Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

who’s going to Mars?

Leave a reply

Here’s a rundown from The Week:

  • The U.S., China, and UAE are all sending unmanned missions to Mars at the moment.
  • It takes about 7-10 months to get there.
  • There is water on the surface of Mars right now, in the form of polar ice caps. I guess I sort of knew that, but not really. I thought there was evidence that there used to be water (there is, and it’s indisputable) and/or that there might be water underground.
  • “NASA’s timeline calls for a crewed mission to the moon by 2024, a lunar base by 2028, and flights from the moon base to Mars sometime in the 2030s.”
  • Elon Musk says he is planning unmanned and manned missions to Mars.
  • If you go to Mars, you pretty much have to accept that the radiation will shorten your natural life, and it is unlikely you will make it back to Earth.

the Democratic Party Platform

Leave a reply

Since the Democratic convention is this week (as I write), let’s have a look at the party platform. I’ll get to the Republican one eventually.

First, let me think about what I’d like to see in there before I read it (seriously, I haven’t read it yet!)

  • Anti-corruption measures. One person, one vote instead of one dollar, one vote. Free political speech for human beings only. Without this you can’t really get anything else done because a tiny rich and powerful minority affected by each policy can block it. This probably means a constitutional amendment.
  • A major childcare, education, and training commitment. This would help struggling working parents, students, and people out of work right now, and put children on the right path to contribute to the economy and society in the long term.
  • A major public infrastructure and private capital investment commitment. This is necessary for both economic growth and quality of life.
  • A major research and development commitment. This is necessary for growth and competitiveness, and also creates jobs.
  • Universal health care. Just join the world’s modern nations and f-ing do it now! It will help with problems like the pandemic, drug addiction, depression, suicide, child mortality, etc.
  • A major risk management program. This sounds unglamorous, and it can be called something else, but the basic insight here is that we were not prepared for the pandemic and we should have been. Well, there will be another pandemic sooner or later, and there are many other risks big and small like nuclear war, famine, fires, floods, earthquakes, and sea level rise. Then there is preventable disease, accidents, violence, and pollution that kill small numbers of people predictably every day and add up to big numbers over time. We need to pick a top five or ten risks and really tackle them systematically, both domestically and internationally. Once we understand what the biggest risks are, we could realign funding, policy and institutions to match.
  • New revenue to support investment. We might be able to take most of what we need from the defense budget, but we might need to RAISE TAXES. If so, join all the other modern nations and just institute a value added tax. It’s the best practice, do it now! I would also support taxes on pollution (e.g., a carbon tax) and waste (e.g., non-recyclable packaging).
  • Unemployment and disability benefits probably could be shored up, and retirement benefits are basically adequate but need to be protected and adequately funded. All this would help deal with the pandemic in the short term and automation in the longer term.

You might ask where climate change, or environmental protection more broadly, or social justice are in this platform. Well, if done right they are woven throughout all of the above.

Okay, that’s the platform for my pretend party. Now for the Democrats.

  • Anti-corruption? Yes, p. 58 gets around to mentioning a constitutional amendment on campaign finance.
  • A major childcare, education, and training commitment? Yes – it’s pretty strong here.
  • A major public infrastructure and private capital investment commitment? an infrastructure bank is mentioned, basically transportation-only
  • A major research and development commitment? “historic federal investments”!
  • Universal health care? Yes, there’s a public option, and people without private coverage get signed up automatically unless they opt out. There’s some cryptic language though about it being in place “until the end of the pandemic”. Hopefully once it’s in place it would be politically difficult to remove it.
  • A major risk management program? piecemeal – pandemics are mentioned as one might expect. Gun violence is mentioned. Agriculture is mentioned but there’s not really a focus on long-term food security. Climate change and air pollution are discussed in some detail. Biodiversity and habitat actually get a paragraph. It gets around to tepid mentions of defense spending and nuclear weapons somewhere towards the end. Only nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, not even reduction let alone elimination.
  • New revenue to support investment? not really anything new – roll back some previous cuts, reduce loopholes, etc. Campaigning on raising taxes is obviously not a winning strategy. Only Bernie Sanders had the guts to go there.
  • Unemployment, disability, retirement? piecemeal proposals, “shore up the states”

So the platform kind of, mostly contains the stuff I care about, except it’s weak on nuclear weapons and peace and tepid on infrastructure. The stuff I care about is buried in a lot of other…stuff. Race and gender stuff. Union stuff. I’m not against most of this stuff, I just think it is a lot of empty words for the most part.

Doughnut Economics

Leave a reply

Doughnut Economics is a new attempt to communicate the goal of an economy that works for humans while not exceeding the natural limits of the planetary system it is embedded in. You want to be in the dough part. If you are in the hole, you are within planetary boundaries but you are poor, starving, unwell, or otherwise not benefiting from the economy that is working for at least some other people. If you are outside the doughnut entirely, you are outside planetary boundaries and the planetary system will not be able to continue supporting the economic system (including you, and everyone else) indefinitely.

