skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of May 6 in ~news
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Comment on Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of May 6 in ~news
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Comment on Seattle’s law mandating higher pay for food delivery workers is a case study in backfire economics in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentYeah, that tracks. But I see restaurants trying to get away with less staff nowadays. There are somewhat upscale places (as far as the food they’re selling) that work like a fast food restaurant...Yeah, that tracks. But I see restaurants trying to get away with less staff nowadays. There are somewhat upscale places (as far as the food they’re selling) that work like a fast food restaurant where you order at the counter, bus your own stuff at the end, and use disposable utensils. Also, during the pandemic they got people used to using your phone to order, so some places do that now. I’ve seen a service where the bill has a QR code you can use.
In hotels, daily maid service seems to be rare since the pandemic?
Businesses are complicated and it can be hard to tell what’s a loss leader. They will try stuff. It kind of doesn’t matter if it’s a loss leader or not; cutting costs is something they’re going to try. Gotta pay the rent somehow.
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Comment on Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of May 6 in ~news
skybrian Link ParentI’ve generally assumed that this is all about helping people in Gaza. But maybe I’m wrong about that?I’ve generally assumed that this is all about helping people in Gaza. But maybe I’m wrong about that?
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Comment on Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of May 6 in ~news
skybrian Link ParentI consider divestment to be a symbolic action taken by a university. It probably isn’t going to affect the behind-the-scenes negotiations between the Biden administration and the Israeli government.I consider divestment to be a symbolic action taken by a university. It probably isn’t going to affect the behind-the-scenes negotiations between the Biden administration and the Israeli government.
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Comment on Outdoor time is good for your kids' eyesight. Here's why. in ~health
skybrian Link ParentYeah, I’m not sure if I buy that. Maybe the idea is that you look around enough to make a difference? It seems like it would depend on the kid.Yeah, I’m not sure if I buy that. Maybe the idea is that you look around enough to make a difference? It seems like it would depend on the kid.
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Comment on Seattle’s law mandating higher pay for food delivery workers is a case study in backfire economics in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentMaybe some of those businesses didn’t pay their workers very much? Immigrants being willing to work for low wages is a thing. Rising wages change the economics of lots of businesses, sometimes to...Maybe some of those businesses didn’t pay their workers very much? Immigrants being willing to work for low wages is a thing.
Rising wages change the economics of lots of businesses, sometimes to the point where they no longer make sense and we do without. Full service gas stations, for example.
The US is adjusting to depend less on low-wage workers in a variety of ways, including automation, self-service, outsourcing to other countries with lower wages, and just paying a lot more for some things (healthcare, day care).
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Comment on Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of May 6 in ~news
skybrian LinkI Was Once a Student Protester. The Old Hyperbole Is Now Reality. - Zeynep Tufekci - New York Times - Gift Link … … … …I Was Once a Student Protester. The Old Hyperbole Is Now Reality. - Zeynep Tufekci - New York Times -
Turkey was still emerging from the long shadow of the 1980 coup. For years, protests were suppressed, sometimes with deadly force. Even a whiff of disruption could get Istanbul shut down, with armored vehicles blocking major roads. Trust me, I said, this is not what a police state looks like.
When I told my friends back home that Americans thought it was outrageous for the police even to show up at a demonstration, it was considered yet more evidence that I had been recruited by the C.I.A.
“The American police showed up to a protest and did nothing?” one of my friends scoffed. “Just watched? No arrests? No heads bashed in?” Yeah, right.
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I stayed in academia and made political resistance around the world one of my primary fields of study. The one lesson I learned above all else is that a disproportionate crackdown is often a protest movement’s most powerful accelerant.
I saw it in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, when a video of penned-in women being pepper-sprayed at close range turned a little-known demonstration into an idea with nationwide reach. I saw it in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in 2013 when people hoping to save the park from demolition were tear-gassed and arrested, their small encampment burned. It helped generate protests that rocked the nation. I saw it in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, when troopers showing up to a grieving community with armored cars and sniper rifles caused the outrage that fueled a national movement. And just think of what the photographs of police officers turning dogs and hoses on peaceful marchers did for the civil rights movement.
