Hyperloop Criticism

There are plenty of difficulties with getting a hyperloop or other vactrain system installed, but none of the criticism I'm seeing of the concept is correct.

For example, they give the example of a tank truck that is evacuated and is crushed in a fraction of a second by atmospheric pressure.  This is a shockingly poor example.  These tanks are intended to be filled under positive pressure, and the metal cylinder has thin walls (1/8" or so) which can hold the load because they are loaded in tension, but not in compression.  Any competent engineer would simply make the wall thickness sufficient to sustain this pressure.  This varies with different tube diameters but Musk's original paper did some calculations on this and it's a half inch or more.

This same thing would also make the pipe immune from most forms of attack from terrorists.  It would take a gun caliber 2" or bigger to punch a hole, or a pretty large focused explosion, through a pipe this thick.

Even if the pipe is punctured or develops a leak, all that happens is pressure is lost, and the vehicles within slow down and air friction increases.

Their solution for earthquakes is also simple and effective.  The pipe is attached in a way that allows its support to move on the pipe.  For quakes with movement up to  the compliance of the mechanism, nothing will happen at all and operation can proceed unaffected.  This is well over magnitude 6.  For a bigger quake, there's a chance the travel of the mechanism will be exceeded.  This won't break the pipe but there may be damage.  Vehicles in operation would slow down and might need rescue, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where an earthquake, even of magnitude 9 or more, actually killing hyperloop passengers.

The Winds of Winter

George R R Martin has seemingly paused the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire series after book 5.  The TV show did not pause there, but it went its own way...some of which was entertaining storytelling, but which ended one of the greatest TV shows in history with a disappointing, nonsensical fiasco.

 One of Martin's stylistic modes is that he does a lot of foreshadowing--hints about what is going to happen.  Some of this is intended to make the events make a lot more sense, to deepen our understanding of what is happening.   He has announced that the next book will be called "The Windows of Winter" and that it will probably need to be split into two books.  He insists that he's well along the writing of it but that he's got so many other projects that he's making less progress than the books fans would like.

Jon Snow, Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, had made an alliance with the Wildlings to defend against the Night King and his zombies, but skeptics within the watch murdered him.   His allies, including the Red Witch, have recovered his dead body and have seen the clearly fatal wounds.  

Daenerys has escaped from the attack of the Harpies by riding Drogon for the very first time.  There seems to have been some telepathic communication going on there but it's not clear.  They have flown vaguely south, and have landed on a big hill, but she has no real idea where they are.  Drogon is severely injured and exhausted, and is unable to hunt on his own, and Daenerys is trying to bring him food while he recovers.

Barristan Selmy has survived the Harpy attack, where he was killed in the show.   Along with Jorah and the mercenary, they are planning a rescue of Daenerys, although they don't yet know where to begin.

Mance Rayder, leader of the Wildings/Free Folk, is still alive, the red witch having cast a spell that convinced Stannis to burn one of Mance's more challenging underlings, thinking that it was Rayder himself.  Jon Snow shot an arrow into the victim to spare him the agony of being burned alive. 

Arya is in Braavos, apparently still in training for the Faceless Men.

Sansa and Theon have escaped from Ramsey Bolton and are still in the woods running. 

Meera, Bran and Hodor are cornered by the zombies in what appears to be an alliance with the Children of the Forest.  The old 3 eyed raven is in there with them, trapped in the roots of a weirwood tree.  It doesn't look good.  The incident that tells us how Hodor got his name is very clearly in the near future and will very likely happen just as it did in the show.

Bran has seen that his aunt Lyanna has died in childbirth, and knows that who he'd thought was his half-brother Jon Snow is in fact his cousin, Aegon Targerian, and that Ned Stark went to extraordinary lengths to protect him.  He has a stronger claim to the Iron Throne does Danerys.  Whether Bran knows whether he's legitimate or not is unclear.  The only living person with direct knowledge of this is Howland Reed, Meera's father.

