Longreads #5 stories

Longreads.com publishes a “top 5 stories” post every week. “Sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, always thought-provoking, they all have a certain je ne sais quoi that makes them special—something you’ll want to share with a friend.” Sometimes there are some real gems here that you wouldn’t pick up anywhere else (well, they are all from somewhere else, but often sources I would not otherwise stumble across.) Well friends, here are a few that caught my eye.

  • How We Lost Our Minds About UFOs – The author goes through the entire history and comes down firmly on the skeptical side. Weather balloons, experimental aircraft, and Cold War propaganda.
  • What Really Caused the Sriracha Shortage? – This is about the sauce made in California with the rooster on it. I include this because I want to make a public service announcement. Sri Racha is a province in Thailand known for spicy sauces that they put on seafood. There are many varieties, and virtually all are tastier than the mass produced pasty substance from California. They are not generally advertised, but some are exported. I recommend “Sriraja Panich Hot Chili Sauce”. Check your local Asian grocery outlet and see what you can find.
  • The Last Stand of the Call-Centre Worker – This is a human interest story, but it goes into the unfolding AI takeover of customer service. It has some interesting numbers: 800,000 call center employees in the UK, 3 million in the US, 1.5 million in the Philippines, and 17 million globally. This is going to decrease as AI takes hold. I’ll just say, the new AI systems are going to provide much better customer service than the absurd automated systems we have dealt with over the past several decades (“listen carefully as menu options have changed”), which allowed companies and governments to just pretend they were providing customer service when actually they were just providing less service and forcing customers to waste their own time trying to serve themselves (kind of like self checkouts now that I think of it, but these are also improving).
  • Would You Clone Your Dog? – Well, this one is about dog cloning. It’s pretty routine at this point. They remove eggs from the dog someone wants to clone (so only females can be cloned at this point?), fertilize them or trick them into thinking they’ve been fertilized them somehow, and implant them in another female dog who has the clone puppies.
  • I Drove a Cybertruck Around SF Because I Am a Smart, Cool Alpha Male and The Most Polarizing Thing on Wheels – I haven’t been in one but I’ve certainly seen them. I grudgingly admire a company having the guts to make a real thing that looks science fiction future-y and sell it to real people in the real market. It shows some imagination.
  • Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business – Apparently there are little doggy bags of human poop still on the moon.
  • Living In A Lucid Dream – Lucid dreaming is certainly interesting. Supposedly almost anyone can learn to do it.
  • ‘It Wasn’t Sexual in Any Way!’ 50 Years of Streaking – By The People Who Dared to Bare All – One guy has streaked at 583 public events.

Urbanomics 2024 wrap-up

I like the Urbanomics blog. It is India-focused but also covers international and U.S. topics. Here are a few things that caught my eye:

  • a chart showing the average global temperature in 2024 surpassed 1.5 degrees C of warming. I don’t know exactly how the IPCC threshold is defined, for example if it is a multi-year average, but nonetheless this ship is setting sail right about now.
  • a chart showing the incredible run for the U.S. stock market this year. As I enter the 10-15 years to retirement window, I can’t help thinking whether this is my last bubble during working years and what the timing means for me personally when it pops or deflates. And given the first bullet, how does the real geophysical overreach bubble we find ourselves in, which it seems might be springing a leak, relate to this financial bubble?
  • a chart showing that China imported the largest share of U.S. goods and services a decade ago but has dropped sharply as the #1 destination for U.S. exports. Canada and Mexico are the other 2 in the top 3. Still, a chart like this tells us only the relative position and doesn’t tell us whether the overall value of U.S. exports has increased in this time, or whether the composition has changed (for example, how much is food and energy vs. high-tech products like electronics or military equipment.) For that matter, when the U.S. governments gives foreign governments aid consisting of cash that they are required to use to buy things from U.S. corporations, does this count as an export? I am thinking it probably does.
  • Embedded in this 2024 roundup is another entire 2024 roundup, the World Bank’s 2024 Key Development Challenges. The trend in extreme poverty around the world is still down, but gains have slowed since the pandemic and are projected to continue to be slow. Huge numbers of people still lack access to modern sanitation, electricity, drinking water, and education. Climate hazards such as floods, heat waves, droughts and tropical storms are a headwind to further gains. Generally, debt burdens have increased and economic growth has slowed in developing countries since the pandemic. As much as we are complaining about inflation in the developed world, it has been much worse in developing countries, where inflation in food prices has been about double that in developed countries. Overall, commodity prices are about 30% higher than before the pandemic.
  • Embedded within the World Bank’s roundup is the “Business Ready 2024” ranking of developing economies based on business environment. This suggests specific policies developing countries (and likely, many developed countries, cities and regions) can take to encourage the private sector. Many of these are relatively straightforward and do not require large amounts of money, which does not mean of course that they are politically or administratively easy to implement.

