Some weird floats and some big jets

To Dad… if there has to be a theme for Sundays, and I say there has to be, then this week’s theme is flotsam and jetsam. What do you do when things and people show up on your shores?

Since you don’t live under a rock, there’s no excuse for not noticing the stuff piling up on the top of rocks on the beaches on Newfoundland. White globs of no-one-knows-what. Every Canadian media outlet along with CBS, BBC, and others have been covering this weird story this week. At the moment, the leading Newfoundland blobster expert thinks its palm oil from cargo wreckages and allowable expulsions from ships entering the U.K. congealed by the cold north Atlantic. Or, it’s something else entirely.

That’s the flotsam. The jetsam is the SpaceX landing their rocket. In the broadest sense, the other stuff is how to find new things and catch them.

You and other engineering types I know were floored when Space X caught a heavy rocket that came hurtling back to Earth. I didn’t see the big deal. I’m starting to.

Sorry, but it still looks to me like they fired from the rocket from this thing and showed the video in reverse. I mean if they can fake a moon landing, why not an Earth landing. Kidding aside, the video is pretty freaking phenomenal. If you don’t quite get why, the cheering should more than tip you off.

Other than ultra-coolness of this, why does this matter? It took me a while longer than most to answer it. And, as usual, it’s money.

In 2019, NASA gave Bechtel a contract to deliver a launch tower. It couldn’t catch rockets. Just help them go up. They hope it will be finished in 2027. They expect it to be ready in 2029. It will cost $2.7B. SpaceX built theirs in weeks. It cost $383M. Oh, and SpaceX’s tower doesn’t just pitch, it freaking plays catch. With a 20-story building.

Ok, so it saved some infrastructure cost and proved — yet again — that government agencies overpay for the things they buy.

The real payoff is in the cost of payload. From 1960 to about 2005, the cost to put stuff into a low-earth orbit didn’t change much. It hovered – no pun intended – around $10,000 per kilogram. Of course, that’s because we had only one supplier. Government. SpaceX has brought the cost down to about $500. In the next couple of years, that price could be under two hundred bucks.

What goes up there? The Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. Yeah, big expensive toys for academics and scientists. Oh, and communications satellites. The stuff that makes our phones work. Now you’re talking.

“Hi, I’m the head of a criminal organization,” said no one. Ever. You’d think. Actually, it happens quite a bit. Because there are few consequences. Do our laws need a re-think?

Funny story. In 1988, I went to a mixer event at my university with my friend, Matthew. As we entered the cavernous building, a nice co-ed… do they still call them co-eds?... sitting behind a table gestured to a stack of my-name-is stickers and thick felt-tipped markers. The guy in front of us penned, “Mahmoud, Afghani freedom fighter.” We laughed. To be fair, The Living Daylights had just come out and romanticized the CIA’s toppling of the Russian’s government in Afghanistan by installing the Taliban as new regional leaders. To this day, Matt and I still larf about this.

But this isn’t a larfing matter. In 1988, Gotti headed the Gambino family. An organization that existed to commit crime. In shorter parlance, “A Criminal Organization.” Around the 49-second mark, you hear the range of their activities, “… prostitution, loan sharking, numbers, the kid liked to wet his beak in everything…” Trust me. Go back and click the link, you’ll get a larf.

Gotti wore fancy suits. Shared soundbites with the media. His home was frequently shown on TV. It was no secret he headed Bad Guy Inc. Because, apparently, you have to do something more illegal than run an illegal enterprise for the Feds to nab you. For ref, see, Capone, Al and tax evasion. Six years after becoming the capo, the Feds eventually gotcha’d Gotti. By linking him to 13 counts of murder and racketeering.

This isn’t a true-crime podcast transcript, so why the 80s recap?

Because the U.S. and Canada just designated Samidoun a terror organization. What does that mean… exactly? Well, from an Al Jazeera story which I’m not going to bother to link: Samidoun masquerades as ‘sham charity’ to provide humanitarian aid, yet in reality it diverts funds to support [other] terrorist groups. You may remember Samidoun from a video where they burned a Canadian flag and chanted, “Death to Canada.”

