Heckuva Job, Money

One of the more curious things about the oil debacle is that it's very possibility exists in the first place. Two years ago HERE I wrote:

...anyone else notice that EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PART OF THE AUTOMOBILE HAS CHANGED…except, gee, what do you know…oil. Gas. We have cars that can fucking drive you to the sporting goods section of a Wal-Mart and order you a hot dog, but gee, FUNNY THING, it still runs on gas. After 120 years. Gee, I wonder why. It’s a mystery.

Automakers today are the horse and buggies of yesterday; for fuck’s sake, the car has been around for 100+ years and the best we can come up with is…gasoline? really??? Goddam, 105 years previous we were riding horses for England, basically.

Are you seriously telling me that 105 years after Kitty Hawk I'm still driving a car that's 1) dependent on oil and 2) "the backbone of American manufacturing"?????

You will of course forgive my youthful exuberance. I was a young, beautifully gilded god with hogballs.

We like to pride ourselves on tidbits like "the entire knowledge of the universe up to 1976 has tripled every year since" or whatever. The iPad you have in your hand right now will be laughed at like the rotary phone or me having a date with an actual woman within about 6 months. And yet we now find ourselves having to contemplate the destruction to the country that would happen if a hurricane hit what is a who-the-fuck-knows how big grouping of something that today is used for the exact same purpose as when Queen Victoria ruled.

Now, I know that money is the reason this is happening. I am not naive. But in this day of exponential growth in knowledge and technology with every passing second, such stagnation on this particular issue is, as my friends at Kam Sing would say,  ridicurous.