Any criminologist will tell you that criminals as a group are also highly deviant in ways that are not criminal. They have very high rates of accidental injury, alcoholism, nicotine addiction, and involvement in automobile collisions. They have poor impulse control. They have high time preference (that is, they find it difficult to defer gratification or regulate their own behavior in light of distant future consequences). And they’re stupid, well below the whole-population average in IQ or whatever other measure of reasoning capacity you apply. I’m going to revive a term from early criminology and refer to these dysfunctional deviants as “jukes”.
One clue to the long-term fall in crime rates may be that most of the juke traits I’ve just described are heritable. Note that this is not exactly the same thing as genetically transmitted; children may to a significant extent acquire them from their families by imitation and learning.
The long-term fall in crime rates suggest that something may have been disrupting the generational transmission of traits associated with criminal deviance. Are there plausible candidates for that something? Are there selective pressures operating against jukeness that have become more pressing since the 1960s?
I think I can name three: ready availability of intoxicants, contraception, and automobiles.
Once I got this far in my thinking I realized that the authors of Freakonomics got there before me on one of these; they argued for a strong forward influence from availability of abortion to decreased crime rates two decades later. And yes, I know that a couple of conservative economists (Steve Sailer and John Lott) think they’ve found fatal flaws in the Levitt/Dubner argument; I’ve read the debate and I think Levitt/Dubner have done an effective job of defending their insight.
But I’m arguing a more general case that subsumes Levitt/Dubner. That is, that modern life makes juke traits more dangerous to reproductive success than they used to be. Automobiles are a good example. Before they became ubiquitous, most people didn’t own anything that they used every single day and that so often rewarded a moment’s inattention with injury or death.
Ready availability of cheap booze and powerful drugs means people with addictive personalities can kill themselves faster. Easy access to contraception and abortion means impulse fucks are less likely to actually produce offspring. More generally, as people gain more control over their lives and faster ways to screw up, the selective consequences from bad judgment and the selective premium on good judgment both increase.
Eric S. Raymond, “Beyond root causes”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-01-12.
March 4, 2021
QotD: Accounting for the long-term fall in the crime rate
February 27, 2021
QotD: What the instructions in Haynes manuals really mean
Translation: Will be corroded into place … Clamp with adjustable spanner then beat repeatedly with a hammer.Haynes: This is a snug fit.
Translation: You will skin your knuckles! … Clamp with adjustable spanner then beat repeatedly with hammer.Haynes: This is a tight fit.
Translation: Not a hope in hell matey! … Clamp with adjustable spanner then beat repeatedly with hammer.Haynes: As described in Chapter 7 …
Translation: That’ll teach you not to read through before you start, now you are looking at scary photos of the inside of a gearbox.Haynes: Pry …
Translation: Hammer a screwdriver into …Haynes: Undo …
Translation: Go buy a tin of WD40 (industrial size).Haynes: Ease …
Translation: Apply superhuman strength to …Haynes: Retain tiny spring …
Translation: “Crikey what was that, it nearly had my eye out”!Haynes: Press and rotate to remove bulb …
Translation: OK — that’s the glass bit off, now fetch some good pliers to dig out the bayonet part and remaining glass shards.Do it by the book — the real meaning of Haynes instructions.
February 23, 2021
The Corgi Toys Story
Little Car
Published 4 Feb 2020Corgi Toys is the name of a range of die-cast toy vehicles produced by Mettoy Playcraft Ltd. in the United Kingdom.
The script for this video comes from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corgi_Toys
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January 30, 2021
Toyota’s Invincible Truck
Big Car
Published 1 Nov 2020Toyota’s best-selling vehicle is the long-running Toyota Corolla, but second is Toyota’s resilient pickup the Hilux that’s been sold for over 50 years. No matter where you are in the world, you’ll likely find one moving up to a ton of cargo down a dusty lane. In the process it’s turned into a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde vehicle. On the one hand it’s the basic indestructible commercial vehicle that thousands of businesses rely on every day. On the other it’s become a well-specced weekend leisure vehicle. And in some cases it’s a bit of both! So why did this unassuming vehicle get a place of honour at the Top Gear studio, and what other successful vehicles have been born out of this long-running pickup?
