Dana Blankenhorn

The Electric Car Revolution

It amazes me how many people still underestimate the electric vehicle revolution.

The chip shortage means there’s not much product in 2021. The Trump counter-revolution is tamping down demand. Millions drive their gas guzzlers like oil was King. They sit at drive-throughs rather than get vaccinated. They go racing in the streets. A 16 year old ran over 6 cyclists in Texas while rolling coal.

That won’t stop change. The irony is that self-driving isn’t even the revolution.

Electric motors are simple to make, just two parts. They can be made in any size. A generator is just an electric motor running in reverse, turning mechanical power (as from a windmill) into electricity. You can make an electric motor small enough to run a watch. They’re also nearly twice as efficient as motors using fossil fuel.

Bottom Rail on Top

It’s a fight as old as the century. (There's a signed copy available at Amazon.Com.) 

Cable operator doesn’t want to pay too much for programming, lest they be forced to raise prices and lose customers. They play hardball with the cable programmer, who tells cable viewers they’re about to “lose access to your treasured programming” should a deal not be made.

Sometimes a deal is not made. Sinclair Broadcasting, now running the regional sports networks it bought from Fox and renamed Bally’s, has lost a lot of these deals. If I want to watch Atlanta United home games, I either take MARTA to the stadium or go to a bar.

It happens a lot with sports. That’s because sports programmers overpay for their rights, then jack up the price they’re charging operators (thus you). If MSG, which has rights to New York teams, can’t get a new deal from Comcast by September 30, for instance, you may miss the New York Red Bulls’ playoff push.  (It’s going nowhere, by the way.)

So, you have the big, bad cable operator against the poor, beleaguered programmer. Comcast is a meanie, you say.

But what if it were Comcast that was doing the begging? That’s happening right now.

Comcast has owned NBC Universal for a decade. It bought the asset from GE. (This was covered extensively on the documentary series 30 Rock.) It’s a sweet deal. Programmer NBC negotiates with operator Comcast for the best possible deal, then Comcast moves money from one pocket to the other.

Eternal White Majority

When my Irish ancestors came to America, this is how they were portrayed.

The whole point of the Scorsese movie Gangs of New York was to illustrate the contempt with which the Anglo-American majority treated Irish immigrants. They saw them as black.

The same thing happened later, with the Italians. Then with the Russians. But today you wouldn’t see Bruce Springsteen or Jerry Seinfeld portrayed as anything but white. Like Alec Baldwin. Like me.

When people write that America will soon be “majority non-white” this is what they’re ignoring. People can easily be made “white” when it’s convenient. By being made “white,” these same people can then look down upon other people, darker people.

Who is Xi Jinping?

What kind of man is Xi Jinping? It’s the most important question in the world right now.  

Cold warriors want you to believe that Xi is the reincarnation of Josef Stalin, an absolute dictator bent on world domination. A lot of big investors believe this. That’s why the values of the biggest Chinese companies, the ones I call “Cloud Emperors,” have been cut in half this year.

But China’s policies toward tech aren’t extreme, not by the standards of American liberalism. Let small suppliers choose their markets? Enforce antitrust laws against predatory acquisitions? Raise taxes, so prosperity flows from the middle class out instead of from the top down? Why, yes.

It’s true Bernie Sanders would never give the state a monopoly on personal data. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t dare limit children to an hour of screen time a day. China’s “Great Firewall” runs both ways. Western data can’t get in, and Chinese can’t get their data out. This includes financial data, as the Bitcoin ban makes it harder for capital to flee.

But Xi’s got bigger problems than anyone here imagines.

Despite being the biggest producer of solar panels and electric cars, China is still like the Cuyahoga River in Randy Newman’s song Burn On.  The Evergrande Crisis, $300 billion in unpayable debt that must be wound down, is like the 2008 crisis that nearly took down the U.S. economy.

Young workers are revolting against a work culture called “996” – working 9 to 9 6 days a week. Those are the people whose support Xi is coveting. The people who grew up under a rising tide of prosperity since 1978 are no longer willing to pay the price  while the economic elites have everything all to themselves. If Xi stood in an honest election, I think he’d win.

The Inflation Opportunity

A lot of people are complaining about inflation right now.

In our technology age, this is nonsense.

