There seems to be a general decline in technical competency across *many* fields. There are several possible reasons for this, some of which would cause pearl-clutching to intensify if mentioned.
The irony of meritocracy falling to nepotism was not lost I think on the very originator of the term. Who actually was a fierce critic of it as a system to order society.
For a society to retain competance, failure must earn it's just reward, as much as success does.
(well, there are a couple bags of fake pearls to use for model parts but clutching those would risk popping the bag and scattering them everywhere and then the cat would eat some and get an intestinal blockage, ergo, clutching pearls is a no no)
There's nothing glamorous about flying anymore: it's just having a hard time. On a 180-passenger plane, the space is not equivalent to 180 bags in carry-on baggage compartments, but about 85, forcing companies to label and place the rest in the hold. On the other hand, the seats are getting smaller and the passengers are getting bigger. In the last ten years, the distance between seats has decreased by four centimeters (from 47 to 43 cm). And how do airlines maximize profits? They put up more seats, they don't give food, they have few employees at the airport and few planes on standby. Flying is an essential mode of transport but it has ceased to be fun, comfortable or easily accessible, to become a nightmare.
Boeing announced at the Farnborough Airshow in the United Kingdom that it will build a new variant of the narrow-body 737 Max 8 aircraft with up to 200 seats. That's eleven seats more than the Max 8 currently in development. Airbus is also taking advantage of the economy class cabin on its A320neo jet, adding nine additional seats to bring the total to 189.
The return to launching capsules on top of V2 style rockets is a sad thing for those of us who assumed we would fly on the Pan Am space clipper to a wheel in space in 2001.
Sadly Space has proven to be an even more hostile environment than we thought and its value is mainly in various satellites which have turned Earth orbit into a garbage dump.
An old TV movie based on the Quatermass films showed a space station like the ISS falling apart over a world falling apart in the then future. We seem to be there.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
The principle can be applied well beyond social media.
Or to quote Theodore Sturgeon, it takes a minimum of redesign to turn a crucifix into a pogo stick.
The return to launching capsules on top of V2 style rockets is a sad thing for those of us who assumed we would fly on the Pan Am space clipper to a wheel in space in 2001.
Sadly Space has proven to be an even more hostile environment than we thought and its value is mainly in various satellites which have turned Earth orbit into a garbage dump.
An old TV movie based on the Quatermass films showed a space station like the ISS falling apart over a world falling apart in the then future. We seem to be there.
And what was the Pan Am Space Clipper powered by? There's talk of nuclear engines for going to Mars. It can be done. But too much is at stake dollar wise on Earth right now. The only way for a successful Mars mission would be to launch two identical ships and a spare parts carrier which would double as a rescue vehicle after the spare parts were jettisoned. And once there, what to do? A drill should be sent down about a mile with a heated return line. Several very large shelters would be in place, erected by automated systems. Seeds would be planted by robots in varying time cycles. And since there's plenty of carbon dioxide, plants will do well. But, unless you want to live in a pressurized and heated lava tube, you might want to opt for the Moon base. Ah, but supply ships will have to launch every hour on the hour from Earth.
The rapid rate in the technological background has disrupted functionality of society and society is due for some correction. New, more functional social order needs to be discovered, consolidated and spread. Conservatism can not survive against orders of magnitude shift in information processes with surrounding social and economic changes, while novel social orders are without sound principles. Like previous changes, trial and error seems to be the process of the day. Dysfunction will probably increase until rate of changes plateau and society stabilize to find new principles of organization.
The romance of aerospace is not really related to the dislocation of society and isn't all that important from a historical perspective.
Was flying ever really glamorous?
Sitting in a draughty, noisy, vibrating Handley Page H.P.42, praying there wasn't fog en route so the pilot wouldn't crash into something, no seatbelt so any pitching could send you flying (and you get lukewarm soup in your lap) doesn't exactly sound like it was fun.
