First off, it's a 1961 documentary about what researchers and technocrats thought the future would be like. Postwar beliefs and attitudes about progress and technology are a long-standing obsession here at the blog. As the title quote indicates, the program captures the era's schizophrenic optimism, the idea that if we could avoid nuclear Armageddon, we'd be unstoppable.
For an added touch of relevance, the show's first half is focused on the founding of BrasÃlia.
However, the East Solano Plan, as proposed, can offer a model for how to build new cities with the whole ecosystem in mind, intentionally: dense housing, paired with walkable and transit-accessible necessities and amenities like jobs, parks, daycares, shops, and services.
— California YIMBY (@cayimby) June 19, 2024
Just to catch everyone up.
This would be an example of my concerns with naive YIMBYism.
It's almost like reducing sprawl wasn't really the goal
The advocates for this project have gone on at great length about all the great ideas and innovations in this proposal, how walkable and sustainable it will be, how the planners have thought through smart ways to use public spaces and encourage local dining and culture, but before we go down the rabbit hole and pursue the feasibility and impact of each of these ideas, this is a good time to step back and remind ourselves why density is considered a good thing and sprawl bad.
There are a lot of arguments for densification. It decreases the footprint required for housing. It reduces commuting time. It reduces the need for additional roads and other transportation infrastructure. It reduces carbon emissions and other pollution.
While these are all valid, all but the first (and in the West, probably least important) depend on how we define density. If were just talking about having a bunch of people living very close to each other, but still driving considerable distances work, shop, dine, etc., then our densification has accomplished little, and may have actually made things worse.
That last point is not just hypothetical. Though we can go back and forth on the magnitude, we note there are cases of new housing in San Francisco being taken by people who worked and previously lived in Silicon Valley. Assuming they were not fully remote, the result was to increase the time and distance being driven and all the negative externalities that go with that.
Now let's take a look at the Solano County project. We'll need more precise details and in-depth traffic impact studies to be more exact, but we are looking at a site roughly halfway between San Francisco/Oakland and Sacramento, slightly closer to the latter, with commute times ranging from 45 to an hour and 15 minutes. It will probably be forty-five minutes to an hour away from University of California at Davis. About the same to Stockton.
Though San Francisco is somewhat smaller and population than most people seem to think, when combined with Oakland we are still talking about well over a million people. Sacramento is about half that but, being the state capital, it tends to punch above its weight. Stockton has over three hundred thousand. If you were looking to establish an exurb to service all of these areas, this is where you'd put it.
And not to put too fine a point on it, exurbs are bad.
Keep in mind that there will be no passenger rail service to this new town for the foreseeable future and that traveling by bus will inevitably make these commute times longer even assuming excellent service. How likely are people to live here without a car? Remote work complicates the picture a bit but presumably most of the residents will work in either Sacramento, Stockton, or the Bay Area. We can easily be talking about over 150 to 250 miles a week of commuting. What about shopping, dining, entertainment, and other services? Even given the most optimistic estimates, for years to come this will still be a relatively small town that can't hope to compete with the major cities on either side.
No matter how densely packed or efficiently laid out this town is, no matter how well designed and innovative the local transportation system is, any conceivable savings will be dwarfed by the fact that this is an exurb.
On a completely unrelated note:
Other investors include Nat Friedman, a co-founder of California YIMBY and a current board member. Brian Hanlon, who leads the organization, said Friedman had no influence on California YIMBY’s endorsing of the East Solano Plan.The thought never crossed our minds.
Coffeezilla first got on my radar when the Financial Times quoted his investigation of a shady crypto deal. I've been watching his channel ever since and I can vouch for the guy. If you're looking for good investigative journalism focused on the financial side of crypto, NFTs, and overhyped tech startups, this is an essential stop.
If we're talking about hype in 2024, the letters AI can't be far behind. These two videos pick apart a particularly sketchy company that has $30 million based on an AI breakthrough that appears to be nothing more than "ChatGPT with some hard-coded scripts."
Listening to Cohan, it's easy to forget how controversial going to war in Europe was.
And finally, something appropriate from the great Jerry Goldsmith.
