Space, the Final Frontier

The title of this post comes from the opening of the 1966 Star Trek TV show.  Star Trek chronicled the adventures of the star ship Enterprise as it voyaged on its 5 year mission of exploration.  It was kind of like the Beagle, a British naval ship that undertook an actual 5 year mission of exploration with Charles Darwin aboard.  Darwin was the resident Botanist, akin to Spock, the Science Officer.  Darwin restricted himself to scientific activities, whereas Spock did little or no Science.  I would describe Spock's activities as more of a spy, or even more accurately as a CIA station chief, someone who coordinates intelligence gathering activities.  Spock was also more actively engaged in the fighting than an actual scientist would be, certainly more actively than Darwin ever thought of being.  Another difference is that the Enterprise's mission ended up lasting only three years before the show got cancelled.

And three years is just about how long the golden age of the "manned" component of the scientific exploration of space ended up lasting.  The Apollo moon landings yielded a bonanza of scientific results.  All of the astronauts who walked on the moon received training in Geology.  Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17 - the last moon walk) was an actual geologist, having gotten his PhD from Harvard.  This geological training allowed the astronauts to select interesting samples for return and to properly document the samples and other geological items of interest that they encountered in the local area around the landings.  This "golden age of manned scientific exploration" lasted from July 21, 1969 to December 14, 1972, just over three years. Other than this, the manned space program has been pretty much a bust from a science perspective.  A lot was learned about how to build and operate large rockets but this could have been learned from an unmanned program.  And a lot was learned about how to get humans to and from space and keep them alive while they are in space.  But this is more "means" information (how to do the experiment) rather than "ends" information (what the results of the experiment are and what these results mean).

The Star Trek (fictional) and Apollo (real) programs are how everyone always expected that space exploration would take place.  You would send daring men and women off to explore.  That was how it had always been done.  It didn't occur to anyone that there might be another way.  And until the advent of Star Trek and Apollo (the '60s) there really wasn't an alternative.  The word "robot" was coined in 1920.  The idea of robot-like creatures is older but for a long time no one thought seriously that a practical robot could actually be built.  The early post WWII era saw the emergence of the concept of "cybernetics", the use of devices to exert autonomous complex control.  By the '60s these techniques had evolved to the point that unmanned "robot" spacecraft were used as pathfinders to set up for later manned missions.

The Russian "Luna" program succeeded in 1959 in crashing a man made device into the Moon.  The U.S. successfully crashed Ranger 4 into the moon in 1962 and soft landed Surveyor 1 in 1966.  There were also various "fly by" and "orbiter" robotic missions to all kinds of places during the same time period.  Besides paving the way for a successful manned landing these robotic missions gathered a tremendous amount of scientific data.  In fact, by the 1969 Apollo 11 manned moon landing, robot space craft had become quite adept at pulling off scientific missions.  But the mind set was still that these robotic missions were pathfinders, paving the way for later "serious" exploration by manned expeditions.  Why?

People are creative and flexible.  They can make "on the spot" decisions.  It seems manifestly obvious that a manned expedition should be able to do a better job.  Human hands connected to human eyes are very sophisticated tools.  But ultimately the argument comes down to flexibility.  People are just so darned flexible and things never go exactly as planned.  So having people on the scene should allow last minute adjustments to be made resulting in a more successful expedition.  And until the advent of small solid state computer based technology there was a lot to be said for this idea.  People will always be more flexible than robots but the "value added" has gotten much smaller.  It's still there.  I have no doubt that all things being equal, people will do a better job than robots.  But all things are not equal.

Putting people in space is fantastically hard and expensive.  People are completely unsuited for space so you have to cocoon them.  They need an earth-like environment with clean air and a ready supply of food and water.  You also have to deal with their waste products: gaseous, liquid, and solid.  They also can't be banged around too much nor exposed to too much heat or cold, nor exposed to too much radiation.  They are big (5' is unusually short) and heavy (100 lbs is pretty light).  Hauling the people, their environment, their "consumables", the equipment necessary to maintain their environment and deal with their waste products, all together this results in the need to haul around a lot of tons of stuff.  Getting a ton of stuff to space costs roughly $20 million dollars (e.g. $10,000/lb).  And you need from a few tons to a lot of tons of stuff.  And I haven't even figured in the cost of making the stuff you need to haul around.

Robots based on computer technology are much less demanding.  Robots work fine in a vacuum so you don't need an atmosphere.  They don't need fuel in the traditional sense, just a little electricity.  They can stand a much wider range of heat and cold so you don't need nearly as much temperature regulation machinery.  They need to be protected from radiation but here too their tolerance range is much broader than humans.  The result is that you can build something that will do something useful that will be less than a cubic foot in volume  and will weigh as little as a few pounds.  The only "consumable" it will require is a little electricity and, since you can put the whole thing into hibernation for months, perhaps years, mission duration can be measured in decades.  You give up some flexibility but look how much you get back.  And do you really give up flexibility?

The common wisdom is that robot missions are inflexible while manned missions are flexible.  I do not believe the record supports the common wisdom.  If nothing else, manned missions are severely limited in their duration.  This means that even if you would like to extend a mission, or even significantly reprogram it, you can't.  All that stuff that is necessary to keep people alive doesn't let you make big changes in the mission.  Finally, there's that ultimate inflexibility.  All your astronauts have to make it back and make it back alive.

What I am now going to do is look at robot missions that are notable for their flexibility, missions that were drastically reconfigured from their original mission plan after they were launched.  And I am going to start with the mission that figured in the first Star Trek movie in 1979, the Voyager mission.  When launched in 1977 Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were just supposed to visit Jupiter and Saturn.   After launch the missions were reconfigured.  Voyager 1 was reprogrammed to also fly by Titan, a moon of Saturn.  Voyager 2 was reprogrammed to fly by Uranus and Neptune after completing its flyby of Jupiter and Saturn.  Finally, both Voyagers were reprogrammed to research the edge of the solar system.   This final reconfiguration was made over 12 years after the missions were initially launched.  In 1990 Voyager 1, which was 3.7 billion miles from earth at the time, took a series of "family portrait" pictures of the Sun, Earth, and other planets.  From this distance the Sun looks like just another star of unspectacular brightness.  And the Earth is so small and dim that you can't make it out in the picture unless you know exactly where to look.  The Voyagers are continuing to collect scientific data but the "family portrait" pictures were the last taken by either spacecraft.

The NEAR (later NEAR Shoemaker) mission was designed to investigate the Asteroid Eros.  The initial plan was for the probe to go into orbit around the Asteroid.  Photographs would be taken and various other readings (e.g. radar, magnetic field measurements, etc.) would also be made.  The mission was launched in 1996 and went into orbit four years later.  The package weighed 800KG at launch and just under 500KG when it went into orbit.  So it consumed only 300KG (about 700lbs) in four years.  Just try keeping a human alive for 4 years on 700lbs of anything.  The power supply for the mission could generate 1800 watts, less than would be consumed by 20 100 watt light bulbs.  The instrument package weighed 56KG, about the same as an astronaut, and consumed 81 watts of power (less than 1 100 watt light bulb).  Try to keep an astronaut from freezing to death in deep space by letting him snuggle up to a single light bulb.  The mission spent about a year in orbit around Eros.  During this period many changes were made to its orbit to get a better look at some feature or another.  But that's not why I picked out this mission.

After the probe had entered orbit and after a lot of science data had been collected a drastic change was made to the mission.  A decision was made and implemented to land (well technically crash but the impact was so soft that none of the instruments were damaged) the probe on the Asteroid.  The spacecraft operated for 16 days after the crash before being shut down.  Bear in mind that the probe was never designed to land.  All the design work was based on the probe NOT running into anything, let alone crash landing into an asteroid.  But it was landed successfully and operated properly for more than two weeks after the landing.

The Deep Impact probe was launched on January 12, 2005.  The plan was to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1 (formally 9P/Tempel).  An "impactor", essentially a large chunk of copper, would be crashed into the comet.  The ejecta would be studied to learn more about the internal structure of comets. The plan was implemented successfully with the impactor hitting on July 4, 2005.  So we're all done here, right?  We did everything we were supposed to so that's it.  Well, not exactly.  The probe had some fuel left and was working fine, except that it no longer had a chunk of copper that could be crashed into something else.  But instead of shutting everything down and forgetting about the probe the mission was reprogrammed to do a flyby of comet Hartley 2 (formally 103P/Hartley).  The Hartley flyby was completed on November 4, 2010.  And, oh by the way, since they had this really cool camera that wasn't doing anything most of the time, they tacked on another mission called EPOCh.  EPOCh took pictures of the solar systems of seven stars that were known to have planets orbiting them and, just for fun, took a bunch of pictures of the Earth and the Moon.  The probe is still going strong.  There is no word yet on whether the probe will be given still more missions.

I have skipped over many examples of robot probes executing complex missions roughly according to the original plan.  I have skipped over examples of things going horribly wrong and robot probes being successfully reprogrammed to recover and fully complete the original mission.  These things have happened many times over.  And it is possible that some missions have been lost that could have been saved had an Astronaut been on board to fix whatever went wrong.  But configuring the mission in the first place to include an Astronaut would have made the mission impossible (all of the missions I have discussed above were "one way" missions, for instance) or made the initial cost of the mission prohibitive.  Just sending one set of Astronauts to the International Space Station, let alone billions of miles beyond, costs more than the cost of a number of of the individual missions I have discussed.

