Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

the productivity puzzle

Nouriel Roubini has a nice run-down on the technologies that theoretically might be having some impact on productivity, but aren’t:

  • ET (energy technologies, including new forms of fossil fuels such as shale gas and oil and alternative energy sources such as solar and wind, storage technologies, clean tech, and smart electric grids).
  • BT (biotechnologies, including genetic therapy, stem cell research, and the use of big data to reduce health-care costs radically and allow individuals to live much longer and healthier lives).
  • IT (information technologies, such as Web 2.0/3.0, social media, new apps, the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality devices).
  • MT (manufacturing technologies, such as robotics, automation, 3D printing, and personalized manufacturing).
  • FT (financial technologies that promise to revolutionize everything from payment systems to lending, insurance services and asset allocation).
  • DT (defense technologies, including the development of drones and other advanced weapon systems).

He also runs through the various possible explanations for why the data do not show any progress in productivity:

  1. These technologies are just not as game-changing as the ones that sparked the revolutions of the past.
  2. The measurements of productivity that worked in the past are outdated.
  3. There is a lag between innovation and its effects on productivity.
  4. The current recession has been so bad it has caused a permanent reduction in capital investment, skills of the work force, and consumer confidence.

I was waiting for Roubini to tell us which combination of these factors is the right one, but he doesn’t so I will speculate myself. #1 is just wrong, although I can see an argument that the new technologies are still in an early stage. Although the plow, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, etc. were game changing, the game didn’t change as soon as they were invented. They had to catch on, infrastructure had to be built, resistance to change had to be overcome, and it took awhile. Each successive revolution happened faster though, which is why I am skeptical that this time is different.

#2 doesn’t make much sense to me. You can tell people who are poor, unemployed, starving, and angry that their condition is just being measured and reported incorrectly, but they are not going to buy that

#4 probably has some validity in the short to medium term, but hopefully it won’t last forever.

My money is on #3. I think there is a lag, and it just hasn’t hit yet. If and when there is a sharp technology-driven surge in productivity, it doesn’t mean everything is going to instantly be great for everybody. As we produce more with less effort, there will be winners and losers, haves and have nots. And there will be a lag between when that starts and when it gets resolved. And just to beat a dead horse, we can’t just keep producing and consuming more forever unless we figure out a way to do that without growing our ecological footprint. And, we need to watch out for those defense technologies.

index of redevelopment potential

This is an index of redevelopment potential for individual properties in Philadelphia and other cities. The application to real estate is obvious, but I can also see a number of applications to public policy. For example, changes to codes and ordinances can improve the overall health, safety, and environmental impact of a city. But these get implemented slowly and incrementally, especially in older cities with fixed boundaries, where most development is redevelopment. If you had a reasonable prediction of where and when redevelopment is likely to occur, you would know which areas to sit back and be patient, and which areas of the city to intervene more directly if you want to see change on any reasonable time frame.

It’s a little bit of a shame the person is not sharing their methodology. I’ve had a number of urban planners and economists tell me over the years this is very hard to do, and seen a few try and give up. So this is either brilliant, or it is little more than a guess. If it’s brilliant it could be very valuable indeed, so I guess I can see the financial incentive not to publish the details. But there is no way to know the difference without knowing how it is done. The author could at least publish a white paper showing some back testing of the algorithm against historic data.

regrets of the dying

This blog post, which apparently is somewhat famous, is about interviews with people who are dying and what they regret about their lives. Number two on the list caught my eye:

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

 

more on the new cancer treatments

The BBC has a bit more on the leading edge in cancer research and treatment:

Cancer is entering a “new era” of personalised medicine with drugs targeted to the specific weaknesses in each patient’s tumour, say doctors…

The idea of precision medicine is to test every patient’s tumour, find the mutations that have become essential for it to survive and then select a targeted drug to counter-act the mutation – killing the tumour…

a revolution in genetics – allowing scientists to rapidly and cheaply interrogate a cancer’s corrupted DNA – is leading to huge excitement about a new generation of precision drugs.

vehicle speed and pedestrian injuries/deaths

Here is the hard data on a person’s probability of survival when hit by a car traveling at a range of speeds. You should go to the link and look at the graphs, but here are a few highlights I picked out:

  • For the average person hit by the average vehicle, you need to get speed down to the 30-35 mph range to have a 75% survival probability, and the 20-25 mph range if you want a 90% survival probability. 15 mph would get you up to about 95%.
  • All people are not average. A 70-year-old struck at 30 mph has something like a 60% chance of living, while a 30-year-old has more like a 85% chance (I’m eyeballing a tiny graph, these numbers are not exact.)
  • All vehicles are not equal. Getting struck by a pickup truck or SUV is more likely to be deadly than a car. Again just eyeballing, if you’re hit by a light truck vs. a car at 30 mph, the average person’s odds of survival would drop from something like 80% to 75%.
  • Those numbers are for death. Obviously, the risk of severe injury short of death is higher. Again using the 30 mph example, the risk of severe injury for the average person hit by the average vehicle looks to be around 50%.

