* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with weekly entries collected by month.
* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Disney's Self-Governing District Says Florida Cannot Dissolve It Without Paying Off Its Debts" by Jamiel Lynch, Chris Boyette, & Eric Levenson, 28 April 2022), the state government of Florida, in service to Governor Ron DeSantis, recently passed a bill to prevent public schools from teaching young students about sexual orientation. In response to the "Don't Say Gay" bill, Disney Corporation decided to end political contributions to DeSantis and others. He retaliated by passing a law that, in principle, stripped Disney of its self-government authority.
That's where it gets complicated. Disney World in Florida is a sprawling complex, including not only the theme parks, but many large hotels, conference centers, and other facilities -- it's big enough to be a good-sized city in itself. Unsurprisingly, arrangements were made to allow Disney to provide the necessary civic services to the complex on its own. The result was Reedy Creek, a special-purpose district created by state law in May 1967 that gives The Walt Disney Company extensive governmental control over the land in and around its central Florida theme parks. Reedy Creek, whose budget comes almost entirely from Disney, pays for its own fire department, water systems, roadways and building inspectors, and it can issue bonds and take on debt to pay for long-term infrastructure programs.
On reflection, it seems implausible that the state government could unilaterally overturn the 1967 agreement -- and it quickly became obvious that DeSantis hadn't thought out the implications of his action, the new law being brief and lacking in specifics. The first obstacle to the new law is that Disney has about a billion dollars in municipal bond debt on Reedy Creek. The old law states that Florida "will not in any way impair the rights or remedies of the holders ... until all such bonds together with interest thereon, and all costs and expenses in connection with any act or proceeding by or on behalf of such holders, are fully met and discharged."
Put a bit more simply, dissolving the Reedy Creek arrangement would require somebody assuming a billion dollars worth of debt. Who would pay? State lawmakers in adjoining Orange and Osceola counties worry that they would be stuck with the bill, and also have to take over providing public services to Reedy Creek. That would be economically disastrous to them, and it is very unlikely to happen -- all the more so because Florida Statute 189.072 stipulates that dissolving a special district requires approval by a majority of landowners. The land of Reedy Creek is mostly owned by Disney.
The new law actually addresses Statute 189.072, simply declaring it null and void. Republican State Representative Randy Fines says: "These are not constitutional requirements. These are statutory requirements. And this bill actually changes the law, which we're allowed to do at any time, and says that we don't have to do those things."
To which State Rep Representative Dotie Joseph, a Democrat, replied: "I think to change the law that exists you would repeal it, not just put another one that contravenes it, but what do I know? I'm just a lawyer." Incidentally, she's a black lawyer of Haitian origins, which seems unlikely to have endeared her to DeSantis and his gang.
In addition, Disney clearly would have a case against the State of Florida on a 1st Amendment basis, it being an unusual thing for American government officials to take vindictive action against a company for exercising the right of free speech. In short, Disney has multiple paths for challenging the new law in court. DeSantis is undeterred, saying that execution of the law will be an "ongoing process" -- meaning: "We're making it up as we go along." Who says law is boring?
Although DeSantis has a comically weak case, Disney doesn't want this fight. The most likely result will be that the two sides will renegotiate the Reedy Creek agreement, with Disney making cosmetic concessions -- say, proclaiming the company won't start fracking on the land, or set up a nuclear power plant -- to allow DeSantis to declare a win. In the meantime, Reedy Creek is still in business as it always has been.
* In other reports of skewed reality, an article from POLITICOO.com ("The Rise and Fall of the Star White House Reporter" by Max Tani, 29 April 2022) discussed why the mainstream media seems to have it in for Joe Biden, with reporting that takes a clearly negative view of him. Of course, the Rightist media has nothing good to say about Biden, and the MSM isn't so blatantly hostile -- but nonetheless seems unwilling to cut him much slack.
One of the main reasons for skew is that reporters covering the White House actually enjoyed the Trump years. They found the toxic atmosphere in the James Brady Press Briefing Room to their advantage, feuding with Trump's press secretaries being good for their careers. However, Joe Biden promised during his presidential campaign that he wanted to make the White House boring again.
