Techbros and adventure

by liberal japonicus

Fodder for discussion with a rather ironic title.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40406673/the-man-who-wants-to-send-us-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean

discuss

 

Comments

[JanieM]

From a commenter at BJ, Anderson Cooper interviewing James Cameron about this subject.

Echoes of the sprouts post on intelligence. It's dangerous to think you know everything just because you know something. I dare say it's even more dangerous to think you know everything just because the one thing you seem to know a lot about is making money.

I remember seeing a takedown on YouTube of Elon Musk's much hyped truck. Reading between the lines, it seemed like it had never occurred to him to talk to an actual trucker about what would work.

[Pro Bono]

I'm thinking about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean.

[wj]

The trouble with Greek names:
I see a headline saying "Titan imploded" and my first thought is "How could an entire moon do that???"

[McKinneyTexas]

I'm thinking about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean.

Yes.

[novakant]

I'm thinking about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean.

Indeed, both the comparative lack of media coverage and the EU migration policy is a scandal:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/22/europe-migration-greece-shipwreck-asylum-seekers/

[Michael Cain]

...and the EU migration policy is a scandal...

Over the next 20-30 years there will be lots of scandalous behavior on immigration policy in the northern temperate zone. Starting as soon as TPTB get an idea as to how much climate-driven migration there is going to be.

[nous]

Just finished a term teaching a research class on climate migrancy and the whole world is totally unprepared for what is to come.

Anyone interested in the topic can start with the work that Abrahm Lustgarten has been doing for ProPublica and branch out from there following his sources.

https://www.propublica.org/people/abrahm-lustgarten

Our climate related geosocial future is not pretty, nor will it be orderly.

As for the Fast Company article, my goodness what an interesting bit of writing that is. So much Galt-y hubris woven through that interview.

Atlas too was a titan.

Shrug.

[wj]

Over the next 20-30 years there will be lots of scandalous behavior on immigration policy in the northern temperate zone.

Although I'm guessing that India will be the world leader by a fair margin. Considering that the median elevation of Bangladesh is less than 10 meters above (current) sea level, and large areas are routinely flooded during monsoon season even now.

[JanieM]

I have finally read (most of) LJ’s original link.

Starting a submarine company sounds a lot like falling in love—it happens slowly and then all at once.

Um, huh? Who falls in love like this? Certainly not me, ever. This empty blather is a like klaxon blaring “Shoals ahead, shoals ahead, stop now!” (I sort of wish I had.)

Adventure tourism is a way to monetize the process of proving the technology.

I can’t tell whether to be glad or sad he’s not around to see how that worked out. Glad he’s not around because he got at least some of what he deserved. Sad because it would have been nice to see him held to account, although I can’t imagine he ever would have been, no matter how many deaths he facilitated with his arrogance and greed.

The Titanic trips help make the case, showing those oil and gas companies that his technology works, while making a profit—something the company hasn’t quite done yet. “We’ll be profitable with the Titanic trips,” says Rush. “The Titanic is where we go from startup to ongoing business.”

Um, not exactly.

Rather than spend $65,000 to climb Mt. Everest, maybe die, and spend a month living in a miserable base camp, you can change your life in a week.

Or lose it.

*****

nous: As for the Fast Company article, my goodness what an interesting bit of writing that is. So much Galt-y hubris woven through that interview.

This is why I quit even looking at what used to be my alumni magazine, Tech Review. The hubris just dripped from its techbro pages; don’t they teach any history at that institution? (Not much, and certainly not much that’s relevant to this question, in my admittedly outdated experience.)

[Michael Cain]

Anyone interested in the topic can start with the work that Abrahm Lustgarten has been doing for ProPublica and branch out from there following his sources.

Lustgarten does good work.

Somewhere here I have an academic study from a few years ago that asks where people in the US that are displaced by rising sea levels will resettle. Much of it is what you would expect. But their model has a significant number of people relocating to the southern Great Plains.

Speaking broadly, the Great Plains has been depopulating for 90 years now. Much of the area has reached death spiral status: not enough people to support professional services like dentists, too few professional services to attract new residents. Climate change is going to just exacerbate the problems in the southern Great Plains. One of these days I'm going to have to work through that study in detail and see why they think the current long-term trends will reverse.

[wj]

One of these days I'm going to have to work through that study in detail and see why they think the current long-term trends will reverse.

Just speculating here (i.e. putting words in their mouths), but I would guess that the reasoning goes something like this:

• There will be internal migration because people being displaced by climate change will have to go somewhere.
• The people being displaced will not want to go (back, in many cases) to places which have lots of snow in the winter.
• It isn't really feasible to build lots more homes in the middle of a mountain range.
• The biggest swath of land in the US which is a) not mountainous, and b) not subject (especially after climate change gets rolling) to heavy snow for months every year is the southern Great Plains.

