California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

The Most Intelligent Thing Trump Has Ever Said

by John Lawrence, March 13, 2019

As practically every other country in the world has grounded Boeing's 737 MAX planes after two recent fatal crashes, the free market US doesn't think it's necessary until every last one of them crashes. Trump tweeted: "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are needed, and the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!"

Bravo and right on, Mr. Trump, for once you are absolutely right. After the Lion Air crash in Indonesia, I wrote:

Last October a Lion Air 737MAX manufactured by Boeing crashed off the coast of Indonesia. All indications were that the pilots had struggled to keep the plane in the air while at the same time the plane's computers were forcing the nose down causing the plane to dive head first into the ocean. Now that the crash has been thoroughly investigated, it has been learned that  a few lines of computer code added to the plane's software without the pilots' knowledge was the culprit in causing the crash. It is a case of too much technology turning the plane's functions over to a computer and taking the pilots' ability to fly the plane literally out of their hands.

It's obvious that the Boeing 737 MAX has a design flaw: TOO MUCH TECHNOLOGY! They are trying to automate flying to the point where the pilot is unnecessary with disastrous results just as the self driving cars Uber and others were testing led to disastrous results. The manually controlled, electronicless planes of the 1920s were safer than the complex jets designed by Boeing today. Boeing's design calls for an awkward, complicated way for the pilots to take control of the plane and not the computer. It ends up with the pilots and the computer fighting for control, a fight the pilots have lost in at least two cases. It would be interesting to know how many other cases there are in which pilots successfully took control of the plane having disengaged the computer.

Flying a plane needs to be as intuitive as possible. Boeing's prescription for the pilots' taking control in an emergency is anything but, and they didn't want the airlines to have to train the pilots about the new technology because that would have made the planes too pricey. So unless the pilots are geeky enough to memorize the manual, they probably wouldn't have known about the procedure for disengaging the computer or in a crisis they would be incapable of remembering. After all they didn't have time to study the manual at that point. Ask Sully about flying skills vs computer control.

The New York Times reported after the first crash:

The story of the change to that system, and how it came to play a central role in the Lion Air crash, shows how safety on modern jetliners is shaped by a complex combination of factors, including fierce industry competition, technological advances and pilot training. It illustrates how, in the rare instances when things go awry, the interplay of those factors can create unintended and potentially fatal consequences.The crash has raised questions about whether Boeing played down or overlooked, largely for cost and competitive reasons, the potential dangers of keeping pilots uninformed about changes to a critical element of the plane’s software.

I wrote previously:

There was a malfunction of the so-called maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, known as M.C.A.S. due to faulty data being fed to it by the angle of attack sensors which are devices on either side of the fuselage that measure how much the plane’s nose is pointing up or down. Preliminary findings from the investigation suggested that the sensor on the pilot’s side of the plane was generating erroneous data. So erroneous data triggered the M.C.A.S. system taking control out of the pilots' hands and forcing the plane's nose downward.

It sort of looks like the Boeing engineers didn't know what they were doing. They had a good design for a reliable plane - the original 737, but they had to tinker with it in order to make more money. They cut corners creating a monstrosity - the 737 MAX. Now they will have to go back to the drawing board. Airbus couldn't be happier as thousands of the MAX planes are on order but haven't been delivered yet. I believe the operative words are "Cancel my order!"

You're right, Mr. Trump: "Older and simpler is much better. Split second decisions are needed, and the complexity creates danger. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!" Will Boeing redesign the plane to let pilots take control just by moving the wheel as it's done with cruise control in a car? Wait and see.

Ethiopia, China, Other Countries Ground Boeing Aircraft After Devastating Crash

From the Washington Post

Ethiopian Airlines flight crashes, all 157 on board killed

 

 

A new Ethio­pian airlines plane bound for Nairobi crashed March 10, killing all 157 people on board. (Reuters)

 

 

By Paul Schemm

March 11 at 11:31 AM

ADDIS ABABA, Ethi­o­pia — Ethi­o­pia, China and other countries announced Monday that they would ground the type of U.S. aircraft that was involved in a devastating Ethio­pian Airlines crash that killed everyone on board Sunday just minutes after takeoff.

But Boeing, the manufacturer of the 737 Max 8 airliner that crashed on a flight from Addis Ababa to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, said Monday that it has no reason to recommend that airlines ground the plane.

“The investigation is in its early stages, but at this point, based on the information available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators,” Boeing said in a statement reported by CNN.

A national day of mourning has been declared in Ethio­pia, and investigators are sifting through the crash site to identify remains so they can be turned over to families. Ethi­o­pian Airlines reported that the “black box” voice and data recorders have been recovered from the plane.

Ethi­o­pian Airlines said its fleet of the planes would be grounded as an “extra safety precaution.”

China’s Civil Aviation Administration said in a statement early Monday that it has asked domestic airlines to temporarily ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 jets before 6 p.m. It was the first time China has taken the lead in ordering a model grounded before other national aviation agencies.

Cayman Airways and Indonesia’s airlines also suspended the use of the Boeing 737 Max 8 plane, the latest version of the industry’s most popular passenger airline. Indonesia’s director general of civil aviation, Polana B. Pramesti, said the move was to ensure flight safety and that the planes would be inspected. Indonesia has 11 Max 8 aircraft in service.

Officials are “conducting an inspection by temporarily grounding the planes to make sure that they’re airworthy,” Pramesti said in a statement.

Following a review, India’s aviation authority said crew members operating the 737 Max 8 must undergo specific training and that only pilots with 1,000 hours of flying experience would be allowed to fly the plane. There are 17 Max 8 aircraft operating in the country.

In Vietnam, meanwhile, the Civil Aviation Authority said it would not license the use of the Max plane in the country pending the results of investigations and remedial measures. While there are currently no Max 8 aircraft in use in Vietnam, budget airline VietJet Air ordered 100 Boeing 737 Max aircraft in February, including 20 of the Max 8 version, at the same time that President Trump was meeting with Vietnamese leaders in Hanoi.

In Morocco and Mongolia, authorities suspended operation of Boeing 737 Max 8 planes flying in each country, news agencies reported. Royal Air Maroc had two of the airlines in service and two others on order. Mongolia reportedly had one of the planes in service.

In the United States, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines expressed confidence in their Boeing planes and crew members. “Our fleet of Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft are operating as planned today and we plan to operate those aircraft going forward,” Southwest said in a statement. American said it has “full confidence in the aircraft and our crew members.”

In the aftermath of the Ethio­pian crash, Boeing stock plunged Monday morning, dragging down the Dow Jones industrial average.

Off the Top of My Head

Boeing Culpable in Lion Air Crash!

by John Lawrence, February 5, 2019

Last October a Lion Air 737MAX manufactured by Boeing crashed off the coast of Indonesia. All indications were that the pilots had struggled to keep the plane in the air while at the same time the plane's computers were forcing the nose down causing the plane to dive head first into the ocean. Now that the crash has been thoroughly investigated, it has been learned that  a few lines of computer code added to the plane's software without the pilots' knowledge was the culprit in causing the crash. It is a case of too much technology turning the plane's functions over to a computer and taking the pilots' ability to fly the plane literally out of their hands.

It all started when Airbus announced a new version of their best selling A320 that was more fuel efficient. Boeing scrambled to come up with a competitive version of their 737. In doing this they redesigned the planes engines making them larger. This required the engines to be repositioned on the plane's wings, and, consequentially, there was a concern among Boeing engineers that this might lead to a stall under certain conditions. They chose to insert a few lines into the computer code that would automatically lower the plane's nose if the plane was about to stall. In order to to keep the price down so that the 737MAX would be price competitive with the new Airbus, Boeing didn't require any pricey pilot retraining  as a result of the upgrades.

The New York Times reported:

Understanding how the pilots could have been left largely uninformed leads back to choices made by Boeing as it developed the 737 Max more than seven years ago, according to statements from Boeing and interviews with engineers, former Boeing employees, pilots, regulators and congressional aides.Those decisions ultimately prompted the company, regulators and airlines to conclude that training or briefing pilots on the change to the flight control system was unnecessary for carrying out well-established emergency procedures.

The story of the change to that system, and how it came to play a central role in the Lion Air crash, shows how safety on modern jetliners is shaped by a complex combination of factors, including fierce industry competition, technological advances and pilot training. It illustrates how, in the rare instances when things go awry, the interplay of those factors can create unintended and potentially fatal consequences.The crash has raised questions about whether Boeing played down or overlooked, largely for cost and competitive reasons, the potential dangers of keeping pilots uninformed about changes to a critical element of the plane’s software.

There was a malfunction of the so-called maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, known as M.C.A.S. due to faulty data being fed to it by the angle of attack sensors which are devices on either side of the fuselage that measure how much the plane’s nose is pointing up or down. Preliminary findings from the investigation suggested that the sensor on the pilot’s side of the plane was generating erroneous data. So erroneous data triggered the M.C.A.S. system taking control out of the pilots' hands and forcing the plane's nose downward.

Again from the New York Times article, Behind the Lion Air Crash, a Trail of Decisions Kept Pilots in the Dark:

The bottom line was that there was no regulatory requirement for Boeing or its airline customers to flag the changes in the flight control system for its pilots — and Boeing contended that there was no need, since, in the company’s view, the established emergency procedures would cover any problem regardless of whether it stemmed from the original system or the modification.

At least as far as pilots knew, M.C.A.S. did not exist, even though it would play a key role in controlling the plane under certain circumstances.

However, pilots were concerned about the lack of knowledge regarding the M.C.A.S. system. “I would think this is one of those systems that the pilots should know it’s onboard and when it’s activated,” said Chuck Horning, the department chairman for aviation maintenance science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

The faulty design of the Boeing 737MAX, in my opinion was that there was no intuitive way fro the pilots to take control of the plane away from the plane's computer once the M.C.A.S. system was activated. There was a way, however, if the pilots had been trained on it which was entirely too convoluted and unintuitive. The centerpiece of that procedure is to switch off two “stabilizer trim cutout” switches on the central console of the cockpit, and then flip open the handles on wheels near the knees of the captain and first officer. By cranking those wheels, the pilots can adjust the stabilizers manually in an effort to keep the plane from pitching up or down.

However, older 737s had another way of addressing certain problems with the stabilizers: Pulling back on the yoke, or control column, one of which sits immediately in front of both the captain and the first officer, would cut off electronic control of the stabilizers, allowing the pilots to control them manually. This is how it should have been done on the 737MAX.

In a car the driver can take over from cruise control just by stepping on the brake or the accelerator. It should have been as simple and intuitive for the pilots to take control of the plane as that, but it wasn't. In their haste to get a version of the plane on the market, Boeing and the FAA screwed up. It's as simple as that. So the fact that Boeing didn't require any pilot retraining and a faulty design was responsible for the death of 189 people. It was all about Boeing's profits.  Newer isn't always better, and too much technology can be worse than simpler technology.

Break Up Facebook (and, While We’re At It, Google, Apple, and Amazon)

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

The New York Times revealed last week that Facebook executives withheld evidence of Russian activity on the Facebook platform far longer than previously disclosed. They also employed a political opposition research firm to discredit critics.

There’s a larger story here.

America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century began with a raft of innovations — railroads, steel production, oil extraction — but culminated in mammoth trusts owned by “robber barons” who used their wealth and power to drive out competitors and corrupt American politics.

We’re now in a second Gilded Age — ushered in by semiconductors, software and the internet — that has spawned a handful of giant high-tech companies.

Facebook and Google dominate advertising. They’re the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.

This consolidation at the heart of the American economy creates two big problems.

First, it stifles innovation. Contrary to the conventional view of a U.S. economy bubbling with inventive small companies, the rate at which new job-creating businesses have formed in the United States has been halved since 2004, according to the census.

A major culprit: Big tech’s sweeping patents, data, growing networks, and dominant platforms have become formidable barriers to new entrants.

The second problem is political. These enormous concentrations of economic power generate political clout that’s easily abused, as the New York Times investigation of Facebook reveals. How long will it be before Facebook uses its own data and platform against critics? Or before potential critics are silenced even by the possibility?

America responded to the Gilded Age’s abuses of corporate power with antitrust laws that allowed the government to break up the largest concentrations.

President Teddy Roosevelt went after the Northern Securities Company, a giant railroad trust financed by J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s two most powerful businessmen. The U.S. Supreme Court backed Roosevelt and ordered the company dismantled.

In 1911, President William Howard Taft broke up Rockefeller’s sprawling Standard Oil empire.

It is time to use antitrust again. We should break up the high-tech behemoths, or at least require that they make their proprietary technology and data publicly available and share their platforms with smaller competitors.

There would be little cost to the economy, because these giant firms rely on innovation rather than economies of scale — and, as noted, they’re likely to be impeding innovation overall.

Is this politically feasible? Unlike the Teddy Roosevelt Republicans, Trump and his enablers in Congress have shown little appetite for antitrust enforcement.

But Democrats have shown no greater appetite — especially when it comes to Big Tech.

In 2012, the staff of the Federal Trade Commission’s bureau of competition submitted to the commissioners a 160-page analysis of Google’s dominance in the search and related advertising markets, and recommended suing Google for conduct that “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation.” But the commissioners, most of them Democratic appointees, chose not to pursue the case.

The Democrats’ new “better deal” platform, which they unveiled a few months before the midterm elections, included a proposal to attack corporate monopolies in industries as wide-ranging as airlines, eyeglasses and beer. But, notably, the proposal didn’t mention Big Tech.

Maybe the Democrats are reluctant to attack Big Tech because the industry has directed so much political funding to Democrats. In the 2018 midterms, the largest recipient of Big Tech’s largesse, ActBlue, a fundraising platform for progressive candidates, collected nearly $1 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

As the Times investigation of Facebook makes clear, political power can’t be separated from economic power. Both are prone to abuse.

One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent such abuses.

“The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economical conquests only, but for political power,” warned Edward G. Ryan, chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, in 1873.

Antitrust law was viewed as a means of preventing giant corporations from undermining democracy.

“If we will not endure a king as a political power,” thundered Ohio Sen. John Sherman, the sponsor of the nation’s first antitrust law in 1890, “we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale” of what the nation produced.

We are now in a second Gilded Age, similar to the first when Congress enacted Sherman’s law. As then, giant firms at the center of the American economy are distorting the market and our politics.

We must resurrect antitrust.

Off the Top of My Head

Too Much Technology?

by John Lawrence, November 30, 2018

The Lion Air plane crash that killed 189 people was caused by a tug of war between the plane's two pilots and a computer. Due to faulty readings from one of the plane's sensors, the computer pointed the plane's nose downward while the pilots tried to keep the plane either level or ascending. Before planes were so highly computerized this never would have happened. Even with computers onboard, the pilots taking manual control of the plane should have overridden the computers. This is a design flaw incorporating too much technology. Evidently, there was a procedure to override the computers, but it was far from intuitive.

I got my private pilot's license many years ago, but haven't flown recently. However, I know enough about the essentials of flying an airplane to know that this accident never would have happened on a plane that the pilots actually were responsible for flying and not the computers.

Think of a car's cruise control system. When you put a car on cruise control, it is essentially being run by a computer at least as far as the car's speed is concerned. The computer keeps the car at a constant speed. However, the driver at any time can put his foot on the brakes or accelerator and immediately override the cruise control. This should have been the case on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane as well. As soon as the pilot took the wheel, the plane's automated system should have been overridden. Since it was not, this is a design flaw in the plane.

CNN reported:

Former US National Transportation Safety Board air crash investigator and CNN aviation analyst Peter Goelz told CNN the data clearly showed issues with both the speed and altitude of the plane.

 

"There is something obviously wrong in both the air speed and the altitude which would point to the flight control systems," he said. "These are fly-by-wire systems -- highly automated -- and pilots may not be able to troubleshoot failures in a timely manner."

 

This is exactly the problem: the planes are too highly automated. There's no reason why a human pilot relying on simple instruments like an altimeter, airspeed indicator and attitude indicator shouldn't be able to take off and land a plane. These basic instruments are fail safe. Even if these instruments did fail, the pilot should be able to take a look out the window in "normal weather" as was the case that day and control his attitude with the "stick". Since the weather was normal that day, the pilots could have done everything manually.

 

Boeing is putting too much technology into planes making the pilots not only redundant, but unable to take over flying the plane when the technology fails. Of course, this penchant for too much technology makes it possible for Boeing to charge a lot more for the plane. The more technology, the more the price goes up. Sometimes, the simpler, the better. A plane's computers should be easily disabled the same way a car's cruise control is disabled - by a slight pressure on the control wheel.

 

The pilot's control wheel is called a yoke. The pilot uses the yoke to control the attitude of the plane, usually in both pitch and roll. Rotating the control wheel controls the ailerons and the roll axis. Fore and aft movement of the control column controls the elevator and the pitch axis. When the yoke is pulled back the nose of the aircraft rises. When the yoke is pushed forward the nose is lowered. When the yoke is turned left the plane rolls to the left and when it is turned to the right the plane rolls to the right.

 

The plane's automated systems - also called "fly-by-wire" - need to be automatically disabled as soon as the pilot touches the yoke. If they had been, this horrific accident could have been averted.

Off the Top of My Head

Henry Booker and Alfred Loomis: Winning the War With Radar

by John Lawrence, March 3, 2018

 

Radar was critical to winning World War II. The two men most responsible for its development were Alfred Loomis and Henry Booker. Booker was in charge of the British laboratory, and Loomis made the critical American contribution. Loomis was the subject of a recent Frontline American Experience program on KPBS. Before this development British anti-aircraft guns could only fill the skies with lead hoping they'd hit something. Radar enabled them to lock on to a single airplane and gun it down. Thus a lot of bullets were not wasted and the accuracy was greatly improved. This saved Britain from total destruction.

Hitler made the mistake of taking on Russia, which theretofore had been an ally, instead of turning his attention toward Britain. If he had successfully conquered Britain, the outcome of the war would have been different. It would be too late for the Americans to get involved. As it turned out the Russians defeated the German troops, and this was the turning point in the war. The German bombing of Britain was successfully fended off with the just developed radar.

Henry Booker emigrated to the US as a professor at Cornell. He was then hired by UCSD to start a new department called Applied Electrophysics around 1967. When I was a young guy working at General Dynamics, I had an interview with Dr. Booker and eventually enrolled in his fledgling department. There was only one other professor there at the time - Kenneth Bowles - and a few students. Booker and Bowles were it. The department eventually split into an applied physics department and a department of Information and Computer Science. My first year there I took courses from Professor Booker. He was a good teacher and an easy grader. When I took the oral exam for my MS degree, Booker was on the committee along with Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm fame and Professor Pieter Schalkwijk who was my last advisor there.

Other students had told me that Booker would ask me to write down Maxwell's equations so I dutifully prepared. Interesting how I was able to interact with these guys who had played such a crucial role in US and world history. I got my degree in Information and Computer Science. After I left UCSD I had a paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory: "“A New Universal Coding Scheme for the Binary Memoryless Source”.

It was based on Schalkwijk's theory and later became known as the Lawrence algorithm.

Off the Top of My Head

Blackholes and Shitholes

by John Lawrence

There is an excellent  two hour show on Nova about black holes. It seems they are ubiquitous in the universe. They seem to be at the center of every galaxy and elsewhere in the galaxies as well. Whereas light escapes from the stars and makes it's way to the earth where astronomers can study them, light cannot escape from a black hole simply because it is so massive that its gravity won't let it. This seems easy enough to understand. Light has mass as Einstein demonstrated so it's subject to being attracted by gravity just as Newton's apple was. A star might be called a light hole because its mass is not great enough to suck photons back to it so they escape. A black hole could be thought of as a massive star with the characteristic that light cannot escape. So what's the big deal?

