On Board Ship by C. P. Cavafy

On Board Ship

by C. P. Cavafy

It’s like him, of course,

this little pencil portrait.

 

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship’s deck,

the afternoon magical,

the Ionian Sea around us.

 

It’s like him. But I remember him as better looking.

He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,

and this highlighted his expression.

He appears to me better looking

now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

 

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago—

the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.

I love those last two lines.  So many thing increasingly seem out of time, from very long ago . . . the sketch, the ship, the afternoon, and so much more unmentioned.  

Early profitable mass transit - taxed until it failed

This is a . . . frustrating interview.  From Anatomy of an ‘American Transit Disaster’ by David Zipper.  The subheading is In his new book, historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom chronicles the collapse of public transportation in US cities — and explains who really deserves the blame.  The journalist, Zipper, comes across as a streetcar fanboy trying to have a mass transit conversation.  He can't ever really shake off the shock that the very oldest form of mass transit just does not meet the needs of the modern customer and the interview keeps coming back to streetcars instead of mass transit.  The book might be quite good but it is hard to tell from this interview. 

Bloom has written a new book, The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.  I want to know what's in it.  What is his thesis?  I would hope that the interview might reveal that.  Zipper's monomaniacal obsession with streetcars stands in the way.

American mass transit is an interesting case study.  It was once financially healthy and prevalent in most major cities.  It is currently moribund, declining, and potentially facing a financial catastrophe depending on what happens with city activity post Covid-19 shutdowns and the consequences of public policies post George Floyd riots.  Most cities have seen a collapse in center city populations and commercial activities and a corresponding collapse in mass transit ridership.  We are talking 30-40-50-60% declines.  The declines that are usually the commercial kiss of death.  

In the American public intellectual conversation however, there is an enduring love affair with mass transit.  It ought to work.  It should be wonderful.  That it has not worked for the past fifty years is laid to bad planning, the evil of cars, redlining, noxious citizens, mismatched or ineffective public policies, racism, etc.  Oh, and as always with any such public policy favorite - inadequate public funding.

My view is more prosaic.  I do not have the bounty of deep knowledge of the minutiae of mass transit history.  To me, mass transit is solving a straight forward problem for a consuming public - can it get them to where they want to be safely, cheaply, and reliably?  It is like most commercial transactions in a market where people have choices.  You simply have to perform at the minimum market expectations to stay in the game.  That may not be easy but it is conceptually straight-forward.

And that is the question unanswerable in most American cities today - Does the existing mass transit infrastructure get you to where you want to go, when you want to go, safely, cheaply and reliably?  The answer is almost always No. And, expensively no!

The biggest weakness is the "cheaply" issue.  Not so much whether the cost of a fare matches the cost of gas and insurance and parking driving your car.  Or any of the other more sophisticated calculations.  The chief culprit is that Americans have become much more productive.  There is time value to consider.  The more productive Americans become, the faster the mass transit needs to be able to deliver them to their destination in order to remain competitive.  A different way of putting it is that mass transit has to improve the speed at which it delivers people to their destinations at a rate greater than Americans increase their productivity.  That has not happened and has no prospect of happening.  Mass transit falls farther and farther behind in the economics of delivering people cheaply given what people's labor time is worth.  

In the fifty years since mass transit began disappearing into the dust bin of history, it has appeared to me that the reasons were relatively plain.  Americans became much more productive (their time has much greater value attached to it), driving has become dramatically safer both empirically and in terms of the perceived alternatives, and Americans became much more widely distributed and less dense (they moved to suburbs).  Additionally, American work became more complex and intricate.  More people work more jobs in more places doing more different things.  

If the transit system takes forty-five minutes to complete a trip that is only twenty-five minutes in a car (and doesn't cost much less than the fully amortized cost of my vehicle), then why would I take the mass transit?  If my productivity earns me $100 an hour, then taking mass transit casts me $33 in lost productivity compared to my car.

To me, the increasing productivity of the American worker and their corresponding time opportunity cost has been the biggest impediment to mass transit.  The shrinking coverage networks is the second.  Reliability is the third issue.  Poor cleanliness and safety are merely the visible faces of an economic solution that is not solving the problem it is intended to solve.

It is not funding, or racism, or suburbia, or subsidized cars, or free parking, etc.  These are all nice little Just So stories for the authoritarian and totalitarian mind.  As always, there are occasionally small nuggets of real issue buried deep in the lard of self-deception.  The reality is that no-one seems to know how to craft a mass transit system which will safely, cheaply, and reliably get people to where they want to be when they want to be there given the alternative choices they readily have.

