Celebrate Change!

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. Our nearest star – our energy-supplying mother-ship, the Sun – is ninety-two million miles away … Our little Spaceship Earth is right now traveling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun and is also spinning axially, which, at the latitude of Washington, D.C., adds approximately one thousand miles per hour to our motion. Each minute we both spin at one hundred miles and zip in orbit at one thousand miles. That is a whole lot of Spin and Zip!

Buckminster Fuller


My first “real” job was with Unisys Corporation outside of Philadelphia. It was the mid-90s, and as mainframe computers gave way to minis and then laptops, the company was not adapting well to change. In fact, many of the veterans that I worked with loved to enthusiastically greet each other every morning “Double S, Double D!!!” Short for “SAME STUFF, DIFFERENT DAY”.

Of course there was (and is) a profound element of truth to Double S, Double D!!! “There is nothing new under the sun” lamented the writer of Ecclesiastes. And yet…. well.. you can probably already imagine how the story at Unisys unfolded. Sales slumping, pensions cut, the grim cloud of layoffs wafting through the cavernous cubicle farms that were so in vogue. My older buddies still greeted each day with an enthusiastic “Double S, Double D” - but everyone knew that there was a whole lot of new and unpleasant stuff rolling downhill. I wound up bouncing out of there in record time, saying a fond farewell to my mentors and jumping headlong into the first Internet Bubble.

So fast-forward a few decades, and here we are in the midst of the first AI Bubble. Still traveling at 60,000 miles an hour around the sun - 525 million miles a year, 5 billion miles a decade, 15 billion miles into my career. That sounds like a lot of mileage! 😃 

There are some remnants of the Unisys campus still left in Blue Bell. The company is operating as a shell from its peak - but most of the buildings have been converted to health insurance or life science startups. On days when I’m feeling nostalgic and maybe trying to turn back time just a little, I take a lap or two around the vast and mostly empty parking lot. “Double S, Double D”… “Same Stuff, Different Day”… echoing in my ears.

But now I know the flip side to what my friends were really trying to tell me all those years and miles ago -”It is all going so much incredibly faster than you or any of us can ever really imagine, so you had better enjoy and make the most of every last second of every single day!”

New Stuff, New Day!
60,000 miles an hour…
525 million miles a year…
You had better buckle up and dive in TODAY!
Because IT’S ALL CHANGE…!