A Roadmap for America

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama made reference to getting manufacturing back in America.  In fact, he explicitly said that "this blueprint begins with American manufacturing."

That made me squirm.  This post is to describe why I think all of America should squirm, and what we should do instead.

The Problem

I squirmed because it strikes me as a wistful desire to return to a bygone era, one that has passed us on and we need to embrace the new change.  We've been through this before, with housing prices:

In the 2009-2010 era, I distinctly remember politicians saying "we have got to restore housing prices! Get them back up to where they used to be!"  (Sadly, a Google News search couldn't bring up any direct quotes.)  But the ugly truth was that housing prices were a bubble, and prices were not going to go back up.  For the housing market, it was a great ride up from 2003 to 2007, and we've been "taking our medicine" ever since.

I feel similarly, although not identically, towards manufacturing.  There has been a fervor recently over how iPhones and solar cells are manufactured in China and not in the US.  Why is that?

First of all, the Chinese are willing to work in conditions that would not be tolerated in the US today.  This is described eloquently in the famous piece done a few weeks ago by This American Life.

Secondly, they're willing to do it for far less than minimum wage.  Shenzhen has the highest minimum wage of any city, at about $207 per month.

Third, the Chinese government is backing production in a big, big way:

• They built their own production factory, at government expense, anticipating the next order from Apple.
• China has outlayed almost $800 billion for its solar cell manufacturing from 2011 - 2020.  Compare that to the outcry over Solyndra going under, at a cost of about $500 million.  

Admittedly, the electronics industry has the worst labor practices of any industry, but it's telling of how far the "other guys" are willing to go.  When President Obama asked Steve Jobs about why Apple can't make iPhones in the US, Steve replied, "Those jobs aren't coming back."

He's absolutely right.  Manufacturing in China is a step or three below what manufacturing was like in Pittsburgh in the early 20th century:

I openly admit -- and heartily welcome -- the fact that Chinese wages are rising (21% last year alone).  I hope that someday in the near future the Chinese worker will have parity with a laborer in the western world.  But that does not mean that the manufacture of iPhones, or most other commodities, will move back to the US.  Instead, they will move to southeast Asia ... or possibly Africa ... wherever the cheapest labor in the world can be found.

The Solution
So, what do we do instead?  America should strive to be an innovator, and stick to the high technology, high capital investment stuff, where the employee has to be smart, skilled, and resourceful.

Here's one example: a government sponsored, nationwide wireless network.  I have no idea how legal this would be, and here's where I need help.

In the 1950's, then-President Eisenhower embarked upon the Eisenhower Interstate System: a network of high-speed roads that would connect the US and allow commerce to flow freely and quickly.  It immodestly touts itself as "The Greatest Public Works Project in History."  The cost in 1991 was estimated to be $128.9 billion (starting in 1956), but wow has it enabled growth in this country.

Why not do something similar for the wireless / networked world?  Roll out a "wireless highway" that anyone can get on to, with bandwidth limits (the 21st century equivalent of speed limits) so that all may partake?

I see two hard parts:

1. Making it forward compatible.  Unlike today's LTE / WiMax / 4G battles, the US network would ideally be upgradeable as technology advances.  The US government has tons of frequencies available for its, so more headroom exists for it to grow than exists in private industry.  I'm not an actual network engineer, but I'm willing to bet this isn't easy.
2. Making Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile happy.  There are laws prohibiting the government from competing with private industry.  And those 4 mobile carriers (and many other, non-national carriers) have spent billions of their own nickels in developing and deploying their own super-fast wireless networks.  But maybe if the government makes the frequencies available to all, then it wouldn't really be competing?  After all, the US Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS all seem to get along okay, right?

This would be innovative.  It would require a large cadre of network engineers to design, deploy, and maintain.  It would train the next generation of electrical engineers, electricians, construction crews, phone developers, and computer makers to take advantage of our "wireless highway system."  And it might unleash a whole new division of commerce (well, actually, just continue to boost the industry we already have) to take advantage of this new highway system.

That, and examples like it, are my idea of a blueprint for America.

The Internet Just Had Its Doors Blown Off

A few weeks ago, the "Powers That Be" that control various aspects of the internet decided to do away with perhaps the most defining piece of the internet: .com .

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the organization that is ultimately in charge of distributing internet names and IP addresses.  They are the ones that enforce the use of .com, .net, .org, and everything else.

And so, on June 20th, ICANN announced that it was opening up the internet to almost anything.  For the first time, an internet address doesn't have to end in ".com" or ".net" or ".au".  Instead, it could end in ".john" or ".smith", if an enterprising John Smith wanted to pony up the $185,000 to register his own top level domain.