There are a whole host of interesting objects in the universe for astronomers to study and get excited about. That's fine. They just recently in 2017 measured a gravity wave. It took two massive installations that must have cost millions of dollars to do it. Whether any practical applications can come out of gravity waves, which were created by two black holes colliding, remains to be seen. Anyway three scientists won a Nobel prize because of the discovery. It's interesting that somewhere else in the universe billions of years ago the two black holes which produced the gravity wave collided. And just last year the gravity wave traveling at the speed of light washed over the earth. If the scientist at one of the LIGO installations hadn't gone home at 4 AM and taken the installation out of test mode, they never would have seen it.

Scientists don't understand about the dark matter and energy that evidently exists in the universe. The dark matter could simply by the sum total of the masses of black holes. I don't see why they don't explain it that way. As for dark energy, well it goes to show that scientists just do not understand everything about the universe. There's still a lot to discover. It also seems that every little discovery requires massive, million dollar installations. Remember the super conducting super collider which cost millions? It finally was able to detect the last "God" particle, the Higgs boson!

Well, measuring gravity waves produced by the collision of two black holes is nice, couldn't all the money that went into it have been better spent eradicating disease and poverty in parts of the world that Trump calls "shitholes"? The energy and efforts of talented individuals could better be spent eliminating war and suffering around the world, not to mention homelessness in America. We don't need technological innovation so much as we need to solve problems here on earth that human societies have been grappling with for millenia.

Off the Top of My Head

Technological Progress Has Not Led To a Better World

by John Lawrence

By all accounts we live in a pretty technologically sophisticated world: self-driving cars, robots, automation, the internet, smartphones that have the computing power of mainframes of 20 years ago. You'd think that we wouldn't have to work as hard, that poverty would have been eliminated and that there would be no more war. But that isn't the case. Far from it.

There is more poverty than ever with masses of people living on one or two dollars a day. War rages all over the planet. There is a permanent war establishment. More and more destructive and sophisticated weapons are being developed and deployed every day. 65 million refugees roam the world looking for a permanent home preferably in a more developed country than the one from which they came. Their homes and cities have been destroyed by war. The old saying, "We had to destroy the town in order to save it" applies to large swathes of the Middle East and Africa.

In the preeminent country of the world, the US, the world's policeman, infrastructure is crumbling and large numbers of homeless people roam the streets of downtown urban centers. Hepatitis A and other diseases are breaking out due to the fact that people must urinate and defecate on the streets. It is a veritable dystopia.

The problem is that no one, including government, is concerned about the overarching problems of peace, a decent standard of living for all and protecting the planet and the environment. People are only concerned about selling boxes whether those boxes be cars, houses or smartphones. There is no profit in protecting the environment; there is only profit in exploiting and destroying it. There is no profit in providing for the poor and wretched of the earth. There is only profit in exploiting them. Frantz Fanon's book, The Wretched of the Earth, needs updating.

Too bad that this is the official mindset of the world's formerly greatest country, the US, where seeking profit above all else is the first and essential commandment. And devil take the hindermost.

 

Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated

By James Clear    |    Mental Models

Murphy's Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

This pithy statement references the annoying tendency of life to cause trouble and make things difficult. Problems seem to arise naturally on their own, while solutions always require our attention, energy, and effort. Life never seems to just work itself out for us. If anything, our lives become more complicated and gradually decline into disorder rather than remaining simple and structured.

Why is that?

Murphy's Law is just a common adage that people toss around in conversation, but it is related to one of the great forces of our universe. This force is so fundamental to the way our world works that it permeates nearly every endeavor we pursue. It drives many of the problems we face and leads to disarray. It is the one force that governs everybody's life: Entropy.

What is Entropy and Why Does It Matter?

What is entropy? Here's a simple way to think about it:

Imagine that you take a box of puzzle pieces and dump them out on a table. In theory, it is possible for the pieces to fall perfectly into place and create a completed puzzle when you dump them out of the box. But in reality, that never happens.

Why?

Quite simply, because the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Every piece would have to fall in just the right spot to create a completed puzzle. There is only one possible state where every piece is in order, but there are an infinite number of states where the pieces are in disorder. Mathematically speaking, an orderly outcome is incredibly unlikely to happen at random.

Similarly, if you build a sand castle on the beach and return a few days later, it will no longer be there. There is only one combination of sand particles that looks like your sand castle. Meanwhile, there are an infinite number of combinations that don't look like it.

Again, in theory, it is possible for the wind and waves to move the sand around and create the shape of your sand castle. But in practice, it never happens. The odds are astronomically higher that sand will be scattered into a random clump.

These simple examples capture the essence of entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder. And there are always far more disorderly variations than orderly ones.

Why Does Entropy Matter for Your Life?

The Trouble With Circuit Breakers

by Paul Keleher

The trouble with circuit breakers is that, although they may trip in response to a short-circuit or ground-fault condition, unless they are tested “in-situ” (after installation, under the conditions of their installation), there is no way to know if any given circuit breaker will trip quickly enough in response to a short-circuit or ground-fault to prevent circuit components from overheating  and being damaged, or worse, due to the relatively high current of any parallel fault. This could cause a fire.

There are 3 types of electrical occurrences that can cause excessive flow in an electrical power circuit:

1.    Overload (series fault): a condition where an excessive (greater than the amount of current that the circuit breaker is designed to carry) amount of current is drawn through a branch circuit which is otherwise in serviceable condition. If a branch circuit of a given current-carrying capacity is exposed to an excessive current, the excessive current may cause components of the circuit to fail due to overheating.

2.    Short-circuit (parallel fault): Electricity will only flow through an electrical circuit when the circuit comprises a complete loop which passes through something which converts electrical current to useful energy, and poses some resistance to the flow of current in the process. Power is delivered by an electrical power circuit to the load (any appliance that uses electrical energy to do work) from the source of electrical power and is returned from this load to the source of power. A short-circuit is an unintentional condition that can be created when the source conductor becomes inadvertently connected to the return conductor by-passing the load, causing the amount of current flowing in the circuit to be limited only by the resistance of the circuit conductors themselves. The amount of current that flows through a short-circuit is typically much higher than the amount of current the circuit breaker is designed to handle. If a parallel fault current is not interrupted quickly, the high current will cause the circuit to overheat and this heat will often damage elements of the branch circuit.

3.    Ground Fault (parallel fault): Similar to a short-circuit except unlike a short-circuit, which is an inadvertent connection between conductors of a circuit bypassing any connected load, a ground fault is an inadvertent connection between a circuit conductor and a part of the equipment enclosing the circuit or other electrical equipment that is electrically conductive. The amount of current flowing in a ground-fault is relatively high compared to the amount of current the circuit breaker is designed to carry, and similar to a short-circuit, will cause damage due to excessive heat relatively quickly.

The Internet of Things: Asking for Trouble

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

A Hacker's Wet Dream

Hackers are licking their chops over the latest push by high tech corporations including San Diego's Qualcomm to create an Internet of Things in which everything is hooked up to the internet: your refrigerator, your thermostat, your security system, your car. It will be a hacker's paradise. Already hackers have carried out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) taking Netflix, Twitter, Paypal and other major websites off the air. Hackers were able to direct an overwhelming amount of traffic to a company by the name of Dyn which acts as a switching hub for internet traffic.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driven by corporate needs to find a new way to keep revenues flowing now that cell phones and computers seem to have reached their maximum growth capacity. So why not promote an internet in which all your household appliances are online? That way you can use your cell phone to set your thermostat, check on your refrigerator to see if you should pick up milk on the way home, check your cameras to see if the FedEx guy left a package etc. Only problem is that most of these devices, which also fall under the heading of Home Automation, have little or no security built in. The net effect is to make your home more insecure and subject to entry by crooks and thieves. If your home security system is hooked up to the internet, it can be hacked with the result that your home is actually less secure. Do you really want your garage door hooked up to the internet so you can check to see whether or not you left it open?

The point is that the less number of devices that are hooked up to the internet, the better. The more that are hooked up, the more that hackers have to work with for an attack like the one on Dyn. The reason is that every such device has to have an internet address. Once hackers decipher that address, they can use it to send a request to any server. If they decipher enough addresses, they can overwhelm and crash any server. Thus legitimate requests are denied and Twitter, Paypal and others are temporarily at least out of business. Those addresses are already available on the "dark internet" where they sell credit card numbers and other illegal items. Also available are default passwords which are rarely changed.

Therefore, despite Qualcomm's business model which projects an increasing number of devices hooked up to the internet, you are better off not having any household devices online. You can have Home Automation without being hooked up to the internet. You just won't be able to use your cell phone to control it or have access to it remotely. Your home will definitely be more secure that way, but the cell phone corporations like Qualcomm will lose money. Internet security for your refrigerator is not a major or sexy selling point. So you will probably never hear about it in an ad. Consequently, internet security which would be quite expensive for your refrigerator will probably not be built in. Hence your refrigerator will be more hackable creating the tradeoff between the convenience of knowing whether or not you need milk versus the ability for a hacker to open your front door.

So Who Needs It?

Silicon Valley corporations are running out of profit margins for devices such as digital cameras, laptops and ipads so they have to develop more gadgets for the consuming public whether they need them or not. In many cases, we are better off without them. This is from an Atlantic article, The Internet of Things You Don’t Really Need

But at what cost? What improvements to our lives do we not get because we focused on “smart” things? Writing in The Baffler last year, David Graeber asked where the flying cars, force fields, teleportation pods, space colonies, and all the other dreams of the recent past’s future have gone. His answer: Technological development was re-focused so that it wouldn’t threaten existing seats of power and authority. The Internet of Things exists to build a market around new data about your toasting and grilling and refrigeration habits, while duping you into thinking smart devices are making your lives better than you could have made them otherwise, with materials other than computers. Innovation and disruption are foils meant to distract you from the fact that the present is remarkably similar to the past, with you working even harder for it.

A lot of people are fascinated by "smart" gadgets when a plain old dumb gadget serves their needs just as well and in many cases better. How many times have I waited for a smart paper towel dispenser to actually dispense its towels. I'm also perfectly capable of turning water on and off without having to wave my hands under the faucet in the hopes that it would actually turn on. High tech nirvana is selling false hopes and dreams in an attempt to lull us into complacency and make us forget what is really valuable in this world. Hint: it's not more gadgets.

Hackers Could Do Some Serious Damage

The hackers who perpetrated the attack on Friday, October 22, 2016 represent only the first wave of those who will be exploiting the vulnerabilities of the so-called Internet of Things. Despite its promotion by Qualcomm and others, it is not a desirable scenario for everything to be hooked up to the internet. The fewer things hooked up, the better. Especially systems like communications and electrical grids. It might be a complete annoyance for hackers to hack into individual homes, but it is quite a different story if they manage to disrupt the electrical grid for an entire region of the country. Do we really want street lights hooked up to the internet or parking meters? Until really secure internet devices become available, we are all better off if fewer things are connected with the internet.

Internet expert, Ashton Mozano at the University of San Diego, said, "A teenager with some limited technical ability could download the code [for the malicious software] from github and get into the game. Given the widespread ignorance, inaction and hubris in the Internet of Things manufacturing realm, this event is just the tip of the iceberg." All the hacker or hackers have to do is to identify an internet device such as a webcam that has little security built in and then do a search for all such devices. Then they order those devices to make a request to a particular server such as the ones at Dyn and the internet shuts down for all those using websites for which Dyn is a key component. Since the requests come from a wide variety of devices, it is impossible to identify the source of the hack. So anonymity for hackers and relative child's play on behalf of those who would screw up the works.

This is from Scientific American:

The IoT is a vast and growing virtual universe that includes automobiles, medical devices, industrial systems and a growing number of consumer electronics devices. These include video game consoles, smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and connected thermostats like the Nest, not to mention the smart home hubs and network routers that connect those devices to the internet and one another. Technology items have accounted for more than 73 percent of holiday gift spending in the U.S. each year for the past 15 years, according to the Consumer Technology Association. This year the CTA expects about 170 million people to buy presents that contribute to the IoT, and research and consulting firm Gartner predicts these networks will grow to encompass 50 billion devices worldwide by 2020. With Black Friday less than one month away it is unlikely makers of these devices will be able to patch the security flaws that opened the door to last week’s attack.

It does not take much sophistication on the part of the hackers. Malware such as the Mirai botnet is well known to most security experts and can be easily downloaded by almost anyone. I guess the makers of such insecure devices as potted plant monitors, that send a text message when a plant needs to be watered, could care less about the hackability of their gadgets. It's all about sales, and who cares about whether or not their device leads to home invasions or robberies. Some of the more ridiculous hook-ups to the internet are devices such as "smart" dog collars, Pixstar internet photo frames, Xiaomi night lights, and Prodigo espresso machines. Obviously, these markets are unregulated. They need to be ASAP so manufacturers can't foist insecure devices on the American and world public. This is only going to create huge headaches in the future. However, the Age of Trump is the Age of Deregulation which will turn into a holiday for hackers.

On Love and Meritocracy - Part 2

by John Lawrence

Part 1 is here.

There is No PhD in Love

The educational system promotes "progress" in western terms that produces gadgets and labor saving devices while employing smaller and smaller numbers of highly educated people to do so. Those people who have a high capacity to love or care for others are devalued as lesser human beings if they do not have high IQs and advanced degrees from prestigious institutions. They aren't promoted in terms of the educational system. There is no PhD in love. The Meritocracy is seen as deserving billions of dollars. Highly educated professionals attain the highest reaches of government from which they declaim on the virtues of people like themselves.

When I was a graduate student at UCSD, my adviser, Irwin Jacobs, founder of Qualcomm and local billionaire, advised me that at the end of my second year there enrolled in a PhD program, there would be a "filtering out procedure." Jacobs, the ultimate Meritocrat, thought nothing about the disruption of lives that would be caused by having them filtered out. Some of these people had sacrificed to come there leaving good jobs; some of them had families to support. I felt somewhat responsible because I had persuaded some of them to enroll in that program. But Jacobs had no qualms about filtering them out if they didn't meet his high standards and didn't deserve to be in the ranks of the 'best and the brightest'.

My point was why did they admit them into the program in the first place if they didn't think they were good enough to be designated PhDs? They certainly had enough stats on them by that time. They all had been graded and quantified for years in their journey through the educational system and had undergone every possible testing procedure. Answer: they needed bodies in the program to justify their professors' salaries and their very existence. But what they should have done is to have filtered them out right at the beginning before they had lost their jobs and their families instead of leading them on like lambs to slaughter.

Meritocracy Produces Divorces and Job Losses

In the wake of the "filtering out procedure" there were many divorces and job losses. That didn't matter to a Meritocrat like Jacobs. What mattered was that they were not good enough to join the club that he was in. Jacobs, a prominent Democrat and philanthropist, exemplified the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) values which along with the Clintons and President Obama sought to align itself with the values of the Meritocracy and leave the unions behind. The union movement has been "filtered out" as globalization and President Clinton's NAFTA have come to pass. These are the values of the New Democrats, the post-industrialists, and the DLC. They have rejected the New Deal and the value of equality as passe in favor of globalization and Meritocracy.

The Meritocrat's solution to every problem is more education, that every problem is an individual and not a societal problem. The individual only has himself or herself to blame. This phenomenon is what Thomas Frank writes about in his book, Listen Liberal. To Dr Jacobs' credit, he has used his money to do a lot of good for citizens of San Diego and elsewhere, just as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and others have. We have replaced New Deal type government programs with billionaire philanthropists.

Another attribute of the Meritocracy is workaholism. Dr Jacobs was a notorious workaholic with little time for his family. After selling Linkabit, he said, "I assured my wife that we’d have lots of time to do things - that every Wednesday, at the very least, we would go out and have lunch together, etc. But there were so many things to catch up on, and so many people that wanted to talk, that I ended up probably being as busy during retirement than I was before."

That is another thing that the Cintonites share with Wall Street. Many of the young well educated crowd goes to work on Wall Street only to find out that the 16 hour days they have to work there aren't worth the millions they're making. Most Meritocrats, however, feel that, since they work so damn hard, they deserve their well-earned money. They also don't have a problem insisting that their workers also work long hours without additional compensation, something that is antithetical to the union movement. That's another reason unions are considered by them to be passe.

 In Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Way, Joe Nocera writes:

The bad side [of Jeff Bezos] is the way he and his company treat employees. In 2011, the Allentown, Pa., Morning Call published an eye-opening series documenting how Amazon treated the workers at its warehouses. The newspaper reported that workers “were pushed harder and harder to work faster and faster until they were terminated, they quit or they got injured.”

The most shocking revelation was that the warehouses lacked air-conditioning, and that during heat waves, the company “arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside” to revive workers who were overcome by the heat. “I never felt treated like a piece of crap in any other warehouse but this one,” said one worker. (After the exposé, Amazon installed air-conditioning in its warehouses.)

 

Last weekend, a lengthy front-page story in The New York Times examined how Amazon treats its Seattle-based white-collar employees. Although they have air-conditioning — and make good money, including stock options — the white-collar workers also appear to be pushed harder and harder to work faster and faster.

In the cutthroat culture described by The Times’s Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, a certain percentage of workers are culled [Ed. note: culled = filtering out] every year. It’s an enormously adversarial place. Employees who face difficult life moments, such as dealing with a serious illness, are offered not empathy and time off but rebukes that they are not focused enough on work. A normal workweek is 80 to 85 hours, in an unrelenting pressure-cooker atmosphere.

Meritocrats think nothing of pushing their workers "harder and harder to work faster and faster", college educated or not. They should share their CEO's Meritocratic workaholism. If not, they're out of there. These are the opposite values of the union movement where limits of total hours worked, and time off for sick leave and vacation leave are put in place. Bezos wants Amazon to have the feel of a start-up where the work pace is frantic and the pressure intense. But the article goes on to question: "The real issue Amazon’s work culture raises — for blue- and white-collar employees alike — is: How disposable are people?"

Contrasting Amazon's work culture with the union movement the article states:

A previous generation of Americans could count on a social compact; if you stuck loyally by a company, it would stick by you, providing you with a good job and a decent retirement. Long ago, loyalty fell by the wayside, and longtime employees learned that their loyalty meant nothing when companies “downsized.”

Amazon — and, to be sure, any number of other companies as well — has taken this idea to its logical extreme: Bring people in, shape them in the Amazon style of confrontation and workaholism, and cast them aside when they have outlived their usefulness.

All this in the name of competition in the globalized work place. Is it worth it to throw away human beings in order to invent another gadget? To grow the economy? To create more billionaires?

Thomas Frank writes, "It was the educational pedigree of the then-forming Team Obama that won [New York Times columnist David Brooks] esteem. ... Brooks had been obsessed with the tastes and habits of the East Coast meritocracy ...." They were the 'best and the brightest'. They got where they were because they were smart, not because they inherited an earldom or something. They were much to be admired. They achieved the American Dream, the Dream of having more money, material stuff and awards than their parents. They were corporate liberals who admired and promoted other smart people like the smart people who got us into the Iraq War in the Bush administration. They represented "credentialed expertise".

