Category Archives: Web Article Review

Abundance

I suppose I need to take on the new book “Abundance” at some point. Perhaps I should read the book first? Well, I doubt most people talking about it have read the book. I’ve read at least half a dozen review of it, and not one of them was able to summarize it in a simple sentence or two that I am able to remember. And this would seem to be a problem politically. I personally had an impression of it as being about technological progress, because I remembered reading a 2012 book by Peter Diamandis called Abundance: The Future is Better than you Think. It is not about that. Then I thought it must be about inequality, because the U.S. is a rich country with a big and growing inequality problem, and that is why the cast masses of people do not have abundance. But it is definitely not about that, in fact it argues that the Democratic Party should mostly not be talking about inequality.

Okay, so without reading the book (yet), it seems to go back to this 2022 article in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson called A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. If it were truly simple, again, I should be able to summarize it in a sentence or two, but I can’t. But here goes in a few sentences:

  • Unnecessary complicated Federal bureaucracy slows down or stops implementation of many things we like, such as Covid tests (dated example), issuance of visas for skilled foreigners like nurses and teachers (hoo boy, dated example).
  • The public and private sectors together have failed to invest enough to keep up with critical technologies like semiconductor manufacturing and automated port operations (not mentioned here, but in the news a lot lately, is ship building).
  • We’re not solving our massive market failures in housing (local zoning laws are cited) and health care. In the case of the latter, the author cites the government and medical industry artificially limiting the supply of licensed doctors and nurses.
  • The clean energy rollout has been somewhat of a bust, or at least very slow.
  • He talks about colleges, but only cites the fact that “elite colleges” only enroll a small fraction of the nation’s students.
  • Infrastructure…er, he only talks about transportation, as the majority of discussions on infrastructure do. But yes, it is hard, slow, and expensive to implement.

And…I’m out of time, but I’d like to come back to each of these at some point. Each one has a complicated, messy set of origins and potential solutions. I am having trouble seeing a sound bite version of these solutions. But the idea of “Abundance” seems to be that if we solve these problems, we get abundance, so they are worth solving.

“how genetics is changing our understanding of ‘race'”

This is a New York Times article by David Reich in 2018. This can be a taboo subject of course, but I think it is useful to know some facts on what the key studies have been and how serious scientists think about it. As Reich points out, because it is a taboo subject, serious scientists self-censor to an extent and this creates a vacuum where un-serious and ill-intentioned people step in. So here are some facts:

  • A key genetic study was done in 1972 by Richard Lewontin. He concluded that about 85% of human genetic variation is explained by differences in individuals and 15% by ancestral, aka racial, categories (which he created, resulting in a slightly circular logic). The categories he chose were “West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians”. Without digging into the paper, I imagine he tinkered with these categories to make the proportion of variation explained by the categories as large as possible, and this is what he came up with.
  • That study become the basis of a broad consensus that the term “race” has no real biological meaning, and is therefore a “social construct”.
  • Reich goes on to argue that even though race is a social construct, it is useful because the race that a person self-identifies as is correlated to certain genes, which in turn are predictive of the risk of certain diseases. So, it makes complete sense for doctors to use a person’s self-identified race as part of health screening. [At least until we just all get our genome sequenced and stored in a medical records?]
  • Reich then goes into the taboos against, and some studies that have dared nonetheless, the delve into correlations between genes, behavior and “cognition”. He doesn’t use the term “intelligence” by itself, but rather “performance on intelligence tests”. [To me though, the examples he gives all seem very marginal, such as a study of people in Iceland showing that certain genes are correlated with years of educational attainment. How well can we truly control for all the factors other than genetics that affect this?]
  • Reich points to an interesting study of the ancestry of modern western Europeans (aka “white people”). They (we) are a mix of ancient middle eastern farmers, western European hunter-gatherers (sometimes called “barbarians”?), and people of Asian ancestry from the Siberian steppes. One interesting thing is that those people from the Eurasian steppes have some genetic similarities to Native Americans. So if a white North American has their DNA sequenced and finds some Native American ancestry, that could have happened in North America in the last 500 years or so, or in Europe a lot longer ago.

I’m not sure I have great words of wisdom to end this one with. Continuing to study the genetic basis of disease seems like a good idea. Trying to link “race” to “intelligence” seems like a waste since neither of these concepts is clearly defined, and even if they ever are, most peoples’ failure to live up to their innate potential is going to be due to factors other than genetics. “Highly intelligent” people who can beat me easily at checkers are not much use to society if they fall for obvious lies and logical fallacies coming from politicians and advertisers. In fact, they are a danger to society. So we need to focus on removing barriers that prevent people from living up to their potential.

electrification in China, US, EU

Here’s an interesting stat from OilPrice.com:

According to a study, China’s electrification rate has hit 30%, significantly ahead of the U.S. and the EU and US where the electrification rate has plateaued at ~22% in recent years.

