Month: October 2021

Economics Nobel

should go to Ryan Petersen for unclogging the port of LA:

A miracle occurred this week. Everyone I have talked to about it, myself included, is shocked that it happened. It’s important to

Understand what happened

Make sure everyone knows it happened

Understand how and why it happened

Understand how we might cause it to happen again

Update our models and actions

Ideally make this a turning point to save civilization

That last one is a bit of a stretch goal, but I am being fully serious. If you’re not terrified that the United States is a dead player, you haven’t been paying attention – the whole reason this is a miracle, and that it shocked so many people, is that we didn’t think the system was capable of noticing a stupid, massively destructive rule with no non-trivial benefits and no defenders and scrapping it, certainly not within a day. If your model did expect it, I’m very curious to know how that is possible, and how you explain the years 2020 and 2021. That initial tweet got 16k retweets and 33k likes, and even the others got 1000s of likes as well, so this successfully got many people’s attention. It’s worth paying attention to the details here, as this was crafted in order to spread and be persuasive, and also crafted to make people angry or to blame anyone. It’s a call to positive action. In particular, I notice these characteristics:

Starts with a relatable physical story of a boat ride, and a friendly tone.

Tells a (mostly manufactured) story that implies (without saying anything false) how the ride led him to figure these things out, which gives rhetorical cover to everyone else for not knowing about or talking about the problem. We can all decide to pretend this was discovered today.

Then he invokes social consensus by saying that ‘everyone agrees‘ that the bottleneck is yard space. Which is true, as far as I can tell, everyone did agree on that. Which of course implies that everyone also knows there is a bottleneck, and that the port is backed up, and why this is happening. The hidden question of why no one is doing much about this is deflected by starting off pretending (to pretend?) that the boat ride uncovered the problem.

Describes a clear physical problem that everyone can understand, in simple terms that everyone can understand but that doesn’t talk down to anyone. He makes this look easy. It is not easy, it is hard.

Makes clear that the problem will only get worse on its own, not better, for reasons that are easy to understand.

Makes clear the scope of the problem. The port of Los Angeles effectively shuts down, we can’t ship stuff, potential global economic collapse. Not clear that it would be anything like that bad, but it could be.

Gives a decision principle that’s simple, a good slogan and again can be understood by everyone, and that doesn’t have any obvious objections: Overwhelm the bottleneck.

Gives a shovel-ready solution on how to begin to overwhelm the bottleneck, at 0 cost, by allowing containers to stack more.

Gives more shovel-ready solutions on top of that, so that (A) someone might go and do some of those as well, (B) someone can do the first easy thing and look like it’s some sort of compromise because they didn’t do the other things, (C) encourage others to come up with more ideas and have a conversation and actually physically think about the problem and (D) make it clear the focus is on finding solutions and solving problems, and not on which monkey gets the credit banana.

Makes it clear solutions are non-rivalrous. We can do all of them, and should, but also do any one of them now.

Gives a sense of urgency, and also a promise of things getting better right away. Not only can you act today, Sir, you are blameworthy tomorrow if you do not act, and you will see results and rewards tomorrow if you do act. Not only reactions to the announcements, physical results on the ground. That’s powerful stuff.

Ends by noting that leadership is what is missing. You could be leadership and demonstrate you’re a good leader, or you can not do that and demonstrate the opposite. Whoever solves this is the leader.

All of it is due to zoning. Zoning kills.
2021-11-05: Things are better, but far from resolved, and of course the story is more nuanced than it first appeared:

it seems clear that Ryan noticeably improved the situation, but the situation is far from solved. Solving it will be a long term process, and we’ll be playing bottleneck tennis as solving one problem highlights others and makes them worse. There’s still lots of low-hanging fruit on the logistics front, starting with Ryan’s change only being implemented in Long Beach and not Los Angeles. There’s also signs of other solutions starting to come online, and that could be helped along in terms of making it shovel-ready and finding the right physical solutions.

2022-02-15: This profile makes the case that things are much more complicated, and Ryan doesn’t understand things as well as he should. Or perhaps they’re just jealous that Flexport has a much nicer UI:

For most everyone else in the logistics business, it was exasperating. “When Ryan Petersen does his interviews, people in the industry typically get upset because he tends to simplify things a lot. He appears sometimes uninformed”. Container stacking had limited impact. Petersen’s bolder proposals, such as the creation of a government-sponsored railhead depot, remain untouched. “There isn’t a silver bullet for this.”

2022-10-06: Flexport also stepped up for Masks in a huge way

When the pandemic hit and we saw there are not enough masks in our hospitals, I found that to be totally unacceptable at a civilization level. We owe this to our first responders, to our doctors. If you asked me to go in there without a mask with some weird disease that might kill me and that no one knows anything about, to serve these patients, I don’t know if I could. These are real heroes that were willing to do it. If you don’t have masks and the doctors don’t show up for work, civilization collapses pretty soon after that. That was very unacceptable to me. I rallied a team at Flexport and we stepped up.

