Unnatural Selection

Amazon description:

Gonorrhea. Bed bugs. Weeds. Salamanders. People. All are evolving, some surprisingly rapidly, in response to our chemical age. In Unnatural Selection, Emily Monosson shows how our drugs, pesticides, and pollution are exerting intense selection pressure on all manner of species. And we humans might not like the result.

Monosson reveals that the very code of life is more fluid than once imagined. When our powerful chemicals put the pressure on to evolve or die, beneficial traits can sweep rapidly through a population. Species with explosive population growth—the bugs, bacteria, and weeds—tend to thrive, while bigger, slower-to-reproduce creatures, like ourselves, are more likely to succumb.

Monosson explores contemporary evolution in all its guises. She examines the species that we are actively trying to beat back, from agricultural pests to life-threatening bacteria, and those that are collateral damage—creatures struggling to adapt to a polluted world. Monosson also presents cutting-edge science on gene expression, showing how environmental stressors are leaving their mark on plants, animals, and possibly humans for generations to come.

El Nino

More El Nino coverage from Slate. It’s going to be the strongest since 1998! or 2010! or ever!

First off, it’s rapidly intensifying. El Niño is about self-reinforcing feedbacks between the ocean and the atmosphere, and from all accounts, this one has its foot on the accelerator pedal.

If it continues, the impacts will be felt around the globe—here’s my detailed rundown of what to expect. Among them: drought in Australia, Southeast Asia, and perhaps India, with flooding in Peru and Southern California.

Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh claims that almost everything we were told about the Bin Laden raid was a lie. I don’t want to believe it, but Seymour Hersh usually turns out to be right. Also, his story just kind of adds up. It’s long but this paragraph kind of sums it up:

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

 

trains

The sad Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia reminded me of this sad article, Why Can’t America Have Great Trains? An excerpt:

Compared with the high-speed trains of Western Europe and East Asia, American passenger rail is notoriously creaky, tardy, and slow. The Acela, currently the only “high-speed” train in America, runs at an average pace of 68 miles per hour between Washington and Boston; a high-speed train from Madrid to Barcelona averages 154 miles per hour. Amtrak’s most punctual trains arrive on schedule 75 percent of the time; judged by Amtrak’s lax standards, Japan’s bullet trains are late basically 0 percent of the time.

And those stats don’t figure to improve anytime soon. While Amtrak isn’t currently in danger of being killed, it also isn’t likely to do more than barely survive. Last month, the House of Representatives agreed to fund Amtrak for the next four years at a rate of $1.4 billion per year. Meanwhile, the Chinese government—fair comparison or not—will be spending $128 billion this year on rail. (Thanks to the House bill, though, Amtrak passengers can look forward to a new provision allowing cats and dogs on certain trains.)

A few decades ago, news of another middling Amtrak appropriation wouldn’t have warranted a second glance; passenger rail was unpopular and widely thought to be obsolete. But recently, Amtrak’s popularity has actually spiked. Ridership has increased by roughly 50 percent in the past 15 years, and ridership in the Northeast Corridor stood at an all-time high in 2014. Amtrak also now accounts for 77 percent of all rail and air travel between Washington and New York, up from just 37 percent when it launched the Acela in 2000.

Trains connect cities and ignore the empty spaces in between, while highways serve those empty spaces. In our U.S. “republican” system (in the original dictionary sense of the word), our politicians disproportionately represent those population and economic dead zones, so that anti-city and economically unproductive nonsense policy positions pay off in power and re-election. These same politicians also find that it doesn’t hurt to throw a little racism, homophobia and xenophobia into the mix just for good measure. It’s about fear of those people in the city who are not like you.

cars are over in the UK

Most Americans haven’t caught on yet, but the tide has turned against widespread car ownership. Here’s an article in the Guardian about the tide turning in the UK:

London, which has pioneered congestion charging and has a well-integrated system of public transport, has led the move away from cars over the past decade, during which time 9% of car commuters have switched to other forms of transport. “People in London have a lot of options and there’s been huge growth across all modes,” says Isabel Dedring, the American-born deputy mayor for transport in the capital. “There’s been a massive increase in investment in public transport…”

Dedring says London has always been progressive in terms of public transport – its narrow, twisting roads were never conducive to the automotive domination that occurred in many US and European cities in the 1960s and 70s, when the car was king. But from the turn of the millennium, there has been a concerted attempt to encourage switching to other modes of transport, and the past decade has seen a 30% reduction in traffic in central London.

