"Russian rocket engine export ban could halt US space program"

Per this report from the Russian RT, the US might have to rethink its policy of relying on rivals/enemies for vital strategic materiel.

There's great wisdom in ensuring domestic manufacturing capacity, to safeguard against exactly these kinds of threats. 

A word from Raymond C. Ventrone, business manager of Boilermakers Local 154, in Banksville, Pennsylvania

Full text of his letter to the editor here.

And this was interesting, too--it's behind a paywall, but one can get the idea:

The U.S government’s Office of Surface Mining has announced that it lost 18,000 documents sought by coal miners as part of a suit to block new federal restrictions on mining. Environment and Energy has the story (subscription only).

Is the US ready for the next generation of supertankers? Short answer: No. And where does that leave us in international competition? Behind.

World's largest ship--cool.   It can carry 36,000 automobiles, 182 million iPads, etc.

But look closer at the graphic above"

So the Maersk Triple E is too big for either the Panama Canal or any US port.  In other words, it can serve five ports in Europe, four in China (including Hong Kong), and two in South Korea.  But not the US.  This is how you lose the battle of international economic--and perhaps strategic--competition.  

If there was ever an issue that leaders of both parties ought to be able to agree upon, it's rebuilding American infrastructure so that we can enjoy continued prosperity all through the 21st century.   

Better Infrastructure Means Saving Lives

A British tourist lost a leg in New York City today when she was hit by a cab that was apparently trying to avoid--or maybe not avoid--a bicyclist on Sixth Avenue.  The New York Daily News has the details, which, of course, will now be sorted out in court.

In the meantime, it's clear that as bicycles play a larger role in America's transportation system, something will have to be done to make the motor vehicle/bicycle/pedestrian ecosystem safer for all concerned--that is, travelers and bystanders.  Perhaps that means designated bike lanes, with curbs.  And who knows what else.

But in any case, a reminder that the right infrastructure can shape life for the better.  And lack of the right infrastructure can leave things getting worse and worse. 

Singapore takes the lead--and keeps working to add to its lead. 

An Infrastructure Bank? Someday?

National Journal's Jill Lawrence writes of the challenges that business is facing developing a pro-business agenda:

If there's an issue that symbolizes those complications, it's infrastructure. Roads, rail, ports, bridges, airports, broadband—who doesn't love infrastructure? Especially in a time of high unemployment, low interest rates, and regular reports about how our infrastructure is "crumbling." Yet, despite supporters ranging from Obama and the AFL-CIO to the Chamber of Commerce, there has been no infrastructure infusion in the past few years. Miller was partial to an infrastructure bank proposed by then-Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., that would have leveraged private funds, but it languished with only Democratic backing. Did Miller try to get some Republican cosponsors? "Yes. And we were never able to."

Since then, Republicans have reacted negatively to a new Obama proposal to cut corporate taxes and use a onetime "transition fee" on repatriated corporate earnings for infrastructure projects. Miller, meanwhile, is now interested in a House infrastructure bill introduced with bipartisan support. But business groups did not mount a full-court press on earlier measures—far from it—and there is no concerted campaign for this one as yet.

More on Elon Musk's "Hyperloop"

On August 13, an unknown (at least to me) blogger posted a fierce critique of Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" idea.

The piece has generated a lively debate--some 321 comments, and counting.  

Bodys Isek Kingelez--Urban Visionary

National Geographic's Robert Draper provides us with a fascinating peek into Kinshasha, Democratic Republic of Congo.   Kinshasha, a city of some 10 million, is the capital of the DRC.

Of particular note is the work of one Bodys Isek Kingelez, pictured above, with some of his work. Kingelez has made a good career for himself imagining fantastic cities.

Cool cities would be a good thing for Congo, for Africa--and for America.  And the world.

