Category Archives: Web Article Review

cars = freedom?

I don’t know how many regular readers of this blog exist, but if there are some, you know I am not a huge fan of cars. They ruin our urban areas, pollute our air and water, kill and injure us and our children, and make us fat and sick and sociopathic. Beyond that, I knew about traffic stops. The U.S. and U.S. states do not just issue you an ID card at birth. Generally speaking, your driver’s license is your most official government issued ID for most people, and there are enough hurdles to getting one that disadvantaged people (poor, homeless, unemployed, transient, undocumented, disabled, addicted, mentally ill, too old, too young, too busy, the list goes on…) often don’t have them. Those people still use cars to get around in many cases, because that is the only way to get around in many of our communities, and then when they get pulled over in a routine traffic stop they are in trouble. Especially if they already have a warrant or some past legal trouble, which the disadvantaged quite often do.

It’s also always bothered me that you give up your rights against search and seizure the minute you step into a car. Police can stop you and search your car and body on very little pretext in a way they would be unlikely to do if you were on foot (“stop and frisk” aside – another conversation, although it illustrates that police intrusiveness we routinely accept when we are in a motor vehicle can cause an uproar when we are not). Sobriety checkpoints also bother me – don’t get me wrong, drunk driving is very, very bad. But a random sobriety checkpoint subjects you to search and seizure on no pretext whatsoever other than the fact that you chose to get into a car, and if you have some previous legal trouble, or just a paperwork problem, suddenly you are in trouble you had no reason to expect. (The best solution to drunk driving is a walkable community.)

So that’s the disadvantaged portion of the population, who tend to get more disadvantaged over time because the deck is stacked against them. But what about the larger population as a whole? Well, this Freakonomics episode tells the story in a way I hadn’t fully considered:

  • Before cars, ordinary people and police just didn’t interact that much. Generally speaking, a search warrant was required for the police to stop and search someone. There weren’t as many police, they weren’t as heavily armed and they just weren’t that busy.
  • Once cars came on the scene and started killing and injuring people in large numbers, traffic laws were enacted. Police were told to enforce the traffic laws, and courts ruled repeatedly that the imminent danger posed by cars in real time overruled the need to obtain a warrant.
  • Add in guns, or really just the possibility of guns being present in any traffic stop, and you have even more violence on top of the deaths and injuries the cars are already causing – “The traffic stop is the most common encounter between individuals and the police, and it’s also the site of a lot of police violence and police shootings that we see in the news today.“
  • At this point, technology would allow us to handle most traffic violations as an administrative matter, with a picture of the violation and a ticket sent in the mail. The article likens this to tax collection and penalties. The police wouldn’t even be involved in most cases.

A couple more thoughts – First, there is a link between mounting fines and mass incarceration, so just imposing more fines on disadvantaged people and trying to collect them may not be the perfect answer. Second, this article doesn’t go into it, but there is also a critical role for safer street and intersection design, which can help a lot to reduce the number of violations, deaths, and injuries in the first place. And I already mentioned it, but the larger urban design and land use policy can reduce the need for driving and increase the number of people able to get around under their own power, which is good for the air, water, land, our bodies and our minds!

I still have some hope for computer-driven cars too. The hype has died down, which means the practical application will probably gradually creep up on us when we least expect it. A computer-driven vehicle should be able to come to a complete stop at every stop sign and red light, stay under the speed limit, stay out of the bike lane, and just generally avoid unpredictable behavior. And if it doesn’t, that is a malfunction rather than a crime, which it should be able to self-report to police and insurance companies and get corrected. Some people are still going to get hurt because there is no risk-free transportation system, but it should be far fewer than what we deal with now.

“paying for” infrastructure and social spending

Overall, I like the way this article in The Week explains how the government spending since the start of the Covid recession, followed by the infrastructure and social spending being proposed now, is likely to be inflationary.

