I wanted to pass along one passage from Salman Rushdie rather agonistic Washington Post op-ed:

To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?

The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.

What will prove irretrievable in the wake of the pandemic other than the lives that have been lost? I think the reputation of the Centers for Disease Control, for one. New York City may be among the casualties. We will know in due course.

I have one major objection to the Washington Post’s editorial on how the U. S. should respond to the incident that took place a few days ago in which the government of Belarus intercepted a Ryanair craft and arrested Roman Protasevich, variously described as a “journalist” or “political agitator” depending on your source:

Mr. Lukashenko’s government transmitted a phony report of a bomb to the crew of Ryanair Flight 4978 as it was flying over Belarus en route to Vilnius, Lithuania. Belarus then deployed a MiG-29 fighter jet to intercept the plane, forcing it to land, whereupon 26-year-old journalist Roman Protasevich was arrested. Mr. Protasevich co-founded Nexta, a channel on the social media platform Telegram that has become a leading source of news about the opposition to Mr. Lukashenko, who stole the presidential election last August to prolong his rule, triggering mass protests and a subsequent crackdown.

With the phony bomb threat, Mr. Lukashenko’s government violated the 1970 Montreal Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation, which Belarus ratified. It says, “A person commits an offence if he unlawfully and intentionally . . . communicates information which he knows to be false, thereby endangering the safety of an aircraft in flight.” Mr. Lukashenko also potentially violated the terms of the Chicago Convention, the founding post-World War II rules of international aviation, which say that “in case of interception, the lives of persons on board and the safety of aircraft must not be endangered.”

Maybe it’s just slipped my mind but I don’t remember the WaPo reacting that way when the government of the Ukraine did almost the very same thing a couple of years back. It’s not the hypocrisy to which I object—it’s the piece’s caption: “It’s time to respond forcefully to Belarus’s wily and malevolent dictator” and the word “forcefully”. I don’t think we should contemplate using force against any state that used to be part of Russia. Maybe they’re just writing figuratively. Professional writers should choose their words more carefully.

I don’t know what the U. S. response should be if any. The incident is already straining EU-Russian relations. Maybe we should just sit quietly by as events play out. If we do determine that something must be done, we might consider getting our facts straight before acting. In another piece I’ve read about the affair today there was a characterization of a West-leaning Belarus as “Putin’s worst nightmare”. Is that the case or is a Russia-leaning Belarus the worst nightmare for people trying to orchestrate the same sort of fascist putsch as the one that ousted the Russia-leaning government of Ukraine?

My only suggestion is more carrots, fewer sticks. Economic sanctions applied against Russia haven’t been particularly effective because Russia’s economy has been a basketcase for 200 years. IMO a friendly, prosperous Russia is a lot more in our interest (as well as less in the Chinese interest) than a hostile, hungry one is.

Is it just old people like me and Joseph Epstein, the author of this Wall Street Journal op-ed on phone and email scams, who are pestered with a continuous barrage of obviously phony calls and messages? After recounting several of the scammers he had been fending off he remarks:

I know I am not alone in receiving these fraudulent phone calls and emails. They seem to be part of modern living, a damnably unpleasant part. So relentless are these scams that one wonders how many people work to bring them off. (100,000? Perhaps many more?) The thought of these people setting out to work each morning to cheat their countrymen is less than cheering. Something has got to be done about it. But what?

I am not usually for big government, but I wonder if stopping all this scamming isn’t a perfect project for the federal government, since I gather these scammers work across state lines and many of them between continents. I wouldn’t, à la the Biden administration, call putting a halt to this vicious finagling “infrastructure,” but it is surely a nuisance and one that has doubtless resulted in financial ruin for lots of innocent Americans, many of them elderly.

As I’ve said before I don’t think that fines and/or imprisonment are the solution to this problem. I’ve already provided my prescription: let the phone companies charge a per-call fee, remittable to the person being called who would be empowered to waive the fee. They could even be allowed to keep a small amount, say 1% of the fee, for their trouble. IMO all but the most determined scammers would vanish overnight.

In her latest Washington Post column Mwgan McArdle explains some uncomfortable truths that will probably make her no friends on social media:

Empirically, we have a great deal of evidence that putting more police on the street reduces crime. We know that Black and Latino people are more likely to be victims of a serious crime than Whites or Asians. We also know that recent data suggests that homicides spiked in the United States’ largest cities last year by an average of 30 percent.

Yet none of that answers the most important question: For communities suffering under high burdens of both policing and crime, does the benefit of more police outweigh the costs of the policing to both individuals and communities?

Even if you concede that policing does reduce crime considerably — which many “defund the police” advocates don’t — it’s possible that more policing does reduce crime for mostly whiter and more affluent neighborhoods, while historically disadvantaged groups mostly bear the substantial costs of being policed. Most of the debate over the past year has implicitly assumed such a tradeoff.

Yet a new paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests this assumption isn’t quite right. Policing really does disproportionately burden Black communities (especially when it comes to low-level offenses), but it also disproportionately benefits them — not just by protecting victims from the people police arrest, but by protecting people who might otherwise have turned to crime.

