food shortages and system thinking

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Some are still predicting dramatic food shortages on the horizon due to the U.S. war of aggression on Iran. I don’t doubt that this is possible. When headlines were suggesting this was imminent shortly after the war started in the spring (of 2026, in case you are reading this in the far future), I was asking myself if it made sense that fertilizer and pesticides coming out of the Middle East at that point would be used for planting this year. (Environmental advisability of a population and food system that depend on fossil fuels would be topics for another day.) And from further analysis, it sounds like I was right and there are significant lags built in. Then again, I should remember that the entire world does not experience the same four seasons that I do here in temperate eastern North America, and growing seasons in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere will be on a different schedule than here, where the next big planting cycle will be spring 2027.

I am a huge proponent of system thinking. However, I am always a little skeptical of authors who talk about system thinking as if only they out of all people in the world have heard of it. I get a whiff of narcissism when I hear that. I tend to think there are plenty of intelligent people and organizations out there who are capable of system thinking, and the cynical/amoral among them would be exploiting their knowledge in financial markets if nothing else. I think the same thing when people claim that only they can spot a financial bubble. There absolutely is something going on in our world where our top political decision makers are relying on short-term linear extrapolation of facts and logic at best, and irrational disregard for facts and logic at worst. I see a severe lack of moral thinking among our political leadership, although that may be nothing new in human history. It would be great to see some form of politics able to select the intelligent, moral system thinkers to lead us. Somehow the opposite seems to be happening, where political systems are not selecting leaders of even above average rationality or moral fiber. This is a severe issue and I at least have the sense that it is getting worse. Nonetheless, I don’t see financial markets going crazy in response to the obviously crazy geopolitical events going on, and this gives me some small comfort.

Invading a sovereign country is still illegal

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I’ve been listening to some contrarian voices like John Mearsheimer, Michael Hudson, and Max Blumenthal on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I acknowledge the idea that aggressive NATO expansion and possible/probable CIA meddling in the 2014 Ukraine election were probably seen by Russian leadership as threatening. I respect Mearsheimer in particular, but I still strongly disagree with the idea that any of this could possibly justify the invasion of a sovereign country. Dirty spy games and attempts to influence elections with propaganda and funding of one group or another are things that all powerful nations have been doing for a long time. Russia and the US are some of the worst. It would be best for all nations of the world if everyone agreed to stop doing these things. But they are not acts of war. Invading a sovereign nation is still the unforgivable sin under the UN Charter. Ukraine’s borders were not in dispute by anybody except their one powerful neighbor, and that is not how it works. All UN members are supposed to band together against the perpetrator, and the Security Council is supposed to be the enforcer. It was just as wrong when the US invaded Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Syria, and Iran. It is wrong when Israel invades its soverign neighbors. It was wrong when China…wait, I can’t think of a case where they unambiguously invaded a sovereign neighbor.

It’s pretty clear to me that the Ukraine war is going to end with Russia occupying the three mostly ethnic-Russian provinces and Crimea for the long term. Let’s just get that done, fix the lines, and ideally get everybody to calm down and recommit to the core principles of the UN Charter. This seems almost impossible at the moment, but leadership transitions will happen around the world and maybe that will provide some openings to a change of course.

Spanish cities are great!

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Spanish cities are great. That’s it, the entire thesis of this article. I haven’t been there. My favorite cities that I have been to are in the Netherlands. But the article says Spanish cities are fantastic across housing, transportation, walkability, public and open space, clear urban/rural boundaries, and affordability, although the latter is beginning to fray. Sign me up, I’m ready to go!

One note on transportation – I tend to think of a tradeoff between excellent (or at least abundant) roads and high car ownership on the one hand, and excellent public transportation and active transportation infrastructure on the other hand. But the article says Spain manages to combine all these things – people have cars and excellent roads to drive them on, but they don’t use them all that much because public transportation is so good. Spanish cities have a higher road density than Los Angeles, which sounds like a bad thing, but it is indicative of high density urban living and means that open space is preserved elsewhere. They don’t talk about parking, but I would be interested to know, if people have cars but don’t use them daily for work/school/shopping, how much land area is covered by surface parking compared to a city like Los Angeles. I’m guessing much less, and if I am right that might be one key to how their cities can be dense without feeling crowded.

