Category Archives: Web Article Review

Pollinator Park

Pollinator Park is a sort of virtual botanical park tour created by the EU. The idea is to show us “what a world without pollinators would be like”. It sounds and looks cool, but didn’t load correctly in my web browser. It is also supposed to work in Oculus Rift, which I am sure is cool. There are some nice pictures in this Inhabitat article.

I have certainly heard that pollinators, and insects more generally, are disappearing, not just on a species diversity basis but on an absolute biomass basis. It makes complete sense that the loss and fragmentation of natural habitats and native vegetation would lead to a loss of insects. Pollution, agricultural chemicals, and climate change (heat/drought/fires/floods/storms) can’t be helping. I have seen at least one dissenting paper on insect loss however and would like to understand the evidence for it better. But taken at face value, it is very concerning. Pollination is undoubtedly a critical ecosystem service that we can’t do without, and this is fairly easy to understand. Unless we can go to some kind of high-tech indoor agriculture, which currently would not be a feasible way to feed 7+ billion people.

I’d also like to understand to what extent it is important to preserve some natural habitat and native vegetation (or other pollinator-friendly vegetation?) in the midst of farmland to maintain yields. What size and what shape should these habitat islands or corridors be, and do they need to be paired with specific crops? More esoterically, if you change the type of crop being grown but leave the insects and vegetation in place, does the ecosystem service value diminish? (economically, yes, but logically and morally, this makes no sense to me and I think it helps illustrate the limits of the economic approach.) Could these designed/managed habitats act as useful buffer/transition areas to more natural preserved areas? Or would they do the opposite, importing non-native plants and animals that would have an adverse impact? Can urban and suburban parks and gardens play a meaningful role? Or is it hopeless and only trying to preserve vast swathes of untouched wilderness would do? (maybe add a placeholder for this on our next planet.) Should we be releasing vast swarms of genetically modified or self-replicating robot insects? (I’m going to go with no!)

The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2040

Every four years, or early in each U.S. presidential administration, the National Intelligence Council publishes a scenario report. I had to look up what the council actually is, and basically it is an organization reporting to the Director of National Intelligence, who reports to the President and is sort of but not really in charge of the U.S. “intelligence community”, which sprawls across various military and civilian agencies with their own organizational structures.

Since this is a U.S. government report and not copyrighted, I can copy and paste as much of it as I want. Here are the five scenarios they came up with:

RENAISSANCE OF DEMOCRACIES: The world is in the midst of a resurgence of open democracies led by the United States and its allies. Rapid technological advancements fostered by public-private partnerships in the United States and other democratic societies are transforming the global economy, raising incomes, and improving the quality of life for millions around the globe. In contrast, years of increasing societal controls and monitoring in China and Russia have stifled innovation.

A WORLD ADRIFT: The international system is directionless, chaotic, and volatile as international rules and institutions are largely ignored. OECD countries are plagued by slower economic growth, widening societal divisions, and political paralysis. China is taking advantage of the West’s troubles to expand its international influence. Many global challenges are unaddressed.

COMPETITIVE COEXISTENCE: The United States and China have prioritized economic growth and restored a robust trading relationship, but this economic interdependence exists alongside competition over political influence, governance models, technological dominance, and strategic advantage. The risk of major war is low, and international cooperation and technological innovation make global problems manageable.

SEPARATE SILOS: The world is fragmented into several economic and security blocs of varying size and strength, centered on the United States, China, the EU, Russia, and a few regional powers, and focused on self-sufficiency, resiliency, and defense. Information flows within separate cyber-sovereign enclaves, supply chains are reoriented, and international trade is disrupted. Vulnerable developing countries are caught in the middle.

TRAGEDY AND MOBILIZATION: A global coalition, led by the EU and China working with NGOs and revitalized multilateral institutions, is implementing far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty following a global food catastrophe caused by climate events and environmental degradation. Richer countries shift to help poorer ones manage the crisis and then transition to low carbon economies through broad aid programs and transfers of advanced energy technologies.

Everything above is a quote by the way. I couldn’t get horrible, terrible, no good very bad WordPress editor to make them look like quotes, even using the HTML editor.

Anyway, there is a lot of doom and gloom here. I am oftentimes all about doom and gloom, especially when others are feeling optimistic, but the contrarian in me wants to think that now that almost everyone is feeling doomy gloomy, maybe the reality will not be so bad. Certainly the major food crisis above gets my attention. A major war, terrorist attack, major natural or industrial disaster, or combination of these could obviously be devastating. Smaller-scale disasters and conflicts are pretty much guaranteed, and refugee flows from poorer to richer nations are going to become an issue more and more. It is hard to see our natural environment coming under less pressure in the coming 20 years, and hard to imagine much progress toward a peaceful world government and equality on a global scale.