It frustrates the living daylights out of the authoritarian and totalitarian mind.  That free citizens should make the good decisions that best suit the needs, circumstances, and constraints of those informed citizens.  

It may entirely be the case that my interpretation is completely wrong, but I suspect it is not.  I am open to evidence that I am wrong and would be eager for insight that has completely passed me by.  I was hoping that there might be something in this book or interview which might change my understanding of things.

But I am not seeing it.  The interview comes across as a long whinge about the past glory days of mass transit and how stupid American policy is when crafted by Americans seeking to optimize their own welfare.

The interviewing journalist seems like a typical leftist with all the normal mind worms who cannot believe the author is not completely buying into the journalist's nonsense.  Bloom does seem resistant to the more obvious foolishness such as the idea that the death of mass transit is due to some sort of car conspiracy.  And, no it's not white flight, either.  

But what is most striking from the piece is that there is no positive vision for how mass transit could or ought to work in the future.  If the most enthusiastic proponents of mass transit cannot envision how mass transit can solve the simple equation of how to safely, cheaply, and reliably get people to where they want to be when they want to be there, compared to the viable alternatives already in existence, then it seems like the mass transit dream is truly dead.  At least for the time being.

Because the market system is always adaptive.  Eventually citizens may not have as high a time value of money, may freely choose to live more densely, and may choose to live in a fashion which might make mass transit viable again.  We should hope we don't come to that reduced circumstance, though many public officials seem dedicated to that outcome.

There was one striking insight from Bloom that I had not known.  I knew that most city streetcars and bus services were private companies and that they were quite profitable in their time.  What I did not know is that City governments became dependent on them for tax revenue.

Was there a perception that the streetcar companies were making money off the backs of commuters? If so, I imagine that when streetcar companies started struggling, people might say, “Screw you guys. You don’t deserve our help, because you’ve profited at our expense for a long time.”

Absolutely. It was hard to shift away from the popular view of the transit company as this evil empire. In an era of skepticism of big business, it was very hard to see the public utility side of transit service. Also, city governments became very reliant on the taxes coming out of transit companies.

Yes, it’s striking today that not only did cities refuse to subsidize transit for decades, they taxed them. You included an example of Atlanta in the 1960s, when 5 cents of a 35-cent bus fare went to taxes. What was the thinking behind that?

At the beginning of the 20th century, streetcars did make money as enterprises. They were able to pay these taxes and still turn a profit. Cities had become so accustomed to transit being a contributor to municipal budgets that it was very hard to shift that approach until they essentially failed.

Sounds like cities might have been the authors of the financial death of mass transit.  

Keep researching till we get the answer we want

 Oh, my goodness, I hadn't seen this issue for what seems like a few years.  It pops its head up and gets some attention and then seems to go dormant.  But that is simply an outsider's perspective.  Perhaps among medical doctors and public health officials it is has been ever-present since I first heard the argument made some four decades.  The core claim is that African American's receive inferior health treatment owing to racial animus by white health professionals.

It is both a perfectly logical claim to make and a difficult one to prove.

On the logic side, we have the fact that there is a deep history of disparate medical access, treatment and outcomes.  We still have some areas where there are disparate outcomes.  Of course, still on the side of logic but against the argument, we have the fact that disparate racial treatment has been consequentially illegal for nearly sixty years and you rarely (or never) see doctors or medical establishments being sued for disparate treatment.  Further, it is not uncommon for medical practitioners and establishments to support charity or mission type services or trips to Haiti or Africa or similar destinations.  Accusations of racial animus are not necessarily incompatible with such behavior but are certainly inconsistent with such behavior.

While proving racial animus would be exceptionally difficult, one might think that proving inferior treatment due to animus might be easier.

One might think, but as is usual with complex systems (and health is certainly a complex system) nothing is never obvious.

If we are going to focus on Race as a subordinate attribute, then there are all sorts of other variables which we need to control.  Income, class, occupation, morbidity, age, education attainment,  diet, etc.  All need to be controlled in order to demonstrate that the differences in outcome might arise from the racial variable.  

Since I first became aware of this argument in the late seventies or early eighties, income, class, morbidity, and diet have all been the confounding variables which have made it difficult to prove that African Americans are receiving the inferior health care owing to racial animus owing to white practitioners.  

Perhaps the claim is true but it certainly feels like there is a huge victim advocacy industry sector to support for whom the claim needs to be true rather than obvious and clear empirical evidence that it is in fact a true argument.

