evolution creations

There’s an interesting post by Republican John Mica (R-Florida), one of the original creators of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), as to whether this should be an on-going agency or whether or not it should be privatized and the agency disbanded.

First let me say that I’m not supporter of the TSA by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, I do believe that the activities of 9/11 are certainly this generations equivalent of Pearl Harbor and the senseless loss of lives, both during the terrorist act as well as the continued loss of American lives as we fight both the Iraq and Afghanistan theatre’s, are a travesty and injustice.

But looking back at the agency’s track record, has the agency withstood the test of time and delivered to thwart further activities that would otherwise take American lives through the use of our skyways? The TSA has a checkered history, marred by allegations of theft, invasion of privacy, groping, disorderly conduct and behavior. But through all of these things, if we can say at the end of the day that we have indeed thwarted the would be activities of terrorists I would argue that the agency has continued value and validity.

I will take a look at my most recent trip to San Francisco from Chicago’s O’Hare international airport. What were the TSA agents doing to thwart those activities? Let me take a head count. There were several agents supervising other agents. There were agents who were taking the bins from one end of the conveyor belt and rudely pushing people around to put them back at the front. There was at least one agent at each X-Ray machine and at least 2 agents for each body scanner. All in all, I ask the question, couldn’t the agency do more with less? For example, do people need to have someone take the bins and move them back to the front, or couldn’t an automated contraption be put into place that did that? Or better yet, couldn’t the conveyor belts themselves be made up of bins that just went around and around and you just put your stuff in them and moved on? Couldn’t you make more of the monitoring done remotely and have less man-power? I would venture a guess that the manpower is what is costing the agency the billions of dollars each year and even the lowest paid TSA agent I would venture to guess they are making at least 40k/yearly–just to move bins around? Also for all they put people through, you’d think the would work better on their customer facing services to improve their appearence to the public and to start using the public as an advocate instead of the continued nuiscance that people see them as?

Nonetheless, America must remain vigilant and not rest on our laurels that the attacks on 9/11 were an isolated incident. America is now more than ever a target for people in this world who do not agree with our way of life and the freedoms that we take for granted, and to that we must respond in kind by taking all necessary precautions to protect ourselves and our future generations. We must ask ourselves though, can the job of the TSA be done better, so that we have a smoother process through our nation’s airports while at the same time not sacrificing the safety that we have come to expect post-9/11.

I’ve been a long proponent to Internet TV over traditional Cable services for many reasons. Obviously cost is the major point here, as many cable services charge you an arm and a leg and additionally there isn’t the ability to pick and choose which programing stations you want to subscribe to as the Cable companies seem to think they have a better way to tell you what you want to watch and pre-bundle these stations.

2 years back we made the conscious decision to say, “NO MORE!” and we disconnected our Cable service and left our broadband internet. We moved to the strategy of using Netflix’s OnDemand service along with Hulu+ as our way to get programming. And by and large that has worked out really well.

But things have changed. The Internet TV landscape has changed. Now you have new players like Amazon who offers both paid Video OnDemand services where you can buy your movies and stream them to your Internet TV devices, but also if you sign up for Amazon Prime, you get a host of shows that you can stream for free, very similar to Netflix OnDemand. Additionally you have services like Crackle that offers their own programming and video’s and now Epix comes into the fold with a host of new offerings.

Needless to say as a consumer, we are getting Video OnDemand overload with all these choices. Gone are the days where you could go to your local Blockbuster’s and knew that they would have the movies you wanted. Now if you want Video OnDemand, your movie may be on any one or number of the aforementioned. What this means is that you end up having to subscribe to a number of these services, and as a result your price per month dramatically goes up.

Ideally I would like to think that there should be three vendors, streaming videos, streaming video purchases, and streaming TV. For example, if we distilled these players down to Hulu+, Netflix, and Amazon, and each had their own nitche, then as a consumer, we would be able to pick and choose which type of streaming we wanted verses picking and choosing based on what content each is licensed to distribute. This could quickly spiral into a worse situation where you could potentially have hundreds of stations each with their own variant of content offerings and your either at the mercy of subscribing to each or picking up a cable service that will bundle it for you.

Personally I’m a bit disappointed that we’ve seen the landscape change like this. On the one hand you could argue that competition is good and will fuel better services, but I have yet to see that happen. There have been many who have criticized Amazon for saying they have a certain number of movies, but most of them are movies that we would never watch so what would be the point in having tens of thousands of crappy titles? On the other hand you have services like Hulu+ who are in talks to be bought or sold, and are having problems with content providers either branching off into their own select nitche (take A&E and CBS as an example) and folks like Netflix who could be under pressure in the upcoming years to not be able to resign their content providers at cheap rates which would mean as a consumer your likely to face higher prices.

The main talk around the automotive industry is to move away from the traditional combustion engine and more towards hybrid (half combustion, half electric) or full on electric vehicles (EV). We see this all over the industry, whether it’s LG teaming up with GM to build more EV vehicles, or Ford and Toyota teaming up to work on new hybrid systems for Trucks—clearly the industry that’s relied on its foundations in the old Model T are looking to the present for answers to the crisis—people want more fuel efficient cars and cleaner running cars. I look back to our own decision to go with the Toyota Prius after our Mazda CX-7. We wanted to reduce our fuel consumption because gasing up the CX-7 each week was terrible and we wanted to put less CO2 and other emissions into the air. These choices are fueling more and more American’s and I would venture people in general around the globe to look inward at their own behaviors and then turn to their respective local automotive vendors to provide answers to meet those needs.

