Slapping Back at the Eduocracy

Kevin at the Smallest Minority had a post yesterday centered on an article in Harvard magazine attacking homeschooling parents and the very concept of allowing parents to run their children's education.

The Foundation for Economic Education frequently posts articles on homeschooling, often by Kerry McDonald.  Mrs. McDonald specializes in this area.  To quote a portion of her biography from FEE:

Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE  ... She is also an adjunct scholar at The Cato Institute and a regular Forbes contributor. Kerry has a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard University.

Kerry went after this article in a letter to the magazine, reprinted in full at FEE.  It seems at least possible that an alumnus with a Masters from Harvard might be taken seriously at the magazine.  It's worth a read if you care about the right to educate without going through the school's indoctrination factories.  As usual I'll post some clips from the article.  It's probably worthwhile to start her response with the illustration for Harvard magazine because it's the introduction readers got to the original article.  

The illustration not so subtly attacks the idea that home schools may be supported by the Bible.  As Kevin notes, it also not so subtly hints that the (likely) public-school-educated artist apparently doesn't know how to spell “Arithmetic.”

I agree with the author of the article and Harvard Law School professor, Elizabeth Bartholet, who is widely quoted throughout, that it is critically important that children be protected from abuse. They argue that sending children to school prompts “mandated reporters,” such as teachers and school administrators, to identify possible child abuse. But many parents choose to homeschool their children to remove them from abuse at school, whether it’s widespread bullying by peers or, tragically, rampant abuse by teachers and school administrators themselves. 
...
One of the more incorrect assertions in the article is the statement that up to 90 percent of today’s homeschooling families are “driven by conservative Christian beliefs.”

... About two-thirds of today’s nearly two million US homeschoolers identify as Christian (equal to the US population as a whole), but the homeschooling population is becoming increasingly diverse, both ideologically and demographically.
....
Much of the current growth in homeschooling is being driven by urban, secular parents who are disillusioned with a test-driven, one-size-fits-all mass schooling model and want a more individualized educational environment for their children.
....
Indeed, research on homeschoolers finds that they are tightly connected with their larger community and may have more community involvement and participation in extracurricular and volunteer activities than schooled children due to their more flexible schedules and interaction with a wide assortment of community members. This reinforces similar research on private education more broadly, suggesting positive civic engagement and outcomes.
....
While there may always be outliers and more research is needed, most peer-reviewed studies on homeschooling outcomes find that homeschoolers generally outperform their schooled peers academically, and have positive life experiences.

Those last two clips may well be the root cause of this attack by the Education Establishment against homeschooling; they're being beaten at their specialty by parents who don't have Ph.D.s in education.  The establishment is being shown to be bad at what they do and to be going about it all wrong. 

In my 10 years and over 3500 posts here, I know I've posted many times that regardless of what we spend on education at the Federal level, it has no effect on education outcomes, meaning those tests that supposedly drive everything.  (One example from early in the blog history.)

Good News Around Florida And the Southeast US

Apparently the Kung Flu doesn't like heat and humidity.  Or sunlight.  Which means there won't be a virus particle within 300 miles of me by about May 1st.   The entire Southeastern US and Gulf Coast should be free of virus by no later than July 1st.  Yahoo News carries the results from the Department of Homeland Security (of all places):

The study found that the risk of “transmission from surfaces outdoors is lower during daylight” and under higher temperature and humidity conditions. “Sunlight destroys the virus quickly,” reads the briefing.

Of course the DHS went on to say not to take them seriously and not to draw the conclusion I just did.  Do I need a disclaimer saying the same? 

Our local forecasts always include a UV index.  Today it was 8 (out of 13) during a period when it was cloudy but not actively raining.  By May 1st, the index often reads, “Fatal within 15 minutes for those not acclimated.”

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For local sightseeing, the next SpaceX launch of 60 satellites was originally announced April 16th, delayed to Wednesday afternoon the 22nd, then pushed to Thursday the 23rd, and has now been pulled back to Wednesday again, no earlier than (NET) 3:37 pm (19:37 UTC).  Today's weather brought passing tornadoes to the area, including the Cape.

Launch Update: #SpaceX launch of #Starlink 7 has been moved up a day to Wed Apr 22nd @ 3:37 p.m. EST from pad 39A according to multiple sources. The F9 was inside the hanger today as the tornado moved thru very close to the pad. No damage is reported at this time. # NASA #Space pic.twitter.com/5grF9Lq6WC 

The drone ship for booster recovery, OCISLY (Of Course I Still Love You), and nose fairing recovery ships Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief left Port Canaveral yesterday. 

A previous mission's 60 Starlink Satellites - SpaceX photo

Patriot's Day

It's a shame that Patriots' Day isn't as big a deal in the rest of the country as it is in New England, Wikipedia says it's a holiday typically observed as the third Monday in April, which usually works out to be the Monday after April 19th. They list it as being observed by

• Massachusetts
• Maine
• Connecticut (since 2018)
• Wisconsin
• North Dakota (since 2019)
• encouraged in Florida (not a state holiday)

So of the five states that have Patriots' Day as a holiday, 3/5 are in New England (Maine insists it's Patriot's Day, singular, not the plural Patriots').  On the other hand, it seems to this outsider that the people of Massachusetts and Connecticut don't vote for anything resembling the constitutional republic that began formation on that day, April 19, 1775, with their rabidly anti-gun governments.

There are several articles around worth reading.  ASM826 writing on Borepatch links to one of my favorite stories.  I heard a re-telling of this story at our Appleseed training many years ago, and recalled having heard of it in grade school but had long forgotten it.  John Richardson at No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money also has a Patriot's day article worth reading.  While there, don't miss the previous article on Paul Revere's ride.

Finally, Sam Jacobs writing for Ammo.com does an article on the day and the events leading up to it in a little more depth than usually seen. 

Tying Some Posts Together - Now With More Flashback!

This week has had a lot of content on Boeing, the FAA, and NASA; in the first case, I tried to point out that the FAA was responsible for some of the issues people bring up as Boeing problems.  There were a lot of good comments in there and reference to other regulatory agencies like the NRC. 

These are not new concepts around here, and while going through some old posts for my 10th Anniversary year I found one I wanted to reprint here.  I was only mildly surprised that I said some of the same things as I did a few days ago, almost word for word.  A bit surprisingly, the links in it are still good (two gave a 404, so I deleted one link, and the other I left for its name). 

If I Got To Dismantle The Fed.Gov

Yesterday, there was a post on The Smallest Minority, along the lines of "What's Wrong With A Little Socialism?", and commenter Jeff C. posted one of those stupid liberal things you see: a list of government programs that they obviously think are just fantastic and challenge you to say you don't want to use them.  (Most liberal philosophy is on the intellectual level of a bumper sticker; this is too long to fit on a bumper sticker, but at that same level).  Like Obama challenging the idea of faith guiding our daily decisions by quoting Leviticus (I think it was...).