As Draper writes:

Behold the city reimagined. Its gateway is a multicolored wheel. Beyond the wheel stretches a ribbonlike boulevard that crosses a Garden of Eden and concludes at a metropolis jutting out of a large body of water. The skyscrapers are bright and fantastically proportioned, a cross between Dubai and Legoland. Some of the buildings bear the emblem of a commercial product like toothpaste or beer; others, a place: Libya, U.S.A., Himalaya. The city is spotless, fiercely original. Also completely uninhabited.

The creator of the intricate cardboard-and-Plexiglas model city is Bodys Isek Kingelez. He looms over it, a bantamlike, middle-aged Kinois dressed entirely in red, from his sunglasses to his leather shoes. “Why don’t we build on water? There’s lots of space! It’s because we are afraid,” the artist declares. “Architects and builders worldwide can try to learn from my perception so as to help the forthcoming generations. I’m dreaming cities of peace. As a self-made intellectual, I haven’t yet reached the point I wish to reach. I’d like to help the Earth above all. Voilà.”

To be in the presence of the reclusive artist and his carnival-like models is to understand that he is not really compelled by altruism. Instead, he embodies the human audacity to reorder and wholly reinvent. To be God, as Kingelez himself observes: “When God created the world, it was Solomon who created the first great buildings. Today I’m just following God’s creation. I never sketch first. Academicians draw. I’m a creator. I rely on my vision.”

The vision came to him, the artist says, in 1979, while he was teaching economics in Kinshasa. “I had a revelation—it was like I was ill,” he recalls. “The voice said, ‘You have much to do. Find scissors, glue, and paper.’ I asked, ‘What can I do with these?’ The spirit told me, ‘Simply begin. You will see.’ I stayed at home with nothing to eat. The small model was finished in two weeks. Someone from my family came to visit and saw it. He said, ‘You must sell it!’”

He has been exhibiting and selling his models across Europe and the U.S. ever since. 

This is the sort of vision we need here in the US, too--it will help restore the romance of construction and infrastructure-building. 

Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" Idea -- Where It Could Fit in the Transportation Vision of the Future

Tech visionary Elon Musk has put forth his "hyperloop" transportation idea, which, maybe, he will personally be working on, after all. 

It's really, really great that Musk is thinking big.  America needs that sort of thinking.  It's a shame that technological feasible solutions are categorized as "science fiction"--that is, regarded as something in the far-off, way-out future.   If "The Jetsons" could imagine this sort of technology a half-century ago, then there's no reason that we, in the real world, couldn't and shouldn't be making these visions come true.

However, even if we get past the usual objections of cost, regulation, NIMBYs, trial lawyers--as I hope we will, through enlightened forward-looking leadership!--we can still wonder whether the hyperloop is really the future of mass transportation.   The hyperloop might compete with airplanes, sure, but will it really displace the personal vehicle?  Probably not.

Consider: Suppose you ride from San Francisco to LA in your hyperloop--which is now a half-hour trip.  Cool.  So you get out of the station in... where?  downtown LA?   If so, then there's a good chance that you're still many miles from where you really want to be.   Century City in West LA is 15 miles away, Orange County is 30 miles away, and so on.  So how do you get to where you are going? And then, once there, how do you get around?  The truly desirable transportation system is point-to-point, not hub-and-spoke.  So if you say you are traveling from SF to LA, you really mean that you are traveling from, say, Palo Alto to Santa Monica, and that means that on both ends of the trip, the hyperloop leaves you with other kinds of transportation needs, be it car, bicycle, skateboard, whatever.

In other words, for extended and/or multi-point trips, most likely, you will want your car or other form of personal transportation with you.  Now of course, your car can be as cool as you want it to be.  That is, it can fully automated, a la the sorts of driverless cars that we read about all the time now.   So you can be "driving" around, getting from point to point, even as you are working, playing, sleeping.   Pretty cool.

Ah, but what about the selling point of the hyperloop, which is extreme speed?  Cars can be made to go a lot faster, too, through automated "car trains," which would link up cars into "convoys" as they go down smart highways.  That is, you're in the car, but the car zips along at computer-controlled speed, perhaps linked to some sort of towing system.   Such assemblies could go much faster than current speeds.

