Ben Carlson is genuinely.....................

 

..........a smart guy, but I disagree with him on this one:

"The stock market is the only place where anyone can invest in human ingenuity."

Abundance....................

 Resources (as opposed to raw materials) are created and produced by human ingenuity. And so because human creativity is open-ended, the notion that there is a fixed amount of resources on earth, or even in any region of earth, is economically mistaken.

-Don Boudreaux

Machines and man............................

     I believe that what the machine does is the opposite of dehumanizing.  It allows us to get rid of the routine.  It forces us to concentrate on the kinds of things that the machine cannot do, and there will always be a great number more of these.  Recall that I mentioned in mathematics as it is understood today, one can construct questions that cannot be answered within the system in which the question was formulated.  No matter how the machine is constructed, there will always be situations that the machine cannot foresee.  The human element, the element of invention, the element of true ingenuity and flexibility, is not apt ever to be taken over by machines.
     Some of the developments I have considered in this chapter will not happen in my lifetime.  They may not even occur in the lifespans of my youngest readers.  But the man-machine combination is likely to transform human thinking and transform it into something much more intricate, very much more interesting and incomparably deeper than mankind has as yet encountered.

-Edward Teller,  The Pursuit of Simplicity

Teller (1909-2003) had this book published in 1980.  I am wondering what he would write today.

When in doubt.........................

.....................................always bet on the optimist.  Primarily because of their faith in human ingenuity.   Bill Gates is willing to make a rather large bet on that ingenuity.   God gave us fertile brains.  For the past eight hundred or so years, we have been using those brains to consistently invent a new world.  Would you bet against it happening again?  Not me.

via

Holy McGyver, Batman............................

Learn how to make a candle out of a stick of butter, a bit of toilet paper, and a paper clip (a match will come in handy too).   Let there be four hours of light.
via

Ouch......................

Spengler frets about the recent lack of "inventiveness" in the good old U. S. of A.  Full essay is here.  Money quote is here:

"In short, the United States does not have a tech sector. It has mature consumer businesses operating under the technology label. They walk like mature consumer businesses, quack like mature consumer businesses, and fly like mature consumer businesses. They are run by patent lawyers rather than engineers."