The State of the Union; Rambles on Moore’s Law and Education

View 808 Tuesday, January 28, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

The State of the Union address can be a dramatic setting for launching a dramatic change in policy. Five years ago President Obama used his first State of the Union address to announce that this would be an era of hope and change: that his election speeches were his agenda.

This year, the fifth State of the Union address, was less hopeful, and certainly less specific, with few specifics, and although the President tried to rouse some of the old fire, his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

Specifics were few. The main economic measure that will be remembered is a demand for a rise in the national minimum wage. The only specific on education was a reiteration of his faith in its effectiveness and its need for more money, and a proposal to provide pre-Kindergarten education to everyone, so that all Americans would have access to world class education.

I sometimes wonder what I would do if it were my task to tell the Congress of the United States what problems the Republic faces, and what ought to be done about them. I’ve given that some thought from time to time, but I never developed an actual program or wrote an actual speech. I’d be a lousy speechwriter for a politician anyway. That is, I used to be a good one, and my speeches for candidates whose campaigns I worked on were effective, but that’s not the same thing. The purposes of a State of the Union speech are many, some partisan and some are invocations of sentiments of national unity.

Mr. Reagan was good at blending those elements. So was Peggy Noonan, but Reagan had the habit of taking drafts of speeches and making them his own, rewriting in places, and often changing the whole direction and theme, often to the horror of his advisors who were sure they understood American politics better than their President did. They were generally wrong about this. Mr. Reagan was extraordinarily wide read and well informed, and had a real sense of history. He was also conscious of the dominating importance of bringing the Cold War to a successful close: a close that could only be successful if the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could be put out of business without destroying much of the world in its death throes. This required careful management and a great deal of his attention, as well as political compromises with ruthless ideologues who did not appreciate the importance of 26,000 nuclear warheads aimed at the United States; and who did not hesitate to demand domestic political concessions from the President as the price of supporting his military and foreign policies.

We no longer have a Cold War. The Seventy Years War ended, and with considerably less slaughter than most strategists – including me – thought would be the price. The conflict with Russia is entirely different from the old Cold War, and is much closer to the more traditional balance of power international politics. Unfortunately, as the Seventy Years War ended, there was exhilaration among the neo-conservatives and other former Marxists who saw a new end of history – the inevitable rise of liberal democracy, would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. And meanwhile our economy depended on Middle East oil. As I had said during the Cold War, I have more faith in American science and engineering and good old fashioned American exceptionalism which could build the Empire State Building and Hoover Dam during the Great Depression, then come out of that to submerge the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan und a flood of tanks, airplanes, rifles, armored cars, liberty ships, battleships, thousands of tone of bombs in a bit under five years.

No matter. When we woke up from the dream of universal liberal democracy established in places where no such thing had ever been contemplated, we had spent the savings from the end of the cold war on a myriad of activates including the two longest wars in our history as we involved ourselves in the territorial disputes in Europe – the Balkans – as a consequence of our Entangling Alliance – NATO – and then in taking liberal democracy and nation building to three provinces of the Turkish Empire which had been thrown together into the Kingdom of Iraq, united Shiite and Sunni Arabs, Christians, Jews, and the non-Arab Kurds. More it was to be done by State Department career civil servants, and Bremer was accordingly dispatched to be the proconsul of Mesopotamia with the worst record since the Year of the Six Emperors in Roman times.

But that is all done, and done, and over. So what ought we to do now?

First, the President is correct in realizing that we have to stop sending expeditionary forces into foreign lands. Empires don’t do that; but of course creation of an Empire wasn’t the point of sending the Army into Iraq and Afghanistan. We went in there in the mistaken belief that would could implant liberal democracy – like Napoleon’s enthusiastic French soldiers, we would carry Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity on the point of our bayonets, or perhaps fire it from our Abrams tanks and drop it from our fighter bombers. Who could resist us?

Had we intended to establish Empire, there was an Iraqi Army for hire, and its soldiers desperate for jobs; and there were plenty of candidates to be the new President of Iraq with an American Resident Advisor. But that was not what we wanted. And what we wanted, which was to give them a liberal democracy, was not in our power of gift. We could have held on for a while, established a new and relatively stable dictatorship – or more likely three relatively stable dictatorships – and left gracefully; but what we could not do was leave behind a stable liberal democracy. But leave that, for those games are over, and the President is wise to retreat.

