Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Firstenergy close to bankruptcy

Firstenergy, a major coal and nuclear utility in Ohio and Pennsylvania, is asking those state governments for subsidies to help it avoid bankruptcy. It’s biggest critics? Groups like the Sierra Club, which you might expect, but also the oil and gas industry.

Natural gas and renewable energy have been making up a larger amount of the country’s electric grid, eating into coal and nuclear power on wholesale markets. With that backdrop, FirstEnergy is also asking the Department of Energy to issue an immediate emergency order to PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for mid-Atlantic states, to provide “just and reasonable” compensation to its fleet of aging coal and nuclear power plants in order to keep them open…

“The Nation’s security is jeopardized if DOE does not act now to preserve fuel-secure generation and the diversity of supply…”

“FirstEnergy needs to stop misleading the public and government officials about the status of its power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania,” said Todd Snitchler, Market Development Group Director for the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. ”For FirstEnergy to cry wolf on the issue of grid reliability is irresponsible and is the company’s latest attempt to force consumers to pay for a bailout.

The collapse of the coal industry isn’t all that surprising, and anyone who has children or lungs should be glad. The possibility of nuclear going down with it is a little surprising. The idea of nuclear appeals to me at least a little bit, but it seems like the economics and keeping the plants up and running just isn’t working out. I wonder if this is just because most of our nuclear plants consist of obsolete, 50-year-old technology, or if nuclear really just will never be able to compete.

Boeing Wannacry

Boeing was hit by Wannacry, the ransomware originating in the NSA, then unleashed supposedly by North Korea. Still, is it really as simple as Boeing having Windows computers without the patch installed? That would seem pretty careless for a major industrial company manufacturing critical systems for domestic use, export and defense.

I’m starting my virus scan right now.

self-parking cars

Wired explains why cars that can park themselves are going to be so awesome, whether or not they are allowed to cruise the public streets and highways just yet.

Parking is a problem that engineers reckon self-driving cars can solve. Send the robot to find a space, after it drops you off at your destination. Summon it back later when you’re ready to leave.

The fatal accident in Arizona this week, in which an Uber autonomous test vehicle killed a pedestrian pushing a bike across the street, highlights some of the dangers of robo-driving at regular speeds. But low-speed movement, with scanners running on full, in a fixed area, is a much safer way to apply the tech. Building owners could have high resolution maps made of their parking lots, geo-fence them, and designate them as no-human zones, so cars can do their thing. It’ll be just like dropping your car at a valet stand, except you don’t have to dig around for singles. More cars will fit into each lot: Because doors don’t need to be opened, the vehicles can squeeze tightly together.

Being a tech magazine and not an urban planning magazine, they don’t realize the significance of the short phrase “More cars will fit into each lot”. Because most cars are parked most of the time, and they take up such enormous amounts of space, this could fundamentally change the land use in cities over time by opening up enormous amounts of space to other uses. And that is assuming people own the same number of cars they do now. As the incentive to own a private vehicle decreases, more of the fleet will be in motion at any given time and less will be parked, accelerating the virtuous cycle of reduced car demand even more. What kind of uses could be better than parking? Well, any – such as housing, commercial space, parks (the kind with soil and plants), natural areas, solar panels. Now might be a good time for cities and suburbs to start thinking about what they want to do with all this public real estate other than just letting it sit there generating heat, stormwater and pollution. As a start, installing separated bike lanes might not seem such a daunting problem, and just opening up some existing parking as temporary loading zones for deliveries, contractors, the elderly and disabled would be an enormous help in many cities.

6,000 U.S. pedestrian deaths per year and getting worse

If you ever wondered how many pedestrian deaths there are per year in the United States, 6,000 is the depressing statistic, and it does not seem to be getting better.

The Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) projects nearly 6,000 pedestrians were killed in motor vehicle crashes in the U.S. in 2017, marking the second year in a row at numbers not seen in 25 years…

“Two consecutive years of 6,000 pedestrian deaths is a red flag for all of us in the traffic safety community. These high levels are no longer a blip but unfortunately a sustained trend,” GHSA Executive Director Jonathan Adkins explains. “We can’t afford to let this be the new normal.”

States reported a total of 2,636 pedestrian fatalities for the first six months of 2017. Adjusting the raw data based on past data trends, GHSA projects that pedestrian deaths in 2017 will total 5,984, essentially unchanged from 2016, in which 5,987 people on foot lost their lives in motor vehicle crashes. Pedestrians now account for approximately 16% of all motor vehicle deaths, compared with 11% just a few years ago.

The worst state for pedestrians, at close to double the national average death rate? Arizona.