Mission accomplished. One reporter who has covered both the Trump and Biden Administrations sees the issue as boiling down to Biden's press secretary, Jen Psaki: "Jen is very good at her job, which is unfortunate. And the work is a lot less rewarding, because you're no longer saving democracy from Sean Spicer and his Men's Wearhouse suit. Jawing with Jen just makes you look like an asshole."
No more wild and crazy tweets from Donald Trump; no more lunatic Friday initiatives from the White House to send the newsrooms into frenzies. No more big-budget White House specials, no more profitable book deals. By all measures, books on Trump sold about ten times as many copies as books on Joe Biden are now. Of course, that can't be called a problem, can it? Eric Schultz, a former deputy press secretary under Obama, says: "It's not such a bad thing that there's a new sense of sobriety in the White House briefing room. The histrionics probably got out of control. It is serious business ... It's probably good for democracy for this to be less personality based and more about the work."
Reporters, however, have had problems adjusting to the new environment, one saying: "It's a boring and difficult job. It's tough to be a White House correspondent if you want to break news -- they're so airtight."
The White House has been covered by the press from the start -- but the concept of the White House correspondent began emerging in the late 1800s and early 1900s when presidents started holding regular meetings with reporters. Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to actually give reporters a place to work in the White House, after taking pity on a group huddled in the rain outside the gates.
An actual association of those reporters came into place in 1914, when those covering the White House grew alarmed, either that the Congressional Standing Committee of Correspondents would get to choose who covered Woodrow Wilson's press conferences, or that Wilson would simply cancel the press conference altogether. The result was the White House Correspondents' Association, an institution explicitly devised to protect and promote the interests of those reporting on the president.
It didn't work out at first; Wilson ended up doing away with press conferences anyway. However, Warren Harding then revived them, and from then on the role of the White House correspondent continued to expand. Franklin Delano Roosevelt held a record number of press conferences, occasionally charming and butting heads with reporters. He expanded access in his final year of office, accredited the first black reporter to attend White House press briefings, but also barred specific reporters that he did not like.
After the introduction of cameras in the briefing room in the 1950s, and President John F. Kennedy's decision to hold frequent televised press conferences, it became clear that being at the White House granted a reporter a certain level of professional stature and celebrity. By the early years of the Barack Obama presidency, reporters were piling into the cramped briefing room, literally lining the aisles in hopes of lobbing questions at press secretary Robert Gibbs. Many of those who did became network anchor chairs.
The process greatly accelerated in the Trump years, with Trump baiting and insulting reporters to push his agenda, with the reporters becoming beneficiaries in return. CNN's Jim Acosta, who appeared to really enjoy his verbal shoot-outs with Trump, got his credentials revoked by the president's press office, and needed security guards when he reported live from Trump rallies. No worries; it helped his standing at CNN, where he leveraged the notoriety into a weekend hosting position that he currently occupies.
Joe Biden is not much like Trump. He has always made gaffes and can be blunt by presidential standards, but he's not remotely as attention-seeking as Trump was. His staff exerts far more control over his time and his media interactions, being generally successful to keep White House palace intrigues out of the media. They will take reporters to task for not focusing on policy. Press secretary Psaki rarely expresses emotion from the podium, where she speaks slowly and avoids lengthy confrontations with reporters. Reporters in the White House briefing room aren't getting celebrity status -- it's Psaki, who is about ready to leave her job, it seems to get a cushy MSNBC hosting job that she'll start in the fall.
The only reporter who has achieved any prominence in covering the Biden White House has been Peter Doocy of Fox News, well-known for his exchanges with Psaki, and for getting the worst of them. He doesn't mind; he's pushing the Fox News line, and it pays off for him. When Joe Biden called him a "stupid son of a bitch" under his breath, he elevated Doocy up a notch.
Psaki was asked if Doocy really was a "stupid son of a bitch, or just plays one on TV?" She replied, not unsympathetically, that Doocy "works for a network that provides people with questions that, nothing personal to any individual, including Peter Doocy, but might make anyone sound like a stupid son of a bitch." Doocy wasn't upset -- he had no reason to be, and there appears to be no real ill will between him and Psaki. He says he enjoys the White House beat, that he's having fun with it.
