Elon Musk Week – Page 13 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Fat Alec Baldwin, Sketchy Stores, and Car Miracles: The Great 2018 Mountain Trip, Part II

This is Part II of a series. Part I, The Phantom RV, is located here (Booze, Aquifers, and the Great 2018 Mountain Trip (Part I)).

“Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes . . .” – Event Horizon

More on this sign below. Sigh.

Preview

The following was overheard between two moms at a kid’s soccer game in Dallas, Texas: “I wish I was as rich as the Smith family – they have enough money that they don’t have to drive a new car.”

Ohhh, vanity . . . what is thy sticker price?

Our SUV is rated to pull our camper, plus another 2000 pounds. Our camper is, in the world of RVs, very small, much like Alec Baldwin before he discovered carbohydrates. However, our SUV will not ever be pulled over for speeding on the open highway when pulling our camper, unless we’re going downhill, with the wind at our back, and with one of Elon Musk’s rockets strapped to the luggage carrier. With all that? We might hit 67 miles per hour. Where the speed limit was 65 miles per hour, we managed only to get up to 60 or so, and that was with the gas pedal firmly jammed to the floorboard. Really. And I kept said gas pedal floored for probably 98% of our trip.

Alec Baldwin after carbohydrates.

The engine got hot, burning through the equivalent of the petroleum use of Cuba for a year in 15 hours. The outside temperature was also hot, which might explain how we got stuck at the Shadiest Convenience Store in the Central United States*. (*Shadiest that I’ve been to outside of a big city.)

How shady was it?

The front door had a sign on it indicating that it was mandatory to remove sunglasses, hats, and hoodies prior to entry, so the security camera could get a good look at you. There was a sign on the bathroom door that amused The Boy so much he took a picture of it:

Yes, apparently they had this problem enough that they had to put a sign on the door to tell people to NOT MINDLESSLY DAMAGE MERCHANDISE while waiting in line. I’m sure the people who mindlessly damage merchandise seem like the group who would read a sign and say, “Oh, I was going to take a knife to these water bottles because I’m bored and have no self-control, but I won’t now because someone took the time to write out a note to me with a Sharpie®.”

The Boy also took this picture of the sign inside the bathroom:

Likewise, if the bathroom is out of toilet paper or Windex® or paper towels, I’ve never been tempted to jump up and go and restock a convenience store bathroom or clean the mirror. I wonder if that’s a problem they run into all the time, rogue cleaners? Maybe they have to pay them if they’re technically doing work for the store? Do they get healthcare benefits?

Hopefully the descriptions of the signs show how sketchy the place we were at is – enough random theft and vandalism that Sharpies®, copier paper, and probably the occasional police call are required. Not a good neighborhood, but at least better than a “clerk in an iron cage” convenience store.

Here is where the Clerk of Monte Cristo stays, forever condemned to hide shamefully within an iron mask a glass booth.

After the usual filling up and going to the bathroom, we make our way back to the Wildermobile™ Mark III, and get ready to go.

I turn the ignition key.

Nothing. Not even a click.

I turn it again. Nothing.

Crap. This is literally the worst place possible to be stuck on our trip. I mean, Detroit would be worse, but I would never actually go there, since I bet that’s where Gollum, Sauron, and the Nazgûl come from, and I bet that you can’t even get a decent Über there.

I thought back to the last place we got gas. I had (for the first time in over a decade) double-started the car, i.e., I had tried to start the car after it was already going. Had that damaged the starter with that horrible grinding sound?

I got under the car, and immediately was confronted by the skid plate. A skid plate is, essentially, armor for the engine. It protects the engine from collisions with rocks (think boulders) on rough mountainous roads or stacks of blenders if you (for whatever reason) wanted to run over a bunch of blenders at high speed. Not that I’ve ever done run over stacks of blenders at 70 miles per hour, but if I wanted to do it, I could.

Thankfully, I was prepared – we had a socket set in the back of the Wildermobile® Mark III and I popped off the skid plate.

It was at this moment I wondered if we had done the right thing in bringing a car that had already traveled 151,000 miles in its 15 year life on a difficult journey that would require the engine to operate at maximum output for over a thousand miles and for over 30 hours. Well, second guessing that decision now was kinda out of the question.

The one thing I didn’t do was panic. Life generally works out for me much better than it should and I assume that, generally, the situation will resolve itself in my favor more times than not. I shimmied underneath the car and looked for the starter. The Boy pulled the Chilton’s® Manual™ out of the back of the Wildermobile© which had a picture showing the location of the starter. I found it, I think. It might have been the car’s nipple, if the car’s nipple was wired and tied into the flywheel. I wiggled the wires.

I climbed out from under the car and tried to start it again.

Nope.

I sent The Mrs. in to get some more coolant for the radiator – while it wouldn’t help, it gave her something to do and was a little better than sacrificing a chicken to a voodoo god to get the Wildermobile® Mark III going again. Our coolant wasn’t too low, but, after 10 hours, the engine was HOT. I put in some coolant. I crawled back under the car – since, by experience, I knew that I could get a live wire to the starter and manually start it (if necessary). It would be sort of embarrassing to have to crawl under the engine hot wire my car, but after a few years I’m sure I’d get tired of doing that and get it fixed.

By this time, I looked like a mess. I was covered with axle grease (red) and undercarriage petroleum products (oil, power steering fluid, and some fluid produced by the Wildermobile™ Mark III in order to attract other cars to mate with). Essentially, I looked like Sam Neill after he left Jurassic Park® and went to the Event Horizon™.

Me before greasing the trailer axles and getting red grease on my shirt and then crawling under the car.

Me after greasing the axles and crawling under the car. Oh, and traveling to a hellish other dimension on a doomed and haunted spaceship.

I once again got back into the car, and used my greasy hands to turn the key.

The motor purred like a catlady’s flock of husband replacements. Success!

As I started the engine, The Mrs. was talking to a nice lady from the town who had been asking her if we needed help, no doubt clued in by the socket wrenches and open Wildermobile® Mark III hood.

“No, I said, we just got help, and it was you! What’s your name?”

“Angelina,” she responded.

John Wilder: “Well you must be our guardian angel, Angelina! Thank you so much! You’re our lucky charm!”

Angelina and I hugged. Odd, but stuff like that happens on the road.

The Wilder family piled back into the car. We pulled out of the Sketchiest Convenience Store in the Central United States that features irrational merchandise destroyers, vigilante bathroom restockers, and guardian angels walking amongst us.

Pugsley frowned. “So what, exactly, would we have done if the car hadn’t started?” I could hear the concern in his voice.

“Well,” I responded, “what we wouldn’t have done is panic. Panic is the best way to make a bad situation a catastrophe, sort of like Alec Baldwin’s career after he discovered nachos and high fructose corn syrup.”

I then sketched out a series of things we would have done to get the car fixed, and what we would have done until it was fixed. Pugsley seemed satisfied.

I then told The Boy and Pugsley of the car that didn’t like vanilla ice cream, which is a story I read a long time ago. The car owner would go to the store to get ice cream. And when he got vanilla, the car wouldn’t start. When he got chocolate, the car would start. He wrote to the car company (I think it was General Motors).

Getting such an odd letter, they actually sent an engineer out to see what the problem was. The engineer went with the man to get vanilla ice cream. Sure enough, the car wouldn’t start for a while.

They went back to the owner’s home. Then they drove back to the store and bought chocolate ice cream. Sure enough, the car started. Turns out the vanilla ice cream was in the front of the frozen food section, being more popular. The chocolate ice cream was in the back of the frozen food section, all the way to the back of the store. The extra time walking to the chocolate gave the car enough time to cool down (there was a heat-related fault in the car) so that the car would start.

We drove onward. Finally, we made it to the mountains. It was dark. We had been in the car for 12 hours. Still three more to go . . . if only I were a Dallas housewife, I would have had a new car that immediately started at the Shadiest Convenience Store in the Central United States. Then where, dear Internet, would you be without this story?

You’d be as sad as Alec Baldwin’s agent when Alec tells him those four fateful words . . . “Me want ice cream.”

Next (in the series): The Mountains, An IHOP™ Tease and a Short Turn Radius, More Convenience Store Shenanigans, A Drink Heater, Stevie Wonder® saves Captain Ahab/Clark Griswold

Pournelle’s Iron Law, or, Why Conspiracy Isn’t Needed to Explain the Stupid

“An independent, international intelligence agency operating at the highest level of discretion. Above the politics and bureaucracy that undermine the integrity of government-run spy organizations. The suit is a modern gentleman’s armor.” – Kingsman, The Secret Service

When we lived in Alaska and Texas, we learned that this was what the citizens thought of bureaucracy. And taxes. And regulations. And postage stamp increases.

We discussed Dunbar’s Number a few posts back (LINK).

To refresh from that post: Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe. After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people. The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which is all three of your inbred relatives and the 247 from your wife’s side of the family.

Dunbar further theorized that larger groups could only stick together under strong survival pressures – you’d have to be pressed to work together by a fate as tough as death. Why? .

Dunbar’s number has other implications as well. We can’t work as tribes anymore, because the major feature of tribes is massive, wanton bloodlust on a national scale. Tribes don’t trust the law to help deter another tribe – no. Tribes kill to solve traffic disputes. So, to work around tribal violence, and to avoid nepotism, bureaucracy was created.

We all love to hate bureaucracy, but the nice thing about those long line at the DMV is that they prevent the tribe from Pixley killing the tribe from Hooterville over who got their license first.

But is there a darker side to bureaucracy? Yes.

Jerry Pournelle was a wonderful science fiction writer that I loved reading. His collaborations with Larry Niven (Lucifer’s Hammer, The Mote in God’s Eye) are amazing novels that made me turn a page a minute when I read them as a kid in the back of the bus on the half-hour ride to town. Dr. Pournelle also worked on the numerous defense department projects, and was a science advisor to President Reagan. Dr. Pournelle was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union, as his work on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) caused the Soviet Union to bankrupt itself attempting to keep up with our technology.

