The Alternative Line
by Joe Holzer
for CNY-PCA Redline Report Copyright 2017 http://www.holzerent.com
Things Change, Life Goes On
The past few months have seen
huge changes for me, and some of them affect you. To begin with, Skip tells me this will be his
last issue as Editor of the Redline Report.
I am sad to report this will also be my last edition of Alternative Line
as a regular contribution to that newsletter for CNY PCA. It has been a fun time writing for editors
who seemed to wish my efforts, but it is time to move on.
With any luck, you should
notice elsewhere the lyrics to a song I wrote on the second day after my
Granddaughter was born to my only child Jessica and her husband Tom. Jess could not possibly have made me prouder,
having become a PhD and teaching professor of Ethics, and having in early
August provided me a grandchild to spoil rotten. But also to teach how to enjoy life because
it is so fleeting, and doing the things which celebrate life, like driving
Porsches – something for which there is simply no substitute ;-)
The lyrics will mention a few
sad things I think about – the fact that automation may soon make those with
actual driving talent not merely redundant, but even perhaps verboten, as autonomous
vehicles which talk to one another may eventually make it unsafe for the vast
majority of “occupants” of those vehicles to allow any vehicle, no matter how
well driven by a human, to inhabit those same roads. The issue will be explained by liability, but
that is a misnomer – it will be the incompatibility of actual intelligence
alongside artificial intelligence once insurance companies determine the
relative risks to their profits from “criminals” like me who will be doing what
good drivers have ALWAYS done – DRIVING instead of all the other attention
grabbing technologies being crammed into vehicles today. It won’t happen in the next five years – the
technology has far too many real world issues to address for which technology
and the mind of software engineers is not sufficient to conjure solutions –
like the range of weather in CNY, for example.
But before my granddaughter Ainsley becomes a driver you may safely
presume it will be the norm.
You have already observed
other inevitables – like the utter demise of physically printed media like this
newsletter. Which will actually take us
closer to that not yet possible “Beam me up, Scotty” moment where ALMOST
everything EXCEPT YOU can be sent electronically to anywhere else it needs to
be at essentially the speed of light.
You and I, as well as my Granddaughter, will still have to travel the
old fashioned way, although I suspect we will find ways to make air travel a
lot faster again without destroying eardrums, the environment, humans
themselves, or our wallets. But if you
have not yet seen any other cultures, I advise you plan to do so as soon as
possible, because technology is rapidly destroying what used to be unique about
them, not least of which was their language.
As one who has traveled a good portion of the planet, I can assure you
it is as educational as any classroom you will ever visit.
And speaking of which; there
is already evidence that the factor of scale may make the concept of a college
education on a physical campus obsolete, if for no other reason than the
cost. Those higher education leaders who
have been experimenting have seen they can produce graduates with identical
learning who have never set foot near their campus for less than a tenth the
current cost to get that on-campus degree.
What will be missing will be the beer blasts and fraternization. But those were already dinosaurs waiting on
an asteroid – you only need watch ANY teenage girl at lunch – they would rather
text a friend right alongside them than actually talk with her. But that is also not without its own
unintended consequences – some good, some not yet determined.
Already having some impact
whose net results are unpredictable at best was a surprise, especially to me. Had anyone suggested to me that a technology
would be so powerful as to reduce the frequency of teenage sex I would have
told them they were crazy – mom nature spent billions of years making us
desperate to put one and one together to make two (or more ;-) but that is
precisely one outcome of the lack of direct interaction noted in the paragraph
above.
I am not so sanguine about one
other seeming outcome of that technology – the dumbing down of writing skills,
as spell and grammar checkers automatically rewrite even the most ham-fisted
incompetence with the English language.
