Monday, August 27, 2012

Why America Can’t Have Nice Things

By Bill Maher


Did you know the Air Force has a miniature space shuttle that can fly and land without a pilot? Neither did I, but they do. And did you know that the Mini Shuttle X- 37B just recently completed a year-long mission in orbit doing something very, very secret? Neither did I, but it did. It touched down in California on June 16. 
It was supposed to land on the 15th, but they wanted to make sure Amanda Bynes wasn’t on the road.  

I'm not a big fan of drones and secret spy planes, but the technology behind it is pretty amazing. And it got me to wondering: why can't we have any of that technology? How come the Air Force gets planes that fly themselves, but I’m still sitting in a car with a steering wheel that Henry Ford would recognize? 

The reason we don't have flying cars, and robot housekeepers, and all that other Jetsons stuff that they promised us we'd have by the year 2000 is because the military got it instead. They got all the cool stuff and we got pizza with hot dogs in the crust. The only cool thing we got was the Internet, which was developed by the Defense Department, thus proving my point. It's purely a fluke that the Internet turned out to be something the public sector would find useful (porn). God knows what Star Trekky new weapons systems they're working on at DARPA or the other hush-hush defense agencies, but whatever they are, I'm sure they'll cost jillions of dollars and be of no use to any of us. It's just money pissed away that we could be spending on making our lives better.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

The cool toys the military and NASA use are extremely expensive to research and build. There's no way to adapt them to mass production with current technology. I assure you there are companies working on that shit. And the unimaginable amount of money they spend on research is necessary for progress. Almost every single technological leap humanity has ever made has been an accident. Let's call it the brute force method for research. Keep testing every halfway decent idea you can come up with and eventually someone will fuck something up and invent cold fusion. Actually, a lot of revelations come once some noob fresh out of school just starts to understand the problem you've been working on for years, but isn't hindered by the things you've come to ignore and makes a logical connection that everyone else dismissed. Anyway, my point is that we have to keep spending on research, even if it doesn't look, to the layman, like it's going anywhere.

Anonymous said...

Why Americans can't have nice things
http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4?op=1

Anonymous said...

Blame Hollywood and the MPAA and RIAA for pretending they're going broke because we're all stealing their content. Fucking anti-piracy bullshit. Did you know, by law, you can get up to five years in jail for playing a Michael Jackson song in a video online? The doctor accused of negligence that led to his death only got 4.

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