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Why Are There So Many Protests in Hong Kong?

Looking back, we can piece together ways that past choices impact the present. Sometimes choice – impact pairing is direct; other times less so. And while we might identify a set up for future problems, we can’t know how those problems will be expressed. A current example is from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is in the news again in a sad way. Protesters marched multiple times in opposition to a proposed extradition to China law. In a city of seven million, the turnout was incredible. One protest march had as many as one million and another perhaps two million people. Police fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and beanbag rounds. There is pressure on the Chief Executive to resign. And all this is happening within the greater context of the China – US Trade War.

But if Hong Kong is part of China, why is there even the need for an extradition law?

The situation in Hong Kong is more complicated than that and had many contributing events.

Photographer: Anthony Kwan / Getty Images. The neon sign at left is for a pawnshop.

Here’s a short list. Continue reading “Why Are There So Many Protests in Hong Kong?”

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The Emergence of Omniscience (Part 1 – Images)

We are in an early transition period of omniscience. We are transitioning from some personal actions that are recorded only through our memories to many events being recorded, re-playable, and shareable. By “personal actions” I mean anything from what content you consume to where you go to how you act. By “re-playable and shareable” I mean that some device or system collects data that can be stored for any length of time and then easily sent to others to observe.

Continue reading “The Emergence of Omniscience (Part 1 – Images)”

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The Cobra Effect (Part 2)

When I started this project to learn about unintended consequences, my first post to go viral (top page of Hacker News) was about the Cobra Effect. The Cobra Effect is another name for “perverse results,” or how when we want more (or less) of something, we sometimes instead create the conditions that produce the opposite of our intended outcomes. In that post I took three well-known examples of the cobra effect and invented antidotes for them.

Those well-known Cobra Effect examples all involved animals (cobras, rats, and pigs) and so my antidotes were based around the animals’ reproductive cycles. I made the claim that those animal examples had the solution built into the problem. Readers loved it (creative look at an old topic!) and readers hated it (you can’t stop the Cobra Effect!).

Since the Cobra Effect is a type of unintended consequence that keeps coming up, I decided to write part two. Continue reading “The Cobra Effect (Part 2)”

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Universal Basic Income (Part 1)

I’ve avoided discussing unintended consequences from one of the big policy debates of today — Universal Basic Income. Until now. This is a big topic so I preemptively titled this post as part one.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a general term that describes mostly government programs that distribute a periodic sum of money to citizens without otherwise considering their income. UBI has been proposed as everything from a tool to reduce poverty to a way to guard against the social impact of job loss caused by automation.

Each group outlines ways UBI could work a little differently. But many questions remain, including how will a particular country’s overall social system change? What are the second-order effects? Could UBI work in one place and not another? Could UBI work at one time and not another? Let’s first look at some UBI experiments and their initial pros and cons.

Continue reading “Universal Basic Income (Part 1)”

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Eradication’s Good Intentions (Mosquitoes & More)

While AIDS, cancer, and heart disease get the headlines, malaria still kills large numbers of people. An estimated range of annual deaths from malaria is 435K to 720K a year (2015), with 90% of deaths located in Africa. These numbers have decreased significantly in the last 10 years but also note that 70% of deaths are from the under 5-year old age group.

Unlike the other diseases mentioned above, the way people get malaria and the way the disease spreads is different. That means when it comes to considering eradicating the many species of single-celled plasmodium parasite that cause malaria, some plans actually call for the eradication of mosquitoes — the vector carrying the parasite and infecting humans.

This post is speculative since malaria and mosquito eradication have not been tried except locally. But there are proposals for global or regional mosquito eradication. In a connected global ecosystem, where connections are not well-understood (or are they?), where do you take a risk? Would the decision to eradicate mosquitoes already have been made if malaria deaths were mostly based in other parts of the world? What could be unintended consequences of mosquito eradication? Continue reading “Eradication’s Good Intentions (Mosquitoes & More)”

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Destructive Collection (How We Destroy Things)

Some destruction is accidental. Some is intentional. Destruction works in different ways. And for different reasons.

These are types of destruction I’ve cataloged. I arranged this list according to what each type of destruction means, methods to achieve, first-order effects, second-order effects, and examples.

(Reminder: first-order effects are the direct, commonly noticeable changes. Second-order effects are the effects of the effects and often not obvious.)

Note that there is a lot of overlap between categories. I didn’t attempt a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive list. That just felt unrepresentative of the messiness of life. 

This is a destructive collection that I hope will change the way you think. Continue reading “Destructive Collection (How We Destroy Things)”

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Uncertainty Saves Lives – the Peltzman Effect

When two sides remain in battle for long, they co-evolve. This is seen in the natural world in everything from the toughening of grasses vs strengthening of herbivore teeth and stomachs to the changing shape of flowers and bird beaks or insect probosces.

In the man made world we see co-evolution in too many pair situations to count. Here are a few such “games,” each operating on the health of the players in a different way: Continue reading “Uncertainty Saves Lives – the Peltzman Effect”