Results for “water” 1034 found
Okie-dokie…
US Intelligence Shows Flawed China Missiles Led Xi to Purge Army
China missiles filled with water, not fuel: US intelligence
And:
…vast fields of missile silos in western China with lids that don’t function in a way that would allow the missiles to launch effectively
Here is more from Bloomberg.
Arizona fact of the day
Arizona now uses 3 percent less water than it did in 1957, despite having a population that’s mushroomed more than 555 percent since then.
That is from Tom Zoellner in the NYT. It is a good piece more generally, and it helps explain why real estate prices in the Southwest have proven robust in light of climate change concerns.
Nicholas Kristof on good things in 2023
Just about the worst calamity that can befall a human is to lose a child, and historically, almost half of children worldwide died before they reached the age of 15. That share has declined steadily since the 19th century, and the United Nations Population Division projects that in 2023 a record low was reached in global child mortality, with just 3.6 percent of newborns dying by the age of 5.
That’s the lowest such figure in human history. It still means that about 4.9 million children died this year — but that’s a million fewer than died as recently as 2016…
Or consider extreme poverty. It too has reached a record low, affecting a bit more than 8 percent of humans worldwide, according to United Nations projections.
All these figures are rough, but it seems that about 100,000 people are now emerging from extreme poverty each day — so they are better able to access clean water, to feed and educate their children, to buy medicines.
Here is the full NYT column, and no he doesn’t deny the bad things that are going on, please don’t engage in the usual mood affiliation people…
Happy New Year to come!
Emergent Ventures, 30th cohort
Mike Ferguson and Natasha Asmi, Bay Area and University of Michigan, growing blood vessels in the lab.
Klara Feenstra, London, to write a novel about the tensions between Catholicism and modern life.
Snigdha Roy, UCLA, for a conference trip and trip to India, math and computation and biology.
Nikol Savova, Oxford, and Sofia, Bulgaria, podcast on Continental philosophy, mathematics.
Seán O’Neill McPartlin, Dublin, policy studies and YIMBY interests.
Olivia Li, NYC, geo-engineering, undergraduate dropout.
Suraj M. Reddy, High school, Newark, Delaware, 3-D printing and earthquakes.
Zhengdong Wang, USA and London, DeepMind, to advance his skills in thinking and writing.
Andrés Acevedo, Medellin, podcast about Colombia.
Luke Farritor, University of Nebraska, deciphering ancient scrolls, travel grant.
Hudhayfa Nazoordeen, Sri Lanka and Waterloo, hydroponics for affordable food.
Thomas Des Garets Geddes, London, Sinification, China newsletter.
Chang Che, book project on the return of state socialism in China, USA/Shanghai.
Alexander Yevchenko, Toronto, ag tech for farmers.
There are more winners to be listed, please do not worry if you didn’t fit into this cohort. And here is a list of previous winners.
*Who Makes the NBA?*
That is the new book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, with the subtitle Data-Driven Answers to Basketball’s Biggest Questions. Most notably, it was written in thirty days with the help of GPT-4.
It’s quite good! Excerpt:
A statistically significant percentage of sons of NBA players shoot free throws at a higher clip than their fathers.
Jokic, by the way, started off playing water polo, and that is partly why he passes as he does and has such good court vision. And this:
And the average NBA player shoots free throws 1.5 percentage points lower in clutch moments in playoff games.
Is some of that due to being more tired rather than choking? On average taller players choke more on free throws, which is perhaps consistent with this hypothesis? Being very tall, they are less likely to be athletic and well-conditioned, in equilibrium that is?
I really liked this book, kudos to the author(s)!
What should UAP disclosure policy be?
That is the subject of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the opener:
There is currently legislation before Congress that, if passed, could be one of the most important laws in US history. The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023, which calls for transparency in matters related to UFOs, is sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and has considerable bipartisan support, although it may fail due to Republican opposition.
However skeptical you or I might be, there are many allegations from within the federal government that the government is hiding alien crafts and bodies, and that the military is seeking to reverse-engineer alien technologies. There are also more plausible claims that there are flying objects that defy explanation.
And:
…if you think all this talk of aliens is nonsense, isn’t the best response some sunlight to show nothing weird is going on?
That is the strongest argument for the bill: if all the recent UAP chatter reflects neither an alien presence nor threats from hostile foreign powers. In that case, drawing back the curtain would discourage reasonable observers from pursuing the topic further. A modest benefit would result.
