Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Are humans a cancer on the planet?

This is the premise of Warren Hern in a new book called Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth.

The basic premise is that humans have the capacity of developing culture, and that has millions of manifestations, everything from language and speech and mathematics to constructing shelters, building weapons and having medical care to keep us alive. These adaptations have allowed us to go from a few separate species of skinny primates wandering around in Africa a couple of million years ago to being the dominant ecological force on the planet to the point we’re changing the entire global ecosystem…

These cultural adaptations have now become maladaptive. They do not have survival value. And they are, in fact, malignant maladaptations because they’re increasing in a way that cancer increases. So, this means that the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process. When I was in medical school, we had four of them that were identified: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues — in this case, ecosystems; metastasis, which means distant colonization; and dedifferentiation, which you see very well in the patterns of cities.

Salon.com

I don’t want to believe this. We know the universe is ultimately tending to random disorder. Somehow, physical forces are able to buck this trend and create small pockets of order like stars, planets, solar systems, and complex chemical compounds. And then on only one planet that we know of in all the universe, something called life has arisen from these chemical compounds, which has an extraordinary ability to construct ordered systems in our random universe. And then in only one species we know of in all the universe, something called intelligence has arisen from that life with the ability to create hitherto unimagined complex ordered systems. I don’t want to believe that this process has come to its conclusion and that the conclusion is one that ends the entire forward progression forever. Of course, if we are not the only intelligent life in the universe and if intelligent life is in fact common, then the situation looks much less bleak. Our particular malignant form of intelligent life can destroy its host and thus itself, and in fact this can happen in the vast majority of cases, but somebody somewhere can carrying on with the project of creating order and beauty in a cold indifferent universe. This, in my view, is the meaning and purpose of life. It just isn’t looking at the moment like we will be the ones to do it. And if in defiance of all reason we are the only intelligent life that has arisen or ever will arrive in the universe, then the future is an eternity of cold indifference, and we will be the ones who blew it.

remote work, productivity, and lazy kids today

I think this Fortune article (paywalled, but I was able to read it the first time I clicked) drawing conclusions about remote work based on productivity statistics is off base. Labor productivity, as I understand it, is dollars changing hands in the economy divided by hours people say they worked. There are a number of measurement problems here. First, in the short term it is just going to fluctuate with dollars changing hands, which fluctuates for all sorts of reasons, so it makes more sense to look at longer-term averages. Second, dollars changing hands is not a perfect measure of value – we could be paying the same number of dollars for crappier goods and services as our expectations are gradually lowered over time. I really suspect this is what is happening.

It does make sense to me that self-reported hours worked at home would be less productive. Even if most people are honest most of the time, some people are going to be less honest some of the time than they would be in an office. People are going to be more distracted. But in all these cases, they are going to report the same number of hours worked and get paid the same number of dollars they would have in the office. So there will be no effect on calculated productivity, while we get used to gradually shifting baseline of crappier goods and services over time.

I think another effect is that training and onboarding are getting harder in some sorts of jobs. Some jobs have a playbook telling a worker exactly what to do, but many jobs do not. In my field of engineering, there is not much of a playbook because we are often trying to apply existing knowledge to solve novel problems under changing external conditions. I learned this job in the 1990s and 2000s by spending a lot of extra time in the office at the end of the day shooting the breeze with colleagues, mentors, and clients. Somewhat frequently, someone would suggest moving these sessions to a local drinking establishment and they would go well into the evening. This was not necessarily healthy for work-life balance or for my liver and waistline, but it’s an important part of how I learned my job and industry and why I am good at it today. This time didn’t go on my time sheet, and yet it boosts my subjectively measured productivity today.

I don’t want to complain about today’s crop of young people, who are just as intelligent as my generation (perhaps more since they’ve been exposed to less lead and air pollution) and seem to have better health habits overall. But the combination of working from home, less informal interaction with mentors, and job hopping means it is much harder for them to learn to do jobs really well. In decade, they will be the ones doing most of the work and trying to train the generation under them, and again we will just get a gradually shifting baseline of lower expectations and worse outcomes, even if we may not be measuring that effectively in dollars.

July 2023 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Citizens United. Seriously, this might be the moment the United States of America jumped the shark. I’ve argued in the past or Bush v. Gore. But what blindingly obvious characteristic do these two things have in common? THE CORRUPT ILLEGITIMATE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT!!!