Not all the rest of the reporters have found the Biden White House a disappointment. Mike Menoli of NBC News is a pleasant, low-key individual who has been covering Joe Biden since Barack Obama tagged him as his running mate in 2008. Menoli is not after the big scoop, seeing himself as in it for the long haul. He says: "Maybe part of it is just that they see me as somebody who comes with that level of context, and has seen them through the ups and downs of a race and has an appreciation for the arc of his presidency, his candidacy and his career in a way that they're still challenging other reporters to understand as well."
Menoli is an exception; the others tend to be frustrated. Many in the MSM are predicting a Republican wave in November -- despite the fact that GOP's woes are deeper than those of the Democrats, and there's no saying how the election will go. It's almost like the MSM is rooting for a GOP win, for no other reason than because it will make life more interesting for them. One cable news executive says: "These reporters are there every day to get anything out of the Biden White House. But it's boring there. It's not what it was."
* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("NASA's Exoplanet Count Surges Past 5,000" by Liz Kruesi, 22 March 2022), NASA has announced the discovery of over 5,000 extrasolar planets to date, in 30 years of exploration.
The 5,005 confirmed exoplanets can be categorized and divided into several distinct types. They include almost 1,500 giant gassy planets, as big as Neptune or bigger; about 200 that are small and rocky; and almost 1,600 "super-Earths," which are bigger than our Solar System's rocky planets, but smaller than Neptune.
More will be found. NASA's latest exoplanet hunter, the TESS mission, has confirmed more than 200 planets, with thousands more to be confirmed from its data. At the present time, there's not much known about the exoplanets beyond their diameters, masses and densities -- but new observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, will be able to find out more. It may not be too long before we can reconstruct images of exoplanets.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As usual these days, there was a bombshell last week -- with a draft of a Supreme Court decision penned by Justice Samuel Alito, in which SCOTUS overturned ROE V. WADE, the decision that legalized abortion. Although the decision hadn't been released, Chief Justice John Roberts attested that it was valid.
Of course, overturning RvW raised a firestorm, the decision seeming entirely perverse. Justice Alito, in the decision, pointed out that "abortion" isn't mentioned in the US Constitution. Then again, neither is "women's rights" or for that matter "women", and the Constitution doesn't say anything about judicial review of laws, either. On the heels of this, a measure going through the Louisiana state legislature that would not merely ban abortion, but make having an abortion an act of murder.
That would be funny, if it weren't so grotesque. Overthrowing RvW will be a legal and practical nightmare; it's just not workable. Congress, for the moment, can't get a consensus on a response. To no surprise, Chief Justice Roberts was very annoyed about the leak. That was a shrug; what was more interesting was the identity of the leaker. Was it someone on the Left, sending out a warning? Or was it someone on the Right, jumping the gun? There's been much speculation, but that's all it is, and we may never know.
* The war in Ukraine burns on. One video on YouTube revealed intercepted phone conversations from Russian troops, revealing a number of interesting things:
The intercepted communications of that Russian officer were obtained from his voicemail account. Entries in that account came to an abrupt stop one day, and were not resumed. Apparently something happened to him.
* I drove down to Denver to do some plane-spotting at Denver International Airport, and go to the Denver Zoo. This was the first time I'd been out of town, not counting a few errands to Fort Collins in the north, in three years, and it was something of a test / training exercise on a number of fronts:
It was a pleasant day out. I had no problems with the traffic, though I never went through downtown Denver. The only problem with the mask is that I got sore a bit wearing it, but I concluded I could take it off while I was in the car, then put it on when I arrived someplace.
The trip was, however, a let-down in some ways. Air traffic at DIA was light and uneventful, while a lot of the zoo was shut down: all the bird exhibits were closed off because of the bird flu pandemic. However, the real disappointment was the S21 Ultra, which proved well inferior to the Powershot, despite the fact that it was much more expensive. Its ability to take shots in dark conditions, which was primarily what I bought it for, was very poor.
I think I can learn how to use the S21 Ultra better, and am likely to get better camera software over time. Nonetheless, on considering matters I ended up doing a substantial rethink of my photo hobby. I realized that my goal of taking good shots inside aircraft museums was likely out of reach -- with further thought suggesting that there was no great point in it anyway. I could easily find good open-source photos of those same aircraft online, and would never be able to match them. I would be making more of a contribution working on aircraft drawings, and retouches of old pictures of aircraft.
