U.S. Military Goes Back to the Future

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex in his "Farewell Address." 

In Power & Market Murray N. Rothbard showed that no publicly-funded enterprise will be profitable because anything you do for political reasons must result in an economic loss. 

Furthermore, economic calculations derive from the relationship between time and money. Therefore, political choices necessarily result in temporal losses. Whereas businesses plan for the future, governments live in the past. 

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/us-seeks-cheaper-hunter-killer-drones-after-iran-destroys-1b-worth-of-reapers/

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/us-military-sent-explosive-drone-boats-into-combat-for-the-first-time/

As a consequence of entropy, merging the military with corporate industries did not jump the military to a higher quantum state of better actions from better decision-making. Instead, the corporations became more averse to change and less invested in disruptions from entrepreneurs and "intrapreneurs". 

Jane Jacobs differentiated the guardian mode from the commercial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival) by contrasting 15 behaviors in each. Some of those are approximately analogous and others are obvious opposites.

Jacobs herself was a "democratic socialist" and she emigrated to Canada because Pres. Richard Nixon was elected. Therefore, it is significant that she recognized the Guardian Syndrome as a standard for socialist nations. She meant that normatively, not positively: statistically, not ethically. In other words, Jacobs described what she discovered, not what she sought. 

"What comes out of a team or a committee is the most daring idea that the least daring man can accept." John Arnold. "Space, Time and Education," Astounding Science Fiction, May 1953, pp. 9–25. Introductory remarks by John W. Campbell, Jr., editor, pp. 9–10.

Bob Gesking makes remote-controlled model boats: Home Hobbyist (gallery)

• Updated: Dec. 13, 2012, 2:49 p.m.
• |Published: Dec. 13, 2012, 1:49 p.m.

https://www.cleveland.com/insideout/2012/12/bob_gesking_makes_remote-contr.html

Communities of hobbyists have been building radio-controlled vehicles for the air, land, and water since the early 1950s. Brothers Walter and William Good built and flew their Big Guff in 1938. The idea of a radio controlled aeroplane was tested by the UK military during World War I. 

As political entropy decreases the energies of enterprise, the military becomes ever less advanced. And, generally and broadly considered, that is a good thing. However, that only reflects the more basic truth that we are all getting poorer because of political decisions being made in market contexts and markets being subsumed by political operations.

The best society separates power and market for the same reasons that it separates church and state. 

[13 April 2013] "The influential head of Google, Eric Schmidt, has called for civilian drone technology to be regulated, warning about privacy and security concerns. Cheap miniature versions of the unmanned aircraft used by militaries could fall into the wrong hands, he told the UK's Guardian newspaper.  Quarrelling neighbours, he suggested, might end up buzzing each other with private surveillance drones.  He also warned of the risk of terrorists using the new technology.  Mr Schmidt is believed to have close relations with US President Barack Obama, whom he advises on matters of science and technology.” -- BBC Technology News here Touted on Slashdot here

https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2013/04/drones-are-everywhere.html

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Audacity of Enterprise

Why a Level Playing Field?

Leadership 

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security

Brain Drain

Catching up on the weekends is difficult and I should have written this ten days ago when I first found the bifold handout in an engineering building on campus. Last night, I heard the term “brain drain” on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” I knew the phrase from the 1960s because of the foreign medical doctors living in our neighborhood near City Hospital (now “Cuyahoga County MetroHealth”). 

Long ago, when I was working for Kawasaki Robotics, one of the company officers said to me that he considered “international people” to be special in themselves, different from the people in their countries of origin.

On the way home last week with the handout in my kit bag it was pretty easy to guess that Hyundai was not the only multinational corporation recruiting at the University of Texas Austin, and that UT is not the only place that those companies are visiting. 

If you had come to America to earn a doctorate in engineering and you were not sure of your future status here, it would make sense to actively arrange your next port-of-call, rather than leaving that to an encounter not of your own planning. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life 

Teaching Ethics to Engineering Students 

ArmadilloCon 41 

Entrepreneurship 

Jim Simons and the Quants

Being centered on mathematicians, this book was not exciting, but it was interesting. James Harris “Jim” Simons (1938-2024) earned his doctorate at Berkeley, and worked for the NSA and the Institute for Defense Analysis, before teaching at Harvard and MIT. (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons). And that is in this story, of course. The focus, however, is on Renaissance Technologies and their hedge funds (Medallion and others), the most successful trading firm in history. Simons’s background in language recognition—pattern recognition; pattern prediction—allowed him the insight to expect that correlations must exist across markets, even if causal factors ultimately remain hidden. Therefore, it should be possible to profit from trading on trends that are unexpected and unperceived by everyone else. He was right.