What about hostile foreign powers as an explanation for the UAPs?:
In that case, additional transparency could be harmful. The US government conducts a variety of intelligence and military operations, and Congress does not insist that they all be made public. There is no transparency for CIA missions, or for US cyberattacks, or for many other aspects of US foreign policy.
In that scenario the case against the bill is relatively strong. And what about good ol’ alien beings and spacecraft?
In that case, is the best policy really what transparency advocates call “managed disclosure”? They had envisioned a panel of responsible experts managing the flow of information, bit by bit.
One question is whether such knowledge might be better kept secret, or known only to the small number of elites who manage to put all of the pieces together. Whether a broad social panic would result from revealing an alien presence on earth is hard to say — but it is also hard to see the practical upside. The best argument for disclosure is simply that the public has a right to know, and that such a knowledge of the reality of the humankind’s place in the universe is intrinsically valuable.
A second question concerns the inexorable logic of disclosure. Practically speaking, the US has a long tradition of whistleblowers and truth-tellers. If there is actual hard evidence of alien visitation, it is going to leak out, with or without the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023. Just look at the Edward Snowden case, where an American risked imprisonment and exile to reveal secrets that were far less important than what could be at stake here.
If the current legislation does not pass, or if a much weaker version moves forward, some people may take that as their cue to step forward and spill the beans — with direct proof rather than hearsay.
So in that “most interesting” case a transparency bill may not matter for long. That means I am not crushed that the disclosure provisions of the bill have been so watered down. In the case where those provisions really matter, a) it may be better if we don’t know, and b) we will find out sooner or later anyway. Aliens and UAPs aside, the appropriate degree of transparency is one of the most difficult questions in politics.
Sunday assorted links
1. Polysee: Irish YouTube videos about YIMBY, aesthetics, and economics.
2. Germany political map of the day.
3. Thwarted Wisconsin DEI markets in everything.
4. The EU AI regulatory statement (on first glance not as bad as many had expected?).
5. The NBA Play-In was in fact a big success. Is the implication that other sports do not experiment enough with producing more fame/suspense at various margins? Basketball games are simply a much better product when the players are trying their best.
6. Your grandfather’s ACLU is back…for one tweet at least.
7. New GiveDirectly results on lump sum transfers, from Kenya.
8. Ideas matter.
9. The Chinese are using water cannons at sea, against the Philippines.
*Napoleon*
You can’t treat it as a normal movie with anything contextualized or explained. Nope. Rather think of it as a crazed male fantasy (the director’s? Certainly not mine) about one particular way of living, presented large and vivid on the screen, with sex scenes too. The fantasy doesn’t even have Napoleon as an especially smart guy, which of course he was. The battles scenes for Austerlitz and Waterloo are some of the best ever filmed. I can’t bring myself to call it “a good movie,” but it was better than expected and I was never tempted to leave.
My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Burns
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode description:
Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, provides a nuanced look into the influential economist and public intellectual.
Tyler and Jennifer start by discussing how her new portrait of Friedman caused her to reassess him, his lasting impact in statistics, whether he was too dogmatic, his shift from academic to public intellectual, the problem with Two Lucky People, what Friedman’s courtship of Rose Friedman was like, how Milton’s family influenced him, why Friedman opposed Hayek’s courtesy appointment at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s attitudes toward friendship, his relationship to fiction and the arts, and the prospects for his intellectual legacy. Next, they discuss Jennifer’s previous work on Ayn Rand, including whether Rand was a good screenwriter, which is the best of her novels, what to make of the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, how Rand and Mises got along, and why there’s so few successful businesswomen depicted in American fiction. They also delve into why fiction seems so much more important for the American left than it is for the right, what’s driving the decline of the American conservative intellectual condition, what she will do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s the future of Milton Friedman, say, 30, 40 years from now? Where will the reputation be? University of Chicago is no longer Friedmanite, right? We know that. There are fewer outposts of Friedmanite-thinking than there had been. Will he be underrated or somehow reinvented or what?
BURNS: Let me look into my crystal ball. I don’t think the name will have faded. I think there are still names that people read. People still read Keynes and Mill and figures like that to see what did they say in their day that was so influential. I think that Friedman has got into the water and into the air a bit. I do some work on tracing out his influence.
Within economics, no one’s going to say, “Oh, I’m a Friedmanite,” or fewer people are, but this is someone whose major work was done half a century or more ago, so I don’t think that’s surprising. It would be surprising if economics had been at a standstill as Friedman still called the tune. When you think about the way we accord importance to the modern Federal Reserve, of course, there were things that happened in the world, but Friedman’s ideas did so much to shape that understanding.