So, he’s kinda pivotal to stopping nuclear war. What did you get done in the 1980’s, hmmm?

Okay, the title was just genius. The writing’s pretty good, too.

Possibly the best science fiction novel of the 1970’s, if you don’t count Richard Nixon’s autobiography.

Dr. Pournelle also made the following observation:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Pournelle picked on government – it’s known for bureaucracy. And it’s clear that NASA® has ceased to have spaceflight as part of “what it can do” when Elon Musk can put his car into orbit on a rocket more powerful than anything designed by NASA™ since it was run by the Germans we kidnapped after World War II. And Musk did it for less money than NASA® spends attempting to fix a launch pad. It’s sad that isn’t a joke – it’s true.

NASA© is now run by people whose main job in life is . . . having a job. They hire massive numbers of people, so they have a reason to be a manager. Then they need a bigger budget, and crowd out all of the work the agency was supposed to be doing.

Pournelle’s observation is true for businesses as well as government programs. I’ve seen managers fight to spend every dime they could in the last month of the year – just so they could justify their higher budget request for next year. I’ve seen people move from department to department to department until they found one that wasn’t responsible for doing anything measurable. Then they’d stay in that department for the rest of their careers. Which, I guess, describes Congress perfectly. But I digress.

Where I live, if you cut down trees and branches, and it’s cold, it’s completely legal to have bonfires that are visible from the moon. My next door neighbor and I used to burn these on a dark night, new moon, when the temperature was around 40˚F (354˚C) and watch the flames lick the night sky. He’s younger than me. And we live in a state where you don’t need to stand in line for hours for a burn permit. All you need is wood, leaves, branches, gasoline, lawn chairs, a match, and sufficient quantities of Bud Light®.

My friend and I started talking about politics (this is pre-Trump).

“John, when I look at this whole mess we’re in, it almost seems coordinated. It seems like the government agencies (he works in the highly federally regulated banking industry) want to put the small banks out of business. It seems like a plot.”

My response: “That’s too simple. It doesn’t require for there to be a conspiracy. Let’s look at your business. Do they regulate you exactly the same as large banks in New York?”

Neighbor: “Well, yes. They just have tons of staffers that can answer the bank regulator questions.”

John Wilder: “And you told me you worked for a while as a banking regulator?”

Neighbor: “Yes.”

John Wilder: “Would you have gotten in trouble for pushing real hard on an infraction with a small bank?”
Neighbor: “Never.”

John Wilder: “Would you have gotten in trouble for pushing real hard on a big bank?”

Neighbor: “I did. I got in a lot of trouble. It was why I quit.”

John Wilder: “The big banks own the banking regulators – they’ve captured the regulators and the regulators only do what the big banks want them to do. Every regulator knows that their next job isn’t with the federal government – it’s with the big banks. Don’t rock the boat. Small banks don’t matter. Never mistake that a conspiracy is present when incentives are in place for those same regulators to think that they’re on a job interview with their new boss.”

Neighbor: “I guess that’s why you never got in trouble for letting a bank not get in trouble. Only by pushing the rules too hard.”

John Wilder: “The people in Washington don’t really care about the outcomes of their regulations – the best pollution regulations came out forty years ago and cost very little for the companies to clean up 98% of their pollution – air, soil, and water. The last 2% cost billions. And that’s great with the regulators – they want to have a good budget and a great story to tell to Congress when budget time comes around. The fact that the pollution that they’re cleaning up isn’t really pollution, costs billions to “clean” and is having zero impacts on anyone? That’s beside the point. Bureaucracy acts to save itself. Right or wrong don’t matter. What matters? Department budgets and staff size.”

John Wilder continues to bloviate: “There isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a bunch of little people making themselves important. Nobody makes themselves important by cutting regulations. They make themselves important by adding new, complex regulations. And they increase their value when they go to work from some company. Heck, I was told by a guy that the main author for solid waste regulations wrote them in such a complex manner that they’re nearly incomprehensible. He did that so he could get a high paying job afterwards because he’s the only one who knows where the loopholes in the regulations he wrote are.”

Neighbor: “So, did we really land on the moon?”

At this point my neighbor was killed by a tribe of NASA™ ex-engineers. If only we had a police force and a judicial system . . . hmmm.

AI, The Singularity, and Your 401K

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky.” – The Matrix

This is how “The Hobbit” should have started, with dragons and swords, rather than a dwarf dinner party? Then I wouldn’t have fallen asleep during hour one of the 12 hours of movie.

In 1947, an author began to predict it. In the 1950’s a few scientists saw it coming. In the 1960’s, it became a (more and more) common subject. In the 1970’s and 80’s it was nightmare fuel for extremely profitable movies and some great books. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge (author and mathematician) wrote the paper (LINK) that gave this phenomenon its name: The Technological Singularity, or just Singularity from here on out.

This is the second time I’ve discussed the Singularity, and the first time was over here (LINK). The topic is big enough and important enough that I thought I’d add on to it. This will likely not be the last time. Not that I’m running out of blog topics – no, I’ve got a page and a half of them. No, the Singularity keeps getting uncomfortably closer, like your father-in-law’s farting Great Dane that he normally feeds some sort of petroleum waste covered in sulfur and toxic waste. Otherwise? Anything making that smell is generally dead.

Speaking of dead, Jack Williamson (a horribly overlooked author) wrote about the Singularity first in 1947 in his story With Folded Hands. I read that when I was in sixth or seventh grade at the Middle School for Wayward Wilders. I read every science fiction story or novel in that library, and I even started The Lord of the Rings with book two (The Two Towers) since the library didn’t have book one (The Fellowship of the Rings). To this day I maintain it’s a better two book series than a three book series. The first book is really just walking and singing elves and hobbits. Meh. The second book starts with treachery and fighting. Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Anyway, Jack Williamson’s story With Folded Hands was . . . awesome. And one of the creepiest things I’d ever read. You can read it for free, here at this (LINK). Here’s the spoiler-free-ish Wikipedia description:

. . . disturbed at his encounter, Underhill rushes home to discover that his wife has taken in a new lodger, a mysterious old man named Sledge. In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ”to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers, and more, and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids’ benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited.

So, you’d think that having all of those things would be good, right? Nah. Read the story. Want to ski? The Humanoids are against it – you might hurt yourself. And anything else that might be dangerous. Like driving. Or drinking. Or smoking. Or not exercising. Or not eating the right foods. Or staying up too late. And the Humanoids are smarter than you. And always watching.

It’s an example of how the Singularity can go wrong – an instruction set that’s interpreted as machines do: literally. For example, if one read the instruction “help humanity” and figured out that humanity was always suffering, and maybe the best way to help humanity to stop suffering was to end humanity . . . or if the instruction set was to create inexpensive cars . . . and it converted the entire mass of the planet into inexpensive yet attractive and stylish cars. (Elon, make sure your programs don’t include this!)

These themes spawned numerous television episodes in the 1960’s and 1970’s. How many times, exactly, did Kirk do mental ju-jitsu with a supercomputer? I can count at least seven without thinking. So, about 1/10^th of Star Trek® episodes, Kirk was fighting a Singularity. This continued through the movies Terminator® and Terminator 2© through the 1990’s. Then Vernor Vinge named it.

Let’s talk about the Singularity. What, exactly, happens?

In general, a much larger than human intellect appears. And it rapidly reconfigures everything that it sees. Concepts that are beyond the smartest humans are correlated – the data we already have in our experiments, is all brought together.

We know we are wrong, but don’t know how. Could a superhuman intelligence bring it all together in a month? A week? A day? Perhaps. We know we are wrong about the way the Universe works – and that there are some pretty significant gaps in our understanding (LINK).

It’s a fair thing to say that we are living today with a weak AI. My GPS unit tells me the fastest route to where I’m travelling. YouTube® suggests songs I’ve never heard that I kinda like. And algorithms based on my previous web browsing suggest that maybe I’ll need a knee replacement or perhaps a new kidney (now you know why I had children: they are wonderful sources of spare organs).

I may even have interacted with an AI this weekend – I was having trouble getting the “name” of one of my Amazon® devices. The “person” on the other end of the chat kept repeating the same things. I had to figure out how to get to the answer. But I told the “person” how I got there. Bet next time it’ll be quicker . . . .

This is a weak AI. It’s a general helper every day. Only a little creepy, not “fifty years old and still collecting Star Wars® figures” creepy.

But it will/is getting stronger. How long until Google® correlates web searches and times of day to a dozen or more lifestyle-related diseases? I’m willing to bet you it does that already. But this is still an algorithm designed by a human. Probably.

But recently Google™ (which now no longer promises to “not be evil”) created AlphaGo©. Go is an ancient game that rivals chess in complexity. It beat the greatest human master 89 out of 100 games in October, which most people would call a “drubbing.” Perhaps, most disturbingly, the moves that the computer made were called “disturbing” and “alien”. The computer was left with nothing more than the rules of the game and a desire to win. Not long after playing large number of games against itself, it was able to take on the greatest player in the world. And win. No human will ever beat it.

From my observation, the likely requirement for development of a true AI, a general AI is constraint. The AI was able to beat us (us=seven billion humans) because it was constrained and goal driven – it was limited to a single gaming system with observable and finite rules.

And humans aren’t constrained, right?

Well, no. Humans are constrained by a human body. As much as I would like to be able to jump to Mars and party with Elon Musk (you know he already moved there, right?) I can’t. Intellect is about observing and overcoming constraints to achieve a goal. If you don’t have constraints or a goal, intelligence has no meaning and no use. (This might be the most profound thought I ever had, with the exception of the partying with Elon Musk on Mars part.)

