These things are basically just helicopters. What makes them new and different is (1) they are electric, (2) at least some are intended to be autonomous (no pilot), and (3) at least some models (like the “Wisk” from Boeing) are planned for release in the next few years.
Yes, they will crash at some point and a few people will die and it will be a huge deal, and thousands of children will probably be killed on that same day by cars, trucks, and motorcycles, and it will barely be mentioned.
This article in technologynetworks.com (which is new to me) says a universal flu vaccine could be here within five years.
Researchers reported that six of 11 nonhuman primates inoculated against the virus that circulated a century ago — the 1918 flu — survived exposure to one of the deadliest viruses in the world today, H5N1. In contrast, a control group of six unvaccinated nonhuman primates exposed to the H5N1 virus succumbed to the disease.
Sacha said he believes the platform “absolutely” could be useful against other mutating viruses, including SARS-CoV-2…
This approach harnesses a vaccine platform previously developed by scientists at OHSU to fight HIV and tuberculosis, and, in fact, is already being used in a clinical trial against HIV.
I feel sorry for the 11 monkeys (chimps?) who gave their lives for this research. But getting rid of flu, Covid, HIV and tuberculosis certainly sounds pretty good. I’m a little confused about why H5N1 is so lethal in these monkeys – is this the same virus causing mild symptoms and no deaths (so far) in cows and a few humans?
I’ve taken Amtrak from New York to Boston. It takes about four hours, and is more or less the best the United States has to offer when it comes to passenger rail connecting major population centers. I live in Philadelphia, which along with New York and Boston, built some of the world’s first subway systems very early in the 20th century (trivia answer: even earlier subways were London, which people might guess, and Budapest, which they might not.) Before World War II, Philadelphia had an ambitious plan on paper to build out its subway system. It never happened – today, we have two dirty, old, and unreliable subway lines connecting a fraction of our city, and we are lucky to have what we have compared to most U.S. cities. I also lived in Singapore from 2010-2013. Singapore is not a utopia in every way, despite what their highly effective government propaganda might suggest, but in terms of public infrastructure and particularly transportation infrastructure, it was astonishing at the time. Well, no longer. After visiting Singapore this week for the first time since I left in 2013, it has gone from astonishing to science fiction. They have nearly doubled the size of their system in the time since I left. But what gave me this sense of science fiction is simply a decade of progress in another part of the world, while the United States has been more or less standing still. We are simply not an advanced country in comparison, and the gap is growing.
What do I think Singapore’s secret is? Not some secret high-tech technology. They nurture domestic industry to some extent, while purposely exposing them to competition from foreign competitors. When I was here as an engineering consultant a decade ago, the subway lines under construction were being managed by a German firm and a South Korean firm, which were in turn managed by the state transit agency, the Land Transportation Authority. The other secret is low-cost labor from developing countries. The Singapore-born population is shrinking, so they focus on educating their population for high value-added careers and allow in motivated and willing migrant workers to do the lower-tech stuff. This entails long hours of hard work in the tropical sun, but in Singapore at least labor and environmental standards are pretty reasonable (you can compare their construction site accident data to ours for example and it is very favorable to them, unless you believe there is some cover up. Middle Eastern countries may be a different story however.)
So the moral of the story here is that coddling inefficient domestic U.S. firms and high-cost U.S. labor to build our infrastructure is going to limit what we can accomplish. The winners will be some subset of domestic firms and workers, while the losers are everyone and the entire economy that would benefit from frictionless infrastructure. In a rational world, we might let in efficient foreign firms and low-cost foreign workers, boost our economy, institute a value-added tax, and use the proceeds to education our next generation and anyone in this generation left behind because we brought in the foreign workers. But our politics are clearly not headed in this direction.
Interestingly, the American Society of Civil Engineers has a new video called “Cities of the Future”, which largely showcases Singapore.
Nate Silver has his own blog out now, the Silver Bulletin (I assume he checked to make sure this is not already an AARP newsletter). Polling averages are free to look at, but you have to pay if you want to see his election prediction model. Just looking at Pennsylvania, he has Trump at +3.1% today (I’m writing on Saturday, July 13, 2024), while Nate Silver left-behind 538/ABC has us at Trump +2.9%. The Real Clear Politics straight-up average is Trump +5.3%. So this illustrates some uncertainty but it is clear to me at least that Biden is toast. Or to quote the headline in the Telegraph, “Biden looks finished – there’s surely no coming back from this…he just made America look like an international joke”.
He is obviously having trouble accessing words on command. I just don’t believe though that he is so far gone he can’t make the political calculation above. Or even if he can’t certainly the people around him can. We can dare to hope that the responsible adults are taking time to come up with a face-saving exit plan (“on the advice of my doctors…”) and to have a plan B in place before they announce said exit plan.
