Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

detecting submarines with satellite lasers

The latest idea in detecting submarines involves using powerful lasers mounted on satellites to penetrate to much greater depths than previously thought possible. As far as I can tell, the lasers don’t actually zap the submarines, they just tell you where they are. This could still be a big deal because undetectable submarines with nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent. A first strike on an opponent’s land- and air-based nuclear forces can never succeed in wiping out the ability to retaliate, as long as the subs are out there. There is even a solid argument that a few submarine-based weapons are all the nuclear weapons a country really needs strategically. So if someone gets ahead in the sub-detection game, a first strike could become more thinkable.

more reasons to worry about the global financial system

William White, formerly with the Bank of Canada among other jobs, has another cheery list of reasons to worry about a new financial crisis.

  • large increases in dollar-denominated debt in the private sectors of emerging market economies,
  • high property prices in many countries,
  • asset-management and private equity firms acting as lenders in place in traditional banks, with less regulation and fewer limits on risk taking,
  • disparities in interest rates between countries leading to capital movement
  • flash crashes,
  • algorithmic trading,
  • passive investing, and
  • the possibility of slower growth, higher inflation, and political meddling in monetary policy in the U.S. caused in part by Trump’s misguided policies.

nitrogen fixing bacteria as an alternative to fertilizer

The invention of nitrogen fertilizer is a key reason the Earth is able to support so many humans, but it has also taken a huge toll on our natural water bodies and climate. Grist has an interesting article on the possibility of using nitrogen-fixing bacteria, either naturally occurring or genetically engineered, on a much wider range of crops and on a much larger scale to help solve this problem.

A pack of startups is racing to market with a means of fixing nitrogen without polluting the Earth. One of them, Pivot Bio, just garnered a $70 million vote of confidence in a funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the coalition of big-name billionaires — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson — hoping to power climate change-beating innovation…

Next year, Pivot plans to start getting farmers nitrogen-fixing bacteria — which efficiently delivers fertilizer to crops, no fossil fuels required. Farmers will spritz seeds with a liquid probiotic as they bury them in the ground. Another startup, Azotic Technologies based in England, is racing to bring a different bacterium to market around the same time. Intrinsyx Bio — a spin-off from a company that supplies NASA with bacteria and other critters for experiments — plans to put yet another bacterium on the market in 2020. And at least one other, the Bayer-backed Joyn Bio, is just ramping up. If any of them is able to provide a viable alternative to the international fertilizer industry, it could be the most significant environmental breakthrough since Haber figured out a way to synthetically release nitrogen from its natural bonds.

So this could be a big deal. Of course, I can’t help thinking of Donella Meadows talking about “layers of limits”. Remove one layer and continue to grow and expand, and you will eventually bump up against the next one.

 

fair vs. unfair inequality

This interesting article in Vox talks about academic ideas on how to distinguish and measure a difference between fair and unfair inequality. The premise is that there is no moral justification for leaving anyone below the poverty line, even if they are there due to bad choices of their own making. But once out of poverty, there is a need for incentives for people to make effort, make good choices and take the kind of good risks that sometimes pay off for society. There is also a difference between people who are less well off because of bad luck (often the luck of who their parents are) and people who are less well off because they have made less effort or bad choices. Of course, people who are better off because of luck or breeding will tend to rationalize their success relative to others as being due to superior effort and good choices, when in fact they may not be the case. So having an objective way to measure this is an interesting idea. It suggests you could have policies that kick in automatically when some measure of “unfair inequality” gets to a certain level. I don’t quite understand the measure itself, but this is a blog post referring to an academic paper, and I didn’t dig into the academic paper itself.

Modern Monetary Theory

The Intercept has a long article on Modern Monetary Theory.

In a nutshell: MMT proponents believe that the government can safely spend far more money than it currently does, and increasing the federal deficit is not a bad thing in and of itself — a public deficit is also a private-sector surplus, after all.

While typically we hear rhetoric that our political leaders must first “find” money through new taxes or budget cuts in order to pay for new programs, MMT proponents say that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works. In so-called fiat currency systems (meaning societies in which money isn’t backed by physically valuable commodities like gold or silver) governments literally create the money and tax it later to control for inflation and keep it in demand.

