Secret by Wang Wei

Secret

by Wang Wei

No.  It is not enough to despise the world.

It is not enough to live one's life as though

Riches and power were nothings.  They are not.

But to grasp the world, to grasp and feel it grow

Great in one's grasp is likewise not enough.

The secret is to grasp it, and let it go.

NPR and the structural racism of ghosts

NPR hits a startling new low - the structural racism of American ghosts.

A reporter for CNN has written an autobiography addressing, at least in part, his bi-racial heritage with a black father and white mother.  In the autobiography, he discusses having seen a ghost, that of his white grandfather.

The NPR interviewer cannot help herself.  She is programmed to read the world, and the next world as well apparently, solely in terms of race.  She proceeds to interrogate the interviewee on the racism of his maternal grandfather's ghost appearing to him after life.

I have often observed that the clerisy are religious in their devotion to their nonsensical ideas of AGW, postmodernism, social justice, DEI, ESG, Woke, etc.  But this interview takes it to a whole different level.

The NPR interviewer starts the reportage with some disclaiming statements to ring-fence her empiricism, but having attempted to ground her brand as an empiricist, she then is fascinated by the obvious racism of the ghost who she was only moments before denying existence to.

The CNN reporter comes across far better than the interviewer.  NPR wants to dwell on structural racism in the afterworld whereas the CNN author wants to explore grace, forgiveness, redemption.

Kind of fascinating the clash of visions which the NPR interviewer doesn't even recognize.  There is the Woke, faux empiricist of NPR trying to engage with an empirical Christian.  A conversation occurs but I suspect it is being interpreted differently on either side of the discussion and certainly interpreted differently by the more based audience.

History

You will never be as bad ass as Princess Anne during a kidnap attempt. pic.twitter.com/Z8NsXgJlJC

— Andrew Cusack (@cusackandrew) May 9, 2023

 

An Insight

Chile was on the verge of creating the most far left constitution of any country on gender, sex, environmental rights, indigenous carve-outs. Working class voters not only rejected that proposal but voted this way in the follow up election over a constitutional convention https://t.co/d0O4ZkTOcJ

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) May 9, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

Cloud iridescence is a colorful optical phenomenon that occurs in a cloud & appears in the general proximity of the Sun or Moon. This one was spotted over Ribeirao Claro, Brazil

[read more: https://t.co/QtWyxuvy4s]
[source: https://t.co/zR7Jqc0uqg]pic.twitter.com/SIwzrSfynr

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 11, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

Differences in muscle strength between men and women are significant. pic.twitter.com/OmYkJxZo9X

— i/o (@monitoringbias) May 11, 2023

 

Competence displacement

From What Happens When the Competent Opt Out? by Charles Hugh Smith.  

3. The politicization of the work environment. Let's begin by distinguishing between policies enforcing equal opportunity, pay, standards and accountability, policies required to fulfill the legal promises embedded in the nation's social contract, and politicization, which demands allegiance and declarations of loyalty to political ideologies that have nothing to do with the work being done or the standards of accountability necessary to the operation of the complex institution or enterprise.

The problem with politicization is that it is 1) intrinsically inauthentic and 2) it substitutes the ideologically pure for the competent. Rigid, top-down hierarchies (including not just Communist regimes but corporations and institutions) demand expressions of fealty (the equivalent of loyalty oaths) and compliance to ideological demands (check the right boxes of party indoctrination, "self-criticism," "struggle sessions," etc.).

The correct verbiage and ideological enthusiasm become the basis of advancement rather than accountability to standards of competence. The competent are thus replaced with the politically savvy. Since competence is no longer being selected for, it's replaced by what is being selected for, political compliance.

It doesn't matter what flavor of ideological purity holds sway--conservative, progressive, communist or religious--all fatally erode competence by selecting for ideological compliance. Everyone knows the enthusiasm is inauthentic and only for show, but artifice and inauthenticity are perfectly adequate for the politicization taskmasters.

4. The competent must cover for the incompetent. As the competent tire of the artifice and make-work and quit, the remaining competent must work harder to keep everything glued together. Their commitment to high standards and accountability are their undoing, as the slack-masters and incompetent either don't care ("I'm just here to qualify for my pension") or they've mastered the processes of masking their incompetence, often by blaming the competent or the innocent for their own failings.

This additional workload crushes the remaining competent who then burn out and quit, go on disability or opt out, changing their lifestyle to get by on far less income, work, responsibility and far less exposure to the toxic work environments created by depersonalization, politicization and the elevation of the incompetent.

5. As the competent leadership leaves, the incompetent takes the reins, blind to their own incompetence. It all looked so easy when the competent were at the helm, but reality is a cruel taskmaster, and all the excuses that worked as an underling wear thin once the incompetent are in leadership roles.

By this terminal stage, the competent have been driven out, quit or burned out. There's only slack-masters and incompetent left, and the toxic work environment has been institutionalized, so no competent individual will even bother applying, much less take a job doomed to burnout and failure.

This is why systems are breaking down before our eyes and why the breakdowns will spread with alarming rapidity due the tightly bound structure of complex systems.

Click to enlarge.

Flycatcher and Wisteria by Ohara Koson

Flycatcher and Wisteria by Ohara Koson

Click to enlarge.

History

Completely blown away by this 4th cent BCE greave found in Bulgaria in 2007 assuming it and associated finds are old news to military history types but worth seeing again. 1/ https://t.co/pNUyOQN5Eh pic.twitter.com/KA49queQAj

— Liv Mariah Yarrow (pronounced, 'leave') (@profyarrow) May 9, 2023

 

An Insight

I'm so old that I remember when Belt and Road demonstrated that China was unstoppable. https://t.co/jKrtcAzsPq

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 9, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

Well this got my heart pounding at 7 am while quietly looking for Willow Tits.
Four European Bison got spooked by something and came stampeding through the forest right past me.
No fences, no familiarity with people, these are the real deal: wild, skittish & fast! And awesome! pic.twitter.com/TiEtz5LBuQ

— Richard Broughton 🇺🇦 (@woodlandbirder) May 8, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

TSUTAYA Bookstore in Japan. pic.twitter.com/8qy0UhgsY4

— World Of History (@UmarBzv) May 10, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

Click to enlarge.

