Monday, September 17, 2018

The underlying order of things?

Should Henry Kissinger be prosecuted for war crimes?


The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) is a documentary film inspired by Christopher Hitchens' 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, examining war crimes claimed to have been done by Henry Kissinger, the National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford. 

The documentary was based on a book by the British journalist Christoper Hitchens.


Having long described himself as a democratic socialist, Marxist and an anti-totalitarian, he broke from the political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Satanic Verses controversy, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton and the antiwar movement's opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. His support of the Iraq War separated him further.

Hitchens veered into the territory of neo-conservatism later in life. But this journey is typical of neo-conservatives. There is a saying among neo-conservatives that "a neo-conservative is a liberal mugged by reality." They have the same activist ideals as when they were young liberals (and socialists and communists), but they embrace the tough methods of conservatives. 

The point is that it is neo-conservatives and liberals -- the same people who pushed for the war in Iraq for the sake of radical reconstruction of Iraq into a liberal democracy -- who want to prosecute war criminals. 

These liberals and neo-conservatives would persecute in the figure of Henry Kissinger a foreign policy realist who would not support the ambitiously idealistic agenda of the war in Iraq. 


"If I had known everything then that I know now, I probably would not have supported it. I thought it would be a quick operation to replace Saddam [Hussein.] I did not think it would lead to — and I would not have favored — a long-term occupation in order to reconstruct a society and to try to repeat the experiences of Germany and Japan in a country that had no comparable institutions. I even then thought that it was beyond the capacity of the United States, or maybe anybody, to turn Iraq into a Western-style democracy. Originally the stated goal was more related to security." 

For Kissinger, the prospect of war should be approached not with eagerness and optimism, but with caution. The US has not been successful in war for the past two generations, but Americans seem to have a case of amnesia regarding this.

"The United States has been engaged in five wars since World War II. In only one of them did it reach its stated objective. In another one, it ended in a stalemate, and from three others, we withdrew unilaterally. I'm talking about the first Iraq War, in which we achieved our objective, the Korean War which ended — that was a kind of a stalemate, and Vietnam, the second Iraq War and Afghanistan  — from which we withdrew unilaterally."

As an isolated and prosperous democracy, Americans believe that their experience of continuous orderly democratic governance -- or at least, their idealized imagining of it as such -- is normal. That is, Americans believe that there is a deep underlying natural and harmonious order in the universe which is manifest in American society and applies to all societies. Serious disturbances around the world are seen by Americans as anomalies that can be remedied through intervention -- a quick technical fix -- that will restore normality and reshape the world in America's image. But actual human history is nothing like this. 

"The United States generally believes that, based on its history, that order is the natural relationship. When order is disturbed, it is for a specific reason. And when you remove that cause of the disturbance, order and peace will reassert themselves. In fact, in almost every part of the world, order is a dynamic process. It can never be equated strictly with the status quo that can then be frozen in place."

Kissinger is very careful to avoid discussing historical events that implicate him in crimes against humanity.

Near the end of our interview, we tried to ask Henry Kissinger to explain happened in Chile on September 11, 1973 — 41 years ago today. That's when the country's military staged a coup to overthrow Chile's democratically-elected, left-wing president, Salvador Allende. We wanted to ask Kissinger to clarify what his role was at the time. He and the Nixon Administration supported the brutal military junta that took power, led by General Augusto Pinochet.
But when we raised the subject today, Kissinger cut us off.    
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estate planning (wills versus trusts)

There seems to be an eternal debate in estate planning between having a trust or simply writing a will.

But when one reads about the subject, it seems that the particulars are so complicated that it is difficult to make blanket statements like "everyone should have a trust" or that "trusts are for millionaires". 

Whether or not one should have a trust or a will -- or neither -- seems to depend on one's specific family situation and in which state one lives. For example, if one has a disabled family member that one is caring for and supporting, a trust can help to keep financial support in place without interruption. If one has a member of one's family whose spending is problematic (e.g., substance abuse issues), a will or trust helps to exclude them from an inheritance (for their own sake, if anything) that might otherwise be automatic. 

Universalized estate planning advice seems dubious. For example, the celebrity financial advisor Suze Orman argues that "everyone should have their own trust". 


Suze Orman may believe in her mission, but her ability to communicate so effectively with audiences might be linked to a tendency to provide overly simplified advice. Moreover, she is a salesman at heart and sells a Do-It-Yourself trust kit for $100.


This opens up another can of worms....

Do-It-Yourself options are free. One can make one's own will for free. 


The rules vary from state to state (for example, California):


Here's how to make one's own DIY revocable trust.


Doing it on one's own involves a lot of reading and work.

Whether one gets a lawyer or resorts to DIY, the most important issue in estate planning might be "Know Thyself".

There might be a crude guideline for who should get a trust or a will.

Two facts that can help one decide whether to make a will or trust are that 20% of Americans have trusts and 20% have wills.

Revocable trusts tend to work for upper-middle class families, and wills tend to work for middle class families.

Here is an extremely simplified breakdown of class structure in the US involving income, education level and type of employment:


- 20% upper-middle class professionals; graduate degrees; income $100K+.
- 20% middle class households with college degrees; income ~$50K.
- 20% lower middle-class with some college; incomes ~$25K.
- 20% working class with high school diplomas.
- 20% poor (half are "working poor", half are "underclass").

This list excludes the top 1% of income earners -- the upper class -- whose incomes begin at $400,000. For the top 1%, an irrevocable trust is relevant. For this group, the benefits of and need for an irrevocable trust are very real -- privacy, and protection from lawsuits and taxation. (On the other hand, an irrevocable trust has a life of its own, and should only be drafted by an experienced lawyer.)

There is a gulf between those who should get a trust and those who can get by with a will, but there might be an even greater chasm between revocable and irrevocable trusts and who should get them. 
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Sunday, August 26, 2018

Disaster prep and information (credit cards as ID?)

Five basic priorities in a natural disaster:

1. water
2. warmth
3. calories
4. cash
5. information

This is in order of priority ... before to the disaster happens. 

