Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:13 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: I doubt that an economic or structural panacea exists. Of course not. However, to throw your hands up and say that no economic or structural modifications are worth while is a bit too defeatist for my taste. Not true. I favor incremental changes. A little tweaking rather than a radical solution. I am a conservative when it comes to laws and governance. Radical change is fine in technology. - Jed Radical technology can bring about radical social change as lamented by the Luddites. Harry
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 9:13 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: I doubt that an economic or structural panacea exists. Of course not. However, to throw your hands up and say that no economic or structural modifications are worth while is a bit too defeatist for my taste. Not true. I favor incremental changes. A little tweaking rather than a radical solution. I am a conservative when it comes to laws and governance. Radical change is fine in technology. I most certainly go along with your rule of thumb, but it must be tempered by rationality. For instance, the pathologies of discontinuity must be compared to the pathologies of the status quo and, in some cases, action urgently taken. It is in such rational decisions that reasonable men frequently differ as, most probably, do you and I in the present instance. If I perceive carnage on a massive scale due to the status quo, whereas you do not, you're perception of me will be that I am pathologically hallucinating and therefore a danger to myself and others whereas I will perceive you as pathologically blind and standing in the way of remediation of catastrophic consequences. Rather than each attempting to have the other subjected to therapy or each attempting impose their preferred human ecology on the other, it is only humane, in the larger scheme of things, to make provision for separation of experimental groups with containment of consequences to those consenting to those consequences. Its a simple matter of ethics.
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
Another route McKubre raised was direct political action to get funding earmarked so as to bypass the bureaucratic pecking order. I tried that with R. T. Jones' oblique all wing design and it backfired. What happened was I visited Jones at his home in the hills above Silicon Valley around the time I was getting the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 signed into law, and discovered that his associates at Stanford (such as Ilan Kroo) were struggling with getting access to the supersonic wind tunnel at nearby NASA Ames. The problem, according to Jones, was that Boeing and the other big boys were struggling to get a conventional SST program going and they didn't want any confusing ideas being floated around the halls of power. So I called up the supersonic wind tunnel guys at Ames and asked them what it would take to get the guys at Stanford some supersonic wind tunnel time. They gave me a budget figure (only around $50,000 IIRC).At the same time I was running around lobbying in DC to privatize launch services, I let it be known to some of the California Congressional Representatives who were in aerospace districts that there was this innovative SST concept that was being blocked because of bureaucratic intransigence for want of a little funding, and would they please earmark some money so the Stanford guys could get some supersonic wind tunnel time at Ames. It happened. What happened next is really interesting: The next year, when the money was supposed to become available, NASA HQ punished NASA Ames for going over their head (even though it was a grassroots organization chaired by yours truly) by reducing the discretionary budget for NASA Ames by an amount equal to the earmark. NASA Ames management then hunted down the guy I talked to about the funding and punished him. I don't know the details, I just know that the Stanford guys never got their wind tunnel time and the guy who gave me the budget figure begged me to do nothing more like that again because his job was on the line. On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 11:34 AM, James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: At about 10 minutes into the interview, the question that is most relevant crops up, which is how can one overcome the block on scientific publication. This is most relevant because it gets to the heart science itself, and the institutional incompetence currently besetting science. Yes, I think this is more relevant than is the provision of an energy revolution because although power is of primary physical importance, the cultural importance of science gets to the central value of being fully and completely human: A mind free to pursue the truth of being. The answers provided by McKubre were an indictment of civilization itself because they did not address how it is that civilization could concoct such an incompetent system of scientific publication hence could not address how to remediate that