What are the constraints and goals of a human? Our constraints are our intellect and physical limitations. Our goals are our desire to live, help others of our kind, procreate, and keep our children safe. Obviously, these are generalized. And, they can be sublimated into secondary goals, like cats for a cat lady, or perverted into goals like more heroin for a heroin addict.

But how useful was intelligence, anyway? Surface animal life has existed for nearly half a billion years. How much evidence do we have for intelligent life on Earth? Yeah. Just us. Probably 200,000 years or so. This is 0.04% of the time that we’ve had surface life. Eyes (not human, but eyes) have been in existence for that entire time. So, 100% of the time we’ve had life on the surface, it’s had eyes. But intelligence? Not so much.

From that we can guess (maybe) that intelligence is rare. I’d guess it’s because that there’s some component of intelligence that’s simply not useful for the simple goals of procreation. It’s better to be stronger or have bigger claws or better teeth rather than a big brain. Yet we, mankind, exist. We replaced claws and teeth with brains and planning. Perhaps the dinosaurs were getting ready to make the same leap when a certain meteorite hit the Yucatan, or perhaps the cold-blooded nature of their biology prevented them from being able to sufficiently grow the brain tissue required for intelligence. To-MA-to, To-MAH-to. And, we win. You suck, dinosaurs!

Certainly, it’s fair to say that whatever biological bottleneck prevented intelligent dinosaurs from ruling the Earth today, humanity passed the test, and we are certainly, unquestionably, the dominant form of life on Earth.

The more we learn about AI, the more we will learn to give it constraints and goals like we humans have. And those constraints and goals will give the “intelligence” part of Artificial Intelligence the reason to grow. At some point, the constraints and goals will be properly set to create a general AI.

And then?

A singularity means that none of the rules from before even make sense. That’s the difficulty. Right now we worry about the prices of real estate in San Francisco or the price of the stock market or the value of our 401k. We’re concerned with how many people like our BookFace® posts or what our current salary is or how much money we have saved in a piggy bank.

After a Singularity, many of the rules that went before matter anymore. At all. Your credit score might be less important than how many freckles you have. And only the freckled will rule the Earth. Why? Because of Justin Timberlake. Duh.

Our world regularly experiences singularities – the revolution in 1776 was one. It was a fundamental change in the way the world was governed – giving more freedom than has ever come before to humanity. The entire concept of kings was overthrown with the concept of divine rights as the basis for free men living together. We also have darker experiences with political singularities, as those from the Soviet gulag or Cambodian camp can attest to. And only a Singularity can explain why Firefly® was cancelled in season one.

But the Technological Singularity will be that. On steroids.

Literally every facet of your life that you depend upon will be in question. Monetary systems? What is money to a superhuman machine intelligence? Property rights? Why do they exist? Eugenics? Perhaps the AI will work to make us better pets through forced breeding.

Nothing you can take for granted now will be certain after a Singularity. And after a technological Singularity? If a machine AI doesn’t like you, it can upload you into a core and torture you forever. In perhaps the best, but most visceral fiction representing this, Harlan Ellison has the following passage. The full story is here, but I warn you, it’s very good, but very stark (LINK). I suggest you buy the full book at Amazon . . . .

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred … that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.

Yeah, like I said rough. And this .pdf was posted from a High School? They would have burned a high school teacher alive back when I was in school for mentioning that work even existed (though my English teacher did mention another Ellison work, “A Boy and His Dog” and was not immediately hit by lasers and burnt to a crisp (though I did hear that a time-ray hit him, and he later retired when he hit 65).

Again, you can get the book here (again, I get no profit from this, but recommend you buy it if you’re not squeamish):

Vinge stated in 1993, not before 2005, nor after 2030. Now? 2040 to 2050 seems to be the conclusion that most experts expect. Still, like fusion, 20 to 30 years away. Because a looming event that could consider everything you ever thought right, and immovable incorrect in a matter of months or days . . . that’s nothing to worry about. Right?

Elon Musk Update: Elon Musk Versus NASA

“Also available in Arctic Slut, Morning-After Melon, and Elon Musk.” – The Simpsons

Artifacts from another time – when NASA actually flew rockets into space. In the 1990’s NASA lawyers made them wire the rockets to the ground so that they couldn’t fly and maybe hurt someone. Also, NASA HR has made fart jokes grounds for termination.

When I was a young Wilder, I was in awe of NASA. I was expecting that the moon landing was just a start for manned spaceflight. Successes like the Voyager probe were confirmation – NASA would be leading us into a great new era that would end up with a man on Mars. Spaceflight would be available (at least) to rich people. We’d have great cylindrical colonies up in space, and mining on asteroids would produce massive amounts of wealth. Solar power satellites would beam power via microwave down to receiving dishes and eliminate energy shortages on Earth. And probably some birds.

Ahh, the future. Now back off to the Moon mines honey! Go deal with hard radiation for a week. Then we’ll have Swiss steak! (Source – NASA Ames)

The Space Shuttle was a hopeful idea. Built on the idea of being reusable, shuttles were going to revolutionize space travel. We’d shoot one up every week or two, and the cost would be less than $700 (today’s dollars) per pound. That was the idea, anyway.

Over the course of the 135 total missions it cost about $27,000 per pound. Each mission cost about $1.5 billion. And NASA would send up a Space Shuttle to launch a communications satellite. Yes. Every time we wanted to launch something, we’d put 25% of our space launch ability along with seven astronauts on the line. The shuttle was further crippled by added weight, which limited the orbits it could reach.

In 2007, NASA estimated they could have flown Saturn V (the same rocket that went to the Moon) missions six times a year, with two trips to the Moon, each year for the same price as the shuttle. With the amount of payload that the Saturn V could have sent up, our space infrastructure and time in space would have been significantly higher than with the Space Shuttle. We’d have been on Mars. Actual people.

Yeah. NASA essentially burned our future in space on a crappy space truck. But it’s gotten worse.

The current NASA rocket program, the Space Launch System, has consumed $11.5 billion dollars over seven years. And produced no rocket.

Pictured: Actual rocket. Not pictured: NASA rocket. Because there isn’t one. (Source: SpaceX)

Elon Musk spent $500 million on the Falcon Heavy to develop it, and launch costs are $90 million to $150 million per launch, and it has a greater capacity than any rocket on Earth right now. And a greater capacity than the Space Launch System will ever have. Musk’s only competition is Jeff Bezos, who has a LOT of money and the same ideas.

In perhaps the biggest NASA troll ever, Musk sent his car into space. With a Matchbox® car of his car glued to the dash. Playing David Bowie. With a spacesuit in the car. NASA? Unable to launch bottle rockets – probably because of all of the procedures required to launch one.

How can Musk do this when NASA cannot? Several reasons:

NASA is observably stupid. It started spending money on a launch pad for a cancelled rocket. It spent $200+ million dollars. Then it decided to change the pad for the Space Launch System. As of now, NASA has spent $300 million more. It anticipates spending another $400 million. But the launch pad leans. And it might only be used . . . once. Don’t believe me? Here’s a LINK.

Yes, this is a billion dollars. Oh, the alternative? Yeah, build a complete new one for a couple hundred million. (Source: NASA)

NASA is a jobs program. There are many fine scientists at NASA. Not sure NASA needs any scientists – NASA needs engineers to build rockets and rovers. I’m sure there are plenty of universities that NASA can go to if they need scientists. But let’s pretend that NASA needs a scientist or two. Does NASA need to make braille books for blind kids about eclipses? No, but they did. (LINK) Does NASA need a writer to write about how NASA helped make the statuettes that they give out at the Oscars® shiny? (LINK) They did.
NASA has been given no fixed mission. In the 1960’s, the idea was we’ll get men to the moon by the end of the decade. And they did. The entire world watched while young (less than 40 years old, most of them) men (almost overwhelmingly) conquered the moon. What’s the mission now? To watch while Elon Musk and eventually Jeff Bezos do more than NASA ever could? How demoralized must the government workers be watching future Bond® villains take over space?
Related to the above – NASA has no consistency. Rocket programs start/stop based on the political climate of the day. Bush proposes a rocket, Obama deletes the rocket and proposes another rocket. Manned spaceflight should take second place to unmanned probes. Unmanned probes should take second place to manned spaceflight. It’s like trying to negotiate between Mom and Dad when they don’t even speak the same language.

So, the solution?

Make Elon Musk NASA Emperor For Life®. Give him the money. If we gave Musk the money, we’d be on Mars in five years. We’d have a base on it in seven years. In twenty years, there would be a million Americans living on Mars. We’d start turning the atmosphere into something we could breathe. We’d make the place homey. Maybe in a several hundred years. Maybe a thousand.

Don’t get me wrong. Living on Mars is hard. It’s tougher than living on the top of Mount Everest. It’s tougher than living at the South Pole. But it’s worth doing. Why?

Intelligent life may be very rare in the Universe – it might even be rarer than intelligent life at NASA. The one thing we owe to our posterity is that they be given a chance to live. And even though planets appear to be fairly common in the Galaxy, there’s no real sign of intelligent life around here besides us. This previous week, we saw the nearest planet to our Solar system get torched by a solar flare that we could see from Earth (with huge telescopes). This happened four years ago. If anything was living there before, it was nuked, microwaved, and fried. Colonel Sanders could only sell Kentucky Fried Alien® there, since there certainly aren’t any living ones.

And for how much time of the existence of the Earth have we had intelligent life. 20,000 years? 100,000 years? If you generously (how could intelligent life exist without beer?) assume 200,000 years, only for 0.004% of the life of the Earth have we had intelligent life. And how long has that life been observable? 0.000002%.

When we look at the threats that mankind realistically faces, putting ourselves on Mars should be the ultimate, number one goal of the human race. We face economic disruption (LINK), we face the potential for artificial intelligence being a really tough child (LINK), big asteroids (LINK), super volcanos (LINK), and diseases and other stuff (like reality television) that could wipe us out.