At first, I was "meh" about this story.  Who's going to sign up for this, and what will it do for them?  Take a prior example: the small western Pacific country of Tuvalu was given the country code of ".tv" in 1998.  (Each country gets its own country code for country-specific things on the internet: .au for Australia, .uk for the United Kingdom, .ad for Andorra ... there's a whole list here)  Businesses lined up behind Tuvalu to "rent" some of their .tv space, with the thinking that it would be really cool to have sites like www.cheers.tv or www.jeopardy.tv -- that all your favorite tv shows would have a .tv address.

But it hasn't really turned out to be all that popular, and Tuvalu appears to have gotten short-changed in the process.

So, at first, I was pretty "meh" about the whole thing.  A nice idea, a $185,000 price tag to keep out spammers and the lowly bloggers like myself, and a limit of 1,000 new top-level domains per year.  Who would sign up for this?

The answer: almost every tech savvy company out there.  Think about it:

• ipod.apple
• search.google
• www.movies.sony
• mickey.disney
• www.HugeOilSpill.bp

You get the point.  Big businesses will have the opportunity to closely align the company name with their product on the internet.  And, depending on how ICANN sets it up, you may even be able to dispense with the www stuff -- simply type in "twitter" in your browser, and you'll be taken straight to Twitter's home page.

The era of ".com" will seem quaint in 5 years.

Measurement of Internet Popularity Score

As I've mentioned before, generating comments from content on the internet is harder than I expected it to be.  Over the past few months, I've spent some time thinking about how to quantify that: how can you score how active a site is on the internet?

One easy metric is the number of hits your internet site gets per month.  To clarify, here is a screenshot of this blog's hits per month, courtesy of the statistics Google provides:

So, I'm averaging about 150 hits per month, although it's been tailing off lately (partly due to the fact that I'm telling Google not to track my own page views).  That's fairly meager, as other sites can get over a million hits per month.

I think another measure of internet popularity is the number of comments generated on the site.  Is the site so popular that people feel the need to put in their own two cents?  In that regard, I'm pretty meager at (as of this writing) 2 comments.  Ever.  But many of the sites I read, I read them because of the comments -- sites like slashdot, armscontrolwonk, and arstechnica often have more meat in the comments (from its readership) than in the original postings.  And then, of course, there are sites like facebook and twitter where the content is the comments.

So, what if you combine those two metrics?  I present the "Measurement of Internet Popularity Score", or MIPS.

(click for full size version)

Note the log-log scale.  This covers a lot of ground.  I've highlighted and named a few regions:

• Lonely Outpost: Less than 300 hits per month and typically less than 10 comments per month.  Yep, I'm squarely in this field.
• Minor Internet Contributor: These sites have a readership between 100 and about 50,000 hits per month, and generate fewer than 100 comments per month. Niche sites and very popular blogs fall into this category.
• Broadcaster: These are sites with huge levels of readership, but aren't necessarily geared towards generating comments.  Some news sites and government information-dissemination pages fall into here.
• Major Internet Contributor: These are the heavy-hitters of the internet, which can draw large readership and spark enough interest that hundreds to thousands of people feel compelled to post their comments.
• Social Media: When the readership gets above about 100,000, and the number of comments approaches the number of readers, now you're into social media territory.
• 4 Chan: This is the land of the absurd, where you get more than 1 comment per hit.  4 Chan is one stereotypical example of a site overrun with internet freaks and teenagers who post their ramblings and inappropriate blather on the internet.  For the record, I never go there; I just know about it from xkcd references.

It has to have a catchy name, but I'm not sure MIPS is quite it.  In the meantime, help out this blog's MIPS by telling your friends and posting your thoughts (other areas? other names?) in the comments.

2010 In Review

Shockingly, 2010 has come and gone.  This marks the technical end of the first decade of the 21st century (remember, since there was no Year 0, the millenium officially started on January 1, 2001).  And it also marks the end of the first year of this blog.  Time for a site refresh, as you can see.

I've only been running Google Analytics for a few months now, so I can't do any advanced navel-gazing over site statistics, or anything nearly as cool as the Google Zeitgeist.  But I can offer some thoughts on the year, as well as some insights (which will also serve as motivational points for myself) for the upcoming year.

Note: I linked to the Barley Blog above because they were the first to do a review of what is probably our favorite beer, the Blue Dawg Wild Blue Lager.  The Barley Blog hated it, and for beer purists, I can see why -- it doesn't taste like a beer. (The Barley Blog also hates that their review is still coming up as a top hit for their site, to which I say, "Neener, neener.")  For anyone else, it's a fantastic way to consume something with 8% alcohol in it.  If they sell it in your area, I highly recommend it.

• Being consistently creative is hard.  After one year and 36 posts, it's harder than I expected to come up with something that (I think) is creative, thought-provoking, and mildly inspirational.  It gives me a new-found respect for the people who can do it regularly, and on a much more frequent basis, like XKCD (Randall Munroe), George Will (Washington Post commentator and general pundit), John Siracusa (ars technica contributor who's not very prolific but makes up for it in brilliant posts ... he likes to keep his signal-to-noise ratio high), Daring Fireball (John Gruber), and this political junkie who produces fascinating (to me) insights of geo-politics.  My hat is off to those folks who do this well and do it consistently.  It's not easy.
  
