I’m seeing a rise in “farewell to the Earth we knew” articles, videos, etc. These scientists are saying goodbye to cold weather as the arctic warms. In this video, a Solomon Islander bids farewell to their island lives. What will you miss as climate chaos changes your life?
Vitalik Buterin (inventor of Ethereum) writes a nice overview of quadratic payments, which can be used as a hybrid voting mechanism. I should have used this method in my 2009 paper [pdf] on fighting over water in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Want to see the future? Spend some time on these maps showing how climate change chaos impacts will vary across the US. Related: RCP 8.5 (the “worst case scenario” for global heating, with an average increase of 4.9C by 2100) is sometimes called “business as usual,” but its proposed pathways of population growth (12 billion people), GDP growth (very slow) and coal use (a multiple of today’s use in contrast to current downward trends) tend to attract criticism. I agree that those assumptions are questionable, but this article makes the obvious point that we might get to RCP8.5 by a combination of human activity (10 billion richer people using lots of oil and gas on goodies as well as coping with chaos) and natural feedback loops (lost albedo as Arctic summer ice disappears, permafrost belching methane, perennial fires/loss of tree cover), such that we get that scenario anyway. Not a good scenario.
Why girls (and boys) need summer camp: “Traditions—unlike the superficial public culture that surrounds us—actually establish significant places for people at every age. They offer work and responsibility appropriate to a person’s experience.”
The rise of women (from inequality) is both useful and urgently needed. NGM — the magazine of bare-breasted exotics — has put out an issue on women, with all the editing, writing and photography by women.
Why is Iran’s government paranoid about environmentalists? Here’s one (authoritative) perspective. My take is that enviro-groups can challenge the government’s authority and competence.
China is one (of ?? countries) “erasing the past” by removing articles from academic databases. Such censorship was not possible in the days of printed journals, but digital archives (often controlled by for-profit companies) are centralized — and thus vulnerable.
For years, I have complained that “nobody wakes up in the morning, looks at GDP statistics, and changes their plans for the day.” Listen to this podcast on mis-measuring productivity and manufacturing statistics, which may have given populists excuses to “fix” problems that never existed. (My impression is that many more people would be happier if they looked at their quality of life instead of a [random? inaccurate?] reference point that supposedly tells them how well they are doing compared to peers.
Fast casual restaurants in the U.S. have adopted tablets on their tables “to increase customer satisfaction profits,” but they’re a trainwreck for servers.
This report (pdf, in Dutch) explores the time savings from optimizing train travel in Europe, indicating that trains can displace many plane trips on speed alone. Blue for train and purple for plane trip duration. Green bars show train times with optimization.
Some very interesting insights into the (dehumanized) algorithms that maximize profits for Capital One (credit cards) at the expense of poor peoples’ bad judgement.
The Economist, commenting on “unexplainably low” inflation, suggests “a uniform handout to the public in which every adult received an equal share of newly created money.” I like that idea — and suggested it 3.5 years ago!
