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“Storage Is A Game Changer”

May 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Tesla is officially no longer solely an EV company but a home-battery outfit as well, which could make for a smoother grid and be a boon for alternative energies. Elon Musk should be pleased, as should those early tinkerers who began repurposing his electric-car batteries for makeshift home conversions. Perhaps the biggest benefit, as Chris Mooney of the Washington Post astutely points out, is the ability to store wind and solar power. An excerpt:

“Storage is a game changer,” said Tom Kimbis, vice president of executive affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, in a statement. That’s for many reasons, according to Kimbis, but one of them is that “grid-tied storage helps system operators manage shifting peak loads, renewable integration, and grid operations.” (In fairness, the wind industry questions how much storage will be needed to add more wind onto the grid.)

Consider how this might work using the example of California, a state that currently ramps up natural gas plants when power demand increases at peak times, explains Gavin Purchas, head of the Environmental Defense Fund’s California clean energy program.

In California, “renewable energy creates a load of energy in the day, then it drops off in the evening, and that leaves you with a big gap that you need to fill,” says Purchas. “If you had a plenitude of storage devices, way down the road, then you essentially would be able to charge up those storage devices during the day, and then dispatch them during the night, when the sun goes down. Essentially it allows you to defer when the solar power is used.”•

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“I Think The Whole System Is Autonomous”

April 30, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

At the Gawker site Phase Zero, William H. Arkin conducted a very interesting Q&A with Harper’s Washington Editor, Andrew Cockburn, who’s just published what’s a sadly timely book Kill Chain, which focuses on the U.S. droning program. Although the author doesn’t believe military droning will become automated, he feels the bigger-picture machinery of the system already is. Remote war has been a dream pursued since Tesla and now it’s a global reality. One exchange:

William M. Arkin:

The CIA’s drone program, the President’s drone program, Congressionally approved, not approved, tacitly accepted: almost every description of the drone program makes it sound like it isn’t the United States and its foreign policy. Is that the consequence of something unique to drones?

Andrew Cockburn:

It’s interesting, drones and covert foreign policy seem to go together. In Operation Menu, Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, the B-52 flight paths were directed from the ground, as was the moment of bomb release. In other words, the B-52s were essentially drones. Maybe the drone campaign isn’t described as the foreign policy of the United States because there’s a tinge of embarrassment that we’re murdering people in foreign countries as a matter of routine.

Beyond that, maybe we should call it the drone program’s drone program, because it’s taken on a life of it’s own, a huge machine that exists to perpetuate itself. Just take a look at the jobs listed almost every day for just one of the Distributed Common Ground System stations at Langley AFB in the Virginia Southern Neck. On April 25, for example, various contractors (some of which you’ve never heard of) were asking for a “USAF Intelligence Resource Management Analyst,” a “Systems Integrator,” a “USAF Senior Intelligence Programs and Systems Support Analyst,” a “USAF ISR Weapons Systems Integration Support Analyst” a “DPOC Network Engineer,” whatever that is, and a few others. All high paying, all of course requiring Top Secret or higher clearances. Every so often we hear that the CIA drone program is going to be turned over to the military. I say, ‘good luck with that’ – is the CIA really going to obligingly hand over a huge chunk of its raison d’etre, and its budget, its enormous targeting apparatus? There’s a lot of talk about “autonomous drones,” which aren’t going to happen, but I think the whole system is autonomous, one giant robot that has become unstoppable as it grinds along, sucking up money and killing people along the way.•

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“Can Tech Progress Be Contributing To Price Declines?”

April 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Andrew McAfee, co-author with Erik Brynjolfsson of 2014’s great Second Machine Age, recently argued in a Financial Times blog post that the economy’s behavior is puzzling these days. It’s difficult to find fault with that statement.

Inflation was supposed to be soaring by now, but it’s not. Technology was going to make production grow feverishly, but traditional measures don’t suggest that. Job growth and wages were supposed to return to normal once the financial clouds cleared, though that’s been largely a dream deferred. What gives?

In a sequel of sorts to that earlier post, McAfee returns to try to suss out part of the answer, which he feels might be that the new technologies have created an abundance which has suppressed inflation. That seems to be certain feature of the future as 3D printers move to the fore, but has it already happened? And has this plenty made jobs scarcer and suppressed wages? An excerpt:

In a Tweetstorm late last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argued that technological progress might be another important factor driving prices down. He wrote: “While I am a bull on technological progress, it also seems that much of that progress is price deflationary in nature, so even extremely rapid tech progress may not show up in GDP or productivity stats, even as it = higher real standards of living.”

Prof [Larry] Summers shot back quickly, noting: “It is… not clear how one would distinguish deflationary and inflationary progress. The price level reflects the value of goods in terms of money, so it is hard to analyze without thinking about monetary and financial conditions.” This is surely correct, but is Prof Summers being too dismissive of Mr Andreessen’s larger point? Can tech progress be contributing to price declines?

Moore’s law — that computer processing power doubles roughly every two years — has made computers themselves far cheaper. It has also pretty directly led to the shrinkage of industries as diverse as encyclopedias, recorded music, film photography and standalone GPS devices. An intriguing analysis by writer Chris Goodall found that the “UK began to reduce its consumption of physical resources in the early years of the last decade.” Technological progress, which by its nature allows us to do more with less, is a big part of this move past “peak stuff.”

It’s also probably a big part of the reason that corporate profits remain so high, even while overall economic growth stagnates.•

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“Klitschko Might Be Facing His Biggest Fight Since Being Elected Mayor”

April 29, 2015 in Politics, Sports | Permalink

The two boxing Klitschko brothers refused to ever oppose one another in the ring, but Vitali, who became Kiev mayor in 2014, has a ringside seat to witness fraternal fighting of another order: a civil war that’s complicating the former WBO heavyweight champion’s quest to attract investors to the tumultuous state. Also muddling the situation is a scandal within his cabinet that’s making his so-called reform government seem like business as usual. During a visit to D.C. to try to raise investment funds for his city, the pugilist-cum-politician sat for an interview with Reid Standish of Foreign Policy. An excerpt:

Despite the dreary forecast for Ukraine, the mayor has made serious strides toward reform. To improve transparency, Kiev is the first Ukrainian city to make all government documents public and available online. The tax code has been simplified, the corporate rate brought down to 18 percent from 23 percent. Klitschko is also pushing for police reform. After years of abuse and corruption, trust in the police force is at an all-time low, but Klitschko is hoping that a combination of higher salaries and competitive exams can restore the prestige to law enforcement. “We want the police to be young, educated, and have a completely different outlook,” said Klitschko.

