Author Archives: Tom Lewis

And the Award for Best Technical Faceplant Goes to….

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The Boeing 737 MAX, it turns out, is not the only thing the company has been dpong wrong. Not by a long shot.

If they gave out Academy Awards for Most Spectacular Industrial Crash of the Year, this year’s hands-down winner would be Boeing, Boeing. It’s not just that their code writers did a nifty update of the software in the 737 Max airliner that caused it to dive unpredictably, killing 346 people in two crashes, and grounding the entire fleet for a year or more. It’s not just that a new version of the 737 has started to show cracks in the attachments of wings to fuselage, causing 50 of them to be grounded for repairs. No, there’s more. Much more. 

Boeing, Boeing, it turns out, has for six years been conducting one of the biggest experiments ever in automated manufacturing, spending untold millions of dollars on robots designed to assemble the fuselages of the 777. The machinery was designed to position the large curved panels that make up the cylindrical fuselage while other machines automatically drilled holes, inserted rivets and fastened them. It would do the work of hundreds of human mechanics, and do it better and faster.  Continue reading →

Technology Run Amok: It’s In Our Genes

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Gene editing is easy. All you gotta do is make the right presumptions.

Next to money, America worships technology most intensely. Most of us believe that no matter what problem arises — climate change, water shortage, soil exhaustion, oil depletion, whatever — technology will solve it (and somebody will make a ton of money). The belief is shored up by a constant stream of ads and stories in the industrial media about the wonders in store for us just as soon as Technology gets around to its next miracle.

This faith is not without basis in our history. I can remember many times Technology intervened in my life in a thrilling way: when we first got electricity in our remote farmhouse (you can flood a room with brilliant light just by flicking a switch!); when we got running water upstairs (no more treks to the outhouse when it was 20 below zero!); when I saw television for the first time (it was I Love Lucy); when I got my first computer (it stores 50 pages of text on a single floppy disc!); and yes, when I got my first smartphone. Continue reading →

RIP Capitalism: The Snake Has Swallowed Its Tail

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I don’t care how tough things are, do not eat that.

There are so many powerful forces arrayed against the survival of industrial economies that people often find it comforting to focus on only one — global climate change, for example — brandish a sword at it and vow to fight to the death. But to act as if there were only one existential threat to our current way of life is as uninformed and irresponsible as pretending there are no threats at all. 

Consider just some of the accumulating catastrophes of the modern world in addition to global warming:

  • The end of cheap energy. It has become almost impossible to extract fossil fuels profitably. The amount of energy gained for the energy invested in drilling and mining has declined steadily, and for some operations — fracking and tar sands, for example —  is approaching parity. When it gets there, the Industrial Age is over. 

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America’s Zombie Oil Bidness: When’s the Funeral?

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When do you write the obituary for a zombie? When you determine that he has no heartbeat or brain activity? Shoot, he’s just getting started. (No, I mean it. Shoot!) A limb or two has rotted and fallen off? He’s still going. That’s America’s oil industry today. No signs of life and still going. 

That’s why I stopped writing obituaries for the American oil industry four years ago. It was not that I changed my mind, or doubted for a moment that the industry was on the verge of collapse; nor was I convinced by the cacophony of liars proclaiming a new era of American energy independence and domination of the global oil industry. It was and remains a colossal lie, gallons of lipstick applied to the rotting carcass of a pig, and yet the pig is still widely regarded as healthy and beautiful.  

A brief reality check is in order. Continue reading →

The Depraved Samaritans of the Air Ambulance Services

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We were going to take him right to the hospital. But his credit card got declined.

When Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, he was trying to explain to a lawyer how to get into heaven. We don’t know if the lawyer got the point or not — I’d bet not — but we do know one group of our fellow humanoids who definitely did not get the point: the people who come to our aid when we are so sick, or so badly injured, that we need to be rescued — after which they come after our savings, our homes, hounding us into bankruptcy if that’s what it takes to get their money. When Jesus said to the lawyer, referring to the Good Samaritan, “Go and do likewise,” this is not what He had in mind.

There needs to be a special place in Hell reserved for the new breed of air ambulance owners.  Increasingly, they are equity managers, people rolling the dice in the Big Casino with ORPM — Other Rich Peoples’ Money. Keep in mind that these are people managing the wealth of people who are already fabulously wealthy, and simply want more. These human buzzards spied a perfect business model in air ambulances: the customers are usually unable to talk, let alone negotiate a price, and even if they could, are too desperate for help to quibble. Continue reading →

Five Things You Should Definitely Not Think About Today

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The only rational response to some of the crap that’s going on.

News outlets have been most helpful lately in distilling the day’s news budget into such features as “Five things you should know today in order to appear smarter than your co-workers at the coffee machine.” But this is a trivial ambition. Being able to quote verbatim the latest unhinged sentence fragments from Mad King Donald might give you a temporary sugar high, but what good does it do, really?

We do not need our attention directed to the things that are happening around us, but away from them. We need a filter, a sort of Faraday cage to keep out ENPs — extraneous news pulses. Instead of climbing in a cage, which would work but is not practical, we have to train ourselves in a basic self-defense exercise: clamping both hands over our ears and screaming WA-WA-WA until the would-be informant gives up. (If it’s a written piece, simply turn away and stare at a blank wall until it’s gone.) Continue reading →

There’s Nothing Civil About Civil War. Or “Civil Unrest.”

