Should a President be Qualified for the Job?

Here's a unique concept:
Virtually every job in every company in every part of the country has requirements. Often, there is a list of qualifying criteria that a candidate must meet to be considered for the position. This is true for everything from computer programmers to janitors. From legal counsels to medical practitioners. Carpenters to auto mechanics. Even housekeepers and nannies need some proof they are suitable for the position. The possible exception is day laborers. These are jobs which require no training, no skills, no special intelligence, and are usually just repetitive manual labor, and only done for a day at a time with each person.

Somehow, I don't think the job of US president falls into the category of 'day laborer'. How do you feel about having a set of criteria for judging the fit of a prospective presidential candidate for the job of running the country? In my mind, I keep going back to GWB's campaign where he was asked to name the leaders of any 5 foreign nations, and he couldn't name even one. I remember when he talked about Canada being "one of our neighbors to the north". And I remember his lack of ability to pronounce words like "nuclear" correctly, and his general confusion and misunderstanding of other countries, and international politics or economics.

If we were to look for skills and experience, what kind of experience would we look for? Well, experience in the position before with a proven successful track record would be the best of course. But failing that, what other jobs, and skills, and experiences would serve to qualify a candidate or eliminate unsuitable prospects?

Let me offer a few criteria as a place to start:

1. Candidate must have been the CEO of a company of at least 100 people and which operated successfully with reasonable growth during the candidate's tenure there. There must be proven managerial skills, leadership skills, financial management skills, and public speaking skills. (If he can't run a small company, can he be expected to run an entire country?)

2. Candidate must be literate. A proven education in an accredited post secondary institution. Ivy League school not required.

3. Special credit may be given for military experience . Especially for combat experience. Service time spent in intelligence community would also be considered a plus, as well as previous successful experience in another political office.

4. Candidate must achieve a passing grade on a knowledge-based exam that includes questions in areas of literacy, science, political science, international affairs, world geography, history, economics, and trade.

5. Candidate must achieve a score higher than 120 on a standard IQ test involving basic skills such as pattern recognition, mathematical problems, logic, vocabulary questions, etc..

6. Candidate must pass an ethics exam that adequately tests his honesty, and ability to determine the 'right' path and willingness to follow that path even at some personal cost.

7. Candidate must pass a psychological test and health exam to make sure there are no emotional problems or mental problems or physical health problems that could lead to poor decisions or poor performance.

8. Candidate must have a clean drug record with no current substance abuse habits.

9. Candidate must not have a criminal record that includes felonies.

10. Candidate must pass a thorough review of their personal associations to ensure he/she doesn't "owe anybody any special favors" such that by repaying them, there would be a compromise of the integrity of the office and role of the president.

Does this sound reasonable for a top 10 of job requirements?
Do these things sound like they are a reasonable expectation of a person who would like to be the President of the United States? Would this allow us to avoid placing a person into office merely because they had a big enough election budget to be advertised highly enough, or because they have friends in the right places, or because they are good-looking enough, or whatever?

It doesn't ensure they would always make all the right decisions in every case, but perhaps at least it ensures that they are *capable* of making good sound decisions.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think we should have a way of ensuring our president is technically skilled enough and qualified enough to do the job? Or do you think the current system of allowing any candidate with enough money to advertise himself is a good enough way to choose our country's leader?

As a secondary question, I wonder how many of our past presidents would pass this criteria? As a tertiary question, who should we open up the candidacy to, to take these tests and submit an application? US citizens only? Or anyone who qualifies? Any age restrictions? Racial or gender, or religious restrictions?

The reason I put the executive requirement in there is because I feel that running a business is excellent training for a political leadership role. You learn to have a vision and stick to it. You learn how to make reasonable goals and then you learn ways to plan to reach them. You learn to manage people. You learn to speak to people. You learn to achieve real results, NOT just political dishwater which gets bandied about in speeches until it smells like fine wine. It's real experience at running things.
The reason I chose that size or larger is because running a smaller company, such as 30 or 40 people doesn't quite have the same level of infrastructure and therefore the leadership skills are at a different level. You need to have a hierarchy that has several layers to it. In a small company, you're either the owner or you're not. If you're not, then you're simply an employee and you simply trade your time for your salary, but you are excluded from any other ambitions because the infrastructure is not set up for that. However, once you get to a certain size, where the infrastructure is large enough - now a person other than the owner can actually have a career there. So people's motivations are different and more complex, and therefore the CEO has a different set of motivational tools available to him. That model of CEO is a little closer to the model of being president. He has to know how to motivate people properly.

I think the fact that so few presidents have had the experience of running a company does not prove that it's not a necessary experiential skill-set, but rather it potentially proves that the presidents we've had are not all as skilled as they might have been.
You may have noticed that I DIDN'T include experience as a lawyer as being a necessary requirement for the position. I just think if you are going to run things, and take on ultimate responsibility for your decisions - then you ought to have some experience running things and taking ultimate responsibility for your decisions.

Running a country IS running a business. It's a very BIG business. But a business. Think about it. Basically, the job of managing a business is a job of managing your resources for maximum benefit and maximum gain. You minimize obstacles and inefficiencies, and maximize productivity and results. Isn't that what we want from our country? I think we need an entirely different set of candidates to choose from. We need to be fishing from a different pool of fish. We don't need another lawyer to run the country. We need a proven leader to lead us. Maybe my impressions are all wrong and maybe Bush is the man. ...but I don't think so.

I have said in the past that the president's role has more or less devolved into that of a 'talking figurehead". And I still say that. However, I think a real powerful individual in that role could make it so much more. A real leader could restore some real power to the role. It could possibly once again return to being much more than the “spokes-model” role it has become. And even as just a talking figurehead - some facility with language and communications skills are necessary.

GWB doesn't seem to be very good at communicating ideas effectively. He comes across friendly and likeable, but frankly, not too bright. A person who has been successful in a CEO role in a reasonably sized corporation would have these skills down pat.
Perhaps by applying these ten criteria for selecting candidates for the role, we could end up putting true leaders into that role. The basic idea here is to find someone who actually has specific skills at leadership and communication, and who has content knowledge about world geography, world history, trade, science, AND political science. We want someone demonstrably smart and knowledgeable and honest and ethical. We need someone with actual, measurable skills for the position. This is merely a set of criteria to ensure our candidates have all those qualities. Somehow, I think having some criteria to this selection process has to be better than what we have now.

What we have now is a system where anyone at all can be president - as long as he can raise tens of millions of dollars in campaign funds to advertise himself. That, and he has to be a US citizen and more than 35 years old. It is arguably the most important job in the country. Our representative to the world certainly. Surely we should have SOME quality criteria other than the fact that he has more campaign funds than the other candidate? Don't you think?

Here’s another question: Why do we usually have lawyers in our political leadership positions? It occurs to me that this evolved from the time of the beginning of the country. At the start , creating a country is mostly a matter of creating legislation. Making laws. Making a constitution - and then making the laws serve the intentions of the constitution. The original structural foundation of a country is it's constitution and it's laws. They define the boundaries of exactly what the country is and what the people within it may do and what they may not do.

The intentions of the founders of the country are reflected in the legislation created to define it. So it makes sense to have lawyers and people trained in law to do this. If the main business of government is to draft legislation, then experts in legislation are viable candidates for that kind of work. Well, now we have been around as a country for well over 200 years. We've got LOTS of laws. For over 200 years the lawyers that run the country in all it's levels and facets have been creating ever more complex laws and loopholes to those laws for their friends and benefactors. It seems to me that we have come to the point where there are OTHER aspects of running a country besides drafting more laws, and that those other things should be more prominent and important now. And these are things that are not completely unlike the effective management of the resources a large, very diversified business.

I think the following things are perhaps now MORE important than drafting new laws:
1) How do we keep our people employed?
2) How do we stay out of debt, or at least minimize it?
3) How do we grow in prosperity?
4) How do we build and maintain our infrastructure?
5) How do we deploy our people to maximize their potential?
6) How do we educate our young?
7) How do we keep our people healthy?
8) How do we get along peacefully with other nations?
9) How do we encourage the maximum in profitable trade with other nations?
10) How do we plan for natural disasters?
11) How do we plan for and minimize economic downturns and maximize economic upturns?
12) How do we prevent offshore outsourcing of jobs from negatively impacting our employment opportunities in this country?
13) How do we minimize waste in all forms?
14) How do we plan for economic and physical development and growth and encourage it, and yet still protect the environment?
15) How do we minimize crime and deal with criminals?
16) How do we deal with people who cannot, or will not, work?
17) How do we deal with military threats from other countries?
18) How do we deal with terrorist threats from outside AND inside the country?
19) How do we deal with religions and their followers?
20) How do we plan our resources to cover drastic shortages in the future?
21) How do we take a lead role in creating technology and innovation?
22) How do we maintain our position in areas of technology, science, and innovation in a heavily competitive world?
23) How do we keep our borders, and our secrets, safe?
24) How do we protect and enhance the things that are important to us as a culture?
25) How do we anticipate and plan for the future needs of our people?

These are just 25 things off the top of my head that I think might be high on the list of things a president needs to be thinking about and finding ways to manage. As I look at this list, it occurs to me that, although lawyers are usually bright people, a training in law does not prepare a person for these kinds of challenges. Legislation - however cleverly worded and debated - does not solve THESE kinds of massively important problems.
What is needed here is NOT another lawyer. It is a LEADER. It is my sense that a CEO-type of leader accustomed to running and managing the resources of a large organization successfully is more suited to these kinds of challenges than the average lawyer. This is why I advocate the criteria I mentioned above as a way to help us find people that can tackle these kinds of problems and find solutions that work.

Most of the political leaders seem too focused on the job of getting elected or getting re-elected to really focus on these 25 items mentioned above. And when they are forced or pressured into looking at one of these issues, I've noticed they often merely draft some sort of legislation that serves the interests of their benefactors and combine it with other bills, which effectively ties it up in a political process long enough that their successors will have to deal with it. They all seem much more interested in the daily business of power-brokering and influence-pedaling, rather than solving these kinds of problems.
It is perhaps an unfair statement and is most certainly not true of all politicians, but it is true often enough that, to me at least, it seems the norm now. We need a different type of leader than what we've had for over 200 years. We have enough laws and rules.
True, it is laws and rules that may define partly how we implement our decisions and solutions, but that is mere mechanism. We need those decisions and solutions in the first place. And one solitary person cannot be expected to solve every problem himself. But he doesn't have to. The job is to find the talents and solutions within US - the people of the country, and motivate us to bring them forth.
The right person is one who can extract the solutions out of us and make them work. We need a decision maker. We need a visionary. We need a LEADER.

