We've mourned our astronauts for long enough. It's time to get on with the real goals they were working for.
NOTE: THIS DOCUMENT IS UNDERGOING MAJOR REVISION RIGHT NOW. Basically, the world changed on me since I started the new version of this document a few months ago and the world hasn't noticed yet, so if it looks choppy and self-contradictory in spots, it'll get fixed sooner or later. The little-known critical technology developments that changed things are listed below in advance of changing the rest of this page to fit them, so this document is still worth reading even in advance of complete revision. If you're in a hurry, click here.
The following consists of things I've been saying for years in online forums ranging from the early BBS systems and Usenet newsgroups to private e-mail. I decided it was time to put them on a web page so I wouldn't need to say these things over and over. As of today (12/13/2000), this can be considered an early draft.I don't have time, but I'm revising this anyway. It's time (1/2004), especially with Bush's new "Mars initiative", which appears to be part of the Bush campaign strategy, not anything that is going to generate any more than a few pieces of contractor graphics suitable for campaign literature.
I do not believe that this document provides all the answers to America's problems. It is intended to point to where the solutions are most likely to be found. It covers more than specific space program advocacy because in order to pay for the kind of technological development and the infrastructure required for new economic growth, we need new economic growth that will result in money staying in the USA. To get this, we have to take a fresh look at many of the assumptions on which America's economic and foriegn policy have been based during both the Clinton and both Bush Administrations. There really is little new here, these are largely a synthesis of the best technology ideas I've seen in science and technology forums and in science fiction. I've renamed this page because it's grown substantially in scope from the original. Consider this a second draft. Not all the links are in place, etc. This will advance faster if I find interest, a lot faster if I find help. This page really should be book length, there's a lot more that I haven't said, and a great deal that needs more research. But there's enough here for a basis for discussion.
Most of what's here could be applied to any industrialized country, the larger space initiatives could work for the European Union. What's mainly required here is leadership with the guts to invest in the future. I'm not exactly optimistic about the existence of such leadership, given the lack of positive evidence.
There are many ideas here for fostering technological growth.
The most critical ones are replacement of fossil fuel with oil grown through new biomass technology, a new space transportation system cheaper and safer than the space elevator, a space industrial park and a moon mining / processing facility which combined, will make it possible to replace coal with enough clean solar energy from solar power satellites to power everybody's lifestyles indefinitely.
Without these, fostering invention as the rest of my recommendations discuss (NOT "innovation") really isn't terribly meaningful, a better mousetrap won't be terribly important or profitable after the oil runs out.
We have an energy crisis coming and we need to start working on solving it NOW. If we don't solve this problem, it will solve us. The good news is that the problem is solvable. The solution to global climate change is implicit in the solutions to the energy crisis presented below.
Whether you believe that peak oil will come in:
it's plain that we're looking at the end game for cheap Middle East oil. This means that we already need to be at work on replacing fossil fuel with something else.It is time to go to work on building the future energy infrastructure which must be in place before the price of oil starts going up steeply in order to keep our lights and heat going and the food delivered to our supermarkets. Peak oil and global warming need not be a problems anymore, unless we sit on our asses and let them happen to us.
Since I wrote the revised version of this document a few months ago, three new technologies have been made public that basically mean the chance at a new ball game with respect to climate change and energy crisis. This entire paper is going to have to be largely revised to take this into account, but I thought I'd share the news with my readers now
These developments are:
Bottom line: in the UNH study referred to here, the researchers estimate that a $183 billion capital investment can give us enough oil to replace all our transportation needs at a continuing cost to us of $53 billion a year. The experimental study referred to above is being reworked, using more capital-intensive (i.e. more computer control) technology to replace the open-pond algae production model postulated in the DOE study. What I expect is perhaps lower capital cost, and cheaper oil.
Note that the capital cost of converting to biomass diesel is roughly what has been spent in Iraq, about $200 billion. So far. Would we be more secure if this money went to American corporations and contractors and employees, or to the oil kings of the Middle East who are largely financing world terrorism? Nicest part is that the project is more or less environmentally neutral, it absorbs CO2 when the algae is growing and releases it when the oil derived from the algae is burned. Versions of this technology revised to use cheap labor may be cheap enough even to make this cost-effective for the Third World to adopt. I think the Chinese and Indians might find the idea of putting their peasants to work algae farming instead of shipping their foriegn exchange overseas to buy oil from the Middle East more expensive than they can make themselves very, very attractive.
