X-Message-Number: 33299 From: "John de Rivaz" <> Subject: progress Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 17:38:05 -0000 Mark Plus had the sense for about 20 years now that economic and technological progress in the U.S. has broken down somehow. I wonder whether that is really true for everyone. Maybe it is the middle classes where progress has slowed. The cost of better working conditions and the availability of things for poor people has to be met somehow and the price is slower progress for the middle and upper classes. I recall how in the 1960s there was a prevailing opinion that things had got worse "since the war". What at really meant that things were not so easy for the middle classes who could no longer afford to keep servants or to buy services at a reasonable price in relation to what they earned. Economic progress is hard to define. So many people earn money for doing nothing of value, but it very much a matter of opinion as to what value is. Value could be regarded as "making things" but if the things don't last and have to be replaced every six months, can they really be regarded as wealth. Regulation compliance surely isn't adding any value, but it could be regarded as making information structure even if no one really wants it. A huge amount of effort has gone into creating a mass of rules and regulations, which require a sort of occupying army of lawyers to enforce. Is this progress? Is this work being done at the expense of development of Jetsons type technology? Of course some machines have proved to be harder to implement than writers who originally conceive of them supposed, but then this has always been so. In the case of cryonics it does not matter too much as long as the patients can remain preserved. -- Sincerely, John de Rivaz: http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy, Nomad .. and more Content-Type: text/html; [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=33299