Thursday, May 21, 2015

Robot cars - an update

I last addressed this subject back in 2011.  Here's the link:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/03/robot-cars.html.  In reviewing what I wrote then I must say I did a very good job.  I first covered potential alternatives to the car (the alternatives work less well than many think they will).  Then I addressed engines and fuels (I think gasoline powered hybrids will be the best choice for a long time to come).  If you want to know more about either subject I refer you to my earlier post.  The last subject I covered then was the one mentioned in the title of both that post and this one.  I made some predictions about robot cars then that are looking pretty good now.  In this post I am going expand on what I said about robot cars then and add some new predictions about how things will develop.

Not a lot of time has passed since my previous post.  But cars are now evolving at warp speed compared to the historical norm.  The first car I drove was a 1950 Plymouth.  It was one of the first cars to sport a new and, at the time "cutting edge", feature.  Most cars built even a year earlier required you to stomp on a button on the floor to get the engine to turn over and start.  This car contained a technological advance.  You could make the engine turn over and start by giving the ignition key an extra bit of twist.  The car my dad bought was the cheapest Plymouth on the lot.  That car did have the new feature but it did not sport what were then options including electric turn signals, a clock, or a radio.  But many other cars of that time did come equipped with all three.  So, if you had bought one of those other models it would have driven just like any "stick shift" car made in the next 50 years.

While I was in college in the late '60s I drove a '58 Pontiac.  It had an automatic transmission (and turn signals, a clock and a radio).  It turns out that driving that car was pretty similar to driving any "automatic" produced in the next 50 years too.  But in roughly the last decade cars have started changing quickly.  A couple of years ago I drove a car that literally had a push button.  You push the button to tell the computer that you want to start driving (or that you are done).  That's a really different experience than the old "put the key in the ignition and go through the rest of the rigmarole necessary to get the engine to start" routine.  In fact with many cars now you don't even have to put the key in the ignition at all.  As long as it's in your pocket you are good to go.

And that's not even the current cutting edge.  A friend of mine has a Toyota Prius.  It has the same push button (and key in the pocket) setup but what happens when you push the button is now radically different.  Now he no longer controls what is happening with the engine.  The computer does.  He pushes down on the "gas pedal" but now all that does is tell the computer you want to go faster.  The computer figures out how to make it so.  What's going on?

I recently saw a story about a $9 computer.  The basic package does not include everything.  There's no power supply or keyboard or monitor.  But the same people that sell the $9 computer will sell you an add on that includes all this stuff and it costs $15.  So you can get the whole package for about $25.  Why does that matter?  Because that $9 device includes a CPU, RAM, a solid state disk, and a number of standard ports you can plug stuff into.  It is powerful enough to run real computer programs.  And it costs $9 if you buy them one at a time.  My point is that large amounts of computer power is now really cheap.

That means that car companies can afford to put a powerful computer in your car.  And that computer has access to power and it will be designed to get inputs from things like the gas pedal or various sensors scattered round the car and it will be designed to send outputs to things like controls on the engine or actuators on the transmission or whatever.  So to add a computer to a car costs the car maker $9 or possibly quite a bit less.  And, if you can use the computer to replace something like the old complex machinery that figured out when to shift automatic transmissions you can save the cost of the components you are replacing.  In fact, replacing components with a computer can actually save a lot of money.  The computer has a negative "cost".

The tipping point on all this was reached about 10 years ago.  I currently drive a '99.  It has a limited amount of computer capability.  But the same make and model of car made only five years later has several much more powerful computers, each dedicated to a different task.  That is now just the cheapest way to go for the car companies.  And computers keep getting even cheaper and even more powerful.

I talked about the DARPA challenge that kicked this whole "robot car" thing into high gear in my previous piece.  To pull that off then contestants had to jam many thousands of dollars of expensive computer and sensor equipment into the cars.  It was hard getting everything to just fit and function.  But car companies have gotten better and better at integrating computers into cars.  And the sensors have gotten incredibly small, incredibly cheap, and incredibly frugal in their power consumption.  Why?  Because in many cases what we are talking about are smartphone components.

Smartphones are small and have tiny batteries that don't work very well.  So cell phone components have to be small and have to be very frugal when it comes to power consumption.  They are still relatively expensive.  If you bought an iPhone 6 without most of its cost being hidden in your monthly phone bill it would cost about $600.  That's a far cry from $9.  But you can now get a phone with the capability of an iPhone 1, introduced in 2007, for perhaps $100.  It would look pretty wimpy and pathetic sitting next to an iPhone 6.  But the iPhone 6 costs now what the iPhone 1 cost then.  The big difference is that the new components that are so much more powerful and so much more capable now cost what the iPhone 1 components cost then.  The price of this sort of thing is plummeting at an astounding rate.  And it is going to keep plummeting.

This is reflected in the features you find on new cars today.  The capabilities that were available on perhaps one or two high end cars in 2011 included sophisticated cruise control, blind spot detection, collision avoidance, and collision alert when you are backing up.  All of these features and more are now available on mid-priced cars.  But the "same" features on these new cars work much better now than they did then.  These include the ability for the car to find the lane markers and keep you in your lane and a feature that tries to figure out if you have nodded off behind the wheel.  And, as the late night infomercials have it, "but wait - there's more".  Car makers are rolling out new and improved features like they are in the fashion business.

