It is very much like deciding if a glass is half full or half empty.  It can go either way.  In the business of estimating the future needs of a country at war this can be a crucial step in deciding if you have enough resources to win that war.  Take another direction and try to deal with business decisions.  You must decide if you have either the supplies or the market in order to become informed as to hire the man/woman power to make a profit.  If you over estimate your supplies and you find the market cannot sustain what you produce you have to cut down on production and cut down on the number of people used to make your product.  Supply and demand works for war as it does in business.

Overestimating or underestimating is not like a crap shoot any more.  You roll dice and there is no way to predict the outcome of dots on cubes unless if you load them in your favor.  War is not throwing dice down a flannel lined table.  Yet, that is what it seems to be if what we hear what  the “experts” say and if you “revere” your President enough to believe what he says.  There is a lot of overestimating and a lot of underestimating going on in the war games we are playing.

I had another thought while trying to figure out if I had the guts to gamble.  My thoughts had this to say about what lawyers say in the courtroom.  If my expertise on courtrooms is up to par because I have seen a lot of courtrooms on TV, I learned that no lawyer worth his or her training would ever ask a question that he or she did not know in advance what the answer had to be.  You cannot go into a situation where a wild hair or wild card would pop up and ruin the case you are trying to make.  There is much more at stake when venturing off to war either carrying too much weight on your back or not enough.  It is critical to get it right or you find the war you wanted happens to turn out to be the war you get.

I once was nine and thought with wonder that when I reached ten I would be one/tenth of a hundred years old.  I thought ahead and made a stab at estimating what a good long life would be and settled on about three quarters of a century.  So, I rounded it out and felt that since I was born in 1926 that reaching the end of the Twentieth Century would do nicely.  I was never very good at math but I approximate a lot and either over estimate or under estimate a lot, too.

So, in conclusion, I would say that I did a fairly good job and underestimated my longevity.  I could not account for the heart, carotid, prostate and knee operations and work them into the equation because that is life.  But, I still don’t know if the glass is half empty or full and I try not to be involved with estimations of any kind. People can remember what you said with assurance – and turn on you.