“Shovel-ready” is dead and buried.

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The Common Problem . . .

Is that the Democratic party has not updated their model of government aid for the Digital Era. In the tech-driven 21st century, improving internet speed carries the same commercial benefits as paving or widening a road for better truck access did in the 1930s. “Shovel-ready jobs” worked for the New Deal. The first President of the United States elected on the power of social media might have had the good sense to make his “Big Deal” economic stimulus “solder-ready.”

The new plan is still based on roads, and where they go. Lease a portion of the right-of-way to a Tier 1 telecom provider, with obligations for minimum uptime and a pre-agreed growth rate for bandwidth. Wire I-81 down its entire length, then continue that connection down I-75. Syracuse University, Virginia Tech, the world-leading supercomputers owned by the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Georgia Tech and the rest of Atlanta, all linked by the fastest Internet connection available. One spur connection, less than 100 miles in length, would tie in NASA’s Space and Rocket Center at Huntsville. The political benefit is obvious. 89 electoral votes, with the possibility of adding Alabama’s 9. The technological benefit is obvious. Not only will this tie together many of the leading research institutions, but it would offload quite a bit of internet backbone traffic from the East Coast networks. The major difference would not be more available bandwidth, but lower latency. If two computers spend less time waiting to talk to each other, the bandwidth needed to support that electronic conversation can be freed up faster.

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Forget “Shovel-Ready” infrastructure projects and start thinking “Solder-Ready.” Government policies must reflect modern commerce, communications, and careers. Every time the government pays someone to move dirt, it needs to include a provision to move data.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Cops have watches; Watches have faces

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*Special Note: Due to ongoing events, active consideration on the current question has been extended.*
 – J.D. Lewis

The Common Problem . . .

Is that local police have surrendered the street corners to drug dealers and gang lieutenants. To improve relations and communication between urban police and urban populations, the most needed change is to give the police a recognizable face for each neighborhood, instead of the thin blue line all the time. Urban centers were safer places for everyone when there was a neighborhood cop who knew not just the neighborhood, but the actual neighbors. Police intelligence-gathering was an automatic process, because there was a trained observer walking the streets and watching who goes into which doors and comes out of which alleys. We can afford for inner-city cops to skip traffic duty 2-4 hours of their workweek.

Starting out, it may be four officers who all park at a community center or a neighborhood store, grab a cup of coffee and walk the neighborhood in pairs for an hour. For longer foot patrols, have three officers walking, and one in a cruiser to run communications between the walking officers and the patrol desk; the radio officer can also shuttle the walking officers to their cars if they are needed elsewhere. Eventually, it will come down to a single officer who climbs out of his cruiser and walks a neighborhood for an hour or two. It is a simple, but not easy, answer. It may take a generation or two, so departments need to implement it as soon as possible.

The Uncommon Solution . . .

People need to be able to say “the” neighborhood cop again. Even better, would be for them to say *our* neighborhood cop. That will take a generation or two. Traffic stops have their place, but police should be more than traffic cops. Foot patrols, and the resulting face-to-face interaction outside an enforcement or investigative context, will go a long way to putting an individual, recognizable face on the monolithic, mysterious force behind the system.

Copyright 2016 J.D. Lewis

Free Ride or Free State?

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The Common Problem . . .

Is that people look at government as good or evil. They tend to view it as either their best friend or their worst enemy. Government is always inefficient, because government, by definition, is about control and limitation in the interest of safety. The question is, what is the appropriate balance point between safety and self-determination? Unfortunately, this is one of those questions where 3 people will give at least 4 different opinions.

Opinion is a bad basis for policy in the first place, but it often becomes law through the force of public opinion. In this case, opinion cannot even provide a generally accepted answer. Logic is the only available answer to set the appropriate balance between safety and self-determination. So, do we make government a first response, last resort, or somewhere in between?

