Frack Whack: Jobs for Both, Right Here

Range Resources is running a propoganda public education campaign on local billboards and websites containing images of diverse children, titles of desirable jobs, and the promise that these jobs will be available. In the future. Right here. Just get out of the way and let them do their thing. Good jobs for your grandkids. You got a problem?



You could go to their website: Range Resources: Jobs For Generations to see the flash movie (which is just awesome, it touched me down deep) or to read the inspiring text:

At one time, parents in Pennsylvania could watch their children grow up and pursue the career of their choice right here at home. That hasn't been the case for many decades now, but opportunity is returning to our state and jobs related to natural gas drilling are leading the way. Soon new industries will come here to take advantage of our newfound, affordable energy, bringing even more jobs. Before long there will be almost unlimited career choices in Pennsylvania. Best of all, it’s a trend that could last 100 years or longer. That’s good news for our children, our grandchildren … and even their children.

When I was a kid there was a preacher named Rev. Ike Eikerenkoetter II but known as Rev. Ike, an evangelist who used to pack armories and the old Madison Square Garden, the Pat Robertson of his day. The Rev. Ike's newspaper ads were a marvel to me and they used the headline, "You can talk all you want about the pie in the sky and the sweet bye and bye, but what about the good ol' now and now?!" (There is a Joe Hill verse that uses the same phrase. Also, read Pittsburgh's Tony Norman on Ike's death).

I have always appreciated the Rev. Ike for his contribution to my awareness, the identification of the transaction type (some call it swindle) that involves my pain now, your profit now, and my longterm profit; and whenever anybody promises me future/downstream ethereal benefits coupled with immediate and allegedly transitory pain and loss for me coupled with profits for them, I think fondly of the Rev. Ike. He taught me some lessons.

I don't think Range Resources would like Ike; their ad campaign is all soft promises in the bye-and-bye - your children will have great jobs here with... somebody... later on! while in the now-and-now, your water is flammable, your kids have migraines, your land is worthless, and they've cut down all your trees. Sorry about the earthquakes.

The best thing about being the target of a propaganda campaign, is knowing that you're the target of a propaganda campaign.

This blog will support Range Resource's public education campaign with supplemental material. Our first contributions:

Informed Consent for PA Fracking Healthcare

From Mother Jones:

Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction—but they won't be able to share it with their patients.

Pennsylvania law states that companies must disclose the identity and amount of any chemicals used in fracking fluids to any health professional that requests that information in order to diagnosis or treat a patient that may have been exposed to a hazardous chemical. But the provision in the new bill requires those health professionals to sign a confidentiality agreement stating that they will not disclose that information to anyone else — not even the person they're trying to treat.

The provision was not in the initial versions of the law debated in the state Senate or House in February; it was added in during conference between the two chambers, said State Senator Daylin Leach(D).

...

The latest move in Pennsylvania has raised suspicions among the industry's critics once again. As Walter Tsou, president of the Philadelphia chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, put it, "What is the big secret here that they're unwilling to tell people, unless they know that if people found out what's really in these chemicals, they would be outraged?"

...


Gov. Tom Corbett's spokesman says this interpretation of the law is inaccurate and doctors will still be allowed to share information with their patients. Doctors could share the information with their patient, but would not be able to relay information about the specific formula used in fracking fluids more broadly.

However, the actual terms of the confidentiality agreements have not yet been drafted, and there seems to be pretty wide confusion in the state about what exactly the bill as signed into law would mean.

I could Tell You, But I'd Have to Kill You.
If I Don't Tell you, you Might Die.

It's interesting in a few ways. Nobody voted for it, but somehow it's the law. It's finished business, but nobody knows what it says. You're supposed to "own" your own treatment, but if you don't have a doctor you won't know anything. Before you go in for the operation, you'll sign a form indicated that you gave informed consent.

Eventually, living in Pennsylvania will qualify as a pre-existing condition, and we can skip the troublesome and time-consuming intermediate process.

