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It’s still under work. Refinements are happening, and there’s still some skepticism, but I’m optimistic. Link to a summary article
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Affordable housing does good!
What she found, after an analysis using Zillow data between 2000 and 2020, and controlling for overall market trends, was that the only significant change was in the positive direction. Homes located within a typical block of the affordable housing developments saw property values increase, on average, by a small but still significant 0.9%…
The link between affordable housing construction and property values has been studied before, with mixed results. A look at federally subsidized rental housing in New York City, conducted by researchers from New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, showed that property values were typically not depressed by nearby affordable projects. “In fact,” researchers wrote, they “led to increases in many cases.”
Another study, from Stanford Graduate School of Business researchers in 2017, looked at properties built with Low Income Housing Tax Credits in 129 counties, most of them in California and New England. They found that the low-income housing developments were associated with nearby home value increases of 6.5% when located in lower-income neighborhoods, and home value declines of 2.5% in higher-income neighborhoods. Less variable was the impact on crime: Low-income areas saw violent and property crime decline, and higher-income areas saw no increase.
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They grew a fish with fewer bones so it’s easier to eat and process.
I’m both impressed and concerned.
Interestingly, they write: “We are conducting the development on a sterile variety, which can help eliminate possible impacts caused by gene-edited fish in the wild.”
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If you’re into UBI, you need to support Housing
I love the idea of a UBI. However, until we have enough housing, any additional money everyone starts getting will just go to increased housing costs. I.e. property values will go up, as will rent, moving that UBI income from the lower class to homeowners and landlords, while not improving the housing situation or life for most people. This is clearly not what we want to accomplish with a UBI.
We need to first build housing and then implement a UBI. (I imagine housing that is owned and run by local gov’ts or non-profit organizations, like housing authorities.) And considering the cost of a UBI, this is very feasible.
Let’s imagine a very modest UBI of $100/mo = $1,200/yr.
There are around 260 million americans over 18. If everyone got a UBI, that’d be over $260B/yr.
If we estimate housing construction costs of $260k/unit (just for convenience; the actual costs average only $200k), we can afford to build 1 Million apartments each year.Estimates vary of how many homes are needed to satisfy housing demand in the US, with estimates varying between 3 to 8 million homes. Let’s round up to 10 million.
It would take just 10 years of our UBI setup to completely transform the housing crisis. That’s not a long time. And this was using very conservative figures. If we imagine a UBI of $1,000/mo (which many do), we could pay for all the housing from a single year’s budget!
And what do we get in return? Primarily, two major results:
a. People are housed: People have adequate housing; slow the progression of people into homelessness (caused by housing prices); improve rate of getting people out of homelessness. (And, ideally, guarantee housing for everyone.) Additionally, the price of housing will go down for everyone, benefiting the lower class tremendously. (Some economists have estimated that the price of housing in some places could come down as much as 10% with adequate housing supply. Imagine saving 10% on your rent!)
(It could potentially reduce the value of homes to some extent, which current property owners will not like, but I don’t think people are entitled to push for housing scarcity so that they can profit off it. Additionally, some studies show that things like changing exclusionary zoning can *increase* property values due to the fact that the same plot of land can now house more people.)b. Money then put into a UBI is not swallowed by the upper class. The value of the money is more evenly enjoyed by all. Not to mention the savings from reduced housing costs (which could easily be $100/mo in savings). In other words, people will have more money, and the UBI becomes more effective.
It’s also worth noting that the investment into housing construction will actually pay for itself, as renters pay for use of the homes. Unlike a UBI, this investment produces dividends. Those funds can be reinvested in housing, other community needs, or used to help fund the UBI.
There is a lot of exploitation that happens in our capitalist system, but housing is by far the worst since it effects everyone (i.e. everyone needs a home) and is likely the most expensive part of everyone’s expenses, with many people seeing a third or more of their income going to this one expense, every month, till they’re dead.)
We must fix housing first. We must plug the hole in the ship before we can expect to move it forward with any efficiency. If you believe in a UBI, and understand the costs of it are worthwhile, then you need to also be advocating for a massive program to address the housing crisis.(via zeshuetoral)
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More evidence that republican reagonimics is literally killing us.
highlights:
In 2021, 1.1 million deaths would have been averted in the United States if the US had mortality rates similar to other wealthy nations,..
