Dana Blankenhorn

Phone Dependence

Nothing has changed our daily lives, in all my 68 years on this planet, so much as the smartphone.

I learned that the hard way when I lost my phone last weekend.

First came the fear. All my passwords are there. My money is accessible there. I must cancel the service, but I don’t have a phone to do it with.

My wife and I drove home in a panic. She tried calling my carrier as we drove, but the proof of identity I needed to start the process was on my desktop. (Imagine if I didn’t have a desktop.)

Fortunately, we weren’t far from home. (What if we were?) On arrival I closed out the phone service quickly. I even ordered a new phone, coming in 5 days, at nominal cost. That phone will have a SIM card to get me most of my apps, thanks to the cloud.

Oligarchs are Marxists

Rich dudes all claim a capitalist back story, red in tooth and claw.

But once they got it made, all oligarchs are Russian. They divide markets among themselves to make sure no one below can get in. This is why we need strict anti-trust laws.

Don’t believe me? Look at sports.

Every American sports league is run on a communist basis. Owners are guaranteed a profit. Revenue is shared, and costs are capped. Supply is artificially limited, so that governments can be extorted for new palaces the oligarchs control.

Americans have become blind to this. But when you get to soccer, the world’s game, the blinders come off.

That’s because in most of the world, where capital is limited, and where the word competition means something, the soccer business really is capitalist. Winners get most of the money, including the TV money. Losers get drummed out of the league and (eventually) out of the business.

Open Source in an AI World

The history of generative AI begins with a betrayal. 

OpenAI, meant to give developers a high and rising model for AI development, went closed source and got into bed with Microsoft. Now Microsoft is leading the charge to regulate AI, raising costs for competitors and creating closed source lock-in. The company wants licensing for all AI, bureaucratic delays before anyone or anything can compete with its proprietary offerings.

The current listing for the Google AI page claims it offers an “ecosystem of open-source tools, datasets, APIs and more.” But open source is never mentioned on the page itself. Google, like Microsoft, now thinks AI is too dangerous to be put into the community’s hands.  

If it’s that dangerous, guys, then ban it. Forbid machine learning, forbid progress. If code exists, someone will try to misuse it. That’s part of the law of code. The only answer is for code not to exist.

America’s Two Car Markets

The U.S. has two car markets. Its auto industry serves just one of them.

This was made crystal clear recently when General Motors said it will discontinue the Chevy Bolt, its electric sedan. It did the same with gas-powered vehicles years ago.

Sedans, crossovers, and mini-SUVs are what people drive in cities. Where roads are thin, families are small, and trips are short, you don’t need anything more. A city car will sit in a driveway 23 hours out of 24. This is what I call the mid-market, cars costing $25-35,000, plus tax, title, and license.

Contrast this with the suburban and exurban car markets, which U.S. makers do serve. They’re huge, like tanks. They’re ridiculously overpowered. When they’re electric, they weigh several tons. They destroy roads, and anything else they’re driven on.

The Wealth of AI

The battle over who gets what when productivity blossoms has been going on since the Renaissance made learning cheap 500 years ago. It accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, accelerated again with the Computer Age, and again with the Internet. It’s accelerating again.

The wealth of AI is the rocket fuel of Moore’s Law.

The late, great Gordon Moore was an engineer, who saw his theory as a self-limiting phenomenon. In various editions of my book on the subject I have tried to explain how this constant, exponential improvement works outward, from processors, to everything silicon touches.

Like software.

Software is still mostly written by hand. In the 20^th century productivity improved only in line with the tools used to write it. The 21^st century brought Moore’s Law to software. Once software goes online, in a managed cloud, it’s instantly accessible to everyone. All the barriers created over a century to cordon off markets disappear. Some can be rebuilt, but at an enormous cost to efficiency.

Open source is a big part of this new Moore’s Law of Software. The more hands on the code, the faster the code improves. Software communities mean everyone is building, together, on a constantly rising platform. There’s no more reinventing the wheel.

Media is Community

The destruction of the media by social networking was self-inflicted.

It was caused by publishers forgetting what their business is about.

They thought it was about advertising.

Here’s what I was taught in 1978, at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Organize and advocate a place, an industry, or a lifestyle. Sell ads against that audience at a premium price. Demonstrate to businesses how your paper reaches their target. Profit.

It’s this misunderstanding that led journalism astray when the Web was spun, a generation ago. I saw this coming and warned against it as loudly as I could. I argued with my teachers that the Internet would create more jobs for journalists over time.

Harbingers of Change

There are lots of harbingers that change is in the air.

You just don’t read about them.

If you look at polls, or headlines from various states, you’ll think Democrats are on the run and Republicans have absolute impunity. Polls are mostly statistical noise it takes an expert to understand. It’s what a party does with its impunity, and how folks in a democracy react, that decides the future.

I don’t care that Trump was indicted, or that Jean Carroll won her suit, or the George Santos was indicted. I don’t care about the latest stupidity from Meatball Ron or the chair-bound governor of the Great State of Texas.

Things Are About to Happen

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. 

A political campaign can start only after policies are implemented.

In 2023, a lot of things are about to happen that will have profound impacts on how people vote next year.

• Ukraine is coming for Russia. We’ll know a lot more about that by fall.
• Jack Smith is coming for Trump. We’ll know a lot more about that by fall.
• Gun, abortion, and education policies are being implemented by states and we’ll know a whole lot more about their effect by fall.

I haven’t even mentioned the weather, which will show in no uncertain terms just how damaging our reliance on fossil fuels has become. Droughts and hurricanes will wreak terrible havoc on the whole planet this summer, and on Americans too.

The Alzheimer’s Scam

A decade ago, when I first returned to the business beat, a company called Dendreon began pushing a non-cure for prostate cancer called Provenge. 

The idea was to fit a therapy specifically to a patient’s DNA. This cost a lot of money. While Provenge did extend life, it was only by a few months. For this Dendreon wanted $93,000. 

If I had all the money in the world, I’d pay that. But if every prostate cancer patient could force insurers and government agencies to pay that, the system would go broke. You can’t have an unlimited draw from a limited pool of funds. (To the right, at the upper right, is my late mother. I learned recently she taught the first "integrated" second grade class in California history, in 1947. I am very proud of her.)

Fast forward to today. Eli Lilly and Biogen have developed drugs to treat Alzheimer’s Disease.

Save the Kindles

You can be comfortable in a big company. But you can also miss opportunities because they don’t look big enough.

Take Amazon.Com. They’re on track to bring in $500 billion this year. About half will be in merchandise sales. The other half will be in services of various kinds. The stock fell after earnings because the cloud unit projected slower growth, some of it driven by its own effort to help customers lower their cloud costs, some by the cost of adding AI software to AWS. Overall, Amazon stock is a buy.

My problem is Amazon has become such a sprawling business that some divisions are just too small to merit attention.

Take the Kindle book division. This is funny because Amazon started as a bookstore.  

I like the Kindle. An e-book reader is lighter than almost any book. You can use it with the lights off. A Fire Tablet can cost just $40 and serve as a personal TV. You can get refurbished Kindle readers dirt cheap.

E-books make printed books seem an environmental disaster. E-books also save money. Amazon offers a $10/month library service called Kindle Unlimited. I consider it a bargain. It offers lots of e-books at $1 to $3.

But in all the efforts by some states to ban books and close libraries, you haven’t heard a word from Amazon. That’s because the Kindle business is so small, by Amazon standards, that the company would rather keep quiet than pursue an opportunity that might be controversial.