volkswagen

The recent allegation that VW has been cheating on emissions testing for the last six years, if true, is fantastic news.

It's fantastic for consumers, fantastic for the environment, and fantastic for Volkswagen.

Volkswagen may now be on the hook for fines of up to $18 billion dollars, according to the Washington Post, and the full cost of a recall effort of nearly half a million cars. That's all before VW begins tangling with a half a million current owners and millions more prospective owners.

How is this good? This is good because it creates a fabulous space for a deal. Here's one idea for a deal that I think could work for everyone:

Point 1: VW re-captures those vehicles which are still on lease, modifies their software, and leases them back out with penalties for high mileage. The mileage restrictions and reduced performance on these leases will make the cars nearly worthless. VW offers them cheaply in exchange for a cash-for-clunkers style trade that takes a grosser polluter off the road. This captures the sunk costs of building these cars in the first place, preserves a role for VW dealers, and gets some worse cars off the road. Perhaps VW also buys back cars in private hands and gets them into low-mileage fleets to blunt the environmental impact without the pointless work of a recall. If my impression of the residuals on VWs is in the right ballpark, this could cost less than $2 billion over the next three years.

Point 2: VW inks a deal to manufacture and sell a million electric cars in the U.S. over the next ten years. For each car eligible for the (up to) $7500 refund from the feds, VW pays the Treasury $7500. For every state and locality that waives excise or registration taxes for electrics, VW pays. This could cost less than $10 billion over ten years. For each car not sold below the target of a million, VW pays the original $37500 fine for the diesel cars plus a new fine of $37500. The cars are built in the US so that EPA inspectors can oversee the loading of the critical powertrain management software that has recently been difficult for VW.

Point 3: The VW pays an additional $1 billion dollars over ten years into the highway trust fund to offset the (presumed) lost gas tax revenue for these million cars over their service lives.

Point 4: VW claws back five cents a mile in penalty fees (up to $3750 per car) for miles driven beyond 100k miles per car in the first three years or for miles above 200k per car over ten years.

Point 5: VW builds $1 billion in SAE DC fast charge stations in the US over the next three years.

This plan could cost VW about $14 billion over ten years to build and sell the lineup of electric cars they have already designed -- some of which are already available for sale. It would blunt the environmental impact of the offending cars by reducing their total mileage, using them to displace worse cars, and putting new electrics into service. This plan would protect the investment of existing owners and protect the investment of VW franchise owners.

This guaranteed production of electrics will ensure that investment in electric-appropriate subassemblies, like electric air conditioning compressors, continues through today's dip in crude oil prices. The truth of large-scale electric adoption is that electric cars aren't mainstream until Magna and Bosch and Valmet and Nippondenso and ZF and dozens of other suppliers are ready.

Point 4, the clawback, will help ensure that these new electric cars are actually used on roads and displace real miles driven by gas and diesel cars. The investment in fast chargers and the economics of the claw-back could work to make these VWs easy choices for drivers with ride sharing services like Uber and in traditional taxi fleets.

The American public get a net environmental benefit at no cost to the Treasury, no cost to the highway trust fund, without a single new EPA rule, and perhaps without any action by Congress.

VW will look back in 15 years and see this as the best thing that ever happened to them in the US. VW could take these licks while establishing this as the prescribed remedy for similar transgressions by other automakers in the US and elsewhere. In three years, we'll find out that VW was not the only automaker who fudged the numbers and then we lather, rinse, repeat.

computing

I wrote recently about the search for a new machine for my daughter. She asked me for a computer of her own so that she could write LOGO programs. I'm helpless.

I considered a lot of machines -- Android tablets, Microsoft surfaces, convertible Chromebook tablets, Windows 10 portable all-in-ones, and traditional macintoshes. I finally bought her a 12" Macbook and a Raspberry Pi.

I had originally hoped that a $150 Chromebook would fit the bill but Chrome OS lost on several fronts. The $1299 Macbook is not eight times better than the $150 Chromebook but it is probably four times as good as the $249 ASUS C100 convertible Chromebook. I bought one of those and returned it with prejudice about a half an hour later. (Computer value estimations may be oddly non-transitive).

