Reflections From a Murky Pond

Our parents and grandparents lived in more optimistic times than we do today. They saw the future as bright with possibilities and filled with the benefits of our rapidly advancing technology.
 

 
The future is now. OK, actually it’s last week sometime because we’ve “come farther” than what is shown in this video. In any event, feel free to quietly weep because those bright-eyed visionaries of the early-to-mid 20th century were so very right in their predictions and so very wrong about how we would make them come true.

The topic of overpopulation comes up fairly often, often in conjunction with Global Warming and/or any one of the many forms of resource depletion and deprivation. Interestingly, the topic of overpopulation is normally limited to the Third World even though the First World is truly beginning to feel the effects of its own form of overpopulation.

True, the First World, especially America, doesn’t have any particular real shortage of any natural resources. The resource, as it were, that our population is too large for is jobs.

Oh Ye Idled Masses

This isn’t even a matter of unrestrained population growth. By and large the First World nations’ organic populations are either stable or in decline. Growth is almost solely through immigration. It’s a matter of a shrinking employment market.

As far I can see and predict we already have too many people for the number of jobs available and it isn’t going to get better because it’s not a recession or depression, it’s progress. A concerted effort to increase efficiency and productivity, combined with ever increasing and accelerating technological advancements make it so that less and less people are needed as employees as time moves forward.

So it’s 2014 and, like the 1st day of every year, people get busy dreaming of- making predictions about what the new year we’ll hold for them and for the societies that they live within.

I’m not really any different; I too place an arbitrary importance upon the new year even though I know that such temporal compartmentalization is illusion.

My prediction – safe, stolid, and lame as it is – is that 2014 will be the beginning of people finally noticing that we have been and are continuing, in an accelerating manner, to move rapidly into an automaton’s Utopia. At least that’s how I see it going in America.

An Automaton’s Utopia – 100% “Employment”

The constant drumbeats from the Left of raising wages and demanding greater and more comprehensive benefits for any and all employees combined with the needs to compete with foreign companies which do not suffer from these problems will continue to drive companies into greater and greater levels of automation.

Andy Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of the fast-food chains, Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., makes this point very clear.

When they talk about raising the minimum wage or providing health care for employees over 30 hours, you’re really encouraging automation.

— Andy Puzder,
CEO, CKE Restaurants

Of course, what is a Utopia for our friendly automata is likely to be cruel and harsh Dystopia for those people living within America’s borders who will find themselves replaced by more efficient and less humanesque “workers” and practices.

As most know, politics makes for strange bedfellows, especially with the intersection of business interests and political careers. It’s often odd, commonly disgusting, but sometimes it’s downright self-destructive.

A Case in point would be Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s chronic and apparently uncontrollable addiction to “Green” energy systems…

Oh, Christ, What The Hell Did I Do Last Night?

I swear he’s worse in some ways than Anthony Weiner. At least, to our knowledge, Weiner wasn’t paying for it and certainly wasn’t paying for it with our money.

WASHINGTON—Sources have reported that following a long night of carousing at a series of D.C. watering holes, Energy Secretary Steven Chu awoke Thursday morning to find himself sleeping next to a giant solar panel he had met the previous evening. “Oh, Christ, what the hell did I do last night?” Chu is said to have muttered to himself while clutching his aching head and grimacing at the partially blanketed 18-square-foot photovoltaic solar module whose manufacturer he was reportedly unable to recall.

We’re talking some serious coyote ugly here. The truly sad part is that we’re also talking about an odd and sad twist to the phrase, “Double Coyote Ugly,” since it’s anyone’s guess which one them would be more likely to want to gnaw their own limb off in order to escape that bed without waking the other. 😉

Science and technology, especially engineering require precise and specific measurements for the important sake of accurately completing necessary mathematical calculations. These are esoteric and often insular disciplines however, and many of these measurements and their more important conversions are not well known outside of the circles of engineering.

• The ratio of an igloo’s circumference to its diameter = eskimo pie
• 2,000 lbs of Chinese soup = won ton
• 1 millionth of a mouthwash  = 1 microscope
• The time between slipping on a peel and hitting the pavement = 1 bananosecond
• Weight an evangelist carries with God = 1 billigram
• Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile / hour = knotfurlong
• 365.25 days of drinking low-calorie beer = 1 lite year
• 16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Serling
• 1/2 of a large intestine = 1 semicolon
• 1,000,000 aches = 1 megahurtz
• Basic unit of laryngitis = 1 hoarsepower
• Shortest distance between two jokes = a straight line
• 2,000 mockingbirds = 2 killomockingbird
• 1 kilogram of falling figs = 1 fig newton
• 1,000cc of wet socks = 1 literhosen
• 8 nickels = 2 paradigms

Enjoy and remember that, by any measure, humor converts to reduction in stress and the clearing of the mind.