Prescription for Failure by Stanley Goldfarb is merely the most recent update I occasionally come across.  In this case the evidence is against the argument.  The subheading is Researchers are ignoring studies on race and medicine that yield ideologically inconvenient results.

On Board Ship by C. P. Cavafy

On Board Ship

by C. P. Cavafy

It’s like him, of course,

this little pencil portrait.

 

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship’s deck,

the afternoon magical,

the Ionian Sea around us.

 

It’s like him. But I remember him as better looking.

He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,

and this highlighted his expression.

He appears to me better looking

now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

 

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago—

the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.

I love those last two lines.  So many thing increasingly seem out of time, from very long ago . . . the sketch, the ship, the afternoon, and so much more unmentioned.  

A logic without accuracy

From The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow.  

A few years ago a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his “accomplishment,” he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. “I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights,” he said, “and 7 times 7 is 48.”1 Those of us with a better command of our multiplication tables might chuckle at the man’s error, but we all create our own view of the world and then employ it to filter and process our perceptions, extracting meaning from the ocean of data that washes over us in daily life. And we often make errors that, though less obvious, are just as significant as his.

 

Monkey pox messaging - 99.897% wrong. Virtually an inverse of Six Sigma quality

Remember back a few months ago we had a brief shining moment when public health experts thought they might have a second chance to redeem themselves after the Covid-19 fiasco with the delightfully named threat of Monkey Pox?   As it turned out, this was not highly contagious, not particularly dangerous, and was highly concentrated in the LGBT community.  It just could not be dressed up as a second Covid coming.

But not before pretty much the same cast of characters made the same mistakes again with declarative statements long on bombast and fear-mongering and short on facts.  But the great American public, having seen this show once, was not taken in a second time.  There was a heavy dose of skepticism and mockery because the quackery was so obvious.

El Gato Malo comes across a small study which reminds us of the nonsense.  From the monkey-business of "online experts" by El Gato Malo.  The subheading is watch as the credentialed class makes a fool of itself on twitter.

The original study is Analysis of tweets discussing the risk of Mpox among children and young people

in school (May-Oct 2022): Public health experts on Twitter consistently exaggerated risks and infrequently reported accurate information by Benjamin Knudsen, Tracy Beth Høeg, and Vinay Prasad.  

 

It is not a huge study with significant rigor but it does supply evidence consistent with impressions at the time.  From El Gato Malo:

remember the monkey pox “epidemic” and all the zika/dengue/ebola gonna come and get you vibes about how it was going to rampage through schools (despite never doing so before) instead of just being an idiosyncratic series of outbreaks almost entirely confined to a few groups of highly promiscuous fellows having male to male sex with large numbers of partners?

it was quite the thing there for a minute before it disappeared from view like so many other flashes in the pan when it failed to live up to billing and refused to spread in schools or really anywhere else. at all. and this is what actually makes this look like a good topic to assess expert opinion with.

so they authors searched twitter for content on monkeypox and schools, because claiming it would spread there was basically a true/false test with obvious accuracy.

From the study:

Results: 262 tweets were identified. 215/262 (82%) were inaccurate and 215/215 (100%) of these exaggerated risks. 47/262 (18%) tweets were accurate. There were 163 (87%) unique authors of inaccurate tweets and 25 (13%) of accurate tweets. Among health care professionals, 86% (95/111) of tweets were inaccurate. Only health reporters, (23/41) 56% of tweets, were more likely to provide accurate information, however this was driven by one reporter. Multiplying accuracy by followers andretweets, Twitter users were approximately 974x more likely to encounter inaccurate than accurate information.

Conclusion: Credentialed Twitter users were 4.6 times more likely to tweet inaccurate than accurate messages. We also demonstrated how incorrect tweets can be quickly amplified by retweets and popular accounts. In the case of Mpox in children and young people, incorrect information exaggerated the risks 100% of the time. 

From El Gato Malo:

Inaccurate claims were 4.6X more frequent that accurate ones and when adjusted for follower count this led to 974X more exposure for false claims.

let that one sink in. if you grabbed a tweet on schools and monkeypox from “an expert” at random on a follower weighted basis, it had a 99.897% chance of being wrong.

truly, the mind boggles. it’s all static no signal. it’s so incredibly wrong and always in the direction of “exaggerating and overblowing risk” that a simple heuristic of “do the opposite of wh

Lots more good material and commentary in his post.

It does leave us with three clear issues.

Nobody should be censoring anything.  When the "experts" are this wrong, this frequently, we need open communication to rectify the inaccurate messaging.

There is a strong tendency towards propaganda from self-interested parties and the State.

There is no negative consequence to the media/academia/state minions when they propagate inaccurate signal and seek to censor accurate data messaging.