From the above, the only "climate change" or "energy crisis" dangers humanity is in is from the collective stupidity of what passes for our business and governmental leadership. I can now say that the tools to solve our most of our biggest problems are at hand, and without major changes in First World lifestyles. Many will be disappointed to find that we'll be able to keep our SUVs, though given a choice between $2.12 diesel and $3/gallon gas (this is a guess), SUV drivers will probably be replacing their vehicles with diesel SUVs.
Intelligent leadership in our business and government communities can go a long way towards solving our energy, employment (how much labor from "warm body" through technology professionals is it going to take to turn 500,000,000 acres into biomass production facilities?) and foriegn policy problems.
The majority of what's described here makes no sense to outsource. Algae biomass is easy enough to grow and process that localizing production to processing facilities makes most sense. Retrofitting smokestacks with secondary energy recovery has to be done where the smokestacks are. Where the space jobs go and how many there are depend on what gets done, but if useful projects like a Space Power Satellite are done first and the industrialization of space becomes part of national industrial policy, there will be plenty to go around. Once the concept is proven we won't be outsourcing to China and India, they'll each be trying to get their own chunk of space profit and probably won't have excess capacity for sale. This looks like generations of "full employment" in most of the world to me.
The sooner we get started, the sooner we're going to have new high-tech and other jobs and the sooner we'll be energy independent.
Is there intelligent life in Washington or on Wall Street?
Concrete steps to get this running? For the oil side, how about government loans, tax credits, and temporary price supports in case the oil cartel gets desperate enough to try to put the new energy replacements out of business by dropping their oil prices to cost of production? For the space side, direct government funding, and or payload guarantees (e.g. the government will guarantee payment for X-million pounds per year of payload to any vendor(s) who can prove the ability to get it to LEO for, say, under $10/pound?) would be a good start. A promise to the rest of the world that the algae oil biomass production technology will be freely exported as soon as it is ready to go? These are the first things that occur to me. If you have other ideas, let me know.
These programs can not be put in place instantaneously and we really need two generations to make this all work. Best case, we have ONE. Yes, this should have been started over 10 years ago, but it didn't happen, so we need to get this going NOW. Earth-based renewable power is cool and "in", but it probably won't cover all the demand even in the USA and will probably be too expensive for the Third World for some time to come, with "some time" meaning after oil can no longer an issue. Cheap energy is a requirement to industrialize a civilization, as the Western world found out in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.
When I wrote the above paragraph, I didn't know that the DOD is gaming military action based on the probability of drastic and sudden climate change. A climate change means that energy usage goes up rather drastically and that the optimistic "peak oil" productions have to be ignored. The Fortune Magazine article linked above suggests wars for resources lasting as long as the resources do. Read the article. While this doesn't prove that this will happen, DOD wouldn't be sharing the information with Fortune if they thought this impossible. Even a significant possibility of this kind of downside means it's worth putting resources into dealing with it, while there is still time to deploy them efficiently. Here is a link to the actual report. [unzips to .PDF , Adobe Acrobat required] It is intended as worst case, but since it doesn't touch on "peak oil", the possible downside is considerably worst than described. The short-term prediction in the report that we can keep an eye on: Massive coastal flooding around the world with words like "unprecedented" and phrases like "abrupt slowing of the oceans thermohaline conveyor" used. Whenever you see this, whether it be next year of 5 years from now, it's time to start thinking of moving to higher ground if you don't live on it already.
Remember that even if sudden climate change does NOT happen, we're still going to run out of oil, this simply means that we have more time to face this and deal with it. "Prematurely" building a replacement for oil energy at worst, means lost opportunity costs. The alternative, not having a replacement and needing one is conserably uglier.
Note that modern warfare is very resource intensive and will in itself add to the draining of resources. Also note that a 20 terawatt space power satellite network providing Earth with power during an ice age means that the people on Earth will simply stay indoors a lot more than usual in safety and comfort. While this may sound boring compared to the exciting global war and disaster possibilities Fortune describes, I prefer boredom to finding myself in the middle of a disaster epic that I can't switch off or walk out on.
It may well be that the cost of space industrialization plus conservation and some military action to protect resources will be considerably cheaper over the next 20 years than the current scenarios where hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on the infrastructure required to drastically increase production plus the cost of protecting them. A large part of the money required to build the first generation of space infrastrucure will oddly enough, be spent on exactly the same aerospace contractors who would be otherwise building munitions. If we get through this period with the ability to tap the sun and the Solar System for resources, we can forget about running out of resources for the next few thousand years. That's enough for any generation to leave as a legacy. Bonus points if this can be done with our population as a whole living in safety and comfort.
