There will not be a "Return to Normalcy" anytime soon

I wrote these thoughts on Facebook in response to a post endorsing Yascha Mounk's Atlantic article advocating voting for Joe Biden as a means of reigning in the "Illiberal Left".

I think the original poster's analysis was correct. People can be defined by, motivated by, and empowered by what or who they hate, and a Trump reelection would further motivate the illiberal left. However, remember the abhorrent 1998 add that said a vote for the GOP meant another church would burn? People like Mounk appear to be saying, in part, a vote for Trump means another federal building will burn. This is like "giving in" to hostage taking and threats of terrorism.

Furthermore, the only way a vote for Biden avoids increasing the power of the illiberal left is if part of the plan is to vote to create a divided government. In other words, if the goal is to avoiding an emboldened Illiberal Left by voting for an arguably centrist Democrat president, the best way to ensure the Democrat president does not stray from the reservation is to preserve Republican control of the Senate, perhaps also the House, and state and municipal offices. Therefore, those who propose Biden as a firewall or bulwark against the illiberal left should not only endorse Biden, but also endorse voting exclusively GOP down-ticket. If those promoting Biden as a bulwark did that, they would add far more credibility to their argument.

With respect to Biden, the idea he is a centrist firewall against illiberalism does not hold up if you read his campaign web page, consider his planned policies (reinstate the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter, rescind Trump's anti-CRT EO, pass the Equality Act), or consider many of his comments, such as ones around youth transgenderism. 2020 Biden is not the Biden from the 1980s and 1990s. In some ways he was to the left of Obama during that administration.

Many are voting for Biden because they believe Biden will usher in a "Return to Normalcy". By that, most are thinking the Obama-Biden era of 2015 (the year before Trump declared his candidacy). Others think it will be a return to February 2020 (before the pandemic hit the U.S.). This is naive thinking.

Regardless of who wins, the Successor Ideology (Wesley Yang's term) marches on. Either more peacefully with Biden, or more violently with Trump.

Human nature suggests a critical mass of people will need to feel impacted by something before they push back. The Successor Ideology eventually will impact enough people that there will be a backlash. That will be the inflection point—not the 2020 election. Somebody is going to lose a job. Somebody is going to be conflicted enough to quit a job. Somebody is not going to get a job. Some divorced mom is going to see her aspiring teenage athlete daughter lose an athletic scholarship, and see her hopes and dreams for her daughter crushed. Someone is going to be called a racist one too many times. Someone is going to have to declare themselves a racist one too many times. Eventually a pushback begins. Eventually people organize to pushback.

Rod Dreher writes about the possibility of China's "social credit" system coming to the U.S. Some have written that the Internet Archive has been pressured to remove items from its Wayback Machine web site. What happens when not even your social media posts can get you fired or prevent you from being hired, but even long deleted social media posts are available, because of archiving sites? What happens when others (those who belong to the right group) are able to scrub their pasts including any archives? What happens when the general public has access to some people's social media, but others social media is restricted from public view? We have seen prospective and current college students held to task for social media posts made when they were 14 or 15 years old. We has seen other people held to task for who they choose to follow on social media, with motive assigned to the reason for following. It is reasonable to assume social media follows have been used against someone in an employment situation. We are not far from the ability to gather someone's Twitter follows and assign an ideological and personality profile to the person based on it.

I think we are in what we might call a "Long War". One measured in decades. I believe the start of this global populist/anti-globalist left+right movement goes back to the 1999 WTO protests (perhaps further back to Ross Perot's anti-NAFTA independent/Reform Party run in 1992). I think we have another decade to run. Wokeness and a claimed "democratic socialism" is the endgame of this "New Left". The "Great Reset" is the endgame of the new neoliberal centrists. A "New Right" has not yet fully defined itself. It may be socially reactionary against wokeness. It might be a further evolution of the anti-globalist somewhat socially conservative populism of Ross Perot and Donald Trump.

Another way to look at this is through the lens of the Strauss–Howe generational theory, or "Fourth Turning". In this model, the entire cycle is about 80-years, divided into four roughly 20-year "Turnings". The Third Turning is an "Unraveling." The Fourth Turning is a "Crisis." Per Strauss and Howe, the Third Turning started in the early to mid 1980s, which puts is in a Fourth Turning now. The problem is, I am not so sure. In some ways things still feel like an unraveling., and it is hard to believe we are approaching the end of a Crisis turning. However, that depends on when the Crisis started. Did it start in 1999 (WTO protests), 2000 (contested election), 2001 (9/11 attacks), or did it start in 2008 (financial crisis)? 2008 makes more sense, and fits with my theory the current Fourth Turning will not see resolution until the second half of the decade of the 2020s at the soonest, but probably more towards the end of this decade.

The idea we have another decade of angst to live through is too much for many to accept. They want a return to normalcy as soon as possible. A different president. A vaccine for COVID-19.  A reliable, compounding increase in the S&P 500 index funds in their 401ks driven by continued cost optimization from the globalization of supply chains and labor markets. Their comforting property tax deduction returned, even if the tax cuts meant their total taxes went down. Readily available cheap, but questionably documented day laborers to handle repainting and landscaping. The costs of all of this put in a can and kicked down the road for future generations or Modern Monetary Theory to deal with. They want ideological and financial comfort food—tonight. This desire leads to a false hope that the resolution is near. It leads to a form of Magical Thinking: This just can't go on any longer. It is like the person who posted on Facebook in mid-March at the start of the lockdown: "We are only going have to do this for two or three weeks until we get a vaccine." Yeah, tell me how the SARS vaccine is going, now, eighteen years after that pandemic started.

I believe the 2020s are going to be another 1960s. People think the current chaos is wrapping up, or that this can be wrapped up, with a Biden win, as if changing the president changes our reality—a sort of quantum superposition. The truth is, it is just starting, regardless of who wins. There is no way out, there is only a way through, and with apologies to Robert Frost, both roads are rough, and neither will make any real difference.

Wake me up in 2030.

The Coming Airliner Consolidation

The COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted air travel. While air travel is starting to recover, it will take years to fully recover. Much of the recovery at this point is in leisure travel, not in business travel. Businesses have moved aggressively to work from home and video conferencing technology even for meetings across town. This technology will result in less demand for travel until travel for in-person meetings is viewed as a competitive advantage.

The pandemic occurred at a moment of a worldwide economic peak, and a major recapitalization effort on the part of the airlines. The pandemic offered the opportunity for airlines to accelerate the retirement of older aircraft ahead of schedule, while deferring the delivery of newer replacement aircraft.

But the broader and longer-term effects are different. In some cases, entire sub-fleets of aircraft are being retired, primarily due to the length of time expected for demand to recover, and because of accounting issues. An aircraft which is owned outright can be retired and sold on the secondary market. An aircraft over 20 years old is fully depreciated, and while this offers no operating cost reduction through expensing depreciation, these are cash-flow cows, operating at very low expense costs at least until their next major maintenance check ("D-check"). Instead, a new approach to accounting is taken. Older aircraft approaching D-checks are retired ahead of schedule to rationalize fleets. Newer, but fully owned aircraft, especially small sub-fleets are sold because they have some value on the secondary market. Leased aircraft are retained, because the lease payments must be made regardless of if they are flying or not.

The upstream impacts to the aircraft manufacturers are the next consideration, and where things will change considerably.

In good economic times, "thin" routes can justify their own dedicated investment in nonstop routes and equipment. In bad economic times, these cities are served via consolidation and connections. As a result, the pandemic sees less value in aircraft at the small end of a category. Aircraft like the 737-700, A319, etc. in the domestic space, and the 767-300ER, A330-200, and 787-8 in the international space. At the same time, lower passenger demand on the middle routes means these aircraft have ideal capacity points for routes formerly flown by larger aircraft. But often, these are smaller subfleets, so there is pressure to serve the thin markets using a different approach.

