Just got boosted...

No ill effects so far, but I'm using this as an excuse to take things easy and sit in the California sun. See you Tuesday.

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Elon Musk may not fully grasp the magnitude of the problem

"All in all, more than 500 such "fragmentation events" have created nearly 130 million bits of debris in Earth's orbit. Those chunks of debris zip around the planet at more than 17,500 mph, or roughly 10 times the speed of a bullet"https://t.co/EURV2ug9ql pic.twitter.com/bc3s6YgkpD

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 20, 2021

If you're the type of person who closely follows science and technology stories (and since you're reading a blog originally named "Observational Epidemiology," I'm thinking you probably are), you've probably been hearing about the Kessler Syndrome and Musk's Skylink and its imitators could have on this potentially disastrous event. It even got the big narrative treatment at the New Yorker.

Before we dive in, there is one aspect of the story that has been widely misreported. 

From Scientific American (2019):

The benefits of mega constellations would be manifold. Blanketing the entire planet with high-bandwidth, low-latency, always-on Internet access means ships out at sea, high-flying planes and people in remote, undeveloped areas (even Antarctica!) will suddenly be connected as never before. “Connectivity is just not [currently] available to everybody,” says Mike Lindsay, a space mission designer at OneWeb. “Half the world lacks an affordable access point to broadband Internet.”

"Manifold" in this case basically meaning one.

We've had satellites delivering broadband internet for about a decade now from companies like Viasat. They use geostationary orbits which means they can cover the entire world with a handful of satellites. The only significant functionality that these enormous low-earth orbit constellations bring to the table is low latency (or ping time), something you want to have for videoconferencing and especially for gaming. It's an embarrassingly small upgrade given the government grants, investor capital and, most of all, potential consequences. 

From Business Insider [emphasis added]:

SpaceX has permission from the US government to launch nearly 12,000 Starlink satellites through 2027, though it's asked to launch 30,000 more for a total of nearly 42,000. In either case, SpaceX is on track to form a "megaconstellation" that outnumbers all prior spacecraft ever launched by humanity. If 3% of the maximum planned Starlink constellation fails, that could mean 1,260 dead, 550-pound satellites the size of a desk aimlessly circling the planet. A 2.5% failure rate could mean more than 1,000 inoperative spacecraft.

There were about 3,200 nonfunctional satellites in Earth's orbit as of February, according to the European Space Agency. Many of these dead spacecraft regularly threaten to collide with others and create a space-debris crisis. In mid October, for example, satellite trackers flagged a "very high risk" close pass between a dead satellite and a discarded rocket body, with one company calculating a 10% chance of collision. (Fortunately, they didn't.)

SpaceX says its satellites will naturally deorbit, or burn up in Earth's atmosphere, if their propulsion systems don't work. But that process can take up to five years, according to Starlink's website. In the meantime, defunct satellites rocket around Earth faster than a bullet, with nobody to steer them away from other spacecraft that may fly in their path.

SpaceX did not acknowledge Business Insider's requests for comment. However, in filings to the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX has downplayed the risk, stating that it "views satellite failure to deorbit rates of 10 or 5 percent as unacceptable, and even a rate of 1 percent is unlikely."

If 1% of its satellites did fail with no capacity to maneuver, the company said, "there is approximately a 1 percent chance per decade that any failed SpaceX satellite would collide with a piece of tracked debris."

The company also claimed that its practices "effectively eliminate the chance that such rates will ever occur."

SpaceX is not alone in pushing to launch large numbers of internet satellites. OneWeb, which the UK government recently purchased out of bankruptcy, has already launched 74 satellites for its proposed constellation of 48,000, while Amazon aims to launch more than 3,200 for its Kuiper fleet. It's unclear how many dead satellites those constellations might also leave in orbit.

...

If the space-junk problem gets extreme, a chain of collisions could spiral out of control and surround Earth in a practically impassable field of debris. This possibility is known as the Kessler syndrome, after Donald J. Kessler, who worked for NASA's Johnson Space Center and calculated in a 1978 paper that it could take hundreds or even thousands of years for such debris to clear up enough to make spaceflight safe again.