But as I said, the leader probably cannot come up with all the solutions to all the problems of the country himself. So here is an idea: The "Solution Lottery"!!!

Here's how this could work: We post the above mentioned greatest problems of our nation to be solved, and invite solutions from the entire population of the country. We offer 2 million dollars to the person who has the most viable solution to any one of the problems, if we can determine that it works to a satisfactory degree.
There are 300 million people here. That is a large, healthy pool of intellect to draw creative solutions from. Surely, somewhere among the 300 million people here, there are some who will have brilliant creative solutions to these problems and wouldn't mind collecting two million dollars to write it up and send it in. Not to mention the satisfaction of helping your own country in a measurable significant way. (Also, think how good that would look on your resume... "Created solution that reduced US unemployment by 30%...")

Now consider the costs. We are talking about 25 major problems. Let's say there are 50 major critical national problems to solve, instead. If we paid 2 million dollars per solution, AND paid ANOTHER 100 million dollars for the group tasked with collecting, evaluating and analyzing and overseeing the solution lottery, the total cost would be 200 million dollars. The last time I looked, the federal budget was about 6 trillion dollars per year. At that rate, this entire program would only cost 17.5 minutes of tax dollars to pay for it. And in exchange, we would have workable, viable solutions for all our largest problems as a country. Our country, our culture, our society would be improved forever. That HAS to be the best use of tax dollars, I've ever heard of.
And what if we can't find 25 solutions among our 300 million citizens? Well, then why not offer it to the whole world? After all, there are SIX BILLION more people out THERE!! And a lot of them are pretty bright.
If the solution doesn't exist this year? Then try again next year!!!! Keep trying!!! Keep it as an open offer for as long as it takes for someone to come up with the solutions we need. Now THIS is what a real leader might do. He would invest a little for a huge return.

And what a return on the investment! Can you imagine what it would be like to have those 25 problems solved!!?? Or at least significantly improved upon?? Heck, even if it cost ten times that amount to manage the Solution Lottery, and even if we paid 10 million dollars for each successful solution, it would still be a huge bargain.
After all, what does it cost us each year to NOT have those problems solved? And these are not the only problems. There are others.
26) How do we feed all our people properly?
27) How do we provide adequate shelter and modern facilities for everyone?
28) How do we help others in other countries without damaging ourselves?
29) How do we gain maximum efficiency in production?
30) How do we remain competitive?
31) How do we attract the right kinds of people to join our country?
32) How do we explore space effectively, efficiently?
33) How do we maximize the utilization of our natural resources?
34) How do we control monopolies to prevent market abuses?
35) How do we maintain a high moral code among our people?
36) How do we minimize the effects of substance abuses?
37) How do we reduce teen pregnancies?
38) How do we minimize school drop-outs?
39) How do we effectively motivate pharmaceuticals to create CURES instead of ongoing treatments?
40) How do we encourage and maintain pure scientific research?
41) How do we minimize gender inequities in the workplace?
42) How do we minimize the effects of racism - or erase it, even!?
43) How do we stop or minimize illegal drug trafficking?
44) How do we stop or minimize organized crime?
45) How do we make our vehicles safer?
46) How do we make air travel safe, convenient, and yet protect from terrorism?
47) How do we prevent rail disasters?
48) How do we ensure that the needs and desires of our population are TRULY represented by the elected officials?
49) How do we lessen the effects of the strong using their advantage to persecute the weak?
50) How do we provide a path for people to upgrade themselves from poverty?

And the list goes on...... We have such INCREDIBLE potential if the right leader would come along and know how to tap into our resources like that. Forget the clouds of impending doom - this kind of change could usher in a whole new era of prosperity. We could go so far with the right leadership.

Thanks for visiting!

Creative Music Writing Techniques

Most people who are in a position of creating new artistic efforts occasionally have periods when they can't seem to come up with any new creative ideas. To help that, I thought it might be nice if we all throw in some ways that we each use to get new creative ideas. It will help everybody.

More ideas help everyone and a rising tide lifts all boats. So please feel free to jump in and share. To that end, here are some techniques I use. I'll start with techniques for writing lyrics and concepts for songs, then get to the musical techniques.

1) For song concepts, I usually write the music first, then listen for the mood of the piece, and then come up with words that support those emotions. But you can also work it the other way round. You can try reading a book and take some concept from the story of that book and make that the theme of a song. Or take an article from a magazine. For example, I read an article in a science magazine a couple of years ago about the process they go through to build the largest mirror in the world for the largest telescope in the world that they are building in California (Not in Hawaii this time). So I had the idea from that to write a song called 'Building the perfect mirror', where the polishing workers on the mirror keep leaving the project because the mirror is so perfect that it captures their inner souls and reflects it back to them, and they cannot take that level of self-scrutiny, and so have to leave. They are embarassed by what they see in themselves when they catch their own eyes in the reflection of that perfect mirror. I haven't yet finished that song, but the concept is in the back of my mind still evolving. Sometimes these concepts take a few years before they surface as a complete song. Sometimes, it's instant.

2 ) Random Word Association. When trying to come up with a brand new idea, you have to literally burn a new pathway in your brain. A thought process that didn't exist before. To do that, you try to relate two things that currently have no relation in your mind. To do THAT, think of your target subject area, then open any book to any page, put your finger anywhere on the page and read the nearest noun to your finger. Now try to connect that noun to your main idea/theme. This will invite all sorts of crazy connections. Throw the chaff away, and keep the gems. The unique, new connections that are genuinely different and new and good. This is a way to create brand new concepts in words and themes for lyrics.

3 ) The Lyrics Puzzle. I learned another trick by reading an interview of David Bowie once many years ago. He said when writing songs, he writes clever little catchy phrases about his subject area, and then cuts them into little scraps of paper, then puts them on the floor and sits on the floor and pushes them around, rearranging them in different sequences like a puzzle to come up with the lyrics for a song. Now, of course, we have word processors to allow us to do that on the screen - but the idea is the same. Create little nuggets of thoughts. Clever little poetic images or clever little plays on words, and then push them around on the screen to try to get a logical flow, then perhaps make them rhyme.

4 ) Song lyrics, like poetry, don't have to rhyme. But it is a time-honored convention, and it does make it easier to remember the words when singing. To get words to rhyme, I take the base word I want to rhyme with, then I go through the alphabet for starting letters to find any other words that rhyme. (Hmmm the word is 'that', so I'll try 'bat, cat, dat, fat, mat, nat, pat, sat,' etc...) The alternative is to use a good online rhyming dictionary. There are several on the web. It feels like cheating, but hey, it doesn't write it for you. It only gives a selection of words to use as the last word on the next line. Your creativity fills in the connection.

5 ) To have creative musical ideas, I use several techniques. One is to try a different tuning on the guitar. This forces you to come up with new chords and different fingerings, because none of the old ones work anymore. You are forced out of your old box into new areas. Whole new sounds. The last concert I gave was in April, This particular show was an acoustic show, and I had 4 guitars on stage because I used 4 entirely different tunings.

6 ) Another technique I use is drum machines. I get some crazy rhythm going and then just jam with it. Try to hear notes in the drum patterns, and then play those notes. Then try to take two entirely different rhythm or melody sequences that you come up with for the same drum rhythm, and overlay them using multi tracking. Listen for the interplay between the two melodic structures. You get three unique things there. The two base melodies, and the combination. Now add a bass line that is different again. Keep layering and look for gems in the overlay effects.

7 ) Steal something from other music, and then twist it. Steal a melody line from some song that catches your fancy, then play the melody backwards. Or play it by inserting different notes at regular intervals, for example take the top note of a downward run and re-insert it back in as every third or fourth note. See how that works. Try playing a harmony line to the original line. Then switch from 3rds to 4ths, to 5ths in the same sequence. Play with it. Over lay one complete melodic sequence with another that is just the first sentence of it repeated over and over on top of the moving one. Just twist and turn the whole melody until it becomes yours. Something different and unique, and YOU.

8 ) Try starting to write a song on a different instrument than your usual instrument. For instance, I am mostly a guitar player, but sometimes I will start writing a tune with drums and bass, then layer in a guitar part to fit that musically. That keeps me from using the same old techniques and ruts that I have used before. I have to force myself to do something new to match the music that is happening.

9 ) Listen to progressive rock bands like Yes, Dream Theater, Spock's Beard, Porcupine Tree, etc. and listen to all the little melodies they play for small phrases and passing sequences and connectors, and see if you can develop something bigger based on those tiny transitional passages. Take some concepts of feel, or snippets of melodic constructs and then expand them, play with them, twist them and make them yours. These types of bands are wealthy with melodic ideas. They have them pouring - even blasting out in quick succession. An embarassment of riches of melodic ideas. Use these as seeds to grow your own trees.

10 ) Listen to other instruments such as saxophones, or flutes, or oboes, or marimbas, or whatever, and listen to the melodic constructs there. Learn from that. Take pieces and play with them. Incorporate into your songs and ideas along with what you know already.

11 ) Listen to musical styles you don't normally listen to to get ideas to expand on. For instance, most rock music is based on old blues. Try classic jazz. Or big band music. Or classical. Or ethnic music using accordions. Or Tuvan Throat-singing. Or Thai music. Or American Indian. or African. Just try different styles you haven't played with before. There is a wealth of stuff out there, you just haven't heard yet. All of it is seeds to grow in the fertile soil of your mind.

12 ) Watch a movie on DVD. At a particularly poignant emotional point in the film, stop the movie, and pick up a guitar. Try to play something that explains how you feel right then. Pretend someone has asked you how you feel at that moment, and your voice doesn't work. The only way to answer is with your guitar. Make it explain. Make it convey your message so anyone can understand how you feel right at that precise moment.

So there you have a dozen ideas for building creative lyrics, song concepts, and musical ideas. Now you have no excuses. Get out there and make me want to brag to my friends that I knew you before you became so famous!

The Music Industry and the Quality of Music

It is no secret anymore that record labels pay radio stations to play their songs.