The mayor is also hoping to loosen the Kremlin’s grip over Ukrainian energy: “Last winter we used 30 percent less Russian gas. It is our goal to get rid of energy dependence on Russia.” Years of cheap gas from the Kremlin has made Ukrainians wasteful with their usage, and Klitschko has unveiled an energy saving program for his city. “We used the old Soviet way to regulate temperature.” he joked, “if you’re hot, you open the window, if you’re cold, you close it.” …

Now Klitschko might be facing his biggest fight since being elected mayor. An investigative report published by Radio Svoboda, the Ukrainian language affiliate of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, alleges that a massive, multi-million dollar complex along the Dnieper River in Kiev being built with illegal permits obtained by a construction firm owned by a business partner of Igor Nikonov, Klitschko’s first deputy and a well known developer.

Klitschko denies the allegations about Nikonov, saying that the connection is nonexistent and the result of “black PR” by unnamed opponents trying to discredit him. “We even have a joke about this: One politician goes to another and says ‘I told everyone your daughter is a stripper.’ The other politician has no daughter, but now he must explain to everyone why his daughter is not a stripper.”•

 

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“[He] Receives His Entire Salary In Bitcoin And Lives Outside The Traditional Financial System”

April 29, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The instability of the Argentine banking system (and the expense of dealing with it) has led a growing number of citizens to embark on a bold experiment using Bitcoin to sidestep institutions, a gambit which would probably not be attempted with the same zest in countries with relative financial stability. But if the service proves to be a large-scale success in Argentina, will it influence practices in nations heretofore resistant to cryptocurrency? And will a massive failure doom the decentralized system?

In a New York Times Magazine article adapted from Nathaniel Popper’s forthcoming Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, the author writes of this new dynamic in the South American republic, which is enabled by itinerant digital money-changers like Dante Castiglione. An excerpt:

That afternoon, a plump 48-year-old musician was one of several customers to drop by the rented room. A German customer had paid the musician in Bitcoin for some freelance compositions, and the musician needed to turn them into dollars. Castiglione joked about the corruption of Argentine politics as he peeled off five $100 bills, which he was trading for a little more than 1.5 Bitcoins, and gave them to his client. The musician did not hand over anything in return; before showing up, he had transferred the Bitcoins — in essence, digital tokens that exist only as entries in a digital ledger — from his Bitcoin address to Castiglione’s. Had the German client instead sent euros to a bank in Argentina, the musician would have been required to fill out a form to receive payment and, as a result of the country’s currency controls, sacrificed roughly 30 percent of his earnings to change his euros into pesos. Bitcoin makes it easier to move money the other way too. The day before, the owner of a small manufacturing company bought $20,000 worth of Bitcoin from Castiglione in order to get his money to the United States, where he needed to pay a vendor, a transaction far easier and less expensive than moving funds through Argentine banks.

The last client to visit the office that Friday was Alberto Vega, a stout 37-year-old in a neatly cut suit who heads the Argentine offices of the American Bitcoin company BitPay, whose technology enables merchants to accept Bitcoin payments. Like other BitPay employees — there is a staff of six in Buenos Aires — Vega receives his entire salary in Bitcoin and lives outside the traditional financial system. He orders what he can from websites that accept Bitcoin and goes to Castiglione when he needs cash. On this occasion, he needed 10,000 pesos to pay a roofer who was working on his house.

Commerce of this sort has proved useful enough to Argentines that Castiglione has made a living buying and selling Bitcoin for the last year and a half. “We are trying to give a service,” he said.

That mundane service — harnessing Bitcoin’s workaday utility — is what so excites some investors and entrepreneurs about Argentina. Banks everywhere hold money and move it around; they help make it possible for money to function as both a store of value and a medium of exchange. But thanks in large part to their country’s history of financial instability, a small yet growing number of Argentines are now using Bitcoin instead to fill those roles. They keep the currency in their Bitcoin “wallets,” digital accounts they access with a password, and use its network when they need to send or spend money, because even with Castiglione or one of his competitors serving as middlemen between the traditional economy and the Bitcoin marketplace, Bitcoin can be cheaper and more convenient than Argentina’s financial establishment. In effect, Argentines are conducting an ambitious experiment, one that threatens ultimately to spread to the United States and disrupt some of the most basic services its banks have to offer.•

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“Solar Photovoltaic Power Is Eventually Going To Dominate Global Energy”

April 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For more than a century, scientists have tried to coax solar power into cheap energy. In 1955, University of California “solar scientists” envisioned an abundance of healthy food and clean energy for Earthlings and space colonists alike. It would cost next to nothing. Never quite happened.

But the sun’s power is there for the taking, and it seems we’re much closer to stealing fire from gods. From David Roberts at Vox:

Obviously, predicting the far future is a mug’s game if you take it too seriously. This post is more about storytelling, a way of seeing the present through a different lens, than pure prognostication. But storytelling is important. And insofar as one can feel confident about far-future predictions, I feel pretty good about this one.

Here it is: solar photovoltaic (PV) power is eventually going to dominate global energy. The question is not if, but when. Maybe it will happen radically faster than anyone expects — say, by 2050. Or maybe it won’t be until the year 3000, or later. But it’ll happen. …

One often hears energy experts talk about “distributed energy,” but insofar as that refers to electricity, it usually just means smaller gas or wind turbines scattered about — except in the case of solar PV. Only solar PV has the potential to eventually diffuse into infrastructure, to become a pervasive and unremarkable feature of the built environment.

That will make for a far, far more resilient energy system than today’s grid, which can be brought down by cascading failures emanating from a single point of vulnerability, a single line or substation. An intelligent grid in which everyone is always producing, consuming, and sharing energy at once cannot be crippled by the failure of one or a small group of nodes or lines. It simply routes around them.

