Category Archives: Web Article Review

7 wars

The Week counts and lists the number of wars the United States is currently involved in.

we’re currently at war in (at least) seven countries across the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan…

It would be shockingly easy for the White House and Department of Defense to do whatever they wanted with no meaningful democratic oversight at all. Our wars are fought thousands of miles from American shores with an all-volunteer force drawn from a tiny percentage of the population. Meanwhile, the country has spent the astonishing sum of $250 million a day on war-making for each of the nearly 6,000 days since the 9/11 attacks 16 years ago. Instead of raising taxes to pay for it, Congress has cut taxes, insulating the American people entirely from the cost and handing the bill to future generations of Americans in the form of debt.

Other people fight, other people suffer, other people pay — it’s a recipe for political ignorance and indifference. All the American people know is that there hasn’t been another 9/11. And that one must always, no matter what, “support the troops.” Together these sentiments translate into: “We dare not say anything critical about whatever the military is doing.” That holds for members of Congress no less than for average Americans. Rather than raise questions or concerns, we’re expected to defer. And for the most part we’re all too happy to comply with this debased and degraded form of civic duty.

I have a proposal – fund these wars through a sales tax levied very clearly on everything we buy. Every time you buy a bag of groceries, your receipt would tell you how much you contributed to the war effort. This way, those of us not fighting or sending other people to fight would at least think about it every day, and maybe be willing to speak out against it or at least make the politicians clearly explain to us why it has to be this way.

Gene Editing 2.0

Before CRISPR even becomes a household word (er, acronym?), it is already being replaced by newer and more precise methods, according to Wired.

Usually, when we’ve referred to Crispr, we’ve really meant Crispr/Cas9—a riboprotein complex composed of a short strand of RNA and an efficient DNA-cutting enzyme. It did for biology and medicine what the Model T did for manufacturing and transportation; democratizing access to a revolutionary technology and disrupting the status quo in the process. Crispr has already been used to treat cancer in humans, and it could be in clinical trials to cure genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia as soon as next year...

But this year, newer, flashier gene editing tools began rolling off the production line, promising to outshine their first-generation cousin. So if you were just getting your head around Crispr, buckle up. Because gene-editing 2.0 is here.

 

2018 transportation trends

U.S. News has predictions for transportation technology in 2018. In a nutshell, sales of electric vehicles will take off, but people will also keep buying inefficient gas vehicles because is relatively cheap right now.

According to this article, the commercial rollout of autonomous vehicles has suffered some setbacks, and 2018 might not be the big widespread adoption year.

Automated vehicle developers will push back their timelines for deployment, for good reason. Automated vehicles are coming, but the real question is when. Just over a year ago, tech magnate Elon Musk said he “felt pretty good” about a Tesla driving completely autonomously from Los Angeles to New York without any human interaction by the end of 2017. But at a recent conference, he pushed that date back another two years. Chevy delayed the debut of Super Cruise, and driverless shuttles have yet to move beyond pilot phases.

Society will greatly benefit from automated vehicle safety improvements. However, it’s a good thing that automated technologies are delayed. Automakers are finding it more difficult to design the system than they originally expected. Instead of putting a product on the road that is unsafe, they are responsibly taking the time they need to make sure the system is ready for the public. Patience will pay off in the long run.

I wonder if it is really a setback in technology, or a matter of a few high profile accidents getting a lot of media attention. Markets and regulatory agencies are going to respond to perception, no matter how clearly the statistics show that imperfect computer-controlled vehicles are a huge advance over human controlled vehicles. Insurance companies are somewhat immune to emotion and responsive to hard numbers though, so at some point when there are safer options available they may just jack rates up on people who don’t take those options. It probably won’t pay to be a late adopter.

Summers: “better than even” chance of recession in next 3 years

Larry Summers is concerned about the stability of the international economic, financial, and political systems.

