closing streets to cars raised business sales by 68%

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This was during four Sundays of “open streets” (which means open to humans and closed to big, heavy motor vehicles) in a portion of Center City Philadelphia. But this works because people live nearby. People don’t really have to “walk to” the event because they live there. When cars are the only practical way to get around, most of the space has to be reserved for cars to maneuver and park (relatively) safely so you can’t have space for people too. It’s obvious, sure, but 100 years of oil-highway-car industry propaganda has brainwashed us to be blind to the realities of geometry. Take your red pills, people!

how the 2020 census affected electoral votes in the 2024 election

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It’s interesting that the U.S. Census is conducted every 10 years, presidential elections are conducted every four years, and census results affect the number of electoral votes apportioned to each state. So the 2020 Census was too late to change electoral votes in the 2020 election, but it has changed them slightly in the 2024 election.

From Newsweek (and I haven’t confirmed this from other sources):

Texas was the biggest gainer, according to the Census numbers that were released in 2021. The Lone Star state gained two more votes in Congress and the Electoral College for the next 10 years. Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon also each gained one seat, while California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia lost a seat each.

I count 3 votes shifted from states that voted Democratic in 2020 (Colorado +1, Oregon +1, California -1, Illinois -1, Michigan -1, New York -1, Pennsylvania -1) to states that voted Republican (Texas +2, Florida +1, Montana +1, North Carolina +1, Ohio -1, West Virginia -1).

It doesn’t seem like this will matter in 2024, but with the election possibly coming down to just 2 electoral votes in the Democrats’ favor (if they win Pennsylvania-Michigan-Wisconsin and lose Georgia-North Carolina-Nevada-Arizona), transferring 3 more points after the 2030 census could make all the difference in the 2032 election. But that is pretty far away and a lot of things can change in 8 years. For example, the actual people moving from “blue” to “red” states could take their “blue” politics with them and eventually shift their new state into the blue category or at least the swing state category. Maybe 8 years could be long enough to do away with the idiotic electoral college itself, which was created to convince 18th century slave owners to join a rebellion against an 18th century empire. But no, I am not this optimistic.

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker

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Something called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute tracks and forecasts which countries in the world are leading on what it considers the most critical technologies. Their definition of critical seems to be mostly technologies with military applications: “defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas”. And their metrics seem to be based largely on number of scientific publications and patents. This approach can be critiqued, but nonetheless the results are interesting and striking.

These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies…

China’s new gains have occurred in quantum sensors, high-performance computing, gravitational sensors, space launch and advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication (semiconductor chip making). The US leads in quantum computing, vaccines and medical countermeasures, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy, small satellites, atomic clocks, genetic engineering and natural language processing.

Building technological capability requires a sustained investment in, and an accumulation of, scientific knowledge, talent and high-performing institutions that can’t be acquired through only short-term or ad hoc investments.8 Reactive policies by new governments and the sugar hit of immediate budget savings must be balanced against the cost of losing the advantage gained from decades of investment and strategic planning. While China continues to extend its lead, it’s important for other states to take stock of their historical, combined and complementary strengths in all key critical technology areas.

I suppose the not-so-hidden agenda here is to get the Australian and other “western” governments to invest more in R&D long-term. That is something I would support. I would like to think that technological progress is not just a competition between nation-states but a shared project of our species and civilization. Utopian, I suppose.

Anyway – scientific publications and patents. I don’t think these are perfect measures of scientific or technological progress. Doubling these metrics will not mean that progress has doubled, but rather there must be some diminishing return. Once metrics like these are established, people are going to game the metrics to some extent rather than try to measure the underlying thing, which in this case is scientific and technological progress.

Do I have a better suggestion? Not really – well, I suppose total factor productivity is the most accepted metric of technological progress as far as I know. The holy grail would be to understand exactly how much and what types of R&D investments will maximize it over long periods of time. I am sure there are past and future Nobel laureates working on this problem, but if they have solved in conclusively I have not heard about it.

