All The Books I Read In 2022

Some notes and quotes from the books I have read this year:

• Building the Cycling City - A few things that stuck out to me:

  • The Netherlands wasn’t always so cycling friendly and it took decades to get to this place.
  • There is no blueprint. Every city is different, but in general prioritizing walking, cycling, public transit and driving, in that order, starts you in the right direction. There also needs to be synergy between modes (ie cycling to the train station, taking the train then cycling to your destination needs to be a smooth process)
  • So many of the projects that helped change things were not popular until after they were implemented. Businesses always think replacing things like street parking with bike lanes will hurt their business, but they often end up helping.

• New Dark Age

  • “Computation does not merely govern our actions in the present, but constructs a future that best fits its parameters. That which is possible becomes that which is computable. That which is hard to quantify and difficult to model, that which has not been seen before or which does not map onto established patterns, that which is uncertain or ambiguous, is excluded from the field of possible futures. Computation projects a future that is like the past - which makes it, in turn, incapable of dealing with the reality of the present, which is never stable.”
  • “Historically, the process of discovering new medicines was the domain of small teams of researchers intensively focused on small groups of molecules. When an interesting compound was identified in natural materials, from libraries of synthesized chemicals, or by serendipitous discovery, its active ingredient would be isolated ans screened against biological cells or organisms to evaluate its therapeutic effect. In the last twenty years, this process has widely been automated, culminating in a technique known as high-throughput screening, or HTS. HTS is the industrialisation of drug discovery; a wide-spectrum, automated search for potential reactions within huge libraries of compounds.” This is believed to be the most significant reason the per-dollar rate at which new drugs are discovered is slowing down.
  • “Or perhaps the flash crash in reality looks like everything we are experiencing right now: rising economic inequality, the breakdown of the nation-state and the militarization of borders, totalising global surveillance and the curtailment of individual freedoms, the triumph of transnational corporations and neurocognitive capitalism, the rise of far-right groups and nativist ideologies, and the utter degradation of the natural environment. None of these are the direct result of novel technologies, but all of them are the product of a general inability to perceive the wider, networked effects of individual and corporate actions accelerated by opaque, technologically augmented complexity.”
  • “Technical possibility breeds political necessity, because no politician wants to be accused of not doing enough in the aftermath of some atrocity or expose. Surveillance is done because it can be done, not because it is effective; and, like other implementations of automation, because it shifts the burden of responsibility and blame onto the machine. Collect it all, and let the machines sort it out.”
  • “The problem of the smoking gun besets every strategy that depends on revelation to move opinion. Just as the activities of the intelligence agencies could have been inferred long before the Snowden revelations by multiple reports over decades, so other atrocities are ignored until some particular index of documentary truthfulness is attained. In 2005, Caroline Elkins published a thorough account of British atrocities in Kenya, be her work was widely criticised for its reliance on oral history and eyewitness accounts. It was only when the British government itself released documents that confirmed these accounts that they were accepted, becoming part of an acknowledged history. The testimony of those who suffered was ignored until it conformed to the account offered by their oppressors - a form of evidence that, as we have seen, will never be available for a multitude of other crimes. In the same manner, the cult of the whistle-blower depends upon the changing conscience of those already working for the intelligence services; those outside such organisations are left without agency, waiting helplessly for some unknown servant of the government to deign to publish what they know. THis is fundamentally insufficient basis for moral actions.”
  • “Fake news is not a product of the internet. Rather, it is the manipulation of new technologies by the same interests that have always sought to manipulate information to their own needs. It is the democratisation of propaganda, in that ever more actors can now play the role of the propagandist.”
  • “What is common to the Brexit campaign, the US election, and the disturbing depths of YouTube is that despite multiple suspicions, it is ultimately impossible to tell what is doing what, or what their motives and intentions are. Watching endlessly streaming videos, scrolling through walls of status updates and tweets, it’s futile to attempt to discern between what’s algorithmically generated nonsense or carefully crafted fake news for generating ad dollars; what’s paranoid fiction, state action, propaganda, or spam; what’s deliberate misinformation or well-meaning fact check.”
  • “Information and violence are utterly and inextricably linked, and the weaponisation of information is accelerated by technologies that purport to assert control over the world. The historical association between military, government, and corporate interests on the one hand, and the development of new technologies on the other makes this clear.”
  • “Our thirst for data, like our thirst for oil, is historically imperialist and colonialist, and tightly tied to capitalist networks of exploitation.”
  • “Data-driven regimes repeat the racist, sexist, and oppressive policies of their antecedents because these biases and attitudes have been encoded into them at the root.”
  • “In the present, the extraction, refinement, and use of data/oil pollutes the ground and air. It spills. It leaches into everything. It gets into the ground water of our social relationships and it poisons them. It enforces computational thinking upon us, driving the deep divisions in society caused by misbegotten classification, fundamentalism and populism, and accelerating inequality. It sustains and nourishes uneven power relationships: in most of our interactions with power, data is not something that is freely given but forcibly extracted - or impelled in moments of panic, like a stressed cuttlefish attempting to cloak itself from a predator.”
  • “Information more closely resembles atomic power than oil: an effectively unlimited resource that still contains immense destructive power, and that is even more explicitly connected than petroleum to histories of violence.”
  • The new dark age: “a place where the future is radically uncertain and the past irrevocably contested, but where we are still capable of speaking directly to what is in front of us, thinking clearly and acting with justice.”
  • “Ultimately, any strategy for living in the new dark age depends upon attention to the here and now, and not to the illusory promises of computational prediction, surveillance, ideology and representation.”