Frank continues: "What this doctrine means for the politics of income inequality should be clear: a profound complacency. For successful professionals, Meritocracy is a beautifully self-serving doctrine, entitling them to all manner of rewards and status, because they are smarter than other people. For people on the receiving end of inequality--for those who have just lost their home, for example, or who are having trouble surviving on the minimum wage, the implications of inequality are equally unambiguous. To them this ideology says: forget it. You have no one to blame for your problems but yourself." Get more education!

Caregivers Not Considered to Have Much Economic Value

Those who have the capacity to love, to care, on the other hand, are not deemed to have much economic value. They represent the lowest rung on the socio-economic ladder. They don't gain access to the most esteemed academic institutions. Nobody is giving them a billion dollar IPO, instant wealth for creating a gadget or an app. Their advocacy is not appreciated. Their love for children and caregiving for elders is not seen as economically worthwhile or viable. Their big hearts are given short shrift compared to the people with big brains. They are even ridiculed for having too little brain power, for not succeeding in school.

Yet smart people have been in power and the world is not better off. There is more war, more unrest, less shared wealth, more homeless, more refugees (65 million at last count), more violence, more dissatisfaction, more drug use, more environmental destruction. Smart people have not solved any major problems except the invention of more gadgets because their approach for the most part is to invent a salable item, something which can be commodified, bought and sold. Certainly the environment was in much better shape 100 years ago, the water cleaner, the air purer, the food totally organic (pesticides and herbicides had not been invented yet).

As E.F.Schumacher points out in Small is Beautiful:

In short, we can say today that man is far too clever to be able to survive without love. No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of love. The assertion that "foul is useful and fair is not" is the antithesis of love. The hope that the pursuit of goodness and virtue can be postponed until we have attained universal prosperity and that by the single-minded pursuit of wealth, without bothering our heads about spiritual and moral questions, we could establish peace on earth, is an unrealistic, unscientific, and irrational hope. The exclusion of love from economics, science, and technology was something we could perhaps get away with for a little while, as long as we were relatively unsuccessful; but now that we have become very successful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position.

I have altered Schumacher's quote slightly replacing his word, "wisdom", with my word "love." But surely we need both more wisdom and more love if planet earth and the life upon it is to survive.

To summarize we don't need more high tech gadgets; we need technology on a human scale, intermediate technology, to prevent planet Earth from becoming a Planet of Slums as Mike Davis points out. Progress as conceived in the West, which is fueled by greed and envy, only creates more poverty and ecological devastation. We don't need more high IQ technologists from prestigious educational institutions. We need people who have a high capacity for loving and caring even though they may not have high IQs. Can this society discover them or is it only dedicated to the greedy and cold hearted technologists who can invent new gadgets and get billion dollar IPOs from investors who have money to burn, the upper 1%? That money only seeks greater financial returns, not a better world or a more peaceful planet. As Hal David said in 1965, "What the world needs now is love, sweet love. That's the only thing that there's just too little of."

On Love and Meritocracy - Part 1

by John Lawrence

We Don't Need Another Gadget

What the world needs now is love... so wrote Hal David in 1965 with music by Burt Bacharach. It was true then and even truer now. We don't need another gadget, we don't need another smartphone, we don't need another IPO which only increases the economic divide between the 1% and the 99%. Economic progress has utterly failed us. It won't prevent the world going up in flames and/or being flooded out due to global warming. It hasn't prevented war and violence crowding out every other story on the evening news and getting worse by the day.

Economic progress fueled by an educational system that promotes Meritocracy has not produced the results by which men and women can live harmoniously with nature, nor the consequence that the material goods that sustain life are widely distributed. We commodify what we think of as intelligence. We grade people from pre-school to graduate school based on their IQ while ignoring their capacity for selfless love, agape, brotherly love, which is the form of love we are talking about here, as opposed to erotic love. We ignore the caregivers, the nurses, the teachers, those who have chosen to join the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps instead of the military whom we celebrate. There are no parades or medals of honor for the Peace Corps. There are no 'thank yous for your service'.

Thomas Frank writes in Listen Liberal, "Meritocracy ... is the conviction that the successful deserve their rewards, that the people on top are there because they are the best. This is the First Commandment of the professional-managerial class.

These days Meritocracy has come to seem so reasonable that many of us take it for granted as the true and correct measure of human value. Do well in school, and you will earn your credential. Earn your credential, and you are admitted into the ranks of the professions. Become a professional, and you receive the respect of the public plus the nice house in the suburbs and the fancy car and all the rest. Meritocracy makes so much sense to us that barely anyone thinks of challenging it..."

The Downside of Meritocracy

The downside of Meritocracy is that it contributes to the economic divide. Technology has produced scads of billionaires whose products mesmerize us without contributing one iota to making the world a better, safer or more life sustaining place or distributing prosperity more widely. Since the tech revolution of the 2000s, middle class wages have floundered, not increased, while incomes and wealth for the upper few percent have soared. Today the twenty richest individuals control more wealth than the bottom half of the population. That’s 152 million people living in 57 million households. The Walton family of Walmart owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. Many American billionaires are a tribute to the Meritocracy having got there by their own merits and not inherited wealth. They form a plutocracy, and their offspring will be the recipients of inherited wealth just as the aristocracy of the ancien regime was formed and perpetuated.

Tech start-ups get millions of dollars when they "go public." Wealth is concentrated among fewer and fewer people, but they're all celebrated because they are so smart. Many of these so-called entrepreneurs went to the best colleges and universities. However, some of them like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Jack Dorsey (inventor of Twitter and the Square) are actually college drop-outs. They are given credit for growing GDP when all they've done is to increase the economic divide, and their products have not been of the life sustaining variety. If someone creates a company and they do a billion dollars worth of business, this grows the economy or GDP by a billion dollars even though most of that money goes to just a few people. The economy grows and so does the economic divide.

As E. F. Schumacher says in Small is Beautiful, subtitled "Economics as if People Mattered," in order for economic progress to be wide spread what is needed, especially in the under developed parts of the world, is intermediate technology, technology which helps small farmers and entrepreneurs improve their businesses - not high tech. Progress, in Western terms, only "demoralizes the many and makes them the helpless dependents of the rich and expert few." High tech agriculture depopulates the countryside, crowds the cities and turns self sustaining farmers into dependents on the cash economy. NAFTA and globalization has ruined Mexican small farmers as American agricultural products priced them out of the markets.

Intermediate technology, such as simple smokeless stoves and simple solar panels, sufficient to keep one light burning, improves the lot of smallholders while keeping them on the land, but it is not seen as representing progress like GPS operated, automated tractors and GMO seeds which reduce the need for human labor while maximizing yields. Automated trucks being developed by Tesla and others will obviate the need for one of the largest occupational categories - truck drivers.

Meritocracy Commodifies Human Worth

Meritocracy commodifies human intelligence and therefore human worth. The educational system does not promote people with big hearts; it promotes people with big brains. The economic system does the same. Every facet of human endeavor that has economic significance is commodified. However, the capacity to love and care for others is not. It is not thought worth commodifying or rated. It is not considered "talent." If it had economic significance, it would be commodified. Imagine if a college entrant had to provide their SAT score and a rating on a scale from 1 to 100 of their capacity to love or care for other human beings and the earth in general. It seems ludicrous to commodify love; yet people that have a capacity to love are needed now more than ever if the earth and its inhabitants are to survive. The Meritocracy's downside is that it does not value love, only "intelligence" or "talent."

But rather than commodify love, more importantly, we need to decommodify intelligence. The grading system should be done away with. It has a fascistic basis, the commodifyng of people into alphas, betas and gammas such as George Orwell predicted in his novel, Brave New World. True education would be learning that took place without students having to be ranked by grades. Where I went to school on scholarship, Phillips Academy Andover, they ranked everyone in the class from first to last. Besides that they had two honor rolls, first and second, and they did this ranking every quarter. When students have to compete for their rank, true education can not take place, but a lot of anxiety and depression can. Some of the titans of high tech have ignored the whole system, dropped out of college and still became billionaires as mentioned previously. Even though they have proved that grading students is inconsequential to high achievement, they still have contributed to the economic divide with their billion dollar IPOs. We should stop celebrating contributors to the economic divide.

Finland Decommodifies Education

Consider Finland's educational system. It's the total opposite of America's. Instead of control, competition, stress, standardized testing, there is warmth, collaboration and teacher-led encouragement and supportiveness. See How Finland broke every rule — and created a top school system. Yet in an apparent contradiction, Finland's students consistently do better than American students on standardized testing.

We have to revise our notion of progress. The twentieth century saw much "progress" including diesel engines which replaced steam engines on the railroad thereby reducing the number of necessary water stops and station agents. The automobile, the movies, the telephone, the airplane, labor saving appliances, the computer, the internet have all contributed to "progress" because they have created commodities which can be sold and/or billed to individual customers or corporations. Inventions which can't be commodified and sold do not grow the economy. The American economy is based on 70% consumer purchases so the emphasis is on the invention of things which can be commodified and sold rather on things which can help people be self sufficient outside the cash economy or things which can help people and the environment which cannot be bought or sold.

We left the "horse and buggy days" behind. But horses and buggies did not pollute, they did not exacerbate global warming. Diesel engines, automobiles and jet engines spewed greenhouse gasses until the earth started warming perceptibly. Renewable energy inventions have the promise of reducing greenhouse gasses and saving Mother Earth, but they need to be implemented on a larger scale than that of individual sales, and large scale government programs for this or any other form of infrastructure are not even being considered by Congress.

Progress didn't turn out to be progress after all if externalities and the sustainability of the earth are taken into account. High tech reduced the need for human labor, eliminating jobs and widely distributed financial gains. Progress took away the dignity gained from having a necessary and productive job and being able to make a living therefrom. Soon robots will eliminate the need for human labor altogether except that labor involved in service jobs. The Amish and the Mennonites, ridiculed for staying in the "horse and buggy" stage of development, have not contributed to global warming the way adopters of the latest technology have. Did they know something we don't know, were they prescient or did they just do the right thing for the wrong reasons?

Fined by China, Qualcomm Losing Chip Business as CEO Departs

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Qualcomm Sucks Up To China

Qualcomm has been fined almost a billion dollars by China for violating its antimonopoly law. China has the world's most internet users and the largest smartphone market so Qualcomm has to tread gingerly with the authorities there since it doesn't want to be booted out of the world's most lucrative market. The fine will knock 58 cents a share off Qualcomm’s earnings for the year. Qualcomm CEO Steven M. Mollenkopf thinks paying the fine will make Qualcomm better positioned to cash in in the future.

This could be another front in the brewing economic conflicts between China and the US. To sweeten the pot Qualcomm has offered China deep discounts on licensing its patents for certain systems and agreed to partner with Chinese companies. But all this could be construed as a bribe in order to get access to the Chinese market.

Since half of Qualcomm’s revenue comes from China, there is a need to be China's "friend" as Chinese internet czar, Lu Wei, pointed out. And that doesn't just mean on Facebook. China has considerable leverage over Qualcomm and a host of other American corporations who are all eager to make money in China. China knows this and is flexing its muscles in an apparent show of economic nationalism.

Although regulation is a bad word in the US, not so in China. China's regulator is the National Development and Reform Commission aka the N.D.R.C. It is getting more aggressive in giving out fines. This could correspond to China's push to develop its own chip market so it won't have to import them from companies like Qualcomm. Since Qualcomm makes most of its money from licensing its patents, the future looks ominous for the San Diego chipmaker. China hasn't always shown the greatest respect for foreign patent holders, and will probably have many patent workarounds up its sleeve.

The Qualcomm Drama: Rich People Fighting Other Rich People Over Who Gets a Bigger Slice of the Money Pie

By now it's conventional wisdom that the ratio between CEO pay and the pay of the average worker has reached astronomical proportions. Huffington Post reports:

The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000 percent since 1950, according to data from Bloomberg. Today Fortune 500 CEOs make 204 times regular workers on average, Bloomberg found. The ratio is up from 120-to-1 in 2000, 42-to-1 in 1980 and 20-to-1 in 1950.

“When CEOs switched from asking the question of ‘how much is enough’ to ‘how much can I get,’ investor capital and executive talent started scrapping like hyenas for every morsel,” Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, told Bloomberg.

Scrapping like hyenas for every morsel aptly describes the plight of Qualcomm management and Qualcomm shareholders. In an earlier article I wrote about how retiring CEO Paul Jacobs gave his employees a homework assignment last March: go home and tell your wife and family to tell Congress to give Qualcomm a tax break. It seems that Qualcomm has a lot of money parked offshore which should be obvious since they do most of their business in China. Before they can "repatriate" that money, they have to pay taxes to the US government on it so they lobby Congress for a tax break in order to bring it home tax free or almost tax free.

The so-called tax holiday has been tried once before with CEOs promising to use the money to build new plants and create new jobs in the good ole US of A. It never happened. Instead CEOs used the money to buy back their own stock thereby raising its price. The idea is that this benefits shareholders who can then sell their stock at a higher price and cash in.

However, a new wrinkle has emerged in the stock buyback business. Instead of it raising the price so shareholders can cash in, Qualcomm has figured out a way to raise the price so CEOs can cash in and leave shareholders grasping for thin air. The U-T reported "Instead of duly enriching the shareholders who own Qualcomm, its executives have leveraged dominance of the world’s smartphone technology to enrich themselves."

As the price of Qualcomm's stock went up, the hyenas - meaning outgoing CEO Paul Jacobs and incoming CEO Steven Mollenkopf - figured out a way to channel the increased largesse not into shareholder profit but into executive pay for themselves. Investors holding large blocks of Qualcomm stock like Jana Partners were not amused.

The U-T reported:

As overall executive compensation jumped 180 percent last year, Qualcomm gave special stock grants worth $95 million to just two executives. Paul Jacobs, the co-founder’s son who gave up the CEO job way back in March 2014, got $45 million that vests over five years.

The new CEO, Steve Mollenkopf, received a staggering $50 million over five years. President Derek Aberle received grants worth $26.6 million.

Jana Partners, a hedge fund, was founded in 2001 by Barry Rosenstein. Jana, which manages more than $11 billion, is known for buying stakes in companies and then seeking to work with management as it pushes for change. In other words they are a thorn in Qualcomm's side. They've been pushing to break up Qualcomm into two companies - one being the chip making operation and the other being the patent licensing  part.

Qualcomm has a huge target on it from Jana Partners. They want to shake up the company in an effort to make shareholders more money and raise the stock price. Jana has invested about $2 billion in the company so it thinks it has the right to boss it around.

$45 Million for Three Months' Work - Not Bad, Eh?

So Paul Jacobs, failing in his quest for a tax holiday, nevertheless, creatively figured out a way to make $45 million for himself while stiffing Qualcomm shareholders. This was all done by means of stock grants. Qualcomm can grant its executives as many stock shares as it wants to. This means that there are more outstanding shares of stock which dilutes the price per share. So Qualcomm's trick was to buy back some of its stock thereby decreasing the number of outstanding shares and increasing the price per share, and then to turn around and grant stock to those three executives so that the final result was that the exact same number of shares, more or less, were outstanding as there were before this maneuver took place.

The U-T opined "Instead of using buybacks to give owners more of the company over time, Jacobs has effectively recycled shareholder profits into executive pay."

So three hyenas in the form of Jacobs, Mollenkopf and Aberle swiped the money off the table before another hyena in the form of Jana Partners could get to it. Had Jana Partners been successful and gotten to the money first, its rich shareholders could have reaped the profits instead of Qualcomm executives and CEO pay would have decreased. Getting back to the obscene ratio between CEO pay and worker pay, in neither case would workers have benefited even if in this instance CEO pay had diminished. The benefits would have gone to another set of rich hyenas, Jana Partners.

Ironically, workers have no leverage in this scenario whatsoever. Even if executive pay decreases, the only likely beneficiaries are other rich people - shareholders - not workers.

Last week Qualcomm  cut its earnings forecast for the second time this year after reporting that its past quarter’s earnings dropped 45 percent from the prior year. Samsung is not going to use its Snapdragon chip this year, but Qualcomm is optimistic. Samsung has invited them to produce their next chip in Samsung's own factory. Like a moth to a flame, Qualcomm will let Samsung oversee its chip making operation. I wonder what could go wrong with that? As other companies rev up their own chip making operations, Qualcomm will not only lose the chip business, but its patents, from which it gets most of its income, will be rendered worthless as Samsung and others devise workarounds to Snapdragon. 

China is also revving up its chip making operations which will result in less of a need for Qualcomm's Snapdragons. They are afraid Qualcomm has built in a "back door" which would allow the US to spy on Chinese officials. Maybe Paul Jacobs got out just in time.

Steve Jobs and American Jobs

by Robert Kuttner from Huffington Post, March 11, 2012

The economy added another 227,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday. That's good news, sort of. It means that the recovery is slowly progressing. At this rate, we will be back to pre-recession employment levels sometime around 2018.

However, this growth in jobs was not enough for wages to keep place with inflation; nor did the unemployment rate drop, but stayed stuck at 8.3 percent. Why? Because folks who had given up have started entering the labor force again, but the percentage of people in the labor force is still two points lower than it was before the recession began. A new study by the Economic Policy Institute reports that earnings declined over the past decade even for college graduates -- so much for the education cure.

In short, the recession made a bad problem worse, but the economy on the eve of the recession was nothing to be proud of. Throughout the first decade of the new century, before the recession hit, wages lagged behind living costs for the vast majority of Americans -- because those in the top one percent were capturing such a large share of the economy's total productivity gains.

Some of this trend was the result of globalization undercutting the bargaining power of U.S. workers; some of it resulted from weakened trade unions and minimum wage laws lagging behind inflation.

Flat or declining wages did not result from declining average productivity. So when we finally climb out of this jobs recession, perhaps we can belatedly confront these deeper trends.

I have been writing about the hotel workers union in New York City.

Thanks to an extraordinarily effective union, Local 6 of the hotel and restaurant workers union, nearly every large hotel in Manhattan is unionized, and everyone who works in these hotels, from dishwashers to room cleaners to doormen to banquet waiters earns a middle class wage. The union recently signed a seven year contract giving workers a 27 percent wage.

Local 6 is an exceptionally effective union, and New York is a unique tourist destination. But since the vast majority of jobs in America will soon be service sector jobs, not vulnerable to global competition, there is no good economic reason why they can't all be middle class jobs. The challenge is political. We as a society simply need to decide, as President Obama famously told "Joe the Plumber," that we want to "spread the wealth around" rather than having it concentrate at the very top. All service jobs could pay a living wage. How to do that? Unions, wage regulation, progressive taxation, and government using existing powers over contractors that it seldom exercises.

But what about manufacturing? This brings me to the other Jobs of my title, the late Steve Jobs.

The New York Times, in a two part series earlier this year on Apple's Chinese contractor, Foxconn, finally made front page news and added some telling detail to what was already fairly well known. The cool, must-have iPads, iPhones, and iPods to which we are increasingly addicted are manufactured with brutal sweatshop labor in Shenzhen, China, where 230,000 employees are making an average of less than $2 an hour work in a single factory complex. Foxconn's dormitories now have nets outside to prevent suicides.

I recently saw a one-man show, Mike Daisey's amazing "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which Daisey, a spellbinding monologue artist, recounts his own conversations with the workers of Foxconn in Shenzhen.

Daisey was on to Foxconn long before the Times. If you get a chance to see this show, which runs for one more week at New York's Public Theater and which will be on tour in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere later this year, don't miss it. Two weeks ago, Daisey made the stunning decision to put his script in the public domain, so that other performances could go viral.

