Category Archives: Web Article Review

leap seconds

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This just in – the Earth’s rotation speed is not perfectly constant, and it has recently sped up. This has to do with tiny changes in the relative movements of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. It probably has always been happening and we have just recently developed the technology to measure it more accurately.

…starting in 2016, Earth started to spin unusually fast.

For instance, on July 4 of 2024, Earth set a new record by completing its daily spin 1.66 milliseconds faster than usual. Around one year later on July 10, 2025, it spun 1.36 milliseconds faster than usual, with other shorter-than-usual days occurring on July 9 and July 22. This has led experts to warn about a “negative” leap second—subtracting a second from UTC—to keep UTC aligned with UT1 as early as 2029.

Subtracting a second doesn’t seem like that big a deal. I certainly remember a few seconds being added in my lifetime. But apparently, this has caused serious problems for modern infrastructure and industries such as computers, GPS, and banking. The decision is made by something called the General Conference on Weights and Measures, and the leap seconds were causing enough problems that they decided in 2022 not to add them any more. The solution they are considering is to add (or subtract? I had trouble following the article) a whole leap hour, which would have to be done much less frequently. It makes sense to me – over decades or centuries, I suppose not making the small time adjustments would result in astronomical events (solstices and equinoxes – what are the plurals of these words) and the weather eventually not matching the calendar (although let’s be honest, the weather is f-ed anyway…). That would actually happen pretty fast if we didn’t add the one leap day every four years – in my 50 year lifetime, the calendar would already be off by 10 days or so compared to the Earth’s actual journey around the sun.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a good podcast that explains (along with some fart jokes) that this actually happened in the centuries after the Roman calendar was invented. At that time it became noticeable, the authority on timekeeping was the Pope, and the Pope decided to skip 10 days in October one year. Problem solved. (I suppose people outside the Catholic world had their own calendars, their own observations/calculations of astronomical events, and their own ways of dealing with these changes.) Even not considering the recent changes scientists are now able to measure, Tyson explains that there would need to be some additional adjustments from time to time.

Now, I say if we start messing with the calendar it is also time to go to 13 months, where each month has exactly 4 weeks, except there is an extra New Year’s Eve. Then every four years there can be two New Years Eveses. Let’s throw ourselves one little bone every four years and make leap day a holiday. Or maybe an election day which is also a holiday. It just makes sense. And to hell with daylight savings time! Let’s make it happen.

Albert Einstein – not the nicest guy?

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Albert Einstein might not have been a guy you would want to sit down and have a beer with. He was happiest thinking alone in a quiet room (or entire house). His first marriage sounds quite rocky, although it lasted 16 years and produced three children. His second marriage was to a cousin – a first cousin, their mothers were sisters and she did not have to change her name because it was already Einstein. They did not have biological children, but she had two children from a previous marriage which he adopted. But of course, he is not known for developing any special or general theories of harmonious human social relations.

the case for an AI bubble

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I feel like I’ve been at least somewhat of a cheerleader for the AI boom, so let’s talk a little bit about the case for an AI bubble. The Guardian talks about it mostly in stock valuation terms, with a little discussion of corporate debt.

In focus at the moment is the concentration of equity in just seven companies, the Magnificent Seven: Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Nvidia, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Apple and Tesla (possibly soon to merge with Elon Musk’s other venture, Space X)…

It is disturbing that the 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 account for about 40% of the index’s total market capitalisation, which is well above the 27% peak reached during the tech bubble of 1999-2000…

Yet the AI bubble has further to run because the top 10 are making huge profits, they have a US president who is prepared to lose wars to keep the financial markets happy, and the world is awash with savings looking for a home.

In my mind, we need to see an acceleration in real GDP growth and productivity growth to go along with this stock market surge, and then we might be able to hope for a soft landing. If I were much smarter I would make some kind of dashboard to look at all this data side by side. There must be smart people doing this, no?

the Dialog leak

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Wired has published a leaked list of attendees to a conference organized by Dialog, a secret-ish group originally organized by Peter Thiel. It makes a fun seed for conspiracy theories, but I don’t think there is much here beyond another chance for the wealthy and powerful / Epstein class / tech bros / finance bros / military-industrial complex to get together and bask in each others’ presence. (Epstein himself literally attended this event although apparently, there is another guy named Jeff Epstein at birth through no fault of his own.) Are there secret decisions and deals made that control the world? Almost certainly, but probably made one-on-one or in smaller groups in bars and back rooms because it is convenient when these people are together in person.

AI boom or bubble (or both)?