• Autonorama

  • “We may hear that people prefer to drive. But in settings that offer no good alternatives to driving, we can’t say what people prefer.”
  • “In the 1930s, motordom learned to depict an unachievable future utopia that is forever just over the next horizon, apparently always close enough to attract extravagant private and public investment, but somehow never actually achieved. The purpose, as some of the motordom’s leaders explained to one another, was not to satisfy personal transportation demands but to serve them while keeping them strategically unsatisfied, to stimulate consumption. … To divert audiences from realistic transport sufficiency, promoters of car-dependent technofuturistic utopias promise instead unrealistic transport solutions up to and including zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.”
  • “These futures are not meant to be achieved. They are to be pursued, for in the pursuit lies the endless demand for vehicles, technology and pavement.”
  • “Motordom’s customers - not only the car-buying public but also the public policy makers motordom depends upon - are caught up in a perpetual consumption machine, pursuing expensive but elusive solutions in vain.”
  • “If most people could walk to a convenience store, we wouldn’t have to figure out how to get everyone access to a robotic car that would take them there. If most children had safe ways to bike to school, we wouldn’t have to design school driveways long enough to accommodate driverless car lines from dropping them off and picking them up. If most bus stops were sheltered and equipped - thanks to technology - with digital signs telling bus riders exactly when the next bus will arrive, we wouldn’t have to commit so much research effort and money to developing high-tech systems that can fit more driverless cars in a given road lane. By recognizing the promise of high-tech driving as illusory, we have our best chance of recognizing all that we can do. When we rescue innovation from the technofuturists and recover the tools they have dismissed, we will find that we can do today, at far less cost, what they have promised to deliver for unlimited dollars at and ever-receding future date.”
  • Futurama 1, circa 1940:
    • This is when the idea of keeping the consumer dissatisfied started by the car companies. “If everyone were satisfied, no one would buy the new thing.”
    • Motordom learned that in cities, where cars were blamed for congestion, driving had to be reframed as the solution instead of the problem. “In the new field of highway engineering, funded by gasoline tax revenues and guided by its promoters in motordom, vehicles’ capacity for speed made them potential congestion relievers, provided highway capacity was sufficient to to permit speed. … Wherever traffic slowed vehicles down, the consequent delay was therefore grounds for building new road capacity.”
    • There were promises that highways would eliminate 98 percent of all accidents and practically all congestion.
    • The drive-everywhere, drive-only city promised that traffic problems will be a thing of the past by the 1960s. “Motorists of 1960 will loaf along at 50 - right through town.
    • Highways going through cities promised to get “people in and out of cities at moderate speeds rather than with the present intolerable delay and congestion.”
    • “Futuramas depict utopian futures of about twenty years hence: soon enough to be relevant to consumers, but sufficiently distant to avert distrust and disillusionment when reality disappointed - as it always did.” There will always be new horizons.
    • “There was irony in the appeal to ‘individual enterprise.’ Writer Walter Lippman did not miss it. ‘General Motors has spent a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefit of private enterprise in motor manufacture it would have to rebuild its cities and highways by public enterprise.’ In the decades that followed, motordom embraced the paradox. Motordom would strive, through public policy, and with public money, to destroy and rebuild American surface transportation around motor vehicle travel, in ways that deprived travelers of a marketplace of competing modes, with the express intention of promoting demand for motor vehicles. All the while, motordom would propagate the notion that public policy was merely following mass preferences, and that the entire conversation was the consequence of the free market.”
  • Futurama 2, circa 1965:
    • Continued promises of expanding highways as a way to remove congestion and accidents.
    • The beginning of the idea of some form of self-driving cars with advancing electronic devices.
    • “In a 1961 ad campaign, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Traffic Safety Program urged drivers to keep driving cautiously until electronics eliminated all hazards and congestion. … Engineers would develop the safe ’electronic highway’ and the congestion-free ‘jam-proof expressway’. Such highway technology ‘prevents accidents,’ plus ‘radar controls steer the car, setting speeds and making crashes impossible.’”
    • Lavish exhibits imagining the future were created for the World’s Fair to help promote the ideas.
    • “The drive-everywhere, drive-only city was never easy to sell - otherwise, the lavish efforts to sell it would have been unnecessary. To sell it, motordom enlisted the authority of science. In such persuasive efforts, the futuristic sales force had the advantage of frequent news reports about research achievements. … Marketing and press coverage of research reinforced the authority of experts in all fields - even in those cases in which the applications would later prove troubling.”
  • Futurama 3, circa 1990:
    • Walt Disney wanted to create an experimental city in which walking and transit were the only transportation options needed - Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow (EPCOT). “EPCOT, as Disney envisioned it, was not the opposite of futurama. Motor vehicles were to be essential to connected EPCOT to the rest of the country. But the plan was based on Disney’s conviction that successful public spaces are car-free, and that everyday mobility needs are best serviced by public transport systems.” He died before any construction began and the company only developed the theme park. Instead they build an exhibit called World of Motion that was basically a propaganda machine for General Motors.
    • GM and other cars united behind the following to ensure a commitment to car dependency: “First, the Interstate Highway System was nearing completion. As the project ended. Congress might scale back federal road funding - unless it could be convinced that a new high-tech roadwork was necessary. Second, as Gorbachev’s Soviet Union first disarmed and then dissolved, the Pentagon’s budget was expected to fall steadily. Many anticipated a ‘peace dividend’ that could support domestic priorities, and such rhetoric could prove useful for the vast new transportation projects. Third, with defense expenditures falling, military contractors were scrambling for new big-budget government customers, and they saw opportunities in high-tech road transportation. In Congress, the weapons makers had friends who were eager to help them find new markets, and they gave the effort an attractive name: defense conversion. Finally, military contractors took advantage of the Gulf War of 1990-91, not only to sell weapons but also to showcase ‘smart bombs’ and other high-tech weapons systems. Military contractors soon used these displays of digital prowess to see markets for other kinds of high-tech systems - including systems for applications in transport.”
    • Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS) was a coalition of industry, government and universities that kept the focus on the future so people would forget the failed promises of the Interstate Highway System (decades late, billions over budget and didn’t fix congestion). They did this by making a massive new project seem cheaper than doing nothing, citing congestion delays costing 73 billion dollars a year in lost productivity.
    • “Why, then, given the apparent failure of the system to relieve congestion, should congress trust GM’s advice again? Had the system in fact exacerbate the problem it was purportedly intended to relive by directing overwhelming federal support to space-hungry cars, to the neglect of other modes? … Wouldn’t federal support for spatially efficient modes serve the purpose better?”
    • “Once transportation policy deprived most people any good choice besides driving a car, whether they could afford one or not, the recourse to driving was then routinely interpreted as a grounds to ignore everything but cars.”
    • On the initial GPS products, that were sold as a way to reduce congestion via improved routes and traffic notices: “Once drivers were on the road, however, the system’s traffic reports seldom saved drivers time, suggesting that TravTrek could do little to speed anyone’s daily commute.”
    • One of IVHS’s few successes at reducing congestion was electronic toll collection. But since the car companies didn’t like them they weren’t implemented in many places. “Though congestion pricing was IVHS’s greatest practical opportunity to relieve congestion, thirty years later, the United States still had no citywide congestion pricing.”
    • On military contractors shifting focus from the Gulf War to transportation: “From their point of view, the problem was not ‘How do we make transport safer and more efficient?’ It was ‘How do we find new customers for our expensive, high-tech systems?’” … “Much of the military stuff is technology looking for a marketplace. What they offer is not really what consumers are looking for.”
    • “At a tiny fraction of their actual cost, smart highway projects might have been limited to what they could actually deliver: some practical navigation guidance, information about current traffic via dynamic roadside messages, and especially charging drivers for the road capacity they used. Instead, because they were sold as systems that could relieve or even eliminate congestion and make roads much safer, smart highways attracted big public money, diverting resources that could have gone to the transit system that can move people safely and efficiently.”
    • “If IVHS doubles highway capacity, we have to ask, ‘What happens when all those cares reach their exits?’ But in 1993, hardly anyone asked.”
  • Futurama 4, circa 2015:
    • “Autonomous vehicles retained the same fundamental constraints they had without the expensive new systems, including high cost, high energy demands, and low spatial efficiency, but their marriage to state-of-the-art technology made them appear innovative enough to be disruptive, and thereby ade them targets of investment.”
    • “High tech was not really offering anything new; rather it was adding a futuristic veneer to the status quo.”
    • “To relieve congestion by eliminating delays to drivers no matter the cost is only to invite more driving. For those in the business of selling driving, this result was not a bug but a feature. By diminishing the time cost of travel, delay reduction also promotes dispersion of destinations, which in turn negates much of the benefit.”
    • “Automation reduces some kinds of risk while introducing others. In gauging the safety benefits of autonomy, promoters of the driverless cars routinely commit an elementary error in arithmetic: they subtract all the crash-causing deficiencies that human drivers are susceptible to, but fail to add all those that their robotic substitutes are susceptible to. Autonomous vehicles are allegedly ‘smart,’ and certainly are relative to an empty conventional car. But with a human driver of average competence at the wheel, a conventional care is still vastly smarter.”
    • “Wherever fast driving is ubiquitous, and by whatever technology the choice is enabled, other choices decline or vanish. Driving then ceases to be a choice at all; it becomes a systemic obligation. Destinations grow ever farther apart; walking, cycling, transit, and other means of mobility become ever less practical once fast driving dominates. For all its burdens on public budgets, car dependency is redefined as normal, while the carless or those who cannot drive are officially classed as unfortunates: the ’transit dependent.’ In such places, car ownership is ’liberating’ only because the environment is so hostile that no one can meet everyday needs without one. It is a private remedy for a state-imposed disability. Owning a car becomes an obligation whether the owner can afford it or not. It is the price of citizenship and the prerequisite for a job. Having no car may prevent employment, but buying, fueling, insuring, garaging, and maintaining a car may preclude accumulating any savings.”
    • “AVs are an attractive but expensive distraction from things we can do today at far less cost that yield affordable, sustainable, equitable, healthful, and efficient mobility. Much as elaborate but ineffectual cigarette filters were an attempt to perpetuate cigarette smoking when it was clear that smoking itself was the problem, AVs are, more than anything else, an attempt to perpetuate car dependency when car dependency itself it the problem.”
    • “Passenger vehicles that can approximate zero crashes already exist. They’re called trains.” Both are expensive but it’s not clear that AVs will ever get close to zero crashes.”
    • “In a messy real world, AVs cannot have 100 percent confidence, or even just always err on the side of caution. There can be no market for vehicles that often make unexpected sharp turns or that hard-brake every few seconds or minutes.”
    • “Though human incapacity to pay attention to nothing has been well documented for more than seventy years, promoters of automated driving systems still tend to discount it, and sometimes proceed as if it doesn’t exist.”
    • “Automated systems work best when they promote human-machine collaboration - admittedly no easy task. Too often, however, they deter it, for example, by requiring drivers to pay attention to nothing, or by inducing overconfidence.”
    • “Humans are and will remain far better at estimating other humans’ intentions.”
    • “In cities, Uber and Lyft tend to exacerbate congestion for some of the same reasons that AVs would. The necessity of parking a conventional car often compels drivers to leave it blocks from their destination, typically in a less congested area. But with an Uber, a Lyft, or an AV, passengers summon a car to a location of their choosing, and they take it to or near the door of their destinations. At busier destinations, traffic-choking drop-off and pickup lines would form.”
  • “Profit seeking induces companies to offer their customers a good product - but if a mobility company’s paying customers are data brokers and the product is data, then data collection, not mobility, comes first.”
  • “When the time spent in travel is regarded not as a total loss but a qualitative experience, walking and cycling tend to look much more like worthy modes of mobility, even if studies of transportation often neglect them.”
  • AV promoters feel that the technology isn’t the issue and that “the biggest hurdle to widespread adoption of automated vehicles are Joe and Jane Consumer.” They feel simply educating them is the solution, not improving their products that don’t work as promised.
  • “If a wrench make a poor nail drivers, the solution is not to develop a high-tech wrench, but to choose a hammer for driving nails. For urban mobility, we already have the tools we need.” Policy makers just choose not to use them, in part, because reports on urban mobility usually reflect the corporate agendas of their sponsors.
  • 55% of Americans would prefer to drive less and walk more.
  • Ciclovias in Bogota: closed major streets to cars one day per week. An inexpensive way to show people then benefits of reducing car dependency. “Business owners who associated dense motor traffic with commerce discovered new markets from people on foot and on bikes.”
  • In Stockholm in 2006, 80 percent of residents opposed congestion pricing. They implemented a 7 month trial that reduced traffic. When the trial ended traffic jams returned. A referendum happened shortly after, and a slight majority improved congestion pricing.
  • These highlight the importance of cheap, easily reversible experiments in shifting public opinion.
  • The Netherlands, where travel by car is deemphasized by policy makers, is rated by Waze the best country in the world to drive in.
  • “A complete innovation palette will include high tech, no tech and everything in between.”
  • “The critics of car dependency face daunting rhetorical obstacles. We can be caricatured as people who want to deprive others of choices. A critic of car dependency can expect to be misrepresented as an opponent of cars. A carpenter who prefers to drive nails with a hammer is not an opponent of wrenches but a person who appreciates what a wrench is for - and what it is not for. A critic of car dependency is likely to agree that there are many jobs for which a car is the right tool. Especially in cities, however, a car makes a poor all-purpose tool, as the per-person energy requirements of any car-dependent city will attest. The wasteful and destructive reconstruction necessary to retrofit an older city to car dependency is evidence of how unsuited cars are to be all-purpose transportation for everyone, everywhere. Critics of car dependency are the advocates of using the right tool for the transport job at hand.”

• Overtime: Why We Need A Shorter Working Week

  • “Work’s ability to aid human flourishing should only be considered sufficient if it can provide the social conditions that would allow all humans to cooperate, structure their time, achieve a sense of dignity and obtain the necessary material means to live in a safe and secure environment.”
  • “Political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson draws parallels between the public governance exercised by the states and the ‘private government’ exercised by managers in firms. Using this analogy, she brings to light a number of uncomfortable truths about the extent to which we, as employees, are subject to the relatively unchecked domination of our bosses. We wouldn’t (knowingly) tolerate such undemocratic granular control of intimate aspects of our lives by the state, Anderson asks, so why should we take it for granted when it comes to our employer?”

• Future Histories - Covers a lot of ground on the issues surrounding technology and society.

  • “What other forms of knowledge have we lost as a result of privileging specific forms or representations?”
  • “The old style of doing business - making money from proprietary software, packaging up information as a commodity to preserve its value - is slowing us down as a species.”
  • “Technology alone will never solve our problems. But political activism, informed by theory and history, can push for technological development to serve people rather than profit.”

• Ghost Work - A detailed look from observing hundreds and surveying thousands of ghost workers who preform everything from flagging tweets to transcribing doctors’ visits. They are central to the functioning of the internet but largely invisible to most people.

  • “Billions of people consume website content, search engine queries, tweets, posts and mobile-app-enabled services every day. They assume that their purchases are made possible by the magic of technology alone. But, in reality, they are being served by an international staff, quietly laboring in the background. These jobs, dominated by freelance and contingent work arrangements rather than full-time or even hourly wage positions, have no established, legal status.”
  • The paradox of automation’s last mile: “As machines progress, they solve problems that previously only humans could solve. But with each solution a new problem — or opportunity for machine learning — presents itself.”
  • “Ghost work markets do not make the transaction costs associated with getting work done evaporate. Instead they shift those costs to the on-demand workers and requesters. While software can be fixed, the bigger issue is a system that turns a blind eye to workers when things break down.”
  • “First, requesters come to on-demand platforms to find and source workers. They take the time and effort to vet them, and those who pass are given a task. After the task is completed, those workers who performed well are added to the hiring firm’s internal database of trusted workers. Then, when it comes time to hire another on-demand worker, firms start by looking in their trusted pool.” Saves them money, and improves onboarding.
  • “In reality, flexibility is a myth.” Workers have to spend so much time scanning new postings because the good ones get snatched up quickly.
  • “According to a national survey we conducted in partnership with Pew Research, 30 percent of on-demand gig workers reported not getting paid for work they performed. Workers can lose their job and wages, with no explanation and no opportunity to appeal the cancellation of their account.”
  • “Platform designers are leaving this enormous potential untapped by not building any infrastructure for workers to collaborate. Platforms like MTruk even discourage collaboration.”

• Money for Nothing - The lead up and fall out of South Sea Bubble of 1720.

• System Error:Where Big Tech Went Wrong And How We Can Reboot - A little more both sidesy than the title suggests.

• [23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism][https://www.academia.edu/20089247/23_Things_They_Dont_Tell_You_about_Capitalism]

• Arriving Today

• Empire of Pain

• The Code

• Evil Geniuses - A good history on how the super-rich and big businesses became so powerful at the expense of everyone else, starting in the 1970s, and really taking shape in the 1980s.