It’s likely, though, that the massive COVID relief bills were the primary culprit. While a supply shock should lead to price spikes, it should also lead to a fall-off in demand as people adjust their overall budgets to higher prices. When people have to spend more on gas and groceries, they should spend less on other goods. That’s not what we’re seeing though: demand remains extremely robust. People are complaining about price increases, but they aren’t cutting back. This is precisely what you would expect if household balance sheets were in generally excellent shape, as in fact they are; if there were lots of pent-up demand due to the pandemic, as in fact there is; and if people were beginning to assume that higher prices were becoming normal — which, if they are, is precisely how you get a self-reinforcing inflationary spiral as opposed to something more “transitory.”

That doesn’t mean those bills were a mistake. The risk really was higher in under-shooting than in over-shooting, and so the government erred on the side of over-shooting and over-shot. It just means that policy going forward has to respond to the new economic situation. Stimulative spending now has a downside of further boosting inflation, and therefore encouraging the Federal Reserve to hike rates faster. Inasmuch as the reconciliation bill’s spending will be stimulative — and its major components like the expanded child tax credit certainly will be — that’s a problem.

The Week

Put another way (not the way this article puts it), the new government spending being proposed is necessary, but right now, with the private economy suddenly heating up, might not be the best time for it. The political system is hopeless about getting the timing right. By the time politicians react to a situation, go through an election cycle, and negotiate a new deal (pun somewhat intended?), conditions have already changed. While I am not an economic historian, this is my limited understanding of how the Kennedy administration managed to ramp up spending in an overheated economy in the 1960s, leading to the inflation crisis of the 1970s.

Monetary policy clearly helps, but “automatic fiscal stabilizers” are another way this problem could be tackled from the government spending end. Congress could pass its “big spending bills”, but tie distribution of the money to economic indicators like the unemployment rate. The Sahm index, which is basically a ratio of the current unemployment rate to its average over the last year. is one metric that has been proposed for this. Using this rule would have turned on the taps in March 2020, then started to throttle back in January 2021 – this sounds about right, given that inflation started to ramp up suddenly in the second quarter of 2021! Congress could take this “set it and forget it” approach, and a future Congress could always undo it if they want, but it might just stabilize our economy and society to the point where it becomes the new normal.

I’ll try not to be cynical. Maybe our politicians are capable of understanding this, communicating it effectively to the public and business community to build support, and doing the right thing.

Okay, I can’t help being cynical – the Democrats will probably push ahead with their enormously beneficial but poorly timed spending bills, the public will benefit enormously from these bills but not give any credit to the Democrats, inflation will continue to ramp up, and the Republicans will fiddle while the economy burns going into the next election cycle.

The Onion interviews Dr. Fauci

The Onion has a fun (and obviously made up and satirical, people) “interview” with Dr. Fauci on how he is “planning for the next pandemic”. It turns out he is planning to intentionally create the next pandemic, as he has all pandemics for at least the last few decades. This is some laugh-out-loud, yet dark, humor people.

The Onion: What type of P.P.E. will be needed for this one?

Fauci: Everyone will need oven mitts and a chef’s hat to ward off infection…

The Onion: What are you most excited about the next pandemic?

Fauci: This one is gonna kill a shit ton of dogs.

The Onion

Now that crosses the line. We can let a million or so people die, especially poor people and babies once they are born and properly baptised, and poor people shouldn’t be having babies to begin with, but don’t mess with our dogs!

If there is any doubt in your mind, that was also satire. I like puppies, and babies, and babies playing with puppies. These are things I hope will continue for some time.

sirens on emergency vehicles: “more harm than good”?

I knew it – all those sirens on ambulances and fire trucks tearing around town might not be improving outcomes. They are bad for our hearing (especially for the people working on the trucks) and might startle drivers into making mistakes or sudden unpredictable moves. Sure, the idea is that if you are having a heart attack or stroke the second count. But according to this article at least, the data just don’t support the idea that those sirens are getting the paramedics to you faster.

