Category Archives: Web Article Review

What’s the investment return on political contributions?

According to some sources I’ve looked at, a rule of thumb is 1000 to 1. So it is entirely rational for amoral rich and powerful entities (be they human, corporate, or non-profit entities) to invest their money and effort in buying politicians rather than competing or innovating. This blog post has some numbers:

Consider: The return on industry lobbying — let’s round up and call it $10 million across several Senate terms — is $124 billion in protected profit per year. Looking at the drug price mark-up in the Taibbi article — from $4 to $1000 — gives a profit increase of 250 times the original (and still profitable) $4 price in India. Let’s lower that increase, since I’m sure Taibbi picked an extreme example. Let’s say that, on average, the protected U.S. profit is “just” a 100-times increase over what’s profitable overseas…

So what’s the ROI to the drug companies on its $10 million in bribes (sorry, entirely legal campaign contributions)? If it’s $100 billion … again, per year … the ROI on campaign contributions is at least $10,000 in profit for each $1 spent to protect it, or more than 10,000 to 1.

If I’m off by a factor of 10, the ROI is … 1,000 to 1.

From a blog called Down with Tyranny

So doing away with this should boost the competitiveness and innovation of our economy quite a bit, allow small and medium business to compete on an equal playing field with big business, and allow less wealthy and powerful parties to have a voice in policy choices (“democracy” is one word I’ve heard used in this context). But who would have to make this change? The politicians being bribed, of course. There was one politician who might have tried to do something, but we didn’t vote for him. The administration we did vote for has not mentioned corruption as a priority lately, although to be fair they do have other urgent priorities.

Colorado extreme drought contingency plan triggered

The drying out of the American west is a slow motion disaster. In this case, governments have seen it coming for quite a while and have actually planned for it. And at this point they have no choice but to take the extreme measure of…planning to schedule a monthly conference call. But seriously, this is a big deal. This has happened before and the result was the end of civilization, as the Anasazi can attest. Luckily civilization is a bit more spread out and connected these days, and technology has advanced somewhat. But there are a lot more of us, we use a lot more resources and produce a lot more waste.

As exceptional drought conditions expanded to more than 65% of the watershed’s total land area in 2020, operational forecasts for the Colorado River have worsened dramatically. Between Oct. and Nov. 2020, Bureau of Reclamation models projected a possible one million acre-foot drop in Lake Powell’s water storage due to lagging snowpack totals and record-setting soil moisture deficits.

“That was the first glimmer we could be looking at this way earlier than we expected,” said Amy Haas, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission.

KUNC, which is a radio station somewhere in northern Colorado

Is a modern U.S. civil war possible, and if so what could it look like?

This article in The Week argues that civil wars can take a variety of forms, so we shouldn’t be overconfident that one is impossible just because we don’t have an obvious geographic basis for one.

