Texas Moves to Ban Social Media Banning

 

On Sept. 9, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 20, a law designed to keep social media companies with more than 50 million subscribers from blocking users whose viewpoints the company disapproves of.  Scheduled to take effect in December, the law has already attracted controversy and threats of lawsuits to keep it from going into effect.

 

Currently, if a user is de-platformed from a large site such as Facebook, there are not a lot of alternatives.  The overarching law in the U. S. pertaining to such situations is Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which prevails if there is a conflict between it and a state law.  However, there is wiggle room that Section 230 leaves, at least according to State Rep. Briscoe Cain, who authored the Texas statute.  Cain regards social media in the same light as telephone companies—that is, "common carriers" whose business it is to take on any and all comers and not discriminate among them based on content. 

 

Such discrimination happens all the time, as one unconfirmed incident I heard of recently attests.  A man at the church I attend volunteers at a local pregnancy resource center, which is holding an online fundraising event in a few weeks.  He told me that the center has found that some of their emails sent to supporters have mysteriously disappeared, implying that the internet service providers' spam filters had been adjusted to block emails from the center. 

 

Another example taken at random from a web search concerns Ryan Moore, a self-described writer and advertising broker, who tried to advertise a video he made in the spring of 2019 in which he was wearing a red "MAGA" (Make America Great Again) hat.  While I have not viewed the video (I checked the link and it is now "unavailable") his description of it sounds mild enough—criticism of the Christchurch, New Zealand terrorist bombing, good wishes for a nice St. Patrick's Day, and so on.  Not only did Google refuse his ad to promote his video, it permanently banned him from ever having a Google ad account again, and confirmed this decision when Moore inquired, saying "Since this decision is final, the account will not be reinstated." 

 

I could multiply such instances that range everywhere from a single post being blocked to the wholesale destruction of an entire business when the Parler app and website were de-platformed by Google and Apple in 2019. 

 

Not everyone who gets de-platformed is defensible, and even Rep. Cain probably does not want to allow hard-core child pornography to go unrestricted on the Internet (although it probably does if you look hard enough).  But HB 20 is an attempt to redress the huge power imbalance that happens when an individual or small organization has its access to social media blocked by a giant well-funded firm that exercises essentially monopoly powers.

 

Either the Texas attorney general or the wronged entity could sue under the new bill, and this may be a point of vulnerability, in that opponents of the bill claim it may interfere with the ability of social media companies to regulate their own content.  Of course it will.  NetChoice, a trade association which counts Google, PayPal, and Facebook among its members, issued a statement condemning the passage of HB 20 and saying that it will probably be blocked by a federal court once it goes into effect.  NetChoice's position is that social media firms, as private entities, are entitled to carry only content that they choose, and by using their facilities, users put themselves at the mercy of the firm's discretion. 

 

This reminds me of a scene out of the 1940 Disney animated film "Fantasia," which set to music cartoon characters both familiar and otherwise.  In time with the famous ballet music "Dance of the Hours," viewers are greeted by a company of baby hippopotamuses, each with a frilly pink lace tu-tu encircling her waist.

 

The analogy is clear—we have a troop of baby-hippo Big Tech giants stomping over the public stage, asking us to believe that their private-firm tu-tus, which might have been appropriate in the very early days when legacy media such as TV and newspapers overshadowed them, mean that whatever they decide about their content is their own business because it affects so few people. 

 

The tu-tus no longer fit, if they ever did.  Big Tech now operates a lot of 900-pound gorillas, to mix the animal metaphor, who do exactly as they please with regard to content that currently will not gain attention any other way than being filtered through the social-media monopoly.  The Texas legislation is one state's attempt to make dealing with social media a little less unfair.

 

I note a disturbing trend of which this controversy is only one example.  A nation, to be a nation, must share a common pool of underlying principles or philosophies, in order to endure.  By their behavior in China, for example, Big Tech firms such as Apple, Google, and Facebook make it clear that nations mean little or nothing to them when it comes to the bottom line.  Of course they need to stay within the law, but "the law" is a slippery and many-faceted thing, especially when you have deep enough pockets to hire enough lawyers to keep even states busy for years just trying to keep from being overwhelmed with lawsuits. 

 

In past controversies involving freedom of speech in this country, opposing sides could at least agree on the statement, "Well, at least we're all Americans."  But I have a hard time picturing the leaders of Big Tech freely admitting such a thing even in public, let alone in private.  Great wealth confers great power, and as Lord Acton said, power corrupts.  It is not yet time to despair that the systems of government that the founders deeded to us can overcome the exercise of raw power with the rule of law, which is all we have to guard ourselves against despotism.  But the upcoming battle over the implementation of HB 20 will be yet another skirmish in the war that is currently being fought over the right of free speech, which Big Tech increasingly wants to define for itself. 

 

Sources:  I referred to a Texas Tribune article "Social media companies can’t ban Texans over political viewpoints under new law" at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/02/texas-social-media-censorship-legislature/ and an article from The Verge at https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22661626/texas-social-media-law-hb-20-signed-greg-abbott..  Ryan Moore described his permanent ban from Google advertising in the Des Moines Register on Sept. 26, 2019 at https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2019/09/26/one-many-conservatives-banned-social-media/3773954002/.

