One man and a pile of junk ends poverty
Orismar de Souza, a homeless man in Brazil, built a car using junk, spare parts and a hammer and chisel. Four years later, the “shrimpmobile” has him back on his feet.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42329229/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/
This story mirrors the story of my great grandfather, James Dodd. He had worked as a coal miner since he was 8 years old to support his mother and siblings. During the great depression he and a friend built a motorcycle from spare parts and road to Detroit to find work in the factories. They left their wives and children behind and when they got to Detroit had to camp out waiting to find work. Remember, at the time there were barely any paved roads. They had to ride through the mountains of Pennsylvania, across Ohio and into Michigan on a single motorcycle they built from junk.
They had to camp for a month before they could get work. They then saved money and sent for there wives and children to join them. At one point my great grandfather had not eaten for a week. When the women who had been renting a room to him found out she offered him food. He insisted that he would not accept charity and instead did work on the house in exchange for meals.
At one point while working in the factory his job was to test alternators. he would put the bad alternators in a box. He arranged to buy the bad ones then at night in his kitchen he would repair them and sell the re-manufactured alternators to repair shops and people fixing their own cars. He eventually quit the job at the factory and was running his own business.
He invested the money from the alternator business into fixing up and renting houses. At one point he had an entire neighborhood with a grocery store which he would allow his tenets with children who had trouble paying the bills to owe him for food until they could find work. The one rule he had was that they had their children ready to go to church which he would drive them them to in the school bus he bought.
When he died the procession of people who attended his funeral was over a mile long. He touched thousands of people’s lives and it all started from a pile a junk.
Homemade Knitting Machine – Repurposed Tech
Knitting machine made from an old printer could be also be totally mechanical using peddle power or a small wind mill. This is great small business opportunity.
You could sell the knitted items, sell the machines, or sell kits and training.
What is Abundance?
Do you work, purchase, or consume anything? If so this new understanding of Abundance effects you.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” The character Inigo Montoya from the movie “Princess Bride”
In 2000 I began a project to change the world. My partner in this project was The Shad0w, contributor to the BitTorrent protocol and creator of BitTornado program. Napster and other peer-to-peer file sharing systems were in full swing and BitTorrent was just starting to catch on. At that point we realized that it was impossible to stop people from copying information. Music, movies, books, or software programs are all just information. Any information can be digitized. Once digitized copies are basically free. But we also realized that if people weren’t paid to make new information the world would stagnate. The entire legal system of intellectual property was based on restricting copies and now that was impossible.
While Shadow worked on BitTorrent and other technologies I worked on business models for this new world we were entering. I began researching, doing experiments and reexamining everything I knew about information. The result of that were several profound discoveries. One of them was a completely different way of looking at economics.
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