incompetence. To merely say Well, all's well that ends well. or There are no utopias. is to skirt responsibility for this artifact we call civilization. There is clearly a very serious disease of unknown etiology, of which the failure of scientific publication is merely a symptom. On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 11:10 AM, James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: This link to the audio works: http://www.mevio.com/episode/318736/fen.120828 On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 1:05 AM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: http://m.podshow.com/media/1049/episodes/318736/pesn-318736-08-29-2012.mp3Interview Listen On August 28, Sterling Allan conducted an interview with Michael McKubre as part of the Free Energy Now series. It was found in this blog http://pesn.com/2012/08/29/9602171_Michael-McKubre_on_Cold-Fusions_Rise_Despite_Political_Academic_Suppression/
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: The next year, when the money was supposed to become available, NASA HQ punished NASA Ames for going over their head (even though it was a grassroots organization chaired by yours truly) by reducing the discretionary budget for NASA Ames by an amount equal to the earmark. . . . the guy who gave me the budget figure begged me to do nothing more like that again because his job was on the line. That is exactly what I would predict. I expect that would happen at any government agency, corporation or university. It is never about science. It is never about profit, or a technology that might benefit humanity. It is all about politics. Power and money. When you mess with someone's prerogative to divvy up the money, he will strike back. You might have the cure for cancer. You might be trying to develop zone refining -- a technique critical to the success of transistors. When the guy in charge (Shockley, in the latter case) finds out you are allocating funds or working behind his back, he will try to shut you down no matter how much merit your idea has. I am not being cynical. That's the way the world works. Almost all of it. The only reason some corporations deviate from that pattern is because they love money more than politics. Politics are often explicit. They are built-in to the structure of the institution. See, for example, IBM in the 1980s or Microsoft today. Microsoft has what they call stack ranking or the performance model which is a recipe for destruction. It is guaranteed death-by-politics. See: http://m.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer QUOTE: By 2002 the by-product of bureaucracy—brutal corporate politics—had reared its head at Microsoft. And, current and former executives said, each year the intensity and destructiveness of the game playing grew worse as employees struggled to beat out their co-workers for promotions, bonuses, or just survival. Microsoft’s managers, intentionally or not, pumped up the volume on the viciousness. What emerged—when combined with the bitterness about financial disparities among employees, the slow pace of development, and the power of the Windows and Office divisions to kill innovation—was a toxic stew of internal antagonism and warfare. “If you don’t play the politics, it’s management by character assassination,” said Turkel. At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. . . . - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 3:52 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I am not being cynical. That's the way the world works. Almost all of it. The only reason some corporations deviate from that pattern is because they love money more than politics. That's why I concluded, in 1992 when this all occurred (on top of the problems with NASA basically thumbing their collective noses at the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990) the only way to attack bureaucratic intransigence in both the private as well as public sectors, was to replace taxation on economic activity with a flat tax on liquidation asset value at a rate equal to the government bond rate. You do that and they're love money more than politics, or they will die.
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:02 PM, James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 3:52 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: I am not being cynical. That's the way the world works. Almost all of it. The only reason some corporations deviate from that pattern is because they love money more than politics. That's why I concluded, in 1992 when this all occurred (on top of the problems with NASA basically thumbing their collective noses at the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990) the only way to attack bureaucratic intransigence in both the private as well as public sectors, was to replace taxation on economic activity with a flat tax on liquidation asset value at a rate equal to the government bond rate. You do that and they're love money more than politics, or they will die. Oh, I forgot to mention that you have to send the money out as a citizen's dividend rather than dolling it out in pork.
