Industrial Engineering Quotes

The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog's wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It's like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.

The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all 'Damned Things' is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this 'Damned Thing' into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into their slots.

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.

In the years that followed, the goal went from taking huge risks to create new industries and grand new ideas, to chasing easier money by entertaining consumers and pumping out simple apps and advertisements. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.” Silicon Valley began to look an awful lot like Hollywood.

Sixty percent of the enzymes used in industry are generated by fungi, and fifteen percent of all vaccines are produced by engineered strains of yeast.

Since our divorce from nature with the industrial revolution, the major challenge for architecture remains a challenge of language as we replace units of growth with units of construction.

The phrase "consumer society" complements the description of the present social order as an "industrial society." Needs are tailored by the mass media to create a public demand for utterly useless commodities, each carefully engineered to deteriorate after a predetermined period of time. The plundering of the human spirit by the marketplace is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

The United States has 250 Billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.' We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition.

The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us "buying"? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world.

By now there were whole new Industrial Revolutions going on in the Low Earths; the British seemed to have the building of steam engines and railways in their genes.

Each year, a shipping publicist told me, 'More oil is poured down the drain by mechanics changing their engine oil than is spilled by the world's fleet of oil tankers.

The dismantling of the vast and wholly parasitic armaments industry had given an unprecedented—sometimes, indeed, unhealthy—boost to the world economy. No longer were vital raw materials and brilliant engineering talents swallowed up in a virtual black hole—or, even worse, turned to destruction. Instead, they could be used to repair the ravages and neglect of centuries, by rebuilding the world.

The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him.

Ironically, the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and entirely unexpected domains of science. For example, over the centuries the frustrating and futile search for a “perpetual motion machine” led physicists to conclude that such a machine was impossible, forcing them to postulate the conservation of energy and the three laws of thermodynamics. Thus the futile search to build perpetual motion machines helped to open up the entirely new field of thermodynamics, which in part laid the foundation of the steam engine, the machine age, and modern industrial society.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.

Dictionaries, manuals, grammars, study guides and topic notes, classical authors and the entire book trade in de Viris, Quintus-Curtius, Sallust, and Livy peacefully crumbled to dust on the shelves of the old Hachette publishing house; but introductions to mathematics, textbooks on civil engineering, mechanics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, courses in commerce, finance, industrial arts- whatever concerned the market tendencies of the day - sold by the millions of copies.

True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter-gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers. Yet the future belonged to the farmers. In 1850 more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants, and in the small villages along the Ganges, the Nile and the Yangtze nobody knew anything about steam engines, railroads or telegraph lines. Yet the fate of those peasants had already been sealed in Manchester and Birmingham by the handful of engineers, politicians and financiers who spearheaded the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, railroads and telegraphs transformed the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons, giving industrial powers a decisive edge over traditional agricultural societies.

Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.

The United States of America has had the world’s largest economy for most of our history, with enough money to feed and educate all our children, build world-leading infrastructure, and generally ensure a high standard of living for everyone. But we don’t. When it comes to per capita government spending, the United States is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries, below Latvia and Estonia. Our roads, bridges, and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

I hadn't realized how supremely shit-housed I was until we stumbled into our room at the Embassy Suites. You ever been so drunk you forgot that you have to shit until the last minute? Well I was at that stage. I nearly had my pants completely off when SlingBlade snaked past me and got into the toilet first. Fine, I go get out of my bar clothes and change into a t-shirt and pink Gap boxers to sleep in. I wait patiently for about three minutes, then I start pounding on the door, screaming at him that I am going to shit on his bed if he doesn't get out of there. A short time later he opens the door laughing his ass off, and says, "That was perhaps the most prodigious shit ever. I just put that toilet into therapy." I take a gander into the bathroom. It looks like Revelations. The toilet is overflowing, brown shit water is spilling out all over the bathroom floor, and the tank is making demonic gurgling noises. THE MOTHERFUCKER CLOGGED UP A HOTEL TOILET! Hotel toilets are industrial size; they are designed to be able to accommodate repeated elephant-sized shits, and their ram-jet engine flushes generate enough force to suck down a human infant, yet skinny ass 170-pound SlingBlade completely killed ours.

The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.

Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants. The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are. We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words. We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

The liberal political system was shaped during the industrial era to manage a world of steam engines, oil refineries, and television sets. It has difficulty dealing with the ongoing revolutions in information technology and biotechnology.

The system has to force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It can't function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn't natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world.

What’s up with your hair?’ I ask. ‘Aren’t you worried you’ll be spotted by angels flying above with all that blue?’ ‘War paint,’ says Dee, fastening his seatbelt. ‘Except it’s in our hair instead of on our faces,’ says Dum, starting the engine. ‘Because we’re original like that.’ ‘Besides, are poisonous frogs worried about being spotted by birds?’ asks Dee. ‘Are poisonous snakes? They all have bright markings.’ ‘You’re a poisonous frog now?’ I ask. ‘Ribbit.’ He turns and flicks out his tongue at me. It’s blue. My eyes widen. ‘You dyed your tongue too?’ Dee smiles. ‘Nah. It’s just Gatorade.’ He lifts up a bottle half-full of blue liquid. ‘Gotcha.’ He winks. ‘“Hydrate or Die,” man,’ says Dum as we turn onto El Camino Real. ‘That’s not Gatorade’s marketing,’ says Dee. ‘It’s for some other brand.’ ‘Never thought I’d say this,’ says Dum, ‘but I actually miss ads. You know, like “Just Do It.” I never realized how much of life’s good advice came from ads. What we really need now is for some industrious soul to put out a product and give us a really excellent saying to go with it. Like “Kill ’Em All and Let God Sort ’Em Out.”’ ‘That’s not an advertising jingle,’ I say. ‘Only because it wasn’t good advice back in the day,’ says Dum. ‘Might be good advice now. Attach a product to it, and we could get rich.

EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure—electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco. Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest.

It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more "product thinking" in leadership--leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed. Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status--Steve Jobs--recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.

In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy. In the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading figure of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, explains that “the very essence of the democratic process” is “the freedom to persuade and suggest,” what he calls “the engineering of consent.” “A leader,” he continues, “frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding … Democratic leaders must play their part in … engineering … consent to socially constructive goals and values,” applying “scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs”; and although it remains unsaid, it is evident enough that those who control resources will be in a position to judge what is “socially constructive,” to engineer consent through the media, and to implement policy through the mechanisms of the state. If the freedom to persuade happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that such is the nature of a free society.

At present the meat industry not only inflicts untold misery on billions of sentient beings but is also one of the chief causes of global warming, one of the main consumers of antibiotics and poison, and one of the foremost polluters of air, land, and water. According to a 2013 report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, it takes nearly four thousand gallons of fresh water to produce a little over two pounds of beef, compared to the seventy-five gallons needed to produce the same weight of potatoes.

The Joy of Sex!—Elaine brought home that dreary tract one day, those tidings of comfort and joy by some Californicated Englishman, and we studied the ghastly pictures, the two hundred different positions. What a joyless book. That poor fucker the instructor-model, performing his gymnastic routines over and over, with slight variations, for three hundred pages, each and every time upon the same woman. No wonder he has that look on his soft hairy degenerate face of a bored he-dog hooked up on the street with an exhausted bitch, longing to leave but unable to extricate himself from what breeders call a “tie.” The woman in the book looks only slightly happier; somebody out of mercy should have emptied a bucket of ice water on the miserable couple. Technique, technique, technical engineering, curse of the modern world, debasing what should be a wild, free, spontaneous act of violent delight into an industrial procedure. Comfort’s treatise is a training manual, a workbook which might better have been entitled The Job of Sex.

genetically modified organism (GMO): (n.) member of the public who has regularly consumed the biotech industry’s food products.

Engineers and mechanics were as much products of the industrialization process as the material goods and the machinery by which those goods were produced.

Extraordinary technology brings extraordinary recklessness.

There are hundreds of miracles within a single machine. Americans calmly explain these with mathematical formulas. Our difficulty is to learn, theirs to appreciate.

Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody's garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn't have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. "Technological change came from tinkerers," wrote Professor J.R. McNeill of Georgetown, "people with little or no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience." John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: "Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can't think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects." That's the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.

To know Dad was to love him... He was the sun and the moon to those fortunate enough to have been in his orbit. Underneath that polished Hollywood veneer beat the heart of a man who came from an industrial engine of steel mills and sweat - from hard-working, wholesome people... Dad adored his wives and doted on his many children, who gladly reciprocated that affection.

There was no near sound - no steam-engine at work with beat and pant - no click of machinery, or mingling and clashing of many sharp voices; but far away, the ominous gathering roar, deep-clamouring.

key reason why we are chronically consuming far too much food energy is because of the wide accessibility of ultra-processed, industrially manufactured foods, which impair our body’s self-regulatory satiety mechanisms and directly trigger hunger and cravings. These ultra-processed industrial foods are chemically engineered to be addictive and make up nearly 70 percent of calories that people in the United States consume today.

Its real deity, I saw, was no longer of a spiritual kind: it was Comfort. No doubt that there were still many individuals who felt and thought in religious terms and made the most desperate efforts to reconcile their moral beliefs with the spirit of their civilization, but they were only exceptions. The average European - whether democrat or communist, manual worker or intellectual - seemed to know only one positive faith: the worship of material progress, the belief that there could be no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression went, 'independent of nature'. The temples of faith were the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dance halls, hydroelectric works; and its priests were the bankers, engineers, politician, film starts, statisticians, captains of industry, record airmen, and commissars.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

In his 2007 book Farewell to Alms, the Scottish-American economist Gregory Clark points out that we can learn a thing or two about our future job prospects by comparing notes with our equine friends. Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and pondering their future. “I’m worried about technological unemployment.” “Neigh, neigh, don’t be a Luddite: our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs and trains took our jobs pulling stage coaches. But we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better too: I’d much rather pull a light carriage through town than spend all day walking in circles to power a stupid mine-shaft pump.” “But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?” “I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.

Widespread introduction of the process [of irradiating foods] has thus far been impeded, however, by a reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the internationally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council - whose members include the meatpacking and fast food giants - has asked the USDA to change its rules and make the labeling of irradiated meat completely voluntary. The meatpacking industry is also working hard to get rid of the word 'irradiation,; much preferring the phrase 'cold pasteurization.'...From a purely scientific point of view, irradiation may be safe and effective. But he [a slaughterhouse engineer] is concerned about the introduction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non-English-speaking workforce.

