Arthur C Clarke and the futurist's inflection point

Clarke circa 1964:

Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation because the prophet invariably falls between two stools. If his predictions sound at all reasonable, you can be quite sure that within 20 or, at most, 50 years, the progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative. On the other hand, if by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn. This has proved to be true in the past, and it will inevitably be true, even more so, of the century to come.

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.

So, if what I say to you now seems to be very reasonable, then I'll have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable, have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.

I can't quite recommend Paul Collins' recent New Yorker piece about the book Toward the Year 2018. Collins doesn't bring a lot of fresh insight to the subject (if you want a deeper understanding of how people in the past looked at what was formerly the future, stick with Gizmodo's Paleofuture), but it did turn me on to what appears to be a fascinating book (I'll let you know in a few days) which provides a great jumping off point for a discussion I've been meaning to have for a while.

If you wanted to hear the future in late May, 1968, you might have gone to Abbey Road to hear the Beatles record a new song of John Lennon’s—something called “Revolution.” Or you could have gone to the decidedly less fab midtown Hilton in Manhattan, where a thousand “leaders and future leaders,” ranging from the economist John Kenneth Galbraith to the peace activist Arthur Waskow, were invited to a conference by the Foreign Policy Association. For its fiftieth anniversary, the F.P.A. scheduled a three-day gathering of experts, asking them to gaze fifty years ahead. An accompanying book shared the conference’s far-off title: “Toward the Year 2018.”
…

“MORE AMAZING THAN SCIENCE FICTION,” proclaims the cover, with jacket copy envisioning how “on a summer day in the year 2018, the three-dimensional television screen in your living room” flashes news of “anti-gravity belts,” “a man-made hurricane, launched at an enemy fleet, [that] devastates a neutral country,” and a “citizen’s pocket computer” that averts an air crash. “Will our children in 2018 still be wrestling,” it asks, “with racial problems, economic depressions, other Vietnams?”

Much of “Toward the Year 2018” might as well be science fiction today. With fourteen contributors, ranging from the weapons theorist Herman Kahn to the I.B.M. automation director Charles DeCarlo, penning essays on everything from “Space” to “Behavioral Technologies,” it’s not hard to find wild misses. The Stanford wonk Charles Scarlott predicts, exactly incorrectly, that nuclear breeder reactors will move to the fore of U.S. energy production while natural gas fades. (He concedes that natural gas might make a comeback—through atom-bomb-powered fracking.) The M.I.T. professor Ithiel de Sola Pool foresees an era of outright control of economies by nations—“They will select their levels of employment, of industrialization, of increase in GNP”—and then, for good measure, predicts “a massive loosening of inhibitions on all human impulses save that toward violence.” From the influential meteorologist Thomas F. Malone, we get the intriguing forecast of “the suppression of lightning”—most likely, he figures, “by the late 1980s.”

But for every amusingly wrong prediction, there’s one unnervingly close to the mark. It’s the same Thomas Malone who, amid predictions of weaponized hurricanes, wonders aloud whether “large-scale climate modification will be effected inadvertently” from rising levels of carbon dioxide. Such global warming, he predicts, might require the creation of an international climate body with “policing powers”—an undertaking, he adds, heartbreakingly, that should be “as nonpolitical as possible.” Gordon F. MacDonald, a fellow early advocate on climate change, writes a chapter on space that largely shrugs at manned interplanetary travel—a near-heresy in 1968—by cannily observing that while the Apollo missions would soon exhaust their political usefulness, weather and communications satellites would not. “A global communication system . . . would permit the use of giant computer complexes,” he adds, noting the revolutionary potential of a data bank that “could be queried at any time.”

[Though it's a bit off-topic, I have to take a moment to push back against the "near-heresy" comment. Though most people probably assumed manned space exploration would have more of a future after '68, and it certainly would've gone farther had LBJ run for and won a second term (Johnson had been space exploration's biggest champion dating back to his days in the Senate), but the program had always been controversial. "Can't we find better ways to spend that money here on earth?" was a common refrain from both the left and the right.]

As you go through the predictions listed here, you'll notice that they range from the reasonably accurate to the wildly overoptimistic or, perhaps overly pessimistic, depending on your feelings toward weaponized hurricanes (let's just go with ambitious). This matches up fairly closely to what you find in Arthur C Clarke's video essay of a few years earlier, parts that seem prescient while others come off as something from that months issue of Galaxy Magazine.

It's important to step back and remember that it didn't used to be like that. If you had gone back 20, 50, one hundred years, and asked experts to predict what was coming and how soon we get here, you almost certainly would have gotten many answers that seriously underestimated upcoming technological developments. If anything, the overly conservative would probably have outweighed the overly ambitious.

The 60s seemed to be the point when our expectations started exceeding our future. I have some theories as to why Clarke's advice for prognostication stopped working, but they'll have to wait till another post.

Removing the senate

This is Joseph

I normally have great respect for Ezra Klein.  His stuff is awesome and I always click on his articles.  Which is why this article annoyed me. 

Consider the proposal:

Bennet has introduced the “Shutdown Accountability Resolution.” The effect would be that from the moment a shutdown starts, most members of the Senate would be forced to remain in the Senate chambers from 8 am to midnight, all day, every day. No weekends. No fundraisers. No trips home to see their families or constituents.

The proposal would not, itself, resolve the DREAMer debate that’s driving the federal government toward shutdown. But it would give the senators involved a powerful incentive to find a solution. This is a body that typically comes together in Washington a few days a week for only part of the year. The last thing they want is to be tied to the Senate floor day after day, for weeks or months on end.

Here’s how the resolution works: It would change Senate rules so that following a lapse in funding for one or more federal agencies — the technical meaning of a shutdown — the Senate must convene at 8 am the next day. Upon convening, the presiding officer forces a quorum call to see who’s present.

