Category Archives: Web Article Review

McKinsey on high-growth industries

McKinsey has a post with a data visualization on industries it predicted in 2022 would be growing quickly by now (May 2026 as I write), versus how they actually turned out. I find it interesting both for the industries/technologies themselves and for which are overperforming and underperforming. Overperforming ones include, of course, “AI software and services” and semiconductors. Robotics, however, has not kept up with expectations at least in terms of widespread commercialization (I think it is still coming, just behind schedule). Electric vehicles are also both high-growth and overperforming, while “shared autonomous vehicles” are high growth and were not considered in the original study due to “negligible baseline revenue” – more evidence that in the U.S. we are being duped as this combination of technologies explodes globally. Interestingly, batteries have not kept up with expectations as a high-growth, profitable industry/investment even though we know the technology itself has seen massive improvements in cost-efficiency. Biotechnology is a mixed bag – “obesity drugs” have exploded while “non-medical biotechnology” has seen no growth in the profitable investment sense. The holy grail of turbocharging construction productivity by making it more like manufacturing (“modular construction”) is about 50 years behind schedule. Maybe the robots can help with this eventually. And finally, even with all our fossil fuel woes the nuclear energy industry never seems able to capitalize, probably because of its long lead times and public risk-aversion on this particular technology.

My big picture analysis – technological progress is slow and steady, but when it comes to which will “hit” in a widespread profitable commercialization/investment sense, it is hard to identify the needles in the haystack at least in any sense of precise timing. In a personal investing sense, you can either gamble and go for broke, or you can diversify and be patient. In a broader economic sense, governments can use policy to try to give a particular industry a nudge, but there is a gambling aspect to this too, and my view is they would be better off focusing on reducing economic friction (great infrastructure, ease of starting a business, predictability, level playing field in terms of taxes and regulation) while protecting the environment and workers. Maybe provide childcare, health care, and education so people can start a business without worrying about those things, and have healthy skilled workers available when they do.

https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/The-race-takes-off-in-the-next-big-arenas-of-competition

Global Environmental Outlook 7

The UN has a new UN-speak report on what we need to do to fix the global environment. The simplest take-home message is an economic one – the benefits greatly exceed the costs, but it requires up-front investment blah blah blah. UN-speak is off-putting to many, so talented politicians and other leaders need to translate it to platforms and policies that speak to us, and then do it. There’s a full report, an executive summary, and key messages from the executive summary. I’ll highlight just a few actions here in my own words:

  • Eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies in the energy, food, and mining industries.
  • Internalize external costs – the good old “Pigouvian taxes” that raise revenue and/or encourage behavior, and we win either way.
  • Alternative/supplemental measures of progress besides GDP
  • Circular economy – recycling and reducing waste
  • Renewable energy phase-in and fossil fuel phase-out
  • Electrify everything – transportation, manufacturing, housing/buildings, and agriculture

Nature-based solutions and conservation of natural ecosystems seem to be important things missing from from this list, but those are in other reports of course. Still, I find it strange to make a distinction between “ecosystems” and the “environment”.

Has Trump pulled off the equivalent of a politically impossible global carbon tax?

Well, certainly not on purpose! He almost certainly thinks he is advancing the agenda of nominally US-based multinational oil companies. But by limiting the supply of oil and gas world wide, he has at least temporarily brought about the peak oil scenario that seemed to be fashionable a decade or two ago, and then mostly forgotten as it looked like new fossil fuel discoveries and exploitation technologies, along with non-fossil-fuel technologies, might outstrip any hard limit in the (economically viable) geologic supply.

