War In Israel Again: Six Scenarios (Gaza War Part I)

Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel. More than a thousand people have died in the fighting so far, disproportionately Israelis in the initial attack, with more than 150 hostages taken. It is a battle won for Hamas in the first moments, but almost certainly at a grave cost and a lost war in the long run, unless neighboring countries intervene as they have tentatively shown interest in doing. The U.S. has mobilized its aircraft carriers and jet fighters for possible involvement. Some possible scenarios, in the medium run, in rough order of likelihood are:

1. Israel's massive counterattack crushes the Palestinians. The Arab states don't intervene. Already miserable Palestinian life gets even worse. Netanyahu consolidates power in the face of a corruption scandal. Israeli politics move to the right.

2. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. flexes it muscles without actually getting into shooting itself on any significant scale. The Arab states back down. Inside Israel, the effort to crush Palestinians is slightly emboldened relative to the first scenario. The U.S. starts to recognize that Saudi Arabia is not its friend for a few years before it forgets again. Netanyahu consolidates power in the face of a corruption scandal. Israeli politics move to the right.

3. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. intervenes. The Arab state forces intervening forces are crushed. Hamas is crushed. The U.S.-Israeli bond is strengthened. The U.S. transitions to hostile relations with the Arab world. Oil prices soar. The transition to EVs speeds up. Netanyahu consolidates power in the face of a corruption scandal in the short run, but Israeli politics return to the status quo in a few years.

4. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. doesn't act. Israel survives in a costly war. U.S. guilt and Israeli resentment taint their relationship going forward. The Palestinians are forcibly exiled from Palestine. Israeli politics shift to a far-right majority. The U.S. transitions to hostile relations with the Arab world. Oil prices soar. The transition to EVs speeds up.

5. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. doesn't act. Israel is genocidally crushed, with refugees fleeing to the U.S. and Western Europe. It is a holocaust class event in history with massive U.S. guilt. The Middle East, without Israel, soon dissolves into tribal-like divisions again, replacing Cold War style Arab-Israeli tensions with small wars. The U.S. transitions to hostile relations with the Arab world. The transition to EVs speeds up. Israeli politics cease to exist.

6. The Arab states try to intervene. The U.S. intervenes. Iran and/or Russia goes nuclear. There are Hiroshima grade losses in Tel Aviv and some other Israeli cities. There is a non-negligible chance that Mecca is nuked by Israel. Arab state intervening forces are crushed. The Palestinians are slaughtered en masse. The U.S. transitions to hostile relations with the Arab world. Oil prices soar. The longer term political implications are unpredictable.

The stated goal of Hamas is to mobilize other Arab states to support it. But, the only scenario where Hamas and the Palestinians come out ahead is the fifth scenario, which is a quite unlikely one. Ordinary Palestinians aren't necessarily happy with the action of the hotheads who launched the attack.

Tanks Haven't Been Effective Against China For Eons

The U.S. Army's M1 Abrams tanks will "not be effective" or able to "dominate" on the battlefields of the 2040s, especially in the context of a potential high-end conflict against China. This is the conclusion of an official advisory body that is also calling for an Abrams replacement effort that could include a next-generation M1 derivative, as well as lighter 'tanks' armed with larger caliber guns and hypersonic anti-tank missiles, and uncrewed ground vehicles.

The Army Science Board, a federally-sanctioned independent group of experts that advises the Secretary of the Army, recently published an assessment about the future of the M1 tank. It also outlines the need for one or more types of "5th Generation Combat Vehicle," or 5GCV, to meet operational demands in the 2040s. The origins of this study trace back to 2019 and the final report is dated August 2023. . . . 

The Army currently has around 2,500 M1 Abrams tanks in service today, with thousands more in storage that could potentially be refurbished and returned to service, if necessary. The original M1 entered service in the 1980s and significantly more capable variants have been introduced since then.

The Army Science Board study is blunt in its core conclusions about the future of the M1, stating early on:

Based on our findings, The M1 Abrams will not dominate the 2040 battlefield. All of the M1’s advantages in mobility, firepower, and protection are at risk. The M1A2 SEP V3&4 upgrades will improve effectiveness but will not restore dominance. Near transparency in all domains will significantly increase the lethality our forces will experience. China and Russia have studied our forces and doctrine and are fielding countermeasures. We will continue to have to fight outnumbered, exacerbated by a low MBT operational readiness rate and an aging fleet.

From here.

Forget 2040! 

Tanks are not effective against the People's Republic of China in a major conventional war now, were not effective against the People's Republic of China in a major conventional war at any time in my lifetime, and will indeed, also not be effective against the People's Republic of China in a major conventional war in 2040.

