Talk-Polywell.org

On his Wednesday program, Glenn Beck asked the question;"What does America create?"
http://www.therightscoop.com/watch-the- ... ry-6-2010/

Here is my answer. I deliberately left polywell out of the discussion. While I believe that polywell represents a game changer I don't want polywell or any flavor of fusion energy for that matter to appear on the Progressives radar as a game changer, yet. What happened to the nuclear industry in '70's and '80's is a clear example of how Cloward Pliven works for a lot of things.:
Glenn
On your TV show yesterday you asked and important question, "What can America Create?" As an American creator studier of the ongoing industrial revolution I think I have some answers. This going to be long because it's not an easy short answer. This has been a question that has managed to absorb way too much of my time and effort.
As for fundamentally transforming society, well the Progressives have got nothing on what me and my friends do and we do it right under everybody's nose. Especially under Progressive noses. This is important because the last the Progressives want is for somebody else to fundamenetally change the rules while they are trying ot overwhelm the existing system. Think about the '70's and what the Progressives had done to create what I call the "regulated society." The best glance that I saw ot what the Progressives thougth they were striving for was Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001, where much of the movie was a character going to the moon, for a bureacratic meeting about the monolith and the problems it represented. It was all experts and academics getting together and experting things to make the world run smoothly.
Of course that old style Progressive vision was trashed in the '70's by the new left and the things they did to break American society apart. Cloward and Pliven worked very well for breaking up the regulated society and it's expert driven assumptions. Urban living in the '70's was not a pretty sight.
But something happened right under the radicals nose just as they had it all, with Jimmy Carter and a Congress that was either the radicals themselves or willing to bend over take it. But something happened that the radicals did not think to stop. A bunch of small companies got started making a kind of toy and funadamentally changed how the world worked. Those companies were Intel, Sun computer, Apollo computer, Apple Computer and a little outfit started by a fresh faced geek named Gates called Microsoft. What they did trasnformed the economy, created the wealth to overcome the Cloward Pliven destruction and allow the system to by and large to heal itself. The Progressives have hated the small computer and it's tool the internet since they were created, with good reason.
Right now, things are starting to look like the '70's all over again. But I don't think that the Progressives are going to win this time either. One thing is that the Progressives are old. Their prime moment was sometime in 1974, with the Watergate driven Republican crash. But they didn't get everything they wanted and then their dreams were smashed. How many times have you heard about how the '80's were all about making money. That's a constant Progressive whine.
But there so much more to it. Those of us who came of age in the '80's had so much to do. There just so much fun stuff going on. And you could get rich doing it. The appeal for radicalism just wasn't there. Especially when you has Ronald Reagan and his vision. the Progressives never knew what hit them.
One thing about being an engineer is that it is impossible to describe our jobs to the normal people and have them understand what we do. If I say my company makes interferometers, gas gompressors, thermocouples or mass spectrometers all I am going to get is a glazed look. Even in common manufactured items get specialized when you start talking about lubrication, electronic packaging or hardware.
Now to my main point. America has never stopped creating things. Just because less people are involved in old line manufacturing doesn't mean that we don't manufacture stuff. We manfacture lots of stuff. Just not where the Progressives are paying attention.
Here is some history of making stuff, in video:
Westinghouse Electric 1906:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/papr/west/westhome.html

GM 1936:
http://www.archive.org/details/MasterHa1936
A current auto plant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8DTURTnAXQ

This is evolution in manufacturing. Same kind of stuff, just slightly different techniques for making it. But there are revolutions too. Here's the classic example:
http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/kilbyctr/jackbuilt.shtml
The impactsfrom this revolution are still rattling around.
What new industrial revolution is just entering the market and likely to wreck the Porgressives applecart yet again. Computers connected to machines are amazing things. In the 80's and '90s most of them were connected to big machines like the robots in the auto assembly palnt video. But's that's changing. Computer controlled machine tool have become cheap enough and easy enough to use that hobbiests and tinkerers are buying them.
http://www.a2zcnc.com/
More toys. Then there is the fabber. 20 years ago there was no tool that could make things by adding material. That has changed:
http://www.ennex.com/~fabbers/intro.asp
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/ ... _beam.html
The fun thing is that these tools have captured the excitment and energy of the young. Who are taking the subculture ideals of being on the fringe in more positive ways than their SF hippie grandparents did:
http://www.nycresistor.com/
Creating is becoming the new radical, bringing in fresh air and new ideas form the fringe along with those oh so devasting toys that upset the Progressives even as they don't even see these thing coming:
http://makerbot.com/
I hope that this give you some hope. If the Progressives in Congressactually paid any attention to the real world they might just discover that their tired evil dreams are something that nobody wants:
http://nextbigfuture.com/
They might discover that those dreams of theirs, which are nightmares for the rest of us have no place in a world which has by and large left them behind. Of, course discovering that would be the end of them.

