Big Business

Assume we have some huge product or service we want to make available to the US population that is hungry and eager to buy it. Let's assume it's a service rather than a product to make it easier to discuss. Since almost everyone wants it we could look to government to provide the service, charging a fee and using tax revenues to insure the costs are covered. We all know that Government provides more services than any non-Government Big Business. Could this be the most efficient way to achieve the highest quality service for the US population or could Private Enterprise provide a higher quality service more efficiently at a lower price? What do you think?

I am so very sorry, because this is a trick question. The results are in. This Christmas the Private Enterprises like Fed-Ex and UPS delivered 1.5+ Billion packages. They together with Private Enterprise retailers led by Amazon did what the United States Postal Services could not do even though they were the first to deliver packages. They did this offering Next Day Delivery. Even some packages shipped Christmas Eve were delivered Christmas Day by volunteer workers. How many Postal Workers volunteered to work on Christmas Day?

Private Enterprise will always provide a higher quality service at a lower price. So when does it make sense to have Government provide a service? Well how about landing a man on the moon and returning him to Earth. No Private Enterprise in the 1960s would have taken on this mission.  In the short term this project lost a lot of money with little hope of a return, much less a profit. However, today space travel innovation and missions are performed by Private Enterprise and the Government is one of the many customers for these Private Enterprise services. 

The US Government is a huge and very important business. It needs to balance its budget and in this process having services performed by Private Enterprises evaluated as an alternative to Government employees should be performed. 

The Martian

Yesterday we watched the movie "The Martian" and it stimulated a flood of memories from my past that took place in the 1960's. I graduated from high school in 1963. Spent the next 2 years on full football scholarship at Sam Houston State in Huntsville, Texas. In the middle of this 2 year period Donna and I started dating. On June 12, 1965 we were married and I took a job at Control Data's Core Labs during the day and enrolled as a full time student at the University of Houston night school. Core Labs started out as a data center providing computer processing services to the huge Houston oil industry. Slumberger, a worldwide provider of oil field services, would use sound waves to log drilling sites, collecting data as the sounds reflected from levels in the oil well. Core Labs would use it's supper computers to turn this sounding data into contour maps depicting a picture of underground that reviewed the probability of finding oil and an indication of how much oil; thus Core Labs produced Core Maps. During 1965 and 1966 the NASA Johnson Space Center was being built. 

First NASA used a Core Labs application, Critical Path Method, to manage the construction of the Johnson Space Center. The entire project was finished in record time. NASA had its own computers, the same computers used by Core Labs. During the Mercury and Apollo launches NASA would just take over our data center to process all data they collected during the mission. A few of the Core Labs' employees were processed through secret clearance including me to help. We would work non-stop for the duration of the missions. I learned a lot about how NASA works, we would fill many boxes of computer printout, you know the big pages. These boxes would be transported to the Johnson Space Center to be stored in a large warehouse. Weeks later some engineer would come in and dig through the carefully marked boxes and rip a few pages from some box and scurry away to his office.

The most interesting and emotional experience was during the Apollo 13 Launch. Everything was normal until the spacecraft exploded on its way to the Moon. We hosted a number of telemetry engineers including a 16 year girl who we called the blond genius; I think she had an advanced college degree at 16 years of age. Long hours of tension ended when the experts left to return to NASA with a solution. The solution had a lot in common with the one used in The Martian movie.

Christmas Blessing

Christmas Blessing

Every year at a time of the longest nights and the shortest days we gather together to renew our 

spiritual energy. It is a time for family, friends and large amounts of kindness and love. We are 

Christians we are not at all politically correct. We celebrate Christmas not just a Holliday. We 

celebrate the birth of a baby that you God sent as a a part of yourself to live among us,  to touch 

our lives and to make us aware of the spirit and the energy in each of us that existed before our 

birth and will last beyond our death into eternity. You came as Jesus to teach us how to live our 

lives to nurture and care for our eternal spiritual energy. 

Please bless all the friends and family spirits that are not here today. Bless each of us so we 

may live our lives through the coming year to nurture and care for our spiritual energy. Bless this 

meal to energies our bodies.

Amen