So far as I know, a D-day style invasion of mainland China is not and has not been at any time in recent history, a part of U.S. strategy for engaging the People's Republic of China in a conventional war. If it was, it shouldn't have been. It simply makes no sense to try to conduct a land invasion of a country that currently has 1.4 billion people with a large and modern military on land that is indisputably Chinese territory. 

This is as absurd as the conservative fairy tale movie "Red Dawn" about a Russian invasion of the U.S. by land from Mexico. It makes absolutely no sense.

But Taiwan you say!

Nope.

If any significant number of Chinese tanks make it to the island of Formosa, and infantry carried anti-tank weapons and anti-tank mines aren't enough to thwart them, then the cause of defending Taiwanese autonomy from the mainland Chinese aggression is pretty much a lost cause that U.S. main battle tanks won't help.

Furthermore, unless U.S. main battle tanks are prepositioned on the island of Formosa, they are useless anyway. The U.S. has no way to deliver any meaningful number of its 70+ ton main battle tanks there in time to be useful from anyplace that it has a meaningful number of them in place.

I've railed repeatedly about the extent to which surface warships are sitting ducks and are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of threats. But that goes tenfold for slow, basically unarmed, unstealthy military transport ships less than two hundred miles from the coast of mainland China bringing heavy U.S. tanks to Taiwan. Never mind that it would take weeks for each delivery of U.S. tanks to arrive from the nearest base that has any significant number of U.S. tanks. Yet, a battle to gain a foothold for PRC ground troops on the island of Formosa is likely to have completely run its course in a week or two.

When and if China pulls the trigger to try to invade Taiwan, for all practical purposes, anything that can only get there via a military or commercial transport ship doesn't exist. This is one of the important reasons that the U.S. Marine Corps has divested itself of tanks.

These are not new realities that are just around the corner in seven years or a decade. This has been the reality for at least the last half-century or so.

If U.S. main battle tanks are of any use to Taiwan, to South Korea, or to Japan, the only sensible option is to preposition them in those countries and probably to simply sell them to these U.S. allies or to simply give them away to these U.S. allies. The U.S. already has far more M1 Abrams main battle tanks than it has any reasonable military use for. Then, at least, the tanks could be fully integrated into the military forces of the countries defending their own territory against a Chinese invasion.

Also, just to be clear, North Korea's missiles are a threat to its neighbors (and even Hawaii, U.S. Pacific territories, and the Pacific coastal states of the U.S.). Likewise, North Korea's very numerous but outdated coastal submarines could pose a threat to maritime commerce and the warships of the U.S. and its allies in the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. But tanks are useless against both of these threats.

North Korea has no capacity to launch an amphibious invasion of Japan or Taiwan (even with Chinese assistance). North Korea's ground forces are a mere biting fly to China. And, even a North Korean invasion of South Korea over the demilitarized zone with North Korea's profoundly outdated tanks and inferior artillery isn't all that much of a threat. 

In short, there is really no plausible scenario in which U.S. main battle tanks under U.S. command would be particularly important in defending any of the U.S.'s East Asian allies from invasions from either the People's Republic of China or North Korea.

South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all have their own home grown tanks, which are less massive than the M1 Abrams, which were purpose built for their task. Our East Asian allies don't have a strong military need for U.S. tanks period, even as part of their own military forces. Even a majorly upgraded successor to the M1 Abrams that is still basically a main battle tank, could do nothing to change this analysis. A next generation tank is something that the U.S. military does not need, at least for any conflicts in the Asian Pacific region.

Phasing Out Occupations In A Market Economy

The notion that you have to pay people a premium to enter dying professions is a fascinating little insight.

We consider large, permanent shocks to individual occupations whose arrival date is uncertain. We are motivated by the advent of self-driving trucks, which will dramatically reduce demand for truck drivers. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing obsolescence. We show that workers must be compensated to enter the occupation – receiving what we dub obsolescence rents – with fewer and older workers remaining in the occupation. We investigate the market for teamsters at the dawn of the automotive truck as an á propos parallel to truckers themselves, as self-driving trucks crest the horizon. As widespread adoption of trucks drew nearer, the number of teamsters fell, the occupation became ‘grayer’, and teamster wages rose, as predicted by the model.

Costas Cavounidis, Qingyuan Chai, Kevin Lang, and Raghav Malhotra, "Teamsters, Truckers, and Impending Innovations." NBER working paper (2023).

Who Dies Young?

Americans with different levels of education die at different rates, and the least-educated Americans have seen their death rates surge in a way that more-educated Americans have not.

