self-driving cars are here

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The self-driving car hype bubble inflated and burst a decade or so ago. As tends to happen, the technology disappeared from headlines but continued to slowly progress in the background, and now seems poised to burst onto the commercial scene in a big way.

The key mistake I’ve noticed people making is they don’t seem to realize that autonomous taxis are no longer a hypothetical future technology. They exist, and you can ride in them. Waymo has been operating in San Francisco and Phoenix for a while now and is expanding soon to Austin and to a sort of awkward-to-describe-accurately swathe of Los Angeles County.

Matthew Iglesias

Iglesias says that self-driving cars have been largely excluded from freeways to date and this has limited their appeal in a business sense, but this will gradually change. Driverless trucks and buses will eventually be huge too, although organized labor will fight these tooth and nail as long as it can.

I’ll share a few more thoughts:

  • Motor vehicles kill around 40,000 people in the U.S. per year and 1.35 million people globally. There is a double standard where we accept this carnage and yet a small handful of self-driving vehicle crashes or even just nuisances are hyped in the media. Self-driving cars will save a lot of lives and property damage. Amoral insurance companies will surely care about this even if nobody else does.
  • Enormous swaths of land are configured the way they are because of cars. It’s not just all the streets and roads, it is all the parking and driveways. Most cars are parked most of the time. And it is not just the physical space those cars need that adds up to a large portion of our landscape, it is the physical space needed for human drivers to maneuver those cars into and out of parking, keep a six-foot-wide vehicle safely within a 12-foot-wide lane, and the spacing needed between cars traveling at high speed due to slow human reaction times. We also want the convenience of parking close to our homes, businesses, and schools to minimize walking. All this will change. Robot cars will be able to park themselves in tight spaces in out of the way places. This will also solve the electric vehicle charging infrastructure problem in cities. They will be able to drop us off and pick us up at our doors on command, which solves the convenience problem. They will be able to space tightly together at high speed. So, they will just take up a lot less space. This may even happen relatively fast. Then humans beings will just sit there and stare at all the space for a long time, maybe decades, but gradually and eventually we will change design standards and zoning codes so that all that space can be repurposed to other things.

Impeach Clarence Thomas Now!

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Supreme Court justices make money on speaking engagements and book deals, among other things. But Clarence Thomas is different – the man is clearly on the take. From The Hill:

ProPublica first reported on the trip to Indonesia, writing that Thomas and his wife, Ginni, vacationed with the Crows for “nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.” The cost of the trip would have exceeded $500,000 for the Thomases, according to ProPublica, but the bill was covered by Crow.  

The Hill

Half a million dollars. Does anyone think this is not the kind of money that will influence our nation’s laws in favor of the person giving the bribe? And who is Harlan Crow?

Crow is a member of the founding committee of the Club for Growth and has served on the board of the American Enterprise Institute since 1996.[10][11][12] He has donated almost $5 million to Republican campaigns and conservative groups.

Wikipedia

My verdict: This is corruption and bribery, pure and simple. Congress can impeach a Supreme Court justice and should do this now. Congress can also amend the U.S. Constitution and it should do that too to outlaw bribery of politicians and judges in this country once and for all.

the remaining carbon budget

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The last IPCC release covered conditions as of about 2019. There is an effort now to update estimates of key indicators annually in between IPCC reports, called the Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence. I could easily spend a whole day reading and trying to understand the details of this one paper. I’ll pull out just one indicator, which is the “remaining carbon budget”. This metric looks not at annual emissions but at the cumulative amount of carbon emitted since 1850 and how much can still be emitted to keep average global warming under 1.5 degrees C. The results are almost laughable. The IPCC put the remaining budget at 500 Gt (billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide from the start of 2020. This update puts the remaining budget as of the start of 2024 at 200 Gt. Annual emissions are in the 50-55 Gt range, so using very rough layman’s math we have 4 years remaining. There are many reasons this is complicated and uncertain, including periodic adjustment of the target itself, emissions of gases other than carbon dioxide, and aerosols to name a few. But nonetheless, we are a few years away and it is clear the world would be on track to miss this target even if it were making a coordinated effort to prevent this, which it is clearly not. This is not a reason to throw up our hands of course. Any effort to limit the damage, no matter how small or how late, may help lessen or delay the catastrophe we are currently headed for.

copernicus.org

What would a real “conservative” agenda look like?

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I consider myself a “liberal” to the extent that I think we need major expansion of the social safety net to minimize human suffering and support working families in our country. But let’s say I took a purely rational, “conservative” view. What might that entail?

