Tag: society

This is Not a Growing Vibrant Economy

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Over the past 20 years, total employment in the US has grown by 11,767,000.

Over the same 20 years, employment among workers over 6o has increased by 11,879,000.

To put that in perspective, 101% of all the jobs gained in the past 20 years were among people who would have retired if the economy actually worked for people.

This might explain why the economists’ view of our economy, and that of ordinary people diverge so sharply.

To quote Douglas Adams, “This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” 

What is going on, at least if you don’t buy into the rosy scenario promulgated by the St. Louis Fed, is that older people are working longer, because life has become more more precarious, with the end of defined benefit pensions, Wall Street looting of defined contributions (IRA, 401(K), etc.), and the general fall in wages over the past 45 years.

So people CAN’T retire, and younger workers are finding that the jobs that they would ordinarily get during their careers are not opening up.

It is a recipe for social unrest and extremism, but the green pieces of paper are quite happy:

Total U.S. employment grew by 11,767,000, or 8.5%, in the 20 years ending in December 2020. All that growth—11,879,000, or 101% of the total—was due to increased employment of people age 60 and older. Meanwhile, the net employment change over the past two decades of people ages 16-59 was -112,000 (-1% of the total change), despite this younger group being 3.8 times as large as the older group in December 2000 and still 2.4 times as large in December 2020. (See the figure below above.)

What’s Driving This Outcome

This age-skewed labor-market outcome was the result of two differences between the groups:

  • The older population (60 and older) grew much faster than the younger population (16-59).
  • The employment-to-population (E-P) ratio among those 60 and older increased significantly while the E-P ratio among the younger population declined, on balance.

With the exception of the large decline in the E-P ratio of the younger population, which is difficult to predict in the years ahead, the basic trend of rising employment among older workers is likely to continue for some time for the following reasons:

  • The older population is likely to continue growing faster than the younger group.
  • The E-P ratio of the 60 and older group is likely to increase further as the health and educational attainment of older people continues to improve and the demand for older workers persists.

Tweet of the Day

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THE SEVEN SECRETS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE

1. Private school
2. Legacy Ivy admission
3. Nepotism hire
4. Seed capital from family
5. Club memberships
6. Personal assistant, nanny, ghost writer
7. Journalists who ask, “What’s your secret?” and uncritically publish the answer

— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) November 26, 2019

This is what it means when I say that someone was born on 3rd base, and thought that they hit a triple.

The problem with aristocracy is that we grant money and power to drooling idiots who won the birth lottery.

Megan McCain, Communist

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McCain: “I started getting angry that conservatives in particular, given we are the party of family values.. that we are leaving women in this country without the capacity and ability to heal physically [after childbirth]”

— Emily Peck (@EmilyRPeck) January 4, 2021

Lovely

It’s axiomatic that conservatives suddenly become liberals when the business of governing touches upon them and theirs.

We saw this with Sandra Day O’Connor, where her reputation for moderation was better described by narcissism:  If she had been effected by it, whether it be sexism or reproductive rights, she was suddenly moderate.

About people who weren’t her, and did not look like her or live a life like her, it’s back to conservatism.

And now we see Meghan McCain doing the same thing.

After having a baby, she realizes that there needs to be some sort of regulation mandating paid maternity leave.

Socialism for me, and capitalism for thee.

If you are morally incapable of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes unless it happened to you, you might be a conservative.

The Tuskegee Vaccine

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Over at Stat, a medical news web site, they are calling for giving priority to giving any new vaccines to peoples of color. 

Taken at face value this seems like a good idea, but when one considers the fact that all of the vaccine candidates have been developed on an accelerated schedule, with Pfizer’s recently hyped entry using a technique never used in human beings before, one can’t help but wonder if the real push for this is to use the minority community as guinea pigs, because even if some of the will be effective and without significant side effects, it is likely that some of them will not be successes:

As the U.S. edges closer to approving a vaccine for Covid-19, a difficult decision is emerging as a central issue: Should people in hard-hit communities of color receive priority access to it, and if so, how should that be done?

