Those crossing through the Holland Tunnel see the most time savings

February 10th, 2025

New York City’s congestion pricing program has been in place for one month, implementing tolls on drivers who enter certain, often gridlocked, areas of Manhattan:

And so far, the results are “undeniably positive,” transit officials say, with measurably reduced traffic and more commuters choosing public transit.

The traffic mitigation plan covers a “congestion relief zone” that spans almost all of Manhattan below 60th street and includes major routes like the Lincoln, Holland, and Hugh L. Carey Tunnels and bridges that go into both Brooklyn and Queens. Since its launch on January 5, one million fewer vehicles have entered that zone than they would have without the toll, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Passenger cars with an E-ZPass that travel through that zone face a $9 toll during peak hours, from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends, and a $2.25 toll overnight. Tolls are more expensive for commercial traffic, and vehicles without E-ZPass face a 50% premium.

Those charges are meant to reduce traffic in the city and also raise funds for $15 billion worth of transit repairs to the MTA. By cutting traffic and ushering more commuters onto public transit, the program will also reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s the first such plan in the United States, though congestion pricing has been successfully used in London, Stockholm, Singapore, and other cities. In Stockholm, traffic levels dropped about 25%, and the city saw less pollution and more investment in local infrastructure. And though business owners and residents there criticized the program before its pilot began — much like they did in New York — a majority of voters ended up making that toll permanent.

New Yorkers are already seeing an impact one month in. Along with fewer drivers in general, the vehicles that still travel through the area are dealing with less traffic. Those crossing through the Holland Tunnel see the most time savings, with average trip times down 48% during peak morning hours. The Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges are both seeing an average of 30% faster travel times. During afternoon peak hours, drivers in the entire zone are seeing travel times drop up to 59%.

More commuters are opting for buses to cross Manhattan, and those buses are now traveling more quickly, too. Weekday bus ridership has grown 6%, while weekend ridership is up 21%, compared to January 2024. (Subway ridership has also grown by 7.3% on weekdays and 12% on weekends, part of a larger trend in ridership growth happening since the fall, per the MTA. Anecdotally, some subway riders have said they’ve seen more packed trains on their morning commutes.) Buses entering Manhattan from Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx are saving up to 10 minutes on their route times, which also makes their arrivals more reliable.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 3 Comments »

These perch-and-wait ambushes are interesting for what they do not show as much as for what they do

February 9th, 2025

David Hambling points to a number of videos released by Ukrainian forces that show FPV lurk-and-strike ambush tactics in action:

The technique is used behind Russian lines to strike vehicles travelling on supply routes and seems to be used as a way to interdict logistics – and also for targeted assassinations.

This technique may have been adopted as a way to get around the short flight time of FPVs, which typically fly for 20 minutes or less and cannot wait for targets.

[…]

What is clear from this is that all three FPVs were in the ambush area, and the operators found it worthwhile to expend three on a low-value target which was not carrying passengers or cargo. In Russia the Desertcross costs around $23,000; the FPVs are around $500 each but availability rather than cost would likely be the deciding factor. Nobody wastes ammo when it is scarce, however cheap it might be.

[…]

These perch-and-wait ambushes are interesting for what they do not show as much as for what they do.

There is no indication how the drones reached their ambush spots. Battery life is the big issue; the drones might have flown there under their own power and counted on having enough juice left for the waiting period and the ambush. But they may have been delivered by drone. Wild Hornets Queen Hornet has been shown delivering FPVs and acting as a flying relay station to increase control range. And when British PM Keir Starmer visited Ukraine recently, he was shown two FPV carriers, one a fixed-wing drone, the other a large multicopter.

Ukrainian forces are increasingly using drones to lay anti-tank mines on roads behind Russian lines. Mines are relatively easy to remove; drones which may be some distance from the road and can be relocated (or target anyone attempting to remove them) may be more challenging.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 7 Comments »

It’s unclear what airframe the Unmanned Systems Forces uses as basis for the far-flying, multi-use drone

February 8th, 2025

Ukraine’s latest unmanned aerial vehicle can fly 1,200 miles, drop a 550-pound bomb and return to base, David Axe reports, making it potentially the most powerful reusable drone in the Russia-Ukraine war:

It’s unclear what airframe the Unmanned Systems Forces uses as basis for the far-flying, multi-use drone, but the scant photographic evidence points to a modified civilian sport plane. Ukrainian drone regiments have long operated propeller-driven Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes fitted with remote controls and an underbelly bomb rack.