And it seems likely that, when it becomes obvious that a big migration is imminent, we will see the same phenomena we saw in, for example, California in the middle of the last century: entire new towns being built, complete with homes, commercial areas, etc.

No-brainer prediction: those who get in early, and in the right places, on land speculation will make a bundle.

[Ugh]

Lots of people canceling their SpaceX reservations right now

[Girl from the North Country]

I've been out of touch for a week - does anybody have the slightest clue WTF is going on in Russia? I am constitutionally unable (after all these years) to take it at, even its confusing and crazy, face value.

[GftNC]

OK, as a start, I've gone to Anne Applebaum:

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, Central Africa Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement on Friday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Etc.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/06/russia-civil-war-wagner-putin-coup/674517/

[liberal japonicus]

I've never heard this, but what I'm guessing is that the missile strike on Wagner
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/06/23/wagner-chief-claims-russia-killed-huge-number-of-troops-in-strike-at-wagner-camp-but-russia-denies-attack/?sh=73e2e753d28c

may have looked like an assassination attempt on Prigozhin and his takeover of Rostov on Don (which is the regional Russian forces headquarters) was to forestall that possibility and was the natural outcome of the way Putin has pitted him against the standard Russian military. However, he's basically crossed the line and is now threatening to march on Moscow so I guess he is hoping that the he's hoping to get the Rosgvardiya to support him and perhaps even replace Putin. That's just my guess.

[JanieM]

Adam Silverman last night quoted another site as asserting that the video of a missile strike was staged. I'm going to link Adam's post and the one he cited, then go have breakfast.

(PS: people kept adding new info the Adam's post late into the night -- newest at the bottom as is the way of comment threads. The other site, Meduza, is adding news updates at the top. I don't know the Meduza site but if Silverman trusts it, it won't be junk.)

Links:

https://balloon-juice.com/2023/06/23/war-for-ukraine-day-485-da-fuq-they-doin-ova-der/

https://meduza.io/en/live/2023/06/23/yevgeny-prigozhin-s-coup

[nous]

Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has been posting their analysis of the Russian situation on Twitter. Worth a quick read, and perhaps a follow.

[GftNC]

Thanks for that, nous. Ditto Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs), specifically their Russia/Eurasia Programme, for a non-US based insight.

https://twitter.com/CHRussiaEurasia

[wj]

Prigozhin has been bad mouthing the Russian General Staff, and the Defense Ministry, for years. My sense is that he finally decided to strike back at them. (Whether they really did attack his troops, I have no idea.) He tried carefully to insulate Putin, by claiming Putin was lied to. But Putin wasn't buying that particular bridge -- perhaps he felt it was a bad look to say he had been bamboozled.

So now Prigozhin finds himself in a situation where his only chance to survive is to pull off a coup. No matter how much he keeps saying otherwise, he has to know that's the reality. Fortunately for him, most of Russia's military is otherwise engaged elsewhere. Not to mention he has apparently captured the Southern Military District’s headquarters, which is the invasion's HQ. So there's even a chance he could pull it off. Certainly the Russian government's actions in Moscow suggest they are taking the threat very seriously.

[nous]

I've been reading (and not deeply, so don't put too much weight on them) that Wagner Group troops have been working closely alongside Russian special forces for years and that may test some loyalty, especially when the elite brigades in the Russian military have been so greatly depleted by the conflict in Ukraine.

Makes me wonder if Prigozhin's appeals to the leaders might perhaps be aimed to land hardest with the frustrated commanders that report to the senior leaders?

What a mess. The urge to exult is strong, but the situation is far too volatile and precarious for anyone with sense to want it to fail. This isn't a pot boiling over, it's a pressure cooker full of shrapnel.

[wj]

And I see that the Mayor of Moscow has told all nonessential workers to stay home Monday. Which sounds like he (or somebody) thinks it's entirely possible that Prigozhin's forces will succeed in reaching the city. As a display of confidence, it rather lacks something. It's not quite panic, but heading in that direction.

[Girl from the North Country]

This isn't a pot boiling over, it's a pressure cooker full of shrapnel.

Amen. One thing age has taught me is that what succeeds a terrible regime is quite often worse. One can hope not, but that's the extent of it.

[McKinneyTexas]

It's 206 kilometers by road from Rostov and Moscow. I don't know the river/bridge situation, but moving 25,000 troops and their support elements that far, that fast seems like a reach.

That said, moving on Moscow to effect a change in Defense Ministry personnel seems like a pretty thin fig leaf to me. It's an act of open rebellion and, historically, there is pretty much only one reason why a general rebels and marches on the capital.

