David Foster

Hillary vs the Industrial Revolution

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Saw a snippet of an interview last night in which Secretary Clinton was saying that: When America (and also Europe, presumably) built all those coal plants and other fossil-fuel-based infrastructure, we just didn’t know what a bad thing pollution was. With the pretty obvious implied mesage to India being: YOU, on the other hand, have no excuse.

Set aside for the moment the second part of the above and focus on the first part. Suppose that, beginning around 1800, we had known everything that we know now (and think we know) about pollution, the possible effects of CO2, etc. What does she think we should have done?

As factories began to emerge, should we have restricted them to those locations in which they could have been powered directly by waterwheels, in order to avoid the use of coal-burning steam engines?

Should we have similarly restricted the use of electricity to areas in which waterpower was feasible? (Bear in mind that during the great age of electrification there were no photovoltaic cells available for solar power generation…also, of course, may environmentalists are almost as opposed to large-scale hydro projects as they are to coal plants.)

Should we have continued to rely on the horse and the mule for transportation? (Remember, without a robust electrical grid, electric cars are not an option…indeed, without fossil-fuel-based power, even electric streetcars would have been out of the question in most places.)

For an individual with Hillary’s wealth and connections, of course, things wouldn’t have been too bad under this scenario. Even if clothing cost 5X what it does today, for instance, she would surely have been able to afford everything she needs. And I imagine that even if fossil-fuel-generated electricity had been banned for the masses, people like Clinton and Gore would have been able to get special permits for coal-fired generators for their homes. (At least if people like them were running the government.

But a large and affluent middle class–on which the Democrats say they place such value–would never have come into existence.

Cool Retrotech

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Here’s an interesting piece about the Apollo guidance computer, which played an important role in the moon-landing mission. The computer’s read-only memory, which stored the program and various constant data, was a “rope memory,” woven by women working at a factory near Boston. The pattern of the weave determined the “ones” and “zeros” of the permanantly-stored data. (via Isegoria)

Among the strange people who assert that the moon landing was a fake, one of the arguments used is that computers in 1969 lacked the computational capacity to guide such a mission. This ignores the fact that the guidance problem for intercontinental ballistic missiles is similar to that for space flight–do they also believe that the American and Soviet missile fleets were make-believe?

It is interesting, though, to compare the AGC with present-day computers. The AGC clock speed was about 2MHZ…around 500 to 1000 times slower than that of the computer on which you are probably reading this. The computer’s RAM was 2000 words, or 4000 bytes (that’s bytes, not kilobytes or megabytes) and the rope-memory ROM was 36KW, or 72KB.

And here’s a guy who built his own working replica of the AGC.

Mindless Verbal Taylorism

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Four customer service stories:

1)Telephoning a restaurant. Call a restaurant on the phone–to make a reservation, check on the specials, whatever..and you will likely hear something like this:

Thank you for calling Snarfer’s Steakhouse, where the elite meet to eat. My name is Tiffany…how may I be of assistance to you today?

You can bet Tiffany didn’t come up with this string of words herself. She has been told exactly what to say, has to say it 100 times a day, and is so tired of saying it that she often slurs the words together:

Thank-you-for-calling-Snarfer’s-Steakhouse-where-etc-etc-etc

Often, the message is so slurred and incomprehensible that I’m not sure I’ve called the right number, resulting in a question:

Is this Snarfer’s Steakhouse?

This kind of thing originated with chain restaurants but can now often be found at many independent restaurants as well.

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The War on Small Business

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Dan Kennedy writes about the climate of fear that Obama is creating among small and medium-sized businesses. (via NeoNeocon, who has a discussion of this article)

Victor Davis Hanson: the war against the producers. (via Dr Helen, who also has a discussion)

Not to mention the dreadful Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which is having a baleful effect on businesses of all sizes–but particularly small and home-based businesses.

Obama/Pelosi/Reid are clearly hostile to business in general, but they seem particularly hostile to small and medium-sized businesses. They do not appear to either to understand the importance of this class of enterprises or to have any empathy whatsoever with the people who start and run them.

Cool Retrotech

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Here’s a guy, Thomas Thwaites, who is attempting to make a toaster, literally from the ground up, starting with primary materials such as iron ore and mica.

For real retrotoasting, though, seems like he also should make the power source from scratch, with a small generator powered by either a waterwheel or a steam engine. The waterwheel approach might be fairly straightforward, but I’d guess it would be pretty hard to make a viable steam engine without using any machine tools.

Which raises, of course, the interesting proposition of making a machine tool without any machine tools to make it with…

Via Isegoria, who sadly says:

As you might imagine, Thwaites is not celebrating trade, technology, and mutually beneficial exchange; he’s condemning it. Sigh.

Hopefully the project will turn out to be a little more nuanced than that–Thwaites does say “The project won’t be a ‘how is it made?’ industrial promo or an anti-industry tirade either”…we’ll see.