Random Book Review: Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

Author: Anthony Everitt
Released: 2009 
Format reviewed: Hardcover (library copy)
Pages of content: 325
Rating: 4/5

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome is a great biography of one of the "Five Good" Roman emperors. It is an engaging book which does a good job of setting the subject into his historical context without getting too bogged down in details. A work on a subject as important as Hadrian could easily grow to a thousand pages, and such a treatise should be produced at some point, but this one is perfect for the general reader.

The adult Hadrian was a complex person - intelligent, competent on a wide range of subjects, arrogant, tireless, curious, a hunter, an excellent administrator, a believer in a wide range of superstitions and mystical practices, an experienced military leader, a poet, a provincial, a homosexual, a cautious ruler, a devoted son-in-law, a grecophile, a horrible husband, and many other things. Some of these aspects stemmed from privilege. He was the son of a senator from southern Spain, and was born in the town of Italica near today's Seville, but he was Italian by descent, and spent much of his childhood in Italy near what is now Tivoli, where he eventually built a massive palace/administrative office. He had a quality education and was groomed from a young age to be a leader, if not emperor. But emperor he became at age 42, and ruled for 21 years. Much of that time was spent traveling, as he believed in being hands-on in as many of the far-flung territories as he could manage. He eventually died at Baiae near today's Naples - not at his massive "villa" - at the age of 62.

The book is not without flaws. It is written in a way that makes Hadrian's ascent seem inevitable. I suspect things were not quite as pat as portrayed, given Rome's turbulent politics. There is no doubt about Hadrian's competency, nor his ambition, but given his abrasiveness as emperor I am surprised there isn't more evidence of enemies beyond his much older brother-in-law. I also found the section about the possible reasons for the death of Hadrian's young lover Antinous in Egypt in 130 to be a bit speculatively salacious. The author does have some evidence to back up his position, and does qualify it a bit, but the section still sticks out to me. However, those flaws are minor, and everyone with an interest in Roman history should consider reading this book.

Random Book Review - Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History

Author: Robert Hughes
Released: 2011
Format reviewed: Hardcover (library copy)
Pages of content: 383
Rating: 5/5

Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History is a fantastic exploration of the Eternal City's 2777 years (and counting) of history by the Australian-born but mostly America-dwelling Robert Hughes.  It is not a comprehensive history, of course.  Any one century of Rome's history could easily fill a book, and many single years are worthy of such treatment.  But the author covers the full extent, from the mythical founding through the cultural wasteland of the Berlusconi era.

All of the expected highlights are included - Roman emperors, Catholic popes, Renaissance painters, Baroque architects, and more.  A full chapter is devoted to the transition from paganism to Christianity, and another on the emergence of Italy as a modern state.  The later also provides some insights into the enduring north-south divide that I had not encountered before.  In other chapters art and artists are the main focus.  Bernini is the subject half of a chapter, the most of any individual creator.  Elsewhere, the author runs through several schools of lesser artists in the same space.  Most of the chapters are fairly upbeat, but the final two on Fascism and on the post-WW2 era less so.  The former is for obvious reasons, but latter is less so.  The author finds modern Rome basically bereft of interesting new art of the kind he likes - painting, sculpture, and architecture.  He does mention the brief flourishing of Italian film from the '40s through the '60s, but finds the cultural output of the capital city since then to be lacking.  I don't think that should be surprising, because the vast self-aggrandizing wealth of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church are both long gone.  The notable high art production that exists in modern Italy mostly occurs in the northern cities like Milan, where the country's wealth is concentrated.

The book concludes on an even more sour note, as the author's complaints about over-tourism fill most of the epilogue.  He's not wrong, but he also doesn't have a solution for what is now a globally recognized problem.  Perhaps there is no good way to balance the personal benefits of incomes rising across the globe, which enable vastly more people to at least temporarily escape their daily drudgery through visiting world-class art, and the hard physical limits of something like the Sistine Chapel, which is only about 130 ft by 44 ft (40 by 13 French units) minus any restrictions to protect the space.  The glibertarian/neoliberal response of pricing everything to the point of diminishing returns would be effective, but would also act to attract even more rich people who are simply hoarding exclusive luxury experiences, and exclude people for whom the art or destination in question actually has significant emotional, cultural, and/or educational value.

That vexing question is certainly not a reason to skip the book, as it is wonderfully well-written.  The author effortless switches between art criticism to biographic sketches to political history, and makes all of many topics he touches seem interesting.  It is also supplemented with two sets of full-color plates, which include many of the paintings, sculptures, and buildings mentioned in the text.  I am not a historian or art critic, so as with most of my reviews I am not able to assess whether the book is factually accurate, or if this one provides good interpretations of history and art.  But it is a great read, and a good introduction to what is arguably the most important city in European history.

Random Media Review: Star Trek Picard, Season 1

Producer: Michael Chabon
Released: 2020
Format reviewed: DVD (library copy)
Episodes: 10 episodes
Rating: 1/5

As with most things cultural, I am well behind on my Star Trek viewing.  I tried watching the third season several months ago when it was first released on DVD, but I did not like the first episode at all and stopped there.  Nonetheless, for some reason, as I was browsing in the library the other day, I impulsively grabbed the first season of this show despite the many negative reviews.  It was a bad decision.

