#But this thread sums up very well how harmful taking these ships too seriously have been for many people

[rey-jake-therapist]

The Sherlock fans managed to convince themselves it was possible the BBC would pretend to end the show and promote a fake series on its place, as an elaborate ploy to get viewers to tune in the following week to find canon Johnlock. Of course this didn't happen, but why did they think it could happen in the first place? It's absurd. The idea that a group of showrunners would deliberately hide the main romance they're trying to tell from the audience for four seasons, while pushing another couple just to fuck with viewers, is bizarre - that's just not how TV works.

Yes, yes, yes, this. Especially when said showrunners, writers and everybody involved repeated many times that it would never happen, and when they never have any clear sign that said characters are in love and are going to end up together. To be clear, a pink light in a scene, a passing mention to a queer writer and a song sung by a queer singer in the soundtrack are NOT "clear signs".

In addition to that, the encouragement to look at a series with the assumption that it's leading towards the desired ship, and working backwards to make everything that happens fit into this idea, is also harmful. It leads to a tunnel vision where other characters and plotlines simply cease to matter and what the characters actually say and do is replaced by the fanon interpretation of their actions.

Other characters= generally female characters.

Basically: if you need a 300 slide long document to convince people a love story is taking place, then it's not a very good love story.

👍

Not a Byler, but can you explain how “conspiracy shipping” promotes media illiteracy and is bad for fandom discourse? What’s wrong with people interpreting a show differently? Genuine q, not trying to be belligerent, just really curious

I mean you don't need to go too far to understand why - just look at the extreme, viscerally upset reaction so many shippers had when vol. 2 aired. I know I make fun and complain about them a lot, but some b*l*rs are very young, queer kids who have convinced themselves they are experiencing something unique and new with ST. They read the elaborate, far-reaching, pedantic meta the older fans write; mistakenly assume that just because something is well-written and very long, it must be correct; and then get their hopes up and their hearts broken when these hopes aren't met.

The media illiteracy comes from the way these theories, somewhat unintentionally, promote a very bizarre way to look at media and how it's written. The Sherlock fans managed to convince themselves it was possible the BBC would pretend to end the show and promote a fake series on its place, as an elaborate ploy to get viewers to tune in the following week to find canon Johnlock. Of course this didn't happen, but why did they think it could happen in the first place? It's absurd. The idea that a group of showrunners would deliberately hide the main romance they're trying to tell from the audience for four seasons, while pushing another couple just to fuck with viewers, is bizarre - that's just not how TV works.

In addition to that, the encouragement to look at a series with the assumption that it's leading towards the desired ship, and working backwards to make everything that happens fit into this idea, is also harmful. It leads to a tunnel vision where other characters and plotlines simply cease to matter and what the characters actually say and do is replaced by the fanon interpretation of their actions. Then when a new installment comes and these other narrative elements do matter, and characters don't behave in ways that are coherent with the (highly elaborate and insubstancial) view they have of them, they resent it. Because it's not coherent with the story they made up in their heads (i.e. B*l*r shippers being shocked and upset that Will isn't treated as a main character, when he hasn't gotten an actual storyline in ages; or being mad at Mike ignoring Will to focus on El, when that's been his consistent behaviour since they got together).

Going back to the "you just don't trick your audience to root for a different couple if your goal is to tell another story", I also want to add that even if that were the case, it would be pretty shitty storytelling. It shocks me that people don't realise that. Prior to vol. 2 airing, I saw a b*l*r on Reddit say that, because Mike saying "I love you" to El was so heavily foreshadowed, that meant it wouldn't happen, because it was too predictable and they were definitely going to subvert it. This is bad media literacy. As a rule, it is a good thing when the audience, at large, can tell what the characters' emotional turmoils are, and where their arcs are going. Basically: if you need a 300 slide long document to convince people a love story is taking place, then it's not a very good love story.

Finally, the poisoning of discourse comes from the (inevitable) disappointment that follows all this, and that, also inevitably, turns into vitriol. The word "queerbaiting" has lost all meaning because of how many times shippers use it to mean "my two favorite dudes didn't kiss". And that's not even getting into the accusations of homophobia and "bad writing" towards anyone involved in the property they're invested in. It makes actual discussion of the way the story uses its gay characters very difficult to have.