Most hopeful story: There is a tiny glimmer of hope that Americans might actually value more walkable communities. And this is also a tiny glimmer of hope for the stability of our global climate, driver/bicyclist/pedestrian injuries and deaths, and the gruesome toll of obesity and diabetes. But it is only a glimmer.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: We are all susceptible to the “end of history effect” in that we tend to assume our personalities will not change in the future, when in fact they almost certainly will. So one way to make decisions is to imagine how a few different possible future yous might look back on them.

social media, retaliation and revenge violence

In case we don’t have enough to blame social media for, we can now blame it for young American men killing each other. It kind of makes sense. If the main cause of murder in this country is simply young men fighting, and guns simply make that fighting much more deadly, then it just makes sense that social media is a channel fueling that cycle of retaliation and revenge among young men left out of the formal economy.

a new superconductor?

Update 8/17/23: Unfortunately, Nature has debunked the idea below that this was a superconductor. The discussion of why a room temperature superconductor would be nice to have is still relevant.

We have a new superconductor…according to the scientists who believe they created it. Or not…compared to other scientists who haven’t been able to fully replicate it yet. Why are superconductors important?

Superconductors that can operate at room temperature and ambient pressure hold promise for quantum computing, a more efficient energy grid, producing energy from fusion and more innovation… Superconducting materials can conduct electricity without losing energy in the form of heat, which happens as electrons move through a material and interact with atoms.

Axios

This seems to me like something computers/robots could work on. Simulate a jagillion materials to see which could be room-temperature superconductors. Then synthesize the most promising ones, test them, determine the most promising of the most promising, tweak them randomly in a gajillion permutations, simulate them again, synthesize them again, test them again, and so on. You could introduce a little bit of random-ness into the process to avoid going down a path-dependent rabbit hole that ends in a dead end (sorry, way too many metaphors there).

WEF Global Risks Report 2023

And now, without further ado, the top ten global risks for the next ten years according to the World Economic Forum:

World Economic Forum

Well, what is very clear here is that environmental issues are at the forefront here. We can’t just pretend our human activities are a small part of the larger biophysical system any more, and that the biophysical system therefore has an inexhaustible ability to support our human activities.

Here’s another way they look at it. This is pretty but maybe it tries to do too much in one picture.

World Economic Forum

So climate change mitigation, adaptation (adaption?), natural disasters and natural resources, which were at the top of the “top 10 list”, are relatively small bubbles in terms of “risk influence” here. But then they drive “large-scale involuntary migration”, “cost-of-living crisis” (food is too damn expensive?), “collapse of a systematically important supply chain” (not enough food at any price?), “geoeconomic confrontation” (war?), “state collapse” and “erosion of social cohesion” (riots over prices, food, immigration, military conscription?). It’s pretty easy to see how these things can interact, with our ongoing squandering of the planet’s biophysical stability as a root cause.

Exxon Lied

I’ve talked about Exxon’s accurate climate science going back to the 1970s before. But it’s just worth repeating in the hopes more people will examine the evidence and reach the right conclusion. They knew. They intentionally lied and misled the public and the government. The entire planet is paying the price today and will pay an even larger price tomorrow. Just a reminder that the obvious climate impacts we are just beginning to endure today are the result of emissions decades ago, when Exxon was doing this science and lying to us all. We have not even begun to pay the price for today’s continuing and accelerating emissions.

What’s really new with the JFK assassination?

You can read this Jacobin article on new document releases and still be confused, and this is is not an unbiased objective journalistic source. But I am just going to state what I think is by far the most likely scenario: The murder of JFK was orchestrated by anti-Castro Cuban exiles with ties to the CIA. Oswald was manipulated by those elements into either participating in the murder or just being in the right place at the right time to be framed for it. He was then assassinated in turn by an agent with clear CIA ties, because he could not be allowed to talk. He might have been a CIA asset at some point, or he might have been a Soviet asset at some point, or he might have been a double agent for either side. It doesn’t particularly matter. Civilian governments ever since have pretty much given the U.S. military industrial complex what they want in exchange for at least publicly staying out of domestic politics.