What's about to happen?  I think the TV show got some things right.  The explanation of how Hodor got his name is clearly correct, although it may differ in detail.

I suspect that the show also got the location of Drogon and Danerys right.  How this will play out is unclear but the TV show version is vaguely plausible.  Will there be another demonstration of Daenerys special fire-gift or will her win over the Dothracki come from the dragons and the collaboration of what remains of her loyal Khalate.  Drogon played no apparent role in this in the show, which I find completely implausible.

In the show, the Harpies are innumerable and overwhelming.  This is implausible, although there were certainly be enough of them to force Danerys to flee.  Jorah, Barristan, etc., will plan a rescue.  This too will go more or less as in the show, although I suspect Barristan's presence will change quite a lot.

In the show, Jon Snow seems to have broken his vow to the Night's Watch, which should have severely damaged his credibility.  In fact, because he died and was brought back to life, his vow has been completed, but several times this is explicitly pushed under the rug in the show.  Martin would not have done this.

I think Jon Snow's recovery will happen in a way that is much more public and surprising.  Here's my guess:  Targarian "Dragons" have a special power that gives them some immunity to heat, and also allows them to come back to life in fire, at least if burned before too much decay has set in.   My guess is that the Red Witch will try to revive him, but fail, and then they will burn the corpse as is Night's Watch tradition.  Midway through the cremation, Jon Snow will come out of the fire--hair and clothing burned off as with Daenerys, but his wounds completely healed and apparently fully alive.  The entire night's watch, including those hostile to Jon, the wildlings and Stannis and his army, will see this and recognize that Jon is truly something special.

 Lady Stoneheart (Caitlyn Tully/Stark)  will hear of this and of Jon's true parentage, and realize that her hatred for Jon Snow was entirely misplaced and that Ned was protecting his nephew, not his own bastard, at great sacrifice to himself and her, and that Ned had probably been loyal to her the whole time.  Since Caitlyn is a POV character, we will see her agony of this revelation first hand.  She cannot speak, but will communicate that she now supports Jon/Aegon as not just King in the North, but King of the seven Kingdoms.  her deadly gang of assassins will play an important role in defeating Cersei, and possibly the battle against the night king.

Daenerys will initially be skeptical of Jon/Aegon's claim, but will eventually accede, including encouraging the dragon and Jon to join.  I suspect the incest in the TV show will not occur, but it might.   I suspect there will be an alliance to fight Cersei and there will ultimately be some cooperative Aunt/Nephew alliance.  Daenerys /is/ the mother of the dragons and will demand a more equal role despite her sex.  Several Targaryan sisters have effectively co-ruled, so this is not without precedent. The fact that the middle dragon is named Rhaegal, after Jon's true father, is some serious forshadowing.

Jamie will join Jon/Aegon/Daenerys after he comes clean about why he tried to kill Bran and how tired he is of his sister's destructive scheme--and buoyed by Tyrion's existing alliance with her.    I suspect the consumation and knighting of Brienne will happen much as it does in the show, but they will marry and live relatively happily ever after.

 I'm not sure who will actually strike the final blow against the night king.  In a way, I hope it's the red witch melesandre, who will kill herself and save the world by doing it.   Arya, with her drop move, is seriously implausible although I admit it was fun to watch.  Theon's dying heroism is very plausible, and he has shown signs of it in rescuing Sansa, but Bran's helpless inactivity is not.   I really like the blue flames coming from Viserion's injured neck, and I do think Viserion getting turned by the night king is a very plausible part of the plot.

 

Colonizing Space

 I'm a fan of shows and movies that depict the colonization of space: Firefly, The Expanse, 2001 a Space Odyssey, etc.     I'm a true believer: Unless we manage to destroy ourselves first, the Human Race will eventually have extensive colonies in space.