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Will authority figures rise to the moment and respond to the challenge with skilled leadership befitting institutions of higher learning? Or will they panic and enforce crackdowns way out of proportion to any actual threat?
It’s not looking good so far. At the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, state police officers in riot gear carrying M4 carbines — the kind of weapons used in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — and chemical-gas launchers were called in to disperse what many onlookers described as a small, peaceful group with a handful of tents. “None of these folks showed up when I lived on campus and white supremacists with tikki torches yelling ‘Jews will not replace us’ marched through campus as I hid my three kids,” Chad Wellmon, an associate professor at the university, wrote on social media.
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As hard as this may be to believe, absent the glare of publicity, these protests might have been unexceptional — the stuff of college life, for better or worse. Just last year, students at the University of California at Berkeley occupied a library slated for closing — bringing their tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses — for nearly three months. Congress didn’t see the need to hold hearings about it. In 2019, students at Johns Hopkins occupied a building for five weeks to protest the university’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its push for a private police force. Four students were arrested, but the administration quickly announced that the charges would be dropped. Why? Probably for the same reason that Police Chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Ga., once quietly arranged for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to be released from the city’s jail — against King’s wishes. He knew the clamor would subside and the protest would roll on to the next city.
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The truth is, protests are always messy, with incoherent or objectionable messages sometimes scattered in with eloquent pleas and impassioned testimony. The 1968 antiwar protesters may be celebrated now, but back then a lot of onlookers were horrified to hear people chanting in favor of a victory by Ho Chi Minh’s army. During the Iraq war, I attended demonstrations to which fringe political groups had managed to attach themselves, and I rolled my eyes at their unhinged slogans or crazy manifestoes.
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Outdoor time is good for your kids' eyesight. Here's why.
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Comment on Seattle’s law mandating higher pay for food delivery workers is a case study in backfire economics in ~finance
skybrian LinkSome complications that I don’t think have been considered: Some cities are much more dense than others, which changes the economics. People aren’t all the same. Delivery might make more sense for...Some complications that I don’t think have been considered:
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Some cities are much more dense than others, which changes the economics.
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People aren’t all the same. Delivery might make more sense for parents or if the customer has a disability.
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Delivery workers can do deliveries using different methods than their customers (bike messenger, e-bike, scooter) so they’re less affected by traffic and parking hassles.
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Restaurants can move closer to the customer. There are some “restaurants” that are just a kitchen and only do delivery orders. There are food trucks.
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Tastes can change. There might be new foods (or traditional foods that are newly popular) that are particularly suitable to delivery.
The ways that businesses change to improve efficiency aren’t necessarily all that high tech.
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Comment on The US Federal Reserve fears a bond meltdown in ~finance
skybrian LinkThere are assertions in this article that aren’t explained very well: That would be interesting if true, but it’s not obvious. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong graph, though. I’d like to see some...There are assertions in this article that aren’t explained very well:
[…] the two-year Treasury yield touched the dangerous 5% level. On previous occasions, such a rise in government debt yields led to a significant market correction.
That would be interesting if true, but it’s not obvious. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong graph, though. I’d like to see some evidence.
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Comment on Tiny electric trucks are coming to a bike lane near you in ~transport
skybrian LinkFrom the article: ...From the article:
“New Yorkers hate to see big trucks in our street, but at the same time, they’re ordering online a lot more,” said Ydanis Rodriguez, the city’s transportation commissioner. That dependency on delivery has only grown, with a daily onslaught of 2.4 (some say 3.7) million packages dropped off at doors every day. Cargi B is a prototype that could meet that demand; unlike commuter cargo bikes with their back wagons or even the Amazon tricycles we’re used to seeing, it’s “longer, wider, and able to hold more weight to have all of those boxes,” Rodriguez said.
