Startup America entrepreneurship and my KESTS to GEO project fate

This morning I had stumbled into a videocast "Startup America" and saw the last few minutes of a panel involved with that. http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/startup-america Apparently focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship, although what I observed was the focus only on entrepreneurship, that is, business activities. Note my "KESTS to GEO" project concept remains mere fantasy because there is no associated entrepreneurship involved with making it happen as a business. The exclusive focus seems to have shifted to entrepreneurs instead of innovators, as a major point of it all at the moment is to create jobs for people to do something useful and stimulate the economy.

As my "KESTS to GEO" project effort has shown, even the best concepts with fantastic potential for stimulating the economy and civilization's very wellbeing and perhaps sheer survival, gets nowhere if people do not make it physically happen. And that involves entrepreneurship activity in our system, instead of an overarching responsible direction of creation of the facilities based on KESTS to GEO concepts' purposes.

KESTS to GEO would have initially cut jobs in aerospace as people focused on electromechanics and large scale energy-supported structures, very different from the reaction engined launch vehicle systems that people had prepared for in their career development and business planning; thus, KESTS to GEO was very much in disfavor by the business community.

And NASA, the obvious potential overarching make-it-happen entity, was having none of KESTS to GEO, possibly again because their well-established careers are based on reaction engined launch vehicle access to space, and it is hard to change one's fields of expertise, in this case to those of very large scale electromechanical transportation structures that are unconventionally supported by the centrifugal action of stored energy within those huge-perimeter structures built as hoops around the Earth. Besides, NASA sees itself as only the means of implementation of government-financed projects such as the Cold War Era national-security significant "race to the Moon," instead of seeing itself as the instigator of other major space projects.

And I can sympathize with those directors in NASA, sweating out each launch and return of the Space Shuttles after Challenger and Columbia ... and remembering that the last several Apollo Moon Landing launches were scrapped to minimize the risk for disaster ... at the vision of those directors having to create an unfamiliar electromechanical system with a perimeter extending clear around the Earth, using little of the familiar rocketry, and achieving something on the scale of the early Panama Canal in its implications ... the scary thought of taking on that responsibility could have had them heading for the bathrooms. Not for long; they are experts in control of events.

I have little doubt that there have always been those who quickly grasped the enormous business implications of my KESTS to GEO project's implementation and productivity, and those folks no doubt saw it as a big disruption to their bread and butter industries such as hydrocarbon-based energy, rocketry aerospace. And even the extended-project fantastic real-estate implication potentials of KESTS to GEO to enable construction of the prototypes of 10,000-person self-sufficient artificial gravity cities shielded by water ice and electromagnetic fields in GEO - and cheaply lift those tens of thousands of people up there - which could potentially lead to a huge real estate shift, thus a threat to even something as amazingly far away business-wise as that of real estate. (For example, see my 1988 file http://www.escalatorhi.com/GenieFilesH/gesp747.html pointing out there is room for more than 15 billion people up there, living in condominium-like residences on the inside edges of the wheels, somewhat as foreseen in NASA's SP-413 book for use in L-5.) Meanwhile, I personally was unaware of the potential business effects, other than to abstract that the project could easily double the net worth of America especially if the space cities were built in GEO; that was as far as I got with that point of view, not important to me. (That kind of thinking is probably why I now live at the poverty level, primarily on Social Security retirement, and very thankful for that income. Not a big problem; I have never known anything except the near-poverty level of life, even working as an engineering tech in electronics most of my life. And I would not know how to be a successful businessman even if I had the money to do it. Although some other Asperger's are quite wealthy from business.)

So instead of being seen as a wonderfully elegant near-future way to provide clean economical electrical energy delivered worldwide (via solar power satellites that it would make finally feasible, that it would enable built and maintained economically in GEO) as well as solar powered full recycling of toxic materials made by our industrial civilization, and make reaction engined spacecraft change from the sleek rockets we now know, to instead become huge non-aerodynamic vehicles built and launched from high above the atmosphere there in GEO, electrically lifted to already be 91% up out of the Earth's gravitational energy well, for massive expeditions to Mars and other places nearby .... instead, it was seen only as a threat to existing powerful corporate interests, and to be dealt with as such.

