Results for “water” 1139 found
Goa ramblings
The monsoon is far less scary when they turn on their windshield wipers or for that matter when they have them. For abandoned rusted tankers in the water, Goa is #1. For non-abandoned rusted tankers, Goa also does well. Many are carrying iron ore to China. The Portuguese colonial churches are eerily like colonial Brazil, yet no one lives in old Goa any more. My guide claims the state of Goa is 45 percent Christian. My hotel practices Restaurant Apartheid and won’t let me sit with the Indian customers. They try to talk me out of eating the Goan foods ("don’t you want the chicken breast Sir? Very nice pastries…", etc.). The white pumpkin curry is amazing. Goa is far less densely populated than I had expected; the major city has only about 80,000 people. One meal experience can involve being served by eight different people, none of whom ever stand more than ten feet away from you and each of whom you must say goodbye to. Need I compare this to Bordeaux? Cashews are the gift of choice. When it stops pouring, which does happen occasionally, women flock to the beach in beautifully colored saris. My taxi driver looked quite a bit like me; I believe he has Portuguese blood as I do. I have read that the state of Goa has the highest per capita income in India; this appears to come from the entire distribution and not just from the peaks. Malcolm Gladwell books are seen everywhere, as is Freakonomics, which has Angelina Jolie on the cover. There is less here than I had thought but I’ve ended up liking it more. Next is Hyderabad, and back to work.
My views on global warming
1. It is by now pointless to deny that global warming is man-made to a considerable degree.
2. It is a very real problem. If you don’t believe me, go visit the deltas of East Bengal or Bangladesh and think about it again. Sweden I am not worried about and Greenland may become valuable, but where do we put the losers and no this isn’t just a few small islands in the Pacific.
3. I can imagine Manhattan and other major cities taking protective action against rising water levels, much as the Dutch do today. I recall reading that the Dutch spend about as a high a percentage of their gdp defending themselves from water as the U.S. does on national defense. That is quite a burden, but it is better than forsaking economic growth.
4. Like Arnold Kling, I do not much trust climate models. Perhaps I have spent too much time doing macro, and the experience carries over. Nonetheless uncertainty about final effects gives us more to worry about, not less. It is the worst-case scenarios for global warming which worry me, not the middling scenarios. Variance is our enemy in this matter.
5. I don’t have a good plan for what to do. Imagine passing and extending Kyoto and turning 2/3 of the U.S. energy supply into nuclear, wind, and solar power. Heroic achievements, to be sure. But if China and India continue to industrialize, global warming will likely continue and perhaps accelerate, as I understand current knowledge.
6. I have yet to see a real plan which recognizes three points: a) without continued economic growth the world will probably fall apart, b) the problem is real and significant, c) any good preventive solution would require an enormous amount of concerted action across both time and across nations.
7. How much does the framing of the problem contribute to our political views on the matter? How much would we spend, or how intensively would we organize global action, if a typhoon were headed right for Bangladesh? An earthquake? A war? A much slower set of changes, not fully our fault? An out-of-control American nuclear weapon? Should it matter?
8. If we could relocate all the losers-to-be into freer and richer countries, should we consider this a satisfactory solution? Or are we still massive and unjustified aggressors if they are crying to us: "Don’t let it happen, don’t let it happen!"?
Why I cannot fall fully for Jane Jacobs
I love the main ideas of Jane Jacobs. Her passing was truly sad for me. I read her as a teenager. It shook my world.
Nonetheless I think she is a tiny-teeny bit overrated. She never coped with the problems of scale. Nor did she explain how infrastructure should be built.
It is fine to juxtapose the old Greenwich Village against the gargantuan planning of the corrupt Robert Moses. Few other social scientists of her time grasped the idea of spontaneous order. But what to do if a city grows from one million to ten million people, as has happened many times in the Third World?
To be sure, favelas and shanties work far better than their reputations. Drug gangs aside, they embody many of the best qualities of Jacob’s analysis, or for that matter Hayek’s. But surely it is a problem when there is no piped water or reliable electricity. How can you get those services into new areas without some serious planning? You can call for private sector involvement but it is planning nonetheless and it probably will involve some use of eminent domain. Or how about new roads?
Perhaps I am unfair to Jacobs, but I read her as thinking we can confront the problems of cities without answering those questions.