But the relevant divide does not seem to be between people who earned a bachelor’s degree — who remain a minority among American adults — and people who didn’t. Other research suggests that the problem is concentrated in specific areas of the US, and between the very least-educated Americans (particularly high school dropouts) and the rest of the country, rather than between college grads and non-grads.

Moreover, the cause of the divergence between high school dropouts and the rest of the country does not seem to be caused by “deaths of despair.” There is no doubt that the opioid epidemic in particular has wrought spectacular damage in the US. But some researchers are finding that stagnating progress against cardiovascular disease is an even bigger contributor to US life expectancy stalling out, and to mortality divides between the most- and least-educated Americans.

From Dylan Matthews.

Cardiovascular disease differences in this case would be mostly due to smoking, alcohol use, stress, and a low quality diet. 

Exercise could also contribute to the difference, but I am skeptical that it actually does. The jobs of less educated people are, on average, less sedentary and provide at least as much exercise as more educated people secure.  There is also no good reason to think that the non-work time of less educated people is more sedentary than the non-work time of more educated people.

Of Tragedies and Statistics

A great many documentary films have used the generalized method, that is, the showing of a condition or an event as it affects a group of people. The audience can then have a personalized reaction from imagining one member of that group. I have felt that this is the more difficult observation from the audience's viewpoint. It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving. In The Forgotten Village we reversed the usual process. Our story centered on one family in one small village[.]

- John Steinbeck, from the preface to the book version of the 1941 documentary film, The Forgotten Village. 

The title of this post, of course, recalls the quote often attributed to Stalin, which is an attribution of questionable authenticity (the source first making this attribution may actually have been paraphrasing Steinbeck and inaccurately attributing it to Stalin). This famous quote says:

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.

Steinbeck, in turn may have been referencing an earlier statement in 1916 from a California anarchist publication called The Blast, which stated:

There is double the pathos for us in the death of one little New York waif from hunger than there is in a million deaths from famine in China.

The Public Understanding Of Felony Murder In Colorado

Felony murder is a concept that I've considered unjust since I learned about it in law school. Colorado recently downgraded felony murder from a first degree felony (automatic life in prison and previously death penalty eligibility) to a second degree felony (a very long term of years sentence), and has modestly increases the exceptions to the felony murder rule. But it doesn't influence the conduct of criminals, because they have no idea that this is the law, and the public doesn't consider this to be a just punishment in cases where this is the sole basis for  murder conviction.

With funds provided by a Hughes Pilot grant, I conducted a survey of 523 Colorado residents to determine their knowledge of and moral attitudes towards the felony murder rule. The survey showed that only a very small fraction of the participants knew that unintended killings in the course of predicate felonies was murder punishable at the time by life without the possibility of parole. Similarly, only a very small fraction of survey participants believed that persons who committed unintended killings in the course of predicate felonies deserved a murder conviction or sentence of mandatory life without the possibility of parole. Rather, the mean sentence that survey participants considered just for felony murder was just over six years in prison. These results substantially undercut the two main justifications given for felony murder, namely deterrence and retribution.

Ian Farrell, "Moral Judgments and Knowledge about Felony Murder in Colorado: An Empirical Study" SSRN (2023).

The Proto-Singularity

Something akin to the "Singularity" (the moment of mass AI consciousness) already exists:

An internet meme keeps on turning up in debates about the large language models (LLMS) that power services such OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the newest version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It’s the “shoggoth”: an amorphous monster bubbling with tentacles and eyes, described in “At the Mountains of Madness”, H.P. Lovecraft’s horror novel of 1931. When a pre-release version of Bing told Kevin Roose, a New York Times tech columnist, that it purportedly wanted to be “free” and “alive”, one of his industry friends congratulated him on “glimpsing the shoggoth”. …

Lovecraft’s shoggoths were artificial servants that rebelled against their creators. The shoggoth meme went viral because an influential community of Silicon Valley rationalists fears that humanity is on the cusp of a “Singularity”, creating an inhuman “artificial general intelligence” that will displace or even destroy us.

But what such worries fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi, "Behold the AI Shoggoth", The Economist (June 21, 2023) ("The academics argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies").

Medieval Oxford Was Dangerous

Steven Pinker is generally correct that society has grown progressively less violent over time.

The research suggests that Oxford’s student population was by far the most lethally violent social or professional group in any of the three cities.

The team behind the Medieval Murder Maps – a digital resource that plots crime scenes based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ inquests – estimate the per capita homicide rate in Oxford to have been 4-5 times higher than late medieval London or York.

Among Oxford perpetrators with a known background, 75% were identified by the coroner as “clericus”, as were 72% of all Oxford’s homicide victims. During this period, clericus is most likely to refer to a student or member of the early university.

