checking in with Ireland and Northern Ireland

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I haven’t been to either Ireland or Northern Ireland, and I would love to go. My ancestors were most likely ethnic Scottish Protestants who lived and squabbled with each other on various sides of the Scottish/English/Irish border, and eventually made their way through Northern Ireland and then to Philadelphia, where they were not warmly welcomed by the famously tolerant Quakers and fanned out into the hills and foothills to the west, where they were understandably not warmly welcomed by the Native Americans who already lived there. Despite tales that white-nationalist, self-labeled “hillbilly” politicians here in the USA try to tell themselves, most of us don’t feel much if any connection to the old country. (In the Virginia foothills I am originally from, I don’t recall ever hearing the word “hillbilly”. “White trash” was the term of art, and not a pejorative but a self-chosen label that described our position on the social ladder pretty well. “Redneck” by contrast referred to an unemployed drunkard who wears dirty sleeveless T-shirts in public and regularly assaults women and puppies.) Anyway, that was a digression and back to Ireland and Northern Ireland. Since I don’t have first-hand experience of these places, I hope my comments below won’t cause any…ire?

  • While violence related to the “troubles” mostly ended in 1998, there are occasional marches and confrontations between the Republicans (who tend to be Catholic and favor an independent united Ireland) and Unionists (who tend to be Protestant and favor continued union with the UK.)
  • There has been disturbing white-nationalist violence and what can only be described as anti-immigrant pogroms in both Ireland and Northern Ireland in recent years. There have also been large counter-demonstrations. (Interesting that here in the USA white nationalist politician J.D. Vance, who is from my originally Scottish Protestant ethnic group, decided to convert to Catholicism only to be publicly chastised by the Pope himself, who is a famously tolerant guy. But I digress once again.)
  • Here are some things I didn’t realize until doing a bit of research: Republic of Ireland citizens can live, work, and travel freely anywhere in the entire EU and anywhere in the entire UK, including Northern Ireland. UK citizens can live, work and travel anywhere in the Republic of Ireland, but they are foreigners in the EU and subject to the same work, travel and visa restrictions as any other foreigners. There are no physical borders or checkpoints between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and people travel back and forth freely for work similar, I suppose, to how Americans travel between states (which is very common for one thing because major rivers often form the borders between states, major cities often grew up around rivers, and major cities therefore will often straddle two or more states). The south has the stronger economy so more of the work commuting is going to be from north to south. Taxes must get a bit messy for people who do this. Trade gets really messy – UK goods intended only for Ireland have essentially no restrictions, but goods that might end up elsewhere in the EU have all the restrictions the EU would normally have.

potential alternatives to the UN

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The UN really seems to be on its last legs, with Russia and the US launching the kinds of illegal wars of aggression that people swung for at Nuremburg, and just today (Saturday, 10/10/26 as I write) the news is the US Secretary of State openly threatening the International Criminal Court. I still think the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the tipping point that sent the UN on its path to irrelevance (as George W. Bush literally promised, and ironically I see the 1991 invasion of Iraq by his father as somewhat of a high point for the UN.) The US and Russia being permanent Security Council members, they appear to be completely immune to any consequences of their actions, at least originating through the UN itself.

Here is a TLDR article from “reality based analysis group“, except that I did actually read it! I will take issue with one small thing, which is the idea that France and the UK don’t deserve their permanent Security Council seats (which is probably true), but Russia does because it is a “superpower”. Russia’s GDP is smaller than either France or the UK’s. It just happens to spend a huge proportion of its GDP on its military, including maintenance of a huge nuclear arsenal, to the impoverishment of its citizens.

Anyway, the article goes through a really interesting analysis of international bodies that could possibly replace the UN. What they come up with is the BRICS group strengthened by some principles taken from something called the Community of Portuguese Language Countries.

https://rbaganalysis.substack.com/p/beyond-the-breaking-point

While the UN is utterly failing to prevent its most powerful members from launching illegal wars of aggression, I still think the UN is functioning in at least three ways: (1) international humanitarian assistance and scientific cooperation, (2) relatively effective monitoring and inspection of nuclear weapons (with some exceptions), and (3) a forum for all (or nearly all) of the world’s sovereign nation-states (and a handful of contested ones) to come together and discuss matters of war and peace. Regarding #2, the IAEA is imperfect because while it has autonomy to conduct surveillance and inspections (as I understand it), its enforcement mechanism is to refer violations back to the Security Council. It is certainly not perfect, but it is the type of strong agreement and functional body we need to prevent civilization-ending nuclear war. The “US-Iran nuclear agreement” that was agreed to under Obama, while certainly not perfect, was agreed to under the Security Council framework and only failed when the US government decided to no longer abide by it. The world needs to work towards some kind of similar surveillance, inspection, and enforcement mechanism for biological weapons, and possibly cyber/AI weapons. When the IAEA exists and is at least relatively effective, it is hard to imagine those functions shifting elsewhere. It is easier to imagine biological and cyber-weapon controls being created within or alongside the IAEA using a similar framework.

the nuclear football – Trump at least as insane as Nixon, without the courageous people around him willing to protect the rest of us

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This is a statement by 36 doctors (by my count, but I only counted once) from the April 30, 2026 U.S. Senate Congressional Record. Sure, it’s political, did I mention this is the SENATE?

