Casual Conversation

Now you seem to have this theme or frame of thought about younger people's opportunities and motivations. I find this perspective personally odd in abstraction. First I think in terms of statistics and sociology. It is a common perspective to say about youth that comes with age as seen in a thread running throughout all of recorded history. So for me I am skeptical of the concept from the outset as a fallacy common to age.

Second (third, fourth, fifth...), back before the crash that disabled me, I had confronted myself about my weight and bad health many years before. I had asked myself what good was it to be able to do so much to modify a car when I failed to modify myself. I started riding a bicycle everywhere as a result and this quickly lead to working in a bike shop and eventually becoming the wholesale Buyer for a chain of bike shops. I even got into amateur criterium racing on many weekends.

As part of the job of a professional Buyer in very high end shops, I had to analyze a lot of statistics to look for patterns and make educated predictions leveraging a lot of money while carrying considerable risk to the business. Much of that experience is about overcoming biases in a similar vain to this perspective on youth. A common example I often mention is just cycling socks. It is not the greatest parallel to this situation, but habits... Most people or owners will buy several colors or patterns of socks to stock in inventory. The least observant of these will buy the same number of socks in each size. This type of person will run the business into bankruptcy within just a few years. The next type of person will buy a staggered number of units for each size realizing they will never sell some sizes as much as others. The rarest type of person will develop statistics across a season by buying a limited variety of conservative colors and patterns and supporting reordering directly to ensure never to run out of stock. In so doing the person will learn that it is perfectly reasonable to place an order like 20-xs | 10-s | 50-m | 300-l | 25-xl. Then they will buy most socks like this in much larger orders that can be negotiated for better margin and terms for credit. The second business might last a decade at most. I can manage such a business sustainably at break even numbers or better because I treat the entire store like this kind of researched problem and I am not afraid to follow the numbers even when they clash with my intuitive logic or conservative anxiety.

As part of being a Buyer, I managed any overburden inventory, so stuff like edge case sizes that did not sell in the store, or things the mechanics ordered incorrectly to work on a customer's bike that I failed to catch in the background were overburden to offload elsewhere. I used eBay a lot for that part of the business. On eBay, I learned to generate money on demand using no reserve auctions. The trick is to think in terms of the average person and their life patterns. Most people live paycheck to paycheck, or at least their spending habits largely reflect their paycheck cycle. Most people also pay rent or a mortgage and the majority of these are due at the first of the month. In this cycle, the largest number of people that have excess money to spend is always on the weekend that follows the 15th of the month. On eBay, the highest volume of traffic for people that are willing to bid on an auction is on Sunday evenings at around 9pm for the West coast of the United States as this will be midnight on the East coast of the US. I always ended my listings at this time and only on months where there is not a holiday or major event. Like, February is terrible. Between the Superbowl and Valentine's day no one is making some major purchase, and the short month means money is much tighter. When I did eBay, I consistently set the high mark for similar items sold in eBay's history by 10-20% more than others within a few years time. I had many other tricks too that were unrelated to these demographics.

One of the challenges in bike shops is understanding how large the entry level market really is compared to everything else. I sold very high end race stuff. I even supported the professional ShoAir team for a year out of my back office. The entry level market was over 80% of my total sales volume. It was only around 20% of my actual retail floor space, but it dominated my storage. People love to come into a shop and see the high end stuff, but they want to buy something cheap.

In all of this experience, I see an abstract spectrum of people and patterns that are very numerous in demographic motivations. There are certain areas where these groups meet and overlap but their motivations are extremely varied.

It was funny to me that each shop owner I worked for obsessed about social media presence when I first started working for them. I told them all, "test your assumptions empirically." They all assumed that the whole world was present on social media in places like Facebook. The first shop spent a bunch of money on ads, insisting that it drove traffic into the shop. I told them to simply pick any item they feel is extremely popular and in very high demand. Then try to give it away for free on a social media platform. Tell people it is free and there are no strings attached and see how long it takes for someone to come into the store and ask for the item based upon social media alone. The fastest I saw was 3 weeks, and I believe the owner actually told the person to specifically come pick up the item out of shear embarrassment. I never had to upkeep social media presence after those experiments.

My point in all of these examples is that, the presence of people in any given space or slice of life is an extremely small fraction of demographics and motivations. If I based buying on what I like myself or what I perceive on the sales floor as customers make purchases and a few interact with me, I would be incorrect by a long shot. I'm pretty good at spotting styles trends and innovations in the upcoming market, but even this is a somewhat ungrounded bias. You see, in this experience I learned the numbers do not lie but my perception and bias does. When you say 'kids these days...' my brain sends up a red flag against this experience as likely an ungrounded perceptive bias.

Like when I was on reddit, I was very concerned about information bubbles and if I was being manipulated. It was much the same on YouTube; I wondered how I was being influenced in unexpected ways when I could not explain why exactly I went down some rabbit hole project and made purchases in retrospective reflection. I don't do such things now after exclusively using Lemmy, so speculatively there may have been some merit, but that is probably more demographic bias. However, Lemmy shows a lot of demographic bias too. We are self selecting our information bubbles even without some masterful or nefarious steering.

Ultimately, I think we are likely some outlier niche demographic; aged and disconnected from who we were as our younger former selves on the oath to now. Forces beyond our awareness self select and separate us from those like us at an earlier stage. Over the last 500 years, as you put it, we have made immense progress. That only happens through incremental improvement across each generation. Therefore I must counter that you and I must still exist in a new and improved revision as time marches on and we hang our hats on the racks of our time.

For 3d printing, a Prusa in not so bad for being reasonably quiet, especially if it is slowed down (if you do not mind longer print times). A small enclosure also helps a lot. The following photo is just a couple of $10 IKEA Lack tables hacked together with a bathroom shower curtain on three sides and a sheet of 2mm plexiglass (that still needs a latch and handle designed). That is enough to print advanced materials and there is no smell in the room. (Forgive my current project clutter around it.) The printer sits on a 50mm hard foam rubber knee/kneeling pad which is the best way to silence audible resonance coming from the table or enclosure.

If you want to get into CAD design, the topological naming issue is all about the way every object builds math references in different spaces relative to each other in a tree. When Sketches are used, each sketch starts in a new topological space making them independent from the object. The faces of the 3d object are all in a single namespace tree. If a change is made to somewhere up-tree in the history of the object, it breaks references that are down tree. The biggest reason for the complexity and why it matters is because all computers must truncate π. Avoid creating references that compound upon π. It is that easy