  • The original U.S. civil war is a somewhat obvious example of a geography-based conflict. Although, I see it as less of a territorial dispute and more of an economic and class conflict, rationalized and manipulated by racial and religious ideology.
  • Yugoslavia in the 1990s was an ugly conflict between ethnic and religious groups who were interspersed geographically. Rwanda isn’t mentioned but I understand it to be similar, although I don’t fully understand either of these conflicts.
  • The English Civil War “that raged from 1642-1651, pitting the crown against parliament, cities and towns dominated by a rising commercial middle class against the aristocratic countryside, and the staid religious convictions of the ruling class against the theologically driven radicalism of more demotic religious sects.” Okay, I’m almost completely ignorant of this one, because I was only taught U.S. history in school and haven’t gone back to study this one on my own. Perhaps the Crown whipped up a crowd of supporters and said something like, “Hey, why don’t you guys go over there and storm Parliament and have a portrait painted (no cameras yet) of yourselves naked except for a pair of Viking horns”?
  • I did read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, but I always thought that book was false advertising because it was 99% about the French side. I’m not an expert on the French Revolution (not mentioned in the article) by any means, but I understand it to be mostly a class conflict – a revolt of the poor and working class against an exploitative aristocracy. The conditions that could spark something like this would seem to be ripening in the U.S. as wealth and income inequality get objectively worse, but watching Bernie Sanders (who to be clear, advocates peaceful income redistribution to avoid the heads rolling) lose last year convinced me the propaganda here has been so successful for so long among the working and middle classes that this is unlikely. Put another way, our working and middle classes misunderstand the cause of our suffering and have been convinced to support the people causing it, or at least enough of us do that we are hopelessly divided for now. Bernie tried and failed twice (and before that, Ralph Nader tried and not only failed but set the cause back by 20 years), but maybe a more charismatic or more skilled Bernie/Nader will come along in the future, and conditions will have worsened in the meantime.
  • The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I understand this as a group with an ethnic and religious identity wanting regional autonomy, and a central government fighting that, leading to a long, low-intensity insurgency and counter-insurgency conflict. This is happening all over the world (the south of Thailand is just one example I am familiar with), but I don’t see obvious parallels in the United States. The repression of the war on drugs and mass incarceration have some echoes of this perhaps, with the Black Lives Matter movement emerging as a somewhat organized, nonviolent form of resistance. Perhaps it could turn violent if something like the Black Panther movement of the 1960s were to re-emerge.
  • Not mentioned in this article is the increase in right-wing militia groups. Their rhetoric is violent, anti-government, sometimes racist although I don’t believe all these groups identify as racist or white supremacist. It’s not exactly clear to me what they want other than disorder.
  • The Spanish Civil War “that shattered the Iberian Peninsula into a multitude of factions — from anarchists, Stalinists, and anti-clerical absolutists on the left to fascists and Catholic authoritarians on the right — between 1936 and 1939.” Again, my formal education was a complete failure and I am ignorant of this one. Maybe Biden has been fooling us and he will now reveal his true colors as the new Franco/Mussolini/Catholic authoritarian/Emperor Palpatine/Voldemort clone. After all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Now, continuing this line of thought, who could Joe Biden appoint as Grand Inquisitor? My first thought is Mike Pence. However, an Inquisition will need to be good at things like contact tracing, isolation of victims, and disposal of bodies, and Pence failed his audition as head of the coronavirus virus task force. So I’ll go with Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania, who just might have the right combination of political skills, religious fervor and psychopathy to get the job done.

Dietary Guidelines for Americans

The USDA has a new version of Dietary Guidelines for Americans out. Sorry, TLDR, but the Harvard School of Public Health has a handy summary (along with some criticism). Basically, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains will never go out of style. Sugar will never be in style again.

I think people of my generation and older are still confused about fat. The guidelines say plant-based oils are pretty much A-OK as long as you stay within your calorie limits, but still recommend “lean meats and poultry”, “low fat dairy”, and limiting saturated fat. First, I am confused whether saturated fat is bad for everyone, even those of us with low cholesterol, or whether the USDA assumes we are too stupid to understand nuances and a blanket statement like this will save lives overall (if so, they’re probably right.) Harvard also criticizes USDA for not discouraging processed meat like bacon and ham (but bacon is so good…well, better to think of it as an occasional treat like a candy bar).

Men should limit alcoholic drinks to “no more than two” and women to one (sorry, ladies). By the way, a(n imperial, 16 ounce) pint of 7% alcohol craft beer is not a drink, it is actually almost two. Whereas 1.5 ounces of 40% alcohol liquor is one drink and actually easier to control. I love those craft beers though. Oh, and don’t touch soda – it’s death in a glass.

But you can have 2-3 cups of (black) coffee a day, with no known negative effects.

You can have more salt than I thought (2300 mg/day) if you don’t have any particular risk factors.

Harvard also points out that the science behind the nutritional benefits of all that meat and dairy is not all that strong, while the science behind the environmental risks is strong, and clear, and not mentioned in these guidelines.

Well, this is the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Not the department of get your ass off the couch, go for a jog, and then eat some vegetables. We have an Environmental Protection Agency, but first of all it is not cabinet level, and second of all they don’t regulate agriculture. Nobody regulates the environmental impacts of agriculture! And the meat, sugar, corn (etc.) and food processing industries are massive, have enormously deep pockets, and use them to buy politicians who will keep it this way indefinitely.

fun with coronavirus math

Let’s do some coronavirus math! This is a word problem, kids. I’m writing on January 14, 2021, and this post will be horribly outdated, but possibly of historical interest, when you read it.