Daisey wonders out loud: what if everyone who buys these products began upping the pressure on Apple to do right by its workers?

I would add: What if Apple made a decision to bring this work home, and to pay decent wages for it, say $20 an hour. Right now, this is literally impossible, because the production facilities to make such products no longer exist in the United States. But the Pentagon has insisted that America hang on to production capacity for certain other sensitive micro-electronics products. And if hostilities escalated between the U.S. and Beijing, you can bet that we would see a crash program to restore more micro-electronics output at home.

Apple earns about $600,000 per year per employee. It can well afford to share a little more of that with its workers.

The New York Times calculated that it would add only about $65 to the cost of an iPad or iPhone to produce it at home at good wages. And over time, it would tend to cost less, since higher-paid workers lead the company to redouble its investment in automation.

Apple can certainly afford this transition. It is now the richest company in the world, sitting on a pile of nearly a hundred billion dollars in cash. If Apple led, it would become bad form for America's other prestigious companies to manufacture for U.S. markets in foreign sweatshops.

Ralph Nader recently published the most improbable of books, a novel titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us. Nader, looking at the grotesque economic and political power imbalance in the U.S., imagined that a cabal of billionaires led by Warren Buffet and Ted Turner have an outbreak of conscience and become crusaders for progressive reform. It's Nader's way of both laying out a reform agenda and spotlighting where the real power lies.

It's a lovely fantasy, but it's not going to happen -- any more than Apple, out of the goodness of its corporate heart, is about to decide to phase out its high-tech Asian sweatshops in favor of decently compensated production jobs in the United States.

But what could perhaps happen is a mass movement of Apple consumers, declaring that it's not cool to treat the people who build these products like beasts of burden or like expendable non-human parts.

Alternatively, as incomes keep falling further behind the cost of living for most Americans, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that we enjoy the coolest of gadgets and that others are even poorer than we are.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is A Presidency in Peril.

Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson

by John Lawrence

Streve Jobs, the book by Walter Isaacson, is of course about Steve Jobs, the person, who died last year at age 56 after a long bout with pancreatic cancer. He was the founder, along with his partner Steve Wozniak, of Apple Computer which is today the largest corporation on the planet in terms of market capitalization. Jobs and Wozniak were both college dropouts who had a passion for technology. After having developed and sold a "blue box" which allowed people to make phone calls anywhere in the world at no charge, they were among the first to develop personal computers after the Altair came out in 1976. Wozniak was the technical genius who developed the circuit boards and Jobs was the visionary who thought of himself as being at the "intersection of technology and the humanities."

Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs shortly after his birth in 1955. Later in life he found his birth mother, and found out the fact that he had a full sister, Mona Simpson, with whom he developed a relationship. Although he had information about his birth father, Jobs decided that he never wanted to meet him, but had actually unknowingly shaken hands with him at a restaurant in Cupertino that his father had managed.

Apple Computer was started officially in 1977 based on the Apple II designed by Wozniak. Three years later they went public and Jobs went from having a net worth of zero to having a net worth of $256 million overnight. After touring the Xerox PARC plant, Jobs got the idea for the graphical user interface and the mouse which were embodied in the first Macintosh and constituted a truly revolutionary development. Even though the Mac never garnered the market share of the IBM compatible PCs, it was a product which expressed Jobs passion for great design principles that extended to not only the case of the computer and the angles of its bevels but also to the packaging. Bill Gates's criticism of Jobs was that he couldn't code, and Jobs criticised Gates as having ripped off the Windows interface from the Macintosh for Microsoft. Despite the rivalry, Gates continued to provide application software for the Macintosh.

Jobs was probably one of the few CEOs of a major corporation that maintained throughout his life that one of his three or four greatest experiences was dropping LSD. Jobs didn't suffer fools gladly and didn't mind calling them bozos and assholes to their faces. His "reality distortion field" was responsible for his being able to convince anybody of anything and winning in most negotiations including getting the music industry to disaggregate record albums and sell individual songs for 99 cents which were to be purchased by consumers from Apple's iTunes store. He didn't endear himself to people by calling their ideas the "biggest piece of shit I've ever seen", but could turn around and be irresistably charming when it suited his purposes. Having started with nothing his passion was primarily to create excellent products rather than to make huge profits. This caused both successes and failures. His behavior at times was so erratic that Apple hired John Sculley, the CEO of Pepsi-Cola, to be CEO at Apple in 1983 just prior to the introduction of the Macintosh which revolutionized personal computing. His main purpose was to rein in Jobs and to impart some sense of order at Apple. It wasn't long before they were at odds with each other, and Jobs ended up being forced to leave Apple, the company he founded, in 1985. Wozniak had long since gone his separate way.

After Jobs left Apple he started NeXT Computer with his own money, a venture that never really got off the ground thanks in part to Jobs perfectionism. Apple did not prosper either under Sculley continually losing market share to Microsoft. Jobs wanted complete control over every aspect of his products from the ground up including both hardware and software, and he wouldn't license the software to clone makers as Microsoft did. The Microsoft strategy was the more successful as it turned out that the market would rather have cheaper, clunky computers than more elegantly designed expensive ones.

While at NeXT, Jobs had the opporetunity to buy Pixar, a small struggling digital animation firm. He was able to cut a deal with Disney to produce Toy Story and took Pixar public right after Toy Story became a huge commercial success. All of a sudden Jobs was back in action. Both NeXT and Pixar might have been failures, but Jobs passion for excellent products resulted in Pixar's huge success. After Apple's slide into decreasing market share for the Macintosh, Sculley was eventually replaced as CEO in 1993. In 1996 Jobs came back to Apple at the Board's request initially as an unpaid consultant. Eventually, he again took full control as CEO. He was able to turn the company around with the iMac whose case he and his design team spent an enormous amount of time on getting just right. Design considerations were primary and the hardware guys had to cram their electronics into the unorthodox case in the best way they could.

Jobs managed to get Apple to buy NeXT thus ending that dead end. Meanwhile, he was CEO at both Apple and Pixar, a fact that he felt contributed to his health problems. Eventually, Pixar was sold to Disney, and a lot of Jobs' weallth came from Pixar rather than Apple. In fact when Apple gave him stock options, they ended up being worthless due to the depreciation of the stock value. During this time Jobs was working as CEO of Apple for $1 a year, something that appealed to his countercultural identity and his professed lack of concern about money.

Jobs' greatest success came in the 2000s, after he was diagnosed with cancer, with the introduction of the iPod, the iTunes store, the iPhone and the iPad. He took Apple from a computer manufacturer to a company that revolutionized the distribution of music, created the smartphone and brought other greatly popular consumer devices to market. Finally, Jobs passion for design and total control over product development paid huge dividends in ways that other companies couldn't match.

Jobs lost his battle with pancreatic cancer in 2011; Tim Cook took over the CEO position at Apple. This article in the New York Times about Apple tells the sad tale about how most of Apple's production is now done overseas. At one time Jobs built factories in the US which he designed himself right down to the color of white paint on the walls and the $20,000. office chairs. Those factories have long since gone to China. As the article points out, it is not only more profitable for Apple to contract out its production to Foxconn in China but it is also more expedient as Foxconn can provide workers who can be rousted out of their dormitory beds in the middle of the night to make last minute changes in products and work incredible numbers of hours to meet product launch dates.

Foxconn's penchant for working its workers to their limits has drawn unfavorable publicity like the following:

In 2010, there were 14 suicides and 18 attempts at Foxconn’s complex. In response, Foxconn raised salaries by one-third, from 900 yuan a month to 1,200 yuan, and set up an in-house counseling service -- complete with music therapy rooms. Buddhist monks were brought in to cleanse the factory of evil spirits. Most famously the company put up nets around workers’ dormitories, and created a somewhat dubious “no suicide” contract all employees were required to sign...

While Apple CEO Tim Cook will make $378 million this year, Foxconn workers are forced to live in squalid dormitories as reported by ThinkProgress:

Apple CEO Tim Cook will receive a $378 million pay package this year, consisting of a $900,000 base salary and $376.2 million in stock options. This is a six-fold increase over his compensation last year, and could very well make Cook 2011′s highest paid CEO.  At the same time that the company is handing such a huge package to its chief executive, though, the workers in China who make Apple’s most well-known products continue to toil in tough conditions. Last year, a report from Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based advocacy and research group found that the Chinese workers at the Taiwanese-based company FoxConn — who assemble the iPad, as well as other high tech gadgets for Apple, HP, Microsoft and others — were forced to work loads of overtime, stand on their feet 14 hours a day, and live packed together in squalid dormitories.

Such is the result of globalization. Consumers in the US and other advanced countries snatch up fancy tech gadgets which are produced by exploited workers in China while the richest 1% continue to receive huge paychecks. American workers are left out of the loop entirely. Jobs and his original Macintosh development team were willing to work 90 hour weeks to produce "insanely great" products. But now this work ethic or rather overwork ethic is being forced on Chinese workers who won't reap the financial rewards that Jobs and his original team reaped for their overwork efforts. Is this the real legacy of Steve Jobs and American entrepreneurialism?

 

How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

People flooded Foxconn Technology with résumés at a 2010 job fair in Henan Province, China.

By CHARLES DUHIGG and KEITH BRADSHER

Published: January 21, 2012 by the New York Times

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.

To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.

Now, to Find a Parking Spot, Drivers Look on Their Phones

By MATT RICHTEL

Published: May 7, 2011 by the New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — It is the urban driver’s most agonizing everyday experience: the search for an empty parking place.

City officials in San Francisco introduced the app to try to ease congestion in the city, but some say it raises safety concerns.

It is part sleuthing and part blood sport. Circling, narrowly missing a spot, outmaneuvering other motorists to finally ease into a space only to discover that it is off limits during working hours.

In this city, it is also a vexing traffic problem. Drivers cruising for parking spots generate 30 percent of all downtown congestion, city officials estimate.

Now San Francisco professes to have found a solution — a phone app for spot-seekers that displays information about areas with available spaces.

The system, introduced last month, relies on wireless sensors embedded in streets and city garages that can tell within seconds if a spot has opened up.

Monique Soltami, a TV food and wine reporter, said she and her sister spent 25 minutes on Friday trying to park. “We were praying to the parking god that we’d find a spot,” she said. “If we had the app, we would not have to pray to the parking god.”

But the system could come with serious consequences. Safety advocates say that drivers on the prowl for parking could wind up focusing on their phones, not the road.

“It could be really distracting,” said Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, where he studies the science of attention. And, he said, it could also be dangerous: “Most people are looking for parking spaces in places that have a lot of traffic and a lot of pedestrians.”

City officials acknowledge the potential problem. They are urging drivers to pull over before they pull up the city’s iPhone app, or to do so before they leave home. But the spots can disappear quickly, as any circling driver knows, and for plugged-in motorists in the habit of texting or glancing at the GPS, the urge to use the parking app is certain to mount as the frustration does.

Nathaniel Ford, executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said safety could actually improve if drivers quickly found a spot instead of circling and getting frustrated. “I get you off the streets as quickly as possible,” he said.

City drivers can testify to the frustration. Ms. Soltami drives into the city several times a week, she said, and spends 20 to 30 minutes searching for a spot each time. “That’s at least an hour I lose every week just looking for parking. It’s very frustrating,” she said.

She said she had heard about the new app, but had not yet downloaded it.

The $20 million parking project here, called SFpark, is backed by the Transportation Department and the Federal Highway Administration, which are looking into how to ease congestion and driver angst by making the most of limited parking.

San Francisco has put sensors into 7,000 metered parking spots and 12,250 spots in city garages. If spaces in an area open up, the sensors communicate wirelessly with computers that in turn make the information available to app users within a minute, said Mr. Ford, of the transportation agency. On the app, a map shows which blocks have lots of places (blue) and which are full (red).

San Francisco’s is by far the most widespread approach that several cities, universities and private parking garages are experimenting with.

Last December, Los Angeles worked with a company called Streetline to introduce a system covering spaces in West Hollywood, and it is expanding the program elsewhere. Streetline has since set up smaller projects on Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River, as well as at the University of Maryland and in Forth Worth, Tex.

More than 12,000 people have downloaded San Francisco’s app, which is available now only for the iPhone but which city officials say they hope to bring to all similar devices.

Eventually officials hope to be able to make regular adjustments to pricing on parking meters — which can be programmed remotely — and at garages so they can spread out demand, raising prices in areas where competition is fiercest and lowering it elsewhere.

Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies parking issues and is serving as an adviser on the San Francisco project, said cities and traffic experts were closely watching the federally funded experiments in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“If it works in San Francisco, the whole world will take notice,” Professor Shoup said.

Research conducted by Professor Shoup found that drivers looking for parking in a particular 15-block district in Los Angeles drove an estimated 950,000 miles a year, equivalent to four trips to the moon.

Those wasted miles are bad for the environment, driver anxiety, the efficiency of bus systems and pedestrian safety, Mr. Ford said. San Francisco has the dubious honor of having the highest rate among big cities for accidents involving pedestrians and cars.

When it is started up, the city’s parking app warns drivers not to use the system while in motion. But safety advocates said that might not be sufficient. After all, they say, texting while driving is illegal in California and in many states, but a number of surveys, including one by the Pew Research Center, show that many Americans do it anyway. .

Elizabeth Stampe, executive director of Walk San Francisco, a pedestrian advocacy group, said she hoped the new parking app would lead to fewer accidents.

“It’s an innovative idea,” she said. “The safe way for people to use the device is for them to pull over, which they know they should do. The question is whether they will.”

But Ms. Soltami, the TV reporter, said using the app would probably join the array of activities already performed by drivers.

“We’re already looking at Google Maps and Facebook on the phone while we drive,” she said. “Aren’t we always looking at something on our phone, or changing the radio, or drinking coffee? You’re always slightly distracted when you’re driving.”

Malia Wollan contributed reporting from San Francisco.

‘Net Neutrality’ – the Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time

from the OB Rag

by Source on December 20, 2010

in: Civil Rights, Culture, Media, War, Peace & Empire

By Al Franken – U.S. Senator, Minnesota / Huffington Post / December 20, 2010

This Tuesday [12/21/10] is an important day in the fight to save the Internet.

As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it’s a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.

This principle is called “net neutrality” — and it’s under attack. Internet service giants like Comcast and Verizon want to offer premium and privileged access to the Internet for corporations who can afford to pay for it.

The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has the power to issue regulations that protect net neutrality. The bad news is that draft regulations written by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski don’t do that at all. They’re worse than nothing.

That’s why Tuesday is such an important day. The FCC will be meeting to discuss those regulations, and we must make sure that its members understand that allowing corporations to control the Internet is simply unacceptable.

Although Chairman Genachowski’s draft Order has not been made public, early reports make clear that it falls far short of protecting net neutrality.

For many Americans — particularly those who live in rural areas — the future of the Internet lies in mobile services. But the draft Order would effectively permit Internet providers to block lawful content, applications, and devices on mobile Internet connections.

Mobile networks like AT&T and Verizon Wireless would be able to shut off your access to content or applications for any reason. For instance, Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn’t nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a Tea Party group in your area).

It gets worse. The FCC has never before explicitly allowed discrimination on the Internet — but the draft Order takes a step backwards, merely stating that so-called “paid prioritization” (the creation of a “fast lane” for big corporations who can afford to pay for it) is cause for concern.

It sure is — but that’s exactly why the FCC should ban it. Instead, the draft Order would have the effect of actually relaxing restrictions on this kind of discrimination.

What’s more, even the protections that are established in the draft Order would be weak because it defines “broadband Internet access service” too narrowly, making it easy for powerful corporations to get around the rules.

Here’s what’s most troubling of all. Chairman Genachowski and President Obama — who nominated him — have argued convincingly that they support net neutrality.

But grassroots supporters of net neutrality are beginning to wonder if we’ve been had. Instead of proposing regulations that would truly protect net neutrality, reports indicate that Chairman Genachowski has been calling the CEOs of major Internet corporations seeking their public endorsement of this draft proposal, which would destroy it.

No chairman should be soliciting sign-off from the corporations that his agency is supposed to regulate — and no true advocate of a free and open Internet should be seeking the permission of large media conglomerates before issuing new rules.

After all, just look at Comcast — this Internet monolith has reportedly imposed a new, recurring fee on Level 3 Communications, the company slated to be the primary online delivery provider for Netflix. That’s the same Netflix that represents Comcast’s biggest competition in video services.

Imagine if Comcast customers couldn’t watch Netflix, but were limited only to Comcast’s Video On Demand service. Imagine if a cable news network could get its website to load faster on your computer than your favorite local political blog. Imagine if big corporations with their own agenda could decide who wins or loses online. The Internet as we know it would cease to exist.

That’s why net neutrality is the most important free speech issue of our time. And that’s why, this Tuesday, when the FCC meets to discuss this badly flawed proposal, I’ll be watching. If they approve it as is, I’ll be outraged. And you should be, too.

Can Gadgets Save the World?

by John Lawrence

There is no doubt that the developed world is hooked on gadgets. There is the ipad, the ipod, the Kindle, the smart phone and too many others too numerous to mention. The question is is this proliferation of gadgets really going to save the world, the environment, the planet. Or is the proliferation of gadgets as a world changer a pipe dream in the mind of some CEOs? In the August 19, 2010 edition of the San Diego Union, Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, says this: "I think the thing that excites most Qualcomm employees is the idea that we can literally change the world with our ideas because we can get those ideas and put them into the hands of 100 million people in a matter of three months." Well exactly how Mr. Jacobs intends to change the world isn't specified. Another app for the iphone perhaps?

I can see how an African wife that has to walk eight miles each day to a water source and then haul water home could be enabled to talk to her family via cell phone during her long and arduous trek. However, what might improve her lot even more would be a source of fresh water in her village so that she wouldn't have to make the trek in the first place. The infrastructure necessary to guarantee each of the 6.7 billion people of the world a supply of clean water close to their home is not high tech. Nor can another gadget bring it about. It's not so exciting to think about the provision of clean water and adequate sanitation facilities to everyone, but that would do more to reduce child mortality and water borne disease throughout the world. On the one hand you have a CEO of a major Fortune 400 corporation proposing that the proliferation of gadgets is exactly what the world needs now. On the other you have the reality that what the world really needs in order to reduce disease and drudgery is basic infrastructure. Which is it?

