Concorde Jet and Decline Trajectory

Concorde Jet and Decline Trajectory

Some say that they height of civilization was the reign of Louis XIV.  Others say that it was after Wellington and Blucher’s defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo with 50 years of peace ending in the Industrial Revolution that was the height of civilization.

However, in the technical fields, the undisputed champion is Concorde.  Concorde was the height of technical civilization, and perhaps the last product of the Industrial Revolution.  It was the only supersonic passenger jet, aside from a minor Soviet copycat version. 

There a no more supersonic passenger jets.  Concorde is gone – it was retired in 2003. 

We may think that the smart phone is a high-tech device, not remembering that it is just a telephone, and the telephone was invented in France in 1854 by Charles Bourseul.  Phones are 160 years old.  Computers?  Computers are a collection of millions of switches.  Switches have been around since electricity was industrialized back in the 1880’s.   

2003 seems to be a year of watershed when we will look back and see that things went down fast from that year forward.  Yeah, the Space Shuttle is gone.  We are no longer smart enough to send men out into space.

What is next for decline?  I think computer operating systems are on the way down from bloatware, a phenomenon happening at an accelerating pace in the last 15 years.  There is some evidence that we will decline in the technology of passenger jets also – there have not been many produced in the last 30 years.  Embraer out of Brazil is an exception, but it is a smaller jet for regional flight along with the likes of Canadair Jet.  We are in a military decline despite having advanced weapons (we are told) – we can no longer defeat enemies on the battlefield unless they are a conventional army.  GM went bankrupt along with many of its former suppliers like Delphi.  The Midwest core of the automotive world is a giant rusting hull.  Silicon Valley is dead, I am told, because people there only want to develop “apps” for phones and computers – toys to play with. 

So, we are no longer producing anything useful, but government is growing, spending is growing, and people are debating “heath care.”  We are more concerned with the sick and the dead than the living and growing.

What are we to do?  Study philosophy.  Philosophy always buries its undertakers.  It will remain when we no longer have Science or Engineering.  It will never die as long as men have the ability to think.

Freddy Martini

Sunk Cost Effect: Staying in the Game when you should Leave

Sunk Cost Effect: Staying in the Game when you should Leave

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The Sunk Cost Effect is perhaps the nastiest thing about human nature that I can think of.

It is why people stay in cults.  It is why people stay in bad relationships.  It is why people stay in dead-end careers.  It is why people cannot “let go of the past.”  It is why wars get nasty beyond any human reasoning.

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The greatest fear is the haunting question in your mind, “So, I did all of that for nothing?”  So, you joined a cult.  You shaved your head, and wear strange clothing.  You alienate all of your family and friends by saying this cult is the greatest thing in the world.  You spent tons of money supporting this cult.  So, now you have these feelings.  You want to leave.  But, you would feel like a fool if you did.  All that money and time would go down the drain.  So, you redouble your efforts and become more stubborn in your defense of the cult because you have so much invested.

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Or, you have been involved in war.  You know 300 guys who have gotten killed.  You do not want them to have died in vain, right?  So, you keep the war going in the remote chances of winning.  The United States was driven out of Iraq, and it is now under control of a hostile regime.  We spent 3 trillion dollars on that war.  We do not want to have wasted all the lives of those men and all that money right?  So, we will probably go back in and spend another 10 trillion, get bankrupted, and kill perhaps just as many soldiers again.

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Now, you understand the idea of sunk costs and how devastating its psychology can be on people, groups of people, and entire nations.

Freddy Martini

Random Notes 20140916

Taleb Again

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Nicholas Taleb ignited a lot of thinking within me.  He talks about the problem of induction.  He speaks of being fooled by randomness.  He talks of travel and speaking many languages.  He talks about the false history of science and technology when in fact this is s history of tinkering more in line with engineering than science. 

