Isaac Laquedem

Military rationing

Following up on my military thought of yesterday, I'd also like to see our presidents get punch cards, something like drink tickets at the more commercial class of receptions, that allow them to attack only one nation per term of office.  I wouldn't expect presidential candidates to announce during the campaign which nation they intended to use their ticket on.

An uneasy thought on training the military

I've had for some time the uneasy thought that the United States invades other nations every ten years or so, not just to achieve some nascent foreign policy goal, nor just to protect civilians from slaughter by their governments, but to give the junior officers of our armed forces some combat experience so that they may become war veterans who will qualify for promotion later on.  It's hard, thirty years after the fact, to think of another convincing explanation for our invasion of Grenada.

On the syntactic meaning of an aircraft carrier

When we sent an aircraft carrier to the sea near Iran and Iraq, it's "to counter the assertive, disruptive, and coercive behavior of some countries," according to the then-boss of the Fifth Fleet in 2007.

When we send an aircraft carrier to participate in war games with South Korea, North Korea says that we're being confrontational.

When we send an aircraft carrier to Japan to respond to the earthquake and tsunami, it's to provide humanitarian aid (and to my surprise, I learned that an aircraft carrier can generate electricity and potable water for use on shore).

I'm fond of Japan, and I'm pleased that our government is lending a hand to help the Japanese people recover from this calamity, but at the same time I'm bemused that a single aircraft carrier can send so many different messages.

It's ugly, but it gets you there, even after an 8.0 earthquake

As a counterpoint to my previous post about the Columbia River Crossing, in which I advocated spending less on interchanges and more on the bridge itself so that it would be iconic (i.e., not plain ugly), I noted this report from KGW.  KGW quotes seismologists as saying that if Portland suffered an earthquake similar to Japan's, the only bridge that would remain standing and safe to use is the Marquam -- the one that our designer set wants the new Columbia River bridge not to look like.

The Laquedem Columbia Crossing Cost-Cutting Plan

A chance conversation with someone involved in the Columbia River Crossing process reminded me of something that John Gray had done, and in turn to a possible partial solution to the bottleneck (sorry) that's holding up the Columbia River Crossing project.

Here is the background: the older Interstate Bridge is almost 100 years old.  Its twin is 54 years old.  They are still serviceable -- three lanes each, reasonable lane widths, sidewalks, and so forth -- but are not built to withstand earthquakes and have lift spans, meaning that every day or two traffic comes to a halt while the bridges are lifted for marine traffic, or just to stay in practice.  Replacing the bridges with a fixed span will cost $250 million to $400 million, depending on the bridge design and exact location.  However, the City of Portland wants the bridges to include space for light rail, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) wants to rework, improve, and expand the ramps and lanes for a mile or two on the Oregon side, and the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT).  When the extras are added in, the cost of the CRC project jumps from the few hundred million for the bridge itself to a whopping $3.2 to $3.6 billion (WSDOT's estimate).  Put another way, the cost of the bridge is only about 10% of the cost of the total project.

Sometime around 1980, Omark Industries, a leading manufacturer of chainsaws, moved its headquarters from Milwaukie to Johns Landing, in Portland.  (John Gray, its president and largest individual shareholder, lived in Johns Landing, which he had developed a few years earlier.)  Giving a tour of the building, he told a small group that when he decided to move the headquarters, he expected some internal scuffling over whose office would be where, how big the individual offices would be, and so on.  Each department wanted more room, collectively more room than the building was going to have, and his management team was looking to him to umpire the turf battle.  Rather than pick favorites, he had the ingenious idea of telling each department that it would have X square feet, or Y square feet, or Z square feet, and drew for them the location of their areas.  He then told the department heads that it was up to them to allocate their department's space however they wished between private offices and communal work areas.  Any manager who wanted a large private office could have one, but he or she would be cramping the underlings closer together.  Apparently it worked fairly well.

How can we get the $4 billion cost down to a number that we can afford?  Here's Isaac's proposal.

1.  We will have an iconic bridge, but it has to be an icon that someone else has already designed and built, not an untested design.  My friend says that the marginal cost of being iconic is maybe $50 million -- that's 1.25% of the cost of the total project, at today's budget figures.  The total cost of the bridge itself will be maybe $400 million.

2.    ODOT can spend $300 million on anything on the Oregon side that it wants to do to the ramps and lanes of Interstate 5.

3.    WSDOT can spend $300 million on anything on the Washington side that it wants to do to the ramps and lanes of Interstate 5.

4.    The consultants can spend $50 million more doing whatever it is that they do.

5.    Light rail will not go on the replacement bridge, but on the eventual replacement of the railroad bridge downstream from the Interstate Bridge.  Whoever wants light rail can chip in to help pay for the cost.  The railroad bridge is even older than the senior Interstate Bridge, and in greater need of replacement.  It should also be converted to a fixed span, and have its main water passage line up with the passage under the Interstate Bridge, so that barges don't have to make an awkward turn when passing through both bridges.

There's no reason for ODOT or WSDOT to spend much more on ramps and lanes and concrete than the cost of the bridge itself - not unless they and everyone else would like to admit that the traffic problem is not the existing bridges, but the maze of on- and off-ramps that ODOT and WSDOT have designed and built and crammed into too short a space.

I'm proud of my dirty wineglasses

Some months ago I noticed that the dishes coming out of my dishwasher still had food adhering to them, and the bases of the wineglasses were encrusted with soap scum.  I thought about running each load twice, once with detergent and once without, but rejected that as wasting water and not being "green."  For a time I hand-washed the cleaned dishes to get the food and soap off, but that seemed like wasted effort - in that case why bother with the dishwasher at all?

Then I came across a series of posts and news items about this problem, and concluded that neither my dishwasher nor my loading technique is at fault; rather, it's because as a result of recent legislation the brand of dish detergent in Laquedem Manor is now phosphate-free.  The phosphate-free detergents don't clean very well, but they're more friendly to the environment.

My frame of mind improved when I learned that; I no longer look on my dirty dishes as signs of domestic failure, but as indicia of environmental success.  If by some mishap the wine glasses come out of my dishwasher without any soap scum, I'll put a little baking soda on the bases so that my guests don't think I'm doping my dish soap with contraband phosphates.

Sex discrimination on your ballot?

A Facebook post by T.A. Barnhart sparked me to rediscover a curious artifact of Oregon law, which I'll phrase as a question:  Does Oregon have any elective offices that the law allows to be filled only by men and not by women?  If so, how many?  "Elective office" means a position that is filled by the voters at a regular primary or general election.  If you are not a political activist the answer may surprise you.