Dear Reader,

With the tenth anniversary of 9/11/01 behind us, there’s something that we should remember for the next anniversary: Terrorists are not politicians. Nonetheless, that seems to be the exact terrorist profile for any major anniversary or event. For example, after Osama bin Laden was killed, many predicted a retaliatory attack. But why? After all, the retaliation never happened, and here again, the 9/11 anniversary occurred without a major incident.

If one is crazy enough to be a terrorist, one doesn’t wait for anniversaries. Anniversaries and speeches are the stuff of politicians’ fondest dreams. Real jihadists probably couldn’t care less when their next attack happens. If another 9/11 occurs, it won’t matter if it is on the anniversary or not. In all likelihood, the attack will come on any given Tuesday – just like the last one. In fact, the terrorists would have to be near brain-dead to plan an attack on an important anniversary.

Nonetheless fear was at an elevated level yesterday. Note this article from CNN:

In the first incident, the Transportation Security Administration was notified of passengers allegedly behaving oddly on American Airlines Flight 34 from Los Angeles International Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, said TSA spokesman Greg Soule.

Out of an abundance of caution, authorities sent two F-16 jets to shadow the flight until it landed safely at JFK at approximately 4:10 p.m. ET, Soule said, adding law enforcement will interview passengers. J. Peter Donald of the FBI in New York said the incident involved three passengers.

Tim Smith, a spokesman for American, told CNN that a passenger alerted the crew to a perceived security concern. The captain investigated and elected not to declare a security threat and no one on board requested military or law enforcement assistance, Smith said.

….

The second incident involved Frontier Airlines Flight 623 from Denver International Airport to Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport.

Crew members noticed two men acting suspiciously. One spent about 20 minutes in a bathroom in the back of the plane while the other waited in a forward galley before using the restroom, also for 20 minutes, said Frontier spokesman Peter Kowalchuk.

“The crew did not feel threatened,” Kowalchuk said, but “maintained surveillance” of the men.

In both cases, the flight crew didn’t feel threatened, yet fighter jets were nonetheless summoned. In my opinion, the second case is particularly ridiculous – as I’ve fit this exact description in the past. On a long flight to Europe, my stomach was feeling rather unwell. As a result, I just needed to stand up for a little while and escape my cramped seat. I must have been standing near the front for 15 minutes after which… yes, I entered the bathroom. Who knew that my activities could have been possibly interpreted as terrorist activity? Thankfully, in my case, F-16s were not dispatched to escort the plane until landing. Out of the tens of thousands flying yesterday, surely a few didn’t feel well either.

Should the crew take note of such passengers? Of course, but scrambling fighter jets over such actions? Come on, folks! Furthermore, this takes us back to the obsession with anniversaries. If every 9/11 warrants scrambling fighter jets for an extended visit to the bathroom, what of today, 9/12? Are we letting down our guard on long bathroom visits on this and every other non-anniversary day?

In my opinion, this call for the fighter jets says much about our policies beyond terrorism. In many ways, America has lost all sense of limits. Sending a jet over an extended bathroom trip certainly crosses a line – one that is very important in maintaining a civil society. The same is happening with policies elsewhere. Over-reactions only consider more money, security measures, and troop numbers without actually questioning the strategy. Afghanistan is going badly? Send more troops and spend more money. The last stimulus didn’t work; let’s do another and spend even more. The near-zero rates haven’t boosted the economy? Let’s do a QE2 followed by two years of zero percent interest rates.

In the government’s view, the answer is always more, more, and then some more. It seems that no one stops to ask if these actions make any sense. If I could ask one realistic thing of today’s politicians, I would ask them to simply draw the line on the economy, the wars, and the security state. I’m not even talking about reducing current measures. Instead, I’d ask them just to draw a line and promise not to cross it.

At what point does security become too invasive and extreme? At what point can we not spend one more cent? At what point have the wars cost us too much money and too many lives? In my opinion, the state of the country and economy is pretty dire, but what scares me even more is that things could get much worse from here. Our leaders have no concept of limits to their actions. And that means the possibilities are limitless – unfortunately, the possibilities are in the wrong direction for improving the U.S.

A Manufacturing Revolution

By Chris Wood

A revolution is under way. It’s still in its early stages, but will likely reach epic proportions over the coming decades. Simply put, it will turn the economics of manufacturing on its head.