Being the “co-international coordinator” of a designated terror organization is enough to get the U.S. and Canadian governments to designate each of Samidoun’s co-heads a “terrorist.” But that isn’t enough for the Feds to take actual action. A person still has to do more than be a designated terrorist and head a designated terror organization to get arrested. Still.

Like Gotti, we know who (co-) heads Samidoun. Charlotte Kates.

Charlotte is the kind of person who would walk into a mixer at a bar and scribble, “Hi, I’m Charlotte, terrorist,” in thick black felt tip on her my-name-is sticker.

Because she can. So, do our laws need an update?

I was thinking about this W.C. Fields quote today, “A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.” It’s so obvious that it’s genius.

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. And, no one works less than the government. The first bit is from Thomas Jefferson. I added the last part.

Somewhere along the way governments removed the balances put in place to prevent the people who govern from writing an endless number of checks. Now, powered by that endless money, they can not only not work, they can dole out their gains to others to buy votes.

Think about it. If you want the people who “Pay too much damn tax” to vote for you, promise a tax cut. You want to win votes from recently graduated students? Wipe out student debt. Warhawks? More defense spending. Teachers in unions? More teachers. People who want some, more, or better healthcare? Pay for some of their insurance.

How absurd can this get?

To find out, let’s play a little reductio ad absurdum.

A politician needs to win votes that are hard to come by. Now there’s a problem we can throw money at. Based on Mainstreet Disney and any craps table in Vegas, the average American likes gambling, free booze (or whatever recreational drug floats their particular boat), vague promises of a cushy union job, more healthcare subsidies, and, oh, I don’t know, pay back some of the money they lose if they buy a totally worthless crypto currency.

Beyond the pale and beyond impossible. Except… one politician just promised all that.

It’s all so obvious. There’s always going to be a group of people who will vote themselves money. Ben Franklin was said to have said as much. No, sorry, warned about it, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”*

I opened with W.C. Fields, I’ll close with a version of one his other famous quotes,

“If at first you don’t succeed, buy, buy again.”

The dude be a genius.

+++

*OK, we’re not sure he said it. But, Alexander Fraser Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee), did give us this longer and more worrisome version, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.” And, he said that about two hundred years ago.

I’ve been thinking about how apps will onboard a new generation of users in the AI era. Yep, that's how I spent my week. It’s like driving a car. From manual to automatic to autonomous.

Remember when I was six and you took me to your office? I played with switches in a metal briefcase. It was the early ‘70s and all they did was turn red lights on and off. That was the day I learned binary.

Some things don’t change. I’m still a dork. This morning, I was looking through census, GDP, and income tables for US counties. But some things do change. Like this form…

For the manyth time in my life, I noticed they use a front-end for their database that lets me click buttons to filter the portions of tables I see. Filter buttons are an entirely fine way to see portions of datasets. I’m older school. I almost always download the dataset and play with it in Excel.

My generation downloads data and sifts through things manually. A slightly younger generation uses these simple forms. I can’t imagine the next generation will even do that. They’d probably ask a GPT to summarize the dataset. They wouldn’t do any work and certainly wouldn’t rely on the pre-determined groupings. AI is going to abstract them from the data. The AI gets it artificial hands dirty while they get coffee.

It’s like cars. I drive a stick. This generation drives automatics. That’s one layer of abstraction. Cars will drive the next generation. The generation before me knew what a carburetor was. I can’t spell it. The next generation won’t even know they existed. Here’s proof. I tried to find an AI drawing of a manual gear shift. Not easy.

No one uses next-gen technology to rethink last-gen stuff.

By now, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with onboarding. This. The same abstraction should hold for onboarding. I setup profiles with something almost akin to code. Services like Amazon and Facebook ushered in simple forms for the online generation. Nice boxes with rounded edges for name, bio, and to let you upload a picture. The next generation will likely say, “Build profile” and a person’s personal AI will tell the new service who you are without a user ever having to “do” anything.

We’re not quite there — yet. But it’s coming. This week, I worked on a conversational onboarding setup with AI. It’s an anthropological Lucy. A way to chat with AI about your profile rather than work it out of you.

---

---