Uncharted Territories

> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing.

I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show.

Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.

I've read this yesterday: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succeeds-despite-stagnation

It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.

And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban…

Thanks for sharing the link! The article focuses on Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB), an unscalable method of solar radiation management. MCB would require thousands of autonomous boats (ideally running without fossil fuels) to locate suitable low-altitude ocean clouds and spray them with finely misted saltwater to increase their reflectivity. At best, this method might achieve localized cooling over ocean areas, but its net impact on global temperatures remains uncertain—scientists are still debating whether it would result in overall cooling or even exacerbate warming in some regions.

The specific experiment mentioned in the article was halted due to a lack of community engagement. The organizers failed to inform or invite the local mayor to the deployment event, leading to public backlash when residents learned about it from the New York Times. Much of the misunderstanding came from a perception that the experiment involved risky technology, though in reality, it was as simple as using a patio mister mounted on a retired warship.

What I was referencing, however, is Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), which differs significantly from MCB in both the type of aerosol used (typically sulfur dioxide, SO₂) and the location of the injection (the stratosphere, rather than the lower atmosphere). If you're interested in learning more about SAI, here's an excellent primer: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/so2-injection

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/07/22334/ Cuomo has been known-terrible for a long time.

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https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/delta-variant-everything-you-need discusses "The Hammer and the Dance", an article published in March 2020, that correctly flagged the risk of mutations.

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1368229958158610435
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-variant-in-brazil-overwhelms-local-hospitals-hits-younger-patients-11614705337?mod=e2tw

WSJ, writing in March 2021: "countries such as Brazil risk becoming a breeding ground for potent versions of the virus that could render current Covid-19 vaccines less effective, public-health specialists warned." Biden's "wear a mask until you do" was in May - very irresponsible.

The obvious implication made by mentioning it is that it's somehow connected.

Maybe the future article will try to claim that we like Mercator because it matches apparent size to importance.

Maybe it'll try to claim that wealth differences are caused by different apparent size.

With the current fashion being to see all inequalities as imposed by force, the later seems more likely.

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... And since the date on the post is a couple months ago, I looked for that follow up and it was two days later but mostly paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-deceitful

The blurb at least sounds like it is indeed exploring that second option, but the meat of whatever argument and conclusion isn't public.

> What America got, by being the heavyweight in NATO, was the greatest economy the world has ever seen. America got rich by selling Europe a nuclear umbrella

But this just isn’t true! The U.S. overtook the UK in per capita GDP in 1880, near the peak of the British Empire: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/us-gdp-per-capita

If you look at GDP growth rate, the US has consistently averaged 1.7% GDP per capita growth over the past 200 years. The mass industrialization during the war itself spike growth and helped recovery from the Great Depression, but America didn’t grow dramatically faster during the NATO era than it did before that.

I found this to be a pretty good blog post summarizing China's geographical interests.

https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/what-china-wants

Obviously they project soft power further, but it is based on economic leverage in the same way that the USA has been doing since WW2. For example, that French museum exhibition was dependent on a Chinese museum to do their exhibition. That dependency came with strings. Only a fool would think that means the Red Army is about to invade Eastern Europe.