It is perhaps unfair to note that Jacobs’s "straight economics" often made little sense, but surely this is relevant to how she understood the major problems of cities. She doubted the necessity of the nation-state and was suspicious of internal economies of scale under a common legal order. She promoted "import substitution," which is now a discredited idea among both left-wing and right-wing economists.
Here is a list of Moses’s projects for New York City. Could the Big Apple have prospered and grown without them?
The Peace Corp.
Private security companies like Blackwater have thrived in Iraq, where
the US military has relied on them for everything from guarding convoys
to securing the Green Zone. But these companies recognize that the
demand for their services in Iraq will eventually diminish, and
Blackwater, for one, is looking for new markets….When Kofi Annan was UN undersecretary general for
peacekeeping, he explored the option of hiring the South African
private military company Executive Outcomes to aid in the Rwandan
refugee crisis. He ultimately decided against the option, declaring
that ”the world is not yet ready to privatize peace."The world still appears to be unready-and representatives of
private military companies believe that’s shortsighted. ”When
traditional peacekeepers can’t provide an adequate response because of
their home country obligations, there’s an alternative that should be
openly and frankly discussed. And that’s a private professional group,"
says Chris Taylor, Blackwater’s vice president for strategic
initiatives….…When the world’s governments and multilateral organizations
have proven as ineffectual as they have in Darfur, should they turn to
the private sector for help? In the absence of a viable alternative, is
the international community’s aversion to what some call ”mercenarism"
stronger than its will to fight genocide?
From the Boston Globe.
No doubt there are some issues to be addressed but this objection from David Isenberg, senior analyst at the British American Security Information Council, is farcical.
”How do you ensure oversight, compliance with international
humanitarian law, follow the rules of warfare, rules of engagement,
comply with the Geneva Conventions, and the whole bureaucratic panoply
of rules that come into play?"
How indeed. But after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret CIA prisons etc. how can anyone claim that this is an argument against privatization?
Thanks to David Theroux for the pointer.
Addendum: Matt Yglesias has some sensible and surprisingly positive thoughts on the peace corp question. In the comments LaFollette Prog writes "If Doctors Without Borders decides to hire a regiment of Doctors With Heavy Artillery and starts capping some Janjaweed ass, it might improve their fundraising efforts in rural America…"
Negative charity
Buried away in a tiny Telegraph column this week was a reference to one of the best academic studies
to emerge in a long time. Doctors in a Scottish hospital have looked at
the hidden costs of charitable parachuting, to the health service in
particular, and published the results in the journal Injury (the link
is to the abstract unless you or your institution subscribe). They
found that the injury rate was 11% and the serious injury rate 7%.
Minor injuries cost the National Health Service £3751 on average and
serious injuries £5781.As the average parachutist raised all of
£30 (this is just a day out after all) each pound raised for charity
cost the NHS £13.75. Every one of the charitable types who feels
terribly virtuous raising money for charity in this way is actually
preventing the health service treating the sick.
Here is the link, and thanks to Matthew Sinclair for the pointer. Can you think of other comparable examples of negative charity?
Addendum: Jeff Ely directs my attention to this example; buy and drink some water, so that Starbucks will donate money to address the water shortage (in other countries).
My favorite things New York City
1. My favorite demographic charts: Track population changes by borough.
2. My favorite NYC dining guide blog: Click on the categories on the top row of the blog to see the whole thing.
3. Favorite neighborhood: To live in? Manhattan is getting so uncool. I will pick the corner of Hudson and Barrow, which is near W. Houston and the West Side Highway, just north of the Saatchi building. There it still looks and feels like the New York City I grew up with (from New Jersey, that is). But when will I have the money and the courage to try? The Upper East Side bores me and the best food is in Queens; neither is suitable for real life.
4. Favorite book about: Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan, by Philip Lopate. I am surprised how few people know this one. Compulsively readable, and it makes me want to write a comparable work. But "A Drive Around Fairfax"? No way.
5. Favorite dim sum: Oriental Garden, in Chinatown, Elizabeth St., make sure to arrive early. Don’t forget Flushing, especially if you have time to kill at LaGuardia. The juicy pork buns at Joe’s Shanghai? Jackson Diner is still great Indian food though it is not the revelation it once was; the competition has caught up with it.
6. Best lunch bargain: Nougatine, the bistro attached to Jean-Georges. Get the venison with green chiles for its amazing mix of textures and heat.
7. Favorite Seinfeld episode: How about Master of His Domain? Soup Nazi is overrated and in fact I don’t even like it. The one where Jerry and Elaine try to be together again is another favorite, plus Show Within a Show.