What I have hoped to demonstrate is that taking the man out of the can does NOT mean taking the flexibility out of the mission.  Because although we have taken the man out of the can we have not taken the man out of the mission.  All of these missions have been directed by people from the ground.  These people are not in a position to lay hands on the hardware.  But they are in a position to do a lot of things.  What is given up besides the ability to lay hands on the equipment is the ability to react quickly.  But what is missing from manned missions is the ability to react slowly.  With robot missions the people on the ground can spend days, weeks, sometimes months figuring out what can be done and how to do it.  They also have ready access to colleagues, libraries, experts, etc. who can pitch in to help.

Robot missions give you the ability to do long duration missions.  Voyager is still going decades after it was launched.  Missions have been reconfigured years after they were launched.  The warranty for the mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers was 90 days.  The "edge of the envelope" estimate was that they might keep working for 270 days.  The Spirit rover may no longer be working but it was known to be working on March 22, 2010, or 2210 days after landing.  This represents a lifetime that is almost 10 times the "edge of the envelope" longest forecast lifetime.  As of December 15, 2010 (day 2450) the Opportunity rover is still going strong.  There is every reason to believe it will break the "10X" barrier.  These kinds of things are just not possible with manned missions.

It is also important to understand that the capabilities of the "robot" part of robot probes are improving exponentially.  The "computer" in each of the Viking probes had less capability than is now typically found in watches.  By the time Spirit and Opportunity were built (circa 2003) the capabilities of the on board computers had improved tremendously.  In early 2007 a major software update was downloaded remotely.  This update made the rovers far more autonomous.  They now make a lot of routine decisions locally without having to check in, and therefore without the delay.  And the hardware used in space probes follows the "ground based" market but lags it by several years due to reliability and other concerns.  So by looking at what's currently available here on the ground we know what the on board capacity of the computers on future probes will look like in a few years.

Today "quad core" processors running at 3 GHz are available inexpensively.  Loading 64GB of RAM into a "server" system is normal and Flash Drives holding up to 256GB are available for less than $1000.  These "available now on a desktop near you" capabilities represent what we will see in probes launched a few years from now.  And it will all fit into a few cubic inches of space and use little power, almost no power when hibernating.  This is enough computing power to enable some serious local decision making.  Lack of local computing power will continue to be less and less of a constraint on future probes.  The biggest constraint on outer solar system probes will not be computer power but the fact that you need a large dish to keep the power requirements of the on board transmitter reasonable.

The match up between manned missions and robot missions already heavily favors robot missions.  And the balance will continue to tilt even more steeply in favor of robot missions.  In spite of this the case for robot probes is rarely made.  Some wise old man, frequently a retired astronaut, shows up regularly in print or on TV to extol the virtues of the manned space program.  I can't remember any print or broadcast outlet giving time to someone to advocate for more robot exploration and less manned exploration.  And that's too bad.   

Negotiation 101

The lame duck session got off to a bad start with the Bush tax cut deal but it has finished off with a bang.  Obama has now had some successes to go with his failures.  This allows us to see what works and what doesn't.  I am going to review how several pieces of legislation went.  I am going to leave out a lot and this will leave out some of Obama's signature accomplishments like the auto industry bailout.  This is perhaps unfair to President Obama but if you expect to be treated fairly you should avoid politics.

I am going to start with the Stimulus bill.  This was passed very early in his administration.  Since it passed it is technically a victory.  But it also highlights some problems with his negotiation technique.  The package consists of roughly one third tax cuts, one third subsidies to state and local governments, and one third new spending, mostly infrastructure projects.  Economists have been studying methods for stimulating the economy going back to the '30s.  There is a broad consensus.  Tax cuts are poor - little or no job creation.  New spending is good - good job creation although it tends to be temporary.  Subsidies to state/local are somewhere in between.  They tend to not create new jobs but they do preserve existing jobs.

So why were the poorly performing tax cut components in the package even though everyone knew they were a poor method of stimulating the economy?  In a word, Republicans.  The idea was to use this component to buy Republican support.  The problem is that it didn't work.  The "stim" was passed with no noticable Republican support.  Worse than that, the Republicans spent the roughly two years between when the "stim" was passed and the election denigrating it.  They were successful in convincing many voters of two things that were wrong, and the Republicans knew that they were wrong.  Many voters believe the "stim" created no jobs.  It created a lot of jobs.  How do we know?  Because of press releases issued by Republicans touting "job creating"  programs in their districts that were paid for by the "stim".  The second lie (there's really no better word to describe the situation) promulgated was the there were no tax cuts in the "stim".  This idea can be traced to Republican politicians and the various mouthpieces of the Republican message machine like Fox news.

The Obama administration can not be faulted for their approach to negotiations over the "stim".  You don't really know what will happen until you actually do it.  The same can not be said about then next major initiative I am going to talk about.  That is Health Care Reform.  The take away from the "stim" process should have been that Republicans would not negotiate in good faith.  "Reasonable" arguments and adopting "Republican" positions (e.g. the tax cut component of the "stim") would not result in Republican support.  The administration should have known all this as a result of the "stim" experience.  Lessions that should have been learned from the "stim" negotiation are not reflected in the Health Care negotiation.

Now if we set aside for a moment the lessons that should have been learned from the "stim" experience then a case can be made for the strategy they used on Health Care.  They did a deal with the big Pharmaceuticals.  In exchange for directing a bunch of money their way, "Pharma" was supposed to support the bill.  Again the other side of the negotiations did not play fair.  While there was not a great deal of public opposition from Pharma they did a lot of damage privately.  They funded a lot of "oppo" groups like astroturf web sites,  They help fund the Tea Party movement through proxies, and they poured a lot of money into Republican candidates and causes.

The next thing the Obama administration did was to do a deal with insurance companies.  They put the "individual mandate" in requiring individuals to purchase health policies from the private insurance companies.  They also killed "government option" alternatives like Medicare buy in that would have provided a low cost alternative to private insurance.  This was supposed to get the insurance industry to support the bill.  It worked exactly like the Pharma deal.  Insurance companies were not that publicly vocal against the bill but they used similar underground methods to support opposition.  So the two deals the Obama administration did may have helped.  But they helped less than they should have.

And like with the "stim" the Obama administration incorporated a lot of Republican ideas in the bill and actively courted Republican politicians to support it.  Like with the "stim" this did not work.  Republican support was zilch.  And the combination of the deals and the courting of Republicans turned out to have a tremendous cost.

Through all this there was one group that the administration conspicuously did NOT cater to.  That was House Democrats.  The deal with Pharma deep sixed any ability to cut drug costs.  The deal with the insurance industry deep sixed any ability to cut insurance overhead costs.  Courting Republicans (and Blue Dog Senators) gave both groups a lot of exposure.  It fixed in the public's mind that these people were powerful and important people.  The side effect was to fix in people's minds that House Democrats were week and unimportant people.  This was in spite of the fact that House Democrats were Obama's most consistent and reliable supporters.

But its even worse than that.  House Democrats raised some issues.  They were firmly swatted down.  "We can't do that.  It would jeopardize our ability to get a deal with Republicans, Blue Dogs, etc.").  In spite of this abuse House Democrats stuck with the President.  They passed every single piece of legislation the President asked for.  And they passed it in the form the White House wanted it in.  This was in spite of the fact that the White House version frequently contained things House Democrats didn't like.  Seen in this context it is absolutely predictable that House Democrats would get hammered in the election.

We now move on to the Bush Tax Cuts.  The White House did a bad deal with the Republicans.  I have discussed this elsewhere (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/12/president-lets-make-deal.html).  The White House argues "it was the best deal we could get".  And they may have been right.  But a large part of the reason it was the best deal the White House could get was previous White House actions.

Finally, we get to move on to some deals that worked out.  Since the Tax Cut deal the following deals have been approved:  repeal of "don't ask don't tell", New START, 9/11 responders, and food safety.  These were all clear wins.  What was different?

My answer is that the White House did not make three key mistakes:  (1) They did not undermine their allies; (2) They did not make premature concessions (and often these premature concessions did not garner reliable support), and (3) they were willing to walk away from the deal.

The White House undermined their allies on the "stim" and particularly on Health Care.  One thing the White House was trying to do with their Health Care strategy was to learn from previous failures.  The Clinton White House tried to do Health Care and failed.  One of the "lessons" was "Don't put up a specific proposal.  This just gives the opposition something to shoot at."  So the Obama administration did not put up a specific proposal.  They finally started to get specific late in the process.

The problem with this is that it represented a double whammy to supporters.  The administration had done deals that removed many key provisions that supporters like me liked.  But we also couldn't defend what was left effectively because there was no specific proposal.  So we couldn't support stuff we liked that was gone because it was gone from the proposal.  And we couldn't support the other stuff because it was not clear what other stuff would actually make it into the final proposal.  This left nothing specific to support.  Apparently we were supposed to support the "trust me" proposal even though we already knew that some of the best stuff would be missing and we had no clear idea what would be cut at the last minute.  This is why there were no giant demonstrations in support of the Health Care proposal.

