Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

building public transit faster and cheaper

Haden Clarkin, in a blog called The Transit Guy offers a “four step playbook” for building public transportation infrastructure in the United States. I’ll summarize and offer a few of my own reactions in brackets.

  • Develop a comprehensive vision, goals, and plan. [Yes, a lot of times people – especially my fellow engineers but also politicians trying to be helpful with funding – want to jump directly to “projects”. A “project” is a specific thing you want to build in a specific place. But it needs to be part of a larger plan to serve a larger purpose in the long term. This planning needs to be firmly in place when the “project” ideas come up and people are pushing for quick decisions on them. And you need a critical mass of people inside the organizations making the decisions, from senior management down to at least mid-level management, to really understand and buy into the plan. And you need to bring new people on board with the plan as you gradually lose institutional knowledge to political churn and attrition.]
  • Approve the plan through a voter referendum. In Haden’s vision, this cuts through a lot of the regulatory red tape later, because all the regulatory requirements tend to have extensive public buy-in and outreach requirements. A state-level referendum may also cut through some of localized NIMBY issues. [He’s writing in Rhode Island, and this may work there. We don’t really have state-level referenda in Pennsylvania, and I assume there is probably some constitutional reason for this. There are mechanisms for updating the constitution, and maybe we should work on this. We do have a big urban-rural divide issue in the state though, like many larger states. This might make it difficult to pass a state-level referendum focused on a metro area. It may be worth a try though.]
  • “Design and Plan it In-House”. [This is consultant hate. I happen to be a consultant who has worked with and been embedded within public agencies, and I think this is hogwash. Well, mostly hogwash. Sometimes public sector people mistakenly compare the hourly direct labor cost for their own people to the hourly cost of labor+benefits+overhead+profit of private sector consultants. Yes, there is a small profit in there, theoretically set by market competition. Competition for public-sector contracts is pretty ferocious, at least outside of the military-industrial complex. The true overhead and benefits cost to the public sector is often hard to define, but if you do an honest accounting of it, it is almost certainly higher than the private sector. Now, you want a public agency firmly in control of design, procurement, and construction of its projects. So it probably makes sense to set some benchmark like the majority of people working on a project should work for the public agency. But then it can make a lot of sense to bring in consultants both for their expertise and because they are a flexible work force you can surge in when needed and then scale back when no longer needed. You let them deal with those overhead and benefit costs so they don’t get out of control on the public side. You want strong technical people on the public side of course, but it is also really important to focus on strong project management, procurement, finance and accounting, and construction management expertise so you can make the best use of the private sector.]
  • Prioritize high impact and publicly visible projects first. [This makes total sense. I especially like the idea of building bus rapid transit lines early and converting them to light rail or even subway over time.]

There’s lots more, of course. Land use, housing, and zoning policy all play a role in building communities where there will actually be demand and support for public transportation. You probably need metro-scale and often multi-state authorities for design, construction, operation, and financing. That is big picture, long term context for the planning process. In my fantasy world, we wouldn’t just have a transportation plan for one municipality, but a comprehensive infrastructure plan (how about transportation, energy, water, communications, green infrastructure and food) at the metropolitan area scale.

US pedestrian deaths – facts and figures

Construction Physics has done a deep dive on US pedestrian fatality numbers. I really appreciate data-based articles like this. I think the answer to the question in their headline, “Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?”, is that our street and road designs are about 50 years out of date compared to best practice elsewhere in the world, and auto-oil-highway industry propaganda hides this fact from us and encourages us to blame the victims. They don’t really talk much about this in the article. But the article focuses on a slightly different question, which is why have fatalities increased significantly over the last 15 years or so? They look at the evidence for the “SUV hypothesis”, increases in drinking and drug use among both drivers and pedestrians, and distracted driving due to cell phones. The evidence seems to support the SUV hypothesis best, and this makes sense to me.

industrial robots in the U.S. and China

This article has some facts and figures on the stocks and installation rates of industrial robots in the U.S. and China, although the units are all over the place making it hard to compare the two, and hard to tell which numbers are rates or trends vs. totals. A note to journalists reporting data: make a table please. AI can even do this for you, you just need to fact check it. Also just check your article to make sure numbers and units are consistent within the article itself. AI can probably do at least a first round of checks (checking itself, if it wrote the article) although a human should do the last round. Maybe a good practice would be to have a different AI peer review the work of the first AI.