And the directors of those interests most likely saw my struggling meek efforts presenting the technological concepts of KESTS to GEO at space technology conferences, realized I was no salesman powerhouse and was clearly advanced in age, so all they had to was to sit on it all and wait for me to die off, then all the potentials of KESTS to GEO would default into their business-power mentalities to play with for their wealth in their own good time, say, perhaps when oil has gone way past its peak, to the business need to look for different sources of energy to sell - and by then they could be positioned to use KESTS to GEO and Solar Power Satellites while squeezing the most profit out of the what-the-market-will-bear system.

But anyway, the KESTS to GEO concept complex that I created is in existence, so I have enabled it to physically happen, even if not in the timeframe I foresaw as important for civilization's continued healthy expansion. So, my efforts have not been totally wasted.

Back in the late 1980s when I was putting the basics together for KESTS to GEO and Centristation project concepts, I read of much despair about the inevitable fate of accumulating pollution of land-sea-air from our industrial civilization, and overpopulation of a limited land area world, making preparation for a future seeming to be futile, the KESTS to GEO concept was able to blow that away: clean electrical energy galore for America and to sell around the world, and even showing how population could be greatly expanded via a high level of civilization built in GEO accessed economically and continuously via KESTS to GEO. It made the future have great potential; and even if held back for decades, people could still plan for a future for their progeny. And since then, the KESTS to GEO concept has been expanded to provide the means for enabling industrial-sourced toxins to be fully recycled in GEO-sited huge solar powered mass-spectrometer type element separators for clean reuse in manufacturing, further enabling a potentially bright future for all.

That abundant future potential is still there, including for the long term hopes for Startup America. Let's invent those paperclips and ball point pens to quickly create reasonably nice jobs for everybody and make a profit right away; it will be sturdy practice for getting on with the big stuff later. Life can be exciting conceiving, inventing, designing and building things and making businesses happen; is lots friendlier to life than the former focus on bash and takeover of war and conflict.

P. S. Most likely there will still be lots of romps by those folks who prefer to trick, bash and destroy their way to fame and fortune, instead of taking the creating and building pathway; so I have written a series of high-tech science fiction novels describing one way all this could play out. (And writing the sci fi versions was lots more fun to do than was writing and presenting the formal technical papers, such as "Cline, James E. D. “Kinetically Supported Bridge Vehicle Lift To GEO” Space 2002 Robotics 2002 Conference Proceedings, American Society of Civil Engineers, 2002, 8-21.) The sci fi series I wrote and self-published, author J. E. D. Cline, includes "Building Up", "The Ark of 1984's Future", "It's Down to Earth", and "The Torus Cities Ice Shields Returning Home". See http://www.kestsgeo.com/2sciencefiction/scifistories.html and particularly "It's Down to Earth" http://www.kestsgeo.com/2sciencefiction/idte.html as an ebook at iBooks or Barnes & Noble etc or paperback at CreateSpace: eStore https://www.createspace.com/3371746 .

A tiny scrap of vindication

It is a bit secretly satisfying to see where someone is using a principle that oneself had described to skeptical audiences, long ago. Twenty-two years ago, in 1989, I wrote GEnie Spaceport Library articles on what I called "Microelevator" describing ways to emplace a seed structure for the "KESTS to GEO" concept for economically transporting materials in the near future for building Solar Power Satellites in GEO.

Me being an Aspie social dunce, I did not realize that my audience was all wrapped up in the visions of their wealth to come from privatization of NASA rocket technology for access to space; such NASA-established technology based businesses were to be their ticket to fame and wealth galore; and my non-rocket concept would have dashed water on their dreams of power and wealth via rocketry. Thus all they were interested in was finding ways to do the thumbs-down on my KESTS to GEO concept, so that rocketry would remain the only way to access space in their business lifetimes. So, after my space conference technical presentations, one of the things I was asked, after they could find no fault in the centrifugal hoop weight support and transportation energy delivery mechanism part of the concepts, was how to put such a high thing into place around the Earth in the first place.