Star Trek: Picard S1 is an awful show on many levels.  The story, at its core, is a retread of themes already explored in previous series, but without anything remotely like a new perspective.  The plot as written isn't enough to fill more than two or three classic Trek episodes, but nonetheless it is stretched out over 10 episodes.  The new characters are uninteresting and underdeveloped.  The old interesting characters are made dull.  The dialogue is forced and awkward.  The emotional moments are unearned.  The rousing speeches are boring and trite.  The endless 'member-berries are infuriating.  Conventions about space travel - distances and times - which were well establish in TNG, DS9, and VOY, are discarded.  The actors are poorly directed.  The 3D ship interfaces are unnecessary and distracting.  The early pacing is overly slow, and the ending is rushed.  And on and on and on.

The only positive aspects of the show are some of the visual elements.  Unlike other recent productions, the audience is actually treated to a decent amount of color.  At times it is a little over-saturated for my taste, but at least it is there when appropriate.  Many of the sets are attractive and seem quite real due to them being well-filled with props and detailed surfacing.  And while I don't really care for the 3D interfaces that have everyone tapping in the air constantly, they do seem plausible.  The CGI also looks fairly good, even if the ships and other design elements aren't great.  But a lot of the camerawork is too close, and the number of camera changes within scenes often makes them lose cohesion.

Basically, if you are a classic Trek fan, there is no reason to watch this show.  It has characters most classic fans want more of - Picard, Data, Seven of Nine, even Riker and Troi - but all of them are given absolutely atrocious dialogue.  In the case of Seven, the character is actively regressed and degraded from what we knew of her at the end of VOY.  And Picard's development is disappointing as well.  I now see why the reviews (at least from people I trust) were so negative.  This is a bad season of television that nobody should waste time consuming.  It should be purged from the Star Trek cannon as soon as possible, and the creators blacklisted from the franchise.

2024 Fitness Results

While 2024 was horrible for the world in many ways, for my own selfish self it was a decent year in the pursuit of fitness.

(data in freedom units)	2024-01-01	2025-01-05	2025 Goal
Weight	172.6	171.4	168
Body Fat % (est.)	39%	36%	32%
Workouts per week	3	6	6
Average workouts per week	-	4.28	5.5
Miles walked per week	9	31	30
Biceps	13	13	14
Chest	39	40	40
Waist	38	37	36
Thighs	21	22	23
Calves	16	16	15
Pullups	0	0	1

While I would like the top-line weight number to have moved more, I did "recomp" to a fair degree.  The body fat percentage numbers are guesses, but I can feel and see substantial differences in several muscles, including side deltoids, trapezius, and pectorals.  At the same time, the amount of excess flesh around my torso decreased visibly.  I hope to see substantial muscle gains in my thighs and upper arms this year.

In addition, the amount of exercise I am able to do each week increased substantially, with the number of workouts doubling and the typical walking mileage tripling.  While the actual statistics are not terribly impressive compared to fit people, I have had several health issues in the past six years, including: frozen shoulder in 2019, what may have been COVID in March 2020, possible long COVID in late 2020, another frozen shoulder in 2021, and probable Lyme disease in 2022.  The frozen shoulders led to considerable loss of muscle mass in my upper body, while the long COVID and the Lyme disease led to general exhaustion for several months.  It is only in the past six months that my exercise capacity has reached an acceptable level.  Also, I'm well over 50 now.  That doesn't make getting fitter any easier.

Anyway, the general plan for this year is below.  Like any battle plan, it will change when new conditions arise.

Day/Activity	Workout	Walking
Monday	Upper, 50 minutes	6-7 miles
Tuesday	Lower, 50 minutes	4-5 miles
Wednesday	Upper, 50 minutes	4-5 miles
Thursday	Cycling intervals, 40 minutes	4-5 miles
Friday	Upper, 50 minutes	4-5 miles
Saturday	Lower, 50 minutes	4-5 miles
Sunday		optional

Bottoming Out or Approaching the Edge?

Apparently we're entering crunch time in the Dump Biden saga.  Biden, unfortunately, has caught COVID-19, taking him off the campaign trail for several days.  That has created another lever for those who are trying to get rid of Biden to use against him.  Apparently there are rumors "major donors" are now threatening to take their money away if he stays in, and as a result he is about to fold.  Of course, I am getting these rumors 3rd- or 4th- or 5th- or 27th-hand, so I have no way to verify them or what Biden's actual thinking is at the moment.  I'm just reacting to the flow of (potential) bullshit in my information streams.

Let me clear: I have thought Dump Biden has been a hit on Biden since day one.  There is not an organic groundswell among the Democratic primary voters based on the 6/28 debate to change who they selected in 50+ primaries.  This is a top-down, rich male-driven attack that does not have the country's best interest in mind,* blasted through a media that is owned by many of the same people but that also has its own parallel interests.  It's a one-way bet for both groups - either they cripple Biden and Trump wins, or they get a shitty replacement and Trump wins, or they get the exact replacement they (and not the Democratic base) want and that person wins, and is beholden to them.  Even Harris, if she survives this putsch and is the replacement candidate, may feel obligated to them (though I would like to think not), or at least very intimidated by what they just accomplished.  No matter the outcome, rich males will get tax cuts and the media will get a controversial, click-bait-ready president.  Everybody else will lose.

I very strongly prefer that Biden stays in.  I believe he can beat Trump - or at least could have beaten Trump before the hit on him was ordered.  Things have gotten murkier since the media blitz against Biden began, and the attempted assassination of Trump did not help.  Biden may be irreparably damaged among low-info swing voters who don't know much but do respond to the general tone of media coverage.  Of course, if the media decided to stop putting its thumb on one side of the scale and try the other one for a change, those swing voters would pick up different vibes.  That won't happen, especially now.  But it's also not clear to me that a replacement will suddenly surge in the polls, even with good vibes from the temporarily placated media.  For better or worse, even if the replacement is Johnny Unbeatable, some segment of the Democratic coalition will be bitter about what has transpired, rendering ole' Johnny eminently beatable.