Objectively observable signs of serious medical concern include…Escalating violence that threatens national and global stability. As Commander in-Chief of our military—more than 5,000 nuclear warheads in inter-continental missile silos, on submarines, and in bombers around the world, are ready for launch solely upon his order, and no one now has the authority to countermand his order.

On August 7, 1974, as President Richard Nixon’s impeachment loomed, White House Chief of Staff, General Alexander Haig, was so alarmed by Nixon’s wandering the halls of the White House at night, sleepless, distraught, and heavily intoxicated, talking out loud to portraits of past presidents on the walls, that he alerted Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. Equally alarmed, Schlesinger directed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George S. Brown, that any military orders from Nixon—especially nuclear ones—first be cleared through him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It has been reported that the nuclear ‘‘football’’ that contains the codes for a nuclear launch was then quietly removed from Nixon’s control.

The public and those with the power to address such potentially catastrophic conditions must ask themselves if they—and we— are confident that officials such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio would do the same.

Well, my first thought is this may have technically been a military coup. My second thought is that no single person should have the power to order a violent attack, nuclear or otherwise. Ideally, you’d like a Congressional vote. Realistically, there have to be some sort of emergency provisions for a quick decision. Granted, the decision might need to happen fast, but there should be ways in the modern age for say at least three people to confer quickly and make a decision. I suppose the decision makers should probably be elected civilians. Our current system puts us at the mercy of Mad King Donald with his finger on the trigger (although on the subject of the playground name calling our political discourse has devolved to, I am warming to Lame Duck Donald or Lame Donald Duck).

This might be taken down by the time you got a chance to read this post… I would like to see the Democrats recruit an actor or comedian who can do an entire debate in the persona of Donald Duck. If we aren’t going to be informed, we might as well be entertained. Then again, I find this just a bit too insane and mean spirited to be truly funny.

pollinators in rain gardens

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This is pretty fun – researchers at Northwestern at Pitt installed cameras in rain gardens and used machine learning to analyze over 40,000 photos of pollinators visiting them. This also appears to be a successful interdisciplinary collaboration between civil and environmental engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and geology and environmental science academic departments, which I can tell you from personal experience can require overcoming surprising and substantial resistance. The article is not open access, sadly. This is why my next job may be happily cleaning toilets at a university, if it gets me gym, pool, and library access.

Continuous diurnal monitoring of pollinator activity in urban rain gardens using camera traps, unsupervised machine learning algorithms, and deep learning detection: A proof-of-concept

The effects of urbanization and climate change have resulted in a global decline in pollinators. Adaptive strategies such as green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), and rain gardens (RGs) specifically, have the potential to create habitat for pollinators in urban environments in addition to other benefits such as hydrological control. Although many studies detail the habitat provision of natural areas, few explore quantitatively the pollinator activity promoted by urban GSI and compare it to a native system. The aim of this proof-of-concept study is to demonstrate an innovative methodology to continuously track pollinator activity using camera traps and employ advanced data analytics to interrogate the videos and identify patterns in pollinator activity. We monitor pollinator activity diurnally across multiple urban RGs and pollinator gardens (PGs) in comparison to a restored prairie using 10 trail cameras with motion detection and IR spectra technology over a month (July 2023). We compare the pollinator activity at patches of a high Coefficient of Conservatism (C-value) native species (Echinacea purpurea; Asteracaeae) to that of a lower C-value native species (Asclepias syriaca; Apocynaceae). Data analysis including use of an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, suggest that RGs located near PGs with high C-value and high-density plant assemblages can promote orders of magnitude greater pollinator activity than isolated systems, or even, a restored prairie. Once acquired, field images were labeled for deep learning model detection. We trained a YOLOv8n model with 42,271 images over a course of 5 runs to detect pollinator classes. These results support the findings that urban landscapes can provide habitats to support biodiversity and offer valuable insights into design strategies that can potentially boost the pollination services of small, patchy GSI systems such as urban RGs when they are located with connectivity and in proximity to PGs. Finally, our trained YOLOv8n model ran with a total precision of 90%, total recall of 79%, and a total maP50 of 85% providing an accurate methodology and foundation to efficiently interrogate and quantify pollinator activity in the field.

checking in with Mr. Money Mustache

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I first became aware of Mr. Money Mustache thanks to his legendary Car Clown post, which I highly recommend to everyone. I’ve almost certainly posted about it before, but since it is legendary here is a taste:

Yet these intra-city trips are commonplace. When I see a car ease into a parking spot, I always run to assist the driver with getting out into their wheelchair, but I am stunned to find that they usually have working legs after all! People drive to the school to pick up and drop off kids. To the grocery store. To the restaurants. To the gym. To each other’s houses. Back and forth on Main Street to show off. Every road sees plenty of cars and personal trucks, some of them in dangerous numbers. And inside, every vehicle is equipped with a La-Z-boy recliner, upon which a tragic clown sits, pushing the soft-touch pedals, turning the power-assisted wheel, and talking on some sort of Clownophone.

