Dana Blankenhorn

Where the Next Boom Will Start

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Every economic recovery is different. What worked before may recover but it's never the same.

That said, note that every new boom starts slowly. Growth is never uniform, not between industries or within an economic cycle. Recovery will be slow. It will take years. But its pace will accelerate and at some point we'll forget again what hard times felt like. That's when we'll be ready for another bust.

Let me start by looking at previous booms I have lived through:

• The 1970s happened in the oil patch. I was in Houston then and it was a lot like Dubai has been the last few years. One bank put up what looked from the air like a huge green dollar sign. That's how things were. After the crash, which was hard, there was finally a recovery, but it was never the same as it had been.
• The 1980s happened on Wall Street. I was a business reporter then and I watched as supposedly brilliant people took apart companies, then put them back together to reveal value. Everything else went up in sympathy. After the crash the Wall Street game changed. You still read about the "heroes" of that era, like Carl Icahn, but it's not the same. Nor will it be.
• The 1990s  happened on the Internet. I was an Internet reporter. I started warning of the crash in 1997, but the boom happened despite me. The bust took down a ton of companies, and I was out of work completely for over two years. But it did come back. Amazon and eBay came back. Other sites came back. Google barely existed at that time. But, again, this decade, online, has been mainly about consolidation and steady change, not revolution.
• The 2000s were all about housing. Whether the boom was real or artificial, the product of lax regulation or an attempt to cover up for the Iraq War's costs, is irrelevant right now. We created enough Confederate Money to paper the world, backed by houses that were only worth a fraction of what we paid for them, and it will take years to unwind that. When housing does "come back" it won't be the same. It can't be. But, in time, it will come back.

Tootie Seals the Deal

The coming Obama landslide is a direct result of the financial panic, and the two candidates' reaction to it.

But there remained uncertainty until this week, when Tootie sealed the deal.

Tootie is the nickname of Madelyn Dunham, now 85. She's Obama's grandmother. She's the lady on the left in this Chicago Tribune picture, taken in 1979.

She not only helped raise her grandson, whom she usually called Barry, but she gave him the example of a strong, executive woman who could come out of her suit after work, throw on a muumuu, and become grandma again.

Madelyn is now gravely ill, and so Barack Obama has taken a few days off from campaigning to see her, to become Barry again.

How does this seal the deal?

End of the Greatest Generation

I have not been online the last few days.

I was at a funeral. For my mother-in-law. Ruth Estelle Robin Steinhauser was her full name. My daughter was named for her.

She lived a full and rich life, a life ahead of her time, becoming head librarian for a school district with 90 schools in it. She had everything she could have wanted, most especially a marriage that lasted 66 years. She even knew her great-grandchildren.

Before her funeral (a really moving affair and a full house) we had a little get together in the home her husband designed and built back in 1961. I suddenly noticed something about halfway through.

There was no one from her generation left.

Yes, there are stragglers. My mom is 85 and I love her very much. My wife's uncle Otto has survived cancer and looks pretty good for 86. But 86 is the magic number here.

The Greatest Generation, as Tom Brokaw called them, is just about gone.

As recently as 2001, when we traveled to Texas for Ruth and Bennie's 60th anniversary bash, the Woman's Club of San Antonio (Ruth's favorite place next to her own home) was packed with people who'd danced to Glenn Miller's In the Mood when it was new. But if you make it to your 80s (and you're lucky if you do), you know the weight of time is pressing down hard, pressing you into the ground.

There is serious significance in this moment. These are the people who not only won the war, but who invented the Generation Gap, rejecting many of their hippie children as those children rejected the Cold War. These are the people who switched from Kennedy to Nixon and became the backbone of the modern Republican Party. They are the people who defined the suburbs and the Sunbelt retirement.

Gone. There is serious political significance in this moment, as we may be about to elect a President whose grandmother, not mother but grandmother, was part of that generation. But I can't do more than note it here. My heart is too heavy for that.

The American Disease

I have no scientific proof of this, but I have long believed ADHD to be the American Disease.

Up to 5% of Americans are diagnosed with ADHD. I'm one of them. I'm creative, I'm quick, I tend to being a polymath. I also have trouble finishing anything longer than a blog post, I'm quick to anger, and I have enormous trouble concentrating on anything I'm told I have to concentrate on (as opposed to what I want to concentrate on). I am very difficult to compel.