Carr's Fix for Social Media: The Digital Communication Act

 

Nicholas Carr is a writer whose book The Shallows:  What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, published in 2010, gained considerable attention by pointing out how new technologies have affected our basic thought processes, and not always in a good way.  In the fall 2021 issue of The New Atlantis journal, he proposes a legislative initiative he calls the Digital Communications Act that would, if adopted, go far toward alleviating some of the worst harms that social media currently cause.  But to understand the thrust of his proposals, a little historical background is in order.

 

Electronic media basically do two different kinds of things:  personal communication and broadcasting.  Until the Internet came along, these two different activities were done by more or less completely different kinds of technology.  The telegraph and telephone are classic examples of the first kind:  personal communication, one person to another.  As regulations evolved in the twentieth century to deal with issues of privacy arising from the fact that telegraph and telephone operators could eavesdrop on personal communications through their systems, legislatures and courts came up with what is called a "common-carrier" doctrine. 

 

Borrowed from the transportation field, the concept of a common carrier is that some industries do things that are so vital to the public good that they need to be regulated in order to enforce goods such as fairness and privacy.  The first quasi-independent federal agency of any magnitude, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was established to enforce common-carrier rules on railroads, which had previously engaged in discriminatory and predatory pricing to exploit farmers who had no other way to sell their crops in wider markets than local ones. 

 

When Western Union and the Bell System came along, the federal government applied common-carrier rules to them.  The tariffs, as they were called, could get quite complicated, but the overarching principle was simple:  treat all communications as private and treat all (or most) customers the same. 

 

Broadcasting, on the other hand, had to be treated differently once people figured out that one person in a studio could potentially talk to millions of others nationwide.  The Federal Radio Commission of 1927, predecessor to the current Federal Communications Commission (FCC), came up with a phrase that described how broadcasters must treat the privilege, granted by an FCC license, of addressing thousands or millions at once:  "the public interest, convenience, or necessity," sometimes abbreviated PICON.  Over the decades, PICON has dictated how broadcasters must behave in order to retain their broadcasting privileges.  As the nature of the public changes continually, PICON standards change as well.  From the 1940s through the 1980s, the FCC imposed what was called the "fairness doctrine," which required broadcasters to give equal time to opposing sides in a political contest, for example.  After the FCC abandoned the doctrine in 1987, religious and partisan political broadcasting flourished, but the net benefit to the public is debatable, to say the least.

 

When the Internet came along, it put all these nice separate types of communication in a super-speed blender and mixed them all together.  From the same computer, I can email one friend, or if I'm a super-influencer, I can send the same image of my latest clothing style to ten million people.  But the two categories—personal communication and broadcasting—still apply, and it's not that hard to separate them by either intent or by statistical means.  As Carr puts it, "An Instagrammer [or an engineering ethics blogger] with a hundred followers can be assumed to be engaged in conversation;  an Instagrammer with a hundred thousand followers is a broadcaster."  Carr says—and I agree with him—that the psychological or humanistic categories of personal communication and broadcasting are still useful, and should be used to discriminate between two types of regulation that his proposed Digital Communications Act would apply to social media and internet service providers.

 

For personal communications, ranging from emails, to Facebook posts to a few friends, to search-engine inquiries, the Act would require companies to respect one's privacy.  No more searching for snow shovels online and getting buried in emails and pop-ups for snow shovels, dirt shovels, and snow cones.  No more talking about driving to a fast-food outlet and having your phone overhear your conversation and throw ads at you for that chain, or a rival one.  We've almost gotten used to it, but I know people who have gotten used to living with cancer.  That doesn't mean it's a good thing to have cancer.

 

For broadcasting, which means anything anybody does that reaches more than a certain threshold number of people, something like the old PICON doctrine needs to be imposed.  Carr is perhaps intentionally vague on what a 2021-era version of the fairness doctrine would look like.  Much of the really harmful stuff that runs around the Internet is spontaneous, as "going viral" is not something one particular person can infallibly bring about.  But the process itself is easily monitored and encouraged by the social media companies, as things like that are their bread and butter.  And it wouldn't be hard to set up rules or software to regulate the process—technically, I mean.

 

Politically, it's another can of worms altogether.  In what could qualify as the understatement of the year, Carr says his proposed Act "would be complicated and controversial.  It would be resisted by many powerful private interests."  Yes, only Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, well, you know the list.  It would be opposed mainly because it would cut off one of their main revenue streams, which is advertising targeted by means of snooping into your private communications, and that would be barred under the Act.  A snowball has an excellent chance inside Mt. Vesuvius compared to this bill, at least under present circumstances. 

 

But times and circumstances change, and maybe some day an outrage may occur that is so universally deplored that the political will of the country will favor such a move.  As Carr points out, it was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 that catalyzed international regulation of the radio waves, because interfering stations made it hard to conduct rescue operations by radio.  We have had numerous political disasters that social media have played a part in, but nobody has been killed yet, at least not directly. 

 

Anyway, I think Carr has done us all a great service in basing his argument for a Digital Communications Act on a sound historical footing, and now all we need to do is enact it.  Stay tuned, so to speak.