But now we get to find out what an actual hard limit on supply looks like. It won’t be permanent – we can speculate months to years. But electrification technology was already a snowball rolling downhill in Asia, and this will just accelerate the takeover of electric vehicles, even if effective propaganda is hiding this from the U.S. public. Governments like Thailand’s are making rational policy choices such as incentivizing trade-in of internal combustion engines for electric. The economic incentive to do this is there, and has been slowed down until now only by infrastructure lock-in and path dependence. Even if this disruption is measured in months or years, the technology will continue to progress even in that time, and rational governments will realize this shut-down situation can happen again in the future and that they can mitigate the risk. So thank you to the one-man wrecking ball who has made all this short-term pain (i.e., horrible suffering and death for many, many human beings which I don’t mean to make light of) and long-term gain possible! (Now, you could say, and I admit, that with electrification coal will be substituted for oil and gas in the near to medium term, and this is not a win for the environment. I actually don’t know if it is a net win or loss, when you consider the greater efficiency of electrification over mobile internal combustion engines. But the incentives still favor renewables longer-term, and the incentives get stronger and stronger as renewables continue to get cheaper while coal as far as I know does not.)

A coalition of the willing implementing an international carbon tax is still a theoretical possibility. Here is one article on what that could look like. It is hard for me to imagine politically, but let’s say a group of large non-oil-producing economies, led for example by China, India, and the Asian Development Bank, decided they were going to do this and impose equivalent border-adjustment taxes (legal under the WTO I think not that this seems to matter any more) on all trading partners not doing it.

An international plan for sustainable development

International cooperation on climate and taxation remains inadequate to deliver decarbonisation, reduce poverty, and finance sustainable development at the required scale. We propose a Sustainable Union among willing countries, combining carbon pricing, new taxes on wealth, polluting fuels, financial transactions, and corporate income, with international revenue-sharing and conditional cooperation mechanisms. Most revenues would remain with participating governments for domestic spending, while a defined share would be pooled internationally. Specifically, participating countries would contribute 1% of gross national income (GNI) to a common pool redistributed in proportion to population, generating net transfers from richer to poorer countries. Meanwhile, the remainder of the revenue would increase domestic fiscal space by on average 2.2% of GNI. Although politically ambitious, such a framework might be credible, as governments are already advancing related forms of voluntary cooperation, and survey evidence indicates that it would be supported by majorities worldwide.

Is Russia really a match for western Europe economically or militarily?

Here’s some fun with the CIA World Factbook, courtesy of Gemini, not fact-checked by me. This might have taken me at least half an hour to an hour to pull together in the past, which means I probably wouldn’t have done it today given other things I have to get to. Anyway, I hear suggestions that Russia is going to inevitably attack western European countries. That just doesn’t make any sense. Russia is a military power only because it spends 7% of its GDP on the military, and at the moment its military is battle-hardened from recent conflict. Very roughly speaking, its military spending is on the order of double the UK, France, or Germany (any one of those). But the GDP of any one of these western European countries is on the order of double Russia’s GDP. So attack them directly, and Russia might have a short-term advantage but they will be able to overwhelm Russia over time. That’s any one. If those three countries stick together, they can steamroll Russia once they get into a war economy mode. And add in the rest of Europe or NATO not including the US, and the comparison is laughable. Add in the US, and Russia would be fighting a literally an order-of-magnitude larger enemy. So maybe, as some are suggesting, Russia would consider attacking a small NATO country like Estonia or Finland, but it seems like a huge gamble to me. And they seem to be pretty coldly rational to me. It’s seems more likely they will try to consolidate their control over the remaining non-NATO eastern European countries, and be content that they have stopped the eastward expansion of NATO dead in its tracks for the foreseeable future if not for generations. This last was probably their primary objective in attacking Ukraine, and it has been achieved.

EntityGDP (USD)Military Spending (USD)Military Spending (% of GDP)
NATO (Total)~$52.10 Trillion$1.59 Trillion~3.0%
United States~$30.62 Trillion$980.0 Billion3.2%
NATO (excluding USA)~$21.48 Trillion$610.0 Billion2.8%
European Union~$19.40 Trillion$427.0 Billion2.2%
Germany~$4.66 Trillion$93.2 Billion2.0%
United Kingdom~$3.56 Trillion$81.8 Billion2.3%
France~$3.08 Trillion$64.7 Billion2.1%
Russia~$2.10 Trillion$149.0 Billion7.1%

methylsiloxanes

All we have to do is look, and we find more “forever chemicals” all throughout the environment and our bodies. This just adds to my suspicion that classes of chemicals like PFAS and microplastics (and before that lead, DDT, etc.) might not be the most pervasive or dangerous chemicals out there, but merely the ones we have put under the magnifying glass so far. Similarly, we put the Covid-19 virus under many microscopes for many years and found all kinds of things it does to our bodies and brains. But if we put similar scrutiny on other microorganisms, who knows what we might find?