On the other hand, much of Europe and Asia have the managed economy thing reasonably figured out, where the capitalist economy is able to grow while the government collects taxes and provides services people need, like health care, education, and retirement. Cynical politicians in Europe and North America may figure out that the refugee pressure they are going to face will be catastrophic and that helping potential refugees in their home countries is a win-win for everyone. The world really has done pretty well with the food situation so far, and let’s assume this will continue to be a priority and that competent visionary people will remain in charge of that. Medical breakthroughs seem very likely over the next 20 years – for example, widespread cures for cancer, diabetes, HIV, and other dread diseases seem like they might be on the horizon. The population explosion will start to slow down. And let’s just say we avoid major war, plagues, or famines through a combination of competence and luck. Things really could be okay, and a generation of children could grow up in a relatively stable, sheltered, prosperous situation much as the majority of today’s middle-aged adults in developed countries did. Some of those children will be the problem solvers of tomorrow who come up with additional breakthroughs and incremental progress.

There, I just talked myself into not being quite so doomy gloomy.

What is infrastructure?

This apparently is a political question. I am not an expert on all types of infrastructure, or a financial expert, but I am somewhat of an expert on urban water infrastructure. The definition of infrastructure I typically use is from the Statement No. 34 of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board: Basic Financial Statements—and Management’s Discussion and Analysis—for State and Local Governments. Here is how it goes:

As used in this Statement, the term capital assets includes land, improvements to land, easements, buildings, building improvements, vehicles, machinery, equipment, works of art and historical treasures, infrastructure, and all other tangible or intangible assets that are used in operations and that have initial useful lives extending beyond a single reporting period. Infrastructure assets are long-lived capital assets that normally are stationary in nature and normally can be preserved for a significantly greater number of years than most capital assets. Examples of infrastructure assets include roads, bridges, tunnels, drainage systems, water and sewer systems, dams, and lighting systems. Buildings, except those that are an ancillary part of a network of infrastructure assets, should not be considered infrastructure assets for purposes of this Statement.

GASB 34

This seems like as good a definition as any. So Biden’s proposed bill is really a capital assets bill. Which doesn’t have much of a ring to it. But neither did infrastructure, it’s a bizarre word that we’ve just been saying a lot so it has started to sound less bizarre. Capital assets, I learned in my undergraduate economics classes, are the economy’s food, and as it consumes them we have to add more just to keep the amount of them level (maintain, repair, rehabilitate, or replace when the time comes). We can increase economic output up to a point by adding even more capital assets to increase the absolute level, although there is such a thing as adding too much (looking at you, old Soviet Union, and possibly modern Japan), and we are almost certainly way below the point that would be too much. It makes total sense to borrow at a reasonable interest rate and invest in capital assets that will provide a return on that investment, and if you can borrow at no interest or even a slight negative interest rate, and you are below that optimal level of capital assets, warm up those printing presses! You can also, in theory, incentivize the private sector to make appropriate capital investments on their side. Investments in education, training, research and development then round out the investment in capital assets by providing the work force and capacity to innovate that set the stage for long term investment. Oh, and you want to try to do all this without irreversibly fucking up the atmosphere and oceans. Easy peasy!

What infrastructure is definitely not is only roads, bridges, and highways. That has been the limit of imagination of many of our elected officials when talking about infrastructure. So good for this administration for taking a more expansive view, and seizing the initiative. We’ll see if this is the one big thing this administration manages to get done in its two year “grace period”. Why do we have a system where we can only do one thing every 8 years?

U.S. Marines “reinventing themselves”

The U.S. Marine Corps is retooling to (be prepared to, but hopefully not) fight a war with China, according to Scientific American. Basically, this involves a focus on amphibious landings to take islands, and then defending them with lots of drones and missiles. The Army can fight big wars with lots of tanks, if needed.

This sounds like a fun video game, and it is good to be prepared, but please politicians let’s not let a world war happen. The drum beats are getting louder every day. I think we need some kind of peace group that meets regularly to define the issues and work on resolving them, or at least keeping them nonviolent. But the drum beating seems to serve domestic political purposes in many countries – remember a military-industrial complex needs an enemy so it can keep eating and growing, especially in countries with elected leaders. And as long as the military-industrial complex is eating and growing, it is willing to pretend it is under the control of elected civilian leadership, even though it could depose that civilian leadership at the drop of a hat. But threaten it or back it into a corner and there is no telling what will happen. So in the U.S. at least, no politician will threaten it (since, I don’t know, approximately November 22, 1963), or nobody willing to threaten it gets seriously close to power. But none of this has anything to do with fighting an actual war. Not even the military-industrial complex wants that, but they will beat their drums right up to the point of war, hoping their opponent will back off and make them look strong. It’s easy to see how this can lead to catastrophe.

yes, you can eat Cicadas

The bulk of the Brood X cicadas are likely to come out in May (if 2004 is a good guide to what to expect) and be centered around D.C. and Baltimore. The edge of the blob just touches Philadelphia, and there are scatterings in southern and Central Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and Georgia. I wonder how they get scattered the way they do – do they start out everywhere and then local populations gradually go extinct over time? Besides a clear map and an empirical probability density function (but they don’t call it that, not wanting to scare readers!), this Washington Post article reminded me that the Cicada swarm is actually made up of three similar but different species. That also is weird and interesting.

