The Sierra Club Vision for Texas Energy

 

Matthew Johnson is the deputy director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.  Last week on Valentine's Day, the Austin American-Statesman published in its opinion section Mr. Johnson's thoughts about the state of the Texas energy situation.  If his piece was a valentine to the state's energy interests, it was one that had a lot more thorns than roses.

 

As the disastrous power-grid failure during the February 2021 freeze demonstrated, all was not well with the Texas energy infrastructure, and Mr. Johnson notes that in 2023, Texas voters approved spending $5 billion on grid improvements.  But in his view, the trusting voters of Texas, who simply wanted more reliable electricity at lower costs, were betrayed by "greedy industrial corporations," who directed the money into "risky, polluting, and unnecessary gas-fired power plants."  According to Mr. Johnson, this was a betrayal of public trust.  Instead, during the current session the legislature is once more considering funding both fossil-fuel and nuclear plants.  Mr. Johnson thinks nuclear plants are a bad idea, because they have suffered delays and severe cost overruns in the past.

 

What should have been done, and what he hopes the legislature will do instead, is to put our money into energy-efficiency measures and renewable energy such as more wind and solar power.  He favors a regulation that would require electric utilities, "while they don't generate electricity," to "produce energy efficiency savings that offset 1% of the energy they sell."  And he mentions practical consumer measures such as improved insulation, smart thermostats, and retrofitted water heaters.  He concludes with this rhetorical flourish: "Together we have the power to forge a sustainable path forward that benefits all Texans—not just a select few."

 

I agree with Mr. Johnson on some of his points.  Energy conservation is a good thing.  In fact, without any special regulatory incentives such as the one he promotes, the energy consumption per capita in Texas actually went down by more than 6% from 2019 to 2022.  This is part of a long-term national trend that results from a number of factors, including more efficient industrial processes, the changing nature of energy-intensive industries, and replacement of old housing units by newer and better-insulated ones.  Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson's hopes that even more energy savings will occur, the fastest way to make people and corporations save energy is to make it cost more.  And that directly conflicts with one of Mr. Johnson's other hopes:  that energy would cost less.

 

If Mr. Johnson wants our Texas grid to be more reliable, let's consider the one thing that those desperate power dispatchers wished they had on that cold February night in 2021:  rapidly dispatchable emergency generators, robustly insulated for cold weather.  The type of generator that starts up the fastest—in a matter of minutes—is exactly the kind that Mr. Johnson deplores:  gas-fired turbine plants.  Why Mr. Johnson calls them "risky," I'm not sure.  While any process involving flammable gas can go awry, I'm not aware of any special hazards associated with them.  The only significant pollution they produce is carbon dioxide, but they make less CO₂ per kilowatt than coal or oil-fired plants. In fact, a big reason that CO₂ emissions are not higher than they are is the replacement of coal and oil by natural gas. 

 

Reading between the lines, I think Mr. Johnson's vision for our energy future would be as close to a 100% renewable grid as we can get, and the shuttering of all fossil-fuel plants, and no new nuclear plants.  If we could wave a magic wand and turn his vision into reality today, I would currently be typing in the dark until my laptop battery ran down.  It is nighttime in Texas, and the wind is not blowing much, at least in San Marcos.  While for brief moments, the abundant wind generation capacity of Texas has supplied a third or more of total Texas electricity consumption, the average is much less, and the same is true of solar power.  An all-renewable grid would require storage of power that could keep us running for days with little or no wind and long, cold nights. 

 

A surprising amount of battery-based energy storage has already been connected to the Texas grid.  As of 2024, there was almost 10 GW of storage available.  That's nice, until you realize that Texas' electricity consumption has peaked historically in the range of 80 GW.  And those batteries could supply 10 GW for only a short time—a few hours, perhaps.  So even if we had enough renewables to theoretically supply all our needs, we would need about an equal amount of battery storage to keep us going, at an expense that would lead to a lot of energy conservation, no doubt—but there goes Mr. Johnson's hopes of low electric bills again. 

 

And that's the fault of those "greedy industrial corporations," no doubt.  But by its nature, a modern energy grid is a large-scale industrial project, and the best institution we have found so far for organizing and developing such things is the corporation.  As for "greedy," I doubt that energy companies, or solar-power and wind-turbine companies, for that matter, are any greedier than other industrial sectors.  They have to make a profit of some kind to stay in business.  And while I'm sure that the details of how the Texas legislature interacts with energy companies might not bear public scrutiny too well, in my view spending $5 billion on gas-fired turbine generators was about the best way it could be spent.