All that said, there is no excuse for the U.S. to be failing to invest in R&D. We need to ramp it up, and keep it up long term. But there is also an opportunity cost when the fire hose is focused on the military-industrial complex (not to mention the existential risks created for us and all humanity – do these alone outweigh the idea of ever winning the “competition” for dominance in horrible weapons?). Peaceful technologies that could improve human lives and our shared environment will not develop as fast as they could. And finally, to be a broken record, if we ever figure out the secret sauce to ramp up scientific and technological progress, the right thing to do is capture that value added to the economy and redirect it to improve the vast majority of human lives, protect the environment, and manage the risks we face, including risks created by the technologies themselves.

high, high, highway construction costs

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U.S. infrastructure construction cost woes stem largely from lack of competition in the construction industry and diseconomies of scale among public agencies procuring the work. I think I am using the latter term right. Very large agencies and projects are going to get better deals than smaller ones. This is somewhat of an iron law of economics, but you might be able to get around it somewhat by bundling smaller projects into larger packages and by getting larger agencies (like the federal government) more directly involved.

The former (lack of competition) is tricky. Architecture, engineering, and construction is generally not a high-profit industry, and it is a pretty high-risk industry. This all pushes towards a few large firms bidding on large projects where they can make a few pennies on a large volume. The construction industry just hasn’t made much in the way of productivity gains in the last half century either, while labor costs have been rising.

You could help solve the competition problem by allowing foreign firms in, and you could help solve the labor cost problem (from the contractors’ point of view) by letting foreign workers in. Both of these things are politically tough in the U.S.

This article in the blog Boondoggle does a pretty good job of summarizing the report in an understandable way, but it also attacks “high price consultants”. Being part of the engineering consultant industry for many years, I feel a need to push back on this a bit. Labor costs at these firms are high too, profit margins are also pretty slim, and there actually is a lot a competition in this industry. When public agencies hire a consulting firm, the price they see includes everything – the actual product of course and the employees’ salaries, but also all the employee benefits, project management, administrative, financial, and legal costs the firm has to bear, plus the taxes it has to pay. Finally, yes, a few pennies of profit on top of all that, and some money spent on marketing to the next batch of customers. When portions of a project are subcontracted, all those administrative costs get repeated at each level of the food chain. So yes, this adds of to a lot of administrative costs, and it would be great to trim them (maybe some hope for AI on this one longer term?), but the fact is that if the public agency tries to do the work with their own staff, they have almost all of these same costs, and they are typically going to be significantly higher. But people often compare only the labor and construction cost borne by the public agency to the entire cost of business borne by the private firm, which is not a fair comparison. And especially at smaller public agencies, they just aren’t going to have the capacity or expertise to do all the work in-house, which is exactly the gap the consulting industry has sprung up to fill.

So to summarize, here are some ideas:

  • Allow foreign firms and foreign workers to participate, especially in industries where it is clear competition is limited and skilled labor supply is tight. You could also try to train and equip more Americans with the skills needed and encourage formation of more firms, in theory.
  • Aggregate smaller projects and public agencies into larger ones to make them more attractive for firms to bid on. Get larger state and federal agencies involved in the procurement process where possible.
  • Turn on the research and development funding fire hose to make progress on the construction productivity problem. AI, materials science, and prefabrication of more components are all ideas being bandied about. This also gets money into the academic and research institutions which creates skills and capacity for our society.
  • Do I even need to say this? Have government provide health care and other benefits other countries are providing their citizens, and relieve this burden on our private firms so they can focus on doing whatever it is they are in business to do.

October 1 Election Check-In

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Here we go – if I stick to my once a month poll review, there will only be one more just before the election.

