A New Role for the Government??

The fiscal conservative in me says the government has no role whatsoever in matters of technology. The pragmatist in me believes otherwise. Time has proven that federal highways, funded by gasoline and other such taxes, are more efficient than coast to coast toll roads. Thus, there is justification for government funding of new highway technologies. Government funding of new weapons technology and weapons research is practically mandatory, unless you want our arms manufacturers selling to the highest bidder, and that high bidder not always being the US. How would you have liked some manufacturer developing the atomic bomb, then selling it to Germany or Japan? Of course, by funding the research, you control what happens with it, and can even influence the direction of the research.

That being said, what is government’s role in space technology? The entire NASA program, up through Apollo-Soyuz was to beat the Soviets to the moon and prove America’s superiority. Once that was accomplished, NASA became a n organization without a mission. The shuttle was created to get to the space station, the space station was a place for the shuttle to go. Promises of technological benefits from micro-gravity experiments still ring hollow. Now with the new race to Mars and the Moon, be prepared for even more hollow promises.

The issue I find most interesting when it comes to government funded technology is in the field of energy. Other nations, most notably France, have shown that government controlled nuclear power generation can be safe, efficient and cost effective. They rely on standardization, uniformity of training and constant re-certification. They have perfected fuel re-processing, which minimizes nuclear waste. The hodge-podge of manufacturers in the US, the incompatibility between different reactor types, and the pressure of competition all contributed to the high costs associated with nuclear power in the US.

Besides nuclear based energy sources, is there a role for the US government in energy development? Unfortunately (that damn laissez faire guy is complaining again), the answer is yes. We still use way too much petroleum for transportation. Yes, we use it for heating also, but a transition to cheap nuclear electricity would allow a transition to electric heat. It’s transportation where oil is used. If the US government took the CAFÉ standards, and steadily increased them to 100 miles per gallon, or limited emissions to near zero, it would force internal combustion engines to a level of efficiency that is currently unattainable with conventional technologies. Our dependency on foreign oil could crumble in a matter of years, and with that, Islamic fundamentalism could go the way of the KKK, a shameful blot, but powerless. I’m still thinking this through a bit, more to follow…

John Lukacs, the New Noah Webster, and Alan Greenspan and pap for the masses

I always try to read a book all the way through before commenting on it But I'm about halfway through John Lukacs "Democracy and Populism" and I'm a bit confused. There are moments of absolute brilliance here, a depth of perception I rarely find. Yet he spends huge portions of the book showing how our definitions of words like facism, totalitarianism, liberal and conservative are incredibly wrong. At the same time, he makes references to Hobbes and Locke that require a fairly sophisticated knowledge of philosophy. So let me get this straight, I don't know what facism is, but I have an indepth knowledge of philosophy? If you, like me, can't remember the tenets of Hobbes philosophy, basically he believed that people are by nature evil, well, not really, perhaps insanely selfish is the right description. Of course, trying to define the teachings of Hobbes or Locke or Aristotle in a few words is impossible. Lukacs is making an important point, that populism is a descent into hell, but damn, I wish he had more than 240 odd pages to prove his hypothosis. I should finish the book tonight, and hopefully will more soon.

On a different note, the world hailed the actions of the Fed this week. Why? The employment report on Friday, to me at least, indicates continued weekness in the job market. Yes, I know, more than "whatever the number" of jobs were created, yet the total number of unemployed INCREASED!!!! In the minds of Wall Street, the biggest problem is inflation, and god only knows prices are increasing. But ALL of the increase can be attributed to the rise in the cost of oil! When prices rise because of the scarcity, real or imagined, of a single commodity, that is NOT inflation. Rising oil prices increases the costs of many things. Take fertilizer for example. Much of the process of producing fertilizer requires the use of various forms of petroleum. The increase in the cost of fetilizer raises the price of producing raw foodstuffs. Add to that the added cost of transportaion because of fuel costs, and guess what, the cost of food goes up! Is this because there is too much money available for food? NO!!! It is because a bubble in oil prices is forming, and the ramifications are far flung.

