Last weekend I went to the Harbor Freight store in Middlefield, Ohio to buy a new set of mechanic's tools. I bought a similar set from Sears back in the early 1990s. Over time bits and pieces are lost and it eventually gets extremely annoying to spend 30 minutes looking for a specific socket or whatever. While I was in the store, I browsed the inventory. They have a large selection of tools and other supplies. The metal working tools there are quite impressive and cheap. There's pipe bending tools, sheet metal forming tools, plasma cutters, welders, etc... A person could outfit a small fabrication shop from mainly Harbor Freight tools for maybe $10,000 or less and be able to build tubular vehicle frames, fabricate large or small parts, etc... There are decent CNC plasma cutting tables for significantly less than $5000.
That scenario is true across the board: a smart person can jump into basically any project and do almost anything today. You can jump into something as seemingly esoteric as CPU design now with a RISC-V core and an FPGA board. You can build a drone. You can make a car, a car engine, a transmission, airplane, helicopter, etc... and on and on. You can make your own smartphone. Your own laptop, etc...
At the same time, the economy of industrialized countries is more centralized than ever. Giant financialized corporations dominate all the industries and own everything because of funny money printing and corruption. Similarly, governments are giant, bloated, incompetent monsters.
It seems implausible both these things can continue ad infinitum.
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