The authors looked at 38 years of police employment data for America’s 242 largest cities, not just to see the policing’s effect on crime, but specifically, what its differential impacts were on different racial groups. In tune with earlier research, they found that bigger police forces reduced “index” crime — serious offenses such as violence, burglary or robbery. Depending on the exact model, they found that hiring somewhere between 10 and 17 new officers averted one homicide every year. And as the opponents of the “defund police” movement have suggested, this indeed disproportionately benefited Black communities: “In per capita terms,” they write, “the effects are approximately twice as large for Black victims.”

Get that? Black people benefit disproportionately from more law enforcement.

In an associated note published through the Niskanen Center, the authors write, “The decline in index crime arrests is four to six times larger for Black civilians than whites, which suggests that investments in policing are unlikely to have contributed to the massive and racially disparate growth in the scale of incarceration in the United States during the last four decades.”

or, said another way the “defund the police” and revisions to prosecution promoted by progressive states attorneys around the country actually harm black people. That’s completely consistent with what people in the black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago have been saying and completely different from the mostly white, mostly suburban online crusaders.

The editors of the Washington Post write approvingly of an International Energy Agency (IEA) report arguing that achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 would be difficult but possible:

The agency rejects fantasies that everyone will suddenly eschew air conditioning and walk to work, figuring that behavioral change will drive only 4 percent of emissions cuts. Moreover, some 785 million people lack access to electricity. For them, the priority is getting this essential service, not how that happens. The goal must be to advance living standards everywhere while cutting the environmental impact.

This would require “a singular, unwavering focus from all governments — working together with one another, and with businesses, investors and citizens,” the report declares. An efficiency drive — changing the technology people use to build buildings, heat homes, produce goods and do practically everything else — would reduce overall global energy demand by 2050 while serving an economy more than twice as large. A massive renewables ramp-up would make solar the largest energy source, with photovoltaic capacity jumping twentyfold between now and mid-century. By 2030, the envisioned solar boom would require installing every day the generation capacity of what is currently the world’s biggest solar farm. Wind would leap elevenfold. Emissions-free nuclear power would continue to play a big role.

Electric vehicle sales would vault from 5 percent of the car market today to 60 percent in 2030. This would require building the equivalent of 20 of Tesla’s massive “gigafactories” every year this decade. Oil demand would drop so rapidly that companies would stop exploring for more, focusing instead on extracting oil from existing wells. While natural gas would play a large role in the transition, drillers and transporters of the fuel would slash emissions from leaky equipment.

All that is the easy part, relying on known technology that already exists at scale. Greening industry, shipping and aviation would require massive new investment in research and deployment. For example, not-ready-for-prime-time hydrogen technology could fuel power plants, trucks and ships, and biofuels could power planes. Much of this would happen after 2030, but only if concerted effort began now.

I’m happy to stipulate that if you ignore enough costs, negative externalities, and run-on effects while overestimating the benefits and assuming linear or better than linear improvements in technology practically anything becomes possible although difficult.

Probably the biggest assumption is this one:

If every country followed the script, the IEA and the International Monetary Fund reckon that massive energy-sector investment would boost global GDP by 0.4 percentage points per year, and people’s total energy costs would rise only modestly as efficiency drove down how much energy they needed to maintain their lifestyles.

while I disagree strongly with this line of thinking:

The agency found that the Earth would warm 2.1 degrees Celsius by 2100 if every nation met its current commitments. That is much higher than the 1.5 degrees scientists recommend. On the other hand, it is also far better than if governments had done nothing.

since it assumes linearity or something approaching it which is rarely a good assumption.

While I agree that greatly reducing emissions by 2050 is possible I don’t believe that the path to doing it looks much like the one they’re advocating if only because highly populous countries like China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil are unlikely to go along with the program. I remain skeptical that the production of electric vehicles can be scaled up by an order of magnitude in 10 years and, indeed, I suspect that EVs are a blind alley because the savings realized depend so much on how the energy used to produce them or power them is generated.

I found this particular study from the University of Michigan interesting at least in part because it confirms things I’ve been saying for some time:

Some climate activists advocate large-scale tree-planting campaigns in forests around the world to suck up heat-trapping carbon dioxide and help rein in climate change.

But in a Perspectives article scheduled for publication May 21 in the journal Science, a University of Michigan climate scientist and his University of Arizona colleague say the idea of planting trees as a substitute for the direct reduction of greenhouse gas emissions could be a pipe dream.

“We can’t plant our way out of the climate crisis,” said Arizona’s David Breshears, a top expert on tree mortality and forest die-off in the West. His co-author is Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability and an expert on paleoclimate and climate-vegetation interactions.

Instead of wasting money by planting lots of trees in a way that is destined to fail, it makes more sense to focus on keeping existing forests healthy so they can continue to act as carbon “sinks,” removing carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and storing it in trees and soils, according to the researchers. At the same time, emissions must be reduced as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

In case you’re wondering where those forests are, the world’s largest expanses of forest are in the following countries:

• Russia
• Brazil
• Canada
• U. S.
• China
• Australia
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Indonesia
• Peru
• India

Forest cover in Russia, Canada, and the U. S. has been pretty constant over the last several decades; China’s and India’s forest cover has increased slightly. The forest cover in Brazil, Congo, Indonesia, and Peru has decreased at a ferocious rate over the last several decades. In other words if you actually want to preserve forest cover, it should be in precisely the countries that are exempt from the provisions of the Paris Accords and the clearest way to preserve forest cover is through economic development.