If this is the most likely scenario, the puzzle is why it is still so threatening today. Individuals involved at the time have to be close to the end of their natural lifespans at this point. Why is it so threatening to the CIA or other government organizations? They could just say yeah, bad things went down during the Cold War and we’re sorry and we are the good guys now. Even if that isn’t true and the dirty truth is that civilians are not really in charge of our government, they can still lie and use the lie to get away with the crimes of today.

But there is one more possibility – maybe the Oswald thing went down the way they say it did, in a bizarre fluke that denies logic and common sense, and that is why we will never be able to make sense of it and will keep searching forever for patterns that are not there.

climate change, migration, and right-wing politics

Climate change is already causing displacement in poorer countries in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East, and this is clearly already fueling the rise of anti-immigration politics in developed countries including the United States and western Europe. The rational response, beyond dealing with climate change, is two-fold and fairly obvious. (1) Rational immigration policies based on the economic needs of the more developed countries, and (2) the more developed countries ponying up to help people in the less developed ones where they live.

The labor-market shortages in advanced economies are not some temporary or short-run phenomenon. In the US, a recent Brookings Institution study documents a shortfall of 2.4 million workers as of December 2022, relative to the 12-month average ending in February 2020. Most of this decline would have happened without the pandemic, owing to changes in the age and education of the population. But there was also a decline in the average weekly hours worked, producing an additional labor-supply shortfall equivalent to another 2.4 million people…

A well-designed immigration policy that allows for the controlled entry of willing workers, and that helps integrate them into host countries, would go a long way toward easing labor-market tightness and preventing humanitarian tragedies caused by smugglers’ shameless exploitation of migrants and refugees. But policymakers will need to look beyond the next election cycle and rise above partisan political interests.

At the same time, it is neither possible nor desirable to move the entire populations of low-income countries to America and Europe, so it is imperative to reject short-sighted economic nationalism. Advanced economies must do more to address the huge imbalances that still exist across the world economy. Reducing global inequality is essential to a sustainable future.

Project Syndicate

This is rational and fairly obvious, and yet politically very, very difficult. Anti-immigrant sentiment and fears over job displacement are common. And anti-immigrant sentiment is not just among people who consider themselves “native born” for several generations. Recent immigrants do not always support the idea of more people following them, especially if they perceive that the more recent immigrants might have an easier path or that they may have to compete with them. Combine that with legitimate fears of job loss and low wage growth among the general population, and sprinkle in some right-wing assholes, and the general apathy toward foreign aid when we have plenty of problems at home, and you have a pretty potent coalition. On the other side, big business generally favors immigration because they like low wages. So maybe there is something there you can work with, but unfortunately on this one issue it seems like politicians pay serious attention to the perceptions of voters and not just deep-pocketed big business. Maybe big business could divert some of their propaganda efforts from voters to support war and pollution and instead work on this issue. Or what about declaring war on climate change. That worked for drugs and poverty, right…ruh-roh!

North Atlantic sea surface temperature anomaly

This year’s ocean temperatures are being described as “unprecedented”, “off the charts”, and “beyond extreme”. I have to stare at this plot for awhile to get it, but basically the 0 line is the long-term average, presumably over 50 years or so. Then each individual line shows the difference between actual temperature and that average, for one year, over the course of the year. So not only is the departure of more than 1.5 C in June 2023 way above the average, it is way above any other extremes seen over the last 50 years.

Daily sea surface temperature anomaly (°C) averaged over the northeastern Atlantic region during 2023 (black line) and for previous years from 1979 to 2022 (red and blue lines). Data source: ERA5. Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF.  

The article gives physical explanations, including El Nino, changes in ocean currents, and changes in wind currents. It says climate change is a factor but doesn’t really reach conclusions on how much of a factor. I think it almost certainly has to be a factor. But the important question to me is whether this is an extreme fluctuation the likes of which we are going to start seeing occasionally, or the start of some runaway trend we are going to start seeing frequently and may even get worse? The article does not suggest anything like the latter. Tipping points concern me – could this be an early warning that we have hit some tipping point in terms of runaway methane release for example? The article doesn’t suggest that. Let’s hope not. If it is, it would be an “unprecedented” planetary emergency and we would need to pull out the stops and try any and all of those risky geoengineering ideas we have been hearing about, because “risky” is by definition less risky than “certain doom”. Let’s hope not. The fluctuation does appear to be subsiding, so we can see where we are next year around this time.