Dana Blankenhorn

Dealing With China

I have a dog in the China policy fight.

Our 30 year-old son has a job waiting in Taiwan. He just needs a visa. Taiwan is slow-walking it because of COVID. China’s belligerence toward Taiwan means we have worries.

Most of what is being written about America’s China policy is bullshit. It’s Cold Warriors anxious for a fight, Republican apparatchiks looking to take Biden down, human rights activists who see China “getting away with it.”

Here’s what I think. Xi Jinping is in trouble. He pretends to be Mao but he’s not. There is opposition to his policies kept inside an opaque party. Jack Ma is still a party member.

China has huge debts. Property debts, government debts, corporate debts. There’s still room to maneuver because the Yuan trades at 6.45 to the dollar. That’s not a manipulation. If China were manipulating the currency it would trade at 7 to the dollar or more.

China has an energy crisis and an environmental crisis going on at the same time it’s the world’s biggest producer and buyer of solar energy. The floods that overtook the country this summer are a lot like California’s fires and Louisiana’s hurricanes, but they’re happening to 20 times more 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.

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.

Atlanta Density Done Right

If you want housing density, make neighborhoods more attractive.

That means adding small parks and amenities people can enjoy within an easy walk before you add housing. If the area doesn’t have them, build commercial-office structures with apartments on top. If you do this backwards, you’re building a slum.

Cities are changing. So is transportation. If I can get most of what I need within a mile, I can use an electric bike unless I need Costco. Maybe I won’t even need Costco. Then rent a van for vacations, use something like Uber for nights out, and we’re good.

Lots of urban people already live this way. The idea of maintaining a car when you’re only using it an hour per day (or less) is wasteful.

But this only works if your area is walkable. This only works if you can get coffee and essentials around the corner, if your lawyer or accountant is nearby, if you can walk your dog and find a park in 10 minutes, with trees and benches to sit on.

Atlanta knows this.

It’s All Biden’s Fault

I have a friend who is mad as hell at Joe Biden right now.

There’s a job waiting for him overseas. He’s fully vaccinated. But he can’t prove it to his new employer’s satisfaction. Even if the host country lets him in, he’ll have to be in quarantine for 2 weeks, at great expense, before he can start work.

How can this be, he asks? Why hasn’t the President mandated vaccine passports?

We all overestimate what a President can do. The media treats him as magic, the final authority, the one person responsible for everything.

But the President’s powers are severely circumscribed. Especially in this case.

There is no national medical database. There’s no federal control over health insurance. Under the McCarran-Ferguson Act , passed in 1945, health insurance is a state function. Even the decision upholding the Affordable Care Act held that states didn’t have to take its Medicaid expansion. Many still don’t.

Misunderstanding China

I think we fundamentally misunderstand China.

First, it’s not communist. Autocratic, yes. Authoritarian, certainly. Capricious and racist and a danger to its neighbors? Why, yes!

But China is capitalist as fuck. It’s a lot more capitalist than America. I was reminded of this recently writing about a company called SOS Limited. 

SOS is a Bitcoin miner. You can’t get more capitalist than that. When you visit SOS’ Web site , it’s a collection of gobbledygook and Internet buzzwords that will make you swoon. In America, SOS would have been shut down by regulators or judges years ago. In China, it’s business as usual, capitalism red in tooth and claw. I compare Chinese capitalism to Deadwood , the TV show. As Randy Newman might put it, “If Mao Zedong were alive, he’d be rolling around in his grave.”

China has been capitalist for less than half a century. A teenager in Shanghai lives in a futuristic world of apps and instant gratification. His grandmother, younger than even I am, grew up amid grinding poverty and arbitrary power. Talk about a generation gap!

The War of All Against All, or a War for All

There are two great struggles going on in today’s world.

There’s a War of All against All, which blames some “other” for local problems. Those people. That religion. That race. That set of beliefs. It’s their fault. Just get rid of them, in the War of All against All, and all will be well.

Then there’s the War for All. That’s the real struggle.

The War for All is what must be done to save mankind, to save life on Earth. We have weapons. We have the clouds, we have science, we have engineers, we have assets of all kinds, and we have the global popular will at our backs. We know what the enemy is, we have means with which to win this war, we just need to get to work on it. Now. Yesterday.

