Donald Shoup explained why parking is so scarce in walkable, livable cities. Basically, you can have walkable, livable cities, or you can have free parking. You can’t have both. This is a matter of geometry. Pricing parking is one answer. Progress on this issue is a dog fight every inch of the way. Most people are not interested in waking up from the auto-oil-highway propaganda matrix and seeing the world for what it is. The fight is worth it. Thank you Donald Shoup for opening my eyes to reality.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
“America First” – where have we heard this before?
Musk, Apartheid, and White Supremacy
I’m not sure I can or want to say anything about Musk that others have not already said. As of a few years ago, I respected him as an innovator. While the U.S. auto companies hem and haw and make inferior cars at high prices and resist electrification, he figured out how to make superior electric cars at reasonable prices and get them into widespread commercial availability. While NASA couldn’t figure out how to get back to space since the retirement of the shuttle program, and quasi public-private entity Boeing seemed to be struggling to get the U.S. back into space, Musk stepped in and made real progress on that. Now certainly, he has been adept at using U.S. government contracts to massively scale up his business, and certainly heavy lobbying must have been a big part of that strategy. The latter is immoral in my view, and yet legal under what passes for outrageously corrupt U.S. law. For an amoral corporate “person”, legal compliance substitutes for moral and ethical behavior in a human person. Corporate “persons” seem to be able to corrupt human persons to their way of thinking. All that is pretty standard big business here in the corrupt U.S. system, and I wouldn’t consider Musk to be any more immoral or unethical than other humans who have played this game successfully under the established rules.
That was a year ago. Now, he is spouting what seem to be clearly white supremacist views. You hate to stereotype the Dutch South Africans as white supremacists, but there is a group of them including Musk and Peter Thiel who grew up under the apartheid system and seem to be motivated on some level by white supremist ideology. It is the very rare human being who pursue self interest in a truly amoral manner devoid of any sense of empathy – these are called psychopaths (and I truly think Donald Trump is one). For the rest of us, it is human nature to find ways to rationalize the advantages, or blame others for the disadvantages, we have been given on the uneven playing field of life. We can tell ourselves we are smarter or harder working than others, or we can come up with theories for why our genetic makeup or religious beliefs or country of origin make us superior to others in the natural order of things. Slave traders and slave owners did this, Nazis did this, American segregationists and red-liners and sub-prime lenders and mass incarcerators did this, white South Africans did this. So when we hear words like “meritocracy” or “preference” or “mentally deficient”, we should be asking ourselves if these are code-words for the same old tired Nazi/Jim Crow/Apartheid playbook we have been struggling to get past all these decades.
A quick aside on “supremacist” and “supremist”. The former seems to be the more accepted and widely used term, but both are accepted and widely used. Here are a couple fun quotes from the article I just linked to:
“The combine are determined to register the negroes, and the white supremacists are equally determined that they shall not.” (New Orleans Times Picayune, 1896)
“The ‘white supremists,’ or regular Democrats, say that the negroes shall not register.” (Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, 1896)
Seriously, it’s 2025. Let’s not go backwards America.
the Civil Rights Act
I admit I don’t know much about the Civil Rights Act. I learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’s more positive moments 67 times in school, but I learned about neither his darker moments nor the ground-breaking legislation his leadership helped bring about. One thing I do know pretty well is the Clean Water Act. In the Clean Water Act, permittees (basically any entity with a pipe or ditch leading to a surface water, including factories obviously but also most cities, towns and larger developments, only not most farms) are required by law to collect data on what they are discharging and report it to their state environmental agency, which is required to report it to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. If they are discharging more than they should, the state agency has to step in (typically this means fine them once, then sue if that doesn’t work), and if the state agency fails, the EPA has to step in. If either the state or EPA fails, third party non-profit groups will step in and sue. (This seems unfair, but normally they sue the permittee, and the state and federal agencies will sign on to the lawsuit on the side of the third-party group. Basically the state and federal agencies are doing what would have been their job anyway, but the lawsuit has forced their hand in making this particular permittee a priority.)
Anyway, it would be hard for Presidential cronies to break this system. It is law and it is decentralized among federal, state, and private entities. The Clean Water Act was passed in 1972.
Now we turn to the Civil Rights Act, which was passed in 1964. It prohibits discrimination in the hiring and firing process, period. So why are we arguing about “affirmative action” and “diversity equity and inclusion” in 2025?
This is from a blog called Popular Information, which is written by Judd Legum, the founder of ThinkProgress. And that’s everything I know about it, so consider the credibility of the source as you consider this:
Trump issued an executive order repealing Executive Order 11246, which was put in place by Lyndon Johnson in 1965. For 60 years, Executive Order 11246 prohibited government contractors with contracts of more than $10,000 from discriminating in hiring or employment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin…
it contained two words that became very controversial, and those were “affirmative action.” Affirmative action had been used in a previous executive order by John F. Kennedy, but it was still undefined. And so, over the rest of the Johnson administration and into the Nixon administration, there was a lot of discussion and debate about what exactly affirmative action meant. And so that became a critical part of the legacy. It was resolved by Nixon. The Nixon administration allowed for the use of goals and timetables to measure the inclusion of minorities and other protected groups within government contractors, and that process has been more or less in place since. Essentially, 11246, with some modest amendments, since 1965 has been in place as the primary mechanism for enforcing nondiscrimination in government contracts and also by government vendors and subcontractors…
Under 11246, government contractors have to demonstrate that they have a plan for reaching out to protected groups, including minorities and women. And then they have to report on the composition of their workforces, or their subcontractors.