 

Sources:  Nicholas Carr's article "How to Fix Social Media" appeared on pp. 3-20 of the Fall 2021 issue of The New Atlantis.  I also referred to a Wikipedia article on the fairness doctrine. 

Worldwide Health Journal Editors Call for Climate Dictatorship

 

Maybe I exaggerate, but only a little.

 

In a recent National Review piece, Wesley J. Smith highlighted an editorial that was recently co-written and published by editors of some eighteen medical journals, including such prestigious ones as The Lancet and PLOS Medicine.  In essence, they're saying, "Hey, you see how much government-caused disruption we've stood for to fight COVID-19?  Let's do even more to fight global warming, combat biodiversity loss, and, yes, incidentally, even improve public health." 

 

They take global warming very seriously, saying "The risks to health of increases above 1.5º C are now well established.  Indeed, no temperature rise is 'safe.'"  Because global warming was caused by countries that emitted more carbon dioxide, and those tend to be wealthier ones, the editors call for a form of retributive justice:  "Wealthier countries will have to cut emissions more quickly, making reductions by 2030 beyond those currently proposed, and reaching net-zero emissions before 2050."

 

So how should we go about doing these things?  Here it gets juicy:  "To achieve these targets, governments must make fundamental changes in how our societies and economies are organised and how we live . . . . Governments must intervene to support the redesign of transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more." 

 

Who will pay for all this?  Why, the wealthy countries, of course.  As a famous bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks, "Because that's where the money is."  Rich countries need to increase their spending on poor countries with grants, not loans.  And after all, having these big differences in wealth is apparently bad for public health too:  " . . . the changes cannot be achieved through a return to damaging austerity policies or the continuation of the large inequalities of wealth and power within and between countries."  In other words, let's have global socialism so that everybody has more or less the same income.

 

If we took that advice literally and divided up all the world's wealth and income evenly, every person in the world would end up with about $34,000.  That sounds nice, but it ignores the literally Hellish world-government system it would take to do that.  If you think Venezuela is bad, where only tiny steps toward this goal have been taken, wait till you try to apply it to the whole world.

 

Perhaps when these editors stick to matters of medicine, they make sense, but in their attempt to address a complex problem that has huge diplomatic, political, and philosophical implications, I think they bit off more than they can chew.

 

First, what about the idea of making the most wealthy countries suffer the most?  If you look at total carbon dioxide emissions from 1750 to 2019, it turns out that the two largest contributors are Europe and the U. S., with about a fourth each, followed by China and the rest of Asia with about a sixth each, roughly speaking. 

 

That obscures the fact that currently, China emits about twice as much carbon dioxide as the U. S. does. So if you're talking about reducing current emissions, a radical action such as putting the entire U. S. economy in a deep freeze would not make as much difference as if China simply reduced their carbon emissions by two-thirds. 

 

What I'm trying to get at is the underlying philosophy of the editors' call to action.  They clearly are going beyond science, and admittedly, medicine is more than just science.  But in conformity with a notable liberal tendency to see solutions to problems as more straighforward than they are, they view the world in a scientistic way in which humans are reduced to pawns or nodes in a giant network that simply needs some adjusting to make it work right.

 

Too many resources over here and not enough over there?  Why, just move the ones that belong to the rich countries over to the poor countries.  If it was a matter of underpowered neighborhoods and a surplus of electric power elsewhere, you really could solve the problem by building a transmission line to move the power where it needs to go. 

 

But how did those wealthy countries get wealthy in the first place?  By their governments allocating everything according to some formulas devised by economists, or even editors of medical journals?  I don't think so.  Economist and author John C. Médaille has said, "Values are created only from human labor applied to the gifts of nature.  There is nothing else."  Historically, the most wealthy countries encouraged human labor to apply itself to the gifts of nature by treading lightly on rights of private property, which includes "transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more." 

 

If wealth is treated simply as a government-controlled asset that can be sent here and there like electricity on a transmission line, said governments will very soon discover that there is no wealth to send.  The fact that this has happened over and over again in socialist and communist countries seems to make no impression on certain types of people, apparently including the types that edit medical journals.

 

Should we just ignore global warming and go on our merry way?  Not necessarily.  It is an unfortunate byproduct of human ingenuity, and we would be foolish to look for anything other than more human ingenuity to get us out of the situation.  But human ingenuity cannot be trammeled and ordered around like so many million barrels of oil, or anything else.  Governments can guide and encourage, but the heavy-handed global dictatorship called for by the medical-journal editors would not get us there.  Instead, it would result in a worldwide economic crash and famine from which the world economy might never recover, and which would incidentally kill millions of people in the process.  So much for improved health care.

 

Some people might be happy to see the future as a vastly reduced number of people eking out a subsistence living in the empty skeleton-shells of cities, hunting deer in Central Park and living on thirty-year-old canned goods, as envisioned in the forgotten Stephen Vincent Benét short story "By the Waters of Babylon."  But that is not where I wish to reside for my time remaining, thank you.  After I'm gone, you can please yourself.