That is, the single most important item to have on hand in a disaster situation is a source of fresh water. 

In the aftermath of a disaster, the order is reversed.

After the disaster, the most important issue is personal information.

This involves zillions of passwords, and also personal information like birth certificates, marriage licenses, social security numbers, wills, trusts, deeds, etc. 

Recently, it was on the news that legendary singer Aretha Franklin did not write a will, and that this is going to screw up her family six ways to Sunday. Bob Marley did not have a trust or a will, and because his music just kept getting more popular after he died, that created infinite complications for his family. Not forming a trust or writing a will seems to be a common pattern among talented but uneducated people who become wealthy.

How to get people to sit down and do that kind of estate planning?

Perhaps fines could be imposed on those who do not have their act together.

People would pay a fine every year during their income tax preparation for not having a will or trust. 

It would not be a set amount, but a percentage of income.

Wealthy people, for whom having a trust would be most important, would simply shrug off a small fine.

For example, in Finland, speeding tickets are adjusted to income, and can cost a wealthy speeder over $100,000. They are putting the lives of others at risk and should feel the sting of punishment just as much as the little guy who gets caught speeding.


In fact, the Finnish “day fine” system, also in use in some other Scandinavian countries, dates to the 1920s, when fines based on income were instituted for all manner of lesser crimes, such as petty theft and assault, and helped greatly reduce the prison population.

The fines are calculated based on half an offender’s daily net income, with some consideration for the number of children under his or her roof and a deduction deemed to be enough to cover basic living expenses, currently 255 euros per month.

Then, that figure is multiplied by the number of days of income the offender should lose, according to the severity of the offense. 
What should the fine for not having a will or trust be set at? Say, 0.1% of annual income.

The average family income in the US is about $50,000, so a 0.1% fine on income would come to $50 per year for not having a trust. That's enough to hurt a little but not break the bank by any means.

In another example, the annual fine for a household with an income of $400,000 per year for not having a trust and/or will would come to $400. That sucks, but it is not onerous.

This might sound like yet another example of an intrusive "nanny state" trying to get people to do what they should already do on their own, supposedly much like a tax on sugary drinks. But the tax on sugary drinks is really a fee to compensate for the "negative externalities" that people's awful personal choices consequently impose on society (obesity epidemic). Likewise, fines for not having a will or a trust are really fees to compensate society for irresponsible personal behavior.


Advocates such as national medical associations and the World Health Organization promote the tax as an example of Pigovian taxation, aimed to discourage unhealthy diets and offset the growing economic costs of obesity.

Perhaps ideally, the information of whether or not one had a will or trust (and other information mentioned above, like birth certificates and marriage licenses) would be in a single ID, like the Estonian e-identity cards. 


That may eventually come to pass.

In the meantime, it might be a good idea to use the materials at hand to have a reasonably secure way of securing personal information, the veracity of which would be vouched for by a credible institution.

That might be ... credit card companies.

In lieu of a government ID card that serves multiple functions, perhaps credit cards could be re-purposed for the task. 

When people sign a will in the presence of a notary or establish a trust with a lawyer, that information would be submitted simultaneously to the government and to credit card companies. 

When people do their taxes, they would submit credit card numbers that would confirm whether or not they had a will or a trust made out, and would accordingly be fined or not fined. (The revenue from the fines would in part go to compensating credit card companies -- and perhaps lawyers and notaries -- for this service.) 

Perhaps someday citizens could vote with their credit cards, from home or at ATMs. Corrupt politicians who manipulate citizens to vote for them would not only be guilty of voter fraud, but also credit card fraud. 
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Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Import Estonia's virtual government (the ID system)?

The Estonian government is now 99% in cyberspace. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Estonia

e-Estonia refers to a movement by the government of Estoniato facilitate citizen interactions with the state through the use of  electronic solutions. E-services created under this initiative include i-Voting, e-Tax Board, e-Business, e-Banking, e-Ticket, e-School, University via internet, the e-Governance Academy, as well as the release of several mobile applications.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic

"It's government is virtual, borderless, blockchained, and secure. Has this tiny post-Soviet nation found the way of the future?"

E-Estonia is the most ambitious project in technological statecraft today, for it includes all members of the government, and alters citizens’ daily lives. The normal services that government is involved with—legislation, voting, education, justice, health care, banking, taxes, policing, and so on—have been digitally linked across one platform, wiring up the nation.

Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a  chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online.

Estonia is a Baltic country of 1.3 million people and four million  hectares, half of which is forest. Its government presents this digitization as a cost-saving efficiency and an equalizing force.  Digitizing processes reportedly saves the state two per cent of its G.D.P. a year in salaries and expenses.

According to the following article, Estonia's virtual government is possible because it is a small, homogeneous country that is educated and technologically accomplished (Skype was invented there). The Estonians have taken pains to secure their state computer system because Estonia is a neighbor of Russia, which conducted the first known instance in history of cyberwarfare  against Estonia in April 2007.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171019-could-estonia-be-the-first-digital-country

In fact, it was the trauma and destruction of the 2007 Russian cyberware that compelled the Estonians to create e-Estonia.

https://www.bbc.com/news/39655415

Non-Estonians can apply for "e-Residency" and become virtual Estonians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia

e-Residency of Estonia (also called virtual residency or E-residency) is a program launched by Estonia on 1 December 2014. The program allows non-Estonians access to Estonian services such as company formation, banking, payment processing, and taxation. The program gives the e-resident a smart card which they can use to sign documents. The program is aimed towards location-independent entrepreneurs such as software developers and writers. The first e-resident of Estonia was British journalist Edward Lucas; the first person to apply for and be granted e-residency through the standard process was Hamid Tahsildoost from the United States.

An article from yesterday that explains so much more about e-Estonia, especially the ID system:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/e-estonia-what-is-all-the-fuss-about/

Since the concept was introduced in 2002, 98 percent of Estonians own an ID card, which is the key to using all the digital services and getting the most out of them. In Estonia, when a person is born, they're assigned a personal ID code -- it's compulsory to have one.