The study defines the electrification rate as the share of electricity in final energy consumption versus energy coming from fossil fuels. According to the study, the U.S. still leads the world in the electrification of buildings; however, China recently caught up to the U.S. and Europe in industrial electrification, and has overtaken both in the electrification of transport. In 2024, electric vehicles (EVs) made up approximately 47.9% of the total passenger car sales in China, a huge increase from 2020, when plug-in EVs accounted for just 6.3% of total sales. In comparison, electric vehicles accounted for less than 23% of new car sales in Europe over the timeframe.

I’m all in on electrification. For one thing, it reduces air pollution and carbon emissions even with our current energy supply mix, as I understand it. But it also allows us to substitute cleaner fuels for electric generation over time, starting with natural gas for coal and oil, and moving towards nuclear, renewables, and as an aspirational goal, maybe even fusion.

I’m not surprised the US is lagging on electrifying transportation, because the oil, auto, and highway lobbies are politically powerful and have money at stake. The regulated electric utility and nuclear industries don’t have the same political pull. (There is no particular reason oil couldn’t have been a regulated public utility.) It surprises me a little that the US and Europe are at the same level.

offloading thinking to AI

It’s disturbing if professionals and students are trying to use AI to avoid hard thinking, as this duo of articles suggests. Ideally, at least in the near to medium term, we need to be doing the opposite. Using AI to perform mundane, repetitive, or just plain frustrating tasks that take up a lot of our time but don’t require deep thinking. Figure out coding syntax is an example, or which of the 99 drop down windows and dialog boxes in Microsoft Word will fix the frustrating formatting problem. (Actually, these last two things are kind of the same as you think about it, just two different ways of accessing a complicated menu of options and trying to communicate with a computer in its version of logic.) If AI can free us from these time wasters, we can have more time for deep thinking and creative thinking. I’m not saying this is the general trend, but this is my personal goal for how I am using AI. For now, I want it to help me do something I could have done myself faster or better. Asking it to think for me would be like asking another person to eat, exercise, or poop for me – I won’t gain any benefits from that.

I’ve been trying to use CoPilot to help me debug a simple stock and flow model. It can’t. It gives me sophisticated-sounding answers that do not even come close to working in the software I am playing with (Vensim PLE in this case).

the ggplot2 “ecosystem”

In the beginning there was R. Or, S? I’ve heard that R actually rests on a foundation of C++ or Java. Anyway, then there was the tidyverse, sort of another whole programming language that rests in R (or a metastasizing cancer that has grown to dominate R, if you ask certain people, but I personally am a big fan). Now within the tidyverse was always ggplot2, which I have grown to rely on almost exclusively for plotting. Now ggplot2 itself has grown into an “ecosystem” of related programs and extensions. Here is a useful guide. I’ve always been interested in finding the really good ones for things like interactive charts (plotly) and animations (gganimate). And awesome as ggplot2 is, there are some things that are just clunky, like scales and legends (seriously, legends are a big pain point for me – I hope there is an extension out there that really streamlines legends). But I am also wary of using extensions that might be buggy or not updated/supported long term, which could make my code obsolete sooner. So I usually try to do things with ggplot2 proper first, and if that doesn’t work with a reasonable effort I will try one of the extensions. So this guide seems timely and useful.

updating the science on nuclear winter

Jeff Masters has a nice summary of the science on the global devastation of even a limited regional nuclear war. He starts with the accounts popularized by Carl Sagan and others in the 1980s, which really did move the needle on global public and political consciousness on the issue. There was also a 2008 paper about the global consequences of a relatively small India-Pakistan exchange. Since then the science has been updated several times, including using the latest climate models. The results are always bad, with even the limited regional war disrupting global agriculture for up to a decade and killing 2 billion people. It would just be cold, in the summer, where food is normally grown, for ten years. Human beings would starve on an unimaginable scale. By contrast, a huge volcanic eruption like the one in Indonesia in 1815 could cause a similar effect, but it would last only a few years. (Nonetheless, we should have a plan for that one, no? Something that happens every few hundred years is common and you have to have a plan for it!) This should probably be the #1 political issue no matter what else is going on. Where are the courageous leaders today?

Is the UN on its last legs?

According to The Economist, the UN is close to bankruptcy, in part because the U.S. and China are not paying their agreed share. I believed in the UN back in the first Gulf War era, when it seemed like the so-called great powers could come together through the security council and collectively decide what to do when a regional power invaded its sovereign neighbor. That simple model, where if one country steps out of line all other countries will turn against it, seems so appealing to me. But that model is clearly out the window, at least since the second Gulf War and possibly since the NATO adventures in the Balkans in the late 1990s.

It’s sad. As a mechanism to prevent war, the UN is clearly completely ineffective at this point. If they were to just close up shop in New York, I am not sure the war and peace situation would be worse off – to be clear, it is very bad and just can’t get that much worse with or without the UN. When serious discussions even happen, they are not happening through the UN.