And of course, long run, Musk's hyperloops could be expanded to include cars themselves, like the Amtrak "autotrain" that takes you and your car to Florida.

Just about anything is possible; we just need the vision to do it.  Fortunately, we have guides such as Elon Musk.   But it will take all of us to be part of integrated solution that works for America as a whole.  

Vision

Details about Elon Musk's possible old/new "Hyperloop" transportation idea are percolating out.  I am skeptical that these sorts of "High Speed Rail 2.0"-type ideas will displace personal transportation, but it's an exciting and important debate.  

American Strength needs Missile Defense

This would, indeed, be a good time to move ahead with missile defense. 

McKinsey on Infrastructure

One of these "game changers" is infrastructure.  As the authors write:

Increased investment in infrastructure, with a new emphasis on productivity. The backlog of maintenance and upgrades for US roads, highways, bridges, and transit and water systems is reaching critical levels. The United States must increase its annual infrastructure investment by one percentage point of GDP to erase this competitive disadvantage. By 2020, that could create up to 1.8 million jobs and boost annual GDP by up to $320 billion. The impact could grow to $600 billion annually by 2030 if the selection, delivery, and operation of infrastructure investments improve.

Infrastructure and Jobs

James Surowiecki, writing in The New Yorker:

We also need many more of the “middle-class jobs” we’re always hearing about. A recent McKinsey report suggested that the government should invest almost a trillion dollars over the next five years in repairing and upgrading the national infrastructure, which seems like a good place to start. And we really need the economy as a whole to grow faster, because that would both increase the supply of good jobs and improve the bargaining power of low-wage workers. As Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, told me, “The best friend that low-wage workers have is a strong economy and a tight job market.” It isn’t enough to make bad jobs better. We need to create better jobs.

Miami Herald/Fresno Bee editorial: "'Grand bargain' is precisely the sort of deal lawmakers should embrace"

The Fresno Bee has approvingly reprinted an editorial from The Miami Herald: "'Grand bargain' is precisely the sort of deal lawmakers should embrace."  

The editorial declares that both parties in Washington should embrace the deal whose outlines are so apparent--a cut in the corporate income tax rate, and an increase in job-creating infrastructure spending: 

And it's not as if there's no real work to be done. America's decaying roads and bridges sorely need sprucing up. During the August recess, voters in South Florida and elsewhere should let their members of Congress know that it's time to set austerity aside and start investing in the economy.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/08/06/3426181/grand-bargain-is-precisely-the.html#storylink=cpy

A Point on the History of Public Investment in US Transportation

In The Wall Street Journal today, writers Larry Schweikart and Burton Folsom make their case against the Obama administration's infrastructure plans.  

As they write:

Railroads are another example of the infrastructure-follows-entrepreneurship rule. Before the 1860s, almost all railroads were privately financed and built. One exception was in Michigan, where the state tried to build two railroads but lost money doing so, and thus happily sold both to private owners in 1846. When the federal government decided to do infrastructure in the 1860s, and build the transcontinental railroads (or "intercontinental railroad," as Mr. Obama called it in 2011), the laying of track followed the huge and successful private investments in railroads.

In fact, when the government built the transcontinentals, they were politically corrupt and often—especially in the case of the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific—went broke. One cause of the failure: Track was laid ahead of settlements. Mr. Obama wants to do something similar with high-speed rail. The Great Northern Railroad, privately built by Canadian immigrant James J. Hill, was the only transcontinental to be consistently profitable. It was also the only transcontinental to receive no federal aid. In railroads, then, infrastructure not only followed the major capital investment, it was done better privately than by government. [emphasis added] 

A bold point.  However, as one Lord Keynes (probably not his real name) argued in a 2011 post, that's not the whole story of Hill.   "Keynes" points us toward the Wikipedia entry on the St. Paul Paul and Pacific Railroad, which tells a different story.

At the moment, I don't have time to chase down all the quotes herein, or to directly compare the scholarship here, so for the time being, I will simply post both arguments, those of Schweikart/Folsom and those of "Keynes."

