When Did We Lose Ourselves?

"mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/" (mxxxxxm24)
05/23/2018 at 17:49 • Filed to: Americana, Concept

1961. This Chrysler Turboflite concept came about in an era where America was enthralled with space flight. Innovations such as separate retractable high beams, wide groove tires, and a spoiler that doubles as an air resistance brake. Oh and the cockpit can open up a bit... just because they can.

That’s what America used to be about. Doing things because we can. Doing things because why the f*ck not? Doing things that pushed the boundaries of what was possible. We were the best we could be. It’s what lead to space exploration in the first place. Well that and competition with the Russians. Maybe that’s the issue at heart. We’ve stopped competing. Grade schools give out medals for participation to kids who fail. Failure is ok now. Failure is normal and even celebrated.

We’ve stopped focusing on what can be done and what’s the best we can do. Instead we cut corners and cost at every chance we see. We are a country that has outsourced everything we can to lower production expenses. Thus driving American companies out of the market. The few that remain have two choices: higher cost or compromise quality. While a select few refuse to compromise quality; many, many compromise. Many long trusted companies now put out complete and total sh*t.

So keep compromising America. Keep playing it safe. Keep being mediocre.

DISCUSSION (37)

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 17:49

with whats currently running the country id say being mediocre might be overly optimistic

jimz > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 17:50

Yeah yeah, I know, the boomers think everything which came after them sucks. Haven’t heard that since, oh, 5 minutes or so.

PS9 > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 17:55

Well this is what happens when a nation decides it’s the best without doing anything to prove it. It’s like someone doing no training, no exercise and no practice going to the Olympics and expecting the gold medals to descend from heaven craddled in a Valkyrie’s bosom.

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > farscythe - makin da cawfee!
05/23/2018 at 17:56

You’re absolutely right. I was too easy on them.

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 17:58

sorry for dumping the politics in here..... couldnt help meself

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > jimz
05/23/2018 at 17:58

I’m not a boomer and I just went into a rant in an article that was originally intent on showing a cool car I just learned about this morning.

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > PS9
05/23/2018 at 18:00

Exactly my point. Standards have been set so low. No one has to prove themselves anymore.

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > farscythe - makin da cawfee!
05/23/2018 at 18:03

No worries. I absolutely avoid politics as much as possible, but the shitty thing I’m realizing is that the average American these days are sheepish idiots that clearly should not be allowed to make any decisions that affect others, and I’m finding it harder and harder to ignore politics.

AestheticsInMotion > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 18:04

This is why I love Tesla and Elon Musk so much. Sure, there are MANY questionable decisions, missed deadlines, teething issues and unnecessary social media posts, but this dude is doing new things! Pushing boundaries! There is an electric sportscar floating in space.....

Bman76 (hates WS6 hoods, is on his phone and has 4 burners now) > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 18:05

But failure IS normal. We’d all be better off if we stopped pretending that we’re perfect and actually put some effort towards analyzing our failures and growing from them. We have always failed, we’ve always just refused to admit it.

For Sweden > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 18:07

But Americans still make concept cars

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 18:08

its not much better this side of the pond..

i’d like to ignore it all.... but everythings kinda going to shit......and a good chunk of people are happy about it..

figure i should at least pay attention so i know when to board up my windows and start sharpening the pitchfork

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > Bman76 (hates WS6 hoods, is on his phone and has 4 burners now)
05/23/2018 at 18:19

Yes but failure isn’t just accepted; it’s celebrated. We should celebrate learning from those failures and succeeding the next try. There in lies the issue. We expect that if we reward failure that people will inherently try to succeed, but why would they try again when they were already rewarded the first time??

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > For Sweden
05/23/2018 at 18:20

Yeah yeah, but usually not radical or even functional. Maybe drawings.

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > farscythe - makin da cawfee!
05/23/2018 at 18:22

Shitty. Where you live?

Bman76 (hates WS6 hoods, is on his phone and has 4 burners now) > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 18:25

But what you’re saying is inherently risk averse. If we don’t celebrate the attempt then we don’t innovate or learn.

Your argument shoots itself in the damn foot.

