Yes, it took billions of years to get from single cells to human intelligence - but as progress was made, progress became faster.
It only took hundreds of millions of years to get from vertebrates to mammals, millions to get from mammals to hominids, hundreds of thousands to get from hominids to humans, tens of thousands to go from hunter-gatherer humans to agricultural ones, hundreds to go from agricultural humans to industrial ones, decades to go from industrial to electronic, and a matter of only years to go from electronic to digital computer networks. In fact change has been so rapid that while you and I, gentle reader, are cyberwhatering our brains out on/., there are still hunter-gatherers hunting and gathering in the Amazon.
Your description of capitalism disallows private ownership for many people.
It is a fact, is it not, that in capitalist systems, ownership of capital resources is held by few? A distinction must be made between the ownership of personal goods and the ownership of capital goods and resources. Yes, most people in capitalist societies have some stuff. Only a few control the "means of production." (Sorry, the dozen shares of Micro$oft in your 401(k) don't count - odds are you don't own them anyway, your investment company does.)
Tom's theory of natural and artificial property: A human being naturally owns their own labor. They naturally own things that they make with that labor from materials and tools that they naturally own, if they don't destroy things they don't own in the process. They naturally own things that they trade their labor or goods for, providing that the other party naturally owns whatever is traded.
Anything beyond this - ownership of land, of ideas, of corporations, whatever - is an artifical construct that can only be justified if it increases human happiness and contentment. Ownership of capital resources falls into this category.
...closer to feudalism than a system based on the free market; that's simply not correct.
No. Capitalism isn't based on the free market, it's based on state creation of such artificial property as discussed above. If you think otherwise, try to envision a capitalist system without private ownership of land or mineral resourses, without intellectual property, without corporations, without the state enforcing artificial property rights.
Capitalism is about deciding who owns what to start with; Tom's theory of natural and artificial property (which one might, if one were daring, call a sort of socialism) is another. Markets are about the rules for trading what you are defined to have; a free market works quite well with Tom's theory of natural and artificial property.
Anyway, back on topic...
I'd love to have biodegradable plastic, especially if it is cheaper than the current stuff.
So would I. IMNSHO everything we make should either biodegrade or recycle - I hate trash! I just don't want GM food, and I want strong protections against industrial-use GM plants escaping into the ecosystem. Natural plants that get into foreign ecosystems can do enough damage (kudzu, for example) - I sure as heck don't want nylon dandilions getting into my yard.
Now we are simply skipping the middle man and transplanting genes across genetic lines. In all honesty this is SAFER than simply promoting random mutation.
Argicultural selection does not promote mutation! It is about selective breeding.
When you cross two strains of tomotoes, or select for a specific quality from a crop, every gene in the resultant strain was already present in the tomato genome. Everything present in the new strain was present in one of the original ones. No new substances are added to the end product, and the change is incremental. These tomato genes have a proven track record for creating safe foods. There won't be anything in your new tomatoes that wasn't in tomatoes before, and the concentration of any harmful substances can only increase a limited amount. If you could eat the old tomatoes safely, you can eat the new ones.
GM foods introduce new genes (and therefore new substances) that were never present in that plant's genome - or perhaps even in that of any plant we use for food. These genes do not have a proven safety record for producing safe and healthy foods. Tell you what, I'll let you go on ahead and eat them for, say, twenty years or so, and see what happens, then maybe I'll give 'em a try. Meantime I like the old-school foods just fine, thank you very much. I just ask that a) you label 'em so I can tell the difference, and b) you contain the plants and their pollen with biohazard protocols so that their modified genomes don't contaminate the baseline.
GM is qualitatively different from agricultural selection. The argument by GM apologists that we're just "skipping the middle man" is bogosity incarnate.
What keeps this from happening on a large scale, is that petroleum is really, really cheap.
Only because there are many external costs that don't show up in the price at the pump.
Start by considering the environmental impacts of non-renewable fuels. Then consider the foreign policy costs of maintaining the flow of oil from the Mideast.
If we had to pay the true, all-costs-included, price for a gallon of gas at the pump, renewable fuels would be a lot cheaper than petroleum.
The thing about capitalism is that, basically, it works.
It sure does! Of course, you have to remember what the purpose of capitalism is - to concentrate the wealth generated by labor into the hands of a few. Capitalism does this quite well, as any analysis of the distribution of wealth in the USA shows.