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

July 19, 2020

My weekly roundup of these I am doing and looking at. Topics include the Biden energy plan, current vs. advanced nuclear, the construction industry, population trends, pesticides, and agglomeration.

The Biden Energy Plan

This week the Biden campaign put out an energy/climate plan. I won’t try to do a comprehensive rundown, but here are a few of my thoughts.

The core of the plan is $2 trillion of spending on clean energy infrastructure: renewable energy, electric vehicles, transit, housing, and building energy efficiency. I don’t find any of this to be objectionable, though it can be hard to forecast how cost effective spending approaches will be.

There is nothing on carbon pricing. I regard carbon pricing as essential to any credible decarbonization plan. With carbon pricing we know how cost effective decarbonization will be because cost-effectiveness is set.

The plan calls for $400B on R&D (that’s about two and a half Apollo Programs in modern dollar figures), with a wide range of areas including advanced nuclear, carbon capture, novel grid storage, electrofuels, and other areas. I consider R&D investment to be the other essential component to a credible decarbonization plan. This aspect of the Biden plan looks very good. The advanced nuclear concept has sparked some debate (see the next item). My friend Dan Rejto gives mixed reviews for the food and agriculture aspects of the plan. He notes some positive elements on the R&D side but the lack of funding for alternative proteins is a major omission.

There is lots and lots of emphasis on union jobs. I’m not really a big union enthusiast and wonder how this impacts the overall cost for a given result. There’s some rhetoric on trade that sounds vaguely protectionist.

The environmental justice section emphasizes enforcement of pollution laws, which sounds good, and “a goal that disadvantaged communities receive 40% of overall benefits of spending in the areas of clean energy and energy efficiency deployment”. I get nervous when EJ becomes a vehicle for passing out goodies. I see this all the time in local planning and the process can quickly devolve into a patronage system.

There’s no nonsense on curbing population, redefining GDP, or other such things. I didn’t expect there would be, but it is still a relief.

There’s nothing about NEPA reform or other regulatory reforms. There really needs to be when considering disbursing such large sums of money. Decarbonizing the power sector by 2035--at most 14 years after the plan could be become a legislative reality--will be difficult under ideal circumstances and impossible if we can’t build high voltage transmission, power plants, and other necessary infrastructure in a timely manner.

I think the plan is very smart politically. It basically serves the function of the Green New Deal, as envisioned by the progressive wing of the party, but it is being employed for party unity. Labor and social justice advocates both have much they can be happy with.

As far as policy merits, I’m in a good mood right now so I’ll give it three stars out of five.

Current versus Advanced Nuclear

The Biden energy plan calls for R&D into advanced nuclear, among other things, but the only line about current generation nuclear is “It would also mean continuing to leverage the carbon-pollution free energy provided by existing sources like nuclear and hydropower...” so at least that should mean avoiding premature nuclear closures. What about building new nuclear power with existing technology?

Among nuclear advocates, this is a major point of debate. One view is that current nuclear technology is too expensive and so we need to develop new technologies, such as small modular reactors (allow for fast and standardized factory construction), sodium-cooled reactors (avoid the need for elaborate containment systems). Or maybe we should go straight for fusion. The second view is that we should push for an asston of nuclear construction, like the French did, and make it cheap by standardizing it and building up a strong workforce.

I confess some agnosticism on this debate but am leaning ever more toward the second camp. Early SMR cost estimates don’t look especially promising, nor do the hypothetical costings I have seen for Gen IV nuclear or fusion. My fear is that if the focus is too much on R&D for the next generation, we won’t solve the fundamental problems that plague the current generation. Furthermore, I would expect that building out a strong nuclear engineering workforce will accelerate the development of new technology. So it’s not like “current vs. advanced” is actually a dichotomous choice.

What actually is the problem that plagues the current generation? I don’t entirely know. But I suspect it is a combination of general megaproject management problems identified by Bent Flyvbjerg, overregulation, and an industry that has gotten lazy.

Construction Technology

Speaking of construction, TechCrunch has a profile this week of a company called Social Construct, founded by Ben Huh of Cheezburger fame. The goal is to use CAD and modular construction to lower construction costs. For decades the industry has been plagued by cost and productivity problems that greatly exceed most other industries.

