FIRST STEPS TOWARD REALITY FOR A SCI-FI SCENARIO?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 17, 2020 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “FIRST STEPS TOWARD REALITY FOR A SCI-FI SCENARIO?”

          Many parts of current reality, from talking wristwatches to smartphones and sophisticated industrial and domestic robots like Amazon’s Alexa, Roomba vacuum cleaners and many more, occurred in science fiction stories decades before becoming everyday devices.

          So it pays today to consider where California and the rest of modern civilization may be headed, with online work and education expanded exponentially as part of the effort to curb the worldwide COVID-19 viral pandemic.

          Increasingly, people communicate by computer, smartphone and smartwatch rather than in person. Isolation grows ever more common; “social distancing” is officially mandated as a key anti-virus tactic, with violations potentially punishable by fine or jail time.

          So a look at one of the first times something like this appeared in literature and the extreme form it took there might be appropriate before the current reality becomes habit in California, where many of the world’s trends are set.

          That early appearance came via the distinguished author Isaac Asimov’s 1957 novel “The Naked Sun.”

          The book sees humanoid robot Daneel Olivaw and his human detective partner Elijah Bailey, natives of earth, travel to the fictional planet of Solaria to investigate a murder. On Solaria, they find a civilization of vast plantations, each inhabited by only one person.

The planet’s rigidly-controlled population of 20,000 is supported by ten thousand times that many robots, who do all the work. The few humans, virtually always isolated, communicate almost exclusively by hologram – their real-looking but ephemeral images projected across thousands of miles, a potential technology far more advanced than the so-called holograms used on some drivers licenses and credit cards today.

          Face-to-face communication, especially of the sort needed to reproduce, is seen as dirty stuff on Solaria, even if it’s occasionally unavoidable.

In the face of the coronavirus, things have not yet gone nearly that far. But today’s great expansion of working remotely by computer and other “smart” devices is creating changes for many millions. This includes schoolchildren who get lesson plans and some supervision from teachers working at home via tablets and computers, some supplied by school systems. Even television reporters now perform live standups with backyard hedges or living rooms as backdrops, rather than the usual graphics like video boards with weather maps.

          It’s a massive change that seems to work in this hopefully brief period when parents are forced to shelter at home to avoid either spreading or catching the virus. But what happens if parents return to work, but schools remain closed, as Gov. Gavin Newsom has hinted they might until next fall?

          That’s unknown. But California has far too few day camps and other day care programs to handle the millions of children who might soon need supervision from someone other than a parent.

           What’s more, despite offers of free Internet service from companies like Verizon, many children lack connectivity in their homes, but can’t go to Starbucks, public libraries or other commercial sites to pick up wifi connections, because most such places – when they reopen – still won’t cater to unsupervised children.

          Meanwhile, working life in California and many other locales has changed radically since shelter-in-place became common government policy. Many workers already had no need for access to bulky file cabinets, drawing boards, easels and fax machines. They could find almost everything they need online with laptop computers costing as little as $200 each and, in some cases, mere tablets that cost much less.

          What happens to them when the pandemic runs its course? Will employers still want to pay rent on many thousands of square feet of office space when they’ve seen their employees can use kitchen tables? The relatively few times employees actually need to see their bosses could be accommodated by renting a large room. Will workers still want to make long commutes? All this might not work for food service workers, but no one yet knows how permanent the changes imposed on restaurants will become, how radically today’s experience might alter California’s future.

          No one knows if all this means fewer humans will eventually be needed, al la Asimov’s Solaria. But while the changes are new, the concepts they’ve begun bringing to life are not.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

TRUMP ACTED IN HASTE ON TARIFFS, MAY REGRET AT LENGTH

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
   “TRUMP ACTED IN HASTE ON TARIFFS, MAY REGRET AT LENGTH”

          By the time most folks reach 70, even very impetuous males, they’ve realized the truth of the hallowed cliché, “act in haste, repent at leisure.”

          But apparently not President Trump. By many reports, he announced a massive round of tariffs on foreign materials and goods like steel and aluminum in a fit of pique, angered because his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner could not get a full security clearance.

          Within less than a week, there were already signs of regret. This was prompted not only by loud criticism from some of his fellow Republicans in Congress, but also because some other countries and federations, most notably the European Union, began openly contemplating their own tariffs on American goods, especially those made in “red” states that backed Trump in the 2016 election, goods like blue jeans and bourbon.

          For a businessman widely experienced in the give-and-take of negotiating, Trump surely knew that for every action there’s a reaction. He likely was not surprised when, for example, Canada began openly thinking about tariffs on cars built in states Trump carried, from Nissans (Tennessee) and Mercedes-Benzes (Alabama) to Chryslers (Michigan).

          So Trump began backtracking. He started by suggesting he might relent on tariffs affecting Canada and Mexico if a “better deal” emerges from current talks on revising the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

          But so far, there’s been no backing off prospective tariffs against goods from China, Japan and South America, among the largest buyers of exported California products from high tech silicon chips to movies and food products.

          Even if Europe were to target red-state industries, China and Japan probably cannot. That’s because so much of their trade with America is actually trade with California.

          California rice, grown in the Sacramento River Valley north of the state capital, is a staple of the Japanese diet because population growth long ago outstripped Japan’s ability to grow enough on its own. China is the largest foreign market for American films, mostly produced by California-headquartered firms, even if some of those companies are foreign owned. And much of Asia depends on computer chips developed in the Silicon Valley. Wine and nut exports to China are also substantial.

