Category Archives: Web Article Review

green ammonia

The idea behind green ammonia is to use renewable energy (solar, wind, etc.) to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be combined with nitrogen gas from the air in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. This is the same as what is done now, except that the most common process is to split the hydrogen off from natural gas, which results in carbon dioxide emissions.

Ammonia is used on a large scale as a fertilizer, so switching to this process would reduce emissions (and wouldn’t make the problem of excess nitrogen reaching our groundwater and surface water any worse, or better). I didn’t realize that ammonia could be burned for fuel. This article explains that even though burning it is less efficient than just burning the hydrogen gas, it is easier to move and store than hydrogen. Burning it does produce nitrogen oxide, which is also a greenhouse gas, but you can use a catalytic convertor to remove that.

It’s not mentioned in this article, but it should also be possible in principle to extract either nitrogen gas or ammonia directly from wastewater and farm waste, which if used as fertilizer would create a closed loop and actually help our ground and surface water at the same time it is helping our atmosphere. This sounds like a win-win-win for me, but it would have a cost, and the cost would have to be paid by the parties producing the pollution now rather than paid by all of us collectively in the future as we are impacted by the pollution, and that is the hard thing to explain and build political support behind.

Zillow’s house flipping debacle

Since I mentioned Zillow’s attempt to use big data to profit on house flipping recently, here is an article on that.

The United States is in the midst of the biggest house price boom ever. The Case-Shiller National Home Price Index was up nearly 20% in the 12 months ended in August, the biggest one-year increase in the history of that index.

Yet one of the biggest real estate brands in the world has seen its stock fall nearly 70% since mid-February. Zillow has gotten hammered after bungling its iBuyer program just three short years after getting into the house-flipping business. The company announced it is shuttering the platform, selling the rest of its housing inventory, and laying off up 25% of its staff.

awealthofcommonsense.com

The housing market has huge inefficiencies, huge transactions costs, and is somewhat corrupt. The algorithms apparently couldn’t account for those factors. The only silver lining is that when you have a big chunk of wealth sunk in the family home, you typically don’t experience huge swings in value on a regular basis.

My Dear Watson

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson was, in fact, a medical doctor. IBM’s Watson is not a doctor, but tried to play one in real life, and apparently failed. The idea was to use machine learning to crunch huge amounts of medical records and treatment data, and provide recommendations to real doctors treating real patients. And according to this article in Slate, it just didn’t work and the division is being “sold for parts”. I assume this means part of the IBM company legal entity and/or its “intellectual property” being sold, not the actual computer hardware which must be obsolete by now?

Along with the recent Zillow house flipping failure, this seems like another high profile failure for machine learning/AI-based business plans. It might be that the business plans are ahead of the technology, or the technology is ahead of the data (one gets tired of the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”, but it is a real thing – a lot of what is in my medical records is garbage, anyway), or both.

more numbers on Philadelphia shootings

A report commissioned by the Philadelphia has some facts and figures on shootings, both fatal (the layman might refer to these as “murders”) and non-fatal. Here are just a few that caught my eye:

  • For every fatal shooting, 3-4 people are shot non-fatally
  • Arguments are cited as the cause of 50% of shootings, while drug-related issues are cited in 18%. (My thinking on this is slowly evolving, because previously I had assumed the drug economy was at the root of much of the violence. I still wonder if the drug economy factors in some way into many of the arguments if you trace them back far enough, and maybe arguments just take on a life of their own at some point.)
  • 37% of fatal shootings from 2020 have been cleared as of January 2022, where “cleared” generally means an arrest has been made. I wondered how many cases might still be open from 2020 that might still be cleared, but the report says that when an arrest is going to be made, 75% of the time it will be made within about three months.
  • Conviction rates in fatal shooting cases ranged from 96% in 2016 to 80% in 2020.

The book Ghettoside referred to a 40% clearance rate in Los Angeles during the height of the 1990s murder surge there. It is remarkable how similar the 37% number above is. Doing the math, the chances of a murderer being caught and convicted is something like 1 in 3. Again, in a surprising echo of what that book discussed, the recommendations of this report mostly talk about crime prevention and suppression strategies. They specifically talk about dedicating more resources to investigation of non-fatal shootings, but they do not recommend increasing the number of homicide detectives or improving their training.

U.S. labor market growth

Axios has a brief piece on the demographics of the labor force in the U.S. A tight labor market is not just a short-term phenomenon during the pandemic recovery.

