Month: June 2014

Creative Destruction Is So Cute, Ctd

A reader begs to differ with this one pushing for driverless buses:

My spouse, who does transportation planning consulting, tells me that driverless or not, buses (and subways, etc.) must have a person on board who is responsible for keeping order and handling emergencies. This role is currently filled by the bus driver.  A switch to self-driving buses will not reduce labor costs because that person still needs to be on the bus.

I think that the future of public transportation are fleets of small, self-driving cars, backed by sophisticated scheduling and routing software.  Riders register their commutes, the car shows up at the right time where you want it, and drops you off where you need to be. Buses will never achieve this level of service.  Using the blunt instrument of “boardings per day” as a metric, the self-driving cars will blow the buses out of the water.  Also, there’s no reason why this couldn’t be a for-profit endeavor.  In fact, Uber is already talking about it.

I should also add that buses are expensive to purchase and maintain.  As the price of small, driverless cars comes down, it will start making economic sense to prefer the fleets of self-driving cars over buses.  Especially if they’re electric, which is a foregone conclusion.

The above video shows what appears to be the first driverless bus, featured in a Singaporean newscast uploaded five months ago. Update from a reader:

I live and work at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (featured that video you posted). Every day I pass numerous signs warning me to be on the lookout for these infamous driverless shuttle buses. But I have yet to see one of these elusive buses; all I ever see are the numerous campus shuttle buses with real human drivers. Clearly, this is something that must not be quite ready for prime time.

America Moves At A Glacial Pace

Which is one reason why Ezra fears the Arctic’s glaciers will become a thing of the past:

The American political system is designed to move slowly. The Founders feared haste, and so they made it, except in the rarest circumstances, impossible. As Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts wrote in their seminal essay “It’s the Institutions, Stupid“,  “the game of politics in America is institutionally rigged against those who would use government — for good or evil. James Madison’s system of checks and balances, the very size and diversity of the nation, the Progressive reforms which undermined strong and programmatic political parties and the many generations of congressional reforms have all worked to fragment political power in America.”

But most issues can wait. … If climate change were an issue like health-care reform or the budget deficit I wouldn’t be a pessimist. My skepticism that we will act with sufficient force soon doesn’t translate into a belief that the world won’t want to act with force later. But climate change has a “game over” quality to it. Once we’ve filled the atmosphere with 800 or 1,000 parts per millions of carbon dioxide the consequences are out of our control.

For The Narcissist In Your Life

New research suggests a way to get them to feel empathy:

Psychologists have long thought that narcissists were largely incorrigible—that there was nothing we could do to help them be more empathetic. But for a new study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, [Erica] Hepper discovered a way to measurably help narcissists feel the pain of others. …

Hepper and her co-authors asked a group of 95 female undergrads to take the same narcissism quiz, and then later to watch a 10-minute documentary about Susan, a victim of spousal abuse. Half were told to try to put themselves in Susan’s shoes (“Imagine how Susan feels. Try to take her perspective in the video…”), while the others were told to imagine they were watching the program on TV one evening. The subjects who were told to take Susan’s perspective were significantly more likely to score higher on empathy. In fact, the more narcissistic they were, the more the trick seemed to work.

“I think what’s going on here is that people who are low on narcissism are already responding to people—telling them what to do it isn’t going to increase their empathy any further,” Hepper said. “But the higher on narcissism you get, the less empathy [you feel]. By instructing them to think about it, it activates this empathic response that was previously much weaker.”

Drone Schooled

Last year, Corey Mead sat in on an Air Force drone pilot training class:

Patrick, a senior instructor who spent years piloting drones and engaging in “super secret squirrel stuff” in Afghanistan, led the class. Tall, angular, and pale, with a jutting nose and a wide, quick smile, he was relentlessly energetic, alternately instructing and cajoling the students. “The first thing to think about,” Patrick told the class’ two students—Paul, a pilot, and Justin, a sensor operator—“is the intent of the attack: what does the attack controller, or whoever’s in charge, want to happen on the ground?” The Air Force requested that I use first names only in exchange for weeklong access at Holloman as part of my research for a book on the future of warfare.