As for why I believe the Bush "Man on Mars" program is a fraud and a deception, go to the Wired News article or the GlobalSecurity article
However, Bush's intentions aren't all that important. What he's done that's important is reopen debate and discussion on new goals for the space program. It's time to hijack this discussion and turn it into something which will actually buy us something. The idea of spending a whole lot of money on space technology isn't a bad one, if the money buys something we actually can use.
A properly designed space program can not only solve our future energy problems, but most of our foriegn policy problems as well.
What America needs is a space-oriented technology program that can be harnessed to solve America's biggest problems:
What they present as solutions
are at best, starting points, and lack specifics like:
Hardly surprising that the proposals don't contain what we as individuals and businesses are going to be made to do in order to cut our energy consumption, the proposals are intended to win votes with happy talk, not slap people in the face with things we know will cost us money. At least they concede that there is a problem. Though vague promises of programs and studies aren't going to keep us warm when the lights go out.
What we need at this point is to start going after the easy stuff NOW which will impact our energy consumption within years and during that time, figure out what else is possible. There are many things that have been proved at a lab scale that aren't in production because there's no current demand in the market. Making current generation inefficient versions of products illegal to sell after X years is one answer. Research needs to be done in other areas to find out where power can be reduced without impacting functionality, perhaps a special R&D tax credit for this is in order. Personal computers are one area where research needs doing. Hint: The laptop doesn't contain all the answers. Energy taxes on products that don't meet certain energy use criteria are another approach to get people to stop using unnecessary energy. I think both will be required, and much of the funding from energy taxes can be used to reduce the impact of these measures on low/fixed income people and marginal businesses.
environment: We have
a large, working fusion reactor capable of powering the entire earth without
environmental pollution indefinitely. The only problem is hooking it up
to our power lines. The solution is discussed below. The metals and organic
chemicals required to manufacture the goods that everyone on Earth need
to get up to First World living standards are sitting ignored on the Moon,
in the asteroid belts, and in the gas giant planets Saturn and Jupiter.
All of these resources can be obtained without environmental damage, because
above the Earth's atmosphere, there are no ecologies we can damage.
Most of the manufacturing processes required to turn these raw materials
into processed materials that can be turned into goods, i.e. the "heavy
industry" part of manufacturing, the oil refineries, the chemical plants,
the metal refining can be done using the abundant energy resources and
taking advantage of zero-gravity processing techniques and vacuum based
techniques which are cheap and simple given access to zero-gravity environments.
However, the measures required to allow tapping the whole Solar System to meet our needs are going to take a generation if we start now, spend a lot of money, and work very, very hard.. The conservation measures discussed here are to make it possible for us to survive in the meantime.
Hint: energy demand
of the new Indian and even Chinese middle classes is increasing
drastically.
Wait until they start demanding their own SUVs. The big problem here is that developing economies have to do things as cheaply as possible in order to build their industrial capabilities, and the cheap ways to do things are energy-inefficient. The only good news here is that as their economies build energy-efficient things for the US market, they will be selling these things at home as well.
technological unemployment. Why the "good jobs" aren't coming back unless we make some new ones is the subject of a very long paper which I may get around to writing someday. But suffice it to say for current purposes that the new jobs which relate to the "record profits" of American corporations are going to happen in the Third World, and will build the Indian middle class at the direct expense of the American middle class. Anyone who wishes to argue this is invited to be specific about where the "new, good" jobs are coming from. At this point, the only substantial source of new jobs in America are "minimum wage" low-skill jobs in the service sector. Anyone who thinks we can all be prosperous working in Walmart and in nursing homes has been listening to Karl Rove entirely too much. The problem with the theory of jobs moving up the ladder is at this point, there's nowhere for them to go.
The current wave of
outsourcing can be lived with if we learn how to make and do new things
we can sell to the world that are harder to export, or if we can create
so much economic demand to employ everybody on Earth who has technology skills. Not that outsourcing is necessarily a good idea. The programs proposed here meet both criteria. Things have gotten to the point where we have to ask as a society "Do we want to buy the bulk of our technological expertise from Third World experts?" The entry-level and lower level programming jobs which kids leaving college look for first are the ones that are being exported. If the kids getting a college education find that there are no jobs out there, they will either not take technology degrees in college or will do so figuring on emigrating to where the action is. Looks like the reverse brain drain has already started. It also looks like college students are dropping out of technology degree programs in record numbers. If America can't provide jobs for our "best and brightest" and we can't help these people create their own jobs, America doesn't deserve them and won't get to keep them. Is this a good thing for America?