Capitalism appeals to greed to do approximately the right thing most of the time. That's more an issue of free markets for labor that of capitalism. The two are not the same. Free markets are about personal choice; capitalism is about control of others and profiting from their labor.
GM companies have basically demonstrated that they can either produce "mule" seeds which won't reproduce or they can produce seeds which can copy themselves, at some risk of "contaminating" the local environment (whatever that means). Which would you prefer?
If they're growing food crops, I'll take neither, thank you very much. GM companies should not be allowed to fsck with the food supply. (At the very minimum, they should be required to inform consumers that their products contain GM crops, so that consumers can make a free informed choice.)
If they're doing whiz-bang stuff like chemical production with GM plants, not only do I want them muled, I want them grown in sealed greenhouses with biohazard protections. Belt-and-suspenders.
I went though a bout of wrist pain when I was in high school - they said it was probably CTS (though they didn't do any serious tests, so it could have been something else) and made me lay off typing and guitar playing for a while, and wear these funky braces on my hands when I slept.
I had trouble off and on for a while. My karate training actually helped a bit, as it increased my hand and finger strength. I've also learned some good stretches for the hands and wrists.
But, strange as it may sound, what really helped was moving the mouse to the other side of the keyboard. In the sort of text editing you do in programming, you use your right hand a lot to hit the cursor control keys (arrows, home, page up, etc.) as you move around the code; then you also use that same hand to mouse around. It puts a lot of extra strain on the right vs. the left hand. If you're having trouble primarily on the right side, try mousing left handed (it takes a while to get used to).
I don't think "faking it" is quite correct. He answered them quite honestly. (Well, except perhaps for the letter he wrote to the draft board afterwards. Now that's social engineering!) He just ran into the multiple choice, checklist sort of psychology beloved of the government and other large institutions, which is more about conformity than mental health. By those standards, he was "deviant" - as many of us would be.
The full story is recounted in "Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You!" in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
OTOH, Feynman was excused from military service as being "mentally unfit"...
The story is in one of his books - either Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman or What Do You Care What Other People Think? (both on my recommended reading list). It's a great tale of intelligence vs. conformism.
The story goes something like this: after WWII they're drafting men for the occupation forces. Feynman gets his notice so he goes to the induction center, and they have to go through psychological screening. He tells them, truthfully, that he hears voices (when he thinks about speakers with interesting accents, he sometimes hears them in his head), that he talks to his late wife (which seems pretty common to me), that he thinks people talk about him (he knows his family does), and so on. It's a hoot.
Also, I think that Feynman displayed a stand-out characteristic of the social geek - he worked at it, deliberately and thoughfully developing this sort of personality for himself.
That is really strange - I can remember my dad teasing me about walking that way when I was a kid. I never though of it as a geek marker. And I also trained myself out of it.
I used to be much more physically awkward and ungainly, but fourteen years of karate training have almost got me down to average clumsiness. MA training is highly recommended, BTW - my dojo is full of programmers and engineers, and my current boss is an aikido instructor. There are a lot of very dangerous geeks out there!
People, for the most part don't buy useless gadgets. People value their time and money and generally spend both on things that add value to their life.
Ah, would that that were true! But people (USAmericans, at least) buy a tremendious amount of useless crap. Furbies, shoes with lights in them, Chia pets, designer jeans, those $19.95 "As Seen On TV!" gizmos...things that are of no use, whose novelty wears off after a week and are then consigned to the attic or the landfill.
Our economy is based on ever-expanding production, which requires ever-expanding consumption; there's a lot of social and economic pressure to keep that consumption going. But most of what is produced is crap, and its consumption gives no satisfation. I'm sure that the same will be true of the emerging "information economy".
On the personal level, the solution is the same: intelligent choice about what to buy and use. But, just as the high level of crap consumption in the economy of physical goods affects you - through polution, consumption of limited resources, competition for shelf space in retail outlets, etcetera - no matter what your personal choice is, it might come about that crap consumption by the masses will affect the infomation available to you. (It's already true of television - for example, see what TNT's desire to pander to folks who like wrestling and westerns did to Bablyon 5: Crusade.)
That depends very stongly on where you live. These discussions often neglect the fact that there is not a public school system in the USA - there are in fact thousands.
To take my own area as an example, each county in Maryland runs its own school system, with oversight by the state. Suburban, mostly middle-class white Baltimore County schools (the system from which I graduated in 1987) are in a completely different world from those of urban, mostly black Baltimore City (which politicially is essentially a separate county).