Skittles and Iced Tea in America: Trayvon Martin

From Pittsburgh's Jasiri X:



see also: Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Homophily and the Sunday Paper

Terminal Leave and the American Aerotropolis

In the military some people build up their leave balances and have 45 days of leave at the end of their enlistment; they can request "terminal leave" - they depart 45 days early, they're gone and free, walking away to whatever they choose as their next. Of course, the military is a rational organization, and they only let you leave if they can afford it. There are priorities.

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Recognized by many as a trenchant contribution, the Washington Monthly's article Terminal Sickness, subtitled How a thirty-year-old policy of deregulation is slowly killing America’s airline system—and taking down Cincinnati, Memphis, and St. Louis with it. is a worthy read.

A tale of Two Khans: Small bit of interweb hyperlink-irony: we note that while co-author Lina Khan is no relation of Alfred Kahn, the father of airline deregulation who openly admitted he didn't understand aviation and couldn't tell the different models of airplanes apart - he famously saw them all as "marginal costs with wings" - a comparison of Alfred Kahn's and Lina Khan's presence speaks clearly about the changes in America over the time gap between Then and Now. (Then is dead, long live the Now.) (edit: spelling corrected)

Terminal Sickness decries the unexpected consequences of 1978 airline deregulation and the subsequent abdication of anti-trust enforcement. "Trust" is a passe term dating from when it was difficult to get a corporate charter, and I hope you get to hear more of the term 'trust' and less of the word 'tryst" over the next few years.

The overt evidence of deregulation's unexpected consequence is the effect of unregulated airline behavior on the economies of Cincinatti, Memphis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. (Actually, the Cleveland debacle is just about to take place as municipal subsidies expire and the United-Continental merger and reduction render the legacy Cleveland operation redundant.)

Local governments have invested treasure and incurred long-term debt in order to build the terminals that airlines need; the federal government spends even more on the runways, navigation facilities, and aviation infrastructure that delivers the airplanes to the local government's terminal.

Our common wealth is invested in long term obligations to provide the (aviation) transport that successful modern cities require. Let's be clear that vibrant air service is a public good, a public need, and even - gasp - a public utility.

However, the unregulated behavior of the airlines puts airline service completely under the sway of (short-term) investors who are not motivated to consider the fortunes of the airport authorities that provide their facilities or the public that funds them. In fact, as they whip-saw airports against each other, airlines have found it marginally profitable to drive airports to the brink and into ruin - in the same relentless way they have extracted wealth from their pensions, employees, and customers.

Although deregulation took the government out finessing the airlines, the airlines still very much tweak the government. For instance, bankruptcy: over the last twenty years airlines have gone into strategic bankruptcies to protect their assets and cut their liabilities, voiding long-term costs and contracts and moving their pension expenses from their own balance sheets into the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which is essentially you and me. In deregulation, government didn't abandon aviation, it just gave up the benefits of influence while retaining the costs.

In many ways, the results of thirty years of airline deregulation should be a tocsin for those who would deregulate other public utilities (energy, transport, etc). Instead the cities abandoned and abused by the airlines invoke the serenity prayer and regard their mistreatment as the result of unfortunate and impersonal market forces, when in fact they are the result of intentional calculation by the airline industry.

So let's be clear on that: in general, what happens in the airline industry is intentional. Your cancelled flight? Their inability to put you on the next plane? Selling 105 tickets for a 100 seat airplane? Your time lost in delays boarding? Scheduling 90 airplanes departures in a time period where only 60 can actually leave in perfect conditions? Those are all airline business decisions, and in general the benefits accrue to the investors and the costs are born by - well, you and me.

Cities and regions need robust, distributed and competitive air service for their economic viability. We regulate gas and electrical utilities, cable companies and phone companies, farm prices and production - because the industry relies on the public and the public relies on the industry, and regulation is mutually beneficial. We can't tolerate the undampened effect of the business cycle (again with the K-waves?) on the dependent population, especially when the business cycle depends on public investment for its infrastructure. Regulation is civilized.

