We need a new direction

H

Handy

Moderator
My thought for the evening:

After close to 50 years of desperately clutching the status quo, this country could sure use some new direction. The white picket fence thing was nice, but it is not a growth industry. You can't run a corporation on zero growth, except into the ground.

The US works very hard to try to hold to a lifestyle and personal goals that were arrived at following WWII. To do so we increasingly ignore the problems in our society and stoically burn through finite natural resources to keep our economy from faltering.


It's a mistake. We need a focus that is not the constant battle over actually minor societal debates, political gossip and sports trivia.


Personally, I favor space. Not some nancy-pants National Geographic exploratory stuff and Guiness book Mars trips. I'm talking about getting upstairs and generating revenue, energy, technology and a vision for a world that is both different and better than our own. But that's just my hobby - there are a lot of right answers, as long as it isn't the same old tired crap.


It would at least be refreshing to have an argument about something other than social security reform for a change. We're treading water. It is time for a national direction to be found and acted upon and to stop congratulating ourselves on being the greatest nation on earth. If that's really true, let's prove it.
 
We are going to have to go into space eventually. This planet will only hold so many folks, and it's going to eventually get too full someday.
 
Actually, Boss, it is entirely possible that you can expend so much of your economic base that you simply can't afford such a leap, necessary or not.

This planet will hold more people given the right methods. The correct answer is to not employ those methods.
 
Travel into space?

You don't have travel very far to find space cases, just your local mall will do.

Why hell, there was some idiot shooting up the mall last night - wounding a teenage girl....:mad: When i look at the # of pissed off kids and 20 something folks out there and realize there the ones who will be running this country, gives me a sick feeling.

Picket fence you say, no i don't want to travel back to the 50ties either. But it would be nice not having to travel armed everywhere ya go. But, "go with the flow" is the watch word of the new millennium.

12-34hom.
 
"After close to 50 years of desperately clutching the status quo, this country could sure use some new direction. The white picket fence thing was nice, but it is not a growth industry. You can't run a corporation on zero growth, except into the ground."

You can't be serious. After nearly 30 years in the Silicon Valley electronics business, I am here to tell you that *no one* is clutching the status quo. Every person I know, in every company I know (and I know quite a few) is thinking up new ideas every day, and trying as hard as they can to grow themselves and their industry. To do anything else is simply death by starvation.

Tim
 
I agree, we should renounce marriage, become pagans, and practice satanic child sacrifice.

That's a new direction, right?

I work for a company that is heavily invested in supporting NASA and other space agencies. It's a lot of fun.
 
Handy,

If you're not already in, here's an invite.
$5.00 cheaper than NRA annual, nice magazine and tolerable level of junk mail.

Planetary
 
Oh, we're moving in new directions all right. Problem is, someone forgot to give those movers and shakers a compass. What about our dependence on fossil fuels? A few are working on alternatives, but only a few, and those are only tinkering, as they have been for half a century with no real, practical advances.

And what about morals? 12-34 hit it on the head. We've moved to a "if it feels good, do it" society which also seems to include a lack of personal responsibility and self discipline. I could go out shopping in the 50's without locking my door. Today, not only is a locked door a necessity; a cocked and locked 1911 is too. Do you like living like that? I sure as hell don't!

We only seem to make advances where a profit is involved, and we ignore blatant problems in society and infrastructure, hoping they'll go away on their own someday soon. They won't. They say history repeats itself, but we don't learn. Hell, we're raising generations that can barely read and write, let alone read a history book.

We're moving all right, in too many wrong directions, with ever increasing speed, towards that slippery slope. :(
 
I would like to say: "To hell with space... we got enough weirdos down here."

:p

I think a good "National direction" or goal would be:

Come up with a workable vehicle that can carry an adult, 2 passengers and luggage over 250 miles, as financially economical as current petro burners, with over 200 horsepower...

And....

consumes no gasoline or petro products as fuel.

I would love to see OPEC countries kissing our collective butts for a few generations...
 
Tim, I am certainly serious. Despite the major contributions of industries like yours, no one in this country lives significantly differently than the Cleavers. The internet is just the new idiot box, most of the promises of the sixties are still unfulfilled (transsonic travel, easy earth to orbit, convenient and quick mass transit, true labor saving home devices). The average family sees each other less, works more, carries more debt and have no aspirations beyond paying the bills. Even our fiction reflects a lack of vision - scifi movies lately feature our world with better looking cars - but no hint that we'll live any differently. We are static, and make no effort to create a future that is anything but a rerun of yesterday.

Mike, I don't understand your attack. But I do understand that we are never going to achieve greatness with that underfunded relic of the cold war: NASA. Scientific pursuit does not inspire anything more than science. The journey of Lewis and Clark did not cause the West to be settled; gold did. Space can be a profitable place, but not if you treat it like Antarctica, which is all we currently do.

Jart, thanks for the link.


Charlie, which slippery slope do you mean? Change? This late preoccupation with slippery slopes would lead one to believe that this society is on the brink of falling, one way or another. Instead of continuing to hold on, we should be looking for new ground.
 