I’m not sure whether I found this report from the Guardian amusing, distressing, or a combination of the two:

Scientific research findings that are probably wrong gain far more attention than robust results, according to academics who suspect that the bar for publication may be lower for papers with grabbier conclusions.

Studies in top science, psychology and economics journals that fail to hold up when others repeat them are cited, on average, more than 100 times as often in follow-up papers than work that stands the test of time.

The finding – which is itself not exempt from the need for scrutiny – has led the authors to suspect that more interesting papers are waved through more easily by reviewers and journal editors and, once published, attract more attention.

That wouldn’t have been my suspicion. As should not particularly surprise you the worst offender was economics but as may surprise you the phenomenon cannot be explained by negative citations. I didn’t think much of the statistical analysis involved in this study. IMO the results could potentially be explained by a very high number of citations of a relatively small number of publications. What could possibly explain that?

Given my interest in languages I found this post by Harry Baker at LiveScience on how cross-cultural the recognition of “iconic vocalizations” is fascinating:

In an online experiment, researchers exposed 843 participants, who spoke 25 different languages among them, to iconic vocalizations representing 30 meanings that would have been key for the survival of early humans. The participants then had to match the sound to one of six words, including the intended meaning.

The intended meanings for vocalizations were grouped into six main categories: animate entities (child, man, woman, tiger, snake, deer), inanimate entities (knife, fire, rock, water, meat, fruit), actions (gather, cook, hide, cut, pound, hunt, eat, sleep), properties (dull, sharp, big, small, good, bad), quantifiers (one, many) and demonstratives (this, that).

Researchers obtained these vocalizations through an online contest where, in exchange for prizes, people could submit basic sounds that they felt best represented different words. Everyone who submitted a vocalization spoke English.

In the experiment, people accurately identified the meaning of these vocalizations 64.6% of the time, on average. The most recognizable vocalization was that for “sleep,” which people identified with 98.6% accuracy. The least recognizable was the demonstrative “that,” with an accuracy of 34.5%, although it was still well over the 16.7% (one in six) expected by chance.

In general, people understood the vocalizations of actions and entities better than those for properties and demonstratives. “These recognizable sounds [actions and entities] are probably associated with these meanings across cultures,” Perlman said. “In others, there’s probably more variability over precisely what that sound is.”

Out of the 25 languages spoken by participants, speakers of 20 languages correctly guessed the meaning of each vocalization on average, speakers of four of the languages did so for all but one vocalization and speakers of the remaining language did so for all but two. The language speakers with the lowest accuracy were Thai speakers at an average of 52.1% and the best performing language speakers were English speakers with an average accuracy of 74.1%.

That certainly isn’t proof positive. It could be that 2/3s of the participants had some familiarity with the paralinguistic features of English, something that would hardly be surprising given the nearly universal exposure to American television. But it is interesting.

What I wish they’d do is repeat the experiment using submissions from native speakers of the Mongolian language or native speakers of Kituba. I also wish they had included recordings of at least some of these “iconic vocalizations”.

I thought I’d pass along the explanation that the CEO of of Colonial Pipelines gave the Wall Street Journal for why he paid the hackers the ransom they were seeking:

Joseph Blount, CEO of Colonial Pipeline Co., told The Wall Street Journal that he authorized the ransom payment of $4.4 million because executives were unsure how badly the cyberattack had breached its systems, and consequently, how long it would take to bring the pipeline back.

Mr. Blount acknowledged publicly for the first time that the company had paid the ransom, saying it was an option he felt he had to exercise, given the stakes involved in a shutdown of such critical energy infrastructure. The Colonial Pipeline provides roughly 45% of the fuel for the East Coast, according to the company.

“I know that’s a highly controversial decision,” Mr. Blount said in his first public remarks since the crippling hack. “I didn’t make it lightly. I will admit that I wasn’t comfortable seeing money go out the door to people like this.”

“But it was the right thing to do for the country,” he added.

I thought this quote from the piece was also interesting:

Paying ransoms to hackers can encourage more criminal activity and often doesn’t lead to a restoration of systems, said Ciaran Martin, the former head of the National Cyber Security Center, the British government’s cybersecurity agency. Companies should consider those factors when deciding whether to pay, he said.

“There are three problems contributing to the ransomware crisis,” Mr. Martin said. “One is Russia sheltering organized crime. A second is weak cybersecurity in too many places. But the third, and most corrosive, problem is that the business model works spectacularly for the criminals.”

or, in other words, Mr. Blount’s decision may have increased future risk. I can’t comment on the role that Russia’s “sheltering organized crime” may have played but I will repeat the suggestion I’ve been making for some time: strict liability. It’s the only way to get companies to take cybersecurity as seriously as needs to be the case.