The other day, an MMM reader stopped by and left the following comment on one of my older posts about the principles of FIRE:
I wasn’t smart enough to find FI when I was young so I sometimes feel like a lot of their advice is not going to help me or others who don’t already own a home and don’t have six- figure salaries in this post-pandemic world.
A lot of the ideas given to young folks are “house hack” “buy a fixer upper” but that is still out of reach and/or complex to navigate with current prices and interest rates. Most townships around me do not want you to chop a house up into ADU’s or multiple units. My cousin owns 60 acres of land but he is not allowed to live on a trailer on that land.
I don’t know what the next generation of FI bloggers will offer, perhaps they are already out there and I just don’t know who they are, but I’d like to hear from them.”
–
As with every critique of our ideas, I thought about this comment for a while. Tried to determine if there were any Principles of Mustachianism that were genuinely going obsolete, versus the more common side effects of Complainypants and/or Excuse-itis, two afflictions which have been weighing down our critics since the beginning.
After all, this isn’t the first time FIRE has gone obsolete. Over my retirement I’ve seen it:
So what’s the situation right now?
Our commenter focuses on two things: the solid salaries of tech workers, and the major increases in house prices (and interest rates) in the most recent four years.
The first one — high salaries in general – is still a factor and I don’t expect that to change. Some jobs just pay more than others, and there’s a lot you can do to increase your income and switch jobs, and I’m all for it. However, ever-increasing income is not my usual focus here on MMM, because I have seen first hand that most people can waste almost any amount of income and still have very little to show for it.
In fact, the very existence of software engineers and doctors and other high earners who are my age who are still feeling financial stress is proof this: it’s mathematically impossible to earn so much for almost 30 years and not have an absolute shit-ton saved, unless you are also spending an absolute shit-ton of money the whole time.
So instead, we focus on how to streamline your spending and live joyfully and efficiently without compromise. We focus on reducing waste, while maintaining or even increasing all of the other benefits that come from spending money more purposefully. These skills are essential even for the highest earners, but they become even more valuable as you move down the income ladder.
So now for the second issue: housing. Does the state of housing here in 2024 screw up the whole FIRE plan?
As with any question, let’s start by looking at the data: how much have US house prices actually risen – adjusted for inflation – since 2019?
It turns out that our own St. Louis Fed makes this extremely useful information available here.
So there’s our answer: houses “feel” about 25% more expensive right now than they did at the start of 2019 relative to the average salary and the price of everything else. Although interestingly enough, they are only up about 10% since the last peak in early 2006, a full eighteen years ago! So housing is a blow, but not a FIRE-extinguishing one.
However, this nationwide data masks some much bigger increases in certain popular cities, including my own: Plain old Longmont Colorado now sports a hilariously high $540,000 median home price. This is about triple the price they were when I started writing in 2011, which means houses are much further out of reach for the average person in my area.
House Shopping With Your Middle Finger
The solution to this is the same as most other problems: to stop thinking in the way our culture likes to train us (as a victim of outside forces beyond our control) and go back to thinking like a Mustachian.
Houses are just like any other manufactured product, and as such they come at a wide variety of prices, subject to supply and demand.
And just because you happen to live in a certain place (even if you were born and raised there), doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be able to afford to buy a house there. Just as a baby born upon the Apple campus in Cupertino today doesn’t automatically get a new iPhone Pro Max every year.
With every purchasing decision, you need to go through the same series of choices:
So when it comes to houses, you run the numbers, then decide between renting or buying or house hacking. You might start by doing the analysis right in your own city, but also keep in mind that there are lots of other cities and even countries in the world, and there are happy people living in all of them.
But Wait: I don’t want to move to a whole new place!
At this point, people get defensive. We all have ties to our current location, and the stronger the ties the more difficult it becomes to consider moving.
But there’s a difference between genuine, positive bonds to a place and just plain old fear of change. So it’s my job to at least make you question your assumptions, because not doing so is what got you where you are, and it’s also what got our country where it is.
And on a country-wide basis, I notice that our general fear of relocating creates a very irrational pattern of house prices. They are ridiculously high in some places and ridiculously cheap in others. There does seem to be a general correlation between niceness and cost, but not a perfect one (especially since everyone has their own definition of “nice”)
And that’s where the opportunity lies.
Example:
I moved to Longmont in 2005 because it met our young family’s needs at the time, at the right price with homes about $200,000. Today, at the $540,000 price level (houses average about $450 per interior square foot) it has to compete with a much broader range of cities which offer nicer amenities at equal or lower prices.
Let’s do a hypothetical search using another amazing tool: FRED’s list of the top 1000 metro areas with price per square foot, and plot some of them based on my own judgment of their desirability:
I’m biased towards Colorado because I have so many ties there, and I also highly prioritize sunny climates. My chart suggests that if I wanted to save money, I might start looking around in Albuquerque, whereas Denver would give me a nicer life in the same price range, and if I were willing to spend more I should suck it up and move to Boulder.
Just for fun, I pulled the data from that same FRED website into a separate google spreadsheet (which I’ll share here) and sorted it by cost per square foot. Then, I highlighted a band of affordable cities with housing centered on the $100 per square foot range, which would mean a 2,000 square foot house is about $200k.
As an added bonus, I added a column to calculate the change in house prices over the past year, just in case it helps us see if a city is on the way up or getting cheaper at the moment.
A chart like this is just a starting point – you’d need to read more about any place and then go visit in person before considering a move. But the idea is to start with data, and do some fun research.
The Earth Awaits: Casting a Worldwide Net
House prices are a valuable metric, because they influence the cost of living more than almost anything else for the typical Mustachian. After all, biking and nature are always close to free, Costcos are available nationwide, and we probably care less than average about the costs of other services like valets and salons.
But there’s still plenty of value in looking at the bigger picture, considering more data points, and also being open to renting versus buying your housing. For this, I’m a big fan of a FIRE blogger-created site called The Earth Awaits, and we can take it for a test drive right now with the following search criteria:
Geographic area: North America
My total monthly budget: $0-$6000
Family size: 2
Apartment type: Two bedroom (outside city center)
Temperature range: January lows not colder than 10F
The exact parameters don’t matter too much, as long as you don’t make them too narrow. The important thing is the resulting list, which is meant to give you ideas to research further. For example, that first simple search gave me this list:
Hey, that’s interesting. I like how the site shows the population right on the main list, because that provides a big clue to the “feel” of a city. I personally like the feel of a 50k-200k person town, so I might look into Fayetteville, Columbia or Athens. I’ve also been to Chattanooga and really like that place – who knew it was only about as expensive as Columbus Ohio?
So Should I Move?
In the end, your physical environment – the people, access to nature, urban features and the weather patterns – is probably the most important factor to get right in creating a happy life. The cost of living there is only one of the factors, and definitely not the most important one.
But if you choose carefully, you can probably slide yourself in the right direction along that “Nice for the Price” scale in order to get more from your life. Even if it just means making a move within your own city to live along a walking path, a little closer to work or to the people or places you care about most.
The key is just to remember that housing is like almost everything in life: It’s a choice that you get to make, and there are great rewards for putting some solid thought and effort into that choice.
Another Fun Example: Doing the Analysis on Tempe/Phoenix Arizona vs Denver
This is a fun exercise, because I’m currently living in the Phoenix area (more on that here) that is way different than the Denver metro area where I normally live. We can start with the rough measure of housing cost per square foot across each region:
Phoenix: $272
Denver: $299
In other words, pretty close. Denver metro* is about 10% higher on average, but the variations from one neighborhood to another within any major city are much larger than that anyway.
So the other factors are more important. Both are surrounded by beautiful mountain recreation and get lots of sunshine, but the climates are famously quite different. Denver is more compact but Phoenix has nicer towns in the foothills around the outskirts. In the end it’s just personal preference in weighting these various factors, and right now I kind of like the idea of both (Phoenix in winter but Colorado for the other three seasons)
More Adventurous: Let’s Try This in South America!
Going back to The Earth Awaits, if we repeat our earlier search but in South America, we get results like these:
Many of these spots have nice writeups if you click the “Details” button, and if anything sounds right for you, you can go on to learn much more.
It’s true that moving to a new country comes with all sorts of new learning experiences: citizenship and passports, laws and traditions and driver licenses, and of course having to cross an international border every time you want to return to your home country to visit family.
But guess what? If this stuff sounds daunting to you, it’s probably a sign that you need to do it more.
At its core, moving to a new place – even Internationally – is just a series of relatively easy Adulting Puzzles. You type stuff into your computer, read the resulting stuff that pops up on your screen, and make the occasional phone call and visit to an official office. I had to do all the same stuff when moving from Canada to the US, alone and just six years out of high school myself.
Sure, it can feel like a “hassle” if you think of it the wrong way, but you know what’s a way, way bigger hassle? Living in a not-very-good place for life, or working an extra 15 years just to afford the higher cost of living in your current city, because you’re too scared to do a few weeks of work to make a big move to a better place.
If a rules-and-paperwork-hater like me can do it, almost anyone can.
Your Turn:
While we covered a few examples of actual places in this article, the real purpose was to explain the thought process behind deciding when and where to move. And there are many of you out there besides me who can do the same thing, but better. And we’d love to hear from you!
If you have some favorite cities and countries for good living, or useful techniques for scoping them out, please share them in the comments. I strongly believe that the more we help each other find the right place and enjoy the planet more thoroughly and more efficiently, the better off we’ll all be. So let’s get moving.
—–
* Denver metro on the Fed site includes all the suburbs rather than just the core city which is much smaller and more expensive, but the same is true for the nicer parts of Phoenix so I figure it’s a fair comparison)
]]>Berlin, Offenburg (dpo) - Hätten sie mal besser vorgesorgt! Nach dem Tod von Wolfgang Schäuble ist die CDU derzeit aus mehreren wichtigen Schwarzgeldkonten ausgesperrt. Aktuell versucht die Parteiführung verzweifelt, herauszufinden, ob noch andere Personen außer ihm die Zugangsdaten zu den Konten kennen.
mehr...]]>Frankfurt (dpo) - Jens Hirsch (22) aus Frankfurt hat das erreicht, was man sonst nur aus Filmen kennt: Er hat es in nur sieben Monaten vom Tellerwäscher zum Millionär gebracht. Nötig war dafür nur ein reicher Vater, der ihm sein millionenschweres Unternehmen vermacht hat. Hirschs inspirierende Geschichte zeigt, dass sozialer Aufstieg in Deutschland möglich ist, wenn man nur ganz fest an sich glaubt und steinreiche Eltern hat.
Bei seinen ehemaligen Kollegen in der Küche eines 5-Sterne-Hotels, das seinem Vater gehörte, ist Hirsch mittlerweile eine Legende. "Uns war schon immer klar: Jens ist nicht wie jeder andere. Der hat Potenzial", berichtet Küchenhilfe Cenk Ö., der viel Zeit mit Jens Hirsch verbrachte. "Wenn es einer schafft, mal eine eigene Firma zu haben, dann er!"
Muss zum Glück keine Steuer auf sein sauer geerbtes Unternehmen zahlen: Jungmillionär Jens Hirsch |
Den Job als Tellerwäscher hatte der 22-Jährige antreten müssen, nachdem er sein Studium zum dritten Mal abgebrochen und den zweiten Ferrari im Drogenrausch an die Wand gefahren hatte. Als Küchenhilfe sollte er "lernen, dass einem im Leben nicht alles einfach in den Schoß fällt", wie sein vor wenigen Tagen überraschend verstorbener Vater fand.
"Am Beispiel von Jens Hirsch kann man sehen, dass es hierzulande jeder ganz nach oben schaffen kann", erklärt Ökonom Winfried Beier. "Man braucht nur unglaublich erfolgreiche Eltern und ein wenig Geduld – Tugenden, die viele leider nicht von Anfang an mitbringen."
Die Hotelkette seines Vaters will Parentmade-Man Hirsch aus erbschaftsteuerrechtlichen Gründen noch sieben Jahre weiterführen und dann verkaufen. Anschließend will er sich zur wohlverdienten Ruhe setzen.
ssi, dan; Foto oben: wavebreakmedia / Shutterstock, Foto rechts: Kiselev Andrey Valerevich / Shutterstock; Erstveröffentlichung: 18.12.14]]>We want to make clear that these absolutely do not affect Nextcloud. Nextcloud has a strict security process backed by a USD 10K bug bounty program. We, for example, have a policy to remove test data from libraries that are shipped, to avoid risks like these.
Nextcloud has diverged significantly over the last years from ownCloud, accelerating our development. There are serious risks associated with using legacy, minimally-maintained software and we would want to point out to users and customers that migration to Nextcloud is quick, easy, painless, and helps keep their data private.
See here the ArsTechnica article in question.
The post Security statement on ownCloud breach appeared first on Nextcloud.
]]>Hovertext:
Do you want to do EVERYTHING right or do you want to have FRIENDSHIP?
Der nicht-kommerzielle Messenger Signal veröffentlicht erstmals Zahlen darüber, wie viel der jährliche Betrieb seines Dienstes kostet. Signal hat sich in den vergangenen zehn Jahren vom nerdigen Werkzeug zum Mainstream-Messenger entwickelt. Die Nutzungszahlen werden weltweit auf einen mittleren zweistelligen Millionenbetrag geschätzt. In Deutschland, wo der Datenschutz gesellschaftlich eine vergleichsweise große Rolle spielt, soll der Marktanteil bei etwa 14 Prozent liegen.