Will solar PV provide enough energy? Right now, you couldn’t power a city like New York fully on solar PV even if you covered every square inch of it with panels. The question is whether that will still be true in 30 or 50 years. What efficiencies and innovations might be unlocked when solar cells and energy storage become more efficient and ubiquitous? When the entire city is harvesting and sharing energy? When today’s centralized, hub-and-spoke electricity grid has evolved into a self-healing, many-to-many energy web? When energy works like a real market, built on millions of real-time microtransactions among energy peers, rather than the crude statist model of today’s utilities?•

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“Many Industries Are Looking To Drones To Perform Work Traditionally Done By Humans”

April 29, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The machines created by the America military to combat the enemy eventually are manifest stateside, whether that means the creation of the Internet (which was initiated by the Department of Defense in response to Sputnik’s success) or drones (perfected during our wrongheaded war in Iraq). These tools of hot and cold wars, when they begin to be used in earnest domestically can be a blessing or a curse, and in the case of drones, they’re both.

Drones are incredibly useful tools, and they’re dangerous, able to deliver a bomb as readily as a breakfast burrito. While that means we should probably brace ourselves and starting working immediately on safeguards, as much as that’s possible, it doesn’t mean the Federal Aviation Administration should strangle a fledgling industry. Even without federal approval for commercial drones, terrorists can do their damage quite well. They needn’t wait for regulations.

One other point in this increasingly automated society: We have to accept that certain jobs (delivery people, messengers, some hospital workers, bridge inspectors, wait staff, etc.) will be largely disappeared with the emergence of pilotless gizmos. How do we replace these positions with new ones? How do jobless people pay for those breakfast burritos that land softly on their doorsteps one fine morning? 

In a Foreign Affairs piece, drone entrepreneur Gretchen West unsurprisingly admonishes the FAA’s sluggishness in addressing the governance of these new machines. The opening:

In the beginning, drones were almost exclusively the province of militaries. At first little more than remote-controlled model planes used in the World War I era, military drones advanced steadily over the decades, eventually becoming sophisticated tools that could surveil battlefield enemies from the sky. Today, the terms “drone” and “unmanned aircraft system” denote a vehicle that navigates through the air from point A to point B and is either remotely controlled or flies autonomously. While they vary in size and shape, such vehicles all feature a communications link, intelligent software, sensors or cameras, a power source, and a method of mobility (usually propellers).

Inevitably, drone technology spilled out from the military and into other parts of the public sector. In the United States over the last decade, federal researchers turned to drones for monitoring weather and land, the Department of Homeland Security started relying on them to keep an eye on borders, and police adopted them for search-and-rescue missions. Then came everyday consumers, who took to parks on the weekend with their often homemade creations. Outside government, drones were mostly flown for fun, not profit.

Until recently, that is. In the last several years, a new group of actors has come to embrace drones: private companies. Inspired by the technological progress made in the military and in the massive hobby market, these newcomers have realized that in everything from farming to bridge inspection, drones offer a dramatic improvement over business as usual. The potential for the commercial use of drones is nearly limitless. But in the United States, the growing drone industry faces a major regulatory obstacle: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued overly restrictive rules that threaten to kill a promising new technology in the cradle.

SERIOUS BUSINESS

As more and more actors have invested in drone research and development, the vehicles themselves have become cheaper, simpler, and safer. Perhaps even more exciting are the changes in software, which has advanced at lightning speed, getting smarter and more reliable by the day: now, for example, users can fly drones without any guidance and set up so-called geo-fences to fix boundaries at certain altitudes or around certain areas. The economics are now attractive enough that many industries are looking to drones to perform work traditionally done by humans—or never before done at all.•

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“Clients Can Select From A Menu Of Skin Colors And Nationalities”

April 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 2010, Mitch Moxley wrote “Rent a White Guy,” an amusing and insightful first-person Atlantic report about being hired by a Chinese firm to be a make-believe American businessperson. “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face,” he was told. In a New York Times documentary short, David Borenstein provides an excellent visual tour of the practice five years on, as it’s become fashionable for desperate real-estate developers of remotely located properties to temporarily stock their buildings with Western workers or performers to make the provincial neighborhoods appear like “international cities of the future.” It reveals a sense of inferiority still felt by the Chinese even as they’ve moved to the center of the global stage. He describes the assignment thusly:

In provincial West China, I filmed specialty firms that collect groups of foreigners whom they rent out to attend events. Clients can select from a menu of skin colors and nationalities; whites are the most desirable and expensive. The most frequent customers are real estate companies. They believe that filling their remote buildings with foreign faces, even for a day, suggests that the area is “international,” a buzzword in provincial areas that often translates to “buy.”•

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“Untrained First-Time User Of Sniper Rifle”

April 28, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Killing just got easier, as DARPA reports its made great strides with “guided bullets,” which allow a novice to hit a long-range moving target every time. You will no longer murder the wrong person, just the ones you intend to shoot. No ammo wasted.

Video from February tests of the Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program.

“The Car Will Become An Accessory To The Smartphone”

April 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We may have already reached peak car in America (and in many other countries). Some of the next automobiles will likely aim for disruption the way ridesharing has, whether they’re EV community cars or driverless. Certainly urban planners want our cities to be less clogged and choked by them.

In “End of the Car Age,” a Guardian article, Stephen Moss smartly analyzes the likely shrinking role of automobiles in major urban centers. The writer sees a challenging if necessary transportation revolution approaching, with mobile information playing a large part in what comes next. The future may not be Masdar City, but it won’t be the Manhattan we’ve long known, either. The opening:

Gilles Vesco calls it the “new mobility”. It’s a vision of cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. He anticipates a revolution which will transform not just transport but the cities themselves. “The goal is to rebalance the public space and create a city for people,” he says. “There will be less pollution, less noise, less stress; it will be a more walkable city.”

