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.

real Terminator-style augmented reality in 2025?

From this Wired headline, you might think 2025 will be year I finally get directions superimposed on the real world through my glasses. But read farther and it sounds more like this is still hard and 2025 will just be a year I can listen to podcasts through my glasses, if I wanted to do that for some reason.

  • Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3S – These are full-on virtual reality helmets I think. I can see this being cool on, say, a long-haul flight, but not walking around a city. Magic Leap is still out there, somewhere, doing something.
  • Ray-Ban Meta – Seriously, this is just making phone calls and listening to music through your glasses. Fine, but not augmented/mixed reality in my opinion. There are some other similar ones from Oppo, Swave, and Emteq and some others that failed on the launchpad or are still in development.
  • Meta Orion, Snap Spectacles, Google Android XR – These are supposed to be the real deal, but are still in the R&D phase. So not too hopeful they will burst onto the commercial scene in 2025.
  • Form – “smart swim goggles”. I can see this – swimming can be boring, and nobody has invented a truly foolproof set of swimming headphones/earbuds that I am aware of.
  • XReal – “focuses on mimicking a big screen display right on the lenses to let users feel like they’re watching media on a big screen”. Again, could be cool on a plane, train, bus, or self-driving vehicle.
  • Emteq – basically sounds like a Fitbit in glasses form. Maybe less dorky than when you see joggers with phones strapped to their arms.

You would assume Apple has some augmented/mixed reality R&D work going on, but they usually seem happy to skip the first couple generations of a new product category (think AI) and let it mature a bit before they join the fray. So the lack of any public hype from Apple is probably a sign that the technology is not going to mature in the next 12 months.

So there you have it – I personally am still looking forward to the (mildly dystopian) world of Rainbow’s End, but it doesn’t sound like 2025 will be the year we get there.

Project Syndicate 2024 book picks

Usually Project Syndicate tells me my free articles are used up, but they are letting me look at their “best books” roundup, I suppose because they are trying to sell me something and I should thank them for the privilege. Anyway, there are a few interesting ones here in the realm of socioeconomic and/or geopolitical non-fiction books. I don’t read too many books in this genre because I am a busy working parent and many of these are TLDR that would have worked fine as longish magazine articles. In fact, sometimes they are magazine articles that got popular and the authors/publishers are trying to cash in. Other times I suspect they are written by humanities professors who are paid by the pound. Nonetheless, here are some that caught my eye. As usual, I am more or less just riffing on the titles and haven’t actually read the books, so don’t take my thoughts as book reviews per se.