Frontline health workers, elderly people, and those with chronic conditions that make them especially vulnerable to Covid-19 are likely to be at the head of the line, but there is also support among public health experts for making special efforts to deliver the vaccine early on to Black, Latino, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, and Native American people — who have experienced higher rates of serious illness and death from the coronavirus.

“Having a racial preference for a Covid-19 vaccine is not only ethically permissible, but I think it’s an ethical imperative,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “The reason is both because of historic structural racism that’s resulted in grossly unequal health outcomes for all kinds of diseases, and because Covid-19 has so disproportionately impacted the lives of people of color.”

………

There is also concern that some groups, especially Black people, might be hesitant to be among the first to get a vaccine, given the history of mistreatment of Black patients in medical research.

“The other challenge you have with saying, ‘We want African Americans to step up first,’  is that we don’t want people to feel that they’re being guinea pigs,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “We need to be very careful. We don’t want to give people the perception that they’re being experimented upon.”

Gee, you think? 

The criteria for distribution should be fairly straight-forward:  Where you have large outbreaks, the vaccine goes first.

Osama bin Laden Won

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QED

It’s September 11, and it’s been 19 years since the attacks, and I thought that this would be a good time look back and try to figure out what it all means.

I keep going back to Eric Frank Russell’s science fiction classic book Wasp, in which the protagonist is sent behind enemy lines to provoke reaction, and it is that reaction which harms the enemy.

Bin Laden knew that he could never defeat the United States, but that he could provoke a response that would cripple the country.

Think of the statecraft equivalent of anaphylactic shock or a Cytokine storm.

Al Qaeda won in the years following 9/11.

You could argue that he won when Bush invaded Iraq, trapping the US military in a quagmire, but I think that it happened when Barack Obama, who ironically enough presided over bin Laden’s killing, normalized the excesses of the Bush administration’s policies of drone terror against brown people and the pervasive surveillance state.

In either case, what has followed in our society has flowed from that day, and out society is by far the worse for this.

We were on an unsustainable path before the attacks, and the descent has only accelerated since then.

Cheap Harleys at Estate Sales

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A Minnesota biker who attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has died of covid-19 — the first fatality from the virus traced to the 10-day event that drew more than 400,000 to South Dakota.

The man was in his 60s, had underlying conditions and was hospitalized in intensive care after returning from the rally, said Kris Ehresmann, infectious-disease director at the Minnesota Department of Health. The case is among at least 260 cases in 11 states tied directly to the event, according to a survey of health departments by The Washington Post.

Epidemiologists believe that figure is a significant undercount, due to the resistance of some rallygoers to testing and the limited contact tracing in some states. As a result, the true scope of infections stemming from the rally that ran from Aug. 7 to Aug. 16 is unlikely to ever be known. Public health officials had long expressed concern over the decision to move forward with the annual event, believed to be the largest held anywhere in the U.S. since the pandemic shelved most large-scale gatherings.

Now, just over two weeks after the conclusion of the rally, the Midwest and the Dakotas in particular are seeing a spike in coronavirus cases even as infections decline or plateau in the rest of the country. South Dakota’s seven-day averages for new cases stood at 347 on Sept. 2 compared to 107 two weeks earlier and its total caseload was 14,003, up from 10,566, according to The Post’s tracking. In North Dakota, the seven-day averages for new cases was 257, up from 142 two weeks earlier and its total caseload was 12,267, compared to 8,968.

If you are looking for a deal on a low mileage Harley, you are in luck.
Not so much the idiots who went to Sturgis.

H/t BS at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

A New Opiate for the Masses?

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Caitlin Johnstone has a very interesting take on QAnon.

Specifically, she thinks that it is a deliberate attempt to sideline the. “Revolutionary Impulse,”.

If you subscribe to Marx’s theories on religion, there, as Zathras would say, “Symmetry.” There is an astonishing level of similarity between the tin-foil hat brigade and the more extreme religions:

The U.S. president has moved from tacit endorsement and evading questions on the toxic QAnon psyop to directly endorsing and supporting it, telling reporters “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” and saying they’re just people who love their country and don’t like seeing what’s happening in places like Portland, Chicago and New York City.

