Category Archives: Web Article Review

what Americans pay for their cars

I am not a member of the 1% by any means, but one key to my personal financial stability has been not owning a car for the last 21 years. People shell out enormous amounts of their income to buy, lease, maintain, repair, replace, and park personal vehicles. And that doesn’t count what you are paying in terms of your home value, property taxes, and gas taxes to maintain all that car focused infrastructure out there. Nor does it count injuries and deaths due to crashes (well, to some extent you pay for that through your car insurance and health insurance), and certainly not the costs of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes due to the opportunity cost of driving relative to spending that same time on some form of physical activity. Finally, people and nature are paying the costs in terms of air and water pollution and heat in more abstract ways (pain, death, knowing ecosystems are being destroyed) if not in dollars.

And of course, for many communities people choose to live in, that personal vehicle is absolutely necessary to get to jobs, school, and put food on the table. I’m just saying where you choose to live is a choice, at least in the longer term. If you want to live in a less car dependent community, you may not be able to change your situation overnight but you could set a goal to change your situation say within 3-5 years. Anyway…

This Jacobin article (which is an unapologetic socialist magazine?) has some interesting facts and figures on what Americans are spending on their private cars.

The country just crossed over a critical threshold last month: 5.1 percent of car owners are at least ninety days delinquent on their loans. This is almost touching the record high of 5.3 percent, reached during the nadir of the Great Recession in 2010. Young people are unsurprisingly hardest hit, with 7.5 percent of car-owning Gen Zers delinquent. The trend for all is upward for the past eight quarters — and expected to continue.

Auto insurance rates are up 56 percent in the past five years; car repossessions are also at post-Recession highs, at 1.73 million so far this year; and car repair costs popped 32 percent in the past two years alone, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s new tariffs. In 2023, a Federal Reserve Bank survey found that car repairs won out over rent, mortgage, health care, and food as the cost that Americans were most concerned about.

Consumers have responded to all this pressure by extending the terms of their loans to decrease their average monthly payments. Yet interest rates have kept rising. The average American is forking over between $550 and $750 a month on their car note, a number that used to be a monthly rent a decade prior. Today 20 percent of all newly originated car notes are over $1,000 a month, and you’d be mistaken to think that only the top income quintile is represented in that number.

$500-1000 per month is a lot of money, and I think that is just the loan payment.

let’s talk about It, kids, cell phones, etc.

I suppose this is my Halloween post. I had never read Stephen King’s novel It, I suppose because I saw snippets of the bad mini-series on TV in the 1990s and was turned off by it. But like literally everything I have read by King, I went into it not knowing what to expect and ended up thoroughly enjoying it. Sure, there are a few nasty gross parts. And what’s really disturbing about the novel is that it depicts violence against children. That is going to turn a lot of people off. But violence is never gratuitous in King’s books, there is always some moral order to his universe. And the monster in It is a supremely evil being with no redeeming features, and we know it is supremely evil with no redeeming features because it kills children. But the monster is not really the focus of the book. Like any King novel, and I’m thinking particularly of The Stand, he spends an enormous amount of time developing his characters and their back stories individually so we really get to know what they are thinking and feeling and how they got that way. Then he puts them together in various combinations and in various situations, and then he puts them all together and we get to see what they are thinking and feeling and how they react to each other. Maybe this is why most of the movies and series about his books suck, because movies and TV are not the right medium to tell the types of stories he tells. Anyway, I was a fan of The Stand, and It is even more interesting in some ways because we get to see the same characters, separately and together, as adults and children, and facing similar wacky situations separately and together as adults and children. So factor all this out mathematically and you can see how to get 1000+ pages of Stephen King!

A quick tangent: It has some lengthy passages describing the sewer and drainage systems of the town, which are intertwined and not supposed to be. And they have to be pumped out, which does in fact happen quite a bit in low-lying coastal areas. Since this is relevant to my particular profession, it’s just interesting to me that King had an understanding and interest in this at the time.