Problem is, Greenspan and the Fed had little choice but to raise interest rates, because it's what is expected by Wall Street and the other brainless investment groups. If the Fed had not raised rates, the perception would be they lacked the courage to fight "a clearly inflationary" issue. Alan Greenspan is an incredibly intelligent economist. I first started reading his opinions in Ayn Rand's non-fiction works (yes, he submitted articles for Objectivist books, before Objectivism decended into a cult of personality) and he has a profound knowledge of market forces. He needs to be educating investors about what is really happening out there. Take my favorite example, tires. In the 60's, tires cost 10 to 20 dollars each, lasted 15,000 miles if you were lucky. Now inexpensive tires are $60, and last for 60,000 miles. That means in basic math terms the cost of tires has not changed in 40 years, so in real terms, they are nearly free! Problem is, most inflation formulae see $60 versus $15 and say tires cost 4 times as much as they used to. Greenspan knows this, he ses this, he must, he is not swayed by the emotional vagaries of an investor. However, he also knows you must play to the audience from time to time. Thus we increase rates, until he can educate the masses. Problem is, the masses are ignorant to such facts. They obsess about the 30 cent per gallon gas they bought, the $15 tires, and fail to see the value of what they are buying.

I don't know where this current economic ride is going to end. I have a saying, stolen from a song, that if the ride is worth the fall, let's ride. Unfortunately this ride is not worth any fall, let alone the one we are heading for. And if John Lukacs is right, it will be on much more than an economic basis.

Will NASA Ever Learn?

I'm still trying to figure out what made Mike Griffin, the new head of NASA (who, by the way had one of the shortest confirmation hearings ever) say that the decision to launch the next shuttle mission would be his, regardless of what the Return to Flight board says. Does he want NASA to be run out of the space-faring business? Has he forgotten Challenger and Columbia, and even the Apollo 1 fire? (well, he may have forgotten the Apollo fire, since NASA refers to it as the Apollo 204 fire, as part of the forgetting process) Maybe he failed to read Diane Vaughns book, "The Challenger Launch Decision," an extremely detailed examination of the flaws in the decision making system at NASA. Maybe he failed to read "Comm Check," by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, where if you aren't a careful reader, one could conclude that no serious efforts were made to determine the damage to Columbia since there was "nothing we could do anyways, why make them suffer." Even the watered down Rodgers commision report (well, except for Richard Feynmans rather scathing appendix) showed that NASA needs to listen to their engineers. And of course, there is the CAIB report, which emphasizes again and again the NASA ignored evidence of a serious problem, that the need to launch outweighed safety concerns, and that there were several items that had to be addressed before launching the next shuttle. Did you miss that one too, Mike?

The obsession with returning the shuttle to flight has a name - "go fever" and boy, does NASA have a bad case. They as much as admit to the CAIB that they don't have a good understanding of foam shedding, yet allow the the shuttle to rollout with a crack in the external tanks foam! They have modified the analysis software for evaluating launch debris strikes, the same software that said that Columbia was in no danger. Well, that's a good thing then, right? Except they are modifying the software in the OPPOSITE direction of safety! That being the case, what is Griffin going to base his decisions on, his 7 degrees, management opinion, or Kentucky windage? How foolish of me to expect him to listen to the experts who have been selected to approve the return to flight. How foolish of me to doubt the Mike Griffin knows best. How foolish of me to expect a government agency, in this administration, to do a patient review of all the facts instead of acting rashly. And lastly, how foolish of me to expect logic and reason to prevail over ego and emotions. Now, the crew of Discovery are unwittingly risking theirs lives for the furtherance of the political careers of bureaucrats, and I can only hope they survive.

Oil Speculators as Terrorists

So, you want to bring the United States to its knees? Don't become some form of human bomb, just jack up the price of oil! The whole world makes lots of money at $35 a barrel. Only the speculators make money at $40 and above. And there is no earthly reason for oil to be above $35 a barrel, NONE! Of course, there was no earthly reason for the stock bubble in 2000 either, but at least the motive was obvious back then, pure greed. The motives behind the people setting the price of oil these days seem to be purely evil. The trouble is when you look at the impact of high oil prices. During the winter, home heating oil prices rise, in the spring and summer, it's gasoline. Either way, it makes people travel less, re-allocate disposable income towards fuel and away from products, and creates a lot of FUD. Petroleum is a major ingrediant in lots of products, from plastics to chemicals and fertilizers. Thus, the cost of food rises, the costs of packaging rises, in fact the cost of most things rise. Once again, people have to re-allocate more money away from "splurges" to more practical items like foodstuffs.
Now, we have to lay off people, because consumers aren't buying what they used to. No one wants an SUV or other irrationally designed vehicle, we all want 100 miles to the gallon. Auto manufacturers have to cut back on hourly workers. All those increased prices in food and gas brings inflation fears, so up go interest rates, down goes home sales, and home prices. Since the baby boomer generation (myself included) use their homes as their retirement fund, whoops, guess I'll be working longer. And lest we forget, the trade imbalance gets HUGE with all that outrageously priced petroleum coming in, and damn little going out. In short, the US economy is on its knees, all by pushing up the price of oil to an irrational level. There you have. You can destroy the US automotive industry, agriculture, future investment, retirements funds, everything. And not a single follower had to imolate themselves to do it. And we just follow the judas goats bell, and abort to orbit again.

