Notes: shortages, skills, startups, short-termism

Turns out there's shortages of random items in the US as well as the UK. Matt Stoller writes about why, identifying 5 factors - monopolies manipulating price and supply, a lack of interoperability so products can't be substituted, machinery which can only be repaired by one company, infrastructure monopolies that are vulnerable to shocks through location or optimisation for efficiency at the cost of resilience, and power buyers cutting out other purchasers.

There are shortages in everything from ocean shipping containers to chlorine tablets to railroad capacity to black pipe (the piping that houses wires inside buildings) to spicy chicken breasts to specialized plastic bags necessary for making vaccines. Moreover, prices for all sorts of items, from housing to food, are changing in weird ways. Beef, for instance, is at near record highs for consumers, but cattle ranchers are getting paid much less than they used to for their cows.

... The lack of resilient supply chains in the United States (and around the world) was masked, until a global shock came among. That Covid would cause such a shock was obvious; as I noted above, before the pandemic hit in force, I predicted it. And now, the pandemic is introducing shortages into our politics for the first time in living memory, largely because our highly thinned out supply chains are no longer resilient.

Forty years of consolidation suddenly met with a pandemic that required a social flexibility that our monopolistic commercial systems can no longer provide.


The UK Skills bill proposes getting rid of a lot of useful technical qualifications.  It was startling to see David Blunkett and Kenneth Baker writing together on this.  They are not just annoyed about the proposed changes:

These documents contained the policy to “defund” most BTecs and diplomas from August 2023 and August 2024, in order to ensure that they do not conflict with the government’s new T-levels, for vocational qualifications.

This is a revolutionary policy, and it is an outrage that it is not on the face of the bill: as secondary legislation of a wider government bill, this means it is very difficult to debate, amend or delete. In our combined years of being in parliament (84 years), neither of us have known such an outrageous constitutional act by any government. We want to send a really strong message to the Commons to expose this policy.

Paul Ford writes:

I made a list of all the interesting climate startups, around 2,000 of them... Sometimes, as I scrolled down the list, a big investment would catch my eye—$60 million for a company that promises to take carbon dioxide out of the air, $68 million for one that will turn it into fuel and materials. But the funding thins out quickly.

... every one seems sure that they are the solution, that they will help us cross the threshold into degrowth. They know the answer.

I began to feel a strong sense of déjà vu. I couldn't place it until, one night, in the glow of the e-reader, I realized: It's Web 1.0 all over again. We are in the Pets.com-puppet-mascot era of climate. The comedy of the technology industry is playing again as a kind of Ibsenian tragedy: Scientists and academics told everyone about this thing for decades, and almost everyone ignored them. But then enough people got interested, and now there's a market. And as a result there are a million business models, a million solutions, huge promises of the change to come: We'll pour everything we have into green-energy infrastructure. We'll transact in carbon marketplaces. We'll pull a trillion tons of CO2 out of the air every year. Never mind that today we can do about 0.0005 percent of that, which rounds to nothing.
...  I want things to go differently this time. But I don't know how you bootstrap a globe-spanning bureaucracy yesterday. I can't even tell you what infrastructure we need, just that in general infrastructure evolves, slowly, in response to tragedy.

Worse, if my déjà vu is accurate and history repeats itself—if the internet was the last big thing, and climate is the next big thing (or the last big thing)—then we aren't at the precipice of a new era. We're at the beginning of a bubble. The trillions in investment have to go somewhere. By the time all the money is spent, the companies in my ebook will probably be gone, save for a few dozen. Rolled up, evaporated. And then what? It's not like we can just wait for the market to recover and see what happens.

screenshot of tweet
https://twitter.com/mrchrisadams/status/1432341323965677572


Matt Stoller writes about Afghanistan:
Today, this short-termism has taken over everything, including the military, which is now dominated by McKinsey-ified glory hounds without wisdom and defense contractors with market power. And this leadership class hasn’t just eroded our strategic capacity, but the very ability to conduct operations. Two days ago, Afghan General Sami Sadat published a piece in the New York Times describing why his army fell apart so quickly. He went through several important political reasons, but there was an interesting subtext about the operational capacity of a military that is so dependent on contractors for sustainment and repairs. In particular, these lines stuck out.
    Contractors maintained our bombers and our attack and transport aircraft throughout the war. By July, most of the 17,000 support contractors had left. A technical issue now meant that aircraft — a Black Hawk helicopter, a C-130 transport, a surveillance drone — would be grounded.