The total number of cases confirmed to date as of today, in the U.S.: “23.1 million+” (New York Times)

The CDC’s ratio of actual cases to confirmed cases: 7.2 (CDC)

Number of cumulative cases in the U.S. so far: 23.1 million * 7.2 = 166 million (166,320,000)

Population of the United States: 328.2 million (Google)

% of our population that has had the coronavirus = 166 / 328.2 = 51%

% of our population that has been vaccinated: 3.1% (Financial Times)

But all other things being equal (which I am sure they are not), 51% of the people vaccinated will have already had the coronavirus, so the vaccine so far adds 1.6% to 51% of our population. Call it 53% to be generous.

We have heard a variety of estimates on what constitutes herd immunity, but the number 70% seems to be sticking at least in the media (I don’t have a source handy, and need to go do some other things now.) So we might not be that far off. The (painfully) slow but steady vaccine rollout tortoise will eventually get to the finish line, people are continuing to get infected at high rates every day in the meantime, and nobody wants to see another wave from the new variant, but if and when it hits us it might push us over the mark (at a horrific human cost, of course).

One last thought is that at the moment, I suspect we are immunizing people who are more likely to have already had an infection than the population as a whole. We are being told this is the most ethical approach, or the quickest way to lower risk for the population as a whole, or some combination of the two. The ethical statement may be true, although this seems subjective. I thought ethics was not up to ethicists, but rather ethicists were supposed to ascertain what our society as a whole considers ethical, and maybe compare that to other human societies past and present. I haven’t seen public polls of what people think is ethical, although they may exist. I can see a case that the way the vaccine is being rolled out is ethical, but I can also see a case for a random lottery being equally ethical.

Better planning and communication would not just be ethical, they are the common sense need and our government is continuing to fail, fail, fail and people are dying, which is the opposite of ethical governance. To my ears, it is arrogant to hear them lecturing us about ethics.

drawing a line from Hitler to climate change

This 2015 Timothy Snyder article is called Hitler’s world may not be so far away. He is a well-respected historian whose previous books include Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

He calls the Holocaust “misunderstood” in the article, but he is not disputing facts or events that occurred. He makes a few points. First, we modern people tend to assume that we are morally superior to Germans of that period, and that we would not allow something like that to happen even under similar circumstances. He says there is no reason to believe this is true. Second, he points out that the worst deprivations occurred not within the borders of Germany or other western European states, but in lawless, stateless areas of eastern Europe. Nazi Germany intentionally created those lawless, stateless areas, but this holds lessons for failed states today, such as Syria. Third, he says that fear about the food supply in the 1930s was a significant driver of Hitler’s policy to expand east, creating space and farm land for Germans while exterminating or enslaving the inferior people who lived there. The so-called green revolution, which drastically accelerated agricultural yields, happened mostly after World War II. (We can argue later whether using massive fossil fuel inputs to produce fertilizer, pesticides, groundwater pumping at rates that will only be replenished over geologic time, and dumping the resulting waste in the ocean was a long-term solution, but it has fed a few billion people successfully for a few decades in a row now.)

So lessons for today are that as the climate crisis almost certainly worsens, we will see failed states, hunger and fear of hunger, mass migration, and these are all risk factors for genocide. I’ll pick a paragraph, but this long article really is worth a read.

Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms, relentless droughts and the associated wars and south-to-north migrations will jar expectations about the security of resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can effect the conflations Hitler pioneered: between nature and politics, between ecosystem and household, between need and desire. A global problem that seems otherwise insoluble can be blamed upon a specific group of human beings.

Project Syndicate predictions for 2021

And now the 2021 predictions are starting to roll in. I blew my one free Project Syndicate article for the month on this, which seems like an okay choice.

  • Covid-19 will recede as vaccines roll out, and the economy will recover. This seems to be a near-consensus, although there is one minority report. And the average growth rate of course hides inequalities, which have gotten worse.
  • As you might expect, lots of speculation about U.S. politics and what Biden will do, but most people expect a return to the pre-Trump status quo at the UN, WHO, Israel and Palestine, the Iran nuclear deal, the climate deal, and democracy/human rights rhetoric we mostly fail to live up to. Of course, there are newfound doubts about U.S. political stability in the medium- to long-term.
  • Renewable energy will continue to be cheap and competitive with fossil fuels.
  • Electric vehicles come up a couple times – the market is pulling, and there may be a big push because the U.S. is significantly behind many other countries on adoption. (My take: The electric and auto industries are behind this, and the oil industry presumably is not but nobody seems to care. Could this break their backs?)
  • U.S.-China tensions will ramp up! Or they’ll die down…the crystal ball is murky on this one.
  • North Korea likes to test new U.S. Presidents with a missile test or two.
  • Poverty and violence have gotten worse in Africa while the rest of the world has been distracted by other things.
  • The effects of food insecurity and extreme weather events are getting worse in developing countries.
  • Cash may be dead, and if so there is at least a three-way race to replace it – “private tokens, central bank digital currencies, and efforts to upgrade the current system”.