Thomas Nagel

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I also downloaded the audio book from Thomas Nagel.  He is a guy who gets the problem of materialism and understands clearly the problem of consciousness.  Science is dead.  The Avant Garde movement in intellect right now is in Philosophy of Mind.  There is nothing new from science since the advent of Quantum Mechanics.  That was almost 80 years ago.  And, given some recent research, it is doubtful that science ever contributed anything useful to modernity outside of stealing ideas from engineers and inventors and making them their own.

If Science is Nonsense, how to we explain…?

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What caused the enormous technical explosion in the last 150 years if it is not science?  Well we had scientific thinking for hundreds of years, with nothing to show for it.  What caused the great technical explosion was humans discovering a very compact form of energy and exploiting it: coal, diesel, gasoline, and heating oil.  The reason we can build large systems and get components for high technology equipment is because we have a fast transportation system based upon fossil fuels that gets things to a destination faster by an order of magnitude than previous generations 150 years ago.  It took about 6 weeks to cross the Atlantic in the times of Samuel Champlain.  Now, we can cross the same ocean in 7 hours with a standard Boeing jet, and in 3 hours with a Concorde.  Materials for the manufacturing of goods can be brought together very fast.  We ship food to remote areas whereas before we had a risk of spoilage and mostly had to rely on local supply – very local supply.  The most important set of “laws of physics” are Maxwell’s Equations.  Why were they developed?  We finally had a source of energy – coal and steam – and we wanted to transport this energy across large distances using electricity.  Engineers figured all this out, and scientists swooped in and took the credit in the history books.

A New Civilization

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What causes advances?  Experimentation.  Tinkering.  It is those with the Fortitude (balls) to take risks and try new things.  These tinkerers will use everything at their disposal to mix things up and come up with something new.  

Freddy Martini

Antifragile: Things that Become Stronger with Disorder

Antifragile

I read Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile over the past few weeks.  It works nicely with my philosophy of “In order to increase your strength, you must push against an opposing force.”  His voice is that of a wise grandfather who has been around the block a time or two and has something to say.

Taleb roughly predicted the economic crash of 2008, and the subsequent Second Great Depression, which is still with us today.  He made millions off of investing against the market trends at the time.  He was a professional trader.

There are certain events that happen both rarely and regularly.  The stock markets crash every seven years or so.  Natural disasters happen every decade or two.  There are three categories of things or systems in their response to this Black Swan event. 

Fragile Things

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Fragile things break under a high stressor.   Think of a porcelain cup.  A large shock will shatter it.  Fragile things are destroyed under high stressors.

His symbol of the Fragile is the king feasting under the Sword of Damocles.  The sword is suspended above his head held only by a horse hair thread.  He is in a fragile situation because a horse hair thread will break under stress.

Robust Things

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Robust things do not care about high stressors.  You can throw an earthquake at them, and they do not change.

His symbol for the Robust is the Phoenix.  The phoenix is repeatedly destroyed, but every time it rises from the ashes and emerges just as it was before.

Antifragile Things

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Antifragile things have a peculiar aspect to them.  They become stronger under stress.  In fact, given the nature of reality, when rare catastrophic events happen, the Antifragile take advantage of the situation and become more powerful – but up to a point.

Taleb uses the symbol of the Hydra for Antifragile things.  When you cut off one head of the Hydra, more grow back in its place even stronger than before.

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Of course, Antifragile fits my personality very well, and those of my closest friends and acquaintances.  We thrive on chaos and situations where things are changing fast.  We like to travel to strange places and test ourselves to see how strong we are.  We like wild and crazy business situations where we do not know whether or not we will survive the next month’s payroll.  We become stronger in these high stress situations.

We tend to like storms and violent weather – hurricanes especially.  We like it when supposedly strong people attempt to challenge us.

Those who like to live comfortable lives are not comfortable hanging around us.  For some reason, we disturb them greatly with our lust for life and stress.  Our minds know no boundaries or standard doctrines.  We are designed by evolution for changes and adaptation.  We are Hydra.

Freddy Martini