January 2019 in Review

After blogging pretty consistently daily for years, I’ve finally slowed this blog down to every other day due to the realities of work and family. Maybe I’ll get back to daily in a couple years. In the meantime, I’m going to pare my “month in review” posts to highlight three items, because it wouldn’t really make sense to do a Top 9 out of 15.

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.

Most hopeful story:

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.

 

what is “dark enlightenment”?

Well, according to Quartz, basically “dark enlightenment” is a neo-fascist ideology to beware of, in which democratic governments are replaced by corporations.

What are the tenets of Dark Enlightenment theory? There are a few consistent themes, circling around technology, warfare, feudalism, corporate power, and racism. “It’s an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point,” says Benjamin Noys, a critical theory professor at the University of Chichester and author of Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism.

Land believes that advances in computing will enable dominant humans to merge with machines and become cybernetic super beings. He advocates for racial separation under the belief that “elites” will enhance their IQs by associating only with each other.

Capitalism has not yet been fully unleashed, he argues, and corporate power should become the organizing force in society. Land is vehemently against democracy, believing it restricts accountability and freedom. The world should do away with political power, according to Dark Enlightenment, and instead, society should break into tiny states, each effectively governed by a CEO.


I’m reminded of a lecture I attended by Paul Romer on his idea of “charter cities”. The basic idea was to create something that looked very much like a corporate state where virtually all institutions including politics would be subordinated to the maximization of economic growth. Now, I am not accusing Paul Romer of being a fascist. In fact, in his conception people from any country can be part of the charter city, as long as they have skills and follow norms of behavior designed to maximize economic growth. But one thing his concept does appear to share is that those norms of behavior are imposed from above, and the only free choice people have is that society is a choice to either be part of it or not.

how did the moon form?

This article in Science Daily says that one theory consistent with the evidence is that the moon formed when something as large as Mars slammed into the proto-Earth (which is what the Earth was called before it was called the Earth. Or to be more precise, there was nobody there to call it anything, but that is what we now call the thing that was there before the thing that we now call the Earth.) This may also be how the Earth came to have a lot of the elements that allowed life to form, which is actually the main point of the article.

urban planning trends to watch in 2019

This one is from Planetizen. One interesting point is the role that (lack of) land use regulation has played in bringing the climate crisis about, and how that is not really part of the conversation at the federal level, but maybe could be.

The Green New Deal also provides the latest example of the lack of understanding about the role of land use regulations in housing affordability and climate change. So far, the Green New Deal lacks any specific land use regulation suggestions. Planners realize land use regulations can be a key tool in mitigating climate change, achieving environmental sustainability, and encouraging shared economic prosperity. Getting land use wrong, however, is how we ended up in the current crisis…

After programs like the interstate highway system, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and the federal Property Tax Exemption created some of the most egregious environmental and social justice mistakes of the 20th century, taking the federal government out of the equation now threatens to cement the legacy of these errors for perpetuity…

In 2019, climate change action, and questions about the effectiveness of future climate change action, must be measured in urban growth boundaries, flood insurance maps, and reduced Vehicles Miles Traveled (VMT). Big talk and subsequent capitulation won’t suffice. (I’m reminded of the implementation of VMT as the legal metric of environmental impact in California, which buckled under pressure from the Southern California Association of Governments.) The built environment will eventually render the failures of compromise.

I do in fact remember Al Gore talking about suburban sprawl. And that is the last I remember a prominent politician talking about it. I don’t think anyone would want to see zoning regulation coming from the federal government. That is not how we do it. But the idea of tying federal funding to a comprehensive infrastructure plan at the metropolitan area sounds to me like it could work. We could think big and make it a lot of funding through an infrastructure bank that served a counter-cyclical function in the macroeconomy, and we could think even bigger by considering all forms of infrastructure from water to the food system to green infrastructure.

do trees really lead to cooling and carbon sequestration?