...

SpaceX has barely launched 2% of its planned constellation, but it has already had a close call.

In September 2019, the European Space Agency had to maneuver one of its spacecraft at the last minute to avoid possibly colliding with a Starlink satellite. The chance of that crash was 1 in 1,000. While that may sound low, NASA routinely moves the ISS for chances of 1 in 100,000.

The ESA said it had to move its satellite because SpaceX had "no plan to take action." SpaceX said it missed the ESA emails about the issue due to a "bug" in its communications systems.

Overall, close approaches like that seem to be happening more frequently.

"We are seeing recently a decided uptick in the number of conjunctions," Dan Oltrogge, an astrodynamicist at Analytical Graphics, Inc, where he uses a software that has been assessing conjunction data since 2005, told Business Insider. "And it looks to be very well aligned with the new large-constellation spacecraft that have been launched."

Five years ago at the blog -- the rise of secular evangelicals laid the foundation for the cult of Trump

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2016

Tom Hanks, creepy CGI Santa Clauses, and the theological canary in the coal mine

I've been making the point for a while now that the evangelical movement that I grew up with in the Bible Belt is radically different from the evangelical movement of today. I was aware that something was changing for a while, but the nature and the extent of the change crystallized for me when I read this 2004 article from Slate:

Next Stop, Bethlehem?
By David Sarno

The Polar Express is the tale of a boy's dreamlike train ride to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus. Like all stories worth knowing, it's rich enough in image and feeling to accommodate many interpretations. Chris Van Allsburg, the author of the book, calls his story a celebration of childhood wonder and imagination. William Broyles Jr., one of the screenwriters of this year's film version, calls it a kind of Odyssey in which a hero undertakes a mythic, perilous journey of self-discovery. And Paul Lauer, who is a key player in the film's marketing apparatus, sees The Polar Express as a parable for the importance of faith in Jesus Christ.

Lauer's firm, Motive Entertainment, is best known for coordinating the faith-based marketing of The Passion of the Christ. Motive helped spread early word of mouth about the filmby holding screenings for church groups and talking the movie up to religious leaders. When The Passion took in a stunning $370 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, Lauer and his cohorts got a lot of the credit. Earlier this year, Motive was hired by Warner Bros. to promote The Polar Express to Christians. But wait, is The Polar Express an evangelical film?

You'd certainly think so, considering the expansive campaign of preview screenings, radio promotion, DVDs, and online resources that Lauer unfurled in the Christian media this fall. This Polar Express downloads page includes endorsements from pastors and links to church and parenting resources hosted by the Christian media outlet HomeWord. There are suggestions for faith-building activities and a family Bible-study guide that notes, for example, the Boy's Christ-like struggle to get the Girl a train ticket. "The Boy risked it all to recover the ticket," the guide observes. "Jesus gave His all to save us from the penalty of our sins."

HomeWord Radio, which claims to reach more than a million Christian parents daily, broadcast three shows promoting the film. At one point, the show's host wondered excitedly if the movie "might turn out to be one of the more effective witnessing tools in modern times." Motive also produced a promotional package that was syndicated to over 100 radio stations in which Christian recording artists like Amy Grant, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Avalon talked about the movie as they exited preview screenings.

…

Some audience members—and a few Christian film critics—would argue that Santa Claus isn't necessarily a stand-in for Jesus Christ. Last month, Lauer told the Mobile Register that he sees The Polar Express as a parable, "not a movie about belief in God." But when Lauer speaks to a Christian audience, he tells a different story. Lauer told HomeWord Radio that when he asked Robert Zemeckis about all the biblical parallels he was seeing in the film, the director "winked and said, 'Nothing in a movie this big ends up in the script by accident.' " (Zemeckis was traveling and wasn't available for comment.)

