White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Will Smart Cities Be Haven for New Kind of Lawyer?

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SAN ANTONIO — Disruption equals opportunity. That was the message that came across loud at a conference here organized by CPS Energy, the local gas and electric utility, on smart cities — a revolution that is underway and surging.

Simply, smart cities are convergence of digital technologies, from street lights to driverless vehicles. Cities — there are more than 19,000 of them in the world — represent a great new vista of business opportunity for new entrepreneurs.

Coincidentally, a small but distinguished law school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is, in its way, seeking to upend the traditional expectations of law students by teaching them law plus innovation and entrepreneurism.

Dickinson Law, founded in 1834 and is now part of The Pennsylvania State University, but operates autonomously, is seeking to turn out a new kind of lawyer: One who is interested in becoming an entrepreneur rather than simply practicing law.

The program is the concept of Samantha Prince, assistant professor of legal writing and entrepreneurship, who had been an entrepreneur as well as a lawyer. She told me that she wanted the Dickinson Law students to realize what a useful and versatile tool a law degree is, and how it can offer those who have one a wide range of opportunities beyond the traditional practice of law.

Prince, with the energetic support of dean Gary Gildin, told me many students have not come to Dickinson Law straight out of college but have had work experience, which makes them more open to a wider range of possibilities.

A partner at one of the large law firms in Washington told me that she wishes her education at one of the nation’s top law schools had been just a little less academic and broader. She said the curriculum was fascinating, but much of it was arcane and directed to the study of the history of law and its seminal turning points. No thought was given to the idea that she might want to use her legal knowledge in any other way than to practice law, probably in a big firm. That she has done.

Lawyers, of course, have always been entrepreneurial. But Prince says that has been in the confines of the profession.

Prince wants her students to think about — at least some of them — how they can use their legal knowledge to start a business, pulling together investors, creators and visionaries.

The faculty at Dickinson Law wants to see some students take their chances and test their mettle in the marketplace. One problem: The study of law is a study of what can go wrong, and new business is a belief in what might go right.

Prince’s students have something of an advantage as they tend to be older and to have had real-life experience. Already some of them are thinking of law differently: Zachary Gihorski wants to use his legal training to lead and shape the future of agriculture; Christian Wolgemuth wants to enter cybersecurity practice and eventually become an entrepreneur; and Ana Anvari wants to serve health care businesses by advising them on health care regulation and helping them to start up or expand their businesses.

Those who are thinking of self-employment may find the new vitality in cities a place of opportunity. The cities are going to be wide open to everything from better electric vehicle charging to automated garbage collection, to repair and maintenance of the automated systems, to restaurants delivering meals by drone. If you can think of it, it will probably be needed.

Although the big tech companies, from Google to Tesla, AT&T to Verizon and Amazon to IBM, are salivating over the new smart city opportunities. History teaches that great fortunes are made by new players when, so to speak, the ground shifts.

The ground is shifting in cities like San Antonio, Chula Vista, Calif., Boston and Houston.

Smart cities represent a huge entrepreneurial chance for smart people — lawyers and otherwise.

Look Up! The Age of the Delivery Drone Is Dawning

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Here a drone, there a drone. Everywhere a drone. Drones, the light ones, not the big military ones that chase bad guys around the Middle East and elsewhere, are beginning to do heavy lifting.

Consider: Packages are already being delivered by drone in Canberra, Australia’s capital. In Rwanda — unsophisticated Rwanda, known more for its genocide in 1994 — drones are delivering life in the form of emergency blood supplies. I am told the blood is dropped where it is needed in the landlocked East African country by little parachutes. In Europe, soon drones will deliver packages between Helsinki, Finland’s capital, and Tallinn, the capital of neighboring Estonia.

If you need it quickly and cheaply, call a drone. They are the new frontier of delivery.

When the new age of unmanned civilian aircraft dawned (thanks to better batteries, cheaper computer chips and, most important, good, cheap gyroscopes), the sky became the limit.  The sky is big, but not that big, and it is going to become a jungle of drones.