 

By the way, some electric utilities do generate their own electricity, contrary to what Mr. Johnson says.  Some buy power from companies that only generate, some both generate and sell, and about the only part of the grid that nobody wants is the most essential one:  the transmission lines themselves.  But even that problem is being addressed with so-called "smart grid" developments, which promise to deliver some of the energy conservation that Mr. Johnson wants.

 

Opinion pages are for expressing opinions, and we are all now more enlightened than we were concerning the opinion of a Sierra Club spokesperson about the Texas energy grid.  All I can say is, I'm glad Mr. Johnson isn't in charge of it.

 

Sources:  The opinion piece "Texas needs more renewables—not fossil fuels" ran in the Friday, Feb. 14, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.  The statistic on Texas energy consumption is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states, and on Texas energy storage capacity I used https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states. 

 

The Potomac Mid-Air Collision: The Role of ADS-B

 

That headline is supposed to make you wonder what ADS-B is, as I did the first time I read about it.  The mid-air collision, of course, is the tragedy that happened last January 29 when American Airlines flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, was coming in for its final approach to runway 33 of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.  About half a mile from the end of the runway, the plane collided with a Black Hawk helicopter.  Both aircraft crashed into the Potomac, killing all 64 on board the airliner and the three crew members on the helicopter.  It was the worst U. S. air disaster in terms of fatalities in over twenty years, and the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is continuing its investigation following a briefing held Feb. 6 for members of Congress.

 

As reported in a piece from CNN, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said at the briefing that it was not clear whether a system called ADS-B in the helicopter was working at the time of the crash.  The critical nature of this question becomes clear when we realize that the height of the helicopter at the time of the crash is something that hasn't yet been explained.

 

Airliners coming in for a landing have to follow a definite glide path in order to reach the runway, and so there are strict restrictions on where other aircraft can go near airports as busy as the Reagan National.  The Black Hawk helicopter was flying something called Route 4, and was practicing what are called "government continuity operations."  In other words, if the President and other key government figures have to get out of town in a hurry, they are going to travel by Black Hawk helicopter, and the people flying the helicopters have to keep in practice. 

 

Presumably, the routes flown by these helicopters are height-restricted so planes approaching the airport will pass above the helicopters.  Whether the Black Hawk involved in the mid-air collision was too high is a critical question, which is where ADS-B comes in.

 

That acronym stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance—Broadcast, and it is a souped-up version of the transponders that commercial aircraft have had for years which tells air-traffic controllers what height a plane is flying.  And that system was a step up from the old follow-the-blips technology that traffic controllers had to use in the early days of radar-assisted air traffic.  Knowing how high an aircraft is helps a controller decide whether two converging blips just mean a harmless intersection of two flight paths at different altitudes, a scary near-miss, or a disaster like the one that happened last month.

 

When fully operational, an ADS-B unit in the Black Hawk would have updated air traffic controllers every second with a GPS-determined three-dimensional location data burst.  This is vastly superior to what the controllers' radar can tell them on its own.  And knowing that the helicopter was high enough to collide with the American Airlines plane would have at least allowed the controllers to alert the pilots to the problem.

 

That is exactly what happened only a day before, when an air traffic controller warned an Embraer ERJ 175 to abort a landing at a different runway at Reagan National because a nearby helicopter was flying at 300 feet.  Although there appeared to be enough altitude difference between the two aircraft, the controller alerted the passenger plane's pilot anyway, who flew around and landed successfully later.  Whether the helicopter in this incident was a Black Hawk or something else is not clear from published reports.  But near-misses like this can provide warning flags for safety-conscious operators, who can apply lessons learned and prevent major disasters such as the one that happened January 29.

 

Late last week, crews successfully recovered all the major pieces of both aircraft involved in the accident, and the hope is that among the rubble is information about whether the helicopter's ADS-B system was working, malfunctioning, or turned off.  The signal that ADS-B transmits is readable by anybody, so in an actual emergency flight carrying the President to parts unknown, it's likely that the system might be turned off for security reasons.  In peacetime it's fine to announce your exact location to all and sundry, but in a combat situation it's the last thing you want to do.

 

The bottom line on this accident remains to be discovered, as we still don't have critical questions answered such as the one about the ADS-B system.  Speaking statistically, if one decided to stage a mid-air collision, one would have quite a challenge, because the volume of air occupied by a Black Hawk is not that large, and exquisite timing and aiming would be required.  Unfortunately, the statistics were not favorable on that deadly evening.