  1. A level playing field. High inheritance taxes followed by redistribution using baby bonds or something similar. A public education system that spends the same amount and provides the same opportunities per student, regardless of location or background of the students. It would entail making it much easier for a second spouse to work or start a business, which would mean guaranteed childcare and health care benefits for all.
  2. A relentless focus on job skills, innovation and productivity growth. This would mean major and equitable investments in education from preschool through college. It would mean big government investments in basic research, not favoring those with military applications. It would also mean subsidies for companies to invest in research and development and skills development for the workforce. It would mean a rational immigration policy focused on letting in those with job skills that add value to our national economy.
  3. A relentless focus on competition. This would mean vigorous anti-trust enforcement and punishment of price fixing attempts.

Summarizing Project 2025

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In fairness, I don’t see much evidence here of the “blueprint for a fascist takeover” narrative some in the left-wing media are pushing. I see misguided yet unimaginitive ideas for a reorganization of the executive branch, which any new CEO of any organization is likely to undertake just to leave his or her (okay, let’s be honest, HIS in this cracker-ass country of ours) mark on the organization. I’ll just summarize my take on this document below.

  1. Double down on the homophobic, Christian Nationalist agenda. This includes immigration controls and attacks on public education. The immigration controls are counter to the big business cheap labor agenda, though, which raises a conundrum.
  2. Shamelessly let the fossil fuel industry lobby write the nation’s laws in its favor, at the expense of our nation’s food security, our coastal population centers, and everyone on Earth.
  3. Shamelessly give the military-industrial complex anything and everything it wants. This crowds out investment in peaceful innovation and technological progress, and greatly increases the risk of nuclear war.
  4. Shamelessly give the financial industry anything and everything it wants. This includes no functioning health care system in our country, and no regulations to prevent a meltdown of the international financial system such as almost happened in 2008. This is very dangerous.
  5. To nominally promote “small government and low taxes”, eliminate or slash the funding of key agencies that underpin our nation’s resilience to the existential threats of our age. This includes FEMA (fires, floods) and the CDC/NIH complex able to respond to pandemics and biowarfare attacks, which are eventually coming.

Project 2025, Part 4

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Tackling the section called “The Economy”.

  • Self-labeled “Conservatives” are not sure if they like free trade or not. Economic and financial conservatives (confusingly known as “neoliberals” in every other country) do. But the xenophobic element does not, so the Republican party is conflicted about this one. This section is “on the one hand… on the other hand…” drivel with no clear policy position.
  • They want to get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, because this agency knows the incontrovertible truth about climate change (which is always in quotes in this document) and this is against the fossil fuel industry agenda.
  • They want to gut the census bureau, because this agency knows the truth that the United States is under minority rule.
  • They want to gut the IRS.
  • They want to gut the Dodd-Frank rule and other regulations passed on the finance industry after they shamelessly almost destroyed the world’s economy in 2008. This is just shameless caving to a powerful industry lobby.
  • There is a faction that wants to eliminate central banking, or try other yahoo proposals like a return to the gold standard. All this was tried in the 19th century and ushered in a century of chaos, culminating in the GREAT DEPRESSION. This is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. I am unclear, but I don’t think the executive branch can do this all on its own.

June U.S. election check-in

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I’m sticking with 538’s adjusted poll averages here, which consider poll quality and recency.

STATE2020 RESULTMost Recent 538 Poll Average (as of 6/1/24)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +4.7% (May 2: Trump +3.2)
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +5.5% (May 2: Trump +5.9)
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +1.4% (May 2: Trump +2.6%)
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +6.2% (May 2: Trump +6.4%)
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +2.0% (May 2: Trump +1.8%)
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +0.6% (May 2: Trump +1.3%)
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +5.9% (May 2: Trump +5.1%)

In May, 1/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Biden – Wisconsin.

In May, 3/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Biden – Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan.

In May, 2/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Trump – Pennsylvania, Nevada.

In May, 1/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Trump – Arizona.

So it’s hard to say things are trending one way or the other over the past month, and the trend needs to be significantly in Biden’s favor for him to have a good shot in November. As it stands now, the electoral college would be 312 Trump to 226 Biden, a major defeat. If Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were to all break for Biden, it would be Biden 270 to Trump 268.