In the 2010s, the massive millennial generation was entering the workforce, the massive baby bo0m generation was still hard at work, and there was a multi-year hangover from the deep recession caused by the global financial crisis. But now, boomers are retiring, millennials are approaching middle age, and the Gen Z that follows them is comparatively small.

Axios

So combine this trend with anti-immigrant politics, and we may have a problem. It could lead to the double-edged sword of higher wages and inflation, a trend toward toward greater automation and technological innovation, a general drag on economic growth (which could ultimately lead to deflation), left wing politics, right wing politics, business pressure for more globalization/offshoring, or some combination of any of these (other than inflation and deflation, but maybe it is possible to have a sudden reversal between these and hard for policy to react quickly even if we knew what to do). It is hard to know what to do, but rational immigration policies based on skills and education to fill jobs available would be a start.

LED lighting vs. windows

Treehugger asks if LED lighting is more efficient than daylight. It seems like a dumb question at first because isn’t daylight free? But the problem inside buildings is that windows allow heat to come and go in addition to light, and LEDs have gotten so efficient that it is not an easy question to answer whether bricking up a window and replacing the light with LEDs would be more or less energy efficient. They conclude that windows should be designed with human comfort and happiness in mind.

Is the Pope the king of Italy?

Just kidding, I’m not that ignorant. That headline was just to get your attention. But then again, I don’t think about the political system in Italy often, so you could say I am ignorant of it. The politics of Italy obviously matters to Italians, but does it matter to the rest of us? Well, there was a guy named Mussolini, but that was quite awhile ago… There’s also a guy called the Pope, who’s not part of the Italian government but has some political power and sway on a global scale. As far as the actual modern government, it’s just a typical European parliamentary democracy, we assume? Well, there is no Italian king, but…

On January 24, when Sergio Mattarella’s seven-year term comes to an end, the Italian parliament and its regional representatives will hold a secret ballot to elect the country’s new president and official head of state…

And yet, in his official capacity as the “guarantor” or “guardian” of the constitution, the president holds considerable power: governments are required to obtain the “approval” of the president, who also nominates (“approves”) the prime minister and his cabinet ministers. Moreover, all laws passed by parliament have to be approved by the president, and he or she is also charged with signing off the dissolution of parliament, for example following a government crisis and loss of parliamentary majority. This means the president effectively decides whether elections should be held or not.

Nor does the president’s power stop there: the incumbent also ratifies all international treaties, and serves as commander-in-chief of the army and as the head of the governing body of the judiciary. The president also wields influence through the technocratic structures of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, particularly the all-powerful Accounting Office (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato) and the Bank of Italy.

Unherd.com

So Italy is at least a Republic of sorts if its head of state is elected by its legislature, which is in turn elected by the people. But the actual powers of the president almost sound like…an ayatollah? In practice, the head of government (i.e. prime minister) may not defer to the President, but it sounds like that balance of power could potentially change with time. And if the President has the ability to dissolve parliament and delay elections during an emergency, the conditions for a potential loss of democracy would seem to be there, at least according to this article.

What’s new with “decoupling”?

Decoupling is the idea that environmental impact per unit of economic growth is declining. If it were to decline fast enough, in theory, it would be possible for growth the continue indefinitely at the same time absolute impact is declining. This article tries to measure the rate this may or may not be happening, and concludes the long term trend is not even close to being on a path where we could turn the corner and see absolute impact stabilize, let alone decline.

While globally, CO2 emissions per unit of GDP are declining, the decoupling rate from 1995 to 2018 was only -1.8 percent annually. To achieve net zero by 2050, the rate would have to accelerate to -8.7 percent, assuming population and GDP growth projections as given, or by a factor of almost five.

Bruegel.org

This seems about right to me. The idea that we need to choose between “growth” and sustainability in the long term, of course, is logically flawed. If impacts continue to grow, there will come a point where the system breaks and human welfare is no longer able to increase.

There are a few flaws in the decoupling argument. “Growth”, as usually measured by GDP, is a measure of gross economic activity, which includes both benefits and costs to humanity. So in comparing impacts (costs) to GDP (sum of benefits and costs), you have an equation with too many unknowns, unless you can come up with some agreed-upon reasonable measure of costs. If you can do that, you would simply subtract costs from benefits to get net benefits, and figure out whether those are growing or not. They may or may not be growing right now. Even if they are, you need to consider whether they can continue to grow in the future, or whether the underlying system is eventually going to break and no longer be able to support further growth. You also need to consider risks of really bad things happening, as well as the odds of really good things like major technological breakthroughs happening. I would also point out that at the moment we are using carbon emissions as a proxy for sustainability more generally, but there is a lot more that should be considered in a holistic view of a sustainable long-term human-planet system.

