By the time you can afford that printer, there are others that cost $100k that do better job. For most tinkerers it will be better investment to place order in local metal workshop with has good printer than have your own cheap lathes, CNC mills and 3d printers in the garage.
>Maybe by the time my car is self-driving and earning me money instead of sitting in my garage, I can get that microfactory set up affordably.
Have you ever thought why there are no cheap capital assets sold in mass markets for public that provide good ROI for no additional effort? (this is good question for armchair economists)
> Have you ever thought why there are no cheap capital assets sold in mass markets for public that provide good ROI for no additional effort? (this is good question for armchair economists)
Pretty much for the reason you covered in paragraph one to be honest.
If I can achieve good with 10k and someone else can achieve awesome with 100k then the person with 100k will win (assuming they can handle demand).
It's pretty obvious (if you look at..well every economic system ever really) that capital begets capital.
It's not a huge thing, the US had this issue at the turn of the 20th century.
Well, the other obvious reason is if everyone can achieve "good" for 1k, everyone will make the investment, leverage the asset, and the ROI will disappear because it was easy & accessible to everyone and becomes highly competitive.
Bitcoin mining was a good example. Everyone has a graphics card, and mining was pretty trivial. Great example of a cheap capital asset with low effort to monetize. Quickly, the ROI slimmed until only large scale operations with low costs and good economies of scale were profitable.
Yep but even there the people with the large amounts of capital won once GPU's stopped been effective since they could afford ASIC's.
I think on some level society has always known this, having access to large amounts of capital doesn't guarantee you'd win but if someone offered me the choice between starting a game of monopoly with $100 or $100,000 I know which I'd pick.
Fun trivia aside, Monopoly was created to demonstrate that activities that promote wealth creation are more beneficial than ones that allow monopolists to run amock.
I'm assuming you mean physical assets that you can keep local? Otherwise historically investing in stocks provides a good ROI with no additional effort.
Well, if you are okay with some nonzero additional effort, then kitchen supplies like an Instant Pot or a Sous-vide heater fall into the joint categories of
A) < $100
B) Saving $1000/year relative to a certain level of cuisine consumption.
>Maybe by the time my car is self-driving and earning me money instead of sitting in my garage, I can get that microfactory set up affordably.
Have you ever thought why there are no cheap capital assets sold in mass markets for public that provide good ROI for no additional effort? (this is good question for armchair economists)