Dana Blankenhorn

#NeverAgain

If #NeverAgain doesn’t apply to everyone it’s just special pleading.

This statement that nearly got me fired last week, from both my jobs. It’s a stance that, if made to a conservative Israeli in 2021, gets you branded an anti-semite.

Of course, even that term is loaded. Anti-semitism refers to prejudice against any semitic people. Palestinians are semites. So are all Arabs. How Israelis can commit daily outrages against Palestinians and call their critics anti-semite is beyond me. But there it is.

In saying this, I’m not denying the Holocaust or diminishing it. Most of the people I grew up around were children of survivors, or the soldiers who liberated them. But genocide is not the unique property of Jews. Armenians were victims of a genocide years before Hitler, no matter how much Turks reject that even today.

White Americans committed genocide against the native Americans, a fact obvious whenever you look into the eyes of Mexican immigrants. Most are descended from Indians. We killed ours. The Spanish just enslaved theirs.

America’s genocide, meant to create “living room” for European settlers, became Hitler’s model for his eastern war, German “lebensraum.” Another American idea that turned out to be nonsense was “eugenics,” the idea that certain races were genetically superior. (In fact, genetic diversity makes a species stronger.) Hitler adopted that, too.

The Holocaust was born in America.

We still hear echoes of it in Republican rhetoric. They won’t be “replaced?” By whom? Immigrants are as human as Tucker Carlson.

Genocide is more than prejudice. It’s more than oppression, or murder. It’s mass murder, meant to exterminate an entire race of people. Americans are committing genocide as I write this. We make guns into totems and kill 100 Americans each day with them. We ignore science and have lost 550,000 in one year. Why won’t Republicans speak out? Because most of the victims are black or brown or immigrants. Never again? Really?

Class Struggle in the 2020s

In the 2020s there are generally two classes of people. (The Class Sketch was first broadcast in 1966. See the whole sketch here.) 

There are the highly educated with their hands on the code. Then there are the uneducated whose actions are controlled by the code.

The result is that instead of having three economic classes in America we mostly have two. Both sides feel bad about it.

The controlling class, understanding that human potential has value, support all kinds of aid to the controlled. We’re liberals. We’re “woke.” We oppose discrimination because it’s inefficient. We support education because we want more of us. Health care, infrastructure, all the social costs that let us focus on the work we do rather than the rest of life, we’re all for it.

The controlled class sees accepting aid as demeaning and they have they pride. It may be all they have, but it’s a potent political force. Knowing that they lack skills, they’re also deathly afraid of being replaced. They lash out in anger at anyone they think might do this – at minorities, at gays, at smart women. They’re focused on protecting what they have.

Labor Troubles

Labor troubles are coming, but they’re not what you think.

We’re being told that the problem is unemployment. That’s temporary. Much more dangerous is the coming problem of labor shortage, especially in high skill positions

This problem has been with technology for decades. Want to know why a skilled computer programmer makes six figures, or why a trained biochemist has no trouble getting a job? It’s the market.

But the pandemic has made some permanent changes. Millions of baby boomers have been locked down, many with jobs, some without. We’re nearly all in our 60s now, and it makes you think. Do we really want to expire at our desks? Or do we want to smell the flowers first? A lot of skilled workers are going to exit the work force in the next few years. We won’t be coming back.

Then, for our elders, there’s the long slide. As we age into our 70s, 80s and 90s, we need more services to get through the day. How much will they cost? Where will they come from? I think some boomers’ “million-dollar retirement” won’t be as plush as we think. Not that those having to wipe the shit off our asses will be happy about it.

The Big Political Story of 2021

Money is walking away from the GOP. (Shown, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.)

This has been going on for some time. Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston and New York, the places where money is made, generally vote for Democrats. They do this because Democrats deliver what technology wants. Tech runs on brains. It’s always in the market for more of them. Brains need training, they need to be empowered, they want to be recruited, they like to be comfortable.

This is the big economic change of our time, a move from resources to brains as the gating factor to growth. Resources need force to secure them. Manufacturing needs hands to run machines. Tech needs brains.

The news hasn’t gotten to everyone. Wall Street sharpies think they know more than the market. There are tech executives who want to corner the market on brains and think other brains are a threat.

These views are wrong for the economy.

Still. It’s hard for money to switch sides. The Republican Party is the natural home of money. That’s been true since the 1860s. For generations, however, money sided with progress. Progress is the root of the word progressive. Both Roosevelts ran as progressives. They wanted progress. So did most businesspeople.

The Greediest Generation

We are closer to the start of 2030 than we are to the heart of 2010.

In the year 2030 the average baby boomer (that’s me) turns 75. Millennials will be entering menopause.

More important, labor of all kinds will be in short supply.

I’ve talked before about the talent shortage. Programmers and scientists can name their price. Locking the door to emigrating talent is economic suicide.

But the same problem will also exist with ordinary labor.

Elizabeth Warren on Tech Street

Ronald Reagan was not oil’s first choice in 1980.

John Connally was first. George H.W. Bush was second. Oil accepted Reagan and, through Bush, won political power for a generation, power it still has in the face of tech’s need for human capital.

