ChatGPT as a productive climate scientist

by philg

Some science professor friends were discussing “Surge in number of ‘extremely productive’ authors concerns scientists” (Nature Magazine):

Up to four times more researchers pump out more than 60 papers a year than less than a decade ago. Saudi Arabia and Thailand saw the sharpest uptick in the number of such scientists over the past few years, according to a preprint posted on bioRxiv on 24 November. The increase in these ‘extremely productive’ authors raises concerns that some researchers are resorting to dubious methods to publish extra papers.

Could ChatGPT enter the arena? I asked for 50 climate change paper titles:

  1. “Rapid Arctic Meltdown: Implications for Global Sea Level Rise”
  2. “Unprecedented Carbon Emissions: Nearing Irreversible Climate Tipping Points”
  3. “Global Heatwaves: Escalating Threats to Human Health and Agriculture”
  4. “Ocean Acidification: The Silent Crisis Decimating Marine Life”
  5. “Climate-Induced Mega Droughts: The New Normal?”
  6. “Vanishing Glaciers: Water Scarcity and the Impending Crisis”
  7. “Rising Sea Levels: The Looming Threat to Coastal Cities”
  8. “Extreme Weather Events: The Cost of Inaction on Climate Change”
  9. “Disappearing Coral Reefs: A Warning Sign of Ocean Health Decline”
  10. “The Methane Time Bomb: Thawing Permafrost and Climate Catastrophe”
  11. “Climate Change and Pandemics: Linking Environmental Degradation to Health Risks”
  12. “Food Security in Jeopardy: The Impact of Climate Change on Crop Yields”
  13. “Climate Refugees: The Human Cost of Environmental Displacement”
  14. “Infernos of Change: The Increasing Frequency of Wildfires”
  15. “The Thinning Ice: Polar Bear Habitats in Peril”
  16. “Floods and Famine: Climate Change’s Impact on Humanitarian Crises”
  17. “The Vanishing Amazon: Deforestation and Global Climate Effects”
  18. “Tropical Cyclones in a Warming World: Increasing Frequency and Intensity”
  19. “Toxic Air: How Climate Change Worsens Air Pollution”
  20. “Melting Mountain Snowcaps: Implications for Freshwater Resources”
  21. “The Climate Gap: Socioeconomic Disparities in Climate Change Impacts”
  22. “Lethal Heat: Surpassing Human Survival Limits”
  23. “The Greenhouse Effect: Amplifying Global Warming”
  24. “Shrinking Biodiversity: Climate Change and Species Extinction”
  25. “Rising Oceans, Sinking Cities: The Reality of Coastal Erosion”
  26. “Climate Change and Mental Health: The Unseen Toll”
  27. “Disrupted Ecosystems: The Cascading Effects of Climate Change”
  28. “The Bleak Future of Snow Sports: Impact of Warming Winters”
  29. “Unstoppable Thaw: The Fate of the World’s Glaciers”
  30. “The Disintegration of Ice Shelves: A Warning from Antarctica”
  31. “Dying Oceans: The Impact of Warming Waters on Marine Life”
  32. “Heatwave Hell: Surviving the New Climate Extremes”
  33. “Arid Earth: Desertification and the Loss of Arable Land”
  34. “Climate Catastrophe: The Economics of a Warming World”
  35. “The Climate Health Emergency: Risks to Global Public Health”
  36. “Suffocating Seas: Declining Oxygen Levels in Oceans”
  37. “Climate Wars: Resource Conflicts in a Warming World”
  38. “The Last Generation: Wildlife on the Brink in a Changing Climate”
  39. “Tipping Point: The Last Chance to Prevent Climate Catastrophe”
  40. “Collapsing Ecosystems: The Domino Effect of Climate Change”
  41. “The Acid Rain Revival: Increased Pollution from Climate Change”
  42. “Inescapable Heat: The Urban Heat Island Effect Worsens”
  43. “The Climate Migration Crisis: Predicting Mass Movements”
  44. “Warming Waters: The Threat to Global Fisheries”
  45. “Carbon’s Legacy: The Long-Term Effects of CO2 Emissions”
  46. “Climate Anxiety: Psychological Impacts of Environmental Change”
  47. “The Drowning of Cultural Heritage: Sea-Level Rise and Historical Sites”
  48. “The End of Seasons: Disrupting Natural Climate Cycles”
  49. “Climate-Induced Starvation: The Future of Global Food Supplies”
  50. “The Silent Killer: Rising CO2 Levels and Respiratory Health”

The last one is my favorite, but wouldn’t it be better as “I Can’t Breathe: Rising CO2 Levels and Respiratory Health”? I asked ChatGPT to draft it.