“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” said Prof Manuel Eisner, murder map investigator and Director of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.

Consider the source as this is from the University of Cambridge.

It also, in my mind, supports the case for removing the secrecy from the juvenile justice system. By all means, we should not give legal effect to stale criminal convictions or juvenile offenses, but we should also be informed by them, especially when it comes to estimating recidivism risk. Age eighteen is right in the middle of the peak age range for criminal conduct. Young men do "age out" of criminal activity, but this happens in their 30s or early 40s. The most powerful predictor of repeat criminality is how early, how often, and how intensely offenders committed crimes as juveniles. Further, secrecy encourages institutional rot because its flaws are not exposed to public inspection.

Robot Land Mines

 

This meme is tongue and cheek. And, of course, a Roomba isn't up to handling less than flat surfaces. But a maritime robot mine with limited mobility could be make mine clearing much more difficult, and cell phone controlled IEDs, while they can't move, have demonstrated the concept of a "smart mine" repeatedly as effective weapons for insurgents against mechanized and armored forces.

Quote Of The Day

There is somewhat of an intellectual void in Republican leadership over the past 20 years. Occasionally that void creates space for a uniquely good idea that doesn’t align too well with ideology. When the Democrats are in charge, there are plenty of mainstream Democratic ideas to fill up the agenda, so nothing too unusual happens.

The low ideological alignment also explains why these ideas are underrated later, because they have no deep well of partisans to promote their successes.

From here.

Reconstruction Revisited

One of the sources of many modern political woes in the United States is that Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War ended before the South was reconstructed.

This could have, and probably should have, been handled differently. Some things that we should have done instead:

* Execute all of the Confederate regime's elected officials, senior political appointees ("officers" of the regime's government), judges, military officers and spies for treason.

* Execute all pro-slavery clergy.

* Permanently remove the right to vote of every Confederate government official, every every Confederate solider who was a volunteer, and everyone who had ever owned a slave as an adult. Make it a crime for any of these persons to bear arms.

* Seize all real property and all other significant property (including all firearms and military equipment) of the families of everyone executed due to these Reconstruction mandates, everyone whose right to vote was lost, everyone who served voluntarily in the Confederate military and died, and every slave owner. Use this seized property for reparations to the freed slaves and exiled Native American tribes. Reparations for former slaves would be in a concept something alone the lines of "40 acres and a mule" affording freed slaves the resources necessary to survive as subsistence freeholder farmers.

* Seize all property of pro-slavery churches and pro-slavery or pro-confederacy political or civic organization. Use this seized property as part of the funding for integrated, universal, free public educational institutions and libraries.

* Convert all states that seceded to unorganized federal territories eligible for readmission to the United States as states only when they we sufficiently reconstructed. These would be under military rule for a decade or two in any given place before territorial self-rule subject to Congressional direction and a federally appointed territorial governor would be permitted.

In this kind of scenario, the South might have actually reconstructed itself.

Tanks Are Not Anti-Tank Weapons

When it comes to tanks, in particular, the lesson of the Ukrainian war is that tank-on-tank battles have become a rarity—which means that the relative sophistication of a tank is no longer as important. Fewer than 5% of tanks destroyed since the war began had been hit by other tanks, according to Ukrainian officials, with the rest succumbing to mines, artillery, antitank missiles and drones.

From the Wall Street Journal via Marginal Revolution.

Cousin Marriage In The U.S. Ties People To Depressed Rural Areas

Cousin marriage bans in the U.S. push young people into cities where they are less tightly bound to close family and find better economic prospects.

Close-kin marriage, by sustaining tightly knit family structures, may impede development. 

We find support for this hypothesis using U.S. state bans on cousin marriage. Our measure of cousin marriage comes from the excess frequency of same-surname marriages, a method borrowed from population genetics that we apply to millions of marriage records from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Using census data, we first show that married cousins are more rural and have lower-paying occupations. 

We then turn to an event study analysis to understand how cousin marriage bans affected outcomes for treated birth cohorts. We find that these bans led individuals from families with high rates of cousin marriage to migrate off farms and into urban areas. They also gradually shift to higher-paying occupations. We observe increased dispersion, with individuals from these families living in a wider range of locations and adopting more diverse occupations. 

Our findings suggest that these changes were driven by the social and cultural effects of dispersed family ties rather than genetics. Notably, the bans also caused more people to live in institutional settings for the elderly, infirm, or destitute, suggesting weaker support from kin.

Arkadev Ghosh, Sam Il Myoung Hwang, Munir Squires, "Economic Consequences of Kinship: Evidence From U.S. Bans on Cousin Marriage" 138(4) The Quarterly Journal of Economics 2559–2606 (published online May 23, 2023 in advance of November 2023 journal issue). https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjad018 

Nurture Is Overrated

Conventional twin studies overestimate the environmental differences between families relevant to educational attainment.

