Shutdown Endgame

I am writing this on a weekend.  We are currently engaged in a partial shutdown of the Federal Government.  As I start writing this post this particular shutdown is now officially the longest on record.  And no one knows how or when it is going to end.  We weren't supposed to get here.  But here we are.

The basic motivation for starting this blog was to provide a counter narrative when I thought a large percentage of what was being said about something was nonsense or ill informed.  This morning it occurred to me that "the shutdown" definitely qualifies.  I have seen a lot of noise and hot air and little intelligent analysis on the subject.  So here's what I have to say.

Consider the unthinkable.  Some event, either in its basic nature or in its consequences, is so horrendous that any reasonable person will feel compelled to do whatever is necessary to make sure it does not come to pass.

In political parlance, we used to have the "must pass" bill.  Not passing the bill was unthinkable.  So, if compromises must be made then they must be made.  So a long standing trick employed by smart legislators was to attach a "rider" to a must pass bill.  (A rider is a small addition that may or may not have anything to do with the main bill.)  But the point is that if you succeeded in getting the rider attached, you were pretty much guaranteed it would become law.  The "must pass" bill must pass, so it will.

Warren G. Magnuson, a long time Senator from my state (he died in 1981) was famous for doing this.  And, as long as it was used sparingly, people grumbled but that was about it.  And someone like Magnuson was accorded grudging respect for being a canny legislator.  And the tactic worked in Magnuson's day because "must pass" legislation passed.  Why?  Because it was unthinkable to not pass a "must pass" bill.  So people grumbled and complained.  But in the end the bill passed.

But this was an abuse of power.  It was just a traditional abuse of power that over time got accepted as one of those things that everybody just had to learn to live with.  And Magnuson was careful to only occasionally resort to this tactic.  And he only did it on relatively small and relatively noncontroversial issues.  A bridge in Seattle got wrecked unexpectedly.  Magnuson snuck funding in a rider to a "must pass" bill that put the Federal Government on the hook for paying most of the cost of the replacement.

So, other than resorting to the underhanded trick of slipping a rider into a "must pass" bill, it was standard issue pork barrel politics.  The amount of money was in line with other pork barrel projects being pushed by other legislators.  And that's the way things used to work.

But then some smart people asked themselves just how far this sort of thing could be pushed.  How about asking for something that would otherwise have been completely unreasonable?  The responsible people would end up sucking it up and voting for the bill even though it now included some horrible component because it was "must pass".  (If you want an example, liberals think the "Hyde Amendment" is horrible.  Conservatives can site examples of things they find equally horrible.)  For a long time this worked.  "Must pass" was must pass, until it wasn't.

For a long time funding the government by passing "appropriations" bills on time every year was considered "must pass".  It was unimaginable to leave the government unfunded, wasn't it?  But over time the brinksmanship kept getting ratchetted up.  Before continuing, let's take a moment to understand how the process is supposed to work.

The Fiscal Year for the Federal Government runs from October 1 of one year through September 30 of the next.  The appropriations process starts with the President submitting a detailed budget request in late January or early February.  This is turned into a Budget Resolution by the House Ways and Means committee and the Senate Finance committee.  The Budget resolution is strictly internal to Congress and provides guidance to the various appropriations committees as to how much money they have to spend.

At the same time the budget is broken up into about a dozen "appropriations" bills, roughly one for each cabinet department.  These department level budgets are processed by the various congressional committees that have oversight responsibility for the department in question.  They hold hearings and go through a "markup" process (making technical - and frequently not so technical - changes) to the budget bill that covers their area of responsibility.

So the Department of Defense gets its budget bill.  The State Department gets its budget bill.  And so on.  When the Budget Resolution is finished and agreed to by the House and the Senate each appropriations bill is expected to conform to the guidance contained in the Budget Resolution.

Generally speaking, work on the Budget Resolution will wrap up in June.  Each appropriations bill goes through the House first (the Constitution requires this) and then moves along to the Senate.  The Senate can, and usually does, make changes.  A "reconciliation" committee consisting of members from both the House and the Senate is now formed to iron out the differences and produce a single bill.  This final version goes back to each body for "final passage".  If that goes according to form it goes to the President for signature.

The President usually signs it but can veto it.  If the bill is vetoed then supermajorities of both the House and the Senate can override the veto.  Or Congress can rework the bill and pass the updated version back to the White House for signature.  Typically appropriations start becoming law in August.  All of them are wrapped up by the end of September.  When that happens all is well and the entirety of the government is funded for one more fiscal year.  Of course, the whole thing starts over a few months later.

It's a complicated process.  And the farther along you get the more rigid it gets.  The House and Senate appropriations bills can be amended right up until the moment they pass.  But whatever comes out of the reconciliation process is carved in stone.  Congress can also make no modification to a bill that has been vetoed if they want to override the veto.  What this means is that one of the best points to insert a rider is in the reconciliation process.  If you can get it by your fellow committee members you are pretty much home free.

I think you can see why the whole process starts many months before the due date of October 1.  And the closer October 1 comes the less practical flexibility there is.  So inserting (or deleting) your change as close to the last minute as you can manage is the best way to make sure it survives the process.  And this late stage leverage, if you have it, means that lots of people find it advantageous to delay things until the absolute last minute.

Power players have long known this.  The result is that the orderly process I have outlined above has been breaking down more and more often.  More and more appropriations bills are passed out of Congress late in September.  And the process can break down even further.  What if an appropriations bill is literally not ready.  Enter the Continuing Resolution (CR).

A CR is a super simple bill that just says "keep funding everything at the old levels with no change".  That is a "clean CR.  It is also possible to add riders.  It is only practical to add a few.  But they represent too good of an opportunity to pass up.  So a CR is a great place to insert a rider.  Especially since a CR is even more "must pass" than a regular appropriations bill.

But what if the unthinkable is actually thinkable.  The thinking went for a long time that if anyone sabotaged a "must pass" bill the wrath of God would descend upon them.  Their reputation would be shot.  Their career would go down the tubes.  And that would be that.  But you know that at some point someone would try it.  And the unthinkable happened for the first time in 1976.

President Ford vetoed the funding bill for what were then the departments of Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare.  That didn't cause a shutdown because Congress overrode the veto.  But the resulting distraction gummed things up enough that the regular appropriations bills got hung up.  So the government shut down for 11 days.  And the world did not end.  Sure, Ford lost his bid for re-election.  But the general consensus was that the cause was not bad behavior of anyone's part.  It's just that the general chaos got out of hand.  And with that, the unthinkable became thinkable.

By one count, if you include the current one, we have now had a total of twenty shutdowns.  There is now a whole process in place to make the whole thing routine.  And the concept of a "must pass" bill has been consigned to the dusty bin of history.  And, oh by the way, the CR has also become routine.  The idea that we should have a thoughtful, disciplined, and responsible budgeting process has also gone the way of the dinosaur.  Now it's all gamesmanship.  The idea of thoughtfully and deliberately going through a process for determining what the Federal Government should and should not spend its money on can now only be described as quaint.

So we now are where we are.  Ostensibly, we are fighting over whether a few billions of dollars should be spent on a wall.  This is out of a budget that totals a couple of trillion dollars.  But that is now our reality.  And the actions (or inactions) that put us here this time around are all attributable solely to the Republicans.

Back when the current budget was supposed to be getting assembled Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House.  And they managed to pass and get signed into law appropriations bills covering about three quarters of the Federal Government.  Why didn't they complete the job?  Ask the Republicans.  Why didn't they include funding for the wall at whatever level they thought appropriate?  Ask the Republicans.

Democrats were in a position to slow the process down somewhat.  But they were not in a position to stop anything.  And this was true right up to January 3, 2019.  That's when the politicians who were up for election in 2018 and won, got seated.  And, of course, Democrats picked up 40 (and perhaps 41) seats in the House.  So from that day forward they controlled the levers of power in the House.

But let's backspace to December when Republicans controlled everything.  The election was over but the new members have not yet been seated.  This is called a "lame duck" session for reasons that are unknown to me.  Anyhow, during that session a deal was struck.  A CR including funding for all of the remaining departments through February 8, 2019 had been agreed to.

House Democrats and Republicans had signed off on it.  Senate Democrats and Republicans had signed off on it.  The White House had signed off on it.  All that was left was to step through the process necessary to turn the deal into law.  That process should have taken only two days.

And the Senate immediately did what it was supposed to do.  Any single Senator can force a "recorded" vote.  That's where the Senate staff polls each and every Senator on the Senate floor.  When everybody has been heard from the tally is formally recorded showing how each specific Senator has voted.  But this is a time consuming process.

If no one objects there is a quick and dirty alternative.  Whoever is presiding over the Senate calls the question.  Senators shout out "Aye" or "Nay" and the presiding officer says "in the opinion of the chair the Ayes have it" or "in the opinion of the chair the Nays have it".  If no one objects that's it and the whole thing takes less than a minute.

And that's what happened.  The Senate approved the CR bill on a voice vote.  And the only time you have a voice vote is when all the Senators are in agreement and they all also think the vote is totally noncontroversial.  But then before the House had a chance to vote several rabble rousers on Fox got on TV and started calling Trump a coward.  And Trump told the House he had changed his mind.

The CR contained $1.3 billion for general border security but nothing specific for the wall.  Trump now said he would veto anything that didn't have $5.7 billion for his wall.  So the House, then still under the control of the Republicans, amended the bill the Senate had passed and sent it back to the Senate.  The Senate was unable to pass this modified version (and we were back to doing recorded votes).  And the old CR ran out and a quarter of the government got shut down.

And since then the Democrats have taken control of the House.  And they are not going to fund the wall at any level.  And Trump says "no wall - no funding".  So we are at an impasse.  So how does the impasse get broken?  That's where most of what the talking heads have to say is either pure hot air or nonsense.