While Qualcomm stands to make money from the proliferation of cell phones and other smart gadgets, who stands to make money off of the provision of clean water and adequate sanitation? They tried the privatization of water in Bolivia, and the result was that the desperately poor people who really needed it could not afford it. This is what happened when water was privatized:

Etched deeply into the granite walls just inside the entrance of the World Bank headquarters in Washington are the words, "Our dream, a world free of poverty." Earlier this month in Bolivia, the citizens of South America's poorest country sent the bank a message once again that the poor aren't too keen on the part of that dream that involves handing their water over to foreign corporations. On January 10 the citizens of El Alto took to the streets en masse to demand that their water system, privatized in 1997 under World Bank pressure, be returned to public hands. Three days later Bolivia's president issued a decree canceling the water concession, led by the French water giant Suez, and an arm of the World Bank itself. The El Alto water revolt follows, by five years exactly, the now famous revolt against water privatization in Cochabamba, in which a company controlled by the Bechtel Corporation was ousted from the country. Together, these two revolts over water should send an important message to officials at the World Bank, if they are willing to hear it. The people of Bolivia did not choose to privatize their public water systems. That choice was forced on them, as it has been in many poor nations around the world, when the World Bank made privatization an explicit condition of aid in the mid-1990s. Poor countries such as Bolivia, which rely heavily on foreign assistance for survival, are not in much of a position to say no to such pressures. World Bank water officials claim all the best intentions when they make the push for water privatization. The bank has argued that poor governments are often too plagued by local corruption and too ill equipped to run public water systems efficiently. Handing water over to foreign corporations, the bank has said, opens the door to needed investment and skilled management. However, to borrow a phrase, the road to bad public policy is often paved with good intentions. Bolivia's experience with bank-forced water privatization is a striking example of the yawning gap between World Bank theory and how things actually work in the real world for the poor families who have to live with the results. In Cochabamba five years ago, the water contract with Bechtel and the Abengoa Corporation of Spain paved the way for rate increases of double and more for poor water users. Those steep and sudden price hikes, needed in part to finance the 16 percent annual profit demanded by the companies, led to citywide protests and eventually to Bechtel's and Abengoa's ouster.The Bolivian government declared martial law in an effort to save the companies' contra ct, leaving one teenage boy dead and more than 100 people wounded. In El Alto the chief complaint about the Suez/World Bank privatization is that it left tens of thousands of poor families with no access to water whatsoever. Fortunately, no one was killed or wounded in this latest water revolt, a credit to President Carlos Mesa, who agreed that the water contract was inadequate and approved its cancellation.

It's true that gadgets have marginally improved the lives in the developed world for people who already have a considerable amount of wealth and who have adequate supplies of fresh water and adequate sanitation. For such people a new gadget is like another new toy to put under the Christmas tree. But for a CEO like Mr. Jacobs to be so misguided and out of touch with the world situation to state that another gadget will "change the world", shows a lack of understanding and empathy for anyone except the class of people that can afford to buy the gadgets that Qualcomm produces. In the US today 15% of the people live in poverty. I don't think they represent the market for the next "smart" cell phone. And who exactly are the 100 million people that Mr. Jacobs can put Qualcomm's ideas into the hands of? They sure aren't the people that are living on a dollar a day or have to walk miles to get water that may or may not be contaminated.

The problems facing the world today can't be solved by the proliferation of gadgets. And basic infrastructure can be better provided by governments and not private corporate capitalism. It would be less arrogant if Mr. Jacobs had said something like "we can't solve the world's problems with our technology but we can make life marginally better for the world's affluent." That kind of a statement would not only be more accurate, but more in an appropriate spirit of humility.

The Economic Dichotomy: One Tier for the Wealthy, Another for the Poor

by John Lawrence

The American economy is getting back to normal. The stock market is roaring - the DJIA is over 11,000 - up 70% from its low of 6800 in March of last year. Consumer spending is up; retail sales were up 1.6% in March. But there are other signs that it isn't actually doing too well. Foreclosures are up and new jobless claims are up as well.

Everyone was getting excited over the 162,000 jobs added in March. However, a goodly part of these were temporary census jobs, and 100,000 jobs are needed to be added each month just to keep up with new entrants to the work force. So what are the lessons to be learned here?

Number 1. We're having a jobless recovery. The stock market and job creation have been diametrically opposed to each other for some time. Anyone who thinks it's a sign of a recovering economy that the stock market is up is not thinking clearly. The stock market goes up when jobs are eliminated - not the opposite. Yes, the economy is recovering for those heavily invested in the stock market and in the right sectors of the stock market. I haven't seen a recovery in my mutual fund, but then maybe alternative energy isn't where the smart money is. All of which leaves me feeling that the stock market is an inside deal with traders and insiders executing deals at warp speed, hypertrading in microseconds while the rest of us schlobs sit there with our patient money not making any gains. And don't trust the stock market to continue its upward swing indefinitely. At a certain point, after all the suckers have reinvested near a peak, as if there were an unseen signal, all the big guys will get out and sell short, the stock market will plummet, and all the oxygen will be sucked out leaving the recently reinvested investors with their pants down again. This is how, I believe, the stock market works. It's an insider's game. This is how Wall Street sucks money out of Main Street. See Matt Taibbi's excellent article.

Number 2. Foreclosures are up and there is no end in sight. They're on track to one million foreclosures this year. What this means is that the average Joes are still losing their houses, and that means a large segment of the population is still in a downward spiral. Foreclosure and bankruptcy usually go together. As well as increased divorce and suicide rates. Why are people continuing to lose their houses? Because they are continuing to lose their jobs. First time unemployment claims are up, and continuing unemployment claims are also up.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance for the first time jumped for the second week in a row, according to government data released Thursday.

There were 484,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended April 10, up 24,000 from an unrevised 460,000 the previous week, according to the Labor Department's weekly report.

Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected new claims to fall to 440,000 in the latest week. The number of new claims was the highest since the week ended Feb. 20, when initial claims totaled 486,000.

People need to analyze all this data and figure out what is going on. Here's my analysis. Rich people are getting richer as witnessed by retail spending increasing and the stock market going up. Poor people are getting poorer as witnessed by increasingly high rates of job losses while job creation remains puny in comparison - 484,000 initial jobless claims vs 162,000 jobs created? C'mon. It's a sinking ship! Formerly middle class people are falling into the poverty class due to, first, job loss and then, secondly, losing their homes to foreclosure. It doen't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. The single biggest driver of the downward spiral is job loss due to productivity gains (from computerization, automation and robotization) and lack of "the next big thing" which would create a job creating bubble. But the business model in this era of globalization is to do the high end work here (which creates few jobs) and then immediately offshore the production and manufacturing jobs to Asia (which represents most of the newly created jobs).

Therefore, the only jobs to be created really are in the local economy - construction (no need of that. We're overbuilt), teaching (municipalities are laying off teachers because they are broke), and health care (still a budget busting sector). The only jobs that have a national or international impact are in the military-industrial complex. The Army, Navy and Marine Corps are still hiring. They'll even train you. No need  to repay expensive college loans. Or you could go to work for Boeing or Lockheed Martin. Their lobbyists are still procuring lucrative contracts which have nothing to do with defending the US but everything to do with lining their own pockets and providing some degree of middle class social welfare. And the FBI and CIA are still hiring.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration dithers on job creation. I'm sure they would like to do more, but the party of "Hell, no" won't let them. Tax breaks for small businesses won't really do anything because small business must have a market for their products. And besides small businesses and startups are getting less labor intensive than they used to be due to the aforementioned computerization etc. The local economy can only absorb so many lawyers, doctors, plumbers and electricians. So there is a surplus labor army whose only remaining choice is to go with the employer of last resort - the military.

As corporations become more centralized and concentrated putting local Mom and Pops out of business due to economies of scale, the economy sheds jobs. Profit making enterprises become concentrated in the hands of a few. Is it any wonder that inequality has increased to the point where it is greater than it was just before the Great Depression? Is it any wonder that there are more unemployed in absolute numbers than there were during the Great Depression? The Obama administration is waiting for the next big technological breakthrough that will produce the next big boom in hiring. It ain't agonna happen any time soon. We've had a spate of technological breakthroughs recently in the computer, internet and wireless fields and within a few short years, as the industries consolidated, the jobs were gone overseas. The point is that tech breakthroughs are not the job producers they used to be.

So what's the alternative? The government has to step in and create jobs directly or through public-private partnerships, and, hopefully, not just in the military-industrial complex. You can only goose private enterprise and entrepreneurship so much and for so long till you realize it's not working. It's not a question of redistributing wealth or income. That's already happening through increased unemployment benefits. It's either that or let more and more people fall into homelessness and despair, an outcome that most conservatives would not find unpalatable. But here is an idea that could not only create jobs (which are becoming increasingly irrelevant due to the fact that labor is becoming increasingly irrelevant for the production of goods), but, more importantly, create widely distributed wealth. And it's not a redistribuition of wealth. It's a creation of new wealth (meaning people make money off of investment rather than work) so rich people can't complain that their present wealth is being redistributed. It's just that they won't be able to control future wealth creation and distribution to as great an extent.

It's something that has already been done in Germany where the government set up a program to encourage citizens to install solar panels on their roofs. The power companies were required to buy all the electricity generated at several times the normal rate. This paid the mortgage for the installation of the panels, and new power plants would not have to be built thereby justifying the higher rate paid to the homeowners. So much electricity has been generated in this way that the program will probably be terminated in the near future. But wealth has been created and widely distributed so that, as the number of jobs decreases, this will to some extent be made up for by a distribution of wealth. People can make money from their (now paid for) solar farms, and their job will just be the maintenance of those farms which will require little time and effort. In the same way people make money off of rentals, they will be making money as a return on investment instead of from actual labor in the job market. But it was the government who facilitated this investment in such a way that the average Joe could take advantage of it. Of course, one would have to be a property owner first, but cooperatives of non-property owners could also be incentivized as well as other ways of benefiting poor people by encouraging the widespread distribution of wealth. This is from a previous blog:

The Renewable Energy Sources Act (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz, or EEG), enacted by the government of Germany, promotes the development of renewable energy sources with a feed-in tariff scheme. In conjunction with Germany’s climate preservation efforts, the ultimate objective of this legislation is to increase the amount of renewable energies in the German power supply to 12.5% by the year 2010. On the 1 January 2009 the latest version of the EEG came into force. The fundamental idea of the EEG is that grid operators must pay a government-specified feed-in tariff to energy generators supplying energy to the grid from renewable sources. This feed-in tariff is intended to make energy from renewable sources cost-competitive with that from traditional sources, and it varies with the amount of energy generated by the producer and the type of renewable energy source. As an incentive to encourage technological advancements and cost decreases for parts and installation, the feed-in tariff drops yearly by a fixed percentage (degression rate). Under the German electricity grid system, the grid operator is legally obliged to provide free access to the grid for all interested generators, and to pay the specified reimbursement for those suppliers qualifying under the terms of the EEG. No contract with the plant operator is necessary. The Energy Feed-In Unit (Energieversorgungsunternehmen, or EVU) is responsible for calculating feed-in tariffs in an equitable way based upon current market prices of energy. Grid generators then pass the feed-in tariff costs down to end-consumers as an incorporated part of the final price seen on their energy bills.

Makes sense, huh? As the need for work decreases, a widespread distribution of wealth means that people will be able to provide for themselves with a minimum of labor. The alternative is to have all the wealth concentrated in a few hands while the masses live at a starvation and homeless level. Or have the government function as state capitalist controlling a large amount of wealth in sovereign wealth funds which are then spent in such a way as to subsidize the average person whether in terms of free education, free health care, old age pensions or various other stipends, sinecures and subsidies. But this would represent the Europeanization of America, something that conservatives would deeply resent. Their resistance to any constructive change is dooming the US to political and economic sclerosis while other nations are passing us by.

More on Snow, CSX and RRs

by John Lawrence

This is an email from Bob Comer in response to my post CSX Railroad and CEO John Snow's Corporate Ethics Responsible for Killing Paul Palank:

 

That commentary about CSX and John Snow is 100% correct.  The guy is nothing but a white-collar criminal and he was rewarded handsomely for his dirty deeds as you so well documented.  The CSX-SUX website--- have you seen it?   It's here: http://www.csx-sucks.com/

 

I have worked with the man, Dave Nelson, who blew the whistle on CSX (and Snow was CEO when they did it) for ripping-off the federal government for 10's of millions of dollars. It was a classic False Claims Act violation by Snow and CSX.  CSX was guilty, but didn't have to pay nearly enough for their crimes.  Big Corps. get away with nearly everything.

 

The situation of Amtrak having to pay (meaning us taxpayers) for the negligence and irresponsibility of CSX officials is beyond outrageous.  So was the 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shanklin v. Norfolk Southern RR.  The Reagan / Bush appointees gave the railroad industry what it had wanted forever-----federal protection from lawsuits based on lack of adequate warnings at RR crossings.  The Shanklin decision said that if even 1 dollar of federal money was spent on the crossing, a plaintiff couldn't claim in a lawsuit that the warning devices were inadequate.  SO, the RR's love that 1952 crossbuck sign since it requires no maintenance for 20 to 30 years and all they have to do is get the state to provide federal funds to put a newer one up and BINGO---hello Shanklin protection!  I have interviewed so many former RR employees I've lost count, but the horror stories are never-ending.  The fact that the U.S. government (FRA) continues to allow the U.S. railroad industry to use the 1872 Track Circuit to detect trains is one of the prime examples of the 'sacred cow' position enjoyed by the industry.  A little rust on just one rail and the "shunt" may fail, causing the train to NOT be detected.  So, the bells, lights and gates don't activate.  The Track Circuit is also used in Block Switching all over the U.S.  High tech. inventions (I did one in the 1990's and so did Joe Pace of EVA Signal) were made using magnetometers, loop detectors and strobe lights at the crossing, but the RR industry and their cohorts at Harmon and Safetran, made sure that the high tech. equipment was never accepted / installed.   

 

I have investigated RR crossing crashes for 20+ years and have done over 300 nationwide.  I helped the NYTimes reporter Walt Bogdanich win a Pulitzer for National Reporting on his intensive investigation of the RR industry, the FRA and crossing crashes in 2003.

 

Bottom line: the RR industry in the U.S. is a 'sacred cow' and has been one since Day One (1825.)  They are self-insured through the Association of American Railroads (AAR) and that self-insurance fund has, last I heard, over 1 Billion dollars in it.  So, when a RR loses a lawsuit, it just gets the money to pay the plaintiff from the AAR fund---no sweat, no bother.  Of course, the RR's always appeal, appeal, appeal---to wear down the family / plaintiff.  AND, I have found that many judges who hear RR cases seem to be on the side of the RR from the very beginning.  One of the worst cases in Ohio, the deaths of a mother and 4 children in Williams county, July 1, 2001, (Petre case) at an unguarded Norfolk Southern crossing (engineer failed to properly sound the horn at the crossing, plus the 5 crossings leading up to the crash), got "the treatment" from a judge-----case thrown out with the judge claiming the driver failed to yield the right-of-way to the train---end of story!   Forget the state law violation by the engineer---4999.02 ORC!  And, the crossing was in violation of 4955.36 ORC----the vegetation removal law.  The train was totally hidden by a two-story farm house and 5 pole buildings, plus vegetation.  Also, many school buses used the crossing but the RR reported to the USDOT / FRA that ZERO school buses used the crossing.  SO, no lights / gates needed!  I did the investigation of that crash and I will be forever angry about the total disregard for safety and justice in that case! 

 

Regards,

 

Bob Comer

Forensic & Electronic Research, Inc.

Magnolia, Ohio  

Toyota and Electromagnetic Compatibility

by John Lawrence

Toyota maintains that there is no problem with its electronics. But they are not talking about electromagnetic compatibility. With wire bundles going everywhere just like in an airplane or a spacecraft, electromagnetic compatibility is indeed a most important consideration. In the first place mechanical linkages to the brake and accelerator systems worked just fine for over a hundred years. One never heard of the Model T having an unintended acceleration problem! So the whole idea of making these linkages electronic is foolhardy to say the least. Here are the problems with electronic linkages.

Signals can jump from one wire to another in a wire bundle. If Toyota has put the wire leading to the accelerator control system in the same wire bumdle as the wire leading to the brake system, a signal meant for the brake can actually trigger the accelerator because a signal in one wire can induce a current in another wire. If the wires are in close proximity, this is even more likely but it can happen even if the wires are not in the same bundle. To be on the safe side, critical wires should be shielded which I bet they're not on the Toyota. Shielding adds another layer and expense to the wiring systems but makes it less likely that an extraneous signal can induce an unwanted current.

Secondly, electromagnetic signals can get in the circuits from outside the automobile. There are all kinds of signals floating around from cell phone signals to TV signals to signals from satellite radio. These signals enter a car from the external environment and are random in strength and variety at any given moment. Again if important wires and subsystems are not properly shielded, these signals can induce unwanted currents in the car's braking and acceleration systems.

Here is a definition of electromagnetic compatibility or radio frequency interference as it used to be called:

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) is the branch of electrical sciences which studies the unintentional generation, propagation and reception of electromagnetic energy with reference to the unwanted effects (Electromagnetic interference, or EMI) that such energy may induce. The goal of EMC is the correct operation, in the same electromagnetic environment, of different equipment which use electromagnetic phenomena, and the avoidance of any interference effects. In order to achieve this, EMC pursues two different kinds of issues. Emission issues are related to the unwanted generation of electromagnetic energy by some source, and to the countermeasures which should be taken in order to reduce such generation and to avoid the escape of any remaining energies into the external environment. Susceptibility or immunity issues, in contrast, refer to the correct operation of electrical equipment, referred to as the victim, in the presence of unplanned electromagnetic disturbances. Interference, or noise, mitigation and hence electromagnetic compatibility is achieved primarily by addressing both emission and susceptibility issues, i.e., quieting the sources of interference and hardening the potential victims. The coupling path between source and victim may also be separately addressed to increase its attenuation.

Electromagnetic compatibility problems have brought down airplanes and probably spacecraft as control systems have been compromised. Malfunctioning of electronic components can result in unwanted signals being generated that then couple to vulnerable circuits where they can interfere with control systems. Lightning strikes can generate an electromagnetic pulse which overwhelms control systems on airplanes or on cars. Why do airline pilots instruct you to turn off your cell phones and laptops during takeoff and landing? Because extraneous signals can cause electromagnetic compatibility problems. There are no such controls in cars. In fact cars are full of electronic devices that are potential causes of interference with vital control systems such as acceleration and braking. And you don't know what electronic sources the driver has brought into the automobile with him that could be left on and could be generating interfering signals. There are all sorts of wireless devices.

And then there are reliability problems. That an electronic switch could fail to turn on or off is not a new revelation. Electronic switches fail all the time. This is a distinct and separate issue from electromagnetic compatibility but is nevertheless related. The usual approach to this problem is through redundancy. If one system fails, there should be a backup system that takes over. In the case of automobile acceleration and braking systems there should be a backup braking system preferably mechanical that would take over in case of electronic system failure.

Toyota's rebuttal to a professor's allegations that he induced uncontrolled acceleration is sort of trite and not to the point as the professor's allegations were rather unsophisticated and crude. Instead of alleging electromagnetic compatibility problems, Southern Illinois University professor David Gilbert alleged an out and out short between two wires. That is not necessary for a signal to jump between the two wires and is a rather crude allegation. It was easy enough for Toyota to debunk it and to show that such a short would cause unintended acceleration not only in Toyotas but in virtually any car with electronic controls. However, there is a grain of something to be followed up on here. A comparison of the systems on cars which have not had acceleration problems with Toyota's similar systems could bring to light differences which could be the root of the problems. In any event "fail-safe" systems need to be installed as backups in Toyotas, something that would result in a very expensive recall, so naturally Toyota doesn't want to do it. It may be necessary for after market engineering to pinpoint the problem because Toyota has no incentive to do it.

