The Best Job I Ever Had

 

In 1979, I had stormed out of IBM White Plains in a huff, terminally miffed at being mistreated in ways that foretold (I supposed) the permanent end to my association with IBM.  In 1984, I rejoined IBM's National Service Division (NSD) in Tampa after about 5 years working for other companies.  I was hired by Judy Manowitz into her "Architecture" group that developed and enforced site-wide standards for the systems and operations staff.  It was really quite boring because it was mostly paperwork-related, but it gave me lots of free time to do stuff I actually enjoyed, like programming.  Since the early 70s, I had been developing an elevated fluency with a language called CLIST to the point that I could teach it better than the highly-paid technical staff that created it.  When the operations crew accidentally caused a horrible administrative catastrophe because someone forgot to update a particular control statement, they asked me if I had any way of preventing it recurring, and I solved it by writing a little snippet of CLIST that automated the update.  I developed a reputation as someone who could do wonderful things.

A year later, management concluded that there really wasn't much need for an Architecture Department since what we did amounted to "winding the clocks".  The Architecture department was disbanded and the staff reallocated to other managers.  Judy placed me with Bud Rowsey's newly-formed "Site Tools and Productivity Department" where my job was to write custom software to help the programming staff get through their work.  I was partnered with Karen McCloskey, and together we fielded requests from random staff members to automate this or that, and responded with CLIST-based processes that increased productivity across many functions.  I used to say that our real job was making programmers smile.  It was the best job I've ever had, and I still miss it.

Some time in 1988, some bean counter in Armonk (IBM Corporate HQ) discovered that while all the parts and manuals were warehoused in Mechanicsburg PA (and shipped from there) the software that ran the automated equipment that packaged and shipped parts and publications orders was all located in Tampa, and there was a real monetary cost to having software running in Tampa burning up the telephone lines to Mechanicsburg telling the warehouse gantries to fetch a packet of nuts and bolts and add it to an outgoing order.  They decided that all that software and the programmers who maintained it were to be relocated north.  The response from Tampa was a collective middle-finger.  It was said that Mechanicsburg made 141 offers and got six (6) acceptances, all from people who had been born in Pennsylvania.

Tampa management (in the person of Joe Rufin) found a project in another part of IBM that badly needed the kind of infrastructure that NSD was about to abandon — raised floors for mainframe computers and other devices, stand-alone power supplies, &c., and they agreed to requisition the entire crew of several hundred employees.  A team of senior logistics experts put together a plan to move all the NSD hardware from Tampa to Mechanicsburg aboard chartered 747 freighters, leaving the Tampa site ready to receive similar-if-not-identical ISSC hardware.  On December 5th, 1988, all of us changed our assigned division from NSD to ISSC, Innovative Systems Support Corporation, a wholly-owned sub of IBM.  The best job I ever had evaporated before my very eyes.

Because my skills had no defined spot within ISSC where they might be put to use, I, along with seven others similarly afflicted, were assigned to a spare department whose mission was to keep us busy and out of trouble.  Our new manager, Betty Ware who by that time already had over 35 years service with IBM, began to rent us out as fill-in employees assigned to random projects (often run by her many contacts within the company) where our particular skills would be useful.  All she asked was that the benefitting manager cover her salary costs.  In this way, she typically managed to use little-to-none of her annual budget for the eight of us.  I worked on projects in Poughkeepsie NY, Raleigh NC, San Jose CA, and Rochester MN over the course of the next few years until IBM offered a pre-retirement package that was just too good to pass up, and I left IBM for the last time in July 1992.

All my subsequent jobs have always included some portion of automation work that makes me more efficient — and that somehow make their way to other programmers who find my tools surprisingly useful.  I still like making programmers smile.

 

The Economics of Electric Vehicles

 

EVs are expensive because many of their parts are expensive, particularly batteries.  To make EVs appear affordable, governments subsidize their purchase, the subsidy being paid by everyone in the tax base.  Charging stations are likewise subsidized both as to their construction and installation as well as the actual rate per kilowatt-hour.

In contrast, fossil-fueled vehicles (FVs) are currently relatively expensive to operate because fossil-fuels are heavily taxed, the opposite of a subsidy.  Governments use the revenue from fossil-fuels to maintain the roads, but over time, that revenue will disappear as EVs displace FVs, and it will have to be made up from some other source, likely EVs and electricity.  At some point in the future, we can expect that all vehicles will be EVs, and their fuel, electricity, will have to be taxed at rates similar to that currently for fossil-fuels.  In other words, electricity is going to become very expensive.

