This post is in a sense a twin of my last post. That post grew out of some featured articles on Autonomous Vehicles in a recent issue of "Science" magazine (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2018/01/robot-cars-now-new-and-improved.html for details). This post grows out of an item in the "Books" section of the same issue. The subject is Arthur C. Clarke. The occasion is a celebration of the fact that December 15, 2017 was the hundredth anniversary of his birth.
So who was Arthur C. Clarke and why does he deserve to have his centennial celebrated? He can best be described as a "futurist". Since he did most of his work before the word had been invented he went about it in the then usual way, he wrote Science Fiction. But like his contemporary Isaac Asimov he also wrote a considerable amount of nonfiction.
The article suggests rereading two of Clarke's works. Since I had both on my bookshelf I proceeded to do just that. They recommended "The Exploration of Space" as a nonfiction selection and "Childhood's End" as a fiction selection. They were both good choices. Before getting into them let me review his life focusing on his technical (i.e. factual) achievements. I will then move on to the two specific books and rope in some his other fictional work.
Clarke was born in the U. K. and died ninety years later in Sri Lanka after living there for many years with his "partner". Being openly gay was just not done at that time but he did not make a serious effort to hide his sexual orientation. He was always interested in technical subjects especially rockets and space flight. His first brush with cutting edge technology happened during World War II. He spent most of the war working on a classified project to provide ground assist to airplanes attempting to land in fog. This was a big problem during the war. The project didn't pan out at the time but influenced subsequent events.
Shortly after the war he introduced the world to geosynchronous satellites. The International Space Station (ISS) orbits near the earth about once every 90 minutes. The moon orbits much further out with a complete circle taking 28 days. It stands to reason that somewhere in between a satellite can take exactly 24 hours to orbit. And if it orbits in the correct direction over the equator it will appear to be completely stationary in the sky when viewed from the surface of the Earth.
Clarke published details of this in the October 1945 issue of "Wireless World". Therein he gave the proper altitude (about 22,000 miles) and the fact that three satellites poised 120 degrees apart would provide complete coverage. He also provided many other details, technical and otherwise. This was all more than a decade before the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man made satellite.
In 1979 he introduced the idea of a space elevator to the public in a science fiction book called "The Fountains of Paradise". Again, the idea is simple. If you could stretch a wire from the surface of the Earth to a point far out in space you could then attach an elevator to it. If you also hooked up electric power lines that the elevator could use then you would have an extremely efficient way to move things to and from space.
There are many technical problems. No material exists that is strong enough to be used for the wire. And that's just the beginning of the list of potential difficulties. But if a working space elevator could be built and turned out to be practical to operate it would completely revolutionize space travel.
And with that let me turn from nonfiction to fiction. (I will get back to nonfiction later.) "Childhood's End" is a great example of the creativity Clarke displayed during his entire life. The book was released in 1953, again before a single man had traveled into space. I recommend the book. But I can also recommend the 3 part miniseries of the same name that the SyFy channel broadcast in 2015 to those who don't want to hunt up a copy of the book. If you aren't already familiar with the story then the next part contains spoilers.
***** Spoiler alert.
In the book (the plot of the miniseries differs slightly but retains the important plot points) humanity is on the verge of sending men into space. All of a sudden giant space craft appear all over the earth. The "Overlords" announce their presence and decree that mankind will be deprived of space travel. Otherwise they are benign and helpful. But for reasons not explained at the time they refuse to reveal themselves. With the beneficial guidance of the Overlords war is abolished and material progress advances quickly. Earth becomes a paradise.
This goes on for some time. Finally, the Overlords reveal themselves. They look like classical devils out of mythology with horns and tails. But by this time humanity has been so accustomed to them and their reputation for benevolence is by now so well established that they are accepted with little trouble. Material progress continues but other kinds of progress comes to a nearly complete halt. First class art and significant scientific progress now seems somehow beyond the ability of current generations of humanity. Some people are concerned about this but most are not. No substantial opposition to the Overlords materializes.
We now reach the final stage. One day all the children below a certain age start changing drastically. The become literally superhuman. They attain superpowers and eventually all leave Earth for some unknown destination. Left behind are everyone above the cutoff age including the children's parents. Those humans left behind are now all sterile. There will be no more children and the non-evolved type of humanity will die off in a generation. "For humanity childhood has ended". Finally we learn that this is a transition that is common in the universe. And for some reason the Overlord race can't make it. They are doomed to be perennial midwives. So in the end we find out they are tragic figures.
***** End spoiler section
This was serious stuff. It was not at all the "ray guns, babes, and big headed aliens" that is the stereotypical Science Fiction fodder of the period. Clarke was great at coming up with creative and original thinking. He was not so good at characterization. Late in his career he wrote the "Rama" series. This was a serious but fictional take on what it would actually be like if an alien space ship took a swing through the solar system and chose not to stop. The books were very popular because of the seriousness with which they treated their subject and because of the care Clarke took with technical details. But they are a slow read.
Let's return to Clarke's nonfiction work. "The Exploration of Space" was written in 1951. I have the updated version that came out in 1959. The changes are fairly modest. By 1959 Sputnik had been launched but the Russian "Luna" mission, the first time the far side (often erroneously referred to as the "dark" side in the pre-Luna era) of the moon had been photographed, had not yet happened. It was also before Gagarin, the first man in space had taken his rocket ride in 1961. So Clarke sprinkled the results from these early space shots into the text but that left it little changed.
The book can be divided into two parts. The early sections are "rocket science for regular people". Unlike today, Clarke correctly assumed that readers of the time could handle some simple mathematics. (Modern writers are justifiably afraid of doing this because of the current widespread fear of actual facts.) He does a nice job of covering the basics.
The most important tenet of rocket science is "it's all about delta-v". "V" for velocity is speed and direction combined. And "delta" is tech talk for "change in". So a change in speed counts as delta-v. But a change in direction (or a combination of the two) does too. When it comes to using a rocket to get from here to there the key thing to figure out is how much delta-v you need. To get from the surface of the earth to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) you need a delta-v of 17,000 MPH (miles per hour). To completely break free of Earth's gravitational field you need another 8,000 for a total of 25,000 MPH. In practical terms, getting to LEO gets you most of the way to practically anywhere.
Clarke does a nice job of laying all this out. He works through several examples like getting from LEO to the Moon or LEO to Mars or LEO to Venus. This is enough examples to show what's involved in getting from pretty much anywhere to pretty much anywhere else. And the delta-v required to get from LEO to the Moon or Mars or Venus (or pretty much anywhere else) is far less than 17,000 MPH. He also provides a basic tutorial on how rockets work and what can be done with a "chemical" rocket, a rocket powered by the traditional method of burning stuff.
Chemical rockets just don't work that well. It is possible to make one that can produce a delta-v of 25,000 MPH but it means the rocket consists almost entirely of fuel. There are some tricks like multiple stages that help. But none of the tricks work well enough to substantially improve the situation. This failure is one reason people are so interested in space elevators, for instance. Clarke does not investigate space elevators in this book but he does investigate alternatives like atomic powered rockets. He does not delve very deeply, however.
In the second part of the book he goes into how we would do this or that. Given that he is doing this before we had any practical experience with space travel he does a remarkably good job. For instance, he talks about various practical aspects of space travel. He calculates roughly how many pounds per day an astronaut would need to survive in space. At the time a "man in the can" was a given because no practical alternative yet existed.
The technology of the '50s was obviously not up to the task in several areas so he was forced to speculate. But pretty much every technical advance he foresees did not come to be. This leads him to conclude that certain missions that are beyond even our current capability would be feasible. In other areas he completely misses technical advances that redefined what was possible. It turns out that predicting the future is really hard to do.
Most obviously he missed the development of small, powerful, resource stingy, computers and other electronic devices of astonishing capability. This has allowed the "man" in the can to be replaced by electronics. The savings have made it possible to send robot missions to Mercury, Pluto, and many of the places in between. These missions are literally impossible to do if people have to come along for the ride.
He also spends some time on large telescopes. He correctly identifies the two big limitations at the time on telescope design but finds no solutions to either. The first was weight. As you make the mirror bigger it must be more and more rigid so that it doesn't distort due to the influence of gravity. The practical limit had already been achieved by the 200" Palomar telescope. A substantially bigger mirror would distort to the point where the image would be inferior to what the Palomar mirror was capable of.
The other problem is caused by the fact that the atmosphere is always in motion. That means that when you look at some object in space small moving lumps of air between the object and the telescope act like lenses and bend light. At some point "atmospheric distortion", even on the best of nights, again degrades the image. And again the Palomar telescope is about as big as you could go before atmospheric distortion results in a poorer image from the larger mirror.
Both of these problems were eventually solved and Clarke saw neither solution coming. Large mirrors are now made of segments. Each segment is smaller than the 200" Palomar mirror and sophisticated machinery makes sure that each segment has the right shape and is pointed correctly. The diameter of the Palomar mirror is 5 meters. A 5 Meter telescope mirror is now considered to be on the small side.
The solution to the atmospheric distortion problem is adaptive optics. The mirror surface is literally bent and twisted many times a second to cancel out the atmospheric distortion. And powerful computer processing also allows two telescopes to operate as if they were a single telescope whose mirror diameter is the distance between them. Earth based telescopes are literally capable of feats unimaginable to Clarke. His solution was to put telescopes in space or on the moon. Space based telescopes (Hubble now, and soon the James Webb Space Telescope) do exist but only in small numbers. No one has tried to put a telescope on the moon.
I'm not trying to knock Clarke here. What I am actually saying is that the prediction business is extremely difficult to do. He does it as well as anybody can. But the results are off the mark for the most part. Let me digress into fiction for a moment before finishing up with some more fact.
Clarke wrote a short story called "The Sentinel". At some point it attracted the attention of a movie director named Stanley Kubrick. The resulting collaboration produced "2001: A Space Odyssey". If you are not familiar with it and you check it out your reaction will probably be "what's the big deal?" But "2001" was a breakthrough and became hugely influential. And so many of the things that made it special at the time have been incorporated into out culture to such an extent that they are no longer noteworthy. And it turns out that "2001" incorporated many of the key aspects of "Childhood's End". So let me review some key plot points.
The movie revolves around the influence of a "monolith". This is a dark rectangular object whos dimensions are in the ratio of 1x4x9 (one then two squared then three squared). We first see some apes fooling around with a monolith in the background. The apes discover weapons. One ape throws a bone into the sky and it morphs into a satellite. This is one of the all time great transitions in movie history. We next follow a scientist who is sent to investigate an "anomaly" on the moon, another monolith. This monolith sends a signal that causes a mission to Jupiter to be undertaken.
For the most part the space ship was operated by the now infamous HAL computer. HAL goes nuts and kills all the astronauts but one. The surviving astronaut gets to Jupiter where he encounters another monolith. There the monolith puts him through what can only be described as a psychedelic experience. This transforms the astronaut into the "Space baby" that the movie ends with.
In "The Sentinel" an object is found on the moon. An attempt is made to take a sample. The object is impervious. You can't hammer a chunk off of it. you can't scratch it with a diamond. You can't melt it with a blow torch. Finally a nuclear weapon does the job. The idea is that the object is sending a "heartbeat" signal to some unknown destination. When the object is destroyed the signal stops and some unknown race learns that there is now a space faring civilization on Earth.
"2001" combines this idea with that of the Overlords. In 2001 they are no longer devils. Now they are mysterious monoliths. But the idea is the same. They transform apes into humans and they transform humans into star children. This is the core evolutionary path in "Childhood's End". With Kubrick's help the story is told in a much more compelling way than it was in Clarke's book. But at it's core it is the same story. And it is a very interesting and imaginative story.
Back to fact. You would think that the science of rocketry would have advanced from the '50s when Clarke was writing "Exploration" to now. But that turns out to not be true. I have covered the state of the art of rocketry in several posts. Here's a link to my first post on the subject: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/11/space-shuttle-rip.html. Here's a link to my most recent post: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/11/rocket-science-in-fact-and-fiction.html. It turns out that I tend to repeat myself. The reason is that when it comes to the economics of rocket ships nothing changes. Clarke hits the highlights in "Exploration". His observations were based on the state of the art in the '50s. Not much has changed.
My 90-9-1 formula is still pretty much unchanged. A rocket consists of 90% fuel, 9% structure, and 1% payload. And it costs about $10,000 per pound to put a payload into LEO. That's pretty much what Clarke said. That's what I have said on several occasions. In one of my posts I noted that Elon Musk said he could get it down to $5,000 per pound. So as I was writing this I went on the Internet and got some numbers for the SpaceX Falcon 9, Musk's rocket. Fueled up and ready to go, the latest version ("full thrust") weighs 1,210,457 lbs. on the launch pad. The list price for a launch is $62 million.
So how many pounds can it put into LEO? Well, there are three answers. The first one is 50,265 lbs. That would mean that 4% of the rocket is payload. That sounds like a big improvement. But the devil is in the details. A Falcon 9 is a three stage rocket. It has a large main stage and a relatively small second stage. Then there's what you put on the top of the second stage. This includes but is not limited to the payload. The total weight of whatever you put on top of the second stage can weigh up to 50,265 lbs. and it will make it to LEO. And it would be great if it was all payload. But it isn't.
If you want to buy the whole package from SpaceX then you need a PAF (Payload Attach Fitting). SpaceX gives you two options. A "heavy" PAF will accommodate 24,000 lbs. of payload. This means that the payload now constitutes 2% of the total weight. And this pencils out to roughly the $5,000/lb. Musk promised. So we're all good now, right. Not completely. SpaceX also offers a "light" PAF. If you go with the light PAF you are limited to a payload of 7,612 lbs. Now we are back to about $10,000/lb.
It is broadly reported that SpaceX missions to the ISS deliver about 5,000 lbs. of material. Given the press's propensity for simplification and approximation I'm going to assume that the PAF used to deliver supplies to the ISS is the light one. For things to work the payload must be able to navigate, change orbit, and rendezvous with the ISS. This takes a complex package with fuel, rockets, and other stuff. It include all this capability requires that the PAF be heavier so the size and weight of the actual payload must be smaller and lighter.
This is a classic example an old saw I invented that says "the bullet items giveth and the fine print taketh away". If you want to provide your own PAF then a Falcon 9 will be able to deliver a total package weighing about 50,000 lbs. to LEO. If your needs are simple (just something to protect your satellite during launch and give it a small kick into your preferred orbit) then a heavy PAF will work for you and your payload can weigh as much as 24,000 lbs. But if you need a "full function" PAF, something that can deliver your payload to the ISS, for instance, then you need the light PAF and your payload must weigh no more than 7,612 lbs.
So are we really doing better? Before they added safety improvements the old Space Shuttle could deliver itself, several astronauts, a life support environment and supplies for said same astronauts, a handy extension arm, and 62,000 lbs. of payload to the ISS. And it could do it for roughly $10,000/lb.
It is early days for SpaceX and the Falcon 9. It has rapidly evolved through several versions in a few years. Once the research and development costs are recovered and the design and construction stabilizes it is hoped by everybody that the per launch cost of a Falcon 9 will go down quite a bit. But even if SpaceX can deliver supplies to the ISS for $5,000/lb. access to space will continue to be fantastically expensive.
And that means that a lot of things, a return of astronauts to the moon as anything other than a publicity stunt, sending people to Mars and returning them safely, mining asteroids, anything that requires sending a lot of material to space, is just going to be too expensive to pay its own way. Today weather satellites and communications satellites pay their own way. Scientists argue that certain exploratory missions pay their own way and I agree with them. But lots of people disagree with that position.
So until there is a breakthrough that neither Arthur C. Clarke nor I can foresee happens that drastically reduces the cost of access to LEO very few "space" projects are going to get funded. And that means that for the foreseeable future (always a chancy proposition) people flying all over the place in space ships will continue to exist only in realms of Science Fiction. That has been distressingly true for far too long a time. Unfortunately, the chances of a breakthrough that would change things is and continues to be vanishingly small.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Robot Cars - Now new and improved
"New and Improved" has graced many a package in my day. Presumably it is technically correct. But it is hard to tell because the differences between the "old" version and the "new" version of the product are (with the exception of the packaging) often modest at best. I have done two posts on this subject previously. The first one can be found at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/03/robot-cars.html. The second can be found at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/05/robot-cars-update.html. Frankly not that much has changed in the slightly more than two years since my last post. So my usage of "New and Improved" is in line with common Madison Avenue usage.
One thing that has changed is that we now have an approved acronym: "AV". "AV" stands for Autonomous Vehicle. It is starting to pop up everywhere. And one of the places where it popped up recently is in a pair of articles published in the magazine "Science". "Science" is the top U. S. scientific journal. (The top scientific journal in the world, and the only one ranked higher than "Science", is the British journal "Nature".). In their December 15, 2017 issue they asked "When will we get there?" on the cover and printed two articles purporting to answer the question inside.