No matter how it occurs, or why, any replacement for Biden other than Harris is absolutely unacceptable.  I will not accept "major donors" controlling the party in that way.  Yes, it may play into their hands if I don't vote for president.  And yes, I am a straight white male, albeit a poor one.  But I believe in democracy, and even if the Democratic Party's selection process is flawed, it is still little-d democratic, and should be respected.  If the Democratic Party won't stand for democracy within its own processes, what will it stand for at all?

So, we may be reaching an inflection point.  Or not.  I certainly don't know.  Whatever happens, it's going to be jarring for someone.

* I have ideas about the composition of this group which are circumstantially strong but otherwise unsubstantiated, so I won't publish them.

Blimey, Frenchies

French voters have just confounded both polling and the analysts by electing a somewhat more left-wing Assembly in the latest legislative election.  As in the 2024 UK general election, voters shifted away from the center and somewhat to the right, but due the geographic distribution of the vote, the left-leaning party (actually a coalition of parties) New Popular Front (NFP) made significant gains.  The main loser was the centrist President Emmanuel Macron, the head of Ensemble (ENS) who, in a classic case of being out of touch with the citizens, decided to call a snap election in response to the strong showing by the far-right (and possibly crypto-fascist) National Rally (RN) in European parliamentary elections.  The results from that election (in France) were not good, but EU elections are often venue where voters in various countries make a domestic protest vote, because the connection between EU governance and the average voter in EU countries is weak at best.  Nonetheless, Macron called an unnecessary election in order to basically berate French voters for making a protest vote in response to his unpopular government.  Initially, that looked like a bad idea, as RN led in the polls.  However, the outcome was a significantly different, as NFP won the most seats.

As in the UK, vote efficiency mattered significantly for the results.  French legislative elections are not strictly first-past-the-post (FPTP), but use a more complicated system (naturallement) where a candidate can win in a first round with over 50% of the vote, but a second round is held if there is no winner.  In that case, only candidates receiving 12.5% of the vote in the first round can advance.  The second round, however, is FPTP.  Voters in both France and the UK understand tactical voting, as do the parties, and in both elections the center and the left agreed to withdraw competing candidates in various seats (though it should be noted that Macron was hesitant about doing so, and his party subordinates revolted).  And in both France and the UK, the right-wing vote ended up being distributed inefficiently relative to other groupings in part because of tactical voting.

I've embedded a spreadsheet below that has the gory statistical details, but the summary is this: NFP earned a seat for approximately ever 89,000 votes, whereas RN earned a seat for every 144,000.*  Overall, right-wing parties picked up about 45% of the vote, but received just 36% of the seats.  The left got 30% and 33% respectively, while the center got 24% and 29%.  (<2% went to other assorted parties.)  Macron had previously appointed a minority government (France's governmental system is overly complicated, but that's the gist of what happened) based on the 43% of seats held by his party and his allies.  After this election, however, he will most likely (again, complicated) appoint someone from the left as Prime Minister.

As in the UK, the French should celebrate the outcome of their election, but nobody on the left or center in either state should be complacent for a moment about turning back the rising right-wing forces in their country.  The voters as a whole are moving in the wrong direction.  Macron may have slowed RN's momentum, but as of now there's no indication that will last.  The French center and French left will have to cooperate and prove the French government can work, or RN will make further gains.

* Note that this is the total of first and second round votes.  A more accurate analysis would take just the votes from the winning round, but I suspect the general point - RN had poor efficiency - would remain. 

Blimey, Limeys

My almost entirely uniformed take on the UK election results is that the while the party distribution in Whitehall shifted significantly to the left, British voters actually shifted away from the center and somewhat to the right.  The Labour Party of 2024 is not (for better or worse) Labour of 2019, and has shifted to the right while it rebuilt its appearance of competency and even-handedness.  On the whole, it picked up more voters on the right than it lost on the left, but the fact that it received roughly the same percentage of the vote as in 2019 can't be ignored.  And almost a sixth of the seats that it picked up came from the complete collapse (due to incompetency in the devolved government, and internal party issues) of the Scottish National Party, which has generally offered a very similar economic program to Labour.  The Green Party and assorted left-leaning independents picked up several seats, mostly from Labour, but also had a few oddball wins over Conservatives.  The Liberal Democrats rose from near death to capture the center by attracting center-right Conservative voters who couldn't stand the incompetency of the past few years, but who also would never vote for Labour or Reform.  However, its vote share was little changed as well, and like Labour, LibDem votes were distributed efficiently.  Reform UK - which should be "Reform", since it is more interested in revolution than reform - didn't capture many seats but did attract a huge protest/repudiation vote from people who thought that the Conservatives failed to deliver on the promises of Brexit and knew that the Conservatives failed to halt immigration.  And finally, the Conservatives collapsed, losing almost 44 percent of their 2019 vote share.  The punishment was entirely deserved given how poorly the party governed from 2010 to 2024.

If the Conservative and Reform votes were combined - as might be the case if the UK didn't use an archaic FPTP standard for parliamentary elections - the right-wing vote would exceed that of Labour.  That would leave LibDem voters as kingmakers, and given that the LibDems mostly captured seats from the Conservatives, the overall 2024 vote was more conservative than the outcome.  However, the UK system rewards "efficiency" - meaning that it rewards distributing enough votes to come in first across as many constituencies as possible, not the overall number of votes nationwide.  Given that the right-leaning vote was split 2 or 3 ways, Labour was the most efficient party in the election, and thus won the seat count handily.  (I'll have another post in a few days with the details of the vote distribution.)