And let's face it, we all know there were a ton of crappy aircraft designs out there designed 1800-2000, his site has devoted more than enough attention to them! (and we've all seen the films of those V-2s toppling over at Peenemunde lolz)
Everyone was beautiful and the champagne was always cold
www.tatler.com
In the olden days, flying was perhaps the most glamorous thing you could do - you really were halfway to heaven. Everyone was beautiful, the champagne was always cold and there was never any turbulence because this was pre-global warming*.
...
*We don't have any scientific evidence to prove this. But it sounds good.
The airplane is no longer a cocktail party with wings. It’s a hulking, hermetically sealed tube crammed tightly with seats that deliver us from one location to another. This is reflected in the way people dress.
www.bostonglobe.com
“Looking back to the 1960s, it really was a glamorous age for travel,” said British designer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker Keith Lovegrove, who wrote the book “Airline: Style at 30,000 Feet.” “My father worked for an airline, so we witnessed the posh days of air travel. That really inspired my book. I remember that it was party time on the airplane, and people really dressed as if they were going to a party.”
There was a time when air travel was reserved for the rich and famous. Today, however, it has been described as 'just a glorified bus operation'.
www.thenationalnews.com
In the course of getting to its current oversubscribed state, air travel has shed more than glamour. It has lost its essential mystique - the sense of wonder we used to have that it was actually possible to fly, and that human ingenuity had built a craft capable of such a thing. This almost childlike appreciation made flying - at least in the early days - something akin to the witnessing of a miracle. Today's airline passenger barely realises that he's doing something that all earlier generations of humans would have considered pure fantasy. In Virgin's Upper Class cabin the seats are configured herringbone-fashion facing the centre. The message is obvious: only nerds want to look out of the window.
For the first few decades of commercial air travel the glamour lingered because the fantasy remained essentially intact. Flying was the privilege not just of the few, but of the few in possession of both money and a spirit of adventure. During the 1930s and 1940s, the great Pan Am Clippers plied the skies, crewed by men in starched naval uniforms and attended by women in pale blue dresses and pink lipstick. Furnished in the manner of flying gentlemen's clubs (an early brochure lists dining tables of black walnut, Wedgwood china and soft leather seats) these majestic machines first opened up the world to the idea of international travel. In doing so, they set us on a course to today's degradations.
There's nothing glamorous about flying anymore: it's just having a hard time. On a 180-passenger plane, the space is not equivalent to 180 bags in carry-on baggage compartments, but about 85, forcing companies to label and place the rest in the hold. On the other hand, the seats are getting smaller and the passengers are getting bigger. In the last ten years, the distance between seats has decreased by four centimeters (from 47 to 43 cm). And how do airlines maximize profits? They put up more seats, they don't give food, they have few employees at the airport and few planes on standby. Flying is an essential mode of transport but it has ceased to be fun, comfortable or easily accessible, to become a nightmare.
Boeing announced at the Farnborough Airshow in the United Kingdom that it will build a new variant of the narrow-body 737 Max 8 aircraft with up to 200 seats. That's eleven seats more than the Max 8 currently in development. Airbus is also taking advantage of the economy class cabin on its A320neo jet, adding nine additional seats to bring the total to 189.
My wife has origins (daddy) at La Réunion island. Down under near Madagascar, that's a 7000 miles flight. For reasons beyond my understanding, every single airlines to La Réunion
a) starts from Paris and nowhere else (as if there weren't La Réunion people in exile elsewhere in Metropolitan France, you know, the country that spreads 600 miles outside Paris)
b) starts at 9 in the evening, to land at 8 o'clock the next morning.
Which makes the trip a living hell. A330, how I learned to hate you.
You land at La Réunion airport feeling like a sleepless zombie... and the climate finish you: 35°C (in a cold day) and 90% humidity.
Oh, and I did that with a 2.5 years old kid... who decided not to sleep, to the great delight of 250 passengers around us, willing to slain us. I mean, the kid actually fell asleep : near Madagascar at six in the morning, with the Sun shining through the windows (facepalm).
And the price: 1200 euros per person, 3600 euros total. Yeeepeeee !