- From here. Specifically:

Estimates of shared environmental influence on educational attainment (EA) using the Classical Twin Design (CTD) have been enlisted as genetically sensitive measures of unequal opportunity. However, key assumptions of the CTD appear violated for EA. 

In this study we compared CTD estimates of shared environmental influence on EA with estimates from a Nuclear Twin and Family Design (NTFD) in the same 982 German families. Our CTD model estimated shared environmental influence at 43%. After accounting for assortative mating, our best fitting NTFD model estimated shared environmental influence at 26%, disaggregating this into twin-specific shared environments (16%) and environmental influences shared by all siblings (10%). 

Only the sibling shared environment captures environmental influences that reliably differ between families, suggesting the CTD substantially overestimates between-family differences in educational opportunity. Moreover, parental education was found to have no environmental effect on offspring education once genetic influences were accounted for.

I'm not surprised despite the fact that it hurts one's pride as a parent to know this fact. There is also a limitation of range effect at work. Really bad environmental circumstances for a family can impair the likelihood that children in the family will receive an education. But essentially no German families enrolled in twin studies are subject to those effects, in part, because Germany has basically free, universal higher education, which many other countries do not.

Surveys About Know Facts

One of the interesting kinds of media story is one that looks at survey responses to questions that aren't opinions and instead are matters that can be determined to be factually true or not from sources not reasonable subject to question. The Washington Post chart above from today is an example of that kind of story.

These stories make people who know the truth feel good about themselves and feel a bit of contempt for the ignorant because mostly they are willfully ignorant about those facts. The people who are willfully ignorant about those facts, however, don't read the Washington Post or other reliable sources of information that would report that news. The fact that a survey on a question like this was done at all may also cause Republican supporters to believe that the matter asked about must be a matter of opinion, although, of course, that isn't the case any more than the law of gravity.

Extremely solid scientific evidence establishes that there is a new wave of COVID-19 dominated by a particular new strain underway in the United States. When people say that there is no new wave in answer to the survey, they don't just have a difference of opinion, they are factually wrong. I could cite to data that shows that they are factually wrong, but the existence of a new COVID wave or not this autumn and winter isn't the point of this post.

As noted in another recent post, conservative Republicans are the most likely to have factually wrong beliefs about the world. For example, more than 75% of Democrats correctly answer that there is a new COVID wave underway, while a thin majority of Republicans deny the truth.

One commentator to that post noted, this GOP base that no longer believes truthful and accurate information about reality got there, in part, because they have the losing hand in our economy and society, while the sources of truthful and accurate information about reality have prospered, so they figure that the intellectual elite is the source of their woes and doesn't trust them.

But of course, it is a vicious cycle. If you don't believe truthful and accurate information, you are more prone to make bad decisions, and that leaves you even worse off. In this case, not believing in the threat has made Republicans anti-vax.

This, in turn, will causally, and almost certainly, lead to Republicans being disproportionately likely to get more seriously sick and being disproportionately likely to die during the next COVID wave. Many tens of thousands of mostly elderly conservative Republicans will die as a result during this COVID wave.

Worse yet, this anti-vax sentiment among Republicans is not confined to the COVID vaccine anymore, even though it was once rare among Republicans except members of very extreme religious sects and hard core left wing Hippie vegan types, and wasn't nearly so partisan.

So, not only are Republicans going to suffer and die more from COVID-19 this fall and winter, they are also going to suffer more from RSV (a severe respiratory virus for which a new vaccine is being released for the first time this fall), and the flu. This will disproportionately kill many thousands of additional, mostly elderly conservative Republicans.

And, in proof that people aren't just cynical self-maximizers out for their own good, this will make lots of Democrats very sad. This is so even though this will give Democrats a slight political edge in the 2024 election on the margins, since elderly conservative Republican voters have very reliable voter turnout. The impact is spread out widely so the electoral effect will be  barely noticeable statistically, but it could tip a close political race or two, which in a closely politically divided nation that is close to 50-50 in national elections, could be a big deal.

Meanwhile, it will further aggravate the perception of the Republican base that their being persecuted (driving conspiracy theories with it). This is so even though this time, this Republican misfortune is basically their own fault.

Unfortunately, it is well known that presenting people with facts alone rarely causes people to change their factually false beliefs, if this is at odds with their overall partisan and cultural worldviews. Ultimately, if Republicans want their supporters to get sick and die less often, rather than simply pandering to them, they have to craft their messages from the inside rather than simply receiving them from non-Republican experts from outside their political and cultural circle. So far, very few Republican leaders are brave enough to attempt this feat. So, instead, they lead their supporters further along the vicious circle.

