Cities are getting smarter. It’s happening right now, and it isn’t much short of a revolution.

Whole cities are incorporating the Internet of Things (IoT) into their daily life, changing the way the cities and towns live and breathe. The idea is to improve the quality of life for the billions who now live in cities or will as the relentless urbanization of the world continues.

Some are more advanced than others, but the revolution is afoot across the globe. Experts can’t explicitly say which communities are leading the pack but, expectedly, Singapore and Dubai are in the front row, and so are New York and San Antonio.

The goal is to make cities, as old as civilization, more citizen-friendly and more efficient and to ready them for further electrification in transportation — and, one day, for autonomous vehicles.

Clint Vince, chairman of the U.S. Energy Practice of the world’s largest law firm, Dentons, tells me that the firm is so involved with smart cities and communities that it has established a not-for-profit think tank to work on smart city issues within it. He said the think tank has determined 14 “pillars” of the smart city, from obvious ones like transportation, water, electricity and sewage to less obvious city functions like health and recreation.

Vince has represented New Orleans and San Antonio for many years, but he now sounds more like a city visionary than a lawyer. “Take the electric grid: It has to go from a single-direction flow, taking electricity from the point of generation to the point of consumption, to a two-way flow,” he said. “Eventually, it has to have multi-directional flows.”

Vince is talking about the effect of microgrids and dispersed electric generation, such as rooftop solar. One day, this grid flexibility may lead to innovations such as electric cars “lending” electricity to the grid when prices are favorable.

Electricity and smart meters, which are the key to what is known as the smart grid, began the revolution. Now the surge is joined by telephony in connecting, managing and directing the smart city infrastructure, and in trouble shooting it.

Tony Giroti, chairman of the Energy Blockchain Consortium, says smart installations aren’t just for monitoring and metering electricity and water consumption, but also play a prime role in bridging the divide between the old infrastructure and the new information-driven one. Smart city sensors will advise before there is a problem with an old pipe or compressor, so that proactive intervention can avert breakdowns.

Cities such as New York and Washington have underground pipes and wires that are past their prime, but they needn’t pose the threats they used to: The cities can cry out electronically when their physical plant is hurting. The New York Power Authority, a state agency, is credited with a leading role in smart cities, but the rush is on across the country and around the world.

As the information-driven city takes hold, so do questions ranging, for example, from where will autonomous ride-share cars loiter when not booked to where will they park?

I was leaving an interview about the future of cities when I fell over it. Literally. One of those scooters that are now part of the urban transportation mix had been left on the sidewalk. Because of the use of internet technology and GPS, riders can leave them anywhere when they get to their destinations. The scooters are picked up and recharged at night, signaling to the company where they are via GPS.

Creating new, more livable cities is exciting; dealing with the unexpected consequences, as always, is challenging. When no one is looking, I’m going to try one of these scooters. I may be in traction when I write my next column, but don’t worry — it’ll be delivered electronically.

 

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Photo by Sven Scheuermeier on Unsplash

At lightning speed, after a judge approved the merger, AT&T and Time Warner announced the completion of their $85-billion deal. Another behemoth has taken the field.

This merger, it is assumed, will lead to a flurry of other mergers in communications. Witness Comcast’s $65 billion bid for Fox, topping Disney’s $52.4 billion offer.

This is heady stuff. The money on the table is enormous, in some cases dwarfing the economies of small countries.

Merging is an industry unto itself. A lot of people get very rich: They are investment bankers, arbitragers, lawyers, economists, accountants, publicists and opinion researchers. When really big money moves, some of it falls off the table into the willing hands of those who have managed the movement.

The fate of the real owners of these companies, the stockholders, is more doubtful after the initial run-up. The earlier merger of Time with Warner Communications is considered to have been disadvantageous for stockholders.

Another concern is the mediocre performance of conglomerates. The latest to have run into trouble is General Electric, which had managed to do well in many businesses until recently.

A more cautionary story is what happened to Westinghouse when it went whole hog into broadcasting and lost its footing in the electric generation businesses. This was spun off, sold to British Nuclear Fuels in 1997, then sold again to Toshiba and later went into bankruptcy.

From the 1950s, Westinghouse it bought and sold companies at a furious rate, until the core company itself was sold in favor of broadcasting. One of Westinghouse’s most successful chairmen, Bob Kirby, told me it was easier for him to buy or sell a company than to make a small internal decision.