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People who are ignorant of history and of the dynamics of human life, have been casually tossing around threats of violence, even civil war in America if they don’t get their political druthers. Some of them who are members of Congress actually launched a mob action inside the Capitol that lacked only torches and pitchforks — and a cause — to be a replica of an uprising.

They know not what they do. Those who refer to our own Civil War mostly talk gibberish — they have no idea about its roots, reality or meaning. Those who toss out these matches of hatred and potential violence for the minor that causes various kinds of accidents like the traffic accidents, the momentary political advantage will smile and tell you that a match cannot destroy a country, and that’s true unless it lands on a mountain of dry tinder. And these people don’t even know what human tinder is, let alone how close it is to igniting. Continue reading →

Ever Wonder What Condition Air Conditioning Is In?

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DOOMSDAY MACHINE — using the electricity of four refrigerators, demanding the power just when it is most difficult to provide, increasingly essential to comfort and even life throughout the world: this could be the machine that brings it all down.

Crushing household debt, a collapsing real estate market and a contracting economy have strangled consumer spending in China, especially spending on big-ticket appliances. One result of this is that sales of air conditioners have tanked, leaving manufacturers in China this spring with about 50 million finished units unsold, stacked up in inventory. 

This is terrible news for industry and consumerism, but it’s good news for the planet. Because, it turns out, our frantic efforts to keep ourselves cool while the planet heats up are accelerating the heating of the planet.  You could call it a feedback loop. Continue reading →

Lemmings Herding Unicorns

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This is what your company has to look like if you want a shot at the big bucks on Wall Street.

Wall Street has made an enormous contribution to the history of our country in recent years, one that no one can deny: it has made the Trump White House look in comparison like a bastion of sanity, a cloistered campus of stable geniuses genuflecting on the big issues of our time. Wall Street, meanwhile, has spent an inordinate amount of its time and money chasing unicorns.

A unicorn on Wall Street is a relatively new private company that has been valued at over a billion dollars by no one-knows-who for no apparent reason. Like the dot-com startups of old, the unicorns gallop onto the field, issue gazillions of dollars’ worth of stock to the public, borrow gazillions more from the hedge funds, and then try to figure out how to do business. Unless you’re one of the people with access to the best stock research tools who moves the stock and the money around and gets rich from fees — and these days who isn’t — these things seldom turn out well. So, naturally, Wall Street is doing more and more of them, and they’re getting weirder and weirder.

Some examples (and remember, I am not making  this stuff up. You can’t make this stuff up):

Continue reading →

Weapons of Mass Digestion

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Suppose that the company that supplies our water notified us that from now on it would deliver water that was perfectly safe — as long as we boiled it before we touched it. We would be in the streets with placards and pitchforks before noon. Yet the food industry takes the position that its responsibilities are met when it delivers to us meat that is safe — as long as it is heated to 160 degrees Fahrenheit before we touch it. And we have accepted this with the silence of the proverbial lambs.
The New York Times has given this remarkable arrangement some attention with a long take [“E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection”] that showcased the plight of a 22-year old woman nearly killed, and left paralyzed, by a hamburger tainted with E. Coli and not sufficiently cooked. (See! It was the cook’s fault! In this case her mother, now plagued by guilt.) Like most writing on the subject, the Times spends a lot of time emphasizing the “there oughtta be a law” aspect of the issue, faulting the US Department of Agriculture for its lackadaisacal inspection practices, as if we could somehow legislate or inspect our way away from the effects of this industrial weapon of mass digestion.
The Times does a very good job of detailing how hamburger is assembled, making it clear that it should be handled in our kitchens in the same way as any other lethal biohazard. And it profiles the Mafia-like ethics of the hamburger grinders who refuse to sell their product to anyone who threatens to test it for purity. “Nice store you got here. Be a shame if anything happend to it.” (Once again, Costco stands out here as one of the few ethical companies on the planet: they test all the burger they buy before they mix it or process it further.)
But the Times piece does not point out that the food industry not only refuses to control this threat to public health — it created it! By force-feeding corn to grass eaters, industry turns the contents of their four stomachs into acid that makes the cows sick and kills most of the E. Coli bacteria that used to l;ive there happily and benevolently, helping in the digestion of grass. The surviving bacteria were 1) acid tolerant and thus able to survive where they had never been able to before — in human stomachs, and 2) teenage mutant ninjas with some weird weapons, such as incredibly potent shiga toxins, as few as 50 of which can perforate your intestines, infect your blood and destroy your kidneys.
But, hey, you’re perfectly safe as long as you, or your hamburger provider, heat the meat to 160 degrees, sterilize all utensils, pans and dishes that touched it prior to heating, and incinerate all clothing, towels or furniture that came in contact with it.
The Times says that the paralyzed young woman “ran out of luck in a food-safety game of chance.” They should have named the game. It’s not canasta, it’s Russian Roulette.

Suppose that the company that supplies our water notified us that from now on it would deliver water that was perfectly safe — as long as we boiled it before we touched it. We would be in the streets with placards and pitchforks before noon. Yet the food industry takes the position that its responsibilities are met when it delivers to us meat that is safe — as long as it is heated to 160 degrees Fahrenheit before we touch it. And we have accepted this with the silence of the proverbial lambs. Continue reading →