Category Archives: Web Article Review

what’s new with humanoid robots?

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ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, and Claude may have helped me speed up some computer-based work tasks over the past year or so, but they still can’t clean my bathroom. This is what I really want to see to believe the robot era has really arrived. This article reads like a press release, but Nvidia says it has an “open-source, pretrained but customizable foundation model that’s designed to expedite the development and capabilities of humanoid robots”. So that’s something, but I am not hopeful it will be cleaning my bathroom or doing my dishes in 2025.

comparing MAGA to European right-wingers

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This (paywalled) Financial Times article compares survey results in the World Values Survey by political party. What is really striking to me is that the U.S. right is off the scale compared to the German, French, or Italian “far right” parties we are hearing about in the news. I didn’t dig into all the details but if this is a survey of the public based on their stated party affiliations, it is possible the right-wing politicians in Europe are much farther right than their respective publics. It is also interesting that this result shows the German right as left of center, while the Australian, French and UK left are right of center. So I am taking all this with somewhat of a grain of salt without understanding all the details, but still it shows that survey responses of the U.S. public identifying with MAGA are way out there.

house sale price premiums by month and city

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Zillow has some data on how much above average home prices are by month of the year and by US city. In general, prices are higher by about 1-3% in March-June. I assume this has something to do with the U.S. school year. It may be somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy though. Last time I was in the home buying market, which was almost exactly 10 years ago, I started looking for listings in January, but there really was nothing to look at until March. So people in my city (Philadelphia) don’t start listing until March, and by the time you go through the process it seems like most closings are going to be in the May-June time frame (precisely when mine was). I wonder if refinancings show up as home sales in this data though, or if they have some way of knowing when the properties actually change hands. That could skew the data because people can refinance any time of year, and they are likely to refinance when interest rates are relatively low and prices therefore relatively high.

defensive gun use

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Rutgers has some facts and figures on defensive gun use in the United States. It is worth noting that “use” includes simply showing or telling someone you find threatening that you have a gun.

  • People who have experienced gun violence or know someone who has experienced gun violence, including suicides, are more likely to own guns.
  • 8.3% of people who own guns have used them at some point. 4.7% showed the gun to someone, 3.8% told someone they had a gun (and they really did), 1.1% said they fired but not at a person, and 1.2% said they fired at a person.

The article doesn’t really come out and say it, but the gist is really that people who own guns are at greater risk of being harmed by guns than people who do not. This is counterintuitive and very few people are swayed by evidence these days, of course. The policy prescription: “Of primary importance will be efforts to shift the narrative around firearms to deemphasize DGU as a common outcome. In doing so, policy efforts can be decoupled from efforts to prioritize safety through a lens of self-defense and instead center on efforts to reduce the risk of injury and death associated with firearm access.”

how a US-Iran war could escalate

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Here I will risk covering a fast moving current event. If I am right, I get to say I told you so as the world goes down in flames. Here is a scenario envisioned in one random blog post:

  • The US bombs Houthi military targets (and civilians) in Yemen – happening now, March 21, 2025.
  • Houthis attack US naval ships with missiles and drones (happening now) and achieve some damage (hasn’t happened yet).
  • The US blames the attack on Iran.
  • The US attacks Iran.
  • Iran attacks US bases, oil and gas infrastructure in surrounding countries such as UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

It’s not mentioned in this article, but I have seen elsewhere, suggestions that Trump might consider low-yield nuclear weapons. I can also imagine a scenario where, in the fog of war, Israel initiates a nuclear attack and claims it is pre-empting an Iranian nuclear attack.

Let’s hope none of this comes to pass. It would result in enormous loss of life, possibly cause a world-wide recession, and unleash the nuclear genie that has been successfully bottled up since 1945.

some policies to combat inequality

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This article in the blog Urbanomics has some ideas on what can be done to combat rising inequality. The blog is India focused, but the suggestions are more or less general.

  • Increase minimum wage.
  • Increase labor’s bargaining power “through institutional (unions, workplace management councils, etc.) and regulatory measures. At some time in future, broad caps on the salary and compensation ratios across levels becoming a norm cannot be ruled out.”
  • Stop exempting gig and contract work from various laws and policies [things like not requiring the entity hiring them to provide health care and other benefits?]
  • Labour-intensive sectors should become the focus of industrial policy. Scarce resources should not be wasted on low-labour-intensity sectors like semiconductor fabrication or data centres… internships, apprentices, reduction in EPF and other costs, wage support for new entrants, industrial policy support through employment generation-linked incentives, etc. [this one is more in a developing country context I suppose]

All this seems…complicated…to me. But maybe these are politically feasible policies. Simple but maybe politically infeasible policies would be to just raise taxes on the rich and powerful and redistribute the proceeds to the masses, as cash, services directly provided by the government, or services indirectly subsidized by the government. In the U.S., perhaps taxes wouldn’t have to be raised as much as we think if we shifted away from some of the massive hidden subsidies we already have – low capital gains tax rates, the cap on social security payroll taxes, deduction of mortgage interest, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage, gas taxes that support highways but not public transportation, and many others. All of this would be politically difficult, of course. But with the Democrats seemingly having become the party of no big ideas, perhaps there is not so much to lose if somebody were to start proposing some.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