And the future, I learned, is like the past: In matters of war, there is tension between what members of the military feel is right and what their work requires. I observed this in the discord between trainers’ rhetoric about how much they disliked killing people—they repeated this to me frequently—and their unabashed excitement, also expressed frequently, about the times they were able to launch strikes and kill “bad guys.” Hating killing, but enjoying the chance to kill. The competing impulses may have seemed irreconcilable, but they were everywhere.

About an hour into class, Patrick told his students that different units would allow them different degrees of control over their attacks. “Sometimes you’ll be handcuffed,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘Run in from this specific angle, and drop a guided bomb unit on that specific point of impact.’” Other times, he said—and this is more enjoyable—“They’ll go, ‘I want you to kill those guys right there,’ and you’ll get to tailor your options to what makes sense to you.”

The Best Of The Dish Today

Thank God for Shep Smith. Meanwhile, his organization is publishing dubious accounts of Bergdahl’s captivity with the sensationalist headline “EXCLUSIVE: Bergdahl declared jihad in 2010, secret documents show.” Read further into the speculation and you find that this could have been Stockholm Syndrome and that Bergdahl also succeeded in escaping at one point and was subsequently kept in a metal cage “like an animal.” Quite why this soldier’s experience and conduct over five long years since he left his base should be hashed over in bits and pieces by the media before any serious investigation has even begun is, well, it’s not beyond me. It’s obviously about ramping the hysteria up to eleven.

But dealing with a case like Bergdahl is something for grown-ups, not Fox News. And there are powerful competing impulses, but the most potent one in the US tradition is surely getting the POW home first. Any investigation can come after. Then there is the simple question of ending hostilities and trading POWs. Somehow, prime minister Netanyahu is treated as a statesman even after he recently released over a thousand prisoners of war in return for one member of the IDF, while president Obama’s tough and not-pleasant call at the winding down of a conflict is somehow a source if interminable outrage. How ugly we can get at times.

Today, I vented some more about the mass grave for illegitimate children in Ireland. Re-reading the post, and some of its tortured sentences, I can see how emotional I am about this. But in the wake of the immeasurable silent pain of so many children for so many years in the sex abuse crisis, to witness another form of barbarism against children in the heart of my own church … well, it’s one of those things that really does shake the foundations of one’s commitment to an organized religion. And maybe it’s because it’s in a part of Ireland where my own grandmother was born and grew up, and about a particular strain of Irish Catholicism that I know only too well – but it’s one of those news events that are hard to get past. It will sink slowly into our consciousness, the way the sudden revelations at Abu Ghraib did, and hint at so much more darkness beyond.

Four less depressing posts: Modo-proofing edible pot; the fathomless human time-suck of Gangnam Style; new frontiers in online cheesiness; and a realist take on Putin’s “win” in Ukraine.

The top three posts of the day were all on the Palinite Tendency and Bowe Bergdahl – with the latest here, and the first here.

See you in the morning.

“The Irish In Me”

A reader writes:

I think there is something very important that gets glancing attention in your post on the Irish 800. And that is, there must have been many who knew about it.

Of course many knew about it. There is complicity by the population as a whole and it isn’t just Catholicism. Mind you now, I love the Irish. I’ve Irish in me. I say this being an American woman, talking to Irish women, knowing Irish women, observing, but from my very distant culture. There have been small Tuam Crosschanges in Ireland in the last 30 years, but … there is a place women must know, and it’s weird. It is far different than an American woman’s place.

In the 1990s, the 90s, for God’s sake, a proper woman wouldn’t order a pint in a pub, or sit in a pub itself. She sat in the snug and ordered a “glass”. So when I came there, I did it too. You wouldn’t look a strange man in the eye, or say hello on the street. That was for the man beside you to do. Friendly yes, extremely friendly. But never between the sexes. Strangers on the street, men, would do this weird little head tip to each other, and you would trot beside your own man, unnoticed, no “How are yeh.” At first visit, when I saw the head tip, I did it too, thinking I was being friendly, like we do back in the States–our two finger wave above the steering wheel on the two lane highways out here. I got caught doing the head tip by my male companion and it was like I was some upper class kid trying to throw up a gang sign in the poor part of town. “What the hell are you doing?” Understand that in my part of the Midwest, you just looked everyone in the eye and there just wasn’t this thing about being a woman. Just not. Looking people in the eye smiling and saying hi here is being polite, not stuck up. And there has never been some weird part of the bar that was the only place girls could go to, and only order a girl drink.