Asked about the driving theory behind QAnon — that Trump is waging a covert war against a satanic pedopheliac baby-eating Deep State —Trump endorsed the idea but reframed it by saying that he’s leading a fight against “a radical left philosophy.”

………

I write against QAnon periodically for the exact same reason I write against the plutocratic media: it’s an obvious propaganda construct designed to manufacture support for the status quo among people who otherwise would not support it. It presents itself as an exciting movement where the little guy is finally rising up and throwing off the chains of the tyrannical forces which have been exploiting and oppressing us, yet in reality all it’s doing is telling a discontented sector of the population to relax and “trust the plan” and put all their faith in the leader of the US government.

As the United States becomes less religious over time, classic Marxist analysis would suggest that something else would take its place, and that capital would support this to distract the masses.

QAnon does seem to check all the right boxes.

Quote of the Day

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In a Collapsed State, the Market Rules to the Exclusion of Any Other Concerns

—The Baffler

Specifically, the author maintains that the free market fundamentalism of the United States will lead to an societal collapse:

………

To illustrate his point, [journalist Robert Kaplan, author of “The Coming Anarchy”] Kaplan traveled to the West African nation of Sierra Leone. In the thick of a decade-long civil war, Sierra Leone was the poster child for failed states. The term had come into general use after 1992, when it appeared in a Foreign Policy article written by two U.S. State Department officials, Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner (not to be confused with Steve Rattner, a controversial figure involved in the 2008 economic bailout).

………

Against this backdrop, Kaplan described Sierra Leone, a country once known as the Athens of West Africa, as a bellwether for the “withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war.” While critics charged Kaplan with trading in racist tropes, he made it clear that this Hobbesian future was not confined to any single continent or country. “West Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world,” he predicted.

What Kaplan missed was the organization behind Sierra Leone’s apparent chaos. For ordinary citizens, wartime Sierra Leone was chaotic, but the economic system was organized, if brutal. Sierra Leoneans called it the Sell Game: rival armies looting the countryside while vying for control of the country’s illicit diamond trade.

Sierra Leone’s Sell Game exemplifies state failure’s central characteristic, as the term has evolved. In the words of Robert I. Rotberg, former director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, in a collapsed state, “the market rules to the exclusion of any other concerns.”

………

Yet the prescience of Kaplan’s Big Idea is truly remarkable. As Kaplan predicted in 1994, West Africa in the 1990s was a dire warning of global trends now hitting our shores. Not the amputations—although who knows how far things will go—but the withering of the nation-state, the rise of tribalism, big man politics, and above all, the Sell Game.

Welcome to the Failed State of America.

I tend to refer to Neoliberal policies as, “Eating our own seed corn,” but this seems to be a bit more intellectually rigorous.

I’ve Heard of Truck Nuts, but Not Valve-Stem Cover Penises

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Parked next to me


Wait ……… Is that what I think it is?


Yes, it is, and it is circumcised

I picked up Nat from camp this morning, the counselors had a camping night together, and she wanted to pick up a bite at the local convenience store, Wally’s Country Store.

So, I parked while she masked up and went in.

I looked to my left, and noticed something odd about the car next to me:  The valve stem covers appeared to be penises.

This, much like truck nutz, it appears to be a metaphor for American society today.

They are almost Trumpian in their crassness, though I am aware that truck nutz predate Donald Trump’s political aspirations by decades.

How is this a thing?

A Huge Part of the Problem

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One of the reasons that police have become a hyper-militarized occupying power is that police hiring increasingly draws from the military.

This means that rather than attempting to protect and serve, police increasingly attempt to, “Dominate the battlespace,” which is antithetical to proper policing:

Calls for the demilitarization of police have gained new prominence in the light of the latest wave of anti-police brutality protests sweeping the United States. But in a country where one-fifth of the police force is ex-military — including George Floyd’s killer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, and Robert McCabe, one of the two officers responsible for knocking down Martin Gugino, the seventy-five-year-old protester in Buffalo — demilitarization won’t come easy.

Many police officers are themselves former members of the military who picked up a career in policing after returning from war zones. But this isn’t the only problem. Loaded down with cast-off gear from the Pentagon — body armor, bayonets, automatic rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles, and surveillance drones — police officers are more likely to regard peaceful protestors as enemy combatants, particularly when the Pentagon’s own top official refers to their protest scenes as “battlespace.”

