Speech, blogging, energy, employment

I have been fantasizing about how to provide jobs for all those 15 million Americans that are underemployed. My previous post "Some ways to expand the nation's skill set and knowledge base" http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2011/02/some-ways-to-expand-nations-skill-set.html seemed to strongly approach that potential, enabling all folks with home internet access to participate in a nationwide manufacturing system; but there would still be lots of folks left out. Even the homeless folks seeking some kind of work need to be included in the "everybody gets a job" idea. My fantasizing today came up with making a declaration that all under-employed people are automatically volunteers for increasing American productivity; but, the recent health insurance thing has pointed out that it may not be wise to set a precedent for saying all people are any particular thing, since some future tyrant political party might misuse such a principle. So I tempered it with the hypothesis that America could offer every American, every person in America, continuous opportunity to register as a member of a "everybody gets a job" system. I'd think that everybody could have a job found for them that they could do, no matter how handicapped the person is. 90 years old, wheelchair bound, severely autistic, paraplegic, whoever, ought to be able to do something productive and interesting to them, however tiny a task.

A thought now is that the conventional business system might take offense at such a thing, believing that a vast pool of desperate people seeking work, is needed to provide them cheap workers for their businesses, so as to maximize their business profit. But all they would have to do is offer the person a better job with adequate pay and benefits, to get the worker, I would think; thus make a little less profit but provide the worker with a better life as a result. Maybe this violates some principle of doing business (I recall the Ferengi's book of business principles in a Star Trek series; as well as the old saying "never give a sucker an even break") but I think as a whole Americans are better than that.

Anyway, this post is to celebrate President Obama's recent address http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/05/weekly-address-winning-future-through-american-innovation which covers a huge number of the things I have urged for decades, although offers different solutions in most cases. America needs to wean herself of most of foreign oil that saps tens of billions of dollars out of our economy every year so as to push our cars and trucks around and run the lights; so we need to diversify our energy sources to provide resiliency in our economy, since we are quite dependent on "energy" to do the muscle work that runs our civilization, no longer dependent on human and animal muscles to do stuff.

Putting people and innovators to the task of providing energy to America, is surely a useful way to put people to work. Some people say that America ought to do without those energy options unless they are done by private industry - but private industry has not been doing the job, no doubt due to the mandate to make the most profit right away, and much of that involves spending it on petrochemical energy sources, both here and offshore, business as usual stuff, nevermind the big picture effects on America and her people. Thus it won't get done, unless a bigger entity teams us all up to get it done, and that is commonly known as 'government". We all pool a part of our income to finance our greater causes, both long and short term; this is called "taxes."

China has outstripped America in the solar power field; no doubt China is as keenly in need of multiple and abundant energy sources as we are, but our local companies are not producing solar power panels, because China is eager to do it, and is supported by government financing so as to keep the price down, defeating the productivity in countries with no government support of the industry. Rooftop solar panels are probably not the major answer for our energy needs, but they can provide some of it while also offering a bit of energy in emergencies when the primary power systems fail for awhile. Wind turbines have the potential to put energy into a pool of primary power systems, as well as wave and tidal energy systems, geothermals too. Nuclear fission power stations have long been touted as if the only needed source of electrical energy; coal fired power generating plants continue to provide most of our energy here in America.

I won't dwell much again here on my own concept for an energy-supported centrifugal transportation structure system for building and maintaining abundant Solar Power Stations in geostationary earth orbit in this blog post, but that potential for the near or further future ought to be enough to ensure the continued exercise of space technologies. Those solar power satellites could obsolete even the nuclear power stations along with coal burning plants, but right now, business profits are rolling in for businesses by keeping things like they are. I also won't harp on the vision tha nature sequestered the carbon long ago in the form of coal and gas and frozen methane deep under the surface of the earth so that life could have an abundant oxygen atmosphere for high energy life to exist; that is getting lots of attention now, finally. It is important to keep life fairly stable for everybody, as we can cope with only so much in our daily lives, avoiding rocking the boat; but longer term survival requires a bit more vision and guidance for the American people, even for the world, than has been commonly practiced.