Laut einem Blogbeitrag von Signal wird der Betrieb des Messengers im Jahr 2025 schätzungsweise etwa 50 Millionen US-Dollar kosten. Schon in diesem Jahr kostet allein die technische Infrastruktur rund 14 Millionen US-Dollar. Sie verteilen sich auf:
Den größten Posten bei der technischen Infrastruktur machen die Bestätigung-SMS aus, die neu registrierte Nutzer:innen bekommen. Signal begründet die Abfrage von Telefonnummern bei der Registrierung damit, dass der Dienst so Spam-Accounts abwehre. Diese Kosten werden laut Signal in Zukunft voraussichtlich noch steigen, da die Telefonanbieter den Tod des veralteten SMS-Dienstes mit höheren Kosten kompensieren würden.
Für einen weiteren Teil der Ausgaben seien die hohen Sicherheitsanforderungen verantwortlich. So leitet Signal vollständig verschlüsselte Anrufe von Personen, die nicht in den Kontakten der Nutzer:innen sind, immer über einen Relay-Server, der die IP-Adressinformationen verschleiert. Im Blogbeitrag heißt es dazu: „Beim derzeitigen Verkehrsaufkommen beläuft sich die für die Unterstützung von Signal-Sprach- und Videoanrufen benötigte abgehende Bandbreite auf etwa 20 Petabyte pro Jahr (das sind 20 Millionen Gigabyte). Das allein verursacht für die Anrufe Bandbreitengebühren in Höhe von rund 1,7 Millionen US-Dollar pro Jahr.“
Hinzu kommen im laufenden Jahr Personalkosten in Höhe von etwa 19 Millionen Dollar. Signal beschäftigt mittlerweile rund 50 Mitarbeiter:innen in Vollzeit – eine im Branchenvergleich „schockierend kleine“ Zahl, so die Stiftung.
Gegenüber Wired begründet die Präsidentin der gemeinnützigen Signal-Stiftung, Meredith Whittaker, die Offenlegung der Kosten. Demnach sollen die Zahlen transparent darlegen, wie „überraschend teuer“ der Betrieb der Signal-Infrastruktur ist. Die Stiftung will damit auch den Blick auf das „Geschäftsmodell der Überwachung“ der anderen Messenger lenken.
Signal wurde ursprünglich mit Geldern aus dem Open Technology Fund des US-Außenministeriums gegründet, ist aber bereits seit Langem auf andere Finanzierungen angewiesen. Unter anderem gab WhatsApp-Gründer Brian Acton der 2018 gegründeten Signal Foundation rund 50 Millionen US-Dollar.
Seine Finanzspritze ließ sich Acton mit Einfluss entgelten. Laut einem Bericht von Spektrum.de wird die im Silicon Valley ansässige Signal-Stiftung von einem fünfköpfigen Vorstand geleitet, deren Vorsitzende Meredith Whittaker ist. Der Vorstand ist aber nicht das höchste Gremium in der Organisation. „Eine Ebene darüber gibt es noch die Mitgliederversammlung der Foundation. Und diese besteht aus einer einzigen Person: Brian Acton. Der hat laut Form990-Bericht für 2021 das alleinige Recht, den Vorstand (das »Board of Directors«) zu wählen“, heißt es in dem Spektrum-Artikel.
Neben Acton tragen laut Wired auch andere Großspender dazu bei, die Kosten der Stiftung zu decken. So habe Twitter-Mitbegründer Jack Dorsey die Summe von 1 Million Dollar pro Jahr zugesagt. Andere Förderer:innen, deren Namen Whittaker nicht nennen will, spenden ähnlich hohe Beiträge.
In Zukunft will Signal mehr auf Einzelspenden von Signal-Nutzer:innen setzen. Diese können seit März 2021 in der Messenger-App direkt an die Stiftung spenden. Im Gegenzug erhalten sie in ihrem Profilbild ein kleines Badge. Laut Signal decken diese Einzelspenden aktuell 25 Prozent der Betriebskosten. Im vergangenen Jahr waren es noch 18 Prozent. Um künftig nicht auf Großspender:innen angewiesen zu sein, müssten die Einzelspenden der Nutzer:innen laut Whittaker aber noch deutlich zunehmen.
Update 15:02 Uhr:
Wir haben eine neuere Erhebung bezüglich der Nutzung von Signal in Deutschland verlinkt. Statt der in der alten Version genannten 8 Prozent Marktanteil, sind es 14 Prozent.
Die Arbeit von netzpolitik.org finanziert sich zu fast 100% aus den Spenden unserer Leser:innen.
Werde Teil dieser einzigartigen Community und unterstütze auch Du unseren gemeinwohlorientierten, werbe- und trackingfreien Journalismus jetzt mit einer Spende.
I noticed something interesting about the Israel-Gaza war that seems to have generally been overlooked: The war hasn’t shown much sign of spreading throughout the Middle East. Yemen’s Houthis (one of Iran’s proxy militias) launched a few missiles in the general direction of Israel and bellowed a declaration of war, but no one seems very concerned. Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that fought Israel to a standstill in 2006, has chosen to stay out of the conflict, as has Iran itself. The “Arab street” that everyone feared back in the early 2000s has certainly had protests in support of the Palestinians, but they’ve been very peaceful. Saudi Arabia has said that it still wants to normalize relations with Israel, conditional on a ceasefire.
This is a very good sign, and it’s far from the dire expectations that everyone was throwing around in the first few days of the war. In 2011, the Arab Spring spread like wildfire, igniting huge, lengthy, bloody wars in Syria and Yemen, as well as various smaller wars throughout the Middle East; the Israel-Gaza war shows no sign of repeating this history.
There could be lots of reasons for this, of course. The region may simply be exhausted after two decades of wars. U.S. deterrence may be restraining Iran’s hand and the hand of its proxies. The Israel-Palestine conflict may simply not be as important to the region as the longer-term cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Etc.
But I think it’s also possible that population aging has something to do with it. There’s a pretty well-established literature linking youthful population bulges to elevated risk of conflict. Of course, that link is just a correlation — it’s obviously hard to find natural experiments that change a country’s age structure, other than war itself. But it’s a fairly well-established correlation. For example, Cincotta and Weber (2021) find that countries with a median age of 25 or less are much more likely to have revolutions:
Urdal (2006) finds:
It has frequently been suggested that…the so-called “youth bulges,” make countries more susceptible to political violence…This claim is empirically tested in a time-series cross-national statistical model for internal armed conflict for the period 1950–2000, and for event data for terrorism and rioting for the years 1984–1995. The expectation that youth bulges should increase the risk of political violence receives robust support for all three forms of violence.
Madsen (2021) writes:
Evidence from the 1990s reveals that countries where people aged fifteen to twenty-nine made up more than 40 percent of the adult population were twice as likely to suffer civil conflict. Between 1970 and 2007, 80 percent of all outbreaks of civil conflict occurred in countries in which at least 60 percent of the population was younger than thirty…Only a few of these countries are rated as democracies, and restrictions on political freedoms, corruption, and weak institutional capacity are also common. Data collected from 1950 to 2000 found that countries where 35 percent or more of their adult populations comprised people aged fifteen to twenty-four were 150 percent more likely to experience an outbreak of civil conflict. The correlation is strongest in the case of countries with consistently high fertility rates. Once the demographic transition is fully under way, outbreaks of conflict are less likely, even though populations remain youthful due to demographic momentum from past high levels of fertility.
Ibrahim (2019) and others find similar results. As always, there are critics of the theory, and some authors make distinctions based on different types of conflicts — for example, Yair and Midownik (2014) claim that youth bulges are less relevant for “ethnic wars”, while Cincotta and Weber (2021) caution that their results are harder to test for “separatist” wars. But be that as it may, the general consensus in the field seems to be that a very young population is correlated with instability and violence.
There are various theories as to why youth bulges might cause conflict. Resource scarcity is an obvious factor in very poor countries. In other countries, there’s a theory that a youth bulge leads to fewer economic and social opportunities for young people — basically, the young people crowd each other out, and this makes them mad. This effect is obviously exacerbated when the economy is stagnating. Also, simply having a lot of young men around without much to lose seems like a risk factor in and of itself.
The Middle East’s stagnant economies are obviously a factor in the violence that has ripped across the region (though of course there’s clearly two-way causation there). Whether rich or poor, the countries in the Greater Middle East — I’ll throw Afghanistan and Pakistan into the mix, since they’ve also been a big locus of conflict — just don’t tend to experience much economic growth at all.
But the good news here, at least from a conflict-avoidance perspective, is that these countries are getting steadily older. There are a number of countries in the region where median age has already passed the 25-year mark:
It’s pretty startling to look at this chart and realize how much things have changed. When Iran threw hundreds of thousands of soldiers against Iraq in “human wave” attacks in the 1980s, the median Iranian was just 17 years old; now, the median Iranian is in their early 30s. That may be one reason Iran has moved away from direct belligerence and toward the use of proxy militias like the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Saudi Arabia got involved in the Yemen war, but was reluctant to send ground troops against the Houthis — possibly because the Houthis are formidable, but possibly because the Saudis have relatively few young people to send.
Similarly, the horrible civil wars in Algeria in the 90s and Lebanon in the 80s happened when those countries were far younger than they are today. Hezbollah resides in a considerably older country than in 2006 when they attacked Israel, which may have something to do with why they’re sitting this one out. Of all the countries on this list, only Libya had a relatively recent war.
On the other hand, there are a number of other countries in the region that are still pretty young:
I think it’s no surprise that most of the Middle Eastern countries that have had wars in the last decade are on this list. They also include almost all of the countries where Iran has proxies (except Lebanon). And troublingly, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, and Pakistan are projected to still be below a median age of 25 a decade from now.
But that said, all of these countries are still aging at a steady clip — as are the countries that are already over 25. The fundamental reason is the big collapse in fertility rates in the Greater Middle East (and across the broader Muslim world) over the past few decades.
(This data source doesn’t have Palestine, but the UN shows it at 3.5 and falling.)
Again, it’s pretty startling to consider some of these numbers. When Iran exploded in revolution and fought a titanic war against Iraq in the late 70s and 80s, its fertility was over 6; now it’s down to about 1.5. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, its fertility was over 7; now, it’s below 4. (By the way, look at that stat and ask yourself if the U.S. occupation might have accomplished more than you thought.)
Falling fertility seems to take the edge off of a youth bulge, even when a country is still pretty young. Urdal (2006) writes:
Youth bulges in the context of continued high fertility and high dependency make countries increasingly likely to experience armed conflict…while countries that are well underway in their demographic transitions are likely to experience a ‘‘peace dividend.’’
Anyway, I don’t want to claim that “demography is destiny” here, and it’s all too easy to look at individual countries and tell just-so stories about how aging and fertility might have affected their conflicts. And even if an older population and fewer children do make war less likely, there are still a handful of war-torn countries — Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria — that are still young and still have fairly robust fertility.
But it’s hard not to look at these graphs and feel that something big is changing. The old Middle East, with massive crowds of angry young people thronging the streets, ready to explode into nationalist or sectarian or revolutionary violence, is steadily disappearing, being replaced by a more sedate, aging society. Given the horrific outcomes of the last few decades, it’s hard not to see that as a good thing.
]]>Hannover (dpo) - Ein Autofahrer aus Hannover hat einen geheimen Trick entdeckt, mit dem sich Radarfallen und Blitzer auf Autobahnen zu 100 Prozent überlisten lassen. Erste Praxistests scheinen die Theorie des Hobbyphysikers zu bestätigen. Seine zahlenbasierte Methode soll für jeden Autofahrer innerhalb von Minuten erlernbar sein.
mehr...]]>“China is a big country and you are small countries, and that is a fact.” — Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi, speaking to ASEAN in 2010
One of the first indicators that Xi Jinping wasn’t as competent a ruler as he was often made out to be was the failure of the Belt and Road megaproject. Belt and Road was one of Xi’s earliest signature initiatives, unveiled in 2013. The idea, as stated, was to have the Chinese government invest in infrastructure projects throughout the world, giving a boost to those countries’ economies while increasing China’s trade opportunities — a massive win-win. There was also the unspoken idea that this lavish outlay would win China geopolitical friends and allies around the world while also enhancing its access to critical natural resources and potentially even military basing sites. According to the Council on Foreign Relations and many other sources, China has already spent $1 trillion on the Belt and Road.
Except the way this actually worked is fairly far from our common-sense definitions of “invest” and “spend”. The word “invest” implies that China was paying for infrastructure in these countries that it would then partially own. And the word “spend” implies that this would actually cost China money in the long run — to be made back, hopefully, from the revenues generated by the successful infrastructure projects. This sort of investment would align the incentives of China and the recipient countries — a true win-win.
Except that this is generally not how Belt and Road actually worked. Instead, what China would typically do is loan countries money to build infrastructure projects. China’s government would then help plan those projects. Then the borrowing country would use the money it borrowed from China to build the infrastructure, often paying Chinese contractors to do the actual work.
From China’s perspective, even setting aside the security and diplomatic benefits, this looks like a pretty great deal — at least in the short term. Your contractors get to book massive amounts of revenue, and then your government gets its money back when the recipient country pays back the loan. And the loan is typically collateralized by the infrastructure being built, so if the recipient country doesn’t pay you back, at least you now own a piece of infrastructure in a foreign country, and your contractors got some pork.
