Category Archives: Web Article Review

Venice flood protection

The Italian government has completed an $8 billion coastal flood protection system. It is interesting because it is submerged under normal sea conditions and can be raised when a storm is coming in.

Youtube

$8 billion sounds like a lot of money, but perhaps it is not to protect a major coastal city and international cultural treasure. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent $14 billion to protect New Orleans and is undertaking a projected $31 billion project to protect Houston (and projections have a way of running over). These are guaranteed to be far uglier projects than the Venice one. These U.S. cities may have “benefitted” from being the first to be devastated by coastal storms in the climate collapse era. Do we really think the U.S. Congress will not pony up even more enormous sums to protect New York, Washington D.C., and San Francisco when the time comes? They will. Cities with major military bases like Norfolk, Virginia and San Diego might make the cut. Smaller but still major cities with less political clout may have more trouble getting their fair share. Boston and Miami might make the cut. Major cities with less political clout, like Philadelphia and Baltimore, might not make the cut. And all this money Congress will find to protect major urban areas, while it will have some economic multiplier effect, will be money not spent on other priorities.

Whoever is Responsible for The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, LOCK THEM UP!

This thing is a major serial killer of around 40,000 Americans every year, including children, and gets away with it! Essentially, it sets the design standards that determine what road and street designs can get federal funding, and it ends up flowing down to a lot of state and local design standards. Making the relative modest changes recommended here by the National Association of City Transportation Officials would help, but really I feel like this is thinking pretty small. Maybe if we held the known serial killer, the Federal Highway Administration, to account it might deter the many copycat killers known as state and local transportation agencies.

NACTO

This also reminded me of this Freakonomics podcast: The Perfect Crime. If you want to kill somebody and get away with it, just run over a pedestrian with your car.

peak natural gas demand by 2030?

The International Energy Agency is forecasting that global demand for natural gas will peak and fall by 2030. In the short term, the Russia-Ukraine war has led to a drop in supply, a spike in prices, and a shift to liquid natural gas from the Middle East. In the longer term though, the shift is toward nuclear (at least, restarting underutilized plants or delaying retirement of already existing plants) and renewables according to this article. It sounds somewhat hopeful and welcome, although of course still too little too late to stop the unfolding climate catastrophe.

are “western elites” “irrational”?

This long article on Naked Capitalism claims the leadership of western countries is not effective in a crisis, and I think there may be something to this. The Covid non-response and some recent bungled natural disaster responses from New Orleans to Puerto Rico to Hawaii come to mind. This article focuses more on Ukraine, and while that situation is certainly unsatisfactory, it is hard to see what the good options would have been. The U.S. choices (NATO expansion, Balkan War, CIA interference with foreign elections) you can point to as questionable were all made years or decades ago, when this author presumably thinks leadership was better.

I certainly share the sense that our political leadership today is not particularly confidence-inspiring. So why is this? The author gives a few possibilities [my thoughts in brackets]:

  • the rich and powerful are out of touch with ordinary people [nothing new here]
  • stormtrooper syndrome – assuming you are the good guys, your opponents or competitors are the bad guys, and the bad guys can’t win [but this was certainly the case during the Cold War and the public loved it!]
  • a “conspiracy of degenerates” – this would have to be hidden from public view
  • right-wing demagogues promoting conspiracy theories and offering a simple message as an alternative that appeals to the public [certainly happening, and this is the good old Hitler playbook we have to watch out for]
  • Iron Law of Oligarchies – any organization is controlled by a small number of powerful individuals whose top priority is increasing their own power, rather than the success of the organization
  • crabs in a bucket – one crab can escape a bucket, but supposedly two or more crabs will stop each other from escaping, the implication being that relative rank is important to us animals – if I can’t succeed at everyone else’s expense, I will make sure nobody can succeed
  • the “Mowshowitz theory” – a variation on the above where power seeking behavior is rewarded within organizations rather than alignment with the stated goals of the organization, and in fact furthering the goals of the organization without seeking power can be punished
  • “intra-elite signaling dynamics” – the power of ritual to signal acceptance of a particular belief system, and the more bizarre the better [exactly what these rituals are I had trouble following]