I think that the above-mentioned Obama speech addresses a lot of these issues in constructive ways, and I really appreciate that.

Startup America entrepreneurship and my KESTS to GEO project fate

This morning I had stumbled into a videocast "Startup America" and saw the last few minutes of a panel involved with that. http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/startup-america Apparently focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship, although what I observed was the focus only on entrepreneurship, that is, business activities. Note my "KESTS to GEO" project concept remains mere fantasy because there is no associated entrepreneurship involved with making it happen as a business. The exclusive focus seems to have shifted to entrepreneurs instead of innovators, as a major point of it all at the moment is to create jobs for people to do something useful and stimulate the economy.

As my "KESTS to GEO" project effort has shown, even the best concepts with fantastic potential for stimulating the economy and civilization's very wellbeing and perhaps sheer survival, gets nowhere if people do not make it physically happen. And that involves entrepreneurship activity in our system, instead of an overarching responsible direction of creation of the facilities based on KESTS to GEO concepts' purposes.

KESTS to GEO would have initially cut jobs in aerospace as people focused on electromechanics and large scale energy-supported structures, very different from the reaction engined launch vehicle systems that people had prepared for in their career development and business planning; thus, KESTS to GEO was very much in disfavor by the business community.

And NASA, the obvious potential overarching make-it-happen entity, was having none of KESTS to GEO, possibly again because their well-established careers are based on reaction engined launch vehicle access to space, and it is hard to change one's fields of expertise, in this case to those of very large scale electromechanical transportation structures that are unconventionally supported by the centrifugal action of stored energy within those huge-perimeter structures built as hoops around the Earth. Besides, NASA sees itself as only the means of implementation of government-financed projects such as the Cold War Era national-security significant "race to the Moon," instead of seeing itself as the instigator of other major space projects.

And I can sympathize with those directors in NASA, sweating out each launch and return of the Space Shuttles after Challenger and Columbia ... and remembering that the last several Apollo Moon Landing launches were scrapped to minimize the risk for disaster ... at the vision of those directors having to create an unfamiliar electromechanical system with a perimeter extending clear around the Earth, using little of the familiar rocketry, and achieving something on the scale of the early Panama Canal in its implications ... the scary thought of taking on that responsibility could have had them heading for the bathrooms. Not for long; they are experts in control of events.

I have little doubt that there have always been those who quickly grasped the enormous business implications of my KESTS to GEO project's implementation and productivity, and those folks no doubt saw it as a big disruption to their bread and butter industries such as hydrocarbon-based energy, rocketry aerospace. And even the extended-project fantastic real-estate implication potentials of KESTS to GEO to enable construction of the prototypes of 10,000-person self-sufficient artificial gravity cities shielded by water ice and electromagnetic fields in GEO - and cheaply lift those tens of thousands of people up there - which could potentially lead to a huge real estate shift, thus a threat to even something as amazingly far away business-wise as that of real estate. (For example, see my 1988 file http://www.escalatorhi.com/GenieFilesH/gesp747.html pointing out there is room for more than 15 billion people up there, living in condominium-like residences on the inside edges of the wheels, somewhat as foreseen in NASA's SP-413 book for use in L-5.) Meanwhile, I personally was unaware of the potential business effects, other than to abstract that the project could easily double the net worth of America especially if the space cities were built in GEO; that was as far as I got with that point of view, not important to me. (That kind of thinking is probably why I now live at the poverty level, primarily on Social Security retirement, and very thankful for that income. Not a big problem; I have never known anything except the near-poverty level of life, even working as an engineering tech in electronics most of my life. And I would not know how to be a successful businessman even if I had the money to do it. Although some other Asperger's are quite wealthy from business.)

So instead of being seen as a wonderfully elegant near-future way to provide clean economical electrical energy delivered worldwide (via solar power satellites that it would make finally feasible, that it would enable built and maintained economically in GEO) as well as solar powered full recycling of toxic materials made by our industrial civilization, and make reaction engined spacecraft change from the sleek rockets we now know, to instead become huge non-aerodynamic vehicles built and launched from high above the atmosphere there in GEO, electrically lifted to already be 91% up out of the Earth's gravitational energy well, for massive expeditions to Mars and other places nearby .... instead, it was seen only as a threat to existing powerful corporate interests, and to be dealt with as such.

