If it all happens with virtual #’s do you hear the ‘Earth shattering Kabooom’?

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Economist blog Free Exchange discussing current Euro(pean) implosion…. A quote “from the International Strategy and Investment Group, explain the political dynamics: Papandreou’s motives are understandable: So far the opposition has provided no support for the measures that he has been forced to push through, and he and his party have been left alone facing the public anger. The opposition’s tactics are in a sense similar to those used by the Portuguese opposition earlier this year. There the opposition forced the government to fall, took over power, and promptly implemented policies very similar to what the previous government was going to do anyway. Papandreou knows that story, and his decision can be interpreted as a refusal to be the victim of the same game.”

The Gov’t is here to help…relieve you of your (fill in the blank)

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

This Forbes piece is in violent agreement with yesterday’s post. I guess more and more people see the problem the way I do…though I don’t think the gentlemanly solution is going to get us where we need to be, but might keep the problem from getting as bad as quickly in the future when the people have taken their eye off the ball to deal with other important issues.

Be Here Now

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

How did we get here? Why is this happening now?

The Here and Now is a phonograph needle tracking the wobbles in the groove that all our yesterdays laid down.

Is there a way out?

There is only foreward there is no going back.

There is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature. (From)

GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Mrs. George William Fairfax, Sep. 12, 1758

Not sure I agree at an individual level all the time, but on the aggregate in the immediate time frame I would. Perhaps its like this: Science tells me that most of my actions are planned a significant fraction of a second ahead of my consciousness recognizing what is going on. It is impossible to change what you do not know is coming but if you plan ahead you can control what happens at a future point in time and space.

And what we do individually and locally does matter nationally and globally, at least a little and if not now then sometime in the future.

Does that mean I demand “Word Gov’t Now!” how stupid do you think I am?

We need more self-control, personal control, local control and less regional control, national control and global control. We do need norms and some way of enforcing them for such things as : life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and such easily debased things as contract enforcement, property rights, ecological cost accounting, financial cost accounting…a few others…maybe

But….the old bureaucratic model, relying on a plethora of relatively well paid trustworthy functionaries to enforce norms is becoming unaffordable.

Laissez-Faire – let it be – management doesn’t work, it doesn’t work in regulation either.

Why has the US Constitution remained important for more than 200 years? Because its simple, basic, lays out fundamentals and leaves the rest for interpretation but by being fairly simple, constrained and pragmatic it is actually possible to interpret it to cover very large sets of cases.

We have to get over the belief that you can make life perfect if you can just tune your laws/regulations/rules just right and get the humans out-of-the-way. We used to know better, I think that most scholars know better. But somehow many folks have come to believe that if not all, then the one specific law they care about can be perfected, and since they care about it passionately they push it forward, usually through a system that has no time to really understand the consequences of this law when combined with that law and this social reality, etc. And with each law becoming more complex because of fiddling to tune it to perfection, the way they interact becomes utterly unknowable. And the law becomes harder to obey and easier for smart lawyers to subvert.

So….

So where do we go from here?

Start to build down the complexity we have built up at every level, what about:

For every new rule, two old ones have to be eliminated and no double dipping?
Limit the length of any law/rule/regulation to two double-sided 8 1/2 by 11 sheets one inch margins typed in 11 point Times New Roman with the option of an extra sheet of readable graphics?
Eliminate mandatory this, no tolerance that, rules that have become a pox on our society?
Make Judges accountable to other Judges and the Bar with impeachment by the people an option?

You can think of more, I know you can!

Cheers

Move along, nothing original to see here…. but maybe some interesting links..

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

As Russel Mead at Via Meadia writes to great effect the Great Loon, the Duck of Death is dead.

And here is Russel Mead’s interesting take on protests etc. A very insightful piece that hit home once more regarding something that puzzled me… ” There was a time long ago when political protest really mattered. The Vietnam protests didn’t end the war (and didn’t keep Nixon from carrying 49 states against George McGovern in 1972), but they helped end the draft. The civil rights movement led to some of the most profound social changes this country has ever seen. Before that, there were labor and suffragette marches…” ” But these days the old style protests remind me of political conventions: empty and pointless (though noisy and publicized) rituals. “ And he draws a comparison to the conventions. Once the conventions were important, before mass media and instant communications, but now they are just rituals the politic druidic class still hold. In the old days a mass rally meant something, life for the working class was twice todays and wages closer to subsistence, and brutality was expected of the police, going to a rally meant something. Today it’s not much more than a smelly holiday. Not to say that there aren’t some grievances and suffering…but OWS is more theater than struggle. And then Amity Shales had this to say about what these folks want, vs what they need.

