Well what do you know, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Nearer came out in 2024 and I somehow didn’t notice. I still tell young people who ask that the original book is a drop-everything-must-read. The question is whether I would tell them to drop the original and read this one first. (As much as I love interacting with Gen Z, the idea of many of them reading two complete books seems like a stretch…) I’ll definitely read this one and compare when I get a chance and see. Of course they also need to read How Much is Enough: Money and the Good Life. And probably Manufacturing Consent, which in 1988 might be the best explanation we have of the propaganda techniques we all seem to be falling for here in 2025.
Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com
Is the UN on its last legs?
According to The Economist, the UN is close to bankruptcy, in part because the U.S. and China are not paying their agreed share. I believed in the UN back in the first Gulf War era, when it seemed like the so-called great powers could come together through the security council and collectively decide what to do when a regional power invaded its sovereign neighbor. That simple model, where if one country steps out of line all other countries will turn against it, seems so appealing to me. But that model is clearly out the window, at least since the second Gulf War and possibly since the NATO adventures in the Balkans in the late 1990s.
It’s sad. As a mechanism to prevent war, the UN is clearly completely ineffective at this point. If they were to just close up shop in New York, I am not sure the war and peace situation would be worse off – to be clear, it is very bad and just can’t get that much worse with or without the UN. When serious discussions even happen, they are not happening through the UN.
The UN still does important things on the humanitarian and science fronts, however, and if nothing else the General Assembly gives the world’s smaller, poorer, and less powerful nations a way to speak more collectively and be heard.
As the UN has faded, I suppose we have seen other organizations rise in parallel to fill in some of the void, like the G20, BRICs, etc. Maybe this is the future, but it really seems like we need a functioning organization like the Security Council, in parallel if the actual Security Council is hopeless, and we need it now.
the problem with sprawl
This article from Strong Towns has a good explanation of why low-density development is not the answer to the housing supply issue.
this style of development works extremely well for a specific type of private developer… developers like Ross Perot Jr. are masters of the assembly-line approach: secure cheap land on the fringe, install infrastructure, and build tract housing as quickly as possible. At this scale, the profits are enormous, and the risks are low. The federal government provides generous support through mortgage guarantees, tax preferences, and highway spending, and buyers keep lining up for new homes.
But while the private sector gets the cash, local governments get the bill. Sprawling developments create long-term infrastructure liabilities—roads, water lines, sewer systems, schools, fire protection—that far exceed the revenue they generate. Local governments, which are really just collections of us acting together, are left trying to maintain and operate systems that are fundamentally unaffordable.
As Mayor Eugene Escobar of Princeton, Texas, put it, his town boomed with affordable homes, but now it’s struggling with traffic, overburdened infrastructure, and a lack of basic amenities. The city’s leadership is trying to build a real downtown, attract jobs, and create public spaces—but they’re doing it after the fact. That’s not planning. That’s triage.
Some suburbs seem to persist for long periods of time. But they are ones located within commuting distance of urban centers with high-paying professional jobs, and the zoning serves to keep the median income in those successful suburbs very high, and therefore able to support the very high infrastructure costs per resident or per square mile. There aren’t enough of these highly affluent people for all suburbs to work like this, so for every successful one there are many turning into slums.
What seems to be suggested instead is a gradual process of intensification from the middle out, so that populations, incomes, and tax revenues can keep rising over time as value is continuously created. This makes sense to me. I think there may be a more linear model though that could work for U.S. suburbs, where the intensification happens along a transportation corridor with progressively less dense development as you move back from highway. This way, you get a long linear downtown with access to transportation and other infrastructure at a low unit cost. People could live in relatively low-density neighborhoods if they want to and still not be too far from work, school, and inter-city public transportation. And these commercial corridors already exist in the form of arterial highways, water and power lines, big box stores and car dealerships separated by oceans of parking.
why parking is the enemy of affordable housing
This article has a clear explanation of why parking mandates push up housing costs in cities.
Off-street parking mandates add hundreds of dollars a month to people’s rent, even for tenants who don’t drive, who then have to subsidize their neighbors’ parking in the building’s garage. One reason for this is that off-street parking is incredibly expensive to build, especially now that building material costs keep rising, and are expected to rise even more with President Trump’s tariffs.
But the other reason is that parking just takes up a lot of space in a building. All the space devoted to a garage and all the related internal building infrastructure takes up room that can’t be devoted to more homes and living space. Not surprisingly, when cities remove parking mandates, builders add more housing and less parking to projects.