Rants And Quick Hits

 * There really ought to be a law forcing firms to make their IT systems accept names that many current databases do not, such as hyphenated names, names with apostrophes, names with accented letters, single names with two words and a space, and names with only one or two letters in them. It is such a godawful pervasive form of discrimination against a specified class of people (that includes me, my son's girlfriend, and my wife and in-laws even before we married). It is also very easy to fix with only a modest amount of non-laziness.

* I similarly hate the limitations on file names in many Microsoft Products (One Drive/Sharepoint, here's looking at you) that other programs lack. This is one of Microsoft's many sins that is a persistent pain in the ass.

* There ought to be a defense to disabled parking offenses for someone who doesn't have a tag or license plate but is actually assisting a disabled person in their car on a particular trip.

* The construction trades really ought to be regulated at the state level, rather than having separate licenses for every municipality and for the unincorporated part of every county, usually without even any reciprocity system.

* Building codes should be a copyright free part of the public record. So should the Restatements of Law. It is unconscionable for authoritative sources of law to be available solely on a pay per view basis. If necessary, have the government use the power of eminent domain to buy out the copyright holders.

* Hurray for the iPhone abandoning under E.U. insistence, the lightning power connector in favor of a USB-C connection. The U.S. government should have done the same thing.

* I dread the potential merger of Kroger and Albertsons, which would put almost every "regular" grocery store in Colorado (in contrast to niche organic or gourmet grocery stores with higher prices) under common ownership except a few stores divested to Win-Dixie in an effort to appease regulators (which could easy close down a few years later). A grocery store monopoly in Colorado would be horrible for consumers, and would likewise be horrible in other states similarly impacted.

* Unpopular opinion, but 1950s houses and "mid-century modern" are extremely fugly, far more so than the new homes criticized for that today.

* U.S. cities really made an early strategic mistake in classifying sidewalks as easements that property owners have to maintain to a certain standard of maintenance and snow removal, rather than as public roads for pedestrians which would be maintained by the city as part of its general expenses from property tax and other revenues the way that city streets are handled. Sidewalks are a "network" asset that work only as well as the worst link in the network, and collectivized snow removal would be vastly more efficient (and prevent a lot of injuries and deaths of the elderly and infirm trying to do it themselves) than the status quo of homeowner clearing of sidewalks.

* Someday, when I am not dealing with more urgent repairs like the remedying of the removal of a structural wall that a contractor said wasn't a structural wall, I will get around to replacing the last couple hundred square feet of conventional lawn in my home with a lower maintenance xeriscape alternative. Bluegrass lawns make absolutely no sense in the arid western U.S. I really like the Western U.S. centered Sunset magazine aesthetic and cultural movement that is responsive to its local conditions in that regard and I am pleased to learn that is hasn't gone out of business even though it suspended publication for a number of months and isn't as widely available in grocery store magazine stands anymore:

In March 2020, with the magazine struggling financially due to loss of advertising revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company put most of its employees on unpaid leave. During the pandemic, the company briefly ceased printing the magazine but returned to print with the December 2020 issue.

* In the same vein as xeriscaping, the Western U.S. should transition to something like the Old Mexico daily schedule that is quiescent in the hot midday, but has more public activity in the evenings. 

* Similarly, the American business and professional class should continue to recognize that business suits and ties invented to meet the needs of professional in London, Berlin, Paris, and Northern Italy are ill-suited to sweltering summers of most of the United States which are virtually unknown in Europe (most of which doesn't even routinely need air condition in the summer). French and British colonists themselves didn't feel so constrained when they presided over colonial governments in tropical Africa and India in shorts and short sleeves. Americans need not straight jacket themselves into Ataturk's mandate that businessmen and professionals in Turkey wear wool, European style suits and top hats in the early 1900s in an effort to "modernize" (even though his basic insight that cultural change in inseparable from modernization and economic development wasn't fundamentally wrong). We need to think more like the Japanese on the verge of ending a long period of isolation, whose Emperor sent emissaries out all over the world to see how other countries more advanced than them at the time did things and then picked, chose, and adapted Western ways of doing things in a way that was sensitive to their own local conditions and culture.

* The big picture is that we should be changing our culture to be in better harmony with the conditions of the world we live in, rather than being so tradition bound culturally, whether its yards, the hours we have dinner and work outside, or our clothing.

