Taxes Filed And The World Gets Stupider.

[robby]

Tax season is always stressful, but I've finished a day early. That's always such a relief, and now I've got a million other things to start on.

I ran into some internet boneheads that were trying to claim that the NASA manned missions never produced any significant technological advancements. One guy insisted there were no developments at all,  and when I brought up the research and development of  lithium batteries, a second guy countered that "NASA didn't invent lithium batteries", and then when I posted a link, a third tried to explain that a $50 million dollar development contract that was mentioned, was simply to supply batteries!  As if someone in a warehouse threw some batteries in a box and sent them to be plugged into the space shuttle.

Has anybody seen the movie Idiocracy, where society gets progressively stupider? It has started, here on the internet.

Comments

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

The Moon flights advanced nothing. That's why we've never been back.

The Times had this letter, from an engineer who said compared to Bell Labs, Google, Facebook and Microsoft have not invented shite, they've accommodated human needs with new arrangements of technology. None of it new like a laser or the transistor. I can think of something could squash innovation dead maybe entirely, say since 1964, Velour let's cut the crap: normativism. All social pressures on the Internet are writ large. The homogenizing flattening of human thought leaves it normal to ask if human footprints on the Moon means anything.