We have known for years that this is how the radio/music industry works. There have been very informative articles on this that were passed around last year on this subject.
The gist of the process is this: Usually, there is an indie promoter who acts as a buffer between the record labels and the radio stations. There are apparently 3 main promoters in the country who do it. They are paid very large sums of money by the labels to promote specific artists that the labels want to push. Then the promoter offers huge bribes and various other incentives to the program directors of the radio stations to buy an 'add'. An 'add' means adding it to the playlist for a group of stations.
These days, of course, almost all radio stations are either owned by Clear Channel or Viacom, and they do regional and national programming. Every city has an "Edge" and a "Kiss FM" and a "MIX" and so on, and they program a playlist of less than 200 songs for each genre.
At any given time, a radio station may only have 15 or 20 songs that it can play. That's why you hear the same 5 or 10 songs repeated over and over all day long every day.

These spots are sold as 'adds' to the promoter who is paying for them with money from the labels. He pays more for an 'add' during a drive-time spot, as opposed to 'adds' in the early morning slots. Also he pays more based on market penetration for a given station. The biggest concerns don't seem to be that it is all 'fixed' and dishonest, and even illegal, but rather simply that it is so expensive. This is how radio stations can afford to have commercial free blocks of music. Because the 'add' revenue compensates for some losses in advertising revenue.

I guess the radio station just looks at it as if they are simply selling airtime one way or another. They either sell to an advertiser, or they sell it to a record label to play their music. And then the radio station owner (Clear Channel) goes even further to buy the concert promotion company, so that now they can plug their own promotion events. They can hire a band for a concert, then saturate the local market with that band's sound for weeks leading up to the concert in order to bump up ticket sales.

In other industries this is similar to something called 'Vertical integration', but in this case, they have a virtual monopoly on the industry. All popularity seems to be contrived by corporate management. They simply 'decide' who they will make popular. The actual preferences of the public don't factor into the mix at all.

This is simply what the music industry has evolved to now. The net effect of this is that the listening public has little or no variety to listen to, and new artists are not given a chance to become popular. The little guy can never break through the system to become popular based on talent or ability.

Only the big labels choose who they want to make famous by corporate 'packaging', etc. For example, they may look at the market factors, and what the competing labels are making money on, and decide they need a 'boy band' to fill a given market niche at the moment. So they start auditions to hire the members into an act. They know they want two blonde boys, and two brunettes. All about the same height. They want a certain look, but they also want a representative of each different 'type' in order to capture a larger percentage of girl fans who go for the different types. Maybe a clean-cut type, and also a bad-boy type, and a partyer fun-type, etc. They assemble the group like hiring actors for a play. Then , they hire songwriters, use their image consultants, they choreograph it, etc. and they build an act. They put together a whole show. They record an album, and then they start the promotion process, buying 'adds' in the right markets and time slots to get the right penetration, etc. then they saturate those markets until sales for tickets and CD's appear. Voila - a new star is born. Just like a product launch for any other product.

The business is not at all about what is 'fair'. It is about how much to spend to get a respectable return on the investment. It's not about talent of the artists, it's about the talent of the managers and A&R folks to choose the right format and timing and market niche to plug into and the right promotional strategy for that product. It becomes a management issue rather than and artistic one.

Many people are suggesting that this trend explains why so many people have gone to the iPOD, and left radio altogether as a source for music. The contrived content, corporate packaging, copycat acts, and lack of real variety make listening to the radio far less fun than it used to be, whereas, my iPOD has over 4500 songs from all my favorite artists spread out over the last 3 decades or so. That is far more entertaining than listening to 5 songs I didn't pick repeated 200 times a day.

I, for one, would dearly love to see a return to the old days of radio where DJ's pick the songs to play based on what they like and what people call in and ask for. The music stands on it's own merits, and artists come forward because they can, and they come up in the listings and rankings and in popularity because they have something that appeals to the listening public. There is an honesty in that that I would love to see us return to.

I wonder if maybe Sony is tired of paying the bribes. Who knows, if the other labels start to feel the same way, maybe the payola-based system will collapse, and we can go back to a more free-enterprise open-to-all approach. What a refreshing thought!

Yes, bribery has always been there in that industry. There is nothing new in that sense, but it's a question of degree, I think. It's always been around to some degree, I'm sure. But up until the late 70's, at least the individual DJ's and radio stations made their own playlists. So if there was bribery, it had to be on a small scale and local. It was too hard to blanket the whole country. So there were always other DJ's, and other stations playing other music. There was variety. It was not unusual to listen to a radio station for most of a day and NOT hear a tune repeated in those days. Variety is what it was all about.

Now, however, with the near-monopolistic control of the airwaves by Clear Channel, the promoters only have to bribe a very small number of people who have playlist control over most of the country, and that's it - they own the airwaves. It's almost like a mafia-controlled industry or something. One response to this has been the proliferation of internet radio sites on the web. The problem is, you can't tune them in on your car - where most of us listen to the radio. Yet.

Recently on NPR radio, there was a news segment about the recording industry. They were saying that now the big labels no longer own the whole show anymore on the record label side. There are now lots and lots of small independent record labels that have sprung up. I suppose now that technology has allowed us to build very inexpensive little recording studios that nevertheless do a very clean job, and since many bands can even afford to record themselves, and since producing the CD's themselves is also more afforbale, the costs are less for producing the actual product, which means the only real expenses are the promotion and distribution. And now the big houses like Capitol, Universal, Sony, etc. are actually selling distribution services, so an indie label can piggyback on to that mechanism to get the product out there. That leaves promotion and marketing. And the small indie labels are partnering with the big labels in order to get the right talent, test it, and share risk, etc. The small label can develop an artist in a local market, then, when ready, they can sell the contract up to the majors who can take a pre-tested primed act national at a reduced risk. This simplifies things considerably, and a lot of these indie labels have sprung up.

Last summer, I was in Las Vegas speaking with just such a label about my own music. It is Reve Records. I gave them copies of my last 2 CDs to listen to and see if they want to promote my albums. But my music is not in their strike zone, so I don't know if anything will happen with it.

This is an interesting little label. They looked at the music industry and found a loophole. One thing that hasn't been covered by the big labels, yet has a sizeable audience. Trucker music. Yes, Trucker music. Young folks might not even be aware of that genre, but a number of years ago, there were quite a few trucker songs and trucker bands, etc. They haven't had any new music in years now, so Doug Widdifield thought he would fill that need. He signed up a pretty female singer, Cori, and brought in some top-notch hired gun musicians from the various Vegas showbands, and put an album together of brand new trucker music with a female singer. Something that hadn't been done before. It's an ecclectic mix of rock, country, funk, jazz, and even rap, but all with a trucker theme and trucker lingo. He even hired dancers. and a choreographer to build a show. They are called the 18-wheeler girls. You see, there are specific trucker shows, with trucker concerts, etc.
This whole world is probably under the radar for most of us, so we don't see or hear about it, but there is an active group of enthusiasts out there for it. Doug hired a bunch of telemarketers and they just call all the gas station and truckstop chains and independents as well all over the US, and sell them directly to the truckstops and roadside diners, etc. It's only just been released, and at the moment, it is already the top-selling CD in all the T/A truckstops across the country.

They are in the music industry, but yet they have totally sidestepped the entire music industry. They are not using conventional distribution to conventional record stores at all. They have not even tried to break through the radio industry stonewall to get airplay.
Apparently, most truckers also are tired of listening to 5 songs they don't like being repeated 200 times a day. So they have become tired of conventional radio. This approach hits them where they live. Truckstops. Direct marketing to the retail level.

Doug has a nice little record label started there, but my music is not trucker music, so I don't know if there is any sort of fit with Doug's mission, but it was great to meet with him and discuss what he's been doing and how he's doing it, and how it's working. He has already invested 300K into this album and this act, and hopes to get a decent return on his investment. it's interesting to see how this industry works. Even in the unique backwaters of the business. And then it was interesting to hear on the NPR segment how this seems to be a big trend now. I wish I could have heard more of the show, but it was on my alarm-clock radio and so I was half-asleep for half of it.

The future of the music industry? Hmmmm. Here the crystal ball grows cloudy..... There are too many variables for me to do a Hari Seldon and use the multidimensional mathematical equations of psychohistory to forecast the future trends with any degree of accuracy. (The Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov, were my favorite SciFi books)

Let's look at the factors entering the equation shall we?
1) Two big companies own the airwaves today. The handful of independants and little college stations left over don't account for a significant slice of the radio universe.
2) Years ago, big record companies took over all the small record companies in order to monopolize the recording industry. Then that changed, and now small record companies are springing up all over again.
3) In the last decade, free downloading and copying CD's contributed to a huge intellectual property issue, where the RIAA has suggested that as much as 2/3rds of the industry profits were sucked away by piracy, both domestic and international.
4) Some parts of the world (notably the far east) don't recognize or protect intellectual property rights at all. Piracy is not really illegal there as it is here. And in places where it is illegal, it is not enforced.
5) The total amount of money coming in from retail sales is far lower now.
6) There has been a shift toward live performances and higher ticket prices for concerts as a source of revenue to musicians, and the industry, rather than recorded works.
7) There is much more fragmentation in the music industry now, with so many people switching to the iPOD approach and satisfying their eclectic tastes with products and artists that are out of the 'mainstream'. This is like the second law of thermodynamics (Entropy increases though time.) In this case we similarly go from a state of high order to a state of chaos and low order as fragmentation of the genres increase, and small artists that don't conform proliferate.
8) There is a shift from album sales to individual song sales through Apple.com's iTunes/iPOD, and through Sony.com, and others. Legitimate downloads paid for by the song. This significantly changes the dynamics of revenue movement, planning, cost structuring - everything. How much do you spend to advertise, promote, market and position a single song that sells for 99 cents online, rather than an album of 12 songs for $19.99 pre-manufactured, shipped and sitting on a shelf. The album has an inventory and distribution sunk cost. The 99 cent song has nothing like that.
9) Music, like all other products and industries is now fully international. It is just as easy to buy an album by a Swedish punk band as it is to buy from a local band, as long as they both sell through their websites - and virtually all musicians and bands have a dedicated website now.
10) Other countries may admire the entertainment industry in the US and may try to buy in in significant ways. Witness the impact Sony has had.
11) The US is losing its predominance in the global marketplace for many products and services and skills. We have outsourced everything, and that has eroded our leverage for offering value once our control has diminished.
12) Economically, the world is moving either toward the new EU, or, increasingly, to China as the new direction-setting superpower. How does the entertainment demands of say 2 billion Chinese people and 1.2 billion Indian people affect the music industry, as they come into a new era of disposable income and better, cheaper, ubiquitous technology?
13) The monopolization of airwave radio has spawned both satelitte radio AND internet radio. Two entirely different approaches. No one can buy up ALL the internet radio sites. They are too easily spawned.
14) The UN has put forward a resolution to set up a global entity to control and manage the internet - which is now a global asset, and a global force in all markets of trade, commerce, and the distribution of information. The US is fighting that, of course, because they would like to own it and run it and control it, but they are losing power globally these days, and there is no one to intimidate by sending an army to lean on them. You cannot stop the rain by shoot a gun into it. The internet, like the flow of international business itself, has become a force of nature.
15) Technology has options that never existed before to create and distribute music.
16) Full-time professional musicians are competing with hobbyists and part-time musicians for producing quality product. And this competition can now come from anywhere and everywhere in the world. And it comes 24 hours per day, everyday. The next great blues album could come from Bolivia, or Finland, or China, or Toronto, or Austin. How much money should a professional full-time musician invest in an album, when it may be lost in a wash of similar or better product produced for next to nothing in any of dozens of countries? It's a big world out there, and everyone has the ability to compete easily and inexpensively now. The barrier to entry are very small. The barriers to huge success, have therefore become almost impossibly high.