Enter AirMap, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based company. It is working with aviation authorities all over the world to design air traffic systems for drones, which allow them free range in the most crowded airspace.

The platform offered by AirMap, according to chairman and co-founder Ben Marcus, is the system that is being incorporated into drone control systems 85 percent of the time around the world. He tells me that Switzerland is a leader in the drone regulatory interface.

Marcus talks about drones passionately, as though they are a good cause. He wants to enable more drones to fly safely. Millions of them.

The drone control system, which is under development, is like the air traffic control system that allows small private airplanes to fly along with commercial jumbo jets. AirMap is a system that has been designed to welcome all flyers, according to Marcus.

AirMap works with air management agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration and its equivalent in other countries, to make the drone future safe and effective for all the players who would like to enter the drone market, including recreational flyers; post offices; retailers like Amazon, an early air advocate; Google, a big proponent of the automated future; and Uber, which has big plans for its role in the cities of tomorrow. Can FedEx and UPS afford to be behind?

There is scarcely anyone who delivers anything, who does not dream of the time when drones will take it to the front door, and where you will retrieve the cargo by varying methods, including taking it from a string, as is happening in Australia, according to Marcus.

Early entrants into the commercial use of drones have been electric utilities for line inspections, broadcasters for remote photography, and police departments for a variety of their work.

“That is just beginning,” Marcus told me.

Another drone company seeking to make a place for itself in the drone space, San Francisco-based Starship Technologies, promotes how clean-and-green and quiet drones are. Certainly, as they run on electric batteries, they avoid all the noise and mess of internal combustion.

Last Christmas, the world was reminded of the need for systems of control of drones around airports when Gatwick, London’s second airport, was closed for more than a day on news of the sighting of a drone.

Marcus points out that, as practical matter, aircraft deal with birds all the time and they are not subject to the kind of control — control not limitation, advocates are keen to emphasize — take the randomness out of drone flying and the use of airspace for other things.

When you buy a drone in the United States, you must register it — and more than a million are registered. Control system technology will keep track of each drone and who is responsible without the “turn left, head 130 degrees” control that aircraft have. The control systems will keep drones at safe distances and altitudes from runways, other drones and physical objects. Delivery drones will use sensors to skip over power lines and stay away from other drones on the same mission.

You do not want your new shoes tangling with a pizza, as drones bearing both head for your door.

Go Green on the High-Tech Bandwagon

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The newly seated Democrats in the House have lessons to learn, but none more than not to tell people what you’re going to take away from them.

That was the great mistake Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made when she laid out her Green New Deal. It sounds like big stick from big government.

She said everything should be done, from rebuilding the entire stock of American housing (which can’t be done) to phasing out air transport (which would never happen) to tackling cow flatulence (which is a smelly challenge). Dreamy nonsense is nonetheless nonsense, and nonetheless has a political price.

It is a bad posture to say to people that you’re going to take things away from them — whether it’s their money in taxes or their way of life — to achieve environmental goals.

The problem with Ocasio-Cortez’s statements is that she’s seen, wrongly, as the new face of the new, far-left Democratic Party. Come the election, Democrats will have to spend time distancing themselves from the Ocasio-Cortez brand of utopian dreaming while capitalizing on their environmental brio.

Foolish extreme suggestions neither woo those who are going to decide the next election nor are they in the dynamic tradition of successful politics. You tell people you are going to fix things, not take them away.

Underlying the Ocasio-Cortez argument, which was codified in a non-binding joint resolution, is the basic idea that the only way to save the planet is to cut all carbon emissions in a very short time and to substitute solar, wind and hydro energy.

Omitted from the statements by Ocasio-Cortez and her Senate collaborator, Edward Markey, D-Massachusetts, is any mention of nuclear, which is still the largest carbon-free source of electricity and hardly scars the face of the earth compared to wind and solar. Maybe that is because Markey has spent his whole career in public life trying to shut down nuclear.

In fact, the environmental movement spent long years fighting nuclear. When I would ask, in conferences in the 1980s, what they would use in lieu of a robust nuclear regime, they would answer coal. But to make it sound environmentally acceptable, they said it should be burned in circulating fluidized bed boilers. These offer some advantage, using limestone to precipitate out sulfate.

