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Neal Stephenson On 'Innovation Starvation'
Geoffrey.landis writes "In an essay discussing the space program, author Neal Stephenson suggests that the decline of the space program 'might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done.' He suggests that we may be suffering from innovation starvation: 'Innovation can't happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable.'" Though the context is different, this reminds me of economist Tyler Cowen's premise that the U.S. has for decades been in a Great Stagnation.
Actually I'd conclude that patents are a main cause that innovation has stagnated in the last 20 years. Innovation depends on sharing knowledge.
What I really wonder is whether the strangulation of research will put our survival at risk at a time in history when we need to be smarter than ever about how we use energy, land, water, and raw materials? Why patents are evil.
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The cold war was great for this. Massive amounts of money were dumped into stuff with the only goal being "get it done before the other guys". Some stuff needs a tonne of money and time sunk into basic research with only a thin vision of the end goal to happen.
These days, we are very good at the standard cycle of:
a) release product
b) collect feedback
c) update product based on feedback
d) release updated product
A business man can understand "if we spend 2 years an $xx researching hard drive technology, it will probably give us something that we can sell in the end". This is why we see continuous advances in the stuff we already have.
We are less good at "hey you smart guys! here's a few billion dollars and a huge lab... give us something cool".
The space program was killed in the 70's because of the Vietnam war. Carter tried to return the U.S. to a space and science society but got caught up in the beginning of the newest form of war.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Did he hibernate thru the dotcom era?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Sounds a lot like today.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Even though I'm not a big fan of cutting the NASA budget, here is some (reasonable) reading about why is it good:
http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/nasap.html
For fans of Neal, there was recently interview on goodreads with him (however, interviewer was, nicely said, boring):
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/video_chat/14
and the evergreen of Neal @google (a lot of interesting ideas - e.g., about wikipedia):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE
Back then, we didn't molly-coddle everyone and give medals to everyone for participation. We rewarded only the winners, the brave, and left the rest in the dust.
Then liberals (note the lower case useage please) took over the schooling systems and have been doing their damnedest to make everything "fair", and as such, we have a generation afraid to take risks, expect to be rewarded for being mediocre, and generally a failure, yet have a massive ego issue. It's not wonder we are where we are these days.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
They aren't terrified and risk averse like the USA is. Shit goes wrong, they pick up, bandage the wounds, and keep trucking. The USA, it spends the next decades dismantling itself and trying to reform its entire society so that some highly publicized 0.000001% chance that somebody might die can be eliminated, at the cost of actually getting anything done.
It's corporate culture to cut R&D. No one wants to develop new products; they just want to charge more and sue anyone who tries to compete or use their IP. That's how it is now. It won't get better until there's a big event to change things. Apparently, it's not recession.
The period that Stephenson identifies with a decline in the ability to get 'big' things done coincidence near perfectly with the rise of neoliberalism in the west. The more markets are deregulated, the less ability we have to actually get things done, because corporations will break up anything large scale for profit - with the full cooperation of sleazy, dishonest politicians who are in their pockets.
But a whole bunch of us are ingrained with a kind of market fundamentalism, that the 'invisible hand' will make things right if you just deregulate some more, that you simply cannot see any way to stave off this decline.
It isn't just technology. This deregulated, global market lets 25,000 people starve to death each year, despite global agriculture producing enough food for each person get 3000 calories per day.
Now cue the stream of /.ers defending their dead ideology because they can't face up to the fact that something they support, both with their ideas and their everyday activities, is so corrosive and destructive to our prospects for survival, happiness, and development.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
But if you check their lives you will see they got that way by taking a lot of risks
You obviously haven't. There are a few poster examples but most of them were born rich.
The problem is that the education system teaches children only how to work towards passing an exam. There is no incentive to learn just for the sake of learning.
Bollocks and more bollocks. You do not get in the top 1% by inventing something. You get in the top 1% by inventing absurd financial ponzi schemes with other peoples money. Yes, there are exceptions. Fantastically rare exceptions, that do not disprove the rule
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Sure there are some born rich... However you could argue they grew up in a culture that encouraged them to take risks growing up in their lives too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Another good read is:
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol50no2/html_files/Program_Management_4.htm
Talking about big projects, project management and the removal of risk by bureaucracy.
Back in those days, child labor and beating your children was acceptable, this allowed them to be more creative and have more drive to change their situation.
Now we mostly hand kids anything they want, and they have no drive to do anything, we protect them from everything, they have no ability to be more creative to protect themselves.
While I am not advocating selling your children to slavery and beating them, I would certainly push to find ways to enhance their ambition and creativity, and not protecting them from EVERYTHING, this is not helping them.
Yes. And we know they got rich by hard work and risk-taking because they spend billions of dollars on advertising to convince us of this.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
is pretty big
Cowen is good agitprop. Take some meaningless facts and irrelevant contradictory statistics, and suggest some absurb policy choices that are internally inconsistent with his own wrong data. Its good agitprop because on the agit side, read on an extremely small scale and out of context, some quotes are pretty rabble rousing, and on the prop side it does a good job of muddled thinking to maintain the status quo. Other than that, its just great.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Kennedy's Moon Speech
"We go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
There's lots of innovation, but it's based around CEO income and stockholder investments. When we went to the Moon, we were threatened with the possibility of becoming #2 on a public stage. We may see this again with China, and redirect our public funds accordingly back to the space program. Or America may just roll over this time, financially broken after fighting multiple wars over the past 8 years. Or it may be that private industry, not public industry, gets the backing of huge investors and the Industrial Revolution begins again, this time to construct space-based mining platforms.
I realize that most great achievements come from either survival instinct or financial gain (which are related). "What's in it for me?" seems to be how things generally work. I'd like to see more basic research funded so we can have better nanotubes, more efficient RAM, and light sabers. Oh, and teleportation.
Aside from the Civil Aeronautics Board, which programs or departments did Reagan end? You can't name any because he didn't.
NASA is a big-government boondoggle. To blame "the market" or "neoliberalism" for its failures is absurd.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Did you know that the vast bulk of New York's complex subway system, without which the city wouldn't function today, was built in about 25 years? Hundreds of miles of tunnels and bridges and stations. Meanwhile, today the city is struggling to build a couple miles of the 2nd Avenue Subway in less than a decade.
Ditto Interstates and improved intercity rail. Our society's ability to do big projects just seems to be on the decline.
Mistake to avoid: Don't invest in projects with a lot of research, instead go with the one guaranteed to make money especially the monopolies. Corporations have a lot to do with stifled innovation. Even patent wars stifle things.