What will happen next, you ask? Where is it headed? Will large labels sell out because they cannot make the profits they once made, and cannot compete with cheaper approaches, and cannot afford the old payola system anymore considering the dearth of retail revenue dollars to be had? Will new companies come in from elsewhere to buy up our recording and music industry as the old American owners sell out in frustration over lower profits? Will everyone switch to internet radio or satelite radio? Will music itself swing more to the Chinese and Indian markets because that is where the bulk of the consumers will be soon? Will CD's become free giveaways as an advertisement to build excitement for concerts where the tickets are $150 each? Will this lead to more mixed-artist CD's? Will cheap, ubiquitous technology for recording and making music turn the industry from large scale big-dollar enterprises, to amateur-based, small-scale, ecclectic groups with small clustered fanbases? Will being a musician no longer qualify as a full-time vocation? Will it be relegated to a hobby for 95% of the practicioners?

I honestly don't know. There are so many variables it is hard to say with any reliability what will happen. So many things are possible, and it is possible for so many things to happen concurrently. There may not be "A" single new direction for the music industry, but rather a diffusion of the music world chasing many new directions all at once. Entropy increases over time. Maybe someone else's crystal ball is clearer than mine.

The point I was trying to make about the crystal ball was that it doesn't work. There are too many factors impacting at once to guess what is going to happen. So I was just trying to quantify what some of those factors were.

I really don't know what will happen, at all. I can't say anything - except perhaps that it will change. Anything that cannot continue forever as is will change. As for your suggestion that the labels should stop looking at copying past successes and simply focus on what is new and unique and good, it begs the question, "what is good?" When Jazz first came out, it seemed a lower form of music. It made no sense to proper classical musicians at the time. It didn't seem like music at all. When Rock and Roll first arrived, it seemed like cheap crap. Anti-establishment, anti-American, poor-quality, simple-minded, criminally-inclined garbage. Many thought it inspired devil worship. Most thought it created malcontents, drug addicts, and encouraged radical rebellious behavior in the youth. But they also thought it was cheap, poor quality music. Yet look how it changed things and look how it evolved. And look how popular it became.

So it is not always immediately obvious to people what is 'good'. It is easy to see what is different and unique, but not all different things are necessarily 'good'. 'Good' seems to be highly subjective. I have always been amazed at one aspect of the music industry. A CD of a really great band that involved 50 people and two years to make, will be on the shelf right next to another CD that was thrown together in a basement by a couple of teenagers in about an hour, and they will both be priced the same. And what's more, the the music from the basement band might sound to me like simple, uninspired poor work, while the other highly professional band might sound to me like high quality work. Excellent melodies, and harmonies, and great virtuosic playing, wonderful production, etc. And yet the cheaply done basement product might easily outsell the 'better' product.
Maybe we could take an example of Blink 182 and any Eric Johnson album. Eric's albums are beautifully crafted high quality works that take years to put together. But Blink 182 sounded to me to have very little musical value, frankly. And yet Blink 182 has outsold Johnson many many times over.
And no - it's not only advertising and marketing. Some of the lower quality stuff were break-through successes with no marketing push or dollars behind them. People simply liked them regardless. I have not heard White Stripes yet, but I read that it was that kind of product with that kind of break-through success. And it's just a guitar and drums.
There is no accounting for taste. And I guess that is what it comes down to. How can we say for sure what is 'good' anymore? It seems we can only really say what we like. Most classical recordings are good music, well played. But we probably don't buy that as much as we buy 'popular music'.
To me, Steely Dan is good, high quality stuff. So is Pink Floyd. So is Toto. So is Eric Johnson, so is Sarah Maclachlan, and Yes, and Vertical Horizon, and Al DiMeola, and a bunch of other artists. But that doesn't mean the next person agrees. I know lots of people who find Eric Johnson's music boring. To them it's all just self-indulgent guitar playing. Some guy showing off his 'Geek Trick" of being able to play a guitar fast. But for those people, that is not an especially attractive talent and has no value. They have seen lots and lots of people play guitars fast, and there is no shine left on that apple. It's been done. Many, many, many times before. The more subtle aspects of his music is lost on them. As soon as they hear him wind up into yet another pentatonic run at high speed, they think, "Oh, ok, I got it. He's one of those....." and he loses them. There is no accounting for taste.

Quality, is a perceived thing based on a listener's taste. I wish I could argue the opposite side. I wish I could point out that there are at least SOME universally-accepted concrete rules about quality involving meter, and rhythm, and staying in key, and tight harmonies, and well-balanced sound mix, etc. etc., but I can't.
My instincts tell me that quality exists above and beyond matters of taste. By my observations and experience tell me otherwise. Sometimes people love what I might consider the most purile, worst quality offerings. And those people think that what they are listening to is high quality.

You and I may squint and shake our heads at the inanity of it all - but there it is. And their opinion about quality and value is worth every bit as much as mine or yours. To be fair and just, we have to acknowledge that.
I learned an important lesson about this from a guy I used to know at work. Wes G. He has a HUGE collection of music and seemed to be a well-versed musicologist. He could tell you the entire history of all the members of every band you ever heard of, and cite every album, and had an incredibly impressive mental storehouse of information about the music industry and the people and music that have come from it in the last hundred years. Then he brought me in some of his favorites burned onto a CD so I could sample them. This stuff was like eating steaming cowpies. It sounded horrible to me! He had become a big fan of punk. But not the better punk. He liked the most raw, base stuff possible. If it sounded like someone took the cheapest Sears guitar, plugged it into the cheapest amp, cut the speakers, cranked the amp, then threw the guitar down a flight of stairs - then he loved it. Honestly, this literally didn't even sound like music to me at all! It was akin to music the way the sound of a bus crashing into a garbage truck is akin to a symphony. It had nothing to do with music. It was just noise! But he, a man whose knowledge about music I admired, LOVED it. And he didn't care for Eric Johnson, and absolutely HATED Stevie Ray Vaughn. He called SRV's music "Guitar Masturbation". And this guy is a guitar player himself! Again, there is no accounting for taste. The lesson Wes taught me was that quality itself is subjective. And that I have to respect everyone else's taste.

I would love to think that it is as simple as having a standard universal set of rules about quality, and being able to measure all music against those rules, but that's just not how it works out there in the real world.
Let me give an example of something concrete. Music-related, but not music. Guitars. Fender guitars vs. Gibson guitars. In the design, and manufacturing of a physical product there has to be various elements of construction that indicate relative levels of quality. Things that work better, last longer, are more artful, require more materials, more expensive materials, things that require more skill to design or build, etc. typically are considered higher quality. This is true for anything from toasters to tow-trucks. From jewellery to jet planes.
Let's look at the construction of a Fender Stratocaster. It is a flat-top, simple cutout body. It has a bolt-on neck made from different wood than the body. The neck has no tilt-back head even, so it's made from less wood than others. In most cases, there isn't even a fingerboard on it. There are no abalone or pearl inlays for logos, or decorations, or fret markers. Just a simple sticker for a logo. There is no neck or head binding at all, let alone multi-layered binding. The body has no binding either. The pickups and all electronics are simply mounted to a cheap plastic sheet and screwed onto the guitar. You can buy a whole mounted pickguard for $49.99. All the electronics premounted. The pickups are the cheapest, noisiest, single-coil pickups. Full of hum. Poor shielding on the pickguards, usually. I don't even want to go down to the level of a Telecaster. We'll just leave that one alone.
Then look at how a Gibson Les Paul or a PRS guitar is made. Set neck construction which allows greater resonance, greater sustain as the vibrations can pass easier from the neck through the body. Binding on the body front and back, and the neck, and the headstock. Tilt-back headstock for greater string seating and greater resonance, and it stays in tune better. Beautiful abalone and pearl inlays for the fret markers and logos. The fret markers are not just little dots either. They are large blocks or trapezoids. Ebony fingerboards. Carved arch tops. Humbucking pickups, double-coil for quiet operation, and smooth, rich sound. The bodies are made from more expensive tonewoods with great resonance. The Les Paul is famous for it's sustain because of these woods and the set neck construction. The electronics and pickups are mounted directly in the wood, and from the rear through the wood, requiring higher degree of craftsmanship to make clean cut lines, blind wiring channels, etc. etc.

Importantly, I should add that I personally own both. In fact, I have 4 Fender Strats and 3 Gibsons at the moment (A Les Paul Custom, Flying V, and an Explorer) and so I am NOT prejudiced either way based on my own guitar choices or preferences. This is as completely unbiased an assessment as I can possibly make. Clearly, by any objective reasonable observation, a Gibson Les Paul is a far, far better guitar and much higher quality guitar than a Fender Stratocaster.
HOWEVER..... Sales over the past 50 years suggest otherwise. They suggest that the Strat is at least the equal if not superior to the Les Paul. Many guitarists seem to prefer Strats. Many that you talk to might talk for hours about the various high quality aspects of the legendary Strat. They might even make the cheap construction aspects of it sound like virtues. ("Look it even has a bolt-on neck so it can be adusted when it goes wrong!!") My God.

Some people will pay more for a Strat than they would for a Les Paul or a PRS, because they honestly think that the Strat is a better guitar. Millions of people feel that a Fender Strat is a high quality guitar. In fact, millions have paid two or three times the money to get an American-made Strat vs a Mexican-made Strat based on some perception of quality of American-made goods vs Mexican made goods, despite the fact that the two factories are only 96 miles apart, and the necks and electronic components are all made in the same factory and shared anyway.

