Category Archives: Web Article Review

Concerns about the food supply trickling into mainstream media

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I’ve been hearing dire warnings about the global food supply – due to the US-Iran war, Russia-Ukraine war, and Super El Nino all coinciding – in alternative blogs and podcasts sources for at least six months now. I look at mostly left-leaning sources but a few right-leaning ones too. I monitor these precisely because they often tell a different story than the mainstream media. I remain aware though that they tend to be biased negative, and sometimes they feature legitimate geopolitical experts opining on financial and economic topics they are not experts in. But they can also serve as an early warning. When we see headlines starting to trickle from alternative media to the very center of the main stream, there is cause for concern. Here is a headline from CNBC: ‘Perfect storm’ brews for global food supply this winter as grain prices soar.

“We’ve got no end in sight to the Black Sea problem. The issue with fertilizer since the start of the Iran conflict is still there and if anything getting worse. U.S. corn yields look concerning after a wet spring and less fertilizer use, and could push prices up.”

“And we’ve got uncertainty from a massive El Niño event about to hit,” he said, referring to the weather event expected to increase volatility in the southern hemisphere.

“It’s just a huge mix of different issues and we don’t know how they’re going to end. It’s a perfect storm.”

measles vaccine and fetal tissue

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Acoording to Snopes, which I consider a reliable source, the modern measles (MMR) vaccine does not contain any fetal tissue whatsoever. It is also true to say that the stem cells it was originally derived from in the 1960s came from a legally aborted fetus in Sweden. This doesn’t cause me any angst personally, but I suppose I can see a point of view where it could cause some people angst. Morally though, why do they find it acceptable to put live babies at risk today because they have an objection to an obsolete technology? And rationally, the same people who oppose this obsolete technology are also resisting upgrades to modern technologies that rely on stem cells not isolated from fetuses and the even more recent mRNA ones that do not involve stem cells at all.

Bill Gates weighs in on AI

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Normally I like to read and skim for main ideas, then distill it down in my mind to a paragraph or a few bullet points. If I let an AI do this for me, I skip the thinking part which is the whole reason I do this thing. But I simply don’t have time to even skim this article by Bill Gates, so I did ask Gemini to summarize it for me. I feel like he wrote this for an international NGO-type audience, and it is written in fairly general terms which a few politicians might try to turn in to specific action, but I can’t imagine this moving the US political system much. Anyway, he says governments should (at least I’m summarizing Gemini’s summary, so I have to use my brain a little bit):

  • Update tax and benefit policy before unemployment starts to rise.
  • Update worker retraining programs before unemployment starts to rise.
  • Strengthen cybersecurity.
  • Use AI to accelerate research and development specifically in health care, education, agriculture and climate change adaptation.
  • International cooperation blah blah blah.

The silver lining I can come up with is that in the United States we have existing programs and policies that address almost all of these (Social Security, Medicare, Trade Adjustment Assistance, the massive intelligence/surveillance/cybersecurity cluster, NSF, NIH, USDA/NOAA to name just a handful. We need a value added tax – but let’s think of a catchy name for the concept – which we don’t have.) They may be inadequate or outdated, but there is a foundation to build on. Internationally, I think the world needs to figure out if the UN can be salvaged or if we need something new (or some strengthening or cobbling together of other groups/frameworks that already exist) to perform the communication, coordination, and conflict resolution functions that the UN has provided (imperfectly) for the last 70 years or so and that it recently seems unable to provide.

The Soviet Union drilled a 40,000 foot deep hole

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This fascinating article describes the scientific enterprise. Among the things they discovered:

  • “For decades, geologists had interpreted a prominent seismic boundary deep beneath the continents as the transition from granite to basalt—the dense volcanic rock that forms most of the ocean floor. But Kola never hit basalt. The supposed boundary was nowhere to be found. Instead, the drill continued through more granitic and metamorphic rock, showing that the seismic boundary did not mark a change in rock type at all. It marked a change in how the same rocks behaved under immense pressure and temperature.”
  • “Nearly 22,000 feet beneath the surface, drill cores contained microscopic fossils from two dozen species of plankton that had drifted through an ancient sea more than 2 billion years ago. This showed that even after billions of years of burial deep within the continental crust, unmistakable evidence of some of Earth’s earliest life had survived.”
  • “Between 16,000 and 23,000 feet, the borehole encountered saline water circulating through fractures in crystalline rocks that geologists had long considered essentially dry. Rather than groundwater that had somehow seeped miles underground, the fluids appear to have originated within the crust itself. As ancient minerals were transformed by heat and pressure, they released chemically bound water, while reactions between water and iron-rich rocks generated hydrogen gas, showing that the supposedly inert continental crust was still chemically active billions of years after it had formed.”

So did they journey to the center of the Earth? No – to put it in perspective, the article says 40,000 feet is “higher than the highest commercial flights”. I know this is true having been on such flights, and yet when you are up there in a tin can you have no idea how high you are. Usually you can’t see anything, but I my recent flight I happened to glance down and saw a really fascinating landscape – possibly the Gobi desert? The formations must have been truly massive because you have no sense of scale. Anyway, digging 40,000 feet gets you “barely a third of the way through the continental crust beneath northern Europe.” What this tells me is that not only is the Earth massive, the atmosphere is a teeny, tiny film clinging to its surface.

What age does intelligence peak?