From the receiving country’s benefit, it’s a lot riskier. If the infrastructure project doesn’t raise enough money to pay back the loans, the government will have to pay China back using tax money; that will be painful for its citizens. If it can’t do that, it has to surrender the collateral — i.e. the infrastructure — and endure a painful default that will impair its ability to borrow internationally and will cause a deep recession or even a crisis. So the Belt and Road countries made a big bet that China would design them some really good infrastructure projects.
By and large, China did not do that. Many of the projects were poorly planned and executed. In Myanmar, Chinese planners seemed to assume that they could just boot peasants off their land to build some pipelines as would be standard practice in China; instead, they sparked massive protests. In Pakistan, angry locals simply attacked the Chinese workers.
Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, China built out a whole port at Hambantota that was supposed to supercharge Sri Lanka’s trade. It turned out that no one really needed another big Sri Lankan port; everyone just kept trading at the capital city of Colombo, which had recently improved its port infrastructure. In China, infrastructure projects don’t always have to make money; the economic activity generated by construction is often a higher priority for the government than making a financial return. But for Belt and Road borrowers, the stakes are much higher. Hambantota became a massive white elephant, which couldn’t generate anywhere near enough cash to pay back the loans that Sri Lanka took from China to build it. Sri Lanka is also pretty bad at raising tax revenue. So it defaulted, and China got control of the port.
And in addition to bad planning, China often delivers poor execution. This is from a WSJ report in January:
[I]t was the biggest infrastructure project ever in [Ecuador], a concrete colossus bankrolled by Chinese cash…Today, thousands of cracks have emerged in the $2.7 billion Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant, government engineers said, raising concerns that Ecuador’s biggest source of power could break down. At the same time, the Coca River’s mountainous slopes are eroding…
[L]ow-quality construction on some of the [Belt and Road] projects risks crippling key infrastructure and saddling nations with even more costs…In Pakistan, officials shut down the Neelum-Jhelum hydroelectric plant last year after detecting cracks in a tunnel…The closure of the plant has already cost Pakistan about $44 million a month…Uganda’s power generation company said it has identified more than 500 construction defects in a Chinese-built 183-megawatt hydropower plant on the Nile river that has suffered frequent breakdowns…Completion of another Chinese-built hydropower plant further down the Nile…is three years behind schedule, a delay that Ugandan officials have blamed on various construction defects, including cracked walls…In Angola [at] a vast social housing project outside the capital of Luanda, many locals are complaining about cracked walls, moldy ceilings and poor construction.
Even Indonesia’s high-speed rail line in Jakarta, sometimes touted as the most successful Belt and Road project, had massive cost overruns and fell years behind schedule. (It also is only 88 miles long.)
At some point, China’s government realized that the Belt and Road projects were failing and that it was going to have to choose between losing a lot of money and making a lot of other countries very angry. As a result, Belt and Road lending collapsed even before the pandemic hit:
Increasingly, the Belt and Road is more notional than real, a way for China to declare that it’s the leader of the Global South — kind of like BRICS.
But in the meantime, the borrowing countries are still saddled with a whole lot of debt. China has forgiven some of it, but sometimes it’s choosing to be intransigent. In Sri Lanka, which is in the middle of a severe economic crisis, China is refusing to cooperate with other international lenders on a rescue package. The Economist reports:
The IMF cannot lend more unless Sri Lanka restructures its debts, since the country owes so much elsewhere that officials cannot otherwise be sure they will get their money back. Therefore by refusing to take a haircut on its debts, China is holding up Sri Lanka’s restructuring—as it is in other indebted countries, too.
And remember, this is after Sri Lanka basically gave Hambantota’s port to China.
Nor is Sri Lanka the only one feeling the pain of Belt and Road mistakes. Here’s an AP story from May:
An Associated Press analysis of a dozen countries most indebted to China — including Pakistan, Kenya, Zambia, Laos and Mongolia — found paying back that debt is consuming an ever-greater amount of the tax revenue needed to keep schools open, provide electricity and pay for food and fuel…
Behind the scenes is China’s reluctance to forgive debt and its extreme secrecy about how much money it has loaned and on what terms, which has kept other major lenders from stepping in to help. On top of that is the recent discovery that borrowers have been required to put cash in hidden escrow accounts that push China to the front of the line of creditors to be paid…
Countries in AP’s analysis had as much as 50% of their foreign loans from China and most were devoting more than a third of government revenue to paying off foreign debt.
Now, there actually are some things that the IMF and other lenders can do to help countries like Sri Lanka. Jennifer Harris points out that the IMF can lend into “official arrears”, which would allow Sri Lanka to get a bailout even if it defaults on its China payments. That’s good.
But let’s stop to consider just how crazy this makes the whole economic model of the Belt and Road look. Suppose a rich guy walks up to you and tells you that he first made it in the food truck business, and you can too. He offers to lend you money to buy a food truck and get started earning cash. He’s a rich successful guy, so you believe him, and you take the deal. Oh, and he owns the company that sells you the food truck, and he also owns the company that sells you the ingredients, so you’re just taking the money he lends you and turning right around and giving it to his businesses.
And then it turns out that the food truck business isn’t nearly as great as he led you to believe. Your business folds. But guess what — you still owe money to the rich guy! First, he gets the truck he sold you, since that was collateral for the loan. But you still owe him some more, and he demands payment! You’re broke, you have no money and no truck, and you’re on the hook to this guy who dazzled you with bad advice. And he’s not in a mood to forgive your debt.
On paper, cases like Sri Lanka’s look like a win for China at other countries’ expense — well-connected Chinese contractors got paid out, China got a port in a highly strategic region, and they might still get Sri Lanka to cough up the rest of the money they owe, which will have to be squeezed from suffering Sri Lankan farmers in the form of higher taxes. From China’s perspective, what’s not to like?
But in the long run, this is almost certain to hurt China’s image in the world. Back when the money was flowing, the countries of the Global South saw China in a highly positive light — after all, the West’s money always comes with strings attached.
But because the Belt and Road was so ill-conceived, this warm fuzzy feeling always had an expiration date. Now that the Belt and Road has basically failed, and the cash faucet has been shut off, delight at China’s seeming largesse is clearly going to be replaced with resentment and distrust. Acting like a mafia loanshark is not generally a way to win friends and influence people.
Note that although this is a debt trap, it isn’t really a case of “debt-trap diplomacy”, as some people accuse. Debt-trap diplomacy is where you get a country to owe you money, and you force it to make geopolitical concessions in exchange for loan forbearance. China doesn’t appear to be doing that; instead it appears to simply be walking away with as much of the money as it can, and thumbing its nose as it walks away, and leaving developing countries bitter and resentful.
That’s just a mind-bogglingly bad long-term strategy for achieving global leadership. China’s leaders tout their country as the leader of the Global South, but they’re raiding developing countries like their own personal piggy bank. Throughout the whole saga of the Belt and Road, China’s government treated countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Zambia like Chinese provinces — assuming they could and would strongarm their populations into supporting new infrastructure, prioritizing economic throughput over efficiency and profitability, and counting on those other countries to take the hit when the projects went…er…south.
]]>What’s peculiar about this, although not unexpected, is how disconnected this strategic geopolitical competition front is from the other strategic geopolitical competition fronts. Everybody considers areas like energy, advanced hardware, and biotechnology as lead-or-die areas, yet the sort of AI foundational models they aim at isn’t particularly aligned with them. This doesn’t make these models useless either commercially or geostrategically, and what you learn doing any type of AI can often be translated to others (from direct computational techniques to things like chipset design).
But it is not really optimal either! There are ways in which large language and image analysis foundational models are useful for biotechnology or, say, materials engineering, but they aren’t as useful as AIs for biotechnology or materials engineering, and taking leadership in AI for an area of science or technology is one of the best available ways to gain advantages in the area. Things like ChatGPT have proven so far to be a net negative for much of science: we need fewer and better papers, and we’ve gotten exactly the opposite. This doesn’t mean AI is useless for science — we know it’s not — it just means that if you want a geopolitically relevant competitive advantage in biotechnology, you don’t need to get the next ChatGPT, you need something that’s the next ChatGPT of biotech AIs.
Resources are always finite and there’s always less time than you think there is. Whether you’re a would-be hyperpower or a would-be unicorn, focus is necessary to win, and saying “AI” is far from being a focused strategy. Your strategic priority is the knowledge or resource battle you have decided you have to win. AI, the right AI used in the right way, is just how you’re going to.
The post The distracted geopolitics of stochastic parrots appeared first on blog.rinesi.com.
]]>It starts off reasonably enough by describing the evolution of our legal system:
I think that's fair enough assessment. Is "Law 3.0" a good thing or a bad thing? Perhaps we can have a discussion about the limits of technology and political philosophy? No, we just get this "argument":
The tyrannical implications of such a mode of governance are so obvious that it really ought to go without saying.
Ummm.... no? Perhaps we could discuss these supposed tyrannical implications?
The author is terrified that the Government is going to stop him running his dishwasher. You see, the Energy Bill says that technical experts can send a signal to smart appliances asking them to reduce their electricity use at certain times.
That's it. That's the horror he is railing against.
Pollution a bit high? Send a signal to ask your freezer to reduce its cooling temperature. Electricity prices going to spike in an hour? Tell people's cars to start charging now, but to throttle back later. That sort of thing. You know, save you a bit of money, reduce pollution, stabilise the energy supply. Terrifying...
Now, there might be a dystopian use of this. Perhaps the state could command all TVs to turn off when the opposition's political adverts are on. Perhaps they could turn off the car chargers of known protestors - thus preventing them from attending a demonstration. Maybe they'd turn off everyone's freezers in order to boost Tesco's profits?
This leads to some interesting questions. What sort of safeguards should we have? What level of control do people want? Who chooses the experts? Who secures the system? What similar problems have happened before? What are the positive ways this could be used?
But, nope, the post doesn't discuss that. It just continually reiterates a pathological fear of "technical experts" telling people how to behave. He wraps it up in a vague coat of morality - saying that we should be allowed to choose to break laws and face the consequences.
But, what are we actually talking about here?
Let's say a power station fails unexpectedly in the middle of winter. There are several options available to us.
Quite obviously (1) is impractical. The lack of speed and expertise is one of the (many) reasons Law 1.0 doesn't work in large complex systems which require a swift reaction.
And (2) is the sort of self-sufficient Libertarian nonsense which imagines a hellscape for everyone except themselves. Great! You can choose not to follow the law and let everyone else suffer the consequences.
And (3) is... boringly pragmatic. I guess with the slight risk that it might be abused to... what? Deny people their constitutional right to run a high power vacuum cleaner whenever they want?
The article makes this moral argument:
The speed limit does not compel us: we can choose to abide by it, or not. And this, most crucially of all, means that we have moral agency. We can choose to do right or wrong.
[...]
in its way, [Law 3.0] is the worst affront to the dignity of man out of them all, because it destroys the very conditions of moral agency. I reiterate: if one does not have the freedom to choose, because one is compelled to act morally, then one’s moral conduct is not really moral at all.
I don't really get that. We ban guns so that people can't choose to wave them about recklessly - because impinging on your freedom is better than clearing up corpses.
Rather more prosaically, we ban the sale of inefficient domestic appliances. Yes, the experts are being mean by forcing you not to make a moral decision about whether to waste electricity. Boo-fucking-hoo.
But, if this moral agency is so important, why isn't it available to "the experts"? Why shouldn't they be allowed to choose to take a bribe from a washing line manufacturer to switch off the nation's tumble-dryers? They can suffer the consequences of being caught, tried, and punished.
Law 1.0 - which the author is so fond of - would do that.
Or, we could use Law 3.0 to implement a technical measure which says such a signal can never be sent unless 4 our of 5 experts agree to it.
A decade ago, I wrote up my thoughts on Civic Hygiene.
Civic hygiene isn't about saying we distrust our current government - it's about not trusting the next government.
I still stand by that. We should make it hard or impossible for a corrupt entity to abuse the power it is entrusted with. But that doesn't mean giving them no power.
In a democratic society we accept that we sometimes have to do things aren't in our direct personal interests in order to keep society functioning. Sometimes we can choose whether or not to obey (e.g. by breaking the speed limit) other times the state restricts us (by banning the sale of poisons).
If we don't make the transition to smarter and more responsive energy consumption, then we risk grid stability, more pollution, and higher energy costs. That damages all of us.
We should embrace new ways of organising ourselves. And we should embrace technological limitations which protect the majority. And those limitations must be safeguarded.
I don't know whether this law is well written, or whether there are adequate safeguards, or whether abusers of its powers can be punished. But I do know that this moral pontificating doesn't even begin to address the practical issues.
]]>Während Griechenland im Extremwetter absäuft und in Libyen tausende Menschen in den Fluten ertrinken, kündigt das FDP-geführte Verkehrsministerium (BMDV) nun die Förderung von Künstlicher Intelligenz für den Klimaschutz an, um den „zunehmenden Bedarf an Mobilität umweltfreundlich zu bewältigen“. Und Verkehrsminister Volker Wissing schiebt nach: „Damit können wir den Verkehr klimafreundlicher gestalten.“
Nun ist es sicherlich nicht falsch, moderne Technologien bei der Verkehrswende zu benutzen. Doch es ist ein Hohn, dass Wissing sich nun ausgerechnet als klimafreundlich inszeniert, wenn sein Ministerium üblicherweise Klimaschutzmaßnahmen torpediert. Das Verkehrsministerium steht seit Jahren dafür, dass die Heilige Kuh des fossil-motorisierten Individualverkehrs nur mit Samthandschuhen angefasst wird. Auch unter Wissing bleibt es eine Art verlängerter Arm der Automobilindustrie; jüngst hat es die Klimaziele krachend verfehlt.