The Man Who Solved the Market:
How Jim Simons Launched
the Quant Revolution 
by Gregory Zuckerman
(Penguin RandomHouse, 2019)

The method was easy to explain: mine the data. Look at all the numbers from all the markets and seek out trends and patterns and correlations. Some turned out to be causative. Regression to the mean predicts that after some market has a remarkably bad day, prices will rebound. The prediction applies to hugely profitable days: the market reverts toward its previous level. That much is easy to understand. The rest never gets explained. 

 

For one thing, no one associated with Renaissance Technologies was willing to talk to Gregory Zuckerman because they were bound by deep long-term non-disclosure agreements. Aside from that, the powerhouse of the company was driven by its staff of Ph.D. mathematicians. It would have to be understood at their level before it could be explained to the rest of us. 

 

What can be understood is that on average, employees who invested with the firm earned about $50 million each. “Since 1988, Renaissance's flagship Medallion hedge fund has generated average annual returns of 66 percent, racking up trading profits of more than $100 billion…” (Introduction). With that money came power, of course. Robert Mercer put his ideology to work when he found Steve Bannon for the Donald Trump presidential campaign in 2016. However, Jim Simons was a Democrat. And he was not alone in that. Many of the academics in the firm were liberals and they contributed to political campaigns, naturally, and also to special foundations (some of their own creation) supporting education, medical research, and other social initiatives.

 

Jim Simons’s methodology was a long time coming. Computers were rare and costly. Ten years later, they acquired the first desktop computers, which were woefully underppowered by today's standards. Although he launched the firm specifically to mine data so that profits could be harvested from trends, Renaissance Technologies also employed traditional traders. The two teams often collided, with Jim Simons himself significantly abandoning the algorithms for what would be too easily called “gut instinct.” Sometimes, we just know.  Also, with that mountain of cash, and with their frequent intra-day trades, they did not need to be often right. At the peak, in Jim Simons’s last decade, with the models and algorithms and supercomputers all generating money, Renaissance Technologies was right only 51% of the time.

 

One aspect of the story which I believe explains as much of their success as their mathematical models, is that Renaissance Technologies adhered to the ideal academic organizational culture. Workspaces were open. Visiting around the office was common. Sharing ideas was habitual. Discussion and disagreement were encouraged. (Pages 199-203). (See also "Team of Teams" on this blog.) It was not always easy and some people never forgave others for their complete lack of social grace. Neither time nor money heals all wounds.

But we all enjoy the profits. Zuckerman presents this as a zero-sum game. For Renaissance Technologies to have profited, many other brokerages, whose clients were stereotypically “dentists” (and other middle class professionals), had to lose. It is true that every trading position requires two people with opposite expectations. Ultimately, conservation of energy (charge; spin) means that everything must be accounted for with nothing magically lost or gained. And yet here we are: 10 billion people, 50% of us in cities of over 1 million; flying around 10 kilometers above the ground or cruising on the ground at 100 kph. We could not have hunted and gathered enough to make this possible. If not for Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies, we would each of us be poorer by unperceived small fractions that did not become the comforts we enjoy.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Two Books About Fermat’s Last Theorem 

The Remarkable Story of Risk 

Happy Pi Day of the Century 

Coins Without Realms (Digital Currency) 

Massive Constellations of Artificial Satellites: What if they were natural?

Many of my colleagues in astronomy, both professional and amateur, are vocal in their opposition to Starlink, the SpaceX project that is placing thousands of satellites in orbit. They complain that imaging and other data gathering has been harmed or ruined by the tracks of these devices.  

What if Earth had a ring and these tracks were a consequence of our natural situation? Would the astronomers curse the ring and demand its destruction?

 

They want it stopped. They want the UN to do something. They vilify Elon Musk. They call the satellites junk and pollution. This is not merely a matter of a difficult technical problem like the construction of the Panama Canal or going to the Moon. It is an emotionally motivated attack on material progress, capitalism, and one audacious entrepreneur. 