Anyway, one thing that surprises me is how different the kids in the story seem from my own kids today, and from my own childhood memories in the 1980s. The story, at least the part where the characters are children, takes place in the 1950s. Some kids in the story are pretty bad, with extremely violent bullying taking place. And some of the adults are pretty bad too. A few of them are brutalizing their own children, but they uniformly blame their own children when they are hurt by the bullies, and their kids are not honest with them as a result. They are also almost uniformly racist and antisemitic. All of which makes for a pretty complex and entertaining story, but was it really like this?

This all made me think a little bit about the idea of “free range kids” and whether I am being over-protective. The kids in the story were definitely free range kids, and they were at risk of death and injury a lot – from bullies, from cars, falling out of trees, drowning, etc. Sure, there is a fictional sewer monster stalking them in the story, but a few kids were going to die violently in this town monster or no monster. So Jonathan Haidt may tell me I am overprotective of my own children, but keeping them safe and healthy is my number one priority as a parent.

I’ve had an interesting experience over the last few years of simultaneously raising two children who are in elementary school and middle school, and also interacting with college students in their early 20s (I just turned 50 if anybody wants to know.) And one thing that strikes me is kids seem a bit kinder and gentler overall than they were even during my own childhood. Perhaps kids have become more “anxious” and lost their edge to survive in the wild as Jonathan Haidt claims (and demonstrates with hard evidence, which I don’t deny), but as a society we seem to have become less tolerant of the bullying in school children and the various forms of sexual coercion and assault that can go on around college age, not to mention outright racist and antisemitic behavior. As Haidt and others are demonstrating, there is some trend of bullying shifting from physical/in-person to online/electronic, and this seems to be disproportionately affecting girls, which I have observed with my own eyes in my children’s classes. Interestingly, I have not observed anything resembling the type of male playground bullying I experienced at times as a kid, although I have observed plenty of rough play leading to bumps and bruises and a little bit of blood here and there. Ironically, the one broken bone our family experienced occurred on one of the padded rubber playground surfaces Jonathan Haidt makes fun of in the interview I link to above. He says kids “can’t get hurt” on these surfaces. Well, they can if they fall just right in sort of a freakish upside-down way. I don’t blame myself or the playground designer, and I certainly won’t stop my kids from going back to that same playground.

The playground bullying I experienced as a kid was nothing on the order of what is depicted in It or Lord of the Flies (which Stephen King cites as an influence). But it must have been real. I am thinking of a few other books – particularly the Great Brain series I enjoyed reading in my own childhood, in which kids attempted to beat up other kids for being Mormons, and at least in the stories the Mormon protagonists learned how to “whip” the other kids soundly enough to be left alone. Charles Bukowksi’s Ham on Rye also comes to mind, in which there is some very disturbing violent assault behavior between school-age boys. And like It, adults are aware of it and choose to do nothing, or even partake in one disturbing case. I tend to think all these authors may have drawn on personal experience.

I’ll close here with a few facts and figures. Along with the rise of teenage depression and suicidal thoughts, particularly in girls, which Haidt and others have pointed out, there is a global rise in mortality specifically among teenagers and young adults, which bucks an overall trend of falling mortality among people of all ages. People at this age don’t die of disease (sure, a few do, but statistically I’m just saying this is a healthy age). They are dying of “injury, violence, suicide, road traffic accidents and substance abuse”. So these are the figurative evil clowns in the sewer stalking our children as they come of age.

Happy Halloween 2025! Watch out for evil sewer clowns, but seriously, watch out for reckless drivers and don’t be one yourself.

building public transit faster and cheaper

Haden Clarkin, in a blog called The Transit Guy offers a “four step playbook” for building public transportation infrastructure in the United States. I’ll summarize and offer a few of my own reactions in brackets.

