>Examples of wasted potential:
> Sarah: Built a fusion reactor at 16. Now? Debugging fintech payment systems.
> James: 3D-printed prosthetic limbs for A-levels. Today? Writing credit risk reports.
> Alex: Developed AI drone swarms for disaster relief at 18. Graduated with top honours from Imperial. His job? Tweaking a single button's ergonomics on home appliances.
>These aren't outliers. They're a generation of engineering prodigies whose talents are being squandered.
Just the opposite can still be like a mirror image :\
When I was younger than that in the land of the dollar bill I had already made millions for our clients in financial services.
At the time of course the dollar and the pound sterling were still backed in a non-fiat way at about $2.5/£1 which people could count on for the long term.
Once everything went fiat, nobody could afford anything physical like they could before.
I didn't get out of high school until after 1971 so it was already far too late.
Then I went to the University to study hardware type things so I would have something to sell where concrete value was being added, not merely shuffled around or gradually extracted. The business school had a ridiculous cheating scandal and they weren't as good at math as I would have liked anyway.
But manufacturing momentum continued to dwindle with skyrocketing inflation and labor costs.
Regardless, I'm still not finished improving my abilities to create and/or make all kinds of things from mechanical hardware, electronics, chemicals and more, but only sold one physical product for a limited number of years in my employers' or my own company, which was a side product within a pure service provider. You can be prepared your whole life and still not get up to launching hardware as easily as you can with something having much less raw material cost.
Which is naturally the way it always was, but one day the costs just skyrocketed out of sight and beyond the reach of millions more technologists in a most insidious way, so no more manufacturing for you. And millions is a lot, that grew to include today's big slice containing almost all of the promising creatives who are capable of earth-shaking physical inventions who were fortunately not previously confined to such an exclusive (never be able to afford it again) club. If past progress would have been limited the same way, Bell Labs or NASA could never have even gotten off the ground in the 20th century. Does anybody today have any idea what places like this were supposed to be like in the 21st century? Hint; not less-capable of putting every other contender to shame, and certainly not smaller or non-existent. While still being dwarfed in size by the combined power of industrial research labs supporting domestic manufacturing.
I guess it's just remaining momentum continuing to slow from an era that was already bygone before I got out of college. Once inflation kicked in, average people couldn't afford to buy US-made products any more, manufacturers couldn't afford to keep making them, and it never got better. Reagan came along and it got even worse. Remember, the great mothballing of factories in the 20th century is only temporary until the value of the currency in average peoples' pockets comes back :\
If you want to be able to make anything you could possibly need, you need to already be making everything you already need.