And the directors of those interests most likely saw my struggling meek efforts presenting the technological concepts of KESTS to GEO at space technology conferences, realized I was no salesman powerhouse and was clearly advanced in age, so all they had to was to sit on it all and wait for me to die off, then all the potentials of KESTS to GEO would default into their business-power mentalities to play with for their wealth in their own good time, say, perhaps when oil has gone way past its peak, to the business need to look for different sources of energy to sell - and by then they could be positioned to use KESTS to GEO and Solar Power Satellites while squeezing the most profit out of the what-the-market-will-bear system.

But anyway, the KESTS to GEO concept complex that I created is in existence, so I have enabled it to physically happen, even if not in the timeframe I foresaw as important for civilization's continued healthy expansion. So, my efforts have not been totally wasted.

Back in the late 1980s when I was putting the basics together for KESTS to GEO and Centristation project concepts, I read of much despair about the inevitable fate of accumulating pollution of land-sea-air from our industrial civilization, and overpopulation of a limited land area world, making preparation for a future seeming to be futile, the KESTS to GEO concept was able to blow that away: clean electrical energy galore for America and to sell around the world, and even showing how population could be greatly expanded via a high level of civilization built in GEO accessed economically and continuously via KESTS to GEO. It made the future have great potential; and even if held back for decades, people could still plan for a future for their progeny. And since then, the KESTS to GEO concept has been expanded to provide the means for enabling industrial-sourced toxins to be fully recycled in GEO-sited huge solar powered mass-spectrometer type element separators for clean reuse in manufacturing, further enabling a potentially bright future for all.

That abundant future potential is still there, including for the long term hopes for Startup America. Let's invent those paperclips and ball point pens to quickly create reasonably nice jobs for everybody and make a profit right away; it will be sturdy practice for getting on with the big stuff later. Life can be exciting conceiving, inventing, designing and building things and making businesses happen; is lots friendlier to life than the former focus on bash and takeover of war and conflict.

P. S. Most likely there will still be lots of romps by those folks who prefer to trick, bash and destroy their way to fame and fortune, instead of taking the creating and building pathway; so I have written a series of high-tech science fiction novels describing one way all this could play out. (And writing the sci fi versions was lots more fun to do than was writing and presenting the formal technical papers, such as "Cline, James E. D. “Kinetically Supported Bridge Vehicle Lift To GEO” Space 2002 Robotics 2002 Conference Proceedings, American Society of Civil Engineers, 2002, 8-21.) The sci fi series I wrote and self-published, author J. E. D. Cline, includes "Building Up", "The Ark of 1984's Future", "It's Down to Earth", and "The Torus Cities Ice Shields Returning Home". See http://www.kestsgeo.com/2sciencefiction/scifistories.html and particularly "It's Down to Earth" http://www.kestsgeo.com/2sciencefiction/idte.html as an ebook at iBooks or Barnes & Noble etc or paperback at CreateSpace: eStore https://www.createspace.com/3371746 .

Looks like "jobs" is the planned battleground for America

Once again I have come around to concluding that the battle for America is about jobs. That is, who gets to say who gets to have a job and doing what. Will it be politically-united big corporations, with intent to split America into a two-class system, the owner-management being like medieval lords living high, while the masses are peon serfs (hard-working folks who have no hope to live better, the American Dream now lost)? Or "sheeple" as they sometimes call them nowadays, indicating how easy it is to herd around and exploit them?

It is easy to see that mindset. Owner-management-investor picking what products and services to make happen, using their manipulation skills to make it pay off for them. But the natural resources and workers that are used to fulfill those products and services, are not considered the same kind of beings as owner-management-investors are, but merely stuff to be used and discarded. Much of the basic bully mindset, just wearing suit and tie and speaking ivy league.