One thing I pointed out in my previous post was the importance of cars talking to each other.  That looked like a problem then.  But the Federal Government stepped in recently and is now coordinating a project to standardize inter-car communication.  That problem got solved before most people even knew there might be a problem.  The rate at which cars are gaining intelligence is astonishing.  And perhaps most astonishing is that several car makers have announced that they will be selling robot cars by 2020.  That's only five years from now.  Even more astonishing is the fact that it looks like they will hit their target date.

There is always someone willing to try to scare people.  With respect to robot cars the standard line is "what if a robot car goes berserk and kills a bunch of people?"  It could happen.  But look at Google's experience.  I was able to report in 2011 that a Google car had been in an accident.  I can now report that Google cars have been in 11 accidents.  And something surprising, at least to the "kill a bunch of people" crowd has happened.  In all but one of those accidents it was obviously the fault of the other person.  The accident that was not caused by the other driver happened while the car was being driven by a person not the automation.

The most common accident scenario has been where the Google car is stopped at a stop sign or a traffic light and someone rear ends them.  The accidents were not the result of the stop.  The Google car had been stopped for a while when it was hit.  The other driver was just not paying attention.  And all the logs and readouts were able to unambiguously and with great detail and specificity tell the tale of exactly what happened and who was at fault.  The attention of robot cars does not wander.  They do not text while driving.  Or, if they do, they are able to multitask so the quality of their driving does not suffer.  It is very likely that robot cars will make the roads safer, much safer.  Robot cars also do not drive drunk.  By far the most difficult problem the robot car people have had to cope with is other cars being driven by people.

I am sure that when robot cars first become available they will not be for most people.  For one thing they will be expensive.  And a lot of people will be unwilling to trust their lives and those of their friends and loved ones to a robot.  I expect that concern to disappear pretty quickly.  The cost problem will take longer.  I expect the first robot cars that hit the road to be quite sophisticated.  But I think they will follow the iPhone model.  The first iPhone blew everybody away.  Until, that is, the iPhone 2 came out.  Apple has succeeded in making each generation of the iPhone more cool than the previous one.

I expect to see the same thing with robot cars.  With the iPhone Apple saw how people were using them and that suggested improvements.  Also, so many iPhones were sold that the parts manufacturers were able to figure out how to make the same part more cheaply or a better part for the same cost.  So later iPhones had better hardware.  Apple turned that into new features or old features that worked better.

I don't expect robot cars to sell in the numbers iPhones do.  But advances in smart phones will help car makers out as will experience gained as many cars hit the road.  I think robot car 2.0 will be much better than robot car 1.0.  And then 3.0 and 4.0, etc. will all be a big improvement on the previous generation model.  iPhones have been around for less than ten years.  Every time a new model rolls out people ask "how can they make the new model better than the old one"?  So far Apple, and the other smart phone makers, have figured out an answer that generates an incredible volume of sales.  At some point this will stop.  But I have no idea when it will be.  I think it will take longer for robot cars to get to the point where the new models don't not seem like that much of an improvement over the old one.  But I am not going to try to guess how long that will take.  Instead I am going to apply my crystal ball to a other related issues.

As I covered more thoroughly in the previous article there are people that think cars are the root of all evil.  I think like an engineer.  Engineers don't think "cars are evil".  Instead they think "what are the problems with cars?"  Then, if they agree that this or that actually is a problem they go on to ask "what is the best solution?"  If the best or only way to fix the problem is "get rid of cars" then "get rid of cars" becomes the engineer's solution of choice.  But the focus is on solving the problem and not some moral judgment about whether cars are good or bad.  We live in a world where people like to fixate on the moral judgment to the exclusion of trying to find the best solution to the problem.  But instead of doing that I am going to apply the engineer's perspective to a couple of problems associated with cars.  I am going to skip over the "is it a real problem" part because I think both of these are real problems.

The two issues I want to address are pollution and streets.  Let me start with pollution.  Cars turn gasoline into several different nasty things.  One of them used to be smog.  Smog is smoky, smelly, and unhealthy stuff hanging around in the air.  It is unpleasant.  It blocks our ability to see blue sky and fluffy clouds.  It also just smells bad.  So it is an aesthetic disaster.  But it also turns out to be a health disaster.  It does terrible things to your lungs.  Smog in the US is mostly a thing of the past.

Changes to the formulation of gasoline and to how cars work got rid of the problem.  Some places still have a smog problem some of the time but for most of us it is pretty much a thing of the past.  The guts of a car (and the chemistry of gasoline) are now quite different than they used to be but it turned out to be possible to fix cars so that they did not create smog.  China has a terrible smog problem.  And some of this is caused by cars.  But most of it is caused by coal fired power plants.  And modern designs for cars and gasoline would take care of the car part of the problem.  So China can fix its smog problem.  It just has to decide to fix it and then do so.

