Staying Ahead of the Machine

I just read Uncle Ken's link about paper jams. I know from my own paper mill experience that paper making and paper processing machines move really fast. I forget how many feet per minute, but it's really fast. If you wait until a problem manifests itself, it's too late. You've got to be proactive instead of reactive. It's like my grandson told me when he was teaching me about the internet, "You've got to stay ahead of the machine." I knew a guy at the mill who had the reputation of being a really good machine tender. I saw him once awaken from a sound sleep, walk over to the control panel, make an adjustment, and go right back to sleep. I asked him about it later and he told me that he had developed a sixth sense over the years. He could tell something was wrong by a subtle change in the sound and vibration of his machine, even when asleep. You can't learn a skill like that from a book.

I'm not sure if something like that could help you with sex, but it might. I read Old Dog's link about sex last night, and found that interesting too. The thing about any kind of poll or survey, especially one about sex, is that you have no way of knowing if the respondents are telling the truth. I don't think the fact that their anonymity is guaranteed matters all that much. Some people have been habitual liars for so long that I don't think they even know the difference anymore. I have long suspected that about half of everything you read, or hear, or see on television is not true. The trouble is that you don't know which half. Nevertheless, if people didn't conduct all those polls and surveys, we wouldn't know anything at all about what other people are thinking or doing. You can't go by what your friends and family tell you because they might not be representative of the population at large and, of course, they can lie as well as the next person. Let us assume, then, for the sake of discussion, that the people in the study were being as honest as anybody, which means that there is probably some truth in the study's findings.

Okay, so people are doing it less than they used to. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It would be nice if we could assume that less quantity automatically leads to better quality but, of course, we cannot assume any such thing. I think that both the quantity and the quality of sex in the 60s and 70s was better than in out parents' generation, just going by the way our parents talked about it, or rather didn't talk about it. Then again, some of the guys I knew who talked about it the most back in the day, subsequently were proven to not know what they were talking about. So go figure.

One thing that struck me was that the authors of the article seemed to think that the reduction in the birth rate was a bad thing. Back in our day, all the experts were saying that the world was getting overcrowded and that, if we didn't start having fewer kids, we were in for trouble down the road. Well, we're down the road now, and people are having fewer kids, but now they're saying that's a problem. Go figure some more.

I don't think that just throwing more money at the schools or the military is going help make either one of them more effective. What's needed, and seems to be lacking, is some kind of cohesive plan. For as long as I can remember, our local road commission has been asking the people for more money so they can fix the roads, and the people always voted it down, until last time. What they did different was they made a prioritized list of the roads that were in the worst shape and promised that they would fix them in that order as the money became available. It's been a few years now and, as far as I know, they have kept their promise. Apparently, people are more likely to approve a tax for a specific purpose like that than they are to approve something general like "fix the roads" or "fix the schools". Of course, no plan will work if people don't implement it. They can't just talk about it, they have to actually do it. Lots of luck with that one!