A new study shows that a specific type of silicone, the so-called methylsiloxanes, is widely present in the atmosphere across diverse environments. Also, concentrations appear to be much higher than expected. According to the researchers, this raises concerns about their potential—yet poorly understood—effects on human health and the climate. Methylsiloxanes are commonly used in industry, transportation, cosmetics, and household products. The study was supervised by Utrecht University and the University of Groningen, and the results are published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

I’m probably a broken record on this, but chemistry really does make our modern lives safer and more convenient overall. Without water disinfection, food preservatives, antibiotics, vaccines, dental anesthesia, etc., our lives would be nasty, brutish, and short indeed, as they were before we had those things. We don’t want to give up the benefits of useful chemicals, but we also should always be searching for non-toxic alternatives that give us the same benefits.

vehicle-to-grid (or detachable, mobile batteries)

That’s right, your electric car could theoretically serve as a battery for your electric house that can detach itself and move around during the day. Not only that, but you could theoretically sell energy back to the grid – “vehicle to grid” – that you don’t need during times of peak demand. It all makes a lot of sense, although predictably the US grid is not up to date enough to fully support this. We can be hopeful though that utilities will make rational choices as they look at grid updates and vehicle-to-grid policies vs. building new generation capacity.

Of course, if mobility is going to be more of a convenient on-demand service as opposed to buying a machine that puts me in debt and takes up a quarter of my house, I personally would rather buy the battery without the vehicle. In fact, if it is profitable to do so, I don’t see why a group of homeowners or investors wouldn’t get together and invest in a battery farm. Or how about a battery+data+solar farm? So it seems to me that if this policy change is made, it could drive significant change in behavior and physical infrastructure.

robots and sidewalks

We’re starting to see those Uber Eats robots on the sidewalks here, and they are spurring some renewed interest in the poor state of the city’s sidewalks. Now, I am surprised they don’t just design the things with bigger tires, as many parents have figured out that a “jogging stroller” can navigate our decrepit streets much better than a stroller with small tires designed for a fully ADA-compliant mall.

Anyway, since sidewalks here are the legal responsibility of private property owners, it occurs to me that Uber could start suing people if they wanted. It seems they would have a valid argument of economic damages. And trip-and-fall lawsuits, or the threat thereof, are a primary motivator of the sidewalk repairs that do happen, as this article in The Philadelphia Citizen points out.

But other cities have figured out better ways, which the article has a nice run-down of:

The 2022 ordinance enabled a straightforward deal: The City of Denver assumed all responsibility for sidewalks in exchange for property owners’ financial support. Denver began collecting a $150 annual fee from property owners and putting it towards citywide sidewalk maintenance. Last summer, Denver announced $75 million in repairs and construction from that fund.

Denver is a bold example, but it’s not alone. In many cities, residents don’t have to shoulder the full burden of sidewalk repairs. Chicago has a popular “shared cost sidewalk program” that has been running for decades and uses City resources to incentivize property owners to repair pedestrian walkways. Citizens pay a maximum of $2,400 — and typically around $1,000 — to participate, costs which are comparable to what a private contractor would charge. Cities like San Jose, NM and Memphis, TN have similar shared-cost programs.

And then there’s Washington, D.C., where a 6-year, $115 million effort to improve sidewalks is underway. The local government established a goal of building 8 miles of new sidewalks each year and repairing up to 40 miles of existing ones — work that aims to satisfy both the Vision Zero initiative and the Office of Disability Rights’ Olmstead Plan. In D.C., the land between a property and the curb is publicly owned, making it easier for the government to intervene. But the decision to prioritize sidewalks and enact a cohesive plan are actions that every city could seek to emulate.