If you don't control for confounds and if there is no effect size, is it science at all?

Poor old Washington Post, they are having a rough time over at casa Althouse.  From "To assess green spaces, the researchers used satellite imaging and applied a widely accepted measure of quantifying vegetation..." by Ann Althouse.  

I let my WP subscription lapse again three or four years ago and so cannot see the details of the reporting but my anticipation that this is an extraordinarily sloppy research amounting to cargo cult science is supported by the commenters who can read it.

The Washington Post headline is 

Living near green spaces could add 2.5 years to your life, new research finds

Where "could" is doing all the heavy lifting.   

The hypothesis that living near nature in general and green spaces in particular is an especially attractive proposition which is naively attractive.  But is it true?

It is a longstanding hypothesis and there are decades of research on the topic.  You can see why it is a challenging argument to support because there are so many confounds.  If people living in green suburbs live longer than people living in dense built-environments, is it because of the greenery or is because people in the suburbs tend to be wealthier, healthier and more responsible?  

There are dozens of confounds which are challenging to define, measure, and control.  "Could" greenspace be beneficial?  Sure.  Is it?  We don't know.  The claim is made ad infinitum but the evidence is weak and disputed on valid grounds.  

The Washington Post is not reporting on a strong new study which moves the dial in determining whether the proposition is correct.  They are reporting on one more badly designed study with few controls of the already known confounding variables.  This is not much more than cognitive pollution.  Shame on the Washington Post for elevating fluff.

When news editors are more interested in ideological and commercial interests than in reporting the news

How the mighty are fallen.  From WaPo seems to want to write about the heat — but you can't elevate the heat story over the smoke story. by Ann Althouse.   She uses the following illustration.

Her point is that there is an editorial failure here trying to merge two unrelated stories.  The first story is a dog-bites-man story, i.e. it is hot in the summer and it is especially hot in the South in the summer compared to other states.  But, crucially, not yet apparently hotter than any normal summer.

And the other story is of the effect of the forest fires in Canada on some of our northern states which have been going on for two months.

So, one story that is not new news (Canadian fires) and another story which is not news at all (it is hot in the summer) and neither story related or relevant to one another.  From Althouse:

These stories are not connected, but they are put together, I suspect, to intensify concern about long-term global warming, which, to me — living where the air quality index is 270 at the moment — feels like a failure to take the smoke problem seriously. It's often hot in the summer in the south! This smoke is something I have never seen in my life. It's actively unhealthy for millions of Americans. After staying home for years hiding from a virus, I am now hiding from the air. On Twitter, I'm seeing conspiracy theories. The mainstream media treating this problem as a phenomenon on the level of 100° temperatures in Texas in the summer is going to make some of us paranoid.

Bad editing is abusive to empirical observation, disrespectful of readers, and verging on propaganda.  It is made worse by the natural assumption that the Washington Post editors are trying to manufacture news to advance an ideological and commercial interest, i.e. AGW.  The normal summer weather is unrelated to global warming and the Canadian forest fires are unrelated to global warming and both are unrelated to each other.

But for the Washington Post editors, it seems, if you sling enough dung against the wall, there will be enough of a pattern to write about.  

Althouse is obviously correct when she points out that elevating normal summer weather to an equivalence with a relatively rare event such as the massive Canadian forest fires is an editorial failure which disrespects those readers who are actually suffering the consequences of the forest fire.

Seems to me like it is a more complete and abject failure than simply not maintaining and editorial sense of perspective.  Seems like an Editorial team who can no longer effectively report news because they are primarily concerned about advancing ideological and commercial interests.

Data Talks

The Censorship Industrial Complex mapped out by @mtaibbi & team shows who is/was behind promoting approved narratives and enforcing censorship.

The money & power of these people/orgs gave them the ability to “own the internet” until Twitter broke free. pic.twitter.com/QQMXME9kDS

— TexasLindsay™ (@TexasLindsay_) May 10, 2023

 

On the Cliffs, 1917 by Laura Knight

On the Cliffs, 1917 by Laura Knight

Click to enlarge.

Really? The Liberty Bell?

Heh.

I am sitting here working into the evening with Spotify on in the background.  I put on John Philip Sousa and some of his more rousing marches because my attention has been dwindling.  Type, type, type . . . on I go.

Then . . .????

Monty Python?

I never recognized that the Monty Python theme music was a Sousa march.  His The Liberty Bell to be specific.  

No reason for me to have considered that an English comedy group from the early 1970s would have used an American marching band song from 1893 for their theme music, but still.  Seems like I would have noticed at some point in the following fifty years.  

Double click to enlarge.

France has probably produced the most reprehensible coterie of public intellectuals that any country has ever managed

Heh.  A couple of interesting passages from Jordan Peterson interview.  

Double click to enlarge.

First:

Jordan Peterson:  Marxism killed at least a hundred million people in the 20th century and there's still apologists.  One in five social scientists identifies as a Marxist.  It's like really? Really?  That's really where we're going to take this?  After the bloody 20th century we're going to say, well that wasn't real communism or something foolish like that even though we had multiple examples of exactly what happens when those doctrines are let loose in the world?  So what happened in the 1960s, in the late 1960s as far as I can tell, this happened mostly in France which has probably produced the most reprehensible coterie of public intellectuals that any country has ever managed.  In the late 1960s when all the student activists had decided that the marxist revolution wasn't going to occur in the Western world and had finally also realized that apologizing for the Soviet system was just not going to fly anymore given the tens of millions of bodies that had stacked up, they performed what I would call a philosophical sleight of hand and transformed the class war into an identity politics war and that became extraordinarily popular, mostly transmitted through people like Jacques Derrida who became an absolute darling of the Yale English department and had his pernicious doctrine spread throughout North America.  Partly as a consequence of his invasion of Yale and what happened with the postmodernists is they kept on peddling their murderous breed of political doctrine under a new guise and resentful people all over the world fell for it and I don't consider that acceptable.  You know, one of the things I've learned, for example, I teach my students in my second year now the class about what happened in the Soviet Union in the Gulag Archipelago and I use Solzhenitsyn as an exemplar.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn as an exemplar of existential psychology because I think he's actually the wisest of the existential psychologists even though he was primarily a historian and a literary figure.  Well, most of the students don't even know what happened in the Soviet Union but why is that exactly?  And the reason for that is that radical leftist ideologue intellectuals in the West have never properly apologized for the role they played in that in the absolute murderous of the 20th century so students don't even know about it.