My expectation is we will see the manufacturers try to wrap up current production of the small capacity variants of their major product lines, and they will not introduce new small models. For example, there are only 14 orders for the Airbus A330-800neo, the upgraded version of the A300-200. The A330-800neo is designed to directly compete against the 787-8, however, the 787-8 has pretty much made its production run, and most new orders are for the 787-9 and 787-10 variants. The 787-9 is the "sweet spot" for the 787 series, with similar range to the 787-8, but greater passenger capacity, lower manufacturing costs, and with the 787-8’s bugs worked out. With the shift of 787 manufacturing exclusively to Charleston SC, there is the possibility of wrapping up production of the 787-8. Boeing can steer demand towards the 787-9 using pricing and financing. It can also fill 787-8 demand with used aircraft traded in, coming off of lease, or early lease return aircraft.

Regarding the Airbus A330-800, the same is true for Airbus. They can try to get open A330-800neo orders converted to A330-900neo orders, and they can leverage trade-ins and lease returns of A330-200s to fill A330-800neo demand. The main value proposition of the A330-800neo is extreme range at relatively low passenger load, and that market is a "good economy" market negatively impacted by the pandemic.

The same logic applies to the planned Boeing 777-8X. The 777-8X is seen as a follow-on to the "C-market" (ultra long-haul) 777-200LR. But the 777-200LR did not sell well. Boeing has already pushed back the 777-8X, and it is possible Boeing could cancel the project.

An obvious question is: "What about the dedicated freight airliner market?" Dedicated freighters operate on different economics than passenger aircraft, and as such do not demand the latest models with the best efficiency. The Boeing 747 has continued production as a freighter, but will wrap up over the next few years. The Boeing 777-200LR, which was not popular as a passenger airliner, but has sold well as a dedicated freighter. Similarly, the Boeing 767-300ER, being retired right now out of passenger service, continues in production as a dedicated freighter. 767 military variants (the KC-46A aerial refueling tanker) remain in production.

Airbus has not had the success with dedicated freighter variants Boeing has had. Airbus offers a dedicated freighter version of the A330-200, but there are only a few outstanding orders.  Airbus also offers an aerial refueling tanker version of the A330-200, with a number of outstanding orders. Airbus is offering passenger to freighter (P2F) conversions of its A320 narrow body and A330-200 and -300 wide body aircraft. Conversions could also impact the market for dedicated military variants.

Boeing has always had a strong passenger to freighter conversion business, and other companies also offer passenger to freighter conversions of airliners. There are currently proposals for 777-300ER passenger to freighter conversions, but with the pandemic accelerating retirement of 777-200ERs (in favor of more efficient 787s and Airbus A350s), there is a possibility of a flood of used passenger aircraft on the market, depressing acquisition prices, making passenger to freighter conversions very economically compelling, and negatively impacting the new build dedicated freighter market, especially the long-term prospects of the 777-200F.

Finally, on the wide-body front, talk of further stretches of the A350-1000 and 777-9 have been talked about, but with the pandemic reducing overall demand, both of these seem less likely.

Therefore, it is a reasonable assumption for the decade of the 2020s, major wide-bodied airliner production will look like this:

Airbus: A330-900neo, A350-900, A350-1000

Boeing: 787-9, 787-10, 777-9X

Dedicated freighters and military variants can keep a line in production even when significant economic downturns cause passenger orders to be deferred or canceled. In the case of the Boeing 767, it will remain in production for another several years. If more orders are made for 767-300F or KC-46A aircraft, production will continue longer.

In the narrow-body airliner space, the smaller end of the series is also likely to be impacted.

Airbus presents a very interesting case, due to its acquisition of Bombardier’s C-Series airliner (now the Airbus A220). Airbus ended production of the A318 in 2013. Airbus has offered an A319neo, but orders have been very limited (~1% of total A320neo family orders), with fully half of the A319neo orders from one airline, Spirit Airlines. Spirit’s order was made in late 2019, with the A319neo portion finalized in January, just prior to the pandemic’s impact. Will this order survive? Would it make sense strategically for Airbus to steer A319neo demand to the A220-300? After a wave of A320neo orders, the current "hot" model of the A320neo family has clearly become the A321neo, which is targeting the Boeing 757-200 replacement market.

The biggest challenge for Airbus trying to steer demand for the A319neo towards the A220-300 is the A319neo shares a common pilot type rating with other aircraft in the A320 family. But, if it can overcome the cost impact of this, it opens up increasing opportunities for the A220 family.

Assuming Boeing recovers from the 737MAX issues, and is able to shift production exclusively to the MAX and wrap up the 737 Next Generation line, it is reasonable to assume the majority of the 737MAX line will be the -8, -9, and -10. Only two airlines have ordered the -7, Southwest (a large 737-700 customer), and WestJet (also a large 737-700 customer). Like the Airbus A319neo, the 737MAX-7 orders represent just over 1% of total 737MAX orders.

With the Boeing 757 aging (the last model was produced in 2004), the 757-200 replacement market is becoming a factor. As a result, like the A321neo, the 737MAX-10 is becoming popular.

Unlike Airbus, Boeing has nothing like the A220 to shift 737-700 demand to. Also, Boeing is likely to get some military and business jet business for the 737MAX-7. Airbus is now promoting an Airbus Corporate Jet (ACJ) version of its A220, which may compete directly with the ACJ version of the A319. Military versions of the A320 family have not been significant, as European militaries have been more likely to use commuter or business jet platforms for smaller use cases, and the A330 for larger purposes.

Regardless, the A319neo (if it survives) and the 737MAX-7 will represent very small portions of the production of these families, more like the A318s and 737-600s of the prior generations. As such, their production runs may be limited, and production wrapped up at some point early in the production runs, allowing manufacturing optimization to focus on the larger variants.

For the A220, the A220-300 clearly dominates the orders, being the "sweet spot" of passenger capacity, range, and operating costs.

The reasonable assumption for narrow-bodied airliners for the decade of the 2020s will look like this:

Airbus: A220-300, A320neo, A321neo

Boeing: 737MAX-8, 737MAX-9, 737MAX-10

The Boeing 767-300ER represented a unique passenger capacity and range capability which is not easy to replace. Aircraft like the Airbus A321LR and XLR will support about 170 international two-class seats, while the 767-300ER supported about 215, and the next step up, the 767-400ER, Airbus A330-200, or Boeing 787-8 support about 240. The gap between 170 passengers and 240 passengers is fairly significant. Next are the range considerations. The Airbus A321XLR has a range of about 4,500 nautical miles, compared to the 767-300ER’s 6,000nm. While 4,500nm may look fairly long-ranged, one has to consider traveling westbound against winter headwinds, which will reduce that range down to about 3,600nm vs. the 767-300ER’s 5,000nm. This makes a route like the 3,980 nm Charlotte, NC to Munich, Germany route (think BMW automobile related business) likely require a refueling stop in the winter. The options are a connection either in Europe or in the US to a larger aircraft.

The prospect of the pandemic forcing the aircraft manufacturers to consolidate production to fewer models, may allow both Boeing and Airbus to consider new options by the middle of the 2020s. Boeing, if it gets the 737MAX issues behind it, consolidates the 787 at Charleston, and gets the 777-X out the proverbial door, could again look at its proposed New Midsize Airplane (NMA). If 767-300F and KC-46A production is continuing, it could again look at a derivative of the 767, perhaps with a new wing and certainly with the latest generation engines, but this seems unlikely. Alternatively, the shuttered 787 line could be restarted with a shortened 787 with a new wing and engines for this market—but the line could also be retooled for an all-new airplane. Or, most likely, a new airplane could be designed (the proposed Boeing "797"). If the 767 line wraps up by mid-decade, and the Everett 787 line is shuttered, it means the 777-9 would be the only aircraft manufactured in Everett, and the prospect of a new design is increased. I think the most likely outcome is an all-new design proposed in the latter part of this decade.

