Soros at WEF

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.

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.

Delta-v

I recently read Delta V, a near-future space exploration saga by Daniel Suarez. I recommend it as a really entertaining and thought-provoking book. The story is about an expedition to mine an asteroid for water, metals, and other minerals in the early 2030s. There are no technologies in the book that seem implausible – in fact, I would say if anything that the author was conservative and assumed only technology that would be available today. (I’m writing this in 2020, just in case you are an anthropologist reading this in the impossibly distant future.) The story doesn’t have a villain per se other than “investors”, but there is a character that seems to be some combination of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, a sort of semi-villain with redeeming features. The author obviously did a lot of research on the physics, biology, and even chemistry of life in space, so be warned that while being entertained you might learn something by accident.

a “decade of liberal failure”?

According to Alex Pareene at The New Republic, the 2010s were a “decade of liberal failure”. He cites the escalation of the Afghanistan war, so carefully considered by Nobel prize-winning Obama, devolving into an quagmire with no obvious point and no obvious way out. He believes that the stimulus package and Affordable Care Act basically worked, but the Obama administration purposely designed them to work behind the scenes. They actually benefited people, but people don’t give the administration any credit for those benefits, and Republicans are able to successfully play on this misconception.

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

science trends to watch in 2020

Wired has a story on science trends to watch in 2020.

  • Stem cells are being used to grow mini-versions of all sorts of human organs, including hearts, kidneys and brains.
  • advances in trying to detect dark matter
  • the end of a key U.S tax credit for solar panels
  • gene editing going mainstream in medical treatments, and newer, safer techniques evolving (pun intended, ha ha!)
  • obvious bond villain Elon Musk launching satellites by the thousands. Also, private flights to the International Space Station.
  • use of massive data sets in “personalized medicine”

Meanwhile, here’s a rundown from LiveScience.com on the weird, wacky world of quantum physics. In a nutshell, these are recent, real-world experiments where matter, energy, and even time do things you wouldn’t think they are supposed to do.

the “best” health advice from 2019

The Week has cherry picked a few studies from 2019 as best. Although they did pick ones with large sample sizes, what would be “best” to me would be some kind of meta-analysis of all studies published and what they said on balance, with some kind of grading for quality and communication of the uncertainty involved. That would be awesome journalism, but I imagine it would be expensive. The great news is that if you add up all the percentages that doing this and that can reduce your chances of death, you can live forever! Anyway, here is my quick summary:

  • Exercise, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains just never go out of style. More whole foods (the thing, not the chain) and less processed foods in general seem to be a very good idea. Seriously, just orient your life style around these things and it is very unlikely the scientific consensus will change some day and tell you it was a bad idea.
  • Napping is good for you – this particular study says “five minutes to an hour once or twice a week”. I’m not surprised that rest is good for the heart, but I thought there was an emerging consensus that maintaining a consistent schedule on all days was good, and this seems to contradict that a bit.
  • Parents are stressed out while kids are young, then ultimately glad they had the kids later in life. This doesn’t surprise me since I am living through the stressed out part, but I do find it helpful to put myself in my future self’s shoes and ask if I would regret having children. In fact, my wife and I did that when we made the decision to have children, and the answer was and is no, we have no regrets. The distinction between happiness in the moment and overall life satisfaction also comes to mind.
  • Aspirin and ibuprofen seem to help your heart, but also raise your risk of internal bleeding. It’s probably best not to self-medicate.
  • Smoking and getting hit on the head, even gently, are not good for you.

Philadelphia in the twenteens

Inga Saffron, the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tries to use the cell phone to tie together trends in Philadelphia in the 2010s. I don’t know if I buy her argument 100%, and I don’t know how serious she is about it, but the list of trends is interesting, and it’s interesting to compare her assessment to my own experience living and working in the city for most of the decade.

  • young adults moving back to the city – this was a huge trend and hard to miss. Apps made it easier to get food and stuff to their homes without driving, and ride sharing made it easier to get around. Inga argues a lot of people “ditched their cars” – this may be true, I haven’t seen the data, but one thing I observed is that a lot of new homes featured garages, and larger developments featured big garages and even surface parking in some cases. This changed the walking experience in some neighborhoods quite a bit, and not for the better. Overall though, it is great for the city to have the people.
  • Tech jobs are one reason the young professionals came back. Tax policy and zoning code changes also had an effect. Inga doesn’t mention “councilmanic prerogative”, but in my neighborhood this means that the 2011 zoning code, considered a national model, still has not gone into effect at the end of the decade. The council person and developers he favors benefit from this by being able to negotiate every new development in their favor. This means that what should be the main street in a densely populated neighborhood underserved by shops and restaurants is mostly still a bunch of building supply warehouses. This also plays to anti-gentrification voters, which has an ugly racial element to it that is hard to talk about. In my view, Inga correctly diagnoses the problem of lower-income residents being pushed to more affordable housing farther from jobs in the city center, without corresponding improvements in public transportation.
  • People are giving up their cars, according to Inga, but traffic is worse and buses can’t run on time due to all the ride sharing and deliveries. Parking garages are disappearing because they are under-subscribed. I would like to examine the numbers on all these issues. Traffic does seem worse, but my instinct is that it is due to poor street design and maintenance, traffic and parking management/pricing, and an almost complete lack of law enforcement effort. Solutions to these problems exist, and all these things in the public realm need to be brought into the 21st century in concert with the new technologies coming from the private sector.

2010s: order of magnitude increase in renewable energy cost-effectiveness

This article in Project Syndicate presents the numbers on renewable energy cost-effectiveness for the decade.

The costs of solar and wind power have fallen more than 80% and 70%, respectively, while lithium-ion battery costs are down from $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to $160 per kWh today. These and other breakthroughs guarantee that energy systems which are as much as 85% dependent on variable renewables could produce zero-carbon electricity at costs that are fully competitive with those of fossil-fuel-based systems.

Project Syndicate