I respectfully submit that quality IS a subjective concept. These people think it is high quality. So they pay high prices for them. They value them and treasure them, and treat them in every possible way as if they ARE high quality. And in this way, they come to be considered high quality guitars. Despite any detailed objective analysis of how they are actually constructed.

You might argue that the one guitar is low quality and the other higher quality regardless of the opinions of millions upon millions of people, but I say that those millions of opinions count. They are money. They are sales. They determine the success of one brand over another, and the ultimate survival of one product and the demise of another. They determine what gets used and heard and accepted. Can millions of people be wrong?
Well, it's a philosophical argument, I suppose. If the fittest survive, that suggests that the winner in sales and survival was the higher quality product. At least to one way of thinking.

Now let's translate this back to music. If Back Street Boys sell millions upon millions of albums, and Allan Holdsworth can't even find a gig to play these days,(he said that in a GP interview last year) and if his previous albums don't sell and are not desired by anyone, who has the better quality product? Who will survive? To my ears, Allan Holdsworth sounds like better, more sophisticated stuff than most 'boy bands'. But apparently I am in the minority by a HUGE margin.
Apparently the most important aspect of any music is whether or not you can dance to it.

This lesson I have learned and seen reinforced many times in life: However sure I may feel about my convictions, I always must allow that I COULD be wrong. And so, I allow credence to other opinions. I try to be fair. I try to stay humble, and I always keep in mind that what seems like immutable irrefutable undeniable FACT to me, is always only just my opinion, since it is only the result of my own observations and analysis, and that must always necessarily be tainted by my own understanding and limited by the levels of my own gifts whatever they may be.

As for 'rules of quality', I do think there ARE rules that I apply to my own music. They aren't ISO 9002 compliant and aren't tracked on a spreadsheet or anything, but they do exist. They are things like the following:
1) Do the vocals stay on key, or do they waver sharp or flat? or does my voice crack, is my breathing right or do I run out of breath on a long note, etc. ?

2) Is the song interesting to listen to?

3) Is there an intro, a verse, a chorus, a bridge, in a recognizeable structure? Or at least, are there changes to keep it interesting?

4) Do each of the instruments sound good? Too much bottom or top end?

5) Are all the voices and instruments in a reasonable balance in the mix, or are some too loud, some not heard at all, do some share the same frequency ranges such that they step on each other too much?

6) Does the music match the words? In other words, are the lyrics about some dark introspective topic, but the music sounds light and bouncy? or vice versa?

7) Does the melody make sense? Is there a logical progression?

8) Do the words make sense?

9) Does the song sound like something that can connect to another person emotionally? Or is it struggling too much with technique or technology, such that the emotional message is lost?

10) Are the instrument parts played well? Or are they too difficult for me and notes are missed or not hit correctly, etc.

11) Are there any catchy or memorable sounds or melodies in the piece, that might stick with a listener afterwards?

12) Are there any glaring mistakes, like one instrument hitting the wrong chord, or unplanned silences, or whatever?

13) Are all the instruments playing together in the same tempo, or are some too late or too early and don't hit the right note or chord at the right time? Is it sloppy, or tight?

14) Is there a reasonable continuity of sound, or is it too choppy, and disconnected?

15) Does it sound like something I would enjoy listening to myself?

And more rules besides these. These are typical of the kinds of things I think about when trying to judge or improve the quality of my own music that I write and record. However, all of these considerations and all of this work means nothing to someone who simply doesn't like it regardless.
My ideas about how to render a high-quality piece of music may differ from the next guy. I might want to do 25 takes of a guitar track to get it right, whereas the next guy only wants to hear something that sounds raw, and with the energy and flaws that come on the first try of something. The next person after him may want it to sound more like a symphony. Everyone is different. I can't please everyone, so I have my own guidelines and standards about quality, and I follow those to the best of my ability.
My music is the best I can do according to what I think is good. And that's it. Some will like it, some won't. Some will think it is quality work, and some will think it is poor quality - maybe because it has too much guitar work and not enough keyboard work, or not enough percussion, or too many vocals, or not enough .....or whatever. That's the real world we have to live in. And some of those people run record labels, and record stores, and radio station playlists.
Such is life.

Conversation on this does illuminate sad and unfortunate truths. The consensus seems to be that there are ways to tell if something is 'good', however, we seem to feel that 'good' quality doesn't seem to matter when it comes to success or even survival. Excellent restaurants shrivel and die, while McDonalds goes on forever and keeps opening up new locations. High-end department stores die off, while Walmart takes over the retail world. Low quality sells and thrives - even in music where low quality and high quality are the same price on the shelf.

Leo Fender was not an engineer, nor even a guitar player or musician of any kind. He was an accountant. He was just trying to make the cheapest possible electric guitar he could. That was the Broadcaster (later renamed the Telecaster). It was just an ugly plank of wood with strings and pickups. It looked like something any teenager could throw together in his basement. It was literally laughed at at the first music industry show he brought it to. The strat was just a slightly improved version, but again, extremely cheap to build.
His genius was in building something cheap but useable that sold based on style. (Which costs nothing to add.) The whole cultural phenomenon that sprang from that, was part marketing, and part happy accident. Cheap sells.
There are all kinds of tastes out there, and that was really my original point. Sometimes you connect to people who have similar tastes.

I heard from a woman yesterday who has two teenagers and one almost a teenager. Her kids don't want her to take my album "Light 'Em Up!" out of the car. Every time they get in the car, they want to hear it. Even when she wants to play some music she needed to practice her singing to (she sings in a choir), they begged and demanded my CD. That made my day to hear that.
Then also, a few months ago my daughter told me she heard my music coming from the headphones of some boy at school she didn't know. She had no idea how he would have found my music, but he did. And apparently likes it. Cool!
Also, two young guys that were making a movie called me up and asked if they could use my music on the soundtrack. Of course I said yes.
Another woman told me the other day she uses my "Light 'Em Up!" album as inspiration for her sculpture art class because it gets people's blood going, and then she uses my softer album "Natural Light" as music for her customers when she is doing massage therapy.
When you hear back from friends that they liked it, you never know if they are just being polite. But when you hear about things like those, you feel better. Frankly, I have been surprised that young people would like or even understand my stuff. I would have thought they would be into Rap or Punk, or some guy with so many piercings and tattoos he looks like he fell down a flight of stairs holding a tackle box, then rolled around on the ground over wet newspapers open to the comics page. I might have thought teenagers liked things based primarily on image, and I cannot imagine my image appealing to teenagers. But everyone is different, even at young ages apparently.
Come to think of it, that album didn't have a picture of me on it. I guess that tells me I should continue that approach....

As for universally accepted 'rules' or guidelines for quality in music, there is a company called Taxi.com. Since no one can legally accept unsolicited music anymore, and since artists still want people to hear their music, this company fills that gap. It is a service that connects the people who need to find music for TV shows, commercials, full-length films, concert promoters, band managers for stars, record labels looking for artists, artists looking for songs, people who need music for any purpose, etc. - with the musicians that can supply that music.
As a musician, you sign up for about $300, and then you look through their listings of what people need and see if you can supply music for that need. You burn a CD with your submission, fill out a form, and mail it off to them.
They have industry experts listen to it decide if it fits and then either dump it, or, if it's 'good' and a good fit to that need, then they forward it on to the person who needs it. The film producer, or band manager or whomever.
If you ask, they will send you back feedback on your submission and tell you whether it's 'good' or not. Be prepared though - they are EXTREMELY picky. They are very critical, and their standards are extremely high. But they will give you details and advice about your style, your content, your approach, ideas, execution, quality, etc.
These are the kinds of people that have been in the industry for many years and supposedly have the kind of ear where they know what is good, and they know what sells, and can articulate details either way why it may be 'good' or 'not good'.
There are many amatuer musicians that belong to Taxi.com, but there are also many pros who are well known, or who have been well known (Randy Bachman is one that comes to mind off the top of my head) who belong to Taxi.com, and this is a way to sell their music into the film industry or music industry. Eric Johnson could definitely benefit from Taxi.com. I bet his music would find it's way as the soundtracks for some movies.
It's an interesting solution to the problem of finding a market for your songs, or finding a manager or record company. If you cannot send your music unsolicited to a record label, how else do you get them to hear your stuff? Well this is a good solution for that, perhaps.
It's also a way to get expert-level, non-biased feedback on your music from someone who knows what they are talking about and doesn't have to say nice things to be polite. They just tell it like it is. I was a member several years ago. I'm thinking I should rejoin again.

Buying a Telescope

Someone asked for advice on how to buy a telescope and what to consider in the process, so I thought I would help out and write up a little guide based on the few things I discovered as I went through my own investigations, and using the lessons I learned to best advantage.

I don't know everything about them, but perhaps I know a little. I will pass on that little bit.

Rule # 1 Do NOT buy a cheap telescope.
It is a waste of money. Generally speaking, if you are planning to spend less than $600, then just get a nice pair of binoculars, and use those. You will find it a lot easier to see things, and find things. Cheaper scopes tend to shake a lot, and you can never focus them, and the lenses are not accurate enough to capture any detail, etc. They will drive you crazy when you try to find things and focus on them. Just don't bother. Honestly.
There are two big brand names in telescopes. Celestron and Meade. Then there are a lot of smaller name brands. From what I have heard and read, these two are roughly equal in quality and price.
Mine is a Celestron Celestar 8. Essentially the common misconception about telescopes is that the bigger they are, the more they magnify the image. This is false. (Why is it that so much in this world is always counter-intuitive??). The magnification is entirely produced by the eyepiece. However, the more you magnify an image, the more light you need to supply in order to see it. And that is what the telescope does. It captures the light and focuses it into the eyepiece. A larger diameter telescope captures more light, therefore it allows you to use a more powerful eyepiece to magnify the image more to see more detail. With most telescopes, there is a small telescope, called a 'finder scope' attached to the side. This allows you to easily find what you are looking for and 'aim' the main scope. These obviously have to be exactly synchronized with the main scope. Most sessions start with synchronizing them by pointing them are terrestrial targets. Something not moving.