Likewise, Airbus has the option of looking at aircraft between the A321neo and the A330-900neo. The prospect of an "A322" stretch of the A321 to go after the intra-Europe and US domestic market is possible. Also, while Airbus is rarely mentioned in conjunction with a middle of the market (MoM) aircraft like Boeing is with the NMA, it is certainly possible Airbus could consider something to go after the market once dominated by the 767-300ER.

In summary, I expect the following to happen in the airliner industry. I do not expect the 777-8X or the A330-800neo to be produced. If the Spirit Airlines A319neo order is withdrawn, I do not expect Airbus to continue to offer the A319neo. If it does go forward, I expect the A319neo to wrap up production shortly thereafter. I expect the 737MAX-7 to wrap up after the Southwest and WestJet orders are fulfilled, with the possible exception of business jet and military variants. I expect Airbus’ dedicated freighter and military variant product to wrap up in the next few years, and given the glut of low-time wide-body aircraft on the market, I expect Boeing’s dedicated 777 and 767 freighter orders to dry up, resulting in those lines wrapping up by mid-decade. Likewise, if there is not a follow-on order of KC-46A military refueling tankers, it is possible the 767 line wraps up by mid-decade. I expect the 787-8 variant to wrap up in a few years as well, possibly with the transition of the 787 line to Charleston. I also do not see a market for stretches to the A350 and 777 beyond the A350-1000 and 777-9X. Finally, I expect these consolidations to set up the aircraft manufacturers to explore new designs in the latter years of the decade of the 2020s.

The Post Police State, or the rise of the Private Surveillance State

It finally dawned on me what the outcome of, and exit strategy for, the “Defund/Abolish the Police” movement will be. First, there will be no wholesale defunding or abolishing of municipal police. There will be significant funding cuts, like we have seen in Austin, Texas. What has to be understood is, if you cut a police department’s funding by say, 30%, you cut its effectiveness by significantly more than 30%. One only has to look at the effect of sequestration on the military. A police department cannot magically reduce its capital infrastructure by 30%. Instead, it must carry the costs of that infrastructure for a significant amount of time, in some cases in perpetuity. A precinct building designed to support 50 precinct officers cannot magically be reduced in square footage, lease/amortization/bond interest, utility costs, etc., by 30%. The only variable cost is the labor expense of employees. What it means is instead of 35 officers, you get 25. The 30% budget cut results in a 50% cut in policing.

The first assumption is: “This is great, because now we can get rid of the bad/dumb cops and retain/hire only good/smart cops.” But the reality is, when the cuts come, the good/smart cops will voluntarily leave first. We saw this with the Cold War drawdown’s voluntary VSB/SSI programs. I recall a squadron commander in 1992 lamenting the voluntary separation programs because the only ones who took them were those who were talented enough to be confident they could quickly find employment elsewhere.

Net-net, we will end up with a much smaller police force comprised of less intelligent, less competent, officers.

How will this affect society?

The first, most obvious is, simple math. Fewer police equal less response, and a longer time to response. Those two things create conditions which will result in an increase in crime. Don’t believe me? When was the last time a police precinct was successfully robbed?

As crime rates increase, there will be a societal response to protect itself. And I am not talking about people buying guns. Guns are a “last ditch maneuver” when it comes to layered home defense.

The first response will be an increase in monitored home security systems, among the middle class.

For those who cannot afford the cost of a home security system, I expect a return to the use of “burglar bars”. These were all the rage in the second half of the 1970s. I remember ads on TV for them. I also remember the news stories about little old ladies dying in house fires because they could not get out of their windows. Burglar bars became controversial. I remember a TV commercial for a politician either running for governor or attorney general. It showed a close-up on his hands, gripping what appear to be prison bars. Then it zoomed out, and you saw the politician standing in the window of a house window with burglar bars. The politician said if he was elected, his crackdown on crime would mean “People would no longer be prisoners in their own homes.” Despite the debate, burglar bars are cheap security, and are likely to find their way back into popular use in low-income areas.

In the early 2000s I was in San Juan, Puerto Rico on Air Force Reserve duty, and we went to lunch at a local sandwich shop located in an upper middle-class area. There were many small, detached homes on tiny lots. Each home was surrounded by what I would describe as a “medieval” spiked fence. These were about eight feet tall. Some were decorative black wrought iron, with long, sharp, pointed spikes. Others were more modern, shiny steel that curved outward at the top, where they came to a razer sharp edge. The fences included a gate at the driveway, but these were manual, not automatic gates. While it is hard to imagine such fencing in the continental U.S., I do believe we will see more fencing and driveway gates. I see some larger older homes with elaborate fences and automated gates in the suburbs of Atlanta, and in neighborhoods like Buckhead. I could easily see these fences upgraded to the “decorative, but deadly” spiked fences seen in places like San Juan.

In December of 2005, I traveled to Johannesburg South Africa on business. I stayed in a hotel downtown (the old tower of the Intercontinental Hotel), but our event was at a resort on the edge of the city. I had to take a cab through and out of the city to the event. As we were driving through obviously middle-class neighborhoods, I noticed these homes reminded me of the ones I saw in San Juan. Same small lots, though many homes were two story, compared to the one-story homes in San Juan. The same medieval fences. But something else. Most of these homes had signs for ADT Security. No big deal, many homes in America have the same, blue, hexagonal signs. But these were different. They didn’t say “This Home Secured by ADT”, they said “This Home Secured by ADT Armed Response”. ADT Armed Response. Private policing, in a municipal neighborhood. Not a private gated community, but right off of a city street. This was the frontier. Because the police were not adequate nor reliable. That picture has stuck with me for 15 years because it was so unusual. It was like the edge of an old map, which said “Beyond this point lie dragons”. This was not America, where on the remote edge of available law enforcement, people rely on guard dogs and guns. This was literally a private company filling a vacuum. Don’t think it can’t or won’t happen here. I bet ADT is planning such offerings right now for cities that defund and reduce police.

The last example is one out of Hollywood. In “Grosse Point Blank”, one of the John Cusack character, Martin Q. Blank's high school classmates, Terry Rostand (played by Steve Pink, who, along with Cusack, was one of the movie's co-writers), is an armed private security guard for a gated community. The character talks about when he is authorized to use deadly force:

Terry Rostand: Oh no, I'm not a peace officer. Yeah, this badge isn't a meaningful symbol. We don't enforce the law, we just execute company policy for homeowners.

Martin Q. Blank: When are you authorized to use deadly force?

Terry Rostand: Oh well, you know, taxes provide your basic services, you know, police and whatnot, but our customers, they need a little bit more than that, so we catch you on the property, we do what we have to do.

I don’t know how real that concept is, but it seems a likely growth area if municipal policing is weakened.

The idea of iron bars, spiked fences, and private police may appear dystopian. I only offer them as examples because they are real. But what else might occur?

More gated neighborhoods. There will be a move to develop more upscale gated townhome communities and gated detached home neighborhoods. There will be moves to install gates at existing neighborhoods. This will be made possible by technology to reduce the need for staffed gates by using remote camera technology. One staffed gate house controlling two remote camera based gates.

Private security. Some of these gated neighborhoods will have their own dedicated private security patrols. But I expect security companies to provide both the gate guards and regional private security patrol/response forces. Such a regional approach could get economies of scale to make them more cost-competitive.