    The contractors also took proprietary software and weapons systems with them. They physically removed our helicopter missile-defense system. Access to the software that we relied on to track our vehicles, weapons and personnel also disappeared.
It’s just remarkable that contractors removed software and weapons systems from the Afghan army as they left. Remember, U.S. generals constantly talked about the strength of the Afghan forces, but analysts knew that its air force - on which it depended - would fall apart without contractors. The generals probably hadn’t really thought about the logistical problems of what dependence on contracting means.

Richard Ankrom fixed a freeway sign in LA in 2001. It's quite the tale, and had a long term impact.  Guerrilla public service was, and remains, powerful, when other institutions are too bureaucratic or underfunded to act.

Debbie Chachra's essay, Care At Scale,

But the real difference between money and infrastructural systems as general-purpose providers of freedom is that money is individual and our infrastructural systems are, by their nature, collective. If municipal water systems mean that we are enduringly connected to each other through the landscape where our bodies are, our other systems ratchet this up by orders of magnitude. ... Alone in my apartment, when I reach out my hand to flip a switch or turn on a tap, I am a continent-spanning colossus, tapping into vast systems that span thousands of miles to bring energy, atoms, and information to my household.

... The dependence on fossil fuels for energy is the largest and most important example of displaced harms and localized benefits, and the hardest to comprehend. On a day-to-day basis, my relationships with the people with whom I share a landscape and infrastructural systems can be as simple and direct as avoiding bumping into them in the subway. But when I light my gas stove to make breakfast or get into my car and drive to work, the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released by combustion enter the atmosphere and contribute to anthropogenic climate change. By virtue of these systems and the shared planetary biosphere, my small contribution to global pollution establishes a relationship to people that I most likely will never meet. For me, that interaction appears diffuse and stochastic—a few molecules of carbon dioxide here in Massachusetts might result in more intense cyclones on the other side of the world, perhaps. But for the community in the path of the cyclone, the interaction is anything but diffuse: they are affected materially, even catastrophically.

... We need to have a conception of infrastructural citizenship that includes a responsibility to look after each other, in perpetuity. And with that, we can begin to transform our technological systems into systems of compassion, care, and resource-sharing at all scales, from the individual level, through the level of cities and nations, all the way up to the global.


screenshot of tweet
https://twitter.com/zielwasser/status/1442715869281411078

Little bits of infrastructure go away if no one can sustain them. Google Groups no longer supports RSS, for instance; a small thing that made gluing together bits of information and doing things with them easier.  

How did we get from the original web, of simple HTML and browsers, to the mess of today? And how can we get back to something less brittle and opaque? Gordan Brander suggests we might take inspiration from podcast systems.

Is GPT-3 truthful? Certainly a lot of people are excited about the words it can generate. However, it turns out to not be very good at answering questions. A new paper submitted to NeurIPS says:

We tested GPT-3, GPT-Neo/GPT-J, GPT-2 and a T5-based model. The best model was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. Models generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans. The largest models were generally the least truthfu...

collectiveaction.tech is collecting examples of collective action and organising in the tech industry / by tech workers.  

screenshot of tweet
https://twitter.com/natematias/status/1443789820610875394
 

Even when you have the data, it often doesn't change the world:

screenshot of tweet
https://twitter.com/mstem/status/1446095372397514753

Will a World Computer based on Ethereum save the world by organising our physical assets better and enabling carbon accounting? Who knows. Vinay Gupta always has a distinctive vision. I'm not sure about the carbon offsetting aspects though... 

Or will we need permacomputing?  This long article by Ville-Matias Heikkilä has a pessimistic tone, but the ideas for what kinds of computing are necessary and could be sustainable long term are fascinating. Reminiscent of A Canticle for Leibowitz. It also makes me wonder whether the people who are thinking about post-collapse computing are connected with those preserving digital assets even for non-collapse futures.

David Finnigan writes about what we can or should do about the climate. Highlights mine.

Because the truth is, our current efforts are not enough. Even with the best efforts of campaigners inside and outside of government, the system won't transition quickly enough to avoid disaster. For that we need everything - civil disobedience campaigns, sweeping regulation, financial divestment, new technology, massive behavioural shifts, better laws, and illegal activity too.

As Genevieve Gunther says, climate change isn't something we're doing, it's something we're being prevented from undoing.

And who's preventing us? Who are the people who are blocking the transition to a sustainable system, who enforce what Alex Steffen calls 'predatory delay'?

They are an interlocking network of politicians, bureaucrats, think tanks, lawyers, trade organisations, banks, militaries, private shareholders, hedge funds, oil companies, journalists and pundits. There are probably more than a million but fewer than ten million people worldwide who actively benefit from and abet the destruction of the biosphere. There can be no reasoning with them.