There is a case for government being the first response. Government can bring more power to bear on any given problem than any other entity, because it can always assemble more resources. With a gross revenue measured in trillions, and future revenues guaranteed through a monopoly on premeditated force, government can buy the answer. The question is, at what cost to the rest of society? Because of its very size, national government alters the supply-demand curve by any concerted action. That alone makes a good case for delegating powers to lower tiers of government. Greater accountability of and access to government institutions makes a better case for assigning government power to the lowest level with the budget and personnel base large enough to handle the job. This is the core ideal of federalism, many smaller units of government working for the narrow interests of their specific constituencies and ceding to higher levels of government only what powers they cannot effectively use themselves.

Even better, though, is for government to be the final resort. This is not because large corporate interests are inherently more moral or responsive; in the general case that is used to set public policy, they are not any better than government. They are, however, more easily avoided than government, if they become harmful to someone. Nor are small, voluntary associations such as co-ops, collectives, or syndicates going to be an effective alternative. For government to justify its existence, it must be large enough to do what the people themselves cannot do in voluntary associations. For government to meet its primary responsibility of preventing violence to its populace, it must be powerful enough to coerce compliance from those who place little or no value on peaceful coexistence. In short, there is no more trustworthiness or value in large corporations or small associations than in government. However, there are more options available in interacting with them.

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

The balance between safety and self-determination lies in a government which follows the Hippocratic Principle: First, do no harm. If a government will limit its actions to ones which meet that standard, it can be trusted with sovereign power. Even such a government, though, should be a last resort. If another private entity does harm, the government can provide effective redress. If the government does harm, there is no other recourse.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Slow To Learn About High Speed Rail

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The Common Problem . . .

Is that people do not look at the history of a problem before trying to solve it in the here and now.

We had urban sprawl before the automobile. Mass transit is not an alternative to the automobile; they work effectively in very different environments. Public transportation in the U.S. was, in point of fact, created in response to urban sprawl in places like New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, where the city and its infrastructure spread to surrounding communities because individual transport no longer worked well there. Adding mass transit to the equation didn’t change the nature of urban growth. Successful cities grow. Very successful cities grow to the point that downtown real estate becomes worth its surface area in gold leaf. The cities with the highest levels of mass transit access are sprawling out so much they have run into each other. New York and Boston have grown toward each other until urban planners refer to their combined economic footprint as the Northeast Conurbation. Seattle and Tacoma are so intertwined that their shared airport is just known as SeaTac, and their growth has pierced an international border to include Vancouver in the cultural commonality. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has the same feature of shared transport nodes, and is so united that it has one set of initials to identify its multiple municipalities. The Bay Area of San Francisco, Oakland, and outlying communities. What’s the most iconic image? The bridge connecting two population centers together. Anyplace you have sufficient population density to support mass transit/passenger rail, what it will accomplish is to move population density from the urban core to the outer portions of the transit network. Large, vibrant cities grow and spread. It is unrealistic and illogical to demand more developed urban infrastructure, then turn around and complain about the inherent consequences of urbanization.

Many people seem to think that city-to-city High Speed Rail (HSR) is just a larger, faster version of light rail. However, there are very different use patterns between a subway or bus system that hundreds of thousands of people use multiple times per day, and intercity travel with each leg of the trip separated by a few days. The easiest pathway to make the economic argument for passenger rail is from Pittsburgh to Denver. The right-of-way already exists, it’s all I-70. That highway, like most of the Interstate system, was built to enhance or supplement existing roads. The parts which would be hardest to acquire today have been public roadways for 200 years! Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Kansas City are all on the direct pathway, and a 200-mile spur from Indianapolis connects Chicago. That’s going to be the easiest and most profitable transcontinental route, and Denver can use I-25 or a short extension to I-15 as a North-South split. Pittsburgh is very close to the existing Acela route, one of the few Amtrak trains to actually turn a profit. If there is ever to be high-speed rail travel in this country, the first east-west connection is going to be in close proximity to I-70. If it can be profitable to run passenger trains across the Kansas wheatfields, HSR can be done. If not, then it won’t work. There’s your make-or-break point.

