Category Archives: Web Article Review

America’s shoplifting panic

Recently I purchased a small bottle of dishwashing liquid for less than $2 at a Walgreens in Center City Philadelphia, and I had to call a clerk to unlock it a Plexiglass case and get it for me. I also notice that shelves are oddly empty in many stores, and I have certainly seen and heard the stories about shoplifting and “flash mobs”.

As always, I like journalism that provides some data to back up storytelling and anecdotal evidence. So kudos to CNN here:

Shoplifting reports in 24 major cities where police have consistently published years of data — including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas and San Francisco — were 16% higher during the first half of 2023 compared to 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice analysis.

However, excluding New York City, the number of incidents among the remaining cities was 7% lower.

CNN

The article also provides some interesting context on past “shoplifting panics”, including one in London when women first ventured into public in significant numbers. People believed they were stealing for the thrill of it. I would speculate that it may have been more a question of whether they had access to cash or what their husbands may have thought about them spending said cash. Then there was a hippie shoplifting panic in the 1960s. And now we have a “breakdown of law and order in cities” narrative fueling the current one.

The article also talks about the enormous pressure on brick and mortar retailers to compete with online sales. I suspect this narrative provides them some convenient leverage in negotiating with landlords, insurers, and local politicians. I also wonder if shoplifting has always gone on but modern surveillance technology means insurance companies are more easily aware to quantify it, and it is just more prevalent than they thought.

115 traffic deaths and counting for Philadelphia in 2023

The Bicycle Coalition has a grim but nicely done map and infographic of traffic deaths in Philadelphia. 115 and counting, including 52 pedestrians, 2 scooter riders, 11 motorcyclists, and 9 bicyclists (but I believe there was a 10th since these numbers were updated.) This is the worst in 24 years, according to the site.

Public opinion tends to blame the victims – pedestrians to some extent, and certainly bicyclists and scooter riders. Public opinion thinks motorcycles are just awesome, despite how deadly they clearly are. I see a trend of people riding motorcycles without helmets, which is just taking a huge risk with absolutely no reward to go along with it. Public opinion tends to blame the police to some extent for lack of enforcement. And last but not least, drivers tend to blame other drivers, because of course every driver considers themselves well above average.

As an engineer, I blame ignorant, incompetent street design first and foremost. I blame the engineers who are not up to date on best practices, ignorant bureaucrats who constrain them even if they are, and ignorant politicians who constrain the bureaucrats and engineers. On the latter, the outgoing Philadelphia mayoral administration at least has a Vision Zero program on the books, massive failure though it has been. The incoming mayor is not known to be a friend of safe streets, and is a proponent of the corrupt “councilmanic prerogative” system that allows ignorant politicians to overrule competent planning and design decisions in our city. The poster child for the latter, Kenyatta Johnson, is set to become the leader of our city council, by most reports.

So I am keeping my hopes and expectations under control. If in some parallel universe the incoming mayor asked my opinion, I would advise her to bring in new management for our streets department (I have no personal knowledge or experience with our current streets department leadership, except to note that they have failed to design safe streets, maintain streets, or pick up garbage and recycling as effectively as other cities.) I would ask that new management to at least bring our street design standards up to the safest level our state transportation department allows. I would ask that new management to put a professional asset management program in place to keep those streets in the best state of repair possible with the funding available. I would give that new management challenging yet achievable metrics and deadlines, and hold them accountable. That’s the relatively easy stuff. The harder stuff is dealing with the police, dealing with the state legislature, and chipping away at public opinion. On the latter, if pictures of dead and suffering children in Gaza are upsetting to people, can we maybe learn something and focus on showing and telling more stories about the risk and suffering street violence is causing to our own children here at home?

India’s Foreign Relations

Here is a long Foreign Policy article on India’s foreign relations. Among interesting things, they manage to maintain formal diplomatic relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel, and Iran at the same time. Their spats with China and Pakistan seem to go on forever but at least in recent decades, have not turned violent.

