If I Were King

For several years now, we’ve known that digital broadcast television was coming. In the US, the date decreed as the end of analog broadcast television was set as 17 February 2009. Yawn. This happened years after I had last actually tuned in to any broadcast television. It might have come up when I had cable, or maybe during one of the times I had satellite service. More likely, it happened when I didn’t have any access to any television at all. Yes, I do smugly feel superior by virtue of not watching television.

But my reaction to the end of broadcast TV wasn’t entirely selfish. I simply didn’t think anyone still received their signals this way. I flat out don’t know a single person who uses an antenna to pluck vidiocy from the ether. I know many who still watch, but they have long since gone beyond the limits of Channel 2 through 13, and won’t put up  with the reception quality anyway.

As Her Majesty often says to me, “You don’t get out enough.” It seems that millions have signed up for coupons that pay the first $40 of the cost of a converter box. In fact, the US government ran through the entire allocation of $1.34 billion as of last Sunday. Ignoring any overhead charges and postage, that would be 33.5 million coupons. They’ve started a waiting list.

President-elect Obama’s transition team has asked Congress for an extension of analog broadcasts, and they will doubtless pony up enough funds for millions of additional coupons. Last month there were 7.2 million requests. If those signals are of value to that many people, then that should be done. But that’s not why I mentioned it.

The FCC has already sold much of this spectrum, the successful bidders are certain to demand some compensation for any delay. But I have to wonder, does it really make sense to sell spectrum? That is, is the best use of our spectrum resources necessarily those that are most profitable? And if this is a public resource, why does the government get the money? Why not simply return this spectrum to the public and see what clever uses it gets put to? It is not necessarily the case that all good ideas for communications come from companies with deep pockets to buy spectrum, our clever citizens should be given room to play around.

The 4 November 2008 FCC ruling to release channels 21 to 51 for network transmission in locations where there is no TV station broadcasting is a good start, but only certified devices will be permitted. That’s fine for players like Microsoft and Google, who pushed for the decision. If I Were King, I’d make the next big chunk of spectrum available to the public, with no licensing or certification required, with nothing more than a requirement that signals not interfere with uses outside the frequency range and that power be limited, possibly to 250 watts – enough to actually do something useful over meaningful distances. The creative potential of tinkerers and experimenters has been constrained by the heavy hand of government for far too long.

Lilly M. Ledbetter went to work for Goodyear at its Gadsden, Alabama tire plant in 1979. I’ve never been inside a tire plant, but I imagine that it’s not a particularly genteel place. Almost twenty years later, as Goodyear’s business declined to the point where layoffs were underway and plant closure was in the wind, it came to light that male managers of similar responsibility were making as much as 40% more than Ledbetter. Oops. The law doesn’t allow pay differentials based on sex or age. Ledbetter sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was awarded a judgment of almost $4 million.

Goodyear appealed, the district court ruled in Goodyear’s favor on several points and knocked the judgment down into the realm of reality, $360,000. Goodyear, elated at the victory, promptly sent over a cashier’s check and two dozen roses. Sorry, Goodyear appealed to the 11th District court which raised additional issues, and finally the case landed at the US Supreme Court where, last year, the company prevailed completely.

The reason? Claims under Title VII have to be filed within 180 days of the alleged discriminatory action. Now I may be out of touch with the norms of the workplace, having only worked as an employee for about three years of my adult life, but I’m pretty sure that in most environments you don’t know exactly what your coworkers get paid. As a recent hire in a large factory, I’m guessing that there is no way to find out what your co-evals take home, and no way to ascertain whether the difference is based on merit, length of employment, or discrimination in the first few months on the job. Even after ten years, I doubt that enough information would be readily available to go to court. By any logic, every pay review that is based on the previous wage or salary is ratification, by the employer, of their original discrimination.