Big business has long staked out technological and business territory using a variety of means, and too often unethically blocking potentially competing technologies and inventions. All in the name of maximizing the bottom-line, to the satisfaction of the investors. No responsibility to the nation or the overall systems of nature and people that make it all possible, even giving them life. Fouling our mutual nest on this planet is of no concern to them unless they get "regulated" or massively sued; otherwise, it is business free-for-all bonanza for them, and increasingly crushing on everything else. As I said, basic irresponsible bully-mind guided stuff.

The effort to use taxes to employ people to create a more self-sufficient "green" energy economy has been stalled by rival political folks who want only continued (and unsustainable) hydrocarbon-and-air based energy sourcing, along with vast sums of money going to other nations in return for oil we just burn away. It is as if they do not understand that the brief energy production is created by un-sequestering the carbon that nature stashed away as coal and oil, and provided oxygen to breathe, the oxygen now used up and made into carbon dioxide. We are undoing what nature took millions of years to do long ago. What better way to sequester carbon than to make it into coal and oil, which are long term stable forms of carbon, stashed safely far underground?

The use of people to create more sustainable energy sources, based on the enormous influx of energy from the sun each day, seems a very wise thing to do, considering that our civilization is based on lots of available energy. Little or no human or animal muscle needed to make things happen for commerce anymore. But the easy corporate money is in continuing to burn oil and coal for energy, and they have no responsibility for the overall system in which they exist, so that is what they manipulate to make happen. And bullies manipulate others; that is what they do, and it is reproductively and lifestyle successful, and thus it continues. Easy money tends to win, nevermind the consequences, especially to other people. The jobs bill is still being blockaded by the big corporate-controlled politicians, despite that it would not use taxpayer money and would only be a boon for Americans - the only difference is that the big corporate folks would not be the only ones controlling who gets a job doing what.

The pattern that explains much of it all, as I started this post mentioning, is the apparent vision by the power elite to make America into a two-class system, with themselves in the elite class, and the rest of Americans made into peons existing to serve the whims of those overlords in their corporate castles. And this has been in the works for many decades - look at the so-called "employment agreement" that technically competent workers have had to sign to get a job, that signs over all their creative output despite not being in a job that utilizes any creative effort, nor does the corporation have any commitment to evaluate and produce from those ideas of employees - the corporation only wants to produce from technology they already control and is well known and thus plugs into management routines which they know how to utilize - and using the "agreement" to justify locking-down all the potentially rival new technological seed ideas from the employee base, prevents any wild cards appearing in the business projections, easier management job then. Since nearly all technologically competent workers have to work for some corporation - and thus sign that often-illegal-but-still-required "employment agreement" that has suppressed the basic technological creativity of "yankee ingenuity" that enabled our industrial civilization here in America. And this has been going on for 30 or 40 years. No wonder we are becoming sheeple.

So, what to do with this mess? The jobs bill, and the green-energy efforts seem steps in the correct direction. How to get out from the stranglehold of the "employment-agreement" phenomenon is unknown; it was made illegal in California decades ago but they just ignored it, saying they would have to be sued by the employee; and other companies simply register in places like Virginia in which that kind of employee-idea-robbing "employment agreement" is not illegal.

It seems all just a Monopoly type game to the owner-management brained folks. But America has been massively economically crushed by the effects of such trickery. Folks in other countries, not hog-tied by employment-agreement blocks to employee technological ideas, have been gaining far ahead of America. And our big corporations are not mending their ways, but instead counting on politics to prevent any changes, while they live high and to heck with tomorrow or all those inferior sheeple trying to rock the boat.

Putting a post here without offering solutions to the gripped-about problems, is not productive. So I just point out the existing jobs bill and the green energy job stimulation and energy sourcing, as going in the correct directions, for starters; and I again point to the posts I have made suggesting the concept of a job stimulation and productivity increase at low cost, by use of the internet-coordinated home-based micro-manufacturing combined with on-the-job training & education on the same home workstations - see "home manufacturing workstations" posts I have made, and a few related documents elsewhere on the net. This could bring otherwise-unemployed (and insufficiently employed) people into the nation's productivity and skill enhancement loop. Management by small and large business would also be part of it, but it would not necessarily be the conventional commute-to-corporate-building workstyle. "Telecommuting" has long been done by some; this would simply be expanding it into the manufacturing work arena, enabling greatly reduced manufacturing costs and thus become more competitive in the world economy. Designing and manufacturing the micro-manufacturing peripherals to work with existing types home computers would be an early step in this process, itself a manufacturing and engineering activity. Since it would essentially be a new kind of manufacturing system, it would need to be intelligently and compassionately configured for safety and where needed, securely.