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 18:26

netherlands... we just barely scraped by without putting the far right in charge last election... but they now have the second largest political party in the country

jimz > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 18:32

Ok, let me break this shit down for you. The SOLE reason for the space race was to beat the Soviets. We didn’t go to the moon just because, we busted our ass to get there before the Soviets to make sure they knew that if we could do that, we could get nuclear warheads perched above them in space. We haven’t gone back to the moon because we discovered that it was pretty much exactly what we expected it to be, a big, dusty, dead rock.

#2 I rant against your rant because it’s precisely the one Boomers trot out when they whine about participation trophies and worthless millennials. Boomers were the slackers and hippies of their day, but you’ll never get one to goddamn admit it. They love to blow smoke about how this country was fantastic in the ‘50s and ‘60s because they (and their parents’) generations were so goddamn bloody awesome and everyone who’s come afterward is a useless nobody.

unfortunately it doesn’t hold water. We were so prosperous in the ‘50s for one reason and one reason only: We were the only major economic power to come out of WWII practically unharmed. We built up a ton of manufacturing capacity and turned it towards making war materials. when the war ended. Europe was in ruins and Japan had a couple of big smoking craters in in. We, on the other hand, had all of our infrastructure intact. We had all of this manufacturing capacity available. Further, because of the war, consumer goods like cars, appliances, and so on hadn’t been manufactured much if at all for several years. We had thousands of returning servicemen who got right to starting families and would need jobs. Oh hey, we have all of these factories ready to start cranking out Fords and Chevys and Frigidaires, we have a ton of guys ready to work there, who are now hitched to newly minted housewives eager to buy all of this stuff. Oh, and we need to make stuff to send over to Europe and Japan to help them rebuild.

If WWII hadn’t turned out the way it had, we would not have been what we were in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The “MAGA” types don’t want to admit that when we were great had as much to do with just plain good fortune as anything else. But sadly that kind of boom is an anomaly in history. and it’s not likely to be repeated again. We’re going to have to come to terms with that instead of repeatedly getting snookered by politicians making empty promises. And the other thing that people don’t want to admit is that it didn’t take very long for that post-war boom to start declining. The automotive industry was already shedding companies before the 1950s were done. Packard was cooked in 1958. Studebaker was dead man walking already and was done in 1962. Mergers saw the loss of several brands as they folded in to AMC (Nash, Hudson, Kaiser Jeep.)

As for the concept car you posted, what evidence is that of anything? cars were still in their (relative) infancy back then. They were just starting to become interwoven with the American way of life. Decades of refinement means the car is a solved problem. And a lot of work and innovation has gone into designing cars now which burn fossil fuels so cleanly that in some places the air coming out of the tailpipe is cleaner than what went into the intake. Incremental improvements aren’t splashy or sexy, but they are the result of a lot of hard work and talent that we are still perfectly capable of, thank you very much. But cars are commodities now. they’re a necessity for most people, not an object of desire.

Planes are the same way. Everyone was trying different things back then because we were still developing the technology and knowledge. Back then the goal was to try to design a plane which could get up in the air, fly for a longer distance than the last one, and land. Now, air travel has long been commoditized so once the winning formula for passenger planes was found (200-300 seat swept wing tube with two big, slow spinning turbofans) that’s what everyone left is doing. Now all of the work is to design planes which can take off, fly for long distances, and land safely over and over and over again for decades. Oh, and burn less and less fuel while doing so.

put it this way: the Boeing 707 entered service in 1958. Within 5 years of entering service, 12 of them had crashed killing a total of 650 people.

in contrast, the Boeing 777 entered service in 1995. It flew for 13 years without a hull-loss incident, and that one (BA38) resulted in no fatalities.

To me that’s pretty damn impressive and a shining example of how we still do great things.

jimz > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 18:47

Yes but failure isn’t just accepted; it’s celebrated

no it isn’t. The stuff the conservative media rants about is blown out of proportion by at least 100 times. These are people who go looking for stuff to piss themselves off and make a huge amount of noise about it. Like some student at a small, private college for rich kids makes some silly demand, and all of a sudden you’d think it’s going on with every single university student at every single school.

unfortunately, the 24-hour news environment means “news” is now expected to be entertainment. So the media reports on stupid shit like “OMG this 30 year old millenial won’t move out of his parents’ house!” because people read it, click on it, and talk about it, as in “yeah, look at this guy! Millennials are such useless trash, aren’t they? We’re so much better than them!” IF they published a story titled “Today 30 million millennials went to class or to work” who would care?

fuck, people even talked about this on ‘50s TV shows. I think it was one episode of Dennis the Menace where someone said about newsworthiness: “’Dog bites man,’ who cares? Happens all the time. now, ‘Man Bites Dog?’ That’s a story!”

none of this shit is new. Sadly, people are convinced it is.