  • “Once a large majority of Americans came to believe that the federal government was uninspiring or incompetent or corrupt or evil, as they rapidly had over the previous decade, it was going to be a lot easier for the economic right to persuade people that regulating big business and taxing the rich were just plain wrong. Those people wouldn’t necessarily become crusaders for free enterprise, but if they started focusing more of the resentment and anger on the federal government, the smart right-wingers knew, it could have the same effect.”
  • Idea behind Law and Economics, which originated out of the Chicago school - “that a main point of the low, not only of antitrust, is to maximize economic efficiency… So if you happen to think it’s a good idea for judicial decisions to also consider fairness or moral justice, or other values or versions of social happiness that can’t be reduced to simple metrics of efficiency, Law and Economics says you’re a fool.” Hides political ideas behind equations and other math to give it the ideal of impartiality.
  • “From 1980 on, Law and Economics arguments powered both the subversion of antitrust enforcement and the new mania for deregulation. It also, for instance, provided the rationales for legal and regulatory changes that were particularly sweet for the telecommunication and financial industries, and for corporate defenses of female pay gaps as being justified by economic efficiency. Law and Economics has shaped other policy as well - it even presumes to reduce marriage and child custody and civil liberties cases to simple equations of economic efficiency - but its primary and profound impact had been to fortify the power of big business to do as it pleases.”
  • Paying executives in stock kills innovation and places more value on short-term gains. “in a survey in the 200s of four hundred financial officers of public companies, as many as 78 percent of them actually admitted they would cancel projects and forgo investment that they knew would have important long-term economic benefits for their companies rather than risk disappointing Wall Street’s every-ninety-days earnings expectations. Another giant irony: precisely the kind of perverse, enterprise-damaging management behavior was what the professor-godfathers of shareholder supremacy in 1976 had warned that purely salaried managers were doing.”
  • “It’s ironic that one of the rationales for America’s 1980s makeover was to revive the heroic American tradition of risk-taking given that so much of the story has turned out to be about reckless financiers insulating themselves from risk by shifting it to customers and, though the government, to taxpayers.”
  • Increasing job insecurity has resulted in a loss of power of the workers. “employees of the biggest corporations, whose jobs everyone had considered the most secure, were now too frightened of being jettisoned from those jobs to push hard for more pay or better working conditions.”
  • “Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase ‘socially liberal but fiscally conservative’ to describe their politics, which meant low taxes in return for tolerance of … whatever, as long as it didn’t cost affluent people anything.”
  • “The old Republican goal of budgetary prudence, trying to balance federal revenues and spending, became a vestigial. Fiscal responsibility rhetorically pops back to life for Republicans only when they’re out of power in Washington, and only as an argument for achieving their secondary goals of reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits and preventing any major expansion of health or education or other social programs.”
  • “The economic right was shrewd enough to understand that the issues they didn’t care much about - abortion, gay rights, creationism - did matter to liberals, and that those culture wars drew off political energy from the left that might otherwise have fueled complaints and demands about the reconstructed political economy.”
  • “And for the last forty years, the story of the tax code has been the same back and forth and back again, Republicans radically lowering rates on business and the rich, then Democrats nudging them back up, not mainly to expand social programs or redistribute wealth but to reduce budget deficits.”
  • “Mistrust of government is an effect of conservative politics as much as it is a cause.”

• There Are No Accidents

  • “The cost of accidents can be counted in taxes paid and wages lost. And because American taxpayers, rather than corporations, carry most of these costs, letting accidents happen is perfectly profitable for corporate America, even when those accidents happen in unsafe American cars or in uninspected American workplaces.”
  • Bad Apple Theory - a few bad apples cause the accidents. New View - if people are making mistakes and getting hurt, it indicates conditions are unsafe “For subscribers of the Bad Apple Theory, the purpose of investigating an accident is to assign blame to whoever made a mistake. Once whoever is in charge assigns blame and hands out punishment, they can consider the accident solved. For subscribers of the New View, the purpose of investigating an accident is to identify the dangerous conditions that caused people to get hurt when someone made a mistake. Once the dangerous conditions are identified, they can be changed - to prevent the accident from occurring again or to reduce the likelihood of death or injury when another person inevitably makes the same mistake.”
  • “Automakers and sellers, car parts manufacturers, and oil companies fought against restrictions dictating how cars we built, redirecting car-related ire towards the way people walked or drove. With concerted campaigns about a few bad apples, these interest groups shifted a conversation about the shocking impact of powerful cars on pedestrian-dense city streets into a conversation about crazy drivers and pedestrians who just don’t walk right.”
  • “While some of the financial benefactors of car sales pushed municipalities to pass local traffic ordinances restricting pedestrians’ access to the street, the American Automobile Association in particular focused on education, launching and funding a national traffic safety campaign in schools. Street crossing lessons became part of the curriculum, and those lessons reinforced the idea that now cars go first and pedestrians wait. Inherent in this education was the message that if the person did not wait and a driver killed them in the street, their death was caused not by the car’s speed but by jaywalking - the pedestrian’s error. The goal was to teach the next generation that the roads are for automobiles, not people. And since cars were new, and pedestrians had long rules city streets, someone had to invent the idea that a person could walk improperly - the auto lobby did just that.”
  • On the idea that the distracted pedestrian being at the cause of many crashes (Car companies even tried to the the term petextrian to take off for people who text while walking) “So appealing was this idea that a survey of transportation officials in 2018 and 2019 found that a third believed that distracted walking was a serious safety issue. Those road planners and engineers estimated that 40 percent of the pedestrians killed died because of distracted walking. (In reality, it is estimated to be the cause of 0.2 percent of pedestrian fatalities.) The same wrongheadedness drove legislators in New York City to pass a law to force the city’s department of transportation to study the depth of the distracted pedestrian problem. The agency abided by the law and conducted a study. They found no evidence of any such problem.”
  • “If the only job of executives is to maximize profits, then without a countervailing force to keep workers safe, accidents happen. This tension between safety and production defines the industrial workplace, where the pressure and desire to make money manifests in accidents.”
  • It is estimated that technologies such as emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection, alcohol sensor interlocks and lane control would save 17000 lives a year in the US if every car had them. “These technologies are not mandated of automakers by regulation but are offered to the wealthy at a cost - so, if you can afford it, you can pay more to change the dangerous conditions inside your car and thus survive an accident. Otherwise you might die because you did not hit the brakes in time, in which case, the story of your accidental death will be that you should not have been driving like such a nut.”
  • “The is significant evidence that the vast majority of people tend to see their own accidents as a product of the environment they were in at the time, and other people’s accidents as a problem of human error and personal responsibility, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.”
  • “By the end of 1953, DeHaven had compiled a list of the most dangerous parts in any automobile. The killers were pointed knobs, dashboards without padding, steering columns that could not collapse on impact - and the lack of seat belts to prevent people from smashing into all of that. His list was proof that accidents were in our control, regardless of the nut behind the wheel. All that matters was how the automakers built the car.”
  • “The accident-prone worker is a myth and the nut behind the wheel a clever distraction from the true cause of accidental death and injury - and we miss a wealth of information that could prevent accidents when we pay any attention to these caricatures of personal responsibility.”
  • “Like the employer blaming the accident-prone worker in the small accident, the politician or corporate CEO insisting this is no big deal is a fixture of the large scale accident. You could say, of course, that it’s essential to calm the public. Except that diffusing our panic can also diminish how much we care about a disaster…. All of this - the cleanup, the lies, the hyperbole of politicians and executives - is an equivalent of the accident-prone worker and the nut behind the wheel. However, the large-scale accident is too big and too public the shift the blame to one person making one mistake. Yet there’s still a need to distract from the dangerous conditions of generating nuclear power and pumping oil, so instead you get powerful people mucking with your perception of the problem.”
  • “Scientists found that cleaning oil of a bird could cause as much injury as the oil itself. The majority of brown pelicans cleaned and released after an oil spill in California never mated again and died. After a 2002 oil spill in Spain, scientists an volunteers cleaned thousands of birds; the majority died within weeks… Still, all this scrubbing serves a purpose. It is oil spill response theater, with the message that these accidents are fine because they can be cleaned up. Pretending that we can clean up a oil spill is one way that oil companies make the risk of an oil spill feel less dire.”
  • “Dumbaugh found that most accidents on city streets happened because cars were driving and turning too fast onto driveways and side streets. It turned out that when traffic engineers build straight, wide roads that looked like interstates, drivers felt encouraged to drive at interstate speeds. Those curves, trees, and benches that engineers removed had actually been making drivers slow down to avoid the risk and more in control driving driving faster, and driving too fast, people died in traffic accidents. The design of the road induced the errors.”
  • “Most of the time, when a traffic engineer designs a new road to connect two places, there is nothing in between, at least at first. Traffic engineers make all the big decisions about the road design - how wide, how fast, how straight - by prognostication. They forecast traffic and land development thirty years into the future and design high-speed roads connecting that new development to the rest of the region. The road is perfectly safe when there is nothing much on it, but as development fills in the spaces between with shops, homes, and schools, the empty high-speed road becomes a busy - and hazardous - high-speed road. Dumbaugh had been taught that roadside hazards were the risk, but the actual hazard is the shape of the street and the speed it encourages. The risk that engineers build into a new roadway only increases over time as development fills in the area around the road.”
  • “Most speed limits are not based on physics or crash test expertise but simply the upper limit of what most amateur drivers feel is safe.”
  • “Engineering schools across the country still teach these rules, and the graduates of those schools still believer that following them will reduce risk for drivers. But these guidelines also give engineers protection. By following the rules, however outdated or unproven they may by, engineers shield themselves from lawsuits. Engineers build roads that put us all at risk of an accident and thus protect themselves from the risk of legal action. When a traffic accident kills someone in an unsafe street, the engineer can claim, accurately but dangerously, that they were just following the rules.”
  • “The government’s interest in protecting people from accident differs depending on the person to whom it happens - an innocent child accidentally ingesting a pill merits a response different from that accorded an adult who uses a drug who accidentally overdoses. In this way, risk exposure can be a moral judgement. The difference between a rapid response to one accident and a seventeen-year wait before responding to accidents that were killing tens of thousands a year represents how we feel about the people having those accidents. We are especially willing to let accidents happen to some people.”
  • “In so many cases, ‘it was an accident’ is a phrase that absolves powerful people of responsibility for dangerous conditions. And these people allow accidents to happen again and again. But when a powerless person says ‘it was an accident,’ the phrase can take on other meanings. It can mean that an overdose was unintentional or that any consequence was regrettable - it can be a way to say: I didn’t mean it. And if ‘accident’ can offer that person some kindness and absolution, that is the story I want us all to hear.”
  • “It is no accident that mechanisms that can prevent overdoes and disease transmission are inaccessible; it is a direct result of a lack of empathy and perhaps even a desire to punish people who are addicted. The outcome of making known methods of prevention inaccessible is that accidental overdose crises are allowed to grow for decades. And while stigmas that attend addiction are particularly deadly, these are hardly the only dangerous ones. For too many people, stigmas stack up.”
  • “You can see how this could create a vicious cycle: accidental death is more likely because of dangerous conditions, which are distributed across society in a racist way, and which are justified to remain dangerous by a racist interpretation of the cause of accidental death. The response to a white person killed in a bike accident, absent racecraft, might be more sympathetic, less focused on human error and more on dangerous conditions - leading to solutions for the actual problems.”
  • “Risk perception researchers have found similar results so often they’ve branded this the ‘white make effect.’ White men feel significantly more comfortable with risk or are just acutely aware that their risk exposure is relatively minimal. They aren’t simply more willing to accept risk; they accurately perceive that they alone are at less risk.”
  • “Researchers have found a correlation between deadly work accidents, for example, and high state debt, meaning states that spend money - whether on infrastructure or social welfare programs - are also places where you are less likely to die by accident. Other research, which correlated greater income inequality with higher accidental death, also found that the cities that spent more on roads had a 14 percent lower rate of accidental death.”
  • “One of the reasons that we don’t spend money to protect people from accidents is the same reason that many Americans blame poor people for their poverty: the human error explanation absolves us of the responsibility. But blaming human error is also a well-documented cognitive bias that helps us see an unjust world as just. This bias - known as the just world fallacy - helps us feel more comfortable in a cruel world by focusing on individual behavior to explain systemic failures and structural inequality. In particular, we zero in on anything that reinforces the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.”
  • “Studies show that this simple act - finding someone to blame - makes people less likely to see systemic problems or seek changes… No matter the accident, blame took the place of prevention.” Example: the helmet-wearing or helmetless status of a person is often mentioned in news reports when someone on a bike is hit by someone in a car. “Noting the lack of a bicycle helmet is a dog whistle for human error, like invoking the jaywalker, or the nut behind the wheel, or the criminal addict. And researchers have found that when we read about an accident and hear mention of human error, such as not wearing a helmet, it draws us like moths to a flame. This is true to such a degree that reading about an accident where someone was found to blame triggers an increased desire for punishment and a disregard for changing institutional or dangerous systemic conditions, such as an unsafe street.”
  • A kid was killed crossing a street with his mother to get from a bus stop to their home across the street. The nearest crosswalk was a mile down the street. The driver of the car was partially blind, admitted to drinking and taking pain medication earlier and had previously been convicted of two hit-and-run incidents. If you want to blame human error you could say what caused the error was (a) crossing the street outside the crosswalk or (b) driving on pain medication after drinking with a medical condition. To actually solve the problem we need to ask why (a) and (b) were allowed to occur. There was no crosswalk nearby and she had to use public transit because she couldn’t afford a car. Driver was given a driver’s license despite being partially blind in part because he needed to drive and he drive into a child because traffic planners declined to add a crosswalk.
  • “You can prevent drunk driving accidents by offering transportation options that allow people to get drunk without driving; you can prevent accidental overdoses by making naloxone as ubiquitous as aspirin; you can prevent accidental fires by installing an automatic sprinkler system in every home in America; you can prevent accidental death caused by overheating or freezing by nationalizing the utility industry and making safe home temperatures a right, not a privilege.”
  • Think of “the lowest-common denominator user - the worst driver, the most tired employee, the most distracted pedestrian. If you want to minimize the damage, don’t fixate on fixing that person. Instead, build an environment that controls the energy that person may come into contact with.” Make the world safe drunks, you make it safe for everyone.
  • “As long ago as 1975, the USDOT itself figured out that three factors most determined whether or not a person was injured in a car accident: how much the vehicle weighed, how high it was off the ground, and how much higher its front end was compared to a pedestrian.” Yet they have done nothing to regulate how vehicles are build. Pedestrian fatalities are rising and cars SUVs are getting bigger.
  • “There is a lot of evidence that regulations save lives and a lot of propaganda that regulations stifle the economy, Narang explains - but there is little or no evidence to support the propaganda. Still today, it is common for regulatory agencies to work towards the goals of corporations and for those agencies to think like the corporations they regulate.” Regulatory capture is killing people.
  • “Regulations are preventative, and when regulation fails, people die. These were all called accidents - teh West, Text, explosion; the Uber driverless car killing; the Boeing 737 Max crashes; the Rhino Resource mine collapse - but Narang tells me that they are choices born of greed.”
  • “When we call something an accident, we feel better at once, and at once, we fail to prevent it from happening again. Only by overcoming this tendency can we prevent accidents.”
  • “Accidents are not a design problem - we know how to design the built environment to prevent death and injury in accidents. And accidents are not a regulatory problem - we know the regulations that will reduce the accidental death toll. Rather, accidents are a political and social problem. To prevent them, we only need the will to redesign our systems, the courage to confront our worst inclinations, and the strength to rein in the powerful who allow accidents to happen.”

