Book finished: It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

★★★★☆

Five stars for insight into how easily fascism can take hold in a democracy. 3 for writing (this is a bit hackneyed). Overall very worthwhile. As the afterward indicates though, this piece is not terribly original in its time. Some of the passages are insightful and some in 2017 a bit worrying.

I think probably more people in 2017 believe that fascism is possible in the US than did in the 30s when this was written.

"Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on."

"it becomes clear that the installation of a fascist government will not be a revolution or a coup d'etat; rather, the groundwork for fascism has already been constructed in the ideological worldviews of the majority of Americans."

Choosing a (free) CAD package

I've been using OpenSCAD for years, exclusively. As a programmer and someone generating exclusively mechanical parts to be 3D printed it's been OK for me. But I feel like I really need an interactive CAD program to work with.

Since I have always and intend to continue to release everything I design into public domain, I feel like I should be using a CAD program that's at least free beer if not free speech.

For free beer, I guess the choice would be Fusion 360. Plenty of makers are using it, but it's not entirely free - commercial users would be required to pay up.

So for now I'm thinking I should at least give FreeCAD a try.

One thing I'll have to be able to do is export in a format that Solidworks can import because that's what the robotics students use (they get it for free). As a mentor and a maker doing free work, I could get a copy of Solidworks for free also, but see above.

Any opinions on free CAD programs? I'm sure FreeCAD has warts, but I figure I'll draw a few things and see how it goes. I also like the fact that at least one friggin' piece of software is entirely local on my PC.