I have for some time been complaining that progress in many fields peaked around 1972 or so, that many important fields have gone backwards. Last man on the moon 1972, cars and clothes washing machines have been getting crappier. The skyline on big western cities is starting to look less and less like the future, as is the interior of your neighbourhood shopping mall. The highest flying and fastest flying …
Tag: technological and scientific stagnation
Tech decline bites Musk
A long time back I remarked that eye of Soros has fallen on Musk. It is starting to look like that the hand of Soros is going to fall upon him. American technology has been declining across the board. Some stuff started declining in the seventies, and as time went by, more and more things went into decline. Apple is still advancing cpu design, but they have no in house …
Technological decline
As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance. In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving. Our art is crap, we …
China passes the US
The most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is a fifty year old plane firing seventy year old cannons scoured from museums and looted from ancient forgotten overseas arms depots. Some people may say that the most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is nukes, but after all these years, who knows if they work any more? We can no longer make tritium, we …
Peak Oil
If you discover more than ten years of reserves, politicians are apt to take it away from you. So for the last hundred years or so, the world has only had ten years worth of proven oil reserves left and has been about to run out in ten years or so. In fact the world has only had about ten years of anything left for the past hundred years or …
Technological decay
I have long argued, and commenters on this blog have long been disputed, that science died shortly after World War II, replaced by official state religion wearing lab coats as priestly robes, and using test tubes as aspersoria for holy water. The age of science began with the Restoration and the Royal Society. The Royal Society’s motto was “Take no one’s word for it”.  Feynman, in his address “What is …
Technological decline
Konkvistador has drawn my attention to the Pu238 shortage. We stopped making Pu238 in 1988 You need Pu238 for nuclear batteries. The 2006 New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt was launched without enough Pu238 to keep all its equipment live during the Pluto flyby, and without enough Pu238 to do its Kuiper belt mission, from which I conclude that since 2011 we have been totally completely flat …
Technological decline
If we cannot build high buildings any more, progressives say we are now so sophisticated that we are now superior to status competition based on giant penis substitutes, and status competition based on having a higher corner office than the other business executives. If high art is an aids infested trannie projectile vomiting over the audience, progressives say that we philistines just don’t get high art. But the most important …
mens rea
I have been arguing that social decay is ending technological and scientific progress. In most areas it has strikingly slowed, in some areas, going backwards in the west, as we forget how to do what once we could do. Others, however, argue that technological and scientific progress is still running hot, or that if it has slowed, it is that we ran out of low hanging fruit. But a big …
Tall buildings and the social order
To make and keep the upper stories of a tall building habitable requires routine high technology. The lifts have to work, the water needs to be pumped, the toilets have let the poop down one hundred stories without shattering violence. It is not all that expensive. Current office space costs in the centers of major cities are so high that very tall buildings are immensely profitable. It is simply difficult …