What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d'état was ruin. (And for three years there had been ruin and nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned.) How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic republic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers, the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the economic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions, from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn't the engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its activity?

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile - a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque [...] The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night-dream of post-industrial society.

During a recent visit to the United States, French President François Mitterrand stopped to tour California’s Silicon Valley, where he hoped to learn more about the ingenuity and entrepreneurial drive that gave birth to so many companies there. Over lunch, Mitterrand listened as Thomas Perkins, a partner in the venture capital fund that started Genentech Inc., extolled the virtues of the risk-taking investors who finance the entrepreneurs. Perkins was cut off by Stanford University Professor Paul Berg, who won a Nobel Prize for work in genetic engineering. He asked, ‘Where were you guys in the ’50s and ’60s when all the funding had to be done in the basic science? Most of the discoveries that have fuelled [the industry] were created back then.’ Henderson and Schrage, in the Washington Post (1984)

The assembly of the innovation engine that propelled the Industrial Revolution becomes easier to see once we recognize how the psychology of premodern Europeans had been quietly evolving in the background for at least eight centuries. Of course, there are many economic and geographic factors that matter too, but if there’s a secret ingredient in the recipe for Europe’s collective brain, it’s the psychological package of individualism, analytic orientation, positive-sum thinking, and impersonal prosociality that had been simmering for centuries.

the most powerful engine of progress is to be found deep within the culture of the industry. It is an attitude that is easy to state, but whose wider application could revolutionize our attitude to progress: instead of denying failure, or spinning it, aviation learns from failure.

Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

The Average Occidental- be he a democrat or a Fascist, a Capitalist or a Bolshevik, a manual worker or an intellectual- knows only one positive "religion", and that is the worship of material progress, the belief that there is no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression goes, "independent of nature". The temples of this "religion" are the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dancing halls, hydro- electric works; and its priests are bankers, engineers,film stars, captains of industry, record-airmen. The unavoidable result of this craving after power and pleasure is the creation of hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever their respective interests come to clash. And on the cultural side the result is the creation of a human type whose morality is confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of good and evil is material progress.

The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols.

Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me asking, “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world,” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business. Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move the descendants of Homo sapiens away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, away from the kind of social engineering that brings tail risks to society. Doing business will always help (because it brings about economic activity without large-scale risky changes in the economy); institutions (like the aid industry) may help, but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming). Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.

At present there are only two land-based cranes in the world that could lift weights of this magnitude. At the very frontiers of construction technology, these are both vast, industrialized machines, with booms reaching more than 220 feet into the air, which require on-board counterweights of 160 tons to prevent them from tipping over. The preparation-time for a single lift is around six weeks and calls for the skills of specialized teams of up to 20 men.13 In other words, modern builders with all the advantages of high-tech engineering at their disposal, can barely hoist weights of 200 tons. Was it not, therefore, somewhat surprising that the builders at Giza had hoisted such weights on an almost routine basis?

the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There

The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest. All that is set forth in books, all that seems so terribly vital and significant, is but an iota of that from which it stems and which it is within everyone’s power to tap. Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water. It applies to the pursuit of the arts as well as to the pursuit of knowledge. Men are still being taught to create by studying other men’s works or by making plans and sketches never intended to materialize. The art of writing is taught in the classroom instead of in the thick of life. Students are still being handed models which are supposed to fit all temperaments, all kinds of intelligence. No wonder we produce better engineers than writers, better industrial experts than painters. My encounters with books I regard very much as my encounters with other phenomena of life or thought. All encounters are configurate, not isolate. In this sense, and in this sense only, books are as much a part of life as trees, stars or dung. I have no reverence for them per se. Nor do I put authors in any special, privileged category. They are like other men, no better, no worse. They exploit the powers given them, just as any other order of human being. If I defend them now and then — as a class — it is because I believe that, in our society at least, they have never achieved the status and the consideration they merit. The great ones, especially, have almost always been treated as scapegoats.

the so-called first-mover advantage is usually not an advantage. Industry pioneers often end up with arrows in their backs—while the horsemen, arriving later (Facebook after Myspace, Apple after the first PC builders, Google after the early search engines, Amazon after the first online retailers), get to feed off the carcasses of their predecessors by learning from their mistakes, buying their assets, and taking their customers.

That night Berkman fell asleep in the bosom of the industrial leviathan. “Its torch of liberty is a furnace fire,” he said, “consuming, destroying, devastating: a countrywide furnace, in which the bones and marrow of the producers, their limbs and bodies, their health and blood, are cast into Bessemer steel, rolled into armor place, and converted into engines of murder to be consecrated to Mammon his high priests, the Carnegies, the Fricks.

Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and mathematics and a companion feeling that no standard combination of the two subjects did justice to what was interesting. So he decided not to take a standard approach. He took a five-year course in engineering physics at Cornell University, learning applied mathematics and a full range of hands-on laboratory styles. Prepared to be hired into military-industrial complex, he got a doctorate in biology, striving to combine experiment with theory in new ways.