Vesco, the politician responsible for sustainable transport in Lyon, played a leading role in introducing the city’s Vélo’v bike-sharing scheme a decade ago. It has since been replicated in cities all over the world. Now, though, he is convinced that digital technology has changed the rules of the game, and will make possible the move away from cars that was unimaginable when Vélo’v launched in May 2005. “Digital information is the fuel of mobility,” he says. “Some transport sociologists say that information about mobility is 50% of mobility. The car will become an accessory to the smartphone.”

Vesco is nothing if not an evangelist. “Sharing is the new paradigm of urban mobility. Tomorrow, you will judge a city according to what it is adding to sharing. The more that we have people sharing transportation modes, public space, information and new services, the more attractive the city will be.”•

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“We Have No Influence On The Things Happening”

April 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m always stunned how some Germans who supported the rise of Hitler maintain a naivete about their role in the horrors, even in retrospect. The denial of culpability runs so deep.

An AMA at Reddit with an unnamed 92-year-old woman (aided by her grandson) who’s spent her entire life in Stuttgart falls into this category, and it’s a fascinating discussion. “We were normal people who did not want to harm anyone,” she says of the Germans who pledged allegiance to Nazism, yet so many were hurt, so many killed. The collective delusion that allowed for such atrocities has never fully lifted. A few exchanges below.

_________________________

Question:

During Hitler’s rise to power before the war in 1933, did all Germans, including yourself, love him? I mean, he did bring back Germany’s lost honour and economy from World War I. When did the general mood toward Hitler change? What did he do? Did you support him during the war?

Answer:

Everybody was enthusiastic about Adolf, nobody hated him or anything like that. That did not change until the end. I don’t know, I was a young girl. We were young and naive.

_________________________

Question:

Did you ever see Hitler himself? At a rally or such?

Answer:

Yes at Obersalzberg I stood right beside him and when he visited the “Hitlerjugend” in Berchtesgaden (Upper Bavaria) I saw him again.

_________________________

Question:

What did you think of the SS?

Answer:

Of course: the elite. They were attractive men and every girl adored them. They were tall and sportive and good-mannered and their uniforms were great. (Grandson: I asked her if they heard bad things about the SS. She shook her head.)

_________________________

Question:

Looking back, what was the most shocking thing you experienced in the time of Nazi Germany?

Answer:

In the “Hindenburg-Bau” (a building in Stuttgart), there was a dance-cafe every Sunday. I was there many times with my friends. There was a musician who played his guitar singing: “Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei, auch Adolf Hitler und seine scheiß Partei.” (Translation: “Everything, everything will come to an end. So will Adolf Hitler and his crappy party NSDAP.”) There was a table with officers in the cafe, one of them stood up, pulled out his gun and shot the musician in his breast. He was instantly dead and they pulled his dead body out of the cafe. That was very horrible.

_________________________

Question:

Are there any popular misconceptions about what average people were like in Nazi Germany? Was there some kind of normalcy and optimism around daily life, or was there a encroaching sense of dread regarding the horrendous things happening in Germany and abroad?

Answer:

We were normal people who did not want to harm anyone. Everybody was optimistic in terms of the war. There was a daily dose of fear, because so many men we knew were at war and we never knew if a bomb would hit the house. We stayed in the cellar and begged that we would survive.

_________________________

Question:

What was, if any, the punishment for knowing you lived around Jewish families but not declaring that to the government?

Answer:

We didn’t know of anyone who hid Jews. But if anyone did, they would have had bad times. There was a Jew named Arnold, who owned a nearby [factory], he was a good man. He gave anyone asking him work and paid his workers well. He never let anyone down. (Grandson: I asked her if they took him away. “Yes they came and arrested him.”)

_________________________

Question:

Did you see the trains filled with Jews or shops that were owned by Jews after Krystalnacht?

Answer:

No, I don’t know. They were arrested, but we didn’t know where they brought them or what happened to them at that time.

_________________________

Question:

Propaganda was undoubtedly used throughout the war. Was she and her colleagues, friends or family aware of what was propaganda/true/untrue? Was it even discussed at all at the time? I’m guessing it would be dangerous to do so, but that probably didn’t stop it being discussed completely.

Answer:

Yes we discussed a lot, but I don’t remember if anyone said that all the propaganda is false. They would not have been allowed to. Hitlerjugend and BDM were strong organisations, there was no chance for going against common beliefs.

_________________________

Question:

When did you realize Germany hadn’t a chance to win the war?

Answer:

We always believed in the victory. Even after Stalingrad. Absolutely.

_________________________

Question:

How do you feel about the trial of Oskar Groening? He is 93 and on trial for working at Auschwitz as a bookkeeper/accountant.

Answer:

Insane. You cannot judge anyone 70 years later. Life is hard enough at 93. They cannot imagine how hard. I bet he regrets the things he has done or had to do without a trial.

_________________________

Question:

Thinking back, does anything about the tense climate in today’s political scene remind you of anything that happened before the war broke out?

Answer:

We only get to know what happens in the world after it happened. We have no influence on the things happening and we have to rely on those men and women who do.•

 

“We Might Still Have Miasmatic Theories”

April 27, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you want to stop bubonic plague, killing as many cats and dogs as possible is probably not the most effective gambit. But that’s what the Mayor of London opted to do in 1665, putting down nearly a quarter-million predators of rats, which carried the lethal fleas. 

While we have a far greater understanding of epidemiology than our counterparts in the 17th century, we still probably accept some asinine ideas as gospel. In a Medium essay, Weldon Kennedy questions our faith in ourselves, naming three contemporary beliefs he feels are incorrect.

I’ll propose one: It’s wrong that children, who are wisely banned from frequenting bars and purchasing cigarettes, are allowed to eat at fast-food restaurants, which set them up for a lifetime of unhealthiness. Ronald McDonald and Joe Camel aren’t so different.

Kennedy’s opening:

In 19th century London, everyone was certain that bad air caused disease. From cholera to the plague: if you were sick, everyone thought it was because of bad air. It was called the Miasma Theory.

As chronicled in The Ghost Map, it took the physician John Snow years, and cost thousands of lives, to finally disprove the Miasma Theory. He mapped every cholera death in London and linked it back to the deceased’s source of water, and still it took years for people to believe him. Now miasma stands as a by-word for widely held pseudo-scientific beliefs widely held throughout society.

