Category Archives: Web Article Review

Is QAnon still a thing?

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QAnon is still a thing, according to this Slate article.

Honestly, these days, QAnon has really just blended into the mainstream. I wouldn’t even think of it as a specific movement, or as just people who identify as QAnon followers. It’s a broader populace that subscribes to these views, even without using the label. The QAnon fixation on pedophilia and child trafficking is a serious and very real issue: We’ve seen it distorted and weaponized into something where calling someone a pedophile has become a go-to political attack for some of our elected leaders.

And with the election around the corner, and especially with all the unprecedented events that have occurred in the past month, disinformation is just blowing up, out of control. Q may be gone for now. And while QAnon, officially, as a movement, has gone underground, the damage is done. We see it every single day. I mean, even just on Twitter last night, I opened the app, and one of the main curated stories by the platform was about how Biden was on his deathbed. There was one suggesting that he had been cloned, or Kamala had killed him. It’s no wonder this stuff has become so widely embraced. It’s so normalized…

The data that exists suggests millions, even tens of millions, of people believe that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles. You can only imagine how many kids have heard this stuff at home—especially over the pandemic, when we were all locked down inside and kids were home all the time. We don’t have a good figure of how many children believe in conspiracy theories, so it’s hard to grasp the scope of this. But BuzzFeed News put out a survey a few years ago asking teachers how often they were hearing conspiracy theories in the classroom. And the response was really devastating—just teachers from all over the country saying they were overwhelmed by the stuff they were hearing at school.

I don’t move in any circles where I would be exposed to this stuff, so it is surprising to me to hear this. Saying Biden is dead is not like saying Dick Cheney is a robot – which is obviously true because how else could the dude still be around?

electric vehicle charging in Philadelphia

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Here’s an article on the woes of electric vehicle charging in my home city of Philadelphia. On the plus side, electric vehicles are becoming more common.

As of January, there were 6,615 all-electric vehicles and 3,149 plug-in hybrids registered in Philadelphia, according to data from the state Department of Transportation (PennDOT). Combined, those represent 1.3% of the city’s nearly 767,000 registered vehicles. That doesn’t include cars used by the many commuters and visitors who drive into Philly every day.

To fully charge a typical EV on a standard Level 2 charger, the owner may have to leave their car parked there eight hours, which means there need to be more chargers per EV than gas pumps per gas car. 

Yet Philly has only 145 publicly accessible charging stations with 378 charging ports, according to U.S. Department of Energy data. Most of the stations have Level 2 chargers, but 13 of them have Level 3 or DC Fast chargers, which typically charge a car in an hour or less, depending on the vehicle’s battery capacity and other factors. Pennsylvania as a whole has 1,785 public stations with 4,598 ports.

Philadelphia is a large city with many neighborhoods, some quite car-dependent. That is where chargers belong, not in the walkable urban core. What we need there are safe, separated, protected lanes for bicycles and light electric vehicles, like e-bikes and scooters and even light-weight golf carts. These need their own signals and they need to never, ever, ever be in conflict with highway vehicles, whether those are electric or not. So I wouldn’t prioritize chargers there, but on the other hand we should be thinking about air pollution. Replacing fossil-fueled vehicles with electric ones is certainly a win for all the lungs of all the people walking and using those light-weight electric vehicles, so that is one argument in their favor, even in urban cores.

I still autonomous vehicles will eventually solve the charging problem, even in urban cores. Because your vehicle will be able to drop you off at your home or another walkable location, then go park itself somewhere it will not be in the way, then come pick you up again when you need it. So ideally we will be able to have walkable urban cores not ruined by private vehicles, and the ability to take trips to car-dependent locations when we need to. I want to believe this is a decade or less in the future, but it seems to be coming along very slowly.

problems with electric buses

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Electric cars might have arrived, technologically speaking, but electric buses are having some problems. The Austin metro area recently committed to going to an all-electric bus fleet, but the early results are that the buses are breaking down and just generally not as reliable as the proven diesel technology. Suppliers are limited, having supply chain issues, and financial problems.

This just sounds like a technology having growing pains in the early implementation stage. Implementation of an emerging technology is a chicken-and-egg problem, where issues need to be solved through “learning by doing”, but if nobody is willing to take the risk to work through those issues the technology never gets scaled up. If you really want it to happen, the federal government might need to share some of the risk in the early stages. Or here’s an idea: pilot the technology with school buses?

so what’s new with Tesla?

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Following up on my electric vehicle discussion lately, here is an article from TheWeek on Tesla. Basically, other companies have entered the field and are catching up on the electric vehicle technology itself, causing prices to drop and Tesla’s profit margin to drop along with it. Tesla’s plan has been to stay one step ahead with the shift to self-driving vehicles, particularly taxis, and this is coming along a bit slower than imagined. Their battery division also doing well.

I’m not a huge fan of Elon Musk himself, but I have always felt that he is playing by the rules of market competition and innovation, rather than trying to buy political influence, suppress competition, and fleece consumers/taxpayers as so many of our “capitalist” industries are doing these days.

August 1 U.S. election check-in!