Philadelphia homicides in 2021

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a decent piece of data journalism on the shocking number of homicides in our city in 2021. Here are some numbers:

  • 557 homicides as of Wednesday, December 29, so we will probably add a few more by midnight on New Year’s Eve.
  • This eclipses the previous record of 500 in 1990. The period 1989-1997 consistently had over 400 homicides per year. We have now had two years in a row in the 500+ range (499 in 2020). During the 2009-2019 decade, the range was 246-356.
  • Guns were the cause of death in 89% of homicides. Nationwide, this number is around 75%.
  • Of the 557, 111 (20%) were considered retaliatory, 166 (30%) were drug related, and 42 (8%) were domestic violence related. It is not entirely clear to me if these percentages overlap or not – hence my giving this article a grade of only “decent”.
  • 8 of the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. recorded more homicides as of December 29, 2021 than they did in 2019. New York City has had 479 murders this year and Chicago “nearly 800”. The article doesn’t normalize these by population for us but I can do that.
    • Philadelphia: 557 homicides / 1.579 million people = 352 per million
    • New York City: 479 homicides / 8.419 million people = 57 per million
    • Chicago: ~800 / 2.71 million people = 295 per million

Philadelphia Inquirer, to go from decent to good, just put these numbers in a nice table or bullet list for us and normalize by population. Bonus points for some kind of bar chart of “tree map” that makes it crystal clear what the categories are and whether any overlap. “Communities of color” are mentioned but there are no numbers on the breakdown of victims or perpetrators by race or by age (they do mention that the number of female victims has increased, although victims remain overwhelmingly male).

So despite the eye-popping numbers in Chicago, Philadelphia is a bit worse although the two are similar. New York is doing much better.

There is a lot of hand wringing over the causes of violence. It is crystal clear though that plentiful guns make disputes and arguments much more deadly than they otherwise might be. Beyond that, we know the pandemic resulted in a large population of teenage boys out of school for a year and a half. We know the pandemic led to an increase in the unemployment rate.

Those are some facts. Now to speculate. The unemployment rate measures the formal economy, but we know that people who are unemployed in the formal economy are not necessarily economically idle. We can speculate that more people, particularly young men, became involved in the drug economy during the pandemic. Mix together young men, drugs, cash, guns, and a culture that leads to cycles of retaliation and revenge, and it is easy to picture a feedback loop that could get out of control.

It’s interesting that many categories of crime are down. This is at least partly because the police are not pursuing nonviolent crimes as much, particularly drug use and drug possession. Many people are drawing a link between decreased enforcement and increased homicides. “Homicide” and “crime” are often used interchangeably in the media, but this is wrong. Homicides are a tiny fraction of crime as a whole, and crime as a whole is down. Reduced enforcement could easily be a reason that crime as a whole is down.

How would you break the homicide loop? Media coverage focuses on guns, and reducing the number of guns might help, but that is very hard to do in our “exceptional” country. Legalizing drugs would take away the profits and economic incentive to traffic drugs and deal drugs, reduce the amount of cash changing hands, and very likely reduce the level of violence caused by drug dealers defending themselves from each other. Assuming this is what touches off many of the retaliation cycles, those should also decrease. Drug addiction might or might not increase, I am not sure, but that could be treated as the medical/behavioral problem it is. The violence on our city streets (not to mention horrific violence to get drugs across our international borders) is just not an acceptable price to pay to reduce the social problems caused by drug use, if the prohibition and law enforcement strategy was even working, which it is clearly not.

So longer term, after legalizing drugs, logical strategies would be an actual public health care system able to help people with addiction, and education and training of young men so they have economic opportunities in the formal economy. Our political system has repeatedly failed to provide these things, partly because rural politicians and voters have disproportionate political power and like to believe poverty, drugs, and violence affect only the mythical “inner city”.

the midterm curse

2022 will be a midterm election year in the U.S. The incumbent political party usually loses seats in the midterm election, and since the Democrats have a majority of 1 in the Senate, losing any seats will mean losing what little control they have. Here are the historical facts according to Alternet:

  • The party that controls the White House has lost seats in 19 of the 22 midterm elections since 1932.
  • The first exception was 1934, when FDR was in office. His New Deal was popular and seemed to offer hope during the pain of the Great Depression.
  • The second exception was 1998, when Bill Clinton was in office. The economy was growing quickly and the Clinton impeachment had just happened.
  • The third exception was 2002, when George W. Bush was in office. 9/11 had happened about a year earlier, and the response to 9/11 including the Afghanistan invasion was popular.

