Category Archives: Web Article Review

weather forecasting

This is interesting. It is not 100% clear to me what the measure of accuracy is below, but the plot shows how much weather forecasting has improved over the last 50 years or so. A 3-5 day forecast is highly accurate now, and 3-5 are not that different. It’s interesting to me that there is such as large drop off in accuracy between a 7 and 10 day forecast – that is not necessarily intuitive, but useful even in everyday life. A 10-day forecast is basically a coin flip, while check back 3 days later and you are closer to 80/20 odds. This is based on pressure measured at a certain height I think, so it doesn’t necessarily mean forecasts of precipitation depth and intensity, rain vs. snow vs. ice, thunder and lightning, tornadoes, etc. are going to be as accurate as this implies.

Our World in Data

There is some suggesting that AI (meaning purely statistical approaches, or AI choosing any blend of statistics and physics it wants?) might make forecasting much faster, cheaper, and easier yet again.

immigration by the numbers

This post on a blog called Demography Unplugged is a nice piece of data journalism. I have been trying to figure out if there is really a “border crisis”, or if challenges that are typical at the border are being exaggerated and cherry picked in an election year.

Measuring immigration is tricky, and this article explains how people try to do it. Basically, you want to know net migration, which is determined both by people coming in and people leaving, which both happen constantly. The Census Bureau surveys the foreign born population periodically and changes in this number are one way to do it.

Immigration really is up significantly over the past year or so. This is partly post-pandemic recovery, but it is also up significantly compared to what it has been historically even in comparably good economic times. They are coming to work. They are not coming disproportionately to commit crimes, although take a large enough group of people and there are going to be some crimes that can be cherry picked and publicized by disingenuous media outlets and political campaigns. There is no evidence I am aware of that terrorists are trying to sneak across the southern border, although of course we need to be alert for this at all ports of entry.

Some are sneaking in, but many are legally applying for asylum, after which most are allowed to enter the country while they wait for a decision on their case. This can take years, and even after a decision is made, there typically are not aggressive efforts made to find and deport them.

They are probably not taking a lot of American jobs that Americans would actually want. They are taking low wage jobs, paying taxes, and not receiving government benefits in return. Unemployment is low. Remember the labor shortage during and after the pandemic, when immigration was mostly shut off. And remember how prices shot up at least partly as a result of that labor shortage? I suspect the uptick in immigration is one factor holding wages and prices down now. The business community loves low wages, which presents somewhat of a dilemma because they also hate taxes, and the same party that advocates for low taxes also advocates for low immigration. This party generally is fine with having a dysfunctional immigration system as long as they can pin the blame on the other party.

So if you want to decrease immigration, you can let people apply for asylum at the border but not let them in until/unless their cases are decided in their favor. That exports the problem to Mexico and creates a humanitarian dilemma, which is what Trump chose to do and will do again if he gets the chance. Eventually word would get out and people would stop coming in such large numbers, but people would (and were) hurt in the meantime. You could drastically scale up whatever processes allow people to apply at U.S. embassies in their home countries. And finally, you could just try to help those countries solve some of their issues that make people want to leave, which would also be solving some of your own issues at home.

Also remember, these are relatively good economic times, and the climate change shit has not really hit the migration fan yet.

nuclear reactors on the moon

According to Breitbart (yes, I occasionally peruse Breitbart to see what propaganda spin they are putting on current events and because they occasionally pick up on a story others do not), Russia and China are considering a joint moon research base powered by a nuclear reactor. NASA is also considering a research base powered by nuclear power. This makes sense to me in a technological sense. What is concerning is the end of an era of international cooperation symbolized by the International Space Station, which Russia has said it is backing out of this year. An international moon base would just make a lot of sense rather than competing national bases.

Now, for some fun science fiction references. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1993 novel Red Mars, which I enjoyed unlike his recent book Ministry for the Future which I couldn’t finish, the first thing humanity does when it gets to Mars is build a nuclear reactor.