According to this article in Vox, The United Nations has a goal of achieving universal health coverage in all countries by 2030. I doubt they were really thinking of the United States when they came up with that, but here we are.
I tend to blame the the situation on lobbying by the insurance industry, because they see public health insurance as an existential threat, and in this country of legalized corruption, big business gets to write our laws in its favor. I knew the American Medical Association, the special interest lobby for doctors, played a role, but I didn’t realize it was as soaked in disinformation and propaganda as this article makes it sound.
The AMA-WB campaign had two key components. First, they used mass advertising to associate NHI with socialism, while the private (or voluntary) insurance option was described as the “American Way”. These advertising efforts of the AMA were complemented by tie-in advertising from other industries fearing a return to war-time price controls. In addition, the strategy called on AMA doctors to discuss private health insurance with their patients and to distribute pamphlets echoing the individualistic advertising message (see Figure 1). Through local and state medical organizations, physicians looking to defray medical costs had organised their own insurance product, which came to be known as Blue Shield, and they were eager for enrolees. All told, approximately $250 million (in current terms) was spent to sway voters, an unprecedented amount for the time. Doctors were also instructed to use their prestige to urge local civic organisations to pass resolutions against national health insurance.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/why-us-doesnt-have-national-health-insurance-political-role-ama
“WB” is a public relations, aka propaganda firm.
I still like to think that individually, most doctors chose the field because they care about human beings. But somehow, as an organized group, they can add up to something evil. And before I cast the first stone, yes I am also thinking about my own profession of engineering (what could be more wholesome than public infrastructure and public health – yes, water treatment probably saves more lives than all the world’s medicine, but that’s a digression) and our unholy alliance with the highway/auto/sprawl industry.
This article also takes aim at unions. By its telling, they wanted to saddle the private sector with the cost of the health care system so they had something to negotiate on behalf of their members (and therefore get people to want to be members). This is also twisted and evil.
What puzzles me a bit is that if big business is really so powerful, why don’t they want to be freed from the burden of providing health insurance? It would seem only to benefit a fairly narrow slice of the finance industry. But it appears that this slice, along with the organized lobbies of doctors and unions, has been powerful enough to keep the American public from having a real health care system for over half a century now.
I can’t tell if this post is serious or not, and this is the mark of bad satire.
Despite an ambitious and widely praised first term in office, he is currently trailing in polls to a man who incited an insurrection and was recently convicted on 34 felony counts. Something needs to change, and much to the chagrin of West Wing fanatics in the beltway, it won’t be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee. Modern technology offers a clear solution. AI can be used to polish how the president comes across, allowing voters to focus on his substance. How many times have we heard voters and pundits alike gripe that “Biden would be the perfect candidate if he were just 10 years younger?” With modern technology, this exact deliverable is possible.
huffpost.com
I sincerely hope this is intended as irony. I have thought however about an AI-based experiment in direct democracy. In this concept, an AI agent would represent me, the individual citizen. It could spend time patiently interviewing me about my views and opinions, and then it could go to Congress and negotiate and vote on legislation with the AI agents of the 328 million other Americans. If I really have time, I could take over control of the agent at any time I want, then hand the keys back over to it any time I want.
A watered down version of this could be AI constantly talking to an elected representatives constituents about their views on various issues and the content of proposed legislation, patiently explaining to the elected representative how his or her actual constituents would like him or her to vote (the pronoun thing is exhausting, and yes I know I have only scratched the surface of potential pronouns), and patiently explaining to the constituents how it all turned out. Imagine if a politician made it a campaign pledge to always vote according to the wishes of a majority of their constituents (as interpreted through the AI agents) no matter what.
I thought of this a long time ago, with the idea that it could be done through polls or through an app, but the natural language AIs could make this much more practical and achievable by just chatting with humans for a few minutes each day and providing constant feedback.
Now, of course the problem with direct democracy is always that 51% of the people might want to exterminate or enslave the other 49%, which is one way to achieve consensus but not what we are looking for. So you obviously have to couple this with protections for the rights of minorities and human rights in general.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.
Most hopeful story: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.
This article suggests we might be able to terraform Mars with some very tough moss.
The scientists subjected whole S. caninervis plants to conditions typically found on Mars: high doses of gamma radiation, low oxygen, extreme cold and drought. They report that the plants could withstand combinations of these conditions, even losing over 98% of their water content and still bouncing back within seconds —”drying without dying” is the term that was used. Perhaps even more astounding is the plant’s ability to recover and grow new branches after being stored in a freezer at −80 degrees Celsius (-112 degrees Fahrenheit) for five years or in liquid nitrogen (-195.8 degrees C; -320.44 degrees F) for one month.