Missing from the Green New Deal is any sense of the new, i.e. how technology can help.

Take aircraft. They are in the early stages of development, but an electric airplane is in the sights of the big airframe manufacturers. Boeing, for one, is working hard on electric airplanes. Electric air taxis are being experimented with in Dubai and about to be tried in Frankfurt.

The Green New Deal, which is short on details, only endorses one technology outside of wind and solar: high-speed rail. Unfortunately, Ocasio-Cortez is boosting it at a time when California is drastically cutting back on the U.S. entry into the high-speed rail game. The United States sat that one out, and it may be too late to get into the game.

But there is hope.

The success of Amtrak’s electrified Northeast Corridor points the way: People will use regular trains if they are available and the track is good enough for them to travel at a reasonable speed of about 150 mph. The immediate answer is better track allowing more express trains, like Washington to Boston or Los Angeles to San Francisco without stops.

Nearly all the problems of the climate are amenable to technological solutions. The new fusion of high technology across the board in smart cities will, among other things, reduce the carbon footprint through efficiency and electrified transportation.

Ocasio-Cortez is a fresh voice in the nation: brave and as yet unbeholden. If she can grasp that we are on the threshold of a brave new world of technology, called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, she’ll see how it can solve many problems, including those it seems to create in climate. Then she’ll have a political product to sell that people will buy.

The one place where technology seems to offer no solutions is with cows and the challenge of Flatulence Arriving Regularly Today (FART).

The Deadly Hurt of Loneliness — It Kills

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For some Valentine’s Day is a day not of love but of profound, despairing loneliness. The candies, cards and flowers from kind people can sometimes serve to open a void of despair, a black hole of unhappiness for them. They are people made lonely through disease. Some lonely for life.

And loneliness kills. That is the brutal bottom line on several recent studies. One by insurance giant Cigna found widespread loneliness, with nearly half of Americans reporting they feel alone, isolated or left out at least some of the time. Releasing the study, Dr. Douglas Nemecek, the company’s chief medical officer for behavioral health, said, “Loneliness has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than obesity.”

I’m fortunate that I’ve seldom been lonely, and never for long. But I’m privy to some of the worst loneliness on the planet. I write and broadcast about those who suffer from Mylagic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It is a disease of the immune system, possibly related to Lyme Disease and Fibromyalgia.

Their disease produces loneliness that those who aren’t lonely can only look upon aghast. We can talk about ME, investigate it, try to understand it. But we can never fully understand its limitless duration.

ME is a disease maybe like none other. It has no easy diagnosis, no biological marker that can tell a physician what the trouble is. And when it’s diagnosed, there is no cure and no standard treatment to alleviate and suppress the symptoms.

Some patients get some help from some therapies. Recovery is very rare. It’s almost always a life sentence. For no known reason, more women than men suffer the disease.

Some find ozone infusion works, but it isn’t easy to access. Others get some relief from Ampligen, a very expensive drug which is classed as experimental.

Patients suffer variously and sometimes simultaneously from sleep that doesn’t refresh, brain fog (dysphasia), headache, joint pain, light sensitivity, sound sensitivity and, sometimes, complete paralysis. Unable to pin down the disease from the symptoms, doctors tend to shun patients and to say it is psychosomatic.

So many doctors, unable to spare the time and ignorant of the research on the subject, either discourage their patients or tell them, “It is in your head.”

Those old standbys, diet and exercise, don’t cut it. In fact, ME is exercise-intolerant. Sufferers are knocked out by any exercise other than minimal. Going out to lunch with friends or some other minor endeavor, like grocery shopping, can lead to collapse, with the patient confined to bed.

In fact, one of the only sure-fire ways of establishing a diagnosis is to put the patient on a treadmill. If reasonable exertion results in collapse, then that’s the proof.