This is a spectacular example of getting the pertinent details of the story right and yet completely missing the point. In another piece, the understatement of “Santa Claus isn't necessarily a stand-in for Jesus Christ” would be sharply comic but Sarno seems to be completely oblivious to the joke.

I know we overuse the clip of the minister gunning down Santa in the middle of a children's sermon, but it illustrates an important point.

[ Clip missing -- Unfortunately, CBS/Viacom has decided that fair use rules only apply to little people.]


Over the past few years the evangelical movement has abandoned the majority of its most deeply held theological beliefs (think of how doctrinal differences with Catholics and, even more notably, Mormons have been put aside). It is not at all coincidental the beliefs that were abandoned were uniformly inconvenient from a political standpoint. The conservative movement has both weaponized and secularized the evangelical movement with remarkable success.

Traditionally, evangelicals were more concerned with the potential corruption of their own religion (frequently to the point of paranoia) than with what others were practicing. Christmas was a particularly hot-button issue. In the eyes of several good Southern Baptist ministers, the holiday had become unacceptably commercial, cultural rather than religious, and, in many ways, pagan. Most of the music, imagery, and traditions had nothing to do with the nativity, the "reason for the season." Often, this general hostility toward secular Christmas celebrations focused on Santa Claus.

Like many religious practices, the no-Santa rule could look a bit silly when viewed from the outside, but there's nothing unreasonable about adherents of a particular faith wanting to maintain what they see as the original meaning of a religious holiday. Growing up, I found these attitudes and the little lectures that often accompanied them painfully annoying, but, even though I disagreed, I could see where they were coming from from a theological standpoint.

Now, evangelicalism is a religious movement stripped of its religious elements. There is no scriptural foundation for tax cuts for the rich, deregulating greenhouse gases, or Donald Trump, but those are the defining issue of the movement of today.

Of course, evangelicals are not monolithic. There are many within the movement, some in positions of authority, who object to these obvious deviations from their original core principles. There are indications that the resistance is gaining momentum, and it is entirely possible that in a few years we will have to rethink our assumptions about evangelical Christians and politics. For now, though, this is a cultural (social reactionary) and political (far right) movement, not a religious one, and trying to think of it in any terms that these is misguided.

"But real estate investing in the metaverse still is highly speculative, and no one knows for sure whether this boom is the next big thing or the next big bubble." Actually, I'm pretty sure I know.

Debra Kamin writing for the NYT. and making Mark Zuckerberg very happy.

Money in these digital worlds is cryptocurrency, as finance in the metaverse is powered by the blockchain — a digitally distributed public ledger that eliminates the need for a third party, like a bank. Anyone entering a virtual world can buy or trade art, music and even homes as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which are blockchain-based collectibles that are digital representations of real-world items. The NFT serves as proof of ownership and is not interchangeable.

And in recent months, the volume of transactions for commercial real estate in the metaverse has ramped up.

So... we've got crypto, NFTs and a virtual housing bubble. No red flags here.

The Metaverse Group has a real estate investment trust, and it plans to build a portfolio of properties in Decentraland as well as other realms including Somnium Space, Sandbox and Upland. The internet may be infinite, but virtual real estate is not — Decentraland, for example, is 90,000 parcels of land, each roughly 50 feet by 50 feet. Among investors, there’s a sense that there’s gold in those pixelated hills, Mr. Gord said.

“Imagine if you came to New York when it was farmland, and you had the option to get a block of SoHo,” he said. “If someone wants to buy a block of real estate in SoHo today, it’s priceless, it’s not on the market. That same experience is going to happen in the metaverse.”

Last week, Tokens.com closed an even larger land deal in Decentraland’s fashion district for roughly $2.5 million. The company, which says the real estate transaction was the largest in metaverse history, plans to develop the area into a virtual commerce hub for luxury fashion brands, à la Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue.

Mr. Kiguel estimates his portfolio in the metaverse is valued at up to 10 times more than its purchase price, and much of the reasoning will sound similar to anyone who has ever bought or sold real estate.

