Traffic jam

When you're in a traffic jam, you guess there's a crash or an obstacle ahead. But then traffic starts moving normally again, you see no crash, and you may be a little annoyed as you think, "wait, so nothing caused this delay??"

There's a term for it: phantom traffic jam. It's caused by one car slowing for any reason, resulting in everyone behind him/her having to slow down even more, then speed up to catch the traffic again, etc., etc., resulting in a wave of slow downs. Call them jamitons.



The maker of this video says the solution to jams is for every driver to keep an equal distance from the cars in front and behind. But can we drivers actually do that? Not really. So the ultimate solution suggested is . . NO humans driving!

And that means autonomous cars, or self-driving cars. Tomorrow I'll post evidence that may answer the question, "can self-driving cars help with traffic jams?"

(cont'd tomorrow)

Jobs' last sale

(follow-up to last Friday's post)

Steve Jobs' last public appearance in 2011 was in front of the city council of Cupertino, CA. He wanted to inspire them with his vision of a new headquarters.

It would look like a space ship that had landed, he said. It was the shape of a circle, he said. Apple could make the big pieces of industrial glass for its completely curved sides (because of their experience building the Apple Stores). Instead of the new site's landscape to hardscape ratio of 20%/80%, when finished the new campus would be 80% natural landscape and 20% hardscape.

He made the sale.

For a description of the new headquarters,  go here and here.

Memorials 2017

Memorial Day in the United States is set aside to honor and remember those men and women who gave their lives in service to their country.

So here are a few of these people:

Navy SEAL Kyle Millikin (38) was killed in Somalia this month while fighting the terrorist group al-Shabaab. His wife and two children are at home in Connecticut.

Army 1st Lt. Weston Lee (25) was killed in Mosul, Iraq, in April.

Army Staff Sgt. Mark de Alencar (37), Sgt. Joshua Rodgers (22), and Sgt. Cameron Thomas (23) were killed in Afghanistan during the last six months.

Somebody had to deliver the terrible news to their loved ones. Here is the story of one who carried out that assignment during the Vietnam war.

Apple Park #2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Apple, Inc., has devoted lots of effort to environment concerns. The average energy consumption of their devices has declined 70% from what it was in 2008. And this new campus, as Tim Cook says, runs on 100% renewable energy. Three-quarters of that comes from rooftop solar plus  biogas fuel cells.

Apple Park has no conventional air conditioning (since Steve Jobs despised that). Tubes of water in the concrete floor connected to sensors will keep the temperature between 68 and 77 degrees.

“We don’t want you to feel like you’re in a casino. We want you to know what time of day it is, what temperature it is outside. Is the wind really blowing? That was Steve’s original intention, to sort of blur that line between the inside and outside," says a VP. 

There are 7,000 trees on the campus, two miles of walking/running paths, and a 100k-square-foot fitness center.

Apple Park is going to cost nearly $5 billion, a figure that shareholders are not excited about. But considering Apple's cash reserves of $215 billion, maybe they can afford it.

Here's the view from a drone a couple of months ago:

Apple Park #1

Steve Jobs started planning for a new Apple headquarters in 2009. He died in 2011 without seeing it come to life, but it has now opened its impressive doors for business.

The building is ring-shaped and set on 175 acres on the former Hewlett Packard campus in Cupertino CA. Officially named Apple Park, some have called it Apple Spaceship. By the end of this year, all 12,000 employees will be moved into this circular building surrounding an outdoor park.

With Steve Jobs as its original designer, you know that it had to be innovative. He had strong opinions that ran from air conditioning to the kind of wood in the offices. 

Current CEO Tim Cook says, "Steve's vision for Apple stretched far beyond his time with us. He intended Apple Park to be the home of innovation for generations to come. The workspaces and parklands are designed to inspire our team as well as benefit the environment. We've achieved one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the world, and the campus will run entirely on renewable energy."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Karoshi #3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Last fall it was ruled that Joey Tocnang's death was related to overwork, hence it comes in the category of karoshi. Just 3 months before going home to his wife and daughter in the Phillippines, he died of heart failure at 27 years old. He was putting in as much as 120 hrs/month required over-time at work.

According to a government paper, 22.7% of Japanese companies polled reported that they had employees who may work 80+ hours/month of overtime. The paper claims that karoshi is a serious risk at that point.

photo: togugu.com/japan/karoshi

Twelve-hour days are common, and most people take about half of their paid vacation days.

The pool of working-age Japanese is expected to shrink even more in coming decades.

Karoshi #2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

With a rapidly aging population and an "aversion to immigration," Japan must deal with an inadequate labor force. They allow more immigrants to come and work, and they're also giving more attention to technology and . . robots.

Two years ago, SoftBank Robotics put 1000 human-resembling robots on the market for consumers and they sold out in one minute at the price of $1600.