Playing the role of Capt. Obvious, who knows what happens next, but that said, surely Prigozhin has as good an idea as anyone in Russia of the state and effectiveness of Russia's remaining conventional forces. IOW, what stands between Moscow and Priggy? Probably not 3-4 mechanized divisions deployed to receiving an oncoming mixed arms force--if there were such a thing, that unit would already be in Ukraine.

One answer comes to mind: a tactical nuke. The problem with concentrating one's forces for a move like this is they make a pretty decent target. Which might explain why Vlad is reported to have jetted off to St. Petersberg, which is almost 1800 KM from Rostov and nearly 1600 KM from Moscow.

Seriously, how viable is Vlad's handhold on the government if Prig's army occupies Vlad's capital? Not liking this at all. If we have the ability to decapitate Prig with plausible deniability, now may be the time to have that option ready to roll.

[wj]

what succeeds a terrible regime is quite often worse. One can hope not, but that's the extent of it.

I'd say that the best case scenario is that the Russian government wipes out the Wagner Group. But is seriously damaged in the process, to the point that it cannot sustain its war in Ukraine. It is, of course, a tiny needle to thread. But, as noted, the best case scenario from the point of view of the rest of the world.

From a Russian perspective (not to mention for Putin), I don't see a "best case" outcome. At most, a "least bad" one.

[wj]

P.S. Putin is reported to have decamped to St. Petersburg (which was his original power base). If true, things might be dicier than they appear from the outside. Guess we'll have to wait another 5-6 hours, to see what morning in Moscow brings.

[CharlesWT]

Prigozhin is an ex-con. And many of his troops are ex-cons. For years he recruited from Russian prisons with the offer to convicts if they trained successfully with him for at least six months their sentences would be vacated and they would be pardoned. Perhaps an appealing offer to people facing years in a Russian prison.

The Wagner Group, being a stateless military, can cut corners and ignore niceties like perhaps the Geneva Convention. Professional and very brutal.

[Girl from the North Country]

Prigozhin has announced that he is not now heading for Moscow, but is turning his troops back. Meanwhile, Lukashenko offers to mediate (!)

[Girl from the North Country]

I can't shake the feeling that there is something very odd about all this. On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that Prigozhin is any kind of brilliant strategist...but still. Very odd indeed.

[Girl from the North Country]

On the Chatham House twitter feed, this:

1/2
According to the press service of #Lukashenka, #Prigozhin accepted the proposal of Lukashenka to halt the movement of #Wagner's armed personnel within Russian territory and take further steps towards de-escalating the tension.

2/2 If all of this is true, this signifies a tremendous success for Lukashenka, and it appears that today he has done as much for the Kremlin as he has never done before and emerging from the status of a puppet he assumed in 2020

If all of this is true, indeed. Hmmmm.

[Hartmut]

The Wagner Group, being a stateless military, can cut corners and ignore niceties like perhaps the Geneva Convention. Professional and very brutal.

Rumsfeld employed Blackwater (how many times have they changed their name since then btw?) for the same reasons. These guys were about as popular with regular allied troops as Wagner is with the Russian regulars. The main difference is that Wagner proved to be a more effective frontline fighting force than the regulars while the mercenaries Rumsfeld hired were for dirty work only and shunned regular combat. Overpaid a$$holes with get-out-of-jail-free cards. Prigozhin looks more like a modern condottiere while Erik Prince was a mere thug in a suit for hire.

PS:
Looking up details I found that Jabbabonk the Orange pardoned the few of Prince's thugs that somehow managed to get themselves convicted by US justice despite their goojf cards.

PPS:
And Prince tried to become a subcontractor of Wagner in 2020 in Africa.

[Donald]

RT has this—

https://www.rt.com/russia/576285-wapo-zelensky-deleted-interview/

Take with grain of salt, but I would say that about every source on this war. Wait a few decades and we may have an accurate history of the war but I’ll be dead then.

Someone smarter than me could maybe determine if that interview really was on the Washington Post before being deleted.

If it is true, it makes sense. Maybe he was supposed to rebel in connection with the Ukranian offensive and create chaos behind the lines. You wouldn’t have to trust him to find him useful.

[GftNC]

Donald, that link isn't working. Is this the same story? I seem to remember reading about it in the WaPo in May....

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/05/15/7402183/

[Girl from the North Country]

I have just been told (cannot yet confirm) that Putin says Prigozhin will not now be prosecuted, and that he appreciates Prigozhin's and Wagner's previous actions....

[Girl from the North Country]

BBC confirms Kremlin says charges dropped against Prigozhin and Wagner troops, plus BBC says Prigozhin may be on his way to Belarus.

