Rants – Page 7 – a sibilant intake of breath

Leadership lacking

The Bagehot column on the U.K. in this week’s Economist contains some of the harshest language I have seen them use, about the Theresa May government trying to implement Brexit, saying: “Britain is ruled by an incestuous clique of frenemies who delight in turning even the most serious issues into melodramas”.

It’s worrisome that so many of the world’s most important countries seem to be badly led at present. Likewise, at a time when we need to be thinking beyond narrow national interests and building an equitable low-carbon global energy system, instead people are defining their allegiances more and more narrowly and expending their energy on unworthy causes and petty conflicts.

Burning up the planet to stay cool

Sticky with humidity after 9pm, electricity demand in Toronto must be crazy right now.

The Independent Electricity System Operator has data for the whole province:

Back in April 2005, province-wide electricity use was 14,890 megawatts: 62% nuclear, 19.3% hydro, 13.5% wind, 4.6% gas.

This connects to lots of climate change questions. Can we really afford not to build new nuclear infrastructure, if we are at all serious about cutting emissions? Can renewables get big enough fast enough to make a difference, or will we be relying on gas with all of its climate problems?

Will the world stay rich enough and electricity cheap enough to keep using air conditioning to stay comfortable? Will places like Phoenix and Texas remain habitable? Also, remember that all the air conditioned cars and trucks are cooling themselves by burning gasoline, not relying on the electricity grid.

Young people and political involvement

Howard Dean recently made some interesting comments about young people and U.S. politics:

“They’re very independent-minded. They don’t like politics. And they mistrust institutions,” Dean said in his characteristically matter-of-fact style. “I think our problem as Democrats is, we’re the head of the oldest party in the West, and this party is an institution that looks incredibly unattractive; not because of our ideology, ’cause that is attractive, and that is why they always vote for Democrats. But the Democratic Party means nothing to them because it’s an institution built by people like me who’s 40 years older than them.”

Dean believes the Republican Party blew a chance with these young voters. “The Republicans had a shot at these guys because these young folks are libertarian economically,” he said, “but the Republicans are so cast in racism and anti-feminism and all these other things that these young folks value.” And Dean’s assessment of the leadership of the GOP was withering. “Leadership in the ultimate is telling your own people that they have to do something that they don’t want to do,” he said. “There’s no leadership at all in the Republican Party. None. Zero. They’re all terrified of their monster that they’ve created, which relies on xenophobia and racism and all these other unpleasant-isms.”

I think it’s true that there is a conflict between generations, and that politics generally serves the old and rich. It’s hard to see a way out of that when the functioning of politics as usual makes young people apathetic more often then apoplectic.

If everyone could see 50 years into the future, I think young people would have the highest voter turnout instead of the lowest, and that older people would start making choices that will not so gratuitously burn up the futures of their children and grandchildren.

Freedom and living expenses

George Monbiot’s career advice for aspiring journalists may apply at least as much to civil servants and academics:

You want to be free? Then first you must learn to be captive.

The advisers say that a career path like this is essential if you don’t want to fall into the “trap” of specialisation: that is to say, if you want to be flexible enough to respond to the changing demands of the employment market. But the truth is that by following the path they suggest, you are becoming a specialist: a specialist in the moronic recycling of what the rich and powerful deem to be news. And after a few years of that, you are good for little else.

This career path, in other words, is counter-educational. It teaches you to do what you don’t want to do, to be what you don’t want to be. It is an exceptional person who emerges from this process with her aims and ideals intact.

…

Even intelligent, purposeful people almost immediately lose their way in such worlds. They become so busy meeting the needs of their employers and surviving in the hostile world into which they have been thrust that they have no time or energy left to develop the career path they really wanted to follow. And you have to develop it: it will not happen by itself.

Summary: go right toward what you think is important, and learn to live cheaply.

Alcohol’s societal role

In many ways, the treatment of ethanol in societies like Canada is exceptional.

It’s the only powerfully psychoactive drug top-end hotels and restaurants will provide you in unlimited quantities as long as you can pay. It’s the only drug that large groups of strangers routinely use to the point of inebriation together, in contexts ranging from weddings to club meetings to fancy dinners at universities. In places like Ontario where it is sold by the government, the government actively advertises it, while simultaneously notionally trying to prevent unhealthy use (which is probably any use, despite self-serving studies that purport to show health benefits from moderate consumption of this known carcinogen).

The societal burden of ethanol is spectacular. The Economist notes:

Between 2006 and 2010, an average of 106,765 Americans died each year from alcohol-related causes such as liver disease, alcohol poisoning and drunk driving—more than twice the number of overdoses from all drugs and more than triple the number of opioid overdoses in 2015… The percentage of Americans who met the criteria for alcohol-use disorder (AUD) in the DSM-IV—a psychiatric handbook that uses questions such as, “In the past year, have you found that drinking—or being sick from drinking—often interfered with taking care of your home or family?” to diagnose alcoholism—jumped from 8.5% of Americans in 2001-02 to 13% in 2012-13, or nearly 30m people. By comparison, 2.6m are estimated to have prescription-opioid and heroin addictions… Analysis by Phillip Cook, a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, published in 2007 suggested that whereas 30% of Americans did not drink at all in 2001-02, 10% of Americans—or about 24m—had an average of ten drinks a day. He believes such habits would not look different today.