In another pure financial play, a group of hedge funds bought Toys R Us and with the added debt, it failed.

In many things, big is essential in today’s economy. News organizations need substantial financial strength to be able to do the job. Witness the cost of covering the Quebec and Singapore summits. As Westinghouse proved by default, big construction needs big resources. That is indisputable.

When growth through acquisition becomes the modus operandi of a company, something has gone very wrong. The losers are the public and the customers. The new AT&T, if it comes about, will still need you and I to lift the receiver, watch its videos and subscribe to its bundles.

Recently, I was discussing the problems customers have with behemoth corporations on SiriusXM Radio’s “The Morning Briefing with Tim Farley” when a listener tweeted that I hated big companies and their CEOs and loved big government.

Actually I’d just spent a week with the CEOs of several companies, admirable people, and I don’t think government should be any bigger than needs be. I certainly don’t think government should perform functions that can be better performed in the private sector.

The problem is size itself.

When any organization gets too big, it begins to get muscle-bound, self-regarding. Although it might’ve been built on daring innovation, as many firms have been, supersized companies have difficulty in allowing new thinking, reacting nimbly and adopting innovative technologies and materials.

If large corporate entities were as nimble as small ones, the automobile companies would’ve become the airplane manufacturers in the 1920s and 1930s. They had the money, the manufacturing know-how and the engineering talent. They lacked the vision. It was easier to be rent-takers in the production and sale of automobiles.

Likewise, it’s incredible that FedEx was able to conquer the delivery business when another delivery system, Western Union, was up and running. But Western Union was big, smug and monopolistic. They had the resources and an army of staff delivering telegrams.

Companies like Alphabet (Google’s owner) snap up start-ups as soon as they are proven. That snuffs out the creativity early, even if it wasn’t meant to, and makes Google even more dominant. I would argue too big for its own good — and for ours.

Trump is the product of a frustrated electorate sick of elites in Washington who pay no heed to the people who pay the taxes and have little interest in them. Thus runs the popular narrative of how we got President Donald Trump and why his base, despite everything, is firmly committed to him.

Half right, I say.

There was a great national dissatisfaction at the time of the election and there is so today. But was that really the result of unhappiness with elites in Washington?

I’d suggest that it is the daily frustration we all face in simply going about our business. Elites are to blame, but not the elites named in the political narrative that has become the conventional view of the Trump phenomenon.

The elites who frustrate us are the large corporate ones that we cannot live without and have difficulty living with. Substitute corporations for elites.

In no particular order, they are the insurance companies, the banks, the credit card companies, the airlines, the hospitals, the telephone companies, the cable TV providers, Amtrak, Amazon and other corporations that hide behind a battery of devices programmed to avoid any direct human contact with the customer.

In fact, to most billion-dollar-plus corporations, the individual is less significant than a grain of sand on a California beach. These suppliers of our needs are hidden in a thicket of automatic phone systems that seem to require that you spend half an hour in a maze of prompts before, maybe, you reach a person who will also behave as though he or she is a recording; a person who is reading from a script and diverting your pleadings.

Collectively, what they’d like to tell you is you are in the wrong and will always be in the wrong because you are a statistical inconvenience, your custom a nuisance.

Step forward my bank.

More than 40 years ago, I added my wife to a credit card. We had an amicable divorce and we both got married again.

Regularly, over the years, I’ve asked my bank to remove her name, Jane Doe King — to protect her privacy — from the card. I paid all the bills, and my notes with the payments and letters were never answered.

Suddenly this year, my bank decided it was imperative that they get information on Jane Doe King, who is a nonexistent person. I went to my branch, explained the situation and was told by an officer that she’d been removed from the card. All’s well that ends well.

But it wasn’t the end, and all wasn’t well.

A few days later, when I tried to call an Uber car, I learned that my card was blocked because Jane Doe King hadn’t supplied her financial information to my bank.

I called my bank. After the de rigueur half hour of playing the equivalent of telephone pinball with their answering system and the irrelevant prompts, I spoke to a representative. He might as well have been a recording because no matter what I said, he went back to the script in front of him.

I explained, he demurred. Jane Doe King would have to prove first that she existed and then that she wanted to be removed from the card, which she had never used in more than 40 years.

