November 2022 – Space Force 7

editor’s note: If nothing else, the good skatepunks at Space Force 7 are effective implanters of some half-decent brain worms. So now, the Employee-Owners at Space Force 7 bring you this never-before published academic white paper of Rick Yukon, supposedly written during his house arrest on board the U.S.-flagged frigate United Crushing. We never published it because the industry was reportedly not-receptive to disruptive academic product. Now, with the recent release of “I SUED THE SCHOOL SYSTEM (2021)” by Prince Ea, a sufficient amount of market inertia and the realities of funding for County K-12 schools, that we narrowly agreed to pull this one off the shelf, hoist it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes. Again, ( . . . ) signifies something we were unable to transcribe from the handwritten notes.

I recently received the news that the local school district plans to close about 16% of its schools due to recent failed ballot initiative. Though they didn’t explicitly state as such, the schools closed were almost all in academically underperforming sections of the county, in other words, the neighborhood not to poor to get attention from the county, but not wealthy enough to be able to reliably feed kids enough brain food to keep their standardized tests scores high. (Aside from the streamlined grading process, is this why we used standardized tests, so we can academically disenfranchise those students who don’t have a sufficiently long attention span to make it in today’s contemporary economy?)

The County closed a bunch of schools with a lot of kids who live in trailer parks. That’s the best money-saving demographic out there. Nobody likes a trailer park kid, except for another trailer park kid. Even the trailer park owner hates a trailer park kid, which is why the trailer park is sold for housing development, to chase that trailer park boy out of the County boundaries.

The County cut funding to a bunch of schools with kids who live in trailer parks, and nobody will cry because everyone hates a trailer park kid. We are allowed to hate trailer park kids because they come from a place that hangs flags that don’t agree with our enlightened political compass. The trailer park boy of the previous paragraph has been brought to you by the makers of Dead Nuts Money Reality. We appreciate your patronage and hope that you will try our other fine products, like canned Peruvian Cole Slaw and canned Peruvian Ceviche. All of our fine foods are made with highest standards of cleanliness and if you think they taste good, then that’s a bonus, but you at least will know that they won’t kill you, as long as the can isn’t bulging outward. Given the nature of distribution network, we are often forced to deliberately dent cans of our products to be allowed sold in dented can stores. So note, those cans are dented inward and are quite safe for consumption. We hope you will enjoy our family-loved line of canned food products, However, if you experience the extremely unlikely event of finding one of our cans or any other manufacturer’s can that has noticeably swollen outward, then please return that can to your local supermarket and ask for store credit for your choice of any similarly-sized can in the store, even one that costs somewhat more than the one you have with the bulging sides and the rust coming out of the top. Don’t worry, your store doesn’t pay for it, we pay for it! We actually send one of our Dead Nuts Money Representatives to your local store to pick up the offending can, and then we retire the can to our Eisenhower Can of Fame Museum in Pocatello, Idaho where tourists to the lower-east-Pacific North West tourism region visit to see canned food products of yesterday and yesteryear.

Apologies for the slight hijack from our sponsors, you, my love, are forced to abide by my misery of having been fired from the job I loved, of losing the woman with whom I thought would outlive me, and then of being slammed into a makeshift brig in one of the stowage compartments aboard this frigate of MY OWN DESIGN! I have a sufficiently large portal that were I to starve myself for a time somewhat longer than it will take this craft to reach Martinique, that I might be able to squeeze through and risk my life to swim the warm waters which will inevitably arrive as we continue to move South. I might be able to squeeze through that porthole, fall into the warm waters and swim to the nearest island, where I will sufficiently change my looks and identity that I will likely go undetected for the rest of my life, all the more likely since my entire existence will most likely be forgotten less than a month after this ship reaches Martinique.

Unfortunately, the portal is only big enough for me to hang my head and puke, or hang my ass and shit. For pissing, I am unable to construct a sufficiently stable platform to allow a steady stream from the portal, so I piss into a small drain near the centerline bulkhead, and I wash it down with a little peroxide to counteract my natural and enviable alkalinity. It’s just the kind of guy I am, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

My point here is that the County cut funding due to some failed ballot initiative, the County then closed 16% of the underperforming schools, because those ones were fucking up the Federal funding anyway. Even in funding, nobody likes a bunch of trailer park kids.

