The United States has more port potential than the rest of the world combined

Friday, August 30th, 2024

Accidental Superpower by Peter ZeihanThe United States has more port potential than the rest of the world combined, Peter Zeihan explains (in The Accidental Superpower):

The coast of Africa, for example, may be sixteen thousand miles long, but in reality it has only ten locations with bays of sufficient protective capacity to justify port construction, three of which are in South Africa.

Ports also require a sufficient hinterland to support them in the first place. In this, Northern Europe faced quite a few challenges in the centuries before European dominance, as much of the coastline was marsh and mud, as is northern China’s. Brazil north of the 22nd parallel south — roughly the latitude of Rio de Janeiro — isn’t much better. South of the 22nd parallel, Brazil’s coast is all cliff, as is much of southern China’s. Australia’s coast may be accessible, but it is so arid it is almost devoid of people — as is North Africa’s coast. Russia’s coast — like most of Canada’s — is (sub) arctic. What few African locations have a friendly coast are often backed up by swamp, desert, or jungle. The entire Sub-Saharan region really only has four coastal areas capable of supporting cities of significant size (two of which are still in South Africa).

[…]

Courtesy of those barrier islands, Texas alone has thirteen world-class deepwater ports, only half of which see significant use, and room for at least three times more. Why not expand port capacity? Because the United States has more port possibilities than it has ever needed, despite the fact that it has been the world’s largest producer, importer, and exporter of agricultural and manufactured goods for most of its history.

[…]

The island of Cuba and the Yucatán and Florida peninsulas limit access to the Gulf of Mexico to two straits, creatively named the Yucatán and Florida Straits. These sharply limit the ability of extrahemispheric powers to play in the Gulf of Mexico.

[…]

That means that since the Civil War the Americans have never had to worry about fortifying anything along the Gulf Coast, even when German U-boats were sinking shipping in the millions of tons off the East Coast.

[…]

In 1871, Canada first tried to solve the Saint Lawrence’s winter ice and the Great Lakes’ waterfalls problems with a series of locks on the river and construction of the Welland Canal. By the 1890s, however, the Canadians had proposed a partnership with Washington for a more extensive, binational waterway that would link the Atlantic Ocean through the Saint Lawrence to the Great Lakes. The main selling point was that the Americans would actually benefit more than the Canadians from improving the waterways on their common border. The Canadians were indeed correct: Bringing the Great Lakes online would turn places like Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit into full-on ocean ports.

[…]

The American government knew that the Canadians were going to build the lock system anyway, because having some sort of transport system that allowed Quebec and Ontario to interact economically was a national imperative. To do otherwise risked hardening Canada’s Anglophone-Francophone divide into something truly ugly. The Americans also knew they would be able to use the fruits of Canadian labor in an unrestricted manner regardless of whether Washington helped pay for it or not: The system would be right on the border and at least some of the canals would have to be on the American side of the line.

[…]

In the end, the Canadians had to foot over 70 percent of the bill, pay almost all of the maintenance, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway wasn’t fully operational until 1959.

[…]

The United States is the only country with significant populations on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, with nearly 50 million people on the Pacific and twice that on the Atlantic. So only the Americans have broad-scale access to both of the world’s great trading zones.

[…]

The Americans have sufficient infrastructure to enable their Pacific citizens to trade with Europe when Asia is in recession, or to allow their Atlantic citizens to trade with Asia when Europe is in recession. Because they can easily switch dance partners, the Americans only suffer a recession caused by international factors when the entire world goes into recession.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 7 Comments »

Play life like a game

Monday, August 26th, 2024

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonIn 2021, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), Musk became obsessed with a new multiplayer strategy game on his iPhone, Polytopia:

In it, players choose to be one of sixteen characters, known as tribes, and compete to develop technologies, corner resources, and wage battles in order to build an empire. He became so good he was able to beat the game’s Swedish developer, Felix Ekenstam. What did his passion for the game say about him? “I am just wired for war, basically,” he answers.

[…]

“He said it would teach me how to be a CEO like he was,” Kimbal says. “We called them Polytopia Life Lessons.”

Musk’s Polytopia Life Lessons:

Empathy is not an asset. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”

Play life like a game. “I have this feeling,” Zilis once told Musk, “that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”

Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.

Be proactive. “I’m a little bit Canadian pacifist and reactive,” Zilis says. “My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to what everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy.” She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless she took charge of setting the strategy.

Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. “Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life,” Musk says. “If we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.”

Double down. “Elon plays the game by always pushing the edge of what’s possible,” Zilis says. “And he’s always doubling down and putting everything back in the game to grow and grow. And it’s just like he’s just done his whole life.”

Pick your battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you swipe back at all of them, you’re going to lose. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zilis found herself coaching him on it. “Dude, like, everyone’s swiping at you right now, but if you swipe back at too many, you’ll run out of resources,” she told him. She called that approach “front minimization.” It was a lesson she also tried and failed to teach him about his behavior on Twitter.

Unplug at times. “I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage,” Kimbal says. Shivon Zilis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. “I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles,” he says. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.

Posted in Business, Games | 3 Comments »

None of the myriad failures of the Directory over the previous four years could credibly be laid at the door of the absent Napoleon

Sunday, August 25th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon enjoyed ‘a triumphal march’ along the route back to Paris, after returning from Egypt, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), and was given a hero’s welcome everywhere as France’s savior:

The Directory privately had to decide whether to arrest Napoleon for desertion (he had left his army in Egypt without orders) and quarantine-breaking, or to congratulate him for winning the battles of the Pyramids, Mount Tabor and Aboukir, conquering Egypt, opening up the East and establishing a vast new French colony, as his propagandists were putting out.

[…]

‘Brumaire’ means ‘season of mists and fog’, and it is appropriately hard to piece together the mechanics of what took place next because Napoleon deliberately committed nothing to paper; only two letters of his survive for the twenty-three days between his arrival in Paris on October 16 and the 18 Brumaire when the coup was launched, neither of them compromising.

For a man who wrote an average of fifteen letters a day, this time everything was to be done by word of mouth. He had already once in his life had his correspondence ransacked for evidence with which to guillotine him, and he wasn’t going to allow it to happen again.

[…]

There may have been as many as ten active plots to overthrow the Directory being secretly discussed in these months.

None of the myriad failures of the Directory over the previous four years could credibly be laid at the door of the absent Napoleon. Defeats abroad had stripped France of the territories he had won in 1796–7 and had cut her off from German and Italian markets. While Russia, Britain, Portugal, Turkey and Austria had joined the War of the Second Coalition against her, there was also a so-called ‘Quasi-War’ with America over the repayments of debts that the United States argued she owed the French Crown and not the French state.