For those not in traditional neighborhoods, but with poor policing, the ADT South Africa armed response model could happen. There are some very expensive homes in Atlanta, on very large lots. The owners of these homes could probably afford very sophisticated, and very capable security.

Where will these companies get qualified, trained applicants? Something tells me there will be a number of recently retired, and recently laid-off former police officers to choose from. Over the long-term, a hiring pipeline and ab-initio training could be a challenge.

But what about those who cannot afford private police solutions? This is where I see the emergence of what I call the “Private Surveillance State”. You may have heard about how local police departments partner with Ring and other smart doorbell systems to access their data to assist in policing. There is an understandable privacy concern, however these devices not only surveil the owner’s property, they also surveil the public area beyond the owner’s property (street and sidewalk). On a cul-de-sac, it is possible to get almost a 360 degree view of a suspicious vehicle and person if each home has a smart doorbell. One of the guiding principles of how “big data” works is many low resolution data points are better than one or a few high resolution data points.

What I anticipate is the smart doorbell service providers providing a subscription access to their data to private security companies like ADT. The biggest problem right now is every security provider is a walled garden. ADT wants to sell you their hardware. Meanwhile someone else sells some other hardware. And then there are DIY systems where there is no monitoring company. But imagine if your local security system monitoring company also has access to you DIY wireless cameras and not only your Ring doorbell but can pull the video from neighboring homes? Imagine if it is augmented by real-time AI?

When it comes to limited policing, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you walk into a police department and sit down with a detective with gigabytes of video showing the make, model, and license plate of the car, video of the theft of property as it happened in your home, and high resolution photography of the perpetrators, you are more likely to get the police to take action than if you come in with one grainy video clip and nothing else.

If a home security company can taut it gets agreement from the police to pursue 80% of robberies and of those 75% are apprehended, that will sell. If a neighborhood is able to promote that crime in its neighborhood has dropped because of a higher arrest rate than other neighborhoods, it will command a premium in home values. If the metric is outcome based, it sells.

If people are fearful, they will be less concerned with the privacy aspects of opting in on sharing their video doorbell footage. It is human nature that an increased fear for personal safety will motivate people to trade a perceived increase in safety for a perceived decrease in freedom. If people really don’t care if an across the street neighbor sharing doorbell video, which includes footage of their house, with a security organization, if the perceived loss of freedom is small or insignificant, in exchange for a measured increase in safety, people will make that trade.

Already, many upper middle-class neighborhoods which are not gated are using a photo-based monitoring system to record pictures of every vehicle which enters the neighborhood. This system has a high enough resolution to discern the license plate, as well as the make and model of the vehicle. These images are stored and are only accessed at police request. But such a system, by incorporating AI, along with a database of vehicle registrations of neighborhood residents, could provide real-time information to a private security organization to know when non-residents enter a neighborhood.

It is not unlikely to see some neighborhoods incorporating their neighborhood entry surveillance with individual home security monitoring, through discounts, or even through an HOA requirement, not unlike a garbage collection service.

Ultimately, what this is likely to result in is an inequity of public safety, not unlike what existed in the later 1970s. Poor people will have burglar bars, and guns. Rich people will live in gated communities with private security guards, augmented by the private security state. The difference will be in the middle class. The upper middle class will also live in gated communities. And the lower middle class will live in neighborhoods primarily protected by the Private Surveillance State.

Even today, the police disproportionately protect the lower socio-economic classes, because more crimes are committed in lower socio-economic areas. Defunding and/or abolishing police is more likely to negatively impact these areas. Higher socio-economic areas, like wealthy suburbs, are more likely to keep higher levels of police funding. The Private Surveillance State is not likely to be needed in a wealthier suburb. However, in the places in between is where the Private Surveillance State will bloom. In-town luxury apartments, townhome communities, gated neighborhoods, old, wealthy neighborhoods, etc. And the highly virtual Private Surveillance State will create virtual gated neighborhoods in average middle class and even lower middle-class neighborhoods.

Technology will drive down the cost significantly over the next decade. However, it will never drive the cost down to a level to allow it to benefit the working poor, and the non-working poor. Which means they will become a relatively less defended target, and therefore, more targeted. Inequity will increase.

Of course, it is likely the progressive state, in its cargo cult thinking, will seek to place similar virtual security in place in lower socio-economic areas. We will hear stories about government contracts to outfit subsidized housing with this technology. Then will be the stories of failure and cost over-runs.

Then what? The impoverished will demand more policing. Not better policing, not more and better policing, just more. Now. They can worry about the better part later. We have seen this story play out repeatedly in urban areas. What then? The conservatives will not want to increase government spending, and the progressives will. The conservatives will be more libertarian, and the progressives will become more law and order. But in between this cycle, there will be lost property, lost opportunity, and lost lives.

Human nature is a roller-coaster. For some, it is an unusually cruel roller coaster, because they only seem to catch the downhill parts. For some, when they reach a peak, they are able to see ahead, and understand there will be ups and downs. Some will anticipate and take advantage of the thrill ride, profiting from the variations, buying low, and selling high. For others, disorientation, nausea, and just wanting to get off.

"Elite" universities are obsolete.

This is from a Facebook post I made today. It seemed worthy of an independent post.

"Elite" universities are obsolete.

Education is the transfer of information, nothing more. It is no different from media and entertainment. Only the content differs, and the fact there will be a test at the end to validate the transfer.

Information is infinitely reproducible, and always has been, but the cost of reproduction has collapsed. That started with Gutenberg over 5 centuries ago, but was accelerated by the digitization and the Internet. The marginal cost of a digital copy is nearly zero.

Information is easily transmitted. Again, during the era of horses and sailing ships, transmission was slow. But since the telegraph, then the radio, later television, and now the Internet, the marginal cost of transmission of information is nearly zero.

The textbook industry is a racket (racket as is racketeering, as is RICO statute), but it has served to reproduce and transmit information. UC Berkeley's David Patterson's "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" has been used by computer science students around the world for 30 years. Every MBA program has emulated the Harvard Case Method since the mid-1980s.

What makes an elite university "elite"? It is actually simple, and it is two things: One, they have huge endowments which allow them to hire the preeminent academics, originally for teaching, but today primarily for research; and two, the elite universities stratify and vet the top 1% of total high school graduates in the U.S. SAT and ACT tests are a reasonable proxy for general intelligence, and elite universities pull from 98th percentile and higher SATs. Most students going to an elite university come from elite high schools, and are in the top 5% or higher of those elite high schools. Going to an elite university doesn't make you "smart". You have to be smart to get in in the first place.

The "elite" universities are made elite by elite researchers and elite students, not by elite teaching or elite content.

The idea of traveling far from home to distant hallowed halls, to be verbally instructed and mentored by wise old sages, the sole custodians of knowledge, is obsolete.

I should probably add, while the elite universities can stratify and vet the top 1% of high school graduates based on objective academic credentials, their ability to stratify and vet beyond those are limited. Sure, they can look at extra-curricular and volunteer activities, along with letters of recommendation in an attempt to view the "whole person", but those are easily gamed. More easily than padding academics, improving academics through tutoring, and improving admission test scores through specialized preparation. Indeed, we saw in the recent scandal, most of the assistance was through fake sports, etc., and a lesser extent was outright cheating on admission tests.

What that means is graduates of elite universities are in no way our moral betters, any more that morality correlates to IQ or academic success. And this is probably the great failing of the elite universities. They make no attempt to impart or distill morality, unlike the charter of the military academies.

Imagine if Harvard added a freshman indoctrination on par with the military academies, putting the incoming class under intense physical and psychological pressure. Imagine if someone psychologically cracked, struck out at a classmate, or disrespected an authority figure they were shown the door.

That would make the "elite" universities elite.

