Category Archives: Web Article Review

increase in atmospheric methane in 2020-2022 was “highest on record”

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This has only been measured for a few decades, but a detectable increase in the rate of increase in atmospheric methane made me think of tipping points. Could the much-to-be-feared feedback loops in permafrost and methane hydrates thawing be underway right now?

This article doesn’t mention either permafrost or hydrates. It does say that the increases are not a result of leaking natural gas wells or any other fossil fuel industry site. They narrow the cause down to “sources such as wetlands, waste, and agriculture”. I supposed some frozen wetlands could be thawing out, but it seems like the article would have mentioned that. I am skeptical that there has been any drastic worldwide change in landfill operations. A big change in agricultural practices – this could be plausible, I don’t know enough to say it is not.

Tokyo train stations

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I have never been to Tokyo, unfortunately. I had a trip planned there in 2011, but the earthquake and nuclear meltdown that year intervened. My condolences to everyone who lost loved ones or was otherwise directly impacted by that event, and I am not suggesting the minor disruption to my vacation plans that year was comparatively important.

Anyway, I was looking forward to seeing Tokyo firsthand and I didn’t get to. But I guess pictures are the next best thing. This article has some nice pictures of railway stations. Now, I spent some time in Singapore recently, and the railway stations there are pretty new and very modern looking. The first thing that strikes me about these Tokyo stations is they are not brand new, and they look pretty similar to older train stations here in the U.S. But the comparison ends there, because they are clean, well maintained, the service is reliable and the population is proud of their public transportation system. I also note that these older stations have been successfully retrofit with barriers so that people can’t fall/be pushed/intentionally jump onto the tracks and die. In the United States, at least here in my home city of Philadelphia, we “can’t afford” these barriers. Meaning of course that human life is not worth enough to us to make this a priority compared to other things we spend enormous amounts of money on, like highways and bombs.

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b11302/
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b11302/

coming food and water shortages?

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Something called the Global Commission on the Economics of Water says that “half of the world’s food production is at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly worsening water crisis threatens global agricultural systems”. Even if this group and these numbers turn out to be a bit alarmist, food really is where the climate change shit is likely to meet the fan. There is downward pressure on yields in tropical regions with increasing heat, partially offset on increased yields from longer growing seasons northern regions. Then there is increasing drought in important food-growing and food-consuming regions will be a big issue, and flooding will be an issue in others. This article doesn’t mention sea level rise, but eventually that is going to impact agriculture anywhere near a coastline or dependent on a coastal aquifer.

The poorest people and countries will be directly impacted by any food shortfall first, while the middle classes will feel the pinch at first in the form of higher prices. But longer term I am concerned that food shortages will drive mass migration and anti-immigrant political movements that could get very ugly. We are already seeing some precursors of this in the United States and Europe today. Whether climate change is a key driver today (and it is at least somewhat of a driver for some people aspiring to move from the Middle East to Europe and Central America and North America), it is only going to get worse.

Thank goodness we have had a robust and constructive debate around global food security policy during this year’s U.S. election cycle…oh…right, I just woke up from that dream again.

AI and asset management

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This article is about AI and predictive building maintenance. It also reads like an IBM corporate press release, but nonetheless it sparks some interesting thoughts. Recently I was at a conference where a friend of mine was on stage and as asked what technologies would be most important for the future of public infrastructure (water infrastructure, in the case of this particular conference.) AI and asset management came to my mind, and I willed my friend to also think of this. Alas, he did not. Now, if I had been up there would I have been able to articulate my thoughts clearly on the spot? Probably not, but with the benefit of a few minutes to think here is what I fantasize I might have said.

Basically, AI should be pretty good at asset management. Given good data on assets and their ages, they should be able to identifying assets (we’re talking physical assets here, like pipes or electrical equipment, or even green infrastructure like street trees) that are nearing the end of their service life and likely to fail in the engineering sense of no longer serving their intended purpose efficiently. Or, somewhat obviously, when things really have failed AI can help get that information to the attention of whoever can actually do something about it. Well, I still think humans have to do the up-front planning and have some vision for what they would like the infrastructure system to look like 20, 30, 50 years down the line. But then, AI should really be able to help with those repair-replace-upgrade-abandon decisions, so that as things wear out the system is slowly nudged in the direction of that long-term vision, all while minimizing life cycle cost and balancing whatever other objectives the owners or stakeholders might have. This all looks good on paper and is messy to do with a mish-mash of real-world governments and institutions and companies, but having the vision is a start.

