Month: December 2025

How did we get to the point where nobody returns phone calls or emails?  Why is everyone driving as if there were a contest to see who could get somewhere first? 

I understand that we are all bombarded with messages and that most phone calls are telemarketers.  But even our “closest” friends seem way too comfortable ignoring our attempts to reach out.

Remember when people would give their seat to a pregnant woman, an elder, or someone juggling three kids and a diaper bag? Now? You’re lucky if they even look up from their phones. The earbuds stay in, the eyes remain down, and we are ignored. 

Courtesy has always been about being polite: showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people.  When did this go out of style?  We used to call it manners.  It was a sign of “good breeding” and an essential part of being liked.

Maybe the root of all this is that they simply don’t care any longer about being liked.  It is now OK to offend everyone with their dress, hair color, and general behavior.  Perhaps that is the only explanation for the irony that the same people who now want to focus on being nice to non-normative LGBTQ++ aren’t friendly to the majority of normative ones.

Please note that I did not use the word normal.  Normative means the majority … the center of the distribution of behaviors or attributes … the masses.  Even TV shows now seem to abhor normative, nice, polite, caring behaviors.

Could it be that the root of all this is that this generation no longer sees a future for their lives?  Are they so sure the world is going to end due to global warming that they will never reach retirement?  Are their job prospects so dim that they are deeply depressed?

The statistics about suicide rates seem to point to this.  The fact that our young employees never expressed the willingness to “suck it up” and do what it takes to truly learn a job does make me think they don’t believe they have the time to achieve success.

Please think about all this when you ask your suppliers for proposals or resumes from job applicants.  They take a lot of work to prepare, and you are usually rather picky about how you evaluate them.  Yet, my experience was that utilities have become rude in their treatment of these efforts.  They don’t inform the proposers of the review progress.  Half the time they cancel the proposal process without notifying anyone.  And God forbid we ask for an honest debrief when we lose so we can do a better job of proposing the next time.

The millennial job interview roaming the Internet does seem all too common. Notice that the job applicant feels she has to approve of her employer rather than the other way around.  Where did this entitlement attitude come from?  Is it the result of the idea that everyone gets a trophy and that grades are an antiquated, elitist concept?

Well, there is one thing for sure.  Common courtesy is no longer common!

The Wall Street Journal just featured the toy that’s sold out in America’s biggest retailers and just topped Amazon’s charts on the busiest shopping day of the year.  It was made by a tech startup that had absolutely no clue how to make a toy.  Nearly a decade ago, the engineers at an obscure Silicon Valley company called Nex began plugging away at an iPhone app that would use artificial intelligence to track basketball shots.

Please do read the full article and think about the fatal flaw in this product design: The Hot New Game Console for this Holiday Season.

After several years, they decided it was time to pivot from software to hardware, convinced investors they weren’t crazy for doing that and came perilously close to running out of money.  The toy they ended up building is a sleek block in pastel colors that sits under the TV and looks like a Rubik’s Cube which essentially tracks people in front of it.

It’s technically a gaming console, but at $249, it’s less expensive than traditional consoles even with the $89 annual subscription. It’s also marketed to people who aren’t in the habit of buying gaming systems: families with young children.  Remember the Nintendo Wii?  It is essentially that without the handheld controllers … it maps the movement using AI.

It even appeals to parents who ordinarily wouldn’t let their kids anywhere near screens. With a camera tracking their motion, users control the Playground not with a hand-held controller but with their own hands and movements. Instead of vegging on the sofa, the users end up bouncing around the living room. As a result, parents actually like that it gives their children a workout.

So far so good … so what’s wrong?  Can you see the fatal flaw? 

It is too easy to knock this idea off with phone software and/or the cameras on a PC, iPad, etc.  Why be in the hardware business if you really don’t need to be. 

Sorry folks at Nex.  Your days are numbered … unless you pivot to the more general market using cell phones, iPads, and even the cameras on PCs.  Your original idea was correct … there is absolutely no reason for one more device in the home.  Yours is no exception … over time.  Don’t become a pet rock!

Things have been unfolding quicker and quicker these last few months.  This blog started out weeks ago first indicating the Wall Street Journal tone had shifted pretty starkly toward outright criticism of climate alarmists.  Just this week, they released another article summarizing the climate alarmists are essentially dead in the water.  What an admission.  Read it for yourself: Affordability Wins!

While it was weeks ago that the emperor was declared butt naked, notice then however that the Wall Street Journal hid under the cover of an editorial board with no names to declare it to be true: Wind and Solar Realities

“The claim that tax credits reduce electric rates is contradicted by experience. Wind and solar must be backed by peaking gas plants or batteries, which both cost more than three times as much baseload power. Renewables also cause price spikes when there are power shortages, and they require more transmission investments to balance fluctuations in loads and frequencies.”

This should come as no surprise as proven by other more recent articles in the Wall Street Journal: Europe Gets Religion on Green and Leftist Dreams Hit Reality
All of this is why Texas’s residential power prices have risen some 40% over the last seven years. The renewable lobby says the financial benefits of the tax credits are passed onto electric customers, which may be true when state-regulated utilities build projects. But the credits usually pad the profits of independent generators.

The best way to make the grid reliable again is to let supply and demand work in energy markets without the distortions of mandates and subsidies. The GOP budget bill takes a step in that direction that should be welcomed.