• Curbing Traffic - The authors moved their family from Vancouver to the Netherlands.

  • Cities that aren’t build around getting around by car are much better for children and their parents. “The additional mental and emotional energy we used to spend choreographing the lives of four people has certainly lessened with our children’s newly discovered autonomy, and we are savoring those effects every day. The results are confident, more independent children and much more chilled out parents. Building autonomous cities doesn’t just lead to happier kids, it leads to happier parents.”
  • On streets with low traffic residents spend more time gathering outside their homes which leads to being more connected with their neighbors. You have far more ‘stop-and-chats’ when there isn’t a constant flow of traffic on the street outside your home. This gives added social connections that would be absent other places.
  • “The danger in not considering care work and the trips required to perform it - or care trips - in the transportation planning landscape, is that the needs of a significant portion of the population are left unmet. Care trips are often undercounted or uncounted because they don’t fall into easily measured, quantifiable definitions. When you think of the average journey to drop kids off at school or daycare, stop at the grocery store, or visit a doctor’s office, they are generally less than a kilometer in distance and seldom take longer than 15 minutes. Most travel surveys fail to take these measurements in account due to their brevity, ultimately ignoring entire swatches of mobility patterns. At the same time, care trips are usually arranged in a polygonal spatial pattern - indirect and with multiple stops - covering smaller geographical areas that are closer to home and made on foot or public transport. From a data collection stance, these trips are harder to track than the average, single-purpose commute for employment.” These care trips are also more often taken by women and the planners are more often men, which further causes those trips to be ignored when designing a system. “When these systems specifically omit data reflecting the need to make multiple stops conveniently and during nontraditional work hours, especially when looking at noncar travel, women are disproportionately underaccommodated, leading to greater strain and inequity.”
  • Following some failed attempts at improving cycling in the Netherlands: “In their postmortem of these two projects, experts pointed to their lack of cohesion and directness. People declined to use them because they were single corridors, designed in isolation, that forced users to detour several streets out of their way, and navigate different types of confusing and inconsistent infrastructure.”
  • Cars are loud and there are many health risks associated with constantly being around that much noise.
  • “When transport planners look at a network, they design for efficiencies based on trips people do take. They examine where they live, where they travel, and how to make those journeys as cost and time effective as possible. However, no one is ever analyzing or measuring the trips people don’t take, which is particularly problematic for the disabled community. Think about the last time you were ill. When you’re feeling a little sick, the last thing you want to do is take a 40 minute meandering bus ride when a 10-minute taxi ride would be easier. If cities are designed like that - and we would argue most are - it puts people off traveling, or it makes those choices more expensive.”
  • On the Gardiner Expressway: “In 2016, the municipal council voted to completely replace the crumbling arterial, including a 7-kilometer elevated section at a cost of $2.2 billion. Between 2020 and 2030, that single piece of infrastructure will eat up 44 percent of the transport department’s capital plan, despite moving just 7 percent of commuters (many of whom don’t even reside or pay taxes in the city). Less costly, at-grade options were rejected by councilors after a staff report predicted that they might prolong peak driving times by two to three minutes.”
  • “These kinds of collective investments in a frequent and flexible public transport system - to maximize its convenience and coverage - are precisely what governments must do to lighten the financial burden of car ownership and break down the all-too-real barriers experienced by those lowest on the socioeconomic ladder. But far too often, untold billions are spent widening roads to benefit those who already enjoy the greatest proximity and privilege, while mass transit that would benefit those who need it the most is chronically ignored and underfunded. By doubling, and then tripling down on car dependence, and mandating costly automobile ownership, regions are quite literally holding themselves back, preventing entire swaths of the population from fulfilling their true economic potential. The tremendous cost of car dependency continues to blow a giant hole in our governmental and household budgets, and everyone ends up the poorer for it.”
  • To build a resilient city means “building diverse, flexible, and reliable options into our transportation networks, and breaking up the monopoly enjoyed by the private automobile in most cities.”
  • “Even in the midst of a climate emergency, many cities continue to look at resiliency from the engineering perspective, and resist the changed needed to weather this biggest crises, which will lead to floods, cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons. By building up their resilience to these events with a windshield worldview, and stubbornly adding road capacity and redundant routes, they may be creating higher car dependency and making things worse by decreasing their ability to pursue comprehensive resilience.”

• The Innovation Delusion - Innovation, or more appropriately, innovation-speak, gets all the headlines and investment, but the maintenance and upkeep of existing infrastructure is what actually keeps the world moving.

  • “There’s no evidence that actual innovation or technological change has increased during the period when everyone started talking about innovation. At it’s most extreme, innovation-speak actively devalues the work of most humans, especially those who do the dirty work that keeps our technological civilization running. And … it fails to capture the essence of human life with technology - where maintenance and reliability are far more valuable than innovation and disruption.”
  • “The late economist Nathan Rosenberg and others who have written deep studies of innovation have tended to emphasize incremental changes and long processes of continual improvement. Indeed, most innovation and most of the changes that have contributed to the massive transformations of the last three hundred years are of this sort. … It’s not the kind of message that will attract multimillion-dollar endowments to universities or enable your dear authors to open up consultancy and get filthy rich.”
  • “If you go to a bookstore or a library and look for histories of technology, the shelves will be filled with biographies of great inventors like Edison, Tesla, and Bell, and stories about the creation of planes, trains, and automobiles. Yet, as we have seen, most human activity centers on using technologies, not creating them. Stories of our everyday interactions with the material world have largely gone untold.”
  • “And in every sector of society, we see how a lack of investment in maintenance is causing catastrophic problems, from dirty hospitals and crumbling bridges to failing schools and inept government agencies. But politicians, pundits, and executives continue to cry out for more innovation to save us from any number of crises - climate change, economic slowdown, inefficient healthcare, to name just a few. This instinct - to pin all of our hopes on innovation - is exactly the problem that we summarized as the Innovation Delusion.”
  • City of Remer, Minnesota need to repair a sewage pipe. Repair costs were 300k, which was more than the city’s budget and there was no federal grant program for such a small project. So they designed an updated system with a cost of 2.6 million which would be able to qualify for a federal grant. “Projects like the one in Remer have burdened localities with extravagant infrastructure that they can’t afford. The consequences lie over the horizon, however, so officials and citizens can congratulate themselves for accomplishing something while leaving the worries and problems to the future.” Why aren’t more sustainable projects emphasized? Why aren’t future costs of maintaining new systems considered?
  • “If governments, organizations, and individuals build and buy systems without providing for their future care, we end up facing a stress-inducing mountain of deferred maintenance and infrastructural debt, which is precisely what we see in many parts of society today.”
  • In 2018 Apple had record revenues but their 4th quarter earnings report didn’t meet expectations, so their share price fell 7%. A big reason for that was because of people replacing their batteries rather than buying a new phone. “The absurdity of Apple’s situation becomes clearer when you think about it in a more holistic way: Apple’s stock price dropped because users were - in a very modest way - choosing to fix instead of throw away. But Apple’s executives and shareholders didn’t seem to care about the potential benefits of these choices, such as less pressure to exploit natural resources, or a decrease in ware as perfectly operational iPhones no longer needed to be thrown into dumps and landfills for want of a reliable battery, or freeing up customers to spend their money on something more important. … If the goal of innovative companies is to constantly increase profit, then anything and everything is fair game for being put in service of that cause - even values like efficiency and sustainability.”
  • An example of the Innovation Delusion in healthcare: organ transplants. Researchers began to experiment with embryonic stem cells for regenerative therapies in the 1990s, viewing it as a way to potentially produce artificial organs and repair damaged organs, which attracted lots of funding. This diverts resources from existing approaches. “Physicians are sometimes reluctant to speak publicly about the dilemma. One told use that the transplant unit in his hospital is decades old and ‘suffers from inadequate infrastructure and limited nursing resources.’ He’s frustrated that there are billions of dollars going into regenerative medicine start-ups that he sees ‘going nowhere,’ but he also feels like he has no other choice but to apply for research funding in the same field.”
  • “Within organizations and society at large, maintenance roles often fall at the bottom of the status hierarchies. Nearly all maintainers experience condescension on the job, whether it takes the form of being ignored, talked down to, or taken advantage of.”
  • “We think the personal costs of maintenance work being considered low status go much deeper and take at least two forms: a lack of recognition and a lack of compensation. A third issue is that maintainers often aren’t given enough resources to do their work.” The people who do these jobs are often women and minorities.

• Your Computer Is on Fire - A collection of essays on tech issues. I thought the best ones were “Sexism is a feature, not a bug”, “Coding is not empowerment” and “How to stop worrying about clean signals”

• Think Again - A book about the value of rethinking. A few takeaways:

  • Define your identity in terms of values, not opinions
  • To get people to reevaluate, ask them how they originally formed an opinion. It is often arbitrary and getting them to notice that can get them to reevaluate.
  • In a debate, acknowledge common ground.
  • Establish psychological safety. When people feel confident they can freely challenge the status quo, or take risks and make mistakes, it leads to better outcomes.

• What’s Wrong with Economics?

