Category Archives: Web Article Review

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.

dolphins and extraterrestrials

No, dolphins are not communicating with extraterrestrials that we know of. This Aeon article is pretty interesting stuff though about how the study of dolphin intelligence and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have been intertwined over time though. The consensus these days seems to be that dolphins are as about as smart as a human toddler, which is pretty smart if you think about it, but not smart enough to build a technological civilization. This article contains some musings about whether technological civilizations are the inevitable end state of the evolution of intelligent life, whether another one would arise on Earth if ours disappeared for some reason (but life itself did not), whether there are likely to be others out there, whether they are likely to have come and gone, and if so why.

Later, at the first Soviet-American conference on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) in 1971, it was suggested by some attendees that we don’t see evidence of supercivilisations across the galaxy because the only ones that persist are the ones that give up the risky path of technology and instead pursue immersion in nature. Ageing civilisations either self-destruct or shift focus to something like Zen Buddhism, it was conjectured: pursuing spiritual and qualitative self-perfection at the cost of all interest in external reality or ‘“quantitative” expansion’. The Russian astrophysicist Vladimir M Lipunov speculated that, across the Universe, the scientific mindset recurrently evolves, discovers all there is to know and, having exhausted its compelling curiosity, proceeds to wither away. By 1978, the philosophers Arkadiy Ursul and Yuri Shkolenko wrote of such conjectures – concerning the ‘possible rejection in the future of the “technological way” of development’ – and reflected that this would be tantamount to humanity’s ‘transformation into something like dolphins’.

Aeon

It’s a bit of a puzzle why we haven’t discovered any signals out there despite looking for around half a century. I recently listed to this Science Vs. podcast where someone likened our search so far to dipping a cup in the ocean and not coming up with any fish. You wouldn’t conclude from that that fish do not exist, just that they do not exist where you dipped the cup. The expert interviewed went on to say that technology is improving and those cups are now turning into buckets.

some facts on special operations forces

This Intercept article has some facts and figures on the growth of U.S. special operations forces.

U.S. Special Operations Command has grown exponentially over the last 20 years. “Special operations-specific funding” topped out at $3.1 billion in 2001, compared with $13.1 billion now. Before 9/11, there were roughly 43,000 special operations forces. Today, there are 74,000 military personnel and civilians in the command. Two decades ago, an average of 2,900 commandos were deployed overseas in any given week. That number now stands at 4,500, according to SOCOM spokesperson Ken McGraw.

Intercept

It seems to me they do the job of a much larger conventional military force, and the future of war (also known as “defense”) is probably some combination of special operations and high technology. My concern is when the military takes over functions more appropriate to civilian diplomats, which it seems to me has been happening.