- Read: Natural (now more like “worsened by us”) disasters are more frequent, which makes each one harder to recover from (and makes us poorer, by diverting resources from “adding” to “staying the same”)
- Read: Legalise ecstasy and cannabis to combat drugs crime in NL. Yep.
- Read: Why It’s Impossible to Rent a Car Right Now (markets are taking time to adjust)
- Listen: Nature needs rights to be protected from us — and Nature is getting them.
- Read: The real gentrification villain? Not the hipsters, but the boomers preventing new development in their neighborhoods.
- Watch: The French Fry King Of Rio de Janeiro
- Watch: John Oliver on databrokers selling your data to anyone. (I can’t find an update, to see if he exposed the “members of congress” he was targeting.)
- Watch: Some insights into Christiana (Copenhagen).
- Listen: Rethinking (Neo)liberalism? (An excellent discussion of a many-sided topic).
- Read: Lead exposure dropped 3-6 points off the IQs of Americans born in the 60s and 70s (that’s me…. aarg!). Related: Read this post on lead, crime and poverty and another on (modern) air pollution.
The Dutch nitrogen crisis
The Netherlands is one of the highest (per capita) GHG emitters in the EU. It is also responsible for a lot of local pollution, mostly due to its intense agricultural production (mostly meat and dairy, mostly for export).
The government has promised to improve its pollution record, but it’s often tried to avoid action.
Now the country is in a “stikstof (nitrogen) crisis” in which nitrogen emissions (a local pollution) need to be reduced by 50-70 percent by 2030.
From what I’ve heard (correct me if I’m wrong), the government is focussing on identifying and closing farms (responsible for most of the domestic nitrogen emissions), and this “plan” is attracting a lot of opposition. Just imagine thousands of angry farmers.
This method of “efficiently” finding/closing farms is neither politically nor economically efficient, as bureaucrats will have to pay a lot if “targeted” farmers don’t want to shut down. The bureaucrats will also be unpopular for “attacking” certain farms.
What the government should do instead is set up a “cap (and reduce) and trade” system where all large farms get a certain number of “rights” (say 1000 in total) and a schedule of “eroding” those rights by 50% by 2030.
Such a system will allow farmers to decide if they want to stay in business (buying rights), close down (selling rights) or change their methods (relieving them of the need to have rights to operate).
My one-handed conclusion is that bureaucrats never know more than farmers on either how to farm or who should retire.
Use market incentives. Farmers already do!
Interesting stuff
- Listen: Land taxes are a good idea (I am wavering between land-only and land+improvements taxes, but both are easier/better than taxing income!)
- Watch: The big tech monopolies (Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple) need stronger regulation.
- Listen: Some wisdom on where markets are going and why many will still go down.
- Read: Undirected consumerism, supply chain snafus and confused retailers are creating messes of wasteful excess and shortage
- Watch: A nice guy’s guide to dealing with a bad cup of (paid) coffee.
- Read: People are already facing “unlivable heat” (wetbulb temperatures over 35C) in this Pakistani city. Surviving, yes, but not thriving.
- Read: Here’s a good update on the clusterfucked mismanagement of the Colorado River. I emailed its author these thoughts: Sadly, the REAL harm is not to farmers (who need to get behind cap and trade of scarce water), but the environment. The Colorado Delta is dead, and Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin is in trouble and/or dying… in both cases due to excess “take.” More ecosystems will collapse, and air conditioning will not replace them.
- This essay on the “internet middle class” of people who make a modest living through internet activities (writing, performing, selling stuff) stuck me as a bit sad. Yes, supporters from anywhere in the world might find you in random ways, but that process, and the endurance of your (patron-creator) relationship, is fragile and one-dimensional compared to working for local supporters. Eighteen years ago, I described [pdf] how Google (and the internet’s “winner-takes all” dynamic) would undermine creativity by removing the “middle-class” performers and teachers. I think that’s still true, to a degree. I’m personally thinking about (one day) moving from my paid job to an unpaid retirement where I do mostly the same as I do now (save the faculty meetings), as the “work for the internet” option seems to have too many negatives.
- Listen: This discussion with a Canadian of the slow supply response from the oil/gas industries surfaced an interesting problem: So many people are refusing to enter this “unethical” industry, and so many people are retiring now (with high share prices that allow them to cash out), that there’s a risk of serious price increases due to unyielding demand. Be careful what you ask for!
