Category Archives: Web Article Review

Treasury Secretary warns against banking deregulation

According to Project Syndicate, the U.S. Treasury Secretary made a recent statement warning against any rollback of regulations that were put in place following the 2007 financial crisis.

He argued that the United States’ political system “may be taking us in a direction that is very dangerous.” Referring to moves to roll back elements of the new regulatory order established in response to the debacles of 2008-9, he lamented that “everybody wants to go back to the status quo before the great financial crisis.” And he declared that “one cannot understand why grown intelligent people reach the conclusion that you should get rid of all the things you have put in place in the last ten years.”

The article goes on to argue that deregulation is actually not likely because academics and the press are against it. But the statement is not about academics and the press, it is about “the political system”. And who has control over the political system? The finance industry. And of course they want deregulation to boost short-term profits, even though it is not in their long term interests to destroy the world economy they depend on to operate.

 

10 things I didn’t know about Robert E. Lee

I really should know something about Robert E. Lee. I had not only a total of three years of U.S. history in grade school (along with 0 years of world history), but a full year of Virginia history in fourth grade. I grew up in Southwestern Virginia until I was 10, then moved to Pennsylvania for my formative high school and college years. So part of my perception of differences between the two states probably has to do with where I was in my personal development, but one difference that always struck me was that in Virginia the state was something important, something to be proud of and know the history of, whereas in Pennsylvania the state was just sort of an amorphous political entity that exists to serve you, and doesn’t do a particularly good job of it. So my childhood was the 1980s, not the 1850s, but I could see some rough echos still of what might make a person like Lee feel loyalty to a state and be willing to fight for it. I’ve been to Washington and Lee University where he is buried (along with his horse), Gettysburg, and Arlington National Cemetery. So, without further ado, here are 10 things in the Wikipedia article on Robert E. Lee that I either forgot since fourth grade, or never knew.

  1. He was trained as an engineer at West Point, and served in the Army Corps of Engineers early in his career.
  2. His wife was a step-great-granddaughter of George Washington.
  3. He served with Ulysses S. Grant in the Mexican-American war.
  4. His in-laws were wealthy slaveowners who owned a large tobacco plantation.
  5. When his father-in-law died, his will stated that his slaves were “to be emancipated by my executors in such manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease.” Apparently the slaves knew they were to be emancipated in the will, but didn’t know about the five years. Lee took the full five years to do it, during which time some ran away and he had them captured and whipped, although there is some controversy over the details.
  6. He fought on the Union side at Harper’s Ferry, before Virginia seceded (I must have learned this in fourth grade, but haven’t thought about it since at least high school).
  7. He was a Union commander at a fort in Texas when Texas seceded.
  8. In 1865 he favored a plan to “arm and train slaves in Confederate uniform for combat. Lee explained, ‘We should employ them without delay … [along with] gradual and general emancipation.’ The first units were in training as the war ended.”
  9. His U.S. citizenship and voting rights were stripped after the war, although he received a pardon and was not prosecuted or imprisoned. They were restored posthumously by the U.S. Senate and Gerald Ford in 1975.
  10. Arlington National Cemetery was his family home.

So there you have it. He certainly wasn’t perfect, but I personally don’t think it is very productive pulling down statues to people who fought and suffered in what they believed was a necessary struggle to defend their homeland 150 years ago, and who mostly didn’t have a choice in the matter (although Lee did). I would rather see interpretive signage, museum displays, tours and school curricula that put the uglier parts of our history in context rather than sweep it under the rug. But what happens is that a few assholes choose to appropriate a particular symbol for their asshole cause, and then nobody else is allowed to interpret that symbol as meaning anything else, so we tear it down, sweep it under the rug, and maybe repeat our mistakes later. So I say leave Robert E. Lee rest in peace and let’s focus on real solutions to real problems affecting the descendents of all the people involved in the civil war – like poverty, inequality, education, physical and mental health, the environment and climate change.

green roofs

Green roofs continue to catch on very, very slowly in the U.S. They are pretty common in Europe. Toronto has a fairly aggressive ordinance requiring them on most new non-residential buildings. Meanwhile, in the U.S. we have scattered demonstration projects and a few tax incentives. San Francisco has just become the first U.S. city to take steps toward requiring them in private development.

We have a strange relationship with technology in this country. We have embraced information technology, but in more traditional fields like civil engineering, architecture and construction our professionals seem to lack information, imagination, and intellectual curiosity about what is going on elsewhere in the world. The thinking typically goes that a new technology is not cost-effective because it is not common, and it is not common because it is not cost-effective. Short-term market forces don’t drive development of the technology in this situation, especially for long-lived technologies like buildings, highways, or pipes. Government can estimate the potential long-term benefits of adopting new technologies, then fund research, development, and lower barriers to new business creation by, to give just one example, freeing entrepreneurs from the burden of having health care tied to a full time corporate job. But our politicians seem incapable of understanding these slightly complex issues, and our citizenry is not demanding that they do.