But it got me thinking, despite the "tax the rich" crap we've heard so much it sickens us, we know that it's the spending.  We know, thanks to Dr. Hauser, that tax incomes remain around the same as percent of GDP regardless of tax rates - tax rates determine if the economy grows and creates opportunity for more people to improve their standard of living.  We all know that deep cuts in spending from both discretionary and the entitlement budgets have to be cut if we're going to turn this ship around.   So it got me thinking, if I were king of the forest, what would I cut? 

Some of it is easy, and you've heard it all before.  The Department of Education has not educated a single person, and needs to go.  The Department of Energy was founded to help us get independent of foreign oil, and we have become more dependent on foreign oil.  BATFE is a useless black hole of suck, and needs to go.  The tax code needs to go, and the IRS sent home.

But here's a couple that will surprise you.  I deal with a couple of "big name" agencies that have undeserved good reputations, the FCC and the FAA.  Both of these were useful at some point, but have long outlived it.  The FCC needs to be cut back to a bare bones couple of geeks who help keep services from stepping on each other, maybe monitoring the spectrum to find violators.  Originally, they provided technical direction for the development of radio and television, and helped get broadcasting started.  Now their technical side is routinely stepped on by stupid political hacks with unimaginably stupid ideas like Broadband over Powerlines while the political appointees advance insipid attempts to regulate the content of news and programming, including whether you have the required number of women and minorities.  The FCC probably hasn't done anything useful since the mid 1960s and needs to go.  Upset you saw Janet Jackson's Wardrobe Malfunction?  Complain to the network and the advertisers.  

The FAA is likewise just about useless.  When it comes to the systems that keep airplanes communicating and not flying into each other in mid-air, they leave all the technical decisions to the industry committees who define the systems, and just have you verify you meet the industry standards.  There's no reason we couldn't just report to the industry committees, with minimal changes.  Did you know that the FAA has us certify radios repeatedly, for every different aircraft they might get mounted on, and the cost to put a newer design radio on an old aircraft is so high that airlines just won't do it?  Why have standards-based acceptance if you then have to certify on each aircraft?  Why not just go to the airframe maker and prove you work on their plane?  It's needless duplication of efforts.

NASA needs to go.  This pains me for many reasons.  I grew up in the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo days and idolized them.  I've worked on a NASA satellite, for the JPL, with people who put satellites out at Jupiter.  But events this year have proven that they lost their recipe sometime long ago.  Then, of course, there's this abomination.  Buh-bye.

And don't get me started on the government takeover of student loans.  Or Amtrack.  I could do weeks on this topic.

NASA, SpaceX Set Launch Date for Manned Flight

As implied earlier in the week, NASA and SpaceX have officially set the launch date for what's called the Demo-2 mission.  The first manned launch in history to be performed by a private company, and the first launch from US soil since 2011 is now scheduled for May 27. 

Liftoff for Demo-2 is set for 4:32 p.m. EDT (2032 GMT) from NASA’s historic launch pad 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida — the same site that hosted NASA’s storied Apollo and shuttle programs.

Also as mentioned in the Tuesday post, the mission was originally intended to be a short term visit but will be extended to a longer duration mission.  NASA launched a new web page dedicated to the mission, describing it as simply “an extended stay at the space station,” for now.

Doug Hurley (foreground) and Bob Behnken working through mission simulations in the Crew Dragon simulator at SpaceX. 

Behnken and Hurley will join fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who launched to the station on April 10. Many of the details are still being ironed out, but we do know that Hurley will be the mission’s commander, and Behnken will serve as joint operations commander. Each will be tasked with specific duties during flight, with Hurley focusing on launch, landing, and recovery. Behnken will handle docking and undocking, as well as any activities while the Dragon is docked with the station.

I've been trying to find a report on the cause of the engine failure on the previous Starlink launch that prompted investigation by NASA and SpaceX.  I can't find anything authoritative, only a remark that it appears to have been a pump on the failed engine having been damaged during the T=0 abort the vehicle went through.  Supposedly, that was informally reported by Musk soon after the mission.

Why Boeing's Problems With 737 Max Aren't Just Boeing's Fault

Let me lead with my conclusion.  My opinion is that the problem is largely from Boeing’s way of dealing with the FAA’s requirements and that those laws are the root cause of this sort of problem.  This isn't surprising because in an industry as heavily regulated as aviation, the Fed.gov ends up as a partner in every decision.  Exactly who we mean by saying “Boeing” isn’t clear, either; that is, was it high level management, was it lower level management pushing optimistic (and wrong) information up the chain of command or just who?

A friend who knows I worked in the industry sent me this article on the Verge that says the reason they've been unable to fix the software for the aircraft (so far) is partly due to the ancient computers they're using.  This is what prompted this entire post.

Every 737 Max has two flight control computers. These take some of the workload off of pilots, whether that’s through full automation (such as autopilot) or through fine control adjustments during manual flight. These computers can literally fly the airplane — they have authority over major control surfaces and throttles — which means that any malfunction could turn catastrophic in a hurry. So it’s more important for manufacturers to choose hardware that’s proven to be safe, rather than run a fleet of airplanes on some cutting-edge tech with bugs that have yet to be worked out.

Boeing took that ethos to heart for the Max, sticking with the Collins Aerospace FCC-730 series, first built in 1996. Each computer features a pair of single-core, 16-bit processors that run independently of each other, which reduces computing power but also keeps a faulty processor from taking down the entire system.

While that first paragraph has a lot of truth in it, the preference for hardware that as been “proven to be safe” goes beyond preference to having strong economic incentives or disincentives.  These go so far beyond simple preference that the article is telling half the story.  The article makes passing reference to regulatory scrutiny for new hardware but doesn't truly capture the intricacies of why the FAA regulations are so expensive and so strangling.

The basic cause of the problems with the 737 Max is that it was refresh of an old aircraft; the very first of the 737 series, the 737-100, rolled out in 1965.  Aircraft do get modernized, though nowhere near as often as consumer items; the last refresh of the series, the 737 Next Gen, was over 20 years ago in 1997.  One reason for the 20 year difference is the FAA’s requirements for this sort of refresh or modernization; nothing is allowed to fly without re-certification, and re-certification is horrifically expensive.

Let me step back for a moment.  In the case of a totally new aircraft, like the 787 Dreamliner a few years before, the FAA requires that prototypes be tested to extremes and the reams of documentation be submitted and reviewed before the aircraft can be accepted for flight.  As part of the process, every system: computer, radio, hydraulics, mechanical, or whatever's on that aircraft must be certified on that aircraft.  It's a redundant test.  I’ll use the examples of the various radio systems on board because those were my specialty and I’m most familiar with the picture; those boxes are tested to conform with a group of industry standards and compliance verified with a document called a TSO (Technical Standard Order).  Then they're additionally tested to ensure they work on that aircraft.  Since the purpose of TSO testing is that every radio meets the same requirements, every TSOed radio should work on any aircraft.  That means, for example, that any manufacturer's HF radio system should be interchangeable with any other manufacturer's HF radio, if it has passed all the same TSO tests.  That’s not to say they’ll be identical; the TSO certifies compliance to what the industry considered the Minimum Operational Performance Standards and we always took pride in being better than required, but all radios that have a TSO meets those minimums.  

