Category: Europe

Which mapping app can avoid narrow roads in Europe? And which can provide walking directions that avoid dangerous neighborhoods in the U.S.?

by philg

We used Google Maps in Portugal. It made quite a few absurdly bad routing decisions. To save a theoretical minute or two it would send our Mercedes E class sedan down roads narrower than a North Carolina dentist’s driveway. We were constantly terrified that a car would appear coming the opposite direction and that we’d be forced to stop suddenly and then back up to a rare section wide enough for two cars to pass. When shown these routes, the locals said that they would never drive along those roads for transportation despite most of them having narrower cars and better driving skills than a Floridian lulled into complacency by textbook highway engineering. Below is a segment from a suggested Google Maps route for our rental car (#2 after the first E class melted down). I don’t think that our Sixt rental agreement says anything about driving up or down stairs, but the road was definitely narrower than the car:

Where was this road, you might ask? In one of my favorite towns in Portugal: Covide!

Is there a mapping app that is smarter about getting around Europe without scraping?

Related question for the U.S.: is there an app that will calculate walking directions to avoid dangerous neighborhoods? Or calculate directions and score the walk with a danger level? This tweet from a former Googler suggests that Google will never do it:

(His/her/zir/their reasoning is that sending pedestrians via a scenic route will lead to “spatial inequality” because the nicer areas tend to be richer.)

WalkSafe seems to have the crime rate information, but I’m not sure that it will provide turn-by-turn directions to a pedestrian.

Here’s a street in front of an AirBnB that we rented in Amarante, Portugal (very pleasant town!):

(The host said to navigate to a nearby parking lot and walk the rest of the way.)

I don’t have a good illustration of a crime-ridden street in Portugal because the country is one of the safest in the world and every tourist attraction seems to be in a safe area.

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How does the EU stay together when France and the eastern nations have such different goals?

by philg

France, the second largest economy in the EU, has voted for central planning and to maximize low-skill immigration (the glass ceiling for female leaders that Marine Le Pen hoped to shatter was apparently made from Florida-style hurricane laminates). That’s the right of voters in a democracy (maybe we’ll see the same thing here in November), but it seems confusing that France can be part of the same political entity, with a lot of share policy, as the eastern European nations whose citizens prefer a market economy and to exclude low-skill immigrants (short of a cataclysmic war, the biggest imaginable transformational force for any country).

How can a Eurocrat in Brussels set a policy that will be accepted by both Estonia and France, for example?

From the Iranians: “During the victory rally of the left coalition in the French parliamentary elections’ second round on Sunday evening, supporters of the left coalition and social democrats held more Palestinian flags than French flags.”

As a Muslim nation (as measured by number of hours devoted to religious observance) and one with a highly centralized and powerful government, maybe France would fit better into the Arab League? Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya was in the Arab League and implemented an Arab-Islamic Socialism.

Note that Science proves that what France needs is a larger role for government in its economy and more low-skill immigration. “Scientists relieved by far-right defeat in French election” (Nature magazine):

RN had been tipped to achieve a majority after winning the first round of voting on 30 June, and scientists feared that this could spell cuts for research budgets, restrictions on immigration and the introduction of broad climate scepticism into France’s lower house of parliament, the National Assembly.

Here are immigrant Scientists learning French back in 2018 (arabnews.com):

Why do they need to learn French if English is the international language of Science? “‘At least half of Paris crime is committed by foreigners,” said Macron (Le Monde), but it is unclear if he meant PhD biologists were perpetrating crime or PhD chemists.

Related (all from France’s “greatest living writer”):

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Is this the month when Europeans stop speeding?

by philg

Loyal readers may remember my proposal to Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph? (apply coronalogic to other situations in which human lives are at risk)

Maybe European readers can tell us if this is the month when Europeans begin to follow the Science. Back in 2022, Autoweek said “Anti-Speeding Tech Is Now Mandatory In European Union” and would apply to all new cars sold starting in July 2024:

The peasants still have some freedom, according to the article, but that could be fixed with an over-the-air software update:

The speed control function goes one step further by cutting power input from the pedal once the speed limit is reached. It’s important to note that drivers can override all four of these systems, either by acknowledging the audible or vibrating warnings or by pushing harder on the accelerator in the case of the haptic feedback or speed control function.