Corporations go to great lengths to employ geniuses: technologists, designers, financial engineers, economists, artists even. I’ve seen it happen,’ he said. ‘But what have they done with them? They channel all that talent and creativity towards humanity’s destruction. Even when it is creative, Eva, capitalism is extractive. In search of shareholder profit, corporations have put these geniuses in charge of extracting the last morsel of value from humans and from the earth, from the minerals in its guts to the life in its oceans. And these brilliant minds have been used to cajole governments into accepting their raids on the planet’s resources by creating markets for them: markets for carbon dioxide and other pollutants – phoney markets controlled by their employers! Unlike the East India Company, the Technostructure does not need its own armies. It owns our states and their armies, because it controls what we think. The dirtier the industry, the richer and more despised, the more its captains have been able to tap into the rivers of debt-derived money to purchase influence and to blunt opposition. Previously they would buy newspapers and set up TV stations; now they employ armies of lobbyists, found think tanks, litter the Internet with their trolls and, of course, direct monumental campaign donations to the chief enablers of our species’ extinction, the politicians.

It's weird not being in our subculture of two any more. There was Jen's culture, her little habits and ways of doing things; the collection of stuff she'd already learnt she loved before we met me. Chorizo and Jonathan Franken and long walks and the Eagles (her dad). Seeing the Christmas lights. Taylor Swift, frying pans in the dishwasher, the works absolutely, arsewipe, heaven. Tracy Chapman and prawn jalfrezi and Muriel Spark and HP sauce in bacon sandwiches. And then there was my culture. Steve Martin and Aston Villa and New York and E.T. Chicken bhuna, strange-looking cats and always having squash or cans of soft drinks in the house. The Cure. Pink Floyd. Kanye West, friend eggs, ten hours' sleep, ketchup in bacon sandwiches. Never missing dental check-ups. Sister Sledge (my mum). Watching TV even if the weather is nice. Cadbury's Caramel. John and Paul and George and Ringo. And then we met and fell in love and we introduced each other to all of it, like children showing each other their favourite toys. The instinct never goes - look at my fire engine, look at my vinyl collection. Look at all these things I've chosen to represent who I am. It was fun to find out about each other's self-made cultures and make our own hybrid in the years of eating, watching, reading, listening, sleeping and living together. Our culture was tea drink from very large mugs. And looking forward to the Glastonbury ticket day and the new season of Game of Thrones and taking the piss out of ourselves for being just like everyone else. Our culture was over-tipping in restaurants because we both used to work in the service industry, salty popcorn at the cinema and afternoon naps. Side-by-side morning sex. Home-made Manhattans. Barmade Manhattans (much better). Otis Redding's "Cigarettes and Coffee" (our song). Discovering a new song we both loved and listening to it over and over again until we couldn't listen to it any more. Period dramas on a Sunday night. That one perfect vibrator that finished her off in seconds when we were in a rush. Gravy. David Hockney. Truffle crisps. Can you believe it? I still can't believe it. A smell indisputably reminiscent of bums. On a crisp. And yet we couldn't get enough of them together - stuffing them in our gobs, her hand on my chest, me trying not to get crumbs in her hair as we watched Sense and Sensibility (1995). But I'm not a member of that club anymore. No one is. It's been disbanded, dissolved, the domain is no longer valid. So what do I do with all its stuff? Where so I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now I'm no longer a tribe of two? And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird? Why do I find this so hard?

And there is no use in saying that if we can invent the nuclear bomb and fly to the moon, we can solve hunger and related problems of land use. Epic feats of engineering require only a few brilliant technicians and a lot of money. But feeding a world of people year to year for a long time requires cultures of husbandry fitted to the nature of millions of unique small places—precisely the kind of cultures that industrialism has purposely disvalued, uprooted, and destroyed.

A tall, leggy French girl on her way to work was looking at her phone and almost walked into me as I crossed the street. I dodged her just in time and she glanced back to give me a dirty look. How dare I not realize the importance of her early morning text message. I wondered how humanity managed to work and accomplish things before our time in history; the invention of electricity, the radio and the light bulb; creating the combustion engine and then building roads for people to travel on; creating aircraft so mankind could travel faster between great cities they planned and built; the industrial revolution; NASA landing a man on the moon; the invention of the microwave so single guys could make TV dinners and not starve. How had mankind managed it all without texting each other every five minutes? Or had they been able to accomplish all these things because they didn’t have this frivolous distraction disconnecting them from dreaming and inventing, and human interaction?

Software developers come mainly from engineering and don’t see how similar their industry has become to the one that produces magazines, newspapers, books, TV shows, and movies. Most software developers haven’t yet learned to develop and follow strict standards for layout and graphic design and to pay as much attention to detail as traditional publishers and media studios do. As a result, graphic design and layout bloopers often get a “Who cares? It looks OK to me!” reaction from developers.

There are hundreds of miracles within a single machine. Americans calmly explain these with mathematical formulas. Our difficulty is to learn, theirs to appreciate. We Latins, even the most intelligent of us, still count on our fingers and toes. But once we do learn, we shall surpass the Americano, because we understand the spiritual significance of a machine. We see the beauty of combining gas, grease and steel into a powerful, exact movement. We appreciate the material destiny of the universe.

