Andy Kessler

WSJ: Great Books for a Brainwashing

https://www.wsj.com/articles/great-books-for-a-brainwashing-11564337511

It’s that time of year again. Soon-to-be college freshmen are whooping it up before being shaped into adults—cruising to Whataburger in mom’s Prius, sneaking cans of ruby grapefruit White Claw Hard Seltzer. Soon it will be goodbye to innocence and hello to an exciting new adventure. But first there’s—ugh—your summer reading assignment.

I’m all for reading, but when I dug around to see what books were assigned this year, I was thunderstruck. The selections are clearly intended to make new students “woke”—a push toward political awareness, an initiation into the cool social-justice league.

Stanford’s “signature common reading program” has two books and a collection of essays this summer. The first is “There There,” a novel set in Oakland about the “plight of the urban Native American.” It’s always troubling to see the word “plight”—you know you’re about to be manipulated.

The next book on Stanford’s list is “Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley.” Uh oh, long shadows sound ominous. Sure enough, the author informs us that San Fran is rich, unequal and un-diverse, with “rapid gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, rising crime, atrophied public institutions.” Wasn’t Gavin Newsom mayor? Worse, it’s “a cautionary tale for the entire country.” Wait, shouldn’t students be focusing on the Bay Area’s unbounded success in driving the global economy by making productive tools that have lifted billions out of poverty? Of course not, because that nasty, long shadow obscures “the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement.” The message to students is that if you win, you lose.

The last item is an e-book (saving paper!): “The Just City Essays: 26 Visions for Urban Equity, Inclusivity and Opportunity.” I’m sure the first two or three essays are enough to get the “sustainable, equitable future” point across.

Yale is not to be outdone.

WSJ: Better Living Through Simulations

https://www.wsj.com/articles/better-living-through-simulations-11563738861

What was Neil Armstrong thinking about as he stepped on the moon? His first words were rehearsed, and he still blew it: “That’s one small step for man” he said, meaning to say “a man.” He then talked about how powdery the soil on the surface seemed. And then this: “There seems to be no difficulty in moving around as we suspected. It’s even perhaps easier than the simulations at one-sixth g that we performed in the various simulations on the ground.”

Armstrong was doing something no one had ever done before, but he was struck by how different it was from the simulations of doing something no one had ever done before. In other words, he was so well-prepared that the only shock was that the experience was somewhat off from what he had been trained to expect. Amazing—and a preview of today. The rest of us would have been jumping with glee like kids in a bouncy castle, unlike the cool, calm and collected Armstrong, who had taken multiple flights in a KC-135 jet to simulate low gravity.

Simulations helped create the computer industry. The first U.S. computer, the Eniac, ran statistical simulations for hydrogen-bomb blasts—not something you can test in the lab. Every chip in your personal computer and phone is simulated well before it is manufactured in billion-dollar fabrication plants. Simulating weather patterns has led to better though never perfect forecasts.

Commercial airline pilots log hours in simulators practicing situations, like hitting a flock of seagulls, that they’ll hopefully never face in real life. So do soldiers, surgeons, nurses—even truck drivers. Add cheap virtual-reality goggles, and all sorts of training can be enhanced, from tricky manufacturing to firefighting and law enforcement.

Simulations can be useful for nearly every product being designed today. Cars have long been tested in wind tunnels and crash labs, but most of that experimentation can now be digitally simulated before the prototype is ever built. Bridges and buildings are now modeled and run through worst-case scenarios before plans are completed. Design, simulate, fix, simulate again and roll out.

WSJ: Lessons From a Trip to the Moon

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-a-trip-to-the-moon-11563137910

“It’s a 1202. What is that?”

Fifty years ago this Saturday, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 30,000 feet above the moon and descending in the lunar module. Behind their seats was the 70-pound Apollo Guidance Computer, with 2,800 Fairchild Semiconductor integrated circuits, each containing two logic gates and running at a speed of 43 kilohertz. It was programmed for the physics of a lunar landing, able to read data like speed, angle, altitude and fuel remaining. But a warning horn sounded. Mr. Aldrin typed 5-9-Enter on a keypad and the machine displayed the error code “1202.” In all their simulations in Houston—so many the “abort” button label practically rubbed off—they had never seen a 1202. So Armstrong asked.

Each program in the guidance computer used a 12-word, 16-bit data-storage unit known as a Core Set. The system had handled countless complicated tasks through the takeoff, approach and orbit, but something had gone wrong during the landing attempt. Turns out a radar used to track the Command Module was overrunning the Core Sets with bad data. Fortunately, the guidance computer had been designed to crash and reboot when that happened, and not lose data so it could continue its guidance function.

Imagine sitting in a tin can, about to make history, trusting a computer with your life, already white-knuckled, and getting the early equivalent of the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death. Each time the alarm sounded, the display went blank for 10 seconds as the computer crashed and rebooted. There were five alarms and crashes in four minutes, the last at 2,000 feet. With no clear sign of any systems malfunctioning, the astronauts and Mission Control scrambled to make sense. Armstrong’s heart rate hit 150. The display finally returned 800 feet above the lunar surface. Noting no data was lost, the flight controller in Houston, Charlie Duke, replied, “Eagle, looking great. You’re GO.”