The article is excellent and I recommend it to you. I particularly enjoy the article's exposition of the railroad experience as precursor to today's aviation environment, and I was amused to find myself contemplating the parallels while riding my bicycle on the bike trail, which is itself an artifact of boom-and-bust railroad investment.

For those kind few still reading - and I am grateful - a few more thoughts about airlines and government, and then in a later post we'll move on to what may be the underlying issue.

Forget Metropolis. Think Aerotropolis

The next new trend in urban economic development is the Aerotropolis, a city-airport duality. According to Dr. John D. Kasarda, "Airports will shape business location and urban development in the 21st century as much as highways did in the 20th century, railroads in the 19th and seaports in the 18th". (see, Aerotropolis.com/)

The perfect situation for an Aerotropolis is a legacy city center with vertical development and the prerequisite mass of the creative class, paired with a geographically removed major airport and connected by multi-modal, high-speed transport (highways, trains, helicopters). A textbook depiction of an area ripe for development as an Aerotroplis might look like this:



In the generic model, a legacy city center with developed education and research facilities, and with robust highway, river and train logistics, connects to a slightly removed major airport by a high-speed corridor of highways and mass transit. Movement between the two nodes needs to be almost frictionless*. The Aerotropolis shows that wealth and growth will occur along the highway connector and around the airport.

So that brings a few new requirements into pragmatic development. The city center and the airport need to be in the same government structure, either City or County, in order for them to share common incentives. No one party can build the Aerotropolis unilaterally; it takes government, business, and airlines.

How can local governments possibly stand with airlines as equal participants when the government bears all long-term risk and the airline can leave at will, abrogating their contracts through creative restructuring every few years? It's not possible; it's a dysfunctional alignment what we have established with our own legislation.

It's as if the military were to adopt a terminal leave policy of: you can leave whenever you want. We'll try to accomplish the Mission without you.

Sometimes we recognize negative trends in time to be able to understand that we've been screwed, but the emotional time-latency and arrested focus on the last time can keep us from seeing how today's rent-seeking works.

Sure, airlines have taken what we gave them - deregulation - and reverted to type. Let's not cry too much about the past, let's look at what's now. Accomplishing the American Aerotropolis and ensuring successful cities in an environment of global competition requires a regulated airline industry.

Don't even start with Spaceports. Please.

Surprise: Cracker Plant Not Located in Hookstown

From the Beaver County Times: Local officials were surprised when the announced location of a new cracker plant was not in Hookstown as expected.

Fracksylvania

A really excellent article in Rolling Stone magazine, The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom by Jeff Goodell.

Kind of interesting that New York has a moratorium on new fracking operations, and this week in Ohio the Republican governor has called for increased regulation and taxation (he said, normalized taxation but he means more) of the fracking industry. Also in Ohio, they've banned pumping poisonous, proprietary fracking fluids underground since they seem to be causing earthquakes.

Pennsylvania? Nothing to see here, move along.

NextGen ATC vs China, Al Queda, and Vinny and the Housewives of New Jersey

The United States has the world's most advanced and safest air navigation system. The problem with a mature successful system is for the vendors; while there's a minor upgrade every few years, the Industry really doesn't get to sell any more major new systems.

Unless they get some magic beans that will change everything. What would be an attractive list of sizzle attributes for marketing's bullet list? Reduce delays. Shorten flights. Improve the carbon footprint. (better stop there).

So they design a new system, call it NextGen ATC, and the vendors design a very, very expensive system. These magic beans are so expensive that the country will have to scrap the existing, world's-best legacy, outdated system completely and put all our future eggs in the vendor's NextGen basket. Why is the vendor's system so expensive? Where does the money go? To the Vendors, silly.