Most cleantech companies crashed because they neglected one or more of the seven questions that every business must answer: 1. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see? We’ve discussed these elements before. Whatever your industry, any great business plan must address every one of them. If you don’t have good answers to these questions, you’ll run into lots of “bad luck” and your business will fail. If you nail all seven, you’ll master fortune and succeed. Even getting five or six correct might work.

Since 2005, it has been the law in California that flat roofs, which cover mainly industrial and commercial buildings, have to be white. And, since the summer of 2009, even sloping roofs put on new residential buildings have had to be “light-colored cool-roof colors, if not white.” Such mandates were motivated by the fact that “a 1,000 square foot area of rooftop painted white has about the same one-time impact on global warming as cutting 10 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.” This is so because of the amount of sunlight reflected back

A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand people who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensable, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital to technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling.

The challenge posed to humankind in the twenty-first century by infotech and biotech is arguably much bigger than the challenge posed in the previous era by steam engines, railroads and electricity. And given the immense destructive power of our civilisation, we just cannot afford more failed models, world wars and bloody revolutions. This time around, the failed models might result in nuclear wars, genetically engineered monstrosities, and a complete breakdown of the biosphere. Consequently, we have to do better than we did in confronting the Industrial Revolution.

The reason a bunch of employees who had no direct responsibility for ads, or culpability when they were lousy, spent their weekends transforming someone else’s problem into a profitable solution speaks to the power of culture. Jeff and gang had a clear understanding of their company’s priorities, and knew they had the freedom to try to solve any big problem that stood in the way of success. If they had failed, no one would have chastised them in any way, and when they succeeded, no one—even on the ads team—was jealous of their progress. But it wasn’t Google’s culture that turned those five engineers into problem-solving ninjas who changed the course of the company over the weekend. Rather it was the culture that attracted the ninjas to the company in the first place. Many people, when considering a job, are primarily concerned with their role and responsibilities, the company’s track record, the industry, and compensation. Further down on that list, probably somewhere between “length of commute” and “quality of coffee in the kitchen,” comes culture. Smart creatives, though, place culture at the top of the list. To be effective, they need to care about the place they work. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider.

. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . . But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?” I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich. He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.” “Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked. After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.

It’s true, organic food is more expensive to grow, and we have to be willing to pay for it. Some people see that as a luxury. I always come back to the same question: Would we rather give our money to the farmer or the pharmacist, the grocer or the doctor? Do we want to spend a fortune in the future trying to fix the damage being done today? Once we compare the potential risk and reward, the extra cost of eating clean food may seem worth it. Eating is the single most important thing we can do to stay healthy. If good, clean food isn’t worth our money, what is? Organic blackberries cost double the normal kind? How does that compare to the price of chemotherapy? How does burning out your insides with toxic chemicals and destroying your immune system and puking out your guts and losing all your hair stack up against spending three dollars more on that organic produce? Your body responds to what you put inside it. It’s simple. How could anything else be possible? You’d accept that if we were talking about your car. Why not your body? Clean also means food that contains no genetically modified organisms—GMOs. This is the really scary stuff, and it’s in the news every day as the big corporations fight every effort to label engineered foods. The fact that the industry is against truth in labeling tells us all we need to know.

For nearly eight centuries, under her Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a civilized and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore fruit an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys of the Guadelquivir and the Guadiana, whose names, and names only, still commemorate the vanished glories of their past. Art, literature, and science prospered, as they then prospered nowhere else in Europe. Students flocked from France and Germany and England to drink from the fountain of learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia were in the van of science: women were encouraged to devote themselves to serious study, and the lady doctor was not unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany, history, philosophy and jurisprudence were to be mastered in Spain, and Spain alone. The practical work of the field, the scientific methods of irrigation, the arts of fortification and shipbuilding, the highest and most elaborate products of the loom, the graver and the hammer, the potter's wheel and the mason's trowel, were brought to perfection by the Spanish Moors. In the practice of war no less than in the arts of peace they long stood supreme.

PayPal to a confident CEO who commands the respect of thousands. “I think there are ways he has dramatically improved over time,” said Thiel. Most impressive to Thiel has been Musk’s ability to find bright, ambitious people and lure them to his companies. “He has the most talented people in the aerospace industry working for him, and the same case can be made for Tesla, where, if you’re a talented mechanical engineer who likes building cars, then you’re going to Tesla because it’s probably the only company in the U.S. where you can do interesting new things. Both companies were designed with this vision of motivating a critical mass of talented people to work on inspiring things.

Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 18 Clothes or the lack of it, don't make, A person obscene, only behavior does. Who are you to judge someone's expression, But, here there are plenty grey areas! Problem is, when obscenity becomes expression, Misbehavior is deemed declaration of independence. Too many people confuse attention with admiration, And a stunt as some wonderful achievement. Accepting obscenity as freedom of expression, Is like showing tolerance to intolerance. Posing butt naked on instagram, unless you're pornstar, Is like barging into capitol with a flag confederate. We must find a balance between comfort and conscience. Civilization falls apart when we can't tell the difference.

Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times. Columbus

As black-box technologies become more widespread, there have been no shortage of demands for increased transparency. In 2016 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation included in its stipulations the "right to an explanation," declaring that citizens have a right to know the reason behind the automated decisions that involve them. While no similar measure exists in the United States, the tech industry has become more amenable to paying lip service to "transparency" and "explainability," if only to build consumer trust. Some companies claim they have developed methods that work in reverse to suss out data points that may have triggered the machine's decisions—though these explanations are at best intelligent guesses. (Sam Ritchie, a former software engineer at Stripe, prefers the term "narratives," since the explanations are not a step-by-step breakdown of the algorithm's decision-making process but a hypothesis about reasoning tactics it may have used.) In some cases the explanations come from an entirely different system trained to generate responses that are meant to account convincingly, in semantic terms, for decisions the original machine made, when in truth the two systems are entirely autonomous and unrelated. These misleading explanations end up merely contributing another layer of opacity. "The problem is now exacerbated," writes the critic Kathrin Passig, "because even the existence of a lack of explanation is concealed.

When President Obama asked to meet with Steve Jobs, the late Apple boss, his first question was ‘how much would it cost to make the iPhone in the United States, instead of overseas?’ Jobs was characteristically blunt, asserting that ‘those jobs are never coming back’. In point of fact, it’s been estimated that making iPhones exclusively in the US would add around $65 to the cost of each phone – not an unaffordable cost, or an unthinkable drop in margin for Apple, if it meant bringing jobs back home.  But American workers aren’t going to be making iPhones anytime soon, because of the need for speed, and scale, in getting the product on to shelves around the world. When Apple assessed the global demand for the iPhone it estimated that it would need almost 9,000 engineers overseeing the production process to meet demand. Their analysts reported that it would take nine months to recruit that many engineers in the US – in China, it took 15 days. It’s these kind of tales that cause US conservative media outlets to graphically describe Asia as ‘eating the lunch’ off the tables of patriotic, if sleep-walking, American citizens. If Apple had chosen to go to India, instead of China, the costs may have been slightly higher, but the supply of suitably qualified engineers would have been just as plentiful. While China may be the world’s biggest manufacturing plant, India is set to lead the way in the industry that poses the biggest threat to western middle-class parents seeking to put their sons or daughters through college: knowledge.

personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is

Hoover wanted the new investigation to be a showcase for his bureau, which he had continued to restructure. To counter the sordid image created by Burns and the old school of venal detectives, Hoover adopted the approach of Progressive thinkers who advocated for ruthlessly efficient systems of management. These systems were modeled on the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer, who argued that companies should be run “scientifically,” with each worker’s task minutely analyzed and quantified. Applying these methods to government, Progressives sought to end the tradition of crooked party bosses packing government agencies, including law enforcement, with patrons and hacks. Instead, a new class of technocratic civil servants would manage burgeoning bureaucracies, in the manner of Herbert Hoover—“ the Great Engineer”—who had become a hero for administering humanitarian relief efforts so expeditiously during World War I. As the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, J. Edgar Hoover found in Progressivism an approach that reflected his own obsession with organization and social control. What’s more, here was a way for Hoover, a deskbound functionary, to cast himself as a dashing figure—a crusader for the modern scientific age. The fact that he didn’t fire a gun only burnished his image. Reporters noted that the “days of ‘old sleuth’ are over” and that Hoover had “scrapped the old ‘gum shoe, dark lantern and false moustache’ traditions of the Bureau of Investigation and substituted business methods of procedure.” One article said, “He plays golf. Whoever could picture Old Sleuth doing that?

One of the most closely guarded secrets of advanced capitalist societies involves the possibility—the real possibility—of radically transforming the nature of housework. A substantial portion of the housewife’s domestic tasks can actually be incorporated into the industrial economy. In other words, housework need no longer be considered necessarily and unalterably private in character. Teams of trained and well-paid workers, moving from dwelling to dwelling, engineering technologically advanced cleaning machinery, could swiftly and efficiently accomplish what the present-day housewife does so arduously and primitively. Why the shroud of silence surrounding this potential of radically redefining the nature of domestic labor? Because the capitalist economy is structurally hostile to the industrialization of housework.

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company.

By now, certain alternate theories are beginning to circulate online. It's the government, they say. Or it's Big Pharma. Some kind of germ must have gotten loose from a lab at the college. Think about it, they say: Do you really believe that a completely new virus could show up in the most powerful country on earth without scientists knowing exactly what it is? They probably engineered it themselves. They might be spreading this thing on purpose, testing out a biological weapon. They might be withholding the cure. Or maybe there's no sickness at all—that's what some have begun posting online. Isn't Santa Lora the perfect location for a hoax? An isolated town, surrounded by forest, only one road in and one road out. And those people you see on TV? Those could be hired victims. Those could be crisis actors paid to play their parts. And the supposedly sick? Come on, how hard is it to pretend you're asleep? Maybe, a few begin to say, Santa Lora is not even a real town. Has anyone ever heard of this place? And look it up: there's no such saint as Santa Lora. It's made-up. The whole damn place is probably just a set on some back lot in Culver City. Don't those houses look a little too quaint? Don't be naïve, say others—they don't need a set. All that footage is probably just streaming out of some editing room in the valley. If you look closely, you can tell that some of those houses repeat. Now just ask yourself, they say, who stands to benefit from all this. It always comes back to money, right? The medical-industrial complex. And who do you think pays the salaries of these so-called journalists reporting all this fake news? Just watch: in a few months, Big Pharma will be selling the vaccine.