closing streets to cars raised business sales by 68%

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This was during four Sundays of “open streets” (which means open to humans and closed to big, heavy motor vehicles) in a portion of Center City Philadelphia. But this works because people live nearby. People don’t really have to “walk to” the event because they live there. When cars are the only practical way to get around, most of the space has to be reserved for cars to maneuver and park (relatively) safely so you can’t have space for people too. It’s obvious, sure, but 100 years of oil-highway-car industry propaganda has brainwashed us to be blind to the realities of geometry. Take your red pills, people!

how the 2020 census affected electoral votes in the 2024 election

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It’s interesting that the U.S. Census is conducted every 10 years, presidential elections are conducted every four years, and census results affect the number of electoral votes apportioned to each state. So the 2020 Census was too late to change electoral votes in the 2020 election, but it has changed them slightly in the 2024 election.

From Newsweek (and I haven’t confirmed this from other sources):

Texas was the biggest gainer, according to the Census numbers that were released in 2021. The Lone Star state gained two more votes in Congress and the Electoral College for the next 10 years. Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon also each gained one seat, while California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia lost a seat each.

I count 3 votes shifted from states that voted Democratic in 2020 (Colorado +1, Oregon +1, California -1, Illinois -1, Michigan -1, New York -1, Pennsylvania -1) to states that voted Republican (Texas +2, Florida +1, Montana +1, North Carolina +1, Ohio -1, West Virginia -1).

It doesn’t seem like this will matter in 2024, but with the election possibly coming down to just 2 electoral votes in the Democrats’ favor (if they win Pennsylvania-Michigan-Wisconsin and lose Georgia-North Carolina-Nevada-Arizona), transferring 3 more points after the 2030 census could make all the difference in the 2032 election. But that is pretty far away and a lot of things can change in 8 years. For example, the actual people moving from “blue” to “red” states could take their “blue” politics with them and eventually shift their new state into the blue category or at least the swing state category. Maybe 8 years could be long enough to do away with the idiotic electoral college itself, which was created to convince 18th century slave owners to join a rebellion against an 18th century empire. But no, I am not this optimistic.

ASPI Critical Technology Tracker

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Something called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute tracks and forecasts which countries in the world are leading on what it considers the most critical technologies. Their definition of critical seems to be mostly technologies with military applications: “defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas”. And their metrics seem to be based largely on number of scientific publications and patents. This approach can be critiqued, but nonetheless the results are interesting and striking.

These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies…

China’s new gains have occurred in quantum sensors, high-performance computing, gravitational sensors, space launch and advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication (semiconductor chip making). The US leads in quantum computing, vaccines and medical countermeasures, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy, small satellites, atomic clocks, genetic engineering and natural language processing.

Building technological capability requires a sustained investment in, and an accumulation of, scientific knowledge, talent and high-performing institutions that can’t be acquired through only short-term or ad hoc investments.8 Reactive policies by new governments and the sugar hit of immediate budget savings must be balanced against the cost of losing the advantage gained from decades of investment and strategic planning. While China continues to extend its lead, it’s important for other states to take stock of their historical, combined and complementary strengths in all key critical technology areas.

I suppose the not-so-hidden agenda here is to get the Australian and other “western” governments to invest more in R&D long-term. That is something I would support. I would like to think that technological progress is not just a competition between nation-states but a shared project of our species and civilization. Utopian, I suppose.

Anyway – scientific publications and patents. I don’t think these are perfect measures of scientific or technological progress. Doubling these metrics will not mean that progress has doubled, but rather there must be some diminishing return. Once metrics like these are established, people are going to game the metrics to some extent rather than try to measure the underlying thing, which in this case is scientific and technological progress.

Do I have a better suggestion? Not really – well, I suppose total factor productivity is the most accepted metric of technological progress as far as I know. The holy grail would be to understand exactly how much and what types of R&D investments will maximize it over long periods of time. I am sure there are past and future Nobel laureates working on this problem, but if they have solved in conclusively I have not heard about it.