>I agree, we should renounce marriage, become pagans, and practice satanic child sacrifice.<

Mike... you're stepping on toes there. Just thought I'd point that out...

Now... what new direction CAN we move in? Space is nice, but how do you get most of the populace involved? Yeah, we can start exploring and such, but how is that gonna actually effect the general populace?
 
"(transsonic travel, easy earth to orbit, convenient and quick mass transit, true labor saving home devices)"

Sort of makes you think that those things are *much* more difficult to achieve than we thought in the 50's, doesn't it? Figure it out. Those are all highly desirable items. If some of them could be provided at reasonable cost (thereby making the providers millionaires) don't you think it would be a reality?

Tim
 
We don't need exploration - we need industry. I'd start by generating electricity in orbit solar arrays and transmitting it to receiving stations in Nevada and New Mexico with microwaves. Sure, it requires an EPA study, but it's better than fuel rods.

In the meantime, convert more infrastructure to electricity to use the new source.

Send robotic ships to the astroid field and bring back some choice iron sources. Leave them at the Lagrange points and start building stuff. Power is free and you can ship anything you make back to earth for free.

Stop treating Aurora like a big secret and start producing lifting bodies that are cheap to run.

Establish a mining base on the moon for water ice + trace elements and use mag stations to dump it into orbit. Combine with astroid output to farm gene modfied organisms that you don't want on earth, but are good for making petroleum substitutes for plastics.


That's at least 20 years of interesting work for a society, and it's just to get us going. Make it a national priority like WWII was (but without the shortages). Everyone works, and everyone is part of something positive that will elevate our fortunes.


This may come as a shock to some of you, but there is a point when global capitalism begins to eat its own tail. Eventually, there is too much stuff to sell and not enough ready income to buy it. We need to get out from under that spectre.
 
If some of them could be provided at reasonable cost (thereby making the providers millionaires) don't you think it would be a reality?
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No. Supply and demand doesn't create enormous leaps in infrastructure technology. The Concorde cut flight times in half, but cost way too much. If a system used the decreased flight times to also decrease ticket cost, it would work.

But alot of it is mindset. If you believe that your major goals in life revolve around the acquistion of a nice car and good house, then you will never demand better or willingly make sacrafices to achieve it.
 
[QUOTEYou can't be serious. After nearly 30 years in the Silicon Valley electronics business, I am here to tell you that *no one* is clutching the status quo. Every person I know, in every company I know (and I know quite a few) is thinking up new ideas every day, and trying as hard as they can to grow themselves and their industry. To do anything else is simply death by starvation.
][/QUOTE]


New ideas every day but are they ideas that produce a more quality life
or ideas to make huge profits from consumers who are lost in a sea of
junk.
As a senior I feel we need a new direction, I was raised in the 40's/50's,
yes we have made progress in electronics, health, but on the down side
we are failing bad in public schools, morals, standards, greed is now the
all consuming drive. We have large corporations who care not for this country
they want huge, quick profits and they don't care who they step on to get
it.
We speak nothing of controlling our population while we export jobs and
import people from third world countries with less then an 8th grade
education.

Unless we do make changes and soon those of you under 40 are in for a tough ride.
 
Charlie, which slippery slope do you mean?
Click to expand...
Well, I ain't talking about the ski slopes in Colorado :D . Seriously, and at the risk of sounding like Chicken Little, the slope to oblivion, as a nation, maybe as a people, and hopefully not as a species. I remember reading a behavioral study done on mice some years ago. (Sorry, but I can't remember who authored the paper, or even the name of the project.) The study revealed some interesting things concerning social behavior and over-population. A small number of mice were placed into a finite space, with the population being gradually increased. In the beginning, the mice were social towards each other. As that space reached max capacity and more, the mice became more and more aggressive towards each other, and even displayed cannibalism, even when food and water was available. At the peak of this, an interesting thing happened. The aggression changed to apathy. They became more and more apathetic, would not mate, and eventually ignored food and water, and of course, died. OK, we're not mice, but can you see the parallels? Ma Nature has shown that she's completely capable of keeping populations in check, and we're not immune. She eliminates the weakest, and we, as a people, as a nation, become more apathetic, which translates to weaker, with each passing day. Apathetic societies are static societies, not growing, not advancing, and history has shown that static societies don't survive. People need new stimuli, new challenges... and new directions to keep from becoming static. If we don't do that, we might just end up going the way of the mice.
 
If we invested the three trillion dollars wasted on the "great society" programs into the space program, not only would we have a thriving space industry, but a lot less poverty too.
 
If you don't realize that we are headed for a world wide epidemic you living in la la land. Its only a matter of time before nature regulates our population. Its the natural order of things. All it will take is for a disease to mutate into an airbourne passed disease. Then we will be dropping like flies. First the old and young or the ones with a weakened immune system. It won't matter what the goverment does to try to stop it once it starts because with the way we travel the world in just hours as apposed to weeks it will be in country before anyone knows its deadly. Within the next fifty years its going to happen.
 
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