For further context, there is no data kept on the Estonian ID card. It's a PKI system, whereby users authenticate themselves with PIN one and seal the deal with PIN two. There's a public key and a private key on the microchip, but no data.

This is how citizens access all of the services.

"One of the principles in enabling this is the once-only principle -- any time you submit any type of data to the government, they shouldn't ask for this data again," Särav explained.

"The government knows my name, where I was born, which school I went to, so if I apply for university, get a job, give birth to a child, they don't need to ask the previous information about me again.

"We have distributed databases and have those databases talking to each other ... there's a machine-to-machine exchange, and I don't need to resubmit any data again."

Another principle is called digital by default, which means the introduction of any new service is to be done digitally.In Estonia, if an individual wants to register a new place of residence, authentication is performed using the digital ID, and the individual can update their information in less than two minutes.

A digital service to the Estonian government is a fully digital end-to-end service with no phone calls, office visits, or physical paperwork.

Another element Särav pointed to as helping with the success of the concept of a digital government is truth by design; individuals own their own data, companies own their own data, and the choice is left to them to determine who else gets their hands on it.

Logging in to Estonia.ee allows the individual to see who is accessing their data.

"Medical professionals can see my medical data, when a policeman stops me they can see my driver's licence data, also if I have insurance, also if this is my car in the first place, etc," she said. "Only if you have granted them access -- it's always consent-based."In Estonia, you can also open a business in 18 minutes -- it holds the world record for this -- with the information pre-filled as the government has a single view of the individual. 

These services are not only open to Estonians, however. In December 2014, the country opened up its digital services to the world, meaning anyone can become an e-resident of Estonia. Since 2014, more than 40,000 people from 150 different countries have been granted Estonian e-residency. They have established over 6,000 companies in Estonia.

Could this Estonian ID card be adopted at the state level in the US?

That is, the Estonian government would be contracted out by state governments to set up a system for ID cards, and this would include the use of Estonia's blockchain servers (located in their embassies worldwide). The services that could later be associated with the ID cards could be added later at the discretion of state governments. 

In the meantime, the process of getting a state ID in the US would be streamlined. One could take all of one's paperwork to a notary and have it validated, bypassing one of the bottlenecks in getting a state ID. Later, those with state IDs could easily get an e-ID.
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Sunday, August 12, 2018

Battery swapping and disruptive innovation?

Battery swapping is the mechanical replacement of a drained battery. This is a less orthodox way to recharge an Electric Vehicle.

The most (in)famous battery-swapping venture was the Israeli company Better Place, which was founded in 2007 and went bankrupt in 2013.


A demonstration of Better Place's battery swapping:


A Tesla doing the same kind of battery swapping, but with infinitely more razzle-dazzle:


This technology is not established, and thus involves the old conundrum of the-chicken-or-the-egg. Which should come first? Swapping stations? Or the EVs built swappable batteries? Neither the auto makers or the station developers want to assume the risk of being pioneers in a non-existent market that would be so dependent on other players to develop.

Also, what would be the uniform standard for batteries between various developers and auto makers?

It could be that battery swapping would work better among fleet vehicles. This is because there would be a certain uniformity within a company. That is, a business with fleet vehicles would have its own swapping stations and vehicles and its own standards.

For example, here is battery swapping for a van. The mechanism is a guy using a forklift. The swap is quick and efficient.


No, it's not as glamorous as when Tesla does it.

It's not just the forklift that is banal. So is the delivery van.

But the banality of a delivery van as an EV resonates with the notion of "disruptive innovation". This is when a cheaper, inferior, less glamorous product finds a niche, improves over time and comes to dominate the mainstream of a market.

Rather than electric cars -- especially high-end luxury electric cars -- the EVs that fit the description of disruptive innovation might be electric buses and electric scooters.

Here is an electric bus getting its batteries swapped out.




A scooter getting its batteries swapped.


One option for electric cars is a battery-loaded trailer that serves as a range extender.


One problem with a trailer for a car is that it is awkward, both aerodynamically and in terms of maneuvering, especially while parking.

Another problem is that the battery trailer just doesn't look cool. Tesla has the right idea putting elegance first 
when it comes to cars.

But a battery trailer just might work for electric buses and certain trucks.

Swapping a trailer full of batteries would take seconds. It could be done manually by almost anyone.

There might be a more interesting way to attach a battery trailer to a truck or a bus.

This would be “truck platooning”, in which a lead truck controlled by a driver is followed by a series of self-driven trucks that are synchronized with the lead truck.


The battery trailer in the case of truck platooning would not be latched onto a vehicle. Rather, the battery trailer would itself be an autonomous truck following behind the lead bus or truck. There would be a recharging cable linking the two vehicles, but nothing more.

In the case of buses, following peak morning traffic hours, some buses would remain in commission, picking up and dropping off passengers. As the buses went about their rounds, an autonomous truck would recharge one bus at a time. This would recharge those buses in preparation for their deployment during peak evening traffic hours.
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Thursday, July 26, 2018

**Football and disruptive innovation?

"Disruptive innovation" entails a process in which a cheaper, inferior product finds a niche outside of the mainstream, improves over time, and then comes to dominate the market. 

How might this apply to sports?

