Let me first say what I know then what I think.
The first thing I know for fact is that the dot.com crash was not about e-commerce not working. The market is based on the force of supply and demand and unfortunately the crash was just that simple, more sellers than buyers. Further to that comes my opinion is that in the extreme people make decisions for two reasons in the stock market, fear and greed. The center of that universe for the capital markets is one thing, interest rates. This I can say with the utmost confidence. Teevee, if you would like to debate this I would be more than happy, but rest assured you will be well over your head on this one.
Anyways on what I believe is the future:
DSB, NSB, LR, etc. In the future someone will develop a better or more efficient way of converting nitrites to nitrates. This is will help us achieve a system which handles the waste in a closed system like it is handled in the ocean.
Lighting, lets be serious, at 120 or 240 volts we will never be able to duplicate the lighting from the sun, so our replication of this although entertaining will never suffice the real thing. The more light the more heat generated, therefor most people will have a chiller.
Protein Skimming, it will be replaced by something in the future that purifies the synethtic salt mix faster and more efficient than ever before.
Rich Man Toys - calcium reactors, pH monitors, etc. etc. They will always be around, not because we are looking for the quick fix but because we are looking for the lastest and greatest toy.
Fish & Coral Collection - I believe it is almost impossible to regulate, especially by itself an industry where people are selling fish for a small percentage of what they retail for. The cost as most people know is the shipping not the capture and sale of the fish. Unless a governmental agency steps in and determines that penalities should exist for unethical fish capture methods nothing will change on this front. The consumer overall will not buy Tank Raised species at a sufficient premium to make that an attractive deployment of the scarce resource, CAPITAL.
Anyways, thats my take on the future.
Wendell
On to the topic
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Originally Posted by teevee
Great topic Jack.
I think any field has these fads - we're all looking for a one-shot, one-size-fits-all solution to the obstacles we face in our hobbies, work and life in general. In reefing it's the trends you've noted, in business it was e-commerce, in nutrition it's the Atkins diet. We're looking for this one paradigm shift that will change the way we do something. I think the problem we have, however, is that we have these theorists, many of them doctors like Atkins and Shimek, who come along with this idea, and develop a test, and find that their procedure works, and then release it, at which point it is bastardized to high hell and becomes another cliche for that social group.
The truth is (OK, I know this is a cliche as well) there are no simple solutions to complex questions. As noted, these great ideas that could lead to a partial reorientation of a discipline are often simply misconstrued by the greater masses, at which point they become useless. I don't know how well Shimek tested his DSB theory, but let's pretend his tests were stringent and objective and concluded that, by his methods, DSBs work. The average hobbyist with a DSB does not follow these instructions, and therefore they fail to work. Suddenly DSBs stop working, and e-commerce stops working, and we have DSB crashes, and the dot.com crash of 1999.
What needs to happen is everyone needs to be on the same level. This is fine for the sciences that attract a select few. When Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, it blew Newtonian physics out of the water and all the physicists who were worth their salt tossed out the old ideas and got with the new. In a hobby like reefing, few of us are educated enough to understand the theory behind DSBs and therefore we immediately fall away from what Shimek believes is a scientific level of reasoning, and therefore the paradigm becomes useless.
For true change to occur, everyone must remain in alignment through the chance. My criminology professor speaks in this way about crime control and the judicial system in Canada*. Someone gets a great idea, and we launch a space ship containing these new ideas towards the planet True Change. But everytime, the people behind the ship fail to follow the instructions and fail to include enough fuel, so the ship crashes back to Earth. Everytime someone in the hobby comes up with a new theory, it starts off nicely, but suddenly falls apart, crashes back down and we all trample it in the stampede to the next "big" thing.
In short, the hobbyist must change before the hobby itself can change.
* For those of you familiar with criminology, the paradigm shift he is speaking of is the "community policing" method.
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