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This discussion relates to Technology Review's article Can Technology Save the Economy? .

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  StupidPeasant
  

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  04/25/2009 05:46 PM

  foolish hope is gone

         I had a little foolish hope in the beginning. It is sad that such a small % goes to innovation from the hundreds of billions.   I would like to have seen 100 billion go into nanotube R&D alone. That is the type of thing to bring real innovation.
  
  Secondly:
         If climate change, jobs and starvation were as important to the politicians as they say, we would be building nuclear, solar, wind and tide desalination plants in as many places as possible all over the world, pumping fresh clean water hundreds of miles onto the dry land.  Grow billions of tons of green food and trees, sucking carbon from the air and feeding the children of the world.  Dry and cube the blocks of salt and residue from the desalination process for storage or put it back into the sea after removing pollutants. Put the many other compounds from the processed sea water to a million uses. Free the wild rivers to reverse beach erosion and save a million species. With abundant food and energy, all that will be needed is the freedom to generate the ideas and real capital to make life on Earth a paradise for as many people as possible wether the Earth is warming or cooling.
          What underlying dynamic is stopping this?  It's a different power they seek.
  Conservatives try to blame liberals for us not using more nuclear power.  Liberals blame conservatives for us not moving on solar and such. None of them try very hard.  It's just an act, arguing about nonsense for the last 30 years. There are vast amounts of investment in the oil, coal, shipping, mining, crops, military, unions and property owners all having powerful interest in keeping both sides of Congress not moving in a coherent direction.  We may eventually get it right; but it is very profitable to some that it take a long while.  It continues to happen just as you would expect it to happen, and to the degree it pays to happen.

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  dmm
  

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  04/28/2009 06:01 PM

  Party pooper?

  I don't mean to be a party pooper or a wet blanket, but this stimulus package is awful. 
  
  First, it is unbelievably stupid to spend money subsidizing stuff to make rural areas more attractive to people other than farmers and vacationers.  A big part of our problem is that our population is too spread out, which wastes energy in myriad ways.  So why in the world do anything to encourage MORE sprawl, longer commutes, bigger exurban houses?
  
  Conversely, there is little to no money in the stimulus package for long-term projects to improve the livability of cities, which is logically where we want people to live and work as much as possible, if we want to reduce energy usage as a nation.  A lot of the money given to cities is going to be used for short-term problems, such as to prop up their failing welfare systems.  Congress should be trying to get the entire middle class (lower middle to upper middle) out of the suburbs and back into cities.  Then the lower class, currently hopelessly dependent on welfare, will be able to get jobs servicing the middle class and can once again start pursuing the American dream.
  
  Third, there is NO money for nuclear, either for building new power plants or for research into improved nuclear power plants.  What the heck???!!  How can TR let this go without comment?
  Nuclear is the ONLY technology that can compete head-to-head with fossil fuels, and there are several known paths to improvement that will slash nuclear's cost per kwH.  And these don't rely on pie-in-the-sky we-hope-we-hope-we-hope advances in basic science, either.

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    ka5s
    

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    05/20/2009 07:05 AM

    Can Technology Save the Economy?

    The whole stimulus package was a desperation move based on the hope SOME part of it would work. If Stimulus money goes into work that has to be done by Americans in our own country, it will to that extent actually create value while we are being paid for doing it.
    
    Our addiction to credit and profit has the effect of sending value overseas, reducing the ability of Americans to generate wealth in our own country.  To the extent that parts of the stimulus do THAT, they will make things worse. 
    
    At present, "knowledge jobs" are touted as the wave of the future, but it is these jobs that are most likely to end up in foreign countries, requiring little beyond server clusters and education, and given there are a LOT more people overseas with degrees and smarts than in the US, and that it is cheaper to hire them than to hire us, it is inevitable such work will end up there. 
    
    We might invent our way into a new technology, replacing (say) gasoline with some as yet hypothetical power source for cars.  But even invented here, it would be manufactured overseas.
    
    No Stimulus can cure that disease.

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    • 
      MidiMagic
      

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      06/10/2009 03:35 PM

      Re: Can Technology Save the Economy?

      The problem is that stimulus spending on projects that mostly benefit government does not expand the economy.
      
      The wealth flows into the wages and the government project. The wages are a one way flow, because there is no product produced for sale. The product of the work done goes into the project itself, and the wealth produced is destroyed, because the project does not create any wealth. This is also true of any works of art.
      