That led to fundamentally reconsidering plans for future road trips. I was thinking of going back to Washington DC, following up my 2016 trip, but then I thought: What for? I had plenty of photos of sights in that city, I wouldn't get any more out of it with a new trip. I still want to take some trips, but now for somewhat different rationales. I remembered that the Air Force Museum in Dayton OH had a "Dawn Patrol" airshow some years, showing off World War I aircraft replicas. That sounded like fun, and getting good shots of them would be easy.
On investigation, it turns out that there will be a Dawn Patrol show in early October, and I started sketching out a road trip. As for my day trip to Denver, I'd made pretty much the same day trip a dozen times before, but probably won't do it again for a long time. However, the day was well spent, having led to a substantial rethinking of my activities -- so I didn't really feel let-down by the exercise. My world after the pandemic is not the same as the one before.
* Plastics are an environmental nuisance, and there's been ongoing work to make them less so. As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Embedded Enzymes Make For Compostable Plastics That Break Down In Days" by Michael Irving, 21 April 2021), researchers have developed a "compostable plastics" that is embedded with enzymes -- catalytic proteins -- allowing them to be broken down into constituent molecules.
Enzymes can be used to break down normal plastics, but that's obviously not a general solution, and it's not very efficient any. Ting Xu -- a chemist at the University of California in Berkeley -- says: "If you have the enzyme only on the surface of the plastic, it would just etch down very slowly. You want it distributed nanoscopically everywhere so that, essentially, each of them just needs to eat away their polymer neighbors, and then the whole material disintegrates."
Ting's researchers decided to embed enzymes into the plastic, but had to factor in the possibility that the enzymes might degrade the plastic items in normal use. To get around that problem, they added a "protectant" named "four-monomer random heteropolymer (RHP)", which ensured that the enzymes were spaced apart. That ensured that the plastics would only break down when exposed to compost soil or hot water. They found that the plastics would not break down if kept in water at room temperature for three months.
They integrated an enzyme named "BC-lipase" into PCL plastic, and another named "proteinase K" into PLA plastic. The PCL broke down completely within two days at 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), while the PLA degraded within six days at 50C (122F). They both broke down into lactic acid. It is not clear how much expense the enzymes could add to plastics production; widespread adoption of such a scheme may be dependent on regulatory intervention. The research team is seeking a patent for the scheme, and has founded a startup to commercialize it.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The war in Ukraine burns on. Russian offensive thrusts have been generally blunted, at high cost to the Russians. One armored unit crossed a river on pontoon bridges; the Ukrainians destroyed the bridges, and then utterly crushed the Russians stranded there.
In an interview with Sky News UK, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukrainian military intelligence, said that Vladimir Putin was critically ill with leukemia, and that a coup was underway to topple him. No evidence was offered for these claims; they may have been psychological warfare to unsettle Putin, and stood to be effective on that basis. Budanov said that Ukraine will take the counter-offensive in the summer, and that the Russians will be cleaned out by the end of the year. We'll see.
Along related lines, the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation has been tasked with trying to identify Russian war dead using various techniques -- particularly facial recognition software that searches the internet for matches to photos of the dead. Once they have a candidate match, they try to track down the families of the dead for verification, and invite them to recover the bodies.
Clearly, such actions serve a propaganda purpose, to bring the war back home to Russians, and cut through the lies of Russian media. The ministry's Mykhailo Fedorov says they often get responses, with about 80% of the responses being threats to kill Ukrainians. What about the other 20%? Fedorov says: "Some of them say they're grateful, and they know about the situation, and some would like to come and pick up the body."
In more amusing news of the war, the Russians looted the John Deere dealership in Mariupol of fancy expensive farm equipment, and hauled it off to Russia. They couldn't get any of it to work, since it had all been digitally locked out. Apparently they're trying to hack their way in now.
* My Logitech wired mouse started to act up, getting jumpy and balky. It was, of course, an optical mouse, so I tried cleaning the lens and the mousepad. That didn't work. I was puzzled -- what could go wrong with the mouse when it had no moving parts? -- but I shrugged and junked it, getting by with an old mouse I had.
Of course, I went to Amazon.com to get a proper replacement. Wired mice are somewhat unusual these days, but I have no particular use for a wireless mouse, it's more trouble than it's worth to me. I was having trouble finding anything satisfactory, until I found the Redragon M602 wired gaming mouse. It looked overly fancy, but the price was right -- less than $20 USD -- so I ordered it.
