Category Archives: Web Article Review

Prospera, Trump, Thiel and the Honduras drug trafficking pardon

The former president of Honduras, Juan Hernandez, who was convicted of drug trafficking and then pardoned by Trump, has ties to Peter Thiel and the “charter city” Prospera. I keep tabs on Prospera, as I was initially interested in the charter city idea after hearing a lecture by Paul Romer (a Nobel prize winning economist). The original concept, which was about economic opportunity, efficiency, and clarity of mission, has morphed into something far more corrupt and ugly.

This governing arrangement was organized in part by Hernández, who served two terms as president of Honduras from 2014 until January 2022. Prospera was permitted to launch the charter city after Hernández allowed for the creation of semiautonomous Zones for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDEs. The ZEDEs were then overseen by a committee that included three of Hernández’s underlings and several American libertarian activists.

So there you have it. I am not saying this is proof that Prospera is the reason for the pardon. But what we see in the press is a lot of puzzlement that the U.S. government can be simultaneously fighting an anti-drug war on the Venezuelan government and supporting a pro-drug former Honduran government. This is logically inconsistent. On the other hand, simultaneously supporting right-wing big business interests in Venezuela (think oil contracts if not outright ownership for US corporations) and right-wing big business interests in Honduras is logically consistent (not to mention corrupt and cynical).

what’s new in the JFK files?

What’s new is evidence that James Angleton at the CIA was personally tracking Oswald, and (separately, really), extensive ties between Angleton and the nuclear proliferation project of Israeli intelligence. The historical backdrop at this time, also based on evidence, is that JFK was actively and vocally resisting said nuclear proliferation. None of which seems to be a smoking gun with fresh fingerprints, just another party with motive and opportunity.

Though Angleton insisted that the agency was inattentive to Oswald and unaware of the purpose of his activities leading up to Dallas, it has since been disclosed through unclassified JFK assassination records that Angleton personally maintained a classified 201 intelligence/surveillance file on Oswald for the four years preceding Kennedy’s assassination, strictly controlling which officials inside the CIA were permitted to see it through compartmentalization.

Angleton committed perjury before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, claiming he knew almost nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting. In another, Angleton concealed the fact that Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City—a visit the CIA publicly claimed it only discovered after the assassination. As Jefferson Morley, author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, explained, the  counter-intelligence chief “preferred to wait out the Warren Commission rather than explain the CIA’s knowledge of and interest in Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate” in Mexico…

At the very moment a U.S. president was seeking to restrict Israel’s nuclear ambitions and limit the political power of its lobby in Washington, the CIA official in control of the Oswald file was secretly sharing intelligence channels, assassination communications, and off-the-books operatives with Israel—and lying to both Congress and potentially some of his own CIA colleagues about it. The government spent 60 years redacting those facts and Americans have a right to know why.

I might ask how many agents (come on, yes, Oswald was a CIA agent/informant/collaborator of some sort) Angleton had files on. Hundreds? Thousands? or just a few? Did having a file folder with your name on it really make you special?

what to do after those holiday meals

I don’t put too much stock in online nutrition and fitness advice, but here is what at least one article (Fashion Beans) suggests in the day or two after overindulgence.

  • Day 1: Start by drinking a whole bunch of water to start flushing salt from the system. Delay caffeine intake for an hour or two (ha, no chance I would ever do this, I have my priorities.) Basically just eat protein, vegetables, and a little bit of vegetable-based fat the rest of the day (hopefully there are some of these amongst the leftovers.) Take a 10-minute walk after every meal (probably never a bad idea). Exercise, but only lightly (as defined by the fitness bro who probably wrote this post.) Give alcohol a break. Get a solid sleep (they say 7.5 hours, sounds a bit overprecise to me).
  • Day 2: Lots of yogurt and fruit and more protein for breakfast.

And that’s it. Sounds totally fine for general health advice. We know what we are supposed to do right? Sleep, exercise, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, protein, approved fats and oils in moderation. 0-1 alcoholic beverages per day and avoid sugar and processed foods almost entirely. Do this for a couple days and you will probably feel decent whether you behaved badly on day 0 or not, I would think. Behave badly for several days in a row, as at least I tend to do over holiday breaks and on vacation, and you might start to feel pretty crappy. So here’s the best piece of advice I can give: Do as I say, not as I do!

what’s next for (incremental improvement of commercial) AI

We normals are hearing in the media that the large language model approach to AI has run its course, that further scaling it up is prohibitive in terms of energy, and that there is an AI-hype-driven financial bubble ready to pop any moment. According to at least one blogger though, the big breakthrough happening right now is having these models “reason” internally before they give an answer.