Consider energy prices. Oil and gas prices are rising fast. But this creates an enormous incentive for anyone building solar panels or wind turbines. It blows through political objections to their installation. It brings capital to start-ups with new ideas that will dramatically increase harvesting efficiency. Harvesting energy, and increasing efficiency in our use of electricity, drive down demand and, thus, prices. The end of oil is one of the decade’s great opportunities and now is the time to seize it.

Electrify My World

When we moved to our current house in 1983, the heavy rail MARTA station next door seemed futuristic. Between 1983 and 2020 my wife took the train to work nearly every day, while I worked from home.

Today MARTA and the urban design it was meant to serve are obsolete.

Electric motors can be made in any size. Batteries are more efficient and cheaper. The cloud means warehouses can break bulk for less than physical stores. The pandemic let my wife recapture 3 hours each day, for chores and for living. She’s not giving that time back.

Work can happen anywhere. The world I wrote about 30 years ago in my book A Guide to Field Computing has arrived. An iPad can do the work of a PC, a phone, and a TV, plus it’s rugged enough for use in a manufacturing plant or warehouse.

Xi is in Trouble

Here’s something no one will tell you today.

Xi Jinping is in trouble.

There is an assumption in the West that, because China is run as an authoritarian state, and Xi Jinping is the President of that state, that he can do anything he wants.

I don’t buy it. The country is too big and too complicated for that to be the case.

Xi has been messing with China’s economy for a year now. Everything he does seems to make things worse. Going after the country’s Cloud Emperors – Alibaba, TenCent, and Baidu – made political sense. Most actions are in line with what western trustbusters would like to do with our Cloud Czars – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. But investors have been losing money.

Westerners don’t understand how much power the Cloud Emperors have. They dominate the entire economy, not just the cloud. Young Chinese are, if anything, more addicted to their phones than we are. They’re overworked, their homes are tiny, many are still living with their parents. The consumerism pushed by the economy, through the Cloud Emperors, has gotten pushback from millions who resent the “996” lifestyle pushed by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma. The 996 lifestyle means working from 9 to 9, 6 days a week. This is a 72 hour workweek, not counting the time spent commuting or preparing for work. And for what, they ask?

Xi has reacted to this by attacking the phone-based playstyle that makes all this tolerable. Telling China’s kids that they can only be on their phones for an hour each day is what American parents were doing in the 1960s, attacking rock and roll. It’s out of touch.

It’s 1969 All Over Again

One advantage to aging is you get to see patterns in the history before you.

1968, for instance. It was a terrible year. I was there. There were riots, and assassinations, and a whole lot of young men who’d been drafted died in Vietnam. Then came the crisis election and we got Nixon.

Beginning in 1968, politics turned slowly to the right and continued to march that way until the vast majority of those alive in 1968 were dead.

Then came 2020. It was a terrible year. I was there. There were demonstrations, and environmental destruction. A whole lot of people died of COVID. Then came a crisis election and we got Biden.

Yeah, But…Watch Out

I hate to sound like some 66 year old curmudgeon, but I was taught a different style of newswriting.

The reverse pyramid had you describe the event in one sentence, then make the most important point about it in another sentence, and so on until the story was told. This let the desk snip the story off at any point and still have its essence, which would be laid down into print.

What I preferred and practice was the magazine style of a circular story. You hit them with a hard lead paragraph, to grab the reader and draw them in. You walk around the story, describing it from every angle. Then you deliver a tag ending, a thank you for reading that puts the whole thing into context. You ensnare the reader, but you also satisfy them.

Today everything is written in a different style. I call it “yeah, but…watch out.”

In this style every sentence, starting with the first, includes a contrary thesis. That is, unless it’s bad news, in which case you pile more on top like whipped cream on a sundae.

The Decade of Immersive Technology

Back in 2019, while at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, I wrote about three key trends that would define the 2020s.

They were the end of oil, the Machine Internet, and DNA as a programming language .

Since then, there has been progress in all three areas. The pandemic, and resulting parts shortages, have delayed but won’t prevent the end of oil. You can see the Machine Internet in all the hype over 5G. The Moderna vaccine is indeed using DNA as a programming language.

Turns out there’s a 4^th trend, and there may be more.