STATE2020 RESULTSilver Bulletin (September 1)Silver Bulletin (October 1)538 (October 1)RCP (October 1)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +0.6%Trump +1.5%Trump +1.5%Trump +2.1%
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Harris +0.9%Trump +1.0%Trump +1.3%Trump +1.5%
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Harris +3.2%Harris +1.9%Harris +1.6%Harris +0.6%
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +0.4%Trump +0.5%Trump +0.7%Trump +0.7%
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Harris +1.3%Harris +1.2%Harris +0.6%Trump +0.1%
MichiganBiden +2.8%Harris +1.9%Harris +2.1%Harris +1.9%Harris +1.4%
NevadaBiden +2.4%Harris +0.9%Harris +1.8%Harris +1.0%Harris +1.1%

The first thing that stands out is there is no disagreement between the weighted poll averages (Silver and 538) on the more likely winner of each state. They also agree with the RCP unweighted average with the exception of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania just looks dangerously close, with a 1% polling bias towards Harris (vs. how people in the state end up voting) making it a tossup. Still, you would rather have that polling average in your favor than against you. The difference between the weighted averages and RCP suggest that there either a lot of polls of Pennsylvania voters that the weighters consider Republican-biased garbage, a big recent trend toward Harris in Pennsylvania (because they rate more recent polls higher), or a combination. I can tell you from personal experience that the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation in my home city of Philadelphia is in hyperdrive, but I also assume the Republicans equivalent is in hyperdrive in Republican-leaning counties (like my old home county of Luzerne in Northeast Pennsylvania.)

If the polls are reasonably accurate, Georgia and Arizona might be moving out of Harris’s reach, and it is hard to believe North Carolina and Georgia are that culturally different (think about the Charlanta mega suburban sprawl cluster-f which is basically one thing).

If Harris wins Pennsylvania, she seems likely to win Wisconsin and Michigan and the electoral vote as a whole. Nevada would pad the score a bit for Harris, but it would not offset the loss of Pennsylvania.

Polymarket gives Harris 50% to 48% odds. Predict prices her at 56 cents to Trump at 48 cents, with other candidates given about 8 cents.

So all the signs kind of point to Harris, but if there is a systematic error of 1-2%, Trump could still pull it out.

science fiction (and fantasy-adjacent?) roundup

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This is a roundup of science fiction (and possibly some fantasy – how did that sneak in?) I’ve read (or increasingly, listened to someone else read) in 2024 so far. I’ll go from what I least enjoyed to what I most enjoyed.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer – grand space opera. I really tried and just couldn’t get into the plot or characters after 100 pages or so. When I was younger I never gave up on a book. When a reader gets to middle age though, we begin to accept our mortality and occasionally set aside a book in favor of finding another one that is more worth our dwindling time on earth. This, for me, was one of those.

The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson – Also didn’t finish. I got this through the Libby app, and it was auto-returned before I could finish it, and there would be a very long wait to get back to it. It reminds me of Ralph Nader’s book Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us – it’s really informative non-fiction in fictional form, and that can sometimes be entertaining, but this just wasn’t for me. I doubt I’ll get back to it.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. More space opera with some Han Solo-esque swashbuckling space pirates. Entertaining enough, but if it is part of a series I somewhat doubt I will come back to it.

A Master of Djinn by Djeli Clark. Basically the superhero genre, which is not my favorite, only with genies and set in an alternate steampunk version of Victorian Egypt, which made it a bit more novel. Nothing cerebral here, light and fun.

Good Omens and American Gods by Neil Gaiman. These are two different books I am lumping together. These are not bad, something like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson for grownups. Completely readable.

Olympos by Dan Simmons – I might have talked about this before because I started the two-book series in 2023 and finished in 2024. Because Dan Simmons books are very long. But the man has a wild imagination and I do like Dan Simmons.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. A “fairy tale for grownups”, literally involving fairies. Short – a novella, or a novelette? I thoroughly enjoyed this one and it left me wanting more. Not necessarily wanting Neil Gaiman’s other books, which aren’t bad but this was a cut above.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. I resisted reading this for a long time because I love Ender’s Game and didn’t want to ruin it with a mediocre sequel. But this is an equally good book even though it is very different. It reminded me a bit more of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep series (which I love) than of Ender’s Game (which I also love, but reminds me, at least on the surface, of a Heinlein book, most obviously Starship Troopers). I recently learned from Wikipedia that the “Ender-verse” is much larger than I had imagined. I am tempted to read more, but once again hesitant to cheapen my memory of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead with sequels that might not be as good. Both of those books won many awards, while the rest of the series has not to my knowledge.

