Incumbent....Anyone Got an incumbent

Assuming Dick Chaney doesn't change his mind, the 2008 election will be relatively unsual in one regard. There will be no incumbent running on either side. For the purposes of this discussion, an incumbent includes the VP of a president who has been termed out.

Last time this happened? 1952 Eisenhower v. Stevenson. Time before that? 1928 Hoover v. Smith. Twice in 80 years or 20 elections, or 10% of the time.

That's about all the research I feel like doing right now. If anyone wants to find previous examples and post them, I'd love to see it.

The Box

I just read "The Box : How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson. It is a description of the history of the cargo container shipping industry.

I know how dry this sounds, but in this and future posts I will attempt to combine information presented in that book, with my own ideas about the almost immeasurable impact this simple and seemingly obvious technology has had on society present and future.

What just stirred me to post on this was watching Bruce Springsteen record "Erie Canal" for his latest CD, We Shall overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Highly recommended tinyurl.com/rn4g4

Beside the awkward fact that Erie Canal is a love song to a mule, the lyrics echo back to a time when production, and cities, had to be near the best possible shipping. Here are the lyrics:

I've got a mule, her name is Sal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal

She's a good old worker and a good old pal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal
We've hauled some barges in our day

filled with lumber, coal and hay

And we know every inch of the way from Albany to Buffalo.

Chorus:

Low bridge, everybody down

Low bridge for we're coming to a town

And you'll always know your neighbor, you'll always know your pal

If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal.
We better get along on our way ol'gal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal

'Cause you bet your life I'd never part with Sal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal.

Git up there mule, here comes a lock,We'll make Rome about 6 o'clock

One more trip and back we'll go, right back home to Buffalo.

Albany, Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, New York grew because they were on the water. Factories, even in New York, were blocks from the docks because the cost of transportation was so high that it was economical to locate manufacturing facilities in prime locations.

Our ability to move goods has fundamentally determined where our cities are. Where people live and work.

The Box - the standardized multimodal shipping container - has totally changed that. Wherever you are, be it Buffalo or a suburb of Beijing, you can manufacture to your hearts delight and stuff your goods in cheap, secure boxes. When full these get pulled by a truck to a rail yard, and then on to a domestic destination (with the last leg back on a truck) or to a port for a trip overseas on a ship carrying 2999 more boxes.

The industrial revolution made it easy to concentrate physical power in a way previously impossible, and reduced the cost of such power so greatly as to be economically irrelevant in most cases.

The current information revolution is doing the same thing to data - previously unimaginable amounts of information can be transported anywhere, basically for free.

Both of these changes created incredible wealth, and did or will change how people live their lives.

My thesis is that The Box - an ugly, cheap, low-tech innovation if ever there was one - has had a similar effect. And more importantly, is becoming more and more important. Multi-modal transportation really is the super highway of stuff. And when stuff can be moved fast and cheap it changes where you make stuff, how much stuff you get, and even how you view stuff.

I know this post is very conclusory. More to come.

Here is My Card

The size of a business card was not standardized until 1958.

No coincidence that the same year saw the introduction of the most powerful piece of plastic since the credit card - the Rolodex.

Come to think of it, credit cards adopted the same dimensions.

If Military Power was Sufficient to Defeat Terrorism.....

Israel would be the safest place in the world. And it isn't.

If you don't believe me, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_in_the_Israeli-Palestinian_conflict_2005 In 2005 3,225 Palestinians were killed by Israelis and 950 Israeli Jews were killed by Palestinians. Even if you ignore the Palestinians - and why not, everyone else does - the numbers are staggering. 72% of Israel's population of 7 million are Jews. That calculates out to about 5 million souls.

So about 1 out of 5,000 Israeli Jews were killed last year by terrorism. 9/11, the most dramatic terrorism attack in U.S., and arguably world history, killed 1 in 100,000 Americans. So on a pro-rata basis, every year the Israeli's go through an event 20 times worse than 9/11. Every year.

I know the analogy, like all analogies, is flawed. Still, as that scum sucker Britt Hume once said about some lie he told on Fox - "Its illustrative of something."

War on Terror. War on Poverty. War on Drugs.

Not a real war in the bunch, unless you have adopted the revised meaning of literal as figurative. So there is a literal war on terror, and a literal war on poverty, and a literal war on drugs. And I could literally eat a horse. Mmmmm, horse.

War without end. The long war. Undeclared wars.

If the Israeli experience tells us anything it is that a great military can win battles. Iraq tells us that we can overthrow a government. By the way, lets call this conflict what it is - Gulf War II - The Overthow of Saddam. Or, more skeptically - Gulf War II - Finishing up Poppy's Business.

What we need to learn is that, in the long run, this is a PR war. We win by NOT making people hate us faster than we can kill them.

$1 Billion is the New $1 Million

Or something.

The price tag for the 9/11 memorial being planned in NY at "ground zero" is now pegged at $1 billion. $1 billion. $1 billion.

$1 billion, $1 billion, $1 billion equals approximately $300,000 for each of the 3,000 or so victims.

Lets pause and think about how $1 billion, $1 billion, $1 billion could be spent.

First the obvious - $300,000 to each of the families of the deceased.

Maybe a $1 billion, $1 billion, $1 billion bounty for OBL.

Hey, how about this - homeland security. Maybe something like port security.

Lets put this in perspective: the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC, a tremendously moving place, cost about $10 million. With approximately 50,000 Americans killed in that conflict, the cost per death memorials was $200.