We Have 90 Days

We Have 90 Days.

As of the beginning of May, many U.S. states are starting to allow a limited, partial, highly restricted reopening of some additional businesses shut down by various orders aimed at limiting the spread of COVID-19. To my knowledge, no state is reopening schools now, but most have tentative plans to reopen around the normal start of the 2020-2021 academic year.

There is a real possibility of a “second wave” of COVID-19 infections in the fall. We have had roughly 90 days to gather information on the virus and the disease. The data suggest the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads dominantly indoors, and rarely outdoors. UV radiation, higher temperature, higher humidity, and fresh air all appear to reduce the duration the virus lives on surfaces. At the same time, indoor summer conditions (cooler, dryer air-conditioned air, lack of UV light, etc.) may increase conditions for transmission. Once typical fall weather drives people indoors, transmissions are likely to increase.

When that happens, how will various municipal and state governments react? We now know more. Children are less susceptible to the disease when infected. It appears transmission from young children to adults is very low. This argues for not closing day care facilities and elementary schools. We don’t have good data on the transmission from infected adolescents to adults. That means closing high schools might be necessary.

Schools will restart in early August. A wave of new infections may start in October. But the plan needs to be known as school restarts. That means we have roughly 90 days to get a plan together.

It is fair to say the nation’s teachers did yeoman’s work implementing a distance learning plan in almost no time this spring. It is equally fair to say this plan was marginal at best, highly dependent on the parents, and resulted in very different learning experiences for the poor vs. the privileged.

We have 90 days to fix this.

We have had roughly 60 days to gather information on what works and what does not work. We have had roughly 60 days to evaluate the current distance learning efforts. We have had 60 days to look in the mirror and admit the home schoolers had this figured out long ago, and we could learn a lot from them.

We have 90 days to come up with a better plan.

As I pointed out in my previous essay “The Model is the Problem”, the best comment I read on this was home schooler Bethany Mandel who pointed out home schoolers go through a transition from “home school” to “home education”. What she meant by this was a successful home schooler integrates normal home activities into the education of the home schooled child. The most common example is using baking to teach fractions.

We have 90 days to create a better plan than the current one. It we mistakenly congratulate ourselves on our “success” in the spring school closures, and assume any fall or winter school closures will simply be more of the same, we will be making a huge error. The same kids who took an educational hit will take another. The same kids who took an educational leap will take another.

As I noted before, the model for the 2020-2021 academic year for primary and secondary education needs to be a hybrid model—one that can shift quickly from on-campus to distance learning, and back again. It needs to be flexible to account for active, involved parents (tutored), minimally involved parents (proctored), and no parents in the house (latchkey). We need to think in terms of “evaluating progress” not just “testing”. This means more open book style tests, more essays, more reports, etc. A mistake would be to go primarily online multiple choice tests, but there is a place for those. The idea of going to semester long workbooks, rather than frequent assignments, is worth considering. More experience-based learning is needed. By incorporating this into the curriculum while on campus, students will know how to complete  experience-based assignments. Given the greater knowledge we have of the virus, a fall/winter lockdown would likely allow for more outside activity.

The idea we have limited amount of time to reinvent our organization also applies to government bureaucracies and commercial businesses. There is a very real possibility of another round of restrictions before Black Friday. The ability of a restaurant to quickly reduce indoor service by increasing spacing, to shift to outdoor dining only, then to delivery and pickup only, and then quickly back, while maintaining customer loyalty is important. Same for retail flexing between 50% capacity, 25% capacity, and curbside only. On the government side, municipal and state government functions will need to be flexible. It was simply to say: “All drivers’ licenses expiration dates are extended 3 months.” It is much harder to service all expired drivers licenses over the last six months in only three months in the summer. “Internet First” has to become the model going forward. Cities and counties should have apps for handling things like utilities sign ups.

Remote access (laptops, VPNs, etc.) have to be the norm, not the exception for all white-collar workers. As I have said before, the model is the problem. Models like treating white-collar civil servants like they are hourly blue-collar workers, with time cards, etc. needs to change. Instead of the insanity of “comp time” to allow “9/80” and “8/80” schedules, and banning working during lunch, most need to be considered exempt workers, and provided much more flexibility in hours. Byzantine rules and high approvals for remote working need to be ended. When they can be tossed aside in an emergency, how important were they? And then there is the very real possibility due to an inability to work remotely, many civil servants were simply sitting home and getting paid for doing no work, while others with the ability to work remotely were doing the jobs of two or three civil servants.

The military is another consideration. While members of headquarters can do some jobs remotely, anyone working with classified information cannot. And the operational units of the military must continue to drill and exercise their military mission. The COVID-19 epidemic on the U.S.S. Roosevelt could have easily happened in an Army,  Marine, or Air Force barracks. Identifying what training can be done “socially distanced”, and what cannot, is the first step of flexing between the two depending on the state of the pandemic. Can basic training be flexed to double capacity in the summer months, and significantly reduced capacity in the winter months? We don’t have 90 days to determine that. It needed to already be done.

Congress has not handled the challenges of the pandemic well. Cutting and running early from D.C. only to have to rush back looked bad. Why did they leave so soon in the first place? Early on, there were many proposals for remote voting by congress. Even when congress was back in session, and the pressure mounted to pass remote voting rules was strong, it was dismissed as being “impossible” to create a secure voting system. This is hard to imagine. Most federal employees have some kind of smart card based ID card (DOD CAC, DOJ PIV, etc.) which provides multi-factor authentication to computer networks and applications. These cards not only allow two-factor authentication with the ID card and a memorized passcode, they also can contain biometric information such as fingerprints. A laptop, a smart card reader, and an issued smart card ID card supporting multi-factor authentication, combined with a relatively way of communicating a vote is not impossible. It would be easily testable on the House and Senate floors. Again, now is the time to address this. Another lockdown in the fall, leading to complete congressional dysfunction just prior to the election would not benefit the politicians. And the idea of politicians saying  there is no way to secure their congressional vote while demanding the people reelect them through mandatory vote by mail will be seen as what it is: hypocrisy.

Which brings me to my next point. Election Day is November 3rd, and we need to face the reality the election could take place during a lockdown. This means states with tougher absentee voting rules will need to act more aggressively. They will need to establish and communicate the integrity of their system. They may need to address restrictions that may not be feasible during a lockdown, such as multiple witness requirements. They will need to get ahead of that now, because if they relax those requirements by emergency decree shortly before the election, there will be a level of public opposition. Since Vietnam and Watergate, individual’s trust in authority and institutions has been steadily declining. Jonathan Haidt described a “collapse in trust” of college students in their faculties. These are both, on average, politically left cohorts, so this loss of trust cuts across ideologies. Societal loss of trust is tinder for a potential fire.

Everything must change. Primary and secondary education must change. Higher education must change. Municipal governments must change. Business must change. State governments must change. The federal government must change. Congress must change. They all have to change. If only a few change, and the majority does not, we will have stasis again. If flexibility does not increase, the only alternatives are “On” and “Off”. If there is another flare-up in late October, and we are faced with only “On” and “Off” in our portfolio of responses, there will be far more angst and unrest than we see today, and that will impact a November 3rd election.

Yes, this pandemic is a once in a century event, and it is temporary. It likely will be history by the 2021-2022 winter season. But the changes made to make education, regulatory and licensing bureaucracies, legislative branches, businesses, and other organizations more flexible and responsive will only pay benefits. The idea of a congress that can be both in session and in district could bring us back to the idea of a citizen legislature. The idea of federal bureaucrats working remotely makes the idea of distributing more of the bureaucracy out of Washington D.C. and into the states they serve more plausible. The idea of more distance learning in higher education may finally be the thing that reigns in out of control college costs. The idea of more remote work by companies makes smaller cities, especially in the industrial heartland more economically viable.

