the stats on Bernie Sanders’s health risks

Slate has an interesting article on health risks for someone Bernie Sanders’s age with Bernie Sanders’s known health condition. The author points out that these estimates can be done for Bernie because he has released a fair amount of health information (although still not everything the author would like), while the other older candidates have not.

  • His 12-month risk of a heart attack, stroke, or death is about 6%.
  • His risk of being hospitalized for any reason between now and November is about 30-35%.
  • His odds of surviving a first presidential term are about 65%, and his odds of surviving a second about 40%.

solving the delivery problem

Wired has an article on solutions to the “last mile” delivery problem. A couple interesting stats are that 5% of deliveries don’t reach their destination on the first try (that sounds pretty good to me) and that this costs retailers about $18 each time. Most of the proposed solutions just have to do with better data on locations and delivery preferences.

This article repeats the claim that deliveries increase traffic congestion, although it admits this is “difficult to measure”. I am still a bit skeptical of this. I am willing to follow the evidence wherever it leaves, but logically I feel like these claims leave out all the trips individuals are not taking to the store. If a delivery truck brings 100 packages to 100 homes, that could mean 100 car trips that were not taken. And that was just one truck, although it is kind of a big obvious smelly one and it might be blocking the street, a crosswalk, or a fire hydrant for a few minutes. Those trucks might also be competing for city and suburban streets at times when people are coming and going from work trips, which could increase peak traffic congestion.

bye bye bumblebees

The latest charismatic species to be at risk of disappearing – bumblebees, according to Science. It’s a simple story – they just can’t handle the heat.

Climate change could increase species’ extinction risk as temperatures and precipitation begin to exceed species’ historically observed tolerances. Using long-term data for 66 bumble bee species across North America and Europe, we tested whether this mechanism altered likelihoods of bumble bee species’ extinction or colonization. Increasing frequency of hotter temperatures predicts species’ local extinction risk, chances of colonizing a new area, and changing species richness. Effects are independent of changing land uses. The method developed in this study permits spatially explicit predictions of climate change–related population extinction-colonization dynamics within species that explains observed patterns of geographical range loss and expansion across continents. Increasing frequencies of temperatures that exceed historically observed tolerances help explain widespread bumble bee species decline. This mechanism may also contribute to biodiversity loss more generally.

Science

January 2020 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Open cyberwarfare became a thing in the 2010s. We read the individual headlines but didn’t connect the dots. When you do connect the dots, it’s a little shocking what’s going on.
Most hopeful story:
  • Democratic socialism actually does produce a high quality of life for citizens in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, the hard evidence shows that the United States is slipping behind its peer group in many measures of economic vibrancy and quality of life. The response of our leaders is to tell us we are great again because that is what we want to hear, but not do anything that would help us to actually be great again or even keep up with the middle of the pack. This is in the hopeful category because solutions exist and we can choose to pursue them.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

locust plagues

East Africa is dealing with a massive locust plague, according to Grist. And of course, they just couldn’t resist using the phrase “biblical proportions”.

East Africa had an unusually wet year in 2019 — warming waters in the Indian Ocean produced a high number of tropical cyclones, which doused the coast and created “exceptional” conditions for locust breeding, Nairobi-based climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker told the Associated Press. Now, swarms of hungry insects are feasting on crops in the Horn of Africa, where millions of people already lack reliable access to nutritious food.

Grist

minimum parking requirements – just get rid of them!

This Vice article makes a pretty strong case that minimum parking requirements should just be gotten rid of. There are so many complicated problems cities are grappling with. This one isn’t all that complicated. Seriously, just get rid of them. This isn’t banning parking, it is just letting the market decide. Free parking is not free, it is expensive and the cost is shared between car owners and non-car owners, but car owners have come to feel entitled to these subsidies and take them for granted. If you want to pay for a car and pay for parking, go ahead and do so. If you don’t, you can spend your money on other things.

tipping point in Amazon

There seems to be a consensus among scientists that if deforestation of the Amazon rain forest continues, rainfall will decrease and the entire system will transition to a sort of dry savanna ecosystem, releasing enormous quantities of stored carbon in the process. There is a debate about whether this is going to happen in 20 years or 2 years.