By the timeframe Bush was talking about, with the facilities this document calls for in place, the price of a Mars trip is most likely to be millions of dollars, not billions anyway, and the trip will be a lot faster, safer, and more comfortable than Bush's alleged plan contemplates. Research on drives capable of fast interplanetary propulsion will be a lot easier in a place where what's outside the window is vacuum and the local gravitational level is zero.
To survive as a technological civilization, we are going to have to think of space as the only place where the solutions required to continue our civilizations are likely to be found. The only place where the resources required to bring all the populations on earth up to US/Europe living standards is in the solar system as a whole.
The basic problem most people who consider the environment first haven't gotten is that the Third World residents are going to be giving the rest of us trouble until they have the chance at the kind of lifestyles and comfort level we take for granted. This can *NOT* be done within the scope of available earth resources and leave a world fit to live in. The resources are up there, the problem is to make exploiting them cost-effective and to figure out revenue models that will make sense to those who can put in the capital. The way to get the private sector into the game is to build the infrastructure which won't bring in immediate profit to make it possible to get there.
There was a time when the resources of the American West were lying around unavailable. Initiatives of the Federal Government combined with the private sector opened the West to us, the most important one being the transcontinental railroad. Remember "the golden spike"? The only real difference is time, technology, and guts on the part of our leadership. The technology problems can be solved.
A world covered with happy consumers and soccermoms is going to have too many people busy having lives to have large population segments that want to kill us. This doesn't mean that terrorism will disappear, but it does mean that the problems should be no worse than they are in the USA. Various and sundry political crazies will still blow up the occasional building belonging to government or organization that they don't like, but this will be exceptional.
The first major long-term goal should be to build a power satellite(s) big enough to replace oil in general and the Middle East specifically as a primary source of energy.
Here is a NASA site regarding plans for a 20 TW system (20,000,000 megawatts) capable of powering the entire world, including projected demands of the Third World as it becomes part of the industrialized world for most of this century, and easily expandable.
I think this is a much worthier goal for America than trying to corral the last few billion barrels of oil with no clue as to what to do after we've burned them.
Note that Bush cut the funding. The last update on the NASA project site is in August 2001. Check the "Last Updated" date on the bottom right of the page.
The other advantage of making the Russians partners from the beginning is that their tank divisions are a lot closer to the Arab world than ours are, and this gives them a very good reason to make sure that the Arabs. . . cooperate.
Certainly. The people who will be going into space will be depending on survival systems rushed into production at a much faster pace than ever seen before. Some will die when they fail. Most who get into trouble will survive due to the kind of clever improvisation seen throughout human history or due to the existence of other space facilities capable of sending help. Remember that we are talking about deploying multiple facilities, not just one, and transportation between them, not the previous situation where there's only one island of life in the sky and no way anyone can get to it to provide help. However, there are lots of high-risk occupations. Working at a chemical plant or an oil refinery isn't the safest thing in the world, either. Neither is being on the front lines in a combat zone. Making a new region safe for human habitation and industry is inherently dangerous.
Whereever you read this, people died in uncounted numbers to make it safe for you to live. The only question relevant to your location, no matter how safe it seems now, is when those people died. In the longest-inhabited areas, the deaths happened thousands of years ago. The American West was once a dangerous place to live. Now, children can safely walk to school in almost all of it. It's just another of the costs we have to pay for survival as a species, get over it and get used to it. If this program succeeds, deaths due to failure of life support or accidents are generally going to be back-page news, just like other industrial accidents are.
The difference between these deaths and the price of occupation of the Middle East until there is no longer any oil to protect is that these deaths will pay for a legacy worth leaving to the children of the kids being born today. A legacy worthy of us as a people.
Why not wait?
Whether you believe that "peak oil" happened several years ago or will happen in a generation, the business / economic / lifestyle changes in order to adapt to reducing energy consumption and increasing the availability of non-fossil fuel sources of energy have to start happening NOW in order to have what we need available by the time we must have it in order to keep our lights on. Regardless of whether we get our renewable power from here or in space, we are going to have to replace large chunks of our infrastructure to make this work and this will probably take more time than we've got even at the most optimistic estimates.
