November 1, 2003 -- The Supersonic Transport and Manned Space Travel Have Stopped

November 1, 2003 -- What Really Happened to the Manned Space program?

November 1, 2003 -- The SST Died Because There are Limits to Manned Business Travel, Too

November 1, 2003 -- Professional Predictors Are Always Wrong

November 1, 2003 -- We Pay for Seniority, not for Results

November 1, 2003 -- There is Big Money in Predictions, But not in ACCURATE Predictions

Fun Quote:

Even paranoids have real enemies.
As a matter of fact, paranoids are likely to MAKE real enemies.



Observation:

If it is truly better for a hundred guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be punished, then you must abolish the legal system.   No human institution will ever be that perfect.

 

             The Supersonic Transport and Manned Space Travel  Have Stopped                

The Supersonic Transport (SST) made its last trip last week.  

Again and again we hear the announcement, “The age of supersonic transport is over.”

The last manned mission into space took place a generation ago.   As one science fiction writer put it, “When I was a child I expected to be alive when the first man reached the moon.  I never dreamed I would live to see the LAST man reach the moon.”

For those who love to be hopeless, the end of the SST and the Manned Space program make good hopeless-ing material.

                          What Really Happened to Manned  Space Travel?                                 

If you want to know what happened to the manned space program, take a look at science fiction programs that were made when the manned space program got under way.   You will see the space adventurers sitting there in their rocket ships talking.   Then you will see something amazing.

In a 1950s television show the members of the rocket ship crew would get ready to do something and they would take down their orders.  How did they take down those orders?   Each one of them pulled out a SLATE to write on!  It was a clipboard with notebook pages that you could detach.

America got into the space program to prove it could beat the Soviet Union in space.  By the time we had done that,  manned missions were out of date.

This does NOT mean that the age of space flight is over.   What it does mean is that we do not have to send human beings to Pluto so they can look around and write what they find down on slates.    At the risky stage of space exploration you send up machines you have developed that are much better observers than people could ever be.

        The SST Ended Because There are Limits to Manned Business Travel, Too          

While Britain and France were hiring giant companies for a Giant Leap into the Future in supersonic transportation, little companies in America were just beginning to develop Silicon Valley.

Britain and France and their mega-companies were finding a way to get people on different continents together in a hurry.   Those people would take their writing slates with them.

In the modern age if you are in a desperate hurry you use a fax and teleconference.   If you can wait on a supersonic transport, then you can wait on a nice first class transatlantic flight at a fraction of the cost of an SST ticket. 

During the trip you can work on your laptop computer.

If you have to have an emergency conference, you can do it with the telephone on the plane.

                                  Professional Predictors Are Always Wrong                                                        

Every move you make starts in the brain.   If you want to move an arm, an impulse in the brain goes to the leg or arm you want to move.

This year, the same year the SST ended, scientists put electrodes into the brains of monkeys that made robot arms move.   The monkey was moving his arm, but the signal in his brain moved a robot arm instead.

You know how fast technology moves.   Within this century you will be able to shake hands with somebody in Europe while you are at home.

And you literally won’t have to lift a finger.

But I wouldn’t invest a lot of money in this technology.   Something else is sure to come along before then.

Predicting the future is a deadly serious business, and it is very difficult.  That’s why I resent people who blithely claim they know what is going to happen and get paid to do so.

Marxists and political “progressives” claim they know the Inevitable Future.   That’s silly.

Marxist professors, “Progressive” political commentators and tarot card readers all claim they know the future.  Tarot card readers, political “progressives” and Marxists are all exactly equal, and you can throw in horoscope makers with them.   All of them are paid by the public, and all of them are not just frauds, they are obvious frauds.

Anybody who claims to know the future is damned fool, and that includes conservative whiners.   Please see World View January 25, 2003 - Please Please PLEASE Stop Sniveling!!

                    We Pay for Seniority, not for Results                   


Professional judges have been giving hardened criminals light sentences for decades.   In response to this, legislatures have been passing minimum sentences and sentencing guidelines.

The news media have just had a big story:  It turns out that a lot of judges don’t like those minimum sentences.  The media say we have to listen to those judges because they have "Experience".  A lot of them have thirty years of experience in handing out sentences, so they are experts.

A sane person would laugh at this.  Those are the judges who have been letting repeat criminals back on the streets for thirty years.  Who in hell would listen to them?

Everybody will listen to them.  When those judges told the media that they wanted the right to put psychopaths back on the street, all they had to do was to point out that they had "Experience" in being judges.

And nobody laughed.

These same judges gave hardened criminals light sentences because they said those criminals would reform “if we give them a chance.”

The judges were wrong, decade after decade.   But that doesn’t matter.

The judges just say all those years they were wrong gave them "Experience".

If you are wrong again and again and again, you just have to stop talking about how wrong you were and talk instead about how much Experience you have had.

Talk about Experience and every conservative will listen, smile, nod and drool.

That is how we choose everybody who determines what our future will be.

       There is Big Money in Predictions, But Not in ACCURATE Predictions     


Experts on Wall Street get paid billions for their predictions about stock trends.  The predictions of these experts have repeatedly been put up against such things as monkeys hitting buttons randomly.   The monkeys are always neck and neck with the experts.

We still pay those experts a fortune, not because they do anything useful, but because they have Experience.

There is a whole industry called Futurology.  It is financed by grant money.   Nobody ever asks a Futurologist if he was ever right.   To be a professional futurologist you must make predictions that sound right to the people who control the grants.

The only prediction that matters to a Futurologist is whether Professor Fuzz, who is on the Grants Committee, will want a Marxist Future or a Progressive Future.

If a Futurology applicant can come up with a good case for Global Warming, the grants committees will feed him well for the rest of his life.

If you look at an application for a job as a Futurologist you will not find one word in it about any accurate prediction that the applicant ever made.   He will say he has studied Futurology, and he will detail how many years he has spent in whatever field he is going to tell the future of.