The same over-the-air update could impose my dream 35 mph (55 kph) limit and “save lives like a Fauci” (TM).

Separately, the speed nanny has supposedly already been in new-design cars in Europe for a year or two. Is there already statistical evidence that the hoped-for reductions in accidents/deaths have occurred? (Might be a little challenging to tease out of the data because newer cars in general might not have the same propensity to get into accidents compared to older cars (as with guns, it isn’t the driver who should be blamed, but the car).) If not, should we be skeptical about this new tech? A dramatic effect was predicted and shouldn’t be difficult to find if the prediction was true. (Though another confounder is that traffic gets worse in Europe every year and it is tough to be involved in a serious accident when you’re crawling along at 5 mph, working your way in between migrants’ tents and all of the pro-Hamas demonstrators.)

Our personal experience with the AI speed overlord wasn’t promising. Our almost-new rented Mercedes E 300de, which reliably started for two entire days (compare to 25 years for Toyota and Honda minivans), was consistently wrong when it came to determining a reasonable speed. When merging into traffic on the highway, for example, it would decide that a former limit of 50 or 60 kph applied and would issue frantic warnings about our 80-90 kph speed as we joined 120 kph traffic. It wasn’t smart enough to use front and rear cameras to see that the car was keeping up with traffic. When on scary narrow roads in little villages, the speed overlord would suggest blasting through at 90 kph. Most of the time, but not all of the time, the speed overlord’s displayed speed limit would be consistent with what Google Maps was showing. The audio warnings could be disabled by pressing and holding a mute button the steering wheel and we nearly always had to do that. The 10-year-old said “Let me get into the front seat so that I can give ‘Hey, Mercedes’ a piece of my mind.”

Related:

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What will the Labour Party do in the UK?

by philg

The British voted for Brexit and Conservative rule so that they wouldn’t be replaced by low-skill migrants. Rather than say “Sorry, asylum is no longer available in the UK,” the government that they elected presided over record-high immigration, but no longer of skilled carpenters from Poland and math wizards from Hungary (Wikipedia says “Net migration into the UK during 2022 is reported to have reached a record high of 764,000”).

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the handful of non-immigrant voters left in the UK booted the Conservatives out. (Note that Labour won 34 percent of the vote, which means they’re far less popular among Brits than Hamas is among Palestinians. (BBC: “The latest survey in June said that almost two-thirds of Gazan respondents were satisfied with Hamas – a rise of 12 points from December – and suggested that just around half would still prefer Hamas to run Gaza after the war ends, over any other option.”))

But what will the Labour Party do? Could Labour conceivably further expand low-skill immigration? Britain is already an Islamic country if we measure by the number of hours devoted to religious activity. How about taxes? Britain offers low taxation for those who start and run companies (see Move to the UK if you’re an entrepreneur? (10 percent capital gains tax)). Will Labour raise those rates? The UK is kind of a basket case economically (maybe a year of coronapanic lockdowns and restrictions wasn’t such a great public health idea, given that wealth and longevity are correlated?). Can an underperforming economy like the UK’s be squeezed to send more tax revenue to Labour’s wise central planners in London?

In the UNESCO World Heritage town of Guimarães, Portugal we found that popular enthusiasm for seizing the means of production was still alive in Europe:

But how could the means of production be seized in the UK when the country hardly produces anything anymore?

The Labour Party’s platform says what they want, but not how they’ll do it:

In their “first steps” document, they actually sound rather, um, conservative in many respects:

They’re going to secure the border and get tough on criminals while keeping taxes low! What did the “Conservative” party actually do, then?

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Why isn’t everyone celebrating Marine Le Pen’s victory in France?

by philg

The United Nations assures us that “We need more women leaders to sustain peace and development”:

The evidence is clear: wherever women take part in a peace process, peace lasts longer. In fact, a peace agreement, which includes women, is 35 per cent more likely to last at least 15 years. And without the solid foundation of peace, development is doomed to be unstable and unsustainable.

A recent Secretary-General’s report to the Security Council called women leadership and participation in peacebuilding a “prerequisite for the fulfillment of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” In other words, without women’s participation, we will not achieve lasting peace; and without the stability of peace, we will not achieve sustainable development.