But getting police officers out of the business of being an occupying military force —whether perpetually or in times of crisis — will also require much closer screening of job applicants who are veterans and elimination of their favored treatment in police department hiring.

………

Policing is the third most common occupation for men and women who served in the military. It is an option widely encouraged by career counselors and veterans’ organizations like the American Legion. As a result, several hundred thousand veterans are now wearing a badge of some sort. Though veterans comprise just 6 percent of the US population, veterans now working in law enforcement number 19 percent of the total force. Their disproportionate representation is due, in part, to preferential hiring requirements, mandated by state or federal law. In addition, under the Obama administration, the Department of Justice provided local police departments with tens of millions of dollars to fund veterans-only positions.

As noted by the Marshall Project in its 2017 report, “When Warriors Put On the Badge,” this combination of hiring preferences and special funding has made it harder to “build police forces that resemble and understand diverse communities.” The beneficiaries have been disproportionately white, because 60 percent of all enlisted men and women are not people of color.

………

Tougher to tackle is the issue of ex-military personnel being over-represented in the ranks of domestic law enforcers. When you leave the service, says Danny Sjursen, a West Point graduate who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, “there’s no de-programming…They just load you up on meds and then you go straight to the police academy.” According to Sjursen, “military-style of policing is based on notion that high-crime areas should be treated like occupied countries.” So the “military-to-police pipeline” increases the chances “that a guy comes back to Baltimore, Camden, or Detroit and functions the same way we did when occupying Kabul or Baghdad.”

What Animal is Known for Leaving a Sinking Ship?

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Well, the rats are bailing out in San Francisco, as the wealthy look to move out of the city now that they have made it into a hellscape of privilege:

Amid the depths of a global pandemic and financial downturn, the demand for real estate is unexpectedly rocketing in wealthy regions outside San Francisco, reports Bloomberg. Agents say that demand is soaring in affluent areas around the Bay Area such as Napa, Marin and further afield in Carmel, as people who have the means look to get away from the city. Meanwhile, the market in San Francisco and Alameda County is still well below where it was last year.

Elsewhere, Lake Tahoe has also seen a surge in real estate interest. The prospect of living out of the city on an alpine lake while maintaining a career is appealing for a new generation of young buyers, as many tech companies have signaled that remote work may be the new norm for a long time.

“I’ve never seen the demand higher for Marin County real estate than when COVID-19 hit,” Sotheby’s Josh Burns told Bloomberg this week, as real estate agents see a surprising uptick in wealthy buyers leaving San Francisco.

………

Meanwhile, the rental market in San Francisco has dropped significantly, with rates for one-bedroom apartments in the city dropping by 9.2% since June 2019, and hitting a three-year low.

However, buying a new home in an isolated haven in a nearby bucolic county is not an option for lower-income San Francisco residents, and some believe the trend is only exacerbating the wealth divide.

“This is an example of another way the most advantaged, the most affluent have isolated themselves from this latest crisis,” Patrick Sharkey, a sociology professor at Princeton University, told Bloomberg. “It’s a very small segment of the population that has another home that they can go take off to.”

The wealthy have made San Francisco unlivable, and not that it is, they are moving on leaving devastation in their wake.

The wealthy are to community as my cats are to their litter box.

Good Riddance

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Seriously, having Google running your life sounds even worse than George Orwell’s worst nightmares:

When Google sibling Sidewalk Labs announced in 2017 a $50 million investment into a project to redevelop a portion of Toronto’s waterfront, it seemed almost too good to be true. Someday soon, Sidewalk Labs promised, Torontonians would live and work in a 12-acre former industrial site in skyscrapers made from timber—a cheaper and more sustainable building material. Streets paved with a new sort of light-up paver would let the development change its design in seconds, able to play host to families on foot and to self-driving cars. Trash would travel through underground chutes. Sidewalks would heat themselves. Forty percent of the thousands of planned apartments would be set aside for low- and middle-income families. And the Google sister company founded to digitize and techify urban planning would collect data on all of it, in a quest to perfect city living.