[Donald]

Gftnc—

The RT link works for me. Anyway, it looks like the same story in your Pravda link.

So my theory is that he was paid to cause trouble for the Russians , but I don’t think the timing was quite right. It might have been better to do this just before the offensive started. But there’s been a fair amount of what looks like incompetence on both sides of this war, though maybe that is normal for wars.

I don’t hold my theory very strongly. I might bet a nickel on it.

[Donald]

And yeah, I knew he had given up. Everything the guy does seems farcical, and I don’t understand what he thought he was going to get out of this no matter what theory is true. But someone like that might have seemed like a useful asset for the Ukranians— if nothing else, Putin seems a bit dumb to have been using this guy.

There is a different conspiracy theory that says the Russians set the whole thing up hoping the Ukranians would think it was an opportunity and charge in to be slaughtered, but that seems unlikely. It ended too quickly. If it stretched out it might have caused real trouble.

Or he might just be an idiot and nothing more.

[CharlesWT]

These guys were about as popular with regular allied troops as Wagner is with the Russian regulars.

While the Wagner Group was traveling to the rear after doing a stent in Ukraine, they were fired on by a Russian army unit. When they made contact with the Russian commander and asked why, his answer was along the lines of "Because I don't like you."

[wj]

There is a different conspiracy theory that says the Russians set the whole thing up hoping the Ukranians would think it was an opportunity and charge in to be slaughtered, but that seems unlikely. It ended too quickly. If it stretched out it might have caused real trouble.

If it was a Russian ploy, Putin wouldn't have looked so nervous during his statement. As it was, he came off looking weak. And if he really did fly off from Moscow, that's even worse for his macho image.

[nous]

I don't believe that there is a script. This is more like reality TV. Every one of these sociopaths is just out to steal a bit of spotlight from their rivals hoping to get them sent off. There is no guiding narrative or controlling strategy, just the calculated tactics of staying in the top for another round. They may have desired outcomes, but survival precludes having any fixed strategy.

Reminds me of another Prigogine (Ilya) and his writings about chaos theory. None of these events are determinate or the results predictable, but all of the results are irrevocable. The arrow of time only points one way.

[Girl from the North Country]

Well, the action seems over for today. Some things are likely to become clearer over the next few days: Prigozhin's whereabouts, for example, and the status of the Wagner troops. What really does seem clear however, as all analysts agree, is this whole episode has weakened Putin considerably. The result of that remains to be seen, but nous's pressure cooker full of shrapnel seems less likely now to explode. I guess that's probably a good thing.

[Pro Bono]

I do not believe that Prigozhin has agreed to go and live quietly in Belarus. Because sooner or not very much later, Putin would have him killed.

[Michael Cain]

By this afternoon, I have largely convinced myself that it was all play-acting. Russia needed to get rid of Wagner for reasons. Wagner takes two cities, races toward Moscow, then stops and retreats back to where they started. No one even stubs a toe.

So, Prigozhin gets a pardon and moves to Belarus where he can run his African mercenaries and do other oligarch things. The 25,000 soldiers each get a pardon, a modest payout, and are scattered across Russia. A couple of Russian Army generals who have already reached retirement age retire with a bump in pension. Moscow city employees get a Monday off. Some senior people get a nice weekend in St. Petersburg.

[nous]

Putin came out of this looking weak. I don't think there is any way that this all unfolded with his guidance and blessing. He loses too much. There is too much disruption. You can't just shrug it off and figure that it has not lost you a great deal of that aura of invincibility.

[CharlesWT]

Chinese leaders need the mandate of heaven. Russian leaders need a strong man aura.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

IIRC, there was an article some years back in Sky & Telescope about the "mandate of heaven" thing, based on historical records plus orbital info.

The claim was that the "mandate of heaven" occurs when all of the visible planets are clustered in the sky.

[wj]

By this afternoon, I have largely convinced myself that it was all play-acting.

I might, might, be convinced that it was play acting on Prigozhin's part. Some of the Russian elites, who have gotten progressively more unhappy with Putin's Ukraine adventure might be involved as well. But I agree with nous, Putin lost way too much face here to have been a party to it ahead of time.

[wj]

The claim was that the "mandate of heaven" occurs when all of the visible planets are clustered in the sky.

IIRC, the relevant bit was that there was regime (dynasty) change when the ruler lost the Mandate of Heaven. Not sure how that would work with the claim here.

[liberal japonicus]

What's interesting about the Mandate of Heaven was that it, in contrast to the Divine Right of Kings, could be withdrawn. Which seems like a wry observation about the persistence of class in Western societies.