Unfortunately, trailer park kids are sufficiently intelligent to get jobs as teachers, and given the relatively low-paying position of the job, they tend to remain in affordable housing developments close to the trailer parks. This has created a dilemma for me as a stockholder in the Dead Nuts Money Canned Food Corporation, because our company does need a sufficient number of trailer park kids to manage our docks, and these trailer park teachers have taken an interest in training their trailer park students for jobs in places other than our company’s docks. And by “docks” I don’t mean the kind of unionized places along the waterfront managed by highly-skilled dockworkers, but rather an industrial building behind a road aggregate yard some quarter mile from the interstate.

But I am willing to put that slight conflict of interest aside and move forward with the narrative.

In this case, I responded to the news of this school closing, gleaned from my read-only UseNet connection and I thought to myself, “self, why do we still have schools anyway?”

And thus the solution; we avoid this nonsense by moving onto the next generation of schools, the Dead Nuts Money Academic System.

The DiNMAS, as we call it internally, is an open-source license that grade schools, middle schools, junior high schools, high schools, and senior high schools can use to convert schools that are slated to be closed, into high-efficiency, lower-cost schools for the entire range of students; from advance to on-level and striving. The goal with the program is to exploit this new era of personal computer, from companies like Commodore, Apple, IBM, Tandy, Texas Instruments, Heathkit, Atari and other computer manufacturers who make systems sufficiently affordable to be used by public school administrators, to automate certain time-consuming tasks performed by teachers which tend to cut-into their areas of teaching expertise by forcing these teachers to perform mind-numbing tasks in the administration of their students. These tasks tend to consume a sufficient amount of time in the average school day that teachers are quoted in popular media as claiming that they don’t have enough time to actually teach anymore. And while the cost to program these small computers to handle these tasks will likely be nontrivial in the school’s budget, the cost per teacher will be only a small fraction of what it would cost to pay that teacher to do the same work. This will allow the targeted schools to focus most of their limited funds to what actually helps to create well-adjusted, comfortable, happy and successful students. This includes things like clean hallways, well-functioning water fountains, school lunch and school breakfast programs, well-organized restrooms and locker rooms with plenty of showers, and both a personal locker and a school locker for each student to organize the intricacies of their personal, social and academic lives. We find that this usually comes to about a third of the day to manage their personal needs (i.e. food, hygiene, naps, relaxation, transit, physical activity), and about a third for socialization (i.e. games with peers, teamwork, relaxation, arcade games) and about a third for academic clarification and training. (i.e. schoolwork, explanation by teachers, problem-solving through self/peer/teacher, and testing.)

With this structure, the school can allow a good bit of student-directed autonomy with minimal supervision in about 50% of the school day, and with teachers able to teach their students with either an eight hour day, or overtime if necessary, or as little as a few hours per week. The low-limit of contact hours is necessary to allow for funding of sporadic instruction from parents and members of the community in trades, arts, personal and social skills. For example, a local Teen Alcoholics Anonymous, Toastmasters International, Optimist, Rotary or Elks Club would likely be able to supply the school with a few hours per week on the organization’s dime.

Upon entering the school for the day, the student decides where he or she would like to go first, for instance the cafeteria for some Grape Nuts and milk, or maybe a Pilsbury Toaster Strudel or Space Stick from the small commissary in the hall, if the student wants to get an early jump on their schoolwork and meet with their available teachers before doing the work, rather than after or during as many students prefer. The school day continues, each student does what they need to do to stay healthy and educated, oversight of the students’ progress is provided by the teachers most frequented by the student, be it the classroom, the cafeteria, the sports field, library, science lab, math lab, et al..