Then there is: 

Jordan Peterson:   Some of you may know that I participated in a debate on free speech, a so-called debate on free speech that the University of Toronto hosted.  It turned into a forum and and whatever that is, but it's certainly not a debate.   But one of the things I did when I was talking to the university administration was to suggest how they might deal with the possibility of protesters and so I said, well, that's easy I know how you can have absolutely zero protesters.  Have it in the morning they won't get out of bed till ten.  So we had it at nine o'clock in the morning and there was one MPP Member of Parliament who showed up to hand out some pamphlets.  Not a single protester.  Oh it's like if you want a controversial speaker on campus just have it at 7:00 in the morning.  You won't get a protester within 50 yards of it because they'll still be sleeping off last night's pot and alcohol induced hangover.

Protectionism is always in tandem with rent-seeking and regulatory power hoarding

I keep reading that the baby formula shortage has been resolved but then I also keep seeing articles and hearing from people that it is still, some thirteen months later, unresolved, and that while shortages are less pervasive, they are still common in some areas.  

Here is the most recent update I have seen.  From FDA Finally Admits It Caused the Baby Formula Shortage by Eric Boehm.  The subheading is The agency is now taking small steps to allow foreign formula manufacturers to import their goods into the U.S.

Covid-19 was man-made

Covid-19 leaked from a lab

Russia Collusion was never a real thing

ESG won't make a material difference to climate

And on and on.  It is amazing how many mainstream stories have ended up being acknowledged as propaganda in the past couple of months.  The fact that it takes 1-4 years to acknowledge the truth is dispiriting but at least there is a sotto voce acknowledgement,

Now we can add

The year long baby formula shortage was always caused by the FDA

The Reason article makes it clear that the FDA was not serving the public health and safety interest but instead was policing a regulatory rent-seeking process beneficial to the regulating agency and to the preferred private company but to no one else.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has finally determined what's to blame for America's recent shortage of baby formula.

The FDA.

More specifically, it's the FDA's unnecessary and protectionist rules that effectively ban foreign-made baby formula from being imported into the United States. On Wednesday, the agency announced plans to tweak those rules so foreign formula manufacturers can permanently import their goods into the U.S., giving American consumers greater choice in the marketplace and ensuring more robust supply chains.

"The need to diversify and strengthen the U.S. infant formula supply is more important than ever," FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in a statement. "Ensuring that the youngest and most vulnerable individuals have access to safe and nutritious formula products is a top priority for the FDA."

That might be true now, but it clearly hasn't been the case in the past. As Reason has detailed throughout the recent crisis, the FDA's priorities have been protecting the domestic formula industry (and the dairy industry, which provides key inputs for baby formula) from foreign competition. As a result, it's nearly impossible to find foreign-made baby formula in the U.S., even though formula manufacturers based in England, the Netherlands, and Germany are some of the biggest suppliers of baby formula to the rest of the world.

How did the FDA fail their responsibilities?  By focusing on their regulatory interests rather than focusing on public health and safety.

When the Abbott Nutrition plant in Michigan was forced to close temporarily due to an FDA investigation into possible contamination, it created a supply shock that left store shelves empty and parents scrambling to find formula. Because of the FDA's protectionist rules (and high tariffs levied on foreign-made formula), markets could not adapt quickly to the shortage here in America—instead, we got political stunts like the White House's "Operation Fly Formula" that accomplished little.

In testimony to Congress, FDA officials admitted to botching the response to the contamination at the Abbott plant. But the real culprit of the recent shortage was a deeper and more pervasive one. No matter what nationalists like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) might suggest, closing off the country to international trade is not a recipe for resilience. The baby formula crisis demonstrated that it is quite the opposite.

So it's good to see the FDA admit those mistakes and crack open the door to allowing foreign formula into the U.S. on a permanent basis.

This is more than just protectionism, this is rent-seeking in the flesh.  

Is the FDA now refocused on protecting the health and safety of the consuming public.  Of course not!  They are focusing on how to preserve their controlling power in a way that protects the American producer, preserves their regulatory power, and ignores the strategic errors of their approach.  Business as usual.

Unfortunately, the list of policy changes the FDA announced on Wednesday mostly amounts to providing technical assistance to foreign firms that want to sell formula here. That is, offering help in navigating the complex approval process, rather than sweeping aside those regulations entirely. If a formula maker has passed muster under E.U. regulations, that should be good enough for the FDA.

There's also the matter of tariffs on imported formula, which are so high that they effectively make any imported formula uncompetitive in the American market. Why would a foreign manufacturer like Holle or HiPP go through the complicated FDA approval process (even after the announced changes) if it knows in advance that its goods won't be able to compete on a level playing field in America?

Portlandia meets Kafka

The City of Portland fines a property owner for the City not providing the services it is supposed to provide.  Three times!

Double click to enlarge.

History

US Marine Eugene Sledge is on Okinawa, observing the reaction to announcement of Victory in Europe: 'Considering our own peril and misery, no one cared much. '“So what” was typical of the remarks I heard around me. Nazi Germany might as well have been on the moon.' pic.twitter.com/u7IMXv1UCV

— Second World War tweets from 1945 (@RealTimeWWII) May 9, 2023

 

An Insight

 

Click to enlarge.