Abstract

The rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) due to human activities have become a significant concern for global climate change and public health. This paper examines the relationship between elevated CO2 levels and respiratory health issues. Through an extensive review of existing literature and analysis of current air quality and health data, we explore the direct and indirect impacts of increased CO2 on respiratory health. Our study finds a correlation between high CO2 concentrations and a rise in respiratory ailments, particularly in urban areas. This paper contributes to the growing body of evidence suggesting that rising CO2 levels pose a considerable threat to public health, beyond their widely recognized environmental impacts. We conclude with recommendations for policy interventions and further research to mitigate the health risks associated with CO2 emissions.

Introduction

1.1 Background Information

The Earth’s atmosphere is experiencing unprecedented changes due to anthropogenic activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, leading to increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2). This increase in CO2 is a major driving force behind global climate change, with well-documented impacts on the environment. However, the implications of rising CO2 levels extend beyond climate change, posing significant challenges to public health, particularly respiratory health.

1.2 Problem Statement

While the link between air pollutants like particulate matter and respiratory health has been well established, the specific impacts of elevated CO2 levels have received less attention. High concentrations of CO2 are known to affect air quality and, by extension, respiratory health. This paper aims to address this gap by investigating the relationship between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and respiratory health outcomes.

1.3 Research Objectives

  • To review the current literature on the impacts of increased atmospheric CO2 levels.
  • To analyze the correlation between CO2 concentrations and respiratory health issues.
  • To explore the potential mechanisms through which CO2 can affect respiratory health.
  • To assess the public health implications of these findings and suggest appropriate policy responses.

1.4 Significance of the Study

Understanding the health impacts of rising CO2 levels is crucial for developing effective public health strategies and policies. This study contributes to the body of knowledge needed to address one of the most pressing issues of our time – climate change and its impact on human health. It also underscores the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to tackling environmental challenges, one that encompasses environmental science, public health, policy-making, and community engagement.

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Plagiarism depends on the context

by philg

Regarding the person my academic friends are starting to call “Claudine GPT”… a guy on Twitter:

Plagiarism if a student does it. ‘Duplicative language’ if a university president. Please someone make it make sense

I asked ChatGPT to sort out the Twitter user’s conundrum. The TL; DR version:

When a student plagiarizes, it is often seen as a failure of this learning process. In contrast, the president of an esteemed institution like Harvard is expected to be well-versed in academic integrity. Plagiarism at such a high level suggests a deliberate breach of ethical standards, which is more serious given their role and influence. … The president of Harvard, as a leader and scholar, holds a position of significant influence and authority. Plagiarism in their scholarly work would severely undermine their credibility, the integrity of their research, and could lead to broader implications for the reputation of the institution they represent. … The president of a university is held to higher standards of accountability due to their leadership position. Plagiarism in their work can lead to severe consequences, including loss of their position, public censure, and damage to their professional career. For a student, consequences are usually confined to academic penalties, such as failing the assignment or course, and potentially facing disciplinary action from the university.

ChatGPT agrees that it is all about context:

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How many physical servers do we think are behind ChatGPT?

by philg

A friend has a powerful new-ish desktop PC with an AMD Threadripper CPU and a moderately powerful GPU. He installed LM Studio and found that running LLama2 used 40 GB of RAM and was able to generate only 1 word per second.

ChatGPT is faster than that and there are millions of users. What’s our best guess as to the hardware and electricity footprint? More than all of the Bitcoin activity?

Just one of Twitter’s server farms, apparently one that could be turned off without compromising the service, was 5,200 racks and each rack held 30 servers (1U each plus some disk or switch boxes?). That’s 156,000 physical servers to do something that isn’t computationally intensive on a per-user basis (though, of course, there are a lot of users).

Why hasn’t OpenAI taken over every physical computer in the Microsoft Azure cloud?