Baltimore County's public schools provided me with a better education than the local private schools (either Catholic schools or military academies) or my parents (good folks, but they don't know calculus) could have provided. And I mean that in the sense of teaching about freedom as well as about facts - "Constitution, Citizenship, and Political Issues" was a mandatory class for seniors, and a lively one.
And don't forget that the state is the teacher's boss, and who doesn't love to put one over on the boss, eh? I learned a great deal about how to get around in "the system" from my teachers.
(The odds are good that I have made a typo or stupid spellling or grammar mistake and someone will use it to point out how bad publik skools is. Please refrain. Thank you, enjoy the show.)
Did the students mind? NO. It actaully helped them to feel SAFE.
What no one seems to understand is that feeling safe and being safe are two entirely different things.
Police states make you feel safe. So long, of course as the Village Commitee doesn't brand you Unmutual.
What actually makes you safe is ordinary people with the means to protect themselves and the willingness to assist and protect each other, even at risk to themselves.
The worst part of this isn't the forced wearing of ID badges - although that's stupid and useless. It's not the use of barcoded SSN -although that's evil. It's the mandated wearing of a Pepsi corporate logo.
Of course, I guess it's part of the plan to encourage complacency and crush dangerous independent thought through consumerism. After all, things have to be ok in any nation where you can purcahse dozens of types of carbonated caffeinated sugar water, right? The revolution will not have official corporate sponsors.
The Internet is not a part of any single country and no government ought to be able to collect money from it.
The issue isn't collecting taxes "from" the Internet - the idea of taxing e-mail has pretty well been shot down. It's about collecting taxes on commercial transations where the Internet is used to place orders, instead of snail mail or the phone. The buyer is in a single country, and the seller is in a single location, and each government will tax acts of buying or selling within its borders.
Despite the blather from the "national borders are just speedbumps on the information highway!" crowd, for regulatory purposes there's no real difference between Internet and mail-order transations. Mail-order hasn't exactly lead to the collapse of national borders, has it?
one which is international, untaxable and untraceable.
International can be done, so can untraceable. Untaxable? That's not a property of the currency. If the state finds out about your transactions and wants to tax them, it will. And (except for trivial transactions) unless you're willing to pay black market overhead - much more expensive than taxes - they'll find out about it.
Hmm, when did Erols start offering this? I'm also in Maryland, and just got set up with Charm.net's SDSL service (192/192). Static IPs (a 16 address block), guaranted connection speed, and no problems with Linux - in fact, the SDSL router was already all set up, all I had to go was plug the cable from my Linux box into the router. I don't think the box was even on when the fellow from Covad was here. (Didn't get DNS hosting, but I could've if I wanted to fork out for it - I'll try setting up myself or using the Public DNS.)
I didn't want to go with Comcast's cable service because of their "no servers" rule, and I'm too far (just barely) from the switch for an ADSL line. The SDSL is pricy ($130-something/mo), but once I get my stuff together I figure I can do some el-cheapo web hosting and co-location (for low-traffic folks who need a static ip) and make some of it back.
Good structure and good variable names help you understand what is going on, but don't help explain why.
Comments the just restate what the code says, like
foocnt++;/* increment foocnt */
are absolutely useless, and those who put them in code need to be taken out and beaten. But comments like
foocnt++;/* yes, this situation counts as a foo */
(ok, a bit of a contrived example) are more useful. Function and module headers that explain design and interface are very useful, and should be required on all sizeable projects, IMHO.
Inside the code itself, perhaps the best way to comment is to write down what a section of code is going to do before you write it. Thus, you write the comment
/* now we have to mung the frobnitz for each element of the barbaz array */
before you write the code that loops over the array . (Assuming that the code is more complex than for (i=0;i) Then, when you're going back over the code, and you see something that makes you pause for a second - or even a quarter of a second - and say "why are we doing this?", comment it. Trust me, the guy who inherits your code will love you for it.
(I have a calligraphic button that says "Code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." Great advice. Anyone know the original source?)
Anyway, I'm glad that I know have a term for refactoring. I've been doing it for years, but it was sometimes difficult to explain to management what had to be done and why. I shall add this tome to my purchase queue.
(I still keep in towel in my car. I'm comfortable with how big a geek that proves me to be.)