The problem for Snow was that no one could see cholera germs. As a result, he, and everyone else of the time, was forced to measure other observable phenomenon. Poor air quality was aggressively apparent, so it’s easy to see how it might take the blame.

Thankfully, our means of scientific measurement have improved vastly since then. We should hope that any such scientific theory lacking a grounding in observable data would now be quickly discarded.

Where our ability to measure still lags, however, it seems probable that we might still have miasmatic theories.•

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“France Is Different From The U.S.A.’s El Dorado”

April 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

If it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck, and Jean-Marie Le Pen and his youngest daughter, Marine, are a couple of ducks.

The former and current leaders of the National Front Party are at odds these days, as Marine attempts to provide the far-right French political group with a more polished and professional face than her loose-cannon dad ever did. But the FN brand of nationalism, even when espoused more politely, is still loathsome and unsettling. From Lucy Westcott’s Newsweek interview:

Newsweek:

Can you see any comparisons between the French and U.S. immigration systems?

Marine Le Pen:

France is different from the U.S.A.’s El Dorado, American Dream image. Millions of people hope to find a better future here. There’s a big difference between France and the U.S. In the U.S., immigrants must work to live. In France, they’re taken care of by public finances. In France, there are millions of unemployed people already. We cannot house them, give them health care, education…finance people who keep coming and coming. The weight is very, very heavy now.

Newsweek:

Do you think France could benefit from an immigration system more like that of the U.S.?

Marine Le Pen:

In general, France always imports from the U.S., but this doesn’t really work. If we could, we’d import a measure that’s consistent: If you come, you’ll have to live by your own means. We do not have the means, the money, to give you free health care, free schools. [This would] dissuade immigrants from coming.

Newsweek:

You’re in the U.S. as European leaders are getting ready to meet to find a solution to the enormous crisis of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean en route to a better life in Europe. What can be done to find a solution and what role can France play?

Marine Le Pen:

Politics shouldn’t invite those deadly trips, all of them are very dangerous. We need to stop the boats and put the immigrants in safety, but also bring them back to their points of origin. In Europe it’s a huge call, an open call, for people to risk their lives in the Mediterranean. [The National Front released a statement after a boat capsized last weekend, killing up to 800 people, calling it a “particularly terrible and shocking tragedy.”]

But we should ask the right questions: Who is responsible for that? Who is responsible for this huge crisis in Libya, for example, for those massive waves of illegal immigration? American leaders and French leaders.

Sarkozy is the guilty one in this situation because he contributed to the Islamist fundamentalist in power over there, with all the consequences that you now know about. [Last Monday, Le Pen blamed former French president Nicolas Sarkozy for the migrant crisis due to his 2011 invasion of Libya.]•

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“We’ll Have To Get Used To Them, Much Like We Did With Mobile Phones”

April 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Comparing delivery drones to mobile phones seems an odd choice–or at least only half the answer.

Drones may soon be ubiquitous as smartphones, as one analyst asserts in Lucy Ingham’s sanguine Factor-Tech piece, “Forget the Fear,” but they have the ability to be as destructive as guns, even more, actually. Is that a pizza or a book or a bomb that’s coming our way? Drones will likely be ever-present soon and will do a lot of good, but even if they’re closely regulated, it’ll be easy to rig up your own and deliver whatever you want to someone–even fear. 

The piece’s opening:

Drones are set for mass proliferation, despite commonly voiced concerns about privacy and use, according to a leading British aviation safety expert.

Speaking at a panel discussion during SkyTech, a UAV conference held today in London, Gerry Corbett, UAS programme lead for the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s Safety and Airspace Regulation Group, said that people would have to get used to the presence of drones in urban areas.

“Society has to accept that we’re going to see a lot more of these flying around towns and cities,” he said.

“We’ll have to get used to them, much like we did with mobile phones.”

However, in order for this to happen, regulation will need to improve in order to ensure that the drones are safe.•

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“Preferential Admission For Legacies Ought To Be An Anachronism”

April 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In America, the main difference between rich people and poor people is that rich people have money.

It sounds obvious, but think about it: Many of the behaviors said to be responsible for the financially challenged being in the state they’re in aren’t limited to them. Poor people sometimes are raised in broken homes and such families have greater obstacles to success. But well-to-do people also divorce; they just have more money to divide. Some poorer folks drink and use drugs which keeps them trapped in a cycle of poverty. True, but wealthier Americans suffer from all sorts of addictions as well and spend the necessary funds to get the help they need. There are people of lesser means who don’t work hard enough to thrive in school, but the same can be said for some of their wealthier counterparts. The latter just have families with enough money to create an educational path they don’t warrant based on their performance.

Pretty much any lifestyle blamed for poverty is lived by rich and poor folk alike.

You could say that if you’re coming from a less-privileged background you should be sure to avoid these habits because you can’t afford them like people with money can, and I suppose that’s true. But even if you stay on the straight path, we shouldn’t pretend we live in a perfect meritocracy which automatically rewards such clear-headed decisions. We all fall, but some have a net to catch them. Sometimes it’s been earned through hard work and luck, and often it’s woven from inherited money and connections.

From Deborah Friedell at the London Review of Books blog:

The director of Harvard admissions has said that being a ‘Harvard legacy’ – the child of a Harvard graduate – is just one of many ‘tips’ in the college’s admissions process, such as coming from an ‘under-represented state’ (Harvard likes to have students from all 50), or being on the ‘wish list’ of an athletic coach. For most applicants to Harvard, the acceptance rate is around 5 per cent; for applicants with a parent who attended Harvard, it’s around 30 per cent. (One survey found that 16 per cent of Harvard undergraduates have a parent who went to Harvard.) A Harvard study from a few years ago shows that after controlling for other factors that might influence admission (such as, say, grades), legacies are more than 45 per cent more likely to be admitted to the 30 most selective American colleges than non-legacies.