  • Amir Lebdioui, Survival of the Greenest: Economic Transformation in a Climate-conscious World. Some ideas on how developing countries could maybe lead the way on various green new deals? Sure, I want to believe in this…
  • Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. “a fascinating tour of ‘extralegal zones’ of suspended sovereignty – an interconnected network of autonomous, business-friendly enclaves where conventional tax, labor, and immigration laws do not apply.”
  • Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. “a classic case of feudal rent defeating capitalist profit, of wealth extraction by those who already have it triumphing over the creation of new wealth by entrepreneurs.” Well, I want to believe in the tech companies because when it comes to U.S. comparative advantage, it’s kind of all we have left? (well, maybe biotech, but a lot of that is tied up with the predatory health insurance/finance industry which has captured our elected officials and is financially raping its own citizens and customers all day every day rather than creating new value.) I want to believe in Schumpeter’s basic formula: capitalism=competition=innovation=”the greatest wealth creating engine the world has ever known”. But if the tech industry and other modern big businesses are not capitalism at all but rather disguised feudalism, that sort of solves my problem of needing to believe in them. The problem being, what is left to believe in?
  • Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. AI and (lack of?) ethics. In my own interactions with AI, I have noticed that it can sometimes show more empathy and patience than any human being could consistently be expected to show. You can shout or curse at it and it responds with “I understand your frustration…” and tries to help you. Does it matter whether there are any emotions there as we understand the term? What seems to matter is whether the AI’s interests are aligned with mine. So that is probably what we need to think about.
  • William Ury, Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict. From a “world-reknowned negotiation expert”. Well, negotiations are about figuring what the interests of the parties are, where they are aligned, and finding something that makes everybody a little better off even if nobody is fully satisfied?
  • Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know. I don’t know if this is a good book, or just time for Malcolm Gladwell to write a book… but there seems to be a negotiation, competition, empathy, and cooperation theme developing here. Per Schumpeter, pure capitalist competition is supposed to be sort of a inadvertent cooperation that lifts all boats, right? Dear capitalists – don’t bite the invisible hand that feeds you.
  • Robert D. Blackwill and Richard Fontaine, Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power. I just don’t want to believe that China is a military threat to the United States. Maybe I am naive, but I just don’t see how it can be in their interests to threaten us. On the other hand, I am 100% certain they feel threatened by us. So how about a little strategic empathy? Can we be less threatening and still deter conflict?
  • Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. When I was a kid, it was dumb TV and high-sugar cereal that was supposedly rotting our brains. But I do see the screen-addiction in my own kids, and I don’t deny the rise in mental illness (diagnoses, at least) among children. Still, the screens give my children access to the world’s information that I could only dream of at their age, and they will be interacting with screens some day in some capacity as part of the work force. So I don’t have the answers here certainly, but I don’t think turning the screens off entirely can be the answer. Talking about what is on the screens sounds like a better path.
  • Kevin A. Young, Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won. I am thinking about the sudden spike in energy use when the AI search engines were turned on. I am thinking about the Kardashev scale, where a civilization’s level of advancement is measured by its energy use (more=more advanced). I am thinking about the Fermi paradox – is it possible that civilizations throughout the universe invent AI but then can’t come up with a viable way to power it without fouling their own nest? This doesn’t really make sense though, when half a century of investment and research in safe nuclear power could have gotten us to a place where we could be fueling the AI awakening more sustainably. The sun’s energy is virtually limitless on our human space and time scales, and solar panels in space are viable with current technology – we would just have had to invest in this and make it happen. Fusion is more speculative but there are some promising developments. I’m just saying, our human performance here on Earth may be pathetic and it seems like we may not make it long term, but if there are a billion civilizations out there similar to ours there must be some that got it right.
  • Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy. “the glaring absence of leadership and preparation during the transition to Donald Trump’s first administration, revealing how the US president-elect appointed incompetent and uninformed individuals to oversee America’s vast bureaucracy.” But this time around, it seems like we are getting even less competent, less informed clowns and fools, and only clowns and fools. Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that in all the billions of advanced civilizations that arise in the galaxy, a Donald Trump always arises at some point and shits the bed.

top urban planning books of 2024

I always enjoy Planetizen’s list of top urban planning books. My training is in engineering, but like almost everyone I am a citizen of an urban area, and besides urban planning is an umbrella that touches on many aspects of engineering, infrastructure, housing, the economy and the environment. Anyway, here are a handful of books that caught my eye. My commentary below doesn’t really have much to do with the books (which I haven’t read), but rather my off-the-cuff thoughts on the topics each book is nominally about.

  • Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World by Sara Bronin – The tide of opinion seems to be against zoning at the moment, but it is just such a basic and important tool to try to shape the types of human settlements we want to live in, and that could be different for different groups of people. I think of private zoning and building codes as one half of the coin, and public infrastructure as the other, but I haven’t really seen a book that gives them an even treatment. Someone should write that book – maybe me, some day somehow?
  • Free the Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos by Audrea Lim. “No piece of ground goes untouched, whether it’s private property, a public right of way, or government-owned open space.” Okay, maybe this one actually attempts something along the lines of what I mention above.
  • A Paradise of Small Houses: The Evolution, Devolution, and Potential Rebirth of Urban Housing by Max Podemski. Because I don’t really have a coherent personal theory of what is wrong with housing and the housing market in the U.S., but there is obviously a lot wrong and I would like to smarten up on this some day. But it pretty much seems to come down to needing more supply of housing whose market value matches the economic means of the majority of households, whereas there is a mismatch currently. Zoning is part of the problem. High rise living and public transportation could solve the problem if we wanted it to, but we just don’t seem to want that. Row houses and town houses with small porches, backyards, roof decks, and corner stores are a compromise in my view – these offer people more privacy and private outdoor space while allowing a pretty dense urban fabric to develop. But you just can’t mix this with universal private car ownership people, because geometry. Maybe autonomous vehicles will be the killer app that could eventually break this logjam, because they can move around in a more space-efficient way and go store themselves in out of the way places when they are not in use, which is most of them most of the time.
  • The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Save Our Time and Our Planet and Shrink The City: The 15-Minute Urban Experiment and the Cities of the Future. Relevant to the above. Basically a new(ish) way of explaining some of the concepts I mention above. I don’t think these ideas have penetrated the endlessly ignorant public discourse on “traffic” and “parking” just yet. Or is the problem just that geometry is not taught in a way that people relate to the actual physical universe?
  • On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America by Abrahm Lustgarten. Right, so where are we supposed to live again? Of course, I want to sell my coastal property just before the real estate market wakes up to the fact that it is doomed – when is this? It also occurs to me that we better consider “the Americas” here and not just “the United States of”.
  • Radical Adaptation: Transforming Cities for a Climate Changed World by Brian Stone, Jr. Sounds a bit more technical than the one above. Please, let’s not turn everywhere into Singapore, which is essentially a network of air conditioned malls, offices and high rise housing connected by subway tubes. But you could pretty much build Singapore on Mars, or wherever, as long as you have some plan to get food and water to the people there (but this might be tricky in a “climate changed world”, eh?)
  • The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play by Frank Andre Guridy. The only reason I would read this one is that Philadelphia has been embroiled in a debate about whether to build a downtown basketball and hockey arena, and I would like to be a bit more informed on the issue. I walked by the one in Washington, D.C. the other week and it seemed to fit into the city fabric okay to me. Then again, what New York and Washington do well, Philadelphia has a tendency to do in a half-assed amateurish less good way about a decade later. And when we fail to implement proven solutions competently, we conclude that the solutions themselves were unworkable from the start.
  • Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been by Jake Berman. Speaking of Philadelphia, we have such a phantom system, including some stations that were built in anticipation of train lines that never actually got built. Thinking big is also no longer a thing, which is sad.
  • Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives by Jarrett Walker. This is an update to an earlier book I haven’t read but would like to. Is this the book that all high school students or at least all undergraduate engineering and architecture students should read to have some basic literacy about transportation? Otherwise our mistaken ideas about how a functional transportation system could actually work will allow the auto-oil-highway-suburban sprawl propaganda machine uncontested dominance over our society and our land forever.
  • Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System by Wes Marshall. Slightly unfair to blame the engineering profession alone for the evil auto-oil-highway-suburban sprawl monster I mention above, but some fair points here nonetheless. If you read the American Society of Civil Engineers code of ethics for example, you might think we would stand up to some of this rather than be the nails the monster uses to hammer the lid on our society. But we would have to wake up to the fact that the propaganda exists and is controlling our minds first, then pull the tubes out of our asses and get flushed out of the matrix before we could go to work.

If I sound a little bit salty when I think about transportation design, (lack of) maintenance and enforcement, and reckless driving and lack of respect for human life up and down our society, yeah I’m a bit salty!

the PNC Christmas Price Index

For those who have never had an account, PNC is (or was once) the Pittsburgh National Corporation, and they are a regional bank. Anyway, they produce an annual whimsical 12 Days of Christmas price index. Ornamental/pet birds haven’t changed much in price since last year – no change for the partridge, the turtle doves, the calling birds, or the swans, and the price of french hens has only slightly outpaced inflation at 5%. Food has increased if pear trees and geese are good indicators (+15-16%). Maids a-milking are assumed to earn the federal minimum wage and have therefore not received a raise since 2009. Professional artistic performers have done pretty well, with 7-16% raises, although musicians seem to be doing better than dancers according to this index. As a family man financing a viewing of the Nutcracker next week, I can vouch for the fact that live entertainment is quite expensive. Not that music and art are not valuable – hopefully after the singularity we will spread our newfound wealth around so that all can enjoy in our newfound leisure time. Until then we will have to continue relying on some combination of government subsidies and the largesse of the wealthy, who seem willing to finance the arts because (a) this is tax exempt and (b) it benefits primarily other wealthy people.

