Dana Blankenhorn

World War III, The Internet War

World War III is an Internet war. It has been ongoing for over a decade.

When the conflict was between countries like Pakistan and Ireland, or Ukraine and Russia, we could afford to ignore it.

Then it came to our own shores. November 8, 2016 was this war’s Pearl Harbor.

Yet we still haven’t reacted, because once the enemy is in the tent the media thinks going after them is friendly fire.

There’s nothing friendly about it.

Sure, there are efforts underway at Google and Facebook to boost “real news” and dissuade “fake news.” Yes, there are efforts underway in Congress to control online political spending. Yes, there is the Mueller probe.

But these are nothing. We still see the Internet War as something we can stop with higher firewalls, or bigger budgets.

We can’t.

The Streaming Crash of 2019

For the last several years, a lot of companies have been trying to fit through a very narrow door.

That door is streaming.

The success of Netflix, and of podcast stars like Marc Maron, has caused a heart attack in the entertainment world. Suddenly everyone, and every company, is aiming for a taste of this action.

They can’t all get it.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to listen to a fraction of the podcasts available now. I have a half-dozen in my phone, and I can’t get to all of them. Long-haul truck drivers can get to a lot, and people who work as security guards may listen for 8 hours per day. But a single Joe Rogan podcast can run 4 hours. Maron does 3 hours every week.

CBS, NPR, the BBC and others are hitching their wagon to podcasts. Spotify plans to spend $500 million on podcasts, an industry that generates $700 million in annual revenue.

These numbers make no sense.

Fixing Health Care

The key to fixing our broken health care system is deceptively simple.

Give those who collect the income firm control of the outgo. There is no such thing as an unlimited draw from a limited pool.

We know this works by looking at the market as it exists right now.

The Veterans Administration takes the biggest risks, people who’ve served our country. They come to the system with terrible problems, and they age out in terrifying ways. Yet the per-patient cost of delivering health care to these people is a fraction of the cost of our other delivery systems, because the government controls both income and the outgo.

The VA is a single-payer system. It gets its money direct from the government, it has a clear mission and requirement to treat people, and it can bargain for the best prices. VA hospitals aren’t fancy, many of the doctors are new to the profession, the staff is stressed, and the whole system is rickety, but it works. And when the Trump people try to privatize it, when they seek to destroy it, this will become very clear to all veterans, even those who would otherwise love them some Trump. They won’t love them some Trump, or any other privatization-mad Republican, ever again if he succeeds in destroying their VA.

The Google Primary

One reason I’ve always been confident that Trump was doomed was because history has generational cycles, and the rising generation hates him.

Another reason is that American politics are based on economic cycles, and the economic future hates him.

America runs by the Golden Rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. The business of America is business, and the business with the highest value-add calls the tune.

Back in 1979 this was the oil industry. Jimmy Carter defied oil with a cardigan sweater and a call for conservation. They buried him.