Put forward by the Resolution 1325, the idea that women should be given greater access to leadership roles in peace and security is closely aligned with the aim of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, on gender equality and women empowerment.

The Science confirms this theory across all domains. “Women leaders make work better. Here’s the science behind how to promote them” (American Psychological Association):

When more women are empowered to lead, everyone benefits. Decades of studies show women leaders help increase productivity, enhance collaboration, inspire organizational dedication, and improve fairness.

Why would any company or country ever select a non-woman as a leader? McKinsey says that diversity leads to huge profits (NVIDIA’s GPU development lab is a rich tapestry of Black and Latinx engineers in a wide array of gender IDs?). Note that, predictably, two white males say that McKinsey’s work in this area is just as beneficial to society as McKinsey’s work with Enron and the opioid pill vendors. “McKinsey’s Diversity Matters/Delivers/Wins Results Revisited”:

Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.

More from the United Nations, this time a complaint that only 26 of the world’s countries have implemented McKinsey’s recommendations and selected female heads of state:

Given all of the above, shouldn’t we expect celebratory and congratulatory tweets from the United Nations, UN Women, McKinsey, et al. following Marine Le Pen’s recent electoral victory in France, the world’s 7th largest country by GDP (while working 32 hours/week and taking 8 weeks of vacation per year!)? Instead, the Guardian describes female leadership in France as “unthinkable”. The Washington Post says “Marine Le Pen is now part of France’s mainstream. That should scare us all.”

Separately, no discussion of France is complete without this poster:

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Europe is rich in migrants, so why isn’t it rich?

by philg

“Europe Has Fallen Behind the U.S. and China. Can It Catch Up?” (New York Times, June 5):

Europe’s share of the global economy is shrinking, and fears are deepening that the continent can no longer keep up with the United States and China. … Beijing and Washington are funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into expanding their own semiconductor, alternative energy and electric car industries, and upending the world’s free trade regime

The secret to wealth is government spending and European governments aren’t big enough.

Private investment lags as well. Large corporations, for example, invested 60 percent less in 2022 than their American counterparts, and grew at two-thirds the pace, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute. As for per-capita income, it is on average 27 percent lower than in the United States. And productivity growth is slower than other major economies, while energy prices are much higher.

The journalists ask us to contemplate an unimaginable horrible scenario:

Imagine if every state in America had national sovereignty and there were only limited federal power to raise money to fund things like the military.

In other words, imagine if the U.S. Constitution were followed and the federal government’s powers were limited to those spelled out in the document.

The news isn’t all bad:

For more than a decade, Europe has been falling behind on several measures of competitiveness, including capital investments, research and development, and productivity growth. But it is a world leader in reducing emissions, limiting income inequality and expanding social mobility, according to McKinsey.

Europe could be leading the leaders in leading even more if governments would hire leading consultants at McKinsey more frequently. Speaking of leaders, the leaders in journalism don’t ask what seems like an obvious question: Science proves that low-skill immigrants make societies rich. Europe is rich in low-skill immigrants, while China is impoverished in low-skill immigrants. “China has the smallest number of international migrants of any major country in the world. Compare its 0.1% of immigrants with near 14% in the U.S. and 18% in Germany.” (Texas A&M, which also notes that immigrants are “very productive”). Shouldn’t Europe’s economic growth be higher than in the U.S. and China?

The NYT article doesn’t mention immigration, except to point out that only a “far-right” political party could question the wisdom of open borders.

Separately, I wonder what would happen if we subtracted out NVIDIA, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft from the U.S. economy. Maybe without Big Tech, the U.S. and Europe would be roughly comparable.

Speaking of the U.S. economy, here’s a chart from zerohedge showing that the number of native-born workers in the U.S. is unchanged compared to 2018:

To find the promised economic enrichment from the presence of migrants we would have to look at the extent to which real wages for the native-born have increased. If we adjust for inflation under the old formula, real wages are likely lower than in 2018. That’s certainly true here in Palm Beach County, Florida.

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Meet in Lisbon this coming week?

by philg

As part of quest for Portuguese (EU) citizenship and because public school ended last week here in Florida, we’re all headed to Lisbon tomorrow and should be there through June 13 (after that we head to the north for a couple of weeks of exploration). Would anyone like to meet? If so, please email philg@mit.edu.