Despite what some in America may hope, the Labour victory on 7/4/24 provides no lessons for Democrats beyond a generic "look competent", which Democrats should already know.  The dynamics are just too different this time for anything else to apply.

Predetermined

Unsurprisingly, a consensus emerged when given the opportunity.

 

 

I hope those people get what they are asking for, even if they don't understand what they've requested.

Cross-Chunnel Comparisons

The High Speed 2 fiasco in the UK has prompted me to update my map of high-speed rail in France.  Obviously the two countries are frequently compared, and here's more in that vein in relation to HSR.

1) Population density is much lower in France than in the UK.  This can be seen by simply inspecting the existing and proposed lines in either country in satellite view, and it is backed by data.  The island of Great Britain is 80,823 sq mi (209,331 sq km) in area and had a population of approximately 64,500,000 in 2021, for an average population density of 798 residents/sq mi (308 residents/sq km).  Continental France is 206,665 sq mi (535,261 sq km) in area and had a population of approximately 65,500,00 in 2022, for a population density of 317 residents/sq mi (122 residents/sq km).  Great Britain is approximately 2.51 times as dense as continental France, and continental France is 39.8% as dense as Great Britain.

2) France is somewhat better at containing urban sprawl than the UK.  This is a qualitative observation on my part, and it isn't uniform across either country.(*)  Areas of France such as the wider region around Lille or the Mediterranean coast from Marseilles to the Italian border are very sprawled out, with little countryside between developed areas except where the geography makes building impossible.  And the UK has compact, relatively contained cities and towns, such as Norwich and Yeovil.  But, overall, I think sprawl is less of a problem in France.

3) The combination of the previous two points means that the French routing strategy of connecting HSR lines with existing urban stations via "off-ramps" to legacy lines works quite well.  The existing approaches to the central stations are fairly direct, and the off-ramps can be built fairly close to the cities.  France generally has avoided building new approaches or stations within existing urban areas.  Lille is the only exception so far.  In contrast, the UK has decided to heavily rebuild existing stations and build new approaches in Birmingham, London (completion uncertain), Manchester (recently canceled), and Leeds (canceled a few years ago).  The prices of those stations has become outrageous and are part of the reason HS2 has been so severely curtailed.

4) France has built a number of stations directly on new LGVs.  Some have been built because there is no classic line near the new HSR line, some because there is only a classic line on one side of a city, and some because the nearest city is too small to serve with off-ramps.  Some stations are connected to the nearest city with legacy rail or a tram system, but others are fundamentally car-oriented, with only limited bus service. Overall, I think the success of these stations is mixed.  A few stations serve an attraction directly, such as the CDG station and the Disneyland station, and these are more successful in terms of passenger counts.  However, the very rural "beetroot" stations are relatively cheap to build, so they may be successful financially.  In the UK, the inline stations at Old Oak Common and Birmingham Interchange are fairly complex and expensive, though they should have high utilization.

5) Paris is semi-central to the country, whereas London is closer to being at one end of the country.  France needs to build a lot more track-miles to fully connect the country, but as explained above, most of those miles were or will be much cheaper to build.  But the main advantage to being central is that the rest of the country does not connect to the capital through just one link that risks being saturated before demand is completely met.  Each link to Paris can absorb a large number of passengers coming from a smaller number cities.  In the UK, the rest of the country will be funneled through one link.

6) On the purely practical side, France has completed 1,699 miles (2,735 km) of HSR track starting in 1981.  The UK has completed only 70 miles (113 km) starting in 2003.  France simply has vastly more experience at everything related to HSR, including track design and construction, rolling stock design and construction, and operations.

7) Both of my maps are fantasy maps.  However, the French one is much more realistic because my suggestions use the same routing principles as the French have been using for decades, and the resulting alignments have been much cheaper to build than HS2 in the UK.

All of the above raises the question: is there any way for the UK to "catch up" with France?  No, not directly.  The UK will never need to build as many HSR track-miles as France.  Nor will it ever be able to build as cheaply as France given the substantially different human geography of the two countries.  The UK could and should learn a fair amount from France, but the former country should also look to places like Japan, South Korea, and Germany for lessons.   Those countries have population densities of 840, 1,340, and 600 residents/sq mi (326, 516 and 233 residents/sq km) and so have more experience in building around existing populations.  The UK also needs to look inward and try to understand why HS2 turned out to be so expensive.  If the UK adapts, it might be able to catch up with France qualitatively, connecting a large portion of its population via HSR, but the UK will need to change a lot to do so.

(*) The relative sprawl of each country probably has been analyzed quantitatively, but since I am an amateur, I don't feel the need to track the studies down.

Fantasy Isle

As a complement to the previous post, I have developed a map of high speed rail in the United Kingdom.  It is a combination of existing lines, lines under construction, projects canceled by the Johnson and Sunak governments, and my suggestions for lines the UK should build in the future.  Those categories are available as separate layers in the map.  A few notes on my suggestions:

1) It is a fantasy map.  A previous version of the map was somewhat more realistic, but I see no point attempting to be serious when the actual UK government has demonstrated it has no interest in a national system.  The Sunak government has even taken a scorched earth approach to the canceled segments of HS2 by authorizing the sale of previously purchased properties.  It has no interest in any future HSR projects, and any Labour government will find restarting the previous program difficult for practical and financial reasons.