 

Sources:  The editorial in question, "Call for emergency action to limit global temperature increases, restore biodiversity, and protect health," appeared in the British Medical Journal (and many other similar journals) at https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1734.  The data on historical and current carbon-dioxide levels is from https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-china-the-main-climate-change-culprit/a-57777113#:~:text=The%20data%20shows%20that%20although,released%20410%20billion%20metric%20tons.  The world's wealth evenly divided was calculated at https://www.bnd.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/answer-man/article170650812.html.  The Médaille quote is from his Toward A Truly Free Market (ISI Books, 2010), p. 66.  And Benét's short story can be found in a number of older short-story anthologies, and is also online at

https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/13_By%20the%20Waters%20of%20Babylon%20by%20Stephen%20Vincent%20Benet.pdf.

Firefly's Alpha and Rocket Pollution

 

Last Thursday, a small startup spaceflight firm called Firefly Aerospace launched its first unmanned rocket design, Firefly Alpha, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.  Things went fine for the first minute or two, and then the dreaded word "anomaly" was heard over the audio feed.  The rocket went off course and officials of the U. S. Space Force, who were apparently acting as safety officers, "terminated" the flight, meaning they triggered a self-destruct process that exploded it over the Pacific Ocean.  Nobody was hurt, except perhaps emotionally and financially, and investigators and engineers will be combing through the data for months to figure out what went wrong.

 

As prototype rocket launches go, this was not an unexpected outcome.  The rival spaceflight firm SpaceX blew up quite a lot of hardware before they got things right enough to risk putting people on board their rockets.  This is an interesting time in the history of space flight, comparable to the early 1920s in the history of conventional aviation.  Issues that no one has given much thought to up to this point will start to emerge in the coming years as rocket launches for everything from low-orbit satellites to Martian manned flights will come along.  One of these issues is the question of pollution from rocket launches.

 

Different kinds of rockets use different kinds of fuel.  The old Saturn V that took U. S. astronauts to the moon burned a refined kind of kerosene with liquid oxygen.  This produced nothing more harmful than carbon dioxide and water vapor, and the launches were infrequent enough to have a negligible effect on the worldwide environment.

 

But rockets designed to launch low-earth-orbit satellites often use solid propellants that typically combine powdered aluminum, ammonium chlorate, and an organic carbon-containing binder.  A solid-propellant rocket is much simpler to build than a liquid-fueled one, as it is basically a giant can of propellant with some kind of igniter at the end.  They are usually used for the initial booster stage from ground level through the stratosphere, and that's where the pollution trouble begins.

 

According to Martin Ross and Darrin Toohey, aerospace scientists writing in the American Geophysical Union's journal EOS, solid-rocket fuel leaves behind lots of solid particles, mainly carbon and alumina (aluminum oxide).  Currently the world is experiencing a rapid increase in annual rocket launches, some 8% a year, and the estimated annual amount of black carbon (BC) soot particles this produces is about 225 tons.  If you spread that much carbon soot over the whole surface of the earth, it wouldn't do much, but that's not where it goes.

 

A substantial amount is emitted in the stratosphere, which is an unusual place atmospherically.  The troposphere, which extends from ground level up to about 7 to 20 km, depending on latitude (4.3 to 12 miles), is constantly churning due to convection, and small particles are likely to be caught in raindrops and wash out pretty quickly.  But there's no rain in the stratosphere—it's too cold, way below freezing.  And worse yet, anything you put there is likely to stay there, because winds move mainly horizontally—there's essentially no vertical convection.

 

So these tiny particles of soot, less than a millionth of a meter in diameter, slowly drift downward but tend to stay in the stratosphere for years.  Ross and Toohey did one of the few estimates carried out so far of what such pollution will do to the climate, and their results are mixed.

 

They assumed rocket launches would increase to emit 600 tons of BC a year, and found that over the poles, this would warm the surface by an average of 1 degree C.  But over the midlatitudes, where most of the BC would be released, the result would be cooling by about the same amount.

 

Well, with all the worries about global warming, what's so bad about that?  Overall, they found that the effect of the prospective BC pollution would be neutral in that regard.  But they emphasize that theirs is about the only study of such effects, and urge the scientific community to look at other possible effects, on the ozone layer and on other atmospheric issues that people haven't even thought of yet.

 

From the viewpoint of engineering ethics, Ross and Toohey are doing a good thing in raising a question that most people haven't even considered:  what are the possible negative
externalities that could result if we have a whole lot more rocket launches per year than we do now?  Getting ahead of possible problems is one trademark of good engineering.  As for their results, it sounds like there is nothing to worry about right away from rocket air pollution, although already it has a contribution to BC emissions equal to that of the entire conventional aviation industry, simply because rockets are a lot dirtier emitters than jets. 

 

In view of Firefly's recent anomaly, the more immediate concern to my mind is how we are going to deal with the first fatalities of paying customers in space flight.  Because sooner or later, you know it's going to happen.  I have not tried to buy a ticket into space, but if I did, I wager there are a lot of papers to sign first, and some of those papers throw all the risk and responsibility onto the passenger.  That's all well and good, but the deaths of a few billionaires on a holiday junket to the first Lagrangian point is going to be a lot harder to dress up as heroism compared to, say, the 1986 death of Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger accident.

