Metric Taps and Dies

 I just learned a powerful advantage that the metric system has over earlier systems.  Specifically, Taps and Dies.  When you're drilling a threaded hole in the SAE system, you need to look up in a chart what the correct size drill is, as it's not simple.  SAE uses two main systems for sizing tapped holes:  1/4" and bigger, the measurement is the bolt size, and then you have a number of threads per inch.  Smaller than 1/4", machine screw sizes are numbered 0000, 000, 00, 0, 1, 2...8, 9,10, 11, 12.   Every shop in America has a tap table, telling you what size drill to use for what size and pitch machine screw, and is it a sensible system?  No, they have numbered and lettered drills.  Some taps have the drill and clearances sizes etched on the tap, but they're often illegible and for the smaller sizes.

 Metric doesn't have this problem.  Metric screws are described by screw outer diameter and pitch length.  Standard 60 degree threads make the tap hole easy.  So an M8x1 screw is 8 mm in diameter and has threads 1 mm long.  So to drill a hole with 90% engagement, such as into plastic, you simply subtract the thread pitch from the diameter to get the hole size.  To get a clearance hole, you drill a hole a little larger than the thread outer diameter.  No tap table is needed. 

 It turns out that this is both a benefit and a curse.  You can get an amazing variety of metric taps and dies, where SAE has largely standardized on Coarse and Fine threads (UNC and UNF), which are of course different for different sized bolts.  The benefit of that is that the SAE has also made some strength definitions, which are enormously powerful if your bolt will be stressed highly.  Most metric tap and die sets will have roughly the equivalent of UNC and UNF, but you can get threads both finer and coarser. 

Colonies on the Moon

 We're about to go back to the moon for the first time since the 1970s, with the aim of having permanently occupied colonies.  Will this lead to people living their lives entirely on the moon?  Perhaps, but I don't think that will happen for a long time, if ever.  Sure, once we have enough people up there, life happens and some of them will die, and probably a few will be born.  But there are a lot of reasons the moon is not a good place for "settlements" as opposed to scientific research operations.

There are plenty of reasons a colony on the moon will be useful.  For example, radio noise from earth will be sharply reduced on the "back side" of the moon, the side that permanently faces away from earth.  This makes it an excellent place to install radio telescopes, includeing massive interferometers and gravity wave detectors.  But these things will operate almost entirely remotely.  The people who do construction and maintenance will live elsewhere--while on the moon, most likely deep underground.

Because the moon is well outside the protective magnetic field of the earth, people staying on the moon will be exposed to high levels of cosmic rays and other radiation, as well as high level of micrometeorite impacts.  People will need to live inside thick shells.  They can venture out inside thinner shells for a few hours, but they are taking a risk.  The lunar astronauts of the 1970s received a level of exposure comparable to a few medical X-Rays from that period, but the longest of them was only outside the earth's protection for 12 days.  People working outside for months on end will get sick.  They must spend as much of their time as possible deep underground, and when they need to be close, mostly do it from heavily shielded vehicles. 

The second problem is low gravity.   Our experiments so far have shown that exposure to microgravity does permanent damage.  The moon is not microgravity, but it is 1/6th of the earth's.  It's hard to imagine that not causing some damage.   One year is really too much for a human to be in zero G.  Let's guess it's 6 years for the moon.  This is plenty of time to get some real work on the moon, and even engage is real life there, but I'm pretty sure there will be a medical limit.

 I think we can compare it to the south pole.  There are lots of people who stay down there for a year, but they generally come back.  There's nobody that actually lives there, although the base is permanently occupied.  I happen to have two scientist friends who have over-wintered there.  They're both back in the US now.  There are lots of other bases in extreme places with similar, rotating crews, and I'm certain that the moon will join them.   

Self Defeating Code of Honor

Most of the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire milleu maintains internal sense, although there's magic and other mysterious stuff.   But occasionally, deep illogic creates terrible, fatal battles for which there is really no need.  I'll cite two examples that really bother me. 

 The fight between Arthur Dayne and allies versus Ned Stark and his allies outside the Tower of Joy is just stupid.  Arthur Dayne had been ordered to protect Raegar's new wife Lyanna, who is also Ned Stark's sister.  His absence at the battle of the Trident may have cost Raegar his life, although Raegar had no way to know that.  Arthur Dayne fights Ned to the death, and Ned wins.   But this makes no sense.  Arthur Dayne is protecting Lyanna, who is Ned's sister.  Ned would never have caused Lyanna to come to harm.

