X-Message-Number: 20885
From: 
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 10:00:27 EST
Subject: No more progress, the aircraft example

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It was upon a time an aircraft corporation called Boeing, making the largest 
jets in the world (did you know about the An 224?), well, most of the 
largest. A contender, Airbus Industries wanted to be the first. Here, 
engineers wanted a bigger plane so they said to managers: we must be the 
first. Managers said to bean counters: Boeing make its profits on big 
aircrafts, we must have one to do the same. So everyone agreed to build the 
A380 jumbo-jet.

Seeing that, Boeing found there was no place on the market for another 
supergiant, so it turned to another concept: the sonic cruiser.

There was a very wealthy individual called Richard Branson, the happy owner 
of an aircraft transport company. Seeing that, Branson ordered some A380 to 
help kick start a project he seen as a progress. When the sonic cruiser idea 
came in, he did the same, this too was a progress he wanted to support.

But the sonic cruiser was a new technology, market was only potential, cost 
and delays to build it was great, so the BBC (Boeing, Bean Counters) turned 
it down. Did Airbus will took over when it will have digested the A380 
project? No, because here political support come only if the bottom line 
objective is to beat these damned americans. Progress is an unknown word, 
rentability an advertising pretext here.

So we are at the end of aircraft progress, not because we have hit the limit 
of physical possibilities, no because there is no more technological 
solutions, not because there is no more potential market to explore, not even 
because there is no buyers able to take a financial risk, not because there 
is a world conspiracy, simply because economy now work as flowing water: a 
small local wall can forbid a large river to flow in a deep valley 10 foot 
away from its border. Water can't see away, the market and the society in its 
whole can't do it anymore. This has a name: mere stupidity.

Let me give you another piece of fundamental physics theory: If the society 
is an abstract space and each person in that society an element of that 
space, then the space-society is Riemannian: locally flat but curved on a 
large scale. Simply, curvature in that space spells: s-t-u-p-i-d-i-t-y. Take 
each person on an individual basis, he/she seems very raisonable, but take 
the long range effect of his/here actions and you get nothing more than 
stupidity. It seems the society has grown too big to be managed by a brain 
born in our species.

Yvan Bozzonetti.

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