Yessir, Yessir, Three Bags Full

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We've got to stop meeting like this

In what has become a biennial celebration, the San Francisco Giants once again are baseball's world series champions. The three championships have been structurally very different. In 2010 it was a starting staff led by Tim Lincecum that really breezed through the playoffs without much of a challenge. In 2012 it was all adversity, all the time, as the Giants faced no less than SEVEN elimination games en route to an easy world series sweep. In 2014 nobody expected anything, as the Giants faced overwhelming odds in trying to win it all from the second wildcard position.

There is some (not altogether unreasonable) talk of a San Francisco "Dynasty", as no National League team has won as many as three world series in five years since the '40s, when MLB was more like AAA ball because so many players had joined the military to fight in WW II. Whether or not the Giants are a dynasty is subject to opinion, but there is no doubt that they have developed the successful strategy for baseball teams to emulate in the post-steroid era. Everything you thought, it turns out, is wrong.

The LEAST important factor in winning MLB championships is offense. There's a very simple reason for this. More than ever before, today there are two very distinct seasons. The regular season is a grind. It takes physical, mental and emotional endurance to get through 162 games in 183 days. Luck is a huge factor in winning - the single greatest determining factor is injuries - and therefore depth. There are 25 active players on a 40 man roster, and superstars represent a single point of failure. In the place of the offensive superstar of yore, you now have to build a strong, effective, flexible bullpen. Albert Pujols and Giancarlo Stanton are much less important to winning it all than Jeremy Affeldt and Javier Lopez. The goal is to structure a team that can make the playoffs, even if they don't dominate the regular season, and then has the right pieces to win three series that are utterly unlike any series played before the post season.

The first very smart thing the Giants did is they recognized the strengths and weaknesses of their home park. A team plays 81 games at home, so it makes sense to build a team that can be expected to win in that environment. There was a time when the Giants fans bemoaned the team's inability to get big-time free agent hitters to come to SF because their power numbers would suffer so greatly. Finally, the front office has figured out that's a feature, not a bug, and builds a team accordingly.

Teams built on pitching need to emphasize defense, because pitching is always a closely-run thing, and giving a team more than their allotment of 27 outs is a sure-fire way to lose games. So the Giants built a team around a big park, a strong starting rotation, a lights-out bullpen and well above average defense. Sure, runs are often very hard to come by, but somehow that hasn't prevented the team from winning those three championships.

And therein lies the lesson. Baseball is not an offensive game. PEDs concealed that fact from us for a generation, and we collectively forgot why baseball is the interesting, exciting game that it is. Teams resisted this recognition for years - how's that working out for you, Anaheim? - but the Giants can no longer be considered a fluke. Third time may or may not be the charm, but going into the playoffs as the bottom seed, the second wildcard, and winning it all convincingly is a lesson that other teams will overlook at their peril. Couple that with 2012's ridiculous two-week run of consecutive elimination games, and the lesson is clear: Build baseball teams that are good enough to make the playoffs, but specifically structured to win in the post-season, and remember how important great coaching and team chemistry can be when the other team is better and things are looking dire.
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Whither the Senate?

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And everybody gets a share

The most accurate poll aggregators are broadly consistent in their expectation that the Republicans will take a slim majority in the Senate next week. I'm not a political scientist, and the underlying reasons why such an unpopular party should win control of the entire US Congress are not, to me, the basis for a particularly interesting discussion. Instead, I'm going to take a few minutes to think through the ramifications of such a loss.

One important thing to realize is that we very likely won't know who controls the Senate just because the election is over and the votes are counted. Both Georgia and Louisiana will likely result in run-off elections, and Louisiana's would not take place until January 6th.  But even then, we may no know the real results until the new Senate is sworn in, as those new Senators elected as Independent or non-party aligned candidates will only then announce which party they would caucus with.

Which means the Lame Duck session might be important. If you want to see people suddenly cast off the shackles of party rhetoric to suddenly speak their mind and act their conscience, the right moment is when they are on their way out the door. Whether any actual legislating gets done, you can expect some high drama and head-turning rhetoric.

One of the important products of the Senate majority is who becomes the Majority Leader. The Senate Majority Leader is a political leadership role with outsized importance, controlling not just the Senate agenda and rules but part of the larger day in and day out political and ideological conversation. Along with the President, the Vice President, The Secretary of State, the Attorney General and the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority leader can speak with sufficient volume to make his or her voice heard over the background noise. And should the Republicans take the Senate, the number one topic will be Senate Rules.