 

If no one wanted these things, they would not be launched. The project cost is estimated at $30 billion (Reuters here.) It could fail, ultimately. Enterprise entails is risk. In fact, absent risk, there would be no enterprise. (Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein reviewed here.) However, the basic fact of a perceived market still exists. 

 

One of my first university classes in sociology studied the workplace in America. The professor was a nice enough guy but accepted the usual complaint that corporations advertise to motivate to buy and do things that we do not really want. I understand. I certainly was never motivated to buy and drink Mountain Dew though millions of people have been. So, I went out online and found some easy examples of famously failed products. When vitamin-enhanced bottled water was first introduced, it failed, and was mocked in the advertising trade magazines. Starlink could fail. 

But it is not the first communication satellite. That honor goes to OSCAR-1 launched for the Amateur Radio Relay League six months before AT&T’s Telstar. So, these satellites have been “polluting” astronomical images for sixty years. No one seemed to care.

 

I believe that the detractors of progress are privileged and satisfied, enjoying their own comforts, and now wanting to deny those benefits to others. Back in the 1960s, one mock on British Labour was “Sod you, Jack. I’ve got mine.” Ludwig von Mises sketched out well the anti-capitalist mentality (Mises Institute here) as being motivated by envy and jealousy.

 

What if Earth had a natural ring? Other planets do. The four giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have rings. Smaller planets do, also. The minor planet of Chariklo, Centaur 2006 Chiron, and trans-Neptunian minor planet Haumea all have rings. (See Caltech News here.)  Ontologically, Earth could as well. If we did and if views of the other planets, the stars, nebulae, etc., etc. were occasionally blocked or photographic plates captured their tracks what would be the response? 

 

Would astronomers wish for (or demand) a massive anti-satellite program? No one seems to be calling for weather modification to clear the sky of clouds on nights that astronomers want to work from their visual observatories. (Radio astronomy is not affected by clouds and rain.) 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Entrepreneurship 

Elon Musk and the Audacity of Entrepreneurship 

Supplies and Demands 

The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy 

Virgin Galactic VX01 VX03

 A picture is worth a thousand words.

NASA-TV cut between its own feed and the press feed from Unity 22.

These are all sequential as presented by NASA.

Time and Altitude stamps show actuals.

 

 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Space is the Place: Come to the High Frontier 

The Virtues of Aviation Culture 

Armadillocon 41 Day 3 Part 1 

Entrepreneurship 

Amateur Astronomy for Pay

Technically, of course, if you are getting paid, then you are not an amateur. At least, that is how the International Olympic Committee used to view the matter, certainly when they took away Jim Thorpe’s medals because he played minor league baseball while in college—though baseball was not an Olympic sport until 1992. Here, the assumption is that you have some other employment or are retired, and for you, astronomy is a pastime. How can you get paid for it?

One of the active members of our local club is a very accomplished photographer. He displays at periodic arts and crafts shows. Astronomical photographs seem to be easy retail sales. The trick is in the printing and mounting and you can find advice online about on that. Tourist-oriented shops or book retailers in your area could be outlets, also. However, most of them will want your work on consignment and typically you take the loss if the item is damaged, or stolen. 

Moon of Jupiter casts its shadow on the planet.
astro@RobPettengill.org
Rob prints his processed images on metal.
I own two.
I know Ron from our local astronomy club.
My wife knows him from a local software club.

Still, because astronomical photographs are compelling, this could be a market for someone who enjoys marketing. Selling online with your own website and through other big outlet sites is always an option. It still requires payment services, packing, and shipping, and customer service and all that.

Astronomers rely on two broad families of software: planetarium and image processing. In the first category, several commercial products such as Starry Night are well known and compete against free software such as Stellarium and Celestia. But with software, creators are passionate about their better idea. Image processing software includes AstroPix and StarTools among others. Again, for those who love to code, the fact that others already have done it is no barrier. (See the earlier post, Ruby Methods the Ruby Way, here.)

Free Astronomy Planetarium Software

Matthew McCool  Southern Polytechnic 

SU E-mail: mmccool@spsu.edu 

posted at the University of Texas Astronomy here: http://outreach.as.utexas.edu/marykay/highschool/07_21.pdf

You can write for publication. The channels are narrow and shallow. In the USA we have two paying magazine, Astronomy and Sky & Telescope. Both are mostly written by their own fulltime staffs. They do accept submissions, subject to a lot of restrictions. Both magazines tell authors to query first. For Astronomy, I found the Guidelines by putting Guidelines in the Search box. (I could not find it as a tab, menu item or link off the homepage.) 