Indonesia’s peat fires

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In Indonesia, land is burned seasonally to clear it for agriculture, and particularly for palm plantations which supply cooking oil used throughout Asia. Burning vegetation creates a smoky mess in the best of times (I have personal experience with this in Thailand), but what makes it much, much worse in Indonesia is the presence of organic soils that can also catch on fire and create an unbelievable amount of smoke. My family and I, including a newborn at the time, were exposed to this in Singapore in 2013, and we couldn’t see neighboring buildings out the window (buildings are close together in Singapore) when it was at its worst. 2013 was a bad year, but there have been even worse ones since then.

The media tends to blame the situation on small-scale farmers who are ignorant of modern practices. That might be part of the issue, but there are also huge international investors driving this trend to make profits on the palm oil, including investors in Singapore where the government routinely complains about “trans-boundary haze”.

This is a crisis of vast proportions – Greenpeace Indonesia identified a total burned area of 600,000 hectares of peatland last year. Indonesia’s fire toll during the severely dry years of 2015 and 2019 was even worse, at times emitting more carbon in a day than the entire U.S. economy did, according to the World Resources Institute. The dense haze emitted from these peatland fires contains smoke particles microscopic enough to travel from the lungs into the bloodstream, causing stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and asthma. A 2022 university study calculated that pollution from peatland fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan during the five years from 2013 caused annual premature deaths of about 33,100 adults and 2,900 infants along with thousands of hospital admissions and severe asthma cases in children.

In tracing the finances that flow to Indonesia’s fire-plagued plantation giants, one name that frequently surfaces is the Sinar Mas Group. Connected to many pulpwood plantations with the largest burned areas in Indonesia, the total burned area across all Sinar Mas linked pulp concessions was 314,200 hectares during 2015–2019.

Independent analyst Profundo, a research organization specializing in financial and corporate analysis, traced the funds received by Sinar Mas’s numerous companies from 2015 to 2023. In total, according to Profundo’s findings, the group’s companies obtained approximately $40 billion in credit deals from global financial institutions, with major creditors from Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. In terms of shareholdings, investors from the United States have put $504 million into Sinar Mas Group since 2022, alongside investors from the United Kingdom, Norway, and the EU with shareholdings worth $407 million.

The Diplomat

You read that right – more carbon emissions on a bad day than the U.S. economy, which I think is still the world’s largest emitter! And the ecological destruction and air pollution would be horrific enough without the carbon emissions on top. This is one of the biggest issues in the world that doesn’t get much attention (a general pattern for Indonesia, which I have also said is the world’s largest and most important country that at least the U.S. general public has barely even heard of.) The palm oil is a useful product though that the region is not about to give up (this would be like the U.S. giving up, I don’t know, french fries?) so the solution has to be using better agricultural practices to reduce the impact, and this of course might lower profits for rich and powerful people and/or raise prices for consumers.

“arrogant” foreign policy

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I would tend to agree with Jeffrey Sachs’s description below of U.S. foreign policy as “arrogant”.

Here is not the place to revisit all of the foreign policy disasters that have resulted from US arrogance towards Russia, but it suffices here to mention a brief and partial chronology of key events.  In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans.  In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections.  In 2003, the US and NATO allies repudiated the UN Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false pretenses.  In 2004, the US continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic States and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans.  In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the US pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine.

In 2011, the US tasked the CIA to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia.  In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi.  In 2014, the US conspired with Ukrainian nationalist forces to overthrow Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych.  In 2015, the US began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe(Romania), a short distance from Russia. In 2016-2020, the US supported Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous backing by the UN Security Council.  In 2021, the new Biden Administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.  In April 2022, the US called on Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia.  