Another thing that has changed since the second article is that I have a new car that is equipped with a lot of automation. It warns me if there is a car in my blind spot. It has a backup camera. It also can look to the side when I am backing out of a parking spot and warn me if something is coming. It also has a feature that will maintain a consistent distance between my car and the car in front of me. It can often detect when I am wandering into the next lane. It also warns me if the car in front of me has slowed down or, in the case of a traffic light, if the car in front of me has started moving. It's not a full up AV but it is several important steps closer than my old car was.
So what did "Science" have to say (besides endorsing the use of "AV")? The Society of Automotive Engineers (the group behind the "SAE" numbers on oil cans) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA - a Federal Agency) got together and came up with a 6 level ratings system for AVs. A level 0 car is like what your grandparents used to drive. It has no automation. A level 5 vehicle is a completely self driving car, what everybody assumes we are pointing at. (The other levels fall somewhere in between.) In the first article ("Not so Fast") the author characterizes the likely timing of when level 5 vehicles will be available as "Somewhere over the rainbow", in other words, way out in the far distant future. Elsewhere he characterizes it as being "still decades away".
The author is generally pessimistic about how fast things will progress. This is a nice counterbalance to the cockeyed optimism of most reporting on the subject. But I think the author is excessively pessimistic. So how does he justify his position?
Well, first he reports there is "surprisingly little research" to back up most predictions of how fast things will progress. He is completely correct here. Most of what we know is from press releases and not from, say, public demonstrations of capability. Sure, there are any number of stories of some reporter being hauled around in a "self driving car". But most of what is demonstrated is the capability to handle carefully set up test tracks, not realistic simulations of real world situations. The last public "bake off" between groups of AV builders happened nearly a decade ago and involved a tightly controlled environment. Various vendors have racked up an impressive number of "open road" miles since but very little detail is available about how uncontrolled the circumstances were.
We know, for instance, that there have been more than a dozen accidents involving Google test cars. These all happened in urban areas with good sight lines and slow speeds. And in almost all of these cases some inattentive driver rear-ended a Google car that had been stopped at a stop sign or traffic light for several seconds. The author of the Science piece correctly noted that these are relatively easy situations for an AV to cope with.
Then there is the now infamous incident where a Tesla driver was killed while the car was driving itself. But this driver was well known for ignoring the restrictions Tesla placed on when its automation should be used. And the situation was quite unusual. A truck with a trailer connected by a long tow bar was turning. The Tesla went between the truck and the trailer and hit the bar, which it had not detected. So the car made a mistake that drivers can and often do make and this driver forced the car's automation outside the parameters he was specifically directed to stay within.
This incident is included in story after story about AVs (including this one) because it is the one and only example so far of a fatality associated with autonomous vehicle operation. Most fatalities caused by drivers don't make the news precisely because there are so many of them, about 30,000 per year.
What else? He defines an AV as "a car that takes you where you want to go, at any time and under any drivable condition, without any human intervention". At first blush that seems to be a perfectly sensible definition. But then he takes "under any drivable conditions" and "where you want to go" to extremes. He cites "to New York City or the Gobi Desert" as examples of where you might want to go. I do not expect my current car to be able to go all the way to the Gobi Desert and it doesn't matter whether it's me or automation that is in control. I freely concede that an AV that can take someone to a specific point in the Gobi desert and do it without any human intervention is a long ways away.
But I live in Seattle, and I have a brother who lives in New York City. I think it's reasonable to expect an AV to be able to do most of the work necessary to go from here to there. It should be able to pick me up at my doorstep and eventually deposit me at my brother's doorstep. But I would expect to help with the selection of gas stations and motels.
My car can't drive itself. But I can plug the address of a gas station, a motel, even that of my brother, into the car's navigation system and it can provide me with detailed instructions for getting there. If I plug successive waypoints in as I go along the route it can get me there in stages. And my car can handle the entire route from my front door to my brother's front door in one shot if I want to drive day and night straight through. Let's say I could take the current capabilities of my car and add an additional capability that would permit me to press an "AV" button. When pressed it would make the car then do the driving instead of me. If such a feature could be added then I would say that that the resulting vehicle would count as an AV.
So I think the author goes too far. But he does point out a valid concern. He points out that "[c]ompanies have gotten very good at crafting statements that will be presented in the most positive light". Too true. And the author points out that an AV needs to handle common suboptimal situations like rainy weather or crowded roads. From there he quotes an expert who says "he wouldn't be surprised if it's 2075 before we get there". I think this is a valid concern but I think both the author and the expert are excessively pessimistic.
First of all, in many cases crowded roads are easier to deal with than less congested ones. Things play out slowly and there are only a few ways for things to go wrong. And if things go wrong the usual solution is to stop the vehicle, something that can be quickly because the vehicle is going so slowly. The same thing is true of rain. There are two issues. Firstly, how slippery is the road. Computers have access to sensor data that people can't even comprehend. So they can continuously monitor traction conditions and act accordingly. Most people are not very good at this.
Secondly, what's the visibility situation? I live in a part of the country where it rains a lot. For the most part visibility remains good. It does tend to get dark out but cameras and other equipment used in AVs are actually better at coping with this than people are. So again in many common situations AVs will cope with the situation better than people do. But that's not always the case.
If you are on a congested road where everybody is in "stop and go" mode then an AV can easily do a fine job of following the car in front of it. In an actual test in my car I found my car did a much better job than I could in these circumstances. But what about really congested situations when you need to move over a lane to get to an exit? What if there is no gap? We've all become more or less adept at bulling our way into the next lane and have accepted that this sometimes may result in honking horns or rude gestures. But what would an AV do in the same situation?
Most of the time when I am driving in rain visibility is diminished but remains adequate. But sometimes the sky opens up and visibility drops to effectively nothing. You can run into a similar situation if there is a bus or big truck in the next lane throwing spray everywhere. Can an AV handle these situations?
How about snow? Snow can make roads slippery. But it can also blot out lane markers. Or it can come down so fast that visibility drops to almost nothing. Or you can get snow over ice, an unfortunately all to common situation where I live. This can give the appearance of tricky but manageable conditions while masking extremely dangerous conditions.
I had not given sufficient consideration to the fact that an AV must be able to handle not only easy situations (dry road, good visibility) but poor situations (rain, congestion). And there is a continuum here. Moderately poor situations are common enough that the AV must be able to handle them. And as the degree of difficulty rises so does the rarity. At some point a tradeoff will be made. An AV will be designated "good enough" if it can handle poor situations up to a certain degree of difficulty. Where will the line be drawn? That is yet to be determined. But AVs will not be required to handle "anything, anywhere, any time".
The first AVs to be put into circulation will only be able to handle fairly easy situations. They are likely to be restricted to urban areas. I think it is likely that they will be handle both day and night time. But they will probably not be able to handle moderately bad weather. They will not be able to handle truly awful situations. But my city tends to shut down when assaulted with only modest amounts of snow. So the fact that some or all AVs might be pulled out of service when it gets truly awful is less of a change than most people think it is.
Another location that is likely to see AVs early is the Interstate. There is a lot of interest in autonomous long haul trucks. There is a lot of money available in this market. It is common for a big rig to put 100,000 or 200,000 miles on in a year. And a lot of that mileage is racked up on the Interstate at night. And there are complex rules governing how long a driver can drive between bouts of down time. If a driver can put his truck on autopilot for several hours straight and it doesn't count as driving time then the truck can be kept on the road doing productive work for more hours per year. That's worth a lot of money to trucking companies. And that's why there are several different groups working on AV trucks.
Right now there is a lot of talk about "how safe is safe enough?" And the author goes into this. The conventional wisdom is that AVs have to be a lot safer than regular cars. Certainly the amount of coverage devoted to AV accidents and not devoted to regular accidents would indicate that this is true. But there is a big fear/novelty thing going on. The very fact that there hasn't been a second "AV" fatality guarantees that whenever it happens it will get a lot of coverage. So far the nonfatal accidents that AVs have racked up have generated little coverage. That's because they tend to be very low speed fender benders. The lack of blood means these incidents also lack newsworthiness.
And this brings up a point that only occurred to me after reading these stories AVs currently operate in an extremely conservative manner. What do I mean? Have you ever drifted through a stop sign? Have you ever "accidently" exceeded the speed limit. Have you ever cut one or another additional corner (i.e. barging when you needed - or just wanted - to change lanes)? We all do. It's a routine part of how most of us drive. We conclude we can safely cheat a bit so we do. But AVs all ALWAYS scrupulously follow all traffic regulations. And their first response to anything hinky is to slow down. People are already starting to notice that AVs are extremely annoying to share the road with because they operate in such an extremely conservative manner.
They currently only annoy a few people because AVs are only on public roads in a few places. But if significant numbers of AVs hit the road in a bunch of different places this could quickly become a serious problem. I live in one of the most congested cities in the country. Something that, at least in the short run, is likely to increase not decrease, congestion will quickly become extremely unpopular. From a technical point of view this problem is easily solved. AV programming can be changed to behave differently (i.e. drive more aggressively with a less scrupulous adherence to traffic regulations). But the political, social, and cultural forces that would inevitably be brought to bear to reel things back in would make this impossible.
Now let me move on for a moment to the second article entitled "A mater of trust". It deals with people riding in AVs. Surveys show that a large percentage of the population is afraid or at least concerned. We have all seen "technology goes berserk" movies and TV shows without number. We have been conditioned to be afraid of killer robots and technology spiraling out of control. And an AV can easily kill someone. So there is something to the concern. But the results of the research reported in the article can be succinctly summarized. In a number of different situations people went from being concerned to being bored in about 15 minutes. A few minutes of actual experience with a simulated AV is all it takes to totally eliminate the concern.
There are some easily implemented recommendations. A display inside the car that lets the passengers know what is happening or is about to happen (i.e. "you are about to reach your destination") seems helpful. Similarly, indicators like flashing lights or the like on the outside of the vehicle seem helpful. They would signal say a pedestrians that wished to cross in front of an AV that the AV sees them and will wait for them. But only a modest amount of this sort of thing is all it takes to make people comfortable with AVs.
I think these results from the second article feed into the concern raised by the first article about safety. People currently have no personal experience with EVs. So they tend to err on the side of caution. But I think experience will quickly ameliorate this need for caution. We already see some effects. Even a non-AV car like the one I own logs a ton of data. This makes the determination of whose fault an accident was much easier and more determinative. We saw this with the fatal crash. Tons of data about what the driver was and was not doing was available. We have also seen it with the Google accidents. Tons of date made it crystal clear that the Google car has behaved appropriately and the "loose screw behind the wheel" in the other car had not.
I expect car makers to initially self-insure because everybody expects that the "victims" in an AV - non-AV crash will ask for millions. But these victims are likely to be confronted by tons of evidence from the AV that the AV was not at fault. Once things settle down, if a car company has to shell out a big settlement every once in a while but most of the paying ends up being done by the non-AV side of the conflict things will change quickly. And I think it will take more than fifteen minutes for this to all shake out. But I don't think it will take long.
This brings me to my final subject. Will AVs change behavior? Specifically, with people with access to AVs pile on the mileage? Preliminary indications at that the answer is yes. In one experiment people were given access to a simulated AV. In this case it was just a car with chauffeur. People in the test racked up considerably increased mileage. It was just so damned handy.
But this test only lasted a week. So there was definitely a novelty factor going on. Who wouldn't want to show off their chauffeured car? It is unclear what the long term effect would have been. But I have to confess that this and several other studies indicated that access to AVs increases average miles driven per week. I can wave my hands and propound arguments that the long term result would be different. But at this time I have zero evidence to put behind such an argument. The best I can come up with is "its too soon to tell" and that's weak.
Everybody has been saying "EVs in 2020" for years now. 2020 is getting closer and closer. Also, the number of players keeps increasing. And today's newspaper includes a one paragraph story reporting that General Motors has just filed paperwork with the U.S. Department of Transportation requesting permission to put cars "without steering wheels or pedals" on the road next year. Certainly the official story from a number of these players is that they still think they can hit the 2020 target.
So I will "revise and extend" my old prediction. I predict that we will see AVs on the road by 2020, at the latest by 2021. They might only be available in "selected areas". But these will be fully autonomous cars (or trucks) on regular public streets. And I predict that we will see AVs widely available by 2030. If I keep my current car for 15 years (I kept my last one for 16) then I will be looking for a new car in 2030. I have told numerous people that I believe my current car will be the last conventional car I own. By then I expect to either shift to an AV or go carless. I would use an Uber-like service instead. Welcome to the future.
One thing that has changed is that we now have an approved acronym: "AV". "AV" stands for Autonomous Vehicle. It is starting to pop up everywhere. And one of the places where it popped up recently is in a pair of articles published in the magazine "Science". "Science" is the top U. S. scientific journal. (The top scientific journal in the world, and the only one ranked higher than "Science", is the British journal "Nature".). In their December 15, 2017 issue they asked "When will we get there?" on the cover and printed two articles purporting to answer the question inside.
Another thing that has changed since the second article is that I have a new car that is equipped with a lot of automation. It warns me if there is a car in my blind spot. It has a backup camera. It also can look to the side when I am backing out of a parking spot and warn me if something is coming. It also has a feature that will maintain a consistent distance between my car and the car in front of me. It can often detect when I am wandering into the next lane. It also warns me if the car in front of me has slowed down or, in the case of a traffic light, if the car in front of me has started moving. It's not a full up AV but it is several important steps closer than my old car was.
So what did "Science" have to say (besides endorsing the use of "AV")? The Society of Automotive Engineers (the group behind the "SAE" numbers on oil cans) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA - a Federal Agency) got together and came up with a 6 level ratings system for AVs. A level 0 car is like what your grandparents used to drive. It has no automation. A level 5 vehicle is a completely self driving car, what everybody assumes we are pointing at. (The other levels fall somewhere in between.) In the first article ("Not so Fast") the author characterizes the likely timing of when level 5 vehicles will be available as "Somewhere over the rainbow", in other words, way out in the far distant future. Elsewhere he characterizes it as being "still decades away".
The author is generally pessimistic about how fast things will progress. This is a nice counterbalance to the cockeyed optimism of most reporting on the subject. But I think the author is excessively pessimistic. So how does he justify his position?
Well, first he reports there is "surprisingly little research" to back up most predictions of how fast things will progress. He is completely correct here. Most of what we know is from press releases and not from, say, public demonstrations of capability. Sure, there are any number of stories of some reporter being hauled around in a "self driving car". But most of what is demonstrated is the capability to handle carefully set up test tracks, not realistic simulations of real world situations. The last public "bake off" between groups of AV builders happened nearly a decade ago and involved a tightly controlled environment. Various vendors have racked up an impressive number of "open road" miles since but very little detail is available about how uncontrolled the circumstances were.
We know, for instance, that there have been more than a dozen accidents involving Google test cars. These all happened in urban areas with good sight lines and slow speeds. And in almost all of these cases some inattentive driver rear-ended a Google car that had been stopped at a stop sign or traffic light for several seconds. The author of the Science piece correctly noted that these are relatively easy situations for an AV to cope with.
Then there is the now infamous incident where a Tesla driver was killed while the car was driving itself. But this driver was well known for ignoring the restrictions Tesla placed on when its automation should be used. And the situation was quite unusual. A truck with a trailer connected by a long tow bar was turning. The Tesla went between the truck and the trailer and hit the bar, which it had not detected. So the car made a mistake that drivers can and often do make and this driver forced the car's automation outside the parameters he was specifically directed to stay within.
This incident is included in story after story about AVs (including this one) because it is the one and only example so far of a fatality associated with autonomous vehicle operation. Most fatalities caused by drivers don't make the news precisely because there are so many of them, about 30,000 per year.
What else? He defines an AV as "a car that takes you where you want to go, at any time and under any drivable condition, without any human intervention". At first blush that seems to be a perfectly sensible definition. But then he takes "under any drivable conditions" and "where you want to go" to extremes. He cites "to New York City or the Gobi Desert" as examples of where you might want to go. I do not expect my current car to be able to go all the way to the Gobi Desert and it doesn't matter whether it's me or automation that is in control. I freely concede that an AV that can take someone to a specific point in the Gobi desert and do it without any human intervention is a long ways away.
But I live in Seattle, and I have a brother who lives in New York City. I think it's reasonable to expect an AV to be able to do most of the work necessary to go from here to there. It should be able to pick me up at my doorstep and eventually deposit me at my brother's doorstep. But I would expect to help with the selection of gas stations and motels.
My car can't drive itself. But I can plug the address of a gas station, a motel, even that of my brother, into the car's navigation system and it can provide me with detailed instructions for getting there. If I plug successive waypoints in as I go along the route it can get me there in stages. And my car can handle the entire route from my front door to my brother's front door in one shot if I want to drive day and night straight through. Let's say I could take the current capabilities of my car and add an additional capability that would permit me to press an "AV" button. When pressed it would make the car then do the driving instead of me. If such a feature could be added then I would say that that the resulting vehicle would count as an AV.
So I think the author goes too far. But he does point out a valid concern. He points out that "[c]ompanies have gotten very good at crafting statements that will be presented in the most positive light". Too true. And the author points out that an AV needs to handle common suboptimal situations like rainy weather or crowded roads. From there he quotes an expert who says "he wouldn't be surprised if it's 2075 before we get there". I think this is a valid concern but I think both the author and the expert are excessively pessimistic.