One thing that occurs to me in thinking about the recent “U.S. offer of civilian nuclear power” to Saudi Arabia is that both India and the U.S. might have an interest in prying Saudi Arabia from close ties to Pakistan’s nuclear program. They may cynically have decided that the nuclear proliferation tumor is going to metastasize to Saudi Arabia no matter what, and they would prefer for it to happen on their terms. An alternative, in a sane world, could be to offer Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other responsible countries civilian nuclear power under strict UN/IAEA oversight, backed up by a Security Council with some credibility.

“plutonium pits”

A “plutonium pit” is the actual core of a thermonuclear bomb. According the Scientific American, the U.S. plans to spend $1.5 trillion dollars on new plutonium pits and new intercontinental ballistic missiles to put them on (actually, it’s not even clear from the article if the $1.5 trillion includes the missiles. This is all while people are sleeping the streets, life expectancies are falling, violence is raging, educational attainment is falling, and the list goes on. I don’t even hear politicians talking about peace or even proposing negotiations to limit the pace of this new arms race. Real, courageous leaders would do this, and they seem to be in short supply. With all the risks our global civilization is facing (food security, floods, fires, drought, pandemics and biological weapons to name just a few very bad ones not really being addressed), we can’t let nuclear proliferation and nuclear war rear its ugly head again. To our politicians I say, somebody step up and lead, you cowards!

what’s new with small modular nuclear reactors

Nuclear energy just has to be part of a climate smart future. It has to be. It also maybe, can be, should be part of a peaceful future free of nuclear weapons. Anyway, what’s new and exciting is that a small modular nuclear reactor was permitted for the first time in the United States. What’s not exciting is the company decided the project was…

https://medium.com/afro-cinemaphile/not-economically-viable-man-beb060247fce

Still, if it can and has been permitted, hopefully somebody will find a business model that works, and/or governments will subsidize it to get it off the ground. In the cancelled or on-hold negotiations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia recently, we hear that the U.S. was willing to consider “giving” Saudi Arabia civilian nuclear technology. This seems problematic, when we know countries (Iran and Israel just to name a couple) have managed to develop dual-use uranium enrichment technology under the appearance of a peaceful civilian energy program. So the technology shouldn’t be “given” unilaterally by nuclear powers (the geopolitical kind of power here) to governments they like. This needs to be done under the IAEA under a strict inspection regime, and there has to be a commitment to enforce it. It seems somewhat unlikely the dysfunctional UN Security Council is set up to do this in the near future.

so what’s going on in Syria?

Syria is complicated. This article is by a Cato Institute author with some strong opinions I am not necessarily endorsing, but it does break down some of the key players.

  • Fact: The U.S. government has ground troops inside the borders of Syria, a sovereign country with a seat at the United Nations, and it does not have the permission of that government to be within its borders. The two countries do not have friendly diplomatic relations but nevertheless, neither side claims to be directly at war with the other.
  • The stated reason for U.S. troops entering Syria was to fight the Islamic State group. By many accounts, that objective has been achieved. It is also worth noting that by some accounts, the reason that group formed was blowback from the 2003 U.S. (mostly unprovoked) Iraq invasion.
  • There are, however, regular “drone and rocket attacks” on U.S. troops by militant groups “aligned with Iran and Syria”.
  • The Syrian government is publicly anti-israel, and the U.S. government is obviously an ally of the Israel government. This article doesn’t mention it, but Israel is also known to be carrying out regular strikes against groups on Syrian territory that it considers threatening and/or Iran proxies.
  • The government of Russia is allied with the government of Syria. The United States presence in Syria is therefore “discomfiting” to the Russian government according to some. Russia has troops on the ground in Syria with the permission of the Syrian government. The U.S. and Russia are not directly at war in Syria or anywhere else, but there have been confrontations, provocations, and “harassments”.
  • The U.S. government supports military forces of the Kurdish ethnic group, which some say serves as a de facto government controlling territory in this area. These Kurdish forces are openly engaged in military hostilities with Turkey inside the borders of Syria, which is a NATO member and declared U.S. ally.
  • The government of Syria and the government of Iran are allies, and the U.S. government is openly very hostile to Iran and accuses them of interfering with politics and funding wars and terror groups throughout the Middle East. The governments of Iran and Israel are also openly hostile, of course, with nuclear risks for the region and world.
  • Some say the U.S. is trying to “bring Assad down” or “steal Syria’s oil”. I don’t know how real these claims are or whether either represents any sort of official policy (well, certainly not the latter, and deploying the U.S. military to “steal oil” tens of thousands of miles away simply can’t be a viable business proposition. This one does not pass the logic test.)