But for that to happen, we have to get to work now.

We have 90 days.

The Model is the Problem.

[Editor's Note: This post will be a work in progress. I want to get it up now. Expect edits.]

Is the model the problem? Is the system the problem?

The only obvious answer is yes.

I am going to go out on a limb with this one. It applies to the other problems as well, such as the small business relief.

We are 20% into the 21st Century. But we are still operating the country on a model developed in the mid-1930s, and perfected during World War II. It is the mid-20th Century model of industrial economy bureaucracy. It may well have worked effectively back then. We were able to build the Hoover Dam, to win WWII, to emerge in the post-WWII era as the world's greatest power, and be a bulwark against the Soviet Union and imperial communism.

It gave us the Interstate Highway system. It got us to the moon. It gave us the Century Series Fighter Jets.

However, at some point, that model started failing. Probably in the 1970s.

By the mid-1980s the Space Shuttle exploded because of bureaucratic incompetence. Bridges collapsed. Emergency response was unresponsive. We had to allow dozens of aerospace companies merge into a duopoly and give one (Lockheed) the fighter franchise, and the new "cheap" F-35 costs more than the older, more expensive F-22, an airplane that took 27 years from initial contract to IOC. We are literally trapped by our own bureaucracy.

In the pandemic, the CDC and the FDA proved the biggest impediments to our response.

Maybe we have the wrong model for today?

I read a great book on the Apollo program by Charles Murray (better known for his controversial book, "The Bell Curve"). When I read it, reading about the early days of NASA, I felt like I was reading about Silicon Valley startups. For an early unmanned test of Mercury capsule, one of the administrators literally took a belt sander to the heat shield to make it fit on the booster.

My point? You cannot look to the past successes of government bureaucracies of the 1930s through 1960s and expect the same success today.

Our political model is also broken. During a time when tens of thousands of Americans are dead due to a pandemic, and tens of millions of Americans are unemployed due to government mandated closures, our politicians prefer to try to leverage the crisis for personal and party political gain, instead of working together. Revolutions have started over less.

But even when legislation is passed and money appropriated, we hear stories of multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies getting “small business payments”, while sole proprietorships and LLCs struggle and wait.

Why? Why did the administration of this program spectacularly fail? In part it is in how the legislation was constructed. It is fair to say it was constructed in an incompetent fashion. The Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department clearly failed in administering the program.

But this is not the first time in this century such failures have occurred. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a.k.a., “The Stimulus Act”) also was littered with inefficiencies and ineffectiveness. President Obama promised “Shovel Ready” projects in 2009. Only a year later, Obama would state “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” In 2011, Obama would say “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” The failures of Solyndra and Abound Solar, who together received almost $1 billion in federal loans, both declared bankruptcy. In hindsight, their products were not viable. How did the bureaucracy fail to qualify these potential recipients?

Then you have to look at the disastrous response of the unemployment insurance system to the record levels of unemployment (over 25 million in three weeks).

The number of unemployment claims was not a surprise. They were expected. How did the bureaucracy fail to ask if state unemployment insurance programs were capable of the processing expected scale of claims?

Many argued for something more like a UBI. Just issue checks to everyone—fast. It would have been simpler to do this, and there could have been some nominal “claw back” tax so those who remained employed, and were making good money, would have the value of the check taxed away. I realize bumping up the higher tax brackets by a few percent would have caused howls of “raising taxes during a pandemic”, but courageous leaders could have explained it.

The point is, the traditional unemployment insurance is the old model. Managed by a bureaucracy. The concept of UBI is something that comes from the libertarian right and the technology left (who is also arguably libertarian-leaning). It is anti-bureaucracy by design. And it would have avoided the challenges with the state unemployment insurance systems.

My argument is the model is the problem. Industrial economy bureaucracies are architected for incremental adaptation. They are generally overbuilt for “peacetime”, because they are expected to surge in time of emergency. That is why they appear fat. The government bureaucracies follow the rules provided them, and rarely change. That is in large part why they appear ossified.

However, in the name of efficiency, starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s (about twenty years after the bureaucracies started failing us), modern corporate management models were applied to government.

As a sidebar, it is important to note most large corporations operated on the industrial economy bureaucratic model as well, many before the New Deal Era of expanded government. The economy grew slowly, capital was scarce, and there was little need for large corporations to react to smaller, nimble competitors. Even after the Progressive Era trust-busting, the smaller remnants of the former monopolies often operated as regional monopolies. The companies which became the “Arsenal of Democracy” all were organized on the industrial economy bureaucratic model. There were exceptions, Higgins Industries was a very small company before it got the LCVP landing craft contract. But most heavy weapons and components were manufactured by the industrial giants.

In the 1970s, many of these industrial giants had near-death experiences as the economies of Europe and Japan had finally recovered to a point they could compete globally. Deming’s innovative management methods, ignored by the industrial economy bureaucracies in the U.S. took hold in Japan. By the 1980s, U.S. companies were desperate to improve, and adopted similar methods. The problem is you cannot adapt via piecemeal Deming’s methods onto the industrial economy bureaucracy model. You can do something totally new and different. You might be able to do some kind of hybrid model. But you cannot tinker at the edges. Cutting budgets, cutting inventories, etc. simply don’t work. If you have an emergency response bureaucracy whose job is to scale up and provide goods (think CDC’s Strategic National Stockpile), you can’t cut the staffing to all that is needed in peacetime and go to just-in-time inventory models. There might be a radically rethought model that could work and be more efficient, but you can’t adjust what you have.

So why did they? My guess is much of this has to do with federal employee unions. Unions are necessarily protectors of the status quo. Their job is to resist change, and as a side-effect, they resist innovation. Federal employee unions were threatened by modern management models, so they sought to keep the impact to incremental effects. Not complete redesigns of departments, but tolerating the 10% staffing cut here, the A-76 study outsourcing of a function there. We will give up that role to a contractor as long as experienced union members are protected and allowed to find new jobs.

There is another factor about public sector unions which must be considered. The era from 1933 to 1945, and beyond until 1960 was a model based on federal employees as public servants. There was a mentality of duty similar to the military. But after President Kennedy expanded the powers of federal employee unions, the reality is the loyalty shifted from serving the people to the union. This is similar to the trend seen in private sector unions in the 1960s, leading to more aggressive union behavior in the 1970s, followed by anti-union sentiment in the 1980s.

What we did is we took an outdated model and made it worse. The simple truth is the bureaucracy of 1955, if preserved and funded, and operated by a pre-1960 federal employee model, might have served us well.

But even increasing funding and staffing cannot fix the existing environment. I recall hearing a reporter talk about the increase in government workers in the post 9/11 era. This reporter started by stating prior to 9/11, a D.C. press pass allowed reporters to roam the halls of federal agencies. Post 9/11, considerable restrictions were put in place. When he did get into the federal agencies, he noted many more employees, many of whom did not seem busy at all. In other words, the post-Deming 1990s stripped bureaucracies at least featured busy, hardworking employees. But adding employees did not change anything. The new bureaucracies simply were throwing more bodies at the wrong model.

Only a different model can fix this. Only a reinvention can address this. Unfortunately, the 2001 Global Terrorism crisis, the 2009 financial crisis, and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis have proven unable to address this. Perhaps the 2020-2022 Economic Depression will. Trumps and Bidens and AOCs are not the answer. We may see something external to government form. The idea of a group of business leaders, perhaps including high profile figures like Mark Cuban and Peter Thiel, organizing and demanding a fundamental rethinking of government. A large enough organized effort would strike terror in the hearts of traditional politicians, much in the same way Ross Perot’s third party run in 1992 shook up politicians of both parties and got them focused on the debt and deficit.