That's an example of where the solution was not to get rid of cars but to make changes so that the problem went away.  If smog was the whole problem we would be done.  But it isn't.  It was just the most visible and the easiest problem to fix.  The big problem that everyone knows about is carbon dioxide (CO2).  If you have a gas (or diesel) car it is going to make lots of CO2.  There is just no getting around this.  If you switch to Natural Gas as a fuel the amount of CO2 goes down but it is not eliminated.  If you switch to Hydrogen you can eliminate the CO2 problem.  But I indicated in 2011 what the problems with Hydrogen are.  I still think they are insoluble so I don't see Hydrogen ever going anywhere.

The best you can do is to manage the problem to minimize it.  There is plenty of room to make cars much more efficient.  That's why I am a fan of hybrids.  I think you can get the amount of CO2 per mile way down from where it currently is.  A car's basic purpose is to move around.  To make this work you need a way to have a large amount of stored energy move around with the car.  A gas tank full of gas represents an unbelievably large amount of stored energy.  It is so vastly superior in this role to anything currently available that I frankly have trouble imagining an alternative.  But we can do a lot better at getting the most out of what is there.  In almost all cases burning generates CO2.  And lots of the burning we do does not have mobility issues.  So I think there are lots of ways to drastically cut the amount of CO2 produced in these situations where mobility is not involved.

Now I would be delighted if I could justify tossing out the entire preceding paragraph out.  If someone comes up with a decent battery, a device that can store and release a lot of energy at a small cost in terms of volume, weight, and money, then I would be all for all electric cars.  A good battery would make all kinds of approaches to CO2 reduction possible.  That would mean that we could ditch the whole hybrid thing for something much better.  The good news is that between 2011 and now there has been some progress in battery technology.  The bad news is that the amount of progress has been very modest.  Batteries still suck.  And I see nothing currently on the horizon that looks promising in terms of a large improvement in batteries.  We should do what we can to reduce CO2 emissions from cars and other vehicles but we are not going to get it to zero or anywhere near zero.  I wish I had better news on this front but I don't.  The same is not true about the other issue.

I know a couple of people that know a lot about urban planning and that sort of thing.  Both of them do not like how much of a city ends up as pavement (streets and parking).  In actual use streets are very inefficient.  We get in our car and drive somewhere.  On both ends there has to be someplace to park the car.  And we go to several places.  So we don't need two places, on average, to park our car.  We need more like ten.  Now if you drive to the mall today but don't tomorrow the parking place you use today can be used by someone else tomorrow.  But you don't go to two or ten places in your car.  You go to hundreds or thousands.  So, on average, many parking places have to be provided for things to work.  That means vast amounts of land devoted to parking.

Then there are the streets that connect everything together.  First, there has to be a street to wherever you might want to go even if you don't do it very often.  Then there has to be enough capacity so that you can go there when you want.  It doesn't matter if the street is wide open at three in the morning if you want to go there at three in the afternoon.  So in the same way that there needs to be lots of parking spaces for each car there needs to be lots of streets to handle the traffic.  So here too the average utilization is low.  And that bugs the urban planners.  They like alive and green not paved and barren.  And most people agree with them.  It seams reasonable to be unhappy about the amount of land area in a city devoted to streets and parking.  It seems reasonable because it is.

The standard urban planner solution is to replace cars with feet or bicycles or mass transit.  I looked at those options previously too.  So now let me focus on how robot cars can make things better, possibly a lot better.  I am going to start with a simple idea:  If a car can drive itself it can park itself.  Ok, how does this help?  Consider the present situation.  When you are home where's your car.  It's in the garage or on the street.  Why?  Because you don't want to have to hike a long distance to get from your car to your home.  But the need for close in parking goes away if the car can drive itself.  It can be waiting close at hand when you want to go somewhere but it can be somewhere else the rest of the time.  It can also drop you off then go away when you return.  You don't need to have an attached garage or on street parking any more.

As long as the car is reasonably close, say within a mile, it can get to your door in almost no time.  An application on your phone to summon it a minute or so before you need it is not hard to implement.  Your phone, if you have a smartphone, already has much more complex applications running on it now.  So that takes care of the home end.  On street or on premises parking is no longer needed where you live.  And the same kind of approach also works at the other end.  As long as you car can be summoned quickly it does not need to be parked within a few steps of your destination.  Then there's the in between part.

There are expectations about how close you will stick to the car in front of you.  They are based on an average plus a margin.  On average a driver can react to changing circumstances in a certain period of time.  You need to be far enough away so you don't hit something while you are in the process of reacting.  On top of that a margin needs to be built in because this is not the kind of thing where "mostly right" is ok.  Enough margin needs to be built in so that it is extremely unlikely that two vehicles will hit each other.  That means that even the most obnoxious tailgater leaves considerable space.  And the timid may leave a ridiculously large amount of space.

A standard number for the capacity of a highway car lane is 2000 cars per hour.  That translates to a bumper to bumper distance between cars of about 160 feet.  I drive a big beast of a car.  It is almost 20 feet long.  If all the cars on the road are about 20 feet long that means that following each car is 7 car's worth of empty space.  If we could somehow jam cars bumper to bumper the same freeway lane could handle 8 times as much traffic.  With cars driven by people you can't do that.  The situation on city streets is not as bad.  The cars are, on average, much closer together.  But the idea is the same.  And then there are those pesky traffic lights.  I spend a lot of time stopped waiting for traffic lights.  And I can't tell you how much of that time I have spent stopped even though there is no one coming.