  • “The most important possibility opened up by behavioural economics is that the neoclassical modal of rational behiviour based on fixed preferences, complete contracts, and ample relevant information is the wrong one. The way most people behave much of the time should carry no implication of irrationality, but should rather be thought of as reasonable behaviour in the circumstances in which they find themselves. The sin of behavioural economics is to dub such behaviour irrational.”
  • “By investing their interests with the authority of science, economics can make self-interest seem more enlightened. Practical people like nothing better than to have their prejudices dressed up in scientific language. Such language has the power to turn what is really a matter of opinion into a fact of nature.”
  • “The weakness of economics in handling power is part and parcel of the absence of institutions from its map of reality. The only actors in its map are maximizing individuals. A proper economics would start with institutions - classes, organizations, and social norms - and then try to show how these shape individual choices. The objections is that such an approach is impossible to model mathematically. For mathematical modelling you need tight priors from which you can deduce precise quantitative conclusions. With any other approach you fall into - God forbid! - political. To this objection Keynes gave an answer which to me is irrefutable: in matters of public policy it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.”
  • “The fact that an idea formerly grasped without maths is now stated in maths is not necessarily an argument for progress, because it ignores the possibility that a great deal of useful knowledge gets permanently lost in translation.”
  • “The upshot is that once a ’normal’ way of doing ‘science’ has been established, it develops strong staying power, however much its scientific claims are questioned. How much more is this likely to be the case in economics, when refutation is almost impossible and vested interests are rampant.”
  • “If economics is to be useful today it will need to modify its belief in the self-regulating market. That free markets contain a principle of order was a huge discovery. It meant that economic life could be set free from state, municipal, communal, and customary direction. But to maintain that market competition is a self-sufficient ordering principle is wrong. Markets are embedded in political institutions and moral beliefs.”
  • On changing how economics is taught: “I would start with the institutions of the macroeconomy and show how they structure markets and shape individual choices within markets. This is what a properly sociological economics would do. Central topics would be the role of the state, the distribution of power, and the effect of both on the distribution of wealth of income. There would be no assumption about individual behaviour except that individuals act as rationally as they can in the incomplete conditions of knowledge in which they find themselves. Further, my textbook would make clear that the only defensible purpose of economics is to lift humanity out of poverty. Beyond this, the lessons of economics end, and those of ethics, sociology, history and politics take over.”

• On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane - If you or someone you know hasn’t worked a low-wage job recently, this should give you an idea of how awful they are to work.

• Abolish Silicon Valley - Wendy Liu’s story of going from believer in big tech to see all the problems with it and capitalism. Although our experiences are quite different, my feelings have followed the same path.

• Cultish - Things that could be considered cult-like language: Using thought-terminating cliches, creating new terminology to get people to feel like they are in the in-group and creating an us-versus-them narrative.

• Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors - Will give you reason to believe Teslas should not be allowed on the road.

• The Dawn of Everything

  • “When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky - in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.”
  • wikipedia

• Do Hard Things

• Automation Is a Myth

  • “Automation technologies are frequently framed as a wave of an age, a de-situated force that will sweep across society or ripple across the globe. But this fiction ignores the social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies at a local level. Automation is both technical and geopolitical, and any discussion must situate the impacts of these technologies within a specific context.”
  • Shifts to more automation are “piecemeal and partial, reconfiguring labor rather than replacing humans”
  • “From nation to nation, region to region, even city to city, technological development and adoption will play out in fundamentally different ways and at different speeds.”
  • “Racialized and gendered relations that elevate some humans while suppressing others. The all-embracing ‘our’ is debunked by the long, tragic tale of history, showing that we are not all in this together. Automation’s human costs are uneven, and this inequality means that we can only speak of ‘our futures’ in relation to ’their futures’”

• Predict and Surveil

  • “Research on welfare agencies nearly three decades ago showed that even when computer systems were ineffective, agencies continued receiving federal and city money for those systems, because the data platforms’ primary value was political.”
  • “If public agencies such as local law enforcement are increasingly using tools and data designed and gathered by the private sector, they are able to work in ways that are less visible”
  • “Using a series of data points to reconstruct an individual’s intentions and behaviors (whether incriminating or exculpatory) rests on the assumptions of an infallible state, or the assumption that law enforcement will draw a correct conclusion.”
  • “Mass surveillance is not the natural result of mass digitization. Instead, what we allow to proliferate and become the objects of massive data collection efforts are choices that reflect the social and political positions of the subject matter that we feel comfortable surveilling.” There is no federal fun registry even though it would be easy to setup. Audit logs of the background checks for obtaining a gun are required by law to be destroyed within 90 days. “Police officers routinely invoked their authority to legitimacy to undermine attempts to surveil their work lives. They have the power to resist in ways that more usual subjects, disproportionately low-income, minority folks with little political capital and no small amount of fear, cannot. In that way, even dragnet surveillance serves to reinscribe inequality”
  • “Surveillance is fundamentally relational. The extent to which it is an exercise of power depends on the organizational contexts in which it is deployed, and how people feel about it depends on where they are in the organizational hierarchy.”
  • Officers complain about their actions being surveilled of performance evaluation purposes while failing to realize they are doing the same thing to others. “I heard a cognitive dissonance in which sworn officers did not recognize (or at least did not verbalize) the irony that their discomfort and resistance is toward the same technology they are imposing on other communities.”
  • “There is no such thing as raw data, because data cannot be divorced from social context.”
  • “The simple argument might be that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from being included in law enforcement’s big data systems. However, the legitimacy of using a series of data points to reconstruct an individual’s intentions and behaviors - whether incriminating or exculpatory - and using that data to predict future behaviors, relies on the infallibility of both the state and the state actors who enter the data.” All it can take is just being in the proximity of a “suspicious” person a couple times and then you become a person worthy of surveillance.
  • Another impact - system avoidance: “deliberately and systematically avoiding institutions that keep formal records, such as hospitals, banks, schools, and employment, to avoid coming under heightened police surveillance.” Since this data ends up in databases used by police. Also leads to people avoiding situations that might induce an Internet search for their name, even if your only contact with law enforcement was the recording of a mugshot with no formal charges.

• Road to Nowhere

  • How we got here:
    • Auto industry and industries that benefit from car dependency lobbied for conditions to make it harder to get around without a car. ie in Cincinnati in the 1920s 10% of residents signed a petition calling for an ordinance to require speed limiters in cars then the auto industry bought a bunch of ads in local newspapers to get them on their side and the ordinance was never passed.
    • “The geographic expansion of cities to make room for cars, the construction of auto-oriented suburbs, and the dismantling of public and rail transport only increased that dependency even as it was sold to the automotive consumer as individual freedom. Once that dependency was established and cemented, all the interests centered around the automobile were able to reap their profits at the expense not just of the driver but the whole of society. Meanwhile, the damage caused by all those vehicles - in maimed bodies, atomized communities, and a defiled environment - was downplayed through changing social norms and a complaint media that rarely drew attention to that array of problems so as not to risk losing large sums of advertising revenue from automotive interests.”
    • “Despite promises that their visions for transportation and the city will serve everyone, it is already becoming clear that those claims are nothing more than marketing material meant to build public support for products that will ultimately serve their companies, their shareholders, and themselves. It is a repetition of how automakers and real estate companies successfully used advertising and the media to convince us to accept our dependence of their industries. We now risk a further deployment of luxury mobility into an already broken transportation system by industry leaders who downplay political problems in favor of technological solutions that fail to grapple with the complexity of the situations into which they are intervening. We cannot allow them to determine our future.”
  • On the Silicon Valley worldview:
    • “The people at the helm of the tech industry have incredibly narrow worldviews, and that has implications for the types of solutions they present to the perceived challenges that need to be addressed. Those who build the libertarian ideology that dominates its upper echelons, and which subsequently spread throughout society as the industry has grown since the 1990s, came from a privileged background that shaped the way they saw the world. These white men of middle-class and even wealthy backgrounds who were able to read the benefits of the economic growth in the latter half of the twentieth century did not give much though as to whether the policies and ideas of progress that worked for them would also deliver for the whole of the working class, particularly women and people of color, who has much higher barriers to gain access to the wealth creation of that period.”
    • “Part of the problem is that executives, venture capitalists, and other important figures associated with the tech industry do not take the time to understand the real problems they claim to seek to solve, and instead make assumptions about serious issues and their root causes to legitimize preconceived technological solutions.”
    • “The intervention of tech companies into the physical space should not be seen as an altruistic move to improve the lives of urban, suburban, or rural residents. As with the automotive interests of the twentieth century, their primary goal is to remake communities to serve their need for profit and control.”
  • On greenwashing the electric vehicle:
    • “The problem with automobility is not solely the fuel that powers it, but the way that companies and governments have successfully reoriented our entire lives around automobiles and, in many cases, have decimated more efficient alternatives.” Car dependency is such an inefficient use of space.
    • “The truth is that the electric vehicle, whether produced by Tesla, General Motors, or any other company, will not address the fundamental problems with a transportation system built around automobiles. In the same way that the fossil fuel infrastructure that spans the globe has been recognized as a threat to the climate and to human life itself, especially the people who live near the sites where it is extracted and refined, the mining industry has begun a significant expansion to support the mass suffering and environmental damage unless we address the role of passenger vehicles in our transportation system and prioritize mobility that is more efficient, both in its resource use and the way it operates.”
    • “Every technology company and every electric vehicle company uses minerals which have harmful effects on workers, the environment, and the communities surrounding the mines.”
    • Giving subsidies to buy EVs is not the best use of public money. EVs tend to be purchased by wealthy individuals and they tend to be purchased as a luxury vehicle, not for the environmental benefits. The EV is unlikely to be their primary vehicle. “Why should we lose a lot of money for the rich people getting a cheap, expensive luxury car?”
    • Emissions in the production process for EVs are significantly higher than internal combustion vehicles.
    • EVs increase pollution from particle matter from wear and tear to tires and brakes past since they are heavier vehicles.
    • “Instead of trying to have personal electric vehicles match the scale of personal gas or diesel vehicles, the emphasis should instead be on getting people to shift from driving to taking transit and cycling, while building more walkable communities where necessities are closer to home.”
  • On Uber’s assault on cities and labor:
    • “When Kalanick said that Uber would crush the taxi cartel, he was not talking about the taxi companies, though they were certainly swept up in it; rather, he was talking about the last vestiges of the taxi drivers’ power over the conditions of their industry. This campaign was not undertaken to benefit the public as a whole, and it certainly did not benefit drivers. Instead, the fruits of deregulation accrued to the white-collar workers who escaped annihilation in the recession and to those young professionals in industries like tech and finance who prospered in the decade that followed at the expense of those who were wiped out by the crash together with the poor, immigrant, and workers of color who had never made it out of precarity to begin with.”
  • On self-driving cars:
    • “The problems autonomous vehicles claim to solve - traffic congestion and road safety foremost among them - can be effectively addressed through low-tech means, but that will require engaging with the politics of transportation and the distribution of benefits and harms that arise from both the existing system and the proposals of the future.”
    • “Part of Silicon Valley’s promise is that its solutions are apolitical and do not involve digging into these difficult political questions, even tough the seemingly apolitical nature of autonomous vehicles hide how they maintain and reinforce the existing unequal dynamics that already define transportation networks. In short, their promise is a lie.”
    • “They still take up too much space in our communities; they would continue auto-oriented development patterns; and they bring a whole new range of new vulnerabilities that city governments are not well-equipped to address, especially after decades of having their budgets squeezed through tax cuts and austerity measures.”
  • On the fight for the sidewalk:
    • “Early on, they recognized that these new companies offering dockless bike and e-scooter options, which collectively became known as micromobility, were not simply trying to get people to adopt a new service, but were staking a claim to some of the little remaining public space in the city, and residents were not going to let it go without a fight.”
    • “Micromobility services, as well as the autonomous delivery robots that are also being deployed on sidewalks, are not designed to place accessibility and affordability at the fore; rather, while forcing their way onto sidewalks, they are also seeking to entrench rentier business models that ensure they take a cut every time people access them. The services are designed to benefit the company, and what is best for users and the broader society is much further down the list of priorities.”
    • “For all the hype about micromobility services, their exponential growth, and inflated valuations, when it comes to something like bikes and scooters, it makes far more sense for people to enable them to do so. That includes bike lanes, of course, but also safe bike parking facilities, especially near key transit hubs. But micromobility services were the most visible part of a broader campaign to seize the sidewalk in service of unproven tech businesses without a clear public benefit.”
    • “The technologies unleashed by Silicon Valley are not neutral. They contain within them the worldviews of the people who develop them; and when they go unquestioned, we allow those very people to make important decisions about how and for whom our society should operate without any democratic deliberation. When we assume that technology can only develop in one way, we accept the power of the people who control that process, but there is no guarantee that their ideal world is one that truly works for everyone.”
  • On the future tech is building:
    • “The founders, executives, and venture capitalists that back these initiatives for the future of transportation have a very narrow experience of the city. Their proposed solutions respond to the problems of urban life as they experience them - not as most residents do. That leads to grand plans that are not only naive, but which fail to address the real challenges that people face in getting around their communities, accessing jobs and services, and visiting family and friends.”
    • Future scenarios for cities that are for more realistic than the visions being promoted: more segregation based on income, more hostile to pedestrians, and using unaccountable technological systems to control even more aspects of our lives.
    • “Rather than a network of tunnels for the masses, such a system could be redeployed as one designed by and for the wealthy. The tunnels would exist not to relieve traffic congestion but to serve as roads for the rich that are inaccessible to the public and connect the places they frequent.”
    • “This is the preoccupation of a group of people that are wealthy enough that they not only never have to consider walking anywhere, but increasingly do not want to be in public for fear of being recognized, asked questions, heckled, or worse. Given that they want to close themselves off, and certainly cannot imagine taking public transit, they project that desire onto much of the rest of society, under the assumption that few other people living in major cities will walk for a few minutes to reach their destinations.”
    • “There is a direct transfer of power from residents to the tech companies in the app-based city, and as control over interactions and transactions shift to vast technological systems, there is also a loss of accountability. In exchange for frictionless for people who have reaped the benefits of the modern economy, there are growing barriers for those who have not - barriers that can quickly appear where they did not previously exist, and which cannot easily be resolved because they are controlled by algorithms instead of human beings.”
  • “If our communities and transportation systems are currently designed around the mobility patterns and lifestyles of powerful men, an equitable and sustainable alternative must instead give priority to the people who have been marginalized by them. But planning such a system cannot end at city borders; it must be connected to an intercity transport network built around the same principles.” Things like high speed rail connecting major city centers, intercity buses connecting smaller towns.
  • “The same effort that went into building the Interstate Highway System and local road networks should be put into building out the national rail infrastructure and public transit systems in urban, suburban, and rural communities. The subsidies and regulatory effort that went into enabling the great suburban expansion must be redirected not only to discourage suburban growth but to build public housing that is rooted in walkable, transit-accessible communities where people can easily reach the services they rely on without the need for an automobile. As part of that effort, our communities and the public services that anchor them must be reconceived for a more sustainable way of life.”