But we can’t come to grips with the War for All if we let the War of All Against All consume us. It’s the Muslims’ fault, the West, the democrats, shouts China. It’s the immigrants, the communists, the Democrats, shout Americans.

Even those leaders inclined toward the War for All, like Joe Biden, must for practical purposes bend the knee in the existential fight with “the other” or lose power. We’re sliding into a Cold War with China neither side can afford. Chinese cities are flooding, America’s west is burning, but both governments are more focused on confrontation.

What the Futurists Got Wrong

Futurists anticipated a lot of important things. They imagined space before we got there. They saw the environmental disaster of this century from a long way away.

But there are two things they got very, very wrong. Computing and resources.

Look at Star Trek. The communicators and tricorders used in the 1960s version of the show were primitive by early 21^st century standards. As one cartoon put it, “all it does is make phone calls?”

I don’t know of a single SciFi author of any renown who saw Moore’s Law coming. Most defined progress through manufacturing automation, which only improves arithmetically. Even those seeing improvements in computing didn’t see how Moore’s Law would take off in every direction computing touched. They didn’t see the iPhone and didn’t see the cloud.

William Gibson came closest. In Neuromancer he imagined something called “cyberspace.” But it was strangely primitive next to the modern Internet. He has since watched throughout his career as history caught up with him. His later novels seemed to take place in the present. His latest, Agency, is alt-history.

As wrong as futurists were on computing, they’re even more wrong on resources. Most writers, like Allen Steele, saw today’s Near Space era as a battle for resources. We would be running out of heavy metals, the thinking went, and ways to generate electricity. We would need to mine the asteroids.

Arborists on Offense

In cities built in forests, like Atlanta, it’s time for city arborists to go on offense.

For too long, they’ve been playing defense. That is, a developer (or homeowner) would decide to cut down some trees, and there would be a process the arborist could object to. That’s defense.

Offense is something else.

It starts with a much bigger budget. Use the money to hire summer workers who will comb the city on foot and by bike, with cameras, identifying lots without tree canopy. Fine those suckers, preferably through a property tax surtax from which they can’t escape. Those same summer workers can identify lots with a full tree canopy. These property owners can apply for a bonus, again in the form of a property tax abatement. The bonus would be smaller than the penalty, providing money for the arborist’s budget. The workers are also more likely to grow up as supporters of trees.

The arborist should also work with independent groups, like Trees Atlanta in Atlanta, to offer property owners advice on what trees they should plant where. Trees Atlanta can use existing programs to pay for those trees where people can’t afford them. And before poor people start futzing about huge trees falling on their houses, there are plenty of smaller trees to choose from.

We can argue about what defines canopy. Is it just the unbuilt areas of the property, or does it include roofs? Trees over a roof can cut cooling bills. But solar panels on a roof can do the same thing.

The arborist should also work with property owners and non-government agencies to get trees on roofs. Every flat roof can be a garden. Every small roof can have a canopy.

A city that wants to grow, expanding the amount of land that’s built-up, has a responsibility to let arborists go on offense. Otherwise, it’s part of the global warming problem. You don’t want that to be your political obituary. Or the actual one for your children.

Behind the Housing Crisis

Today’s housing crisis is the perfect storm of demographics and inefficiency driven by politics.

The demographic thing is easy. I’m 66 and I’m not moving. There are lots of us boomers. Staying alive. Enjoying our homes. This means fewer homes for younger people. Eventually we die and the baby bust enters the housing market. We become Japan. Just not now.

Housing has resisted Moore’s Law in 3 ways. Most of the costs are political.

1. State building codes keep out new building new technology. That’s politics.
2. Local zoning keeps out all but politically-connected builders. That’s politics.
3. Transactions resist automation. This can be fixed.

Right now, it can cost 15% of your equity to move. That’s about 6% on each side of the transaction, buying and selling, then 3% for the actual move. The idea of a starter home, a home for kids, then downsizing means 45% of your equity goes out the door during your life. The only people getting rich are the agents and brokers taking your money.