• Laboratory-equipment economics: prices stay high because of engineering overhead, patent thickets, vendor lock-in via service contracts and liability—not BOM cost—so even an OpenPCR-grade <$100 thermocycler never reaches a $100 retail shelf.  
• Real-world sourcing: surplus portals (UCSD, UW), LabX, eBay, and unpublished “deal” reps from Thermo Fisher, Sigma, Hitachi-Koki and Mitsubishi Tanabe remain the only way to beat list prices, which labs routinely negotiate down only 10–20 %.  
• A proposed experiment: launch a fixed-price marketplace (“labroad”) for sub-$10 k open-source instruments to test whether latent demand exists outside the grant-funding cycle, since labs budget $50 k synthesizers rather than risk warranty loss on DIY kit.  
• Job-market snapshot: Bay Area software demand is so high that “a smiley face on a bag of potatoes could get an internship,” whereas entry-level biotech is low-wage bench labor unless one targets bioinformatics, management, or starts a company.  
• Practical résumé advice: submit a standalone PDF, list GPA, citizenship, GitHub link, chronologically ordered projects with concrete outcomes; decorative graphics and reliance on cover letters are disqualifiers.  
• Housing reality check: expect $1,200–$1,500/month with roommates in Berkeley/SF, arrive with cash/checkbook and credit report because summer rents rise daily; Oakland is the next gentrification frontier.  
• Open-source friction: DMCA takedown (#367508) and RMS’s long-term MIT squat illustrate legal and institutional tensions facing independent biology/AI researchers.  
• Emerging interfaces: Leap Motion’s $80 3-D hand tracker was floated as a low-cost input for future BCI or AR rigs.  
• Prediction tooling: uncertainfuture.com (open-source GitHub repo) and Canonizer.com were debated as structured alternatives to informal singularity polling, with warnings that popularity ≠ epistemic merit.  
• Build-system pain: modernizing NanoEngineer (Qt 4.4→4.8) and compiling Qt on Windows (needs Perl) versus Linux (`apt-get install qmake`) highlight the gap between visionary open nanotech design tools and everyday dependency hell.