I am never going to be the blog-media-news miner that Instapundit is. Here is the latest on the SLS fiasco from Rand Simberg, the Space Launch System is a works program, yes well paid and aerospace is effective economic multiplier but the money could be spent to so much better effect!

(edits, still not getting all of this right the first time)

“Here’s the problem: there are no grownups. “

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

I have a new hero! I love this line, maybe it was just a matter of right words at the right time on the right topic but it is perfect. Bob Krum was discussing the euro debt crisis among other things (like stupid questions on ‘presidential debates’) in Stop Waiting for Superman.

There are no grownups; there are just folks (blokes in Brit speak) like us, imperfect humans who are lucky to make a right decision (on issues more complex than whether to turn into the path of that oncoming Mack truck or not) much more than 50% of the time (and we don’t always make the right one regarding the Mack truck.)

What does that mean? Many things but one of them is that overly complex political, financial, social, technical…etc constructs are asking for problems. Stable systems are ones that are essentially self organizing, a pile of sand will settle into the same conical shape every time because its stable in its environment. Small c capitalist, old meaning liberal economies, are self organizing and stable. The euro zone is a complex web of overly constrained systems that like some cartoon Rube Goldberg steam plant is constantly threatening to blow a gasket and it requires a genius just to know where to apply the next tourniquet.

In the last few decades we have made vast strides in understanding ourselves and our world (in a thousand different dimensions.) Then we have often reacted to this increased understanding by thinking we can control more things and implementing more and more rules. The effects of those rules are often individually complex and unintended but the interactions between them is (IMHO) utterly outside of our ability to cope with. Among other things I rather suspect that every one of us (barring a newborn baby maybe) is technically a criminal, having violated at one time or another various laws, rules or regulations most of which we had no idea existed or had no way to follow.

Somehow we have become inured to the regulated world, see it as natural, but it’s probably reached its practical limits and is now in the process of imploding. We have the tools to creat a more self organized – de-bureaucratized world but have not yet quite figured out what it really looks like and how to transition from where we are to where we need to be.

Maybe that’s just wishful thinking….fueld by a frustration at the idiocy that seems to have become institutionalized in so many places. But change ‘is in the air,’ though it may still be some years away. I just hope that the transition can be made relatively peacefully, there are far too many people on this orbiting rock (7Billion!?) for a major disruption to be anything other than catastrophic for far too many.

There is no utopia waiting over the brow of the next hill, and there was never a golden age that we have somehow lost (one man’s golden age was someone elses hell.) We can’t go back to a past that never existed, and refusing to live and work today because the day after tomorrow will be better is foolish and self-destructive. Tomorrow never gets here, let alone the day after, and your vision of the world will never occupy a future today unless you work for it in the today you find yourself in. Live in the now with a vision of where you want to end up.

Space – Dreams – Mind – Future Mil

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

International Space Station's Expedition 29 crew on September 17, 2011, while cruising over the Indian Ocean near Australia and south of Madagascar

Is it only after certain brute needs are met that we can look up and see the wonder, the beauty of the world around us? And if you are trapped in the mental, social, and light smeared deserts where too many of us live in, does it takes a special imagination to see beyond the here and now?

SNC Dream Chaser Docked with ISS

Sierra Nevada Corporation dreams big with the Dream Chaser, a crewed spaceplane based on the NASA/AF experimental lifting body designs from the ’70s (It was the crash of one of these that was a lead in to the Six Million Dollar Man TV show by the way, not to put you off.)

They have a composite fuselage built and have experimented / developed (like Virgin Galactic) a hybrid rocket motor. A hybrid rocket motor has a solid fuel but liquid / gaseous oxidizer. You don’t have to deal with the complex plumbing of a pure liquid motor or the uncontrolability of a solid. They are talking to Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic about catching a ride into the stratosphere on a White Knight II. I’d even guess a sub orbital launch from a WKII is likely. I then hope they talk to SpaceX about a ride to orbit on a Falcon. There is no reason these various guys shouldn’t be looking at cooperation as their technologies mature, or not. Its possible the SpaceX dragon will be a wonderful cargo hauler but not a real solution for crew return or maybe won’t really be reusable….