“It’s location, location, location,” he said. “A parcel of land in the downtown core, which has a lot of visitor traffic, is worth more than a parcel of land in the suburbs. There’s a scarcity value.”

I get the feeling I should say something now, but I'm pretty sure anything I could come up with would just be gilding the lily.

Why I despair sometimes of improving things.

This is Joseph.

This is German Lopez:

Part of the issue here is that "criminal justice reform" is a huge area, ranging from "defund the police" to using research to improve police effectiveness (e.g., smart version of foot patrol). Painting it all as radical (in the spirit of defund the police) disguises some really sharp critiques. How would the foot patrol reform advocates react to a spike in crime? Hiring more officers and deploying them more efficiently to reduce crime doesn't seem to be an obviously dumb or ineffective answer. 

Do we need reform? Well, the George Floyd killing suggests that there is at least some possibility for improving police performance when dealing with minorities and suspects. When you look at the level of public outrage that it created, it is hard to argue that a status quo that enabled that to happen doesn't have at least some room for reforming police procedure. There were four officers present; the other three could have been trained to intervene in a way that George Floyd survived and was able to have his case heard by a court. 

Or what about more modest reforms? For example, should overtime count as part of one's peak earnings for determining pension benefits? There are a lot of professions (e.g., teachers, professors) where this is not the case and a lot of money could be saved by not having officers in their last few years working massive amounts of overtime. Overtime is expensive, it could be invested in having more officers serving, and tired people make mistakes. If pensions are too low than that should be addressed directly, shouldn't it? 

Police reform is a large area and a lot of these measures would reduce crime. For example, more officers instead of overtime would increase total resources and leave more capacity for a surge. Careful training in safe takedowns saves money from lawsuits, protects civilians, and enhances public trust (which can make investigations more effective). Further, reforms like instituting heavier foot patrols in high crime areas might deliver wide ranging benefits, over and above the additional costs. One thing that is often neglected is that smart reform often involves spending more money. When you reform and improve any institution, it is far harder to do it while reducing costs -- just look at military reform for some rich examples

Finally, if crime really is spiking then this is showing a limitation of the current system. We aren't investigating counterfactual cases where there is a reform -- I am not aware of any major reforms that are ongoing in places with crime spikes. Many of the reforms listed above would have more officers on the streets by trying to spend money more efficiently. Maybe this is worth trying? And surely it counts as police reform? 

Great example of sarcasm in chart form

Jamie Powell of FT Alphaville points us to this wonderful Twitter exchange between Cameron Winklevoss and Joe Weisenthal.

Here's Powell:

Literal bitcoin bros the Winklevii have made a habit over the past five years of making statements that simultaneously make you question how they got into Harvard, and yet also understand how Zuck allegedly nicked the idea for Facebook off them.

Who, for instance, can forget their assertion that bitcoin was a better store of value than gold because Elon will eventually mine an asteroid full of the shiny stuff, leading to a ruinous supply/demand imbalance?

But we’re not sure even that compares to this tweet from Cameron Winklevoss on Wednesday about yet another subject that every bitcoin bro is suddenly an expert on: inflation.

So do you acknowledge, therefore, that inflation was 0% since 1986

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) November 24, 2021

I did a quick chart to look at the last 35 years of inflation pic.twitter.com/15HNtoJdJJ

— e pluribus unum (@jedgarnaut) November 24, 2021

Actual engineering is cool

Great example of problem solving and iteratively modifying designs to overcoming increasingly difficult challenges. 

"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]

If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. [The original link has gone dead, but I was able to find the relevant clip.]

As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation).

Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a vengeful spirit, was been cursed with all of the diseases Europeans brought to the Americas.

Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.
Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...
Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.
Buffy: Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of - Not that I don't like Spaniards.
Spike: Listen to you. How you gonna fight anyone with that attitude?
Willow: We don't wanna fight anyone.
Buffy: I just wanna have Thanksgiving.
Spike: Heh heh. Yeah... Good luck.
Willow: Well, if we could talk to him...
Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.
Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but, some of that made sense.