Shutdowns end in one of two ways.  It might have been caused by some kind of small technical problem.   Everybody gets together and fixes the problem.  There is good will on all sides so this doesn't take long.  The fix is passed into law and everybody goes back about their business.  So that's one way a shutdown ends.  The other way is a lot more ugly.

A number of shutdowns have been the result of an actual difference of opinion.  One side says "red".  The other side says "blue".  Until everybody can settle on a color we are all stuck.  That's the kind of shutdown we now have.  These kinds take a lot longer to resolve and that's why we are in record setting territory when it comes to the duration of the shutdown.

These kinds of shutdowns generally devolve into a blame game.  Who is responsible for the shutdown?   Whoever gets the blame sees their popularity decrease.  Once the losing side has been clearly determined then that side gives ground and a resolution close to the position of the other side ends up being agreed to.  From there, things progress along a path similar to the "technical problem" case.

So who's winning and who's losing in the popularity contest that surrounds the current shutdown?  The Democrats are winning and the Republicans are losing.  But things have gotten a lot more complicated than they were the last time we had a contested shutdown.  There have been structural changes so the old formulas no longer work.

Trump is widely blamed for the shutdown.  This is because he is the one who reneged on his promise to support the CR.  He also publicly accepted responsibility for the shutdown before it even began.  That should mean that his popularity is sinking like a rock and he will soon be forced to change his behavior.  But we now live in an "alternate facts" world.

His support has not declined.  His supporters either don't believe it's his fault or they think it is okay to shutdown the government in order to secure funding for the wall.  He has long since given up on getting support from any group other than his hard core base.  The fact that whatever popularity he had among other groups is shrinking is not important to him.  So he sees no reason to change his behavior.

The same is not true of other Republicans.  Many of them depend to some extent on support from groups who are not part of Trump's hard core base.  Nobody among these groups is happy about the shutdown.  They do blame Democrats but only to a modest extent.  Mostly they blame Republicans in general and Trump in particular.  The problem for Republicans is that they depend critically on Trump's hard core base.  Those people demand loyalty to Trump.  If Republicans get on the bad side of Trump loyalists they are in big trouble.

Now let us turn to the Democrats.  They just won big in 2018.  Voters in general preferred Democrats to Republicans by a wide margin.  Gerrymandering and other issues meant that this did not translate to an improved situation for Democrats in the Senate.  But it did in the House.  Democrats believe rightly that their base expects them to oppose the wall.  The Democratic base blames Republicans and Trump for the shutdown by lopsided margins.  So from a political perspective there is no reason for Democrats to change their position.

But wait.  There's more.  History tells Democrats that if they concede on the wall Republicans will move the goalposts and ask for more and more and more.  Trying to compromise with Republicans has not resulted in good outcomes from the Democratic perspective.  After 9/11, for instance, Democrats went along with the Bush agenda out of a sense of patriotism and solidarity.  It didn't get them anything from Republicans.  Instead Republicans just dug in harder and demanded more.  So from a tactics perspective, backing down looks like a bad idea to Democrats.

The situation in the Senate is interesting.  Democrats are holding firm.  Some Republicans depend on moderates to win elections.  Moderates have said loud and clear they don't want a wall.  But moderates are the smaller group.  Trump supporters make up the bulk of the people who vote GOP.  Still several Republicans have started talking publicly about reopening the government.  But talk is cheap.

The key player in all this is Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell.  I don't like him but I respect him.  He is a wily old fox.  He doesn't mind some members of his caucus mouthing off as long as they behave the way he wants them to when push comes to shove.  For instance, Jeff Flake has made a lot of anti-Trump noises over the last few months.  But he mostly voted the way Mitch wanted him to vote.  And he didn't even say a thing until last Spring when he lost in the GOP Primary in Arizona.  That meant he had to go home for good in January of this year.

McConnell is wise enough to give his members a little wiggle room over thing that don't matter as long as they go along with his plans when it does matter.  The GOP has a three seat cushion in the Senate.  If three people defect McConnel can still win because Vice President Pence gets a vote if there is a tie.  By my count there are five GOP senators who, on paper, have defected.  So McConnell is in trouble, right?  Right now he is not in trouble.

That's because what he has been doing so far is making sure no bill gets to the Senate floor for a vote.  As long as nothing happens that stops him from being able to hold up votes he is fine.  But theoretically, there is a way a vote could be forced.  It is called a "discharge petition".

If a majority of Senators sign such a petition then the bill, whatever bill they signed the petition to discharge, must be brought to the floor and voted on. Certainly all the Democrats (I am counting the two Independents as Democrats for the purposes of this discussion) would sign such a petition.  So all it would take is four Republicans to sign on too.  As far as I know no Republican has signaled they would sign such a petition.  That's why we are at the "talk is cheap" stage when it comes to Senate Republicans.

And McConnell's behavior is interesting.  He is Missing in Action (MIA) and has been for several weeks.  Why is this?  The answer is simple.  He currently has no good options.  For better or worse, he is currently stuck with Trump.  That's because he and fellow Republicans all need the Trump base.  The Trump base goes where Trump tells them to go.  So McConnell can't afford to annoy Trump enough to cause him to bad mouth McConnell.

And McConnell has to be very unhappy with Trump right now.  Power in Washington comes from the ability to make or stop deals.  To be effective your word must be your bond.  If you say you will do (or not do) something you must follow through 100% of the time.  McConnell has been wielding power in Washington for a long time.  His word is his bond once he signs on.  But that is not true with Trump.

And this is a behavior pattern of Trump's that goes back decades.  Trump sees welching on deals as a standard business tactic.  Normally a businessman can't get away with that behavior.  But a number of circumstances have allowed Trump to.

Originally his dad, whose word was his bond, bailed him out.  Then Trump screwed over a number of New York banks after his dad could no longer bail him out.  He was able to put off the inevitable for a while by switching banks.  But eventually that stopped working.  So he moved on to international banks.  When that stopped working he started to deal with oligarchs and corrupt governments.

That was still working but then he made the mistake of transitioning from the business world to the world of Washington D.C.  The problem for him is that there is now no other group to move on to.  But he hasn't figured that out yet.  But he is also not going to change his behavior at this late date and become someone who can be counted on to keep promises.

McConnell is inextricable bound to Trump at this point.  But he knows that Trump is and will always be an unreliable partner.  And that means McConnell literally can't make a deal that involves Trump because he can't count on delivering Trump.  So how does he make a deal in these circumstances?  He can't.  So he has gone to ground.

He is hoping something will change and give him an opening.  At that point he can jump in and get credit for saving the day.  But currently there is literally nothing he can do until something changes.  He is the key man but he is radio silent.

And the press is letting him get away with it.  They are content to blame Trump, talk to lots of Democrats and Republicans and ask inane questions predicated on ridiculous assumptions.  And while all this is going on they are giving McConnell a free pass.

There is a theoretical way out.  McConnell could secretly tell his members that he is okay with them signing a discharge petition as long as he is kept out of it.  Then when the discharge petition surfaces he would say "I had no idea this was happening and now Senate rules require me to bring the bill to the floor."  In other words, "it's not my fault".

From there we would see what happened.  Trump could sign the bill or he could veto it.  If he signed it that would be the end of that but he would get raked over the coals by the same rabble rousers that made him change his mind in the first place.  So most likely he would veto it.

That would put Republicans in both the House and the Senate in a pickle.  Do they want to make a meaningful vote?  (Republicans in that House voting against various Democratic initiatives designed to get the government back open are not making a meaningful vote.  Everyone expects these bills to die in the Senate.  As long as that holds the votes are symbolic.)

A number of Republican votes in both the House and the Senate would be required to override the veto.  But these votes would not be symbolic and everyone would be watching.  So I expect that if a bill made it to the floor a large number of Republicans would be forced to vote for it.  Remember, what we are talking about is legislation that passed the Republican controlled Senate on a voice vote and had the public support of the Republican House leadership.

The discharge petition idea works for McConnell if he can escape blame.  But I calculate that he calculates that he would not escape blame.  And I think his calculation is correct.  As long as that is so McConnell is not going to okay members of his caucus signing a discharge petition.

Right now, there is not enough pressure coming from the general public to break things loose.  As long as that remains true the stalemate will continue and that part of the government that is shut down will stay shut down.  Well, actually more of the government will shut down.

Various tricks have been used to keep parts of the affected agencies and departments at least partly open.  But many of those tricks only work for a while.  More and more of those tricks no longer work and more and more of the government is shutting down.

At some point something is going to give.  When?  I don't know.  It's the "what" that may be more interesting.  The Republican party has been skating on thin ice for a long time.  For eight years they got away with being "the party of no".  Whatever Obama was for, even if it was something with broad Republican support, they were against.

But recently they controlled all the branches of government for two years straight.  Mostly what they got done during that period was putting through a giant tax cut for the rich that started out unpopular and has only gotten more unpopular since.

They promised to kill Obamacare. They failed at that.  Trump promised to build a wall and force Mexico to pay for it.  They had two years to come through on that promise but they failed there too.  There are a number on internal contradictions that they were able to paper over during the Obama years by blaming everything on Obama.  Trump has proven to be terrible at deal making.  I could go on.

But how does this current shutdown redound to the benefit of Republicans?  Well, if the Democrats collapse and completely give in, that would be a big win.  But I am betting that won't happen.  Republicans could pull something off in the legislature (Discharge petition or something else) that would get the government funded but not the wall.  That would likely be very unpopular with a large segment of their base.

