Cats, charts, and politics
You've all heard of the famous terracotta army assembled by the Qin dynasty emperor Qin Shi Huang at his imperial capital in Xianyang. Well, this is the not-quite-as-famous terracotta rabbit army assembled by the Drum dynasty empress Marian in her imperial capital of Irvine. Someday these two armies will have it out. My money is on the rabbits.
News from Ukraine:
NEW: Russia has launched more than 300 sorties into Ukraine the last 24 hours: senior U.S. defense official.
???????? sorties are not "venturing very far and very long" into ???????? airspace, the official said. Russia still has more than 60 percent of fixed wing and rotary wing capability.
— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) March 21, 2022
Huh. So after three weeks 40% of all Russian aircraft have either been destroyed or are in nonworking condition. I'm just a civilian, but that sure seems like a lot. One thing we seem to have discovered during the Ukraine war is that Russia's air force really sucks.
What's the deal with all those loud allegations about biological laboratories in Ukraine? Do they exist? Are they making bioweapons? Are they dangerous? The answers are yes, no, and yes. The best short piece about them that I've read was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:
The allegations have shocked those who are most familiar with the Pentagon’s post-Cold War initiative, called the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. That is because not only has Russia been aware of the Pentagon’s work securing chemical, biological and nuclear facilities across the former Soviet Union, but it had also been its beneficiary for many years.
....The program, which dates back to 1991 and continues today, stretches across the former Soviet Union. Since the program started, the Pentagon has spent approximately $12 billion on securing material used in weapons of mass destruction in post-Soviet republics, according to a DTRA spokeswoman.
....The president of Ukraine [in 2001], Leonid Kuchma, concerned about the threat of terrorism in his own country, asked the U.S. for help. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier, Ukraine had been starved of the funds needed to secure its biological facilities. Mr. Weber put together a team that visited Ukraine’s biological and chemical facilities, which ranged from large laboratories to small veterinary research centers. “We found that a number of them had dangerous pathogen collections left over from Soviet days,” he said. “They were in pretty bad shape.”
As we used to say back in the Golden Age of Blogging, read the whole thing if this is a topic you happen to care about.
Here is 60 Minutes on housing:
Nicely done @FairweatherPhD. Time to build! https://t.co/qw5zaNxdVK
— Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior) March 21, 2022
I don't get it. People keep saying stuff like this, but:
There are housing shortages in California and in specific cities that are hot destinations right now, but overall the US has been building houses at close to the same rate as always. Since 2001, when this data series starts, we've built 24 million housing units for 22 million new households.
Temperatures have soared wildly over Antarctica during the past week, with the eastern part of the continent experiencing temps about 70 degrees above normal (i.e., about 10°F instead of -60°F). That sounds pretty spectacular, but the technical description is even more spectacular:
The warm conditions over Antarctica were spurred by an extreme atmospheric river [that] made landfall on Tuesday between the Dumont d’Urville and Casey Stations and dropped an intense amount of rainfall, potentially causing a significant melt event in the area.
The moisture from the storm diffused and spread over the interior of the continent. However, a strong blocking high pressure system or “heat dome,” moved in over east Antarctica, preventing the moisture from escaping. The heat dome was exceptionally intense, five standard deviations above normal.
A five-sigma event happens only roughly one in a million times. I don't know how many heat domes Antarctica typically gets in a year, but probably not many. That means the current one is a million-year event—or maybe a 2-million-year event or a 500,000-year event.
This is ridiculously unlikely, of course, and a much better hypothesis is that climate change has pushed temperatures up enough that a heat dome like this is now more like a two-sigma event, one that we'll see every few years.
But don't worry. After we've melted Antarctica away, I'm sure we can buy a new one on Amazon for an astonishingly low price and next-day delivery.
Wait. Is it now conventional wisdom on the Fox News right that masks just flat-out don't work? I know they've always hated masks and mask mandates—and think liberals are weenies for constantly wearing masks just to show off—but when did they decide masks had literally no value at all? What did I miss?
You remember Hunter Biden's laptop, don't you? Sure you do. What you may not remember is that a few weeks before the 2020 election a bunch of ex-intelligence folks wrote an open letter saying they suspected it was part of a Russian disinformation plot. That turned out not to be true—something the New York Times recently confirmed—and a variety of people are pissed off that no one is being drawn and quartered over this obvious attempt to prop up Joe Biden shortly before the election.
Yawn. It's true that the intel folks got it wrong, but that's the most trivial possible part of the whole Biden laptop story. In case you don't remember:
Remember all this when your local wingnut starts haranguing you about how the laptop was genuine all along and it goes to show that the mainstream media is corrupt blah blah blah. Whatever we know now, the media did the right thing in October 2020 based on what they knew then. Giuliani could have helped them verify his story anytime he wanted, but he didn't. So of course they didn't report on it. Nobody with a room temperature IQ would have done differently.
New COVID-19 cases are on the rise in Europe, but hospital admissions continue to fall in most countries. In the US, the trajectory for hospital admissions is straight down. If we continue at our present rate, we'll break our record low point by next weekend.
Here's a quasi-philosophical question for your weekend amusement that's probably been studied but is just obscure enough that I can't find anything relevant when I search for it.
Most philosophical systems assume that a life is a life, all equally valuable. This makes sense for any moral system that has to be universal, but in practice it's obviously not true. Every one of us systematically values some lives more than others.
What I'm curious about is whether anyone has done empirical research to find out just how much we tend to value different lives based on their relationship to us. Put differently, how much time/effort/money would we expend to save the life of, say, our mother vs. the life of an unknown Vietnamese peasant?
As an example of what I'm talking about, here are various categories of people with scores attached to them:
This suggests that, in practice, you'd spend a lot of effort to save the life of your mother, but still only about half of what you'd do to save your own life. For a random person with whom you have no plausible connection, you'd be willing to expend about a millionth the effort you'd expend to save yourself.
Obviously there are lots of possible systematic categories: kinship, nationality, geographic proximity, fame, etc. And the values would likely depend on your own culture, religion, etc.
Has anyone ever done empirical work of this sort? It seems like it might be useful to incorporate it in some way into a system of real-world ethics.
Over at Vox, Siobhan McDonough has a lengthy piece about a guaranteed income experiment being done in Georgia. The headline calls it "revolutionary," but I can't say I'm floored by the idea that giving poor people an extra $10,000 per year will vastly improve their lives. Of course it will. The drawback is that it would cost a lot to roll this out across the whole country, something the article doesn't address.
However, because the program is aimed at Black mothers, McDonough does address the racial politics involved:
Racially targeted programs such as affirmative action and reparations tend to be unpopular. Opposition to these programs is largely driven by white Americans; they tend to be far more popular, if not universally, among Black Americans and other Americans of color.
This didn't sound quite right, so I googled a bit and found something interesting if unsurprising. When you ask people if they support affirmative action, most say yes. But if you ask them if employers should take race into account in hiring decisions—which is practically the definition of affirmative action—the vast majority say no:
I'm using Gallup and Pew polls from 2018/19 here, but other polls provide similar results. There are two takeaways from this. First, the Black/white difference in support of "affirmative action" isn't all that big. Second, real-world programs of affirmative action in hiring are indeed unpopular, but they're unpopular with both white and Black respondents. The same is true of affirmative action programs for college admission.
This is not especially surprising. There are loads of things that people support in principle but don't support when they see the price tag. This is just one of them.
The moral of the story is to be careful about generalizing. Affirmative action and reparations break down very differently. Roughly speaking, everyone of all races hates affirmative action in actual practice.