While high equity prices and low volatility may seem surprising, they likely reflect the limited extent to which stock-market outcomes and geopolitical events are correlated. For example, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks had no sustained impact on the economy. The largest stock-market movements, such as the 1987 crash, have typically occurred on days when there was no major external news…

Financial markets are widely cited, including by US President Donald Trump, as providing comfort in the current moment. But a relapse into financial crisis would likely have catastrophic political consequences, sweeping into power even more toxic populist nationalists. In such a scenario, the center will not hold…

But recessions are never predicted successfully, even six months in advance. The current expansion in the US has gone on for a long time, and the risk of policy mistakes there is very real, owing to highly problematic economic leadership in the Trump administration. I would put the annual probability of recession in the coming years at 20-25%. So the odds are better than even that the US economy will fall into recession in the next three years.

He goes on to say that recession is not even what he is most worried about, but a downward spiral where people lose faith in their governments and elect people who will actually act to destroy the effectiveness of governments. In this environment, autocrats can seize control by rallying the population against internal and external enemies, whether real but exaggerated, or completely fictional.

The Best of the Best of 2017

Here’s a little feature I call the Best of the Best of. Basically I’ll link and comment on a few “2017 in review” articles I happen to come across. I’ll let all this rattle around in my brain and do a “best of” my own blog in January.

  • Worst cyberattacks of 2017 (Axios): Cyberattacks are bad, of course. This is an article about the most successfully bad ones, including hospitals, pacemakers, and Equifax. The article suggests, without providing any evidence at least in this short article, that some of these might be government hackers in North Korea, Russia, or China gathering information and probing U.S. vulnerabilities prior to a larger attack in the future.
  • The year in architecture (curbed.com). Not that I particularly care about architectural style, but the architectural press covers some planning and sustainability topics that I find interesting, A few highlights for me include Hurricane Harvey coverage, what Google Citylabs is up to in Toronto, Blade Runner 2049, a new energy-efficient Cornell campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City, timber-framed skyscrapers, and a Philadelphia rowhouse because Philadelphia rowhouses are where all the cool kids live and you don’t know what you’re missing until you buy one.
  • And for completeness, the year in landscape architecture (Huffington Post). A highlight for me was the reopening of the big fountain garden at Longwood Gardens outside Philadelphia. I have fond memories of visiting that garden as a kid and got a chance to see it again with my own children shortly after it reopened this year. The rest of the article is a bunch of park designs and book reviews including some touching on urban ecology.
  • Planetizen urban planning blog’s most popular posts of 2017: a few that caught my eye are a Microsoft smart city development in Arizona, Seattle discontinuing its bikeshare program, “bikelash” from angry drivers, skepticism about self-driving cars, and the never-ending debates about density, gentrification, and New Urbanism. They also have Top 10 lists of planning-related books, websites, and apps. One new website that caught my attention is called “Treepedia”.
  • 2017 MacArthur Fellows: I hadn’t heard of any individuals, but it can be interesting to see the professions and trending specialties. I count 10 artists/writers, 7 social scientists/activists (sorry to lump you guys together), 4 computer/physical scientists/mathematicians, 1 journalist, and 2 landscape architects/planners
  • Stuff that happened in the Middle East in 2017 (Lawfare): Saudi Arabia initiated some social and economic reforms, but also an internal crackdown on political rivals, aggressive diplomatic attacks on some of its neighbors and a vicious, ongoing military attack on Yemen which the U.S. is participating in. The war in Syria is apparently winding down with its government hanging on. ISIS was decisively defeated by the Iraqi and U.S. armies and no longer controls territory politically, but has “gone underground” to plot and inspire terrorist attacks around the world. The U.S. is trying to back out of the Iran nuclear deal. Kurdistan tried to declare independence and the rest of the world basically ignored it. The U.S. has also torpedoed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and gotten itself condemned by the great bulk of the United Nations. But good news: the U.S. still leads a “coalition of the willing” including “Israel, Guatemala, Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Togo”, at least until several of those blink out of existence from sea level rise (a slight irony there?).
  • The year in hate crimes (ProPublica): Somewhat unsurprisingly, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic incidents were both up in the U.S.
  • Best political long-form articles of 2017 (Longreads.com): This is a seriously deep dive into resurgent white nationalism in Europe and the U.S. If you take the plunge be sure to come back up for air.
  • Best science and technology long-form articles of 2017 (Longreads.com): The most interesting one here is on artificial intelligence augmenting human intelligence.
  • Jealousy List 2017 (Bloomberg): This is a list of articles Bloomberg writers liked in other publications. There is way too much to read here. A few interesting ones are the decline of public research universities, James Burnham’s “managerial elite”, what is going on at Snopes.com, even more white nationalism, the risk of nuclear war, Elizabeth Warren, chemical industry foxes guarding the toxic hen house at the EPA, the complete dysfunction and failure that is the U.S. health care system, the Bin Laden raid, and octopuses.
  • The Most-Read Business Stories of 2017 (Wired): A lot of these have to do with the effect of automation on jobs. Also, Amazon’s “nomadic retiree army”, guaranteed basic income, and China’s social scoring plan.
  • Best of Wired Science (Wired): Wired Science is awesome. I could spend 2018 just reading these articles from 2017. The most popular commercial species of banana is so inbred it is in serious trouble. (But, one thing I learned when I lived, worked, and traveled in Asia for awhile is that there is a whole universe of delicious bananas out there most of us have never tried. Some have seeds, don’t ship well or don’t keep well, and therefore are not commercially ideal, but are actually quite delicious.) Meat allergies might be caused by a tick. Life-extension pills, fake meat, and robot friends might all become real things.
  • 2017’s Biggest Conspiracy Theories (Snopes.com): Maybe these really were big, but I hadn’t heard of most of them. A few things I didn’t know is that this year’s killer hurricanes either were real and created by the government, or else they were fictitious and created by the government. The survivors of the Las Vegas shooting are being hunted down and murdered. Bitcoin is a creation of an evil artificial intelligence. And Obama is running a shadow government. Now, I don’t automatically discount all conspiracy theories. I figure that for every 100 conspiracy theories, one or two are probably true, so it’s good to keep an open mind, review the facts, and then reject about 99% of them.
  • Wired most-read opinion pieces (Wired): A few interesting ones are about “permanent” drought in California, the idea that a state government could just pull the plug on a private corporation like Equifax, playing the odds in sports, and criminal sentencing using algorithms.
  • Top economics commentary from Project Syndicate: Some top economists wrote about everything from why the U.S. economy, stock market, and/or dollar could be headed for a fall, to the collapses of Puerto Rico and Venezuela, to recognizing the need to compensate globalization’s losers.