He’s still in policymakers’ minds. He’s still in the monetary policy establishment’s minds, even if they’re not fully following him. I think we’re in the middle of a big reckoning now. You saw all the debate about M2 and the pandemic and monetary spending. I don’t know where it’s all going to settle out. It’s a more complicated world than the one that Friedman looked at. I tend to think he is an essential thinker, that the basics of what he talked about are going to be known 50 years from now, for sure.
COWEN: Did Milton Friedman have friends?
Definitely recommended, and Jennifer’s new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is one of my favorite books of the year. It will likely stand as the definitive biography of Friedman.
Sunday assorted links
1. Will Sweden move away from school vouchers?
2. Lagos harbor and various water and real estate projects.
3. How Manuel Blum became such a successful academic advisor.
4. Chinese confrontations with Filipino ships.
5. U.S. approves chikungunya vaccine. As I’ve been telling you, it is all going to work.
6. Claims about fake license plates.
A Genius Award for Airborne Transmission
One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic was the early insistence by the WHO and the CDC that COVID was not airborne. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” the WHO tweeted on March 28, 2020, accompanied by a large graphic (at right). Even at that time, there was plenty of evidence that COVID was airborne. So why was the WHO so insistent that it wasn’t?
Ironically, some of the resistance to airborne transmission can be traced back to a significant achievement in epidemiology. Namely, John Snow’s groundbreaking arguments that cholera was spread through water and food, not bad air (miasma). Snow’s theory took time to be accepted but when the story of germ theory’s eventual triumph came to be told, the bad air proponents were painted as outdated and ignorant. This sentiment was so pervasive among physicians and health officials that anyone suggesting airborne transmission of disease was vaguely suspect and tainted. Hence, the WHOs and CDCs readiness to label airborne transmission as dangerous, unscientific “misinformation” promulgated on social media (see the graphic). In reality, of course, the two theories were not at odds as one could easily accept that some germs were airborne. Indeed, there were experts in the physics of aerosols who said just that but these experts were siloed in departments of physics and engineering and not in medicine, epidemiology and public health.
As a result of this siloing, we lost time and lives by telling people that they were fine if they kept to the 6ft “rule” and washed their hands, when what we should have been telling them was open the windows, clean the air with UVC, and get outside. Windows not windex.
Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech was one of the aerosol experts who took a prominent role in publicly opposing the WHO guidance and making the case for aerosol transmission (Jose-Luis Jimenez was another important example). Thus, it’s nice to see that Marr is among this year’s MacArthur “genius” award winners. A good interview with Marr is here.
It didn’t take a genius to understand airborne transmission but it took courage to put one’s reputation on the line and go against what seemed like the scientific consensus. Marr’s award is thus an award to a scientist for speaking publicly in a time of crisis. I hope it encourages others, both to speak up when necessary but also to listen.
Addendum: I didn’t take part in the aerosol debates but my wife, who has done research in aerosols and germs, told me early on that “of course COVID is airborne!” Wisely, I chose to take the word of my wife over that of the WHO and CDC.
Emergent Ventures Africa and Caribbean, fourth cohort
Sokhar Samb is a Data Scientist from Senegal. Her EV grant supports her work of drone mapping Senegalese cities and towns such as Dakar and Semone by capturing high-resolution aerial imagery and Light Detection.
Cesare Adeniyi-Martins is from Nigeria and founded Abelar to promote the special jurisdiction economics charter cities in Africa. His EV grant is for general career support.
Alecia McKenzie is a Jamaican author currently residing in France. Her EV grant supports her work at the Caribbean Translation Project to translate Caribbean literature (originally written in English, French, Spanish, or Dutch) into Mandarin Chinese.
Lorenzo Gonzalez is a Belizean currently residing in Canada. Lorenzo has a Masters degree in Economics from the University of Waterloo. His EV grant is to support his writing on tourism on Belize Adventure to promote economic growth in the country.
Keeghan Patrick, Graduate student at MIT; Shergaun Roserie, Mechanical Engineer at FAANG; and Dylan Paul, current MBA student at Harvard Business School. All three are from Saint Lucia. Their EV grant is to support their work through their organization, Obtronics, which, among other activities, offers robotics engineering educational programs to students in St. Lucia.
Raymer Medina is from the Dominican Republic. His EV grant supports his work on low-cost robotics design and development.
Thomas Aichele is multi-based in Chicago, Dakar, and Abidjan. Thomas works in the FinTech industry in West Africa. His EV grant supports his writing on technology infrastructure progress in West Africa.