Of course, people hate new taxes, and are only partially fooled by not-even-tax-deductible taxes disguised as service charges and fees. There’s also a complex issue this article doesn’t go into, which is that by making private property owners legally responsible for obviously public sidewalks, the city also makes them legally responsible for arguably public infrastructure underneath such as water, sewer, and gas pipes. But the point is that these programs solve a problem and give us value back in a more efficient manner than the non-system we have now.

Academic publishing beyond the current citation regime

This blog post from someone named David Oks pines for a time before citations became a central pillar in the effort to advance scientific publishing. Thank you Mr. Oks for sharing your views, which got me thinking. I am not sure I agree 100%, because an important part of civilization and science is our ability to document the state of knowledge so that each successive generation can build on it. But the point is taken that the extreme focus on gaming this one metric (number of citations, citation scores of individual academics and journals) has become an end in itself, rather than a means for advancing civilization and science.

I do think AI can be very good at improving the state of the “literature review”. Every scientific article starts with a summary of literature on the topic, which the authors then typically build on (although, some articles are just literature review). A human author can spend years sifting through a vast amount of literature relevant to a topic, particularly a novel or interdisciplinary topic, trying to find those few needles in a haystack that are really the most, say, 100 highly relevant papers, and synthesize them into a foundation that can be built on it. I have done this, and it is actually a very fun thing to do (for my personality type, I suppose, not for everyone, but there are many like me…) Through this process, you gradually build and refine your own unique mental model on a subject which then can become the foundation for your personal unique contribution to human progress. However, even spending years, you can’t come close to looking at everything possibly relevant, and you can miss some of those needles. An AI should be able to look at literally the entire haystack, find and synthesize the needles, in a matter of minutes or at most hours, compared to months or years for a person. The only sad thing here is that the best mental models in the brains of the smartest humans might not be built in the same way. Overall though, I suspect the rate of progress can be increased significantly.

What is an alternative to the citation regime according to Mr. Oks?

So I suspect that we’ll have to fundamentally rethink the institutions of scientific life for the age of strong AI. Perhaps, as AI makes it possible to do much more science much more quickly, the culture of science will become more like the culture of engineering—faster, more collaborative, less interested in priority claims. In such a world, the most efficient unit of scientific contribution might be a living document, perhaps even just a GitHub repo: something with data, code, analysis, and a thin narrative layer that AI scientists could read, regenerate, or update as needed. And citations, in this world, could ultimately become obsolete. Journal articles would survive, though perhaps they’d become something closer to definitive pronouncements on major breakthroughs or on the state of knowledge in a given domain—a bit like what scientific books were before the rise of journals. In a world where science is much more productive than it is today, legitimacy will be the scarce factor in the production of useful scientific knowledge.

I am not sure I have experienced the culture of engineering described here in my own engineering career, but this may be referring to something more like “product development” rather than the public infrastructure and environmental planning type work I do. Anyway, my idea of AI-backed knowledge synthesis plus this idea of open data and code may be on to something.

e-scooter hate

Here’s a Canadian e-scooter hit-piece. You definitely won’t find me on an e-scooter in Philadelphia, because both the outdated infrastructure and driver behavior make it much more risky than I could ever accept. But that suggests the solution: rethinking and modernizing infrastructure. E-scooters belong in the “bike lanes”, and bike lanes need to be modernized to accommodate all sorts of light personal vehicles. They need to be separated and physically protected from high-momentum vehicles designed for inter-city highway travel, and if they are combined with infrastructure for these high-momentum vehicles at all, they need their own signals at intersections so that the two are never, ever in conflict.