Big-C and Little-C Consciousness

This article in KurzweilAI explains the competing “Big C” and “Little C” theories of consciousness.

Another viewpoint on consciousness comes from quantum theory, which is the deepest theory of physics. According to the orthodox Copenhagen Interpretation, consciousness and the physical world are complementary aspects of the same reality. When a person observes, or experiments on, some aspect of the physical world, that person’s conscious interaction causes discernible change. Since it takes consciousness as a given and no attempt is made to derive it from physics, the Copenhagen Interpretation may be called the “big-C” view of consciousness, where it is a thing that exists by itself – although it requires brains to become real. This view was popular with the pioneers of quantum theory such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger.

The interaction between consciousness and matter leads to paradoxes that remain unresolved after 80 years of debate. A well-known example of this is the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, in which a cat is placed in a situation that results in it being equally likely to survive or die – and the act of observation itself is what makes the outcome certain.

The opposing view is that consciousness emerges from biology, just as biology itself emerges from chemistry which, in turn, emerges from physics. We call this less expansive concept of consciousness “little-C.” It agrees with the neuroscientists’ view that the processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. It also agrees with a more recent interpretation of quantum theory motivated by an attempt to rid it of paradoxes, the Many Worlds Interpretation, in which observers are a part of the mathematics of physics.

what’s new with Magic Leap?

