Streetcar Plans Plow Ahead

Friday, September 7th, 2012

Streetcars are making a comeback — with federal backing:

In 2009, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood pledged $280 million for urban-transit projects, such as streetcars. During the past four years, the Department of Transportation doled out more than $450 million to 12 streetcar projects across the country, according to the Federal Transit Administration.

Atlanta and Salt Lake City already have broken ground on streetcar projects with a total of $74 million in federal funding.

Minneapolis is preparing to apply for more federal money to get a project under way after receiving a $900,000 federal planning grant in late 2010, said Peter Wagenius, a policy director for Mayor R.T. Rybak. “These streetcar lines are short not because they should be, but rather because cities have been doing what was possible with available funding,” Mr. Wagenius said.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

Peter Schiff Undercover at DNC

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

Peter Schiff rubs me the wrong way, but his short stint undercover at the DNC is eye-opening:

Posted in Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

Californians spend freely on Amazon.com before sales tax deadline

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

Depending on where they live, Californians pay 7.25% to 9.75% in sales taxes, and Amazon.com is poised to collect California sales tax in a few days, so shoppers are buying now:

“I’ve ordered nine things in the last two weeks,” said Cheng, 32, whose purchases include a hands-free roaming camera for $199.99, five pounds of protein powder for $53.99 and exercise resistance bands for $26.99. “Any time you can save money, that’s a good thing.”

He’s not the only one looking for a deal.

Abdel Ibrahim, a tech entrepreneur and trader from San Diego, said he would buy a MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with retina display on Amazon before the cutoff, a move that will save him about $270 in sales taxes.

“It makes a huge difference,” the 30-year-old said. “If there’s anything else I can think of where I can fork up some money and save a couple hundred bucks, I probably will.”

Amazon won’t say whether sales to California customers have spiked in recent weeks. But judging from comments on social media sites and reportedly increased buying activity in other states before similar sales tax laws went into effect, many shoppers see these final days as an excuse to shop freely.

[...]

The Seattle company, which for years avoided having a physical presence in California so it wouldn’t have to collect sales taxes, is now opening two enormous fulfillment centers in the state. The warehouses, in San Bernardino and Patterson, are expected to bring more than 1,000 new jobs to the state. Once they’re up and running, the proximity of the centers could speed up shipping times for shoppers — same-day shipping, however, isn’t in the plans yet.

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Entrepreneurship is hard

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

Entrepreneur Steve Blank fixed electronic warfare equipment in Vietnam — which was a great job, from his 19-year-old perspective:

One fine May day, on one of my infrequent trips to the flight line (I usually had to be dragged since it was really hot outside the air-conditioned shop), I noticed a few crew chiefs huddled around an empty aircraft spot next to the plane I was working on. Typically there would have been another of the A-7’s parked there. I didn’t think much of it as I was crawling over our plane trying to help troubleshoot some busted wiring. But I started noticing more and more vans stop by with other pilots and other technicians — some to talk to the crew chief, others just to stop and stare at the empty spot where a plane should have been parked. I hung back until one of my fellow techs said, “Lets go find out what the party is about.”

We walked over and quickly found out it wasn’t a party — it was more like a funeral.  The A-7 had been shot down over Cambodia.  And as we found out later, the pilot wasn’t ever coming home.

While we were living the good life in Thailand, the Army and Marines were pounding the jungle every day in Vietnam. Some of them saw death up close. 58,000 didn’t come back — their average age was 22.

Everyone shook their heads about how sad. I heard later from “old-timers” who had come back for multiple tours “Oh, this is nothing you should have been here in…” and they’d insert whatever year they had been around when some days multiple planes failed to return. During the Vietnam War ~9,000 aircraft and helicopters were destroyed. Thousands of pilots and crews were killed.

I still remember that exact moment — standing in the bright sun where a plane should be, with the ever present smell of jet fuel, hearing the engines of various planes taxing and taking off with the roar and then distant rumble of full afterburners — when all of a sudden all the noise and smells seemed to stop — like someone had suddenly turned off a switch. And there I had a flash of realization and woke up to where I was. I suddenly and clearly understood this wasn’t a game. This wasn’t just a big party. We were engaged in killing other people and they were equally intent on killing us. I turned and looked at the pilots with a growing sense of awe and fear and realized what their job — and ours — was.

That day I began to think about the nature of war, the doctrine of just war, risk, and the value of National Service.

Captain Jeremiah Costello and his A-7D was the last attack aircraft shot down in the Vietnam War.

