HALF-FULL REPORT 06/23/23
The Global Authenticity Problem
U.S. Navy hydrophones detected the implosion and loss of the Titan, a deep-sea submersible Oceangate owned on Sunday, June 18, 2023. However, the Pentagon was not allowed to release this by order of the White House. The illusion of a significant search and rescue operation complete with reports of banging sounds from the deep was maintained throughout Hunter Biden’s court case. As a result, many more Americans understand the ins and outs of marine tourism than the gravity of Biden’s corruption.
Narrative control is an art, and those practicing it earn substantial sums. Perhaps it has always been this way: storytellers are valued in every society.
Biden is weaponizing the government against the citizenry and now brazenly flaunts the idea of equal justice under the law. Selling out U.S. interests and policies to undermine gas and oil producers is not a crime or a low-level misdemeanor in modern America. Carrying a cell phone that connects to a government-spoofed cell tower in the vicinity of the U.S. Capital on January 6 carries a twenty-year sentence. The government wants to impose the death penalty for the crime of standing in a crowd while White and conservative.
*******
The Dangers from Induction
Since about 2012, engineering disasters have been increasingly caused by unqualified designers biasing designs based on appearance, cost, or poorly vetted subcontractors. The first big one was the bridge in Florida that collapsed due to overloading internal tensioners. Automobiles such as the Chevy Volt, aircraft like the Boeing 737 Supermax, and now the Titan submersible are experiencing catastrophic failures.
My experience with clients has many examples where committees are assigned a design task with a history of working well with others, which lands one a spot on the team. Not proficiency, experience, or the grit to sweat the details well into the night. Engineering design teams increasingly gather around a conference table with one team member at the computer’s keyboard projecting information up on a big screen.
The process often includes a facilitator repeating the mantra to show me the data. Or if there is no data, then it does not exist. This new school of engineering design sees the world through the computer database rather than through mathematic equations. Problems are solved using computers to scan databases and determine correlation coefficients between two or more data sets.
The discovery process once relied upon a deep understanding of the relevant science and math and then applying the mathematics to produce prototypes or pilot plants. Considerable experience, deep education, and empirical testing fueled the development of new knowledge. Science, engineering, and medicine expanded as new knowledge was discovered.
This basic system put Americans on the moon 54 years ago.
However, the skill and experience necessary to engineer systems using deductive reasoning can have high up-front costs. The talent is expensive.
Companies first gradually, then suddenly, shifted to inductive engineering, where design information is sourced from databases, not by calculating and testing design criteria. This approach deskills the design process to the point that complex system designers do little more than arrange lines on a computer screen.
Most of my business as a consultant, post-Covid, has been to identify and correct design errors in the chemical industry affecting product cost and quality. In nearly every case, a client was in trouble because an inexperienced, diverse team failed to ask the right questions while sitting around the conference table with coffee mugs in hand.
Design processes such as SCRUM or rapid prototyping assume designers bring deep experience. But instead, a design trap is forming where deep skill sets are required, but inductive methods prevent deep skills development.
The situation worsens with A.I. as science, engineering, and medicine are being radically deskilled. Innovation is slowing for the first time in millennia. The decline is accelerating as corporations are forced to consider everything other than merit when hiring with the assumption that complex computer technology will think.
Catastrophic failures are becoming more common as modern design methods often do not include safety margins. Design safety margins are usually closely guarded secrets that allow one company to operate in a different position on the cost-quality curve than another. For example, Honda generators have higher displacement engines per kilowatt output than competing brands. The customer gets a machine that lasts forever because the larger engine runs cooler and under less stress than a competing design from China. Honda does not disclose their engineering margins, but they can be determined with simple math.
It is the rare customer that does the math.
In the case of the lost submersible, nobody did the math either. The hull was five inches thick, manufactured from carbon fiber wrapping a mandrel and saturated in epoxy. The end caps were made from titanium with an acrylic (Plexiglass) window to the front.
The hull should have been strong enough from the computer design program, provided no manufacturing flaws or material inconsistencies were present. It is these inconsistencies that create the need for design safety margins, as well as unexpected loading.
Oceangate fired personnel that identified variations in the carbon fiber thread and insisted on halting manufacturing until the vessel and its components could be tested. The firing decision might have reached all the way to the board of directors, including big names such as David Rothschild.
For whatever reason, the need to produce the submersible quickly outweighed prudence. Why the world urgently needed a submarine capable of transporting elites to any spot in the ocean with the majority of the vessel fabricated from sonar-absorbing carbon fiber is anybody’s guess. It’s not like there is a second, double-dog secret, Epstein Island. Surely not.