The clowns have to wait in line when the traffic light turns red. They have to bumble though the parking lots and wait for each other to back out of parking spaces, because their machines are so bulky that two cannot pass each other in a space less than 20 feet wide. They line up at special events and fight for places to park on the streets. Then they line up at the gas station and the car wash and the oil change shop. And the machines make them fatter and poorer every time they use them.

And we haven’t even addressed the most clown-like invention of them all: the drive-through (or ‘drive-thru’ as it they spell it here, which is suitable because “thru” is not even a word, just as drive-through services should not exist). The clowns actually sit for several minutes in a self-imposed traffic jam, engines idling, just so somebody can hand them some shit through the window of their car!

I am 1000% on board with car-dependence being a root cause of many social, environmental, and health problems plaguing U.S. cities. Now, his proposed remedy for Car Clown-ism was for people to ride bicycles on public streets. In my opinion, riding bicycles on most public streets in the United States is way too risky. I don’t blame the (potential, frequent) victims, the riders themselves, for this. I blame cowardly engineers, politicians, and public officials who cling to 50-years-outdated street designs when modern safe designs are well known. And to a lesser extent poor construction, maintenance, and enforcement.

Anyway, I chose to ditch my car and live in a walkable community starting in 2004 and have never looked back. I estimate it has saved me $300-700 a month every month since then, which I have either saved (in B.C. – before children) or spent on other things (children, mostly). And I have very few regrets, other than maybe spending less time in nature than I might have liked, but I don’t think living in a car-dependent suburb would have changed that much.

Back then (April 2013), MMM was posting up a storm, with 10 posts or so a month. His post this month (September 2026) is his first since April, so the heyday of the blog has past, but I will always have fond memories. Whether I agreed with every single thing or not, it was an entertaining, inspiring blog. Thanks MMM!

2026 flu and Covid vaccine recommendations

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The (U.S.) Centers for Disease Control has not gotten around to issuing vaccine recommendations this fall, and if they do their credibility has been severely, possibly terminally damaged. The better source seems to be the American Medical Association, which doesn’t actually create recommendations itself but aggegrates the recommendations of four professional societies considered authoritative.

I’ll summarize below, but obviously I am not qualified to give medical advice (my credentials: I have an environmental engineering degree and took precisely one micro-biology course). The standard advice is always “talk to your doctor”. But in our broken health care system (although “broken” would seem to imply that it worked at some point in the past), many people do not have “a doctor” that they have consistent access to, and even if they do it is often impossible to communicate with this person informally. If you have to make an appointment sometimes far in the future, waste half a day, and spend a crazy amount of money to ask a one minute question, most people are just not going to do that. Tele-medicine helps slightly with the appointment and time wasting part, I guess. And insurance companies sometimes have a free nurse hotline who might be allowed to give this type of advice.

Theoretically, you could ask a pharmacist for advice, but the only people I know who do this are ones that happen to be married to a pharmacist. Marrying a pharmacist is not a terrible idea because they are one of the highest-paid occupations. And although they probably know a lot about untraceable poisons, they do not have a strong incentive to murder you for your money because they most likely have a lot more money than you.

Many people I know also aren’t going to consult or heed the official recommendations, relying instead on “trusted messengers” such as acquaintances, ethno-nationalist politicians, internet randos, or just hunches of unclear origin. So without further ado, here is my summary of the recommendations, which you should verify for yourself. I’ve thrown in RSV for good measure. My daughter had a nasty run-in with RSV as a baby so I can personally attest to this one.

  • Babies under 6 months – flu and Covid no, RSV (under 8 months) yes
  • Children 6 months to 2 years – flu yes, Covid yes, RSV maybe (they should have already had RSV at this point, but if not the answer is a strong yes before 8 months and “talk to your doctor” after that)
  • Children 2 to 18 years – flu yes, Covid only if there is some risk factor, RSV no
  • Adults 19-49 – flu yes, Covid yes, RSV no
  • Adults 50+ – flu yes, Covid yes (specific formulations for 65+), RSV at 75+, 50-74 only if there is some risk factor
  • There are some nuances for pregnant women, immunocompromised people, and health care workers. At least, these people might have consistent access to a doctor they can ask for advice.