The Washington Post reported recently on a study which concluded that one in eight Americans meets the diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder, adding: “Stunningly, nearly 1 in 4 adults under age 30 (23.4 percent) met the diagnostic criteria for alcoholism.”

I think a few responses to this are prudent:

Alcohol advertising should be banned in areas including billboards, print media, and television
Plain packaging requirements like those used for tobacco may be prudent to try
Alcohol corporations should pay a significant share of the cost of treatment for alcohol dependence and alcohol-induced chronic health conditions, and treatment availability should be greatly expanded
Alcohol licenses should be experimented with, which could be revoked for those imposing risk or harm on others
We should support research into less damaging substances which could play a similar social role, like the alcohol-replacing benzodiazepine David Nutt is searching for
Combat the ideological dogmatism in the treatment system, including the idea that total abstinence is the only goal to pursue or that AA-style 12-step programs should be a mandatory part of treatment

Arming Saudi Arabia

I find the debate about Canadian arms companies selling weapons and vehicles to Saudi Arabia a little perplexing. The media coverage seems to turn on the question of whether the arms and equipment are being used to oppress the civilian population of Saudi Arabia. I find this perplexing because there seems to be ample evidence that oppression at home and abroad is the main business of the Saudi government, and that anybody selling them anything should expect it to be used that way.

On one hand, it’s appealing that moving to non-fossil fuel sources of energy could undermine countries like Saudi Arabia. On the other, it’s frightening to think what would happen to the region in a future where nobody wants or is willing to use their oil.

Activism as being a catalyst

When we think about global trends, we tend to focus on their importance and how rapidly things are changing. China’s economic rise, along with massive economic development and urbanization around the world, all have unambiguous importance, though we will endlessly disagree about how they will interact and few of us will live long enough to feel confident we saw the final outcome (there are major limits to knowledge and prediction).

If one makes a sincere effort to understand what is happening in the world and feels compelled to try to encourage some of the best possible outcomes, given the state of the world right now, perhaps it makes sense to think in terms of which trends you hope to speed up and which you hope to inhibit.

The key question in effectiveness has to be: am I / are we making a difference in terms of an important objective.

So perhaps it makes sense to think about being a catalyst or accelerant (to choose a more obviously violent analogy) hoping to create as substantial a ∆ifference as possible in the final chemical equilibrium.

Sometimes working for the ACLU is fun

Step 1: British comedian John Oliver produces an absurd segment about coal CEO Bob Murray:

In it, Oliver acknowledges Murray’s history of litigiousness toward critics and challenges him to do his worst.

Step 2: Murray sues Oliver for defamation in West Virginia circuit court

Step 3: As reported in Slate, Jamie Lynn Crofts of the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia files one of the world’s funnier legal documents in the form of an amicus brief to the court

As John Stuart Mill said about freedom of speech in general: “Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being ‘pushed to an extreme’, not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case”.

Political speech, news reporting, and satire all deserve special protection in the public interest. Hopefully this whole back and forth will discourage those who face criticism in the future from seeking to suppress it through the courts of a free society.

Grating coupler arrays as cameras

A recent Economist article describes a novel camera design with the promise to be far thinner than those that exist now, with some novel features:

Not only do Dr Hajimiri’s cameras have no moving parts, they also lack lenses and mirrors—in other words, they have no conventional optics. That does away with the focal depth required by today’s cameras, enabling the new devices to be flat.

…

To mimic the image-making role of the optics in conventional cameras, the OPA manipulates incoming light using electrons. Dr Hajimiri compares the technique to peering through a straw while moving the far end swiftly across what is in front of you and recording how much light is in each strawful. In the OPA this scanning effect is created by manipulating the light collected by the grating couplers electronically, using devices called photodiodes. These place varying densities of electrons into the amplified light’s path through the OPA, either slowing it down or speeding it up as it travels. That shifts the arrival times of the peaks and troughs of the lightwaves. This “phase shifting” results in constructive interference between waves arriving from the desired direction, which amplifies them. Light coming from other directions, by contrast, is cancelled through destructive interference. Change the pattern of electrons and you change the part of the image field the OPA is looking at. Scanning the entire field in this way takes about ten nanoseconds (billionths of a second).

…

To zoom in for a close-up, the device selects a specific part of the image and scans it more thoroughly. To zoom out for a fish-eye, it scans the entire optical field, including light from the edges of that field. To change from zoom to fish-eye takes nanoseconds.

Doubtless, such cameras will have some interesting applications. Unfortunately, that will certainly include further entrenching the surveillance state — increasingly using devices too small to see.

Endless screams and wails

It’s selfish, but one thing I hate about living in central Toronto is that there are sirens of one type or another audible almost all day and all night long. Even when no sirens can actually be heard, I hear them screaming in my imagination.

The message: “It’s an emergency! But you can’t do anything about it” is frustrating and also a reminder of my feelings of pained impotence in response to climate change.