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Well, we’ve gone from an almost unspeakably boring election to a pretty exciting one in just over a month. We had the fateful Biden-Trump debate on June 27, the Trump assassination attempt on July 13, Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out of the race on July 21, and now the Democratic Party seemingly selecting Kamala Harris as its candidate.

Polls are a little crazy. 538 does not seem to be producing its typical weighted polling averages at this point, while Nate Silver’s substack is now posting some weighted polling averages for public consumption. Real Clear Politics unweighted polling averages are…there. One question is whether to include any polls from before July 21 in the averages. I am not going to do any math though, and just report the averages as these two sites are showing them on August 1 in my local time (11 hours ahead of EDT).

STATE2020 RESULT538 (TRUMP/BIDEN,
July 1)		Silver Bulletin (August 1)RCP (August 1)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +4.8%Trump +2.7%Trump +4.2%
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +6.3%Trump +2.2%Trump +3.6%
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +0.8%Harris +0.4%Trump +0.2%
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +7.3%Trump +2.2%Trump +5.5%
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +2.0%Trump +0.2%Trump +2.7%
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +1.8%Harris +2.6%Harris +2.0%
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +3.8%Trump +2.2%Trump +4.0%

I tend to trust the Nate Silver numbers here, since they are weighted for recency and things have changed very recently. Based on his numbers, the electoral college as it stands today would be Trump 287, Harris 251. So despite Harris’s “momentum”, which the media is playing up because they want us to watch commercials, Trump still has it at this very moment. On the other hand, Pennsylvania is all but tied, and if it goes for Harris the electoral college would be Harris 270, Trump 268.

The momentum is clearly there – there has been a decisive shift toward Harris across the board compared to where Biden was a month ago. On the other hand, she is slightly underperforming Biden 2020 across the board. To me, Harris is a fairly bland center-right Democrat with less baggage than 2024 Biden or 2016 Hillary, so this all makes some sense to me. Being a mixed-race stepmother doesn’t really change my personal impression of her political leadership skills one way or the other, but perhaps it will affect turnout. For what it’s worth Polymarket gives a 55% chance of Trump winning and a 44% chance of Harris winning. Which seems consistent. Predictit seems to be blocked as an online gambling site in the jurisdiction I currently find myself in.

So, maybe more crazy things will happen, or maybe it will come down to economic trends and turnout, like it usually does.

those lagging electric vehicle sales

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Since I happen to be in Thailand, here are a couple excerpts from an article about lower than expected electric vehicle sales in Thailand. I am not trying to pick on Thailand or even comment on Thai government policy, but merely give a local example of what seems to be a global trend.

Thailand on Friday signalled it was hedging its bets over its previous all-out commitment to EV cars. Instead, in a new policy announcement, the kingdom is focusing on hybrid vehicle production or HEVs…

…there is a growing realisation that the EV industry, which is capital-intensive and does not support the country’s critical automotive parts industry, has been a mixed blessing.

“We are experiencing an EV oversupply as plenty of EVs imported from China over the past two years inventories,” he explained. At the same time, he confirmed that there are presently 490,000 unsold EV cars in storage. That is 63% of all vehicles produced in Thailand over the last 12 months. In the meantime, EV vehicle sales remain a relatively small percentage of overall car sales in the kingdom. In June, vehicles for the domestic market produced in Thailand were only 34,522 units. A huge drop of 43.08%. This is a catastrophic outcome by all accounts.

Anecdotally, just from moving about the country a bit, I don’t see charging infrastructure. And this echoes what I see in (my small corner of) the United States. We haven’t built the infrastructure to support electric vehicles, and we haven’t made the policy changes like adjustments to the gas tax which funds much of our highway maintenance. So we blame problems caused by a lack of planning and implementation on the technology itself.

But there is something else here. There are winners and losers with electric vehicles. The winners are all of us and our children’s lungs, plus our water and air. But these are diffuse benefits, and politically speaking it is concentrated interests that move the political system. Big business interests like the oil and automotive industries. The reference to “car parts” is telling here. Electric vehicles are superior because they have fewer complex parts and require less maintenance and service. Just like shutting down any sprawling, inefficient, polluting Soviet industry, what is good for society means some loss of jobs and profits for a minority, and that minority has some political clout. So when we hear that electric vehicles are “not catching on”, we can ask how much of this is propaganda driven by big business interests who will lose money if they do catch on.

Nonetheless, I think the hype bubble may have burst but the technology is here and here to stay. It may take a decade or two to really take over rather than exploding onto the scene the way some expected.

the “election trifecta”

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This Freakonomics podcast describes an “election trifecta” three ideas to greatly improve US elections.

  1. Non-partisan, single ballot primaries, with the top four vote getters moving on to the general election
  2. ranked-choice voting in the general election
  3. non-partisan redistricting

This all sounds pretty good. The two major parties are not producing good candidates for leadership of our country, and they are preventing more talented potential leaders from competing.

I am a registered Democrat in a state with closed primaries, and I wrote in Bernie Sanders in the primary. I would have voted for Joe Biden in the general, but then again I would have voted and will vote for anyone who is not a serial rapist, convicted felon, and traitor who led a violent attack on the United States Congress.

what’s new with flying taxis

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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.

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2022/october/03/wisk-unveils-autonomous-air-taxi

what’s new with a universal flu vaccine

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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?