Two of those leading engineers are: Julian Schrittwieser who helped teach AlphaGo how to play Go at a level never witnessed in human history and is now a lead researcher at Anthropic. And Łukasz Kaiser, who whilst at Google Brain, co‑authored the paper that launched the architecture now driving every major released model on “Attention is all you need”…

Kaiser, for his part, corrects time horizons. The category of work that still belongs unquestioned to humans is shrinking. He states, with a deep belief, that these AI systems will be able to do any labor task currently performed on a computer within a timeframe of five years! …

The question is not whether machines will pass some imagined threshold in the future, but what it means that they have already crossed thresholds we still debate as hypothetical. A society reacts to what it believes is true, not to what is true. When the prevailing public understanding is delayed by years, institutions are, by definition, operating in a prior decade.

We can model technological progress as a series of sequential, overlaid S-curves that have to overlap in just such a way to produce continuous exponential growth. At least some insiders are still thinking in terms of keeping this S-curve going, in a competition between companies and countries. And when we see a new technology break through into widespread public, commercial use, it has already been going in the lab for awhile. That used to be measured in decades, now it is months if these optimist insider voices are to be believed.

https://onepercentrule.substack.com/p/is-ai-on-a-new-trajectory

ASCE 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure

The American Society of Civil Engineers (of which I am a member) has released their every-four-years assessment of U.S. infrastructure. Why every four years? Once per presidential cycle I assume, and maybe they aim for about a year after the election to avoid being overly political? Because the goal here is to influence policy and keep the taps flowing with money for infrastructure projects that engineers will work on. It’s a lobbying group and it’s a big business, but nonetheless they try to be objective and infrastructure investment is needed.

The “letter grades” thing is kind of a gimmick, but an effective one I think for getting headlines and communicating with the media and the political class. Then there is more detailed information that interested people, or hopefully people who might be drafting future legislation, can dig into. What is most interesting to me personally is the references.

Anyway, to summarize, the Biden infrastructure spending is slowly working its way through the system and this has resulted in some improvement. I think this is Biden’s true positive legacy, whether he eventually gets any credit for it or not. But the report comes across as pleading for the country to sustain the slightly increased momentum created by the Biden-era funding bill. In my ideal world, infrastructure wouldn’t be funded by One Big Bill once a generation, but continuously as it is needed. And the way for the federal and state governments to do it, I have always thought, would be in a counter-cyclical manner during recessions. Planning should be regional in nature, with local projects that are consistent with long-term planning goals ready to go as funding becomes available. Some funding should be local, because the local community needs skin in the game. Federal and state governments could then match this local investment at a higher or lower level depending on what is happening in the economy. And there needs to be money for the full life cycle including maintenance/repair/upgrade/replacement, not just for new construction. And that is my personal broken-record infrastructure rant from this one civil engineer, thank you for listening.

environmental economics, behavioral economics, and [E]cological [E]conomics

The journal Ecological Economics has as long article on the history of…ecological economics, which it invented. I started through the article a bit skeptical, and became absorbed. They are now trying to figure out how behavioral economics fits in. There is a ton of interesting stuff here, and I am not sure I can even begin to summarize it.

The basic tenet in Ecological Economics (EE) is eloquently stated in the seminal paper by (Røpke, 2004, p. 296): “the human economy is embedded in nature, and economic processes are also always natural processes”. The field gained formal recognition with the founding of the International Society for Ecological Economics in 1988, followed by the launch of the journal Ecological Economics in 1989 and the first international conference in 1990 (Røpke, 2004). It emerged after several unsuccessful attempts to make environmental economics more grounded in physical reality and less constrained by its rigid methodological assumptions. In response to this rigidity, the scholars who founded the EE society and journal opted for openness: any opinion or method could in principle be considered, debated and possibly dismissed only ex post. This stance reflects EE’s commitment to methodological pluralism (Norgaard, 1989), rooted in the belief that no single approach can adequately capture the full complexity of socio-ecological challenges.

That’s the beginning. It goes on like that for a long time. Note that “environmental economics”, which essentially extends the logic of traditional economics to properly deal with external costs and benefits, is not good enough according to the founders of ecological economics. Essentially, we need to acknowledge that the human economy is embedded in the natural world, not the other way around. Behavioral economics extends traditional economics to account for how real individuals (humans, firms) reach conclusions and make decisions, which falls short of pure rationality. The ecological economics crowd says this focus on individual decisions was the breakthrough that allowed behavioral economics to break through into the field of traditional economics. But this is also not good enough because our decisions and actions as a society are more than just the sum of decisions and actions by all the individual actors. That’s my take-home summary, but the article puts it much better backed by evidence and academic studies. Worth a read.

RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS

Anybody who says renewable energy is a drag on the economy or a hoax is either misinformed or lying. Below are the numbers, from Financial Times.

https://www.ft.com/content/d0c25a97-cb18-4e7d-aeb3-8f5a93b9b2c1

The fossil fuel industry is fighting for its life through propaganda and bribery of public officials (which is legal in the United States). They can’t win in the end, but they may be able to obscure the truth from at least the U.S. public for a few more decades, which may take our entire planetary civilization down with them.

AI-mediated transportation asset management

This article is called “Cities and states are turning to AI to improve road safety“. Basically the concept is to pay private vehicle owners to install dashboard cameras which take video of street conditions and feed it into a central database. What makes it “AI” seems to be computer-assisted analysis of the videos.

This all makes sense to me, although I wonder if you just put this technology on all the public fleet vehicles out there (buses, police cars, fire trucks, public works vehicles, maybe partner with utility companies) if that would be enough.

I do like the idea of focusing more on the infrastructure itself when it comes to safety, rather than vehicles and their drivers which is essentially blaming the victim. With gradual advent of autonomous vehicles, I see a shift in attitudes towards zero tolerance of deaths and injuries. Early on, my thought was that this was unfair because human-controlled vehicles cause so many deaths and injuries and we tend to think of these as inevitable. But as I have thought about it more, the public has essentially zero tolerance for deaths and injuries on any form of public transportation, whether trains, buses, or planes. It is time we held motor vehicles and the infrastructure they are traveling on to this same standard, and the trend seems to be in that direction.

The other positive trend here is a core principle of asset management itself. We all know infrastructure is expensive and difficult to build and maintain, but it does wear out and need to be repaired and eventually replaced. Each time you do a repair or a replacement, you have a chance to upgrade at low or sometimes no extra cost. Any single piece of infrastructure lasts a long time, but there are always things wearing out here and there throughout the system. So if you have a solid vision of where you want to go and you make those repair/replace/upgrade decisions consistent with it, small changes can add up to big system change over time, and this can be done cost-effectively. We don’t need “AI” to do this necessarily, but if calling it AI helps us get over the psychological hurdle to actually make it happen, let’s go for it!

Culdesac Tempe

This is basically just a real estate development with no parking. It’s on a light rail line, and the main idea seems to be to embrace micromobility (bikes, scooters, autonomous taxis) for people to get around. It doesn’t seem hugely pathbreaking to me, but I think what might make it seem pathbreaking to suburban Americans is that the bikes, scooters, human beings, and cars are not in conflict with each other. This is so simple, and yet so pathbreaking. It’s also pathbreaking because it’s in greater Phoenix. We assume this can’t be done in American cities because when we choose to devote most of our space to car maneuvering and car storage, there is not also room for the bikes, scooters, and human beings.

Are recessions good?

Recessions have become more rare in recent decades, and you have to leave it to the Economist to suggest that this might be a bad thing. Well, the Economist and Joseph Schumpeter, who is my personal favorite economist.

Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist, argued that they provoke “creative destruction”. Failing firms leave the market, capital decamps to more promising technologies and workers move to more productive jobs. The result is short-term pain and long-term gain. Schumpeter did not argue that politicians should deliberately engineer downturns. But nor did he think they should try to prevent them. “Depressions are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress,” he wrote. They represent “something which has to be done”.

In my many grade-school years of American history (which seemed to be the only kind of history I ever got, unless you count that one year of Virginia history I had to take), I remember my eyes glazing over when hearing about “the panic of 18XX”. Where “XX” represents pretty much any odd numbered year during that century. It just seemed to be a wild and woolly time with no central banks, regulation, or consumer protections. Lots of people got rich, and lots of people lived in what we used to call “third world” conditions.

It makes sense to me that businesses should not be overly insulated from the consequences of the risks they take, while ordinary people mostly should. So this points to not a lot of bailouts for inefficient industries, coupled with robust social insurance like unemployment and disability. In the U.S. though, what I see is big business capturing the government and successfully insulating itself from the consequences of risk taking, which suppresses competition and Schumpeter-esque innovation. We do sort of seem to get the unemployment thing right though, when push comes to shove, which worked out pretty well during the pandemic. People who were employed when the pandemic hit seemed to do okay. People who were not employed fell through the cracks of course, as they tend to do in our system. And if they turned to drug or alcohol abuse, they fell even further due to our lack of universal health care.

So my quasi-libertarian prescription here, which I think Schumpeter and even Hayek might approve of, is to let the companies compete and innovate, or die. Let them hire and fire at will. But workers need to be protected by robust unemployment, disability, health care and child care programs. The government needs to raise and then redistribute revenue to do this, but everybody comes out ahead in the aggregate except a few fat cats at the top who would rather use their wealth and power to rig the system in their favor than have to compete and innovate. Recessions are also the time to double down on infrastructure, research and development, education and training funding which underpin long-term productivity growth and innovation of an advanced economy. I think Schumpeter’s ghost would love that!