Maṇḍala is a Sanskrit word meaning 'circle'. The mandala is a model for describing the patterns of diffuse political power distributed among Mueang or Kedatuan (principalities) in medieval Southeast Asian history, when local power was more important than the central leadership ... the overlord-tributary relationship was not necessarily exclusive. A state in border areas might pay tribute to two or three stronger powers. The tributary ruler could then play the stronger powers against one another to minimize interference by either one, while for the major powers the tributaries served as a buffer zone to prevent direct conflict between them.

Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment. Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live. And if we fix those shortages, we will help to solve many of the other, seemingly unrelated problems that we face as well.

• Less than 1% of rapes and attempted rapes end in a felony conviction
• Less than a third of rapes are reported to the police
• Between 2 and 8% of reported sexual assaults are false (does not include rapes that were not reported)

• Cities founded in the fire-prone frontier by anti-government types that didn't want to be told how to build (proper infrastructure, firebreaks etc.)
• Real estate has been the main wealth generator for a while, "Selling out to a developer was the only retirement plan most farmers knew."
• "What was once sparse is now densely packed with pine, fir, cedar, and manzanita. A forest that supported 64 trees an acre in pre-settlement times now boasted 160 trees an acre ... 'I don't think we could have managed the forests any worse.'"
• "as Wilson and his staff studied the fires more closely, he could see that their oddly linear pattern of ignition clusters corresponded to major electrical power lines."
• “These weren’t outlier events,” Wilson said. “These same spots had a history of fire. They had burned before and were destined to burn again. If you charted it out, we weren’t having far more wildfires than in the past. But the wildfires we were experiencing were far more deadly and destructive, and that had to do with mismanaging the forest and building communities in the wildland-urban interface. The state’s population was exploding in the very areas most susceptible to wildfires.”
• Forestry management and fire prevention - prescribed burns, reducing fuel load - curtailed in favor of military-style firefighting.
• "To justify its high costs, [Cal Fire] had to figure out a way to make itself essential throughout the year. This was how it evolved into a 24/7 provider of emergency services to the sprawling mountain communities ... instead of trying to slow down the suburbanization of forestlands, Wilson said, the department served the growth — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in funding."
• "In their filings, each attorney traced the historic blazes to a culture of mismanagement, corruption, and cover-up that had taken hold inside PG&E decades before. A pattern of venality, they argued, began in the company’s early years and became more recalcitrant in the 1980s and 1990s, when PG&E, with the connivance of the California Public Utilities Commission, its watchdog, made a decision to place profits and bonuses to top executives — and dividends to shareholders — over safety."
• "It was fiction that the California Public Utilities Commission exercised any watchdog role over PG&E, he said. “They don’t have the resources, they don’t have the trained personnel or mindset, to monitor and audit PG&E’s compliance with safety regulations. PG&E can literally get away with murder.”"

I am not suggesting that zoning is not a binding constraint in some locations. But there are parts of that map where there are big deficits in affordable units in locales where land is basically free. Zoning cannot be a constraint in those locales.

I’m not convinced by that all the arguments that came my way last night via Twitter that zoning is hamstringing the productivity in urban areas so that people in the countryside are suffering. Cities may boost national productivity numbers, but that is a function of aggregation, not necessarily of strong economic spillovers. It might be that lack of growth in cities ultimately dampens demand for whatever Iowa supplies to cities, but the regional distribution of economic growth over the past four decades suggests that whatever economic spillovers there might be are weak.

But then the Iowans could move to the city if the housing were not so expensive. And that’s true….and yet they have had fewer constraints on migration than people internationally have, and yet there they are, still in Iowa, while I have crazy people telling me we need a wall (even though we already got one) because California and New York are too full of immigrants. People should be able to move to where the jobs are, sure, but I also think David Imbroscio has a point: people should be able to stay home and live a decent life, too.

What makes me the enemy, you may ask? In their mind it’s very simple: if you’re not among the victims, you’re among the culprits. In your case, you’re that modern bogeyman called the liberal urbanite hipster ...

But it took our leaders ten years to figure out they needed to actually go to the slums and to the countryside.

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.

• Campaign Zero
• Police training sucks
• Report by union of black St. Louis police officers
• Police violence is not a response to community violence - there's no correlation

• Spur
• The League of Pissed-Off Voters
• Bay Area New Democrats
• San Francisco For Democracy
• California contact for Social Democrats USA
• Democratic Socialists of America local chapters
• Vacancies on SF boards, commissions and task forces (via a helpful friend who mentions you can audit their meetings (open by law) or peruse past meeting minutes)

Piketty fears that given rising levels of wealth inequality, democracy is doomed. People will not tolerate high levels of inequality forever, and repressing their resistance to an unequal social order will eventually require dispensing with democratic forms. I’m not so sure ... procedural democracy limping on against a background of inequality, disdain and humiliation is not an attractive prospect, but it is already a big part of our present and may be the whole of our future unless egalitarian politics can be revived.

Yet the US political system has been under the influence of wealthy elites ever since the American Revolution. In some historical periods it worked primarily for the benefit of the wealthy. In others, it pursued policies that benefited the society as a whole ... unequal societies generally turn a corner once they have passed through a long spell of political instability. Governing elites tire of incessant violence and disorder. They realise that they need to suppress their internal rivalries, and switch to a more co-operative way of governing, if they are to have any hope of preserving the social order.

