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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 8/22/97 -- Vol. 16, No. 8
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets on the third Saturday of every month in Belleville; call
201-432-5965 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. URL of the week: http://www.en.com/users/mcq/. Maureen F.
McHugh's web page. [-ecl]
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2. Peanuts are a by-product of good farming methods. The peanut
plant restores nitrogen to the soil that other crops take out.
Even if there was no nut on the peanut plant, the task of restoring
nitrogen would have to be done. Peanuts are just a by-product of
re-enriching soil. They are nearly free. Have you seen the price
of peanut butter?
I remember back when I was a kid there were all sorts of exciting
predictions about the world of the future. We used to look forward
to what the exciting, high-powered world of 2000. How much better
it would be from the world we knew. But you know the people who
made those predictions really did not understand human nature and
economics. The prediction of things getting a lot better for the
common people are true up to a point and terribly flawed beyond
that point. Really the rule seems to be that predictions of
abundance in the future are as a rule never true. There will
always be a reason why a prediction of abundance will turn out to
Nuclear power was going to make "electricity too cheap to meter."
It is human nature that nothing valued by the recipient will ever
be too cheap to meter. It is a corollary to "there is no such
thing as a free lunch." The price of electricity, like the price of
peanuts, is whatever the public is willing to pay. If the cost of
producing electrical power dropped to a tenth of the current cost,
it would probably have little effect on the price to the consumer.
How about the old idea that in the future technology would make us
so productive that we would have to work no more than an hour a
day? What happened to that one? Instead of there being less work
to do, the people I know are working as hard or harder than they
did even twenty years ago. People are working longer hours.
Rather than one breadwinner working an eight-hour day we see both
adults working and eight-hour days are rarely the norm. What
happened seems to be that if one corporation becomes more
productive its competitors have to become more productive just to
keep up. Corporations will not pay a full salary for a shorter
day. Instead they produce at a faster rate determined by
competition and downsize to take up the slack. Higher productivity
is not the universal boon that we expected it to be and it probably
never could have been. The future age of leisure that was
predicted at the 1939 World's Fair is never likely to happen for
pure market reasons.
The interesting thing is that we keep predicting the Golden Age as
being just ahead. Just this last year saw the release of the film
L5: FIRST CITY IN SPACE. It portrayed the L5 colony as a sort of
paradise in space: large, beautiful, full of people living in
idyllic surroundings fulfilling themselves. If there is an L5
colony it will be small, cramped, and Spartan. It will have been
put in space under tight budget restrictions that will limit its
construction to the bare necessities for sustaining life. It will
be an ugly place to live and will be staffed by a few dedicated
people who do not care. That is what the frontier is always like.
People came to America because they heard, some of them, that the
streets were paved with gold and most ended up in grimy tenements.
There may well be a glorious future like we see in the L5 movie,
but you know it won't look the way the film portrays it. You have
to look at those images and factor in parsimony. If you are
predicting the future, always bet on parsimony and never abundance.
[-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
There are scores of thousands of human insects