I think our first instinct is to look for someone to blame – and it’s obviously true that better driver behavior, pedestrian behavior, or both could prevent accidents. But police enforcement is obviously part of the answer. It upsets me when I hear the Philadelphia Police openly say they don’t enforce traffic laws because they have “real crimes” to attend to. Sure, their job is to keep the population safe from violence on our city’s streets – well, this is violence on our city’s streets! And it disproportionately puts children and the elderly at risk compared to other forms of crime.

Finally, better design of streets, intersections, and signals is a big part of the answer. Nearly perfect designs exist in places like Denmark and the Netherlands, but well-trained and well-intentioned U.S. engineers are either ignorant of them or cynically assume they can’t or won’t work here, or that they are not affordable.

I assume these same police and engineers would not go out on the streets and shoot old people and children in the head, because that would be unethical, so why is knowingly allowing the preventable deaths of old people and children through ignorance and negligence any different? And why does the public largely accept this and assume it can’t change?

bicycles, airships, and things that go

I have read Cars, Trucks, and Things that Go to my 3 year old son at least 100 times. It is his favorite book in the world. I didn’t have a lot to do with this – I actually tried to steer him more toward animals and nature, but his fascination with wheels began shortly after birth and shows no signs of abating. It’s clearly baked in to his genetic makeup, which is interesting considering that almost all evolution of our genetic makeups happened before cars, trucks or other things that go (other than legs and muscles) ever existed. Perhaps humans, and the male of the species in general, just have an instinctive attraction to power, whether it comes from harnessing animals or burning things and then transferring that power through mechanical or electrical means. That would clearly give us an advantage and it makes total sense, but it is amazing that it emerges within months of birth.

I’m not going to censor Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. But there is a lot of pollution and unsafe road conditions in those books, plus head-scratching things like children driving cars, and enormous pileups where nobody gets hurt. So I think it’s great that some people are trying to update that classic winning formula with updated and more sustainable technology choices. Of course, kids don’t need to be brainwashed in the latest urban planning buzzwords, they need to be educated in how to think about systems so they can reach the right conclusions and make the right choices when they grow up. They also need to be entertained. We’ll see if this succeeds.

Swiss tunnel

It is actually possible to build major new infrastructure. At least, the Swiss can do it.

The Gotthard rail link has taken 20 years to build, and cost more than $12bn (£8.2bn). It will, the Swiss say, revolutionise Europe’s freight transport.

Plans for a better rail tunnel have been around since the 1940s, but it was not until 1992 that Swiss voters backed their government’s plan to build a new high-speed rail link through the Alps…

For 17 years, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, more than 2,000 people have worked on the tunnel. There have been accidents: nine tunnel miners have died.

Pretty amazing. What infrastructure projects will the U.S. public support starting today that will not be ready for a generation? Like I said, the Swiss can do it.

I think tunneling is a key technology for the future for everything from transportation to water management, and eventually space colonization. The technology has improved a lot since we dug the first subway systems with shovels in the late 1800s. Now we use massive tunnel boring machines like the one shown in this article. But it’s still hard and expensive enough with our current technology that it’s not often the first technology we go to.

Moore

Here is an interesting article about Moore, Oklahoma, which has been hit by four incredibly powerful tornadoes in sixteen years, which is statistically all but impossible. Beyond the sheer spectacle of it, and the fact that I’ve spent some time in central Oklahoma, the statistical side of it is interesting to me, as I sometimes find myself asked whether some system should be designed to withstand a storm that happens 10 times a year on average, 4 times a year on average, once every 10 years on average, once every 25 years on average, etc. We don’t have a million years of data to base these things on, and even if we did the climate seems to be changing, and even if it were not there is ultimately a judgment call involved about how much risk is too much given our finite resources we have to divide up among so many things.

…tornadoes are pretty rare. One thousand a year, scattered across the continent, does not produce many data points at the scale of an individual city. Most days, there aren’t tornadoes anywhere. That problem is exacerbated by the third issue: Scientists really only have about 50 years of really good tornado documentation. Essentially, Brooks told me, scientists can’t tell us whether what’s happened in Moore is abnormal because they don’t know what a “normal” amount of violent tornadoes is. With all of that, Brooks said, there’s not a good way to clearly tell the difference between patterns and pareidolia. After all, the human brain is primed to find significance in the random. In the creaky corners of our neural pathways, a jumble of rocks can become an old man, a coat hanger can become a drunk octopus, a bunch of craters on the moon give us a friendly smile. It’s so easy for a few random events to make one small town look like a tornado magnet. It would be harder not to see it.

May 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • There are scary and seemingly reckless confrontations going on between U.S. and Russian planes and ships in the Indian Ocean. And yet, it is bizarrely humorous when real life imitates Top Gun.
  • The situation in Venezuela may be a preview of what the collapse of a modern country looks like.
  • Obama went to Hiroshima, where he said we can “chart a course that leads to the destruction” of nuclear weapons, only not in his lifetime. Obama out.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • I try not to let this blog get too political, really I do. But in an election season I just can’t help myself. This is a blog about the future of civilization, and the behavior of U.S. political, bureaucratic, and military elites obviously has some bearing on that. In May I mused on whether the U.S. could possibly be suffering from “too much democracy“, Dick Cheney, equality and equal opportunity, and what’s wrong with Pennsylvania. And yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, TRUMP IS A FASCIST!
  • The world has about a billion dogs.
  • It turns out coffee grounds may not make good compost.