I see wonderful things

Daisugi is a 14th century Japanese forestry technique that allows growing and harvesting perfect tall trees from the upper portions of existing trees leaving the base and root structure of the “mother tree” intact.

📸IG iszkt2g pic.twitter.com/vFvvgPYkXR

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) May 9, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

America’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Moment Has Already Arrived, New IRS Data Show | Jon Miltimore https://t.co/xXJvHK2qjT via @feeonline

— Charles Bayless (@CharlesBayless) May 10, 2023

 

AQI to Cigarettes Calculator

Well, that's handy.  If you live in a location with poor air quality, what is the equivalence of that bad air quality in terms of cigarettes smoked.  AQI to Cigarettes Calculator.

In Atlanta, we have not been noticeably affected by the Canadian wildfires.  It is summer so we have heat and humidity and particulates hang in the air.  Regardless of fires in Canada.

This Wednesday morning, it promises to be a beautiful clear day with a high of 91 degrees.  Humidity is only about 70%.  

With an AQI of 60, the equivalent number of cigarettes consumed per day is just less than one (0.93 cigarettes).  

All somewhat back-of-the-envelope.  Still, a good effort and not as alarming as I thought it might be.

A Postman of the City of London, 1911 by Samuel Harry Hancock

A Postman of the City of London, 1911 by Samuel Harry Hancock

Click to enlarge.

The clerisy is the breeding ground of Change Merchants. Fear has to be created in order to drive regulatory change in order to sustain the clerisy.

A very interesting argument.  From Change Merchants by N. S. Lyons.  The subheading is Rule by “Virtuals” leads to constant disruption.

The essay is worth reading in toto but the heart of it is:

Whether an academic, a journalist, a financial analyst, or a software developer, a member of this Virtual class makes his living—and, indeed, establishes his social and economic value—by manipulating, categorizing, and interpreting symbolic information and narrative. “Manipulate” is an important verb here, and not merely in the sense of deviousness. Such an individual’s job is to take existing information and change it into new forms, present it in new ways, or use it to tell new stories. This is what I am attempting to do as a writer in shaping this article, for example.

Members of this class therefore cannot produce anything without change. And they cannot sell what they’re producing unless it offers something at least somewhat new and different. Indeed, change is literally what they sell, in a sense, and they have a material incentive to push for it, since the faster the times are a-changin’ in their field, or in society, the more market opportunity exists for their products and services. They are, fundamentally, merchants of change.

This is not a new observation. As the writer Kevin Phillips noted in Mediacracy in 1975:

Change does not threaten the affluent intelligentsia of the Post-Industrial Society the way it threatened the landowners and industrialists of the New Deal. On the contrary, change is as essential to the knowledge sector as inventory turnover is to a merchant or manufacturer. Change keeps up demand for the product (research, news, theory, and technology). Post-Industrialism, a knowledge elite, and accelerated social change appear to go hand in hand.

What has shifted since 1975 is that the proportion of would-be intellectuals and other Change Merchants in society has grown vastly larger as our manufacturing sector has declined and we’ve steered a greater and greater share of young people into postsecondary education. We face an ever greater surplus of “knowledge elites,” who form a growing portion of our ever more postindustrial economy; therefore, ever more intra-class competition rages as these elites attempt to sell unique theoretical “products” in disruptive new ways. The result is a vastly elevated number of suppliers of social change. And that supply creates its own demand.

The most vibrant example of this dynamic today is academia. In recent years, many have lamented the infiltration of political activism into the ivory tower, allegedly once devoted purely to the pursuit of truth. But the whole structure of academia is almost perfectly designed to incentivize activism. To advance in or merely survive the competition of their crowded fields, academics must constantly strive to produce something—anything—new and seemingly innovative. It’s “publish or perish.” In other words, academia creates its own demand for continual disruptive change. And activism maximizes opportunities for such profitable disruption. After all, academia is a “marketplace of ideas,” and sellers in a marketplace will naturally advertise to stimulate demand. Some naive academics may have hitherto sought only to understand the world, but the whole point of academia is to sell the need for academics to change it. Activism is the inevitable strategic business innovation of the academic market.

Today, almost every sector of the postindustrial economy operates with a similar incentive structure. Fast culture is good business for the same reason as is fast fashion. Just as promoting hedonism and conspicuous consumption can stoke demand, so a strong incentive exists to promote a whole suite of values that encourage sustained and faster change. Values that scramble sensibilities, obliterate old borders, uproot ties that bind, eliminate the limits of old obligations, pry open and plunder distinct and exclusive communities and cultures; or that discover new rights, or temporarily establish fashionable new moral norms that suddenly compel conformity; or that launch grand moral crusades—all create new demand for services that otherwise wouldn’t exist. “Progress” is profitable.

By contrast, the prospect of deaccelerated change—or, worse, the notion offered by conservative traditionalists that there exist permanent truths, a fixed human nature, or inherited ways of life that have already provided best-fit solutions to intractable human challenges—is, in a real sense, an existential threat. Like the shark who must keep swimming constantly in order to breathe, the Change Merchant finds that stability means death.

I add corroborating support from my career as global partner in an audit, tax, and management consulting firm.  But my experience was extendable to adjacent fields such as lawyers, merchant bankers and others as well.

Business was never so good as when there were new regulations coming down the pike.  No new regulations for a couple or three years and growth would flatline, profits shrink.  Partners would begin to get antsy and cast about for new services to sell.  But that was challenging.  With regulations, clients have to buy.  Without regulations, the new service has to stand on its own beneficial merits.  And truly productive work is hard work.  

HIPPA was a windfall.  Sarbanes-Oxley was manna from heaven.  Y2K, salad days from an earnings perspective.  But let there be no major regulatory change for two or three years and it was as the Israelites wandering in a desert barren of revenue growth or profits.

The phenomenon was known and understood but had no particular name.  Change Merchants will do. 

Not all regulation is useless or self-defeating.  Not all change is from regulations.  But they are all part of the same financial ecosystem.  

