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Earlier today I decided to get a new Tivo and rewire the entertainment center. I had finally figured out that some of our pixelation problems occured when some other large device in the house was running. The microwave was especially bad. That prompted buying a power conditioner which then precipitated having to rewire the power. While I was in there I decided to add in cabinet multi-color LEDs so I could see what I was doing.

Wires. Everywhere.

Earlier this week I was relayed a story about several dozen people with highly advanced technical degrees being exposed to Windows 8 for the first time on the laptop that was attached to the overhead projector. Apparently no one, not a single person, could figure out how to make Windows 8 load a presentation and display it on the external monitor.

Apparently even one wire is difficult.

Why do these problems persist? Why do we still struggle with attaching an external projector to a laptop. Why do I still have an amplifier with twenty different cables coming out of the back?

There's the startup idea that'll make you a billion dollars. Understand and figure out a solution for that entire class of problems. Yes, I know I can buy closed wireless systems for wireless audio but that still leaves me with video, power, etc.

So why do these problems still exist? Why are we willing to put up with them?

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Found via Instapundit and Helen's Page: Milton Friedman for kids? Absolutely! An economic adventure book series for kids (ages 6-12) is a Kickstarter project for a series of books to teach kids economics from an Austrian perspective.

This project brought a couple of thoughts to mind. The first is that I think children can learn and should be taught topics like economics and engineering at a young age. Sure, make it age appropirate and accessible, but there's no reason kids can't be exposed to the concepts. The same thing goes for basic engineering concepts. Estonia is teaching programming to kids starting at age 7 and going through age 16 to turn them into technology literate producers instead of low-wage tech consumers. I work in an industry that desperately needs skilled workers with the ability to think systematically about not just code but the world in general. Programs like this Kickstarter project and Estonia's are desperately needed across our educational system.

The second thought is about crowdfunding projects in general. One of the entrepreneurs in Hypepotamus is in the crowdfunding space so we've been discussing what works and what doesn't. The economic adventure book project has done many things right. It has the “That should exist!” feel with its constituency. Enough work has been done before the funding project even started to show progress and the abilities of the project members. And its been 'vetted' by being linked from Instapunding and Helen's Page. Crowdfunding is a marketing process with many moving parts and many chances to run off the rails quickly. The two things people who donate to a projects are looking for are the same things any investor is looking for: is the opportunity real and can the team do it.

So yea, I donated a few bucks.

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Yesterday's article on Deep Space Industry's Microgravity Foundry got me curious about large scale 3D printing.

As with most things dealing with 3D printing these days there are professsionals and hobbyists. Sadly all require gravity at the moment.

Anyone who has been to a televised football game recently will recognize this method being developed at MIT

The most interesting aspect of this system is that there is no limit to the size of the area being printed. Although the larger the system the longer the guidelines which means more slack and slop in the system. Multiple printheads would help.

For better precision there are multiple gantry based systems that take the same basic design of small scale systems put them in an embigenator:

 
Or this monstrous arm based system:

 

Untitled from Dirk Vander Kooij on Vimeo.

Then there is Caterpillar. Instead of additive forming of the final product, Caterpillar does subtractive shaping on truly massive scales:

And yes, Caterpillar does plan on doing this in space.

Maybe I'll print my next house…

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Starting with Planetary Resources (PRI) and now with Deep Space Industries (DSI) the idea of using raw materials from space has become credible enough that news outlets in various markets have felt the need to report on it. The problem is they're getting it wrong:

• Investors shrug at pie in the sky plans to mine asteroids, moon
• Mining asteroids - Going platinum
• Tech Billionaires Plan Audacious Mission to Mine Asteroids

Yes, both PRI and DSI discussed platinum recovery as a secondary market. But if these were real journalists or financial analysts instead of a link trolls they would have spent the time to understand the market and the opportunity. The latest in this trend is Simone Foxman reporting for Quartz in The crazy economics of mining asteroids for gold and platinum. Simone's opening sentence suggests she may not have read or seen either company's websites or press releases: “Not one but two companies have now decided that they’re going to mine asteroids to collect gold and platinum.” Both companies have specifically said the main justification for the business is in space uses for water and raw structural materials. Simone spends the rest of the article doing basic calculations based on this assumption: “If we assume that an entire spherical asteroid with a 10 m diameter (about 523 cubic meters) is made of platinum, and that one of these asteroid miners could harvest the whole thing, then they’d get about 11.2 million kg of platinum. At current market rates, that comes out to $12.1 billion.”