Also, here is a cicada cookbook from the University of Maryland. I have tried fried crickets in Asia but I don’t think I can bring myself to try Cicadas. As the into to the cookbook points out though, shrimp and crayfish are basically bugs that we westerners eat, so your ick factor is mostly just a matter of cultural conditioning. The cookbook also has this interesting comparison of protein in insects vs. other animals we humans like to eat:

Many people all over the world eat insects and other arthropods both as a delicacy and staple. This is sensible because insects are nutritious. Insects provide as much protein pound per pound as lean beef. For example, every 100 gram serving of each, termites provide 617 calories of energy while lean ground beef gives 219 and cod gives 170 (3). Although their amino acid content is not as well-balanced for human nutrition, this can be easily corrected by including fiber and other plant proteins into your diet. Insects are also a good source of minerals and some vitamins, especially for people who have limited access to other animal proteins.

University of Maryland

So termites sound like a pretty good survival food. Even if you live in some wasteland where nothing else will grow, there is likely some wood around that you could feed to them. You can then feed them to chickens or rats if you want, but it may be most efficient to just eat them if you can handle it. I don’t think I handle it – termites are in the cockroach family, I while I can handle the crickets for sale in Asian street markets, I cannot handle the “water bugs” which are basically cockroaches. But maybe if someone can grind them into a flour or paste I can use to thicken my soup, it could be a nutritious supplement and I might not have to think about it so much.

are hydrogen fuel cells finally arriving?

Not in the U.S., according to this article in Asia Times (a Hong Kong affair I don’t know a lot about), but maybe in China and Europe. Fuel cells have worked just fine on the space shuttle and on naval ships, but have not been close to competitive even with batteries for everyday vehicles. This article says that may change starting with commercial trucks. Government investment in refueling stations is a key.

Europe and Japan – Germany has declared 2021 the year of hydrogen technology – are running only slightly behind China. For the next decade or so, battery-powered passenger vehicles will dominate the market for low-carbon substitutes for the internal combustion engine. But batteries can’t power long-range freight transportation by truck and rail, and China is making a decisive commitment to hydrogen…

Already the largest market for Plug-in Energy Vehicles (PEV’s) with 3 million on the road, China projects a fleet of 50,000 fuel-cell vehicles (FCV’s) by 2025 and 1 million by 2030, from only 6,000 on the road in 2019.

Asia Times

In my utopian vision, long-range freight would be moved mostly by electrified rail, then delivered locally by small electric vehicles. Fuel cells would make sense for aircraft – much cleaner stuff than that nasty old jet fuel, and could maybe be made onsite at airports rather than shipping or piping all that toxic fuel around. They also seem attractive to me as backup generators for, say, hospitals, or any building/facility that can be solar-powered most of the time but needs a backup power source for cloudy days. Right now that often involves a tank of diesel fuel, which is a maintenance hassle at best and an environmental nightmare at worst. Small nuclear reactors, desalination plants, and fuel cells all seem to go together well to me, because you could use the excess nuclear power during low demand periods to electrolyze water, store the hydrogen in fuel cell form, and use it for peak electric demand or jet fuel or whatever you need.

and vaccinated people don’t spread the virus…much

The confusion among the public continues. Basically, vaccinated people have a 10% or so chance of getting infected Covid-19 if they are exposed to it. If they are infected, they won’t get seriously ill but they might be able to spread it to un-vaccinated people who might then get seriously ill. If you multiply the probabilities, the odds of getting infected by a vaccinated person and then getting seriously ill are low, and the odds that a given person we are exposed to will be vaccinated is getting higher all the time, so the risk is getting lower all the time. Vaccinated people are being asked to wear masks to help that risk drop as quickly as possible. BUT half the population is hearing “the government is sugar-coating the science” and the other half of the population is hearing “vaccinated people are likely to spread the virus”. Neither of these messages is accurate in my view – I’m hearing the risk is low and getting lower, and we all need to get vaccinated to get the risk as low as possible (which will not be zero, but we can all move on to worrying about other diseases such as antibiotic-resistant syphilis).

how the U.S. dollar could fall

Here is an article by Kenneth Rogoff on how the U.S. dollar could lose its privileged position relative to other currencies long-term. Basically, this would be bad because suddenly the U.S. would have to pretend as though money is actually real. The government, businesses, and homeowners would have to pay actual interest on their debts, and would have less money to spend on other things. Traveling, working, and living abroad would also get more expensive in dollar terms. On the other hand, imported things would get more expensive but exports would get cheaper for people in other countries to buy, and this might boost trade. There are geopolitical implications too which I don’t understand well.

