Have we stagnated?
Wayne Lundberg
entrepreneurship, innovation and new business startups only to discover that
in the last three to five years no really significant innovation has hit the
market. For over five years playing the self employment forum all I have
seen are resellers starting new businesses - nothing new, just buy from
China and sell on eBay - or the like.
In following this alt.inventors newsgroup we see occasional claimants to
perpetual motion and the like, but not much in the real of real world,
possible applications of new, innovative technology.
Which once was the goose that laid the golden egg for the rest of the world.
We invented the transistor - Sony got the license and took it to the moon
and back. We invented the camcorder and the same thing happened. 3M invented
the CD and look what happened there. And so on.
Over half a million layoffs so far this year and what are these people going
to do to earn a living?
With the politicians pulling our chains on the energy thing by artificially
making oil scarce, they may be, in fact, promoting innovation. Not means of
finding alternative sources of energy, but maybe a completely different
life-style paradigm shift.
Is anybody here seeing anything like a breakthrough to the future?
John Geigle masterpiecemodels
I have pretty much stayed away as most of the regulars have quit
posting.Most everything I have seen here is a bunch of arguing people
wishing that they had a good idea.With this economy, We have seen a BIG
drop in new inventors submitting ideas to us. We have not really seen a
ground breaking idea in several years.
Please call me at my shop Monday I have what I think is a breakthrough
you can get my number off my site. I would appreciate your opinion
cheers
John Geigle
www.mastepiecemodels.com
Tim Jackson
teaching physics to kids (only 1 in 4 schools has a physics specialist),
and IT teaching is in a slump. Even Sir Clive Sinclair's latest
forecast is for flying cars! Imagine (as a BBC comedian pointed out)
the insurance premiums if you're under 25 and have a couple of
convictions for air-traffic control zone violation.
The main innovation area now is biotechnology (maybe because of all
those biologists teaching physics), which is pretty hard for individual
inventors to get into on the kitchen sink level (and would probably get
you arrested).
I'm not sure it's politicians that are making oil scarce, unless you
count those oil company men who found they could do more for selling
their product by working in politics. Its a financial thing. It may be
debatable whether we've actually reached or passed 'peak oil', but it's
pretty clear we've hit 'peak oil futures'.
We all haven't done so badly out of laying eggs for the rest of the
world. It's the marriage of western technological innovation with low
eastern labour costs that have driven the sustained economic boom we've
all just finished enjoying. It came back to us as cheap computers, TVs,
mobile phones, etc. How much would CDs cost now if they were being
manufactured in the west?
If you want a crystal-ball reading, I foresee a prolonged decline in
standards of living, and future historians will look back on the turn of
the millennium as a golden age, a technological Renaissance period, a
Garden of Eden from which mankind was cruelly evicted never to return.
Future innovation will be more about coping with our straitened
circumstances than about "progress".
"You've never had it so good."
Tim Jackson
the
www.tim-jackson.co.uk
one
Wayne Lundberg
"Tim Jackson" <t...@tim-jackson.co.uk> wrote in message
news:2aidnQA5NpOP7PPV...@posted.plusnet...
Maybe it's just the smoke from July 4th rockets in the air, and independence
from the UK so many years ago. But seems like we cousins are suffering the
same maladies... again. Only united, in defense from the Muslims and others
who want our goose that lays (or laid) the golden eggs.
But...
I could live off an acre of fairly arable land. A pig and piglets, maize,
beans, squash, weeds and remnant wood to leech lime for soap and stuff...
could maybe take on a few more acres as the family grows. And end up in a
tribal fashion with enough small 'estancias' to support the six trillion
people on the planet... without a single car in sight.
Now... I'm not proclaiming Ludite thinking... but taking what is really
important to us humans and putting it into an acre or two... again.
Remember the story of the good hearted doctor who took vaccination to that
lost African tribe somewhere near Mt. Kilamanjaro? This little family/tribe
had been there forever, living off the bounty of their small acreage. Then
the doctor injected the miracle of medicine and lo and behold, few kids
died! And as time went on, too many kids lived... which depleted the
resources they had forever used... and the new kids began to die.
Nature has her way to keep us in balance. I'm just hoping to live long
enough to see this balance take place.
Tim Jackson
To be fair, most Moslems I know (and I live in a predominantly Moslem
neighbourhood) want to work hard, make money, send their kids to a good
school etc. But they are not too keen to socialise with the
'indigenous' people, who consequently fear them as "other" and as
out-competing themselves.
And those small unrepresentative terrorist groups that would bomb and
destroy our way of life are not interested in the goose except in as
much as it can be used as a weapon against the wealthy groups exploiting
less fortunate peoples and the planet's natural resources to their own
exclusive ends. In fact their justifications have rather a lot in
common with your own arguments regarding natural balance.
> But...
>
> I could live off an acre of fairly arable land. A pig and piglets, maize,
> beans, squash, weeds and remnant wood to leech lime for soap and stuff...
> could maybe take on a few more acres as the family grows. And end up in a
> tribal fashion with enough small 'estancias' to support the six trillion
> people on the planet... without a single car in sight.
That would be six billion. But where do you find six billion acres of
"fairly arable" land. Not here where most people own a "postage stamp"
garden. At 1/10 acre mine's locally considered big, and I'm not even
within the arable zone. Not in most of Africa where the soil is badly
degraded, and most of the good stuff appropriated by multinationals for
export crops. And not on the flood plains and coasts where the sea will
reclaim it before too long.
>
> Now... I'm not proclaiming Ludite thinking... but taking what is really
> important to us humans and putting it into an acre or two... again.
>
> Remember the story of the good hearted doctor who took vaccination to that
> lost African tribe somewhere near Mt. Kilamanjaro? This little family/tribe
> had been there forever, living off the bounty of their small acreage. Then
> the doctor injected the miracle of medicine and lo and behold, few kids
> died! And as time went on, too many kids lived... which depleted the
> resources they had forever used... and the new kids began to die.
>
"Save the children" is the antithesis of "Save the planet". If the
ecology is green, babies are magenta.
> Nature has her way to keep us in balance. I'm just hoping to live long
> enough to see this balance take place.
>
This is what the four horsemen of the apocalypse are for. War, Famine,
Pestilence and Death. Expect to see them around a lot more.
Tim Jackson