[wj]

I found this
https://twitter.com/saintjavelin/status/1672359782940913669?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
irresistible

2021: The russian army is 2nd in the world!
2022: The russian army is 2nd in Ukraine!
2023: The russian army is 2nd in russia!

[GftNC]

I don't think we have a very current Open Thread, but I thought this from the WaPo about a linguistics prof and a 75 year old Peruvian indigenous woman working together to save a language of which she is the only speaker might be of interest. Elements of it reminded me of recent discussions we had about whether the concentration on modern concepts like the scientific method had the effect of sidelining worthwhile knowledge (or ways of thinking) embodied in the language and folk knowledge of indigenous cultures (or words to that effect).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/23/endangered-language-iskonawa-amazon-peru/

“What’s messed up is that most of the claims about human cognition, the psychology of Homo sapiens, are based on a very homogenous sample of human beings,” Zariquiey says. “There is this very big bias toward languages with similar characteristics, because all European languages, except Basque, come from the same common ancestor, and have generated similar patterns, which we think of as being universal but which aren’t, or at least haven’t really been proven to be so.”

That view challenges the prevailing thinking in modern linguistics, promoted most notably by MIT professor emeritus Noam Chomsky, whose universal grammar theory posits that our hardware — the human brain — strictly limits the parameters of any possible language. Others hold that the software — the language itself — is far more malleable and responds to the environment.

Underlying that abstract debate are some fundamental questions about human nature. How do we acquire and process language? Does the language you speak determine how you think? And do we really know all that the human brain is capable of?

Field linguists, such as Zariquiey, argue that we have barely scratched the surface of these profound puzzles. One example that appears to support that view is some Australian Aborigines’s instinctive knowledge of the cardinal points without need of a compass.

Even in windowless rooms, they know north from south — a capacity most Westerners have no inkling they could activate. Seyfeddinipur cites an Aboriginal elder signaling the capsizing of a boat. His hand movements would change from clockwise to counterclockwise depending on which direction he was facing.

I wondered (in a vague and probably ignorant way) whether this sort of capability could, on the contrary, be similar to the way some people have perfect pitch, i.e. an innate ability, but perhaps that doesn't make sense because presumably you have to know the scale to know what the notes are? It's late in London, and none of this might make sense, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone here either a) demolished my example, or b) at least found the article interesting.

[Girl from the North Country]

Two comments under that story. The first is just another fascinating fact, hopefully accurate. The second may be a critique of the Aborigine story above.

What a great story, thank you. I've been concerned about the loss of languages since I studied the effect language has on how we perceive our world. One quick example is color perception. There is a tribe in the Philippines whose women can see a color the men can't. They have a highly gendered language and the word for the color is not said by the men. Outsiders also aren't able to distinguish the shade, until they learn the word for it and given the example of the color, after that you can see the shade. How many aspects of our existence are being missed because of the way language interacts with perception? What necessary categories are we missing because of how our grammar functions? What vital concepts are we doing without because we can't express a verb without a subject? It's a subtle topic and difficult to wrap your head around, but I am glad people like this guy are working on it.

***

Chomsky is right that our brain's architecture imposes an absolute limit on our perceptions and ideations. Our "software" cannot trump those limits. However, our incomplete and flawed questions also reflect our limitations.

As to the Austrailian aboriginies ability to know the cardinal points, it is directly related to their language's lack of words that give relative position (such as next to, or behind). In their language, they can ONLY use cardinal directions (such as "he is north of you" rather than "he is behind you"). So, from youngest childhood they've trained themselves to know the cardinal directions. The article is very flawed by not discussing this properly.

My mind is generally blown, and I find I cannot get my head around this stuff at all. I knew that with age I was finding abstract concepts much more difficult, but this is ridiculous. I'm going to bed.

[Pro Bono]

What vital concepts are we doing without because we can't express a verb without a subject?

Evidently that question was asked, but surely not about native English speakers.

[wj]

Coming soon to schools across Florida. (Can Texas be far behind?)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wordsmithorg/53000881351/

[JanieM]

They have a highly gendered language and the word for the color is not said by the men. Outsiders also aren't able to distinguish the shade, until they learn the word for it and given the example of the color, after that you can see the shade.

I am extremely skeptical of this story, or of the relationship between some phenomenon or other and the explanations being made for it. (Kind of like Pro Bono's skepticism about expressing verbs without subjects in English.)

I have a long-running joke with my daughter about what we think "blue" is -- if I get time maybe I'll make an image to show what I mean. But basically, if you put some blue on a ribbon, and shade it off into green on one side and purple on the other (in Excel, let's say :-) ), her "blue" is shifted further toward the purple and my "blue is shifted further toward the green. So right in our own family we have a disagreement about the relationship between color names and colors.