But there is more. The industrial economy bureaucratic model also applied to education. The rise of the educational model is timed with the Second Industrial Revolution, around the turn of the 20th Century. That is when high schools (secondary education) was mainstreamed, to prepare people for industrial and white collar jobs. Little has changed in the primary and secondary education in a over century. There have been various experimental alternatives in education, but nothing has disrupted the industrial economy bureaucratic model of education.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused 100% primary and secondary public and private school closures throughout the country. Schools rapidly attempted to shift to a distance learning model with mixed results. The only students who were not disrupted were homeschooled students. And that is instructive.

Author and home school mother Bethany Mandel stated the mistake being made was the schools were forcing the students into “home schooling”, when home schoolers had learned the right approach was not home schooling but “home education”. The point Mandel was making is home and education have to be integrated for it to work. The example often put forth is using baking to teach fractions.

Much of the distance learning is focused on workbooks and exercises and limited to little testing. Grading for many students has moved to a pass/fail model, without letter grades. Some schools are simply planning to give all students As.

For some students, the tools for remote learning (computers, Internet access, etc.) are severely limited. Some students have no parent in the home, due to the parent being an essential service worker. Others have parents at home who are not able to adequately support the home schooling effort. In some school districts, a significant percentage of students have simply dropped off the radar.

We are at a point where two things are highly probable. Schools will return to session in the fall of 2020, and there will be a second wave of COVID-19 which will force another round of school closures.

The industrial economy bureaucratic model is likely to drive school systems to simply double-down. Buy more laptops. Maybe fund cellular hot spots. Try to do the same thing done in Spring of 2020 but a little better.

The correct answer is a new model. The obvious approach would be to bring leaders of traditional education together with leaders in the homes schooling community. Building a lesson plan for hybrid schooling, something that offers three alternatives to an individual lesson—a traditional distance learning with workbooks, and two alternative experiential lessons designed to fit most student needs, perhaps one for a student with a parent, and another for a student alone—would be a model that would be far more successful if another round of school closures was required. Yes, it is a lot of work, but the resources are there. And the time is available (we have all summer).

The simple truth is the hybrid model could work fine even in the classroom with no school closures. It would make learning more fun, and it would exercise the hybrid model.

Another round of school closings, with many students falling even further behind, may cause significant unrest among parents. New thinking is required. New models are required.

And this is where we are. We are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but we are still operating governments and education on a Second Industrial Revolution model, the industrial economy bureaucratic model—big, heavy, slow-moving, very slow changing, centralized structures. It is long obsolete, by about a half a century. It could have sustained for a decade or two, but It should have been replaced no later than the 1990s. It has been exposed. It will be replaced. But how soon, and through what process?

What will the 2020s hold?

Looking back on the 2010s as a busy adult, it is hard to see much change.

I started the decade with my first iPhone, an iPhone 3GS. I don't recall if I got that iPhone in 2009, or 2010, but it was somewhere around there. And I was a smart phone user since 2005, when I bought a Palm Treo, with a data plan, and enabled my corporate email (via IMAP) on the device. I even bought software to allow me to tether the phone (via its data sync cable) to my laptop. Prior to that, in 2003, I was using SMS text messages on my GSM phone to communicate internationally. At the end of the decade (literally the very end), I had an iPhone XR.

My work tools did not really change. I started the 2010s with a Macbook Pro, and ended with a newer Macbook Pro.

Microsoft Windows went from Windows 7 to Windows 10. My home PC did not change much, an old flat screen monitor died, so I bought a new one.

My primary home TV did not change. It is still the same 1080p Sony SXRD rear-projection I bought on Black Friday in 2006. My basement TV went from a 30-inch 1080i CRT to a large 1080p LCD (bought second-hand).

While I went through four iPhones in the 2010s, I have the same 80GB iPod Classic I won in a work contest in 2006, which I use for my car audio.

I bought a new car in early 2010 (a 2009 model year car), and drove it for most of the decade, replacing it in early 2018 with a used 2015 model year car. The old iPod integrates just fine with the newer vehicle.

What did change? The single biggest consumer change I saw was the end of traditional media. Let me unpack this.

I started the decade still a member of the Air Force Reserve. As a flier in the Air Force, I had to carry considerable paper manuals. Most of these were published in PDF format, but we had to carry hard paper copies. I was curious about e-reader technology, and tested Air Force PDFs on the Sony Reader, which supported PDFs. Unfortunately, the resolution of E Ink e-readers was not good enough to render an 8-1/2 x 11 inch PDF page filled with small font text. However, in 2011 I purchased an iPad, and I found the iPad did render PDFs adequately. A couple of years later, the Air Force standardized on the iPad 2 as its Electronic Flight Bag. A single iPad replaced several large binders. While e-readers have had mixed success when compared to a handful of personal books, clearly they have an advantage for reference libraries.

The second example is when we purchased a minivan in late 2014 in anticipation of the birth of our second child. My manager at work told me: "Don't get the DVD player option. It is not worth the additional $7,000. Instead, go on Amazon on Black Friday and buy two cheap Android tablets. And sign up for their free kid app of the week." So for less than $100 for two tablets, and another $100 or so for headphones, cases, and car mounts, and another $50 for DVD ripping software, each child can watch what they want to watch. And now play games as well.

Obviously, the 2010s were the decade of Netflix, where Netflix's original DVD based business faded into irrelevance, and its nascent streaming service became an industry changing phenomenon.

Audio went through more changes. From the idea of digital downloads replacing traditional CD sales, to the emergence of streaming and the end of stand-alone MP3 players. Certainly, the smart phone played a role in this transition, as did smart speakers.

We went from renting DVDs to video streaming, and from buying CDs to downloading digital music to dedicated MP3 players which docked to speakers for the home, to audio streaming to smart phones and smart speakers. Media is all but dead.

The second most significant consumer phenomenon of the 2010s were "ridesharing" services Uber and Lyft. These services simply were not possible prior to the rise of the smartphone, and were the most disruptive business of the decade.

The third major consumer trend was the decline of retail, a.k.a., the "retail apocalypse". Everywhere during the 2010s one could find abandoned storefronts. This was not a new trend, as the decline of malls started in the 1990s, but a second wave started in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Specialty stores were obsoleted by online retailers, causing brands such as Toys "R" Us, Borders Books, and Payless ShoeSource to close, but also department stores like Sears and J.C. Penney to shrink their presence considerably. This trend is so significant, most cities are developing plans to deal with declining retail centers.

In the business area, the mainstream adoption of cloud computing was the biggest trend, followed by the mainstream embracing of mobile technology.  Cloud computing officially started just prior to the 2010s decade, as Amazon Web Services EC2 came out of beta in late 2008. By mid-decade, mainstream adoption had started, and by late in the decade, most organizations were adopting cloud computing. In that time, the concepts of IaaS and PaaS had been refined into industries of their own. Also, software as a service (SaaS) was mainstreamed during the 2010s, with Salesforce and Microsoft's Office 365 driving a large portion of that segment. The decade started with significant on-premises infrastructure refreshes, driven by Intel's significantly improved Nehalem processor, the rationalization to x86 as the defacto instruction set architecture,  the emergence of Linux as a viable alternative to UNIX, Windows Server 2008 as robust enterprise grade version of the Windows NT line, and the widespread use of 10Gb Ethernet networking. The decade ended with many large organizations getting completely out of the data center business, keeping what was required to be capitalized, owned, and self-managed in colocation facilities, and pushing everything else to opex SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS platforms.