Once, some years ago, I was on a date with a woman (it happens occasionally) when it began to rain as we were walking back to my car. We got soaked.
I reached in the back seat and handed her...my towel.
"You keep a towel in your car?" she asked, incredulously. She was not a geek girl. Very pretty, but not a geek girl. I think she thought it was really strange to keep a towel in the car, despite the fact that it was right then an incredibly useful thing to have.
Hmmm, maybe in the personals ad I placed recently I should have said, "ISO a woman who knows where her towel is."
Totally, when I start my country, its going to be complete lassiez-faire capitalism, free from all government regulations.
So you'd remove creations of the State such as corporations, intellectual property, and land and natual resource ownership? It would be an interesting sort of capitalism.
Economic boom of the 80's? You mean the one fueled by deficit spending, the one that took us to the crash of '87 and the recession of the early '90s?
Remember how that wealth was supposed to trickle down? How many beggars did you see on the streets of America prior to 1980? How many did you see by the end of the Regan/Bush years?
The recent revisionism of the Regan era is astounding to me. Doesn't anyone remember Iran-Contra? The man was either incompetent or a serious criminal. Probably incompetent - we're talking about a guy who consulted with astrologers here, and believed that a literal Biblical Armagedon was coming soon. We're lucky to have survived his term of office.
The one thing he did have was the ability to surround himself with talent - speechwriters, handlers, and advisors - who provided the illusion of competence.
Does the net possibly have the potential to change political systems from representitive democracy to partipipatory democracy
Is that what we want to do? Move towards mob rule? It's bad enough now with politicans driven by polls. The structure of the republic is supposed to insulate us from mob rule and produce leaders who have the opportunity to study the issues in depth. Direct democracy is no panacea.
I participated in the first robot competition at the University of Maryland, College Park. Our robots were made of Lego and run by a controller board from MIT (the name escapes me at the moment). Our 'bot was working perfectly in the lab. But come the day of the competition - which (important plot point!) was televised on the campus's cable channel - it went into total failure mode.
We were using a toothed gear wheel on an axle to break an IR beam to measure the distance we moved. Turned out that the lighting for the TV broadcast was blinding the sensor! Didn't figure it out until afterwards, though. B-(
Slashdot Mirror
It only took hundreds of millions of years to get from vertebrates to mammals, millions to get from mammals to hominids, hundreds of thousands to get from hominids to humans, tens of thousands to go from hunter-gatherer humans to agricultural ones, hundreds to go from agricultural humans to industrial ones, decades to go from industrial to electronic, and a matter of only years to go from electronic to digital computer networks. In fact change has been so rapid that while you and I, gentle reader, are cyberwhatering our brains out on /., there are still hunter-gatherers hunting and gathering in the Amazon.
There's a Scientific American commentary from about two years back on this subject that you might want to read.
Tom's theory of natural and artificial property: A human being naturally owns their own labor. They naturally own things that they make with that labor from materials and tools that they naturally own, if they don't destroy things they don't own in the process. They naturally own things that they trade their labor or goods for, providing that the other party naturally owns whatever is traded.
Anything beyond this - ownership of land, of ideas, of corporations, whatever - is an artifical construct that can only be justified if it increases human happiness and contentment. Ownership of capital resources falls into this category.
No. Capitalism isn't based on the free market, it's based on state creation of such artificial property as discussed above. If you think otherwise, try to envision a capitalist system without private ownership of land or mineral resourses, without intellectual property, without corporations, without the state enforcing artificial property rights.Capitalism is about deciding who owns what to start with; Tom's theory of natural and artificial property (which one might, if one were daring, call a sort of socialism) is another. Markets are about the rules for trading what you are defined to have; a free market works quite well with Tom's theory of natural and artificial property.
Anyway, back on topic...
So would I. IMNSHO everything we make should either biodegrade or recycle - I hate trash! I just don't want GM food, and I want strong protections against industrial-use GM plants escaping into the ecosystem. Natural plants that get into foreign ecosystems can do enough damage (kudzu, for example) - I sure as heck don't want nylon dandilions getting into my yard.Argicultural selection does not promote mutation! It is about selective breeding.
When you cross two strains of tomotoes, or select for a specific quality from a crop, every gene in the resultant strain was already present in the tomato genome. Everything present in the new strain was present in one of the original ones. No new substances are added to the end product, and the change is incremental. These tomato genes have a proven track record for creating safe foods. There won't be anything in your new tomatoes that wasn't in tomatoes before, and the concentration of any harmful substances can only increase a limited amount. If you could eat the old tomatoes safely, you can eat the new ones.
