If you’ve never had a job in corporate America, the following video is exactly what it is like. To sum up, it’s just a bunch of people taking decisions about things that they know nothing about. And for every one there’s a business management professor somewhere laughing his ass off.
Archive for July, 2008
My friend Michelle just sent me a question that I thought would make an interesting blog post. Her question:
If we went to the moon in 1969, why aren’t we going now? NASA first says money, then says it’s radiation that cannot be flown through. Did the radiation become more dangerous? can radiation grow? I say no to both and guess money. And then I say why isn’t there money? And then I say we spent it all on useless wars. Do you have an opinion on this? We discussed this at work, and it was the most intellectually challenging discussion I have ever had here.
Yes, yes I do have an opinion on this. First let me say that I am not aware of any statements that NASA has made regarding not going back to the Moon because of radiation. This sounds more like Moon Hoax propaganda. However, the Sun’s radiation does increase, but by such a small amount that over even 40 years it would be hard to measure. Even over the last 2000 years, the Sun’s output has remained virtually stable, only varying by about 0.1%. Only on the scale of millions of years would we notice the increase. In about one billion years, the Earth will be so hot that life as we know it will not be able to exist.
The real reason we aren’t going back to the Moon is an almost complete lack of public interest or political will. The Apollo project was cancelled due to the lack of political and public support. That support began to wane almost the instant Neil Armstrong’s foot was placed on the Moon. It hasn’t returned. Politicians these days lack any real vision for the future and spend most of their time pandering to the electorate on social issues and having their palms greased in smokey back rooms.
I think the biggest problem is that Americans are just plain lazy. Kennedy said:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…
I think a lot of people miss that last part. Doing hard things keeps us challenged and keeps us innovating, but we haven’t done anything hard in a long time, probably since the Moon landings. Nothing we have done since has matched that and we haven’t even really attempted to do anything special.
So what now? Personally, I think the United States is done. Unless something big happens in the next few years to really motivate us as a people, we will recede into history just as our European forbearers have. Our time as the world’s leader is over and that task has been handed off. So good luck to India and China. I see them as dominating the next 100 years of progress and history.
Check out this link to the Pew Research Center’s Pew News IQ test. It asks you twelve questions about current events and shows you your score as well as how you rank according to demographics. I answered all twelve correctly and scored in the 97th percentile. The test was fairly easy in my opinion, especially since it was multiple choice. But despite that, most people did fairly poorly. Even the most casual news watcher or reader should be able to get all of these. I guess that means people just don’t keep up with the news.
Even though ignorance seems to be all the rage these days, science is still cool. And the coolest part of science is pictures in space. Here’s a new time-lapse video with a bit of a twist from the EPOXI mission. It’s really just a video of the Moon passing in front of the Earth. It’s cool because we’ve never really seen anything like it and also because it’s real. No CGI, just the real Moon passing in front of the real Earth.
While I was once a crazy Texas thousandaire, Texas is also known for producing an abnormally high amount of billionaires who think they can save the country. The two that come to mind immediately are H. Ross Perot and T. Boone Pickens. Hmm, come to think of it, they also only use an initial for their first names. How does J. Neal Bales sound? Anyway, back to the story.
T. Boone Pickens has a new website called PickensPlan (as seen on TV!) that outlines his concept for a new US energy strategy. He thinks all natural gas power generation should be replaced with wind energy and the natural gas savings can then be used to power our automobiles and reduce our need for foreign oil. He freely admits that his plan is not a permanent solution and is merely a bridge to whatever comes next. He also stresses the importance of good leadership to get the plan working. He says it would only take ten years, but with little or no infrastructure for natural gas powered autos, his plan might take longer than he thinks without significant help in the form of tax breaks and government vouchers.
H. Ross Perot has a new website too called Perot Charts. Be sure to check out the creepy and poorly scripted video on the front page. It’s a virtual love fest coming from some anonymous guy that Perot chose to “run” this project. I think we know who’s really in charge. The site is basically just a giant slideshow of Perot’s famous charts which have been updated for the 21st century. He doesn’t really have a plan or anything, just a bunch of charts and a lot of moxy. Go get ‘em Ross!
