What was in the East Wing of the White House?

I admit to being ignorant of this. I know the Oval Office is in the West Wing of course. Yahoo has a rundown of the East Wing. The main thing it seems to have housed is official offices of first ladies over the years. But not Hillary Clinton, who insisted on being in the West Wing, or Melania Trump, who doesn’t seem to do office-y things. And there was also a theater with a really big TV where presidents and guests could watch movies and the Super Bowl. But given how busy I am as a normal middle aged working parent, I can’t imagine presidents are often able to sit down and dedicate a 2-3 hour chunk of time to watching a movie or sporting event.

The east wing “colonnade” was essentially a hallway.

The iconic outdoor photos we often see of world leaders are typically taken in the outdoor West Wing colonnade.

There are also the east and west porticos, which are basically covered porches. Photo captions online seem to mix up the porticos and colonnades at times.

going to college is still a lot better than not going to college

I hear people “questioning the value of a college degree” in the media. Sure, education is getting more and more expensive at a time when wages seem to be stagnating and there is some uncertainty whether career prospects for today’s graduates will be similar to those of past generations. But the numbers say (paying to study and not work for four years and) getting a degree is still a much better investment than not getting a degree and going right to work after high school. Sure, you could borrow the cost of four years of college and bet it on cryptocurrency or the Super Bowl, and you might come out ahead, but you might also come out living a short life under a bridge somewhere. You could also train as, say, an electrician and probably have a decent income and successful career, but you would still probably do better in the long run as an electrical engineer.

Anyway, this is from the Financial Times, which I still seem to have residual access to from my own recent student career.

To determine whether recent graduates are having an especially tough time in 2025’s low-hiring environment, the comparison we should make instead is with others who recently entered the labour market for the first time, regardless of age. A newly job-seeking graduate might be in their mid-twenties, but someone entering the world of work straight from high school will be several years younger.

Once we do this, it turns out that those without a degree are actually having a much harder time of it. In the US, unemployment among recent college graduates is up 1.3 percentage points from its mid-2022 low, but by almost double that among recent labour market entrants without a degree, who have seen a 2.4 point rise. This is very different to the much more modest 0.7 point rise among the frequently — but inappropriately — cited group of non-grads in their mid-twenties who are sheltered from today’s harsh hiring conditions.

But evidence for the kind of large-scale AI-driven displacement of early-career knowledge-sector jobs that would explain broad-based graduate malaise remains conspicuous by its absence….When viewed instead as a broader cooling of the labour market, in which inexperienced workers of all stripes bear the brunt (and especially those with the least skills) we don’t need to reach for such exotic explanations. The unwinding of extremely tight post-pandemic labour markets, rising input costs from inflation, tax changes and tariffs, plus the broader economic uncertainty during Donald Trump’s second term, are sufficient to explain what we’re seeing.

AI-related changes to the job market and wider economy are almost certainly coming, in my view, but we may be perceiving a causation between today’s technology and economic/political headlines that is not quite happening in real time.

October 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!

Most hopeful story: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I mused about what it was like to be a child in the distant past of novels I have read, during my own youth, for my own children today, and for young adults I have interacted recently. We hear children are “anxious” and experiencing various crises, and I am not denying there is hard evidence of this, but with my own eyes I also see kids being somewhat safer, kinder, and gentler to each other than in the past. I hope it is possible to mitigate some of the negative effects of technology and other negative influences on kids today while also building on the positive trends.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830502.It

The Tyranny of Small Decisions

I have thought about this concept on my own, but didn’t know about the work of Alfred Kahn. Basically, the idea is that many small daily decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can lead to drift from the organizations mission or goals, and ultimately undesirable outcomes or even failure. All these individual decisions can seem rational and well-intentioned to the people making them.

This all makes sense to me, and I have seen it play out in organizations. I do think it is a strong argument for planning. Organizations that don’t have appropriate decision making processes in place are going to fail. For even for organizations that do, the people making the decisions need to understand the goals and mission of the organization, and the larger systems that organization is embedded in. That means you need a plan, and the plan needs to be periodically reviewed and communicated so that it stays in the forefront of peoples’ minds. And there needs to be a process for continuity of the plan when the people involved inevitably change over time. I don’t think embedding the plan only at the highest level of management works very well – it needs to be embedded at all levels of the organization, particularly mid-level management but even the rank and file, in my view.

Charlie Stross continues to rant about renewable energy and fascism

Yes, Charlie Stross continues to rant, enjoyably and correctly, in my view. I’ll share a brief quote and then encourage you to read his long post. And I’m still bothered by the idea that he is 61 and “never expected to get to be this old”. That is not that old, dude! Possibly I feel that way because it is not all that much older than I am! And I am not yet ready to concede that I am old.