But the A-22s have only ever been caught on video conducting one-way missions, slamming into their targets like slow cruise missiles. The new Ukrainian drone can drop its bomb and then fly back to base, meaning it can fly a few or many missions until it wears out, crashes or gets shot down.

In making its longest-range drones reusable, the drone branch could multiply the number and pace of deep strikes it conducts against targets inside Russia, which have lately included bomber bases and oil facilities. The strikes have raised the cost of Russian bomber sorties targeting Ukrainian cities, and depressed oil production in a country that utterly relies on energy exports for state revenue.

[…]

Controlling a drone in mid air, usually through a combination of pre-set GPS-based navigation and direct human control via satellite radio, is fairly straightforward. Landing a drone is hard, however. Smaller models can cut their engines, pop a parachute and float down to the ground. Bigger models must be eased onto a runway.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver

February 7th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenOne scorching-hot morning in August of 1966, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), an Iraqi Air Force colonel named Munir Redfa climbed into his MiG-21 fighter jet at an air base in southern Iraq and headed toward Baghdad:

Redfa then made a sudden turn to the west and began racing toward Jordan. Iraqi ground control notified Redfa that he was off course.

“Turn back immediately,” he was told. Instead, Redfa began flying in a zigzag pattern. Recognizing this as an evasive maneuver, an Iraqi air force commander told Colonel Redfa if he didn’t turn back at once he would be shot down. Defying orders, Redfa switched off his radio and began flying low to the ground. To avoid radar lock, in some places he flew as low as seven hundred and fifty feet. Once he was at altitude, Redfa flew over Turkey, then toward the Mediterranean. But his final destination was the enemy state of Israel. There, one million U.S. dollars was waiting for him in a bank account in Tel Aviv.

Six hundred miles to the west, the head of the Israeli air force, Major General Mordechai Hod, waited anxiously for Munir Redfa’s MiG to appear as a blip on his own radar screen. When it finally appeared, General Hod scrambled a group of delta-wing Mirage fighters to escort Redfa to a secret base in the Negev Desert. It was a groundbreaking event. Israel was now the first democratic nation to have in its possession a Russian-made MiG-21, the top gun fighter not just in Russia and its Communist proxies but throughout the Arab world.

[…]

For years, Mossad searched for a possible candidate for defection. Finally, in early 1966, they found a man who fit the profile in Munir Redfa, a Syrian Christian who had previously expressed feelings of persecution as a religious minority in a squadron of Muslims. Mossad dispatched a beautiful female intelligence agent to Baghdad on a mission. The agent worked the romance angle first, luring Redfa to Paris with the promise of sex. There, she told Redfa the truth about what she was after. In return for an Iraqi air force MiG, Redfa would be paid a million dollars and given a new identity and a safe haven for himself and his family. Redfa agreed.

[…]

What Israel learned from Munir Redfa’s MiG ultimately allowed them to overpower the combined air forces of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan during the Six-Day War.

[…]

Israel was playing the weak card in the hope of winning American military support. Helms also said that he’d recently met with a senior Israeli official whose visit he saw as “a clear portent that war might come at any time.” Coupled with Angleton’s assessment, Helms said this meant most likely in a matter of days. When Israel launched an attack three days later, Helms’s status with President Johnson went through the roof. “The subsequent accuracy of this prediction established Helms’s reputation in the Johnson White House,” wrote a CIA historian.

The story of Redfa’s defection made international headlines when it happened, in 1966. But what didn’t make the news was what happened once Israel finished with the MiG: the Soviet-made fighter was shipped to Area 51.