In the 1968 Godzilla entry Destroy All Monsters, it is assumed that by the year 1999 humanity will have settled their differences and established an international moon base led by a world government. This is important because they will need to cooperate to deal with threats such as aliens and monsters.

And finally, let’s just watch the Russian space station Mir blow up in the 1998 movie Armageddon. In 1997, there really was an explosion and fire aboard the actual Mir, which the cosmonauts present were able to put out. In 2001, most of the station was intentionally burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, and the rest allowed to crash into the Pacific Ocean. The Mir was originally a Soviet project. NASA had plans to put up its own competing space station, but after the fall of the USSR the two countries agreed to cooperate on the International Space Station instead. Seems long ago now.

Ralph Nader on Gaza

I haven’t made up my mind on the Gaza situation, and therefore I haven’t talked a lot about it. And I probably shouldn’t, but I want to get my own thoughts in order. You can stop reading here if you want.

The October 7 attacks were horrific and it is entirely understandable why Israel would choose an overwhelming and violent response. In case we forget the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. invaded not one but two sovereign countries after those attacks, and occupied them for 20 years. There were not so many video cameras in those countries as we have in Gaza now, so the civilian suffering was not in the western public eye to the extent it is now, but the suffering was undoubtedly horrible. This is more like the Vietnam war, which was very public and which people had a very visceral reaction to.

Second, there are people in positions of power on both sides who espouse hateful, racist ideologies. These people have intentionally monkey-wrenched the peace process at least since the hopeful moment of the Oslo accords in the 1990s. The participants in that peace accord were murdered by racist ideologues (one assassination 100% documented; the other somewhat obviously poisoned in my opinion, but maybe not established 100%.) Antisemitism has been a problem since Roman times, and is a problem throughout the Muslim world today. Hateful, fundamentalist ideology also drives the settler movement. I do have a position on the settlements – I agree with the international consensus that they are wrong and illegal, and they need to stop.

Now to war crimes. I am not an expert on the subject, but I know there is an international consensus against collective punishment and against ethnic cleansing. The Israeli government is quite clearly engaging in these two things under any logical textbook definition, and I don’t think this is justified as a response to the original attacks. As for genocide, I don’t believe they are intentionally exterminating civilians, which is what many people associate with genocide. Under the UN definition of genocide, the ethnic cleansing (forcible and permanent moving of populations) counts as genocide, and they are guilty of it. There is a question of whether the Israeli government intends the movement to be permanent, but I am convinced that there is at least an element within the Israeli government that would like to reduce the Palestinian population of Gaza permanently by forcing people across the Egyptian border. I have always found the UN definition problematic though because some of its sub-parts are so obviously more violent and evil than others. There are degrees of unimaginable depravity. For example, murdering 6 million people is a higher plane of depravity than taking children away from their parents for reeducation to destroy their traditional culture and language (the Chinese approach in Xinxiang, the U.S. treatment of Native Americans well into the 20th century – of course, the U.S. military shot and displaced plenty of Native Americans in support of settler colonialism in the 19th century, lest we forget).

So back to civilian suffering, which is horrible. Is it justified as unavoidable collateral damage in an otherwise proportionate response to the original attack? I can’t answer this, but it seems there is much more that can and should be done to alleviate the suffering. The extreme ideological elements on both sides seem mostly indifferent to this suffering.

I promised to get to Ralph Nader. He says the real death toll is closer to 300,000 than 30,000. The 30,000 counts only official deaths reported by hospitals, while he believes there are hundreds of thousands of bodies buried under rubble that have not been counted.

With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000? With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death and injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.

The Health Ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of named deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months, blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the “official” rising civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.

Ralph Nader

Strong words. If true, it is an impressive piece of propaganda for the Israeli government to question the Hamas estimate as being too high by a factor of 10, when it is actually too low by a factor of 10.