First of all, in many cases crowded roads are easier to deal with than less congested ones. Things play out slowly and there are only a few ways for things to go wrong. And if things go wrong the usual solution is to stop the vehicle, something that can be quickly because the vehicle is going so slowly. The same thing is true of rain. There are two issues. Firstly, how slippery is the road. Computers have access to sensor data that people can't even comprehend. So they can continuously monitor traction conditions and act accordingly. Most people are not very good at this.
Secondly, what's the visibility situation? I live in a part of the country where it rains a lot. For the most part visibility remains good. It does tend to get dark out but cameras and other equipment used in AVs are actually better at coping with this than people are. So again in many common situations AVs will cope with the situation better than people do. But that's not always the case.
If you are on a congested road where everybody is in "stop and go" mode then an AV can easily do a fine job of following the car in front of it. In an actual test in my car I found my car did a much better job than I could in these circumstances. But what about really congested situations when you need to move over a lane to get to an exit? What if there is no gap? We've all become more or less adept at bulling our way into the next lane and have accepted that this sometimes may result in honking horns or rude gestures. But what would an AV do in the same situation?
Most of the time when I am driving in rain visibility is diminished but remains adequate. But sometimes the sky opens up and visibility drops to effectively nothing. You can run into a similar situation if there is a bus or big truck in the next lane throwing spray everywhere. Can an AV handle these situations?
How about snow? Snow can make roads slippery. But it can also blot out lane markers. Or it can come down so fast that visibility drops to almost nothing. Or you can get snow over ice, an unfortunately all to common situation where I live. This can give the appearance of tricky but manageable conditions while masking extremely dangerous conditions.
I had not given sufficient consideration to the fact that an AV must be able to handle not only easy situations (dry road, good visibility) but poor situations (rain, congestion). And there is a continuum here. Moderately poor situations are common enough that the AV must be able to handle them. And as the degree of difficulty rises so does the rarity. At some point a tradeoff will be made. An AV will be designated "good enough" if it can handle poor situations up to a certain degree of difficulty. Where will the line be drawn? That is yet to be determined. But AVs will not be required to handle "anything, anywhere, any time".
The first AVs to be put into circulation will only be able to handle fairly easy situations. They are likely to be restricted to urban areas. I think it is likely that they will be handle both day and night time. But they will probably not be able to handle moderately bad weather. They will not be able to handle truly awful situations. But my city tends to shut down when assaulted with only modest amounts of snow. So the fact that some or all AVs might be pulled out of service when it gets truly awful is less of a change than most people think it is.
Another location that is likely to see AVs early is the Interstate. There is a lot of interest in autonomous long haul trucks. There is a lot of money available in this market. It is common for a big rig to put 100,000 or 200,000 miles on in a year. And a lot of that mileage is racked up on the Interstate at night. And there are complex rules governing how long a driver can drive between bouts of down time. If a driver can put his truck on autopilot for several hours straight and it doesn't count as driving time then the truck can be kept on the road doing productive work for more hours per year. That's worth a lot of money to trucking companies. And that's why there are several different groups working on AV trucks.
Right now there is a lot of talk about "how safe is safe enough?" And the author goes into this. The conventional wisdom is that AVs have to be a lot safer than regular cars. Certainly the amount of coverage devoted to AV accidents and not devoted to regular accidents would indicate that this is true. But there is a big fear/novelty thing going on. The very fact that there hasn't been a second "AV" fatality guarantees that whenever it happens it will get a lot of coverage. So far the nonfatal accidents that AVs have racked up have generated little coverage. That's because they tend to be very low speed fender benders. The lack of blood means these incidents also lack newsworthiness.
And this brings up a point that only occurred to me after reading these stories AVs currently operate in an extremely conservative manner. What do I mean? Have you ever drifted through a stop sign? Have you ever "accidently" exceeded the speed limit. Have you ever cut one or another additional corner (i.e. barging when you needed - or just wanted - to change lanes)? We all do. It's a routine part of how most of us drive. We conclude we can safely cheat a bit so we do. But AVs all ALWAYS scrupulously follow all traffic regulations. And their first response to anything hinky is to slow down. People are already starting to notice that AVs are extremely annoying to share the road with because they operate in such an extremely conservative manner.
They currently only annoy a few people because AVs are only on public roads in a few places. But if significant numbers of AVs hit the road in a bunch of different places this could quickly become a serious problem. I live in one of the most congested cities in the country. Something that, at least in the short run, is likely to increase not decrease, congestion will quickly become extremely unpopular. From a technical point of view this problem is easily solved. AV programming can be changed to behave differently (i.e. drive more aggressively with a less scrupulous adherence to traffic regulations). But the political, social, and cultural forces that would inevitably be brought to bear to reel things back in would make this impossible.
Now let me move on for a moment to the second article entitled "A mater of trust". It deals with people riding in AVs. Surveys show that a large percentage of the population is afraid or at least concerned. We have all seen "technology goes berserk" movies and TV shows without number. We have been conditioned to be afraid of killer robots and technology spiraling out of control. And an AV can easily kill someone. So there is something to the concern. But the results of the research reported in the article can be succinctly summarized. In a number of different situations people went from being concerned to being bored in about 15 minutes. A few minutes of actual experience with a simulated AV is all it takes to totally eliminate the concern.
There are some easily implemented recommendations. A display inside the car that lets the passengers know what is happening or is about to happen (i.e. "you are about to reach your destination") seems helpful. Similarly, indicators like flashing lights or the like on the outside of the vehicle seem helpful. They would signal say a pedestrians that wished to cross in front of an AV that the AV sees them and will wait for them. But only a modest amount of this sort of thing is all it takes to make people comfortable with AVs.
I think these results from the second article feed into the concern raised by the first article about safety. People currently have no personal experience with EVs. So they tend to err on the side of caution. But I think experience will quickly ameliorate this need for caution. We already see some effects. Even a non-AV car like the one I own logs a ton of data. This makes the determination of whose fault an accident was much easier and more determinative. We saw this with the fatal crash. Tons of data about what the driver was and was not doing was available. We have also seen it with the Google accidents. Tons of date made it crystal clear that the Google car has behaved appropriately and the "loose screw behind the wheel" in the other car had not.
I expect car makers to initially self-insure because everybody expects that the "victims" in an AV - non-AV crash will ask for millions. But these victims are likely to be confronted by tons of evidence from the AV that the AV was not at fault. Once things settle down, if a car company has to shell out a big settlement every once in a while but most of the paying ends up being done by the non-AV side of the conflict things will change quickly. And I think it will take more than fifteen minutes for this to all shake out. But I don't think it will take long.
This brings me to my final subject. Will AVs change behavior? Specifically, with people with access to AVs pile on the mileage? Preliminary indications at that the answer is yes. In one experiment people were given access to a simulated AV. In this case it was just a car with chauffeur. People in the test racked up considerably increased mileage. It was just so damned handy.
But this test only lasted a week. So there was definitely a novelty factor going on. Who wouldn't want to show off their chauffeured car? It is unclear what the long term effect would have been. But I have to confess that this and several other studies indicated that access to AVs increases average miles driven per week. I can wave my hands and propound arguments that the long term result would be different. But at this time I have zero evidence to put behind such an argument. The best I can come up with is "its too soon to tell" and that's weak.
Everybody has been saying "EVs in 2020" for years now. 2020 is getting closer and closer. Also, the number of players keeps increasing. And today's newspaper includes a one paragraph story reporting that General Motors has just filed paperwork with the U.S. Department of Transportation requesting permission to put cars "without steering wheels or pedals" on the road next year. Certainly the official story from a number of these players is that they still think they can hit the 2020 target.
So I will "revise and extend" my old prediction. I predict that we will see AVs on the road by 2020, at the latest by 2021. They might only be available in "selected areas". But these will be fully autonomous cars (or trucks) on regular public streets. And I predict that we will see AVs widely available by 2030. If I keep my current car for 15 years (I kept my last one for 16) then I will be looking for a new car in 2030. I have told numerous people that I believe my current car will be the last conventional car I own. By then I expect to either shift to an AV or go carless. I would use an Uber-like service instead. Welcome to the future.
Friday, December 29, 2017
Uranium One
There is a lot of talk being bandied about these days concerning the "Uranium One" scandal. There is a consensus that a lot of people are getting suckered on this. But there is a lack of consensus as to who specifically is getting suckered. Conservatives think the suckers are liberals and the general public. They argue that the Clinton people are pulling the wool over everybody's eyes. And, of course, the main stream media, who are in the tank for Hillary, are actively cooperating with the wool pulling. First, though, a quick look at what the ruckus is all about.
Uranium One was (it no longer exists) a mining concern headquartered in Toronto Canada. They controlled a lot of mining assets in the U.S. and elsewhere and one of the things they mined was Uranium. Uranium is a "strategic material" because it is the key component in nuclear bombs and has other military uses. So any important change in ownership must be approved by the U.S. Government. In 2013 the Uranium One company was sold to a subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian government Uranium monopoly. And, of course, for this to happen the U.S. Government had to approve the sale, which they did.
So why is this a scandal? Because supposedly Hillary Clinton put her thumb on the scale to make sure the sale was approved. She did this back when she was Secretary of State. If true, this would constitute some kind of scandal. Before going into the rest of the details of the "scandal" let me back up and address whether the "liberal media" is actually in the tank for Hillary. And to do that I want to start by going all the way back to the '60s.
President Kennedy was a lady's man. He had a number of one night stands. His most famous conquest was the actress Marilyn Monroe. None of this came out at the time because there was a "gentleman's agreement" (and at time we are talking about the "gentlemen" of the press were almost all men) that this sort of thing was none of the press's business. It all eventually came out but there was a decades long delay.
Fast forward to 1984. By this time the rules had changed. A Senator named Gary Hart was running for President. As with the Kennedy case, people in the know knew he played around. But now the press saw it as their jobs to tell the public about this sort of thing rather than covering it up. So the press asked Hart about this and he adamantly denied it. He in effect challenged the press to prove he was fooling around. Well, they did. They unearthed proof that he entertained a lady not his wife on a boat named "Monkey Business" of all things. And this revelation sunk Hart's campaign.
Fast forward again, this time to 1992. Now Bill Clinton is running for President. And people in the know knew he played around. The press geared up for a repeat of the Hart play book but Clinton outfoxed them. He admitted to playing around without actually saying so. He professed to being a sinner and asked forgiveness. Without an outright denial the press were stymied in their ability to knock him out of the race and they were very unhappy about it.
But this turned out to be the first of a long list of "Clinton scandals". The shorthand name for the whole list is "Whitewater", the one that came next. "Whitewater" is the name of a real estate development the Clintons invested in. Whitewater was supposed to be a classic "pay for play" deal. The plan was the usual one. Insiders would be let you (in this case the Clintons) in on the ground floor of an investment opportunity with the intent of giving you a risk free way to make a nice quick and apparently entirely legitimate profit. You would then owe the insiders a favor to be redeemed later. The problem is that things did not go according to plan.
Whitewater never got off the ground and the Clintons lost over $20,000 on the deal (a lot of money for them at the time). So since they didn't get paid they didn't have to play (dole out a favor to be named later). All of this came out fairly quickly. But the very same press that is supposed to be in the tank for the Clinton's gave Whitewater wall to wall coverage for literally years.
You can often find patterns in people's behaviors. The press should have quickly abandoned Whitewater because as a scandal it was fatally flawed by the fact that the Clintons lost money on the deal. They should have lain in wait for a different pay for play example that went as planned. But they didn't. They continuously recycled Whitewater for years. And if they had in fact been in the tank for the Clintons they should have made excuses for the Clintons from the very beginning and then promptly dropped the whole thing. This is the opposite of what they actually did.
And there is an even more confusing aspect to all this. There was an actual successful pay for play deal that went completely according to plan. And it surfaced during the height of the "Clinton scandal" era. Hillary (she was the moneymaker as a very successful lawyer while Bill made chump change as the Governor of Arkansas) invested in something called "cattle futures" exactly once in her entire life. Through a brokerage firm in Little Rock she bought a "futures contract" tied to the price of cattle. She sold it a couple of weeks later and made a tidy profit.
Obviously she knew nothing about the futures market for cattle (or any other commodity for that matter) so how did she make a nice profit in such a short period of time? Most likely because the fix was in. There is something called "front running" that can be applied to transactions like the one Hillary made. A number of transactions are typically handled at the same time. And there is often some price variation even though the transactions are supposedly "simultaneous". Front running consists of giving the lowest purchase price and the highest sale price to the transaction belonging to the favored customer. This is likely what happened here. And the people running the brokerage rang up a future favor.
As I said all of this came out right in the middle of the years long season of "Clinton scandals". Yet many people I talk to who were paying attention at the time are completely unfamiliar with this event. And the reason is simple. This successful example of pay for play never got much coverage. It didn't even get much coverage in conservative media. So what we see is tons of coverage of a failed pay for play "scandal" and almost no coverage of a successful example of pay for play. It would have made sense to devote little coverage to the former and a lot of coverage to the latter but that's not what happened.
And These are just two of the several "scandals" that occurred while Bill Clinton was running for President or in office. And most of the "scandals" were entirely made up so they had even less substance than Whitewater. The last in line was the Monica Lewinski affair. Clinton had an affair (but not sex in the biblical sense) with her. Still it was a bona fide scandal. The press, liberal and otherwise, used the fact that this affair was a real scandal to justify all of the coverage heaped on the other not so real (and in some cases completely fake) "scandals". But the unmistakable conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the liberal press in definitely not in the tank for Clinton.
But wait, there's more. And, of course the "more" is the Clinton email server "scandal". This came to dominate coverage of Hillary's Presidential run to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Various studies indicate that twice as much of the time devoted to covering the Clinton campaign was spent on emails as was spent on pretty much everything else. And we got headlines about "new email revelations" for week after week after week. But interestingly enough while pretty much everyone else's email server was hacked the server Hillary used wasn't. And the 30,000 emails that were made public showed a competent and careful person going about the day to day business of being Secretary of State and doing it well.
But the coverage in the liberal media was based on cherry picking nits and nats that could be taken out of context to make her look bad. And the FBI did manage to unearth some emails that weren't turned over but they all were initiated on some other mail server and would not have been in the archive of the Clinton mail server. And a couple of emails contained classified information. The classified information consisted of pictures of damage done in Pakistan by drone strikes. At the time the emails were sent similar pictures could easily be obtained from unclassified sources. And the fact that the pictures were classified was not obvious and all of them were buried deep in reply chains where they were easily missed.
So, while it could be argued that laws were broken, the violations were minor. That's why the FBI concluded what they concluded. And meanwhile various much more serious email scandals were breaking out all over the place. These other scandals have seen far less coverage in the press, liberal or otherwise. And the coverage of Hillary's email "scandal" was essentially the same in the liberal and the conservative press.
So if there was a juicy Uranium One scandal the liberal press would be all over it. But they aren't. So let's dive a little deeper into the conservative coverage of Uranium One, whatever it is, and see what we can find there.
Uranium One is supposed to be another pay for play deal. Hillary was paid through one of the Clinton charities, The Clinton Foundation or the Clinton Global Initiative. Later, the theory goes, Clinton "played" by making sure the Uranium One deal got approved. But there are major problems with both the "pay" part and the "play" part. Let's look at them in order.
The Clintons are rich. They are now worth millions of dollars. But they are not fabulously wealthy. They own a large nice but not all that fancy house in upstate New York. It certainly wouldn't meet Trump's standards. And they only own the one house. They also own no boats, helicopters, airplanes, or other toys of the truly wealthy. They are certainly not hurting financially but neither of them is driven by the need to accumulate fantastic amounts of wealth. We know this because we have access to decades of Clinton Income Tax returns.
If they had tried they certainly could have milked their charitable opreations for large amounts of money but they haven't. I'm sure they get handsomely reimbursed for Foundation related expenses like travel and lodging costs. But none of the Clinton family draws a salary from the Foundation (the Clinton Global Initiative is a subsidiary of the foundation). And the Foundation's books are audited annually so any large kickbacks to the Clintons would be obvious.
We can see where they get their money by checking their tax returns. They get it from book sales, speaking fees, remuneration for sitting on boards where they are not expected to put in much time or effort, and that sort of thing. For better or worse you can make a lot of money doing that sort of thing if you have the right kind of name recognition. So there was no straight up bribe-type "pay". How about something more subtle?
The Clinton Foundation is a charitable operation, one that is very well thought of. It routinely gets top marks from all the "charity watch" type organizations. Very little of the money goes to overhead. Most of it is spent on things like medicines in Africa that result in doing good but also in good publicity. In a certain sense you can call the operation a money laundering operation.
If you have a bad reputation and want to get your name associated with some kind of "do gooder" program it's hard to beat the Clinton Foundation. They actually do good. But they also make sure that the people that give them money with which to do good get lots of positive publicity. And the Foundation has a reputation around the world of being effective. People think their programs work well, are sensitive to local concerns, etc. They have a reputation for running a first class operation in an area where there are a lot of fly by night operators.