In Ireland, if you didn’t comply with these little norms, you were a slut. Or certainly an embarrassment.

Has Ireland changed? A bit.

However, in the year 2012, I visited relatives in rural western Ireland whose teenage daughter got pregnant. She wasn’t shipped off, she stayed home, had the baby. I came for tea. We talked of everything, but the baby. The baby sat in the room, and no one remarked about it. It was as if there was some creature making a bothersome noise, like an errant animal, and NO ONE TALKED ABOUT HOW THAT CREATURE GOT THERE.

I think about that poor girl, pregnant at 14, who in her tiny village would have had no access to contraception and very little sense of birth control. To get birth control would be to find someone to give you a lift 5 hours away, to Galway City. The likelihood of a girl like that being able to get away, to travel that far, just to do that, get birth control…well it just would never happen. I presume there was a boy involved, no one said anything. Dun da bheal. Shut yer mouth. She will never live it down. Never. Her life is over in that village. She will have to leave in order to have a decent life. Anytime she comes home for a visit, the talk will start up.

My husband used to fantasize from time to time about moving to Ireland and I just couldn’t. I have a daughter. The very thought just made by chest tighten with anxiety. I find that environment terrifying. There isn’t the equivalent, even if you are Catholic, in the States. There is somewhere to go. You have options. You can get contraception. People will acknowledge there is a baby, if you do get pregnant. Your life is not over. It isn’t Catholicism. It is dun da bheal.

The children of the slatterns, those 800, well that was dun da bheal as well. The cruelty of it is astonishing, because honestly, the Irish LOVE children, they dote on mine when we go over. But the 800, they were evidence of a great damning shame. They were the mewling creature in the room that one should just not notice.

Bad Behavior On The Soccer Field

It doesn’t pay off:

In the World Cup, the countries that most regularly get dealt red and yellow cards are some of the least successful to have entered the tournament.

Just looking at the number of cards given to a single team since 1970—when the current penalty system was first introduced—Argentina comes out on top with 99 yellow cards and seven reds. But Argentina is a perennial qualifier and has played 54 matches in that time. Quartz has crunched the numbers on a more telling metric: the average number of cards doled out to teams per game. The result: None of the top 20 offenders on our list has reached a World Cup final, at least since the card system began.

It looks like underdogs commit more penalties out of carelessness or desperation.

In other World Cup statistical analysis, Andrew Bertoli links participation in the World Cup to state aggression:

The results show that going to the World Cup increases aggression substantially. The countries that barely qualified experienced a large spike in aggression during the World Cup year. The difference in the aggression levels between the two groups is statistically significant and very unlikely to have been caused by chance (p<0.01). The estimated treatment effect is also much larger for (1) countries where soccer is the most popular sport and (2) non-democracies, which have a history of using sports to generate public support for their aggressive foreign policies.

The qualifiers not only took military action more often than the non-qualifiers, but the actions they took tended to be more violent.

The Economist instead focuses on World Cup politics in Brazil, the host country:

Mega-sporting events, [Brazil’s Dance with the Devil author Dave Zirin] writes, have become “neoliberal Trojan horses, preying on our love of sports to enforce a series of policies that would in any other situation be roundly rejected”. World Cup euphoria, he argues, has given the Brazilian government cover to pursue a radical agenda of austerity, privatisation and the mass eviction of slum-dwellers.

Mr Zirin’s indictment of massive sporting events certainly has merit. The Brazilian reality, however, is not as neat as he would have it. The country’s difficulties with staging global showcases long precede its supposed neoliberal turn. In 1922, when hosting an exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, the government forcibly relocated many slum-dwellers in its eagerness to present a modern face to the world. The last time Brazil hosted the World Cup, in 1950, critics objected that the money would be better spent on schools and hospitals.

Mr Zirin is too quick to find external causes for Brazil’s internal problems.