Remember the part where cars will soon be talking to each other.  Well how about putting a "car" at each intersection.  It wouldn't actually be a car.  It would instead be the traffic light system.  It could tell my robot car when the light was going to change.  That might help.  But much more is possible.  Most traffic lights are connected to sensors in the road that detect cars.  Pretty much the only thing this information seems to currently be used for is to decide whether or not to cycle the "left only" signal.  Smart traffic lights could also use the information to retime the light cycle on the fly.  This should allow the lights to cycle in a more efficient pattern.

The sensors in the road can also be used to continuously monitor the amount and timing of traffic.  This would allow the signal duration to be dynamically adjusted to allow for increases or decreases in traffic no matter when or why they happen.  Many lights now have a "night" pattern or a "rush hour" pattern.  But these are hard wired in and only infrequently changed.  It is very expensive to gather the data and make the changes so it is rarely done.  And patterns are set for average or expected or typical conditions rather than actual current conditions.

So we can get the traffic lights to work better.  We can have the signal let the cars know when the signal is going to change.  The information can also flow in the other direction.  My car can also tell the signal when it needs the "left turn" cycle activated or that it is going to be making a right turn so there doesn't need to be a "through" cycle if it's only for my car.  That sort of thing effectively increases the capacity of streets.  And, where it makes sense, increasing speed limits also increases capacity.  If the separation between cars doesn't need to be increased then a higher speed limit increases the capacity of the street.  Computers in cars do not become inattentive and they can react very quickly.  So once most cars on the road are robot cars we can substantially increase (double?  triple?) the effective capacity of streets.  This means the same streets can handle a lot more traffic or the same amount of traffic can be handled by a far more modest street system.

And then there is this.  Most people now want a car that is their own.  Part of it has to do with the fact that a car is a statement.  Forty year old men driving a muscle car are making a statement.  But so are twenty-five year old women driving a cute pink car.  The auto industry has come up with pretty much whatever kind of vehicle you need to make whatever kind of statement you want to make.  Then there is the fact that some people haul a lot of stuff around.  They need a car of their own because it needs to have their stuff in it.  And so it goes.  But then there are other people who just don't care.  If they want to make a statement they want to do it some other way.  Or they see a car as basic transportation.  If you can get them to where they want to go they don't care how it is done.  At present most of us find a car to be the most practical option.  But what if that were not true?  What if there were other practical options?

Some people manage to get along without a car.  One trick they employ is to occasionally use a taxi.  If you only need a car once in a while it is cheaper and may be more convenient to cab it.  And we now have Lyft and Uber.  They provide what is essentially a taxi service but it is cheaper and more convenient.  At least that's their story.  But we can go a lot further in this direction in a robot car environment.  What if you don't own the car you summon?  Say some of the cars in that garage we were talking about before are pool cars.  They are available for anyone to use.  If an appropriate car shows up and gets you to where you want to go does it have to be a car your own?  For some people it does but for others that is not a requirement.

Robot cars allows us to take the taxi/uber/lyft model even farther.  Presumably the direct cost per mile would be higher.  But the purchase and maintenance costs would be zero so that actual cost would be lower.  And now the number of cars it takes to make everybody happy drops substantially so the demand for parking drops and the urban planners get to reduce the amount of pavement.  That makes them happy and us happy because all of us like more greenery in out lives.

And lots of people currently buy more car than they routinely need.  I have a big beast.  But most of the time there is only me so it is overkill.  If I could summon a small car when that's all I need but get a big car for those few times that I need one then I will, on average, be in a smaller, more efficient car, than what I now use.  Yet I will have something that in a practical sense works better than what I now have.  This will not work for everyone.  But it will work for a lot of people.

If you are an "I hate cars - period." person none of this will be persuasive.  But if you are in an "I hate cars for the following specific reasons" person or if you are an "I have and use a car because there is really no practical alternative" person then I have shown you a future that looks pretty good.  And it looks like robot cars will arrive sooner than I expected them to.  And that's even better.  I, for one,. can't wait.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Civil Unrest

I know something of this subject based on first hand experience.  I went to college in the late '60s and early '70s.  I caught the tail end of the Civil Rights related unrest and was front and center for the Vietnam War unrest.  Most of this post is going to be pretty serious so let me start with a funny story from the period.

One day things were going hot and heavy.  There was a large crowd gathered at what passed for "speaker's corner" on campus.  There was street that ran along one side of the speaker's corner area.  That day a rickety truck was carefully working its way to who knows where.  Something went wrong and everyone immediately found out what the truck was carrying.  It was bees, zillions of bees.  It was instantaneously and unambiguously established that the student protesters and the bees were quite unhappy with each other.  Needless to say the crowd of students thinned quickly.

With distrust of authority running high at the time the theory quickly gained currency that the bees were some kind of plot by school administration to get back at protesters.  But it eventually turned out that it was just some bee guy who was having some kind of bee problem and had come to consult with a professor on campus.  He had brought the bees along so that the professor could see what the problem was.  The one that lost out the most was the bee guy.  In the melee he lost most of his bees.  For the rest of us it ended up being a tee hee during a period when tee hees were hard to come by.