This has allowed the Foundation to raise and spend about $2 billion over its lifetime. If you are say a Russian Oligarch who has done a lot of shady deals an obvious way to burnish your reputation is to go into partnership with The Clinton Foundation. And various Russian Oligarchs including those associated with Uranium One have done just that. And so have other shady people like Saudi princes. And so have lots of good upstanding people. It's what the Foundation does.
And there is no kickback to either the Clintons or to the shady or otherwise people making the contributions. That's where the Foundation differs from a standard money laundering operation. In a standard money laundering operation the point is to launder dirty money into clean money then return the clean money to the original "investor". A fee for service is taken along the way but most of the dirty money put in is supposed to come back as clean money. As a money laundering operation The Clinton Foundation is all "fee" and no "return". All the investor gets out of the deal is good will. That's worth something. The question is how much?
Various investigators have identified $145 million in contributions to the Clinton Foundation on behalf of various people who had an interest in the Uranium One deal. That is lot to pay for good will. The standard pay for play calculus starts with you kicking in the $145 million. Then the sweetheart deal happens. Then you make way more than $145 in additional profit (the clean money) down the road. Set that aside for a moment and look at the timing however.
$131 million of the total came from one guy, a Canadian named Frank Guistra. But he sold the company in 2007. If it made a ton of money after 2013 then he wouldn't make a dime on the deal. Another $1 million came from another Canadian associated with the company. So most of the so called bribe money actually came from Canadians, not Russians. But let's now return to the "play" part.
Supposedly Hillary did sneaky underhanded things while Secretary of State to get the deal to go through. But the deal had to be approved by nine different agencies of the Federal Government. They all did. Let's skip the whole "she secretly corrupted all nine agencies" idea and go to the most fundamental one. Was there a reason why the deal needed a boost to get approved? To answer that question it is useful to look at the history of Uranium mining.
Before World War II no one cared about Uranium. So no one spent much time trying to figure out where it could be found. Then Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt and the Manhattan Project got under way. All of a sudden the government needed a bunch of Uranium. But the whole thing was ultra-top-secret. So efforts to locate Uranium had to be done very quietly. As a result of this the impression was built up at the time that Uranium was very hard to find.
Then Hiroshima happened and the secret was out. And a nuclear reactor for powering submarines and later electricity plants was developed. And all of a sudden there was a market for Uranium And so mining companies started looking for it. And it turns out it is all over the place. Uranium is a commodity. People will buy it from whatever source that is cheapest of the sources available to them. As mining companies looked around they found Uranium in lots of places so the race was on to find places where it could be mined very cheaply.
Most of the mining in the immediate postwar period in the U.S. took place on or near the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. These mines have since all been shut down not because they ran out of Uranium but because they are not cost competitive against mines located in other places in the world.
To my knowledge Uranium mining is or has taken place in the U.S. (obviously), Canada (home of Uranium One), Europe (to support the German effort during World War II), South Africa (to support the bomb program they later abandoned), Russia (successful bomb program), China (successful Chinese and North Korean bomb programs), Brazil (bomb program that was abandoned before the first bomb was built), and Central Africa (remember the "yellowcake" Saddam was supposedly importing into Iraq). I don't doubt that it can also be found in lots of other places.
And then there are the ups and (mostly) downs of demand for Uranium. There was essentially no demand before World War II. Then the market for bomb grade Uranium opened up. It was quickly followed by the opening up of the market for reactor grade Uranium. Then the U.S. and Russia started signing nuclear arms reduction treaties. That dried up the bomb grade market (at least in the U.S. and Russia). Then the Three Mile Island happened in 1979. All of a sudden we were building no nuclear power plants in the U.S. and construction also slowed down in the rest of the world. Then Chernobyl and later Fukushima happened. There is now almost no market for reactor grade Uranium any more. The market for Uranium peaked many decades ago and has been on a decline ever since.
But it's worse than you think. Above I mentioned "bomb grade" and "reactor grade" Uranium. I need to drill down on them a little. Uranium comes in "isotopes". The important ones are U-235 and U-238. Natural Uranium, the kind that comes out of mines, is composed of about 99% U-238, 7/10 of 1% U-235, and traces of everything else. To make reactor grade Uranium the percentage of U-235 needs to be "enriched" to 6%. This is a difficult and expensive process. But roughly 9 pounds of natural Uranium can be enriched to make 1 pound of 6% U-235 Uranium and 8 pounds of "depleted" Uranium. The enrichment level of bomb grade Uranium is classified. But it is rumored to be 90%. Making 1 pound of bomb grade Uranium is fantastically difficult and expensive. But the point is that a whole lot of depleted Uranium is left over. And the stuff is pretty useless so it tends to just sit around.
Reactor grade Uranium still has a market. But as disarmament has kicked in a lot of bomb grade Uranium has become surplus. Using the 90% figure to make the math easy, if we start with 10 pounds of bomb grade Uranium it contains 9 pounds of U-235. If we "downblend" our 10 pounds of bomb grade Uranium with 140 pounds of depleted Uranium (assumed to have no U-235 left in it, again to make the math simple) we end up with 150 pounds of reactor grade Uranium. My point is it doesn't take much bomb grade Uranium to make a lot of reactor grade Uranium.
The U.S. has decommissioned thousands of nuclear weapons.. The Russians have decommissioned a similar number. That's a lot of surplus bomb grade Uranium available with which to make a whole lot of reactor grade Uranium by downblending it with depleted Uranium. And then there is Iran. They made a bunch of Uranium that was enriched to 20% U-235. It all went to the Russians as part of the nuclear treaty we did with Iran. That's still more enriched Uranium that can be downblended to make still more reactor grade Uranium which can then be flooded into the already shrunken reactor fuel market which depresses prices and demand still more.
My point is there isn't a lot of money in the Uranium mining business and there hasn't been for a long time. And part of the deal the U.S. signed off on when it approved the Uranium One deal guaranteed that the U.S. would continue to have access to all the natural Uranium it traditionally had access to.
But this is not very important because Uranium is a commodity. We are good as long as we can get as much as we need from somewhere. And we have lots of somewheres to pick from. There was never any reason to block the Uranium One deal. All the agencies did their due diligence and decided there was no reason to block it so they all signed off on it.
With no "play" needed there was no reason for any of the participants to "pay". The deal was absolutely non-controversial at the time. So there was no reason for Hillary to interfere. And all evidence indicates that she didn't.
Of course, in some circles it is sometimes useful to gin up yet another Hillary controversy so you can stoke up your base. So the suckers in the Uranium One story are the conservatives who are buying the snake oil the conservative media and conservative politicians are trying to sell them. The market for this sort of snake oil, unlike the market for Uranium, is strong and getting stronger.
Uranium One was (it no longer exists) a mining concern headquartered in Toronto Canada. They controlled a lot of mining assets in the U.S. and elsewhere and one of the things they mined was Uranium. Uranium is a "strategic material" because it is the key component in nuclear bombs and has other military uses. So any important change in ownership must be approved by the U.S. Government. In 2013 the Uranium One company was sold to a subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian government Uranium monopoly. And, of course, for this to happen the U.S. Government had to approve the sale, which they did.
So why is this a scandal? Because supposedly Hillary Clinton put her thumb on the scale to make sure the sale was approved. She did this back when she was Secretary of State. If true, this would constitute some kind of scandal. Before going into the rest of the details of the "scandal" let me back up and address whether the "liberal media" is actually in the tank for Hillary. And to do that I want to start by going all the way back to the '60s.
President Kennedy was a lady's man. He had a number of one night stands. His most famous conquest was the actress Marilyn Monroe. None of this came out at the time because there was a "gentleman's agreement" (and at time we are talking about the "gentlemen" of the press were almost all men) that this sort of thing was none of the press's business. It all eventually came out but there was a decades long delay.
Fast forward to 1984. By this time the rules had changed. A Senator named Gary Hart was running for President. As with the Kennedy case, people in the know knew he played around. But now the press saw it as their jobs to tell the public about this sort of thing rather than covering it up. So the press asked Hart about this and he adamantly denied it. He in effect challenged the press to prove he was fooling around. Well, they did. They unearthed proof that he entertained a lady not his wife on a boat named "Monkey Business" of all things. And this revelation sunk Hart's campaign.
Fast forward again, this time to 1992. Now Bill Clinton is running for President. And people in the know knew he played around. The press geared up for a repeat of the Hart play book but Clinton outfoxed them. He admitted to playing around without actually saying so. He professed to being a sinner and asked forgiveness. Without an outright denial the press were stymied in their ability to knock him out of the race and they were very unhappy about it.
But this turned out to be the first of a long list of "Clinton scandals". The shorthand name for the whole list is "Whitewater", the one that came next. "Whitewater" is the name of a real estate development the Clintons invested in. Whitewater was supposed to be a classic "pay for play" deal. The plan was the usual one. Insiders would be let you (in this case the Clintons) in on the ground floor of an investment opportunity with the intent of giving you a risk free way to make a nice quick and apparently entirely legitimate profit. You would then owe the insiders a favor to be redeemed later. The problem is that things did not go according to plan.
Whitewater never got off the ground and the Clintons lost over $20,000 on the deal (a lot of money for them at the time). So since they didn't get paid they didn't have to play (dole out a favor to be named later). All of this came out fairly quickly. But the very same press that is supposed to be in the tank for the Clinton's gave Whitewater wall to wall coverage for literally years.
You can often find patterns in people's behaviors. The press should have quickly abandoned Whitewater because as a scandal it was fatally flawed by the fact that the Clintons lost money on the deal. They should have lain in wait for a different pay for play example that went as planned. But they didn't. They continuously recycled Whitewater for years. And if they had in fact been in the tank for the Clintons they should have made excuses for the Clintons from the very beginning and then promptly dropped the whole thing. This is the opposite of what they actually did.
And there is an even more confusing aspect to all this. There was an actual successful pay for play deal that went completely according to plan. And it surfaced during the height of the "Clinton scandal" era. Hillary (she was the moneymaker as a very successful lawyer while Bill made chump change as the Governor of Arkansas) invested in something called "cattle futures" exactly once in her entire life. Through a brokerage firm in Little Rock she bought a "futures contract" tied to the price of cattle. She sold it a couple of weeks later and made a tidy profit.
Obviously she knew nothing about the futures market for cattle (or any other commodity for that matter) so how did she make a nice profit in such a short period of time? Most likely because the fix was in. There is something called "front running" that can be applied to transactions like the one Hillary made. A number of transactions are typically handled at the same time. And there is often some price variation even though the transactions are supposedly "simultaneous". Front running consists of giving the lowest purchase price and the highest sale price to the transaction belonging to the favored customer. This is likely what happened here. And the people running the brokerage rang up a future favor.
As I said all of this came out right in the middle of the years long season of "Clinton scandals". Yet many people I talk to who were paying attention at the time are completely unfamiliar with this event. And the reason is simple. This successful example of pay for play never got much coverage. It didn't even get much coverage in conservative media. So what we see is tons of coverage of a failed pay for play "scandal" and almost no coverage of a successful example of pay for play. It would have made sense to devote little coverage to the former and a lot of coverage to the latter but that's not what happened.
And These are just two of the several "scandals" that occurred while Bill Clinton was running for President or in office. And most of the "scandals" were entirely made up so they had even less substance than Whitewater. The last in line was the Monica Lewinski affair. Clinton had an affair (but not sex in the biblical sense) with her. Still it was a bona fide scandal. The press, liberal and otherwise, used the fact that this affair was a real scandal to justify all of the coverage heaped on the other not so real (and in some cases completely fake) "scandals". But the unmistakable conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the liberal press in definitely not in the tank for Clinton.
But wait, there's more. And, of course the "more" is the Clinton email server "scandal". This came to dominate coverage of Hillary's Presidential run to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Various studies indicate that twice as much of the time devoted to covering the Clinton campaign was spent on emails as was spent on pretty much everything else. And we got headlines about "new email revelations" for week after week after week. But interestingly enough while pretty much everyone else's email server was hacked the server Hillary used wasn't. And the 30,000 emails that were made public showed a competent and careful person going about the day to day business of being Secretary of State and doing it well.
But the coverage in the liberal media was based on cherry picking nits and nats that could be taken out of context to make her look bad. And the FBI did manage to unearth some emails that weren't turned over but they all were initiated on some other mail server and would not have been in the archive of the Clinton mail server. And a couple of emails contained classified information. The classified information consisted of pictures of damage done in Pakistan by drone strikes. At the time the emails were sent similar pictures could easily be obtained from unclassified sources. And the fact that the pictures were classified was not obvious and all of them were buried deep in reply chains where they were easily missed.
So, while it could be argued that laws were broken, the violations were minor. That's why the FBI concluded what they concluded. And meanwhile various much more serious email scandals were breaking out all over the place. These other scandals have seen far less coverage in the press, liberal or otherwise. And the coverage of Hillary's email "scandal" was essentially the same in the liberal and the conservative press.
So if there was a juicy Uranium One scandal the liberal press would be all over it. But they aren't. So let's dive a little deeper into the conservative coverage of Uranium One, whatever it is, and see what we can find there.
Uranium One is supposed to be another pay for play deal. Hillary was paid through one of the Clinton charities, The Clinton Foundation or the Clinton Global Initiative. Later, the theory goes, Clinton "played" by making sure the Uranium One deal got approved. But there are major problems with both the "pay" part and the "play" part. Let's look at them in order.
The Clintons are rich. They are now worth millions of dollars. But they are not fabulously wealthy. They own a large nice but not all that fancy house in upstate New York. It certainly wouldn't meet Trump's standards. And they only own the one house. They also own no boats, helicopters, airplanes, or other toys of the truly wealthy. They are certainly not hurting financially but neither of them is driven by the need to accumulate fantastic amounts of wealth. We know this because we have access to decades of Clinton Income Tax returns.
If they had tried they certainly could have milked their charitable opreations for large amounts of money but they haven't. I'm sure they get handsomely reimbursed for Foundation related expenses like travel and lodging costs. But none of the Clinton family draws a salary from the Foundation (the Clinton Global Initiative is a subsidiary of the foundation). And the Foundation's books are audited annually so any large kickbacks to the Clintons would be obvious.
We can see where they get their money by checking their tax returns. They get it from book sales, speaking fees, remuneration for sitting on boards where they are not expected to put in much time or effort, and that sort of thing. For better or worse you can make a lot of money doing that sort of thing if you have the right kind of name recognition. So there was no straight up bribe-type "pay". How about something more subtle?
The Clinton Foundation is a charitable operation, one that is very well thought of. It routinely gets top marks from all the "charity watch" type organizations. Very little of the money goes to overhead. Most of it is spent on things like medicines in Africa that result in doing good but also in good publicity. In a certain sense you can call the operation a money laundering operation.
If you have a bad reputation and want to get your name associated with some kind of "do gooder" program it's hard to beat the Clinton Foundation. They actually do good. But they also make sure that the people that give them money with which to do good get lots of positive publicity. And the Foundation has a reputation around the world of being effective. People think their programs work well, are sensitive to local concerns, etc. They have a reputation for running a first class operation in an area where there are a lot of fly by night operators.
This has allowed the Foundation to raise and spend about $2 billion over its lifetime. If you are say a Russian Oligarch who has done a lot of shady deals an obvious way to burnish your reputation is to go into partnership with The Clinton Foundation. And various Russian Oligarchs including those associated with Uranium One have done just that. And so have other shady people like Saudi princes. And so have lots of good upstanding people. It's what the Foundation does.
And there is no kickback to either the Clintons or to the shady or otherwise people making the contributions. That's where the Foundation differs from a standard money laundering operation. In a standard money laundering operation the point is to launder dirty money into clean money then return the clean money to the original "investor". A fee for service is taken along the way but most of the dirty money put in is supposed to come back as clean money. As a money laundering operation The Clinton Foundation is all "fee" and no "return". All the investor gets out of the deal is good will. That's worth something. The question is how much?
Various investigators have identified $145 million in contributions to the Clinton Foundation on behalf of various people who had an interest in the Uranium One deal. That is lot to pay for good will. The standard pay for play calculus starts with you kicking in the $145 million. Then the sweetheart deal happens. Then you make way more than $145 in additional profit (the clean money) down the road. Set that aside for a moment and look at the timing however.
$131 million of the total came from one guy, a Canadian named Frank Guistra. But he sold the company in 2007. If it made a ton of money after 2013 then he wouldn't make a dime on the deal. Another $1 million came from another Canadian associated with the company. So most of the so called bribe money actually came from Canadians, not Russians. But let's now return to the "play" part.
Supposedly Hillary did sneaky underhanded things while Secretary of State to get the deal to go through. But the deal had to be approved by nine different agencies of the Federal Government. They all did. Let's skip the whole "she secretly corrupted all nine agencies" idea and go to the most fundamental one. Was there a reason why the deal needed a boost to get approved? To answer that question it is useful to look at the history of Uranium mining.