American "gridiron" football in particular seems ripe for disruption.
Not so long ago, boxing was a respectable staple of mainstream television entertainment. Because of fatalities, it has moved into the shadows. Football seems to be following the same path.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/us/boxing-is-a-brutal-fading-sport-could-football-be-next.html
As implausible as a steep decline in football’s fortunes may seem now — the Super Bowl in February was the most-watched program ever on American television — time was when boxing seemed just as unassailable. In television’s early years, fights were broadcast almost every night. Back in 1926, when boxing was king, Gene Tunney’s wresting of the heavyweight title from Jack Dempsey was covered by this newspaper with a banner headline and half a dozen articles on Page One. That sort of display would be unimaginable now. How many people today can even name the reigning heavyweight champ? Boxing’s contraction is evidence that anything can happen.
Precautions to protect players with body armor only make the play more aggressive.
Among the questions is whether football players — well padded and practically faceless under their helmets and visors — are inclined to whack one another hard precisely because they are encased in so much protective gear. Some even have helmets and shoulder pads made with Kevlar, the superstrong fiber used in bullet-resistant vests. In a related rough-and-tumble sport, rugby, players wear no comparable armor. They also do not butt heads as American footballers do. Not surprisingly, degenerative brain disease is not an overriding worry in rugby (though spinal injuries from scrums are). In women’s lacrosse, too, players wear no helmets, except for goaltenders; a consensus has formed that head protection would only encourage rougher play.
Professional football is most vulnerable in its recruitment stream, a process of cultivation that begins in boyhood.
In theory anyway, a major interruption of the flow of players from high school to college and then on to the pros could disrupt the game. Comparable breaks in the talent pipeline certainly took their toll on boxing. Granted, football’s collapse is on no one’s radar. Still, boxing learned the hard way that it was not invulnerable, just as Ad Francis had to absorb that lesson.
The big talent that used to go into boxing went instead into football because there were fewer injuries in football, along with more money and greater glory. Today, those guys go into sport fighting, which is safer yet and perhaps more charismatic. 

 The decline of boxing and the rise of suburbs

Journalists look for a single public event that knocked boxing from its throne of popularity.
Maybe the transformative moment was in 1982 when a South Korean boxer, Duk-koo Kim, died after taking a pounding from Ray Mancini in a lightweight title match. Or maybe it was back in 1962 when Emile Griffith beat Benny Paret into a fatal coma during a welterweight title fight. Perhaps the moment arrived earlier yet with works like “The Harder They Fall,” a 1947 Budd Schulberg novel and 1956 film that depicted the boxing world as a swamp of crooked managers, mobbed-up promoters and blood-lusting fans. Even Hemingway, who dearly embraced the so-called manly art of self-defense, acknowledged its ruinous potential in “The Battler,” a 1925 short story revolving around a broken-down punch-drunk pug.
Two facts undermine this perspective. First, boxing was always brutal. This brutality, rather than shocking the American public, was the whole appeal of boxing. Second, in places like Britain and Russia, boxing is still popular or is becoming even more popular.

Rather than discreet events, it is better to look for long-term trends. The deeper long-term trends that boxing faced in the 20th century were increasing suburbanization and prosperity. The exodus from the cities to the suburbs beginning in the 1950s along with the "long boom" from 1950 to 1970 softened Americans, and turned them from boxing to jogging and soccer.

Boxing is an urban sport, and manifests the combative individualism of city life. Perhaps the two most memorable scenes from the 1976 movie "Rocky" were the protagonist practicing his punches on a slab of beef in a meat locker and his exuberant jog through Philadelphia. The jogging scene might appeal more to suburbanites, and has little to do with earlier boxing movies.

The economic interpretation of boxing is that it is literally a way to fight one's way out of the slums, but the sociological critique is that young men get into boxing in order to develop their sense of self-esteem. (This is supposedly also why young men in the city also join street gangs. Interestingly, it seems that a major reason why people go to law school is bragging rights, and only later do they figure out what to do with the law degree.) The urban working-class and poor have an inferiority complex because they compare themselves to the more affluent citizens in their midst. In Ireland, impoverished workers from the countryside would comment that "We did not know we were poor until we moved to Dublin", and, beset with low self-esteem and social dysfunction (alcoholism, addiction), the Irish government would pay them to return to their poor but happier villages. But the great trend of the second half of the 20th century was people moving up a notch on the economic ladder and then moving out to the suburbs.


The geographic trend of 21st-century America would be another exodus to the suburbs, this time from rural areas. This has implications for football.

Football next?

The American middle class in particular is turning against football because of head injuries.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-football-concussions-youth-kass-met-0906-20170905-column.html#

Parents read the news, they know about concussions and CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. While a recent study wasn't random — brains were donated by concerned families — the analysis by Boston University of brains from dead players showed that of 111 brains from NFL players, 110 suffered CTE, a condition causing depression, psychosis, dementia, memory loss and death.

Is new scientific knowledge driving the middle class away from football? Or is a middle-class disposition toward individualism driving the new interest in brain injury? 

 Football is the game of the Rural Working Class, a sport that emphasizes warlike self-sacrifice. Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out the similarities between American football and dog fighting. People who fight their dogs to death nevertheless love their dogs for their devotion. Likewise, Americans love their football players for their grit and self-sacrifice. That is, terrible injuries were always an obvious reality of the game. In fact, that was precisely football's appeal, especially for the Rural Working Class. Suddenly everyone is talking as if these types of injuries are a recent discovery. 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/19/offensive-play

 As small-towns become economically obsolete and rural denizens migrate to the suburbs and/or move up into the middle class, they adopt a suburban middle-class orientation toward the self that would value an activity like jogging over football. 

https://www.apnews.com/66e699491a3b478293620c1e5069dc9e
ELLICOTT CITY, Md. (AP) — On a cool and rainy afternoon during the first week of classes at Centennial High School in this well-to-do Baltimore suburb, about 50 members of the boys’ cross-country team sauntered across the parking lot for their after-school run. 
Meanwhile, about 30 kids in helmets and pads were going through drills on the pristine artificial turf field at the school’s hillside football stadium. 
“It used to be the other way around,” said Al Dodds, Centennial’s cross-country coach, who has 64 boys on his team this year. “Now, there’s a small turnout in football and cross-country is huge.” 
The decline would be much steeper if not for a handful of states in the South and the West. Throughout the Northeast, the Midwest and the West Coast, in communities urban and rural, wealthy and working-class, fewer kids are playing football.
A study published last month in the medical journal Translational Psychiatry showed that kids who played football before age 12 were more than twice as likely to have mood and behavior problems. 
The news hasn’t escaped the parents at Centennial, one of the top-rated public high schools in Maryland, where 97 percent of students go on to college after they graduate. Just 10 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, an indicator of poverty. 
“Families around here are more into academics,” Zach said.
The decline in football is happening in the more urban states, those of the Northeast, Midwest and the West Coast. 

