Early October 2017 Links

• "Bezos will charge monopoly prices. There will be no price signals. Shippers will be in the same position as 19th-Century farmers in counties served by one railroad. Eventually, there will be an Interstate Bezos Commission."
• You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
• The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more. [Speed Matters]
• America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score. Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent's king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. [Asia Times]
• Our trainers regaled us with tales of unruly robots. They told us how one robot had tried to drag a worker’s stepladder away. Occasionally, I was told, two Kivas—each carrying a tower of merchandise—collided like drunken European soccer fans bumping chests. [Wired]
• The Hajnal Line is a geosociological concept. It’s a line that separates (more or less) NW Europe from Southern and Eastern Europe. Inside the line, White Euros (such as Germans and Englishmen) evolved extreme out-group altruism from selective pressures imposed by the manorial system and the Church’s ban on cousin marriage (out to the sixth cousin, I believe) [CH]
• The Piper Malibu, especially the early Continental-powered version with the 4-blade MT prop (quiet inside!), is the ideal family airplane. As long as you have a letter from God promising that the stressed-to-the-limit turbocharged piston engine won’t quit, you can fly in pressurized air-conditioned comfort nearly anywhere in North America with just one stop and sipping gasoline at close to 20 mpg. [Greenspun] 
• Recently, Puerto Ricans have primarily been migrating to cheaper Orlando in central Florida. Hillary’s campaign devoted considerable effort to registering Puerto Rican new arrivals to tip the crucial purple state of Florida blue.  That strategy failed to swing Florida in 2016. But Democratic strategists are hoping that an exodus exacerbated by Hurricane Maria will deliver Florida’s 29 electoral votes in 2020.  This kind of election rigging helps explain why Democrats have been so compliant in letting Puerto Rico fall apart. [Taki]
• "How do I get out of the room as fast as possible without alienating Harvey Weinstein?" [NYT]
• Map of tree canopy height. Redwoods! [NASA]
• A sociopath would try to have a senior mining company buy out their company.  Some seniors may do this if they can pay for the purchase in overpriced shares (or they may simply do this because the CEO was duped into making a dumb purchase and surrounds himself with yes men).  The wonderful thing about this is that the senior miner has a vested interest in perpetuating the lies. [Glenn Chan] 
• The most important risks of hypnotics include excess mortality, especially overdose deaths, quiet deaths at night, infections, cancer, depression and suicide, automobile crashes, falls, and other accidents, and hypnotic-withdrawal insomnia. The short-term use of one-two prescriptions is associated with greater risk per dose than long-term use. Hypnotics are usually prescribed without approved indication, most often with specific contraindications, but even when indicated, there is little or no benefit. The recommended doses objectively increase sleep little if at all, daytime performance is often made worse, not better, and the lack of general health benefits is commonly misrepresented in advertising. [NIH]
• I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash”. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one. [Kazuo Ishiguro]
• Russo traces the amazing course of Korshak's life—from his childhood on Chicago's Jewish West Side to his role as a mouthpiece for the Windy City's Mafia leaders and, eventually, as a major league fixer who brokered labor truces and other deals for politicians and Hollywood moguls (Korshak died, aged 87, in 1996). The list of his clients and associates reads like a who's who of the last 50 years, including Ronald Reagan, MCA president Lew Wasserman, hotelier Conrad Hilton and cosmetics king Max Factor. [Amazon]
• Gompertz law, in cartoon form: your body is deteriorating over time at a particular rate. When its “internal policemen” are good enough to patrol every spot that might contain a criminal 14 times a day, then you have the body of a 25-year-old and a 0.03% chance of dying this year. But by the time your police force can only patrol every spot 7 times per day, you have the body of a 95-year-old with only a 2-in-3 chance of making it through the year. [Gravity & Levity]
• Similarly we can extrapolate the maximum service time for a wooden utility pole. Half of them make it to 90 years, but if you have a large installed base of 110-year-old poles you will be replacing about one-seventh of them every year and it might make more sense to rip them all out at once and start over. At a rate of one yard sale per week, a 110-year-old pole will have accumulated 5,720 staples.[Plover]
