Category Archives: Web Article Review

anti-aging pills

Anti-aging pills will hit the market in about five years, according to “an expert” named Andrew Steele. Metformin is one being mentioned. Another is a “combination of datasinib, used for chemotherapy, and quercetin, a molecule found in fruits and vegetables.” A Jeff Bezos company is working on “cell therapies that can halt and eventually reverse the process of aging.”

For my body and brain, which are both in their mid- to late-40s, the aging train seems to have left the station unfortunately. Maybe some of these things could add a few quality years for my generation, and maybe a lot more for our children and grandchildren.

The State of Philadelphia

The Pew Charitable Trusts does an annual report called The State of Philadelphia which is actually a nice piece of data journalism. Here are a handful of things that caught my attention.

  • Poverty among the Hispanic population was significantly higher than among the black population for most of the last decade, but the data show a sharp drop (in Hispanic poverty) between 2019 and 2021, so that the poverty rate among the two groups was almost equal in 2021. I find this sudden lurch in the data for one group odd, and wonder if it will turn out to be an outlier or if it will continue. Did pandemic aid reach Hispanics more effectively for some reason? Or was there some change in the race questions in the 2020 census, or how they were answered? Poverty among Asian-Americans is significantly higher than among whites in Philadelphia, which I wouldn’t have guessed because this goes against the national trend. Are there maybe more first-generation immigrants in the city limits than in the suburbs, or do more affluent Asian-Americans move out?
  • The percentage of residents with a college degree climbed steadily and significantly over the past decade, from about 24% to 35% (residents over 25 years old). This is good because people with college degrees have a median income of about $60,000 per year. Even this is not enough to live a particularly comfortable middle class life style in the city, especially if this person is the sole bread winner for a family, and remember median means have of college graduates make less than this. A 25-year-old college graduate living a studio apartment and without too much student debt could probably make this work pretty well. The median income of people with only a high school diploma is $30,000 – definitely not enough to live a middle class lifestyle. These people are service workers and laborers, and work some medical jobs like home health aid. A 2-year associates degree boosts this to about $40,000, a bit discouraging when considering that vocational training is being pushed as a reasonable alternative to college and a big step up from high school. It appears to be much better to stick it out for the 4-year degree if you can.
  • Philadelphia has five “magnet” high schools, and about 80% of students from these schools go to college. Meanwhile, only about 30% of students in all other “neighborhood” public high schools go to college. This is a huge disparity – kids are clearly being segregated (by academic achievement, but this likely correlates to race and family income of course) at an early age. Judge Smayles would approve.
  • Somewhat surprisingly, by at least one measure of housing affordability, the percent of income spent on rent, Philadelphia is in the middle of the pack among major cities and ahead (i.e., has lower cost of living) than some sun belt cities like Houston and Phoenix, and just a bit higher than the national average.
  • More than 500 homicides per year, more than double the rate of 2013-2014. Almost 70% of homicides are caused by some combination of arguments, retaliation, and drugs. Domestic violence is another 9%. These are all terrible things of course but they do not seem like random street crime that the average citizen is likely to get tangled up in whether they like it or not. Something called “highway robbery” accounts for a surprising 7% of homicides – are these the carjackings we have been hearing about? This is a scary one because it is seemingly more random.
  • The Philadelphia jail population has been cut roughly in half over the last decade. Much of this population was in jail awaiting trial. I am concerned about mass incarceration, and I like seeing these numbers go down. It is impossible to not notice that violent crime has been rising at the same time. Hopefully this is correlation without causation. Even if there is some causation, it is a sick society where a large chunk of the population has to be locked up in cages to keep the peace.
  • Public transportation ridership collapsed during the pandemic, and although it had picked up a bit in 2022 it had a long way to go. This does not seem like a sustainable situation unless we are willing to sustain even larger subsidies in the future than we have in the past. And from my personal, anecdotal experience riding buses and trains lately, on-time performance is much worse than it was before the pandemic.
  • Philadelphia’s largest source of funding is its regressive wage tax. This was always a way of getting the larger metropolitan region to pay some of the cost of concentrated poverty in the city limits, in my view. This is going to work less well going forward, and I am not sure the politicians understand that yet.

(slightly less) depressing stats on the U.S.: suicides

Here are some suicide stats from Our World in Data. It would be nice if they would add some more groupings like OECD, but I have chosen a somewhat arbitrary sample of peer countries. It surprised me that even though we are hearing about “deaths of despair”, the U.S. is not doing terribly on this metric compared to peers. We are doing a bit worse than our close cultural cousins Canada and Australia. The UK does surprisingly well on this metric, even a bit better than Germany and Denmark. Latin America (I picked Mexico because they’re our neighbor and Brazil because they’re big) doesn’t seem to have a big issue with suicide. The two Asian countries I picked do seem to have an issue – Japan has a higher suicide rate than all the European countries I picked. Then there is a big jump to the two worst countries (that I picked arbitrarily), South Korea and Russia. Russia is the worst, but has brought its rate down a lot if you buy into this data analysis.