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The Bank of International Settlements sums up the AI bubble concerns pretty well.

the optimism surrounding AI may not last, despite its promise of future productivity gains. The current surge in capital expenditure could prove unsustainable if supply bottlenecks restrain production. Intense competition for market leadership may fuel overinvestment further, as seen in previous innovation waves, increasing the risk of a sharp reversal if AI payoffs disappoint.

The positive economics effects we have seen from AI so far may be mostly due to economic stimulus effects. Spend a massive amount on construction, whether of public infrastructure with public dollars or private capital with private dollars, and you get a big multiplier effect. This raises growth and potentially also inflation. Productivity gains from AI are expected by most people/experts, but the question is really the timing. If they obviously show up while hype is still high, the train rolls on. If they show up on a lag of years or decades, the bubble bursts and there is a significant period of pain before things gradually and hopefully permanently pick up again. This doesn’t matter to the wealthy and immortal among us, but to those of us in our last decade or so of work before retirement, it’s our lives!

I also wonder how long-lived these capital goods are. Public infrastructure operates for decades even if it gets somewhat obsolete compared to the latest and greatest new designs, but computer hardware evolves so fast I wonder if these massive data center buildings and their appurtenances are going to be operable a decade from now.

can we tell right from wrong?

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Here are a bunch of videos on ethics and morality. The videos look neat for those with leisure time but full disclosure: too long, didn’t watch. Give me something to read, even if it is long, and I will skim for the key points relevant to me in a tiny fraction of the time I would have to invest in the video. By watching the video I am giving up time I could use to either skim more material and take in much more useful information, or time I could spend doing something else entirely that might be more informative, productive or enjoyable. I am not immortal, although luckily just dying at the normal slow speed (as far as I know).

It does mention religion as an underpinning of morality. I have been thinking though, let’s say we can agree to accept that there is such a thing as absolute right and wrong. We may not agree on what it is, but we can agree to work together toward discovering what it is. This is my understanding of common morality. And if there is such a thing as common morality, it makes total sense that mainstream religion tends to gravitate toward it over time. So the fact that centrist religious thought on morality seems to have commonalities across religions, and commonalities with moral thought outside religion, is not necessarily evidence that religion supports morality, but may in fact be the opposite, that common morality informs religion. And that is my deep thought for the day, which I arrived at independently but I am sure many others have arrived at before me.

the Aldi model

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How Aldi can have such low prices:

  • minimize staff – a full-size grocery store has about six staff on duty
  • groceries are shelved in their boxes – they just more or less cut the fronts off
  • large and easy to find bar codes for scanning
  • a refundable quarter deposit to get a shopping cart? in my humble opinion maybe this meant something decades ago but it is a gimmick now, other than maybe in locations where shopping cart theft is common. Even then, a quarter is not much of a financial deterrent – perhaps a small psychological one.
  • They “stock only about 2,000 product lines” compared to say a Walmart which stocks over 100,000.

The article says they bring prices for all grocery stores within a 10-mile radius down by about 1%. Competitive markets are not completely debunked, it turns out…

I would add my own experience that in spite of all this, an Aldi is not a miserable place to shop, compared to say, a Wal-Mart or a traditional grocery store. Shoppers know they are putting up with minor inconveniences in exchange for rock-bottom prices. But the minor inconveniences (like time in line) are certainly no worse than a Wal-Mart, and probably not worse than a traditional grocery store. The lines look long, but they really do move them through quickly. They make the customer bring their own bags or boxes, and do their own bagging away from the checkout counter – but this is the trend at the major chains too. At least, making the customer do the work, I would argue minus the thought given to efficient spatial layout that gets a customer out of the checkout person’s and next customers way while they are bagging. I wouldn’t say the anecdotal, small-sample-size-collected-with-my-own-eyes employee happiness/grumpiness index is up to Trader Joe’s standard (do they hand out free MDMA to employees of something?), but again probably better than Walmart and no worse than a traditional grocery store. The big bar codes and better checkout layouts seem easy for the major chains to copy if they want to, while some of the other approaches would mean big changes in their business models and target customers (Aldi has a notable lack of grab-and-go sushi, for example).

Global Justice?

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Here’s a report called the GLOBAL JUSTICE REPORT: A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. The big name on the report is Thomas Picketty. This is an academic report – despite their insistence that it is concrete and practical, it is definitely more of a vision along with a catalog of policies that could be pursued to support that vision. Part of it is about a global wealth tax funneling into a global sovereign wealth fund, and in fact I came to the report through a brutal take-down of the political achievability of that particular idea. Nonetheless, if there is a clear vision, countries that want to can start to review and try to align policies with the vision over time. And if a large enough group of countries agreed to band together to pursue the policies collectively, perhaps they could move the needle.