Nvidia porn:

Here are some excerpts from the book Elon Musk regarding the Christmas 2022 move of servers from Sacramento to save $100 million per year:

It was late at night on December 22, and the meeting in Musk’s tenth-floor Twitter conference room had become tense. He was talking to two Twitter infrastructure managers who had not dealt with him much before, and certainly not when he was in a foul mood. One of them tried to explain the problem. The data-services company that housed one of Twitter’s server farms, located in Sacramento, had agreed to allow them some short-term extensions on their lease so they could begin to move out during 2023 in an orderly fashion. “But this morning,” the nervous manager told Musk, “they came back to us and said that plan was no longer on the table because, and these are their words, they don’t think that we will be financially viable.” The facility was costing Twitter more than $100 million a year. Musk wanted to save that money by moving the servers to one of Twitter’s other facilities, in Portland, Oregon. Another manager at the meeting said that couldn’t be done right away. “We can’t get out safely before six to nine months,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Sacramento still needs to be around to serve traffic.”

The manager began to explain in detail some of the obstacles to relocating the servers to Portland. “It has different rack densities, different power densities,” she said. “So the rooms need to be upgraded.” She started to give a lot more details, but after a minute, Musk interrupted.

“Do you know the head-explosion emoji?” he asked her. “That’s what my head feels like right now. What a pile of fucking bullshit. Jesus H fucking Christ. Portland obviously has tons of room. It’s trivial to move servers one place to another.” The Twitter managers again tried to explain the constraints. Musk interrupted. “Can you have someone go to our server centers and send me videos of the insides?” he asked. It was three days before Christmas, and the manager promised the video in a week. “No, tomorrow,” Musk ordered. “I’ve built server centers myself, and I can tell if you could put more servers there or not. That’s why I asked if you had actually visited these facilities. If you’ve not been there, you’re just talking bullshit.”

Musk then predicted a two-week move for the 150,000+ servers in 5,200 racks, each of which weighed 2,500 lbs.

“Why don’t we do it right now?” [young cousin] James Musk asked. He and his brother Andrew were flying with Elon from San Francisco to Austin on Friday evening, December 23, the day after the frustrating infrastructure meeting about how long it would take to move the servers out of the Sacramento facility. Avid skiers, they had planned to go by themselves to Tahoe for Christmas, but Elon that day invited them to come to Austin instead. James was reluctant. He was mentally exhausted and didn’t need more intensity, but Andrew convinced him that they should go. So that’s how they ended up on the plane—with Musk, Grimes, and X, along with Steve Davis and Nicole Hollander and their baby—listening to Elon complain about the servers. They were somewhere over Las Vegas when James made his suggestion that they could move them now. It was the type of impulsive, impractical, surge-into-the-breach idea that Musk loved. It was already late evening, but he told his pilot to divert, and they made a loop back up to Sacramento.

“You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex [a Twitter employee who happened to be there] said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods. Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved. “Well that doesn’t seem super hard,” he said as Alex the Uzbek and the rest of the gang stared. Musk was totally jazzed by this point. It was, he said with a loud laugh, like a remake of Mission: Impossible, Sacramento edition.

The next day—Christmas Eve—Musk called in reinforcements. Ross Nordeen drove from San Francisco. He stopped at the Apple Store in Union Square and spent $2,000 to buy out the entire stock of AirTags so the servers could be tracked on their journey, and then stopped at Home Depot, where he spent $2,500 on wrenches, bolt-cutters, headlamps, and the tools needed to unscrew the seismic bolts. Steve Davis got someone from The Boring Company to procure a semi truck and line up moving vans. Other enlistees arrived from SpaceX. The server racks were on wheels, so the team was able to disconnect four of them and roll them to the waiting truck. This showed that all fifty-two hundred or so could probably be moved within days. “The guys are kicking ass!” Musk exulted. Other workers at the facility watched with a mix of amazement and horror. Musk and his renegade team were rolling servers out without putting them in crates or swaddling them in protective material, then using store-bought straps to secure them in the truck. “I’ve never loaded a semi before,” James admitted. Ross called it “terrifying.” It was like cleaning out a closet, “but the stuff in it is totally critical.” At 3 p.m., after they had gotten four servers onto the truck, word of the caper reached the top executives at NTT, the company that owned and managed the data center. They issued orders that Musk’s team halt. Musk had the mix of glee and anger that often accompanied one of his manic surges. He called the CEO of the storage division, who told him it was impossible to move server racks without a bevy of experts. “Bullshit,” Musk explained. “We have already loaded four onto the semi.” The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than five hundred pounds of pressure, so rolling a two-thousand-pound server would cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure at any one point was only five hundred pounds. “The dude is not very good at math,” Musk told the musketeers.