I have talked elsewhere about what I learned by studying the "Vietnam" problem in the years after that wound down.  See http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/vietnam-lessons-learned.html for details.  But the same is true about Civil Unrest.  I have also outlined just how much was going on in one specific year from this period (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/08/1968.html) in another post.  I got to observe a lot of Civil Unrest first hand from the inside at that point in my life.  Afterwards I spent some time thinking about the subject.  Here is the result of that thinking.

Our society suffers from a serious case of systemic amnesia.  We have a hard time remembering what happened last week, let alone last year, or roughly 50 years ago.  The amount of civil unrest that characterized that period is much greater than anything that is now happening or has happened recently.  Not one but several bombs were detonated on the campus of the school I attended.  For a while it seemed like there were bombs going off not just on my campus but all over the place.  The amount of death and destruction associated with the Watts Riots or the MLK riots dwarfs any current or recent event now in the US.  I write this in what may turn out to be the middle of events taking place in Baltimore Maryland.  And I write this just the day after what has turned out to be an annual event in my town, the May Day Riot.

When I now watch these events I believe I am doing so with an educated eye.  As such it is disappointing to watch people who should know better display their ignorance.  The first thing they get wrong is some variation on "this has never happened before".  It may have never happened before in the professional life of the speaker.  More likely, it has happened before, even during that often short span of time, but it makes for a better story to pretend otherwise.   That is an obvious error.  Let me move on to a more subtitle one, leadership.

As I noted above there was an area that ended up functioning like a speaker's corner.  People with portable bull horns (a recent invention at the time) would get up and speechify.  The theory is that a "great leader" will get up and by the power or his logic, or more likely the power of his oratorical gifts, will  sway the crowd.  If he is truly a great leader he will soon turn the crowd into putty in his hands and be able to get them to follow him wherever he chooses to lead.  That's how it is supposed to work.

But that is not what I saw in action back in the day.  Speaker after speaker would get up and take his, and occasionally her, shot.  Sometimes it would take and sometimes it wouldn't.  It took me a long time to figure out what the rules were.  The rules were "if you say what the crowd wants to hear they are with you, otherwise they are not".  Certainly a more articulate speaker has a better shot.  And certainly a speaker with more oratorical gifts stands a better chance.  But a bad speaker saying the right things has a far better chance than the best speaker saying wrong things.

The subject, for the most part was the war in Vietnam.  Students were mostly against it for good reasons and bad.  So that wasn't the issue.  The issue was what to do.  There were a whole range of options from "do nothing" to "burn everything down".  The trick was to occupy the spot on that scale that was closest to where the listeners were.  Mostly this crowd was non-violent.  Few supported the campus bombings, which were carefully planned and executed to result in no death or injury.  That was too extreme on one end.  And no one was at the other extreme, in the "do nothing" camp.  Mostly what the crowd wanted was to have their beliefs voiced effectively.

So they wanted to demonstrate and they wanted to demonstrate at a specific level of intensity.  If you could think up a gimmick that would succeed in getting the word out, that would make you a hero.    Shutting part of campus down was ok.  Shutting everything down was too far.  Although one day after something particularly horrible had happened someone came up with the idea of walking down the I-5 freeway.  And so it came to be that the first time a freeway was shut down anywhere as part of a protest was in Seattle.  The establishment claimed at the time that this was the most horrible thing that could possibly have happened.  Now what happened that day would be seen as a normal commute.  Traffic around here has gotten that much worse since then.  To summarize, speakers advocating something that was too hot or cold didn't get anywhere with the crowd.  Speakers who hit the "Goldilocks" spot (just right) got somewhere.

What all this taught me was that "leadership" consists to a great extent of figuring out where the parade is going and getting to the front of it.  Now it may be that the parade wants to go where you want it to go.  Great!  But it will not go where it does not want to go.  Does that mean there is no role for leadership?  No!  It is just not what it is usually made out to be.

Most of us are pretty inarticulate most of the time.  A leader can take ideas that we have a hard time articulating and say them in a way that we wished we could.  A leader can also take a fuzzy, muddy concept and clarify it.  It is also true that organization is necessary to turn incoherent desire into coherent and hopefully effective action.  If there is an organization an individual can join his individual efforts can join with those of many others.  This can result in a more powerful effort that is more likely to succeed.  Finally, although a leader can't get the parade to go in an entirely different direction, the parade can be nudged into a slightly different path.  A leader can, in effect, get the parade to march down the left side of the street, the right side of the street, or the center of the street, as long as it is the right street.

Let me demonstrate this with some examples from back then and from now.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was widely acknowledged by friends and enemies alike as an inspired and inspiring orator.  He was also a great leader.  But a careful examination of his record will show a number of misses to go with the hits.  When he was assassinated in 1968 it was during a period when people had almost completely written him off.  Why?  Because he was saying unpopular things and not saying popular things.  He was still organizing and leading the same kinds of campaigns as before.  His rhetorical skills were still superior.  But it wasn't working.  Why?

He had come out against the Vietnam War.  You would think that would be a good thing.  But people within the Civil Right's movement saw it as a distraction.  And people outside the Civil Rights movement like President Johnson who had been his supporters saw this as King abandoning his friends.  So it actually turned out to be very unpopular with the people who would normally make up the membership of King's parade.  And the country had moved on.  The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 had been passed and enacted into law.  The immediate need to do civil rights right now was widely seen as no longer so immediate.  In short people were not interested in his message.so they tuned him out.  He was still a great orator and a great leader but people did not want to be led in the direction he wanted to lead them.