Anyway, here is how Rogoff says it could go down:

  • Up until now, China has pegged its currency to a “basket of currencies” in which the dollar has a fairly large weight. Its currency is lower than it would probably be if traded openly without restrictions. This helps China export cheaply, just as I mentioned above. But eventually they may want to change this, for similar reasons as I mention above.
  • Other Asian countries may eventually adopt Chinese currency, peg their currencies to Chinese currency, and start using Chinese currency as reserve savings. This would all increase the status and stability of the Chinese currency internationally relative to the dollar. So far, countries around the world (including China) have kept mostly dollars in reserve because they consider it the most safe, stable currency.

What wild animals were at the Wuhan market?

It seems that the efforts to trace Covid-19 back to bats in the Wuhan province are pretty inconclusive. SARS and MERS were both definitively (?) traced back to bats, so people seem to have jumped to this conclusion. “Similar” viruses have been found in bats, but bats have all kinds of things and the family of coronaviruses seems to be extremely common. The WHO team does say it is extremely unlikely that any of the “several” laboratories studying coronaviruses in the city would have made a mistake leading to emergence of this virus. (This alone raises a few questions for me. Is it unusual for a city the size of Wuhan in China or other countries to have several laboratories with coronaviruses lying around? Or do most big cities have some kind of epidemiological laboratory, and the family of coronaviruses is so common that almost any lab would have examples of it in the fridge? What about the dangerous ones.) They also say definitively this is a natural virus, not a genetically engineered one.

I’ve been to “wet markets” in Singapore and Thailand, which could well be tame compared to the one in Wuhan, I have no idea. I would hypothesize that you have a lot of people working, shopping, and eating in very close proximity to each other. Sometimes you have people doing grosser things, like smoking, or spitting. Cats and dogs sometimes roam freely. And sometimes these markets are air conditioned, I have seen it both ways. So if someone already had the virus, it might have spread between people in the market and have nothing particularly to do with food or wild animals.

But I found it interesting to read what wild animals were actually for sale in the Wuhan market. Do people eat bats, or keep them as pets? (And before you judge as a westerner, be aware people in other cultures are just as horrified by some of our habits and things we eat as we are by some of theirs.)

The so-called wet market had 653 stalls and more than 1,180 employees supplying seafood products as well as fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, and live animals before it closed on Jan. 1, 2020. Days before, 10 stall operators were trading live wild animals, including chipmunks, foxes, raccoons, wild boar, giant salamanders, hedgehogs, sika deer. Farmed, wild and domestic animals were also traded at the market including snakes, frogs, quails, bamboo rats, rabbits, crocodiles and badgers…

Bloomberg

So no bats mentioned. I also find myself thinking about the various “bird flu” and “swine flu” scares of the past. It is often human-livestock contact that gives rise to concerning pathogens, so we should keep that in mind. And of course, there are still plenty of deadly pathogens being spread by mosquitoes, fleas and ticks while we are fixated on this one (admittedly horrific) unusual coronavirus incident.

what Singapore does well

After reading this long article in the London Review of Books, I find myself reflecting on my own experience in Singapore from 2010-2013. Here’s my take on what they do well. First, they educate everybody. Everybody is not an international math champion, despite what you might think, but everybody gets a solid education through at least a two-year vocational degree. Second, they build their economy by attracting foreign investment and being a center of trade. Third, they have rational guest worker policies for both skilled and unskilled workers. I think all this keeps the economy humming along pretty well. Then, they have rational tax policies. They help the population build wealth through a subsidized housing program (often called “public housing” in the international press, but think of it more like a condo you own with the government as your condo association. If you meet certain requirements (which include race and fertility, policies that would not translate well everywhere), you essentially get to buy your condo at a discount and sell it at full price. Then there is essentially a forced saving scheme, which is invested in the well-managed sovereign wealth fund and given back to people in annuity form at retirement age.

That’s what I liked. I felt the focus on economics resulted in a society where a lot of people really are all about money, and people are somewhat cold to each other. The idea of technocratic government and leadership development works up to a point, but it results in a certain arrogance that does not always match ability. They have comprehensive and highly efficient public transportation, but they still separate residential and commercial land uses and this results in really long commutes for people. And if you are not from there, the place just feels a bit crowded, loud and claustrophobic after awhile.

I had the fortune of experiencing an election while I lived there, and I came away thinking that their one-party-dominated system is not all that different than our two-similar-party-dominated system, at least in terms of barriers to entry and resistance to change. But overall, I think their system is working better in the interest of their people than the U.S. system in recent years.