Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Al Gore’s New Book

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A review:

Techno-enthusiast Al’s discussion is interesting, if occasionally heavy-handed in its erudition. With so many facts on display, errors inevitably creep in: Bronze wasn’t chosen over copper in ancient times because copper is too brittle (it isn’t brittle at all) but because bronze tools could hold an edge under hard use, as copper tools couldn’t. Even so, Mr. Gore’s fans will find the book a useful introduction to the future, if not to the past. Yes, he does go on about climate change at some length, but that is hardly news. There is much, much more to the book than a rehash of the global-warming debate.

But then Savonarola Al intervenes, his fondness for high-toned scolding coloring every topic. It’s a pretty monochromatic color. After reading Savonarola Al’s sermons, one might be excused for thinking that all of the evils in the world come from corporations. There is a lot about what Mr. Gore calls “the domineering crimes of the robber barons” and the evils of capitalism, but the actual “crimes” that Mr. Gore mentions, chiefly lobbying efforts that thwart regulation, don’t seem all that bad in comparison with the things that governments are capable of doing. In much of the Third World—think Zimbabwe or Iran—people have far more to fear from the despotic regimes that misrule them than they do from private enterprise. And even in the free world, governments have a coercive power that no corporation can rival. Hence the need for lobbyists as a check on wealth-destroying intrusions into markets and abridgments of commercial freedom.

Want to get money out of politics? Get politics out of money.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Columbia Disaster

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The latest issue of Space Safety Magazine is dedicated to it. I disagree with Andrea’s take here, though:

The focus of commercial space is very much on cost-cutting, while vague assurances are made about safer vehicles. Sometimes safety is even presented as a stubborn obstacle to industry development and progress [I plead guilty as charged – RS]. The commercial human spaceflight industry needs to remember that the primary goal of the Shuttle Program was cutting the cost of transportation to orbit by an order of magnitude, a goal at which it failed miserably. As with the supersonic Concorde, the Shuttle was doomed by being both expensive and unsafe. Being expensive made it in turn unaffordable to undertake any further development or safety modification. But even being expensive to operate did not stop either the Shuttle or Concorde from operating for about 30 years. What ultimately ended these programs was their inadequate safety.

Probably true for Concorde, but not for Shuttle. As I write in the book: Continue reading The Columbia Disaster →

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

James Lovelock

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Environmental heretic:

We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation.

What he doesn’t (or at least didn’t) understand is that they want civilization, and humanity itself, to fail.

Humor, Technology and Society

The Hunley

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Learning the answers to what happened:

…it may be that the crew, found at their seats when the sub was raised with no evidence of an attempt to abandon ship, may have been knocked out by the concussion of an explosion so close by, said Lt. Gov. Glenn McConnell, a member of the South Carolina Hunley Commission.

“I think the focus now goes down to the seconds and minutes around the attack on the Housatonic,” he said. “Did the crew get knocked out? Did some of them get knocked out? Did it cause rivets to come loose and the water rush into the hull?”

The final answers will come when scientists begin to remove encrustations from the outer hull, a process that will begin later this year. McConnell said scientists will also arrange to have a computer simulation of the attack created based on the new information. The simulation might be able to tell what effect the explosion would have on the nearby sub.

Maria Jacobsen, the senior archaeologist on the project, said small models might also be used to recreate the attack.

A fascinating archaeological project.

Business, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Memories Of Flint

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A few months ago when I was back to visit relatives, I took a drive around, and saw the vast empty field that used to be A.C. Spark Plug, where my father and later my brother (and, during summers in college, I) worked. And when I flew in, I saw from the air the ruins of what used to be Buick City, along the Flint River. It was surreal.

For years, Gordon Young, a Flint native living in San Francisco, has been running a blog that’s become sort of a water cooler for people who are from Flint, Michigan, but not necessarily any longer residents.

As a result of a lot of time spent back there over the past few years, he’s written a new book about his experience in buying and restoring a dilapidated house. I don’t think you have to be from Flint, or even Michigan (similar deindustrialization stories could be told about Pontiac, Saginaw and of course Detroit itself), to appreciate the theme of how you can’t go home again, but sometimes you can come close.

And I hope that with the new right-to-work law in Michigan, some of the companies like Honda and Mercedes and others will now consider setting up shop on the old industrial sites, and there can be some semblance of a return to the former glory, even if the new jobs won’t provide the middle-class incomes on unskilled labor that they did in the fifties and sixties. Those days are simply gone, never to return.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s an example post from the blog. 1973 was the year I graduated from High School, into a recession that in Flint was a depression (unemployment was more than twenty percent). The suckitude of the economy, and getting laid off from a job as a mechanic at the VW dealer, inspired me to go back to school, at Mott Community College (named after Charles Stewart Mott, on whose property it was built, and who did die that year, as Gordon notes). In retrospect, that probably was the high point. I moved away three years later, to go to Ann Arbor, and never moved back.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the book’s web site. That reminds me that I should build one for mine.

Business, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Grounding Of The Dreamliner

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…is a sign of a threat to innovation:

The Dreamliner’s troubles reflect a wider trend. Innovation in mature economies such as America’s seems stuck in a perpetual holding pattern.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has warned about this slowdown for years.

“There is so much incrementalism now,” Thiel said in a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “Even back in the ’90s there were companies like Amazon that were willing to do big things. That has gone out of fashion now.”

Thiel points to Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and the electric car company Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), both run by Elon Musk, as the rare examples of recent attempts to leap forward boldly. Yet Musk often gets portrayed as a quixotic dreamer.

“I think this reflects the insanity of our country, that anything non-incremental is seen as insane,” Thiel says.

Who’s responsible for this perceived downturn in innovation? One obvious target is overweening government. Some Boeing defenders have charged that the FAA wildly overreacted by grounding the Dreamliner.

“They are trying to make us too risk-averse,” says Gordon Bethune, a retired airline executive who worked for Boeing and later ran Continental Airlines. “The FAA is teaching Boeing something. Are we sending the right signals to our innovators in automobiles, airplanes, appliances, that the heavy hand of God is going to come down on you if you have so much as one question wrong in a hundred-question exam?”

Yet an even more important factor than excessive regulation is that the public markets simply don’t reward big risks. While going public theoretically should give companies more access to capital to finance research and development, it turns out that an initial public offering actually tends to discourage bold bets.

More than 20 years of patent citations show that on average in the five years after a company stages an IPO there’s a 40 percent drop in the quality of innovation, says Shai Bernstein, an assistant finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who has studied the trend.

I think this is why Elon has backed off on what were originally rumored to be his plans for an IPO this year.

Gee, someone should write a book about the consequences of extreme risk aversion for human spaceflight.