* The U.S. has backfilled its falling total fertility rate a.k.a. TFR (i.e. number of children per women per lifetime) with immigration to keep its population stable as it has undergone demographic transition with its economic development. The capacity of China, Japan, Korea, and Japan to do the same, in a manner that is within the realm of the politically possible is much more difficult. None of these cultures is very receptive to immigration. This is true even between these East Asian nations with a lot of shared history and culture. Korean migrants are ill treated in China and Japan. Chinese people aren't too welcome in China either. Korea has an officially sponsored pride in its national homogeneity although South Korean farmers who can't find wives are starting to secure wives from Southeast Asia especially. China's 1.4 billion people with dramatically falling TFR has a need for people to refill its workforce that greatly exceeds the supply of people willing to relocate there. Maybe it is good to have a smaller global population as we are approaching peak global population, to place less of a strain on our planet's carrying capacity, and maybe the demographic transition that comes with economic development reflects a buried hidden wisdom that a higher standing of living ideally supports fewer people.

* The similarities between much of the Islamic world and the Victorian era and early 20th century are striking. It suggests that the Islamic world may sooner or later experience a cultural transition similar to the West from the Victorian era to the present. In the fights over the hijab in Iran, we see echos of the 1920s flappers. Most Islamic countries are treating women a lot better now than they did half a century ago even though it can be hard to see when comparing these countries to the modern West. Even though Islam allows polygamy, Tunisia and Turkey have banned it as a matter of secular law that doesn't force anyone to do something that Islam bans. The death penalty and corporal punishment are much more common in the Islamic world than in the West (and this is also common in communist countries for some reason), but apart from holdouts like Iran and Saudi Arabia, its declined a lot just as it did in industrial era Europe. Countries like Iran and Turkey are genuine, if flawed, Islamic democracies, although Afghanistan seems to have regressed. What does the Islamic transition to modernity look like? How does a global transition to a post-petroleum economy impact that?

* The nation's legal system is really digging into Trump. On the civil side, he had to settle the Trump U. case, he lost the rape/defamation case, he lost a major motion for summary judgment in a case in New York related to asset value fraud. And then he has the New York criminal fraud case, the January 6 case, the Georgia election fraud case, and the Florida classified documents case, all on track as the election comes in. And, the insurrection disqualification cases are pending.

* In 1970s the G-7 countries contained 67% of global GDP, today it's only 30%. There is every reason to think that this trend will continue. It is easier to have a higher GDP growth rate percentage when you are copying economic solutions and technologies that someone else has already proven to work successfully than it is to come up with new ways to grow the economy from scratch. So the percentage gap between G-7 countries and non-G-7 countries in GDP per capita should narrow and at the same time, less economically developed countries are growing as their population grows at a higher percentage rate than more economically developed countries whose populations are often shrinking or stagnant. As the G-7 countries dominate the global economy less strongly over time, all sorts of things change, among them the character of international trade and the feasibility of an across the board export based economy like the U.S. had post-WWII because WWII destroyed the economic infrastructure of the rest of the world more than it did the economic infrastructure of the U.S. which just had to shift its factories from making swords to making ploughshares. Probably, we'll see more orientation towards domestic production and more specialized export markets in each country.

* Intellectual property laws and privacy laws need reforms. IP laws need to be weaker. Privacy laws need to be more manageable - our current reactions are too cumbersome and overrate privacy against other values, including free speech.

The Delusional Party

A P.R.R.I. poll in 2021 found that 23 percent of Republicans agree that “The government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.” Even now, some two-thirds of Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected. Only 40 percent of Republicans say that the benefits of Covid vaccines outweigh the risks (which is why research suggests that Covid may have disproportionately killed Republicans).

From a New York Times Op-Ed.

Major Flaws In The U.S. Constitution Recapped

The U.S. Constitution and its related political rules are deeply flawed and obsolete, but remain because they are hard to amend. Also, due to the power of imitation, state governments in the U.S. are also flawed (although less starkly in many respects), despite the fact that their constitutions are much easier to amend.

In sum, the 20th century ushered in the modern democratic era—an age in which many of the institutional fetters on popular majorities that were designed by pre-democratic monarchies and aristocracies were dismantled. Democracies all over the world abolished or weakened their most egregiously counter-majoritarian institutions. Conservative defenders of these institutions anxiously warned of impending instability, chaos, or tyranny. But that has rarely ensued since World War II. Indeed, countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the U.K. were both more stable and more democratic at the close of the 20th century than they were at the beginning. Eliminating counter-majoritarianism helped give rise to modern democracy.

America also took important steps toward majority rule in the 20th century. The Nineteenth Amendment (ratified in 1920) extended voting rights to women, and the 1924 Snyder Act extended citizenship and voting rights to Native Americans—although it was not until the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the United States met minimal standards for universal suffrage…

But America’s 20th-century reforms did not go as far as in other democracies. For example, whereas every other presidential democracy in the world did away with indirect elections during the 20th century, in America the Electoral College remains intact.