The manufacturer pictured them being used to greet dinner guests and comfort hospital patients. Emotion-based behaviors, yes . . because they come "equipped with emotion-recognition software."

The government is not unaware of karoshi (death by overwork) and there have been attempts to deal with it. But there's a lot of work to do, and an inadequate number of working-age people to get it done. One out of four Japanese (that includes children) is over 65.

Karoshi #1

Japan's top advertising agency, Dentsu, has begun turning out the lights at 10 p.m. to get their employees to go home. Most other businesses apparently don't turn out the lights at 10 p.m., letting people work their lives away.

There's a Japanese term - karoshi - for "death by overwork."

Excessive overwork is changing society, according to a Harvard sociologist, and it exacerbates other dysfunction. The number of births required to sustain a society is 2.1 per woman, but Japan's current birth rate is 1.41, maybe too low to recover from. The sociologist says, "This is death to the family."

photo: businessinsider.com

(cont'd tomorrow)

Quarter-life

When danger and opportunity meet . . you could think of crisis that way. The "quarter-life crisis" presents both to twenty-somethings. It's frustrating if you don't know what direction to go. Here's advice from one who's been there.

Avoiding debt

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Millennials (age 18-34, roughly) seem to value financial independence for themselves, maybe more than their parents. At the same time, a sizable number of millennials live with their parents, probably because of heavy student loans and the high price of homes today.

But according to a recent study, some young women in their 20's and 30's are making good money decisions that will have them spending less than that horrific average of $600k (yesterday's post) on debt service over their lifetime.

photo: forbes.com

"Creating wealth is all about choosing correct habits now," common sense from a finance expert.

Those young women ranged in income from $30k to $150k and had these things in common:

1) they knew their income, what they had to work with
2) they knew their expenses and had worked out a budget
3) they set spending priorities
4) they used some device to save or invest money, like an automatic savings deposit

Lifetime debt

Over a lifetime, the average American will pay . . $600,000 in loan interest. It's a shocking amount that's paid on car, house, college, student, consumer, and every other kind of debt.

photo: creditloan.com/debt

If a person feels like his money is slipping away, or that he doesn't have much to show for the income he's made, this could explain why. It's an enormous amount of money to pay for . . nothing more than the guy who bought the same stuff without borrowing.

Here's a graphic that shows debt accumulating during various stages of life.

(cont'd in tomorrow's post)

Warlord #2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

African warlord Joseph Kony led a group of rebels in central Africa, originally fighting against the government of Uganda but now (according to the video below) simply available for hire.

They are called "The Lord's Resistance Army" and were supposed to be fighting for a society that would fulfill all the Bible's Ten Commandments. But . . it's a travesty in that they break them all.

There are lots of videos on youtube about the LRA and those children taken from their families, knowing nothing but war. Here is one of them.

Warlord #1

He made a career out of ruining lives, and he was spectacularly successful at it. The United Nations says he and his army killed at least 100,000 people. And just as bad, they stole about 66,000 children and turned them into soldiers and sex slaves between 1986 and 2005.

Joseph Kony, called "one of the most brutal and deplorable warlords in the region," has been hunted for years by Ugandan military. That effort was backed by the United States with military advisors and hundreds of millions of American dollars.

AP photo 

The man has a talent for hiding out in the jungle. Much of his army has left him, or been killed or captured, but he and his remaining soldiers are still out there. A lawmaker in Uganda says that her people "yearn for justice."

But Kony may never be brought to justice. Both Uganda and the United States are ending the search.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Progress

Yesterday one of the links went to HumanProgress.org, "a data-driven educational website devoted to improving the public’s understanding of the state of the world. All of our statistics come from reputable sources."

One of their pages is entitled "Your Life in Numbers - Explore how much the world has changed since you were born." The categories are average life expectancy, babies surviving the first year, income per person, average food supply, average number of years of school, level of democracy.

Enter your country and the year of your birth and you will find out how much your country has changed. Or, check another country that you're interested in.

Economic freedom

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

It's good for women to be free to make their own choices - because it's just, and also because society prospers from the free choices of its people, both women and men. Economic freedom is a good thing.

Consider China's history. Under the rule of communist Mao Tse Tung, the government imposed coercive control on agriculture and all production. But around 1978, after his death, the country began to change.

Agriculture was de-collectivized, permission was given to start businesses, foreign investment was permitted. Later reforms allowed people to actually own their own businesses.

With more economic freedoms, people created wealth. China's economy grew 31x from 1978 to 2016. Growing prosperity meant additional freedom, like freedom from many hours of laundry. Only 10% of Chinese urban households had washing machines in 1981 - but 97% did by 2011. 

Economic freedom is a good thing. Remember how Hans Rosling's mother's life was changed by a washing machine. Good things result from growing economies.

photo: kenkoskela.com

Washer results

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"Washing machines are still doing the work [today that] they were doing 80 years ago – which isn’t just cleaning clothes. These juddering boxes are life-transforming technologies that allow women to put their time and labor to more constructive use."