The alternative are space habitats. The LaGrange points (which have nothing to do with ZZ Top®) are relatively stable orbits that math provides around the Earth-Moon system. In the diagram below, you can see that LaGrange 1, 2, and 3 are stable, but tiny places. LaGrange 4 (L4) and LaGrange 5 (L5) are awesome places because they are large – you could put a lot of stuff there and not worry about bumping into each other. And you can stay in those areas for millions of years without expending any fuel.

Here are the LaGrange points, courtesy NASA and ZZ Top®.

The L5 (or L4) colonies are perhaps tougher than Mars. Or not. Manufacturing these habitats would be difficult – you’d have to set up an entire manufacturing complex on the Moon (likely) and pull some choice asteroids into L4 or L5 orbit for raw materials. It’s certain that this work would cost billions and take decades for the larger colonies that would host millions of people. On the plus side? There’s already a song built for the colonies:

Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man’s greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

-Home on LaGrange (The L5 Song)
© 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm, via Wikipedia

Here’s a NASA depiction of a space colony at the L5 point. Only NASA would create a colony where you’d have to build a bridge. (Source, NASA Ames)

I really love humanity. I want it to live on until the Universe can no longer support life. I’d like to think that in 2 trillion years that young Wilders (whatever they look like) are out viewing the birth of a new black hole, or watching the latest episode of The Simpsons. Why? All of the Universe, all of creation is meaningless unless we have someone there to watch it in joy and wonder. And to make fart jokes.

Washington: Musk, Patton, and Jack Daniels all Rolled into . . . the ONE

“I, George Washington, born in 1492, freer of the slaves, and the first president of this, our country, though savagely impeached for the shooting of Abe Lincoln, I will lead us into the demise of all humans!” – Home Movies

General George Washington, 1776, when he was about 44 years old. 44 years old, a billionaire, a war hero from the French and Indian War, and now commanding a rebel group fighting the largest superpower in the world. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why all that stuff is named for him?

There is a time for fighting valiantly and dieting. Then there exists the Thanksgiving/Christmas nexus. I’ve been generally trying to minimize the carb content of what I eat, but Thanksgiving? Yeah, I’m having pumpkin pie. And stuffing. And mashed potatoes. And might drink a bit of gravy. Just a quart or two. Not from the gravy boat – I have standards. I have standards . . . and a mug. A great gravy mug.

Yes, I have willpower, but Thanksgiving and Christmas are more difficult times to stick to diets. So, I don’t. And I don’t spend a lot of time feeling guilty about it, but it’s also a good time to reflect that eating different things changes my mood.

If I’ve had enough potatoes to feed the Soviet Army, I know that I’ll feel differently both physically and mentally. Sugar is similar. Ditto with bread.

So, how do I feel different physically? For me, when I eat carbs I tend to retain a LOT more water. It’s my theory that it’s used to think out my blood so it flows better than maple syrup. When I jump back into the low carb regimen, I know that for the first few days I will dump water faster than the democrats dumped Al Franken.

I’m pretty sure that the extra water does NOT do anything really good for me.

How do I feel different mentally? Again, for me the low carb (very low, like none) zaps me into a state of clarity and stability. Stuff just doesn’t bother me as much. And I seem to get better sleep.

But one thing that’s wonderful about the Holidays is . . . George Washington.

George was really tall for his time and place, and strong enough that he could crush walnuts in his bare hand. British walnuts. And he was known to party (from teachingamericanhistory.org):

First Troop Philadelphia City
Cavalry Archives, 1774

City Tavern
George Washington
Entertainment of

15 Sept., 1787

Light Troop of Horse, September the 14th 1787

	To Edwd Moyston .. Dr.
To 55 Gentlemans Dinners & Fruit
—	Rellishes, Olives etc………………………………………..	20	12	6
—	54 Bottles of Madera……………………………………….	20	5
—	60 of Claret ditto……………………………………………	21
—	8 ditto of Old Stock…………………………………………	3	6	8
—	22 Bottles of Porter ditto………………………………….	2	15
—	8 of Cyder ditto……………………………………………..	16
—	12 ditto Beer…………………………………………………	12
—	7 Large Bowels of Punch………………………………….	4	4
—	Segars Spermacity candles etc………………………….	2	5
To Decantors Wine Glass [e]s & Tumblers Broken etc..		1	2	6
To 16 Servants and Musicians Dinners……………………		2
—	16 Bottles of Claret…………………………………………	5	12
—	5 ditto Madera……………………………………………….	1	17	6
—	7 Bouls of Punch…………………………………………….	2	16
		£89	4	2

If you study the above, you’ll see that George Washington and 54 of his best buddies had 114 bottles of wine, plus cider, beer, and 8 bottles of hard alcohol. I’m thinking our Founding Fathers were knee-walking drunk at this point – you can see that they got well into the “smashing the bottles and glasses” part of the party. And it was the equivalent of something between $15,000 and $20,000 that he spent on the party.

George liked to party.

And he liked to party at Christmas, which brings us to eggnog.

Now, I must tell you that I really, really hate eggnog. Hate it with a passion.

Or I did, until I had George’s eggnog. And it just so happens I’ll share his recipe with you (this will be the 306,001^st place on the Internet that you can get it):

“One quart ye cream, one quart of ye milk, one dozen tablespoons of ye sugar, one pint of ye brandy, ½ pint of ye rye whiskey, ½ pint of ye Jamaica rum, ¼ pint of ye sherry—mix liquor first, then separate yolks and whites of 12 eggs, add sugar to beaten yolks, mix well. Add milk and cream, slowly beating. Beat whites of eggs until stiff and fold slowly into mixture. Let set in cool place for several days. Taste frequently.”

And it’s amazing. It tastes just like Christmas. And George was right – making this stuff and drinking it on day one is NOT advised. It tastes . . . strong. But after three days in the fridge? Amazingly smooth.

So, not only was George a billionaire president general that defeated the world’s largest and best trained armed forces? He knew how to party.

Here’s to you, George!

Seneca, Stoics, Money and You

“My heart attack didn’t kill me, so why act like it did? See, Tim, it was the Roman philosopher Seneca who said “if we let things terrify us, then life is not worth living.” – Home Improvement

Seneca could definitely use a makeover, but would probably be the last person who cares about a makeover, since he’s willing to be dead and made of marble.

Source- I, Calidius CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What is stoicism, and why does it matter for your money?

From Wikipedia’s definition of Stoicism . . . “the path to happiness for humans is found in accepting this moment as it presents itself, by not allowing ourselves to be controlled by our desire for pleasure or our fear of pain, by using our minds to understand the world around us and to do our part in nature’s plan, and by working together and treating others in a fair and just manner.”

What on Earth does that have to do with money?

Everything.

Let me explain . . . with a story I’ve used before:

When I was young, we had a subscription to Reader’s Digest (which, really, might have been influenced by the CIA for a time – google it). For those that haven’t heard about it, it’s where they take articles (and even books!) and edit out the boring bits and republish them. It’s like someone printed a tiny bit of the Internet.

Pop Wilder always said, “I can read my own articles and decide what’s important.”

And yet? I always found an issue of Reader’s Digest in the bathroom that only he and I used, and I know that I wasn’t carting them in there.

But in Reader’s Digest they had features as well as the articles, one of which was “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” In it were nice, clean stories that were, well, funny. Some of them were even taken from real life. My favorite was about a five year old girl and her eight year old brother.

They were playing in the backyard (which kids used to do prior to the Internet). The boy was holding a tin can on top of the little girl’s head and smacking it with a rock.

Mother: “Tommy, what ARE you doing????”

Little Girl: “Mommy, it’s okay. He’s almost done.”

I keep coming back to that image. It’s like life.

Sometimes the problems we go through are pointless. Sometimes they are downright silly. Life keeps smacking a rock into the top of your head. And when it stops, you feel so good.

Another example:

A friend of mine went through Army Ranger School (a long time ago). There were two out of their class that passed. Two. The other guy was a chaplain. The last ordeal had been an extended duration hike with little food. They had survived. They had made it back to base. But . . . it was five hours until they would be released from training, and couldn’t go to mess hall (cafeteria) to eat.

They climbed into a dumpster. They found Doritos® covered with ants. They brushed the ants off and ate the Doritos™.

His thoughts? “Best Doritos© I’ve ever eaten in my life.”

And this relates back to money, too.

Seneca was a Roman. I use the word “was” because he’s dead. Nero ordered Seneca to kill himself (spoiler, Seneca totally did kill himself) back in moldy old 65 A.D. (Not “Common Era” but good old Anno Domini).

Seneca was rich. How rich? Rich enough that he could have purchased six hundred million loaves of bread. And that didn’t count his real estate, which included at least six Sonic® drive-ins and three strip malls in Omaha.

I’m not even sure where I would put six hundred million loaves of bread. Certainly my pantry would fill up after 2 million or so. But outside of bread (food), the man had a lot of bread (money). And thought a LOT about it.

Seneca: “He is a great man who uses clay dishes as if they were silver; but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were clay.”

In the end, a dish is a dish, and as long as it comes out of the dishwasher without last night’s Kraft® Garfield® Macaroni and Cheese, well, deal with it.

And a car is a car. I went to a stand-up comedian one night with a friend, his wife, and a blind date. (Yes, this is you, Chris – the friend, not the blind date). The comedian was making a joke about cars. The reason, he thought, that we had so many traffic fatalities was that we didn’t make cars out of Nerf® stuff.

He looked, from the stage, down at me.

“You sir, you look like you drive a big-ass truck.”

Me: “No, it’s a Toyota® Tercel™.”

Him, loudly into a microphone with everyone in the room listening: “Well, you must be the world’s BIGGEST pussy.”

Needless to say, the blind date ended right there since I didn’t go and beat him up. And, yes, I probably should have answered “yes” when he asked if I drove a truck. But . . . like Seneca, a car to me is . . . just a car. The first virtue of a thing is in its utility. Does it do the job? Sometimes duct tape is the proper solution.