The Titan was completed and entered service without critical system redundancy or even non-destructive testing of its pressure parts. Instead, a sound recording device was placed inside, and the vessel test dove while the microphone listened for popping noises. Popping sounds indicated carbon fiber rupture and cracking within the epoxy composite. This test validated the computer design. However, there is no possible way for this test to have determined the actual engineering margin. Was the sub operating at 100% pressure load or 80% at its operating depth? No way to know.
********
Battlefield Simulations
Computerized wargaming to train Ukrainian officers, develop plans, and predict the outcome is essential to Ukraine’s Spring Offensive. Germany developed the software.
Wargames have a long history, with natural red-on-blue simulated conflicts considered the gold standard. However, extensive field games are expensive and require substantial skill and logistics train. Starting about two hundred years ago, countries found it helpful to simulate wars using complex strategy games that do not require a specific understanding of technology or logistics. These giant board games deskilled strategy development.
Enter the battlefield computer simulation. Assumptions built into the software now substantially replace human experience and insight so the pure strategic leader can emerge. Remember that sanitation, tactics, and logistics significantly affect the real world.
Ukraine’s war planning via simulation might not be new, but the war is showing the results of simulation errors. Ukraine, and the more excellent West, expected Ukraine to move faster and more profoundly during this offensive than they have. It is possible that the simulations failed to include the destruction of a major dam across the Dnieper or other factors.
If the German simulation contains errors, then there is a big problem. Drone swarms have been used in wars for about a decade, and technology to counter them is just emerging. Reliance on computer simulations introduces the same engineering margin problem to the battlefield that was introduced into the Titan submersible. Experienced advisors can fix issues on the ground, but the approach is costly compared with developing sounder plans.
There is a problem with this war that has little to do with the rightness or wrongness of the conflict. It is the same problem emerging in many other complex systems designed through computer simulation.
The idea that armies, companies, design teams, etc., can now function with a more significant number of less skilled people is wrong. Don’t put your money into any venture claiming computerization has eliminated the need for talent.
*******
Climate Change Simulations
Five years ago this week, Greta Rothschild Thunberg, the autistic niece of a very powerful, globally-known financier, declared that we would all be dead due to global warming by this very week.
Her masters relied upon flawed computer simulation and the economics behind replacing human competency with computer code. Greta is an excellent example of the problems emergent as natural talent is considered redundant. The entire WEF and its U.N. Agendas are based on this flawed premise.
Three years ago this spring, the world locked down due to a faulty computer simulation run at East Anglia University by epidemic hacks. The whole planet ground to crawl while dissenters possessing deep experience were silenced and ruined. Trust science to many people means trusting computer simulations.
The world is suffering from the loss of logically deductive reasoning that fleshes out new ideas from fundamental principles. Become a master of logical deduction. It is the most difficult to do well, but it is in great demand and poor supply.
*******
Leading from the Rear
The head of the Wagner Group in Russia, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is an experienced military leader with a long history of leading from the front. He claims that the Russian military is experiencing losses far and away, more significant than the reports carried on RT.com claim. He says this is because Russia has its own problem with inductive analysis. Only the Russian phrase translates as something close to Leading from the Rear, where a plan is hatched, and only results confirming the program are reported to Putin. Prigozhin tells everyone who will listen that Russian generals Shoigu and Gerasimov are lying to Putin.
German Leopard tanks are not experiencing the casualties that R.T. reports, and Ukraine performs much better than said. The root of the deception appears to be structural, where the Russian general staff is using metrics such as the number of Ukrainian casualties per 100 artillery rounds fired. Junior officers are inflating the number of Ukrainian KIAs as they operate under a quota system.
The Russian war plan does not allow for innovation or field results that do not match their simulations and strategy. They don’t seem to be adulting.
In many ways, the Russian problem is similar to Xi’s situation in China, where officially reported economic results are very different from actual results.
Western governments and businesses are boxing themselves into a corner through over-reliance on simulations, while Russia and China are doing the same by over-relying on central planning. The difference is that we are still free enough to discuss the problem in the West. After disasters from Covid-19, to the $20 Billion and growing loss at Anheuser Busch, to the public outrage over stolen elections, we can correct problems.
Since the Bud Light boycott started, yesterday’s Skye’s Links reported massive cash outflows from woke ESG funds. BlackRock is dealing with an $18 TRILLION outflow. If this continues, Larry Fink’s position as the wokest of the woke will be in jeopardy.
Even though Hunter Biden is getting away with a slap on the wrist for crimes that would put any Republican into a supermax for life, the Deep State no longer represents the national interest. Russians and Chinese do not have a peaceful way to change their government. We do.
Mike Ryan is a chemical engineering consultant for the Iron and Steel, Heavy Chemicals, Minerals, and Fibers Industries.