A big part of why there were not enough masks is because all the world’s airplanes were grounded during the pandemic. They were not really flying to China. 50% of the world’s air freight flies in the belly of passenger planes. If those passenger planes are grounded, there is no air freight capacity. We found there were lots of masks available in China. They have ramped up production, but we don’t have air freight to get them in. The rest of the world, as far as I can tell, looked at that problem, put their hands up, and said, “Eh, fuck. I guess our doctors are going to suffer. Let’s watch this on TV and see what the people are saying.”

If you listen to the problem statement, 50% of the world’s plane flies in the belly of passenger planes and those are grounded right now. The solution is so obvious. Look at all the planes that are grounded. I managed through investor networks and connections that I have been fortunate enough to build over the years. I called the airline CEOs and I was like, “Hey, can we use your planes? We are going to go get some masks to save America’s hospitals.” One hundred percent of them said yes. United Airlines gave us free flights. Atlas Airlines gave us a 747 for free. We were getting Dreamliners for a 200k round trip. Ask your super-rich friends if that is a good deal on a private plane, a round trip to China on a Dreamliner. We flew 83 planes, completely full. We filled the overhead bins and the seats. In the end, we shipped 500m masks to America’s hospitals.

It was like, “Wait a minute. Why are we the ones doing that? We’re not supposed to be in that industry.” The value in that lesson for the whole world is naïve optimism. Try it. Let’s see if we can solve the problem. You can do more than you think you can. It was very inspiring for everybody at Flexport to see, “Whoa, this is working. We actually made this happen.”

Web Photoshop

This has to be some kind of high water mark for web capabilities. Pretty late in the game, unclear that it matters much? For example, will WebAssembly take full advantage of Apple custom silicon?

Over the last 3 years, Chrome has been working to empower web applications that want to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the browser. 1 such web application has been Photoshop. The idea of running software as complex as Photoshop directly in the browser would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. However, by using various new standardized web technologies, Adobe has now brought a public beta of Photoshop to the web.

1021

New research pinpoints an exact date Vikings from Europe were in North America: 1021 (1000 years ago this year), 430 years before Christopher Columbus was even born. How was this determination possible? Because the Sun erupted in an immense series of storms that altered Earth’s atmosphere, leaving measurable changes in tree rings at the time. A team of scientists looked at wood found at the L’Anse aux Meadows Viking site. In 3 cases the trees had been physically cut down, and moreover, they were clearly cut with metal tools — Vikings had metal implements at the time, but indigenous people did not. The wood was all from different trees (one was fir, and another juniper, for example). The key parts here are that the wood was all from trees that had been alive for many decades, and all had their waney edge intact as well.

Blinking Tubes

You’ve probably seen it: a dual-tubed generator console that’s appeared in movies and TV shows like Star Trek (all of them, pretty much), Knight Rider, V, Austin Powers, The Last Starfighter, and even Airplane II. This prop was originally built in the 70s and in the decades since has been placed in scenes requiring an impressive piece of high-tech equipment. The video above is a compilation of scenes in which the console has appeared

Wavelets

Built upon the ubiquitous Fourier transform, the mathematical tools known as wavelets allow unprecedented analysis and understanding of continuous signals.

Fourier transforms have a major limitation: They only supply information about the frequencies present in a signal, saying nothing about their timing or quantity. It’s as if you had a process for determining what kinds of bills are in a pile of cash, but not how many of each there actually were. “Wavelets definitely solved this problem, and this is why they are so interesting” A signal could thus be cut up into smaller areas, each centered around a specific wavelength and analyzed by being paired with the matching wavelet. Now faced with a pile of cash, to return to the earlier example, we’d know how many of each kind of bill it contained. Part of what makes wavelets so useful is their versatility, which allow them to decode almost any kind of data. “There are many kinds of wavelets, and you can squish them, stretch them, you can adapt them to the actual image you are looking at”. The wave patterns in digitized images can differ in many aspects, but wavelets can always be stretched or compressed to match sections of the signal with lower or higher frequencies. The shapes of wave patterns can also change drastically, but mathematicians have developed different types, or “families,” of wavelets with different wavelength scales and shapes to match this variability.

Most important century

The “most important century” series of blog posts argues that the 21st century could be the most important century ever for humanity, via the development of advanced AI systems that could dramatically speed up scientific and technological advancement, getting us more quickly than most people imagine to a deeply unfamiliar future.

The long-run future is radically unfamiliar. Enough advances in technology could lead to a long-lasting, galaxy-wide civilization that could be a radical utopia, dystopia, or anything in between.