They could throw Trump under the bus, a perfectly sensible thing to do from my point of view.  But that too would be very unpopular with a large segment of their base.  Losing a big chunk of their base, even if it just turned them apathetic rather than driving them into the arms of the Democrats, would be a disaster for Republicans.

For a long time I have believed that sooner or later Democrats would have to come straight at Republicans.  Over the years I have seen Democrats forgo opportunity after opportunity to do that on issues that I thought Democrats could win on.  Maybe we have finally come to that point.  Certainly a lot of newly elected Democrats are spoiling for a fight.  If Democrats go straight at Republicans and win that might destroy the Republican party, at least in the short run.

Fasten your seatbelts.  It's going to be a bumpy night.

Man in Space

And yes, I know there have been some women in space.  The second person is space, for instance, was a woman.  But I derived my title from a book called "A Man on the Moon" by Andrew Chaikin.  And all the Apollo astronauts, the subject of his book, were men.  And the focus of this piece is a contrast between crewed space missions and uncrewed space missions.  So the focus is not on any particular attribute of any particular astronaut (or Cosmonaut, if the follow the Russian usage), but on what crewed space missions achieved and what they did not.

And, before I continue, I note that 2019, the year I am writing this post in, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the first time a person set foot on the moon.  And here's an interesting thing that happened in a now long ago time.  I was watching Jeopardy! one day and the Final Jeopardy answer was "The Headline on the front page of the New York Times on July 20, 1969".  It took me ten or fifteen seconds to come up with the correct response.  None of the contestants on the show even came close.  That was the date of the Apollo 11 landing.  To work . . .

I am going to start my history of putting people in space with the Manhattan Project, the effort to build the first Atomic Bomb.  The key number is something called "mean free path".  If the nucleus of a Uranium atom Fissions (breaks into pieces), on average, it ejects about two Neutrons (subatomic particles).  We are told (and it's true) that an atom is mostly empty space.  But a very small part of an atom is the nucleus.  If one of these neutrons happens to hit a nucleus then it will blast it apart and the "chain reaction" will continue.

The mean free path is the distance a neutron travels before it hits another nucleus.  If your lump of Uranium is too small then the neutron will fly away before hitting another Uranium nucleus and your bomb will fizzle out.  But if your lump is big enough and you get some neutrons flying around then each neutron will hit another Uranium nucleus and break it apart sending more neutrons flying.  If you can pull this off then you get a nice big boom.  If not you get a fizzle.

It turns out that one of the deep dark secrets of the atom bomb business is this simple fact.  But there are tricks.  One trick is to use explosives to compress the Uranium.  This reduces the mean free path.  If you get it right then the amount of Uranium you need is decreased.  Another trick, and this one didn't get out for a long time, is Beryllium.  If you enclose the Uranium in a Beryllium shell the shell will bounce the neutrons back into your lump, thus effectively extending your mean free path.  And that means you need less Uranium.

The Manhattan program needed to figure out the Beryllium trick in order to make even the first bomb work.  They just didn't have enough Uranium otherwise.  So why is all this germane to the subject at hand?  Because the Russians (then called the Soviets) stole the first US design, which required a pretty big chunk of Uranium to work.  But after that US scientists figured out a bunch of other tricks for making atomic bombs physically small and light.

US scientists got so good at shrinking atomic bombs that they made one that fit inside a standard artillery gun.  This was a monumental achievement.  Remember, the first atomic bomb was so big that if filled up an entire B-29 bomber all by itself.  But for a long time the Soviets only know how to make big and heavy bombs.  (They later caught up and could also make very small atomic bombs.)

It was obvious to anyone interested in using atomic bombs in war that using rockets to shoot atomic bombs to the other side of the earth was a good idea.  Since the US knew how to build small atomic bombs they didn't bother trying to figure out how to make big rockets.  The Soviets (see note above) were initially not so good at shrinking atomic bombs so they set out to make big rockets from the get go.

Fast forward to 1957.  The Soviets launched the first artificial satellite into orbit.  A big reason they were first was because the US had all these great bomber-type airplanes like the B-36 and the B-47, so they felt little urgency to build rockets capable of carrying atomic bombs.  Being behind in the "bomber race", the Soviets put a lot more focus and emphasis on rockets, big rockets.

That first satellite ("Sputnik") was pretty small.  But because the Soviet big rocket program had been pushed harder they were able to scale up from there very quickly.  So they put a dog, "Laika", into orbit.  (It died a few days later because the Soviets had no way to get it back down.)  Only a few years later (April 12, 1961) they were able to put Yuri Gagarin into orbit and safely get him back to earth.  They were able to follow it up with the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963.

This quick progress was possible due to the fact that the Soviets had started putting a lot of effort into developing rockets long before the US did.  This was because they didn't have good bomber-type airplanes.  And they had put an early emphasis on big rockets because for a long time they didn't know how to build small and light atomic bombs.

Anyhow, for a long time after 1957 the US was fumbling along in the wake of the Soviets.  There initially didn't seem to be a pressing need to spend the bales of money necessary to catch up.  So the US didn't.  But the Cold War was going on.  And the Soviets were touting their space program and it's impressive list of firsts as proof positive of the superiority of the Communist system.

Politics being what it is, eventually the US government, both the administration and the Congress, decided this was unacceptable.  And eventually the level of embarrassment got so great that the money spigot was opened wide and cash flowed.

At the time this was going on I knew nothing of the "why" of it.  I was a science and technology guy so I just thought spending a ton of money building cool space stuff was a great idea.  I still believe that.  But people who think like I do have always been and continue to be a small minority.

Most people don't understand that the government spending a lot of money on leading edge technology eventually results in benefits to everyone.  This is one of the few places where "trickle down" actually works.  What they do understand is "the bad guys are doing something bad and we must do what it takes to beat them".  In this case the bad guys were the Soviets and the place we needed to beat them was in what became known as the "space race".

So the US started out well behind the Soviets in terms of our ability to build rockets, particularly big rockets.  Once the money spigot opened that started to change.  But it took several years for progress to become readily apparent.  In those early years the Soviets continued to score first after first.  The good news was that this caused the money spigot to be opened very wide.  And that made a lot of things possible.

The US was losing the propaganda battle badly in May of '61 when Kennedy made his famous "before this decade is out, to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely" commitment.  So why the moon?  In 1961 the US was still way behind and it was going to take several years of substantial effort to gain the lead.  In that time the Soviets would score some more firsts (see above).

For Kennedy's announcement to work as a propaganda tool the US needed to pick a goal that was hard enough that it would take several years to achieve.  And they needed a goal that was spectacular enough and understandable enough that, if the US succeeded, the average person would say "the US is definitely ahead now".  Pretty much nothing short of "man on the moon" fit the bill.

Kennedy spent some time understanding the issues.  And he eventually came to believe whole heartedly in a muscular US space program, just on its own merits.  So did Lynden Johnson.  I don't know the origins of this but Johnson was a true believer in the space program pretty much from the start.  That meant that when Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson became President, he was a strong supporter of the space program.

The US in 1961 had a cobbled together a program called "Mercury" whose entire objective was to just get a US astronaut into space.  Thinking ahead, engineers had come up with an obvious extension.  After the one man Mercury missions, we would move on to two man "Gemini" missions.  But in the early days there was no good answer to the "why" question with respect to Gemini.  Why put two people into the capsule instead of just one?  Neither Mercury nor Gemini ("the twins") had any obvious goal other than just the doing of the thing.

When Kennedy said "we're gong to the moon" a third program, Apollo, was grafted on the end like it made sense and it had always been planned to be that way.  Apollo would feature three astronauts in a space ship that was designed to go to the moon and back.  As a result of the need to build up to Apollo, Mercury and Gemini finally had a "why".

The book I referenced above was originally published in 1994.  It was updated and reissued in 2007.  I found out about it because I watched a very interesting "Nova" episode about the Apollo 8 mission.  The problem is that pretty much everybody agrees that Apollo was the high point of the whole "put people in space" thing.  Why is that?

Well, I have alluded to it above.   The whole "moon shot" was primarily a propaganda effort.  It was designed to demonstrate that US space capability was better than everybody else's.  And, most importantly, it was better than the "Communist" system the Soviets used.  It succeeded.  In fact, it was too successful.  The moon shot convinced the Soviets they couldn't be competitive in a space race against the US so they moved on.  And that left nothing catchy for the US space program to do.

In theory there was lots it could do.  But there wasn't sufficient support for any of those other things.  So, the money spigot closed back up.  For instance, Nixon the man that succeeded Johnson as President, had little or no interest in space.  So he whittled NASA back as much as he could and as quickly as he could.

His approach was to do as little as possible.  He had to pretend interest to keep the "space lobby" (people like me) happy.  But he really didn't care so his approach was "what's the cheapest thing I can do that will get these people off my back?"  He ended up with the Space Shuttle, a poorly designed vehicle whose development was chronically underfunded.  If you are doing something because it will save money then you should be able to do it cheaply, right?

But let's leave those kinds of considerations aside, and look at what crewed space exploration has achieved.  In the early days, not much was achieved.  Various stunts proved that people could be put into space and gotten back safely.  That's very hard to do so in the early days there was little left after that for anything else.  But, as the doing of it problem got solved there came a time when there was room for other things.

And the "other things" fall into two general categories:  scientific and commercial.  None of either was done in those early missions except for the taking of pictures.  But by this time spy satellites were taking more and better pictures.  It's just that the only people who got to see the spy pictures were the military and the intelligence communities.  And these missions were so fantastically expensive that no commercial endeavor was possible.

Gradually the science component of these missions increased.  Before Apollo, only a dib here and a dab there of science was done.  That continued to be true through Apollo 11, the first moon landing.  Some science was done on Apollo 12.  If you don't know how Apollo 13 went, watch the movie.  But the later missions, Apollo 14-17, did a lot of science.  This science haul is one of the reasons Apollo was a high point.  No other crewed missions ever did science that was nearly as impactful as these missions.