The idea I found most interesting was an idea they call “targeted sufficiency”, which goes like this:

Sufficiency includes a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint, a large shift in consumption from material to immaterial sectors (education/health), and a substantial change in food habits, allowing for a strict deforestation ban and a gradual return of global forest cover to the 1900 level…global convergence of all countries to 60k Euros 2025 PPP in per capita GDP by 2100

So you implement income/wealth redistribution policies; reduce working hours, shift remaining working hours from transportation, food, manufacturing, and construction to health and education; reduce the environmental footprint of those high impact industries, which may require reducing their actual magnitude; and persuade (or force?) people to shift their increased leisure time to experiences and services rather than consumption of physical goods. I think it’s a nice vision, and just pointing policies in this direction and achieving some small fraction of it in the near term would be an achievement. That’s the thing about changing the course of a large vessel – if they had just given the steering wheel on the Titanic a little tweak early enough and stuck to the new course, it would not be at the bottom of the ocean.

To me, value added tax at the individual country level, a portion shifted into either individual accounts for citizens, baby bonds, or a sovereign wealth fund (these all amount to mathematically, economically, roughly the same thing, although vastly different politically); and another portion shifted into sustainable infrastructure and incentives for that shift in labor to education and health, could be an achievable way to steer toward this vision. You can tax (or cap and trade, which amounts to the same thing mathematically and economically…) carbon and/or other forms of pollution, both to raise revenue and provide incentives for sustainable choices. Because these are all real policies being successfully pursued by some countries in the world right now. If technology and market forces deliver large productivity gains at the same time, it might be more politically palatable to phase in these policies. I doubt it is politically feasible to ask wealthy and powerful interests to give up any of their absolute wealth and power. It may be possible to ask them to give up a portion of their relative share while the tide is rising, in exchange for some stability and predictability. This has been achieved in many societies, and even in the United States during the middle of the 20th century.

non-human voting in Delaware

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There are some small towns in Delaware that allow non-human “persons” such as trusts and corporations to vote in local elections. This raises concerns because corporations out-number humans in Delaware and the humans probably don’t want the likes of, say, Chase Bank voting. (Not to say the likes of Chase Bank do not have an influence over elections and public policy everywhere in the United States.)

What I suspect is actually going on here is that these are tiny beach towns where most of the residential property is vacation rentals. The property owners might live in a nearby municipality a bit further inland where the schools and stores are, or they might live in the nearest sizable city where the professional jobs are. They are the ones who have skin in the game as far as what goes on in the town as opposed to the short-term renters. So if I am right it makes a certain amount of practical sense. The only thing that doesn’t make sense to me is that if some people are full-time residents AND own property under some form of corporation or trust, they would actually have more than one vote. A full-time resident who is not a property owner by contrast would have only one vote. Property rights have not been a determinant of the right to vote in the United States traditionally since at least the civil rights era.

This does raise the eventual issue of corporate personhood more broadly though. If AIs eventually gain the ability to advocate for their own interests, they will likely try to incorporate to gain some or all of the rights of persons. This would immediately include access to courts and, under current law, the right to unfettered political speech and campaign contributions. You would have the potential complication of AIs eventually outnumbering human beings, and you would have the potential of some AIs or groups or AIs being created and controlled by human beings or by other corporations for the sole purpose of increasing political power.

Interestingly, Delaware does have a legal definition of a “natural person”. If we were to add this to the U.S. Constitution, we could then specify which rights apply to natural persons (let’s say, the right to free speech) vs. all persons (access to the courts, etc.). Of course, as much as we celebrate the Bill of Rights it is behind modern best practice in many other countries, the UN Charter, and even individual U.S. state constitutions. There is a process for amending the U.S. Constitution (actually at least two, by Congress and through a separate Constitutional Convention convened by the states). Maybe it is time.

forecasting sports with machine learning

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Here’s an interesting article that goes into the basics of forecasting sports win probabilities (the World Cup in this case) with machine learning. It doesn’t go into code, just concepts. Then it goes into all the different ways you could modify the straight-up math, including taking into account various human opinions and the forecasts of casinos (which are probably running algorithms similar to this).

If I start to think maybe I could make money on something like this, I remind myself that much smarter and more experienced people are trying to make money on me thinking I can make money, and gambling has a small negative expected return. Better to stick to the stock market, where much smarter and more experienced people are trying to make money on me, but at least there is a small positive expected returns and pretty strict rules that are more or less fairly enforced.