 

According to a Wikipedia article on the ADS-B, the U. S. somewhat lags behind other countries in requiring adoption of the system by most aircraft.  I suspect it is a fairly costly piece of avionics, involving data links to a plane's GPS system and a 1-GHz-range microwave transceiver and antenna.  Both aircraft were definitely equipped with ADS-B, but as mentioned above, it has not been determined whether the Black Hawk's unit was operational at the time of the crash. 

 

More generally, this incident provides a good reason to speed up the adoption of ADS-B, which provides faster and more accurate data to air traffic controllers, who need all the help they can get.  Another issue unearthed at this early point in the investigation is that the control office in charge of the airspace was understaffed at the time, and one controller was handling situations normally dealt with by two individuals.  Whether this understaffing contributed materially to the collision remains to be seen, but the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees air traffic control operations, is not exactly a poster child for governmental efficiency.  Other countries such as Canada have transformed their FAA equivalents into private non-profit organizations, paying for them by user fees, and sometimes this makes things run better and cheaper.  But that is an argument for another day.

 

We will keep an eye on the investigation of Flight 5342's crash, and hope that lessons learned will be applied to keep anything like this from happening again.

 

Sources:  I referred to an ABC News article on the ADS-B question at https://6abc.com/post/washington-dc-plane-crash-major-pieces-helicopter-deadly-midair-collision-recovered-ntsb-says/15882589/, an NBC news article on the helicopter's route at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/black-hawk-helicopter-investigation-pilots-flight-path-dc-plane-crash-rcna190031, and a CNN article on the day before's near-miss at https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/us/dca-plane-helicopter-crash-invs/index.html, besides the Wikipedia articles on "2025 Potomac River mid-air collision" and "Automatic Dependent Surveillance—Broadcast."

 

P. S.  This blog lost one of its most faithful and long-standing readers with the passing of David Jenkins, K4COG, on Feb. 1.  I met David in 1980 at a lecture I gave at the Bible translation organization Wycliffe Bible Translators, and being fellow amateur-radio operators, we hit it off and kept in touch for the following 45 years.  He will be sorely missed by his family and many friends.  To Dave, I say "God bless and 73."

The Pros and Cons of Cancer Blood Tests

 

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott made the news the other day without ever touching a football.  He came out in favor of federal legislation that would require Medicare to pay for a blood test that can detect 20 different types of cancer.  Prescott's mother died of cancer, as did the mother of Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, who is sponsoring the legislation.

 

A recent article in the Austin American-Statesman describes how two million people a year are diagnosed with cancer, but often too late to do anything about it.  Prescott believes in the test so much that he had the Cowboys' entire staff screened at his expense, which was considerable as the tests range between $2000 and $3000 a person.  Cowboys staffer Tad Carper is glad he did, though, because it caught his case of cancer of the tonsils.  Presumably, he had his tonsils removed and that took care of the problem. 

           

This particular test has not yet been approved by the Federal Drug Administration, but if the proposed legislation passes it would automatically be paid for once approval is given.  It's not hard to figure that this would add several billion dollars to the annual cost of Medicare, which is already one of the primary budget-busters in the federal budget.  But who cares if it saves lives?

 

We all care, or should.  From an engineering point of view, this is a classic tradeoff, in the sense that we face a decision which will favor one good at the expense of a different good.  On the one hand, more cancer screening will help us find, and hopefully treat or cure, more cancers, leading to longer lives.  On the other hand, more money spent by the federal government that it doesn't have will lead to less money somewhere else, or inflation, or some other less well-defined but nevertheless negative fiscal consequence sooner or later.  And there's always the possibility that the tests may turn out to be, if not a total boondoggle, at least a lot less effective than we hoped. 

 

Paralysis in Congress (legislative, not literal) being what it is, the chances of this bill getting approved are iffy at best, as it has come up several times in the last few years and never made it into law.  But let's take this idea to the limit. 

 

Suppose we found some genetic test that would not only predict cancers, but would outline our entire medical history, to the extent possible.  Obviously, it couldn't predict things like a person taking poison at the age of 43, but there are many diseases, the main killers of heart disease and cancer among them, which have a strong genetic component.  This pipe dream is already somewhat realistic today and will only become more so in the future.  Wouldn't it be a great idea to profile every baby at birth and lay out his or her entire medical life history at the get-go?

 

On the one hand (here we go again), you could take steps to forestall diseases that a person might be especially prone to.  My wife had breast cancer, which was treated, and now she is cancer-free.  But some women carry genes that make them especially susceptible to breast cancer.  And some of those, on discovering this fact about themselves, decide to undergo pre-emptive double mastectomies. 

 

But what if you find out you'll die of lung cancer at the age of 43, say?  At this time, most lung cancer is basically untreatable except in a palliative sense.  Or what if you're going to get Alzheimer's when your 72 and die at 85?  There's no treatment for that either. 