 Space colonies are a lot different than colonies in the new world, India, China, Africa, etc 4 centuries ago, or by various cultures around the Mediterranean and other places 2000 years ago.   For starters, there were already people living in most of these places--they had air to breathe, soil to plant crops in, etc.  This is not true in space.  We will either have to bring these things with us or make them there.  Colonization opened people up to new diseases and other problems in the old days; that will also be true of space: Radiation poisoning, lack of gravity, price of air and water, etc.   My dad, who worked for decades designing satellites, is skeptical that we will ever be able to overcome these, but I think we will.  But it will be hard and it will take much longer than people like Elon Musk imagine.

 The first nasty problem is the difficulty in getting people and goods from Earth's surface into space.  This is very hard, but there's nothing completely intractable about it.  Chemical rockets can do it, but at great expense.  SpaceX, to their credit, have moved the needle considerably.  Several science fiction writers have proposed some sort of fusion rocket, which can be profoundly more efficient.  This will require a breakthrough to achieve, although it's superficially plausible.  Several SF stories, Such as The Expanse and Firefly have followed this route.  Breakthroughs, unlike more straightforward engineering, are difficult to predict, but I understand enough of the physics to be pretty confident that the breakthrough will happen, most likely in the next half century or so...I'm guessing it will be some sort of rocket fueled by Nuclear Fusion, but I expect to be surprised...

The next problem is gravity.  It turns out that humans need some gravity to be healthy, although we can tolerate its absence for a little while.  Many SciFi stories imply or require some sort of artificial gravity--Star Trek and Firefly are two notable cases, although little detail is given. Gravity Plating, as suggested by Star Trek, will require a pretty big breakthrough--comparable to the Warp Drive of that same milieu.  It's plausible that they are related--In Einsteinian General Relativity, gravity is an artifact of the warping space by large masses.  There may be other ways to warp space, ways which allow faster than light travel or gravity plating, but these are completely outside our present understanding of physics.  

 The Expanse does away with artificial gravity: they make it the old fashioned way, by accelerating.  In space ships, they are designed so that thrust is aligned with the axis of the ship, and any acceleration or deceleration gives the occupants a pretty realistic impression of gravity.  In the stories, which are mostly about warfare in space, accelerations well over 1 G are commonplace, but I think the vast majority of ships will remain comfortably 1 G or less the vast majority of the time.  The second way, of course, is to spin things--centrifugal space ships.  Several of the space colonies in the stories are asteroids, which have been spun up to create artificial gravity and hollowed out.   A little engineering shows that this is implausible.  A 1 G force on a several mile long cable exceeds the tensile strength of most rocky-based materials, including iron.  Centrifugal colonies will be largely artificial and their diameter will be only a few miles at most.    They may be very long--more like O'neill cylinders and less like those envisioned by von Braun and Chesley Bonnestal.   They might be made from material harvested from asteroids like Ceres, but they will not simply be those asteroids.

Present chemical drives can only produce an acceleration sufficient to get out of the earth's gravity well for a few minutes.  But if there is some sort of fusion drive that can produce a sizable fraction of a G for weeks on end, this will have a profound effect on travel around the solar system.  A ship that can accelerate for many days at one G can go to Mars in a few days.  This would profoundly change economics of a colony.   It could even bring the duration of a trip to another star down to a few decades. 

The third difficult, but not intractable problem, is radiation.  All manned space missions so far have been one of two things:  very short or, beneath the van Allen Radiation belts, which protect us from a lot of radiation.  A colony on the moon, Mars, or in a space station or elsewhere, will need considerable radiation shielding.   The simplest way to do this today is using many feet of shielding.  Heavy metals like Lead are the most effective by thickness, but a much thicker layer of dirt or water is much more effective.  I'm think that most space habitations, including those in centrifugal stations, will be protected by ten meters or more of whatever material is most convenient.  Digging deep underground will be the simplest way to provide this on a planet or moon, but an O'neill cylinder will need to have a thick shell of some sort..