8. Favorite free activity that even most New Yorkers don’t do: Browse the auction displays at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, especially before the major auctions in May and November.
Movies, music, literature? Not today. You might as well try "My Favorite Things Not in New York" for an easier task.
The Shangri-La Diet
Seth Roberts’ diet book, The Shangri-La Diet has just been published. Actually, the Shangri-La Diet isn’t really a diet, it’s a method of suppressing appetite. Roberts argues that the body follows a simple heuristic – when calories are tasty they must be plentiful so turn up the appetite and stock up when the fruit is on the tree. But if calories taste like cardboard then times must be bad (why else would you be eating cardboard?) so turn the appetite down and use up those fat stores. If you had to eat cardboard to lose weight the diet wouldn’t be very appealing but Roberts found that a few hundred calories of extra-light olive oil or sugar water are enough to turn the appetite weigh down (pun intended.)
The book is a quick read and in addition to the diet itself there are interesting asides about science, self-experimentation, the obesity epidemic and other topics.
Don’t take my word for it, however. The great thing about Roberts’ methods is that you will know whether they work within a day or two. Buy the book, try it out, you have a lot to lose!
Addendum: Long-time readers may recall that I wrote a brief profile of Berkeley psychologist Roberts and his novel self-experiments. That profile turned out to be one link in a chain that led to the present book (I am kindly mentioned in the acknowledgments.).
The future of ports and vessels
It is a fun game to write out only the last paragraphs of good books:
Where vessel size had once been limited by the locks in the Panama Canal, containerships had grown so large that twenty-first-century naval architects were constrained by the Straits of Malacca, the busy shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia. If a containership ever reaches Malacca-Max, the maximum size for a vessel able to pass through the straits, it will be a quarter mile long and 190 feet wide, with its bottom some 65 feet below the waterline. If it should sink, it will take nearly $1 billion of cargo with it. Its capacity will be 18,000 TEUs, or 9,000 standard 40-foot containers, enough to fill a 68-mile line of trucks each time it arrives in port. Where it will call is a serious question, because few ports anywhere are deep enough to accommodate it. The answer may well be brand-new ports built in deep water offshore, with Malacca-Max ships linking offshore platforms and smaller vessels shuttling containers to land. If they ever come about, these enormously costly ships and ports will create yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe.
That is from Marc Levinson’s The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Here is a link to Virginia Postrel’s post on the book. Here is a photo of a Malacca-Max ship; sadly there is no elephant nearby.
My favorite things Louisiana
Ah, to be on the road again… Most of my reporting from Louisiana will likely appear in another venue (links in due time); for now you must be content with these notes:
1. Favorite song: King Porter Stomp, by Jelly Roll Morton. I didn’t think about this one much, though many Louis Armstrong songs are fair contenders. To sort through music more generally would take hours. In addition to jazz, Cajun music, zydeco, and "swamp pop," there is Jerry Lee Lewis, Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson, Little Walter, Buddy Guy, Lucinda Williams, and yes Britney Spears.
2. Movie, set in: Southern Comfort remains underrated. Interview with the Vampire was better than expected. Water Boy has a few funny jokes. There is also Streetcar Named Desire (not my thing), Big Easy, The Drowning Pool, The Apostle, and last but not least The Blob was filmed in Abbeville.
3. Writer: I don’t much like Truman Capote, though I can see he was important at the time. John Kennedy Toole is a good pick, don’t forget Kate Chopin, plus I will confess a weakness for the best of Anne Rice; Witching Hour and Lasher are my favorites. Elmore Leonard rounds out a strong category, and I am likely forgetting some notables.
4. Artist: John James Audobon did some of his work in Louisiana, plus he was born in Haiti. Does that count? Clementine Hunter is one pick from the Naives. Here is another picture by her.
5. Dish: Boudin blanc or peppered, boiled crayfish. Overall I prefer the simple rural food to the New Orleans Creole style and its heavier roux-based sauces.
6. Architecture: There are many wonders, try this typical and not even extraordinary house from the Garden District.
The bottom line: Riches await you here.
Philosophical implications of inflationary cosmology
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite universe, we find that the doomsday argument applies only to effects which change the average lifetime of all civilizations, and not those which affect our civilization alone.
Got that? Here is the paper. Here is brief background.
It seems if you count all possible universes (or call them parts of our multiverse, whatever) as normatively relevant, none of your actions matter in consequentialist terms.
