#unblockbikelanes

Just following up on yesterday’s “paint and pray” post about ignorant, unsafe street designs killing people in New York City and Philadelphia. There is a Twitter hashtag called #unblockbikelanes. Maybe the Philadelphia Police and Philadelphia Parking Authority look at it on occasion. Maybe they don’t. Maybe the engineers at the Philadelphia Streets Department will be inspired to learn about safe street design. Maybe they won’t. Either way, it’s indisputable photographic evidence that may eventually have a variety of uses.

https://twitter.com/printtemps/status/702941757009326080

Resources for safe street design:

“paint and pray”

This article makes a case against Bill de Blasio in New York City talking a good game on climate change while refusing to make safe bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure happen. I could ask exactly the same thing of my mayor, Jim Kenney in Philadelphia.

Bike lanes have expanded in de Blasio’s time but at a shameful pace and in a frankly dangerous way. Most new lanes are not protected. Instead of a firm barrier that moving cars are unable to cross, all that separates bike riders from their deaths is a painted line or a plastic stick every 20 or 30 yards. This has been referred to as a “paint and pray” policy: painting bike lanes and praying nobody will get hurt. It might be sufficient if several other things existed that do not. They include the following:

Drivers respecting the lines and not driving into bike lanes.

Delivery trucks and other vehicles not parking in bike lanes.

Drivers not opening their doors in front of bikers.

Police enforcing these rules.

These things do not prevail, which is the main reason bikers and pedestrians are being killed and injured by the tens of thousands every year. On my daily commute, it’s not unusual to encounter several delivery trucks, Ubers, or other vehicles parked in unprotected bike lanes on a single block, requiring me to merge into moving car traffic. Often the vehicles, rather than being stationary in the lane, are moving into it.

This could describe my bike commute in Philadelphia. And I am a (relatively) young, able bodied person. Biking should be the mode of choice for families with small children and healthy older people, and we are not even close to that being a safe option.

revisiting the trophic theory of money

One of my most popular posts ever is a brief musing about the “trophic theory of money” I wrote back in 2014. Brian Czech, who developed or at least clarified and named the theory, has a new journal article about it here. He writes pretty well for a lay audience so I would encourage people to read the paper rather than rely on me to summarize, but nonetheless here are a few key points in my own words so people can start yelling at me:

  • Before humanity figured out how to produce an agricultural surplus, everybody was trying to scratch a living out of the dirt and there was no need for money to be invented. Once the agricultural surplus became significant, many people were freed up to do other things and this led to money. So money is essentially measuring the amount of activity happening outside of agriculture, and indirectly measuring the amount of agricultural surplus that allows this to happen.
  • Towards the end of the paper, Mr. Czech acknowledges that improvements in technology over time (usually driven by intentional investment in research and development) have been able to reduce environmental impact per unit of economic activity, even though total environmental impact has continued to grow. However, he believes this process has nearly reached its limit and will not continue much longer.
  • It is possible the economy could transition to a steady state where GDP (adjusted for inflation) is no longer growing. It is also possible our environmental impact will overshoot the planet’s carrying capacity enough and for long enough that a sharp contraction in GDP (and necessarily, the amount of agricultural surplus) will occur.

Where do I stand on this? I take the laws of thermodynamics, and the fact that humanity is a species existing within and not apart from nature, as a given. I think there is a lot of knowledge out there yet to be discovered, and if our society took the right steps we might be able to keep growing in a sustainable way for some time. I don’t think there is any evidence that our sociopolitical system even understands the problem let alone is likely to take those steps. I don’t think action on the necessary scale will take place unless and until we reach a crisis stage. About the most positive I can be is to hope for a relatively minor crisis rather than a civilization ending one.

there are crazy people with guns on airplanes right now

They’re called air marshalls and they are put there by TSA. This article says being an air marshall might be the hardest, most stressful job ever devised. Everyone knows flying is stressful. It’s almost like a form of solitary confinement. Electronic diversions and moderate use of alcohol and over-the-counter substances can help. Air marshalls are not allowed to do any of these things. They just have to sit there. They have high rates of suicide compared to other law enforcement and military jobs, and they also die of heart attacks, strokes and blood clots.