They go on to speculate, without providing evidence, that cell phones and legalized marijuana might explain these trends. Interesting, although there are some studies suggesting that marijuana legalization has not impacted traffic deaths, and at least some that contrary to all expectations it has decreased them. I’m not saying drive stoned. I’m just saying the governors may be making a claim not only without providing evidence to back it up, but contrary to evidence that already exists and is very easy to look up. If I were going to speculate on causes of the increased death rate without doing any research, I would go with increased driving spurred by the economic upturn and relatively low gas prices, coupled with the continuation of low-density car-dependent urban design, ignorance of and consequent failure to adopt safer street design practices that have been known and applied elsewhere in the world for decades.

humans as a check on self-driving cars?

This article describes the safety protocols Uber had in place to try to avoid a pedestrian death like the one that just happened in Arizona.

Trainees spend time in a classroom reviewing the technology and the testing protocols, and on the track learning to spot and avoid trouble. They even get a day at a racetrack, practicing emergency maneuvers at highway speeds. They’re taught to keep their hands an inch or two from the steering wheel, and the right foot over the brake. If they simply have to look at their phones, they’re supposed to take control of the car and put it in park first.

Working alone in eight-hour shifts (in Phoenix they earn about $24 an hour), the babysitters are then set loose into the wild. Each day, they get a briefing from an engineer: Here’s where you’ll be driving, here’s what to look for. Maybe this version of the software is acting a bit funky around cyclists, or taking one particular turn a little fast.

And constantly, they are told: Watch the road. Don’t look at your phone. If you’re tired, stop driving. Uber also audits vehicle logs for traffic violations, and it has a full-time employee who does nothing but investigate potential infractions of the rules. Uber has fired drivers caught (by other operators or by people on the street) looking at their phones.

Phoenix’s water supply

Phoenix wasn’t on the recent list I posted about the cities most likely to experience a serious water crisis, but maybe it should have been. According to The Guardian:

Phoenix gets less than eight inches of rainfall each year; most of the water supply for central and southern Arizona is pumped from Lake Mead, fed by the Colorado river over 300 miles away…

That river is drying up. This winter, snow in the Rocky Mountains, which feeds the Colorado, was 70% lower than average. Last month, the US government calculated that two thirds of Arizona is currently facing severe to extreme drought…

The Phoenix area draws from groundwater, from small rivers to the east, and from the mighty Colorado. The Hoover Dam holds much of the Colorado’s flow in the vast Lake Mead reservoir, but the river itself is sorely depleted. That water has now dropped to within a few feet of levels that California, Nevada and Arizona, which all rely on it, count as official shortages. Lake Powell, the reservoir at the other end of the Grand Canyon, similarly averages half its historic levels.

Let’s review – snowmelt, rainfall, and groundwater all disappearing, and the city continues to grow.

fatal automated vehicle crash in Arizona

A Google automated vehicle has killed a pedestrian in Arizona, which has some of the loosest regulations on testing them. I learned about this from the Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia.

This is certainly a tragedy. The Bicycle Coalition seems to condemn Google for testing the car, then goes on to make the point that human drivers kill people every day, every one is a tragedy, and there isn’t much public outcry about it. I agree with this, and yet I find it interesting that logic and our gut feeling about the morality of the situation seem to be so different. Imagine that changing all cars to self-driving ones would cut the number of people killed by 50% (and I have seen estimates of much larger reductions than that). It would seem immoral not to make that change. But at the same time, it would seem immoral to unleash a fleet of robot cars, knowing that a certain fraction of them are going to kill people, and by killing a few people learn how to not kill as many people in the future. I don’t know the answer to this, except that the technology will gradually get better, and insurance companies may eventually decide the human drivers are not worth the risk.

the singularity is near…in China

This article in Economist says China wants to be a

“cyber superpower”—one that, within a dozen years, will lead the world in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, semiconductors and the coming “5G” generation of mobile networks, not to mention synthetic biology and renewable energy.

This is a pretty good list of technologies of the future. Although they clearly have some potential military applications, they have many more civilian ones where everyone can gain at the same time. Personally I don’t think investing in the technologies of the future should be thought of as a zero sum game. It is more a question of whether the U.S. wants to keep up with its current peer group of the most advanced nations with the highest quality of life, a group it is still part of but in the middle of the pack and slipping toward the back, rather than out in front. If the idea of competing to lead in these technologies spurs the U.S. to action, that is okay with me. The article does have a few policy prescriptions:

Better that it should develop a broader policy to strengthen its technosystem, argues Ms Kania of CNAS. Instead of making it as closed as the Chinese one, which would seem to be Mr Trump’s preference, it needs to engage with allies such as Europe, Japan and Korea to spread open standards. It needs to build a shared digital infrastructure, such as common pools of key data for things like self-driving cars. And it needs to rediscover what has made it great in technology: investing in both basic and applied research and being an attractive destination for highly qualified immigrants (a requirement which, it must be admitted, the Trump administration is not well placed to meet).