“Think of people you know who have passed away before reaching age 65. Statistically, half of them would still be alive if the US had the mortality rates of our peers. The US is experiencing a crisis of early death that is unique among wealthy nations.”…
The US had lower mortality rates than peer countries during World War II and its aftermath. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the US had mortality rates similar to other wealthy nations, but the number of Missing Americans began to increase year by year starting in the 1980’s, reaching 622,534 annual excess US deaths by 2019. Deaths then spiked to 1,009,467 in 2020 and 1,090,103 in 2021 during the pandemic. From 1980 to 2021, there were a total of 13.1 million Missing Americans.
The researchers emphasize that this mortality crisis is a multiracial phenomenon and is not specific to minoritized groups. Black and Native Americans are overrepresented in these measures… Still, two-thirds of the Missing Americans are White, a result of the larger population of White Americans, their older age distribution, and death rates that are significantly higher than other wealthy nations…
They connect the large excess mortality burden to the failure of US policy to adequately address major public health issues, including the opioid epidemic, gun violence, environmental pollution, economic inequality, food insecurity, and workplace safety. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated many of these issues, particularly among lower-income and minority groups, and now that most of the safety-net policies created during COVID-19 have expired, vulnerable groups have lost vital support.
“We waste hundreds of billions each year on health insurers’ profits and paperwork, while tens of millions can’t afford medical care, healthy food, or a decent place to live,” says study senior author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, Distinguished Professor at the School of Urban Public Health at Hunter College, City University of New York. “Americans die younger than their counterparts elsewhere because when corporate profits conflict with health, our politicians side with the corporations.”…
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Highlights:
One common rationale against climate action is that the resulting fossil fuel investment losses could impact people’s retirement or long-term savings. However, researchers report in the journal Joule on June 22 that the loss of fossil fuel assets would have a minimal impact on the general populace. In high-income countries, most financial losses would be borne by the most affluent individuals for whom the loss makes up a small percentage of their total wealth. In contrast, the financial loss of lower-income individuals would be minimal and feasible for governments to compensate…
Their results found that, in the United States, two-thirds of the financial losses from lost fossil fuel assets would affect the top ten percent of wealth holders, with half of that affecting the top one percent. Because the top one percent tend to have a diverse portfolio of investments, any losses from fossil fuel assets would make up less than one percent of this group’s net wealth. When the researchers repeated this analysis for the United Kingdom and continental European countries, they found similar results.
“Investing in a stranded asset is like buying a rotten apple,” says Chancel. “In this case, the apple is rotten because of climate change. Who owns these rotten apples? We find that the richest 10% of the population owns the vast majority of these assets.”
In contrast, 3.5 percent of financial losses would affect the poorest half of Americans. Asset losses make up a larger proportion of wealth for this group. However, because their overall net wealth (assets minus liabilities) is significantly lower, researchers estimate that these losses could be compensated for $9 billion in Europe and $12 billion in the United States…
“There’s this idea that it’s the general populace that should be opposed to climate policy that creates stranded assets because their pensions are at risk or their retirement savings or just their savings,” says Semieniuk. “It’s not untrue that some wealth is at risk, but in affluent countries, it’s not a reason for government inaction because it would be so cheap for governments to compensate that.”
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hmmmm
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tl;dr: Many people derive satisfaction from completing chores, so having autonomous robots do it may be less attractive to many people. Researchers suggest stressing how freed-up time can offer people a chance to derive meaning in other ways, such as more time with family.
The article reminded me of a Ray Bradbury story (I think in the book “dandelion wine”) in which an older man rebukes a kid for planting no-mow grass (it only grows so high), as the old man waxed poetic about the joys of mowing his lawn.
Personally, as someone with mental health issues who never seems able to get my sh*t in order, I’m looking forward to getting all the help I can get!
But this is an interesting indication of what shifts society may see as robots become increasingly capable and adopted for everyday uses.
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While I am aware and wary of the potential downsides of automation (in particular, job loss), I am very excited about its potential to make expensive services inexpensive; in particular, medical services. I want to see so much more R&D into automating expensive aspects of the medical field, from mundane tasks like the paperwork, to researching and producing new drugs, to automating life-saving medical procedures.
Aside from the obvious value of getting to stay alive, these machines could address doctor shortages across the world, reduce wait times, improve patient outcomes, and make them extremely affordable. This last point is extremely important: In many parts of the world, healthcare is just not affordable or available. This includes remote and developing areas, such as in Africa, as well as in “affluent” places like the US where medical debt is the #1 cause of bankruptcy.