Additive manufacturing – or 3D printing, as it’s commonly known – is already a $1 billion+ business. And the stage is set for huge growth in the years ahead.

According to Wohlers Report 2011 ( the industry’s bible), revenues produced by all additive manufacturing products and services last year reached a record $1.34 billion and reflected a growth rate of 24.1% from 2009. The compound annual growth rate for the industry’s 23-year history is an impressive 26.2%. And conservative forecasts call for revenues to reach $3.1 billion by 2016 and $5.2 billion by 2020.

Many of the products that you use today – from the car that you drive to your smartphone – have been conceived, designed, prototyped, modeled, and tooled with the help of a 3D printer.

More than 100 companies worldwide do some sort of 3D additive manufacturing, according to Wohlers Associates. So 3D printing technology is already changing the world. But we haven’t seen anything yet.

In the early days of this industry, the primary use of 3D printers was for rapid prototyping. Industries ranging from architecture to aerospace used these machines to quickly go from drawing board to tangible model or prototype on the cheap.

While good design software allows the virtual creation of three-dimensional objects on a computer screen, businesses require a physical object they can hold and inspect before committing huge sums to manufacturing and production. Traditionally, this was a time-intensive and expensive process, even for making a nonworking model of a simple item. Creating something as mundane as a new sole for a shoe, for instance, came with complex problems. Turning the design of a new sole into a model used to take Timberland a week, at a cost of around $1,200. You can imagine the expenditure of time and money for more complicated models.

3D printing changed all that. In Timberland’s case, it has cut the time to 90 minutes and the cost to $35.

Rapid modeling and prototyping still makes the biggest business case for 3D printing. But as the technology has improved, the machines are increasingly being used to make final products too. According to Wohlers Associates, more than 20% of the output of 3D printers is now final products rather than prototypes. The firm predicts this figure will rise to 50% by 2020.

For example, a team of researchers at Filton (where Britain’s fleet of Concorde supersonic airliners were built) who are part of EADS Innovation Works – the research arm of EADS, a European defense and aerospace group best known for building Airbuses – have printed a complex, shoe-sized, titanium landing-gear bracket for use in an airplane. Normally, the piece would be made from a solid block of metal using the traditional “subtractive” manufacturing process, which can result in 90% of the material being cut away. It also uses more energy than “additive” manufacturing. And that’s just the beginning. Obviously, the size of printable parts is limited by the size of 3D printers, but the group believes ever bigger systems are not only possible but inevitable. They hope to soon print out the entire wing of an airliner.

As this trend in specialty manufacturing accelerates, further technological improvements will transform the rapid prototyping of today into the rapid manufacturing of end-use products tomorrow. What’s more, as prices for 3D printers continue to decline, a virtually untapped consumer market will begin to emerge. Together, these two factors will fuel huge industry growth in the years ahead.

But what exactly is 3D printing? It is simply the process of joining materials together to make three-dimensional objects, usually layer by layer (like one might hand-build a clay pot), as opposed to the more well-known practice of subtractive manufacturing (like Michelangelo chipping away at a block of marble until he created the Pietà).

Within that broad definition, the term “3D printing” itself is generally used to refer to a number of distinct manufacturing technologies. All are additive manufacturing processes, but the differences lie in the way the layers are built to create the end product.

3D printing always starts with three-dimensional CAD (computer-aided design) data, with the data sliced into thin layers, then fed to the 3D printer. The printer then typically employs one of six manufacturing technologies to create the desired object.

3D Printing Using Inkjet Technology

As can be inferred by the name, this technology is just traditional inkjet printing with an added dimension: The printer, guided by the computer model, mixes a special powder substrate with a binder to solidify it and deposits that, one layer at a time, until it has built up the final product.

Here’s a video that’s recently gone viral, depicting this process on one of private company Z Corp.’s machines.

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM)

Developed by Scott Crump, cofounder and CEO of Stratasys Inc. in the late 1980s, FDM technology is like 3D printing with a hot glue gun. The FDM printer creates three-dimensional objects by heating up thermoplastic modeling material and precisely extruding it layer by layer, from the bottom up, along with any necessary support structures. The soluble support structures are then dissolved in a water-based solution, leaving an object with a smooth surface and fine details intact.

A video about the creation of this technology and where it is now can be seen here.