When it arrived, I promptly plugged it into my PC and played with it. First thing I noticed was that it's illuminated with colored variable LED patterns. It was pretty, but I didn't see it as useful, which led to my first problem: how to turn the LEDs off.
As it turned out, the M602 has four auxiliary buttons:
After puzzling around, I found that the rear top button allowed me to cycle through the LED modes until I found the OFF mode. The front top button was a bit harder to figure out, until I realized that it controlled the speed of the mouse cursor, allowing me to control the sensitivity of the mouse. The sensitivity was given in DPI -- dots per inch -- which confused me, until I realized it meant that moving the mouse an inch would move the cursor the specified number of dots. "Hey, that's a nice feature!" The LEDs light up in a different color for each sensitivity setting.
It is apparently possible to reprogram the buttons, but I had no reason to do so. I found yet another button on the bottom of the mouse for changing modes; I don't know exactly what it does yet. As gadgets go, a mouse is an unexciting item, but I was very pleased with the product, and intend to buy another one as a spare.
* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("China Adding Finishing Touches To World-First Thorium Nuclear Reactor" by Nick Lavars, 20 July 2021), the element thorium (atomic number 90) is most commonly found as the thorium-232 isotope. It is weakly radioactive, with a half-life of billions of years. However, under neutron bombardment, it can be converted into uranium-233, which can be used as a nuclear fuel. It is about three times as abundant as uranium, being almost as common as lead, and so has been attractive as a fuel for nuclear reactors.
The Chinese government is now working on a prototype nuclear reactor using thorium in the desert city of Wuwei, in Gansu Province, to follow with other reactors of the same configuration if all goes well. In this scheme, thorium is dissolved in molten salt, which is cycled through the reactor core, driving a secondary molten-salt coolant loop that ultimately drives a power turbine. The molten-salt reactor has no fuel rods, operates at low pressures if high temperatures, and if there's a reactor failure, the fuel will solidify as it cools and not contaminate the surrounding area.
In 2011, the Chinese government began work on a 2-megawatt prototype reactor in Gansu, with the reactor now being completed. It is the first operational thorium molten-salt reactor in the world. Design work is underway for operational reactors with capacities of up to 100 megawatts, with the first to be completed no earlier than 2030.
Details are not clear. Uranium or some other nuclear fuel is still required to kick-start a thorium reactor by providing neutron bombardment, and the molten-salt fluid is notoriously corrosive. Presumably, these issues have been addressed in the prototype reactor.
* The title of a CNN.com article: "Wind & Solar Generated A Record 10% of the World?s Power in 2021" (30 March 2022) -- speaks for itself. According to a study from climate think-tank Ember, not only is 10% of the world's electric power supply today, clean sources in general accounted for 38% of the power supply, even more than coal.
According to the study, 50 countries are generating more than 10% of their power from wind and solar, with the fastest transformations happening in the Netherlands, Australia, and Vietnam. Those countries have switched around a tenth of their power from fossil fuels to wind and solar in just the last two years. Ten countries generated more than 25% of their power from wind and solar, led by Denmark at 52%.
The report found that solar and wind power could grow fast enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above levels before industrialization, given the 10-year average compound growth rate of 20% to be maintained to 2030.
Solar generation rose 23% globally in 2021, while wind supply increased 14% over the same period. Together, both renewable sources accounted for 10.3% of total global electricity generation, up 1% from 2020. The report included data for 209 countries covering the period 2000 to 2020. For 2021, it added data for 75 countries.
However, coal-fired power generation also saw its fastest growth since at least 1985, up 9% in 2021 at 10,042 terawatt hours (TWh), or 59% of the total demand rise. Gas generation, in contrast, increased by only 1% in 2021. The biggest demand rise for coal is in China. Renewables are gaining on coal, and coal's external diseconomies make it a bad bargain, but it's not going away just yet.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from BBC.com ("Retired Colonel Speaks Out On Russian TV" by Steve Rosenberg, 5 May 2022), state-controlled media in Russia has been "all in" on Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, proclaiming the nobility of the Russian cause and the inevitability of Ukrainian defeat.
