emerging.org

If someone offers me something for free, I tend to take it. If it’s junk, I’ll avoid it, but cash works. So when I get credit card offers in the mail, I act on them if:

a. They’re easy to get out of
b. There’s no annual fee
c. They offer cash or something easily actionable

The other week, one came in offering $100 bucks for opening an account. All I had to do was make a purchase on the card within 3 months. No fee, no real catches (aside from a 30-some percent rate, but there’s no way I’d carry a balance on the thing). So I filled out the offer, and got the card.

Now it was just a matter of using the card. Coincidentally, there was some kind of benefits fair at work (discounts on cell phones, gym memberships, vision care, that kind of thing) this week. I went over, figuring it was something potentially productive I could do while waiting for a build to finish. (Needed to get Lasik info anyway.) Turns out there was a Costco membership table there.

This could be useful, but how much were they scamming memberships for? The usual cost is $50 bucks, but here they gave you a bag, $10 bucks off, and a credit card offer for $25 bucks. Really, it boiled down to $15 bucks for a membership, which really is worth it if you go to Costco a couple times a year.

Why not use the credit card I have in hand to make a purchase, so I can get my free $100, and have the purchase get me another card with a new check?

No such luck. Wrong kind of card. I still have a long way to go at this.

I might have a yellow belt at being cheap, but if I was really together, I would have had an in-flight offer on the right kind of card, and could have had that ready to use right at that moment.

Maybe next time I can prove myself worthy, but for now I’m still just a young grasshopper.

Some days it’s hard to tell if the tech industry is depressing or the current state should be a cause for optimism. (I’m talking about tech in general, not embedded systems, web apps, phones, etc. This applies to the whole thing.)

I mean, on one hand, in the valley, the supposed technology development center of world, the leading edge of the industry is brought into focus by sites like valleywag, who at this moment are talking about Scoble’s lament that he locked himself into Facebook as his modern day Rolodex. Three months ago he was praising it with: “Facebook is the modern day rolodex.” We may not invent much, but I think we were first to market with ADHD. (If you’re reading this a week from now (10/14/07) and this has no relevance, you’re proving my point.)

What passes for technology development around here is less technology and development and more of a VC-backed popularity contest. There’s a complicated analogy here to musical chairs that I won’t go into. C’mon. Twitter? I can’t go into what I feel about that kind of waste. (Update: Zlango? 12 million bucks? Uncov.com covers this perfectly, as usual.)

It’s just depressing if you look at it from that angle. There’s another, though - consider how far we can go from where we are today. Think about it.

Here’s where we are right now. Silicon vendors are investing huge amounts of time and energy reinventing their lineup so we can have a new weird variant of a chip that does almost what the previous one did, but in some new way that’s, well, really, not usually any better. Then there’s the effort of getting a whole toolchain going that can target the thing. Then there’s the usual bootloader efforts. Once that’s in place OS development is done to support the new variant. Bonus points if it actually uses any of the chip’s new features. Depending on the target area, vendors now take the thing and get their stacks going on it. Once this whole (simplified) chain is complete, it can be wrapped up, productized, boxed, marketed, and sold.

Now people have this new chip that should be able to do all of this fancy stuff, and what do they do with it? They send twitter messages. For a few months. Then it gets pitched in favor of the next generation device, which is really just a way to recoup all of the losses around the errata on all of the technology bits used in the first run.

Sad.

But think where we can go from here. If you feed me an apple, I can metabolize it into energy (and optionally store it) then use that energy to do an amazing number of things. I could build a house. I could write a sonnet (not a very good one, though). I could write long papers on the social importance of Mork and Mindy. I could write useless blog posts.

Feed an apple to technology, any technology, today, and what do you get? Nothing. It’ll rot on top of any MIPS processor you place it on. About the only thing it’ll do is mush and short circuit the board, causing complete and usually irrevocable failure.

Want to get fancy? Feed the apple to an energy conversion technology like a biomass converter. Then you can convert the apple into a suboptimal amount of current that can be fed to a computer. And what will the computer do with it that’s so magical? Not much - really, all they do is ever-more-modern-and-fancy methods of loading memory addresses and performing simple operations on the contents. They can’t comprehend the depth of Robin Williams on cocaine.

There’s something really fundamentally wrong here, but the lesson in the end is that what we have today is complete crap when it comes to technology. There’s a long way to go, and if RTLinux was worth 10M, just think what a fruit-powered sonnet generator is worth!

And now, your moment of zen.

Rumored here.

Neat. Combine unstable and expensive energy supplies with a weak dollar and we can:

a. Make a serious push for other energy sources.

b. Learn to do things for ourselves again. You know, make stuff here using our now-cheaper US labor. (We did make things, once upon a time. It wasn’t always like this.)

Ideally, it’d be good to do both, if possible. Looking around sometimes, though, it’s hard to imagine many of the people around you as productive economic contributors. Consumers? Sure. But consumption without production only works as long as the credit line holds out. I didn’t live through the depression, but sometimes I think it would be a good thing for this place to go through something like that again. Reset mentalities a bit.

There’s a lot more that could happen in the next few years aside from the above 2 options, but those would be good things to do to solve some of the core problems facing the country. Dedicate a few areas of high desert to Stirling Energy and we can get at least a large jump on breaking the oil addiction. (I’m partial for being connected to them via FSMLabs/New Mexico.)

With oil rising and the dollar dropping, unless the labor markets really can capitalize on the labor costs (are markets really that efficent?) it seems like we are heading for a recession. I’ll guess the measurable indicators will be coming in July or so, after the rest of the mortgage ARM peaks settle out and the rest of the housing crunch hits the consumer. It has to come sooner or later - constant growth with finite resources doesn’t hold up forever, politically or physically.

We have the potential to become a leader again rather than just the big fat elephant in the room. The US used to be able to innovate, and if we don’t dig ourselves out of this energy mess, I don’t think we’ll ever get there again.