Americans love our sirens. When I lived in Singapore for a couple years, one thing I noticed was that police, fire trucks (which were often more like vans), and ambulances didn’t use sirens much. Now, Singapore tore down most of its historic buildings (which you could argue is sad), which means its buildings are mostly very modern standardized high rises. I think that is one reason they don’t need the big fire trucks. Their streets are wide and well maintained (this is not great for pedestrians or people on bicycles). They also do congestion pricing on a major scale so they just don’t have the traffic we have (I support this, but you could argue it is inequitable because the rich can afford to drive while everyone else takes public transportation. The public transportation is very good and reliable however.) Sirens aside, I found Singapore awful in terms of urban noise pollution and wore ear plugs much of the time I was there. The noise didn’t seem to bother most of the locals or people from nearby countries.

tongue eating parasites

In Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files books, there are horrifying demon parasites from alternate dimensions that can eat your tongue (and, um…other body parts – why spoil it?) and live in your mouth, while turning you into a sort of zombie. A horrifying idea, but these books are fun, tongue-in-cheek (oops…) highly entertaining and recommended (by me). Anyway, it looks like he got the idea from an IRL horrifying parasite that is about a third of an inch long and can indeed eat your tongue and live in your mouth – if you are a fish. Gross.

Did productivity triple during the pandemic?

I’m hearing claims that “productivity tripled during the pandemic”, and maybe this is the computer and internet and mobile chickens finally coming home to roost and deliver on the promises made way back in the 1990s. Maybe there is some truth to this, but it seems much more likely that the denominator contracted suddenly (hours worked) than that the numerator suddenly expanded.

Here’s one graph I have seen referenced.

What could be going on here? Well I don’t know, you should consult the experts. But of course I can speculate:

  • Lower-productivity (economic output measured in dollars per hour worked, not in the worker’s sense of satisfaction, sanity, or self-worth) jobs suddenly disappeared, and higher-productivity ones (reverse caveats above) were left, so average productivity went up.
  • I’ve heard it suggested tat workers who still had jobs suddenly had no commuting time, so they worked some extra hours, and got more done but didn’t necessarily report the extra hours worked to their employers. I might buy this as a marginal, short-lived effect. Maybe a few young go-getters did this, but certainly not us middle-aged parents who suddenly had small children bouncing off the walls 24-7.
  • I will buy the idea that workers were more productivity with the new software (Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.) than they would have been in the same situation with software and communication options available a few years ago. I’m not sure I buy into the idea that they were more productive at home with these tools than they would have been in the office.
  • Maybe there was a sort of mania of productivity for the work-from-home set at the start of the pandemic, for 2-3 months or so. Then it crashed back to earth, which you can sort of infer from the limited number of data points here.

So no, the data are interesting but I am going to say the singularity did not occur last year. I think there may have been a bump in average productivity per (remaining) worker when some workers just disappeared from the economy, which is not a net positive, and I think there may have been a short-term mania among work-from-home professionals that is now feeding into our widespread burnout situation a year and a half or so down the line, and that is not a long-term positive. I do think the rapid/non-voluntary adoption of new software and communication tools on a massive scale probably gave a bump to technological progress, which might pay longer-term dividends.

The pandemic also gave a sudden boost to biotechnology, which may ultimately end disease as we know it, create unimaginably horrible weapons that kill us all, or both.

Drug violence and the Netherlands

A lot of the violence in the U.S. and around the U.S. border if fueled by the drug trade. With drugs illegal, there is just so much money to be made that it is worthwhile for organized crime to form, heavily arm itself and take large risks to move those drugs and make that money. South of the border, organized crime is so heavily armed it is able to intimidate the authorities. North of the border, law enforcement has become militarized and heavily armed in response. This results in a balance of power but also one of the world’s most violent countries that is also prosperous and supposedly peaceful.

That’s my view of the U.S. But is it happening elsewhere. Yes, according to Der Spiegel, in the Netherlands. This might seem surprising, because the Netherlands is known for decriminalizing soft drugs (cannabis, hashish – wait, isn’t that just a kind of cannabis? – and now apparently synthetic drugs like ecstacy.) What is left though is hard drugs, specifically cocaine. Cocaine smuggling and trading is leading to similar violence to what we see in the U.S., although on a much smaller scale. If I read the article correctly, they have around 20 drug related murders per year. That is 20 too many, but it also happens in a month in any sizable U.S. city, so there is no comparison.