All that said, there is no excuse for the U.S. to be failing to invest in R&D. We need to ramp it up, and keep it up long term. But there is also an opportunity cost when the fire hose is focused on the military-industrial complex (not to mention the existential risks created for us and all humanity – do these alone outweigh the idea of ever winning the “competition” for dominance in horrible weapons?). Peaceful technologies that could improve human lives and our shared environment will not develop as fast as they could. And finally, to be a broken record, if we ever figure out the secret sauce to ramp up scientific and technological progress, the right thing to do is capture that value added to the economy and redirect it to improve the vast majority of human lives, protect the environment, and manage the risks we face, including risks created by the technologies themselves.

high, high, highway construction costs

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U.S. infrastructure construction cost woes stem largely from lack of competition in the construction industry and diseconomies of scale among public agencies procuring the work. I think I am using the latter term right. Very large agencies and projects are going to get better deals than smaller ones. This is somewhat of an iron law of economics, but you might be able to get around it somewhat by bundling smaller projects into larger packages and by getting larger agencies (like the federal government) more directly involved.

The former (lack of competition) is tricky. Architecture, engineering, and construction is generally not a high-profit industry, and it is a pretty high-risk industry. This all pushes towards a few large firms bidding on large projects where they can make a few pennies on a large volume. The construction industry just hasn’t made much in the way of productivity gains in the last half century either, while labor costs have been rising.

You could help solve the competition problem by allowing foreign firms in, and you could help solve the labor cost problem (from the contractors’ point of view) by letting foreign workers in. Both of these things are politically tough in the U.S.

This article in the blog Boondoggle does a pretty good job of summarizing the report in an understandable way, but it also attacks “high price consultants”. Being part of the engineering consultant industry for many years, I feel a need to push back on this a bit. Labor costs at these firms are high too, profit margins are also pretty slim, and there actually is a lot a competition in this industry. When public agencies hire a consulting firm, the price they see includes everything – the actual product of course and the employees’ salaries, but also all the employee benefits, project management, administrative, financial, and legal costs the firm has to bear, plus the taxes it has to pay. Finally, yes, a few pennies of profit on top of all that, and some money spent on marketing to the next batch of customers. When portions of a project are subcontracted, all those administrative costs get repeated at each level of the food chain. So yes, this adds of to a lot of administrative costs, and it would be great to trim them (maybe some hope for AI on this one longer term?), but the fact is that if the public agency tries to do the work with their own staff, they have almost all of these same costs, and they are typically going to be significantly higher. But people often compare only the labor and construction cost borne by the public agency to the entire cost of business borne by the private firm, which is not a fair comparison. And especially at smaller public agencies, they just aren’t going to have the capacity or expertise to do all the work in-house, which is exactly the gap the consulting industry has sprung up to fill.

So to summarize, here are some ideas:

  • Allow foreign firms and foreign workers to participate, especially in industries where it is clear competition is limited and skilled labor supply is tight. You could also try to train and equip more Americans with the skills needed and encourage formation of more firms, in theory.
  • Aggregate smaller projects and public agencies into larger ones to make them more attractive for firms to bid on. Get larger state and federal agencies involved in the procurement process where possible.
  • Turn on the research and development funding fire hose to make progress on the construction productivity problem. AI, materials science, and prefabrication of more components are all ideas being bandied about. This also gets money into the academic and research institutions which creates skills and capacity for our society.
  • Do I even need to say this? Have government provide health care and other benefits other countries are providing their citizens, and relieve this burden on our private firms so they can focus on doing whatever it is they are in business to do.

October 1 Election Check-In

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Here we go – if I stick to my once a month poll review, there will only be one more just before the election.

STATE2020 RESULTSilver Bulletin (September 1)Silver Bulletin (October 1)538 (October 1)RCP (October 1)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +0.6%Trump +1.5%Trump +1.5%Trump +2.1%
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Harris +0.9%Trump +1.0%Trump +1.3%Trump +1.5%
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Harris +3.2%Harris +1.9%Harris +1.6%Harris +0.6%
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +0.4%Trump +0.5%Trump +0.7%Trump +0.7%
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Harris +1.3%Harris +1.2%Harris +0.6%Trump +0.1%
MichiganBiden +2.8%Harris +1.9%Harris +2.1%Harris +1.9%Harris +1.4%
NevadaBiden +2.4%Harris +0.9%Harris +1.8%Harris +1.0%Harris +1.1%

