During a panel discussion a couple of years ago in which I was critical of wind projects, someone cited conventional wisdom that the Saskatchewan government should be on the “leading edge” on renewable energy research.
I said it should not, that our strength is conventional energy and the focus should be there. Solar and wind should be left to those with the incentive to get their gadgets to actually work – like the Japanese. Let them spend the billions to figure it out. We’re better off paying retail after the fact;
“Let CNN buy the new stuff and test it out, and when the technology is right I’ll come in like a ton of bricks,” he says. “You spend a million dollars on some innovation and it turns out that nobody in the department knows how to use the damn thing. So they need something else to make it work. It never stops. When I see that the Framistan is working, we’ll get one. Hell, we’ll get two. But in the meantime, let CNN waste their money.” Framistan, it turns out, is a word Ailes loves. It became popular after it was used on an episode of I Love Lucy–it stands for unnecessary gear. “Framistans always need an additional Framistan. And this network isn’t going to run in the red.”
Remember that.
I remember it as being a “framistat”.
Framistan is where Fram oil filters come from. Everyone know that!
Framistats are outdated technology. Since the Web 2.0 revolution we use digitonic frombotzers now.
Are people from there called Framis or Framistanis? I get confused on that one.
The first manned mission to Mars is going to lead to myriad opportunities in technology, resource extraction and science.
Since the payoff is so enormous, we need to be on the “leading edge” of Martian landing and exploration research.
Now I want the book. (The Chafets one excerpted here, not the Sherman one, which is certain to be a thinly veiled smear.)
Framistan: aka a doohickey, or a thingamabob.
The Japanese, Kate? You are well aware, surely, that Japan’s R&D “model” is little different from China’s or the USSR’s—let the West do all the hard work, and steal it without so much as a sumimasen. They go to the West, buy a gadget, and figure out how it works and where they can cut corners without the gadget blowing up in someone’s face before the six-month warranty runs out.
Actually just about everything about Japanese “culture” is a funhouse-mirror distortion of the folkways of other nations, the Chinese first, the West later. The Japanese are sharp, ’tis true—they’d have never managed to conquer half of Asia if they weren’t, even with Western guns—but they never think of anything new.
As for solar or wind power, the fact that nobody at all in his right mind risking his own money puts it into that sort of thing if he ever cares to see it again speaks for itself. Even the Japanese went with nuclear power, sources of which will last until the end of the universe itself. Of course, serious research and investment in nuclear power is a cardinal sin to the eco-cranks.
Is the problem that too much fossil fuel is in the hands of savages? Deal with the problem and only the problem—drive the savages away and turn their land over to civilized men on whom oil wealth isn’t completely wasted. Israel should be a hundred times its current size, stretching from the Nile to the Tigris, with enough oil to last her till Judgment Day with plenty left over to sell to the Christian world. Every Israelite householder should be getting a national dividend cheque sufficient for him to abstain from serious work entirely and devote his life to study of the Law and raising his children in it, if it pleased him to do so.
They would be too, were Saudi princes and Arab kleptocrats not swanning around with the loot, their wives spending a king’s ransom at Harrod’s while their husbands buy half the city with their ill-gotten gains. The Arabs, of course, never came up with anything on their own but Islam. Even what passed for Islamic “philosophy” was copied from pagan Greece. The world would lose little by their disappearance, and decent people would not mourn them long.
Whatever the Queen spends on research into how best to rid the world of Islam is a truly wise investment, which will pay off a thousandfold. (I will spare you my own suggestion, as I have made it many times. Possibly there are good reasons for not applying it that I have overlooked.) Let the eco-cranks waste their own money on “alternative energy.” Experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other.
Rob, surely that’s a joke. A bloody good one it is too. Mars? Sure we haven’t gotten to half of the earth! Most of our own dominion is a howling wilderness where nothing worth eating will grow and where only a lunatic or an Eskimo would live, if he didn’t have a job in a mine to go to.
Again, people spending their own money haven’t considered going much beyond low earth orbit. There’s a reason for that. Assuming men could be sent to Mars and arrive alive, healthy and sane, what, pray, will anyone do on Mars when they get there worth the trouble of going? What will they eat, much less drink or breathe? If you want men to live on Mars, go away and figure out first how you’ll make Nunavut self-sufficent in vegetables. The Martians may not thank you, but the Eskimos will.
It’s true. High technology occasionally pays off big, but is normally a lousy investment. They don’t call it “the bleeding edge” for nothing. That’s why I avoid such companies in my stock portfolio, despite being a manager of R&D.
The companies that really make the money are those who find ways to exploit proven technologies the best.
Mine an asteroid. (after it arrives here on earth)
Rodger Ailes is so far ahead of the pack, he is the Thomas Sowell of the news business. Sun news is following the same model and if the CRTC played fair Sun would soon be kicking CTV and other posers in Canadian news. Rodger also has the greatest eye for beautys with brains, but then, CBC has Mesley and the Star has Mallick while the Globe has (“I just hate Harper, all my girlfriends hate Harper so I do to”; Adler Dec 08), Margret Wente, so the witness will sit down. 20 years down the road there will be a huge bonanza for scrap dealers when these windmills of gaia are being dismantled for the copper and steel, where will the cheerleaders like Suzuki and Gore be, in the Bahamas, and the politicians who facilitated this scam will be with them.