The FAA doesn't accept that logic, essentially insisting when everything is combined together the TSO doesn’t matter; what matters is how they play together.  This view is not that different than insisting it doesn’t matter that the boxes are assembled with interchangeable screws, what matters is that specific screws work in specific holes; it’s dismissing the idea of interchangeable parts, and ignoring the continuous improvement in manufacturing!  What that lack of accepting TSO does is lock an old aircraft, like the 737, into using whatever was certified on that aircraft for the life of that model.  If parts become obsolete and a certain system can't be bought any more, the manufacturer can't just supply a more recent model.  That requires a new round of certification tests for the new system and this applies to everything on the aircraft; from engines to electronics to doors.  Again, for example, if the first 737 was certified with a vacuum tube radio for air to ground communication, they would be required to use that vacuum tube radio as long as they manufactured a 737 or until they certified a more modern radio.

It’s difficult to understate just how big a portion this is of the costs to create a new product in aviation from the airplane itself down to every little portion of it.

That's what trapped the 737 Max.  The main reason for the new version was to improve fuel economy by putting new engines on the plane.  That was going to force some amount of retesting and certification; for example, the bigger (higher bypass) engines required longer landing gear; the longer landing gear interfered with the existing radar system on the 737, so that was replaced with a more modern radar.  That meant the bigger engines, the longer landing gear and the radar required certification tests.  You can see how this could cascade into lots of tests unless they did their best to rein in changes.  The more things that need certification, the more expenses climb and could drag out schedule for years.  The first commandment became, "Thou Shalt Change As Little As Possible":

The new engines, which were larger and heavier than the ones on the Next Generation, did indeed make the Max just as fuel-efficient as its rival. But they also disrupted the flow of air around the wings and control surfaces of the airplane in a very specific way. During high-angle climbs, this disruption would cause the control columns in the airplane to suddenly go slack, which might cause pilots to lose control of the aircraft during a dangerous maneuver.

Boeing could have fixed this aerodynamic anomaly with a hardware change: “adaptive surfaces” on the engine housing, resculpted wings, or even just adding a “stick pusher” to the controls that would push on the control column mechanically at just the right time. But hardware changes added time, cost, and regulatory scrutiny to the development process. Boeing’s management was clear: avoid changes, avoid regulators, stay on schedule — period.

The FAA's rules – these aren’t new rules, everyone knew them going in - put Boeing in a tight spot.  Boeing's management, and I don’t know exactly at what levels, compounded the situation by not recognizing that certifying a more powerful flight computer could help their software fixes.  When they got into trouble, the fixes continued to demand more performance out of software to avoid hardware re-certification, compounding the bad decision to not bite the bullet and certify a new Flight Control Computer.  It looks now like that would still be the smart thing to do, but it would fly in the face of the corporate promises so far as to when the 737 Max will be able to fly again. 

Although I worked in the industry for nearly 20 years at a contractor to Boeing, Airbus, and many smaller aircraft manufacturers, I'm basing this on my experience with other programs.  I worked on the 737 Max, but in a fairly minor role in moving the new radar system from its original use to the new plane.  I retired at the end of 2015 and have not been involved since. 

Rollout of the first (or one of) 737 Max aircraft dedicated to qualifications testing, 2015.  Also from The Verge, 2015.

Oops. Got By Me

Been working on a kind of involved post and I'm just not comfortable that it's clear enough, so it's off to the back burner so I can mull it over some more and revise, revise, revise.  Or toss.

Meanwhile, before the "Best Before Date" gets here:

Just a Little Space News

If you don't want to talk about the virus, and I don't want to talk about the virus, ditto talking the politics of the virus, it's kinda slow out there.  After all, with so many of us in lock down, it's kind of a slow news day all around.

So a couple of small news items.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine says he's “fairly confident” that astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will fly SpaceX Crew Dragon's Demo-2 mission by late May.  With a begrudging admission that it might slip into June, but probably not by much.  It was announced in March that approval for the manned mission partially depended on a resolution of why booster B1048 had an engine failure with seconds to go in its burn to place 60 Starlink satellites in orbit earlier in the month.

[Bridenstine] also stated that SpaceX’s March 18th in-flight engine failure was “not going to impact our commercial crew launch,” confirming that SpaceX already has “a really good understanding of” what went wrong. Most likely, this means that Falcon 9 B1048’s stumble was directly related to the fact that the booster was flying for the fifth time – a first for a SpaceX rocket and orbital-class rocket boosters in general. Crew Dragon Demo-2 will be Falcon 9 booster B1058’s first launch.

There are a couple of parachute tests aimed at “corner cases” - infrequent and improbable combinations of circumstances the system may be exposed to - which will be flown soon.  The last test, scheduled around the end of March, was aborted under peculiar circumstances.

During SpaceX’s most recent parachute test last month, the test rig was dropped from a helicopter prematurely after the craft became unstable over a test site in Nevada. NASA officials said the parachutes were not to blame for the botched test, and the helicopter pilot decided to release the test rig for safety reasons.

“It got unstable,” Bridenstine said. “The pilot dropped the test article, which was basically just a weight simulator. Nothing from that was recoverable, including the parachutes that were on-board. So we’ve got two more parachute tests, and now they’re going to be done out of the C-130 (cargo plane) instead of from a helicopter. We’ve got agreement from the chief engineer and the program manager, and the astronaut office, that those two parachute tests that we have remaining are good to go out of the C-130.”

You probably heard that the Russians just launched a crew of three to the International Space Station back on the 8th.  NASA’s current contract with the Russian space agency to purchase Soyuz seats for U.S. astronauts expires this year.  The commercial crew contracts were awarded to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 (this was in yesterday's column) but since both are behind the original schedule, it leaves the ISS with a crew of three instead of six until May's test flight.  Hurley and Behnken were originally scheduled for a short visit to ISS but will join the crew for an extended time.

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With the COVID-19 delay “until further notice” of the Argentinian satellite SpaceX was to have launched on March 30th, they've been shuffling around and have scheduled the next mission to launch 60 Starlink satellites.  Originally set for NET Thursday 4/16 it has now slipped into next week, tentatively Wednesday the 22nd; that's right: Erf day.   This will be the third flight of booster B1051. 

Booster 1051's first mission was to launch the first Crew Dragon test flight last March, which sort of ties these two stories together.