Compare this to the New START treaty in particular.  This was always a specific proposal.  You knew what you were signing up for when you signed on to support the proposal.  This allowed the White House to go out and round up support.  There was no talk that those Republican Secretaries of State were a bunch of whiners.  It was also a proposal that was very popular with the Democratic base.  The White House deserves credit for rounding up all that Republican support and for sticking with the program.  They also didn't make the mistake of undermining their allies, although I don't know if I would give go so far as to them "credit" for their failure to screw up.

New START is also a great example of not making premature concessions.  The White House made no significant concessions.  The final treaty was the same as the original treaty.  Nothing was changed.  They did n't change the missle counts, for instance even though there was a specific request to do this froma Republican.  Now they did throw a lot of "weapons modernization" money into the pot.  But this was more of a bribe than a concession.

And the same is true for "don't ask don't tell".  They could have watered it down early.  "It won't apply to the Marines".  "We will have a five year, no ten year phase in."  Stuff like that.  Now the White House did concede and do a study.  And they did wait until after the election and then wait further until the study came out.  And it was possible that the study would have turned out to be bad news.  But if the SecDef and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs can't make a study come out the way they want between them, they should be fired.  The fact that they had both the SecDef and the Joint Chiefs chairman also means that they again did not undermine their allies.  In fact they supported their allies.

The "9/11 responders" bill is interesting.  As far as I can tell this was not a big priority for the White House.  The water on this was mostly carried by the New York delegation.  But the White House deserves credit for at least not screwing it up.  They again avoided undermining their allies.  They again made no premature concessions.  And, for whatever reason, they manifestly were unwilling to make a deal at any costs.  There were substantial concessions made on this bill.  The term was cut from 10 years to 5.  The amount of money was cut by $2 Billion.  But these concessions were made at the last minute.  And they resulted in additional support.  I think these were really face saving concessions.  The Republicans were faced with a PR disaster.  The concessions gave Republicans a face saving way to reverse their positions.

And the "9/11 responder" bill is significant for another reason, the media attitude.  One of the reasons that Republicans are able to behave so badly is that their misbehavior is not consistently reported.  A scan of mainstream media for filibuster stories will come up short. I'm sure you will find them.  But you will not find them as part of a consistent theme and attached to the idea that this tactic by the Republicans constitutes bad government.  The result is that the general public does not believe there is a large gap between the parties on the "good government" front.  I think most people would say "sure it's bad government but both sides do it" with the implication being that the amount of wickedness is roughly evenly divided.

I want to specifically call attention to Jon Stewart on this.  I think that this is a case where he made a real and critical difference.  Jon is in the "mock politicians" business.  He picks on Republicans more often than Democrats because they are more often deserving.  But his "Restore Sanity" rally indicates where he would prefer all of us to be.  The "Restore Sanity" rally was aggressively nonpartisan in its tone.  But that's not how he approached "9/11 responders".  He did a piece that was typical of his work.  He mocked Republicans for being "all things 9/11" until the responders bill came up.  He also mocked the media coverage of the bill.  It was a great piece but it was within his normal range.  But then he went beyond his normal range.  He did a whole show on the bill.  The first segment was one of his typical pieces.  Again Republicans did not come off well.  But then he continued.  His middle segment featured four responders, all with serious medical conditions.  This segment was not at all comedic.  His final segment was an interview with Mike Huckabee.  Mike has been on the show several times.  He can be quite funny.  But Stewart went after him on the "9/11 responders" bill.  He got Huckabee to admit that in principle the bill was a good idea.  He also tried to get Huckabee to say bad things about his fellow Republicans for holding the bill up.  Huckabee is now an experiences verbal tap dancer and avoided doing that.  But the general thrust of the interview was that there really was no good reason for opposing the bill.

After this the New York media took up the cause.  A clip from the Stewart 9/11 responder material was even shown on Charlie Rose.  I don't think Rose has ever shown a Stewart clip on his show before.  The media shined a bright light on Republican misbehavior on this bill.  That is something they generally never do.  And it was critical to the bill's eventual passage.

Frankly the food safety bill flew under my radar.  I think it was not on the White House "high priority" list.  So it snuck through more on benign neglect than anything else.  Certainly there were a number of congressional Democrats who were deeply invested in the bill.  But since it was not an administration priority it was easy for them to walk away and there was no reason for them to make premature concessions.  And since they were not interested they did not bother to undermine their allies on this.  This allowed the bill's supporters to manage a campaign that was ultimately successful.

Obama is now on vacation in Hawaii.  I would like to believe he will learn from his failures and his successes.  We will soon find out.  The budget is a mess for the usual reasons.  Theoretically this mess needs to be dealt with in February.  But politicians on all sides of these deals are adept at kicking the can down the road.  Something that will be harder to delay a decision on is increasing the debt limit.  That should require resolution within the next six months.  So what's my advice?

The first thing is to let the Republicans go first.  I believe that the Clinton strategy of putting a whole health plan on the table was not the big mistake.  The way I saw it at the time was that the Republicans used a "death by a thousand cuts" strategy.  They said "we don't like this component".  They would not propose an alternative.  So the debate became between a specific proposal which might be the best but had some flaws and some theoretical perfect but unknown alternative.  Unfortunately, then and now, the media falls for this ploy every time.  They don't hammer the opposition for failing to make a specific proposal.  So the Republicans objected to this component and that component and built up the impression over time that the whole bill was a really bad thing.

It turns out we now know that that eventually the Republicans made a counter proposal to the Clinton bill, one that looks a lot like the current Obama bill.  But whatever they did  was so low key that I missed it at the time.  Anyhow, money bills are supposed to originate in the House.  It's right there in the Constitution.  So Boehner and the Republicans are theoretically on the hook to go first.  This will let the White House and their Democratic allies do "death by a thousand cuts", if the White House is smart enough to figure this out.

Beyond that the White House must support its allies rather than undermine them.  This involves embracing their positions publicly even if the plan is to trade them away later.  (And it's a good idea to let supporters know in advance before you do the trade).  Then they need to stop making premature concessions.  There is no reason to make a concession if it does not result in additional support for your position.  Finally, they must always be willing to walk away from the deal if it is bad enough.  This may mean having the government shut down.  This is a case where Obama's current reputation as a wuss actually works to his advantage.  If the deal falls apart it's got to be the Republicans' fault 'cause Obama's a wuss.  Any deal that is so bad that even the wuss walks away from it must be really awful.

net neutrality

I have been following the debate on "net neutrality" since it surfaced a couple of years ago.  It is heating up now because the FCC seems about to issue some regulations on this subject.  So far I have yet to find anyone who knows what they are talking about.  This is one of those classic situations where lots of people think they know what they are talking about but they don't.

First, everyone knows what "net neutrality" is, right?  The idea is a simple one.  There are bytes.  They travel across the Internet.  All bytes are equal.  Specifically, some bytes are not given preferential treatment so that they are delivered before other, less privileged, bytes.  That's what most people think when they think "net neutrality".  And the problem is that a lot of people who are technically knowledgeable or have a business interest have a different definition.  The definition varies with the actor but it's not "all bytes are equal".  So if you are trying to follow the discussion carefully and an "expert" starts spouting, make sure he is means "all bytes are equal" when he says "net neutrality".  If he's one of the ones using some other definition you might have to "translate" the rest of his remarks.  He's probably just obscuring the fact that he's really saying "my company/group want's to pretend it's for net neutrality when it's not".

The second problem is not political.  It's fundamental.  Most people think we currently have net neutrality, as defined above.  They are wrong.  Right now the net is fundamentally NOT neutral.  It really has never been neutral.  Back in the day when the Federal government ran ARPANET, NSFNET, and the other networks that eventually became the Internet there was some discrimination.  But it was an accident of how the Internet came to be and of various decisions that were made as the net evolved.  In short, it was a side effect of what was going on.  And there was no systematic plan to discriminate for or against certain traffic.  Things just worked out that way.  Since the Internet has become a commercial enterprise this accidental discrimination has been replaced by wilful discrimination.  The Internet discriminates in favor of some traffic at the expense of other traffic as a fundamental matter of how it now works.  Understanding why this is so is simply a matter of adhering to that old tried and true saw, "follow the money".

Where does the money come from that funds the Internet?  It comes from two sources.  First there are fees paid by ISPs.  I get my Internet connection through Comcast.  Part of the monthly fee I pay to Comcast gets sent on my behalf by Comcast to various Internet "long haul providers".  These are the people who provide the connections between cities and countries.  The original long haul provider was AT&T.  The Federal government contracted with AT&T to provide the long distance connections between sites for the original ARPANET.  As the early net grew the new entities contracted with AT&T for various links.  And other players like MCI got into the business.  When the various Federally funded networks were flipped over to private hands AT&T did various deals with various organizations using the government network to continue to provide the same service for a fee.  MCI and the other players did similar deals.  These early deals have continued to set the pattern.  Since then things have gotten a lot more complicated and there are many more players but the pattern has held.  ISPs by subsidizing other players provided the money that funds the Internet.  But the additional complexity opened the door for another funding source.

