Dehydrato

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I coined the now-famous term "Godzillionaire" which is defined as a person with a net worth of at least 1 Godzillion dollars.
And, yes, Godzillion is also a TAE trademarked word, meaning "the amount of money required to genetically engineer or irradiate a small lizard so it turns into a 200-foot long, fire-breathing, immortal monster capable of destroying Tokyo yet somehow morally against it." I imagine that would take a lot of money to accomplish.
This google search will reveal that Godzillion and Godzillionaire are used extensively on this site.


Another TAE invented word is "Wallerite" which is "a futuristic bulk material with the mechanical properties of aluminum but the insulative properties of foam board insulation."

There are a few others that I shall not name here. Instead, I'd like to introduce my first musical term. Last night I had a couple beers, and that, combined with a mild cold, woke me up with an incredibly baritone voice. For some reason, when I drink and get dehydrated, I wake up temporarily able to sing lower than I should, at least until my throat gets well lubricated. This makes the morning commute fun, as I can sing a baritone harmony to the radio that normally eludes a person of my tiny stature.
Hence the following phrase: "Ugh, I woke up this morning, and I was singing really dehydrato."

Dehydrato: singing artificially lower than normally possible via dehydration. Common methods for dehydration include binge drinking, chain smoking, or viral infections.


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Matt Yglesias and Engineering

Yglesias:

The real problem with overspending on defense, by contrast, is that the defense establishment competes for people with civilian sectors of the economy. The guys who are building these cool military exoskeletons, for example, are obviously very talented. And the supply of talented engineers isn’t all that elastic. When they supply their talents to defense-related projects, the civilian economy is starved of talent.

While I admit, my cool, defense related job has starved the civilian community of my daring and copious engineering talent, I have to say that it seems very blind to assume that no engineer that works in the defense industry is making a real, quantifiable contribution to private industry. Defense research spending (or it's brother, the academically-geared NIH spending which could be lumped into a "government research spending) accounts for a huge number of genuine, beneficial innovations, both incremental and breakthrough. Part of the reason for this is because things that work really well for soldiers, like the ability to use a satellite tracking system to know their location and altitude anywhere on Earth, also happens to be really handy for boats, cars, hikers, etc. But the other part of this is that a private corporation simply can't afford to lose money on 19 out of 20 ideas. If I had gone to the CEO of my last company, a private engineering firm that specialized in designing the guts (ductwork, piping, and electrical lines) of buildings, and said to him "Duane, I've got an idea, supported by some cutting edge science, that would save 30% of the electrical bill for a building. All we need to do is set up a basic metallurgical shop and mix the following ratios of ores." I would have been laughed at.
However, if I take that same idea, packaged in a "white paper" to the Navy Research Lab or DARPA, and the idea seemed sound, they're likely as not to throw a $500k bone my way, and in a year they might have a new product, Wallerite, that has the mechanical properties of aluminum ductwork but the insulative properties of foam board insulation. In which case, the government would buy a ton of it at cost (via Bayh-Dole) and I wouldn't make a lot of money off that...but then companies like my former one would spec that super ductwork in their designs and courtesy commercialization efforts (also funded by a STTR), I might make billions. Now, for every 1 engineer that makes Wallerite and really does some good, we do get 19 engineers working on the F-35, the biggest boondoggle in military acquisition history. Nevertheless, if the government were to cut the $500k out of the Defense budget that I would need to develop Wallerite, then not only does the world (and environment) miss out on my cutting edge new ductwork material, but the national economy loses a lot of potential revenue (and tax dollars). Or, as Tony Stark says in the first Iron Man movie:

Tell me, do you plan to report on the millions we’ve saved by advancing medical technology or kept from starvation with our intellicrops? All those breakthroughs, military funding, honey.

Later in his post, Yglesias drops a weird doozy

The Manhattan Project involved a huge proportion of the world’s finest scientific minds and rightly so. But undertaking that kind of civilian to military brain drain all the time can be very harmful.

I think he's misrepresenting the Defense Budget if he blankets it under "military" brain drain.
That all said, I am in favor of cutting the Defense budget. Only, let's not cut the research budget (I admit bias), instead, let's cut back on unjustified empire-building in faraway countries where the locals despise us.


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The Post-Labor Era

Megan suggests that while we "lose jobs to China," we in fact are still maintaining jobs...we just create different ones:

For an individual with a job in a textile factory, there may indeed be displacement.  Yet over the centuries, our economy has "lost" millions of jobs.  Weavers no longer ply their trade in front of a hand loom, threshers don't stride through the golden fields of wheat with their scythes, and wheelwrights and blacksmiths have lost their livelihoods to the horseless carriage.  Yet unemployment has not shot up to 100%; over time, we've found jobs to replace all of these specialties.

Perhaps someone will protest that we lost those jobs to technology, rather than trade, but what's the difference between competing with a Chinese laborer, and competing with a machine?  Either one can cause distressing temporary dislocation, but both of them make us more productive, boosting our lifestyle (and, thankfully, the lifestyle of the Chinese laborer).