There are 3 main different types of telescope to get. There is the classic style, called a Refractor, which is long and narrow, and has one main lens at one end and the eyepiece at the other. Think Captain Bly. These are either cheap and useless models, or they are impractically large and far too expensive, and awkward to use. Pass.
A Newtonian (also called a reflector telescope) is a large, long tube with an open hole at one end, and a mirror at the other end. The eyepiece is sticking out the side near the front. The light comes in the open hole, travels down the tube to the mirror, then bounces back up into a prism which reflects it sideways out through the eyepiece. This type is typically less expensive, and therefore allows you to get a larger diameter for the same price. However, they are bulky, and the open end leads to dust inside which intereferes with quality.
Then there is the Schmidt-Cassegrain style. This is the one that most people get when they get even a little serious about it. This has a shorter, fatter cylinder, with a glass lens on the front, and a solid center section in the middle of that lens. The light comes in that lens, travels down the tube, bounces back from the sealed mirror at the back, up into another mirror embedded in that center section in the front lens, and then bounces back again to the bottom again, this time focused through the center through a prism and an eyepiece. By bouncing the light twice, it gives the effective power of a telescope three times as long, without having to actually be that long, It is much more compact. (for sound engineers, this concept is the optical equivalent to a 'folded horn' speaker enclosure)

In all cases, the key in terms of the 'power' of a telescope is the diameter. A 4" or 5" diameter is fairly small and will only capture limited light. You will see the moon. You might see a couple of planets. You will not see any DSO's (Deep Space Objects). Very little of interest. These are essentially toys. They are meant to appeal to well-intentioned parents to buy for their kids for Christmas. Usually the kids try to set it up, get frustrated, leave it, and never go back to it. Save your money. Pass. Then there are the 8" size. These are good. You can capture quite a lot with that. DSO's, planets, nebulas, clusters, lots of stars, details on planets and their moons, etc. (instead of just a white dot) Then there are 10" size. These will capture slightly more things. Nebulas are easier to see, etc. Then it goes into 14", 18" 21", etc. These are for institutions. They are tens of thousands of dollars typically.

Weight is a significant consideration. An 8" and it's stand will weigh somewhere between 60 and a hundred pounds to carry outside to set up and use. A 10" and it's stand may be 140 lbs or more, It is considerably more effort. Anything larger than that is a two-man job and a serious bit of work Like picking up and carrying a big-screen TV. You will want those to be permanently mounted in a private observatory. That's a whole different level of expense and commitment then.....

So really, practically speaking, the best size is either an 8" or 10". Preferably an 8". You must have a motorized one. If it has no motor, then walk away. It is useless. Consider that when you are focused on an object in the sky with any serious magnification at all, the Earth is turning. That star or planet will scroll out of your field of vision in roughly 2 seconds. Perhaps less. That makes it , for all practical purposes, literally IMPOSSIBLE to find anything. It always takes more than a few seconds to find what you are looking for. Trust me on this. And when things are constantly sliding around on you at the same time, you WILL want to give up. As for motors, there are two kinds. 1) A right-ascencion motor (RA motor). This is the one that tracks the Earth's movement, and counters for it. It allows an object to stay in the scope. You have to start by orienting the scope to the north star, and then the RA motor is aligned with the direction of spin of the Earth. (that is a little trickier than it sounds.....lol) This is a basic requirement on any decent scope. 2) A Declination motor. This is optional. This allows for up and down motorized movement of the scope in the 90 degree opposite direction as the RA motor. (north/south) The combination of both motors allows you to have those digital finder systems, where you punch in the coordinates RA XX.X, DE YY.Y, and it finds your star for you. That's nice. I don't have that on mine. I just have the RA motor. The rest I do myself.

Things to look for: A good STURDY stand. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. If the stand is not rock solid, then the slightest breeze will blow on your scope and shake the image and make it blurry and ruin all your hard work finding things. A vertical adjustment. I didn't get this and now I find it is sometimes hard to get into position under the scope to see things. That would have helped a lot. Optics. Extremely important. Basically, if you get Celestron or Meade, you're ok. They both have excellent optics. I cannot say about any other brands.

Prices: Mine, with an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain Celestron, with an RA motor and a sturdy stand, but no vertical adjustment, was about $1199. Then with the extra eyepiece, and a barlow lens (this is a 2X multiplier) , and a couple of filters, etc. It got to about $1500 or $1600 I think. That's a very basic price for a decent telescope. If you want one with the digital finder system (both motors, etc), in the same size, then you are looking at roughly $2,000 to about $5,000. The 10" will be significantly more. Mostly, they like to sell the ones with the digital finder systems. More money for them, of course. But I frankly wasn't into it to the point that I wanted to spend that much money. $1500 was my limit. For the same model with the digital finder system at that time, it was $3300. And then the extra eyepieces and filters, etc. Way too much for me for the degree I wanted to get involved. I don't regret that now. It's been great to have fun with once in a while, but I don't use it nearly enough to make it worthwhile for that.

One cautionary note: The moon is very bright when looking through a telescope. Use colored filters, or risk damaging your eyes permanently. Another hint, take the scope outside a couple hours before you want to start using it. Let it aclimatize to the outside air first. Otherwise you will get fog on the lens and mirror and it will be impossible to focus. Also, turn off the lights in the house. Get your eyes used to the dark. One more, take a compass. It's handy when aligning it to exact north.

One more thing, you will need to be able to find the north star by yourself. To do this, find the big dipper. Take the two outer stars on the cup part of the dipper. Draw a line between them and extend the line out straight, above the cup. That line points directly at the north star. That is the one star that will not move. Everything in the sky rotates around that. You will need to align your scope with that.

Another thing, all the planets are on the same ecliptic plane as the sun and the moon. They all rise where the sun and the moon does, and set where the sun and the moon do. Draw a mental line across the sky from where the sun rises to where it sets. When looking for planets, look along that line.

Oh one last thing - get a software program. There are lots. Some are cheap, some are expensive. In this case, the cheap ones are probably good enough. Save your money for the scope. I think the one I use is Observatory Gold. It works nicely, and wasn't too much money. Plan your viewing ahead of time with that, and use it to know exactly where to look for what you want. It's fun.

Should an Artist Please Themselves, or Please Their Audience?

In a thread on another forum, someone said in answer to a question from me, "Writing music to please others is a recipe for disaster."

I don't happen to agree, but it's an interesting point on a subject where there may be opinions on both sides, and therefore there might be interesting fodder for discussion.

Frank Zappa played music that amused himself, regardless of the fact that it went against virtually every conventional wisdom about music and what will be successful. So did Yes, and King Crimson, and many other artists over the years. However, he said a record label gave him a chance in 1965, and they spent a lot of money promoting him and pushing it until it sold enough to break even. He later said that the industry was MUCH harder now, and no record company would ever give someone like him a chance anymore.

Those days are long gone. The music business is much more about business now, not music. New bands like that don't seem to penetrate the financial guardians of the mainstream music industry anymore. So, does this mean that different, unique artists, and unique musical projects toil in obscurity, never to be seen or heard by the public? Yes, perhaps. This is not 1965 any longer. Back then, it was different.

So, as an artist hoping to make a living writing and playing music, do you serve your private personal muse exclusively, and continue working at some minimum wage job somewhere and starve, and never enter the music industry at all? Or do you try to figure out what people want to hear, and what sells, and then try to work your way into the industry to earn a living as an artist/musician but always compromise your musical tastes to match the market? Some might consider it selfish to only entertain yourself, and consider your highest goal should be to serve others by entertaining them. Give them what they want and need. They might suggest that is more giving. Not only is it the more sensible thing to do economically, but it is also more unselfish.

However, others might argue that if you compromise your music in order to sell it then you have sold out, prostituted your artistic integrity, and are no longer a worthy artist. Still others might argue that if you stick to your own musical styles and ideas and it doesn't garner any sort of commercial audience, then you never even enter the playing field at all, and you are merely another hobbyist, and will never get anywhere musically. Both arguments have a point.

Personally, I could probably take either side and debate from that perspective, because there are compelling arguments in both directions, but I'd like to know what the consensus of opinion is. What do you think? Stick to your music and stay unknown? Or play what people want to hear and possibly become known and thereby get your music out there? Or do you do one then the other? Billy Joel became famous writing highly successful commercial music that sells well (and which I like by the way), but then he wanted badly to write an album of classical-sounding original compositions. As a new artist, he would never have been given a chance to write, record, and sell that album, but as an established famous artist, he had enough clout to get it done and get it out there for posterity, even if it only sells 100 copies. He wanted to write that music for the sake of the music, not for the sake of what would be accepted or what would sell. He achieved a personal musical goal he had for decades. It was a pure luxury. The personal self-indulgence of a star. And why not? Good for him. He deserves the right to do that after so many years and after giving so much to so many people.

But the industry is not set up to indulge the unknown artist with that same luxury. Will there be new Frank Zappas? New King Crimsons? New Yes's? New Gentle Giants? Big labels would never take a chance on them nowadays of course, but would small independent labels? Perhaps. But if they do, will they have enough money to market them to a large national or international market? No. By the nature of small labels, they are small specifically because they DON'T have the resources for that. So they probably stay local. And if it is geographically contained to a small local area, are there enough fans of that eclectic type of music to support a band trying to make a full time living at it? If some band with weird obtuse angular, different music could only play in your city and 50 miles surrounding, would they make a living? Are there lots of clubs hiring bands playing that kind of bizarre music? Are there lots of concerts in your local area hiring bands playing that kind of stuff? If you were running a small local label, would you make a business decision like that? Would you bet your limited resources on pushing an artist with such limited eclectic appeal to a small geography?

This is a philosophical issue, and a business issue, that concerns every musician, because most musicians seem to always want to play material that might not be popular. Everyone wants to play stuff that might be fun for them, but not necessarily to others. The drummer wants to play drum-oriented music where it's all about the rhythms and the percussion instruments, and the rest is less important. The bass player wants funky slap playing that features the bass, and the rest of the instruments shrink into the background. (Stanley Clark plays two bass tracks, one to hold the bottom end of the tune together and the other as a lead instrument) Vocalists want it to be all about the vocals, and the rest of the band is just background accompaniment, pianists want it all about a grand piano sound, and the rest is there for dramatic accent and a rhythm section.
These, of course, are not 100% true all the time. They are oversimplifications simply to make a point. But it does seem relatively rare that the personal choices of a musician coincide exactly with what is popular and sells. Therefore those two goals always seem to be at odds, don't they? So what do you think? What do you think is the best decision to make in this kind of choice?