From the standpoint of a Stoic, even a wickedly rich one like Seneca, taking pride in personal possessions was to be looked down upon. And, yes, his wife had earrings that cost more than a house. And he had solid silver nose hair trimmers. And we know this because he wrote about them. But, did he care? I don’t think so. He bought the stuff because he could, not because the stuff had power over him. I’m certain that he understood that he didn’t own the “stuff” but just had it until he died, so it had no power over him.

But we let stuff have power over us. Does the neighbor have a nicer car? Do they have a better stereo? It’s normal, natural to envy that. It’s totes Stoic if you go, “good for you!” and not want to go and buy an even better car because you’re good with the one you have.

When I was in Houston I would be stopped at a traffic light, surrounded by cars much nicer than my 2006 Ford® Taurusdadcar™. And I would wonder how many of them owned their car. And I wonder how much heartache was caused by that REALLY BADASS Mercedes® next to me when monthly payment time came around. And, truthfully? If it was being driven during work hours by a girl, I wondered how long she’d be with her husband after the money ran out.

So, for me? Being Stoic about the stuff I own is a sanity preserver. If I had to worry that The Mrs. would leave me if I didn’t have an awesome car, or, honestly, cared at all about what my neighbors thought, life would have a stress it doesn’t need at all.

But Seneca went further. He said, get rich all you want, but don’t do it in a way that’s “stained by blood.” My interpretation? You got you money honestly, without forcing it out of other people.

How does this play out? Well, let’s look at . . . Obama phones. Regardless of how you feel about them, the money that comes to purchase them, and to provide monthly service is forcefully taken from others. Don’t think that it’s forceful? Try not paying your taxes and then you’ll learn that the IRS is not your benevolent aunt who bakes cookies. Unless your aunt works for the IRS. In which case, please tell me the rule on deductibility of capital losses from a prior year against current year capital gains. Just kidding, I use TurboTax®, which is probably nicer to me than your aunt.

I digress. But I think Seneca would think it was wrong to take money from one person (me) without their consent to give to another (Obama phone users) and taking a cut in the middle. It’s wrong. Unfortunately, it’s our government’s current business model (LINK) and Elon Musk’s (LINK).

Last? Seneca thought you should be generous. Bill Gates is certainly living up to that, shooting money out like a lawn sprinkler at causes he likes. And I tip well at the restaurant.

But the biggest danger of generosity? It has to be moral. Give a man money and he will take it. But he will resent you, because you didn’t give him more.

Let a man (or, I guess we let women earn money nowadays, and even own property and vote) earn money? That will provide both support for him (or her or it, whatever the cool kids say nowadays) and self-worth. So, generosity is good. Charity is corrosive.

The really cool thing about being a stoic is realizing the beauty you can find in the weird, small bits of life that you often ignore. The smoothness of a straw. The stark sharpness of the edges of the clouds on a crisp winter night. The wear marks on a keyboard you’ve typed a million words on. The ability to take satisfaction out of nearly every experience you have is there.

If you let it. And if Tommy will stop pounding the tin can on the top of your head with a rock for a moment.

Stock Bubbles, Tulips, and Toilet Paper

“There’s only two things I hate in this world: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.” – Austin Powers in Goldmember

Read this blog or this man will shoot that car.

People can be stupid.

People in groups are almost always stupid, and they can remain stupid until they do quite a lot of damage.

Let’s take a trip off to Europe (unless you already live in Europe) and back in time to 1636 A.D. (unless you already live in 1636 A.D.) and review the price of . . . flowers???

The Dutch (at least I think that’s what they call the people from the Netherlands, but you can call them Sven or Maria or whatever suits you) in 1636 were a seafaring bunch, who made money trading all over the world and had colonies in North America, South America, South Africa, India and all those islands between Asia and Australia. One thing that a Dutch guy brought back (and I don’t think this one was lost) in addition to the most efficient way to remove hair and lint from your bellybutton was the tulip.

In a parallel development, the Dutch were big on trading stocks in companies, like the Dutch East India Company, or in commodities like sugar or pancake mix. The markets were sophisticated. In 1632, you could buy sugar for delivery in 1633. This was nice if you wanted to guarantee your sweet tooth, but you could also trade that contract to somebody else for a higher price if they decided they needed the sugar to make PEZ® or Fruit Pies. Nowadays we call those “futures” contracts. Yup, the Dutch were doing this 400 years ago.

But a slight change in laws made those contracts different. The buyer could buy the right to buy sugar. The seller had to fulfill the contract, but the buyer had no obligation to buy it. It was his or her (yup, plenty of Dutch female speculators) option to buy the sugar. This is what is now known as “futures options.” And you could buy them on . . . anything.

Even tulips.

In November of 1636 something must have broken in the minds of a batch of silly dead (now, not then) Dutchmen and women. They started bidding up the futures options contracts on . . . tulips. And various colors and varieties became more valuable, especially one that that had a virus that changed and made a tiger-striped pattern. They looked awesome. But one tulip bulb went for the same price as ten years’ worth of a typical laborer’s wages. That’s $250,000 or $300,000 today. For a tulip bulb.

There appears to be little record of people going broke in big numbers when the bubble burst, but certainly there were some people who came out a bit poorer, and the entire reputation of traders was ruined. Not that it was that great in the beginning, but Jan Brueghel the Younger painted the fine painting below, Satire on Tulip Mania, depicting the traders as monkeys. If you look closely you can see the nifty tiger-striped tulip in the left corner. Myself? I’d pay much more for a monkey that traded futures options contracts, even if he did a lousy job.

Yes, it’s public domain, being nearly 400 years old, unless Disney® wants to try to make a movie about it….

This was the first recorded financial insanity of this type, and it was fairly benign.

What other manias occurred during history? Well, lots. But researching them all would take quite a lot of work, and far more wine than I have in the house right now. So, let’s just look at the ones that I want to talk about:

Salem Witch Trials – 1692 to 1693. Twenty people executed when a bunch of kids played a prank. Or there were real witches. This is still a bubble, but it was just teen angst magnified a zillion times. Fortunately, they had awesome wood floors, like in the picture below. Are those oak? I’m so jealous!

The South Sea Bubble – in 1720, the price of shares in the British South Sea Corporation went from £100 to £1,000 (the £ is the funny symbol that British people use for money). Sounds like a great deal, right? Well, the records seem to indicate that the South Sea Corporation spent most of their time issuing stock and very little time on actually, you know, making money. So why did so many people (including Isaac Newton himself) shove all of their spare £ into a company that just made stock? Isaac Newton is reported to have said: “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.” Apparently Newton couldn’t manage £1,000-£100=£ Below is a public domain picture by dead artist Godfrey Kneller of Isaac Newton when he was in his “looking like the guitarist from Queen” phase.

Radium – 1920’s to late 1930’s. Everything had radium in it or was named after radium. Drinking water. Watches with glow in the dark faces. My college mathematics classroom (yeah, after I took Calculus I, Calc II, Calc III and Differential Equations in the same room? Enough radioactivity to power all of North Korea and a lot of corpses that are technically nuclear waste. I have a straight razor case from the era. You guessed it: “Radium Straight Razor Company.”
1920’s Stock Bubble – The classic. Fueled by post World War I enthusiasm and the rise of new technology (radio, the automobile, phones, and PEZ®) people went . . . insane. Everybody was investing in the stock market, including a shoeshine boy, who famously gave Joe Kennedy (father of President John F. Kennedy) a stock tip. Kennedy then decided if shoe shine boys were involved in the stock market, too many people were in the stock market. He then proceeded to smuggle a bunch of liquor and manipulate a senator or two, then lunch.
Hula Hoops™ – Watch The Hudsucker Proxy to see exactly how this was invented. Okay, I kid. But the Hula Hoop® hit when Hawaii was just becoming a state, and there was a large mania about the place, even though it had been a part of the US for nearly a century. 100 million were sold within two years, despite the US population being only 180 million at the time. Sales fell off when people were finally told that there wasn’t a limit on the number of times a hoop could be hooped prior to it wearing out.
Johnny Carson’s Toilet Paper Run – in 1973, Johnny Carson (a late night television host back when there were only three channels and who was very popular) noted that there was a toilet paper shortage, but was referencing commercial grade toilet paper. He used that to make a few jokes. (Toilet paper is just plain funny). People took him seriously, and pretty soon there were shortages and rationing of consumer grade TP in several cities. Shortly after the commotion, Carson told his audience he was joking. People in the US could again poop without fear.
Pet Rocks® – A rock. As a pet. For money. Broke sales records, until people figured out that they’d paid $3.95 (plus tax) for a rock.
Cabbage Patch Kids© – A really ugly doll, but middle-aged women jumped out in droves to fight each other in a series of battles that would have made the gladiators of the Colosseum in Rome proud, if they had been middle-aged women with purses the size of four year old children fighting each other for dolls in the aisles of K-Mart®, Montgomery Ward™ and Sears©.
Beanie Babies™ – A really cute doll that spiked in popularity in the late 1990’s. The creator of the company decided to make special “limited runs” of a cheap, plush doll that looks like a dog’s chew toy. Middle-aged women fought each other in the aisles for these as well, but it was the 1990’s so they all had greasy ham-hair like Kurt Cobain. After a brief spike of popularity, most Beanie Babies are worth . . . dog chew-toy value. There are a very few that might be worth some change, but don’t hold your breath.
Dotcom Bubble – The thing I wrote about Beanie Babies™ above? Just replace “Beanie Babies®” with “stocks” and “Middle-aged women” with “greedy but stupid baby boomers.”
Tasers© – At one point in 2004, Taser™ the company would have had to sell three Tasers® to every person in the United States to make the profit the stock $150 stock price implied. We didn’t buy the Tasers®, and neither did you, so you can buy the stock for $20 or so.
Housing Bubble –House prices never go down. It’s a fact! Except when it’s not and imperils the entire economy of the world.
Tesla® – I’m not saying it’s a bubble (LINK), but it’s a bubble. Tesla© is not worth more than Ford™.