The random nature of the Toyota acceleration/inadequate braking problems point to random system failure through component failure or electromagnetic compatibility problems. And these are problems that could cause Toyota a lot of money to fix:

NORRIS: Would the resolution of this problem be radically different if it turned out that it was electrical instead of mechanical? Mr. BENSINGER: I think so. This is something we looked at here at the Los Angeles Times, why Toyota seemed so resistant to electronic issue. And the answer is because it's a much bigger kind of problem than it's a mechanical problem. Fixing an electronic problem is much more complex. It also is a little bit more scary in the public eye. When people think about a sticking pedal, they think, fine, swap out my pedal and I'll be okay, or add a little piece to it. When you think about a computer problem, you start thinking about your desktop that crashes all the time. And that gets very scary when you're talking about vehicles that weigh 4,000 pounds and go 75 miles an hour. People are terrified of that and don't want to think about that. The other issue is litigation, the legal risk is very high because once you start saying there's a potential software or other electronic bug, everyone and their brother will start blaming every fender bender on that whether it's true or not. And certainly a lot of potentially spurious litigation could ensue, that even if Toyota wins, could have it tied up in courts for years.

In addition to electromagnetic interference and electronic component failure, there is the possibility of software glitches in the onboard computer. In general the over sophistication of the modern automobile is probably responsible for the sudden and random acceleration problems. Just turning on or off the headlights might generate an electrical spike that would make acceleration and braking systems malfunction. An excellent and comprehensive article on electromagnetic interference in automobiles can be found here: "Could Electronics Be What's Causing Runaway Cars?"

Toyota: High Technology Gone Awry

by John Lawrence

Over 100 years ago Henry Ford invented the automobile. There were many kinks to be worked out but faulty accelerator pedals was not one of them. Recent events with Toyota's random acceleration problems should give us pause as we ask the question - 'how much technology is too much technology?' Henry Ford had a fairly simple system for accelerating and braking. It was mechanical linkage. In a hundred years this system proved ultra reliable. You never heard of a problem like unwanted acceleration for the first almost hundred years of automobile technology.

However, since Toyota and other car manufacturers have incorporated super sophisticated technology into their automobiles, all of a sudden there are these problems that have caused a number of deaths including the ones on Mission Gorge Road in Santee, CA where I drive practically every day. There a loaner Lexus went out of control with unstoppable acceleration until the four occupants were killed. At that time it was thought that the problem involved improper floor mats. An ancillary problem was that there is no obvious way to turn off the engine since the key had been abandoned for the push button. Some times the simple way is the best way. Why should a tried and true technology that has worked well for 100 years be abandoned in favor of the never, never land of high tech?

Some times I think that Ted Kaczynski's diatribe against technology was correct. To quote him: "The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries." Well, this would certainly be applicable to the overly technologized and sophisticated automobiles being manufactured today. Actually, Henry Ford had a better idea: mechanical linkages.

Although Toyota vehemently denies that the acceleration problems have anything to do with the electronics, there is mounting evidence that they do. First, let's consider why Toyota would want to rule this out in favor of a relatively simple mechanical fix. It would cost them a whopping huge amount of money, that's why, to fix the electronics compared to only a moderately huge amount for a recall involving a simple fix like they are doing now. Today's cars are increasingly run by computers, and for Toyota to redesign and replace all those computers would likely bankrupt the company. Instead of the simple mechanical linkage that has worked so well for 100 years, acceleration is accomplished by sending a signal to the "brains" of the automobile where it is processed and then a signal goes out to the engine to accelerate. Well, what could go wrong with this setup? Everything - that's what. Signals can get sidetracked; signals can go astray. Electromagnetic interference can create false signals that then will be acted upon as if the driver had initiated them. Signals can be spontaneously generated by malfunctioning electronics.

In some cars stepping on the brake will override any signals coming from the accelerator, but not in Toyotas. So there is the possibility for all kinds of electronic mixups which have caused the deaths of dozens of people. The electromagnetic incompatibility of the various subsystems connected up to the car's "brains" can alter the correct functioning of the car in the same way that electromagnetic compatibility problems have brought down airplanes. Wire bundles physically located in close proximity can cause signals to jump from one circuit to another causing erroneous signals to be sent to the car's various subsystems. It's entirely possible that a signal intended for the braking system could "jump tracks" and end up causing the accelerator to function improperly. Also signals originating outside the automobile can attach themselves to the wires of the cars subsystems with the result that the car goes out of control without the driver's ability to override these false signals. Extraneous signals can induce false signals in the automoble's control systems taking the car out of the driver's control.

Then it's entirely possible that the car's central computer itself was improperly designed or in many instances functioned improperly due to the failure of some chip, for example. Electronics malfunction all the time. Relying on the perfect functioning of a computer is skating on thin ice when it comes to preventing the loss of human life. Overtechnologized subsystems are probably responsible for not only cars malfunctioning with disastrous results but also airplane malfunctioning, railroad malfunctioning, signal malfunctioning of all sorts. All sorts of systems rely on the fact that some computer will not malfunction. It's better to rely on the old adage: 'The simple way is the best way.' When you consider all the dirt and pollution that a car is exposed to, the lack of cleanliness in the engine's components could cause various parts to gunk up, and then who knows how that will affect its operation? Dirty electronics have a tendency to malfunction. Mechanical vibrations and jolts can cause electronic components to fail, and cars are certainly exposed to all kinds of potholes and bumps in the road especially as infrastructure is allowed to deteriorate due to lack of funds. A certain number of electronic components will malfunction out of the box. After all they are manufactured by other computers which are not perfect. These are all reasons why there should be mechanical overrides for crucial automobile subsystems. What if, when the power steering failed, the car would be unsteerable? That's not a situation that drivers would probably contemplate with approbation.

Will Toyota go back to the simple mechanical linkages for braking and acceleration and the key starter rather than the push button starter. I doubt it. In the final analysis technology is alluring and seductive. A certain number of deaths will be found to be acceptable although no Congressman will ever say so in so many words. After all they have been paid off by Toyota's campaign contributions and lobbyists. Just as a certain number of deaths from railroad travel or airplane travel is found to be acceptable to the authorities, the same will eventually be the case for Toyota which may be required to "tweak" the system but will probably not be required to go back to mechanical linkages. That would be like requiring early car manufacturers to go back to the horse and buggy.

We can all look forward to continued malfunctioning of computers and electronics due to electromagnetic compatibility problems, due to component failure and reliability problems. All these systems need to be backed up with mechanical subsystems as a last resort when the hypersophisticsted, overdesigned, fanch schmancy, computerized subsystems fail. Ted Kaczynski had a point.

The Boom Bust Cycle in American Capitalism

America's economic development has been predicated on boom and bust cycles. First there were the railroads which contributed mightily to an economic boom that lasted well into the twentieth century. They provided a lot of jobs as well as creating a lot of rich people like Jay Gould, Mark Hopkins and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Then there were the great technological advances of the twentieth century. The automobile created a lot of wealth and provided a lot of jobs. It was the same for the radio, TV and movie industries. In each case a technological innovation created a boom, provided jobs for a period of time and then, as the industry consolidated, the number of jobs diminished. As the pace of technological development quickened, the pace of the boom and bust cycles quickened. All the many technological developments of the 1920s were followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Earlier technological developments were at a more primitive stage that required more human labor as an input to the manufacturing process. Later technological developments were automated sooner so they required less human labor once the various projects got off the ground and consolidated.

By the time of the personal computer and internet boom, the initial phase that required human labor and provided jobs was quite short. In fact this boom facilitated the offshoring of labor and led to an overall decline of US jobs.  Also the leveraged buyout business in which a private equity fund takes over a company, lays off its workers and sells off the component parts or takes it into bankruptcy is a relatively new phenomenon. Baran and Sweezy in their book, "Monopoly Capital," have put forth the thesis that the development of American capitalism is completely dependent on technological development and entrepreneurialism, and, in fact, that is the only thing keeping American style capitalism alive. Many people are wondering what is the next Big Thing that is going to get us out of the Great Recession and start providing jobs again. Where is the next boom coming from?

All of this begs the question, what if the next Big Thing which supposedly will end the Great Recession and provide good solid middle class jobs for a time doesn't come along? Is it possible that American capitalism is so dependent on a succession of Big Things that it will just dry up and become untenable unless there is another great innovation or technological revolution? Could it be that the lack of a technological revolution will lead to a political revolution? The US has been known as a society which encourages entrepreneurialism and innovation. This has led to the creation of great wealth and in the process has provided a lot of good jobs for short periods of time. Most jobs are provided by small businesses and in fact small businesses which are recent start-ups. But recent technological developments combined with the lack of a US industrial policy have led to the destruction of good jobs as corporations have opted to increase profits by going to where labor is cheapest. And government has encouraged the process by offering incentives for corporations to offshore jobs. NAFTA and the WTO encourage this process. It's important to remember that corporations are not in the business of providing jobs. They are in the business of maximizing profits, and one way to do that is to minimize the outlay for labor. This can be done by driving down wages and eliminating workers. This in turn can be accomplished by a process of automation and outsourcing jobs to where labor is cheapest.

In an environment where there is a fairly long period of consolidation and in which there are no technological innovations on the horizon, it may turn out that American style capitalism is at a distinct disadvantage. In such a period of history a society predicated on technological innovation and entrepreneurialism may lose its economic dynamism. Less entrepreneurial societies that are better organized at the governmental level and with more focused industrial policies may be better suited for economic development. Societies which have industrial policies and which encourage industrial development on the micro level while setting parameters at the macro level which encourage not only the development of wealth but the creation and retention of jobs might just have the upper hand. In particular China, while not being known for innovation up to now, may gain the upper hand simply because it is better organized in terms of overall industrial policy and because its governing model is more direct and simplified compared to the relative chaos of American government which involves a whole host of competing self-interests and has shown signs of sclerosis and dysfunction recently. A strong hand at the tiller is preferable to a boat that is completely adrift.

In a period of consolidation compared to a period of rapid technological advance, more authoritarian governments might be better able to exploit technological developments that have already occurred rather than depending on technology yet to be invented and exploited. US capitalism is relatively unorganized. Corporations seek less government involvement because they want to maximize their ability to operate unilaterally, innovate and make quick profits. The bottom line and the stock price are more important than the provision of jobs. In fact the provision of jobs is counterproductive to the making of profits. That's why the stock price goes up when the number of workers goes down. Societies which are less innovative tend to be more organizational and to be able to exploit periods in which less technological innovation occurs. They are better able to organize overall systemic development because they are more singleminded in their approach to the economy. American capitalism is better at componental innovation as opposed to systemic development because nobody is in charge of organizing the whole of society. Corporations develop components not overall societal systems.

It would be unthinkable that private enterprise without governmental oversight could have developed the interstate highway system, for example. Government was largely involved in the development of railroads after the Civil War by providing incentives for private corporations. Private enterprise can do economic development based on technological developments and at the component level, but overall systemic development is best organized by government which can set parameters and provide incentives and public private partnerships. The development of components like automobiles, TV sets and personal computers was best carried out by private enterprise, but the development of infrastructure like the highway system, the assignment of the electromagnetic spectrum and the internet are areas where the government needs to play a role. High speed internet can be compared to high speed rail in terms of infrastructure and in both areas the US lags behind due to the fact that government has not played its proper role.

For example, green infrastructure development, which is one of the looming innovations, is better organized on a societal level rather than on the component level. Individual corporations can develop and manufacture the components such as solar panels and windmills, but only government can organize all these components into an overall energy system which efficiently provides energy when and where it's needed. This requires an electrical distribution network, transmission system or backbone and the dimensions and blueprints for this can only be done at the societal level. No corporation is capable of determinig or mandating the overall systemic parameters and infrastructure. In fact corporate development would lead to a hodge podge of nonstandard, non-interrelating components which would compete with each other producing a mish mash at the system level.  Therefore, more authoritarian, less innovative societies are in a postion to better exploit technology when it comes to infrastructure.

The same reasoning applies to other aspects of infrastructure. Corporations are notorious for externalizing costs while internalizing profits. This means that they exploit existing infrastructure while not maintaining it. If government does not mandate that they repair or maintain infrastructure that they use or does not step in and do it itself, eventually corporations will not be able to function due to outdated or malfunctioning infrastructure. Societies that have an overarching vision of economic and infrastructure development are better suited to see to it that infrastructure development occurs simultaneously with technological advancement and that jobs are created and maintained rather than workers exploited and their jobs exported. Societies with industrial policies will seek to create and maintain jobs while they export products and import raw materials. Societies without industrial policies will export jobs and raw materials and become dumping grounds for other societies' manufactured exports as citizens are increasingly persuaded to become passive consumers and nonunionized workers.

It's not hard to see areas in which the US has fallen behind other societies due to lack of infrastructure development because corporations have insisted on lower taxes and smaller government. Their lobbyists and campaign donations have created a society that reflects their own short term interests. High speed rail, common in other advanced industrialized societies, is almost completely non-existent in the US. High speed internet is more advanced in South Korea and other societies than it is in the US. Again that is a function of lack of infrastructure in the supposedly "freer" US. A modern electrical transmission grid is lacking in the US nor is there any political impetus for developing it. And then the older infrastructure technologies of water develoment, sewers, roads and bridges have largely been neglected. A concomitant of lack of infrastructure development in the US is the lack of jobs that all that infrastructure development and maintenance could provide. But again infrastructure development is something that is not profitable for US corporations and would have to be pursued by government, and the prevailing philosophy in the US is not to give government the resources it would need to provide the jobs to do this. This is considered to be socialism and as such is anathema in the US. Other societies, though, do not have American hangups and phobias about socialism and are better suited to pursue infrastructure development side by side with technological component development. Research budgets and educational systems in other societies are now beginning to outstrip similar developments in the debt ridden US so that, even in the area of technology, the US is falling behind. Education is free and proliferating in most other advanced societies while in the US education budgets are stagnant or diminishing. And the most talented, instead of going into science and engineering, go into the financial sector where much more money is to be made in financial engineering and the development of financial products.

An industrial policy considers the best ways that government and private enterprise can work together to develop society, create wealth, distribute it somewhat equally and create and maintain jobs. All these elements need to be in balance and work together harmoniously in order for an economic system to function in a healthful manner. The US with its emphasis on component level development and lack of government oversight has created a society in which job creation and preservation is of little value. Long term goals by society at large give way to short term profits by private corporations. Private corporations dominate government instead of the other way around. When new consumer products at the component level such as the automoble, the TV and the personal computer are not brought forth in rapid succession and infrastructure is left to languish, societies predicated on individual components will falter and societies focused on a harmonious balance between component level development and overall societal development including the provision of a stable job infrastructure will prevail in the creation of not only individual but also societal wealth and well being.

The Problem with Meritocracy

Meritocracy, the notion that those who are the brightest, most talented and hardworking should get ahead in society, is a tacit adjunct to democracy, capitalism and the American way. Shouldn't the best and the brightest prevail and assume leadership positions in society not to mention reap the most financial rewards? Shouldn't society promote and shower honors and prizes on people who by dint of their achievements and accomplishments have shown that they deserve preeminence?

In "Smile Southern California, You're the Center of the Universe," author James Flanigan extolls the virtues of such people and goes on and on about the talented people who have built businesses and created fortunes for themselves. Such people as Charles Woo who founded Megatoys. Today, Megatoys does $100 million in annual sales and employs 200 to 400 people depending on the season. Revolutionary ways of combining entrepreneurialism, capital markets, supply chains, computers and the latest technology result in vibrant contributions to the new economy and promise the best of all possible worlds. Or so it seems until you lift the carpet and find all the dirt that's been swept beneath it. And many of these wonderful people who have created billions in wealth (mainly for themselves) later go on to become philanthropists giving a lot of it away. What could be a more ideal scenario? The best and the brightest work hard, become entrepreneurs, start businesses, develop new products, employ people, create wealth, contribute to increased GDP, become philanthropists. This is the promise of capitalism. Isn't it all wonderful?

The problem with such a world view is that it doesn't take into account the masses of people who don't have the prodigious talent or work ethic of these few with 190 IQs who are capable of working 18 hour days. Tremendously talented workaholics will undoubtedly create value and get ahead in the workplace and the marketplace. But where does this leave average Joes who don't possess the talent or the smarts or the work ethic? You might say, forget them, they are the laggards, the C students, the less talented, the less deserving. Well, acknowledging the contributions of the best and the brightest, a society nevertheless has to take into account and provide for all its members, not only the most prolific and the most productive. A society that doesn't becomes a hierarchical, top down society relegating the less talented to inferior positions of economic and financial well-being. And such a society verges on fascism and corporatism when the less talented are exploited by the more knowledgable and powerful and used as cannon fodder or workplace fodder. Although society needs to let the talented do their thing, it is not a good idea to give them ultimate control or they will get into a position to lord it over the merely average.

Meritocracy can easily create aristocracy and even turn into fascism unless it is leavened by a respect for all human beings whether of high or low endowments and achievements. There is certainly a spectrum of human talents and abilities, but not all rewards should go to the most talented with a few crumbs from the table going to those of more modest talents and abilities. Everyone except the most physically and mentally disabled can make a contribution and deserves respect and acknowledgment, not just the most talented. Sweeping the floors is a necessary function and the person who does it deserves recognition for that and not merely condescension. And a compassionate society provides a comfortable place for everyone to dwell in not just the most intelligent who are sometimes the most ruthless. Societies lacking compassion and based on meritiocracy alone soon veer into fascism. The Germany of Adolph Hitler is a good example. It was a society not lacking in brilliant achievements and talented and hardworking individuals. If Hitler had died before the invasion of Poland in 1939, he would have gone down as one of the world's greatest individuals. But a belief in German triumphalism, exceptionalism and social Darwinism taken to extremes turned German society into an inhuman and compassionless monster. The least talented, the disabled, as well as the least German, the Jews, were earmarked for elimination.

Flanagan goes on detailing the stories of other rags to riches immigrants such as Sabrina Kay who made millions in the fashion industry. A second generation Korean immigrant, she was able to borrow $500,000. from her parents to open California Design College in 1991. She sold out in 2003 for $15 million. I guess it takes money to make money, but not all entrepreneurs have needed parental handouts. Some like Irwin Jacobs, who founded Qualcomm and whose father was a taxi driver, started out with little except a college education. Nevertheless, the question arises what about the employees and workers that the budding millionaires and billionaires have used along the way. In many cases they have been sweatshop workers in foreign countries who have worked for peanuts while creating fortunes for their employers. That's the dirty little secret of meritocracy - the meritocrats have been talented enough to exploit less talented people along the way. And this holds especially true for immigrants with ties to their old countries where people are desperate for work. So jobs are exported there. Flanagan sees nothing wrong with this because the high value jobs are still here in America. Except that they aren't; they're being shipped overseas as well where well educated individuals are willing to work for less. Even if all high value jobs stayed in the US, the question is begged as to what about those workers who aren't capable of doing the high value jobs but whose jobs have been shipped overseas. Flanagan blithely ignores this part of the equation as he waxes romantic over wealth creation and entrepreneurialism which is assumed to, but often doesn't, trickle down to the merely average.

While in some cases the most talented such as Bill Gates have been amply rewarded for their efforts, there are other cases in which the most talented lost out to those better organized in the corporate format. Take Robert Armstrong, for example, the inventor of FM. He also invented the Super-regenerative circuit (patented 1922), and the Super Heterodyne receiver (patented 1918). The superheterodyne receiver makes AM and FM radio as we know them possible, and is probably the single greatest invention affecting radio of all time. It makes tuning a radio possible. Each radio station has a different carrier frequency, and the superheterodyne receiver allows the information riding on the carrier to be stripped off when the radio is tuned to a particular station.