You need some enforcement, but we should remember that the core reason for all the traffic rules, licensing, registration, insurance, sobriety checkpoints, search and seizure, personal injury litigation, etc. is that cars are just so deadly. Yes, there are anecdotes of bikes and scooters running into each other and running into pedestrians and causing the occasional injury, but most of those are not going to be serious. So there is a question of how much we want to constrain personal freedom (as we do very significantly and appropriately with private cars) when it comes to much less dangerous forms of transportation (now, about those aggressive jogging strollers…)

I might allow autonomous golf carts traveling at low speeds (5-15 mph maybe) in the bike lanes, although today’s bike lanes are not wide enough for that. I might just ban private high-momentum human-driven vehicles from most streets and let the golf carts use them. Cities need this if forms other than cars are going to be viable forms of transportation in all kinds of weather for all kinds of people, and not just a from of recreation for the young and healthy. Of course, at this point the cyclists and e-scootists might decide they want to use the street too, and that might end up being okay. And then, especially if we don’t need so much space for parking as shared autonomous vehicles and human-powered transportation modes become more practical, we can turn part of what used to be the bike lane and sidewalk into gardens, affordable housing, or whatever a city needs. It’s a nice vision, and anything in the urban U.S. public infrastructure context has just taken much, much longer to progress than I would have thought in my youth. But I hold out some hope the breakthrough of autonomous electric vehicles, which is inevitable, could catalyze some faster change.

yes, the CIA is still meddling in other countries’ affairs (and also, because we appear to need it, a reminder that the word “peace” means NON-violence)

If we need some confirmation that the CIA played a role in the January 2026 Iran street protests, here is Fox News journalist Trey Yingst seemingly quoting an interview with Donald Trump. The quote is ‘ “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them,” President Trump told me. “And I think the Kurds took the guns.” ‘

Now, this is an X video of a Fox News segment where an informal conversation with Trump is quoted. It’s Fox News, which of course is known to spin. But (1) it is a major news outlet that doesn’t usually lie outright, even if it spins and (2) this seems to be a respected professional journalist, not an opinion piece. So I give it some weight as having a significant probability of truth.

The CIA messing in other countries’ elections and opposition movements is not a new thing, of course, and it is not only the US that does this. European countries, Russia, and China certainly do it. In fact, the US did it in Iran in the 1950s, and that event is seen as a significant reason Iran and the Iran-US relationship are where they are today.

Maybe the invasion was intended to back up the protests, as Trump blustered at the time that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded”. So it makes me wonder if the protests broke out earlier than they were supposed to, when the US military was not ready, or if they broke out when they were supposed to but the US military was just not ready, or Trump just failed to pull the trigger at the planned moment. Nothing I am saying here justifies the illegal, unprovoked war of aggression on the sovereign nation of Iran. I am just saying it appears to be an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression that was also 100% incompetently handled. We are ruled by evil fools, not evil geniuses.

This also causes me to give more weight to the Russian claim that the CIA meddled in Ukraine’s affairs in 2014, stirring up an opposition movement that deposed a possibly fairly elected pro-Russian government. The back story on this is that first, a pro-Russian government was forced out by the street protests. But then there was an election, which brought a pro-Europe/US/NATO government to power, and was certified as free and fair by impartial international bodies. So far so good, but the pro-Russian parts of Ukraine largely did not participate because they were either under Russian occupation – Crimea – or occupied by pro-Russian local militia types – Donbas. So there was meddling on all sides, and much more direct and openly violent meddling by the Russian side. Then later, these events were used to justify the Russian invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine, which can have no legal or moral justification.

So if cooler heads ever prevail, we need to re-establish the idea of respect for soveignty. And the US could even go so far as to say it is not going to meddle in the affairs of other countries any more, other than through open diplomatic means and through international bodies. Doing this unilaterally might seem naive, since other countries would almost certainly continue their meddling – the classic prisoner’s dilemma, which also derails so many attempts at rational arms control. But when you consider that the meddling seems to lead to undesirable outcomes more often than not, maybe it would not be naive after all. We can cite any number of conflicts from the overthrow of the elected Iranian government in the 1950s, the mostly forgotten Indonesian genocide also in the 1950s which killed half a million people, support for the Taliban in the 1980s which led to 9/11, and name pretty much any country in Latin America. So my modest proposal is we just stop. Recommit to peace (but now thanks to the fool in the White House we have to actually state that this means NON-violence) and support for democracy and human rights through diplomacy and participation in legitimate international bodies.

Well, that turned into a rant I didn’t necessarily see coming. If you got this far, whether you agree or disagree, thanks for hearing me out!