2) My system nonetheless could probably built, though not economically.  A few of the lines might be close to economic viability if construction costs are reasonable.  "Reasonable" in this case would be £100M/mile and £1,000M per station.  HS2 has blown way past those numbers to £396M/mile and £4-6B for stations in London and Manchester (now canceled).

3) I have chosen to tunnel the lines into city centers in order to maximize train speed.  Long approaches to existing stations on existing lines would reduce the average speed along those lines.  Building new approaches would be very expensive in dense urban areas, and very disruptive to the existing urban fabric.  I have chosen tunnels for those reasons and because, as stated above, I don't have to be serious here.

4) A lot of England is basically suburban or exurban, similar to New Jersey, especially in the Midlands.  Cities and towns all connect, with very little actual countryside between them.  That is part of the reason the per-mile cost of HS2 exploded.

5) Stoke-on-Trent is a polycentric mess.  The existing station isn't near the center of the biggest constituent city, Hanley.  I have chosen to put a tunneled station under the center of Hanley because more bus routes run through there, but either location might work.

6) I've spaced out most of the stations, but Sunderland is an odd case.  It is very close to Newcastle, and the two are connected by existing rail and a joint metro system that partially runs in the rail right-of-way.   However, as it is near the end of branch, adding one stop wouldn't impact as many passengers as adding a stop between, say Stoke-on-Trent and Manchester at Stockport.  And I feel the benefits of having a station in economically depressed area would be significant.

7) I have not included a station at Heathrow or any other airport (apart from the under-construction station near Birmingham Airport).  The French TGV system does include stops at some airports, but they are generally ones that are outside of built-up areas, such as CDG, making routing to them easy.  Heathrow was well away from built-up areas when it was first constructed, but it has been swallowed by London's sprawl, and constructing a HSR link to it today would be very expensive.  Nor is there a need to build one.  HSR systems are replacements for short-haul flights, not glorified airport shuttles.  With a fully-built UK HSR system, nearly all major English cities would be within two hours of London.  Even the Scottish cities would be well under four hours away, making city center-to-city center times competitive with airlines.

8) I have included some projects such as a second Severn tunnel and a second Chunnel that aren't technically high-speed lines, but which I think will be needed as part of the overall rail system in the future.  The existing Severn Tunnel is already 137 years old, and a replacement will be necessary at some point.

9) The HS1-HS2 link - which was initially proposed as part of HS2 but rejected early on - won't be needed until there is more capacity across the Channel.  Then the limiting factor would be HS1.  The link might be technically impossible depending on how HS2 is constructed.

10) The 2100+ routes are pretty speculative.  Who knows what the state of the world will be by then, and there's a good chance that anything planned now will need radical changes.

That's enough scattered thoughts.  Enjoy the map.

High Speed Halt

In a move that is both eminently reasonable and entirely shortsighted, the UK PM Rishi Sunak canceled the northern section of High Speed 2, a high-speed rail project extending from London to several northern cities.  Specifically, he canceled the section from just north of Birmingham to central Manchester.  The reason stated was the rapidly increasing cost of the project, which had grown from estimates in 2010 of £17B for a ~335 mile-long network to £98B in 2023 for a ~230 mile network.  The network is now planned to be only around 130 miles in length, with a currently estimated cost of about £62B.  The responsibility for completing the final section in the south, from Old Oak Common in the London suburbs to the terminus at Euston Station in central London, has been removed from the purview of HS2 Ltd, the entity that had been supervising the construction.  Work on the section had already been paused earlier in 2023, and will supposedly resume, but the timeline has not yet been clarified.

This move is reasonable at one level, as the explosion in cost from the earliest estimates to the latest figures published this past summer means that the utility to the country in a standard cost-benefit analysis has declined significantly.  There is, of course, little point in building public infrastructure that is so expensive that the cost of servicing the debt undertaken to build the project outweighs the economic gains from whatever service the infrastructure provides.  That applies to water, sewer, road, and airport projects as well as rail projects.  The UK government, which has been run either in part or completely by the Tories since 2010, has been unable to control the costs of the HS2 project, and has decided to limit the project to the section where substantial construction has already been done.

However, the statements by the Sunak government on the changes to HS2 don't explain how it plans to get the costs for the parts of HS2 that (currently) survive under control.  There is no reason anyone should believe that current estimates for the project will turn out to be any more accurate than previous ones.  The Sunak government claims that up to £36B that was going to spent on HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester will be invested in other projects.  I expect that number to be both reduced by further cost increases in HS2 and by future budget issues that will "require" diverting the previously diverted funds to existing programs.

It should be no surprise to anyone that the Conservatives have failed to control their own project.  Fundamentally, the UK Conservative Party - along with many conservative parties elsewhere - does not believe that government can do anything well, and that the private sector is inherently more efficient at everything.  This has been proven wrong over and over again.  The private sector is not reliably competent at delivering complex public works in many countries, including the UK.  But the Tories outsourced not only the actual implementation of HS2, but also a lot of the design and high-level management of the project, to entities that are not working for the public good, but for private profits.  Some of the cost increases have been exogenous (inflation, COVID), but I suspect a lot have been due to complications that come from not having the incentive to make accurate estimates or figure out the least costly way of doing a particular task.

Despite the questionable of utility of HS2 at the current cost, cancelling the northern sections is nonetheless short-sighted.  HS2, at least on the western side of the Pennines, had two purposes. First, it would reduce the travel time between Manchester, Birmingham, and London.  Reduced travel time would increase economic activity in areas affect by the project.  Second, it would free capacity on the West Coast Main Line for local and freight services.  In train operations, mixing high- and low-speed trains reduces the number of trains that can run per hour significantly.  With the high(er)-speed intercity passenger trains removed from the WCML, the number of other trains that could run would increase by more than the number of high(er)-speed trains removed.  But the need for increased capacity on the WCML north of Birmingham will not disappear because HS2 P2b was canceled, nor will Manchester get any closer to the south, where most economic growth in the country has occurred in the past few decades.