However, the facade slipped when Russian state TV brought on a guest commentator named Mikhail Khodarenko, a retired Russian Army colonel and military analyst. When asked about the war, he said that "the situation [for Russia] will clearly get worse" as Ukraine receives additional military assistance from the West and that Ukraine could "arm a million people". He continued:
QUOTE:
The desire [of Ukrainian troops] to defend their motherland very much exists. Ultimate victory on the battlefield is determined by the high morale of troops who are spilling blood for the ideas they are ready to fight for.
The biggest problem with [Russia's] military and political situation is that we are in total political isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don't want to admit it. We need to resolve this situation. The situation cannot be considered normal when against us, there is a coalition of 42 countries and when our resources, military-political and military-technical, are limited.
END_QUOTE
In February 2022, even before the invasion of Ukraine, Khodarenko had written an article in a military journal, criticizing "enthusiastic hawks and hasty cuckoos" for proclaiming that Russia would easily win a war against Ukraine. He concluded: "An armed conflict with Ukraine is not in Russia's national interests."
The question was whether Khodarenko was really bucking the Kremlin line, slipping through the cracks of traditionally clumsy Russian bureaucracy, or was working on behalf of the Kremlin, paving the way for withdrawing from the war. It appears he was working on his own, since the next day he appeared again on state TV, parroting the Kremlin line. One suspects threats were involved -- but it is also true that Putin likes to make a pretense that dissent is tolerated, with the "dissent" being staged.
* As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Inside Russia's Failure To Control Ukrainian Airspace" by Piotr Butowski, 06 May 2022), the expectation when the Ukraine war began in February was that Russia would swiftly establish air superiority over Ukraine, cleaning the Ukrainian Air Force out of the skies. As with other expectations, that didn't happen, despite the Russians sending in a majority of their total tactical air assets.
The Ukrainians were prepared, having sent their combat aircraft to temporary airfields before the invasion began -- most Russian-style tactical aircraft are built to handle rough field operations -- and littered the original airfields with dummies, which soaked up Russian cruise missile attacks. Russian intelligence was inept and faulty.
Russian aircraft did not then control the skies, in large part because of the threat of being picked off by Buk-M1 surface-to-air missiles (SAM) on mobile launchers. The threat of the Buk-M1 has kept the Russian Air Force operating at low altitudes, where Russian combat aircraft are vulnerable to Stingers and other infantry SAMs provided by the West. The Ukrainians also already had some more effective S-300 long-range SAMs, and are increasing their stocks. One US defense official said in March:
QUOTE:
[The Ukrainians] are being very nimble, very agile in how, when and where they apply air defense. I'm not just talking about shoulder-fired air defense, short-range, but also long-range mobile air defenses.
END_QUOTE
The US and other NATO countries have also been providing real-time intelligence, obtained from a matrix of sources, giving warning of attacks. Although nothing much has been said about it, it appears that Ukraine is operating a sophisticated networked combat control system, ensuring that Ukrainian warfighters have an immediate and detailed knowledge of the national battlespace, down to the level of individual combat vehicles. The Ukrainians have a highly accurate and timely picture of adversary disposition and actions.
Russia has been operating about 200 aircraft sorties per day since the start of the war, that being an order of magnitude more than Ukraine. The Ukrainians are selective in their use of crewed tactical aircraft, since Russian forces have plenty of mobile SAMs that would readily destroy them. Exactly what missions they are assigned is not all that clear. By early May, the Ukrainians say, they had destroyed almost 200 Russian fixed-wing aircraft, and over 150 helicopters. The Russians claimed they had destroyed a comparable number of Ukrainian air assets -- which was suspect, because the losses were greater than the numbers the Ukrainians had. By that time, according to US sources, the Russians had fired over 2,000 missiles of all types into Ukraine. The failure rate of these missiles has been apparently high: some have failed on launch, some missed their targets, some hit but did not go off.
While the Russians do operate a range of different drones, apparently their numbers are small, and Russian forces not very well trained in their use. So far, the Ukrainians have been winning the drone war hands down, their Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones terrorizing Russian troops in continuous night attacks, using MAM small laser-guided bombs. The Ukrainians are obtaining more drones with different capabilities, and are well prepared to make good use of them.