In the absence of a quorum, the Senate moves to a roll call vote demanding the attendance of absent senators. If a sufficient number are absent, the sergeant at arms will be asked to arrest them. This process is repeated every hour between 8 am and midnight until a bill passes reopening the government.

The result is that senators need to remain on or near the Senate floor for the duration of the shutdown. They can’t go wait it out in the comfort of their own home.

Perhaps they omitted the piece where the house of representatives is also penalized.  But a budget needs to be passed by both the House and the Senate, right?  So how does this prevent the strategy of the House passing a budget and then leaving for six weeks?  They aren't required to be present 8 am to midnight every day.  I read the whole thing and it seems awfully specific to senators.

So if the house passes something then the senate can rubber stamp it, or being sitting around until they do.  House members can be on the golf course. 

After all, if the senators make an agreement on a budget, doesn't it have to pass the house as well? 

It also hides the real story, which is that budget reconciliation would let a budget be passed with 50 votes.  There was a decision here to put a priority on tax cuts without working out a budget at the same time.  The idea that they would need to compromise now was baked into using the previous strategy for a tax cut.  But it doesn't help to then make the senate a hostage of the house. 

Similarily, what happens if a president vetoes the budget?  Punishing senators for other people's actions seems to result in a stable outcome of making the senate impotent.  Now this could be the goal, but that seems like a different conversation (should there be a senate). 

Feel kind of bad about making fun of Soylent now

Remind me to throw in some raw water jokes next time I write something about the culture of Silicon Valley.

Double blind peer review

This is Joseph

I was reading this piece by Andrew Gelman and this led me to this other article in the comments.  The discussion was a journal being annoyed by preprints, and one reason that people wondered if it might be so was double blind peer review.  So the comments on the challenges of double blind peer review are well worth thinking about:

A related problem with mandatory DBPR, if the journal wants to actually attempt to enforce it (in my experience, many problems in any form of professional life start when someone creates a rule and then tries to be consistent in enforcing it, despite the messiness of the world), is that in addition to the assumption that the manuscript is not available through Google, it also assumes, more completely, that it has not previously been seen by the reviewers in an unblinded state.  That seems like a rather untenable assumption, especially in specialised fields.  PSPB is a well-respected journal by any measure, but like any journal ("Cell wouldn't take it? Let's try Nature!") it may not always be the first port of call for the authors who submit there.  Should the reviewer who has already seen the manuscript unblinded on behalf of another journal recuse herself because she knows who the author is, thus depriving the editor of an expert opinion (which, as a bonus, could presumably be provided very quickly

I am actually pretty good at guessing who the authors are when I review a double blinded paper, even if I am not specifically trying.  Part of it is that some pieces are informative -- a paper on the Framingham Heart Study has a limited pool of typical authors.  Journals ask people to include notes about ethical review (gives the institution).  And the citations are a pretty big clue if there is any building upon previous work.

Does this mean that I shouldn't review in areas where I know the field well?

It is not a trivial problem.  But I think I might err on the side of free information above strict blinding if I had to make a call.  But it's definitely an issue I want to think more about.  

Montclair SocioBlog makes a good point

This is Joseph

I don't completely agree with this sentiment, but I think it is worth deconstructing the underlying thinking pattern that the author identifies:

Last week, a New York Times op-ed about Medicare had a title that characterized the Republican approach: “You’re Sick. Whose Fault Is That?” The same idea applied to abortion would give us “You’re Pregnant. Whose Fault Is That?” It’s a great question if you are interested in assessing blame. The payoff comes in the currency of feelings – guilt (for those with illness or unwanted pregnancy), pride or righteousness for the healthy and virtuous. But if you’re interested in effective policy to improve people’s health or reduce abortion, “whose fault?” is the wrong question.Why not ask, “How can we help?”

There is a question about whether the question"how can we help?" is the best approach.  I think that it is terribly unhelpful to focus on judging others for their struggles, misfortunes, and challenges.  Everyone has a moment when they are down or require help.  If you don't believe that then ask how many infants are completely self-sufficient and don't require at least some degree of assistance.

Focusing on judging is a barrier to solving problems, both social and in in terms of public health.  It is a good thing to remember.

Infrastructure thoughts of the day

This is Joseph

Some thoughts on transportation and infrastructure.

Duncan Black points out a new proposal to create dedicated lanes for driverless cars.  I think it goes without saying that creating dedicated lanes will make any transportation system look good and that it says a lot that we are thinking about this for expensive cars but not buses.

In parallel, there is a nice article on how high speed trains can replace airplanes for medium distance trips.  To some extent this advantage comes from us deliberately making air travel inefficient.  Whether or not we need TSA screening, do we need long queues?  I like trains, I wish we had more of them, but I think the real barrier is the will to create efficient infrastructure projects. Should Paris be more efficient than New York?  

Mark Palko and Andrew Gelman are grappling with this inefficiency in the comments to this post.  Mark is assuming the stifling world of Los Angeles where even small improvements in density require huge amounts of political capital to change restrictive zoning and to reach out to the impacted communities.  Andrew asks the obvious question of why we can't just let construction companies fix these issues without central planning getting involved (via changing the zoning).  It's a good question.  My pet theory is that we've let house prices get so high that even small changes in value equal huge gains and losses, making local homeowners resistant to improved zoning.    

Too busy for a real post...

... but not too busy to give you a flying machine fix

Looks almost too pretty to fly, but it did.

Scientific American June 17, 1905. “It traveled at a high speed for over a mile, and then came slowly and steadily to the ground ... The experiment was attended with complete success, and testified to the efficiency of the design.”

When the YIMBYs don't have the answer

This is a bit LA specific but you can probably generalize the conclusions to other areas.

While there are certainly cases where simple solutions work with complex problems, you should always beware when the appeal rests disproportionately on that simplicity, particularly when combined with ideology and vested interests.