There are many lessons from Apollo 11, and you’ll hear them all week. First, timing is everything: Inspired by John F. Kennedy, all six lunar landings occurred during Richard Nixon’s first term. Another obvious and overlooked lesson is that technology is an indispensable yet imperfect tool. I’ve had my iPhone crash trying to hail an Uber. I know, First World problem.

Apollo 11 was a source of pride, but also confusion. Whenever hurricanes and other freaky weather hit in the ’70s, my grandmother would explain it by insisting, “They touched something up there on the moon.” Sadly, climate thinking hasn’t advanced much.

People often ask whether space exploration is worth the cost. I’ve certainly been in and out of the “We went to the moon and all we got were Velcro and Tang” camp. Doubters now insist the money should have been spent to fight poverty in inner cities.

WSJ: The Key to the Long Expansion? Logistics

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-key-to-the-long-expansion-logistics-11562526973

“You can’t recommend those stocks,” a Wall Street strategist insisted in 1986. “We’re in the third year of a four-year expansion. They won’t work.” Being naive, I did it anyway. The expansion lasted a total of almost eight years, until July 1990. Strategists don’t know much, but to be fair, it was a B-school accepted truth that expansions last four years. Another expansion began in 1991 and lasted a record 10 years. And this month we broke that record. Since June 2009, the U.S. economy has kept growing. Every day is another record.

Did you ever wonder why we are enjoying a decadelong run? What changed? Everyone wants credit. Was it the Federal Reserve and its relentless stimulus? Nope. The Fed creates the money the economy needs, but not the need itself. Obama or Trump policies? A divided Congress? Demographic shifts? A strong or weak dollar? Actually, none of the above. The answer is just-in-time. You can thank all those freshly minted consultants you see in premium economy crisscrossing the country with their AirPods and Allbirds and airy attitudes.

In the previous era, before pervasive computing, economies would live and die by inventory cycles. Heck, biblical times record seven years of feast and seven of famine. The expansion starts, consumers buy, investment and hiring ramp up, wages and prices rise, inflation emerges, consumers buy ahead of price increases, investment peaks, inventories build, consumers are tapped out, recession starts, inventories are drawn down, and layoffs begin—then start all over every four years. Until recently, price signals didn’t travel very fast, and inventory tracking used clipboards.

In a micro version of this cycle, the videogame industry had a huge bonanza in the early 1980s that ended in ’83 with bust of the highly anticipated “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” game. Warner Communications literally buried about 700,000 unsold cartridges of “E.T.” and other titles, and lost more than $500 million. The semiconductor industry got stuck with loads of chips in inventory that had to be written down. It was ugly. After a similar inventory mess related to then-newfangled personal computers, the tech world started implementing just-in-time delivery. Companies like Compaq would ask for chips to be delivered Tuesday for PCs shipped on Wednesday. This gradually smoothed out the cycles of a very volatile industry.

Thirty-six years later, much of the global economy has perfected this just-in-time supply chain. Digital cash registers and bar codes log consumer purchases. Logistics software allows manufacturers to track every production detail everywhere on the globe. Data is fed into giant databases that forecast demand. Manufacturing, transportation and retail are a highly choreographed water ballet of delivering inventory right before it’s needed. Exactly the right amount of toothpaste is magically dropped onto Walmart shelves each night.

WSJ: Kill Section 230, You Kill the Internet

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kill-section-230-you-kill-the-internet-11561924578

The internet was almost killed in its cradle. Will it happen again? In October 1994, an anonymous poster on Money Talk, a bulletin board run by the early online service Prodigy, accused Long Island brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont of fraud. Yes, that Stratton Oakmont, of Leonardo DiCaprio and “Wolf of Wall Street” movie fame. Fraud central. But in 1995 Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy for defamation. The firm claimed the online service was liable as a publisher because Prodigy posted content guidelines that human “board leaders” enforced and deployed software that screened for offensive language. Sound familiar?

Amazingly, Prodigy lost the case. This prompted Congress to insert language into the Communications Decency Act of 1996, known as Section 230: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

That’s all it took to enable the online world as we know it today. Online companies can claim they are a bunch of disk drives and, with few exceptions, innocently passing along whatever their users post on them. Without Section 230, tort lawyers would have smothered the internet. Facebook , Twitter and Google today would be Little Tech—if they existed at all.

Section 230 also allows companies to restrict content that is “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” With these “community standards,” online companies can remove anything and can’t be sued.

There’s a wide lane between moderating hate speech (Facebook Live of Christchurch shooting) and crippling free speech (banning conservative voices). OK, but Facebook and the like are often governed by the court of public opinion, with its varying views on fake news, identity politics and political meddling. Seems lots of folks are triggered by what they see online. But Facebook, YouTube and Twitter’s community standards are murky and vague and seem to change daily, so the dogpile to regulate or even break up tech giants grows, with the addition of new bodies across the spectrum from Elizabeth Warren to Ted Cruz.

Are online companies publishers? Should Section 230 be repealed? Heck no.

Gerald Loeb Awards 2019

Thrilled to win the Commentary Category.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/ucla-anderson-school-of-management-announces-2019-gerald-loeb-award-winners