“Traffic levels have gone down massively,” says Dedring, “partly because of the congestion charge, but also because we are taking away space from private vehicles and giving it to buses through bus lanes and to people through public realm [developments].” And now to cyclists, too, with the planned “cycle superhighways” and cycle-friendly neighbourhoods being trialled in three London boroughs.

 

climate change impact reports

Here are a number of reports on climate change impacts on U.S. cities:

The common thread is that extreme weather is going to be more frequent and more damaging, and we need to be ready.

aging and deflation

This study says the relationship between aging and deflation (as seen in Japan, but possibly coming to many more countries in the future) depends on whether the aging is driven by falling fertility (which shrinks the work force in absolute terms) or longevity (which shrinks it only in relative terms).

Negative correlations between inflation and demographic aging were observed across developed nations recently. To understand the phenomenon from a politico-economic perspective, we embed the fiscal theory of the price level into an overlapping-generations model. In the model, successive short-lived governments choose income tax rates and bond issues considering the political influence of existing generations and the policy response of future governments. The model sheds new light on the traditional debate about the burden of national debt. Because of price adjustments, the accumulation of government debt does not become a burden on future generations. Our analysis reveals that the effects of aging depend on its causes. Aging is deflationary when caused by an increase in longevity but inflationary when caused by a decline in birth rate. Numerical simulation shows that aging over the past 40 years in Japan generated deflation of about 0.6 percentage points annually.
Here is another study that concludes “a larger share of dependents (ie young and old) is correlated with higher inflation, while a larger share of working age cohorts is correlated with lower inflation.” So maybe it depends to what extent the aging population is dependent on the working population, and whether the working population has additional dependents in the form of children (who will become the next working population). It’s complex, dynamic stuff that is hard to puzzle out.

risk and investing

This blog is about looking at possible futures, not necessarily profiting from them. But of course, who doesn’t want to do that if they can? It’s not just about short-term profit, it’s about building a nest egg which is your personal resilience against whatever events the future holds. A nest egg is also about your personal choice to defer some happiness now for the possibility of greater happiness later.

This book looks promising to me. The author breaks risks into “inflation, deflation, confiscation, and devastation”. I haven’t read the book, but presumably he offers portfolio suggestions to deal with these risks.

Since I’m on personal finance today, here is a grab bag of other related topics and links.

One thing everyone can and should do right away is minimize how much the financial industry steals from us in the form of fees. Index funds are one way to do this. The case to go all-index is incredibly strong, but in case you don’t want to take my word for it, Vanguard makes the case every year. If you are the type to dig into numbers yourself, S&P has a free online data set here. Finally, this Economist column mentions a number of smaller startup companies that are providing some competition to the big banks and their ridiculous fees. Among them is TransferWise which says it allows people to transfer money abroad much cheaper than they have been able to in the past. I haven’t tried it yet.

Scratch and Raspberry Pi

Here’s an article about how Scratch (a programming language supposedly any child can learn) and Raspberry Pi (a computer that costs less than $50) fit together.

We’re huge fans of Scratch here at the [Raspberry Pi] Foundation. It was designed to teach young people how to program but it’s a great learning tool at any age: you can build your first program in minutes and pick up fundamental concepts very quickly. Whilst having fun. Sneaky!

If you’ve never tried Scratch before then today is the day to boot up your Pi and have a play. If you are Pi-less then you can use it online, but you’ll be missing out on the best bit of all: physical computing with Scratch. It’s probably the easiest way to hook up sensors, LEDs, buttons and motors to the Pi

400 ppm

Yes, we’re at 400 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, consistently now, everywhere. As a reminder, the pre-industrial number was something like 280.

For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of this greenhouse gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015,  according to NOAA’s latest results.

“It was only a matter of time that we would average 400 parts per million globally,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “We first reported 400 ppm when all of our Arctic sites reached that value in the spring of 2012. In 2013 the record at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory first crossed the 400 ppm threshold. Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone.

From a non-scientific sample of people I know, people who thought they were immune from seasonal allergies seem to be suffering them for the first time, and people who have always suffered them, which includes me, are reduced to slobbering insomniac messes. Could there possibly be a connection?