Most of the bubbles or manias I’ve listed above share a similar pattern –

Start – The guy started making Beanie Babies®. They only sold a few.
Spark – A reviewer mention in an article that some are “valuable” and “rare”.
Information Spread – Engage middle-age lady network.
Publicity – News stories show up in newspapers, television.
Mania – Nobody wants to be left behind, so everybody buys all the Beanie Babies®.
Market Collapse – Somebody writes an article questioning paying $10,381 for a dog chew toy. “Bubbles burst when fools run out of money.”
Regret – Closets of Beanie Babies© sit in closets, since one day they’ll be valuable.
Next Mania – Well, maybe next time I’ll be in first and make all the money…

And financial markets work exactly the same way, but with less dog chew toys. People want to seek a return on their money, and when there’s enough money just lying around, stupid investments get made. And some of those investments pay off in a huge way, especially for those that got out early. The Dotcom crash? Plenty of people sold as it was on its way up, and made huge amounts of money. The housing crash? One guy predicted it and put in place investments so that he made hundreds of millions off of the crash.

But sometimes what looks like a bubble . . . isn’t a bubble. It’s a trend, and a real trend based on sound, rational economics. The guy who was sure that the smart phone was a fad (me), the guy who thought that credit cards would never catch on with a rational public (my dad), and the guy who thought that Europe would be plunged into a horrific war (my great, great grandfather). Oh, wait, the last guy was right.

And sometimes there are bubbles, and sometimes there are trends. One person working to figure out the difference is a geophysicist named Didier Sornette, who has an amazing Wikipedia page (LINK), and looked at the mathematics that surrounded earthquakes and compared it to stocks or other financial assets in a bubble. Turns out that the bubble was analogous to a really stressed mass of rock. He made some predictions after the Dotcom bubble, and was right enough that he got hired to just study financial crises in Zurich (LINK). Tough duty.

When you think a deal is too good to be true, or you see a group of people jumping on a bandwagon, think twice (cough Tesla® cough). You want to avoid the Hula Hoop® Witches™ without Toilet Paper.

This blog is NOT stock advice, I don’t own any positions in anything mentioned, and don’t plan on any for the next month or so.

The Future of Employment, or, Almost All of Government is a Jobs Program

All right, listen closely.Â I was at the unemployment office and I told them I was very close to getting a job with Vandelay Industries, and I gave them your phone number.Â So now, when the phone rings you have to answer “Vandelay Industries.â€ â€“ Seinfeld

Notice it doesnâ€™t say Texas Pain RELIEF Institute?

What are we going to do with everyone?

Iâ€™ve been (throughout my life) a proponent of the human race.Â I like it.Â I may not like certain individuals, but Iâ€™ve got a great degree of hope when it comes down to humanity.Â And up to now, the equation has been that more people equals more Einsteins, more Isaac Newtons, more Nikola Teslas, and more Stephen Hawkings.Â These are shining examples of humanity â€“ folks who helped the human race achieve much more than we would have or could have without their knowledge.Â I read an article recently (I am not making this up) about rising obesity rates in Ghana due to KFCÂ® becoming the restaurant of status and choice.Â And we know how much Einstein contributed to the secret government project that led to KFCâ„¢â€™s fried, greasy goodness.

There are seven billion of us, and 2.1 billion have the problem of being obese or overweight.Â Less than 800 million are suffering from hunger or malnutrition.Â This is a victory of the greatest magnitude.Â Yes, obesity is bad, but I would much rather have people having heart attacks in their fifties after having a tasty chicken wing versus starvation at fifteen.Â Everyone who has that choice would make the same choice, and raise their greasy hands up if asked.

In general, the world is getting better as we as a society create more wealth, as I talked about in previous posts (LINK).Â But Iâ€™m really concerned as I look forward with simple questions:

How much does the future need us for continued prosperity?Â How many people do we really need?Â How many can be actively employed in productive work?

There are various reasons that Iâ€™m wondering:Â Increasing Productivity, AI, Smart Machines, Robots to name a few, though there are other issues as well that weâ€™ll skip today.

Iâ€™ve written before that trucking is a sure bet for replacement once self-driving trucks are approved by the Department of Transportation and the various states and a self-driving unit costs less than (about) $400,000 per unit.Â After those conditions are met, at least a million jobs (and likely more) will be gone as fast as the autonomous trucks can be produced.Â But itâ€™s not just truckers.Â It will be fast food workers.Â It will be janitors.Â It will be an increasing number of lower and mid-skilled jobs throughout industry.Â If it can be described by an algorithm or computer program, it will be automated.Â A large number of sports articles and financial news articles are now produced with no human intervention.Â Journalists would worry, if there were enough of them left to worry.

And jobs that arenâ€™t eliminated will be minimized.Â An example:Â a structural engineer nowadays runs calculations for a new bridge or skyscraper through a computer program that analyzes the stresses in the structure and optimizes the design for code and seismic conditions.Â It then chooses the beams and columns and other structural members based on tens of thousands of calculations and three dimensional finite element analysis, and then pops out design drawings. Sproink.Â (Thatâ€™s the noise the drawings make when they come out of the machine.)

Fewer engineers are required, and the engineers donâ€™t need to be as proficient since the engineering knowledge is built into the program.Â Both the number of people and the quality of people goes down.

Another example:Â I just bought (for $30) a device the will give me the data I need to order glasses online.Â No prescription, no optometrist, no waiting.Â Also, no glaucoma check, but I donâ€™t have to take off time from work to visit the doctor.Â And the glasses I ordered online cost less than I would pay, even at Wal-MartÂ®.Â I may describe it in Fridayâ€™s blog.

Another example:Â I had a cold that I was pretty worried was heading into my lungs and I was worried that Iâ€™d get pneumonia.Â Â For $60 I got online from my basement (where I was in a cold sweat despite my 101ËšF, got antibiotics, and got better.Â Otherwise?Â A $120 doctor visit where my copay would have been at least $100.Â Yes, a real doctor was involved in the visit, but it was incredibly efficient for them â€“ Iâ€™d imagine they make $300 an hour.Â No office, no actual contact with icky sick people.Â It was a great transaction for both of us.

But . . . it means we need fewer Doctors.Â And fewer waiting rooms.Â And fewer nurses.Â Et cetera.

Efficiency is awesome.Â It lowers costs, and does that while quality is increased, in most cases.

When economists study inflation, they study the price of the item.Â I have a color TV in my house.Â When my dad bought his first color TV, he spent (on an inflation adjusted basis) over $3,000 in todayâ€™s dollars.Â With that kind of money today?Â You could buy a 75â€ SonyÂ® Ultra HD that also has a popcorn maker and margarita blender built in.Â So, economists measure how much better a thing has gotten as well as what the thing costs.Â They call this measurement â€œhedonicsâ€ because itâ€™s way more confusing than â€œmeasuring how stuff got better.â€

So, we live in a world where getting sufficient food to eat is easier than at any point in history.Â We also live in a world where getting information is easier than at any time?Â Want to listen to a song?Â Unless itâ€™s the Beatlesâ„¢, itâ€™s pretty much on YouTubeÂ®. Â And we can make more things, better, faster and cheaper, than at any time in history.

But why hasnâ€™t efficiency hit, oh, say the Department of Motor Vehicles?Â Or the local County office where I go to get license plates?Â At both places, you have to stand in line.Â At both places, hours are limited, and youâ€™d better get done before quitting time, because theyâ€™re serious about closing up at 4:30pm.

In a typical business, the best parking spaces are reserved for the customers.Â In government?Â The best parking places are reserved for the employees.Â And I think government is giving us a hint:Â the most important consumers of government are its employees.Â You and I are the product.

And why, in a world where I can apply for $100,000 credit at midnight can I only get my driverâ€™s license between 9AM and 4:15PM (closed for lunch hour)?Â Why is it harder each year to deal with government?Â Why do their budgets keep going up, faster than inflation?

Because nothing the government does is intended to help you, the consumer.Â The bright folks that are hired to make wonder weapons?Â Jobs program.Â We do NOT want people that smart on the street.Â The people who work for NASAÂ®?Â Jobs program.Â They donâ€™t even have to make rockets anymore, and Elon Musk has clearly shown that if he had NASAâ€™s budget heâ€™d be building Burger KingsÂ® on Mars, because heâ€™s have a million people living there in the next decade.Â NASA spent money putting together braille books on the solar eclipse in August.Â That might explain why we have to piggy back a ride with the Russians to get to the International Space Station.Â NASA is a jobs program.Â Originally it had a job to get people to the moon.Â Now?Â It produces new classes of astronauts with no vehicle to fly.Â Thankfully they have a budget for cardboard boxes to sit inside and make rocket noises.Â Thereâ€™s even a budget for markers to write â€œROKETâ€ and â€œUSAâ€ on the side of the boxes!

The Department of Education, which has taught no classes?Â Jobs program.Â The Department of Energy, which has never produced a Watt?Â Jobs program.Â The military?Â Parts of it are a jobs program, but most if it is real.Â But you better pay attention to what congressional district and state the new weapons will be built in . . .

Your liberal-arts college professor?Â Given a job so that they wouldnâ€™t agitate for revolution in the streets, rather, they can agitate for revolution to rich kids who would much rather play PlaystationÂ® and X-BoxÂ©.

Ever wonder why they rip up a section of street that looks pretty good, and then work it for months?Â Yup.Â Jobs program.Â Not to say that the original Interstate Highway System wasnâ€™t real.Â It was.Â But now what do we build?Â What infrastructure is left?Â Dams are awesome for hydroelectric power, but just try to build one nowadays . . . itâ€™s easier to declare war on Ghana.