[liberal japonicus]

I've got a lot to say about this, but for those interested, John Haviland is the person who did the initial research on the use of cardinal directions.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/640693

Not trying to bust you for bringing it up, but the notion of the second comment, about how 'their language's lack of words for relative position' is cause for this is an overstatement. From the paper

There are three parts to my presentation. I demonstrate (1) that familiar deictic elements abound in the GY repertoire of locative resources; (2) that a kind of observer “viewpoint” is explicitly encoded in the complex morphology of GY cardinal terms; and finally (3) that ordinary discourse about place and location is replete with indexicality as
well.

Looking thru the comments, there are a lot of similar statements that are unfortunately problematic.

[Girl from the North Country]

Not trying to bust you for bringing it up

No no, I'm not taking any offence - it's always a risk when, as a complete layman in a subject, one posts something which looks very interesting but that other people know enough about to dismiss. (What I do hate is when one posts something interesting and well reasoned, only to have it dismissed solely because of the associations, or other opinions, of the source. Unfortunately, I know that one can share one opinion with people one would go a long way not to be in bed with, and it doesn't necessarily invalidate the one opinion.) The Aborigine thing just rang a bell about a recent discussion of ours.

On the colour thing, I was suspicious too. Some years ago I developed a serious eye disease, which could have blinded me but was caught just in time, and is now in remission. During all the millions of tests, I discovered (in my 50s!) that I had some green colour blindness, i.e. I cannot see certain sludgy green colours as green. It suddenly made sense of infrequent events of my childhood, e.g. friend: "Pass me the green towel" me: "There is no green towel. What, you call that green?!" etc etc.

[Michael Cain]

One line of study suggests that human tetrachromacy may be a thing. A significant number of women have a fourth type of cone that doesn't appear to be used (non-functional tetrachromacy). (Lots of cone stuff is gene-linked, that's why color-blindness is much more common in men.) There's some evidence that at least some of those women do have better than normal color differentiation. A sufficiently closed society where most girls are tetrachomatic and expected to see one or more colors that men don't see seems possible.

Long ago I was doing research that required some knowledge of the human visual system. Some fascinating stuff there, especially in terms of what sort of processing the brain can be trained to do. Back then, when TVs were analog, Europe and the US had different standards. Europe's had fewer frames per second but a higher number of scan lines. When Americans would first go to Europe and see a TV, they asked why the flicker was so bad. After a couple of weeks they quit seeing it. Europeans coming to America asked why they could see the scan lines, but after a couple of weeks they quit seeing the distinct lines. The second case may have been a physical adaptation. In a room with a moveable chair and an old analog TV showing interesting content, people asked to place the chair where they feel most comfortable watching place it very precisely just far enough away that they can't resolve the scan lines. It's good enough to get a fairly accurate measure of their visual acuity.

[Barry]

Wj:
"The biggest swath of land in the US which is a) not mountainous, and b) not subject (especially after climate change gets rolling) to heavy snow for months every year is the southern Great Plains."

Isn't that an area already hit by droughts, heat waves and water shortages?

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Years ago, attended a big public lecture by Edwin Land, on the subject of color vision. One part of which was "here's a spectrum, how many colors do you see?". Very interesting.

And that the colors one perceived were strongly affected by nearby colors. LOTS of processing between the retina and the conscious mind, so the effect of "language" and "culture" does not surprise me at all.

If you want color to be purely objective, express it in nanometers, otherwise GTFO.

[Michael Cain]

LOTS of processing between the retina and the conscious mind...

Impacts other senses as well. Actual experiments show that if something appears to be rushing at your face, audio processing shuts down entirely while your brain decides if you need to dodge. This came up when someone noticed that if the audio tagline in a TV commercial happened when the visual was a can rushing straight at the camera, no one remembered hearing the tagline. IIRC, the Stanford researchers who did that work told me they started because of a Chef Boyardee commercial.

[Michael Cain]

Isn't that an area already hit by droughts, heat waves and water shortages?

Yes, and predicted to be worse by the time migration away from coastal areas becomes significant. This is my usual map/cartogram pair for the Great Plains (GP counties in white). 300-500 miles wide. Note the lack of cities. That's one of the defining characteristics, and is for real reasons.

[wj]

Isn't that an area [the southern Great Plains] already hit by droughts, heat waves and water shortages?

Two points:
First, climate change will doubtless impact that area as well. No idea in which direction.
Second, since people are (inexplicably IMHO) willing to tolerate Florida's current (meteorological) climate, who knows what else they might find acceptable?