GM foods introduce new genes (and therefore new substances) that were never present in that plant's genome - or perhaps even in that of any plant we use for food. These genes do not have a proven safety record for producing safe and healthy foods. Tell you what, I'll let you go on ahead and eat them for, say, twenty years or so, and see what happens, then maybe I'll give 'em a try. Meantime I like the old-school foods just fine, thank you very much. I just ask that a) you label 'em so I can tell the difference, and b) you contain the plants and their pollen with biohazard protocols so that their modified genomes don't contaminate the baseline.
GM is qualitatively different from agricultural selection. The argument by GM apologists that we're just "skipping the middle man" is bogosity incarnate.
Start by considering the environmental impacts of non-renewable fuels. Then consider the foreign policy costs of maintaining the flow of oil from the Mideast.
If we had to pay the true, all-costs-included, price for a gallon of gas at the pump, renewable fuels would be a lot cheaper than petroleum.
Capitalism appeals to greed to do approximately the right thing most of the time. That's more an issue of free markets for labor that of capitalism. The two are not the same. Free markets are about personal choice; capitalism is about control of others and profiting from their labor.
If they're growing food crops, I'll take neither, thank you very much. GM companies should not be allowed to fsck with the food supply. (At the very minimum, they should be required to inform consumers that their products contain GM crops, so that consumers can make a free informed choice.)If they're doing whiz-bang stuff like chemical production with GM plants, not only do I want them muled, I want them grown in sealed greenhouses with biohazard protections. Belt-and-suspenders.
I had trouble off and on for a while. My karate training actually helped a bit, as it increased my hand and finger strength. I've also learned some good stretches for the hands and wrists.
But, strange as it may sound, what really helped was moving the mouse to the other side of the keyboard. In the sort of text editing you do in programming, you use your right hand a lot to hit the cursor control keys (arrows, home, page up, etc.) as you move around the code; then you also use that same hand to mouse around. It puts a lot of extra strain on the right vs. the left hand. If you're having trouble primarily on the right side, try mousing left handed (it takes a while to get used to).
The full story is recounted in "Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You!" in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
The story is in one of his books - either Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman or What Do You Care What Other People Think? (both on my recommended reading list). It's a great tale of intelligence vs. conformism.
The story goes something like this: after WWII they're drafting men for the occupation forces. Feynman gets his notice so he goes to the induction center, and they have to go through psychological screening. He tells them, truthfully, that he hears voices (when he thinks about speakers with interesting accents, he sometimes hears them in his head), that he talks to his late wife (which seems pretty common to me), that he thinks people talk about him (he knows his family does), and so on. It's a hoot.
Also, I think that Feynman displayed a stand-out characteristic of the social geek - he worked at it, deliberately and thoughfully developing this sort of personality for himself.
I used to be much more physically awkward and ungainly, but fourteen years of karate training have almost got me down to average clumsiness. MA training is highly recommended, BTW - my dojo is full of programmers and engineers, and my current boss is an aikido instructor. There are a lot of very dangerous geeks out there!
Whatever the risks and benefits of fusion reactors are, building one on top of a fault line is just plain dumb.
Our economy is based on ever-expanding production, which requires ever-expanding consumption; there's a lot of social and economic pressure to keep that consumption going. But most of what is produced is crap, and its consumption gives no satisfation. I'm sure that the same will be true of the emerging "information economy".
On the personal level, the solution is the same: intelligent choice about what to buy and use. But, just as the high level of crap consumption in the economy of physical goods affects you - through polution, consumption of limited resources, competition for shelf space in retail outlets, etcetera - no matter what your personal choice is, it might come about that crap consumption by the masses will affect the infomation available to you. (It's already true of television - for example, see what TNT's desire to pander to folks who like wrestling and westerns did to Bablyon 5: Crusade. )
A libertarian favors personal freedom, while an authoritarian favors control by the state or other institution.
A capitalist favors an economic system based on property, while a socialist favors an economic system based on the exchange of labor.
The two are orthogonal. It just happens that the Libertarian Party (US) is libertarian capitalist.