- Listen to this podcast episode on why a liberal arts training provides useful tools for a happier — and more successful — life.
The high cost of permit parking
That’s the title of a new paper that I just uploaded on SSRN.
The paper is “interesting” for its critique of weaknesses in Amsterdam’s parking policies, which the city is (perhaps unjustly) famous for.
It’s also interesting for the “ratio” method of comparing market and bureaucratic prices, to see if they are in balance.
I am definitely looking for feedback/corrections/advice on the paper. please forward to anyone who may have an interest!
“The high cost of permit parking” (with Karolina Kneller)
Abstract: In 1992, Amsterdam’s voters pushed for a more-aggressive autoluw (fewer cars) policy, but progress has been slow. Hourly parking tariffs are the highest in the country, but car registrations are higher than in 1992. We explore the gap between promise and results by making a spatial comparison of parking prices (set by bureaucrats) to living prices (set by market forces). We assume that a balance between supply and demand for open spaces will result in a relatively stable ratio of these prices across the city. We do not find such stability.* The normalized price of parking permits (for residents) is much lower than the normalized prices of living space or hourly parking (for visitors). Cheap permits encourage car ownership, which takes public space away from other uses. Our recommendation, in line with that of Donald Shoup (an inspiration for this study), is to increase the price of permits and let neighborhoods spend the proceeds on improving their streets.
*one-handedly 😉
Interesting stuff
- Read: Shipping containers have lowered the cost of handling ocean-freight by 99 percent, but they fall off ships all the time (and increasingly so, due to climate chaos), which leads to some weird stuff floating around.
- Listen: George Monbriot on why and how we need to change our food systems
- Read: As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces An ‘Environmental Nuclear Bomb’ — this story surprised me, as the Mormons (who dominate Utah politics) were famously good at managing water. It seems that THAT culture has been replaced by excess growth and water use. The GSL drying up, like the Aral and Salton “Seas,” exposes toxic dust but also shows the magnitude of excess use — a vision that we do not — but should — have of disappearing groundwater. More: Paul Krugman agrees with me and makes the (obvious, but important) point that there’s no chance of addressing climate chaos if Utah can’t even save the GSL.
- Read: How San Francisco Became a Failed City (but may be coming back from the edge of woke-stupid?): “…these are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.” Fuck.
- Read: How crypto giant Binance became a hub for hackers, fraudsters and drug traffickers (and that $2.3 billion is MAYBE 0.1% of the volumes banks launder, so keep that in mind…). Related: Hackers switch to email-fraud (e.g., sending a fake invoice from a “trusted” email).
- Read: Constant bargain hunting makes us value all the wrong things about shopping (like the value of the item itself).
- Read: Cities need to absorb water to reduce flood damage
- Read: Conservative (US) judges are “mining” linguistics databases to justify their opinions by selecting past uses of words
- Listen: Steve Levitt discusses his failure to understand geo-engineering but also the many troubles of the IPCC and other climate-related programs
- Read: Writers describe how they revise (and revise and revise)
H/T to ED
Review: Longitude
Since I got into watches, I’ve heard more about more about Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, a book by Dana Sobel that was published in 1995.
The book is short (191 pages) and blazing read, which stems more from Sobel’s clear and direct style than from the simplicity of the plot, which takes many twists and turns between the 1714 announcement of the “Longitude Prize” and its ultimate (but anti-climatic) award 60 years later.
What was the Longitude Prize and why did it matter?
After “just a few too many” maritime disasters resulting from ships now knowing their correct longitude, the British Parliament offered the prize to direct inventors and scientists towards finding a solution. What was the problem? Sailors at sea could easily identify their latitude, or distance from the equator, by observing sun’s noon height above the horizon, but they could not determine their longitude, as that distance could only be known relative to a starting point to the east or west.
Two main solutions were proposed. The first method tracked the difference in time between the starting point and the current location (comparing “local noon” to time at the starting point), which would tell you how far you were, in terms of the 24 hours it takes for the Earth to rotate. The second method compared the “star map” above one’s head to a published guide of star locations, to understand where in its rotation the Earth stood.