Some treatment of symptoms helps some people. Ryan Prior, once a gifted student athlete, takes 19 pills a day and can work. He is a producer for CNN in Atlanta and made one of two U.S. movies about this disease, “Hidden Plague.” He has a created the Blue Ribbon Foundation, aimed at educating new physicians and medical students about the disease.

The other movie is “Unrest,” which is the life story of Jennifer Brea, a talented young woman whose suffering was recorded on home videos. It is an award-winning movie. Brea has delivered a TED talk on ME and continues to advocate as the disease allows.

Laura Hillenbrand wrote two bestselling, non-fiction books, “Seabiscuit” and “Unbroken,” while stricken. She has limited mobility and works in bed with her head raised, talking to people by phone and email. Stairs can be impossible for her.

I’ve received many heart-tearing emails from those who suffer, where spouses and lovers have given up the grinding toil of caregiving and abandoned their former partners. Some patients tell me they dream of death — a welcome release from their terrible days of pain and aloneness.

Suicide rates are believed to be high. But as the Centers for Disease Control doesn’t track suicide as a function of ME, there is no exact data.

What is needed is better-funded research, more doctors educated in the disease, and more attention to the pitiable shut-ins as they wait for a therapy breakthrough. Their loneliness is a punishment on top of a punishment, a life sentence in solitary.

 

— For InsideSources

New Tech Bonanza Will Be the Digital Takeover of Cities

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Benjamin Franklin was the first to deploy street lighting. He put candles in a four-sided, glass case for his lights. The engineering took a giant leap forward in England, when William Murdoch lit his home with coal gas lights in 1792.

Today street lighting is taken as a given, like waterborne sewage. But it’s also one of the building blocks for the cities of the future, known as “smart cities.”

In Bedford, Mass., a company called CIMCON Lighting has developed a controller node, which is the size and shape of a brioche loaf of bread and sits atop a light pole. The node isn’t big, but it packs a lot of functions beyond controlling the LED light. It’s Wi-Fi-equipped and is in constant wireless communications with its own network and with the city or county management structure. It has a camera, which can be used for crime control; more apps can be added.

Smart city advocate Pete Tseronis, formerly chief technology officer at the Department of Energy, says that in today’s context “smart” means connected; things that speak to other things.

By that measure the CIMCON Lighting device, or controller, is mighty talkative. The company calls it NearSky and says it enables “the internet of outdoor things.”

To me, it’s an outlier of things to come. Smart cities are the precursor to big changes in everything from transportation to entertainment, from food delivery to garbage control.

CIMCON Lighting believes its technology is a gateway to the smart cities concept that cities around the world are headed toward, some with accelerated political involvement.

In fact, the race to be smart is on and cities from San Antonio to London, and Boston to Singapore are already out of the blocks. It’s going to get giddy.

Old controllers on lights turn them on and off, and sometimes dim them. CIMCON Lighting and the new generation of controllers are little Napoleons, controlling everything they see and much that they don’t. The controller sitting modestly on a street light will be in the vanguard of the revolution that will encompass the whole city.

The electric utilities, the technology companies (like Google, Amazon and IBM) and the telephone giants (like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile) all are interested in seizing the lead in the new city space. Their interest goes way beyond things like street lighting to the very command-and-control of cities, from routine police dispatch to disaster management. The old-line companies are wary of what Amazon, Google and Facebook might do in the smart city space.

These big techs are looking past simply managing old infrastructure through digitization, to a new world of automated cars, remote home deliveries, intercity trucking and charging electric vehicles.

The telephone companies are hinging their participation on their 5G networks, which they are rolling out in fits and starts. The electric utilities believe they have something of a leg up because they’ve been working on making the electrical grid smart for a decade and that it’s now far-advanced with a lot of demand controlled by the customer, not the vendor: a smart city selling point.

Morgan O’Brien, a co-founder and chairman of Nextel Communications, and himself a giant in the telecommunications industry, says the current telephone standard, LTE (Long-Term Evolution), is strong enough to start the revolution and in due course 5G will fit in.

O’Brien is now vice chairman of pdvWireless, which has developed a private system for electric utilities’ communication with a dedicated spectrum to secure it. This has evolved from a suite of workplace wireless communications tools.