Now, I feel this needs a qualifier. While in general I agree with her; if the US gave up a manufacturing job and gained a tech-sector job, then both US and China would benefit. However, not every vacated job in the last 100 years was replaced by a fitter, smarter job that provided the employee with enhanced happiness. How many manufacturing jobs, given this lose one - gain one scenario, have been replaced by high-stress jobs in real estate, or in mutual funds? Jobs that, for some, might provide a paycheck and nothing more. How many lost manufacturing jobs are replaced by volatile jobs at companies that fire and rehire with a libertarian-loved reckless disregard for anything but the bottom line?

Here's my bottom line: until we can successfully educate the American people to a point where they all take productive, stable jobs in technically demanding fields, we will need manufacturing jobs to keep unemployment down. 

More on this to come.

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Axed

I'm taking Curious Cat off my blogroll, as it has degraded to hackery and advertising.


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Ending Cars?

After several months of arguing in favor of autonomous cars...I feel its about time to start tackling mass transit. This comes on the heels of me reading a report that for every ten barrels of oil that enter the United States, seven of them power automobiles. That's a lot of oil. And subsequently, it is a lot of CO2.

The solution to this abject waste of natural resources would of course be to expand mass transit, and streamline it, and make it more personal, so that large number of people gave up on their cars. This, of course, assumes that Transfer Booths and Stepping Disks cannot be invented in the short term.

Now, in the event that not every city will want to reorganize into a "totalitarian hellscape" with optimized subway systems and zero streets, an eventuality must be that:
1. The distance from your personal starting point to the mass transit approaches zero.
2. The mass transit system day to day deviation in arrival and departure time approaches zero.
3. The distance from the mass transit to your destination approaches zero.

Of course, we cannot realistically expect every mass transit system to run exactly on time every day, and often, they pad the departure times so that delays in the arrivals disappear. This leads to inefficiencies in the system. You end up with variations of this, like when subways basically run as fast as possible, without the expectation of pre-timed departures. Or you have busses, which often have published departure times from various stops, and a small amount of dead time at each stop accounts for late arrivals. Early arrivals mean a bus often idles, wasting gas.
So what causes an early or late arrival of a bus? Traffic lights and traffic would be the most obvious reasons. What if these were eliminated?  The easiest way to eliminate traffic lights would be to eliminate cars.

Think of it: a city where the streets are completely covered with buses. By eliminated the congestion of cars, it frees up a massive amount of road surface that can be occupied by buses, which now can run at more stops, increasing the customization and helpfulness of the mass transit system by dropping you off closer to your destination. Further, the massive increase in demand for bus services should thereby decrease the price. Or at least make the bus service more efficient.

Imagine, if you will, that the whole city transit system can be reorganized into a giant fractal pattern. Or like a tributary system for a massive set of rivers that all flow into a central lake. Every morning it "rains" people, who hop on the nearest mass transit object, be it a bus or train or trolley or whatever. Then then amalgamate into a critical mass that requires a larger mass driver to move them further towards the central hub. This is, unfortunately, exactly how mass transit systems are designed in theory but never in practice. Part of the reason for this is that the mass transit system is usually built around the highway system for a city, that is, it runs along the most convenient routes possible given that the actual most convenient routes are already occupied by mega-super-highways. What if your ten lane super highway was instead occupied by nine lanes of mass transit and one lane of opposed flow mass transit, for the rare birds that travel from city to suburb to work? Can you really tell me that such a system would be slower for people's commutes? Don't make me laugh.

Taxi drivers will rail against what I am about to say: cities should ban cars. It is really any more farfetched than driverless cars? In the case of driverless cars, the added cost of the autonomous driving electronics package would be offset by the decrease cost of gas and the decreased cost of car insurance, as you basically wouldn't need it. In the case of city-wide car bans, the added cost of taxes to subsidize the huge surge in number of mass transit entities would be offset by the individual savings found in most cases by eliminating gas from the budget completely, as well as the car itself (and insurance).

Of course, none of this will ever happen. But what if...


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Busy

Like TPI, I have been pulled away from my hobbies as of late, due to familial obligations and certain temporary extra-curriculars. Forgive me, dear readers, but posts may be a bit light - for a bit longer.

Just to keep you in the know, I am working on two proposals, worth $50k each, to develop clean energy technologies. I can only write so much a day...and those proposals involve a lot of writing.

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Cars that Drive Themselves, Ctd

Tim Lee has made a bet with Ryan Avent:

I bet you $500 that on your daughter’s 16th birthday, it won’t be possible and legal for someone with no driver’s license to hop into a self-driving car in DC, give it an address in Philly, take a nap, and wake up at her destination 3-4 hours later (depending on traffic, obviously).
The car must be generally commercially available–not a research prototype or limited regulatory trial. It can be either purchased or a rented “taxi.” And obviously there can’t be anyone helping to guide the vehicle either in the car or over the air.

Of course TAE has an opinion about this. I think it is naive to believe that one day soon we'll all just "switch over" to driverless cars. Instead, I imagine that Lee will win the bet but Avent will win the war: by 2026, vehicles will be available with certain levels of autonomy that continue to incrementally increase safety for passengers. Perhaps his daughter will still need a driver's license, but won't need to use her driving skills except in the event of severe weather, or in parking lots or National Parks or somesuch.

For more on driverless cars, see my entry here and embedded links. We've been over this a lot at TAE.
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