The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up: Europe had been relying on Russian exports of natural gas via the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, but Russia—which is primarily a natural resource extraction economy—suddenly turned out to be an actively hostile neighbour. (Secondary lesson of this war: nations run by a dictator are subject to erratic foreign policy turns—nobody mention Donald Trump, okay?) Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it’s cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.

The idea of fossil fuels as “stranded assets” has faded from the US press, but he is surer than ever. And I think he is right, and it is industry and political propaganda (which are, of course, one thing at the moment, or maybe always one thing but different industries get the upper hand depending on the politics) that is hiding this fact from us here in the United States, which is rapidly downshifting to developing country status relative to the world’s most advanced countries.

what Americans pay for their cars

I am not a member of the 1% by any means, but one key to my personal financial stability has been not owning a car for the last 21 years. People shell out enormous amounts of their income to buy, lease, maintain, repair, replace, and park personal vehicles. And that doesn’t count what you are paying in terms of your home value, property taxes, and gas taxes to maintain all that car focused infrastructure out there. Nor does it count injuries and deaths due to crashes (well, to some extent you pay for that through your car insurance and health insurance), and certainly not the costs of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes due to the opportunity cost of driving relative to spending that same time on some form of physical activity. Finally, people and nature are paying the costs in terms of air and water pollution and heat in more abstract ways (pain, death, knowing ecosystems are being destroyed) if not in dollars.

And of course, for many communities people choose to live in, that personal vehicle is absolutely necessary to get to jobs, school, and put food on the table. I’m just saying where you choose to live is a choice, at least in the longer term. If you want to live in a less car dependent community, you may not be able to change your situation overnight but you could set a goal to change your situation say within 3-5 years. Anyway…

This Jacobin article (which is an unapologetic socialist magazine?) has some interesting facts and figures on what Americans are spending on their private cars.

The country just crossed over a critical threshold last month: 5.1 percent of car owners are at least ninety days delinquent on their loans. This is almost touching the record high of 5.3 percent, reached during the nadir of the Great Recession in 2010. Young people are unsurprisingly hardest hit, with 7.5 percent of car-owning Gen Zers delinquent. The trend for all is upward for the past eight quarters — and expected to continue.

Auto insurance rates are up 56 percent in the past five years; car repossessions are also at post-Recession highs, at 1.73 million so far this year; and car repair costs popped 32 percent in the past two years alone, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s new tariffs. In 2023, a Federal Reserve Bank survey found that car repairs won out over rent, mortgage, health care, and food as the cost that Americans were most concerned about.

Consumers have responded to all this pressure by extending the terms of their loans to decrease their average monthly payments. Yet interest rates have kept rising. The average American is forking over between $550 and $750 a month on their car note, a number that used to be a monthly rent a decade prior. Today 20 percent of all newly originated car notes are over $1,000 a month, and you’d be mistaken to think that only the top income quintile is represented in that number.

$500-1000 per month is a lot of money, and I think that is just the loan payment.

let’s talk about It, kids, cell phones, etc.

I suppose this is my Halloween post. I had never read Stephen King’s novel It, I suppose because I saw snippets of the bad mini-series on TV in the 1990s and was turned off by it. But like literally everything I have read by King, I went into it not knowing what to expect and ended up thoroughly enjoying it. Sure, there are a few nasty gross parts. And what’s really disturbing about the novel is that it depicts violence against children. That is going to turn a lot of people off. But violence is never gratuitous in King’s books, there is always some moral order to his universe. And the monster in It is a supremely evil being with no redeeming features, and we know it is supremely evil with no redeeming features because it kills children. But the monster is not really the focus of the book. Like any King novel, and I’m thinking particularly of The Stand, he spends an enormous amount of time developing his characters and their back stories individually so we really get to know what they are thinking and feeling and how they got that way. Then he puts them together in various combinations and in various situations, and then he puts them all together and we get to see what they are thinking and feeling and how they react to each other. Maybe this is why most of the movies and series about his books suck, because movies and TV are not the right medium to tell the types of stories he tells. Anyway, I was a fan of The Stand, and It is even more interesting in some ways because we get to see the same characters, separately and together, as adults and children, and facing similar wacky situations separately and together as adults and children. So factor all this out mathematically and you can see how to get 1000+ pages of Stephen King!

A quick tangent: It has some lengthy passages describing the sewer and drainage systems of the town, which are intertwined and not supposed to be. And they have to be pumped out, which does in fact happen quite a bit in low-lying coastal areas. Since this is relevant to my particular profession, it’s just interesting to me that King had an understanding and interest in this at the time.

