Month: February 2009

Congress completed its attack on the U.S. economy today by voting (in the House) to delay the shutdown of analog TV broadcasting. If you were hoping to get a job building, installing, or maintaining new services that used the freed-up spectrum, hope no longer. The spectrum, and therefore any new jobs created by its new licensees, won’t be opened up until mid-June. An auction for a tiny portion of the TV spectrum raised $20 billion (source). Let’s assume that auctioning the entire spectrum would generate at least $100 billion in revenue for the Federal Government. Let’s further assume that the spectrum license is one third of the total capital investment required for a new wireless service. That means that, had analog TV been shut down, companies would have invested a further $200 billion in planning, design, equipment, software, marketing, customer service facilities, etc. That’s real capital investment that should be creating long-term jobs. There probably isn’t that much actual investment in the latest $800+ billion “stimulus” bill going through Congress. We would need to expand the current bill to $1.6 trillion in order to undo the damage done by the delay in the shutdown of analog TV.

Let’s also look at the global warming and air pollution angle. A VHF station transmitter will typically deliver more than 300 KW of output power. Assuming some level of losses, we’re talking about 0.5 megawatt per TV station to run the analog transmitter. Multipled by the more than 1000 television stations nationwide, even accounting for the fact that many are lower power UHF stations, we would need a good-sized coal-fired power plant running 24 hours per day to supply this load. Given that we’re running these huge transmitters for no particular reason, we’re going to need even more elaborate schemes to combat CO2 pollution.

Finally let’s look at the electronics retailers, some of which are going through Chapter 7 liquidation proceedings right now, notably Circuit City. Under the original plan they would have had their best day ever on February 17 as the analog TVs stopped receiving signals through their rabbit ears. They would have sold converter boxes, new digital TVs, cable subscriptions, satellite subscriptions. What do they get now? The same temporary boost in sales, but three or four months after most have gone out of business.

Can anyone think of a more effective way to shrink the U.S. economy?

[To those who worry about the effects of a TV shutdown on the poor: more than 97 percent of U.S. households classified as being in poverty own a color television and this number was about the same even when TVs were much more expensive. Americans at all income levels seem to be able to obtain necessary television gear.]

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What would you call people who pay $25,000 for a nine-week course of study with a collection of Silicon Valley optimists? “Singularly Stupid”? That may explain the name for the new Singularity University (SF Chronicle article).

The idea of the singularity is that technology, especially in the form of artifically intelligent robots, will solve all of our problems and technological advance will speed up exponentially starting roughly around the year 2030.

So far technology innovation hasn’t outstripped Malthusian human population growth. We can grow more food more efficiently, but the number of human mouths to feed has grown just about as fast, so that we struggle to feed everyone. A lot of what we’ve done over the past few hundred years has come at the cost of using up the Earth, e.g., clearing forest for farmland or digging up coal and oil and lighting it on fire, taking all of the Cod out of the North Atlantic. Far from freeing us from cleaning the house, Artificial Intelligence thus far has failed to live up to promises made by professors seeking research funding in 1960 (that reminds me I need to do laundry!).

Given the track record of tech as a mixed blessing and as a slower agent for change than predicted, do young people need to prepare for 2030? Can they prepare by listening to Ray Kurzweil, or anyone else born in 1948? Should they fork over $25,000 for nine weeks or simply watch old Jetsons episodes?

Maybe I will kick off the comments section with a realistic tech innovation that would change the world in a positive way. My pick: A better battery (cheaper, lighter, higher power density). That would enable the use of renewable energy in every kind of portable application, e.g., cars and airplanes, and also make it much more practical to use wind and solar generation.

[Special offer: If you come to Boston this summer and pay me $25,000, I will spend 9 weeks telling you all of the places that a better battery could be used, starting with my Super Walkman design that can play 2300 cassette tapes before requiring a recharge.]

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I’ve drafted an article comparing Verizon FiOS with Comcast, mostly looking at Internet service. Please comment with typo corrections here and use my main server’s “add a comment” link at the bottom of the page to contribute alternative perspectives and things that you think will help other readers make the best use of FiOS or Comcast. Thanks in advance.

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I had dinner this evening with two Harvard undergraduates. I asked how they felt about our government borrowing trillions of dollars that they would have to pay back. “It’s a good time to be in school,” they responded. What did they expect would bring the U.S. out of this depression? “When Americans realize how tough it is going to be, they’ll start working a lot harder. I spent last summer working in a lab in India. The Indians worked much harder than any American because it is much more competitive over there.”

This might be a more sensible explanation of how we might plausibly return to economic growth than anything that I’ve heard from politicians or economists.

[Alternatively, the kids could get jobs as public school teachers upon graduation. This New York Times article talks about the lives of some teachers in the Rochester, NY public schools, which has doubled its real-dollar payroll expenses over a couple of decades even as the student achievement has continued to slip. The Times story concentrates on the benefits enjoyed by the unionized public employees and doesn’t mention the fact that the schools are considered failures and that an employer would find an ample supply of better educated workers in most parts of Mexico, India, and China.]

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Michael Phelps, the heroic swimmer from the 2008 Olympics, apparently has been smoking some marijuana lately. Let’s compare his situation to the average American’s. Phelps has a high-paying job doing something that he loves, millions of dollars in endorsement revenue just in the last few months (source), and his own charitable foundation. All of this has been achieved at the age of 23. Phelps has made money so fast he probably didn’t have time to invest it in the stock market, so we can be fairly certain he isn’t depressed about his personal finances.

Joe Typical American, by contrast, is about 35 years of age. His Olympic gold medal count is zero. He is probably overweight, if not obese. Unless he works for the government or in health care, he is unemployed or worried about being unemployed. He probably didn’t enjoy his job that much when he was employed. His retirement savings have been confiscated by the Wall Street bonuses of 1995-2007. His future earnings have been confiscated by the Wall Street bonuses of 2008-2015 (to be paid out of TARP and other taxpayer funds, which will inevitably result in debt).

If Phelps needs to smoke dope, what do the rest of us need to get through the next decade or two?

[On an unrelated note, a few readers pointed out that Phelps was convicted of drunken driving four years ago, shortly after winning 8 gold medals, and the world didn’t get its panties quite as twisted. Driving a monster SUV and running the risk of killing someone isn’t as exciting as inhaling some marijuana.]

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… because Microsoft will do it for me.

http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer

was published in September 2005, describing a dock for a mobile phone that would serve as the user’s desktop computing environment.

A friend emailed today to point out that on December 7, 2007 (Pearl Harbor Day), Microsoft filed “SMART INTERFACE SYSTEM FOR MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS DEVICES” (serial number 952152).

Can someone explain to me how these are different? Is my product proposal prior art for this Microsoft patent application?

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