The first thing that stands out is there is no disagreement between the weighted poll averages (Silver and 538) on the more likely winner of each state. They also agree with the RCP unweighted average with the exception of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania just looks dangerously close, with a 1% polling bias towards Harris (vs. how people in the state end up voting) making it a tossup. Still, you would rather have that polling average in your favor than against you. The difference between the weighted averages and RCP suggest that there either a lot of polls of Pennsylvania voters that the weighters consider Republican-biased garbage, a big recent trend toward Harris in Pennsylvania (because they rate more recent polls higher), or a combination. I can tell you from personal experience that the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation in my home city of Philadelphia is in hyperdrive, but I also assume the Republicans equivalent is in hyperdrive in Republican-leaning counties (like my old home county of Luzerne in Northeast Pennsylvania.)

If the polls are reasonably accurate, Georgia and Arizona might be moving out of Harris’s reach, and it is hard to believe North Carolina and Georgia are that culturally different (think about the Charlanta mega suburban sprawl cluster-f which is basically one thing).

If Harris wins Pennsylvania, she seems likely to win Wisconsin and Michigan and the electoral vote as a whole. Nevada would pad the score a bit for Harris, but it would not offset the loss of Pennsylvania.

Polymarket gives Harris 50% to 48% odds. Predict prices her at 56 cents to Trump at 48 cents, with other candidates given about 8 cents.

So all the signs kind of point to Harris, but if there is a systematic error of 1-2%, Trump could still pull it out.

Indonesia’s peat fires

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In Indonesia, land is burned seasonally to clear it for agriculture, and particularly for palm plantations which supply cooking oil used throughout Asia. Burning vegetation creates a smoky mess in the best of times (I have personal experience with this in Thailand), but what makes it much, much worse in Indonesia is the presence of organic soils that can also catch on fire and create an unbelievable amount of smoke. My family and I, including a newborn at the time, were exposed to this in Singapore in 2013, and we couldn’t see neighboring buildings out the window (buildings are close together in Singapore) when it was at its worst. 2013 was a bad year, but there have been even worse ones since then.

The media tends to blame the situation on small-scale farmers who are ignorant of modern practices. That might be part of the issue, but there are also huge international investors driving this trend to make profits on the palm oil, including investors in Singapore where the government routinely complains about “trans-boundary haze”.

This is a crisis of vast proportions – Greenpeace Indonesia identified a total burned area of 600,000 hectares of peatland last year. Indonesia’s fire toll during the severely dry years of 2015 and 2019 was even worse, at times emitting more carbon in a day than the entire U.S. economy did, according to the World Resources Institute. The dense haze emitted from these peatland fires contains smoke particles microscopic enough to travel from the lungs into the bloodstream, causing stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and asthma. A 2022 university study calculated that pollution from peatland fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan during the five years from 2013 caused annual premature deaths of about 33,100 adults and 2,900 infants along with thousands of hospital admissions and severe asthma cases in children.

In tracing the finances that flow to Indonesia’s fire-plagued plantation giants, one name that frequently surfaces is the Sinar Mas Group. Connected to many pulpwood plantations with the largest burned areas in Indonesia, the total burned area across all Sinar Mas linked pulp concessions was 314,200 hectares during 2015–2019.

Independent analyst Profundo, a research organization specializing in financial and corporate analysis, traced the funds received by Sinar Mas’s numerous companies from 2015 to 2023. In total, according to Profundo’s findings, the group’s companies obtained approximately $40 billion in credit deals from global financial institutions, with major creditors from Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. In terms of shareholdings, investors from the United States have put $504 million into Sinar Mas Group since 2022, alongside investors from the United Kingdom, Norway, and the EU with shareholdings worth $407 million.

The Diplomat

You read that right – more carbon emissions on a bad day than the U.S. economy, which I think is still the world’s largest emitter! And the ecological destruction and air pollution would be horrific enough without the carbon emissions on top. This is one of the biggest issues in the world that doesn’t get much attention (a general pattern for Indonesia, which I have also said is the world’s largest and most important country that at least the U.S. general public has barely even heard of.) The palm oil is a useful product though that the region is not about to give up (this would be like the U.S. giving up, I don’t know, french fries?) so the solution has to be using better agricultural practices to reduce the impact, and this of course might lower profits for rich and powerful people and/or raise prices for consumers.