 

I once read a short story whose author or title I can't recall (what if your memory starts to fade when you're 71?), but the gist of it was a dinner party at which a magician told the fortune of everyone at the table, and they believed him.  He laid out exactly what was going to happen to them from that day forward.  I forget the rest of the story, but the point was that knowing the future is a two-edged sword.  Yes, you can forestall some things that would be good to know about in advance.  But other things are truly inevitable, and knowing them would cast a pall over one's entire future and possibly lead even to depression and suicide. 

 

Pancreatic cancer rates are increasing for unknown reasons, and it is one of the most insidious and deadly types of cancer, often being asymptomatic until it's far too late to treat.  And even if caught in the early stages, it spreads so fast that surgery usually doesn't help.  The most famous recent victim, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was accidentally diagnosed with pancreatic cancer as a result of an examination for something else, and following her surgery for it she survived for an extraordinary eleven years, far above the norm for such a situation.  So having a blood test for pancreatic cancer under the present conditions of treatment protocols would in most cases just let you know earlier that you were going to die of it.  Sometimes ignorance truly is comparative bliss.

 

This brings to mind what the 18th-century wit Samuel Johnson said when he heard that a former acquaintance was going to be executed soon.  "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."  Perhaps it would be a good thing to have a populace with minds concentrated by the knowledge that they are going to die at a future date certain.  But we all know we're going to die sometime anyway, and there's all the difference in the world between knowing that, and knowing when and how.

 

It's up to Congress to decide whether a blood test for many types of cancer should be made available for everyone on Medicare.  But if that does come to pass, you can depend on it to have unintended consequences, some of which we may regret.

 

Sources:  The article by Nicole Villalpando, "Dak Prescott:  Medicare should cover cancer test" appeared on p. 1 of the Saturday Feb. 1, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman. 

Attention Must Be Paid—But To Whom?

 

In Arthur Miller's famous play "Death of a Salesman," the salesman Willy Loman's wife Linda cries out at the climax, "Attention, attention must be paid to such a person."  If we love someone, we honor them with attention, which is something only a conscious being can pay.  In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr takes a look at current concerns that our attention spans are growing shorter because of social media and smartphones. 

 

Some academics see the crisis as real.  Immerwahr quotes theologian Adam Kotsko, who teaches at a small liberal-arts college, as saying ". . . in the past five years, it's as though someone flipped a switch . . . . Students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding."  On the other hand, media that use modes other than just text are getting longer.  Immerwahr notes that one of the most award-winning films of 2024, "The Brutalist," runs well over three hours.  And a highly popular video game called "Baldur's Gate 3" takes a dedicated player about seventy-five hours to play.

 

As Immerwahr points out, every new medium from the printed novel to radio and television gave rise to similar concerns that people will no longer be able to pay adequate attention to things they should attend to.  Interactive media such as TikTok, Facebook, and the like have added a new factor:  the carefully-honed algorithms that profile user preferences and give them more of what they like.  That is how you can pick up your smartphone to check the weather forecast, finally shake yourself forty-five minutes later and ask, "What have I been doing?" and not be able to come up with a satisfactory answer.

 

Overall, though, Immerwahr concludes that if attention spans are in trouble—a concept he says even psychologists can't satisfactorily define—we are still able to devote long unbroken spans of time to things that we are interested in, or things that attract us.  At the end of his essay, he concludes that the real problem is not so much that we can't pay attention, but that what we pay attention to is often overhyped, inflammatory, divisive, or false. 

 

Rod Dreher couldn't agree more.  In his new book Living in Wonder:  Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Dreher calls for a recognition that modern societies have adopted a set of undebated underlying assumptions about the world that derive from the fact that we are, in a pungent phrase, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—conveniently abbreviated WEIRD.  This combination of background factors is highly unusual in world history, and has led us into a materialistic, scientistic worldview that excludes the supernatural from practical consideration.  That, Dreher points out, is a real problem, because the world simply isn't that way.

 

Attention is a kind of love.  One cannot love something, or someone, to whom one pays no attention.  Dreher makes no secret of the fact that he is a capital-O Orthodox Christian.  The Orthodox family of churches sat out the Reformation, and preserve an unbroken tradition of acknowledging the supernatural in worship and theology that goes back all the way to the time of Christ.  His book is full of stories of dreams, visions, apparently coincidental meetings, and similar phenomena that support his contention of God, and demons too, being all around us. 