The current Senate under Harry Reid made some changes to the rules regarding a filibuster against Presidential administrative and judicial appointments. The conventional wisdom is that let the genie out of the bottle, and now every time the Senate majority changes hands, the rules will be changed to suit the party taking power. Despite claims that he would restore the original rules, it seems highly unlikely that a Majority Leader McConnell would actually return additional power unnecessarily to the Democrats. So the open question is whether he would eliminate the filibuster altogether, rendering the Democrats a helpless minority, or merely leave things the way they are right now. Certainly the more radical 'tea party' wing of the Republican Senate Caucus would want to maximize their power to force President Obama to veto bill after bill passed by both houses of Congress, while the more moderate - or perhaps cautious would be a better word - Republicans will recognize that they are likely to be back in the minority in as little as two years. 

The bloodiest fight will come if a Supreme Court vacancy opens up before the end of Obama's term. The Republicans will refuse to allow a vote on ANY nominee in hopes of just running out the clock, but that's the shortest route to a true constitutional crisis imaginable. If we end up having that fight, the outcome may well determine the future of American democratic governance.

Which brings us to the question that will provide the most entertainment over the next couple years. Will a Republican-controlled Senate be able to find common ground with the significantly more radical Republican-controlled House of Representatives? There will be many times when the House passes bills so radical and prima facie ludicrous that not even Republican Senators will vote for them. Remember, even if they win the majority of seats, it will be a very narrow majority. If no Democrats vote for a given bill, they won't be able to sustain more than a couple defections.

The real question about effective legislation in a divided government environment where Republicans control both houses of Congress is just exactly how onerous will a bill have to be before our famously 'moderate' and bi-partisan President vetoes it? He certainly won't sign Obamacare repeal, but how hard will he fight to protect social welfare programs and a common-sense regulatory regime? And if the Republicans put unpleasant right wing conditions on every bill, will Obama eventually just sign them in order to 'govern'?

Stay tuned. It's gonna be a bumpy ride....
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Quality is Great, Right Up Until You Really Need Quantity

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This is great. Until you need a LOT of them

Humans like quality. When it comes to manufactured goods, we prefer better fit and finish, more elaborate functionality and little touches that make something 'better' in some tangible sense, even if those touches aren't necessary to the basic function. And we aren't put off by increased complexity if it results in something that we value to a greater degree. In cars, in lawn mowers, in computers, and - yes - in guns, elegant design, beautiful fit and finish and luxury accouterments serve to identify 'quality', and we'll happily pay more for goods we perceive as somehow 'better'.

But it's a funny thing about guns. In peacetime, we love our elaborate, high-quality weapons systems. But when the wolf is at the door, they're suddenly too expensive and too slow to manufacture. We want a whole bunch of guns and we want them NOW. In the early 1940s the Western allies found themselves in such a position. In the UK they feared an iminent German invasion. In the US, fears of imperial Japan were realized at Pearl Harbor. In Canada and Australia they were mobilizing large armies, and they knew they needed to somehow produce enough modern weapons to equip them.

One of the key weapons of the time was the submachine gun. There were no intermediate cartridge assault rifles then, and battle rifles fired a big, powerful round and were incapable of effective, accurate full auto fire. Machine guns were heavy, crew served and unable to maneuver with the platoons on the line. The bridge was the submachine gun - a small, light machine gun firing a pistol cartridge. High levels of firepower over short ranges, it was desirable to have a couple submachine guns in every infantry squad. In other doctrines - notably German and Soviet - a much greater concentration of submachine guns was SOP. So a way to manufacture and deliver a very large number of these weapons in a very short time was a high priority.

What is a gun? At its most basic, it is a bolt, an operating mechanism, a trigger mechanism, a chamber and a barrel, all in some kind of housing with controls for the user. There is a nearly infinite number of ways to design and produce these components, but many of these design decisions are preferences, a more elegant or more aesthetically pleasing way of doing something that could also be done in a cheap, crude manner. Cost and complexity come from machining parts out of solid steel. If you can stamp, or bend, sheet steel and replace some of the more expensive parts, use welds instead of pins and screws, and reduce the use of wood and other aesthetically pleasing 'furniture', you could produce an ugly, functional submachine gun without a special factory for a few dollars.

Unsurprisingly, most governments at the time arrived at a very similar conclusion. But as one of the classic examples of its genre, let me introduce you to the M-3 'Grease Gun', a .45 ACP submachine gun produced at GM's Guide Lamp division in Indiana - a headlight factory.