For Amazon, FedEx, and everyone else, the DOT has adopted rules in late March that finally spell out how e-cargo bikes can operate in the city. The rules include some restrictions: The bikes can only go up to 15 miles per hour (slower than an electric Citi Bike), and they’re not allowed to idle on the sidewalk, ever. But the main question until now has always been: How big can they be? And in that respect, the rules are surprisingly generous: up to 16 feet long, seven feet high, and four feet wide. (The average New York City bike lane is somewhere around eight or nine feet wide.)
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Now the question is how cargo-bike companies will respond. Ben Morris, the founder of Coaster Cycles, a Bay Area–based cargo-bike manufacturer, says his company is now busy designing a vehicle that could meet the guidelines and satisfy what individual customers, not just delivery companies, might want. Compared to Europe, where cargo-bike sales are growing 50 percent each year, and where companies like FedEx and UPS are already using them, New York is the only place in the United States that has rules like this on the books, says Morris, and he has only heard of a few cities looking to join in.
He doesn’t expect cargo bikes to flood the streets tomorrow — or even this year. It’ll take time for companies to put an entirely new logistics chain in place, from batteries and cameras to drop-offs and training, and to create a bike that will meet what different delivery companies and individual consumers need.
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Tiny electric trucks are coming to a bike lane near you
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Comment on Carbon dioxide pipelines and underground injection can cut greenhouse gas, but community opposition is fierce in ~enviro
skybrian Link ParentI don't mean on their side in general, just for these particular projects. The question is whether to be in favor of the carbon capture schemes that the Biden administration wants to do.I don't mean on their side in general, just for these particular projects. The question is whether to be in favor of the carbon capture schemes that the Biden administration wants to do.
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Comment on Bread, how did they make it? Part IV: Markets, merchants and the tax man in ~humanities.history
skybrian (edited )LinkI thought this was interesting for its sketch of how some communities started using money: … … … …I thought this was interesting for its sketch of how some communities started using money:
For the farmers who need to sell their crops (for reasons we will get to in a moment) and purchase the things they need that they cannot produce, the merchant feels like an adversary: always pushing his prices to his best advantage. We expect this, but remember that our pre-modern farmers are just not that exposed to market interactions; most of their relationships are reciprocal, not transactional – the horizontal relationships we discussed before. The merchant’s ‘money-grubbing’ feels like a betrayal of trust in a society where you banquet your neighbors in the good years so they’ll help you in the bad years. The necessary function of a merchant is to transgress the ‘rules’ of village interactions which – and this resounds from the sources – the farmers tend to understand as being ‘cheated.’
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Such disdain appears, with varying justification, in the sources of every pre-modern agrarian society I’ve studied, to one degree or another. One commonplace of Greek and Roman thinking – despite these being very active, maritime societies – was that the first production of ships and the first sailing was in some essential way a profanation of the divine realm of the sea, a space humans ought not have ever ventured into – and certainly not for anything as mean as profit […] As far as elites were concerned, merchants didn’t seem to produce anything (the theory of comparative advantage which explains how merchants produce value without producing things by moving things to where they are most valued would have to wait until 1776 to be mentioned and the early 1800s to be properly explained) and so the only explanation for their wealth was that they made it by deception and trickery, distorting the ‘real’ value of things (this faulty assumption that the ‘real value’ of things is inherent in them, or a product […]
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The first place coinage gets used is where bullion was used – as exchange for big long-distance trade transactions. Indeed, coinage seemed to have started essentially as pre-measured bullion – “here is a hunk of silver, stamped by the king to affirm that it is exactly one shekel of weight.” Which is why, by the by, so many ‘money words’ (pounds, talents, shekels, drachmae, etc.) are actually units of weight. But if you want to collect taxes in money, you need the small farmers to have money. Which means you need markets for them to sell their grain for money and then those merchants need to be able to sell that grain themselves for money, which means you need urban bread-eaters who are buying bread with money, which means those urban workers need to be paid in money. And you can only get any of these people to use money if they can exchange that money for things they want, which creates a nasty first-mover problem.
