I am a protopian, which means that I accept neither visions of utopia nor fears of dystopia but do expect gradual improvement. (NY Times, Medium)
The NY Times runs an op-ed asking why our anti-poverty programs haven't reduced poverty, relying on a measure of poverty that does not include government assistance. Kevin Drum shreds this by pointing out that if you do account for government assistance, the US poverty rate has fallen from 18.7% in 1980 to 8.3% today. There is a widespread belief on the left that nothing has gotten better, whether we're talking about poverty, racism, health care, or any number of other things, even when this is demonstrably false.
People tend to assume that artifical intelligence will be less scatterbrained than humans, more focused, perhaps monomaniacal. But if you compare animals, the more intelligent ones seem to be more internally conflicted than the stupid ones. I mean, other than us the animal that does the most bizarre, pointless stuff is probably orcas. So maybe superintelligent AI will we more scatterbrained and conflicted than we are.
I've been reading all my life that the Sargasso Sea was a sort of misnomer/just plain wrong, because the central Atlantic is not really full of seaweed. But Yahoo tells me that there is now a "5,000-mile seaweed bloom that can be seen from space" right around where old maps showed the Sargasso Sea. This is blamed on fertilizer, but maybe something else in the past had the same effect – big dust storms on the Sahara? – and the sailors who named the Sargasso Sea weren't really wrong.
How much safer has construction work gotten over the past century? A lot.
This rather irritating review of two books on the history of science nonetheless comes back to the theory I have mentioned here before, that the intellectual creativity of the modern world, first in Europe and then elsewhere, was launched by the flood of new knowledge coming from around the world.
Ordos in Inner Mongolia, once famous as a "ghost city" that somehow foretold the future collapse of China's economy, is now said to be thriving, mostly because of the schools that have opened there.
More on the view that the recent spate of UFO videos can't depict what they seem to, because the "craft" violate our most basic knowledge of physics. For example, they seem to move through air at extremely high speeds without generating friction. You may think, that just means aliens are super advanced, but if our knowledge of physics is that wrong, you could be looking at literally anything. Like, say, the visions of Paleolithic shamans projected 50,000 years into the future. That wouldn't violate our physics any more than frictionless motion does.
Narco-submarines made in Colombia can cross the Atlantic, carrying drugs to Europe.
Comprehensive study of donkey genetics finds that they were domesticated only once, in the Horn of Africa, around 5,000 BC. (NY Times, Science) Donkeys were an integral part of human life for a long time, and still are in some places, but the relationship has never been easy. Donkeys have never learned to love their work, as dogs have, so their stubbornness and willful stupidity are part of folklore wherever they are kept.
Interesting article on George Orwell and Albert Camus, who both saw themselves as people who put the truth before ideology and paid a price for it. They arranged to meet once, in Paris soon after WW II, but Camus fell sick and never showed up.
Giorgia Meloni, Italy's new fascist-lite Prime Minister, scares a lot of people – Stern dubbed her "the most dangerous woman in Europe" – but so far she has governed quite responsibly, picked few fights, and sided with Ukraine against Russia, and her approval rating is the highest of any leader in Europe.
Women do sometimes falsely accuse men of rape, as the infamous case of "Facebook fantasist" Eleanor Williams shows. On the other hand, rape remains a difficult crime to prove, so most of these falsely accused men have little trouble proving their innocence.
After decades of trying and bitter public protests, the French government finally rammed through a bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. I'll give this to Macron, he risked his political future to do something he felt had to be done. (NY Times, NPR)
Interesting Neolithic archaeology in the Arabian desert.
The Biden administration threatens to ban TikTok if it is not sold to a non-Chinese company. The issue is that TikTok collects a ton of data on users to which the Chinese government could get access. Most users don't care because they figure the US government could get access to their data from US-owned apps, and they don't like that any better.
Ukraine Links
As the snow melts around Bakhmut, fields full of Russian corpses are exposed. I should say that some people doubt these photos but they are being posted by people I have found to be reliable.
"Russian citizens are ratting each other out to authorities in droves for anti-war comments made in bars, beauty salons, and grocery stores." From Vretska.
Spokeswoman for the Free Buryatia Foundation claims that as of January 9, 471 Buryats had been killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine, while by March 4, 622 had been killed. So the daily death toll has risen from 1.5/day in 2022 to 2.8/day in 2023. Buryatia has a population of around 975,000. Also note that while Buryats and other minorities are overrepresented in the Russian army, their death toll amounts to 0.064% of the population. Russia's losses are hard on their army but for the population as a whole people fleeing abroad is a much bigger problem.
Detailed summary of what is known about the Nordstream Pipeline attack from British journalist Brian Whitaker, with lots of links.
British MOD reports that the Russian army has imposed "punitive shell rationing" due to shortages, and that this is the reason Russia can't mount a meaningful offensive.
The NY Times runs an op-ed asking why our anti-poverty programs haven't reduced poverty, relying on a measure of poverty that does not include government assistance.
ReplyDeleteI think the idea was that government assistance was supposed to help people out of poverty, not keep them on government assistance forever. As someone says in the comments, "It's like diabetes. Diabetics on insulin can live long, full lives, but it would be real nice to be able to cure diabetes."
"After decades of trying and bitter public protests, the French government finally rammed through a bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. I'll give this to Macron, he risked his political future to do something he felt had to be done."
ReplyDeleteHe also did it in defiance of French democracy and the will of both the French people and their duly elected representatives. And he did that by exploiting an article of the French constitution which was written as a safeguard against situations where the government is paralyzed by things like rapid government changes one after another - which is absolutely not the case in France, and is not the reason this legislation couldn't otherwise pass.
This is abuse of power, plain and simple.
When I read the op-ed, I was less troubled by the question of whether its facts about poverty rates were right, and more by its crude "cui bono?" reasoning. The premise is that, if institutions or people can be shown to exploit the poor, then poverty exists in America IN ORDER to benefit the institutions and people who exploit it.
ReplyDeleteThis is essentially a leftist form of conspiracy theorizing.