Complicating that is the current push for 'renewable energy': wind and solar.  Barring some near-miraculous technological leap, it is clear to everyone who studies the available data that all renewable energy sources combined cannot supply enough energy to support even a 20th-century 1st-world civilization.  Failing to develop nuclear power, our standard of living is going to devolve drastically, perhaps to a standard that George Washington would find tolerable.  21st-century Americans will not like being pushed back 200 years.

So, if renewable energy can't handle even today's demand, where is all this electricity we're currently using coming from?  In large part, it's coming from coal and other similarly dirty fuels.  It may be that EVs are actually more polluting than FVs.

There is also the issue of facility availability.  People who own homes will have the option of having their own personal charging station, but renters, especially apartment dwellers, will probably not.  They will be forced to rely on public charging stations, paying a surcharge for the use of the facility and dealing with either long waiting lines or appointments.  While FVs 'recharge' in 5 minutes, EVs take hours.  This will also play heavily into the economics of 'road trips'.  Drive 6 hours, recharge for 3 hours.  That's a whole day of travel for some people.  A coast-to-coast road trip will take 10 days, 9 overnight stays in hotels along the way.  As of right now, long road trips are too expensive for EV owners, put aside the fact that recharging facilities may not be available where and when needed for such an adventure.

One proposed solution to the problem of "recharge time" is to make batteries easily swappable.  When an EV arrives at a recharge station, its battery is measured for charge, pulled, replaced with a fully-charged battery, and the driver pays the difference between charge levels, possibly with a fixed fee for labor to do the swap.  If the swap can be done reasonably quickly (less than 20 minutes) it gives the travelers time to visit the restroom, grab something to eat/drink, and get back to their car.  For this to be feasible, all cars will have to share a single interface to their battery.  There may be many manufacturers or brands of battery, but they all have to fit into the same space and connect the same way.

Along the way from here to there, we will have to maintain parallel service facilities, one for EVs and another for FVs.  The chain of gas stations we today take for granted took 120 years to develop, but we need the same thing for our EVs to be ready tomorrow.

Not going to happen.  It's especially not going to happen when the ordinary consumer realizes how much this is all going to cost.  EVs are going to prove to be economically unfeasible.

—==+++==—

Update 6/26/23:  It's starting.

 

How To Steal An Election

 

Over at The Conservative Treehouse a few days back, somebody posted a suggestion about how an election could be stolen, and I've been thinking about that from a systems standpoint. 

The way elections are run in Florida, to get a mail-in ballot, the voter must initially request a mail-in ballot.  Thereafter, all that's required is a check mark on the mailed-in ballot that asks to continue in that mode.  This year, I fudged my ballot — by using blue ink instead of black — and had to go vote in person.  At the polling place, I surrendered my mail-in packet in trade for a fresh ballot for my precinct after displaying both my voter registration card and my driver's license, filled it out, and then I fed it into the ballot-reading machine under the watchful eye of a poll worker.

Republicans won every statewide election, some by very wide margins.  Ron DeSantis beat Charlie Crist by 1.5 million votes, and that was known within an hour of the polls closing.

In Arizona, with a fraction of Florida's population, Democrat Katie Hobbs beat Republican Kari Lake by a few thousand votes after a full week of counting.  Maricopa County, with 83% Republican registration, split 50-50.  Unbelievable... literally.

So, if Secretary of State Katie Hobbs wanted to steal that election, how might she go about it? 

First, some assumptions:  every voter has a voter-id number.  It's on my voter registration card, and when my mail-in ballot arrived, the return envelope was bar-coded with my number.  I have to presume every state does something similar.  This enables the scanning equipment to know that this ballot came from a registered voter, and the state database can be marked to indicate "this voter-id voted by mail".  Presumably, when one votes in person, the poll worker inputs the number shown on the voter registration card and the equipment marks the state database to indicate "this voter-id voted in person".  The state database thus knows — in real time — which voter-ids have already been used, and which voter-ids have not been used, and can thus prevent any voter-id being used more than once.