They say (in part): “Most of the articles used in the magazine are commissioned by our editors. Occasionally, we do publish unsolicited material. To query us on an article idea, send a letter or an outline that describes the piece. If you have not been published in Astronomy, please send writing samples along with your letter. All submissions must include a typed, double-spaced printout. These materials will not be returned to you. You will receive a written response indicating whether or not your article has been accepted for publication.”

Sky & Telescope is more user-friendly. The guidelines for contributors is a labeled link at the bottom of the home page. Sky & Tel says (in part): “About half the material in each monthly issue of Sky & Telescope is written by our editors and regular contributors. The rest is authored by science journalists, research astronomers, historians, and accomplished amateur astronomers from all nations and diverse cultures. Many authors write for us again and again, but we're always looking for new writers eager to share their enthusiasm, talent, and expertise with our readers.”

(Just to note: I have not submitted any queries to either magazine. I am not far enough along in my knowledge base. I have been granted literary awards by the American Numismatic Association, but in those cases, I report on the works of others, not original discoveries. So, that would be my intentions here as well.) 

 

Cary Jacobs (Kent, UK) acrylic on canvas
advertised on The Sky Searchers dot com
under Vendors

If you like buying and selling, astronomy is a hobby that depends on expensive equipment. I will caution that buying and selling is an activity in its own right. In the five years from 1977 to 1982, computer retailers learned that a successful track record in refrigerator sales is a better predictor of success than knowledge of computers. If you do not enjoy trading, knowledge of astronomy will not provide the skills. Those skills can be learned, but it is learning by trial and error which can be expensive.

Just a side note:  Shipping can be expensive as well. A friend from my local club assured me that his telescope is portable because it weighs only 50 lbs. When I wanted to borrow a scope from the club, the equipment chair cautioned me that the optical assembly alone weighs about 60 lbs. That is something of an upper limit for a hobby scope, but a factor to consider. Eyepieces, lenses, mirrors, finders, filters, and such are much smaller and easier to take to FedEx, UPS, or the USPS.  

Lecturing for pay is possible. Our local astronomy club does get requests from hotels, resorts, and similar venues to provide guest lecturers for special events. They offer (modest) honoraria that cover time and expenses. 

You could always do your own advertising and market your own presentation services. However, as with sales, if you do not already enjoy public speaking, knowledge of astronomy will not carry you through. It is learnable. Toastmasters International is a popular engagement for those who want to learn public speaking. I will say that my wife tried it when her information systems employer wanted her to make videos. Instead, she took 18 weeks of improv training at a local theater. She got over the fear of presentation but does not volunteer for it. I do. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Entrepreneurship 

Venture Capital 

The Scientific Method 

Hypatia of Alexandria 

Physics for Astronomers: The Works of Steven Weinberg 

Extreme Ownership

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, St. Martins Press, 2015.

“So, there I was, knee deep in hand grenade pins…”  The authors claim that this is not a string of self-glorifying war stories, the kind that old men grow in the retelling.  But, in fact, every teaching point is illustrated with a real war story. The authors assure us that the reports are sanitized so as not to violate operational security (OPSEC). Business briefs follow the battle scenes. Again, the details are altered to protect the client. Unfortunately, that reduces these white papers to blank pages. Although the Navy SEALs are realistic, the business people all sound alike. Lacking depth, the executives and managers are cardboard characters. Despite those flaws, the teaching points are valid. 

The thesis of the book is easy to understand. Extreme Ownership means taking full responsibility for your experiential world. If your boss does not understand your circumstances, then the failure is yours: you did not make it clear enough. I was reminded of a scene in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Some thuggish architects are complaining to each other about the hero, Howard Roark. Face it, one admits. You are just mad because he doesn’t even notice you. “He’d notice me if I bashed his head with a club.” No he wouldn’t: he would just blame himself for not avoiding the club.

The other lessons are equally unarguable.

No bad teams, only bad leaders.

You must believe in your mission.

Check your ego. (In other words, control it, block it, like checking your luggage at the departure gate.)

Cover and Move means that teams protect each other, leap-frogging forward.

Simple commands are easier to carry out. Complex missions must be simplified to their essentials.

