I knew Japan was considered a nuclear capable state, meaning they have the technology, raw materials, and expertise to produce nuclear weapons if they so choose. I recently heard this claim about Taiwan, which was news to me. Now I have heard it about South Korea.
The risk of nuclear war is getting unacceptable. The U.S., Russia, and China could be leading on this issue, but are instead fanning the flames.
The Philadelphia-area Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) is experimenting with micro-transit. I have heard that the idea of micro-transit, including semi-fixed but flexible bus routes people can schedule with apps, has not worked all that well in trials elsewhere. And SEPTA has a history and tendency of underwhelming. Nonetheless, I think that if the U.S. remains committed to its low-density sprawl land use preferences, traditional fixed bus and rail routes are just not going to work. Something more flexible is needed, and if public agencies can find ways to do it more efficiently or cost-effectively than the private sector then it’s worth a try. If we are tempted to say it is unfair for a subsidized government agency to compete with the private sector in this area, we should remember the enormous public funding that has gone into building and maintaining our enormous public road network over the past 70 or so years at the expense of nearly all other types of public infrastructure.
I’m still skeptical of you though SEPTA. You have never exceeded my low and steadily declining expectations. Prove me wrong.
His new book is called End Times but it does not appear to be about the apocalypse, but about a cyclical view of political history with some evidence to back it up.
When a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to turn in an ominous direction in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.
Peter Turchin
I haven’t read the book, but I have officially added it to my queue of too-many-books-to-read-before-I die. (I’m not terminally ill that I know of, it’s just a long and growing list.) The queue is periodically randomized, so just because it already has too many books to read before I die does not mean I will never read this particular book.
Anyway, one disturbing implication just from the brief description above is that we may not be able to educate our society out of economic inequality. That seems to go against the data which clearly show that people with more education earn more than people with less education. So it’s a case where a dynamic model leads to a different, counterintuitive conclusion compared to a linear extrapolation of data from the recent past.
Axios has some interesting stats:
So, I suppose the U.S. is still a majority Christian nation, and certainly a majority religious nation, but the viewpoints of nearly a third of us are severely underrepresented by our elected leaders.
This survey did not address how many of our elected leaders who claim to be religious humans are actually lizards who drink the blood of human babies in the basements of pizza parlors.
Brookings has a report on crime in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Seattle. Homicides are up sharply in all these cities, but the overall crime picture is more nuanced. The actual stats show that while homicide is way up, other violent crimes are up only slightly. Central business districts are generally pretty safe, with violent crime and property crime mostly happening in residential neighborhoods. Nonetheless, office workers have an impression that central business districts are less safe than before the pandemic. I share that perception. This article points out that my perception may have more to do with the visible disorder of homelessness, drug use, and just general filth on the streets and on public transit. I witness all of this daily in Philadelphia. At the same time I know that these things are for the most part not a physical threat to my person. And I always try to remind myself that the person annoying me by experiencing homelessness or drug addiction on the streets of my city is having a much worse day than I am. Brookings has a solution salad at the end of their article – politicians, please do these things.
A new disease is threatening beech trees (Philadelphia Inquirer, paywalled) in the U.S. We don’t want to lose our beeches like we did our chestnuts. Beeches have some similar features in that they make up a significant amount of our eastern forest canopy (like chestnuts used to), produce fatty nuts that feed birds and other species, and their leaves serve as host plants for insects that feed birds and other species. It is not clear yet what is causing this disease, but hopefully we can learn from the cautionary tale of the chestnut and try to get out in front of it.
Anti-aging pills will hit the market in about five years, according to “an expert” named Andrew Steele. Metformin is one being mentioned. Another is a “combination of datasinib, used for chemotherapy, and quercetin, a molecule found in fruits and vegetables.” A Jeff Bezos company is working on “cell therapies that can halt and eventually reverse the process of aging.”
For my body and brain, which are both in their mid- to late-40s, the aging train seems to have left the station unfortunately. Maybe some of these things could add a few quality years for my generation, and maybe a lot more for our children and grandchildren.
The Pew Charitable Trusts does an annual report called The State of Philadelphia which is actually a nice piece of data journalism. Here are a handful of things that caught my attention.
Here are some suicide stats from Our World in Data. It would be nice if they would add some more groupings like OECD, but I have chosen a somewhat arbitrary sample of peer countries. It surprised me that even though we are hearing about “deaths of despair”, the U.S. is not doing terribly on this metric compared to peers. We are doing a bit worse than our close cultural cousins Canada and Australia. The UK does surprisingly well on this metric, even a bit better than Germany and Denmark. Latin America (I picked Mexico because they’re our neighbor and Brazil because they’re big) doesn’t seem to have a big issue with suicide. The two Asian countries I picked do seem to have an issue – Japan has a higher suicide rate than all the European countries I picked. Then there is a big jump to the two worst countries (that I picked arbitrarily), South Korea and Russia. Russia is the worst, but has brought its rate down a lot if you buy into this data analysis.
We are more violent by an order of magnitude than other developed countries, and while the pre-pandemic trend was downward it has turned up sharply again.