Anyway, one thing that surprises me is how different the kids in the story seem from my own kids today, and from my own childhood memories in the 1980s. The story, at least the part where the characters are children, takes place in the 1950s. Some kids in the story are pretty bad, with extremely violent bullying taking place. And some of the adults are pretty bad too. A few of them are brutalizing their own children, but they uniformly blame their own children when they are hurt by the bullies, and their kids are not honest with them as a result. They are also almost uniformly racist and antisemitic. All of which makes for a pretty complex and entertaining story, but was it really like this?

This all made me think a little bit about the idea of “free range kids” and whether I am being over-protective. The kids in the story were definitely free range kids, and they were at risk of death and injury a lot – from bullies, from cars, falling out of trees, drowning, etc. Sure, there is a fictional sewer monster stalking them in the story, but a few kids were going to die violently in this town monster or no monster. So Jonathan Haidt may tell me I am overprotective of my own children, but keeping them safe and healthy is my number one priority as a parent.

I’ve had an interesting experience over the last few years of simultaneously raising two children who are in elementary school and middle school, and also interacting with college students in their early 20s (I just turned 50 if anybody wants to know.) And one thing that strikes me is kids seem a bit kinder and gentler overall than they were even during my own childhood. Perhaps kids have become more “anxious” and lost their edge to survive in the wild as Jonathan Haidt claims (and demonstrates with hard evidence, which I don’t deny), but as a society we seem to have become less tolerant of the bullying in school children and the various forms of sexual coercion and assault that can go on around college age, not to mention outright racist and antisemitic behavior. As Haidt and others are demonstrating, there is some trend of bullying shifting from physical/in-person to online/electronic, and this seems to be disproportionately affecting girls, which I have observed with my own eyes in my children’s classes. Interestingly, I have not observed anything resembling the type of male playground bullying I experienced at times as a kid, although I have observed plenty of rough play leading to bumps and bruises and a little bit of blood here and there. Ironically, the one broken bone our family experienced occurred on one of the padded rubber playground surfaces Jonathan Haidt makes fun of in the interview I link to above. He says kids “can’t get hurt” on these surfaces. Well, they can if they fall just right in sort of a freakish upside-down way. I don’t blame myself or the playground designer, and I certainly won’t stop my kids from going back to that same playground.

The playground bullying I experienced as a kid was nothing on the order of what is depicted in It or Lord of the Flies (which Stephen King cites as an influence). But it must have been real. I am thinking of a few other books – particularly the Great Brain series I enjoyed reading in my own childhood, in which kids attempted to beat up other kids for being Mormons, and at least in the stories the Mormon protagonists learned how to “whip” the other kids soundly enough to be left alone. Charles Bukowksi’s Ham on Rye also comes to mind, in which there is some very disturbing violent assault behavior between school-age boys. And like It, adults are aware of it and choose to do nothing, or even partake in one disturbing case. I tend to think all these authors may have drawn on personal experience.

I’ll close here with a few facts and figures. Along with the rise of teenage depression and suicidal thoughts, particularly in girls, which Haidt and others have pointed out, there is a global rise in mortality specifically among teenagers and young adults, which bucks an overall trend of falling mortality among people of all ages. People at this age don’t die of disease (sure, a few do, but statistically I’m just saying this is a healthy age). They are dying of “injury, violence, suicide, road traffic accidents and substance abuse”. So these are the figurative evil clowns in the sewer stalking our children as they come of age.

Happy Halloween 2025! Watch out for evil sewer clowns, but seriously, watch out for reckless drivers and don’t be one yourself.

maybe global warming isn’t causing as much drying as we thought?

I certainly have had the impression that both agriculture and natural ecosystems are becoming more water scarce due to global warming, and that this is going to be a big problem at some point. We hear that the Amazon (River basin) may be tipping into an arid ecosystem, which has implications for the entire global climate and food supply, for example. But this article in Water Resources Research suggests there may be some feedback loops being overlooked. If I can try to summarize in a couple sentences, the concern is that higher temperatures cause greater evaporation from soil and transpiration (evaporation of soil moisture through the pathway of plant roots and leaves), and this will lead to drying both in agricultural and natural ecosystems. But plants have mechanisms to resist this loss of moisture, specifically by closing stomata which are the openings in leaves through which transpiration takes place. The mechanism can offset some but not all of the increased drying effect.