For much of the economy, and certainly as a partner in a management/IT consulting firm, technology, powered by Moore's Law, is already a natural change environment.  The S-curve of all new technologies have been, largely due to Moore's Law, steepening over the past four decades.  It is now a frenetic scramble as the S-curves of new technologies begin to scramble one another and the mean time of adapting to new technology is now greater than the mean time of new technology evolution.  If it takes five years to recognize, invest in, and reap benefit from a new technology and the S-curve of that technology is 30 years, all is good.  If the S-curves of new technology are 3 years, we are in unsettled times.

And those are the shoal waters we are currently shooting.  In 1900, any new technology, such as electric refrigerator's, might have a forty-five year S-curve from introduction as an expensive exotic to the time where they became a universal consumer good.  For internet connected smart phones, the S-curve was more like ten years or less.  

Technology drives its own massive change environment.  There are risks and dangers to it but it is broadly beneficial with everyone ultimately becoming richer, more efficient, and more effective.  

Lyons is focused on a different class of change - elective change arising from the governance process and far more driven by sociological forces and insider financial interests than is technological change.  And critically, from my perspective, far more ambiguous in terms of its actual benefits.  It is beneficial to the Change Merchants of course.  But to everyone else?  That is far from clear.

Most regulations seem to end up being ineffective, counter-productive or to have a sting in their tail of unexpected consequences.  

And there is a second order of regulatory driven change.  There was a clear need for privacy considerations underpinning HIPPA whether HIPPA ended up serving that end well or not.  There was a clear need for improved transparency behind the push to Sarbanes-Oxley.  Some class of regulation is indeed necessary, whether it is well designed regulation or not.

But the class of necessary regulatory change plows the field for a more toxic and dangerous form of elective change.  That arising from ideology or advocacy or simple Change Merchant greed.  Regulatory changes driven by baseless fear and without empirical grounding and with no clear benefit.

Anthropogenic Global Warming

Public Health a la Covid-19

Income Inequality

Social Justice

Systemic racism 

Decarbonization

Defunding the police

Vision Zero 

Critical Race Theory

Recycling

DEI

ESG

Etc. 

There is no clearly measurable benefit arising from any of these.  Certainly a rhetorical argument can be crafted for any and all of them.  But each comes at a cost and there is no robust benefit to any of them.  All the financial benefit is front-end loaded and targeted to the pockets of the Change Merchants.  There are beneficiaries of each of these advocacy movements but it is all rent-seeking financial benefit and represents no improvement in productivity, efficiency or effectiveness accruing to the nation or public.  

Lyons also touches on the issue of class and self-interest of the clerisy in creating, through propaganda, the fear necessary to carry their baseless arguments into the realm of discretionary regulatory change where rent-seeking profits can be manufactured from thin air and with no benefit to the coerced public.

Kudos to Lyons for articulating this process.

History

This is a good point, and brief thread which applies far beyond Canada - people seem to fail to recall how crazy people were during prior mass movements. https://t.co/OdeUuaZmKO

— David Manheim - bsky:@davidmanheim.alter.org.il (@davidmanheim) May 9, 2023

 

An Insight

The most harm of all is done when power is in the hands of people who are absolutely persuaded of the purity of their instincts-- and the purity of their intentions. - Milton Friedman

— Cerebral Wisdom (@CerebralWisdom) May 8, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

Tumbleweeds start out as tiny seedlings; by summer the plant has a round shape. They grow flowers and fruits. By fall they dry and detach from their roots, so they spread their seeds

[source: https://t.co/XLKA9YjF8U]
[video: https://t.co/JqAMLmJ4nx]pic.twitter.com/2kurUZu1vp

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 9, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

Click to enlarge.

Data Talks

Behold, Twitter! I have produced the *inflation-adjusted* Ozimek line, which accounts for the substantial automobile inflation since his original tweet.

The figure is now $48,737. @ModeledBehavior https://t.co/JWvRl7Z4lh pic.twitter.com/G9OBGsbJy2

— Alan Cole (@AlanMCole) May 5, 2023

 

The Nurse, 1963 by John Berry

The Nurse, 1963 by John Berry

Click to enlarge.

Marchetti Constant, just another God of the Copybook Headings

Excellent piece.  From How Transportation Technologies Shape Cities by Tomas Pueyo.  The subheading is Part 3 of How to Understand Cities. 

We don’t realize it, but the shape of our cities—from how big they are to what services they have—is mainly driven by one thing: transport technologies.

1. Marchetti

The size of cities is determined by transportation technologies, whether it’s Ancient Rome, Medieval Paris, Industrial London, turn-of-the-century Chicago, or Highway Atlanta.

People live within 30 min of their work. This is the Marchetti Constant. 

For millennia, most cities were limited in size because people moved by foot. Even big cities like Ancient Rome or Medieval Paris didn’t grow beyond 3 km in diameter. Indeed, since people walk at a speed of about 5 km/h, and they are only willing to walk up to 30 min to commute, they were only willing to walk for ~3 km. 

Then, in the early 1800s, London (orange) built the first urban railway. Suddenly, you could live much farther, close to a station, take the train, and in 30 min reach your work. The city grew accordingly. But not uniformly. 

Marchetti notes in the original paper:

Cars make all the difference. As they have a speed of 6 to 7 times greater than a pedestrian, they expand daily connected space 6 or 7 times in linear terms, or about 50 times in area.—Marchetti, Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior.

The time budget for travel is a universal and narrow constraint.  

Click to enlarge.

I vaguely recollect that there is a related law to the effect that commuting speeds in cities are pretty invariant as well.  I don't recall the name of the phenomenon but the effect is that regardless of traffic design and technology speed, traffic congestion will always cluster around 10-15 mph in cities.  

You add road lanes, you improve light sequencing, you improve flows, etc. and you will gain brief relief from congestion before the system reverts to the mean.  Higher speed conditions invite more people to commute pushing the average speed back down to the norm.