After Christmas, Andrew and James headed back to Sacramento to see how many more servers they could move. They hadn’t brought enough clothes, so they went to Walmart and bought jeans and T-shirts. The NTT supervisors who ran the facility continued to throw up obstacles, some quite understandable. Instead of letting them prop open the door to the vault, for example, they required the musketeers and their crew to go through a retinal security scan each time they went in. One of the supervisors watched them at all times. “She was the most insufferable person I’ve ever worked with,” James says. “But to be fair, I could understand where she was coming from, because we were ruining her holidays, right?”

The moving contractors that NTT wanted them to use charged $200 an hour. So James went on Yelp and found a company named Extra Care Movers that would do the work at one-tenth the cost. The motley company pushed the ideal of scrappiness to its outer limits. The owner had lived on the streets for a while, then had a kid, and he was trying to turn his life around. He didn’t have a bank account, so James ended up using PayPal to pay him. The second day, the crew wanted cash, so James went to a bank and withdrew $13,000 from his personal account. Two of the crew members had no identification, which made it hard for them to sign into the facility. But they made up for it in hustle. “You get a dollar tip for every additional server we move,” James announced at one point. From then on, when they got a new one on a truck, the workers would ask how many they were up to.

By the end of the week they had used all of the available trucks in Sacramento. Despite the area being pummeled by rain, they moved more than seven hundred of the racks in three days. The previous record at that facility had been moving thirty in a month. That still left a lot of servers in the facility, but the musketeers had proven that they could be moved quickly. The rest were handled by the Twitter infrastructure team in January.

Getting everything up and running in Portland took about two months, in the end, due to incompatible electrical connectors and hard-coded references in the Twitter code to Sacramento. Elon beat the 6-9 month estimate, but not by 6-9 months, and he admitted that rushing the move was a mistake.

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Two-year anniversary of Boston’s order that 5-year-olds be injected with an experimental vaccine in order to appear in public

by philg

It’s the two-year anniversary of the Boston Covidcrats ordering 5-year-olds to be injected with a non-FDA-approved vaccine if they wanted to enter a restaurant, do an after-school sport, see a movie, or visit a museum. The Science-informed order says “vaccinated individuals are less likely to develop serious symptoms or spread COVID19 to those near them” (i.e., claims that the injection prevents transmission despite the fact that the injection was never tested for its ability to reduce transmission).

“Mayor Michelle Wu announces COVID-19 vaccine requirement for certain indoor venues in Boston” (Boston.com) summarized the situation:

The requirement will apply to indoor dining at restaurants, including bars and nightclubs; indoor fitness centers; and indoor recreational spaces, like theaters, concert venues, and sports arenas.

The first phase — requiring employees and patrons ages 12 and up to show they’ve gotten at least one dose of a vaccine — takes effect on Jan. 15. They will subsequently be required to show they’ve received at least two doses on Feb. 15.

Boston will also require children as young as 5 to show they’ve gotten at least one dose to enter those indoor spaces by March 1. And by May 1, children aged 5 to 12 will be required to show proof of full vaccination as well.

The order Monday follows similar policies in other major American cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. And it was announced in conjunction with other neighboring Massachusetts communities — including Arlington, Brookline, Cambridge, Salem, Somerville — that are advancing mirroring vaccine requirements for their local indoor venues.

Some initial resistance was anticipated:

Businesses will also be required to post a printed notice, available in multiple languages, informing visitors of the policy. And according to Wu, the city’s Inspectional Services Department will run checks to ensure compliance with the order.

“Once it gets to the point that it is part of the culture, part of the standard expectation, there’s much less direct challenge in compliance,” she said.

However, Wu described the proof of vaccination check as “just one more interaction that is already happening” between customers and staff.

“It would be a quick glance at an app or a card or a photo of your card,” she said.

If the following is true, why didn’t Mayor Wu order a real Chinese-style lockdown?

“We need to take every available action to protect our cities, residents, businesses, and institutions,” she said.

Why did the Followers of Science allow the filthy unvaccinated remnants to continue to congregate inside the never-closed (“essential”) marijuana stores, for example?

