How did an imbecile like Trump become President?
Featured image courtesy of The Daily Beast.
The more things seem unrelated the more tightly coupled they are.
Moore’s Law
It’s not an actual law of physics, just a prediction that has stood the test of time and is treated like a law.
Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and CEO and co-founder of Intel, in 1965 posited a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%.
Wikipedia
Moore’s Law is how President Ronald Reagan bankrupted Russia.
Star Wars
The more unrelated things seem, the more tightly coupled they are. I’ve worked in IT for over thirty years. This black hole the government threw hideous amounts of money into was pure genius. There were many different “plans” under this umbrella term.
One pitch was to fund very fast durable computers that could be scattered about the country connected via high speed communications to each other and satellites. Software would be written to detect incoming nuclear (or really any) missiles. Computes would then calculate where to point really powerful lasers and were to aim surface to air killer missiles and destroy the threat before it got close.
Another pitch I heard was a missile shield. This idea was really out there. They wanted to create an energy shield (like they have for ships in Star Trek) and deploy it across the country.
Science fiction writers think up these things and then someone has to figure out how to make them. Periodically many of them actually turn out to be something. To understand the weight these ideas carried in the international community you probably need to watch How William Shatner Changed the World.
Here is what you really need to know.
That is the first computer I ever bought for myself with my own money. They came onto the market in 1985. It had what I believe to this day was the best keyboard ever made for a PC. It was somewhat fragile as all computers were for that time. I loved it dearly and did a lot of homework with it along with playing some silly games. It had an Intel 8088-2 16-bit processor running 4.77 Mhz. You could spend really big dollars and get the 10 MEG hard drive instead of the second floppy disk. You can read more specs here if you wish.
As far as I know there was only one Cray-3 ever made. It was delivered in 1993. The design goal was 16 GFLOPS. (Giga FLOPS – Floating point Operations Per Second) Even if all of the surface to air interceptor missiles and high powered ICBM killing lasers were ready on the day Ronald Reagan announced this program, there wasn’t enough computing power in the world to pull it off. Critics pointed this out repeatedly yet America kept dumping truckloads of money into the program.
We who backed this idea sounded like lunatic fringe to the bean counters of the world, but we knew Moore’s Law. We also knew that Seymour Cray and the other great hardware minds of the day needed massive checkbooks to solve the fundamental computing problems the IT industry in general needed solved.
Today we have desktop computers, when combined with a good video card and proper driver, that can compute thousands of GFLOPS. Because the federal government dumped huge amounts of money into the computer industry in the early days we can now purchase desktop computers that just humiliate the one and only Cray-3 for a few thousand dollars brand new or under $500 in the second hand market.
Russian scientists knew Moore’s Law too. Russia spent itself into bankruptcy trying to keep up. Unlike the space race, where you could do much of the engineering using pencil and paper long before building anything, coming up with the proper materials for high end chips as well as the coolants was an expensive trial and error process.
The Arms Race
Today’s youth cannot fully understand the nuclear arms race fever that gripped both Russia and the United States. Despite the “official” stories, I had to perform Duck and Cover drills when I was a child and I certainly wasn’t born in the 1950s. Maybe my school was just rural enough it took years to get the memo about stopping them?
Do you honestly think America spent all of that money launching a man to the moon and safely returning him because we wanted to gather a few rocks? Nooooo child. We wanted to build an ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) so we could nuke any part of Russia we wanted. If you have a rocket that can launch a heavy payload to the moon and a control system to navigate re-entry where you want, then you can easily use that to nuke any part of Russia. Given the size and weight of the capsule and crew that also meant you could put a really big warhead on top of that missile.
How it was sold mattered
Had President Kennedy said to the American people “I want to build a really big rocket so I can nuke any part of Russia” he wouldn’t have had the entire nation behind him. Indeed, much of the world watched American astronauts land on the moon and cheered us on.
At the time President Kennedy challenged the American people to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth it was an even more lunatic statement than Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars. Given we already had computers and Moore’s Law, we knew we could eventually make Star Wars work and so did Russia.
Maybe the national Star Trek like energy shield is still a bit of a pipe dream, but we have more than enough computing power to run that sensor web and coordinate rail-guns, high energy lasers, and other missile killers. I don’t think anyone who has ever ventured onto the Web with a browser could doubt that today.
