Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

The only significant thing I ever did on ARPA NET was to get GPS funded. Of course that is too strong a statement; actually it was a lot more complicated than that.

What happened was that Francis X. Kane, the silent co-author of Possony and Pournelle THE STRATEGY OF TECHNOLOGY, had invented Global Positioning System while Director of Plans at USAF Systems Command, and had managed to get USAF to request and get funding. Then in the 70's Congress zeroed GPS out of the budget. Kane called me in hopes I had some resources to get it revived. I broadcast a message about that on ARPANET, and Lowell Wood, Livermore physicist and one of Teller's inner circle, saw it, sent me email to get details, got in touch with Kane, and went to Washington where he lobbied among his Congressional contacts to get it restored. It was restored and I think it would not have been done without Wood, who would not have heard about it were it not for ARPANET. GPS turns out to be important, but then we all knew it would be; the trick was convincing Congress.

That done, I had books to write and work to do. Commercial net accounts were coming, Loudon was inventing what became CompuServe after several evolutions and transformations and acquisitions, and BYTE was inventing BIX; I still held a clearance through having been President of Pepperdine Research and I still did some policy briefings for Air Force Plans and Doctrines, and so had all the communications I needed. Stallman, one of my friends from the MIT ARPANET, was done with most of his work there (I was an early beta tester of emacs, and some of my naïve observations found their way into the final product), and I found I spent most of my time on ARPANET playing ZORK, an activity for which I had no time; it was a gift of time to find that account closed. I resented the way it was done, but not enough to speak to anyone in the Pentagon about it. I see that the story still reverberates after twenty years (it all happened in CP/M S-100 days, mostly at 300 baud; 1200 was a godsend). Peace.
(source)

Do any of you have heroes, mentors or just consistently sensible public figures that you fear losing?

Pournelle is 86 now

Between 1847 and 1859, at least 36 expeditions set out in search of Franklin’s lost ships, but all ended in failure. It wasn’t until researchers turned to Inuit oral history that they were able to locate the final resting place of the Erebus and the Terror in the past decade.

The site where Fitzjames and at least a dozen others perished was located by searchers in the 1860s, who heard Inuit stories that the survivors resorted to cannibalism – news that rocked Victorian England. That testimony was given some support in the late 1990s by the late anthropologist Anne Keenleyside, who found marks consistent with human-made cuts on nearly a quarter of the bones.

A molar from one mandible, etched with knife marks, proved a match with one of those 25 [DNA samples] and the team soon realized they were holding the remains of Captain James Fitzjames. The results were published on Tuesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

In 1828 Congress passed a tariff that increased the rates on imports into the United States to as much as 50 percent. This was the largest increase in the country’s history. The aim was to protect American manufacturing in the North by making importing foreign goods more expensive. There were strong feelings about the Tariff of 1828. Reactions were divided by geography, and the country split in a way that would later be echoed by the division between the Union and the Confederacy in the Civil War. People in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky generally supported the tariff. Meanwhile, Southerners nicknamed it the “Tariff of Abominations.” Support of the tariff was one of the issues that helped decide the election of 1828. John Quincy Adams lost to Andrew Jackson.

1930 skrev USA:s president Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) under en av historiens mest ökända handelslagar: Smoot-Hawley-tullen.

Lagen höjde tullarna på över 20 000 importvaror för att skydda amerikanska jobb, företag och jordbruk från utländsk konkurrens.

Istället blev resultatet ett förödande tullkrig som fick världshandeln att kollapsa och USA att gå in i väggen.

Like Trump, Hoover was elected largely because of his business acumen. An international mining engineer, financier and humanitarian, he took office in 1929 like an energetic CEO, eager to promote public-private partnerships and use the levers of government to promote economic growth.

“Anyone not only can be rich, but ought to be rich,” he declared in his inaugural address before convening a special session of Congress to better protect U.S. farmers with “limited changes of the tariff.”

Instead, the 31st president got the Great Depression.

“National Socialism demands that the needs of German workers no longer be supplied by Soviet slaves, Chinese coolies, and Negroes,” [Nazi Party chief economist Gottfried] Feder wrote. Germany needed German workers and farmers producing German goods for German consumers. Feder saw “import restrictions” as key to returning the German economy to the Germans. “National Socialism opposes the liberal world economy, as well as the Marxist world economy,” Feder wrote. Our fellow Germans must “be protected from foreign competition.”

Even though Hitler’s own foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, was concerned that the strategy would spark a trade war, and could drive up the price of imported eggs by 600 percent, Feder’s tariffs fit into Hitler’s larger vision for “liberating” the German people from the shackles of a globalized world order.

Hans Joachim von Rohr, who worked at the Reich’s nutrition ministry, went on national radio to explain the logic of Hitler’s tariff strategy. “The products that Germany lacks must be made more expensive; then farmers will produce them in sufficient quantities,” Rohr explained. “And if foreign competition is kept at bay by tariffs and the like, city residents will prefer domestic production.” Rohr offered lard—“Schmalz”—as an example.

The primary targets of the Hitler tariffs—the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands—were outraged by the sudden suspension of favored-nation trading status on virtually all agricultural products, as well as on textiles, with tariffs in some cases rising 500 percent. With its livestock essentially banished from the German market, Denmark, for example, was facing substantial losses. Farmers panicked. The Danes and Swedes threatened “retaliatory measures,” as did the Dutch...

Hitler launched his trade war on the second Friday of his chancellorship. That evening, he appeared in the Berlin Sportpalast, the city’s largest venue, for a rally in front of thousands of jubilant followers. It was his first public appearance as chancellor, and it served as a victory lap. Hitler dispensed with the dark suit he wore in cabinet meetings in favor of his brown storm-trooper uniform with a bright-red swastika armband.