The response of the Sunak government should have been to slow the construction down while it examined the root causes of the cost increases and developed in-house government expertise to manage the future portions of HS2.  Stopping and starting construction disrupts supply chains and employment pipelines, as does long gaps between major projects.  High Speed 1, aka the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, was completed in 2007; HS2 construction did not begin until 2020.  Both institutions and individuals will naturally lose competency over periods far shorter than 12 years.  And when there are future projects in the pipeline, companies are less likely to try to milk current projects, as they have incentive to do a good job in order to get the next one.  Now there is no clear future after 2033, when HS2 is (currently) projected to be completed.  Though project names are being thrown about by the Sunak government, they are largely just old plans that haven't gone anywhere, or minor if necessary upgrades.  The UK needs to commit to a national HSR system that it will build out over the next 75-100 years in order to signal to companies and individuals that it is worthwhile to make long-term invests in education and equipment.  So far the Sunak government hasn't done that, and probably won't given that it has decided that pro-car and anti-environment rhetoric is a useful electoral tactic.  What a Starmer government might do is unclear at this point, and unimportant unless Labour actually wins the next election.

Slowing construction of HS2 would have a downside, of course, which is that financing would have to be carried for an even longer time before farebox revenue and economic benefits start to cover debt repayment.  Nor is there any guarantee that much could be done by the government at this point.  A lot of the increases could be exogenous, or they could be political, meaning that the specific details of construction have been (and continue to be) altered to buy off specific opponents.  It may be that too many bad decisions are locked in, and nothing can be done.  But the Sunak government should try, and then should apply those lessons to future projects.

As a distant observer I don't know exactly how the UK returns to a point where it can build rail projects at a reasonable and predictable cost.  But I believe it should.  Otherwise, the country have difficulty increasing productivity as congestion will continue to increase as the population rises.  The UK's recent experience is in contrast to countries like France, Spain, and Italy, where national HSR systems are moving forward at close to estimated costs.  But those countries have been building more regularly, and have been more judicious in their outsourcing.  Whatever the problem in the UK ultimately is, I hope they identify and resolve it soon.

(1) A side benefit of completing the line between Manchester and London would have been the reduction of flights between Manchester and London area airports, some of which are runway slot-limited.  However, I don't believe it was part of the project's cost-benefit analysis.

Red-Hot Mapping

In something of a coincidence with the event described in the previous post, I have created a new map which covers nuclear power reactors in North America.  Most of these are in the US, of course, as America is the global leader in nuclear power generation.  But Canada has its own independent nuclear industry centered in Ontario, which lacks Quebec's massive hydropower potential, and I've included those plants.  Mexico also has one lone plant, which it imported from America.

In the period after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the subsequent Fukushima Daiichi incident, I published an number of posts on nuclear power.  I've largely lost interest since then because the industry seemed destined to become moridbund, which largely happened.  But in the past few years there has been an increasing amount of hype around "small modular reactors," which promise to solve the problem of the massive up-front costs required to build large reactors such as the AP1000 units in Georgia or the EPR units at Flamanville and Olkiluoto.  On the map I have noted 8 different SMR projects from 7 different vendors as being reasonably firm, given the amount of subsidies flowing to them at this point.  The currently authorized subsidies won't be enough to get the projects to completion, but for now I am assuming the subsidies will continue to flow.  But past history indicates that costs will escalate rapidly, and politicians will balk at some point, most likely after considerable concrete has been poured.

Time will tell, of course, but until then enjoy the new map.

First of a Kind or Dying Gasp?

On July 31, 2023, Unit 3 of the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant entered commercial service.  It is the first new reactor to be brought online in the United States since 2016, and only the second since 1996.  It is a Westinghouse AP1000, which is a two-loop (of primary coolant) design derived from the Combustion Engineering System 80.  It is classified as a Generation III+ reactor, which is a somewhat arbitrary marketing designation used by the nuclear industry to indicate the design has some passive elements in its safety systems.  An additional reactor of the same design is under construction at the Vogtle plant, and should become operational within a year.

The probability of Vogtle 3 and 4 being safe reactors is quite high.  The fundamental design is not new, and China has operated four AP1000 reactors since 2019 without incident.*  The Georgia plant is located inland, so there is no risk of tsunamis flooding the site.  Georgia Power and the American nuclear industry as a whole have a lot of operational experience at this point - far more than when Three Mile Island Unit 2 was operated incorrectly, causing a major accident in 1979.  The first large power reactor in America went online in 1968; the industry has an additional 44 years of experience since the TMI meltdown.

What the nuclear industry has not improved since 1979 is the cost of constructing reactors.  I am not going go down the rabbit hole of attempting to compare costs between different sources of electricity in this post, but it is very safe to say that Vogtle 3 was not cheap to build, and neither Unit 3 or 4 were as cheap as was promised by Westinghouse back in 2013 when construction started.  Why costs escalated so much is hotly debated, but Westinghouse and its subcontractors are responsible for a good portion of the blame.  The nuclear industry also has to compete with other power generation technologies, and the shale gas "revolution" made the economic case for nuclear power difficult even before the cost overruns at Vogtle and Summer were known.

