Life was really hard way back in my grandparents’ time, but they had faith that if they worked hard and did their best to make the world a better place, things would get better. Today’s young… well. If they seem a bit too dedicated to partying and having fun, who can blame them. They aren’t going to have much fun in the harder meaner hungrier world that we’re handing to them, so why not have fun now, while they can? The loss of hope is the big difference here. Our grandparents had hope that the future would be better. Today’s young people know it won’t be — that it’s only downhill from here as the empire collapses and things get harder and harder. That does things to people’s heads, knowing that kind of thing…
– Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin
]]>Field people had minimal contact with the residents of the asylum, but you would spot their badges occasionally at the cafeteria. I think they had their own access point, as some had medical equipment that would have been a major roadblock at the main entrance. NSA was not a collegial environment. You stayed in your own area and mixed with others in that area only, or one of the paranoids would want to know why. Very different from the field where you learned other people’s specialties because there was rarely much in the way of back-up in the event of illness or emergencies.
]]>Now of course, Apple and M$ take the credit for all the work of PARC, but they are full of [you know what!] Way of the World…
And yeah, I think you are right about the Wright’s and their media savvy. 😉
]]>Could be, Stu, but the Wright Bros understood the media, and what happened to Alexander Graham Bell, so they made sure what they did got covered and reported. There were a lot of people all over the world who may have done it sooner, but no one knew it outside their area.
]]>I think of what kind of progress children born in the 70’s will see in their time, and I feel sad. They were already born with man having reached the moon, and nothing done in outer space since then has matched that peak. Cars and aircraft are more fuel-efficient, quieter, faster, and more powerful, but those are marginal improvements on already-existing inventions. The Internet, which hit its stride in their mid-20’s, certainly was an innovation, but it’s pretty much the only real innovation of the past forty years (by real innovation, I mean one that changes how people live — by that standard, big-screen tv’s aren’t real innovation, since they’re merely an improvement upon an already-existing technology that doesn’t fundamentally change how people live). And given that things seem to be pretty much winding down, I doubt we’ll see any other real improvement… it’s all downhill from here, bay-bee.
We live in sad times. Our grandparents could exult in the march of progress, even if their own life was hard at times they could be confident that progress would help make their lives easier and more productive over time and that their own children would have an even easier and more productive life, assuming that nobody blew up the planet with nukes. But our own children… it looks like things are going the other way for them :(.
– Badtux the Progress Penguin
]]>The 20th Century was a hell of a ride.
]]>