But, since this is not the easy "business-as-usual" direction, no doubt it will continue to be suppressed by the big boys, irresponsible bully experts on manipulating events. Sorry about that.

Thoughts about balancing the U.S. economy in the world

20100620 JEDCline

Thoughts about balancing the U.S. economy in the world

Ref: "U.S. once again cast as world's consumer of last resort" article

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-global-economy-20100620,0,1603901.story

Since Americans use 20% of world's oil energy and produce only 2% of it, the $1 billion a day going offshore to buy oil is a major waste. Much of that oil goes to push our behemoth vehicles around to move us around everyday.

So it seems to me that if We Americans would focus on innovative ways to have much greater time, convenience, and energy efficiency in our movements, this would be an effective effort to improve our economy and reduce the trade deficit. Think changing 20% down to 2%: that is a big change; this is serious innovation, instead of incremental improvements just to keep "business as usual" going along to supply routine dividends rolling in.

While it would be nice to drag around a 4 bedroom house on wheels everywhere we go, having the luxuries and safety of home wherever we go, it is not really addressing the basic need to occasionally move ourselves and purchases around. Even moving the typical 3,000 pound car's mass simply to move our 165 pound weight to the job and back each day, clearly is not efficient. Yet the car provides a way to get to work 20 times faster than walking, and occasionally keeps the rain off and ruffians from assaulting along the way. So innovate how to do those functions without the 3,000 pounds to haul around too, that is all. View the bigger picture, how things interact, will help.

Another major item is the "stimulus money" which has gone to help create jobs, such as road construction, improving needed infrastructure. But we ought to equally use that stimulus money, as so many other nations did to jump-start their economies in the past, to focus on producing goods and services to be provided as exports, producing goods and services that efficiently compete in the world economy, as well as be useful at home.

And, in the process, it needs to increase people's being conscious of being productive and contributing to the American economy in the world system, an increased busyness including some that is paid time. This overall ideally could bring in the 10% of us who are not adequately employed, too, as well as adding some productivity even for retired folks.

Keep a notebook at hand: how much gas did you save when walking to the corner store to get a small sack of goodies, instead of firing up the big gas buggy to do it today? What was that experience like? Can you imagine some other way to have made it even more interesting, efficient and convenient?

Space and mass

For awhile I have been toying with an idea that seems long in creation in my subconscious mind. It's not fully formed; might never be. But with the help of my daily small cup of red wine, here goes.

Think of mass, created in the Big Bang. And think of space, created at the same time. Imagine that mass is simply where space was pulled out of, and space is steadily being pulled back in to mass. Thus gravitational force is merely riding along in place as space gets pulled back into mass.

The total energy involved is given by Einstein's mass-energy equivalence equation, E = M * C^2, and was created by the stretching out of space that created the mass.

As I think about it more, a particle that has been around awhile would have more of its equivalent space reeled in than a younger particle of the same type. The sum total energy released by the annihilation of the particle, as in a positron-electron collision where the energy is converted into photons, is the energy of the energy of the space that had been reeled in already, plus the energy of the space that remains still stretched out at that point in time. Thus seems at the moment to me to suggest that the space stretch of a positron is the opposite of the space stretch of an electron. In the early formation of the universe with equal amounts of terrene and contraterrene mass, the uneven distribution apparently involved more "black holes" of CT material to swallow up more of CT mass, leaving the terrene form of mass of our familiar universe. (I can't remember how to spell "terrene" and "contraterrene", CT, as I have not really consciously thought much about this since high school days, over half a century ago.)

