#398 A Failed Experiment

#398 Failed Experiments

I didn't really give it enough time. But the reduced schedule of posts didn't work out as planned. There's too much nonsense going on to warrant such sparseness. Especially since windbag-atude is much easier than scarcity. Plus a bunch of people wrote angry emails saying once was not enough.

Maybe it would have been a better idea to conduct an unannounced test. And when you think about it, that's often the case.

Take Wall Street. They come up with vaporware and start selling it Stuff that no one knows what it is, but seems to be a way to make a buck pops up all the time. More often than not, it is announced with enormous hoopla, and early success, and then, like any Ponzi scheme, it falls apart, leaving us with a credit market that looks like a squid exploding, a housing market that looks like the winds that hit Myanmar and China and gasoline at $4.00 a gallon or more.

Some cynics believe all that's been intentional and that there's a small bunch of people who've made a boatload of money and are sailing into the sunset on it while the rest of us drown. I say Fie on the negativatators! We all know the Street is only there to make you better off and just screwed up this time. So a small experiment might have warded off the trouble.

Then, there's the war. Maybe we're really in Iraq to give the Israelis a good fighter plane route to Iran's nuclear bomb factories, as some now say. Or maybe we just didn't know what we were getting into and now we have to live with THAT exploding squid. A small-scale experiment might have taught us better, although given the White House mentality, (can something mindless have a mentality?) it's unclear.

Maybe if they played around in the pharmaceutical lab a bit more, we wouldn't have had Vioxx.

Corn-based ethanol? What were we thinking? It uses more energy and causes more production-stage pollution than petroleum, it causes food prices to rise, and you don't end up saving either the planet or any money, since E85 packs way less juice per gallon than regular gas, so you use more of it. Save half a buck a gallon, buy 20 percent more gallons. A little more time in the testing stage might have fixed that.

This is not a new problem.

We're living in a world where a woman from a hoity-toity suburb, graduate of two hoity-toity colleges is casting herself as the presidential candidate of the Working Man, and where another candidate is such a kaleidoscope of conflicting ideas no one knows what he stands for. These items need further testing before they're brought to market.

So does this: A local hospital goes out of business. A local doctor wants to re-open it. He has a slight problem: he writes a lot of prescriptions for addictive medicine and sells them to addicted people. He needed more testing.

No one these days can be accused of over testing.

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Shrapnel:
--The "Smart Car" (See Wessays 12/8/07) just got a good rating in the crash tests. So now, when you get pancaked between two 18-wheelers, you can be proud that you got smooshed in a high-scorer. And if you can survive, you can just pick the thing up and carry it home.

--Drink responsibly, they're always telling us. My liquor store doesn't sell that brand. Anyone know where I can pick some up?

--Why can't they make a Glad Wrap dispenser that doesn't tie the stuff in a knot as you tear it off? If they can't fix that, maybe they can suggest a use for otherwise un-used knots of Glad Wrap. Or maybe they can make it in colors, so at least the waste looks pretty.

I'm Wes Richards. You know the rest.
(c) 2008 WJR