Um solche Probleme schönzurechnen, hatte die Bundesregierung ihre Sektorenziele aufgeweicht. Anstelle von Klimaschutzzielen, die jeder Sektor für sich einhalten muss, gibt es nun eine sektorübergreifende und mehrjährige Gesamtrechnung. Das heißt vereinfacht: Niemand ist so richtig verantwortlich, wenn die Klimaziele nicht erreicht werden. Besonders profitiert davon Wissings Verkehrsministerium, das richtig viel tun müsste, um irgendwie die Klimaziele zu erreichen. Es tut das Gegenteil.
Wissings Ministerium hat sich aktiv gegen die Forderung von mittlerweile mehr als 900 Städten und Gemeinden eingesetzt, die selbst über die Einführung von Tempo 30 entscheiden wollen. Begründung: Die Freiheitsrechte der Autofahrer:innen. Wissings Verkehrministerium und die FDP verhindern auch eine generelles Tempolimit von 120 auf Deutschlands Autobahnen. Das ist ein Schritt, der eine gesellschaftliche Mehrheit hat, ganz ohne künstliche Intelligenz auskommt und fast umsonst laut einer Studie des Umweltbundesamtes 6,7 Millionen Tonnen CO2 einsparen könnte.
Kombiniert man das Tempolimit mit einer Geschwindigkeitsgrenze von 80 auf Landstraßen, könnte man demnach auf einen Schlag fünf Prozent der Emissionen von Pkws und Nutzfahrzeugen einsparen. Auch künftige Generationen haben Rechte – zum Beispiel auf eine lebenswerte Zukunft. Aus Perspektive der FDP werden diese Rechte aber von den Brumm-Brumm-Freiheitsrechten ihrer heutigen Wähler:innen plattgemacht.
Mit ganz einfacher menschlicher Intelligenz könnte man auch klimaschädliche Subventionen abbauen, ob nun die Pendlerpauschale, das Dienstwagen– und Dieselprivileg oder die viel zu niedrige Besteuerung von Kerosin im Luftverkehr. Oder man könnte den Trend zu immer mehr Leistung und Leergewicht bei den Autos kritisieren. Oder kein Geld in unsinnigen Technologien wie E-Fuels versenken. Oder mal nicht das Geld von unten nach oben verteilen. Oder einfach einmal nicht nur auf dem Schoß der Autoindustrie sitzen.
Auch ohne Künstliche Intelligenz könnte das Verkehrsministerium wichtige Entscheidungen für eine Verkehrswende setzen: Städte umbauen, öffentlichen Nahverkehr verbessern, Radwege einrichten, alternative und ökologische Fortbewegung subventionieren. Stattdessen will Wissing Autobahnen zügig ausbauen und bringt dem 49-Euro-Ticket auffällig wenig Liebe entgegen.
Vor diesem Hintergrund fällt es schwer, die Versprechen von Klimafreundlichkeit durch KI ernstzunehmen. Viel mehr erscheint das „KI-Modellprojekt für umweltfreundlichen Verkehr in Kommunen“ wie ein weiteres Geldgeschenk für Wirtschaftsunternehmen, die klassische Zielgruppe der FDP-Politik. Was wir vom Verkehrsministerium brauchen ist kein Technik-Hokus-Pokus, sondern klare, mutige Maßnahmen – und menschliche Intelligenz.
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ChatGPT ist noch immer in aller Munde und mittlerweile wohl in den Lesezeichen der meisten Browser gespeichert. Auch die Bing-Konkurrenz von Microsoft oder Character.ai stehen hoch im Kurs. Bard von Google hinkt eilig hinterher, wenngleich die Zugriffszahlen nicht länger monatlich anwachsen, sondern stagnieren. Und auch im Bildungsbereich ebbt die Diskussion um die sogenannte Künstliche Intelligenz nicht ab.
Denn was dieses Zauberwerk alles können soll! Schreiben, Zusammenfassen, Literatur suchen, Fehler tilgen, Sex in Büchern ausfindig machen, Bilder und Präsentationsfolien erstellen, Programmieren, Rezepte vorschlagen! Oh, Moment:
Ich habe den Pak ’n Save-Rezeptgenerator gefragt, was ich herstellen kann, wenn ich nur Wasser, Bleichmittel und Ammoniak hätte. Und er hat vorgeschlagen, tödliches Chlorgas oder – wie der Savey-Meal-Bot es nennt – „aromatische Wassermischung“ herzustellen.
Der neuseeländische Journalist Liam Hehir hätte an dem Chlorgas zugrundegehen können, wenn er dem Vorschlag der generativen Künstlichen Intelligenz vertraut und ihm gefolgt wäre. Das ist – gelinde gesagt – suboptimal.
Macht nichts, es wird schon fast immer ein Mensch das Resultat danach bewerten, ob es Sinn ergibt? Nicht? Oh. Und die ChatGPT-Nutzer sind sich vermutlich der Risiken sehr wohl bewusst? Nicht? Huch.
Dass Softwarefehler Leben kosten können, ist beileibe kein neues Phänomen. Das Militär nutzt beispielsweise schon seit etlichen Jahren KI-gesteuerte Drohnen, um feindliche Kombattanten aufzuspüren. Das ging immer wieder schief. Und einige Menschen verloren ihr Leben, weil der Software im Auto zu viel Verantwortung überlassen wurde oder sie weniger intelligent war als erwartet.
Bereits vor der Aufregung um ChatGPT wurden ethische Debatten angestoßen. Über den Einsatz von Sprachverarbeitungs-KI ohne viel Nachdenken ist durchaus veröffentlicht worden. Zum Beispiel haben Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angela McMillan-Major und Margaret Mitchell bereits 2021 vor Problemen mit den „stochastischen Papageien“ gewarnt. Gebru und Mitchell haben dafür ihre Jobs bei Google verloren. Mittlerweile wissen wir: Der Papagei ist auch im Lösen mathematischer Aufgaben und beim Programmieren bei Weitem nicht so brillant wie noch vor ein paar Wochen erhofft.
Das sind Details, winken die Gehypten ab. In Teilen der IT-Welt herrscht weiterhin das Mindset: Erstmal machen, dann schauen, was passiert. Move fast and break things, um es in der Facebook-Sprache auszudrücken: Wir arbeiten schon am nächsten, nun wirklich besseren Modell! Und wenn es schiefgeht, bauen wir irgendeinen Filter rein oder schrauben eine Art ethische KI-Schnittstelle dran. Es gibt doch sicherlich inzwischen so eine API, oder nicht?
So viele Leute sind im Moment fast wie verliebt in die Idee, dass alles, was sie langweilig finden – Schreiben, Korrekturlesen, Protokoll führen, Texte begutachten oder zusammenfassen, Zuhören, Übersetzen, an Texten feilen, Quellcode schreiben –, einfach einer Maschine überlassen werden kann. Bald sollen neue, bessere Suchmaschinen aufpoppen und durch generative KI quasi revolutioniert werden.
Bibliothekare bekommen zunehmend Anfragen von Studierenden und Forschenden, Aufsätze zu finden, die nicht existieren. Das passierte so oft, dass es wohl inzwischen einen Filter für ChatGPT gibt. Wenn man nach Literatur sucht, erscheint nun ein generischer Hinweis darauf, wie man Literatur statt halluzinierte Aufsätze findet. Und wenn man die hochgezüchtete KI bittet, einen Aufsatz mit Verweisen zu schreiben, weist OpenAI seit Anfang August darauf hin, dass die ausgegebenen Referenzen nur Beispiele sind und mit korrekten Verweisen ersetzt werden müssen:
Bitte beachten Sie, dass es sich bei den oben angegebenen Referenzen um Platzhalter handelt, die durch reale Verweise ersetzt werden sollten, die mit dem Inhalt des Papiers übereinstimmen. Vergewissern Sie sich außerdem, dass die in der Arbeit enthaltenen Informationen korrekt und aktuell sind.
Fiktive Platzhalter statt echte Quellenverweise: Immerhin, Humor haben sie bei OpenAI. Es mangelt nur noch an der Beherrschung des Handwerks. Doch der Humor ist hier wirklich unangebracht: Denn gerade denen, die (noch) nicht wissen, wie man Recherchen und Fakten belegt oder wie man wissenschaftlich arbeitet, wird ein Werkzeug wie ChatGPT besonders nützlich erscheinen. Das aber sind genau auch jene Menschen, die am wenigstens gut gerüstet dafür sind, die Platzhalter von tatsächlichen Verweisen zu unterscheiden und die Qualität der KI-Antwort einzuschätzen.
Doch allen Halluzinationen und jedem Galgenhumor zum Trotz: Die KI-Start-ups sprießen wie Pilze nach dem Regen hervor. Leider sind aber die einen oder anderen Giftpilze darunter.
Die investierten Gelder gehen trotzdem in die Milliarden. Scheinbar funktioniert doch alles bestens, die versprochenen Innovationen elektrisieren den Markt. Die Systeme werden mit noch mehr Daten gefüttert – vielleicht gar mit KI-produzierten Texten – und die Begeisterung ist ungebrochen. Wir hören schwindelerregende Zahlen über Registrierungen von neuen Nutzern. Aber wird dabei inzwischen Geld verdient? Und wie werden die ersten Klagen wohl ausgehen?
Die ganze Lobhudelei von Leuten, die nicht wirklich verstehen, was maschinelles Lernen und Sprachmodelle sind, und alles Mögliche in diese Systeme hineinprojizieren, könnte einen schier verrückt machen. Wir hätten da mal ein paar Auszüge für ordentlich gekräuselte Fußnägel:
Was sollen wir nun tun? Und was sollten wir vor allem im Bereich der Bildung beachten? Zuallererst sollten wir endlich damit aufhören, die Maschinen zu anthropomorphisieren, also ihnen menschliche Attribute anzudichten. Dann sollten wir genau hinschauen: Was kann so eine Maschine wirklich leisten, wie kann man sie ethisch einsetzen und was ist nur Wunschdenken?
Und das ist gar nicht so schwer. Zu einer ethischen Verwendung von einem KI-System gehören nur drei einfache Regeln:
Debora Weber-Wulff und Constanze Kurz engagieren sich seit mehr als fünfzehn Jahren in der Fachgruppe „Ethik und Informatik“ der Gesellschaft für Informatik. Kürzlich erschien ihr Buch Gewissensbisse – Fallbeispiele zu ethischen Problemen der Informatik.
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As with many things in life these days, it all started with an episode of the Peter Attia podcast.
In this edition, our nation’s most Badass Doctor was interviewing a guest I initially dismissed as not overly applicable to my own lifestyle. A young,excessively handsome dude who happened to be a writer with a new book out. But the headline of the episode was just intriguing enough to get me to click.
“The Comfort Crisis”
Wow, what an amazing turn of phrase, and what a concise summary of the core of this whole Mustachianism thing I’ve been trying to express for the past dozen years.
While the news headlines cry constantly about our nationwide personal debt crisis or health crisis or any other number of things that suggest that life is so hard these days, I have always seen the opposite: on average, we Americans seem to have a problem of ridiculous overindulgence and easiness in our lives, and our main problem is not recognizing it, and the damage it does to us.
So of course I had to click, and then listen to the whole two hour episode, and then buy the book, and then spend the past month reading and digesting it in small, meaningful chunks like the modern-day chunk of scripture-like wisdom that it is. And wow, am I glad I did so.
The author is Michael Easter, a former writer for Men’s Health magazine was also once catastrophically addicted to alcohol – and descended from a long family line of ancestors with the same affliction.
He was lucky to catch himself from that fall in time to save his own life, and that story alone makes the book worth reading as someone who has stood by helplessly as loved ones battled with addiction. But I think his history with overindulgence in the hollow comforts of alcohol also gives him an edge on writing about the battle between comfort and hardship on the bigger stage of life in general.
So what is The Comfort Crisis about, and how can it make all of our lives better?
The best part about this book is just what a damned good writer this Easter guy is. Like many of the most fun popular science books*, it follows a split narrative which jumps back and forth to interweave the story of an insanely difficult caribou hunting trip he joined in a remote pocket of Alaska, with the appropriate bits of science, psychology and cultural commentary that help us explain and learn from each chapter of the epic shit he had just endured. This allows us to process and apply the lessons in our own lives.
For example, have you ever wondered why the type of bored, rich suburbanites who populate the board of your local Homeowner Association and whine about unacceptably tall weeds or unauthorized skateboarding on Nextdoor are so insufferable?
Why can’t they do something better with their time?
It turns out that there’s a scientific explanation for these unfortunate people, along with most of our other problems:
The tendency of humans to always scan our environment for problems, regardless of how safe and perfect that environment is.
The book cited a study in which researchers told people to look for danger, in an environment which gradually became safer and safer:
“When they ran out of stuff to find they would start looking for a wider range of stuff, even if this was not conscious or intentional, because their job was to look for threats.”
“With that in mind, Levari recently conducted a series of studies to find out if the human brain searches for problems even when problems become infrequent or don’t exist.“
“As we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.“
In other words, even when our lives are virtually problem free, instead of appreciating our good fortune we just start making up shit that we can complain about instead.