As the stretching out of space, in that creation of the mass, extended throughout the extent of the universe, the annihilation of the electron-positron means the simultaneous loss of their part of "space" and that "snap" ought to be be simultaneously felt throughout the universe at the same instant. Although the means to detect the "snap" has yet to be explored.

The force of gravity exerted by the particle remains a constant since the rate of space it is pulling in is constant, the closer to the mass the stronger the pull due to the increased arc angle that the other mass intersects of that space. Since the "force" of gravity increases with the inverse of the square of the distance, instead of the cube of the distance, this suggests that that force is a two dimensional space force, which leads to further areas to explore.

This set of interrelated concepts surely ought to be able to be useful as part of a theme in some science fiction story which I have yet to write, anyway.

A comment re the coal provision in the energy bill

Electrical power is essential to America. Coal is a home-source for such energy; far better than buying from offshore sources for mere oil to burn and is gone but our hard-to-pay debt for it remains. Coal sourced electrical power seems necessary as a desperate form of energy while we have massive wind and solar sourcing projects started and completed; but coal is not a substitute; it is imperiling the world environment and should be done only while waiting for direct solar sourced energy is being created. The risk is that coal business profit interests may secure their long-term income source at the expense of the nation's alternative energy system's creation.

Home internet-linked manufacturing workstations

Background:

Adequate energy, adequate human resources, and adequate communication and transportation, are central to America as it is to civilization. As is adequate productiveness to match the needs of the nation and its place in the larger world economy.

As America is using 25% of the world's energy while producing only 3% of the world's energy, clearly energy is a key issue. Somehow, the two numbers need to be brought into equality. Many means for bringing wind and direct solar energy into the system have long been discussed elsewhere.

The current trends of approaches are necessarily to be made with minimum change involved, such as merely upping the fuel efficiency of the average car; that is an achievable goal if it is the goal instead of business profits being the prime goal; I drove a car that would meet probably 80% of the average commuter and housewife transportation needs and got 42 miles per gallon when cruising at freeway speeds, roomy inside, safe and very easy to drive, it was built 19 years ago. Surely that same vehicle could be being built today, if it was 19 years ago. But egos, franchises and excessive profiteering is in the way of doing that; and clearly we cannot overcome that problem even now.

Yet, even doubling the average car's fuel efficiency, does not bridge the great gap in energy usage vs energy supply in the nation. And in fact, the vehicular efficiency is part of a national system that can provide for the adequate energy, human resources, communication, transportation and productiveness. Putting patches such as raising fuel efficiency standards for car manufacturers, is needed as soon as possible; yet, there really needs to be an eye toward what could actually meet the goal requirements in a time frame enough to rescue the nation.

Key to the solution is the vision of the whole picture; and the endless questions of does a proposed change get us closer to the goal or not, and what does it do to the myriad other factors in the overall picture.

Some potential approaches would have a more interesting appearance if the whole picture is referenced.

The Home Workstation Approach:

Such an approach is that of bringing into reality a whole new technique for getting things done efficiently in terms of energy, time, and human resources for a new category of national productiveness, thorough to creation of an economy stimulation through creating a nationwide at-home workstation system of "kanban" subassembly and internet-coordinated and in some case partially teleoperated equipment for various kinds of manufacturing steps done at home, coordinated by small and large business management which is in turn managed by reference to the entire needs of the nation.

Home workstations, linked with internet, unified by corporate or small business management including shuffling of kanbans between homes.

Those home workstations being also set up to be on the job training workstations.

Goal for part time work at home with these home workstations. They could be used a few hours after a regular 9-5 job workday, instead of commuting to a second job to make ends meet.

The home workstations could be part time work for the unemployed, doing make-work that builds up their skills for when real work becomes available. They would be used for retired people, to get them back in the work force, at their skill level; this could boost their self esteem as they continue to contribute to the GNP even after retirement, when no full time job is practical for them. Aptitudes, rather than prior employment, would be the determiner for who does what on these home workstations.

Testing of aptitudes, much like the on the job training from the home workstations, would be done at home too.

Continued monitoring of quality and quantity of work from each workstation and person over time would provide additional data for potential for further jobs they could do, including change or upgrade to the particular type of fabrication or testing workstation.

