Re: "The Only Thing They Learn" -- does anyone else find it irritating?

On Jun 17, 9:30 pm, John Schilling <schil...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:13:34 -0700 (PDT), Mark_Reich...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jun 13, 12:23 pm, Quadibloc <jsav...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 13, 6:43 am, il...@xxxxxxx wrote:
Does anyone else find this trope irritating and unbelievable?
It can be irritating without being unbelievable.
Someone else noted that often people do learn from recent history -
and, thus, they overcompensate, and err in the opposite direction from
their immediate predecessors. But that doesn't stop errors from being
repeated in the same direction when you skip a generation, in fact, it
makes it more likely.
But why _should_ errors be repeated, when people have access to so
much written history nowadays?
Avoiding the mistakes of people in past history assumes we have a
choice.
For example, it is now said that with global warming, we are in danger
of repeating the mistakes of the ancient Babylonians and others whose
civilizations collapsed due to environmental problems.
Do we have the choice today of drastically cutting back our energy
consumption?
Typical false choice.  More money should have been prudently invested
in renewable energy research so that we'd have relatively cheap solar
and wind alternatives and electrical storage options to turn to now.

Savard did offer a restricted subset of the availabe choices, true,
but your proposed alternative doesn't add anything useful.

Because research doesn't work the way you think it does.  It is in
particular *not* an arbitrary means of converting money into useful
technology.  Research and development is primarily about turning
*expertise* into useful technology.

It can be stifled by lack of money, if e.g. experts are stuck working
out of their garages in their spare time rather than in well-equipped
and -staffed labs full time.  But beyond a certain point, once you've
got every expert in the field working on the job with full support,
there's not much to gain by throwing more money at the problem.  

And if one is desperate enough to try, lucky enough to succeed, one
can sometimes bring a technology into experience a decade or two
faster than the natural progression of such things would have it.
See, e.g., the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project.

But the one thing you absolutely will *not* get from this "we need
it NOW, cost is no object!" approach, is a *cheap* new technology.
See, e.g., the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project.  Things that
are born in a cost-is-no-object environment, are pretty much never
cheap, and you almost need to start over from scratch to make them
cheap.  

Solar energy research and development in particular, is not being
stifled for lack of money, nor has it been any time since I've been
paying attention at least.  Every potentially promising avenue of
research I've seen, is being pursued.  Everybody I've met who wants
to be working in the field, is.  And they're getting an awful lot
done, as fast as they can.

If you give them more money, they'll certainly thank you for it,
but they won't get the job done any faster.  Depending on how you
do it, it could well slow them down.

Research and Development is what I do, so please, trust me when I
say that what you are suggesting simply won't work.

But that wasn't likely in United Corporations of America, particularly
when the fossil fuel industry calls all the shots.

And please don't start with the idiot conspiracy theories again.  There
really isn't anything you can do to destroy your credibility and kill
the debate any faster or more surely.

How do you come by that naivite? Let's see, an actual conspiracy gets
us into a disasterously expensive war and it just happens that the
partners of Iraq Petroleum Company get back in with no bid contacts,
and the Russians that were also giving free help, do not.

What you hate is that I actually won't put up with the bull*** rather
than weakly submit like I'm supposed to. If that seems a non
sequitor, its just that no matter what actual facts I try to present
to them, my parents will never give up the fantasies they've
constructed in their heads no matter how out of whack with reality
they are. To my father, everything is simple: it's black people's
fault. He's never going to get me to agree with him, the best I've
done is keep my mouth shut and let him wind down.

By the way, I see this as a intentional premediated attack on the
middle class by those who profited from it. What is the scapegoat of
your choice?

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/JubaksJournal/WhereDidOurFinancialStabilityGo.aspx
.

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