Morning Fog

Outmoded Infrastructure - Those Overhead Power Lines

Sunday afternoon my little neighborhood experienced a heavy thunderstorm - unusually heavy winds and a violent torrent of rain, but still a thunderstorm - that passed through the area in less than 30 minutes but put out the electrical grid to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses for 10 hours (in my case) or even longer.   This was only the longest of three recent power outages, all of three hours or more, over the past two weeks.  Two were weather-related, the third was somebody driving into a utility pole.  

In addition, we've experienced at least two blips in the same period, of the sort that punch out the power just long enough to shut down computers and cause the waste of 15-20 minutes rebooting, logging in again, and the like.  I wish this performance were rare, but power outages occur where I live on the average of one or two a month.  The electric company's reporting number should be on speed dial, but by now, I have it memorized anyway.

The constant interruption of power supplies, even by fairly normal weather or routine traffic accidents, has several causes, but primary among them is simply our failure as a society to protect power lines by burying them.   Here as in other endeavors, a business's short-term cost considerations are allowed to overrule sensible public policy.  No one has found a way yet to deliver electric power wirelessly; until we do, it only makes sense to update our infrastructure to minimize the potential for disruption.

A Fourth Of July Tradition

When I was a kid (just a few short years ago of course) our family always owned a U.S. flag that my dad would get out and display in front of the house on certain patriotic days.  There was Flag Day of course,Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and especially, Independence Day.  At the time, it seemed that nearly everyone followed this practice.  These days, I don't see very many flags out on homes any more.  Too bad - it's a nice tradition, and one that's still meaningful.

 

 

(A version of this item has been cross-posted on The Tin Lizard,
www.thetinlizard.com)

Dysconnection

Census workers being attacked and threatened?  It's happening.  There are lots of other signs of dissatisfaction with government, and of a more general malaise in the country these days.  It reflects ignorance, and certainly, frustration with the economic disaster brought on by eight years of Bush "spend and don't tax" policies, not to mention an inordinate concatenation of disasters, natural and man-made.

Yet I don't think that explains the extent to which we're seeing unprecedented examples of man's basic inhumanity to man.  Another recent news item, for example, points out the rising use of texting to threaten, cajole, and otherwise seek to destroy a person's privacy, perhaps their life. 

In a world where we are all supposedly so interconnected via new technologies ranging from smart phones and the internet through social networking and texting, we're really not connected at all -- not in ways that count.   The technology in this case has tended to lock people away in compartments. 

Real human interaction becomes more and more rare.  In the 1940s, you might go call on your neighbor; in the 1960s, you might have phoned him; in the timid new world of the 21st century, you're likely to text him.  Rather than going out to a movie, people sit at home and watch a DVD on their gigantic plasma television. They fail to socialize, to learn to deal with others.  And naturally, though unfortunately, it's the weird and the dwellers on the fringe who succumb most readily to the tempations of sitting in front of a screen, connecting without connecting. 

Virtual reality, after all, is not reality.  It all boils down to dysconnection, rather than connection. 

Oil Spill - What More Can Go Wrong?

Deep on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast, a diamond strip saw that was supposed to complete the final cut at the top of defunct, bleeding BP well has become "stuck," delaying, if not completely thwarting, progress with the capping operation.

With this latest news, it begins to seem as if this whole project is really jinxed.   An optimist might observe that the oil is making its way to shore much more slowly than expected -- but it's still coming, and there's plenty more behind it.  So we naturally ask ourselves, "Has anything about this incident yet gone right?"

Certainly that must be President Obama's feeling.  This makes Courtland Milloy's commentary today all the more germane.  Yes, Presidents, for better or worse, "own" whatever happens on their watch, even the events that can't be predicted or fixed.  The oil spill becomes Obama's Hurricane Katrina.  (Curious that both events involve Louisiana...if it could be shown that Monica Lewinsky had some connection to Louisiana, we'd really be onto something.)

Although Obama has been better than his predecessor about taking responsibility for such an exogenous, unpredictable, and insoluble event, his critics have been just as shrill and unforgiving as were Bush's critics five years ago, and for similar reasons.   Neither President succeeded in seeming attuned to the human side of the disaster (not to say they weren't), so both were/are damaged politically by their failure to be God.  

Milloy's piece correctly points out that when people are frustrated and angry  they'll blame the President no matter how he handles the issue.  And they will blame government, even if they're the sort who don't think government is necessary.  It's not fair, but politics is a tough life. 

A Memorial Day Cause

An interesting tale in today's news is that of the American cemetery that was formerly a part of Clark U.S. Air Force Base, in the Philippines.  The base was turned back to the Philippines government a decade ago without any special arrangements having been made for the upkeep of the cemetery, which is the final resting place of about 9,000 Americans, one-quarter of whom are former U.S. military.  Now, as the Washington Post reports, a few concerned organizations consider that the cemetery isn't being kept up properly (though to me the photo accompanying the article makes it look a lot like the community cemetery near me), and they have launched a campaign to get the U.S. government to pay for the refurbishment and continuing maintenance of the site. 