The risks of trying something hard (and expensive) and failing are too high. The media has convinced us that any failure must be followed by a blood-letting of the offenders rather than applauding their best efforts even if they failed. Until we can become a society that celebrates trying instead of only celebrating success we won't be doing hard stuff. Oddly, we give kids medals for getting last place in a banality contest and then when they become grown ups we accept no failure regardless of the original odds of success.
Is this the way you normally talk to people? If you think he's wrong, you can say why, but do you honestly expect him to come up with sources for you? Especially if you're talking to him like he's a child and you're the teacher or some shit? If people don't respond to you, it not because you've won, it's because you aren't worth it.
We do have several problems, as I see it: Science is being denigrated:
1. By the leftish 'safety for all' crowd. The day we let some shmuck say our kids can't play with model rockets because they count as fireworks was the day we lost the space race. Truthfully, we half lost that war the day they said we couldn't buy fireworks. Scientists do experiments. Sometimes they blow things up. That is why the DOD hires them. If we want adult scientists we have to let kids do the fun parts of science. That means blowing things up. Yes, the stupid ones will lose a finger or two. That is the price we pay to get the smart ones to pay attention.
2. By the far right's religious majority. The day we let some shmuck denigrate environmentalism and evolution, was the day scientists stopped doing science and started getting in a PR war.
3. By the media's "Everyone's opinion matters". The day let JENNY McCARTHY say that vaccines caused any thing was the day we lost science.
We still innovate - but the problem is we let morons innovate against science - with crackpot model rocket laws designed by morons to protect morons, crackpot policies on the environment and evolution designed to force other peoples' extreme religious views on moderates, and crackpot on TV because they get more viewers.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The U.S. was founded by people with brave and adventurous spirits who were willing to take on unknown risks and leave the old world to try and make a better life in a new and unknown land. They took care of themselves and didn't look for the government to be their nanny.
Sadly, that's been lost. We're now a nation of pussies who want the government to grope our genitals so we'll feel safe getting on a plane. It makes me sad.
I don't know what caused this. Perhaps we were too successful and became complacent. Now, instead of embarking on new and dangerous adventures we're just trying to hold on to what we have. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. You cannot live in a holding pattern. You're either growing or you're dying.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck."
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
All the big unknowns appear to have shifted from physical to intellectual projects, like Finance. Credit default swaps were amazingly new, and amazingly risky on the down side, but we built that manned rocket to Jupiter and then watched it explode before our eyes as it tried to pick up too much speed around Mars and went careening into the planet, packed from stern to stem with all of our retirement money.
And who would have thought that spending money on all sorts of interesting things, and deciding that nobody had to pay for it because we could borrow the money for just a couple cents on the dollar (and the people who could pay for it found ways not to pay), would end in tears. And yet, here we are in the US, desperately trying to figure out how to lock in that pennies rate to long term debt, 'cause if we see bond rates like we did under Reagan we're going to look like the dumb, ugly sibling compared to Greece.
If you think big risks aren't being taken, you're wrong - they're just in different places.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
big money. And right now there are a bunch of luddites coming to power who are economically clueless.
We should have a program for solar power as large as the highway system
We should be building new technology nuclear plants
We should be poring money into energy storage research.
We should be revamping the whole grid
we should be building schools, and getting more educators.
we should be improving public health.
We should also tarif any country whose minimum work environment doesn't meat are federal guidelines.
Every one of those will drive more innovation; which means more products, more jobs, and more money.
but, all that costs money. SO instead we will just rot and loose all the thing that made america great.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You've embarrassed yourself enough for this story.
We don't protest the success of the top 1% richest people, we protest the inequality in the division of rewards of success.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
If you read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers you'll find that the rich got rich by being at the right place at the right time and having important friends to help them.
Problem with this is that we only really see those who succeeded because of huge risk. Behind everyone one of them are probably several thousand who ended up living in a cardboard box for the rest of their lives.
On an individual level, all or nothing risk is viable.. at a country level, it seems like less of a good idea.
Innovation can't happen without accepting the risk that it might fail.
The political reaction to a failed investment in Solyndra is a prime example. The company had some interesting solar cell technology that looked very promising. It has been argued that by increasing our investment in alternative energy we can kick oil and coal and become leaders of the new energy economy. Unfortunately we don't have the stomach for high risk/reward investments like we used to.
I appreciate the second link's take on things, with the "Low-Hanging Fruit" metaphor, but I think the author misses some key elements in how it applies to modern society. Fifty years ago, discovery and innovation was much easier and the things invented were just lying around (like oil) to be simply picked up and applied. Just as the Enlightenment 200 years ago resulted in an explosion of discoveries about the natural world because the realm of scientific knowledge was so small at the time... You couldn't investigate any natural phenomena without discovering a new element or species.
It's getting harder and harder to push the frontiers of knowledge, and nearly impossible for and individual acting alone to do. In America we have this mythos of the "Great Man" a single inventor like Zuckerberg, Jobs, or Edison, but in reality these people are the exception while the rule is that it takes large teams and incredible financial investment to innovate today, but our mythos of innovation downplays the collaborative side of invention.
Space Exploration is an important example of this. We emphasize Capitalism as the best engine for innovation, but it was Socialism that took man to the Moon. Capitalism is only just now reaching space, 40 years later. Teamwork accomplishes great things, but in America we emphasize individualism and personal profit, which are great motivators, but create silos of productivity that are disadvantaged for lacking the cross-pollination of ideas that comes with collaboration.
Queue the "Marxist" ad hominem attack in 3... 2... 1...
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
I think it probably has something to do with the waning of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. This caused the US government to stop investing so heavily in basic research. Back then, the idea was to make big projects actually work -- because if you didn't, the Soviets certainly would. Nowadays, big projects become politically distasteful very early on, and immediately become targets for cuts.
Reminds me of the premise behind the entire Dune series: humans won't do jack until they're oppressed (or feel that way).
Zuckerberg one day just INVENTEND the wall, and relationship information and that guy tells me there's nobody left taking risks anymore...
It took like 50 years to build the pyramids.. they are a huge achievement not just from an engineering standpoint but a political view. Today, it's basically impossible for any long term project to survive multiple administrations/congresses without some politician cancelling it at the slightest excuse. That's what killed a long of scientific research projects.