To take my own area as an example, each county in Maryland runs its own school system, with oversight by the state. Suburban, mostly middle-class white Baltimore County schools (the system from which I graduated in 1987) are in a completely different world from those of urban, mostly black Baltimore City (which politicially is essentially a separate county).
Baltimore County's public schools provided me with a better education than the local private schools (either Catholic schools or military academies) or my parents (good folks, but they don't know calculus) could have provided. And I mean that in the sense of teaching about freedom as well as about facts - "Constitution, Citizenship, and Political Issues" was a mandatory class for seniors, and a lively one.
And don't forget that the state is the teacher's boss, and who doesn't love to put one over on the boss, eh? I learned a great deal about how to get around in "the system" from my teachers.
(The odds are good that I have made a typo or stupid spellling or grammar mistake and someone will use it to point out how bad publik skools is. Please refrain. Thank you, enjoy the show.)
Police states make you feel safe. So long, of course as the Village Commitee doesn't brand you Unmutual.
What actually makes you safe is ordinary people with the means to protect themselves and the willingness to assist and protect each other, even at risk to themselves.
Of course, I guess it's part of the plan to encourage complacency and crush dangerous independent thought through consumerism. After all, things have to be ok in any nation where you can purcahse dozens of types of carbonated caffeinated sugar water, right? The revolution will not have official corporate sponsors.
Despite the blather from the "national borders are just speedbumps on the information highway!" crowd, for regulatory purposes there's no real difference between Internet and mail-order transations. Mail-order hasn't exactly lead to the collapse of national borders, has it?
International can be done, so can untraceable. Untaxable? That's not a property of the currency. If the state finds out about your transactions and wants to tax them, it will. And (except for trivial transactions) unless you're willing to pay black market overhead - much more expensive than taxes - they'll find out about it.I didn't want to go with Comcast's cable service because of their "no servers" rule, and I'm too far (just barely) from the switch for an ADSL line. The SDSL is pricy ($130-something/mo), but once I get my stuff together I figure I can do some el-cheapo web hosting and co-location (for low-traffic folks who need a static ip) and make some of it back.
ARRGGH! That little code snippet looked find in Preview mode. I guess What You See Is Not What You Get. Anyway, hope the idea came through.
Comments the just restate what the code says, like
foocnt++; /* increment foocnt */
are absolutely useless, and those who put them in code need to be taken out and beaten. But comments like
foocnt++; /* yes, this situation counts as a foo */
(ok, a bit of a contrived example) are more useful. Function and module headers that explain design and interface are very useful, and should be required on all sizeable projects, IMHO.
Inside the code itself, perhaps the best way to comment is to write down what a section of code is going to do before you write it. Thus, you write the comment
before you write the code that loops over the array . (Assuming that the code is more complex than for (i=0;i) Then, when you're going back over the code, and you see something that makes you pause for a second - or even a quarter of a second - and say "why are we doing this?", comment it. Trust me, the guy who inherits your code will love you for it.
(I have a calligraphic button that says "Code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." Great advice. Anyone know the original source?)
Anyway, I'm glad that I know have a term for refactoring. I've been doing it for years, but it was sometimes difficult to explain to management what had to be done and why. I shall add this tome to my purchase queue.
I reached in the back seat and handed her...my towel.
"You keep a towel in your car?" she asked, incredulously. She was not a geek girl. Very pretty, but not a geek girl. I think she thought it was really strange to keep a towel in the car, despite the fact that it was right then an incredibly useful thing to have.
Hmmm, maybe in the personals ad I placed recently I should have said, "ISO a woman who knows where her towel is."
HTH. HAND.
Economic boom of the 80's? You mean the one fueled by deficit spending, the one that took us to the crash of '87 and the recession of the early '90s?
Remember how that wealth was supposed to trickle down? How many beggars did you see on the streets of America prior to 1980? How many did you see by the end of the Regan/Bush years?
The recent revisionism of the Regan era is astounding to me. Doesn't anyone remember Iran-Contra? The man was either incompetent or a serious criminal. Probably incompetent - we're talking about a guy who consulted with astrologers here, and believed that a literal Biblical Armagedon was coming soon. We're lucky to have survived his term of office.
The one thing he did have was the ability to surround himself with talent - speechwriters, handlers, and advisors - who provided the illusion of competence.
We were using a toothed gear wheel on an axle to break an IR beam to measure the distance we moved. Turned out that the lighting for the TV broadcast was blinding the sensor! Didn't figure it out until afterwards, though. B-(