So like the Clean Water Act, regulated parties had to actively collect and submit data to show they were complying with the Civil Rights Act. This data could be scrutinized by public and private entities, leading to enforcement by public agencies and the threat of private law suits to force public agencies to do their jobs if that was necessary. But unlike the Clean Water Act, the requirement to collect and submit the data was the result of an executive order and not a law. So some lawyer in Trump’s camp was smart and evil enough to understand this and to remove that reporting requirement after 60+ years. The law is still there, but it will be harder to monitor and prove that someone is breaking the law.
The obvious solution going forward would seem to be for Congress to amend the Civil Rights Act to include the text of the executive order. It would even make a lot of sense to add the protections of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to the U.S. Constitution itself. These things are not going to happen while the current iteration of the Good Ol’ Neo-Nazi Party is in the majority, despite support for basic bedrock civil rights being a bipartisan consensus for many decades under many center-right administrations.
here come the agents
Who knows what combination of reality and sales pitch this really represents, but OpenAI is pushing the idea of AI agents, which I recently mused could be a big thing in 2025.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the technology world by surprise on Thursday with the release of Operator, his company’s first AI agent that can act autonomously on the web…
“This idea of delegating your ‘proof of personhood’ to an agent and letting it act on your behalf is actually super important,” he [not Altman, a different guy talking here] said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Instead of only allowing people you think are human [on your website], you will also allow AI agents that represent a real human…
World’s ID technology could also be used to license AI agents to act on your behalf, Sada said. In a recent blog post, the project notes that its proof of human tools will not only distinguish humans from bots, as they do today, but could help people control a network of AI agents online.
So there you have it. Humans are already interacting with AI agents. But soon, we will be able to authorize AI agents to interact with other AI agents on our behalf. But we will need good AI agents to try to protect us from bad AI agents and bad people doing bad things with AI agents. How will the average person be able to tell if their AI agent is good enough to protect us from AI agents controlled by much richer and powerful people, corporations, and government agencies? For that matter, my mind goes back to Charlie Stross’s Accelerando. I didn’t find it to be a particularly easy or entertaining read, but in that book AIs are able to incorporate themselves, which gives them most of the rights of people, which enables them to legally act in their own interest. Where is all this going to be even a year from now compared to today?
“Evolution, Morpheus. Evolution! Like The Dinosaur. Look Out That Window. You’ve Had Your Time. The Future Is OUR World, Morpheus. The Future Is OUR Time.”
“I’m Agent Johnson. This is Special Agent Johnson. No relation.”
record adoption rate for ChatGPT
I mentioned recently that I had couldn’t remember any technology being adopted into widespread commercial and public use as fast as the large language models. Here is some empirical confirmation of my impression, from Reuters:
ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.
The report, citing data from analytics firm Similarweb, said an average of about 13 million unique visitors had used ChatGPT per day in January, more than double the levels of December.
“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” UBS analysts wrote in the note.
Websites and apps are not exactly technologies, and the large learning models are more than just websites or apps. What about cell phones themselves, or radio, or electricity, or toothpaste, or the plough, or the wheel, or fire? I think the adoption of all these critical technologies probably had a half life measured in years at least, probably decades or even centuries the further back you go. I’m sure there are many scholarly studies out there.
health insurance cost inflation
I seriously have the best of intentions not to be overly political in this blog, but it’s just really hard right now as the U.S. government is making absurdly ignorant policy choices that are not even consistent with their barely coherent stated goals. In this case, after stating a goal of bringing living costs down for “ordinary people” (maybe we could take that to mean the middle 50% of the income distribution?), there is a good chance Republicans will raise health insurance costs massively for people using the Affordable Care Act. (They are no longer talking about repealing that act, just adding “Un” in front of affordable.) The article I link to is from my home state of Pennsylvania, and estimates what the Good Ol’ Boy Party is proposing would raise costs more than 50% for a family of four with a household income around $125,000. Actually, they don’t have to propose anything, or even do anything at all – all they have to do is let sunset provisions in existing laws expire as they probably planned all along.
So basically, Trump and cronies assume that Americans are too busy/distracted/uninformed (I never say “stupid”) to notice that their health care costs explode if at the same time the price of everyday spending on things like gasoline and groceries were to slow down a bit. That, and they may hope to break the Affordable Care Act on purpose, point out it is broken, and then try to eliminate it. This is like intentionally breaking your own personal car and then arguing that this proves cars are not a workable technology for anyone to get from point A to point B.