 

Most of the volume of commercial rocket launches in the future will be for unmanned utilitarian purposes such as minisatellites and so on, and the worst that can happen there is if something blows up and falls on somebody, generally speaking.  But space tourism has begun, and it will be interesting to see how the industry deals with its first paying-customer accident.  Maybe that will just make it more exciting and attractive, like drag racing does for some people.  And from a libertarian point of view, if somebody wants to spend a ton of money risking their lives on a rocket ride, I suppose it's none of my business. But life is too valuable to waste it on cheap thrills, or even expensive ones.

 

Sources:  Martin N. Ross and Darrin W. Toohey wrote "The Coming Surge of Rocket Emissions" which appeared on the EOS website at https://eos.org/features/the-coming-surge-of-rocket-emissions.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the stratosphere, Firefly Aerospace, and Christa McAuliffe.

Will Fusion Energy Always Be Forty Years In the Future?

 

Indulge me in a little stroll down Nerd's Memory Lane.

 

When I was in high school, I heard about an upcoming talk on nuclear fusion that was going to be part of some publicity event in a new Fort Worth theater.  As my grandmother was the theater director's secretary, that may be how I found out about it.  Anyway, I went.

 

It was a good crowd, and the guy presenting the talk described what nuclear fusion was in layman's terms, talked about what had been tried so far, and went into considerable detail.  This was probably around 1970, mind you.  Hydrogen bombs (more exactly, thermonuclear weapons) which are still the only way we know how to produce a large amount of energy with fusion, were less than twenty years old.  The speaker may have mentioned tokamaks and plasmas and so on, and while I was listening I thought of a question to ask him at the end.

 

There were several people lined up before me, and the guy, who looked plenty old enough to me to be an Authority (although he was probably only about 40), patiently answered all the questions people had, even stupid ones.  I was the last person in line.  I asked him if somebody had thought of using feedback control to stabilize plasmas, and he said yes, that was one thing they were considering.  I felt thrilled to have thought of something that would almost certainly become an important source of energy by the time I was his age, or a little older.

 

Well, fast-forward fifty-one years or so.  No one has yet put a single watt-second of fusion energy into a power grid anywhere.  On the website of the electrical engineering profession's general-interest magazine IEEE Spectrum, there is an interview with a professor of science journalism named Charles Seife who thinks the latest "milestone" announcement by the U. S. National Ignition Facility (NIF) is not so much a milestone as they claim it is.  More like so many minutes on a treadmill, perhaps.

 

What the NIF announced was that they managed to ignite a lump of fusion fuel to the extent that it made 1.3 megajoules of energy.  Just to put that in perspective, that's about the energy content of a pound (0.45 kg) of gunpowder.  I don't know how many billions of dollars has been spent on the NIF, but if that's all they can do with it so far, it'd be a lot cheaper to wait till New Year's and buy a lot of firecrackers.

 

Not to be too cynical, Seife admits there is a legitimate reason to keep the NIF running, but he thinks it has little or nothing to do with the practical goal of fusion energy.  The NIF was founded to study nuclear weapons, because the same basic process is used both in thermonuclear weapons and other types of fusion processes.  As long as we in the U. S. wish to remain members of the nuclear-weapon club, we need to keep our thermonuclear powder dry, so to speak, which means maintaining experts that know how to make sure the bombs will go off when we want them to, and not otherwise.  So letting them fool around with stuff like the NIF keeps them occupied and in practice for checking nuclear weapons without actually setting them off above ground, which is forbidden by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.  Technically, we can test them underground, but because seismological instruments can tell almost anybody nearly as much about the test as we could find out ourselves, that's not done a whole lot either—the last U. S. underground nuclear test was in 1992. 

 

However, selling the public on keeping nuclear-weapons scientists in fighting trim is a hard job, while promising them electricity "too cheap to meter"—a famous catch-phrase of early proponents of fusion power—is a lot easier.  The elephant in the fusion lounge is ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a multinational collaboration based in France which has been keeping lots of mainly European scientists and engineers busy since 1979, or only a few years after my conversation with the fusion evangelist.  ITER's latest deadline to first make plasma is 2025, although they have had considerable schedule slippage over the years.  And who knows how far it will be between making plasma (which any neon sign does whenever you turn it on) and making money by selling electricity made from fusion energy?

 

From an ethical point of view, the main issue I see here is how scientists present their work to the public.  Some things are inherently easier to sell in some cultures than others.  For some reason which may have to do with the displacement of faith in God by faith in the Universe or science, U. S. astronomers are able to extract some $30 billion a year from the federal government, roughly speaking (this includes all of NASA's budget and the NSF budget for astronomy-related activities).  In a day when Congress tosses trillions around like popcorn, that doesn't sound like much.  But for an activity which explicitly excludes profit motives—who ever made money off the Andromeda Galaxy?—that's a good chunk of change.  By and large, the public agrees with astronomers that what they do is cool, and pays for it.

 

Maybe the NIF people need to jazz up the coolness of what they're doing.  I've seen photos of a similar facility, the Z-machine at Sandia Labs, which outdoes anything in Frankenstein's lab for impressiveness.  Of course, just saying you do cool things with sparks or lasers will only take you so far.  But it might be worth a try, rather than setting up goalposts that promise more than they deliver.