What puzzles me is a) Paris and no other and b) the night flight. WTF, can't airliners fly by day ? plus the view of Africa from 35 000 ft high would be nice.
"Glamor" is a function of wealth and classiness. When whatever is said to be "glamorous" is available to the masses, it's no longer glamorous.
Part of this is the "exclusive" nature of the glamorous thing. Crossing the ocean in comfort and style used to be something that only the rich could afford, with great staterooms on ocean liners. The masses had to bunk down in crappy little damp cabins or, worse, steerage. If *everyone* could have staterooms, it wouldn't be glamorous, for the simple fact that it would be the standard way to go.
But there's also another part to it: if everyone could have their own staterooms... a sizable fraction of "everyone" would promptly trash the staterooms, because a sizable fraction of everyone is a low-IQ monster. We've all seen videos of high calorie r̷̞͋͝e̷̛̥͚͝t̶̝̺̆̾a̵̝͒r̶̉ͅḋ̸̝̹s̵͓̻̏ freaking out on airplanes because they were told to sit their asses down. We've all seen videos of mentally challenged/deranged weirdos assaulting people or relieving themselves on public transport like buses and trains. We've all seen videos of entitled jackasses abusing their Uber drivers, up to and including assault, theft, murder. This is the polar opposite of "glamorous."
None of this is to say that the rich and famous - the "glamorous people" - can't be idiotic scumbags. I suspect we can all think of rich people who have, say, offspring who are drug using, hooker-smashing corrupt dirtbags. But this is a somewhat self-correcting system: if you;re rich and stupid, chances are quite good that pretty soon you won't be rich anymore. But if you are poor, you can attain high levels of un-glamorousness and easily maintain that. Glamorousness is an actively unstable system, forever needing attention and effort to resist collapse. Anti-glamor is an incredibly stable system, easily attained, difficult to climb out of.
So air travel in the "jet age" reached a level of glamor that proved basically impossible to retain. And it is now, with many airlines, down in the muck and the urine and vomit and spilled pharmaceuticals with trains and buses.
With luck, we'll achieve a new level of glamorousness as those with the will and skill board ships to the off-world colonies. And with luck, it'll be a while before it gets mundane enough to carry the scumbags in large numbers. because a Mars colony populated by the kind who populate Spirit Airlines cell phone videos would quickly return Mars to a lifeless status.
What we call today retro future will be reality in some alternate universe, I wonder what has gone wrong in ours... Maybe the rejection of nuclear power?
Cynic mode on: Maybe rampant capitalism/consumerism? Sell cheap trinkets/distractions to the masses to make a quick dollar in the short term. Why do long term/big projects?
Cynic mode on: Maybe rampant capitalism/consumerism? Sell cheap trinkets/distractions to the masses to make a quick dollar in the short term. Why do long term/big projects?
What we call today retro future will be reality in some alternate universe, I wonder what has gone wrong in ours... Maybe the rejection of nuclear power?
A lot of things went wrong and sideways between Then and Now if your goal was the future that was promised. To get that, we need a society that is not just prosperous, but much less filled with degeneracy at all levels.
"Idiocracy" wasn't supposed to be a documentary, but here we are.
*Rejection* of capitalism is a bigger problem. Technological advancement and the improvement of the human condition are products of the free market, far more than any other system. Destruction of the family and social norms in favor of stagnation is more a function of... well, *not* capitalism.
*Rejection* of capitalism is a bigger problem. Technological advancement and the improvement of the human condition are products of the free market, far more than any other system. Destruction of the family and social norms in favor of stagnation is more a function of... well, *not* capitalism.
It is capitalism combined with technology that generates is own opposition, in that it destroys previous moral systems that enabled growth of capitalism and leaves a void in its wake.
Stuff like "family values" can't not survive all of electronic medias trying to replace it with consumerism, so it dies. Ideas like raising kids can not compete with capital throwing money at ideas that increases the size of economy via increasing the labor pool, so that dies. The engine of modern economy is in advertising, because mass mind control is the natural end point of optimization.