Looking back on the events around 1991-93, and to the events that followed, it is clear that the US was determined to say no to Russia’s aspirations for peaceful and mutually respectful integration of Russia and the West.  The end of the Soviet period and the beginning of the Yeltsin Presidency occasioned the rise of the neoconservatives (neocons) to power in the United States. The neocons did not and do not want a mutually respectful relationship with Russia.  They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient.  

U.S. foreign policy has been a playground bully. Nobody likes or trusts a bully, but they fear and respect the bully. This works okay for the bully as long as they are perceived as strong. But as soon as they are perceived as weak or at least weaker compared to competitors, they have a problem. They can’t keep others in line through fear or respect any more, and they don’t have friendship or trust to fall back on.

It’s hard to imagine repairing the relationship with Russia right now. Their action in invading a sovereign neighbor cannot be excused no matter what we have done. We can manage the relationship to try to make it less bad going forward, and we can try to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them with China and other (relatively, perceived to be) increasingly powerful countries. We can first put policies in place that can build trust over time. Nobody will trust as at first, but if our actions were to match our promises over a period of decades we could slowly rebuild our relationships. Here are a few ideas to bandy about: (1) a no-first-strike nuclear policy, (2) serious commitments to nuclear weapons reductions, and re-entering or re-establishing of treaties and agreements with other countries that have or potentially seek nuclear weapons, (3) nuclear power for countries that want it, in exchange for a commitment not to seek nuclear weapons and submission to a strict inspection regime, (4) a commitment not to invade sovereign UN member states ever again without a Security Council resolution, (5) a commitment not to interfere in other countries’ elections or seek “regime change” ever again through covert action, only through public diplomatic channels. There are plenty of things I leave off here (biological weapons and pandemic preparedness, food security, carbon emissions to rattle off just a few) but these are some basic war-and-peace ideas, and we need peace to have a shot at solving the other complex problems the world faces right now. Getting politicians to make these commitments or similar ones would be hard, and sticking with them for decades would be harder, but it needs to be done.

flame-throwing robot dogs

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I was skeptical at first, but apparently there are a number of flame-throwing robot dogs that you can buy. Flame throwers have legitimate uses in agriculture, forestry, and ecological restoration, and are very lightly regulated. These seem dangerous, but then again the backpack-mounted alternatives seem very, very dangerous (basically, a backpack full of gasoline or napalm). There are links to a number of questionable videos in the article I have linked to above, but the one I link to below is an actual manufacturer of these things.

Youtube

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.’ (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451).

trans-boundary organized crime

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This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it is true: Chinese gangsters with ties to the Chinese government are in league with Mexican gangsters to smuggle drugs and people into the United States, and in at least some cases enslave those smuggled people on farms operating in the United States. Relatedly, Chinese gangsters with ties to the Chinese government are known to be laundering drug money through Canadian banks including TD (i.e. Toronto Dominion) bank.

None of this should be an excuse for racism of course. The gargantuan and inasatiable U.S. demand for drugs is the root driver of these problems, criminalization of said drugs creates the profit incentive, and organized crime exists to exploit opportunities like this while minimizing risks (to itself). Organized crime tends to be ethnicity based because recent immigrant groups have social ties to each other and to people and organizations in their countries of origin. And particularly in the case of human trafficking, it is the immigrants themselves who are typically exploited by criminals belonging to their own ethnic group. The risk of violence to those of us not directly involved would seem to be low, other than people who get caught up in the illegal drug marketplace in one way or another.

Nonetheless, all this needs to be smashed. And it can be smashed by traditional law enforcement, inside our traditional borders. Human trafficking and borderline or outright slavery in particular just have to be smashed without mercy. The Oklahoma story above is particularly disturbing where it sounds like law enforcement knew for quite a while that armed guards were confining and forcing people to work against their will, within the boundaries of the United States.