Finally, PNC does remind us that we would have to actually buy 12 partridges in 12 pear trees 22 turtle doves, etc. if the repetition in the song is taken literally. So it would get quite pricey indeed.

Happy Holidays everyone!

The Gospel, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy?

An article in “+972 Magazine” makes some very attention getting claims about the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. On the one hand, it is based on anonymous sources, and if any of it is true it is surprising to me it has not turned up in more well known media outlets. On the other hand, it really makes a lot of logical sense to me in that it seems 100% consistent with facts on the ground. So I am summarizing it here as it is summarized in the magazine, and I encourage you to consider it seriously but with a healthy dose of skepticism.

First, they describe an Israeli program to identify likely Hamas associates based on statistics. People are assigned a score from 0 to 100, based on their likelihood of being associated with Hamas. The statistics are trained on cases known for sure to be associated with Hamas.

The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently. 

“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.”

Since the October 7, 2023 attack, this story goes (I am going to stop saying this from here – I am relaying the story as this source explains it), a few things have changed. One is the increasing automation of the process, producing large numbers of potential targets. Second is the lowering of the threshold from the highest scoring targets to lower scoring ones.

He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”

One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” he said.

The system is believed to be about 90% accurate, meaning 10% of the targets identified do not have links to Hamas, and Israeli leadership judged this to be acceptable collateral damage. But whatever you think of the morality of that judgment, it was the tip of a very large and very cold iceberg. Because the leadership also decided that to take these people out, it was acceptable to take out their extended families by leveling their homes in the middle of the night. The higher value the target, the greater number of innocent civilians the leadership judged to be acceptable to kill.

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

So it kind of makes a very cold, calculated kind of logical sense from a certain point of view – the leadership believes it is under an existential threat, and they judge that killing 15-100 people for every combatant (which they are about 90% sure of) is acceptable to remove the threat.

I have to say this high a ratio does not seem morally acceptable to me. You can say “what about” the Allied bombings of German and Japanese cities in World War II, the score counting of “military aged males” in Vietnam, and whatever went on in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S.-enabled Saudi bombing of Yemen, etc. And you would be right – all of these are very likely immoral, in my view. Millions of wrongs don’t make a right.

A lot is made of the AI angle here, and that makes it a bit more chilling to me. Basically, technologies developed for marketing (by U.S. firms in many cases) are being applied to evil causes the Nazis, Stasi, the KGB or the Spanish Inquisition could only have dreamed of. I think the Israeli leadership believes what it is doing is morally justified, even if most reasonable people in the world might disagree. It’s horrible to imagine what a truly horrible, ill-intentioned regime might do with these technologies.

the other 2024 Nobel prizes

I already talked about the Nobel prize in economics. You can read about the others here.

  • physics: “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”
  • chemistry: “computational protein design” and “protein structure prediction”
  • physiology or medicine: “the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation”
  • literature: poetry – yay humanities
  • peace: “efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”

So AI and AI-assisted biotechnology basically. And I hope the taboo against nuclear weapons ever being used is as strong as this suggests it is.

the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics

I learned about the 2024 Nobel in economics from this Planet Money podcast. Basically, the award is for work illustrating how economic growth, and hence economic inequality, can be explained by “institutions”. And specifically “inclusive institutions”. And inclusive institutions seems to come down to what is called (in academic circles and outside the U.S. political context) “liberalism”. Democracy, the rule of law, economic freedom, competitive and well-functioning markets including labor markets, free and fair trade. It all kind of makes sense, just as the world seems headed in other directions. The silver lining, I suppose, is that no matter what hand your country is dealt in terms of geography or natural resources, you can theoretically build good institutions and succeed over time.