Check out Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" for an interesting take on this dynamic for nation-states and political economies. His core thesis is that dominant powers rise as new players leverage new technologies (especially energy technologies), build complex interdependent economies centered around those technologies, but then wither and fall as they spend increasingly more on military power to monopolize and defend the chokepoints of those technologies. When a new more efficient technology comes along, they are doomed to irrelevance as they fail to capitalize on those technologies, and new players swoop in for dominance.
He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.
Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.
energy is a time accelerator. You can do more, produce more, using energy.
all of our "wealth" is due to our application of energy. Maintaining and increasing wealth both require energy.
Some people look at the relationship between wealth and energy. And there's more than one way to look at it. I found this interesting for a really big picture perspective.
I guess we could count the need for more efficient IT tools/engines too - use less electric and human power to fulfill our knowledge needs using better algorythms.
I was fascinated by "At Home In The Universe" back in the 90s. But this seems like a rehashing of the same ideas, without new evidence or theory. Anything new here?
West Virginia didn’t outlaw new housing like Portland did. American cities largely rejected supply and demand over the last decades, as land-owning interests found alliance, variously, with renting incumbents and the economically naive.
Charleston didn’t make better policy than Salem; it simply didn’t pass the bad ones.
I agree, but also think it's important to remember that the federal government didn't used to just leave it up to the private sector. The government used to be a major source of homebuilding. Had the federal government not abandoned the project of building public housing supply would be higher. They're much better equipped for overcoming local zoning limitations than a land developer.
Federal response used to also be much more in line with this being a housing crisis. They built a quonset hut village that held a couple thousand people in LA after WWII before postwar homebuilding caught up more. That could be done with a pen stroke again today and thousands could be housed tomorrow, but you can imagine the political footballing that would be involved with something like this.
Portland recently passed legislation to allow infill of 2- and 4-plexes. There is new construction (corporate and residential) going up everywhere. Your agenda is showing.
So perhaps the solution is more affordable senior housing built in lower cost of living areas? If we’re subsidizing the housing, medical care (Medicare), income (Social Security or a bridge to it), you don’t need to build in expensive urban cores; location is not as important. Suburban cores are probably fine if the land cost is reasonable and close enough to public transit.
Connections to your community, family, and friends are important. No one wants to go die somewhere far from everyone they know because they can’t afford otherwise. Plus in California you’d have to go remarkably far before apartment prices actually significantly dent. Go way out to lancaster in la county and you still pay high rents, nv and az aren’t too much cheaper now either, so whats left then in the southwest, tijuana?
> So perhaps the solution is more affordable senior housing built in lower cost of living areas?
That's still necessary but we're past the optimum point where that is helpful.
Once folks transition into homelessness, they've lost their income earning ability. Reacquiring employment is much harder after homelessness and much worse for older people. For them, the pool of who will hire them sharply decreases year by year.
We need a modern sort of WPA. Even for some of the mentally ill homeless people there is plenty of work in the city for them to do if we bothered designing a jobs program.
Does anyone have a similar compendium specifically for software engineering disasters?
Not of nasty bugs like the F-22 -- those are fun stories, but they don't really illustrate the systemic failures that led to the bug being deployed in the first place. Much more interested in systemic cultural/practice/process factors that led to a disaster.
Getting drivers off the road will save lives, and not a small number. Most companies investing in automated driving have built a system that is safe and largely effective. These systems have worked safely in the places they've been deployed. We should be heavily investing in expanding their capabilities.
Yet Tesla's system is the most famous and most widely-deployed and basically doesn't work at all. They have made themselves the face of the technology, and that face is uuuuugly. When people think of self-driving cars, they don't think of Cruze or Waymo. They think of a techbro giggling at his Tesla making fart sounds while it barrels into someone's kitchen.
Tesla's marketing is correct in that self-driving cars will have huge economic benefits and save lives. Their grift is harming the reputation of even legitimate companies. The best way I know to speed up self-driving car development is to shut Tesla down.
It seems to me if you wanted to deliver on "economic benefits", save lives, reduce emissions, etc there is an obvious already existing option: subways/LRT. For inter-city travel build high speed rail. I just don't see driverless cars as the panacea that other people do, even if it worked— which it doesn't seem to.
Nothing has ever been a panacea, and people very rarely claim things will be. Cars will be around for a long time. Building public transportation is not trivial and not practical everywhere. People often drive even in parts of the world with good public transportation. Replacing human drivers with (working) computers would be a major improvement.
One of the safety training stories at the lab I used to work at was about a chemist who set his lunchtime hamburger on the shelf in the fume hood while running reactions with a potent methylating agent. Slow painful death over the course of a week. Definitely put the fear of god in me.
Pop-culture tangent: Does anyone know if Slotin's story was the inspiration for Dr. Manhattan's orgin story in _The Watchmen_? Many resonances between the two.
Maybe, but I lean towards assuming not. Most (all?) of the characters in Watchmen were Charlton Comics characters with the serial numbers scratched off, and their backstories adjusted slightly to fit the setting. Dr. Manhattan specifically was based on Captain Atom, whose origin was originally that he was trapped in a rocket as it launched. The change from that to the "intrinsic field" experiment was probably just to make it more "weird" along with Ozymandias' actions.
> The character's origin had Adam working as a technician in a special experimental rocket when it accidentally launched with him trapped inside. Adam was atomized when the rocket exploded while entering the upper atmosphere. However, he somehow gained superpowers that included the ability to reform his body safely on the ground
There's plenty of easy-to-find evidence out there that shows that the speed and magnitude of these changes are not only unprecedented in human history, but geologic time scales as well. It's also crystal clear that these changes are caused by the massive increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by humans burning fossil fuels. This is sorted by both theory and massive amounts of evidence. Good primers exist all across the web, http://climate.gov/ is a good starting point.
"But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN.
Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.
> "But wait, maybe this is all just natural cycles" is borderline willful denial at this point, especially on a well-informed site like HN. Might as well ask if maybe the earth is flat after all.
On such website dismissing someone for questioning common knowledge wouldn't be worse? :)
May I remind you people used to think the earth was the center of the solar system and they burned the person who questioned it. Quite an extreme example, but you get it right?
LOL. Copernicus & Galileo didn't "doubt" the geocentric model, they provided scientific evidence that it was incorrect. You see how that's different, right?
"I'm not trying to question climate change, I'm just wondering if this overwhelming scientific evidence might somehow be wrong, despite any evidence to the contrary ... and I'm just as brave as Galileo for questioning established orthodoxy, too!".
He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...