You may pick two, but no more than two, of the following:

Liberalism
Inequality
Nonpathology

... if severe inequality is going to continue, then there must remain some sizable contingent of people who are socioeconomic losers, who will as a matter of economic necessity become segregated into less-desirable neighborhoods, who will come to form new communities with social identities, which must be pathological for their poverty to be stable.

Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what.

I'd argue that the reverse is really the issue that needs more attention. Online systems that do not provide strong cryptography rearrange power, as compared to their offline equivalents.

It was not feasible to scan all phone calls for keywords in 1970, since that required effort from humans to do the patching and listening. The power dynamic changed when our industry brought those calls into a centralized, trivially-storable clear-text format. Encrypting the conversations is simply a partial return to the status quo of a few decades ago.

Two teams of American climatologists published research confirming that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to collapse, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program released its third National Climate Assessment, which noted that average temperatures in the United States had increased by between 1.3 and 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century, predicted that in the absence of human intervention those temperatures could rise by another 10 degrees during the coming century, and attributed recent adverse weather events such as floods and droughts to climate change caused by humans.

Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand’s king and the world’s longest-serving head of state, turns 85 years old today. King Bhumibol, also known as Rama IX, has ruled Thailand for more than 66 years, and is a popular figure throughout the country.

Well, yes, I suppose it does look that way, given if you get caught sending text messages that don’t approve of the king, you can get twenty years in prison. Still, good to see Instagram covering corrupt regimes. I’m looking forward to their highlights of photos from North Korea and Bahrain.

• This site is blocked in Iran
• but available in China

• Engaging a large, well-known real estate developer who provides a nice 3D rendering of the shiny, multi-million dollar mixed retail/residential development he'll build
• Selling off subdivided lots piecemeal to smaller developers or individual owners

PBA Official 1: Okay, we've sent text messages to at least 400 delegates, and they're all going to come to court tomorrow to protest the arraignment of our brother officers. We've called this meeting to decide what signs they should hold up for the myriad news cameras that we expect to be there. I'll open this up to the floor - any ideas?

PBA Official 2: How about 'Just Following Orders'?

There are two types of 'shared deliberation' in contemporary society, one that's focused on resolving conflicts between individuals over competing goods, and another (which he's championing) that's focused on building the common goods that we need qua being a member of groups.
Because we're so good at the former, and so bad at the latter, we have virtually no resources in our politics for asking what we owe each other, and so we mostly talk about what we're owed ourselves.

The US public is rabidly opposed to paying higher taxes, yet the trend level of taxation (at around 18% of national income) is not sufficient to pay for the core functions of government.

"In 1839, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected slavery in a decision that found that a slave named Ralph became free when he stepped on Iowa soil, 26 years before the end of the Civil War decided the issue.

"In 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated “separate but equal” schools had no place in Iowa, 85 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision.

"In 1873, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled against racial discrimination in public accommodations, 91 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision.

"In 1869, Iowa became the first state in the union to admit women to the practice of law."

Energy is the defining issue of our time.

Addressing the environment is the major reason Chu took on this job.

These problems provide a tremendous opportunity for the DOE, but it comes with a burden: we can not fail.

...

We can’t be completely overwhelmed by the short term economic woes; we need to still find a path to solve our long term problems. The DOE has to invent transformative technologies that will allow us to get to the next level of energy independence.

• Newsweek's in-depth election series looks good. They got access to the Obama and McCain campaigns in exchange for not publishing until after the election.
• Our next president

'I don’t think that the problem with the American people is that they are not being forced to get health care,' Mr. Obama has said. 'The problem is they can’t afford it.'

• He's willing to talk about child care as an issue of equality
• He proposed a relatively detailed health care plan that economist Brad DeLong likes although he has since come in for criticism from other economists (because he didn't go far enough, apparently - he isn't willing so far to admit that mandates on employers would be required. Update: Obama on why his plan doesn't include a mandate.)
• Cute
• Open to limited legalization of marijuana
• He'd talk directly to Iran
• Open to nuclear power (everyone will have to be eventually; Hillary is "agnostic")
• Voting record contrasted with Hillary's. No earthshaking revelations.
• A look at his "present" votes in the Illinois state senate
• To be continued...

The more antagonistic a person is toward the traditional order, the more inexorably he will subject his private life to the norms that he wishes to elevate as legislators of a future society. It is as if these laws, nowhere yet realized, placed him under obligation to enact them in advance at least in the confines of his own existence. The man, on the other hand, who knows himself to be in accord with the most ancient heritage of his class or nation will sometimes bring his private life into ostentatious contrast to the maxims that he unrelentingly asserts in public, secretly approving his own behavior, without the slightest qualms, as the most conclusive proof of the unshakable authority of the principles he puts on display. Thus are distinguished the types of the anarcho-socialist and the conservative politician.

[Scott] is much more interested than [the Austrians] are in the actual political processes through which markets come into being ... markets – even and perhaps especially Hayekian markets – don’t exist in an institutional vacuum – and the institutions on which they rely are going to shape the extent to which they succeed or fail in making use of local knowledge.

• Judge strikes down part of the Patriot Act. The feds now have to go to a judge before requesting records from ISPs. Time to renew my ACLU membership.
• There are a lot of entities that look like banks but aren't regulated like banks. This seems important. Think "a run on the banks structured investment vehicles".