Memories of the 28th Century

After posting the blog on inferiority, I started wondering if I should have not posted it. Then the thought came that maybe I should have advocated rebuilding the mental hospital system. Then I thought, nah, that was bad. But just now I saw an article about MAGA people looking for Trump to take action in his comments about prosecuting Obama, and I realized, again, that closing the mental hospitals was a mistake.

I certainly did not support Obama, and I think that he made some major mistakes, but for Trump to accuse him of treason is absurd. It would be very easy to show that Thump has committed treason, but the case against Obama is tenuous, at best.

After this thought, I started to think that Trump’s suggestion of prosecution of Obama is sufficiently irrational that this idea is enough for him to be thrown out of office, except that the congressional Republicans wouldn’t go along, but it this may make Tromp lose some more support.

We don’t need a president who makes lamebrained comments about his predecessors. The responsibility of the president is to carry out the acts of Congress. But the president is only one of many examples of a low level of rationality. We just have to look at the news to see how people have abandoned rational thought.

I remembered again today how I considered if countries were run by rational people, then they would find ways to settle disputes without resorting to war, whether shooting or by trade.

A few years ago, I had a great time writing “The Gods Complain”, a short story about the Gods trying to pin down causes and ways to improve the atmosphere in the Middle East. They succeeded, but that was in a parallel world, so we don’t see the results here. That was about people demanding that their opinions were superior to the opinions of everyone international news and thought that people were finally becoming sane: the ethnic cleansing in Palestine was slower, and there were no active wars in that region. Then the rebellion in Syria started, and that continues, even though the elected government was tossed out, the rebels haven’t decided how to handle things. And that was before Russia invaded Ukraine and made another mess. There were a few little wars around the world, but fewer than usual.

Another big problem is that people overcomplicate things. That is, they fail to apply Occam’s Razor. And that applies to more than just ideas. Automobiles come to mind, and that has been a problem with the automobile industry for a long time. Electric automobiles were mostly abandoned in the early 20th century, because they were inconvenient to runs and had short range, and there were relatively expensive. Steam cars were abandoned in the 1920’s, because the manufacturers were greedy and tried to maximize profit per unit, so they piled on extras. That left us with internal combustion vehicles, even though they are complicated and expensive to build, compared with steam, but Henry Ford and others balanced costs and prices, so more people could buy more of them. When Doble was trying to sell cars for $5000, Ford was selling cars for less than $1000.

These days, we could have steam cars that would cost a quarter as much as an electric, and if it used propane to create the steam, it would produce no pollution. On the manufacturing side, a steam car uses old technology, so it can be built without special materials, and its production causes little pollution, unlike electric vehicles.

Comparing steam with internal combustion engines produces a similar result. internal combustion engines have hundreds of moving parts, while steam vehicles have about two dozen moving parts. More parts mean more cost to produce, and they produce more friction, which greatly reduces the theoretical efficiency of internal combustion engines. The cost of the engine is only one part of the cost of a vehicle, but steam engines have a huge power to weight advantage over other power plants.

It might also be a good idea to apply Occam’s Razor to other manufacturing decisions, but it takes money, also. Applying Occam’s Razor to political decisions is usually easier, and it saves money, rather than costing more