 

His chapter most relevant to our topic is "Aliens and the Sacred Machine."  In search of meaning, we will pay attention to all sorts of things that don't necessarily fit into the materialist worldview.  With the advent of artificial-intelligence companions (AI girlfriends, for example), some men find that they are more comfortable talking to a machine, or even doing other things with it, than with going through the effort to meet and get to know a real woman. 

 

But that isn't all.  According to Diana Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina Wilmington, many influential people think that AI reveals "nonhuman intelligence from outside our dimension of space-time."  In other words, the "I" that software like ChatGPT uses isn't just a function of the program—there's a non-material personality at work in there somewhere.  And according to Dreher, if it's not God, it's from the other place—in other words, demonic.

 

Reading this section of Dreher's book reminded me powerfully of C. S. Lewis's 1945 science-fiction dystopia That Hideous Strength.  In that book—which has a sketchy outline of what is recognizably the Internet, 45 years before its advent—scientists manage to revive the decapitated head of an evil genius so it serves as a medium of communication between them and certain forces which turn out to be demonic.  Their regard for what they call the Head can only be described as worship, and when people cease to believe in God, they will end up worshiping either themselves or something outside themselves that eventually enslaves them. 

 

When the first caveman painted the first cave painting, he was probably tempted to sit and admire his work instead of paying attention to his fellow cave-dwellers, so in a sense, the problem of distracted attention has always been with us.  But not until recently has it been super-powered by AI algorithms that insidiously lead us away from God and the human beings who deserve our attention, and into the rabbit-holes and dungeons of distraction that wastes the only thing all of us have the same amount of every day—time. 

 

Dreher relates how he was rescued from a near-suicidal focus on his own misery by the ancient practice of reciting the Jesus Prayer, five hundred times a day.  This forced his attention away from himself and his distractions, and while he still has plenty of problems, he was able to get moving again and write a remarkable book. 

 

Those of us who grew up in a less distraction-prone age—the 1960s, say—have no idea what younger people struggle against in trying to pay attention to those objects and people which they know deserve it.  If you believe in such things, say a prayer for them as we face the assaults of AI-powered social media, and be aware that, as Dreher begins his book, "The world is not what we think it is."

 

Sources:  The article, "Check This Out" by Daniel Immerwahr appears on pp. 64-69 of the Jan. 27, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.  Rod Dreher's Living in Wonder was published in 2024 by Zondervan.  C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength is available in numerous editions.  And a description and explanation of the Jesus Prayer is at https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/prayer-fasting-and-almsgiving/the-jesus-prayer.

Did IBM Help with the Holocaust?

 

Edwin Black certainly thinks it did.  In 2001, he published the fruit of years of research he and dozens of volunteers conducted into the history of the International Business Machines Corporation and how its German offspring, called Dehomag, participated in Nazi Germany's highly organized wartime actions, including the execution of six million Jews and other "undesirables."  The resulting 520-page book, IBM and the Holocaust, has to be one of the most excruciatingly detailed and exhaustively researched books on any technical aspect of World War II.  But if you frame the issue in terms of a legal case, the book is more like an extensive set of notes for the prosecution, rather than the prosecution itself. 

 

To say anything meaningful about the book in the space of one column is presumptuous, but I'll try anyway.  Black provides useful context by briefly describing the corporate history of IBM, which formally begins in 1911 with the founding of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.  One of the founders was the German-American inventor Herman Hollerith, whose concept of storing information in the form of little holes in thin stiff cards gave rise to what we would now call the first data-processing machines.  Salesman Thomas J. Watson, who eventually rose to head the company, expanded IBM's customer base beyond the U. S. government, which used "Hollerith cards" as long ago as the 1890 census, and by 1930 Watson was in firm control of what was now known as International Business Machines, or IBM.  Almost in parallel, a German subsidiary whose full name was Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen GmbH (abbreviated "Dehomag") was established and provided punch-card equipment to Germany and other European customers.  Dehomag was owned 90% by IBM USA, which wasn't a problem until Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and the U. S. public perception of what became the Nazi regime turned sour.

 

Author Black accumulated tens of thousands of documents showing exactly how Watson and IBM USA kept Dehomag going throughout World War II, despite its being taken over by Nazi-appointed trustees once the war began.  Profits, which were substantial, built up in frozen accounts which were accessed after the war, and Black shows how IBM-designed and provided punch cards and processing systems allowed the Nazis to count, locate, and round up Jews and other disparaged types when the time came for the concentration camps to ramp up their killings. 