* American President Joe Biden has proposed a new tax plan, with a controversial element: a proposal to tax unrealized gains. On the face of it, that sounds preposterous -- but the Biden Administration has the best and the brightest, so it would seem there's more to it than meets the eye. One Jason Furman, previously chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the second Obama term, wrote an essay for WSJ.com ("Biden's Better Plan to Tax the Rich", 28 March 2022), to lay out the case.
Currently, taxes are collected on capital gains only when an asset is sold, not when the asset increases in value. However, that has three disadvantages:
Trying to determine schemes to get around these problems has not been easy, but the Biden team has come up with a workable proposal. The plan would apply only to households with a net worth of $100 million USD or more. It would levy a minimum tax of 20% on all income plus unrealized capital gains. The tax on unrealized capital gains would be a one-shot deal, effectively an advance payment on capital gains to be made in the future, with the payments spread out over five years. Assets would be valued at their market value. Presumably, if the actual capital gains were less than estimated, the taxpayer would get taxes back.
What about "illiquid" assets that aren't readily converted to cash? The idea is to impose a "deferral charge" on such that would effectively increase the capital gains rate when they were finally cashed in. That would prevent people from converting liquid assets to illiquid ones to dodge taxes. There's a lot of pushback on the Biden tax plan and it is likely to go through changes, but it is not unreasonable in any sense on the face of it. [ED: It didn't fly, at least not for now.]
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: An essay by one Casey Newton, who runs a newsletter named Platformer that discusses the digital impact on democracy, probed the tricky issue of social-media moderation through a recent Facebook report on the subject.
There's a consensus that social media is unfair, with polls showing that three-quarters of Americans believe social-media firms censor political views they don't like. Republicans are the most earnest in this view, with 90% of them believing social-media firms do exercise censorship. That suggests one of the difficulties in coming to grips with social-media moderation: most people believe there's censorship, but both sides believe they are the ones being censored. The widespread insistence among Republicans that their views are being suppressed is particularly contrary, since the Right has found social media very useful in promoting their doctrines.
Another one of the difficulties is that social media actually does censor political views. Anyone promoting neo-Nazi views is likely to be booted off social media immediately, and that is clearly suppressing a political view. The trick is that there's no great disagreement that neo-Nazi views should be suppressed -- which suggests the real question being asked by the critics is: Are social-media firms aligned with our political views?
That brings us to Facebook's quarterly community standards enforcement report, which makes for interesting reading. First, it turns out that very little of the speech that Facebook removes is "political", at least in the sense of "commentary about current events and policies". What gets removed are posts related to drugs, guns, self-harm, sex and nudity, spam and fake accounts, along with bullying and harassment.
To be sure, these categories can be hard to sort out from politics; guns, of course, lead to discussion of gun control laws. However, Facebook is less worried about ideology than about driving users off, having noticed that the more obnoxious the online environment becomes, the more people drop out. Social-media companies proclaim they want to "keep the community safe" -- which is true, if in the sense that users will leave an unsafe community.
On the other hand, if Facebook moderates too heavily, users are driven off as well. The biggest complaint of Facebook users is having posts arbitrarily deleted. That is troublesome to Facebook not only in alienating users, but also in the labor required to correct such mistakes. What Facebook management wants is a fully automated moderation system, its judgements based on transparent rules that everyone can understand. It is very hard to see how that can happen -- and worse, it's hard to see exactly who wants it. Partisans inevitably cry "censorship" whenever content moderation goes against them. A reasonable balance is the last thing they want, and so the war goes on.
* A related article from ECONOMIST.com ("Britain's Online Safety Bill Could Change The Face of the Internet", 25 May 2022), Britain's government is now charging ahead with internet-regulation legislation, the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which will impose sweeping new obligations on new obligations on search engines, social-media sites, forums, video sites and the like. The OSB's defenders say it will make the UK "the safest place in the world in which to use the internet", with provisions including:
British civil libertarians are not happy, with critics pointing out the OSB is likely to collide with the free-speech provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Britain remains a signatory. David Davis, a Tory MP, has called the OSB a "censor's charter" that would "strangle free speech online".
The OSB does prioritize its targets, with the worst offenses actually covering things that are already illegal, such as encouraging suicide, making threats to kill, or assisting illegal immigration. Given the volume of postings to big social media sites, the only way to monitor the postings is with automated methods. There may come a time when AI monitoring systems are capable of doing a good job, but today they are notoriously crude, often making mistakes and flagging harmless postings.