• “Tesla is a zero,” Spiegel declares, reiterating the theme of his short presentation at the Robin Hood investment conference last November — a thesis that boils down to the fact that Tesla has been burning through cash and losing hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter, and will face a slew of electric-car competitors over the next few years. These include rivals like Porsche, which is what he drives. “Tesla is losing a massive amount of money with no competition, and yet massive competition is coming,” he says. [II]
• Pennsylvania and Ohio have the two largest white rural populations in the United States, despite only being the 5th and 7th largest states overall. Unlike some larger states like Texas and California, these states' non-metro areas are covered by prosperous small farms (especially since the big ag price run-up of 2006-2008) and small towns. Driving through, you encounter one quaint small town with a 2 block downtown area after another, sometimes under 10 miles apart. [SS]
• Here’s how he described the [Chinese caffeine] plant in his book: "...half the windows were smashed, and rags streamed out. Bags of stockpiled chemicals sat inside the broken first-floor windows. The place reeked — a chemical stench to make you gag — and a tall rusty tank leaked a tarry sludge." [link]
• The more perfumes and body lotions that are used, the higher the levels of synthetic fragrances – called polycyclic musks – that are in the blood, reports a new study that examined college students from Austria. [link]
• The fact that no such brawls ever happen in the American parliament is good evidence for how the idea that both parties are really just one uniparty is correct. For such a divided country how else can one explain that politicians never come to trading punches with each other? [SS]
• This lesson is particularly important, as a lot of foreign policy thought in powerful nations today look at the world exactly in this matter: invade here, stare down enemy there, expand sphere of influence, control world. Neoconservatism is probably the worst example, but far from the only one. The Bronze Age collapse provides a grisly object lesson in how devastating these delusions can be. Borders are something only humans acknowledge, problems usually don't care. It can happen very quickly: In such a strained environment, all that needed to occur was a trigger: the dice just had to come up wrong one year and everything began going to shit. Society's more fragile than it looks, and disconnected elites + taxed treasuries + disaster can easily send things spiraling into chaos. [The Fire Last Time]
• Nevertheless each life style must be able to turn in an energy profit sufficient to survive, reproduce and make it through tough times. There are few, if any, examples of extant species that barely make an energy profit – for each has to pay for not only their maintenance metabolism but also their “depreciation” and “research and development” (i.e. evolution), just as a business must, out of current income. Thus their energy profit must be sufficient to mate, raise their young, “pay” the predators and the pathogens and adjust to environmental change through sufficient surplus reproduction to allow evolution. Only those organisms with a sufficient net output and sufficient power (i.e. useful energy gained per time) are able to undertake this through evolutionary time, and indeed some 99 plus percent of all species that have ever lived on the planet are no longer with us – their “technology” was not adequate, or adequately flexible, to supply sufficient net energy to balance gains against losses as their environment changed. Given losses to predation, nesting failures and the requirements of energy for many other things the energy surplus needs to be quite substantial for the species to survive in time. [Energy Return on Investment: A Unifying Principle]
• We can either have one large national border, or millions of smaller borders within the disintegrating state. There will never be a borderless world; like water, borders will find their level. And that level is usually contoured by race and ethnicity.[CH]
• General Kelly, Trump's Chief of Staff, has put Trump on a establishment-only media diet. Further, staff members are now prevented from sneaking him stories from unapproved sources during the day (stories that might get him riled up and off the establishment message). The impact has been immediate. [GG]
• Applebee’s has said it will close 135 locations this year; Buffalo Wild Wings will shed at least 60.Ruby Tuesday closed 109 restaurants last year, and put the whole company up for sale in March. Friendly’s, Bennigan’s, Joe’s Crab Shack, and Logan’s Roadhouse have all filed for bankruptcy. [Eater]