As for the aftermath of the operation, I picture something like the Chinese government’s approach in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the location and behavior of individual people is individually tracked and people are taken away for incarceration or reeducation. This also meets the UN definition of genocide, but at least it would be relatively bloodless compared to the intense suffering we are seeing now (and Chinese government’s genocide is relatively bloodless compared to the U.S. invasion and occupation of neighboring Afghanistan). For Palestine, I don’t see much hope for a return to the optimism of the 1990s any time soon.

Belarus

This might seem like a random topic, but Peter Turchin got me interested in Belarus. By his telling, sure, Lukashenko is a thug who has tortured and disappeared his political rivals, but he is a thug who has delivered some economic success and quality of life for his people. He has blocked potential oligarchs and maintained something along the lines of the original vision of Soviet state-owned means of production. In Russia (again by Turchin’s telling), the oligarchs got the upper hand in the 1990s and early 2000s, after which Putin crushed them and at least partially restored economic and political power to the bureaucratic government. In Ukraine, the oligarchs completely got the upper hand after the fall of the Soviet Union, took over the country and the political revolutions and counter-revolutions since then are oligarchs fighting amongst each other.

Numbers below are from the CIA World Fact Book and rounded by me. It’s a little unfair to look at the numbers for Ukraine right now, but we can compare Belarus to Poland, Russia, and Germany. Belarus is the poorest among these, but the distribution of wealth is significantly more equal (similar to a Scandinavian country in fact). Life expectancy is significantly higher than Russia and similar to Poland. So you might say yes, Belarus appears to be the closest thing to a Soviet workers paradise where nobody is rich but people have jobs, put food on the table, and get medical care. Russia is richer but strikingly unequal, and some combination of poor nutrition, poor mental and/or physical health, substance abuse, violence and/or poor health care holds down life expectancy. Germany is wealthy and healthy, although fairly unequal.

BelarusUkraineRussiaPolandGermany
GDP per capita at PPP$20,000$9,000 ($12,000 pre-war)$28,000$35,000$54,000
Ginni Index2427363032
Unemployment Rate5%9%5%3%4%
Average Life Expectancy (years)7570727682
CIA World Fact Book

what are U.S. special forces up to?

Naked Capitalism has a long article which links to a lot of other long articles.

SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialised and secret missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations[.]

One of [SOCOM’s] key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. 

Naked Capitalism

Training other countries’ militaries at their invitation seems okay. The question is always who is running that country, what is their human rights record, etc. Tracking and killing terrorists is problematic because just designating someone a terrorist makes it okay to kill them. Like for example, any individual involved with an “Iran-backed group” in Syria, Yemen, or wherever. Which are countries our troops are most definitely not invited to be in. If you have troops on the ground in a sovereign country that you are not invited to be in, how is that not a war against that country? These are often “disputed territories” of one sort or another, but again if you can just label as place you want to invade a disputed territory and then invade it (as Russia has done repeatedly), that is clearly problematic.

Finally the really scary thing about special forces is they can kill politicians and take over countries, if they want to. Including ours. Let’s hope they don’t want to, but if someone ever wants to do that and has control over the special forces, this is the direction a straight-up military coup could come from. They would just come up with a narrative that it is necessary to “protect the constitution”, and the demands of the dead founding father-gods would then trump whatever living civilians are actually nominally in charge at that moment. Don’t worry about the other branches of government – the Cowardly Congress will go along with it, and the Supreme Court will decline to hear the case.

Vaclav Smil

New Yorker has a long profile of Vaclav Smil. His books have been on my list of too-many-books-to-read-before-i-die for a long time, and have occasionally been semi-finalists, but I have not yet gotten to any of them. The latest is called How the World Really Works.