But that does not address the real problem of this Republic in these days of Moore’s Law. The new technology based on “microchips” – Large Scale Integrated Circuits – like all technologies follows an ogive or logistic curve – we called it an S Curve in The Strategy of Technology – and not a true exponential, but such curves appear to be exponential for some time before they tend to flatten out (but may then start a new S curve after a time); and Moore’s Law has applied for many years. LSIC based systems get twice as powerful for about half the cost at a period of about two years. That probably won’t continue for too much longer, but think about it: it has already changed the world. It has made possible the Internet which changes merchandise and marketing. It has changed manufacturing: America manufactures more now than it did in the old days, but it no longer needs masses of unionized blue color workers to do it. A lot of those skilled labor jobs which turned working men into middle class citizens are gone: first exported to places where they would be done cheaper, now consigned to robots. In general, if a job can be described in the old language of the Gilberths, it can probably be programmed into a robot.

And this is coupled with a education system that absorbs increasingly large amounts of money, but teaches very few students to do anything that someone else will pay them money to do.

Meanwhile the President is proud of the number of jobs he has created, but in fact he has created fewer jobs than the number of jobs which have just – vanished. The reason that unemployment is now below 7% — or can be said to be – is not because so many are going back to work, but because a larger number have simply given up trying to find work. By definition, once someone gives up trying to find work, that person is no longer unemployed.

The President addressed this situation by asking for larger minimum wages. He also asks for another extension of unemployment benefits. Pay people to be unemployed – and raise the minimum wages that must be paid to those who are employed. Does anyone believe that the President thinks this will solve the unemployment problem? Does anyone think this will solve the labor problems in these United States? I will leave this as an exercise for the reader.

The other solution to the problem, to restoring American to a nation that can build the Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building in fewer than five years even in the depths of a Great Depression, is education: and the President proposes that we raise the cost of education. He doesn’t put it that way, but he would throw more money into the education system; this has been going on since the Great Society with the result that the Universities and Colleges and Education Normal Schools have all become Universities and raised their prices, while the Junior Colleges demand upgrading of their titles, and everyone raises their prices; the accrediting organizations comply with this by demanding ever more expensive doodads as well as higher “qualifications” and credentials for those who absorb this new money, with results that are easy to see. My mother taught first grade in rural Florida, and her primary mission was to make sure that every kid in her class could read and knew the addition tables before leaving first grade. She was always a bit ashamed that she had only a two year Associate of Arts degree from the Florida State Teachers Normal School in Gainesville; but she was able to say that very few children left her first grade who had not learned to read and, as she put it, “those didn’t learn anything else either.” The notion that a child of normal intelligence, bright or dull, would leave first grade unable to read was unthinkable.

The President proposes that we give all children Pre-Kindergarten. This sounds a bit like Head Start, a program that everyone I know wishes well – I know no one who doesn’t want Head Start to work – yet no one has ever been able to show that it does any good at all. After three years in our school system you cannot tell which children were Head Start and which were not; and this is not from lack of trying. Everyone wishes that program would work; but no one can show that it does. Pre-Kindergarten is unlikely to fare better.

The only solution to the education problem is to insist that the schools work; that teachers teach the children to read. If you had a computer programming business, and some programmers came to you to say they could not program the computers you have, because the computers aren’t learning, you’d fire them and find programmers who could do the job. Similarly with teachers. Teachers who can’t teach should go find other careers, not think up reasons why they have failed. My wife for a while was the teacher of last resort in the County juvenile justice system – she got the kids who had been sent to reform school and who could not read. Hundreds, thousands of them. They all came with ten pounds of paperwork proving that it wasn’t the system’s fault that these pre-teens and teens could not read. They just simply couldn’t learn. Roberta threw away the excuse papers and taught them to read. After a while there were few to no discipline problems – kids who insisted they didn’t want to learn to read were so astonished when they began to learn and saw others learning that they discovered that after all, they really did want to learn. They had just been convinced that they couldn’t learn. There is plenty of data on this. The reason children don’t learn to read is that they have not been taught to read. If you want them to learn, find teachers who can and will do it. Don’t send them to pre-K, which isn’t going to teach them to read either. We’ve been through this before. Kids who can’t read are not likely to learn how to do stuff that other people will pay them money to do. And the schools are routinely turning out illiterates.

Teach the kids to read, and make them learn the addition and multiplication tables in the first two grades. It can be done. We used to do it. We did it at St. Anne’s on Highland Avenue in the Memphis district known as “Normal” because it was at one time the home of the West Tennessee Normal School which has since transmogrified into a University of Tennessee. But apparently no longer turns out teachers who can teach first graders to read.

The President did say something important: that we need more programs of apprenticeship. But those cannot be, since he also insists on high minimum wages. Just as the minimum wage laws have ended the “board job”, an important way for some to work their way through college. Apprenticeship programs were once an important way to enter the work force; but we don’t do much of that any more.

Instead as the President said (echoing probably the dumbest thing Bill Gates ever said) that we need Pre-K because every American kid deserves access to world class university education. Which is to say that a world class university education will become worthless since all can have it. No child left behind means no child gets ahead; and it works like a charm.

