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home   12 October 2004
To Infinity And Beyond!
LEE GOLDBERG's column Electronic Design January 20 1997
OK, call me a hypocrite, a supporter of corporate welfare, but I'm nuts for the space program. Despite its waste and inefficiency, I get a lump in my throat when watching a launch, knowing that it's my tax dollars that NASA's burning. When my sensible friends ask me to justify the billions spent on heaving a few dozen souls and a few tons of hardware into the void, I mumble pious words about technical spin-offs and scientific discoveries, but it's all nonsense. I've finally realized that the only honest justification for it is that it's a really cool thing to do - and that it gives us a chance to dream.
Of all the breakthroughs and marvels that the space program gave us, its biggest contribution may have been inspiring generations of nerdy kids to crack their books, do their homework, and dream about one day going to the stars. Like our athletic counterparts, most of us fell short of playing in the major leagues. But, a lucky few made it, with the rest of us cheering them on from the sidelines - and we were all better off for having made the attempt.
It would be great to give today's kids a chance to dream about the stars again.
The following is from 'Electronics' 13 July 1992
And by now it has got much worse both in America and Britain.

AMERICA'S WILLTO DO IS UP AGAINST AMERICA'S WILL TO SUE.
"While U.S. corporations are hiring lawyers" we heard a prominent CEO grumble recently, "the Japanese are hiring engineers".
That CEO isn't the only one grumbling. If you've ever wondered what happened to good old Yankee ingenuity and competitiveness, look in court.
Litigation costs American industry an estimated $300 billion each year. And costs to our country in lost competitiveness and lost opportunities may be even more dramatic.
For example, product liability insurance costs for American manufacturers often are 20 to 50 times higher than those for foreign firms. 25% of U.S. manufacturers have discontinued product research, and 15% have laid off workers as a direct result of product liability. Yet, each year more new lawyers graduate from U.S. law schools than work in all of Japan. America now has 70% of all the world's lawyers, a federal caseload that has tripled during the last 20 years, and a Congress (45% lawyers) too paralyzed to act. What can you do about it? Join with us.
It's time to reconvince Americans that the best way to create wealth is to make something, not sue somebody.

ENGINEERINGTALK - Issue 355: 22 February 2007, Chris Rand, Editor, writes:

They say that engineering's biggest problem is its own PR, and that may be true. But when it comes to the negative PR created by technology not working, blame the management. How many engineers, scientists and technologists of any sort are, at any one time, working on something which they know should never have been commissioned in the first place? The most obvious culprits of all, of course, seem to be our political leaders, but worse still are the industrial management which leaps in to offer to meet the most hare-brained requests even when they've got "potential disaster" written all over them?

There's always a string of firms queueing up to tender for every bridge, stadium or airport required to be built way past any previous price-performance benchmarks. But what gets me is when there's a scramble to get a contract when the technology obviously hasn't even been developed yet. The thinking goes like this: the client (a government, say) has a problem which needs solving through technology, and decides that the best way to find out if the technology exists is to ask "industry". Not wanting to miss out, industry gets its development engineers to rig up a small-scale development project and make it work, and then says "yep, we can scale that up as you require". And the next thing you know, every nurse is apparently going to be doing ward rounds clutching a tablet PC, every passport-holder is going to get their irises scanned, and every journey you make in your car is going to be monitored so you can be charged for it.

Or not. That's the trouble with technology, it never works properly, does it?

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