Less then ninety days later the air war over Southeast Asia ended.

For the rest of my career when things got tough in a startup (being yelled at, working until I dropped, running out of money, being on both ends of stupid decisions, pushing people to their limits, etc.), I would vividly remember seeing that empty spot on the flightline. It put everything in perspective.

Entrepreneurship is hard but you can’t die.

Posted in Business, Steve Blank, Technology, War | No Comments »

The Foreign Language of Mad Men

Wednesday, September 5th, 2012

The past, even the recent past, is a foreign country, and, as Mad Men reminds us, they speak a foreign language there:

It’s in business language, though, that Mad Men really shows its weaknesses. Modern boardroom language creeps in with striking regularity. Take the verb “leverage,” for example. Last season, Pete Campbell angrily reported that Philip Morris used Sterling-Cooper “to leverage a sweeter deal” from another agency. Leverage presumably sounded like a hard-nosed business term in the table read; but it comes from banking, and hard as it may be to remember, investment bankers did not always rule the roost of American business. Widespread use of “to leverage” metaphorically is a creation of Reagan’s America, not Kennedy’s. Don Draper and his peers in grey flannel suits looked out on a dull, relatively unimportant banking sector; for them, leverage meant debt as much as it meant power. Not only is the individual phrase wrong; so is the whole field of metaphor. Talking like an investment banker would have had approximately the allure of talking like an accountant.

Business vernacular seems to trip up the writers again and again. Draper’s new contract in season three includes a “signing bonus,” a phrase that was extremely rare outside of sports (the staid “bonus for signing” was far more common); Paul Kinsey is urged to “keep a low profile” at a meeting in 1963, a phrase that spread like wildfire only in 1969; and in season four Honda sets a series of rules to “even the playing field” in a competition, a phrase that (along with the more common “level the playing field”) seems to have entered the boardroom around 1977.

It’s not only business, though. There are scores of idioms that are strikingly modern. “Feel good about,” “match made in heaven,” “tough act to follow,” “make eye contact,” “fantasize about”; all are at least tenfold more common today than in Mad Men‘s times. Any of these individually might be perfectly plausible; but for “feel good about,” for example, to be said four separate times over the course of the show by several different characters is extraordinarily unlikely. Such flaws aren’t just anecdotal; shows and movies from the 1960s, written by writers with as sure a grasp of the spoken language as Weiner, have far fewer outliers from the print corpus than their modern imitators. The Twilight Zone, for example, doesn’t use “feel good about” once in over 100 episodes.

[...]

What seems to be the most ubiquitous mistake in Mad Men is so frequent as to be invisible: the phrase “I need to.” Modern scripts set in 1960s, including Mad Men, use it constantly: it’s about as frequent as everyday words like “good,” “between,” or “most.” But to say “I need to” so much is a surprisingly modern practice: books, television shows, and movies from the 1960s use it at least ten times less often, and many never use it all. Sixties dialogue written back then used “ought to” far more often than modern imitators do. I checked several movies and TV seasons from 1960 to 1965, and all use “ought to” more often than “need to”; every modern show I could find set in the ’60s does the reverse. Google Ngrams shows the trend clearly as well.

Posted in Linguistics, Media | 1 Comment »

The Siege of Academe

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Kevin Carey examines Silicon Valley’s attempts to besiege Academe:

Minerva sprang from Nelson’s observation that higher education was increasingly a realm of mismatched supply and demand. Recent decades have been generally peaceful and prosperous on planet Earth. There are a lot more people with the desire and ability to pay for higher education than there used to be. Elite American schools are the unchallenged market leaders, which is why applications to Harvard have increased by double digits annually for years, with growing demand from China and other fast-developing economies.

In response to this surge in demand for its product, Harvard has done the following: absolutely nothing. It hasn’t expanded the size of its freshman class by a single student in the last twenty years. With a few exceptions, this is true for all elite American schools. They don’t have to get bigger, they don’t want to get bigger, and, anchored as they are to immovable physical places, they can’t get bigger in any meaningful or not absurdly expensive way. Yale, one of the exceptions, is currently in the process of expanding its undergraduate enrollment by 15 percent, or about 800 students. This involves building two new “colleges,” the rectangular gothic buildings in which Yale undergraduates live and study, at a cost of more than $600 million—or twenty-four times what Minerva got in seed money, an amount that was repeatedly described to me as shockingly large.

