Sustainable Yada Yada Yada

How Aldi can have such low prices: minimize staff – a full-size grocery store has about six staff on duty groceries are shelved in their boxes – they just more or less cut the fronts off large and easy to find bar codes for scanning a refundable quarter deposit to get a shopping cart? in my humble opinion maybe this meant something decades ago but it is a gimmick now, other than maybe in…

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The latest paper from Johan Rockstrom and company lays out climate scenarios through the year 3,000. There is plenty still to be figured out about the scientific details, but some major uncertainties are the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases – in other words, how much warming will occur per unit of emissions – and how likely the major…

Here’s a report called the GLOBAL JUSTICE REPORT: A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. The big name on the report is Thomas Picketty. This is an academic report – despite their insistence that it is concrete and practical, it is definitely more of a vision along with a catalog of policies that could be pursued to support that vision. Part of it is about a global wealth…

Johan Rockstrom and company have a new paper talking about possible trajectories for the climate through the year 3000. There is a fair amount here, but one thing I find interesting is that while they are not talking about the highest emissions scenarios anymore (SSP3 under the CMIP6 framework), they are looking at a range of equilibrium climate sensitivities (ECS), and this makes a big…

This article says remote work, rather than AI, explains much of the recent slow hiring of new college graduates. It kind of makes sense to me – older managers came up in an environment where building relationships face-to-face was the foundation of productive teams. In my earlier career years, the unspoken expectation was that we spent more than 8 hours in the office, and a lot of that was…

This is the first story or post I personally have read on the IPCC’s Coupled Intercomparison Project (CMIP) round 7. I’m sure people who do climate science for a living are all over it. But I am not exactly a layperson – I’m an engineer who should aware of and probably incorporating climate science into my daily work. And not to brag but I am an engineer who has done Ph.D.-level research on how…

There are some small towns in Delaware that allow non-human “persons” such as trusts and corporations to vote in local elections. This raises concerns because corporations out-number humans in Delaware and the humans probably don’t want the likes of, say, Chase Bank voting. (Not to say the likes of Chase Bank do not have an influence over elections and public policy everywhere in the United…

Here’s an interesting article that goes into the basics of forecasting sports win probabilities (the World Cup in this case) with machine learning. It doesn’t go into code, just concepts. Then it goes into all the different ways you could modify the straight-up math, including taking into account various human opinions and the forecasts of casinos (which are probably running algorithms similar to…

The International Energy Agency has a deep dive on global electric vehicle sales. Sales everywhere have accelerated sharply over the last five years. Of the countries covered, only Norway has gotten close to 100% of all new sales. Other countries that are over 50% are Nepal, Iceland, China, and Singapore. Sales are particularly lagging in the U.S. and Canada. The IEA article has a visualization,…

I think of “rewilding” as something that happens outside the city, but this literature review looks at how the concept could apply in an urban context. Exploring rewilding as a potential design approach to improve urban biodiversity: A systematic review of the literature Urban biodiversity continues to decline under rapid urbanization. Although biophilic design and green–blue infrastructure…

This might be a bit of a rambling post. I’m thinking about data centers and energy. First of all, we have a sudden boom in energy demand caused by AI, and the fossil fuel industry is not able to meet it. The amount of energy fossil fuels can supply us may have peaked in a physical sense, in an economic sense, and an environmental sense (i.e., finally seeping into the thick skulls of public…

This is a new entry in the blog Construction Physics‘s series on construction productivity. They argue that one reason it is hard to achieve economies of scale in manufactured housing is that there is a relatively small transformation from the raw materials to the finished product. And then transportation costs are high. This contrasts with an industry like oil refining, chemicals, or electronics…

Our World in Data has updated stats on causes of death worldwide. The focus of the written article and analysis is children, but they have the stats for all ages. This is certainly a grim topic, but it is also very informative in terms of what policies a government might want to support if it actually cared about its people. The visualizations in the article are great and you should look at…

Urbanomics blog has a summary of ideas for redistributing the (potential? expected?) wealth gained from AI, rather than letting it all flow to already deep-pocketed corporations and investors. “Clever tax reforms, such as levies on corporate profits that are above a normal return on capital, on land and on natural resources” inheritance taxes “public wage insurance” (I think we like to call…

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The people running Palantir and other companies focused on military/security/surveillance applications of information technology seem to have, at best, a faith-based belief that the United States can do no wrong. At worst, their beliefs are based on eugenics and white Christian nationalist attitudes which simply have no basis in fact or logic. I don’t…

Edmund Phelps, a Nobel prize-winning economist, is not alive to defend himself against this Breitbart article claiming to be based on his ideas: This is where incoming Fed chairman Kevin Warsh’s argument about artificial intelligence and monetary policy fits naturally. Warsh has argued that AI represents a genuine supply-side productivity shock, not merely demand-pull inflation dressed up as…

We’ve all had a handful of cases of what we are pretty sure was food poisoning, along with a few hundred or thousand cases of more mild…gastrointestinal distress, to use a euphemism. This article from Philadelphia magazine says many people may have some misconceptions. We tend to blame the last meal we had before the symptoms start. But the microorganisms that cause a serious case of food…