The first method was a challenge because there were no clocks (let alone watches) that could stay accurate as a ship sailed and swung and dipped and heaved across the seas, through changing temperatures and humidities. Few clocks could stay within 5 minutes per day, let alone the 5 seconds per day needed to win the prize. The second method was a challenge because it required mapping stars from different locations on Earth across the 16-year cycle it took the Earth, while wobbling, to pass through its “star cruise.” The second method was also useless in cloudy conditions or when the moonlight was too bright.
A determined problem-solver
The hero of the story is John Harrison, a carpenter-turned-clockmaker who spent most of his life (from 20 to 80 years old) inventing, refining and improving various clocks, and then finally a pocket watch (see the cover image). The villain(s) of the story are the astronomers who blocked recognition of Harrison (they were in charge of awarding the prize) while promoting their preferred “star solution.”
Although I am no watchmaker, I was impressed by the many advances that Harrison created and refined, such as a constant-tension winding spring (to replace a pendulum) and bimetallic components whose differing reactions to temperature maintained the same shape (length or thickness) in hot and cold conditions.
Although the Longitude Board could should have recognized Harrison’s victory as early as 1737 (and certainly by 1761), it issued smaller awards here and there, to encourage several contestants, before finally recognizing Harrison (after intervention by King George III) in 1773. Harrison was 80 years old. One of the main reason’s for his ultimate success was the ease of using his clocks/watches, which gave a location quickly and easily in comparison to the star method, which required several hours of calculation.
In these days of GPS and atomic clocks, most of us do not struggle to know our time and location, but these “modern delights” are only due to the efforts of determined, creative geniuses like Harrison. (NB: His pocket watch lost 5 seconds over 80 days in 1761; a modern, Swiss-certified “chronometer” — such as a Rolex — is allowed to lose 10 seconds per day!)
I give this book FIVE STARS for its compelling and interesting story.
Interesting stuff
- Read: Rent-the-Runway struggles with its “sharing” business model — is it sustainable? Profitable?
- Read: “As transformative investing grows, even if it remains a niche part of the financial market, emphasizing how it’s different from other kinds of ethical investing will become even more important, especially if it wants to avoid the haziness that surrounds socially responsible investing.”
- Read: Airlines take seating space and then sell it back — and you’re thrilled!
- Read: China’s new vassal: Vladimir Putin (the tables have turned)
- Read: Climate chaos: More Dengue in Singapore — and worldwide.
- Listen: Demographics, population growth and more (or less?)
- Watch: The ebb and flow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
- Read: Climate change damages (and other problems with life) can be radically reduced by educating people (women in particular) in poorer countries — or everywhere!
- Read: How harmful is social media? (Not as harmful as toxic personalities)
- Laugh (cry?):
Mining, entropy and sustainability
Fossil fuels, like many mined resources, are “non-renewable,” which means they are used faster than replenished (as far as human-time scales are concerned).
But the extraction and consumption of non-renewables (NRs) also creates pollution (“negative externalities”) at local and global scales.
Mining scars the landscape and produces toxic tailings. Fracking releases methane and pollutes water. Oil drilling pollutes aquatic and land ecosystems. Even getting “on site” means plowing through remote, sensitive ecosystems. Fossil fuel consumption contributes to climate chaos by increasing GHG concentrations in the atmosphere.
The NR industry tries to “offset” damages with various wheezes, i.e.,
- Restoring landscapes by shifting earth back into holes or filling ponds of tailing water
- Cleaning process water before its released back into ecosystems
- Scrubbing GHGs from the atmosphere via carbon capture and storage (CCS) or other technologies.
- “Protecting” landscapes elsewhere (on paper).
The trouble with ALL of these techniques is that they defy the laws of physics, as far as 100% remediation is concerned, for two reasons:
- The production of NRs requires energy and “remediation” also requires energy. Thus, there’s no way to “reset” the situation to its ex-ante state.
- The consumption of NRs releases energy (often the point) as well as pollution. Recapturing or removing that pollution (via CCS or DAC, etc.) will take energy, so there’s no way to “suck it all back in” without using even more energy than was generated in the first place, due to entropy.
Why does this matter? Because many industry lobbyists seem to promise that it’s possible to find/extract/use NRs and then clean up the consequences while still remaining profitable.
Although it’s true that 100% remediation is possible from an engineering perspective, it’s also true that such activity cannot occur without adding more energy and work, which makes any 100% goal (e.g., “green growth”) physically (entropy) and financially (fixed costs plus operating costs) impossible.