United StatesChina
total industrial robots in operation (2024)not reported“over 2 million”
new industrial robots installed in 202434,200295,000
robots installed per 10,000 workers295 (? units unclear and inconsistent)470 (? units unclear and inconsistent)
share of global total of industrial robotsnot reported54%

The US has some ideas and strategies and plans for how it could maybe begin to keep up or at least prevent the gap from widening. But you have to forgive me for being skeptical about our idea to implement plans and ideas. We sometimes hear that US workers are “the most productive in the world”. I would like to see some facts and figures on this. I assume we are talking about the dollar value of goods and services sold per hour of (human) work. And that would seem to be good on the face of things given that our unemployment rate remains low for the time being. But even if it remains low, we know the wealth is being horded by the top 1% and not shared with most of those highly productive workers. And if it is still true that we have a lead in labor productivity, you wonder how long we can expect that to last when we are gutting the research and education foundations of our past human capital and technological development.

Chinese government surveillance in Tibet

We hear a little bit about surveillance in Xinjiang in the international press, and even less about Tibet. But the situation is similar, according to this article on Eurasia.com (which I have no prior or independent knowledge of – the author of this article appears to be based in India and towards the bottom has some positive partisan things to say about India’s approach in Kashmir compared to China’s approach in Xinjiang and Tibet).

The AI-driven civilian surveillance systems deployed in the region are derived from military-grade C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) systems.

China has created a “widespread optical fibre cable network” and uses satellite stations (VSAT) to create an effective and secure command and control network across Tibet. Comprehensive broadband connections enable the government to monitor and control the flow of information…

The integration of a panoply of advanced technologies in Tibet  – AI-driven systems fusing facial recognition with internet browsing and app-based monitoring, DNA and genomic surveillance, and GIS tracking data – underlines the emergence of a terrifying approach to governance in the 21st century. It uses machine learning to power systems that prioritise state control and suppression over individual liberties and self-determination.

The situation in these Chinese provinces (and Gaza, which is a much more violent version) is interesting/concerning to me as an example of today’s surveillance and data management technologies taken to extremes in service of sinister social control. It’s probably happening other places that aren’t in the news, and probably happening in more subtle ways right under my nose as I write this.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

This new mutual defense pact between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan seems like a huge deal to me. My take is that after the Israeli attack on Qatar, Saudi Arabia has decided it can’t rely on the US nuclear umbrella to cover it. So they are formalizing a relationship whereby they bankroll Pakistan (and probably its shadowy security services with ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups) in exchange for a nuclear arsenal with their names on it. It seems likely to me that other Gulf countries that often move in lockstep with Saudi Arabia (UAE, Bahrain, Oman) might join this alliance. I don’t know about Qatar itself, after Saudi Arabia was threatening them militarily just a couple years ago. And they have never ramped up military spending while welcoming in the US military. No matter how you look at it, it is a loss for control of nuclear proliferation and US influence in the region. It very well may have the deterrent effect on Israel that these countries are looking for, but it seems to drag a whole range of large countries into a mesh of confusing and entangled alliances, including the US, India, and China.

7 of 9 planetary boundaries breached

The Planetary Health Check 2025 updates the status of Johan Rockstrom’s “planetary boundaries” using new data. I’ve pointed out that the indicators chosen are a sort of muddle of stocks and flows from a systems perspective, but nonetheless I think it is a good attempt at scientific communication. It distills complex underlying data into a set of indicators ordinary busy/distracted (I try to avoid words like “ignorant”, but the result is the same whether we can’t or won’t educate our selves) people can understand. I still like the “ecological footprint” concept personally because it is a single system-based metric, and you can drill down a level into its individual components if you want to. Nonetheless, it seems to be out of fashion and replaced by this. Anyway, 6 of 10 planetary boundaries were already previously outside the “safe space”, and this time ocean acidification is added to the list. Only ozone and stratospheric aerosol loading are in the safe space, and paradoxically the latter exacerbates global warming somewhat. There is some nuance, with indicators like nitrogen pollution and biodiversity loss in the “high risk zone” and others like land use and carbon dioxide in the increasing risk zone and headed in the wrong direction.

if a tree falls in the woods, and a microphone picks it up and is reviewed by an AI, who emails a human but the human doesn’t check their email, did it make a sound?

