Openculture.com has a list of where to start on philosophy. Perhaps I’ll add these to my retirement reading list.
They are as follows: Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn’s Think, the complete works of Plato, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, St. Augustine’s Confessions, René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.
AMOC is of course the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, and a new study summarized by Guardian suggests we are on a path to its tipping point.
Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. These show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later.
The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models.
Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels.
I admit that when I am sort of lazily thinking about this, I don’t distinguish in my mind between the tipping point and the collapse. But they are different, as this article illustrates. The tipping point is the point of no return, but because there is a time lag between the tipping point and the consequences, the tipping point is going to be called in hindsight rather than in real time. And this is very bad for our increasingly short-attention-span species and civilization.
Well, Musk himself has not volunteered for invasive brain surgery as far as we know. But some people do in fact have small electrodes implanted in their brains. I learned from Startalk that this has legitimate medical uses. If a person has brain cancer and would die without brain surgery to remove a portion of the brain, surgeons will implant these electrodes and monitor the brain’s signals for a period of time to understand exactly which part of the brain needs to be removed, and to do that as safely as possible. The ethics of this are pretty clear. Technologically, the next step after this invasive form of brain monitoring is to advance non-invasive brain monitoring technologies, which exist but are currently not as good. And after that, still in the realm of science fiction for now, would come the injectable nanobots that can connect your brain to the internet. According to Ray Kurzweil, that fabulous science fiction future is scheduled to arrive in 2029.
Now back to Musk and Neuralink. A person who had the technology installed about 18 months ago has chosen to speak publicly. The person was paralyzed after an accident, and this has given him the ability to do many things he would otherwise not be able to do.
a Neuralink-made robotic surgery device implanted the chip and connected tiny threads with more than 1,000 electrodes to the neurons in his brain. Now the device can measure electrical activity, process signals, then translate those signals into commands to a digital device. In layman’s speak, the BCI, or brain-computer interface, allows Arbaugh to control a computer with his mind. As a result, Arbaugh can do things like play Mario Kart, control his television, and turn his Dyson air purifier on and off without physically moving his fingers or any other part of his body…
When Arbaugh became Participant 1—or “P1” as he is often referred to by Neuralink employees and subsequent study participants—he joined a list of about 80 people to ever receive such a device. Brain chip interfaces have been a focus of neurological study for more than 50 years, and a dozen companies in the U.S. and China have been conducting limited human trials since 1998.
But becoming the first patient to get a Neuralink implant, in particular, is its own right of passage. For one, Neuralink’s device has threads with more than 1,000 electrodes, giving the device a much higher connectivity rate than most of the BCIs currently being studied in humans in the market. But Neuralink also places its electrodes in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement—a more invasive approach than competitors like Synchron or Precision Neuroscience, which also have ongoing studies of multiple patients. Neuralink’s device is also wireless, versus competitors like Blackrock Neurotech that require a wired connection from the implant through the skull to an external receiver for signal capture and decoding (Blackrock Neurotech sells a wireless processor that has been used for research).
So there you have it. This brain control (as in brain controlling something other than a human body part) technology is farther along than us laymen not paying attention might have thought.
Good bye summer 2025!
Most frightening and/or depressing story: A gigantic incoming object could be the alien ship that will put us out of our misery. Okay, probably not. The interesting and scary thing is that as our ability to look at the nearby universe improves, we are seeing more surprising stuff. But how are we supposed to think about let alone do anything about a very low probability existential threat like this one? We are not even responding to the “somewhat likely” (nuclear war, pandemics) and “likely happening right now” (a climate tipping point leading to future collapse) existential threats in front of us. I suggested that the tipping point will be called in retrospect, and 2025 might be a nice round number for the history books.
Most hopeful story: No matter what impression we are being given in the U.S., economic forces continue to push towards renewable energy and electrification worldwide.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Designer babies are here, and the trend towards the rich and powerful accelerating their own evolution (and a few governments making this available to the masses) can only accelerate.
It’s sad – Philadelphia’s public transportation, which was already creaky and unreliable due to decades of deferred maintenance and capital investment, is being financially starved due to dysfunctional politics at the state level. At the heart of the political game is a willful misunderstanding of a fundamental truth – most economic activity occurs where the most people are. Is this really not so obvious that we need to debate it? And this means that most taxes in a state like Pennsylvania are paid in its metropolitan areas. It makes sense to spend some of that money disproportionately in rural areas which by definition can’t generate the net economic activity to support themselves. But people and politicians in these rural areas not only do not appreciate this, they believe the exact opposite thing to be true – that they are subsidizing metropolitan areas. Which is logically, financially, and physically impossible. But mirroring the larger country, these irrational rural politicians have disproportionate political power relative to the number of people they represent. I have no political answers to this political problem, and I am getting closer to considering leaving the state. Delaware and New Jersey have their own problems but are much more rationally governed.
