Category Archives: Web Article Review

coronavirus changes to keep

This article in Axios lists some changes brought about by the coronavirus that we might want to keep after the coronavirus.

  • not just remote work, but remote hiring and onboarding – There are now people working at the local branch of my company who I have never met in person. Conversely, it seems no more weird to work online with people anywhere in the world* who I have never met in person, than it does to work with someone local who I have never met in person. This gets us closer to the economists’ dream of a truly mobile workforce that could iron out some inequities. (* Time zones still exist, and I can tell you from working with U.S. staff while I was living in Asia, working in the middle of the night still sucks. I worked with someone in South America last year though who was only one time zone away from mine, and that worked out great. India – I love you guys but the time zone thing is just too brutal…)
  • new movies streamed – well, okay, if you’re a big movie buff… but I do see the distinction between movies and TV shows with a series of hour-long episodes slowly dissolving, and the shows tend to be higher quality. I suspect 2-hour movies that take a year or more to produce and then release may be on their way out.
  • more seamless delivery of everything – yes, but we still need street and parking design in our cities to catch up
  • telehealth and teletherapy – yes, this seems good. I’d like to see home visits make a comeback basic routine health care – no real sign of that yet, although my life insurance company did recently send a nurse to my house to check my weight and blood pressure, stick me with a needle and collect a cup of my pee. So it can be done. Here’s an idea – let’s do vaccination this way.
  • Maybe some states are realizing the internet needs to be treated like a public utility going forward. We’ll see….
  • better remote education tech – this article mentions smaller class sizes and better parent-teacher-school communication. I agree – some of what the remote model lacks could be offset by more one-on-one and small-group attention where it will do the most good.

I’d like to add timed tickets to this list. I’ve seen a few museums, parks, etc. do this in the past, but it has become much more prevalent to buy a ticket that gets you in within a certain window during the day, and this has a huge crowd control benefit. Things are just much more enjoyable when they are less crowded. I also like restaurants and stores that let you check in online, then text you when your table or customer service person is ready for you. Let’s get rid of standing in line forever!

Covid and automation

Pew has an update on activities that might be automated in the near to medium term. Covid might be speeding this up – there’s not much hard evidence offered in this article, but one expert interviewed said he thinks it has been accelerated by five years. Sadly, the articles does not contain any videos of robots at work, which are always fun.

  • taking orders in restaurants – seems like a no-brainer, most of us have probably done this
  • flipping burgers – I haven’t seen this yet
  • delivering meals and towels in hotels and hospitals – The first place I saw this was a hospital in Singapore. I played a (very low speed) game of chicken with the robot. The robot won – or I won, if winning means walking away with all my limbs. It was a children’s hospital so if I lost a limb I would have had to go to a different hospital.
  • cleaning hospital rooms – I’d really like to see this one! If they can clean hospital rooms, can they clean my house?
  • welding in factories – I don’t spend much time in factories
  • meatpacking – no, I haven’t seen a robot rip a chicken open but it seems like the kind of thing that makes sense for robots, if we are all going to continue ripping open and eating animals (which I do myself, and would be a hypocrite if I said I didn’t think we should continue doing this)
  • “Jobs also could be automated for better-educated knowledge workers, including some computer programmers, medical assistants and sales professionals.” The logic here is a little tenuous – replacing travel and convention industry jobs with online meetings. I guess, but is that really the same job being automated, or is that just a job that went away? Did refrigerators “automate” the job of delivering blocks of ice to our homes? If you were the ice man (and now you no longer cometh – I couldn’t resist), I guess that distinction doesn’t matter much to you. Refrigerators do have to be designed, manufactured, delivered, maintained, repaired, and eventually recycled or disposed of, however.
  • customer service – I think this is true, although the computers aren’t necessarily doing a good job and our expectations may have just been lowered to the point where we accept this.
  • “low wage gigs in stores and restaurants” – When I was a teenager I checked out and bagged groceries. That job has been “automated” by making the customer do it themselves. So again, is eliminating customer service the equivalent of automating it, or do we just not remember what customer service was? Not that it was ever perfect.
  • “low skill jobs in mining or factories” – I don’t spend much time in mines
  • “department stores dropping off automated orders at the curb” – a couple years ago, I would have called the police if people were banging on my door and leaving things in front of my house at odd hours. Now it’s the norm.

