sustainableyadayadayada
Sustainable Yada Yada Yada
This is a blog about sustainability, urban design, scientific and technological progress, and what the future may hold. As well as interesting or random stuff on occasion. I'll try my best to avoid politics!
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is the world in a depression?
According to the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook, maybe. And not just since Covid, but the world has been slowing since the 2008 financial crisis. They say it’s due to demographics (aging population, shrinking work force), “misallocation of resources” (low capital investment?), “fragmentation” (moving away from free trade?) and slowing innovation as measured by total factor productivity. Well…
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America's "ambiguous" Taiwan policy
This article explains the U.S. policy of being intentionally vague about defending Taiwan. It is all about maximizing deterrence. Historically, the idea was both the deter China from any attack, but also to deter Taiwan from a declaration of independence that would be likely to provoke an attack. Going forward, this article suggests arming Taiwan to the teeth and encircling China by stationing…
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bird flu in cows
A strain of flu infecting wild birds now seems to be pretty widespread in cows. The concern is not so much that cows will infect humans, but that this shows the virus can evolve and spread from birds to mammals, where it can evolve again. It doesn’t sound too dangerous in its current form given the vaccines available.
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March 2024 in Review
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Ralph Nader says the civilian carnage in Gaza is an order of magnitude worse than even the Gaza authorities say it is. Which is almost unthinkably horrible if true, and makes the Israeli public statements about collateral damage seem even less credible. However even handed you try to be in considering this war could be a proportionate response to the…
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April election poll check-in, or "it's just the fading price shocks in gas and groceries, stupid"
Here’s where we stand as I write this on April 3, 2024. Sure, there are all sorts of reasons the polls might be wrong and it is a long time until election day…but I would rather be ahead in the polls and saying that than behind, wouldn’t you? Or even behind and getting less behind.
STATE2020 RESULTMost Recent Real Clear Politics Poll Average (as of 4/3/24)ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +5.2% (March 1:…
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free trade vs. migration
“Free trade” seems to have gone out of fashion at the moment. But this article in The Conversation makes the point that easing trade restrictions with countries sending large numbers of migrants to the U.S. could help. And not just at the margins – the study this article says that reducing restrictions on just textiles from just six countries could potentially reduce migration to the U.S. by…
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Turchin's End Times
I got through Peter Turchin’s book End Times. It is definitely an interesting book. To summarize, organized human societies tend to develop a “wealth pump” whereby the wealthy and powerful influence the rules of the game to appropriate an ever larger share of a society’s wealth and power for themselves, at the expense of ordinary people. “Ordinary people” is not just the median or what we think…
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R.I.P., Vernor Vinge
Vernor Vinge died on March 20, 2024. I am not sure it is necessary for a person to have a “favorite author”, and I might not give the same answer every day, but if pressed I might come up with Vernor Vinge. I stumbled first across his essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era around the same time I stumbled across Bill Joy’s Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us…
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Netanyahu
This is an article from 1996 in something called the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs. Here are some facts about Benjamin Netanyahu as reported by this article.
He went to high school in suburban Philadelphia. (I looked up elsewhere, and it was Cheltenham high school. This is a public school district in a not particularly posh area.) Then MIT.
He was a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, at…
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weather forecasting
This is interesting. It is not 100% clear to me what the measure of accuracy is below, but the plot shows how much weather forecasting has improved over the last 50 years or so. A 3-5 day forecast is highly accurate now, and 3-5 are not that different. It’s interesting to me that there is such as large drop off in accuracy between a 7 and 10 day forecast – that is not necessarily intuitive, but…
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immigration by the numbers
This post on a blog called Demography Unplugged is a nice piece of data journalism. I have been trying to figure out if there is really a “border crisis”, or if challenges that are typical at the border are being exaggerated and cherry picked in an election year.
Measuring immigration is tricky, and this article explains how people try to do it. Basically, you want to know net migration, which…
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nuclear reactors on the moon
According to Breitbart (yes, I occasionally peruse Breitbart to see what propaganda spin they are putting on current events and because they occasionally pick up on a story others do not), Russia and China are considering a joint moon research base powered by a nuclear reactor. NASA is also considering a research base powered by nuclear power. This makes sense to me in a technological sense. What…
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Biden crumbles to dust
I thought the State of the Union went okay for Biden. No doubt, a medically appropriate dose of a 100% legal methamphetamine prescribed by a doctor could help a person get through something like that.
Oh, but the Onion captures the spirit put out by the other party’s senile candidate so well…
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Ralph Nader on Gaza
I haven’t made up my mind on the Gaza situation, and therefore I haven’t talked a lot about it. And I probably shouldn’t, but I want to get my own thoughts in order. You can stop reading here if you want.
The October 7 attacks were horrific and it is entirely understandable why Israel would choose an overwhelming and violent response. In case we forget the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. invaded not one…
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Belarus
This might seem like a random topic, but Peter Turchin got me interested in Belarus. By his telling, sure, Lukashenko is a thug who has tortured and disappeared his political rivals, but he is a thug who has delivered some economic success and quality of life for his people. He has blocked potential oligarchs and maintained something along the lines of the original vision of Soviet state-owned…
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what are U.S. special forces up to?
Naked Capitalism has a long article which links to a lot of other long articles.
SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialised and secret missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations[.]
One of [SOCOM’s] key components is the Joint…
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native wildflowers from bulbs
For something random and different (but hey, it’s meteorological spring right?), here are some wildflowers native to the U.S. that can be grown from bulbs.
Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium atlanticum), native to eastern North America
Calochortus spp. lily, native to western NA
Dwarf-crested iris (Iris cristata), native to eastern NA
Fritillaria spp., native to western NA
large camas (Camassia…
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