Especially if you are depending upon the private sector to develop them.
Did you know that no private company ever developed a Chip-fab lab? Couldn't afford to. It was always done with government funding but farmed out to feed the baby weasels in the private sector. Fifty years after we went into space, the private sector is now beginning to be able to afford the economie of scale and pay their shareholders to have a "private" space project. We wouldn't have had Hubble if it was dependent upon the private sector. Hell we can't even have a repertory chorus with fully paid personnel with the rules of the private sector. Is your chorus in Bath paid a living wage? Did Handlo make a profit? What exactly is it that the private sector does well? Fund the upper 1% of the nation, but just barely? Look what its done to the rest of us. All we can do is breed. That's why abortion is an atrocity to the lower classes. Flooding the wealthy with children is their only power. How much would you be willing to pay them NOT to have children and to go to school? No? Humm! ... They hired a black janitor to clean up the mess and now all they can do is complain about the streaks. Humm! With a song.. in my heart. Or is it: "No man is in island, no man stands alone, each man's joy is joy to me, each man's grief is my own. We need one another so I will defend each man as my brother, each man as my friend. That's what they taught me in school in the Quapaw reservation. That was government as well. The private sector would have preferred Ayn Rand. :>)) REH PS. You boys gettin' tired? You seem tired these days. How ya feelin? From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Friday, July 02, 2010 9:45 AM To: [email protected]; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Pew Poll: American's Predict Life in 2050 Steve, At 08:37 02/07/2010 -0400, you wrote: Asleep at the wheel... Food? Water? Energy? 'The Spirit in The Gene' at work. Steve I agree. I just wonder what the point of these sorts of polls are. Most people have little idea of the scale of things, or the complexity of things, nor the cost of them. look at the first para, for example! Poll: Americans Predict Life in 2050 A joint poll from the Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine finds high hopes about science but anxiety about the environment By T. A. Frail Illustrations By Serge Bloch Smithsonian magazine, August 2010 Within the next 40 years, most Americans believe, the United States will get the bulk of its energy from sources other than oil. Maybe not from oil but certainly the US (and all other advanced countries) will still be heavily reliant on fossil fuels. There's no way that wind turbines, solar technology, nuclear power (all needing massive governmental subsidy anyway) or whatever can be scaled up to producing even half of electricity requirements. None of these can produce stock organic chemicals either (particularly nitrogenous fertilizers) at anywhere near economic cost. Computers will converse like people. Unlikely in the extreme. Ever since Japan's attempts at 5th Generation computing 30 years ago every possible algorithm-based approach has failed. Artificial Intelligence is a wasteland. Cancer will be cured, There are many sorts of cancers and most of them involve incredibly complex associations between scores and sometimes hundreds of genes. As now, only a few of the many cancers will be treatable (or postponable) and artificial limbs will outperform natural ones. Hardly. Nature has spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting limbs with every conceivable ability. We can certainly invent prosthetics which can do a few unusual things which our natural limbs can't do, but not the all-round performance. Astronauts will land on Mars, Technically possible but will astronauts be able to remain fit and sane on the journey there, and then on their return? All the evidence about basic physiological and psychological limitations of the human body and brain is pointing the other way. Robots perhaps, but live humans never. and ordinary people will travel in space. When ordinary parents cannot afford more than one or two children in advanced countries how are they going to be able to afford the price of a space ticket? Most ordinary people in advanced countries will still be paying off their governmental debts in 40 years' time -- if there hasn't been a catastrophic hyperinflation in between, and if they're lucky enough to have a job. Keith But that optimistic outlook on scientific achievementdocumented in a nationwide opinion poll conducted by the Pew Research Center <http://people-press.org/report/625/> and Smithsoniandoes not extend to the environment. A small majority of those polled said most of the United States would face severe water shortages by 2050. Six in ten said the oceans would be less healthy than they are now, and seven in ten foresaw a major energy crisis. Overall, fewer than half expected the quality of Earths environment to improve. If the U.S. has a national religion, the closest thing to it is faith in technology,said Scott Keeter, director of survey research for the Pew Research Center <http://people-press.org/report/625/> . But technology is not seen as a panacea for fixing the environment. The poll, occasioned by the magazines 40th anniversary and designed to assess attitudes about the next 40 years, also documented a drop in expectations. Americans remain generally positive, with 64 percent of those surveyed saying they were somewhat or very optimistic about what the next 40 years holds for them and their families; 61 percent said the same about the nations future. But in a Pew poll taken in May 1999, the questions garnered response rates of 81 percent and 70 percent, respectively. Of course, the 1999 poll was taken at the height of the high-tech boom and on the eve of a new millennium. Since then, terrorists attacked the United States, the nation has engaged in two wars, the cost of living has outpaced wages and a recession has damaged the economy, among other things. In the new survey, 58 percent of respondents said a world war would occur in the next four decades, 53 percent said terrorists would attack the United States with nuclear weapons, and the same majority said the nation would be less important in the world than it is now. The Smithsonian/Pew poll was conducted April 21-26just after the BP oil spill began in the Gulf of Mexico, but well before its magnitude became apparent. The survey included 1,546 adults in the United States reached by residential telephone or cellphone. The margin of error for the total sample is no more than plus or minus 4.5 points. The documented belief in technological advancement extended from the laboratory (half said an extinct species would be resuscitated through cloning) to outer space (half said evidence of life would be found elsewhere in the universe) to the marketplace (a small majority said gasoline-powered cars would go out of production). In an exception to the pessimism about the environment, the poll found a ten-point drop in the percentage of respondents who say the earth will get warmer: from 76 percent in 1999 to 66 percent in 2010. That trend is very consistent with data we've gathered on the issue of global warming more generally,Keeter said. There are many possible explanations, but one thing is quite clear: there is a strong partisan and ideological pattern to the decline in belief in global warming.The vast majority of the change since 1999, he said, has occurred among Republicans and independents who lean Republican. Because the U.S. population is expected to increase by more than 100 million by 2050, the poll asked about such growth. More than twice as many respondents (42 percent) said it would be more harmful than beneficial (16 percent). And there was ambivalence about immigration. Roughly a third of respondents said legal immigration had to be decreased to keep the economy strong, but a slightly higher proportion said legal immigration had to be kept at current levels; a quarter said it should be increased. A clear majority expected race relations to improve (68 percent). Even more expected a Hispanic candidate to be elected president of the United States (69 percent). And 89 percentthe largest majority in the entire pollsaid a woman would be elected president. There was broad agreement that the cultural landscape, however else it changes over the next 40 years, will have less paper. More than six in ten respondents said they believed that paper currency and printed newspapers would disappear and personal letters sent by mail would be exceedingly rare. And a hopeful outlook on the U.S. economy56 percent said it would be stronger in 2050 than it is nowcame with a caveat: 86 percent said Americans would have to work into their 70s before retiring. Those longer careers, in the respondentsview, would not be accompanied by longer lives. Those who thought more people would live to be 100 (42 percent) were outnumbered by those who did not (50 percent). T. A. Frail is a senior editor at Smithsonian. Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Poll-American s-Predict-Life-in-2050.html#ixzz0sTuGIa51 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