Recently in Los Angeles, we've seen a powerful alliance between utopian urbanists, free market advocates, and real estate developers. The rhetoric has been lofty, framing their initiatives as a battle against climate change, congestion, and urban decay. A look at the details, however, raises serious questions and perhaps reveals the fundamental flaw of the alliance, that utopianists who depend on market forces and business self-interests are perhaps bound to be disappointed.

Before we get into cases, let's review a few general principles. Building housing so that residents have access to good public transportation is generally a great idea, but it is important to define what constitutes "good" here. Since the objective is to reduce or even eliminate the need for cars, the public transportation options need to be reasonably competitive in terms of range of destinations, speed, convenience, and pleasantness, roughly in that order.

The first is particularly important in terms of jobs and commuting. The main problem with the naïve live-where-you-work model is that people often live in multi-income households and frequently change jobs. This also brings up an aspect of public transportation that is frequently forgotten by people who write about buses and trains but don't actually use them. While as-the-crow-flies distance is usually a pretty good indicator of travel time if you have a car or a bike, it can be almost meaningless when you are relying on other forms of transportation. In a place like Los Angeles, it is easy to find examples where one 10 mile trip will take 20 minutes while another will take two hours.

A good (albeit arbitrary) metric for evaluating public transportation as a commuting option would be to count the number of destinations that can be reached by bus, train, and bicycle within a half hour (maybe 45 minutes). Based on that metric and other factors such as available land and demand for middle and lower income housing, there are a number of spots in LA that would be ideal for development.

Chinatown would be perfect. In addition to having its own train station, it's within walking distance of Union Station, the major transportation hub for the county. Between the different bus and rail lines, you have a reasonable commute to much of greater LA. Another excellent candidate would be the section of the Green Line that connects the silver line in the blue line in South LA.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you were to look at the map of the LA train system and try to find the worst possible place for building housing around stations, you would very probably end up picking the Expo line to Santa Monica. While overall a good addition to the system and certainly better than nothing, the Expo line is a slow and exceptionally badly connected train. The commuter relying on it would have either a very small list of destinations or would face daunting travel times.

You can probably guess where this is going. The one place where everyone's talking about this new urban vision is the one place it's least likely to work, Santa Monica. There are vacant lots used for parking within walking distance of Union Station and a desperate need for good affordable housing in places like Watts. Train station housing developments in those areas make far, far more sense from a public transportation standard and from an economic development standard, but given the choice between a trendy, upscale beach neighborhood and Compton, where do you think the real estate the money is going to flow?

(Yes, I do realize that there's a trickle-down argument, but LA's a big place and the idea that lowering prices in fashionable beach communities will have a noticeable effect on the market in East LA seems unlikely.)

 At the risk of pounding home the obvious,bad housing regulations and zoning laws have done a lot of damage and NIMBYs bear a great deal of the blame. Under the right circumstances, intelligent deregulation and selective application of market forces could help alleviate some serious problems, but blind faith in those forces and in the enlightened self-interest of developers is foolish and dangerous.

Another satisfied Comcast customer

From XKCD

Linking health insurance and employment: does the saga ever end?

This is Joseph

Yesterday, I wrote about Matt Reed talking about unions.  He had an earlier post on how an aging work force was doing bad things to the health insurance costs at his institution.  His solution is pretty obvious from a policy perspective -- linking health insurance to employment is looking like less and less of a good idea over time.  Among other things, it reduces job mobility and insulates customers from directly seeing the relevant costs (a second payer causes problems).  But it also reduces the quality of life for older adults.

One of the commentators on the post had an excellent point about how it discourages things like early retirement for burnt out staff:

Here is how we think Matt: Retiring before 65 is economic suicide. Even if you have a decent pension and some serious savings, a quick look at the private health insurance market will dissuade you from even thinking about it. This is doubly the case if you have any known health problems. Those $2,000 a month premiums, $5,000 deductibles and $7,500 out-of-pocket maximums mean you are $30,000-some a year in the hole the day you walk out the door. If you become disabled and don't have private disability insurance that you bought when you were 20 it is even worse. I have known people who have been fired before age 65, but I don't know any that went out the door on their own. (Oh, and your chances of finding another job? Zero! Unless you like driving Uber.)

It's astonishing that costs of health insurance exceed that of many people's pensions.   It is also likely that we've long since hit the point of diminishing returns on trying to get people to pay more in deductibles.

Now I am not unaware of the risks and costs of transitioning to a single payer style of system, especially when health care costs are already high.  But it isn't absolutely clear to me that these high costs are necessarily helping improve health, overall, which is an issue.  But it is also clear that suddenly radically reducing compensation for a huge segment of the economy is likely to cause . . . disruption.

But it is a problem worth thinking about and it would likely pay large dividends to have a good policy plan for improvement.  I mean it isn't like there are nearby functional models that work in decentralized and diverse English speaking countries with a large immigrant population that manage to have a decent life expectancy.  Right?

Colleges and unions

This is Joseph

Matt Reed is worried about unions in discussions of the financial stability of colleges:

Internally, for instance, many public colleges (including my own) are unionized. Collective bargaining agreements, and sometimes state laws, can greatly narrow the strike zone for any prospective downsizing. When you have to do layoffs by seniority, and your salaries are mostly determined by seniority, the most expensive employees are the most protected. That makes the math harder.

While I get that this creates problems, there are bigger issues that everyone wants to ignore.  I want to talk later about health insurance costs, and how that creates a relatively large crisis.

But the idea that job security is a problem suggests that there is already an assumption of neoliberal ideals of a lack of security in life.  Keep in mind that wealth provides options and people with lots of money have an implicit security -- you have options if working is optional or if you can cover a gap without problems. Why have we evolved from seeing people as resources to liabilities?  Why would you not want to keep your most experienced employees?

It is also worth noting that institutional loyalty is much harder to develop if senior managers are constantly worried about high seniority employees.  How can you be loyal to a place that sees you as a barrier to efficient lay-offs.