 Moreover, that decline is also happening in rural areas in those states and among their working class population. 

 This would seem to be an example of "cultural hegemony", by which the upper classes dominate the social norms in those more urban regions. 

 But in rural regions, the mentality of the Rural Working Class holds sway, and football remains popular. (It would be interesting to see if the urban and affluent populations in rural regions have abandoned football.)
Another influence might be the preexistent regional cultures of the US that trace back to the colonial era, and which subsequent immigrants assimilated into. The prevailing values and attitudes in the US, from this perspective, do not align strictly along the urban-rural axis. The regions that still celebrate football in this scheme are the Far West, Deep South and Greater Appalachia. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/urban-rural-united-states-regions-midterms.html

Far West
Settlement largely controlled by corporations or government via deployment of railroads, dams, irrigation, mines; exploited as an internal colony, to the lasting resentment of its people.

Deep South
Established by slave lords from English Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society. Modeled on slave states of the ancient world — democracy was the privilege of the few. Fights for rollbacks of federal power, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor and consumer protections.

Greater Appalachia
Settlers from war-ravaged Ulster, northern England, lowland Scotland. Deep commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty; intense suspicion of external authority.

The regions that have forsaken their attachment to football would be Yankeedom (North East), New Netherlands (Midwest) and the Left Coast (West Coast).

Yankeedom
Puritan legacy; perfect earthly society with social engineering, individual denial for common good; assimilate outsiders; vigorous government to thwart would-be tyrants.

New Netherland
Dutch-founded; retains traits of 17th-century Amsterdam: a global trading culture; materialistic; multicultural; committed to tolerance and freedom of inquiry and conscience.

Left Coast
New Englanders (by ship) and farmers, prospectors and fur traders from Appalachian Midwest (by wagon). Yankee utopianism meets individual self-expression and exploration.

The finances of football are complicated.

 Football is expensive, but its popularity means that not only can it pay for itself, but it pays for other sports. If football becomes less popular, then it can no longer pay its own way. Other sports may then also become endangered unless they gain in popularity. But will they manage to pay for themselves?

While participation in tackle football is down, flag football is becoming more popular. 
Participation in the NFL Flag program run by USA Football for kids ages 6-17 increased by 66 percent from 2013 to 2016, with 385,000 kids playing last year.
In high schools, the expense of the sport and increasing specialization by young athletes are also factors. And while football is declining, other sports are growing, among them soccer and lacrosse. But football is different because it remains the nation’s most popular spectator sport, and schools expect to sell tickets on Friday nights. 
“The key thing about football is that it’s such an important part of the financial picture of schools. Some of these schools rely on the attendance in high school football to pay for these other sports,” Gardner said. “While we certainly applaud the growth of all sports, we remain vigilant about what’s going on in football because of the economic impact.”
Football's problems are also intertwined with the state of television.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/super-bowl-nfl-ratings-decline/551861/
Every year, the story of the Super Bowl is partly a story of its gargantuan audience. Of the 20 most-watched TV broadcasts in U.S. history, 19 are Super Bowls. (The other one is the series finale of M*A*S*H.) 
But this superlative legacy is in tension with an equal and opposite force: the steady collapse in NFL viewership. The size of the league’s average per-game audience has declined by about 17 percent since 2015, an astonishing fall for the crown jewel of pay TV. 
 Football is in decline in part because television is in decline.
The television problem is prominent yet simple. Fewer people are subscribing to pay TV, which means that ratings are declining for just about everything on cable and broadcast. To pick an example quite different from football: The audience for last weekend’s Grammys telecast declined by nearly 10 million, a stunning 30 percent drop in one year that is related to the fact that cord-cutting is accelerating, leaving fewer people (especially young people) with access to cable TV. Attention has shifted from pay TV to mobile devices, which aggregate football highlights, stats, and fantasy scores, allowing more fans to closely follow the sport without actually watching it live on television.
Cord-cutting, the shift to mobile devices and "fantasy football" might all be forms of disruptive innovation -- cheaper, inferior alternatives that nevertheless suffice and end up replacing the status quo. That does not bode well for televised football.

Some of football's problems relate to star players being stuck on bad teams or having a high rate of injuries, or popular teams faring poorly.

Many of the most popular and marketable players in the NFL in 2017 are either injured (like Aaron Rodgers, Andrew Luck, and J.J. Watt), playing for mediocre or noncompetitive teams (like Russell Wilson, Von Miller, and Eli Manning), or both (like Odell Beckham Jr.). It ought to concern the league that the remainder is composed mostly of quarterbacks aged 35 and over (Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger). Of the 10 NFL players with the best-selling jerseys, only one made the playoffs without being injured or suspended: Tom Brady.
But it’s not just a dearth of star players; the NFL also suffers when its most popular franchises are suffering. This has been particularly clear in the playoffs, which have shown some of the worst ratings declines of the year. An analysis by the media research firm MoffettNathanson ranked the league’s teams by internet traffic to their official websites. Just four of the 13 most popular teams made the playoffs. But of the 10 least popular teams in the league, half of them made the postseason and played in the first round of the playoffs. It will surprise no one that ratings for that week were dismal, down 20 percent from the previous year. 
The implications of the sorry state of football go beyond the fate of football. It will also affect television, the retail industry, media consolidation, social media and cable companies.