Before World War II no one cared about Uranium. So no one spent much time trying to figure out where it could be found. Then Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt and the Manhattan Project got under way. All of a sudden the government needed a bunch of Uranium. But the whole thing was ultra-top-secret. So efforts to locate Uranium had to be done very quietly. As a result of this the impression was built up at the time that Uranium was very hard to find.
Then Hiroshima happened and the secret was out. And a nuclear reactor for powering submarines and later electricity plants was developed. And all of a sudden there was a market for Uranium And so mining companies started looking for it. And it turns out it is all over the place. Uranium is a commodity. People will buy it from whatever source that is cheapest of the sources available to them. As mining companies looked around they found Uranium in lots of places so the race was on to find places where it could be mined very cheaply.
Most of the mining in the immediate postwar period in the U.S. took place on or near the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. These mines have since all been shut down not because they ran out of Uranium but because they are not cost competitive against mines located in other places in the world.
To my knowledge Uranium mining is or has taken place in the U.S. (obviously), Canada (home of Uranium One), Europe (to support the German effort during World War II), South Africa (to support the bomb program they later abandoned), Russia (successful bomb program), China (successful Chinese and North Korean bomb programs), Brazil (bomb program that was abandoned before the first bomb was built), and Central Africa (remember the "yellowcake" Saddam was supposedly importing into Iraq). I don't doubt that it can also be found in lots of other places.
And then there are the ups and (mostly) downs of demand for Uranium. There was essentially no demand before World War II. Then the market for bomb grade Uranium opened up. It was quickly followed by the opening up of the market for reactor grade Uranium. Then the U.S. and Russia started signing nuclear arms reduction treaties. That dried up the bomb grade market (at least in the U.S. and Russia). Then the Three Mile Island happened in 1979. All of a sudden we were building no nuclear power plants in the U.S. and construction also slowed down in the rest of the world. Then Chernobyl and later Fukushima happened. There is now almost no market for reactor grade Uranium any more. The market for Uranium peaked many decades ago and has been on a decline ever since.
But it's worse than you think. Above I mentioned "bomb grade" and "reactor grade" Uranium. I need to drill down on them a little. Uranium comes in "isotopes". The important ones are U-235 and U-238. Natural Uranium, the kind that comes out of mines, is composed of about 99% U-238, 7/10 of 1% U-235, and traces of everything else. To make reactor grade Uranium the percentage of U-235 needs to be "enriched" to 6%. This is a difficult and expensive process. But roughly 9 pounds of natural Uranium can be enriched to make 1 pound of 6% U-235 Uranium and 8 pounds of "depleted" Uranium. The enrichment level of bomb grade Uranium is classified. But it is rumored to be 90%. Making 1 pound of bomb grade Uranium is fantastically difficult and expensive. But the point is that a whole lot of depleted Uranium is left over. And the stuff is pretty useless so it tends to just sit around.
Reactor grade Uranium still has a market. But as disarmament has kicked in a lot of bomb grade Uranium has become surplus. Using the 90% figure to make the math easy, if we start with 10 pounds of bomb grade Uranium it contains 9 pounds of U-235. If we "downblend" our 10 pounds of bomb grade Uranium with 140 pounds of depleted Uranium (assumed to have no U-235 left in it, again to make the math simple) we end up with 150 pounds of reactor grade Uranium. My point is it doesn't take much bomb grade Uranium to make a lot of reactor grade Uranium.
The U.S. has decommissioned thousands of nuclear weapons.. The Russians have decommissioned a similar number. That's a lot of surplus bomb grade Uranium available with which to make a whole lot of reactor grade Uranium by downblending it with depleted Uranium. And then there is Iran. They made a bunch of Uranium that was enriched to 20% U-235. It all went to the Russians as part of the nuclear treaty we did with Iran. That's still more enriched Uranium that can be downblended to make still more reactor grade Uranium which can then be flooded into the already shrunken reactor fuel market which depresses prices and demand still more.
My point is there isn't a lot of money in the Uranium mining business and there hasn't been for a long time. And part of the deal the U.S. signed off on when it approved the Uranium One deal guaranteed that the U.S. would continue to have access to all the natural Uranium it traditionally had access to.
But this is not very important because Uranium is a commodity. We are good as long as we can get as much as we need from somewhere. And we have lots of somewheres to pick from. There was never any reason to block the Uranium One deal. All the agencies did their due diligence and decided there was no reason to block it so they all signed off on it.
With no "play" needed there was no reason for any of the participants to "pay". The deal was absolutely non-controversial at the time. So there was no reason for Hillary to interfere. And all evidence indicates that she didn't.
Of course, in some circles it is sometimes useful to gin up yet another Hillary controversy so you can stoke up your base. So the suckers in the Uranium One story are the conservatives who are buying the snake oil the conservative media and conservative politicians are trying to sell them. The market for this sort of snake oil, unlike the market for Uranium, is strong and getting stronger.
Saturday, December 16, 2017
Chopped
Think of this as a holiday piece. I usually have something serious to say. Not this time around. This is a totally frivolous piece. No great analysis. No deep meaning. Just fun.
"Chopped" is a TV show I have gotten into. I think with me it's a fad and at some point I will lose interest and drop it. But at the moment it fascinates me. From a business perspective, it's anything but frivolous. It has had 35 "seasons" (they seem to constitute 13 episode blocks), has aired continuously since 2009, and is getting close to broadcasting its 500th episode. It normally airs on Tuesday evenings on the Food Network and, as far as I can tell, its popularity remains strong. So I expect it to continue on long after I have tired of it. And that's fine with me.
"Chopped" is nominally a cooking competition show. But the emphasis falls heavily on the competition aspect. It requires superior cooking skills to be competitive but its format seems tailor made to guarantee that the food produced will often be mediocre at best. That's why I say it is mostly about the competition and not so much about the cooking.
The maser of ceremonies is Ted Allen. He gained fame by being one of the "fab five" on a show called "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". Ted and the rest of the band were out gay men before that was common. In each show they would help out a straight guy with a problem by applying their "queer eye" to, for instance, help him throw a party or redecorate his apartment. Each of them had a specialty. One of them was a decorator. One of them was a fashion guy. And Ted was the food guy. The show was ground breaking, very popular at its peak, and introduced a lot of Americans to gay men being gay men. Ted's "foodie" credentials on "Queer eye" led him to the job at "Chopped"
The show has an extremely tight format. There is little or no variation from show to show. Think "Jeopardy!" but with food. Four contestants are judged by a three person panel typically consisting of working chefs. Each contestant has to prepare a course while a clock counts down. After each course a contestant is chopped (i.e. kicked off the show), hence the title. The line "if your dish doesn't cut it you will be chopped" is repeated frequently. After three rounds, typically, Appetizer, Entrée, and Dessert, three contestants have been chopped and we have a single "chopped champion" left who receives $10,000. (We are told the other contestants get nothing but apparently their expenses are covered and they get a $1,000 gift certificate.)
What makes this so tough is that for each round the contestants are presented with identical baskets containing four "mystery ingredients". All four ingredients, which are revealed when they open their baskets just before the clock starts, must be incorporated into the dish. And the ingredients are selected so that they do not go together. There is also heavy emphasis on the exotic. The show is filmed in New York and it is hard to imagine it being filmed anywhere else.
The producers must come up with 12 mystery ingredients per show. Over the run of the show that means about 6,000 different ingredients. (I'm sure they occasionally repeat an ingredient but this does not happen often.) There is rarely a round in which I even recognize all of the mystery ingredients, let alone have any idea what I would do with them. New York with it's many ethnic enclaves with their own specialty shops is almost a necessity when it comes to finding enough different items.
On the other hand the producers do provide a nice cooking setup for the contestants. Each contestant has their own station consisting of a work area in front and a stove behind. They are provided with a wide assortment of coking utensils and equipment. Off to the side is an area containing additional equipment that can be used on a "first come - first served" basis. This area houses a hot oil fryer, blast chiller, ice cream machine, and many other devices. It is common for more than one contestant to want to use say the fryer or the ice cream machine. Contestants are expected to not hog a machine but there are no formal rules about sharing.
And the "no formal rules" part is also true of the judging. There are almost no formal rules governing how the judges decide who gets chopped. Contestants are supposed to stop cooking when time is up. Contestants are expected to produce a dish that contains all four ingredients. But if a contestant omits an ingredient it does not automatically result in getting chopped. But a hard rule is that if a contestant omits an ingredient from some but not all plates (shorts a plate) all the shorted plates will go to a judge.
Besides the two areas mentioned above (and the area occupied by Ted and the judges) there is a pantry area that contains a wide assortment of ingredients commonly found in a well stocked commercial kitchen. Industrial refrigerators are stocked with ingredients that need to be refrigerated like milk, butter, etc. There is also a section for fruit and other fresh foods. The selection is seasonal but broad. How broad? It seems to contain edible flowers a goodly amount of the time. There are also a section with dried staples (sugar, flour, taco shells, etc.) and another section with a broad selection of spices. (Contestants get a tour of this area before taping starts so they know what's available here and get an idea of where things are located.)
It is possible to prepare very good meals in this environment except for a couple of things. You have a very short period of time to work with. The actual cooking must be done in 20 minutes for the Appetizer, and 30 minutes each for the Entrée and Dessert. For some particularly difficult baskets a more generous time limit (i.e. 30 minutes for the Appetizer or 45 minutes for the Entrée) is used.
But the biggest problem is the mystery ingredients. They are selected to be incompatible with each other. And one or more of them often normally takes a long time to prepare properly. As an example a cut of tough meat like those used by barbeque restaurants might be included. Normally it would be cooked over show heat for as long as 12 hours. But the contestant has to figure out a way to deliver a tender and flavorful "do" on this ingredient (and the rest of the basket) in the 30 minutes allotted.
What we as viewers see is a 60 minute show (44 minutes, if you ignore the commercials). It has been edited down from actual events. Various online sources indicate that it takes 12 - 20 hours to shoot an episode. Needless to say, even allowing for "prep" time and other "behind the scenes" activity, a lot of what goes on ends up on the cutting room floor. We get more of a "highlights from" that an accurate picture of what actually goes on. But one thing that is apparently portrayed accurately is that contestants have less than a minute between when they find out what's in the basket and when the count-down clock starts ticking.
Anyhow, as indicated above the show follows an extremely rigid format. Everybody is introduced. The first basket is opened. The contestants cook. They are then lined up in front of the judges. Each contestant must prepare four plates. Each judge gets one and the fourth goes under a cover. In turn each contestant describes what they have prepared, the judges sample and comment on it and we move on to the next contestant. The contestants are then herded into a holding pen and Ted and the judges confer. The contestants are brought back and Ted removes the cover and displays the dish of the chopped contestant. A judge explains their combined decision, the contestant exits, and we move on to the next round. Or, in the case of the final round, the winner is given a check for $10,000, is declared to be a "chopped champ", and makes a few short remarks. Roll credits.
Somewhere along the line the contestants are interviewed fairly extensively. They are asked to discuss their decisions and the thinking behind them or to react to events such as getting chopped. Portions of this are laid into the audio track or inserted into footage of the action.
The whole show is built around a countdown clock. During the timed portions of the action we are frequently getting shots of the countdown clock telling us how much time is left. A clock motif is used to get us into and out of the commercial breaks. Ted starts the clock counting down with "Clock starts now". When the clock runs out he announces that "time's up - step back". And, of course, dramatic and suspenseful music is playing in the background of a goodly part of the show.
If that's not enough Ted is often heard shouting out how much time is left. And then he ostentatiously counts the last ten seconds down. This is to a chorus of shouts from the judges giving useless encouragement and generally making a ruckus as the contestants rush to put the finishing touches on their plates. If I was trying to finish something tricky up I would not want a bunch of maniacal people shouting at me. But apparently this is common behavior in commercial kitchens so it really isn't out of line.
The judges do provide an actual service to the viewer. They engage in what writers call "maid and butler dialog". This is when the maid tells the butler (or vice versa) something they both already know as a vehicle for the author telling the reader something they need to know. In the context of the show judges will frequently discuss an ingredient or technique that many audience members (i. e. me) are unfamiliar with so we know what it is and how it might be used in a dish. They also will suggest how two ingredients might be combined to harmoniously create something.
But there seem to be rules as to how far they can go. With all the rushing around it is common for a contestant to lose track and burn something. The judges seem to always confine themselves to a general statement like "I smell something burning" rather than a specific statement like "the rice at Joe's station is burning". It is also not clear whether the contestants can even hear what the judges are saying in these cases.
I suppose that at some level this show can teach you something about cooking. I don't cook and have no interest in learning. So that sort of thing is wasted on me. But what I think it is terrible at is showing people how to put dishes together that taste really good.
The contestants are forced to compromise. It is possible that two or three ingredients can be combined harmoniously. But there is always at least one ringer. Yet the contestants are supposed to create a single dish in which all four ingredients can be tasted. But often the best thing that can be done to enhance the flavor of a dish as a whole is to omit completely one or more of the basket ingredients. But that comes close to being a chopping offense. If done deliberately it would probably result in an automatic shop.
Another approach would be to make one thing with some of the basket ingredients and another completely different thing with the others. Then present them as completely separate components on the dish that are to be eaten separately. This is frowned upon and substantially increases the probability of a chop.
Some tricks are permitted or even encouraged. A contestant can, for instance, create a soup containing some ingredients that goes to the side while the rest of the ingredients are in the preparation on the main plate. But the flavor of the soup should compliment the rest and it should be possible to combine a bit of soup with a bit of the rest when the judges taste the dish so they end up with a single integrated harmonious bite.
Another permitted trick is to, for instance, make a rub or coating for your meat or fish that uses a problematic ingredient. Or you can make a sauce that is smeared elegantly on the plate before the other ingredients are added or drizzled on top of your main preparation. But it is expected that the judges will combine these components into one "bite" and taste that. If the result works then you are a winner.
But it is often not possible (or it is beyond the capability of the contestants for one reason or another) to create a single dish that combines all the basket ingredients and still tastes really good. So what happens most of the time is the contestants strive for balance, a dish that is neither too sweet nor too sour, neither too bland nor too spicy, neither too this nor too that. If an ingredient is too bland you try to spice it up. If it is too spicy you try to tamp the heat down. If it has little or no taste you try to amp it up somehow. The result is a dish in which all four flavors can be detected but the dish is not much of anything and particularly not too delicious.
And my personal tastes tend toward the simple. I like good quality ingredients that have not been messed with much. Let the quality and taste of the original ingredients shine through. But the judges expect each basket ingredient to be transformed. So an ingredient might be an apple pie or ice cream or something else that already tastes great. Contestants, however, are not supposed to leave it alone. So, for instance, a contestant can use ice cream from the basket to make a different kind of ice cream or as a component that goes into something entirely different. A contestant could turn a strawberry pie from the basket into a strawberry rhubarb pie. But in no case should an ingredient just be left alone.
I don't know what the dishes the contestants end up with actually taste like. I would be a terrible judge for many reasons. The biggest one is that I am a picky eater and my food preferences sound peculiar even to me. So there are lots of basket ingredients I wouldn't eat no matter what. But I suspect that if I did get past my hang ups I would find most of the dishes mediocre and some tasting actually awful. It is so hard to not make the combinations taste not awful that the best that can be achieved most of the time is mediocrity. So there's that.
Then there's the fact that the judges sample four dishes in the first round, three in the second, and two in the third. So that's 36 basket ingredients plus whatever the contestants have thrown in along side the basket ingredients. The result is that for the most part the judges don't eat all of what's on the plate. They just take a taste of this and a taste of that. It's like wine tasting. Judges take a little sip, evaluate it, and spit it out. They miss out on a whole lot of very good wine. But that's the job.
As far as I can tell, the "Chopped" judges don't spit anything out. And I think in many cases they are being asked to taste something that came out badly. So they aren't missing out on that much great food. But I suspect they don't eat anything that isn't part of the tasting on show days because if they did they would be stuffed by the end of the day. And even if a dish starts out pretty good it may sit around long enough to get cold before it's time for the judges to taste it. The whole process is not conducive to the production of tasty food.
And something that bothers me personally is that a good portion of the food that is prepared for the judges goes to waste. And the contestants are not required to use all of the ingredient that is in the basket so they usually don't. They are often given a large piece of meat, say a leg of lamb, for instance. Only a small amount of it will end up on a plate. The rest gets thrown away. As is whatever portion of the ingredients taken from the pantry that didn't end up on a plate. As is the plate of food that goes under the cover.
And what happens to all the perishables the pantry is stocked with that don't end up getting used? I suspect they are given away to a food bank but the official web site is silent on this and much more. I find myself musing on the wastage as I watch the show.
That said, the show does suck me in. And the contestants are incredibly talented. Putting something, anything, on the plate in the time allowed and under the conditions they have to work in (all of the above plus a bunch of roving cameras poking everywhere) is incredibly impressive. But they do. And it is obvious that they are very skilled at the business of cooking.