Which raises an interesting point.  It is quite the fad now, and for several years, to focus on walkable cities when designing the built urban environment.  There are also related efforts to reduce or remove parking in order to discourage vehicular traffic.  Further, Vision Zero, also related, wants to reduce the speed of traffic in order to reduce traffic related deaths, principally in cities.  And let's not forget another clerisy obsession, repurposing scarce road space from cars to bicycle lanes, no matter how few people bicycle.  Finally, both the clerisy and City Planners are deeply enamored of the millions and billions of dollars available through the federal government for mass transit.  Which ever fewer people choose to ride.  

No matter how much is spent on mass transit though, its role in labor transportation is increasingly de minimis.  For example, see US Public Transit Has Struggled to Retain Riders over the Past Half Century. Reversing This Trend Could Advance Equity and Sustainability by Yonah Freemark.  Independent of the clerisy obsession with undefined equity and misunderstood sustainability, Public Transit can't get Americans to take a ride.  

Since 1970, the number of US workers roughly doubled, increasing from 77 million to more than 150 million. But over the same period, the number of transit commuters increased by only about 1 million. Just 5 percent of workers now get to work by bus or train nationwide, compared with almost 9 percent a half century ago. Most people are driving instead.

All these fads are popular among the clerisy and advocacy groups and reasonably unpopular among the public.  People want to get from A to B quickly, cheaply, safely, and reliably.  As long as the utopianism of the clerisy, and their pet City Planning Departments, don't interfere with those objectives, people don't object.  In recent years though, the clerisy, advocacy groups and Planning Departments are becoming increasingly insistent that there should be fewer cars, less parking, less roadway for cars, more mass transit, and fewer labor transportation choices. 

Fundamentally, they want to force their vision on the public even though that vision means that labor transportation will take longer, despite what the residents actually want.  The clerisy proceed blithely, without taking into account that longer commute times changes the configuration of the city, making it smaller and more condense.  The clerisy assumption, to the extent that they think about it explicitly, is that because they want people to live in small, dense, walkable cities, then everyone must want that.  

An assumption we are seeing tested in real time.  It would appear that over the past three years, people are exiting the big cities with the greatest manifestation of Clerisy thinking and planning.  The San Franciscos, Seattles, Los Angeles, Portlands, Chicagos, etc.  

My suspicion is that we are seeing fragmentation of most these cities as well.  All metropolitan areas are made up of multiple jurisdictions with a core City government but then massive areas of the functional city which are actually under the jurisdiction of counties or smaller independent city governments.  As an example, the City of Atlanta is a jurisdiction of about 500,000 people under a very progressive, clerisy dominated governance.  The metropolitan city is 6,500,000 people with the balance of 6,000,000 under county and other governance structures.  They do not experience the clerisy vision of bad public services and slow commutes.  93% of Atlantans do not live under the governance of the clerisy vision.  

Over the past fifty years, City of Atlanta has managed to attract perhaps 75,000 people to live within the city while the suburbs and exurbs have attracted some 5.5-6 million.  Not a particularly ringing endorsement of the vision of the clerisy and the City Planners.  

In the past five years, the clerisy vision for city centers seems to have come to the fore and I suspect we will see, over the next five years or decade, a further exodus from city centers as people seek the efficiencies, productivity and benefits of large city living without the harassment and functional failure arising from the vision of the clerisy.  

The Marchetti Constant was way after Kipling's time but it would seem to qualify as a Copybook Heading.  Labor transportation speed determines the size of the city and when you deliberately slow down the labor transportation speed you make the city smaller and you drive people out to jurisdictions with a focus on making labor transportation fast, cheap, safe, and reliable.  

Until then, as the clerisy pursue their vision in sacrificial city centers, you still have the Gods of the Copybook Headings defying the vision of the clerisy.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, 

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

UPDATE:  I came across what I had been recollecting in a Thingfinder post from December 2016, London Traffic.  Smeed's Law.

The Wikipedia post is here.  

History

Erich Schwam, died at 90 years old. In his Will, he left $2M+ to the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in thanks to the town for hiding and saving his family during WWII.

Schwam arrived to the village with his parents in 1943. The family was saved by local residents who… pic.twitter.com/sH7tvfNEUB

— Humans of Judaism (@HumansOfJudaism) May 8, 2023

 

An Insight

"Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

C.S. Lewis pic.twitter.com/69rhuYRkrW

— Mark W. (@DurhamWASP) May 8, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

The elephant beetle typically ranges between 7 and 12 cm (2.75–4.75 in) in length, with the largest male specimen known measuring 13.7 cm

[read more: https://t.co/xVoGGdO3Hb]
[📷 https://t.co/3lP5NLsF7V] pic.twitter.com/uZMBdb1mPT

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 9, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

The greatest autist in history was the English mathematician Charles Babbage. He once sent a letter to Alfred Tennyson telling him that his poetry was insufficiently accurate with regards to current population growth trends

A true icon. pic.twitter.com/8bCqfayTR0

— Swann Marcus (@SwannMarcus89) May 7, 2023

 

Data Talks

NEW Trust in Media 2023 Poll:

Americans are sharply divided along partisan lines on how much they trust the news reported by national media organizations.https://t.co/5VTrkTr0MU pic.twitter.com/a7heKK5fGt

— YouGov America (@YouGovAmerica) May 8, 2023

 

The Maid, 1862 by Wilhelm Amber (German, 1822-1899)

The Maid, 1862 by Wilhelm Amber (German, 1822-1899)

Click to enlarge.