There seem to be a lot of people dreaming about a lot of options, far and away above what NASA has been able to do for most of my life. I can only hope this continues.

And by the way, the guys who are supporting this stuff, they’re all in the 1% the OWS crowd are against. When OWS talk about bankers, they almost have my sympathy, but when I look to eSpace and Steve Jobs, even Gates, then that faint flicker, flickers out.

You have to have big assets to make big dreams real, and as long as they are spending it on this sort of thing, I’m all for them keeping every last cent of what they make in the money world.

What happens when your memory is so faulty you don’t even know your memory is faulty?

I was reading an article in an actual paper magazine Brain Power that was discussing the problems of a patient with a particular type of brain damage. The patient had a form of amnesia that let him remember old information, from before the brain damage, but not since, the person can do all the normal things, dress and take care of themselves, but they are living in an eternal now. And because all they have is a fixed past and an utterly confusing now their mind basically fills in the gaps, without ongoing memories the persons brain/mind cannot do the sort of ‘running average’ comparison of the now with the near, recent, etc past that keeps us (most of us, relatively) grounded in the hear an now. So this person asked a simple question about where they are and why, would come up with various stories, from the nearly right to the utterly fantastical and apparently believe them and operate as if they were true.

So maybe writing Sci Fi requires a certain amount of amnesia?

: Beating the Decline..

There is a very interesting article at Baen the premier outlet for Sci Fi these days particularly Mil Sci Fi. Mr. Dunn has done an excellent job of outlining the current trajectory of the mil world from the threat to the budget and the current reaction of the Tech Services, the Navy and Air Force, I eagerly await the second part which will deal with the ground forces.

The situation in grunt land has always been more complex than that in the technical services, not to say that the sea or the air are simple, just simpler, on land you have the interaction of so many things that it is hard to readily predict what will work and what won’t.

I can hear a lot of cat calls regarding the fact that Navies and Air Forces have made huge missteps. And I agree but in general those mistakes while suboptimal where still better than what came before. In the mud its not clear that this is always the case. Now I’m not talking about weapons like nukes or even heavy artillery, these are technical services, but as we have found out in Iraq and Af’stan its boots on the ground that matter and a thousand little actions that eventually spell success or failure.

In the J.S.Zaloga book Panther vs. Sherman focusing on the battle of the bulge the author re-examines the face off between these two tanks. And while in most pure technical terms of armor, gun, ground pressure, engine power, the Sherman comes off the worse, in fact tactically it often won. For many reasons, reliability, more vehicles, fighting from ambush, generally more agile, better visibility.

While better equipment is often an amplifier, training, logistics and morale are generally more important once you have reached reasonable parity. You are not going to beat even a PzKfWgn II with straight up lancer charge. But there is no reason that an armored force couldn’t be fought to a standstill by folks on horses given horse portable anti tank weapons, equivalent logistics and lack of air superiority (Russia in Af’stan anyone?)

Precision weapons and ubiquitous day/night recon and observation are having profound effects on open field warfare. And the emergence of extended urban/sub-urban campaigns are making things even more difficult. Then there is the emergence of powerfully armed subnational or non-national forces whose operations are distributed temporally and geographically, to such an extent that they look like policing problems, but are really outside of the scope of traditional police force, since they are often heavily armed and operate largely within the law except for occasional egregious exceptions…..

So I’ll be interested to see what Mr. Dunn has to say in his second article.

Work a day World….which will come

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Another article about the end of work as we know it and I have to agree that this is the ‘feeling’ i get when looking and listening to the world at large. My jobs over the years have taken me to many companies, many new, some middle aged, a fair number ‘old line industrial.’ And the way I see it now is that we’ve been overlooking profound changes that were happening without causing much of direct stir while looking in the wrong direction and perhaps (probably) pursuing the wrong ‘solutions’ to what may not be real problems.

The story I would tell is this, that the heyday of the giant integrated conglomerate as a generic solution in the technology arena was probably sometime around the middle of the twentieth century. Not that anyone realized it or noted it, but after that smaller companies were often able to outmaneuver the big guys and started carving away chunks, not directly but by making managers/owners make decisions that marginalized pieces of their business. These middle sized companies started small and sometimes grew big and became conglomerates but on average the company size got smaller and more focused.