  • Develop a comprehensive vision, goals, and plan. [Yes, a lot of times people – especially my fellow engineers but also politicians trying to be helpful with funding – want to jump directly to “projects”. A “project” is a specific thing you want to build in a specific place. But it needs to be part of a larger plan to serve a larger purpose in the long term. This planning needs to be firmly in place when the “project” ideas come up and people are pushing for quick decisions on them. And you need a critical mass of people inside the organizations making the decisions, from senior management down to at least mid-level management, to really understand and buy into the plan. And you need to bring new people on board with the plan as you gradually lose institutional knowledge to political churn and attrition.]
  • Approve the plan through a voter referendum. In Haden’s vision, this cuts through a lot of the regulatory red tape later, because all the regulatory requirements tend to have extensive public buy-in and outreach requirements. A state-level referendum may also cut through some of localized NIMBY issues. [He’s writing in Rhode Island, and this may work there. We don’t really have state-level referenda in Pennsylvania, and I assume there is probably some constitutional reason for this. There are mechanisms for updating the constitution, and maybe we should work on this. We do have a big urban-rural divide issue in the state though, like many larger states. This might make it difficult to pass a state-level referendum focused on a metro area. It may be worth a try though.]
  • “Design and Plan it In-House”. [This is consultant hate. I happen to be a consultant who has worked with and been embedded within public agencies, and I think this is hogwash. Well, mostly hogwash. Sometimes public sector people mistakenly compare the hourly direct labor cost for their own people to the hourly cost of labor+benefits+overhead+profit of private sector consultants. Yes, there is a small profit in there, theoretically set by market competition. Competition for public-sector contracts is pretty ferocious, at least outside of the military-industrial complex. The true overhead and benefits cost to the public sector is often hard to define, but if you do an honest accounting of it, it is almost certainly higher than the private sector. Now, you want a public agency firmly in control of design, procurement, and construction of its projects. So it probably makes sense to set some benchmark like the majority of people working on a project should work for the public agency. But then it can make a lot of sense to bring in consultants both for their expertise and because they are a flexible work force you can surge in when needed and then scale back when no longer needed. You let them deal with those overhead and benefit costs so they don’t get out of control on the public side. You want strong technical people on the public side of course, but it is also really important to focus on strong project management, procurement, finance and accounting, and construction management expertise so you can make the best use of the private sector.]
  • Prioritize high impact and publicly visible projects first. [This makes total sense. I especially like the idea of building bus rapid transit lines early and converting them to light rail or even subway over time.]

There’s lots more, of course. Land use, housing, and zoning policy all play a role in building communities where there will actually be demand and support for public transportation. You probably need metro-scale and often multi-state authorities for design, construction, operation, and financing. That is big picture, long term context for the planning process. In my fantasy world, we wouldn’t just have a transportation plan for one municipality, but a comprehensive infrastructure plan (how about transportation, energy, water, communications, green infrastructure and food) at the metropolitan area scale.

US pedestrian deaths – facts and figures

Construction Physics has done a deep dive on US pedestrian fatality numbers. I really appreciate data-based articles like this. I think the answer to the question in their headline, “Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?”, is that our street and road designs are about 50 years out of date compared to best practice elsewhere in the world, and auto-oil-highway industry propaganda hides this fact from us and encourages us to blame the victims. They don’t really talk much about this in the article. But the article focuses on a slightly different question, which is why have fatalities increased significantly over the last 15 years or so? They look at the evidence for the “SUV hypothesis”, increases in drinking and drug use among both drivers and pedestrians, and distracted driving due to cell phones. The evidence seems to support the SUV hypothesis best, and this makes sense to me.

industrial robots in the U.S. and China

This article has some facts and figures on the stocks and installation rates of industrial robots in the U.S. and China, although the units are all over the place making it hard to compare the two, and hard to tell which numbers are rates or trends vs. totals. A note to journalists reporting data: make a table please. AI can even do this for you, you just need to fact check it. Also just check your article to make sure numbers and units are consistent within the article itself. AI can probably do at least a first round of checks (checking itself, if it wrote the article) although a human should do the last round. Maybe a good practice would be to have a different AI peer review the work of the first AI.