The CO₂ Balancing Act: Why Global Warming and Greening Don’t Dry Earth as Much as We Thought

While air warming and vegetation greening are widely assumed to intensify terrestrial drying through enhanced evapotranspiration, rising atmospheric CO₂ concentration ([CO₂]) may counteract this effect by inducing stomatal closure and reducing water depletion. However, the complex interplay between these factors has obscured their net impact on global terrestrial drying. Here, we develop a model that physically and effectively quantifies the relationships among evapotranspiration, [CO₂], and climate and vegetation changes, which can explicitly reflect how CO₂-mediated stomatal regulation interacts with climate and vegetation changes to modulate evapotranspiration. We find that, globally, the drying effects of warming and greening are largely offset by CO₂-induced reductions in surface conductance (69.4% ± 16.9%) and associated meteorological feedbacks. This compensatory mechanism is overlooked in traditional drying indicators, that is, the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) overestimates trends in drought-affected area (63.2% ± 10.1%), drought duration (58.7% ± 9.5%), and drought intensity (43.9% ± 7.7%) during 1982–2014 by ignoring CO₂-vegetation-climate interactions, and similarly, potential evapotranspiration-based aridity index underestimates wetting trends by 66.1% ± 3.5%. Our results reveal a systematic bias in current global drying assessments, which exaggerate drying in aridifying regions while underestimating wetting trends elsewhere. These findings reinterpret the hydrological impacts of global change, demonstrating that [CO₂] rise acts as a critical buffer against terrestrial drying. The study provides a mechanistic framework to reconcile observed greening with hydrological trends, offering transformative insights for ecohydrological modeling and water resource management in a high-[CO₂] climate.

building public transit faster and cheaper

Haden Clarkin, in a blog called The Transit Guy offers a “four step playbook” for building public transportation infrastructure in the United States. I’ll summarize and offer a few of my own reactions in brackets.

Develop a comprehensive vision, goals, and plan. [Yes, a lot of times people – especially my fellow engineers but also politicians trying to be helpful with funding – want to jump directly to “projects”. A “project” is a specific thing you want to build in a specific place. But it needs to be part of a larger plan to serve a larger purpose in the long term. This planning needs to be firmly in place when the “project” ideas come up and people are pushing for quick decisions on them. And you need a critical mass of people inside the organizations making the decisions, from senior management down to at least mid-level management, to really understand and buy into the plan. And you need to bring new people on board with the plan as you gradually lose institutional knowledge to political churn and attrition.]
Approve the plan through a voter referendum. In Haden’s vision, this cuts through a lot of the regulatory red tape later, because all the regulatory requirements tend to have extensive public buy-in and outreach requirements. A state-level referendum may also cut through some of localized NIMBY issues. [He’s writing in Rhode Island, and this may work there. We don’t really have state-level referenda in Pennsylvania, and I assume there is probably some constitutional reason for this. There are mechanisms for updating the constitution, and maybe we should work on this. We do have a big urban-rural divide issue in the state though, like many larger states. This might make it difficult to pass a state-level referendum focused on a metro area. It may be worth a try though.]
“Design and Plan it In-House”. [This is consultant hate. I happen to be a consultant who has worked with and been embedded within public agencies, and I think this is hogwash. Well, mostly hogwash. Sometimes public sector people mistakenly compare the hourly direct labor cost for their own people to the hourly cost of labor+benefits+overhead+profit of private sector consultants. Yes, there is a small profit in there, theoretically set by market competition. Competition for public-sector contracts is pretty ferocious, at least outside of the military-industrial complex. The true overhead and benefits cost to the public sector is often hard to define, but if you do an honest accounting of it, it is almost certainly higher than the private sector. Now, you want a public agency firmly in control of design, procurement, and construction of its projects. So it probably makes sense to set some benchmark like the majority of people working on a project should work for the public agency. But then it can make a lot of sense to bring in consultants both for their expertise and because they are a flexible work force you can surge in when needed and then scale back when no longer needed. You let them deal with those overhead and benefit costs so they don’t get out of control on the public side. You want strong technical people on the public side of course, but it is also really important to focus on strong project management, procurement, finance and accounting, and construction management expertise so you can make the best use of the private sector.]
Prioritize high impact and publicly visible projects first. [This makes total sense. I especially like the idea of building bus rapid transit lines early and converting them to light rail or even subway over time.]

There’s lots more, of course. Land use, housing, and zoning policy all play a role in building communities where there will actually be demand and support for public transportation. You probably need metro-scale and often multi-state authorities for design, construction, operation, and financing. That is big picture, long term context for the planning process. In my fantasy world, we wouldn’t just have a transportation plan for one municipality, but a comprehensive infrastructure plan (how about transportation, energy, water, communications, green infrastructure and food) at the metropolitan area scale.

Future Yada Yada Yada

in which I explore the imminent collapse of civilization, the fabulous science fiction future, and points in between