One thing is for certain, as jobs continue to evaporate: to make external income in the future, you will need to be entrepreneurial (that's the word that describes people that start new businesses). For many, that will mean building ventures to produce local energy, food, and products/services. For others, that means building new things (from simple DIY systems to complex 3D fabricated devices) that have potential in in the global marketplace.
The best way to succeed doing this, in an increasingly dire global economy, is to fully embrace the idea of open source hardware. Here's what this means:
- Start and stay small. The entire point of this is to: make an external income for you, your family, and the people that helped you build the product.
- Don't become indebted. Don't take capital from financiers. Resilient entrepreneurship is not about layering on debt/leverage or growing to a size large enough to attract the attention of an increasingly corrupt economic, legal, and financial system that will crush you like a twig.
- Build a prototype as a proof of concept. Document how you did it using video. Even better: put it all on a page in MiiU. NOTE: If you need money to prototype something that's interesting/useful to a large number of people, ask for donations to build it (ala kickstarter). It's important to note that these are not really donations since you can reward the people that contribute with early versions of the product).
- Release the plans/diagrams/videos for how to build the prototype for free (so it can be manufactured locally by those with the capacity for doing so).
- Host a community on-line for those who want to build it. Use the community that develops around the prototype to build advanced/better versions of the device.
- Sell/trade/barter finished versions of a productized version of the device/item to those that can't build it themselves.
- Develop a reputation. Do this successfully enough times and raising money for prototypes and selling finished versions will become easier and easier. Note that reputation works in reverse too.