They collected a lot of rocks and brought them back.  These were subsequently analyzed, a process that continues to this day, and tons of great science was done with them.  Our understanding of the moon, where it came from, what it is made of, and much else, stems primarily from Apollo.  And the moon rocks were the most important contributor.  But the astronauts also made a lot of important observations, took a lot of valuable pictures, and set up a number of valuable experiments.

One gadget they set up was a reflector that allowed a laser to be used to determine the exact distance to the moon.  Both the distance and the way the distance varies with time tell scientists a lot.  Another important instrument is the seismometer.  The study of earthquakes (moonquakes, in this case, but the science is the same) allows scientists to determine a lot about what the inside of the moon looks like.

Both of these measurements not only tell us a lot about the moon, they tell us a lot about the earth.  Tides on earth, for instance, affect the distance between the earth and the moon.  So by studying the moon, specifically how far away it is, we can learn a lot about how tides on earth work and what effects they have.

After Apollo various short lived projects like Skylab were implemented.  But the big project has been what eventually became the ISS, the International Space Station.  The total cost of the ISS exceeds $100 billion.  It has turned out to be so expensive that it had to be internationalized.  It has now been in place in one form or another for twenty years.  And the US designed and built the Space Shuttle specifically as a vehicle for the building and maintenance of what eventually became the ISS.

But what's it all about?  A consistent answer over the decades has been "so we can go exploring".  Okay.  There has been "Explorer's" clubs around in one form or another (the National Geographic Society is an example of one that is still in business) for a couple of hundred years now.  But they have mostly been a plaything for rich people.

Regular people like the idea of exploration.  They just don't see the need to make more than a token contribution to the cost of exploring.  In the past almost all expeditions were financed by rich people.  Now they are mostly financed by governments.  Voters are willing to allocate tax dollars to exploration as long as the sums involved are very modest.  Beyond that, it's mostly rich guys trying to score bragging points off their friends, enemies, and associates.

The Second answer is actually a variation on the "exploration" theme.  It's scientific research.  There is a larger constituency for this sort of thing.  I get jazzed when I think about all the things we found out as a result of Apollo.  Geologists are over the moon about the same subject.  The same is true generally of scientists in many fields, lots of which have no obvious connection to space.  Electronics and Computer Science benefitted greatly from the Space Program.

Then, of course, there's Tang.  You all know what Tang is?  And that's my point.  The people who know about Tang are laughing right now.  The people who don't are justifiably mystified.  (Spoiler alert:  it's powdered artificial Orange Juice.)  Most people just don't see any kind of direct connection between their lives and people exploring space.  As such, they tend to be pretty unhappy when the Federal Government puts a lot of money into the subject.

We saw this with Apollo.  The scientifically important flights, 11-17, all took place in a four year period extending from 1969 through 1972.  But public interest in and support of Apollo peaked with 11 and declined through the remaining missions.  And this is in spite of the fact that the scientific and exploratory benefits started at a very low point with 11 and grew substantially as mission followed mission.  It really was just a public relations stunt, as far as the interest of the general public was concerned.  Once we had landed on the moon there was no reason to stay involved.

I subscribe to a number of scientific journals that cover scientific advances across a broad range of subjects.  These journals regularly cover important scientific advances derived from space missions.  But I can't think of anything significant that has come out of the crewed missions in the post-Apollo era.  Instead, it has all come out of what we now call robotic missions.  Why is this?

In the early days of space exploration computers had little capability.  And all the more capable machines were large, heavy, and consumed substantial amounts of power.  In short, you couldn't put them on a space ship.  People were the only option when you needed smart.  And it took a lot of smart to pull off an Apollo mission.  The Apollo capsules had a "computer" aboard.  But we would laugh at it now.  I think my garage door opener has more processing power than that device had.  But it was bleeding edge at the time.

People had to do most of the work.  But it is a mistake to believe that it was the people in the space ship.  They were very important.  But it was the thousands of people on the ground that did the most critical work.  Not one of the Apollo missions could have succeeded without ground support.  The astronauts couldn't navigate for themselves.  They couldn't figure out what to do if some modification to the original plan became necessary.  It was not a couple of guys onboard that figured out what to do next but a team of hundreds of people on the ground working feverously that did almost all of the work.

All space missions are crewed.  That crew always includes a big crew of people on the ground.  Sometimes it also includes a few people onboard the space ship.  Nowadays, it usually it doesn't.  The indispensable part of the crew is the ground part not the onboard part.  And that's the part that advocates of putting people aboard spaceships get wrong.  They think the distinction is between "manned" and "unmanned".  All space missions are "manned" by a large group of people on the ground.  (And the ground crew has always included women.)  The difference is that is some cases a few members of the very large crew are local, they are on the vessel.

The "Afterward" in "A Man on the Moon" is instructive.  He notes of the ISS "even now [in 2007], after so much money, so much time and effort, so much wasted opportunity, no one was sure what the station would be good for".  And that's the fundamental problem with crewed space ships.  To put it bluntly, what's the "value add"?

When it comes to the ISS promises have been made about manufacturing advances due to zero gee (more accurately called microgravity - stuff does get bounced around to some extent).  Some tests and pilot projects have been run.  But the results so far have been a bust.  There doesn't seem to be anything that can be made on the ISS that can't be made far more easily "down the gravity well" on earth.  Similarly, no one has succeeded in making anything on the ISS that can't also be made on earth.

Now, compare that with the situation that pertains to uncrewed space based machines.  There are lots of "Comsats", satellites in geosynchronous orbits (orbits at that cause the satellite to appear stationary in the sky).  These are used to relay TV signals from one part of earth to another.  This is a thriving and successful business.  It is now common for a local TV station to buy "satellite time" so they can broadcast a sporting event that takes place thousands of miles away.  This business is so popular that slots in geosynchronous orbit are hard to come by.  Pretty much all of them are in use.

Weather satellites are very valuable.  They have revolutionized forecasting by being able to provide vast quantities of accurate detailed information for the entire earth, not just the places that are easy to get to.  And, of course, they provide the "satellite pictures" that are a staple of every TV weather broadcast.  Since this has historically been the province of governments, all of these are government owned and operated.  But taxpayers see this as one of the best uses of their tax dollars.  So government spending in this area is very popular.

Another business that more than pays for itself is the intelligence business.  Spy satellites are ubiquitous.  Intelligence agencies depend heavily on them and, as a result, spend heavily on them.  This too is a government expenditure, but it too is a popular one.

Sandwiched into a "neither fish nor foul" category is GPS satellites.  We all depend on them.  Originally there was only one set.  And it is operated by the US Airforce.  But other countries decided they wanted their own.  So the Russians, the Europeans, and others, have put up satellites that serve the same purpose.  Again, although the cost of GPS satellites is borne by governments, taxpayers strongly support this kind of expenditure.

Another similar category is "earth resource" satellites.  There is a lot of data that can be collected by satellites.  And it is very valuable to farmers and other land management types.  But various groups have managed to politicize this.  The data they gather has, for instance, been used to make a strong case for Global Warming and to show that it is caused by humans.

There are groups (the fossil fuel industry, for instance) that are heavily invested in denialism (arguing that there is some conspiracy afoot to cook the books on the science).  So controversy is manufactured where there is really none (the books, at least the scientific ones, are not being cooked).  But as a result of the "controversy", funding, again by the government, for this work is fought over vigorously.

In all these cases, even the controversial ones, there is no difficulty answering the "value add" question.  In each case there is a large group that thinks the results produced are very valuable and implement a specific, well defined, purpose.  Some people may argue that doing something is a bad thing but everybody knows what the objective is.  And everybody knows that the particular piece of space hardware advances the objective.

This is most obvious in the field of scientific exploration.  Until recently (from a historical perspective) if you wanted to do some exploration your only option was to send people out.  Now, at least when it comes to space exploration, the option exists to send a robot, an uncrewed machine, to do the exploration.  And again there is no ambiguity about why the mission is being flown.  It is being flown to go to a specific place and collect specific kinds of data.  And at least some people think that data is very valuable.

The "why are we doing this?" question applies to all crewed missions in the post-Apollo era.  It applies to no uncrewed missions in the same period.  But the argument is continuously made that we should send people to these various places.  The argument boils down to a single word:  flexibility.

People with the mobility of their bipedal form of location, and with the dexterity with which they can pick things up and manipulate them, are more flexible.  That, at least, is the argument.  It is made with respect to various activities on the Apollo missions.  This astronaut noticed this thing and was able to respond appropriately on the spot and immediately.  Several pieces of equipment were repaired and several samples were collected (or photographed) because an astronaut was on site, saw an interesting rock and collected it, for instance.  And this argument is true as far as it goes.

But there is also the fact that people are extremely inflexible.  As Chaikin is going through each Apollo mission there is point after point after point where an opportunity must be forgone.  It will take too long.  It is too far away.  Whatever.

The duration and number of space walks was severely constrained.  Only a few could be made.  And each could only last a set number of hours.  A particular space walk had to end by a specific and extremely inflexible time.  Even basics, like how many days the astronauts would spend on the surface of the moon was set in stone and could not be changed for any reason.

Contrast this with the uncrewed situation.  Chaikin talks about Voyager 2 in his afterward.  Had Voyager 2 been a crewed mission it would only been able to visit Jupiter and Saturn.  Keeping the astronauts alive and getting them back to earth would have eliminated the possibility of extending the mission.

The actual mission was extended in two different ways.  First, Neptune and Uranus were added.  And this was done after the mission launched and the space craft was millions of miles from earth.  After Voyager 2 passed Uranus the question was asked:  why turn it off?  The answer turned out to be that there was no reason to do so.