 

From the earliest IBM-facilitated census in 1933 to the last gasp of the Nazi regime in 1945, punch-card systems helped Germany keep track of trains, coordinate production, and account for every death in every concentration camp.  A secret government agency founded in 1937 and called the Maschinelles Berichtwesen (Office of Automated Reporting) kept track of punch-card equipment and supplies, and served as a central clearinghouse for all punch-card technology and operations, which consumed many millions of cards during the war.  And as Black shows, the U. S. minders at IBM kept tabs on Dehomag and other European subsidiaries all the way through the war, sometimes even with the assistance of U. S. diplomatic personnel.

 

That sounds bad enough.  But what is missing in Black's otherwise unimpeachable thoroughness of documentation is any consideration of alternatives, and a kind of moral summing up of exactly what IBM's culpability was.  His book is a classic case of not being able to see, or at least talk about, the forest because of all the trees in the way.  In the introduction, Black admonishes the reader to read the book all the way through, or not at all.  I did what he told me to, but this meant slogging through page after page of minutiae such as examples of bills of sale and machine serial numbers. 

 

Perhaps Black thought his job was simply to report the facts and let the facts speak for themselves.  But facts never do—historians have to say something about what they mean.  And what I kept wishing for was an examination of what Watson (who in a real sense was IBM at the time) could have done differently, and whether it would have made any difference.

 

For example, suppose Watson had simply sold Dehomag at a huge discount to whatever buyers in Germany were around in 1939, say, and walked away from the subsidiary, cutting off all communication with it.  One could argue that this would have been a dereliction of responsibility to IBM's shareholders, as Dehomag was using IBM's technology and patents.  But perhaps it would have been worth it for the war effort.  As it turns out, Dehomag probably had enough expertise to keep going without the parent company's help, but perhaps with less effectiveness.  The Nazis were not about to let go of the informational power that punch-card systems gave them, and the Maschinelles Berichtwesen would have kept the machines running somehow. 

 

As it happened, Watson tried to walk a fine line between not appearing to favor the Nazi regime on the one hand, and not abandoning Dehomag altogether on the other hand.  In 1937 Hitler awarded Watson the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, but in June of 1940, Watson publicly returned the medal, and nearly lost Dehomag in the process.  But intense diplomatic and other efforts kept Dehomag in IBM's orbit, however tenuously.

 

If punch cards had never been invented, Hitler would probably have killed a lot of Jews in World War II anyway, but maybe not as efficiently and thoroughly.  One frustrating aspect of Black's book is that he clearly has only a layman's understanding of exactly how IBM's 1930s punch-card technology operated.  He shows how the Nazis valued and used the technology and how much faster it allowed them to find Jews and track railroad cars, but comparisons between operations carried out with punched cards and modern-day computing are lacking. 

 

Nevertheless, Black has shown that IBM's machines were an essential part of the Nazi war machine, and that Watson and his underlings did nothing to slow down their use—in fact, they assisted to the extent possible, always refraining from asking exactly what the Nazis were doing with their cards. 

 

The IBM of today is a vastly different entity than it was in the 1930s, but the sordid record of its collusion with Nazi Germany is a moral lesson in the responsibilities of corporations in wartime.  Black has given us plenty of material from which to draw that lesson, but the job of learning it is up to us.

 

Sources:  Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust:  The Strategic Allliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation was published by Crown (a division of Random House) in 2001.

Tesla Smart Summon App May Not Be

. . . all that smart, that is.

 

Say you're a well-off single twenty-something guy with a brand-new Tesla and you read the following on your car's control screen:

 

"Buckle up for the ride of your life, except, surprise!  You're not in the car.  ASS (Actually Smart Summon) allows your vehicle to come to you, or head to a spot that you choose, all on its own.  It's like magic, but with more tech and less wand-waving."

 

What's not to like?  Imagine leaving a bar with your date and saying, "Watch this," and pressing the ASS button—on the phone, that is.  And your new Tesla just quietly leaves its space in the parking lot and pulls up next to you.  How cool is that?

 

And how likely are you to follow the fine print on the instruction screen to the letter, which reads in part "Keep an eye on your car and its surroundings at all times.  Stay vigilant, especially around the fast and the furious (people, bikes, and other cars)."  No, you're more likely to be lapping up the adulation from your date. 

 

So when the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received a complaint about a crash involving a Tesla under Actually Smart Summon control, it started looking around and found several other similar incidents in media reports, a total of twelve malfunctions that it is currently investigating.

 

Part of the problem is that the NHTSA has told Tesla to report directly to them any crashes on "publicly accessible roads" that involve autonomous operation of its vehicles.  The Summon software has an internal interlock that prevents it being used on public streets, and it's intended only for parking lots and driveways.  This leads to a debate about what "publicly accessible" means.  If you have a gate at the bottom of your driveway, it's not publicly accessible.  But what if there's no gate, or the gate is open?  I'd say most ungated parking lots for retail and commercial enterprises are publicly accessible.  It looks like Tesla hasn't been entirely forthcoming to the NHTSA, assuming in the first place that they knew about some of the incidents.  And considering how intimately the software of every Tesla is tied to corporate HQ, I suspect they had the data at their fingertips.