Yes, life is all about the trade-offs. Every decision. Every day. This is another set of trade-offs. That is exactly what this is about. The reason it HAS to be competitive is that there are not enough seats on the bus for all those who want to ride. We have to compete for a seat. There are literally millions of people who would love to have their music played on the radio, but there is only airtime for a few.
Business is about survival of the fittest. In it's infancy, the music business made "mistakes" and allowed music that was good and unique and different to get out there even though it wasn't profitable. But these days, the companies that make poor business decisions are either quickly crushed by the competition, or they are 'consumed' by their competitors who are financially stronger and have more leverage. So the survivors have learned and they don't make those kinds of "business mistakes" anymore.

The purpose of any business is to make profit for it's shareholders. It's really just that simple. Anything that serves that interest is good, anything that works against that goal is bad and should be avoided. Professional management is all about managing the precious and limited resources of the company (money, people, time, equipment, assets, relationships, reputation, etc.) to optimum efficiency to achieve the highest profit possible for that company and to encourage growth and ensure survival. Anything else is counter-productive to their goals.

They have learned their lessons from years of spending large amounts of money on bands that flopped, or gave poor rates of return on the investment (known in business as ROI). They now know exactly how to spend money to get maximum returns, and they know how to write recording contracts with artists to squeeze every dollar out for themselves and leave the artists with virtually nothing - or even in debt in many cases. The record companies are protected, the artists are exposed. That is because the company negotiates from a position of strength and the individual artist has none, therefore it is not a negotiation at all, but rather a dictation of terms and conditions by the record label, entirely to their benefit.

This doesn't serve the purposes of the public, nor our culture, and certainly not the artists who create the music, but it serves the purposes of the record companies, and so that is how they choose to operate.

The unfortunate irony of this is that, as an artist, even if you do choose to create music that is popular, and even if you are very good, and honest, and diligent, and devote your life to it, the odds are so stacked against you by now, that you STILL might not survive as a musician and artist.

So it's no wonder that the making of music is falling more and more to the amatuer set. Those who would otherwise be full time musicians, now do other jobs for a living and indulge their passion and their muse as a part-time non-profitable enterprise.

I wonder if, one day, the idea of making a full-time living from playing music will seem like trying to make a full-time living playing Frisbee.....

Recording Studio Techniques

Since I have been recording in my own studio environment for over 25 years, and since I have read a number of books, magazine articles, taken videotape courses, and read websites on the subject, I have over the years, both collected and invented a number of studio techniques that I thought might be useful if I posted them here - just on the outside chance that someone might come upon this in their travels....

Some of these I picked up in a course or an article (like the first one here on Stereo Miking), and others I discovered through need or sometimes even by mistake. And sometimes I earned the lesson through hundreds of hours of tweaking and experimentation.

For this first post on the subject, I will write 3 techniques to get started, but I will have more to add in future posts as well. Here is the first installment:

Stereo Miking:
Microphone placement is a big part of the art of recording studio techniques. Things sound different depending upon where you hear them from. To hear a realistic sound image of an instrument the way you hear it in person, you need to get a stereo image of it because you have two ears and that is how you hear things normally. To get a stereo image (a left and a right track) of an acoustic instrument (like an acoustic guitar) you usually need two mics (not always - for my Ovation acoustic, I mike one side and plug in for the other and get a blend of the two distinct sounds). The question becomes, how do you position the mics for a stereo effect that is similar to what a real person hears when sitting there in front of the musician. Part of the problem is something called 'phasing'. This is caused by the placement of the microphones where one mic picks up the sound in one section of the sine wave, and the other mic picks it up a little further away, in another section of the same wave. If the two are exact opposites, for instance if one is at the peak of the sine wave, and the other is at the lowest point of the valley, then theoretically one cancels out the other and there is no sound at all. In reality though, it is never that precisely opposite so what really happens is a very thin, weak overall sound when the two are mixed together because part of the sound from one side is being cancelled out by the other side.
To fix this, you would need two identical mics in EXACTLY the same position in front of the instrument. The problem then becomes that they pick up the EXACT same sound, so there is no difference, therefore no separation, therefore no stereo, therefore no point. So there is a simple technique that solves this nicely called the “X-Y mic placement” technique. You take two identical microphones (some even try to buy sequential serial numbers to get them as exactly the same as possible), then, you place them one on top of the other pointing directly at the acoustic guitar. They should be separated by as little air as possible without touching. The diaphragms inside the mics should line up exactly on top of each other. Now swivel each mic 45 degrees in the opposite directions, so one is pointing toward the bottom of the guitar and one is pointing up the neck toward the head. The mics need to be on a 90 degree angle from each other. This gives the effect of hearing sounds from each side of the instrument and the room and the airspace around it AS THEY ARRIVE in the same spot – like your head does. Because the mic diaphragms are so close to each other, phasing is decreased as much as possible, and this allows a full, deep, rich sound, as well as stereo imaging.

The Sound Landscape:
When you go to a concert, you actually hear the instruments coming from different parts of the stage, That is what gives it that added sense of reality and depth of space. To create that same expansive feel, I try to do the same thing when do my final mix down from 32 tracks to a 2-track stereo image. You can do this using the stereo pan controls on each track for side to side placement, and also using the reverb and or delay for front to back-of-stage depth-of-field placement. If you have 3 main vocals, you can get different effects by placing the singers all together in one spot, or by separating them across the sound panorama. Keep in mind, that placing them together will usually give a tighter sound, but you will sacrifice clarity. Spreading things out geographically, will give a spacious feel, and a more clear sound, but some things that you might want to sound tight and together (like some background vocals, or a horn section) might sound too loose for you intended sound picture.
Here’s how I think of it: Think of painting a picture of the band. Do you paint all the players in one spot? All in the middle of the stage, or do you spread them out? Which ones do you group together in one area and how close are they standing? Well, when you have a mental picture of where people are standing, then you will know where their sounds have to come from. Then pan them to their spot on stage in your mental painting. Use the reverb and delay to place them forward or back in the stage, and then use volume adjustments to zoom in on someone for special solo parts, etc. Also consider that people don’t always stand in one place through the whole song. How about allowing people to move once in a while? Take a guitar solo and gradually pan it across from center off to the left, and then increase the reverb as he goes off into the back. Or imagine the opposite where an instrument or a singer comes from the side and the back out to center stage for a solo. This is what the automation in recording systems like Pro Tools are excellent for. Every song has it’s own settings for everything, and the settings can change dynamically as the song moves along.

Jigsaw Puzzle EQ Strategy:
One thing often overlooked by musicians (and less-experienced recording engineers) is that an instrument that sounds great on its own, sounds different once in the mix with the other instruments. Some frequencies cut through, and others are trampled by the similar frequencies from other instruments. In fact, in the general mix of instruments there is often a general ‘mud’ in the middle somewhere, where the individual instruments lose their distinction and everything blends together in a messy muddy way. This is not good, usually. One way to avoid this is to use the EQ (Equalization controls which control the amount of boost or cut of each frequency range) on each instrument track to fine-tune the sound so that the different instruments fit together better. That way they all contribute to the sound of the ‘band’, but each instrument can still be distinguished.
To achieve this, I think of each instrument as a puzzle piece. I can carve away a part of one to make room for a part of the next instrument that needs to occupy that frequency space in the sound. For example, you might cut the guitar sound around 200 hz, so that the bass can be heard without turning it up too loud that it dominates the overall mix. Sometimes you can achieve sound distinction advantages of a solo by using eq inventively instead of always using the volume. One rule of thumb for EQing is that you should generally not adjust the eq for any frequency for any track more than about 3db. Any more than that, and you have a different problem. Eq can be used to fix certain problems, but only to a point. Too much adjustment and it’s a mistake. The sound of the instrument loses it’s integrity and authenticity.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I am concerned about the future. Without being overly pessimistic OR optimistic, but trying to remain realistic, I want to anticipate the things that are likely to happen by extrapolating from current trends, and taking in expert opinions and analysis, do some of my own analysis, and plan around the results of all of that. Few things that happen are completely bad or good within themselves, except by perspective, we may interpret them one way or another. The decline of the British Empire probably seemed like a very bad thing from the British perspective (for those who had the courage to acknowledge it at the time), but it probably benefited others around the globe as their opportunities began to blossom. America’s star began to shine after England’s began to fade a bit. No matter where you are, the place you are in is not the only place to live in the world. The job you are doing is not the only job you can do. Life is big. There are always many possibilities. Change is inevitable, so adapting to change as it happens will allow you to survive. But anticipating change beforehand, will allow you to thrive.

With that in mind, lets look at some of the trends that are happening within the US now and looking at how we compare to other countries and try to extrapolate into the future to see where these trends are likely to lead us. Is the US the best place to stay long-term? If so, where in the US? What will be the better areas to live? The northeast? The northwest? The Mid-west? The south has been where most of the growth has been - is that the best place for the future? Is it better to move into the major cities close to jobs without spending a fortune on gasoline when it gets to European levels at $5 and $6 per gallon? Or will it be better to live in rural areas where we can grow our own food? And what will be the better areas to focus on for a career? Since higher fuel prices will make delivering products long distances more expensive, that will change things so that the economies of scale don't count the same way anymore. Does that mean there will once again be a need for local agriculture for smaller farms to ship locally instead of the mega-farms with hundreds of thousands of acres who have to ship all over the country? What other vocations will the new economics create or support. Where will it make sense to live? If not the US at all, then where?

Let’s look at where we are in the US at the moment. We can start with the scary, negative stuff, then go to the more optimistic side after that.

In a world that revolves ever more around technology, a major key to success in that world is perhaps education. And in that respect, we have fallen behind dramatically.
Americans now stand 49th in the world in education. Our 4th grade students are among the best in the world, but by the 9th grade, we have sunk down to among the worst of the industrialized nations. And yet it’s not for a lack of investment. In America, we spend far more money per capita for education than any other country on the planet. South Korea is at the top of the educational quality scale now, and yet they spend far less on education that we do. Logically then, the problem must not be a lack of resources. It must be either systemic, or cultural factors. I believe it may be both. In high schools here today, the focus is not on learning academics, it is on sports and social activities. Sports are a good healthy pastime for young bodies. They do teach some valuable lessons about teamwork and competition, etc., but schools spend far more attention to football than they do to science and math and other academic subjects. And even among the academic subjects, they seem to have strange priorities. My 15 year old daughter has been taught little or nothing about the history of the world, but she has already has three full term courses on Texas history so far. In the grand scheme of a complete education, Texas history is of marginal value at best. Learning a little more about the other 95% of the world would be far more valuable.
At the systemic level, football, and other sports have become an unhealthy obsession for most schools in this country. Football is a great entertainment, but it will NOT keep us in a leadership position in the world in the next few decades. Football will NOT feed our citizens ten years from now. Also, there is an unfortunate social/cultural tendency to punish the better students for being bright. Rather than a social community that encourages academic excellence, the typical social groups within most high schools tend to consider the brighter kids as ‘geeks’, ‘nerds’, and other short-forms for the social pariah. They are rejected in favor of jocks. This is not a new development, the momentum for this direction has been gaining for decades.
For us to produce brighter, more well-educated people, we would have to change deeply in-grained habits of cultural bias, and also put into place broad, sweeping changes to the overall focus of all our schools away from sports, and social activities and switch them over to the more academic focus that schools in the up-and-coming countries have.
Then there are American colleges. These have long been highly thought of around the world for having the best resources, and track records for success. But that has changed in recent years. Foreign student attendance is down over 55% year over year for the past several years. There are simply much better schools elsewhere in the world now. Our schools have become businesses that sell degree programs in almost whimsical, non-essential areas. And the quality of the core areas has lagged the rest of the industrialized world.