O’Brien told me he believes you must look to companies — possibly post-merger ones — which have the technology, capital and ambition to conquer the smart cities market to identify the likely movers and shakers. Of course, pdvWireless hopes to be in there, he said.

Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler describes 5G as a “huge pipe” that will have such capacity for communications and handling vast amounts of data that it’ll itself bring about a mini-revolution. Wheeler worked on getting and keeping the military up to speed on evolving digital technology.

There are more than 19,000 cities and counties that operate as cities in the United States, and more than 50,000 in the world. So the companies are salivating over a gigantic market, almost unimaginably tempting.

Want to Be President? Then Learn the Politics Trade

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Mark Twain once observed that no one would try to play a fiddle in public without some prior instruction in the instrument, but no one had such hesitation when it came to writing.

Clearly, many candidates these days think you can run for president without any political experience or with precious little. The unqualified and the marginally equipped seem to believe they are uniquely gifted to be president of the United States.

At the moment a large school of Democrats feel that because they empathize with the working poor, the struggling middle class and are appalled by the excesses of the plutocrats, they can, when elected, put it all right. They confuse empathy with policy and achievability.

Then there are those who subscribe to the belief in business as the incubator of all skills. These are the people who believe — and they could well line up for former Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz — that if you can run a business, you can get a handle on Washington. It is a myth that just won’t die. If one can make a lot of money, it proves just one thing: One has made a lot of money. Running based on commercial success and Washington failure doesn’t work. The two worlds are not subject to the same laws of nature, as it were.

In business, you can walk away from failure; in politics, it follows you. If a franchise deal fails in business, you abandon it. You can’t abandon Russia or China because you can’t get a deal. And you can’t abandon the poor because you think you can’t afford them.

Politics is, above all, learned, and it is learned in political places — school boards, community associations, unions and state legislatures. Anywhere where offices are elective.

If you want to succeed in reshaping Washington, the first thing to do is to understand it and respect it. Yes, respect it.

We are so inured to people running against Washington that we forget that it is the product of all the others who ran against it. Washington, like all complex systems, is the sum of its parts, from the lobbyists to the agencies, and the laws which Congress has passed.

Washington is a seething, dynamic system, not too complex to be reformed but way too complex to be a candidate for simple solutions. Look at the supreme political amateur Donald Trump and see how his plan to upend Washington and “drain the swamp” has fared. In engineering and science, if you want to change something, first understand it — know its parts and their functions before you start.

Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, failed to reform the State Department because he didn’t feel he needed to understand it. He failed in his own right, even without the difficulties Trump piled on him.

If politics is war by another means, then don’t show your hand. You don’t tell the enemy where you’ll dig in or what secret weapon you’ll bring to bear. To declare the rate of tax you favor (70 percent for the rich), how you are going to implement a national healthcare system (extend Medicare) and who you’ll not  listen to (lobbyists are a great source of information), and what limits you are going to put on yourself (to draw attention to your rectitude) is neither the way to get elected nor to do the peoples’ business. Caring isn’t a plan.

Many successful presidents, from Washington to Clinton, have been bad businessmen. The best qualification for the office isn’t how well you’ve done at something else, but to have run something big and political like a charity, an advocacy group, a school, a city or a state. That way you learn the art of give a little, take a lot. Those who haven’t had this administrative experience need to study it over and over.

As Lloyd George, the British prime minister during World War I, wrote, “There is no greater mistake than to try to leap an abyss in two jumps.” Every day, I read someone is setting out to prove him wrong and run for president without regard to the geography of the politics.

Call Me Madam — Women Who Would Be President

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Good morning class, draw near and listen ever so closely.

So, you all want to be president of the United States, arguably the most difficult and demanding job in the world?

Clearly, you feel that you have unique talents which will promote peace and prosperity and block injustice, racism and men hitting on women.

You are sure that you will be able to curb, gently, the imperial instincts of China and its canny leader, Xi Jinping.

And you have a sure-fire plan to contain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East and to persuade our shaken allies that it is worth standing firm with us.