We refer to that entire process as monetization – when I talk about economies being ‘monetized’ or ‘incompletely monetized’ that’s what I mean: how completely has the use of money penetrated through this society. It isn’t a one-way street, either. Early and High Imperial Rome seem to have been more completely monetized than the Late Roman Western Empire or the early Middle Ages (though monetization increases rapidly in the later Middle Ages).
Extraction, paradoxically, can solve the first mover problem in monetization, by making the state the first mover. If the state insists on raising taxes in money, it forces the farmers to sell their grain for money to pay the tax-man; the state can then take that money and use it to pay soldiers (almost always the largest budget-item in an ancient or medieval state budget), who then use the money to buy the grain the farmers sold to the merchants, creating that self-sustaining feedback loop which steadily monetizes the society. […]
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I should also note that monetization seems to have been an inherently fragile phenomenon; any disruption to the ability of the state to mint coins or in the trade and market system which ensured there was something to buy with those coins and the countryside would rapidly demonetize. Consequently monetization, especially among the lower classes who are the least exposed to coinage, tends to be an ebb-and-flow phenomenon over time.
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The irony of all of this extraction is that while it is often nasty and predatory, it can have some positive long-term effects, because the extra food that the farmers are being effectively forced to produce moves through either state-redistribution or market mechanisms to an increasing population of specialist non-farmers who in turn provide benefits for the broader society, sometimes including the farmers.
Metal tools, improved plows, large mills and bakeries would all be impossible without specialist smiths, wood-workers, architects, millers and bakers, for instance. And those merchants, moving food around from where it is common to where it is scarce can – if there are enough of them and trade is sufficiently unrestricted by things like wars – serve a valuable stabilizing role on the otherwise wildly destructive volatility of prices for things like food and other essentials. Moreover, specialization and trade encouraged distance travel, which might bring foreign disease, but might also bring new agricultural technologies.
If the extraction is done in coin, then the effects of monetization are layered on top of this. While we talked about the reasons why money provided at best an imperfect store of value for farmers, it was valuable in [other] ways, but only if the economy was deeply monetized such that even the very small purchases a farmer might make could be handled in cash. The great advantage of coinage is that it tremendously reduces transaction costs and allows for more complex business arrangements, which in turn enhance the overall efficiency of the underlying economy.
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Bread, how did they make it? Part IV: Markets, merchants and the tax man
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Comment on Carbon dioxide pipelines and underground injection can cut greenhouse gas, but community opposition is fierce in ~enviro
skybrian (edited )LinkFrom the article: … … … … … It’s an odd situation. If climate change is an emergency then I guess we should be on ExxonMobil’s side? At least in the US, these huge projects aren’t going to get...From the article:
[…] proposals to divert carbon dioxide from smokestacks to vast subterranean wells are regarded by the White House, the United Nations and the International Energy Agency as crucial to preserving any hope of meeting the world’s climate goals. The Biden administration’s plan to zero out emissions from the power grid by 2035 increasingly hinges on the success of colossal carbon capture deployment. The government has made billions of dollars of incentives available to motivate companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron to rapidly develop it.
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In Montana, the federal Bureau of Land Management in 2022 identified the Snowy River site as one of the first stretches of public land that may be suitable for carbon sequestration. ExxonMobil wants to inject 450 million cubic feet of carbon dioxide per day into the ground. The company is not identifying where that gas would come from, but one likely source is a carbon dioxide pipeline currently used to support oil and gas extraction projects (the pressurized gas is used to force fossil fuels to the surface).
That pipeline is connected to a large ExxonMobil natural gas plant 500 miles away in Wyoming. ExxonMobil says Snowy River’s storage capacity is equal to a year’s worth of polluting greenhouse gas from 1.6 million cars.