          If Trump thought retaliation against his proposed tariffs would hurt California, he didn’t say so. But given the context of his seeming vendetta against the Golden State because it has defied him on several fronts, chances are he would not mind that. Of course, if Central Valley farms begin to suffer and fallow fields and orchards because tariffs are cutting down the exports that consume almost half their output, it just might harm the electoral prospects of GOP congressmen like Jeff Denham, Devin Nunes and David Valadao, who have toed almost the full Trump line for the last 16 months.

          And California farmers are expecting big trouble if Trump insists on the tariffs. They now take in more than $21 billion from foreign markets, with California almonds, for example, dominating nut sales almost everywhere. California vintners also would suffer. Wheat growers immediately protested the tariffs, and some large grain farmers were major Trump financial backers in 2016.

          California farms account for much of the world’s crop of table grapes, olive oil, raisins, figs, artichokes, dates, kiwis and canned, pitted fruits like peaches, plums and apricots. China imposed 25 and 15 percent tariffs on some of those items, including grapes, almonds and walnuts.

          Put a serious crimp in the China trade, as the nascent tariff war could do, and rather than helping decrease America’s trade deficit, the new levies could worsen it.

          So if he ever reflects on his insistence on tariffs – by all reports, against the advice of his top economists – Trump may come to regret it.

          But even though he frequently denies saying things days after they were videoed and recorded, he won’t be able to label the consequences of tariffs as fake news. Rather those consequences could include a new recession, loss of millions of American jobs and assured electoral defeat in 2020.

          The bottom line: Trump acted in haste on the tariffs and unless he relents soon, he could regret it the rest of his life. So might a lot of other people.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

'DISCLOSE ACT’ AS ANTIDOTE TO DISMAL VOTE TURNOUTS?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 17, 2015, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “‘DISCLOSE ACT’ AS ANTIDOTE TO DISMAL VOTE TURNOUTS?”

          Politicians have come up with myriad alleged reasons for the dismal vote turnouts seen across California in this spring’s municipal elections – not even reaching 10 percent of eligible voters in the state’s biggest city, Los Angeles.

          Bad timing, some suggest. Too many elections, others say. Another excuse: not enough news coverage.

          But these rationalizations ignore a fundamental reality of today’s politics. Voters just don’t trust politicians, believing many have been bought by special interests making unlimited, often anonymous donations under the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous “Citizens United” decision, which declared that corporations have some of the same rights as people.

          Because Supreme Court justices serve for life and several who voted for Citizens United are relatively young, that decision won’t be reversed anytime soon. So anyone believing that openness and transparency can create trust in government must look elsewhere for solutions.

          One that many believe can be effective is immediate, prominent disclosure of the biggest funders of political campaigns and advertising both for individual candidates and ballot propositions.

          Enter California’s proposed “Disclose Act,” a putative law that’s been on the drawing board in the Legislature for more than five years. It would require the top three funders of ballot measure ads be shown clearly in the ads themselves. And it requires the donors listed in the ad be the original sources of the cash, forbidding the use of committee names often employed to conceal the identities of the original contributors.

    While this doesn’t require similar disclosure of donors to so-called independent expenditure committees backing individual candidates, it’s a big step in the right direction. Donors to the candidates themselves are listed on the secretary of state’s website.

         

          Backed by the California Clean Money Campaign and more than 400 other organizations, the Disclose Act reemerged in the Legislature in March, co-sponsored by Democratic Assemblymen Jimmy Gomez of Los Angeles and Marc Levine of Marin County. It’s now also known as AB 700.

          “The goal…is to press for greater transparency at who’s trying to hide behind these magnificently titled political committees, expose their true identities and motives,” said Gomez.

          It’s anybody’s guess whether voters watching TV and Internet ads would pay attention to this information if offered. But at least this would give them the chance to understand what and who is behind the ads blasted at them.

          Would it have worked with something like last fall’s Proposition 45? That measure, aiming to regulate health insurance prices just like car insurance and property coverage premiums already are, led in polls by about 10 percent when the campaign around it began in July of last year.

          But a $55 million ad campaign, seemingly ubiquitous for months on both radio and television, reversed that margin and led the initiative to lose by 59-41 percent.

          The measure was opposed by the California Medical Assn. doctors’ lobby and the California Hospital Assn., among others. They feared controlling insurance premiums would cut into their members’ income. The endings of their ads also contained fine print and barely audible statements saying they were paid for by the state’s biggest health insurance carriers, Kaiser Permanente, Blue Shield, the parent company of Anthem Blue Cross and HealthNet.

          The result made it plain almost no one read the fine print or heeded the sotto voce disclosure statements, let alone checked out the secretary of state website. The ads turned around about 1 million voters, as effective a campaign as the state has seen in years.

          Things might have been different had the Disclose Act been around. Would voters who knew the message was sponsored by Big Health Insurance still have changed their minds and chosen today’s unregulated health insurance premiums? It’s speculative to say that disclosure would have prevented the turnaround in voters’ opinion on insurance rate regulation, but the Disclose Act at least would have let them know who was trying to influence them.

          All of which means that although the latest version of the Disclose Act would still leave plenty more to be done, it would be a big step toward voters’ understanding the political process and leveling a playing field that now tilts markedly toward large corporations.

         

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net