You might want to know what to do about Africa’s soaring population and declining prospects.

You, also, I trust have given thought to the future as the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds with huge consequences for the future of work (artificial intelligence taking away jobs); the future of transportation (autonomous vehicles, ships and airplanes); and remote farming (farms operated from city desks).

If you are all set on those things, we can get down to the ones that may decide the election: the social issues, including abortion, education, gender equity and gender equality; gun control; access to health care; immigration; and income inequality.

You might want to tell people how you will turn back the tides and solve global warming. Rich people are starting to worry about their oceanfront homes; that means it will become a fashionable topic with those who have been indifferent screaming for action

Now, ladies, step forward for little individual tutelage.

Elizabeth Warren: You have the pole position as the racers line up, but already there are troubling things. Ms. Warren, you must stop taking President Trump’s bait. How the devil did you get into getting your DNA analyzed? Bad move. Lead the debate, do not join it.

Kamala Harris: A few good notices and you are off and running. Just wait until the opposition research pulls apart the cases you prosecuted when you were a district attorney in San Francisco — and the things you said in court. Two former prosecutors, Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, have tarnished the brand.

Kirsten Gillibrand: The announcement on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” was, well, weak. It looked like you were there because you had just published a children’s book called something like “Snuggles the Rabbit.” Bold statesmanship was not to be heard. It is hard to look presidential on a comedy program. Looking presidential is worth a lot in the polls, especially at the beginning. Now to those giant flip-flops on guns and abortion. Were you not a darling of the NRA? What about your switching from pro-life to pro-getting-elected? Explain your double epiphany.

Tulsi Gabbard: Step forward and salute. Major, you are the only declared candidate with military service: the only candidate in sight who has worn your country’s uniform and seen active duty. Bravo! That is going to be a huge credential, but not quite enough to outweigh the fact that you are too exotic: born in American Samoa, raised in Hawaii and a Hindu. At 38, you have got time, lots and lots of it. Beware hopefuls. This lady may not be for turning.

To the whole class of four: Have you ever run a large organization? Have you a big scandal you think you can keep hidden (you cannot)? Do you know enough people to staff the Cabinet? Do you know how you will find 1,200 people to fill the positions that must be confirmed by the Senate? How is your golf game?

Three of you are senators, Gillibrand, Harris and Warren, and Gabbard is a member of the House. Hard to run against Washington when you already have contracted Potomac Fever.

Suggestion: Get a big idea and run with that. Keep out of the granular social stuff, it will bring you down. Prepare to be vice president and bide your time.

House, Senate, White House, America’s women are on the move, and may the best woman win.

 

 

Photo: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, campaigns for Hillary Clinton at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N..H., on Oct. 24, 2016.

The Real Crisis: Stubborn Belly Fat

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A review of television advertising turns up keys to what is really bothering Americans — making them grouchy, despairing and causing them to vote in strange ways.

It is nothing short of a pandemic. There has been no word yet from the Republican or Democratic leadership on this debilitating national crisis that is causing more than half of us to act strangely and to seek to alleviate or conceal our affliction.

It is, of course, stubborn belly fat (SBF). We carry around, collectively, millions of pounds of it.

If you are gasping, it is because you know what I mean. You know the misery of that roll below the navel that will not go away despite extreme measures like jogging or eating African berries as recommended by Dr. Oz, who is one of the few men of his age who does not have SBF. Of course, he looks as though he has been in a Turkish prison all his life and has never had enough square meals to get the dreaded SBF.

My own research shows that SBF is followed on the Misery Index by cellulite and, growing in severity but still far behind SBF, crepey skin. Ugh! Happily, cellulite does not have to be shown: Avoid beaches and pools and if you are unsure, undress in the dark. There are myriad creams that offer to banish crepey skin. They may be mildly effective but the surefire fix, never patented, is long sleeves. Hide it.

Sadly you cannot hide that roll around the belly, just below the belly button and above the recreation area. It wobbles in your bathing suit, bulges in pants and dresses when you sit. There are various rubberized garments which will pull it in for as long as you can stand the constriction, but those only flatten: maximum discomfort for minimum concealment.