 

Sources:  The interview with Charles Seife is at https://spectrum.ieee.org/has-fusion-really-had-its-wright-brothers-moment.  The energy comparison with gunpowder is from https://chesterenergyandpolicy.com/2017/12/27/the-hidden-energy-of-new-years-even-celebrations-measured-in-joules/#:~:text=While%20most%20real%20firecrackers%20are,48%20J%20of%20explosive%20energy and the date of the last U. S. underground nuclear test is from https://allthingsnuclear.org/emacdonald/is-the-united-states-planning-to-resume-nuclear-testing/.  A photo of the z-machine in operation is at https://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/.

Federal Safety Agency Investigates Tesla Autopilot

 

In 2015, the upstart automaker Tesla introduced its Autopilot feature, an advanced artificial-intelligence-enabled system that takes over most of the routine operations that a human driver normally performs.  At the same time, Tesla warned Autopilot users that they should remain attentive with their hands on the wheel at all times, even when Autopilot is engaged.

 

This is a little bit like taking a hungry child into a candy store and telling them not to touch anything.  Most kids will obey, but it's hard on the kid and it can lead to embarrassing situations.

 

It's not surprising that, according to the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), since 2016 ten people have died in eight crashes of Tesla vehicles in which the Autopilot feature was the cause of the crash.  Lately, there have been numerous crashes, one of them fatal, in which Teslas with Autopilot engaged have run into the rear of emergency vehicles with flashing lights. 

 

Finally, the NHTSA has had enough.  It has launched a formal investigation into how the Autopilot system works, how it is implemented, what its defects are, and what steps Tesla has taken to make sure that drivers are paying attention like they are supposed to when the Autopilot is driving the car.  There is abundant evidence that in many of the crashes, the driver was doing something other than watching the road:  watching a movie, playing a video game, or even sitting in a seat other than the driver's seat.  The Autopilot system is supposed to monitor hand pressure on the steering wheel, but according to some sources, this feature is very easy to defeat, and many people appear to have done so.  And most of them probably get away with it most of the time.  But not always.

 

In human-machine safety issues, there is a tradeoff between the two poles which represent extreme approaches to operating a device safely.  One pole relies totally on training the individual not to do dangerous things, or to do them in a safe way, if that makes sense.  Think of stunt drivers in the movie business:  they do things with cars that cars are not designed to do, but with careful planning and finely-honed skills, they manage to survive car flips, crashes, and other tricks that have probably passed into history now that CGI technology is so good that real stunt drivers are probably looking for work.  But the point is that this approach to safety concentrates on the knowledge and attention of the operator or driver, and basically tells him or her to drive safely.

 

The other pole of safety is building in foolproof safety features to the machine itself, so that even an ignorant five-year-old turned loose with the keys couldn't get hurt.  It's not possible to make a car at a reasonable price that is completely safe no matter what you do—at least not yet.  But many of the autonomous-vehicle-type features that are now showing up on many makes besides Tesla move in this direction:  lane-keeping features, automatic braking to avoid head-on collisions, and so on.  They make up for a driver's deficiencies, inattention, or errors.  But they are far from perfect yet, and so the attention and intelligence of the driver are still needed to fill in the gaps where systems like Tesla's Autopilot still can't figure out the situation, such as an emergency vehicle stopped in your lane.

 

I expect the NHTSA will encounter some headwinds in trying to figure out Tesla's Autopilot system.  Elon Musk has, shall we say, a rather cavalier attitude toward convention and traditional ways of doing things, and recently abolished Tesla's public-relations department.  Perhaps he thinks a few tweets from him do just as well, and in the absence of more formal ways of getting information from the company, he may be right.  But nobody can stop the NHTSA from renting or buying some Teslas and putting them through various scenarios and seeing what they do with and without human supervision.  Whatever is going on under the hood, the results will be clear to see.

 

But just testing the hardware and software is only part of the issue.  The poisonous mixture that the NHTSA is dealing with combines an Autopilot system that is very good—so good that people really can let it drive the car for many minutes at a time and get away with it—and drivers who either intentionally put too much trust in the Autopilot system, or simply get distracted and fail to do what they know they ought to be doing, which is looking at the road.  But nobody just accidentally starts watching a movie or playing a video game, and so we must conclude that in at least some of the cases where inattention and the Autopilot have caused crashes, people simply ignored the advice of Tesla to not let Autopilot drive the car by itself, and paid the penalty for their inattention.

 

Now in some countries and cultures (and political persuasions—notably extreme libertarianism), this would not be a concern of the government's.  If people want to do foolish things and ignore instructions, well, let them do it and suffer the consequences.  The problem with this attitude is that it ignores everybody else, particularly other people who might be harmed and killed in the same accident.

 

My point is simply that we in the U. S. have grown accustomed to holding automakers to safety standards that avoid preventable accidents, in the sense that preventable accidents follow a consistent pattern which reasonable interventions at not too much cost can prevent. 

 

We are in a curious transition phase in which systems like Autopilot are good enough to fool us that they can really drive our cars without us paying any attention, but not good enough to do it for real.  And until it is just as safe to play pinochle from the driver's seat as it is at home, we need some way to remind drivers that they can't ignore the road even if the car seems to be driving itself.

