there has got to be something pathological to this idea that the best shirt to wear is a hairshirt. This kind of tax doesn't benefit anyone, it isn't as if the govt is picking winners and losers... everyone loses, at least anyone in the US.

People that think such a thing is a good idea because 'medical companies make too much money as it is" remind me of jihadis.

The rewards that they seek just aren't part of this world, they are something existential.

And they don't give a damn who they wreck to get that painful WTFgasm. Even themselves.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

If you want the government to pay for your health care, you are going to get what they want to pay for. Ask doctors how medicare is working out for them. Ask yourself why anyone would want to become a doctor - it will be only a slight exaggeration to call them government employees without civil service benefits.

Whatever new devices are created will be built overseas, and the government will set up a commission to investigate the lack of competitiveness in American medical technology.

Idiots.

And each year my dream of a cybernetic implants keeps getting further and further away.

Add in the FDA and I am amazed any company does business here. Hell I am surprised the companies just move to China, make what ever the hell the want. The start setting up smuggling networks or even medical surgery zones.

Come to Chiba City and get your new pace maker, act now and get an extra lasik surgery.

Revolution, fuckers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRv4jp-hhBE

Work out of your own home, for yourself - sell your (medical?) products to medical device companies- no healthcare required. Forcing a free market it healthcare (portability).

When "employees" in the traditional sense goes - so will the issues with healthcare portability. THe market will follow the money.

Change the game.

THe market will follow the money.

Not if obie and the now left wing dem party has anything to say about it. It's bad, really bad. The repubs are bad, but what the dems are doing now is just a disaster. I am glad I supported Darth Nader, I could not in good conscience support either big party.

Feebie- See this link from Leno, including the text and the video clip. Leno keeps what is perhaps California's finest collection of old and exotic cars in a warehouse in Burbank. He's a man with special needs, including a sincere desire to sustain his collection in an environmentally responsible way, so he latched onto this a few years ago.

(If I say anything wrong here and a mechanically-minded person wants to correct me, please do. I'm flying on fumes with this one: My hands are a soft as a baby's butt. I haven't swung a hammer since Carter was president. Wholesale disagreement with central assertions and petty criticisms of snowflake details are each welcome and appropriate.)

The Reichental clip gives the impression that these printers make parts themselves, which is not really how it works. 3D printers make precisely correct models, which can then be passed to a machinist who will forge real parts from appropriate materials. It saves a CRAZY amount of expense for revision and enhancement. And for designers, it's the best thing since sex.

Feebie's right, this is absolutely a revolution. It makes vast centuries –literal centuries– of toil and frustration go away. They vanish.

But it's not the Star Trek machine that will just build or duplicate anything you want. It will probably be a long time before these printers can just squirt out working parts themselves. Metal and alloys are going to tough for them, as will blended materials. Wood is going to be murder....

....And wood's important, because I want a 1939 Gibson L-5 Premiere. To own. MINE. A real one, like the dozen or two they made back on Parson Streets as Europe commenced its descent into Hell.

Well, I can't have one. A handful survive, each worth more than whole neighborhoods. The machine tools for that guitar are worn out and scattered by a number of owners and corporate changes. The geniuses who actually constructed the thing are dispersed, deceased, or blind & arthritic. As you'll have inferred from Gibson's settlement with the Justice Department this week, you can't just go cut down the best tree you can find and build a guitar anymore.

But a cheap 3D printer will allow a lot of very talented luthiers to start much closer to the goal than they could have at any time in history. They'll arrive at almost-good-enough when they're 23 instead of 54... And they'll still be recklessly horny for perfection and childishly enthused for playful experimentation.

And that's the thing, Feebie.

I can imagine that in my lifetime, they'll be selling them made out of carbon fiber or something similar. Well, CF is not maple. Such a guitar may play like a '39 as judged only by deaf, sightless fingertips, but it won't sound or look like the original maple. (Or smell like it, which is worth more than you'd think.) But craftsmen will be able to so cheaply & readily explore the density of the soundboard that the tone might be improved. And I could get a neck spec'd out to my tiny-man hands (1 9/16" at the nut, 1967-style, but with no volute, thankyouverymuch). And it will be indestructible. I'll be able to leave it on the back seat of my locked car for a sunny weekend in Los Angeles, and it won't warp. Six months later I'll leave it out on the roof deck in the rain. It will survive the Big One.

I can imagine that in your son's lifetime, he'll be able to buy something imperceptibly different from the original... But with as many of these improvements as he cares to pay for, with green sheets in his wallet remaining for payments on his flying car. I'd speculate that every surviving Stradivarius violin has been already been scanned. (And Antonio's two extant Strad guitars, which are too delicate to withstand a fresh set of strings at playable tension.)

Wonderful technology, right? Who could object?

Government can't deal with this. Government is not equipped to exploit the freedom this technology provides... Because this freedom is about speed, cheapness, playfulness and independence, and each of these is anathematic to centralized authority.

Remember, the majority of America's unionized workers are government employees. Unions are NOT about welcoming new tech which challenges the job security and inefficiency of the aging membership.

Listen to this speech at the Joint Warfighting Conference. Time and again, Jones (of Google) makes the point that the government can't move fast enough or cheaply enough to exploit new computer technologies.

"America's enemies," we can be sure, will clutch 3D printers tightly to the bosom, as will every independent American craftsman worthy of your love for the next ten decades. In this way, the latter will also become enemies of the government, which dislike lithe, independent talents... As discussed in this blog post and the one which follows.

So how will government respond?

Government will regulate the shit out of it, I predict. Based only on the magnificence of the technology, we can expect government to intrude mightily on the specifications for printer files (discussed briefly by Jay Leno, above), and clumsy them up. After all, who needs the model if you can just scan an existing (broken) part, then email the file to your machinist for manufacture? I'd wager that it will become illegal to use 3D scan files not conforming to a National Security Administration specification... Or that every internet file large enough for that purpose will be opened and decoded during transmission anyway.

What should your nephew –y'know, the sweet kid who's good with his hands and always got A's in Shop– expect from the Transportation Safety Administration when he tries to carry one of these tools through Chicago O'Hare?

Because the kid might be a terrorist, right? This technology COULD be used to make nuclear bombs!!!!!

This is HALF of what made Radwaste's fearmongering the other day so repellent.

Government technocrats and contractors will always say whatever they need to say to strengthen their professional positions. The will sell out any constituency, they will cripple any technology (Hellooooo, Solyndra!). It's all about protecting their careers with the dearest authority America has to offer... Because no paycheck's as solid as one the Federal government.

(The other half of my anger was the naked, animal dishonesty of Radwaste's comment. I was reminded of a time 30 years ago, when a power company was trying to build a plant in Indiana. At a public function, a PSI representative addressed a group of college students, looked us straight in the eye, and said that the Price-Anderson Act required power companies to bear the full cleanup costs in the event of an accident. This is almost precisely the opposite of the truth. I had hoped that my generation, having seen the horror of a few accidents, might have brought a little more integrity to the industry's rhetoric.)

More to say, but it's late.

Technology, operating inexpensively in the hands of people pursuing whims and their own interests, can solve almost any problem. Never let government or its agents tell you otherwise.

Yes, it's revolutionary.