This year’s Living Planet Report paints a bleak picture of ongoing ecological collapse. I think this is an organization that has some incentive to be on the bleak side of average, but still I tend to buy into the message. The alarm is sounding, but not reaching the general public or our political leaders. People just don’t understand this like they do the simplistic concept of carbon emissions, and of course even that we are failing to address in an adequate way. What’s the elevator pitch for why it matters, even for people who don’t value or have much emotional connection with nature? In a word, it’s the food, stupids.
bad things that happen in Philadelphia
Well, as a certain leader said last Tuesday (I am writing on Friday, October 2), bad things happen in Philadelphia. Like several people getting shot every day. And it’s happening in cities all over the country. There are all kinds of debates about what is causing it, but what I see is escalating cycles of revenge and counter-revenge among young men in certain neighborhoods. Add in a culture that glorifies gun violence, and what could have been fist fights in more innocent times becomes fatal. Add in lack of education and economic opportunity which leads young men to get involved in the illegal drug trade to earn a living. The fact that drugs are illegal is what makes them valuable enough that young men can earn a living by getting involved. The fact that they are illegal means turning to the civil authorities to settle disputes is not an option. Add in violent repression by said civil authorities. Now you have a self-perpetuating and escalating cycle of violence. In a cycle, there is no true “root cause”. What you need to do is de-escalate the cycle of violence. The good news is you can tackle any link in the cycle. You can try to tackle the culture that glorifies violence by reaching out to young men at risk, providing better role models, reaching them at school, etc. You can try to do something about the guns. That all sounds good but the evidence is mixed. You can try to break the cycle by tackling child care, education, and economic opportunity. That is admirable, it is important, it is absolutely necessary, but it is a long, long game and you have to be prepared to stay at it for a long, long time before you see results. You can try to break a cycle quickly by tackling its weakest link. In a much shorter time frame, you can de-escalate the violence by taking away the value of the drugs. Just legalize them, and they will not be so valuable. Victims of violence will be able to turn to the civil authorities, without fear that they themselves will be punished. Drug addiction may increase and may cause suffering that wouldn’t have occurred before. This is a problem for the health care system, both physical health and mental health. Well, let’s get that figured out, but that is another long, long game…
Health care. Child care. Education. And goddamnit, LEGALIZE DRUGS NOW!!!
Ralph Nader on R&D
I’m still thinking about innovation – Ralph Nader says the U.S. government invests plenty in research and development, but only wealthy and powerful interests reap the benefits.
We send our tax dollars to Washington, D.C., and the federal government gives trillions of these dollars to companies in the form of subsidies and bailouts.
Trillions of dollars are devoted to government research and development (R&D), which has built or expanded private companies. These include such industries as aerospace, pharmaceuticals, military weapons, computers, internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and containerization.
Our taxpayer-funded R&D is essentially given away free to these for-profit businesses. We the People receive no royalties nor profit-sharing returns on these public investments. Worse, we pay gouging prices for drugs and other products developed with our tax dollars.
Counterpunch
Maybe, but if this means an obsession with patents and copyrights and other forms of “intellectual property rights” designed to capture value for investors, I think it can go too far and actually limit innovation. It might make more sense for the government to make the investments, institute a value added tax to recoup the benefits of increased progress economy-wide, and return some combination of benefits and services to the people. This would be a pretty obvious win to the private sector and the public at large. Of course, the illogical pro-business, anti-tax ideology U.S. corporations have spent decades manufacturing and imposing on the population makes this combination of policies politically almost impossible.
“innovation driven industrial policy”
I’m still on the topic of innovation. Slate has an article on what an “innovation driven industrial policy” would look like.
It is not—and has never been—that the U.S. does not have a de facto industrial policy. Through regulation, foreign investment rules, trade barriers, and even subsidies (think ethanol), the federal government has found ways to support U.S. industry. And even the most ideological appropriators have not succeeded in removing millions of dollars of research funding channeled through the long-standing research agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or through programs established to support development of that research, such as the Small Business Research Innovation program (now branded as “America’s Seed Fund”).
Slate
So the idea is that an industrial policy would take all this and put it under some kind of central management intended to spur progress in key areas. Then it would pump out more funding and encourage private industry to do the same.
a new “science of progress’
This article in the Atlantic says we need a “new science of progress”. It’s an interesting philosophical question – the universe is all around us, its secrets there for us to reach out and understand. The knowledge that exists to discover is not changing, and yet we seem to only be able to discover it in fits and starts. Are there things we could do to discover it faster? Well, there is something called the scientific method. There is something called technology. The field of economics certainly tries to study progress in a systematic way. How best to educate and train human beings is a perennial field of research. Maybe we need to mash all these together somehow, then add hefty doses of system thinking and data science? Or maybe we just need to find the really smart, innovative, unconventional thinkers and figure out how to harness their genius better?
