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preexisting certification standards
  • It occurred to me that we might be able to compare OSE's machines to the traveling amusement park rides that have been around for so long. They share a couple important qualities 1) they have to be as simple and durable as possible 2) they have to be easy to take apart and reassemble over and over again 3) they have to be safe for all sorts of different people to be around while they're abusing the laws of physics.

    Despite the fact that traveling amusement park rides injure and kill people every year, nobody is really bothered by them. We should find some people in the industry to consult on how they achieve safety certifications in their rides' design and maintenance and how they deal with the inevitable fallout from accidents. 

    Can anyone think of other industries that we could consult with? With that industry as an example maybe we can come up with some others so we don't have to start from scratch.
     
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  • The industry which springs most readily to mind is the automotive enthusiast aftermarket, the hot-rod industry. It comprises to a very large extent relatively small businesses that are limited to tiny production volumes, compared for instance to the mainstream motor industry. It is under constant threat from a legislative edifice that is designed at best to keep such an industry peripheral, at worst to eliminate it summarily. Other salient aspects are the way this industry is enthusiasm/product-driven; the way consumers and producers interact socially and consumers participate in processes; the way it holds vernacular technical definitions; the way the boundaries between manufacture, maintenance, and modification are indistinct; and the way it constantly absorbs more and more traditionally mass-production techniques and somehow makes them work at a small scale.

    One thing to realize, though, as regards certification standards is that they are not of a civil, good-governance sort of nature, whatever the concomitant embellishments might suggest. Certification standards are without exception hostile and predatory. They are designed to create conditions for one industrial basis and one only to survive. The purpose is not only to eliminate competition from small-scale alternatives but to eliminate alternatives whose survival would collapse the processes by which artificially magnified markets are maintained. If an industry based on small-scale manufacture is desired it must be thoroughly understood that its first requirement is political.

    What we are doing - if we are doing it right - is going to threaten certain interests seriously. Expect to be vilified. Expect to be criminalized. Expect to be opposed with military force.
     

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