So the craft is still flying years later.  And it has now voyaged into entirely uncharted space.  And it is still collecting valuable data and sending it back to earth.  During this "extended" (actually twice extended) mission it found the point where the sun's influence wains and the galaxy's influence waxes.

He also mentions "Spirit" and "Opportunity".  These were two small vehicles that landed on Mars.  They too demonstrated extreme flexibility.  They were certified to last 90 days.  Spirit lasted 2208 days.  Opportunity lasted even longer, 5317 days.  Everything that these rovers were able to do after the first 90 days was bonus time that would not have been possible if these were crewed missions.

We just saw another example of this recently with New Horizons.  This is a spacecraft that was able to do the impossible, impossible for a crewed mission, that is.  It flew by Pluto.  First of all, it took almost ten years to get there. We couldn't have built a spacecraft big enough to keep people alive that long.

Second, it was a one way mission.  It's not coming back.  Crewed missions MUST return to earth with the crew alive and reasonably healthy.  Sending New Horizons to Pluto was only possible because the machine weighed a thousand pounds at launch.  We have a rocket big enough to shoot a thousand pound machine into space at the speed necessary to get to Pluto.  We don't have a rocket that is big enough to do the same with a machine weighing a hundred times as much.  And a hundred thousand pound or heavier machine would have been necessary to keep its crew alive for a decade or more.

But wait, there's more.  After New Horizon passed Pluto, scientists asked "is there anything else we can do with it?"  And there was.  On New Year's day it flew by a Kuiper Belt Object officially called 2014 MU69.  Unofficially, it is called Ultima Thule.  Again, this was not even in the plan until after New Horizons flew past Pluto.  What Voyager and Spirit and Opportunity and New Horizons (and many more robot space probes) demonstrate is that uncrewed missions are extremely flexible.  They are, in fact, far more flexible than crewed missions.

And there is a good reason for this.  All these "uncrewed" missions actually have a large crew of people.  It's just that they are on the ground and not in the vehicle.  So the "benefit" of crewed vehicles is actually the opposite.  Adding a crew substantially diminishes net flexibility.

What is different is the speed with which this flexibility demonstrates itself.  Crewed vehicles are flexible on time frame of seconds to minutes and inflexible on longer time frames.  Uncrewed vehicles are flexible on a time frame of hours to years and inflexible on shorter time frames.  A lot of experience has repeatedly demonstrated that long term flexibility is far more valuable than short term flexibility.

But we are going through the argument yet again.  The ISS is still up in space.  But the US stopped flying the Space Shuttle many years ago.  Uncrewed rockets have been delivering supplies to it and returning with trash.  Manned rockets have been swapping crew.

Currently the only way to get the crew back and forth is on a Russian rocket.  Supposedly the Russians are doing a bad thing by charging $80 million per person to provide this service.  But that's about what the same service actually cost when the US was flying the Space Shuttle.

Later this year, if everything goes well, Elon Musk's SpaceX company will be able to take over from the Russians.  At that point it will theoretically be back to "full speed ahead" when it comes to crewed missions.  But we are still asking the "what's the point" question.  There is talk of sending people back to the moon.  Why?  There is no good answer.  There is talk of sending people to Mars.  Why?  Again, there is no good answer.

Spirit and Opportunity are not the only successful uncrewed missions to Mars.  About every two years NASA sends another uncrewed mission to Mars.  They have been remarkably successful at doing valuable scientific work.

And China just landed a machine on the far side of the moon.  This is the first time anyone has landed anything on the far side of the moon.  Their machine even includes a small rover roughly similar to Spirit and Opportunity.  And that's not the only uncrewed mission to the moon.  And these missions have also generally been successful.

Remember that sending some people to the moon to visit for a couple of days will be fantastically expensive.  A permanent base would be perhaps a thousand times more expensive.  There is only a little science people can do in a couple of days and they can't get around any distance so they would only get a look at a couple of square miles of the moon.  A permanent base could do more exploration but only perhaps ten or twenty times as much.

A mission to Mars would involve a few people spending perhaps six weeks on Mars at an almost incalculable cost.  Again, you can only do a very little in that time.  And again, a permanent base on Mars would cost perhaps a thousand times as much as a one-shot out-and-back crewed mission.  And the opportunities for exploration would only be expanded by a little.  And, given the ISS experience, there is no way any kind of commercial project could turn a profit.

For the cost of a manned mission to the moon a series of robot missions including rovers could traverse thousands of miles on the moon.  For the cost of a moon base the same thing could be done on Mars.  Push a single pin into a standard wall map.  That's about the extent of the exploration we have done so far on either the moon or Mars.  Crewed missions will keep it that way.  They are just too expensive.  The future of space exploration belongs to the robots.

Trends in Retail

Like much in society today, the retail landscape is changing.  And I am not talking about what store chain is up and what chain is down.  Or what trends are newly hot and what trends have gone cold.  I am talking about structural changes in the industry as a whole.

And this is not the only upheaval in retailing I have observed in my lifetime. There have been plenty.  But, as is my wont, I want to begin at the beginning, or, at least close enough to the beginning so I won't miss anything of significance.  So let's start a thousand years ago.

At that time, most people were tied to the land and saw little commerce of any kind, let alone retailing.  The exception was China, where things were far advanced over pretty much the entirety of the rest of the world.  I am going to ignore China.  The rest of the world eventually caught up to China so it will get covered indirectly.

Transportation at the time for most people consisted of foot power.  They were farmers who got from place to place by walking.  So typically there was a market or village (often the same thing) within ten to twenty miles of the farm, and at that time most people lived on a farm.  There was no money to speak of so what little commerce there was took place using barter.  And barter is very inefficient.  But at the time it was the only option available.

So people tried to accumulate a small surplus of something, anything, that others might need, so they had something they could trade for what they couldn't make or grow themselves.  So besides the market, the village hosted a small number of artisans, blacksmiths, carpenters, and the like, who provided what people couldn't make themselves.  The villages were small and served a small population so any one village hosted a very few artisans.  There wasn't enough local economic activity to host more.

But mostly people made for themselves.  So, they made clothing.  But they had almost no technology to help them out.  So they wove and they knitted.  And they used the skins of animals.  For weaving and knitting you need thread or yarn.  Both are difficult to make without equipment and the process is labor intensive.  So making the thread or yarn was where most of the effort went.  A good carpenter with good tools could make a spinning wheel.  That could turn fibers and hair into thread or yarn.  And a skilled carpenter could make a simple hand loom for use in weaving cloth.

But the these simple looms were best employed making rectangular pieces of fabric.  So a sarape was a good design.  You wove two rectangular pieces of cloth.  Then you could sew one edge of each together leaving a gap in the middle for the head.  A cloak, that article much beloved by purveyors of romantic fiction and epic fantasy, can also be made with a rectangular piece of fabric to which a couple of ties are attached.  Add ties to a rectangular piece of cloth and you have a wrap-around skirt.

But neither a sarape nor a cloak is actually very good at keeping you warm.  (The wrap-around skirt is a definite improvement over both.)  But complicated construction was nearly impossible and that limited peasants to simple garments, none of which worked all that well.  The button was invented late, not because buttons are hard to make, but because button holes are hard to make.  And the zipper dates back only to about 1900 and Velcro to about 1960.  Only rich people could afford elaborate clothes of complicated construction.

And that was generally true of almost the entire population.  If they couldn't make it for themselves, perhaps aided by a few simple tools that had to be well enough made to last decades, they had to find a way to do without.  All this made the exchange of goods very difficult so few goods were exchanged.

Things slowly got better.  Money, necessary to replace barter with more complex forms of exchange, was slow to arrive in quantities sufficient to make a difference.  And more complex tools also became available only slowly.  Steel was a luxury.  So, for a long time, if it couldn't be made from wrought iron, it couldn't be made.  This meant, for instance, that plows were very crappy for a very long time.  A wrought Iron plow wears out quickly.

But the situation slowly improved.  And specialists like harness makers started to arrive on the scene.  It was difficult but possible for a small farmer to make his own harnesses.  But a specialist could turn out a much superior product much more quickly.  But that specialist needed skill and tools. Cobbling, making shoes and boots, is similar.  Again, it is possible for a farmer to make sandals or moccasins but a specialist can turn out a much superior product much more quickly.

So, as money became more and more available and other improvements were made, the typical town or village slowly acquired more and more types of specialists.  And these specialists made the farmers more productive.  And that meant a village could afford to support more specialists leading to a virtuous circle.  And typically each specialist was installed in his own shop.  And at this point, advertising was not a problem.  There were still so few of them that everyone knew where everyone's shop was.

Probably the first type of business where some kind of advertising became important was the tavern or public house.  If a town was going to host more than one of a particular kind of business it would be a tavern.  Taverns started hanging up signs.  And, since most people still couldn't read, they went with easily identifiable symbols.  And as taverns multiplied in large metropolises like London or Paris, they started using with two symbols on a sign.  So you had the "rose and crown" or the "pig and whistle".  The sign would have a stylized but identifiable rose and a stylized but identifiable crown carved into it, as an example.

Probably the first standardized signage was the three gold balls that identified a pawn shop / money lender.  The second was the striped pole that identified a barber.  And the combination of signage and for a long time word of mouth was the entirety of an establishment's marketing campaign.

And for a long time all roads were crap.  So all larger cities were located on rivers or the seashore.  Back then ships were the only way to reliably and cheaply transport large volumes of goods.  The Romans (and the Chinese) had built good roads.  But the Roman roads stopped getting maintained when the Empire fell so they slowly decayed.  This means that outside of China the volume of commerce increased but it was still at a very low level.