Now, of course Stephenson, who unfortunately can't locate his butt even when he's sitting on his hands, like that moron William Gibson who went public on the Op-Ed page of the New Whore Times (known to the droids as NY Times) ignorantly claiming that Stuxnet was nothing more than street coding (anyone bother to read the code on the ultra-mofo?????????), knows absolutely nothing about economics, forensic economics, the causes of the meltdown, the absolute inequality today, the offshoring of American jobs in all categories over the past 50 years, dramatically increasing with each new decade, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
These clowns are othing more than abject fools, much the same as spin meisters like Michael Lewis, who mixes 20% truth with 80% BS to misdirect and redirect with his pathetic Wall Street-financed books --- an exercise in absolute and abject fraud.
He invented relational databases and depth-first search single-handedly!
Completely abolish patents. Then what?
If someone sees a good idea- they can use it. Nothing wrong with that?
Do you think people will stop innovatiting? I doubt it- let's pretend I have a company called Pear.
I invent something new... the jClock. It's a device that tells time AND you can strap it to your wrist. OK - with patents I can maybe make a bazillion dollars being the only one making it.
Now - imagine there are no patents.. if I make the jClock I may only make half a bazillion dollars instead of a bazillion dollars. Will I therefore not make the jClock because others will try and steal my idea? No- I still make the product- but get less rich off it.
Patents secure a monopoly based upon who gets an idea to their lawyer first. Monopolies are bad for the economy and patents are bad for the economy.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Keep in mind the top 1% is over 3 million people in America alone. You honestly think many of those 3 million people invented "absurd financial ponzi schemes with other peoples money" ??
More realistic reasons:
- their families sacrificed a lot to send them to medical school or law school
- they sacrificed a lot to start a new business that became successful
- they got lucky
I believe that this is largely a symptom of our government and culture demanding short-term "results" with regard to anything that we spend money on. This is fine for consumer goods (buying a computer or gadget at a store, for instance), but in science--where is where innovation seems to take place pretty exclusively--these huge, "going-to-the-moon-type" achievements are built on many, many smaller achievements that, themselves came out of many, many failed attempts at making something work.
We didn't develop our space program just because we succeeded once, in a really big way, but because we developed thousands of supportive technologies in the decades and centuries preceding that achievement. (We couldn't have reached the moon without the Greeks keeping track of star movements, which led to telescopes; we needed an industrialized society, which required the assembly line, and the invention of gears, levers, engines, etc. before that. The list of such examples is much long to post here.)
Essentially, without spending a lot of time and money on things that *might* work, but also *might not* work, we couldn't have gotten as far as we are. We could have gotten *much* farther if we'd not adopted this ideal of having every avenue of research pan-out either in the short term, or in the foreseeable long term. Similarly, Thomas Edison tried literally hundreds of different materials to make his "electronic lighting device"--while everybody told him he was wasting time and money--before he invented the light bulb. In our present investment/research culture, funding would have been pulled at around filament attempt number 20, because it was getting too "costly." Of course, the multi-billion-dollar industry of electric lighting would not exist right now if it had been.
This short-sightedness, which seems to be based around a buy-(research)-and-receive-(results/products) business-like culture that will ultimately see us (the USA) left in the dust by other nations that are willing to risk significant loss in return for possible gains down the road. I dearly hope that we end this trip-toward-obsoletion before the USA becomes synonymous with a lesson about short-sighted greed and instant gratification.
Just my 2 cents (that I personally think are worth more...of course).
Far too many times we read about how some schools do away with valedictorians and the like, where no one can be better than another person. Everyone gets to be on the team in some sports for young children around here, barely stopping that at High School.
We have built a system that does not celebrate the best of us but instead tries to convince us that everyone is born equal and should be treated as such. You cannot bring down the brightest to bring up the dimmest. It just doesn't work. If anything we should separate them so those who can are fast tracked while those who cannot, will not, or on the edge, can get more assistance.
Parents respond to their environment, the government sets that environment because it has the power to intimidate.
My favorite account is my friend's daughter, who spoke both English and Spanish as the result of wanting to be able to talk to her grand parents. They only used English at home unless the grand parents were there. She is a very bright kid. She got put into special classes when they found out she spoke Spanish combined with the fact her mom was second generation which meant her skin color wasn't the pasty white of her father. The system did it. If it wasn't for her mom going to the board nearly every day she would have been doomed to what are essentially remedial classes.
Too often the system assumes little susie is stupid because of where she is from. Then too often systems will make it so that a little bobby who truly is backward is not left behind by holding everyone up.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Don't be insane. One in 100 people is in the top hundred. You're telling me 70 million of the world's people got rich because of financial Ponzi schemes? Seriously, there's about 300K people in finance in London. Maybe there's a couple million worldwide, if you loosen the definition.
The problem is people who whine about other people being smarter/luckier than others instead of getting on with things.
There is plenty of innovation, even in the United States, and despite the patent system.
It is difficult to see innovation because our lifestyles quickly adapt to it. Let me give you three examples of major innovations during the past 20 years or so:
1) You can now obtain just about anything with very little effort. Wanted a rare book, a used import auto part, some kind of odd screw, or an antique coin, in 1980, and you'd have to spend lots of money and days, weeks, or years tracking it down. You might fail. Nowadays, if something is out there that you want, it's probably being offered on the Internet. Let's say that you want a couch for nothing. How would you do that in 1980? Today you can post a message on craigslist and someone reading it might respond by telling you to come and pick up. Maybe he's willing to get rid of it for 50 bucks.
2) For pennies a day you can communicate with a billion people, and you can broadcast your wants and and desires to a like-minded group. Doesn't matter where they live. Around 1985 zone calls (> 25 miles away) cost $8.00 an hour. Long distance to different area codes in the United States was a bit cheaper at around $5.00 an hour. That's communicating with one person at a time, or to a bulletin board system, which had very limited communities of a few hundred people or maybe a few thousand.
3) Myspace 2-3 years ago and Facebook and Twitter today. Not even in 2005 could you communicate with a pool of hundreds of millions of people with such ease.
Point is, we have tons of innovation and it is happening at a rapid pace. We're taking it up so quickly we don't even notice.
Yeah, those CDOs with the fake AAA credit rating were some scary shit. For a second there the 1%ers were at a huge risk of missing out on their multi-million dollar bonuses.
And the Koch brothers, they took a major risk inheriting millions from their father and then took huge risks with other people's lives and health by skirting laws and regulations put in place after the risk takers before them risked other people's lives and health and lost, well, the people living and working around the risky operation lost not the 1% risk takers.
There are many 1%ers who are taking personal risks in beneficial efforts, Steve Perlman, the guys around start ups like SpaceX, etc. But there are many more who are taking risks where failure is more of a loss for those around them than a failure of their own. The risking of everyone else for non-innovative based gains is part of the basis for the protests. You probably realize the protests aren't actually protesting success but acknowledging the destructive actions of a fair number of the 1%ers doesn't quite work for your snarky comment.