[…]

Munir Redfa’s MiG had been nicknamed the doughnut because the jet fighter’s nose had a round opening in it, like a doughnut’s. It was the first advanced Soviet fighter jet ever to set its wheels down on U.S. soil.

MiG-21 Nose

“We broke the MiG down into each of its individual pieces. Pieces of the cockpit, the gyros, oscillograph, fuel flow meter, radio… everything. Then we put it back together. The MiG didn’t have computers or fancy navigation equipment.”

[…]

“Breaking it down was the first step in understanding the aircraft. But it was by sending the MiG flying that we really figured out how it maneuvered so damn fast,” Barnes says.

[…]

“We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver. That was the key. Get it on the first chance you get. There were no second chances with a MiG,” Barnes explains.

[…]

“Since no spare parts were available, ground crews had to reverse engineer the components and make new ones from raw materials,” Barnes says. “But when both phases were over, the technical and the tactical ones, we’d unlocked the secrets of the MiG.”

[…]

“The fact that we had a MiG at Area 51 infuriated the Russians,” explains Barnes. “They retaliated by sending more spy satellites overhead at Area 51, sometimes as often as every forty-five minutes.”

[…]

“We were pinned down,” says Barnes. For weeks on end, the Special Projects Group couldn’t turn on a single radar system; the Russians were monitoring the area that intensely. Barnes and his group passed the time by playing mind games with the Soviets. They painted strange shapes on the tarmac, “funny-looking impossible aircraft,” which they then heated up with portable heaters to confuse the Soviets who were shooting infrared satellite pictures of the work going on there. “We got a kick out of imagining what the Russians thought of our new airplanes,” Barnes says.

[…]

The ultrasecret MiG program at Area 51 gave birth to the Top Gun fighter-pilot school, a fact that would remain secret for decades. Officially called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, the program was established a year after the first MiG arrived, in March of 1969, and based out of Miramar, California. Instructor pilots who had fought mock air battles over Groom Lake against Munir Redfa’s MiG began training Navy pilots for sorties against Russian MiGs over Vietnam. When these Top Gun–trained Navy pilots resumed flying in Southeast Asia, the results were radically different than the deadly nine-to-one ratio from before. The scales had tipped. Now, American pilots would begin shooting down North Vietnamese pilots at a ratio of thirteen to one. The captured Soviet-made MiG-21 Fishbed proved to be an aerial warfare coup for the United States. And what followed was a quid pro quo. To thank the Israelis for supplying the United States with the most prized and unknowable aircraft in the arsenal of its archnemesis, America began to supply Israel with jet fighters to assist Israel in keeping its rivals at bay.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

There were sound logistical reasons why England hadn’t been successfully invaded since the fifteenth century

February 6th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon ordered Decrès to construct a prototype of a flat-bottomed boat, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), which could carry one cannon and one hundred men across the English Channel, and to contact Cambacérès, Lebrun, and Talleyrand to find individuals who would privately sponsor the building of these transports, which would be named after them.:

The flat bottoms of many of the boats, whose maximum draft was 6 feet fully loaded, meant that they could be run up on a beach, but although most were ready by the spring of 1804 they tended to ship water and sailed very badly unless the wind was dead astern, and south-eastern winds are rare in the English Channel. The pinnaces also needed to be rowed if they were not going dead ahead, which over 22 miles of sea would have been exhausting for the troops. Although a night attack was intended, a full eight hours of darkness came only in the autumn and winter, when the weather was too bad to risk a crossing in flat-bottomed boats. The Channel made up for its narrowness by its notorious unpredictability; there were sound logistical reasons why England hadn’t been successfully invaded since the fifteenth century (when she had been by land from Wales). By the early nineteenth she had the largest, best-trained and best-led navy in the world.

Napoleon was undeterred. On July 30, 1804 he told General Brune, we ‘only await a favourable wind in order to plant the imperial eagle on the Tower of London. Time and fate alone know what will happen.’

[…]

All the leading French admirals – Ganteaume, Eustache Bruix, Laurent Truguet, Pierre de Villeneuve, as well as Decrès – opposed the English expedition as far as they reasonably could, chastened by the two Channel squadrons of over thirty British ships-of-the-line on permanent station.