There had already been no fewer than four French war ministers in eight months that year, and with army pay so deeply in arrears, desertion, brigandage and highway robbery were rampant in the countryside.

Royalist revolts in Provence and the Vendée had reignited.

A Royal Navy blockade had wrecked overseas trade and the paper currency was next to worthless.

The taxation of land, doors and windows, the seizure of suspected pro-Bourbon hostages, and the Jourdan Law of 1798 that turned the earlier emergency levées en masse into something approaching universal military conscription, were all deeply unpopular.

Corruption over government contracts was even more rife than usual, and was correctly assumed to involve Directors such as Barras.

Freedom of the press and association were heavily restricted.

[…]

Few blights undermine a society more comprehensively than hyperinflation, and great political prizes would go to anyone who could defeat it. (The deputies of the legislature paid themselves in an inflation-proof way, by index-linking their salaries to the value of 30,000 kg of wheat.) The Directory had abolished the Law of the Maximum, which kept prices down on staples such as bread, flour, milk and meat, so the bad 1798 harvest had led to a pound of bread reaching above 3 sols for the first time in two years, leading to hoarding, riots and genuine distress. Perhaps worst of all, people couldn’t see how anything could improve, because revisions of the constitution had to be ratified three times by both chambers at three-year intervals and then by a special assembly at the end of the nine-year process.

[…]

By contrast, the constitutions that Napoleon had recently imposed on the Cisalpine, Venetian, Ligurian, Lemanic, Helvetian and Roman republics, along with his administrative reforms of Malta and Egypt, made him look like a zealous, efficient republican who believed in strong executives and central control, solutions that might also work well for metropolitan France.

[…]

Yet none of this was enough to dispel the overall impression among Frenchmen that the Directory had failed and, as Napoleon put it at the time, ‘the pear was ripe’.

Nor was there a place for Napoleon within the existing political structure, as the minimum age for Directors was still forty, whereas Napoleon was thirty, and Gohier hadn’t seemed keen to alter the constitution for him.

[…]

‘A nation is always what you have the wit to make it,’ he said. ‘The triumph of faction, parties, divisions, is the fault of those in authority only … No people are bad under a good government, just as no troops are bad under good generals … These men are bringing France down to the level of their own blundering. They are degrading her, and she is beginning to repudiate them.’

[…]

‘Well, what can generals expect from this government of lawyers?’

[…]

Two separate stages of the coup were planned. On Day One, which was originally intended to be Thursday, November 7 (16 Brumaire), 1799, Napoleon would attend a specially called session of the upper house, the Elders, where it sat at the Tuileries, to inform them that because of British-backed plots and neo-Jacobin threats, the Republic was in danger, so they must authorize that the next day’s meeting of both the Elders and the lower house, the Five Hundred, should be held 7 miles west of Paris in the former Bourbon palace of Saint-Cloud. Primed by Sieyès, the Elders would appoint Napoleon as commander of all the troops in the 17th military district (i.e. Paris). That same day Sieyès and Ducos would resign from the Directory, and Barras, Gohier and Moulin would be prevailed upon to resign also by a judicious mixture of threats and bribery, leaving a power vacuum. Then, on Day Two, Napoleon would go to Saint-Cloud and persuade the legislature that in view of the national emergency, the Constitution of the Year III must be repealed and a new one established replacing the Directory with a three-man executive government called – with fittingly Roman overtones – the Consulate, comprising Sieyès, Ducos and himself, with elections to be held thereafter for new representative assemblies that Sieyès had been formulating. Sieyès believed he had the Elders under control. If the Five Hundred baulked at abolishing themselves, their newly elected president, Lucien, would dissolve the body.

The flaws in the plan were glaring. A two-day coup might lose the conspirators the all-important initiative,

[…]

The second problem was to keep the coup secret

[…]

Those members of the Elders likely to oppose the decree simply weren’t given proper notice of the extraordinary (and extraordinarily early) meeting, one of the oldest tricks in politics.

[…]

On receiving the news of his appointment by the Elders, Napoleon changed into his general’s uniform and rode to the Tuileries, arriving at 10 a.m., where he found Sébastiani and his dragoons.

[…]

‘You are the wisdom of the nation,’ he flattered them, ‘it’s up to you to indicate the measures in these circumstances that can save our country. I come here, surrounded by all the generals, to promise you all their support. I name General Lefebvre as my lieutenant. I will faithfully carry out the mission you have entrusted to me. No attempt should be made to look in the past for examples of what is happening: nothing in history resembles the end of the 18th century.’

[…]

As Napoleon rode past the Place de la Révolution that evening, where Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Danton, Babeuf, the Robespierre brothers and so many others had been guillotined, he is said to have remarked to his co-conspirators: ‘Tomorrow we’ll either sleep at the Luxembourg, or we’ll finish up here.’

[…]

At Saint-Cloud Napoleon addressed the Elders, but it was an unimpressive oratorical performance which reads better than it apparently sounded:

You are on a volcano. The Republic no longer has a government; the Directory has been dissolved, the factions are agitating; the time to make a decision has arrived. You have summoned me and my companions-in-arms to aid your wisdom, but time is precious. We must decide. I know that we speak of Caesar, of Cromwell, as if the present time could be compared to past times. No, I want only the safety of the Republic, and to support the decisions that you are going to take.

He referred to his grenadiers, ‘whose caps I see at the doors of this chamber’, and called on them to tell the Elders ‘Have I ever deceived you? Have I ever betrayed my promises, when, in the camps, in the midst of privations, I promised you victory and plenty, and when, at your head, I led you from success to success? Tell them now: was it for my interests or for those of the Republic?’ Of course he got a cheer from the troops, but then a member of the Elders named Linglet stood up, and said loudly: ‘General, we applaud what you say; therefore swear obedience with us to the Constitution of Year III, that is the only thing now that can maintain the Republic.’

[…]

The interval between Day One and Day Two had given the opposition time to organize to try to block the provisional Consulate that Napoleon and Lucien were about to propose. The Five Hundred included many more neo-Jacobins than the Elders and was twice the size; it was always going to be far harder to convince.

[…]

When Napoleon arrived with fellow officers and other troops, the younger deputies of the Left professed themselves outraged at seeing men in uniform at the door of a democratic chamber. Napoleon entered on his own and had to stride half-way into the room to reach the rostrum, in the course of which deputies started to shout at him. An eyewitness, the neo-Jacobin Jean-Adrien Bigonnet, heard Napoleon shouting back: ‘I want no more factionalism, this must finish; I want no more of it!’

[…]

‘Down with the tyrant!’ the deputies started to yell, ‘Cromwell!’, ‘Tyrant!’, ‘Down with the dictator!’, ‘Hors la loi!’ (Outlaw!)