The long-run future could come much faster than we think, due to a possible AI-driven productivity explosion.

The relevant kind of AI looks like it will be developed this century – making this century the one that will initiate, and have the opportunity to shape, a future galaxy-wide civilization.

These claims seem too “wild” to take seriously. But there are a lot of reasons to think that we live in a wild time, and should be ready for anything.

We, the people living in this century, have the chance to have a huge impact on huge numbers of people to come – if we can make sense of the situation enough to find helpful actions. But right now we aren’t ready for this.

Radioactivity & deep time

Radium forever transformed attitudes to time and where we may be within history – creating the first efflorescence of truly long-term thinking. Until that point, we knew the Earth was old, but hadn’t fully embraced how many more millions – or even billions – of years could lie ahead for humanity and the planet. In Europe, Christians assumed they were much closer to time’s end than its beginning. Judgement Day was anticipated soon. Then, the 1900s dawned, and radioactivity was discovered. This changed everything. From thinking they lived near history’s end, people now recognized they could be living during its very beginning. Humanity’s universe, no longer decrepit, now seemed positively youthful.

Glasses history

In his book Kitāb al-Manāẓir (Book of Optics), written in 1021, the Arab mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen, was the first to recognize and describe the magnifying property of curved glass surfaces and to put it to practical use by making reading globes. Despite the groundbreaking significance of this discovery, it remained unknown in the West for a long time because it was published in a treatise written in Arabic. It was not until the end of the 12th century that Alhazen’s treatise was translated into Latin by Franciscan monks in Italy, revealing to the Western world that an object was magnified when viewed through a transparent spherical element. The translation of the Book of Optics provided not only a physical explanation but a practical insight: convex polished hemispheres made of certain semiprecious stones magnified letters when placed on them. These reading stones were the first vision aids to be used systematically.

Astrocytes

The star-shaped cells usually help clear away toxic particles that build up in the brain naturally or after head trauma, and are supposed to nourish neurons. But laboratory tests on mice show astrocytes also release toxic fatty acids to kill off damaged neurons, confirming a suspicion many neurologists have had for years. “Our findings show the toxic fatty acids produced by astrocytes play a critical role in brain cell death. The results provide a promising new target for treating, and perhaps even preventing, many neurodegenerative diseases”.

Astrocytes regulate the response of the central nervous system to disease and injury and have been hypothesized to actively kill neurons in neurodegenerative disease. Here we report an approach to isolate one component of the long-sought astrocyte-derived toxic factor. Notably, instead of a protein, saturated lipids contained in APOE and APOJ lipoparticles mediate astrocyte-induced toxicity. Eliminating the formation of long-chain saturated lipids by astrocyte-specific knockout of the saturated lipid synthesis enzyme ELOVL1 mitigates astrocyte-mediated toxicity in vitro as well as in a model of acute axonal injury in vivo. These results suggest a mechanism by which astrocytes kill cells in the central nervous system.

Differences in differences

The Nobel Prize goes to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens. If you seek their monuments look around you. Almost all of the empirical work in economics that you read in the popular press is due to analyzing natural experiments using techniques such as difference in differences, instrumental variables and regression discontinuity. The obvious way to estimate the effect of the minimum wage is to look at the difference in employment in fast food restaurants before and after the law went into effect. But other things are changing through time so circa 1992 the standard approach was to “control for” other variables by also including in the statistical analysis factors such as the state of the economy. Include enough control variables, so the reasoning went, and you would uncover the true effect of the minimum wage. Card and Krueger did something different, they turned to a control group. Pennsylvania didn’t pass a minimum wage law in 1992 but it’s close to New Jersey so Card and Kruger reasoned that whatever other factors were affecting New Jersey fast food restaurants would very likely also influence Pennsylvania fast food restaurants. The state of the economy, for example, would likely have a similar effect on demand for fast food in NJ as in PA as would say the weather. In fact, the argument extends to just about any other factor that one might imagine including demographics, changes in tastes, changes in supply costs. The standard approach circa 1992 of “controlling for” other variables requires, at the very least, that we know what variables are important. But by using a control group, we don’t need to know what the other variables are only that whatever they are they are likely to influence NJ and PA fast food restaurants similarly. Put differently NJ and PA are similar so what happened in PA is a good estimate of what would have happened in NJ had NJ not passed the minimum wage. Thus what Card and Kruger estimated the effect of the minimum wage in New Jersey by calculating the difference in employment in NJ before and after the law and then subtracting the difference in employment in PA before and after the law. Hence the term difference in differences. By subtracting the PA difference (i.e. what would have happened in NJ if the law had not been passed) from the NJ difference (what actually happened) we are left with the effect of the minimum wage. Brilliant!