[…]

Napoleon and his senior advisors recognized that it would be impossible to send large numbers of men over on a single tide, and a surprise crossing in fog was also deemed too dangerous.

[…]

The best strategy that could be devised on any of these occasions was the ruse of luring the Royal Navy away from the English south coast for long enough to cross the Channel. Yet the idea that the Admiralty Board in London could be induced to leave the narrows of the Channel under-guarded for even one tide was always utterly fanciful.

Napoleon wrote to Ganteaume on November 23, 1803 about the flotilla of 300 armed longboats (chaloupes cannonières), 500 gunboats (bateaux cannoniers) and 500 barges he hoped soon to have ready. ‘Do you think it will take us to the shores of Albion? It can carry 100,000 men. Eight hours of night in our favour would decide the fate of the universe.’

[…]

Yet even if Napoleon had succeeded in getting ashore in Britain, Nelson’s return would have cut him off from resupply and reinforcement, and 100,000 men was not a large enough force with which to conquer 17 million waiting Britons, many of them under (admittedly makeshift) arms. Britain had undertaken intense preparations to repel an invasion from 1803 onwards: southern towns were garrisoned, fire beacons prepared; provisions stockpiled in depots located at places such as Fulham, Brentford and Staines, and every landing place was itemized from Cornwall to Scotland. Seventy-three small ‘Martello’ beacon towers were built along the south coast between 1805 and 1808, defensive breastworks were dug around south London, and some 600,000 men (between 11 and 14 per cent of the adult male population) were enlisted in the British army and Royal Navy by the end of 1804, with a further 85,000 in the militia.

Posted in War | No Comments »

5% is about the base rate for pandemic flus per year

February 5th, 2025

Flu, Scott Alexander reminds us, is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses:

Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is named after which flavors of these two proteins it has – for example, H3N2, or H5N1.

Influenza A evolved in birds, and stayed there for at least thousands of years. It crossed to humans later, maybe during historic times – different sources give suggest dates as early as 500 BC or as late as 1500 AD. It probably crossed over multiple times. Maybe it died out in humans after some crossovers, stuck around in birds, and crossed over from birds to humans again later.

During historic times, the flu has followed a pattern of big pandemics once every few decades, plus small seasonal epidemics each winter. The big pandemics happen when a new strain of flu crosses from animals into humans. Then the new strain sticks around, undergoes normal gradual mutation, and once a year immune response decays enough / mutations accumulate enough to cause another small seasonal epidemic (Why is this synced to the calendar year? See here for more).

Let’s digress to visit his piece on “diseasonality”:

The most common theories for disease seasonality are:

  1. Pathogens like the cold
  2. Pathogens like low humidity
  3. People are cramped indoors during the winter
  4. People have low vitamin D during the winter, and vitamin D helps fight pathogens

None of these are really satisfactory on their own.

[…]

Deprived of seasons, a place doesn’t just have a slow burn of flu cases all year. It has a big epidemic, then dies down for a while, then has another big epidemic. In retrospect, this is an obvious consequence of how diseases work (eg the SIR model of transmission). Some people get the disease, it spreads exponentially until lots of people are immune, and then it stops until something changes.

[…]

So in the tropics, Florida, and Alaska, epidemics “want” to follow a cycle of coming approximately once a year. In the tropics, nothing is giving them that cycle, so they come at a random time once a year, or twice a year, or whatever. In Florida, UV light, temperature, etc provide that cycle, and they come once a year. In Alaska, UV light, temperature, etc also provide that cycle, and they come once a year independent of what’s going on in Florida.

Back to the original piece:

The severity of any given flu epidemic depends both on the innate severity of the virus, and on how closely the human population’s circulating flu antibodies match the epidemic strain. People usually have good antibodies to the seasonal flu, because it’s only slightly different from last year’s seasonal flu. For the big new animal crossovers, the level of protection provided by existing antibodies is unpredictable. Older people may have antibodies left over from the last time that particular flu crossed over from animals to humans; younger people probably won’t. In some cases, people’s immune systems will be permanently synced to the first flu they encounter, with less protection against subsequent versions.