"Capital" never lost control of the media and the flow of ideas, but this control only serves the interest of the owners of the media but not the general idea of capitalism or the functionality of society.
In addition to indifference from the rulers, neutral drift of the environment inflicts heavy damage to human instincts. The invention of television and subsequent technology have greatly disrupted human evaluation of social status and socialization and produced generations of anxious people with poor social skills and inability to mate. This disruption exceeds the capability of powerful authoritarians states to fix, with Singapore, China and Russia all having no capability in reversing course. Modern parasocial relationships, enabled by tech, is to family, what candy bars is to food, and society don't even know of a diet plan.
It is easy to point to some "pathological ideas" raised somewhere, but the same issues shows up anywhere that adapts the modern economy regardless of details of history, the fashionable ideology or political party.
There is also the loss of transcendental values like god or aerospace achievement as short term transactional hedonistic thinking dominates, but that is overall not that important compared to other issues.
A lot of things went wrong and sideways between Then and Now if your goal was the future that was promised. To get that, we need a society that is not just prosperous, but much less filled with degeneracy at all levels.
"Idiocracy" wasn't supposed to be a documentary, but here we are.
*Rejection* of capitalism is a bigger problem. Technological advancement and the improvement of the human condition are products of the free market, far more than any other system. Destruction of the family and social norms in favor of stagnation is more a function of... well, *not* capitalism.
I think there is a case for arguing that traditional engineering has taken a back seat to a virtual world in which "being there" does not need a plane or a spacecraft.
Images of futuristic machines started in books and then flourished in films and television. But as this site shows they have gained a new reality online.
Supersonic air travel has not found customers willing even to buy a small executive machine. Such a jet has been feasible for years but there are just too few people who want to pay for one.
Some countries like China and France have made high speed rail travel seem easy to roll out. Britain on the other hand is a small densely populated country with high levels of car ownership.
In short things sort themselves out as they have always done.
"Feudalism," like later "mercantilism," is simply an early form of socialism. Socialism is "means of production owned/controlled by the state;" feudalism, it's own by the local Lord... who is essentially the State. The serfs have little to no profit motive, thus feudalism essentially *needs* to force the serfs to work via threats.
"Capital" never lost control of the media and the flow of ideas, but this control only serves the interest of the owners of the media but not the general idea of capitalism or the functionality of society.
The invention of television and subsequent technology have greatly disrupted human evaluation of social status and socialization and produced generations of anxious people with poor social skills and inability to mate. This disruption exceeds the capability of powerful authoritarians states to fix, with Singapore, China and Russia all having no capability in reversing course. Modern parasocial relationships, enabled by tech, is to family, what candy bars is to food, and society don't even know of a diet plan.
And once again, these systems are often controlled by the State. China and Russia, for example, have heavily State-controlled media *and* state controlled social media.
I think there is a case for arguing that traditional engineering has taken a back seat to a virtual world in which "being there" does not need a plane or a spacecraft.
People started worrying about that back in the 90's At the time I argued with my rather single-minded boss that the emergence of truly realistic virtual reality would play hell with peoples desire to risk their lives and their tax dollars to go to Mars. The closer we get to holodecks, the further we'll get from physical adventure.
Supersonic air travel has not found customers willing even to buy a small executive machine. Such a jet has been feasible for years but there are just too few people who want to pay for one.
In no small part because SSTs are *illegal* in many jurisdictions. You can't overfly the US supersonically. Hopefully the X-59 will lead the way towards quieter SSTs, but "quieter" isn't the same as "quiet," and there will *always* be someone who'll bitch bitch bitch about even the most sedate of muffled *thumps.*
In the UK the classic state vs private enterprise battle has become an Orwellian two legs bad four legs good argument.
Sadly the Pandemic and other areas of life have shown that management is poor both in the public and private sectors.
Noone seems to know how to fix this, least of all the ever growing number of managers.
The BBC is not controled by the State any more than Sky or the Murdoch Press. It does, however, suffer from the British vice of recruiting people who look and think like those already there. In the BBC's case this has come to be a slightly left of centre London mentality.
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