The back story is that Lyanna had been betrothed to Ned's good friend, Robert Baratheon, and he was in love.  Raegar "stealing" Lyanna away was ostensibly the cause of the war.   When Robert found out that Lyanna had betrayed him, he might have killed her, and more likely her newborn son, so to some degree she did need protection.  But Ned would never have hurt her, even had his friend ordered him to.  When Arthur Dayne realized who it was that he was fighting, and that his prince had fallen, reason dictates that he should have renegotiated.   Ned and Arthur were itching for a fight, but this fight just stretches credibility.  Ultimately, they both wanted the same thing: Lyanna and her heir's survival.  A tiny bit of renegotiation would have changed things.

When I read the books, it was clear that Lyanna was dying in Childbirth, although it was never explicitly said.  That Jon Snow was the outcome of this childbirth already seemed pretty likely, and what Robert would have done with him.  Ned, for all his loyalty to Robert, was even more loyal to his family and would have protected Lyanna and Child, even against Robert.  

Sandor "the Hound" Clegane had been traveling with Arya.  He seemed to have a special care for the Stark girls, although his stated goal at the start was to "Sell" Arya to her aunt, Lyssa.  But Lyssa was murdered and they continued north.  By this point, Arya and Sandor had become good friends.  After arriving too late to deliver her to her mother and brother--murdered at the Red Wedding--they continued on, and stumbled into Brienne of Tarth and Podrick.  Once again, the goal of these two "teams" was entirely aligned--they wanted to protect the Stark Girls and deliver them to safety--a little discussion before starting to fight would have stopped the whole thing.

I'd hope that real fighters in these situations would have had a discussion and worked things out.  In both cases, there was honor at stake, but the people the promises had been made to were dead.   Loyalty to your "team" is important, but these incidents seem designed to show that there is always ambiguity as to which team you are on.   Human interrelations are always complex.    Picking teams almost never is.   Sports makes a terrible metaphor for these situations.  There were numerous cases of brothers fighting on opposing sides in the US civil war.  Lyanna's love and marriage with her families ostensible deepest enemy could have been turned into a huge alliance and improvement for the world, but stupid adherence to codes of honor prevented it. 

A lot of the fans of the show like to see the battles, and indeed these two were among the better ones.  There was a lot of clamoring for "Clegane-Bowl", and the showrunners acceded to it.   That one was less dumb.

 

Archimedes Mirror

Lot's of people have thought that the great Syricusian polymath Archimedes made a weapon capable of setting the sails of ships on fire from a distance.  There is no historical evidence of this--the story seems to come from the middle ages.   The Mythbusters, several times tried to repeat this stunt, and failed every time.   While I can see problems with the individual experiments, I think they got it right--for several practical reasons, Archimedes probably did not try to set sails on fire by using individual flat mirrors focused by hand.  He may have experimented with it, but like the mythbusters, failed at every attempt.

That said, it is definitely possible to set things afire with a large mirror focusing the suns rays.  You can buy a hand held cigarette lighter that works this way, and a larger mirror can generate a fire at a distance of a few feet.    An accurately enough focused mirror could definitely start a fire at a distance, but it needs to be pretty accurate.  It's remotely possible that the mechanics of Syracuse could have made such a mirror, but I'm certain that had Archimedes seen such a mirror under production, he would have noticed the optical magnification it would have provided, and he'd have invented a reflecting telescope within days. This obviously did not happen, so I don't think Syracuse made such a mirror.   

Why the PNW Will Never Have High Speed Rail

 I live near Seattle, and I love it here.  We're a little isolated from the rest of the country, which is both good and bad.  One of the bad things is that it takes frustratingly long to get to any other part of the country.  If you want to get there in less than a day, you need to go by air.   It takes 24 hours to get to the nearest other region, the San Francisco Bay Area, by rail, or 13 hours by road, but only if you're lucky with traffic and break the speed limit a lot.

Lots of people advocate for High Speed Rail, and I am very much one of them.  An imaginary 200 MPH (300KPH) HSR system could get us from Seattle to San Francisco in 3.5 hours.  If the stations are near to your destinations, it would be practical to get to a meeting and back in a work day.  This isn't really practical by air unless you fly private--Airports are half an hour or more outside of town, and TSA adds 90 minutes or more.  Add that to 2 hours in the air each way and it adds up to 4.5-5 hours travel time each way.   Add that to the meeting itself and it's a 12 hour day or more.   Private Jets are slower, but not that much, and they subtract all of TSA, and they can be precisely scheduled--it makes the one day round trip possible, which it just isn't on scheduled flights.  So the people who can afford it, do so.

