I had occasion to chase a customer for several hours last week trying to get some information from him. This, one of my Gas Guys, being a guy who asks if the sheriff's after me when he can't immediately find my tender voice on the other end of the telephone when he calls. When I finally caught up with him he told me "Man, I'm running the pipeline. It's almost noon and only 33 degrees here, 75 miles from New Orleans, and the high yesterday was only 35. If not for global warming can you imagine how really cold it would be?" He went on to ask me to thank Al Gore for him the next time I see him. I think I'll change my name to Rodney. But our government is going to tax us based upon our "carbon footprint," and use some ethereal formula developed by who-knows-what sort of computer program written by someone who can't even write code that will forecast last week's weather. A code writer who's on the government payroll, no doubt.
We, as a society, spent years getting rid of all the chloro-fluoro-whatevers from every nook and cranny of our industrial, commercial, and residential cabinets. This, because some folks convinced government functionaries these compounds were destroying the ozone layer around planet Terra and we were all going to die. But a bit of analysis and reasoning would have shown that cosmic radiation from El Sol is what causes molecular oxygen (O2) to break down and reform as ozone (O3), at best an unstable compound, and when the poles are facing away from the sun there isn't enough direct radiation to sustain ozone production ... like, during the winter months of our respective hemispheres. Ozone holes have never appeared between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Why? That analysis was probably done by some government bankrolled person as well.
When government gets into the act, there's no telling what it's going to cost us. There never can be a true profit, but there's always a cost that we schmucks on the street will have to pay ... like when NASA spent beaucoups of bucks developing a pen that would write upside down and in free fall, while those Russian dudes just switched to using a pencil.
It hasn't always been that way.
When Thomas Edison worked so long and hard to invent the electric light bulb he had no government backing. His goal was profit, moolah, dinero, jingwa, bucks, money ... to replace the oil lamps used on wooden whaling ships of the day. He invented a generator to produce electricity so he could sell other electrical stuff, and serial number 2 still sits at Pharr Yarns in McAdenville, NC where the inventor installed it. At least it was about 15 years ago when I was doing some work over there. Edison later got into a battle royale with his former employee, Nikola Tesla, and Tesla's patron at the time, George Westinghouse, over whether or not the standard of electric power generation would be direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC). The Tesla/Westinghouse team won because AC is more efficient and easier to transmit over long distances less expensively. Westinghouse made his initial fortune inventing an air brake system for railroad cars that would provide more even braking pressure to the wheels. Guglielmo Marconi infringed on over 40 of Tesla's patents when he developed a radio system that could transmit data over long distances.
Procter and Gamble made a batch of soap that was left in the mixer too long and air got into the concoction, so they called it Ivory and sold the fact that it floats. The 3M company made a glue that didn't stick very well so they invented the sticky note. Microwave ovens were developed as a result of someone noticing that working around high powered radio transmitters caused stuff to melt. Radar was developed when someone noticed that some of the energy from an electric spark would bounce off of distant objects and could be used to determine bearing and distance from the source, spark gap modulation was what it was called ... and it certainly can be fun when a new maintenance guy is walking across the end of the flight line with an arm load of fluorescent tubes in his arms, and the tracking radar from a jet fighter gets pointed in his direction. Those tubes don't last long, though, when they light up and he drops them as he's heading for the hills.
The transistor was invented at AT&T Bell Labs by William Shockley and his accomplices at a time when vacuum tubes were consuming a lot of power, lots and lots of power. They eventually switched to digital integrated circuit electronics and called those electronic switches "processors" because they, AT&T, weren't allowed to use "computers." Their "processors" allowed them to handle more calls with physically smaller equipment that consumed far less power, with more functionality, and do so at close to the speed of light. Reading technical manuals or ciphering measurement errors in a #5 crossbar office during the middle of the afternoon when call traffic is highest was always a good exercise in mental focus, though.
In government operations they buy last year's computers, at vastly over valued prices, and then hire more people to operate them ... seemingly to do less work with more people and higher priced equipment. Computers are supposed to allow fewer people to make more mistakes faster, not the same mistakes with more people.
There are somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 patents directly related to women's b'assieres ... uh, next subject.
Walter E. Rudish was a hoot. He was the founder of WER Industrial, a manufacturer of industrial motor drive systems. Mr. Rudish was an old German immigrant dude who listened to Thomas Edison's admonition to "find a need and fill it." He began his career here as a salesman of some sort, I'm not sure I ever knew exactly, who listened to his customers and their needs. He would then go figure out how to fill that need, scrape up the jingwa to have one unit built, stuff it in his briefcase and hop in his car to go sell them. After he sold a bunch he'd figure out how to set up to manufacture that item. The last endeavor he embarked upon was manufacturing DC electric motors from the eensy weensy teenie ones smaller than one's fist up to big honking 1,000 horsepower jobs, and everything in between. They built motors that generate the artificial gravity in the space shuttle. They built motors for CNC machine tools, textile machinery, robotic hinkies of all sorts, conveyors, paper machinery, electric carts, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and about any other place an electric motor might be used ... and without being on the public dole.
Where's all this going? Private enterprise develops a product and performs research for one purpose and one purpose only ... to earn a profit or to earn a higher profit. Okay, so that's two. Those prostitutes.
What does government do research for? Their stated purpose is to aid the private sector by "investing" (that's, like, spending frivolously in the instant example) our taxbucks on projects that will enhance their ability to be profitable. But in the final analysis, theirs is but one and only one purpose as well ... to spend money they have not earned and for which they will be held accountable to no one if it's wasted. Why else would we have government funded studies of cow flatulence in Argentina, what porno flicks turn on a chimpanzee, why bumblebees can't fly, and why snot freezes when the temperature is -40 degrees outside. Do any of these have practical, and profitable, uses to the public? Uh, no.
So why should we, the tax paying and sometimes voting public whose taxbucks are removed from our wallets with the force of a government gun, be required to pick up the tab for someone else's fun times? Why should we subsidize oil companies to put ethanol in the guzzeline we pump into our gas tanks? Why should we be forced to subsidize solar power research that no one can prove is anything close to efficient or cost effective? Why should we have to ante up for some PhD doctor cat to develop a system that he's going to turn around and sell back to us for jajijibucks per unit?
Why should we be forced to use our taxbucks to build, then support, a research center here in our area that has no proven worth to us as tax payers and sometimes voters? Doesn't this stink oh so familiarly like public funding of "art" that isn't pretty to anyone but a bunch of arteests, ultra el spiffo reading programs that leave students still unable to read upon completion, math programs which don't teach that the square root of 121 is 11, science programs that allow someone to state undeniably that one and only one chlorine atom can destroy 10,000 molecules of ozone?
If those who advocate so strongly for such a facility feel that it will be a valuable and worth while endeavor, why don't they develop something, go sell it, then figure out how to manufacture it ... please see Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, Rudish et alia above. If such as facility would be so valuable, why doesn't industry jump all over that prospect? Because it isn't. To those advocates I would additionally state first "Break out your wallets like the rest of us have, big boys."
Holy moley. This is shaping up to be a raspberry coffee night already.
Royce E. Burrage, Jr.
Royce@Officially Chapped.org