The second biggest trend was the embracing of mobile. As Apple with its iPhone and the Google Android platform became a defacto mobile duopoly, and as smartphone penetration increased, a similar push to the late 1990s and early 2000s for businesses to get on the web emerged in the 2010s with mobile. Banking apps replaced ATMs, and airline apps replaced kiosks. Even ordering coffee at Starbucks was accelerated via mobile apps. While mobile apps are gimicky for some businesses, they are useful for many others, and critical for a few. And while most use cases for mobile were customer self-service, some businesses leveraged mobile for their own employees. Chick-fil-A's use of tablets to take orders and payments in the drive through during peak hours, airline flight attendants using mobile devices to process payments in flight, and of course products like Square, who allowed any independent business with a mobile phone to process credit card payments, and services like Uber and Lyft which are built entirely around the mobile phone ecosystem of location services and payment processing.

So what will be the trends for the next ten years? I really can't predict the consumer side of things. After all, I have a 13 year old rear projection TV, and just replaced a 2014 model year iPhone with a 2018 model. I bought a 2015 model year car about two years ago and intend to drive it as long as I can. I was a later adopter of Netflix streaming, finally joined Amazon Prime in 2019, but did subscribe to Disney+ within weeks of its launch.

My first prediction would be streaming surpasses broadcast and cable/satellite. Some channels will likely die off and fade away. Every media company will offer a streaming platform. People will expect an "all you can eat" model from the streaming providers, and there will be a war among the providers as to who can provide the most content. I also expect more ad supported "freemium" models to emerge. Related to this, I expect to see more audio streaming. Ad supported streaming has a strong potential because internet advertising offers the highest level of targeting and customization, which is something broadcast is not capable of providing. Streaming also offers the potential for interactivity, so the idea of interactive television could finally become a reality, with the viewer able to choose from different content rated version, and select from multiple story arcs. The other likelihood is, with all of the new streaming services, and the competition between them, Netflix's market cap will come down to Earth in the decade of the 2020s.

My second prediction is some autonomous vehicles will become mainstream by the end of the decade. What form I do not know. It may be limited to some kinds of minibuses on fixed routes in dedicated lanes, or it may be Level 4 or 5 autonomous automobiles. If Level 4 or 5 autonomous passenger vehicles become mainstream by the middle of the decade, Uber and Lyft will survive and likely thrive. If autonomous passenger vehicles do not become mainstream by the end of the decade, Uber and Lyft will disappear in current form. What is important is even if automated vehicles are limited to certain lanes, the idea of an autonomous minivan carpool-like service would be disruptive compared to the alternative of less frequent city buses. I think the significant thing to consider is, automated vehicles are likely to first appear in a form we are not expecting. Perhaps automated Bus Rapid Transit in places without existing mass transit (or mass transit driver unions).

In the business space I occupy, IT, I have better ideas, simply because I get exposed to my employer's roadmaps and hear about the strategic IT plans of customers.

My first predicted trend is edge computing. The push to the cloud will over-reach, and the overreach will be first seen where low latency and high bandwidth are needed. This will drive edge computing, if for no other purpose than to process and compress local data sets before uploading them to the cloud.

The best analogy for edge computing are content delivery networks (CDNs) today. If one looks at the history of CDNs, they originally were created to deal with the limited bandwidth of the internet, and limited computing power of internet servers. The appeal of CDNs in the era of the early dial-up internet faded as broadband penetration increased, but they would become critical again with the rise of downlodable and streaming media.

I mentioned Netflix and the rise of streaming media replacing traditional DVDs and CDs. What makes Netflix unique is its content delivery network, Open Connect. Some people love to point out Netflix was an early and aggressive adopter of Amazon Web Services. But when you watch a show on Netflix, it is not streaming from AWS, or from AWS' content delivery network, but from Netflix's own CDN. Netflix negotiated with ISPs to place their CDN appliances in the ISP's facilities. In most cases, this means the local telephone exchange facility for DSL based services, and the cable head-end for cable modem based services. This means Netflix is only streaming over the proverbial "last mile" of the Internet. Programs are pushed out to the Netflix Open Connect appliances ahead of availability. This is why when a new season of a show drops, millions of people can binge watch it with no slowdown of the Internet.

At the end of the 2010 decade, Disney launched Disney+. Prior to launching Disney+, Disney had to contract with existing CDN providers to ensure they could support the expected customer base. While the specifics are confidential, it is speculated Disney contracted with many CDN providers to ensure they had content as close as possible to their customers.

Video streaming providers and content delivery networks provide an important archetype for the future of edge computing. In additional to content delivery networks, there will need to be compute delivery networks.

Given today's Internet bandwidth, CDNs provide more value as a latency reducer. The latency for a web page, or simple streaming videos can easily be measured in the tens of milliseconds. However, edge computing will likely require sub 10 millisecond latency, and perhaps sub 5 millisecond latency. It will not be possible to simply locate compute resources in the same facility as existing CDNs.

It might be an ideal use case for existing local data centers, such as colocation facilities and existing corporate data centers. Alternatively,  edge compute networks could be built in conjunction with 5G network facilities. 5G and edge compute facilities might be to the 2020s what "cloud plus mobile" was for the 2010s. 5G's limited broadcast distance will require many facilities. These facilities will connect into backhaul fiber networks. These new fiber networks will be installed throughout urban and suburban areas. It would be easy to connect an edge compute network facility to the 5G backhaul network. We have ten years to build this out a combined 5G and edge computing infrastructure, so I do expect it to look new and different, not bolted on.

My second prediction is AI goes mainstream. There was a lot of noise about AI in the last decade, peaking in 2018. Hype was bracketed with warnings of another "AI Winter". NVIDIA's market cap ran up to an incredible high, only to lose half its value. Companies bid up to seven figures for newly minted data scientist PhDs. But not much was visibly produced by AI. Most if it was invisible, things like fraud detection. That which was visible was not promising: people killed by self-driving automobiles, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, disturbing deepfakes, etc.

Part of the problem is we are still in the early days of AI. However, Moore's Law continues, academic efforts around machine learning and deep learning have expanded, software continues to improve, and companies are becoming more experienced in AI, what it is good for, and what it is not currently good for. This will lead to a rationalization, a focusing, which will produce usable results. Many of these uses cases will be simpler than the hype of the last decade.

The other thing which is likely to happen, which has not happened yet, is the commercialization of AI services. Today, each potential user of AI has to build their own AI environment. Sure, they can leverage cloud providers for the GPU infrastructure, and they leverage the open source tools, but they have to employ data scientists to build the training models, prepare the data, train the models, test the inference, etc. The idea of a third-party AI organization specializing in particular use cases, such as  retail loss prevention, coming in and doing a complete AI based solution from data identification to data optimization to training to implementation of a final product is yet to be mainstream. Once it is, we will see more of deployment of AI. I expect data scientists employed by large retailers and large banks to create startups focused on implementing AI solutions.

The last IT related prediction I will make for the next decade is the idea of "everything as a service". The public cloud providers have changed the way enterprise IT customers consume resources and services. Many customers never implemented significant charge-back or show-back mechanisms to measure the cost of providing services. The idea of pay for use on premises IT was a feature of the mainframe and has been explored for decades in the open systems space. AWS's on-premise Outposts platform can be consumed either in an opex or capex model. I have seen some customers push back on opex models (software subscriptions) in favor of capex, and I have to wonder if it may be in part due to public cloud and SaaS opex expenditures consuming their opex budget, leaving IT with only capex remaining. If this is true, I expect budgets will evolve over time to a more opex heavy model. If some customers prefer opex models, and some capex models, this means vendors must provide both. I think we will see this with both software and hardware.

Regardless, I expect we will see more change in the next ten years than we saw in the last ten years. The pace of change of technology is accelerating. It is hard to notice because we are conditioned to the current time, and we are conditioned to change, so we only see change in retrospective.