And this is precisely why the decline and fall of the NFL is such a big deal for television—and, truly, for much of the retail industry. Television is a $70 billion advertising business, and the NFL is its keystone. The Super Bowl is by far the largest live broadcast event in the U.S. Football accounts for almost half of Fox’s “gross ratings points” (a common proxy in the ad industry for audience reach) and at least one-eighth of the same measure for CBS, NBC, and ESPN. Its demise will encourage more large media companies to merge—as Disney and Fox have proposed and CBS is allegedly discussing—and nudge even more commercial dollars to internet advertising companies, where Google and Facebook stand to benefit. Football’s rise to cultural dominance mirrored the ascent of pay TV as the single best business model in American entertainment history. Today, both industries are falling back to earth together.
More along these lines:

http://fortune.com/2017/09/20/nfl-monday-night-football-tv-ratings-decline/
My own view is that declining NFL ratings are the logical outgrowth of the decline in legacy linear television overall. This larger decline has been going on for over a decade now; is rooted in a fundamental shift to anytime, anywhere viewing on broadband devices; and affects all legacy TV programming to one degree or another. In short, contrary to the hopes (or delusions) of some in the TV industry, the NFL is not immune to these larger societal and viewing dynamics. 
The more important question is: What happens to the pay TV edifice when the NFL cornerstone isn’t there anymore? The answers are multiple, but two are particularly important. 
First, the link between household growth and pay TV growth has been irreparably broken. The creation of a new household—most commonly by a young adult leaving home—used to almost automatically result in an additional pay TV household. That is simply no longer the case. Millions of American households are living happily without pay TV and one of the reasons is that Monday Night Football and other NFL games are simply no longer must-see TV. Put another way, U.S. legacy pay TV households have peaked and will only decline going forward. 
The second effect of declining NFL ratings is the slow collapse of the supersize pay TV bundle itself. If the NFL isn’t must-have content, then nothing is must-have content. The result is a mushrooming of skinny bundles from providers as varied as Sling TV, DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, and Hulu’s Live TV. 
These services vary pretty dramatically, seemingly agreeing only on three things: people want cheaper pay TV offerings; what people want varies (including access to the NFL); and half a loaf (in terms of monthly subscription fees) is a whole lot better than none.
Unfortunately for football, when people do watch televised football, their attendance at football games diminishes. This is because the increasing quality and size of televisions makes home viewing more palatable.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2018/02/13/college-football-attendance-sees-second-largest-decline-in-history/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c8fdb4aebc5f
The reasons are varied and have been discussed at length in recent years. Better television quality and presentation of the games by the TV networks have made staying at home or watching at a sports bar a much more enticing proposition; why would you pay top dollar to fight traffic and crowds to watch a game out in the elements when you could simply stay home and have a much better view at a much lower price? Other observers point to today’s students, fewer of whom see going to football games as an important element of college life.
Watching sports on a TV instead of in a stadium is classic disruptive innovation. This might also be a trend in tourism as well, as it was during the 2009 recession: 

1) People in Japan and the US who had planned on a trip to Hawaii instead went to their nearest Disneyland.
2) People who had been planning on a trip to Disneyland instead took their families to movie theaters.
3) People who used to go to the movies instead bought big TVs, sound systems and a Netflix subscription.
(This is also a "crisis trend", in which a crisis exposes and accelerates new and previously obscure trends.)

 Perhaps football stadiums are the shopping malls of the future.

What would disruptive innovation in American gridiron football look like? This would be a cheaper, inferior version of American gridiron football that nevertheless entertains and replaces the mainstream status quo.

It might look a bit like "arena football". It is a small-scale, indoor version of American gridiron football.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_football
Arena football is a variety of indoor gridiron football played by the Arena Football League (AFL) and China Arena Football League (CAFL). The game is played indoors on a smaller field than American or Canadian outdoor football, resulting in a faster and higher-scoring game. The sport was invented in 1981, and patented in 1987, by Jim Foster, a former executive of the National Football League and the United States Football League. It was a proprietary game (the rights to which were owned by Gridiron Enterprises) until 2007, when the patent expired. Though not the only variant of indoor American football, it is the most widely known, and the one on which most other forms of modern indoor football are at least partially based. 
It looks action packed but claustrophobic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNrQITyOVv4 

The comments note that it is an off-season sport that gives football junkies a "good enough" option. That is the perfect description of the first stage of disruptive innovation, when an inferior product finds a niche. The second stage is when it improves over time. How could arena football become more charismatic?

Perhaps one can also look to other forms of "football" as a source of ideas to modify American gridiron football and make it more amenable to disruptive innovation. 

Sports involving kicking a ball have long existed all over the world, but the modern professional family of sports called "football" find their roots in the English-speaking world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football
Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball with a foot to score a goal. Unqualified, the word football is understood to refer to whichever form of football is the most popular in the regional context in which the word appears. Sports commonly called football in certain places include-  association football (known as soccer in some countries); - gridiron football (specifically American football or Canadian football);-  Australian rules football;-  rugby football (either rugby league or rugby union); and - Gaelic football.These different variations of football are known as football codes. 
The origin of all these sports is found in what Americans refer to as "soccer" ("association football"). Legend has it that one day someone picked up the soccer ball and ran with it, and a new sport was born -- rugby. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_union#History

From rugby, American gridiron football was developed with the intent of being more strategic.

Rugby has fewer head injuries than American gridiron football for at least several reasons.

1) Player size and running. The ball is in play for prolonged periods of time in rugby, without the brief and intense spasm of play typical of American gridiron football. Longer periods of play involves more running, which favor the lighter player. Huge players might be better at blocking or tackling, but they become winded after just a few minutes of running. Lighter players means that the hits and tackles are less injurious. 

2) Body armor and aggression. Rugby players do not wear padding and helmets. Body armor encourages rougher play and leads to more and worse injuries.

3) Tackles. Tackles in rugby involve wrapping one's arms around around the legs of the ball carrier and pulling him to the ground. In American gridiron football, tackles are collisions that force the ball carrier to the ground. 

Tacklers are not required to wrap their arms around the ball carrier before bringing him to the ground; in fact, the ball carrier is often "tackled" by the defender taking a running start and hitting the ball carrier to knock them to the ground. Tackles can also be made by grabbing the ball carrier's jersey (or even hair, should it be long enough and allowed to dangle freely from beneath the helmet) and pulling him to the ground. As mentioned above, the referee can declare that a play is dead if the ball carrier's forward progress has been stopped, even if he has not actually been taken to the ground. 