What are we escaping? Here’s life this morning at the Juno Beach Pier (adjacent to Jupiter):

Air and water temp both about 80 degrees (reaches what the New York Times says is a lethal heat index in the afternoon, though, at 91 degrees).

Related:

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Eden Golan vs. Fire Saga at Eurovision

by philg

Eden Golan in Sweden (note the big wheel):

Will Ferrell and a similar wheel as part of the Fire Saga act at Eurovision:

Separately, for fans of the Eurovision movie (one of the few bright spots of coronapanic!), here’s the official music video from Eden Golan:

It’s remarkable how faithful the film is to the real contest!

Separately, I wonder if Florida should get some credit for Eden Golan’s entry. I am not aware of any hurricanes in Israel and yet her song is titled “Hurricane”. I would pay Taylor Swift prices to see Eden Golan and Ron DeSantis perform a duet version!

Finally, shouldn’t those who want to ensure continued Hamas rule in Gaza have been happy that Israel was participating in Eurovision? The righteous say that Israel is committing “genocide” (extremely slowly?) in Gaza. If true, isn’t it better to have as many genocidal Israelis in Sweden where they won’t do any harm rather than in Gaza where they will kill Gazans (who are, according to UNRWA tweets, entirely unarmed and peaceful so it is actually a mystery as to how fighting continues because there are no Gazans shooting at the IDF).

Related:

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The death of Europe: a challenge to the Efficient-Market Hypothesis religion

by philg

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that Europe is “dying” when “stagnating” might be a fairer description. The chart below isn’t adjusted for inflation, so the European market is more or less flat in purchasing power while the investor in the U.S. market has done nicely.

All of Europe’s challenges and advantages were known to investors in 2008. Ditto for the U.S. The Efficient-Market Hypothesis, therefore, would suggest that the above situation shouldn’t have happened. Returns to the European stock market should have been about the same as returns in the U.S. market unless something dramatic occurred. Perhaps we could say that Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 was an unforeseen dramatic event, but it looks as though the divergence between the markets happened well before that.

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The Spanish Civil War started as a medium-size resource allocation dispute

by philg

“How the Spanish Civil War Became Europe’s Battlefield” is an interesting lecture series by Pamela Radcliff, a professor at UCSD.

According to the teacher, the political fight that started the war was about how much low-skill workers should be paid. The progressive Republicans wanted workers to be richer without them having to learn more (e.g., to read) or work harder. The conservative Monarchists, who became the Nationalists, did not want the government intervening in the labor market or allocating farmland, especially out of concern for small business owners.

The conservatives called the progressives “Communists” and the progressives called the conservatives “Fascists.” These monikers were inaccurate at first, but eventually each side lived up to the other’s worst caricatures. The progressives seized the means of production and had the workers take over from the capitalists. Farms were collectivized. The conservatives joined up with fascists in Germany and Italy. Both sides killed anyone who disagreed with them. (About 500,000 people were killed, including thousands of Catholic priests killed by the progressives.)

In other words, the political situation in mid-1930s Spain wasn’t that different from what we have here in the U.S. today! The Spanish, of course, did not enjoy the abundant natural resources that we stole from the Native Americans. And Spain did not have a big flood of low-skill immigrants like the one that is purportedly continuously enriching the United States (or at least the elites).

It would have been interesting if the Republicans had won the civil war. This would have been a tough challenge because, though President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to assist his fellow progressive economic reformers, anti-Communist sentiment in the U.S. Congress prevented him from sending weapons and U.S. tax dollars. The Soviet Union did send weapons and personnel, but they were no match for what the Germans and Italians were providing to the Nationalists and the progressives did a lot of fighting and purging amongst themselves (anyone who didn’t follow the Communist line was labeled a Trotskyite). But if the Republicans had won, it would have been interesting to see their collective farms spread all across Spain, their central planning, their workers’ paradise in the heart of 1950s Europe.

Separately, Spain today is acting against its own economic interests, if our politicians are to be believed, by trying to reduce the number of economy-boosting low-skill immigrants:

Note that this lecture series is also available on Audible.

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