Monthly Archives: October 2014

To Colonize Mars you need Batteries: Elon Musk’s bold vision

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I think I’ve figured Elon Musk’s grand plan. He really only ever wanted to colonize Mars, but to do that he understood that you really need a strong safe source of power to be able to do this. I recently read a book called The Martian, which I highly recommend if you’re a huge nerd and love space, where the main character is assumed dead and left behind on Mars. He knows from the very beginning he’ll have to stay alive for the next 400 Sols or so (Martian days). Two things are of paramount concern to him. Power and food. Food is a little harder than the power because he has solar panels, but that’s not going to be very effective for moving him to where he knows he needs to be in those 400 Sols. (This isn’t much of a spoiler, you learn all of this in the first few pages).

So with that in mind, you know that you need to be able to keep power going during massive sand storms, which is the reason why the main character was left on Mars. These can last hundreds of days and greatly reduce the effectiveness of solar panels. Furthermore, getting to Mars is a huge pain, which if you read The Martian, you’ll really understand the full impact of humans trying to get to Mars.

Elon Musk started 3 companies with the express intent of getting to Mars and enabling a colony to survive. First, Space-X, this solves the getting to Mars portion. It’s an effective private space company that has already landed some pretty massive contracts from NASA. The goal of this company is to continually drive down the cost of launching rockets and building capabilities for space travel. The second company is a battery company, Tesla. Yes, I know it’s a car company, but it’s really a battery company. If you wanted to create a vehicle for forcing higher capabilities in battery technology there’s none better than an electric Car. Musk plans to open the Gigafactory to feed the Tesla, but he already plans on using them in other places. He’s offered Boeing his batteries since they are safer than other companies’ batteries. Finally, his solar panel company, Solar City is a method for continually charging those batteries.

Elon Musk isn’t only trying to take out the car companies with Tesla. For the power grid batteries are effectively required to manage a renewable based power grid because there are times of no power from wind or sun. Musk already is deploying battery changing stations across the US. Right now these are powered by the grid and used to store energy. It’s likely he has designed these stations to be bidirectional so the grid can charge the batteries and power can be sent from the batteries to the grid. It’s likely that these stations will be topped with the best of the solar panels that Solar City is able to buy. Forcing more and more investment into higher capability solar panels.

As more Americans start to use Solar City, it’s likely that they will begin to offer batteries, made by Tesla, to help store excess power, some will go to the grid, some will be stored. This will then be sold to the grid during different hours to help stabilize the grid. Effectively, this could lead to a completely decentralized power grid where power companies only maintain the physical grid without generating any power.

As these various companies mature over time, they will continue to push the capabilities of their respective industries. This will have a positive impact on Musk’s true goal of colonizing Mars. He will continually have better and better solar panels to capture the weaker Martian sun. He’ll have more effective power/weight ratio for batteries that will charge almost in an instant. He’ll have a space ship that will get it there effectively and safely.

Elon Musk is building an empire to save humanity from itself. Overall, it’s pretty amazing.

Businesses and Silver Bullets

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I’ve been teaching Lean Process Improvement or Six Sigma for about 6 years now. I’m getting into learning Agile in a pretty deep way through reading a ton of books, seeing it in action, and working with Agile teams. I’m currently learning Business Architecture/Enterprise Architecture as well. All of these methodologies are similar but different in some dramatic ways. Lean itself isn’t a project management solution, it has some features of it, but the goal is to take action put something in place and measure the results. Inherently, you’re supposed to be done as soon as possible. Six Sigma has some pretty strong Project management capabilities built into it, but it’s not to be used to install software or some other type of function, it’s design to solve a complex problem, prevent it from happening again and moving on. Agile is totally about managing projects while with as little overhead as possible, while maximizing visibility. This is done through frequent light weight touches and less frequent demos. Finally business architecture is about defining the structure of the business then identifying root causes. I’m the least impressed with Business Architecture at this point because it seems to have the objective of keeping the people at the top in charge while minimizing the amount of empowerment throughout the organization. That’s just my first brush with it though and I could be wrong. The other methodologies are all about empowering the team and the people doing the work so they can be as effective as possible. With Lean and Six Sigma the goal is to eliminate your own job if you’re an instructor or internal consultant, it doesn’t seem the be the case with Business Architecture.