• Chokepoint Capitalism

  • “In chokepoint capitalism, the aim is to create enduring barriers to competition that enable corporations to monopolize or monopsonize their markets.”
  • “There’s a lot of arguing over what does (and should) count as monopoly or monopsony for the purposes of antitrust law. Antitrust enforcement currently relies on highly technical infractions that are very difficult to prove until long after a corporation has wreaked terrible harms, at which point the company is likely so powerful the law can be difficult to actually enforce!”
  • “As monopsony expert Cartensen explains, when companies are forces to give greater discounts to their most powerful buyers, they tend to find the money by ’exercising their power over their workers to further depress wages and other workplace investments.’ In other words, ultimately it’s authors and other culture workers who pay for Amazon’s fatter margins.”
  • Digital rights management (DRM) is supposed to guard against unauthorized copying. US Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it a crime “to tamper with a software-based lock that restricts access to copyrighted work. This is broader than what was required, as it does not distinguish between tampering with locks for legal or illegal purposes.”
  • “This overboard implementation radically shifted the balance of power in the entertainment industry. It meant that any company who made an entertainment platform became the sole arbiter of whether and how customers, competitors, and even the copyright owner could alter the locks’ functioning.”
  • “Amazon understood that even though DRM is the enemy when you are trying to break into someone else’s monopoly, it’s the best friend you can have when you’re trying to create your own. The Kindle ebook store featured exactly the same kind of DRM that enabled Apple to become so powerful in the music download space. Every book was shackled to Amazon’s platform. Amazon wouldn’t even permit publishers who wanted to release their titles without DRM to do so. Holdouts like the tech publisher O’Reilly, which understood the danger, weren’t permitted to release their titles as DRM-free ebooks on Amazon’s platform until Kindle’s supremacy was safely established.”
  • Amazon pressured publishers to digitize their books quickly or risk demotion in search results, so publishers rushed to do so. They did so without knowing Amazon would only charge 9.99 for the most popular ebooks and new releases. Publishers “were worried, too, that cheap ebooks would lure customers away from physical copies, threatening the ongoing viability of physical bookstores and giving Amazon even more power than it already had.”
  • “By using DRM to raise the switching costs to a point where few readers are interested in moving elsewhere, Amazon keeps publishers locked in too. The elegance of this moat is that it’s self-digging: the more ebooks readers buy, the wider and more difficult to bridge it becomes.”
  • “Say you visit the Washington Post. Dozens of brokers bid on the chance to advertise to you. All but one loses the auction. But every one of those losers gets to add a tag to its dossier about you: ‘Washington Post reader’… Here’s the thing: the companies want to advertise to Washington Post readers, but they don’t always care about advertising in the Washington Post. And now there are dozens of auction losers who can sell the right to advertise to you, as a Post reader, when you visit cheaper sites.”
  • “One known technique for maximizing profits id for Google to buy up ad space from publishers at a discounted rate and sel it on to advertisers for a huge and undisclosed premium. When the Guardian purchased some of its own ad inventory and followed the money, it discovered that up to 70 percent of revenues were siphoned off before ever reaching the publisher. Middlemen were snatching most of the value, leaving news providers with as little as 30 cents of each dollar spent on ads attached to their content.”
  • “Perhaps the biggest fraud of all is the theory itself: the idea that with enough surveillance data and machine learning, ad tech can cell anyone anything. It sure sounds plausible that Google and Facebook, with all that information they’ve invasively sniffed out about you, can do a much better job of targeting you with ads than an advertiser who just targets readers of a particular publication. But the case is growing less and less convincing.”
  • “The anticompetitive flywheel is obvious: Apple started with an innovative, attractive product, which locked in the first users. Then it gave software developers and content distributors an easy way of reaching that audience, encouraging them to invest in new software offering an ever wider range of content. That attracted more users, all tied to the App Store as their only source of software. Once enough users were locked in, the suppliers were too. That’s what gave Apple the power to unilaterally change the deal developers and creators had signed up to. They also gave themselves unlimited power to decide which apps made it into the store, with the developer guidelines not even pretending to offer any kind of procedural fairness.”
  • As soon as a corporation creates a chokepoint it will do everything in it’s power to make it permanent. “Rather than trying to retain their dominance by making the best products, they do this by locking in suppliers and workers, killing off or merging with rivals, and making their markets maximally inhospitable to new entrants.”
  • “There are excellent reasons to mobilize against Big Tech. … But the backlash against Big Tech is focusing too much on its Techness and not enough on its Bigness. Misapprehending the source of the danger risks actually making it worse. If you think Google is bad now, just imagine what it will become if we keep creating rules that make it all but impossible for alternatives to emerge.”
  • “There are three core ways interventions outside of antitrust can help: by encouraging new entrants, by directly regulating buyer power, and by building up countervailing power in workers and suppliers.”
  • “The lack of data stymies collective action too. If nobody knows how bad their deal is or their contracts ban them from sharing the details, it’s hard to organize to collectively demand better.”
  • “The case for interoperability isn’t about creating competitive markets in which the best products win. It’s about creating a world of tools, devices, and services that are under the control of the people who depend on them.”
  • “By addressing the symptom (too much money for platforms, not enough for news) rather than the cause (that the platforms have created chokepoints that enable them to capture an unfair share of value), these solutions risk exacerbating the problem: if news’ survival becomes reliant on those giants remaining rich and powerful, it will be all the harder to wind them back to a manageable size. That’s a real danger.”
  • “A jobs guarantee would indeed increase the share of GDP that goes to labor, because every private sector employer would know its workers could shift into public work if the conditions were better there. That’s why a job guarantee is such a powerful response to chokepoint capitalists. The only reason megacorporations can steal wages and divert such a big share of profits to investors is because their workers and suppliers have no other choice. By giving them one, a job guarantee would put meaningful floor under pay and conditions. As private sector conditions improved, people would move away from guaranteed jobs and back into the market. But the public jobs would always be there, a built-in safeguard to respond when corporations grow too abusive.”

• Sideways The City Google Couldn’t Buy

• The Shame Machine - Punch up with shame, don’t punch down.

  • “Each time we look away from someone asking for money on the street, for example, or speed past a person sleeping under a bridge, we withhold respect, trust, and inclusion, not to mention any concern for the person’s safety. But we also contribute to the sorry status quo by perpetuating the norms that prop up the ruling shame machines. If we accept that the fat, the poor, those with addictions, and so many others are suffering because they made bad choices, we, too, are part of the problem. Developing awareness of the dignity violations we commit daily represents the first step toward dismantling the shame machines.”
  • “Does any woman deserve to bear a digital scarlet letter for the rest of her days simply because she acted foolishly one summer afternoon? Should she lose her job? These are key questions for fairness. But they’re also central to strategy, because the shame weaponized in these online pile-ons can spark angry countermovements. Their excesses, often exaggerated, also provide a handy defense for powerful people under attack, who can then position themselves as victims of a hypersensitive elite.”
  • “Oppressors experience shame, some to a greater extent than others. So they find it much more comfortable to deny the human rights abuses they’re benefiting from and to rally around myths”
  • “Even in this age of shame networks and punching down, healthy shame can still work its magic. But it must come through doors and windows that are open, not those that are shuttered. Friends and allies know where those openings are, and how to get the message across most effectively. Far better than Bill Gates or Dr. Fauci, they can deliver the kind of gentle shame that signals love. That alone can give us a powerful push in the right directions.”

• Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet - and What To Do About It

  • “Until we change how these corporations operate, and for whom, our smartphone manufacturers will continue to clear pristine forests in the hunt for precious metals to line consumer gadgets destined for the rubbish heap, and workers will continue to be exploited in the ironically named ‘fulfillment centres’ of online shopping giants.”
  • Myth 1: Free markets are competitive
    • Market failures: if a company has more information than consumers then it can get away with charging more. Spillovers - harms to society and the environment that aren’t priced in to the market.
    • “Free markets are supposed to bring us growth and technological advancement, so if we could believe the myth that our markets were competitive then the costs might be worth it. But actually the very opposite is true: free markets seem to inevitably turn into concentrated ones, ostensibly with the regulatory blessing of antitrust authorities. And with that market concentration comes unaccountable power.”
    • “The economy is run for shareholders but they are not reinvesting in the real economy, they are extracting value from the stock market.”
    • “High profits are not enticing start-ups into industry, in part because the incumbents use their excess profits to create a walled garden: they lobby for precisely the kind of regulation that would keep smaller entrants out.”
    • “Free market competition creates power. In fact, ‘competition’ has come to be synonymous with domination and corporate power”
  • Myth 2: Companies compete by trying to best respond to the needs of society
    • “Companies are certainly efficient at generating schemes to make money- it is another question whether the public at large benefits.” ex. collusion, mergers
    • “A single-minded focus on profits forces companies to pursue all available means of obtaining power and lowering costs.” Lots of social and environmental harm is the result.
    • “Companies compete for power, for the benefit of their shareholders, in ways that harm society.”
  • Myth 3: Corporate power is benign
    • “But the world we actually live in is replete with market failures. Whilst consumers get intangible ‘utility’ - supposedly swimming around in a well-provisioned world of cheap stuff companies and those running and investing in them get cold, hard cash and, if they are able to take advantage of market failure loopholes, far more than their fair share, at our collective expense. With money comes power, the power to do more harm, to earn more money and entrench the status quo. This is efficiency, this is opportunity, this is freedom, this is justice. This is competition.”
    • “And, in fact, the supposed innovativeness of dominant firms is often due not to private genius and investment but to public investment in basic research - it is not the reward of profit that incentivizes innovation but the foresight and vision of government.”
    • “The company with rents to spare can use them to underwrite their externalities and to fight any litigation or regulatory punishment that may one day materialize.”
    • “There are many types of corporate power that allow the powerful to choose how to shape the economy and society in their interests.”
  • Myth 4: We already control corporate power with antitrust
    • “Antitrust has turned into a technocratic field of experts mechanistically applying dated economic theories, out of touch with the urgent reality of our times.”
    • “Bork established what is today the gold standard of competition law - the ‘consumer welfare’ test. But under this test, whatever happened in big companies was assumed to be good. The powerful deserve their power and, somehow, in ways not clearly articulated, this situation was assumed, invisibly, to also serve the powerless. Meanwhile, the shareholders of monopolistic companies, and other powerful individuals, receded quietly into the background.”
    • “Modern antitrust condones corporate power.”
  • Myth 5: The law requires companies to maximize financial value for shareholders
    • “Shareholder value is actually quite a peculiar sort of rule: it has its origins in law, yes, but equivalent legal principles in other fields of law will have reams of cases affirming the core tenets, shaping the boundaries of the rule and excising the exceptions. For shareholder value there is no well-established body of case law or specific statute - just a few by-the-way musings from judges, and fragmentary decisions.”
    • “Even the 2014 pronouncement by the Supreme Court in Hobby Lobby - a case concerning corporate religious freedoms but which included a declaration by the court that companies are not required to maximize shareholder value, nor have they ever been - cannot shake shareholder value from the corporate psyche”
    • “The law is being willfully misinterpreted to our collective detriment as it does not require companies to maximize shareholder profit.”
  • Myth 6: We are all shareholders; we all benefit from corporate focus on shareholders’ interests
    • “Most shareholders are already wealthy”
  • “Power and responsibility should be reunited, through corporate law and antitrust, otherwise any siloed attempts to mitigate ruthless competition or dissipate corporate power will fail. This is the core principle of stakeholder antitrust and the basis of a new vision for regulating corporate power in free markets by recognizing, finally, the blind spot of capitalism: that free market competition, unrestrained, allows for the accumulation of power and the transmission of harm.”
  • “But it is nonsensical that a framework centred around ‘welfare’ continues to ignore the harms to consumers, society and the planet.”
  • “Shareholder value demands that profits be maximized and distributed to shareholders. An alternative conception would be to demand and democratize the corporation and to share the power of the company within the company itself, to co-opt the corporation’s power and resources for the public good.”
  • “One of the advances of stakeholder governance is that it creates a regulatory check within the company itself, ideally giving voice to consumers, workers, local residents and public interest groups, as well as investor. This has distinct benefits, because stakeholders are generally better motivated, have more information and have the global reach to monitor corporate conduct beyond the resource and jurisdictional limits of any national regulator.”

• Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires - A good takedown of the soullessness of “The Mindset” of how the rich tech guys view the world.

  • “The Mindset is based in a staunchly atheistic and materialist scientism, a fait in technology to solve problems, an adherence to biases of digital code, an understanding of human relationships as a market phenomena, a fear of nature and women, a need to see one’s contributions as utterly unique innovation without precedent, and an urge to neutralize the unknown by dominating and de-animating it.”

• No Such Thing as a Free Gift

  • Three main concerns of philanthrocapitalism:
    • lack of accountability and transparency - how independent are you when a large portion of your funding comes from a private philanthropic organization?
    • channelling private funds toward public services erodes support of government spending on health and education.
    • many of the big philanthropists earned their fortunes through business strategies that exacerbate the same social and economic inequalities that they are claiming to try to help
  • Why do growing philanthropy and growing inequality seem to go hand in hand?
    • charitable donations deprive tax revenue that could be spent on redistributive welfare policies
    • most charitable donations do not provide economic relief for low-income individuals
    • philanthropy is used to thwart demands for higher taxation and redistributing wealth
  • “For decades, health activists in the US and internationally have suggested that current patent laws are a significant obstacle to achieving worldwide access to affordable medicines. Bill Gates does not agree. And his outspoken views on patents, combined with enormous cash injections towards the health policies he prefers, may have single-handedly thwarted efforts to open pharmaceutical markets to have more generic competition.” A problem considering the Gates Foundation influences the current administration, the WHO, the Global Fund on these issues and press coverage, academics and NGOs.
  • “Carnegie’s faith in his unique ability to provide for community members led to a curious paradox. Once he became convinced that parting with his wealth was the most appropriate action, he became equally convinced that he had a moral duty to accumulate as much wealth as possible, even if it meant exacting ever more pain from his workers in order to create that wealth.”
  • “Ruth McCambridge, editor-in-chief of the influential Nonprofit Quarterly magazine, has emphasized this concern, querying whether the rise of increasingly powerful ‘mega-philanthropies’ with increased leverage over smaller organizations may be creating a situation where ‘well-funded organizations with great marketing capacity and social capital to spare have been perhaps overcapitalized - arguably well past the real value of what they add.’ She worries that ‘once tens of millions of dollars have been invested in one organization, what will the willingness be to reverse that course, even if it is clearly falling short of failing or causing unanticipated harm to communities or community infrastructure?’”
  • “After tracking the impact of microfinance loans over a twenty-year period, the investigators found an almost negligible increase in schooling and a minor jump on household spending.” … “One group has profited handsomely from microfinance, and that’s the investors, most of them based in wealthy nations”
  • “What’s happening in the world of large mega-philanthropies and their corporate beneficiaries is the spectre of double exemption. Despite being headquartered in Britain, Vodafone avoided paying UK corporation tax for three straight years - and that during a period of drastic government spending cuts. Then the Gates Foundation reduces Vodafone’s expenses even further by offering the company’s subsidiary non-repayable grants worth over $6 million. Finally - and here’s the double exemption part - the Gates Foundation’s founders receive a tax break for their contribution to Vodacom, so US tax payers lose out as well as UK ones.”
  • “If a research team is forced to prioritize research or policy decisions stipulated by a donor who monitors and punishes any divergences from the donor’s demands, there are no limits to a donor using philanthropy as a veneer for increasing personal or corporate profitablility, something that’s often detrimental to science and the public welfare” ex: not being able to inform participants in a trial of a drug’s risk.
  • “The question is whether the practices associated with the new philanthropy - tighter control of grantee decision-making; a demand for swifter indicators of project success - might be stifling ingenuity and progress rather than engendering it.”
  • “Study after study has proven that only a small percentage of charitable donations from wealthy donors reach poor individuals. Most of it tends to go to alma matters or cultural institutions frequented by the wealthy.”
  • “Many financiers have grasped something even less mentionable in polite company than poverty. That is the fact that poor kids are themselves the opportunity. Easy cash is being generated off the backs of children subjected to weeks of standardized testing, forced transfer institutions in the wake of school closures, or lured to ‘online’ schools through canny advertising gimmicks. A closer look at the online school movement illustrates how tax dollars and philanthropic donations are being used to fuel huge windfalls in the private sector.”
  • “The Gates Foundation has been adamant in the past that one of the best ways to measure teachers is through student test scores. It has spent hundreds of millions funding grassroots organizations that lobby states to use ‘value-added-modelling’(VAM) in order to determine a teacher’s value.” … “A 2010 study commissioned by the US Department of Education found that value-added estimates often lead to a considerably higher level of random error, misclassifying up to 26 percent of the time - a rather worrying figure for teachers faced with the prospect of their jobs depending on their VAM results.”
  • “When it comes to public education in the US, there’s little indication yet that many of the initiatives the foundation has spearheaded have in fact been positive for students. Despite a history of policy reversals and failed efforts, the foundation continues to be upheld as an exemplary and uniquely results-oriented organization.”
  • “While teachers are increasingly threatened with job loss for their own perceived failures, there is no similar penalty for the Gates Foundation. In fact the opposite is true: the more that the organization fails to reach its own stated goals, the more opportunities it has to try and mitigate its own past weaknesses. Quite ironically, the answer to ineffective philanthropy is more of it; failure of the philanthropy is its own success.”
  • “In 2009, David McCoy, a London-based physician and global health policy expert, investigated the Gates Foundation’s spending on global health and found that out of 659 grants awarded to non-governmental or for-profit organizations, 560 were offered to organizations in high-income countries, mainly in the US. Only thirty-seven grants went to NGOs based in low or middle-income countries. Similarly, of 231 grants given to universities, just twelve were awarded to universities based in developing regions. A number of researchers have questioned whether this resource allocation is a sound strategy.” It excludes scientists and program managers who best understand the problems.
  • “There is widespread suspicion that global patent laws are mainly being written bu their beneficiaries. And nowhere is this frustration more visible than when it comes to global health inequality and access to medicines.”
  • “Gates is often praised for putting his fortune towards combating HIV. But his campaigning against increased antiretroviral treatment in poor countries infuriates health activists who say that the Gates Foundation has continually lobbied against price reductions for HIV drugs and other medications.”
  • On Gates intervening on the direction of HIV research to steer it in a counterproductive way that he wanted: “Whether or not Gates did intervene warrants more media attention, something reiterated to me by those who fear that that Gates Foundations funding of media outlets leads journalists to censor negative criticism; those in the field refer to the problem as the ‘Bill Chill Effect’.”
  • On patent rights: “But 20 years of the current patent system contradicts Gates’s claim. The system has worked - but only for a very small minority of businesses. Even American citizens lose out thanks to the enormously high price of pharmaceuticals in the US”
  • “When Gates suggests that the current patent system works well to protect the interests of rich nations - he’s right. Where he’s misguided is in suggesting that the system also works well for poor nations.”
  • “If aids flows are working well, why do they need a masterful PR campaign to convey that message effectively? Many observers on the left and right suggest that the problem isn’t a marketing failure; it’s a failure with the underlying ‘product’.”
  • “Since 2008, numerous studies have confirmed that futures prices can alter spot prices.” Speculation can drives prices up and also send them spiralling down.
  • “Championing high-tech interventions often leaves developing markets poorly places to compete with large multinationals, exposing smallholders to interminable patent battles with well-capitalized firms. Policies championed by the Gates Foundation threaten to price African producers out of their own domestic markets.”
  • “Access to cheap, sugary foods is displacing fresh food as the main source of nutrients. In recent years, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) - mainly stroke, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic respiratory disease - have become the biggest cause of death in poor and middle-income countries, outstripping deaths from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS.” Yet hardly any major philanthropic donors have shown an interest in tacking these problems, while they continue to be major shareholders in companies responsible for them (ie Coca-Cola)
  • “When an individual commits $100 million of the business or other appreciated property to charity, the foregone taxes from the government are often far greater than the after-tax cost to the donor. Had the donor not given the $100 million, the donor would have an additional tax liability of up to $66 million just based on the foregone capital gains tax and the savings from the income tax charitable deduction. If one adds in the estate taxes, the tax savings may be as much as $75 million. Given the size of the tax subsidy, it is important to ask what society is getting in return.”
  • “But when philanthropy is being used as a loot bag for well-financed hedge funders and private equity buccaneers, as in the case of US education, then more restrictions are warranted. If the donors kick up a fuss, one could easily repeat back to them what they often stipulate to their own grantees: a close watch on how dollars are spent is essential to ensuring the creation of ‘social value’. And if you don’t like the rule, then don’t give the money. Pay the taxes instead.”
  • “Because if a gift is actually given - that is, if it’s actually meant to be surrendered by a donor, preventing him or her from further claims on that gift - then a donor has no right to involvement. Recipients deserve their own independence.”