Boeing Continues Their Fall From Acceptance

A news item on Ars Technica last Friday opened with a quote from NASA's acting chief of human spaceflight, Ken Bowersox, that probably caused collective shivers in the halls of all the big Defense/big Government contractors:

“... I have decided to eliminate Boeing from further award consideration.”

Let's start with the Boeing 737 Max.  Everyone knows those stories, that the most recent model of one of the most successful Air Transport aircraft has been grounded for a year after two crashes that killed 346 people between them, collectively making for the worst air disaster since September 11, 2001.

I wasn't aware of the issues with the company's KC-46 Pegasus tanker program, which is $3 billion over budget, three years behind schedule, and beset by technical issues.  In March, the Air Force revealed that it had upgraded chronic leaks in the aircraft's fuel system to a Category I deficiency. This is a problem for an aircraft that is supposed to perform aerial refueling.

Of course, we've covered the deficiencies in the Starliner capsule test flights here (one, two, three, four) along with the fact that Boeing is the prime contractor for the Space Launch System, which is several years late and billions of dollars over budget. 

Since December, the company's space issues have also become more widely known following the failure of the company's Starliner capsule to successfully carry out a test flight to the International Space Station. NASA labelled this aborted mission, during which the spacecraft was nearly lost two times, a "high visibility close call." The company has agreed to perform a second test flight without crew to assure NASA of Starliner's safety.

The SLS was supposed to fly by 2017, but now is likely to be No Earlier Than 2021.

The article on ARS summarizes Boeing's meteoric fall from grace with NASA and is worth a read.  I'll extract some highlights here.

But a new document released by NASA reveals the broader scope of Boeing's apparent decline in spaceflight dominance. The "source selection statement" from NASA explains the space agency's rationale for selecting SpaceX over three other companies—Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Sierra Nevada Corporation—to deliver large supplies of cargo to lunar orbit. NASA announced its selection of SpaceX for this "Gateway Logistics" contract in late March. The selection document says that SpaceX provided the best technical approach and the lowest price by a "significant" margin.
...
When comparing the selection rationale for the 2014 commercial crew contracts with the rationale for the recent Gateway logistics contract, the perception of Boeing's offering could not be more stark. In 2014, Boeing was very much perceived as the gold-standard—expensive, yes, but also technically masterful. In 2020, the company was still perceived as expensive but not ultimately worthy of consideration.
...
Six years later, the perception of Boeing's bid for the lunar cargo contract is much changed. Of the four contenders, it had the lowest overall technical and mission suitability scores. In addition, Boeing's proposal was characterized as "inaccurate" and possessing no "significant strengths." Boeing also was cited with a "significant weakness" in its proposal for pushing back on providing its software source code.

Due to its high price and ill-suited proposal for the lunar cargo contract, NASA didn't even consider the proposal among the final bidders. In his assessment late last year, NASA's acting chief of human spaceflight, Ken Bowersox, wrote, "Since Boeing’s proposal was the highest priced and the lowest rated under the Mission Suitability factor, while additionally providing a conditional fixed price, I have decided to eliminate Boeing from further award consideration."

NASA itself is in danger of the same collapse.  Looking over 10 year old blog entries, as I've been doing, I recently came across one from 2010 where I advocated shuttering the agency.  I thought they were nothing but an arthritic bureaucracy back then.  But NASA is still relatively admired among government agencies by the public and is currently working with new intensity to meet President Trump's goal of returning America to the moon to stay by 2024.

It is notable that the most likely scenario involves launching crew and a lander on the same rocket, which would require Boeing to both complete the Space Launch System rocket's core stage—under development for nearly a decade now—as well as a brand-new second stage called the Exploration Upper Stage before then.

I lump Boeing getting the SLS and the new EUS flying in time in the "Fat Frickin' Chance" category ("only he didn't say frickin'").  While America seems to largely still admire NASA, the advent of commercial space and SpaceX's emergence as a dominant force in the world's launch industry seems to be getting people to see that commercial companies are results-oriented, while NASA is a typical government income redistribution project, and many in NASA see that as the agency's purpose, where tax money is spread among lots of congressional districts to ensure the program can't be killed. 

Boeing's Starliner capsule after the early end of its December mission.  I'm not going to bet this was Boeing's last launch, but I wouldn't be terribly shocked if it proved be their second to last.  They say there's nothing more permanent than a temporary Government program, but NASA's last few years may have broken the SLS's lock on congress.

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Side Note:  Not a big story in terms of things to say, but Rocket Lab, the New Zealand small satellite launch company I've talked about several times, successfully achieved helicopter recovery of one of their Electron boosters.  They're not landing on a ship or concrete pad with engines blazing like a Falcon 9, but adding re-usability has to lower cost and make them a better competitor.  Video here.

Happy Easter!

On the most peculiar Easter of our lifetimes, I thought it was time to re-dress my annual Easter post and drop some of the links that were too old.  Part of my usual posting is hard to drop, because it's part of my personal conversion story, so those parts will still be here.

Coming from my background, it was a large change.  I had studied biochemistry and microbiology in college from the fall after high school through my third year before life imposed some detours, eventually getting my degree and starting life as an engineer.  I had been an avid amateur astronomer from age 12 so between biology and astronomy, I was deeply marinated in the standard model of Cosmology as well as conventional biological evolutionary theory.  Frankly, like the vast majority of students, I wasn't giving it much thought any longer, but my wife had re-affirmed her faith (she had first accepted Christ as child) and I was having all of my mental models disrupted.  She had started a subscription to Bibical Archaeology Review and the constant refrain from archaeologists, not religiously motivated, along the lines of "we thought this was old Jewish folklore, but here it is" got me thinking "if that's true, maybe there's more that's true."  Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ then played a role in filling in the gaps in my historical knowledge. 

Easter is the most important day in Christianity and far more important than Christmas because of the resurrection.  Everyone has a birthday, but only one man in history has been resurrected.  So since virtually everyone, including honest atheists, agrees Jesus was a real man in history (Jesus' existence is better attested in ancient sources than that of Julius Caesar - but no one claims Julius was not a real person) and died on the cross, the question becomes whether or not it can be verified that Christ was seen after the resurrection by someone other than the closest circle of disciples. Strobel says:

Did anyone see Jesus alive again? I have identified at least eight ancient sources, both inside and outside the New Testament, that in my view confirm the apostles’ conviction that they encountered the resurrected Christ. Repeatedly, these sources stood strong when I tried to discredit them.

Could these encounters have been hallucinations? No way, experts told me. Hallucinations occur in individual brains, like dreams, yet, according to the Bible, Jesus appeared to groups of people on three different occasions – including 500 at once!

In the end, after I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.

For a great examination of this, see the 2016 post "Five Confounding Facts About Jesus' Resurrection" at Sense of Events. Donald Sensing put together an excellent piece; simply put, it's preposterous to reconcile the events of that time without saying Jesus rose from the dead that Sunday.  Last year, Sensing outdid himself with several days worth of posts on the historical Jesus, including a rather long piece on exactly why Pontius Pilate executed Jesus.  This is followed by articles put together by working scientists, "Can A Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?" and "Is Belief in the Resurrection Unscientific?"