I have been interested in this topic for a while now and see construction costs as a major weak link in any credible effort to address housing costs. There would be great, broad-based social value for developing tools for turning around productivity trends. My suspicion is that the major bottleneck the industry faces is fragmentation. Not until we start seeing some major vertical (and maybe horizontal as well) integration will we see better planning and the opportunity to employ building information modeling, modular construction, robotics, 3D printing, or whatever other high tech tools people imagine.

As for Social Construct, I hope they’re successful. I’m a fan of I Can Has Cheezburger, Huh’s other notable work. But recent past efforts to modernize the construction industry, such as Google X’s endeavors, Katerra, and Plant Prefab, for instance, have not (yet) turned the industry around.

Population Trends

There was a major new study in The Lancet this week which forecast a peak human population in 2064 and a decline to a world TFR of 1.7 by 2100. This dire (from my pronatalist perspective) forecast seems to me to be a better reflection of actual trends than the standard UN forecast, which does not envision a peak population until around the turn of the century.

I think the study should be taken as a wakeup call for policy makers to take falling fertility seriously. The paper itself focuses on adaptation and immigration as solutions, generally pouring cold water on pronatalist policies (ducking the question of where the migrants will come from if the whole world sees sub-replacement fertility).

As a forecast, I think the paper is a good reflection of mainstream understanding and functions well as a reference point. But I still see wildcards which are not well understood (at least not by me) and could, over the course of 80 years, result in a reality quite different from forecasts. It is hard to imagine that more countries will not adopt much more aggressive pronatalist policies, perhaps going as far as state-sponsored child rearing and ectogenesis, if they become sufficiently alarmed. Culture can change in ways that are not predictable and not the same as past changes. Sooner or later natural selection should become noticeable as a factor causing a fertility rebound.

Pesticides

I haven’t done as much new content lately as usual for Urban Cruise Ship, since I’ve been focused on this longer term social endeavors project and some other things that aren’t going online for a while, but I did draft up a section on pesticides (sans graphics). A few observations.

I found several estimates on the externalized damages of agricultural pesticides at $4-19/kg. The world uses about 3.5 million tons per year, so that’s about $14-66 billion of externalized damages per year. These kinds of numbers are always fuzzy (and previously I’ve seen some higher estimates), but orders of magnitude estimates help us rank environmental issues by seriousness. Annualized damages from climate change, nitrogen runoff, and deforestation are in the trillions each. Land use and biodiversity loss may each reach into the tens of trillions. Poor ocean management, water pollution, and ozone depletion are in the hundreds of billions. So pesticides may be an order of magnitude or more lower than these other issues.

The world hasn’t seen a peak in pesticide usage overall or per acre, but there may have been a peak in per calorie of food.

The value of pesticides in modern agriculture is indisputable. Without them yields would probably be about half of what we see. That would mean either a massive conversion to additional cropland, labor costs from working the land, or we wouldn’t be able to feed the world. But we may be overusing pesticides relative to the optimum. China in particular.

Integrated pest management is the solution I see most often as to how to cut pesticide usage. It’s a fairly broad term that encompasses a range of tactics to control pests. The main barrier to expanding IPM is that it requires specialized knowledge and training, so labor costs come into play. IPM may be a bit like recycling in that regard, where labor can substitute for environmental harm. But in a world of growing wealth, and urbanizing, peaking, and aging population, solutions that involve more labor are not very attractive. This is probably an area where advancements in precision agriculture will be important.

Agglomerationists

Anton Howes discussed “the agglomerationists” in his newsletter this week. The idea that having more and better connected people fosters commerce and creates wealth is a thread that connects a range of policy views: pronatalism, urbanism, free trade, and free migration, for instance. This is something I have been thinking for a while and am grateful that Anton has articulated the concept better than I have.

One can take the agglomeration principle in a different direction though and see it as a challenge. In any system characterized by returns to scale, there is likely to be a diminishing returns problem, and I think we see plenty of evidence of this nowadays with stagnating productivity, high cost of urban living, and subreplacement fertility, for instance. It may be that the real agglomeration challenge is not to increase the scale of the economy so much as to develop less scale-dependent modes of production. I’m not sure if this goal is possible or desirable, but it would be good to be open minded.