What a great tale!  It struck me at first that this was a no-brainer.  Uncle Sam should pay for this; how could it have been overlooked? 

But speaking of overlooking, it's important not to overlook a few points.  The military people buried there, if I read the article correctly, mostly aren't there because they died in battle.  They are veterans of many different wars, who served in all branches of the service, who for the most part ended up in the Philippines by taking military or civilian jobs at the base long after their combat service, or maybe by marrying a Filipino.  Since the place apparently never was designated as a "National Cemetery," or a battlefield monument, it doesn't receive federal funding.  I'd say the Air Force erred in establishing this cemetery at all; the deceased should have been shipped home or buried in local cemeteries off base.

In that respect, The Clark facility seems to be just like any general purpose cemetery anywhere in the U.S., i.e., a lot of combat veterans may be buried there, but Uncle Sam doesn't pick up the tab for maintenance.  I think of the cemetery in Kansas where my WWII-vet father is buried along with many others who were not veterans.  The local VFW puts a flag on his grave on Memorial Day, but the federal government doesn't pay upkeep for the cemetery.  

The Air Force having made the mistake of creating this burial ground, though, I suspect most Americans would agree that we as a nation, and the military services in particular, do have an obligation to help (help!) maintain it. 

Timing is everything.  I'm betting that the publicity for this cause, published on Memorial Day (observed date), will probably catalyze some kind of action by which the USG will eventually provide the funding requested.  Military veterans, and others buried on the former Clark AFB, will have reason to thank writer William Branigan and the Washington Post. 

Jeremiah Wright And Buses

My last post was about the deleterious effects that the extremists in any "big tent" operation can have on the perceptions people have of the whole.

How could I have overlooked citing the example of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former minister who is now complaining that the Obama administration has thrown him under a bus and won't listen to a thing he says.   Duh!  Can he really be surprised?  Of course he has a right to voice any views he wants, but having made statements he must have known would be embarrassing to the Presidential candidate, he had to realize what he said could - almost certainly would - work against the interests of nearly everybody in the tent.  We can also assume that he was asked, initially, to tone down the rhetoric, but he didn't take that hint.  So perhaps two wrongs make a Wright. 

Oddly, people with radical ideas are often the sort who think their views have to be aired at any time, in any context, and don't care "what other people think."  It's egotism combined with the insularity of being on the fringe in the first place.   No doubt the world needs such people but often they self-marginalize themselves.  They jump in front of the bus; no one needs to throw them. 

A Taxing Experience

I finished up my taxes a few days ago and sent them in "electrocutionally."  What a long, complex process it can be, even if you don't have anything particularly complicated in your income picture.  I still do my own taxes (with the help of a tax program).  Some people think CPAs and tax lawyers are a big help, but a lot of the work is just in collecting and organizing the data, which your tax expert will mostly expect you to do for him.  The one year I took my taxes to one of these "pros" a couple of decades ago, he just took the numbers I gave him and plugged them into Turbotax.  Along the way, he made three errors in data entry, one transposing a $3,000 interest deduction into 300;  if I hadn't caught them, no one would have.  So I went back to doing my own taxes.

Every year at this time, millions of taxpayers think, why can't this all be made simpler?  It can.  And if it were, I'm sure the IRS would be happy -- less work, less paper, easier to detect fraud, and probably overall, greater revenue with less fuss.  But we all know it won't happen; Congress is not going to stop tinkering with the tax code as a way to influence behavior, provide benefits to specific industries or areas, and the like.

Politically, I doubt that it could happen, even if every Congressperson swore an oath to simplify tax laws.  Certain interest groups, industries, regions, all now have a stake in keeping the code the way it is, with all its little arcane, difficult-to-track bennies for them.  Another group has a different motivation to resist change:  A simplified tax code would put all those tax lawyers and accountants on the bread line; the empires of Turbotax and similar taxpayer programs would collapse.  

I use Turbotax myself; it seems accurate and saves a lot of calculation.  But I hit the wrong radio button to print out a copy of my forms and the program shot out 165 pages of thinly sliced tree ... which is where it comes to light that Turbotax itself may be part of the problem.  It seems that for nearly every IRS form, there's also a Turbotax worksheet, and some of them are pretty inane.  For each different charity you gave cash to during the year, the program will spit out, if you allow it, a three-page "worksheet" - a dozen charities means nearly 50 pages, none of which contain more than one number - the amount you gave.  Then there are the forms that print out with nothing but zeros - a depreciation schedule, when I don't have any depreciation (well, OK, at my age I do have depreciation, but not in my assets). 

This is just an effort to make the complicated look even more complicated, but it's one reason that the people and software companies that "help" you with your taxes will oppose tax simplification.

Snow And Jobs

I suppose one of the hardest things for any politician to plan for, or deal with, is the fundamental impatience of the average citizen. 

Yesterday in another forum I commented on the attitude most people seem to have after the recent snowstorm:  "Well, sure, we've had more snow than was ever recorded in more than 100 years, but darn, it's been a week so why isn't everything completely back to normal?  One local columnist accurately noted how this kind of childish annoyance at minor inconvenience has wrecked more than one politician's hopes of reelection.