The Northwest has three big cities: Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.  Metro Vancouver has about 3.4M, Seattle, 4.2M and Portland 2.5M.  But those three cities are in a geographic island:  There's a huge mountain range between central Oregon and the Central Valley of California, and two even bigger mountain ranges to the east.  It's over 600 miles from Portland to San Francisco, and about 300 of them are really rugged terrain.  The SF Bay area has only about 8 million people: less than the PNW.  To make a High Speed Rail Corridor really practical, LA/San Diego, about 20 million people need to be added.  And once you've done that, you need to connect to the rest of the country.  Spokane, Boise, Helena and the other northwest cities are tiny.   You need to go down to Salt Lake City and Denver, or up to Calgary/Edmonton, to reach many folks.  

 There is already rail through all of these routes, but a lot of it is very far from being able to handle High Speeds.  Through the Siskiyous, it's barely able to handle moderate speeds and there are some radical twists and turns.  Making this capable of even 200KPH, will be incredibly expensive, much less 300.   A bunch of the existing route is comfortably able to do 80MPH--but less than half.  All the terrain north of Eugene will need to be moved into the Willamette/Cowlitz/Nooksak Corridor, and rebuilt to HSR standards.  The construction cost to do this is at least $100M/mile for the 700 miles from Eugene to Vancouver--$700B, and that doesn't factor in the cost to obtain the land and get other political clearances. Figure $2T.  Redding to San Diego is about the same: 700 miles/$2T.  Finally, you've got to do the mountains: Eugene to Redding is about 300 very mountainous miles.   That'll probably cost at least $2T, maybe even more.  

 Would it be worth it?   Perhaps.   The roadbed that's already in the various flat corridors will be cheaper to obtain than the portion that's not.  Near Seattle runs along the Puget Sound Coastline, and will be useless for our purposes--Everett to Olympia, well over 100 miles, and apart from the cities themselves, that's probably the most expensive land on the route.  Such a system will stimulate business enormously--but $6T is a lot of money: about 2 years GDP from the entire affected region.  

----

 In the long term--surely not in my lifetime, we will have some form of VacTrain.  Hyperloop or maybe something even better.  Many pundits argue that this will be quite a bit cheaper than HSR, and I see their point: Hyperloop takes a tiny amount of space, and tunnels and bridges are much less substantial than for trains.  A Tunnel Boring Machine through the Sikiyous would solve a mess of problems.  Not sure it's possible, but it's an appealing thought.  Not just 200MPH.  1000 MPH.  Seattle to SF in 45 minutes, no waiting anywhere. 

Firefly's Most Important Speech

 The story of the movie Serenity so far:   River Tam is now recognized as a Psychic, and she apparently took in what the Alliance had done 12 years ago when "in a room" with "leading members of Parliament".  She doesn't recognize what she knows, but the Alliance is terrified that people will find out.  She is accidentally triggered to remember, and what she remembers is the single word "Miranda".  The crew figures out how to go to Miranda, which is a planet in "Reaver Space", and when they get there, what they find is weird devastation.  The people have just laid down and let themselves die.  They find a recording of a scientist, who explains what happened--they'd been experimenting with an Aerosol drug that was supposed to calm down the population, but it went too far, and they quit living.  Except for a tiny number, who lost all self control and became exceptionally violent.  The scientist is killed by Reavers on the video, and the crew, with several interactions with Reavers, realize who the Reavers are and how they came to be, and why the Alliance so desperately wants this secret kept.

 Malcolm Reynolds, who despite his rural background has read quite a bit, knows the history of previous efforts to improve the species, such as the Nazi Eugenics programs, and realizes that though well intended, they are nearly always a really bad idea.   And he gives this speech:

 

 

He doesn't hold to that.  And he is right to.  Trying to overpower natural selection is risky at best.   It's hard to know what motivation led the scientists to try planet-level distribution before they did a pretty thorough small scale experiment at a level that would surely have shown both bad responses, but there may have been some unknown factor.

 

I think the Alliance chose the wrong response: they tried to keep the thing a secret, and they did a fairly good job.  But secrets eventually do find their way out, especially one this big.  They probably should have told the truth and sent the navy to exterminate the Reavers as soon as they realized what happened.  Most of the guilty died on Miranda, so they can put the blame there--even if the important member of Parliament actually was responsible.

 

I am sympathetic to the urge to Eugenics.   We've done it with our farm animals, with our vegetables, etc., etc.  And by and large it has worked.  But the successful efforts have taken hundreds or thousands of years to perfect, and there are lots of "errors" that have needed to be culled.   We cannot cull humans, although the Nazis did think we could.  