Space.com
Previously, my money was on fungi, but some combination of moss and tardigrades might be able to evolve into intelligent life in a few billion years. Now that it looks like humanity is probably going to destroy itself on Earth long before it develops viable space colonies, it’s more important than ever that we broadcast our devil spawn to other planetary bodies as soon as possible. If life on Earth more generally survives, whatever the cockroaches evolve into will be able to talk to whatever the moss evolves into in a few billion years, and there will still be hope for peace in the solar system for a few billion years before the sun burns out.
This is one of those posts where I say I am not going to comment on fast-moving current events, and then I do anyway. I’m writing this the morning of Saturday, July 6, 2024, and anything can happen before this gets posted and certainly between now and when you are reading it, whoever you are.
Here are two interviews with Biden, one from September 2023 and one from last night. The difference is pretty clear to me. It’s clear that he is having a lot of trouble accessing words and names on demand. That in itself does not indicate that a person is not able to think clearly. Surely, if he had had a stroke his doctors, family and political team would not be trying to cover that up? (But see Woodrow Wilson where this exact thing happened – with his wife and doctors concealing the extent of it not just from the public but from Wilson himself. And some say losing his leadership was decisive in the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles, the failure of the League of Nations, both of which led to World War II being more likely.) Not being a particularly articulate person, I have had this problem myself in many stressful situations, such as job interviews and first dates, even in my 20s. But I am not a professional politician. Being articulate and appearing to be sharp thinking on their feet is their stock in trade, and as they say, “perception is reality” in politics.
In terms of the hard nosed probability of a Democrat winning this election in November 2024, a few days ago I thought the risk of someone other than Biden was greater than the risk of Biden losing. If Biden could return even to the form we see below from September 2023, I think the “bad night” at the debate would blow over and the election would be at least a tossup. I am coming around to the idea though that the situation is deteriorating and will continue to deteriorate over the next four months. Biden seems to be having more trouble over time and the spotlight is going to be on him every second. So I think the situation is irretrievable. Taking a sort of reverse inspiration from Woodrow Wilson, his doctors can “discover” some condition that requires his immediate retirement, and he can then announce that he is retiring with some relative saving of face. Maybe we’ll get that “contested convention” we are always hearing about. Personally I like Kamala Harris okay, and maybe she would inspire enough turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee to eke out a victory. Or maybe a percentage point or two of suburban swing voters won’t bother to turn out for her because they just “don’t like her”, as happened to Hillary. Or maybe Trump will suffer an honest-to-god stroke in the next four months. The country has had a run of bad luck and we are due.
Well, I was all set to tell you that the polls moved decisively toward Biden in June, and that would have been true with just a few days to go. But it seems the debate on June 27 really did cause a sharp swing toward Trump. I don’t like it, but these are the facts of the case. We will see if the effect is persistent or if things slowly revert to trend. Either way, the polls closing in the last few days of June may not fully indicate the state of the damage, so it may get worse before it gets better for Biden, if it does in fact ever get better.
| STATE | 2020 RESULT | Most Recent 538 Poll Average (as of 7/1/24) |
| Arizona | Biden +0.4% | Trump +4.8% (June 1: Trump +4.7) |
| Georgia | Biden +0.3% | Trump +6.3% (June 1: Trump +5.5) |
| Wisconsin | Biden +0.6% | Trump +0.8% (June 1: Trump +1.4%) |
| North Carolina | Trump +1.3% | Trump +7.3% (June 1: Trump +6.2%) |
| Pennsylvania | Biden +1.2% | Trump +2.0% (June 1: Trump +2.0%) |
| Michigan | Biden +2.8% | Trump +1.8% (June 1: Trump +0.6%) |
| Nevada | Biden +2.4% | Trump +3.8% (June 1: Trump +5.9%) |
In June, 1/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Biden – Nevada.
In June, 1/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Biden – Wisconsin.
In June, 1/7 swing states had no change – Pennsylvania.
In June, 2/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Trump – Arizona, Georgia.
In June, 2/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Trump – North Carolina and Michigan.
So the trend is all over the place, with big swings toward Trump coming right at the end of the month. Trump obviously has all the swing states at the moment and is headed for an electoral college landslide if current trends hold.
Enough has been written about the debate. I’ll just link to this Politico article that points out that if you were just reading the transcript, a lot of what he said was very reasonable and even astute. That was my impression when listening to the actual debate. But I can’t excuse any politician for failing to be prepared and put on a decent rhetorical performance – that is what they do, and there 10,000 politicians who could have done it better than Biden did on Thursday night. So either he was inexplicably, inexcusably poorly prepared, or he really is faltering physically and mentally, with dire consequences for our nation’s future.