“Certainly. If they don’t know how I insert theÄ”
“Hush! I don’t want to know. And walls have ears. We don’t make any fancy announcements; we simply start manufacturing. Wherever power is cheapest today. Where is that?”
The muckraking author fairly frothed at the “cruel, heartless monopoly” held by the Shipstone complex over the prime necessities of “all the little people everywhere.” I could not see it that way. What Shipstone and his companies did was to make plentiful and cheap what used to be scarce and dearÄthis is “cruel” and “heartless”?
The Shipstone companies do not have a monopoly over energy. They don’t own coal or oil or uranium or water power. They do lease many, many hectares of desert land . . . but there is far more desert not being cropped for sunshine than the Shipstone trust is using. As for space, it is impossible to intercept even one percent of all the sunshine going to waste inside the orbit of Luna, impossible by a factor of many millions. Do the arithmetic yourself otherwise you’ll never believe the answer.
So what is their crime?
Twofold:
a) The Shipstone companies are guilty of supplying energy to the human race at prices below those of their competitors;
b) They meanly and undemocratically decline to share their industrial secret of the final assembly stage of a Shipstone.
This latter is, in the eyes of many people, a capital offense. My
terminal dug out many editorials on “the people’s right to know,” others on “the insolence of giant monopolies,” and other displays of
righteous indignation. –
The Shipstone complex is mammoth, all right, because they supply cheap power to billions of people who want cheap power and want more of it every year. But it is not a monopoly because they don’t own any power; they just package it and ship it around to wherever people want it. Those billions of customers could bankrupt the Shipstone complex almost overnight by going back to their old waysÄburn coal, burn wood, burn oil, burn uranium, distribute power through continent-wide stretches of copper and aluminum wires and/or long trains of coal cars and tank cars.
But no one, so far as my terminal could dig out, wants to go back to the bad old days when the landscape was disfigured in endless ways and the very air was loaded with stinks and carcinogens and soot, and the ignorant were scared silly by nuclear power, and all power was scarce and expensive. No, nobody wants the bad old waysÄeven the most radical of the complainers want cheap and convenient power. . . they just want the Shipstone companies to go away and get lost.
“The people’s right to know”Äthe people’s right to know what? Daniel Shipstone, having first armed himself with great knowledge of higher mathematics and physics, went down into his basement and patiently suffered seven lean and weary years and thereby learned an applied aspect of natural law that let him construct a Shipstone.
Any and all of “the people” are free to do as he didÄhe did not even take out a patent. Natural laws are freely available to everyone equally, including flea-bitten Neanderthals crouching against the cold.
In this case, the trouble with “the people’s right to know” is that it strongly resembles the “right” of someone to be a concert pianistÄ but who does not want to practice.
But I am prejudiced, not being human and never having had any rights.
Whether you prefer the saccharine company version or the vitriolic muckraker’s version, the basic facts about Daniel Shipstone and the
Shipstone complex are well known and beyond argument. What surprised me (shocked me, in fact) was what I learned when I started digging into ownership, management, and direction.
My first hint came from that basic printout when I saw what companies were listed as Shipstone complex companies but did not have “Shipstone” in their names. When one pauses for a Coke . . . the deal is with Shipstone!
Ian had told me that Interworld had ordered the destruction of AcapulcoÄdoes this mean that the trustees of Daniel Shipstone’s estate ordered the killing of a quarter of a million innocent people? Can these be the same people who run the best hospital/school for handicapped children in the world? And Sears-MontgomeryÄhell’s bells, I own some Sears-Montgomery stock myself. Do I share by concatenation some part of the guilt for the murder of Acapulco?