………

But Sidewalk Labs’ vision was in trouble long before the pandemic. Since its inception, the project had been criticized by progressive activists concerned about how the Alphabet company would collect and protect data, and who would own that data. Conservative Ontario premier Doug Ford, meanwhile, wondered whether taxpayers would get enough bang from the project’s bucks. New York-based Sidewalk Labs wrestled with its local partner, the waterfront redevelopment agency, over ownership of the project’s intellectual property and, most critically, its financing. At times, its operators seemed confounded by the vagaries of Toronto politics. The project had missed deadline after deadline.

The partnership took a bigger hit last summer, when Sidewalk Labs released a splashy and even more ambitious 1,524-page master plan for the lot that went well beyond what the government had anticipated, and for which the company pledged to spend up to $1.3 billion to complete. The redevelopment group wondered whether some of Sidewalk Labs’ proposals related to data collection and governance were even “in compliance with applicable laws.” It balked at a suggestion that the government commit millions to extend public transit into the area, a commitment, the group reminded the company, that it could not make on its own.

Seriously, giving your city to a profit driven ghoulish mega-corporation seems to be hihg on the list of really stupid ideas.

Good that it is over.

Tweets of the Day

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HTML was originally developed as a mark up language for non-programmers. It was highly successful as democratizing web development. And then it was replaced with more powerful tools that exclude non-programmers.

This change was as predictable as it was bad.

— Nikkita Bourbaki (@futurebird) April 30, 2020

The real reason we have brogrammers creating more obscure and syntactically incomprehensible languages is that they want to preserve their priesthood. The results are as negative as they are inevitable:

C was created by legendary male hackers and 40+ years later it is still impossible to write safe C code. COBOL was created by women who were pioneers in computer science, runs the world financial system, and you only hear about it when the world breaks.

— woolie (@woolie) April 10, 2020

Mind Officially Blown

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I just came across this analysis of the toilet paper shortage, and it makes a very strong argument that it is not primarily hoarding.

It turns out that there are two highly distinct toilet paper markets, the home market and the commercial market, and the products are different. Typically, they aren’t even made in the same paper mills.

Because people are staying home, the consumption of home toilet paper is up by as much as 40% because they are not using restaurant and workplace bathrooms and toilet paper.

The mills cannot retool quickly, so there is a shortage.

There’s another, entirely logical explanation for why stores have run out of toilet paper — one that has gone oddly overlooked in the vast majority of media coverage. It has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with supply chains. It helps to explain why stores are still having trouble keeping it in stock, weeks after they started limiting how many a customer could purchase.

In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports.

Georgia-Pacific, a leading toilet paper manufacturer based in Atlanta, estimates that the average household will use 40% more toilet paper than usual if all of its members are staying home around the clock. That’s a huge leap in demand for a product whose supply chain is predicated on the assumption that demand is essentially constant. It’s one that won’t fully subside even when people stop hoarding or panic-buying.

Woah.

I See This as a Benefit of the Pandemic

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There have been a lot of changes driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, most have been destructive and negative.

However, I consider it to be a positive that companies are dropping “influencers” as they try to reduce costs.

Call me puritanical about this, but I think that the whole influencer thing to be basically a parasitic activity, as well as being a mark of the general decline of our society, so the fact that it is going away, even if just for a short time, to be a good thing:

Some large fashion and beauty retailers have paused affiliate link programmes as the coronavirus pandemic depresses sales, BoF has learned, throwing a cornerstone of the social media economy into turmoil.

Macy’s, Dillard’s, T.J. Maxx and Ulta Beauty were among the chains to at least temporarily end the practice this week, denying influencers and media companies of the sales commissions they receive from posting links to products. These links have become a multi-billion dollar ecosystem, serving as the main source of income for many influencers and a lucrative revenue stream for media brands.

But with stores closed in most major cities, and consumers cutting back their spending on fashion, retailers are slashing costs. Millions of US workers have been laid off across all industries in the last two weeks, and some economists are predicting a global recession as bad or worse than the downturn that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Dillard’s told its affiliate partners in an email that “the decision was made due to the impact of Covid-19 and the realignment of marketing strategy.”