I suspect you can guess how it came to be called the 'Grease Gun'.  Everything is stamped, welded, folded, and bent. Wire stock, welded magazine, a knurled, threaded cap, inspired by plumbing, to retain the removable barrel. Because of all the welded sheet metal, it could be a little fragile. The flip-up dust cover over the ejection port functioned as the safety. It loaded 30 rounds of .45 ACP from a similar welded sheet metal magazine. It was 22 inches long and weighed ten pounds loaded. It was full-auto only, but fired at the relatively slow rate of 450 rounds per minute, allowing an experienced user to squeeze off single shots, or three round bursts. But the main reason for a gun like this is that it is fast, easy and cheap to manufacture. Three quarters of a million were produced, at a cost at the time of less than $20 a copy.

The M-3 was used in all theaters of WW II, and went on to see action in Korea and even Vietnam. And it was part of a long heritage of stubby, ugly, all metal submachine guns that became stalwarts of the world's infantry.

There was the classic British/Canadian STEN:

 

 

The infamous German MP-40 'Schmeisser'

And the Russian PPSh-41 'Burp Gun'

We can - and probably will - have endless debates around the relative values of form and function, and we will always be attracted to what we perceive as higher quality goods. But, when the time comes to end the debate and go into production, it is external conditions that will decide what it is we produce. And when one finds oneself staring into the dark abyss, one loses all interest in elegance and luxury, and demands function and quantity. And in those desperate moments, those are all the virtues required.

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Teller Ulam - Rube Goldberg Meets Doomsday

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Surprisingly, the inner workings of an atomic bomb are not terribly complicated. There's the 'gun design', where a 'bullet' of highly enriched uranium is fired with conventional high explosive into a matching 'target'. On high velocity impact, the Uranium becomes a single, critical mass and a fission explosion happens, because physics. Sure, adding some neutrons with a polonium/beryllium initiator is nice, but assembling a weapon like this isn't rocket science. And just like that, you lose a city like Hiroshima. Alternatively, if you can get your hands on 20 kilograms of Plutonium-239, the design is even simpler. You cast the plutonium in a sphere, surround it with high explosives, set fast detonators all around the sphere, with timers configured so it all goes boom at the same instant. The plutonium is compressed to critical mass, and once again you get fission, a few grams of matter is converted to energy and, once again, you lose a city, this time Nagasaki.

What you may not realize is that nobody uses these designs anymore. Atomic bombs are SO fifties. Even as the rubble in Japan was still cooling, physicists were looking for a more powerful, energetic weapon. If fission is good, then adding a little fusion to the mix must be even better. Virtually every nuclear warhead deployed today is a thermonuclear device patterned after the original "Teller - Ulam" device. And good lord, it's the scientific equivalent of a madman's ramblings on full yellow legal tablets. Except, to the best of our knowledge, the damn thing seems to work.

The details? Where to start? Teller Ulam is a multistage weapon. It starts with a conventional explosive that initiates a fission explosion. And that's where things get dicey. The fission explosion, even if it is a 'boosted' fission explosion, isn't enough. So the goal is to use that initial fission bomb to create a fusion reaction. The challenge is that from the moment that fission is initiated, you have only milliseconds to create your fusion reaction before the whole thing is vaporized. You are essentially creating a complex chain reaction inside an atomic bomb in the process of detonating.

The idea is that you use a typical first generation atomic bomb (as crudely described above) to focus a blast of X-Rays on a 'secondary' - a target that, under the right conditions will initiate nuclear fusion. You focus the x-rays, you reflect them with a 'tamper' and you enhance them by surrounding the secondary with a fissionable shell. If all goes according to design, for a very brief moment you get nothing short of a miniature star - a hydrogen fusion reaction. Of course, to understand the engineering challenge this represents, you have to go back to the very first step. The whole process was kicked off by detonating an atomic bomb. And everything that happens afterward, the whole complex set of steps and processes, all happens inside the casing of the warhead in the microseconds before that initial atomic blast vaporizes the whole kit, kat and kaboodle.

The part that nobody outside of the nuclear weapons community is clear on is precisely the mechanism by which the secondary is compressed enough to begin a fission reaction. We know that the X Rays from the primary are somehow 'focused' across the 'interstage' section of the weapon, and by some process (there are several competing theories, any or all of which may be in use), those X Rays initiate a fission reaction in the secondary. The most likely method is one where a very secret formula 'foam' surrounds the secondary, and the X Rays from the primary convert the foam into a highly energetic plasma that compresses the secondary, which fissions and compresses the Lithium Deuteride fuel to thermonuclear temperatures, initiating the fusion reaction.