But even if we could achieve the by now almost impossible goal of getting our students up to the level of South Korea, we would still have a problem though – because their educated workers are cheaper than our educated workers. So even if we managed a miracle like we did 100 years ago when we introduced public schooling through the high school level, still that miracle would not be enough any more. We are simply too expensive to compete. That means that once our young people push their way through the school system, they would have a hard time finding jobs to support themselves, because the companies have already outsourced most of those kinds of jobs overseas.

The fact is, we’re just not competitive anymore. We’re not educated well enough, so our human products are not high enough quality, and the prices for our educated humans are too high. However, we can’t just give up. We have to at least stay in the race, even if we cannot win anymore. When Britain’s star faded, they didn’t fall off the map entirely. They remained a viable country with some dignity and some position in the world. They just weren’t the top banana anymore. We could do as well if we play our cards right.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the military is spending money, time, and effort sending scientists to the American Film Institute to learn how to write movie scripts. Why? Well, because they are hoping to 'sell' science and technology as a career path to America's young people. They want to make it look sexy and interesting to be a scientist. Apparently some part of the government has got the message and is trying to do something about it. This is what propaganda machines are all about - changing the minds and hearts of a nation of young people. We need them to be interested in maths and sciences. We need them to have a core desire for the things that could potentially make us strong again. We need to be turning out the top students again, and in sufficient numbers that we still have a stake and a say in the new technologies, the forces that will shape the future. Expect to see more shows like CSI.

But meanwhile, while we try to interest our young in the hard sciences, countries with inexpensive labor forces are turning out large numbers of well-educated knowledge workers able to work in information-based high-level jobs. Countries such as China, India, Mexico, Malaysia, Brazil, etc. have huge numbers of qualified graduates every year.
China has 3.3 million each year
India has 3.1 million
The US has 1.3 million.
And in Engineering programs the numbers are revealing:
China has 600,000, India has 350,000. We have 70,000, and 35,000 of those are foreign students who no longer have plans to stay here to find work. The other 35,000 graduating are having a harder and harder time finding work in the US because all the jobs are being outsourced overseas for lower wages.

So China has 20 times more engineers graduating each year than we do. That has never happened before. This is new to our experience.

What does that look like after 5 years of producing 20 times as many engineers as we do? And what does that tell us about where the future of technology and innovation will come from? And what does THAT tell us about the future economic prospects of our country versus the others?

If you still believe we are the leaders in the world for technology and innovation, you may be living in the past. That USED to be how it was. We invented things. We created them. Then we manufactured them and sold them all over the world and got wealthy. Then we got greedy and started outsourcing our production to 3rd world countries to save a little on the cost of production, to make them cheaper and keep more profits. Then we outsourced more and more until we outsourced the design functions as well. Then our own abilities to produce those new technologies and innovations were reduced, and the people we exported those jobs to learned those skills. And those countries developed schools to teach the next generation, and the next and the next. They have caught up and now surpassed us.

You don't believe it? How about some examples? Probably the biggest technology product in the world is the computer, right? Virtually all computers now have LCD screens on them. Either separate units for desktops, or built-in for laptops. Chances are you are reading this on one of them right this minute. Try to find an American-made LCD screen. Go ahead. I dare you. That technology was originally invented here. Specifically, the LCD twist technology, which is at the core of it, was patented by Marcel Vogel, a senior research scientist at IBM labs. IBM decided that there would not be a strong enough commercial market for it(what vision, huh?), so they sold it to a small California-based company, which was subsequently purchased by a Japanese firm. That technology then left our shores forever. Now we pay for it with almost every new electronic gadget made from cell phones to computers, but we do not own it.
How about a video camera? The core technology there is the CCD. How many American-designed/American-made CCD units are there? Try to find one. The TV is old technology, isn’t it?. How many TV models are made in the US now? How many are even just designed here (I don't mean the case - I mean the actual television unit itself. The actual technology components) How about a fax machine? A digital camera? There is a CCD in the digital camera too. Have you ever come across a place that fixes digital cameras? Do they have any way of diagnosing problems with the CCD unit? How about calibrating it? No. That technology does not exist here. None of these things do.
The Pacific rim countries are exporting high-technology goods to America now in much the same way we used to manufacture and export TV sets to places like Kenya. They could use it, but had no idea how to fix it or replicate it. They could only buy more from us. We have now become like they were then.

Times have clearly changed. That ringing sound you hear is the alarm clock. Time to wake up. We need to open our eyes and our minds, shake off the sleep, and look around. We have been comfortably numb far too long.

We are 12th in the world in number of broadband connections per capita. South Korea is number one. And theirs are far faster than ours, and they work through almost every cell phone they have. And cell phone networks around the world are far better than ours. By the way, how many cell phones are completely designed and manufactured here in the US? Can we even fix them? Do we even know the details of the technology in them anymore?
Once, in 1990, I was visiting Pittsburg and I tried to buy a cell phone, and when the sales clerk saw from my address that I lived in Toronto at that time, she refused to sell it to me saying that this was advanced technology that couldn't leave the country. What incredible naïve ignorance and arrogance. America now has about the WORST, most backward cell phone networks of all industrialized countries.

One problem is that the leaders tell us about a different America. They have hypnotized us into thinking we are still on top. Still the best. Still no. 1.
It is a dream. An elaborate hallucination perpetuated by those that wish to profit and benefit from our apathy and our willingness to believe that everything is fine and we're still on top, and that the people in charge know what they are doing. Just keep voting them in because everything is fine.

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow. And the technology of tomorrow becomes the economy of the day after.

Yet congress cuts science funding dramatically every year. There are over 1,000 fewer science grants ever year as we spiral ever faster down the black hole into ignorance. We are starting to erode science teaching in schools to go back to teaching religion instead. We are headed in the wrong direction if we want to rebuild our position and our standing in the world. But it may be too late. We may be too far down the slippery slope already.

So what will happen? And what can we do about it? Or, at least, how best should we respond to it?

Well some good will come of this. As America becomes poorer, other countries will get richer. The standard of living will improve for an awful lot of people - and it's about time. For decades, we have had a country with only 5% of the world's population using up 25% of the world's oil production, and over 40% of it's other resources. That kind of inequitable imbalance is unstable, and it was only a matter of time before the pressure of various forces would topple it. The current rash of terrorism is certainly one of those pressure factors. It’s no coincidence that the terrorists are coming from the have-not countries to attack America.

So it seems America will become a little more like the rest of world, finally. Maybe, ten years from now it will not be so common for an average worker to have a 2500 square foot house and two cars, and a few thousand of dollars in the bank, and a net worth of a few hundred thousand dollars. Maybe the average worker in America will have what the average worker in a typical European country has.

But is this the end of America? Well, yes and no. Personally, I think the America we have known, and the world as we knew it has ended, and a new era has begun. But America will continue in new forms.
Don’t rule out America. Americans have certain advantages over other groups in the world. They are more optimistic, for instance. Do not underestimate the power of optimism! It is VERY powerful. Not just in some mystical, mysterious way, but in real, tangible ways. For example, a pessimist might feel defeated and give up when his business idea fails. But an optimist picks himself up after a failure and tries again. And he may try again and again, and again, until he finds something that works. A joint study group from MIT and Cambridge University in England discovered that this is the chief reason why MIT graduates became successful in business while Cambridge students have not had the same degree of success – despite an excellent education. They found that Europeans in general and Brits in particular, tend to be pessimistic. And they tend to believe that if they fail once, they have failed at everything, that they now have a black mark on their record, and should give up ever trying anything big again. The Americans don’t have that. They have a sense of simply trying again until they find something that works.
That one factor alone gives Americans a certain powerful resiliency that will stand them in good stead through the coming decades. This country will not die out strictly from competition.
Also, it is important to note that there is a tendency to overestimate the competition. The fact is that China, India, and other countries are not without their own challenges. They have their own problems that they have to overcome before they take their place as the next pre-eminent global powers. I feel their destiny is inevitable just from sheer size and momentum of growth alone, but the path will not be without its challenges.

America is also morphing internally into something different than it was. It was a country with a majority of people who were white, English-speaking, of European descent. That is changing. Given the current trends of immigration, childbirth rates, and demographic shifts, some demographic economists suggest that the US may be more than 50% Hispanic by the year 2010 or 2011. Also, the trend toward less and less education, more poverty, more racial tensions, etc. is accelerating. Also the average age is getting younger. They estimate that our current average age of 34 will drop to about 24 by the year 2020. This means we are headed deeper into the child-bearing ages, which means an acceleration into those demographic trends.
So part of the factors that will pull America down from it’s position as self-claimed ‘leader of the free world’ will be some internal factors as well as pressures of competition from outside. It seems unavoidable that America will have less in the future than it has had in the past.

But perhaps, the rest of world will finally get its due. This is not just about us losing. It’s as much about the opening up of resources to the rest of the world. It’s about having many more viable places to go and live and make a living. It’s about a whole new world of possibilities. It’s about growth and expansion, and optimism on a more global scale. Then maybe they will hate us a little less once the distance between us has lessened. In technology, they have already caught up and surpassed us.

Remember- Science leads to Technology which leads to Economy. They have already caught up in science and then technology. Caught up and then surpassed us. It looks like they are now poised to surpass us in economics and standard of living as well. Countries that were once far behind us, are not so far behind us now.

Check your rear view mirrors. Objects may be closer than they appear.