A lot they do is the sort of thing where even somebody like me can tell if they are an expert or not. And they are experts. They also are very articulate about what they are doing and why they are doing it. This comes through very clearly in the commentary included in the broadcast. I can't tell based on my own personal expertise if they are making the right choices because I have no personal expertise in this area. I am forced to rely on the opinion of the judges for that. But the commentary tells me that, right or wrong, there is intention behind their actions. And I respect that.
And the whole countdown/contest element totally works. I'm sure that most of the contestants most of the time could prepare better dishes if only they had more time. But everybody knows this going in. It's speed chess not tournament chess so adjust your game accordingly. Lots of good cooks have gotten chopped by managing their time poorly or trying to do things that can't be done in the allowed time. Nobody thinks they are the one that is going to make this mistake. But it happens regularly. And that's one of the guilty pleasures of watching the show.
Someone is going to get chopped even if all the contestants prepare great dishes (except see below). But on the flip side if all the contestants prepare crummy dishes at least one of them will survive. The judging is relative. So it doesn't matter how good or bad you do. It matters that you do better than at least one of your competitors. It must be extremely frustrating to do well but get beat out by someone who happened on that day and at that time to do better.
And there is definitely a luck factor involved. You can make your own bad luck by forgetting to plate an ingredient for whatever reason. Or you can drop something or lose track and let something burn. But the worst bad luck is to get cut. Good chefs use incredibly sharp knives. And this very sharp knife, incidentally designed to cut meat, is flying close to your hand while you are trying to keep track of a million things. A hard and fast rule on the show is when you get cut you have to stop. There is a first aid person on site. That person needs to make sure your cut is cleaned and bandaged before you can continue. And any food you have bled on can't be eaten. And what can't be eaten can't be judged.
But in most episodes none of that comes into play. The judges still have to come up with someone to be chopped. And the process is entirely subjective. If we were there to see the food and if we could taste it then this might make their decisions may seem less arbitrary. The judges evaluate every dish. But most of what goes into their evaluations is either not available to us (i.e. how the food actually tastes) or ends up on the cutting room floor.
If we had all the video it might make the process seem less arbitrary. I also think the commentary is edited together with the intention of making it hard for viewers to determine who did well and who did badly. All contestants in a particular round seem to either do poorly or do well, if you go by the commentary we see. This makes for more drama and excitement, better TV. But it also makes it harder for us at home to tell if the judges chopped the right person.
Good reality TV (from a viewing perspective) is not reality. It is artificial in that it has been manipulated. We want drama, lots of drama. And the manipulation often goes far beyond the "just show us the exciting parts" kind of thing. In a typical "follow a bunch of people around" show like any of the "Real Housewives" shows, situations are manipulated and the participants are manipulated. "Did you hear what so and so said about you?" The participants would have to be pretty dim to not realize what's going on. But most of them are smart enough to know that a lot of conflict and drama, a lot of shouting and carrying on, is what is going to make the show a success. And they want the show to be a success and their part in the show to be significant. So they go along.
It is well known that on "The Jerry Springer Show" people will manufacture a shocking and mostly fictitious scenario to sell to the producers. The producers know this is going on. But they are adept at being appropriately oblivious. All they care about is if the group is good enough to maintain "plausible deniability". "We had no idea they were pulling the wool over our eyes, honest." Everybody ends up happy. A bunch of people make it onto TV that otherwise wouldn't be able to. The show gets good ratings. The group may let their friends know that the fix was in but they do what they can to not spoil a good thing for the next group coming down the block.
I am not a fan of the "Real Housewives", "Jerry Springer", etc. school of reality shows. But I am okay with the kinds of manipulations Chopped does. And I'm sure the producers carefully evaluate potential contestants looking for those they think will carry themselves well on TV. But its a show that takes real skill to succeed at and none of the contestants are being the least bit deceptive. The only real surprise contestants note is that it is much harder to win than they thought going in. And you probably have to be a little bit crazy to want to appear on the show so that bit of self deception is probably for the good.
"Springer, "Housewives", and similar shows need villains, the more hiss-able the better. The Chopped producers are happy if the audience likes and roots for everyone. Someone must be chopped. But the judges aren't being villainous when they chop someone. They are just doing their job. Similarly, a contestant is not a bad person because they lost. It's just that someone had to be chopped.
Finally, in one round of one episode the judges only said nice things about all three contestants and didn't chop anyone. But they announced at the time that this had never happened before. And they then proceeded to chop two contestants in the final round so there was only one winner in the end. So in the world of Chipped and for one round it is possible for everyone to win. And that's a nice place to leave things. Happy holidays.
"Chopped" is a TV show I have gotten into. I think with me it's a fad and at some point I will lose interest and drop it. But at the moment it fascinates me. From a business perspective, it's anything but frivolous. It has had 35 "seasons" (they seem to constitute 13 episode blocks), has aired continuously since 2009, and is getting close to broadcasting its 500th episode. It normally airs on Tuesday evenings on the Food Network and, as far as I can tell, its popularity remains strong. So I expect it to continue on long after I have tired of it. And that's fine with me.
"Chopped" is nominally a cooking competition show. But the emphasis falls heavily on the competition aspect. It requires superior cooking skills to be competitive but its format seems tailor made to guarantee that the food produced will often be mediocre at best. That's why I say it is mostly about the competition and not so much about the cooking.
The maser of ceremonies is Ted Allen. He gained fame by being one of the "fab five" on a show called "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". Ted and the rest of the band were out gay men before that was common. In each show they would help out a straight guy with a problem by applying their "queer eye" to, for instance, help him throw a party or redecorate his apartment. Each of them had a specialty. One of them was a decorator. One of them was a fashion guy. And Ted was the food guy. The show was ground breaking, very popular at its peak, and introduced a lot of Americans to gay men being gay men. Ted's "foodie" credentials on "Queer eye" led him to the job at "Chopped"
The show has an extremely tight format. There is little or no variation from show to show. Think "Jeopardy!" but with food. Four contestants are judged by a three person panel typically consisting of working chefs. Each contestant has to prepare a course while a clock counts down. After each course a contestant is chopped (i.e. kicked off the show), hence the title. The line "if your dish doesn't cut it you will be chopped" is repeated frequently. After three rounds, typically, Appetizer, Entrée, and Dessert, three contestants have been chopped and we have a single "chopped champion" left who receives $10,000. (We are told the other contestants get nothing but apparently their expenses are covered and they get a $1,000 gift certificate.)
What makes this so tough is that for each round the contestants are presented with identical baskets containing four "mystery ingredients". All four ingredients, which are revealed when they open their baskets just before the clock starts, must be incorporated into the dish. And the ingredients are selected so that they do not go together. There is also heavy emphasis on the exotic. The show is filmed in New York and it is hard to imagine it being filmed anywhere else.
The producers must come up with 12 mystery ingredients per show. Over the run of the show that means about 6,000 different ingredients. (I'm sure they occasionally repeat an ingredient but this does not happen often.) There is rarely a round in which I even recognize all of the mystery ingredients, let alone have any idea what I would do with them. New York with it's many ethnic enclaves with their own specialty shops is almost a necessity when it comes to finding enough different items.
On the other hand the producers do provide a nice cooking setup for the contestants. Each contestant has their own station consisting of a work area in front and a stove behind. They are provided with a wide assortment of coking utensils and equipment. Off to the side is an area containing additional equipment that can be used on a "first come - first served" basis. This area houses a hot oil fryer, blast chiller, ice cream machine, and many other devices. It is common for more than one contestant to want to use say the fryer or the ice cream machine. Contestants are expected to not hog a machine but there are no formal rules about sharing.
And the "no formal rules" part is also true of the judging. There are almost no formal rules governing how the judges decide who gets chopped. Contestants are supposed to stop cooking when time is up. Contestants are expected to produce a dish that contains all four ingredients. But if a contestant omits an ingredient it does not automatically result in getting chopped. But a hard rule is that if a contestant omits an ingredient from some but not all plates (shorts a plate) all the shorted plates will go to a judge.
Besides the two areas mentioned above (and the area occupied by Ted and the judges) there is a pantry area that contains a wide assortment of ingredients commonly found in a well stocked commercial kitchen. Industrial refrigerators are stocked with ingredients that need to be refrigerated like milk, butter, etc. There is also a section for fruit and other fresh foods. The selection is seasonal but broad. How broad? It seems to contain edible flowers a goodly amount of the time. There are also a section with dried staples (sugar, flour, taco shells, etc.) and another section with a broad selection of spices. (Contestants get a tour of this area before taping starts so they know what's available here and get an idea of where things are located.)
It is possible to prepare very good meals in this environment except for a couple of things. You have a very short period of time to work with. The actual cooking must be done in 20 minutes for the Appetizer, and 30 minutes each for the Entrée and Dessert. For some particularly difficult baskets a more generous time limit (i.e. 30 minutes for the Appetizer or 45 minutes for the Entrée) is used.
But the biggest problem is the mystery ingredients. They are selected to be incompatible with each other. And one or more of them often normally takes a long time to prepare properly. As an example a cut of tough meat like those used by barbeque restaurants might be included. Normally it would be cooked over show heat for as long as 12 hours. But the contestant has to figure out a way to deliver a tender and flavorful "do" on this ingredient (and the rest of the basket) in the 30 minutes allotted.
What we as viewers see is a 60 minute show (44 minutes, if you ignore the commercials). It has been edited down from actual events. Various online sources indicate that it takes 12 - 20 hours to shoot an episode. Needless to say, even allowing for "prep" time and other "behind the scenes" activity, a lot of what goes on ends up on the cutting room floor. We get more of a "highlights from" that an accurate picture of what actually goes on. But one thing that is apparently portrayed accurately is that contestants have less than a minute between when they find out what's in the basket and when the count-down clock starts ticking.
Anyhow, as indicated above the show follows an extremely rigid format. Everybody is introduced. The first basket is opened. The contestants cook. They are then lined up in front of the judges. Each contestant must prepare four plates. Each judge gets one and the fourth goes under a cover. In turn each contestant describes what they have prepared, the judges sample and comment on it and we move on to the next contestant. The contestants are then herded into a holding pen and Ted and the judges confer. The contestants are brought back and Ted removes the cover and displays the dish of the chopped contestant. A judge explains their combined decision, the contestant exits, and we move on to the next round. Or, in the case of the final round, the winner is given a check for $10,000, is declared to be a "chopped champ", and makes a few short remarks. Roll credits.
Somewhere along the line the contestants are interviewed fairly extensively. They are asked to discuss their decisions and the thinking behind them or to react to events such as getting chopped. Portions of this are laid into the audio track or inserted into footage of the action.
The whole show is built around a countdown clock. During the timed portions of the action we are frequently getting shots of the countdown clock telling us how much time is left. A clock motif is used to get us into and out of the commercial breaks. Ted starts the clock counting down with "Clock starts now". When the clock runs out he announces that "time's up - step back". And, of course, dramatic and suspenseful music is playing in the background of a goodly part of the show.
If that's not enough Ted is often heard shouting out how much time is left. And then he ostentatiously counts the last ten seconds down. This is to a chorus of shouts from the judges giving useless encouragement and generally making a ruckus as the contestants rush to put the finishing touches on their plates. If I was trying to finish something tricky up I would not want a bunch of maniacal people shouting at me. But apparently this is common behavior in commercial kitchens so it really isn't out of line.
The judges do provide an actual service to the viewer. They engage in what writers call "maid and butler dialog". This is when the maid tells the butler (or vice versa) something they both already know as a vehicle for the author telling the reader something they need to know. In the context of the show judges will frequently discuss an ingredient or technique that many audience members (i. e. me) are unfamiliar with so we know what it is and how it might be used in a dish. They also will suggest how two ingredients might be combined to harmoniously create something.
But there seem to be rules as to how far they can go. With all the rushing around it is common for a contestant to lose track and burn something. The judges seem to always confine themselves to a general statement like "I smell something burning" rather than a specific statement like "the rice at Joe's station is burning". It is also not clear whether the contestants can even hear what the judges are saying in these cases.
I suppose that at some level this show can teach you something about cooking. I don't cook and have no interest in learning. So that sort of thing is wasted on me. But what I think it is terrible at is showing people how to put dishes together that taste really good.
The contestants are forced to compromise. It is possible that two or three ingredients can be combined harmoniously. But there is always at least one ringer. Yet the contestants are supposed to create a single dish in which all four ingredients can be tasted. But often the best thing that can be done to enhance the flavor of a dish as a whole is to omit completely one or more of the basket ingredients. But that comes close to being a chopping offense. If done deliberately it would probably result in an automatic shop.
Another approach would be to make one thing with some of the basket ingredients and another completely different thing with the others. Then present them as completely separate components on the dish that are to be eaten separately. This is frowned upon and substantially increases the probability of a chop.
Some tricks are permitted or even encouraged. A contestant can, for instance, create a soup containing some ingredients that goes to the side while the rest of the ingredients are in the preparation on the main plate. But the flavor of the soup should compliment the rest and it should be possible to combine a bit of soup with a bit of the rest when the judges taste the dish so they end up with a single integrated harmonious bite.
Another permitted trick is to, for instance, make a rub or coating for your meat or fish that uses a problematic ingredient. Or you can make a sauce that is smeared elegantly on the plate before the other ingredients are added or drizzled on top of your main preparation. But it is expected that the judges will combine these components into one "bite" and taste that. If the result works then you are a winner.
But it is often not possible (or it is beyond the capability of the contestants for one reason or another) to create a single dish that combines all the basket ingredients and still tastes really good. So what happens most of the time is the contestants strive for balance, a dish that is neither too sweet nor too sour, neither too bland nor too spicy, neither too this nor too that. If an ingredient is too bland you try to spice it up. If it is too spicy you try to tamp the heat down. If it has little or no taste you try to amp it up somehow. The result is a dish in which all four flavors can be detected but the dish is not much of anything and particularly not too delicious.
And my personal tastes tend toward the simple. I like good quality ingredients that have not been messed with much. Let the quality and taste of the original ingredients shine through. But the judges expect each basket ingredient to be transformed. So an ingredient might be an apple pie or ice cream or something else that already tastes great. Contestants, however, are not supposed to leave it alone. So, for instance, a contestant can use ice cream from the basket to make a different kind of ice cream or as a component that goes into something entirely different. A contestant could turn a strawberry pie from the basket into a strawberry rhubarb pie. But in no case should an ingredient just be left alone.
I don't know what the dishes the contestants end up with actually taste like. I would be a terrible judge for many reasons. The biggest one is that I am a picky eater and my food preferences sound peculiar even to me. So there are lots of basket ingredients I wouldn't eat no matter what. But I suspect that if I did get past my hang ups I would find most of the dishes mediocre and some tasting actually awful. It is so hard to not make the combinations taste not awful that the best that can be achieved most of the time is mediocrity. So there's that.
Then there's the fact that the judges sample four dishes in the first round, three in the second, and two in the third. So that's 36 basket ingredients plus whatever the contestants have thrown in along side the basket ingredients. The result is that for the most part the judges don't eat all of what's on the plate. They just take a taste of this and a taste of that. It's like wine tasting. Judges take a little sip, evaluate it, and spit it out. They miss out on a whole lot of very good wine. But that's the job.
As far as I can tell, the "Chopped" judges don't spit anything out. And I think in many cases they are being asked to taste something that came out badly. So they aren't missing out on that much great food. But I suspect they don't eat anything that isn't part of the tasting on show days because if they did they would be stuffed by the end of the day. And even if a dish starts out pretty good it may sit around long enough to get cold before it's time for the judges to taste it. The whole process is not conducive to the production of tasty food.
And something that bothers me personally is that a good portion of the food that is prepared for the judges goes to waste. And the contestants are not required to use all of the ingredient that is in the basket so they usually don't. They are often given a large piece of meat, say a leg of lamb, for instance. Only a small amount of it will end up on a plate. The rest gets thrown away. As is whatever portion of the ingredients taken from the pantry that didn't end up on a plate. As is the plate of food that goes under the cover.
And what happens to all the perishables the pantry is stocked with that don't end up getting used? I suspect they are given away to a food bank but the official web site is silent on this and much more. I find myself musing on the wastage as I watch the show.
That said, the show does suck me in. And the contestants are incredibly talented. Putting something, anything, on the plate in the time allowed and under the conditions they have to work in (all of the above plus a bunch of roving cameras poking everywhere) is incredibly impressive. But they do. And it is obvious that they are very skilled at the business of cooking.
A lot they do is the sort of thing where even somebody like me can tell if they are an expert or not. And they are experts. They also are very articulate about what they are doing and why they are doing it. This comes through very clearly in the commentary included in the broadcast. I can't tell based on my own personal expertise if they are making the right choices because I have no personal expertise in this area. I am forced to rely on the opinion of the judges for that. But the commentary tells me that, right or wrong, there is intention behind their actions. And I respect that.
And the whole countdown/contest element totally works. I'm sure that most of the contestants most of the time could prepare better dishes if only they had more time. But everybody knows this going in. It's speed chess not tournament chess so adjust your game accordingly. Lots of good cooks have gotten chopped by managing their time poorly or trying to do things that can't be done in the allowed time. Nobody thinks they are the one that is going to make this mistake. But it happens regularly. And that's one of the guilty pleasures of watching the show.