In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a landmark. The volume contains many of the best-known Romantic poems. The second edition in 1800 contained a Preface in which Wordsworth discusses the theories of poetry which were to be so influential on many of his and Coleridge's contemporaries. The Preface represents a poetic manifesto which is very much in the spirit of the age. The movement towards greater freedom and democracy in political and social affairs is paralleled by poetry which sought to overturn the existing regime and establish a new, more 'democratic' poetic order. To do this, the writers used 'the real language of men' (Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and even, in the case of Byron and Shelley, got directly involved in political activities themselves. The Romantic age in literature is often contrasted with the Classical or Augustan age which preceded it. The comparison is valuable, for it is not simply two different attitudes to literature which are being compared but two different ways of seeing and experiencing life. The Classical or Augustan age of the early and mid-eighteenth century stressed the importance of reason and order. Strong feelings and flights of the imagination had to be controlled (although they were obviously found widely, especially in poetry). The swift improvements in medicine, economics, science and engineering, together with rapid developments in both agricultural and industrial technology, suggested human progress on a grand scale. At the centre of these advances towards a perfect society was mankind, and it must have seemed that everything was within man's grasp if his baser, bestial instincts could be controlled. The Classical temperament trusts reason, intellect, and the head. The Romantic temperament prefers feelings, intuition, and the heart.

As noted in About ESC Electrol Specialties Company began fabricating CIP System components as a vendor to one of the nations largest suppliers of cleaning chemicals to the Dairy industry more than 50 years ago. This vendor was a major provider of the engineering services, components and skilled personnel required to design and install CIPable automaed processes, for dairies initialy, and later food and beverage processors. This vendor was actively involved with new facility construction, but more importantly, also developed and applied the methodos of applying such new technology equally well to "recycle old dairies" via rennovation projects planned to provide the exisitng facility increased capacity, efficiency and quality capabilities, and keep it running during the rennovation process. This vendor worked on a design and install" basis and used its own wsanitary welding crews, even Internationally, through the mid 70s.

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.

Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers. My wife, Meia, likes to point out that the aviation industry didn’t start with mechanical birds. Indeed, when we finally figured out how to build mechanical birds in 2011,1 more than a century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the aviation industry showed no interest in switching to wing-flapping mechanical-bird travel, even though it’s more energy efficient—because our simpler earlier solution is better suited to our travel needs. In the same way, I suspect that there are simpler ways to build human-level thinking machines than the solution evolution came up with, and even if we one day manage to replicate or upload brains, we’ll end up discovering one of those simpler solutions first. It will probably draw more than the twelve watts of power that your brain uses, but its engineers won’t be as obsessed about energy efficiency as evolution was—and soon enough, they’ll be able to use their intelligent machines to design more energy-efficient ones.

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution.

Finally, if we add to these observations the remark that Marx owes to the bourgeois economists the idea, which he claims exclusively as his own, of the part played by industrial production in the development of humanity, and that he took the essentials of his theory of work-value from Ricardo, an economist of the bourgeois industrial revolution, our right to say that his prophecy is bourgeois in content will doubtless be recognized. These comparisons only aim to show that Marx, instead of being, as the fanatical Marxists of our day would have it, the beginning and the end of the prophecy, participates on the contrary in human nature: he is an heir before he is a pioneer. His doctrine, which he wanted to be a realist doctrine, actually was realistic during the period of the religion of science, of Darwinian evolutionism, of the steam engine and the textile industry. A hundred years later, science encounters relativity, uncertainty, and chance; the economy must take into account electricity, metallurgy, and atomic production. The inability of pure Marxism to assimilate these successive discoveries was shared by the bourgeois optimism of Marx's time. It renders ridiculous the Marxist pretension of maintaining that truths one hundred years old are unalterable without ceasing to be scientific. Nineteenth-century Messianism, whether it is revolutionary or bourgeois, has not resisted the successive developments of this science and this history, which to different degrees they have deified.

Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either. Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers--obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

The problem that ought to concern us first is the fairly recent dismantling of our old understanding and acceptance of human limits. For a long time we knew that we were not, and could never be, “as gods.” We knew, or retained the capacity to learn, that our intelligence could get us into trouble that it could not get us out of. We were intelligent enough to know that our intelligence, like our world, is limited. We seem to have known and feared the possibility of irreparable damage. But beginning in science and engineering, and continuing, by imitation, into other disciplines, we have progressed to the belief that humans are intelligent enough, or soon will be, to transcend all limits and to forestall or correct all bad results of the misuse of intelligence. Upon this belief rests the further belief that we can have “economic growth” without limit. Economy in its original—and, I think, its proper—sense refers to household management. By extension, it refers to the husbanding of all the goods by which we live. An authentic economy, if we had one, would define and make, on the terms of thrift and affection, our connections to nature and to one another. Our present industrial system also makes those connections, but by pillage and indifference. Most economists think of this arrangement as “the economy.” Their columns and articles rarely if ever mention the land-communities and land-use economies. They never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage “to strengthen the economy.