If we move forward a few hundred years the high technology device of the day was the ship.  And better technology meant better ships, be they warships or merchant ships.  So there was money in the ship business pretty much before anything else.

And the complexity of an oceangoing ship, say of the fourteen hundreds, demanded a lot of specialized labor and equipment to build and maintain.  And that resulted in the first example of what we would now recognize as a mercantile operation, the ship's chandlery.  This was a retail establishment that specialized in selling all the bits and bobs that large, complex, ships needed.

And by this time more money was in circulation.  So we saw all kinds of specialty retailers following in the footsteps of chandlers.  And, for the most part, they followed the tavern model.  They would put a sign up outside with some kind of icon carved into it that indicated their area of specialization.

Later, when good quality and inexpensive window glass became available, a window display was added.  But their marketing campaign consisted primarily of "word of mouth".  This is when the phrase "by appointment to the King" came into general use.  This all changed with the advent of the newspaper.

It took a while for people (both the publishers and the readers) to figure out that placing an advertisement in a newspaper acted like word of mouth on steroids.  People read newspapers to find out what was going on.  It is a small step from learning the news of the day to learning where to find the best (or cheapest or closest) merchant selling a particular item.  The world has not been the same since.

To state the obvious, newspapers depend on a high level of literacy in the population.  Once a significant percentage of the population could read and write (and a process for making paper cheaply came into widespread use), trends in retailing started to be strongly influenced by trends in communication.  The other strong influencer is one I have already talked about, trends in transportation.

I noted that for a long time the siting of large cities depended on access to rivers or seashore.  This was because, as I noted above, for a long time volume transportation over substantial distances was only possible using ships.  If a merchant dealt in goods originating a distance away those goods traveled in ships.

So towns in the interior tended to be small.  And retailers in these interior towns tended to mostly to depend on the skill of their labor rather than their access to goods from a distance for their livelihood.  This severely restricted the types and amounts of commerce that was possible.

Roads slowly got better but the big revolution in land transportation came about with the introduction of the railroad.  It now became possible to transport large volumes of goods over long distances quickly and inexpensively.  Railroads came into existence in the 1800's.  And that roughly coincided with the introduction of the telegraph.  Telegraph messages were quick but they were also very expensive.  So their impact on retailing was limited.  It was cost effective to deal with suppliers via telegraph but it was not cost effective to deal with customers that way.

What railroads, and a reasonably quick postal system (perhaps a week to send a letter a thousand miles) enabled was the catalog retailer.  The most famous example of this was Sears, Roebuck, and Company.  Sears set up shop in Chicago, which had excellent rail connections to the rest of the country.  They sent out their "wish book" catalog and received orders by mail.  Then they used rail freight to deliver the goods ordered.  A wide variety of goods was available in a large city like New York City.  But Sears was able to provide a similar wide variety of goods to anywhere that had good rail service.

This revolutionized small town life.  It did it in two ways.  The first way is the obvious one.  People could order and receive a much wider selection of goods than local merchants stocked.  But the second revolution is often overlooked.  A customer could look in the Sears catalog and see what something cost there.  If the local merchant charged a lot more than Sears, this could be brought to the merchant's attention.  The merchant was forced to either lower his prices or see business decline.  A much higher level of competition was thus introduced into small town retailing.

But this increased level of availability and competition did not extend to everything.  There used to be something called a "dry goods" store.  Dry goods were the kind of thing you could ship via boat or train without damaging it.  So anything "perishable" still had to be sourced locally.  And most kinds of food is perishable.  Drying or pickling many kinds of foods ruins it.  Just ask sailors whether they preferred "salt beef" to fresh meat.

One way this played out has become a staple of American mythology.  If you built an insulated rail car and packed it with ice you could keep meat, particularly beef, from perishing while preserving its flavor.  The cheapest place to raise beef cattle was out on the prairie a long way from anywhere.  So, "beef cattle" were fattened up, say in West Texas, then they were "driven" to a railhead, say at Abilene, Kansas.  There, they were slaughtered and the beef loaded into chilled rail cars and shipped east.  This is the economics behind the "cattle drive" much beloved in Western movies and TV shows.

At about the same time Sears was getting into business (1886) there arose another phenomenon that I don't completely understand, the "department store".  These only existed in medium and large cities.  They were a large, single, unified, store that internally was broken up into a large number of departments.

Each department functioned along the lines of a specialty shop.  One department sold dresses.  Another department sold furniture. A single department store could host an amazing assortment of merchandise for sale.  And, other than the fact that it was all the kind of thing an average person would buy, there was little commonality involved.

I am old enough to remember when a number of these operations were still going strong in Seattle, my home town.  But why?  I can come up with two suggestions.  The first is management.  Not everyone knows how to run a successful retail operation.  And there is a considerable amount of "general retailing expertise" that applies across lots of kinds of merchandise.  My second suggestion is also the one I think is the important one, advertising.

A department store can afford to advertise regularly in a newspaper.  They can build up "brand loyalty" for the store.  "Shop with us and we will have everything you need and treat you right."  A department store can also feature goods from one department in one ad and goods from a different department in the next.

The consumer was continuously reminded of the existence of the department store due to the regularity of the appearance of an advertisement.  And over time each department in the store could be featured.  The customer was reminded of the many departments that could be found, all in one convenient place and clustered under a trusted name.

A stand alone operation  specializing in the goods from just one department could not afford the cost of duplicating the size and frequency of the newspaper ads the department store could afford.  They had to settle for ads that were either smaller or less frequent.

So the state of transportation at the time (railroads) and the state of communications at the time (newspapers, catalogs) shifted the retailing landscape dramatically in the late 1800s.  The advent of airplanes, radio, and later TV, didn't shift the retailing landscape as much.  But cars did.

The wide availability of cars made the shopping center possible.  Starting in about 1950 the shopping center was able to sell itself as a bigger, better, department store.  The shopping center could engage in the same kind of newspaper advertising department stores had been doing.  And they could offer more departments in the form of specialty shops.  And each specialty shop could offer a wider variety of goods than the department in a department store could.

But for a long time in spite of the fact that they were competitors, department stores and shopping centers coexisted.  In fact, a successful shopping center was "anchored" by one or more department stores.  The only change for department stores was now, instead of a single store in a single city, all the successful department stores had expanded into "chains".  At one time there was only one Macy's store in the world.  Now they are all over the place.

At the same time the catalog operations added stores to the mix.  You could order from the Sears catalog or you could go to the Sears store.  You could even order from the catalog but have it shipped to the store.  You would then use your car to pick it up.  J. C. Penney's evolved into another of these hybrid operations.  For a long time both Sears and J. C. Penney's (and others) had extensive catalog operations.  At the same time they had large chains of stores, often serving as an anchor to a shopping mall.

It would be interesting to have access to the books of these hybrid operations like Sears and Penney's.  I think there was a slow shift.  Catalog volume dropped off slowly.  But for a long time it remained profitable (I opine).  And for a long time the anchor stores at malls were also profitable.  But I suspect that the trend of business moving away from catalog and away from department stores in malls moved slowly enough that a case could always be made to continue on as before.  But the trend has finally caught up with them.

And coming up along the inside was a different retail model, the big box store.  "Big box" is often associated with Walmart.  But Walmart is more accurately seen as a department store chain.  They were just the first to figure out how to adapt the department store model to rural and suburban-fringe areas.  The secret to success was the combination of the interstate highway system and the car.  The customer density might have been low.  But Walmart figured out how of how to get people to drive long distances to one of their stores.

And at the time Walmart was growing quickly, rural and other low density areas were underserved by the retail industry.  So, Walmart didn't make a fundamental change to the industry.  They just figured out how to expand an already tried and true formula into a new market.

As I noted above, the size of the average specialty shop in a mall could be substantially larger than the department of a department store.  That trend got taken to extremes.  All of a sudden we started seeing very large stores dedicated to a single line of products.  A classic example is Best Buy, an electronics store.

But the grocery store, which started out pretty small, kept getting bigger and bigger.  It is now a "supermarket", and it is truly "super" in terms of size.  We also have big box book stores, furniture stores, sporting goods stores, etc. now.  Most often they are in malls.  But sometimes they are like Walmart's, a free standing operation,

And, of course, what makes the big box store feasible is the same thing that made Walmart stores feasible.  People can now drive long distances to find what they want.  You just have to give them sufficient reason.

And then coming up fast on the rail you have the internet and Amazon.  The internet is a communications revolution.  The equivalent of a Sears catalog can now be delivered to your home on demand.  And the catalog entries can be updated instantly.  And the cost of creating a "catalog" entry on the Amazon web site is far less that the equivalent cost for Sears to create an entry on its catalog.

The "Amazon story" is now well known.  It started out selling books.  Then it branched out by adding this and that.  It has since added third party sellers.  So now you can get almost anything through Amazon.

And this whole "Amazon is killing retail" story is now well known.  My local mall has a big Barnes & Noble bookstore but B&N is reputed to be hanging on by a thread and most of it's competitors are already gone.  Video rental stores are gone.  And so on and so on.  The rapid expansion of the big box trend was supposed to be an "Amazon beater" strategy.  It worked for a while.  But it looks like it lacks long term staying power.

Retailing at all levels has had to adjust to the internet.  Many companies quickly added an internet along side the rest of their operation.  But for most it was supposed to be an adjunct to their main retail business.  Barnes & Nobel, for instance got into the web in a big way.  They even developed the proprietary Nook e-reader.  The conventional wisdom on all of this is now "too little - too late" and "doomed to failure".

But here's where I think I have something fresh to contribute.  And that is this.  I think retailing is not doomed.  I just think we need to do a rebalancing.