• What Tech Calls Thinking

• Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials

• Right of Way

  • “Wide travel lanes, shoulders free of obstacles, and generous turning radii all promote speed. And speed and pedestrians are a dangerous combination.” … “Speed is perhaps the most crucial factor that will determine whether a pedestrian will walk away from a crash unscathed or will be killed. And critically, the force of the blow rises exponentially as speed increases. For a pedestrian struck at less than 20 miles per hour, risk of death is less than 5 percent, according to a 2011 study by the AAA Foundation, but the risk rises fast; 65 percent of pedestrians struck at 40 miles per hour or more will be killed.”
  • “Since the 1940s, cars have been the dominant organizing principle in neighborhood and city planning in the United States. Huge portions of every US metro area have been designed to prioritize driving speed over pedestrian safety.” … “A good rule of thumb is that if a city or state developed after the invention of air conditioning, it is likely to be a dangerous place to walk.”
  • Places with a high level of “griddiness” (a tight network of streets that are highly connected to on another, forming a grid with lots of right angles and four-way intersections) are safer for walking.
  • “When there are few people walking in the first place and those who walk are very marginalized, building political support for changes that might benefit people who walk, wheel or take transit is a tough political battle.”
  • “Traditionally, traffic engineers have designed signal timings to minimize delay for drivers and have timed crossings with non-disabled, physically fit men around middle age in mind.” This increases the chances that someone who is not able to walk across a street as fast as a fit middle aged man can’t cross the street before the signal changes, putting them in danger.
  • The idea of shared responsibility among drivers and pedestrians results in lots of victim blaming (not crossing at a crosswalk, not wearing bright clothing…)
  • “One reason news and police reporting about pedestrian crashes can be one-sided is structural. Perfect information about what causes pedestrian crashes is often not available - and often many factors are at play - but the information that is available is, in many cases, lopsided. Because a dead or incapacitated pedestrian is not around to tell his or her side of the story, the driver’s account may be the sole basis for the police report. … pedestrian victims are also more likely not to be native English speakers, which can be an additional barrier to making their case with authorities.” Traffic collisions are rarely investigated in depth by police or reporters.
  • “Heather Magusis analyzed seventy-one headlines from media accounts of ten pedestrian fatalities that took place in Edmonton in 2016. The study used critical discourse analysis to look at the way subtle language choices reinforce larger power dynamics. Magusis found almost all the media accounts of pedestrian deaths used a few different syntactic and grammatical cues that subtly placed blame on the victims.” ex a pedestrian was hit by a car rather than driver hits pedestrian.
  • “There is no snappy term, no jaywalking equivalent for drivers who fail to yield to pedestrians when they are required, and perhaps that is why it is not widely recognized as a problem.” … “A 2018 study in Milwaukee found that at noncontrolled crosswalks - crosswalks with no traffic lights or stop signs - drivers were only yielding to pedestrians 16 percent of the time. A 2014 Chicago study observed the exact same proportion: 16 percent.”
  • “As vehicles get larger and heavier, pedestrian crashes, when they do occur, are becoming more deadly. In just five years, from 2010 to 2015, holding the number of pedestrian crashes equal, the odds of dying in a pedestrian crash increased 29 percent.”
  • “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that pedestrians struck by an SUV are two to thee times more likely to be killed than those stuck by a car. And for child pedestrians, who are more likely to be hit in the head, the risk is about quadrupled.” Higher bumpers mean you get hit higher up on your body, closer to vital organs.
  • “US safety regulations have never imposed any standards on automakers specifically to protect people outside the vehicles: pedestrians or cyclists.” Europe imposed rules starting in 2010.
  • “The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) instructs engineers that a crosswalk with a traffic signal is only ‘warranted’ if ninety-three pedestrians per hour are crossing at the location in question. Failing that, the MUTCD states that a crosswalk with a traffic signal can be warranted if five pedestrians are struck by cares at the location in a single year. In other words, five people have to be maimed or killed in a single year at a single location for it to warrant delaying drivers with a traffic light.” How do you ven know if 93 people will cross per hour without a light there in the first place? If you build it people will use it.
  • “Civil engineers as a group are not representative of the populations who suffer the most from poor walking conditions.” They are higher income. 85 percent are male, 80 percent are white.
  • One effective way to improve pedestrian safety is to give them a bit of a head start (5-7 seconds) at traffic lights. In New York fatalities and serious injuries declined 40 percent at intersections with lights with leading pedestrian intervals.
  • “It is clear now that the company was, without any external supervision and under competitive and financial pressure, acting quite recklessly. Part of that appears to be explained by cultural deficits within the company. According to Isaac, executives at the self-driving car operation that eventually became Uber Advanced Technology Group, prior to its acquisition by Uber, reportedly pasted stickers around Silicon Valley with their informal motto: ‘safety third.’”
  • “Automatic emergency braking (AEB) is one of the most promising of these technologies. This feature, which automatically brakes when an object is detected in front of the front bumper, has been shown to not only reduce crashes, but also to lessen the severity of crashes then they occur. … Although these new technologies are making their way into new cars, the introduction of them has, in many cases, been limited to luxury models … automakers are moving slowly in part because there has been no move from the federal government to mandate these technologies, despite escalating pedestrian fatalities.”
  • “Another concern is that as cars begin to come standard with potentially helpful automated features, they might encourage drivers to take more risks, counteracting their benefits.”
  • “Pedestrians need complete sidewalks to be safe. They need comprehensive street lighting. They need curb ramps so that wheelchair users are not struck in the street. They need bus stops that are located in safe places, preferably with shelter. They need traffic signals that give them enough time to cross. They need crosswalks at locations where pedestrians really want and need to cross, not just where it is expedient for drivers. And because drivers are so bad at yielding at uncontrolled crosswalks, those crosswalks often need additional treatments such as raised speeding tables and flashing lights.”
  • “More focus is needed on reducing vehicle speeds, especially in urban areas. The design tactics used to make ‘slow roads,’ like those common in the Western European countries with the best traffic safety outcomes, should be common in the United Stats, said Garrick. ‘A slow road is one where it’s not really physically possible to go very fast,’ he said. ‘It is elavated at the intersection for example.’”
  • “In addition, it is crucial that the infrastucture changes are well targeted. To have an impact, infrastructure improvements cannot just happen in wealthy, white neighborhoods where almost everyone has alternatives to walking and taking the bus.”

• In Case of Emergency

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer

  • Street design process:
    • Design for high speed - wide lanes, more sweeping curves, wider recovery areas and broader clear zones. “There is rarely an acknowledgment of the opposite capability, however: that slow traffic speeds can be obtained by narrowing lanes, creating tighter curves, and reducing or eliminating clear zones. High speeds are a design issue, but low speeds are an enforcement issue. This is incoherent, but it is consistent with an underlying set of values that prefer high speeds.”
    • Design the street to handle all the traffic that routinely uses it plus any anticipated increase in traffic. “There is no consideration given as to whether that is too much traffic for the street, and rarely is there a conversation of whether other alternatives should be considered.”
    • “Given a certain speed and volume, how does the design cookbook indicate the street’s ingredients be assembled? Within the design process, the answer to that question is, by definition, safe. Any other design would generally be considered a compromise of safety.”
    • Final step is to take this “safe” design and determine the cost. “Any questioning of this minimum effort would be considered a reckless endangerment of human life.”
    • In order of importance, the design process values: speed, traffic volume, safety then cost. For most humans the order is safety, cost, traffic volume then speed.
  • “The burden of making value decisions should not rest with technical professionals. Traffic engineers are incapable of representing the complexity of human experience that needs to be considered in a street design. … This is not so much a statement on the engineering profession as it is an acknowledgement that city streets are the frameworks of human habitat, a complex-adaptive environment that must harmonize many competing interests.”
  • Roads and streets:
    • Road: A high-speed connection between two places
    • Street: A platform for building community wealth
    • “Roads and streets are the yin and yang for city building. They are at cross purposes and antithetical to each other, but both are necessary for ultimate success. We must have great roads that provide high-speed connections between productive places, places that build wealth and prosperity. We must also have great streets that produce enough wealth not only to sustain themselves, but also to fund a proportionate share of the roads that connect them to other productive places.”
    • “Degrading roads to make them more street-like, or degrading streets to make them more road-like, reduces the overall value provided by the transportation system.”
    • Stroad: a street/road hybrid. “A stroad tries to be both a street and a road, providing bth mobility and access, yet fails miserably at both”
    • Stroads have wide lanes, turning lanes and other features to facility high speeds. They also provide access to homes and businesses. Because of the speeds, development is spread out, increasing the cost of infrastructure and other public services. “For the level of investment. they have a comparably poor financial return and fail to provide a meaningful level of mobility.” Because of the high speeds, they are also the most dangerous environment we build in our cities.
    • “The decision on whether a transportation investment is a road or a street is a policy decision requiring no technical expertise. That decision must be made by elected officials, individuals who are accountable to the citizens of a community. It should not be made by technical professionals.”
  • “Instead of providing drivers with an illusion of safety, designers should ensure that drivers on a street feel uncomfortable when traveling at speeds that are unsafe. On the streets, the design speed should be thought of as the maximum speed at which traffic will routinely flow without the need for continual traffic enforcement (which should be reserved for deviant behavior).”
  • “No property in my neighborhood becomes more valuable because we can now drive to Walmart a minute more quickly, especially if the increased tax burden of sustaining the shortcut is factored in. All of our property values would soar if the walk to the restaurants and shops in our core downtown as safe and pleasant. The value of those restaurants and shops would soar as well.”
  • “The most important roads to any community are not those that accommodate commuters. They are not those that allow people to get quick access to the big box stores on the periphery. The most important roads are not even in the city limits. They are the roads that connect the city to other places.”
  • “Wherever development patters are most productive, wherever the highest value per acre is measured, those are the places where people will be found outside of a motor vehicle.”
  • Four step process for capital investment:
    • Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.
    • Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?
    • Do that thing. Do it right now.
    • Repeat.
  • “The only way to respond to traffic congestion is by creating local alternatives to distant trips. Increases in traffic congestion increase demand for local alternatives. Instead of fighting congestion, we need to embrace it. We need to recognize it for what it is - pent-up demand - and use it to create wealth and prosperity within our cities. Cities that deny requests to build a new duplex or corner store because of concerns with traffic have things backward. Local leaders should never deny a new apartment building or new neighborhood restaurant because they may increase traffic congestion. It is traffic congestion that requires us to build more and more local destinations.”
  • “Instead of scolding the public, the NHTSA should ask some difficult questions about the time of day and conditions under which traffic fatalities occur. If they did, they would discover that most happen at nonpeak times and in noncongested areas. They would discover that the traffic fatality rate is much higher during periods of low congestion. This is not because aberrant members of the public time their trips to avoid congestion. It is because the transportation system is designed to be really dangerous, and traffic congestion, along with the slow speeds that result, is masking just how dangerous it is.”
  • “Transit is a wealth accelerator when it is used in support of productive development patterns and is deployed to function either as a road or a street. Successful transit requires successful places, so if you desire transit, you must focus on building a productive place, somewhere where people want to be outside of an automobile.”
  • “In an auto-oriented model, the more cars that are there, the more space that must be given over to accommodating those vehicles. That means parking lots instead of destinations, driving lanes instead of sidewalks, which is the opposite of wealth-building. Auto based development effectively puts a cap on the success of a place, a physical limitation for how many people can be in one place at one time and, subsequently, how much investment can occur.”
  • “The easier we make it for that next marginal cyclist to get on their bike, the more we accelerate a culture of walking and biking, the greater the return on our efforts. It is a less measurable outcome than the number of bike trips, but more meaningful.”

• The Progress Illusion

See also

• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week
• What I Read or Listened to This Week