Open source *is* progressive. Anti-patents *are* progressive. What you seem to be doing is confusing the term "progressive." The Democrats are not progressives, they are simply another arm of the capitalist machine. The biggest give-aways (as in raw money given away, not tax reductions) in our history have been by both the "conservatives" and the "liberals."

Josh Cryer wrote:Open source *is* progressive. Anti-patents *are* progressive. What you seem to be doing is confusing the term "progressive." The Democrats are not progressives, they are simply another arm of the capitalist machine. The biggest give-aways (as in raw money given away, not tax reductions) in our history have been by both the "conservatives" and the "liberals."

The Democrat machine is in no way capitalist. It is fascist (in the politico-economic sense) in character. Of course some Republicans fit in that category as well.

The Too Big To Fail machine.

The alliance of Big Industry (of various sorts) with Big Politics.

The deal is. Big Industry is not much of a wealth creator. Small business does that. It is also not much of a jobs creator. Small business does that.

And why isn't big business much of a wealth creator? It operates mostly in commercial and industrial commodities where the margins are razor thin. Big Steel. Big Autos. Big Banks. Big Unions. etc.

What I find hillarious as a former progressive is that the so called "party of the small guy" is aligned with the aristocrats. Which is why Sarah Palin has such resonance in America among honest progressives. What I call the PUMA revolution. Now a faction of the Tea Party Movement.

Jccarlton is quite correct. Control is once again slipping away. Kids are doing biotech in their basements. Fusion in their basements. Under the radar.

What encourages me the most however is that there will be more and more retired folks like me with real world experience retiring and spending their time helping to clean up the mess.

So it is not kids in basements that the PTB have to worry about most. And the funny thing is that the politicians are courting the very people who will do them in. Why? Because old folks are disproportionately voters.

The climate scam was brought down by a retired mining investment statistician. Who would have guessed it? I'm happy to say that I contributed a little to his efforts by contributing what I know. And translating the science into language people not in the field can comprehend.

Between my two blogs I get a million reads a year. A petty fair audience. And they tell their friends.

But something happened that the radicals did not think to stop.

I was involved with that from Jan. 1975 on and my biggest worry was that the government would figure out what a threat it was and put a stop to it. I was pouring on the coals day and night in order to grow the toys into a threat.

My mate and I printed T-Shirts with the motto:

Support The Revolution Buy A Computer

We knew.

Oh. Yeah. A lot of the tech savvy radicals were involved. They saw it as a way to take down the hated IBM. Heh. Little did they know that it would in time take them down as well.

Josh Cryer wrote:Open source *is* progressive. Anti-patents *are* progressive. What you seem to be doing is confusing the term "progressive." The Democrats are not progressives, they are simply another arm of the capitalist machine. The biggest give-aways (as in raw money given away, not tax reductions) in our history have been by both the "conservatives" and the "liberals."

Open source and anti patents are fantasies of people who haven't yet understood that what they create has real value. Once that happens open source and loss of control goes away real fast. As for those ideas being progressive, what part of the huge bundle of bad ideas that represents Progressivism did open source spawn from. as far as I know it was a bunch of coders and software types who came up with open source as a more or less collaborative technique between geeks in basements and garages.

What give-aways were those? If you don't reference nobody knows what you are talking about.

I think that he did not ask the right question.
The right question is:
What is the US currently creating for other countries, that is of higher value than what other countries create for the US?

