On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 06:21:26PM -0400, Paul M Foster wrote:
> So the environmental wackos are going in a certain direction and they
> don't know where they're supposed to end up? And they don't know because
> they haven't gotten there yet?
Basically. Liken it to software development. The US government, when
developing, say, attitude adjustment modules for satellites, didn't know
how to track the progress of the procedures until after they'd done it a
few times. Then there was the problem of not reusing code, so you ended up
with programmers re-inventing the solutions every time. As you stream
lined the process, you could relate certain portions of the project to past
projects, see what changed, and come up with a better estimate of where you
stood in relation to the beginning and end of the project. The polution
of the earth hasn't completed yet, or we'd know how much toxic waste it
took to destroy an ecosystem. Right now, there's no aggregation of the
data $persons collect on the various ecosystems being destroyed. So
there's nothing to compare anything to ,and educate the environmental
community on precisely what's happening and where projections will go.
Right now it's very much like this:
* stranger walks onto scene of angry mobsters *
<stranger> Hey, what're we mobbing about?
<mobster> The environment's being destroyed, dude!
<stranger> I'll jump on the bandwagon, even though I could do more good
by contributing to research!
> Yep, makes perfect sense. ;-}
I'm detecting a slight hint of sarcasm. Please wave the sarcasm flag if
you're going to use it; I have a hard time catching it.
--
- Isaiah
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:24:53 EDT