 

Sources:  I consulted an article in Consumer Reports at https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/nhtsa-safety-defect-investigation-tesla-autopilot-crashes-a6996819019/ and an article in the Aug. 16 Austin American-Statesman online edition "Feds Open Investigation Into Tesla's Autopilot System.  The statistic on total fatalities and accidents due to Autopilot since 2016 was obtained from https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/infrastructure/561717-increasing-number-of-crashes-involving-teslas#:~:text=In%20total%2C%20at%20least%2010,each%20year%20in%20the%20U.S.

Forensic Engineer Discovers Design Flaw in Surfside Condo That Collapsed

 

On June 24, a thirteen-story condominium building in Surfside, Florida, known as Champlain Towers South collapsed, killing 98 people.  The building was shortly due for a 40-year reinspection, but previous inspections had noted serious cracking and corrosion problems.  The U. S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is conducting an extensive investigation into the collapse, and their findings will probably be regarded as definitive.  In the meantime, however, a private Florida firm called Consult Engineering undertook to do an investigation on their own, based primarily on publicly available prints of the building's construction.  And they have discovered a serious design flaw which, combined with aging, may well account for the way the building collapsed.

 

Consult Engineering is headed by Joshua L. Porter, who specializes in forensic engineering of existing structures.  He used the same design equations and approaches that the original designers used in 1979, when the building was under construction, and studied the prints he obtained to determine which ones were for planning only and which ones expressed the way the structure was actually completed ("as built.")  He also consulted recent videos taken inside the structure and the videos of the actual collapse, and produced a 40-minute YouTube video of his own that presents his conclusions.

 

While I am an engineer, my specialty is electrical, not mechanical, and I had to pause Mr. Porter's video several times to figure out what he was talking about.  But the video was worth watching, because he has found a significant difference between the original design and a revised design that was issued in January of 1980, during the construction of the building.  What follows is my summary of what Mr. Porter found.

 

Partly to maximize the space available under a then-existing 12-story zoning limit in place when the condominium was built, an excavation was made below grade for a parking garage beneath the structure.  This meant that the ground or lobby floor, which was also partly designed for parking, had to support the live loads of automobiles driving over the poured-concrete slab floor. 

 

To support the floor, concrete columns were poured, and in many places these were substantial ones, 24 inches square (61 cm x 61 cm).  Others were smaller, 16 inches square or even 12 inches by 16 inches.  Mr. Porter used the hand-calculation methods that were state-of-the-art for 1979 and discovered that the load of the slab on the columns was in many cases right up to the edge of what he calls the "punching shear" limit. 

 

Punching shear can be explained this way.  Imagine taking a square piece of cardboard from a corrugated cardboard box, and a sharpened pencil.  With one hand, put the pencil point-downward on the floor and place the cardboard on the eraser end, and mash down on the cardboard.  You will probably break the tip of the pencil first.  That means you have not exceeded the punching shear limit of the cardboard yet.

 

But then, try the same thing with the eraser end of the pencil on the floor and the pointed end on the cardboard.  It won't take much pressure to make the pencil point punch through the cardboard.  This shows that the bigger the column at the attachment point to the slab, the stronger the system is with regard to the danger of punching shear, which is the column punching through the slab.

 

In the original 1979 drawings, there was a one-foot step or drop at the ground-level (lobby) floor between two areas.  There were planned planter boxes over part of this area—rectangular concrete tubs in which dirt and shrubs were planted and watered.  And there were cars parked over another part of it.  Partly to support the cars and planter boxes, and partly to allow for the one-foot step, the engineer had placed several concrete beams between the columns underneath these extra loads.  A beam is just a thicker piece of concrete reinforced and cast into the floor, which strengthens the floor in that area and transfers loads to the columns it connects to.  These beams were about a foot thick and would have safely carried the extra vehicle and planter-box loads.  One beam was built into the one-foot drop, which was one reason for the beam to be there.

 

But in a January 1980 revision of the drawings, the architect decided to eliminate the one-foot drop.  Surprisingly, the engineer also eliminated all the supporting beams that went along with it.  So in one case there were automotive live loads within a foot or two of small 12-by-16-inch columns.  And in a photo of the building's exterior taken before the collapse, Mr. Porter found that several planter boxes had been built in places that no existing print allowed for, further increasing the punching shear load on the smaller columns.

 

Mr. Porter's conclusions were that several aspects of the building design were executed with no margin of safety—loaded exactly to 100% of their carrying capacity.  This allowed no margin for corrosion damage, which was abundantly evident in recent photographs.  But the most serious flaw was the lack of beams underneath cars and planter boxes, right in the area where the initial failure apparently occurred.  From eyewitness reports and videos, the first failure was apparently when the lobby (ground floor) slab had a punching-shear failure and collapsed into the basement, leaving several smaller columns without support over a 20-foot length rather than their designed-for 10-foot length. 

 

The building stood for several minutes after that, and a few people managed to escape.  But with the lobby floor gone, the middle of each column formerly attached to the lobby floor was now unsupported sideways.  That, together with forty years of corrosion and cracking, probably induced one of the columns supporting the main building to buckle.  Once it went, the lack of safety margins meant that adjacent columns were overloaded and buckled, and the building was doomed. 