So what will probably happen is the Democrats will lose seats in 2022, because that happens 86% of the time. The Republicans will say the Democrats did everything wrong and that explains the result. The Democrats will say they did everything right and it still just happens 86% of the time. The media will more or less side with the Republicans because they like to give explanations, like when they give an “explanation” every day for why the stock market went up or down when it is clearly much more than 86% random.

To have a shot at bucking the trend, the Democrats would need (1) a big, popular, perceived to be successful policy agenda, (2) a war or other major acute crisis perceived to be handled well, and/or (3) fast economic growth.

On (1), I just don’t buy the idea that policy success is going to get Biden very far. He has done objectively well on pandemic rescue and direct payments to taxpayers, and he seems to be getting little or no credit for it. I don’t think people are even aware of these successes. The pandemic is grinding on and people are in a generally sour mood. They do not judge politicians on how much worse things could be if actions hadn’t been taken, or how much less sour the mood could be. It is just the sour mood that counts. I do think there was one mis-step, which was giving people enormous amounts of money without making sure they appreciated it. Doing this as electronic tax refunds, even on a monthly basis, does not seem to have worked well politically. I saw one poll where many people said they had not received the payments, even though most of them demonstrably, factually had! This is the flip side of the phenomenon companies are well aware of, where charges that show up in our bank accounts or credit card statements after the fact and with minimal fanfare “feel” less painful than when we open our wallets and fork over cash or write a check. Payroll deductions also take advantage of this psychology. So I think the optimal political strategy would have been for the Democrats to mail people paper checks, even if that would have been less efficient economically than the way it was done. Some sort of debit card, as is typically done for food stamps, could also have worked. Imagine if it had Biden’s face on it, like a Roman emperor stamping their face on a gold coin. And the big infrastructure and social “spending bills”, even if they pass, do not seem to be scoring the Democrats any points. People don’t understand the long-term benefits of these critical investments and the Republicans are just winning the narrative by screaming incoherently about debt and inflation and socialism. It’s a meme, not a rational argument, and it’s resonating with where our heads are as a society right now.

On (2), it seems like Covid has become too much of a long-term, grinding, slow-burn crisis for Biden to get much credit for managing it reasonably well. Like I said, things are going moderately badly, and there is no credit given because things could be going much more badly. That said, it seems entirely plausible that Covid could largely burn itself out in 2022, as almost every (surviving) human on Earth will have some immunity from vaccination, infection, or both. This is in the absence of a major new killer variant, of course. Things could also improve to near-normal over the summer, and then a new fall wave could hit just at the wrong time (politically speaking, for the party in power.) A major terrorist attack or a war over Taiwan, Ukraine, or Iran could be good timing for the mid-term elections, and disastrous for life on Earth. I’m not sure anyone knows what a major meltdown of the communication, financial, and/or electrical systems would mean politically. Please no on all of these.

On (3) it seems entirely plausible that the economy could pick up and inflation could moderate throughout 2022. Things are definitely getting off to a rocky start, and if they steadily improve and seem to be going really well in the late summer and fall, the public will give the party in power credit for that whether they deserve it or not. If inflation seems to be spiraling out of control, it will be the political kiss of death and could lead to a landslide against the party in power.

I’ll go out on a limb and give a prediction of what I think is most likely: Economic growth will pick up, inflation will moderate, and Covid will recede into the background by late summer into fall. The world will avoid major geopolitical turmoil and nuclear war. The public will be in a pretty good mood and the President’s approval ratings will be relatively high. The Democrats will still lose a handful of seats in the Congress because that just happens 86% of the time. This will be the end of Biden’s big, bold legislative policy agenda. In the second half of his term, he will focus on unglamorous administrative policy and foreign policy because those will be the options left to him. The Republicans will say their gaining a handful of seats spells certain doom for Biden in 2024, and they will be wrong, because Presidential elections seem to be tossups lately no matter what else is happening.