Now, influencers find themselves scrambling to figure out how to supplement that once-reliable source of income.

The Missing Story of the Iowa Clusterf%$#

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Dave Dayen makes what should be the leading story of the Iowa vote count clusterf%$#, that this is a manifestation of what he calls the. “Bullsh%$ Economy,” where economic decisions are on the basis of connections, and not competence or value.

This is important.

The failure of the ACRONYM subsidiary SHADOW is not an issue of the inherent problems with software, it is an issue of corruption and self-dealing:

In one sense, the Iowa caucus debacle will last just a couple news cycles. We have the data on paper, tabulated in front of tens of thousands of witnesses, and it merely needs to be collated. Eventually it will, and though the damage to the news cycle is irreparable—Joe Biden’s disappointing outcome has been diluted in particular—the process will go on with an accurate count. Caucuses are horrible and probably a dead letter, but for different reasons than the delayed count; the real problems arise from the electoral college-style distortions between the initial percentages and the final delegates, and the tacit vote suppression from forcing people to attend a two-hour meeting on a weeknight when they might be working.

 But the spectacle has highlighted a much more consequential problem in America, something I have coined the bullsh%$ economy. We’ve seen elements of it all over the place. When MoviePass offered unlimited screenings for ten bucks a month, when Uber gets an $82 billion valuation for a low-margin taxi business it has never made a dime on, when WeWork implodes after the slightest scrutiny into its numbers, that’s the bullsh%$ economy at work. We have seen the farcical bullsh%$ of Juicero and the consequential bullsh%$ of Theranos.

………

 The story of Shadow, makers of the app that utterly failed to deliver in Iowa, is a perfect example of the bullsh%$ economy. It starts by being a tech solution to a non-existent problem. Iowa counties are compact; the largest one has a landmass of 973 square miles, and it’s close to twice the size of the average county in the state. Even there, no major city is more than a 30-minute drive from the county seat, Algona. Even with that ancient technology of the car, you could have each of the 99 counties report final results within a couple hours of the end of the caucuses.

………

 Shadow is a subsidiary of ACRONYM, a non-profit with lots of connections to the Democratic consultancy, including veterans of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager who sits on the ACRONYM board. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked Plouffe on a late-night panel about his participation, and as he swiveled in his chair uncomfortably he disclaimed any knowledge of Shadow or the app.

 Similarly, ACRONYM issued a statement positioning themselves as a mere investor in Shadow, without knowledge of their inner workings. But last year, ACRONYM announced they were “launching” Shadow, as part of an effort to help Democrats “win” the Internet and run better campaigns. The head of ACRONYM, Tara McGowan, is married to a Pete Buttigieg strategist.

 All this doublespeak is a hallmark of the bullsh%$ economy. Your mind doesn’t have to travel to the nether regions of conspiracy, but you can hardly blame people for doing so. This is reflective of the rolling incompetence covered by confidence within the modern economy, especially when you sprinkle on the labor-saving promise of techtopia. When the bullsh%$ economy fails, it robs people’s belief in the basic bargain of commerce, the idea that you get what you pay for, that companies operate in good faith to provide quality service. But when placed in contact with politics, it just demolishes faith in the system. The bullsh%$ economy spurs distrust.

 So there we have it: an unnecessary app that narrows the supply chain of votes to the central tabulator, and when the supply chain fails it creates chaos. We see this all over our economy; useless services, narrow supply chains, magnified fiascos. As long as confidence men lie to the right people, they can gain entry and take on enormous responsibility, until it all falls apart. We live in a country where you can spout New Age consultant speak, charm a large foreign investor, and make off to your guitar-shaped living room with over a billion dollars, paid effectively to go away. That’s WeWork guru Adam Neumann’s story, and increasingly it’s our story.

(%$ mine)

Our economy, and our society, is deeply, and possibly ineluctably, corrupt.

It needs to be fixed, which means that many of these people need to be aggressively prosecuted.

Missing the Point

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A number of publications have reported with much fanfare that Bernie Sanders is leading the field in donations from active duty military personnel by a large margin.

This misses the point, which is that we as a society should not give a flying f%$# in a rolling doughnut about this.