My big worry is that the US and the west in general is creating less and less and mostly is shifting goods arround adding cost to something but not adding any value to it.
E.g. if you import cars into the US and the importer the sells is to the distributor who in turn sells it to the reseller, you are adding cost to a good, but no value. The true value of the good was created outside of the US. If at some point the value of the goods imported into the US exceeds the value of the goods exported from the US, you will have a problem.

IMHO, our best bet is know how. We (the west) still do have the better schools, scientists and engineers. But the gap is getting smaller all the time. At some point China wont need our know how anymore. What then?
What will we give them in return for the cars they are selling to us?

Skipjack wrote:I think that he did not ask the right question.
The right question is:
What is the US currently creating for other countries, that is of higher value than what other countries create for the US?

My big worry is that the US and the west in general is creating less and less and mostly is shifting goods arround adding cost to something but not adding any value to it.
E.g. if you import cars into the US and the importer the sells is to the distributor who in turn sells it to the reseller, you are adding cost to a good, but no value. The true value of the good was created outside of the US. If at some point the value of the goods imported into the US exceeds the value of the goods exported from the US, you will have a problem.

IMHO, our best bet is know how. We (the west) still do have the better schools, scientists and engineers. But the gap is getting smaller all the time. At some point China wont need our know how anymore. What then?
What will we give them in return for the cars they are selling to us?

Something they haven't even thought of yet.

If you can avoid it, you want to stay out of commodity businesses. There is not much profit there.

America still does a LOT of software. All it takes is brains. And what are the deliverables? For all practical purposes - weightless.

What are the deliverables for the NEW manufacturing? G codes.

Jccarlton,

Open source and anti patents are fantasies of people who haven't yet understood that what they create has real value.

Where do open source advocates and anti-patent advocates reject the value of the information and data within them? In fact, for more stringent anti-copyright advocates (which I should have included with progressives), we see that they actually use copy-right laws against themselves. The value of open source, free software (anti-copyright), and anti-patents rests in the freedom that they give people. Allowing more to participate when before participation is limited to those who can defend their patents or copyrights through the use of lobbiests and special interests.

Once that happens open source and loss of control goes away real fast.

Hahaha, open source isn't going away any time soon. It requires a fascist state to uphold copyright and patents. Grandmas getting sued and retirement garnished because their grandkid downloaded some music. Fun times.

As for those ideas being progressive, what part of the huge bundle of bad ideas that represents Progressivism did open source spawn from. as far as I know it was a bunch of coders and software types who came up with open source as a more or less collaborative technique between geeks in basements and garages.

Yes, but what happened was that copyright law evolved to support those with power, and the coders realized that they were losing access to the hardware. It all started when a big corporation decided that the hardware drivers for a printer were not to be dissected. A progressive wants to move the technology forward, and if it weren't for RFCs and the open process advocated by the scientists involved, the internet would have taken a lot longer to become what it is. Engineers like to think of ways to lock things up, progressives and scientists like to think of ways to open them up.

What give-aways were those? If you don't reference nobody knows what you are talking about.

Bush's bailout (largest giveaway in the history of the world), Obama's health care reform (hurts the middle class more than any other group). (Obama's HCR is better called "health insurance reform." Even Krugman is starting to dislike it.)


MSimon, I don't really disagree with what you've written except for the Tea Bagger part (they really are just nasty ignorant fools who contribute little). Technology is evolving toward ends which allow people to create in their basements, rather than relying on big corporations. Yeah, we still have to buy computers from Apple and Dell. But if you look at the open sectors of the technologies we use on a daily life, you can see huge potential there.

Open Cores for open GPUs and open CPUs. RepRap, open fabrication. We'll get there within 10-20 years, and at that time things will look far more progressive, because the industries that formerly relied on copyrights and patents and the force of law will have to adapt or die.

The movement is distinctly progressive, though. Not progressive in the MSM sense, progressive in the philosophical sense.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Freeing_t ... ry_culture

I myself want to explore "open spectrum." All that white space is available for networks to take advantage of. If we built devices to do the transmission, we could have a totally open internet and cell phone infrastructure. Not "free" mind you, as electricity does, for now, cost money. But undeniably cheap. No more $1000 cell phone bills.

Tea Bagger part (they really are just nasty ignorant fools who contribute little).

There you go again Josh.