What elements of rugby can be borrowed by American gridiron football?

1) Running would be encouraged by changing the rules on passing. In American gridiron football, passes beyond the line of scrimmage must take place from behind the line of scrimmage. In rugby, passes can be made at any point on the field, as long as the receiver is behind or alongside the passer. While the current rules in American football regarding passing forward from behind the line of scrimmage would still be observed, beyond the line of scrimmage rugby's rules on passing would be adopted by American gridiron football in order to prolong the length of play and encourage running. (There is another related issue addressed by this rule addition. Because a ball carrier beyond the line of scrimmage is not permitted to pass the ball in American football, potential tacklers aim to hit the carrier as hard as possible. In contrast, in rugby, potential tacklers are more cautious about "over-committing" to a tackle because the ball carrier could simply hand off the ball in the midst of a tackle -- taking the tackler(s) out of the action.)

2) Body armor would be eliminated from American football. 

3) The American style of tackling would be banned. Rugby's rule of tackling by wrapping the tackler's arms around the ball carrier would be imposed. However, other ways of bringing down the ball carrier that are currently banned, such as tripping and pulling, would be permitted. 

Here American gridiron football would take on a new public identity or "brand" -- as a grappling sport. Classic grappling sports include wrestling or judo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grappling 
Grappling techniques can be broadly subdivided into Clinch fighting; Takedowns and Throws; Submission holds and Pinning or Controlling Techniques; and Sweeps, Reversals, Turnovers, and Escapes.
To some degree, all of this would be allowed, even to players who did not posses the ball.

With its current emphasis on collisions, American football is essentially a striking sport. Whereas in typical striking sports like boxing or karate, the hands and feet are used to deliver punches or kicks, American football utilizes the entire body to deliver a body blow. 

American football would be reformed by including some elements of grappling. After all, sport fighting minimizes the injuries to the brain and internal organs that plague boxing by including grappling. American football would then be the equivalent of sport fighting in the realm of team sports. (Boxing is an individual collision sport, whereas sport fighting is an individual collision sport with grappling; American gridiron football is a team collision sport, whereas reformed American football would be a team collision sport with grappling.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_sport 

Rugby may suggest ways that collisions can be minimized, but rugby is not perfect. It has a problem with injuries to the neck and spine because of scrums. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(rugby) 

The line of scrimmage in American gridiron football might not be as injurious as the scrum, and might be worth salvaging. It would be modified, however. Holding would be allowed at the line of scrimmage. In fact, linemen could use holds and trips from judo or aikido to bring down opposing linemen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holding_(American_football) 

There are two types of rugby, each with its own style of tackle. In "rugby union", players must be brought to the ground, but the ball is still in play.
In rugby union, a player must be brought to ground for a tackle to be completed. The tackled player must release the ball, but the ball is not dead and a ruck forms to contest possession of it. If the ball carrier is not brought to the ground a maul will usually form. High/reckless or stiff arm tackles laws once dictated any contact made above the shoulders was an offence. Now, even if contact starts below the shoulders, if the head is involved in any reckless tackle it results in the offending player being given a yellow card and therefore sin binned. World Rugby now defines a reckless tackle as being any contact where the tackler "knew or should have known that there was a risk of making contact with the head of an opponent, but did so anyway".
In "rugby league" there are a variety of tackles that do not entail bringing the ball carrier to the ground.

In rugby league the ball-carrier can be tackled by any number of defenders from any direction. The initial contact in the tackle must be made below the ball carrier's neck or it will be deemed a high tackle and penalised. A tackle in rugby league is completed when any of the following occurs:[10]
The attacking player's ball or the hand or arm holding the ball comes into contact with the ground while still held by one or more defenders. 
Although still on his feet, the attacking player's forward momentum has ceased while still held by one or more defender.  
Being held by a defender, the attacking player makes it evident that he has succumbed to the tackle and wishes to be released in order to play-the-ball.  
A defender places a hand on the attacking player lying on the ground.
Perhaps one can look to Australian rules football for further potential innovations. There was a desire to make the new sport safer than rugby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football 
The club's stated aim was to create a simple code that was suited to the hard playing surfaces around Melbourne, and to eliminate the roughest aspects of English school games—such as "hacking" (shin-kicking) in Rugby School football—to lessen the chance of injuries to working men. In another significant departure from English public school football, the Melbourne rules omitted any offside law. "The new code was as much a reaction against the school games as influenced by them", writes Mark Pennings. 
Opposition players may bump or tackle the player to obtain the ball and, when tackled, the player must dispose of the ball cleanly or risk being penalised for holding the ball. 
The ball carrier may only be tackled between the shoulders and knees. If the opposition player forcefully contacts a player in the back while performing a tackle, the opposition player will be penalised for a push in the back. If the opposition tackles the player with possession below the knees (a low tackle or a trip) or above the shoulders (a high tackle), the team with possession of the football gets a free kick.
Rugby was a sport of the upper classes which prepared them for the brutal rigors of administering an empire, but the brutality of rugby was unsuited for ordinary Australian workingmen who could end up unemployed as a result of serious injury. 

The tackle in Australian rules football is a grappling move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tackle_(football_move) 
In Australian rules football, the move commonly described as a "tackle" is similar to in rugby and involves wrapping, holding or wrestling a player who has possession of the ball to the ground. Players not in possession of the ball are not allowed to be tackled, and will receive a holding the man free kick if tackled. 
That kind of grappling sounds safer than a collision.

As there is no offside rule in Australian rules football, players can be tackled from any direction, and are often blindsided. For this reason, the sport allows players to shepherd and bump their opponents within 5 metres of the ball, to protect the ball carrier. 
That is, potential tacklers can come out of anywhere and surprise the ball carrier because there is no offsides rule, with the trade-off that potential tacklers can be hindered by the offense. That interference might help to limit any kind of collision. 