Now I do get the main point -- that colleges are meant to be grown and shrunk in slow and organic ways.  It is not a style of organization that works well with either fast growth or fast shrinking.  This suggests that maybe stabilization of finding (both directions) should be a piece of the conversation.  After all, doesn't it make sense to be able to plan?

It took Coke a while to escape its patent medicine origins

As this July 6, 1907 issue of Scientific American demonstrates.

Self-driving cars would be wonderful

This is Joseph

Another new year topic seems to be that of self driving cars.  This is a nice piece on the subject, with a smart take on the problems of having a human driver ready to take over: 

First, as one might infer, the human who is suddenly asked to intervene is going to have to quickly asses the situation. The handoff delay means a slower response than if a human had been driving the entire time. Second, and even worse, the human suddenly asked to take control might not even see what the emergency need is. Third, the car itself might not recognize that it is about to get into trouble. Recall that Uber tried to blame a car accident when its self driving car was making a left turn on the oncoming driver, when if you parsed the story carefully, it was the Uber car that was in the wrong.

This is exactly correct.  Problems that can be foreseen well in advance really don't typically need a human driver.  It is the moment that things go wrong that you need a sense of judgment.  And I can't think of a more boring thing to be doing than constantly watching the car drive.  I would much rather either check out and do something else (e.g. read) or be accumulating information on issues like road surface slipperiness. 

Remotely located drivers are even worse (imagine a bad cellular connection during the driving emergency). 

If we have a way to make a self-driving vehicle work than I am an enthusiast, but I want to make sure that the new option is better than the current technology.  We might get there, but it is during an emergency that I want the enhanced reflexes of a computer the most. 

Bitcoin skepticism

This is Joseph

This is a very good critique of bitcoin and blockchain approaches in general.  It pairs with some recent work by Megan McArdle, who is also skeptical.  It's got to be a great solution for something if this part is even close to correct:

Plus, it’s not actually that good a payment system — Visa can handle sixty thousand transactions per second, while Bitcoin historically taps out at seven. There are technical modifications going on to improve Bitcoin’s efficiency, but as a starting point, you have something that’s about 0.01% as good at clearing transactions. (And, worth noting, for those seven transactions a second Bitcoin is already estimated to use 35 times as much energy as Visa. If you brought Bitcoin’s transaction volume up to Visa’s it would be using as much electricity as the rest of the world put together.)

I value privacy in my transactions but I also value fast and cheap, as well.  I am not sure what problem this solves that cash or gold can't solve, given that they also have the slow transaction problem.  Cash has the added advantage that things are priced in it, making it a bit easier to come to agreements about the cost of things (a volatile currency is a bad store of value).

So I suspect that this is one more case of a market showing irrational exuberance.  Which should get us to wonder about what other price discovery mistakes could be embedded in markets, and why it is key to think about how and why a market can fail.  Bitcoin is a small issue, but health care is a much bigger one and it is quite possible that we have similar issues of market failure there as well.  

So food for thought.  

All of Ryan's speeches sound better in the original Newspeak

For years, Joseph and I have been arguing over the use of terms like “Orwellian.” His position was that certain comparisons (such as those to Hitler and the Nazis) were so emotionally charged and carried so much baggage that you could seldom productively employ them in a rational argument. My counterargument was that if the similarities were both fundamental and specific and the relationships were truly analogous, you should use the most apt comparison.

At the time I think he got the better of me in the debate, but conditions have changed and I am feeling stronger about my arguments. Certainly a reference to Orwell wouldn't be out of place in this excellent column by Michael Hiltzik.

One expects politicians to conceal their intentions behind a obfuscating scrim. The problem is that news organizations become complicit in their underhanded efforts to cut social program benefits by employing the benefit-cutters' terminology.

Just after Christmas, for example, Politico achieved a multi-fecta in an article about disagreements between House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over Medicaid and Medicare.

Reading from the top down, the article referred to "overhauling" the programs, to "reform," "welfare and entitlement changes" and "policy modifications." These are Republican terms for benefit cuts. There's no excuse for journalists repeating them without defining them. But one has to drill pretty deeply into the Politico piece to find the first mention of benefit "cuts" (to paragraph 12, actually).
Politicians aiming to cut Social Security and Medicare use weasel words to hide their plans. Let's call them on it.


Other weasel words often found creeping into what purport to be objective reports about social programs are "reshape," "revamp," "modernize" and especially "fix." As we've observed in the past, Republican plans for Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps and other such programs are "fixes" in the same sense that one "fixes" a cat or the Mafia "fixes" an informer.

I've mentioned (in another context) the warning delivered in a 1965 speech by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) about what he called "semantic infiltration" in policy debates: "If the other fellow can get you to use his words, he wins."

Retirement and the issue of social security

This is Joseph

Every once in a while I hear about how social security is a monster that will destroy the federal budget if it is not reigned in.  Seriously, just google about the social security trust fund and you will be amazed.  So I was curious as to what the average benefit looks like.

According to Social Security, itself, the average benefit in November 2017 for retired workers was $1,375.29.  It was less for people living on disability.  That averages out to about sixteen thousand dollars per year.  The poverty line, for one person, is twelve thousand dollars per year as of January 2017.

What this actually means is that there isn't actually a lot of room for cuts here. Remember, that is the average and many participants will end up with even less.  Even in low cost environments, this suggests that social security is mostly a hedge against actual starvation and homeless, more than a real plan to retire.

So keep this in mind when there is a discussion of the need to cut entitlement programs to handle the new deficit crisis.  There isn't really a lot here to cut without having very profound economic impacts on vulnerable senior citizens.  And it is not really a driver of increased costs:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security’s share of gross domestic product will rise by about 1.5 percentage points over the next three decades, to 6.4%. The share going to Medicare, Medicaid and the Childrens Health Insurance Program (if Congress ever gets around to reauthorizing CHIP) will rise by 3.3 percentage points, to 8.8%.