These cries had dangerous overtones for the conspirators because during the Terror — which had only ended five years earlier — the outlawing of someone had often been a precursor to their execution, and the cry ‘À bas le dictateur!’ had last been heard when Robespierre was stepping up onto the scaffold.

Lucien tried to establish order, banging his presidential gavel and shouting for silence, but by then several of the deputies had come down from their seats into the main body of the Orangery and had started to push, shake, boo, jostle and slap Napoleon, some grabbing him by his high brocaded collar, so that Lefebvre and the grenadiers had to place themselves between him and the outraged deputies.

[…]

‘He managed to get down to the courtyard,’ recalled Lavalette, ‘mounted his horse at the foot of the staircase, and sent an order for Lucien to come out to him. At this point the windows of the chamber were flung open and members of the Five Hundred pointed at him still shouting “Down with the dictator!” and “Outlaw!” ’

[…]

The next stage was to win over the four-hundred-strong Corps Legislatif guard under Captain Jean-Marie Ponsard. This was achieved not by Napoleon alone but instead by a piece of pure theatre that one suspects might have been stage-managed, possibly even practised beforehand. It bears an uncanny resemblance to a remark Napoleon had made to the French consul in Genoa, Tilly, just before his arrest in 1794, when he wrote of Augustin Robespierre, ‘Had he been my own brother, if he’d aspired to tyranny I’d have stabbed him myself.’

Now, five years later, Lucien made precisely the same point when he leaped onto a horse to harangue the guards about how the majority of the Five Hundred were being terrorized by a minority of fanatics in the pay of English gold. He then drew his sword, held its point against Napoleon’s breast, and cried: ‘I swear that I will stab my own brother to the heart if he ever attempts anything against the liberty of Frenchmen.’ It was a promise as disingenuous as it was histrionic, but it worked. (It was also the last time that any of Napoleon’s brothers proved anything other than a complete liability to him until the battle of Waterloo itself.)

‘Captain,’ Napoleon told Ponsard, at least according to one much later account, ‘take your company and go right away to disperse this assembly of sedition. They are not the representatives of the nation anymore, but some scoundrels who caused all its misfortunes.’ Ponsard asked what to do in case of resistance. ‘Use force,’ Napoleon replied, ‘even the bayonet.’ ‘That will suffice, mon général.’

With General Charles Leclerc (who was married to Napoleon’s sister Pauline) and Murat (who was engaged to Napoleon’s other sister Caroline), Bessières, Major Guillaume Dujardin of the 8th Line and other officers, including Lefebvre and Marmont, denouncing the lawyer-politicians who had supposedly been bought by English gold, Ponsard’s soldiers simply cleared out the Orangery, ignoring the deputies’ cries of ‘Vive la République!’ and appeals to the law and the constitution.

[…]

Fearing arrest, many deputies then fled, according to legend some of them jumping out of the Orangery’s ground floor windows. Lavalette recorded them ‘doffing their Roman toga and square cap costumes, the easier to flee incognito’.

[…]

‘The Directory is no more’, they decreed, ‘because of the excesses and crimes to which they were constantly inclined.’

They appointed Sieyès, Ducos and Napoleon — in that order — as provisional Consuls, pointing out that the first two were former Directors, which offered a sense of constitutional continuity, however spurious.

[…]

After a decade of Revolution, many Frenchmen were desperate for leadership and recognized that the parliamentary process inhibited that, as did a constitution that was next to impossible to amend.

[…]

Army officers prize order, discipline and efficiency, each of which Napoleon considered by then to be more important than liberty, equality and fraternity, and at that moment the French people agreed with him.

[…]

Brumaire was not described as a coup d’état at the time, though of course it was one and the term was very much in the political vernacular (it had been used to describe the Thermidor purge). To contemporaries these were simply les journées (the days).

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Collins submitted to a far less conventional way of seeking out the truth of the cause of the crash

Saturday, August 24th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenOxcart pilot Kenneth Collins was taking the experimental spy plane out for a subsonic test run, like a race horse out for a trot, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), when something went wrong:

“Suddenly, the altimeter was rapidly unwinding, indicating a rapid loss of speed,” Collins recalls. In heavy clouds, Collins had no visual references to determine where he was. “I advanced the throttles to counter the loss of airspeed. But instead of responding, and without any warning, the aircraft pitched up and flipped over with me trapped underneath. Then it went into an inverted flat spin.” The Agency’s million-dollar A-12 Oxcart was unrecoverable and crashing. Collins needed to bail out.

Collins had no idea how close he was to the Earth’s surface because he was in the middle of a cloud and couldn’t see out of it. He also did not know if he was over a mountain range, which would mean he had even less time to eject. Collins closed his visor and grabbed the ejection ring that was positioned between his legs. He pushed his head firmly against the headrest and pulled. This kind of radical ejection from a prized top secret aircraft is not easy to forget, and Collins recalls dramatic details. “The canopy of the aircraft flew off and disappeared but I was still upside down, with the aircraft on top of me,” he explains. “Having pulled the D-ring, my boot stirrups snapped back. The explosive system in the seat rocket engaged, shooting me downward and away from the aircraft.” First Collins separated from the Oxcart. Next he separated from his seat. After that, he was a body falling through the air until a small parachute called a drogue snapped open, slowing his body down. In his long history of flying airplanes, this was the first time Collins had ever had to bail out. Falling to Earth, he tried to get a sense of what state he might be over. Was he in Nevada or Utah? The ground below him appeared to be high-desert terrain, low hills but no mountains that he could see. He was still too high up to discern if there were roads. As he floated down, in the distance he spotted the heavy black aircraft tumbling through the air until it disappeared from sight. “I remember seeing a large, black column of smoke rise up from the desert floor and thinking, That’s my airplane.” Only now there was nothing left of it but an incinerated hunk of titanium smoldering on the ground. Fate was a hunter, all right.

[…]

Collins unclipped himself from the parachute and began collecting everything around him. Flight-protocol pages and filmstrips of navigational maps fluttered across the desert. As he hurried to collect the top secret papers, he was surprised to hear a car motor in the distance. Looking up, he saw a pickup truck bouncing toward him along a dirt desert road. “As it got closer, I could see there were three men in the front cab,” Collins recalls. “The truck pulled alongside me and came to a stop. I could see they had my aircraft canopy in the back of their pickup.”