I have had my own theories for awhile, and they have to do with education. I do not think children are being educated well in basic logic and being able to spot logical fallacies. This makes us susceptible to propaganda. They are not being educated well in the behavior of complex, dynamic systems. They are learning plenty of math and science, but it results in short-term and literal thinking rather than longer-term and abstract thinking. And finally, I don’t think children are being challenged to think morally. I’m just talking about the habit of asking yourself before you make a small daily decision whether you think on balance the consequences are on the side of right or wrong, justice or injustice.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

an agent-based stock market simulator

This agent-based stock market simulator, which was originally programmed in NetLogo and later moved to R, captures the behavior of the market in a statistical sense. Which is to say, it shows how multiple traders following logical strategies can add up to a whole lot of randomness and unpredictability. Also known as autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity and/or generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity, if I remember my statistics class correctly. But the article does not go into that.

stock market returns as simulated by an agent-based model

Maui

The Maui fires are awful. First of all, my sympathy for all the loss of life, property, and all the displacement and disruption people are experiencing. The Los Angeles Times has some coverage of factors that may have contributed to the disaster.

  • Rain shadow and seasonal dry conditions, which are normal
  • Severe drought on top of these conditions
  • Low humidity
  • High winds (gusts up to 80 mph) caused by a hurricane nearby, but not close enough to cause rainfall on the island
  • High ocean temperatures made even worse by El Nino this year

The severity and frequency of both drought and hurricanes have increased due to climate change, making this catastrophic combination of factors more likely to occur than it would have been in the past. The article also says cooler ocean temperatures in the past have tended to steer hurricanes away from Hawaii, and this is also less like to occur now than in the past. So all this is bad luck, but we humans have made our own bad luck to a certain extent.

What is Obama up to?

According to this rambling article, he has houses in Hawaii (Oahu), Hyde Park (I’m assuming Chicago, not New York or London?), Martha’s Vineyard, and the Kalorama development inside Washington D.C. The latter is popular with current and ex-government types, celebrities, diplomats, and captains of industry. Some conspiracists believe he is running a “shadow government” from this location, and for this the offer two points of evidence: (1) He is a retired career politician who still lives in Washington, D.C. at least some times and (2) higher ups in the current administration are sometimes spotted at his house. This seems pretty weak to me. His house seems like a convenient place to have an offsite meeting where you would already have the maximum possible security presence and you might get some free advice from the former leader of the free world in the bargain. Giving take-it-or-leave-it advice would not be “running a shadow government”. Doing some fundraising and persuading at the request of the current party leadership would not be “running a shadow government”. So I don’t know but it seems unlikely.

There’s also some gobbledygook about Ukraine in the article. The only real data points we have on that are that (1) Obama instinctively opposed Hillary Clinton’s push for more or less unprovoked war on Libya (although he gave in), (2) he offered Ukraine only non-lethal aid following the invasion of Crimea, and (3) he supported the Minsk peace accord. We can only speculate now whether Russia would have invaded Ukraine under a Hillary Clinton administration, although I think they were scared enough of her that it may have motivated them to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election (after the U.S. almost certainly interfered in the 2014 Ukraine election, at least in terms of propaganda.) If they had, we can only speculate whether she would have responded with a no-fly zone or some other Cuban Missile Crisis level gamble. I think she might have. Now we need to look ahead and consider whether a second Trump administration will just give up the farm and allow Ukraine to be partitioned or conquered outright.

Are humans a cancer on the planet?

This is the premise of Warren Hern in a new book called Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth.

The basic premise is that humans have the capacity of developing culture, and that has millions of manifestations, everything from language and speech and mathematics to constructing shelters, building weapons and having medical care to keep us alive. These adaptations have allowed us to go from a few separate species of skinny primates wandering around in Africa a couple of million years ago to being the dominant ecological force on the planet to the point we’re changing the entire global ecosystem…

These cultural adaptations have now become maladaptive. They do not have survival value. And they are, in fact, malignant maladaptations because they’re increasing in a way that cancer increases. So, this means that the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process. When I was in medical school, we had four of them that were identified: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues — in this case, ecosystems; metastasis, which means distant colonization; and dedifferentiation, which you see very well in the patterns of cities.

