About Breaks My Heart

(This post actually belongs on my Freedom Isn't Free blog, but I don't have time to write a post that long today.)

Gene Heskett asks a sort of innocuous question:

Need a calculator that knows about coulombs

Quite a series of revelations in that thread.

[Update: I blogged about a bc programming example from my contributions to this thread under Programming is Fun. JMR20160111]

What almost breaks my heart is that we arrogant mortals think we, as a race, have advanced. We don't know how we got here, and we could not do it again, without help.

And we refuse to look to the source of help that got us here.

My children play their video games. They are getting good. Their parents think it's such a waste of time.

Investors (on Wall Street, etc.), who could be helping move money to producers and move product to the market, play their investment games.

Management (at technology companies, etc.), who could be making technology available to consumers, play their market games.

Lawyers, who could be helping people understand each other, play their games (and it's much more clear that it's about power and controlling others instead of themselves, not about money).

Who else do we have playing games, while people are dying?

And the rising generation can't get us back to the moon. Read the thread I linked to above if you want to know why.

[I don't think I've unpacked this explicitly anywhere yet, but it's a thread that underlies many of my freedom-isn't-free rants. It has to do with managers and marketeers thinking they have to monetize everything, so that technology becomes hard to get to, or wrapped it tape barriers, and with attrition among the real technologists, the people who knew how to do the technology without the monetized marketizing, getting old and leaving us you guys behind. JMR20151230]

[Update: I'm looking at qucs now. It looks rather interesting. JMR20151225]