"James B. DiGriz" <jbdigriz@dragonsweb.org> wrote :
<snip> Declan's note about ADM hogs at the trough with lots of other hogs...
A far more productive application of corporate welfare would be if that money were spent on engineering research and development of geosynchronous solar power microwave relays, fusion and advanced fission reactors, permanent manned statons on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, etc. The planet and its politics would likely be a lot cleaner. Just one beneficial side effect.
Just wait until some orbiting uwave controller goes bonserk and boils a slice of America from DC to San Franciso. Oops. How about picking some of the low-hanging fruit first? Start with greed and waste and work your way up to the Buck Rogers stuff. After all, if we can't get the simple shit right what hope is there that we can handle anything that requires brains and responsibility?
If govts. didn't insist on scarfing up so much in taxes and thwarting markets at the behest of vested interests, private parties probably would already be doing most of this by now.
But what else is new?
jbdigriz
Until there is a crisis nothing will be done. It will require widely accepted evidence of a problem ( read : widespread domestic starvation ) before action will be taken and then the only parties in a position to take that action will be those same private parties ( the dreaded vested interests ) that you complain about. I think that our technology is one of our greatest strengths and our faith in that technology is one of our greatest weaknesses. We avoid basic remedies in the hopes that techology will offer some sort of ultimate cure that will not inconvenience us one bit and the net result is that we raise the stakes unnecessarily. Am I wrong or doesn't there seem to be an implicit assumption in our *SOVSUV-mad rush to consume petroleum that technology has the solution to a shortage just about ready to roll when the need arises? Myself, I highly doubt it in spite of Bush's reassuring words that "there are no limits" to what technology can accomplish. Sorry, I don't commute to work in an F350 King Cab Dualie, Mike ( pessimistic techie and closet Luddite ) *SOV - Single Occupancy Vehicle as opposed to HOV SOV is not my own - thanks to DB in Madison.