Minerva is designed to soak up this growing excess demand. Nelson plans to signal elite status through a combination of rigorous admissions standards and a nail-tough academic curriculum. While the courses will be conducted primarily online, students will live together in shared housing units in cities around the world. They’ll start in their home country and then rotate to different cities in later years, finishing with a capstone project in their chosen major. Nelson figures this can be done for less than half of what Ivies charge students, and that if Minerva ends up with a student body of 10,000 undergraduates it will be a financial success.

In many ways the plausibility of Minerva comes down to a pure numbers game. The world is very big, and the number of students served by elite American schools is very small. They turn down nine out of ten potential customers now, and the number of global aspirants is only starting to grow. Nelson expects that 90 percent of Minerva students won’t be American. Even with the inevitable discount applied to newness and online-ness, even with a high bar to get admitted and a second high bar to graduate, at some point the sheer weight of numbers solves everything. Ten thousand is a small amount in a world of seven billion people.

Indeed, scale is the oxygen feeding the combustible mix of money, ambition, and technology-driven transformation in the valley. Low margins, uncertain business models, limited marketing budgets—all of these limitations and more can be overcome by scale. And the rapid growth of mobile telecommunications technology means that the number of people in the world who are potential customers is quickly moving toward the number of people in the world.

Minerva isn’t the only project in this city—or in this neighborhood, even—playing this numbers game. One company I visited had start-up costs so low that it never even had the need for venture funding; in valley parlance, it was “100 percent bootstrapped.” Quizlet, as the company is called, was started in 2007 by a Bay Area high school student named Andrew Sutherland. The first product was flash cards. If you were learning the names of animals in French, for example (the sophomore-year high school assignment that motivated Sutherland to create Quizlet), you’d create a digital flash card by entering “penguin” on one side and “manchot” on the other. By the time Sutherland was a college junior, the site had three million monthly users. Now the company is a typical San Francisco start-up with black chairs and MacBook Airs. It makes enough money to rent space and pay salaries by running small ads on the site and by selling a premium version for $15. The ads and subscriptions aren’t expensive, but they don’t have to be when you’ve got millions of users and host everything in the Cloud.

To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions, the executive responds. Quizlet has no sales force, a very small marketing department, and more than seven million monthly unique visitors. (There are about fifty million public school students in the United States.) Quizlet, in its busiest months, during the school year, is among the top 500 most visited sites on the entire Internet. Now they’ve expanded beyond flash cards. You can create study groups, convert your content into multiplayer games, and search for cards and games that other people have created. We think we can get to 40 million users, then 100 million, says the executive. The question that drives the company, he says, is this: How can we create amazing learning tools for one billion people? This is the way most of the people in the valley talk.

Posted in Business, Education, Technology | 1 Comment »

The Steampunk Era

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

Naval technology went through a brief but crazy steampunk era before settling on the modern battleship design:

And nothing was more steampunkish than the era’s naval ships. HMS Inflexible (launched 1876), shown above, is as good an example as any. [...] In this image she retains an auxiliary sailing rig — later reduced to pole masts for signaling and to support fighting-tops armed with light weapons. Her main armament is 4 x 16-inch muzzle-loading rifles. (Most navies had adopted breech-loaders, but the RN reverted to muzzle loading after a couple of nasty accidents.)

Her two turrets are offset to port and starboard — ‘Murricans of sufficient geekitude may recognize the similar overall arrangement of USS Maine, of 1898 “remember the” fame. (Infamy, perhaps, from the Spanish perspective.) This turret arrangement was in considerable vogue at the time, in an effort to maximize all-around fire.The turrets could, in theory, fire directly ahead and astern, and even through gaps in the narrow flying deck. In practice, trying this caused considerable blast damage to the ship.

The underlying assumption was that — given the slow firing rate and doubtful accuracy of those enormous guns — a battle would likely devolve into a melee instead of an orderly line-astern engagement. This same speculation lay behind the most notorious feature of steampunk-era warships — the ram bow, which ultimately accounted for precisely two “hostiles,” along with some half a dozen “friendlies.”

Nevertheless the ram bow became such a defining feature of warships that it was retained into the early 20th century. Indeed, most early-generation dreadnoughts had ram-shaped bows, though no actual reinforced rams.

HMS Inflexible also carried another weapon intended for a close-range melee: a pair of underwater tubes for launching torpedoes. These, as it turned out, were to have a much bigger future than the ram bow. Even at the time they were recognized as having extraordinary implications. Inflexible’s stubby 16-inch muzzle-loaders, or any comparable guns, could only be carried by a large and very costly ship. But even a fairly small boat could carry and launch a torpedo.