So it is that we come to the 2020 game. Tech has been in the economic driver’s seat for 12 years, but in the political back seat for three. Tech has suffered for this. Its priorities have been ignored. It has been scapegoated by an Administration working in the interests of oil.

Technology is Democratic. It’s not a question of who tech prefers. Tech needs a seat at the political table, it will have a seat at the table, and that table will be Democratic. Assuming, of course, that democracy survives.

Tolerance, Technology, and the American Hitler

Donald J. Trump is the closest thing to Hitler America has yet produced.

He is the crisis. In becoming the primary object and fascination of the world, Trump has revealed both his character and that of everyone supporting him.

He is a racist. He is a fascist. He seeks dominion over the world only to seize its wealth for himself and his friends. His allies use power only as a tool against other religions, or other races, or against strawmen (and women) of their own devising. They beat the chains of their followers into swords.

We know this, now. In the summer of 2019, many believe there’s nothing to be done, that his final victory is inevitable. They see Democrats as feckless and divided. More important they see technology as Trump’s ally.

It’s this last point I come to challenge. While there are features in technology that assist any surveillance state, and the war of all against all, technology as an industry is the greatest boon to human liberty yet created.

The reason, as I’ve written here many times, is that human capital is now the gating factor to economic growth. It’s the human mind’s ability to conceive of new problems, and of ways to solve those problems, that delivers economic growth. Access to capital, and to other minds that might execute on plans, becomes a multiplying factor.

But first comes the idea. First comes the experiment. First comes science, and engineering. Later you need money, and marketing. All these things are maximized where human minds are free, where capital can choose its own home, and where people can choose their own leaders.

Capitalism. Democracy. Liberty. The more of these you have, within an ordered system, the more growth you have. It’s the need for order, for restraint, that has many people confused into thinking China’s rise at America’s expense is inevitable.

The Darkness

The Darkness is always around us.

It searches for us in the dark teatime of the soul. It tries to drag us down into nothingness. Usually we resist it.

Not always.

Wealth and fame are no immunity from the Darkness. Talent doesn’t make you immune. Knowing it, being able to name it, doesn’t mean it won’t come for you. I’m not immune to it.

We don’t know what leads people to choose eternal Darkness. We can’t know. It’s a secret they take to the grave. As with mass shootings, we’re desperate to know, but our souls are private worlds.

We think celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade are special, but they’re just people. We also think America is special. The lesson of our time is that it’s not.

The idea of America has always been built on its denying the Darkness, but Darkness has always been here. It was a snake under the table when the Constitution was being written. It remained there, despite everything, after the Civil War. It remained there after World War I and World War II, spreading its tentacles through the “Banana Republics” of Latin America. The Darkness wasn’t destroyed by the Civil Rights movement.  It just went underground.

While we pretended to have beaten the Darkness, it continued to grow in the American soul, despite the warnings of George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower that trying to police the world or build a military-industrial complex threatened everything we called our light. Now it has come out to play.

Moore’s Third Law

Almost 20 years ago I began the most important work of my career.

My working title was "Moore’s Lore,” stories about Moore’s Law. A "marketing expert" insisted I put my name in the title. 

The original Moore’s Law, described by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore for Electronics magazine in 1965,  estimated that circuit density could increase for 10 years, at the same cost, and indeed by 1975 Intel was shipping chips that had over 64,000 circuits on them. Moore then “formalized” the law, saying he expected density to continue doubling, at the same pace, for as far as he could foresee. 

That’s Moore’s First Law. Moore never mentioned a second law, but it’s there.

Moore’s Second Law is that just as circuit complexity grows exponentially, so does its capital cost. While you can make up this cost by making more chips, it means the chip-making business is consolidating. Today there are only four manufacturers of microprocessors – Samsung, China’s Taiwan Semiconductor, the Middle East’s Global Foundries, and Intel itself.

The implications of Moore’s Second Law, as it continues grinding down, is that chip production becomes a national security issue.

Ever since Moore’s 1965 article came out, cynics have been trying to call a halt to Moore’s Law. As circuit lines get close together their distance can’t be measured, the cynics note. Every increased expense or shortfall in decreasing circuit size is seen to be evidence that the “Law” is “ending.”

The 1978 Game: Our New Political Overlords

At this point in 1978, no one in politics saw oil coming.

I was getting ready to graduate from Northwestern, and would spend the next several months, mostly unemployed, back home in Houston, the capital of oil, before getting the job resulting in the picture to the right. People were becoming accustomed to the strange man in the White House and his scandals. His “Georgia Gang” of cronies was being derided as a political gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

But beneath the surface, economic change was brewing. Oil had been handed political power under Lyndon Johnson and found a ready embrace in the Nixon years thanks to former Governor John Connally, whose decision to switch sides seemed at the time like a small story but would later prove massive.

Oil didn’t want to become a Republican bulwark. They wanted to play both sides against each other. Carter, and his more liberal detractors, forced them into the Republican camp. During the 1978 campaign, and beyond, this would prove decisive.

We’re at a similar historical junction now. Washington is becoming accustomed to a strange man in the White House, and his scandals. His “Wall Street Gang” is being derided as a political gang that can’t shoot straight.

But beneath the surface, change is again brewing.