Here in massachusetts we just had all the bridges on RT 93 revamped over the course of a month and a half, 2 bridges at a time, 2 weeks each (scheduled for 3 weeks each, but they consistently beat the estimates). The impact on commuters and locals was fairly minimized and even when roads had to be closed from time to time it was never more than a few days at a time. The contract was written with incentives for finishing early and penalties for running late.
If you want something done quickly, you have to make it worth while for the people doing the work. If the state had just gone around asking for the lowest bidder with no other requirements each bridge would have taken over a month to repair and the impact on the communities and the commuters would have been greatly increased. Now, how much that is worth is up for debate, but the fact is, when a project is specced and managed correctly, even state governments can get shit done in short order.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
most of them inherited their money from other people who did the work.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Seriously, this is killing America. A friend of mine has something innovative for iPhones, droids and tablets. Great idea. He was going to produce in America. Then met with somebody that has a manufacturing company in China and talked him out of it. Basically, pointed out that he is going to trade doing cheap chinese manufacturing for free distribution channels to Walmart, Sams, Costco, K-Mart, etc. Basically, all of these large retail companies are simply fronts for Chinese manufacturing companies.
If we really want innovation, then we need to get manufacturing going again here, and have access to these retail stores.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There are only two meaningful frames of reference. Human beings exist in the present and are given by their immediate futures (you have a very different immediate future if you are faced on one hand by a hungry grizzly bear vs. an attractive lover... your immediate future informs your thoughts and actions.) The problem is that your immediate future is flavored by where you happen to be looking, your frame of reference. The two common frames of reference are forward facing and backward facing. If you go into the future backward facing, trying to hang onto some past mythical glory, you will be oblivious to the opportunities of the moment, and worse continually trying to force the future into a straight-jacket called "Making it look like the past." A backward facing frame of reference is doomed to prove the past is better than the present because it will continually sabotage the future and all you are left with is a self fulfilling prophecy. The folks that have hijacked our country over the last 30 years are for the most part backward facing. In fact the future terrifies them. In the hopes or reliving a glorious past, or avoid a threatening future, they have robbed everyone of any real future at all.
That isn't to say that we are doomed. On the contrary, the future is coming ready or not, and we need to stop lying to ourselves and repeating those lies to our children. Never before have we been faced with greater challenge or opportunity. We stand at the threshold of infinite possibility, all that it takes to grasp an unbridled future is the integrity to confront what is failed, the courage to address that and the inspiration to invent what it is possible for being human. Blaming fools for being foolish is a wasted effort, instead let's choose people to lead us who have vision, dedication and proven track records of hewing out bold futures. Most of all let's fix our collective eyes on a future worth living in and hold our administrative leader to account, either applauded or feet over the flames. Oh, and for the love of all that's holy, let's do a quick smell check on our representatives and please throw out the ones that have spoiled.
We got to the moon, but once we put the flag in to prove we could do it, we never bothered to do it again. Too expensive, and while we learned a lot doing it, actually going to the moon itself doesn't do much.
OTOH our economic activities in space (satellitess mostly) have been humming along just fine. One of the great dangers of doing "big things" just to prove you can do them is they are build on a foundation of sand. When you do useful things, they are built on a firmer foundation.
I believe in governement support as seed money to do big useful things, but I have less interest in expensive national pride programs.
We've hit limits on our energy sources and materials? Nah. Technology is magical and depends only on our faith.
1) Patent law and corporate ownership of ideas. Why would I ever bother to exploit my idea if I'm just going to be screwed by either the government's patent process (subverted by legislation influenced by corporate money) or the company I work for who would sue me because I might have gotten the idea while I was working for them?
2) Regulation and litigation. Say tomorrow, I figure out how to make a thorium battery the size of a baseball that can run your house, but it puts out some radiation. Rather than simply and sensibly putting it in a lead box with some warnings, I'd have to deal with mile of red tape and incredible amounts of insurance costs due to liability exposure as every white-trash gomer in the USA tries to sue me when they get lung cancer.
3) The incredible shrinking politician. Politicians have become tragicomically risk-averse. They don't want to upset anyone's eminent domain, the environmental lobby to protect the tweeting titmouse, or the vast herds of NIMBY that roam the land. They don't worry about that sort of thing in China. Flawed or not, they can get high speed rail done. In the USA, we never will.
It's all about trade-offs. Patent law still serves some people quite well (If they have access to money). Regulations have good and bad effects. Tort litigation has admittedly curtailed some of the more blatant corporate abuses, but it has also reduced the effectiveness of both government and corporations.
It's about what kind of society you want, and about that, there is simply no overwhelming consensus.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If decision-makers were at all close to being omniscient there would be no risk. In the average company, innovaters are not rewarded for successful innovations, but they are punished for failed attempts at innovations even if it only failed because the manager assigned more tasks to the scientist/engineer to slow them down or pulled the funding in the home stretch.
Most of the innovation of the late 20th century was just a realization of the potential of discoveries from the early 20th century. The transistor and the laser were the last breakthrough inventions of the 20th century. Once those existed the stage was set to build everything we have today. Yes there were plenty of refinements, but the only thing that stands between the newspaper in 1950 and Google today is time and an understanding of potentials. If we've fully explored the potentials, there's nothing we can do but wait for the next breakthrough discovery.
Oh now that's rich!
I'm worth a few 100 million dollars. I think I'll take a rick and invest a few 10 million dollars in a risky business. Oh what's that? if failed. Okay, I'll jet off to my island retreat and sulk for a bit till I make back my few 10 million in non-risky market trades. Wow, the pain.
Hi, I'm worth a few ten thousand, plus a mortgage, I think I'll risk most of my few ten thousand on a risky business, maxing out credit cards since I can't seem to get a loan. Oh what's that? It failed. No problem, I'll probably lose the house, no doubt I got to pay those creditors off, except I can't seem to get job, but if I get one I'll spend the next decade struggling to even get back to where I started.
In some ways life is much harder then it was back even 50 years ago. If you fail now the chance, the opportunity to get back on your feet is greatly reduced as more and more people are struggle for the same spots on the boat. Please don't tell me that the top 1% are risking their lives. For me to believe that, I'd want to see a multi-millionaire (or billionaire) drop most of their wealth (80/90%) into something truly risky like space travel/commercialization, advanced mass transportation (tunnel under the ocean), or some other human kind expanding effort. They risk shit.