Whether or not which technology is best goes back to the speculation between Blu-Ray and HDDVD or Beta Max and VHS. That isn’t the purpose of this post to argue the merits of each technology. But what is at the core is how EV will fit into our everyday lives.

Let’s take a look at a typical scenario. You live in one city and your friends live in another. Let’s say that there’s some distance in between, for the sake of this argument I’ll take the distance between Joliet, IL and Sun Prairie, WI as this is a trip we make a few times a year. The distance between the two location is 167 miles, or roughly 2 and a half hours driving. I would say this is pretty much the extent of how far someone would be willing to drive in one day as 5 hours driving (2 and a half up and the same back home) is quite a long time. Let’s assume for the sake of this scenario that your EV can make the trip one way, but will require a charge to get back home.

In the current context this scenario is fairly easy to digest. You’ll top off your car before you leave. When you get to where your going, presumably you are going to maximize the time you have with the people you are visiting and therefore will park your car at their home and when your ready to leave you will get back into your car, realize that you need some gas, and drive to the local gas station to fill up before your return trip home. Alternatively you could pull the handle on the slot machine and start heading back home hoping you’ll make it or rest on the belief that between the two locations you’ll find a gas station to your liking (we prefer to only gas at BP stations, so this makes it more difficult for us to pull off the gambling option). Pretty straight forward.

Let’s look at the same situation, but only approach it from an EV standpoint. Now most EV are going to have a limited range to begin with, so most likely your going to initially charge it before your trip, but when you get to where you’re going, you are going to need to charge again. This is where things get tricky. As it stands there is yet a nationwide EV charging infrastructure. There are a lot of discussions around evolutions of charging stations that you would presumably see around parking lots, traditional gas stations and other area’s that your car parks for any period of time. But that still assumes that your car will be there for 30-60 minutes time. This is a stark comparison to today’s 3-5 minutes that you would typically spend filling your car with gas. But also many homes are being outfitted with home ports in their garage that allows for EV charging on a 240 volt circuit vs the traditional 120 volt circuit. Many new cars that are coming out are extended range EV, meaning that they have a backup system to allow for extended range using more traditional combustion engines. The Chevy Volt is an example of this, as is the 2012 Toyota Prius EV. But nonetheless, your car is going to take between 3-8 hours to charge depending on the volts. But we also now need to take into consideration that while you have guests over to your home and you have to accommodate them by feeding, housing and possibly entertaining them, we must also pay to charge their EV. All indications seem to suggest that off-peak rates and the draw of approximately 1-1.5 kilowatts of power. This will certainly not be a deal breaker for most people, but what happens in situations that you are having a party and you have multiple or tens or hundreds of guests? What do you do?

If we look at the future picture a bit closer, the practicality of EV on a large scale seems to be missing a serious logistic component to how do we make everyday occurrences a reality? Will parking lots across our nation have a charging port for every space? Will they be metered or free? If we think about how fast new technology is adopted we don’t have to look that far into our history. For example, television was a major technological advancement of the last century and was commercially available since the 1920’s and was widely available for most by the 1970’s, so 50 years for mass adoption. The internet was available back in the 1980’s and was widely adopted by 2009, so that evolution only took 20 years. The iPhone was released back in 2007 and arguably started the mass cultural smartphone revolution that only took a few years to become widely adopted]annote=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone”]. Clearly the evidence shows that the time it is taking us to adopt to new technology as we become more and more proficient in these changes is dramatically decreasing. It is safe to argue that while we may think that EV adoption will take 50+ years, that the reality is people will gravitate towards these technologies to meet their growing needs and concerns.

The outstanding issue still is logistics, how do you bring this new technology to the market without adaquate infrastructure to support it? I go back to smartphones, if we relied on the old aging CDMA/TDMA networks that provided our traditional mobile phone conversations and dial-up speeds, the evolution of smartphones would most likely not have happened as people would not see the benefit of having a device that was slow. The same would apply to EV—if the infrastructure to make everyday life driving decisions is not supported and requires special adaptation, then adoption will take much longer. For instance, would the internet have taken a foothold if every home had to be specially wired with a T1? It probably would have, but the adoption would have taken many more years.

There are several possibilities to addressing these EV logistical issues. For example, roads are fundamental throughout the United States. One possibility would be to retrofit the roads with charging tracks that when driven over would over time recharge a vehicle. In essence, then the car would be in perpetual charging modes while being driven. Charging stations need to be improved to dramatically reduce the time at the charger to bring the charge time down to < 30 minutes. Additionally batteries need to be dramatically improved to both hold better charges so you can drive longer distances between charges, but also not be as dramatically impacted by changes, such as weather. If we look at the driving distances in an EV between mild (normal) climates and cold (winter) climates, we have to wonder what kind of adoption EV will have in states and countries that see the vast part of their year in tundra-like conditions. I’m not arguing that combustion engines don’t also face degraded performance in winter conditions, but the wide availability of fuel and fundamentally easier to maintain engines make for an easy argument to say that combustion engines in those types of climates will still dominate people’s preferences.

Just like how FDR laid down a nationwide foundation to have an interstate highway system to address the growing need to be able to traverse our country by gas or diesel powered vehicles, we need a similar program to provide the interstate accessibility to EV powered vehicles. Taking on this initiative would demonstrate our commitment to this technology and how prepared we are to integrate that into our day to day lives, but also provided the needed infrastructure to allow every-day American’s accessibility to this technology.