Basically, he sees himself as bringing relentless rationality and quantitativeness to discussing the world’s energy situation, and is often characterized as an anti-environmentalist as a result. He points out how much energy we really use to make modern civilization possible and how fossil fuels mostly make this possible. For example,

…the power under the direct control of an affluent American household, including its vehicles, “would have been available only to a Roman latifundia owner of about 6,000 strong slaves, or to a nineteenth-century landlord employing 3,000 workers and 400 big draft horses.” He was making a characteristically vivid point about the impact of modern access to energy, most of it produced by burning fossil fuels. No one can doubt that twenty-first-century Americans’ lives are easier, healthier, longer, and more mobile than the lives of our ancestors, but Smil’s comparison makes it clear that most of us underestimate, by orders of magnitude, the scale of the energy transformations that have made our comforts possible.

New Yorker

Increases in efficiency and renewable energy technology are happening, but when he does the math he finds that they are not happening fast enough to bend the curve of consumption and pollution back downwards in the face of relentlessly increasing consumption, especially in the developing world.

The recent slowing of China’s rate of industrialization—S-shaped curves eventually flatten—has not ended its reliance on fossil fuels; the Chinese are still building new coal-fired power plants at the rate of roughly two a week. Not that long ago, Beijing was still a city of bicycles; today, it’s plagued by air pollution, much of it produced by cars. China is the world’s leader in the manufacture of electric vehicles, but it’s also the world’s leader in generating electricity by burning coal. India’s road network, which is already the world’s second longest, after ours, is growing rapidly.

China’s energy consumption will likely peak before 2030, Smil said, but India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and countries in sub-Saharan Africa, among others, are already aiming to follow its growth example. “Don’t forget that at least two and a half billion people around the world still burn wood and straw and even dried dung for everyday activities—the same fuels that people burned two thousand years ago,” he continued. For many years to come, he added, economic growth in such places will necessarily be powered primarily by coal, oil, and natural gas. “They will do what we have done, and what China has done, and what India is trying to do now,” he said. The rate at which the world decarbonizes, he continued, will be determined by them, not by us.

(still New Yorker, but I’m a good little intellectual property rights respecting monkey)

I had this sense when I lived in Asia, that Asia is just so vast and the potential for explosive growth is so enormous that what we do in the US and western Europe will be overwhelmed by their impacts.

I am definitely on the side of math, logic, and reason which are in short supply in this world. I don’t like cynicism disguised as realism to be a substitute for making and having a plan. If math, logic, and reason show that the sort of half-assed plan the world has is not going to work, then the world needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that is going to work. It’s like saying your train is headed for a cliff and the the breaks on your train are not strong enough to stop the train before the cliff. If you throw up your hands and do nothing, you are going off the cliff which is not really an option. Trying to do literally anything is a better option than doing nothing. You would find ways to try to slow down the train or improve the brakes even if you thought the chances of success were low, right?

CIA officer displays human head in Oval Office

Okay, it’s a mask, but as far as I can ascertain, this happened. One imagines the CIA is happy to leak disguise technology from 30 years ago. Who knows what they have today. Of course, donning a mask does not infuse a person with language skills or cultural empathy. For that, you just need to hand a suitcase of cash to a person who grew up in another language and culture. The only thing that might have changed about that technology is the suitcase.

Daily Mail

RAND solves the border crisis!

RAND has all the answers on what we need to do at the border.

While politically challenging, a holistic update to U.S. immigration laws based on a better understanding of American immigration needs and the factors that are driving people to make the dangerous trek to cross the border would help reduce the numbers of migrants arriving daily to the U.S.-Mexico border and the challenges migration poses to receiving localities. This would require building on the current efforts to provide lawful pathways, easing the burden on host communities, matching immigration policies with the needs of the labor market, and addressing root causes of migration, while adhering to American legal and humanitarian responsibilities.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/02/the-crisis-at-the-border-a-primer-for-confused-americans.html

There you go. This sounds like a decade-long project at least, so politicians with 2-4 year election cycles would need to sell voters with 20 minute attention spans on it now, then competently implement it over the course of a generation.