Dana Blankenhorn

2020: The Crisis

“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” 

Thomas Paine (right) died penniless in 1809, the forgotten Founder. He died that way because he was a writer, not a politician. His writing was a demand, not a request or a negotiation. The words above were read to Washington’s men before they crossed the river at Trenton. Paine made ours a revolution, not just for the patrician, but the working man. Not just for the General, but for the private. Not just for those who would lead, but those who would die. 

Every crisis has casualties. The year 1968 was marked by terrible casualties. The Great Depression and the following war killed tens of millions of people. The Civil War killed 2% of this country’s people, mostly young men in the prime of life.

Compared to that, the Crisis caused by Trump should be easy to overcome, its casualties minimal. But that won’t be. His Presidency reeks of all the worst in our history. It combines the greed of those around Warren Harding, the weakness of James Buchanan, and the racism of Andrew Jackson. The crimes are all done in plain sight, as Nixon’s crimes were done.

We’ve had some bad men in the White House, but never one whose soul belonged to another country. Trump is Putin’s man. It’s that simple. We beat Russia in the Cold War, but revenge is a dish served cold, and Trump is Russia’s revenge.

The year to come will be all about Trump. It can’t be about anything else. Can America throw off a foreign dictator when he’s already in the White House? Will we stand, once again, against the racism, the misogyny, and the brutality our forefathers fought against? Are we Americans or docile Soviets?

Against the Mullahs, against Moolah, against the militarists, the three arms of the triad that has kept the developing world in bondage for centuries, it seems we have only words, faith, and hope. The question seems simple. Whose side are you on – America’s or Russia’s? But those who fear the loss of their power over other races, and over women, won’t be swayed by words. It’s going to take the hard work of all of us to win this, and even if we win the battle the war to save the planet will have just begun.

Dorsey of Africa

Everyone’s scared of China. Everyone thinks China is about to take over the world.

It’s not.

China is aging faster than we are. China’s authoritarian rulers stop new ideas from developing. They’re wasting just as much money, and potential, in Xinjiang and Hong Kong as we are with our Gulag and border wall.

In an age where human capital is the gating factor to economic growth, there is only one name for young men and women to know.

Africa.

This is not just about Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey’s plans to spend half his time there next year. It’s about what is there whether he’s there or not.

Solving Health Care

The health care crisis is curable.

It doesn’t require a government takeover. Most of the next year’s debates over health care will talk around the problem. They’ll be the same-old tired arguments over public vs. private control.

In the end it doesn’t matter. You can’t have an unlimited draw from a limited pool of funds. Make that the key to policy and you can develop sound policy. You don’t have a choice about buying health care. You don’t even have much choice on who you buy it from.

The solution has three parts.

Managed care. Bargain for drugs. Guarantee competition.

Let’s start with managed care.

Where Have You Gone, Al Gore?

The Sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock.

Yet in 2019 California’s electricity was still running through a centralized system that was obsolete 20 years ago, when then-Vice President Al Gore coined the term “enternet,” predicting renewables could make the energy grid resilient. 

Now that his vision is possible, he’s silent.

Ordinary people are now way ahead institutions of this. Residential solar is growing at 30% per year.  The fastest growing occupation over the next decade is expected to be that of a solar power installer.  Old solar panels are even recyclable, into anodes for new solar panels.

Fall of the Moolahs

A political tsunami is most likely when Wall Street gets out of step with the economy.

While it’s not yet showing up in the statistics, the U.S. economy is already in recession.

If you import or export, your business is down. If you’re a retailer, your business may be gone. If you’re a farmer, only the government is holding you up. If you’re a manufacturer and you’re not named Boeing, you’re struggling. If you’re in transportation you’re hurting. If you’re in the oilpatch, you’re dying.

The reason this isn’t apparent can be seen in the latest headlines from Maersk, the Danish shipping company. Their sales are down, but so are their costs, so their profits are up, and so is their stock. 

How can profits be rising, and thus stock values, if we’re in a recession?

Heidelberg One: LaLa Lab

First in a series of essays showing how my book, Living with Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future, interacts with the bleeding edge of software development at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, where some of the biggest brains in software history try to inspire the next generation, and be inspired by it. 