Separately, here’s a photo of the Scientist who imposed the order wearing a rainbow sash, but the sash lacks the trans-enhanced rainbow triangle that is part of our state religion. From “Boston mayor under fire after sending list of critics and protesters to police” (New York Post, July 16, 2023):

More recently…. “Boston Mayor Michelle Wu shows off photo from ‘electeds of color’ holiday party after defending gathering: ‘A special moment’” (New York Post):

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Our democracy has been saved or further threatened by the Colorado Supreme Court?

by philg

The Colorado Supreme Court, all of whose members “were appointed by Democratic governors”, has voted for protect our democracy by restricting the group of candidates from which Coloradans can choose in the 2024 Presidential elections.

Although I’m sure that this was well-intentioned, could the result be to threaten our democracy instead? I continue to reject the poll numbers that suggest that Donald Trump is a stronger candidate than Nikki Haley (my favorite Republican for the past few years, though that is arguably like being a dwarf among midgets) or Ron DeSantis (a great governor who needs a softer and more optimistic tone if he’s going to go higher, in my opinion). If Trump is banished from politics by an impartial group of 7 Democrat appointees, mightn’t that actually help democracy-ending Republicans by eliminating a candidate who would lose a general election?

From Quality of Life in Denver (2019)…

What do people read in Denver? I visited the Tattered Cover, an old-school downtown bookstore, to find out. “For the sisters, misters, and binary resisters”:

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Thanks to Hamas we can finally see the inside of Widener Library

by philg

Harvard’s Widener Library has been locked down for more than 100 years–longer than lockdowns were deemed necessary by Science. The titanic building was opened in 1915, just three years after the sinking of the RMS Titanic activated Harry Elkins Widener’s will. Most of the library was closed to undergraduates for most of its life. Since they weren’t researchers, why did they need to poke around in the stacks? Male undergraduates were welcome to use Lamont Library and females (Radcliffe students) had their own library.

Respectful tourists have always been strictly barred from the library, as far as I’m aware. Harvard teaches that no human is illegal at the border, but nobody can get anywhere near Widener without a Harvard ID.

Thanks to the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), we can now see the inside of Widener in the Wall Street Journal (by a U.S. senator from Alaska):

When I walked upstairs to the famous Widener Reading Room, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Nearly every student in the packed room was wearing a kaffiyeh. Fliers attached to their individual laptops, as well as affixed to some of the lamps in the reading room, read: “No Normalcy During Genocide—Justice for Palestine.” A young woman handed the fliers to all who entered. A large banner spread across one end of the room stated in blazing blood-red letters, “Stop the Genocide in Gaza.”

Curious about what was going on, I was soon in a cordial discussion with two of the organizers of this anti-Israel protest inside of one the world’s great libraries—not outside in Harvard Yard, where such protests belong. They told me they were from Saudi Arabia and the West Bank. I told them I was a U.S. senator who had recently returned from a bipartisan Senate trip to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I mentioned the meetings I had. I expressed my condolences when they told me their relatives had been killed by Israeli military action in Gaza.

One then asked whether I supported a cease-fire in Gaza. I said I didn’t, because I strongly believe Israel had the right both to defend itself and to destroy Hamas given the horrendous attacks it perpetrated against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.

Their tone immediately changed. “You’re a murderer,” one said. “You support genocide,” said the other.

They repeated their outrageous charges. I tried to debate them, noting the Israel Defense Forces don’t target civilians, and that the only group attempting to carry out genocide is Hamas. But civil debate with these women was pointless. As I was leaving Widener Library, they pulled out their iPhones and continued taunting: “Do you support genocide? Do you support genocide?” The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee posted some of this exchange on Instagram.

If students were handing out fliers and hanging large banners in the Widener Library Reading Room denouncing, say, affirmative action or NCAA rules allowing men to compete in women’s swim meets, Harvard leaders would shut them down in a minute. But an anti-Israel protest by an antisemitic group, commandeering the entire Widener Reading Room during finals? No problem.

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How’s Adolfo Martinez, imprisoned for burning a rainbow flag, doing?

by philg

It’s been four years since Adolfo Martinez was locked away for stealing a rainbow flag from a church and burning it in the street outside a strip club. “Iowa man sentenced to 16 years for setting LGBTQ flag on fire” (USA Today).

Here’s a photo of the church back then:

Here’s the church web site as of September 25, 2023:

Who can decode the symbols on the “Community Pride Worship” banner above?

I can’t find any post-imprisonment media stories about Adolfo Martinez. He has been erased, it seems. He was 30 years old when he was imprisoned and will be 46, almost ready to retire on SSDI, when he gets out.

