US too delusional to fix
Jim Davidson at GSC - a good rant on why innovation has slowed to a crawl. It's the socialists, of course. [gsc]
People used to have a reasonable expectation of a future with more inventions, brighter, faster, niftier vehicles. But, of course, the intention of the socialists has always been to prevent that future, to license all activities, to regulate all conduct, to prevent innovation, to destroy entrepreneurship, to have boots smashing human faces, forever.
So, naturally, we don't have those things to anticipate. The inventors have invented, but they cannot make any money because they aren't allowed to sell their products. The Moller air car cannot be flown except as an experimental aircraft. The ducted fan personal aircraft can't be flown except as an experimental aircraft. Richard Branson couldn't enter the USA to look at the designs for his new spaceship because he's a foreign national.
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The way to solve this problem has traditionally been for the thin veneer of civil behavior to wear off, and people go out and slaughter the scum who have been causing them grief and aggravation. When every city has every lamp post and city building decorated with the eviscerated bodies of the filth who think they govern us without our consent, then a new culture can arise to replace the old.
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About 1969, DARPA funded the first mil-net which was adapted to commercial use in 1973 as Compuserve. In 1976, Hayek conceived of free market money, denationalisation of currency. About that time, open source crypto became the standard approach, and within a few years we had RSA and other standards. I suspect that the arrival of technologies like encryption and bitTorrent and peer to peer networks and digital bearer instruments and Loom are the harbingers of doom to the old civilisation. A new culture based on open source and consent is replacing the old culture of compulsion and limited competition.