I’ll offer a few more along these lines, if the U.S. would like to be a “cyber-superpower” a dozen years from now:

  1. Small businesses and startups innovate, and they challenge lazy established big businesses to innovate. It needs to be much, much easier to start a business anywhere in the United States. It is not necessarily taxes and regulations, but the fact that there are too many complicated, confusing taxes and regulations fragmented among local, state, and federal entities. We need to figure this one out.
  2. Economic growth requires continuous investment in human capital. People working toward an academic degree need an income, and the government needs to find a way to provide them with one. We need job skills training and retraining programs, and employers need to be heavily incentivized to train the workers they need in the skills they need. Skills-based immigration and guest worker programs can fill in the remaining gaps between the needed skills and available trained Americans.
  3. Economic growth requires continuous investment in physical capital (what economists call “plants and equipment”) and in public infrastructure. For the former, tax incentives could be the answer, however unpopular they might be. For the latter, an infrastructure bank could be the answer, where the actual creation of the money supply is done through the issuance of infrastructure bonds.
  4. Economic growth requires continuous innovation. On the private side, big tax incentives for research and development could be the answer, while on the public side, we could just turn on the taps for funding research, particularly at public universities. This has been slipping in recent decades from where it used to be.
  5. I just mentioned a number of programs that require public spending, of course. I think they would pay for themselves in the long run, but in the short run new sources of revenue would be needed, however politically unpopular. I would look to a value added tax as the international best practice which the U.S. continues to ignore, and taxes on pollution and waste which have the added benefit of making us healthier and safer.
  6. For any of these policies to have a prayer of getting through our political system, we would need a constitutional amendment making it clear that the right to free political speech applies only to human beings, not to corporations or dollars. Otherwise the United States will not be able to have these nice things.

the sinking dollar

Barry Eichengreen points out that while the differential between growth and interest rates between the U.S. and most other countries should have predicted a stronger dollar in 2017, it actually fell by 8% and is still falling so far in 2018. Explaining exchange rate changes after the fact is a lot like explaining stock market changes after the fact – they are easy to rationalize after the fact, but if anyone really knew how to predict them accurately, that person would be a trillionaire. Somewhat humorously, Mr. Eichengreen links to an article that gives 17 possible reasons (with links to sources for many of them), which is essentially the same as giving none.

Finally he says the most likely explanation is just uncertainty. Foreign investors just don’t know where the U.S. and its economy are headed, or that it will continue to be the rock solid safe haven it has been for the past 50 years. This sounds about right to me. Foreigners have been willing to stuff U.S. dollars under their mattresses for 50 years, in the last couple decades with low or even no returns, and some may have decided it is time to diversify.

beating the war drum

This article from The Intercept explains how the U.S. government and media often fail to examine the motives of foreign leaders, and this is one reason we keep making mistakes that lead to war.

That power is called cognitive empathy, and it’s not what you might think. It doesn’t involve feeling people’s pain or even caring about their welfare. Emotional empathy is the kind of empathy that accomplishes those things. Cognitive empathy — sometimes called perspective taking — is a matter of seeing someone’s point of view: understanding how they’re processing information, how the world looks to them. Sounds unexceptional, I know — like the kind of thing you do every day. But there are at least two reasons cognitive empathy deserves more attention than it gets.

First, because the failure to exercise it lies behind two of the most dangerous kinds of misperceptions in international affairs: misreading a nation’s military moves as offensive when the nation itself considers them defensive, and viewing some national leaders as crazy or fanatical when in fact they’ll respond predictably to incentives if you understand their goals.

The second reason cognitive empathy deserves more attention is that, however simple it sounds, it can be hard to exercise. Somewhat like emotional empathy, cognitive empathy can shut down or open up depending on your relationship to the person in question — friend, rival, enemy, kin — and how you’re feeling about them at the moment.

It is important to understand that the leaders of these countries are often terrified of the United States. Iran, North Korea, and to some extent China are almost certainly afraid of the United States. The Soviet leadership was terrified of the U.S. in the 1980s, a fact we didn’t appreciate fully until after the fact.

Understanding this doesn’t mean the United States can’t compete and defend itself against threats. It could help us finds ways to reduce tensions that ultimately lead to a safer world for everyone.