So for example, the Spanish Flu of 1918 was an H1N1 strain that killed about 2% of the world population. But the exact mortality pattern was surprising; people between 18 and 28 were especially likely to die, and people older than 88 especially likely to survive. Why? Because an H1N1 flu went pandemic in 1830; anyone who first encountered the flu around then had an immune system synced to H1N1. But an H3N8 flu went pandemic between 1890 and 1900; anyone who first encountered the flu then had an immune system synced to that strain and was unprepared for H1N1.

[…]

Interestingly, 5% is about the base rate for pandemic flus per year: five in the past century = one per twenty years = 5% chance per year.

[…]

Third, maybe mortality would be between 0.01% and 0.2%. The argument here is looking at normal (ie not 1918) flu pandemics of the past century. The least bad among these, the 2009 swine flu, had CFR of 0.01%. The worst, Hong Kong flu, was somewhere around 0.2%. If H5N1 is a normal pandemic flu — and right now there’s not much that differentiates it — it will probably be somewhere in that range.

Fourth, maybe mortality will be 2-10%. This was the mortality rate of the 1918 Spanish Flu. It seems to be an outlier: as far as we know, no other flu in the past 500 years was nearly as bad.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Our culture has erased transcendent meaning

February 4th, 2025

There is a certain treacherous animal spirit stalking around in the WEIRD world, Freddie deBoer says, particularly among the young, a yearning for deliverance — and if they have to, they’ll take deliverance through violence:

Our culture has erased transcendent meaning and left in its place short-form internet video, frothy pop music, limitless pornography, Adderall for the educated and fentanyl for the not, a ceaseless parade of minor amusements that distract but never satisfy. And people want to be satisfied; they want something durable. They want something to hold on to. They want to transcend the ordinary. And I’m afraid that, with God dead and the romantic ideal ironized into annihilation, the pure thrill of violence is one of the only outlets left to express the inexpressible, and committing violent acts is free. People make fun of me about all of this, but I’m quite certain. We are approaching a new era of cults, of terrorist cells, of mass shooters pouring out of our society like ants from an anthill in pursuit of a discarded candy bar. In a world that is not remotely atheist but still relentlessly secular, we are bound to find some folk worship of Shiva, people kneeling in reverence before the bomb like they do on the Planet of the Apes.

The Trump shooter’s utter lack of motivation, his blank and pathetic face, his relentlessly vapid existence are the 21st century. Maybe he had a political end in mind, when he incompetently squeezed off those rounds. Maybe the Zizians are true believers. The point is not that ideology, or the will to ideology, is absent. It’s that ideology itself has become a joke even among those who want to believe, just another object of nostalgic fascination in a culture where all deep meaning has been confined to the past.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Marines using cheap commercial tech to hide command posts in plain sight

February 3rd, 2025

Marines deploying to Asia for recent exercises learned to hide their command posts, whose tell-tale radio emissions could give away their position to an enemy, by using cheap commercial tech to hide in plain sight:

Using host nation WiFi allowed the Marines to blend “right into the environment,” Siverts said. Marines took cellphones on the deployment and accessed the mobile network with local SIM cards so their network wouldn’t stand out. “We’re not able to be detected,” he said.

Communicating that way requires encryption and small form factor communications, he added, referring to communications platforms that are much physically smaller than the platforms they typically use.

Another tool in the Marine Corps’ arsenal is commercial radars that are indistinguishable from commercial fishing vessels, Siverts said.

[…]

Among the Army’s top goals is improving command posts’ ability to avoid enemy fire. That includes making command posts smaller and easier to relocate, as well as reducing their electro-magnetic profiles.

“If we slog around the battlefield with massive operations centers, which are difficult to set up and often contractor-supported, we will get pounded,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said in October at the annual Association of the United States Army meeting.

“The Russians are learning this lesson several times a day [in Ukraine]. And we will not learn the hard way.”