These home workstation's design and fabrication would provide new business opportunities too. They could be of many kinds and be designed for modular add-ons for adding versatility; each would include common computer workstation functions much like already exist, as linked through the high speed internet, along with small scale tooling for manufacturing subassembly steps, some of which could be done teleoperated from elsewhere in some steps such as micro-assembly parts, analogous to electronic "pick-and-place" assembly of tiny surface mount parts on circuit boards common for decades. drill presses and similar small scale machine tools would be part of the workstations, as well as precision measuring equipment, especially suited for the home workstations primarily involved in quality control.

Instead of the commuter intensive transportation system we now have, this would then change to a delivery-intensive transportation system. The movement of the "kanbans" or packages of subassemblies between the various home workstations would become the domain of the delivery service providers; initially this could be the existing carriers such as the US postal service, UPS, Fed-Ex etc, as well as more local enterprising delivery such as by teenagers with small delivery trucks working within a smaller neighborhood subset. The tracking of location and movement of these "kanban" packages would be a prime function, possibly utilizing GPS tracking systems.

(* Note: the term "kanban" is adopted from the Japanese "Just-In-Time" - JIT - highly efficient manufacturing system begun in the 1980's.)

Existing types of video-chat systems can provide much of the face-to-face type interactions as needed between management and employees. Existing homes often have rudimentary computer, much less versatile, workstations for internet and game use with computers via the internet; such sites would be useful for addition with the workstation locations. The same combination of computer and manufacturing equipment of the workstations would also be adapted to on-the-job training and generalized home education, expanding the capabilities of the employees right at their workstations. The more versatile the workstations, the greater the potential for performing a wider range of kinds of processes as becomes needed by the national productivity's evolving need set.

Intended Results:

This concept has potential to bring back competitive manufacturing to the United States, through massively boosting productivity, by enabling part time work at home to match the abilities of all classes of people including retired seniors and young people, changing the transportation system needs drastically through elimination of much of the automotive commute system, and being more time-and-energy efficient due to the elimination of the daily commute to a worksite.

Attention, our carmakers maybe can finally listen ... no?

A front page item in recent news is calling for loan by the American public to the US automakers, numbers like $25,000,000,000 in loans. Just to re-tool for a tiny increase in fuel efficiency, at that. The foot-dragging of our beloved car industry about much higher fuel efficient vehicles was caused by several factors, not all of which have been mentioned in the news. Some go really deep and are completely missed by management in SOP. This post is not to rehash those things, but instead to propose a modified suggestion I have posted for a couple years, without notice; probably this one will get equal burying, in favor of 25 bn hoopla. Anyway, here goes. First, am going to repeat a post I have made several times, several places, but with a few changes in it:

There are ways to greatly reduce the wastage in use of fossil fuels, that can make a significant difference and pay for itself; but takes some very different ways of looking at things, along with backing off of business egos a bit at times. Transportation is one area that looks quite promising for this approach. If we can look at a 10 year time frame for payback plus profit, some possibilities come to mind. It requires looking at the big picture, to find the solutions; the old narrow picture has lost the game, maybe it is time to include the lateral scenes to make the big picture.

