America Is Running Out of New Ideas

We had a generation of short sighted mismanagement where we put a bunch of MBAs in charge of everything. Being able to quantitatively measure things became more important than understanding what the measurements meant. Politicians and executives alike began using polls and survey data not just as a sanity check for their intuition but as a substitution for it. Penny-wise pound-foolishness was in vogue, and in an effort to draw blood from stone, institutions commercial, cultural, and political were gutted. Massive consolidations were made in the name of efficiency while captured regulatory bodies did nothing. Bigger institutions took on bigger projects which required more bureaucracy to maintain. Projects consistently grew too big to fail, and as the tolerance for risk disappeared so too did the appetite for personal initiative. Short term, cheap patches were repeatedly chosen over long term solutions as technical debt was difficult to quantify and thus not real. Infrastructure fell into disrepair, training became more rare, wages stagnated, opportunities dried up. People began to feel the effects of the mismanagement, but it did not end. People lost faith in their institutions, and in one another, as they grew more cynical. As the labor force itself was cannibalized, people lost the time and energy for the simple pleasures of life. Traditional pastimes were left to past times, communities outside of work collapsed, and people fell into despair. Various coping mechanisms were employed - some old like drugs and alcohol, others new like social media, but these were poor substitutes for what was by this point irrecoverable. What can men do in such a hopeless situation?

Valve wing ornithopters - high power and efficiency aerodynamic propulsion

Monocrystalline graphite - revolutionary material *who will discover it first?

a movie about Smedly Butler

disclosure: I'm from Ohio, still part of the USA