Foreign Policy’s 2024 election roundup

Foreign Policy has a useful roundup of election results from around the world in 2024. Despite the rightward lurch in the United States, there doesn’t seem to have been a clear ideological trend globally. The narrative this story puts forward is that voters around the world rejected incumbents in favor of whoever was offering an alternative, and a lot of this was fueled by the sudden and shocking reductions in disposable income that affected massive numbers of people around the world. I learned something from this – inflation, assuming it outpaces wage increases, is worse politically than unemployment. Where unemployment has a profound affect on a small number of voters, inflation has a less acute but still profound enough affect on a majority of voters. And this happened around the world (which analytical, rational people, who seem to be in short supply in the U.S., might realize can’t be blamed on Joe Biden. If anything, Biden’s downfall was that he first raised expectations by cushioning the blow early in his presidency, and then let it hit people below the belt right at the worst time, politically speaking, a little after the midpoint of his presidency. Anyway, here is the FP roundup:

  • Iran voted out a conservative president in favor of a more liberal minded one, at least by local standards. Of course, they still have an unelected supreme leader for life (but only one, compared to the nine we have here in the United States).
  • India’s right-wing religious nationalist party lost ground and had to form a coalition government.
  • While I have heard (United States of) American women say in interviews that they don’t think a woman will be taken seriously as leader of a country and they have never heard of such a thing, and are shouting brainless slogans like “drill baby drill!”, famously tough-guy dominated MEXICO has elected a FEMALE CLIMATE SCIENTIST president.
  • A decade or so on from the Steve Bannon-engineered Brexit fiasco, the UK has for the moment at least reverted to a center-left government.
  • Indonesia has elected a right-wing paramilitary leader suspected of crimes against humanity.

will 2025 see the rise of the AI agents?

Despite all the AI hype, we (at least the general public and most workers and middle managers) do not have AI agents we can assign to do our bidding. This is going to be a game changer, for better and for worse. This article is about shopping, which seems to me like one of the most frivolous use of these agents, but of course one that businesses will look to as a way to extract even more value from all of us.

In 2024, venture funds invested an estimated US$1.8 billion in AI agent projects. Deloitte’s latest Global Predictions Report argues 25% of companies that use generative AI will launch agentic AI projects in 2025.

Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2028, 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made by AI agents.

I’m trying to think of uses for AI agents in my personal and work life. They should be really good schedulers and calendar managers. I can imagine giving them limited autonomy to schedule appointments for recurring home maintenance, for example, giving me a checklist to fill out confirming that the work has been completed satisfactorily according to industry standards and legal requirements, and paying the contractor if it has. if it hasn’t, my agent might engage in some kind of preliminary negotiation with the contractor’s agent and be allowed to settle within certain bounds before taking up the time of us valuable humans. You can see where I am going with this – there are all kinds of applications in project management, construction management, operations management, and (gulp) tourism and hospitality management. Companies have been trying to automate these tasks for decades, in fact, with very unsatisfactory results and a lot of human time wasted. Smarter AI systems should be able to reduce some of this friction, handling routine tasks while just keeping humans minimally informed, and understanding when a human being needs to make a decision and exactly what information they will need to do so.

I can imagine a helpful AI looking over my shoulder as I make small daily decisions and telling me whether they are likely to help or hinder me in meeting my long-term goals. For example, will my eating and shopping choices increase or decrease my expected life span? Will they increase or decrease my expected net worth at retirement age? Good AI agents might be able to help me counteract the bad AI agents out there that are going to be trying to get me to make bad choices.