 Water is relatively common in space, but it will be a limited resource for most colonies because it'll need to be mined and transported.  Air is a little more problematic, but not really.   We can breathe any non-poisonous gas mixture that contains enough Oxygen and CO2.  On earth, Nitrogen is most convenient and likely will be in space too, but we're far from limited.  Oxygen can be made from water and other things by Electrolysis and is a byproduct of photosynthesis.

 We will need plants growing in space to feed ourselves.   Simply dedicating surface area to plants is not particularly efficient: The most solar-efficient plants are well under 1%, where present photovoltaics can easily do 15%.  Put photovoltaics on all possible surfaces and grow plants underground under efficient electric lighting.  The photovoltaics are much more tolerant of radiation than plants are and are relatively easy to replace, and to manufacture from materials that we already know are on The Moon and Mars and other objects.

Presuming we don't drive ourselves extinct first (and Elon Musk and Donald Trump are presently the leading individuals working towards making us extinct)  I think we will have permanent colonies in space by 2050 or so, and self-sufficient colonies some time after 2100.  The sorts of populations on Mars and Ceres envisioned in The Expanse are unlikely to occur until there is a major breakthrough, such as the Expanse's Epstein Drive, but I'd think that by 2200 there will be tens of thousands of people living, breeding and dying entirely in space.  Far from the millions portrayed by the Expanse. 

Why Do Liberals Think Trump Supporters are Stupid?

 

The following is by Florida writer Adam-Troy Castro, 2019

'An anguished question from a Trump supporter: "Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?"

The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters - the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don't...

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought "Fine."

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, "Okay."

That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, "No problem."

That when he made up stories about seeing muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, "Not an issue."

That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn't care, you chirped, "He sure knows me."

That when you heard him illustrate his own character by telling that cute story about the elderly guest bleeding on the floor at his country club, the story about how he turned his back and how it was all an imposition on him, you said, "That's cool!"

That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.

That when you heard him brag that he doesn't read books, you said, "Well, who has time?"

That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn't commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, "That makes sense."

That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, "Yes!"

That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man's coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, "What a great guy!"

That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, "Thumbs up!"

That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, "That's the way I want my President to be."

That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they're supposed to be regulating and you have said, "What a genius!"

That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, "That's smart!"

That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was the middle of water and you have said, "That makes sense."

That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, "falling in love" with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, "That's statesmanship!"

That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids. has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas - he explains that they’re just “animals” - and you say, “well, ok then.”

That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.

What you don't get, Trump supporters in 2019, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it's also...hear me...charitable.

Because if you're NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.

How To End US "Decline"

The Orange Terrorist, in his inauguration speech today, said he will end US decline.  Sorry, Dim Don, you, more than anyone else, represent US decline.  Here are some things that will actually reverse the things your voters have been complaining about

Raise the minimum wage.  Lots of evidence (Kruger and Card, etc), proves that at least for moderate changes, raising the minimum wage helps the economy, and there's essentially no evidence that it hurts, even for substantial raises.

Increase taxes on the rich.  From before the great depression until the 1960s, the top marginal tax rate was above 90% and even after Kennedy's cuts, the top rate was over 70%.   This does not seem to have hurt the US economy at all.  Every single case of a tax cut for the rich supposedly improving the economy can be debunked.  For example, Reagan's 1983 cut caused people (mostly businesses) to change the timing of expenses to optimize for the tax change, but after the dust had settled, the economy returned to the mean it had been on before.   It's also important to realize that the extremely high tax rates were only a marginal rate.  For example, in 1955, a married couple earning over $400K owed 91% of their earnings over $400K to the IRS.  A $400K income in 1955 is equivalent to $4.7M today.  But this is only a marginal rate.  The median family income in 1955 was $4400, and the tax on that was $940.  Our $400K earner was actually only paying about a 70% effective rate.