The teachers would need to migrate as much as the students in order to foster student progress, communicate with colleagues and create a health and happy balance between work and comfort. Therefore, a chalkboard central to the main entry of the school could inform students where to find their desired teachers, and the teachers could update the system through the day as needed. Some type of computerized “terminal board” system could also be used, similar to what is used in airports and bus depots to direct travelers to their desired flights. Curricula will be sufficiently simplified to ensure that keystone-skills in math, language, science, communication, physical health, personal health, social health, writing and trades are communicated, learned, tested and established for ensuing increase in academic difficulty and ability. Students will be free to seek instruction from peers, teachers, UseNet, online providers such as America Online and Compuserve, and other internet resources. Unlike the current assigned-teacher method, students and teachers are free to target instruction to the most effective for them, which may change day by day for some students and teachers, or remain constant for other students and teachers. While the cost of operating that school would not decrease significantly with the DiNMAS program, the cost to fund significant improvements in student efficacy will be negligible, which can lead to increased Federal and State funding for the school. Finally, a few word about standardized testing … these methods will not show increases in scoring on standardized tests for some students, due to the availability of custom-paced learning within DiNMAS. Therefore, students who do not show an improvement in standardized testing, should also be tested with non-Standardized testing (for instance long-form testing, interview testing or project testing) and then calibrated to the Standardized Scores using standard deviation from standard modal or multi-modal performance on the non-Standardized testing.

The details of the system and open source FORTRAN coding of some academic administration systems are contained within the DiNMAS white paper and available for public inspection, on request to Scientific Illustration Services, who may charge a nominal fee for publication costs.

The end this sales call, I leave you all with the stories of Wrangel Island, a mountainous and isolated arctic island in Russia’s extended territory. On this island, in 1921, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the famed Arctic Terrestrial lecturer from Harvard University, shipped off a small band of explorers to claim the island, even though neither Canada nor Britain wanted the island enough to go to war with Russia over it. So Stefansson did what Arctic Terrestrial lecturers from Harvard University tend to do, and he gathered a small group of well-meaning Yank students to move to the island and raise the British flag. Russia was not pleased. But you see, Stefansson, having come from Icelandic parents, and born in Manitoba himself, moving and living in the Arctic was more a way of life to him, rather than a feat of adventure. In fact, Stefansson, once said something to the effect of “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” His projects were filled with adventure not because he was incompetent, but mostly because a survivor like Stefansson saw nothing too heroic about living, working and prospering in the kind of cold that could Dead Nuts a man’s Money.

Most of my work as a physicist has been in the research and development of technologies that can be manufactured in Developing Nations with minimal up-front investment. I was led into this field by one of my Academic Advisors, Ashok Gadgil, at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Professor Gadgil is the kind of physicist who measures his research success not in papers published, or funding gathered, but in the lives saved by the developments of him and his students. I am one of his students, for better or worse, and I write that with some hesitation, for fear that a man of my ill-temper, poor-reputation and devilish looks will reflect poorly on my teacher. The last time I visited Professor Gadgil, he gave me a hug. So I think the reality is that Professor Gadgil doesn’t worry so much of ill-temper, poor-reputation and devilish looks, but rather he cares about the childen who live in poverty, and now have the chance to have health, learning and ambition, regardless the poverty. Professor Gadgil gave a few lines of instruction to me, and I knew what he needed. And then some of the best physicists East of the Mississippi showed me how to use the tools of Nature to do physics. They didn’t teach physics to me, or if they did, I didn’t learn much of it. But I wasn’t in the program for that anyway. I was there to learn how to do physics. And they taught me how to do that; how to have a happy family (I failed at that), how to slow down and enjoy the research (I failed at that one too). They taught me how how structure a covariant tensor to manage differentials that would otherwise be unsolvable. (I sorta got that one) and they taught me how to throw certain problems away because they are intractable.

The subject of this paper is a problem that is arguably intractable.