As "Keynes" presents the other side:

James J. Hill is often invoked as a hero by apologists for extreme laissez faire, because his railway was allegedly built completely privately, without any government subsidies or land grants. Unfortunately, there some inconvenient facts the free market ideologues leave out when they discuss Hill and the Great Northern Railway:

(1) Hill acquired a pre-existing railway called the Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad (which was originally charted as the “Minnesota and Pacific Railroad” in 1857) as the starting basis for his Great Northern Railway. The Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad existed because of massive government support:

“In 1857, the territorial legislature of the state of Minnesota issued a charter to the Minnesota and Pacific Railroad to build a standard gauge railway from Stillwater in the east to St. Paul in the west .... The railroad received a grant of 2,460,000 acres (1,000,000 ha) of land from the territorial legislature. This was the seventh largest land grant of the 75 given to railroads nationwide between 1850 and 1871. Construction began in the autumn of 1857, and in 1856 the state backed a $5 million bond issue to support the new rail system. But speculators manipulated the nascent railroad’s profits, overcharged it for supplies, and sold off some of its assets. It went bankrupt in 1860, and the new state legislature purchased all of its assets for a mere $1,000. … In 1862, the state legislature reorganized the bankrupt railroad as the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad.
....
But James J. Hill, who ran steamboats on the Red River, knew that the SP&P owned very valuable land grants and saw the potential of the railroad. Hill convinced John S. Kennedy (a New York City banker who had represented the Dutch bondholders), Norman Kittson (Hill’s friend and a wealthy fur trader), Donald Smith (a Montreal banker and executive with the Hudson’s Bay Company), and George Stephen (Smith’s cousin and a wealthy railroad executive) to invest $5.5 million in purchasing the railroad. On March 13, 1878, the road's creditors formally signed an agreement transferring their bonds and control of the railroad to Hill's investment group. On September 18, 1889, Hill changed the name of the Minneapolis and St. Cloud Railway (a railroad which existed primarily on paper, but which held very extensive land grants throughout the Midwest and Pacific Northwest) to the Great Northern Railway. On February 1, 1890, he transferred ownership of the StPM&M, Montana Central Railway, and other rail systems he owned to the Great Northern.”

Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad, Wikipedia.

(2) Hill benefited from government negotiations with Native Americans to obtain the right to build his railway on their land:

“The Great Northern had to stop construction in 1886 to wait for the government’s negotiations for Indian lands. The 1887 agreement over the Sweetgrass Hills gave the Great Northern Railway a 75-foot right-of-way over the Rocky mountains and through Western Montana-plus permission to use all the stone and lumber it needed for construction.” (Holmes, Dailey, and Walter 2008: 175).

Lloyd J. Mercer summarises how Hill’s Great Northern System relied on the acquisition of previous state-subsidised railways with land grants:

“The Great Northern System was an outgrowth of the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railroad, which was formed May 23, 1879, considerably after the end of the land grant era. The St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba was initially formed out of the foreclosed St. Paul and Pacific railroad, which had come into possession of a federal land grant created by an act of March 3, 1857. The unsold portion of that old grant passed to the new company and became the major part of the land grant of the Great Northern System. In 1880–1881 the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba acquired the charter of the Minneapolis and St. Cloud Railway Company, to which was attached a land grant from the State of Minnesota in the amount of 10 sections per mile. This grant formed the remainder of the land grant of the Great Northern System, which became the beneficiary of efforts to subsidize predecessor railroads that were, unlike the Great Northern, truly pioneer effects.” (Mercer 1982: 59–60).

Mercer (1982: 148) also concludes the acceleration of the “construction and operation [sc. of America’s railways] through subsidization made a positive contribution to nineteenth-century economic growth in the United States. On efficiency grounds government intervention in the timing of the railroad building decision was rational.” James J. Hill was in fact a beneficiary of that government intervention by his acquisition of earlier railways.