The term 'hydrogen bomb' is a bit of misnomer. It's true that the entire device is designed to produce hydrogen fusion, but most of the energy released is from good old fission. The fusion reaction's primary purpose is to add enough energy to greatly enhance the efficiency and output of the fission reactions. The original bomb designs were less than ten percent efficient - that is, they needed to contain a large amount of fissile material so that getting 10% of it to fission before the whole thing was vaporized would result in a large enough yield.  Now, despite the unlikely complexity of the modern thermonuclear device, you get much more energy out of a given amount of fuel than you did before. Which is ironic, because the modern warheads such as the W-88 are designed to have a maximum yield of just a few hundred kilotons, while the earlier weapons often yielded 10 megatons or more.

There's a few lessons to take away from all this. First, even though the first Teller - Ulam device was tested in 1952, and despite it's rather unlikely design, nobody has figured out how to improve on it or replace it. There's also a lesson here about letting the physics and math dictate the engineering. In order to make something work in the real world, you sometimes might have to compromise on the most elegant applied science to get the desired result. But most of all, it's kind of bizarre to consider that human culture could be ended for all time by these goofy, Rube Goldbergian bombs.
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Sing For Your Supper

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What is a song worth? How much should a consumer expect to pay to listen to a specific song? How much should the artist expect to be paid when the consumer listens to one of their songs? A few years ago, this was a question with an easy answer. You bought a cassette, or a CD, for $15 or $20 dollars. A dozen or so songs, widely varying in quality and even genre, on a flimsy plastic playback platform. Everyone had a sense that this was way too expensive, but the alternative was listening to the radio. Sure, that was free - you had to listen to the commercials, that was part of the deal - but you had no control over what was played, and when.

Then came the 90s, the internet and Napster. Now there was an alternative - not only was music suddenly free, but you could get just the songs you wanted. For the next decade, the record labels fought their customers tooth and nail for the right to make millions from music sales. And eventually, just as the download model killed the CD, streaming services (mostly) killed the download model. Whether subscription based or ad supported, streaming services pay the labels and the artists a great deal less than they made in the days when music consumers had no choice but to buy that $15.00 CD, even if they only liked one song on it.

Artists should definitely be able to make a living making music - the question of whether they would quit making music if they couldn't get paid at some level, as is often suggested, strikes me as the wrong question to ask, and unlikely in any case. But how much should any musician realistically expect to make? Prior to the rise of rock n roll in the late 1950s, musicians made a living. They could devote their lives to making and performing music, and in return they could expect to be paid. It was a blue collar, working class way to get by, but for people who felt the need to make music, it was a perfectly fair deal. Then came Top 40 radio, gold albums and sold out arenas, and at least a subset of artists (and their record label partners) became fabulously wealthy. They were millionaires with their own airplanes and an unlimited supply of drugs and groupies. Even if you weren't in that rarefied company, every rock n roll band knew they were just one number one hit away from paradise.

But is that what music is worth? Does it make sense that a band should make millions? It seems that we've been through an anomalous period in time when the limits of the distribution format allowed music to be artificially priced at irrational and unsustainable levels. Successful bands will always make a lot of money - in a tightly connected world where anything can go viral in 24 hours, the demand for a 'hot' band or performer will provide nearly instant wealth. But the system, the music industry, the streaming sites, the $0.99/song downloads, internet and terrestrial radio - these distribution formats have to work in such a way as to support the vast working class mainstream of musicians, singers and songwriters. The record labels have lost their cash cow, but they were never necessary to the process anyway. They were the parasite, sucking much of the lifeblood out of a relationship between artist and fan. That they should end up with nothing is a particularly satisfying form of justice.

There is a kind of free floating assumption that because musicians have become unimaginably wealthy in recent decades that this is some kind of norm, one that we must find a way to preserve. But that seems almost certainly wrong to me. So let's start with this - median household income in the US stands at a little over $50,000/year. I don't think anyone would begrudge a performer making 50K. Is there some reason that performer should expect to make MORE than that? How much more? More than a welder, a truck driver, a software engineer? Are musicians so much more valuable to society that they should expect to make twice the median income? Four times?

I don't know the answer. My gut tells me a musician with a decent following is going to make at least a hundred grand, and that's very much as it should be. I can't for the life of me understand why a musician should expect to make tens of millions of dollars anymore - the market can no longer generate that much cash. In looking around today, it looks like the whole system is settling into a functional equilibrium. Some viable mix of ad-supported streaming, subscription streaming, paid downloads and live performances, along with the other commercial opportunities available to talented artists, should make it possible for a musician to make a decent living doing what he or she loves to do, and while the era of the millionaire performer might be fading, that's still a pretty good outcome.
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Right to Exist

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Sounds good. What's it mean?

