Smear merchants lie through their teeth about people like me who want
to help others so their bosses can stay in power to help themselves.
Partisan bickering will not solve our problems. We need outside-the-box
ideas that help liberals, conservatives, and everyone else get more of what
they want. Requires pixie dust? Impossible? No. Read an example of how
we could make government affordable without penalizing anyone.

Kevin Pezzi, MD

The Singing Surgeon™
I'm part Native American and revere natural health,
so should I also call myself a Medicine Man, too? :-)

Iconoclastic views on economics, politics, technology, science, and life

I'm a PBS mind in an MTV World

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.

A shocking example of how USA efficiency has plummeted

The Erie Canal was an engineering marvel: a 363-mile-long canal linking the Atlantic Seaboard and Great Lakes, with 18 aqueducts to cross rivers and 83 locks to raise and lower boats over the 682-foot vertical drop from one end to the other. Built between 1817 and 1825 without experienced surveyors, civil engineers, or skilled laborers, it slashed statewide shipping costs by 94% and created so much wealth that the term “millionaire” was coined shortly thereafter.

Cost? A mere $7 million—about $100 million in today's dollars. Now for something shocking: the canal was built primarily by hand supplemented with animal power. That is, no modern tractors, bulldozers, or other heavy equipment that can do more work in a day than a man—or even a man with a horse—can do in a year.

Since modern earthmoving equipment makes workers hundreds of times more productive and enormously more valuable even after factoring in equipment cost, why couldn't we replicate the Erie Canal for much less than the inflation-adjusted $100 million figure? Such a mammoth project would likely now cost over $100 billion and perhaps even more, thanks to predictable cost overruns and delays imposed by court orders halting construction so scientists could bemoan the project's impact on local mosquito populations and whatnot.

No one involved in building the Erie Canal system was an expert; instead, they improvised and learned as they went along. Even with almost 200 years of experience and heavy equipment that literally moves mountains, we can't begin to match the productivity per inflation-adjusted dollar of the original canal workers. Such a project would now cost 1000 times more—but why?

For as long as I can remember, economists have said that the productivity of American workers is steadily increasing. If we've really made such amazing leaps in output per worker, why are today's workers left in the dust by their early-19^th century counterparts with shovels and pickaxes but no chainsaws or Caterpillars?

Comments (3)

Today's Cost

It's frightening to think how much this canal would cost if constructed today—by this government.

Comment #78 by William Wheaton
December 19 2010 09:04:29 PM

Today's Technology

I like the article. It makes a lot of sense. The question is why today's productivity cost is higher than in the 19th century.

For one our cost of living is higher. Second it requires a lot of money to build equipment to meet technology that did not exist before. And the ways we produce goods are not the same any more.

So it is impossible to compare the productivity of any services in today's environment with the old days in terms of dollars.

Another example, today we depend heavily on computers for information to run businesses. The price to acquire this information is not cheap but very reliable, and this did not exist in the old days.

I am sure it is the same in the field of Medicine.

William Wheaton