The men, who appeared to be local ranchers, sized up Collins. Because the flight had been subsonic, Collins was wearing a standard flight suit and not a high-altitude pressure suit, which would have made him look like an astronaut or an alien and likely prompted a lot more questions. Instead, the ranchers asked Collins if he wanted a ride. They said they knew exactly where his airplane had crashed, and if he hopped in, they’d give him a ride back to his plane. Until that moment, no civilian without a top secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the Oxcart, and Collins had strict orders to keep it that way. He’d been briefed on what to do in a security breach such as this one, given a cover story by the Agency that fit perfectly with the proximity to the Nevada Test Site—and with the times. Collins told the ranchers that his aircraft was an F-105 fighter jet and that it had a nuclear weapon on board. The men’s expressions changed from helpful to fearful. “They got very nervous and said if I wanted a ride, I better jump in quick because they were not staying around Wendover for long,” Collins recalls.

The ranchers drove Collins to the nearest highway patrol office. There, he jumped out, took his airplane canopy from the back of the truck, and watched the men speed off. Collins reached into the pocket of his flight suit. Inside, he found the note that read call this number, followed by a telephone number. Also in his pocket was a dime. Inside the highway patrol office, Collins asked the officer on duty where he could find the nearest pay phone. The man pointed around to the side of the building, and using the Agency’s dime, Collins made the phone call that no Agency pilot ever wants to make. A little less than an hour later, Kelly Johnson’s private airplane landed in Wendover, Utah, along with several men from the CIA. After a brief exchange of words so Kelly Johnson could confirm that Collins was physically okay, Collins boarded the airplane. During the two-hour flight to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, no one said a word. “There would be plenty of talking to do during the debriefing,” Collins says, “and with the Agency’s tape recorders taking everything down.” A crash of a CIA spy plane meant someone had some explaining to do.

[…]

“Maintenance guys, security guys, navigators, we all took off in trucks and airplanes and headed to Utah,” Pizzo explains. With Collins confirmed alive, the goal now was to locate every single piece of the wrecked airplane, “every nut, bolt, and sliver of fuselage.”

[…]

Once they found the site, the work crew had a lot of digging to do. The aircraft, Article #123, hadn’t broken apart in flight, but given the speed at which it had hit the earth, huge sections of the airplane had become buried. Critically important was locating every loose piece of the titanium fuselage. The metal was rare and expensive, and the fact that the Agency’s spy plane was hand-forged from titanium was a closely held secret. If a news reporter or a local got a hold of even the smallest piece of the aircraft, its unusual composition would raise questions that might threaten the cover of the entire Oxcart program. Equally critical to national security was making sure the radar-absorbing materials, known as composite and that covered the entire airplane, remained in government control. If a piece of the plane got into the wrong hands, the results could be disastrous: the Russians could learn the secret of stealth.

Along with a crew of more than one hundred men, the Agency brought its own horses to the crash site. Men from Groom Lake took to the desert terrain on horseback and began their search.

[…]

In Air Force culture, when an airplane crashes, someone has to take the blame. Collins explains: “In the SAC [Strategic Air Command] mind-set, if there’s an accident, the wing commander suffers the consequences.” Instead, Collins believes, Holbury tried to get Collins to be the fall guy. “Holbury didn’t want blame; he wanted a star. He wanted to become a general, so he tried to put the blame on me. After the crash, even before the investigation, he requested that I be fired.”

Collins was unwilling to accept that. Fortunately for Collins’s career, Kelly Johnson, the builder of the aircraft, didn’t care about blame as much as he wanted to find out what had gone wrong with his airplane. Listening to Collins describe what had happened during the debriefing, Johnson couldn’t figure out what caused the aircraft to crash. He wondered if there was something Collins had forgotten, or was maybe leaving out. “I was clear in my mind that the crash was a mechanical error and not a pilot error,” Collins explains. “So when Kelly Johnson asked would I try unconventional methods like hypnosis and truth serum, I said yes. I was willing to do anything I could to get to the truth.” While the Pentagon’s accident board conducted a traditional investigation, Collins submitted to a far less conventional way of seeking out the truth of the cause of the crash.

Inside the flight surgeon’s office at Lockheed, Collins sat with a CIA-contracted hypnotist from Boston, “a small, rotund man dressed in a fancy suit,” as Collins recalls. “He tried very hard to put me in a trance, only it didn’t work. I don’t think he realized that hypnotizing a fighter pilot was not as easy as he thought it might be.” Next, Collins was injected with sodium thiopental, also known as truth serum. Collins remembers the day well. “I told my wife, Jane, I was going to work for a few hours, which was unusual to begin with because it was a Sunday. The point of the treatment was to see if I could remember details other than those I relayed in the original debrief with the CIA. But yes, even with the sodium pentothal in my system, everything I said was exactly the same. The treatment takes a lot out of you and after it was over, I was very unsteady on my feet. Three CIA agents brought me home late that Sunday evening. One drove my car, the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was still loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.”

[…]

After a lengthy investigation it was determined that a tiny, pencil-size part called a pitot tube had in fact caused the crash. The pitot tube measured the air coming into the aircraft and thereby controlled the airspeed indicator. Unlike in a car, where the driver can feel relative speed, in a plane, without a proper reading from an airspeed indicator, a pilot has no awareness of how fast he is going, and without correct airspeed information a pilot cannot land. When Collins flew into the cloud, the pitot tube reacted adversely to the moisture inside and froze. The false airspeed indicator caused the aircraft to stall. As a result of the stall, the Oxcart flipped upside down and crashed.

Posted in Technology, War | 1 Comment »

This has made them hostile to China and friendly to the United States

Friday, August 23rd, 2024

Accidental Superpower by Peter ZeihanWhile the United States is largely immune to extrahemispheric invasion, Peter Zeihan notes (in The Accidental Superpower), there are any number of potential routes that the Americans could — and during World War II did — use to invade Europe and Asia:

By the end of the war the Americans had not only extensively used launching points such as Iceland, Sicily, and Great Britain, but the postwar NATO alliance brought islands like Zealand, the Azores, Cyprus, and the Faroes into the American defense network.

Asia’s sea approaches are even more favorable to the Americans. Off the East Asian coast are not simply a series of archipelagoes, but a series of well-established, populous nations: Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. All, like the United Kingdom, are full-on powers in their own right. What do they have in common? A fear that another regional power might one day be powerful enough to end them. In the past this has made them hostile to Japan (and friendly to the United States), and in the present this has made them hostile to China (and friendly to the United States). As of 2014 all — including Japan — are allies.

Posted in Policy, War | 7 Comments »

The bear had at least 13 adult parasitic worms pulled from its eyes

Thursday, August 22nd, 2024

Researchers have reported the first known infection of an exotic eye worm in a black bear in the US, which was killed in Pennsylvania in November 2023:

The bear had at least 13 adult parasitic worms pulled from its eyes, and the researchers identified them as the invasive, potentially blinding species Thelazia callipaeda, which was only first detected in the US in 2020.