As to how our world, and our decisions, matter at the margin, we delve into the murky waters of infinite expected values. With an infinity of alternatives out there, our little add-on doesn’t seem to make any difference for the grand total. Why should even you raise the average outcome across universes? (TC yesterday: "No, Bryan, we are not leaping up Cantorian levels of infinity, it is just one version of you getting another Klondike bar.")
One option is that only our universe, or some other "in-group," matters. The other universes cannot count for less, rather they must count for nothing. I recoil at such a thought, but it does avoid the mess of infinities. Alternatively, we might embrace some version of Buddhism.
On the bright side, philosophic talk about modality is no longer so problematic but rather refers to facts about other existing universes. Since that problem threatened to bring morality to its knees anyway ("what do you mean, you "could" have done something different? You did what you had to do."), maybe I don’t feel so bad after all. And who should care if I do feel bad? The other me feels fine. Infinity has its benefits, and there are many worse problems.
You should lower your probability that God exists, since the Anthropic Argument will dispense with the Argument from Design. Only the ordered pockets of the multiverse can wonder about why we are here and why things seem to run so smoothly.
That’s a lot to swallow in one day, but it seems the probability of all those propositions just went up.
Addendum: Have I mentioned that inflationary cosmology and its implications fit my crude, pathetic intuitions? Since we have a universe, I feel it must somehow be a kind of cosmic "free lunch." And once you open the door for free lunches, why stop at just one? There is no good reason to rely on our locally-evolved common sense intuitions when doing philosophic cosmology.
Department of !
Saturn moon spewing water vapor. Or so it seems…
Interesting links
1. David Friedman has a novel coming out.
2. Here is another good reason to have sex.
3. Contracts for everything, a’ la Mary Blige.
4. Long compound German nouns.
5. Bird flu, standing on one foot, by EffectMeasure. Here is a good analysis of avian flu in cats.
6. How baseball statistics confuse the transient and the permanent, pointer from Robert Schwartz.
7. George Lucas: "I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million."
8. How to moderate a panel, pointer from Chris Masse.
What I’ve been reading
1. Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking, by Fuchsia Dunlop. The other night I made a sauce with five chopped green onions, blended to a smooth paste with one tablespoon sichuan peppers (first dunked into hot water). Add three tablespoons chicken stock, one teaspoon light soy sauce, one and one half teaspoons sesame oil. Apply to cooked chicken. More generally, buy Chinese cooking wine and black (Chinese) vinegar and you are almost ready to go.
2. Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, seventh edition. This is not just a reference work, it is also the best book on jazz, period. The main drawback is a lack of material on Norwegian jazz, a recent interest of mine.
3. This NYT article on previously-covered Dana Schutz. Or try this article on nuns and the origins of reggae.
4. Recent books by Julian Barnes and Zadie Smith, while entertaining enough, won’t attract interest thirty years from now. Question: What is the optimal lag time before deciding a work of fiction is worth reading? Few novels require urgent reading, so how about fifteen years? Why do I violate this rule so regularly?
5. Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine, by A. Zee. This unique book lives up to its subtitle; it teaches you how to make sense of Chinese characters, how the Chinese think about food, and how it all fits into a bigger picture.
Funes, the Memorius
A wonderful short story by Borges, appropriate for today, and it is much shorter than you might remember. Thanks to Alina Stefanescu for the pointer.
Plus ca change…
I had the same reaction as Pablo Halkyard at the PSD Blog to yesterday’s article in the NYTimes on Bolivian water privatization so here is his post:
Juan Ferrero’s
article in today’s New York Times discusses the poor results of water
privatization and nationalization in Bolivia, as well as the country’s
turbid future as it struggles to reform.After
days of protests and martial law, Bechtel – the American multinational
that had increased rates when it began running the waterworks – was
forced out. As its executives fled the city, protest leaders pledged to
improve service and a surging leftist political movement in Latin
America celebrated the ouster as a major victory, to be repeated in
country after country.Today, five years later, water is again as cheap as ever, and a
group of community leaders runs the water utility, Semapa. But half of
Cochabamba’s 600,000 people remain without water, and those who do have
service have it only intermittently – for some, as little as two hours
a day, for the fortunate, no more than 14.The sad
part is that I have read the exact same article by Juan at least four
times in the last two years – although sometimes the names of Peru or
Ecuador are plugged in for Bolivia, or electricty/gas replaces water as
the featured sector.
See also my earlier post on some surprising benefits of water privatization.