Second, there may be registered voters who do not realize that they are registered voters.  This is the result of so-called "motor voter" laws whereby one can be quietly and involuntarily registered to vote because of some innocuous interaction with the state:  getting a driver license, opening a business, applying for a homestead exemption...  In some states, this can happen even if one is not a citizen — and thus ineligible to vote at all.  None of those newly-minted voter-ids are associated with either
(a) a photo id, or
(b) a signature.

Third, while the return envelope is marked to indicate my voter-id number, the ballot is not.  The ballot is identical for all voters in a given precinct.  There is nothing to indicate who cast this ballot.

Putting these facts together, we see that the state database not only knows who voted and who has not, but it can produce a roster of non-voters by precinct.  If you intend to steal an election, that's critical information.  With a roster of non-voters and a printer, you can print however many ballots are needed to make up the difference between the current winner and your preferred candidate.  All you need after that is a crew of ballot-markers who are given a list of voter-ids that have not yet cast a ballot, a stack of unmarked ballots, and time to produce the needed votes.  The ballot-markers fill in the appropriate spots on the ballot, and tell the state database "this voter-id voted".

As far as anyone can tell, all of those manufactured votes are legitimate.  Proof of wrongdoing simply does not exist, so there is no way to "prove the election was stolen".  It's the perfect crime.

How can this be prevented?  Certain pathways must be blocked to prevent their use. 

• mail-in ballots must be explicitly requested. 

  Sending ballots unsolicited must be forbidden.

• Voter registration must be limited to real persons who present proof of their identity. 

  This is why Democrats fight so hard against so-called "voter suppression" laws.

• Culling of voter rolls must be an ongoing process. 

  Voters who fail to vote in two consecutive elections must be culled from the registration lists.

• All ballots must be in the hands of the poll workers within some short time after the polls close. 

  Allowing days or weeks to pass, and allowing sudden discoveries of previously unknown stacks of ballots is exactly the thing that allows that perfect crime of stealing an election.  The critical ingredient is 'time'.  Whenever voting results are delayed, the outcome is a narrow victory, usually by a Democrat.  Same-day voting results are often characterized by huge margins of victory, often by Republicans.

All of these measures will be fought tooth-and-claw not because "they suppress voter turnout", but because they make it difficult or impossible to steal an election.  If you want to see honest elections going forward (and who doesn't?), we must get control of the process.  Failure to do that is the greatest threat to our democracy.

 

About "The Farside Chronicles"

 

Book One of "The Farside Chronicles" ("The Door") begins with a short anecdote wherein one voice, the inventor, outlines a way to solve the perennial problem of 'where shall I park the car?' using dimensional distortion.  The second voice, the other, remains skeptical of the feasibility of the method.

I recall being involved in just such a conversation during the year I spent at Manhattan College as a Physics major.  The first voice is that of one John Patrick Celenza, my classmate, and the second voice is mine.  The idea John planted decades ago germinated in my mind as a story-line that became, after voluminous re-work, The Farside Chronicles.

In the late 80s or early 90s, personal computers made it possible — no, made it easier — to write and edit material such as books and other treatises.  That was probably the start of what has become a publishing revolution on a par with Gutenberg.  It became feasible for someone with such an interest to actually write a book and have it published — for a fee, of course.  Since childhood, I had been 'a writer', often scribbling in pencil in one of those black-and-white marble-patterned notebooks my latest opus, none of which ever survived long enough to actually meet a typewriter.  Now in possession of my very own computer, I could write to my heart's content, saving my output onto 3½" floppy disks and revising whenever it seemed necessary or prudent.  My first serious effort beginning soon after I became a PC owner was, naturally, the story that eventually would become "The Door".  As with so many such tasks, it progressed fairly quickly to 95% complete, and remained there permanently.  Every now and then, I would open the file containing 'the book', reread it, and try to compose an ending that satisfied my heart.  Nothing worked.  It felt as though I had painted myself into a corner, and I could not even imagine how I might rewrite myself clear of it.  I put it aside and moved on other things.

About 2006, I observed that the nature of politics was undergoing a sea-change.  Everything about it was becoming much more adversarial and contentious.  Where once Nixon and Kennedy could have engaged in a reasoned debate on the issues, then shook hands when it was over, there was no more hand-shaking going on.  The major political parties weren't shooting at each other, but they were clearly 'at war'.  It seemed to me that we were within a stone's throw of graduating to actual gunfire.  I began to write a story about a gruesome school shooting that prompts a call for the repeal of the 2nd amendment, and leads to a second American civil war.  In 2011, I self-published "Tipping Point" via Author House, a vanity press headquartered in Indiana.