'Spatiotemporal analysis" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but you should still read this

Earlier in our housing thread, we suggested that a site for urban densification should be largely judged based on how many potential jobs are within an hour's commute using existing public transportation. We didn't stop to think about which shift. 

A spatiotemporal analysis of transit accessibility to low-wage jobs in Miami-Dade County

by XiangYan et al.  [Emphasis added.]

From the abstract:

An essential function of public transit is to connect low-wage earners to their jobs or potential employment opportunities. Previous research has shed light on this issue by examining how transit accessibility varies across space, the temporal variations of transit accessibility, and the modal disparity between public transit and automobiles, but often in a disjointed manner. This study contributes to the literature by considering all these issues together in a unified analytical framework. Specifically, we conduct a spatiotemporal analysis of transit accessibility to low-wage jobs and of the disparities between transit accessibility and auto accessibility. Our analysis focuses on Miami-Dade County in Florida, a region defined by a low-density, auto-oriented urban form and a Hispanic-majority population. We find that residents of low-income and Black-majority neighborhoods enjoy a higher level of transit accessibility because of their concentration in high-density urban areas. Often located in suburban and rural locations, Hispanic-majority neighborhoods have a much lower level of accessibility. Not surprisingly, transit accessibility is higher in peak hours than other hours of the day. The gap between transit accessibility and auto accessibility is striking, with car users being able to access eight times more low-wage jobs than transit riders on average. The accessibility gap is smaller during peak hours and in the downtown Miami area; but still, auto accessibility is about three times that of transit accessibility. The large disparities between transit accessibility and auto accessibility provide a strong rationale for additional funding support to promote transit services, such as on-demand microtransit services, in lower-density areas and during off-peak hours.

And from the introduction:

When a temporal perspective is considered, the problem of low-income workers being poorly served by public transit systems can be more profound. To maximize efficiency, most transit agencies around the world provide reduced services during off-peak hours, in the evenings, and during weekends. But these are the periods when a significant proportion of low-wage earners commute to work, as they often take works shifts that are not on a regular nine-to-five schedule (Lambert et al., 2012). Moreover, some low-income workers may have multiple jobs, often requiring them to switch job sites in the middle of the day when transit services are reduced. However, existing research has commonly focused on investigating if residents of low-income areas have adequate spatial access to the transit network, paying much less attention to the temporal variations of transit services. Notably, some studies have shown that disadvantaged social groups often receive better transit services as they tend to live in higher-density areas (Grengs, 2012; Shin, 2020), but it is less clear if this advantage varies by time of day. A recent study has shown that while residents in socially disadvantaged areas of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, on average, had better transit accessibility to jobs than those in socially advantaged areas, this advantage is not consistent over the course of the day (El-Geneidy et al., 2016a).

Why gun vigilantism is so problematic

This is Joseph.

Consider this tweet by Josh Marshall:

Or this one by an internet commentator:

In both cases you have an issue with demarcation between what is a lawful use of self-defense and what is an active shooter. Let us be blunt. There are definite cases of criminal mass shooters. There are also cases where actual law enforcement officers abused their positions to commit crimes. How much worse does it get when random citizens can start enforcing laws in a chaotic situation? 

The classic example is an active shooter at a movie theater. It is dark. It is crowded. It is hard to see and hear anything with the gunfire and smoke. Now imagine 20 people draw guns. Which ones are the active shooter and who is not? And do you want to be the person holding a gun when the police arrive? 

Or in the case we started with -- Ahmaud Arbery -- we have gun armed people "arresting" a jogger. How can the jogger (who was innocent of any crimes so far as we can tell) determine that these are "well intentioned" citizens making a mistaken arrest and not criminals out to rob him?