Say you're Amazon.  You want to make sure people connecting to your web site get quick response.  Now you could depend on the deals done by ISPs like Comcast do with long haul providers like AT&T but this puts you at the mercy of a bunch of players you don't control.  So if you are smart you do a deal like the ISP players do with the long haul providers.  A long haul provider like Level 3 has a fast nationwide network.  They will agree to provide fast service for your traffic for a fee.  They have local hookups into the Internet at lots of locations like New York City.  Level 3 sets things up so that traffic originating in NYC going to an  Amazon server located in Seattle is pulled off the Internet after traveling only a short distance in NYC.  This traffic is put on the high speed Level 3 network and goes across the country to Seattle.  There it is dumped onto the local Internet for delivery to the Amazon server.  The result is that the NYC customer gets lightning fast response even though he is accessing a server way across the country.  For a company like Amazon there are sound business reasons for signing up for preferential service from long haul providers like Level 3 so they do.  Companies willing and able to pay for premium service represent a second revenue stream.

Now I don't know if Amazon has a deal with Level 3.  I used Amazon and Level 3 in my example just to make it easier for people to understand what's possible.  But companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and others have made companies like Level 3 that can deliver premium service very profitable.  And the services these companies are paying for and getting result in an Internet that is very much NOT neutral.

And, like a lot of things, the real situation is actually a lot more complicated.  There are lots of ways to provide preferential treatment.  Google, for instance, has not one but many data centers.  It makes sense that my Google request should be serviced by a different data center than someone else's.  And it makes sense to use a sophisticated strategy that depends on distance, data center load, and other factors to pick the data center that gets my request.  And there is a service for that.  It is provided by a company called Akami - "The leader in Web Application Acceleration and Performance".  It goes without saying that if your company has not signed up with Akami the "Acceleration and Performance" of your web site will be not as good.  Your bytes will be treated as second class bytes.

Akami is well known for providing these kinds of services.  Akami is not alone in providing "preferential treatment".  F5 takes a different approach but the result is the same.  Your F5 enhanced site will perform better than the other guy's.  There are lots of other companies, many that I've never even heard of, coming at the problem in lots of ways, ways that I would not even think of.

But even if we ignore the "preferential treatment" provided by Akami, F5, and others, and just focus on the problem of moving bytes from point A to point B, all bytes are still not treated equally.  It took me several years to figure out a basic attribute of the Internet, namely what specific path a set of bytes going  from point A to point B will take.  Say point A is NYC and point B is Seattle (to stick with something similar to the example I used above).  Most people assume that  "all bytes are equal" and that some random path is chosen, perhaps the one that looks like the best path at the moment.  It turns out that the Internet doesn't work that way.  If a message, a "packet" in Internet speak, is going from your PC in NYC to a web server in Seattle it always takes the same path.  And that path is determined solely by business considerations.

Begin tech content
(You can skip to "End tech content" without missing anything important if you trust me on what I just said).

A message as it transits the Internet spends most of its life going from router to router.  Your PC is connected to a router.  The server on the other end is connected to a router.  Pretty much everything in between is routers.  A router is a connection device.  It works something like freeway interchange.  A freeway interchange connects roads while a router connects network wiring.  The business of figuring out how to get from one place to another on the Internet is done by routers.  And these decisions are determined by "routing tables".  Navigating on a trip from NYC to Seattle on the Interstate Highway System can be thought of as selecting the right "on" ramps and "off" ramps to get to the right roads that connect NYC to Seattle.  The rest of the time you just follow the road you are on.  The only time you have to make a decision is when you get to an interchange.  On the Internet the only time a decision needs to be made about where a message should be sent next is when it is being handled by a router.  On our road trip the driver would make the decisions about which ramp to take, possibly by consulting an AAA map and road signs.  On the Internet routers consult routing tables.  A driver can chose to ignore the map and signs.  Routers can't chose to ignore the routing tables.

Hidden away in nondescript buildings across the country are facilities called  IXPs, Internet Exchange Points. IXPs are the highway interchanges of the Internet.  The way a message gets from NYC to Seattle is that the local ISP in NYC sends it to a local IXP.  The IXP contains routers from other ISPs and from long haul providers.  So the message could be sent to any one of the other routers connected at the IXP.  And there are probably several long haul providers connected to the IXP that could get the message to Seattle.  Once we pick a long haul provider by sending the message to a specific router then the bytes will be sent via that long haul provider to an IXP that is closer to Seattle.  After transiting more IXPs the bytes will eventually end up at an IXP in Seattle that is connected to the ISP that handles Amazon.  Each of the routers, the router operated by the ISP in NYC, the routers at each of the IXPs, and the router at the ISP in Seattle, has a routing table.  There is nothing random or "neutral" about these routing tables.  Together they specify the exact route your message will take as it crosses the country.  So how are the contents of these routing tables determined?

The answer is that all the parties have done business deals with all the other parties.  There are layers and layers to these deals.  But the bottom line is that the routing tables are set up so that the bytes take the path that is specified by the appropriate deals.  Your NYC ISP might have done a deal with AT&T.  So AT&T will carry the message on its local routers in NYC to a specific IXP.  If Amazon has done a deal with Level 3 then AT&T is going to send the message to a Level 3 to router at that NYC IXP.  Then Level 3 will figure out internally which of its routers to use to get the message through Level 3 routers at the various IXPs to eventually get it to an IXP in Seattle.  Then say Amazon uses Qwest as its ISP.  Then the Qwest/Amazon (and perhaps Level 3) deal will cause Level 3 to route the message to a Qwest router.  Then Qwest will get the message to the Amazon server.  The routing tables implement the deals between the various parties.  Speed or congestion or anything else does not enter into the process for building the routing tables.

You can see how this works if you have a Microsoft PC.  (I think this works on Macs too but I am not a Mac person).  On a PC you need to know how to open a "Command Prompt" window.  Once there you want to use a command called "tracert".  TRACERT is a standard Internet command so you can do a web search to find out more about it.  And TRACERT is a little cranky and will often appear to be hung up.  That's because TRACERT tries a lot of things that fail.  It has to wait for processes to time out before it knows that something has failed and it's time to try something else.  I will ignore the details and just stick to the basics.

If you run say "tracert www.mit.edu" (for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) the command will show you all the routers the message goes through to the MIT server.  It will show you the name of most of the routers along the way.  From the name you can usually figure out who owns the router.  When I send a message to an MIT server it needs to go from where I am on the West Coast to the MIT campus on the East Coast.  When I issue this command it turns out that the cross country part of the trip is handled by Level 3.  Now if I enter "tracert www.bc.edu" (for Boston College) it turns out that the cross country part of the trip is handled by a company called "cogentco" (Cogent Communications).  Now my PC doesn't move between commands and MIT and Boston College are only separated by a few miles.  What's going on?  The MIT message always goes through the same path using Level 3 and the BC message always goes through the same path using COGENTCO.  Well, whatever ISP MIT uses has a deal with Level 3 and whatever ISP BC uses has a deal with COGENTCO.  Which path is faster?  It doesn't matter.  The web of deals specify the route.  Which route might be faster or less congested or whatever are not part of the calculation.

BTW, you may be wondering why I didn't use Harvard University as my second example.  When I tried "tracert www.harvard.edu".  I found out that Harvard also uses Level 3 for long haul but the path is different than the one for MIT.  Why?  Because the Harvard servers are located in Washington DC.  Who knew?

end tech content

So what's the prospects for net neutrality?  Be afraid!  Be very afraid!  All of the pundit types talking about this that I am familiar with don't know what they are talking about.  And I think they know more about this than the politicians and bureaucrats.  So there is exactly no chance the politicians and bureaucrats will get it right.  And the chances of improving the current mess are extremely small. Unfortunately, the best we can hope for is that they will only make it a little worse than it already is.  And we don't even have the "do nothing" option to fall back on.  There's money in that there Internet.  And the companies attached to the money have lobbyist in DC and lawyers to make deals with each other.  They actually know what's going on.  Left to their own devices they will make things much worse in pursuit of higher profits.
 

We won't hold the American people hostage

Representative Debbie Wasserman Shultz said "we won't hold the American people hostage" on "Countdown" this evening (December 17, 2010) when discussing her vote in favor of the Obama "compromise" bill to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years (and many other things).  That tells you all you need to know about how the Republicans continue to roll the Democrats.  They put them between a rock and a hard place. They find a "rock", something Democrats feel compelled to do, in this case extend unemployment benefits for 13 months.  This forces Democrats to go to the "hard place", in this case extending the Bush tax cuts.

The Republicans have now done this repeatedly.  There are only two things necessary for this strategy to work:  (1) the Republicans stick together, and (2) the Republicans find a "rock".  This strategy appears to be dangerous for Republicans but it isn't really.  It might have been the first couple of times the Republicans tried it.  I am sure it was hard talking the Republicans into sticking together in the early days.  But now there is a long proven track record to show that the strategy works really well.  So the case for sticking together is now easy to make within the Republican caucus.  So the danger of Republicans not sticking together is now very low.

The only risk left is that Republicans will not be able to find a "rock".  Here too the risk is pretty illusory.  Frequently the Democrats will give the game away as Rep. Shultz (and many other Democrats) did in this case.  Democrats believe in a functioning government.  Democrats believe in not holding the American people hostage.  Democrats believe a lot of things.  All the Republicans have to do is find a way to frame the debate in a manner that appears to put one of these Democratic beliefs in jeopardy.  And it doesn't have to be real.  Remember "government death panels".  They didn't exist and weren't in the bill and insurance company death panels actually exist but their fictitious existence was enough of a threat to make Democrats jump through real hoops.