We're not really birthday people. I would normally have spent somewhere between $5 and $75 on a birthday present for a child. I did not buy a $1299 laptop because computers are important, or because STEM is important, or because education is important or anything like that. I bought it because computing is deflationary. I'm trying to ensure that good computing seems as accessible and affordable to my children as it will later be.

A mac does a lot out of the box but it's not a turn-key computing environment for children. I'm about a dozen hours into the configuration of the machine and I still think I'm in the wilderness.

My first step was to make an account for my daughter. That was easy until I got to the password. My daughter opens her bike lock with a four digit number. Does she really need an eight-character mixed-case password? No. A four digit pin number? That doesn't seem right either. Auto-login using a password she doesn't remember? This is harder than setting up the Commodore 64.

I moved on from authentication into what Apple calls 'parental controls'. Apple wouldn't let me tweak the parental controls until I made a parental account. Now I'm in double authentication purgatory. I have an authentication system for a child that makes no sense and a second credential and account for an adult that serves absolutely no purpose except for managing the child's interface.

People appear to have lots of different ideas about how to manage a child's interface. For lots of people, this seems to have a lot to do with steering kids away from Wikipedia and into the tamer wasteland of auto-playing videos at PBS Kids. That's not my deal. For some, it has to do with replacing parental supervision with an electronic screen time limiter. That's not my deal either.

I want to use the available knobs to turn the Mac environment into the kind of environment that I wish I had as a boy. The Mac desktop started out simple in 1984, but a stray click on the menu bar today brings up a translucent gray screen that tells my child that GOOG 621.35 and AAPL 112.57. Amiga Guru Meditations were more helpful. After dozens of fiddly interactions, 10 percent of the finder has been stuffed back into its bottle.

With hotkeys, gestures, and the rest all turned off, I could begin to take this machine from day planner on crack to computer. I actually think Safari is a pretty great computing environment. This
mac would become a Safari-book if Safari supported webrtc, web midi, packaged web apps, and a few of the other user-facing features that make Chrome not Safari.

I downloaded Chrome, enabled 'Developer mode' in the extensions menu, and loaded up a few
of my favorite web apps as 'unpacked extensions' from the local filesystem.

Life is now pretty good. My daughter gets many of the benefits of Chrome without a Chrome sign-in. She has local printing. She and I have a software development environment that requires only a text editor. She has, in the Macbook, one of the best computer terminals available at any price.

The fly in this ointment is bad interaction between Chrome and network restrictions in parental controls. I have beat on a dozen Chrome settings to try and get it to stop contacting Google. Every time it tries to contact Google, I get a pop-up informing me that a series of random IP addresses in Google space are blocked.

In the end, I wrote a shell script that opens Chrome at login with a command line flag that specifies a PAC. That file that steers all traffic into a nonexistent proxy. That shut Chrome up.

I went a little further and built a Chrome extension for her that overrides the new tab page with an interface built just for her.

Our prototype computing environment is a variant of the simple LOGO I built her last year.

She is very happy with the machine. It's a good size for her. It's a good weight. The USB C charging cable is easy to use. Printing works.

The machine doesn't support Common Core. It doesn't run any dedicated educational software. It doesn't eliminate paper textbooks. It is not configured for remote administration. It is not rugged. It is not synchronized with the cloud. It has no collaboration features except for a wide viewing angle.

Seymour Papert said, of computers and children, that if the child is not programming the computer then the computer is programming the child. He was right in 1980 and he's still right today. Every child deserves a personal computing environment.

I would challenge Google and Apple and Microsoft and Donald Trump and anyone who can hear me take a 'computes out of the box' pledge to build devices that offer a useful computing environment on par at least with the ROM BASICs of the 8-bit era straight out of the box without the installation of any software, without a single credential, without a wifi password, without a software update, and without a click-through EULA. Let's call it the 'RUN 2020' pledge. By 2020, we could get every major manufacturer to offer at least this much computing out of the box. We could get a computing environment available from every lock screen by 2020. Every machine would be ready to compute on Christmas morning and on the first day of school. Every new machine would be useful before the packaging was cleared away. Every working donated machine would be useful for something immediately.

This idea is hardly outlandish. Support across platforms for ephemeral 'guest' accounts is growing. RUN 2020 pushes guest a little harder and ensures that guest mode is useful. I admire and support the One Laptop Per Child. I want Every Laptop to be for Every Child next.