The cost of large plants is why the nuclear industry has shifted to promoting "small modular reactors" - some of which aren't all that small, and none of which will be any cheaper than large reactors if the companies developing them don't get enough orders to justify building the factories that would enable serial construction using transportable modules.  However, the SMR vendors have yet to prove themselves to be failures, so the hype surrounding them continues.  This contrasts sharply with the prospects for new large reactors.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission website indicates there are active combined licenses for six more large reactors, but none of those are under construction, and six previous licenses have been withdrawn by the license holders.  Two of those licenses were for AP1000 reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina, which were so far over budget that the power company building them canceled them in 2017.  So Vogtle Unit 4 is likely to be the last large reactor to go critical in American in the next 15 years, at the very least.

Below is a chart showing all of the commercial power reactors built in America sorted by date of commercial operation.  It does not include the 43 reactors that were canceled after construction was started, nor a number of small reactors that were not intended for commercial operations despite being connected to the local grid.  Despite a number of announcements, there are no SMRs under construction as of today (2023-08-02).

* That we know of, of course.  But there has certainly been no major accidents, as those are subject to detection by remote monitoring.

Say No to Mars on Drugs, Bitches

I've long been a skeptic of the idea of sending humans to Mars before we can determine whether or not there is a functioning biosphere on the planet.  This recent post articulates my thoughts better than I ever could.  Some choice quotes:

At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.

I would compare keeping primates alive in spacecraft to trying to build a jet engine out of raisins. Both are colossal engineering problems, possibly the hardest ever attempted, but it does not follow that they are problems worth solving. In both cases, the difficulty flows from a very specific design constraint, and it’s worth revisiting that constraint one or ten times before starting to perform miracles of engineering.

Even the astronaut corps recognizes that exploring Mars and keeping it pristine are irreconcilable activities, like trying to drill for oil in a cleanroom. The problem goes beyond practical questions like how to store 17 months of astronaut shit and gets to the crux of the matter: why is bringing a leaky, bacteria-filled terrarium to Mars step one in our search for Martian life? What incredible ability do astronauts have that justifies taking this risk?

And it is hard to overlook that the $93 billion NASA has already spent through 2025 to not land anyone on the Moon would be enough to send probes to every world in the solar system, including moons we know have oceans of liquid water and two entire planetary systems that haven’t been visited since Voyager 2 gave them a quick once-over in the 1980’s.

The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission—how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat?— get no love from Elon. Once you get beyond “rocket factory go brrrrr,” there is no plan, just a familiar fog of Musky woo. The Mars rockets will refuel from autonomous robot factories powered by sunlight. Their crews will be shielded from radiation by some form of electromagnetic handwaving. Life support, the hardest practical problem in space travel, “is actually quite easy”. And of course Musk dismisses the problem of microbial contamination (which I can’t emphasize enough is governed by international treaty) as both inevitable and no big deal.

The arguments against any country or company sending a mission to Mars are overwhelming.  But the subject has become an entirely emotional discussion, like the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating COVID, though with less immediate harm.  Budgetary realities will probably push the problem out well into the 2040s at least, by which time a bit more reality will hopefully intrude and the whole project will be scrapped in favor of more robotics.

2022: At Least It Wasn't 2021, Which Wasn't 2020

2022 was an improvement for most of the world over a bad 2021, which was better than the horrid year of 2020.  But it still wasn't great.

On the positive side:

• The COVID pandemic subsided to an elevated (relative to flu) endemic level in most of the world, though deaths remain higher than would be the case if vaccination hadn't been politicized in certain countries and nationalized in others.
  
• Democrats maintained control of the Senate, meaning Biden will be able to continue making quality judicial appointments.
  
• The fascist-sounding COVID promoter Bolsonaro was defeated in Brazil, and he did not attempt to overturn the results by force.
• The Inflation Reduction Act is not a perfect climate bill, but it was an important step forward.
  
• JWST came online and produced spectacular images.
  

On the negative side:

• Putin ordered the Russian military to invaded Ukraine for no reason other than he is a bitter old man who remains traumatized by the fall of the Soviet Union 31 years ago.  Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and millions more displaced as a result.
  
• Republicans took control of the House, which will lead to a dysfunctional US government for the next two years.
• The Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade, ending legal abortion and degrading women's health in many states.
  
• A petty man-child took over Twitter, a highly influential social media site, and proceed to fire thousands and undermine the communities that depend on the site.
  

On the worrisome but unresolved side:

• Central bank interest rate hikes in response to elevated inflation, led by the US Federal Reserve, may help trigger a recession in 2023.
• Republicans are still threatening to use the debt limit to hold the country hostage.
  
• China's overly restrictive COVID policies were dramatically and impetuously near the end of the year by dictator-for-life Xi, which will probably lead to a large surge in deaths and continued disruptions in the world's second-largest economy.

RIP, Queen of the Skies

The last Boeing 747 left the Everett, Washington factory yesterday, 2022-12-06. The pioneering and now-venerable design will continue to fly for at least a couple of decades for cargo operators and in government fleets, but as of this writing there are no American passenger aircraft of the type. This makes me a little sad, as the 747 is so impressive and iconic, symbolizing in every image the promise of the jet age. Its most direct replacement, the 777, is incredibly impressive in its own right, but it just isn't as distinctive as the 747. I would have liked for the 747 to be built forever, but commercial quad jets are doomed by the relentless logic of accounting. I hope that Boeing can at some point recover from the disastrous reverse takeover by McDonnell-Douglas so that it can engineer and produce the next great icon of the skies. But until then, blue skies and tailwinds to all the remaining 747s.