I asked him to call the officer in the bank’s branch with whom I’d spoken. He said his phones didn’t have outgoing lines and so he couldn’t do that. I said I’d go to the bank’s branch and have the officer call the credit card department and straighten out the matter. But he wouldn’t give me his direct-dial number or his last name; just his first name and the general number. I went into serious profanity suppression mode.

Only the appearance of the person who does not exist would satisfy the Man Who Can’t Make Phone Calls. Fearing temper loss, I hung up and emailed the bank officer who had “fixed” the problem. He hasn’t replied.

The message is that you, the customer, and your account and patronage don’t count.

Even as you read this, thousands of Americans are getting the electronic runaround as they try to solve simple issues. Confused and angry, they are turning to the wildest political solution they can: Trump. Sadly, this is another abortive pursuit.

To me, there is something especially savage and cruel about deportations. It reminds of what I saw in colonial Africa, or in South Africa, or touring the Auschwitz concentration camp. Armed men and women coming by surprise to rip apart a family, to condemn people to a future they had braved so much to escape, evokes all the horrors of history. The rough brutality of one person taking charge of another appalls, twists the gut and stops the heart.

Even if sanctioned by law, the unfettered power of the state and its officers moving against an individual is profoundly ugly. The fact that those seized have broken the law doesn’t seem, in most cases, to justify ending the order and hope of their modest lives.

Yet I don’t believe any nation should allow conquest by immigration which is a threat to one’s culture, one’s language and one’s own sense of place. I believe there should be legal immigration, screened immigration. Our natural rate of population replenishment is inadequate.

Against the backdrop of vast shifting populations around the globe, the United States has only a modest problem. The illegal immigrant inflow, particularly across the southern border, has dwindled. So the issue is the estimated 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants who are here, have put down roots and are often raising American children.

Their fate is bitterly divisive: on one side, liberals and groups that speak for immigrants wanting amnesty and citizenship and on the other, conservatives demanding that our immigration laws are immutable, and the illegals must be arrested and deported.

Mark Jason, a retired IRS inspector from Malibu, Calif., looked at the problem from a taxman’s point of view through the Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group, which he founded in 2008.

Jason was concerned with the negative effect illegal immigrants were having on local communities, straining budgets and overwhelming social services. This kind of pressure has led many local entities to act against these people, denying them services, from driving licenses to schooling.

Jason knew from his research that many illegal immigrants, who came here to get a better, safer life, want eventually to return to their homelands. Trouble is they are immobilized in the United States, particularly if they have family here. If they visit their homelands, they can’t get back into the United States.

Jason believes a creative tax could defuse the illegal immigrant argument and stabilize life for what have become people of the shadows.

His plan, his third way, will:

—Grant all illegal immigrants who want to work a permit, called a REALcard (short for respect, equality, accountability and legality) that is valid for 10 years and renewable.

—Impose special taxes — 5 percent on the wages of the workers and 5 percent on the same wages to be paid by the employer — which would go to the hurting local communities.

Jason calculates that his tax will raise $210 billion over 10 years and that this money should be earmarked for communities hosting large numbers of immigrants.

For a decade, Jason has been imploring immigration groups, think tanks and Congress to consider his plan. Next week, he will be holding an information session on Capitol Hill to investigate various perspectives on immigration. His plan is to have a discussion on immigration focused on sound public policy, placing the interests of U.S. taxpayers first and treating all the stakeholders with respect.

I’ve known Jason for five years and have been astounded by the tenacity of this gentle Reagan Republican and his desire to do the right thing for those caught up in the immigration gyre, to relieve the acute artisan labor shortage, and to help counties and cities with their added illegal immigrant burdens — the new money going to education, health care, policing, jails and social services.

Legalize the illegal immigrants and some will go home early. Data shows that about half will return eventually to their homelands.

To my mind, Jason’s self-funded Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group is offering a solid alternative to the bleak immigrant policy debate — and to the swinging door of the detention center. Illegal entry into the United States in law, so venerated by the deportation enthusiasts, is only a misdemeanor.

Families physically torn apart, deportation and ruin, is a severe penalty for a misdemeanor. Does it fit the crime when there is another way?

 

 

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Photo: VANCOUVER, BC – OCTOBER 30 The peace arch border on October 30, 2016 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Peace arch border between Canada and USA represent the world’s longest undefended border.