Laffer and others argue that there is a threshold tax rate beyond which, there is no incentive to invest or expand businesses.  Lots of research has been done on this, and there's no evidence at all of such an effect below about 70% effective tax rate.   It's important to realize that when we had these extremely high tax rates, that all of the people who were paying them were getting huge no-bid contracts from the government.  You don't hear much about Howard Hughes and Henry Kaiser trying to lower tax rates.   You hear a lot about them trying to avoid realizing dividends and gains so they wouldn't get taxed, and making big investments and loans so they could call that an expense.

All income should be taxed at the same rate.  Today, long term capital gains and a few other things are taxed at a much lower rate.  I think the right way to do this is to exempt all income below some level, appropriate for where the person lives, and tax all income above that at the same rate.  The marginal tax rate system was an attempt to do that, but I think it's outlived it's usefulness.    I'm ok with long term gains being adjusted by a CPI correction.  40 years ago, this would have been painful to compute, but nobody does their taxes by hand anymore.  The computer can figure it out.

Effectively ban non-productive profiteering.   The value of the economy is the value of all the goods and services in it.   If it is possible to make money without providing a service, this is a drain on the economy. Examples of this include high-velocity trading, private equity, hedge funds, and several others.  Insurance has become largely a scam, especially health insurance.   Some of these things do provide an actual service, but the drag on the economy far outweighs their Return on Investment.   Countries which have nationalized health care pay less than half what the US does.

I'm pretty sure we could devise a scheme which taxes businesses at a rate inversely proportional to the number of employees.    So a private equity or high speed trading firm employs about 20 people and brings in a $billion a year, they should be taxed at 99%.  If a factory employs 10,000 people and brings in that same $billion, they should be taxed at 10 or 20%.   If a small shop employs 20 people and brings in $250K, it should be taxed at $10% or less.

Tax for-profit churches.  If a church engages in politics, proselytizing or any of a host of other for profit operations, they should lose their tax exempt status.  If a church (or any other organization) sponsors a food bank or other actual charity, they should get an exemption for that, but not for funding the preacher's gold mines in Africa.  A significant fraction of the Orange Terrorists support comes from for-profit churches telling their congregants that opposing him is a threat to our freedom.  The truth is pretty close to the opposite.  Simply taxing them will make a lot of them go away.

Support and encourage unions.  The time that America worked best was the 30 years after WWII.  At that time, about 30% of workers were in a trade union.  Trade unions give workers bargaining power which most workers lack.

Build/Rebuild infrastructure.   This employs a lot of people.  The ROI on infrastructure is extremely high.

Adjust the zoning laws to make sure there's profitable low-income housing and healthy food everywhere.  For example, places like South Lake Union here in Seattle used to be a warren of moderate priced apartments.  The rules need to make sure that the moderate income people who work downtown have a place to live.  Tax the bejezus out of luxury condos, etc., and make it cheap to have low-cost restaurants and other shops.

I'm a fan of transit, but we cannot make people use transit by making the alternative miserable.  Some people cannot ride the bus to work--a repairman, a consultant who works a different place every day, etc.

Separate run-of-the-mill banking from Investment Banking.  Until it was overturned in 1996, the Glass Steagal act gave protections to ordinary banks, called "Savings and Loans", including federally insured deposits.  They also did regular inspections of banks and closed them if they violated certain rules.  This meant that for the period that Glass-Steagall was in effect, S&Ls gave a reliable 5% or so interest and nobody lost everything.  Investment banks wanted the government protection, without the limitations, so they convinced congress to overturn this sensible protection.  11 years later, the economy collapsed. Banking and the building industry are very important.  Nobody was making big profits out of S&Ls unless thy were scammers, but it kept a huge part of the economy healthy.

We need to make it as cheap and healthy as possible to be poor.  Whether this is Universal Basic Income, Housing subsidies, or something else, we can't have poor people starving or homeless.

In the same way, we need to make sure that everyone has a safety net.  Rich people claim that only rich people start businesses.  Historically, this is not true.  The people who start businesses are in a situation where they know that failure doesn't make their family destitute.  Whether that's extended family, government programs or something else is beside the point.  At the present time, this does mean that only rich people can start businesses