Sarcasm doesn’t translate well on the internet.
“Sarcasm doesn’t translate well on the internet.”
And that,Mr.Huck, is why we have the little /s or /sarc tag for people who take themselves to seriously sometimes.
And Dick….you’re saying the ChiComs and the Russkies do NOT commit indrustrial espionage? What planet are you from again?
I disagree Rob Huck. I think sarcasm translates extremely well on the net and particularly well on the comments of this blog.
Meanwhile, it is not as bad as in Australia.
“The Gillard government will allocate over $13 Billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to help fund even more of these useless monstrosities and as already demonstrated above, wind turbines create more pollution in their manufacture than what they can save once they ever become operational, they kill thousands of birds and bats each and every year they are in operation, they affect human health, blight our beautiful landscapes, cost a fortune to install and maintain, require 24/7 back-up gas or coal power source (so what’s the point of them in the first place?), cost on average 2.2 jobs for every 1 job and to top it off, they don’t reduce our Carbon Dioxide emissions one iota and the Australian taxpayer will still be forced by the Gillard government’s Clean Energy Future legislation to buy billions of dollars worth of foreign Carbon Dioxide abatement certificates from snake oil salesman from dodgy 3rd world countries who will never cut an ounce of Carbon Dioxide emissions. In short – we have all been conned.”
lots of excellent information . . . I love the picture of the Chinese factory where the make the special magnets used in wind turbines.
http://www.andysrant.com/cartoons-by-steve-hunter/
Easy for you to say Arnold…but I suspect you’re a male chauvinist pig…
SK isn’t quite my idea of a leading area for R&D. Outside of the Canadian Light Source, which is a Canadian not a provincial facility.
Who spent millions developing computer icons and the mouse? Xerox. Who made millions off the idea? Apple and MS. Who spent millions developing the first hand-held cell phones? Motorola? How much does market share does Motorola have now? Zip.
Rabbit’s got it right – there’s a good reason they call it the ‘bleeding edge’. Being first over the hill make look good in the movies, but it’s guy #10 who gets to go home and tell his grandkids about it.
Remeber back int the 70s and 80s when every politician from Scotland to New Zealand wanted to use public money to make their juridisction the next Siliconwhatever?
The same is happening now … To be kind.
It’s the second mouse that get’s the cheese.
Robert…sorta like I don’t have to outrun/out climb the bear,just you??
People without reserves of gas, or oil, or uranium, or coal have no options, so green (as in government bucks green) energy is their shining hope, especially if some other taxpayer can be fleeced.
In Saskatchewan we have options.
Renewable energy is BS. The only reliable form is hydro; and how much research is necessary there?
That aside, the attitude, “let someone else do it” is precisely the clever, shortsighted notion which keeps Canadians forever hewers of wood and drawers of water. We think we are MIGHTY clever folk, exporting resources; until we notice that the products manufactured from those resources are being sold back to us at thousands of times what we received.
Canadians are, actually, fairly good at R&D (real R&D), which was shown in the development of the Avro Arrow, cancelled by Yet Another Sasker by the name of Diefenbugger (the only reason I would ever be in Saskatoon is to p*** on his grave). And of course we had the Candu reactors, which successive Federal governments allowed to languish. And yet, Canadian civil aircraft are reasonably competitive, and a few other things.
Oh yes, I know that the Saskers think that only Yanks can do R&D – my father was one, and he was always surprised when Canadians achieved anything R&D-wise. Well, God rest his soul.
Living off natural resources is fine but they give out, or better sources are found.
If any of you want to purchase an iron mine, with fairly good ore, then come to NL. I’ll show you a Bell Island mine, and you can buy it for a song, pump it out, and you’re ready to go.
Yes, at one time Bell Island was a major world producer of iron ore. And the ore is still there.
Toronto financiers know what Canadians are good for. Some Canadians have good minds, but it is intelligence without shrewdness; and we all have strong backs!
“Yeh load sixteen tons …”
Back in the ’60’s the theory was….
Early innovators…
Early adopters
mid adopters
Late adopters….
The biggest losers were the first and the last.
The early adopters made the coin…tis ever thus….
But ya got to be payin’ attention….mostly it is a passing advantage….in any endeaver…
Fisher, RN First Sea Lord, proponent of the Dreadnaught….was inspired to develop the “Battlecruiser”…sacrificing armour for speed with the Battleship’s guns. The ideal commerce raider….faster than anything more powerful and more powerful than anything as fast……great idea until the other guy built them too….obsolete with the advent of fast battleships….
As it turns out, the Wind-Framistan doesn’t have enough E=MC2 so it will always need additional Chemical-Bond-Framistans.
As Albert Einstein once remarked – If we knew what we were doing we wouldn’t call it research.”