ProPublica most-read stories of 2024

Here are a few stories from ProPublica that caught my eye:

what countries U.S. combat troops are in at the end of 2024

Twice a year the President is required to inform Congress about where U.S. troops are engaged in combat. This seems to leave a lot out – most obviously, naval and air force operations around the world that are nominally based out of the U.S. and its territories. Massive U.S. bases in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere that are not obviously and directly engaged in combat. “Advisors”, special operations, covert actions, intelligence operations, and contractor operations of various kinds. Satellites, somewhat obviously. Nonetheless, the report says U.S. troops are engaged in combat in:

  • Iraq and Syria – lumped together, somewhat oddly. U.S. combat troops are on the ground inside Syria, a sovereign nation which has not invited us to be there. They are supposedly fighting Islam-inspired terrorists, but not the ones that just overthrew the country’s government. The U.S. is allied with Kurdish groups, which were fighting the Syrian government (but were not allied with the group that successfully overthrew the Syrian government), and are fighting Turkey, which is a U.S. ally and NATO member. The U.S. directly bombed “Iran-affiliated groups” in Syria twice in November. The short letter does not mention any U.S. support for Israeli operations inside Syria, but it is hard to imagine the U.S. being completely uninvolved. The U.S. still has troops in Iraq (Mission Accomplished) 21 years after invading that country. These troops are supposedly invited to be there by the Iraqi government, and are supporting “Kurdish Iraqi security forces” and providing “limited support to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission in Iraq”. I am kind of baffled by these last two statements, but I guess I am just ignorant.
  • “Arabian Peninsula Region”. This is an anti-terrorist mission supposedly at the invitation of the Yemeni government. At the same time, we are hearing about massive famine in Yemen caused by the Saudi attacks on the country, and it is not exactly clear what the U.S. role in that is.
  • Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. U.S. troops are involved in anti-terrorist actions in all these countries, supposedly at the invitation of the host countries.
  • Somalia – U.S. troops are involved in anti-terrorist combat operations at the invitation of the government. This one is pretty ugly, but many accounts.
  • Djibouti – Djibouti is basically a massive U.S. military base for many operations in Africa and the Middle East. Again, it’s a little odd that this gets mentioned when others don’t – what about Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Qatar?
  • Cuba – Guantanamo Bay is still open for business with 30 prisoners. Maybe Biden should just drop these people off in Florida or Texas on January 19.
  • Philippines – again, odd that this massive base gets mentioned when other massive ones do not, but it is because there are some in-country operations U.S. troops are involved in.
  • Israel – U.S. troops are defending Israel while it is attacking its occupied territories and sovereign neighbors.
  • The report mentions small numbers of U.S. troops in Egypt and Kosovo.
  • Afghanistan – “United States military personnel remain postured outside Afghanistan to address threats to the United States homeland and United States interests that may arise from inside Afghanistan.” Um, so this does not make it clear where they are, how many troops there are or what they are actually doing, if anything…
  • Niger – Well, here is a country that kicked us out following a military coup, and apparently we actually left when they asked us to.
  • There are 80,000 U.S. troops deployed to NATO countries in western Europe, according to the letter. Again, it’s a little unclear to me why these are listed while troops in Japan and Korea are not.

Longreads reader favorites

Longreads.com readers like some weird, occasionally morbid stuff apparently, most of which does not appeal to me personally. The only one that really stood out to me is I was Hypnotized as a Teen. Was it Dangerous? Basically, the verdict is that medical hypnosis is definitely a real thing, and there is overall agreement that stage hypnosis is at least partially real. People can’t be hypnotized against their will, apparently, but once they agree to it at least some people lose control to the hypnotist and do not remember details of the experience.

Longreads #1 stories

A lot of the #1 stories are kind of depressing, to be honest. Here are a couple that caught my eye:

Planetizen’s top posts of 2024

There are a lot here. Quite a few have to do with housing, a topic I would be interested in brushing up on. A lot have to do with transportation, a topic I have just feeling complete and utter despair about, at least in the context of the United States and my particular city and state. One possible bright spot is congestion pricing in New York City. Congestion pricing just works, even though it is politically unpopular and counter-intuitive to many people’s “common sense”. Maybe people will notice that it solves some of the congestion and parking issues they like to complain about, and maybe it will slowly spread to other cities and states.

December 2024 in Review

In December I reviewed a number of “best of” posts by others, so this is really a roundup of roundups.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The annual “horizon scan” from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution lists three key issues having to do with tipping points: “melting sea ice, melting glaciers, and release of seabed carbon stores”.

Most hopeful story: I’m really drawing a blank on this one folks. Since I reviewed a number of book lists posted by others, I just pick one book title that sounds somewhat hopeful: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Bill Gates recommended The Coming Wave as the best recent book to understand the unfolding and intertwined AI and biotechnology revolution. I also listed the 2024 Nobel prizes, which largely had to do with AI and biotechnology.