Nordstrom's is a department store chain that people used to think was getting it right but those same people now think they are in trouble.  And right this minute they are.  They put in lots of large retail stores in malls and for a long time that strategy worked well.  They were one of the first companies to create an internet presence so people figured that they had done the right thing here too.  But now people are not so sure.

The "all internet - all the time" people figured that all of retailing was going to follow the move rental model.  But I think that is too extreme.  What I expect to see is a rebalancing.  Neither retail sales nor internet sales will go away completely.  But I see the internet side becoming more important and the retail side less so.  In the specific case of Nordstrom's, I don't see them going down the drain.  I do see them needing to downsize their retail presence (smaller stores) while continuing to enhance their internet presence.  And that will be difficult and expensive to pull off.

People like to shop at Nordstrom's.  They got the whole "shopping as theater / entertainment" thing well before most of their competitors.  So their stores are very pleasant places to hang out.  But stores cost a lot of money to operate.  When almost all of Nordstrom's sales came through their stores this worked fine.  Their stuff was a little more expensive that what could be found elsewhere.  But people figured the price difference was worth it and Nordstrom's bottom line reflected that for many years.

But let's say you are a Nordstrom's regular.  If you are a "fast fashion" type who always has to have whatever is trendy RIGHT NOW then time spent in the store is still well worth it.  But most of us, including the fast fashion types, also buy a lot of staples.  When it comes to a lot of what we buy, we know exactly what we want before we enter the store.  For these purchases the in-store experience is less valuable.  So why not just order it off the Nordstrom's web site?

Nordstrom's needs to hold on to their customer base, and expand it, if possible.  For new customers the in-store experiences is the best way for Nordstrom's to introduce itself.   And for the person who needs assistance, help finding the right size or style or color or accessory, you can't beat the in-store experience.  The problem is "how does Nordstrom's (or any other retailer) get the additional expense of their retail operation to pencil out".

I think the way Nordstrom's needs to do that is by downsizing their stores, thus reducing the cost of their retail presence.  The remaining retail side of the business would be much more tightly focused on the customer service aspects of their business.  Nordstrom's runs an extensive cosmetics operation.  Providing help finding just the right shade of lipstick or other cosmetic is something customers regularly need and appreciate.

Taking the measurements necessary to make sure clothing fits properly is also important.  But if a complete set of measurements is taken and entered into Nordstrom's computer system, that system can then apply those measurements to all the clothes Nordstrom's offers in a way that insures that all the clothing the customer orders will fit properly.  That would be especially helpful to women as it is harder for them to achieve the correct fit.

Finding the right store size and the right mix of products and services will be hard to figure out.  And getting from where store chains like Nordstrom's are, namely lots of big stores in lots of malls, to where they need to be, smaller stores, perhaps in more locations, perhaps in fewer, will be even harder to do.  Nordstrom's is trying to pull exactly this off.  I wish them luck.

And Amazon is coming at it from the other side.  Like Sears, Amazon started out with no retail presence.  But Amazon has been experimenting with physical stores for some time now.  Their recent efforts include purchasing the "Whole Foods" supermarket chain, and rolling out "Amazon Go" cashier-less stores.  Both of these initiatives have attracted a lot of attention.  And no one, Amazon included, is sure where either initiative will end up.

And taking the wide view of retailing, there is another trend going on.  Lots of malls were built.  The theory was "there is no such thing as too many malls".  That is obviously nonsense.  But it took a long time for this sector to get overbuilt.  Then, among other things, the internet came along.  And, as I have argued above, we need less retail than we used to.

But at the same time, cities like Seattle, changed their zoning so that pretty much every building had to include row of small retail stores at street level.  At one time there was probably a shortage of spaces for small retail.  But the zoning was changed quite a long time ago now so there is now a substantial surplus of these sites for small retail, at least as I see it.

This combination of a surplus of retail space, large and small, and a decreasing need for all kinds of retail, means I see trouble in the market for retail real estate.  Lots of malls went out of business in the past decade.  I think most of the damage has been done in that area.  But, here too the shrinkage will continue.  And I see particular trouble for anchor stores in malls.  I see the occupants of those malls staying in the mall but I see them downsizing into smaller spaces.  And I see building owners having trouble keeping the small retail the City forced them to build full.

And as long as we are talking about external trends that affect retailing, here's a final one.  The entire world has been shifting from a middle class based economy to a banana republic-style model.  We will have a few super-rich people and a lot of poor people.  The middle class has been shrinking as a percentage of the total population and I expect this to continue.  (For the moment, China is an exception here.  China has a growing middle class.  But they are coming from no middle class at all.)

Each individual rich person buys more stuff than poorer people do.  But there aren't that many of them.  So the aggregate demand they represent is small.  What drives a healthy retail economy is a large middle class.  Even more helpful, from a retailing perspective, is to put more money into the pockets of poor people.  Poor people spend what they have and they spend most of it on retail.  Middle class people spend almost as high a percentage of their money on retail as poor people do.  Rich people spend a far lower percentage of their money on retail than do people in either of the other two groups.

There are far more poor people than rich people.  Even with their reduced numbers, there are also far more middle class people than rich people.  If you add 1% to the income of every rich person there will be essentially no impact on retailing.  If you add 1% to the income of every poor person you will see almost 100% of that money flow through to retailers.  But poor people have little money so that 1% change will add up to a relatively small amount.  If you add 1% to the income of middle class people a lot of it will flow through to the retail segment.  And it will be a large amount in the aggregate.

What we have been doing is taking new income away from the people who underpin retailing, the poor and the middle class, and giving it to the rich, the people who do the least for retailing.  We have seen growth in retail.  But it has been almost entirely funded by the poor and the middle class taking on more debt.  That is unhealthy.  The best thing that could be done to improve the lot of retailers is to direct new income away from the rich and toward the middle class and especially the poor.  But that does not seem to be in the cards any time soon.  And that is going to put retailing into yet another bind.

U. S. Mail - Number Please

I like to know how things work.  And in almost every case the current system for how a particular thing works evolved in stages over time from humble origins.  This post covers the evolution of Mail Addresses into numbers.  It turns out that every single place the United States Postal Service (USPS) is capable of delivering mail to has a specific unique number associated with it.  How can that be?  Well, it didn't start out that way.

The phrase "Number Please" conjures up the image of a telephone operator.  Back in the day a lot of the telephone system was operated manually.  An "operator" sat at an "exchange".  When you wanted to make a phone call you did something (cranked on a handle in the early days) to get the operator's attention.  This lit up a light on the "plug board" of the exchange.  The exchange was manipulated by the operator by plugging and unplugging "patch cords".  So the operator would connect herself to you, ask for the phone number you wanted to connect to, then manipulate some patch cords to connect you up.

In the very early days you could just say "connect me to Mable" and the operator knew what to do.  But phones soon became so popular that asking for someone by name soon became unwieldy and everyone who had a phone was assigned a number.  For a long time the "number" was a combination of letters and numbers but that was actually a con.  If you look at a phone "dial" you will see that the "2" key is labeled "ABC", the "3" key is labeled "DEF", etc.

So if my phone number was "Olive 7335", which it was at one point, that really meant OL7335, "OL" being the first two letters of "Olive".  And the "O" was really a "6" and the "L" was really a "5".  So, for all practical purposes my phone number was 657335, a number.  At some point the phone company decided that this "letters and numbers" business was not worth the bother and dropped it.  People are now used to phone numbers being a series of digits.

But in an interesting development, "phone numbers" are going back to being names.  Most people now use smart phones.  And to call somebody they look that person up in their "Address Book" and hit the "dial" button.  People only know another person's actual phone number just long enough to enter it into their address book.  After that, they go by their name.  (The same goes for texting, which is rapidly replacing the phone call.)

Back in the day (early '60s) there was a British TV show called "Danger Man".  It was syndicated in the US under the catchy name of "Secret Agent".  And for the US run, besides giving the show a new name, they slapped on a catchy new theme song.  That song contained the line "they've given you a number and taken 'way your name".  The USPS has given every mail delivery location a number but they haven't taken it's "address" away -- yet.  But that's the end of the story.  Let's go back to the beginning.

For a long time almost everybody was illiterate.  Before paper was invented writing material was very expensive so most people found a way to get along without learning to read or write.  Then paper was invented.  This was followed by "movable type" printing.  Now there was much more of an incentive to learn to read and write, and lots more people did.  And if two people can read, information can be shared by one person writing a "letter" to the other person.  The problem was how to get the letter from the party of the first part to the party of the second part.

Well, most of the people the typical person knew didn't live that far away.  So talking a friend or acquaintance into delivering the letter worked reasonably well.  But governments and some business people found it valuable to communicate over longer distances.  And for a long time the "find a friend or acquaintance who is going that way" was the only option available.

Governments have the most money and the most need of long distance communications.  So governments started setting up regular messenger services.  Messengers would travel a fixed route on a fixed schedule carrying letters.  At first these messenger services only transported "official" letters pertaining solely to government business.  So business groups ended up setting up parallel messenger systems that handled commercial letters.

Eventually sanity intervened and the systems were consolidated into a single messenger system that handled both government and business correspondence.  But these systems were complicated, idiosyncratic, and expensive.  And most people still couldn't read or write.

Fast forward to the American Revolution and Ben Franklin.  Literacy in the "colonies" was increasing and Franklin recognized that an inexpensive, simple, reliable, Mail system was valuable to everyone.  So he made sure that the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8, clause 7) empowered Congress to "establish Post Offices and post Roads".  The US government has been in the Post Office and Mail delivery business ever since.

One idea Franklin pushed successfully was for a standard cost to send a letter regardless of how far it was going.  This drastically reduced the complexity involved in using the system.  You addressed a letter.  As long as you were in an area served by the USPS and you were sending a letter to a destination served by the USPS you paid the same low price ("for the low, low, cost of a stamp . . .").  This meant mail going a short distance subsidized mail going a long distance.  But initially very few letters went a long distance.