I got an idea for a business, I know it will work, I just need a few million. it wont make double digit profits, it will only help a local or regional area, but it will put people to work, help the ecology, and provide fun and learning for folks Think the likes of Buffet, Gates, or Ellison would risk their billions and invert in creating new business at the small level? I doubt it very much.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Actually, the really sad part about the 2nd Ave Subway is that most of it is ALREADY built. That project has been started and stopped a few times already.
Michael Jackson's "BAD" video was shot in a 2nd Ave Subway station -- that's an idea of how far back that goes. I think it was started in the 70's under Ed Koch. I remember going through a section of it back in my college days when I was doing some NYC archeology.
All they really need to do is clear out the homeless communities down there and more of it would be complete than you think. The fact that it's going to take a decade for that is really down to corruption, not a lack of being able to do the job.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
On the subject of NASA and insanely dangerous and unstable: that reminds me of the video footage of the first moon landing. Talk about flying by instinct and not much else. I don't even think Neil Armstrong had an altimeter because he (or his co pilot) needed to look down at the window bt his feet to judge how close he was before he fired the retro rockets. Talk about balls.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Wait, rich guy risks 10% of his net worth, loses it, and gains it back slowly. Not-rich guy invests 60%, loses it, and declares bankruptcy. Hey not-rich guy, maybe the reason you're not making it is because you're careless with your money. Stick to lottery tickets, perhaps.
They are real killers of Innovation.
Privatization of the space program isn't going to help. When it comes to society "getting big things done", private industry has never been as good as the government. Even in the occasions where private industry did get something big done, it was usually with help from the government..
'
Space is never going to be developed without governments doing the heavy lifting.
You are welcome on my lawn.
(I first posted this in 2002.)
Space travel with chemical fuels isn't feasible.
After half a century of building big rockets, we now know that they don't work very well. Half a century ago, they were use-once-and-throw-away devices, and they still are. Payloads are still tiny compared to the launch weight, even for the Shuttle. Compare the figures for jet aircraft, which can be half payload.
Reliability is still lousy, too. This is because so much weight reduction is required just to get the things off the ground that they don't have adequate safety margins. About 10-20% of satellite launches still fail, almost half a century after the first one. That number isn't improving, either; in fact, it was a little better in the 1970s. There have only been a few hundred Shuttle flights, and it's crashed once. (Update since I wrote this in 2002: twice). Commercial aircraft flights, by comparison, fail a few times per year, out of millions of flights.
Half a century in aviation took us from the Wright Brothers Flyer to the B-52. Half a century in rocketry took us from the Atlas I to the Atlas V. There's been little progress in launch vehicles since the 1960s. All the major launch systems were created decades ago. So chemical fuels just don't have the power-to-weight ratio for useful space travel. People knew this in the Orion nuclear rocket days; it's a straightforward calculation. It's unfortunate that an Orion wasn't launched once or twice, just to demonstrate that nuclear propulsion is possible.
I would be interested to see some kind of data showing that a) the top 1% of wealth holders in America where by-and-large born into lower/middle-class financial stations, and b) somehow quantifies your assertion that those folks grew up in a culture encouraging risk-taking.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.--Mark Twain
Daniel Suarez provided some interesting near term solutions to some of these stagnation issues in his recent very enjoyable "Daemon" and "Freedom" novels. Sad that I also agree with his vision that these solutions would be violently resisted by various interests.
Back then, we didn't molly-coddle everyone and give medals to everyone for participation. We rewarded only the winners, the brave, and left the rest in the dust. Then liberals (note the lower case useage please) took over the schooling systems and have been doing their damnedest to make everything "fair", and as such, we have a generation afraid to take risks, expect to be rewarded for being mediocre, and generally a failure, yet have a massive ego issue. It's not wonder we are where we are these days.
This is the most insightful thing I've read on Slashdot in weeks. But you said baad things about liberals. Prepare to be modded down to -1
I might be stirring up the hornet's nest here, but I think union reforms and perhaps some de-unionization are going to be necessary before we can do big projects like we used to. There is just so much red tape involved in getting medium sized tasks done, and the cost of getting it done is getting more and more enormous. People want their piece of the pie, and they want to be right more than they want to do the right thing.
Born rich == didn't earn it.
Institute a 100% inheritance tax, spur innovation.
It'd be interesting to see how many people sacrificed a lot to start a new business (but were unsuccessful), or the number whose families sent them to school, only to have them not be "successful". I think the former's a lot larger number, of course -- many small businesses fail.
You have republicans calling democrats socialist while everyone of the giant republican company's are full on ringing endorsement of communism.
Anyone one who is buy using or selling communism in Democracy.
So apparently we have indeed failed.
Do you know why that is?
Yes, in part because of graft, corruption and other assorted Human nonsense.
In large part because when the tunnels were first dug, there was relatively little in the way. Now we have tunnels, conduits, tunnels, cable, tunnels, water lines.
It's a harder job. This interesting article describes how the original subway was built. Basically dig and fill, very little tunneling.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don’t think it is as much an issue of innovation as resource outlay. We live in a world where profit is the prime motive, and thus the prime value. This is fine for markets, but this mindset has overreached markets themselves and become the default value system for societies as a whole.
In the past societies invested in large scale visions for reasons that aren’t always easy to articulate, but that were certainly not limited to economic gain. Whether it’s space exploration or building cathedrals and monuments, large scale projects require massive resources and corporate (as in group) commitment. Our epoch is dominated by self-interest (some might argue enlightened self-interest), market forces and market mentalities. Obviously, there is no incentive for corporations to outlay massive resources for projects that are either risky and/or that offer limited or negative ROI. But that’s not really the issue; I wouldn’t expect them to do so. The problem is that the market mentality has so thoroughly usurped dominance across all facets of society, the common opinion is that everything should be run like a business.
If you run government like a business, or put differently if you govern your society as though it was a giant company, society has no place for grand vision. We are constantly told that only markets know what society needs and are best equipped to efficiently provide those needs. Of course it isn’t profitable to engage in these kind of projects (or not obviously profitable), so markets will not engage in them. Moreover, if government engages in them, it will require resources, i.e. taxes revenues, and we are constantly told that taxes destroy markets (though the actual data doesn’t bear this out). Anyway, I could follow this tangent into a political debate, but salient point for this thread is that we have become a market society and a market only values grand vision if it leads to obvious monetary profit. If the same resources can be spent toward a greater profit elsewhere it would ‘be foolish’ not to spent to spend it elsewhere.
Innovation is getting status and cunt with efficiency.
