Crowd-sourcing is better.

FOSS is very good.

Before these and similar developments in SOHO bookkeeping and financial planning, capitalism was necessary. But just as Quicken, Peachtree, etc put probably a hundred thousand bookkeeping operations out of business in the last thirty years or so, so too do recent technological developments show the age of the capitalist is drawing to a close. Capital markets work with convenient fictions that we no longer need.

You are missing the point.

The tremendous success of FOSS-- including its adoption by major corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Ubuntu-- proves that capital markets are not necessary for a vibrant economy. The growing success of crowd-sourced projects are another and more direct challenge to the myths that capital markets are based on. Like a mud and wattle palace of an ancient Middle Eastern empire, capitalism, and capital markets, are crumbling. There has not been a "devine right of kings" for centuries. Soon the myth of the capitalist as the necessary kingpin to a modern economy will also fade away.

You might see that happen during your life time. It seems that basic changes in world views that used to take hundreds of years to change everyone's life are now happening in a couple of decades. Sometimes faster. Just saw a remarkable first hand report of people driving donkey carts in the outback of Timbuktu while using cell phones to broker deals on their goods while still hours away from the market.

The world is changing. Visualize whirled peas.

Hey, Dude, go easy on that stuff.

At best you are confusing a derivative with the original. Otherwise your mind seems to have cast Elton John as the fifth Beetle, which while an intriguing fantasy in some ways, is sort of at right angles to ordinary reality.

So please ease off before your head 'splodes and messes up the interior decorating.

Wall Street doesn't "work". It never has. There is no "work" being done by anyone involved solely with Wall Street activities. None of that activity produces actual goods or services. A laundromat contributes more to the real USA economy than all the mutual funds ever have, or ever will.

The main problem with capitalism today is that it is a religion that has been completely subverted by heretical money changers from the original visions of John Locke and others.

The most exciting and beneficial economic activity of the last ten years is the development and distribution of free open source software, which is putting the tools of production into the hands of everyone who is living above abject poverty. The impact is huge. Yet this is a gift economy that does not fit the capitlalistic model and has nothing to do with "finance".

The age of finance is drawing to a close, and good riddance. It belongs in the history books, in a chapter after the age of slavery, along side the chapters on the age of colonial oppression and the age of consumerism. (The new ages of ecological balance and anonymous gift exchange ("freeware") are the first emerging ages of the anthropocene epoch).

I was thinking it was a few miles east of Portland Oregon. Maybe around Madras or south of that.

Point taken. I think of the Maquis as DS9, and had forgotten there was some bleed over from there into TNG. DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise seemed to be working more with interpersonal relationship issues than with the mythic reinterpretations of TOS and TNG.

These post-Trek, meta-Trek phenomena are intriguing to me. Is the field broad enough and deep enough to support a three year thesis project on the emergence of contemporary myths? Probably not without taking on the Marvel myths as well.... and that would be truly weird even by Portland standards. I'll look elsewhere.

So modern medicine should go back to the more complex approaches that alternative healthcare has developed over dozens of hundreds of years?

That makes sense.

But none of it is patentable, so fat chance that anyone is going to be funded for the oh-so-necessary clinical trials.

I'm holding out for the gold-pressed latinum age.

I remember that TOS was so cool because it was showing what the world could be like if we somehow were able to get past the major crises of that day. Which were (in descending order of impact on a white middle class male teen): 1) women entrusted with chain of command positions; 2) tolerance of the rights of people who did not look like everyone in my home town; 3) resolving major disagreements with foreigners without throwing nukes around.

How could Star Trek be relevant today like it was back then? I can't imagine a Star Trek episode with Spock and Kirk, or even Data and Picard, dealing rationally with terrorism.

TOS and TNG were fantastically great myths born of that age. But that age is now in our history, and today's problems of terrorism, ecological brinksmanship, and the 99% vs the 1% do not lend themselves to the same kind of myth making.

You do realize that your point supports my position. One major way that humans are faulty with regard to today's nuclear fission is the amount of administratium that interferes with every aspect of that industry. Engineers do not study administratium and are not trained in its management. And yet over the long term it is one of the most dangerous elements in water cooled nuclear plant operations.

Well, the problem is not in the current reactor designs. Those are as good as it gets.

The problem is in the reactor designers who consistently fail to recognize that the humans who implement the designs are completely faulty material. Humans screw up. Every reactor failure that has ever occurred is because humans screwed up. There is no possible way any of today's nuclear reactor designs can be made safe, because the ingenuity with which humans can screw up is astronomical while the designs of safety mechanisms are necessarily more finite.

I would like to hear more about thorium reactors. But India is working on those and here in the USA there is a tremendous NIH problem. Which is another form of humans screwing up.

IMO, the problem is that the Republicans who are politically savvy are seeking to become governors or powerful legislators at the State level because they have sense enough to stay away from the national scene. At the national level, Republican politics is a chaotic whirlpool of tea partiers, evangelicals, super-capitalists, anti-thises and anti-thats that will suck under anyone who can actually DO politics, and will toss some random joker up to the top to be the next candidate.

I would like some kind of Phoenix Party to rise from the ashes of the Republican Party. But I don't think that is going to happen. I think America is going to become a one-party system with jumble of political clowns on the other side of the aisle for perhaps a decade. It will probably take that long for the clowns to destroy the remaining infrastructure that the GOP had put together between its re-emergence in the early 1900s and 1980.

But on a serious note, I think we probably have the technology now to make both pilot and cockpit redundant, and probably even allow someone outside the aircraft to land the thing, when something really bad happens. It seems to me the only major obstacles to developing this are human and institutional inertia. This would be a fundamental change in all kinds of roles.

And I hope my sense of humor in the last post does not offend anyone. What happened to that A320 was a gruesome tragedy. There should be no denial about that.

Pilot B: Ground control, Pilot A isn't letting me take my turn!

Ground Control: You two had better learn how to play nice together! Now, Pilot A, you let Pilot B take his turn, just like we all agreed before you took off.

Pilot A: But but but...

Ground Control: Don't make me have to take it away from both of you! You know how your boss gets when I have to tell him about something like that.

Yeah that could be a problem. Maybe the airlines could screen pilots for adult behavior.

Now that airliners are becoming fly-by-wire machines, how hard would it be to add a second cockpit?

Think of turning an A320 or a 787 into a drone, with the pilot and copilot in separate drone control compartments perhaps with one at the nose of the plane and the other at the tail. In a situation like this last one, the remaining sane pilot would request that ground control lock out the controls of the crazy one. If ground control judged that both pilots were incapacitated, then a drone control station on the ground could take over flying the plane. This design would also discourage hijacking, provide better redundancy of some critical systems, and in some worst case scenarios, allow a ground control officer to land a plane whose pilots had both become unconscious, as in a sudden decompression incident.

It undoubtedly would take years to adapt current drone technology, pilot training, and airframe design to make the best use of this approach. That is all the more reason to get Boeing, Airbus, and the rest of the industry working on this.