 

There is nothing official about Consult Engineering's analysis of the Surfside condo collapse.  But coming from a professional whose business it is to do such studies, it seems highly persuasive.  Last-minute changes in construction can be deadly, and this tragedy may be yet another example of this principle.

 

Sources:  The Consult Engineering presentation on the Surfside condo collapse can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaZcyq7YsNA.  I also referred to Wikipedia's article "Surfside condominium collapse." 

 

Two Logics and Engineering Ethics

 

Though most of us never give a second thought to philosophers, we live in cultures which have underlying philosophical assumptions that are rarely examined.  Just as some things are hard to say in certain languages, some thoughts are hard to think in certain philosophies, including certain kinds of thoughts about ethics and morality.

 

Logic can be considered as a sort of language of philosophical thought.  It turns out that over the past century or two, there has been a revolution in the type of logic that has been taught and accepted by most philosophers, and as a result this revolution has insinuated itself through most Western cultures.  But there are a few philosophers who think this almost unnoticed shift has had profound effects that almost nobody understands.  And I'd like to take the rest of this space to explain why.

 

You might think that logic is just logic, but if you look a little deeper you will find that philosophers have come up with basically two different kinds of logic.  Historically, the first philosopher to take a disciplined academic look at logic was Aristotle, who lived from about 384 B. C. to 322 B. C.  His book on logic sets out various ways to argue from premises (things you believe or know are true) to conclusions, which are things that must be true if the premises are true.  One of these ways is the syllogism:  "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man;  therefore, Socrates is mortal."  The first two phrases are the major and minor premise, respectively, and the third phrase is the conclusion, which must be true if the premises are true.

 

Philosopher Henry Veatch calls this classic Aristotelian kind of logic "what-logic," because it is based on an intuitive, common-sense notion of what things are.  Aristotle believed that people could look at things and determine what they were essentially, at least to some degree.  Most people can tell apples from oranges, for example, and Aristotle would say that's because the essential makeup of an apple is different from the essential makeup of an orange. 

 

Aristotelian logic reigned until philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) began to question things that up to then were thought to be obviously true.  The details are complicated, but basically, they began to say things like, "When you see an apple, the only thing you can be sure of isn't the apple itself—it's the idea of an apple in your mind."  Grossly oversimplified, Hume and Kant and their followers began to treat human thought and language as the only things we could be sure of, and tried to work outwards from thoughts to things in the outside world.  They believed that we could never really know what a thing is, and there was no point in trying.

 

In the centuries since then, among most philosophers Aristotelian what-logic has been replaced by what Veatch calls "relating-logic."  Another name for it is symbolic logic.  Electrical engineers have encountered it in the form of Boolean algebra, and it is embodied in all digital computers in the form of logic gates that perform logical functions like AND and OR. 

 

While symbolic logic has proved to be extraordinarily useful—computers excel at it, naturally, and philosopher Peter Kreeft compares the change from what-logic to relating-logic to the shift from Roman to Arabic numerals—it has some basic shortcomings.  The most serious is this:  it can never tell you what a thing is; it can only say how things relate to each other.  Here is Veatch on this defect:  "To take the case merely of human actions . . . since there is no such thing as a human nature that can be appealed to in a relating-logic, there is no way in which one can determine what man's function is or what sort of activity a characteristically human life must consist in."  For the purposes of ethical reasoning, these are major problems.  If you can't answer the question, "What is human nature?" you can't very well say this aspect of human nature or this action is better than that one. 

 

Kreeft, who has taught philosophy at Boston College for four decades, says that symbolic or relating-logic has taken over so thoroughly that it is beginning to disable his students from understanding aspects of reasoning that depend on what-logic:  analogies, for example.  After Kreeft had published a criticism of certain aspects of computers, a well-known expert phoned him and predicted that as society began to think more exclusively in the relating-logic computer mode, ordinary intuitive understanding would atrophy and the SAT (Scholastic Achievement Tests, formerly used for college admissions) would drop its section on analogies as fewer people could figure them out.  This actually happened a few years later.  Kreeft dusted off some old logic exams from 1962 and gave them to his current 21st-century students, and they failed spectacularly, especially when it came to analogies.  For example, in the sentence, "He pointed with his right hand to the hands of a clock," the word "hands" is used analogically.  But only three out of 75 students understood that.

 

Kreeft claims that losing the ability to do what-logic is tragic, and may be either a result or a cause (or both) of everything from the rise of utilitarian ethics ("the greatest good for the greatest number") which is a favorite of engineers, to the sexual revolution, which does not recognize anything like the natural form or "nature" of human sexuality. 

 

While relating-logic is great for making things work, it fails to tell us what anything really is.  And to the extent that modern thought and discourse increasingly exclude types of reasoning based on what-logic, we seem to be dumbing ourselves down to act more like computers and less like human beings.  In The Magician's Nephew, C. S. Lewis said, "Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."  In leaving Aristotelian logic behind, the Western world may be doing exactly that.

 

Sources:  Peter Kreeft's article  "The Social, Moral, and Sexual Effects of Symbolic Logic" in his How to Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas From the Cultural Abyss (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2021) contains a reference to Henry B. Veatch's Two Logics (Evanston, IL:  Northwestern University Press, 1969) and explains this situation a lot better than I did.