Category Archives: economics

The Long Tail of DIY Electronics

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These are the Golden Years of electronics hacking. The home DIY hacker can get their hands on virtually any part that he or she could desire, and for not much money. Two economic factors underlie this Garden of Electronic Eden that we’re living in. Economies of scale make the parts cheap: when a factory turns out the same MEMS accelerometer chip for hundreds of millions of cell phones, their setup and other fixed costs are spread across all of these chips, and a $40 million factory ends up only costing $0.50 per unit sold.

But the unsung hero of the …read more

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For the Cost of Republican Tax Cuts, We Can Give Working Americans Up to $18,000 a Year

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Instead of corporate tax cuts for big companies that can be used to create more robots, we could allow Americans to benefit from the wealth automation creates. Continue reading For the Cost of Republican Tax Cuts, We Can Give Working Americans Up to $18,000 a Year→

For the Cost of Republican Tax Cuts, We Can Give Working Americans Up to $18,000 a Year

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Instead of corporate tax cuts for big companies that can be used to create more robots, we could allow Americans to benefit from the wealth automation creates. Continue reading For the Cost of Republican Tax Cuts, We Can Give Working Americans Up to $18,000 a Year→

Ted Cruz’s Law Paper From 1996 Is the Best Argument Against Letting Tech Companies Run Rampant

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‘Voting with your wallet’ doesn’t work: Smart consumers are powerless to stop unregulated companies from screwing over the masses. Continue reading Ted Cruz’s Law Paper From 1996 Is the Best Argument Against Letting Tech Companies Run Rampant→

The True Cost of Your Uber Ride Is Much Higher Than You Think

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Investor reports reveal riders only pay 41 percent of the full cost of each ride, with investors footing the remaining 59 percent. Continue reading The True Cost of Your Uber Ride Is Much Higher Than You Think→

The Dubious Claim of a World Helium Shortage

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If you’ve been reading the news lately, you doubtless read about the find of a really big new helium gas field in Tanzania. It’s being touted as “life-saving” and “game-changing” in the popular media, but this is all spin. Helium is important for balloon animals, scientists, and MRI machines alike, but while it’s certainly true that helium prices have been rising steadily since 2000, this new field is unlikely to matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

The foundation of every news story on helium is that we’re running out of the stuff. As with most doomsday …read more

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Hackaday Links: June 5, 2016

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CERN is having a hackathon. It’s in October, yes, but the registration is closing on the 15th of June. They’ve been doing this every year, and the projects that come out of this hackathon are as diverse as infrastructure-less navigation, cosmic ray detectors, and inflatable refrigerators.

Have one of those solder fume extractors? Here’s an obvious improvement. [polyglot] put a strip of LEDs around the frame of his solder fume extractor to put a little more light on the subject.

A few months ago, [Bunnie] started work on a book. It was the Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen. It’s …read more

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Retrotechtacular: MONIAC

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There is an argument to be made that whichever hue of political buffoons ends up in Number 10 Downing Street, the White House, the Élysée Palace, or wherever the President, Prime Minister or despot lives in your country, eventually they will send the economy down the drain.

Fortunately, there is a machine for that. MONIAC is an analogue computer with water as its medium, designed to simulate a national economy for students. Invented in 1949 by the New Zealand economist [WIlliam Phillips], it is a large wooden board with a series of tanks interconnected by pipes and valves. Different sections …read more

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