Now there is a looming problem with medical costs, but these apply to all forms of medical insurance and not just public programs. 

It's inexpensive and bare bones now.  Reform, other than maybe increasing pay-outs to recipients who end up below the poverty line is likely to do real harm for surprisingly small savings (and keep in mind that we recently enacted a huge tax cut that suggests that deficits are not an immediate concern).  Finally, undermining this program undermines the justification for the quite regressive payroll tax, which is a key piece of revenue now that we keep cutting income taxes.

Rethinking crossownership

[Warning, I'm pretty much shooting from the hip here. This is not an area where I am knowledgeable and I do not have the time to research the subject properly. As a result, this is very much written to the good-enough-for-blogging standard, so it would be wise to double check any of the following assertions before passing them on.]

As a general rule, I tend to be skeptical of "we need this to be competitive" arguments against regulation and antitrust enforcement. Usually these claims come down to an excuse for gouging the customer or an attempt by incompetent managers to survive by gaming the system. If you can't make a go of a business without monopoly/monopsony power, then you probably aren't very good at your job.

There are, of course, exceptions, cases where technological and economic changes really have made it difficult for even the best run companies to survive, even when those companies serve a real and necessary social good. Local journalism is a perfect case in point. Some of the best reporting I've seen over the past few years has come out of newspapers, and yes, television stations outside of the major markets of New York and LA. I particularly want to single out the TV reporters because, though we all tend to mock them, they've been responsible for some remarkably good work on stories that, though important, are often ignored by institutions like the New York Times.

John Oliver hit many of these same points in his excellent piece on Sinclair broadcasting.



.

Anything we can do to encourage more and better local journalism is worth pursuing. There are considerable synergies and cost savings from combining a newspaper and a television (and possibly even a radio) station. Furthermore, in an age of cable and the Internet, I am much less concerned with the potential abuses from having this kind of cross ownership.

The key word here (and it is absolutely essential) is "local." As soon as you start to scale up, the social benefits start to drop off while the potential for abuse increases exponentially. As the experience with Sinclair has shown us, ownership across many markets actually tends to decrease the amount of local journalism and, perhaps more importantly, the amount of local editorial control.

Put simply, the standard I have in mind is that crossownership is acceptable, perhaps even desirable, if you're talking about relatively small players in relatively constrained regions. If, on the other hand, you're talking about big players (particularly those like Sinclair with a history of stifling local journalistic autonomy), the tighter the ownership restrictions the better.

Happy New Year from Winsor McCay.

Should we care that the congestion tax is regressive?

This is Joseph

Over at Vox, Matt Ygelsias very nicely hits on one of my pet peeves about people calling congestion taxes (and similarly gas taxes) regressive:

Again and again, one hears the objection that congestion fees are regressive, but I think this is doubly mistaken. Analytically, it's true that congestion fees let the rich off relatively easy, but it's also the case that it's poor people who are disproportionately likely to not own cars and to benefit from faster buses.

But more to the point, it's easy to alter your overall tax system to make a congestion charge clearly progressive. The two main options are either to use the revenue to finance a sales tax cut (sales taxes are extremely regressive) or to pay out a "congestion dividend" to all the city's residents.

 I think that the current conversation about taxes has poisoned people's ability to be objective about these things.  Every time there is a new source of revenue, there is a push to cut progressive taxes (like the income tax).  The recent cut of the top income tax bracket is a case in point.

But raising revenue can be used to provide income support and social services.  It is a two step process, although I can understand the confusion about this given how we seem to focus only on a "taxes are bad meme".

But Matt is completely correct that poor people don't always have cars.  And if good (i.e. fast and reliable) bus service made it possible for more families to live car-free then that would be a big win, both for road safety and pollution.  Or maybe safer roads make bicycles work (even greener and cheaper).  Now this requires a commitment to good public transit services (or bike lanes), but I remain puzzled as to why this is remotely controversial.

I also want to note that the people making this argument seem to have no trouble with regressive taxation in other contexts.  The payroll tax is more regressive than the income tax.  Want to bet which one we just cut? Sales taxes are regressive, but they show no signs of being targeted in favor of an increased capital gains tax (which is progressive).  I am not saying that there are not other considerations, but I always find it puzzling how regressive is brought out in this context and not any other.

I will become much more sympathetic to the "regressive" objection when it is applied more broadly.  At the margin a congestion tax can finish a family financially.  But so too can sales taxes, which could make the difference between sufficient and insufficient income.  So if we are going to discuss regressive taxes, can we start with the elephant in the room. It's really an astonishing example of details are just not thought through.  If this is the standard then I don't see regressive as a serious problem with a tax that can be a) remedied with the right spending decisions and b) has positive social consequences.  So can we drop this point? 

Please?

The Last Jedi and narrative risks *major spoilers*

This is Joseph

The last Jedi is visually amazing and has some great character moments.  The plot is not the best, although that has rarely been a strength of Star Wars movies.  But I did want to comment on how the plot was, in a very odd way, just as safe and conservation as the Force Awakens. 

Needless to say: SPOILERS

REALLY, no kidding, SPOILERS




The Force awakens was basically the plot of a New Hope rehashed for a new group of heroes.  It is not necessarily the wrong artistic choice -- bringing a series back to the basics can create a fertile ground for exploring new paths forward.  Unfortunately, the Last Jedi seems to have managed to mangle the plot. 

The main conceit of the new series is that they reverse expectations at every step, often just to reverse them:

1. Luke is a grumpy old man and not a wise Jedi master
2. The plans that the heroes try cost lives and don't save them (Finn's expedition leads to the death of most of the surviving members of the resistance)
3. Poe's reckless actions make things worse, not better, and being a hot shot ends up being counter-productive
4. Snoke is killed immediately
5. Turning on his master doesn't redeem Kylo Ren
6. Rey falls for Kylo not Finn
7. Heroic self-sacrifice is stopped by another character, with no viable plan to prevent everyone from dying

I could go on, but the trick seems to be to reverse expectations at every turn and try to make it fresh and original as a result.  But what struck me is how they somehow managed to avoid all of the real narrative risks that they could have taken with the story.

