HAVE I FAILED IN MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE? OR SET THE STAGE FOR FUTURE SUCCESS?

 First of all, good news.  There has been sufficient agreement on increasing the national debt ceiling.

• The next new ceiling will again become a crisis point in early 2025 after the next presidential election.
• Appears that there will be some Democrat concessions regarding work requirements and standards on recipients of food stamps.  Medicaid will remain untouched.
• 
  As Janet Yellen has more recently indicated an absolute deadline of Thursday, June 8, there will be some discussions in the House on Tuesday, where there will be grudging approval, followed by action in the Senate, probably on Wednesday.  Then the President signs on Thursday and the world will be saved from a Great Recession.  Might take a day later than Yellen's warning, but everything seems at this point  to be okay.
• I guess there will not be a fatal Act Two by Republicans.  What's that?  Read my posting of 26May2023.

So my take:

• Speaker Kevin McCarthy said that he has 95% of the his members happy, and while a few ultra conservations will moan, a lot, they don't add to 10 votes.  McCarthy will be admired for showing good sense and control.
• A lot off progressive Democrats will scream and rant, and they are being told to do so to show the necessary liberal colors for the next congressional season, which kind of makes Biden look good for working out a compromise.
• President Joe Biden has in his pocket at least 10 Democrats who will vote as needed, and probably 20.  These are the ones in safe seats and can come up with the reason for such a noble act.  What do they get?  Sure funding bargains for their state in the future.
• The House will pass the agreement, and so will the Senate.
• The Republicans will claim victory for they got a few key concessions.
• Biden will tout the two-year agreement, meaning this won't happen again until after the 5 November 2024 presidential election.
• The fact of the matter is that the debt ceiling will be increased, for the defense budget will again go up, with almost everything else remaining fixed for the next fiscal year.
• This was a standard political stalemate.  Both sides won and lost.
• There will be no fiscal default.

I was reading the May 2023 issue of STANFORD magazine this weekend, featuring The Breakout Bunch, or research to reach the world, which convinced me that failure can well be a necessary step for ultimate success.  Or, at least that can well rationalize the success of my professional life.

• 
  It starts with Stanford Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering Chaitan Khosla in 1999 learning of his 3-year old's celiac disease, for which there was then no drug treatment.  
• I of course immediately thought back to my undergraduate days in the Chemical Engineering department more than 60 years ago.
• Anyway he early on received the National Science Foundation's top award for early-career researchers, and was able to use those funds to work on finding a solution to celiac disease.

Khosla wrote to celiac research supporters in 2002. “I have a dream that when he goes to college in the fall of 2014, he takes with him a refillable prescription for a pill he can take whenever he finds himself in a situation where he cannot avoid, or does not wish to avoid, a gluten-containing meal. 

• Today, two decades later, Khosla is a full professor, his son is five years out of college...and there is still no medication for celiac disease.
• Did he fail?

• 
  Nope, it took him that long to create two promising therapies.  
• This was just the start of a longer quest for funding, development, approval and cost-effective availability
• He says, for every project like his, there are ten others just on his campus in similar position.  They have not yet even written the first chapter.

Stanford has created various "accelerators" in several fields, like medicine, learning, sustainability and so on, to help academics convert their research findings into products and policies for the world.  The chasm between lab bench and clinical testing, let alone the marketplace, is so vast, the costs so high, the odds so low, that this challenge is lamented as the Valley of Death.  The combine science, engineering, law, business and other needed disciplines to spur success.

Also recently, the National Science Foundation came to the same conclusion, and created a major convergence accelerator.  

National-scale societal challenges cannot be solved by a single discipline. Instead, these challenges require convergence: the merging of innovative ideas, approaches, and technologies from a wide and diverse range of sectors and expertise. 

Launched in 2019, the NSF Convergence Accelerator builds upon basic research and discovery to accelerate solutions toward societal impact. The program funds teams to solve societal challenges through convergence research and innovation. To enhance its impact, the Accelerator also places teams together in cohorts, synergizing their work through facilitated collaboration.

To address those two questions at the top, while nothing I did at the University of Hawaii has made me a billionaire, all my failures await success.  I remember in 1982--that was more than 40 years ago--new Dean of Engineering Paul Yuen of the UH College of Engineering visiting me in my U.S. Senate office, and we pondered over how we could build that bridge from academic research to the marketplace.  As Stanford has only recently realized, most of their research does not go far.  There is this gap that needs a bridge.

Right then and there we invented such a structure, the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research, which more than 40 years later, still exists, and seems to be focusing on accelerators.  Click on that lead to read the story of PICHTR.  I have lost track of their recent doings, but went to their web page and was impressed with the high quality of the board members, some I have closely worked with before.

So have I failed in my professional life?  On the basis of the above, I was a remarkable success.  Will my work set the state for future successes.  Absolutely.  Unfortunately, not for me.  

Around six years ago I was asked by MENSA to provide two talks on my ideas.  The title can be combined into HOW TO BECOME RICH OR FAMOUS...AND MAYBE BOTH.  Thus, here is the opportunity of your lifetime.

• Peace:  10% Simple Solution for World Peace
• Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence:  Worked at the NASA Ames Research Center in this area...wow, almost half a century ago.
• Eternal Life:  how to live forever (my PhD dealt with DNA/RNA)
• 
  
• There is the standard way...by going to Heaven.
• But what if there is no such place.  What if religion is a con job?  Wonder why there is no proof of an afterlife?
• Well, there are ways science should be able to lengthen your life.  You'll still die because of accident or gamma ray burst or something else as awfully final, but there is no reason why we need to be stuck with a life expectancy of 80 or so.

• 

  Global Warming
•  Geoengineering solutions
•  5 cents/pound carbon dioxide credit
• Venus Syndrome

• 
  Energy
• Fusion:  Star Power for Humanity (I spent two assignments with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion)

• 
  Transportation:
• Ground:  Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (a fuel cell car will take it five times further than any battery-powered vehicle, and methanol is a lot cheaper than  hydrogen)
• Air:  Hydrogen Jetliner
• 
  OTEC and the Blue Revolution (I drafted the first OTEC and hydrogen legislation when I spent three years in the U.S. Senate, both of which became laws)

• 
  Enterprises (I formed companies on the following ventures)
  • Rainbow Pearls International (not white or black pearls, but colored ones)
  • Hawaii Geo-Spa (an eco-tourism attraction using the geothermal effluents)
  • The Ultimate Ocean Ranch

What exactly should you do?  Just click on the entry that interests you, and you're on your way.  I can be helpful if you wish, but the whole purpose of this posting is to make you rich and/or famous.  I want to do as little as possible, and fade into the sunset.

I should recognize, as I do annually, that tomorrow is Memorial Day.  My posting of 2022.  

The 34th annual 1.5 hour Memorial Day Concert on the National Mall begins at 8PM, and will be televised in Hawaii at 7PM, tonight, not on Memorial Day.  Not much of a truly sterling cast this year, but it's all about patriotism, and looks like most Republicans are regaining their senses.

Got to show again Iam Tongi in his first American Idol audition.  This led to he being voted winner last week.  Note his rubbah slippahs.

Super Typhoon Mawar is know as Super Typhoon Betty in the East Pacific.  First appeared on May 20 at 30 MPH, shot up to 155 MPH three days later.  On the 24th, brushed by and seriously damage Guam at 140 MPH.  Intensified to 185 MPH on May 26, and today weakened to 120 MPH.  Not sure about intensity, but the current path is away from the Philippines, sufficiently east of Taiwan, but the eye is currently projected to fly right over Okinawa.

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