It soon occurred to some analysts (as we would call them now) that this weapon could revolutionize not only tactics but naval strategy. By the 1880s torpedo boats became the space fighters of the late-Victorian imagination, dashing in to strike at cumbersome death stars battleships. The British and French even experimented with torpedo-boat carriers.

Probably things would not have worked out quite so neatly as the torpedo prophets imagined, even if there had been a suitable war to test out their doctrine. The same technological progress that provided 16-inch guns and ironclads to carry them, as well as torpedoes and torpedo boats, soon produced so-called quick-firing guns, and these were mounted on the big ships. Torpedo boats could no longer attack with impunity.

Even before the heyday of torpedo boats, another creative idea for deploying torpedoes got a trial. HMS Polyphemus (launched in 1881) was a “torpedo ram.” A fairly large ship resembling a surfaced submarine, she had an armored turtle deck for protection, the inevitable ram bow, and several torpedo tubes along with reload torpedoes.

Tech progress (specifically the quick-firing gun) rendered Polyphemus obsolescent by the time she entered service — a typical fate of steampunk-era warships. But she would end up being indirectly immortalized in science fiction.

By the time HG Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, in the late 1990s, the torpedo-ram concept was already long obsolete. But HMS Thunder Child in the novel is described as a torpedo ram. The idea must have stuck in Wells’ mind, some years earlier, as the epitome of advanced naval technology.

One commenter notes that an era is defined not so much by the span of time but what we remember:

If WWII came a decade earlier, our imagery would be full of all-metal biplanes. If it came a decade later, radar-fused proximity shells could have made conventional attack by aircraft on battle fleets as suicidal as WWI’s frontal assaults against machine guns.

He mistakenly notes that trench warfare was never seen as the likely outcome of a large war prior to WWI breaking out, when Ivan Bloch predicted exactly that, and H.G. Wells cited his work in The Land Ironclads.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Human Cycles

Sunday, September 2nd, 2012

As Turchin et al. developed cliodynamics, they found that two trends dominate the data on political instability:

The first, which they call the secular cycle, extends over two to three centuries. It starts with a relatively egalitarian society, in which supply and demand for labour roughly balance out. In time, the population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. At a certain point, the society becomes top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again.

Superimposed on that secular trend, the researchers observe a shorter cycle that spans 50 years — roughly two generations. Turchin calls this the fathers-and-sons cycle: the father responds violently to a perceived social injustice; the son lives with the miserable legacy of the resulting conflict and abstains; the third generation begins again. Turchin likens this cycle to a forest fire that ignites and burns out, until a sufficient amount of underbrush accumulates and the cycle recommences.

These two interacting cycles, he says, fit patterns of instability across Europe and Asia from the fifth century BC onwards. Together, they describe the bumpy transition of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire in the first century BC. He sees the same patterns in ancient Egypt, China and Russia, and says that they explain the timing of last year’s Egyptian uprising, which took the regime of then-president Hosni Mubarak by surprise. At the time, the Egyptian economy was growing and poverty levels were among the lowest in the developing world, so the regime could reasonably have expected stability. In the decade leading up to the revolution, however, the country saw a quadrupling of graduates with no prospects — a marker of elite overproduction and hence, Turchin argues, trouble.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | No Comments »

September 1, 1939

Saturday, September 1st, 2012

On September 1, 1939, 1.8 million German troops invaded Poland on three fronts — East Prussia in the north, Germany in the west, and Slovakia in the south:

They had 2600 tanks against the Polish 180, and over 2000 aircraft against the Polish 420. Their “Blitzkrieg” tactics, coupled with their bombing of defenceless towns and refugees, had never been seen before and, at first, caught the Poles off-guard. By September 14th. Warsaw was surrounded. At this stage the poles reacted, holding off the Germans at Kutno and regrouping behind the Wisla (Vistula) and Bzura rivers. Although Britain and France declared war on September 3rd. the Poles received no help — yet it had been agreed that the Poles should fight a defensive campaign for only 2 weeks during which time the Allies could get their forces together and attack from the west.