[Michael Cain]

So I spent some time this morning finding the copy of the paper I had tucked away and doing a first read of the methodology. As it turns out, the Great Plains "anomaly" is driven by the current very low county populations. For example, if 200 people move to a Colorado county with a population of 2,000, that county gets marked as experiencing a >10% impact (the highest category). My Colorado county's ~4% impact as shown on their map would represent 15,000 people. The article doesn't have large numbers of people moving to the southern Great Plains, just large relative to the existing very low numbers. Still leaves the question of what 200 people added to a rural county of 2,000 will do, but that's for another day.

Never mind :^)

[wj]

The town I grew up in had a population of perhaps 2,000 in the 1950s. The next "town" over (it did have a post office, but the kids went to our high school) had a population of maybe 100. Today their populations are roughly 43,000 and 87,000 respectively. Then, we connected to the outside world via a 2 lane road; today, a Interstate runs thorough. Then, water was all from wells; now virtually none of it is.

What I'm saying is that some of the reasons for low population can change radically when the population grown anyway.

[Michael Cain]

What metro area are they in?

[wj]

San Francisco? (About 30 miles west of here.) Oakland? (About 20 miles west of here.) Both easy commutes -- when people mostly commuted from the suburbs, of course. Google "San Ramon, CA" for details.

[Michael Cain]

Ah. The model I'm questioning has displaced coastal people moving to places like Hamilton County, KS. 200+ miles in any direction to a city of any size. Population down 25% since 1930. Not as bad as many Great Plains places because it sits on the modest SW Kansas gas field, and the Arkansas River passes through it.

In the past, when the SCOTUS* has found that Colorado has taken more than its share of the river water, they have allowed Colorado to balance things with money, not water. If that were made a general principle, Colorado will eventually just take the water and pay Kansas a couple million dollars annually.

* By tradition, the case name Kansas v. Colorado is reserved for the ongoing water fight over the Arkansas dating back to 1902.

[Michael Cain]

Google "San Ramon, CA" for details.

I've been there! Pac Bell had an enormous office complex in San Ramon. The lobby was like an acre of marble you had to cross to get to the front desk. The guy I was visiting there told me the California PUC didn't allow them to include the cost of that lobby in their rate base.

[nous]

The emerging research and modeling for internal climate migration has a lot less migration to the rural great plains and a lot more to cities, building more on the current trends for internal economic migration (which makes sense since climate migration will also be economic opportunity migration).

(No links, as this is a composite impression from a dozen or so student research projects from this quarter - that the trend they are citing).

The thing they are starting to realize, though, is that the poor populations in the destinations will be squeezed hard by the influx, and the poor in the areas that are seeing movement away will likely be stuck where they are and facing ever worsening prospects.

I fully expect to see a lot of the families that left California for the Southwest because of the property values end up returning in the next two decades in worse economic shape than when they left, and the least lucky getting stuck where they are with worsening climate impacts.

Northern cities in decent projected climate zones need to start planning for infrastructure and low cost housing or they will have to spend the money after the fact for homelessness programs, drug treatment, and crime prevention.

[JanieM]

Northern cities in decent projected climate zones need to start planning for infrastructure and low cost housing or they will have to spend the money after the fact for homelessness programs, drug treatment, and crime prevention.

Speaking off the cuff with no time to find cites, this is already happening in Maine. Covid brought a big influx of people from the big cities to the south (NY, Boston, who knows where) who wanted to get out of the cities and who could work from home. Housing prices went through the sky; houses were sold before you could even get a realtor to take you to see them. Often, sold sight unseen with no inspection.

Now we have an awful housing shortage, not enough affordable housing, a fair # of immigrants landing here, and ... what a mess.

I don't even think this is generally considered a "decent projected climate zone" -- people who haven't lived through these winters don't find it easy, and I expected a lot of the people who moved in early in the Covid era to manage one winter and then go back where they came from. That doesn't seem to be happening, though, or at least the housing frenzy hasn't abated at all. Maine is, after all, very beautiful, harsh winters notwithstanding. And if you can get into winter outdoors activities, then winter isn't such a trial after all.

[Michael Cain]

The emerging research and modeling for internal climate migration has a lot less migration to the rural great plains and a lot more to cities, building more on the current trends for internal economic migration (which makes sense since climate migration will also be economic opportunity migration).

Same as my impression from my own readings (also w/o links). I still have some family in Nebraska, so follow some statistics there. Over 50% of the state's population lives in the three counties that make up Omaha, Lincoln, and their suburbs. Estimates are that by the 2030 Census it will be over 60%.

I expect the Colorado Front Range urban corridor, where I live, to continue booming as people figure out that to some extent you can swap increases in altitude for increases in latitude as a mitigating factor.

[wj]

The model I'm questioning has displaced coastal people moving to places like Hamilton County, KS. 200+ miles in any direction to a city of any size. Population down 25% since 1930.