The Pain Of Painting

For Matisse, writes T.J. Clark, “painting was agitation”:

He said to more than one admirer late in life – no doubt intending to frighten, but still, I think, essentially telling the truth – that in order to begin painting at all he needed to feel the urge to strangle someone, or lance an abscess in his psyche. There ought to be a better way. ‘Paintings seem to be finished for me now’: he is writing in 1945 to his daughter Marguerite, who was recovering at the time from the horror visited on her in a Gestapo prison at Rennes. ‘I’m for decoration – there I give everything I can – I put into it all the acquisitions of my life. In pictures I can only go back over the same ground.’ …

Painting, in Matisse’s case, had always equalled Nature. Certainly confronting Nature – passing it under his fingers – had proved to be delight as much as interrogation: a rustling and smoothing of things into the skein of colour that was painting, so he believed, and that painting had to fight continually to keep in being, up front. But doing so was inseparable from the murderous urge, the mud and flies, the grimace, the exacerbation – ‘the accomplishment of an extremist in an exercise’. ‘He took in front of nature,’ as an early critic had it of Cézanne, ‘the attitude of a question mark.’

Israel’s Marriage Laws

Ariel David explains them:

There is no civil marriage. Jews can only be married in a religious ceremony, by an Orthodox rabbi under the authority of the Chief Rabbinate, the top religious authority for Jews in Israel. This means there is also no interfaith marriage between Jews and non-Jews, since Orthodox Judaism does not allow mixed unions.

Israelis who belong to other streams of Judaism, such as Reform or Conservative, must still tie the knot in front of an Orthodox rabbi in a traditional ceremony if they want their marriage to be recognized by the state.

Other religious authorities recognized by Israel, including those of Muslims and of Christian denominations, also do not perform interfaith marriages, so a Jew cannot marry a Muslim or a Christian unless one member of the couple converts to the faith of his or her partner. (Islamic law technically allows for a Muslim man to marry a Christian or a Jewish woman, as long as their children are raised Muslim, but Muslim clerics and scholars frown on the practice.)

What Tiananmen Meant To Moscow

Sergey Radchenko places the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and ensuing massacre in geopolitical context, focusing on Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing just weeks before the event:

The Soviet delegation was stunned by the scale of the protests. “This is a revolution,” concluded Gorbachev’s confidant Yevgeny Primakov, who had been a prominent advocate of rapprochement with Beijing. “Could it not be,” wondered Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze, an official at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, “that we normalized relations with political dead men?”

Gorbachev himself was worried and relieved in equal measure — worried because he had found himself in the epicenter of a national upheaval, and relieved because at least it was not his nation. “Some of those present here,” he told members of his delegation on May 15, “have promoted the idea of taking the Chinese road. We saw today where this road leads. I do not want Red Square to look like Tiananmen Square.”

Jay Ulfelder considers how things could have turned out very differently both in China and in the USSR, where reactionaries in the government attempted to stop Gorbachev’s reforms with a clumsy putsch in August 1991:

That August Putsch looks a bit clowny with hindsight, but it didn’t have to fail. Likewise, the brutal suppression of China’s 1989 uprising didn’t have to happen, or to succeed when it did. In a story published this week in the New York Times, Andrew Jacobs and Chris Buckley describe the uncertainty of Chinese policy toward the uprising and the disunity of the armed forces tasked with executing it—and, eventually, the protesters in Tiananmen Square.

“At the time,” Jacobs and Buckley write, “few in the military wanted to take direct responsibility for the decision to fire on civilians. Even as troops pressed into Beijing, they were given vague, confusing instructions about what to do, and some commanders sought reassurances that they would not be required to shoot.” Seven senior commanders signed a petition calling on political leaders to withdraw the troops. Those leaders responded by disconnecting many of the special phones those commanders used to communicate with each other. When troops were finally given orders to retake the square “at any cost,” some commanders ignored them. At least one pretended that his battalion’s radio had malfunctioned.

As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan show in their study of civil resistance, nonviolent uprisings are much more likely to succeed when they prompt defections by security forces. The Tiananmen uprising was crushed, but history could have slipped in many other directions. And it still can.