These are just facts, but they are not openly discussed. We need to talk about “minimizing damages” instead of pretending it’s possible to “remediate, restore, recapture or offset.”
My one-handed conclusion is that NRs are very useful, but let’s not forget about the damages from their production and use. So the choice is between sustainable but unprofitable or profitable but unsustainable. Choose one.
Interesting stuff
- Watch: Symphony in acid …. on the biggest screen possible!
- Watch: Jon Stewart explains “the problem with white people“
- Read: “Buy now pay later” is bringing debt and regret to a new generation and (related), listen to this podcast on scams and shorts in finance, with an emphasis on crypto.
- Read: Proton is like google, except you pay for data privacy (I’m a customer).
- Listen: Debate “is Chinese investment good for Africa?”
- Read: How the internet gets people to plagiarize each other
- Read: Putin’s propaganda machine
- Read: How to fix social media (use groups — as suggested in my paper on group cooperation)
The long and short of my hair
Students at my university are rather amused at the passport photo to the right, which hints at my long hair in 2007. I ask them “what’s so interesting?” but they don’t have much of an answer. I’m guessing that they’re reacting to the difference between then and now (my short hair is not more salt than pepper), but, I think there’s also something of a “whoa, crazy” element to guys with long hair — or maybe economists with long hair?
That reminds me of one of my favorite long-hair scenes: I was in Virginia (the rural side) for a summer school in 2005, and we grad students were climbing the stairs to the bar/pool hall when a guy yelled “hey, where you going hippie?” in my direction. Without a pause, my philosopher friend from Quebec said “he’s no hippie, he’s an economist!” Take that, non-sequitur!
Anyways, back to hair, the long and short…
I had normal hair for most of my life. The first time I got radical was after returning from my post-university European travels, where I merely trimmed my hair at the neck, thereby allowing quite the “fullness” to develop. At that time, I was under a lot of stress (long story), which I escaped by changing job, home and girlfriend. I decided to travel the world for five years, and that kinda fuck-it led to my Halloween mohawk. My “as loud-as-possible” style was popular with the guys on the shop floor (they were Vietnam vets recovering from drugs, alcohol and other issues). “Hey man,” one said, “I used to have hair like that.”
From that “base,” my next step was obvious: grow my hair as a clock during my travels.
As anyone will tell you, there’s an “ugly” phase of growing out your hair, where it’s too long to manage but too short to tie back. That stage (and many others) don’t matter when you’re traveling and meeting new people every day, so my transformation was just my private source of amusement (some people wouldn’t recognize me if we met after too many “hair days”). A few years later, I had a mane:
Long hair seemed to fit better in Africa, where people — locals and visitors — tried many looks. Long-term travelers like me (over two years in at that point) often carried a “look” due to saving money, carrying a few changes of clothes, and embracing no social norm. Our “culture” was whatever we focussed on.
I also thought long hair changed the way how people saw me and helped them relax — “where you going, hippie?” types excepted. Short hair says “responsible” or “stressed;” really short hair says “military/CIA,” so that’s a bad sign, right?
I wasn’t totally wrong, but long hair is a pain, and — after yet another day of trying to look through my mop (while driving around the US, on a “trip-inside-the-trip” visit to the US in 1998), I cut it short.
And then we (I was with a girlfriend now) went back “out there,” on the way to Asia, where I started to cut shave my hair, which was handy for staying cooler, cleaner, and fitting in with the locals, like this guy:
I kept the short hair for the rest of the trip and until I started graduate school in 2002. Then, I decided to “start the clock” for the duration of my PhD studies, so I didn’t cut my hair for 6 years and then a few years after. Ok, I did trim the ends that split due to my swimming. (I was using heaps of conditioner, but chlorine is nasty.)
In 2009, I went short with a “fancy” (=$90) haircut in San Francisco. While living in the Netherlands, I adopted the national gel-habit for a few years, but then went to “shorter doesn’t need gel,” where I’ve been ever since.
I like my short hair for its low maintenance and tidyness. I’m not sure if it scares people (CIA!), but long hair also isn’t a “peace weapon” so I’ll just stick with the smile.
My one-handed conclusion is chose your hair to suit your mood but don’t assume your hair will change the way people see you.