And we end up with the status quo.  A resistance against an empire that is overwhelmingly strong and is led by a person strong in the dark side is being led by a small group of heroes.  None of the new people died.  Luke becomes a force ghost, just like Yoda. The situation at the beginning is exactly like the end and we don't really have new plot angles that take us in a new and fascinating direction.

If you are going to invert expectations then you should create new paths forward.  Instead we get the same set up and very little narrative payoff.  Maybe that isn't the main thing in a Star Wars movie, but it definitely detracted from the otherwise very beautiful piece of film.  

Robots reanimating dead musicians

From NPR (May 28, 2007)

Pianist Glenn Gould's classic 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations has never been out of print. Yet this week, Sony Classical will release a brand-new recording of it.

It’s actually a recording of a "re-performance" of the music, designed by a North Carolina software company called Zenph.

The idea is simple: Old recordings sound old. Decades of amazing musical performances are hidden behind the limits of audio technology at the time they were recorded.

The Zenph "re-performance" process isn't a remastering — that is, trying to fix an existing recording with equalization or noise reduction. Instead, it's a new recording of a performance that scientifically matches the earlier one. Zenph uses a Yamaha Disklavier Pro, an actual acoustic piano that can, with a computer's help, play back with microscopically accurate timing and sensitivity.
...
Zenph will be turning to jazz next, with a recording of “re-performances'” of Art Tatum, including a live concert performance they hope to re-create, with no one at the piano, at Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

And you think we're shrill

Ad running in Scientific American, 1905.

Merry Muskmas to all

[I've been going back and forth as to whether or not some of this is meant to be read as parody. If I missed some subtle wink from the author of the piece, pointed out in the comment section I will amend this post.]

I've been on the Elon Musk beat for quite a while now, and I thought I had a pretty good idea where the upper bound was for hype and journalistic credulity, but this Rolling Stone cover story by Neil Strauss really does set a new standard.

Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the Earthling who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonization.
...
“Musk is a titan, a visionary, a human-size lever pushing forward massive historical inevitabilities – the kind of person who comes around only a few times in a century”

And that's pretty much the level of critical scrutiny you can expect from the entire piece.  It's not just the lack of skepticism – – we've seen plenty of that – – but the obliviousness to the need for skepticism.  Up until now, most reporters for major publications have at least acknowledged that some level of skepticism would have been appropriate. True, many of the disclaimers are little more than lip service, but the journalist on those stories understood that they should do at least the bare minimum.

Strauss is the first writer I can think of who addresses proposals like the Hyperloop completely without any mention of its critics and the serious questions about its viability.

The article even has a photo caption that reads 'Inspecting the Hyperloop, which will transport people from city to city in record time.' Not "may" or even "will probably," but "will" despite a widely held consensus among transportation and infrastructure experts that this is unlikely to be viable as anything more than a glorified amusement park ride in the foreseeable future.

We may come back to this article. There's a great deal of unintentional journalism here, insights into Musk's real and extraordinary gifts for motivation and promotion, talents that have led to some truly amazing accomplishments. There is also an interesting cautionary tale in the way Strauss lets his subject steer the narrative away from these genuinely important and impressive points and toward unquestioning acceptance of a self mythologizing narrative.

For now, though, I'm just going to let it stand with this. Frankly, reading a puff peace this inflated takes a lot out of me.

Kids and Cars 2

This is Joseph

At some point I thought there was a comment on my last post asking about walking to daycare.  It's actually closer than I thought in terms of time: 3.8 miles which Google maps thinks will take me 79 minutes.  With a jogging stroller this would work if I only did one pick-up or drop off a day. 

But I still wonder why it is such a huge deal to have daycares located near places of employment; does it make me a socialist to wonder why the extra commute works (and I am happy to pay marker rates of mid-twenty thousand per year -- it's the price of a kid). 

Kids and cars

This is Joseph

Duncan Black has another post up about how nice it is to live in a city, and have a lot of options to avoid driving.  I lived this way for much of my life.  But now I am trying to get a child into daycare.  After discovering that daycares in some cities (like mine) have wait lists that are years long (not a joke), the question of why don't you get a daycare near your house rather answers itself.  I am not sure why the coordination is so poor, but it makes a big difference.

So I decided to look at a commute from home to a daycare it is possible to get into (not easily) and then to work (and back).  Note that these times assume normal and fast flowing traffic (ha!), which can influence both buses and cars.

Home to daycare by car: 12 minutes
Home to daycare by bus (normal morning): 34 minutes

Daycare to work by car: 14-20 minutes (google maps gives a range)
Daycare to work by bus: 37 to 44 minutes (plus time to wait for a bus)

Presuming one spends 15 minutes doing kid drop-off and that you have exactly a median wait time for the bus on the way to work (15 minutes, as they typically come every 30 minutes) plus needing to be ten minutes early for the bus in the morning (because the bus coming early is an extra 30 minute wait) then the time to do a morning drop-off and get to work:

By car: 41 to 47 minutes
By bus: 111 to 118 minutes

Now, remember that this is doubled because you need to repeat it all at the end of the day.

A car is about 50 minutes and will likely be an hour with traffic and parking.  It's more expensive but it means that if I leave the house at 7 am then I can get back home at 6/6:30 pm or so, and have worked a full day, and have a buffer in case I am delayed so that I don't have to pay overtime rates at the daycare.