Thelazia callipaeda adult in the eye of a cat

T. callipaeda is a nematode previously known for spreading in Asia and Eastern Europe, where it plagues carnivores, rabbits and hares, rodents, and primates (including humans). But it has recently undergone a swift and massive expansion in its range, including to Western Europe and North America. The initial 2020 detection in the US was in an eye of a pet dog in New York that had no travel history. Since then, it has shown up in at least 11 dogs — in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Nevada — and two cats in New York, according to a study published in February. (The travel history of the Nevada dog is unknown, so it’s unclear where that infection occurred.)

In the new study, the UPenn researchers noted that the adult female bear with the T. callipaeda infection was “legally harvested” in Monroe County. The infection was detected as it was being processed for taxidermy. The researchers noted that two other bears harvested in the area had similar eye worm infections, but those cases were not investigated to determine the type of worms.

[…]

The worm spreads via a variegated fruit fly, Phortica variegate, that feasts on the tears and salty eye secretions of various mammals. There’s only limited data on P. variegate‘s distribution in the US. But it’s clearly an effective vector for the worm and efficient at delivering the parasite to new hosts.

The fruit fly’s role is not just to transport T. callipaeda, but also to help it grow. The life cycle of the worm starts in a host’s eye, where early-stage (L1) larvae are released by adult female worms and picked up by a male fly. The fly then becomes infected, with the larvae going through two developmental stages in the fly’s testes. When they’re ready, the third-stage (L3) larvae migrate to the fly’s mouthparts, where they can be transferred to a new host.

Posted in Animals, Science | 1 Comment »

A fireworm sting can leave you in pain for several hours and can even cause dizziness and confusion

Wednesday, August 21st, 2024

Everything in Australia is trying to kill you, but Texas now has Australia-worthy fireworms washing up on its beaches:

They really do sound like a sci-fi or fantasy monster:

The marine creatures are also known as bristleworms because they have hair-like bristles that are hollow and full of venom, so you can probably guess how they earned their other name.

“The reason it’s called a fireworm is because when it stings you, it feels like fire,” said Jace Tunnell, director of community engagement for the HRI in a video posted to the institute’s YouTube page.

[…]

A fireworm sting can leave you in pain for several hours and can even cause dizziness and confusion.

“As far as I know they can’t kill you, which I guess is the good news,” Tunnell said.

The bristles are hollow spines that are filled with venom. They break off and embed into your skin if you brush up against them.

And if they don’t already sound terrifying enough, Tunnell said the worms can produce asexually — if you cut one in half, it will regenerate into two worms.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

FPV drones generally require a radio link to the operator

Tuesday, August 20th, 2024

Russia is striking back against the Kursk offensive with new drones guided by fiber optics which are immune to radio jamming:

FPV drones generally require a radio link to the operator. This transmits a video signal from the drone, and command signals to the drone on another channel. Loss of either signal usually means an instant crash.

This is why we have seen a profusion of trench jammers, suitcase jammers and vehicle -mounted jammers on the front lines, blasting out radio noise on selected frequencies. If effective they create a bubble of protection reaching out fifty or a hundred yards. This will generally keep FPVs away, although skilled FPV operators approach at a steep angle so their drone gets through on sheer momentum.

Drones keep changing their operating frequencies and jammers keep being updated to stop them in an unending cat-and-mouse game. This is why it takes a blitz like the one in Kursk, with a prolonged period of preparation to identify all the frequencies in use and the concentration enough jammers to block everything in a given area to strop all drones for a time.

Drones can also lose their link for other reasons. The radio link essentially requires over line of sight. This is fine when the drone is well above ground, but as soon as it dips low, communication starts to break up. Flying relays help, but FPVs have to dive low during the final attack, and there is almost always interference in the video signal in the last second which impair the view at the critical moment.

If you’ve watched a few FPV drone videos, you’ve seen the static right before impact. (They’re analog feeds, typically.)

When I first learned about TOW missiles — “Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided” — I was incredulous that a missile spooled out a wire along the way, a three kilometer-long wire. The design goes back a ways:

Late in World War II, the German Army began experimenting with modified versions of the Ruhrstahl X-4 wire-guided missile. Originally developed for the Luftwaffe as an anti-bomber weapon, by changing the warhead to one using a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) design, the new X-7 version made an effective anti-armor weapon with a range of hundreds of metres. This would greatly improve the effectiveness of infantry anti-tank operations, which at that time were generally based on smaller weapons like the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck, limited in the best case to ranges on the order of 150 metres (490 ft). X-7 was never fully developed before the war ended.

These newer FPV drones spool out fiber-optic cable, which carries a high-resolution video signal:

On August 12th videos on social media showed what were claimed to be attacks Ukrainian BTR-4 reconnaissance vehicles in Giri with fiber-optic FPV drones. While this is impossible to confirm, the video show an unusual lack of interference.

[…]

The company Skywalker Technology is now offering fiber-optic drone controllers on the open market. The company website gives a contact address in Singapore, although ClashReport describe them as Chinese.

Skywalker sell a number of drones with military applications including one armed with rockets and another kamikaze type, plus devices to convert consumer quadcopters into bombers. Their latest offering is a fiber-optic guidance set to replace radio control. As with previous designs, it comes with a considerable weight penalty; a 5 km/ 3 miles cable reel weighs about two and a half pounds. Maximum range is six miles, HIGHCAT offers twice that.

As with other FPV components which are commonly sourced from Far Eastern suppliers, this opens up an instant supply of new technology to both parties in the Ukraine conflict. Whereas previously military technology went through a process of evaluation, specification, testing, approval and acquisition taking years, independent drone makers can now buy off the shelf and ship drones to the front in weeks.

The most commonly raised objections – snagging on obstacles, the cable breaking, leaving a trail back to the operator – do not appear to be real issues, but fiber-optic control does have downsides as previously discussed and is unlikely replace radio control entirely. This type will be effective in situations of intense jamming though and might be used in the first wave of an attack.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

That day Musk became the richest person in the world

Monday, August 19th, 2024

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonTesla’s stock price dropped to $25 per share in early 2020, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), and then bounced up to ten times that:

On January 7 it hit $260. That day Musk became the richest person in the world, with $190 billion, vaulting him past Jeff Bezos.

Under the extraordinary compensation bet he had made with his Tesla board in February 2018, amid Tesla’s worst production problems, he got no guaranteed salary. Instead, his compensation would depend on hitting very aggressive revenue, profit, and market value targets, which included Tesla’s market valuation increasing ten-fold to $650 billion. News articles at the time predicted that most targets would be impossible to achieve. But in October 2021, Tesla became the sixth company in U.S. history to be worth more than $1 trillion. Its market value was greater than its five biggest rivals — Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, and GM — combined. And in April 2022, it reported a profit of $5 billion on revenue of $19 billion, an 81 percent increase from the year before. The result was that Musk’s payout from the 2018 compensation deal was around $56 billion and his net worth at the start of 2022 increased to $304 billion.