The second level of priority concerns posts that aren't actually illegal, but which are judged to be "harmful". There isn't a lot of agreement on what "harmful" amounts to, with the government talking about everything from vaccine skepticism to bullying to glorifying anorexia or racist insults against England's football team. Children will have to be shielded from such things, while social media sites will have to make a judgement on how to display them to everyone else.
Ruth Smeeth, a former MP and the boss of Index on Censorship, calls them a "clusterfuck". The government has said tech firms merely have to use discretion, but Smeeth is dismissive: "Can you imagine the political pressure on any platform that says publicly they're OK with this stuff?" Again, supervision will be automated, with the same potential for blunders.
There is bipartisan support for the OSB, so it is likely to be implemented. Tech firms will then be faced with choices: they can make changes for Britain only, make the same changes everywhere -- or just stop doing business in the UK.
* I have to comment that a requirement for robust online identification is likely both necessary and, over the longer run, unavoidable. We need robust online ID to carry on legal transactions on the internet, and even potentially vote, while protecting us from online fraud. Governments could promote online ID systems, and make sure they aren't abusive. Mandating ID would be overbearing, but in time it would become so difficult to do business online as to make it impossible to avoid. It's the future, like it or not.
As far as content moderation goes, my own concern is with fraud. If people say they don't like vaccines, well okay; if they say that vaccines are demonstrably unsafe, they're lying. Trolls do not generally tell subtle lies: they tell outrageous lies that fly into the face of reality. We already have laws against fraud, and fraudsters often get busted online; why not extend the legal concept of fraud?
As for myself, this last week I took a step back from the online crazy race. From 2016, the USA has been in a continuous state of uproar, but:
I didn't decide to simply shrug it all off, instead simply choosing to back up a bit and distance myself from the frenzy; I was really never closely connected to it anyway. All I did was drop individuals from my Twitter FOLLOW list, to instead focus on news tweets, while promoting my ebooks. I will still post REPLIES at times that I know provoke the trolls, and if they answer to them, I mute them unread -- there's a trick to doing that, never mind the details. Trolls like to argue, but they don't like to be ignored. On Twitter, it's not as important to have the last word as it is to have the first word.
* As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("AI Cracks The Code Of Protein Complexes" by Robert F. Service, 11 November 2021), artificial intelligence (AI) technology has proven useful in the difficult task of determining the 3D shapes of proteins. Researchers have, to date, acquired a large, if not yet complete, catalog of the structures of human proteins. Proteins do not always act by themselves, instead joining forces to form protein complexes. Now a system of programs has been developed to determine what proteins are likely to interact with one another and what the resulting protein complexes look like.
In 2020 two groups -- one from a UK company called DeepMind and the other led by David Baker at the University of Washington in Seattle -- each created AI systems that generated thousands of predicted protein structures, including a few protein complexes found in bacteria. Now, both groups have improved their programs so they can solve hundreds of structures of protein complexes, Baker and his team having announced that they have unraveled the structures of 712 complexes in eukaryotes, or cells with nuclei.
To hunt down proteins that could form complexes together, Baker's team began by comparing the amino acid sequence of all 6000 yeast proteins to those from 2026 other fungi and 4325 other eukaryotes. The comparisons allowed the researchers to track how those proteins changed over the course of evolution and spot sequences that appeared to change in tandem in different proteins -- hinting that the parallel changes suggested the proteins were elements of complexes.
The researchers then used its AI system, named "RoseTTAFold", in conjunction with DeepMind's publicly-available AlphaFold, to attempt to solve the 3D structures of each set of candidates. Out of 8.3 million identified co-evolving yeast protein pairs, the AI programs identified 1506 proteins that were likely to interact, and was able to map the 3D structures of 712.
Among the highlights of the discoveries are structures for protein complexes that help cells to repair damage to their DNA, translate RNA into proteins in ribosomes, pull chromosomes apart during cell reproduction, and ferry molecules through the cell membrane. DeepMind's John Jumper, one of AlphaFold's lead developers, is leading a team working along the same lines, having announced an updated "AlphaFold-Multimer", which mapped structures of 4433 protein complexes. Baker says: "It's really an exciting time for structural biology."
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