Now it is a necessary component of making the strategy work that the Republicans be willing to act in an irresponsible manner.  And it must have been hard for some Republicans to take this step in the past.  But everyone knows that the Democrats will do the responsible thing and pull the country back from the brink of disaster.  How do we know?  Because they have done it time after time before.  The most obvious example from the recent past is TARP.  TARP was a Bush initiative.  Most people have forgotten that already.  In spite of the fact that TARP was necessary to pull the entire economy back from the brink of disaster, and in spite of the fact that TARP was a Republican program, most of the people who voted against TARP were Republicans.  TARP would not have passed without the heavy Democratic support it received.

Going a little further back in time, it was necessary to raise the debt limit in the Bush era.  Now remember, if the Bush administration had acted in a fiscally responsible manner and not blown up the budget and moved the government from a surplus regime to a deficit regime, it would not have been necessary to raise the debt limit.  But, as usual, most of the NO votes for raising the debt limit during the period when the Republicans controlled both chambers of the legislature and the White House came from Republicans.  The bills would have failed and the government would have been shut down without the Democrats bailing out irresponsible Republicans.

I can think of no examples where Republicans took a hard vote in order to be responsible and bail out Democrats but there are many votes beyond the ones I have pointed out where Democrats took hard votes to bail out Republican irresponsibility.  And the voting record of Republicans since Obama took office is a long litany of irresponsibility.

It would be nice if the "liberal" mainstream media consistently covered Republican irresponsibility.  This week Jon Stewart has devotes several segments on "The Daily Show" to the "9/11 first responder" bill that would extend enhanced medical coverage to these people.  He noted that ABC, NBC, and CBS have not covered this issue at all.  Fox, the "all 9/11 all the time" network, has only mentioned it in passing, and then failed to report that it was being held up by Republicans.  If the mainstream media had just missed the ball on this one story it would be understandable.  But the mainstream media has missed the ball on the dozens of other similar situations where the Republicans have filibustered important legislation that is normally bipartisan.  A current example is the Start II treaty.  This has broad support among the Republican foreign policy establishment.  Yet it is being held up solely by Republicans.  In the Bush era any opponent to any military appropriation, no matter how larded up with pork, was branded by Republicans as a traitor or someone who "didn't support the troops" or all kinds of other bad things.  Yet the Republicans in the Senate have twice unanimously voted to block the bill from even being allowed to come up for a vote and there has been nary a peep out of the mainstream media.

I could go on.  But my point is that expecting Republicans to become reasonable and responsible any time soon is irresponsible.  So what should be done?  This has been going on for a long time.  It can be traced back at least to Newt Gingrich in the early '90s.  In that time a number of strategies have been tried.  Mostly they have depended on Republicans coming around and being reasonable.  Only one strategy has worked at all.  It is the one I mentioned on a previous post.  Clinton let the government be shut down twice in an argument with the GOP about the budget.  Unfortunately, this is the only example where direct confrontation has been tried.

It is important to keep in mind that the climate is against Democrats.  As I outlined above, the mainstream media has been captured by the Republicans.  Republican talking points and spin dominate that slant taken by the mainstream media in their political coverage.  As an example we are now talking about the deficit.  Why?  Because the Republicans want to talk about it.  Most economists tell us that we should be increasing Federal spending to try to pull us out of our current deep recession.  They also say that spending on public works is the most efficient way to pump up the economy and that tax cuts are the poorest.  But we have just finished an election season dominated by talk of closing the deficit and cutting taxes.  The Republicans just rode "closing the deficit and cutting taxes" to a big victory.

But cutting taxes makes it just that much harder to close the deficit.  And Republican after Republican has claimed over and over that cutting taxes does not increase the deficit.  Yet where is the "Republicans are full of shit" (or some more polite version of the same idea) coverage from the mainstream media?  Now it is possible to cut taxes and close the deficit if you are willing to make draconian cuts to spending.  With the expiration of Federal subsidies to States in the "it didn't work" (according to Republicans) stimulus bill, states are now being forced to make draconian cuts to their budgets and it's not pretty.  So Republicans could salvage their credibility by proposing draconian cuts to the Federal budget.  But, given the unpopularity of such cuts, there will be no serious effort by Republicans to make any large budget cuts.  They can't even rein in in earmarks by their own people and all earmarks taken together amount to pocket change.

Democrats have reverted to their usual "spineless" posture.  If the Republicans are in charge, as they were for six years during Bush, and if the Republicans manage to act feckless enough on their own, which they apparently did after the 2004 election, this can work for Democrats.  But as their sole strategy it is bound to fail.  Republicans have been the dominant party for most of the last 30 years.  They are now on the rebound.  Drastic action is required.

Again, as I indicated in a previous post,  confrontation is required.  If the other side does not take your threats seriously then the threats are ineffective.  Republicans do not take threats from Obama or congressional Democrats seriously.  Why should they?  Democrats never deliver on the threat.  The mainstream media also don't take these threats seriously.  This is because the beltway punditocracy doesn't take these threats seriously.  Several pundits have been caught out when Democrats caved on some issue.  Many pundits have seen their stars rise when they predicted that Democrats would eventually cave when most people thought Democrats would stand fast.  So at this point there is no reason for a beltway pundit to take a Democratic threat seriously.  On the other hand everyone takes Republican threats seriously.  Why?  Because Republicans deliver on threats, even if delivering requires them to take an unpopular or irresponsible action.

There is only one way to rebalance the equation and that is for Democrats to make good on a threat.  They have to walk away on a deal if the deal is not good enough even if this results in bad things happening.  That's the only way.  Now, this means doing something irresponsible.  So it is important to pick the place to take a stand carefully.  My opinion is that the Bush tax cuts was the best place.

Consider the alternatives.  Should they take a stand on increasing the debt limit by opposing it?  That has the effect of shutting the entire government down.  How about the Defense budget?  That has the effect of shutting the military down while we are in the middle of prosecuting two wars.  What about the bill to fund the entire government?  That's worse than the Defense bill.  Compared to these the down side to the Bush tax cuts is small change.  And look at the bill we actually got.  Besides the major items like the Bush tax cuts and the extension of unemployment we got the whack to the estate tax, a very bad thing.  And then we got a bunch of "corn husker kickback" type sweeteners for one special interest or another.  It was a bad bill that will do a lot of harm.  The best you can say about it is that "on balance it does more good than bad".  In other words it the good is only a little greater than the bad.

Now it has taken only days for the consequences of the Democratic cave on this bill to surface.  After months of negotiations and carefully worked out compromises the "omnibus" bill to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year has been blocked by Republicans.  Why not?  There is no downside risk for them.  In the current "post Obama compromise" environment it will be easy for the Republicans to ring more concessions out of Democrats.  In the "spineless Democrats" environment we operate in this is how things work.  And it is going to continue to be how things work until Democrats grow a spine and fight back. And given their long record for spinelessness the Democrats are going to have to stand up a number of times before Republican behavior changes.  And these confrontations will keep getting more painful the longer Democrats wait.  And all of us will also have to live with the pain of bad Republican policies while all this is playing out.

President "let's make a deal"

President Obama, like President Clinton, is a "let's make a deal" kind of guy.  The idea is that getting part of what you want is better than getting none of what you want.  It is also part of the "give and take" that is the mother's milk of politics.  If both sides give a little then each side can take most of what they want and everyone is better off.  That's the theory.  But for this theory to work both sides have to be playing by the same rules.

Rumor has it that President Regan, a Republican, was on very good terms privately with House Speaker Tip O'Neil, a Democrat.  Reagan also spent a lot of time, it is said, talking on the phone with various Democrats.  With solid support from his own party this allowed Regan to rack up an impressive number of legislative victories.  He would hold his Republicans and peal off enough Democrats to get his bill passed.  And buried in all this were concessions to Democrats to seal the deal.  That's how it is supposed to work.

And that's how it did work, most famously under President Lyndon Johnson, the role model for Presidents trying to work congress.  But then Newt Gingrich came along.  Newt decided that this "go along get along" approach that Regan had used so successfully was the wrong way to go.  So Newt set about to change the rules.  He started recruiting Republicans that would hold party discipline to be of paramount importance.  He also started using litmus tests and drumming Republicans that were not doctrinaire enough out of the party.  He was able to pull this off because he figured out how to raise vast amounts of money.  In several cases Newt engineered the defeat of Republicans who he thought weren't pure enough.  His theory was that he could get the seat back later.

All this came together in 1994.  By this time Newt had purged the party of most moderates who did not want to go along with him.  And he applied his giant war chest effectively.  He got enough of his people elected that enough house seats went from "D" to "R" to swing control of the House from "D" to "R".  As a result of this success Newt got himself elected Speaker.  With all the pieces in place he implemented his strategy.  It was "no compromise - my way or the highway".  No more of this woozy negotiation stuff for him.