This goes to a major flaw in self defense with guns -- you can create a chain of self defense claims from one misunderstanding where a bunch of people are dead and yet there is no crime. Does this not suggest some need for introspection on gun use in public places? Now, to be clear, public places is very important. I have thoughts about private spaces, as well, but they are way less clear. If Ahmaud Arbery had been on private property and not a public street then many of the issues would have been different in important ways. There are also issues with retreating when you might be responsible for young children and the aggressor is moving quickly. These are not the cases we are thinking about. 

Instead, it is the way that you can be provocative in a public space and then be completely covered by self defense for the confrontation that you provoked. And there is no way that Ahmaud Arbery wasn't aggressively confronted before the shooting, there is even video of the encounter. But as soon as you think about citizen's arrests for actions in the past (see first tweet) in cases of dubious identification, it quickly becomes clear that this could be used by bad actors in a variety of ways. 

Mainly just an excuse to run a cool video

From the Atlantic:

Today, SpaceX regularly flies astronauts into orbit on a transportation system it designed from start to finish, and is the only private company to have earned that responsibility. But the Dragon capsule doing that work is a cozy, gumdrop-shaped container, not a giant spaceship, and can carry seven people at a time, not the 100 passengers Musk imagines boarding Starship someday. If successful, Starship would be unlike any other space vehicle in history, especially on its return to Earth. America’s now-retired fleet of space shuttles landed on runways like planes, Russian Soyuz capsules parachute down to the desert, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsules splash down in open water, but Musk envisions Starship landing vertically, as upright as it stood before liftoff. It is an enormous technical challenge.

Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that the actual engineers at SpaceX are doing impressive work and making major advances, but not challenging in the sense that no one has done it before. Real rocket scientists are quick to point out that the same underlying technology put us on the moon over fifty years ago.

Nor has it been dormant in the meantime.

Of course, the Delta Clipper was far more primitive than the starship, but it also flew a quarter century ago and was built for a fraction of the budget, even adjusting for inflation. Taking this and other projects into account, SpaceX's advances clearly represent real progress, but not radical breakthroughs. Theirs is an evolutionary, not revolutionary approach, particularly compared technologies like air-breathing rockets and other single-stage-to-orbit systems which, if they pan out, will completely disrupt air and space travel. Musk's company has been as conservative from a technological standpoint as it has been bold from a business standpoint. 

There's nothing wrong with that -- it may turn out to be the best approach -- but it is almost the complete opposite of the story the press has converge on.

Gerontocracy

This is Joseph.

Pat Leahy is retiring from the Senate after 48 years of service at the end of this current term. He was 34 years old when he was first elected to be a Senator. He will be replaced as the president pro tempore by Dianne Feinstein, the 87 year old senior senator from California. The average age of senate is 63 years. 

But the bigger question is whether it is really a healthy process for such prestigious positions to be held by the same people for so long. Romans famously re-elected their consuls yearly (typically never the same person 2 years in a row), with a post-consul career path that was often many years as Proconsul or governor. 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg was an Associate Justice of the Supreme court for 27 years, to age 87 (dying in office). When people called for her to retire we got arguments like this one:

First, she loves her work on the Court. She rarely misses a day on the bench. Once she sat through argument with a broken rib; when her beloved husband of 56 years, Martin Ginsburg, died, she was on the bench, announcing an opinion, 24 hours later.

And her work has gotten more interesting recently. Since the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens in 2010, she has been the senior justice on the liberal side of the Court. This is an important job—when the Court’s conservatives vote together as a five-member bloc, the senior liberal justice assigns the task of preparing the liberal dissent. The purpose of such a dissent is to discredit the majority’s reasoning and offer future courts grounds to distinguish or overrule the case. Ginsburg often assigns that duty to herself; her major dissents are masterpieces of the genre

which is just odd. It is great that she enjoyed her work and being the senior justice makes it more fun. Notice how Steven Breyer is now resisting retirement because his work is so fun. But what does "the work is fun" have to do with the question of senior public service? These are not professorial posts at a university where the consequences of sticking around too long are sharply limited.  