Someone is going to get chopped even if all the contestants prepare great dishes (except see below). But on the flip side if all the contestants prepare crummy dishes at least one of them will survive. The judging is relative. So it doesn't matter how good or bad you do. It matters that you do better than at least one of your competitors. It must be extremely frustrating to do well but get beat out by someone who happened on that day and at that time to do better.
And there is definitely a luck factor involved. You can make your own bad luck by forgetting to plate an ingredient for whatever reason. Or you can drop something or lose track and let something burn. But the worst bad luck is to get cut. Good chefs use incredibly sharp knives. And this very sharp knife, incidentally designed to cut meat, is flying close to your hand while you are trying to keep track of a million things. A hard and fast rule on the show is when you get cut you have to stop. There is a first aid person on site. That person needs to make sure your cut is cleaned and bandaged before you can continue. And any food you have bled on can't be eaten. And what can't be eaten can't be judged.
But in most episodes none of that comes into play. The judges still have to come up with someone to be chopped. And the process is entirely subjective. If we were there to see the food and if we could taste it then this might make their decisions may seem less arbitrary. The judges evaluate every dish. But most of what goes into their evaluations is either not available to us (i.e. how the food actually tastes) or ends up on the cutting room floor.
If we had all the video it might make the process seem less arbitrary. I also think the commentary is edited together with the intention of making it hard for viewers to determine who did well and who did badly. All contestants in a particular round seem to either do poorly or do well, if you go by the commentary we see. This makes for more drama and excitement, better TV. But it also makes it harder for us at home to tell if the judges chopped the right person.
Good reality TV (from a viewing perspective) is not reality. It is artificial in that it has been manipulated. We want drama, lots of drama. And the manipulation often goes far beyond the "just show us the exciting parts" kind of thing. In a typical "follow a bunch of people around" show like any of the "Real Housewives" shows, situations are manipulated and the participants are manipulated. "Did you hear what so and so said about you?" The participants would have to be pretty dim to not realize what's going on. But most of them are smart enough to know that a lot of conflict and drama, a lot of shouting and carrying on, is what is going to make the show a success. And they want the show to be a success and their part in the show to be significant. So they go along.
It is well known that on "The Jerry Springer Show" people will manufacture a shocking and mostly fictitious scenario to sell to the producers. The producers know this is going on. But they are adept at being appropriately oblivious. All they care about is if the group is good enough to maintain "plausible deniability". "We had no idea they were pulling the wool over our eyes, honest." Everybody ends up happy. A bunch of people make it onto TV that otherwise wouldn't be able to. The show gets good ratings. The group may let their friends know that the fix was in but they do what they can to not spoil a good thing for the next group coming down the block.
I am not a fan of the "Real Housewives", "Jerry Springer", etc. school of reality shows. But I am okay with the kinds of manipulations Chopped does. And I'm sure the producers carefully evaluate potential contestants looking for those they think will carry themselves well on TV. But its a show that takes real skill to succeed at and none of the contestants are being the least bit deceptive. The only real surprise contestants note is that it is much harder to win than they thought going in. And you probably have to be a little bit crazy to want to appear on the show so that bit of self deception is probably for the good.
"Springer, "Housewives", and similar shows need villains, the more hiss-able the better. The Chopped producers are happy if the audience likes and roots for everyone. Someone must be chopped. But the judges aren't being villainous when they chop someone. They are just doing their job. Similarly, a contestant is not a bad person because they lost. It's just that someone had to be chopped.
Finally, in one round of one episode the judges only said nice things about all three contestants and didn't chop anyone. But they announced at the time that this had never happened before. And they then proceeded to chop two contestants in the final round so there was only one winner in the end. So in the world of Chipped and for one round it is possible for everyone to win. And that's a nice place to leave things. Happy holidays.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
The War on Drugs
This post takes a broad view of drugs and drug policy. But as an introduction I want to clean up a related loose end. I have written two posts about marijuana legalization. Here's a link to the first one: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/11/legal-marijuana.html. I wrote that post just after Washington State voted to legalize recreational marijuana sales and use. In my second post (see: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/01/legal-marijuana-report-from-front-lines.html) I did a status update to report on how things were going roughly two years in.
An additional two years (and a little more) have now transpired so I would like to start off with another update. In my first post I didn't know how things would go but I expressed considerable hope. In my second post I was concerned. Things were proceeding more slowly than I thought they should and I saw a number of outstanding problems. I can now report considerable progress.
The Federal Government has not officially changed its position. So Marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug but the Obama Administration moved to a more "hands off" stance with respect to efforts by states to loosen things up. This allowed my state to make considerable progress. I was concerned that there were two different regulatory regimes within Washington State. That has been fixed. Recreational and medical marijuana are now under the same regulatory regime. So that problem has been fixed, at least in my state. Also, the number of retail outlets has expanded considerably.
Various initial start-up problems had meant that legal pot was expensive. Those are behind us and pot prices are low and availability is generally high. Various city and county jurisdictions have outlawed sales but legal pot of good quality at a relatively low price is available with little (jurisdictions that have outlawed it) or no (the rest of the state) problems. As a side note, the situation now mirrors the availability of alcohol in "county option" states like Texas. This has led to a listing in the Yellow Pages (when there were still Yellow Pages) section of many directories in Texas for bootleggers. They would contract to deliver alcohol to you if you lived in a "dry" county. I expect similar idiocy to prevail in those parts of my state that continue to prohibit retail pot sales.
And the number of states that allow legal sales of pot for recreational use has climbed quickly since my last post. There was a story in the paper not long ago about a "drive through" recreational pot store being opened in Las Vegas to cater to tourists. Following the recent passage of "Proposition 64" recreational pot will be legal in California starting on January 1, 2018. I expect that the move by California, historically the home of a large number of illegal pot "grow" operations, will accelerate the trend toward legalization at the state level. On the other hand, with Trump in the White House I expect no forward progress on the national front.
With that out of the way, let me move to a more broad look at drugs and drug policy. Chinese workers were imported in the nineteenth century to build the transcontinental railroad. They brought opium with them. It joined alcohol (imported by Europeans), cocaine (long used in South America) and the mind altering drugs peyote and mescaline (used by natives in Central and South America respectively). Alcohol devastated native populations as their bodies were poor at tolerating it. The other drugs had niche markets and didn't initially represent a serious problem.
That all changed in the late nineteenth century. This was a period when "snake oil" salesmen peddling various "tonics" became popular. There was no regulation at the time so they were free to come up with any formulation that would produce sales. A druggist named John Pemberton introduced Coca-Cola. The original formulation included a small amount of cocaine to juice sales. The "Coca" part of the name is a shout out to this ingredient. And at the time there was noting illegal about doing this. It was not even considered unethical.
But then Laudanum became popular. Laudanum contains opium and the most important active ingredient in opium is morphine. Morphine is addictive. This is good for repeat sales. And as a tonic that pepped a person up and made them feel good it was a complete success. Needless to say this made Laudanum quite popular. But it also produced large numbers of addicts. And these were often women who were members of prominent families. And one of the problems with morphine is that the body develops a tolerance to it over time. So that as time passes it takes larger does to get the same effect. And this too was very good for sales.
But this came to be seen as a big problem. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century laws were passed that outlawed retail sales of anything containing opiates. The large population of Laudanum addicts were either weaned off of it or eventually died off. By roughly 1920 there was no "drug" problem except, of course, alcohol. Prohibition came in, failed, and was mostly abolished by the early '30s. By now most of the country has gone "wet" but there are still some holdouts, some states and counties (see above) that have stayed "dry". And this return to "wet" was mostly a good thing but for some it created a problem.
The repeal of prohibition caused big problems for the federal officials that had been tasked with its enforcement. The enforcement operation was a failure by every measure but one. Bureaucrats that had been running prohibition had come to control a large budget and staff. With prohibition gone there was now no reason to keep them on. Unless, that is, a new mission could be found. So the people in charge invented the drug problem and just repurposed their organization to go after drugs and drug dealers rather than alcohol and alcohol dealers. Their solution has made a giant problem for the rest of us ever since.
As I indicated above, the Laudanum/opium/morphine problem has been pretty much solved by this point. Oh, they did their best to hype the problem with the active cooperation on Hollywood and sensationalist newspapers. But a bigger target was necessary. And that's where marijuana came in. Various versions of the now notorious "Reefer Madness" movie were released in the late '30s. The film was wildly inaccurate and completely ridiculous. But most people had never heard of marijuana until this film came out. It was heavily promoted and people just assumed that it was reasonably accurate. And that's where most people's perception of pot came from for a long time.
Pretty much nobody cared about this early phase of the War on Drugs except a few bureaucrats whose continued employment depended on it. And various kinds of drugs made handy villains for sensationalist books, films, and magazines. So various boogey men like Fu Manchu peopled popular fiction. But all that changed in the "swinging '60s".
Youth was feeling rebellious for various reasons that I am not going to get into. But this resulted in a general attitude of distrusting authority. Whatever authority said was bad must be good. So a lot of experimentation with illegal drugs took place. Among the drugs that people tried out in substantial numbers were mescaline, peyote, and morphine. It was quickly discovered that, to put it mildly, these drugs were not for everybody. So their use dropped off fairly quickly. As did the use of new drugs like LSD as I have indicated elsewhere. But a drug that got and kept a large following was marijuana. Cocaine also developed a smaller but equally long term following.
And all of a sudden drug enforcement could again become a big deal. And at the time youth was socially liberal. So conservatives could go after drug using liberals as degenerates and bums. And conservatives are always happy when they can denigrate their opposition. So Richard Nixon, the standard bearer for conservatism at the time, declared an official War on Drugs. He pointed out that they were illegal (not like "good" drugs like nicotine and alcohol that conservatives consumed in large quantities) so, by definition, the people who consumed them were criminals. And the only appropriate thing to do with criminals is to throw the book at them.
And once the hoopla for drugs like mescaline and LSD died down it was important to maintain as the official position that marijuana and cocaine were horribly dangerous. Without them the "drug problem" was not big enough to have substantial political impact So the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1971. This resulted in something called the "CSA Schedule".
The Schedule was a list used to determine the official government position on how dangerous a particular drug was. A "Schedule 1" drug was horribly dangerous, the worst of the worst. The danger was reduced as you move through the schedules. So a "Schedule 5" drug was not very dangerous. Which schedule a drug landed on made a tremendous difference in how regulators and law enforcement treated that drug. Even being listed on one of the less dangerous schedules triggered various regulatory requirements and restrictions. And the listing of a drug on Schedule 1 or Schedule 2 triggered the tightest regulations and the harshest restrictions and penalties.
Heroin and LSD are on the Schedule 1 list. This is probably appropriate. But so is marijuana and that is totally ridiculous. Amphetamines, Morphine, and Oxycodone are on the Schedule 2 list. All have a high potential for abuse and addiction. But they also have potentially beneficial uses so it is appropriate to treat them differently than the "no beneficial use" attribute that characterizes Schedule 1 drugs. But cocaine is also a Schedule 2 drug. This is less idiotic than putting marijuana on the Schedule 1 list but it doesn't seem right. To fill in the picture I will note that Anabolic steroids are Schedule 3 drugs and Valium is a schedule 4 drug. I don't recognize any of the drugs on the Schedule 5 list.
My point is that the CSA Schedule is much more of a political document than it is a document based on science or practical experience. Technically it is jointly administered by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). But it is a political document more than anything else. And this dominance of political considerations to the detriment of scientific analysis or a review of practical experience is the hallmark of the War on Drugs and has been all along.
Did you know that there is an explosion of heroin use and that it is a now a pressing public health crisis? You did if you have spent any time with the press in the last year. But if you have been following along with this post so far then you should be very skeptical at this point. And your skepticism is well justified. It is hard to make something up out of nothing. (At least that used to be true.) So there turns out to be a small kernel of truth imbedded in all the sensationalism. Heroin usage and various problems following therefrom are up by a lot in the last few years. But what is up even more is the abuse of dangerous prescription drugs.
Oxycodone is the active ingredient of many prescription pain medications. Examples include Percocet, Percodan, and OxyContin. And have I mentioned that Oxycodone is an opiate, a drug in the same chemical family as opium? "Oxy" use has shot through the roof. But this is not because "Breaking Bad" chemists are mixing up batches of the stuff in their bathrooms and kitchens. A high volume and sophisticated pipeline has built up over time to funnel large quantities of Oxy from the pharmaceutical company that owns the rights to illegal street dealers.
Illegality is taking place at every step of the way from manufacture to ultimate consumption when it comes to heroin. For a small percentage of the volume that flows down the equivalent Oxy chain every step is legal. Some people have a severe pain problem of limited duration. They get a legitimate prescription from a legitimate doctor. They fill the prescription at legitimate pharmacy. They take their one time supply of the pills home. And there they consume them for a relatively short period of time to deal with their pain. Every step in this chain is and should be legal. People legitimately and legally get the relief they need for the limited time they need it. Then they go back to their normal, Oxy free, lives.
But the spectacular volume of "legal" Oxy manufacture is well beyond the legitimate need I have just described. And only a few percent of production ends up being consumed by completely legitimate users. The rest is diverted into illegitimate channels where it is sold by drug dealers. This pattern is typical of abused drugs that are available by prescription. There is a relatively small legitimate market for these drugs. And for that market everything is not only completely legal, it is as it should be. But various techniques are used to facilitate the diversion of a far larger quantity into illegitimate channels. This does no end of good to the bottom lines of the "legitimate" drug companies involved.
All the executives of these companies need to do is look the other way at the right time. Sure, the drugs end up where they are not supposed to be. But the company has already made its profit. And the stock holders are happy to reward executives for this kind of behavior. All it takes is a little unethical behavior. And it is currently not even illegal. The pharmaceutical companies have taken a page out of the NRA handbook. They have gotten legislation passed that shields pharmaceutical companies from any kind of legal jeopardy for their unethical behavior. Looking the other way is now completely legal.
The fix to this problem is simple and obvious. You make it illegal for drug companies and executives to look the other way. Then you crack down on them. The problem is that this would result in a sudden and drastic reduction in the profits that undergird those outrageous salaries and high dividends. So senior executives and big investors would be mad. And they would take their anger out on politicians stupid enough to even think of doing this. So expect a lot of hot air to be expended but nothing to change when it comes to the "legitimate drugs" part of our drug epidemic.
So that's where we are. If we assume for the minute that the War on Drugs is completely legitimate then the strategies and tactics we at currently employing have failed utterly. Drugs are more widely and easily available at lower prices than they ever have been before. But the War on Drugs is not completely legitimate. It is probably not even mostly legitimate. It is at best partially legitimate. And the biggest reason for the failure of efforts to win the War on Drugs is the large quantities of nonsense that is thrown around. We are not going to get anywhere unless we reduce the nonsense to manageable quantities. In service of that here are two quick BS tests:
Any politician or bureaucrat who is not in favor of moving marijuana from Schedule 1 down to one of the low risk schedules is full of BS.
Any politician or bureaucrat that is talking about "the Opioid epidemic" who doesn't focus on the prescription drug component as opposed to the illegally manufactured component of the crisis is full of BS.
People who are full of BS should be either ignored, if possible, or told to shut up and go away. They are the people making things worse instead of better.
There has been no real problems caused by recreational marijuana legalization in Washington or anywhere else. Lots of tax revenue has flowed onto state coffers and the system is now working quite well, at least in Washington State. I think cocaine is a more serious drug. I am in no way an expert but my understanding is that "crack" cocaine can be quite addictive and destructive. But this whole "bust people and throw them in jail for a long time" strategy is a total failure. It's time to try something else.
And the "something else" I recommend is switching from a "law enforcement" approach to a "medical problem" approach. And I think this can be made to work for all drugs, not just marijuana and cocaine. It costs fantastic amounts of time, effort, and money to bust, convict, and incarcerate people. And you ruin their lives so they are a burden on society for the rest of their lives. And this system is often used to further disadvantage people like minorities and the poor. Drug use is at the same level in white suburbs as it is in black inner cities. Yet most of the people who are in jail come from black inner cities.
Why not just monitor the situation? If problems occur then treat these problems as medical problems. Throwing drunks in jail doesn't work. AA works. AA is much more a medical approach than it is a law enforcement approach. Throwing people who manufacture, import, sell, or consume drugs in jail doesn't work either. If it worked we'd all know about it. If these people in the drug trade are not causing problems either to themselves or to society treat them like the problem drinker who somehow manages to keep everything together. Ignore them and their problem.
Many people think there is such a thing as an "addictive personality". Our experience with addictive drugs is that some people get hooked and some people don't. Some people who get hooked seem to be able to get off drugs fairly easily. Some don't. Nicotine is generally considered one of the most addictive drugs there is. My father had little trouble quitting cold turkey after smoking for many years. My mother's experience was the opposite. She found it almost impossible to stop smoking. She repeatedly tried to quit. She once stopped for 7 years before going back to smoking. In the end it was more a glacial tapering off to nothing than anything else.