• chicken (whole breast filet, seasoning [salt, monosodium glutamate, sugar, spices, paprika], seasoned coater [enriched bleached wheat flour {with malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid}, sugar, salt, monosodium glutamate, nonfat milk, leavening {baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate}, spice, soybean oil, color {paprika}], milk wash [water, nonfat milk, egg], peanut oil [fully refined peanut oil, with Dimethylpolysiloxane, an anti-foam agent added]), bun (bleached, enriched wheat flour [wheat flour, barley malt, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid], water, sugar, yeast, soybean oil, wheat gluten, salt, vinegar, calcium sulfate, citric acid, ascorbic acid, enzymes), butter oil (soybean oil, palm oil, salt, natural butter flavor and beta carotene for color), pickle (cucumbers, water, vinegar, salt, calcium chloride, alum, potassium sorbate [preservatives], natural flavors, polysorbate 80, yellow 5, blue 1). [Chick-fil-a]
• The big sci-fi ideas today are mainly in novels. Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem trilogy, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora tower over recent sci-fi movies. There’s a Chinese movie adaptation in the works for the first book in the Three Body trilogy though. [SS]
• Yesterday someone asked my cleaning lady to invest in Bitcoin. Now if someone had asked her to accept payment in Bitcoin, or send payment in Bitcoin, then this would be compelling evidence that one should invest in Bitcoin. But when cleaning ladies are asked to invest in Bitcoin, not a good investment. [Jim]
• A century of reliable valuation evidence indicates that the S&P 500 is likely to experience an outright loss, including dividends, over the coming 10-12 year horizon, and we presently estimate likely interim losses on the order of -60% or more. A rate of return of even 1% in cash is a much more desirable option than investors may imagine. [Hussman]
• On my previous flight to the space station, a mission of 159 days, I lost bone mass, my muscles atrophied, and my blood redistributed itself in my body, which strained and shrank the walls of my heart. More troubling, I experienced problems with my vision, as many other astronauts had. I had been exposed to more than 30 times the radiation of a person on Earth, equivalent to about 10 chest X-rays every day. [link]
• The valley is the world’s largest patch of Class 1 soil, the best there is. The 25-degree (or so) temperature swing from day to night is an ideal growing range for plants. The sun shines nearly 300 days a year. The eastern half of the valley (and the western, to some extent) uses ice melt from the Sierra as its water source, which means it doesn’t have the same drought and flood problems as the Midwest. The winters are cool, which offers a whole different growing season for plants that cannot take the summer heat. [NYT]
• In 1988, Robert Jackall wrote a book called Moral Mazes published by Oxford University Press. He said organizations today follow this code: You never go around your boss. You tell the boss what he wants to hear, even though your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as boss. Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do what your job requires. You keep your mouth shut. [JTR]
• Making extraordinary amounts of money takes time and risk. Even the richest man on earth only has 24 hours in each day. Time spent making money takes away from family, friends, health. And when you have enough, you should use your money to CUT risk, not to make more. [JTR]
• Portugal now has debt that is 130 percent of GDP, a level that, prior to 2008, would have been considered crippling (Estonia is at about 10 percent, for comparison to a country that is at the top for tax competitiveness; New Zealand is at about 25 percent; the U.S. is just over 100 percent). [Greenspun]
• The power of a work of art to prime emotions and actions changes over time. Perhaps, initially, the audience isn't ready for it, then it begins to impact a few sensitive fellow artists, and they begin to create other works in its manner and talk it up, and then it become widely popular. Over time, though, boredom sets in and people look for new priming stimuli. For a lucky few old art works (e.g., the great Impressionist paintings), vast networks exist to market them by helping audiences get back into the proper mindset to appreciate the old art (E.g., "Monet was a rebel, up against The Establishment! So, putting this pretty picture of flowers up on your wall shows everybody that you are an edgy outsider, too!"). [SS]
• What started as wonky geochemical mechanisms were sequentially replaced and fortified by biological ones, the authors believe. "Think of life like an onion emerging in layers, where each layer functions as a feedback mechanism that stabilizes and improves the ability to fix carbon," says Braakman. [SF]