Actually, nobody knows what is new with Magic Leap. But there is supposed to be something new in 2018.

 at long last, Magic Leap has unveiled a prototype and will make its headset available with developer tools in 2018. The goggles, dubbed the Magic Leap One, come with a controller and battery pack the size of my palm, and have a steampunk vibe. They’re sleek, with bug-eyed lenses, and a Rolling Stone preview suggests they’ll be expensive. Truthfully, there’s not much more information available. Developers haven’t tried them, so it’s impossible to compare them directly to other available prototypes. But what’s distinctive about these glasses is that they exist at all—that Magic Leap has finally come forth with evidence that its technology, which until now has only been seen by those of us who have signed lengthy and complicated nondisclosure agreements, will have form.

Samantha Bee takes on the Apocalypse

I’m not a big Samantha Bee fan. I find her un-funny and would rather get my news elsewhere in a more serious form. It also makes me uncomfortable that she is essentially making fun of people’s religious beliefs here, even though yes they are kind of ridiculous on their face to those of us who don’t share them. You need to try to understand where people are coming from before you have any chance if changing their minds or at least staying well out of their way. On that note though, it is interesting watching this clip just to see some Christian fundamentalists talk about their beliefs in their own words. That, and the one laugh-out-loud-funny moment that kind of makes the point nicely that Trump is not part of any moral majority, religious or otherwise.

the tax plan and the mandate

I assumed that the end of the “individual mandate” would seriously undermine funding for Obamacare, and in fact that is exactly what Trump is claiming. But Politifact says we all have that wrong. In fact, those penalties cover only about 3% of the cost of the Affordable Care Act. The main point of the penalty was always a psychological incentive for people to go to the exchanges and find out if they qualified for free or subsidized insurance. People wanted to avoid that penalty even if avoiding it meant they pay more for insurance than they would have paid for the penalty. Not only that, but people who qualify for Medicaid, which is free, have been more likely to find out they qualify for Medicaid because they go to the exchanges after wrongly thinking they are subject to the penalty. So it was somewhat of a psychological trick all along rather than a serious funding mechanism. This doesn’t mean that removing it will have only a 3% affect on premiums for the subsidized private plans – the effect may work in reverse, with more people never going to the exchanges and some not realizing they qualify for free Medicaid benefits. The CBO guesstimate is a 10% increase in premiums as a result of this effect. It’s still going to hurt the working class who need health insurance the most and it’s still immoral. The really immoral part is that as U.S. health care costs continue to spiral out of control in both the public and private sectors, our immoral dishonest politicians are going to point to Obamacare as the cause, and our uninformed citizens are going to believe them.

U.S. life expectancy down again

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has released statistics on life expectancy and causes of death for 2016. Some interesting findings:

  • Overall average life expectancy fell by 0.1 year, from 78.7 to 78.6 years.
  • The average masks the finding that for women, life expectancy held steady at 81.1 years while for men, it decreased by 0.2 years from 76.3 to 76.1 years.
  • Deaths from disease were down in almost every category. The increases come from “unintentional injury” and suicide. Unintentional injury sounds like car accidents and falling off a ladder, and it does include those things. But dig a little bit and it includes “poisoning”, and poisoning in turn includes drug overdose.

The Guardian explains that life expectancy has fallen two years in a row and how unusual that is:

Drug overdoses killed 63,600 Americans in 2016, an increase of 21% over the previous year, researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics found.

Americans can now expect to live 78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 years. The US last experienced two years’ decline in a row in 1963, during the height of the tobacco epidemic and amid a wave of flu.

“We do occasionally see a one-year dip, even that doesn’t happen that often, but two years in a row is quite striking,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch with the National Center for Health Statistics. “And the key driver of that is the increase in drug overdose mortality.”

The article goes on to explain that the last time we saw three years of decline was during the Spanish flu epidemic 100 years ago.

Comparing any two years could easily be a statistical blip, as any climate science denier could tell you. But it seems clear that over time the U.S. is losing ground to its peers in the developed world. The solution our elected politicians have identified, of course, is to take away health care and mental health coverage from the working class.