We'll have to get around to these issues sooner or later.  

A slow city recovery

This piece is really just a dunking on San Francisco.  From A San Francisco Journalist Wanted to Debunk Horror Stories About Her City. She Got Kinda Sidetracked by the Truth by Rick Moran.

What I found interesting was this quote, I think from the original author, Elizabeth Weil.

The doom-loopy vision laid out for downtown SF was not pretty: Workers don’t return, offices remain empty, restaurants shutter, transit agencies go bankrupt, tax bases plummet, public services disappear. According to research from the University of Toronto, cell-phone activity in downtown SF is 32 percent of pre-pandemic levels. That number is 75 percent in New York.

Using cell-phone activity as a proxy for population density and commercial activity in a central city area is a clever idea.  Not a perfect substitute for direct population density information but also reliably obtainable.  

Going to the original research by University of Toronto, you get this wonderful graphic.  

Interesting points all up and down the graph.

California has a reputation for high taxes, excess regulations and poor services.  It also bought into the Covid lockdowns more rigorously than most states and also flirted more seriously with the concept of defunding the police and decarcerating criminals.  It has also seen a hemorrhaging of residents to other states over the past few years.  Not a state you would expect to find significant recovery.  

But you do, just not where one might expect.  San Francisco aren't in the recovery flock but Bakersfield, Fresno and San Diego are in the top ten and doing well with 118%, 115%, and 93% respectively.

But in the big cities, of Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco, things aren't looking to good for the cities or residents with 62%, 47%, and 32% respectively.  

My city, Atlanta, is only 49% recovered.  Government has been ineffective, policing abysmal, we flirted with Defunding, and people have stayed away from downtown.  Possibly permanently.

The Covid panic ended early in the South, at least a year ago now.  It ended at the Federal level just this past month or two.  So why people not returned to downtowns?  A combination, presumably, of better and cheaper lifestyles by working at least partly from home, and concerns about physical security in a depoliced environment.  The stories coming out of New York City certainly do not allay those fears.  

We'll see how corporations and enterprises end up accommodating the employees whetted appetite for work from home.  Maybe more will return to the office but that is not especially obvious yet.

My suspicion is that the decline in policing in combination with a general decline in government services in combination will as many or more away from the downtowns.

We shall see but I am surprised how low the response has been so far in terms of resuming normal levels of downtown city activities.   

We knew from the beginning

Well that's interesting.   Chiefly because the conclusion was reached so early but also because was suppressed from the public conversation.  From Leaked Pentagon Report Forensically Dismantled Fauci-Led Natural Origin Study by Hans Mahncke. 

Researchers at the Department of Defense wrote a devastating takedown of the Proximal Origin study, which was used by Dr. Anthony Fauci as proof that the COVID-19 virus had come from nature. 

The takedown, dated May 26, 2020, was written in the form of a working paper called “Critical analysis of Andersen et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” It was authored by Commander Jean-Paul Chretien, a Navy doctor working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Dr. Robert Cutlip, a research scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency. The paper came to light on May 15, when it was leaked to the public via virus origins search group DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19). 

The working paper forensically dismantles the natural origin case made in Proximal Origin and concludes, “The arguments that Andersen et al. use to support a natural-origin scenario for SARS-CoV-2 are based not on scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions.”

The existence of this internal Pentagon paper is crucial, as it proves that government officials were well aware in the early months of the pandemic that there was no evidence in support of a natural origin of the COVID-19 virus. Additionally, given the crushing discrediting of Proximal Origin, Pentagon officials would also have been aware of Fauci’s efforts to seed a false narrative about the origin of COVID-19. 

Proximal Origin was initially conceived by Fauci during a secret teleconference held on Feb. 1, 2020. The ostensible purpose of the teleconference was to deflect attention from a possible lab origin of COVID-19 and to shift the focus to a natural origin theory. Fauci directed a number of scientists, led by Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and Robert Garry of Tulane Medical School, to pen a study that could be used to discredit the lab leak theory. Despite being directly involved in the inception of the paper, as well as in shaping its arguments, Fauci’s role was concealed from the public. Fauci later bestowed Andersen and Garry with lavish taxpayer-funded grants.

The defects in Proximal Origin were immediately noticed by reviewers at science journal Nature. This fact only became known late last year from emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by independent journalist Jimmy Tobias. However, with the help of Jeremy Farrar, who now is the chief scientist of the World Health Organization and who had helped Fauci shape the natural origin narrative, Proximal Origin was accepted for publication in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. It boldly concluded that no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”