      To expand the economy, there must be two things:
      
      - Work to produce products and wages (two way wealth production) that are then used for trade on the open market.
      
      - Government not taking too much of the economy in taxation. Government now takes around 70 percent. It should be 10 percent.

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  joesmiley
  

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  05/01/2009 06:10 PM

  Propelling Marketing into a more quantitative and scientific discipline

  Here at Sentrana we are propelling Marketing into a more quantitative and scientific discipline, to help business leaders who struggle with the challenge of optimizing marketing decisions when it comes to resource allocation and pricing strategy. We have successfully implemented Revenue and Price Optimization solutions with clients spanning industries as diverse as Consumer Packaged Goods to Computer Software, where these organizations were empowered to determine their prices, marketing mix, and product assortments that maximize revenue and profitability. These solutions allow companies to actively shape their markets through the probabilistic prediction of future outcomes, to stay ahead of continuously shifting market demand through the realization of market awareness, and to achieve unity of direction and coherence of decisions across organizational units. The solutions provide immediate and enduring impacts on the organization’s financial performance and competitive strength, and allow companies to lead their markets by turning complexity into competitive advantage.
  
  A related blog posting:
  
  Forget Your Competitors, The Power to Consistently Lead Your Market Lies In Understanding How Every Customer Values Your Product
  
  http://blog.sentrana.com/2009/04/17/forget-your-competitors-the-power-to-consistently-lead-your-market-lies-in-understanding-how-every-customer-values-your-product/
  
  Joe Smiley
  Sentrana
  http://www.sentrana.com
  

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  javs
  

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  05/04/2009 10:52 AM

  The Necessary Revolution

  The question “Can Technology Save the Economy?” was wisely reinterpreted by Bill Sweet as “Can the Stimulus Bill both Stimulate and Transform?” in the IEEE Spectrum’s Energy Wise Blog. Such a reinterpretation and my post under markm@kyield.com’s comment Incremental innovation (controlled by entrenched) led me to comprehend that reform “transformation” (incremental innovation controlled by IOUs) is just not going to work.
  
  As IOUs keep entrenched, the only way out to introduce the overdue fundamental structural radical “transformation” is spelled out by M.I.T. professor Peter Senge el al in their book “The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World.” Thus the latest EWPC article posted is Can EPRI Professionals Get Out of the IOUs Box to Join the EWPC Necessary Revolution?

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  Britt Borden
  

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  05/17/2009 10:45 PM

  Food Science Jobs

  Money should be spent in the the area of food science; such spending would be helpful to humanity while also creating food science jobs in the food manufacturing industries.

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  • 
    efittery
    

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    06/03/2009 05:21 PM

    Re: Food Science Jobs

    Hopefully "Food Science" will provide a way to rid the worlds food supply of "Persistent Organic Pollutants" also known as POPs.
    
    In 1995 the Department of agriculture bought a samplying of groceries from 100 USA stores.  Every item was polluted with POPs.  The worst offenders were butter, cheese, meats (fish, beef, pork, chicken).  I was surprised that the fresh water fish were more polluted than the salt water fish.
    
    Recent research ( Use www.wikipedia.com to search on "Persistent Organic Pollutants" ) has shown that obese people with low levels of POPs are 37 times less likely to have pre-diabetes/diabetes than skinny people with hi levels of POPs.
    
    Current explanation is that the chemicals in POPs (dioxin, DDT, agent orange, PCBs, etc) confuse the normal mechanisms the body has for using insulin causing diabetes.
    
    Every nursing mammal (humans included) female has high levels of POPs in their milk.
    
    Anyhow, I may have some of the above wrong, but POPs is as big of a problem as Global Warming.
    
    All food has POPs in them.
    

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  MidiMagic
  

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  06/10/2009 03:25 PM

  Taxes are the problem

  The economy failed because governments put themselves first.
  
  Because their revenues were falling, they raised taxes in a recession. Their useless government programs were more important than the economy. The result was many business failures, leading to less tax revenue. So they stupidly did it again.
  
  The result is that most workers are paying over two thirds of their incomes in taxes. Over one third of the income is taken in direct taxes. But the worker also pays all of the business taxes. These are hidden in the product prices, because there is no other source of money for the business to pay them from.

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