George Soros summarized the disastrous state of the world in a speech to the World Economic Forum, then tried to end on a high note. The high note didn’t succeed, at least for me. He got me too depressed with his list of problems: climate change first and foremost; authoritarian trends in many countries including the United States, China, Russia, and India; Brexit; and specter of nuclear war rising. His solution to all this is better education focused on system thinking and critical thinking. I can certainly support that – if we start now, it is a long term investment that may pay off in 40 years as babies born today start to move into positions of power. We may always want to consider some shorter-term measures to deal with the risks of war and climate change if we would like those babies to have a civilization to grow up in for the next 40 years.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
Arctic Report Card 2019
Looking for good news? Do not read NOAA’s Arctic Report Card 2019!
neonicotinoids
The problem with neoniconitoid pesticides, according to this Intercept article, is not that they kill bees directly, but that they weaken their immune systems so that they succumb to fungal infections. Sick bees have an instinct to fly away from the hive and die quietly somewhere to protect the hive. And the concentrations that cause this are so low they are not even detectable in monitoring data.
undeclared U.S.-Russia war?
I’m not familiar with this blog yasha.substack.com, but it makes a somewhat convincing argument that the U.S. and Russia are fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, and that is a theme running throughout the impeachment proceedings.
If you read the impeachment literature, including the articles of impeachment, you’ll find the notion that we are at war with Russia underlies a major part of the case against Trump. Aside from the charges of self-dealing and corruption and attempts to influence an election, Trump’s other overarching crime is he “compromised American national security” and “injured national security” by slightly delaying the nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine that had been approved by Congress. The argument is that he will “remain a threat to national security” if he remains president and so must be removed. This line of thinking is expressed even more clearly in the House Judiciary Committee report on impeachment.
yasha.substack.com
socialism by the numbers
We can argue about the ideology of “socialism” vs. “capitalism”, often without even clearly defining these terms. It’s harder to argue with an avalanche of clearly presented evidence. This article from Current Affairs lays out the numbers showing the United States gradually slipping behind it’s developed country peer group in all areas. Consistently, the Scandinavian and Northern European countries that combine high productivity with policies to redistribute some of the wealth do the best. Our Anglo-American cousins the UK, Canada and Australia tend to do a little better than the U.S. but have still fallen behind the leaders of the pack.
The U.S. does well on measures of average income and wealth, but very poorly on measures of median income and wealth. We do poorly on measures of free time, infant and maternal mortality, life satisfaction, and innovation. I’m sure you can argue about how some of these indicators are defined and measured, but the overall trend is clear – we are creating financial wealth, but not sharing it and not creating satisfying or healthy lives for the majority, and we are continuing to slip behind our peers.
Robert Skidelski on the robot revolution
This is a long article on automation and jobs, but what it boils down to is a reminder that if robot come for our jobs, simply working less and spending time on other things will be an option. This has happened many times in history, and the idea that becoming richer leads to working more is a very recent development. On the other hand, this only works if we share the new wealth.
MH370
It’s sad to read about what (probably, most likely) happened to MH370, the Malaysian airliner that went missing in 2014. Don’t read on if you don’t want to know. Okay…what really probably happened according to The Atlantic is that the pilot, who had a history of mental illness, locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit, intentionally depressurized the plane and climbed to 40,000 feet, which would have caused everyone onboard to lose consciousness and die painlessly in their sleep, repressurized and reheated the plane, then flew for thousands of miles towards Antarctica before diving into the ocean. Disturbing, hard to explain, but there it is.
I learned a few things from this article. First, 40,000 feet is about as high as commercial airliners can go. Second, the oxygen masks provided to passengers are meant to last only about 15 minutes, long enough for the pilots to perform an emergency descent to below 13,000 feet, where there is enough air and it is warm enough for people to breathe without them. Meanwhile, the pilots have pressurized air tanks and masks that can last for hours, if needed. Finally, crazy pilots do occasionally crash planes on purpose, so you can add that to your list of things to worry about if you are looking for something new.