In addition to the great quote, I'd say this was exceptional work from Bob Chipman but I don't think you can be characteristically exceptional (seems like an oxymoron). He does a great job walking at critical tightrope, maintaining his objectivity while giving an evocative account of his subjective reactions to the film.
Much of the review is devoted to the story behind the movie, a passion project decades in the making that was completed after the creator's death through the hard work of friends and fans. Chipman talks with well-earned nostalgia about stop action animation the film was built around and, based on the clips shown here, the work is excellent. He also places this picture in the larger context of independent filmmaking and be rather uncertain point we find ourselves at.
Highly recommended across the board.
A rational land-use policy in a state like California needs to balance the agricultural productivity against the proximity to housing demand. Though there is still more farming in LA County than you might expect, it's a tiny fraction of what you would've seen just 50 or 60 years ago. It just doesn't make sense to have orange groves in the middle of a major metropolis no matter how productive the are.
There are lots of places in California where the housing crisis could be greatly helped by converting just a few square miles of farmland into residential areas, particularly if the focus were on apartment complexes. Of these, the places where the need is most dire and the opportunity is greatest tend to run along the 99.
Check out Bakersfield, which has recently suffered some of the most explosive growth in home prices in the state despite being surrounded by unoccupied land.
Where we don't need to be having this conversation is around a car-dependent exurb about an hour from any of the cities it is likely to serve, even an exurb carved out of less productive land. This is why having the actual co-founder of California YIMBY invest in the latter is such an interesting plot twist.
The mystery of why this attack on the locavore movement was so bad when legitimate criticisms were so easy to come by would have first gotten a little deeper, then gotten simpler if I had googled the author first.
Pierre Desrochers is associated with pretty much every conservative/libertarian think tank you can think of (the Mises Institute, the American Institute for Economic Research, the Fraser Institute, Cato, The American Enterprise Institute) and apparently plugged in to the right's sinecure economy.
There are a lot of good arguments for locavore skepticism, but none of them seem particularly Austrian Schoolish. There's nothing about the locavore movement that is obviously antithetical to conservative/ libertarian philosophy. If anything just the opposite. It does not require increased taxation, subsidies, or regulation. It is based on encouraging consumers to have an impact through personal choices. It encourages entrepreneurship.
But after a few years of dealing with posts from Cafe Hayek and think pieces from Cato, you start to get a feel for the table and you realize that sometimes the objective is not about winning arguments, or changing policy, or even being consistent with conservative/libertarian values; it's about catharsis and dominance.
Desrochers skips over the many valid arguments for not overemphasizing local foods, and instead creates straw-men versions of locavores who demand everyone eat nothing but food produced within a hundred miles because his target audience wants crude caricatures. People on the other side of the argument are...
A nuanced, fact-based discussion about sustainability and scalability (like the one Joseph and I are about to have on the topic of veganism) would raise serious questions about the locavore movement, but it wouldn't make those tree-hugging liberals look foolish and it wouldn't make all those George Mason faculty members feel good about themselves.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
"Is not" journalism and our excessive tolerance of silliness
On Marketplace yesterday, Pierre Desrochers, author of the Locavore's Dilemma, presented his case against locavores. It did not go well.
There are good arguments against the locavore movement, that it's a distraction, that it isn't scalable, that it's a solution only available to the well-off, that the superiority of local produce is largely due to suggestion, that there's no good business model to support it, that frozen vegetables are actually more nutritious. I don't necessarily agree with all of these, but they're serious arguments that an advocate of the locavore movement have to address.
Desrochers doesn't make any of these arguments, nor will you see him addressing issues like asymmetry of information or monocultures. Instead we get what we so often get from contrarians, shrill and unadulterated silliness. The bar for these "is not" pieces is so embarrassingly low as to barely exclude grunts and spit bubbles. In this case, Desrochers' "arguments"* depend on the following assumptions:
1. Almost everyone will become a locavore;
2. Rather than trying to eat more locally grown food, locavores will eat nothing but local;
3. Even in times of shortage and crop failure, there will be no imports;
4. and despite all of this locavores will continue eating the exact same food in the same seasons.
