[Noisebridge-discuss] Grad student survey request

[Joel Jaeggli]

Big box stores like most distributed retail operations are the product of:

Finding a business model that works

Leveraging economy of scale

Replicating it

Low cost of capital for successful models.

The last one is terrifically important, what means is also those mutual funds and money market funds  that everyone holds in their retirement need large quantities of low risk investments. If you wonder why there's so many of these things look in your own portfolio...

Joel - same store sales growth is crack cocaine to fund managers... 

Joel's iPad

On Jul 8, 2010, at 7:07 PM, jim <jim at well.com> wrote:

> 
>   i don't get it. 
> 
>   seems to me the spirit of people in former times 
> with respect to sewing and welding and carpentering 
> and fixing their cars and so forth was a matter of 
> doing or doing without, i.e. the spirit of being 
> resentful and tired at having to stay up late to 
> fix the tractor. 
>   i don't know how to think about technology and 
> big box stores occuring in the same sentence. 
>   i think there's great significance to the 
> difference between having to fix or make something 
> in order to survive (i.e. carry on with life's 
> chores) and wanting to repurpose something to be 
> something other because one has the free time and 
> resources to be able to do so; there is the idea 
> that technology has reached some kind of tipping 
> point in that common, inexpensive items contain 
> various subsystems that can be re-purposed. 
>   it seems to me that a certain amount of 
> education and/or exposure to ideas matters in 
> people's abilities to do such re-purposing. 
> 
>   what is the deal with "big box stores" in your 
> mind? they are derived from the same marketing 
> principles that brought us fast food and highly 
> restricted forms of music and other products that 
> are branded and delivered ubiquitously to leverage 
> economies of manufacturing scale and reduced costs 
> of goods. what ever do big box stores have to do 
> with hacking-making-do-it-yourself? 
>   there've always been a big lot of people who 
> have done nothing for themselves: slaves and in 
> later times laborers who worked each day to 
> exhaustion just to make food and rent (mark twain 
> noted that abolition had its advantages that the 
> wealthy no longer had to take care of the daily 
> needs of their workers). 
>   people attracted to noisebridge seem to be 
> intelligent, curious, educated in some way or 
> another, and with time enough to exercise their 
> interests--having the time is quite important, 
> it may derive from being unemployed or from 
> refusing to work at an uninteresting job or from 
> still being in school or being young enough or 
> old enough or alternatively inclined enough to 
> have nothing else to do but look for a fun==
> satisfying way to put in time until we're put 
> into the earth. 
> 
>   i think you've got romanticized ideas about 
> this stuff and you should get rid of them so 
> you can see clearly. there are a lot of people 
> doing this stuff, each with idiosyncratic 
> motives. you gotta talk to a fair number of 
> them before you can start to see patterns, much 
> less craft surveys to ferret out the dynamics. 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 18:12 -0700, Kyla Wagman wrote:
>> This is an interesting point.  I probably shouldn't capitalize the
>> maker movement since I don't know of any previous time where one was
>> prevalent.  I'm more referring to the spirit that was around the time
>> when people weren't reliant on technology/big box stores/etc... and
>> could do and make things on their own.  I don't know if there's
>> significance in the fact that people had to instead of wanted to make
>> for themselves. Does that make sense?  
>> 
>> I think it's fair to say that the influx in technology, big box
>> stores, and manufacturers over the decades has made people (in
>> general), reliant on it/them. And so they do less for themselves than
>> they did before.  Fair?  The DIY spirit has been a growing trend over
>> the past years - and this renewed interest in DIY has shed light onto
>> the likes of you all who never really lost that DIY spirit.  Some
>> argue the trend towards DIY is a result of the recession, some would
>> say it's a generational response.  I don't know what I think yet,
>> still figuring that out.  But what's interesting about you all, is
>> that the spirit is really intrinsic to yourselves.  I talked to
>> someone who said, you either have it or you don't.  You aren't
>> tinkering/hacking/making as a result of some bigger factor - you've
>> just always done it or been interested in it.  Do you guys agree with
>> that? 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Jesse Zbikowski
>> <embeddedlinuxguy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>        On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Kyla Wagman <wagmank at vcu.edu>
>>        wrote:
>>> I'm working on a project about the resurgence of the Maker
>>        Movement
>> 
>> 
>>        I'm interested in the idea of a "resurgence"; was there a
>>        historical
>>        Maker Movement which the current one is recapitulating?
>> 
>>        For that matter when did "maker" become a term applied to a
>>        human
>>        being, as opposed to a coffee maker or bread maker? It's never
>>        really
>>        scanned properly to me.
>> 
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> 
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