Regardless, all of these methodologies indicate that our businesses are extremely sick. It’s becoming pretty clear to me that the vast majority of current state business practices are flawed and leading to under performing businesses. Lean Six Sigma, makes it clear that there are out dated and poor performing processes. Agile makes it clear that traditional software development doesn’t work and is much too expensive. Business Architecture indicates that no one knows what people are doing, why they are doing it, or where other parts of the organization are doing the same type of work.

In many cases some of the problems looking to be solved by Business Architecture are eliminated in a true Lean organization, but not always. I believe that is why Lean Startup methodology is becoming so popular in both new and old businesses. It’s a novel way to force change in an existing company, while in a Startup it helps keep the company healthy much longer. Furthermore, it forces the company to build effective organization structures early and continually test them.

With the majority of businesses being unhealthy due to out dated processes or aging systems, it’s no wonder why organizations are always looking for a silver bullet. They need a quick fix because nothing is working correctly. The goal to continually drive more and more profits prevents leaders from taking a hard look at what they are doing. Forcing investment in doing the right thing the first time or to do the right thing for the organization even if it takes more time and potentially money.

With my current process improvement classes and engagements I’m seeing a continually struggle between the way you should do Lean, focus on changing what you can, and the reality that most of the work is being done through systems. Even if I wanted to improve processes around the system there’s a limit to what I can do, because I cannot effect change on the underlying system. Changing those systems either IT or organizational can be impossible to do without a strong organizational will and clear strategy. Without either of those, any improvement or agile effort is doomed to fail.

Companies forget that they pay wages; don’t understand complexity of economy

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Apparently 68 out of the top 100 retailers are concerned about flat or falling wages. Huffington Post did some poking around their 10-K forms and aggregated the top risks for the top 100 retailers. Huffpo found that low spending, unemployment, and falling or flat wages were the top 3 items. To me this is really interesting. Apple was recently identified as part of a wage fixing scheme that looks like it could have cost employees something on the order of $3.2 Billion, Wal-Mart has cut hours of their employees as to prevent themselves from paying for ObamaCare for those employees, which means that those employees have to pay for their insurance out of pocket, as they have to insurance now.

All of these things together impact the web of our economy. What we’re seeing is local optimization which leads to sub-optimization of the entire system. Companies that are cutting wages or benefits to maximize their profits are likely taking a cut out of their own revenue stream. It’s likely that many Wal-Mart employees shop there because it’s the lowest priced place in most areas for most goods. The fact that WinCo is Wal-Mart’s largest threat now, is pretty indicative that wages are falling.

When Henry Ford raised the wages of his employees to a real living wage, it wasn’t out of kindness or some perceived social good. It was so that his employees could buy his car. If a large mass of people are unable to buy a good you produce because of your own wage policies you’re creating a problem for yourself. Furthermore, economies are networks, they interact with each other. Each and everyone of those employees would then become representatives for the Ford brand and be able to show off the good they were manufacturing. With every new employee hired, Ford knew that there would eventually be one more sale.

Companies today have clearly forgotten this. Retail is one of the largest segment of our economy, with a huge number of employees. If this entire swath of our population cannot afford to buy consumer goods, then it’s likely that we’re going to be continually be at risk for another recession. People buying stuff is what keeps our economy going. If the companies that staff the most people do not pay them well enough to keep buying stuff beyond food, then we’re at a great risk.

Wages are a very difficult thing. There’s a Socialist party in Seattle that’s trying to get minimum wage up to $15, but offered a job starting at $13/hour. Employees have gone on strike to get higher wages. I’ve written about it several times, however, whenever companies are indicating that low wages are a risk to their business, it’s time for them to start looking in the mirror. There are large retail industry groups, these groups should start to investigate the root cause of these risks and propose recommendations to address these concerns.