On top of this, Desrochers doesn't even seem to have kept up with the debate. Consider this:
It's better to grow tomatoes in the Florida sun than in a heated greenhouse in upstate New York because the energy required to transport them 1200 miles is only a fraction of that required to heat greenhouses for several weeks.Florida tomatoes are literally the worst possible crop to use as an example here.
In addition to being tasteless, Estabrook also points out that compared to tomatoes from other sources or from a few decades ago, the modern Florida variety have fewer nutrients, more pesticides (particularly compared to those from California), and are picked with what has been described as 'slave labor' (and given the use of shackles this doesn't seem like much of an exaggeration).
But openness to new ideas is only a virtue if it's accompanied by some sort of critical facility. We need to start recognizing silliness again and, more to the point, we need to start demanding more.
I've never been a big fan of On the Media --they've always struck me as too wimpy for the job at hand -- but I am a big fan of Cory Doctorow and this segment is an excellent introduction to some of his most5 important ideas.
[01:00] Host Brooke Gladstone interviews Cory Doctorow, journalist, activist, and the author of Red Team Blues, on his theory surrounding the slow, steady descent of the internet.
[15:59] Brooke asks Cory if the troubles that plague some corners of the internet are specific to Big Digital, rather than the economy at large—and how our legal systems enabled it all. Doctorow explains how the antitrust practices of the early 1900s went awry, and what exactly he means by “twiddling.”
[31:29] Cory and Brooke discuss possible solutions to save the world wide web. Among them: better enforcement of privacy laws, interoperability, and the ever elusive "right-to-exit." Plus, hear about the one industry that so far has been mostly immune to the forces of "enshittification."
To understand the politics of 2024, you need to understand the political journalism of 2022.
Tom Bonier, the analyst who probably came off the best over the past couple of years, has a highly recommended thread commemorating the anniversary of the Dobbs decision.
On the 2nd anniversary of the Dobbs decision, I figured I'd share a reminder of how abortion rights has become the most powerful single issue in politics, and is likely more salient now than it was in 2022.
— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) June 25, 2024
[For those who prefer their threads rolled up, here's a link.]
One important aspect which Bonier hits only tangentially is how
rapidly the establishment press, particularly the New York Times and Politico, converged on the Dobbs-won't-matter narrative, and how far they have been
willing to go to protect it from a growing mountain of conflicting data.
After
you've been following the mainstream press for a while, the appeal of
the narrative is not difficult to reverse engineer. If you are leery of
being seen as a cheerleader for the Democrats, nervous about Republicans
working the refs, and generally inclined to picture yourself as sober
and above the fray," no big deal" was the obvious choice.
https://x.com/MollyJongFast/statu
Some of
the sharper and more independent minded observers like Bonier
immediately spotted trends in the data that undercut the narrative...
I shared that finding in a tweet and a hastily assembled chart the next day. To be clear, I have never seen a registration surge among any specific group like this before, and don't expect to again. pic.twitter.com/ZO8VV1IfQt
— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) June 25, 2024
But most data journalists were treating the data as a drunkard's lamppost, a source not of illumination but of support for the approved Dobbs narrative and for that of the red wave.
NYT 2022/10/17
Since the midterms, we've seen a lot of moonwalking and "but next time it'll be different" analyses, often with a data-based veneer (there is an essential distinction between following the data and coming up with an argument that supports your preferred point and doesn't conflict with the data). There has also been an alarming rush to credulously embrace Republican spin about how the election is going. The latest example being that Trump and the GOP have successfully pivoted to the center.
NYT columnist and good soldier, Ezra Klein:
I found myself, this week, watching Trump’s May 1 rally in Waukesha, Wis. Most of it features Trump’s constant stream of overstatement, false nostalgia, wild braggadocio and barely veiled threat. But the tenor changed when Trump turned to abortion. Here, Trump swung suddenly to the left of his own base. The goal, he said, was “to get abortion out of the federal government. Everybody wanted that. That was uniform. Then about 10 years ago, people lost their way. They started talking about — how many months?”
This is Trump’s pivot on abortion. Unlike other Republicans [The "other" is doing a bit of heavy lifting here. -- MP], he’s saying the goal wasn’t, and isn’t, a nationwide abortion ban. The goal was letting states decide for themselves, and now they are.