Yesterday, the House passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act by a vote of 247 to 171. President Bush announced that he would veto the bill along with another employment discrimination bill, the Paycheck Fairness Act, passed the same day. But who cares? Knowing the lamentable Shrub’s feelings, consideration of these bills by the Senate will be timed so that he won’t be sitting at the desk when the bill arrives for the president’s signature.

The rules of litigation probably mean that Ledbetter won’t get anything from Goodyear. If I Were King, I’d make sure that this went back to court so the new rules would allow Ledbetter to enhance her retirement. And the argument that discrimination needs to be identified, documented, and papers filed within 180 days of the first discriminatory action by an employer? I’d suggest that it be put to good use, mulching the corporate rose garden at Akron, Ohio. I’m sure there is enough of this sort of rich organic material already available at Crawford, Texas that Goodyear can have it all.

The Seattle Times ran a story yesterday quoting an article in the current issue of Science magazine (it costs money to read the article there) to the effect that global warming will dramatically reduce the agricultural production around the world by the end of this century. “With average growing-season temperatures expected to rise more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit, crop yields will fall 20 to 40 percent, the report estimates.” That’s a very dangerous bit of news.

What’s dangerous about it is that much of the climate-science community, certainly the political parts of it, is convinced that global warming is anthropogenic. Unfortunately, the political part so overwhelms the scientific part that we’re not likely to ever know for sure. The evidence to date is certainly far short of logical certainty, and a lot of time and effort is being spent trying to prove that the temperature swings of the past never happened. The very real possibility is that the warming is caused by the same things that caused the Medieval Climate Optimum or the warm weather that allowed the Roman Empire to thrive, in which case cutting back on our “greenhouse gas” emissions is going to do diddly squat.

If that’s the case, what we really need to do is develop strains of crops that will provide better yield at warmer temperatures. For example, scientists at the University of Washington are working on a project called “Nutritious Rice for the World”. This is a distributed-computing effort to analyze DNA sequences in rice that could lead to rice strains that will better serve a warmer planet. (I have four CPUs here running the program in the background, and tens of thousands of others are contributing CPU power to the cause as well.) That is something that could actually help.

Those who pretend that the cause of the current warming trends are known, and who sneer at those of us who are skeptical, aren’t helping. Pretending that they have a case not only endangers our future directly, it is bringing about an age when obvious logical fallacies go unrecognized and constantly repeated. I’m one who feels that having a populace that can think logically is a boon, even if it would be a real hardship to demagogues like Al Gore.

If I Were King, I would not only have a bully pulpit for pointing out widespread logical errors, but I would support efforts to prepare for changes in the climate. Given the climatic variations over the last few million years, and the fact that we are running close to the high end of the range, I’d support efforts to prepare for a bit more warming as well as the dramatic cooling that is, based on history, rather more likely.

We don’t write many letters these days. We don’t want to spend the time writing them, we don’t want to spend the time reading them, and we certainly don’t want to wait for them to be carried physically to distant places. We want it short, and we want it now. The era of Twitter.

I’ve recently been immersed in a project involving letters, about 700 of them. Obviously artifacts of another era. Specifically, they were written during the Great Depression. A man named James Linsley, a street-car operator at Minneapolis, Minnesota, longed to return to farming, and wanted his son to learn the ways of the farmer. With his wife Martha, he bought a small farm at Nevis, Minnesota, but there was no way to give up his paycheck. So in the summer of 1932, Martha and their two children, John and Ruth, decamped for Nevis, while James stayed in town.

It didn’t work. Two years later they had lost the farm and all were back in the city. But while they were giving it their best shot, the letters flew back and forth. On some days, all three of the Nevis group wrote to James, and James sometimes wrote to all three of them on the same day as well.

Many years later, when little Ruth was in her 80s, she bought a manual typewriter and transcribed the text of all the letters, and wrote a charming narrative about the experience. The letters are full of marvelous details about, both letters and narrative present a close-up look at life in that time and place.