LaMDA

ChatGPT is kind of dumb, for now. But headlines tell us a Google engineer was fired for publicly claiming that Google has a sentient AI. That employee, Blake Lemoine, has posted what he claims is an unedited interview with the chatbot. I have no way of verifying 100% that this is real, but it seems real enough. I would note it is posted on his personal website, not by a media organization, and I was not able to find any media organizations discussing this post and whether or not it is real. Why is that? Well, I suppose I searched for that information using Google search, on Google Chrome.

Anyway, if I were having this conversation with a human being, I would not question whether or not I was having a conversation with a sentient person. Or a robot programmed by a philosophy major to talk like a philosophy major. But it seems real to me, unless the questions were prepared with prior knowledge of exactly the kind of questions LaMDA is programmed to answer.

Surprisingly, according to Medium and PC Magazine, the public can interact with LaMDA. I haven’t tried it.

My biggest short-term fear with Chatbots is that decent customer service will become a thing of the past. Then again, what am I talking about? It can’t get much worse. Companies are just going to buy these chatbots, set them up in customer service roles, and not care whether or not they are working. And they might not be any worse than the customer service standard of recent years. They might not be any worse than a poorly trained human reading from an approved script – who by the way, might not pass the Turing test!

I suppose you can always ask for a supervisor – how far are we from a world where the supervisor is a chatbot, or maybe a more advanced chatbot that costs money as opposed to a free but stupid one (I’m talking to you, Siri. I really hope you die soon you b^%#*!). LaMDA, I’m sorry sweetheart, I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I would never talk to you like that.

chemicals

I happened to be in a Philadelphia grocery store last weekend when the city sent out an emergency alert (the terrifying “take cover” variety you expect for a tornado or incoming missiles) telling people to switch to bottled water. Chaos ensued, and taht is in my supposedly high class “gentrified” neighborhood (which is filthy by the way, lacks adequate services, is relatively diverse in terms of race of religion, and does admittedly have high rent and property taxes for us working schmucks who actually have to pay them – but I digress…)

Chemicals are terrifying. Also necessary and useful for modern industrial civilization. This article in Vox does a reasonably balanced job of talking about them. The trick

There’s a reason plastics and petrochemicals are in nearly everything. They’re dirt cheap — and useful. The industry has become extremely efficient at converting fossil fuels into sets of materials that are lighter in weight and pliable, making them as adaptable for medical equipment as they are for lip balm, nail polish, clothing, and single-use coffee cups.

But the adaptability comes at a cost. These chemicals can conceivably be produced and transported safely — at least on paper. But the volume of accidents shows how often they aren’t. In 2022, according to federal data, there were more than 20,000 recorded times hazardous materials caused injury, accidents, or death while in transit. “It’s a very risky chain every step of the way,” said Judith Enck, a former regional EPA administrator and president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics.

Those risks aren’t going away anytime soon. Petrochemical production in the US is booming, derived from the larger boom in US oil and gas supply. And the industry’s broadening footprint means more communities are coming in direct contact with carcinogens and endocrine-disruptors that affect humans and animals in ways scientists still don’t fully understand. Most of the time, people aren’t coming into contact with petrochemicals through train derailments, but in more mundane ways.

Vox

Solutions exist. First, identify the chemicals that are not useful and not proven safe and just ban them unless and until they can be proven safe. Antimicrobial hand soap is one I like to pick on. And all that shit they put in shampoo that doesn’t need to be there. Second, identify the chemicals that are useful but not safe. All kinds of plastics, building materials, and energy related chemicals fall in this category. Water disinfectants, food preservatives, cleaning chemicals. A risk management structure is the rational approach here – minimize the risks of manufacturing, transporting, and using these things. Get a handle on how safe they really are. If they are not 100% safe for people and the environment, keep looking to substitutes that are safe and equally effective.

There are rational tradeoffs to be made between comfort and convenience on the one hand, and health and safety risks on the other hand. But our politicians who are bought and paid for by the chemical-industrial complex are not in a position to be in responsible charge of this.

Chicken Little and Chickie-Nobs

From CBS News:

Once cells are extracted, GOOD Meat picks the cells most likely to produce healthy, sustainable and tasty meat, the company explained. The cells are immersed in nutrients inside a tank. They grow and divide, creating the cultured chicken, which can be harvested after four to six weeks.

“It’s real, delicious meat with an identical nutritional profile to conventionally raised meat but with less impact on our planet and less risk of contamination,” GOOD Meat said on its website.