Preferential admission for legacies ought to be an anachronism, not least because it overwhelmingly benefits rich white students. Harvard’s admissions director defends the practice by claiming that legacies ‘bring a special kind of loyalty and enthusiasm for life at the college that makes a real difference in the college climate… and makes Harvard a happier place.’ That ‘special kind of loyalty’ can express itself in material ways. Graduates with family ties – four generations of Harvard men! – are assumed to be particularly generous, and they cut colleges off when their children don’t get in.•

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“We Stood Back And Watched iCEO Execute This Project”

April 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When people defend CEO pay, they often argue that business leaders like Steve Jobs deserve every cent they get, without mentioning how these are the most extreme outliers. There are also CEOs like probable Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who did a really cruddy job running Hewlett-Packard, collected a monumental golden parachute when she was fired and was safely out the door when thousands of employees lost their jobs. Okay, maybe she’s an outlier also, but your average company leader isn’t an innovator (that word) but a steward. They’re very overpaid.

Automation has allowed many of these corporate titans to reduce staff over the past decade and the practice will likely continue apace, but that blade has two edges, and the received wisdom of the importance of the CEO will likely be threatened by technology as well. 

From Devin Fidler at Harvard Business Review:

For the last several years, we have been studying the forces now shaping the future of work, and wondering whether high-level management could be automated. This inspired us to create prototype software we informally dubbed “iCEO.” As the name suggests, iCEO is a virtual management system that automates complex work by dividing it into small individual tasks. iCEO then assigns these micro-tasks to workers using multiple software platforms, such as oDesk, Uber, and email/text messaging. Basically, the system allows a user to drag-and-drop “virtual assembly lines” into place, and run them from a dashboard.

But could iCEO manage actual work projects for our organization? After a few practice runs, we were ready to find out. For one task, we programmed iCEO to oversee the preparation of a 124-page research report for a prestigious client (a Fortune 50 company). We spent a few hours plugging in the parameters of the project, i.e. structuring the flow of tasks, then hit play. For instance, to create an in-depth assessment of how graphene is produced, iCEO asked workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to curate a list of articles on the topic. After duplicates were removed, the list of articles was passed on to a pool of technical analysts from oDesk, who extracted and arranged the articles’ key insights. A cohort of Elance writers then turned these into coherent text, which went to another pool of subject matter experts for review, passing them on to a sequence of oDesk editors, proofreaders, and fact checkers.

iCEO routed tasks across 23 people from around the world, including the creation of 60 images and graphs, followed by formatting and preparation. We stood back and watched iCEO execute this project. We rarely needed to intervene, even to check the quality of individual components of the report as they were submitted to iCEO, or spend time hiring staff, because QA and HR were also automated by iCEO. (The hiring of oDesk contractors for this project, for example, was itself an oDesk assignment.)

We were amazed by the quality of the end result — and the speed with which it was produced.•

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“Russian Humor Is Slapstick, Only You Actually Die”

April 24, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Some of Ian Frazier’s customary whip-smart, wondrous prose is on display in his NYRB piece about a raft of volumes by and about Daniil Kharms, a writer from that self-inflicted wound called Russia, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic, incarcerated for being an “anti-Soviet children’s writer” and ultimately starved to death at 36. He matured as an artist under Stalin, an era bathed needlessly in blood, his dark, absurd sensibilities perfect for the time and place or perhaps warped into midnight by them. Though Frazier wisely warns against accepting this narrative as a comprehensive explication of Kharms’ work. The opening:

Russia is the funniest country in the world. Some countries, like America and England, are funny mostly on purpose, while others, like Germany and France, can be funny only unintentionally. (But that counts! Being funny is tricky, so any way you do it counts.) Russia, however, is funny both intentionally (Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov) and unintentionally (Vladimir Putin singing, as he did at a televised event a few years ago, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill”). Given the disaster Russian history has been more or less continuously for the last five centuries, its humor is of the darkest, most extreme kind. Russian humor is to ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling is to a petting zoo. Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.

Surveys that measure such distinctions often rate Russians among the world’s least happy people. To judge from the Russians I know, this information would hold little interest one way or the other. To Russians, happiness is not the big deal it is to us; the Declaration of Independence they don’t have makes no statement about it. On the street or otherwise encountering strangers Russians don’t paste big grins on their faces, the way we tend to do. They look sternly upon reflex smilers. Their humor is powerful without a lot of jollity, and it’s hard to imagine Bulgakov, say, convulsed and weeping with laughter, as I have been when reading certain scenes in his novel Heart of a Dog.

Daniil Kharms, a Russian writer who came of age in the worst of Soviet times, is categorized as an absurdist, partly (I think) because it’s hard to know what else to call him. To me he makes more sense as a religious writer.

He is really funny and completely not ingratiating, simultaneously.•

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“The Project Is Called ‘Replacing Humans With Robots'”

April 24, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

An excellent New York Times short-form video report “Cheaper Robots, Fewer Workers” by Jonah M. Kessel and Taige Jensen delves into the automation of labor in China, which claims it suffers a shortage of workers in some provinces and districts despite its immense population in the aggregate. Chinese firms say employees displaced by faster, cheaper machines are offered better positions, but that appears, unsurprisingly, to not be the case.

You probably wouldn’t want to live in a country left behind by robotics, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great societal challenges for those nations that thrive in this new age.

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“It Will All Go Better With Genetically Engineered Plants. And Animals. And Farmers.”

April 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m in favor of genetically modified foods, even if I have concerns about Monsanto and its ilk. Even without human-made climate change, we eventually would face a temperature shift threatening to agriculture. Let’s get started now (carefully and intelligently) on these experiments, especially since there are going to be more mouths to feed. 

In 2010, David Honigmann of the Financial Times had lunch with Stewart Brand, a strong proponent of GMOs, which were meeting with resistance in Europe, particularly France. An excerpt:

Food, I say, is central to French culture. He scoffs. “Socialised agriculture is OK?” He takes some fig jam with his cheese. France, I say, is full of small farmers, not dominated by agrochemical combines. “That’s fair.” None the less, he insists that “it will all go better with genetically engineered plants. And animals. And farmers.

“We’ve had 12 or 13 years of genetically engineered food in this country and it’s been great. My prediction is that in a couple of years we’ll see a soyabean oil that has Omega 3 fatty acids to cut down heart disease. Who would refuse that, any more than people refuse to take medicine?”