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January 19, 2021
Milton Friedman’s “Shareholder Doctrine” is alive and well
Satish Bapanapalli on why Friedman’s doctrine helps to explain why auto manufacturers spend so much money to crash-test their vehicles:
Ford Focus versus Ford Explorer crash test IIHS by Brady Holt is licensed under CC BY 3.0
Of all of Friedman’s great ideas, the Shareholder Doctrine is perhaps the most misunderstood by academics, in large part because many left-leaning intellectuals use the good old straw man argument to misleadingly caricature the doctrine as a “profit-at-all-cost system regardless of human toll.”
Case in point, the latest sermon by some reputed academics published in Fortune magazine: “50 years later, Milton Friedman’s shareholder doctrine is dead.”
This one has all the usual tropes, including the claim that “Friedman … urged business to use its muscle to reduce the effectiveness of unions, blunt environmental and consumer protection measures, and defang antitrust law. He sought to reduce consideration of human concerns [such as] treat[ing] workers, consumers, and society fairly.”
Friedman said no such things. Read it for yourselves. Friedman’s primary argument was that it is not the job of the officers of a corporation (corporate executives) to fight for social causes. The officers must only act in accordance with the shareholder’s wishes, “which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”
Of course, in some cases, the shareholders may themselves encourage charitable spending and other corporate policies and activities deemed “socially responsible.” In which case, executives are tasked with finding the best ways to fulfill those objectives. In his article, Friedman clearly demonstrates why this is a logically precise position.
The scolds, who authored the Fortune article, put forth an alternative. Their “three pillars” proposal advocates for laws to be imposed on corporations with vague and fuzzy objectives (note the italicized words) such as “responsible corporate citizen[ship]”, “treating workers … fairly“, “avoiding externalities, such as carbon emissions, that cause unreasonable or disproportionate harm to others”, and corporations should make profits by “benefiting others.” To rub foolishness on the vagueness, the proposal calls for putting the onus on the corporations to measure and demonstrate progress on these fuzzy objectives! To put it in Friedman’s own words, such proposals “are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor.”
January 8, 2021
Renault’s Backwards Car
Big Car
Published 12 Oct 2020Renault’s Project 900 is certainly an odd-looking car, but it’s also a car designed to break new ground. It used innovative new materials and gave class-leading visibility to try to leapfrog the competition. It also seems they were trying to beat their competition in the “weird” category as well, which given they were up against Citroën was no mean feat! So, what happened to Renault’s backwards car, and what echoes of this strange but innovative design are there in today’s cars?
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December 31, 2020
The limiting factor that holds back the green dream of electric cars everywhere
I’m not actually against the spread of electric vehicles — where appropriate — but we’re a long way technically speaking from an all-electric future on the roads. Alongside the vast increase in our electric generation and distribution infrastructure such a change would require, there’s also the practical limitation of what is currently possible in battery technology, and hoped-for improvements will require significant breakthroughs which seem more than just a step beyond our current capabilities:
Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK
“There are liars, damned liars, and battery guys” – or some variation thereof – is an aphorism commonly attributed to US electro-whizz Thomas Edison.
Edison’s anecdotal frustrations remain valid today because scarcely a month goes by without a promised battery revolution, and scarcely a month goes by without that revolution arriving.
In October, for example, The Register encountered Jagdeep Singh, CEO of QuantumScape, a battery startup that boasted a new type of battery that could double the range of electric vehicles, charge in 15 minutes, and is safer than the lithium-ion that dominates the rechargeable market.
“Ten years ago, we embarked on an ambitious goal that most thought was impossible,” Singh said in a canned statement. “Through tireless work, we have developed a new battery technology that is unlike anything else in the world.”
Singh might disprove Edison’s aphorism and deliver the better batteries the world will so clearly appreciate. But to do so he’ll have to buck a 30-year trend that has seen lithium-ion reign supreme.
Why has the industry stalled? The short answer is that chemistry hasn’t found a way to build a better battery.
“The basic concept of what a battery is hasn’t shifted since the 18th century,” says Professor Thomas Maschmeyer, a chemist at the University of Sydney and founding chairman of Gelion Technology, a battery developer. All batteries, Maschmeyer explains, consist of three main building blocks: a positive electrode, called a cathode; a negative electrode, called an anode; and an electrolyte that acts as a catalyst between the two sides. “These three elements cannot change. So, if you want a breakthrough, it must come from a fundamental change in the chemistry,” Maschmeyer says.
Better living through chemistry
Battery boffins have proposed a periodic table’s worth of alternative compounds that could surpass lithium-ion batteries.These largely fall into two categories. First, batteries that are trying to surpass the energy densities that lithium offers, such as solid-state batteries, lithium-sulphur, and lithium-air. The other is batteries comprised of more abundant materials such as sodium-ion batteries, aluminium-ion, and magnesium-ion batteries.
But changing the chemistry of batteries is easier said than done, says Professor Jacek Jasieniak, a professor of material sciences and engineering at Monash University. He compares changing one element in a battery to changing a chemical in a pharmaceutical. “Often solving one problem exacerbates another,” he says.
December 26, 2020
The Matchbox Car Story
Little Car
Published 27 Jan 2020Matchbox is a popular British toy brand which was introduced by Lesney Products in 1953, and is now owned by Mattel, Inc. The brand was given its name because the original die-cast Matchbox toys were sold in boxes similar to those in which matches were sold. The brand grew to encompass a broad range of toys, including larger scale die-cast models, plastic model kits, and action figures.
During the 1980s, Matchbox began to switch to the more conventional plastic and cardboard “blister packs” that were used by other die-cast toy brands such as Hot Wheels. The box style packaging was re-introduced for the collectors’ market in recent years, particularly with the release of the “35th Anniversary of Superfast” series in 2004.
The script for this video comes from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbo…
If you find issues with the content, I encourage you to update the Wikipedia article, so everyone can benefit from your knowledge.
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#matchboxcars
December 1, 2020
QotD: Elon Musk as a real life Delos D. Harriman
The shock of recognition will, I promise, flip your lid. The story is, inarguably, Musk’s playbook. Its protagonist, the idealistic business tycoon D.D. Harriman, is what Musk sees when he looks in the mirror.
“The Man Who Sold The Moon” is the story of how Harriman makes the first moon landing happen. Engineers and astronauts are present as peripheral characters, but it is a business romance. Harriman is a sophisticated sort of “Mary Sue” — an older chap whose backstory encompasses the youthful interests of the creators of classic pulp science fiction, but who is given a great fortune, built on terrestrial transport and housing, for the purposes of the story.
Our hero has no interest in the money for its own sake: in late life he liquidates to fund a moon rocket, intending to take the first trip himself, because he is convinced the future of humanity depends on extraterrestrial expansion of the human species. (Also, the guy just really loves the moon.)
The actual stuff of the story consists of the financial and promotional chicanery that Harriman uses to leverage his personal investment. Harriman uses sharp dealing with governments, broadcasters, political groups: he plants fake news about diamonds on the moon to blackmail (a disguised version of) the de Beers cartel, and terrorizes companies with the threat of using the moon to advertise for competitors. He is, in short, not afraid to use questionable means to achieve a worthwhile higher end, and does not — Musk haters take note! — recoil from actual fraud.
Heinlein didn’t provide for live broadcasting of his imagined lunar mission, which is almost an afterthought in his Great Man business yarn. TV cameras were, like computers, one of his blind spots. But if he had thought to make Harriman the owner of a fancy-sportscar manufacturing concern, and if he had thought to have Harriman put a car in solar (trans-Martian!) orbit as one of his publicity stunts, that would have been there in “The Man Who Sold The Moon.” Selling the moon is just what Musk is doing. Except the moon is a tad worked-over as a piece of intangible property, so we get Mars instead.
Colby Cosh, “Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique”, National Post, 2018-02-12.
November 5, 2020
The Range Rover Story
Big Car old account
Published 26 Feb 2019To help me continue producing great content, please consider supporting me: https://www.patreon.com/bigcar
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The Range Rover is the ultimate go-anywhere luxury SUV. It was born out of Rover’s desire to sell more cars in the USA, and its design was a complete accident. So how did a company known for saloon cars and agricultural off-roaders invent a car that created a brand-new market segment?
Much credit for this video has to go to aronline.co.uk for their excellent articles.
#RangeRoverClassic
August 19, 2020
He calls it “unintended consequences”. I disagree … these consequences are very much intended
Brad Polumbo is being far too generous to Californian politicians by saying the impending collapse of the state’s entire gig economy was not the intended result of passing “worker protection” laws that penalized success:
UBER 4U by afagen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
This Friday, Uber and Lyft are set to entirely shut down ride-sharing operations in California. The businesses’ exit from the Golden State will leave hundreds of thousands of drivers unemployed and millions of Californians chasing an expensive cab. Sadly, this was preventable.
Here’s how we got to this point.
In September of 2019, the California state legislature passed AB 5, a now-infamous bill harshly restricting independent contracting and freelancing across many industries. By requiring ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft to reclassify their drivers as full employees, the law mandated that the companies provide healthcare and benefits to all the drivers in their system and pay additional taxes.
Legislators didn’t realize the drastic implications their legislation would have; they were simply hoping to improve working conditions in the gig economy. The unintended consequences may end up destroying it instead.
Here’s why.
AB 5 went into effect in January, and now, a judge has ordered Uber and Lyft to comply with the regulation and make the drastic transformation by August 20. Since compliance is simply unaffordable, the companies are going to have to shut down operations in California.
Their entire business model was based upon independent contracting, so providing full employee benefits is prohibitively expensive. Neither Uber nor Lyft actually make a profit, and converting their workforce to full-time employees would cost approximately $3,625 per driver in California. As reported by Quartz, “that’s enough to boost Uber’s annual operating loss by more than $500 million and Lyft’s by $290 million.”
Essentially, California legislators put these companies in an impossible position. It makes perfect sense that they’d leave the state in response. It’s clear that despite the good intentions behind the ride-sharing regulation, this outcome will leave all Californians worse off.
July 15, 2020
Donald Shoup, the “Sir Isaac Newton of parking” or an “‘academic bottom-feeder’ who found a wonderful, rich ecological niche down there in the depths”
Colby Cosh, after taunting Ontarians yet again over our just-barely-past-Prohibition views on alcohol in public places, goes on to praise the work of UCLA economist Donald Shoup and his insights into the economics of parking:
“Parking meter FAIL” by kingdesmond1337 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Parking — boring topic, ain’t it? Shoup latched onto it as a young-ish man because he was a follower of Henry George (1839-1897), the intriguing “single tax” economic theorist of the 19th century. George favoured a tax on the unimproved value of land parcels as a way of socializing pure rent (the value earned from occupying a mere location) and encouraging development. It is a concept that many economists still like, although it is potentially difficult to apply at scale. The widely used concept of tax increment financing is one example of Georgism in practice.
Shoup started out trying to fit parking spaces into the Georgist picture, but the boring topic was so underexamined that he found himself having to build a general theory of parking. He quantified the relationship between parking and traffic, finding that people “cruising” for parking spots were more destructive than anyone had imagined, and he inspired waves of research into the hidden market values of parking spots, which are rarely bought or sold in their own right. He happily describes himself as an “academic bottom-feeder” who found a wonderful, rich ecological niche down there in the depths.
Shoup has spent decades travelling the world and preaching against the concept of free parking, often meeting with bad-tempered resistance. Nevertheless, he has made a lot of headway in the world of urban planning. Any economist can see immediately how bundling a “free” parking space with an apartment or a job might be inefficient. The renter or homeowner has to pay a hidden extra cost for an amenity he might not choose to use, and the commuter is being given an incentive to drive to work — an incentive whose cash value he might prefer to keep. Shoup soon found, on empirical investigation, that most urban parking lots show signs of less-than-optimum use.
[…]
Of course, too little parking is as much of an efficiency problem as too much, which is why Shoup and his followers want parking to be priced wherever possible: if more is really needed, let a market create it. (To my eyes he has at least as much Hayek in him as Henry George.) In the era of Uber and smartphones, it is a lot easier to imagine a fully Shoupista world in which prices for parking spots update in real time and drivers look up prices at or near their destination before setting out.
June 15, 2020
QotD: The very first “road trip”
By 1888, he had a working prototype, which had successfully driven down a road. The now-patented Motorwagen had no gears and could not go up hills, but it worked. One morning, Benz’s wife Bertha decided to take the car on its first extended road trip. With her two sons, she pushed the car out of the garage, until it was far enough from the house that they could get it started without waking her husband.
Bertha Benz had a destination in mind — her parents’ house in Pforzheim, about 65 miles from her home. Following roads meant for wagons, she and her sons started the drive — the first recorded road trip in a car.
There were challenges. A pipe clogged; Benz cleaned it with her hat pin. A wire shorted; she insulated it with her garter. They needed more fuel; she convinced a pharmacist to sell her an unusually large amount of the gas the car used. When the brakes started wearing out, she had them shod with leather at a cobbler. When she reached a hill, she had the boys push (along with local help).
By the end of the day, the Benzes had reached Pforzheim, where Bertha telegraphed her husband that they were safe. After a few days’ visit, they drove back home to Mannheim.
Ten years ago, Germany created an official Bertha Benz Memorial Route, marking her historic road trip. Part of Bertha Benz’s motivation was to sell potential customers on the advantage of automobiles; although it took another decade or so, people eventually bought into this transportation revolution.
Sarah Laskow, “An 1888 Road Trip Sparked Germany’s Romance With Cars”, Atlas Obscura, 2018-02-28.
June 12, 2020
Operation Barbarossa Transport Vehicles and Logistics – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 11 Jun 2020What good is your army if you can’t supply it? As the German army prepares to invade the massive lands of the Soviet Union, it faces hefty production, logistical and supply challenges.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…
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Cassowary Colorizations – https://www.flickr.com/photos/cassowa…Sources:
IWM Q 7084, Q 9333, Q 7105, Q 5238
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
Bundesarchiv
from the Noun Project: Lorry by Andrew Cameron, Train by Cipto Nur Khoir, Train by priyanka, screws by Danil Polshin, screw by ibrandify, screw by DinosoftLab
18th German Panzer Division mark, courtesy Plbcr https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Picture of the Achtung-Panzer! cover, courtesy courtesy Drrcs15 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”
Hakan Eriksson – “Epic Adventure Theme 3”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 10”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
3 hours ago
Many think of World War Two as this modern, mechanised, fast-paced, mobile Blitzkrieg war. But despite the flashy propaganda films of soldier-filled trucks and tanks charging through big open fields in Eastern Europe, the German and Soviet war effort heavily relied on horses. In fact, hundreds of thousands of horses were deployed in the German army on the forefront of Operation Barbarossa. Over 2.5 million horses would “serve” in the German army in the entirity of World War Two. Now, our entire channel relies on the hefty horsepower that our community we like to call the TimeGhost Army provides us with. Join the effort and support us on www.patreon.com/timeghosthistory or https://timeghost.tv!
Cheers, Joram
March 1, 2020
“When you’re driving a fancy car, you’re an avatar for everyone else’s bad boss, useless trust-fund roommate, or absent workaholic father”
At Car and Driver, Ezra Dyer confirms what most of us already suspected about the folks who drive expensive rides:
Excuse us if you’ve already devoured the latest volume of the Journal of Transport & Health, but the March issue contains the results of a novel experiment that tested a cherished automotive stereotype. The study is entitled “Estimated Car Cost as a Predictor of Driver Yielding Behavior for Pedestrians,” but you can think of it as, “Are BMW drivers really jerks or what?”
Okay, so it was more nuanced than that. The authors of the study sent four pedestrians — black female, black male, white female, white male — to crosswalks in the Las Vegas area to see how many drivers would yield. The overall results were pretty dismal, with a yield rate of only about 28 percent out of 461 cars. Cars yielded more often to female and white pedestrians than male and nonwhite pedestrians, although not enough either way to register as statistically significant. The only factor that consistently predicted yielding behavior was the value of the car. Notably, the study’s authors estimated the book value on all 461 cars, so the 2004 Mercedes S-class that’s worth $5000 didn’t get ascribed automatic snob appeal.
[…]
However, if you’re driving an actual exotic, something way far up the food chain, behavior changes again. Everyone yields to the Rolls or the Lambo because cars like that are so over the top, they make you interesting by association. Plus: most people don’t know anybody with a car like that; thus they can’t associate it with anyone awful. The ultra-expensive car, and the driver, are a curiosity. What’s that guy’s deal? He probably invented that fake grass that goes between the pieces of sushi. And good for him! But the guy in the 911? He can wait an extra two turns at the four-way intersection. Probably deserves it.
Our not-scientific conclusions: If you expect fellow road users to demonstrate courtesy, you should drive either a 1984 Renault Alliance or a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ roadster. But either way, and to everybody in between: Yield at the damn crosswalks.