In my case it has been Skip who has made up for mostly my typing
inabilities. But you dear reader get the
point. And as usual I digress ;-)
The idea that you might tune
you own vehicle to maximize its performance will become even more remote than
OBD-II has already made it – both for emissions concerns and for governmental
control. Which might explain to you why
ALL my vehicles are ’95 or older. But
that must inevitably be affected by the law of diminishing returns – eventually
even those will be destroyed by the environment. Whether they are doing the same TO the environment
is open to argument, since at least the VW Diesel scandal has proved that
nobody REALLY knows what the tailpipes are putting out – and NYSI ONLY talks to
the computer, which can still pass even if parts of the engine are flying out
the tailpipe, seemingly ;-)
You dear readers have
doubtless heard of GMO technologies. They
will be both a boon, because the world population is expanding even as arable
land is being consumed faster and faster to put the population, and a bane because
much of that population wants to share in the wealth and convenience we in “the
west” have for too long seen as our birthright.
Something has to give. And one
outcome will be the inability to obtain adequate food yields without “aiding”
the natural evolution by applying what science will discover is possible
through gene manipulation whose random alternatives might have taken centuries. And one catch of that model will be the
monocultural ecosystems they will produce, if they have not already become
unsupportable by their cost from having corporate ownership of seed lots. One thing nature has demonstrated repeatedly
is its ability to throw a curveball at the best thinking of scientists’
perceptions of what they “know”.
At the same time, wise sages
like Neil DeGrasse Tyson should be heeded when he observes that “the world is
made of Protons, Neutrons and Electrons, but mostly Morons”, to which I added
the explanatory “Protons have a Positive Charge, Neutrons have No Charge,
Electrons have a Negative Charge, but Morons are IN Charge”. That should give us all pause ;-) At the same time, though, one of the reasons
we Porsche Club faithful have been willing to plunk down our long green has
been the perception, not always borne out, that higher cost paid for better
engineering will return greater value in the long run. One need only consider the experience with
the 996 series IMS bearing and the earlier 2.7L case halves of magnesium to
recognize that mistakes can ALSO be well engineered into expensive junk.
That said, however, it is
ALSO well demonstrated that evolutionary development, instead of stylistic
modification, has been the general history at Porsche, which is why there will
be few who would argue against the idea that the ’95 Porsche 993, which
pre-dated the OBD-II rest of the 993 series made through model years ’96-’98,
is likely the penultimate example of an air-cooled 911 series vehicle. It is also well demonstrated that SOMEBODY
sees enough inherent value, even in the 996, to develop a better mousetrap for
the IMS bearing, just as the Dilavar studs and time-serts prolonged the 2.7L salvagability,
even as better alternatives were developed by Porsche which could actually bolt
right in, such as the Motronic 3.2 I used to replace MY 2.7L when I lunched it
at Watkins Glen, making my ’77 Targa almost bulletproof, but a handful to drive
with the added weight and horsepower hung out behind the rear wheels, while
keeping the same width tires and wheels as original. In fact, I hope you will see “MY Car History”
elsewhere in this issue as well. No
sugar-coating allowed ;-)
I am sure there are a host of
other things my granddaughter will see, and do, which I cannot even perceive
today, just as my parents could never have dreamed of an internet where every
bit of information ever created was literally at my fingertips, if I merely had
the wisdom the know to go looking for it instead of believing every fake news
article posted by people with agendas, which has helped to so polarize the
electorate because we are too busy to ask simpleu questions like “what’s wrong
with this picture”. Sadly, I don’t see
that improving anytime soon. Especially
with what “spin doctoring” pays ;-)
I don’t wish to be either
alarmist nor defeatist, but merely a realist.
My granddaughter will have a world to deal with which is more complex,
and she must be willing to share even more of the privileges she had bestowed
upon her with the rest of the world. But
if she can navigate that world, and especially become a learned and thinking
individual, she can also be a leader who can help steer that world to a better
place than she arrived to. So I am full
of cautious hope. And I’ll bet YOU dear
readers hope for much the same from YOUR progeny. I wish you all, and Ainsley, too, the very
best of luck, and hope you will all grab at the mantle to raise it high. Thanks for your patience and tolerance of my
wit and “wisdom” (?! ;-) for the past 90 articles. It’s been fun.
Joe Holzer, the Idea Man ;-)