What happens to the price of oil futures as soon as it becomes obvious that our use of oil is permanently dropping due to both reduction on demand and work on increasing supply from non-fossil fuel sources? What happens to current oil prices?
The secondary policy implication is that with the Middle East becoming a non-issue on the international scale, we can divert some military resources to space industrialization. How much extra security did the $80 billion spent on the invasion of Iraq? The $80 billion spent on that invasion would have paid for most of the demo SPS program, probably including the first phases of the lunar mining and processing facility.
What did the war Bush bought us buy us instead? A few years worth of cheaper oil. Doesn't it make more sense to buy indefinite access to free energy?
In general, we're going to have to pay for energy independence and access to Solar System resources with money and by making changes to increase technological growth:
In many cases, automation and assembly of manufactured products closer to where they are consumed or where the raw materials are can reduce the labor cost of products below the best costs one can extract from cheap labor plus the cost of shipping to the First World. I'm seeing products *reengineered* to take advantage of cheap labor costs. New keyboard switches are individually placed rubber caps placed by hand... *replacing* one piece moldings. Reason is to save material where manpower is *cheaper* than another few cents of material. Isn't there something just wrong about that? I've wondered if one could beat this cost by building fully automated keyboard factories next door to plastics processing facilities and taking orders from retailers via the Web. This is just a specific example of what might be possible. Too many people are hypnotized by the mantra 'cheap labor'. . . even if using it might be reducing profits instead of increasing them.
Most of what is wrong with both government and business in this country is directly because of short-term decision making kept up long enough for the consequences to be visible on the horizon.
How did this happen? The tax laws were changed in the Reagan years to favor bonuses and options based on short-term performance at the request of corporate CEOs who contributed lots of money to Reagan.
What needs to be changed? Tax treatment must favor deferred compensation based on performance of the company based on when the deferred compensation is paid, for instance, 5, 10, 15, 20 years after the CEO takes office. If the company tanks right after the CEO leaves, there's no deferred compensation. There are a lot of dot.com CEOs who cashed out just in time to see the companies they built crash due to their own bad planning. Let people who build unsound businesses that get hyped into big IPOs suffer along with the investors who bought into the public offering. Let CEOs who hollow out a company pay along with the current investors when conditions change and they don't have the ability to adapt because all the people with the experience to deal with it got fired because they were "too expensive to keep", or their outsourcers become competitors with all the company's core expertise and current experience in serving the company's customer base.
Another one is [that company that is making 100% content available via broadcast quality format and selling high-quality (check) digital copy for cash, with no DRM and trusting public honesty. Personally, I favor individual digital watermarking for downloads. 128K MP3 is the promo, CD-quality or 5.1 channel DVD-A is the product. Bust the people who distribute PRODUCT whether this be via selling counterfeit discs or CD/DVD quality audio. Not that there is a whole lot of that going on, a typical 128K MP3 is 5 megabytes, a typical CD audio track about 50, I'd rather not think of a typical DVD-A with 5.1 channels. This not only benefits listeners, but technology developers . . . software, consumer hardware, future developments in this area with applications we can't begin to imagine. Though I can imagine recording and transmitting human experience along the lines of the movie Brainstorm. Figure that this will take lots of bandwidth. My point isn't that this is possible (but wouldn't it be fun to work on?), my point is that not all the killer apps for broadband or that are computationally intensive with consumer or business uses have been invented yet. However, working on them if one is using cablemodems are problematic. . . port control . . .
But if a content provider cartel like the RIAA and the MPAA comprise becomes the gatekeeper for all new consumer technology, we can confidently expect them to make development of anything they don't understand in the US impossible and that this new technology will be created by our foreign economic competitors. This is due to their rabid fear of new technology, as demonstrated by the fact that Jack Valenti is still running the MPAA despite his prediction that "THE VCR WILL KILL HOLLYWOOD" a generation ago. They don't get it. They can't get it. We need to leave them the hell out of the decision loop. Their ability to co-opt the legal system with respect to promoting their own interests is a result of massive mistakes made by both political parties. Our government needs to start undoing these mistakes.
