Renting the Makerspace doesn’t go far enough. What Portland needs is a “Bainspace” or a “Sachspace” where we can teach schoolchildren about how to bribe the executives of a company to sell out and bail, then school them in asset stripping, in loading said business with unsustainable interest payments on crippling debt, and in how to cash out early using preference shares. This is how wealth is created concentrated in the post-productivity economy into which the children will grow up. We need to teach kids about how to use Federal Food Stamp Assistance programs to reduce their labor costs to below the poverty level. We need to have zero-hour contract writing classes. Perhaps the plan is to set up a makerspace in Portland for 6 months, before outsourcing it to Xi’an province in China - offshoring american jobs is another key skill that the children of the future will need to be proficient at. There’s soldering together an Arduino and a chain of LEDs to create a flashing Aqua Teen Hunger Force logo, which is tier-1 skill, connected with actually making something (so last century), and then there’s the skills that our economy values, such as learning how to create a risk-neutral portfolio by hedging Arduino against Polulu wixel, Beaglebone, Adafruit, Raspberry Pi and Kano, and in creating actual (financial) products based on the expected future value of the homebrew market. I know which skills my children will be learning. Get with the programme people!