Predictions Are Hard - 2022 Edition

Predictions are actually easy; it's accurate predictions that are hard.  I'm only going to make inaccurate predictions today, since I haven't paid any attention to polling this year.

Senate - 47 D+I, 53 R

House - 208 D, 227 R 

Update 2022-12-07:

Senate - 51 D+I, 49 R

House - 213 D, 222 R 

Better than I expected!  That will teach me to not be lazy, if I ever get around to learning the lesson.

The loss of the House is a big blow, but the Dems over-performed relative to the baseline.  And a gain of one Senator will not only prevent a flood of shitty bills emanating from Congress, it will diminish the power of any narcissistic Dems who would annoint themselves co-President.

Random Book Review - A Song of Ice and Fire (so far)

Author: George R. R. Martin
Released: 1996-2011
Format reviewed: Mass-market paperback
Pages of content: 5,285 (per internet sources)
Rating: incomplete

I started re-reading the ASOIAF books and stopped because I realized I would be disappointed... again.  While Martin is under no legal obligation to his readers to complete the series, he is at risk of betraying a promise implicit in the beginning of every story: that there will be an end.  Sure, the GoT television series provided an end, but to a different story, one that was heavily re-written to meet the needs of the format.  I (and a great many other readers, I suspect) want to be given the end to the original work, in the original format.  (It was obvious by books 4-5 Martin was writing with an eye to creating an episodic television series, and it was part of the reason those books weren't as good as the first three.)

It is hard to recommend that a reader of speculative fiction not read what is one of the best high fantasy novels ever written (book 1, A Game of Thrones), so I can only ask that readers who haven't encountered the series not start it until Martin shows he is serious about completing the work.  Instead, they should invest in completed series or other ongoing series where the author is likely to finish the story.  Martin has for years stated on his blog that he is continuing to write the next book and has completed many hundreds of manuscript pages.  Those claims, to me, indicate that the author isn't really in control of his material, and that his editor(s) have no leverage over him that will force him to focus.  The latter is unsurprising, as Martin is probably the second most successful living speculative fiction author, trailing only J. K. Rowling, who has become a billionaire on the back of her very popular (but much less inventive) Harry Potter series.

Martin's continued involvement in many other projects, ranging from an ASOIAF prequel series to a dinner train in New Mexico, is an indicator he is bored with his creation.  That is his prerogative - it is his life to live and, as I said, he is under no legal obligation to complete the series.  But I think it is bad for speculative fiction in general that such a famous series can be so neglected that it risks being left unfinished.  Readers will be more hesitant to plunge into a new mega-series if they don't believe it will be finished.  While mega-series are not the end-all and be-all of the speculative fiction genres, they have drawn in a lot of new readers, and are an important part of the industry, much as Hollywood blockbusters are important to the movie industry.  I hope for the sake of his readers and speculative fiction in general that Martin finishes ASOIAF.  I just don't really expect him to do so at this point, and that disappoints me.

Random Book Review - The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History

Author: William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman
Released: 2013
Format reviewed: Hardcover
Pages of content: 283
Rating: 2/5

The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History is an interesting but poorly edited book that doesn't prove its overly long title.  It covers the effects of the 1815 eruption of the Mount Tambora stratovolcano on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, which is by current consensus the largest eruption of at least the past 1000 years.  It focuses in on the details of the weather in 1816 in eastern North America and Northwestern Europe, and on the subsequent effects on food availability

Unfortunately, the descriptions of weather often run on far longer than they really need to, and only the authors' engaging writing style save large portions of the book from extreme tedium.  In some cases the details of a single day can run to several pages.  The book is also completely lacking in graphics, even basic maps, which can be frustrating to someone who hasn't memorized the location of minor European cities such as Glarus.  Yes, the internet exists, but a book is still a low tech device that can be used anywhere there is light, and a non-fiction book should not shun visual information so completely as this one.

Overall, I found The Year Without Summer readable but disappointing.  Its description of the details of the eruption is cursory, and it doesn't attempt to link climate to the weather that fills so many of its pages.  The book is almost exclusively focused on Northeast America and Northwest Europe, which may interest readers of an English-language book printed in America more than other places around the world, but the limited geography betrays the title.  And it does very little to prove that the eruption changed history.  I can't recommend this book to anyone other than specialists who might find use for the detailed description of the weather in the time period.

Random Book Review - The Dirk Gently Novels

Author: Douglas Adams
Released: 1987 / 1988
Format reviewed: Mass-market paperback
Pages of content: 306 / 320
Rating: 3/5 / 3/5

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul are two* nominally science-fiction novels by the late and very much missed British author, Douglas Adams.  More accurately, they are comedies with a smidge of science fiction and/or fantasy to help the absurdist humor along.  In that aspect, they are similar to Douglas's more famous Hitchhiker's series.  However, the setting is primarily on Earth in this series, and there is considerably less action.

Both of the books are called detective novels, but as such the clues are a little obscure, at least to this reader, who may not have approached the books in a sufficiently adversarial manner.  The pacing of LDTTS is the better of the two, as there are more jokes sprinkled throughout and the setup portion of the book moves a little better.  DGHDA doesn't really come alive until the last 80 pages, but it's fairly fun once it does.  Both have interesting endings, though neither are entirely satisfactory.

Overall, these are fun, readable books that anyone who enjoys either speculative fiction or British humor should consume.  They don't rise to the level of the early HHGG books, but unlike a lot of recent speculative fiction, they are easy to finish without getting frustrated.  I recommend them for anyone who doesn't have a hangup about reading only 'serious' literature.

* An partial draft of the third novel in the series was published posthumously, but I felt it inappropriate to include it here.