Marla Dukharan is a Trinidadian Economist. Her EV grant is to support the production of a documentary on the causes and effects of the EU taxation blacklisting of Caribbean countries.
Mary Najjuma is a Ugandan Engineer and current PhD candidate at the London South Bank University. Her EV grant supports her research on rural efficient and optimal cooling hubs.
Andrew Ddembe, Ugandan social entrepreneur. This follow-on grant is to help support the work of his organization, Mobiklinic, in promoting medication care and education in rural Uganda.
Farai Munjoma was born and raised in Zimbabwe and resides in Edinburgh. He founded the Sasha Pathways Program, a virtual career accelerator for African youth. His EV grant is to support the career development program.
Stéphanie Joseph, originally from Haiti, is currently residing in the US. Stéphanie is a current MBA candidate at Harvard Business School. Her EV grant supports her project on land-mile financial inclusion in the Greater Caribbean.
Evalyn Sintoya Mayetu is a Kenyan guide on the Greater Maasai Mara. She is the country’s first female safari guide to achieve Silver Level certification. Her EV grant is for general career development.
Dr. Collin Constantine, born and raised in Guyana, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Girton College, University of Cambridge. His EV grant supports his research on integrating income distribution and the balance of payments constraint into macroeconomics, focusing on the Caribbean.
I am very thankful for the leadership of Rasheed Griffith here, he also wrote those descriptions.
Saturday assorted links
1. Model this.
2. A bunch of claims about nobles, genetics, and violence.
3. New results on interpretability. And much more detail. Potentially very good news. One interpretation. Some are becoming less pessimistic.
4. Arnold Kling on the trouble with books. Remedies will come!
Union Busted
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) just filed for bankruptcy because it lost a case with a port operator in Portland. The back story is amazing.
The ILWU is one of the most powerful unions in the United States. Since bloody riots in 1934 it has controlled all 29 seaports on the west coast of the United States, giving them monopoly power. The ILWU’s 22 thousand workers are known as the “lords of the dock” and they earn an average of just over $200,000 in salary and another $100,000 in benefits, a bit more than the typical CEO. Some ILWU foremen take home half a million a year.
The ILWU has a lock on dockworkers but there are other rival unions. In Portland, for example, there were two jobs for reefers–electrical workers who handle special refrigerated containers–that since 1974 had been held by members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The ILWU, however, wanted control of these jobs and in 2012 one of the heavies of the union, Leal Sundet, threatened the manager of the port operator that if he didn’t help him to take these jobs from the Brotherhood and give them to the Longshoremen he would create havoc. When the port operator didn’t comply–it wasn’t clear even that they could comply as the jobs were not under the port operator’s control–the ILWU followed through on its threat. Repeated shutdowns, slowdowns and discovered “safety violations” disrupted port operations so badly that the entire port closed.
The port operator, however, took the ILWU to court, arguing that the labor actions were illegal. The jury agreed giving the port operator an award of $93.6 million for its losses, later reduced to $19 million. The Union doesn’t have the $19 million, hence the bankruptcy.
Thus, the union has been bankrupted, the port closed, hundreds of millions of dollars lost and shipments slowed all because of a dispute over 2 jobs.
In related news, the just approved ILWU contract raises wages for ILWU workers and ensures that there will be no serious automation of the ports for at least another six years, again putting the United States behind the rest of the world in efficient shipping and logistics.
I am reminded of the day Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for their illegal strike.
*The Creator* (movie review with spoilers)
This movie was deeper and more philosophical than I was expecting. Imagine a Buddhism that decides the AIs represent the true renunciation of desire, and thus embody the Buddhist ideal. Globally, the AIs ally themselves with the Buddhist nations, now unified under a “Republic of New Asia” banner. Mostly it looks like Vietnam (water buffalo), until snow-capped mountains are needed near the end.
The Buddhists considers the AIs to be kinder than humans. America, however, tries to destroy them all, as part of a misguided quest to bomb the proverbial data centers.
You will find visual quotations from A.I., Robocop, Terminator II, Kundun, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Firestarter, Westworld, Lost in Space, the Abraham story from Genesis, and more. The special effects were good, and surprisingly understated compared to the usual excess. Scientific consistency, however, you will not find.
In this movie it is Eliezer and the Americans who are the bad guys. I was surprised to see Hollywood make that move.
From the director of Rogue One, a good sign of course, and the soundtrack is by Hans Zimmer. This movie is not perfect, but I am very glad I saw it. The U.S. reviews for it are unreliable, the BBC did OK, Vulture too.