The UN still does important things on the humanitarian and science fronts, however, and if nothing else the General Assembly gives the world’s smaller, poorer, and less powerful nations a way to speak more collectively and be heard.

As the UN has faded, I suppose we have seen other organizations rise in parallel to fill in some of the void, like the G20, BRICs, etc. Maybe this is the future, but it really seems like we need a functioning organization like the Security Council, in parallel if the actual Security Council is hopeless, and we need it now.

the problem with sprawl

This article from Strong Towns has a good explanation of why low-density development is not the answer to the housing supply issue.

this style of development works extremely well for a specific type of private developer… developers like Ross Perot Jr. are masters of the assembly-line approach: secure cheap land on the fringe, install infrastructure, and build tract housing as quickly as possible. At this scale, the profits are enormous, and the risks are low. The federal government provides generous support through mortgage guarantees, tax preferences, and highway spending, and buyers keep lining up for new homes.

But while the private sector gets the cash, local governments get the bill. Sprawling developments create long-term infrastructure liabilities—roads, water lines, sewer systems, schools, fire protection—that far exceed the revenue they generate. Local governments, which are really just collections of us acting together, are left trying to maintain and operate systems that are fundamentally unaffordable.

As Mayor Eugene Escobar of Princeton, Texas, put it, his town boomed with affordable homes, but now it’s struggling with traffic, overburdened infrastructure, and a lack of basic amenities. The city’s leadership is trying to build a real downtown, attract jobs, and create public spaces—but they’re doing it after the fact. That’s not planning. That’s triage.

Some suburbs seem to persist for long periods of time. But they are ones located within commuting distance of urban centers with high-paying professional jobs, and the zoning serves to keep the median income in those successful suburbs very high, and therefore able to support the very high infrastructure costs per resident or per square mile. There aren’t enough of these highly affluent people for all suburbs to work like this, so for every successful one there are many turning into slums.

What seems to be suggested instead is a gradual process of intensification from the middle out, so that populations, incomes, and tax revenues can keep rising over time as value is continuously created. This makes sense to me. I think there may be a more linear model though that could work for U.S. suburbs, where the intensification happens along a transportation corridor with progressively less dense development as you move back from highway. This way, you get a long linear downtown with access to transportation and other infrastructure at a low unit cost. People could live in relatively low-density neighborhoods if they want to and still not be too far from work, school, and inter-city public transportation. And these commercial corridors already exist in the form of arterial highways, water and power lines, big box stores and car dealerships separated by oceans of parking.

why parking is the enemy of affordable housing

This article has a clear explanation of why parking mandates push up housing costs in cities.

Off-street parking mandates add hundreds of dollars a month to people’s rent, even for tenants who don’t drive, who then have to subsidize their neighbors’ parking in the building’s garage. One reason for this is that off-street parking is incredibly expensive to build, especially now that building material costs keep rising, and are expected to rise even more with President Trump’s tariffs.

But the other reason is that parking just takes up a lot of space in a building. All the space devoted to a garage and all the related internal building infrastructure takes up room that can’t be devoted to more homes and living space. Not surprisingly, when cities remove parking mandates, builders add more housing and less parking to projects.

In some cases, the cost of building an underground garage for the required parking spaces ends up being the real limit on how tall a building can be. On paper a builder might be legally allowed to add more units than proposed, but if providing the parking for them is too unaffordable, they’ll opt for a smaller building.

I still think self-driving (and self-parking) vehicles will solve this particular problem in the long term, because vehicles will be able to park themselves in very tight spaces. The technology has arrived in the world’s most advanced countries (not the U.S. sorry, we are behind and falling more behind.). But it might take a generation for laws to catch up, and we are going to be stuck with a lot of wasted space for a long time to come.

why the ruins of ancient cities are found underground

A common reason, apparently, was fire. When a city was largely destroyed by fire, people would just level out the rubble and start building again on top. This also helped protect from floods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyTOYEk_Z2Y&t=1s

We were still doing essentially this same thing in the U.S. even a hundred years ago. Philadelphia, for example, is a city built on originally swampy floodplain between two large rivers. Developers channeled streams into huge sewers in the valleys, cut off the tops of nearby hilltops, and filled in the valleys. This made a flat plain for development, as much as 30 feet above the original land surface in some cases, with sewers ready to go. The sewers were for both drainage and waste, in a time before flush toilets when people previously just tipped their chamber pots into the streets each morning. And remember that added to all that human waste was the waste of horses, the main form of transport. Then there were factories and slaughterhouses discharging all sorts of nasty things to those sewers and rivers. So there was a certain brutal logic to it at the time, but of course we don’t want to be doing this in new areas. It makes sense for people to use these areas where we have already sacrificed the environment more intensely, while greening them up with lots of trees and parks so they are actually nice places for people to live.

Interesting pictures and narrative on this process in Philadelphia are here and here.