In the long run, he insists, opposition will die out. “IVF is the big example. I remember when that was an abomination in the face of God’s will. As soon as people met a few of the children, they realised that they were just as good as the ‘regular’ ones. My hope is that, unlike nuclear, which involves almost a theological shift, getting gradually used to genetic foods will be a non-issue.”•

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“The Book Is Full Of Flatulent Tributes To The Guardian And Its Would-Be Journalists”

April 23, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The upside to the financial crisis of a medium, say like magazines with their economic model tossed into the crapper by technological progress, is that publications are forced to reinvent themselves, get innovative and try offbeat things. In that spirit, the resuscitated Newsweek assigned Wikileaks editor (not “self-styled editor”) Julian Assange to review Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man.

And what a gleefully obnoxious pan he delivers, making some salient points along the way, even if it’s not exactly unexpected that he would be bilious toward traditional media in favor of alterna-journalists like himself. Additionally: Assange proves he is a very funny writer. You know, just like Bill Cosby.

An excerpt:

In recent years, we have seen The Guardian consult itself into cinematic history—in the Jason Bourne films and others—as a hip, ultra-modern, intensely British newspaper with a progressive edge, a charmingly befuddled giant of investigative journalism with a cast-iron spine.

The Snowden Files positions The Guardian as central to the Edward Snowden affair, elbowing out more significant players like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for Guardian stablemates, often with remarkably bad grace.

“Disputatious gay” Glenn Greenwald’s distress at the U.K.’s detention of his husband, David Miranda, is described as “emotional” and “over-the-top.” My WikiLeaks colleague Sarah Harrison—who helped rescue Snowden from Hong Kong—is dismissed as a “would-be journalist.”

I am referred to as the “self-styled editor of WikiLeaks.” In other words, the editor of WikiLeaks. This is about as subtle as Harding’s withering asides get. You could use this kind of thing on anyone.

Flatulent Tributes

The book is full of flatulent tributes to The Guardian and its would-be journalists. “[Guardian journalist Ewen] MacAskill had climbed the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau. His calmness now stood him in good stead.” Self-styled Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger is introduced and reintroduced in nearly every chapter, each time quoting the same hagiographic New Yorker profile as testimony to his “steely” composure and “radiant calm.”

That this is Hollywood bait could not be more blatant.•

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“Six Performers Had Arrived To Offer An Erotic Dance At The Funeral Of An Elderly Resident”

April 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

In China, the leading cause of death is now cancer (and the mortality rate from the disease considerably higher than the world average), so you’d think the government would have its hands full with that issue. But they still have time to be concerned about “funeral strippers,” an admittedly strange lure to draw mourners to a service. There’s an official crackdown on the practice. From Te-Ping Chen and Josh Chin at WSJ:

In China, friends and family of the deceased may have to do without a special form of funereal entertainment: strippers.

According to a statement from the Ministry of Culture on Thursday, the government plans to work closely with the police to eliminate such performances, which are held with the goal of drawing more mourners.

Pictures of a funeral in the city of Handan in northern Hebei province last month showed a dancer removing her bra as assembled parents and children watched. They were widely circulated online, prompting much opprobrium. In its Thursday statement, the Ministry of Culture cited “obscene” performances in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, as well as in Handan, and pledged to crack down on such lascivious last rites.

In the Handan incident earlier this year, the ministry said, six performers had arrived to offer an erotic dance at the funeral of an elderly resident. Investigators were dispatched and the performance was found to have violated public security regulations, with the person responsible for the performing troupe in question detained administratively for 15 days and fined 70,000 yuan (about $11,300), the statement said. The government condemned such performances for corrupting the social atmosphere.•

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“The Share Of Americans Convinced That Health Care Is A Right Shrank From A Majority To A Minority”

April 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Obamacare, as it was derisively labeled by those who wanted to scare us from it, has been one of our nation’s most successful large-scale pieces of legislation in recent memory. It’s expanded insurance tremendously, slowed formerly ballooning costs and would seem to be a long-term job creator. (Diagnostics and service aspects of medicine may soon be automated, but many other positions will require a human element for the foreseeable future.) Even Tea Party representatives have enjoyed the benefits.

You would think the populace would be thrilled, but poll numbers stubbornly suggest that the Affordable Healthcare Act has turned off much of the nation to a further sharing of our responsibility for one another. I don’t think of this as a victory for the GOP PR machine. I’m not one of those people who believe that the matter with Kansas is that the citizens have been hoodwinked. The matter with Kansas is Kansans, and to extrapolate that, the matter with America is Americans. I don’t believe we’re fooled. I think we often see things through ideology rather than by results, and that’s a dangerous stance, especially if we are headed for greater wealth inequality, encouraged by AI which will reduce employment opportunities. Perhaps futurists in Silicon Valley believe we’re entering an age of technological socialism, but the people are not enamored with such an idea, even if it would benefit them. From Thomas Edsall at the New York Times:

With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, the share of Americans convinced that health care is a right shrank from a majority to a minority.

This shift in public opinion is a major victory for the Republican Party. It is part of a larger trend: a steady decline in support for redistributive government policies. Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at Berkeley and one of the nation’s premier experts on inequality, is a co-author of a study that confirms this trend, which has been developing over the last four decades. A separate study, “The Structure of Inequality and Americans’ Attitudes Toward Redistribution,” found that as inequality increases, so does ideological conservatism in the electorate.

The erosion of the belief in health care as a government-protected right is perhaps the most dramatic reflection of these trends. In 2006, by a margin of more than two to one, 69-28, those surveyed by Gallup said that the federal government should guarantee health care coverage for all citizens of the United States. By late 2014, however, Gallup found that this percentage had fallen 24 points to 45 percent, while the percentage of respondents who said health care is not a federal responsibility nearly doubled to 52 percent.•

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“Their Children Would Also Have Bigger Brains”

April 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When speaking of neural enhancement being distributed unfairly because of wealth inequality, it’s important to remember that even without drugs or prosthetics or engineering, we already have a similar playing field and that it’s very much divided into haves and have nots. Brain function, even size, is already influenced by poverty. From Chris Gyngell’s Practical Ethics post about a fictional brain-growing drug:

A new drug, Numarol, is currently being trialled which increases the surface area of the brain in children. Numarol causes children to have bigger brains, do better in cognitive tests and generally improves their life prospects. One critic of Numarol recently pointed out it would be very expensive, and only the rich would be able to afford it. Its release would likely create a significant difference in brain size between the highest and lowest socioeconomic groups. Numarol would create a world in which biological inequalities are forged from economic ones. The rich would not only have bigger houses, better cars, and better healthcare than the poor, their children would also have bigger brains. Such a world would be abhorrent.