Many of the companies I visit have huge factories built in the heyday of mass production. Today these factories instead of producing just one product, produce several, or dozens and the people who service the machines are a fraction of the ‘old’ work force, or much of the facility stands vacant while the still sell just as much in raw value as they did when they had hundreds if not thousands of workers. Many stay in these old factories, because they’re essentially free and/or tearing it down would open them up for problems with the EPA re ‘Brown Field Remediation’ etc.

What happened to all those workers? We’ve heard about the hollowing out of our manufacturing for a long time but the pain was ‘mostly’ pretty low level, why? Because for the first forty years most of the the effects were hidden. Those smaller, mid sized companies were usually, less automated and less efficient but less expensive in terms of human driven overheads (generally younger staff, lower wages, small efficient shops, small effective teams, managerially efficient), and they sopped up, the workers no longer needed by the ‘mainline’ shops.

So why the agony now? I think that the internet bubble then the financial bubble hid the tailing off of the gentle transition, or maybe it kept more of the old line industries / jobs in play and then dropped them on the floor in one steaming pile. And suddenly the staid old like companies appear to have vanished, and the jobs appear to have vanished, but they had mostly vanished a decade and more ago, the rest was financial illusion.

If there had been no 911 and a need to hide the cost of the wars it sparked and a Ranch and Cancun Vacation (instead of bread and circuses) program put on to distract our attention, we would probably have seen the pain earlier and I think less severely. Now we probably are going to undergo a painful decade of recession, maybe more until we understand that the world has changed and work and the economy have to evolve.

How that evolution is going to happen is a blank to me. But what I see as happening over the next several decades is an ongoing evolution of work to highly automated mass production of basic needs, and the creation of more and more boutique, even artisanal companies often supported by constantly shifting teams of people who are engaged for short run needs.

And perhaps the gov’t and many folks who are still looking at the past to guide the future, will stop trying to save industrial age health and retirement systems that are unsustainable in the long run, and look to a much more personally focused system one that is portable across the country and across the globe if we have any sense.

Health Care Costs (3)

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

So to continue: The way I see Health Care has seen a bubble in the US that has grown huge over a very extended period. Most have called this ‘bubble’ Health Care Cost inflation. But a bubble over any period between inception and bursting can be seen as (mistaken for) inflation. Is the HCC “Bubble” going to burst or do we have to just accept this as inflation. I think that too many people want this to be Inflation, not a bubble. And I do not want a ‘bust’ but I do think we need to get on the off ramp, to a price plateau at the very least.

I’ve discussed:

The pernicious effect of opaque pricing
A spike in Cost/Value in capital investment (buildings and equipment.)
The Gov’t affected floor to pricing
The profit motive effect of increasing costs in the system

Now I’ll add some more:

Direct sales…more and more selling of this that or the other service, drug, wonder cure, to the general populace who have no real way of parsing the useful from the useless or even harmful. And then the sales guys got to congress and punditry and started demonizing those who tried to point out that the common man was not really in a position to make medical decisions. (Not that the god-doctors should be put in charge, much as many of them believe that they should be because they are smarter than anyone else.)
Litigation, because medical outcomes are impossible to ensure, and there has been a Lawyer bubble going on for many decades, doctors got sued more and more frequently, malpractice insurance costs went up and so another cost was added into the equation (and for a long time absorbed because the system hid the costs)
Specialization, again 9% of 10,000 is a lot more money than 10% of 5,000, but 15% of 10,000 is even more. Specialist charge at a higher rate because they are specialists and have special skills, that are needed by special cases…..they don’t have to see as many patients, get to go to conferences and consult with other wizards and look down their noses at the rest of the world, even at other doctors. What’s not to like? Just one more cost adsorbed in the system.
Administrative fief building, its a fact of nature, or rather an emergent property of human society: administrations grows more complex and adsorbs more resources as time moves on, as the top level administrators increase the number of ‘direct reports’ then create hierarchies so they don’t have to talk to as many people so they can be ‘more efficient.’ Administrators (Bureaucrats) are extremely good at capturing the system and turning it to serve them versus the customer the system is supposed to serve.

So what is the solution. Well I think you can see the one I would focus on first but that will be a discussion for another day.