One of the techniques I had proposed was to lift the seed tubing up by using backward-directed high velocity mass brought up the tubing and reflected backwards at the exit nozzle array, so that the reaction force would be to pull the front reaction nozzle upward. Typically I would just get a blank stare about that, and then they would drift away, to then just use the ignore-it-to-death approach on KESTS to GEO - which worked.

So this evening I just stumbled upon a photo in a Pop Sci article that very well illustrates that principle, at http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-01/just-time-spring-break-water-powered-jetpack-finally-goes-sale "Just In Time For Spring Break, Water-Powered Jetpack Finally Goes On Sale" The photo shows a person high in the air, trailing a tube from the water's surface where a boat was pumping water like mad up the tube, and the water being directed downward at the upper end of the tube, supporting the person's weight in the air by reaction force. A really nice graphic display of the principle in action.

In case anybody has any interest in this - other than to try to find some way to shoot it down to preserve their business technology control - there are some of my early writings available online, including copies of the GEnie Spaceport Library files - (it is still a mystery why the GEnie - General Electric Information Network - public network was not converted to integrate with the internet when the net came along - General Electric Corporation certainly had the wealth and expertise to do that) - and a copy of my 1997 technical paper on KESTS to GEO which I presented to the Space Studies Institute at Princeton in 1997 in hopes of getting their help on that mutual interest large scale space access concept (only to be laughed away and refused to publish my paper - I had unwittingly violated the NIH principle and my concept's implications were too big) but the paper is available online. Here are the links. Of course, the later formal papers and derivative writings are also available on those websites, as well as published conference proceedings.

Microelevator on GEnie:
http://www.escalatorhi.com/GenieFilesH/gesp578.html
http://www.escalatorhi.com/GenieFilesH/gesp581.html
http://www.escalatorhi.com/GenieFilesH/gesp592.html

The 1997 paper:
http://www.kestsgeo.com/1techconcepts/documents/ssi1997graphics/kesepts-ssi-directhandout.html

The current KESTS to GEO concept:
http://www.kestsgeo.com/1techconcepts/kests/KESTS2GEO.html

General technical paper's description and links page:
http://www.kestsgeo.com/1techconcepts/documents/documents.html

(If the website pages don't show up at first, try again after a few days - quite often right after I post a blog entry regarding my concepts using websites as detailed info, the websites get hacked and have to be rebuilt, taking them a day or so to get back online, but after most people would have forgotten about it.)

I also describe the technique in my sci fi novel written in 2007 "It's Down to Earth" (by J E D Cline) available as an eBook at Apple's iBooks, and as a paperback from the CreateSpace eStore https://www.createspace.com/3371746

Could be my blog writing's here are on some troll's "block access" blacklist, but it is satisfying to write about being kinda vindicated after all these years, even if not acknowledged by anyone else.

And here is a copy of my drawing from my 1997 paper on KESTS to GEO:

American innovation, jobs and productivity

The issues of "jobs for Americans" and "American innovation potential" have increasingly gotten the official - and public - attention in recent times. It is a subject that I have written upon quite often here in my blog in the past seven years or so. My posts apparently are pretty much ignored. So here goes another one.

I won't again go deeply into the long term intense suppression of grass-roots innovation in American technical field worker, caused by the widespread and even standard mis-use of the so-called "employment agreement" signing over all rights to the employee's innovations to the employer, related to the employer's job being done by the employee or not. There is just no incentive to innovate if it is automatically stolen from the employee, with no commitment to do anything with the innovation.the "employment agreement" is supposed to protect the employer from the employees running off with the company's ideas and using them on their own; but companies have very tight means of protecting their own ideas and designs, without any need of such an agreement. So the agreement, normally required as a condition of employment, seems to only be to make life easier for management, with nothing new and unexpected to interfere with their careful flow chart schedules. But it wipes out the grass roots innovation potential of Americans, and has been at it for many decades and we are increasingly feeling the tragic effects. I have many blog posts on the subject, here on this blog, if anyone is interested.