One of the primary political/diplomatic debates of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the discussion around Israel's 'right to exist'.  This is a curious construct, and one that deserves a great deal more consideration than is typically given. There really isn't this kind of debate over any other nation. Even in the case of controversial nascent nations such as Kosovo or South Sudan, there is no question of their 'right to exist' - merely a question of international recognition of that existence. Indeed, what entity can even grant a nation such a right? And wouldn't a Palestinian nation have a similar 'right'?

But Israel isn't appealing to some international body to vouchsafe its right to exist - it demands that its adversaries - Palestinian groups like Fatah, Hamas and Hezbollah and regional nations such as Iran and Saudi Arabia - concede simply that it has such a right. But the belief in a nation's right to exist is influenced by all manner of external and domestic political considerations. Did Great Britain believe the United States had a right to exist in the early decades of the 19th century? China certainly doesn't believe Taiwan has a right to exist. Does Kurdistan have a right to exist? How about Azawad?

To further complicate matters, a nation's right to exist in no way conveys any kind of protection, or guarantee of longevity. There was no real question of the Ottoman Empire's right to exist, right up until it ceased to exist and its territory and holdings were gobbled up by other powers. And all the years of my life, right up until that day in 1991 when it no longer existed, I never heard anyone question that the Soviet Union had a right to exist. Indeed, it seems that the reality of a nation's existence - along with the political, diplomatic, economic and military strength required for enforcement of said existence - is all that is required for the international community at large to assume that a nation has such a right.

One must assume that the goal of the Israeli leadership is to create a condition where their adversaries are not officially committed to Israel's ultimate destruction. And that would certainly make negotiations simpler, even if it makes no sense for an advanced, modern nuclear power to take seriously the aspirational goals of the decades old founding document of a ragtag rebel paramilitary. But when considered in broader terms, it seems an odd demand for the Israeli leadership to make. If, for example, Hezbollah was to announce tomorrow that they would accept Israel's right to exist, but continue to resist the occupation, does anyone for one minute truly think that would change anything? Would Israel accept that statement as Hezbollah's true goal? Iran has insisted for a decade, from every level of government and clergy that they do not want and would not develop nuclear weapons, and yet Tel Aviv has disregarded these repeated statements as lies and attempts to 'buy time' to develop nuclear weapons. For better or worse, they are not prone to take seriously any claims from their adversaries that run counter to their own institutional beliefs.

So to summarize. It's hard to understand what a national 'right to exist' might even mean. There is no body that can grant such a right. There is no effective way to deny that a nation has a right to exist. Some new nations don't receive universal recognition or diplomatic relations, but their existence is never discussed in terms of a right or lack thereof. A nation's existence itself constitutes its right to exist - that right is not granted by other nations or organizations acceptance, the right to existence is contained within existence itself. If it was any different, then we would be having this discussion about more than a single nation.
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Sweden vs. the Submarine

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Not the Loch Ness Monster

OK, nobody knows much, and what they do know they aren't saying, but this is just too good to pass up.  A few days ago the Swedish navy overheard a distress call - in Russian - from a vessel in the waters off Stockholm. The immediate assumption was that the vessel in question was a submarine, probably involved in some sort of of clandestine intelligence gathering mission. In the days that followed, the Swedish government claimed there had been at least 3 'credible sightings' of foreign underwater activities offshore, including the now infamous photo of a submersible craft on the surface taken by a civilian on the shore.

During the cold war, it was very common for the Soviet and Swedish navies to play a deadly game of cat & mouse in the waters of the Baltic Sea between Stockholm and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in Southern Lithuania. The Swedes were not know for playing around, and made liberal use of depth charges as they chased these subs from around their shores. In case there is some doubt about what the Swedish navy was seeing, in 1981 a Soviet Whiskey class submarine loaded out with nuclear weapons was stranded on a bar off Karlskrona in southeast Sweden, causing a massive diplomatic incident. After more than a week of tense negotiations, Swedish surface ships towed the submarine into deeper water where it was permitted to go free. More recently, a pair of Russian SU-24s penetrated Swedish airspace in what was seen as an intentional probe of Swedish air defenses. The Russian fighters were intercepted and escorted back to international airspace.

What would a Russian submarine be doing in the Baltic off Stockholm? Nobody's saying anything, but the unspoken assumption is that the major powers use specially equipped submarines to tap underwater fiber optic cables in order to intercept digital telephone and internet communications. The US has famously been doing so since the USS Halibut took part in Operation Ivy Bells in 1971.

At this point, if the Swedish navy hasn't found anything, they probably won't, but it's clear that some foreign entity is operating intelligence gathering submarines in the Western Baltic for purposes that the Swedes find suspicious or downright hostile. While all the indications - and the history - indicate that this is Russian activity, there are other nations, particularly the US and UK that could be operating in those same waters for the same reasons.
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