The same seems to apply to the unemployment situation.  A year ago, the President and economists pretty much across the spectrum warned that the jobs situation would get worse before it got better, and that our best efforts would probably only mitigate the worst effects.  That seems to be about what happened; unemployment figures do appear to be looking up a little bit now, but the main effects of TARP have been largely invisible (a job NOT lost doesn't register anywhere).  Those who have lost jobs are understandably frustrated, and even if they may grasp intellectually that things are improving generally, they'll be much more likely to voice impatience and exasperation that things haven't got better for them personally.

This excerpt from a report by Jake Tapper on ABC News this morning says it all:

The Obama administration credits the stimulus with saving or creating two million jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts that figure between 800,000 and 2.4 million. Obama today projected that the stimulus funding will save or create another 1.5 to 2 million jobs this year. But a New York Times/CBS News poll out today shows that only 6 percent of Americans believe the plan has created any jobs, with 48 percent thinking it won't, a number higher than late last year.

I guess we need for jobs to be as abundant next week as snow was last week (would anyone complain if there were too many available jobs? -- yes, that would drive down wages/salaries).  Meanwhile, hapless politicians can only wish that the very visible snow were less so, and that the mostly unnoticed jobs saved/created so far were more clearly evident.  

LED Stoplights

Another poorly thought-out idea from the hucksters is the LED stoplight, which (it now "comes to light") can be completely obliterated by wind-driven snow.  Old-style lights using incandescent bulbs produce heat that normally melts any snow that collects, leaving them visible to drivers.  LEDs don't produce heat, so now - as much as seven or eight years after some municipalities began installing them - the media are "discovering" the problem, apparently because a woman was killed by a driver running a red light he couldn't see.  (We might ask why that driver couldn't see the woman's car in front of him, but that's another story.)

The benefits of LEDs probably outweigh the disadvantages, because they can save as much as 90% of the energy cost a "regular" stoplight would use.  As a result, government jurisdictions in snowy areas are already finding ways to deal with the problem.   One official's suggestion in the linked story above, that drivers just have to be more cautious when they can't see the lights, is idiotic -- we know that's not going to happen, and the casualties already reported prove it.   More promising is installing additional covers, but the covers are costly, so some are protecting only the red lights this way.  

Nevertheless, that's a lot like buying a new house and finding you have to replace all the wiring or add insulation behind finished walls - retrofitting is always expensive.  It can usually be avoided by thoughtful design and by disclosure.  This is a problem manufacturers of this traffic-control equipment should have thought of and dealt with long before they started marketing it.  Governments, too, ought to have considered the problem, though (color me skeptical) in my mind I picture some second-level municipal official in a sales presentation being smart enough to ask the question, and getting a run-around answer.

Missing The Obvious: Ford's New In-Car Computer

Media of all sorts are abuzz over Ford's recently revealed plan to put what it calls "driver connect" technology -- i.e., a computer with a couple of 4-inch screens -- right in the dashboard of its new models beginning as early as this year.  This technology promises to integrate a lot of existing dashboard functions through voice commands, while also adding others such as GSP and even the ability to watch movies in the front seat.  The company says some of these functions would be disabled while driving. 

I applaud Ford's reclaiming a mantle of innovative thinking in the U.S. auto industry; it's great that the company seems to be shaping its own future without the need of a government bail-out.  But the obvious point they're missing here is:

This is a bad idea, guys!  

The first thing that occurs to any objective observer is that this is a big safety problem.  Drivers are distracted enough; it's far too common these days to be behind or next to a driver that can't seem to stay in his lane, or slows down inexplicably in traffic, or sits obliviously at a light that turned green 30 seconds ago.  These people are on the phone; they are dangerous; and they don't need more distractions, especially in the front seat.

Let's be open-minded:  As noted, Ford says "some" functions would be disabled unless the car is in park.  That's certainly a plus.  Let's hope, for example, that the driver can't watch a DVD, or the television broadcast of today's football game, while actually driving.  Still, I'm pretty certain that not enough functions will be disabled.   To combine certain functions into voice commands, rather than dashboard buttons, might provide a very minor improvement in overall safety.  But it's been demonstrated in many studies (and it's also just plain common sense) that the issue in distraction is not whether your hands are occupied elsewhere, but whether your mind is. 

Ford could make a strongly positive contribution if all the functions people now seem to expect to do in a moving vehicle (GPS, telephone, and the outlet that runs plug-in electrical gadgets) were disabled when the vehicle is moving.  That would remove a lot of distraction -- remember that advice, to use the phone, pull over and stop?  As an alternative, large flashing warning lights on the outside of the car would be a big help whenever these features are being used:  "Caution! Distracted Driver!"  But I doubt Ford will do either, because no one would buy the car if they did. 

That's the second reason this is a bad idea.  It just doesn't seem to be attractive technology in today's marketplace.  With smart phones everywhere and Apple set to unveil an iTablet, why will people want to use a system that's rooted in their car, rather than one they can use in the car, and also take with them to the office, and home?  Regardless of any safety issues, this seems to me to be the big "if" that will determine whether the "driver connect" concept becomes a Mustang or an Edsel.