By bus, that's really 2 hours each way. This assumes that all of the buses come -- one bus that doesn't adds 30 minute increments. It is common at peak times of year for buses on campus to be full and not pick up any passengers.  In these cases, I might have to use a taxi occasionally, which definitely makes the cost savings seem less optimal (but noting compared to late fees).  If I aimed for opening of the daycare I would leave the house at 6 am, struggle to get to work at 8 am (see buses being 30 minutes apart and occasionally they get behind) and have to leave a 4 pm to make sure that I could make it all work (and not be late to daycare).  No lunch break is possible and now we have a 4 to 5 hour daily commute.  It's not that any leg is insane, it is that public transit needs to be exceedingly well designed to make it efficient to do a two location trip twice a day.

Now, you might ask about daycare at work.  It's at least a 3 year wait list for infant care and you get routinely bumped by priority groups (making 3 years very optimistic).  I guess some people are able to plan this well enough . . .  or are lucky enough to not be staff.  

Now, of course, an employer could make this a priority and get that waitlist dropped.  But that seems so . . . alien . . . to the way that places are run these days that I struggle to see it.

But so long as daycare is a requirement (and I am not wealthy enough to have either nannies or the ability to make one salary easily work) then it's really going to drive car ownership.  If you want to improve car reliance, then this seems like a very pertinent problem and a key place to start putting in some creative thinking.

Christmas Greetings from Slumberland

From the great Winsor McCay.

"Albert and Pogo's Christmas" by Walt Kelly

If you've gone through the holidays without hearing "Sugar Rum Cherry"...

 ... you have not had a cool Christmas.

Nine out of ten technomages recommend DNA-aligning essential oils for your essential oil needs

I've got more to say about this excellent New Yorker piece by Rachel Monroe (and about what Monroe does that other journalists should emulate). Her deep dive into the world of essential oils illuminates one of the most interesting corners of 21st century pseudo-science, the medical quackery that somehow appeals to the audiences of both Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop and Alex Jones' InfoWars.

For now now, though, I'm just going to highlight this beautiful example of magical heuristics, using the language of science to conceal fundamentally mystical thinking. [Remember to rub your screen three times clockwise before reading, unless using an Apple product, in which case it's counterclockwise.]

Disillusioned by Western medicine, Cohen began exploring other options. She studied with multiple healers and shamans; she read books with titles like “The Body Toxic” and pursued a massage-therapy license. As part of her training, she took a class on a massage technique called “raindrop therapy,” which incorporates essential oils—aromatic compounds made from plant material. At the time, essential oils were not well known, but Cohen was drawn to them right away. “From the very first moment with those oils, I noticed something was firing that hadn’t been firing,” she said. “I was deeply moved.”

Today, Cohen puts frankincense oil on her scalp every morning; when she feels a cold coming on, she downs an immune-system-boosting oil blend that includes clove, eucalyptus, and rosemary. On days when she has to negotiate a contract on behalf of an organization that she volunteers for, she uses nutmeg and spearmint to sharpen her focus. She earns the majority of her income working as a distributor for Young Living, a leading vender of essential oils.

Cohen is middle-aged, with a friendly, open face framed by graying curls. Though her house, in Long Beach, is full of New Age trappings—a statue of Ganesh, huge hunks of crystal—she speaks with the quick clip of someone who once gave a lot of corporate presentations. As we sat at her kitchen table, a glass globe puffed out clouds of tangerine-scented vapor.

Cohen offered me a glass of water enhanced with a few drops of an essential-oil blend called Citrus Fresh. “It helps the body detox,” she said. “Not that you’re toxic.” The water was subtly tangy, like a La Croix without the fizz.

Cohen went into her treatment room and came back with a small vial labelled “Clarity.” She put a few drops in my left palm. “This is good for getting your mind clear,” she said. “Rub it clockwise three times. That activates the electrical properties in the oil, and aligns your DNA.” Following Cohen’s instructions, I cupped my hands around my nose and inhaled deeply. The smell was heavier than that of perfume, so minty that it was almost medicinal. Cohen looked at me expectantly. “I feel perkier,” I ventured.

A few more words about the official game of Kružno, Slovakia*

While the gift-giving season is still upon us...

Back when I was teaching high school math, I got very much into games and puzzles as a way of teaching both specific concepts and more general skills like problem-solving and strategic thinking. In addition to all the standards (chess, checkers, etc.) and some interesting historical games, I started developing some of my own, mostly played on 6 x 6 x 6 hexagonal boards that I printed out and taped together.

I was particularly happy with the way one of these games, Kružno, turned out. It played well. The underlying dynamics were, as far as I could tell, unique, and it was what I like to call an elegant game, with very simple rules (it takes a bright seven-year-old about five minutes to catch on) supporting a reasonably high level of complexity and challenging play.

I ran off a small batch and tried my hand at selling them both individually and as part of a hexagonal game set (the 6 x 6 x 6 board can be used for dozens of contemporary and historical games). I sold a few and got some good feed back but realized I didn't have the risk-tolerance to take the business to the next level.

I've been working on an online Kružno. The logic's been worked out and I'm planning on getting it up and running next year. In the meantime, I'll keep the Amazon store up for a while longer. Check it out. I think you'll have fun with it.

* No, really.

As if you didn't have enough to worry about

[This is another one of those too-topical-to-ignore topics that I don't have nearly enough time to do justice to, but I suppose that's why God invented blogging.]

There's a huge problem that people aren't talking about nearly enough. More troublingly, when it does get discussed, it is usually treated as a series of unrelated problems, much like a cocaine addict who complains about his drug problem, bankruptcy, divorce, and encounters with loan sharks, but who never makes a causal connection between the items on the list.

Think about all of the recent news stories that are about or are a result of concentration/deregulation of media power and the inevitable consequences. Obviously, net neutrality falls under this category. So does the role that Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, Twitter played in the misinformation that influenced the 2016 election. The role of the platform monopolies in the ongoing implosion of digital journalism has been widely discussed by commentators like Josh Marshall. The Time Warner/AT&T merger has gotten coverage primarily due to the ethically questionable involvement of Donald Trump, with very little being said about the numerous other concerns. Outside of a few fan boys excited over the possibility of seeing the X-Men fight the Avengers, almost no one's talking about Disney's Fox acquisition.