Sadly, developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which still have the opportunity to shape major new urban areas, are mostly not learning from this example.

prediction markets

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A site called Contrary Research has a deep dive on prediction markets. They are similar to sports betting and options trading mathematically, but different in terms of legal and regulatory treatment (which is constantly litigated and evolving). There are concerns about insider trading. Despite all this, I like them just because they give us some more data points to look at. On political events, sometimes they echo polls and sometimes they tell a different story. On geopolitical events, they provide a somewhat objective, independent data point that might help us spot bullshit in the narratives we are being offered by the media.

Anyway, Polymarket and Kalshi are the big ones. There are others, and there is a blurring of the lines between sports books and prediction markets, which both starting to overlap each other. I was curious if there was an aggregation site for multiple prediction markets, and a popular one is Election Betting Odds. They are pretty true to their name and don’t cover everything on the prediction markets. At the moment, they show J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio leading Gavin Newsom for U.S. President in 2028. They show Democrats with an 80% chance of taking the House in November but the Republicans with a 56% change of continuing their majority in the Senate. Now, prediction markets are not always even consistent internally. If you go to Polymarket itself, they match that 56% chance of Republicans controlling the Senate, but another contract shows a 44% chance of a Democratic sweep of both levels of Congress (and a 41% chance of a Democratic House, Republican Senate. I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the probabilities here – are these things in fact inconsistent?)

Here is CBS News telling me “Senior defense officials looking at Cuba military options“. Well, today Polymarket thinks there is a 14% chance that the U.S. will invade Cuba in 2026 and a 31% chance of U.S. military action against Cuba by December 31, 2026. Well, I guess military action could fall short of an invasion so these two markets are not necessarily inconsistent.

We want walkable neighborhoods…with big houses, big backyards, driveways, garages, and free parking

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Survey after survey shows a shift in favor of Americans saying they want to live in walkable communities.

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of respondents said they would pay more to live within walking distance of parks, shops, and restaurants, according to the latest Community and Transportation Preference Survey from the National Association of Realtors®—shared first with Realtor.com®.

But intelligent people who probably did just fine in geometry in high school do not connect what they learned to the two-dimensional reality of their neighborhoods.

But enthusiasm drops when walkability becomes a question of what gets built nearby. While 63% say small-lot single-family homes would be a good idea in their community, support falls to 51% for townhomes, duplexes, and other attached housing, 44% for rental apartments, and 40% for condos.

When you set up the geometry that includes those large lots and lots of car storage storage space both at peoples’ homes and nearby shopping centers, the car infrastructure ends up taking up a lot more space than the actual houses, yards, and stores. Things get more spread out and quickly become unwalkable.

There are some potential solutions I can think of. Mixed use (commercial and residential together) is the obvious one. But people have at least an impression that this means more crime and noise. Setting up cities in a more linear way is a possibility – a long, narrow commercial main street with a long, narrow strip of housing behind it including single family homes and lots if that is what people want. Safe, protected infrastructure for bikes, scooters, golf carts, and whatever light low-momentum vehicles we come up with next – these let you cover those distances that take too long or are too boring to walk. Maybe they need to be covered in some climates. But most importantly, there has to be a safe, protected middle ground for light, practical transportation modes that fall in between walking and heavy highway vehicles. And the resistance to this basic concept is just enormous, for some reason.

Traditional public transportation definitely should play a role, particularly along that linear main street. But when things are more decentralized and randomly laid out, vehicular transportation may need to be more on-demand, whether public or private, human driven or autonomous, and I think we should just experiment with all combinations of these until we figure out what works for a particular community. If we can decouple the need to get around in vehicles from the need to store all those vehicles in a stationary manner steps away from our homes and businesses, that can free up a lot of space.

I can picture all this in my head just fine, and then the painful process of change on the ground is measured in decades if not generations, so now at age 50 I wonder if I will see a freaking safe protected bike lane in my neighborhood during my natural lifetime (and my neighborhood is one of the most walkable neighborhoods in one of the most walkable cities in the USA!).

July 2026 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The idea of a bursting AI investment bubble is pretty scary, especially to those of us approaching retirement. The recent boom in private capital spending seems to be the major thing propping up the US economy. The short-term stimulus effect is fairly obvious, but the question is whether the longer-term productivity effects the markets seem to be expecting are going to show up before the markets lose patience.