In some cases, the cost of building an underground garage for the required parking spaces ends up being the real limit on how tall a building can be. On paper a builder might be legally allowed to add more units than proposed, but if providing the parking for them is too unaffordable, they’ll opt for a smaller building.
I still think self-driving (and self-parking) vehicles will solve this particular problem in the long term, because vehicles will be able to park themselves in very tight spaces. The technology has arrived in the world’s most advanced countries (not the U.S. sorry, we are behind and falling more behind.). But it might take a generation for laws to catch up, and we are going to be stuck with a lot of wasted space for a long time to come.
why the ruins of ancient cities are found underground
A common reason, apparently, was fire. When a city was largely destroyed by fire, people would just level out the rubble and start building again on top. This also helped protect from floods.
We were still doing essentially this same thing in the U.S. even a hundred years ago. Philadelphia, for example, is a city built on originally swampy floodplain between two large rivers. Developers channeled streams into huge sewers in the valleys, cut off the tops of nearby hilltops, and filled in the valleys. This made a flat plain for development, as much as 30 feet above the original land surface in some cases, with sewers ready to go. The sewers were for both drainage and waste, in a time before flush toilets when people previously just tipped their chamber pots into the streets each morning. And remember that added to all that human waste was the waste of horses, the main form of transport. Then there were factories and slaughterhouses discharging all sorts of nasty things to those sewers and rivers. So there was a certain brutal logic to it at the time, but of course we don’t want to be doing this in new areas. It makes sense for people to use these areas where we have already sacrificed the environment more intensely, while greening them up with lots of trees and parks so they are actually nice places for people to live.
Interesting pictures and narrative on this process in Philadelphia are here and here.
What did DOGE actually do?
This article is by David Walker, a former US Comptroller General.
Contrary to assertions by some, DOGE has not conducted audits. Rather, it has performed targeted and tactical transaction reviews of selected government information systems using artificial intelligence capabilities.
Its objective has been to identify possible fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement in an effort to cut federal spending. Musk announced a goal to save $2 trillion, but this was later reduced to $1 trillion and then to $500 billion, which has still proven to be overly optimistic. DOGE now claims to have achieved about $160 billion in savings, but this number may be significantly overstated based on the evidence provided…
While DOGE has so far fallen far short of any of its financial goal, it has brought some important things to light. For example, it has uncovered a number of concrete examples of significant waste in the federal government, and it has re-exposed many of its operational problems, such as outdated information systems and inadequate internal controls. A vast majority of these operational problems were previously identified by the Government Accountability Office and various inspectors general.
So, they just tried to feed all the government’s data into an AI and identify some waste, fraud, and abuse. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like such a terrible job to do that routinely, or just add it to the audit toolbox as this guy is suggesting. So why all the drama and general crazy?
It occurs to me though that the approach was shockingly ignorant in many ways. They seem to have assumed that nothing the government does has any benefits, only costs, and therefore any reduction in spending would be a savings. Government accounting in general does not distinguish between spending and investment, which has always been a problem. I could “save” money by not going to the dentist any more, for example, but I would pay for it many times over both in money and pain sometime in the not too distant future.
The Clinton-Gore administration executed a rational, effective, and somewhat brutal government efficiency campaign in the 1990s. You can hear about it on Planet Money: The Last Time We Shrank the Federal Workforce.
Rationally speaking, the government should step in to improve citizens’ lives where private markets are obviously not able to deliver, like on health care, child care, education, fundamental research, unemployment and disability insurance, and retirement. It should create a level playing field for businesses large and small, regulate anticompetitive practices, set minimum labor and environmental standards, maintain public safety, and provide for the common defense. It should use a portion of the value added by a healthy economy to do these things, which reinforce the healthy economy in a positive loop. I’m not a genius tech bro but these things are obvious to me.
bibliometric analysis
Here is some R code and detailed explanation on how to thoroughly explore keywords within an academic field, in this case ecology.
make America great…maybe by lowering infant mortality to at least the average among developed countries?
Infant mortality is a grim subject. Our World in Data provides a grim but interesting look at the details of how this data is collected and standardized. (Now for context, infant mortality across developed countries is much less than 1%, which is a happy thing, and in the most successful countries – Japan and Scandinavia – it is close to 0.1%.) For example, doctors have to make a call on what constitutes a live birth, and it makes a difference how premature births are counted, since very premature babies have a low chance of survival. The U.S. counts all live births in its official numbers no matter how premature. Regardless of these details, infant mortality in the U.S. sticks out like a sore thumb on the chart for being about twice as high as the eyeball average (let’s call these numbers 0.5% and 0.25%). Shame.