Life changes for a woman, her family, and her society when she escapes some of the labor of caring for her home. She gains independence, and her society benefits when she creates wealth or volunteers for a worthy cause - because she's free to be productive according to her own strengths and passions.

Economic freedom is a "proven road out of poverty." While the world has been getting freer, there are still 18 countries today where husbands can "legally deny their wives permission to work." Some of those are among the poorest in the world. 

(cont'd tomorrow)

Washers

Technology has changed the world, especially the internet, right? According to this author, the clothes washer may compete with the internet in terms of how much it changed the way people lived before it.

"In 1900 the average household spent 58 hours a week on housework—meal preparation, laundry and cleaning. This compares with just 18 in 1975." Hans Rosling did the TED talk below to show how the washing machine changed women's lives in the West (where a high percentage of us have one) and is still changing women's lives in the rest of the world.



Hans tells us how the washing machine changed his mother's life. What did she get out of the washing machine? Books.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Hindenberg

Saturday was the 80th anniversary of the crash of the Hindenberg airship, May 6, 1937, in New Jersey. It carried 97 passengers from Germany, 35 of them dying in the disaster and another victim was on the ground.

Flammable hydrogen kept the ship in the air until it ignited in over a landing site in New Jersey.



Words of a radio announcer reporting on it were recorded at the time but not broadcast until the next day - "Oh the humanity!"

Capable

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

It seems that the U.S. government's posture toward native Americans is still as it was in 1831:

"Chief Justice John Marshall set Native Americans on the path to poverty in 1831 when he characterized the relationship between Indians and the government as “resembling that of a ward to his guardian.” With these words, Marshall established the federal trust doctrine, which assigns the government as the trustee of Indian affairs."

Tribal reservation stories are tales of impoverished futility. But here's a different story. An 8,000-member Choctaw tribe in Mississippi (with 75% unemployment) developed over 25 years from a "stagnant welfare culture" into one of the biggest employers in Mississippi, through the energy and optimism of a young chief.

Eventually the tribe ran a printing company, construction company and more, generating annual revenue of $300 million. "The result has been widespread prosperity . . The number of Choctaws on welfare has fallen dramatically; education, health, and housing have sharply improved."

Incapable

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"Imagine if the government were responsible for looking after your best interests. All of your assets must be managed by bureaucrats on your behalf. A special bureau is even set up to oversee your affairs. Every important decision you make requires approval, and every approval comes with a mountain of regulations.

"How well would this work? Just ask Native Americans." 

image: wikipedia

Reservations are "islands of poverty in a sea of prosperity." 

Part of the problem is that the federal government owns and manages Indian land. The land they live on can't be leveraged in order to borrow money to invest. If a company wants to develop an energy resource like oil or coal, they'll have to go through 49 steps and four federal agencies. But off-reservation that enterprise would require only four steps.

Behind all this "is the notion that tribes are not capable of owning or managing their lands."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Poorest

It's obvious what ethnic group is poorest in America, right? Maybe it's not obvious. The author of The New Trail of Tears explains the policies that hold back American Indians from doing what other people groups have done to create wealth for themselves.

Dissent

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

So, yes, the arguments surrounding "climate change," aka global warming, are complicated. If you are not a climate scientist, and you can't independently study relevant evidence, how do you know which side to support?

The writer of the Dilbert cartoons is a "trained hypnotist" and says he has studied persuasion. He has some thoughts as to how people choose a side in the debate.

"No one is using reason, facts, or common sense to arrive at a decision about climate science. Here’s what you are using:  1. Fear 2.Unwarranted trust in experts 3. Pattern recognition.

"I accept the consensus of climate science experts when they say that climate science is real and accurate. But I do that to protect my reputation and my income. I have no way to evaluate the work of scientists.

"[T]he cost of disagreeing with climate science is unreasonably high if you are a scientist."

image: tvtropes.org

Consensus

(cont'd from last Friday's post)

So there was "scientific consensus" back in the 1970's that the earth was cooling and at risk of a new ice age. Today we're told that there is "scientific consensus" that the earth is warming and at risk of multiple disasters.

This view is actually an amalgam of claims:  1) Temperature of the globe is rising as a long-term trend, 2) It's caused by human activity, 3) Its effect on earth is bad, 4)  Politicians must make drastic economic changes.

That's an awful lot to agree on, not to mention the fact that point #4 is not even science but rather policy. Politicians, not scientists, make policy - which is simply an answer of what to do with information.

PC speech has labeled scientists with dissenting views as "deniers" (as in holocaust deniers). That's pretty strident rhetoric for science, since dissenters usually spearhead scientific progress.

The whole thing is complicated.

(cont'd tomorrow)