For example, let us imagine that "we America" buy the design rights for the 1990 Honda Civic Hatchback from Honda, along with any tooling and assembly data they have remaining on that now obsolete vehicle, 18 years into history. So it ought to be potentially a cheap design purchase; obtaining working ones around the country ought to still be possible for examples. I owned one of them and it got 42 mpg on the freeway commute in the Los Angeles area, and handled great on the road; had automatic transmission, a/c, cruise control and plenty of room inside; and the engine still did not use oil up at 160,000 miles (although I did use a high quality synthetic oil, only a little more expensive than normal oil per mile) when it was squished in a multi-car wreck from which I walked away. It did have some design flaws in the positioning of the alternator and electrical relays too near the driver, causing long terem EMF risks, which ought to take less than half a million dollars to modify; the only other flaw would be harder and might need living with for now, that is the need to replace the engine timing belt every 70,000 miles. In this scenario the government (state or national) would provide loans and enough guidance for the project to re-create this proven vehicle in the context of the need. If they are produceable in multi-million quantities here in the US, cost probably would be maybe $10,000 each or significantly less if all vehicles were identical. These new vehicles would be offered free in direct exchange for any vehicle which gets less than 18 mpg, regardless of age or condition of the gas hog. Thereafter, for each of these new vehicle's 10,000 miles of commute, at say average of 36 mpg, it has saved the consumption of 555 gallons of refined gasoline; at a cost of $4.00 per gallon, that is $2,220 saved per 10,000 miles driven. If the average vehicle is driven 100,000 miles, that is a savings of $22,200, so the vehicle has long since paid for its $10,000 cost to the nation, and produced a substantial profit of over 120%. Each individual who did the vehicle exchange got a new vehicle free (or remaining payments to yet make on the former old gas hog vehicle) and is saving $2.00 in gas for every 36 miles driven. But more importantly to the world ecosystem's climate, it has saved the use of 5,500 gallons of fuel per vehicle. For each 1,000,000 vehicles thus replaced and utilized, this is a savings of 5,500,000,000 gallons of refined petrochemical fuel to remain in the world's reserves becoming more precious with time for non-fuel uses; along with preventing its enormous amount of CO2 from being dumped into the atmosphere to add to global weather disruption and resultant sea level rise.

OK, that is the repeated post, more or less. Further thoughts include:
1) Lots of egos are involved, paticularly those of the "Big Three" automakers. However, it is an even better indication of quality person if admission of error and redirection to adequately solving the problem happens.
2) It is a design of another automaker; an 18 year old design probably has passed teh 17 year limit of patents, but in respect to the original designers, perhaps it could be a joint venture between Honda (Japan) and one of the big-3 US car makers. And the quantities involved would be far greater than suggested in the above referenced post which shows it is a big win-win for everybody to get the gas hogs off the streets, getting a brand new free high quality vehicle for participating, that pays for itself more than twice over in the first 100,000 miles.
3) There are probably similarly proven vehicles in the high gas milage and performance arena than that multipurpose hatchback vehicle was; unbiased research into that would find the answers; the resulting otehr vehicles could be assigned to each of teh other "Big 3" US car makers to convert over for production, based on existing proven designs, like that of the 1990 Honda Civic hatchback.
4) Part of each of the "big 3" manufacturing plants could be converted to refurbishing some of its former produced vehicles, truly re-manufacturing them, from vehicles traded in; this would be to maintain a working transportation system as exists now, while a consciously engineered national transportation system is put into place.
5) Continuing development of a hybrid vehicle would proceed enthusiastically and clear-headed. Part of this design/development activity would be starting from teh ground up to produce a target vehicular performance, not from a jigsaw puzzle of minor changes from the way we do it now. Think time and energy efficiency plus safety and reliability, with a realizable change in the associated infrastructure.
6) get serious about creating a next generation American transportation system, one that provides the personal convenience of privately garaged vehicles at residence, integrated into an automatically controlled system when on the freeway and most surface streets. Does it take a two ton vehicle to take a 165 pound person to work? Why not a 500 pound vehicle? Figure the more frequent refueling stops, vs the higher energy efficiency and mileage of the lower mass being pushed around. And even more effectively develop a national-potential transportation system for non-cargo-carriers, that utilizes a distributed energy system such as the "Pull-Band-Commute" system I proposed decades ago.
7) Overall, each step needs to be done by looking at the wide view overall picture of America and the world. Where there are existing franchises and business territories including technology ones, buy them out from American-pooled-resource-funds for fair prices, instead of struggling with pretzel-like work-around solutions.

OK, there I have made my soapbox noise again to an empty audience, all of them elsewhere to decide to throw zillions of dollars for no defined goals, to pretend they are doing something to solve the problems. Well, maybe a few continue to remain to throw rotten eggs and crash my email and websites, just to prove they are boss.

James E. D. Cline
jedcline1@kestsgeo.com
jedcline@gmail.com

(Ref http://energyideasjedc.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html )