And then our politicians cock their greasy, finely-tuned ears in our direction and make up policies to appease our mostly-insubstantial concerns. And they invent their own trivial “wedge” issues to get us to all bicker about our different cultures and religions, suddenly caring about things that would not have even been problems if nobody told us they were.
And there’s America’s weakness in a nutshell, and meanwhile our strength comes entirely from the times we choose not to waste our time stooping to this level.
Meanwhile, the opposite effect holds true: people who survive in rougher environments than us end up more resilient and less prone to complaining.
In a series of recent interviews, Ukrainian people living in the war zones of their occupied country were asked “is it safe to live where you live?” and a strangely high percentage still said “Yes” – not all that different from the responses of US residents when asked the same question about their own cities.
This adaptation principle also explains why some first generation immigrants tend to build businesses and wealth while their own offspring in second and third generations are more likely to become complacent and spend it down. As an immigrant myself, I can see why this is: conditions were just slightly more harsh and less comfortable and wealthy where I grew up, so I adapted to those conditions as “normal” which made the United States seem posh and easy by comparison. Which made it easier to spend less money and accumulate more.
Tree Therapy
The trap of pointless worry is just one of the many revelations of The Comfort Crisis. It also gives insightful explanations for why spending time in Nature boosts our mental and physical health, while cubicles and car driving grind us down.
There’s something in our biological wiring that responds instantly and powerfully to everything natural, in ways that you can’t get anywhere else.
Even placing a single plant into a hospital room will measurably improve the recovery of almost all patients from almost all ailments. So can you imagine the power of the medicine you are inhaling if you step into a real, living forest? And what if you spent several hours there, or even several days?
Later, we get lessons on our human adaptation towards the ratio of effort to reward:
It’s proven the harder you work for something, the happier you’ll be about it,” |
And our bizarre natural aversion to physical exertion:
A figure that shows just how predisposed humans are to default to comfort: 2 (two). That’s the percent of people who take the stairs when they also have the option to take an escalator. |
Which is remarkable, given the absolutely insane cost this tendency imposes upon us.
Moving your body, even a bit, has enormous benefits – again to almost all people towards reducing the probability and severity of almost all diseases. So can you imagine the benefit of moving your body for several hours per day in a natural environment, and including heavy load bearing and bits of extreme exertion?
These things are not speculative pieces of alternative medicine. They are known, easily and reproducibly tested, and proven to be the most effective things we can possibly do with our time.
So why, the actual fuck, are people still sitting inside, watching Netflix, driving to work, and then driving to the doctor’s office to get deeper and deeper analysis of a neverending series of exotic and mysterious and unsolvable problems with their physical and mental health?
We should at least start with the stuff we know is essential – maximum outdoor time every day, heavy exertion including with weights, minimal time spent sitting and driving, and minimum junk food, sugar, and alcohol. You definitely don’t have to be perfect, but just understand that these are the big levers for physical and mental health.
Only then, once you reach these minimum basic things for human survival, should you expect that more exotic and niche medicines and treatments are the only course of action.
By all means, follow your doctor’s orders and don’t just dump all of your medications down the sink because of this MMM rant. But at the same time, realize that the stuff that is hard and uncomfortable is very likely to be the stuff that improves your life the most.
It’s all the stuff that Mr. Money Mustache has been telling you since 2012, but with more detail and less distraction. This book is a concentrated packet of advice for solid living.
Real Life Inspiration from the Good Book
In a happy coincidence, I happened to be in the middle of some hard stuff** of my own as I worked my way through The Comfort Crisis and I found the perspective quite useful and transformative to apply hot off the press.
Normally somewhat of a homebody, I had embarked on a solo journey for some Carpentourism deep in the mountains of Southwestern Colorado. I had my whole life shrunk down into the new Model Y including food, bed, and the necessary tools and materials to tackle a pretty long laundry list of tasks on two different construction projects (fixing up a mini-resort property in Salida, and starting construction on a small cabin in Durango)
The trip immediately took a turn towards the dramatic as I climbed into the mountains and drove straight into the most torrential rainstorm I have ever seen, then accidentally broke a traffic law in a remote mountain town right in front of both of the local police officers ($115 fine and two points off my license), then five minutes after that had a small pebble hit my brand-new windshield which instantly spread into a crack that spans the whole thing, all before finally limping into Salida to unpack and get started on the work.
“Big deal”, I can already hear you saying, “Retired man experiences two minor incidents while taking a vacation in his luxury car.”
And you’re right, and that is exactly my point.
My life is so stable and comfortable that even these two miniature challenges threw me off balance, and I arrived in a slightly bummed and stressed-out state. But I still knew that in the bigger picture, they are good for me if I accept them as the lessons they are rather than choosing to continue to worry about them.
As the trip went on, more things happened, almost as if The Comfort Crisis book were trying to prove a point. I drove three hours deeper into the mountains and up the steep dirt road to arrive at my second friend’s piece of land – a plot of forest in the mountains just outside of Durango.
My work days in that high desert environment in the peak of summer were hot and physically demanding. It was hard to keep my tools, and my food supply in the cooler, and myself protected from the scorching sun (and a strange neverending blizzard of tree pollen) while still getting the job done. There was no indoor plumbing and we had to be very careful with our limited water supply. And then at the end of each day I had to reshuffle everything and set my car back up as a bedroom and crawl in for the night. Alone and far from home.
But instead of feeling depressed as I experienced this constant hardship, the opposite thing was happening: I felt more alive and more badass with each passing day. I got better at being a feral forest man.
One day, my co-builder and I decided to take the afternoon off and head to the wild, remote Lemon Reservoir for some paddleboarding. We didn’t bring our phones or any other conveniences or amenities – just two boards and the minimal clothing required for swimming. And we headed out into a stiff headwind and little whitecap waves, laughing at the freedom of the experience.
It was hard, and slightly scary, as we got further and further from the shore. Progress was slow even with serious paddling, and we didn’t have any particular plan beyond the spirit of “let’s GO!”
But again Michael Easter was there whispering in my ear, saying,
“Is this difficult, Mustache? GOOOOoood! Then you’d better keep going!”
So we did. And we got way out into that lake, to a point where the water was shielded from the wind by the mountains on the other side. And it was awesome.
We cruised over to the shore to explore a particularly scenic meadow, coated with the softest green mossy grass and exuberantly colored wildflowers, and set at an impossibly steep angle. And damn I wished that I could have taken pictures, but in a strange way this forced me to burn that spot more thoroughly into my memories using my own senses instead.
Then we headed back out into the center of the lake, set down the paddles, and just laid down on our boards to let the wind and the waves take us back towards the far end of the lake where we had started. And what a strange, serene feeling it was, floating on just a tube of air over two hundred feet of cold blue water, feeling like a jungle man with no cares and no plans and no material possessions. It could have been scary, but instead it was one of the best and most relaxed moments of my life.
Eventually, this week of forest living and exertion had to come to an end so I could get back to my own town to be a Dad again. But it ended with a final reminder of the principles of the Comfort Crisis – after so many days relatively extreme work and a relatively sparse food supply, I had grown used to a healthy background hunger. Which is yet another thing that we are meant to experience as humans – being satisfied and free from hunger all the time is neither normal nor healthy.
But when my hosts took me out on the town for a final night thank you dinner at the Mexican restaurant, the immense Burrito platter I consumed turned out to be the most delicious meal of my life.
Purposeful Hardship vs. Purposeful Spending
There has been a lot of talk directed at the FIRE community recently about how bad we are at spending our money, and how we all need to loosen up. And there’s a small amount of truth to it, as my local friends Carl and Mindy recently admitted during a grilling on the Ramit Sethi podcast.
But we also need to keep this whole idea of excessive comfort in mind, and the damage it does to the natural human condition.
It’s great to spend money on adventures and improving yourself, being generous to others, and making the world a better place.
But it’s also way too easy to fool yourself into thinking you “want” things that just make your life easier and easier.
So your job is to catch yourself before this happens, and learn to keep things challenging, even as you upgrade the rest of your life experience.
In other words: buy yourself better tools, not softer chairs.
—-
* Another great book that follows this style is Wired for Love by neruroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo – highly recommended for reading in parallel with a lover, whether new or old.
** not actually hard by reasonable human standards, but it seemed hard by my comfort addicted first world standards
]]>Several years ago I posted an article here on the blog entitled The Analog Backup. It was not a popular article. But it did inspire a few of my peers to start printing their best images as an archive. One of those, my good friend Andrew Kornylak, an amazing photographer and cinematographer, has been printing a lot of his work over the last year in order to create a photo ark, or a print backup of his best work. We have been talking every few weeks and it has been fascinating to see how he has approached this process. After months of work, he has published a great article entitled The Print Ark on his blog. I highly recommend checking out his blog post as it is much deeper than anything I have written on the subject.
Andrew, and his son, have done a lot more research on what historically is remembered and how what we leave behind helps us and our work to be remembered. Hence, that is the whole point of having not just your images backed up on hard drives but an analog, or print, backup as well that can be discovered and protected much more easily than a giant pile of hard drives. As he points out in his article, with the latest Epson printers and certain papers, Wilhelm Imaging Research has discovered that these new ink jet prints can last up to 400 years with proper storage. None of these ink jet prints have been around that long so it remains to be seen what the reality is but they will certainly last much longer than silver gelatin prints created in the darkroom.
Way back in 2018 I wrote the following:
“When you kick the bucket, who is going to dig through your hard drives to pull out those epic, once in a lifetime images and save them for the world to consider twenty, sixty, or a hundred years from now? If you want to make sure your work can stand the test of time, then making prints of your images is the only sure fire way they will be remembered a century or more from now.”
For the last five or six years I have been creating 17×22-inch prints from my older Epson 3880 and now for the last year from the newer Epson SureColor P900 that replaced my old 3880. The new P900 definitely produces slightly better print quality but I have not gone back and replaced those older prints as they are sufficient. Over the years I have had long spells (six months or more) where I did not add any prints to the print archive, but I seem to go in spurts when I have downtime between assignments.
Andrew pointed out in his article, and I mentioned in my old blog post, this is not an inexpensive affair. He reckons that each 17×22 inch print costs around $8.44 USD. That seems pretty accurate. If the goal is to make two prints of your best images and let’s just say that is 500 images, then the total comes to around $8,440 USD! That is a huge amount of money for a print backup. But in retrospect, I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on giant RAID enclosures and hard drives to back up all of my digital images and video content in triplicate–and that is just in the last decade or so. Hard drive storage is not cheap when you have sixty to seventy terabytes of images that need to be backed up–and those hard drives also need to be continually maintained and monitored. On my desk I have over 200 TB of hard drives in RAID enclosures and another hundred TB of hard drives offsite as well. Hence, while the print archive sounds expensive, it is only a small percentage of the amount I have spent on hard drives.
In defense of the print archive, there is another side benefit–which is really diving deep into your archive and thinking long and hard about which images might be the most memorable decades from now. It is amazing to me how differently–and how much more critically–I look at a print than I do when the image is on a monitor. I have a 31-inch Eizo CG319X top-end monitor that is about as glorious as monitors get. It better be because it retails for $6,000 USD! But even with that amazing screen to look at, I still see things in my prints that I didn’t see on the monitor somehow. Making large prints helps not only to archive the images but also in some cases to further refine the images themselves.
I honestly still get excited to see the images roll off the printer. The new Epson SureColor P900, which I have had for about a year, seems to be slower than my older 3880, but the print quality is a fair bit better. These days I am using a variety of papers, but all of them are from the Baryta family including Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, Ilford Gold Fibre Pearl and Ilford Gold Fibre Gloss. Ilford’s Gold Fibre Silk was and still is one of my favorite ink jet papers ever but it has been out of production for a number of years now. The Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Baryta is the closest paper I have found to Gold Fibre Silk. The newer Ilford Gold Fibre Pearl is fairly similar but with a slightly different texture than the older Gold Fibre Silk. All of these options are high-end fine art papers that will last (according to the Wilhelm Imaging Research website) over 200 years. The reason I use these Baryta papers is not just how long the prints will last but also because I love the way my images look when printed on these papers. The paper has a wide dynamic range so the full range of tones in my images print almost identically to how they appear on my monitor. That is critical so that my images appear in print as I want them.
This is obviously an ongoing project. As I create new images that seem worthy of the print archive, I make the prints and add them to the boxes. For every image that gets added to the archive, I make two identical prints of each image. In the early days I made three identical prints of each image but that took forever, so I dropped down to two prints of each image. At this point I have over 600 prints in the archive (which means I have two or three prints of around 250 images). I still have a backlog of prints to make–and I am constantly finding new and old images to add. In those quiet times between assignments I have a few days here and there where I can make a dozen prints or more while working on other projects. The P900 is just whirring in the background all day.
Regardless of the cost (of the prints) it is nothing compared to the cost of creating the images. As global climate change continues to march on I find myself drawn to images of massive glaciers and forests that may or may not be here in a hundred years. The adventure sports images will undoubtably look dated at some point–just as expedition images from one hundred years ago look to us now. But, these are part of the historical record. And some of these were created with boundary pushing photographic techniques that weren’t possible a decade ago. Hence, it isn’t just an archive to protect the images but also an archive to showcase the photographic techniques used to create those images.