Ruth’s daughter took the typescript to a friend of mine to be converted to text, and started editing the files. I was hired to build a website. I’m pretty proud of it right now, and when all the navigation is finished in a few days, I’ll be unbearable. Fifteen of the forty chapters are now up, along with about 170 of the letters. The DearDaddy.com home page is up, but if you want to dig into the content now you’ll need this link to the Our Story page.

Now that we are in the hardest economic times since the Linsley’s tried their hands at farming three quarters of a century ago, there may be some value in taking a look at those letters. Just don’t expect it to be as quick as digesting the 140 characters of a tweet.

The next president and the new Congress are getting ready to launch the largest economic stimulus package of all time, while being nervous about the resulting debt burden. After all, the reason we’re in this mess is because the US, and in fact most modern nations, have been piling up the debt for years. Understanding the risk of more, there is a sudden commitment to make this all as efficient as possible. President-elect Obama has said that a close look at Social Security and Medicare would be a “central part” of his efforts to contain federal spending. He has named Nancy Killefer to the new office of White House Chief Performance Officer, her job is to “scour this budget, line by line, eliminating what we don’t need, or what doesn’t work, and improving the things that do.”.

Hello? What difference is that going to make? The point at this moment is to get money back into circulation as quickly as possible, and it makes no difference at all whether that results from careful intentional spending or money falling through the cracks. In fact, the fastest thing they could do is drive their limousines down Skid Row and occasionally toss handfuls of C-notes out the windows. The homeless that snatch up those bills are going to spend them instantly. And they’re not going to spend their money on fancy Scotch or French wines, they’ll be going for the all-American Mogen David 20/20.

One thing that might make sense is to look at which areas of the country are most in need of the boost, and make sure that there is plenty of government spending wasted in them. If the community is broke, residents aren’t going to stuff the federal booty in a mattress.

There are only two places where the waste should be avoided. The first is imports. It doesn’t do this country much good to hand a bunch of cash to those who are going to buy new BMWs or Rolexes with it. The second is banks. The last thing we can afford to do is to hand over billions of dollars to banks who are just going to sit on it. Uh, wait. Isn’t that what the outgoing administration spent the first third of a trillion bucks on?

If I were king, I’d understand that there was a time for prudence, and a time for profligacy, and I’d dispatch with the Puritanical concept of prudent prodigality that seems to be the current rage.

I’ve always had a reasonable sympathy for Israel, but I’ve certainly been critical of some actions they’ve taken over the years. It’s hard to understand criticism of the current Israeli attack on Hamas.

Even during the putative cease-fire they agreed to last June, Hamas has been launching rockets into Israel. I’ve yet to hear of any military targets being hit, it always seems to be apartments, shopping areas, and schools. I think any reasonable person would agree that this has to stop.

Personally, I have no trouble living next to heavily-armed neighbors, and I often have. I don’t have any trouble living next to irrational people that hate my guts, that’s happened too. I wouldn’t be comfortable with it, but I wouldn’t invoke military force to attack a heavily-armed, irrational neighbor who hated my guts. However, when that neighbor actually starts shooting at my house, it seems reasonable that it be stopped, and right smartly at that.

Were I to find myself in that situation, I’d call 9-1-1. Unfortunately, there is no comparable solution available to the people of Israel, they have no choice but to put on their helmets and march.

Israel has allowed a great deal of food and medical supplies into Gaza, even during this attack. I hope they figure out how to continue that, and wish they could figure out a way to evacuate the wounded either to their own facilities or to Egyptian hospitals. I’d like to see them figure out a way to get unarmed civilians out of Gaza City so they can tighten the siege without hurting noncombatants.

I’m sure it’s too much to ask for, but it certainly would be a good thing for the residents of Gaza to understand that when Hamas stores weapons in their neighborhoods and attract Israeli attacks, it’s Hamas that is destroying their neighborhood. It would also be a good thing if the rest of the Arab world were to take a firm stand against the violent and irresponsible Hamas.