To learn more about the book, especially if you're an agent or publisher, write me and we'll talk

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I got a demonstration of just how powerful Moore’s Law of Software has become at LaLa Lab, an exhibit being held in conjunction with the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.

LaLaLab is subtitled The Mathematics of Music. It demonstrated the value of Digital Signal Processor, or encoders as Texas Instruments’ competitors call the. DSPs turn analog input into digital output or vice versa. Here they’re used not just to move the music, but to graphically show what’s going underneath, and let you interact with it.

A microphone and some instruments demonstrates how this works with a Fast Fourier Transform. Speech, the input of a variety of instruments, or just playing music comes up as beautiful diagrams ,showing just how “saturation arithmetic” fills a computer with input over time. The degree to which a note is played during each bit of a second is shown as white against the black of time itself. Each channel of input is separated, showing how a DSP can pick up a variety of types of sounds separately, giving a mixer control of it.

Nearby is a demonstration of how easy it is to control music. A tablet has sensors which turn your waving hand into output, “conducting” music from Chopin or Beethoven. The hand’s movements, and the system’s response, are displayed on a screen overhead. 

There’s a lot to learn here about math, about music and about outputting results on a screen so people can understand it. I asked one of the people manning the booth how you can get the software. It’s all online, downloadable. All music teachers, or math teachers, need to do is build a curricula around it, using the extensive documentation in the booklet she handed me and the tools at Imaginary.org.

 

Trump is Not Unusual

Lost in The Eternal Now, reporters make One Big Mistake in writing about Donald Trump.

They call him unique.

There is nothing unique about Donald Trump. Yes, he is attempting to overthrow gains the American people won from tyranny over the course of 100 years.

But all those fights were against other Americans, and American governments. We have been here before. We have always been here.

Let’s not even talk about slavery or the Indian genocide. Let’s not even play Ragtime, the book, movie or musical where a black man is put down while a white immigrant rises.

Let’s start with that great liberal hero. Woodrow Wilson.

Twilight of the Cloud Czars

In 2019 five companies dominate the global economy.

I call them the Cloud Czars.

They are Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

These companies have a combined market cap of over $4 trillion. The smallest of them, Facebook, is worth more than AT&T and the Walt Disney Co. combined.

The Cloud Czars dominate retailing. They dominate media. They dominate computing and communications. According to politicians of both the left and the right, this means they’re illegal monopolists and should be broken up.

This idea is dumber than anything Donald Trump ever said.

The Ghost of the Eternal Now

I’ve been a reporter for over 40 years, and I’m still angry at the same thing that upset me in journalism school. (That's me on my first journalism job, wondering why someone is taking my picture.)

This is the attitude of an eternal now. It’s driven by this old chestnut – a journalist is someone who works for someone who buys ink by the barrel. The key to that sentence is the phrase “who works for someone.” Journalists are supposed to leave their minds and hearts at the door of the newsroom.

Reporters are taught to have no sense of history, or of the future. Mainly we’re taught to pretend we know nothing, and everything we’re told is equally valid. As a result, most reporting has no context, and we can’t call out stupid when it’s right in front of us.

That’s how Trump gets away with it. Any reporter who likens what he’s doing to Jefferson Davis or Adolph Hitler is accused of malpractice by agents of stupid at The New York Times. We’re just supposed to print what he says and repeat what he does, like good little stenographers. Then let Bret Stephens or Ross Douthat tell us what it means. Everything’s fine.

It’s even worse in business, which is my beat. Because we are taught to ignore the broad sweep of business history, we send readers down blind alleys. We pretend that making cookies is as cutting edge as writing software.

The past and the future have always been there in front of us. It was clear in 1979 that oil was taking over from manufacturing, but people reported from Detroit then as if that city could be saved. It was also clear that oil was a boom-and-bust business, but I was told to report from Houston that the boom would go on forever.

The 2020 Game

The Tell on what will happen in 2020 came in late July of 2019.

Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, attorney general William Barr and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin (far right), issued existential threats against the Cloud Czars. Under Trump’s orders.

The Cloud Czars, for those unfamiliar with my current work at InvestorPlace, are Microsoft, Amazon.Com, Google, Apple and Facebook. As technology has come to dominate the economy, the Czars have come to dominate technology.

They’re the Cloud Czars because the tool which dominates technology is cloud computing. It combines parallel processing with virtual operating systems and open source techniques to hold down costs.