I disagree with the opinion that the fancy cookie recipe writers and cooks perfecting dishes are wasteful of intellectual effort. I'm terrible at making time for cooking -simple or difficult items -and I certainly don't work on perfecting a recipe, but I'm glad someone is making the effort and gets to make a living at something they are passionate about. There's plenty of people who get excited about rockets and engineering, plenty of directions for intellectual effort. Seems too utilitarian to ask everyone to pursue useful thoughts.

Just enjoy the product of their efforts (in restaurants for instance).

Maybe political banter is a luxury like fancy food is luxury. Knowing what's going on every week in the candidate's lives isn't necessary to voting -it may even be misleading. It takes a ridiculous amount of effort to keep up with all the political news, effects of the political news, and accuracy of the news versus the actual opinions of potential leaders. Months of effort -which is why I just enjoy the efforts of others (like gabfest) who summarize it for me. It's interesting, entertaining, but not a topic on which I choose to spend too much intellectual effort.

Exactly. I mean where do you draw the line. It's like saying we had a car that had 4 wheels and went 100 years ago. Why do we still have engineers at Ford? Or it has four wheels, so why doesn't everybody drive a Ford Estima?

And where do you draw the line? Should every one be an engineer now? Athletes? Artists? What constitutes "useful"?


P.S. David, I really hope you meant telemetry for rockets to go to Mars and not telemetry for rockets to kill people. Because that would be in incredibly poor taste.