Based on the interest and private commitments, Batch 1 is already sold out. We'll be ordering 5x the volume in Batch 2.

> be me > order parts on JLCCNC > total price: $400 > total duties: $500 > surprisedpikachu.png > Decide to check American shops > Lowest price is over $5000 > Cry very large American re-industrialization trauma tears

A lot of people learned something in 2008 that they never really unlearned: the institutions they trusted had very different incentives than they did. People lost jobs, homes and savings. Banks got bailed out. The upside was private. The downside became everyone else’s problem. It’s pretty easy to understand why “trust us” stopped working after that. You can see it in the surveys. Before the crash, roughly 40% or more of Americans expressed strong confidence in banks. By 2010, that was down around 20%. Edelman found similar drops in trust in banks and business across the US and much of Europe. This wasn’t just people being angry for a few months; it stuck around for years and hasn't really faded. It changed the baseline. People started demanding more evidence. Explain the product. Show me the fees. Tell me what happens when something goes wrong. A recognizable logo and a big advertising budget weren’t enough to answer those questions. They also got more careful with money. Savings rates rose, debt got paid down, and discretionary spending got cut. Some of that was necessity. But the assumption that things would keep getting better had taken a pretty serious hit. The way people evaluated companies changed too. Personal experience, independent information and other customers’ reviews carried more weight. You could still trust your own bank because it had treated you well while having very little faith in the industry as a whole. And that skepticism didn’t stay confined to banking. Watching powerful institutions get protected while ordinary people absorbed the consequences gave people reasons to question government and big business more broadly. Markets eventually recovered. That didn’t undo the lesson. Higher stock prices don’t automatically restore confidence in the institutions that failed you. One of the longest lasting consequences of 2008 was that people became harder to convince and more cautious with their money. They are less willing to take an intermediary at its word and more interested in whether the incentives actually lined up. Once people start asking those questions, telling them to trust you isn’t much of an answer.