The U.S. has done large-scale passenger rail before. In the space of a century, we went from laying rail faster than any other nation in the western hemisphere through having the largest rail network on earth to the collapse of passenger rail in the 1960s. The rise of U.S. “car culture” was in the 20s and 30s. The Golden Era of U.S. passenger rail started around the same time, and continued for another generation. If you want to blame a transport option, try the Boeing 707. Glorious vistas of the heartland, and time to enjoy them because someone else is on the controls? Check and check. The jet gives the same pleasures of travel, and puts you at your destination in about 1/4 the time. Existing railways and rail equipment are dedicated to nationwide freight transport using slower, heavier rolling stock. Any high-speed passenger rail system is going to require a dedicated right-of-way connecting multiple major cities.

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

There is an obvious test case to analyze for HSR. The I-70 corridor has more advantages than any other proposal: existing right-of-way, most of the route has low population density and economic density to object to expansion, and it connects many of the most-visited cities in the country.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

High-Level Thinking To Solve High-Priority Problems

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The Common Problem . . .

is that people have become dependent on precise knowledge. There is an epidemic of “analysis paralysis,” where everything must be numbered off, measured, and calculated. There is a lack of abstract thinking, being able to address the “big picture” of conceptual knowledge and high-level thinking skills such as analysis and synthesis. For the entire 20th century, the pattern has been to teach skills and facts, and that trend toward limited thinking skills has only strengthened in recent years. Skills-based education was displaced by a focus on STEM subjects, Science, Technology, Education, and Math. Yes, student performance in these areas has collapsed over the past few decades, but focusing only on those subjects is a failure to address the bigger problem.

Anyone who learns algebra just for the math skills is missing out on the logic skills, learning to rearrange the terms of the problem into a more tractable form. History and literature teach not only reading comprehension, but also the higher-level thinking skills. They provide invaluable practice in understanding something that one has not directly experienced. What people need is formal training in how to think big, how to understand and analyze something from a conceptual standpoint, how to step back and step up to abstract thinking and other high-level cognitive functions. Most of these functions depend on qualitative learning. Qualitative understanding is more than knowing the definition and description of something, it is knowing why something is the way it is. Cause-and-effect is a good way to start critical thinking, but it needs to go more than one level deep to aid understanding. Those second and third order thinking skills are what contribute to understanding the whole picture, rather than getting mired in unconnected details. Numbers are good tools, but they must have context to have any meaning.


The Uncommon Solution . . .

Don’t limit teaching to skills, to STEM. People need to learn analytical skills, abstract reasoning, how to comprehend the whole, not just details.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Educational Reform Formed By Educators

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The Common Problem . . .

With education in the U.S. is that the final decisions are made by people who are too far removed from students. Too many student teaching supervisors have not worked with the same student body on a daily basis since the students were born. Federal funding from the Department of Education is controlled by bureaucrats who are six degrees of separation from the classroom. By the time you account for students and teachers in the classroom, principals, superintendents, school boards, and state-level Departments of Education, the federal bureaucrats are no more connected to the students than any random person in society is going to be.

If we expect educational reform that is going to make a difference in student performance, then it makes sense that educational professionals who work directly with students on a daily basis ought to be involved. If the U.S. Department of Education wanted to get serious about improving educational outcomes, it would fund a study group made up of past winners of state-level Teacher of the Year, including territories which want to participate. Get all the winners in the past decade, and you have a knowledge base of 500 recognized experts in classroom teaching. Have them meet two summers in a row. The first summer, have them identify actions and priorities which are common to many of the teachers, especially teachers in different age ranges. The second summer, focus on what successful teachers do differently, why they continue to do it that way, and why it still works.

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Identify what successful teachers do in common, and why what they do differently still works.

 

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis