I know that it was probably a spell-check error, but as someone who used to live in Denmark, swapping the two nations is an annoyingly common error that grates me.
I would really like a substack feature to allow readers to suggest corrections. And the authors could ignore them. But it would make it much easier to tell the authors about stuff like this, or minor spelling errors.
'every civilization, at every time in its history, faced major problems'. The rarest of things - an online historical perspective on our current problems.
This should be inscribed above the door of every school, university and government building in the West, to stop people thinking they're walking into a doomed institution.
I keep trying to tell people that World War II was the most destructive event in world history, and yet it is virtually impossible to find any trace of its impact 80 years later.
My motto: Whatever was built can be rebuilt. This applies to any damage from the Trump administration.
Example: After the resignation of Nixon, Congress passed laws with the goal of dismantling the imperial presidency. These laws worked pretty well for 50 years, but apparently they need strengthening.
That's true. Over here there's still the iron railing stumps and rows of Victorian terraced housing punctuated by half a dozen 1950's low-cost houses, to remind us of the War :-). Mind you, we as a nation, have been dining out on those 6 years in the 1940's, ever since.
That’s a pretty narrow parochial view of history, parochial in time and place (as in your are talking as an American not, say, somebody in Hamburg or other surviving bombed out cities) and WWII has hardly been forgotten. It’s still “the war”.
When one is writing a comment you can't drag in 5 different examples from 5 different historical eras. I was looking for traces of WWII during my several trips to Europe in the 1980s. I found shrapnel marks in buildings only in East Germany.
Of course, this was the 1980s, but on that trip, an inhabitant of Kent described how dogfights took place overhead during the Battle of Britain. The memory of the war was Even more fresh in Germany. I spent three months in Bavaria in the 1980s and I was privileged to have a two-hour conversation with a local who served as a veterinarian with the German Army on the Eastern Front.
I came to the conclusion that the war had psychologically ended for the English about 15 years previously, and for the Germans about nine months previously. However, it is now 80 years on, and 98% of the people who can remember the war are dead. So very few people reading these comments will have a vivid idea of how destructive WWII was.
That's true. It's kept alive by the media over here to some extent, and in a way that previous conflicts like, say, the Crimean War, couldn't have been (however memorable Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, might be) because it wasn't filmed. But otherwise life carries on around the few scars that are left as if nothing had ever happened.
It is interesting that the American Civil War Is currently much more salient for most Americans than WWII. This may be because the issues that provoked the American Civil War continue in American life in a way that the issues involved in WWII Have receded. The American Civil War Involved racism and differing cultures between states.
Of course, both you and I realize that the UK deserves to be immensely proud of its role in WWII, even if that past seems dead and irrelevant to most modern people.
Incidentally, the glorification of insane bravery by Tennyson led to some pretty awful ideas about how best to fight in WWI.
Like Barbara Tuchman's Distant Mirror reflecting the political concerns of the 1970's. She got into trouble with 'proper' historians but it was widely read.
In his discussion of the fall of Rome, historian Chris Wickham made a great aside re the “cultural decay” explanation: people often mention the contemporary sources decrying the state of the culture during the time of Rome’s fall, but they neglect to mention that there were writers saying the culture was doomed at pretty much every point in Roman history. Then, as now, doomerism was never not in style.
1. Radiologists also do procedures: venography, angiography and biopsies that require manipulating a needle or a catheter. AI cannot do that nor can robots acting autonomously.
2. More scans per visit is not improved productivity if it doesn’t lead to better outcomes. There is an agency problem here as there is in much medical practice: doctors are very good at creating work for themselves.
Regarding radiologists, I offer the example of the washing machine.
Washing machines are a classic example of a slowly adopted technology. We moderns struggle to understand why, but back in the day, getting your laundry clean involved a lot of manual labor either from yourself, or from a washerwoman you had to pay. The result... the well off were visibly cleaner and better mended than the poor.
So when 'clean laundry' was democratized by new tech, elites didn't want it. They poo-poo'ed the new machines, and explained that their human washerwomen MUST do a better job than a stupid machine ever could. So the poors apparently clean clothing was actually not REALLY clean, etc. And they continued to pay washerwomen for a generation or two more. Slowing machine adoption, or at least extending that career path.
We live with a tiered health care system, where elite customers can pay for human radiologist interventions (checking the AI analysis), or even mandate that such be the norm for everyone. I would argue that access to excellent healthcare is currently as class-charged a concept as clean clothes were in the 1880s.
There's a similar effect today with dishwashers where people (especially if they or their parents are reasonably recent immigrants from poorer countries) are 100% convinced that dishwashers can't wash dishes as well as humans, despite every single restaurant (in the west) they've ever eaten at using a dishwasher and they couldn't tell.
Dishwashers are not always useful except at table service restaurants. Many others do without.
As for the immigrants' perception, they are correct: dishwashers can't wash and dry dishes as well as diligent humans, that's plainly obvious. The choice about using a machine is based on caring about quality, and about available human time and diligence, which might be different for the immigrants you've encountered.
At home, where I know both the machine and the people, I can look at a glass or dish and often know which member of the family hand-washed it, or even which member of the family loaded it in the dishwasher.
It's not plainly obvious. There have been multiple studies showing you are wrong. Dishwashers get dishes cleaner.
Belke L, Maitra W, Stamminger R (2018) Global consumer study to identify the potential of water-saving in dishwashing, Energy Effic, 11, 1887–1895. https://doi.org/10.100...
-Berkholz P, Kobersky V, Stamminger R (2013). Comparative analysis of global consumer behaviour in the context of different manual dishwashing methods. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 37, 46–58. https://doi.org/10.111...
-Fuss N & Stamminger, R (2010). Manual dishwashing: how can it be optimized? International Journal of Consumer Studies, (5), 432–348. https://doi.org/10.313...
-Fuss N & Stamminger R (2012). Application of best practice tips in manual dishwashing in Germany and Spain, Int J Consum Stud, 36, 173–182. https://doi.org/10.111...
-Knowles Weaver E, Bloom CE, Feldmiller I (1956). A study of hand versus mechanical dishwashing methods. Res. Bull. 1956, 772, 1–43.
-Maitra W, Belke L, Stamminger S, Nijhuis B, Presti C (2017): Scope of improvement in water usage efficiency in manual dishwashing: a multicountry study by questionnaire survey. International Journal of Consumer Studies. https://doi.org/10.111....
-Porras GY, Keoleian GA, Lewis GM, Seeba N (2020). A guide to household manual and machine dishwashing through a life cycle perspective. Environmental Research Communications 2(2)024002: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.108...
-Schencking L, Stamminger R (2022). What science knows about our daily dishwashing routine. Tenside Surfactants Deterg. 59, 205-220. https://doi.org/10.151...
-Stamminger R, Elschenbroich A, Rummler B, Broil G (2007) Dishwashing under various consumer-relevant conditions, Hauswirtschaft und Wissenschaft, 81–88.
-Stamminger R, Schmitz A, Hook I (2018) Why consumers in Europe do not use energy efficient automatic dishwashers to clean their dishes? Energy Effic, 12, 567–583. doi.org/10.1007/s12053-018-9648-2
I'm glad I'm not Stamminger. What a dismal career.
I smell an AI generated list, which appears to miss the mark. BTW, the links are all broken.
Note that by better, I wasn't referring to sterilization, water usage, energy or time, as found in the study titles above. I mean that glasses and dishes appear clear of food and spots. Diligent humans are better at those things.
If you doubt this, consider how often humans have to wash dishes after a dishwasher fails to clean them (even after repeated attempts). This doesn't occur the other way around.
Even the highest quality equipment is no match. I've owned the whole gamut.
Furthermore, when using a dishwasher, the quality of a wash depends not just on the machine, but the users' dishwasher practices and even the particulars of the water source.
Its the people who wash their dishes to the point of complete cleanliness and then load them into the dishwasher who drive me crazy. I used to think this was an American thing, maybe due to dishwashers having been adopted earlier when they were less effective, but then I met Americans who think its a European thing. I've concluded that some families at some point had a dishwasher that didn't work, and its just become family lore that dishes have to be "rinses" with a brush and soapy water.
The other one is not using rinse aid. People don't use rinse aid and then go around declaring that all dishwashers damage glasses.
I disagree with a couple of your premises. Washing machine adoption seems pretty comparable to adoption of the telephone or air conditioning*. As memorialized by Robert Caro** the human costs of doing laundry by hand were massive. So maybe there was some level of resistance at the tippy-top but the vast majority of Americans took to it immediately.
Second the point of the radiology article is that AI basically hasn't been adopted at all. About 20% of Americans are on Medicare and 25-30% have a PPO through their employer, so around half of Americans are covered to see the majority of doctors. There's no tiny cabal of radiologists for the rich while the rest of us make due with AI slop like you're inferring.
On your first point, EVERY forecast by the ICCP has been revised upward in terms of the damages and costs of warming. And this from Bill Mckibbin today: +Very ungood news: a record increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year, up 3.5 parts per million which is the fastest one-year climb since se started taking measurements. Obviously the biggest part of that is ongoing combustion of fossil fuels—but there are also worrying signs that the natural carbon sinks in oceans and forests are beginning to buckle.
Dr Oksana Tarasova, a WMO senior scientific officer, said: “There is concern that terrestrial and ocean CO2 sinks are becoming less effective, which will increase the amount of CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, thereby accelerating global warming. Sustained and strengthened greenhouse gas monitoring is critical to understanding these loops.”
So if there is a scientific reason for your optimism, please do share.
Where is the evidence that EVERY forecast of the ICCP ( I assume you actually mean the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is the IPCC ) has been revised upwards? The scenarios used by McKibben and other alarmists cite are usually the RCP8.5/SSP5 which has been already proven to be completely off the track of reality with hugely increasing world population and reverting most electric generation to coal, none of which are happening. These scenarios haven’t been updated in 3 years at least.
Even though the CO2 concentration has increased by 3.5 PPM to 423.9 PPM last year, that hasn’t had any significant impacts as there is no decrease in crop production or hurricanes or other disasters that can be attributed to the increase in warming. McKibben named his group 350.org because he claimed if the CO2 level went above 350ppm the world would end and here we are at 423.9 and the impacts have been minimal.
Noah is obsessed with complaining about how the "left" over stresses MMGW over the economic benefits of green energy, but as far as that may be true, his is the kind of glib denialism that provokes it.
To build on your point: Fossil fuel CO2 emissions, per Our World in Data, totaled 37.8 billion tons in 2024, and the trend is still going up. Technology has the potential to solve to deliver a low-carbon future, and China in particular is making good progress with solar, wind, batteries, and EVs. But will it be fast enough to avoid devastation? Being "spared the worst" is not very comforting, if "the worst" is uninhabitability. We're experiencing losses already -- direct damage to currently small numbers from wildfires, heat waves, and tropical storms, indirect damage to larger numbers from wildfire smoke, drought. We've pretty much used up the carbon budget to remain below a 1.5 degree increase in temperature, and it's less and less likely that we'll stay below 2 degrees by 2050 unless we more quickly shift to renewables and electrify transport and home heating. The market is moving faster, but not fast enough, in large part because we don't price in the externality of dumping CO2 into the biosphere, and in part because developers building solar farms find it hard to make a profit when the daytime price for solar drops near zero. And the solar panel makers in China have competed away almost all their profits. Meanwhile every country with reserves of oil and gas wants to exploit them and quickly, for fear of missing the market -- especially new entrants like Guyana, Gabon, Mauritania, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The competition for sales should keep fossil fuel prices low enough to enable internal combustion engines to compete with EVs on total cost of ownership for a few extra years.
But that isn't the worst. At least not the worst for the mainstream dire prediction. Significant increases in natural disasters, increased weather volatility, shifting regional weather (importantly rain) patterns, rising oceans and more is pretty bad. But also is not uninhabitability, or extinction level bad. We have room to 10x death rates from adverse weather events, to have whole regions have reduced inhabitability and at high costs in money any lives ... just adapt. People will move, living standards could drop. I think technology can mitigate this, but even it it didn't dropping down to, say, 1970s levels of GDP and violence is still very livable. So is mid-ww2 levels of mass death. provided we keep birthrates up enough. Both scenarios are very bad ... but again very survivable.
> I wrote a whole post debunking the notion that globalization hollowed out the American middle class:
You're right but also somewhat wrong. When people whine about "the middle class" they're obfuscating what they mean. When they say "Entire regions once defined by prosperity — Rust Belt America, the coal fields of northern England, small-town France, eastern Germany — are now locked in decline." they're mostly correct. Specifically, the position of low-education male manual workers has gone down a lot in the social order. And those workers were the economic backbone of large regions of the advanced countries. Noah is quoting statistics of the society as a whole, which won't reveal that certain demographics are moving downward in the wage distribution and they're not happy about it (while others are moving up). But it's clear that unlike the economic development in the US in the mid-1900s, currently it is not a story of everybody moving upward more or less in lockstep.
Also the "locked in decline" rhetoric is not wholly wrong. There's a significant cost to setting up a new business in an area that is in economic decline -- everybody there sees you as a taxpayer from which money is to be redistributed to restore everybody else's prosperity. You want to set up your growth industry in a place where the economy is on the upswing already. ... This is the exact opposite of the simple labor-market model, where you would want to put a business where labor is cheapest.
There's also a lesson for the future: If the mechanization of almost all brute labor devalued the largely male workers whose main asset was brute strength, the mechanization of at least some types of verbal labor could have major effects on the economy and the class structure (that is, which sorts of people get the bulk of the goodies).
> "Educated people tend to think that the only kind of smarts worth having is the kind they possess -- superior powers of articulation combined with deep stores of knowledge." -- Bret Stephens
> "Phrased differently, since AI is a world-beating producer of bullshit, it will simply saturate the world with bullshit and all those who did bullshitting for a living will find themselves out of work and out of social position. AI might not be an existential threat to humanity but it is definitely an existential threat to the bullshitting class." -- "The bane of the bullshitting class" from "Wood From Eden"
Is it possible that the trend is older Nobel laureates is the increased nature of winner-take-all grant processes plus general gerontocracy, wherein the older established labs with older established PIs just get more money and have more grad students at their disposal to direct? By all accounts it is extremely hard for new PI's to establish themselves. The vibe is that "back in the day a newly minted PhD with grit and gusto could get cracking on good research, but now both because of societal factors (grants and reputation) and scientific ones (the scientific horizon is further out and takes longer to reach) that's just not true anymore.
Just a bit pedantic, but you mentioned that Denmark is nationalizing a Chinese owned semiconductor company; while in the FT post that you cited, and the paragraph that you quote, all mentioned that the Dutch government conducted the nationalization.
At least you should double check what you cited for better credibility of your writing though.
Radiology is a really interesting specialty. A few years ago, I joined a new firm that primarily does car accident defense. The first expert we hire in any case is a radiologist, which was a surprise to me. On one of the first cases I handled, I didn't know this and we were about to go to trial without one. I freaked out when I was informed of the oversight, but my boss said just call our regular guy, and we had all the imaging reviewed within a day or two, and that was with having to mail CDs.
Then, a few weeks ago, I broke my collarbone. I'm a cycling enthusiast, and I have crashed many times (including when I broke the collarbone), so I've had probably quadruple the number of imaging studies compared to the average person, including three head CTs just this year (I'm fine). Before I got into cycling, around when I joined the new firm, I was pretty sedentary but very healthy, so I'd had little contact with medicine for the previous ten years. I recalled that getting x-rays and imaging was a pain and you had to be concerned about radiation.
Not so any longer, it seems. If I need or even want x-rays (for example, to see if I can be cleared to go back to doing jumps on my bike), I just email my doctor or call an advice line and they're ordered, then I can walk in and get it done in about half an hour door to door, and then the results show up on my phone later that evening. When I get the x-rays, I don't need to wear any bulky vests and the tech barely even bothers to leave the room except that the controls are behind a little glass partition, as x-ray imagers use less and less radiation every year.
Part of this is that Kaiser is simply the best healthcare provider in the world (doubly so if you're healthy), but a lot of it is the straightforward muscle of technological innovation, and it's DEFINITELY true in my case at least that these advances have led mechanistically to greater utilization. Personally, I'm looking forward to getting an instant AI read on my phone, and then being able to request a radiologist read and/or an opinion from the ortho or my PCP in the app, for example.
So the picture is a Northern European degrowther woman lecturing you on all the evils you did that will not stop climate change, inequality, and supposed decline of infrastructure? That's funny :D
Not really related to anything but how did "the Anglosphere" come to mean "no, I don't mean India, I know they speak English there but it doesn't count. Nigeria and the Phillipines? Look this is getting awkward without making me seem like I'm racist. Kenya? Pls stop. South Africa? sigh. Malaysia? Yeah not them either. New Zealand? Come on in!"
I think it always meant to be "Britain and its white settler colonies + Ireland", since even though Nigeria speaks English and inherits institutions from the British, they did not inherit all British institutions and policies though.
(No political leaders behind that project ever thought to make India a full member, since that would mean the Empire would be ruled from Delhi! Also African colonies, apart from South Africa, would not count).
Personal view: I believe that in a timeline that South Africa was not formed (and Cape Colony remained independent), then such a Cape Republic could be a full member of the Anglosphere.
Not sure dutchland is in Denmark. But I really like the radiologist Ai analysis. And doesn’t this apply to so many areas of work. Which raises the question how will the investment in Ai ever get paid back at any reasonable margin.
A pretty similar paradigm happens with Amazon as well: the new delivery system of Amazon ended up needing more people to deliver goods to users comparing to supermarkets/traditional stores.
Noah, you should check out https://global-tipping-points.org/. On climate, there are some highly non-linear tipping points with potential for huge positive feedbacks in CO2 release. Most worrying is CO2 that will be released by permafrost melting. Estimates of the potential release are growing as we learn more. All of our climate tech so far may not be enough to prevent these tipping points from happening. On the positive side, the Global Tipping Points report does discuss several positive tipping points, particularly in PV energy.
Europe doesn’t need to stand up to China. American economists who trumpeted globalisation for decades now want Europe to impose tariffs on a country that is where it is because American ideologies on free trade (and most favoured nation status) put it there. In fact China doesn’t threaten any western country, it may threaten American hegemony but that’s clearly not the same thing.
We are only a few weeks away from the tariff bullying of Europe by the US presidential incumbent, along with threats to NATO. Chinese “support” for Russia appears on this blog only, and is backed away from just as quickly.
Better for Europe, if it has to take sides, to side with China. Or take no sides.
Editorial note: Netherlands not Denmark (Dutch not Dane)
I know that it was probably a spell-check error, but as someone who used to live in Denmark, swapping the two nations is an annoyingly common error that grates me.
My first reaction was: “Oh, Noah, not you too!”
: )
I would really like a substack feature to allow readers to suggest corrections. And the authors could ignore them. But it would make it much easier to tell the authors about stuff like this, or minor spelling errors.
Not that it's a big deal, but It's simpler than ever to avoid that kinda mistake with AI.
'every civilization, at every time in its history, faced major problems'. The rarest of things - an online historical perspective on our current problems.
This should be inscribed above the door of every school, university and government building in the West, to stop people thinking they're walking into a doomed institution.
Jon, as a professional historian, 100% agreement.
I keep trying to tell people that World War II was the most destructive event in world history, and yet it is virtually impossible to find any trace of its impact 80 years later.
My motto: Whatever was built can be rebuilt. This applies to any damage from the Trump administration.
Example: After the resignation of Nixon, Congress passed laws with the goal of dismantling the imperial presidency. These laws worked pretty well for 50 years, but apparently they need strengthening.
That's true. Over here there's still the iron railing stumps and rows of Victorian terraced housing punctuated by half a dozen 1950's low-cost houses, to remind us of the War :-). Mind you, we as a nation, have been dining out on those 6 years in the 1940's, ever since.
That’s a pretty narrow parochial view of history, parochial in time and place (as in your are talking as an American not, say, somebody in Hamburg or other surviving bombed out cities) and WWII has hardly been forgotten. It’s still “the war”.
When one is writing a comment you can't drag in 5 different examples from 5 different historical eras. I was looking for traces of WWII during my several trips to Europe in the 1980s. I found shrapnel marks in buildings only in East Germany.
Of course, this was the 1980s, but on that trip, an inhabitant of Kent described how dogfights took place overhead during the Battle of Britain. The memory of the war was Even more fresh in Germany. I spent three months in Bavaria in the 1980s and I was privileged to have a two-hour conversation with a local who served as a veterinarian with the German Army on the Eastern Front.
I came to the conclusion that the war had psychologically ended for the English about 15 years previously, and for the Germans about nine months previously. However, it is now 80 years on, and 98% of the people who can remember the war are dead. So very few people reading these comments will have a vivid idea of how destructive WWII was.
That's true. It's kept alive by the media over here to some extent, and in a way that previous conflicts like, say, the Crimean War, couldn't have been (however memorable Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, might be) because it wasn't filmed. But otherwise life carries on around the few scars that are left as if nothing had ever happened.
It is interesting that the American Civil War Is currently much more salient for most Americans than WWII. This may be because the issues that provoked the American Civil War continue in American life in a way that the issues involved in WWII Have receded. The American Civil War Involved racism and differing cultures between states.
Of course, both you and I realize that the UK deserves to be immensely proud of its role in WWII, even if that past seems dead and irrelevant to most modern people.
Incidentally, the glorification of insane bravery by Tennyson led to some pretty awful ideas about how best to fight in WWI.
Like Barbara Tuchman's Distant Mirror reflecting the political concerns of the 1970's. She got into trouble with 'proper' historians but it was widely read.
The Victorians were insane, period. :-)
Wait, so it’s *not* dulce et decorum?
Yes... Crisisism where every daily problem is "a Crisis"...
True. The news media are under so much pressure to grab readers attention, they feel they have to feed the problem.
In his discussion of the fall of Rome, historian Chris Wickham made a great aside re the “cultural decay” explanation: people often mention the contemporary sources decrying the state of the culture during the time of Rome’s fall, but they neglect to mention that there were writers saying the culture was doomed at pretty much every point in Roman history. Then, as now, doomerism was never not in style.
Two points about radiology:
1. Radiologists also do procedures: venography, angiography and biopsies that require manipulating a needle or a catheter. AI cannot do that nor can robots acting autonomously.
2. More scans per visit is not improved productivity if it doesn’t lead to better outcomes. There is an agency problem here as there is in much medical practice: doctors are very good at creating work for themselves.
Regarding radiologists, I offer the example of the washing machine.
Washing machines are a classic example of a slowly adopted technology. We moderns struggle to understand why, but back in the day, getting your laundry clean involved a lot of manual labor either from yourself, or from a washerwoman you had to pay. The result... the well off were visibly cleaner and better mended than the poor.
So when 'clean laundry' was democratized by new tech, elites didn't want it. They poo-poo'ed the new machines, and explained that their human washerwomen MUST do a better job than a stupid machine ever could. So the poors apparently clean clothing was actually not REALLY clean, etc. And they continued to pay washerwomen for a generation or two more. Slowing machine adoption, or at least extending that career path.
We live with a tiered health care system, where elite customers can pay for human radiologist interventions (checking the AI analysis), or even mandate that such be the norm for everyone. I would argue that access to excellent healthcare is currently as class-charged a concept as clean clothes were in the 1880s.
There's a similar effect today with dishwashers where people (especially if they or their parents are reasonably recent immigrants from poorer countries) are 100% convinced that dishwashers can't wash dishes as well as humans, despite every single restaurant (in the west) they've ever eaten at using a dishwasher and they couldn't tell.
Dishwashers are not always useful except at table service restaurants. Many others do without.
As for the immigrants' perception, they are correct: dishwashers can't wash and dry dishes as well as diligent humans, that's plainly obvious. The choice about using a machine is based on caring about quality, and about available human time and diligence, which might be different for the immigrants you've encountered.
At home, where I know both the machine and the people, I can look at a glass or dish and often know which member of the family hand-washed it, or even which member of the family loaded it in the dishwasher.
It's not plainly obvious. There have been multiple studies showing you are wrong. Dishwashers get dishes cleaner.
Belke L, Maitra W, Stamminger R (2018) Global consumer study to identify the potential of water-saving in dishwashing, Energy Effic, 11, 1887–1895. https://doi.org/10.100...
-Berkholz P, Kobersky V, Stamminger R (2013). Comparative analysis of global consumer behaviour in the context of different manual dishwashing methods. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 37, 46–58. https://doi.org/10.111...
-Fuss N & Stamminger, R (2010). Manual dishwashing: how can it be optimized? International Journal of Consumer Studies, (5), 432–348. https://doi.org/10.313...
-Fuss N & Stamminger R (2012). Application of best practice tips in manual dishwashing in Germany and Spain, Int J Consum Stud, 36, 173–182. https://doi.org/10.111...
-Knowles Weaver E, Bloom CE, Feldmiller I (1956). A study of hand versus mechanical dishwashing methods. Res. Bull. 1956, 772, 1–43.
-Maitra W, Belke L, Stamminger S, Nijhuis B, Presti C (2017): Scope of improvement in water usage efficiency in manual dishwashing: a multicountry study by questionnaire survey. International Journal of Consumer Studies. https://doi.org/10.111....
-Porras GY, Keoleian GA, Lewis GM, Seeba N (2020). A guide to household manual and machine dishwashing through a life cycle perspective. Environmental Research Communications 2(2)024002: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.108...
-Schencking L, Stamminger R (2022). What science knows about our daily dishwashing routine. Tenside Surfactants Deterg. 59, 205-220. https://doi.org/10.151...
-Stamminger R, Elschenbroich A, Rummler B, Broil G (2007) Dishwashing under various consumer-relevant conditions, Hauswirtschaft und Wissenschaft, 81–88.
-Stamminger R, Schmitz A, Hook I (2018) Why consumers in Europe do not use energy efficient automatic dishwashers to clean their dishes? Energy Effic, 12, 567–583. doi.org/10.1007/s12053-018-9648-2
I'm glad I'm not Stamminger. What a dismal career.
I smell an AI generated list, which appears to miss the mark. BTW, the links are all broken.
Note that by better, I wasn't referring to sterilization, water usage, energy or time, as found in the study titles above. I mean that glasses and dishes appear clear of food and spots. Diligent humans are better at those things.
If you doubt this, consider how often humans have to wash dishes after a dishwasher fails to clean them (even after repeated attempts). This doesn't occur the other way around.
I can't believe we're even debating this.
You need to buy better equipment.
No true Scotsman eh?
Even the highest quality equipment is no match. I've owned the whole gamut.
Furthermore, when using a dishwasher, the quality of a wash depends not just on the machine, but the users' dishwasher practices and even the particulars of the water source.
Its the people who wash their dishes to the point of complete cleanliness and then load them into the dishwasher who drive me crazy. I used to think this was an American thing, maybe due to dishwashers having been adopted earlier when they were less effective, but then I met Americans who think its a European thing. I've concluded that some families at some point had a dishwasher that didn't work, and its just become family lore that dishes have to be "rinses" with a brush and soapy water.
The other one is not using rinse aid. People don't use rinse aid and then go around declaring that all dishwashers damage glasses.
I disagree with a couple of your premises. Washing machine adoption seems pretty comparable to adoption of the telephone or air conditioning*. As memorialized by Robert Caro** the human costs of doing laundry by hand were massive. So maybe there was some level of resistance at the tippy-top but the vast majority of Americans took to it immediately.
Second the point of the radiology article is that AI basically hasn't been adopted at all. About 20% of Americans are on Medicare and 25-30% have a PPO through their employer, so around half of Americans are covered to see the majority of doctors. There's no tiny cabal of radiologists for the rich while the rest of us make due with AI slop like you're inferring.
*https://humanprogress.org/trends/cost-and-adoption-of-new-technologies/
**You know, I swore I would never be bent like my mother, and then I got married, and the first time I had to do the wash I knew I was going to look exactly like her by the time I was middle-aged.” https://www.robertcaro.org/post/robert-caro-on-the-art-of-biography
Those passages are one of the reasons why Caro biographies are so in a class of their own.
On your first point, EVERY forecast by the ICCP has been revised upward in terms of the damages and costs of warming. And this from Bill Mckibbin today: +Very ungood news: a record increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year, up 3.5 parts per million which is the fastest one-year climb since se started taking measurements. Obviously the biggest part of that is ongoing combustion of fossil fuels—but there are also worrying signs that the natural carbon sinks in oceans and forests are beginning to buckle.
Dr Oksana Tarasova, a WMO senior scientific officer, said: “There is concern that terrestrial and ocean CO2 sinks are becoming less effective, which will increase the amount of CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, thereby accelerating global warming. Sustained and strengthened greenhouse gas monitoring is critical to understanding these loops.”
So if there is a scientific reason for your optimism, please do share.
Where is the evidence that EVERY forecast of the ICCP ( I assume you actually mean the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is the IPCC ) has been revised upwards? The scenarios used by McKibben and other alarmists cite are usually the RCP8.5/SSP5 which has been already proven to be completely off the track of reality with hugely increasing world population and reverting most electric generation to coal, none of which are happening. These scenarios haven’t been updated in 3 years at least.
Even though the CO2 concentration has increased by 3.5 PPM to 423.9 PPM last year, that hasn’t had any significant impacts as there is no decrease in crop production or hurricanes or other disasters that can be attributed to the increase in warming. McKibben named his group 350.org because he claimed if the CO2 level went above 350ppm the world would end and here we are at 423.9 and the impacts have been minimal.
This was an excellent summary of the actual consensus science when it comes to extreme weather and a heating climate. In case you missed it.
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/24-questions-on-extreme-weather-disasters
This should be widely shared to offset the exaggerated rhetoric around extreme weather.
Same page and link, no?
Noah is obsessed with complaining about how the "left" over stresses MMGW over the economic benefits of green energy, but as far as that may be true, his is the kind of glib denialism that provokes it.
To build on your point: Fossil fuel CO2 emissions, per Our World in Data, totaled 37.8 billion tons in 2024, and the trend is still going up. Technology has the potential to solve to deliver a low-carbon future, and China in particular is making good progress with solar, wind, batteries, and EVs. But will it be fast enough to avoid devastation? Being "spared the worst" is not very comforting, if "the worst" is uninhabitability. We're experiencing losses already -- direct damage to currently small numbers from wildfires, heat waves, and tropical storms, indirect damage to larger numbers from wildfire smoke, drought. We've pretty much used up the carbon budget to remain below a 1.5 degree increase in temperature, and it's less and less likely that we'll stay below 2 degrees by 2050 unless we more quickly shift to renewables and electrify transport and home heating. The market is moving faster, but not fast enough, in large part because we don't price in the externality of dumping CO2 into the biosphere, and in part because developers building solar farms find it hard to make a profit when the daytime price for solar drops near zero. And the solar panel makers in China have competed away almost all their profits. Meanwhile every country with reserves of oil and gas wants to exploit them and quickly, for fear of missing the market -- especially new entrants like Guyana, Gabon, Mauritania, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The competition for sales should keep fossil fuel prices low enough to enable internal combustion engines to compete with EVs on total cost of ownership for a few extra years.
> if "the worst" is uninhabitability
But that isn't the worst. At least not the worst for the mainstream dire prediction. Significant increases in natural disasters, increased weather volatility, shifting regional weather (importantly rain) patterns, rising oceans and more is pretty bad. But also is not uninhabitability, or extinction level bad. We have room to 10x death rates from adverse weather events, to have whole regions have reduced inhabitability and at high costs in money any lives ... just adapt. People will move, living standards could drop. I think technology can mitigate this, but even it it didn't dropping down to, say, 1970s levels of GDP and violence is still very livable. So is mid-ww2 levels of mass death. provided we keep birthrates up enough. Both scenarios are very bad ... but again very survivable.
China, india and other developing countries are not going to tank their economy due to some potential forecasts for global warming
Neither should the united states or europe
The only solution is technological is to make renewable energy super cheap
> I wrote a whole post debunking the notion that globalization hollowed out the American middle class:
You're right but also somewhat wrong. When people whine about "the middle class" they're obfuscating what they mean. When they say "Entire regions once defined by prosperity — Rust Belt America, the coal fields of northern England, small-town France, eastern Germany — are now locked in decline." they're mostly correct. Specifically, the position of low-education male manual workers has gone down a lot in the social order. And those workers were the economic backbone of large regions of the advanced countries. Noah is quoting statistics of the society as a whole, which won't reveal that certain demographics are moving downward in the wage distribution and they're not happy about it (while others are moving up). But it's clear that unlike the economic development in the US in the mid-1900s, currently it is not a story of everybody moving upward more or less in lockstep.
Also the "locked in decline" rhetoric is not wholly wrong. There's a significant cost to setting up a new business in an area that is in economic decline -- everybody there sees you as a taxpayer from which money is to be redistributed to restore everybody else's prosperity. You want to set up your growth industry in a place where the economy is on the upswing already. ... This is the exact opposite of the simple labor-market model, where you would want to put a business where labor is cheapest.
There's also a lesson for the future: If the mechanization of almost all brute labor devalued the largely male workers whose main asset was brute strength, the mechanization of at least some types of verbal labor could have major effects on the economy and the class structure (that is, which sorts of people get the bulk of the goodies).
> "Educated people tend to think that the only kind of smarts worth having is the kind they possess -- superior powers of articulation combined with deep stores of knowledge." -- Bret Stephens
> "Phrased differently, since AI is a world-beating producer of bullshit, it will simply saturate the world with bullshit and all those who did bullshitting for a living will find themselves out of work and out of social position. AI might not be an existential threat to humanity but it is definitely an existential threat to the bullshitting class." -- "The bane of the bullshitting class" from "Wood From Eden"
You telling people they’re wrong about stuff is one of the main reasons I read your posts. You’re quite good at it!
>>instead, the EU is now insisting that Chinese investments transfer technology to local European companies
Oh how the table turns...
Haha yes good for the goose, good for the gander....
Is it possible that the trend is older Nobel laureates is the increased nature of winner-take-all grant processes plus general gerontocracy, wherein the older established labs with older established PIs just get more money and have more grad students at their disposal to direct? By all accounts it is extremely hard for new PI's to establish themselves. The vibe is that "back in the day a newly minted PhD with grit and gusto could get cracking on good research, but now both because of societal factors (grants and reputation) and scientific ones (the scientific horizon is further out and takes longer to reach) that's just not true anymore.
Just a bit pedantic, but you mentioned that Denmark is nationalizing a Chinese owned semiconductor company; while in the FT post that you cited, and the paragraph that you quote, all mentioned that the Dutch government conducted the nationalization.
At least you should double check what you cited for better credibility of your writing though.
Its a clear typing error... this is a blog, not a news magazine.
It’s not a typo. It’s a mistake.
Ohh, no a human being made a mistake
Radiology is a really interesting specialty. A few years ago, I joined a new firm that primarily does car accident defense. The first expert we hire in any case is a radiologist, which was a surprise to me. On one of the first cases I handled, I didn't know this and we were about to go to trial without one. I freaked out when I was informed of the oversight, but my boss said just call our regular guy, and we had all the imaging reviewed within a day or two, and that was with having to mail CDs.
Then, a few weeks ago, I broke my collarbone. I'm a cycling enthusiast, and I have crashed many times (including when I broke the collarbone), so I've had probably quadruple the number of imaging studies compared to the average person, including three head CTs just this year (I'm fine). Before I got into cycling, around when I joined the new firm, I was pretty sedentary but very healthy, so I'd had little contact with medicine for the previous ten years. I recalled that getting x-rays and imaging was a pain and you had to be concerned about radiation.
Not so any longer, it seems. If I need or even want x-rays (for example, to see if I can be cleared to go back to doing jumps on my bike), I just email my doctor or call an advice line and they're ordered, then I can walk in and get it done in about half an hour door to door, and then the results show up on my phone later that evening. When I get the x-rays, I don't need to wear any bulky vests and the tech barely even bothers to leave the room except that the controls are behind a little glass partition, as x-ray imagers use less and less radiation every year.
Part of this is that Kaiser is simply the best healthcare provider in the world (doubly so if you're healthy), but a lot of it is the straightforward muscle of technological innovation, and it's DEFINITELY true in my case at least that these advances have led mechanistically to greater utilization. Personally, I'm looking forward to getting an instant AI read on my phone, and then being able to request a radiologist read and/or an opinion from the ortho or my PCP in the app, for example.
So the picture is a Northern European degrowther woman lecturing you on all the evils you did that will not stop climate change, inequality, and supposed decline of infrastructure? That's funny :D
That ( here AI Ghiblified ) meme has stayed around so long because it has no rational explanation, so you can assign it any meaning you want.
Not really related to anything but how did "the Anglosphere" come to mean "no, I don't mean India, I know they speak English there but it doesn't count. Nigeria and the Phillipines? Look this is getting awkward without making me seem like I'm racist. Kenya? Pls stop. South Africa? sigh. Malaysia? Yeah not them either. New Zealand? Come on in!"
I think it always meant to be "Britain and its white settler colonies + Ireland", since even though Nigeria speaks English and inherits institutions from the British, they did not inherit all British institutions and policies though.
A similar way to look at the Anglosphere is this idea from late 19th century to unify the British Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Federation
(No political leaders behind that project ever thought to make India a full member, since that would mean the Empire would be ruled from Delhi! Also African colonies, apart from South Africa, would not count).
Personal view: I believe that in a timeline that South Africa was not formed (and Cape Colony remained independent), then such a Cape Republic could be a full member of the Anglosphere.
Agreed, except I think many would exclude Ireland. Anglo is typically a synonym for English or British ancestry.
Also explains the exclusion of the Bahamas, Jamaica and Belize
Not sure dutchland is in Denmark. But I really like the radiologist Ai analysis. And doesn’t this apply to so many areas of work. Which raises the question how will the investment in Ai ever get paid back at any reasonable margin.
A pretty similar paradigm happens with Amazon as well: the new delivery system of Amazon ended up needing more people to deliver goods to users comparing to supermarkets/traditional stores.
This phenomenon (Jevons' paradox) is one reason why there are arguments that technologies in this century would not solve the problems of aging population though: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201473576-the-age-of-decay
And such a massive build out of data centres. 💣
Noah, you should check out https://global-tipping-points.org/. On climate, there are some highly non-linear tipping points with potential for huge positive feedbacks in CO2 release. Most worrying is CO2 that will be released by permafrost melting. Estimates of the potential release are growing as we learn more. All of our climate tech so far may not be enough to prevent these tipping points from happening. On the positive side, the Global Tipping Points report does discuss several positive tipping points, particularly in PV energy.
Europe doesn’t need to stand up to China. American economists who trumpeted globalisation for decades now want Europe to impose tariffs on a country that is where it is because American ideologies on free trade (and most favoured nation status) put it there. In fact China doesn’t threaten any western country, it may threaten American hegemony but that’s clearly not the same thing.
We are only a few weeks away from the tariff bullying of Europe by the US presidential incumbent, along with threats to NATO. Chinese “support” for Russia appears on this blog only, and is backed away from just as quickly.
Better for Europe, if it has to take sides, to side with China. Or take no sides.