The majority of intelligent and educated people on the planet do not understand these concepts. We need a critical mass of people, certainly leaders and decision makers, to understand the problem before we have much hope of solving it. I support new and novel attempts to communicate these ideas. This one doesn’t quite seem fully coherent to me in terms of stocks and flows, and I think if we taught children about stocks and flows from a young age they would grow up better able to understand systems in terms that aren’t so dumbed down.

metropolitan planning organizations

Leave a reply

If you live in a decent sized metropolitan area, your metropolitan planning organization forces local officials and other stakeholders to get together across political jurisdictions and make decisions about how to prioritize transportation projects in the context of a long term plan. The results then get sent up to the state, which uses it to allocate funding.

The article has a number of criticisms. MPOs have tended to favor highways over other forms of transportation, and these have often disrupted disadvantaged communities. They have tended to favor suburban areas. They have tended to favor new construction over maintenance of what is already constructed.

I have always thought MPOs are good even if they are imperfect because (1) they force stakeholders to work together at the right geographic and economic scale for infrastructure planning, (2) they force some kind of long term plan to be put down on paper, (3) they force the prioritization of site-level projects to be justified in the context of that long term plan, and (4) they bring in state and federal money to get projects in the ground based on the priorities of local actors that have “skin in the game”. In the absence of this process, either political jurisdictions would plan in isolation, or more efficient but less democratic structures would be created that largely cut out elected officials, voters and taxpayers. Engineers and officials not trained in planning would tend to jump right to analysis of site-level projects without a real plan. State and federal funding either would not happen at all or would be based on political lobbying. Corruption would likely be more common. And systems that are less in public view would tend to be neglected until major, obvious failures occur that affect peoples’ lives.

What I just described covers the state of water infrastructure in the U.S. pretty well. I think we should expand MPOs to cover other kinds of infrastructure rather than just transportation. MPOs are one of the reasons that politicians and the public think infrastructure=transportation and transportation=infrastructure. They do some rational planning and economic analysis at roughly the rate geographic scale and time period, then feed that into a messy political process to rank site-specific, short-term projects, then direct taxpayer money to projects that are likely to benefit the citizenry, while sharing the wealth at least a little bit. Unless you want to go authoritarian, it’s a reasonable approach to get infrastructure done in a democracy. I think it’s better and more equitable than the ratepayer-funded utility model followed in the water, energy, and communication industries.

the Overlook Hotel

Leave a reply

Ever wonder if the Overlook Hotel from The Shining is real, and where it is? It is real, it’s in Oregon, and you can stay there. Its real name is The Timberline. The interior is not like the movie though, those shots were done in a movie studio. That’s probably good, unless you are looking for a creepy Halloween experience. There is no hedge maze, but the mountain setting and snow are real. It is most certainly not shut down for the winter, because it is a ski resort.

what’s up with the U.S. dollar?

Leave a reply

The U.S. dollar has declined sharply against the Euro, a basket of major currencies, and gold since mid-May. What does it mean? I don’t know, you should ask the experts! But I’ll try to figure it out.

First, the actual numbers. The dollar has declined sharply, but the actual exchange rate at the moment is around the middle of a band the dollar has traded in since 2014 or so, and it has declined sharply during that time only to recover. So the fluctuations could be random about some long-term mean, or in response to events, but followed by a reversion to the mean with random fluctuations thrown in.

Second, the textbook answer to whether a strong (or weak) dollar is good or bad. All other things being equal (which they are not), investors would trade other currencies for U.S. dollars if they could get a better interest rate on U.S. dollars than on their home currencies. This might be the case in recent years, as interest rates have been low around the world, and even negative in Europe, but slightly higher in the U.S. All other things (including interest rates) being equal, investors in other countries would trade their currencies for U.S. dollars if they thought this was a safe place to put their long-term savings. Most governments (maybe the Swiss) don’t actually keep enormous vaults full of gold bars hidden under mountain fortresses any more. This has been exactly the case since the 1997 financial crisis, with developing countries and China in particular buying and stashing enormous quantities of U.S. dollars. This might be changing for a few reasons. China may be gaining more confidence in its own currency. Europe has decided to pull together and start backing its currency with EU bonds rather than just bonds from individual countries. Countries also have the option of holding baskets of foreign currency rather than just the U.S. dollar, and also the option of forming sovereign wealth funds with more diversification and potentially much higher returns than currency reserves alone. Finally, the long-term health and stability of the U.S. financial and political systems look shakier than they have in a century or so.

Third, is it good? It’s good for exporters, bad for ordinary people paying higher prices for things that have to be imported, maybe good for home-grown industry which could be more competitive with pricier imports. It’s bad for Americans living and traveling abroad, as I found out from personal experience, but that is a small fraction. So on balance, the main risk domestically seems to be price inflation, and that seems somewhat unlikely in the midst of a historic recession. Exploding debt and low or no growth for an extended period of time could lead to a problem making interest payments down the road, but we need to get through the current crisis before there is a long term to worry about.