Or this argument:

I think from her perspective she is taking a long view of history, not a case by case one, or a term by term one. She has to believe that justice will win out in the end—or that, if it doesn’t, her departure at one point or another couldn’t be the major factor. I agree with her and I think people ought to give this issue a rest and concentrate on electing Democrats to the White House and the Senate. … I think the issue is serving as kind of a displacement for the liberals’ general sense of powerlessness—they seem to feel that getting Ruth to resign would be something concrete they could accomplish when all else is failing. 

I mean having her replaced by Amy Comey Barrett has opened some fascinating doors as well.

But I don't want to make this too much about the Supreme court, an appointed body that clearly is being gamed. What is equally concerning is the idea that it is healthy for a person to have a "safe seat" for nearly 5 decades. This happens in the house as well. 

Now, if you think I am going to scream "term limits" then you are daft. Expertise is also important and short term limits (which are always the proposal) seem counterproductive. Instead, I would like to see people rotate out and fill other positions to spread out expertise. Imagine if one of the ways that you could leave the Supreme court was to become an appeals court judge. You'd have experience and perspective spread, while keeping the positions at the top from being permanent positions. People would have to think about their post-SCOTUS career too. 

I wonder if forcing circulation of posts would have other benefits for congress. We already ensure that the president leaves office but wouldn't it make sense to find an way to engage past-presidents? I mean not 100% of them might be great decisions, but it can't hurt to have people circulate among the top offices. Or at least it seems a worthwhile conversation. 

A literal sign of the times

Sam Dean reporting for the LA Times:

Staples Center is getting a new name for Christmas: Crypto.com Arena.

The downtown Los Angeles venue — home of the Lakers, Clippers, Kings and Sparks — will wear the new name for 20 years under a deal between the Singapore cryptocurrency exchange and AEG, the owner and operator of the arena, both parties announced Tuesday. Crypto.com paid more than $700 million for the naming rights, according to sources familiar with the terms, making it one of the biggest naming deals in sports history.

The arena’s new logo will debut Dec. 25, when the Lakers host the Brooklyn Nets, and all of Staples Center signage will be replaced with the new name by June 2022.

Crypto.com’s chief executive, Kris Marszalek, hopes that the new name will come to be seen as a sign of the times.

“In the next few years, people will look back at this moment as the moment when crypto crossed the chasm into the mainstream,” Marszalek said when reached at his home in Hong Kong.

“This is just such a brilliant move from the guys at AEG, because the next decade belongs to crypto,” he said. “And this positions L.A. and this particular venue right at the center of it.”

In their report on the carbon footprint of food choices, All Things Considered fails to consider all sorts of important things

I can't excerpt the relevant parts of this NPR piece because they left those out. 

Given a major, reoccurring question, journalists will tend to converge, often with little or no apparent thought, on one or two standard framings. Sometimes the writers and editors are manipulated into telling the story a certain way. The Republican Party has grown remarkably adept at this over the past thirty years. Other times, it seems to happen purely by chance, almost an example of symmetry breaking, the result of the powerful pull of herd mentality. 

Approaching the climate impact of our diets in terms of  animal protein vs. plant-based protein reflects both advocacy and a certain underlying logic. In many contexts (such as healthy eating), the plant v. animal distinction make a great deal of sense, but not if you're talking about greenhouse gases. The range of footprints within the animal protein category is simply too big to be treated as a single category. 

Compared to pushing vegan meals on the general public, it is relatively easy to persuade people to opt for one type of animal protein over another (marketers do it all the time). Though estimates vary, these substitutions can reduce the carbon footprint from 60% to 90%. Anything beyond switching from beef to poultry or perhaps even to pork starts getting into diminishing returns. Every shift down the scale is an improvement, but at some point not enough of an improvement to justify the additional effort.

I don't want to get sucked into the weeds debating the pros and cons of a vegan lifestyle -- it's healthier, more ethical and better for the environment -- but you cannot responsibly report on this topic and group together two more or less equally popular options  such as beef and chicken without pointing out that one is five to ten times as bad as the other. 