That my dear reader is why Russia went bankrupt. Ronald Reagan got them to play the capitalist game of “Who can spend the most money?” If we completed building Star Wars before Russia, we could nuke Russia out of existence with a first strike knowing full well their (or anyone’s) missiles couldn’t harm us.
For everyone else, nuclear weapons would be obsolete.
That was the line that sold it to the pacifists, nuke haters, deficit hawks, and others. This defensive system would make nuclear weapons obsolete.
Because of the money the government poured into that program each of you reading this is using a relatively low cost (certainly not the multi-million dollar Cray price tag) computer that is unbelievably fast compared to that NCR PC4 I used to own. Most of you are using one that is way faster than a Cray-3.
Not that it matters to this discussion, but some time in the early 2020s, unless someone dumps huge amounts of money into finding new materials, Moore’s Law will cease to be a law. We won’t be able to push current technology any further.
Morning in America
A nation with confidence can do incredible things. President Reagan had made movies that people enjoyed, some might say made people feel good. Out of the gate after his inauguration the hostages were released by Iran. By 1984 gasoline was around $1.13/gallon. Thanks in large part to the Star Wars money the computer industry was growing by leaps and bounds.
Ronald Reagan ran the best campaign ad in the history of politics. It was totally positive, perfectly narrated, and welcomed by people on both sides of the isle. I do hope you take the time to watch that video. It will give you some idea as the the level and sense of civility that existed during the Reagan years.
Civility meant a lot. While many, myself included, believe he wasn’t a good president, we all respect the grace, dignity, and civility President Carter brought to the office. Ronald Reagan continued much of that class and he seemed to have ideas that worked.
Ronald Reagan won re-election with a 525 – 13 Electoral college vote over Walter Mondale.
Life is never perfect, but by and large, it wasn’t bad. Many people like to focus on the scandals but they really should focus on how everyday Americans felt like they were doing okay.
The only real mistake of the Reagan era was not forcing Ross Perot and Steve Forbes to fly to Russia and buy the country for its debt after it collapsed. Americans have a bad habit of pulling out too soon. Way too much “Get ‘r Done!” in the culture; always declaring things done long before they are finished.
Bush 41
Speaking as a life long Republican I couldn’t imagine a worse President at this point in my life or American history. He rode President Reagan’s coattails back into the White House and the gopher started sledding down the mountain right away. It honestly left many Americans waxing nostalgic over the mismanagement of the Carter years.
Quite possibly the only bright spot of this Presidency was Dan Quayle. He used to Gaff in front of the camera on what felt like a weekly basis. He provided no end of material for Saturday Night Live.
First Gulf War and CNN
Most of you reading this won’t have thought about or even believe that right here is where we got President Trump. The miss-handling of this put most of the pieces in place to allow a Donald Trump access to the White House. Some of you may figure it out from the details. Rest assured I will cover it in the summary in the final part of this series.
For, what may have even been legitimate reasons, Bush 41 wanted to build a coalition so it wasn’t just us and a couple of friends kicking Saddam Hussein’s ass. This lead to a really long deployment for National Guard troops that are normally weekenders.
A fledgling Cable News Network decided to stick with the first Gulf War 24×7. Honestly, I think the war is the only reason the channel survived. If you think these two things are unrelated to Trump getting in the White House you would be wrong.
Flat panel televisions came way down in price around this time, especially the small ones. Many large companies, especially the Fortune 500, had National Guard employees who were now deployed and/or their spouse worked at the company. Lots of people wanted to know when we were finally going in. Others just wanted to know about their loved ones.
Corporations started hanging those televisions near the ceiling in common areas, not just a lobby. Some were just out in the hall near the stairwells. Volume was either turned way down or completely off. People looking for more coffee or coming in to make copies stopped and read the ticker. They got conditioned to trusting little more than a written sound bite.
For millions of Americans, that was it. They spent five minutes reading the sound bites on the ticker and that was their “news consumption” for the day. People stopped looking for the detail behind the bite. America became a Twitter nation without Twitter.
The First Gulf War ended February 28, 1991.
Continued in Pt. 3.