... The people who are fighting for the preservation of outdated, harmful systems in 2021 are not going to be persuaded by protest placards or scientific reports. The only option is to make the cost of their choice high enough that they're no longer willing to pay it.

One thing that the pandemic has revealed is that we are willing to do far more extreme things than we realised. Last year, each of us radically reshaped our lives in the space of a few short weeks. In the UK, politicians held off on announcing a lockdown because they assumed that people wouldn't be willing to make that sacrifice. But it turns out we're willing to go to extraordinary lengths to protect our community and each other.

If you're willing to suspend your life for months or years at a time, to refrain from visiting family or friends, to put your life plans on indefinite pause, in order to give our healthcare system the best chance of navigating this crisis: what else might you be willing to do?
Via David's post, I found John Lanchester:
It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs ... in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it?

... We deeply don’t want to believe this story. The fourth report of the IPCC makes it clear that we are right not to want to. The Summary for Policymakers is a strange document, one which bears out a comment Norman Mailer once made to the effect that ‘form is the record of a war.’ In this case, the war is that between science and the politics of global warming, which is powerfully present in every line of the SPM, mainly in the form of its total absence. The way the SPM works is that the scientists write a report, and then are put together in a room with representatives of the world’s governments, and between them they agree a text that has full support, the idea being that there is nothing left that can be contested: that the SPM has the full support of all the relevant scientists and their governments. Since the governments in question include the administrations of George W. Bush, King Abdullah, John Howard and Hu Jintao, this is not a straightforward process....

What does the picture painted by the SPM mean? The short answer is that no one knows. Although we know more about many aspects of the climate than we once did, the fact is that we are entering a period of climatic change outside the experience of recorded human history, without a confident sense of what those changes will entail... The trouble is that the global climate is a system of such complexity that we can’t model in sufficient detail what the effects are. ... What would happen if the harvest failed all across Europe or the US or Africa? What would happen if it failed again the next year, and the year after that? What would happen if the rain-and-meltwater pattern in the Yangtze valley, the core of Chinese agriculture, changed? What would happen if the glacial run-off from the Himalayas, which supplies most of India with its water, were to change?
 
... The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse.
The letters in response to this article include a great tip:
John Lanchester wonders why people don’t go about keying SUVs. One reason is that there’s a better way of letting SUV owners know how you feel about them: let the air out of their car tyres. This was the strategy adopted by a French group called Les Dégonflés (‘The Deflated’, or, in argot, ‘The Scaredy-Cats’), who have inconvenienced many Parisian owners of ‘quatres-quatres’. The key fact (so to speak) is that since no actual damage is done, it is difficult to prosecute the protesters. -- Alexander Scrimgeour

If you certify things, you have to be ready to take the certification away if they stop being good. OSHWA revoked a certificate for a previously open hardware breakout board last month, because documentation is no longer available.

Helen Lewis writes about Sally Rooney's latest book and how much information can be packed into memes, how opaque memes are if you are not Extremely Internet, and whether people who are not are, in fact, happier:

Eileen sees that her ex Aidan has captioned a photograph of himself as “local sad boy. normal brain-haver. check out the soundcloud.” She doesn’t unpack this, and neither does the narrator. Yet the density of meaning in these 11 words is astounding. We can guess his age, his political affiliation, and how much time he spends online. ... Rooney is the first writer I’ve seen who understands the language of being Extremely Online well enough to use it without self-reflexiveness....

In laying out Aidan’s bio, Rooney captures all of this—internet culture’s stew of irony and insecurity and performance and status anxiety and tribal affiliation and desperation for attention while adopting a pose of diffidence. In eleven words! In the context of Beautiful World, Where Are You, the point of this section is that Aidan, like many of the Too Online, has stitched together a whole persona out of pre-chewed ideas. He is not authentic, whereas Simon—unselfconsciously singing a hymn at Mass—is a real person, not a collage of memes. And so Simon is the worthy romantic hero, and Eileen settles down to a happily un-ironic life with him: baby, mortgage, the works.

However, Aidan’s 11 words are also a test: like Picard on Darmok, can you decode these random snatches of meaning? In Star Trek, “Shaka, when the walls fell” turns out to mean “failure”—referring to an original incident everyone on the planet would be expected to know. (Maybe they were big Civ 5 fans.) “Check out the soundcloud” is, similarly, part of a dialect—the language of the Too Online.

If you can decipher it, you have won admittance to a special club. You and Rooney share a language which is impenetrable to 99% of the world’s population. You have also, in some cosmic moral sense, lost. Simon wouldn’t know what “check out the soundcloud” meant, and he’s all the happier for it.