[…]

In November 2021, he conducted a Twitter poll to see if he should sell some Tesla stock in order to realize some of the capital gains and pay tax on it. There were 3.5 million votes, with 58 percent voting yes. As he already was planning to do, he exercised options that he had been granted in 2012 and were due to expire, which caused him to pay the largest single tax bill in history: $11 billion, enough to fund the entire budget of his antagonists at the Securities and Exchange Commission for five years.

“Let’s change the rigged tax code so the Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else,” Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted at the end of 2021. Musk shot back, “If you opened your eyes for 2 seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year. Don’t spend it all at once… oh wait you did already.”

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

The savants had missed nothing

Sunday, August 18th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew Roberts The first volume of Vivant Denon’s vast and magisterial Description de l’Égypte was published in 1809, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), its title page proclaiming that it was ‘published by the order of His Majesty Emperor Napoleon the Great’:

For the rest of Napoleon’s life, and indeed after it, further volumes of this truly extraordinary work appeared, finally numbering twenty-one and constituting a monument in the history of scholarship and publishing. The savants had missed nothing. From Cairo, Thebes, Luxor, Karnak, Aswan and all the other sites of Ancient Egyptian temples, there were immensely detailed scale drawings (20 inches by 27) in both colour and black and white of obelisks, sphinxes, hieroglyphics, cartouches, pyramids and sexually aroused pharaohs, as well as mummified birds, cats, snakes and dogs. (According to volume twelve, King Ozymandias didn’t have a ‘wrinkl’d lip and sneer of cold command’ as Shelley suggests, but a rather engaging smile.)

[…]

The savants’ greatest discovery was the Rosetta Stone, a stele in three languages found at El-Rashid in the Delta.

[…]

Under the peace agreement covering the French withdrawal in 1801, the Stone was handed over to the British and sent to the British Museum, where it still safely resides.

Tragically, the Institut near Tahrir Square in Cairo was burned down during the Arab Spring uprising on December 17, 2011, and almost all its 192,000 books, journals and other manuscripts — including the only handwritten manuscript of Denon’s Description de l’Égypte — were destroyed.

Posted in Linguistics, Policy, Science, War | 1 Comment »

Fate is a hunter

Saturday, August 17th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenAfter surviving the Korean War, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Oxcart pilot Kenneth Collins returned with a fatalistic attitude:

“Fate is a hunter,” Collins believes. “When it comes for you, it comes,” and for whatever reason it was not time for death to come to him yet. This was a notion Collins formulated during the Korean War while flying reconnaissance missions and watching so many talented and brave fellow pilots die. How else but by fate did he survive all 113 combat missions he had flown? On those classified missions, the young Collins was armed with only a camera in the nose of his airplane as he flew deep into North Korea, sometimes all the way over the Yalu River, being fired at by MiG fighter jets. During the war, he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and also the coveted Silver Star for valor, the third-highest military decoration a member of the armed services can receive. Both medals were pinned on Collins’s chest before he turned twenty-four.

[…]

Accepting fate as the hunter made things easier for Collins, which is how he dealt with the memory of his closest friend and former wingman from the Fifteenth Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, Charles R. “Chuck” Parkerson. The two men had flown on many missions together, but there was one from which Parkerson never came home. “We had flown into North Korea and back out side by side,” Collins recalls. “We were almost home when Parkerson radioed me. He said the engine on his RF-80 had flamed out and he was unable to restart it. I saw he was losing altitude quickly and he knew that soon he would crash.” Parachuting into enemy territory meant certain death. “Over the radio, Parkerson asked me, ‘What should I do?’” Collins explains. “I said, ‘Fly out over the Yellow Sea and I’ll fly with you.’ I told him to bail out in the water and I’d send his coordinates back to base for a rescue team.” It seemed like a good idea, and Collins flew alongside his wingman as they headed toward the Yellow Sea. Parkerson prepared for a bailout. “But there was a problem,” Collins recalls. “The canopy on Parkerson’s RF-80 was stuck. Jammed. It wouldn’t open, which meant he was trapped inside the airplane. There was nothing I could do for my friend except to fly alongside him all the way until the end.” Collins watched Parkerson land his airplane on the sea. With Parkerson unable to get out of the sinking aircraft, Collins waited, watching from the air as his friend drowned. “When your time is up, it is up,” Collins recalls.

Posted in Technology, War | 4 Comments »

The Americans secured all potential approaches that could be used for an assault on North America

Friday, August 16th, 2024

Accidental Superpower by Peter ZeihanBy the beginning of their participation in World War II, Peter Zeihan explains (in The Accidental Superpower), the Americans had already secured all of the potential approaches that could be used for an assault on North America:

Considering the distances involved, the outside world missed its best chance to disrupt America’s development in the War of 1812, one of only two occasions when the Americans faced an extrahemispheric invasion (the other being the Revolutionary War). The critical battle was for Fort McHenry in September 1814.

The British had sacked and captured Washington, D.C., just three weeks before and were moving north by land and sea toward Baltimore. At the time, Baltimore was the largest city in the region and a notorious hub for the privateers who had been raiding British shipping lines. But it was also the sole meaningful land link between the northern and southern states: With the Allegheny Mountains to the west, all roads hugged the Chesapeake Bay, which in turn led to the bay’s major city and port. As importantly, the entirety of inland America was dependent upon Baltimore. The Cumberland Narrows through the Appalachians lay just to the west, and only three years earlier the government had begun construction on a road to connect the Potomac River to the Ohio valley. Instead of a months-long sail down to New Orleans, then up the Mississippi to the Ohio, this new National Road would allow Baltimore to serve as an immediate outlet for Pittsburgh and lands beyond.

If the British could hold Baltimore, the war’s other theaters would be rendered moot and the young America would be split into North, South, and interior. Luckily for the Americans, Major George Armistead’s heroic defense of Fort McHenry convinced British commanders that the post could not be taken with available forces. While time has eroded the details from the American mind, all Americans instantly recognize the description of the battle and its outcome as recorded by an American who watched the battle from the deck of a British vessel where he was being held prisoner: Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.”

[…]

The British attempt on Baltimore — indeed, the entire war effort — would have been impossible without launching grounds in Canada and the Caribbean. The Americans took note of which territories were used and reshaped their foreign and military policies to ensure that those lands — and any like them — could never be used for such purposes again.

[…]

American diplomatic, economic, and military pressure succeeded in hiving Canada off from Britain and transitioning it to neutrality.