I think the U.S. should legalize, regulate, and tax soft drugs right away. We should get a health care system that provides physical and mental health care to people with drug problems. But what to do about the hard drugs? I don’t know, but I still think the violence may be more evil than the drug-related social problems. Just take the market away from the criminals first and then go from there.

gain-of-function research

According to Vanity Fair, a lab in New York collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans”. I personally don’t care about the “lab leak hypothesis” at this point. It is clear that this type of research is common now and probably happening all over the world. It needs to be tightly monitored and controlled or we may be in for a bleak future.

what’s new with fish?

Our World in Data has a sprawling and data-dense article on everything to do with fish, fisheries, and aquaculture. It’s well worth digging into if you have five or six hours, but I could stare at the pictures alone for an hour if I actually had that kind of time.

Here were a few highlights for me:

  • Some species are really in trouble, sharks in particular, but on balance the overfishing situation has improved significantly over the past decade or two. When looked at by weight, about 80% of fishing is sustainable, and when looked at by individual fisheries (which vary in size), about 2/3 is sustainable. Tuna, in particular, is pretty well managed these days.
  • They dug into a particular paper which the media summarized as “the oceans will be empty by 2048”, explain why that didn’t even make sense as a summary of what the authors intended at the time, and then explain why this conclusion no longer holds with better data on fish stocks as opposed to just fish catch.
  • Fish catch has largely stabilized over the past few decades while aquaculture has boomed. Aquaculture has become much more efficient – some wild fish are still used to feed animals, but this has declined and animal feed has become more plant-based. Also, environmentally-motivated not-quite-total vegetarians should feel pretty good about eating farmed mussels, clams, and oysters.
  • The most damaging forms of fishing, such as bottom trawling, have declined, although they are still in wide use in developing countries.

Fish are the classic example often used to teach stocks and flows – they illustrate how time lags and feedback loops can lead to counterintuitive results if you are just eyeballing the trend in one particular flow, rather than gaining an understanding of the underlying system structure and how that explains its behavior. This is one reason why the simplistic science communication we have had during the Covid crisis has been ineffective, in my view. Unfortunately, data (sometimes called “facts”, but that assumes we can accurately measure the state of the world, which we never can with 100% uncertainty) doesn’t just transform itself into good policy and good decisions. The media seems to create this expectation in people, and then I think they are disappointed and confused when the story seems to change and evolve from day to day. At some point, they conclude that a made-up opinion is as likely to be accurate as the garbled message coming from the scientists/or and policymakers. And then of course, some cynical people exploit this disillusionment for their own cynical purposes.

“Disease X”

Are you worried that nobody is prepared for the next big pandemic? Have no fear, there is a group preparing to “advise the WHO on developing a framework to define comprehensive studies” about that. And after that, the WHO is going to be “developing policies and enhancing preparedness” about it. I am sure this will not take very long!

It seems like the UN and the WHO should be the organization to lead this effort globally, and creating new bodies in parallel would be redundant and counter-productive. But the UN approach did not seem to work very well this last time around. There are also the intertwined risks of natural pandemics, biological warfare and biological terrorism that need to be dealt with, and the WHO does not seem to be the agency to deal with these as existential threats. It seems to be more about representing the world’s under-represented people and countries at the table where these things are discussed.

In the U.S., our existing agencies (CDC, customs, FEMA, etc.) did not deal with this threat effectively. Again, nobody wants to just make new redundant agencies, and nobody wants to just turn the thing over to the military industrial complex. But it seems like we need to do something. Maybe this is why Obama created the “white house office of pandemic whatever” to try to coordinate or at least understand all this. Not a new parallel agency, but a new layer of oversight or at least a watchdog. The government grows this way, and the new growth may be healthy, but we never prune out the dead underbrush.