What are the vendors selling? Are they going to develop a startling new technology for their share of the public treasure? No, they're going to misappropriate leverage the GPS network. Let me say this another way: they're going to sell the public a system based on the free, existing GPS network that the public has already paid for. Wow, these guys went to some college.

GPS is the basis of Industry's NextGen bundle, because it provides a capability that Industry doesn't have to pay for or maintain. It's free; it's ubiquitious.

Unintended Consequences of Free and Ubiquitious

The problem with free and ubiquitious is that people start using it for creative secondary reasons, and those applications can bring unintended consequences to other participants.

A New York financier saw an arbitrage opportunity and invested in what he thought was an undervalued frequency spectrum. He formed a company, LightSquared (e=mc²), bought the spectrum at a bargain (from the public, btw) and attempted to exploit the space by using the spectrum for wide scale, metropolitan WiFi (the internet - another free ubiquitious thingy). (LightSquared's founder Philip Falcone is the 540th richest person in the world, the 188th richest in the United States, and is apparently too young to have read Bonfire of the Vanities.)

Unfortunately, LightSquared's use of their spectrum caused problems for everybody's GPS.
Without getting too technical, GPS uses a satellite way up high to send a teeny weeny faint radio signal to your WalMart GPS which was produced on razor-thin margins. In other words, GPS requires a cheap-as-possible device to receive and process a very faint signal. For a long time it worked, because nobody was using the adjacent spectrum.

LightSquared wanted to use the adjacent spectrum and place fairly relatively low-power transmitters all around cities (with airports) to provide MetroWiFi. Their low power tranmitters put out a much stronger signal than the far-away satellites.

LightSquared wasn't just threatening RadioShack; LightSquared was threatening everybody's use of the free/ubiquitious GPS. In particular, LightSquared pissed off the John Deere tractor company, which upsells tractors with GPS navigation, and so their Senator became very concerned about GPS integrity.

There's nothing wrong with LightSquared's technical approach. The problem is that billions of existing GPS receivers aren't shielded for interference, and aren't built to identify the legitimate satellite signal. LightSquared unintentionally exposed an essential, flawed assumption in relying on GPS.

LightSquared lost because the Homeland Security Military Industrial Complex (HSMIC) commissioned studies and wrote papers that said, Establishing low-power transmitters in LightSquared's spectrum will disable all GPS air navigation for that region. Wow. wow Wow wow Wow. wow.

We have no love for LightSquared or Falcone, who was attempting to become rich by exploiting an undervalued national asset, which is a bit like stealing from your children. It is intriguing that the HSMIC would publicly confirm that a series of low-power transmitters could disable GPS air navigation just when we're about to throw away the robust, decentralized legacy outdated system in favor of a single-point-of-failure, easily jammable pure-play GPS NextGen system.

I mean, Holy Asymmetric Warfare, Batman! Haven't we recently seen American aviation grounded by asymmetric techniques? Are we really about to decommission the existing robust, decentralized system and replace it with something that can be disabled with a few low-powered transmitters?

The Asymmetric Scenario

Here's the script: a non-state, religious-based network that's upset because we're occupying their 'stan places electronic transmitters in ten US metroplexes. The transmitters are innocuous; they look like laptop power supplies. They're programmed to turn on and off in a consistent, intermittent pattern during the day; each city's network will go active two days a month. Monday it's Newark; Tuesday it's Dallas; Wednesday is LosAngeles; Thursday is Chicago; Friday is Atlanta. Week two is Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Houston, Seattle. Get the flick? They plug these devices in on the first of the month and walk away; they're in storage units, rental houses, etc. They've just shut down the domestic GPS aviation system, because the uncertainty is unacceptable.

To be fair, radio-based air navigation has always been subject to intentional, adversarial interference (MIJI). It's nothing new. The difference is that existing systems can be overcome by high-powered transmitters and those are relatively easy to find and deal with. The faint GPS signals can be thwarted by a few low-power transmitters that are very hard to find when deployed as a noisy network.