In the modern era President Obama has the same problem.  In my opinion he is a great leader and I believe history will eventually agree with me.  People may disagree with my opinion.  But, as with King, the general consensus of friends and enemies alike is that Obama is a great orator.  In 2008 when he was running for president that was enough.  But a concerted effort to undermine and block him has been successful.  Enemies hate him and despise his policies.  Friends are disappointed that he hasn't done more.  He can argue that he got as much as there was to get but that's not the kind of rhetoric that stirs the soul.  Now let's consider a noted opponent of each of these people.

In King's case Richard Nixon immediately comes to mind.  Nixon was not ever considered a great speaker.  He also is no one's idea of a leadership role model.  But he found a group of people and figured out what they wanted to hear and then told them that.  If he needed a great turn of phrase there was always a speech writer around somewhere.  That turned out to be enough.  He used this technique to get into congress and eventually into the White House.  And Nixon demonstrates something else about leadership.  You don't need to get everyone to join your parade.  You just need to get enough.

Nixon is also instructive in another way.  He used the "find the parade and get in front of it" strategy in the late '40s and early '50s to become a successful politician and nationally prominent.  He also used it to get elected President in 1968 and reelected in 1972.  But he also ran for President in 1960 and governor of California in 1962.  He lost both races after using the "I'm more experienced and competent than the other guy" argument.

That brings us to President Obama's most effective opponent, Senator Mitch McConnell.  Here again we have someone with no gift for rhetoric, soaring or otherwise.  He can make a modest claim to leadership ability as he has been in charge of the Republican contingent in the US Senate since the end of 2006.  But Mitch McConnell is not the name that comes to anyone's lips, even those of his most ardent supporters, when the subject is "great leaders".  Nevertheless, he has been quite successful.

He has been able to block many popular Obama initiatives.  This has redounded to his benefit by causing the afore mentioned disappointment among Obama supporters.  And he has orchestrated a successful effort to bring Senate Republicans from the minority to the majority.  McConnell's achievements are mostly of the negative kind.  But he has proved to be brilliant in his ability to get to the front of the parade he has chosen to lead.  He has brought voters to the Republican cause and that has cemented his position at the front of the parade of his fellow Republican Senators.

Now let me move on to the most noteworthy feature of Civil Unrest, in a word rioting.  Unfortunately, (more on this below) what makes an example of Civil Unrest noteworthy is the amount of mass destruction.  In the '60s this often involved actual death.  There were 34 deaths associated with the Watts riots in '68.  In another notable event from the period National Guardsmen killed 4 college students at Kent State University in 1970.  (Since they were white kids this event probably had a bigger impact in the end than Watts and that's sad.)  On the "and destruction" front one source lists the number of buildings damaged or destroyed in the Watts riots at roughly a thousand.  There were lots of other instances of Civil Unrest in the period.  At least one happened in the vary same Baltimore that is now back in the news.  Compared to the level of death and destruction then, recent events have been small bore.

The inciting incident in both the Ferguson and Baltimore examples was a death.  But the civil unrest that followed has so far been free of additional fatalities.  And while destruction is preferable to death I am against it for a number of reasons.  I was against it too back in the day.  So I also asked myself how it could be avoided in the future.  And, as recent events have more than amply demonstrated, there is no public solution on display.  Which leads me to my next topic, the news media.

There has been an unofficial education process going on stretching back to the civil rights activities of the '50s.  In the '50s the only technology available for procuring news "video" was the movie camera.  In ideal circumstances (an event at a fixed location where the schedule was known well in advance) a stand was set up where the bigger news organizations could put their 16mm movie cameras.  Elsewhere I am sure that 8mm "home" equipment was put to use.  But it didn't work very well.  Film was expensive.  You had to get it back to the studio so it could be developed and edited.  Then very short snippets would find there way into "newsreel" previews at the movies or onto 15 minute news broadcasts on TV.  People who became involved in "man on the street" situation did not know what was going on and just played it straight.

This was true through most of the '60s as TV stations got networked together and video tape replaced film.  TV news also went to a half hour of national news and 30-60 minutes of local news.  "Man in the street" encounters were still rare enough so that most of the public didn't know how to "game" them.  But technology marched on.  News gathering made its way into movie and TV plots and people became much more knowledgeable about the process and much more skilled at gaming the system.

Now everyone knows how the dance goes.  And average people on the street know what is expected of them when the TV cameras show up.  There are even lots of people who know how to "Jerry Springer".  Springer's long running show is about people behaving badly.  It is widely believed that most people on the show now are just making up the most outrageous behavior they can think of in an effort to get their 15 minutes of fame.  They know that everyone is in on the gag and their friends and family won't take what they see on the show seriously.

It would be nice if people only "Jerry Springer"-ed on the Springer show but they don't.  Things have gotten to the point where people are coming up to news people and critiquing them, often quite knowledgably, for covering Springer-type behavior and ignoring what is really going on .  So the expertise of the average viewer has changed a lot.  And the fact that this level of expertise is now common means that it is common knowledge that a good way to get the news media to show up is to burn something down.

This aspect of the situation has changed a lot.  Other aspects have not changed nearly as much.  In thinking about civil unrest and how to avoid it I came to the conclusion that the news media has a very important role.  "If it bleeds it leads" (a variation  on Springer-think) is now no longer a secret, as I indicated above.  So this leads to more "burn it down" going on, right?  Well, actually not.  The part of society that is outside the news business has concluded that the disadvantages of a "burn it down" strategy outweigh the advantages.  So, in spite of how well it works if your objective is to get on TV, there is remarkably little "burn it down" going on.  But this is in spite of how the news business operates not because of it.  I think that's bad.

There is a way for the news business to make a positive contribution.  Unfortunately it requires them to move away from the current "if it bleeds it leads" story selection model. They don't have to move completely away.  But they need to make different news decisions having to do with demonstrations.  Frankly, I can't figure out how the news business decides what level of coverage to give a demonstration.  If violence breaks out and there is video, of course it is covered.  But sometimes non-violent demonstrations are covered and sometimes they aren't.  They sometimes cover small demonstrations and frequently don't cover big ones. There doesn't seem to be a consistent rule.

The events in Baltimore exactly illustrate the problem.  There was little or no news coverage of large non-violent demonstrations surrounding earlier events similar to the Gray event.  There was little or no news coverage of the large non-violent demonstrations after the death of Freddie Gray but before the rioting took place.  That results in people feeling that they are voiceless and powerless.  At some point someone thinks "time for a fire".  If there is no alternative then it should not be surprising if thought eventually morphs into action.

So far the Baltimore situation has involved exactly one day of rioting.  This was not due to anything the authorities did nor was it a result of anything the news media did.  In fact, one of the features of post riot news coverage has been the count down clock.  A 10 PM curfew has been imposed.  Many news stations have run clocks counting down to 10 PM.  This is an open invitation for riots to break out on the stroke of zero.  It is hard to think of a more obvious invitation to mischief than that.  Anyone interested in mischief is guaranteed a large audience that have been put on to the edge of their seats.  There is some modest justification for this particular behavior.  There is no justification for their pre-riot behavior.

And its not just Baltimore.  In the run up to the 2003 Iraq war there were large anti-war demonstrations in my home town of Seattle and in other places.  There was almost no news coverage of this.  The result is that people like Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who carried water for the Bush Administration in the run up to the war, can claim with a straight face in her new book that there was no one making a case against going to war.

I believe it is incumbent on the news media to cover a demonstration, especially if it is peaceful, if you can get a large number of people to turn out.  It's news.  It also gives voice to the frustrated.  Often people are willing to settle for a fair hearing.  If they get one and they lose the argument they may be unhappy but they don't feel powerless .  So a part of the coverage needs to include an airing of their position.

Often public opinion is one sided because people are only exposed to one side of an issue.  Now it may be that there is only one sensible side of an issue.  I think most of the arguments advanced by the pro-gun people are nuts.  But if they can get a big enough group of people to show up somewhere then that should get them some coverage.  I think eventually people figure out who makes sense and who doesn't.

What gets covered and what doesn't depends to some extent on the prejudices of news organizations.  But it depends even more strongly on business reality.  "If it bleeds it leads" gets ratings.  Higher ratings gets more ad revenue which keeps the business in business.  Covering non-violent protests will not help their ratings.  But it is the business they are in.  I believe that the lack of investment in non-sexy news had led to a deterioration in the amount of trust and respect accorded news organizations by the public.  And I believe that has been bad for business in the long run.

Pretty much all of the news business is struggling financially.  It is another example of the kind of short term thinking that pervades so much of what passed for "smart" business these days.  It made a number of business operations a lot of money for a long time (as measured by Wall Street) but it is not working very well at the moment.  Unfortunately, in the same way it took trust in the news business a long time to erode, it will take a long time to build it back.

There is another issue where recent events resonates with past events.  In Baltimore the neighborhood CVS Pharmacy was burned out.  Pretty much everyone, with the possible exception of a few of the people actually responsible, thought this was a bad idea.  The community lobbied hard to get the store located where it was.  And it provided a service that many in the community found necessary and important.  It is not clear if CVS will rebuild.  Certainly, on one would blame them if they chose not to.  And that echoes what took place in the '60s.  Most of the burning and looting happened in the local neighborhood.  It has been noted that parts of what used to be the business district of Baltimore has still not been rebuilt since it was burned down in the '60s.  It seems counterproductive to burn out your own community.  So why is that what seems to inevitably get burned?

The answer is pretty obvious.  These people don't have a lot of resources.  They burn what they can get to.  But it is a bad idea long term.  And nearly immediately after the one night of rioting in Baltimore it was obvious that most residents in the affected areas were well aware of this.  Movements broke out immediately to clean things up and make sure the rioting was not able to start up again.

It is too soon to tell if it is for real or not but it has been widely reported that the Crips, Bloods, and other gangs have declared a truce and gone into "law and order" mode.  They are stepping in and playing the role of the police in the current absence of the real police.  The gangs claim this is not some kind of protection racket.  A contributing factor to this surprising development is the past absence, according to many citizens, of effective policing by the real police.  Things like this have a way of falling apart as time passes.  So some time will have to pass before we will know if this development is what it appears to be or not.