Salon.com

I don’t want to believe this. We know the universe is ultimately tending to random disorder. Somehow, physical forces are able to buck this trend and create small pockets of order like stars, planets, solar systems, and complex chemical compounds. And then on only one planet that we know of in all the universe, something called life has arisen from these chemical compounds, which has an extraordinary ability to construct ordered systems in our random universe. And then in only one species we know of in all the universe, something called intelligence has arisen from that life with the ability to create hitherto unimagined complex ordered systems. I don’t want to believe that this process has come to its conclusion and that the conclusion is one that ends the entire forward progression forever. Of course, if we are not the only intelligent life in the universe and if intelligent life is in fact common, then the situation looks much less bleak. Our particular malignant form of intelligent life can destroy its host and thus itself, and in fact this can happen in the vast majority of cases, but somebody somewhere can carrying on with the project of creating order and beauty in a cold indifferent universe. This, in my view, is the meaning and purpose of life. It just isn’t looking at the moment like we will be the ones to do it. And if in defiance of all reason we are the only intelligent life that has arisen or ever will arrive in the universe, then the future is an eternity of cold indifference, and we will be the ones who blew it.

remote work, productivity, and lazy kids today

I think this Fortune article (paywalled, but I was able to read it the first time I clicked) drawing conclusions about remote work based on productivity statistics is off base. Labor productivity, as I understand it, is dollars changing hands in the economy divided by hours people say they worked. There are a number of measurement problems here. First, in the short term it is just going to fluctuate with dollars changing hands, which fluctuates for all sorts of reasons, so it makes more sense to look at longer-term averages. Second, dollars changing hands is not a perfect measure of value – we could be paying the same number of dollars for crappier goods and services as our expectations are gradually lowered over time. I really suspect this is what is happening.

It does make sense to me that self-reported hours worked at home would be less productive. Even if most people are honest most of the time, some people are going to be less honest some of the time than they would be in an office. People are going to be more distracted. But in all these cases, they are going to report the same number of hours worked and get paid the same number of dollars they would have in the office. So there will be no effect on calculated productivity, while we get used to gradually shifting baseline of crappier goods and services over time.

I think another effect is that training and onboarding are getting harder in some sorts of jobs. Some jobs have a playbook telling a worker exactly what to do, but many jobs do not. In my field of engineering, there is not much of a playbook because we are often trying to apply existing knowledge to solve novel problems under changing external conditions. I learned this job in the 1990s and 2000s by spending a lot of extra time in the office at the end of the day shooting the breeze with colleagues, mentors, and clients. Somewhat frequently, someone would suggest moving these sessions to a local drinking establishment and they would go well into the evening. This was not necessarily healthy for work-life balance or for my liver and waistline, but it’s an important part of how I learned my job and industry and why I am good at it today. This time didn’t go on my time sheet, and yet it boosts my subjectively measured productivity today.

I don’t want to complain about today’s crop of young people, who are just as intelligent as my generation (perhaps more since they’ve been exposed to less lead and air pollution) and seem to have better health habits overall. But the combination of working from home, less informal interaction with mentors, and job hopping means it is much harder for them to learn to do jobs really well. In decade, they will be the ones doing most of the work and trying to train the generation under them, and again we will just get a gradually shifting baseline of lower expectations and worse outcomes, even if we may not be measuring that effectively in dollars.

social media, retaliation and revenge violence

In case we don’t have enough to blame social media for, we can now blame it for young American men killing each other. It kind of makes sense. If the main cause of murder in this country is simply young men fighting, and guns simply make that fighting much more deadly, then it just makes sense that social media is a channel fueling that cycle of retaliation and revenge among young men left out of the formal economy.