But RCA CEO, David Sarnoff, a Russian immigrant, conspired to have Armstrong's FM radio put out of business partly because RCA was so heavily invested in AM and partly because it would interfere with the launch of television by RCA after WW II. RCA lobbied the FCC to change the frequency allotment for FM, which it did, thus making all of Armstrong's radios and radio stations obsolete overnight.  Most experts believe that FM technology was set back decades by the FCC decision. What a little lobbying can do! Armstrong would see no personal rewards for all his work and all his genius. He'd expected royalties on the manufacture of FM receivers. He expected to negotiate contracts with FM broadcasters. He also expected royalties on every TV set sold - in the U.S. and, eventually, abroad, for TV's sound system was his - FM.

But that wasn't going to happen. RCA tried to circumvent Armstrong's patents, and began producing televisions with his sound system, but paying him nothing, and then, finally, offering him $1 million for a non-exclusionary license. It was something like a scene from the Old West, the rich rancher going to his upstart competitor next door and saying, "I'm going to give you $1 million for your spread. Do you want me to pay you, or do you want me to pay your widow?"

In 1948, Armstrong turned to the courts - charging open theft, infringement on five of his basic FM patents. RCA responded with an army of lawyers who tied him up for six years with trickery, truth-twisting, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, and botheration. Armstrong went broke with legal expenses and was outspent and outargued by RCA corporate resources and their team of attorneys. Armstrong lost his marriage and eventually committed suicide. Meritocracy sometimes produces ghastly results. Arguably the best and the brightest, Armstrong lost out to corporate chicanery. In his case meritocracy yielded to corporate power.

A similar fate was visted on Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television, at the hands (again) of David Sarnoff and his RCA corporate lawyers. So meritocracy isn't all it's cracked up to be especially when corporations are arrayed against individual inventors and entrepreneurs. The corporate form overpowers and dominates them. And if this can happen to talented individuals, how much more likely is it to happen to individuals who are less talented?

Even in the best of all possible meritocracies, a high degree of inequality will eventually obtain. If most of the rewards go to a small minority of very talented individuals, they will come to have economic and political domination over the vast majority of average Joes. The only way to forestall this eventuality is for government to step in and prevent it by seeing to it that society's rewards are distributed more equitably and evenly, by seeing to it that all financial rewards do not go to the most talented and hardworking, by enforcing an ethic of sharing through redistributing some of the spoils and wealth creation to society as a whole and not just to private interests no matter how meritorious they are.

While I would agree that more of society's rewards should go to those who have contributed more to society, we have to look at the meaning of the word "contribution." Is it really a contribution to society if the rewards from an endeavor go exclusively to the private entity that created it? No, that is a contribution not to society but to self. It would be a contribution to society if society, meaning the public, reaped some of the financial rewards as well. This means that any creation cannot be exclusively owned by the creator. If there needs to be a rationale for this, it is that the creator was enabled by society in the first place whether by the educational system or some other publicly provided good or service. Therefore, a meritocracy needs to be leavened by wealth sharing which is usually accomplished through taxation although cooperative enterprises are possible which share wealth directly. Luck is a big factor in who reaps rewards from an invention as most inventions such as the telephone had multiple inventors, namely, Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Paul la Cour, Antonio Meucci and others. In most cases only one got to the patent office first and got the credit.

Does this mean that a corporatrion like Microsoft, for instance, has to go out and hire people who will be mediocre at their jobs. Not at all. It just means that work should not be the complete basis of income. Those who are unable to do a good job are better left unemployed, but still need to be provided for. If they are truly incompetent, it is better to pay them to stay out of the work force rather than to screw it up. But they can't be left to wither on the streets. This is the difference between a compassionate society and fascism.

To sum up, wealth needs to be redistributed to some extent so that those who are not the best, brightest and most talented share in it in order to prevent a large degree of inequality and so that meritocracy doesn't veer into corporatocracy and fascism.

Philo T Farnsworth, Inventor of TV, Screwed by David Sarnoff, CEO of RCA

Philo T Farnsworth (1906-1971)was a Mormon farm boy who is the undisputed inventor of television yet he made little money and got little credit for his efforts. Instead he was tied up in litigation by David Sarnoff and his RCA corporate lawyers, and, although he eventually was ruled the sole inventor of TV  by the US Patent Office, he collected precious few royalties from Sarnoff and RCA before his patent expired in 1947 shortly before the post war boom in TV sets really took off. In 1935 the US Patent Office declared that Farnsworth was the undisputed inventor of TV. However Sarnoff and RCA tied Farnsworth up in litigation that prevented Farnsworth from marketing a single TV set. Then along came World War II which prevented Farnsworth from pursuing his commercial venture. After the war Farnsworth had two years to market and collect royalties before his patent expired in 1947 and TV became public domain. It wasn't until after 1947 that TV sales really took off with the result that RCA didn't have to pay royalties to Farnsworth at all and most of the profits went to RCA. Farnsworth eventually died depressed and alcoholic having spent his life dedicated to his invention. The basic history of the invention is the following:

In 1921 the 14-year-old Mormon had an idea while working on his father's Idaho farm. Mowing hay in rows, Philo realized an electron beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines, reproducing the image almost instantaneously. This would prove to be a critical breakthrough in Philo Farnsworth's invention of the television in 1927. Earlier TV devices had been based on an 1884 invention called the scanning disk, patented by Paul Nipkow. Riddled with holes, the large disk spun in front of an object while a photoelectric cell recorded changes in light. Depending on the electricity transmitted by the photoelectric cell, an array of light bulbs would glow or remain dark. Though Nipkow's mechanical system could not scan and deliver a clear, live-action image, most would-be TV inventors still hoped to perfect it.

So Farnsworth used electronics instead of a mechanical device to scan the picture a line at a time similar to the way he raked hay a row at a time. With the advent of digital TV, each row is divided up into a number of picture elements or pixels which are then given a digital value. But Farnsworth's black and white TV was simpler. The camera recorded an analog signal which represented the values between pure black and pure white continuously, a line at a time, using the photoelectric effect to convert light intensity into an electron stream. This signal was then converted into a radio wave that was sent out over the air and then reconverted into an electron stream at the receiver. The electron beam was then swept back and forth in rows or lines (similar to Farnsworth's hay field) across a cathode ray tube which then lit up according to the lightness or darkness of the original image.

Interested in electricity and science from an early age, Philo explained his ideas for television in a diagram to his high school teacher. This diagram turned out to be invaluable when the Patent Office had to decide who had precedence in the invention of television. They decided that Farnsworth's ideas took precedence and he was issued a patent in 1927. At the age of 19, having dropped out of college, Philo persuaded two backers to put up the money necessary for him to develop his ideas. He had to develop a camera that would turn an image into a stream of electrons and a television tube that would turn a stream of electrons into an image.

Meanwhile, in 1929 David Sarnoff hired Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian emigre like himself, who had a competing version of electronic television. Sarnoff had engineered a virtual monopily for RCA in the radio industry, was sitting on a large capital war chest, and was determined to do it again with television. In 1930 Sarnoff sent Zworykin to California  to check out Farnsworth's invention which was considerably more developed at that time than Zworykin's. Farnsworth had a working TV camera. Farnsworth was too naive to  realize that Zworykin's mission was to steal his ideas for RCA which then tried to do a work-around of Farnsworth's patent. Zworykin told Farnsworth disingenuously, "That's a beautiful tube. I wish I had invented it." Later Sarnoff himself visited Farnsworth and offered him $100,000 for his invention. Farnsworth refused since he felt that, as the inventor, he should be paid royalties instead. Sarnoff had famously said, "RCA doesn't pay royalties; we collect them."

In 1931, Farnsworth found a company that agreed to license his television technology. In an old brick building in Philadelphia, Farnsworth signed a secret deal with a radio company called Philco that wanted to get a head start in television. They agreed to his terms and offered to fund his research if he would bring his lab to Philadelphia. The move was shrouded in secrecy because Philco wanted to hide their plans from RCA. After leaving Philco and forming his own company, Farnsworth demonstrated live TV in Philadelphia in 1934. Sarnoff decided to use his corporate might and his team of patent lawyers to fight Farnsworth, who had only one patent attorney, in court. Teetering on the verge of bankruptcy Farnsworth signed a deal with an English company that enabled him to put the first TV station on the air in 1936.

Burned out by constant work and pressure, Farnsworth started to drink heavily, decided to get away form the TV business and retreated to a farm in Maine. Meanwhile, David Sarnoff was finally ready to unveil RCA television to America. The history books would say that television was born in 1939 at the New York World's Fair. Farnsworth's first public demonstration in Philadelphia, five years earlier, was forgotten. At the World's Fair in 1939, David Sarnoff  stated, "We have added radio sight to sound." Although RCA lore would not mention Farnsworth as having anything to do with bringing TV to the world, after seven years of crippling litigation, Farnsworth finally won his case against RCA. In October, 1939, Sarnoff was forced to admit defeat. For the first time in RCA's history, royalties would be paid to an outside inventor. The small inventor had dared to take on the giant corporation, and he had won. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Just as TV was about to go into production, World War II intervened. By the time the war was over, Farnworth had just two years left before his patent would become public domain. So in the end, he was shoved aside and RCA, the corporation, was the one that got the credit for developing and presenting television to the American people.

After the war Farnsworth worked on a variety of projects for ITT. But his health deteriorated due to alcoholism and depression. He had to sit by while Sarnoff and RCA took all the credit and the money for the invention of television. As always his ventures teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. Stress associated with his job threw Farnsworth into relapse.  He was eventually terminated and allowed medical retirement.

In the spring off 1967, Farnsworth and his family moved back to Utah to continue his fusion research at Brigham Young University, which presented him with an honorary doctorate. The university also offered him office space and an underground concrete bunker location for the project. Realizing the fusion lab was to be dismantled at ITT, Farnsworth invited staff members to accompany him to Salt Lake City as team members in his planned Philo T. Farnsworth Associates (PTFA) organization. By late 1968 the associates began holding regular business meetings and PTFA was underway. However, although a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was promptly secured and more possibilities were within reach, the financing needed to pay the $24,000 in monthly expenses for equipment rental and salaries was stalled.

By Christmas 1970, PTFA had failed to secure the necessary financing and the Farnsworths had sold all their own ITT stock and cashed out Philo's life insurance policy to maintain organization stability. The underwriter had failed to provide the financial backing that was to have supported the organization during its critical first year. The banks called in all outstanding loans. Repossession notices were placed on anything not previously sold and the Internal Revenue Service put a lock on the laboratory door until delinquent taxes were paid. During January 1970, Philo T. Farnsworth Associates disbanded. Farnsworth became seriously ill with pneumonia and died on 11 March 1971, broke and depressed.

Philo Farnsworth was named one of Time magazine's 100 greatest scientists and thinkers of the 20th century. He had had high hopes for television - that it would bring the world together and provide unlimited educational opportunities for all. Like the inventor of radio, Edwin Armstrong, and the inventor of the triode, Lee de Forest, he was sadly disillusioned by the programming that was put on his invention instead. However, in 1969 he and his wife, Pem, watched a man walk on the moon, and he knew his work had been worthwhile. Meanwhile, David Sarnoff, who had driven Armstrong to suicide over his invention of FM radio and Farnsworth to drink and depression, continued to make profits for RCA Corporation.

The Qualcomm vs Broadcom Spat

By now everyone has heard about the Qualcomm Broadcom spat. Qualcomm sued Broadcom over patent infringement and Broadcom sued Qualcom over patent infringement. They are like two little boys playing in a sandbox, and one says, "You infringed on my patent." The other one says, "No you infringed on my patent. Nyaaaah." "My patent portfolio is bigger than yours." "No it's not! Mine is bigger than yours!" As they continue to hurl sand in each other's face, someone said, "Let's get an adult (in this case a judge) to decide who infringed on who's patent." Well, the adult has finally determined that Broadcom is right and Qualcomm is wrong. "Not fair," cries Qualcomm. "We'll get another adult to decide because this one is biased!" Besides Qualcomm recently had to pony up $20 million to Broadcom even before the recent ruling.

The ruling means all new devices launched after 7th June 2007 that use Qualcomm's chipsets will be banned from being imported into the U.S. The stakes, therefore, could not be higher, even though the ruling does not affect handsets that are already available. The point is it will in effect prevent operators from launching new models using Qualcomm chipsets in the U.S. market.

But Broadcom is being magnanimous in victory just as Qualcomm is crying foul in defeat. Broadcom is extending an open hand and is offering Qualcomm the opportunity of licensing its patents, the ones Qualcomm is infringing upon. Isn't that nice of Broadcom? The one kid is going to still let the other kid play in his sandbox even after the other kid threw sand in his face. C'mon Qualcomm. Be gracious in defeat, pay up to Broadcom for the use of its patents and everything will be fine. You still will be able to import all the chipsets you want into the US market. But Qualcomm says, "Waaahhh. Those are our patents, and (stamping its feet) Broadcom should pay us not the other way around." Qualcomm wants to make all this money just for letting other companies license its patents. Its fleet of corporate lawyers must justify their existence by insisting that other companies pay them, and they take it pretty hard if it's the other way around. Now Broadcom's corporate lawyers have smug smiles of satisfaction on their faces while Qualcomm's drag around with their tails between their legs. We can't have that.

"Our goal is simply to ensure fair competition and a level playing field, not just for Broadcom, but for the entire cellular industry," said Scott McGregor, CEO at Broadcom. "Qualcomm's practices prevent that. Their monopoly in CDMA technology has increased the price of cell phones in the U.S., and we are hoping that the courts will prevent the same thing from happening with the next generation '3G' cell phones. Qualcomm's monopolistic activities limit competition, stifle innovation, and ultimately harm consumers and service providers."

This sounds very reasonable, Qualcomm. Be nice. Scott McGregor is looking out for the whole industry and the American consumer, not just himself! Now don't be greedy, and (I shudder to think) monopolistic! Horrors! Out damned spot!

But wait a minute! There's a missing piece of the puzzle. Qualcomm is being forbidden from importing CDMA chips into the US market. But Qualcomm is a San Diego, CA, USA based company. Solution! Make them here. Then you won't have to import them! And it would create a few more US based jobs. Problem solved! That'll be a couple million, please. Just pay my PayPal account. Fire the corporate lawyers. Save tons of money. Jeez, I might even let you infringe on my patent. I can't afford to hire a bevy of corporate lawyers to defend it. How would I even know? Someone's infringin' Lawd, Kum Bay Ya. You know, while these high tech billionaires play their little sandbox games over millions of dollars, the rest of us peons are just scratching out a living and playing games on our cell phones. How did we ever get along without them? We're  living in different worlds.

To add insult to injury Qualcomm Stadium and the feckless San Diego Chargers are going bye-bye while Henry Samueli, co-founder and CTO of Broadcom, is cruising to victory as owner of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks (just Ducks now, thank you!) ice hockey team since his team won the much coveted Stanley Cup this year in addition to its triumphs over Qualcomm.

But if my previous suggestion doesn't work for them, here's another one: Qualcomm and Broadcom should merge! That's a true capitalistic solution to the problem. They could call themselves QualBroadcom, and for a website QualBroad.com. Pretty neat, huh? But I've got a patent on the name. So don't think about doing it without paying me first! Don't forget my expertise in the name game! If the cell phone gig starts to fade, they could always go into the escort, massage, outcall business. You know Quality Broad Company, QualBroad.com. For all the conventioneers, conference attenders and out of town CEOs, where you gonna turn when you need a little excitement or dinner companionship? Why QualBroadcom! Satisfaction guaranteed for all of your out of town human resource needs! We are discreet and professional.  Need a massage after a hard day of conventioneering? Just call QualBroadCom or  log on to QualBroad.com. Problem solved! That'll be another million, please.

The US Can Satisfy All Its Energy Needs Without Buying Any Foreign Oil

The US has a domestic supply of energy in the form of coal equal to all the known oil reserves in the middle east. So why are we depending on oil for our energy? Big corporate interests want us to buy oil not coal. Coal is a lot cheaper than oil. Already, half the electricity generating plants are powered by coal. The technology is emerging for coal fired electricity producing plants to be pollution free, and electric car technology is already here. That means that, in addition to all out household and industrial electricity consumption needs, all our transportation needs can be powered by electricity ultimately produced from coal.

America has more thaan 274 billion tons of coal reserves - a 250 year supply based on current usage levels. That's 29 times the known US reserves of natural gas and 54 times the known US reserves of oil. The use of coal to generate electricity in the US rose by over 188% between 1970 and 2003, and government experts predict that the use of electricity from coal will rise by another 25% by 2020. The US produces more than 1 billion tons of coal each year or about 35% of the world's coal supply - more than any other country. Wyoming is the state that produces the most coal (about 390 million tons in 2004), and Montana has the largest reserves (about 120 billion tons).

Another reason to make coal the US' primary energy source is that it's more affordable than other sources of energy including oil. Energy costs place the highest burden on low and middle income families. In 2005 families earning less than $10K spent 48% of their income on energy costs. Families earning $10K to $30K spent 17% while families earning over $50K spent only 5%. Costs for household energy use have risen much slower than costs for transportation due largely to the fact that over half the electricity produced comes from coal which is relatively cheap compared to oil. While household energy costs due to electricity use increased 12% from 2000 to 2005, energy costs due to fuel oil increased 67%. Similarly, business energy costs will be reduced by a greater usage of electricity produced from coal resulting in increased competitiveness and more jobs.

In the early 70s the Federal Congress passed the first Clean Air Act. Since then pollutants from coal based power plants have been reduced by 35% while electricty produced from coal has been increased 180%. Technological improvements in the generation of electricity from coal will result in the first pollutant free coal based electricity generating plant by 2012. These plants will produce hydrogen as a by-product which can then be used for hydrogen powered vehicles and will completely contain carbon dioxide which is the main greenhouse gas.

FutureGen is an initiative to build the world's first integrated sequestration and hydrogen production research power plant. The $1 billion dollar project is intended to create the world's first zero-emissions fossil fuel plant. When operational, the prototype will be the cleanest fossil fuel fired power plant in the world. The initiative is a response to President Bush's directive to draw upon the best scientific research to address the issue of global climate change. The production of hydrogen will support the President's call to create a hydrogen economy and fuel pollution free vehicles; and the use of coal will help ensure America's energy security by developing technologies that utilize a plentiful domestic resource. Additionally, other countries will be joining the U.S. to participate in the project. The prototype plant will establish the technical and economic feasibility of producing electricity and hydrogen from coal (the lowest cost and most abundant domestic energy resource), while capturing and sequestering the carbon dioxide generated in the process. The initiative will be a government/industry partnership to pursue an innovative 'showcase' project focused on the design, construction and operation of a technically cutting-edge power plant that is intended to eliminate environmental concerns associated with coal utilization. This will be a 'living prototype' with future technology innovations incorporated into the design as needed. The project will employ coal gasification technology integrated with combined cycle electricity generation and the sequestration of carbon dioxide emissions. The project will be supported by the ongoing coal research program, which will also be the principal source of technology for the prototype. The project will require 10 years to complete and will be led by the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, Inc., a non-profit  industrial consortium representing the coal and power industries, with the project results being shared among all participants, and industry as a whole.

The technology to use coal to produce a substitute for natural gas and fuel for jet planes exists today. By 2025 all coal powered electricity generating plants could be converted to ultra -low near zero emissions.