For a while this flummoxed Clinton.  He is a charmer and if you put him in the room with anyone he can logic or charm or whatever pretty much anyone, including Newt, into a deal.  So Newt's handlers made sure he didn't spend any "one on one" time with Clinton after they figured out what was going on.  The result was that Clinton's agenda quickly ground to a halt.  You can't do "let's make a deal" if the other side doesn't want to make a deal.  But Clinton figured out how to counter this strategy.

Politicians know that the secret of success is to be seen as doing good things and stopping bad things from happening.  It really is that simple.  If the other guy is elected he will do bad things and block good things from taking place.  That's the fundamental message of any election campaign.  So if a bad thing happens then it must be the fault of the other guys.  And this is important because voters tend to remember the bad things more than the good things.  That's why negative campaign adds work.

What Clinton did was he drew a line in the sand.  He was arguing with Republicans about the budget.  He said the Republican budget was so bad he would veto it.  And he did.  And the government shut down.  He then said "This is all the Republicans' fault as I am a deal maker and if they had been reasonable the government would not have had to be shut down".  And the public believed him and the Republicans had to back peddle and a budget was quickly passed and the government went back into business.  Now shutting the government is a pretty big bad thing.  But as a result of this the Republicans took Clinton seriously and he was able to make deals with them.

The point of all this is that at some point you have to stand up and say "this and no more" and mean it.  You must accept the real possibility of bad things happening if you don't get what you want.  Otherwise the other side will assume they can roll you because you are a wuss and your threats are empty.  President Obama has gotten himself into this situation.  The Republicans think he is a wuss.  I think he is a wuss.  As such, Republicans believe, with a massive amount of evidence to support their position, that in the end the President will back peddle and take the Democrats with him.  So they don't deal with him on a serious basis.  The only way to correct this situation is to hold your position and let bad things happen.

Now unfortunately we are in the position where many bad things can happen.  The government can be shut down in a few months if we don't raise the debt ceiling.  There is no Defense spending bill so we might need to shut down the DOD while two wars are going on.  The extensions to unemployment have expired.  The Start II treaty is being held up.  All these things are bad things.  All of them are in a bad place because of Republican intransigency.  And the things that are happening (unemployment) or could happen (debt ceiling, defense bill, Start II) are very bad things.  So, if Obama wants to hang tough, should he pick one of those?

No!  There is a better choice.  The Bush tax cuts are about to expire.  Obama has said he wants to extend them to anyone earning under $250K but not for those making more.  What happens if they all expire?  Well, actually not much bad.  Taxes go up a little for the under $250K set and a lot for the over $1M set.  But for the under $250K set it's not that much.  And almost $4 trillion of debt increase won't happen.  And Republicans get blamed for increasing every one's taxes.  The conventional political calculus is that this is a very bad thing.  But it seems pretty manageable to me.

And it can be fixed next year with a retroactive bill.  So most of the damage is potential rather than actual.  And the "filibuster" calculus changes.  The Republicans have to originate a bill in the House then the Senate has to pass it.  And even with some defections, the Democrats will have enough members in the Senate to filibuster anything they don't like so the monkey is on the back of the Republicans to come up with something.  And, of course, Obama could veto it, if he doesn't like it so they have to come up with something that is Democrat friendly.

So all kinds of good things happen if the Democrats follow my (and Senator Schumer's) advice and let the whole Bush package expire.  Now President "let's make a deal" Obama might have trouble going along with this.  But Republicans stopped paying attention to him a long time ago.  And Democrats need to tell the President he needs to be with them on this one.  If he goes along he will finally get some leverage with the Republicans.  They will no longer be able to ignore him.

This is tough medicine.  But the take away from the recent election for me is that it's OK to be irresponsible.  Republicans have gotten away with being irresponsible by saying "nothing bad happened even though we did all those irresponsible things".  And they are right.  They were bailed out and covered for by the Democrats being responsible.  And being irresponsible is, by definition, irresponsible.  The responsible thing to do, given that some irresponsibility is necessary at this point, is to be responsibly irresponsible.  And the Bush tax cuts are the right place for it, assuming you even believe that letting them expire is irresponsible.

Obama needs to take a stand somewhere and this is the best place.

(added 12/7/10 - Pearl Harbor Day for God sakes)
Today the President said "I will fight".  Well, I've watched this President fight Republicans for nearly two years now.  And as a fighter, it would be an insult to wusses to call him a wuss.  On the Bush tax cuts, letting everything expire is a far better deal than the one he has come up with.  He needs to stop prematurely capitulating on issues.  He needs to stop punishing his friends and rewarding his enemies.  He needs to get a lot smarter a lot faster about how to negotiate.  And he still has a badly flawed picture of what Republicans will and won't do.

Unless he cleans up his act, I am going to be looking for another Democrat to challenge him in the 2012 primaries.  At this point he has succeeded in losing my support.  And I am sorrier about that then he is.

Wikileaks

For all of you who are put off by the length of my posts this one should make you happy.  I make no promises about the length of future posts.

Wikileaks is in the process of dumping their third mass of internal U.S. government documents.  I have not been able to figure out the publication schedule on this dump.  I know they have posted a number of the more juicy ones but I don't know when the remainder of the rumored 250,000 posts are due out.  Nevertheless . . .

This is the third major dump of U.S. documents.  The first dump was on Afghanistan.  The second dump was on Iraq.  This dump appears to be a bunch of internal U.S. State department documents.  Now, I am all for doing something about excessive secrecy.  There is a need for some secrecy.  But 99% of everything that is classified is not classified because it needs to be.  A large percentage of classification is CYA.  Someone doesn't want the embarrassing stuff to leak out.  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and someone doesn't want the rottenness to be put on public display. An even greater source of unnecessary classification is bureaucratic.  No one wants to authorize stuff to be declassified.  It is always seen as being safer to classify as much as possible.  You wouldn't want to be the person who was responsible for the one in a million document that should have remained classified to have been released, even if it means classifying 999,999 documents that shouldn't have been.

People forget that the Clinton administration declassified tons of stuff and generally improved the situation by making it harder to classify stuff and easier to get things declassified in a timely manner.  The George W. Bush administration promptly reversed that decision and cranked the classification machine up way past where it had been before Clinton got in.  And one of the failures of the Obama administration is that it has retained the Bush policies.  So, seen as a push back to over classification, Wikileaks has been a breath of fresh air.  99% of what they have published has been stuff that ranged from "shouldn't have been classified" to "mildly embarrassing".  They haven't been as assiduous as they should have been at scrubbing things like names that can and will be used by bad guys to do bad things.  But nobody gets it 100% right.

The U.S. government is not the only organization that is guilty of over classification and that deserves to be embarrassed.  Pretty much every government in the world does the same thing to a greater or lesser extent.  And, whatever flaws you attribute to the U.S., and I attribute a lot of flaws to the Bush administration and some flaws to Obama, there are several much worse actors out there and many that are just as bad.

So, if the Wikileaks people have more material from the U.S., my advice is to not publish it.  Your credibility is on the line here.  The next thing you need to publish is a big dump of stuff from someone else.  If you don't have any stuff from someone else, that's a major problem and you need to put ALL of your efforts into fixing that problem.  You need to especially target governments or institutions generally seen by the U.S. as bad guys.  You need to put some balance into your program.

There are two ways to look at Wikileaks.  The way they would prefer to be seen is as a high minded anti-secrecy operation.  The second way is as an anti-American organization with some kind of political axe to grind.  It is now up to them to provide some evidence that the former view is the correct one.  Unless they do a large dump of somebody elses' dirty laundry next then the the only reasonable conclusion is that the latter characterized is the correct one.

(added 11/30/10) Web posts indicate that Wikileaks has a bunch of documents from a big U.S. bank.  The speculation is that the bank is Bank of America.  There are a lot of Wall Street people that should be in jail.  And I am confident that a number of them work at BofA.  So if this document dump eventually leads to jail time for some of these people, that's a good thing and Wikileaks would deserve some credit.  But it's not enough.  It is still necessary for Wikileaks to demonstrate that it is not just on some kind of anti-US jihad.  And to do that it must do a non-US document dump.  While I believe there are a number of bad actors at BofA that are currently getting away with their villainy, BofA is still a US entity.

Space Shuttle - RIP

The last Space Shuttle launch is scheduled to happen within a year.  I have never been a fan of the Space Shuttle so it couldn't happen too soon for me.  What follows is a quick history of rocketry in general and the Shuttle in particular with an admittedly U.S. bias.

The rocket was invented by the Chinese several hundred years ago.  Various efforts to transform the rocket from a novelty into a useful and practical device, e.g. for use in warfare, were generally unsuccessful until recently.  That all changed with the work of Robert Goddard and a small number of associates operating on a shoestring budget.  Goddard developed the scientific foundations of rocketry in the early part of the twentieth century.  He launched a number of rockets, primarily in the 1930's, to turn his theoretical work into practical devices.  Unfortunately, the only ones paying attention were a bunch of Nazi Scientists, most notably Werner von Braun.

Von Braun and his team refined Goddard's work and turned it into a practical military device, the V-2 rocket used against the British in World War II.  The V-2 would have been more successful except for a British intelligence effort called "Double Cross".  Double Cross convinced the Nazis that they were scoring direct hits in downtown London when, in fact, the rockets were actually landing in the suburbs to the east.   In spite of this, the V-2 was a clear demonstration that rockets could actually be put to practical use.  And the obvious practical use was to carry nuclear weapons.