Posted in Technology, War | 2 Comments »

Books are celebrated for being provocative, but the readers being provoked are almost never people who belong to the same social and political tribe as the reviewer

February 2nd, 2025

Why is there so much conventionality in what the book media celebrates?, Freddie deBoer asks:

For one thing, books take a long time to read and review, much longer than a movie or album. This means that people within book reviewing circles often feel pressure to devote their limited reading time to the same small number of titles each year.

[…]

The books that receive a great deal of attention often do so because the publishing company has decided to invest enough resources and effort into willing that outcome into being. Most critics follow the crowd when it comes to their opinion on a given book, and when they embrace their inner contrarian they tend to do so in predictable ways. (Some people love to be the one lonely voice in the wilderness, calling out a beloved book as a fraud, but if you’re motivated to be that voice rather than by your organic feelings about a book, then you’re still beholden to the crowd, still captive to other people’s tastes.) Books are celebrated for being provocative, but the readers being provoked are almost never people who belong to the same social and political tribe as the reviewer. (Please direct your provocations only towards those the reviewer would like to see provoked, thank you.) Certain kinds of ideas and certain kinds of stories are privileged, and much more than that, certain kinds of writers.

Posted in Media, Policy | 2 Comments »

It was a behemoth of an airplane, the fastest-flying six-engined aircraft in the world

February 1st, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenThe XB-70, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), was all that remained of General LeMay’s once-beloved B-70 bomber after it had been canceled by Congress, despite the four billion dollars invested in it:

The X in front of B-70 indicated that the bomber was now an experimental test bed for supersonic transport. It was a behemoth of an airplane, the fastest-flying six-engined aircraft in the world.

On June 8, 1966, the mission for the day was a photo op with the XB-70 as the centerpiece. An F-4, an F-5, a T-38, and an F-104 would fly in formation alongside. Barnes was in charge of monitoring telemetry, radar, and communications from the Beatty tracking station. “General Electrics had built the engines on all six airplanes flying that day,” Barnes says. “They wanted a photograph of all their aircraft flying in a tight formation for the cover of their shareholders’ meeting manual that year.”

It was a clear day, with very little natural turbulence in the air. The six aircraft took off from Dryden and headed west. About thirty minutes later, the pilots began getting into formation over the Mojave Desert. Barnes was monitoring data and listening on headphones. Using his personal Fischer recording system, Barnes was also taping the pilot transmissions. For this particular photo op, the X-15 pilot, Joe Walker, whom Barnes had gotten to know well, was flying in the F-104. Walker was on the right wing of the aircraft and was trying to hold his position when turbulence by the XB-70’ s six engines made him uncomfortable. “Walker came on the radio and spoke very clearly,” Barnes recalls. “He said, ‘I’m opposing this mission. It is too turbulent and it has no scientific value.’”

Only a few seconds later, a catastrophic midair collision occurred. “We heard the pilots screaming, ‘Midair! Midair! And I realized at first the XB-70 didn’t know it had been hit,” Barnes remembers. Joe Walker’s F-104 had slammed into the much larger airplane, caught fire, and exploded. On the XB-70, both vertical stabilizers had been shorn off, and the airplane began to crash. Continuing to pick up speed, the XB-70 whirled uncontrollably into a flat spin. As it headed toward the ground, parts of the aircraft tore loose. One of the XB-70 pilots, Al White, ejected. The other, Major Carl Cross, was trapped inside the airplane as it slammed into the desert floor. There, just a few miles from Barstow, California, it exploded into flames.

“It was so damn senseless,” Barnes says. “A damn photograph.” The worst was yet to come. “A lot of people blamed Joe Walker. Easy, because he was dead. There was, of course, the tape of him saying he was opposing the mission. That the vortex on the damn XB-70 was sucking him in. Bill Houck, the NASA monitor at our station, asked me to give him the tape recording to send to Dryden. Once NASA got a hold of it,” Barnes says, “someone there quietly disposed of it.”