More recently… “UPenn student who praised ‘glorious’ Hamas terror attack later arrested for stealing Israeli flag” (New York Post):

Tara Tarawneh — a 2020 graduate of King’s Academy in Madaba, Jordan — was arrested Nov. 4 for allegedly stealing an Israeli flag from the front of a Campus Apartments house near the Ivy League campus, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported last week.

Tarawneh gave a hate-filled speech at a Philadelphia rally last month, with video of her addressing the pro-Palestinian crowd going viral, … “I remember feelings so empowered and happy, so confident that victory was near and so tangible,” she tells a crowd of the monstrous Oct. 7 attack. “I want all of you to hold that feeling in your hearts. Never let go of it. Channel it through every action you take. Bring it to the streets.”

Mx. Tarawneh could reasonably have expected an award for his/her/zir/their actions (the current gender ID of a college student today can never be assumed). A 2019 tale from NYU:

As soon as the [Israel Independence Day celebration] started, an anti-Zionist student rushed to the front of the protest line, held up the Israeli flag, lit it on fire, and threw it to the ground where it continued to burn. Adela [the Jewess] told her friends to ignore him, sing “Hatikvah” and move on.

Suddenly, a student protestor grabbed a microphone from a Jewish student, yelled “Free Palestine!” and waved his hands in the air. More protestors took the 10-foot Israeli flag, shredded it, and hung it from lamp posts and trees. Two protestors were arrested by NYPD and charged with assault, reckless endangerment, and property theft and damage.

Soon after, Adela, who was also a senator for the NYU student government, met with the administration to tell them that a line had been crossed and it was time to act.

What did NYU instead? They gave the anti-Israel hate group the President’s Service Award – the highest honor a student group can receive.

Related:

  • “Man gets 10 years for fatally stabbing Sioux City roommate” (Des Moines Register, also in the fall of 2019): 39-year-old Elmi Said was sentenced Friday. He’d been charged with second-degree murder for the Oct. 28, 2018, slaying of 40-year-old Guled Nur. … Said is also known as Abdiqadar Sharif.
  • “Iowa man in face-mask fight sentenced to 10 years in prison” (2021): Police and court records indicate Shane Michael, 42, went to the Vision 4 Less eyewear store on Merle Hay Road in Des Moines on Nov. 11 of last year. While there, Michael was wearing his face mask pulled down slightly, leaving his nose exposed.
  • “Chicago man gets 8 years in prison for robbing a bank in Sheldon, IA” (2023)
  • “Driver sentenced to 2 years probation in April crash that killed East High School student” (2022): The driver involved in a crash that killed a 14-year-old East High School student has been sentenced to two years probation. Des Moines police said Terra Flipping struck 14-year-old Ema Cardenas with her car on April 28, 2022. She drove away following the crash before and was arrested that same day.
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Immigration and rent are both at all-time highs

by philg

New York Times notes that the U.S. working class is suffering from having to pay “record rent”:

Unaffordable rents are changing low-income life, blighting the prospects of not only the poor but also growing shares of the lower middle class after decades in which rent increases have outpaced income growth.

Nearly two-thirds of households in the bottom 20 percent of incomes face “severe cost burdens,” meaning they pay more than half of their income for rent and utilities, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Among working-class renters — the 20 percent of people in the next level up the income scale — the share with severe burdens has nearly tripled in two decades to 17 percent.

What else has gone up in two decades? “In October 2023, the Foreign-Born Share Was the Highest in History” (Center for Immigration StudiesLow-immigration, Pro-immigrant):

  • In October 2023, the CPS shows that 15 percent of the U.S. population is now foreign-born — higher than any U.S. government survey or census has ever recorded.
  • The 49.5 million foreign-born residents (legal and illegal) in October 2023 is also a new record high.

I question the calculation above because it uses what is likely a flawed methodology for counting undocumented immigrants (hatefully referred to as “illegal”). I think that the 49.5 million immigrants depicted above include an estimated 12.3 million undocumented immigrants. This Yale study says that 10 years ago were were hosting approximately 22 million of the undocumented, but the error bars were substantial. Via the Yale methodology, the correct number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. would be roughly 30 million and the total number of immigrants would be close to 70 million, not 49.5 million.

We have to scroll through about 20 screens to read the entire NYT article. The reporter is described as having “written extensively about poverty, class, and immigration”. Yet neither immigration or population growth is considered in the article, even long enough to be dismissed, as a potential factor in the high rent.