So I feel bad for the air marshalls after reading this. I also wonder if having a stressed person with a gun on the plane makes me safer statistically than not having one. I feel the same way about armed teachers. There is just a certain rate of mental illness and substance abuse prevalent in the human species, and having more guns around means that more people will have access to deadly weapons at times when they are not thinking and acting clearly. You have to compare that to the very rare (but horrifying) rate of homicidal maniacs walking into schools and shooting. And teachers are not trained in use of deadly weapons or screened for mental health to the extent that law enforcement officers are, at least to my knowledge.

special operations culture

This article by a Marine special operator says special operations have a culture problem. That doesn’t surprise me too much. Anyway, here is the prescription the author gives for addressing an organization’s culture problem:

  • Acknowledge the problem. It’s hard to spot a slow change from within an organization. One solution is to have a peer organization do a review.
  • Employ trusted agents. These are sort of the blue collar leaders.
  • Harness and rein in the cultural power brokers. These are more like the middle management.
  • Win the population. This is an idea for counter-insurgency where you try to peel the bulk of the population away from a few bad actors within their ranks.

The article mentions “core values”. My own observation about core values is that strong, well-functioning organizations tend to already have them implicitly, and when you have to make a big deal about training people in them explicitly your culture is already lost. I’m not sure you can change individuals’ core values all that much. You can try to weed out people with bad ones and bring in people with good ones.

the climate town hall

A blog called “DeSmogBlog” has a pretty good run-down of the Democrats’ “town hall meeting” on climate change. I have to admit, I have not watched the whole thing, or very much at all.

Here’s my take. First, there are short- to medium-term practical issues that need to be tackled immediately and simultaneously. The first is disaster preparedness and disaster response – storms, fires, floods, droughts. We need to be ready for a major earthquake, plague or terrorist attack too although we can’t blame the climate directly for these. The second is the long-term stability of the food system under projected temperature and water supply trends. The third is dealing with the systemic corruption that has allowed the fossil fuel industry to buy and control our politicians for decades.

I think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren understand these issues best. I don’t think other candidates understand them at all. I think they divorce them from larger socioeconomic issues to a certain extent, and that is a mistake. It should be possible to take advantage of fluctuations in the economy, employment, and financial system to make the right investments at the right time and minimize the pain.

Beyond these, we need to deal with our interwined land use, energy, transportation, food, and ecosystem issues. It could be done in ways that would be a win for everyone. Invest in the right kinds of infrastructure, education and training for workers, and innovation. It is unlikely to be done because our education system does not provide the public with the mental tools needed to understand systems, and therefore we do not elect politicians who understand systems and have workable ideas on how to fix them. This will still be true even if the corruption issues can somehow be solved.

August 2019 in Review

My work-life balance situation continues to not favor a lot of blog posts. Or is it work-life-family balance? Or is family part of life? Yes, I guess so. Anyway, what there is not a lot of time for is personal leisure activities like reading, writing, and thinking. Not that I don’t enjoy reading Green Eggs and Ham for the 50th time. I do. Anyway, here are a few highlights of the slim pickings that constituted this blog in August 2019. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
Most hopeful story:
  • I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

Hasbro phasing out plastic packaging

Hasbro has announced they are phasing out plastic packaging. Now, they are not phasing out all the stuff they make out of plastic, which is most of what they make and sell. But I think it is a good sign that the companies that produce all the packaging might be willing to think of the role they play in waste/pollution/litter/climate crisis, rather than just trying to pin all the blame on consumers. Governments can get involved by either taxing plastic packaging or banning it outright.

the end of “shareholder primacy”

From Project Syndicate:

The Business Roundtable, an association of the most powerful chief executive officers in the United States, announced this month that the era of shareholder primacy is over.

Does this signal a new era where companies consider a broader range of values and stakeholders than just the latest stock value? Stakeholders could include employees, customers, and maybe even present and future generations of the public at large, for example. Let’s not get too crazy and include plants, animals, and rocks just yet. Not so fast – according to this article, this is just a reaction to the growing power of institutional investors such as pension funds. Rich and powerful managers and board members are trying to protect their own jobs and fortunes like they always do.