Stereolithography

Using a combination of laser, photochemistry, and software technologies, stereolithography creates 3D objects essentially by drawing the object with a beam of UV light aimed at a photosensitive pool called a liquid photopolymer. The light beam traces a cross section of the desired object, turning a thin layer of the liquid plastic to solid, then adheres it to the layer below. The process continues, layer by layer, to completion.

Stereolithography was invented by Charles Hull, cofounder and CTO of 3D Systems Corp. in 1986.

Selective Laser Sintering (SLS)

SLS is very similar to stereolithography, except the UV light is replaced with a high-power laser and the vat of liquid photopolymer is replaced with a powder base. The laser selectively fuses powdered material by scanning cross sections of the desired object on the surface of the powder bed. After each cross section is scanned, the powder bed is lowered by one layer, and the process is repeated until the desired object is completed. Unlike stereolithography and FDM, SLS does not require support structures since the part being constructed is surrounded by unsintered powder at all times.

Other

Two other, less widely used 3D printing technologies are laminated object manufacturing (LOM) and electron beam melting (EBM).

LOM involves cutting and gluing thousands of sheets of material (usually paper) together to form solid objects.

EBM is similar to SLS technology but is capable of producing even more robust and exacting products. The technology manufactures the desired object by melting metal powder layer by layer with an electron beam in a high vacuum. The end products are fully dense, void-free, and extremely strong.

Each method of 3D printing has its advantages. The primary attraction of inkjets is speed. FDM is generally one of the cheaper forms of 3D printing. Stereolithography enables a very high level of detail and surface finish. SLS allows one to produce parts in a wide variety of materials ranging from plastics to ceramics to metals.

Regardless of which technique is best suited to a particular application, it’s easy to appreciate the potential of 3D printing to change the world. The various technologies are already being used for rapid prototyping and specialty manufacturing by countless industries, from medicine and aerospace to fashion and construction.

From here we see the market developing in two directions in the short run. First there will be growing demand from engineers and designers for simpler and cheaper desktop 3D printers that are able to produce prototypes or concept models quickly. Demand will also increase for much more elaborate machines capable of cost-effectively creating widgets by the thousands, paving the way for tomorrow’s fast, on-demand manufacturing.

Further down the road lies the utopian future where we can all instantly download, distribute, and manufacture anything, anytime, anywhere. Obviously this is still a long way off, if it is even attainable. But it may not be as far-fetched as Bill Gates’ dream of a computer on every desk and in every home was 30 years ago.

Developments like 3D printing can seem like easy profit powerhouses, but the most profit potential is well ahead of the building trend. The team behind Casey Extraordinary Technology keeps abreast of the field, sifting the diamonds from grains of sand. Put their expertise to work for you: A trial subscription is risk-free for ninety days.

Additional Links and Reads

Trichet Loses His Cool at Prospect of Deutsche Mark’s Revival in Germany (Bloomberg)

I can’t comment much on this. The article pretty much says it all:

Trichet, 68, lost his cool yesterday with a reporter who asked whether Germany should abandon the euro and return to the mark as Europe’s debt crisis roils markets and spooks voters

“I would like very much to hear the congratulations for an institution which has delivered price stability in Germany for almost 13 years,” Trichet said in Frankfurt in an uncharacteristically raised voice. “It’s not by chance we have delivered price stability,” he said. “We do our job, it’s not an easy job.”

When sensibility is treated as a form of treason, then one knows for sure that Europe is doing badly. Is there really anything that controversial about inquiring whether Germany would be better off with the mark?

Few Are Retiring, Few Are Hiring (Ludwig von Mises Institute)

Here’s a good blog post noting the issue of few older workers retiring and even fewer younger ones finding work. The blog notes that the average 16-year-old worked 40% less in 2010 than one did in 2007. This certainly can’t be a good long-term trend. Personally, working in high school had a lasting impact on my work ethic.

In my opinion, being able to build a work ethic early on and feeling like one is creating or adding value is priceless. Maybe it’s difficult to quantify the economic effects here, but it certainly can’t be good. This generation is really missing out.

Gold Bugs, Gold Bears, and Melting Down Grandma’s Ring (Daily Finance)

With gold prices up, many readers have likely been eyeing those rarely used pieces of jewelry at home. This article gives some basics on selling scrap. Even if you’re not planning on selling any jewelry, it’s an interesting read. For example, are you in the black on your wedding ring yet? Read and find out.

That’s it for today. Thank you for reading and subscribing to Casey Daily Dispatch.

Vedran Vuk
Casey Daily Dispatch Editor