History

An ethereal London skyline sketched into this 13th-century manuscript of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of Britain.https://t.co/nqe4F3OmNW

(@BLMedieval Royal MS 13 A III, f. 14r) pic.twitter.com/7iDueXbv3y

— Calum Cockburn (@CCockburn2) May 8, 2023

 

An Insight

When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics. - P.J. O'Rourke

— Cerebral Wisdom (@CerebralWisdom) May 7, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

Using its strong back legs, the basilisk lizard, aka the Jesus Christ lizard, pushes down so fast and so hard with its feet that it never sinks further than a few inches below the surface of the water

[BBC Earth: https://t.co/CJcPVZnG9n]pic.twitter.com/4J5CNvfMJy

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 9, 2023

 

Offbeat humor

I'm a professor of Latin. My pronouns are 𝘪𝘴, 𝘦𝘪𝘶𝘴, 𝘦𝘪, 𝘦𝘶𝘮, 𝘦𝘰, and I expect my students and colleagues to memorize them and use correctly. https://t.co/KINxWNSIuc

— Jake 🇺🇸 (@omni_american) May 8, 2023

 

Data Talks

San Francisco is experiencing its biggest commercial real estate crisis. 31% vacancy across-the-board and some buildings are 80%. It is not pretty. pic.twitter.com/7BQ5pgmcEh

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) May 8, 2023

 

The Classical Liberal is inherently humble, accepting the limitations of man

From The Humble Capitalist by Richard Hanania.  The subheading is The central planning fallacy never dies.  

Take the issue of whether a nation should have an industrial policy, which is defined as a strategic effort to develop specific parts of a national economy, or manufacturing in general. A country may decide it wants to, say, manufacture cars, rather than let the market send price signals about what its citizens should be doing.

When I hear such plans, I’m taken aback by the faith it puts in intellectuals and politicians. At most, I think the smartest human beings might be capable of being small cogs in vast machines that no one can understand or control. I trust that the guy who runs a single car factory, or the logistics manager of a major hotel chain, might know what he’s doing in his limited domain. I am, in contrast, inherently suspicious of those who think they have answers to questions like “What kinds of jobs should most people have?” or “Which goods should we manufacture at home instead of buying from China?” If you believe that you have 20 extra IQ points on proponents of industrial policy, but it would take a superhuman AI to even have the possibility of doing central planning well, is that arrogance or humility? Sounds like arrogance relative to fellow humans, but humility in the sense of understanding your limitations.

Markets take into account the information necessary to allocate goods and resources in efficient ways. Through the price system and individuals making decisions that they’re directly responsible for, they provide answers to an endless array of questions that no central planner can even begin to consider and weigh in their entirety.

Is your nation any good at making cars? Are the people culturally or temperamentally suited for that kind of work? Would forcing them to manufacture their own cars make them better off than just doing whatever produces the most value and then buying cars from other nations? Are you sure, from all the goods and labor it takes to produce a car, the market can’t figure out a better way to create wealth or make technological breakthroughs? Can the supply chains for each product that goes into making a car be put together at a reasonable cost? What are the second and third order effects of distributing resources toward what are, based on the choices of those who could risk their own money, inefficient uses?

Many conservatives who support industrial policy seem to see economic efficiency as no more than a secondary concern. They somehow think manufacturing jobs are better for people getting married, forming families, and instilling virtue. As someone with a background in the social sciences, I find the idea that one can not only plan an economy, but also predict the cultural impacts of an economic policy to be absurd. That project is way beyond any tools that we have. Just because in previous decades the US had better manufacturing jobs and higher rates of family formation does not mean one can recreate through trade policy the culture of Eisenhower’s America. This is pure cargo cultism.

I like that - "cargo cultism" as a term for the rent seeking mind in the national policy context.

Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1862 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905)

Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1862 by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825–1905)

Click to enlarge.

But there is always a market for the authoritarian statist view. Regrettably.

From ‘Power and Progress’ Review: Technology and the New Leviathan, a book review by Deirdre N. McCloskey.  The subheading is Two economists argue that, in the face .  of world-changing innovation, the state can make better decisions for society than the free market.

The book is Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.  I do not know Johnson but I have a number of Acemoglu's books.  He writes on topics of interest to me but I rarely more than skim his work.  He is traditional statist authoritarian.   McCloskey is a classical liberal.  The two world views do not mesh, principally because the statist authoritarian worldview is so profoundly and consistently wrong about how the world works and so consistently disastrous in terms of consequences to people.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson have written a long, eloquent book arguing that technological progress is a decidedly mixed bag. They believe that the power of the state can and should be used to select the best of the goodies from the bag. The state, they argue, can do a better job than the market of selecting technologies and making investments to implement them.

Mr. Acemoglu is a prolific economist and a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize; his MIT colleague Mr. Johnson is an economist and professor of management. In “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity” they claim that the billions of daily decisions by you and me—to venture on a new purchase or a new job or a new idea—do not “automatically” turn out optimally for ourselves or society. In particular, poor workers are not always helped by new technology. The invisible hand of human creativity and innovation, in the authors’ analysis, requires the wise guidance of the state.

This is a perspective many voters increasingly agree with—and politicians from Elizabeth Warren to Marco Rubio. We are children, bad children (viewed from the right) or sad children (viewed from the left). Bad or sad, as children we need to be taken in hand. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson warmly admire the U.S. Progressive Movement of the late 19th century as a model for their statism: experts taking child-citizens in hand.

The strange history of ‘vitalism’ in America, technocracy on the rise, Henry Threadgill’s musical odyssey and more.

The authors begin with the questionable assertion that the most prevalent attitude toward technology today is a heedless optimism. “Every day,” they write, “we hear . . . that we are heading relentlessly toward a better world, thanks to unprecedented advances in technology.” Their chapters then skip briskly through history—from the agricultural revolution of the neolithic era, to the industrial revolution of the 19th century, to the Western postwar economic expansion of the 20th century—seeking to show how at each turn new innovations tended to empower certain sections of society at the expense of others. The “power” that concerns them, in other words, is private power.

Since the 1920s, economists from John Maynard Keynes to Paul Samuelson to Joseph Stiglitz have been claiming, with increasing self-assurance though with surprisingly little evidence beyond the blackboard, that (1) private arrangements work poorly, (2) the state knows better, and (3) we therefore need more state. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson have long believed in this anti-liberal syllogism. Statism recommends a growing Leviathan, as Mr. Acemoglu argued equally eloquently in “Why Nations Fail,” a 2012 book with James Robinson.