This may cost the taxpayers as much as the Mars project which is projected to cost $500B-$1T. The difference? What I propose will be a profit-making investment. The US government will be able to sell access and tax the companies that go into space, and the electricity purchased here and the rest of the world as well. As soon as space industrialization becomes a reasonable investment, the private sector will put money into it. There are many industrial processes that are expensive on earth that are cheap in orbit if there's access to places to put them and cheap transport for the manufactured goods to markets. Real estate in the American West before the railroads wasn't worth a hell of a lot. Priced real estate in Beverly Hills lately?
Too impractical? Expensive?
Perhaps the price of human survival, or at least the price of survival
of technological society is too high for societies to be willing
to pay. If we are not willing to pay the price, we as a species don't deserve
to survive.
Jobs? Once the space
infrastructure in one that where people do business; a place where there's
easy access to industrial parks with life support, power, etc., the next
things to go up will the business services required to do any kind of business.
Self-service desktop publishing / shipping / office supply places, electronics
parts stores, delicatessans, restaurants, *massage parlors basically, if
people need it on earth, people probably will need it up there. This means
that objects ranging from paper clips to CNC machine tools and larger will
have to be lifted into orbit, and most of the jobs at space facilities
in the long run will NOT require advanced degrees and superhuman
reflexes any more than those jobs require these qualities do on Earth.
Most important: Kids being born today will inherit the Solar System as a source of job and business opportunities, instead of wars over the last few billion barrels of oil followed by watching the lights go out all over the world. What kind of a legacy would you prefer to leave for the future?
* note to non-US readers:
in the US, massage parlors are generally fronts for illegal prostitution.
Note
1: For those of you whom this would concern, your university or research
institution will get a lot more research done if you can simply send grad
student up to do research by book transit on a commmercial space flight
and paying a commercial or institutional research facilty housing and lab
access fees in place of the current model of trying to get an experiment shipped into orbit via Shuttle or somebody's satellite launch. An experiment that goes wrong shipped via satellite is megabucks of wasted money. One that goes wrong with the experimenter a couple of meters away gets fixed, and if the experiment works, immediate followups along the line of inquiry are possible.
The scientists who are arguing in favor of scrapping a manned space presence are protecting their personal turfs and trying to get increased budgets, not increase the amount of scientific research. At least not research they aren't personally doing. It's an academic version of short-sighted greed, albeit for "the most noble of motivations". Yeah, right. A.Lizard
The Space Access Society
link below discusses development and politics as relevant to the most important
factor in making space a useful resource. Space links:
Outsourcing
Middle class people historically pay much higher taxes than the wealthy, more so now given the Bush tax cuts. We're going to need tax money and people who can better afford higher costs of living to make this work. The middle class also is the root of social stability. Pursuing the policies advocated here will be much more difficult in a time of social unrest. More to the point, except for very specific circumstances, there isn't that much to be saved by outsourcing. There is far more to the cost of a high-volume product than the cost of labor. In fact, the paper linked to above suggests that many decisions to outsource manufacturing are based on bad financial analysis. In a high-volume product produced by automation, the cost of labor really shouldn't be much more than 10%. More means that the process or the product needs to be redesigned.
The theory that all consumers benefit from lower prices holds true when buying from overseas sweatshop producers through WalMart. However, you may have noticed that Fortune 500 companies are increasingly using offshore calling centers and R&D to cut labor costs. Noticed that they are reducing costs of either services or products to end users? The majority of the benefits are going to large stockholders. While this is as likely to be a retirement fund as an individual wealthy investor, also note that corporations are increasingly defunding or borrowing from pension funds.
Outsourcing all a company's core business products is literally building the future competition. If all an outsourcer is getting from US management is labor cost-based payments and increasingly irrelevant orders from a management who is no longer in touch with its customers, its production, or its R&D, where is our American management adding value, and why shouldn't outsourcers in lands where they know the legal turf and American CEOs don't take over management and keep the profits? Why are companies going to outsourcing en masse? In part, this is a management fad, like "Theory Y" and other fads of the past that ran their course and died. Companies are already being warned by the trade press to reconsidering outsourcing. Here's an example from CIO Magazine. Others are already looking for the exit.
The question can be asked, if outsourcing presents so many potential problems for business, why hasn't anyone run into serious trouble yet? The answer is that this has already happened, but VCs who see a chance for short-term savings are driving the trend anyway.
However, a more sinister interpretation can be placed on the actions of many CEOs who are pushing outsourcing. CEOs no longer spend their working lifetimes at a corporation. Their primary compensation is based on stock options and bonuses based on quarterly profit targets. If they don't produce continously rising profits, no bonuses and no options. HOW MANY COMPANIES HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THAT CAN DO THIS WITHOUT COOKING THE BOOKS IN SOME WAY? Real boats rock.