“There are some very conservative states that voted a very much more liberal policy than anybody would’ve thought,” Trump said. “Very liberal policy, a couple of states. I won’t mention, but a couple of states really surprise people. But, basically the states decide on abortion. And people are absolutely thrilled with the way that’s going on.”
Thrilled? The one time you can hear the crowd boo Trump is during his abortion spiel. But he doesn’t back down. I don’t know if Trump’s effort to run to the center on abortion will work, but he’s definitely going to try, even if it offends his base. Is there any issue on which Biden is doing the same?
With the possible exception of Klein and a couple of interns at Fox, no one actually believes that focusing on the overturning of Roe V Wade constitutes a pivot to the center, even if we forget about all the times that Donald Trump has abandoned actual centrist positions from previous campaigns. Dobbs was insanely unpopular from the beginning and has only grown more so as its scope has increased and the horror stories have accumulated, and Dobbs was correct is very much Trump's position.
Here is Donald Trump bragging about ending Roe v. Wade over and over pic.twitter.com/5MdthlkZbH
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) June 24, 2024
RNC Chair: It is absolutely critical to remember who it was that put anti-abortion and conservative judges on the district courts, on the circuit courts, and nominated the three conservative justices to the United States Supreme Court that overturned Roe. That was Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/VY9dVHTZSX
— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) June 24, 2024
[I don't hear a lot of booing.]
As spelled out in a typically solid TPM post by Emine Yücel, the Republicans have no good messaging options when it comes to reproductive rights and particularly IVF. At this point, they're simply thrashing around looking for the least bad option. Perhaps the only thing working in their favor is the reluctance of publications like the New York Times and Politico to admit they got this story wrong.
Even in its current sad state, you still find yourself in interesting conversations on Twitter.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky born September 11, 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher[2][3][4][5] and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence.[6][7] He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California.[8] His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings when programmed to pursue even seemingly-harmless goals, and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design. The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value human life, then given enough power its optimized goal would be to turn all matter in the universe, including human beings, into either paperclips or machines which manufacture paperclips.[4]
Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.
— Nick Bostrom, "Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence", 2003
Bostrom has emphasised that he does not believe the paperclip maximiser scenario per se will actually occur; rather, his intention is to illustrate the dangers of creating superintelligent machines without knowing how to safely program them to eliminate existential risk to human beings. The paperclip maximizer example illustrates the broad problem of managing powerful systems that lack human values
It is Aarne-Thompson type 565, the Magic Mill. Other tales of this type include The Water Mother and Sweet porridge.
Synopsis
A poor man begged from his brother on Christmas Eve. The brother promised him, depending on the variant, ham or bacon or a lamb if he would do something. The poor brother promised; the rich one handed over the food and told him to go to Hell (in Lang's version, the Dead Men's Hall; in the Greek, the Devil's dam). Since he promised, he set out. In the Norse variants, he meets an old man along the way. In some variants, the man begs from him, and he gives something; in all, the old man tells him that in Hell (or the hall), they will want to buy the food from him, but he must only sell it for the hand-mill behind the door, and come to him for directions to use it. It took a great deal of haggling, but the poor man succeeded, and the old man showed him how to use it. In the Greek, he merely brought the lamb and told the devils that he would take whatever they would give him, and they gave him the mill. He took it to his wife, and had it grind out everything they needed for Christmas, from lights to tablecloth to meat and ale. They ate well and on the third day, they had a great feast. His brother was astounded and when the poor man had drunk too much, or when the poor man's children innocently betrayed the secret, he showed his rich brother the hand-mill. His brother finally persuaded him to sell it. In the Norse version, the poor brother didn't teach him how to handle it. He set to grind out herrings and broth, but it soon flooded his house. His brother wouldn't take it back until he paid him as much as he paid to have it. In the Greek, the brother set out to Constantinople by ship. In the Norse, one day a skipper wanted to buy the hand-mill from him, and eventually persuaded him. In all versions, the new owner took it to sea and set it to grind out salt. It ground out salt until it sank the boat, and then went on grinding in the sea, turning the sea salty.