This is exactly what Progress Studies would investigate. It would consider the problem as broadly as possible. It would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.
Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.
The Atlantic
BP Statistical Review of World Energy
BP has put out its Statistical Review of World Energy 2020. I’m a little short on time so I’m going to quote CNN’s coverage of it. (At least I think this is the report CNN is referring to. I have noticed a trend recently where journalists talk about a “recent report” without naming it or linking to it.) At least, I’m going to try to quote it. WordPress’s block editor is getting harder and harder to use.
In a “business-as-usual” scenario, in which government policies and social preferences evolve in the same way as in the recent past, oil demand picks up slightly following the coronavirus hit, but then plateaus around 2025 and starts to decline after 2030.
In two other scenarios, in which governments take more aggressive steps to curb carbon emissions and there are significant shifts in societal behavior, demand for oil never fully recovers from the decline caused by the pandemic. That would mean that oil demand peaked in 2019…
”As difficult steps go, BP’s pirouette from traditional oil company to green energy giant ranks among the more challenging,” Susannah Streeter, a senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown said in a note to clients.
CNN
What exactly is a “green energy giant”? Carbon capture might be a thing, eventually, but that seems like a risky bet as the only business strategy. If most things are going to electrify, it seems like the green energy giant will be the regulated electric utility business, at least in the United States, and it seems unlikely BP is trying to go there. They can try to supply that industry with things to burn, I suppose, like natural gas and liquid natural gas (coal and oil seem to be on their way out), but I am not sure that is a growth industry. Aviation might move toward hydrogen fuel cells eventually. There must be some tiny demand for rocket fuel. Chemicals, drugs, and plastics will continue to exist, of course, but I am not sure that would be a huge source of annual revenue growth for decades. They can manufacture solar panels, windmills, efficient transportation and electrical equipment of various sorts, get into the smart grid, smart buildings and materials, batteries, etc. But doing all sorts of little bits and pieces like this would seem to get them into industrial conglomerate territory, and there are plenty of companies already there. Maybe that is where they are headed – just make forays into lots of different markets and see if anything sticks.
nuclear weapons are still out there
Stephen Cohen, a well-known Russia scholar, has died. His last book (I think) was called War with Russia? and was basically a reminder that nuclear war with Russia is still a distinct and very dangerous possibility. Not only have treaties and arms control agreements been broken and abandoned under Trump, but U.S. and Russian troops are engaged in violent conflicts dangerously close to each other in Ukraine and Syria, among other places. I can’t help noting that these locations are very close to Russia’s borders, not close to ours. Remember how we reacted to Russian missiles in Cuba? We have a double standard. Biden hasn’t talked much about nuclear weapons, which disappoints me, but at least he is a knowledgeable, responsible adult and things can’t get much worse under his leadership.
September 2020 in Review
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
- The Covid recession in the U.S. is pretty bad and may be settling in for the long term. Demand for the capital goods we normally export (airplanes, weapons, airplanes that unleash weapons, etc.) is down, demand for oil and cars is down, and the service industry is on life support. Unpaid bills and debts are mounting, and eventually creditors will have to come to terms with this (nobody feels sorry for “creditors”, but what this could mean is we get a full-blown financial panic to go along with the recession in the real economy.
Most hopeful story:
- The Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis had the courage to take aim at campaign finance corruption as a central reason for why the world is in its current mess. I hate to be partisan, folks, but right now our government is divided into responsible adults and children. The responsible adults who authored this report are the potential leaders who can lead us forward.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
- If the universe is a simulation, and you wanted to crash it on purpose, you could try to create a lot of nested simulations of universes within universes until your overload whatever the operating system is. Just hope it’s backed up.
freight vehicles and urban design
Next City has a roundup of ideas for more efficiently accommodating freight vehicles in dense cities.
- Better, cheaper (or even free to the user) public transit, so there aren’t so many cars clogging up the streets trucks need to drive on
- “logistics hotels” where goods from many sources can be mixed, matched, and put on smaller vehicles appropriate to city streets (this is kind of how a port works?)
- “design infrastructure like intersections and bus lanes with interactions between freight activity and vulnerable road users, like children, in mind” (sounds good, if a bit non-specific
- Design trucks so they just aren’t so dangerous
- Better allocate curb space to get more deliveries out of fewer vehicles
I have a few more ideas.