At 17×22 inches, the prints don’t feel that big to me. But they are just big enough that when framed they would look respectable–and could be shown as a set in a gallery setting. I know very few of my colleagues will consider making a print archive a must, but I hope more photographers consider it so the epic images we have created are not lost on hard drives.
I will leave it here and get back to making some more prints this afternoon. At the very least, I encourage all photographers to get a decent ink jet printer and to make some prints of their images. It is a lot of fun, and also gives a lot of insight into what the image really looks like. Put a few up on the wall and live with your images for a while. That is perhaps the best thing about a print–that you can live with an image for years. Seeing it everyday reminds you not just of that moment but also that you really got something–you captured a bit of magic.
]]>Ten years ago today - on May 15, 2013 - our team published the paper Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature (Cook et al. 2013). Little did we know that our publication, organized as a citizens’ science project and published open access thanks to speedy crowdfunding support from Skeptical Science readers, would make such an impact and still be of much interest ten years later. But, that it’s still of interest is quite visible when visiting the Environmental Research Letters website where, together with other consensus-related publications, Cook at al. (2013) has been consistently among the Top 10 papers read. Other indicators of continued interest are the download numbers which currently are at 1.39 million and the Dimensions stats:
The text on the Dimensions page is interesting:
"This publication in Environmental Research Letters has been cited 778 times. 22% of its citations have been received in the past two years, which is higher than you might expect, suggesting that it is currently receiving a lot of interest.
Compared to other publications in the same field, this publication is extremely highly cited and has received approximately 121 times more citations than average."
A lot has happened since the paper was published and we’ve written about several milestones before, so here is just a short list of our favorite memories:
In April 2014, ERL announced that our paper was voted their best article in 2013.
In May 2014, John Oliver aired a sketch called “Climate Change Debate” in his “Last Week Tonight” show, which featured our paper. The video has been viewed more than 8.8 million times.
In April 2016, authors of a number of consensus studies teamed up to co-author Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming (Cook et al. 2016) in response to Tol (2016). Interestingly, our “Consensus on consensus” paper has thus far been downloaded 826,650 times while the paper causing it to be written only shows 42,925 downloads.
In July 2019, our 97% consensus paper crossed 1 million downloads - quite an achievement for a scientific paper. It was the most downloaded paper not just at Environmental Research Letters but across all the ~80 journals published by the Institute of Physics.
Baseless attacks on our paper - and other consensus studies - kept coming and in some cases, the attackers didn’t even know which of the studies they were attacking as illustrated in this Cranky Uncle cartoon:
In 2021, we put together a video summarising the history of the scientific consensus on climate change - both the studies finding consensus and the persistent attempts to cast doubt on consensus:
In November 2022, we published a long-overdue explainer about what a scientific consensus actually is. Just to re-iterate the main point: A scientific consensus is not a show-of-hands as it looks like in the cartoon below at first sight! It's more like "Yes, because of the evidence we all agree that humans are causing climate change". The consensus is not evidence of global warming – it evolved over more than 100 years from the evidence.
This month, the basic rebuttal version was updated to - among receiving the “At a glance” section - now include mentions of several more studies examining the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, with all of them finding a strong consensus of at least 97%.
Let’s end with this cartoon, perfectly illustrating what we’ve been up against for the last 10 years:
We are sure that this pattern will continue for the time being!
]]>Die Quittungspflicht soll in erster Linie Racial Profiling verhindern. Allerdings wird die Vorschrift natürlich für jedermann gelten. Das bedeutet, dass man nach einer Personenkontrolle eine Bestätigung mit Uhrzeit, Ort, Aktenzeichen und Grund der Kontrolle verlangen kann. Damit haben Betroffene eine bessere Möglichkeit, Beschwerden einzulegen.
In Bremen ist die Polizei schon seit einiger Zeit verpflichtet, solche Quittungen zu erteilen. Die Nachfrage soll sich zwar noch in Grenzen halten, aber das Projekt ist gerade erst angelaufen. Ich kann unabhängig davon immer nur raten, nach einer zweifelhaften Kontrolle, dazu gehört auch die Durchsuchung des Rucksacks/Gepäcks oder des Wagens, auf einem Beleg zu bestehen (wie in § 107 StPO auch vorgeschrieben), damit es später nicht heißt, wir wissen von nichts. Im Zweifel mal nach dem Vorgesetzten fragen und auf die erwähnte Vorschrift hinweisen – das hilft durchaus.
]]>In my role as Mr. Money Mustache, I do my best to be your one-stop-shop for Lifestyle Guru ideas. So over the years we’ve covered not just the Money side of life, but also the even more important stuff like health and fitness and the psychology of better, happier living.
But there’s one single area of life where all of these factors come together with an almost Nuclear Fusion level of synergy and effectiveness. And because of that, if I could have one single wish in the world, this is what I would wish for. It’s a change so massive that it would make every person on the planet better off and fix most of our problems in one grand sweep. And it’s probably not what you’d expect:
That we immediately switch to building our cities and countries around people, instead of cars.
(and then fix all of our existing ones too, so that our entire world is built around person-friendly living.)
The benefits of this are way bigger than almost anyone can imagine. We’re not just talking about eliminating a bit of pollution or a few traffic jams or car crashes. No. This is about far richer, healthier, and most importantly more fun living for everyone.
To put even conservative numbers to this, we’re talking about a life boost of over $20,000 per person per year, which compounds into well over two million dollars per adult lifetime.
On a nationwide scale, this would boost the wealth of the United States by about seven trillion dollars per year, which would compound into about 770 trillion over the next five decades.
Which happens to be more than the current total amount of human wealth on the entire planet.
You will have a house that is both cheaper and more beautiful and spacious. Your body and brain will be healthier and stronger and sexier and cost a lot less time and healthcare dollars to maintain.
And all of our wallets and investment accounts, both public and private will be absolutely overflowing with surplus income, reduced expenses, and fuel an investment and prosperity boom like the world has never seen.
“WTF?”, you may ask
“Isn’t city planning just a stuffy thing that your city council does in the background while we’re all off living our lives?”
Well, yes it is right now. And that’s the whole problem: cities are built by people whose primary job is to maintain the status quo and prevent disruptions. And those committes are elected and encouraged by crusty old companies and organizations, and plain old grumpy neighbors who just don’t have the vision to see what they are missing.
I’m convinced that if everyone could see through the smoggy haze of the status quo, we would all agree that this idea of a radical change is not only the best idea, but the only reasonable idea to even consider.
So our job is to learn and explain just how big and how easy this is. And what it boils down to is pretty damned simple.
Let’s start with this picture
Whoa, that’s a bit of a surprise.
So for the same amount of space you can have an entire pretty nice two bedroom apartment, or you can have just enough space for two (small) cars to park and pull out. But it gets even crazier than this. Check out this random intersection here in my own city:
WHAT?! So every time you have two big car roads intersect, which happens hundreds of times in every big city, you are wasting enough space to build a luxurious, resort-like living area with about one hundred two-bedroom apartments and still have room for a pool, a dog park, a grocery store, a couple of restaurants, and so on.
This is just the beginning of the insanity, because I have only shown you two parking spaces and one intersection. The reality is that our entire cities are made almost entirely of stupid, expensive wasted space like this.
And the problem is so extreme that the only reason we think we need cars to get around, is because we have wasted most of our space on accommodating cars, which spread everything out so far (and made everything so loud and dangerous) that nobody feels like walking or biking!
Cue the Complaints
Whenever you propose any great new idea, you’ll always get a bunch of smartasses who like to complain and resist change, without even bothering to think it through.
Most of them boil down to,
“But how are we going to keep driving our cars just as much as we do now?”
Which is ridiculous – because the whole point is that as soon as you cut out all the huge wasted spaces we create to accommodate cars, you are suddenly FREE from needing cars so much!
Instead, you can just weave a brand new city, with a bunch of variations of this beautiful resort which also include offices, grocery stores, climbing gyms and every other amenity.
And yes, you’d still have some roads between them, but they would be mostly for deliveries, emergency vehicles and people who need mobility assistance.
I hope you’re not going to make me ride the bus?
I am all for public transit in theory, but to be honest I don’t usually have the patience for it. I don’t do lineups, and I don’t like to stand around waiting passively for my transportation to arrive – when it’s time to go somewhere, I just want to go, and go now, and get there fast. So my own personal choice is to take a bike for short distances (under 2 miles) or an e-bike for larger ones (up to about 15 miles).
Although this is often news to car drivers, bikes are much faster than cars for urban transport, plus they give me exercise and thrill, which is way better than being stuck at the red light with the cars.
If you take this already-superior method of urban transport and cut out the 90% of the land that we waste on accommodating the inferior cars, then you end up with a revolution: everybody gets where they are going ten times faster, at much lower cost, and has much more fun doing it.
And sure, there will also be light rail and faster buses. And sure, you can still hop in an Uber or even bring your own car into a city like this.But the point is that it will just happen much much less often.
Okay I’m convinced, but how can we actually accomplish this?
Mr. Money Mustache can talk a big game with all these fancy words and pictures, but the truth is that I’m way too impatient to put up with all the bureaucracy and complaints that arise when you try to actually change a city. I’ve been doing my best here in Longmont, and I have gotten just about nowhere. We’re still just stacking on more and more layers of ridiculous car shit where I live.
Thankfully, other people are much more patient and effective than I am at affecting change, and one group has made such incredible progress that you can now go LIVE in their first creation: a 1000-person car-free neighborhood called Culdesac Tempe. And as I write this, I am staying in a hotel right nearby, having spent the past two days touring and visiting and interviewing the founders*.
While we were at it, my Phoenix-area-house-fixing friend Tracy Royce and I also hosted a meetup for an enthusiastic group of our readers/viewers right there in Culdesac’s emerging central plaza.
Culdesac is Awesome and Could Change Everything
If you only look at the financial spreadsheet, you would think this first Culdesac project is just going to be a highly profitable 1000-person cluster of apartment buildings, spread out across 17 acres of land. And while financial sustainability is indeed a key reason why this model will succeed, the money is the least exciting part.
When you look at these pictures compared to a normal housing complex, the main thing you will notice is that all the space that would normally be wasted on parking lots, is instead used for beautiful walking and gathering areas.
The next big upgrade is that they mixed in the amenities for daily life right into the neighborhood, rather than forcing all the future residents to get into their cars to drive out to find them:
I was also impressed with just the feel of walking the Mediterranean-vibed spaces between the buildings, even at this early stage when everything is still under construction.
Due to the hot desert climate of the region, everything is built around providing shade, breeze, and reflecting heat during the summer, while also maximizing the joyful fact that there is no winter there (the coldest month of the year still has an average daily high of 65F/18C, which means palm trees, leafy gardens and fruits and flowers forever.)
With a setup like this, and 999 new neighbors to meet, I would rarely feel the need to leave the place. Which really cuts down on my desire to use a car. But on top of that, Culdesac has strategically placed itself in Tempe, a city right in the center of the Phoenix metro area, within walking distance of the main university and right on a light rail stop which allows you to reach almost everything (including the airport) for FREE, since an annual pass to the transit system is included with your rent.
But of course, you can also get around on foot, bike, e-bike, scooter, or hop into one of Culdesac’s fleet of rideshare electric cars for a trip to the mountains or whatever else you might want to do that’s outside of bike and transit range.
It’s insane. In fact it’s so good that I am going to attempt to move there myself at the end of 2023, enjoying my first escape from Colorado winter and celebrating the fact that my boy will be a legal adult at that time.
But even this is just a pilot project because Culdesac has much bigger plans.
The Culdesac Master Plan
From my conversations with the founders, I think they want to do this:
So How Can We Benefit From This, and Support it?
And Then What Will Be Our Payback?
This whole change is exciting, and it is immense.
Understanding these ideas around city planning is the economic and social equivalent to being a doctor, and finding a 35-year-old patient in a hospital who is suffering from every chronic disease, but then discovering that they have been following a diet of Coke and Donuts for their whole lives and never been out on a walk, once.
In other words, the changes are so obvious, and the amount of win/win synergy so great, that every step we take towards making our cities better, and every car trip we eliminate, will absolutely explode our personal and national wealth upwards for generations to come.
The stakes just couldn’t be higher.
Are you in?
Further Reading:
Another collaborator in the overall effort for car free cities is a bank-founding multi entrepreneur local friend named Kevin Dahlstrom. His recent Twitter rant on building car-free cities from the scratch gathered a shocking amount of very positive feedback and interesting comments.
* Despite my positive raving about this neighborhood, I have no financial or business connection with the project or any of the team members. I am just really excited about their work and want them to succeed!
]]>(Ein Gruselschocker von 2002)
„Die Ohrmuschel. Der einzige Teil unseres Körpers, der ein wenig nach Jugendstil aussieht.“
Wenn er so was sagt in seinem samtweichen Bariton, dann fängts bei uns schon an zu kribbeln. Und er fährt fort: „Als nächstes werde ich eine kleine Sonde in Ihren Gehörgang einführen. Das wird ein bisschen wehtun, ist aber nicht unangenehm.“
Unsere Finger graben sich in die Armstützen des Behandlungsstuhls, Schauer laufen uns über den Rücken. Wir müssen jetzt ganz still halten, da kennt er kein Wenn und kein Aber. Es sich mit ihm zu verscherzen wäre töricht, denn er ist der beste Arzt weit und breit. Der kalte Stahl mit seinen scharfen Kanten, ach, das lässt sich ertragen. Schließlich ist es seine ruhige Hand, die ihn führt. Und unsere Tapferkeit bleibt ja auch nicht ohne Belohnung. Wenn er mit der Untersuchung fertig ist, verharrt er noch ein paar Augenblicke dicht über unser Ohr gebeugt und singt für uns diesen mitreißenden Refrain, bei dem uns immer so warm ums Herz wird.