I’ve read the first couple chapters of This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. I don’t know if I’ll finish it, because I don’t seem to be in the mood for long non-fiction books at the moment. But there are some really interesting things. First, there is a definitive answer to the “if a tree falls in the woods…” question. The tree causes air and soil molecules to vibrate for sure. But for that to qualify as “sound”, it has to be detected by ears and transmitted to a brain, where it becomes sound. Squirrel ears can qualify, so the brain doesn’t happen to be human. In fact, scientists have put electrodes in animal brains and confirmed that they react to sound exactly as our brains do. So it’s interesting me to that we are born wired to understand music at a neural level – this is an instinct actually much more fundamental than language.

There’s some more interesting stuff. The reason a violin sounds different from a flute or a human voice has mostly to do with overtones – a note is not just a single pitch but many mathematically related pitches where the strength varies between pitches. (Some people say the violin is the most beautiful instrument because it is most like the human voice. I say this is an insult to violins.) There is also the “attack”, which is the percussive noise made when sound first starts on a given instrument, which is chaotic for a short period of time before stabilizing. Then there is reverberation or echo of the space the instrument happens to be in (as I was musing about pipe organs recently, you could think of the space as part of the instrument since it is so fundamental to the sound). Pipe organs are particularly interesting because they give the organist control over which overtones are sounded at various strengths. Digital synthesizers are intended to do exactly this, but I think anyone with well-functioning ears can still detect the difference between a synthetic sound and one produced by physical instruments. Then again, as most of the music we hear these days is recorded and played back, we are probably losing a lot of nuance of what the instruments sound like at the same time the synthesizing technology is continuing to improve.

Charlie Stross on renewable energy

I always enjoy Charlie Stross‘s take on things. He’s a fiction writer, sure, but he seems to have his finger on the pulse of politics and technology, and from an international perspective. He says he is writing more escape fiction now because his past near-future dystopian writings have come true, and that is too depressing to write any more. I still love the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes series though. Anyway, his ideas below are consistent with some recent thoughts I’ve expressed that market incentives have actually shifted to favor renewable energy and electrification, but in the U.S. at least a massive onslaught of oil and gas industry propaganda is successfully keeping us from realizing what we are missing…

Renewables have definitively won: last year it became cheaper to buy and add new photovoltaic panels to the grid in India than it was to mine coal from existing mines to burn in existing power stations. China, with its pivot to electric vehicles, is decarbonizing fast enough to have already passed its net zero goals for 2030: we have probably already passed peak demand for oil. PV panels are not only dirt cheap by the recent standards of 2015: they’re still getting cheaper and they can be rolled out everywhere…

The oil and coal industries have tens of trillions of dollars of assets stranded underground, in the shape of fossil fuel deposits that are slightly too expensive to exploit commercially at this time. The historic bet was that these assets could be dug up and burned later, given that demand appeared to be a permanent feature of our industrial landscape. But demand is now falling, and sooner or late their owners are going to have to write off those assets because they’ve been overtaken by renewables.

Politics and propaganda can’t buck economic forces forever (because economic forces are ultimately, eventually constrained by our real physical universe). The question is how long these trends can take to play out. Charlie says he doesn’t expect to see it, and this is sad to me. I am one decade younger, and that makes my odds only a little bit better. Unlike Charlie, I am not an extremely talented writer making a gift of the contents of my brain to the entire world. Lately it has been making me sad when I learn that the author of a book or series I have enjoyed is dead. I find myself looking up what age they died and what they died from, and wondering what is going to come for me and when. Sad, I know. Such is the existential dread of late middle age.

how to be a traitor to the United States of America

I happen to like my country, but I would like to offer some suggestions on policy options for the aspiring traitor:

  1. Remove funding for basic scientific research other than in weapons. This investment will take a while to pay off, but long term it will remove the basis for economic growth as an advanced economy, until one day we can no longer be an advanced economy.
  2. Make sure only the rich can afford adequate child care. This will ensure that single parents and adults in single-income households (usually mothers) will not be able to work or study. This removes a good chunk of the potential work force, and makes sure those women will not gain new skills or knowledge that might allow them to contribute to our economy. You can also remove access to birth control to help reinforce this cycle, and you have also retarded any progress on new or better birth control technology.
  3. Undermine education at all levels. This is also a slow burner because it will take a generation for today’s toddlers to become tomorrow’s ignorant incompetent adults (he who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a child, be careful not to teach him anything). There are some immediate things you can do though. A big one is stop issuing visas for full-pay international students. This immediately subtracts hard currency from the nation’s economy, and also has an additional payoff tomorrow of making sure they can’t stay in the country and add value to the economy.
  4. Identify industries where the United States has a comparative advantage, and sabotage them. Also reduce the pool of skilled workers they have access to. If you’re lucky, they will throw up their hands and leave the country for a techno-libertarian island dystopia.
  5. Invest heavily in industries with no comparative advantage for an advanced economy. Textiles and footwear come to mind. But then you can also undermine free trade in general so that nobody will be interested in buying inferior, high-cost products anyway. By undermining research and development, you have also made sure that potential high-value-added industries like robotics and autonomous electric vehicles can never keep up with higher-tech, more productive foreign economies.
  6. Let the transportation, water, electric, and food infrastructure decay. You don’t have to actually do anything here. Just don’t talk about it and nobody will know or care or do anything.
  7. Here’s where it gets wonky, but you want to put incompetent people in charge of monetary policy and generally all things to do with money and finance. Do this, then get out of the way while the financial industry captures and manipulates your idiots to its short-term advantage while creating an unstable house of cards that will come crashing down in the not-too-distant future. Crypto-currency is not the core of this strategy but just a little extra grease on the wheels of chaos.
  8. Undermine the nation’s ability to prepare for, respond, and recover from natural disasters, such as fires, coastal and inland flooding, hurricanes and other severe storms, and earthquakes. There’s a certain element of chance here. You could get a major volcanic eruption if you are lucky, but you can’t control that. Drought and generally poor water management are some of those slow-burn policies that could take a long time to pay off, but climate change is on your side here. As they say, the end of civilization as we know it is two meals away.
  9. This is somewhat of a tricky play, but through a combination of foreign aid removal, lack of action on climate change, and poor diplomacy with nearby countries, you can ramp up flows of desperate migrants. This gives local people somebody to blame for all their problems other than your policies.
  10. Apply propaganda judiciously to make sure Americans don’t know Chinese factories are building autonomous vehicles for $10,000 and investing in ultra-modern high speed rail and automated ports. Also use anti-tax, anti-immigrant, anti-city, and anti-poor people propaganda (the last two go together pretty well) so that nobody will be willing to fund the government or expect it to do anything.

You might be surprised that I have left certain seemingly obvious policies off this list. But I actually would not send an angry mob to attack the legislative building or set it on fire. It’s better to have the empty symbols of democracy sitting there for people to look at. I would not cancel elections, but rather limit the choices to a few very bad ones. I would not blatantly limit speech but rather do the opposite, encouraging a huge amount of meaningless talky-talk so that everyone’s jaws are flapping at the same time and there is no way anyone can be listening let alone thinking.

Good luck, modern day Benedict Arnold, in your quest. And may God Bless the United States of America.

bacteriophages

This article is about “AI designed viruses”, but what seems more important to me is progress on the idea of genetically engineered bacteriophages, or viruses that can infect and potentially kill bacteria. Antibiotics seem to have entered a state of diminishing returns (i.e., technological progress is falling short of evolution in some really scary bacteria). Bacteriophages seem promising as the next phase, where you can inject someone with a virus that will infect the specific bacterium causing a problem while not damaging any other healthy cells or beneficial bacteria.