But that’s enough for the night.

Moore’s Law is making it possible to teach robots to do many of the jobs which brought much of the working class into the middle class. It is inexorable, and that genie is out of the bottle. It can’t be stuffed back in.

Schools are not teaching people to do things that other people will pay them money to do; yet we insist that everyone go to ever more expensive and increasingly irrelevant schools. Of course the wealthy are not deceived and apparently many teachers are not; while there are districts where teachers send their own kids to public schools, there are increasing numbers of districts where they try not to. Those who can escape the ghastly education system try to do so, but the trend is to close those loop holes, and “solve” the problem by throwing more money into the blob.

But I do not think you will hear much discussion of this sort in a State of the Union Address.

Defense

BAE Trials 3-D Printed Parts On Fast Jet

Aviation Week & Space Technology Jan 13, 2014 <http://www.aviationweek.com/awin/awst.aspx> , p. 27

Tony Osborne

London

BAE Systems looks to 3-D printing to reduce production costs

Printed headline: Print Preview

BAE Systems has begun flight trials of three-dimensional printed metallic components on the Panavia Tornado combat aircraft, as the company explores the potential benefits of the method.

A one-off component—a bracket made from printed stainless steel and designed to carry a fixed thermal-imaging camera—has been fitted to a U.K. Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 the company uses for flight testing. The bracket was produced in a fraction of the time and cost that similar items would have previously taken.

“The traditional methods of producing such components, designing the molds and building the tooling and associated waste that goes with that, is all eliminated through 3-D printing,” says Peter Bosley, head of design for Tornado at BAE Systems. “The time and cost saving is already significant.”

BAE Systems has been experimenting with different forms of 3-D printing for the last 15 years, although much of this work has focused on the use of polymers for rapid prototyping and materials development. But more recently, the company has been using 3-D printing to produce a range of ready-made parts to protect the aircraft on the ground and during maintenance, in a bid to reduce repair costs.

ArticleImage <http://www.aviationweek.com/aw_images/large/AW_01_13_2014_139_l.jpg>

BAE Systems is using 3-D printed parts on its flight-test Panavia Tornado, including a bracket (inset) to hold a fixed thermal-imaging camera. Credit: Tony Osborne/AW&ST; Inset: Bae Systems

Items produced include protective covers for Tornado cockpit radios, support struts on the air-intake doors and protective guards for power take-off shafts. Some of these parts are now in daily use with RAF Tornado squadrons in the U.K. and on deployment in Afghanistan.

The company says such parts now cost less than £100 ($164) per piece to manufacture, resulting in savings of more than £300,000 ($492,990). Potential savings are projected to be more than £1.2 million between now and 2017.

The 3-D printing machines are installed at the company’s facility at RAF Marham, Norfolk, where the RAF Tornado fleet undergoes maintenance. BAE Systems believes the process could be used to good advantage at other bases. Company executives foresee air forces taking their own 3-D printers with them in-theater, where critical spares could be printed on an as-needed basis.

“You are suddenly not fixed in terms of where you have to manufacture these things. You can manufacture the products at whatever base you want, providing you can get a machine there, which means you can also start to support other platforms such as ships and aircraft carriers,” says Mike Murray, the company’s head of Airframe Integration.

“And if it is feasible to get machines out on the front line, it also gives improved capability where we would not traditionally have any manufacturing support,” Murray adds.

Other trials have included flying a number of flight-cleared 3-D-printed non-metallic parts made out of materials such as ULTEM, a thermoplastic already used widely in aerospace, and Polyamide 12, a nylon-based plastic.

For the moment, the company is taking small steps. Engineers are currently looking to 3-D printing to create an in-cockpit stowage container for Tornado crews’ night-vision goggles. The containers could be produced using a mix of printed and polymer materials.

BAE Systems engineers believe larger-scale metallic components capable of standing up to the stress and temperatures faced by combat and commercial aircraft could be produced via 3-D printing in less than a decade. The company is already working closely with British universities on a range of printed materials.

In a recent trial in conjunction with Cranfield University, engineers produced a 1.2-meter (3.93-ft.)-long 3-D generic wing spar section from titanium using the Wire and Arc Additive Manufacture process. The piece took 37 hr. to produce, from the time the digital model was created in the computer to when the part was removed from the printing system.

At Southampton University, engineering students have already produced a radio-controlled aircraft produced entirely though the 3-D printing method. The university’s Laser Sintered Aircraft was built with just five “snap-together” components without the use of conventional fasteners.

“For engineers, it is a different way of thinking. Three-dimensional printing offers the ability to produce a single piece component without the need for fasteners,” says Bosley.