The other religions of the world are about ritual and ultimately about self, about proving yourself worthy; Christianity is about grace.  You're not worthy on your best day; you're saved by Grace.  No other religion teaches Grace.  Islam teaches that Allah is unknowable.  Christianity teaches that not only is God knowable, he wants us to know him.  Islam doesn't teach salvation, it teaches servitude to a fickle, arbitrary, distant Allah.  Christianity teaches forgiveness by Grace; that you're given a gift you don't deserve by a God who wants a close personal relationship with us.  I like the way the Message translation talks about being saved by Grace (Ephesians 2: 8)

It's God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. 

Evolution vs. creation? I believe people pay way too much attention to this.  There's no mention of evolution in the bible, but there's no mention of the laws of thermodynamics, Avogadro's number,  relativity or thousands of other such things.  The bible isn't a science book.  Look at it this way: the creation story, how we got here, takes up a page.  The next thousand pages (or more, depending on font size, paper size, and so on) are concerned with how we treat each other while we're here; how we create and maintain a civil society.  Creation is clearly not the emphasis of the book, the other 99.999% is.  It's interesting that the vocal objections to conventional evolution are coming from the Physics and Math departments - the outsiders.   

Saying a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum exploded creating everything sounds remarkably like "Let there be light", especially if someone were trying to explain the standard model of cosmology to people who were mathematically at the level of today's preschoolers.  You got a better way to explain modern physics to kindergartners? 

Enjoy your day.  Enjoy your families. Instead of the usual pork butt I've got a rack of spare ribs going into the smoker.

Shop Update for the Week

I've been doing shop updates on my little engine project on roughly a weekly basis, and since it fills the gaps with the slowdown in Space activities just up the road, it seems to fit. 

Last week, I was talking about making a fixture to drill a couple of critical holes across the piston; that part I've been working on entirely too long.  I felt pretty confident that would work but wondered if that wasn't overcomplicating things.  The alignment relies on two features being aligned; could I eyeball them into proper alignment?  The features are a slot in the piston being horizontal and two tapped holes being vertical.  All of those features are visible in last week's post.

So I spent several hours experimenting, taking pictures and trying to measure how close to properly aligned things were.  I used a gauge pin (.250 diameter) standing on end and then the spotting drill, looking at the picture under magnification and trying to see if lines between the objects looked adequate.  They sure seemed to:

The pin is just a little to far to the left in this shot, the hazard of setting this up by eye and the reason I used the magnification and lines drawn on the photos for reference. 

Once I convinced myself that this method of alignment was close enough, the actual drilling took nowhere near as much time, and I finished the piston in a an hour.

As a side note, it never ceases to amaze me just how dirty things really are that I've just spent time and effort cleaning to get them ready for pictures like this.   You should see the inside of this piston. 

There's a couple of parts that need to be finished for the piston.  The first is the wrist pin that goes in that big hole and through the piston, that's a piece of standard dimension steel rod that gets cut to length and a couple of flats milled on the ends for the setscrews that hold everything together.  The small hole gets a piece of 3/32" diameter brass tubing to carry oil into the piston from an external oil cup.  Since I don't have any tubing like that, I chucked up a piece of 1/8" brass rod, trimmed the diameter to .094 to match the hole and drilled a 1/16" hole along its long direction.  The wrist pin is held in a connecting rod, and I've cut a rough-sized blank to make the conn. rod from.

I mistakenly made the one on the left too long, and in parts this small, it's easier to start over and make another properly.  That's the one on the right.

And that's the state of things today.  A slow pace but much faster than the months when I didn't get near the shop.

Saying, "That's the Most Stupid Thing I've Ever Seen" is Not a Challenge

A week ago, I saw the story of man being arrested while out alone on a paddleboard, nowhere near another person, for violating social distancing rules.  He might have come within 25 feet of a pier.  And so, because a lifeguard ordered him off the water and he either didn't know, didn't hear or just didn't comply, police boats were scrambled to arrest him.  In which the police had to violate social distancing to get close enough to touch him for coming within a couple of hundred feet of a pier. 

Seriously, when we say, “that's the most stupid thing I've ever seen”, the police have got to stop saying, “hold my beer.”

Take Wednesday night services at Temple Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi.  As they've been doing, they were holding services over Low Power FM radio.  The churchgoers were in their cars, listening to the teaching on the radio when police arrived and ordered everyone to leave.  Those who questioned that were handed $500 fines.  That story link is from theBlaze, linked to the Delta Democrat-Times.

Lee Gordon — a 23-year member of the church as well as a representative for the Washington County Board of Supervisors — told the Democrat-Times the church has been using a low-power FM frequency to broadcast sermons in the parking lot for the last three weeks.

"The preacher is in the church at the pulpit, and we are streaming the service live as well," Gordon added to the paper. "But a lot of our membership is elderly and [lacks access to streaming technology]."

Gordon told the Democrat-Times he and his wife were among those gathered in the church parking lot — and figured they all were abiding by the coronavirus social distancing guidelines given they were in their cars with the windows rolled up.

But that wasn't the case — and they paid for it.

Gordon told the paper he and his wife were both issued $500 tickets.

I should note that Mr. Gordon said the police "were respectful and just doing their job. They asked us to leave first, and those who stayed got a ticket."  

(Bad quality screen capture from YouTube, posted on The Blaze)  The article explains the sole occupant of that car is a retired nurse.  Clearly the only person within 6 feet of that vehicle is the officer giving out tickets.

The arguments are just as inane as you'd think.  The Mayor of Greenville says “It's all about trying to save lives,” and “gatherings of 10 or more people have been banned in the city for more than three weeks,” but it's hard for me to grasp why having several cars with people in them constitutes a public gathering.  Perhaps if the cars were door to door with the windows open, you could violate six feet social distance, but everyone says they had their windows up.  (I don't know about Greenville, Mississippi, but around here you'd have your windows up, your car idling and your air conditioner on!)  

Despite getting the $500 fine, County Board of Supervisors member Mr. Gordon says,

"There's 25 cars 200 yards away all in the same place at the Sonic Drive-In. What we're doing endangers nobody," he said.

Frankly, that makes it sound to me like the Mayor got his panties in a bunch because he thought the church was defying him.  

Resilience and the Total Cost of Coronavirus

In my mind, I've been beating the drum of more resilience in our systems for a while, but a quick check of the page with Windows Control-F only shows the word twice, in my article on toilet paper and chicken wings.  Maybe it's just in my mind and I haven't talked about it here so much as with other people or I'm just seeing the same problem of our systems being too specialized over and over again.