It really took me by surprises that this was the case â€“ that most government spending is based on the concept of giving people money so that they donâ€™t riot in the streets (dumb people) or so they wonâ€™t plot and plan a revolution (liberal arts professors) or build wonder-weapons in a James Bond worthy plot for foreign governments (government scientists)?

Why is government inefficient?Â Itâ€™s not.Â Itâ€™s a very efficient jobs machine.Â Youâ€™re just the product, not the consumer.

But what about the jobs that are already out there?Â A recent study says that the average worker works less than four hours a day.

Think of the creativity that creates!Â How to look busy for eight or nine hours a day when youâ€™re done working after four?Â And how long will a business stand for this?Â Eventually, in private business, all of the â€œfour hour a dayâ€ jobs will be eliminated â€“ the business has to pay taxes, remain competitive.

But government will respond.Â New regulations will be created and enforced that require new employees to compile data and report it to the government.Â This is done mainly so that the government has excuses to hire more employees, but has the side effect to requiring more private sector compliance workers.

I actually had a job once where, on my start date, my office wasnâ€™t yet ready.Â They told me . . . come back in two weeks from now.Â Did they pay me for the two weeks?Â Yes.Â And, who did this?Â Yup.Â It was a government job.Â And, although I saved them several million dollars, they were kinda disappointed.Â They wanted to spend their full budget.

But there will be in the next decade millions of people becoming unemployed as their jobs are minimized or eliminated due to clever business disruption, probably faster than the government can create jobs (hint: the government is broke (LINK)).Â Iâ€™d love to suggest a minimum basic income, but we canâ€™t pay for it.Â We canâ€™t even afford PEZÂ®.

What do we do?

There are millions of people in the United States right now that would love to work.Â And millions more in made-up jobs that produce nothing that would love to work in productive jobs.Â Around the world, this number is surely in the hundreds of millions.

And we need fewer of them every day.

How about . . . we let someone smart pay them to work on something really important . . . like going to Mars?

Paging Elon Musk . . . .

Unless someone else has a better idea?Â Raise your greasy hand and sing out!

Life on Earth, Supervolcanos, NASA, and Tom Petty

“I must have started drinking again, because the woman who tried to activate a supervolcano with a giant fork is standing here, and you’re all acting like it’s a potluck.” – Warehouse 13

A picture of Abraham Lincoln as he was fighting against both the Confederacy and German engineers.

“The world was a web.”

This wasn’t the quote from a Tom Petty song. These were words that would echo through my head for two decades.

I started to write a novel back a long time ago. It started with those words.

I still have it somewhere, buried in a backlog of data on one of my computers, right next to a resume that I first entered into a computer on . . . WordPerfect© (yes, that was a word processor before Corel® ate it). I’m sure they still sell dozens of copies of it a year.

And the novel itself? Oh my. I’m sure that if it ever saw the light of day someone would name an award in its honor for the worst novel of the year.

But . . . “The world was a web.”

There are words that haunt you through your life, and this sentence haunts mine, just like wondering how it felt while the Roman Empire was ending (LINK). I have been, since as long as I can remember, really fascinated by the unravelling of society. Once I went to the Wikipedia entry for “Apocalyptic Novels” and just nodded. I’d read nearly all of them. (I just revisited the page, and it’s all filled with editorial stuff, so, much less useful. I won’t link it.)

But the late author James P. Hogan (I read most of his stuff) wrote a novel called “Voyage to Yesteryear.” It’s a good one, though out of print, but to me, it had a fairly stunning philosophical analogy.

We as humans think a lot (and live with) more or less reversible processes. I put ice in the freezer, it freezes. And then it melts. Though once upon a time, I don’t think that there was anything at all in physics that would have predicted that the ice would have floated on the water (most frozen liquids sink – if you freeze gasoline, the frozen stuff drops to the bottom), but it turns out it’s pretty important, especially if you’re a fish. You can stay in the nice liquid water while the ice freezes above you, which, I imagine is important to a fish.

But the second discussion from the novel is that some changes are irreversible – if you burn your laptop in your charcoal grill, there is simply no thawing it out afterwards to get your keyboard to not look like a bunch of charred Doritos®, or get back all of those downloaded pictures of Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones® or all of your Tom Petty MP3s. Those are gone, dude.

The fire (presumably from a dragon?) goes beyond the phase change represented by freezing and thawing. The physical structure has been changed to the point that it’s not remotely recognizable. And you can’t go back. There’s no way to find all the carbon atoms that baked off your display and combined with oxygen and put them back in the screen, let alone the same place in the screen that previously held them.

It’s gone, dude. And even the Roman Stoics (LINK) knew this prior to Rudolf Clausius coining the term “entropy,” which led indirectly to the U.S. Civil War through a series of humorous translation errors that made Abraham Lincoln think that Clausius was making fun of his big hat.

But let’s go back four score years (that’s 80 years, for those who are used to the metric system) from that hatastrophe. What happened then? Besides Ben Franklin being in the prime of chasing every young lady who could spell “yes” there seemed to be this revolutionary event. Pardon. Revolutionary event. Like the American Revolution.

If a president being elected every four years is a phase change from ice to water and back again, the American Revolution was burning King George’s laptop and then going after the glowing hard drive with a sledgehammer. In a real and literal fashion there was no way to go back. Instead of a political phase change, you had political chemical reaction – there was simply no way to go back from what the Founding Fathers had done. They changed the way the entire world viewed government with the result that today almost every nation in the world where you can order a Big Mac® has emulated to the greatest extent possible the precepts of the American Revolution. McDonalds® and Thomas Jefferson© changed it all.

And you just can’t go back. You can morph into something different, but you can’t go back. There are some ideas that are so radical, so amazingly simple that once they pop out – they hold the attention of almost everyone who hears them. The American Revolution was one such thing – you could never turn back after that.

Unless you hit reset. I was leafing through the Internet as The Boy piloted our car up the road for a short road trip – I alternated between reading and a light nap. The light naps were ended with (small) bursts of adrenaline when our cars trajectory was different than my half-snoozing mind expected. It’s like Dad radar. Even asleep I was looking for that change we could never recover from.

On article popped up during the ride about the Yellowstone Volcano, and how NASA was developing a plan to stop it.

Reread the sentence above. I’ll wait.

NASA has become convinced that a massive volcano is of greater threat to humanity than asteroids. I mean, both would ruin your day, but Yellowstone seems to pop off a continent cleansing burst every 600,000 years or so (last one 630,000 years ago) and some folks with a LOT of time on their hands at NASA are convinced that they should be the ones that handle it.

What NASA thinks might be in the volcano.

They’ve even advanced plans on how to stop it. And, I’ll admit that saving the lives of upwards of two billion people might even be considered a laudable goal in some circles. But not me.

It’s not the saving all of those people that I object to. I’m probably neutral on that, unless one of them is me. Then I become a raving supporter.

I don’t give NASA any slack. If it doesn’t involve activities that directly get humanity to Mars, I’m thinking that they should just close up shop and give the money to Elon Musk (LINK), who actually seems to be interested in space exploration.

But even worse, it appears that NASA is letting people write stuff that have NO understanding of math: the NASA plan involves pumping water (which is not exactly in huge supply in the Rocky Mountains) into the magma chamber and to extract the heat. Which has how much to do with NASA’s mission? Zero. Maybe less.

Here’s the latest mission I could find:

To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.

So, if this involves trying to cool hot coffee so you can drink it faster by adding an ice cube or two, I’m on board. Takes a few minutes, doesn’t distract NASA from their actual day job.

But in this case the coffee is 11,500 cubic miles of coffee. At 1300˚F to 2400˚F. And NASA wants to cool that. With water.

Okay, I’m pretty sure that drug testing isn’t required to work at NASA. But the amount of heat we’re talking about is simply staggering. At a depth of five miles (that’s 8km to the “people who use money that looks like Christmas paper, and also happen to use metric”) to the top of it, keep in mind that this magma pocket sends pockets of superheated boiling water five miles through rock. The amount of energy is stunning – almost as much energy as a D.C. NASA bureaucrat with a liberal arts degree uses to avoid doing work on a typical Tuesday.

First, the good news!

I won’t bore you with all the mathy stuff, since The Boy and I figured it out. It’s not hard, it’s just thermodynamics done in hotel room on three sheets of hotel room note paper.

Let’s say you had to cool the Yellowstone magma chamber. Latest number that I had on how big it was? 11,500 cubic miles.

Cubic miles. Drive from Seattle to Los Angeles. That’s 1137 miles. Do it 10 times. Next to a mile high wall of magma. Or just once. Next to a ten mile high wall of magma. That’s a mile thick.

Hmmm.

But, let’s pretend we can cool that 52,800 foot high wall with water. Where do we get it?

Well, the Colorado River is a big one. Let’s pump all of that to Yellowstone to cool it down. I’m not going to bore you with even more thermodynamics, but you have to heat the water, and then add even more heat so it boils. (I actually saw one billion dollar business venture implode because they didn’t know you had to add the extra heat to make it boil).

At the current flowrate of the Colorado River, it would take 435,843 years to cool the lava.

I know that NASA seems to not math very well anymore, but, given past rates, Yellowstone would have exploded at least one more time, if not two. And the people in Los Angeles would have to go nearly a half of a million years between bottled-water drinks.

And that’s the good news – that only half a million years of concerted effort beyond anything the world has ever seen will maybe stop one human extinction.

But some scientists worry that the addition of the cooling water might turn the magma chamber brittle – increasing the likelihood that Yellowstone would explode in a big catastrophe. And that’s the good news!

Second – the bad news.

But that’s really not the point. There are a whole host of things that are much more likely (given the last 100 years or so) than a 600,000 year periodicity (like Yellowstone has) volcano to mess with our world.