SBF is pernicious: It is like a tattoo, there for all time.

Now there are those who say that diet and exercise will banish it. Diet and exercise, those two imposters that are prescribed for everything from a broken heart to bankruptcy. The medical profession has an answer: diet and exercise. Lies! Americans have been running since the 1970s, have joined health clubs in the millions and have eschewed everything that tastes good. You know what? SBF is spreading.

Eat only lettuce and you will die of malnutrition, emaciated – except for that ring around the tummy, belly fat. Believe me, it will go with you to the grave, jiggling. The hips may shrink, the thighs contract, the chest disappear inside the rib cage but look down and – Oh, horror! — it is there wobbling, mocking, and taunting, keeping you from love, happiness at the beach or pool, a job promotion and defying the best tailors and dressmakers to wall it in.

It is even a sore political subject.

Former President Barack Obama did not seem to have any, which depressed his approval ratings. It made it hard for some to trust him. Another former president, Bill Clinton, who is a shadow of his former self and a vegan, knows all about it. I bet that skinny as he is now, compared with his time of serial hamburger intake, below his belt line, there is a strip of protruding fat that harkens back to days of indulgence: the irremovable scar of eating a lot.

As for President Donald Trump, with that front-facing bay window, you know there is a sack of SBF. I know how that feels. Mine wants a doughnut right now.

Trump’s Right About Wheels, Less So About Walls

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President Trump has sought to conflate walls with wheels. In a call-in to Fox and in several tweets, he declared both as having been around for a long a time and that they’ve proven themselves.

In a tweet last month, he said, “Democrats are trying to belittle the concept of a WALL, calling it old fashioned. The fact is there is nothing else that will work, and that has been true for thousands of years. It’s like the wheel, there is nothing better. I know tech better than anyone. …”

I’m with Trump on wheels. I’m a fan of wheels. They work, walls less so; walls are heavily invested in failure, as a psychiatrist might say.

You can get by without wheels, but you’d be ill-advised. The Incas built a great civilization without the round things. Amazing. Don’t try it. Likewise Great Zimbabwe, the center of a Southern African civilization in medieval times, was also wheel-free and has some beautiful walls, all built without grout. The stones just sit there, collaborating if you will. This construction isn’t recommended where stone-throwing is prevalent. You’ll get your wall thrown in your face.

When it comes to wheels, we are so deep into the wheel culture that one’s head goes round and round. The greatest invention of the last few years was, without doubt, adding wheels to luggage. What took so long? Well, the wheels do have super nylon bearings and are better than the old wheels, but even so …

There’s a downside: Bellhops, porters and others have been, well, wheeled away. Sort of like grain-grinders before the mill wheel sent them back to wherever old mortar and pestle people go —  probably into building walls.

There are forever new uses for wheels, like giant flywheels which can store untold amounts of energy. Nifty eh? These are the solution to the “alternatives,” like wind and solar, making too much electricity when everyone is at work or asleep. Downside: this wheel, with as much energy as hundreds of locomotives, is also an inadvertent weapon of mass destruction. If it gets loose and goes wandering through your town, wheelie mayhem.

Walls are really without equal for houses and buildings. After that, their history has been troubled. Emperor Hadrian, something of an architect, built a wall in order to keep undesirables out of Rome’s Britannica province. It stretched from sea to sea across northern England, only 174 miles. Yes, he had the army build it along with a ditch. They put it up — using stone, earth and wood — in six years. Its greatest use has been as a tourist attraction.

Ditto the wall around China, all 5,500 miles of it. A lot of China’s enemies, like the Mongols, Japanese and British, found it easy to get over or to come by sea. It, too, is a big tourist attraction nowadays. The story of walls is they pay for themselves, if you can wait a couple of thousand years.

As for the purpose of keeping people in or out, the Berlin Wall must get a prize. It was a great concrete-and-barbed-wire job, but the thing that made it work were the shoot-to-kill guards. No rushing it a second or third time.