finally, (some) hard numbers on schools and Covid spread

This article from The Intercept cites some recent research studies that put some numbers behind what level of community spread would make opening schools unsafe. The basic idea is that school (especially elementary school) is pretty safe when the level of infection in the community is relatively low, because kids coming to school are not that likely to be infected. But when the level of infection in the community rises, kids coming to school are more likely to be infected and further accelerate the spread.

Even educated people in the general public have a hard time with unit conversions, and this article switches between various units within the article. Come on, guys. Anywhere, here are the numbers from a variety of sources in the article. I’ve done the unit conversions (correctly, I think, but this blog post does not constitute medical advice…)

  • 36-44 per 100,000 population per week (~5-6 per 100,000 per day)
  • 147 per 100,000 per week (21 per 100,000 per day)
  • 35 per 100,000 per week (5 per 100,000 per day)

That seems like a pretty big range, and I am also suspicious whether the reporters have carefully checked the math, given how they jump around even within the article. But let’s assume they have it right. The threshold is somewhere between 35-147 cases per 100,000 per week. The Pennsylvania Department of Education recommends a threshold of 100 cases per 100,000 per week to consider in-person K-12 school. (Although private and parochial elementary schools have been open throughout the pandemic, and public school districts are hit or miss.) The official number for Philadelphia county at the moment (I’m writing this on January 7), which they only update once a week, is 225.9 per 100,000 per week and falling. My unofficial 7-day running average of the numbers the Philadelphia Health Department reports in its daily press releases is 235.0 per 100,000 per week and falling (but looking at a plot, I would say it’s bouncing around and not clearly rising or falling this week). Those of us with children in public school have not had the option of in-person school so far during this school year.

2020 Human Development Index Report

You could spend a lot of time going through any one sprawling UN report like the Human Development Index Report. Then you could spend a lifetime digging into the underlying sources. Here are a few things I gleaned from a light skim and looking at some of the pictures:

  • Amartya Sen says the index was designed as an alternative to be looked at alongside GDP, and the intent is to identify shortcomings of GDP, draw attention using a single aggregate number which doesn’t really mean much, and then hope news media and individuals dig into the underlying information. He thinks this has been reasonably successful.
  • The index crashed in 2020 due to Covid-19.
  • They have made a significant effort to incorporate ecological risks into the index. There are interesting chapters on planetary boundaries and relationships between the overall level of development and ecological risks across countries. Of course, the countries with higher development levels tend to contribute more to the global risks, which then fall on the countries with lower levels of development. So the goal would be to reduce the impact from the more developed countries, while moving the less developed countries up the development ladder without creating even more risk globally. This is hard to do.
  • Chapter 2 summarizes the magnitude of overall human impacts compared to the scale of the planet’s natural systems, the planetary boundaries concept, and the biodiversity collapse. Not a bad introduction if anyone is new to these issues.
  • Food security risks have increased significantly, and not just due to Covid-19 but due to flooding, droughts, heat, and natural disasters clearly driven by climate change. There are a lot of intertwined issues out there, but if we were going to pick only one to pay attention to globally, this would be it. See pp. 56-58. Flashing warning lights here!
  • There is an essay on existential threats to the species and civilization somewhere towards the back. One way to estimate the risk is to look at how long the species has been around, how long some of our ancestral Homo species were around, and then the annual risk of extinction. Interesting, but I wonder how hard it would be to measure/model progress against this metric or the potential impact of any one action. Even if we don’t go extinct, the category of existential threats includes an unrecoverable collapse of civilization or merely a partial collapse to an “unrecoverable dystopia”. Let’s try to avoid any of these.
  • Of course, the UN has to balance all the doom and gloom stuff with an equal word salad of things we could try to do to make it better. There are a lot more facts, figures, and scientific references in the first part, and a lot more anecdotes and case studies in the second part. TLDR, but hopefully there is some stuff in there that could trickle down to actual policies and actions at the national and local level.