Ron Rogers discusses the accident:

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Sarah Paine on How Mao Conquered China

January 31st, 2025

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Sarah Paine again, this time on how Mao conquered China:

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Napoleon got his money, and Barings and Hopes made nearly $3 million from the deal

January 30th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsAt the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he decided to ignore:

On the same day that Whitworth called for his passports in Paris, across the Atlantic President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an acre.

[…]

‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’ Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.

[…]

The financing was arranged via the Anglo-Dutch merchant banks Barings Brothers and Hopes, which in effect bought Louisiana from France and sold it on to the United States for $11.25 million of 6 per cent American bonds, meaning that the American government did not have to provide the capital immediately. As a result, Barings were paying Napoleon 2 million francs a month even when Britain was at war with France. When the prime minister, Henry Addington, asked the bank to cease the remittances Barings agreed, but Hopes, based on the continent, continued to pay and were backed by Barings – so Napoleon got his money and Barings and Hopes made nearly $3 million from the deal.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) replaces a patient’s plasma with saline and purified albumin

January 29th, 2025

The deregulation of the immune system with age eventually leads to chronic inflammation, or inflammaging, but blood sharing between young and old mice has shown rapid and robust pro-geronic and rejuvenative influences:

Interestingly, the procedure of small animal plasma exchange to dilute the circulating factors in plasma effectively reset the age-elevated systemic proteome and restored youthful healthy maintenance and repair of muscle, liver, and brain, without any added young blood, young plasma, or young factors.

For people, plasma dilution is known as plasmapheresis or therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE); it replaces a patient’s plasma with saline and purified albumin. The blood cells are returned to the patient so that while the cell profile does not change, the circulating blood proteins are diluted, including cytokines, autoreactive antibodies or toxins, and such pathogenic determinants of specific disorders.

Although its full therapeutic benefits are still being discovered, TPE is one of the treatments for autoimmune and neurological diseases such as myasthenia gravis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Guillain–Barre syndrome.

Moreover, TPE has the capacity to relieve the symptoms of long-haul COVID-19, including prevention of pneumonia, reduction of “brain fog,” and attenuation of the cytokine storm and hyper-inflammation.

This came up when eccentric life-extension fanatic Bryan Johnson (“Don’t die!”) shared the news — accompanied by a delightful photo — that he;s no longer injecting his son’s blood:

 

Pilot studies of TPE involving mice and three human patients look promising:

The results demonstrate significant and lasting rejuvenation of both humoral and cellular blood compartments in people who underwent repeated plasmapheresis. The rejuvenative changes are not limited to a reduction of inflammaging but encompass diminished circulatory protein markers of neurodegeneration and cancer, as well as reduced senescence, lower DNA damage, and improved myeloid/lymphoid homeostasis. Mechanistically, these and previously reported positive effects of TPE become better understood through longitudinal comparative proteomics of the blood plasma, demonstrating a youthful recalibration of the canonical signaling pathways, broadly regulating tissue health, and interacting through the node of TPR-4. Lastly, a novel application of Levene’s test to profile the noise of the systemic proteome uncovered several proteins: new biomarkers that collectively quantify a person’s biological age, removing a need for predictions.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 1 Comment »

Marc Andreessen on Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America

January 28th, 2025

Lex Fridman interviews Marc Andreessen on “Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America”:

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

Ukraine’s all-drone, multi-domain attack could be a ‘seminal’ moment in warfare

January 27th, 2025

Ukraine successfully pulled off an all-drone, multi-domain attack on Russian positions near Kharkiv in December:

UGVs conducted the full spectrum of mission sets including surveillance, mine clearance and direct fire, supported by uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), the official stated before explaining how the “tactical air-land operation” represented the first instance of an “uncrewed battle fought by one side” in the ongoing war.

Reflecting on the attack, which appeared at the time as merely a “footnote in daily reporting,” the official went on to describe it as a “seminal moment in the changing character of conflict.”

Warning “Ukraine faces today what [NATO] could face tomorrow,” the speaker went onto describe how Ukraine’s military continues to place a premium on attritable technologies to create combat mass,” before adding: “Ukraine has made the most of turning industrial disadvantage into a furnace of innovation.”

Posted in Technology, War | 3 Comments »

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