This NPR report literally does not have a single word on the differences between various sources of animal protein. The listener is left with the impression that one is pretty much as bad as the other. Given the seriousness of this situation, that's dangerously negligent journalism. 

For more on the issues with grouping together things of radically different magnitude, take a look at our  post on cigarettes and cocaine arguments.

While on the subject of Lysenko

From Current Biology, December 2017.

Russia’s new Lysenkoism by Edouard I. Kolchinsky, Ulrich Kutschera, Uwe Hossfeld, and Georgy S. Levit

One of the most disturbing trends in current Russian science is the so-called ‘re-thinking’ of the historical role of Lysenkoism. There is a growing body of literature reasssessing or even fully rehabilitating the erroneous ideas of Lysenko. The phenomenon became internationally known thanks to the 2016 book Lysenko’s Ghost by the American historian of science Loren Graham. Graham claims that the popularity of modern epigenetics, as well as the growing influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and sympathies to Stalin, significantly contributed to the revival of Lysenko’s views. However, the picture is more complex.

The first to alert the public to the new rise of Lysenkoism was a Russian embryologist, Leonid Korochkin, who published a short overview in the influential newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta. In his article, Korochkin blamed mysticism and ignorance, spreading in Russian society, for the growth of Lysenkoism and other pseudo-scientific teachings. In the second half of the 2000s, a series of seemingly scholarly publications appeared with the objective to re-habilitate Lysenko and to discredit Vavilov. Initially, pro-Lysenkoist books were published by authors that have little connection to biology or the history of science.

Subsequently, however, scientists with degrees in biology, agriculture or medicine joined the campaign. For example, Lysenko’s former PhD student, Petr Kononkov, published an edited volume entitled Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, Soviet Agronomist, Plant Breeder, Biologist. Another book by Kononkov by the title Two Worlds, Two Ideologies takes Lysenko into the general context of competing Western and Soviet/Russian ideologies. Remarkably, Kononkov’s book was sponsored by the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications, an executive organ of the government, established in 2004 by decree of the President. With respect to the interpretation of historical and biological data, the latter book is plainly Stalinist and Lysenkoist. Kononkov imagined Lysenko as a patriotic humanist with a worldview deeply rooted within the Russian Orthodox culture, though the Orthodox Church in no way supports the neo-Lysenkoist doctrine. In these and other similar books by Kononkov and his co-authors Lysenko appeared as a true patriot and great scientist who was ahead of his time. Lysenko’s concepts, such as the theory of Jarovisation and vegetative hybridization, they argue, were close to practical needs of agriculture. In one of his publications, entitled Lysenko’s Contribution to the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the author states that Lysenko’s innovations were meant to solve the food problem in the periods of famine when the country lacked adequate academic, material, financial and human resources. Nicolai Vavilov, on the contrary, is presented by neo-Lysenkoists as an orthodox academic writer, who did not appreciate applied aspects of biological research, and accordingly wasted resources for questionable purposes. In that sense, this first wave of neo-Lysenkoism looked like the continuation of old controversies around Lysenko and Vavilov, which appeared to have been solved several decades ago.

The most recent version of neo-Lysenkoism is, however, much more inclusive. The current enmity between Russia and the West contributed to bolstering of pro-Lysenko arguments, adding ideological overtones. Thus, in Two Worlds, Two Ideologies, geneticists over the globe with an international publication record are depicted as pseudo-scientists and charlatans, performing tasks assigned to them by globalist agendas that are hostile to Russia. Opponents of Lysenko are called ‘traitors of the nation’. According to Kononkov, Lysenkoism corresponds to the current geopolitical interests of Russia. The editor of this book, German Smirnov, educated as an engineer, is known for his anti-Semitic claims. He maintains that Zionism was the main anti-Lysenkoist power not only in Russia, but all over the world.