In other words, I am both hyper-focused and distractable, I can be charming but I'm prone to depression. These are symptoms typical of what I call "male" ADHD, the kind you hear about and read about most often. I have likened it, most popularly, to having Robin Williams in my head. (This also brings a tendency to self-medicate. Robin's had two stints in rehab.)

There is another kind of ADHD, which may be dramatically under-diagnosed. I learned about it from my daughter. I call it "female" ADHD. In this version you become Robin's audience. You're lost in your own world, and breaking out into the real world can be a struggle. This often comes with learning disabilities -- dyslexia in my daughter's case.

So why do I call this the American disease? Partly because very few Europeans have it. To many Europeans this proves Americans are making the whole thing up. But think about it. If you were living in, say Germany or Italy 100 years ago, or in Ireland or Scotland 200 years ago, or in England 300 years ago, and you had ADHD, what's the first thing you'd think of doing?

Right, getting the heck out of there. Going to America.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

ADHD is like this sometimes.

Just when you think you have a handle on everything, that things are moving forward, the call comes and you're thrown back into it.

A science teacher this time. John argued about the answer to a question. It got personal. He got mad. He raised his voice. He ignored signals to calm down, to leave the room. The other kids were scared, and didn't know what he was going to do.

All the kind words and promises in the world won't do a lot of good at times like this. Talking to the teacher I feel like I'm talking someone down off a ledge, all the while feeling like I want to crawl out there with them.

It doesn't help to realize that this is happening less-and-less. It doesn't help much to realize that, when John came home that day, he was filled with remorse, angry at himself. He didn't want to hear my words. He had heard them too often. They were playing in his head all day.

Yet in some ways these are the best of times. We got a letter last week inviting John to apply to Yale. I have on my desk an invitation from five top schools, including Harvard and Penn, for him to attend a seminar on going to one of them. It's like being the parent of a top basketball prospect with iffy friends. He might become a star or he might fall down completely.

Open Source is Parallel Processing on Steroids

I was chatting up a Washington liberal today, and it was depressing.

The subject was computing. The liberal bemoaned the power of corporations to wreck a great, highly-functional government project.

The project was starved for funds, its developers allowed to leave, and now its bones were being picked by lobbyists, all aiming their "best of breed" systems as replacements for bits-and-pieces of what had once been a magnificent computing edifice.

Even if Democrats are elected this fall, he said, they don't understand these technical arguments about open source vs. proprietary. They'll be bought off just like the current crop.

Which is when it hit me, the frame he could use to tear down all those vendors and bring back what was lost, what is in the process of being lost.

Open source is parallel processing.  (Shown is the parallel processing lab at the University of Utah.)

No matter how big a vendor might be, it's still one system. Like the Von Neumann architectures that dominated computing for its first 40 years they have a bottleneck. The only way to speed up the process of finding a solution is to speed the whole process, get more GHz. It's this kind of thinking which led, by the 1980s, to so-called "supercomputers" like the Cray.

Parallel processing was developed in the 1980s at the Sandia Labs in New Mexico. The idea was simple -- to break jobs into parts, to move the parts onto many systems, and then to put the solutions together on the back end.

In the 20 years since parallel processing has come to dominate computing, relegating Von Neumann to a Wikipedia entry. First people stacked Macs to beat a Cray. Then they used parallel processing on the Internet itself, creating distributed computing projects like SETI @  Home. Today parallel processing is used inside chips -- all today's latest AMD and Intel silicon is doing parallel processing. From two to four to eight -- who knows how far we can go with it.

That's sort of how open source works. Only on steroids.

Because with open source not only do you parse out pieces of a project to different companies, or different developers, but their work can cross-pollinate. Not only can you build systems in parallel, but you can also use a vast community of users to find bugs, and another vast army to stamp out the bugs.

The genius of Linus Torvalds lies in his ability to constantly re-engineer Linux' development process, first farming out all the work, then finding new ways to coordinate the massively-parallel architecture which develops in response. And the design of Linux itself responds well to this parallel processing impulse, since it consists of central functions in a kernel, ancillary functions surrounding it, and a host of distribution providers who can build working systems from all the pieces -- sometimes using just parts of the kernel for a mobile system, embracing optional things like virtualization for a server.