For the moment, what is becoming more critical is access to a) Internet infrastructure, and b) long distance transportation. The former to provide jobs for people working remotely, and the latter to get food and other supplies to them. The Interstates and transcontinental (freight) railroads provide the transportation. And give a right-of-way to string fiber optic cables for the Internet connections.

[wj]

The thing they are starting to realize, though, is that the poor populations in the destinations will be squeezed hard by the influx, and the poor in the areas that are seeing movement away will likely be stuck where they are and facing ever worsening prospects.

I fully expect to see a lot of the families that left California for the Southwest because of the property values end up returning in the next two decades in worse economic shape than when they left, and the least lucky getting stuck where they are with worsening climate impacts.

nous, has there ever been a time when you saw changes happening that you didn't think would make things worse for the poor? Seriously, have you?

Some changes certainly do have a negative impact. On the other hand, there are examples like the Dust Bowl. A lot of poor folks left Oklahoma and surrounding areas for the Southwest. Their prospects here were not good either. But in spite of the massive shortage of housing when they arrived, and awful lot of them ended up (admittedly some years later) in far better shape than they had been. There's not obvious reason why that couldn't happen again.

[JanieM]

I will add to my Maine observations -- people buying property here on NY or Boston incomes can obviously price local people out of the market, and are doing so.

It's not a new phenomenon -- when I moved here from a Boston suburb in 1987, the people in the Boston suburb (where we had rented for a year or so after a stint in Milwaukee) were complaining that the Boston housing market boom was pricing local young people out of being able to buy homes in their home towns.

Here in Maine, people were complaining about the same thing....probably partly caused by the overflow from Boston.

So this isn't new, it's just that the pace has been much more frantic lately.

One of the items on my list of "Maine superlatives" (a mixed bag) is that Maine has the highest percentage of second homes in the country. I think this is because of several patterns: LOTS of Maine people of modest income have "camps" -- rough cottages that they go to as often as they can. ("I'm up ta camp this weekend...") Lots of other people from "out of state" have second homes here. But this means that there's a lot of habitable housing sitting around with no one in it for a lot of the year, while many people go homeless....

Political commentary redacted.... We need more affordable housing, one way or another. And I suspect that second-home-owners from "out of state" are a minor part of the problem compared to investors buying up and flipping or renting properties simply for profit.

Grrrrrr.

[JanieM]

nous, has there ever been a time when you saw changes happening that you didn't think would make things worse for the poor? Seriously, have you?

It is my understanding that the poor are always the first and worst hurt in economic bad times. So why not climate-change-induced bad times? Why the people who have the least have to take the brunt of bad times is ... a mystery?

Not really.

[wj]

It is my understanding that the poor are always the first and worst hurt in economic bad times. So why not climate-change-induced bad times?

Quite. In the places which are having bad economic times. But other places may well be having good economic times concurrently. That, after all, is an incentive to move, rather than hunker down where you are. Climate change will be bad, even brutal, in some places. But in others, it may well improve things. Similarly, the economy will tank in some places and boom in others.

I think back to 1945-1965 in California. There was a MASSIVE housing shortage.** In fact, my dad spent a career doing nothing but building houses all over the county. (Not as the guy creating the subdivisions, just a basic carpenter.) It was also a time when the local economy boomed. And not just for the economic elites. Then as now, there were jobs at pretty much every level going begging.

** The population of San Ramon didn't explode because there was any shortage of demand for housing either.

[nous]

wj - the westward expansion was quite good for most poor (white) families. If we were in similar circumstances I'd imagine that things would work out similarly to what happened during the Dust Bowl. Same for my ancestors who came here during the Swedish diaspora.

What we have now that we did not have then is a reduction in our habitable zone that is going to push *far* more people out of their homes than were displaced by the Dust Bowl. That's going to significantly narrow the margins.

Immigration of skilled workers from the Global South are going to add even more competition that the rural poor from the US will not be able to compete with.

Which is why I think this will be far more challenging that the Dust Bowl, or from the immigration waves of the 1800s.

More people, less livable area. Bad combination. It'll act like a low pass filter.

[JanieM]

Humans have been moving/migrating forever, of course; some of my relatives migrated to California and Florida in the 1950s, their parents having migrated from Italy to the US 50 years before that.

But let's not pretend it's cost-free (with many kinds of costs), and it's still likely to be the people who can least afford the costs who will pay the most.

[nous]

It'll act like a low pass filter.

High pass filter, rather. We're hoping we can pass the threshold.

[JanieM]

Was going to put a spectrum image here as a follow-up to the conversation about linguistics and color naming, but it appears that Typepad has finally blocked the hole through which images could be embedded in comments....