• Documenting how bad the driving is in DC is hard.  I've only done 6 "Driving In DC" posts in the past year, and I'm ashamed of myself.  On a day-to-day basis, you come across countless examples of how bad it is.  But to actually stop, remember it, take a picture, or otherwise document the scenario is hard.  The idea for "Driving in DC" was partially motivated by this site, and it's impressive how long they've been able to keep it up.    (Slightly irreverent, but very funny.)  I promise I have more examples in store, I just haven't gone through the documentation process yet.  Stay tuned ... and if you have any suggestions or examples of your own, feel free to post them in the comments.
  
• Generating comments is tough.  I have received one comment on this site.  Ever.  One.  I get it, that the stuff I post about isn't really comment-inducing.  Posts about Jane's crazy OMGWTFBBQ party last week may be more likely to get feedback, but that's what facebook is for.  The readership-to-comment ratio has spawned an idea for another post (like a Dunbar's Number) that I'll put up sometime in 2011.
  
• Generating ad revenue is tough.  Google provides a really cool way to generate revenue for each site: see those ads on the left hand side of this screen?  The way they have it set up, if you opt in to AdSense, Google places content-specific ads to the right of the screen.  Each time someone clicks on an ad, the owner of that website gets a kickback.  In this case, that's me.  (I'll be ecstatic when the AdSense revenue can cover the $13 annual domain name costs.  I'm hoping for 2015.)  On one hand, I'm surprised at how few clicks I get on those ads ... given a few hundred site visits, you might expect a few clicks here and there, right?  Nope.  Personally, I never click on those things, so it only stands to reason that nobody else clicks on them, either.

So have a happy 2011.  And although we've missed it once today, later tonight will be 11:11:11pm on 1/1/2011.  That won't happen again for another 10 months ... and it'll be even cooler 10 days after that.

Failing Gracefully

The internet is broken.  I blame cascading style sheets.

To explain the above (somewhat inflammatory) comment, I need to explain something common to engineers.  A key attribute in almost any well-designed system is known as "graceful degradation" or that the system "fails gracefully."  In practice, this means designing the system such that, in situations where the inputs aren't 100%, the system notices this, and adjusts its output accordingly.

For instance, many laptops (in close coordination with the processors that run them) have different levels of output: when plugged into the wall, the computer will crank out as much performance as it can.  When on battery power the CPU will slow down a bit, and the screen might dim slightly to ease the power draw from the battery.  When the battery level gets below 10%, the CPU might go into a slower, power-saving mode -- slow, but still functional to allow you to get your work done and hopefully save your work.  It's at about this time that the computer starts throwing warning messages at you, along the lines of

"FEED ME."

Then, once battery power gets to around 1% or 2%, the computer will put itself to sleep (since you're apparently incapable or untrustworthy), in a last-ditch attempt to husband the tiny amount of juice left in the battery while it patiently waits for you to plug it back in again.

This is graceful degradation: decreasing output for decreasing input.

The internet, in its modern form and for the average user, does not fail gracefully.

This was brought to my attention recently when I was suffering through a bad wireless router.  Our computers would download the first part of a web page, then hang indefinitely.  *Very* frustrating.  The below picture is a screen shot where I've cut out the middle section (it was all white anyhow; you're not missing anything):

In this case, I was looking up what "aGPS" is, or "assisted GPS."  The fact that I'm using Safari on a mac is irrelevant; this malady affects all computers and all browsers.

Now look at the bottom: it says, "Loading," and that it's completed 70 of 85 items.  That seems like a lot; 70 of something should imply some level of content.  And yet, the screen is completely blank!  There is no information to display yet.

And here's where the internet doesn't fail gracefully: you have to load almost all of the content, almost all of the time, regardless of your connection speed and regardless of the quality of your connection.  I would think, in any intelligently designed system, the content would come first -- in this case, some text explaining the details of aGPS.  But, no, with the construct of Cascading Style Sheets, you have to load tons and tons of format first -- and the content comes last.

This is a shame, because the whole idea of CSS is to separate content from presentation.  But the internet doesn't prioritize the order in which it sends it to you.

This would happen all the time with our faulty router: it would load the first sections of a web page, then hang indefinitely.  Incredibly frustrating, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's suffered from this.  Sites designed for mobile viewing (on your cell phone or iPad, for instance) don't really get around this: they just cut down on the amount of formatting, but they still rely heavily on cascading style sheets.

End of rant.  This is a small detail that probably only affects a few people.  But for an entity that seems to take such interest in picayune things, when the website is down, it's incredibly frustrating and I'm surprised someone hasn't already done something about it.

Sometimes I use a text only browser, like Lynx or Lynxlet, just for fun.  Maybe we can overthrow the CSS overlords.