- Don’t forget some kind of temporary parking for contractors and delivery people serving urban customers. It doesn’t have to be free, but it should be reservable.
- Don’t forget garbage trucks, unless we are going to think of a better way to deal with garbage or get rid of garbage entirely.
- Alleys can work well for trash and deliveries, if they are designed with that purpose in mind. They can provide play space and just generally space for people to spread out the rest of the time (but NOT if they are just a bunch of garage entryways).
- I still want my robot deliveries, both ground and air! In my city though, robots using the sidewalks for deliveries will need them to be in a better state of repair, and that won’t happen because sidewalks are technically the responsibility of homeowners, many of whom are poor and/or don’t even know the sidewalks are their responsibility. On the few streets with incompetently designed, unenforced, and unmaintained bike lanes, the robots’ wheels and gears will get all gummed up with the blood of children and old people who believed the mayor’s promises to build safe protected bike lanes like they have in Europe.
- I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. COPY DUTCH STREET DESIGN NOW!!! Just don’t let it go to their heads, the smug bastards…
summer reading 2020
Here’s what I read this summer (okay, full disclosure – I started in March):
- The Stand. I suppose I decided to read The Stand because of Covid-19. Like most Stephen King books I have read (a short list consisting of The Running Man, which he wrote under a pseudonym early in his career and I didn’t actually realize was Stephen King until later, and The Shining, which I decided to read on a whim one Halloween), it wasn’t exactly what I expected, wasn’t as horrifying as I expected, and I thoroughly enjoyed it in the end. I read the extended version, clocking in at over 1200 pages, which includes information he intended to be in there from the beginning that was cut by the original publisher.
- Futuristic Violence in Fancy Suits. Just dumb, fun escape reading, superhero stuff.
- The Testaments by Margaret Atwood. Now, I’ve given Margaret Atwood a hard time on this blog before, not that she knows or cares. That was before I read The Handmaid’s Tale, and I take it all back. This is a sequel (actually, it sort of takes place loosely in parallel) to The Handmaid’s Tale. The Handmaid’s Tale is a special book. It’s particularly effective as an audio book, because it is supposed to be the audio testimony of a young woman of unknown fate. It is affecting, because it is something like a slave narrative or The Diary of Anne Frank, and you really identify with the character. Of course, the latter two are real while this is a work of fiction. If you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, you need to read it and then reflect on it for awhile before reading The Testaments, but I found The Testaments to be a powerful and affecting book as a supplement.
- I decided that my theme this summer would be “books by Neal Stephenson”. I started with The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. I was looking for escape fiction and this one is about witches, Vikings and time travel. It is very long, and I got the idea he was just getting wound up at the end. I enjoyed the book.
- Next in my “Summer of Stephenson” was The Diamond Age. This is a book about nanotechnology. Like many books about post-singularity technology (I’m thinking of Accelerando by Charles Stross, as good an escape fiction writer as any), I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I was expecting. It was hard to follow the plot and hard to relate to the characters. I applaud Mr. Stephenson for writing a different, creative sort of book, but it just wasn’t that fun for me. Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Stross should both talk to Vernor Vinge about how to make far future technology more relatable.
- Last in my “Summer of Stephenson”, I’m listening to Cryptonomicon, his massive epic about World War II code breaking. It’s an interesting listen, although I tend to listen for a half hour here and there and then be ready for something else. I’m finding it’s good for passing the time on those insomniac nights.
- Finally, I’m reading The Angle Quickest for Flight by Stephen Kotler. It sounded like a fun Dan Brown type thing, but it is turning out to be not fun for me. It’s a tough slog, but I almost never give up on a book.
In summary – Stephen King, fun, although I am not a “horror fan” per se. Vernor Vinge, fun. Anything by Charles Stross except for Accelerando, fun. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, very fun. Other books by Neal Stephenson, moderately to somewhat fun, although after binging on him for a summer I will probably take an extended break. “Fun” might not be exactly the right word for Margaret Atwood, but Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments are well written and powerful stuff you don’t want to come true. Her MaddAdam trilogy is moderately fun stuff you don’t want to come true, and come to think of it, it kind of closes the loop to where I started with The Stand.
I also watched some of the Netflix series Altered Carbon this summer. It reminded me how incredibly fun that book was, even Snow Crash fun. In fact, I would suggest Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), Altered Carbon (Richard K. Morgan), and Rainbow’s End (Vernor Vinge) as a very fun cyberpunk trio.