Legacy energy companies like ExxonMobil are eager to deploy technologies that could extend the life of fossil fuels by mitigating their role in global warming. Plus, federal incentives are potentially lucrative. The single Montana project could generate as much as $12.7 billion in federal tax subsidies. ExxonMobil took it over when it acquired carbon capture and pipeline developer Denbury for $4.9 billion in November.
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An ambitious proposal in the Midwest recently collapsed. The proposed 1,200-mile Heartland Greenway pipeline was supposed to span five states, bringing 15 million tons of carbon dioxide captured at ethanol plants each year to storage sites where it would be buried.
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Navigator CO2 canceled the Heartland Greenway project in October. It blamed “the unpredictable nature of the regulatory and government processes involved.”
Armstrong is one of many energy executives who said the project faltered because the developers spent too little time educating communities about the technology and talking through concerns. Companies more practiced in securing permits for pipelines, it was argued, would win local buy-in.
But it is not turning out that way for ExxonMobil in Montana.
Assurances from ExxonMobil that disruption would be minimal are met with worries that the project will disrupt the ecosystem, leave water tables vulnerable to the leaching of carbon dioxide, and create a safety hazard.
A rupture in the existing pipeline several years ago left one Carter County ranch looking as if a meteor had hit it. Pictures from 2018 show a deep, truck-size crater in the ground covered with what looks like dry ice residue, caused by the compressed carbon dioxide’s combustion.
Since that time, another major pipeline accident had dire consequences for the town of Satartia, Miss. The pipeline was also owned by Denbury, the ExxonMobil subsidiary.
The 2020 rupture filled the air above a section of the pipeline with dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide, resulting in a medical emergency that sent 45 people to the hospital with respiratory and other problems, according to a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation.
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Energy companies say they are undeterred.
Among the projects inching forward is one on a 140,000-acre coastal stretch between Houston and the petrochemical facilities of Port Arthur, Tex., called Bayou Bend, where Chevron plans to store as much as 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide. The company is hoping the proximity to factories will make the project more palatable to regulators and landowners.
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Developers promoting the projects are adamant that most of the work will happen out of sight, with the carbon buried as deep as 10,000 feet and hardly any industrial activity above ground.
“This has to happen,” said Chris Powers, Chevron’s vice president for carbon capture, utilization and storage, pointing to the forecasting models showing that carbon capture is crucial to curbing global warming. “To make this grow at scale, it is going to take hundreds of projects.”
It’s an odd situation. If climate change is an emergency then I guess we should be on ExxonMobil’s side? At least in the US, these huge projects aren’t going to get done without big energy companies doing them.
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Carbon dioxide pipelines and underground injection can cut greenhouse gas, but community opposition is fierce
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Comment on Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThis seems like an overreaction. We have only a vague idea of how it happened. Hopefully a postmortem will be published, and then we can talk about what they should have done. Compare with how...This seems like an overreaction. We have only a vague idea of how it happened. Hopefully a postmortem will be published, and then we can talk about what they should have done.
Compare with how crashes are handled in the airline industry. It seems that at least nobody died.
I would like to see easier ways for ordinary consumers to automatically back up Google-hosted data, though.
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Comment on Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ in ~tech
skybrian LinkHere’s the joint statement.Here’s the joint statement.
Investors do sometimes fund growing businesses. For example, VC’s fund startups. But for profitable businesses, the money flows in the opposite direction, from the business to investors, through dividends and stock buybacks.
So it seems like thinking of your tuition money as flowing to Israel is likely mostly an act of imagination. One could just as easily imagine the college getting a small amount of its funding from Israeli businesses. As a symbolic connection, maybe that’s equally objectionable?
What happens for any given college’s investments? We would need to dive into the details to see. I would guess that on average, foreign investments are a fairly small percentage, Israeli investments are a tiny chunk of those, and they’re mostly profitable businesses. Under those assumptions, direct donations would make a much bigger difference. But it would be interesting to see someone do the analysis for real.