Inflation is still a risk, MMT advocates say, but it’s a much more remote risk than mainstream economists let on, and it’s one that can be addressed down the line if it arises, without so much pre-emptive austerity.

They also talk about the idea of a federal jobs guarantee.

I just had a few college economics courses, but the idea seems risky. By expanding the money supply so drastically, I thought you risked hyper-inflation and a devaluing of your currency relative to others. Of course the U.S. can push it further than other countries, but there still must be a breaking point. But the idea of some kind of counter-cyclical automatic investment in infrastructure, education, training, and research is appealing to me. This could kick in if unemployment hits a certain level, growth falls below a certain level, or some combination of the two. Then during stronger economic times, the government steps back and lets the private sector take the lead. I think it would have to be some kind of formula or else the politicians will ruin it.

Project Censored’s Top 25

Project Censored has released its top 25 censored stories for 2017-2018 (2019 is available for sale as a book). Among the interesting ones:

The Florida Parkland High School shooter was a member of the school’s Junior Reserve Office Training Corps and was taught to shoot surplus military weapons by something called the Junior Marksmanship Program.

“Solutions journalism” is a relatively simple idea to offer solutions along with coverage of problems to avoid “negative news overload”.

Natural systems such as rivers are being given legal rights and even personhood in some places.

Regenerative agriculture is an idea to sequester carbon by restoring soil and vegetation on a large scale.

Cell phones might be causing miscarriages.

Also, Russia may be up to no good but at the same time the exhaustive coverage of it may be distracting us from other important issues. Opioid drugs continue to kill a lot of people. And the rich are getting richer. But I don’t think these really qualify as “breaking news” for those who have been paying attention.

Trump and the next pandemic

Add to the stupidity of the Trump administration slashing funding to prepare for and respond to the next deadly pandemic outbreak. These are the unwanted border crossings we should actually be worried about, and by helping people in countries where diseases are breaking out we could also be protecting ourselves.

The investments made after the 2014 Ebola crisis have been slashed in recent proposed federal budgets from the Centers for Disease Control, the agency that works to stop deadly diseases in their tracks, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which responds to international disasters, including the Ebola outbreak. Moreover, Timothy Ziemer, the top White House official in charge of pandemic preparedness, has left his job, and the biosecurity office he ran was summarily disbanded…

Perhaps most terrifying, difficult to treat and highly fatal strains of H7N9 avian influenza are spreading throughout China.

This strain of bird flu causes rapid respiratory illness with associated multiorgan dysfunction that’s easily spread by a small droplet. That’s why it’s so difficult to control and why recurrent epidemics continue to crop up: There have been five epidemics of H7N9 since 2013 in China alone, the most recent between the fall of 2016 and fall of 2017. Across these epidemics, among the 1,565 confirmed cases, about 40 percent of infected individuals died.

September 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • The Suzuki and Kodaly methods are two ways of teaching music to young children that may actually help them think later in life. Training in jazz improvisation may also be good for young brains in a slightly different way.
  • There are some bright ideas for trying to improve construction productivity, which has languished for decades. Most involve some form of offsite fabrication.
  • In energy news, there’s a big idea to produce half the world’s electricity from sunlight in the Sahara desert. Another idea for collecting solar energy in otherwise (ecologically) wasted space is solar roadways, and there are a few prototypes around the world but this doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet so far. Another big idea is long-term storage of energy to smooth out fluctuations in supply and demand over months or even years.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

do kids do better in private school than public?

The answer, at least in this study, is a clear no. Kids in private school are doing better than kids in public school, but it can be entirely explained by family income.

Does Attendance in Private Schools Predict Student Outcomes at Age 15? Evidence From a Longitudinal Study

By tracking longitudinally a sample of American children (n = 1,097), this study examined the extent to which enrollment in private schools between kindergarten and ninth grade was related to students’ academic, social, psychological, and attainment outcomes at age 15. Results from this investigation revealed that in unadjusted models, children with a history of enrollment in private schools performed better on nearly all outcomes assessed in adolescence. However, by simply controlling for the sociodemographic characteristics that selected children and families into these schools, all of the advantages of private school education were eliminated. There was also no evidence to suggest that low-income children or children enrolled in urban schools benefited more from private school enrollment.