A related idea is "harm minimization". If a person can use drugs and suffers no ill effects then intervention is not necessary. For those who seem well and truly hooked then perhaps some kind of "maintenance" program can be used. If this allows them to lead a relatively normal life that puts no one besides themselves in harm's way then why not? People who as a result of drugs are doing serious harm to themselves and/or to others need a more aggressive intervention. In some cases incarceration might be the best option for them. But it is likely this group will be small.
This different approach will save society a lot of money. It drastically reduces the amount of graft and corruption underwritten by the drug trade and our current response to it. It's got to be good to take money out of the hands of drug gangs and the people they bribe. If we stop throwing so many people in jail it also substantially increases the number of productive members of society. This goes for the time they would be spending in jail and the time after they get out. And society saves the money currently being put into cops, prosecutors, judges and court rooms, jails and prisons, and systems to monitor them after they get out.
The changes I have proposed are nothing new. Many others have advocated these same changes for a long time. But there are a number of powerful groups and individuals heavily invested in the status quo. A lot of money is being spent on the current system. The people getting a paycheck and the companies goosing their bottom lines would lose big if we switched to the new system.
And frankly a lot of politicians over a long period of time have been able to make the current way we approach the War on Drugs work for them. They don't want their base to figure out that they have been conned for all this time. And then there are the people who for one reason or another legitimately believe that there is something especially evil about drugs (but only certain drugs). They want desperately to hold on to their beliefs.
And so far the people who are on the side that says "we need to keep doing what we are doing even though it is an obvious and conspicuous failure" have managed to stymie any change either in the way most people think about the issue or in how the system works. And the War on Drugs does have one success story it can point to. It has been very successful in putting large numbers of minorities and other disliked groups into jail. This supports the narrative that "there is something inherently bad about those kinds of people". And a lot of people derive considerable benefit from that narrative. But it is the result of selective enforcement and not a difference that is inherent to the targeted groups. Unfortunately, far too many people see this as a good thing.
I expect no progress on moving to something that works better unless and until I see my two BS tests come into widespread and effective use. And I hold out little hope for that happening any time soon.
An additional two years (and a little more) have now transpired so I would like to start off with another update. In my first post I didn't know how things would go but I expressed considerable hope. In my second post I was concerned. Things were proceeding more slowly than I thought they should and I saw a number of outstanding problems. I can now report considerable progress.
The Federal Government has not officially changed its position. So Marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug but the Obama Administration moved to a more "hands off" stance with respect to efforts by states to loosen things up. This allowed my state to make considerable progress. I was concerned that there were two different regulatory regimes within Washington State. That has been fixed. Recreational and medical marijuana are now under the same regulatory regime. So that problem has been fixed, at least in my state. Also, the number of retail outlets has expanded considerably.
Various initial start-up problems had meant that legal pot was expensive. Those are behind us and pot prices are low and availability is generally high. Various city and county jurisdictions have outlawed sales but legal pot of good quality at a relatively low price is available with little (jurisdictions that have outlawed it) or no (the rest of the state) problems. As a side note, the situation now mirrors the availability of alcohol in "county option" states like Texas. This has led to a listing in the Yellow Pages (when there were still Yellow Pages) section of many directories in Texas for bootleggers. They would contract to deliver alcohol to you if you lived in a "dry" county. I expect similar idiocy to prevail in those parts of my state that continue to prohibit retail pot sales.
And the number of states that allow legal sales of pot for recreational use has climbed quickly since my last post. There was a story in the paper not long ago about a "drive through" recreational pot store being opened in Las Vegas to cater to tourists. Following the recent passage of "Proposition 64" recreational pot will be legal in California starting on January 1, 2018. I expect that the move by California, historically the home of a large number of illegal pot "grow" operations, will accelerate the trend toward legalization at the state level. On the other hand, with Trump in the White House I expect no forward progress on the national front.
With that out of the way, let me move to a more broad look at drugs and drug policy. Chinese workers were imported in the nineteenth century to build the transcontinental railroad. They brought opium with them. It joined alcohol (imported by Europeans), cocaine (long used in South America) and the mind altering drugs peyote and mescaline (used by natives in Central and South America respectively). Alcohol devastated native populations as their bodies were poor at tolerating it. The other drugs had niche markets and didn't initially represent a serious problem.
That all changed in the late nineteenth century. This was a period when "snake oil" salesmen peddling various "tonics" became popular. There was no regulation at the time so they were free to come up with any formulation that would produce sales. A druggist named John Pemberton introduced Coca-Cola. The original formulation included a small amount of cocaine to juice sales. The "Coca" part of the name is a shout out to this ingredient. And at the time there was noting illegal about doing this. It was not even considered unethical.
But then Laudanum became popular. Laudanum contains opium and the most important active ingredient in opium is morphine. Morphine is addictive. This is good for repeat sales. And as a tonic that pepped a person up and made them feel good it was a complete success. Needless to say this made Laudanum quite popular. But it also produced large numbers of addicts. And these were often women who were members of prominent families. And one of the problems with morphine is that the body develops a tolerance to it over time. So that as time passes it takes larger does to get the same effect. And this too was very good for sales.
But this came to be seen as a big problem. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century laws were passed that outlawed retail sales of anything containing opiates. The large population of Laudanum addicts were either weaned off of it or eventually died off. By roughly 1920 there was no "drug" problem except, of course, alcohol. Prohibition came in, failed, and was mostly abolished by the early '30s. By now most of the country has gone "wet" but there are still some holdouts, some states and counties (see above) that have stayed "dry". And this return to "wet" was mostly a good thing but for some it created a problem.
The repeal of prohibition caused big problems for the federal officials that had been tasked with its enforcement. The enforcement operation was a failure by every measure but one. Bureaucrats that had been running prohibition had come to control a large budget and staff. With prohibition gone there was now no reason to keep them on. Unless, that is, a new mission could be found. So the people in charge invented the drug problem and just repurposed their organization to go after drugs and drug dealers rather than alcohol and alcohol dealers. Their solution has made a giant problem for the rest of us ever since.
As I indicated above, the Laudanum/opium/morphine problem has been pretty much solved by this point. Oh, they did their best to hype the problem with the active cooperation on Hollywood and sensationalist newspapers. But a bigger target was necessary. And that's where marijuana came in. Various versions of the now notorious "Reefer Madness" movie were released in the late '30s. The film was wildly inaccurate and completely ridiculous. But most people had never heard of marijuana until this film came out. It was heavily promoted and people just assumed that it was reasonably accurate. And that's where most people's perception of pot came from for a long time.
Pretty much nobody cared about this early phase of the War on Drugs except a few bureaucrats whose continued employment depended on it. And various kinds of drugs made handy villains for sensationalist books, films, and magazines. So various boogey men like Fu Manchu peopled popular fiction. But all that changed in the "swinging '60s".
Youth was feeling rebellious for various reasons that I am not going to get into. But this resulted in a general attitude of distrusting authority. Whatever authority said was bad must be good. So a lot of experimentation with illegal drugs took place. Among the drugs that people tried out in substantial numbers were mescaline, peyote, and morphine. It was quickly discovered that, to put it mildly, these drugs were not for everybody. So their use dropped off fairly quickly. As did the use of new drugs like LSD as I have indicated elsewhere. But a drug that got and kept a large following was marijuana. Cocaine also developed a smaller but equally long term following.
And all of a sudden drug enforcement could again become a big deal. And at the time youth was socially liberal. So conservatives could go after drug using liberals as degenerates and bums. And conservatives are always happy when they can denigrate their opposition. So Richard Nixon, the standard bearer for conservatism at the time, declared an official War on Drugs. He pointed out that they were illegal (not like "good" drugs like nicotine and alcohol that conservatives consumed in large quantities) so, by definition, the people who consumed them were criminals. And the only appropriate thing to do with criminals is to throw the book at them.
And once the hoopla for drugs like mescaline and LSD died down it was important to maintain as the official position that marijuana and cocaine were horribly dangerous. Without them the "drug problem" was not big enough to have substantial political impact So the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1971. This resulted in something called the "CSA Schedule".
The Schedule was a list used to determine the official government position on how dangerous a particular drug was. A "Schedule 1" drug was horribly dangerous, the worst of the worst. The danger was reduced as you move through the schedules. So a "Schedule 5" drug was not very dangerous. Which schedule a drug landed on made a tremendous difference in how regulators and law enforcement treated that drug. Even being listed on one of the less dangerous schedules triggered various regulatory requirements and restrictions. And the listing of a drug on Schedule 1 or Schedule 2 triggered the tightest regulations and the harshest restrictions and penalties.
Heroin and LSD are on the Schedule 1 list. This is probably appropriate. But so is marijuana and that is totally ridiculous. Amphetamines, Morphine, and Oxycodone are on the Schedule 2 list. All have a high potential for abuse and addiction. But they also have potentially beneficial uses so it is appropriate to treat them differently than the "no beneficial use" attribute that characterizes Schedule 1 drugs. But cocaine is also a Schedule 2 drug. This is less idiotic than putting marijuana on the Schedule 1 list but it doesn't seem right. To fill in the picture I will note that Anabolic steroids are Schedule 3 drugs and Valium is a schedule 4 drug. I don't recognize any of the drugs on the Schedule 5 list.
My point is that the CSA Schedule is much more of a political document than it is a document based on science or practical experience. Technically it is jointly administered by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). But it is a political document more than anything else. And this dominance of political considerations to the detriment of scientific analysis or a review of practical experience is the hallmark of the War on Drugs and has been all along.
Did you know that there is an explosion of heroin use and that it is a now a pressing public health crisis? You did if you have spent any time with the press in the last year. But if you have been following along with this post so far then you should be very skeptical at this point. And your skepticism is well justified. It is hard to make something up out of nothing. (At least that used to be true.) So there turns out to be a small kernel of truth imbedded in all the sensationalism. Heroin usage and various problems following therefrom are up by a lot in the last few years. But what is up even more is the abuse of dangerous prescription drugs.
Oxycodone is the active ingredient of many prescription pain medications. Examples include Percocet, Percodan, and OxyContin. And have I mentioned that Oxycodone is an opiate, a drug in the same chemical family as opium? "Oxy" use has shot through the roof. But this is not because "Breaking Bad" chemists are mixing up batches of the stuff in their bathrooms and kitchens. A high volume and sophisticated pipeline has built up over time to funnel large quantities of Oxy from the pharmaceutical company that owns the rights to illegal street dealers.
Illegality is taking place at every step of the way from manufacture to ultimate consumption when it comes to heroin. For a small percentage of the volume that flows down the equivalent Oxy chain every step is legal. Some people have a severe pain problem of limited duration. They get a legitimate prescription from a legitimate doctor. They fill the prescription at legitimate pharmacy. They take their one time supply of the pills home. And there they consume them for a relatively short period of time to deal with their pain. Every step in this chain is and should be legal. People legitimately and legally get the relief they need for the limited time they need it. Then they go back to their normal, Oxy free, lives.
But the spectacular volume of "legal" Oxy manufacture is well beyond the legitimate need I have just described. And only a few percent of production ends up being consumed by completely legitimate users. The rest is diverted into illegitimate channels where it is sold by drug dealers. This pattern is typical of abused drugs that are available by prescription. There is a relatively small legitimate market for these drugs. And for that market everything is not only completely legal, it is as it should be. But various techniques are used to facilitate the diversion of a far larger quantity into illegitimate channels. This does no end of good to the bottom lines of the "legitimate" drug companies involved.
All the executives of these companies need to do is look the other way at the right time. Sure, the drugs end up where they are not supposed to be. But the company has already made its profit. And the stock holders are happy to reward executives for this kind of behavior. All it takes is a little unethical behavior. And it is currently not even illegal. The pharmaceutical companies have taken a page out of the NRA handbook. They have gotten legislation passed that shields pharmaceutical companies from any kind of legal jeopardy for their unethical behavior. Looking the other way is now completely legal.
The fix to this problem is simple and obvious. You make it illegal for drug companies and executives to look the other way. Then you crack down on them. The problem is that this would result in a sudden and drastic reduction in the profits that undergird those outrageous salaries and high dividends. So senior executives and big investors would be mad. And they would take their anger out on politicians stupid enough to even think of doing this. So expect a lot of hot air to be expended but nothing to change when it comes to the "legitimate drugs" part of our drug epidemic.
So that's where we are. If we assume for the minute that the War on Drugs is completely legitimate then the strategies and tactics we at currently employing have failed utterly. Drugs are more widely and easily available at lower prices than they ever have been before. But the War on Drugs is not completely legitimate. It is probably not even mostly legitimate. It is at best partially legitimate. And the biggest reason for the failure of efforts to win the War on Drugs is the large quantities of nonsense that is thrown around. We are not going to get anywhere unless we reduce the nonsense to manageable quantities. In service of that here are two quick BS tests:
Any politician or bureaucrat who is not in favor of moving marijuana from Schedule 1 down to one of the low risk schedules is full of BS.
Any politician or bureaucrat that is talking about "the Opioid epidemic" who doesn't focus on the prescription drug component as opposed to the illegally manufactured component of the crisis is full of BS.
People who are full of BS should be either ignored, if possible, or told to shut up and go away. They are the people making things worse instead of better.
There has been no real problems caused by recreational marijuana legalization in Washington or anywhere else. Lots of tax revenue has flowed onto state coffers and the system is now working quite well, at least in Washington State. I think cocaine is a more serious drug. I am in no way an expert but my understanding is that "crack" cocaine can be quite addictive and destructive. But this whole "bust people and throw them in jail for a long time" strategy is a total failure. It's time to try something else.
And the "something else" I recommend is switching from a "law enforcement" approach to a "medical problem" approach. And I think this can be made to work for all drugs, not just marijuana and cocaine. It costs fantastic amounts of time, effort, and money to bust, convict, and incarcerate people. And you ruin their lives so they are a burden on society for the rest of their lives. And this system is often used to further disadvantage people like minorities and the poor. Drug use is at the same level in white suburbs as it is in black inner cities. Yet most of the people who are in jail come from black inner cities.
Why not just monitor the situation? If problems occur then treat these problems as medical problems. Throwing drunks in jail doesn't work. AA works. AA is much more a medical approach than it is a law enforcement approach. Throwing people who manufacture, import, sell, or consume drugs in jail doesn't work either. If it worked we'd all know about it. If these people in the drug trade are not causing problems either to themselves or to society treat them like the problem drinker who somehow manages to keep everything together. Ignore them and their problem.
Many people think there is such a thing as an "addictive personality". Our experience with addictive drugs is that some people get hooked and some people don't. Some people who get hooked seem to be able to get off drugs fairly easily. Some don't. Nicotine is generally considered one of the most addictive drugs there is. My father had little trouble quitting cold turkey after smoking for many years. My mother's experience was the opposite. She found it almost impossible to stop smoking. She repeatedly tried to quit. She once stopped for 7 years before going back to smoking. In the end it was more a glacial tapering off to nothing than anything else.
A related idea is "harm minimization". If a person can use drugs and suffers no ill effects then intervention is not necessary. For those who seem well and truly hooked then perhaps some kind of "maintenance" program can be used. If this allows them to lead a relatively normal life that puts no one besides themselves in harm's way then why not? People who as a result of drugs are doing serious harm to themselves and/or to others need a more aggressive intervention. In some cases incarceration might be the best option for them. But it is likely this group will be small.
This different approach will save society a lot of money. It drastically reduces the amount of graft and corruption underwritten by the drug trade and our current response to it. It's got to be good to take money out of the hands of drug gangs and the people they bribe. If we stop throwing so many people in jail it also substantially increases the number of productive members of society. This goes for the time they would be spending in jail and the time after they get out. And society saves the money currently being put into cops, prosecutors, judges and court rooms, jails and prisons, and systems to monitor them after they get out.
The changes I have proposed are nothing new. Many others have advocated these same changes for a long time. But there are a number of powerful groups and individuals heavily invested in the status quo. A lot of money is being spent on the current system. The people getting a paycheck and the companies goosing their bottom lines would lose big if we switched to the new system.
And frankly a lot of politicians over a long period of time have been able to make the current way we approach the War on Drugs work for them. They don't want their base to figure out that they have been conned for all this time. And then there are the people who for one reason or another legitimately believe that there is something especially evil about drugs (but only certain drugs). They want desperately to hold on to their beliefs.
And so far the people who are on the side that says "we need to keep doing what we are doing even though it is an obvious and conspicuous failure" have managed to stymie any change either in the way most people think about the issue or in how the system works. And the War on Drugs does have one success story it can point to. It has been very successful in putting large numbers of minorities and other disliked groups into jail. This supports the narrative that "there is something inherently bad about those kinds of people". And a lot of people derive considerable benefit from that narrative. But it is the result of selective enforcement and not a difference that is inherent to the targeted groups. Unfortunately, far too many people see this as a good thing.
I expect no progress on moving to something that works better unless and until I see my two BS tests come into widespread and effective use. And I hold out little hope for that happening any time soon.
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