Item — HN Reader

Why not?

I mean there are certainly folks doing "off the grid" experiments that are moving this way, and I can certainly see a future where you create enough power for most of your home needs locally, including using some version of a 3D printer to build common items out of stock you have around the house (once they can also accept such). Things that are too costly to build at that scale or require special feedstock could be built by a neighborhood machine (much like mills used to service their neighborhoods), with the feedstock being ordered as needed.

Yes, as long as it is massively inconvenient there is a benefit for trading money for free time. But I would like to spend some of that free time making it possible for me to have a choice of my own - rather than a choice for my provider (who likely will eventually decide they need to make a profit).

1 comments

We're just seeing economies of scale in action.

It is cheaper per unit of energy to make a natural gas power plant and sell the power than it is to build a small-scale generator to power one home on natural gas. Once that model is established, there is resistance to local power generation. The same scale works at neighborhood level power generation. (Or construction, or manufacturing)

Cost is the difference now between using the cloud and running your own hardware. It is cheaper both in time and money to let a company like Google run your e-mail than to run your own server. So people do it. It is a very simple matter of convenience. I don't expect a backlash until people become mistreated to the point of breaking.

I am an enthusiast of 3D printing and I like the vision you've laid out, but I see it always being cheaper per unit to make 10,000 of something than 1 of something. So delegation will continue unless the underlying behavioral incentives, cost and convenience, change.

It isn't cheaper ... yet.

Such visions are the stuff of startups.