AfromanGTO > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 18:49

That’s true. I blame shitty parenting and common core math.

Sam > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 19:00

Counterpoint -

Kinja'd!!!

Though you are still pretty close to being spot-on. The American companies couldn’t compete, so they started building shit. Our “national pride” kept them limping along for years until they finally died, but were then resuscitated with our tax dollars.

Sam > jimz
05/23/2018 at 19:04

Boom.

SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 19:58

You’ve never lost yourselves. Your country (like most Western nations) hasn’t really changed that much socially, politically, creatively or financially (with respect to other developed nations) since this concept was outed.

We are no more or less risk averse now than we were then but the massive increase in the scope and scale of our technical capacity has substantially broadened our options for intellectual creativity.

Back when that concept was launched, vehicle ownership was a status symbol. And the concepts reflected that. Now it’s nothing to own four and to most people they are just another commodity...and the design creativity reflects that. But dig deeper and you’ll see the creativity and innovation is still there...it’s just buried in the engineering instead.

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > Bman76 (hates WS6 hoods, is on his phone and has 4 burners now)
05/23/2018 at 20:16

I understand what you’re saying, but there is an inherent difference in awarding failure and encouraging people to try try again.

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > farscythe - makin da cawfee!
05/23/2018 at 20:18

Sh*t man. The wealthy elitists are taking over. That’s no good.

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > jimz
05/23/2018 at 20:33

I won’t argue with anything you just said. I actually agree with you on a lot of those fronts. I would like to point out that I did admit in my article that we were in competition with the Russians (I meant Soviets). I know full well wwII was the sole driver in our economic boom at the time and years to come. I very much dislike most hippies from that era saying what you think I am saying.

I’m really griping about our societies new trend of awarding failure and cost cutting being the main driver of most businesses because of our current economic lows. With your Boeing example... how many of those parts were manufactured in America? How many jobs were outsourced to cut costs?? We are no longer self sufficient is what I see.

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > jimz
05/23/2018 at 20:43

The validity of the media is unquestionably sh*t. They will report on whatever feeds their agenda. I hate that bs and am careful where I get my news. I am not talking sh*tabout Millenials.

It’s the newer generations man. I have friends with kids and a younger sibling and schools are all the same. They award failures. They just do. It’s not media. It is what is happening. When I was a kid and we lost a basketball tournament we didn’t get anything. That fed my fire. Made me want that success the next time. I were discouraged by failure, I’d be a weak individual. I didn’t need someone to come and tell me I did my best... that actually pissed me off. I didn’t do my best yet, because I didn’t succeed. You haven’t seen my best yet

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > AfromanGTO
05/23/2018 at 20:44

Haha thanks for that!

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > Sam
05/23/2018 at 20:47

And thus awarding their failure with a bailout ha

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 20:52

well.... at least it never ends well for them either.....

jimz > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 20:55

who is “awarding failure?”

John Norris (AngryDrifter) > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 21:01

Bring back the concept cars; bring them back big time.

f86sabre > mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/
05/23/2018 at 21:43

I feel you, but remember that Apollo was built by the lowest bidder. I will go the opposite direction as you though. I think it isn’t that failure being celebrated that is the issue. The issue is we are afraid of failure and risk. If it is not a sure thing then it isn’t happening. If someone may get hurt then it isn’t happening.

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media
05/24/2018 at 09:24

You’re not wrong. A less pessimistic view than mine lol

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > jimz
05/24/2018 at 09:35

Schools. Where we learn our social skills for life. With sports and even band and art. I just see it first hand. Kids are being made soft. Not set up for actual failure

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > John Norris (AngryDrifter)
05/24/2018 at 09:37

Yes! Save the concepts!!

mXxxxXm24 /O/ /O/ > f86sabre
05/24/2018 at 09:40

You’re closer to what I mean than you think. At a young age kids are allowed to fail and are kept safe from the negative that goes along with true failure. Kids aren’t prepared for actual failure. So in the real world they fold like lawn chairs.