Foreign Policy’s 2024 election roundup
Foreign Policy has a useful roundup of election results from around the world in 2024. Despite the rightward lurch in the United States, there doesn’t seem to have been a clear ideological trend globally. The narrative this story puts forward is that voters around the world rejected incumbents in favor of whoever was offering an alternative, and a lot of this was fueled by the sudden and shocking reductions in disposable income that affected massive numbers of people around the world. I learned something from this – inflation, assuming it outpaces wage increases, is worse politically than unemployment. Where unemployment has a profound affect on a small number of voters, inflation has a less acute but still profound enough affect on a majority of voters. And this happened around the world (which analytical, rational people, who seem to be in short supply in the U.S., might realize can’t be blamed on Joe Biden. If anything, Biden’s downfall was that he first raised expectations by cushioning the blow early in his presidency, and then let it hit people below the belt right at the worst time, politically speaking, a little after the midpoint of his presidency. Anyway, here is the FP roundup:
- Iran voted out a conservative president in favor of a more liberal minded one, at least by local standards. Of course, they still have an unelected supreme leader for life (but only one, compared to the nine we have here in the United States).
- India’s right-wing religious nationalist party lost ground and had to form a coalition government.
- While I have heard (United States of) American women say in interviews that they don’t think a woman will be taken seriously as leader of a country and they have never heard of such a thing, and are shouting brainless slogans like “drill baby drill!”, famously tough-guy dominated MEXICO has elected a FEMALE CLIMATE SCIENTIST president.
- A decade or so on from the Steve Bannon-engineered Brexit fiasco, the UK has for the moment at least reverted to a center-left government.
- Indonesia has elected a right-wing paramilitary leader suspected of crimes against humanity.
will 2025 see the rise of the AI agents?
Despite all the AI hype, we (at least the general public and most workers and middle managers) do not have AI agents we can assign to do our bidding. This is going to be a game changer, for better and for worse. This article is about shopping, which seems to me like one of the most frivolous use of these agents, but of course one that businesses will look to as a way to extract even more value from all of us.
In 2024, venture funds invested an estimated US$1.8 billion in AI agent projects. Deloitte’s latest Global Predictions Report argues 25% of companies that use generative AI will launch agentic AI projects in 2025.
Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2028, 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made by AI agents.
I’m trying to think of uses for AI agents in my personal and work life. They should be really good schedulers and calendar managers. I can imagine giving them limited autonomy to schedule appointments for recurring home maintenance, for example, giving me a checklist to fill out confirming that the work has been completed satisfactorily according to industry standards and legal requirements, and paying the contractor if it has. if it hasn’t, my agent might engage in some kind of preliminary negotiation with the contractor’s agent and be allowed to settle within certain bounds before taking up the time of us valuable humans. You can see where I am going with this – there are all kinds of applications in project management, construction management, operations management, and (gulp) tourism and hospitality management. Companies have been trying to automate these tasks for decades, in fact, with very unsatisfactory results and a lot of human time wasted. Smarter AI systems should be able to reduce some of this friction, handling routine tasks while just keeping humans minimally informed, and understanding when a human being needs to make a decision and exactly what information they will need to do so.
I can imagine a helpful AI looking over my shoulder as I make small daily decisions and telling me whether they are likely to help or hinder me in meeting my long-term goals. For example, will my eating and shopping choices increase or decrease my expected life span? Will they increase or decrease my expected net worth at retirement age? Good AI agents might be able to help me counteract the bad AI agents out there that are going to be trying to get me to make bad choices.
real Terminator-style augmented reality in 2025?
From this Wired headline, you might think 2025 will be year I finally get directions superimposed on the real world through my glasses. But read farther and it sounds more like this is still hard and 2025 will just be a year I can listen to podcasts through my glasses, if I wanted to do that for some reason.
- Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3S – These are full-on virtual reality helmets I think. I can see this being cool on, say, a long-haul flight, but not walking around a city. Magic Leap is still out there, somewhere, doing something.
- Ray-Ban Meta – Seriously, this is just making phone calls and listening to music through your glasses. Fine, but not augmented/mixed reality in my opinion. There are some other similar ones from Oppo, Swave, and Emteq and some others that failed on the launchpad or are still in development.
- Meta Orion, Snap Spectacles, Google Android XR – These are supposed to be the real deal, but are still in the R&D phase. So not too hopeful they will burst onto the commercial scene in 2025.
- Form – “smart swim goggles”. I can see this – swimming can be boring, and nobody has invented a truly foolproof set of swimming headphones/earbuds that I am aware of.
- XReal – “focuses on mimicking a big screen display right on the lenses to let users feel like they’re watching media on a big screen”. Again, could be cool on a plane, train, bus, or self-driving vehicle.
- Emteq – basically sounds like a Fitbit in glasses form. Maybe less dorky than when you see joggers with phones strapped to their arms.
You would assume Apple has some augmented/mixed reality R&D work going on, but they usually seem happy to skip the first couple generations of a new product category (think AI) and let it mature a bit before they join the fray. So the lack of any public hype from Apple is probably a sign that the technology is not going to mature in the next 12 months.
So there you have it – I personally am still looking forward to the (mildly dystopian) world of Rainbow’s End, but it doesn’t sound like 2025 will be the year we get there.