Perhaps the native-born can buy instead of rent? “The Math for Buying a Home No Longer Works. These Charts Show You Why.” (Wall Street Journal, Dec 11, 2023):

Neither immigration nor population growth is mentioned in the WSJ.

What about the unhoused lifestyle, hatefully referred to by the New York Times as “homelessness”:

An annual head count, conducted in January, found the homeless population had increased by more than 70,000 people, or 12 percent. That is the single largest one-year jump since the Department of Housing and Urban Development began collecting data in 2007, and the increase affected many different segments of the population.

By the government’s count, 653,104 people in the United States were homeless in January.

“The most significant causes are the shortage of affordable homes and the high cost of housing,” said Jeff Olivet, head of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.

But some researchers argued that much of the rise stemmed from the surging numbers of migrants entering the United States, noting a sharp growth in homelessness in the most affected cities, including New York, Denver, and Chicago.

“To me, the story is the migrant crisis,” said Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has long served as an adviser to the federal government’s annual count. “Even without the migrant crisis we would have seen some increase, but certainly not to this extent.”

Homelessness grew among every group the federal government tracks. It rose among individuals and families with children. It rose among the young and the old. It rose among the chronically homeless and those entering the system for the first time.

It also rose among veterans, the group that in recent years had experienced the sharpest declines, after a significant expansion of federal aid.

I am stunned that migrants got a cameo in the NYT!

Update, December 19, from the NYT… “As Need Rises, Housing Aid Hits Lowest Level in Nearly 25 Years”:

As the safety net has expanded over the past generation, the food stamp rolls have doubled, Medicaid enrollment has tripled and payments from the earned-income tax credit have nearly quadrupled.

But one major form of aid has grown more scarce.

After decades of rising rents, housing assistance for the poorest tenants has fallen to the lowest level in nearly a quarter-century. The three main federal programs for the neediest renters — public housing, Section 8, and Housing Choice Vouchers — serve 287,000 fewer households than they did at their peak in 2004, a new analysis shows. That is a 6 percent drop, while the number of eligible households without aid grew by about a quarter, to 15 million.

The first paragraph is interesting. From the NYT’s perspective, it is great news that 2-3X as many Americans are welfare-dependent. There is, certainly, no possibility that we could run out of other people’s money.

In the past 40 years, entitlements have grown 15 times as fast as discretionary programs outside of defense, Robert Greenstein of the Brookings Institution has found. “The fact that housing aid is discretionary has really hindered its growth,” he said.

More than 19 million households qualify for rental aid by having “very low incomes”— half the local median or less — but only 4.3 million get help. (In Charleston, a very low income for a family of four is less than about $49,000.)

Loyal readers will be familiar with my inability to understand how we can support this kind of inequality. We take 19 million households, all more or less similar in terms of how poor they are and how much effort they put into working. We select 4 million of them to get free housing and tell 15 million to go pound sound (or crash at a relative’s apartment). If housing is a human right, why wouldn’t we give free houses to all 19 million? If housing is not a human right, why do we give free houses to 4 million households?

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Should New York City hire Hamas to build tunnels?

by philg

When NYC wants to build a tunnel, it costs $3.5 billion per mile in pre-Biden money. See “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth” (NYT, 2017).

Here’s a recent tweet from the IDF:

At NYC prices, the 2.5-mile tunnel network would have cost nearly $9 billion to construct and we can be pretty sure that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) did not spend anywhere near that much. This part of the video (made by Hamas) may show construction techniques:

For those who object on the grounds that Hamas and PIJ have some anti-Jewish attitudes, to judge by recent street demonstrations and domestic jihad efforts, NYC is already home to plenty of folks who want to see Israel destroyed. See, for example, How was the immigration of Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov supposed to benefit native-born Americans? and How was the immigration of Akayed Ullah supposed to benefit native-born Americans? Also, this October 8 celebration of the October 7 attacks:

Another idea for saving money and improving performance: hire Egyptians to guard the U.S. border. There are plenty of people who’d like to leave Gaza right now, I’m sure, yet the Egyptians have managed to keep them from entering Egypt via a combination of fence/wall and personnel. The U.S. has a track record of demonstrated failure in border control (hassling international airline passengers whose passports were already checked twice on departure doesn’t count, in my view). Why not replace our border patrol with Egyptian contractors and let an Egyptian company build the non-wall wall that the Biden administration is building?

Egyptians at work on their border wall:

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