Recent outbreaks in US dairy farms, underscore the urgent need to understand the transmission pathways. The study aimed to evaluate the modes of introduction and transmission to dairy farms, through geospatial and exposure analyses. Our findings favour a singular introduction over multiple independent introductions, with non-waterfowl species exhibiting the highest dairy farm exposure, which is a major shift from historical waterfowl spread. Moreover, bidirectional spread between cattle and poultry highlights the intricate nature of disease transmission within the agricultural ecosystem.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Peter Turchin’s description of a “wealth pump” leading to stagnation and political instability seems to fit the United States pretty well at this moment. The IMF shows that global productivity has been slowing since the US-caused financial crisis in 2008. In Turchin’s model, our November election will be a struggle between elites and counter-elites who both represent the wealthy and powerful. That sounds about right, but I still say it is a struggle between competence and incompetence, and competence is a minimum thing we need to survive in adangerousworld. In early April I thought things were trending painfully slowly, but clearly, in Biden’s direction. As I write this in early May I am no longer convinced of that.
Most hopeful story: Some tweaks to U.S. trade policy might be able to significantly ease the “border crisis” and create a broad political coalition of bigots, big business, and people who buy things in stores.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: If the singularity is in fact near, our worries about a productivity slow down are almost over, and our new worries will be about boredom in our new lives of leisure. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to count on this happening in the very near future, and therefore stop trying to solve the problems we have at the moment. This would be one of those “nice to have” problems. If it does in fact materialize, the places to be will be the ones that manage to shut down Peter Turchin’s wealth pump and spread the newfound wealth, rather than the places where a chosen few live god-like existences while leaving the masses in squalor.
Here’s where we stand as I write this on May 2, 2024.
STATE
2020 RESULT
Most Recent Real Clear Politics Poll Average (as of 5/2/24)
Arizona
Biden +0.4%
Trump +5.0% (April 3: Trump +5.2)
Georgia
Biden +0.3%
Trump +3.8% (April 3: Trump +4.5)
Wisconsin
Biden +0.6%
Trump +1.8% (April 3: Trump +0.6%)
North Carolina
Trump +1.3%
Trump +5.4% (April 3: Trump +4.6%)
Pennsylvania
Biden +1.2%
Trump +1.0% (April 3: Trump +0.6%)
Michigan
Biden +2.8%
Trump +1.2% (April 3: Trump +3.4%)
Nevada
Biden +2.4%
Trump +4.5% (April 3: Trump +3.2%)
Real Clear Politics
The electoral college vote, as it stands at the moment, would be 312 for Trump to 226 for Biden (no change from April 3).
Of the 7 swing states lifted above, 3 shifted toward Biden (Arizona, Georgia less than 1%; Michigan more than 1%) and 4 shifted toward Trump (North Carolina and Pennsylvania less than 1%; Nevada and Wisconsin more than 1%). So it’s hard to see any clear momentum towards Biden in these numbers over the past month.
ABC-owned, Nate Silver-less 538 has its polling averages out now. These are supposedly weighted by quality and bias based on performance in past elections, so we can compare them to the Real Clear Politics straight up averages of quality and garbage polls. The 538 averages also consider third party candidates.
STATE
538 Poll Average (5/2/24)
Real Clear Politics Poll Average (5/2/24)
Arizona
Trump +3.2%
Trump +5.0%
Georgia
Trump +5.9%
Trump +3.8%
Wisconsin
Trump +2.6%
Trump +1.8%
North Carolina
Trump +6.4%
Trump +5.4%
Pennsylvania
Trump +1.8%
Trump +1.0%
Michigan
Trump +1.3%
Trump +1.2%
Nevada
Trump +5.1%
Trump +4.5%
So there is certainly not a story here to suggest that 538 thinks we are flooded with garbage polls biased towards Trump. 6 of their 7 averages show larger leads for Trump than the Real Clear Politics straight up averages. They could also suggest a shift toward Trump in more recent polls, since 538 gives more recent polls some extra weight.
Taken alongside the worsening March inflation trend, which was released in April and might tend to affect poll results released in April, I don’t see any good news here for Biden.
In my experience, robins can tear up grass, scatter mulch while foraging for food, and even eat fruit or crops from your garden. Moreover, their nests can harbor parasites and insects, which can put your family, pets, and home at risk. The smell of robin droppings can also be incredibly unpleasant, particularly if the birds manage to get inside your walls.
This left me speechless – It honestly never occurred to me that robins could have enemies. Could this person maybe be thinking of pigeons? Or is this person even a person? If this is an AI concluding that a harmless bird is a threat that needs to be gotten rid of, it may be a cautionary tale for other species, like ours.
Here is a story in MIT News about AI doing experiments on proteins, with drug development and gene therapy implications. This seems like the clearest application of AI at the moment – anything where there is a formula to be figured out and a large number of combinations to be tried. I can definitely see this accelerating scientific and technological progress, although the efficiency to me seems to be more in the “automation” part than the “intelligence” part.
High speed rail is actually inching forward in the United States, with a private company planning to connect the two urban areas starting in 2028. Here are some factoids from this article:
The route will be built primarily along an interstate highway median. This makes huge sense to me since the U.S. interstate highway system is secretly one of the world’s great feats of infrastructure financing and construction. It might be because we spent so much money and effort on it that we haven’t been able to pull off anything else comparable in the last half century. It might be hard to imagine as the autonomous vehicle hype bubble seems to have burst, but autonomous vehicles are eventually going to increase the capacity and reduce the congestion of U.S. highways. When that happens, we might be able to give over some of the real estate freed up to bullet trains, a true smart grid, solar panels, or whatever else we need to connect the country.