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I took a required art appreciation class in high school before moving on to a STEM degree and career. In a previous lifetime (also known as high school and college) I was somewhat of a decent amateur musician. So my knowledge and interest in visual art is pretty limited. But I was always fascinated by Hieronymus Bosch. This is a nice video explaining what we know about The Garden of Earthly Delights. It turns out we know surprisingly little about the motivation and intended message of the painting. Which I suppose is okay, since if a visual artist wanted to use a bunch of words to explain their intended message, they would be a writer instead. I always thought the most obvious interpretation is about original sin, where Adam’s interest in Eve leads to all kinds of debauchery for mankind later on which we all get punished for. But another interpretation apparently is that if there had been no original sin, then the debauchery itself could be sort of an alternative heaven. I don’t know, the first interpretation seems more likely to me. Considering this was medieval Spain we are talking about, I kind of think he was testing the boundaries of how mischievous he could be without getting burned at the stake.

total factor productivity

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This is mostly a review for yours truly, partly as I am pondering whether there is any economic theory or strategy that could justify the Trump federal budget cuts and tariffs. My verdict: no, I don’t think so, I think they are based on simplistic ideas: linear, short-term, misguided thinking about the national debt and trade deficits. Anyway, here are a few quotes from the IMF:

It’s a measure of an economy’s ability to generate income from inputs—to do more with less. The inputs in question are the economy’s factors of production, primarily the labor supplied by its people (“labor” for short) and its land, machinery, and infrastructure (“capital”). If an economy increases its total income without using more inputs, or if the economy maintains its income level while using fewer inputs, it is said to enjoy higher TFP…

Recent IMF research shows that TFP growth has slowed around the world since the global financial crisis. In low-income developing countries, it has come to a virtual standstill in recent years…

TFP is higher in countries where the average worker has more years of schooling, the quality of education and training is better, and the workforce is healthier. These advantages enable the average hour of work to generate more economic value added—in addition to improving the quality of life more broadly…

So what can advanced economies do? First, they should “do no harm,” by avoiding policy mistakes, such as permitting a decline in market competition, with powerful firms using their monopoly positions to stifle entry and innovation, or reverting to costly trade protectionism. Beyond this, policymakers should craft regulations that tap the possible productivity benefits of recent innovations in green technology, information and communications technology, and artificial intelligence. They should also tackle remaining barriers restricting the opportunity for women and minorities to bring their talents and innovative potential to all sectors of the economy.    

So, a long-term strategy to boost productivity and national wealth could be to invest in childcare and education (the people who will come up with tomorrow’s innovations, and also their parents who can’t come up with today’s innovations because they are too busy), research and development. The current U.S. administration is cutting all these things. Investing in infrastructure and physical capital also helps if you have underinvested in it in the past – there is a diminishing return to these investments, but the U.S. can’t be anywhere near the diminishing return. It also makes sense to invest in a counter-cyclical strategy – more when private sector unemployment is higher and less when it is lower.

 

ports, shipping lanes, and grand geopolitical strategy?

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This article says Panama, Greenland, South Africa, and even Somalia are all important to sea-based trade and naval control of sea lanes in the event of war. I don’t doubt this, but this also feels like a grand strategy cooked up by somebody’s armchair general uncle just reading stuff on the internet and looking at Google Maps. I also found this interesting:

While the United States dominates global maritime security, there is a huge disparity in the other direction when it comes to influence over maritime trade. Unlike the PRC, which controls around 12.6 percent of global port throughput through COSCO and CMP, the United States has no state-backed firms among the world’s leading terminal operators. In terms of global port influence, the United States would likely rank behind not only the PRC but also the United Arab Emirates (DP World), France (CMA CGM/Terminal Link), and Singapore (PSA International).

U.S. ports and port operations seem to be way behind the leading edge elsewhere in the world. So one thing we could do is focus on learning how to build and operate modern, highly automated, large-scale ports. This would sound like part of a sound “industrial strategy” to me. And it makes sense that we wouldn’t want China or any other country controlling trade and sea lanes to the detriment of free trade. We shouldn’t be trying to do this either. It would make sense to me to focus on international agreements to keep access to ports and shipping lanes open and fair to all countries.

U.S. Poverty: Facts and Figures

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This article from Peter G. Peterson Foundation has some facts and figures on U.S. poverty.

  • It explains the difference between the Official Poverty Measure and Supplemental Poverty Measure, both calculated by the Census Bureau. The former does not consider the effects of government benefits, while the latter does. I was thinking that the spread between the two could be seen as a measure of how effective government benefits are. But the supplemental measure is actually higher than the official one (12.9% vs. 11.1% in 2023) because it also takes into account some expenses that poor families face, including health care, housing, and child support.
  • Of those below the poverty line, about one-third live in deep poverty defined as half or less of the poverty level.
  • Racial disparities are pretty much what you would think. But I was surprised that the poverty rate among Asian-Americans is higher than the poverty rate among white Americans. This is interesting because I know Asian-Americans have a higher median household income as a group than white Americans. For the other groups, poverty rate and median household income seem to track pretty well. For Asian-Americans, this result suggests there is a large disparity with some very high income and some very low income people. The article does not cover Native Americans.
  • The (supplemental) poverty rate among children was 5.1% in 2021 due to pandemic-era programs and bounced back to 13.7% in 2023. Thanks Biden! No, literally thanks Biden 5.1% and no thanks to Congress you cold unfeeling psychopaths for the 13.7%. How can they live with themselves (answer: a majority of politicians are cold unfeeling psychopaths), and how can they be so unbelievably adept at deflecting blame that the public is unaware or supportive (answer: anti-tax and racist propaganda).

There is more interesting stuff in this article, which I may talk about in a future post.