You can see how all this could lead logically to the idea of a universal basic income. If automation is increasing the productivity of the economy as a whole, but displacing some workers, you can take a portion of new wealth created (this is called taxes) and redistribute it. Or you can set up a sovereign wealth fund and distribute dividends from it, while saving some of the money to redistribute on a future rainy day (you don’t need to do this if you can just print as much money as you want and people will accept it worldwide, but then again maybe you should be planning for a day when that will no longer be the case). Set the tax rate right and you can help everybody at least a little while maintaining the incentive to innovate. Or you can try to be more targeted and use the money for unemployment payments, education and training. This should all be a no-brainer, but the people making the profits don’t want to give up even a small share, and they have spent decades manufacturing a toxic anti-tax culture that makes this politically very hard to do.

Richard Florida’s plan for Philadelphia

Richard Florida and another dude I hadn’t heard of (but he’s local) have a plan for post-pandemic Philadelphia, and it goes something like this:

  • Focus heavily on medical and biotech R&D and startups, where we are a major center.
  • Upgrade workforce skills to participate in this industry.
  • Local procurement policies, especially from minority businesses.
  • Do something to fill vacant store fronts.
  • Do something about poverty.
  • Raise the minimum wage.
  • Develop “concrete actionable strategies” to do these things.

This all sounds pretty good to me. It’s short on specifics of course. We need to grow the economy and create professional jobs somehow without alienating the anti-gentrification crowd. Then tax revenue could increase and just maybe you could do something about poverty. Poverty is the tough nut to crack because there may just not be enough money to go around within a single political jurisdiction, although there probably is plenty to go around in the metro area as a whole, and certainly in the state and country as a whole.

I think professional management of city services would also help. Philadelphia should be a first class international city, but in addition to the income and education inequities it is held back by a personality that is too accepting of amateurism and mediocrity, and too unwilling to look at what is working elsewhere and adapt it. This is not such a tough nut to crack, in my view. Government, businesses, educational institutions, and the public worker unions could get together and probably come up with a plan to upgrade services significantly while saving money, building skills, and creating jobs in the process. This would be a win-win-win for everyone.

bumble bee watch

If you have some free time or are looking for an outdoor project with kids, you can take pictures of bumble bees and upload them to this website. Scientists there can help you identify them and tell you if they are rare.

Bumble bees seem to like my anise hyssop, milkweed, and sunflowers especially. I tried to take a photo of one just now but it turns out they don’t always sit still for photos. There is only so much you can do for wildlife in an urban situation, but one thing you can do is plant to help bees and butterflies, then have friendly conversations with family, friends and neighbors when they ask what the heck you are doing in your “overgrown” garden and when your “weeds” make attempts to expand beyond your borders.

genetic engineering and coronavirus vaccines

Some of the coronavirus candidates are being developed using tech such as chicken eggs that have been around for a while (no, I don’t know which one came first…) But there are also some cutting edge genetic engineering technologies being applied to commercial vaccine development for the first time.

The gene-based vaccines (several based on messenger RNA, and which I’ll refer to as mRNA vaccines from here on out) are novel and promising because of the speed with which they can be designed and scaled for manufacturing, but none has ever been licensed for use to combat a disease. The mRNA candidates inject genetic coding from the SARS-CoV-2 virus into the vaccinee, which then induces the body to create part of the virus to attack with an immune response. In other words, through genetic coding, the body itself produces a component of the pathogen, which then primes the body to attack the full virus if it later presents itself.

Viral vector vaccines using adenoviruses are also more novel than traditional vaccine platforms. Viral vector vaccines use a genetically engineered virus that is not the vaccine target to deliver into the cells of a vaccinee the genetic instructions to produce a protein of the targeted virus, which then induces an immune response. The European Medicines Agency (Europe’s counterpart to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) recently approved an adenovirus vaccine (with a booster) for the prevention of Ebola.

AEI

I remember reading in the past that new techniques like these should be applied to vaccine development, but weren’t being because the sure-fire profit motive wasn’t there for the big drug companies. I guess tens of billions of dollars in government funding changed that in a matter of months. The good thing is we will have this technology up and running going forward. The bad thing is it sounds a little scary if it were to fall into the wrong hands.

if the universe is a simulation, can it crash?