United StatesChina
total industrial robots in operation (2024)not reported“over 2 million”
new industrial robots installed in 202434,200295,000
robots installed per 10,000 workers295 (? units unclear and inconsistent)470 (? units unclear and inconsistent)
share of global total of industrial robotsnot reported54%

The US has some ideas and strategies and plans for how it could maybe begin to keep up or at least prevent the gap from widening. But you have to forgive me for being skeptical about our idea to implement plans and ideas. We sometimes hear that US workers are “the most productive in the world”. I would like to see some facts and figures on this. I assume we are talking about the dollar value of goods and services sold per hour of (human) work. And that would seem to be good on the face of things given that our unemployment rate remains low for the time being. But even if it remains low, we know the wealth is being horded by the top 1% and not shared with most of those highly productive workers. And if it is still true that we have a lead in labor productivity, you wonder how long we can expect that to last when we are gutting the research and education foundations of our past human capital and technological development.

Chinese government surveillance in Tibet

We hear a little bit about surveillance in Xinjiang in the international press, and even less about Tibet. But the situation is similar, according to this article on Eurasia.com (which I have no prior or independent knowledge of – the author of this article appears to be based in India and towards the bottom has some positive partisan things to say about India’s approach in Kashmir compared to China’s approach in Xinjiang and Tibet).

The AI-driven civilian surveillance systems deployed in the region are derived from military-grade C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) systems.

China has created a “widespread optical fibre cable network” and uses satellite stations (VSAT) to create an effective and secure command and control network across Tibet. Comprehensive broadband connections enable the government to monitor and control the flow of information…

The integration of a panoply of advanced technologies in Tibet  – AI-driven systems fusing facial recognition with internet browsing and app-based monitoring, DNA and genomic surveillance, and GIS tracking data – underlines the emergence of a terrifying approach to governance in the 21st century. It uses machine learning to power systems that prioritise state control and suppression over individual liberties and self-determination.

The situation in these Chinese provinces (and Gaza, which is a much more violent version) is interesting/concerning to me as an example of today’s surveillance and data management technologies taken to extremes in service of sinister social control. It’s probably happening other places that aren’t in the news, and probably happening in more subtle ways right under my nose as I write this.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

This new mutual defense pact between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan seems like a huge deal to me. My take is that after the Israeli attack on Qatar, Saudi Arabia has decided it can’t rely on the US nuclear umbrella to cover it. So they are formalizing a relationship whereby they bankroll Pakistan (and probably its shadowy security services with ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups) in exchange for a nuclear arsenal with their names on it. It seems likely to me that other Gulf countries that often move in lockstep with Saudi Arabia (UAE, Bahrain, Oman) might join this alliance. I don’t know about Qatar itself, after Saudi Arabia was threatening them militarily just a couple years ago. And they have never ramped up military spending while welcoming in the US military. No matter how you look at it, it is a loss for control of nuclear proliferation and US influence in the region. It very well may have the deterrent effect on Israel that these countries are looking for, but it seems to drag a whole range of large countries into a mesh of confusing and entangled alliances, including the US, India, and China.

7 of 9 planetary boundaries breached

The Planetary Health Check 2025 updates the status of Johan Rockstrom’s “planetary boundaries” using new data. I’ve pointed out that the indicators chosen are a sort of muddle of stocks and flows from a systems perspective, but nonetheless I think it is a good attempt at scientific communication. It distills complex underlying data into a set of indicators ordinary busy/distracted (I try to avoid words like “ignorant”, but the result is the same whether we can’t or won’t educate our selves) people can understand. I still like the “ecological footprint” concept personally because it is a single system-based metric, and you can drill down a level into its individual components if you want to. Nonetheless, it seems to be out of fashion and replaced by this. Anyway, 6 of 10 planetary boundaries were already previously outside the “safe space”, and this time ocean acidification is added to the list. Only ozone and stratospheric aerosol loading are in the safe space, and paradoxically the latter exacerbates global warming somewhat. There is some nuance, with indicators like nitrogen pollution and biodiversity loss in the “high risk zone” and others like land use and carbon dioxide in the increasing risk zone and headed in the wrong direction.

if a tree falls in the woods, and a microphone picks it up and is reviewed by an AI, who emails a human but the human doesn’t check their email, did it make a sound?