Anyways, I was excited to read this article. The tl;dr is that a robot performed some laproscopic surgery on pigs, performing difficult gastro-intestinal surgery - and it performed well. The machine also planned most of the surgery as well - though there was human doctor oversight.
However, one could imagine a few years from now, a single human surgeon could oversee several of these at once, thereby reducing the need for human surgeons, bringing down costs, etc etc. Cool stuff.
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materialsscienceandengineering:
A protein mines, sorts rare earths better than humans, paving way for green tech
Rare earth elements, like neodymium and dysprosium, are a critical component to almost all modern technologies, from smartphones to hard drives, but they are notoriously hard to separate from the Earth’s crust and from one another.
Penn State scientists have discovered a new mechanism by which bacteria can select between different rare earth elements, using the ability of a bacterial protein to bind to another unit of itself, or “dimerize,” when it is bound to certain rare earths, but prefer to remain a single unit, or “monomer,” when bound to others.
By figuring out how this molecular handshake works at the atomic level, the researchers have found a way to separate these similar metals from one another quickly, efficiently, and under normal room temperature conditions. This strategy could lead to more efficient, greener mining and recycling practices for the entire tech sector, the researchers state.
“Biology manages to differentiate rare earths from all the other metals out there—and now, we can see how it even differentiates between the rare earths it finds useful and the ones it doesn’t,” said Joseph Cotruvo Jr., associate professor of chemistry at Penn State and lead author on a paper about the discovery published today in the journal Nature. “We’re showing how we can adapt these approaches for rare earth recovery and separation.”
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How Scientists Gonna Act when the Climate Finally Messes up the Earth
Fun… though the reality is that the scientists are gonna be screwed too. The super rich may last a bit longer.
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- "The potential of this new [A.I.] technology is becoming increasingly clear, and the estimates for its impact on the broader economy are mind-boggling. Research firm McKinsey & Company thinks it could add $13 trillion to global economic activity by 2030, whereas Ark Investment Management predicts that number could be $200 trillion."
—https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/05/30/110-sp-500-companies-talking-ai-2-stocks-buy-now/
By way of context, global gdp is currently around $100 trillion.
If M&C are correct, we’re looking at a 10% increase, which is enormous.
If AIM is correct, we’re looking at a 200% increase, which is unfathomable.
If the result is somewhere in the middle, around $100T, we’re still looking at a 100% increase in global GDP.Basically, AI is either going to turbocharge the economy, or it’s going to blast our economy into another universe, or something in between.
We are not ready.
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How to fool a mouse: ‘chemical camouflage’ can hide crops and cut losses by over 60%
This is pretty cool. Instead of using dangerous chemicals to kill mice. Just trick them instead. Non-violent. Cheaper. And can save a TON of food. Pretty awesome.
Highlights:
In a research paper published today, we show how “chemical camouflage” can prevent house mice finding newly sown wheat seeds. The method reduced mouse damage to wheat crops by more than 60% even during plague conditions, without killing a single mouse….
Rodents are responsible for an estimated 70 million tonnes of grain lost worldwide each year. Even a 5% reduction in these losses could feed more than 280 million people….
When a food is too difficult to find, or an odour is not a useful indicator of food, foragers must give up and search for something else to avoid wasting energy.
Because hungry animals can’t afford to waste effort on odours that don’t lead to food, they are vulnerable to olfactory misinformation and chemical camouflage. As with visual camouflage, if the background, in this case smell, appears the same as the item we are trying to hide, the target item cannot be distinguished.
Animals can also learn about the usefulness of information, making them vulnerable to another form of misinformation – odour pre-exposure. By deploying food odours before food is available, foragers initially attracted to the odour repeatedly receive no reward and learn to ignore it.
When the food does become available, foragers don’t follow the odours because they know they’re unrewarding. We recently used this technique to dramatically improve nest survival for threatened shorebirds at risk from by predation by invasive predators in New Zealand…
After two weeks, our camouflage and pre-exposure treatments had reduced mouse damage by 63% and 74% respectively, compared to the control. We also estimated that 53% and 72% fewer seedlings, respectively, were lost to mice on these plots.
"Come with me as we binge-watch the future."
My name is Ari Einbinder
This is the journal of my travels into the realms of science, education, reality, and imagination.
