Month: November 2004

“Iraq election may yet be postponed”

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So say the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan (via Drudge). Sounds like wishful thinking on their part.

Given who the messengers are, the message I am taking from all this is that the sooner Iraq holds elections, the better. The worst thing we could do would be to reward terrorists and non-democratic Arab regimes by postponing the election. It would be nice if Iraq could even advance the scheduled date, just to make its enemies squirm. For dictatorships, violence is just another business tool but elections are terrifying.

Bring on the elections in Iraq and elsewhere.

Privacy? What’s that?

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BellSouth’s DSL availability page will display the street address associated with any phone number that you enter, even if that number is unpublished or unlisted. I tried it with an unlisted number and it returned accurate information. How did I find out about this useful service? Someone who works for an ISP told me. I suspect it’s common knowledge among people who need to track down owners of unlisted numbers. It may be that this information is already available for purchase from data vendors, but if the phone company is giving it away it raises a number of concerns — privacy, of course, as well as questions about what exactly unlisted customers are paying extra for. It should be obvious that merely hiding the name on the account is of little value if the address is public.

So was this a programming oversight or does BellSouth really want to make all of its customers’ addresses public?

Defund NASA

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Here’s a good article by Paul Jacob on the merits of defunding NASA, and allowing private enterprise to lead the charge into space.

Americans and scientists and the current space industry must wean themselves from the idea of subsidy — a point I often make, of other industries, in my Common Sense e-letter. No matter how expertly NASA charges corporations for its services, such as satellite placement and repair, the very existence of a government-funded service bureau introduces a corrupting element into the industry.

Private enterprise can bloom in space. But only by getting NASA and government subsidies out.

Update: Ken made an excellent point in the comments. I was reponding, but I’ll respond here.

The free market has a record of innovation, lowering cost, and improving quality, particularly so in the high tech/high science industry. Government can and should piggy back off the private sector.

You would be surprised what private enterprise will fund. For example, say launch costs for putting heavy loads into space are cut to the point of commodity. Then the variable cost of the high-end research is diminished more or less to the research itself. Even that would probably benefit from privatization. Some company out there will want to look into Magnetic Sail Plasma Beam Propulsion. VC funded startups would want to patent it. Skunk works for the big defense companies would be the candidates with the infrastructure and knowledge base to support it. Letting a VC funded startup shoulder the cost for an expensive bleeding edge technology has historically been a very successful model. For that one startup that figures it out, the payoff would be, literally, astronomical. The other 99% of VC funded startups may be complete duds/write-offs. But that payoff is exactly what VC’s are gunning for. Say I am Kleiner Perkins. I would set aside $100 million, find 10 companies showing the most promise in space propulsion and put $10 million into each. If there aren’t any companies, I would incubate them (KPCB has an in-house entrepreneur program iirc) I would then syndicate the companies to where I own about 20% of each company to lessen the risk, and the companies would get more money to work with. So each company would get about $50 million in funding. If even one company does hit it big, that $10 million is going to be worth a lot more than $100 million. What’s high end space propulsion worth? If they had a lock on Magnetic Sail Plasma Beam Propulsion, I would value it in the public markets to the tune of $5 to $10 billion. 20% of $5 billion is $1 billion, for a 10 fold return on the original investment of $100 million. Bingo, science fiction becomes reality, and we have a new propulsion system.

It’s one scenario. But my main point is that government has a lackluster track record for innovation. They tend to play it safe when it comes to being a catalyst for major change. So why not let the profit-driven private sector do it? It may not seem as “noble” as the pure pursuit of science, but it has a knack of getting the job done.

Reality Check

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The problem I have with many people who advocate Liberal agendas is that they insists that they’re the most moral, caring people. That’s all fine and dandy, but you have to pay for care.

Case in point is Tennessee’s managed health care system, Tenncare. It was started 10 years ago when the state faced a budget crisis. Back then they were facing a $250 million shortfall in their budget, mainly due to runaway health care costs. So they decided to fix the problem by expanding the medical programs.