Just this weekend, I saw that dairy farmers were dumping milk for the same reason there's glut on restaurant chicken wings and a shortage of grocery store toilet paper.  The retail stores are short of milk and milk products but the restaurant and service sector is overflowing with the stuff and the system can't adjust fast enough.  Today I heard many livestock ranchers are in a double bind, too. Smithfield, the giant meat processor (bacon, ham, sausages...) closed its processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. 

Smithfield harvests more pigs per year than South Dakota's roughly 900 hog farmers raise, which means its closure will have ripple effects across the region, reaching into southwestern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa, said Glenn Muller, executive director of the South Dakota Pork Producers.

Muller estimates Smithfield harvests roughly 5 million hogs a year, or 19,000 to 20,000 a day.

"That’s a huge, huge concern if we lose that capability," Muller said. "To not only our producers but to maintain that food supply."

Will all those 20,000 hogs per day go to waste?  Beef producers are also facing a pinch.  Feed is going up in price, prices for the cattle are going down and they're afraid of having cattle on hand and no place to sell it to.  The Midwest is in the midst of planting season and is worried they can't plant enough and won't be able to get enough help to harvest it.  It seems likely that food shortages are coming. 

It seems to me that the economic damage being wrought here by the Kung Flu dramatically overshadows the health damages.  Don't get me wrong; it's clearly a tragedy that nearly 16,500 people in the country have died from the disease, I just wouldn't be surprised if 5 to 10 times more than that die as a result of our reaction to it.

At an "away game", a comment to Borepatch, I noted my (most likely rather unusual) way of looking at this.

The total annual death rate is around 7800 peeps/day (2018 data from CDC) - which includes the flu. Not all of those are in hospitals because some are fatalities or suicides cleaned up by first responders, but most are hospitalized. Suicides and injuries account for about 680 deaths per day, putting the total closer to 7100 On top of whatever number that is, we've added around 1200/day, about 17% increase. Is our system so fragile that we can't handle a 17% overload?

That said, it's not the same everywhere and some cities and hospitals are worse off than others. Some are getting more than 17% overload and some may have fewer deaths than [a typical] year.

Later on in the comments, Aesop from Raconteur Report answered my rhetorical question with, "hell yeah,"

You've leaned it out, like airlines, to the point that if it's not running at >90% most days, it goes broke.
There's no surge capacity, and they can't survive financially with 80% occupancy and 80% staff.
(Who do you know that's willing to sit around idle 20% of their working year?)
So it's high 90s, most days and times.
Thus little stretch if catastrophe strikes.

In my view, this is the result of planners applying "Just in Time" inventory management to hospital beds and equipment in the name of efficiency.  A fundamental in setting up a company is the trade-off between efficiency and responsiveness.  When you walk into the post office and waste your 20 minutes in line, it's because they're being efficient.  You wait on them.  When you need a doctor or the ambulance, just like the police or the ambulance service, you want responsiveness; you want them to be waiting on you.  Back right after Trump's election, I wrote a piece saying, "God Save Us from Efficient Medicine" where I went into more of this.

Yeah, I don't claim to know the optimum solution for balancing steady state demand vs. peak demand in hospitals or other parts of the medical world, I just know we need a better balance.  For all the years in industry I worked in a Just In Time inventory system, I called it, Just Missed It inventory.  The company, thankfully, realized it and over-ordered some supplies based on how often they were defective.  Extra capacity equals resilience.  I see a place for food distributors that would make agreements with both retail grocers and restaurant chains so that the food supply could be shifted a bit between the end markets if conditions necessitate.  I'm not sure, but I'd think that after a hurricane when parts of the state are on 3 weeks without power, that those areas experience an increase in restaurant demand compared to grocery stores. The same sort of business needs to be looked at in all these markets. 

The problem as I see it is we're not tracking any of the impacts of shutting down the country and just tracking how well we protected the health care system from collapse due to an increased workload.  There are many reports going around about increases in calls to suicide hotlines and telephone counseling facilities as more and more people face depressing situations.  There are anecdotal reports of increased calls to domestic violence agencies.  The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, reported an 891% increase in calls over last year.  Doctors are reporting fewer patients in Emergency Rooms for heart problems and other typical conditions they treat and doctors think patients are staying at home when they think they're having a heart attack instead of going to the Emergency Room.  This isn't good.

In New York City, the number of people dying at home has surged in recent weeks to about 200 a day, compared with about 22 to 32 deaths during the same time frame last year, according to the New York City Fire Department’s data on cardiac arrest calls.
...
Nearly 68% of cardiologists who responded to an informal Twitter poll posted this month by Angioplasty.org, an online community of cardiologists, said they have been seeing at least 40% fewer cases.

I know that when this topic comes up, the leftist wokescolds start to say, "you only care about money!  You don't value life!"  The answer is that the country is only looking at how many lives we're helping in one very specific place and totally ignoring the much, much larger group that's being impacted by these policies.  We can't put a price on it because it's impossible to know how many lives we've saved.

What if we're losing one life for every life we're saving?  What if it's more than that?  You might object, but how do you know without measured data?  Remember, they eliminated all elective surgeries.  My wife's cancer surgeries were considered elective, would she be sitting with me if those were put off three or six months?  How many people will die because of that?  With apparently millions of businesses closing that's going to affect healthcare as well as all retail businesses.  How many people will die because of that?  What about the millions of workers who have no place to go back to? 

(ShutterStock, but used at the NY Daily News.)

CNC Can Be Fun

As we approach Easter, many peoples' thoughts turn to chocolate bunnies; especially if they've been quarantined away from the chocolate.  Not many dream of 6' tall chocolate bunnies, but these guys at Autodesk carve a giant chocolate bunny with multi-axis manufacturing robots.



Video posted for Easter 2018.

Sometimes the projects are simpler and more modestly sized.  It still used both a 5-axis CNC and a 3D Printer, which is, after all, another CNC machine.

Meanwhile... Boeing To Redo Failed Starliner Test from December

It probably won't surprise any readers that after the troubles (one, two, three) with last December's Starliner capsule mission (unmanned), Boeing has committed to flying another mission to show their manned capsule can work.  The announcement came Monday evening. 

"We are committed to the safety of the men and women who design, build and ultimately will fly on the Starliner just as we have on every crewed mission to space," Boeing said in a statement. "We have chosen to refly our Orbital Flight Test to demonstrate the quality of the Starliner system. Flying another uncrewed flight will allow us to complete all flight test objectives and evaluate the performance of the second Starliner vehicle at no cost to the taxpayer."

Readers will remember that the flight only met the lowest level objectives that were set for it.  It never achieved an orbit that would allow the Starliner to dock with the Space Station, and the week long mission was shortened to two days.  In the aftermath, several potentially disastrous software problems were found.  That's when it hit the fan.

...This led NASA's chief of human spaceflight, Doug Loverro, to designate the December flight a "high-visibility close call" in March.