The US path to the future is clear: more dependence on cheaper coal based electricity for household, business and transportation use, less dependence on more expensive and less reliable foreign oil. The question is: will we have the political leadership and collective will to implement a rational future for America or will we continue to be governed by politicians who are only concerned about catering to corporate interests in return for campaign contributions and lobbying jobs.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

by John Lawrence

A great documentary film, "Who Killed the Electric Car?", is playing now in a very limited number of art theaters. Too bad since this film should be widely viewed. Anyone interested in the high price of gas, the environment and automotive technology should certainly see it. It "pairs well" (as Starbucks would say) with another current great documentary by Al Gore, "An Inconvenient Truth." These films both should be seen by every thinking, caring person.

The history of the electric car goes something like this. First a definition and a distinction.  By electric car we mean a car powered solely by batteries whereas a hybrid is a car powered by gas and batteries. A plug-in hybrid is a car which can be plugged in to recharge the batteries whereas a normal hybrid's batteries only get charged in the process of driving.

The electric car has been around for over a hundred years. In 1859 Thomas Davenport invented the battery powered car. In 1890 Thomas Edison built a battery powered car using nickel-alkaline batteries. In 1903 one third of all cars produced were electric vehicles, one third were steam powered and one third were gas powered. In 1930 Krieger manufactured the first gas-electric hybrid. It was front wheel driven with power steering. A gasoline engine supplemented the battery pack. In the same year the successful introduction of Ford's internal combustion engine powered Model T virtually wiped out the electric car companies.

In 1990 the Los Angeles basin issued 41 stage 1 smog alerts. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted a Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate requiring car manufacturers selling vehicles in the state of California to have 2% of their market share in ZEVs by 1998, 5% by 2001 and 10% by 2003. In 1995 the American Automobile Manufacturing Association circulated a confidential proposal to launch a public relations "grassroots education campaign" to repeal the CARB ZEV program.

In 1996 in response to auto industry pressure, the CARB made the ZEV mandate more flexible. A "Memorandum of Agreement" between CARB and seven of the largest automobile manufacturers stated that the automakers would promote and market ZEVs in sufficient quantities to meet consumer demand. However, advertising expenditures for GM's EV-1 were minimal as the auto manufacturers did everything they could to discredit their own vehicles while advertising gas-powered cars to the hilt. 10% of all new cars and light duty trucks were still required to be ZEVs by 2003.

In 2000 GM's EV-1 was made available for lease at $400 to $500 a month. Meanwhille, GM purchased Hummer, a gas guzzler, showing where its priorities really were. In 2002 GM, ChryslerDaimler and seven San Joaquin Valley dealerships sued CARB over the ZEV mandate. The US Department of Justice in the Bush Administration filed a "friend of the court" brief supporting GM's and Daimler's suit arguing that the ZEV mandate was an attempt to regulate fuel economy standards something only the Federal Government could do. Alan C Lloyd, chairman of CARB, was named Chairman of the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a group devoted to promoting fuel cell technology, a competitor to electric car technology which was being promoted by the auto industry. Accordingly, Lloyd and CARB lost interest in electric cars. President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address called for research in hydrogen fuel cells. The only problem was that hydrogen fuel cell technology was at least 15 years away. EV technology was already proven and in production. At best fuel cell technology would require a large expenditure in infrastructure in terms of filling stations whereas electric cars could be simply plugged in at home at night.

In 2003 Toyota announced that it would stop production on its electric vehicle, the RAV4 EV, citing poor sales. The Toyota was the only EV that could be purchased (for $42,000) in addition to being leased. The CARB  under Alan Lloyd further modified the ZEV mandate to only require auto makers to roll out a mix of gas-electric hybrids, fuel cell and partially zero emission vehicles by 2008. This effectively killed the ZEV mandate. Subsequent to the CARB's revisions, GM announced that it would not renew leases on the EV-1 and would recall all of them dispatching tow trucks to haul them away from customers reluctant to relinquish them. Ford, Honda and Toyota also pulled their fleets of EVs off the roads.

In 2004 EV-1's are discovered and filmed at GM's Arizona proving grounds having been crushed. Documentary maker Huell Howser elicits the admission that not only are the practically new EV-1s being crushed but that they are scheduled to be shredded so that no earthly trace of them will remain. In 2005 EV-1 activists launch a 24 hour vigil at a GM lot in Burbank where a number of EV-1s have been impounded. When enclosed vans showed up to haul them away, the activists blocked the exit and were handcuffed and arrested by local cops.

In 2006 GM and Toyota ended research on hydrogen-powered  fuel cell vehicles. It seems that they were merely a stalking horse to put out there to attract attention away from and to finally kill EVs. Why you may ask would auto manufacturers want to get rid of the EV? Here are some reasons. A large percentage of auto dealer profits come from maintenance and the EV, in contrast to the gas engine, is virtually maintenance free. Also oil companies would go out of business, and there are still a trillion barrels of oil in the ground and $100 trillion in profits yet to be gained by oil companies. So they don't want oil free transportation to become a reality just yet.

Regardless of the machinations of the oil companies and the auto manufacturers who are more interested in their own profits than in a technology which will protect the environment, reduce greenhouse gasses and reduce costs to consumers (hence less profits), there is an independent company, Tesla Motors, which as of 2006 is manufacturing all electric cars which use Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries developed by Stanford Ovshinsky, have a range of 300 miles, can go 0 to 60 in 4 seconds and cost less than a penny a mile to operate. It will be interesting to see how the auto manufacturers and oil companies will respond to this challenge. Will they try to buy them out and kill the electric car again? Will they try to get legislation passed by the oil friendly (Bush, Cheney and Condoleeza Rice are former oil company executives) Federal Government? Will they try to propagandize consumers away from the all electric vehicle. In the near future, however, only rich people will be able to afford a Tesla, the first car named after an electrical engineer, which started production with a sports model. Down the road, if EVs become more affordable, the average person may be able to own one. Don't expect any help from the Bush Administration though in jump starting the switch to EVs. Their interests are tied in with the status quo.

Finally, Ovshinsky and his company Ovonics have developed thin film solar panels which can be used in lieu of shingles as roofing materials. Every new and re-roofed home can have a built-in solar panel covering the whole roof! It is with sadness that we note the recent passage (August 16, 2006) of Stan Ovshinsky's wife, Iris, who was an equal partner in his business developments.

Speaking for the family, Dr. Ovshinsky’s daughter, Dr. Robin Dibner, said, “Iris fought for peace, equality and justice with empathy for everyone. She found great happiness in creating new industries that resulted in high-value jobs. She was full of life and sparkle, bringing joy to all who met her.”

Edwin Howard Armstrong: The Inventor of FM

Edwin Howard Armstrong was born in 1890 in New York City. He studied electrical engineering at Columbia University inventing the Regenerative Circuit while a junior there. Also the Super-regenerative circuit (patented 1922), and the Super Heterodyne receiver (patented 1918). The superheterodyne receiver makes Am and FM radio as we know them possible, and is probably the single greatest invention affecting radio of all time. It makes tuning a radio possible. Each radio station has a different carrier frequency, and the superheterodyne receiver allows the information riding on the carrier to be stripped off when the radio is tuned to a particular station.

Armstrong didn't invent radio. Lee DeForest, among others, with his invention of the triode got the credit for that. Armstrong's inventions made radio feasible, practical and listenable. Regeneration was a form of positive feedback that allowed the production of radio waves. Such a circuit is called a transmitter. Similarly it allowed for the reception of radio waves by a circuit known as a receiver.

Armstrong patented the Regenerative circuit in 1914 and licensed it to the Marconi company. He then went to Europe to fight in WW I. When he came back he found himself embroiled in a patent fight.

From Wikipedia:

In particular, the regenerative circuit, which Armstrong patented in 1914, was subsequently patented by Lee De Forest in 1916; De Forest then sold the rights to his patent to AT&T. Between 1922 and 1934, Armstrong found himself embroiled in a patent war, between himself, RCA, and Westinghouse on one side, and De Forest and AT&T on the other. This patent lawsuit was the longest ever litigated to its date, at 12 years. Armstrong won the first round of the lawsuit, lost the second, and stalemated in a third. Before the United States Supreme Court, De Forest was granted the regeneration patent in what is today widely believed to be a misunderstanding of the technical facts by the Supreme Court.

In 1920 Westinghouse bought Armstrong's patent for the superheterodyne receiver and started the nation's first radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, Marconi's company RCA started buying up the patents of Westinghouse and AT&T including Armstrong's and DeForest's patents. RCA was content to let DeForest win the patent fight because it meant that they got the use of the patent for another 10 years even though they knew Armstrong should have won.

During the patent fight Armstrong started working on the invention of FM radio which was far superior to AM because it was static free and much higher fidelity. It was patented in 1933. Armstrong lobbied the FCC to create a frequency band for FM which it did - between 42 and 50 MHz. Armstong then helped to market a small number of high powered FM radio stations in the New England states, known as the Yankee Network. Armstrong had begun on a journey to convince America that FM radio was superior to AM, and, he hoped, to collect patent royalties on every radio sold with FM technology. FM was also chosen by the FCC to provide the sound for the fledgling television industry. Armstrong should have collected royalties for that as well.

However, RCA CEO David Sarnoff, a Russian immigrant, conspired to have Armstrong's FM radio put out of business partly because RCA was so heavily invested in AM and partly because it would interfere with the launch of television by RCA after WW II. RCA lobbied the FCC to change the frequency allotment for FM which it did thus making all of Armstrong's radios and radio stations obsolete overnight.  Most experts believe that FM technology was set back decades by the FCC decision.

From Wikipedia:

Furthermore, RCA also claimed invention of FM radio and won its own patent on the technology. A patent fight between RCA and Armstrong ensued. RCA's momentous victory in the courts left Armstrong unable to claim royalties on any FM radios sold in the United States. The undermining of Yankee Network and Patent Court battle brought ruin to Armstrong, by then, almost penniless and emotionally distraught.

From Edwin Armstrong: The Creator of FM Radio:

During World War II, Armstrong did important research on long range radar for the War Department and gave his FM patents to the military for no fee, an important gift, once the U.S. commanders realized that the German army traveled on AM, which they could easily jam. FM was unjammable. By the end of the war, Armstrong had developed his continuous wave FM radar to the point where he was able to bounce a radio signal 238,000 miles -- to the moon and back again. He had proven that FM waves, unlike AM waves, could penetrate the ionosphere. That paved the way for radio communication in space, and it gave astronomers a new tool to measure distances from the earth to the ends of the universe. By the end of World War II, FM had been proven. Much to the disgust of RCA's David Sarnoff. "I thought Armstrong would invent some kind of a filter to remove static from our AM radio. I didn't think he'd start a revolution -- start up a whole damn new industry to compete with RCA." Furthermore, FM was a distraction. Sarnoff wanted RCA to put its resources into the development of television, which was taking up huge chunks of RCA's working capital. "A new kind of radio," said Sarnoff, "is like a new kind of mouse trap. The world doesn't need another mousetrap." Armstrong would see no personal rewards for all his work and all his genius. Now he found that RCA and all of America's big communication giants were teaming up to stifle FM, and take away all the rewards Armstrong had been waiting for. He'd expected royalties on the manufacture of FM receivers. He expected to negotiate contracts with FM broadcasters. He also expected royalties on every TV set sold -- in the U.S. and, eventually, abroad, for TV's sound system was his -- FM. But that wasn't going to happen. RCA tried to circumvent Armstrong's patents, and began producing televisions with his sound system, but paying him nothing, and then, finally, offering him $1 million for a non-exclusionary license. It was something like a scene from the Old West, the rich rancher going to his upstart competitor next door and saying, "I'm going to give you $1 million for your spread. Do you want me to pay you, or do want me to pay your widow?" In 1948, Armstrong turned to the courts -- charging open theft, infringement on five of his basic FM patents. RCA responded with an army of lawyers who tied him up for six years with trickery, truth-twisting, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, and botheration. RCA had time. For Armstrong, time was running out. RCA could afford the legal fees. Armstrong had to sell many of his assets, including his stock in Zenith and RCA and Standard Oil, for $200,000. With all of his other expenses, including the expense of running his research facility at Columbia University, Armstrong could afford to pay only $22,000 to his lawyers. By 1954, he was ready to settle. He asked RCA for $2.4 million. RCA countered with $200,000, less than the outstanding bill for his legal fees. Armstrong appealed to his wife, Marion. Would she advance him some of the money he had given her years ago? She objected. That was the money for their retirement. Exhausted and out of hope, frustrated by all the litigation, Armstrong exploded in a great rage. He swung a poker at Marion. The blow landed on her arm. She fled to her sister in Connecticut. Armstrong had shattered his happy marriage of nearly 30 years. He spent Christmas and New Year's alone in his New York apartment. Then, on January 31, 1954, he wrote a final letter to Marion. "I am heartbroken because I cannot see you once again. I deeply regret what has happened between us. I cannot understand how I could hurt the dearest thing in the whole world to me. I would give my life to turn back to the time when we were so happy and free. God keep you and may the Lord have mercy on my soul." Next morning, Edwin Howard Armstrong put on his hat and coat, wrapped a scarf around his neck and walked out the window of his apartment on the 13th floor. David Sarnoff told the press, "I did not kill Armstrong."

The moral of this sad story is that a single solitary individual no matter how meritorious, no matter how ingenious, no matter how deserving of recognition and reward is no match for a corporation with large capital assets and a team of well-paid corporate lawyers. This poor man, Edwin Armstrong, having contributed so much to society was driven to despair simply because Sarnoff and RCA had the power to do it. They squashed him like a bug, and they didn't care.

Postscript: After his death, Armstrong's widow, Marion, renewed the patent fight against RCA and finally prevailed in 1967. Marion would get a little more than a million dollars, the same amount that Sarnoff had offered Armstrong in 1940. In effect, Sarnoff had finally gotten an answer to the question: "Do you want me to pay you, or your widow?"

Qualcomm: What's in a Name?

Qualcomm is a San Diego based corporation that does very fine work in the cell phone world. It's a Fortune 500 company, and I'm sure they have a lot of very smart people running the company and a lot of very fine  people working there. Their record of quarterly profits is admirable; so much so that they find themselves in the enviable position, quite often, of having to pooh-pooh their own profit reports something like this. "Well, even though we exceeded Wall Street analysts' expectations this quarter, don't expect us to keep this up. We'll probably do really lousy next quarter!" This is called lowering expectations. If the analysts got really excited and expected Qualcomm to do great things in the next quarter and then they fell short, that would be really bad for their stock. People would probably dump it if it didn't live up to expectations, and that would be really, really bad!

However, I have a problem with 'Qualcomm,' the name. It's just too obvious: Quality Communications.  Duhhh! How banal! How mundane! It's also a little too long. Too many m's. It's obvious they didn't have a naming expert like me come up with that one! Actually, Qualco would have been better. Shakespeare said, "What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." True, but actually there's a lot in a name. Certain sounds and certain words or word fragments connote certain things either pleasant or not so pleasant. Consider the words 'smegma' and 'maggot. Would you want a rose called by either of these names? "Oh, come here, Honey, and smell this wonderful smegma." How poetic!

Instead,  Qualcomm should have hired me to come up with a name that connoted pleasant associations having to do with their primary field of interest: cell phones. How about this: Celerity Corporation? The dictionary definition of celerity is rapidity of motion or action." It connotes speed, a very cool thing in any name, and cell phones - Cell-erity. Or it could even be called the Cellerity Corporation Even better. Also variations on this theme would work such as Celeritas Corporation or Cellarium Corporation with connotations of solarium as well. Solarium connotes the sun, always a good connotation. How about Celereal or Cellereal? A little too much like cereal, maybe.

Taking a different tack, consider the word 'accelerate,' related to celerity to be sure. How about the Accell Corporation? Unfortunately, other entities have seen the beauty in these names and taken them for their own operations, but they don't include major corporations. I'm sure Qualcomm could have had them if they wanted. Here's another one: Cellebrium. This connotes something really brainy as well as cell phones. However, it sounds a little like a drug or a cereal. Then there's variations on the word 'cerebral.'  Celebreal Corporation. Sounds a bit mysterious. That's OK. Or take variations on the word 'alacrity.' Alacrity means "promptness of response, cheerful readiness." What could be better than that? How about Cellacrity Corporation?

Intel knew what they were doing when they came up with the name "celeron" for one of their chips. It connotes speed, the very thing they would like their chip to be noted for. There are some companies whose names have nothing to do with their product line like the Cubic Corporation in San Diego. Then there's even a copycat Conic Corporation. There's no Spheric Corporation or Tetrahedronic or Octagonic Corporation. Why?? By the way, Cellonics would be a good name. Carrying this a bit further, how about the name Cellineal Corporation? Cellanial Corporation connotes the word cranial which connotes brainy which is good although there is a slight connotation of 'anal' which is bad. How about Cellubrious? Not bad. Close to salubrious from the Latin - healthy, safe - and meaning "promoting health and well-being." A perfect connotation.

I could go on and on. But there's no need to. They're stuck with the name 'Qualcomm.' They're never going to change it. And we're stuck with Qualcomm Stadium since they gave $17 million to the city of San Diego for the naming rights. How dreadful! Look at all the stadia that are named after corporations with dreadful names! We have here in San Diego the IPayOne Sports Arena. I Pay One!! It shouldn't be allowed. How disgusting and vulgar! How trite! It's a travesty of the English language, it is. And then the problems with Enron Stadium. They've finally renamed it Minute Maid Field! Finally, we have (in other parts of the country) Alltel Stadium, Bank of America Stadium, Invesco Field, Heinz Field, Lincoln Financial Field, Quest Field and FedEx Field. What next? Wal-Mart Stadium? Even Kick Ass Field would be better than these corporate names. How about Trash Talk Stadium or UpUrButt Field? Oh well. There's nothing I can do about it. Money talks, and if some city wants to name their stadium after the Smegma Corporation, there's nothing I can do about it!

Electronic Voting: What a Farce!

Most County governments that are investing millions in electronic voting machines are barking up the wrong tree. The idea is you go to the polls on a certain day; you have your identity checked by a number of poll workers. Then you go into a voting booth, and, instead of using mechanical equipment, now you'll be using electronic equipment to vote. What's wrong this this picture?! Instead of investing millions in electronic voting boxes, the government instead could adopt a model that would let you use the electronic box you already have, namely your desktop or laptop computer in your home.

And don't tell me that there are security concerns. Of course there are security concerns, but if my desktop is secure enough to do secure credit card transactions, it's secure enough to vote. Each person would have their own secure voting account. What the government should be developing is a website and the behind the scenes software to process and integrate each voter's account. Vote tallying would be a snap! There is always a chance of ID theft and that a voter's account will be hacked into and hijacked, but the consequences of having your credit card account hacked into and hijacked are far graver than having your vote hijacked. If your credit card is hijacked, it could cost you big bucks; if your vote is hijacked, some other guy than the one you voted for might get elected. Serious to be sure, but not as serious as losing your money!

Think of the revolution this would engender. First, most of the money that goes into holding an election would be saved. There would be no need for polls, poll workers, voting machines etc. etc. It would be a convenience to the voters not having to make a special trip to the polls. By the way those without a PC could vote at any public library. There would be no need to vote on a particular day. Voters might have a two or four week period to vote much as they have now if they vote by mail. How much more secure would be voting by computer than voting by mail! Special elections would be a snap instead of costing millions.

Think of the fringe benefits. The additional government money that would presumably go into computer security would have corresponding benefits to any and all computer transactions: business to business transactions, banking transactions, credit card transactions. Instead of the archaic methods we now have and are continuing to be implemented, this would be a giant step into the 21st century!