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To: Moominoid who wrote (68141)	8/26/2005 4:42:28 PM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

Moominoid Re: "Industrial Era" BINGO. Nothing has changed in an important way in my lifetime, and I doubt it will in the future in any big way. We still make steel, rubber, plastics, chemicals, fibers, ceramics, paper, and all the rest the same way we always have. Efficiency improvements in all these areas have been little tiny changes at the margin, not order of magnitude improvements. The limitations are imposed by natural law, a whole array of road blocks ranging from Ohm's law to Newton which we will never cross. The only change is that we now consume vastly more of all these things than we ever have. Decades ago non-technicals like the Rockefeller brothers, when they were having a bad day and having some doubts about the "New World Order" they were trying to create, a "futurist" style expert would be ushered in and the futurist would lecture the brothers on the "wonders" just around the corner. In those days the fairytale was that nuclear fusion would provide all the worlds energy needs by the year 2000 and that "anti-gravity" would be a perfected soon after, breaking the hyperspace barrier and allowing deep space travel. And there were many more futurist style fairy tales to go along with those, all of them untrue. Because events proved the "Buck Rodgers" era futurists to be full of bologney those today have to be more circumspect; no more promices of "free" fusion power or effortless space travel. Now the main fairytale is that telecommunications is somehow going to solve all the worlds problems. The problem is that we are still stuck here in the world of Newtonian limitations, which can all be simply summed up as variations on the "no free lunch" rule. And we are using vastly more "industrial age" material and with no let up in sight. Slagle

To: Moominoid who wrote (68141)	8/26/2005 5:30:19 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Moom, if we use GDP per barrel of oil as a measure of "industrial revolution", then you will find that many countries are far less involved in the industrial revolution than in times gone by. For example, General Motors and Exxon were a very big deal in the 1970s. Now, check out the market capitalisation of those and compare them with Yahoo! Google, Nokia, Microsoft, QUALCOMM, eBay, Amazon, etc.... The USA is far less dependent on industrial revolution things than back in the glory days of oil. Same for other countries. China and India will never become "oil" or "industrial revolution" economies. They'll go straight to the cyberspace world, without passing GO and they'll collect a LOT more than $200. While it's sad for people like me who grew up in the heyday and zenith of the industrial revolution, as my knowledge of carburetors, gearboxes and hydraulic systems is irrelevant to the lives of people these days, the young of today will have a great time without the burden of expensive and dirty smokestack economies. Mqurice