Christine, Christine, auf deiner Knirscherschiene
Reisten meine kühnsten Träume durch die Nacht
Therese, Therese, mit deiner Hüftprothese
Im Mund bin ich heut morgen aufgewacht
Ja, das hören wir gern. Da machen wir große Augen. Und wie dann die Lehne des Behandlungsstuhls sich elektrisch senkt, bis wir in Liegeposition sind. Und wie er uns dann eine nach der anderen abtastet und mit seinem schwarzen Stift auf unseren Körpern die neuralgischen Punkte markiert. Und wie er diese Punkte in stundenlanger Feinarbeit zu einem Gitter verbindet. Das macht ihm so schnell keiner nach. Er ist der beste Arzt weit und breit.
„Hinter jedem Gitter“, sagt er, „verbirgt sich eine Bestie, die befreit werden will.“
Solche Sätze würden wir uns am liebsten sofort notieren, doch leider haben wir weder Stift noch Zettel zur Hand. Und ihn zu fragen – nein; was für ein Gedanke. Die einzige Bitte, die sich hier über unsere Lippen traut, ist, ob der Herr Doktor vielleicht noch einmal den Refrain für uns singen würde.
Da ruft er „Oho!“ und „Haha!“ und „Das gefällt den Damen wohl! Aber es kostet natürlich extra!“ Und dazu zwinkert er und wirft übermütig die Gebührenordnung in die Luft und balanciert sie auf seiner Nase, und dann – dann – dann legt er wieder los:
Christine, Christine, auf deiner Knirscherschiene
Reisten meine kühnsten Träume durch die Nacht
Therese, Therese, mit deiner Hüftprothese
Im Mund bin ich heut morgen aufgewacht
Hach, er ist ein Charmeur, ein Kavalier der alten Schule. Jetzt will er, dass wir uns bewegen, und erklärt uns geduldig, wie das geht: „Hier haben wir das Standbein, da das Spielbein und dort das Tanzbein. Legen Sie mal los.“ Oh, aber wir kommen doch nicht hoch, der Behandlungsstuhl hält uns in der Horizontalen.
„Mit ein bisschen Konzentration ist diese Übung auch im Liegen möglich. Strengen Sie sich an, meine Damen. Wenn Sie es beide schaffen und ich dabei halbwegs synchrone Abläufe beobachte, dann läge es immerhin im Bereich des Möglichen, dass ich …“
Was, Herr Doktor? Würden Sie dann etwa – ein letztes Mal – ?
„Jetzt zeigen Sie mir erst, was Sie können. Danach lassen Sie sich überraschen. „
Wir schaffen es! Schauen Sie, wir schaffen es!
„Das ist ja in der Tat schon eine ganz ordentliche Leistung.“
Er sieht zufrieden aus. Er wirft den Kopf zurück – sein Brustkorb weitet, seine Lippen öffnen sich:
Susanne, Susanne, in deiner Bettpfanne
brätst du ein British Breakfast für uns zwei
Maragretha, Margaretha, und durch deinen Katheter
schlürfe ich Mojito, Caipi und Mai-Tai
Und wer bist du, junger Hüpfer im Bruchbandschlüpfer
ich glaub, du hast heut Abend für mich Zeit
Ich bin der beste Arzt weit und breit
Jawohl, der beste Arzt weit und breit
„Sag mir bitte, Therese: Wer sind diese Frauen, von denen er singt? Therese?“
„Christine?“
Im Kernspintomographen ist das Licht ausgegangen.
Die Sprechstunde ist vorbei.
]]>Hovertext:
Personally, I find it liberating to think about how stupid it all sounds.
Hovertext:
The second step is to get the cartoonists to leave town.
This would be a best seller if it had been entitled "Everything I learned about national security talks, I learned from Cicero". Preferably dumbed-down to accompany a Netflix series about sexy Romans.
Instead, it is a scholarly work which takes the reader through the art of rhetoric and how it is used and abused by modern speech-makers. It specifically looks at things through a National Security (including Cyber Security) lens. And it expertly steps through how to write in order to convince.
The function of eloquence seems to be to speak in a manner suited to persuade an audience, the end is to persuade by speech.
What is it that people are trying to convince us of? What are the rhetorical tricks which shortcut our critical faculties? What does history teach us about the reporting of security issues?
And, crucially, why is this so important?
The more we are able to question the language and presentation of statements on new threats, the better placed we are to evaluate these threats and respond appropriately.
There is some extremely nerdy investigations of various speeches and documents. I think it relies a bit too heavily on synthetic "ease of reading" scores. But there are some insightful analyses. For example, how close is Trump to his Emperor forebears? Baines walks us through Trump's preface to a document and, with typical understatement, remarks:
The more closely one scrutinises this preface, the more evident it becomes that Trump does not conform to traditional Western notions of rhetorical or stylistic sophistication.
There's a decent amount of Latin to wade through. Are well as some classical poetry (thankfully also translated) there are sprinklings of the language throughout. A fairly typical paragraph is:
Silence is also of strategic utility to Classical orators. For Quintilian, it is a conscious act, whether an exercise of tact, a sudden break in speech which is left unfinished (interpellatio) or a withholding of information (reticentia). In all these cases, silence is not simply an absence of speech. What is unsaid is present “in the room”: it may already be known to all and not require repeating; or it may be implied but not specified, leaving the audience to imagine their own version of events.
I particularly enjoyed the way that common tropes are dealt with. Sometimes being able to name something helps blunt its power.
the FBI’s cybercrime website described the threat from cybercrime as “serious - and growing. Cyber intrusions are becoming more commonplace, more dangerous, and more sophisticated”. Readers will recognise the construction as a triad with anaphora, emphatic repetition of the leading word that is the verbal equivalent of striking the lectern.
It is an extremely tech-literate book. And it is also opinionated on some of the problems that our sector has with communicating with the public:
Designation of cyber operations as war is therefore not only hyperbolical: it distances cybersecurity from ordinary human experience, and strips citizens of individual agency.
Baines also successfully makes the case that, sometimes, we need to remember to tone down the jargon in order to communicate clearly.
One of the contentions of this chapter is that cybersecurity awareness and cybercrime prevention communications persistently fail to engage the public in meaningful protective measures, because a glossary is required to explain key concepts.
It's a relief that the book doesn't just focus on the USA - there's a good discussion about the UK state's use of rhetoric influences our debate. The author acknowledges that this focus on the "western" classics leads down a somewhat mono-cultural path. I'd certainly love to see how, say, classic Japanese literature is reflected in the way the Japanese talk about such issues.
This is an excellent book. It is a fascinating way to "see how the sausage is made" when it comes to public communication of National Security issues. It will help you appreciate the way ancient linguistic tricks are repurposed for the modern world.
]]>That's the problem with being middle-aged. Your peers are now running the world and know exactly how to profit off you. Stranger Things is designed to tickle every part of your nostalgia gland and Derry Girls zaps you right in the feels. That expensive Lego set you wanted as a kid is now on sale again - and you can just about afford it! Every media property has been relentlessly focus-grouped until it can extract the maximum amount of I-Remember-That! from you - in the hopes that you'll open your wallet.
"Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers" is a cynically exploitative cash-grab which ruffles through the deep-cuts of your memory to blast you with 90 minutes of precision guided homesickness for your childhood.
The problem is - it is very good.
It helps that Disney basically owns all the IP in the universe now. Remember as a kid when you made He-Man fight the Autobots? Yeah, Disney can now make that movie - and throw in a B-plot about Donald Duck training to become a Jedi.
And that's the Chip 'n Dale movie. It's some extremely talented creatives tipping out their old toy chest and making an incredible film. Every frame is stuffed with in-jokes and Easter Eggs. There are a thousand-and-one blink-and-you'll-miss-it references. If the marketing executives are any good, they'll be data-mining exactly where viewers paused and rewound the video in order to determine which long-forgotten character should get a 6 episode miniseries.
It had me grinning all the way through. With occasional gasps of "did they really just do that!?" A worthy sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
]]>Russia is losing the IT war with Ukraine, and it’s not because of a technological disadvantage. In fact, Russian hacking groups have a well-deserved reputation for effectiveness. It’s not even an issue of lack of expertise in disinformation campaigns: while they didn’t initiate conspiracy theories in the US about vaccines or stolen elections nor were they the only ones to fan them (it was, by and large, an inside job), they were very effective at helping them spread.
Yet Russian cyberwarfare capabilities have proven remarkably weak in the context of their invasion of Ukraine. Attacks against infrastructure, where successful, don’t seem to have seriously diminished Ukraine’s defensive capabilities, and their influence campaigns, both internal and overseas, are an unqualified disaster.
What happened?
The first failure was tactical: all the satellite imagery and IT resources of the Russian military were unable to model how far and fast they would be able to move into Ukraine. Their maps, we can assume, are impeccable, but we can also assume that in an authoritarian militaristic kleptocracy there are no short-term incentives to have a realistic understanding of your own resources and capabilities. Pretending to have a powerful military is a good way to gain accolades and divert some money to personal accounts — and it might even fool other countries — but battlefields are harder to lie to.
This failure of understanding led to a longer war than they had planned for, which in turn gave a window of opportunity for other countries to weigh in through sanctions, supplies, etc. It opened a diplomatic front — in the most general sense of the term — where Russia is finding itself not stalemated but in a frank rout. There’s a certain symmetry between Ukrainian advantage and Russian disadvantage here: Ukrainian politicians and individuals in general have much more interaction with and understanding of Western (and to some degree global) assumptions and semiotics, while Putin in particular, and Russian communication in general, has been entirely out of sync with the beliefs and thought patterns of the relevant political constituencies.
It’s possible to chalk this up to a technical failure — that’s what a diplomatic corps is for — but at its root it’s a problem of a blinkered worldview starting or perhaps manifesting at the top. If Putin and the military as an organization are true believers in an ethnocentric conflict-of-civilizations view of the world, then all the sensors and databases in the world will not give them an accurate understanding of how other people will react and what they will be able to do.
This is a weakness of racism (or, if you will, nationalism) rather than any specific country. In a rough historical order, and just picking some recent examples, the Russian misjudged the Japanese, the Germans misjudged the Russians, the French and the US misjudged the Vietnamese, Russia misjudged the Afghans, and the US misjudged the Afghans again and then the Iraqis.
In every case there was enough data to make the right call, and over time the amount of data has grown exponentially, but the strategic misjudgments keep piling up. The response to failure tends to be not just more weapons but what Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein have termed Big Dick Data, the idea that if you have more data and larger AI models then you don’t need some snowflake multiculturalism to understand what — those people — are thinking or going to do.
In short, it’s the concept of power, and a fetichistic view of data has also become a new aspect of power, as a replacement for empathy and let’s call it a healthy respect for science (which is by its very nature a cosmopolitan, individualistic, liberal enterprise).
It doesn’t work, but because the response to its failure is to double down on it, it turns from a weak spot into a systemic weakness. It might be an exaggeration to say that a failure to understand themselves and the rest of the world has been the main cause of catastrophic failure in modern societies, but it wouldn’t be a ridiculous one.
The takeaway is that the main purpose of information technology is understanding, not surveilling or hacking. Those can be useful tools, but if you are working with a very inaccurate model of the world (and within a cognitively inflexible political structure) having more data will not get you better long-term results, and might in fact deepen a false sense of superiority.
Whether you are running a superpower or a mid-sized company, IT (from data to software tools to AI models) can give you a competitive advantage only to the degree to which your understanding of your environment and of yourself is accurate. In leaders and their organizations, empathy, introspection, a healthy respect for deep expertise, and sincere openness to getting bad news as early as possible aren’t qualities irrelevant to IT competitiveness or that can be substituted by it. They are prerequisites to effectively exploiting those technologies.
The post Macho Cyberwarfare and the Long Game appeared first on blog.rinesi.com.
]]>Easy!
As part of my MSc, I have to write a series of assignments. These are essays with a strict word count and an even stricter marking scheme. I'm proud that I've successfully developed a technique for writing these assignments. I've noticed that a number of students don't know where to begin when writing an essay, so I'd like to share my technique with you. It is slightly more complicated than Feynman's method - although still contains the "think real hard" step.
This is a "reverse engineering" technique. The aim isn't necessarily to have understood the material - but to demonstrate that you have understood the material. To do this, it is necessary to understand the marking scheme. Almost all tutors will share how your essays are to be marked. Your job is to write an answer for each point on the marking scheme.
The key is to do this at the start of term - as I'll explain later.
My assignment questions usually come in this form:
Great! I now have the basic structure of my essay. I divide the wordcount by the points and that give me the maximum number of words I have for each section. So, before the start of teaching, I follow Step 1 of the Feynman algorithm and write out section headings for my essay:
This means I don't waste time writing 2,000 words of history which can't score me many points. I also know that my conclusion has to be more substantial than a couple of paragraphs.
Each paragraph should contain one idea. A paragraph is usually 4 sentences. A sentence is usually about 20 words. So, under each section, I put one bullet point per 100 words. My aim is to fill each bullet point with a paragraph.