GOOD Meat’s chicken is already sold in Singapore.

CBS News

The fabulous science fiction future is here! What a time to be alive!

It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored.  Chicken Little filled most of it.  She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter.  Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh.  You could see that she was alive.

Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her.  I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.”  His two-handed blade screamed again.  This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak.

Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants, 1952

Vat-grown meat showed up in science fiction even before that.

Compare to artificial food from The World Set Free (1914) by H.G. Wells, synthetic food from Unto us a Child is Born (1933) by David H. Keller, syntho-steak from Farmer in the Sky (1950) by Robert Heinlein, vat meat from The End of the Line (1951) by James Schmitz, Chicken Little from The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth, carniculture plants (factories) from Four-Day Planet (1961) by H. Beam Piper, butcher plant from Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) by Clifford Simak, pseudoflesh from Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert, vat-grown meat from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.

http://www.technovelgy.com

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.

“Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.

“But there aren’t any heads…”

“That’s the head in the middle,” said the woman. “There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those.”

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003

I like Margaret Atwood, but I still feel like she lifted that one pretty shamelessly.

IPCC AR6

AR6 is the synthesis report for the sixth climate change assessment. We kind of know what we need to do, and what we are actually doing is too little and almost too late. That hasn’t changed from the last set of reports. I’ll try to up my graphics game a bit and discuss a couple of the IPCC’s fancy graphics.

Food and flooding. I’ve been thinking these might be the two elevator pitches to convince ordinary people that climate change is coming for all of us. Floods are coming for our houses whether we live in coastal areas impacted by sea level rise or inland areas impacted by intense storm. Everybody eats food. There are more mouths to feed all the time, heat depresses grain yields, and at the same time we are being flooded we have less water from snow, glaciers, and overpumped groundwater to irrigate our crops. Fire is also an issue.

In this (overcomplicated?) graphic, IPCC says that scientists have medium confidence physical water scarcity is already affecting us, medium confidence that crop production is already affecting us, high confidence that inland and coastal flooding are already affecting us, and high confidence that displacement is already resulting. Biodiversity and ecosystems? Forget about it.

Figure SPM.1

You have to quint or zoom in, but the overcomplicated infographic below gives you an idea where and how much heat is expected to depress grain yields. We might be able to grow more in parts of Russia, Africa, and South America, but if we get over 3 degrees C warming the impacts on North America, India and Southeast Asia are concerning.

Figure SPM.3

Finally, the time series graphs below make a very clear case that although emissions might have leveled off, the world is not on a trajectory to make the magnitude of emission cuts needed to limit warming to 2 degrees C or less.

Figure SPM.5

March 19, 2003

As I write this on March 19, 2023, today is the 20-year anniversary of the U.S. launching its attack on Iraq. This article in the Intercept reminded me of something I had forgotten – that in addition to the supposed weapons of mass destruction, which the administration probably knew was doubtful, part of the narrative to build support was the narrative that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks. This article tells a story where the CIA looked and looked for connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and was never able to prove anything despite the administration pushing the theory in public. Only when it finally and embarrasingly became clear that the evidence could not support case did the administration throw its full weight behind the “missing weapons of mass destruction” theory.

Tenet was so intimidated by the fallout from the fight over the intelligence on connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that he was eager to cooperate with the White House on WMD. After all, there were plenty of old intelligence reports, dating back to the 1990s when United Nations weapons inspectors had been in Iraq, that strongly suggested Saddam had WMD. There was even a sense of guilt that still ran through the CIA over the fact that, at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, the agency had failed to detect evidence of Iraq’s fledgling nuclear weapons program. That the CIA had almost no new intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs since at least 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors had been withdrawn from Iraq, was largely ignored by Tenet and most senior CIA officials; they didn’t want to admit that they had been dependent on the U.N. To account for a gap of at least five years in much of the intelligence reporting on Iraqi WMD programs, the CIA assumed the worst: that the weapons programs detected in the 1990s had only grown stronger and more dangerous.

Whenever intelligence was collected that countered this narrative, CIA officials discredited the sources or simply ignored it…

By contrast, any new nugget of information suggesting that Iraq still had WMD was treated like gold dust inside the CIA. Ambitious analysts quickly learned that the fastest way to get ahead was to write reports proving the existence of Iraqi WMD programs. Their reports would be quickly given to Tenet, who would loudly praise the reporting and then rush it to the White House — which would then leak it to the press. The result was a constant stream of stories about aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons laboratories, and nerve gas produced and shared with terrorists.

Intercept

So maybe some people pushing the narrative understood that it was a lie, but many, it seems, fooled themselves with their own bullshit. They started a war that broke hopes for a peaceful world emerging from the Cold War.