Because there's way more money in preventing progress than there is promoting it. What headline gets more viewers on the news? "New rail system will help people get to work and improve economy," or "New rail system will destroy environment, starve kittens." Then come the protests and the lawsuits. Everybody makes a lot more money stymying and slowing a project than they do helping move it along.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
It's easy to take risk when a rich daddy has your back.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
From the third paragraph:
Space Exploration is an important example of this. We emphasize Capitalism as the best engine for innovation, but it was Socialism that took man to the Moon. Capitalism is only just now reaching space, 40 years later. Teamwork accomplishes great things, but in America we emphasize individualism and personal profit, which are great motivators, but create silos of productivity that are disadvantaged for lacking the cross-pollination of ideas that comes with collaboration
Unfortunally, this is the EXACT reason anyone playing the Civilization game would usually go Monarchy -> Communism till all science goals was achieved -> Fundamentalism to rake in the cash.
ANYBODY that chose Capitalism would usually have lots of money...but their science would tank into oblivion and the only way they could win was to kill the other civilizations before they got there spaceship built first.
Kinda scarry how well the game has fortold the future considering it came out in 1996.
If you own the patent, you MUST license it to people who actually produce the product. People who wish to use ANY patented technology would pay a percentage of their gross receipt per unit into a pool. The devil's in the details of administrating this. I'm not stuck on this scheme as the solution; but plainly the ability to suppress production is a big problem. If you don't think it's a problem, just google "ovonics", or try to buy a large battery pack for EV experiments.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
These conspiracy theories are appealing because a person that has to take expensive drugs to control a chronic condition for the rest of his life makes a lot more money for the drug company than someone that takes a cure for two weeks
Not necessarily. If a drug company produces something that cures or prevents a disease, then a patient who uses such a cure or vaccine will live longer and become a user of the drug company's other fine products.
maybe patents should expire in 5 years unless you reapply for continued protection.
U.S. patents already have what you suggest: maintenance fees due roughly 3, 7, and 11 years after issue. Software patent holders gladly pay those.
Everything is about setting expectations and how overpaid fucking prima donnas have a sad if we don't meet them.
The real problem is that we need to break up the three or four dozen major players in our economy and force them to work for their pay. Right now we service the needs of a few whiny executives in this economy. That needs to change. Employees need to be shielded from the effects of disastrous executive decisions, and not blamed for every bad management call.
Patents may have a little bit to do with it, but not a hell of a lot. The biggest problem is monopolies who have no incentive to innovate because they are squatting in front of guaranteed "revenue streams," i.e., captive consumers who have no option to vote with their feet.
Time for another round of massive trust-busting.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Somehow I think you missed the point.
Taking a risk != being careless with your money.
Or, why not be critical of the rich person, he also lost. And probably lost more.
Risking a lower amount for the not rich guy is likely stupid, and unlikely to produce a reward ( or I would assume he would not have risked it, being not rich is not the same as being stupid ).
Sticking to lottery tickets would be careless.
Your post smacks of "you arent rich, learn your place".
emt 377 emt 4
Hi. I know some of the very rich. Not the merely well-off or even the excessively comfortable but the so-rich-I-can-buy-you-but-I-won't-because-I-have-enough-lackeys rich.These people did not get that way by taking chances or being risk-takers like so many American would like to believe. They got that way either by inheriting a small fortune and using it to carefully (very carefully) leverage it into a huge fortune or by ripping off everyone around them and then using the resulting money to fight off anyone who would dare seek revenge. The real rich don't ever use their own money. Instead they convince people they know what they are doing and then use OPM (Other People's Money) to make their investments, buyouts, mergers, etc. No truly wealthy person in America would ever sully themselves buy spending their own wealth.
The truly wealthy are just enormous money sinks, holes into which money disappears never to be seen again. There is only one way to get that money back into circulation and that is to tax the living crap out of all of them. A 90% tax rate would be just about right because after the lawyers, lobbyists, Swiss bankers and money launderers get through the truly rich would end up paying about as much in taxes as they would under a 'fair' system.
As far as patents go, the truly rich don't care; not really. Patents are just a card game they play with each other in their spare time -- like Texas Hold 'em with billion dollar bets. And you can bet the money that's won or lost will be OPM.
I think that what's lost in this debate is that we went through the industrial age, which fundamentally pushed the limits of science. For example, until we can produce a processor that processes at a terahertz what really have we accomplished, or inject someone with medicine that will make them better in 1 minute. We associate innovation with revolution and I think that misses the mark tremendously. First, innovation by definition is marginal improvements or a fundamental shift in how something is done. I think that there is tons of innovation out there. Imagine the power packed into a cell phone today vs. 60 years ago...wait...no cell phones 60 years ago...heck even 30 years ago it was just barely starting. What about robotic surgery....30 years ago...yeah, nope. Splitting the atom, huge in the middle of last century...been there done that. What might be next? How about materials that are easily reusable and can be used for numerous purposes. Imagine being able to create a car out of a material, engine too (except for electric pieces) which can be blended with pigment to produce a specific color, something that doesn't rust, but is also able to be reduced down and separated into distinct components by applying a simple process such as dunking it in fluid and then applying a resonant frequency against it in order to disintegrate it...then maybe you turn it into a chair or gather up the pieces and create a different vehicle which suits your needs now vs. then...using the same elements. Will a revolution happen? It's possible, but until we shift from this idea that innovation hasn't happened because of patents, or other ridiculous ideas I don't know if we will have another revolution. All it takes is a percieved problem or perceived necessity.
1) Much of the low hanging fruit being gone - thereby raising the cost of going farther down any road.
2) No big bad "enemy" to beat which makes us more unwilling to take risks that we may if something was "on the line".
3) Rampant individual greed/lobbying/taxcuts/evasion and decades of deficit spending by governments at every level have left them without the ability to invest in a big future.
Don't kill the lawyers. Like other working class people, they do what they do for the paycheck. Kill the consumers whose dollars pay their employers. Look in the mirror. Look at the climate wars. On the one hand, experimenting with our only planet by making all sorts of changes seems acceptable. On the other hand, alarmism about the possible consequences of one of those changes to some people ignores that those gaining and those losing will have quite different views.
Perhaps the coming dark age of universal ignorance poverty bankruptcy and war will lead to something better. If so it will have to be quick or it will take a thousand years.
If the Internet, Weather monitoring/GIS/Digital Global, the electrical grid and such aren't big to him, he needs to reexamine what he's smoking.
Sure the space program brought a lot to the table, but we actually did the "Big thing". We just couldn't sustain it.