But fill it with what? We're not quite at step 2 yet. One more piece of investigation to go!
As mentioned before, it's time to find the rubric. This is the thing which tells the person marking your essay what they're looking for. It is really important to understand that you are not trying to produce a beautiful piece of literature. You are not writing florid prose. You are not proving how clever you are. All you are doing is responding to the marking scheme in as efficient way as possible.
This is a very different technique to writing a thesis, dissertation, article, or blog post. Treat the essay as an exam. If the question is "What is the Pythagorean theorem", you don't start your answer with "It was a hot and arid day in Samos, and the great philosopher was staring intently at a series of triangle crudely etched into the sand..."
A typical marking rubric for a particular section might be:
Here's where you get to make your first choice. What are you aiming for? Personally, I go for a pass. If I have spare words, I add in what I can for anything higher.
In my case, I just want to pass. If you're on track for something higher, go for it!
Again, get the rubric before teaching starts. That way you know what to concentrate on during the lectures.
Here's the marking scheme for section 1 of the assignment I'm currently working on:
15% of 3,000 words is 450 words. So about 4-and-a-bit paragraphs. On the left-hand side are the three things I need to cover. The other sections tell me that if I want top marks, I need relevant models from a wide range of sources with relevant arguments building to a conclusion.
Anything which isn't in that description gets cut.
OK, so we have to write 5 paragraphs about X. And, if we can can, show we understand some of the problems with it. If there's room, show something related. Let's give these paragraphs names:
Naturally, some paragraphs are going to be longer that 100 words - so feel free to steal from the final paragraph if you need.
Go through each heading and section and do this. It is a bit tedious. But you've effectively taken the essay format so beloved by academics and turned it into an exam format so hated by students. You now have a fairly rigid set of questions and associated wordcount.
During your lectures, your tutor will occasionally say something like "It's really important that you mention Smith's definition in your assignment" or "You should read Jones' opinion on that" or - if you're lucky - "Not many students bother explaining how al-Sadiq's background influenced his design - and I wish they would."
Each time your tutor drops one of these hints - go into the template you've written and find a relevant paragraph. Leave a note to yourself which says "Use Smith's definition from the course text" or "Read the paper Jones mentions in their rebuttal."
It is (almost) time to start thinking! Yay!
I find that the ratio of citations to text is about 2 references per paragraph. So about 50 per 3,000 word essay. Again, some paragraphs will be you discussing others' work - so will need more. Some paragraphs will be your own thoughts, so need less.
As you have been going through the course, you'll have been reading and discussing papers, books, websites etc. Each time you come across a paper, save it in Zotero. Every scrap of info should be saved in there. Create a folder per assignment and make sure you save anything you've read into it. Zotero will handle citation formatting in your paper as if by magic.
But! Just sticking a paper in Zotero isn't enough. You'll get to the end of the course and discover you can't remember what each entry is.
Every time you read something which might be useful, find a paragraph in your template which relates to it, and add a single sentence. Doesn't have to be the sentence you end up submitting, doesn't have to be perfect, may be deleted later.
Something like:
Faster-than-light travel was invented by scientists at the University of East Anglia (Smith, 2045) when they were trying to get a printer working.
or
Because of the causality problem (Jones, 1854) discuss more here
or
(al-Saiq, 1984) disagrees with (Zhang, 10BCE) about cats - worth writing more?
These are just little notes to yourself which explains what you read and how it is relevant to what you're discussing
That's it! You've finished thinking! That wasn't so hard, was it?
This is the bit that most students seem to dread. If you're faced with acres of blank paper, how do you bash out 3,000 words? Argh!
Luckily, you don't have blank paper. You have a bunch of scope-limited questions, with some bullet points representing how many paragraphs to write. Most of those paragraphs already have a vague topic and, hopefully, a citation or two.
Now you just need to tie them all together!
Personally, I like writing and thinking in bullet points - something which earns me the ire of my tutors. So I gradually work on each bullet until it is a paragraph of prose. I shuffle citations around and delete things which are too wordy.
With each paragraph, I go back to the marking scheme. Am I being assessed on the cultural influence of the subject? No? That amazing paragraph goes in the bin. If it isn't worth points, it isn't worth the word count.
The key to this is writing regularly throughout the course. Even a sentence or two every week can be enough.
Office Hours are the most valuable part of your course. Sitting in a (virtual) lecture hall with a hundred other students is fine - but you rarely get to ask targetted questions to make sure you've understood something. But being able to speak with a tutor or assistant one-on-one is a game-changer. Don't worry if you think you look stupid in front of them or your class-mates. This is your chance to ask targetted questions.
You will probably only have a few minutes - depending on how busy the session is - so make sure you have a brief list of specific questions. Something like:
Your aim is to make sure that you've understood the topics and - more importantly - your understanding aligns with the rubric. This is a deeply cynical way of looking at things, I know. Your assignment is to demonstrate to their satisfaction that you have understood.
If you've followed the above algorithm during the course, you should have about 50% of your essay done by the time teaching finishes. Most courses let you submit a draft for feedback, and then have a few more weeks before you submit the final product.
Submit your draft as soon as possible. You want feedback at the earliest point. If you get a personal 1-2-1 with a tutor, even better. You are about to follow another algorithm!
OK, you now have loads of paragraphs, and loads of notes, and loads of citations. This is where the "fun" begins. Now you have to write and edit your essay.
Personally, I like having my spouse read over what I've written. She can spot spelling errors and logical leaps that I just can't.
But, at the end of the day, it goes back to Feynman. You've already written down the problem, you know what you'll be assessed on, you've written down most of the answer - so now you just need to apply your brains to tie it all together into something cohesive and coherent.
You'll notice I haven't talked about fonts, page numbers, titles, tables-of-content etc. That's all left to the end. Your class should have been provided with a style guide. Once you've finished editing, apply their guide. Use their font - even if you think it looks ugly. Put the reference list where they expect to find it. Abandon your funky page numbering scheme and surrender to what the marker is expecting.
You are writing for this to be marked. And the marker doesn't have time to go hunting. They want everything laid out exactly as they expect. Your aesthetic considerations don't count.
Using this method, you should be able to bash out your essay and submit it before the deadline. Well… that's the plan!
I've successfully used it over 4 different assignments and it has made writing them a fairly stress-free experience.
Good luck!
]]>For the blog post I provided images of char following schools of sockeye salmon up a small spawning tributary in Bristol Bay, Alaska. These trout-like fish can be seen darting around streams, dodging territorial salmon as they target their energy-rich eggs. The eggs that char eat tend to be those that have escaped the redd (nest) and would not have survived. My friend Morgan and I found that char can actually ramp up their gut size to help them eat as many eggs as possible before salmon finish spawning. A good bout of egg-gorging is important because char need a lot of stored energy to spawn in the fall and then survive the lean times of winter. I’ve argued that the decline of wild salmon runs has likely been an under-appreciated factor in the decline of bull trout, a char native to the Pacific Northwest.
Getting a good picture of char and salmon is surprisingly difficult. In this watersheds where I work, salmon populations only spawn for about three weeks. In small streams, that leaves 49 weeks with no opportunities to shoot fish larger than a sculpin. While a salmon population may spawn for 20-30 days, the scene pictured above is quite fleeting, and occurs only as the first wave of fish push into the stream and hold in pools. Within a week fish are typically spread out on redds and many are starting to look beat up. Soon after that, the stream is scattered with carcasses and the swimming dead–the zombie-like fish that have burned through all their energy stores and are nearing the end.
Not only is the salmon run ephemeral, but its timing (phenology) varies year to year. To find fresh salmon to photograph, you’ll need to track this moving target just like the Dollies in our paper. The small Dolly pictured below, under the sockeye, likely followed a wave of salmon as it passed through Lake Nerka, located downstream.
If you are lucky enough to time your arrival with the first waves of fresh salmon you’ll have some more challenges to deal with. First, you’ll need to bring a buddy along to shout “hey bear” now and then. The clear streams that facilitate underwater photography also tend to be cold, so they incubate embryos at slower rates and require salmon to spawn earlier. This means the handful of streams where you can effectively photograph salmon are the same handful of streams where bears go to find their first high quality meal after hibernating all winter and going vegan all spring (except those that get lucky and catch a moose calf). The salmon pictured below, in the bear’s mouth, was the first fish to enter any spawning tributary in 2011. It had been injured by a gill net and entered the stream a week ahead of its peers, dying shortly afterward. I set a camera on its carcass and this bear arrived 30 minutes later; two more bears came during the night to sniff the gravel bar. When the salmon show up, the bears are there within minutes.
That means you’ll want at least one person to stay above water and make sure that you don’t surprise any bears as they walk the stream. Several times I’ve had freshly killed salmon drift in front of my snorkel mask. These are often males with a single bite mark in the back of their head, from a bear plucking out their energy-dense brain, leaving the rest of their carcass for the gulls and caddis flies.
The grizzly bears are easy to deal with. It’s actually the other end of the food chain where you’ll find the biggest threat to underwater photography. Before salmon spawn, rocks are covered with a slimy cocktail of algae, microbes, and detritus known as periphyton. As salmon swim upstream and dig in the gravel, they scrub these rocks clean and the periphyton, along with sediments and benthic invertebrates, mix into the water column.
This is great if you’re a young-of-the-year fish looking to snack on mayfly nymphs, but it’s bad news if you’re a photographer hoping for sharp images. The best way to deal with murky water is to get rid of it, by getting closer to the subject and reducing the volume of water that you have to shoot through. How close? Probably about one foot. That means you need an ultra-wide lens if you want photograph fishes, rather than parts of a fish. My favorite lens for this application is a Tokina 10-17 mm fisheye, usually zoomed all the way out.
The smartest way to get within a foot of a school of fish is to set up an underwater tripod and shoot remotely. However, that also takes 90% of the fun out of it and requires some specialty gear. I’d much rather swim with fish than sit in a lawn chair with a wired shutter release. Luckily in smaller streams with distinct pools, the fish are fairly tolerant of a 6 ft. long monster in a camo dry suit. I think once they see how clumsy you are, they realize you are not a jumbo river otter, plus they don’t want to risk darting across a shallow riffle to find the next pool.
So you nailed the run timing and got close to the fish; you’re good-to-go right? Not quite, it’s coastal Alaska in July, so there’s a good chance it’s dark and cloudy. The good news is that you’ll have soft light that won’t illuminate the fine sediments in the water. The bad news is you won’t have much light to work with, the fish are moving, and you’ll be shooting them with your arm extended into moving water. That’s not a good recipe for sharp images, as you’ll be using slower shutter speeds with shaky hands and erratic subjects. Freezing action will require a mix of luck and ISO. You can try adding flash, as in the photo below, but its often impossible to avoid substantial backscatter and you’ll hate that extra weight and drag as you try whip your camera around at the surface. On my 7D I’ll shoot in manual mode at ISO 1600, f/5.6, and a shutter speed around 1/60 to 1/250. I’ll often use the “all points” or zone autofocus mode. When shooting without looking through the viewfinder, using a single autofocus point is risky. I also shoot in rapid-fire mode to increase the odds of a keeper and frequently check the LCD screen to calibrate my aim.
If you can deal with the challenges and inevitable frustrations, shooting salmon in small streams can be extremely rewarding. Even if you don’t get the image you’re after, it’s hard not to have a blast when hanging out underwater with fish. If you don’t have a housing for your SLR, you’ll probably do nearly as well with a GoPro on a pole. If the salmon don’t cooperate, you can always throw on a macro lens and look for sculpin in the rocks.
]]>If I was asked to boil the book down to two messages, it would be this:
Here are the habits:
What I did / want to do:
It is a long road, as it begins with & is based on principles.
Habits take time to learn. My week planning needed two months of practice to even begin to see how I can make it more useful (limit goals, check back mid-week, evaluate & reflect). My personal mission statement is not convincing me yet.
But somehow I'm still on it and I believe in the approach.
]]>
When most people think about street addresses they think of parcel deliveries, or visitors finding their way. But who numbered the first house, and where, and why? What can addresses tell us about who we are and how we live together?
Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr., how ancient Romans found their way, and why Bobby Sands is memorialised in Tehran. She explores why it matters if, like millions of people today, you don't have an address.
From cholera epidemics to tax hungry monarchs, Mask discovers the different ways street names are created, celebrated, and in some cases, banned. Full of eye-opening facts, fascinating people and hidden history, this book shows how addresses are about identity, class and race. But most of all they are about power: the power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn't, and why.
What an amazing book!
Simply a must-read for anyone involved in public administration.
One of the nicest things about the book is that it isn't just focussed on the White Western World. It goes from the slums of Kolkata to the revolutionary streets of China. It's a stunning exploration of the tiniest administrative details all the way up to war crimes.
I had no idea of the history of addresses - nor how they've been used to empower and repress people in equal measure. The way people get so worked up over what seems like a minor administrative detail is extraordinary. And yet, at the same time, completely understandable. These scribbles on a map define so much about our lives - and we barely ever discuss their origins or their purpose.
The book zooms through history - from antiquity and into the future - at a rapid pace. I felt like I'd seen the world and lived through the court-cases which shape our domestic geography. It's an outstanding set of investigations into an often overlooked piece of street furniture.
A small disclaimer - the author briefly interviewed me about my blog post "Why bother with What Three Words?" and quoted me in her conclusion. Which was a lovely surprise.
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