 

The Associated Press story about this latest kerfuffle between the NHTSA and Tesla reminds us that in the past, Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has complained that the regulatory agency is stifling progress in autonomous driving technology.  There is speculation that once the Trump administration is in charge of all executive-branch agencies such as the NHTSA, Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's campaign and was appointed to a government-improvement board, will pressure the NHTSA to lay off Tesla, in short. 

 

How much regulation is too much?  It depends on who you ask:  the companies that are regulated, or the people who benefit from regulations.

 

Just to pick a historical example, ask any member of the families of the so-called "radium girls" who spent eight hours a day in the 1920s painting radium dials on watches and clocks, came down with radiation poisoning, and died horrible deaths.  The use of radium was not regulated at all back then, and the radium girls paid the price. 

 

On the other hand, a classic case of "rent-seeking," which means a firm that uses government regulation to create a monopoly or other favorable business environment for itself, came about for most of the twentieth century in the U. S. when Ma Bell (American Telephone and Telegraph) regulated away virtually all other telecomm companies except for a few harmless local enterprises here and there.  In retrospect, this over-regulation stifled competition and slowed technological advance to a crawl until antitrust lawsuits broke up the monopoly and led to the explosion of telecomm services and smartphone apps that we (mostly) enjoy today. 

 

There are two extremes to think about.  The same AP article mentions that Tesla suffered its first decline in sales in a decade last year.  Could this be a sign that regulatory burdens are losing Tesla business?  I doubt it.  There are so many other factors involved—Chinese competition in electric vehicles, the continuing high prices of EVs compared to gasoline-powered cars, even political factors (I'm sure there are some people who will refuse to buy a Tesla simply because Musk hangs out with Trump)—that blaming a sales decline on regulatory pressure is implausible.

 

Musk has a well-earned reputation for playing fast and loose with bureaucracies and their spawn, namely regulations.  This attitude on the part of a radical innovator is understandable.  Technical innovation frequently gets ahead of the law, in that it creates situations that are unprecedented and nobody has had the time to figure out what laws to pass regarding them.  Musk seems to believe that it's easier to get forgiveness in retrospect than permission in advance, and there is some truth to that.

 

On the other hand, he also seems to think that telling people to be careful absolves him and his company of responsibility if a Tesla driver disobeys instructions.  Many crashes involving the "self-driving" features of Teslas have happened because, in direct contradiction to instructions telling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over if something unusual happens, the drivers have been doing things like watching videos on their phones. 

 

It's possible something similar is happening with the Summons features.  Besides the Actually Smart Summons, there is a Dumb Summons that lets you manually drive the car like a giant radio-controlled toy, and that obviously requires you to pay full attention to what you're doing and watch the four-camera display on your phone while you're doing it.  But the NHTSA is concerned about latency issues and how fast the car can go in this mode, as it looks like remote-control drivers may not have had enough time to avoid obstacles such as other parked cars and bollards (those traffic-preventing posts mounted in the ground).

 

My two cents on this is that the NHTSA is doing about right in not taking drastic action such as banning all Teslas from the road, but not ignoring new problems as they surface in complaints and media reports either.  The NHTSA will continue to spotlight problems with Teslas, and Musk will continue to gripe that they're overdoing it, and life will go on. 

 

And maybe the people making up acronyms at Tesla for the next new app will be a little more careful about what it spells.  I spent five minutes trying to think of how I could incorporate ASS in my headline, but finally took the high road and left it out.  Not everybody else will, though.

 

Sources:  An Associated Press article published on Jan. 7, 2025 entitled "US opens another Tesla probe, latest focused on tech that remotely returns car to driver," appeared at https://apnews.com/article/tesla-investigation-safety-autonomous-death-a158e4dee7b5e94b148ec3bb5c47233d.  I obtained the instruction quotes from a screenshot contained in a short video demonstrating the ASS app at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RmVk-0LlDMI. 

Jeju Airlines Flight 2216: A Deadly Combination

On Sunday Dec. 29, the Boeing 737-800 carrying 181 people on Jeju Air Flight 2216 from Bangkok to the South Korean regional airport in Muan crashed, killing all but two flight attendants on board.  The circumstances of the crash are yet another example of how problems that may not be fatal individually can combine to create a major tragedy.