Hopefully, if the universe is a simulation, it is a stable one. And if it crashes, whatever intelligent entity is out there can call his or her IT guy, spin it up again, fast forward to where it left off, and we won’t know the difference. If it is a simulation, do we really want to know? This article in Scientific American says that if we really want to know, one way to test whether it is a simulation is to try to crash it on purpose. So how would you do that? One way is to build our own simulated universes, then let them build their own simulated universes, and so on. At some point, the hardware of our universe should not be able to run all those universes. So to get to this point, we need to keep working on building way faster computers.

robotic fighter planes

Robotic fighter planes are here. I remember reading one article (which I can’t find at the moment) about a test where human pilots were unable to beat them in a simulation. The simulation is unimportant, because the robots were unconstrained and allowed to sacrifice themselves if that gave them the greatest chance of taking out the enemy fighter. And that is just what they did – play chicken with the human pilots, whose instinct was to try to preserve themselves and their expensive planes. Anyway, here is another article from Forbes about a “robotic wingman” called Skyborg. Beyond the apocalyptic name (Terminator bad guys meet Star Trek bad guys?), the article focuses on intricacies of Pentagon procurement. Suffice it to say, the companies involved (who probably issued a press release that led to this article) hope there will be lots of procurement.

modern monetary models

These two posts have a long explanation of monetary theory in general, and modern monetary theory in particular. It’s a little over my head, although I like challenging myself to try to understand it. It is a very abstract system to try to understand. I think that if you can understand monetary policy, you might have a chance to understand what money actually is. And if enough people understand it, they might stop believing in it and the world might end.

Basically, as I understand it, the government prints money (i.e., borrows money from itself) and spends it, usually more than it takes back in taxes, and this creates a surplus in the private sector. It can control the money supply by changing the amount it borrows and spends, or by changing the tax rate. I think what people find scary about “modern monetary theory” is that it suggests money doesn’t have to be taken seriously and any needed amount can just be printed any time. This is why politicians generally have not been given the keys to the printing press.

I have a metaphor in my mind of the real economy as a machine with pistons and gears turning. The fuel for the machine is maybe human effort and ideas (and some actual fuel). But the gears will grind without grease, so you have to lube it up. Not enough and the system will shut down violently. Adding extra will not make the machine turn faster, but it will not do any serious harm other than maybe a gunky mess someone has to clean up. Better to use a little too much lube than not enough. The lube for the economic machine is money.

There were a few other interesting things in the articles that I didn’t know or hadn’t thought about recently. It refers to the late Wynne Godley at Cambridge University as the “father of stock-flow consistent modeling”. I think a few people in a few different disciplines might claim that mantle, but that is the neat thing about system theory, it’s interdisciplinary. There is a certain irony if anyone is into it and doesn’t realize it is interdisciplinary.

There is a free(?) system dynamics system called Minsky, something like Stella but tailored specifically to finance and economics. Matlab also has a sort of stock-flow simulation module call Simulink that I hadn’t heard of. I am still waiting for that system dynamics R package.

The Minsky model also made me think of the late Jay Forrester, who advocated for a long time for stock-flow modeling in economics.

Traditional mainstream academic economics, by trying to be a science, has failed to answer major questions about real- life economic behavior. Economics should become a systems profession, such as management, engineering, and medicine. By closely observing the structures and policies in business and government, simulation models can be constructed to answer questions about business cycles, causes of major depressions, inflation, monetary policy, and the validity of descriptive economic theories. A system dynamics model, as a general theory of economic behavior, now endogenously generates business cycles, Kuznets cycles, the economic long wave, and growth. A model is a theory of the behavior that it generates. The economic model provides the theory, thus far missing from economics, for the Great Depression of the 1930s and how such episodes can recur 50–70 years apart. Simpler system dynamics models can become the vehicle for a relevant and exciting pre-college economics education.

Jay Forrester, quoted in a blog called Viewpoints that Matter (including the blogger’s viewpoint, presumably)

Imagine if the average high school graduate really had an intuitive understanding of how important systems like the economy are structured and why they function the way they do as a result. The world might be a different place.