In the latter half of the 1800s, the United States both purchased Alaska (1867) and annexed the Hawaiian Islands (1898). This did more than push back potential Asian hostiles twenty-six hundred miles. Beyond Hawaii the next meaningful speck of land is the 2.4-square-mile atoll of Midway, another thirteen hundred miles from either Hawaii or Alaska. The Americans militarily snagged Midway in 1903.

In the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Americans seized direct control of Puerto Rico and de facto control of Cuba. This prevented any hostile power from potentially severing American access from the greater Mississippi basin to the outside world via the Florida and Yucatán Straits.

The Americans usurped British control of the western Atlantic outright with the Lend-Lease program in the early part of World War II. By terms of the agreement the United Kingdom gave the United States rent-free control for ninety-nine years of nearly all of the serviceable British ports in the Western Hemisphere.

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

Scientists drilled the deepest core yet

Thursday, August 15th, 2024

In May of 2023, scientists drilled the deepest core yet and recovered serpentinized peridotite that forms when saltwater interacts with mantle rock:

Separating the planet’s rocky crust and the molten outer core, the mantle makes up 70 percent of the Earth’s mass and 84 percent of its volume. But despite its outsized influence on the planet’s geologic processes, scientists have never directly sampled rocks from this immensely important geologic layer.

And that’s understandable, especially when you consider that the crust is roughly 9 to 12 miles thick on average. Luckily, that average contains outliers—areas of the world where the crust is actually incredibly thin and faulting exposes the mantle through cracks. One such area is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, specifically near an underwater mountain called the Atlantis Massif.

On the south side of this massif is an area known as the Lost City — a hydrothermal field whose vent fluids are highly alkaline and rich in hydrogen, methane, and other carbon compounds. This makes the area a particularly compelling candidate for explaining how early life evolved on Earth. Additionally, it contains mantle rock that interacts with seawater in a process known as “serpentinization,” which alters the rock’s structure and gives it a green, marble-like appearance.

It was here, 800 meters south of this field, in May of 2023 that members of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) — aboard the JOIDES Resolution, a 470-foot-long research vessel rented by the U.S. National Science Foundation — extracted a 1,268-meter core containing abyssal peridotites, which are the primary rocks that make up the Earth’s upper mantle.

[…]

“We had only planned to drill for 200 meters, because that was the deepest people had ever managed to drill in mantle rock,” Johan Lissenberg, a petrologist at Cardiff University and co-author of the study, told Nature. He said that the drilling was so easy that they progressed three times faster than usual. The team eventually drilled a staggering 1,268 meters, and only stopped due to the mission’s limited operations window.

Posted in Science | 3 Comments »

Only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana

Wednesday, August 14th, 2024

Palmer Luckey sounds like a fictional character:

Luckey is the owner of the world’s largest video game collection, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base — which is the kind of thing a man can afford to buy when he single-handedly turns virtual reality from the laughingstock of the technology industry into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by inventing the Oculus Rift in a camper trailer parked in the driveway of his parents’ duplex in Long Beach, California, where at 19 years old he lived alone and survived on frozen burritos and Mucho Mango AriZona tea.

[…]

After selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion and then getting fired by Mark Zuckerberg for making a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to “shitposting in real life,” Luckey tried his hand at building a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison. After he decided that would require too much lobbying work, he attempted to solve the obesity epidemic by making food out of petroleum products centrifuged out of the sewer system — a perfectly delicious and low-calorie idea, he maintains, which he only ditched because of the “marketing nightmare” of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage. In the end, he decided instead to found Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup that makes lethal autonomous weapons systems. It is now valued at $14 billion.

[…]

In his spare time, when he is not providing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol with AI-powered long-range sensors, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy with drones to attack high-value Russian targets, or winning first place in the Texas Renaissance Festival’s costume contest with historically meticulous renderings of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn sewn and stitched by his wife, Nicole—who’s been at his side for 16 of his 31 years on earth — Luckey recently built a bypass for his peripheral nervous system to experiment with giving himself superhuman reflexes; vestibular implants to pipe sounds into his skull so that instead of having to call him and wait for him to pick up, Anduril employees could just pick up a designated Palmer Phone and talk straight into his head; and a virtual reality headset that — by tying three explosive charges to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency (i.e., GAME OVER) — kills you in real life when you die in a video game.

[…]

Before the recent preference cascade enabling high-profile tech moguls to violate the taboo against supporting Donald Trump, there was first the lonely figure of Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled, Jules Verne-obsessed, amateur scientist with no money, whose faith in the power of technology was so strong that he worked jobs sweeping ship yards, scrubbing decks, fixing engines, repairing phones, and training to sing as a gondolier for tourists, all in order to spend his nights in a gutted 19-foot camper trailer trying to manufacture dream worlds out of breadboards and lens equipment and accelerometers and magnetometers and a soldering iron — which he did, bringing virtual reality to the masses, burning a hole in his retina with a laser, and losing it all to Zuckerberg over a meme, only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.

Posted in Business, Technology, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

Residents found themselves surrounded by polluted water, poisoned air, and a destroyed landscape

Tuesday, August 13th, 2024

Brian Potter explains how California turned against growth:

Residents found themselves surrounded by polluted water, poisoned air, and a destroyed landscape. Views and natural beauty were increasingly spoiled by overhead power lines, outdoor advertising, freeway overpasses, and thousands of identical houses. Infrastructure like roads, schools and sewer systems were stretched to their breaking point. Crime was rising, and neighborhoods of single-family homes with largely white residents were being encroached on by apartment buildings housing the poor and minorities. In response to this unwanted change, Californians began to create land-use restrictions that would curb growth, help stop environmental harm, and limit the influx of new residents. When this drove up property values, Californians then passed Proposition 13, which cut property taxes, reduced the government’s ability to fund services, and locked in the low-growth culture that had taken root.

[…]

Since the days of the gold rush, growth in California came at the expense of the landscape and the environment. Six years after the discovery of gold, the landscape surrounding the motherlode was “scarred and devastated” from mining operations. Following the development of hydraulic mining, which uses high-pressure water to break up rocks, entire mountains were torn apart, and the resulting silt and debris clogged the rivers. The large-scale water projects that brought water to cities and farms flooded ravines, drained lakes, and destroyed ecosystems. Diverting water from the Owens River to Los Angeles dried up the formerly-fertile Owens Valley, and large-scale water diversion caused Buena Vista Lake and Tulare Lake to dry up. Damming of the Tuolumne River to provide water for San Francisco flooded the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Conservationist John Muir, who had fought against the dam, lamented that “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature.” In 1905, a canal dug from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley overflowed, causing an enormous flood which only stopped when the Southern Pacific Railroad filled the breach with 2,500 carloads of rock and gravel. The result of the flood, the Salton Sea, has today become an “environmental disaster” due to steadily increasing salinity. In 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, causing a flood that killed 400 people and destroyed everything in its path as the water rushed out to sea. In 1940 the Los Angeles River, one of the city’s major amenities, was turned into a concrete channel to protect the surrounding areas from flooding.