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: That's why I concluded, in 1992 when this all occurred (on top of the problems with NASA basically thumbing their collective noses at the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990) the only way to attack bureaucratic intransigence in both the private as well as public sectors, was to replace taxation on economic activity with a flat tax on liquidation asset value at a rate equal to the government bond rate. I doubt that an economic or structural panacea exists. This problem is caused by our primate nature. It happens with every kind of institution as far as I know, including government agencies that depend on tax money; corporations such as Microsoft that depend on profits; and organizations such as churches that survive on charitable donations. I think you have to live with this. It is a built-in limitation of human nature, like the fact that we only work eight hours a day, we think slowly and we are often obsessed with sex. People often complain about our fellow humans. Japanese will say that the Japanese public is hopeless. Americans think our voters are stupid and they fall for politician's tricks. Democrats are fed up with Republicans and vice versa. The problem is, there is no better group of human primates available. It isn't as if we can restock with superior people from a parallel universe. We are stuck with this generation of people presently inhabiting this planet. A scheme to improve things that calls for better human nature, a better crop of people, or more morality that people are prone to exhibit is going to fail. It is like saying we should build bridges with something 30% stronger than any known material. All in all, people are the paragon of animals, noble in reason, infinite in faculties. History has shown that we are capable of remarkable achievements. So I see no reason to complain about us, and I can't think of how complaining might help. People discovered cold fusion. Martin Fleischmann and Stan Pons did. They were smart, but not superhuman. What people can do, they can do again, and learn to do better. I am confident it is possible to power our civilization with cold fusion. I am confident that we can find ways to overcome the political technical problems and make that happen. I am not confident that we *will*, but I am sure that we *can*. I know this because we have met greater challenges in the past, and the people who lived in the past were no better than we are. As Kennedy said: Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. . . No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: That's why I concluded, in 1992 when this all occurred (on top of the problems with NASA basically thumbing their collective noses at the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990) the only way to attack bureaucratic intransigence in both the private as well as public sectors, was to replace taxation on economic activity with a flat tax on liquidation asset value at a rate equal to the government bond rate. I doubt that an economic or structural panacea exists. Of course not. However, to throw your hands up and say that no economic or structural modifications are worth while is a bit too defeatist for my taste. However, I'm quite happy to let well enough alone as far as you're concerned as long as I can live in a separate nation state.
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: I doubt that an economic or structural panacea exists. Of course not. However, to throw your hands up and say that no economic or structural modifications are worth while is a bit too defeatist for my taste. Not true. I favor incremental changes. A little tweaking rather than a radical solution. I am a conservative when it comes to laws and governance. Radical change is fine in technology. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
http://media.podshow.com/media/1049/episodes/318736/pesn-318736-08-29-2012.mp3 Is a dead link. Moreover, the link you provided was in error syntactically: http://m.podshow.com/media/1049/episodes/318736/pesn-318736-08-29-2012.mp3Interview On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 1:05 AM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: http://m.podshow.com/media/1049/episodes/318736/pesn-318736-08-29-2012.mp3Interview Listen On August 28, Sterling Allan conducted an interview with Michael McKubre as part of the Free Energy Now series. It was found in this blog http://pesn.com/2012/08/29/9602171_Michael-McKubre_on_Cold-Fusions_Rise_Despite_Political_Academic_Suppression/
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
This link to the audio works: http://www.mevio.com/episode/318736/fen.120828 On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 1:05 AM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: http://m.podshow.com/media/1049/episodes/318736/pesn-318736-08-29-2012.mp3Interview Listen On August 28, Sterling Allan conducted an interview with Michael McKubre as part of the Free Energy Now series. It was found in this blog http://pesn.com/2012/08/29/9602171_Michael-McKubre_on_Cold-Fusions_Rise_Despite_Political_Academic_Suppression/
Re: [Vo]:Interview with Michael McKubre
At about 10 minutes into the interview, the question that is most relevant crops up, which is how can one overcome the block on scientific publication. This is most relevant because it gets to the heart science itself, and the institutional incompetence currently besetting science. Yes, I think this is more relevant than is the provision of an energy revolution because although power is of primary physical importance, the cultural importance of science gets to the central value of being fully and completely human: A mind free to pursue the truth of being. The answers provided by McKubre were an indictment of civilization itself because they did not address how it is that civilization could concoct such an incompetent system of scientific publication hence could not address how to remediate that incompetence. To merely say Well, all's well that ends well. or There are no utopias. is to skirt responsibility for this artifact we call civilization. There is clearly a very serious disease of unknown etiology, of which the failure of scientific publication is merely a symptom. On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 11:10 AM, James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: This link to the audio works: http://www.mevio.com/episode/318736/fen.120828 On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 1:05 AM, Axil Axil janap...@gmail.com wrote: http://m.podshow.com/media/1049/episodes/318736/pesn-318736-08-29-2012.mp3Interview Listen On August 28, Sterling Allan conducted an interview with Michael McKubre as part of the Free Energy Now series. It was found in this blog http://pesn.com/2012/08/29/9602171_Michael-McKubre_on_Cold-Fusions_Rise_Despite_Political_Academic_Suppression/
