Boomers Driving the Car

Had a chat with Carol last night. We were discussing the impact that the boomers will have on the medical system. When you look at the population histograms between 2005 and 2025, you are absolutely astounded by the number of old people that we will be carrying in the future.

Carol seems to think that suicide is going to become an increasingly acceptable option for these folks. She thinks that it is because they will do it willingly to decrease suffering. I will agree that this will always be an aspect (for background look here), but more and more I think that the system will start breaking down in its ability to deal with these oldsters and suicide will gradually be more and more used because the system cant keep up.

F=ma

Newton's Second Law

The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.

Let's set F equal to the ability of a society to exist. An arbitrary value will be assigned to denote "adequate" societal performance,

Lets set M as the population of the society

Let's set A as the product of the money supply and the velocity of that money.

Thus, when a nation's population increases, in order to maintain F at a constant, the money supply or the velocity of the money must increase. Since there is an inverse relationship of mass to acceleration, these must increase more rapidly than the rate of growth.

If money is leaving the country in external trade imbalances, the product of the money supply and velocity is made smaller and F drops below "adequate" societal performance.

Just a thought...I'll work on it more later.

The grand scheme of things

The hardest part about getting old is dropping the thought that somehow your desires and beliefs have any impact on the way that the world proceeds. We in America have this odd idea an individual will be able to change the world. I am more and more coming to the conclusion that the historic leaders were just people who got out in front of mass movements and claimed leadership. The mass movement was there first. The mass movement was the important entity. The so-called leader was merely an afterthought of the overall action.

The resumes leave the building

I posted three applications today for a company with no connection whatsoever to this parliment of whores that is called the biotechnology industry.

At the end of the day, I don't believe that the good that this industry does will outweigh the evil.

A New Direction

I think that I have to leave Biotech. It is becoming a decision that is being forced upon me from without, but it is a decision that will be for the best in the long run.

I don't like to think about it too much, but for the last eleven years, I have been working in a business (Rapid HIV testing) that is doomed from the start. The companies that I have worked for during this time have not been companies that created a viable product. Rather than that awful choice, they have been companies that created a totem for investor to ogle and throw their volatile money.

In the United States, there will never be a significant market in rapid HIV testing. Even if the USFDA allows an over the counter version of this out, the market for sluts and man-ho's in this country is too small to support the business. All of the companies that are chasing this rainbow have spent a minimum of US$40,000,000 to get to this point. There is no way on God's green earth that 4-5 companies with a total outlay to date of greater than US$200,000,000 can recoup their outlays with sales in the United States.

So lets look at the global market. Europe is a small, old society with a medical system that keeps the capitalist nature in line, there is no market there. China and India have their own internal industries that they will support, they will not allow American companies to enter that market at the level needed to recoup the losses to date.

So you are left with Africa and South America. Africa is a basket case that doesn't have the money for anything other than the US$0.60 tests that the NGO's can offer. South America is an afterthought, too small to make a difference, too hostile to the NorteAmericanos to buy from us.

The money was good. I got to travel and get out of debt. But it is time to move on.

Pity the fool

The former corporate shitheads sent a nastymail today. Seems that anything that I know is now their property.

Leave it to say that everything that they currently do was stolen wholesale from someone else. Apparently, their argument is that they stole it fair and square and so it is theirs now and no one else can play.

Maybe he was right.

Reprise:  Limitations on the Discussion

James Ussher made the remarkable statement that the world began sometime in 4004 BC.

This has been the butt of centuries worth of mocking, maybe even justified mocking. But let us turn this idea on it's head just for the sake of argument. Let us take the step of saying that that perhaps mankind came into being around 4004 BC.   There can be not proof for this, just a different way of looking at the problem.

I am not going to argue that the universe came into being in 4004 BC. I am not stupid. The evidence for the age of the the universe at approximately 13.7 billion years is too solid to ignore.

I will not argue that the earth came into being in 4004 BC either. I feel comfortable with the age of the earth at around 4.5 billion years.

Nor will I be caught into the trap that the bodily form that man inhabits came into being in 4004 BC. The bodily form that we use has been around quite some time, thank you very much.

What I will propose is that to be a member of mankind is to:

1. Possess a soul.
2. Have the same basic set of genes as >99% of the current human population

So what I posit as a working hypothesis is that the first ensoulment of mankind took place in a couple of folks in the middle east around 4000 BC.   The physical bodies (which we share >99% sequence homology with) prior to that time were for all intents and purposes, animals as they did not possess a soul.  From a straight biological point of view, we are of a common species with these "pre-men" and it would be impossible to differentiate them from ourselves morphologically, as the lack of a soul precludes them from being man.

This cannot ever be proven. Perhaps it is merely a facile argument to rationalize my personal faith. That being said I will work on this idea over time and add supporting evidence if I can find it and if I think of anything to refute it, hopefully I will be intellectually honest enough to include that as well.

I don't post often enough

The purpose of a blog should be primarily that of a diary. You show it to other people, and if you are like Samuel Pepys, some will even read it. For the most part however, blogs have become where the self-absorbed choose to spew out whatever ill-thought-out tripe that the blogger is thinking at that moment. The definition of a "good" blog is one that mostly agrees with your own ill-thought-out tripe.

The world is a complex place, bloggers usually take a small section out of it and grind their teeth on it like it was a piece of meat until it submits to their world-view. The trouble with this methodology is that once the process is complete, the subject, like a piece of meat so treated, is usually unfit for consumption by others.

I am getting to be an old man. Like the rest of the boomers, I was brought up to believe that the world cares about and values my opinion. This "truth" is becoming more and more transparently false every morning that I wake up and open my eyes. The world seems to have its own agenda, one that we do not form, but rather we swim in like fish in a sea. We are minnows in a sea where predators exist, and we try to convince ourselves that we can vote the predators into extinction.

But the predators in our world are not democrats. They will swim away for a while, mostly because they are not hungry right then, but they will be back when it is time.