• The early concern about switching to NextGen is: China can shoot down satellites, and NextGen requires satellites.
  
• The asymmetric concern about NextGen is: a very low cost, hard to track, easily deployable grid of low-powered transmitters will render GPS unusable to aviation, and NextGen requires GPS.

I find the second issue (asymmetric vulnerability) more concerning than the first (China). But now it seems that the greatest risk of all is a guy named Vinny and the housewives of New Jersey, and the many people like them.

NextGen ATC vs Vinny & the Housewives of N.J.

Here's a story. The facts are fudged but there's truth in it; there are links to the official reports below. There's a guy named Vinny who lives in Fort Lee, New Jersey with his wife. Vinny's girlfiend lives in Passaic, which is far enough away that they're not likely to see each other in church, but close enough that he can get over there occasionally.

Vinny thinks the wife suspects something. She watches Housewives of New Jersey, which is kind of an aspirational drama for her. Vinny knows The Wife could slip a GPS tracker into his car and he'd never know it, so he seeks advice from his cousin Joey.

Joey works for a delivery company where they put GPS trackers in every vehicle to optimize efficiency - which means, keeping the guys from napping. His cousin went to Google and typed in, GPS blocker jammer and found a solution. Now on rough days Joey turns on the jammer gizmo, drives to a park and takes a nap. Fuggedaboudit.

Vinny does the same thing. He buys a personal GPS jammer and turns it on before he sneaks over to Passaic for an assignation. Unfortunately, when he drives by Newark Liberty Airport on the Turnpike, his GPS jammer blocks the GPS signal. Two pilots report the outage and it's a major snafu. The technicians come out but now everything's working fine because Vinny has moved on. At the airport people try to figure out what happened over coffee and bagels; it's hard to troubleshoot a phantom event. Fuggedaboudit.



About ninety minutes later, the pilots are reporting GPS problems again. Guess what? Vinny is going home to Fort Lee. The technicians scurry all around and chaos reigns again, but a while later everything seems fine.

Both Fox News and The Economist carried this story. The geeks are all over this; WIRED magazine's article was titled, The $30 GPS Jammer that could paralyze US Cities, and they suggest there's a lot more involved than aviation, because a lot of embedded systems use the GPS time-stamp as an essential component.

The Newark Airport has never been able to commission their public-private-partnership (PPP) Honeywell GPS ground-based augmentation system (GBAS) in spite of their great desire to do so, because between deliverymen and philandering spouses like Vinny, there's a lot of people on New Jersey highways with GPS jammers.

There is, remarkably, a public version of the official report online which details the profusion of GPS jamming devices along the New Jersey Turnpike. The report documents multiple days with multiple GPS jamming events. Vinny is Legion.

Back to Vinny. We don't know if Mrs. Vinny ever got a GPS tracker, all we know is that Vinny is a weasel scoundrel who was afraid of being discovered. He was afraid she could be a wannabe Housewife of New Jersey and buy a GPS tracker, so Vinny invested in some electronic countermeasures (ECM). (Probably, next season, the Housewives will deploy drones.)

Vinny's compromise of the Newark airport was driven by his desire to not get caught in adultery. That is a rational, non-trivial, universal motivation.

Any engineering system faces forces that would work against it. Bridges, for instance, must deal with wind and tides. If NextGen has to contend with nervous adulterers for operational reliability, it is doomed from the start. And I think that's an argument that most Congressmen could relate to.


China? Fuggedaboudit. Think about Vinny and the recent LightSquared documentation, and the wisdom of replacing the legacy system with a GPS system.

Caricature as Affirmation: Yehuda Moon

Much of my blogging is elsewhere, but it seemed like this belongs here.

So often I find myself (on rare introspective moments) as a bit of a caricature, but today's Yehuda Moon presented something I've done myself a few times (and with a rain cape, no less) and I took it as affirmation rather than reduction: