Call me a radical lefty, but, IMO, certain pieces of IP should reside in the public sector, i.e., not for profit. Among them, I include anything that pertains to human health and safety.
As we see here, Volvo made a humanitarian decision back in 1959. Of course, if such a call had to be made in the corporate arena in 2021, who knows what would happen.
As suggested in the photo here, Americans have a bad habit of underestimating the enormity of their problems.
A good example is the revolution that’s taking place within the Republican Party. In particular, the GOP has become the party of Trump. That’s right: he’s out of office and about to be flatten by an avalanche of criminal indictments the size of the largest boulder shown above, but anyone who says that he actually lost the 2020 election is committing political suicide.
As a result, Republicans are going to find themselves in a totally untenable position when it comes to the next national election. Fine by me.
Much to the chagrin of American conservatives, i.e., those who stand for Ronald Reagan’s values of small government and limited spending, Trump has successfully marginalized any congressional Republican who doesn’t maintain absolute loyalty to him. God help him or her who’s bold enough to tell the truth about the “Big Lie,” aka the ridiculous “stolen election” narrative.
What’s happening to Liz Chaney is comical to watch, though it may work for the Republicans in the short term. The GOP has unified around Trump, and that may be enough for success in the 2020 mid-terms. But eviscerating anyone of any integrity and sanity will fail miserably at the national level.
Chaney is a true conservative, and she’s fiercely intelligent. If the Republicans are going to win a national election, she and her policies are far more likely to carry the day than those of the Trump cultists.
Keep in mind that Bush 43 had decent support from women, young people, college-educated people, even people of color, and he still lost the popular vote (twice). Trump has virtually none of that following, especially now, after the insurrection and the onset of other legal woes from hell. To at least 80% of these people, he’s regarded as the criminal sociopath that he truly is.
Mitch McConnell has inflicted a great deal of damage on the American people over the years, but, though he doesn’t seem to realize it, it seems those days are over. With 200+ million vaccinations, 160 million stimulus checks, a great deal of environmental devastation reversed, a huge jobs/clean infrastructure bill in the works, and respect for the U.S. from foreign countries dramatically improved, let’s be honest: things aren’t going McConnell’s way.
OK, maybe you saw this one coming.
Regardless, the point is clear: much of human activity is incredibly destructive. We kill one another, we pollute our home planet, we destroy other creatures’ habitat without a thought, and we inflict horrible cruelties on our fellows.
On the other hand (from Hamlet): What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!
I happen to believe that the balance of good and helpful character of humankind and our capacity for evil is constantly changing. It would be nice to know which side is winning at this point. But right now, it’s unclear.
The rejection of science is a phenomenon that lies at the core of many of the most challenging issues in our world today.
Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are impeding our efforts to control the pandemic.
Congressional climate deniers are hampering our attempts to prevent the planet from heating to the point that the human race experiences unprecedented levels of suffering.
A full 70% of Republicans believe, without any evidence, that the election was stolen from a great president, Donald Trump.
All this would be terrifically amusing if the damage these people cause weren’t so extreme, and if there were a mechanism for turning this around. Unfortunately, ignorance begets ignorance.
Technologically, the world has the capacity to end most of human suffering, and create a sustainable society in which we all live productive, healthy, and happy lives.
Politically, we’re as far away from that potential as we are from Andromeda.
Carl Sagan died in 1996.
Maybe it’s good that he couldn’t see what the United States looks like now.
We don’t dabble in stupidity. We bathe in it. We elect it president. We have a cult of 74 million voters slavishly worshipping it.
Yeah! Go get ’em! Take it on the goddamn road!
America needs REAL Republicans. None of these pansies with traditional conservative values like small government, personal accountability, free markets and little regulation.
I want Capitol stormers. Anti-maskers. Open carriers of weapons of war. Torch bearers. Cross burners. Science deniers. Of course, gotta have some sex traffickers thrown in there too. Better get ‘er done before you go to trial.
This fellow asks a very good question. When indeed?
First, let’s realize that America is the only nation that has trouble assimilating this idea.
We are also a culture that worships money, and in this case, that may turn out to be a good thing. As I’m fond of saying, cleantech is destined to be the pre-eminent industry in the 21st Century, and apparently we are in the process of jumping into it with both feet.
When it becomes clear that people are making money by the peck in things like clean energy, efficiency solutions, electric transportation, and energy storage, cleantech will become mainstream overnight.