I’ve read the first couple chapters of This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. I don’t know if I’ll finish it, because I don’t seem to be in the mood for long non-fiction books at the moment. But there are some really interesting things. First, there is a definitive answer to the “if a tree falls in the woods…” question. The tree causes air and soil molecules to vibrate for sure. But for that to qualify as “sound”, it has to be detected by ears and transmitted to a brain, where it becomes sound. Squirrel ears can qualify, so the brain doesn’t happen to be human. In fact, scientists have put electrodes in animal brains and confirmed that they react to sound exactly as our brains do. So it’s interesting me to that we are born wired to understand music at a neural level – this is an instinct actually much more fundamental than language.

There’s some more interesting stuff. The reason a violin sounds different from a flute or a human voice has mostly to do with overtones – a note is not just a single pitch but many mathematically related pitches where the strength varies between pitches. (Some people say the violin is the most beautiful instrument because it is most like the human voice. I say this is an insult to violins.) There is also the “attack”, which is the percussive noise made when sound first starts on a given instrument, which is chaotic for a short period of time before stabilizing. Then there is reverberation or echo of the space the instrument happens to be in (as I was musing about pipe organs recently, you could think of the space as part of the instrument since it is so fundamental to the sound). Pipe organs are particularly interesting because they give the organist control over which overtones are sounded at various strengths. Digital synthesizers are intended to do exactly this, but I think anyone with well-functioning ears can still detect the difference between a synthetic sound and one produced by physical instruments. Then again, as most of the music we hear these days is recorded and played back, we are probably losing a lot of nuance of what the instruments sound like at the same time the synthesizing technology is continuing to improve.

Charlie Stross on renewable energy

I always enjoy Charlie Stross‘s take on things. He’s a fiction writer, sure, but he seems to have his finger on the pulse of politics and technology, and from an international perspective. He says he is writing more escape fiction now because his past near-future dystopian writings have come true, and that is too depressing to write any more. I still love the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes series though. Anyway, his ideas below are consistent with some recent thoughts I’ve expressed that market incentives have actually shifted to favor renewable energy and electrification, but in the U.S. at least a massive onslaught of oil and gas industry propaganda is successfully keeping us from realizing what we are missing…

Renewables have definitively won: last year it became cheaper to buy and add new photovoltaic panels to the grid in India than it was to mine coal from existing mines to burn in existing power stations. China, with its pivot to electric vehicles, is decarbonizing fast enough to have already passed its net zero goals for 2030: we have probably already passed peak demand for oil. PV panels are not only dirt cheap by the recent standards of 2015: they’re still getting cheaper and they can be rolled out everywhere…

The oil and coal industries have tens of trillions of dollars of assets stranded underground, in the shape of fossil fuel deposits that are slightly too expensive to exploit commercially at this time. The historic bet was that these assets could be dug up and burned later, given that demand appeared to be a permanent feature of our industrial landscape. But demand is now falling, and sooner or late their owners are going to have to write off those assets because they’ve been overtaken by renewables.

Politics and propaganda can’t buck economic forces forever (because economic forces are ultimately, eventually constrained by our real physical universe). The question is how long these trends can take to play out. Charlie says he doesn’t expect to see it, and this is sad to me. I am one decade younger, and that makes my odds only a little bit better. Unlike Charlie, I am not an extremely talented writer making a gift of the contents of my brain to the entire world. Lately it has been making me sad when I learn that the author of a book or series I have enjoyed is dead. I find myself looking up what age they died and what they died from, and wondering what is going to come for me and when. Sad, I know. Such is the existential dread of late middle age.