Progressive Taxation vs Monopoly

I think I'm what could be called a "Market Socialist".  I strongly believe that free, competitive markets drive innovation and successful response to changing circumstances.  I also believe regulation is strongly necessary for markets to be truly competitive and not subject to a variety of "market failures".  This include monopoly and various forms of near monopoly, "race to the bottom" enshitification, and several more.   This regulation has a cost and unfortunately, some of the solutions require replacement of an entire market area by government-operated business, which of course costs some money.

There are a few areas that history has shown the free market cannot work:  The first is the military.   Some humans are prone to aggressive acts, and occasionally are charismatic enough to get others to support them.   We need military and police forces to keep these in check, and history has shown, over and over, that if these things are operated by private enterprise, societal collapse is inevitable.   The cops and soldiers must be strongly controlled by highly democratic institutions that are only motivated by the public good: something, whether it's strong ethics rules, public transparency, or something else, keeps them from using the power that these agencies give them for selfish or destructive goals. 

 The list of these necessarily public services is long: the court system, the roads, the postal service, communications networks, health care, many more.  We can argue about exactly how to nationalize these systems: for example, the Bell System was a for-profit company that held a virtual monopoly on phone service in the US from early in the 20th century until 1984, and it worked.  Bell was strongly regulated, both that their prices and services they were required to provide were publicly regulated, and that they were required to keep advancing the technology.    Changing technologies, many of which had been created by Bell Labs, convinced regulators and the courts that it was no longer possible to do this.  This was a disaster for society, in many ways.  It created a bunch of new billionaires, but it created lots of what could be called "parallel monopolies", each of which has all the bad properties of the old monopolies, but there are more of them that we must deal with.

 We must fix this.  Ultimately, we need to set things up so that no functional monopoly is allowed to exist without regulation that prevents enshitification.    As a fan of markets, I believe the best way would be to enforce rules that prevent any market from having too few competitors to keep it really free.  I cannot think of a circumstance where this is fewer than a dozen roughly equal competitors,  and probably more.  There are also circumstances--and the phone company of old is a perfect example, where there are huge structural advantages to having a monopoly.  That monopoly needs to be regulated so that it provides a comfortable income for its workers and shareholders, but its growth is limited.  This would not inherently disallow competition: GTE competed with Bell in the old days.  I think the modern version would be a small number of tightly regulated collaborating companies providing the coax, optical fiber, microwave and cellular networks, with service providers licensing these carriers to provide specific services.  The carrier companies would be required to cover every place and everybody for the same price and service quality, and allow "roaming" at no cost--you shouldn't need to know which carrier you're using, or need to be in some special place.

 Of course, doing this massive regulation, and in many cases, massive government-run operations, would require taxation.  During the time that most people think America was at its greatest: 1933-1980, taxation was extremely progressive, and the same attitude that led to that led to competent monopoly enforcement.   Income over $400K was taxed at 91% marginal rate for much of the 1950s, and it worked extremely well.  Today, the top marginal rate is about 1/3rd of that.  And the billionaires are running amok--the worst of them are monopolies (including the host of this blog...).  We must stop this.

 I say: we need a progressive tax rate that creates a lot of revenue for public sector without hurting people who can't afford it.  Here;s my thinking:

income less than 2/3rds of median income ($50K):  0% tax

income between 2/3ds and double median ($150K): 10% marginal tax

various rates in the middle here, which I'll leave blank for the moment.

income over 25M: 70% marginal tax

income over $1B: 95% marginal tax

All income should be taxed, with NO mechanism for diverting income into lower-taxed brackets, such as carried interest, borrowing against assets, dividends, long term capital gains, allowed.  The top brackets may seem punitive, and to some degree they are.  Billionaires hurt society.  There are a few who do good things with their money, but too many use their money for bad.

There are ways for $billion earners to avoid taxes:  put large dollar values into actual charitable causes, like building schools, subsidizing food programs, etc.   If you do this, you get a tax break, much like we do today.  For profit, pseudo-charities, should not get a break.

I'd also add one more category:  If your business produces goods or services, you should be taxed at a normal rate.  If your business produces only profit, it should be taxed highly enough that you'll find some other way to make a buck.  I'm not exactly sure how to define this, but here's a start:  If your business profits more than some amount per employee, that profit should be taxed punitively.  For example, if your hedge fund has 50 employees and makes a $billion a year, that's 20 million per employee--way too much for it to be considered a useful service.  More analysis needs to be done, but I suspect the threshold here should be something around $1m per employee before tax rates become overtly punitive.    (I don't mind the businesses owner taking in multi-million, provided hundreds or thousands of people have good-paying jobs as a result)