There are many “myths” that surround the September Campaign; the fictional Polish cavalry charges against German tanks (actually reported by the Italian press and used as propaganda by the Germans), the alleged destruction of the Polish Air Force on the ground, or claims that Polish armour failed to achieve any success against the invaders. In reality, and despite the fact that Poland was only just beginning to modernise her armed forces and had been forced (by Britain and France) to delay mobilisation (which they claimed might be interpreted as aggressive behaviour) so that, at the time of invasion, only about one-third of her total potential manpower was mobilised, Polish forces ensured that the September campaign was no “walk-over”. The Wehrmacht had so under-rated Polish anti-tank capabilities (the Polish-designed anti-tank gun was one of the best in the world at that time) that they had gone into action with white “balkankreuz”, or crosses, prominently displayed in eight locations; these crosses made excellent aiming points for Polish gun-sights and forced the Germans to radically rethink their national insignia, initially overpainting them in yellow and then, for their later campaigns, adopting the modified “balkankreuz” similar to that used by the Luftwaffe. The recently designed 7TP “czolg lekki”, or light tank, the first in the world to be designed with a diesel engine, proved to be superior to German tanks of the same class (the PzKpfw I and II) inflicting serious damage to the German forces, limited only by the fact that they were not used in concentrated groups. They were absorbed by the Germans into their own Panzer divisions at the end of the campaign.

On September 17th. Soviet forces invaded from the east. Warsaw surrendered 2 weeks later, the garrison on the Hel peninsula surrendered on October 2nd., and the Polesie Defence group, after fighting on two fronts against both German and Soviet forces, surrendered on October 5th. The Poles had held on for twice as long as had been expected and had done more damage to the Germans than the combined British and French forces were to do in 1940. The Germans lost 50,000 men, 697 planes and 993 tanks and armoured cars.

Thousands of soldiers and civilians managed to escape to France and Britain whilst many more went “underground”. A government-in-exile was formed with Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz as President and General Wladyslaw Sikorski as Prime Minister.

Under the German-Soviet pact Poland was divided; the Soviets took, and absorbed into the Soviet Union, the eastern half (Byelorussia and the West Ukraine), the Germans incorporated Pomerania, Posnania and Silesia into the Reich whilst the rest was designated as the General-Gouvernement (a colony ruled from Krakow by Hitler’s friend, Hans Frank).

In the Soviet zone 1.5 million Poles (including women and children) were transported to labour camps in Siberia and other areas. Many thousands of captured Polish officers were shot at several secret forest sites; the first to be discovered being Katyn, near Smolensk.

The more I learn about World War II the less sense it makes.

(Hat tip to David Foster.)

Posted in War | 11 Comments »

Tannerite

Saturday, September 1st, 2012

Ever wonder how all those people who upload their videos of targets exploding on YouTube get away with possesing and detonating explosives?

Actually, no, that’s not a question I’ve ever asked, but Cheaper Than Dirt‘s Rob answers it:

This may surprise some of you, but the compound they detonate is not a regular explosive — it is a binary explosive shot indicator and subject to a different set of laws. Tannerite, the compound in question, is the trademark for a patented ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder based binary explosive used primarily as a target for firearms practice. Tannerite comes separated into two powders, which by themselves are completely harmless. You combine the two to produce the explosive. It is completely legal and you can purchase it from a number of sources. Tannerite holds unique properties in that it remains stable unless hit with a massive amount of force, such as a high velocity projectile. Simply dropping it or hitting it with a hammer will not produce any effect.

Some of you might be wondering how in the world a powerful explosive like this is legal. Interestingly, it has many legitimate uses outside of target practice. In the United States, it is a primary tool for avalanche control and police use. Tannerite falls under the same laws as black powder and all other explosives that are exempt for sporting use. ATF regulations allow the manufacturer to produce the two components separately since neither compound is an explosive by itself. However, the mixture is an explosive once mixed, and you cannot transport it without following strict regulations including insurance, packaging, and signage on the vehicle. Various regulations also govern the storage of mixed Tannerite. The compound is so stable, that low-level rifle and pistol ammunition will not set it off. Only high-velocity rounds have the energy to make Tannerite explode.

Despite its explosive capabilities, the misuse of the product has resulted in no deaths to date. Statistically speaking, a neighborhood swimming pool is far more dangerous than Tannerite. A civilian may shoot exploding rifle targets the same day they mix their Tannerite as long as they do not exceed their state’s limit on explosive powder. Per federal regulations, the law allows you to possess 50 pounds of pre-mixed powder for sporting use. A state such as Maryland has a limit of 5 pounds.

I cannot imagine this information being misused.

Posted in Weapons | No Comments »

Newer Entries »