Project 2025, Part 3

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Continuing to tackle this thing with the section called “the general welfare”. I’m just reading the summary since the thing is so long. Various authors want to:

  • End Medicare and Medicaid. [We are the only developed country without a health care system, and our population is suffering for it. This is a shameless giveaway to the finance/insurance industry.]
  • Gut the National Institutes of Health and the CDC. The section makes wild, conspiracy theory-driven claims that there was no scientific evidence that masks or vaccines helped end the Covid-19 epidemic. [Pardon me, but this is radical, dangerous, ignorant, lying bullshit! This also means our nation will not be prepared to respond and recover from the next pandemic, be it of natural or bioweapon origin. This puts our nation at huge risk and is therefore wildly irresponsible and unpatriotic.]
  • Double down on fossil fuels, end promotion of alternative energy, fuel efficient and electric vehicles. [We are going to lose our food supply and our coastal cities. This is a shameless giveaway to the fossil energy industry, and it is EVIL.]
  • End the Department of Education and let parents decide what their children will believe about the world. This is basically driven by the Christian Nationalist, homophobic agenda, although somewhere in there is a shameless giveaway to the charter school lobby.
  • Regarding the EPA – well, finally, here is a federal agency I actually know something about, having spent decades helping local governments and water utilities comply with its mandates. This section doesn’t say a lot about water, and what it does say is not all that controversial – it even has some love for the state revolving loan funds. Otherwise, this section focuses mostly on rolling back regulation of fossil fuels and vehicle fuel efficiency (which in the EPA context means allowing more air pollution), ignoring greenhouse gases, and otherwise leaving most regulation to the states. They want to slash much of EPA’s research and science agenda, and shift oversight of enforcement actions from lawyers to political appointees. None of this is particularly radical, only “conservative” and would probably take us more or less back to the Bush or Reagan years. Failing to regulate greenhouse gases is a crucial moral and practical unforced error for our country of course, I am just saying it is fully consistent with the shameless giveaway to wealth and power agenda the Republican Party has been pushing for the last 50 years.
  • Basically bring the DOJ and FBI fully under the control of political appointees. Actually, the propaganda narrative is that the Biden administration has done this, while in reality this is a good example of doublespeak where you accuse your opponent of doing exactly the thing that you plan to do, so that any protest sounds like a childish “I know you are but what am I”?

Project 2025, p. 2

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Okay, continuing to look at this thing. So far, to summarize, it is a Christian nationalist agenda and a military-industrial agenda.

Continuing with the “Department of State” section, which I will say is the most logical and coherent chapter I have read so far.

  • They want to break up the Department of Homeland Security. But basically, just keep everything immigration-related as a cabinet-level department and scatter the remaining bits and pieces to other agencies. One of those bits and pieces is FEMA, which it sounds like they want to severely curtail financially, including the National Flood Insurance Program. [By some accounts, it was George W. Bush’s creation of DHS after 9/11 that broke FEMA and left it unprepared for Hurricane Katrina. Do we think disaster response and flood insurance will be less important going forward than it has been over the past 20 years or so, given that we are about to lose our coastal population centers? We probably will need a national fire insurance program at some point as private insurers pull out of that business as they did flood insurance decades ago. Someday that big earthquake is coming for us too. And let’s hope we are done with terrorist attacks for the foreseeable future, both foreign and domestic, but of course why would be be. And who is going to deal with pandemics and bioweapons, the CDC? Well, I assume the document just hasn’t gotten to them yet.]
  • They want to privatize TSA. Airport security was private on September 11, 2001, as I recall.
  • “Re-hemisphering manufacturing and industry”. In other words, make cheap stuff for American store shelves in Central and South America rather than Asia. Actually an interesting idea as it potentially takes away some immigration pressure while potentially helping people in those countries (and wealthy, powerful corporations and gangsters in those countries and the U.S., of course).
  • Just keep beating up on Iran. [No, the government of Iran is not well-intentioned or blameless toward the United States. I just think there is a strong stench of propaganda any time they are mentioned and I am skeptical that they are the criminal mastermind bogeymen behind everything bad happening in the greater middle east.]
  • “The manifest failure and corruption of the World Health Organization (WHO) during the COVID-19 pandemic is an example of the danger that international organizations pose to U.S. citizens and interests.” [What? I missed this completely. The pandemic the United States probably accidentally caused?]
  • Participating in the United Nations and other international organizations is only a means to achieve U.S. interests.

USAID

  • Basically, cancel anything climate change related and double down on fossil fuels throughout the developing world.
  • And some more homophobia and Christian Nationalism thrown in here.