In Cyprus, Belfast and Israel walls have been erected to keep people apart. Trump wants keep people out and apart, but he has no idea how this will stimulate people to get around, over, under or just to find new access.

Most walls that have stood the test of time have been built of masonry because it lasts. Steel has a short life: It rusts and requires constant expensive painting or maintenance.

All references to the Trump wall suggest that it sticks up, maybe 30 feet. He might investigate a ha-ha wall. They are the wall equivalent infinity pools. The ground looks level and verdant, but a deep ditch or trench faces an impregnable vertical wall below the surface level. These were favored around Australian lunatic asylums in the 19th century. When the poor inmates tried to make a break they were, in fact, walled in — hence, the ha-ha. Maybe it’s what we need on the southern border, inconspicuous and effective.

 

Photo: A man ride a bicycle pass the hole in section of ruined Berlin Wall. By Tossapol Chaisamritpol

 

The Coming Convulsion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

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It isn’t starting with a bang, but don’t be deceived: The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is underway, and companies and institutions that ignore it will be overwhelmed by it. Individuals will adapt to it as best we can, as we always have.

In short 4IR is the fusing of the digital, physical and biological spheres. It’s the interconnection of everything, bringing change in companies, jobs, schools and eventually government. Government won’t to be able to stand idly by when it sees traditional businesses upended and huge changes in how we work and study, and where.

As 4IR moves ahead one can reasonably contemplate a time when body parts will be printed, robots will prepare restaurant food and drone taxis will take us to the airport, where departures will be handled without human intervention — because you were verified through facial recognition when you bought your ticket on your smartphone, you won’t need to do anything but walk through security and onto a plane, which has a cabin crew to look after you but no pilots.

Behind and driving the revolution is artificial intelligence, commanding everything from farms, where tractors will start themselves and plow or reap without a human in sight, to street lights that turn off when nothing is moving and back on as needed, to manufacturing that will be dominated by 3D printing, better referred to as additive manufacturing.

The troubadour of 4IR is Klaus Schwab who created the World Economic Forum back in 1971, the world’s most important ideas mart known as Davos, after Davos-Klosters the Swiss resort where the forum meets every year. This year Davos kicks off on Jan. 22 and will be devoted to what Schwab, 80, a German economist and engineer, has called “Globalization 4.0”.

The first forum to look at 4IR was in 2016. Schwab has written two books on the subject — the “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” — and has been ceaseless in promoting the future while warning of it. He told Gerard Baker, the former executive editor of The Wall Street Journal, in a TV interview that enumerating the challenges wasn’t enough, there need to be solutions as well.

A note: Don’t think you can join the 3,000 participants this year. It’s by invitation only. And if you get one, Davos hotel rooms — plain vanilla rooms – can cost $900 a night and suites can go for $5,000 a night. When I checked, there were few vacancies. The movers and shakers start early.

The three past industrial revolutions are listed by Schwab as the replacement of animal power by water and then steam power, the latter at the beginning of the 18th century; the deployment of electricity, starting in the late 19th century; and the digital revolution of the last part of the 20th century.

The Davos meeting will examine the upheaval besetting the world with 4IR and how it’ll be managed. It’s what Schwab calls Globalization 4.0. “We must develop a comprehensive and globally shared view of how technology is affecting our lives and reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments. There has never been a time of greater promise, or greater peril,” he says.

Andre Kudelski, a Silicon Valley veteran, now head of the eponymous Swiss high-tech company that bears his name, says, “A skilled engineer can take control remotely of any connected ‘thing.’ Society has not yet realized the incredible scenarios this capability creates.”

Says Robert Shiller, a Yale University economics professor and 2013 Nobel Prize winner, “We cannot wait until there are massive dislocations in our society to prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Others dream of a cleaner, safer and healthier world. Dileep George, an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher, quoted by the forum, says, “Imagine a robot capable of treating Ebola patients or cleaning up nuclear waste.”

Leon Trotsky, a veteran of the Russian Revolution, said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” He might well be paraphrased to say, “We may not be interested in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but it is interested in us.”