Anyway, having said all that, Philadelphia’s public transportation is not exactly cutting edge or visionary. It’s dirty, old, slow, and communication is poor. And it’s not cheap – one person riding a bus can save money relative to Uber, assuming they don’t place a high value on time. But several people traveling together will not save money. Tourists and business travelers have no hope of understanding it, if they were willing to brave the urine and feces and garbage and rats in the stations and bus stops and on the vehicles themselves. A system like this is at risk of losing out to more innovative competition, even if that innovative competition is bad for the environment and dangerous for people. So let’s look at some of the alternatives mentioned in this ABC article.
A couple thoughts. First, we see tech solutions like Uber adapting to public transportation, and starting to cover the gap between whatever public transportation can provide and what people actually need to get from Point A to Point B. This is basically good, although if public transportation can’t compete on cost it may eventually disappear. Governments might do the math and decide to subsidize the more flexible private options instead. Self-driving and self-parking wheeled vehicles may change the dynamics of how all this works, and relatively soon. All of this is likely to exacerbating sprawling land uses rather than the more compact urban areas we know are best for economic growth, innovation, human health, and the environment. But that has been the trend for a century at least.
I have some hope that self-parking vehicles may enable less waste of the most economically valuable land for parking. Because the point of parking is to make transportation easily accessible where you are working/shopping/recreating, and a self-driving vehicle can park efficiently farther away but still show up when and where you need it. Instead of a store having to have a parking lot that is bigger than the store, you can now have two stores next to each other and a large parking lot/garage out of sight on the edge of town. And that garage or lot won’t have to be as big because the self-parking cars will be able to maneuver more efficiently not to mention infinitely patiently compared to human drivers.
This might seem esoteric, but it is somewhat germane to some points I made recently. One part of a big-picture solution to housing supply challenges lies in, well, housing. But another angle (at least from an economic growth perspective) lies in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure allowing people to live in one place and work in others with less friction (i.e., travel time and cost.)
Under conditions of spatial mismatch between labor supply and demand, intercity non-local employment, including intercity-commuting-based employment and remote work, has become increasingly common worldwide. However, research examining intercity non-local employment from an industry perspective remains limited. Using census data from 2011, 2016, and 2021 for Australia’s significant urban areas, this study adopts an industry lens to examine patterns of intercity non-local employment and their associations with industry diversity, industry disparity, and the location quotients of different industries. The findings reveal that: (1) Intercity non-local employment in Australia intensified during 2011–2021, with Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth serving as key network nodes; (2) Although industry diversity is not significantly associated with non-local employment, work-residence connections are more likely to form between industrially diverse cities over longer distances; (3) Industry disparity between work and residential cities reduces the likelihood of non-local employment, reflecting a tendency toward employment self-containment; (4) Cities with higher location quotients in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing exhibit a stronger capacity to attract non-local workers. This study supports developing regional industrial diversity centers as hubs for labor mobility and interaction. Furthermore, it highlights the rationality of industry complementarity, particularly between capital and non-capital cities, as a strategy to balance labor supply and demand, and calls for further evaluation of the long-term impacts of non-local employment on cities reliant on specific workforce sectors. Overall, this research advances the understanding of Australia’s urban structure and offers valuable insights for targeted industrial development strategies aimed at fostering balanced and sustainable urban systems.
I did work and travel in Australia a bit about 10-15 years ago, and one thing that struck this American is that their cities are just really far apart, and there is not much in between. So I got the impression that a lot of their white collar business travel is by plane. What is blue collar business travel you ask – there I am thinking of long haul trucking. And no, if I am thinking about long haul trucking in Australia I can’t get Mad Max out of my head. One really hopes this is not our future.
Here in the US, implementing these types of policies seems mostly like a political pipedream at the moment. I could imagine a really smart developer doing this as a marketing scheme, maybe. maybe. But this is a great article that gives us a window into some things that are being tried in Europe (although, I also hear voices in Europe speaking longingly of the perceived lack of regulation in the US). I don’t know – our regulations may be equally strong or stronger in some areas like hydrology and water quality (which is missing from the framework discussed here btw) wetland and floodplain protection, and endangered species (although these are under constant political threat). Ideally in my view, species would not have to get endangered first before we will do anything for them.