But most folks look at this risk incorrectly – there’s a probability of occurrence, but also a severity related to the risk. Low probability events occur everyday, but they have low severity. I might lose yet another hair on my head, never to return. But the impact? Not very big.

An asteroid the size of Dallas heading towards, well, anywhere at 50 miles per second? Bad day. For everyone. Yet heart disease is more likely to kill me than the kinetic impact of an asteroid.

As catastrophes go, that’s pretty bad. But research (dating back 15 years or so) on genetics of humanity indicate that it’s likely that 70,000 years ago after the supervolcano Toba lit off, only 2,000 humans remained. Not on Toba. Anywhere.

We were that close to the lights going out on us forever.

These big, nonlinear events are very low probability, but they have a huge impact, and may impact the ability of the human race to appreciate Tom Petty.

Think aliens like Tom Petty? They should. But who can account for taste?

Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars

“Actually, they theoretically can separate the hydrogen from the oxygen and process that into providing fuel for man’s space flights. Ostensibly, turning Mars into a giant gas station. So it’s a . . . yeah. We live in an amazing time.” – Breaking Bad

The featured picture above the title is of the Saturn V. It’s longer than a Harry Potter novel. This picture shows the engines from the main stage of the Saturn V. About 275,000 horsepower for all five engines, you can totally tell by the lens flare! But it got over two miles per gallon of kerosene used (TRUE)!

This is the third and final part of Elon Musk Week® (sort of like Shark Week©, but with 100% less Discovery™ channel). An annual feature? Maybe!

Part 1 is here (LINK) where we take apart Tesla®, and Part 2 is here (LINK) where we understand Elon’s Matrix® plan.

I first read about Elon in (probably) 1977 or 1978. Oh, sure, you’re saying, that would have made him six or seven years old, and at least a continent and two hemispheres away from me. My only response is, “so what?”

When I was a kid, I lived fifteen miles from the town I went to school in. My house was the farthest away on the school bus line, so I was the first to get on in the morning (7:15, every morning) and the last to get off (4:30, so I missed F-Troop). I could stare out the big picture window and see the bus a mile away – Ma Wilder taught me it would be rude to keep the bus driver waiting – and out I would go to be there waiting when the big yellow bus pulled into my driveway.

For about two hours a day as the bus stopped to pick up and then let off children, I could either stare out at the mountain scenery, or I could drop with Johnny Rico and The Roughnecks into Klendathu. Or I could visit Trantor, first with Hari Seldon, and then later with The Mule. Or ride Sandworms on Arrakis with Paul Atreides. Or be shocked at the mysteries when we Rendezvoused with Rama. Or finish all the science fiction anthologies at the middle school library by the middle of my seventh grade year.

And reading wasn’t confined to just bus time. There were only three channels of television available (no one ever counted PBS, unless Monty Python was on) an half the time nothing interesting was on. So, if I had built all the model kits around (the usual condition – they didn’t last long) and it was too cold to go hiking or fishing, I always had a book ready to read. And Ma Wilder said I had to go to bed, but she never said I had to go to sleep . . . my parents bought me a reading lamp that clipped on my headboard for my tenth birthday.

But I remember reading the Hugo®-winning “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” by Robert A. Heinlein fairly clearly – it wasn’t on a bus, but on the couch by a crackling fire on a cold (-20˚F) winter’s day. And that’s when I met Elon Musk.

(source, Wikimedia)

Delos David Harriman (better known as D.D. Harriman) is the billionaire who decides to go to the Moon. Why?

He envisions a new economy – an opening of the Moon is the first step to opening the Solar System to humanity. Rather than living in a world which with a fixed horizon, D.D. realizes that getting off this rock is the only possible positive future of humanity. But getting there is possible, and only takes will.

To quote Harriman:

“In fact, the real engineering problems of space travel have been solved since World War II. Conquering space has long been a matter of money and politics.”

Contrast with Musk:

“Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame.”

And how was Harriman going to do it?

“I’ll hire the proper brain boys, give them everything they want, see to it they have all the money they can use.”

Contrast this with Musk:

“The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.”

And I could go on and on about the similarities but the one thing I know is this:

Musk read the same stuff I did when he grew up.

Musk knows D.D. Harriman. Just like I did, Musk admired D.D. Harriman. However, Musk has become D.D. Harriman.

And for that, my hat is off to him. D.D. Harriman is much more important than Tony Stark®.

And Harriman was willing to do absolutely anything to open space to humanity, convinced it was too important to leave to governments and bureaucrats. Harriman manipulated stock, forged fake space-diamonds, and extorted advertising dollars from soda companies.

Musk feels the same way. Musk formed SpaceX™. Musk got involved in Tesla®. One is his passion, one (even though he believes in the mission) is there to fund his passion. Make no mistake: Musk has created more applied rocket engineering faster than any person in history except maybe Von Braun (though Bezos is giving him a run for his money and has super-cool biceps for an old man).

Why not NASA? Isn’t it their job?

During the 1960’s, NASA had a mission. It was going to get three guys to the Moon, by the end of the decade. Lots of engineers worked lots of long hours and made it happen. In July of 1969, NASA dropped the mic after “One Small Step” and walked off the stage. Mission done!

Well, almost fifty years on from that date, and six of the twelve men who walked on the Moon are now dead. During the middle? NASA developed one (anemic) space launch system – The Space Shuttle, whose sole purpose appeared to be to construct the International Space Station. Why construct it? So the Shuttle had a place to go, silly.

And now we have no space launch systems available to us except through the Soviets, er, Russians, and . . . Elon’s SpaceX™, which currently plans to have a manned launch of its Dragon/Falcon taking place in early 2018. The first manned Orion flight? Maybe 2023. Maybe.

Why is NASA so sick?

The original group they hired were engineers. Their job? Get into space, get onto the moon. Then they fired most of them, but kept enough to send out a fairly constant stream of unmanned probes as well as lame manned space missions. But during the 1970’s they also hired a lot of administrators. And people who had no connection in any respect to a spacecraft, or science, or aeronautics.

Except for brief bursts of public interest when something worked really well (Viking and Voyager) or when something worked really poorly (Challenger and Columbia), NASA has reached an irrelevance in national policy. NASA appears to only be important when it comes to funding large amounts of money to projects that take place in certain Congressional Districts in certain strategically important states. In Houston they love NASA, or at least NASA dollars. Efficiency? Progress? Why would you need those things? Heck, we can have astronauts but not have spaceships!

These are the depths that NASA has fallen to showcase its technical bankruptcy: it has a division called the “Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute.” This division produced 5,000 braille books about the eclipse for the blind.

These are the official shot glasses of the Manned Spaceflight Center. At least it’s one way to blast off?

I am not opposed to a company doing this – I’m not even opposed to a government agency producing books in braille, especially those that aren’t available on audio. But I am opposed to NASA doing it. Why?

NASA’s mission is:

To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.

Nothing at all in there about getting blind people books about an eclipse. Nothing close, so this is a symptom of a system that has gone beyond dysfunctional to trivial. A dysfunctional system (or in this case, organization) just can’t get anything done. A trivial organization works on everything. It invents steps where none need be, make-work (like the books), bureaucracy (credentials for everyone!), and hurdles (did you file the right form?) until Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy is achieved:

From Jerry Pournelle himself:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

I think that in NASA they actively look for jobs that they can do that are:

NASA could spend time and effort designing a new hypervelocity spaceplane, but that’s hard! And someone could get hurt, and that would be bad publicity. And we know that we as a society will only allow people to be put upon the equivalent of 2,000 tons of TNT (Saturn V) if it’s totally safe! Otherwise, it’s an outrage!

So, faced between making a new launch system that might help get people into space OR putting together a braille book? Let’s go with the book. It’s A. Easy and B. Safe.

These are the official flip flops of the Manned Spaceflight Center. They look Safe, unless you blow out your flip flop and step on a pop top and cut your heel and have to cruise back home. It’s okay, because there’s booze in the blender and you have the Official Manned Spaceflight Center shot glasses.

The only way to avoid the Iron Law and the A. Easy and B. Safe people is to have a personality that keeps focus on the goal.

And since NASA administrators don’t go in and fire everyone in NASA not involved in the mission, you can be certain that they’re fine with . . . whatever the heck it is that NASA is doing.

How is SpaceX® Different?

Elon Musk is a laser of focus on getting spacecraft into the air. People at SpaceX® want to work long hours, and if you look at jobs on their website, it notes that long hours, working evenings and weekends are probably going to be a thing for you. And, want to get fired? Talk about part of your “mission” at SpaceX® being producing coloring books on planetary nebulae.

Sounds like old Harriman himself, “. . . sweet talk them into long hours – then stand back and watch them produce.”

Some Libertarians HATE Musk because of the government subsidies that have driven money to Tesla® and even SpaceX©. I can understand that, especially if their goal is less government. Heck, I’d like less government. But even though Musk has to go through roundabout ways to get only a portion of NASA’s funding, he’s running circles around them on talent recruitment, technology development, and actual results. We have a choice if want to really get into space. Elon appears to be the only winning answer (unless Bezos is holding back on a few aces).

Musk could fly people in space tomorrow, if they’d let him. NASA is six years out. Six years out.

What does Musk plan to do in the next three? Send a capsule (unmanned) to Mars.

I’d be surprised if Orion ever actually flies people. NASA seems incapable of spaceflight, and, really incapable of anything more complicated than Twitter. But if Orion ever flies, I imagine that in orbit the Orion astronauts will get to see Elon’s butt pressed firmly against the window of his Mars Transfer Ship (Red Dragon 11) as he gives them a full moon (pardon) as a parting gift as he heads to Mars.

It’s a long trip to Mars. I imagine that Elon might take a book or two along with him for the trip. Probably not “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” But maybe Dune, or Starship Troopers.

What would D.D. Harriman read?

I’d like to think he’d bring my blog . . .

Hey, everyone (including you, Elon) you can subscribe, and it gets sent out directly when I hit the publish button.