I’ve been working on one more metaphor for awhile. Maybe the real economy is like a tightrope, and the financial economy is like a safety net stretched above a concrete floor. If we use too much food, water, energy, saturate the atmosphere and ocean with our waste, etc. we will fall off the rope. Hitting the concrete floor would be a failure of the real economy like starvation or freezing to death. The safety net would be a spike in prices for food or energy that slows down the economy short of (most people, right away) actually dying of exposure. The fall would still be very painful and you might break bones or even your neck if you fall just the wrong way. What about something like nuclear proliferation or all the ice in Antarctica suddenly melting? I don’t know, maybe dry rot in the old net that we are failing to do anything about. No price signal is going to save us from those.

Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis

The Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis has a new report, Climate Action: Building a Clean Economy for the American People. It has a laundry list of the kinds of measures that are needed and that the next Congress could choose to act on. What is really interesting though is the last chapter, which is called Dark Money. It takes solid aim at the fossil fuel industry’s campaign to misinform, disinform, and buy political influence, especially following the Citizens United decision. On the page introducing this topic is a picture of our Supreme Court justices.

The Democratic Senators blame Republicans, of course, but the cirampaigns need to be funded too. They pretty much admit here that big business owns Congress, and the Supreme Court made that happen. Well, remembering my high school civics, the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, but Congress wrote the Constitution and Congress can change it.

The Republican Party Doesn’t Stand for Anything!

I said I was going to look at the Republican Party Platform.

I have voted for Republican candidates at the state and local level at times in the past. I am sympathetic to pro-business, pro-growth arguments at times. I think that some countries have overreached in terms of taxation and regulation at times. I tried to give the Republican Party the benefit of the doubt. BUT…

Today I confirmed that THERE IS NO REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM. They didn’t meet to discuss one, and didn’t adopt one, in 2020. They are for whatever Trump says, and against whatever Obama and the Democratic Party say. They have no ideas, no policy proposals. They simply don’t stand for anything! This is not propaganda. I am not making this up. This is what their website literally says. Just to make sure I wasn’t missing something, I went to the Republican National Committee website, and clicked on the link to the party platform from there. Here’s what is says:

WHEREAS, The RNC has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement…

WHEREAS, The RNC, had the Platform Committee been able to convene in 2020, would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration

WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda;

RESOVLVED [sic], That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention

The Republican Party

Okay, fine, let’s look at the 2016 platform then, and compare it to the policy priorities of my pretend party platform.

  • Anti-corruption? No! They are literally against any limits on the purchasing of influence by the rich and powerful. p. 12.
  • A major childcare, education, and training commitment? No! The health and welfare of children is a paramount responsibility of the government…right up to the point where they are born. From that point, childcare is up to parents alone, preferably two heterosexual parents, and the government will not and should not interfere. Parents should have a choice of schools, which sounds reasonable, but in practice this means defunding the universal public education system. Make sure white people are not discriminated against in college admissions. The government should not provide student loans and higher education should be privatized as much as possible.
  • A major public infrastructure and private capital investment commitment? A major research and development commitment? They talk about technology. They talk about startups. I’ll give them some points for talking about the electric grid, which Democrats don’t mention. They don’t really see an active government role in any of these things, let alone an active funding role. They are maybe open to some funding for R&D in the private health care industry.
  • Universal health care? No! Continue to rely on the failed private market place that provides poor outcomes at the world’s highest prices, for those who are able to obtain care at all.
  • A major risk management program? No, but remember I didn’t give the Democrats a high score on this. I’ll give them some points for talking about food security. I’ll give them some points for talking about cybersecurity. They talk a lot about coal. I wonder if they would still talk about coal so much if they adopted a new platform? They state that the IPCC is a political body, not a scientific one. They reject international agreements on carbon emissions. They want to double down in the war on drugs. They are generally for more military spending, more nuclear weapons, and against arms control agreements. Iran, China, and maybe Russia are the enemies. They are just generally against much involvement in international organizations.
  • New revenue to support investment? No, they’re just generally against taxes.
  • Unemployment, disability, retirement? No, they want to monkey with social security.

I tried to be objective and read the document with fresh eyes. I am generally disgusted by it. This is a party with no ideas for improving the country, and I would not entrust them with leadership of anything. I hope they crash and burn in 2020, and reemerge as a more moderate, pro-business and pro-growth party.