In 1997, a captain working for a Singaporean airline called SilkAir is believed to have disabled the black boxes of a Boeing 737 and to have plunged the airplane at supersonic speeds into a river.* In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately crashed into the sea by its co-pilot off the coast of Long Island, resulting in the loss of everyone on board. In 2013, just months before MH370 disappeared, the captain of LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 flew his Embraer E190 twin jet from cruising altitude into the ground, killing all 27 passengers and all six crew members. The most recent case is the Germanwings Airbus that was deliberately crashed into the French Alps on March 24, 2015, also causing the loss of everyone on board. Its co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had waited for the pilot to use the bathroom and then locked him out. Lubitz had a record of depression and—as investigations later discovered—had made a study of MH370’s disappearance, one year earlier.
Atlantic
That’s about five intentional crashes in 20 years, or one every four years on average, if I am doing the math right.
what urban and rural voters have in common
This article in Governing is mostly about what urban and rural voters do not have in common, why rural voters have a disproportionate share of politic power relative to their numbers, and why politicians therefore cater to them and tend to downplay urban issues, which are the issues that affect the vast majority of citizens. However, the article included a couple of paragraphs on what urban and rural voters have in common, which I thought were insightful.
Low-income residents of urban neighborhoods who know they’ll never be able to afford to live in the glitzy new apartment building that’s going up are, economically speaking, in a similar boat as rural residents who’ve seen the factory shut down and the area left behind by the global economy. “Urban neighborhoods that are dealing with population loss are dealing with the same issues of abandonment as low-income rural counties,” says Hill, the Ohio State professor. “The problems are the same: drug abuse, abandoned factories, losing kids to places with rising opportunity.”
Governing
I can actually attest to this, originally being from an Appalachian factory town, then from a former Pennsylvania coal town, and now living in central Philadelphia. The problems of poor people, and the problems of middle class working people, and the problems of working parents, and the problems of the disabled and the retired, etc. are pretty much the same everywhere. The difference is that urban areas are where most of the productive economic activity that can be taxed come from. And investments in infrastructure and programs in relatively dense population centers can just serve a lot more people for the money spent compared to less dense areas. And finally, denser areas with universities and startup companies and corporate R&D centers are where people come together to learn and solve problems.
Of course, one party in particular is good at playing to the emotions of rural voters and convincing them that they are the only real Americans, that people in the cities are not like them, are a threat to them and are draining resources away from them, when in fact the opposite is true. Sometimes they even convince suburban voters that their interests do not lie with other voters in the metropolitan areas they are a part of.
suspended animation
This article in New Scientist (I don’t know anything about this publication) suggests that people who arrived at the hospital technically dead by any standard definition have been chilled to very cold temperatures for a couple hours, operated on, and resuscitated. This is not too surprising because you do occasionally here of people who drown in very cold water and get resuscitated after longer periods of time than you would think. Also, if bears, chipmunks, and frogs can do it with basically the same organs as us, why not us? But still, this is something new that could change the traditional definition of death and maybe lead toward the idea of hibernation present in every space travel story ever.
e-Estonia
Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Here’s a 2017 article from the New Yorker:
E-Estonia is the most ambitious project in technological statecraft today, for it includes all members of the government, and alters citizens’ daily lives. The normal services that government is involved with—legislation, voting, education, justice, health care, banking, taxes, policing, and so on—have been digitally linked across one platform, wiring up the nation…
Its government presents this digitization as a cost-saving efficiency and an equalizing force. Digitizing processes reportedly saves the state two per cent of its G.D.P. a year in salaries and expenses. Since that’s the same amount it pays to meet the nato threshold for protection (Estonia—which has a notably vexed relationship with Russia—has a comparatively small military), its former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves liked to joke that the country got its national security for free…
The program that resulted is called e-residency, and it permits citizens of another country to become residents of Estonia without ever visiting the place. An e-resident has no leg up at the customs desk, but the program allows individuals to tap into Estonia’s digital services from afar.
The New Yorker
A 2% boost to GDP seems like a pretty big deal to me. It’s a pretty clear example of how well-functioning government can provide a platform and level playing field for the economy to thrive. I can imagine this potential being even larger in the U.S. where everything is so decentralized and inefficient, even at the metro scale. Of course, this very inefficiency keeps a lot of people busy that would need to find something else to do if it went away.
Apparently anyone can apply to be an e-resident, and it allows you to essentially do business as though you were from, or in, Estonia. You can also hire them as consultants, of course.