Project 2025

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We’re hearing, at least through media sources one might consider somewhat left-leaning, that “Project 2025” from the Heritage Foundation is an open plan for a fascist takeover of the United States following the example of Mussolini or even Hitler. Both those leaders mobilized street thugs, neutralized the legislative and judicial branches, and co-opted big business almost entirely. They also brought state/provincial and local police forces completely under their central control. Is Trump or any American leader even remotely capable of herding the cats that make up our decentralized, fragmented, and largely dysfunctional government? I’m a little skeptical, so let’s take a look at what’s actually in the document.

Keep in mind, the Republican Party did not even manage to pull together a written party platform in 2020. It was literally the party of no ideas. And that, in fact, does sound like Mussolini, who had no real concrete or coherent policy proposals, and ruled more on charisma, machismo and promises to Make the Roman Empire Great Again. And from what I understand, he was far better at campaigning than actually governing. Hitler, evil as he was, certainly put together a highly functional administrative state at least for a few years. And right off the bat, this document makes a “promise” right in the introduction (pp. 35-36) to decentralize power and dismantle the administrative state.

First of all, the actual document on the website is called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” and then further down the page, “Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project”. Each chapter of this thing is written by a different “conservative scholar” covers a different part of the executive branch. So at this point, I have to say it seems totally normal for the leader of the executive branch to have a plan for who he (or she – I’ll just do the pronoun thing once) wants in each box of his org chart and to have some idea of what he would like each person to do once they are there. So I’ve skimmed through this 920 page document very quickly and tried to pull out a few highlights. It’s hard because although the document claims to make concrete policy recommendations, it doesn’t really. It mostly identifies key positions in the executive branch and recommends hiring people to fill them who agree with a very nebulous policy agenda of “protecting Christian families”.

  • It talks a lot about “families”. What it seems to mean by this is married heterosexual Christian couples with children.
  • It talks a lot about Christianity. It talks a lot about school choice. What it seems to mean by this is married heterosexual Christian couples teaching their own children to think like them. It actually states that “schools serve parents” and that parents are their children’s “primary educators”.
  • It talks about protecting Christian American families within our borders against foreigners. This seems to be the primary purpose of the military.
  • It talks about debt. What it seems to mean by this is eliminating most of the social safety net, possibly to lower taxes for Christian families. Of course, this does not apply to the cost of protecting Christian families from foreigners, which is worth any price.
  • But amid all this nebulous rhetoric, there are some concrete policy proposals that are just blatant giveaways to rich and powerful big business interests. A few are below (I can’t figure out how to make a simple indented list in this latest ridiculous version of WordPress.
  • “The President should eliminate the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), which is cochaired by the OSTP, OMB, and CEA, and by executive order should end the use of SCC analysis.” [because why would our children need food, or coastal population centers? This is evil.]
  • Double down on the war on drugs. This does not mean helping addicts, which is a “leftist woke” idea. It means ramping up violence on our streets, at and near our borders. And this should not be managed by people with professional experience, it should be managed by politicians with political aims.
  • Lots of homophobic stuff. I won’t even go into it. When the “next conservative President” is looking for all these political appointees, a great place to start the search will be closets.
  • Merit hiring, merit pay based on performance appraisal results, and the ability to let underperformers go in the civil service bureaucracy. Okay, I could get behind this one in theory as should anyone who has ever been to a post office. But they also want to gut benefits for federal workers, which is not really the right idea. [A good idea would be more along the lines of extending similar benefits to private sector workers. And most of the private sector, save certain corners of the finance industry, would benefit greatly from this. But the finance industry gets what it wants, such as no functional health care system.]
  • They just generally want to gut the bureaucracy and starve the beast, of course. Same old ideas they have always had. They sell them on the idea that the money would be given back to average people, when in reality these ideas are always used to justify subsidies for the already wealthy and powerful at everyone else’s expense.
  • Prepare for “great power competition”, and specifically for a war with China over Taiwan. Then stick a fork in China’s eye. [great way to pare the national debt, right?]
  • Active support by active duty military for border control.
  • NUCLEAR MODERNIZATION AND EXPANSION [because why do our children need to survive to old age at all? This is evil.]
  • Just shovel money at defense contractors without limit, and make producing weapons the focus of the U.S. economy. Funding research and development is okay only when it is about weapons.
  • Double down on recruiting high schoolers into the military. pp. 134-135 – this section is particularly chilling.

I’ll go ahead and post this since I haven’t posted in awhile. Maybe I’ll continue looking at the document in another post.