Wall Street analysts who tout the wonders of a corporation that has managed to somehow defy the law of nature by posting continously rising profits every quarter over a period of years should be taking the corporation apart to find out what the hell is really going on. Could it be that "savings" from outsourcing added to the bottom line aren't quite as real as they appear? What happens to US investors in any corporation who suddenly discover that their outsourcers are now competitors who own their technology, their business processes, and their customer lists? This is trouble on the horizon, and it's likely to create as big a mess as the S&L disaster did, i.e. wealth held by millions of people, and large chunks of retirement funds suddenly vanishing in a puff of smoke.
Finally, even if everybody, CEOs and outsourcers are dealing honestly (the odds that everyone is dealing dishonestly are probably about the same as the odds that nobody is), America is still building future competition. Check this Fortune Magazine article discussing this. His solution? Believe it or not, it's better education. And what jobs are these graduates going to be filling in the future described here? Personally, I think that the only way out of this mess that can result in a country that's a good place to live is massive investment in the future. Energy independence, R&D, and basic science. The one thing we know we can do better than the industrializing Third World at this point is throw more money at problems. At this point, if we are willing to make some sacrifices, we can still make this work. If present trends continue, the most profitable places to invest will be anywhere but here. The new companies developing new markets and the hot new technologies are going to be there, not here. At that point, it's simply going to be too late.
I do not favor prohibiting outsourcing. What I do advocate is that Federal and state government laws and policies, starting with tax codes be reviewed and the ones that favor outsourcing be repealed. I recommend that offshore centers that deal with the public be required to announce their company affiliation and location on every customer contact. I also advocate that the Federal and state governments put policies in place that forbid dealing with vendors who use substantial foriegn outsourcing in creating their products and services. But in the final analysis, if we as Americans are not willing to invest in our future, our future will come for us anyway. In a form we are not going to like. Outsourcing is investing in the future of other countries.
What if we make it all work?
The Solar System opens up.
Heavy industry, mining, manufacturing moves off this planet. Into orbit,
onto the moon, to the asteroid belt, to other planets. If a factory or
a mine is in orbit, it won't be polluting the air or water here. It's as
simple as that. Anybody who thinks that all these jobs will or can be done by
robots and AI isn't sufficiently familiar with the state of the art in these fields to be worth listening to, though robots and AI will be utterly necessary aids to people building businesses in space.
Links
The original of this post can be found here, it's drastically edited here to fit the previous content.
The choice you favor is redistribution vs investment in the future with you on the wrong side.
Redistributing all the wealth in the top 1% that Bush's economic policy favors would make a lot of people feel very good for a while. It would could do a lot of things for a lot of people.
Extra consumer spending would create a lot of jobs, some of which might even be in the USA.
Adequate funding of schools, welfare benefit levels high enough to actually keep people eating and roofs over their heads, job training programs, etc.
No, I haven't any clue as to where the jobs are coming from, other than minimum wage service sector crap... if we are going to get new "good jobs", we need new technology to give us new goods and services we can sell, and nobody who tells us that the "improved" economy we've gotten from outsourcing seems to have any clue what these are to be. No, we can't build a GREAT!!! future around selling iPods to each other.
NONE OF THE ABOVE WILL DO ANY GOOD WHEN THE OIL FINALLY RUNS OUT, or will be all that helpful when the wars over which of the world's countries will get to burn the last of the oil. The good news is that global warming may be less a problem than anyone expected.
By the way, if you who believe in "spend it all on social programs" haven't noticed, these wars have already started. Remember the Gulf War? Noticed the War on Iraq? Noticed the Pentagon plans for increased spending to build a miltary with capabilities straight out of science fiction?
That military is intended to fight those wars, and the spending to build and maintain that military makes current NASA budget levels look like a roundoff error.
The alternative to redistributionism is "making a bigger pie". Make the economy bigger. A Solar System-wide economy will have enough jobs for everybody. The technologies required to make this work will make possible new goods and services that will solve problems here on Earth, which translate to full employment and good jobs.
It should be obvious to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that information technology just isn't enough of a technological driver to make indefinite prosperity possible for a society. We need to make physical things as well as process information. The dot.bomb should be adequate evidence for this.
Send mail to me at alizard@ecis.com