This post mostly is to briefly explore the subject of "jobs." "Jobs" usually implies "employer" and all that 'employer" implies - management, supervision, ownership, facilities, profits, sometimes investors - all get a cut of what the one doing the job achieves. "Overhead" expense is typically more than what is paid to the one doing the job.

There is another way of achieving things, that I have experienced. It leaves out the wannabe bosses and bullies; instead, everyone is cognizant of the overall task the group is to achieve, and as the project progresses, whoever is free at the moment then pitches in to do the next thing that obviously needs doing. This implies participant versatility and wide skill level as well as the continuing urge to achieve the common goal of the group, in an acceptable quality way.

Some people who are better at one kind of task tend to do that kind of task more than those who are less skilled at it. But this is significantly different from the conventional job separation mode under a chain of owner-management, where peopel go to college specializing in some field and then when employed, that is the only kind of thing they do.

I have also explored, using the freedom of science fiction writing, a way to have a group of people become self-governing in productivity, in my novel "Building Up", where a group of people are abandoned in a wheel-type space colony in low earth orbit, so they develop a way to get it done themselves, partly letting the computer handle some management tasks.

And I have described the "Home internet-linked manufacturing workstation" concept in this blog, and have a paper on it available on Scribd. This seems to be a way quite fitting for existing technology to enable bypassing much of the conventional business costs of facilities, commute time & expense & energy cost, and especially to get the unemployed and under-employed to contribute to the productivity of the nation.

But all of these ideas have been ignored and possibly suppressed. I assume that is because it significantly reduces the need for the in-person middle management, which is where people get preferential treatment by being bosses, superior to the underlings, well paid and ego-boosting. Those types of people are expensive to the productivity system. Unfortunately they are also influential (I suspect many were schoolground bullies when younger) and they are experts in manipulating things (such as keeping this blog post from reaching those who would benefit by reading it.)

OK there it is, I did my duty. This post briefly points out big problems and big possible solutions. Details are elsewhere in my blog and am available for questions. Do I expect it to get past the trolls? No.

Parakeets, corporations and Toddler Property Laws

Since some guy out there has got two women instead of just the one as decreed by the 50-50 birth ratio of males and females, there is no woman available for me; so I need to be content with the companionship of a computer and a pair of parakeets.

The computer and I have come to an understanding: if I play by its rules, it does a splendid job; it is up to me to figure out what the computer's rules or laws are, however. Fortunately, the suppliers of computers and software have found that customers prefer user-friendly computers and their software.

The parakeets, however, are something else. Trying to figure out their operational laws of behavior keeps coming up with surprises. Finally I remembered seeing, several years ago, a list of rules about little kid's belief systems, that might help me understand the parakeet's behavior.

I had to ask others who are more into the preschool teaching field, about the details of that list, so I could see if it applied to my parakeet companions. Here is what was sent me, as a result:
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Toddler Property Laws

1. If I like it, it's MINE.

2. If it's in my hand, it's MINE.

3. If it's in your hand, it's MINE.

4. If I can take it from you, it's MINE.

5. If I had it a little while ago, it's MINE.

6. If it's MINE, it must never appear to be yours in any way.

7. If I'm doing or building something, all the pieces are MINE.

8. If it looks just like MINE, it is MINE.

9. If I saw it first, it's MINE.

10. If I was thinking about it first, it's MINE.

11. If you are playing with something that I was playing with a long time ago, it automatically becomes MINE.

12. No one can play or touch anything that is MINE.
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Yes, those operational principles help explain the interactions of the two parakeets with each other and with other things. Including with me.

Another more uncomfortable awareness growing is that it also too well describes much of the interactions between corporations, too. And some grown adults or groups of people. So it seems to explain a lot, if it is root behavior among peers, upon which refinements are built as people grow up - haphazardly learned refinements.

I know that the list of "toddler property laws" was written to amuse people. But they too well describe some other behaviors, so it goes beyond amusement's usefulness.