As a result of this several countries, most notably the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (Russia), launched efforts to build large rockets for military and other purposes.  The U.S. put its efforts on a slower path because they had airplanes (e.g. B-52 bomber) that could be used to effectively deliver nuclear weapons.  The USSR, without this option, put more effort into their program with the result that the USSR launched the first Satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.  The USSR was also behind in efforts to miniaturize nuclear weapons so they aimed for rockets with heavier "lift" capacity than comparable early US efforts. This resulted in a number of other USSR space "firsts" like the first man in space (Uri Gagarin).  The USSR reaped a PR bonanza for its efforts.  Understanding that the USSR would continue to rack up "firsts" for at least a couple of more years, President Kennedy set a US goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely" in a speech on May 25, 1961.  The goal would take about ten years, giving the US a chance to catch up and go ahead in the "space race", an important aspect of the "cold war".

NASA configured the Mercury (one man flights), Gemini (two man flights), and Apollo (three man flights) programs into a path to achieve the "man on the moon" goal.  Apollo resulted in the first manned moon landing on July 20, 1969.  The "man on the moon" stunt was essentially a PR stunt, in terms of reasons for the political backing necessary to find the money to make it happen. And by July of 1969, when the landing happened, Nixon had taken over from Kennedy and then Johnson as US President.  Nixon, unlike his two Democratic predecessors, was not a fan of the space program.  But it was immensely popular so he had to come up with a follow on to Apollo.  The obvious choice was a "man on Mars" program but this was way too expensive and likely not feasible.  The fall back option was a permanent moon base.  Again this was fantastically expensive but probably barely feasible.  It was certainly too expensive for Nixon's tastes.  So the next fallback option was a space station.  This lacked "sex appeal", as had the moon base, but even this limited objective was deemed too expensive.   So the Nixon administration proposal was the Space Shuttle.  The theory was that whatever follow on manned space project was selected, the Space Shuttle would be useful.

So the Space Shuttle was chosen because it was the cheapest alternative.  And one justification was to make spaceflight cheaper.  But more justification was needed for public consumption.  So the other official objective was to make spaceflight ecologically friendly.  Up to this time all rockets were "one off" proposals that spewed out vast amounts of pollution.  This seemed wasteful.  So how about creating a reusable space vehicle?  It would save on resources because it would not have to be built over from scratch.  And this would help make it cheaper to operate.  That's what the Nixon administration came up with.

The concept for the base vehicle was a "space capable" DC-9 (commercial airplane).  But there was not enough room inside for all the rocket fuel.  So a cheesy external tank was added to hold the fuel.  Well, this made the whole thing less efficient so two cheap "strap on" solid fuel external rockets were added.  That gave the whole vehicle enough power to get off the ground.  And the strap on rockets were supposed to be reusable too.  The result was an abortion.  The "engineering" that went into the basic design was awful.  But the engineering to actually make the abortion work was awe inspiring.  

I can not overemphasize the amount of genius engineering that was necessary to make the Shuttle work at all.  But the result of slapping all this together was that the Shuttle failed to achieve any of its design objectives.  It quickly went massively over budget.  It went over budget both with respect to time (it was years late) and cost (its actual cost was several times the original estimate).  At one point the cost problem got so bad that NASA promised that operationally it would be so cheap that the US no longer needed traditional  ELV (Expendable Launch Vehicle) rockets.  This allowed NASA to steal the money that would otherwise have been used to purchase them to plug into the Shuttle budget deficit.

Eventually construction was completed and the Shuttle went into service.  But it turned you that the nightmare was just beginning.  The Shuttle was NOT economical to operate.  It turns out that spaceflight is very hard on hardware.  So instead of an airplane like (roll it in, gas it up, clean the johns, replenish the in flight meals and booze, and roll it out) process after each flight the Shuttle needed extensive maintenance.  So it couldn't be turned around quickly.  It was not just a matter of paying for another batch of fuel.  A lot of parts need to be replaced or refurbished, and all this required a large, well trained and therefore expensive, support operation.  Shuttles were way more expensive to fly than the ELV rockets they competed with.  So the flight rate has never even been half of what was initially predicted.  And they are down frequently for some major fix so they are not dependable.  And they are bloody expensive to operate when they are working.  A typical flight cost between $600 million and $1 billion dollars.  You can buy several ELV launches of even the largest expendable rockets like the Delta IV, Atlas V, or Ariane 5 for the price of one Shuttle launch.

And they are not safe.  We have had two tragedies. The first one was caused by the famous "O-ring" problem with the strap on external rockets.  This problem was not caused by any inherent problem with the Shuttle.  Rather the problem was a direct result of NASA trying to keep costs as low as possible.  Everything about the Shuttle was way more expensive than it was supposed to be.  So NASA only funded the "necessary" and not the "nice to do but not absolutely necessary".  The O-ring problem was only a "potential" problem and not an "actual" problem.  Until, of course, the O-ring problem eventually became an actual problem with disastrous results.

The second tragedy, however was a direct result of the design.  The Shuttle uses liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen for fuel.  Both of these are very cold.  So insulation is critical.  But it must be thin and light.  Insulation is sprayed on various things.  Its primary job is to insulate so its strength is minimal.  The Shuttle itself is also built as flimsily as possible to save weight.  Now in a standard "stack of tubes" rocket design, if something falls off it tends to drift away from the vehicle slightly and, therefore, not hit it.  But the Shuttle has all these things that are beside each other so when an object drifts slightly away from one part it can run not into empty air but into another part of the Shuttle.  And, since the Shuttle is as flimsy as possible, when it hits, it can do a lot of damage, even if "it" is a light fluffy piece of foam.  And that's what happened.  A piece of foam broke off, hit another part of the Shuttle, and knocked a big hole in it.

Besides these two problems that resulted in tragedies the Shuttle has had a large number of less serious problems.  These have led merely to costly (both in time and in money) delays.  An obvious solution to the "problem" of the Shuttle is to replace it with a better design.  And this NASA has tried to do in the last few years.  President George W. Bush initiated the "Orion" program to develop two more traditional vehicles to replace the Shuttle.  But Orion has run into schedule and budget problems too.  An obvious alternative is to "man rate" one or both of the Delta IV/Atlas V.  This seems the most sensible approach to me but has not been adopted for political reasons.  And even man rating the Delta IV/Atlas V would run into a lot of money.  What's going on here?

It turns out that Goddard did his work too well.  For instance, he figured out that Hydrogen/Oxygen is the best fuel for a "chemical" rocket.  You have to go with some kind of Science Fiction approach that does not depend on chemicals for fuel to do better.  He also patented the multi-stage rocket concept in 1915.  There was a lot of tough engineering work necessary to go from his primitive devices of the '30s to the V-2 of the '40s to the Sputnik of the '50s to the Saturn 5 of the '60s.  And, in my opinion, the Shuttle of the '70s is no improvement on the Saturn 5 of the '60s.  But the only fundamental advance over Goddard was the adoption of ceramics for insulation.  The other advances were important and difficult to achieve but they were not fundamental.  And there have been no fundamental advances since.  The Orion rocket designs were based on modifications of components from the Saturn 5 or the Space Shuttle.  There was no new breakthrough technology or even design.  The design was a classic "stack of tubes".

We now have massive computer resources available to assist in the design.  We have advances in materials.  The metals available now are stronger and more heat resistant than the metals used in the Saturn 5 but not to the degree that results in a fundamental difference.  Likewise, the ceramics available now are better but not to a fundamental degree.  And there is no new design idea that makes a fundamental difference.  So we can do the job better than we could then but not a lot better.  And that means that modern rocket design is better but not a lot better than what was available in the '60s.  And, most importantly, rocketry is not a lot cheaper.

The latest idea is to privatize the whole endeavour.  The idea is that NASA is stupid and inefficient.  There is a case to be made that NASA is stupid.  But most of the stupidity can be traced to two factors.  The first is politics.  NASA must site facilities and do work in many locations in order to spread the money around for political reasons.  This is a stupidity forced on NASA by external forces.  The second source of NASA stupidity is budgeting.  NASA has repeatedly done stupid things because it has not had the money to do things right in the first place.  The first Shuttle disaster is a classic example of this.  But NASA has been running the manned space program on the cheap, as in too cheap, since about 1970.  The cost of a PR spectacular is just too high.  No one will pay it.  And there is just no "hard nosed business" reason for the manned space program.  There never has been one.

We will see if privatization is effective is solving NASA's twin "stupid" problems.  I don't think it will.  Privatization is a very good cover for pretending that space spectaculars can be had "on the cheap" so I expect that the pressure to drive NASA's manned space budget even lower will increase as the shift to privatization progresses.  If privatization is substantially cheaper then the budget will go down enough to more than compensate for any increased efficiency.  Now I think there is room for cost saving.  A private operation that does not need to spread the work around to the districts of powerful members of congress can save some money.  And theoretically the private sector can squeeze out "CYA" costs.  But the private sector also wants to make a fat profit (NASA makes none) and pay its senior executives fat salaries and bonuses (a lot more than current NASA senior managers are making).  So what's the balance point?  I think privatization can possibly save 10-20%.  And 10-20% is not enough to make a big difference.  I think privatization will ultimately be used to kill off the manned space program.