The Los Angeles end will be at a suburban commuter rail station. I guess this makes sense since most people don’t live in downtown Los Angeles and will need to get to dispersed locations in the metro area. And let’s just face it, people are going to drive to the train station and there is already going to be parking there. It does mean the real trip from downtown LA to downtown Las Vegas will be a lot more than the advertised two hours, for anyone actually doing that trip.
It got a mix of federal grants and tax-exempt loans. This makes sense too since the highways and airports in the country are heavily subsidized, whether we like to admit it or not. The total is about $6 billion – this seems very low but I guess this is a straight shot through the desert. Estimates for a comparable project linking dense urban areas like LA and San Francisco top $100 billion, and are still going nowhere.
It will “reach speeds” of 186 mph, comparable to Japanese bullet trains. This sounds good – I would like to know the average speed compared to the Japanese trains (which they poured money into right around the time the U.S. decided to build its highway system.) Again, this is a straight shot on new infrastructure through the desert. Amtrak’s Acela can “reach” pretty high speeds (150 mph according to this article) but it is limited by the condition of tracks and the fact that it has to share the tracks. (I use a suburban Philadelphia commuter rail station that Amtrak blows through several times a day. There is absolutely no physical separation between people on the platform and the train, which is a bit frightening.)
It is supposed to cut a 4-hour car trip to 2 hours.
It is supposed to be significantly cheaper than flying (but people don’t think this way – they typically compare the cost of mass transit to the cost of fueling their vehicles only, thinking of everything else as a sunk cost. So hopefully ridership projections will bear out.
All in all, sounds like a great project for the U.S.
In an example of a bad headline, this article is headlined “Amazon ends California drone deliveries“. But in the first paragraph, you learn they are discontinuing them in one particular town where they have been pilot testing them. There could be any number of political or bureaucratic reasons for this. And in the third paragraph, you learn they are starting them elsewhere, in this case in a Phoenix suburb.
My take: Deliveries by small, light autonomous vehicles make a ton of sense. In my view though, we are considering flying drones because our ground-level transportation designs are about 50 years out of date. We need to evolve our thinking from “bike lanes” to dedicated lanes for all sorts of slow, light vehicles that aren’t going to cause serious injuries or damage if they run into things. They have to be completely separate from lanes designed for highway vehicles. They need to be separate from pedestrian walkways. They need their own signals (or maybe they don’t need signals at all, but only if they are nowhere near those deadly highway vehicles). They need to be well constructed, well maintained, and enforced. I would allow only zero-emission and quiet vehicles in these lanes. All of this should be cheaper and easier than continuing to feed the money pit that is our outdated transportation infrastructure system currently in place in urban areas.
Politically, at least where I live, this gets into the “green gentrification” debate, and we are losing that debate massively, having just elected a mayor who is openly hostile to anything that would reduce the amount of blood soaking our streets. This is irrational of course, when safe efficient street designs could help people of all incomes and backgrounds get to jobs and lead longer, healthier lives.
I wanted to refresh my memory on what happened in Libya in 2011. Well, to actually understand the factions and politics is well beyond my relatively limited grasp of geography and history. But as I was thinking about violations of sovereignty by UN Security Council members (of which the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russian invasions of Ukraine are blatant examples), it occurred to me that 3 of the 5 permanent Security Council members (the U.S., France, and UK) were involved in this action. So if it was illegal, that would mean that 4 of 5 permanent Security Council members (all except China!) have been involved in illegal invasions of sovereign countries in the recent past.
But if we take Wikipedia as an authoritative source, there was a Security Council resolution that authorized a NATO “no-fly zone” (aka bombing campaign) in Libya, and what was done fell within the resolution. Russia and China abstained from that vote. So I am going to classify it as legal whether ill-advised or not. I think Russia can legitimately point to the U.S. Iraq invasion as a “whatabout” relevant to its invasion of Ukraine, but I don’t think it can point to Libya.
I guess my point here is that the relevance of the Security Council seems to have declined greatly, and maybe you can trace the beginning of its decline to the U.S. Iraq invasion. Whether it can be brought back to relevance, or whether the Ukraine invasion is the final nail in its coffin, remains to play out. But if the members want to save it, it would seem that some commitment and effort would be required, and I don’t see many signs of that happening.
Beautiful green roofs have popped up all over the world: specially selected plants growing on structures specially designed to manage the extra weight of biomass. Amsterdam has taken that one step further with blue-green roofs, specially designed to capture rainwater. One project, the Resilience Network of Smart Innovative Climate-Adapative Rooftops, or RESILIO, has covered over 100,000 square feet of roofs in Amsterdam, including 86,000 square feet on social housing complexes. Citywide, the blue-green roof coverage is even bigger and growing, currently estimated at over 500,000 square feet.
Making this widespread would be great, because buildings represent a large proportion of impervious surfaces in urban areas, and in the type of dense, walkable urban areas some of us think are best for people and the environment overall, there is not always enough room to deal with runoff from rooftops when it gets to the ground. So dealing with it on rooftops is great.
But alas…despite the impression that this is a new technology, it has been around for a long time and it is just not catching on in the United States. Because the construction industry in the United States is change resistant, inefficient, unproductive, and unimaginative. One could imagine this changing – there is a lot of money that could be made and a lot of jobs that could be created. More prefabricated building components is one idea that has been tossed around and around and implemented elsewhere. But decade after decade after decade, we just do not change in the United States. Call it the old American can’t do spirit.