Asked to explain why he did this, Loverro told reporters at the time, "We could have lost a spacecraft twice during this mission." As a result of this, NASA has begun to investigate Boeing's safety culture. The agency also formally opened a process during which its Safety Office will investigate space-agency elements that may have led to the incident—likely focusing on why NASA did not detect the errors in Starliner's flight software.

Boeing says they will pay for this mission in its entirety, for which it budgeted $410 million.  No date has been given for the flight, even a preliminary "No Earlier Than" (NET) estimate.  Sources to Ars Technica say to expect it no earlier than next fall. 

That means that SpaceX could potentially fly more than one of their Crew Dragon missions to the ISS before Boeing is able to fly a manned Starliner mission - I expect that would be NET than early 2021. 

All of this subject to the additional restrictions and re-scheduling of everything, everywhere due to the virus pandemic. 

Starliner test vehicle on the pad, 12/19/19. Trevor Mahlmann photo.

SpaceX's Latest Starliner Failure Was Most Likely Not the Problem

According to Elon Musk, as quoted by Telsarati the buckling collapse and failure of SN3 in its second set of tests was likely due to test design error or operator error.  I didn't cover the story of the test failure over the weekend since I saw it in a few places and figured most people knew it happened but there was no coverage of why until today.

On April 3rd, SpaceX initiated the third full-scale Starship prototype’s first cryogenic (ultra-cold) pressure test by loading the ~30m (100 ft) tall rocket’s upper propellant tank with what was likely 400+ metric tons (~900,000 lb) of liquid nitrogen. For several hours, liquid nitrogen – a chemically-neutral propellant simulant – was loaded and offloaded several times. Finally, around 2:07 am local (07:07 UTC), the liquid oxygen tank below the methane tank abruptly crumpled, reminiscent of a plastic bottle with the air partially sucked out of it. After several long seconds of gradual crumpling, gravity did what gravity does and pulled the heavy upper tank to the ground, shredding the rest of the rocket’s thin steel skin.

Both unfortunate and a positive development, Musk has recently confirmed Teslarati’s earlier speculation that based on videos of the anomaly, a bad test design and operator error(s) – rather than a technical fault of the rocket itself – could have been the cause of Starship SN3’s failure. In other words, barring future operator error-related failures, Starship SN3’s second cryogenic test went quite well and should mean no delays to Starship SN4’s ongoing assembly.

This two minute (1:55) video from NASA Spaceflight shows the critical moments and the buckling failure of the lower portion of the Starship, the liquid oxygen tank, in the first 20 seconds of video.

In his explanation, Musk revealed that the rocket failed because the lower (liquid oxygen) tank had not been pressurized enough to withstand the stress of a methane tank fully loaded with liquid nitrogen. Musk’s description almost makes it sound like one or several people failed to account for the fact that liquid nitrogen is nearly 25% heavier than the cryogenic methane it was simulating.

As the quotes from the article mention, construction of Serial Number 4 is well underway.  Musk said that they would examine and possibly reuse the thrust section of SN3.  Eric Ralph at Teslarati notes that based on some construction steps during the construction of SN3, he concludes that SN4 is four weeks behind SN3, so four weeks away from the launch pad. Assuming the same speed of production, assembly, and outfitting, of course.  Of course, everyone is hoping to see them mount these raptor engines on the Starship and have it hop around the south Texas beach, just like Starhopper did last summer. 

SpaceX photo on Elon Musk's Twitter page

Shop Update - the Webster

Last Saturday, we talked about my Webster internal combustion engine and the issues I had with the piston and rings.  Thanks to comments from and conversation with both Raven and Ritchie, I realized I had a defective mental picture of how piston rings function.  Based on that, I enlarged the piston ring grooves a few thousandths in both directions.  The grooves were made deeper, so that the test ring pieces (from the two I broke getting out of the piston) moved around easily in the grooves and if I pressed the ring down into the groove, I could feel the step up onto the piston with a fingernail.

The piston has a handle, a half-inch diameter, couple of inch long piece barely visible on the left in this picture, held between the chuck jaws.  That's not part of the piston design, it was just there to make it easy to work on.  Now that I was willing to accept the piston, it was time to turn the piston around, part off the handle and start to work on the back side, which has a few features.  While it was turned around, I took out a bit of metal with a drill bit and then the biggest end mill I can put in the lathe's tailstock.

Next, I needed to make a fixture to hold the piston tight in my vise without marring it. I took a piece of scrap aluminum and made a hole in it that's about .003 bigger than the piston, then slit the whole fixture in half lengthwise so that the two halves would be perpendicular to the vise jaws and clamp onto the piston. I had the piston wrapped with a piece of soda can, also aluminum about .004 thick.  When I squeeze this just by hand strength, it doesn't want to close. In the vise, it works as intended.

This is the back of the piston with a groove for the piston's connecting rod to rotate and work.  There's a pair of 4-40 holes on either side that hold a pin that the connecting rod moves on - called the wrist pin (Wikipedia tells me the real name is a Gudgeon pin).

The piston is now close to being finished with its machining with the exception that it needs two holes drilled through it.  If you take the horizontal axis, where the fixture is split, as one axis, a hole gets drilled fully across the piston a little forward of where the piston is held in this fixture parallel to the top of the fixture.  That hole is 3/16" or 0.188 diameter, and has to be precisely sized (a reamed hole, not just drilled).  Perpendicular to that hole, along an axis from the top of the frame to bottom, is a smaller hole, 3/32" or 0.094, for a small oiling tube.  That hole is on only one side of the piston.

In other words, I need a way to hold the piston in two orientations in the vise jaws with it lying parallel to the floor of the vise.  The piston will be oriented more like the picture on the top here, probably except for the solid top being on the left in the vise, not the right like on the lathe.  The first orientation is with that slot visible in the middle of the piston parallel to the floor of the vise to drill the 0.188 hole, and then rotate it 90 degrees so that slot is perpendicular to the floor of the vise, for the small tube

I've thought about this and don't have a real feel for how accurate those angles have to be.  I know that for any deviation from perfection in the wrist pin's holes the piston will rotate in the bore a small amount as it goes back and forth in the cylinder. That wobble would add to losses or inefficiency in the engine.  Some playing around in 3D CAD gives a fixture that could be made from a scrap of 1/2" thick aluminum bar.  The section that plugs into the slot in the piston is obvious.  Those surfaces on the rectangular section become reference surfaces that I can count on to align the piston for drilling in the right places. 

 
On the other hand, it might be acceptable to just eyeball the alignment and the position of the pin with respect to that slot will be fixed by the setscrews anyway.

No. Just No, the Coronavirus Was Not Caused by 5G Cellular

While poking around on some links on the Kung Flu, Mrs. Graybeard stumbled onto a thread of news stories that are so frankly insane that they just can't be responded to.  People are trying to burn down what they think are 5G Cellular towers because they believe the virus is caused by 5G.  If they believe there's a virus at all and it's not just the 5G.  From Sky News in the UK:

Several videos claiming to show 5G towers on fire were posted to a page on Facebook which was created on Thursday and taken down by the platform on Friday.