Simone, neither company has said that is their business model. In both cases the companies assume PGMs are semi-valuable left overs and are NOT the main reasons for the venture. Also, in both cases the business models assume incremental profit from technology development AND incremental cost reductions from technological maturity (especially from reduced launch costs).

So, starting now lets take a look at the cost of bringing 1 lb of material from an asteroid to the earth. The price of something is set by who is willing to pay for it. Right now NASA is building the OSIRIS-REx mission which will return between 2 oz and 4 lbs of material plus a 505 day mapping mission for $1 billion. Assuming a rational NASA (not a good assumption to make but we'll go with it for now) if someone can do it for $1 less it makes sense for NASA to use that other source. So making a financial analysis based on the cost of terrestrial platinum when the scarcity of pristine asteroid material is a much more rational and economic choice suggests other motivations.

In PRI's case the business model is water (and other volatiles) extraction for life support and fuel. In the long run PRI looks more like Exxon NYSE:XOM than Stillwater PlatinumNYSE:SWC. DSI's business model (if it wasn't GLARINGLY obvious from the images on their website) is building really BIG stuff using giant 3D printers. DSI looks more like Caterpillar NYSE:CAT or Halliburton NYSE:HAL. For people who actually understand these markets the most interesting news from the DSI press conference was the Microgravity Foundry which can print structurally capable nickel metal from a nickel charged gas. There wasn't very much detail on how this type of 3d printing worked but printing structurally capable metallic structures in microgravity is something very new.

All of that said, there are plenty of open questions about both business models. Both assume some customer is out there wanting oxygen, hydrogen, water and giant 3d printed structures. Who might those be? Where did THEY get their funding? What's their business model? Those are HUGE questions. NASA thinks there's enough demand for refueling to have just done a test on the ISS. MDA is building the SIS spacecraft. Those are fairly big endorsements of the basic assumptions.

But apparently intentionally misreading or ignoring the data provided by the companies to setup an idiotic “Ooooh! Platinum isnt' worth that much!” or “You'll crash the PGM market” strawman is OK in what people call link trolling …err… 'journalism' these days.

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I spent the evening at the Georgia Tech Entrepreneurs Society meeting at Hypepotamus. The topic of discussion was how to educate students about entrepreneurship being a valid career choice: “Don't get a job. Make one.”

At Monday's S* Open Breakfast meeting the topic turned to figuring out how to expose every student to entrepreneurship in some form. The idea in both cases is that the economy of the future is not going to be friendly to those who can't make their own opportunities. Even if you do leave school and end up deeply embedded in Bain's 5000 strong workforce, global economics and the accelerating rate of technological change means there is a really good chance your job will be disrupted out from underneath you. Being exposed to entrepreneurship in college will give you the mental scaffolding to create your own opportunities where others will see none. The SOB crowd on Monday coined the term “career drownproofing”.

The GTES group is helping by creating as non-threatening a space as possible where students can come and talk to and work on business ideas. The Georgia Tech Startup Exchange is on the first floor of the library and is open to all. If you are at Tech then please encourage students even remotely interested in learning what a startup is to stop by.

One interesting bit was why the Startup Exchange was created when Hypepotamus was just down the street. Apparently students from last year's Startup Semester even found Hypepotamus to be intimidating. Something any co-working space needs to think about.

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One of my tasks at Pipefish as co-Founder is setting the company culture. One part of that is how you setup and frame incentives. Incentives can take all sorts of forms. Some are performance based: did someone meet or exceed a performance target. Some are for aligning motives with the company: stock options with a vesting schedule.

One incentive that some companies get very wrong is the signing bonus. For some the signing bonus is a way to preserve internal salary ranges or compensate an employee for something they are losing by moving. Neither of these are an incentive. They're simply accounting techniques to rename parts of base salary.