Prioritize and execute.  You cannot do everything all at once. Attempting the wrong task will cause other goals to be missed. Know what is most important and do that.

Decentralize command. It is old advice. Nonetheless, delegating authority can be a matter of life and death in an urban warzone. In every organization, span of control means that each decision-maker ideally has only about five people reporting.  I was reminded of how ships –especially warships – are run: each department depends on all the others, and each expects the others to run their shops effectively. The captain cannot do it all from the bridge. Each section is responsible for its own performance.

Plan.  This shocked me: the US Navy SEALs devote more time – much more time – to creating and presenting PowerPoints than they do fighting in combat.  As I came close to the end of the book, I had a long weekend training drill at Texas State Guard headquarters. I chatted with another ex-pilot about software development. Pilots spend as much time or more planning flights than actually flying. But software developers seem to all just bang out code with no planning. The results are all around us. If code really blew up, or if systems really crashed, programmers would do more planning.

Leading up and down the chain of command is a direct consequence of extreme ownership. It takes some finesse to lead the people above you, but it is no less necessary than leading those under your command. You are responsible for your environment. If your boss does not understand your situation, it can only be because you failed to communicate.

Decisiveness and Uncertainty are easy opposites. Leaders make decisions, usually right ones, if they are good leaders. Leaders who waver, postpone, and procrastinate are not leaders at all, but managers who are in deep water (or worse) over their heads.

The chapter on Decisiveness and Uncertainty introduces the final chapter: Discipline equals Freedom. This chapter actually goes into Aristotle’s “golden mean” without naming it explicitly. The authors run down a list of opposites and counsel moderation in all things: leader and follower; confident but not cocky; humble but not passive; competitive but a gracious loser; and so on.  Through the course of the book, the tension between opposites powers much of the narrative. In Chapter 8, the authors explain that Decentralized Command is possible only when the Commander’s Intent is communicated clearly.  

Books on management and leadership are easy to find. A book that announced radically new truths would be rare. The guidance here is not radical. Shorn of the war stories and business briefs, this might be a 20-page essay.  They are nonetheless 20 very valuable pages.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Primary Leadership Training 

Leadership 

Profiles in Courage 

Entrepreneurship 

Politics and the Inverse Square Law

The farther you are from something, the less you know about. In physics, this applies to the force of gravity, to electro-static attraction or repulsion, to the intensity of sound.  More generally, it applies to social and political distances.  Political decisions made at city hall, the county seat, the state capital, and Washington D.C. must suffer by the square of the distance from a lack of information.

From DigitalArtForm.com

On the other hand, when you make economic choices for yourself, your family, or household, you are most directly informed about the facts and the consequences.  The further into the future you plan, the less you know and the greater your risks.

Political plans to save the planet and the future generations that inhabit it must suffer from degradations of knowledge along every dimension of true costs, actual benefits, and both primary and secondary consequences intended and unintended.  Indeed, it is quite likely that many, if not most, future generations will not even be on this planet.

The world’s oldest continuing companies (see Wikipedia here) are all narrowly focused on mundane pursuits such as beer, wine, candy, jewelry, and hospitality.  It is hard enough to make beer successfully for 200 years.  The oldest companies in the United States (Wikipedia here) reflect the economic paradigm of capitalism: pencils, chemicals, tools, and newspapers. And we still have old breweries and continuing farms.

http://www.classroomhearing.org/images/6db_drop.jpg

 Governments are less successful.  The UK and USA are wonderful exceptions. England last executed a king in 1649.  The Glorious Revolution of 1688 defined the status of crown and parliament.  The Constitution of the United States was ratified a hundred years later.  Although Iceland does claim the longest continuing parliament, the Althing, that institution only existed within a context of subordination to Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, as Iceland was not politically independent from 1262 to 1944. Generally, governments come and go with alarming regularity exactly because they are so poor at both predicting the future and responding to new circumstances.

SUNY Canton Engineering
and Construction Management
Interactive here.

Perhaps the best judgment came from Prof. Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House.  Addressing a Republican Party fund-raiser, he said of the government, “These people are not evil. They just have the wrong information system.”  In other words, they are informed by power, not market.  And the physics of power is not encouraging. Though not all analogies between electrical circuits and political action are valid, generally, any resistance can draw more power until the system overloads.   

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS 

The Science of Liberty

The Remarkable Story of Risk

Entrepreneurship

Space is the Place: Come to the High Frontier