There – I don’t know that I “explained” it, but I don’t know that there is anything to explain. We are there because they are fighting us, and they are fighting us because we are there. There are at least four distinct conflicts happening in the same geography – U.S. vs. Russia/Syria/Iran/islamist groups, Israel vs. Syria/Iran, Syria vs. Kurds, Turkey vs. Kurds. What a mess. Even Donald Trump wanted to get out of Syria, probably for what I would consider the wrong reasons. Let’s get the U.S. military out and the diplomats in. Where is Jimmy Carter when you need him? Who is the next Jimmy Carter – Obama maybe?

rolling the DICE

The Intercept has a long take-down of William Nordhaus’s DICE climate change economic model. Well, it’s not just this journalist, who may not have past middle school algebra for all we know, in this openly left-leaning publication taking him down, it’s Joseph Stiglitz, Nicholas Stern, and Herman Daly among others. So despite some unnecessarily inflammatory language, I found the article to be a good summary of where this debate stands.

The basic take-down is that Nordhaus’s model ignores those “fat tail” tipping point scenarios, and is basically just extrapolating recent data far into the future in a linear manner, without consideration of true system dynamics. I might agree, but I can also see the point Nordhaus himself makes that our global society is doing much less than even his somewhat conservative model would recommend. Scientists sometimes deserve to be accused of “paralysis of analysis” – because there is some controversy, politicians and corporate leaders can rationalize continuing to do nothing. When in reality, all the economists and scientists cited here, who vehemently disagree with each other, all agree that our global society is doing too little too late to avert catastrophe. If our leaders would do what Nordhaus is recommending, it would be a huge step in the right direction, and then we could have a useful debate about whether we have done enough or still need to do more. We are nowhere near that point so this is quite literally an academic debate. If the more catastrophic scenarios people are talking about were moving the politicians in the right direction, that would be one thing, but I am not convinced. I think seeing the experts argue with each other just gives the politicians excuses. And we KNOW most of them failed elementary school arithmetic.

rapid intensification strikes again

Hurricane Otis, which just struck Acapulco last week as I write this, went from a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane in 24 hours. This is scary because you can’t evacuate major coastal cities every time a tropical storm is nearby, and enormous damage and death can result from this, and it is becoming more frequent.

1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030!

The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post says China will have 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, an increase from a few hundred now. This is bad, in my view. It is also less than the U.S. and Russia have (5,000-6,000 each). Whatever one may think of China’s policies toward Tibet, Xinxiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, China has not invaded any sovereign UN member states without permission in recent memory (ever? there’s a good history question but I can’t think of one.) The United States and Russia have both invaded multiple sovereign states each in very recent memory (do I need to list them? Panama, Bosnia, Iraqx2, Afghanistan, Libya, Georgia, Ukraine, and I’m probably forgetting some – oh, Syria, when and how the f— did the United States invade Syria without anyone noticing? I’m not counting the dozens or hundreds of countries where we have boots on the ground with the permission of sketchy governments.) So who has reasons to be afraid of whom? I’m just saying, the United States leadership could try putting themselves in another country’s shoes and ask what they might be thinking and feeling. You don’t have to agree with your opponent to try to understand them better.

Only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war. I hope we can continue to make this statement for a long time to come. If we have 5,000 nuclear war heads, China has 300 (making up some round numbers here), and is threatening to build more, maybe there is some room for negotiation? Maybe they would agree to stop at 1,000 if the U.S. and Russia both agreed to reduce to 2,000. The whole world would be safer. We would have a shred of credibility when we tell other countries they don’t need nuclear weapons. This would be a clear win-win-win-(etc.) situation. Are there any courageous leaders left in our country or anywhere on Earth?