Where many companies go wrong is providing a signing bonus with terms that require repayment of some portion if the employee leaves before some period. No one really expects to get that money back. The idea is to create fear in the employee that if they leave they will be on the hook for some large repayment. Not a great way to start a relationship.

One important alternative that many overlook is signing bonuses in forms other than cash or stock options. These types of bonuses can go along way to setting expectations AND culture. Here are a few examples:

• attendance at a professional conference
• free trip to Comic-con
• archeological expeditions in Colorado

Being a space nut the one I'm going to try is a free zero gravity flight. Its about the price of a typical signing bonus and its one hell of an experience. It also sets one of the cultural parts of the company that I want to push: We are a company of smart engineers that see the power of technology to improve and enrich the human experience.

So if you're a Rails developer or a machine learning expert and you want to help change the world, come join us.

Update:

Matthew Maley at TheTechCPA picks up the theme and discusses the tax consequences of signing bonuses like the ones above. The gist is that bonuses like this are taxable to the employee so they would need to be gross up the bonus so the employee doesn't have out of pocket tax consequences.

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In the space community one organization that's been quite vocal lately is Penny4NASA which is advocating for more than doubling NASA's budget from 0.48% of the Federal Budget to a whole 1%. The idea behind the name is that of overy dollar American's are spending in taxes they should be able to spare one penny for NASA.

Setting aside the fact that its not a penny because we are borrowing about 1/3 of our federal spending. That means of that whole penny we are borrowing one third from someone else.

But what if there were a way to not just double NASA's budget but triple or even quadruple it?

Penny4NASA's goal is to increase what NASA can do. I'm confident their goal isn't just the transfer of cash. The idea is to have enough cash to do something useful. Something BIG. There are two ways to do that: increase revenue or decrease costs. Penny4NASA seems to think the only way of doing that is to increase revenue.

I'm going to examine decreasing costs.

Lets start with decreasing launch costs. Both SpaceX's development and operational costs are at least three times cheaper than NASA. The NAFCOM reports lists SpaceX as spending a bit more than $300 million. If done by NASA using the same processes it is currently using for the Space Launch System the cost would be $3.6 billion.

That's more than TEN TIMES the cost.

But it is comparing apples and oranges. The Falcon Heavy is estimated at 120,000 lbs to LEO and the SLS is targeting 150,000 to a truly monstrous 280,000 lbs. Both have a 5 meter diameter fairing. But such a rocket necessary? If you can assemble a space station with a Falcon 9, service and refuel a satellite, and launch an interplanetary vehicle without needing 280,000 lbs of payload capacity, why do it?

The estimated costs for SLS through 2025 are $40 billion (give or take a few billion). NASA's budget through that period is $204 billion. That means SLS will be sucking up slightly less than 20% of NASA's budget.

So think on this: cancel SLS and rework NASA's missions slightly to use commercial launchers and voila! you have not just doubled but tripled NASA's available budget, not buy giving it more money, but by cutting its costs. And in a world where sequestration looks more and more likely accomplishing more with less. Do THAT and the American taxpayer will be ecstatic! Do that and they might, just might trust you with more (assuming there's more available).

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A Techcrunch article that has made the rounds and even hit some mainstrem sites discusses whether America Has Hit “Peak Jobs”. The general idea is that some of the unemployment and possibly most of the shrinkage in the total labor force are due to efficiencies in business and manufacturing negating the need for those workers to begin with. Extrapolating that into the future you hit a point where technology requires less and less employees to do more and more stuff. That point is called “peak labor”.

Much of the post scarcity economic discussions assume that the various aspects needed for such an economy arrive at the same time and that the transition is done with some knowlege and intent. In many singularity scenarios the major issue is whether its a hard or soft landing. Is the transition smooth and manageable or is the societal impact so fast and drastic that its considered catastophic for most of humanity.

My thoughts are that, like most things human, it is an uneven fractious muddle full of both sadness and hope. What we are seeing even now is that certain parts of our society simply cannot cope with how quickly things are changing even now. Some turn Luddite. Some simply turn into survivalists/hippies (the only difference between an organic communcal farm and a prepper survivalist camp is the presence of a few guns).