Finally, I want to cover one more issue.  And to do so I want to circle back to something I opened this piece with.  And that's the annual May Day riot in Seattle.  It came off this year in pretty much the same way it has in the last few years.  It is important to know that while it is now an annual event it actually has a known starting point.

In 1999 the World Trade Organization (WTO) held a big conference in Seattle.  Steam had been building up for some time among a number of activist groups to try to make some noise and the WTO meeting seemed the perfect opportunity.  Everybody knew this.  So both sides geared up for a lot of activity.  Lots of "anti" groups geared up to descend on the town with the intention of staging big protests.  The police and various government agencies geared up to be ready to handle the protests. 

Now Seattle is not like Baltimore.  It's pretty liberal and at that time the Police Chief was very liberal.  He tried to reach out and do some co-ordination.  He wanted to give the protesters plenty of opportunity to vent but he wanted to keep things peaceful and under control.  The protest organizers, even the pacifist ones were having none of this.

Things got completely out of control.  Most of the protesters wanted to confine their protesting to marching around, perhaps blocking streets and so forth but they were not into violence and property destruction.  But then there were the anarchists.  They were into some serious mayhem.  Their plan was to blend in with the larger peaceful groups.  Then they would peal off, quickly wreck some havoc, then filter back into the larger protests confident they could blend in.  They had masks and other simple disguises to facilitate this plan.  The anarchist plan worked to perfection.  Everything else was a complete mess.

The police were underprepared for the activities of the anarchists and the non-anarchist protesters were un-cooperative.  The police over-reacted and reacted incompetently.  The result was more chaos than the anarchists could have possibly predicted.  If you are an anarchist, chaos is your objective.  The rest of the protesters saw whatever message they were trying to get out drowned in coverage of tear gas and broken glass.  The cops looked like incompetent thugs.  The anarchists won and everyone else lost.

I did not understand the reluctance of the nonviolent protest organizers to work with the police.  Part of it might initially have stemmed from the fact that the police wanted them to stick to a schedule, stay in designated areas, and not block streets.  In short, they were supposed to be good little protesters.  And I think there was a significant amount of mistrust on the part of the protesters when it came to the police.  But I believe that the Mayor and the Police Chief sincerely wanted to give the protesters a fair shake.  (I'm guessing the protest organizers would disagree with this sentiment.)  But after the event, I don't understand the total lack of cooperation.

The anarchists made the protesters look bad. The cops may have come off looking worse but that didn't help the protesters or their causes. They still looked pretty bad when the tear gas cleared.  I thought there would have been at least some co-operation by the protesters to try to identify and round up the worst of the bad actors.  It would have given the protesters a way to make up for the damage done by the anarchists.  But there was nothing.  That was a mistake because average people conflated the anarchists with the peaceful protesters.  And that has done the protesters and what they care about a lot of harm since.

And so things stayed for nearly fifteen years.  People on both sides have dug in.  There seems to be a great deal to support the idea that the Baltimore Police are part of the problem and not part of the solution.  Certainly, there are still factions within the Seattle Police that share that sentiment.  Seattle is one of several cities under a "consent decree" with the Justice Department over bad behavior.  More than a hundred cops joined a law suit challenging implementation of the decree.

But I see some motion in the wake of Ferguson.  The early days of Ferguson were bungled (polite characterization) badly.  But after a few days the cops backed off and things went much more smoothly.  And there was no talk of permits and staying on the sidewalk and that sort of thing.  Baltimore moved to a more sensible approach much more quickly than Ferguson did.  People need space to vent.  If you give them that space things will become much less uncivil and return to civility more quickly.

But that still leaves us with the actual bad actors.  Not a few teenagers who go too far but the anarchists who wrecked so much havoc at the WTO conference in Seattle in '99 and who burned the buildings and cars in Baltimore that night.  Seattle, then or now, would have been a good place to start.  As I indicated, this May Day thing has settled into a routine.  The peaceful protesters show up in large numbers during the day.  They protest peacefully during the day.  Then evening comes.  The number of protesters goes down but an anarchistic component now makes its presence felt.  And there is an incident.  There always seems to be an incident.  I suppose you can say the police come off looking bad.  But how does that advance the cause of any of the groups that protest peacefully?  And the anarchists seem to get away with it so there is no reason for them to stop showing up.  So every year we go through the same dance.  That's not progress.  There is only the thinnest of excuses for the peaceful protesters to fail to help.  Frankly, the excuse is too thin.  Their behavior needs to change.

I understand why the community finds Baltimore police so untrustworthy.  The situation is much worse in Baltimore than it is in Seattle.  Given that it is hard to argue that Baltimore is the place to start.  But peaceful protesters need to understand that they get tarred with the same brush as the violent ones.  It is obvious that most of the people who live in the most affected neighborhoods of Baltimore understand that.  So maybe Baltimore will find a way to lead where Seattle so far hasn't.

All that is necessary is to upload some video to YouTube then make an anonymous tip to the authorities.  Maybe that has already happened.  If it has then the news media doesn't know it or they have decided not to report it.  Every day it become more and more obvious how little privacy is left in situations where there is a lot of interest.  This is a situation where that very lack of privacy can have a beneficial impact.