Frontline in Yemen and Mosul

PBS Frontline probably makes the most consistently depressing documentaries. They also somehow get consistently amazing access to war zones. They did an episode on Yemen recently, and they have one on Mosul coming up. I find these extremely disturbing – if the measure of success in fighting terrorism were taken to be the cost in civilian lives and human rights, I am not sure any of these wars would be worth it. Humanitarian war is an oxymoron – if our political leaders are waging war to achieve geopolitical objectives with little regard to human rights, the people need to understand how horrific that is and try to come to terms with it. These documentaries do a pretty good job at that.

the tech revolution and the engineering, architecture and construction industry

This article from Engineering News Record tries to answer the question of what the tech revolution means for the engineering, architecture, and construction industry.

As the world around us becomes more technology-driven and sophisticated, what will that mean for A/E/C? It’s been well-documented that the construction industry productivity gains in the past 40 years have been paltry, and that’s perhaps stating it lightly. So how can we go to IBM’s Watson for legal advice (yup, Watson will put a lot of lawyers out of business), get advanced health screening on our smartphones, obtain a master’s degree on our tablet computer, and then turn around and tolerate 20th century design and construction approaches? How can we allow technology companies to create massively personalized customer experiences, and then deal with a lack of communication and transparency on our construction projects, or dumb models (even worse, 2-D printed drawings!) with meaningless data?

We can’t. Our clients won’t. We need to embrace technology, get comfy with data, and revolutionize the client experience.

I figured the article would elaborate on the three suggestions above, but it doesn’t, really. I think our industry lags behind for a few reasons. First, we design and build things that last a long time, like highways, sewer pipes, buildings, etc. Even if the level of knowledge and technology relating to these things is increasing, they don’t get replaced very often. When individual little pieces of our transportation and water systems break, we replace them with similar or incrementally improved pieces, because it doesn’t seem to make sense to replace the whole system with something radically different all at once, even if that could be the right long-term answer. University curricula, professional groups, labor groups, institutions such as utilities and authorities, licensing and credentialing programs, and their associated lobbyists arise to resist change and perpetuate the status quo. Engineers and architects aren’t really trained in long-term planning or system thinking. There is a planning field that sort of is, but we constantly beat them down and encourage them to conform to short-term thinking so they can remain employed in our industry. In private consulting we talk about serving our clients all day long, but there is really a revolving door between private industry and public clients and not a whole lot of room for new and revolutionary thinking to enter the mix. Truly disruptive technology like self-driving cars leading to drastically reduced demand for private vehicle ownership, and drastically reduced demand for paved surfaces, could eventually push out some of the old thinking. It’s hard to imagine the water or environmental equivalent, but maybe a truly revolutionary toilet that doesn’t require a sewer system at all could be an example. Truly revolutionary building materials like cheap carbon fiber could be another.

not the Cuban Missile Crisis

Sheldon Stern, who was a historian at the JFK library for 23 years, points out that JFK stood up to his military leaders who were hell-bent on a full-scale invasion of Cuba, while today we are hoping that our military leaders might stand up to a President’s reckless decision to unleash the military and risk nuclear war.

It is all but impossible to imagine this kind of informed, rational and mature leadership coming from the Oval Office today. If discretion and common sense are to prevail, it will require, as noted above, turning the central dynamic of the Cuban missile crisis upside down; this time, the top military figures in the administration may be forced to try to short-circuit an impulsive over-reaction by their commander-in-chief. Today, fortunately, most senior military officers are vastly more politically sophisticated and historically educated than their 1962 counterparts (who received most of their formal military education before the advent of nuclear weapons). Indeed, Mattis has edited an important book about American views of our military and McMaster is the author of a highly-regarded study of the failure of civilian and military leadership to prevent the escalation of the Vietnam War. There is room for hope.

I too hope that cooler heads will prevail, and if the coolest heads are in the military at the moment I am behind them. But if the coolest heads are the military, it is a sign that the civilian leadership has completely failed. I am not confident that it will get us out of trouble this time, and even if it does it is a scary precedent for the future. Basically we are saying it is okay for the military to step in and take over in an emergency. Nothing in our constitution is supposed to allow that, and for it to happen the President has to be extraordinarily weak and the entire rest of the civilian government has to stand by and do absolutely nothing.

Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare by Bertrand Russell

Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare was a 1959 book by Bertrand Russell. The title is clearly tongue-in-cheek because these are two things that don’t mix. Here is a fun quote/paraphrase relating the book to the present day, provided by History News Network:

Responding on August 8 to North Korean threats, Trump publicly warned that North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Later that day, North Korea’s state media announced that its government was considering a strategy of striking the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam with mid- to long-range nuclear missiles―a strategy that a spokesman for the Korean People’s Army said would be “put into practice” once Kim authorized it.

This kind of reckless and potentially suicidal behavior is reminiscent of the game of “Chicken,” which achieved notoriety in the 1950s. In the film Rebel Without a Cause (1955), two rebellious, antisocial male teenagers (or juvenile delinquents, as they were known at the time) played the game before a crowd of onlookers by driving jalopies at top speed toward a cliff. Whoever jumped out of the cars first was revealed as “chicken” (a coward). A more popular variant of the game involved two teenagers driving their cars at high speed toward one another, with the first to swerve out of the way drawing the derisive label. According to some accounts, young James Dean, a star of Rebel Without a Cause, actually died much this way.

With news of the game spreading, Bertrand Russell, the great mathematician and philosopher, suggested in 1959 that the two sides in the Cold War were engaged in an even crazier version: nuclear “Chicken.” He wrote: “As played by irresponsible boys, this game is considered decadent and immoral, though only the lives of the players are risked.” But the game became “incredibly dangerous” and “absurd” when it was played by government officials “who risk not only their own lives but those of many hundreds of millions of human beings.” Russell warned that “the moment will come when neither side can face the derisive cry of ‘Chicken!’ from the other side.” When that moment arrived, “the statesmen of both sides will plunge the world into destruction.”

This might be the biggest problem of all with having nuclear weapons around. Even if rational adult supervision is present 99% of the time, and even if there were no risk of terrorism, it only takes one irrational leader one time to pull the trigger and fuck up our world permanently.

National Climate Assessment – censored?

13 U.S. agencies, including NOAA, NASA and EPA, are required to produce a National Climate Assessment every four years. The thing about bureaucracy, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad, is that it grinds on somewhat disconnected from the political process. So the latest National Climate Assessment has been produced. It has to be approved by political appointees in the agencies before it can be officially released, but no matter because the New York Times has posted the key appendix here, called the U.S. Global Change Research Program: Climate Science Special Report. I’ll post a couple excerpts below:

First, a bit of the up-front matter:

The findings in this report are based on a large body of scientific, peer-reviewed research, as well as a number of other publicly available sources, including well-established and carefully evaluated observational and modeling datasets. The team of authors carefully reviewed these sources to ensure a reliable assessment of the state of scientific understanding. Each source of information was determined to meet the four parts of the IQA Guidance provided to authors: 1) utility, 2) transparency and traceability, 3) objectivity, and 4) integrity and security. Report authors assessed and synthesized information from peer-reviewed journal articles, technical reports produced by federal agencies, scientific assessments (such as IPCC 2013), reports of the National Academy of Sciences and its associated National Research Council, and various regional climate impact assessments, conference proceedings, and government statistics (such as population census and energy usage).

“Fake news published by the failing New York Times”, indeed! I vowed never to forgive the New York Times for their role in the Iraq invasion debacle, but they are beginning to redeem themselves. The Trump junta seems to be getting frustrated that their Goebbels-esque propaganda isn’t just getting parrotted unopposed.

And now, I’ll just share this graphic which I found a bit shocking:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/climate/document-Draft-of-the-Climate-Science-Special-Report.html

One interesting thing is you might think Florida or Georgia might be the wrong place to be, but these maps suggest they may not change as much and the rest of the country will sort of catch up to create one big Jurassic stew. Now, people live in hotter places than Florida and Georgia and manage to get along just fine. The real question is whether we can grow food under these conditions.

If you don’t believe me that this is disconnected from the political process, read this Guardian article about how the USDA has been instructed to avoid the term climate change. That is the agency responsible for our nation’s food security.

Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead…

The primary cause of human-driven climate change is also targeted, with the term “reduce greenhouse gases” blacklisted in favor of “build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency”. Meanwhile, “sequester carbon” is ruled out and replaced by “build soil organic matter”.

Reading on, I have to say it isn’t clear how high up the political chain this directive came from, or whether it is a mid-level supervisor advising staff how to stay out of political trouble. Self-censorship is still censorship though, and indicates the politicians have created a climate (no pun intended) of caution and fear for scientists. I can’t argue with building organic matter though, which would be good with or without climate change.