As part of the actions to fight biodiversity loss, the European Union is working on a restoration regulation demanding the principle of no net loss (NNL) state of biodiversity of urban green space. Applying this principle in urban planning may raise conflicts between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision. Furthermore, integrating the NNL of biodiversity principle into urban planning cannot be isolated from existing planning tools or processes. Here we present a novel approach where the green area factor tool and biodiversity offsetting are integrated to achieve NNL of biodiversity in urban planning, while maintaining the necessary ecosystem services and avoiding the negative, unintended tradeoffs that may occur if only one of these tools is used in the planning process. We provide a model which combines the two approaches to create a holistic method to understand and govern both biodiversity and ecosystem services of urban greenery. The model is intended to be used as part of urban planning processes.
John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, has a new book called Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production. The ideas are not really new, as he admits:
As we and others have said before, from a physics perspective, resources are low-entropy materials (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). The entropy law holds that systems tend towards higher entropy states spontaneously. Living systems, as non-equilibrium systems, need to extract low-entropy materials from the environment to compensate for their continuous dissipation.
We are taking concentrated resources from the Earth’s biophysical system, using them to perform useful work, and producing waste products which consist of less concentrated substances and heat which are too diffuse to use for useful work, and in many cases cause harm to the system. Entropy must increase at the scale of the universe, but organized systems like life and human civilization can get away with decreasing it on scales that matter to us short-lived primates, if not to a dark, cold universe that most likely doesn’t care about us (revealing my atheist stripes here, sure if you are religious that helps to solve this existential dread problem, and good for you!) There is a scale where the impact of our human economy becomes large relative to the physical system it is embedded in, and the economic theories we have based critical decisions on have chosen to neglect that to this point. Economists might say, our equations can account for that, we have just chosen to neglect it and we have clearly stated our assumptions. Well, those assumptions no longer hold as we approach or pass the point of no return.
Many others have made these points. In addition to Georgescu-Roegen – a few that come to my mind are Herman Daly, Howard Odum, Brian Czech, Jay Forrester and the authors of World3, to name a few. But these voices have been ignored by mainstream economists because they were from other disciplines, did not have the right credentials, or did not make their arguments at a time when the prevailing body of thought was receptive. So it probably helps to have one more credentialed academic economist make them for the audience of academic and professional economists at this particular point in history. Today’s students will be tomorrow’s professionals. Economists are very, very important. For better or worse, their opinions and choices and advice to policy makers shape our world. Maybe at a time when the public has become less receptive to these ideas even though the crisis has rapidly worsened, the economics profession could be ready to listen. I don’t know, but it’s worth another try.
While there is a propaganda shield between news coverage of the global climate emergency and those of us absorbing news here in the US, the American Meteorological Society bravely continues to publish their annual State of the Climate report. I think “absorbing” is the right word because, while accurate news sources are not actually censored and are out there to be sought out, if you are just getting your news from headlines and sound bites and passing a monitor in an airport, you’re getting the impression that the ongoing collapse of our world’s biophysical life support system is not a front and center concern.
Anyway, I think of this report as sort of the interim annual report between whenever the IPCC gets around to their major releases. Here are some quick highlights:
So it’s bad bad bad, dad. I don’t know how else you can spin this other than to say it’s important to put one year in the context of longer-term trends. But the long-term trends are all bad. And if we are hitting unexpected records, that suggests that the projections (which are bad) may not be bad enough. Increasingly it looks like the world may be at that tipping point – it will be called in retrospect rather than definitively in the moment, but it might be now. 2025 will be a nice round year to put in the history books.
This is a short Wikipedia article about defining and mapping the historical or potential natural vegetation of areas that have been developed or otherwise altered by humans. Sure, there is plenty of scientific debate about the concept but it seems to me like it could be adapted for practical purposes. Even in the U.S., we have ordinances in most places requiring maintenance or restoration of something approaching natural hydrology on development sites (I’m not saying implementation of this concept is remotely perfect either, just that it is widespread and more or less accepted). But we don’t have anything approaching that for ecology, and you can restore hydrology without restoring an ecosystem (for example, with a storage and infiltration tank under a parking lot). So if you have a model of what the original or potential natural vegetation of a place is, you should be able to quantify what percentage of that is being destroyed, preserved, or restored by a given project.