The fact that it is a major story, and cast as a major victory for the Sanders campaign, is a reflection of a hyper militarized, and hence highly dysfunctional, society.

The Other Problem With Self-Driving Cars

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There are a number of claims as to the benefits, and one, that it would make transportation more efficient, has been shown to be objectively false in a study.

The study was fairly straightforward, they have people cars with drivers, and studied how their vehicle use changed.

Many more trips and many more miles driven, meaning more congestion and more waste and pollution:

A few years ago, Mustapha Harb realized there was a problem in his field of research about how autonomous cars will change the way people travel. The solution to the problem he settled on was as simple as it was revealing.

………

One did not have to look far for studies and articles suggesting fleets of self-driving cars could, for example, reduce traffic. These techno-utopian articles claimed the same highways we use today could, with slight modifications, accommodate many more autonomous vehicles than they do human-driven cars. AVs could, using more precise control systems, follow one another at much closer distances. Similarly, lanes could be narrowed, accommodating perhaps six lanes where there are only five today.

These promises were, and remain, the foundation upon which AV utopianism has been built: a greener, safer, faster, and more pleasant transportation future just around the corner.

But, Harb found, these promises couldn’t be checked. After all, self-driving cars didn’t exist yet.

Harb, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was intimately familiar with the research already done on the subject in his field. Most of it consisted of surveying which, while far from perfect, was the best approach available.

“You would send people a survey,” Harb described, “like, hey, there’s a self-driving car in the future, how do you think your travel will change in the future?”

These studies, flawed as they were, found something very different from the rosy future AV companies wanted investors and the public to imagine. They found reason to believe AVs would drastically increase the number of vehicle miles traveled, commonly shortened to “VMT” in academic literature.

And the more vehicles miles traveled, all else being equal, the more traffic and emissions we can expect, canceling out many of the AV’s touted benefits.

………

While the survey results were potentially alarming, it was difficult for researchers like Harb to put too much stock into them. Some surveys predicted only a few percentage points increase in VMT in a self-driving car future. Others, upwards of 90 percent.

………

But his advisor, Professor Joan Walker, had an idea. What if they hired chauffeurs to drive random people around?

The chauffeur, Walker outlined, will do the driving for you. And, just like the most optimistic AV future of fully autonomous robot cars zooming around, you don’t even have to be in the car.

“All these things the self-driving car can do for you in the future,” Harb summarized, “a chauffeur can do for you today.”

The concept, once it reached published form, elicited praise and jealousy from other researchers. “It’s delightfully clever and brazenly simple,” gushed Don MacKenzie, head of their Sustainable Transportation Lab at the University of Washington. “I wish I had thought of it.”

………

For example, the chauffeur could bring the kids to soccer practice and back or drive a friend home and then return to the house. They could even pick up groceries and make a Target run to simulate a driverless car future where items could get bought online and loaded into your AV by a store employee before returning home.

Harb readily admits the study is not perfect, nor is it likely to prove the most accurate predictor of what our autonomous vehicle future looks like. But it is, by many estimates, the best first approximation we have.

And that approximation is, in key ways, a vision of things to come.

Harb thought they would see people sending their cars out more than if they were driving themselves, something like a 20 or 30 percent increase in VMT with the chauffeurs. Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but towards the middle of the wide range of the results the surveys had suggested.

He was wrong. The subjects increased how many miles their cars covered by a collective 83 percent when they had the chauffeur versus the week prior.

To put these findings in perspective, when researchers looked into the impact Uber and Lyft have had on urban congestion, they reported an increase in VMT in the single digits. San Francisco, which has seen some of the largest percentage increase of cars driving around in its downtown thanks to Uber and Lyft, had an increased VMT of 12.8 percent.

Knowing how much gridlock and traffic those rideshare cars have added to the city, imagine six and a half times as much car driving as that is almost impossible.

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But none of the researchers Jalopnik spoke to believe those flaws detract from the overarching, real-world conclusion: AVs will change people’s behavior in profound ways. MacKenzie called it “probably the best data we have based on actual, measured behavior.”

There are places for self-driving cars, but the reality envisioned by folks like Elon Musk is a looks to be rather dystopian.