I haven’t played with a spaghetti-coated breadboard in a long time.

Amazing, those days I spent in my parents’ basement, looking at schematics and converting them into breadboarded computing systems, mainly with the RCA 1802 and Intel 8080/8085 CPUs.

In our day, switches, relays, light bulbs, and later, transistors, LEDs, “pots” (potentiometers) and other parts, mixing analog and digital signals for alarm systems, oscilloscopes, and finally, desktop-sized personal computers, occupied our idle teenage years.

These days, kids load up a GUI programming system and off they go.

We used to tune carburetors and exhaust systems by hand to improve our straightline and slalom speeds.  Now, they use chip programmers to tune hotrods for speed and fuel efficiency.

They’re even flying electric aeroplanes that can carry human-sized “cargo.”

What’s next?

Will preschool kids take online courses like these?

How does/can technology improve an event like Oktoberfest?

I homebrewed beer back in the mid 1990s.  What has technology done for the homebrew business?

Is the price for decreased demand in the marketplace simply higher unemployment?  And is unemployment the words we really want to use to describe those who aren’t tethered to the flow of labour credits we call wages?

I purposefully retired in 2007 so I could focus on what’s important to me.  Sure, that made me, an active member of the workforce at the age of 45, unemployed because I wasn’t relying on a steady stream of investment income to compensate for the cutoff of labour/salary/wage-based income.

However, unemployed does not equate to inactive.

I haven’t sat still for the past four-plus years.

I’ve written a bunch of books, blogged daily, consulted for a friend who wanted a formal test lab at his startup company, written business plans for potential startups, worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, donated blood, supported charities, aided my mother in-law and managed my investments that I haven’t yet tapped in order to build principal as much as possible before siphoning off dividends and interest in my old age.

I’ve also played with my childhood toys – electronic parts, books, RC planes, balsa wood models, hiking boots, electronic keyboards, computers.

All while staying in touch with my network of friends and associates.

Unemployment is a mindset.  Lack of a means of paying for the cost of living and maintaining a comfortable standard of living is a practicality.

Should we expect our fellow humans to support clean water, affordable food, personal privacy/property rights and a safe, crimefree society?

Very little of my life is magical.

Pretty much everything has a ready explanation or a line of reasoning with which I can pursue answers.

Like snapping connectors into a solderless breadboard.

Or managing a whole species.

Propose a solution, experiment with a prototype, roll out an alpha/beta version to eager testers, observe and report, make a golden version for private/commercial/public use and go on to the next question(s).

States of energy in flux.

Convincing young people to serve in professional, paid, military roles to protect us from ourselves, serving hidden purposes for the greater good, including clean water, affordable food, personal privacy/property rights and a safe, crimefree society.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, someone will tell you or convince you what you’re doing, usually to someone else’s benefit.

Those who accumulate wealth for the sake of personal power and wealth are vulnerable to the barbarians at the gate whose lack of basic amenities denies them a sense of decency.

Are you serving yourself or others?

Are your states of energy connected at the self, family, subcultural, cultural, planetary, solar system or universal level?

Are you more interested in inflating your ego or feeding and establishing the egos of those around you?

What am I going to do with these wires, electronic parts, Arduino and breadboard that’ll improve the longterm survival of our species within the solar system ecosystem?

Unemployed?  Not me.

I’m a set of states of energy in motion.

Fahrvergnügen!