It didn't used to be like this. For most of the 20th century, the government kept a vigilant watch for even potential accumulation of media power. Ownership was restricted. Movie studios were forced to sell their theaters (see United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc). The largest radio network was effectively forced to split in two (that's why we have ABC broadcasting today). Media companies were tightly regulated, their workforce was heavily unionized, and they were forced to jump through all manner of hoops before expanding into new markets to insure that the public good was being served.

In short, the companies were subjected to conditions which we have been told prevent growth, stifle innovation, and kill jobs. We can never know what would've happened had the government given these companies a freer hand but we can say with certainty that for media, the Post-war era was a period of explosive growth, fantastic advances, and incredible successes both economically and culturally. It's worth noting that the biggest entertainment franchises of the market-worshiping, anything-goes 21st century were mostly created under the yoke of 20th century regulation.

Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

[running late this year but there's still time]



A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can be one of the toughest times of the year.

If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping:

The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a big metal truck, a large can of Legos with enough pieces to keep up with an active imagination. You can get any of these for around twenty or thirty bucks at Wal-Mart or Costco;*

Shop smart. The better the deals the more toys can go in your cart;

No batteries. (I'm a strong believer in kid power);**

Speaking of kid power, it's impossible to be sedentary while playing with a basketball;

No toys that need lots of accessories;

For games, you're generally better off going with a classic;

No movie or TV show tie-ins. (This one's kind of a personal quirk and I will make some exceptions like Sesame Street);

Look for something durable. These will have to last;

For smaller children, you really can't beat Fisher Price and PlaySkool. Both companies have mastered the art of coming up with cleverly designed toys that children love and that will stand up to generations of energetic and creative play.

*I previously used Target here, but their selection has been dropping over the past few years and it's gotten more difficult to find toys that meet my criteria.

** I'd like to soften this position just bit. It's okay for a toy to use batteries, just not to need them. Fisher Price and PlaySkool have both gotten into the habit of adding lights and sounds to classic toys, but when the batteries die, the toys live on, still powered by the energy of children at play.

From the back of the Scientific American -- the ads they'd like you to forget

From June 19, 1909

From November 21, 1908

From February 2, 1902

Megan McArdle is worth reading today

This is Joseph

I want too outsource today's comments to Megan McArdle.  I don't agree with everything in her piece, but I think that she highlights the consequences of not working out due process for these issues.  The real underlying issue, which I think that she omits, is that powerful people have been protected by position of great privilege from facing the consequences of loathsome behavior. That has led to some justifiable rage, after years of torment and this needs to be thoughtfully considered.  But let's make sure that the path forward is developed on solid ground, because it would be a pity for this forward progress to be lost. 

"All that lava rushing 'round the corner" – – A musical accompaniment for the post-Moore GOP mood

We've been hearing a lot about growing Republican anxiety over a possible electoral "tsunami" in 2018. Without getting into the likelihood of this particular scenario, I would like to suggest a different natural disaster metaphor.

Note to AI researchers: why don't you forget about chess for a while

[Another game post brought to you by Kruzno.]

By digging into the rich history of board games (and possibly doing a little tweaking) I suspect we can come up with other abstract strategy games of perfect information that put humans and machines on a more equal footing, and more importantly, provide as or more interesting fields of study for AI. Of course, there's always go, but wouldn't it be fun to do something different for a change?

Whenever you need to make a survey of games, the best place to start is almost always David Parlett (followed by Sid Sackson but more on that later). Lots of promising potential candidates both historical and modern. To get things started, how about the medieval game that for a while rivaled chess for popularity, rithmomachy?

From Wikipedia.

Very little, if anything, is known about the origin of the game. But it is known that medieval writers attributed it to Pythagoras, although no trace of it has been discovered in Greek literature, and the earliest mention of it is from the time of Hermannus Contractus (1013–1054).

The name, which appears in a variety of forms, points to a Greek origin, the more so because Greek was little known at the time when the game first appeared in literature. Based upon the Greek theory of numbers, and having a Greek name, it is still speculated by some that the origin of the game is to be sought in the Greek civilization, and perhaps in the later schools of Byzantium or Alexandria.

The first written evidence of Rithmomachia dates back to around 1030, when a monk, named Asilo, created a game that illustrated the number theory of Boëthius' De institutione arithmetica, for the students of monastery schools. The rules of the game were improved shortly thereafter by the respected monk, Hermannus Contractus, from Reichenau, and in the school of Liège. In the following centuries, Rithmomachia spread quickly through schools and monasteries in the southern parts of Germany and France. It was used mainly as a teaching aid, but, gradually, intellectuals started to play it for pleasure. In the 13th century Rithmomachia came to England, where famous mathematician Thomas Bradwardine wrote a text about it. Even Roger Bacon recommended Rithmomachia to his students, while Sir Thomas More let the inhabitants of the fictitious Utopia play it for recreation.

The game was well enough known as to justify printed treatises in Latin, French, Italian, and German, in the sixteenth century, and to have public advertisements of the sale of the board and pieces under the shadow of the old Sorbonne.

Any other suggestions?

The sad part is, if you take away the joke bullet points, the list better than what you got in Car&Driver

XKCD on self-driving cars.

If we are going to talk about games, everyone should probably read this first.

[Brought to you by Kruzno]

I've long been an advocate of board games (particularly the abstract strategy variety). They're wonderful for both recreation and education, they can provide intriguing examples of mathematical and logical concepts, and, of particular relevance these days, they can be a great testing ground for AI research.

All of these purposes would be better suited if people were familiar with a wider range of games and knew more about their history. This brings us to the game designer and historian, David Parlett and his indispensable Oxford history of board games. I'll be coming back to this book in the future, but for now, this is just a general recommendation. If you're an educator, a researcher, or just someone with an interest in the topic, you should definitely try to get your hands on a copy.