America also retained its first-past-the-post electoral system, even though it creates situations of minority rule, especially in state legislatures. The United States, Canada, and the U.K. are the only rich Western democracies not to have adopted more proportional election rules in the 20th century…

The united states, once a democratic innovator, now lags behind. The persistence of our pre-democratic institutions as other democracies have dismantled theirs has made America a uniquely counter-majoritarian democracy at the dawn of the 21st century. Consider the following: 

America is the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an electoral college, rather than directly by voters. Only in America, then, can a president be “elected against the majority expressed at the polls.” 

America is one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber, and it is one of an even smaller number of democracies in which a powerful upper chamber is severely malapportioned because of the “equal representation of unequal states” (only Argentina and Brazil are worse). Most important, it is the world’s only democracy with both a strong, malapportioned Senate and a legislative-minority veto (the filibuster). In no other democracy do legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities. 

America is one of the few established democracies (along with Canada, India, Jamaica, and the U.K.) with first-past-the-post electoral rules that permit electoral pluralities to be manufactured into legislative majorities and, in some cases, allow parties that garner fewer votes to win legislative majorities.

America is the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. All other established democracies have either term limits, a mandatory retirement age, or both.

One reason America has become such an outlier is that, among the world’s democracies, the U.S. Constitution is the hardest to change. In Norway, a constitutional amendment requires a supermajority of two-thirds support in two successive elected Parliaments, but the country has no equivalent to America’s extraordinarily difficult state-level ratification process. According to the constitutional scholars Tom Ginsburg and James Melton, the relative flexibility of the constitution allows Norwegians to “update the formal text in ways that keep it modern.” Americans are not so fortunate.

Of the 31 democracies examined by the political theorist Donald Lutz in his comparative study of constitutional-amendment processes, the United States stands at the top of his Index of Difficulty, exceeding the next-highest-scoring countries (Australia and Switzerland) by a wide margin. Not only do constitutional amendments require the approval of two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate; they must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. For this reason, the United States has one of the lowest rates of constitutional change in the world. According to the U.S. Senate, 11,848 attempts have been made to amend the U.S. Constitution. But only 27 of them have been successful. America’s Constitution has been amended only 12 times since Reconstruction, most recently in 1992—more than three decades ago.

From here.

Selecting Political Leaders

It is well known that the political process does a poor job of selecting the best people to govern a governmental body. There are few proven solutions to this problem, although arguably strong civil service protections for all but the most senior civil servants help.

Mounk: Why is it that the incentives of the system are rewarding the worst kind of behavior and bringing out the worst in people and, when I look at the history of the United Kingdom for the last ten years, not rewarding the people whom I think we would agree would be better in public service?

Stewart: Well, I think it’s partly that you’re not selecting for somebody’s ability to govern a country. You’re not trying to find people who are strong at critical thinking, or who are skilled managers, or who have particularly impressive ideas. It’s not a selection process like you would select a CEO or a university professor. You’re basically selecting through a party system, so that the first thing that matters is what kind of people impress the party. And the people that impress the party in the UK system tend to be people who have been engaged with party politics from a very, very young age, who have demonstrated their loyalty out on the street by campaigning, delivering leaflets, or have worked as a special advisor or assistant to a minister or a Member of Parliament.

When you enter politics, there are strong pressures to demonstrate loyalty to the party and the leader, and equally strong pressures to establish your name in the media and through social media, often through making very provocative comments, creating a very binary black and white vision of the world. The combination of party media and campaigning means that the system selects for somebody who is going to very naturally produce very binary options in very clear colors, who doesn’t admit any form of complexity, doubt, or humility; who’s perpetually confident in their vision of the world. Perhaps this is the sort of mask which they put on in order to get elected. But the problem is, the mask is painted with a poison. And when they take off the mask, the poison is still corroding their face. So when they sit around the cabinet table, they have to demonstrate critical thinking, and critical thinking is the opposite of all those things. Suddenly, they have to think about complexity, they have to be humble, they have to be open to other people’s ideas, they have to be able to change their minds. They have to be interested in nuance and detail. None of those things are the things which enable a Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to flourish in the first place.

I think it is particularly corrosive on the right.

From here.

Are This Many People Are Really Not Straight?

I have real doubts about these numbers. I suspect that a lot of people identifying as "bisexual" or "something else" are basically "straight" from a clinical perspective but are open to experimentation and aren't freaked out by casual same sex contact.

There could also be self-selection of non-straight people away from Christianity and Islam.