Sounds rather backwards, doesn’t it? But the plan was to screw over the Federal government since the Feds provide matching funds for Medicaid and Medicare. By enrolling thousands of the uninsured, proponents figured that they’d have the money rolling in toot sweet.

Well, the obvious happened. The program very quickly spiralled out of control, which is completely predictable. The cracks started to show as quickly as 5 years ago, with costs and corruption rampant. Even so, supporters tried to say that it was a success since the patients who benefitted the most from the program said that they were satisfied. (Give me something for free and see how much I complain.)

Tenncare popped up in the news earlier this year with the Canadian drug scandal. It seemed that Tennessee was getting desperate to reduce costs or find some funds.

Now it’s really gone off the rails. The program is costing $7.8 billion a year!!! And this is in a state without any income tax.

Reforms are being discussed but they seem very weak to me. It looks like about 430K people will have to be dropped from the rolls, and something tells me that this is just the start.

I don’t think a whole lot will be done before it’s a complete disaster. Everything I read about the program talks about how caring and moral it is, even though it will probably drive the state to the verge of bankruptcy and leave hundreds of thousands without any health care at all.

Strong Tank

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I’ve been a fan of the Army’s M1 Abrams tank since I was a kid. Most kids were reading comic books or baseball magazines; I was reading about U.S. and Soviet tank designs (I was a strange kid). Here’s an interesting site with pictures titled “M1A1 Abrams Lessons Learned During Iraq War 2003”. Here is the original powerpoint. One interesting outtake was the destruction of an abandoned M1 to not compromise the vehicle and/or technology. According to them it:

“Took one thermite grenade, one sabot in turret ammunition compartment, and two Maverick missiles to finally destroy the tank”.

Strong tank.

Update: The armor on the M1 is Chobham armor. Here is a brief description of it from Wikipedia.org:

“Chobham armour is a composite armour developed at the British tank research centre on Chobham Common. Although the exact composition of Chobham armour remains a secret, it appears to be a combination of ceramic layered between armour steel plating, a combination that is excellent at defeating high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rounds. Possible ceramics for such armours are: Boron carbide, Silicon carbide, Aluminium oxide (Sapphire), or Titanium boride.

The exact nature of the protection offered by this layering remained a mystery for some time, but it was eventually revealed that Chobham armour works in a manner somewhat similar to reactive armour. When the armour is hit by a HEAT round the ceramic layer shatters under the impact point, forming a dust under high pressure. When the HEAT round “burns through” the outer layers of armour and reaches the ceramic, the dust comes flying back out the hole, slowing the jet of metal.

Modern tanks also have to face KE-penetrator rounds of various sorts, which the ceramic layer is not particularly effective against. For this reason many modern designs include additional layers of heavy metals to add more density to the overall armor package. The metal used appears to be either tungsten or, in the case of later M1 Abrams tanks, depleted uranium.

The effectiveness of Chobham armour was demonstrated in the first Gulf War, where no Coalition tank was destroyed by the obsolete Iraqi armor. In some cases the tanks in question were subject to multiple point-blank hits by both KE-penetrators and HEAT rounds, but the old Russian ammunition used by the Iraqis, in their Polish licence built T-72’s, their old T-55’s bought from Russia and upgraded with “enigma” type armour, and T-62 tanks left them completely incapable of penetrating coalition armour. It’s also worth noting that the Iraqis rarely actually hit the coalition tanks, because of lack of training and inferior optics. To date, only 5-10 Chobham-protected tanks have been defeated by enemy fire in combat, including an M1 that was hit by an RPG-7 in the Second Gulf War; no crewmembers of either the M1 or Britain’s Challenger II have been killed as a result of armour penetration.

The latest version of Chobham armour is used on the Challenger II (called Dorchester armour), and (though the composition most probably differs) the M1 Abrams series of tanks. Though it is often claimed to be otherwise, the Leopard II does not in fact use Chobham armour.”