So many of my Captain Obvious blogs over the year have repeated this theme. It is the bedrock of good energy policy. Mandates and subsidies distort markets and, unfortunately, provide ample opportunities for opportunists to rob under the banner of innovation.

Don’t get me wrong. We do need a full portfolio of ideas, if for no other reason so that we can point to where they work and don’t. We once again need to include nuclear and hydro in new construction. We know we need more of both. But the naïve idea that wind and solar would save the day and bring about future utopia was far-fetched to say the least. However, only a few besides me would declare the emperor nude.

For a while, I just thought it was a form of being polite and inclusive … you know … like tolerating your less than brilliant relatives when they show up at your door to stay for a few days carrying their overnight clothes in Piggly Wiggly bags.

Then, I thought it could just be the loving attitudes toward those who can’t take care of themselves we are commanded to do in our faith traditions.

But now I must admit, after watching US politics over the past few years, there is something terribly wrong with humanity that it has become so polarized it can’t find common ground solutions to anything. Common sense is simply not common.  The complexities in life seem beyond the intellectual reach of just about everyone today. The mirage of simple superficially appealing notions is still so alluring it beckons the masses to follow truly stupid ideas.  

Therefore, it was refreshing to see this latest article pointing out the gaping holes and incorrect math of other recent alarmist tirades: Climate Study Retraction

Wake up people! Pay attention! Or, as one of my favorite lines in the movie Aliens by the Marine Private Hudson when encountering them: “Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!”  It is time for sobriety and seriousness.

Look … it is fine to admit when you celebrate a memory such as Thanksgiving or Christmas and fail to dwell on the myth vs reality of the details.  These are wonderful times for us to be with friends and family and be thankful.  It is quite another to claim them as factual accounts.  They should change our heart attitudes toward those less fortunate.

These holidays should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

My master’s from RPI in management was in new product development, and I have spent my entire engineering career in wildly different areas: attack submarines, health care, rotor dynamics, heat recovery, and energy efficiency.  Chasing higher performance has been a recurring objective, but I quickly learned the laws of diminishing economic returns in real life.

Admiral Rickover singlehandedly drove the nuclear-powered dream for navy vessels. Economics was secondary or unimportant. We “pushed the envelope” in everything.  After finishing my masters in new product development, I worked in the health care industry optimizing the cost and quality of patient outcomes in the largest most complex hospitals in the world … pushing for greater productivity while under huge constraints due to a lack of nurses.

I then worked for MTI in Latham, New York where we focused on low temperature heat recovery using advanced power systems and heat pump technology.  I worked under some of the brightest minds in the world, assessing both technical and economic potential.  It was a wild and crazy place because we literally could design and build almost anything you could imagine … and did.

That firm was the first to design high speed dental drills running up to 300,000 rpm using air bearings.  We were the only firm in the world that could balance uranium enrichment centrifuges using lasers as it was run up to final operating speeds.  The people there were the brightest minds in the world on high-speed machines.

Our clients were mostly the national labs and the big defense departments. So, production economics were unimportant to them.  They were if you wanted something to sell to the public (we designed and built the gas turbine-driven engines for Chrysler).  Most often we just build demonstration projects to prove an idea was feasible.  For example, we built fuel cell powered cars long before the models you see now entered the market.

When you live in the world of defense, economics doesn’t matter.  You literally only care about developing a better mousetrap.  But, once you must face the real-world markets, it is quite another thing, and the market is unforgiving. Just because you build a better mousetrap, they do not necessarily beat a path to your door.

So, I was curious to read the latest approach to an area we considered about 40 years ago: Power generation from geothermal heat sources.  On one level, it is an obviously good idea since it would seem to be an endless source of energy.  However, once you take a closer look at the geothermal hot springs around the world, you find these sources are extremely corrosive and the sites are intrinsically dangerous and unstable.

MTI was so used to crazy ideas that our designers would often use the phrase: “we will have to build that out of superillium or unobtanium.”  These obviously fictitious metals were their polite way of expressing doubt that anything could survive these working environments.  Of course, when you do work in defense you also encounter the brutal fact that the service life of some things, like the engines used in fighter jets, only have a service life of a few hundred hours.  Think about that.

So, here we go again with geothermal energy … the seemingly endless free heat available from within the core of the earth. Here is an article that offers one perspective:  Volcanos Powering Homes

While this idea has proven to work in some narrow cases (Iceland and New Zealand) it has never been workable where high temperatures or extremely corrosive brines are encountered.  Plus, most of the recent attempts have failed to operate reliably over time even with government subsidies.

All too many of these dreams are more about sucking money out of a government research punchbowl faster than others while it lasts.  We have seen dozens of these projects emerge over the past few years doing absurd things like attempting to remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere.  Removing it by capturing it at the major sources makes much more sense.  Eliminating the emission in the first place can make the most sense.

Contrast that with businesses that extend the boundary of economics … extracting lower grade resources due to economics that now make sense.  That was a necessity when we ran out of iron ore and had to figure out how to use taconite.  Here is the case for the production of copper, which is so essential in today’s markets.  The Next Generation of Copper Mining

However, copper isn’t sexy.  Our climate alarmists like chasing the dream of free energy.  It is not free … it is extremely costly to chase … and we don’t have superillium or unobtanium.