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“Fluid intelligence“, which is your ability to solve problems without applying outside information, peaks around age 20. I find this discouraging. But then “crystalized intelligence”, which is your ability to apply outside information to problems, does not decline until later in life (50, 60, 70? there are a lot of numbers in this article.) I find this encouraging as I am entering this window now. It also suggests to me that multi-generational teams may be good at problem solving if we can get past some of the cultural issues (seriously, what is with the avoidance of eye contact by 20-somethings today?)

The article goes on to describe measurement errors and biases that have affected past studies. A big one is that when you test the intelligence of a sample of people of different ages all at once, you get one answer, whereas if you follow the same people for decades and test them repeatedly using the same methods, you get a different answer. The latter approach is the better one, but of course it is difficult because it takes 50 years to carry out an experiment.

exercise and dementia

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Exercise generally lowers dementia risk – hooray! But there are nuances – exercise performed in the context of work does not seem to lower dementia risk. This suggests to me either that stress plays a huge role, or that people with active jobs are actually doing more than the optimal amount of exercise. Maybe both. Another thing that surprised me here is that active commutes are not shown in the data to reduce dementia risk. That’s a shame, because I want people who shift from a car commute to an active walking or biking commute to be healthier. Maybe stress plays a big role here too – caused by real and perceived physical safety risks, noise pollution, and air pollution. If so, these are things we can try to mitigate through better design of our urban infrastructure.

the rise of electoral democracy

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Our World in Data shows is that, while there has indeed been a rollback in the number of democracies and number of people living in democracies over the last twenty years, the trend over the last 250 years or so have been a sharp and relentless uptick in electoral democracies. The US and UK were the first in the late 1700s, but New Zealand was the first to provide true universal suffrage.

I’ve been thinking, there are plenty of examples of rational and reasonably well functioning non-democracies in the world. And there are plenty of messy, imperfect, dysfunctional electoral democracies for sure. The article points out that a lot of electoral democracies exist on paper but have not had truly competitive elections in recent history. But we know the long-term relationship between economic growth and quality of life tracks closely with the rise of democracy, and we know that electoral democracy gives us some insurance against being trapped permanently in the truly terrible governance situations that sometimes arise in both democracies and non-democracies.

Waymo using Chinese EVs

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I’ve seen Waymo testing these vehicles around Philadelphia. It turns out these are Chinese-made, but Waymo adds the self-driving technology itself after importing them. Even after paying the tariff, they are about half the price of the Jaguar vehicles Waymo has been using.

https://electrek.co/2026/08/20/waymo-zeekr-ojai-chinese-ev-robotaxi-all-riders/

Polymarket has predictions of when Waymo will launch in various US cities, and these have ticked up significantly compared to the last time I looked. Chances of launching by end of 2026 (Sunday, August 23, 2026 as I write):

  • Operating now: San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Orlando, Austin, Atlanta (the last two dispatched by Uber)
  • > 75%: Tampa, San Diego, Denver, Las Vegas
  • 50-75%: Charlotte, Sacramento
  • 25-50%: Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore
  • < 25%: New York, London, Minneapolis, Seattle, DC, Portland, Boston

I’m glad to see Philadelphia with close to an even chance of launching by the end of the year. I personally wouldn’t bet on those odds, but they tell me that a year from now I will most likely to able to hail an automated taxi in my city, which will increase my safety and the safety of my children by roughly a factor of 10. And that doesn’t count reduced risk for pedestrians or the calming effect these vehicles are likely to have on human drivers.

the 1877 Super El Nino

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A Super El Nino in 1877 led to a famine that killed an estimated 50 million people, between 3 and 4 percent of the world’s population at the time. Deaths were concentrated in developing countries including China, India, and Brazil, which I am assuming would have had large populations of rural subsistence farmers at the time.

The article talks about how the impending 2026-2027 El Nino may be comparable in terms of heat and drought, but we have much better forecasting of what to expect and technology to deal with it. The article stops short of discussing how to actually deal with it, but I would assume some combination of stockpiling food in advance, international trade, international coordination and assistance, and (temporarily boosted, long-term unsustainable) irrigation. Also not discussed in the article are the self-inflicted geopolitical events (both the Middle East and Ukraine, which is an important grain exporter) that are making growing and trading food more challenging, right when this is most harmful. You can provide subsidies for farmers and consumers if prices spike, but at some point that will not help if there are really absolute shortages – if that happens, let’s hope it’s shortages of preferred foods rather than a shortage of absolute calories.

Yougov poll of support for bike lanes in US

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A yougov poll of about 1100 Americans shows that people support bike lanes in their communities by a pretty wide margin. Now, you could say this is a small sample size and people who ride bikes might be more likely to have answered. But, it is weighted for demographics and respondents were asked whether they own a car, own a bike, and how often they use these modes of transportation. There are plenty of respondents who do not own or ride bikes. And by a large margin, people support bike lanes. Not only that, they support separated, protected bike lanes, they are willing to give up some parking (but not car travel lanes) to add bike lanes, and they support (the only morally correct view in my opinion) that it should be legal to ride bikes on sidewalks when there are no bike lanes.

Respondents are grudgingly in favor of allowing e-bikes in bike lanes, but majorities oppose scooters, rollerbladers, skateboarders, robots, and people in wheelchairs. Sidewalks ideally should be designed and maintained to support some of these uses, but we all know that does not always happen when responsibility for sidewalks is often pinned on the individual property owner.

So my verdict is that, as is so often the case in our cities, the loudest, angriest voices opposing change create a disproportionate perception that people in general oppose change. And in the case of our streets and sidewalks, choices made by a few cynical public officials and reckless drivers can ruin it for all the rest of us.