Solaris

Leave a reply

I’ve been revisiting the fantastic descriptions of the alien ocean in Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, and I just want to share one part of one paragraph, which I hope does not constitute a copyright violation. His paragraphs are quite long however.

…if comparisons with Earth really have to be employed – these are formations larger in magnitude than Colorado’s Grand Canyon, modeled in a substance that on the outside has the consistency of jelly and foam (though the foam hardens into vast, brittle garlands, into tracery with immense holes, while some scientists have seen it as “skeletal excrescances”). Within, it turns into an ever firmer substance, like a flexed muscle, but one that quickly, at a depth of fifty feet or so, grows harder than rock, though it retains its elasticity. Extending for several miles between walls that stretch like membranes over a monster’s back and cling to its huge “skeleton” is the actual extensor, a seemingly independent format, like a colossal python that has swallowed an entire mountain chain and is now digesting it in silence, from time to time setting its body in slow, shuddering, fishlike contractions. But this is only what the extensor looks like from above, from the cabin of an aircraft. When you get close enough to it that the walls of the ravine rise hundreds of yards above the plane, the python’s torso turns out to be a moving expanse that stretches all the way to the horizon and is so dizzying it takes on the look of a passively bulging cylinder. The first impression is of a whirl of slick gray-green slime whose layers throw off powerful glints of sunlight; but when the craft hovers right over the surface (at such moments the edges of the ravine in which the extensor is concealed are like heights on either side of a geological depression), it can be seen that the motions are much more complex. They possess their own concentric rotations, darker streams intersect, and at times the outer mantle becomes a mirrored surface reflecting clouds and sky and shot through with loud explosive eruptions of its half-fluid, half-gaseous center. It slowly becomes clear that right below you is the central point of the forces holding up the parted sides that soar high into the sky and are composed of sluggishly crystallizing jelly…

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem

Like I said, that is one part of one paragraph. It goes on like that for a long time. There have been a couple movies, but it really is a case where a few words are worth a thousand pictures, and whatever you picture in your mind is better than anything the most talented movie special effects person could come up with.

Day X

Leave a reply

This New York Times article about right wingers in the German police and military is a bit concerning. It sounds like most of it is just doomsday prepping, but at least some subset of it involves taking advantage of said doomsday to round up immigrants and political “enemies”. I kind of thought Germany was one of the last countries we needed to worry about at this point. But seriously, what I find concerning is that if it is happening there, the situation in the U.S. is probably worse. Oh, and neo-nazis in Europe have a magazine, and on the cover of that magazine is Donald Trump.

automatic stabilizers are not boring!

Leave a reply

Slate says automatic stabilizers are boring, and then follows up with a long article on how great they would be. They would have kicked in for both the 2008 recession and the current one, without the months of arguing and lost time.

Things like unemployment insurance are obvious, but I like to think about opportunities for making investments we know we need to make anyway. Like infrastructure investments, capital investments, research and development, childcare and education and training. All of these create jobs now while providing payoffs in the future. When the private sector falters, the public sector kicks into a higher gear and carries the ball for awhile. Then the private sector recovers and debts can be paid back, or a surplus can even be built up. But once again, it’s too late to do it right this time around. It’s time to start planning for the next time around.

traffic-related death during the shutdown

Leave a reply

The National Safety Council (a nonprofit group) has some numbers on deaths caused by cars during the coronavirus crisis.

Preliminary estimates from the National Safety Council based on May data from all 50 states indicate that for the third month in a row, road users in the U.S. were at a higher risk of dying from a motor vehicle crash. As reported in Injury Facts, the fatality rate per miles driven in May – when most of the country was deep in quarantine from the pandemic – jumped a staggering 23.5% compared to the previous year, despite far less traffic on the roads. The number of miles driven in May dropped 25.5% compared to the year prior. The increased rate comes in spite of an estimated 8% drop in the number of deaths for May compared to the prior year. Overall, the mileage death rate per 100 million vehicle miles driven was 1.47 in May compared to 1.19 in 2019.

National Safety Council

There are some questions you could ask, like how do the 2019 numbers compare to the average of the last 3 or 5 years. But I also know we have seen an unusual number of grisly pedestrian and bicyclist deaths in my city this year (these make the news, while people dying in highway accidents sadly aren’t even headline news because we are so used to and accepting of this totally unacceptable risk.) I think it is pretty obvious what is going on. Narrow lanes, trees, parked cars, and other traffic send a message to the human brain to slow down. For some reason, seeing human beings walking or bicycling causes some people to slow down, while others seem to be oblivious, reckless, or occasionally intentionally aggressive. Most of these people are not bad people the rest of the time. It just seems to be human nature to speed up when we see an open space in front of us. So decreasing traffic, in the absence of better design measures and consistent enforcement, won’t solve this problem. Education may help but doesn’t seem to reach everyone. I think design is the answer and I’ve said it before – just copy the Dutch street design manual and be done with it.