We need, in other words, the legislation currently being pushed by left and right to try again the policies of antitrust, trade protection, minimum wage and, above all, subsidy for certain technologies. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson are especially eager to regulate digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. “Technology should be steered in a direction that best uses a workforce’s skills,” they write, “and education should . . . adapt to new skill requirements.” How the administrators of the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce would know the new direction to steer, or the new skills required, remains a sacred mystery.

Choosing a path for a society and its economy is not the only role of Leviathan; distributing economic justice is equally important. “Government subsidies for developing more socially beneficial technologies,” the authors declare, “are one of the most powerful means of redirecting technology in a market economy.” Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson regard the private economy as an inequality machine.

In former times, they write, “shared benefits appeared only when landowning and religious elites were not dominant enough to impose their vision and extract all the surplus from new technologies.” Today we need the state to use its powers “to induce the private sector to move away from excessive automation and surveillance, and toward more worker-friendly technologies.” Fear of surveillance is a major theme of the book; therefore “antitrust should be considered as a complementary tool to the more fundamental aim of redirecting technology away from automation, surveillance, data collection, and digital advertising.”

“Power and Progress” puts forward a new statist agenda and argues against a foolish reliance on individual discovery and free entry into jobs and markets. Well, so what? What’s wrong with their case for a new Leviathan, so long as it is advised by certain economists from MIT?

McCloskey then refutes the authoritarian statist argument based both on evidence and logic.  It is useful to refute the perennial balderdash of the authoritarian statist.  No matter how good their intentions and no matter how eloquently they write, the authoritarian statist worldview is repugnant.  Morally, philosophically, and empirically.  

But there is always a market for the authoritarian statist view.  Regrettably.  

Identities and category errors

From The Queers Versus The Homosexuals by Andrew Sullivan.  The subheading is We are in a new era. And the erasure of gay men and lesbians is intensifying.

Do you remember the homosexual?

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? He was, for a period, a key figure in the conversation about gay rights. He was Will in “Will And Grace,” or Keith in “Six Feet Under,” or Cam in “Modern Family” — a normie-enough dude randomly distributed across the human population and country. Once invisible and closeted, the AIDS epidemic exposed him without mercy in every state in the country. With this unexpected visibility, and in the wake of hundreds of thousands of young corpses, the survivors built a movement that won every gay and lesbian the right to be free from discrimination and to marry and serve openly — and proudly — in the military.

It was the most speedily successful civil rights story in memory. Its case for equality was simple and clear: including us in existing institutions needn’t change anything in heterosexual life. “Live and let live” in equality and dignity was the idea. And the most powerful force behind this success was the emergence of so many ordinary gays and lesbians — of all races, religions, backgrounds, classes, and politics — who told their own story. America discovered what I had discovered the first time I went into a gay bar: these people were not the stereotypes I was told about. They were not some strange, alien tribe. They were just like every other human, part of our families and communities; and we cared about each other.

What would happen if and when we won the battle was always an open question. The question of transgender rights — associated with but very different from gay rights — remained unresolved. But in the new climate of acceptance, transgender people also became increasingly visible and accepted, and they too won a stunning victory in the Supreme Court. The Bostock decision in June 2020 gave those who identified as the opposite sex full civil rights protection. Yes, there were still skirmishes over cakes. But with equal rights, and growing toleration, it seemed as if we’d achieved a settlement that would allow us all — straight, gay, and trans — a chance to get on with our lives in freedom.

And now? Back in culture war hell.

If you read the MSM, you’ll be told this war is back because the GOP has, for cynical reasons, become an even more unhinged hate-machine, now dedicated once again to “targeting the freedom and dignity of queer people,” as one NYT columnist writes today. You will, in fact, almost never see a news story that isn’t premised on this idea. And it’s obviously true that some on the right have never really accepted gay equality and have jumped at a new opening to undo gay integration and dignity — and the rawness of some of the homophobia and transphobia out there right now is palpable. The resurrection of bathroom bills and the move to curtail the rights of trans adults are repulsive and dumb.

But when you examine the other issues at stake — public schools teaching the concepts of queer and gender theory to kindergartners on up, sex changes for children before puberty, the housing of biological males with women in prisons and rape shelters, and biological males competing with women in sports — you realize we are far beyond what the gay rights movement once stood for. It’s these initiatives from the far left that are new; and the backlash is quite obviously a reaction to the capture of the gay rights movement by queer social justice activists.

This originally caught my eye owing to the headline which would fall into the category of "Unexpected Headlines in My Time."

But there is an additional insight in what Sullivan is saying.  

I am accustomed to thinking about institutional capture when it comes to fanatical ideological movements and the culture wars.  

While it is not his main point, it is an important point and I have read and heard it expressed in may ways over the past few months but never in terms of institutional capture.

It’s these initiatives from the far left that are new; and the backlash is quite obviously a reaction to the capture of the gay rights movement by queer social justice activists.

The argument would be that LGBT is an institution (obviously not a governmental institution but certainly a semi-formalized institution until recently representing the interests of its members, primarily L and G interests.  

But then the LGBT institution was captured by the Trans movement and the associated ideologues.  Parties who did not share or wish to advance or protect the achievements of the LG part of the coalition.  

Is LGBT an institution?  I can see multiple arguments pro and con but I suspect the weight of the arguments falls on, yes, they are an institution.  I have thought of them more as movement and, certainly, at one time they were definitely a movement.  But they achieved their primary objectives.  What was left was less of a movement and more a residual of the institution and that is what has been captured.

An interesting way of thinking about it.

History

By showcasing every documented battle in human history, this map emphasizes the importance of the European project.

Happy #EuropeDay 🇪🇺 pic.twitter.com/DTF8NWEBUV

— Xavi Ruiz (@xruiztru) May 9, 2023

 

An Insight

Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day. - Vaclav Havel

— Cerebral Wisdom (@CerebralWisdom) May 7, 2023