And yet, the benefit of this work as a starting point, is undeniable. The battery industry may or may not have a future in grid-scale energy storage. But the undeniable reality is that the battery industry controls the single most critical component of the contemporary electric vehicle. Franz Kafka wrote something like “the hardest bones, with the richest marrow, can only be conquered by the united crushing of all the teeth, of all the dogs.” Ultimately, we do need to inventory the benefits and damages from the production of these batteries. And with time, some “united crushing” we will improve the model, and we will improve the production itself of these batteries, and with time, we won’t even need to ask these questions … for example some grid=scale batteries that are produced with Rare Earth Elements, Lithium, Cobalt, Titanium and other materials that are ethically sourced from Employee-Owned, Employee-Equity companies from within the countries they are sourced, including countries in West Africa and South America.

Ideally, this paper is that starting point. There has been lots of work on this topic, but in this work I apply a Thermodynamics-sourced assessment of normally difficult-to-measure effects like air pollution, wealth concentration, and other economic and public health costs and benefits. Yes, this is an approximation, it is flawed, but it is a place to start, hone the metal, create a tool with a working edge that is effective and a pleasure to use.

If we hope to compare a battery-operated EV with a diesel-electric train engine, for instance, we will need some common baselines with mass moved, average distances between refueling/recharging and the performance envelope with regard to things like acceleration, power output and torque. And we will have to settle with some less-than-perfect baselines of impact to cultural and environmental health. For instance, it can be difficult to really decide how much damage is done to an indigenous tribe versus benefits to public health. But given the current luxury-status of the most common electric vehicles, there should be enough marginal benefit in protecting cultures while simultaneously providing the economic benefits of local ownership, that the increase in costs for employee-owned components would be comparable to — for instance — premium Bang & Olufsen speakers in a Tesla-brand vehicle. Smaller EVs meant for a non-luxury market would have comparably smaller costs to ethically-sourced battery components. This is a demonstration of the imperfection of the measurement with some key criteria, but other measurement is simple enough, we have plenty of tailpipe measurement from combustion vehicles that can be quantitatively compared to water and soil pollution from REE, lithium and cobalt extraction, for instance.

Typical air pollution measurement is based on the six EPA Criteria Pollutants, which do not include CO2. However, we can use Particulate Matter, NOx, and CO as reasonable measures of an engine’s combustion efficiency. Water and soil pollution is often graded in severity on a linear scale, which can be useful for both battery production and hydrocarbon extraction and refining. The opportunity for improved public health — for better or worse — can be compared to economic measures like GDP per capita, average salary, employment and savings statistics.

Finally, this work restricts itself to technologies currently in existence for powering vehicles and manufacturing vehicle components. These include things like electric passenger vehicles, diesel-electric train locomotives, electric over-the-road trucks for long haul and intercity, passenger busses, electric motorcycles, human and cargo transport over snow, ice and water, gasoline-electric passenger vehicles, and of course, human-powered and animal-powered vehicles like bicycles, and horse-wagons, among others.

Comparing batteries to conventional and existing methods of energy storage (like the diesel fuel in a diesel-electric locomotive) is critical because we can’t hope to critique and improve an industry without an accurate assessment of alternatives to cover any down-time or development-time in the battery industry necessary to improve manufacturing processes and affiliated economic development in the commonly ethnic tribes in Africa, South America and Central Asia who supply the Asian, European and U.S. battery industry with the resources it needs; like Rare Earth Elements, cobalt and lithium.

The proposed thermodynamic model doesn’t easily and clearly apply to the non-combustion electric vehicle motors, but the entropic signature of petroleum extraction, refining, distribution, combustion and exhaust can approximately compare to the entropic signature of battery components extraction, refining, manufacturing and use in the vehicle. And we can compare vehicles lifespans, cost to purchase, repair and operate, which are critical metrics to ensure equitable social justice across a wide range of income classes and workers.

The readily-available data on air pollution from conventional combustion vehicles is easy to obtain, the U.S. EPA maintains a nationwide database of attainment to air quality standards. And as petroleum has been commercially extracted and refined for over 80 years, we have a reasonable gauge of the pollution to soils and groundwaters from a range of operations, from well-run to poorly-run. But as a new industry, this data is much harder to obtain for the extraction and refining of REEs, lithium and cobalt.

This is the breadth of measurement that we have accepted with this study. Please view the published work in the Journal of Environmental Manufacturing Practices and Standards. Thank you.