People don't understand just how expensive the manned space program is.  The US has sunk over $100 billion into the International Space Station (ISS).  We have gotten some PR benefit.  But due to budget problems, almost no scientific work has been done on the ISS.  One justification for the Shuttle has been that it could be used for scientific purposes.  But almost no scientific work has been done with the Shuttle because science has always been cut out of the program to solve budgetary problems.  So the only payoff for the Shuttle has been PR.  Like the ISS, there has been only a small amount of PR benefit from the Shuttle.  And that has to be balanced against the fantastically high cost.

The cost of a single Shuttle launch is about the same as the New Horizons mission to Pluto.  New Horizons will cost about $650 billion over the lifetime of the mission (2001 - 2015).  It will do the first flyby of a "dwarf planet".  We know almost nothing about dwarf planets in general and Pluto in particular.  The scientific payoff will be tremendous.  And, given the place Pluto plays in culture (think the Disney cartoon dog, for instance), it will also generate a large amount of PR benefit.  Another unmanned program, the Spirit/Opportunity mission to Mars, cost far less than a single Shuttle launch.  But if you say "Spirit and Opportunity" to a significant segment of the public they will recognize them as Mars rovers and have a very positive opinion of them.  So the "Spirit/Opportunity" mission is another unmanned mission with a large scientific and a large PR payoff.

Contrast this with the manned space program.  Most of the public no longer follow Shuttle launches.  Among those who do, a significant segment is interested in the "car crash" aspect (is something going to go horribly wrong).  Interest in the ISS is also at an all time low.  I am interested in these kinds of things and I can't tell you who is currently aboard or what they are doing.  So the PR payoff has been low for the manned space program for a long time now.  People are generally in favor of a manned space program, Science Fiction movies are popular, but that general approval does not translate into any kind of political will.  The only people who really care are the contractors.  There principle interest is in a paycheck.  People in congress who represent space heavy districts care.  But what they care about is the payrolls and political contributions, not what the manned space program actually achieves.

Nearly all of the scientific benefit from the space program and nearly all of the PR benefit of the space program have come from the unmanned side, especially in the last 20 - 30 years.  Given the lower cost of unmanned missions compared to manned missions, and given the much higher scientific payoff of unmanned missions compared to manned missions, and given even the higher PR payoff of unmanned missions compared to manned missions, I expect the payoff to continue to favor unmanned missions over manned missions by a large margin.

And given the high cost and meager returns both in science and PR, why do we even continue to have a manned program?  I think it is because no politician wants to be known as the one who killed off the manned space program.  But privatization provides an out.  There has been some squawking about privatization but not enough to seriously affect its trajectory.  Once NASA has handed over responsibility for manned space programs to private industry it becomes possible to do a "death by a thousand cuts".  You just keep cutting the money you hand over to private contractors.  When a specific project is killed it is due to "private sector incompetence or greed" rather than some bad thing a politician did.  So the manned space program dies but no politician is arrested (loses an election) for the crime of killing the manned space program.

The Social Network

I went to this movie yesterday.  There of lots of people with more expertise than I in the movie review business.  What I would like to do is make some observations from a long time "computer nerd" perspective.

The movie is primarily about Mark Zuckerberg and the early years of Facebook.  I don't do social networking so I have never been on Facebook.  And the computer business is in a continuous state of evolution so I am not familiar with the details of the technical wizardry Mr. Zuckerberg pulled off.  But I view that as an asset.  It gives me a little distance but some professional perspective.  So here goes.

The movie is a piece of fiction designed for consumption by a general audience.  Aaron Sorkin deserves tremendous credit for coming up with a great script.  The director, etc. and especially Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who played Zuckerberg deserve tremendous credit.  And the movie is grounded in a great deal of truth as Mr. Sorkin lifted a lot of dialog from transcripts of depositions and other proceedings of the several law suits involved.  What I know about this comes completely from the movie.

With the preliminaries out of the way, the first thing I want to remark on is the character of Mr. Zuckerberg.  In the movie he is portrayed as someone who has tremendous computer skills and very weak people skills.  I am sure this is an oversimplification of the real Mr. Zuckerberg.  But it is something I can relate to from personal experience.  I am similar.  My computer skills, while substantial, are not at the level of the movie Mr. Zuckerberg's and my people skills are somewhat better. Another feature he has is an unbelievable amount of drive.  I was never that driven.  I share the low priority he attached to money.  But he is much more conflicted than I am.  Money is how score is kept.  Money was very important to Zuckerberg, seen from that perspective.  He wanted to score big.  I never wanted to score that big.  My "enough" threshold is much more modest.

For people like myself and Mr. Zuckerberg computers are much easier to understand and deal with than people.  Computers have rules that they follow literally robotically.  The trick for dealing with computers is to understand these rules and use them to trick (or force) the computer to do what you want.  If you ask the right way the computer will do what you want.  If you ask the wrong way the computer will not get mad or hold a grudge.  Fix how you ask (the details of the code) and the computer will go and do what you want without complaint.  People don't work that way.  The "rule set" for people is much more complicated.  People are inconsistent, illogical, break the rules, hold grudges, etc.  So, setting sided the distortions and simplifications, I understand Mr. Zuckerberg.

So with an understanding of Mr. Zuckerberg, what are we to make of his relations with the Winklevoss twins and their associates?  Not much good!  They meet with Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg figures out quickly what they are looking for and agrees to collaborate.  Then, without making a contribution to their enterprise, Zuckerberg terminates the relationship after seeing their code and getting some kind of idea what their web site is supposed to do.  Viewed from the perspective of a socially maladroit nerd do his actions make sense and are they proper?  I can't see any justification for his actions.

First the code.  Zuckerberg characterizes it as of poor quality and says he didn't use any of it.  So what.  First I am going to talk about the code quality.  Ultimately code exists to implement a function.  Even if it is "poor" the real question is whether it is sufficient to the task.  "Poor" code may be sufficient to the task.  It doesn't mean good code wouldn't work better but it doesn't need to work better, it only needs to work.  And one of the tasks Mr. Zuckerberg was hired to do was to improve the code.  I find no reason to believe he didn't understand this.

Next to the functionality.  Zuckerberg characterizes what the Winklevoss twins had was not well thought out and different from Facebook.  Without comparing what they had with the initial version of Facebook I can't render a useful opinion on that.  But it is obvious that the two things were at least vaguely related.  Even if the Winklevoss twins' product was poorly conceived and Facebook was brilliant it still matters that they were related.

In science there is an apparently weird quotation about some theory being "not even wrong".  Scientists work with theories that are wrong all the time.  But sometimes a theory, while known to e completely wrong, can directly or indirectly give a scientist some insight about a "right" theory.  If a theory is so poor that not only is it wrong but it is so wrong it can not be used as a basis for finding an insight that moves the inquiry ahead it is said to be so bad it is "not even wrong".  In the same sense, if the Winklevoss twins' ideas were poorly developed and implemented they might still have provided some insight to Zuckerberg that ended up in Facebook.  So even if we assume that Zuckerberg's characterization of the Winklevoss twins effort is correct it still does not mean that Zuckerberg did not derive something of value from the association.

But beyond all this Zuckerberg voluntarily accepted certain responsibilities.  he was the one that decided on an incredibly simple verbal contract.  That contract bound him to make a good faith effort to provide value to the Winklevoss twins.  He did not do that.  He did do a quick review of the code and the concept.  If he had problems he should immediately made an effort to bring these issues to the Winklevoss twins' attention.  He did not.  Instead he started working on Facebook, knowing that would interfere with his ability to meet his obligations to the Winklevoss twins.  There is no reason to believe that he was not aware of this.  So I am in complete agreement that the Winklevoss twins had a right to sue him and had a right to substantial compensation. 

In a similar vein he misbehaved and it was appropriate that his friend Edwardo had a right to substantial compensation.  With that out of the way, let me move on to a more general issue.

Very few people are able to pull off what Zuckerberg pulled off.  There is a reason for this.  First, he was an incredibly gifted coder.  People who have the coding talent he has are extremely rare.  But they do exist and most of them do not have the kind of success Zuckerberg had.  That's because Zuckerberg had a second quality, drive.  Now I may lack this but others, especially if they are rewarded early in life, do.  So, while important, this is not that critical a component.  Zuckerberg has an additional skill.  He was able to visualize what Facebook should look like and how it should operate.  He might have gotten ideas form his friends, enemies, etc. but he was the one who figured out which were the important ideas and how to integrate them so they worked together.  This is something I am not good at.  I am good at writing code but not coming up with a "big picture" idea of what code should do.  The only ideas I had for code were system utilities of one sort or another.

Zuckerberg was like Bill Gates in this respect.  Gates had other abilities beyond just being able to write a lot of good code quickly.  Gates had a good business sense and trained himself to become a good salesman, something I think Zuckerberg never did.  What is necessary for success at the level of Gates and Zuckerberg is a lot of luck, a lot of drive, and multiple skills.  This combination is extremely rare.  It is a good thing that our society rewards people that have this very rare and valuable combination.  But I think we can encourage these people sufficiently for them to do what they do and for society to reap the benefit without compensating them at the multi-billion dollar level.

Enjoy the movie.