One can academically debate whether comparative advantage exists in a post-singularity economy or the definition of value and whether it can be invented. But the reality is that the transition is going to leave many with no job. Even if the cost of goods is so low that the cost of being on the dole is to cheap to worry about, there is still a lack of purpose. In much of this country and Europe there is a growing sense of “getting mine before the getting is gone”. That its OK to milk the system because there's just nothing else to do.

One extremely concrete example is the significant increase in the number of people exiting the labor force by moving to permanent Social Security disability. If many of those jobs are not coming back because wholly new jobs requiring neural plasticity that many simply don't have, are we indeed heading for a world where more than half of the population never has a real job but still assumes it needs one to be of value. Will that part of the population resent the other half out of jealousy of purpose? What happens to virtue when there is no hard work to do?

At some point stability around a new normal will appear. But will the process of getting there be one where entire populations lose purpose?

Was Agent Smith right?

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Earlier this week the Baker Institute held a discussion entitled LOST IN SPACE: THE NEED FOR A DEFINITIVE U.S. SPACE POLICY. Here's the video of the event:

George Abbey's opening remark didn't leave much hope for a useful session: “Come this July it'll be two years since an American spacecraft has been up to visit that station.” Apparently SpaceX's Dragon doesn't qualify as either American or a spacecraft. Soon after that John Logsdon makes the comment that Nixon correctly didn't want space to be such a large ongoing expenditure but instead wanted it to fade into the regular background of political spending.

With rare exceptions, “definitive US policies” for industry are rare. One current exception is the President's Advanced Manufacturing Partnership. The policies that have come from that have been, as expected, politically driven. But in no case has the Partnership said that the government should start manufacturing stuff, building equipment to manufacture stuff, or create any agency to be in charge of making stuff. There are agencies such as the FCC that regulate certain industries but, with the excpetion of NPR/PBS, none of those agencies actually does the thing it regultes. The FAA doesn't build airplane, The FDA doesn't make drugs, grow crops, or make food. The DOT doesn't make cars or drive paving machinery. The Department of Education doesn't hire teachers.

So why, in a world with Elon Musks and Bob Bigelows, does the Federal Government need a “Definitve Space Policy”?

As I watched this video again I came to the conclusion that it no one really cares anymore. The only people who care are feeding at a tax payer funded trough that is going to continue to shrink while industry moves ahead aggressively. Five years ago I would have gotten really animated about the views of the panel members. But these days I don't see those views having any effect on actions.

yawn

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I discovered earlier today that Twitter had finally made my Twitter archive available for download. Here are some of the highlights:

(very first tweet)
31 Jan 07
working in the office
View on Twitter

8 Nov 07
Sigh. Obama thinks Hillary can't “bring the country together” and he thinks he can? His policies are further to the left than hers? How …
View on Twitter

13 Nov 07
At YnR last night the remnants of the Startup Weekend bizdev team suggested a Startup Weekend where all development is outsourced to Ind …
View on Twitter

15 Jan 08
http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc5134.txt <– “A Uniform Resource Name Namespace for the EPCglobal Electronic Product Code” – My last RFC! Yay!
View on Twitter

29 Nov 08
Oh hell yea!! Tech just beat Georgia!
View on Twitter

4 Nov 08
@aarjav I just hope when Obama doesn't lean “right-er” that you apologize to those of us youre backing up against the wall.
View on Twitter

(This was the tweet when we won the Lunar Lander Challenge)
30 Oct 09
a celebration: http://twitpic.com/nk2hf
View on Twitter

(I'm not sure about the 10,000 people but the other two look to be on track)
31 Dec 09
Within ten years 10,000 people will have been in space. The majority of them will not work for NASA or be US citizens. #in10years
Ten years from now there will be a purely private space station and private missions to either the moon or an asteroid #in10years
Ten years from now we will have discovered a roughly earth sized extrasolar planet that shows hints of organics in its atmosphere #in10years
View on Twitter

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