But we already live in this world. Numarol is fictional, but the rich do have children with bigger brains than the poor. Social inequalities have already been written into our biology. 

This is the lesson from one of largest studies of brain morphology and structure in children. Brains of children from the lowest income bracket — less than US$25,000 — had up to 6% less surface area than those from children whose parental income was more than US$150,000. These differences in brain size where then found to be associated with differences in performance in a number of cognitive tests measuring working memory, vocabulary, and reading ability. These associations were independent of age, sex, parental education level and genetic ancestry (which was assessed through a whole genome analysis).

The relationship between family income and brain size was more pronounced among children in the poorest families where “income disparities of a few thousand dollars were associated with major differences in brain structure, particularly in areas associated with language and decision-making skills.”•

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“Something Potentially Momentous Is Happening”

April 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Whenever I see the parent of a grade-school athlete cursing at an umpire or encouraging the child to play very aggressively, I always make a mental note that in a couple decades society will have another terrible middle manager in its midst.

Even worse for these paper pushers of tomorrow, the working world will probably not need them–it doesn’t even really need them now. In a Wall Street Journal piece, Christopher Mims writes of startups replacing the middle-management level with data, allowing the numbers to make decisions humans used to make. The practice disappears some costs–and jobs. The opening:

Something potentially momentous is happening inside startups, and it’s a practice that many of their established competitors may be forced to copy if they wish to survive. Firms are keeping head counts low, and even eliminating management positions, by replacing them with something you wouldn’t immediately think of as a drop-in substitute for leaders and decision-makers: data.

“Every time people come to me and ask for new bodies it turns out so much of that can be answered by asking the right questions of our data and getting that in front of the decision-makers,” says James Reinhart, CEO of online secondhand clothing store thredUP. “I think frankly it’s eliminated four to five people who would [otherwise] pull data and crunch it,” he adds. …

The result isn’t really “big data,” just more data, more readily available, says Mr. Bien. The only “algorithm” processing the data and using it to make predictions is simply the humans scanning it for correlations. And now that every employee can have the tools to monitor progress toward any goal, the old role of middle managers as people who gather information and make decisions doesn’t fit into many startups. Nor do the leaders who remain need to poll middle managers to find out how employees are doing, since transparency and accountability are the essence of the data-driven company.

It isn’t the end of middle management, but it is an evolution.•

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“Any Great City Has Its Own Mythologies”

April 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Prophecies can fulfill themselves, which is the hope of Angelenos as nation’s largest city hopes to remake itself as something like an ecotopia despite it’s ever-growing population and density of automobiles. Before the middle of last century, locals began to have their streetcars and trolleys taken away, hearing relentlessly that L.A. was a car city, and it had to be that way. It didn’t have to be that way then and doesn’t need to (completely) be that way now. But first hearts and minds must be won, and many projects successfully completed. From Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow at Slate:

In recent years, Los Angeles has made headway on its most infamous environmental problems, and is even trying to position itself as a green leader. Smog has greatly diminished. Despite adding 1 million people to its population, the city claims to use the same amount of water as it did 30 years ago. Los Angeles is also heavily investing in mass transit while growing denser. (An EPA report found that between 2005 and 2009, the metropolitan area grew significantly more compact, as two-thirds of new housing was built on already developed land.) And Mayor Eric Garcetti’s new sustainability “pLAn” could have been drafted by Al Gore. It lays out a comprehensive suite of goals, such as eliminating coal from the city’s energy portfolio and diverting 90 percent of waste from landfills, both by 2025. In short, a place long known for its suburban character is becoming more of a city. And a place known for defying natural limitations is beginning to try to honor them—a goal that’s at once humbler and more ambitious.

Readers outside the region may have already seen an article or two about how this or that aspect of L.A. isn’t so terrible anymore. Within the region, these changes have collectively contributed to a sense of a new and improved L.A.—an emerging mythology of a more sustainable, responsible, and communal city. Granted, it’s a myth in more than one sense. To apply those adjectives to L.A. requires some squinting (and perhaps politely ignoring the Lexus that just cut you off on the 405). And the drought has the potential to pit water-consumers against each other rather than pulling them together. But this narrative could nevertheless reshape the city’s self-image. Indeed, outsiders who cling to the old clichés about L.A. have themselves become a target of ridicule. As the real-estate blog Curbed LA put it, “New York Times stories about Los Angeles are amazing because they’re like seeing the city through the eyes of a dorky time traveler from 1992.”

The most explicit attempt to capture the shift in the zeitgeist is the notion of the “Third Los Angeles,” a term coined by Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. In an ongoing series of public events, Hawthorne has proposed that L.A. is moving into a new phase of its civic life. In his formulation, the first Los Angeles, a semi-forgotten prewar city, boasted a streetcar, active street life, and cutting-edge architecture. The second Los Angeles is the familiar auto-dystopia that resulted from the nearly bacterial postwar growth of subdivisions and the construction of the freeway system. Now, Hawthorne argues, this third and latest phase harks in some ways back to the first, in its embrace of public transit and public space (notably the billion-dollar revitalization of the concrete-covered Los Angeles River). Hawthorne’s focus is not specifically environmental. But a more publicly oriented city also tends to be a greener one. This is partly because mass transit and walking mean lower carbon emissions. And more broadly, willingness to invest in the public realm tends to coincide with political decisions that prioritize the public good, including ecological sustainability.

Any great city has its own mythologies. But perhaps in Los Angeles, as in California generally, myths loom particularly large.•

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