Well, yes, generally they do, especially in the tropics. But there is scientific uncertainty as to exactly how much, and there are some special cases where some types of trees in some places don’t lead to net cooling and carbon sequestration. That’s my read anyway. Science shouldn’t be censored of course, but some scientists are either really bad at communication or they like to make a name for themselves by trying to grab headlines with contrarian claims. Not that I have all the answers on how to communicate uncertainty concepts to a non-scientific audience. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go warm up my super-axe-hacker, which can chop down four truffula trees in one smacker.

We still don’t know who killed JFK, RFK, or Martin Luther King?

A new letter by a number of family members and prominent figures is pressing for more investigation. This is from a blog called Who.What.Why.

Signers of the joint statement include Isaac Newton Farris Jr., nephew of Reverend King and past president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Reverend James M. Lawson Jr., a close collaborator of Reverend King; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, children of the late senator.

Other signatories include G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which determined in 1979 that President Kennedy was the victim of a probable conspiracy; Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the surgeons at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas who tried to save President Kennedy’s life and saw clear evidence he had been struck by bullets from the front and the rear; Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower who served as a national security advisor to the Kennedy White House; Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and a leading global authority on human rights; Hollywood artists Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner and Oliver Stone; political satirist Mort Sahl; and musician David Crosby.

The declaration is also signed by numerous historians, journalists, lawyers and other experts on the four major assassinations.

I’m not exactly a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that I think the vast majority of conspiracy theories are not true. But make a list of enough conspiracy theories, and a few of them are going to be true. There are enough eye-witness accounts that contradict the official accounts in both the JFK and MLK cases to put them both (the official accounts I mean) in the most likely false category. And if they seem like ancient history, consider that no leader since then has taken on the U.S. war machine in any serious way, as it continues to gobble up around 5% of our GDP and we lag the world’s other industrialized nations in infrastructure, education, health care, and child care, while leading it in violence and incarceration.

As for Malcolm X, I just don’t know all that much about him. Perhaps I should find out more.

margin calls

I don’t pay too much attention to stock market commentary, but another warning light on the economic dash might be that margin calls appear to have spiked. You ignore most of those warning lights most of the time, but sometimes they mean something, and if there are more of them over time and they are all flashing at once you might want to do something about it. Margin calls mean investors who have borrowed money from their brokers to buy stocks are being told by the brokers they have to pay the loans back, which forces them to sell some of what they have. It suggests the brokers are nervous the market might fall. If it actually starts to fall, this can accelerate the fall because people are then forced to sell when they don’t want to and everybody else is selling. And margin calls are just the visible tip of a debt iceberg, most of which lies unseen beneath the surface. This blog is called Wolf Street.

smart home gadgets

This article from MIT says this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics…what? anyway it’s the big annual consumer electronics expo in Las Vegas) was all about voice-controlled home gadgets. I’m excited about certain things. I like the idea of a video doorbell and smoke detectors that can text me if they sense something while I am not home, for example.

The main concern people seem to have is privacy. While that concerns me a little, I am more concerned about repair and replacement of all this stuff as it wears out. There are a lot of little things broken in my house right now. I know how to fix some of them. I know who to call on others, although it can be a royal pain to get them to actually show up, diagnose the problem, and then follow up until it fixed. My “home warranty”, which is really just a contract with a network of independent repair people, helps a little to get them to be responsive and follow up, but dealing with them is still a pain. While I am fixing things, other things are going to break. Things like keyholes and doorbells last at least 20 years with minor repairs, and traditional dumb appliances last 10 or so years with minor repairs. It is better to just accept that things break at a certain rate and deal with it than to get frustrated, although they do seem to have a tendency to break all at once when I have other challenges going on in my family and work life. I know there is absolutely nothing special about me and everyone deals with the same issues, except the super rich who can just pay someone else to worry about it.

Now, when we add all the smart technology to the dumb things in our home, they are still going to have most of the same dumb problems they have always had, requiring occasional minor repairs and replacement after 10-20 years. But the added technology is going to need some combination of physical repairs and tech support frequently, and it will probably need to be replaced every 2 or 3 years like any other electronic device. Except now it will be 100 little things breaking and needing replacement in your house. Probably, you will need some kind of service contract for someone to come check and fix things at least monthly.