—==+++==—

It might be useful to know how book publication has changed over the past half-century.

As recently as 1985, an aspiring author would laboriously type (double-spaced) 'the book', often rewriting sections or chapters at the urging of amateur or professional editors, and send (the original or a Xerox copy) to Random House or Alfred Knopf or ...

The book would disappear into the bowels of the publisher's workrooms and would result in one of several outcomes:

1. a rejection letter (typically);
2. suggestions for changes (sometimes);
3. an acceptance letter (rarely).

If accepted, the publisher causes the work to be typeset preparatory to printing, delivers the galley proofs to one or more editors/proofreaders, who make sure the final product is ready for prime time.  Then the book is printed, typically in multiples of 10,000 copies, a quite expensive proposition.

If the book sells, royalties will be paid to the successful author and more printing will happen.  If the book doesn't sell, the publisher is on the hook for all those costs.

Successful books wind up at Barnes&Noble for $37.95 and everybody is happy.  Unsuccessful books wind up at Books-A-Million for $5, $2, or $1, and only Books-A-Million is happy, but not very happy.

That doesn't happen (much) anymore.

These days, an aspiring author may approach a well-known publisher, but these typically are no longer interested in unsolicited manuscripts.  Their unspoken rule of business is "Don't call us; we'll call you."

Instead, the author self-publishes by contracting with any of several vanity presses.  The services provided by the vanity press are centered around making a manuscript look like a book.  They do not care how well-written or poorly-written the manuscript is.  They will — for a fee — check spelling, punctuation, and grammar.  They are not taking any risk; the author is.

The cover art, the book's body text and illustrations, are sent as computer files to any of several on-demand-publishers, but mostly to Ingram in Tennessee, the world's largest.  Ingram is able to produce a book by separately producing the body text and the cover, and assembling the components in the right order.  Ingram can produce one book; they can produce 100 books; they can produce 10,000 books, on demand.

So, a prospective book buyer sees a book advertised on Amazon and adds it to their cart.  Amazon sends the order to Ingram and pays Ingram the agreed price.  Ingram produces a book as ordered, plus a mailing label, the book is boxed and handed over to USPS, FedEx, UPS, or equivalent, and Ingram pays the publisher the agreed price.  The publisher keeps their share and pays the author the agreed royalty.  It is possible that, for a given book, this never happens.

The cost to get to ink-on-paper is borne entirely by the author.  In rare cases, the author's phone will ring and someone from Random House will invite her to come to New York to talk about her next book.

—==+++==—

"Tipping Point" enjoys a small but steady popularity and provides a stream of royalties that is thin enough that it may never pay me back for what it cost to see the book in print.  I am, unsurprisingly, reluctant to do it again.

However, seeing "Tipping Point" finally launched took a weight off my shoulders such that I began to entertain the notion of finishing that mothballed book.  I re-read it and began to try alternative endings, finally settling on one that completely satisfied me.  Unwilling to press on toward publishing it, however, it went back on the shelf, finished at last, but only enough to satisfy my desire to have it done.

It was some time before it occurred to me that I had left that story in such a state that a sequel was possible.  I sometimes describe it as 'the book itself whining to me that it was lonely and needed company'.  Besides, I was, at that point, semi-retired and a stay-at-home pensioner, Nielsen Media having flushed me with my first-ever layoff.  With nothing better to do, I started writing 'book two'.  It was as if I could not prevent the words flowing onto the page.  Once you have opened the floodgates, as Thomas Sowell once observed, you cannot tell the water where to go.  Four months after starting it, "The Town" had taken its final shape.  I wrapped a metaphorical ribbon around the two volumes and stowed them both back onto their virtual shelf.

"No, no," they now called to me in chorus.  "Not done!  Not done!  You can't leave the story there!"

I began book three, then contract work interfered with progress as I found myself back in Texas living on 'bachelor status' and working long hours for Bank of America.  Eventually, "Farside Colony" joined its sisters on that virtual shelf, whereupon the first two taught the newcomer the theory and practice of wheedling.  Thus there is now a fourth book, "Farside Legacy", that effectively ends the chronicles.

The four are available via Kindle Direct Publishing.