Infants are defined as up to one month in age, and the article says the main factors driving mortality in babies this young have to do with the health of the mother. So we’re back to the U.S. not having a well-functioning health care system accessible to all, and lifestyle factors including obesity.
Here’s another article on increases in cancer diagnoses in Americans under 50. Part of the reason is more and sensitive screening at younger ages, so we may be catching more cancers that have always existed and treating them earlier. But part of it comes back to lifestyle. We tend to be afraid of chemicals, but again obesity is mentioned as a major factor. If we really wanted to get serious about making America healthy (again? when was the golden age of awesome health exactly?), seriously tacking obesity might be the single best place to start.
more Peter Turchin on Trump
Peter Turchin doesn’t really believe in grass-roots popular movements. Behind any apparent popular movement, he sees a “counter elite” competing for dominance over the current elite. In the present moment, this means the Trump movement vs. what I would call the center-right consensus of the last three decades or so.
The initial state of shock is now transforming into a more active phase, judging by a surge of recent mainstream media editorials and statements by various establishment figures who call for “mobilization,” “mass protest,” “national civic uprising,” and “revolution” (in my terms, counter-revolution). In a recent post on Racket News, Are We in a “Soft” Civil War?, Matt Taibbi provides an impressive sample of such calls to action. (In my view, we’ve been in a soft, that is, relatively non-violent, civil war since 2016. Now it is a revolution.) …
He then goes through the different ways the revolution could proceed: (1) assassination, (2) impeachment, (3) “sectional secession” – the example given is California refusing to follow federal orders, Trump sending in troops, and the governor mobilizing national guard, (4) a “color revolution” – the example given is CIA operatives Trump has fired organizing an apparent grass-roots movement, (5) military coup, (6) “the inertial scenario” which basically means Democrats trying to resist through traditional legislative and election politics, (7) “suppression by external Great Powers”, and (8) restoration by an internal faction (King Obama! okay, that is my example). He says #6 looks most likely but is not likely to be successful.
One can imagine combinations of these. If shadowy forces are plotting under #4, an apparent grass-roots movement can be combined with a not entirely free and fair election (hello, Ukraine and many other countries where the CIA has mucked about). You can imagine a not entirely free and fair election where the military steps in supposedly on the side of the constitution and announces resumption of the normal constitutional process in a year or two, which may or may not happen (hello, Thailand and many other countries).
Turchin says #7 is unlikely, but I wonder. No country is going to mount a full frontal military assault on the United States, I don’t think. But our federal government is deeply dysfunctional and incompetent, and while we may be able to bump along during relatively normal times we will not be able to respond competently to an unexpected emergency. If I were a competent enemy of the United States, I would mount a cyberattack or terrorist attack of some sort, cover my tracks, and frame some obvious public enemy (like Iran or China) for the crime. With an incompetent response, it might not take much to trigger a meltdown of systems like the financial system, power grid, food distribution system, etc. Even without a malign actor out there, it is doubtful our country could handle something like a major earthquake.
To be clear, I am hoping against hope that my country can muddle through the next 3-4 years without a major crisis it can’t handle.
how to cut a mango
I need a break from doom and gloom, so why not how to cut a mango? This is a useful life skill, and not one this typical white bread mainstream American learned growing up. I also like that she is showing the Asian mangos (which I see marketed as “champagne” mangos) rather than the Mexican ones we more typically see in the US. These can be prohibitively expensive in your typical chain grocery store, if you see them at all. My guess is they don’t ship as well and they just aren’t as pretty to look at on the outside. The place to look for them is an Asian grocery if your city has one. Look for a big box that at first glance might contain rotten potatoes, and you will be on the right track.
By the way, I looked it up and the plural of mango is…either mangos or mangoes. Mangoes is a bit more popular, but both are acceptable.
And lastly a travel tip. If you ever find yourself traveling in a tropical country and want to make small talk, don’t bother about the weather. It’s hot. Everybody knows it’s hot, it’s always hot and it’s always going to be hot. But people generally love to talk about tropical fruit, so it’s a good ice breaker. And nobody ever got disappeared by the local gestapo for talking about fruit, that I know of. Well, bananas and coconuts, maybe…