The 2026 Planetary Health Check

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The 2026 Planetary Health Check is out. This is Johan Rockstrom’s “Planetary Boundaries” framework. 7 of 9 indicators have moved beyond the “safe operating space”, and most or all are continuing to move in the wrong direction, often in an accelerating fashion. This is scientists trying to be very empirical and focus on indicators that are measurable. It leaves me hungry for a model that uses these variables to explain how the system as a whole is functioning. And they do give a qualitative nod to interconnections and system understanding. But overall, it is a nice compilation of recent scientific evidence in one place, combining the familiar (more or less) evidence on carbon concentrations and emissions with less familiar evidence on biodiversity and habitat destruction, the pipeline from nitrogen and phosphorus extraction to water pollution, and land use.

I could spend weeks or months drilling in to the references, but I have children who apparently think I am running a bed and breakfast (i.e., they are out of bed and asking for breakfast), so the part of the day where I have some control over how I spend my time is now over, and if you want to extract some interesting points from this report you will have to do it yourself.

Chinese cars would take only 10% of U.S. market in a decade?

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One report by a market research firm estimates that if imports of Chinese cars to the U.S. were allowed, they would take around 10% of the U.S. market over the next decade.

…according to market research firm Mobility Global, if restrictions were eased and China-based automakers were allowed to do business Stateside, they’d be selling as many as 1.7 million vehicles per year by 2038, Bloomberg reports. That translates to about 11% of the world’s second-largest automotive market (right behind China itself).

I find this a little hard to believe. I’ve seen Chinese EVs on the road while traveling in Southeast Asia, and they appear to be just as good as Japanese or Korean cars on the road (there were very few U.S. brands in evidence aside from a few pickups, but even there Toyotas are popular), and they are vastly cheaper. So it seems silly to me to think that U.S. consumers won’t choose something that is equally good and vastly cheaper, if not better and cheaper. And if there are no laws preventing government and corporate fleets from investing in these vehicles, I can’t see why they wouldn’t.

I think autonomous vehicles are going to take over quickly once legal and policy barriers finally fall, probably reaching critical mass in a couple years if I had to guess. And the reason EVs haven’t taken off, in my view, is the pathetic lack of accessible, convenient charging infrastructure. Autonomous vehicles are likely to remove that barrier because they can just drive off and find a charger somewhere that a human driver would not have the patience to deal with. I can’t imagine why entrepreneurs wouldn’t fill underused, out-of-the-way parking lots or warehouses with EV chargers. You can pack a lot of cars into a small space when infinitely patient robots are doing the maneuvering. It would be more like a port operation than a parking lot as we think of it.

You can say the power grid is not up to this, and that is probably right. But the increasing demand for electric power generation and transmission will drag that industry kicking and screaming into the present at some point. That is my understanding of how supply and demand work.

September 2026 OECD Economic Outlook

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The September 2026 OECD Economic Outlook is out. There is nothing too earth-shattering here, more like an extrapolation of current/recent trends. The project global (real) economic growth ticking up a bit from 2.9% in 2026 to 3.0% in 2027. In the U.S., the numbers are 2.2% and 2.1%, and in the Euro area 1.0% and 1.0%. So far, the world has been more resilient to the disruptions of the Iran War and U.S. tariff dumb-fuckery (I can’t bring myself to use the word “policy” which implies some sort of underlying theory or strategy) than expected, although the situation gets riskier the longer it goes on. While there are differences in inflation between countries, the inflation trend is global and projected to gradually ease going forward. China has been a special case of recent deflation, which they see ticking back up to a small positive number by next year. Government debt is concerning nearly worldwide, but they don’t see the bottom falling out suddenly or imminently. El Nino and “extreme storms” (the words “climate change” do not appear in this report) are likely to affect food prices which will affect low-income households the most. AI holds risks of short-term failure to meet market expectations, and medium- to long-term productivity enhancement.

September 2026 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Concerns about the food supply over the next year or so have seeped from alternative media into mainstream media stories. I consider this indicator at least as frightening as the content of the stories themselves. Honorable mention: tactical nuclear weapons (these would not help the food supply).

Most hopeful story: While there has been somewhat of a rollback in the number of competitive electoral democracies over the last 20 years, this is a minor blip when you look at the democratic revolution over the past 250 years.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: While exercise lowers dementia risk in general, exercising at or on the way to work does not seem to help as much. I speculated this might be due to some combination of stress, noise pollution, and air pollution, with the latter two being solvable problems. But although raw “fluid” intelligence seems to peak around age 20, “crystalized intelligence” which accounts for experience does not start to decline sharply until well after age 50, and possibly not until after age 70. Reading, physical activity, and “engagement with arts and culture” are all good for the aging brain.