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Inside Dean Kamen's Seceded Island of Geekery
mattnyc99 writes "The new issue of Esquire has a long, in-depth, intricate profile of Dean Kamen and his quest to invent a better world. Earlier this month, we discussed Kamen's Sterling-electric car, but this piece goes into much more detail about how that engine works — he got the original idea from the upmodded Henry Ford artifact in the basement of his insane island lab — and about how his inventions often go overlooked, including the Slingshot water purifier that Stephen Colbert made famous but that no one has actually bought yet. Quoting: 'To get the Slingshot to the 20 percent of the world that doesn't have electricity, Kamen came up with the idea of splitting it in half. Leaving the Stirling aside, he would try to develop a market for his distiller in parts of the developing world that have electricity but not reliable clean water. "There are five hundred thousand little stores in Mexico," he says. "If we can put one of these in 10 percent of them, that's enough to put it in production." That may be the killer app for the distiller.' So, is this guy all hype with overpriced devices, or is time for someone to take his genius (Segway aside) to the mass market?"
so this guy can design $26,000 wheelchairs that no one can afford. $12,000 electric mopeds that no one buys.
Call me not impressed.
And now he has some water filtration system, cost unknown, but probably pricey.
And a Stirling engine of unknown efficiency and reliability.
If you read between the lines of TFA you might get the impression that investors are not clamoring to invest in another expensive set of gadgets that are over-designed and over-priced and under-powered.
In general the rich are rich because they contribute a lot of value to society and invest their money to generate future returns. In general the poor are poor because they don't contribute much value to society and tend to squander their income on disposable goods (like alcohol, cigarrettes, and lotto).
There are exceptions. If you collect checks for no work, and create no value to society, those checks will eventually stop and the problem will fix itself.
The reason wealth tends to cluster in families is because intelligence is a heritable trait.