Most hopeful story: A carbon price is still a very good idea, even if propaganda has pushed this idea out of the headlines we see on a daily basis. About 30% of the world’s carbon emissions have a price on them, which is more than I would have thought. Several comprehensive academic analyses suggest the carbon price should be in the range of $100-165 per metric ton. Only a few countries are at this level, but the fact that many countries actually have the legal and administrative mechanism for a carbon price in place seems hopeful to me. It proves that when we are being led to believe these policies are politically impossible in the United States, this is in fact just effective propaganda. Political winds can and do shift, particularly when a crisis becomes obvious (I am not hoping for one), and the rational policy options are waiting in the wings.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I encountered a proposal called “targeted sufficiency“: “a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint, a large shift in consumption from material to immaterial sectors (education/health), and a substantial change in food habits, allowing for a strict deforestation ban and a gradual return of global forest cover to the 1900 level…global convergence of all countries to 60k Euros 2025 PPP in per capita GDP by 2100”.

more on Chinese EVs

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Here’s another article (by an American who toured Chinese factories) on how great Chinese electric vehicles are, and how far behind American industry seems to be. So are we going to just keep protecting and bailing out our failing auto industry, while using propaganda to try to keep the public from realizing what we are missing out on? There are, apparently, some possibly legitimate concerns about imported vehicles as a way to hijack the internet somehow (?).

Given the affordability and quality of Chinese EVs like those from Xiaomi, these cars could go over well in the U.S. Perhaps too well, undercutting Western automakers who fear China’s advantages will put them out of business.

But the U.S. government is concerned about the perceived security risks of internet-connected vehicles — that they could be used as surveillance tools given all the data they collect or even be remotely controlled by the Chinese government through back door software access. There were similar Chinese fears about Teslas until it reached an agreement in 2024 to use Baidu’s mapping platform.

The Biden administration’s “connected vehicle rule”, issued in January 2025, effectively banned Chinese vehicles from American roads, with prohibitions on software starting in 2027 and hardware kicking in 2030.

As a start, maybe we could provide public benefits to our citizens to take that burden off our corporations trying to compete with foreign counterparts that provide those modern benefits? Beyond that, I wonder how we can be so far behind on industrial robots when we are supposedly so high tech?

The obvious superiority of electric vehicles is a dam that eventually has to break in the minds of the U.S. public.

homicide clearance rates in Philadelphia

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Homicide clearance rates in Philadelphia are way up in 2026. I learned from this article that clearance rate is basically the number of arrest warrants issued on open homicide cases divided by the number of homicides during a calendar year. Some homicides get solved in later years, so it’s not a perfect measure of cases solved but it’s a reasonable proxy. The rate in 2025 was 71% compared to numbers that often hovered in the 40s or 50s over the past decade or so. This is partly due to homicide rates falling so that a fixed number of police can devote more time to each case, and partly due to surveillance technology. It supports the idea, which I first thought seriously about after reading the book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, that most communities support police if they feel like they are being policed fairly and if they feel that crimes have a good chance of being solved. And it’s not discussed in this article, but I suspect that when people feel like they can call the authorities in and have a good chance of justice being served, they are less likely to take matters into their own hands. And over time, a culture of escalating revenge and retaliation might slowly change.

Sebastian Mallaby

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Sebastian Mallaby is a Washington Post columnist, among other things. I found this too-long-didn’t listen podcast had some interesting things (I skimmed the transcript – thank you to all podcasters who choose to post a transcript!). Here’s just one quote, but there is a lot in the article.

So the case for believing that getting first to artificial general intelligence or AGI is the key metric is that once you get there, you have such a powerful model that nobody will ever catch you up. And there’s this notion, the singularity idea, that when you get to a position where the model is strong enough to write all of the code for the next model and then that next model will create the one after that, the power of the frontier goes vertical and at that point it’s game over. And this is a view held, I think, particularly strongly at Anthropic.

And that’s an argument. There’s another argument, though, which is, the frictions associated with getting the model into deployment, whether that’s in a military setting, in a government setting, in a corporate setting, are going to be significant. And so just having the best possible frontier model in your server inside a frontier lab isn’t the whole enchilada.

I’ve had this same thought – that some industries (like tech companies with intangible products and very short product cycles) will adopt AI very quickly and it will be very disruptive, while in others (particularly government) friction will be enormous. I suspect traditional professions like engineering and medicine will be somewhere in between.

He also talks about government and international regulation of AI. His point is that we have structures, like the Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Nonproliferation Treaty to emulate. It’s complex but it has been done and can be done. It requires some moral leadership and political will, which seem to be in short supply in today’s world at the moment.