Health Care Cost (2)

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

When I was a kid and even as a younger adult I went to the dentist’s office and other ‘providers’ and the amenities were clean and neat but often I was treated in a ‘ward’ environment. And this was way after I’d left Jolly Olde England and the NHS (National Health Service.) Today most providers I go to the office/clinic space is custom designed often with soothing art, music, video etc. Now don’t get me wrong, Video/Music does help when you’re under the drill (having something probed etc,} and the video screens used for modern digital x-rays or other data reproduction are a boon as well. But why is every ‘provider’ the same. Why did hospitals move away from wards to private or semi private rooms with the concomitant increase in capital and operating costs. Why does my local hospital s soaring almost churchlike multi story lobby floored in granite with overlooking balconies and a Yamaha robo grand piano, and this is not the top end hospital in the region.

It seems to me that what we have seen is a health care bubble, much like the higher eduction bubble (or the overall education system foam,) we’ve seen in the last thirty years….but I digress.

As providers realized that they could attract more lucrative patients by setting up nice offices in nice parts of town the general price of HC (excuse the acronym) went up, in general the expectation in all for pay HC went up while the free clinics crashed.
It’s mathematically obvious that 10% of 5,000 is a lot less than 9% of 10,000 and the cost of consumables etc are usually fully reimbursed by the payee because their price is a published known. So providers made more and more use of high cost consumables of one sort or another, and were not incentivized to keep the costs down even if their ‘profit’ was squeezed a bit.
Medicaid and Medicare have managed to subsidize the lower end of the patient rainbow and pushed up the overall cost by pushing the higher end patients and providers into a different ‘market space.’
Because the actual cost of HC is essentially invisible to the patient the steady spiralling cost was not noted by the high-end clients because they perceived (I think rightly) that they were receiving value for money. BUT as the high-end pulled away the middle dependent ons insurance etc was stretched and the low-end fell away, the old-fashioned cheap equipment / methods / services they had used were rendered obsolete and replaced by the new much higher cost versions.

Add this and other mechanisms together and you have a bubble. One that grew and grew, while people griped, tried to do something about it but failed. For some reason we seem unwilling to change the basic underlying dynamics. Is that because they are so complex and interlaced that people can’t be bothered to go beyond the simplistic. Or do a lot of the bad things have attractive sides that would be lost if we made major changes?

In the current system its impossible to figure out the trade-off between a private room and a ward. Once that wasn’t true or as true. We have the technology to make this problem go away. I believe that with transparent pricing and costs wouldn’t we make different decisions. Maybe not all the time, but maybe enough to break the back of the ridiculous inflation rate we see in health care.

Health Care Costs (1)

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

I was listening to the Diane Rehm show this morning. She had a panel discussion on Health Care, Obama Care and Health Care Costs. They touched on a couple of issues that I find rather under discussed and it struck me as odd after a while that no one really dug in on the topics.

Here is Topic 1…

Why is it that the cost of a procedure or a piece of gear etc, varies according to who is paying? If you’re lucky enough to be covered by a relatively old fashioned policy like I am you will see on your explanation of benefits that the Doctor, Hospital, Clinic, Dentist…(the provider) charged one price but the insurance agreed to pay another, the provider agreed to that and wrote off some or all of the rest and you paid your deductible plus some additional cost sometimes for one arcane reason or another.

The Provider and the Insurer have some pre agreed price sheet that you never get to see. (You never get to see any price sheet that I know of.) Blue Cross Blue Shield apparently has one price sheet, UHC another, Medicare and Medicaid another, and the uninsured are hammered with the top line rate. An uninsured person who cannot prove he/she can pay up front is charged a higher rate again, (at least that appears to be the game) and then the hospital hounds the near-victim for some ‘pittance fraction’ that in the end is still probably more than an insurer would have paid.

If there were an industry agreed to list of procedures etc (which has to be effectively in place.) You, a consultant, a doctor w/should be able to tell what services you require and you should be able to look up what those services cost on the web comparing various providers. There should be various providers offering various prices and various deals, that you can work through and figure out what is the best value solution for you and your family quite quickly.

This way the insurance companies could reduce costs because they no longer have to individually negotiate prices, rebates, write-offs with each set of providers, the providers likewise can reduce costs for the reciprocal reason.

Administration costs are a huge part of the Health Care Expenses these days and to me this seems to be one of the myriad reasons why.

Health Care Costs are rising almost uncontrollably and the lack of a price comparison mechanism seems to me to be a significant issue.