[…]

Between 1910 and 1930, the number of salmon in the Sacramento River fell by 80%. In the mid-1930s, 750,000 tons of sardines were being caught annually off the California coast, but the industry was completely wiped out by the end of the 1960s, in part due to overfishing.

[…]

Harvests of California’s majestic redwoods rose to “unprecedented levels” to provide lumber for new housing, and by the end of the 1950s, 90% of California’s redwood belt had been chopped down. Air pollution from industry and millions of cars created a lingering “smog” in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco that poisoned the air and blocked off views: smog attacks were so common by the 1960s that they were reported by the news along with other weather announcements. Sewage was regularly dumped into lakes and rivers: in 1961 an estimated 250 million gallons of sewage was dumped annually in the San Francisco Bay. Developers regularly made plans to fill in thousands of acres of the Bay to make more land, to the point where many worried it would be turned into a narrow shipping channel just wide enough for ships to pass. In 1969, a blowout from an offshore platform created an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, killing thousands of animals and polluting more than 30 miles of beaches. Excessive pumping of groundwater for agriculture had caused the land to subside by tens of feet in some locations, and excessive irritation had deposited minerals and other pollutants in the soil.

[…]

Much of this concern was about the aesthetic effects of ongoing growth. Many people had moved to California to be surrounded by natural beauty, not billboards, neon signs, traffic congestion, and thousands of identical “ticky tacky” houses.

[…]

While California had traditionally been a bastion of single family homes, by the late 1960s construction had shifted to building large numbers of apartments, which would inevitably be occupied by low-income residents. This was “perceived as a categorical threat to the detached culture of low-density residential life.” One California housing expert noted that “one of the most cherished property rights in our ‘free enterprise system’ is not the right to do what one pleases with one’s property, but the right to live in a neighborhood in which no more multi-family housing may be constructed.”

[…]

In 1965 the U.S. removed quotas on immigration based on national origin, and subsequent immigration reforms created a path for previously illegal immigrants to become legal residents. In 1960 only 1.3 million of California’s ~16 million residents were foreign born, and only 8% of residents weren’t white. By 1970, the non-white fraction had risen to 12%, and by 1996 it had reached 51%.

[…]

California’s violent crime rate doubled between 1960 and 1970, and by 1980 had doubled again.

[…]

By 1970, 25% of the country saw pollution/ecology as an important problem, up from 1% in 1960. That same year there were over 8000 environmental bills introduced in congress.

[…]

Between 1971 and 1975, 244 CEQA lawsuits were filed alleging that projects failed to properly complete an environmental impact report, and a state study found that CEQA litigation had been “excessive and frivolous, resulting in unnecessary legal costs and costs of project delay.” An environmental organization handbook at the time noted that “the mere threat of a suit can also be an impressive political tactic… suits can be an effective delaying tactic in order to force compromises.” Between 1971 and 1975, CEQA lawsuits were used to challenge more than 28,000 units of housing construction in the San Francisco area alone.

[…]

Los Angeles had the first zoning law in the country in 1908, and California set the precedent for single-family home zoning in the 1920s. But historically, restrictions had been part of a broader plan to encourage growth by making cities appealing; now they were being used to shut it down. By the mid-1970s, most cities and counties in California had some form of growth restriction in place.

[…]

prices. In 1973, southern California homes were on average $1,000 cheaper than homes nationally. By 1979, they were, on average, $42,400 more expensive (reaching $143,000 more expensive by 1988). Between 1970 and 1977, San Francisco had the largest home price increase of any of the 16 biggest metros in the U.S., with average home prices nearly doubling. By 1977 San Francisco had the highest home prices of any large metro in the country, up from 6th highest in 1970. Los Angeles followed behind as a close second.

Increased home prices, coupled with a property tax reform that raised residential tax rates and assessment frequency, caused property taxes to skyrocket. A home purchased in Los Angeles for $45,000 in 1973 with a $1,160 property tax bill would have a $2,070 tax bill just three years later. As home prices rose throughout the state (going from an average of $34,000 in 1974 to $85,000 in 1978), average property taxes doubled, and in some cases even quadrupled.

[…]

Dissatisfaction with the taxes also came from the fact that taxes were increasingly being spent on things like welfare, healthcare, and schools in poor urban areas (a 1976 state supreme court case mandated that spending per-pupil be roughly equal across the state). In other words, in many jurisdictions taxes were being funneled to the poor and minorities rather than improving local services like police or road construction.

In response to increasing dissatisfaction with property taxes, California passed Proposition 13 in 1978. The ballot measure, which won by a 2-1 margin, rolled back assessed home values to their 1975 levels, limited assessed value to a 2% increase each year unless the house was sold, and capped property tax rates at 1% of the value of the house. Later amendments allowed a homeowner to pass on his home to his children (or even grandchildren) without triggering a reassessment, letting the low property taxes be passed from generation to generation.

Proposition 13 did exactly what it said on the tin. Homeowner property taxes immediately fell by nearly 60%, reducing government tax revenues by roughly $7 billion annually (with “losses” even higher later as property values continued to climb). City tax revenue declined by 27% on average, and county tax revenue declined by 40% on average. While government spending had risen by 4.1% per year between 1957 and 1971 in inflation-adjusted terms, after Prop 13 it began to fall. One estimate suggested that by 1988, Prop 13 had saved taxpayers $228 billion. California fell from 7th in the nation in tax revenue per $100 of personal income to 35th.

Cuts in government services quickly followed.

[…]

Perversely, Prop 13 in some ways acted directly against homeowners’ desire for more local control. The measure eliminated local control over property tax, redirecting it to the state legislature and governor. Local governments and school districts were forced to hire lobbyists to represent their interests in the state capitol in the hopes of getting a portion of reduced tax revenue.

Prop 13, along with the enormous number of growth controls passed by various jurisdictions, forced California into a vicious cycle. With reduced tax revenues (and inability to control the revenues that remained), residency became far more zero sum. Services allocated to new residents might easily come at the expense of existing residents, incentivizing jurisdictions to create further growth controls. Rising property values forced people to live farther and farther away from their jobs, exacerbating the problems of growth: longer commuting distances meant more air pollution, more traffic congestion, and more freeway.

[…]

Economist Ed Glaeser estimated that as early as 2002 land use restrictions in San Francisco add nearly half a million dollars to the cost of a typical home, and in 2009 Hseih and Moretti estimated that relaxing land use restrictions in San Francisco and New York alone could boost national GDP by 8.9%.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 4 Comments »

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