And FWIW I'm rather in sympathy with the Tea Party movement. And the things you claim to be against they are against. Count me in as one of the nasty ignorant fools who contribute little.

Not to worry. November will tell if we have any serious traction.

But just to fill in some details.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2 ... Convention

Almost 1-1/2 years since she shook up American politics with her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is set to headline another landmark political event: the first-ever Tea Party Convention next month in Nashville, Tenn.

On its face, the gig would seem a step down for Ms. Palin, one of conservative America’s most popular and polarizing figures (not to mention major thorn in the side of the Obama White House).

But with an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll ranking a generic “Tea Party” as more popular than either Democrats or Republicans, and Palin herself rivaling the charming Mr. Obama in poll popularity, many experts see the Tea Party event as a potential milestone for a mounting, even transformational, force in US politics.

Something they haven't even thought of yet.

Exactly!
Personally, I would call that Know How.
But, for Know How you need science and engineering and to be a leader in that you need an excellent education.
Personally I think that schools have become to easy and to low quality nowadays. Here in Austria it is due to the left wingers and their desire to make sure that "everyone is the same". Since they could not make the idiots smarter, they had to make the smart people dumber by watering down the quality of education.
In Russia things are different nowadays. There schools are difficult. Children get a broad range of education from early childhood. They do not only learn the essentials (math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc), but also multiple languages and at least one instrument. Call me oldfashioned, but I think that having a great general knowledge is more important than having a more targetted education as some propose. Sure having to learn only one thing perfectly makes things easier. It also makes you easily foolable and worthless when your job (for whatever reason) becomes obsolete.

Skipjack wrote:

Something they haven't even thought of yet.

Exactly!
Personally, I would call that Know How.
But, for Know How you need science and engineering and to be a leader in that you need an excellent education.
Personally I think that schools have become to easy and to low quality nowadays. Here in Austria it is due to the left wingers and their desire to make sure that "everyone is the same". Since they could not make the idiots smarter, they had to make the smart people dumber by watering down the quality of education.
In Russia things are different nowadays. There schools are difficult. Children get a broad range of education from early childhood. They do not only learn the essentials (math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc), but also multiple languages and at least one instrument. Call me oldfashioned, but I think that having a great general knowledge is more important than having a more targetted education as some propose. Sure having to learn only one thing perfectly makes things easier. It also makes you easily foolable and worthless when your job (for whatever reason) becomes obsolete.

American education for the top 10% is excellent. We have "Advanced Placement" which combines the best teachers with the best students. And our engineering schools haven't fallen for PC. My best guess? Even socialist don't want to die in a bridge failure accident.

MSimon wrote:

Tea Bagger part (they really are just nasty ignorant fools who contribute little).

There you go again Josh.

I work with these types daily, I avoid political discussion with them because they are hateful people. The irony is that we are all government employees, so, they're getting a big check because of tax payers.

They insult me daily without even knowing it. And they are hypocrites to boot.

American education for the top 10% is excellent.

Are 10% enough to keep your economy running?

Skipjack wrote:

American education for the top 10% is excellent.

Are 10% enough to keep your economy running?

Generally. Education is wasted on most people and not necessary for others.

Also consider that multiplication and division was beyond most of the population in the 1500s.

Try this on "smart fraction theory"

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm

or this:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/12/smar ... heory.html

They insult me daily without even knowing it.

Your job as a government employee is to say "Thank you sir" and "Yes Ma'am" and give a sincere smile when you do.

You are their servant - in the American system.

You will recall that the Revolution of 1776 was based on these kinds of issues. You wouldn't want a repeat would you?

Now Josh, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be a part of the servant class. But you must know your place if you want to keep your customers happy. And keeping the customers happy is very important. Your life may some day depend on it. I'm told the Tea Party people are armed and dangerous. And they are unhappy.

And why do you think the Tea Party folks are happy with THAT name? You might want to look up Boston Tea Party for a clue.

Or think of why the US Military gets the highest rating of any similar group in America (compare them to politicians say). One of the reasons is that they know who they serve. And they have rigid rules about how they can treat their customers. It is no mistake that we say military folks are "in the service".

BTW I was once part of the servant class. It is an honorable occupation if done in the correct spirit.

If you are insulted by the Tea Party folks you aren't doing your job right.