Tackled players need to keep the ball in play.

A tackled player must immediately dispose of the ball legally, by kicking or handballing, but not by throwing or dropping the ball. If this is not done, a holding the ball free kick will be awarded to the tackler. If the ball is knocked free by the tackler, pinned to the player by the tackler, or the player unsuccessfully attempts a kick or handball, a free kick will only be awarded if the ball carrier is deemed to have had a prior opportunity to dispose of the ball prior to being tackled. If a player has not had prior opportunity to dispose of the ball and a tackler knocks the ball free during a tackle then no free kick is paid and the game continues. 
Keeping the ball in play would keep the game in progress, and make it more of a running game.

Again, players are thrown to the ground, not hit.

A tackle must only contact below the shoulders and above the knees, and a player is able to be thrown to the ground, so long as the tackle is deemed not to be reckless or likely to cause injury. There are also rules outlawing pushing in the back making tackling more difficult. Tripping, by both hand or foot, is not allowed and can be a reportable offence. 
Players wear little to no padding to cushion the impact of tackles, however players generally wear mouthguards to protect their teeth.  
Tripping might not be so bad if it were the kind of careful tripping that one finds in aikido.

In this English-speaking family of sports there is an outsider with a suspiciously strong family resemblance to Australian rules football -- Gaelic football. "Tackling" in Gaelic football is remarkably safe.
Gaelic football defines tackling as wresting the ball from an opponent's hands. Bumping is allowed on the player with the ball, but a player cannot be grabbed. 
"International rules football" is a hybrid of Gaelic football and Australian rules football.

International rules football is a hybrid game between Australian rules football and Gaelic football. Tackling in International Rules is subject to similar rules as Australian rules football, but with some subtle differences. Tackling is only allowed as low as the waist, whereas it is allowed down to the knees in Aussie Rules. One handed tackling has been banned in International Rules since the 2008 International Rules Series. 
The similarities between the two sports have long been noted, and it has been speculated that one sport might have influence the other during their development, or perhaps it is a coincidence of convergent evolution. Gaelic football also seems to be influence by the "hurling", the Irish equivalent of field hockey. So in the case of Gaelic football, there seem to have been some indigenous Irish precursors, mixed in with the influence of rugby, and maybe some mutual influence with Australian rules football.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Gaelic_football_and_Australian_rules_football


There is an entire different tradition of football found in Italy, referred to as "calcio" or "calcio fiorentino" or "calcio storico".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcio_Fiorentino 
Calcio fiorentino (also known as calcio storico "historic football") is an early form of football and rugby that originated in 16th-century Italy. Once widely played, the sport is thought to have started in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. There it became known as the giuoco del calcio fiorentino ("Florentine kick game") or simply calcio; which is now also the name for association football in the Italian language. The game may have started as a revival of the Roman sport of harpastum.  
Calcio was reserved for rich aristocrats who played every night between Epiphany and Lent.[1] Even popes, such as Clement VII, Leo XI and Urban VIII played the sport in Vatican City. The games could get violent as teams vied to score goals. A variation of Calcio Fiorentino was most likely played in the 15th century as well, as a match was organized on the Arno river in 1490, notable as a day so cold the waters were completely frozen. On another famous occasion, the city of Florence held a match on February 17, 1530, in defiance of the imperial troops sent by Charles V, as the city was under siege. In 1574 Henry III of France attended a game of "bridge fighting" – put on in his honor during a visit to Venice. The king is recorded as saying: "Too small to be a real war and too cruel to be a game".
The rules do exist, but they are minimal. Sucker punches and kicks to the head are illegal, but that is about it.

The modern version of calcio has not changed much from its historical roots, which allow tactics such as head-butting, punching, elbowing, and choking. However due to often fatal injuries, sucker punches and kicks to the head are currently banned.[1] It is also prohibited for more than one player to attack an opponent. Any violation leads to being expelled from the game.  
The game starts when the Pallaio[clarification needed] throws and kicks the ball toward the center line, then at the first whistle as the ball first rests on field, 15 forwards or Corridori begin fighting in a wild mixed martial arts match- punching, kicking, tripping, hacking, tackling, and wrestling with each other in an effort designed to tire opponents' defenses, but which often descends into an all-out brawl. They try to pin and force into submission as many players possible. Once there are enough incapacitated players, the other teammates come and swoop up the ball and head to the goal. 
From this moment on, the players try by any means necessary to get the ball into the opponents' goal, also called caccia. The teams change sides with every caccia or goal scored. It is important to shoot with precision, because every time a player throws or kicks the ball above the net, the opposing team is awarded with a half caccia. The game ends after 50 minutes and the team which scored the most cacce wins. 
Some graphic photographs: 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/gallery/2015/jun/27/the-calcio-storico-the-most-brutal-sport-on-earth-in-pictures 

This might be more in line with what American gridiron football should evolve into, at least in terms of embracing grappling.

In sum, if American gridiron football were subjected to disruptive innovation, the result would be a cheaper, more convenient form of football. 

1) This would be a sport without collisions and their expensive consequences, and would instead emphasize grappling. It would still be a hard, rough sport -- which is the whole point of the sport. 

 2) It would probably be played on a smaller field, as in arena football. 

 3) Every team in the league would play every other team -- the "round-robin" tournament system. This would stretch out the playing season and allow teams to recuperate for at least one week prior to the next game. It would be less dramatic than an elimination tournament, where the losing team would be eliminated after only one or two losses. However, it would be more fair and more accurately reflect talent and effort, because even great champions can have a bad day and get eliminated to everyone's dismay. 

 4) The worst team in the league at the end of the season would be banished to a lower league or division, and could only rejoin the higher league if they won championships three times in the lower leagues. This would spare the best players in the league from the prospect of ending up on a bad team (e.g., OJ Simpson) because good players are bid out to mediocre teams in order to make those teams more competitive. There would be fewer teams with better players, making for classic games. (With the round-robin tournament system, the season would be stretched out to compensate for fewer teams.)
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