Should the Fed look to take action to protect the companies from themselves in order to protect the economy? Should the minimum wage be increased to address the problem? Should the government take action at all, it’s the businesses fault if they fail because they didn’t pay their employees enough. What do you think?

FBI double downing on encryption horrors

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Last week I wrote about how the Washington Post was being irresponsible by arguing that phone encryption was a greater risk than a benefit for citizens. Because the BAD GUYS or evil people would take advantage of it. Only a few days ago the director of the FBI doubled down on these statements saying that “phone encryption will take us to a very dark place.” Furthermore, the scare mongering examples he provides, cell phone data provided no help nor would have encryption been any sort of hindrance in the investigation.

Phone encryption will more likely force governments and the police to actually get warrants to search phones. As with Passwords courts can order a suspect to hand over encryption keys, in cases where the police don’t have enough evidence to earn a court order they are expected to crack it on their own with their own computer experts. This will likely lead to something of an arms race between police and encryption writers, but that’s already been happening for years.

I think that this is about something bigger than phones though. Once your average computer user has been educated in encryption for phones and loses their fear of encryption, they will likely look into encrypting or expecting their computers to come encrypted. Since phones are fairly easy to hack it makes sense to start with those spaces. However, with the massive amounts of computer leaks at companies lately, it’s likely that Microsoft will begin to encrypt their operating system, eventually consumers will expect it on their personal computers. Laptops and tablets are extremely easy to steal. With encryption it makes the theft a lot less valuable as they have to completely wipe the computer and will be unable to extract any data that might be used for identity theft.

The final end effect might be that users will have true end to end encryption. Which will make it much more difficult for the FBI, CIA, and NSA to spy on ordinary Americans. The end result of phone encryption might actually be that overall Americans have dramatically improved privacy from other Americans, businesses, and governments (not just the American government).

This is why the FBI is terrified.

Phone Encryption

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It’s been announced that both iOS and Android are going to have fully encryptable phones which will be a huge boon for our 4th amendment rights. As well as to protect us from more mundane things like theft or simply losing your phone. Our phones these days contain as much or more personal information as our computers do these days. The average person doesn’t have any sort of two step authentication on their personal accounts on their phones. In most case people do have some sort of password protection to get into the phone, but once in it’s fairly easy to get into many applications.

For end users there’s nothing better than having a stronger security measures as in many cases companies poorly manage their security. This can be highlighted from the past week of exploits and those celebrity pictures. Encrypting phones might not prevented the celebrity leak, but in many cases it could. It’s believed that some of the hacks of Paris Hilton years ago came from hacking her phone through a BlueTooth connection, so a fully encrypted phone may have protected her from that hack.

All these things are good, however, the Washington Post has decided that this encryption is a risk to public safety because it will help criminals. This is the exact same argument that people make against BitCoin and full disk encryption. BitCoin ended up spawning SilkRoad, which has been shut down and it’s more likely that more crime is committed with dollars rather than Bitcoin. Full Disk Encryption has been used by both criminals and the more technical savvy. With the recent changes where the government can simply take your laptop at boarder crossings without any sort of warrant. Which means anyone at anytime that could have been flagged by the NSA could have their computer searched at will.

It’s more likely that encryption will protect an average person from an arbitrary search than protect a criminal. It’s likely that without everyone being encrypted, having your computer or phone encrypted would have been a huge red flag, however, with these recent changes that can’t happen. Meaning the average person will be safer as well as the fully legal with nothing to hide security conscious individuals.

The Washington Post, FBI, and other agencies are wrong. Fully encryption on our phones protects our privacy, improves our fourth amendment, and give us more control over our own devices. If the FBI and the US government is successful in creating a backdoor the encryption will be worthless and the put us more at risk as we’ll have a false sense of security.