Campaign group The Centre For Countering Digital Hate said the first footage was posted to Instagram by a local man under the name of paddymann123 at 10pm and was viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
...
A different video posted on Twitter on Thursday, showing two men installing 5G cables under a road being berated by a woman claiming that 5G kills people, received 1.6 million views on Twitter.

They also posted this scorecard of 5G towers to be destroyed.

A computer gamer's  website called Respawn First covers some background on the story, “"5G Sucks Oxygen From Lungs" and Causes Corona - Bonkers Conspiracy Theory”

5G is being tested around the world as we speak but there are conspiracy theories that claim that 5G is the cause of COVID-19, the Corona Virus. The theory also suggests that 5G sucks the oxygen from the lungs and causes people to drop dead. If this can even be called a theory. Interestingly people are actually believing this.

They include a Twitter video from a Britt Twit who doesn't exactly say 5G sucks the oxygen out.  She says it causes the hemoglobin molecules in blood cells to be unable to bond to oxygen and carry it.  Which makes just as much sense and has just as much evidence as radio sucking oxygen out of the lungs. 

There are people saying the Coronavirus is fake, that it's a plan to wipe out the population carried out by Bill Gates.  Unlike Ted Turner or other self-declared heroes of the environment, I've never seen anyone quote Bill saying he wants to kill off 95% of humanity.  The argument is that Wuhan had their 5G network operable last November and then people started dying.  Therefore it's not the “fake ass virus”, it's the 5G, so I guess there's no such thing as coincidence in the world?  Good thing nobody told them places in South Korea and the US had 5G systems running before Wuhan did, so if it was 5G, the disease would have been in those places first, not in China. 

A guy I used to work with had a saying for times when someone in discussion brought up the most irrational things you'd ever heard; “you just can't argue with logic like that” and you really can't argue with people saying things like that.  Anyone who would say a virus that can be seen in an electron microscope isn't real, or say that viruses in general aren't real, isn't going to understand your evidence and their standards for what constitutes evidence will leave you speechless. 

Among the Lessons Learned from COVID-19

A friend sent me a link to this story on Marker, a part of Medium, called “What Everyone's Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage.”  The author's perspective is one that has been showing up in various places lately and I think is one of the early, big lessons from the Kung Flu outbreak.

His main point is that the toilet paper shortage's root cause isn't panic-buying, it's not irrational, it's global and not unique to the US or states undergoing a surge in cases.  Instead, it's a completely natural result that should have been expected - and may have been among some experts.

There’s another, entirely logical explanation for why stores have run out of toilet paper — one that has gone oddly overlooked in the vast majority of media coverage. It has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with supply chains. It helps to explain why stores are still having trouble keeping it in stock, weeks after they started limiting how many a customer could purchase.

In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports.

Peter Grant over at Bayou Renaissance Man shared a story back on March 30th that's the same basic issue, only it's the food supply and not toilet paper.

Most consumers are not aware food consumption in the U.S. is now a 50/50 proposition. Approximately 50% of all food was consumed “outside the home” (or food away from home), and 50% of all food consumed was food “inside the home” (grocery shoppers).

Food ‘outside the home’ includes: restaurants, fast-food locales, schools, corporate cafeterias, university lunchrooms, manufacturing cafeterias, hotels, food trucks, park and amusement food sellers and many more.  Many of those venues are not thought about when people evaluate the overall U.S. food delivery system; however, this network was approximately 50 percent of all food consumption on a daily basis.

The ‘food away from home‘ sector has its own supply chain.  Very few restaurants and venues (cited above) purchase food products from retail grocery outlets.   As a result of the coronavirus mitigation effort the ‘food away from home’ sector has been reduced by half of daily food delivery operations, possibly more.  However, people still need to eat.

The parallels are interesting: the industrial toilet paper is different from the home market TP and food for the restaurant industry is packaged differently than food for the grocery store.  

Talk to anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you the toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets, rather than in brightly branded packs of six or 12.

Of course, it's not universally true that businesses use those huge rolls; there are commercial dispensers that hold two more conventionally-sized rolls and many small businesses are in small buildings with a single bathroom and they use grocery-store type paper, not the stuff that comes on pallets.

The food industry is likewise facing problems with distribution.  Notably, there's a surplus of chicken wings.  The wholesale price of chicken wings has dropped from $1.60/lb to $1.25, and that's blamed on the cancellation of March Madness and the end of the NBA season; there's no sports to watch at a sports bar while munching on wings.  You may have heard that Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest single day for wing consumption, but the industry says that since March Madness runs over the course of a month, more wings are consumed then.  The industry was primed for the biggest four weeks of the year when social distancing hit.

What happens to all these wings? Companies are hoping that if the price goes lower and lower, someone is bound to buy the stock. Because these are sold wholesale, it’s not exactly packaged retail ready for supermarkets. Unless a supermarket has staff willing to bag the wings, no consumer is looking to buy chicken wings in bulk. So, that’s pretty much out of the question.

In addition, wings served in restaurants rarely come with the wing tip, and are just the drumette and flat or wingette, usually cut apart.  The wings in our regular grocery store are all three parts still connected.  Looking around the grocery store, commodities like rice, beans and pasta are in limited quantities.  My impression is these are small packages in a retail chain, and somewhere wholesalers are backed up with huge bags of them.

The CEO of a fruit and vegetable supplier told NPR’s Weekend Edition that schools and restaurants are canceling their banana orders, while grocery stores are selling out and want more. The problem is that the bananas he sells to schools and restaurants are “petite” and sold loose in boxes of 150, whereas grocery store bananas are larger and sold in bunches. Beer companies face a similar challenge converting commercial keg sales to retail cans and bottles.

Without a major interruption to the ways of doing business, it seems all of our supply chains have become too optimized for the normal flow of business and are ill prepared for the changes this has brought; they don't exhibit resilience.  You need look no farther than our dependence on Chinese production of antibiotics and most of our pharmaceuticals.  There are stories that ships bearing exports to the US were ordered turned back by the Chinese government when they realized they needed the supplies on those ships more than they need the dollars from selling them. 

 “The normal distribution system is like a well-orchestrated ballet,” said Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School. “If you make a delivery to a Walmart distribution center, they give you a half-hour window, and your truck has to show up then.” The changes wrought by the coronavirus, he said, “have thrown the whole thing out of balance, and everything has to readjust.”

Under normal conditions, this is wonderful.  It's the kind of optimization maximizing value that free markets produce.  Automatic (or undirected, free market) optimizations are fine, but sometimes when working with optimization for certain problems, we find that we need to push the optimizer to look for solutions it can't find on its own.  It seems that some effort, some direction aimed at creating more resilience in the supply chain is needed.

Crispy baked garlic Parmesan wings “Serving suggestion”  (This was dinner tonight)