John Taylor Gatto might be a good start.
http://4brevard.com/choice/Public_Education.htm
Gatto says the point of public education is to produce identically trained, docile workers; suitable for cannon fodder or wage slavery. He quotes John D. Rockefeller's LETTER NO 1. OF THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD: "We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply.
And, of course, the "liberals" had little or nothing to do with it. It was plutocrats, mostly. According to Gatto, anyway.
It's easy to take risk when a rich daddy has your back.
The bill gates effect. He could afford to do the software company thing. Luckily for him it worked out. I cannot afford to try what he did...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
dropping the romantic but not very meaningful manned missions does not represent a 'decline'. Now, whether putting all our money into the military and not schools, our psychic energy into fearing terrorism and not innovation, our world-views in ancient myths and not reproducible science, our economy into making a few very rich and the majority poorer is, in fact, depressing our ability to innovate and compete, well, who would have thought it?
What evidence is there that the program is in actual decline?
We nee Liability Insurance! We need more liability insuurance.
And we need Health Insurance! We need more health insurance.
And Life Insurance! And Auto Insurance! And Medicaid Co-pay insurance!
And our Social Security Insurance has been borrowed to insolvency by Congress, so we need Additional Retirement Insurance!
Research and Development? After buying all the insurance we are required to, who has money left for Research and Development?
And who can't see the possibility of a competitor having filed first on the ideas we might bring to functional operation? Filed first on speculation.
With First-to-File we might invent and then have to pay the ScienceFiction R Us Division of Patent-Trolls, Inc. for having imagineered ahead of our engineering.
Or give our engineering to them, because they own it with their "patented" imagined idea.
I don't think $55 million passes the smell test, either. Why would it not work for a public company to do (revenues-profits)/FDA_approvals over a two decade time span? Even then, it doesn't prove that Pharma couldn't have brought good two drugs to market for the cost of one home run. It suggests that Pharma believes one home run is worth a pair of extra base hits.
Then usual PR ruse then kicks in. After you pack your squad with nine 50 home-run hitters, divide your Yankee payroll by total number of hits to paint a sorry picture of escalating costs totally out of control. Do not divide by runs scored. And further, slather on the Hollywood accounting, where cost is equated to short term cash obligation ignoring future tax rebates. The version of "cost" says something about the need for deep pockets, while hatching a sleepy lie about just how quickly those pockets are full again.
I'm not with Neal whatsoever in this piece. I sat on the same rug, watching the same TV, showing the same moon mission, at very nearly the same age. I was sneaking out of bed to do so, having only barely learned how to tell time.
Freeman Dyson has long maintained that the least realistic payload in space is a human being. It's a lousy frontier for flag planting. Since the 1960s, were about half-way to having a non-human payload that can do nearly as much--possibly more. And at a tiny fraction of the launch cost, independent of launch vehicle. While Neal was hunkered down for seven years spewing out the Baroque Cycle (a mammoth achievement) he seemed to miss the entire story of Spirit and Opportunity.
Around the same age as my late night visits to Apollo mission countdowns, I used to sit in the bathtub and use my legs as pistons and my shiny backside as a battering ram to propel water out of the local gravity well. In a tame mood, this started with several iterations of harmonic amplification. Subsequent to gaining the ability to reason past glory (some heartless trudge would always point out the wet floor), I've never had any desire to continue with the wet space dream.
If the advantage of space is vacuum micro-gravity, we could accomplish the same by building an evacuated tube around the equator, with hardly any launch costs at all. Plenty of engineering challenge there.
If the mission is viewing, that's being handled fairly well by a combination of ground stations and spectacular satellites.
If the mission is seeking life in the cosmos, we need to bulk up our skinny little legs until we can generate a plume from the tub in the basement up through the skylight in the loft on the third floor. Or we can wait for 50 years and let dry flakes of dust float up on a thermal waft instead.
The fact is that the USSR and the US were willing to bankrupt themselves and each other to win the cold was. The US was concerned (at least in the early 1960s) that the USSR could build a base on the moon, so they needed to develop their own capability for lunar missions. The expenditure on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo was orders of magnitude higher than any comparable civilian R&D programme. It existed because of unique circumstances and it is unlikely to exist again.
Having said that I do think that manned space exploration suffers from a lack of good objectives. The moon would be fairly easy but its been done. Mars is a can of worms because that planet has a relatively deep gravity well. Mercury and Ceres are difficult to get to because you have to cross a significant part of the gravity well of the sun, and the corresponding return is too low. For me, the best target we should aim for is Titan. As a successor to the ISS we should assemble a deep space vehicle large enough to have lots of redundancy. Equip it with ion drives with power from fission reactors and photo-voltaic cells. Plan for missions to last at least ten years.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Indeed. I meant Nixon, but had a brain fade.
Must be one of those senior moments I started having about age 11.
Unless obtained as a strictly defensive patent (which should have a lower bar) let the government charge property tax on patents (and other "intellectual property"). Let the owner state what the patent is worth to figure the tax basis and require them to sell the patent to anyone who offers that price. If the owner decides the patent was undervalued, then they can up its value and pay 3 years back taxes on the new basis. (Note: This idea is a modification of an idea presented by Robert Heinlein.)
I think you missed sarcasm in that last statement. You demonstrated his point exactly.
But /. said I was a faggot for saying it. I guess it helps to have a famous name.
Who can say what is true and what is not. If /. can't even seem to agee with itself, and come out with some kind of consistand and coherant world view of what the truth is, what hope is there for the general population. /. has the best and mostest int3lligent people on the planet, and they don't know what is true and not true. Therefore, I postulate that there is no truth, and nothing is permitted.
Innovation comes from the middle class. The underclasses are too busy trying to survive to innovate. The rich have no need to (other than using this innovation as an investment vehicle). As the middle class shrinks, the number of people innovating shrinks, as does the quanity of innovation in toto.
Want more innovation? Reinvigorate the middle class rather than turning them into the underclass.
That is all.
The FA posits no innovation is happening and takes as exhibit #1 the space program.
I'll grant you that the space program is not doing well on the face of it: no more shuttle, no mission to Mars, no faster than light devices or anything exciting today. In fact space is relatively boring because we can now go to LEO easily, but putting up humans there has little value. Now going very far away from LEO is terribly hard, and we don't know how to do it efficiently. Also most people only care about big, spectacular things for very short amounts of time. Remember the Apollo program ? People were bored by Apollo XII already. Do you remember the name of the Apollo XIV commander ? Look, shiny !