Let’s begin with this notion that society, not entrepreneurs, is primarily responsible for the success of an enterprise. What is the evidence for that? Actually there is very little. Consider the great inventions and innovations of the nineteenth century that made possible the Industrial Revolution and the rising standard of living that propelled America into the front ranks of the world by the mid-twentieth century. Who built the telegraph, and the great shipping lines, and the railroads, and the airplanes? Who produced the tractors and the machinery that made America the manufacturing capital of the world? Who built and then made available home appliances like the vacuum cleaner, the automatic dishwasher, and the microwave oven? More recent, who built the personal computer, the iPhone, and the software and search engines that power the electronic revolution? Entrepreneurs, that’s who. Government played a role, but that role was extremely modest. In the nineteenth century, the government did little more than grant licenses to companies to operate on the high seas or to go ahead and build railroads. As is often the case when there are government favors to be had, such licenses and contracts were attended with the usual lobbying, cajoling, and corruption. In the twentieth century, the government refused to help the Wright brothers because it had its own cockamamie idea about how airplanes should be built; the Wright brothers, on their own, actually went ahead and built one that could fly, and the government was so angry that for a long time it simply ignored this stunning new invention.

the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,

Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions. Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today; and we definitely know her achievement continues to enrich the lives of billions of people. What we also know is that such discoveries were, again, based on centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation – recall how the basic principles of agriculture were known long before anyone applied them systematically – and that the results of such experiments were often preserved and transmitted through ritual, games and forms of play (or even more, perhaps, at the point where ritual, games and play shade into each other). ‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks.

Professional Bio of Shahin Shardi, P.Eng. Materials Engineer Welding and Pressure Equipment Inspector, QA/QC Specialist Shahin Shardi is a Materials Engineer with experience in integrity management, inspection of pressure equipment, quality control/assurance of large scale oil and gas projects and welding inspection. He stared his career in trades which helped him understand fundamentals of operation of a construction site and execution of large scale projects. This invaluable experience provided him with boots on the ground perspective of requirements of running a successful project and job site. After obtaining an engineering degree from university of British Columbia, he started a career in asset integrity management for oil and gas facilities and inspection of pressure equipment in Alberta, Canada. He has been involved with numerus maintenance shutdowns at various facilities providing engineering support to the maintenance, operations and project personnel regarding selection, repair, maintenance, troubleshooting and long term reliability of equipment. In addition he has extensive experience in area of quality control and assurance of new construction activities in oil and gas industry. He has performed Owner’s Inspector and welding inspector roles in this area. Shahin has extensively applied industry codes of constructions such as ASME Pressure Vessel Code (ASME VIII), Welding (ASME IX), Process Piping (ASME B31.3), Pipe Flanges (ASME B16.5) and various pressure equipment codes and standards. Familiarity with NDT techniques like magnetic particle, liquid penetrant, eddy current, ultrasonic and digital radiography is another valuable knowledge base gained during various projects. Some of his industry certificates are CWB Level 2 Certified Welding Inspector, API 510 Pressure Vessel Inspector, Alberta ABSA In-Service Pressure Vessel Inspector and Saskatchewan TSASK Pressure Equipment Inspector. Shahin is a professional member of Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta.

The climate for relationships within an innovation group is shaped by the climate outside it. Having a negative instead of a positive culture can cost a company real money. During Seagate Technology’s troubled period in the mid-to-late 1990s, the company, a large manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers, had seven different design centers working on innovation, yet it had the lowest R&D productivity in the industry because the centers competed rather than cooperated. Attempts to bring them together merely led people to advocate for their own groups rather than find common ground. Not only did Seagate’s engineers and managers lack positive norms for group interaction, but they had the opposite in place: People who yelled in executive meetings received “Dog’s Head” awards for the worst conduct. Lack of product and process innovation was reflected in loss of market share, disgruntled customers, and declining sales. Seagate, with its dwindling PC sales and fading customer base, was threatening to become a commodity producer in a changing technology environment. Under a new CEO and COO, Steve Luczo and Bill Watkins, who operated as partners, Seagate developed new norms for how people should treat one another, starting with the executive group. Their raised consciousness led to a systemic process for forming and running “core teams” (cross-functional innovation groups), and Seagate employees were trained in common methodologies for team building, both in conventional training programs and through participation in difficult outdoor activities in New Zealand and other remote locations. To lead core teams, Seagate promoted people who were known for strong relationship skills above others with greater technical skills. Unlike the antagonistic committees convened during the years of decline, the core teams created dramatic process and product innovations that brought the company back to market leadership. The new Seagate was able to create innovations embedded in a wide range of new electronic devices, such as iPods and cell phones.

the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play…. All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “co-operative”, i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them…. Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world State and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific technique, and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements…. In normal cases, children of sufficient heredity will be admitted to the governing class from the moment of conception. I start with this moment rather than birth since it is from this moment and not merely the moment of birth that the treatment of the two classes will be different. If, however, by the time the child reaches the age of three it is fairly clear that he does not attain the required standard, he will be degraded at that point. [T]here would be a very strong tendency for the governing classes to become hereditary, and that after a few generations not many children would be moved from either class into the other. This is especially likely to be the case if embryological methods of improving the breed are applied to the governing class, but not to the others. In this way the gulf between the two classes as regards native intelligence will become continually wider and wider…. Assuming that both kinds of breeding are scientifically carried out, there will come to be an increasing divergence between the two types, making them in the end almost different species. (pp. 181–188, emphasis added)