Why it's been awhile

Amazing how sometimes things just turn out, and the circle closes. I've been trying to escape my day job for quite sometime, got all set to bail out, when they announce a plant closing. Now I get to do what I want to do (albiet a few months later) with some paltry, but helpful amount of severance. Of course some of my co-workers are in shock, they have essentially worked for the same people for 20 or more years, never had to do a resume or any job search work, now they are 50+ engineers with no job search skills. It's bad enough they have let their engineering skills stagnate for so long, but over time their salaries have risen to the 99th percentile, while their skills have withered to the 33rd percentile. With the ever shrinking job market up here in New England, their future will be dependent on contacts and luck.

I was fortunate in my childhood to have seen the empty mill buildings in Lowell. To realize that once great companies can just up and move, or cease to exist was earth shattering to me at the ripe old age of 8. It certainly explains why I've never lasted longer than 4 years at any one company, and why continuous training and learning are integral to my life. In this day and age where there is no such thing as loyalty in the workplace, the ability to keep your skills generic is the best way to insure continued employability.

The counterpoint to generic skills is that a lot of firms are looking for specific skills. It's interesting to look at some of the jobs that are out there. For example, "some company" is looking for someone who has experience designing and testing the power supply used in EMC's Symmetrix system. There's a 6 month contract for a former EMC employee who has no other skills than what they learned at EMC. Yup, that's what I want to do with the rest of my life, wait for an ex-employer to need me. You still waiting to re-marry your ex too?

Sorry if this is turning into a rant, but damn if American manufacturers aren't insisting on performing an Abort to Orbit. Rather than use approriate components that require a higher engineering talent level, they are embedding PC's in coffee makers, and scheduling reboots. It's bad enough NASA is still stuck on the ground, do we have to bring down what little is left of domestic engineering talent and manufacturing? It's fine for me, when it's a crisis, my rates start at $100 per hour and soar from there. But wouldn't you like to do a little thinking up front and pay $50?

Introduction

I have zero tolerance for people acting under the influence of stupid, people who fail to take personal responsibility for their beliefs and actions, and people who think they know me better than I do. Thus from time to time, I will share what I feel are the more egregious cases of any of the aforementioned Zero-T issues. And you may ask, why Abort to Orbit? It's one of the abort options for the space shuttle during liftoff, when they are too high and too fast to land, but don't have enough power to go to their planned orbit. So the abort to orbit, though not high enough to do their mission, but maybe high enough to do something useful. It had become a favorite phrase of mine years ago, when mighty NASA forgot they were in the vision business, and settled for a poor excuse for a launch vehicle instead of holding out to do things right. It represented mediocrity, settleing for less than you need, less than you could be. As I watched superior technology fall by the wayside (Betamax, OS/2, non-segmented processors) in favor of less than second best, as I watched elections become a choice between the lesser of who cares, as I watched absolute drivel rise to the top of TV, movie and book sales rankings, I realized abort to orbit isn't just an option, it seems to be a way of life.

I'll finish this first post with an example. I have recently completed reading several books, the most thought provoking of them being God's Debris by Scott Adams, a great read so long as you observe the disclaimers in the preface. This is a quiet book that started life as an ebook, will never reach some of the loftier heights a good book should reach, yet is nicely done. Then I finish The Godfather Returns, by Mark Winegardner, which I'm sure will soon top everyones bestseller and most recommended lists. The only problem is the book is awful. Some of the story ideas are pretty good, but the exposition is abrupt at best, a hydra headed compound sentence doing the work of a paragraph or three. After all these years, and a grueling search for "S/HE WHO WOULD FILL MARIOS SHOES" and this english teacher (professor, sorry) is the best they could come up with? Guess they just aborted to orbit.