Exploring space is hard? Blame physics and nature. There isn't any other way to explore the solar system but to spend very long boring months in a tiny cabin, exposed to high doses of radiation, with the certainty of not being able to come back, for very little return (yay, we went to Mars, how cool is that?). No wonder no one is going. Plus it costs many billions, and and we are in a recession. Instead we are sending robots, and those work very very well. We have sent robots to all the planets except Pluto, how that for exploration? Space exploration is happening on a budget, live with it.
In fact there would be a way to go big and spectacular again, but for this we would have to face building a behemoth in space of many hundreds of tons capable of using nuclear weapons as fuel. Perhaps the Chinese will do it in a few decades. Look up "Orion spacecraft" if interested.
Meanwhile there is plenty of innovation back at altitude near zero. This does not mean we are not doomed. We are going to face an energy crisis of staggering dimension in the coming decades, and we are not doing enough to ward it off right now. This is where we need so spend our true innovation dollars, and for the most part, we are kind of doing it.
There is a reason why most innovation has ceased and "big" projects no longer get done. The West (and America in particular) has become too racially diverse for any widespread trust. America has degenerated, like most of the West, into racial blocks, all mutually hostile, and all dedicated to wiping out the others if possible and if not, seizing most of the wealth and political/social power.
America in 1940 was 89% White (yes, really), 10% Black, and 1% everything else. THAT America could afford the staggering effort of the Manhattan Project, basically about twice the money/resources allocated to Hitler's Luftwaffe, while fighting on two massive fronts with made-from-scratch navies, air forces, and infantry/armored divisions. The America of the 1960's was about 85% White, about 11% Black, and about 4% everything else. THAT America could afford the Space Program and moon landings while fighting Vietnam. Because there was no massive White-to-Black/Hispanic welfare wealth transfer, no "diversity" requirements, a lot of excess wealth created and little usage of the Welfare State.
As Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone research shows, people in a "diverse" society have:
* Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
* Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one's own influence.
* Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
* Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
* Less likelihood of working on a community project.
* Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
* Fewer close friends and confidants.
* Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
* More time spent watching television and more agreement that "television is my most important form of entertainment".
ALL Scientific Revolutions require a group of people cooperating, i.e. greater than just one revolutionary thinker. A racially unitary and religiously unitary society is a necessary (but of course not sufficient of itself) for this high-trust to happen. As America slowly morphs into Mexico, it will necessarily have the scientific advances of less than Mexico (being a place of endless racial conflict).
No, we can't all get along. The pathetic rainbow/unicorn hope of a some Colors of Benetton society gets you at best, the Ottoman Empire, at worst the Russian one, neither known for technological excellence. Diversity because of human nature creates endless friction, making technological advance impossible.
We all want lots of nice, utopian things. But hard reality is that technological advances that are broad and deep require a high-trust, racially/religious homogenity, as the fundamental basis (then social open-ness, repeat it is necessary but not sufficient unto itself).
Take Europe. Filled to the brim with Muslims, who categorically reject Darwin, think the Universe is 8,000 years old, and fundamentally don't believe in a rational universe that can be understood by man. Just try teaching Evolution in Europe, with lots of Muslims objecting ... by killing people. Diversity = the technological advances of say, Egypt.
USA universities have moved to policing beauracries where the President and Provosts weld absolute ownership of all intellectual activites conducted on campus by any employee.
USA University Legal staff's are drafting edicts that rob any university employee of anything written while on payroll and off payroll hours.
Robbing universtiy employees at USA Universities is the new IN game in town.
Even Harvard's President, i.e. CEO, can pay off the FBI to "look the other way" even pay them to kill some one he dislikes.
Now thats REAL money at work I'd say.
The problem is MBAs, they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. To them any form of innovation is an immediate cost with no known value, so stop the innovation and stop the waste (to an MBA) of money.
The correct words: greed and insane corporations, wall street sharks and financial criminals. Ah! Stupid and greedy politicians too.
Thanks to the "european wellfare statism" we didn't have a war or big social problems since the 40's.. U.S. had four or five wars, and now is in a deep economic hole thanks to your marvelous and benevolents corporatios, Wall Street sharks and financial criminals.
Sell your "propaganda" elsewhere.
Chicago Molecular Gastronomy Restaurant Moto
-kgj
If you look at the country and its civilization as an evolving system you would find that early on (during the early settlement period) it was a very rudimentary system with very poor or non-existing infrastructure. At that time, creating anything to satisfy immediate needs produced immediate results and great benefit. Examples: roads & highways, sewer systems, water treatment systems, power plants, railroads, ships, mass manufacturing & automation of heavy and laborious tasks. At the current point in time, the system has become very efficient with its infrastructure, automation, and highly evolved sophisticated communication systems. The challenge at this stage is recognizing when it's more beneficial (think cost & creation of new opportunities) to throw away existing work done and create something completely new to replace it or merely maintain and incrementally improve the existing work. A very intensive multi-dimensional cost-benefit analysis would be required for the former. Aside from that, the current system also represents an evolved complexity which poses another challenge, namely whether to attempt to integrate into the existing complexity or seek to reduce it with the new work done. In some ways, this is similar to software development. =)
The current laws basically mean a license to print money, AND NOTHING ELSE. Patents exist in US law under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress:
“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Note that it says LIMITED TIMES, not forever. We know that it is hostile to innovation in software; the same is true everywhere. And then there's drugs, with insane prices, which, once the patent expires, are produced generically for a fraction the price. And on, and on.
Let's go back to patent law of a century ago... AND NO SOFTWARE PATENTS. Copyrights (or lefts), fine... but we need to roll back the damn DMCA, too.
mark
If projects like the Global Village Construction Set achieve their goals, communities could establish their own industrial base to pursue big goals. Maker culture (and open source before it) has achieved some amazing things, like affordable home 3D printing, and it's accelerating. The failure of government and business to achieve big goals could be seen as an opportunity. What goals would you pursue?
"1970's president that told Americans they need to focus on science, alternative fuels, computers, and math to compete in a future world."
Just like the other two 1970s presidents did.
I think just about every president since Nixon has said that. Whether or not they got any funding for it.
The only reason that I'm starting with Nixon is that was the administration when the oil shocks started to bite. ERDA was created during a reorganization of the AEC in the very early Ford administration, though the work leading up to it had been done in the late Nixon admin.
Carter renamed it DOE and did another reorganization early in his administration.
As to telling Americans they need to focus on science and math etc, you can go back to at least Ike with Sputnik. Probably with Truman and FDR with WWII which was a massively technological war.
Though Carter did look snazzy in a sweater while he was telling us to turn down the thermostats.