Re: doomed


Straydog wrote:
On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Smith Rhoade wrote:


<Russell.Martin@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1149875828.766611.69610@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[snip]

Kennedy brought us the monumental vision of a trip to the moon, and thereby
propelled miniaturization of electronics, communications revolutions, and
increased commerce.


his personal secy had other ideas about Kennedy -saying the latter made
him feel like a pimp.Take it from me -the trip to the moon never
happened, and will not be happening anytime soon barring some
technological breakthroughs. They wouldn't have lost so many mars
rovers if only they could send a man to another planet and get him back
alive. Just to let you know, mars has a gravity not much diff from
earth, and may someday support life due to the presence of oxygen and
some ice.

Johnson had a utopian vision for abolishon of poverty. He didn't succeed,
but at least he made the effort.

Then came Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and BushII. None
actually promoted any grand program for the future betterment. Certainly
not Nixon Ford or Carter. Reagan perhaps (but I think he gets too much
credit); at least presided over the demise of the Soviet Union. And he
proposed a couple of science fiction thingies like hypervelocity air-travel
and missile defense. For a while a new super duper cyclotron was in the
works.

I'd be suspicious of the quiet big increase in money going into black
programs and the leaks coming out about the databases, telephone &
internet spying, and how NSA/CIA money is pumping up the economies of
mostly SE Asia, and less some US companies who do all the paper-pushing,
by buying tons of hardware for RAM, storage, and CPU power.

The others, of both parties, I can't think of a single visionary thing put
forth by any of them that was actually implemented, attempted to be
implemented, budgeted for, carried out.

A puffed idea: a manned trip to Mars (by Bush II), which I instantly put
in the same category as WMD in Iraq.

We need desperately a new interstate system. Advanced rail. More airports.
Alternative fuels. Better health care distribution and
availability--affordability.

I'd like to see CEO pay somehow capped at around $2-3 mil, cash-only. No
more fringes than regular underlings get. No more $20-200 mil packages.

But we won't see action from the "unvisionary" uncreative folks now in the
seat of power. On the contrary they are trying to destroy the internet by
turning ISPs into official snoops.

In the end it is the vision thing. As I wrote to that whinner from HR who
couldn't get along with her scientists, " you guys in HR create nothing."

The new "creators" of anything are the whips in finance with hedge funds,
swaps, hot money, futures, CDOs, CMOs, tricks, tweaks, leverage, fraud,
crime, and Enronism. The latest blast I'm reading abut is that the big
guys are hiring anthropologists to help design advertising and marketing
strategies, to exploit your ethnic behavior tendencies, traits, heritage,
...anything to sell you something.

Its called entymology or something like that. I heard of someone doing
research on that in one of the IIMs -and that person was positioning
himself for big corps as employers coz the small fish couldn't afford
to waste money on that.

regards
-kamal




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