Has technological progress stalled?

Ahhhh, Dachau, We happened to be in Munich on our honeymoon tour in ‘82 and stumbled across it. We went in and as one would imagine it’s grim. As we were leaving we queued up to note our impressions in the comments book. We waited while German visitors ahead of us wrote extensive, very extensive, comments.

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Clearly none of you have driven in Lewisham, they cant even park without bumping into each other no amount of training would ever suffice.

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a crowd gathered… the vehicle moved back and forth with little progress shunting first the car in front and then the one behind before, eventually after some time, it had created enough space and angle to emerge from its parking place… This was the main street in Abbeville Centre, Northern France. Very entertaining and fascinating to observe - French driving skills at their best :wink:

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Seen that a few times in Paris, groups of young peopke literally shifting adjacent cars back and forth manually, so they can get their own car out. long ago though.

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You can add to that hypothermia by immersion in cold water.

Nice chap, Mengele - not.

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An excellent reason to have a tow bar fitted!

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bull bars more like :wink:
image

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Google Hubertus Strughold, the so-called “Father of Space Medicine”.

While he may not have personally carried out experiments, he authored reports based on the data recorded on behalf of the Luftwaffe and was most likely present when the SS (particularly utter filth such as Sigmund Rascher) carried out these inhuman experiments.

It’s just one big pork barrel. 20 billion dollars to develop, from what was supposed to be ‘cheaper’ already developed components. Six years late. Four billion dollars for every launch, and they haven’t even finished spending the multiple billions. It’s obscene.

Wasn’t sure whether to post this here or on @John_Scully 's old ‘China Worries Me’ thread - but decided to put it here because despite the headline it emphasises BIG technologies like driverless high speed trains and renewables alongside data and chips - and for me raises the question of whether it’s just in ‘the west’ that progress has stalled?

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prefer fish and chips myself… had that the other day for lunch at a local French restaurant for our 48th wedding anniversary :wink:

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Congratulations! And to Mrs. Graham for putting up with you (or any man) for 48 years…

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Felicitations! :champagne::clinking_glasses::birthday:

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Hi Geof,

Returning to your post after the more mundane, but more challenging task of installing a second bathroom.

One of my favourite maxims is that all technology is intermediate. Worked this out for myself, but many others must have reached a similar conclusion, long before.

However, rates of technological change vary spectacularly, so a new computer or cell phone is out of date as soon as it comes out of the box, By contrast, a superb Japanese santoku chef’s knife with a Damascene blade may have changed little during the past five centuries.

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New computers and smart phones aren’t “out of date as soon as they leave the box”, that’s just what the marketing droids want you to believe.

I built my gaming PC in 2011 and with a couple of new graphics gard upgrades over the years, it still plays AAA titles at great frame rates at 1080p. The only limitation I’m finding over the last year is that the latest and greatest PC games now require W10 and I’m still running W7, but I have a plan to fix that this winter.

Computer technology has very much stagnated of late with ever over-hyped Intel and AMD promising smaller and smaller performance increases. We won’t see the huge performance jumps of single core > dual core > quad core again until a new substrate medium is perfected.

My 2017 iPhone 7 is still running the latest version of iOS and is reporting 86% battery capacity. It will only be replaced when I break it.

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there’s truth in that.
Also have in mind that there is a chip shortage but the market wants you to keep on buying in order for them to survive.

My neighbour (who works in IT) told me earlier this evening that Volkswagon have just bought up 200,000 Whirlpool washing machines just to strip out the chips…

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It does make you wonder what the real longevity of tech could be. (I am by the way typing this on a laptop I bought secondhand before we moved to France 10 years ago - I wiped off Windows and installed Linux, and have just updated it ever since.)

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Please excuse my hyperbole. I should have written, ‘almost as soon as they leave the box.’

However, I no longer remember how many computers and phones I’ve had in the last thirty years. Whereas I only replace a knife when its blade is too concave to be resharpened.

The two points I made were that all technology is intermediate - ie. it’s never an absolute solution and at some point any technological solution will be replaced by another one, but the timelines may vary enormously.

It’s true of course that some ‘technologies’ are very ancient - especially hand tools - the basic form of the hand axe goes way back into the stone age.
It’s constrained, I suppose, by the relatively unchanging form of the hand that uses it…