Since I had no peers with whom to interact until I was past the toddler stage, maybe 4 or 5, I missed experiencing this, myself. So it is helpful to know it now, at least intellectually, to help me understand people, to have a better idea of what might be expected of various others. And of my parakeets. ----------------

One person involved with gathering up this particular list of toddler property laws for me, evaluated the overall scenario much better than I have, so I will copy it here, without naming the author:

"… I also believe, as do you, that it explains a lot about animals AND people of all ages. It is so sad to see the behavior in older children and adults. In children there is hope for teaching and the child's development. In people we can hope for the maturation and development of the adult.

Unfortunately our society has equated education and/or corporate success with common sense and good social skills. Said in a different way, the sins we see in the toddler only manifest themselves in the adult also. Hopefully the adult has decided to live with the gifts that God has given us - that brings out the best in ourselves.

Your two parakeets may not have developed past the two year old stage of emotional development that we see in the human being. We see this in people who have been severely traumatized and can't get past that emotional age. We also see it in human beings who because of a developmental delay never seem to grow past a certain emotional level.

The behavior of corporations, in my opinion, is really based on the people who run the corporations. But, I agree with you. The list of "Toddler Property Laws", although funny puts into words what we all know to be true but don't face. It's easier to face them in light of 2 year olds. The good parent takes them to heart and teaches the child the opposite, which is good social skills, empathy and friendship./and, personally, I don't think that parent is untouched by the teaching of these lessons."

Temperament being part of contextual interpretation

Have been noticing how today's "outside my window" daily nature photo http://www.levalleyphoto.com/gallery/viewphoto.php?id=2327 demonstrates how much the brain alters what is exactly perceived by the eyes, by factoring in the surrounding context - in this picture we can "see" a flying white seagull instead of perceiving a black smudge on yellow smear - and this helps me understand some political instant interpretations of what people experience.

Of course, some political factions apparently collect people of similar Temperament, another strong contextual factor too.

I was impressed by the recent news descriptions of the recent fracas in Tucson - the Democrat news described it as a "shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and some of her constituents," whereas the Republican news referred to it as a "grocery store shooting." And that seems to indicate specific different frames of minds. Like, did someone shoot a grocery store; instead of shooting a Congresswoman and federal judge etc; or was the place of happening the only thing of interest, nevermind that some people got hurt - apparently by a loner-nobody freaking out - they were not part of "us" and therefore were against "us," and so the only important thing was the grocery store.

I think there might be some resentment about the technique that the Congresswoman Giffords used, typical of a "Catalyst" Temperament of "cooperative interaction" in person directly with constituents to learn of their concerns and opinions, whereas the "Stabilizer" Temperament folks would instead believe that a Congresswoman ought to only be cognizant of what had come up to her as filtered through the hierarchical rank's opinions' colorings. And my analysis of this in this paragraph is more typical of the "Theorist" Temperament functioning on this parameter per "scientific inquiry." To complete the four-Temperament picture, those folks of a more "Improvisor" Temperament would probably relate to it only as part of "performance with skill," aware mostly of the people's doings as the fracas was prepared and carried out by all involved there at the time, end of subject to them.

All four Temperament viewpoints seem necessary to cover the various contextual aspects of something, I think. And this principle probably covers much of human life, I'd think. Maybe if news articles would first announce a specific Temperament viewpoint that is to be utilized in the article, people could be alerted that the article might not be of their own individual Temperament's viewpoint.

Better yet, if news articles would be prepared separately on the page in all four Temperament viewpoints available simultaneously to all readers, it would bring much more balance to human awareness and interactions as a result. A reader could first go to the description from their own Temperament' viewpoint qualities, so as to be more comprehensible to them; then, if still interested, go for the other aspects of the event being described, aware they are valid, too.

But my experience indicates that some folks only tolerate their own Temperament's viewpoint, even getting furious at any suggestion that there might be other valid kinds of viewpoints; perhaps because they are coming from a "win-lose" thing, where the only important thing is "who wins," and that is a survival level issue for them.