 

Following an apparently normal flight from Thailand, on the approach to Muan the pilot was warned of the presence of birds near the runway.  According to the Wikipedia article on the accident, during their approach the pilots issued a mayday, apparently due to a bird strike.  They were given permission to land in the opposite direction to their initial approach.

 

On the ground, residents reported hearing loud bangs before the plane landed, and smoke was seen coming from one engine, suggesting that birds may have disabled it.

 

For reasons yet unknown, the landing gear was not deployed before the pilot attempted a second pass at the runway.  The plane landed nose-up and skidded for 1200 meters on the engine nacelles.  A video made by a bystander shows the plane traveling toward the end of the runway, apparently intact and not on fire yet.

 

But 250 meters beyond the end of the runway, the plane encountered the concrete foundation of an instrument-landing-system antenna array.  The plane was going fast enough to destroy all of the fuselage except for a small section of the tail, in which the two survivors were found with serious injuries.  Everyone else—175 passengers and four crew members—died.

 

The damaged flight recorder was recovered and is being analyzed in the U. S. for clues as to why so many things went wrong at once.  But even at this early stage in the investigation process, a few things are clear.

 

A bird strike disabling one of the two engines of a 737 is not by itself a fatal occurrence.  If the other engine is operating normally, there is enough power and control remaining for a skilled pilot to land the craft and even take off with one engine, given enough runway distance.

 

A failure of landing gear to deploy, by itself, is also a survivable problem.  If ground crews have enough notice to spread foam on the runway and be prepared for a post-landing fire, planes have successfully landed (a "belly landing") without operating landing gear.  The feat is very tricky, however, and always damages the plane extensively, and any obstructions on the ground or past the end of the runway can destroy the plane.

 

And that is exactly what happened when the 737-800, which up to that point had survived the belly landing relatively intact, struck the concrete antenna-array foundation 250 meters beyond the end of the runway.  Aviation experts say that barrier should not have been allowed to be erected so close to the flight path.  It is an obvious undesirable feature of airport architecture to have a solid substantial structure that won't break away in the possible path of belly-landing aircraft.  Some South Korean architectural firm is going to have to answer some hard questions in the near future.

 

So we see that the accident involved at least three independent, although possibly related, problems:  the bird strike or whatever it was that apparently killed an engine, the failure of the landing gear to deploy (whether through mechanical failure or human error), and the placement of a potentially plane-destroying concrete obstruction in the flight path.  Eliminating any one of these issues could have resulted in a scary but survivable landing.  But all three of them combined to produce the most deadly aircraft accident on South Korean soil in that nation's history.

 

This accident comes at a supremely fragile point in the political history of South Korea, which is currently being run by an acting president after Yoon Suk Yeol, who was duly elected in May of 2022, declared martial law, was impeached on Dec. 14, 2024, and replaced by Han Duck-soo, who was impeached in turn on Dec. 27, and replaced by Choi Sang-mok.  A national tragedy such as the Jeju Air crash would be a blot on even a popular president's record, but coming at this time of instability, it will only add to the general level of tension and anxiety in the country.

 

Our sympathy extends to the hundreds of relatives, loved ones, and friends who lost passengers at this holiday time.  Until the flight recorder is examined, we can't know exactly what was going on in the cockpit during what was clearly an emergency.  And in the aftermath of such a tragedy, assigning blame is not going to bring anyone back from the dead, although it might give a sense of closure to some. 

 

South Korea is a fascinating case study of a culture which propelled itself from a rather backwards agriculture-based traditional model to one in which cutting-edge technology fuels a so-far thriving economy.  Curiously, though, South Korea has the world's lowest total fertility rate.  At 0.78, it is well below the replacement rate of about 2.1 (the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime), and is already having a deleterious effect on the country's economy and social life.  Losing family members is always hard, but in a country where marriage and childbearing have become relatively unpopular, a tragedy like this one must make things seem even worse.

 

We look forward to the results of the investigation into this accident.  But already there are lessons to be learned about airport architecture, about emergency landing procedures, and about the damage birds can cause when they fly near airports, as birds are always going to do.  The year 2024 ended badly for air safety, with the apparent shooting down of Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 which we covered only last week, and now the Jeju Air crash.  Let's hope the lessons from both of these tragedies are learned quickly and applied to make air travel in 2025 even safer than ever.

 

Sources:  I referred to a Reuters article on the Jeju Air crash at https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-extends-boeing-737-800-inspections-following-fatal-crash-2025-01-03/, a CBS News report at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-korea-plane-crash-police-raid-jeju-air/, and the Wikipedia article "Jeju Air Flight 2216."