Unfortunately, junk mail has changed that.  We can now get bombed with catalogues, sales flyers, etc., from all over the country.  And this ability to send a letter from anywhere in the country to anywhere in the country demands a uniform system for identifying where the letter is supposed to go.

And, as with the case of telephones and operators, initially whatever the system was it would be operated by people.  And people are very flexible.  So early on locations had what amounted to a nickname.  There is the famous "Bleak House" of literature fame.   The house Winston Churchill lived in most of his life was called "Chartwell".

Once you got close, people were just supposed to just know where it was.  In order to facilitate the "get close" part of the process, the destination was additionally identified (in the case of Chartwell) as being near the town of Westerham in the district of Kent in the country of England.  And back in the days when only rich people in fancy homes got mail that system was sufficient.

About this time a standard hierarchical form was adopted.  The bottom line of the address contained the most general type of location information, typically a city, state, and perhaps a country.  The next line was more specific, typically a building number and street name.  And the line above was still more specific, typically the name of the recipient.

Thanks to Franklin and others, more and more people were availing themselves of the postal system.  And as the number of users increased, the stateliness of the typical mail recipient's abode declined.  Just going with a name like "Chartwell" stopped being tenable.  So, an effort was made to give all streets in a town a unique name and each building on a given street was given a unique number.

Addresses of the form "123 Elm Street, Anytown, Anystate" came into general use.  Around the World War II time period this was not always enough so large cities started getting broken up into "zones".  So it became "Anytown 3" to indicate that the address was located in zone 3 of Anytown.  This meant that letter sorters didn't need to be familiar with all of a large city.  They just needed to know their way around whatever zone they were working in.

But by World War II mail volumes were large and a lot of the mail traveled a significant distance.  By this time the USPS was organized into a hierarchy.  The country was divided up into "sections".  If a letter was not going to someplace local it was sent to one of a limited number of "sectional center facilities".  Internally within the USPS these facilities were assigned a 3 digit number.  This represents the third incursion (after street numbers and then city zones) of numbers into the business of delivering the mail.

Even after the War a lot of flexibility was permitted because the system was still a manual one, for the most part.  A person can easily determine that "Wa", "Wash", and "Washington" all refer to the same state so all three forms (and several others) were permitted.  And address lines that became too long were not a problem.  If it looked like there would be a problem then whoever was doing the addressing would just do something like go with an abbreviation instead of spelling things out in full.  The mythical "Frostbite Falls, Minnesota" worked just fine, for instance.

Then in 1963 a switch was made.  The postal zones within cities were dropped.  And two more digits were added to the sectional center facility number.  These two extra digits allowed a specific post office within a section to be identified.    And the system was publicized and given a catchy name, the "ZIP Code".  People and businesses were instructed to add the ZIP Code to the city-state line.  But adding the ZIP code could be a problem if the city-state line was already quite long.

So, at the same time a list of two letter state codes were promulgated and people were encouraged to use them instead of all the earlier (and usually longer) variants.  So my state became "WA" and that shortening allowed the ZIP Code to fit right in.

In order to encourage the widespread adoption of ZIP codes starting in '67 bulk mailers were required to use them if they wanted to mail at a discount.  So every Post Office in the country had its own unique ZIP Code.  This got rid of a lot of problems caused by near-duplicate addresses.  Any town could have a "123 Elm St.".  And it was possible that two close together towns with similar names could have the same address.  When the ZIP Code boundaries were set up the USPS made sure that each instance of "123 Elm St." (or any other specific address) ended up in a different ZIP Code.

And the 5 digit ZIP code was a big help.  But there were still a lot of addresses within a single ZIP Code.  So in 1983 the USPS went to a ZIP+4 system.  They added a "+" and another 4 digits to the end of the ZIP Code.  They also started rolling out a barcode system.  All of a sudden, a bunch of ticks started appearing below the address.  These ticks were designed to be read easily with a dumbed down version of the UPC Code scanners used in supermarkets.

The original barcode contained only the 5 digit ZIP code.  But improvements and enhancements were added over the years.  First it was expanded to include the ZIP+4 information.  Finally a two digit "Delivery Point" number was added.  A 5 digit ZIP Code gets us to the correct Post Office.  A ZIP+4 Code gets us to the specific delivery route (or part of a route) operating out of that Post Office.  The addition of the two digit "Delivery Point" number gets us to a single specific house, apartment unit, etc.

This 11 digit number (a 5 digit ZIP, plus a 4 digit +4, plus a 2 digit delivery point) gets us to a single number that uniquely identifies any specific location capable of receiving mail anywhere in the US.  And in 2012 the latest version of the USPS barcode was introduced.

It is called the "Intelligent Mail" (IM) barcode and it became mandatory in 2013.  It is much more elaborate than even the 11 digit barcode it replaced.  The old barcode used only short ticks and tall ticks.  So that each tick encoded one bit of information.  The IM barcode used four tick types - short-centered, short-centered+up, short-centered+down, and long (a combination of short-centered and the "up" part and the "down" part of the other two ticks).  So each tick encodes two bits of information.  The IM barcode consisted of 65 ticks encoding 130 bits of information.

Ignoring some "overhead" ticks (you need to know if you are reading the barcode upside down or right side up, for instance) the "payload" translates to a 31 digit number.  11 of those digits are used to encode the ZIP+4+2 11 digit number described above that identifies the unique delivery point of the letter.  Most of the rest of the digits are used to create a tracking number so letters or packages can be tracked like they can at UPS or FedEx..

The tracking number is broken into two sub-parts.  The first part is the sender identification number and the second part is the item number.  The USPS assigns a sender identification number to each participating company or organization.  A unique item number is then assigned by the sender to each item that sender mails.  Two formats are used.

Some of the "sender" numbers are short.  They are assigned to (relatively) high volume mailers.  There are fewer numbers but there are also fewer high volume mailers than there are (relatively) low volume mailers.  By keeping the number short for some mailers there is room for a larger pool of item numbers for these mailers to use.

Other "sender" numbers are longer.  This allows the system to accommodate a larger number of low volume mailers.  But the trade-off is that these mailers have a smaller pool of item numbers to work with.  But they shouldn't need as many as the high volume mailers so it is a good trade-off.

In either case a unique item number is assigned to each piece of mail.  But the number only needs to be unique within a 90 day window.  After that it can be reused.  The combination of the sender identification number and the item number is a fixed size.  So the combination always takes up the same amount of space within the 31 digit number.

So it is cool that the USPS can now track an item.  But that's not the main point of adopting barcodes.  The main point was to permit machine sorting.  A mail sorting machine can sort mail by reading the barcode.  It doesn't have to have the smarts to handle all the variation in regular printed addresses.  And it is still legal to write an address by hand.  No machine can read handwriting reliably.  And they definitely can't do it at high speed.

There is a nice feature that this 11 digit unique delivery point number enables.  I was sending an Amazon package to a cousin a few days ago.  I filled in the address and Amazon came back with "is this the address you mean".  It had made a small change to what I had entered.  There are now lists available to Amazon and others of all the valid addresses in the US.  Amazon chunked through the address I had provided and found no match.  But it did find a very similar address, which it suggested to me.

A similar thing happened to me several months ago when I was at the USPS mailing a package.  The staffer entered the address I gave and it came up "tilt".  It turned out that the person who had given me the address had included a ZIP code that was completely wrong.  With a little poking around the staffer was able to suggest to me a completely different ZIP code that turned out to be the correct one.  That's definitely a good thing.

So is all this automation helping?  I'm sure it is.  But the cost of a First Class stamp has been rising quickly over the last several years.  (And I'm old enough to remember when the cost of a First Class stamp went from two cents to three cents.)  What's going on is that mail volume is dropping.  But it costs a lot (and costs keep rising) to keep all those Post Offices running all over the place.  City people like me heavily subsidize country people.

There is a high enough volume of mail to cover the overhead in cities.  But that is not true in rural areas.  A rural Post Office may cost less to run.  But it costs a lot more on a per-letter basis to run than an urban Post Office does.  The very people who benefit from this cross subsidization are the ones who scream loudest about how much it costs to keep the USPS going.  But they also don't want any of those rural Post Offices, the ones that lose so much money, closed.

I know what my ZIP+4 ZIP Code is.  But I don't know what my Delivery Point number is.  And if there is a way to find out what it is I haven't been able to find it..  So, I only know 9 digits of the 11 digit number that represents my delivery address.  Could the USPS switch over to the 11 digit number at some point?  Sure.  But it doesn't look like they are going to do it any time soon.

But there are lots of businesses that know what my 11 digit address is.  You see many bills and pieces of junk mail come with that IM barcode printed on it.  And I can tell it was printed at the same time my address was printed.  It wasn't added later by the USPS.  Instead, it's right there underneath the address that was printed by the people who are sending the mail to me.  And you can't create an IM barcode without knowing what my particular and unique 11 digit address is.

And on an apparently unrelated but actually related subject, the decennial US Census is coming up in 2020.  The Census people need to know where to look to find everyone.  Well, guess what?  The magic database that is used to validate addresses and to list what each address's Delivery Point is tells you almost every place to look for people.

It's not going to catch people who are living in their cars or otherwise have no fixed address.  But if you regularly get junk mail then your address should be in the Delivery Point database.  The Census people were able to work with bulk mailers to develop a "where to look" list when they were doing the 2010 Census and that was helpful.  But this Delivery Point database business means that things have gotten much better organized since.  And the Census people should be able to take advantage of that.

Giving people numbers is not just for secret agents any more.