A Father's Worst Fear

Once you have a child your own death is no longer the worst fear you can imagine.

Every parent knows this. Risk and loss are the price we pay for love. The price is highest when it comes to our kids.

Yet people pay it every day. Babies die, and older children get cancer. Teenagers lose their lives in car accidents, black teenagers more often in a hail of bullets. Athletes get sudden heart attacks. Then we give these most precious gifts to the nation, and risk their loss in war.

We can't protect them, although we try. We fret over them instead, natter at them, worry aloud until they send us an exasperated "Mu-therrrrr" or "Daaaaad" to shut us down, because they have that first fear, their own deaths an unimaginable horror.

Sudden Death

I suffered some panic attacks recently, and I  now know why.

Russell Shaw (right), my friend of many years, died suddenly on Friday. He was 60.

Sudden death is a shock to loved ones at any age.

For the young it most often comes from a bullet or a car crash. A few athletes die suddenly from undiagnosed heart conditions, and these cause the most shock of all because it's not supposed to happen that way.

Dealing with Oppression

Oppression is not something I deal with well.

It's something we're supposed to learn in kindergarten, but the ADHD kid (like me) doesn't have a mind for it then, so it passed me by. (I doubt Robert Fulghum had ADHD, since he learned these lessons in kindergarten.)

Americans in general are bad with oppression, yet oppression is a necessary evil. It's part of life. Organization oppresses the disorganized. The kindergarten classroom must be organized. The teacher has to be in charge, even when she's wrong. You're supposed to sit down, shut up and obey instruction. That's the whole purpose of the class.

This personal reality is also political. The main reason Democrats seem so wimpy (to those in the Netroots) is they have learned the hard lesson of dealing with oppression. Whether by fair means or foul they've been losing, on the whole, for 40 years, and they're used to living in the nooks and crannies of a Republican world.

That's what triangulation is all about. You assume that your own side, no matter how well-intentioned, is too extreme, and you try to fit modest reform between what you want and what you know the other side is going to do. Hillary Clinton continues sailing into the wind that doesn't blow and it drives people crazy. That's her real problem right now. Barack Obama doesn't assume the wind exists, John Edwards insists the wind can be resisted.

Polls show Obama is right -- in our guts we know the Republicans are nuts. Every one of them. Even that nice Governor Huckabee. Yet Congressional leaders keep leaning forward into the wind, as though afraid reform is going to be knocked over. Media pundits keep leaning forward, into the wind that doesn't blow. There's an Emperor's New Clothes feel to the whole thing. Washington truly seems like a Potemkin Village at times like this.

But back to me.

Ritalin Wars Do Damage

One of the more interesting news items to hit our house recently was that MRIs confirm how ADHD impacts brain development.

Areas of the brain which are taught in kindergarten, those involved in social rules and cues, develop slowly. Areas of the brain dealing with higher functions develop normally.

This doesn't just explain the physiology of ADHD, but may also explain some of our social pathologies toward it. The idea of changing when things are taught is anathema to many people. ADHD kids are taught things they can't learn, then blamed later for having failed to learn them.

Unfortunately this isn't how the news was read by readers of Judith Warner (right) in The New York Times.  Let kids be kids, and they'll grow out of it, reared its ugly head, " a nation of boys drugged into conformity by knee-jerk liberal school systems."

Pl-ease!

You can't "let ADHD kids be kids," in that you can't just let them run around loose, unmanaged, and expect them to learn anything. You have to find some way to give them structure, to make them sit, before they can learn. And once they do sit, they learn faster than other kids, they hyper-focus and can become better at what interests them. The sooner you can start this process, the sooner strengths can be recognized and rewarded.

In my own case, knowing about my ADHD might have been the best medicine, only I wasn't given it. Instead, I was sent to a psychiatrist who knew nothing of the condition and an offer of Ritalin was rejected by my mother, who said  "you're not going to put my kid on drugs."

The result was a pretty hellish childhood, at least from the point of view of my own mind, one which I've only forgiven my parents for in the last decade, since I learned the cause of my trouble. Instead of being given help I was sent to a Baptist youth camp upstate, which taught Revelations until it came out of my ears, complete with movies. Step out of line and you'll fry in hell, they said, and here's what it will look like. Those images still inform my nightmares and leave me more than a little skeptical about churches and God, even though I know such communities can help whether or not you believe the doctrine.