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Links: Peculiar HUD programs, hydrogen energy, breakthrough therapies, and more!

* I spotted an interesting HUD program that covers a topic I’ve never or rarely seen the feds touch: “Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing through Off-Site Construction and Pro-Housing Reforms Research Grant Program Pre and Full Application.” Four million dollars are available, with grants of $500,000 and five estimated awards. (Five times $500,000 is $2.5 million, not $4 million: feel free to ask HUD about the discrepancy). Still, the “Increasing the Supply of Affordable Housing” offers funding for research to “build the evidence base to accelerate the adoption of effective practices and policies to increase the production and supply of quality, affordable housing.” News that the housing crisis is primarily one of demand may finally be percolating through the federal bureaucracy.

What’s your favorite unusual grant program? Leave a comment with the answer.

* “US could soon approve MDMA therapy — opening an era of psychedelic medicine.” Better late than never. Banning MDMA by making it a Schedule I drug was a mistake when it happened and continues to be a mistake, and one that makes millions of people pay the price of our collective folly. “What MDMA Therapy Did For Me” is a passionate first-person account of using MDMA therapeutically, and it begins: “I did MDMA therapy. It was a deeply profound and life-changing experience.” And then: “I would rank it as one of the top 3 most important things I’ve done in my life, at least in terms of my personal development.” I of course, like you, have never done anything illegal, but “What MDMA Therapy Did For Me” is consistent with my own experiences.

* “I personally named my house and business after Silmarillion references – I would have named my car after one, but I learned my friend had named her car after it first, and that Steven Colbert had also named his car after it, and it would be weird to have all these cars named ‘Vingilótë’ driving around. At this point I backed off.” Would it be weird, or too weird? From “Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters.”

* Rice cookers are great, underrated kitchen gadgets. I use mine (also a Zojirushi, if you’re wondering) all the time. It, combined with an Instant Pot, helps me make a lot of good, interesting food in a relatively short period of time, and without having to constantly check for doneness.

* A supposed breakthrough in stationary storage for hydrogen-nickel batteries. Emphasis on “supposed.” I’m not sure what the “catalyst” is, exactly, as described in the article. We’ve worked on some hydrogen grant projects and are cognizant of the potential benefits (here is us describing the DOE’s Hydrogen Shot grant program), but we’ll see how many breakthroughs materialize that can also be commercialized. Press releases are cheap.

* The great electrician shortage. It’s interesting to see this:

People who graduate from college do earn more, on average, than people who don’t, but the statistics can be misleading. Many young people who start don’t finish, yet still take on tens of thousands in education loans—and those who do graduate often discover that the economic advantage of holding a degree can be negated, for years, by the cost of having acquired it.

Those who skip college frequently do better, and not just at first.

While I’m not sure we’d have seen emphasized in this venue a decade ago, word about the problems of the “college for all” model is spreading. Better late than never. My main essay on this topic is here, from 2017, but it’s still relevant.

* Make parking impossible. We can choose to make the cities we want to live in through effective public policies.

* “How to Stop Environmental Review from Harming the Environment.” The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) is having the opposite effect of what its creators intended. It often harms, instead of helping, the environment. Maybe we should fix that.

* 2023 geothermal update.

* California strip malls were upzoned last Saturday. The housing crisis is encouraging California politicians to take some relatively modest steps towards improvement, which are welcome, but more can and should be done. Property owners should be able to build whatever they (safely) want to. Don’t believe me? Visit Tokyo and observe the incredibly dense and creative land use planning that allows 36M folks to live in relatively affordable and good housing.

* Related to the link above: Developer could build hundreds, and maybe a thousand, apartments in Beverly Hills. Good. California needs more housing—a topic we’ve covered extensively, particularly because we’ve worked on so many California homelessness services and affordable housing grants—and the sooner California builds more, the sooner it can help get the homeless housed and make life at least somewhat affordable for the middle class. The California dream of inexpensive, sunshine-filled life was alive until NIMBYs brutally murdered it via zoning. Let’s bring it back.

* “Towards an enlightened centrism.” This is often what we aspire to: knowledge, information, understanding, and an avoidance of petty clannishness.

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Links: Battery recycling, how to lower housing prices, the shift from colleges to apprenticeships, and more!

* The Dept. of Energy announces a $375 million loan for an automotive-grade battery recycling plant, which is sited for Rochester, New York. We didn’t work on this project, but we’ve written proposals for many adjacent DOE applications in batteries and other materials, so we know how arduous the underlying process for this one likely was.

* “More Students Are Turning Away From College and Toward Apprenticeships: Some white-collar training programs have become as selective as Ivy League universities.” This makes sense, for all the reasons I articulated back in 2017. There are also now programs like Western Governors University (WGU) that are designed to reward skills not time in seat. A lot of students presently in college probably shouldn’t be, and probably aren’t getting much if anything out of college—apart from debt. College isn’t the magic panacea it was made out to be for many decades; instead, college degrees were then relatively rare. Now they aren’t and, simultaneously, schools have reacted to the current student-loan environment by creating degrees that require almost no work and impart essentially no skills.

* “More Flexible Zoning Helps Contain Rising Rents: New data from 4 jurisdictions that are allowing more housing shows sharply slowed rent growth.” While this is obvious, there’s a weirdly large amount of denialism out there about the way increasing supply will over time lower prices.

* Looks like RSV vaccines will be available by next winter, which is great! Less illness is better than more.

* Closing Industry Frontiers, which compares the closing of the American frontier to the filling out of the Internet software industry over the last ten years. The next political frontier might be O’Neill habitats.

* Why the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) Deserves More Funding. Modern vaccine approaches may take out a large number of diseases in the 2020s and that’s great. The RSV note above concerns only one disease, but there are many others.

* One “secret” of writing is to write every day. (This is not really a secret: pros know it, but amateurs often don’t want to believe it.)

* “Lennar defies La Habra’s Measure X, files what could be ‘builder’s remedy’ application.” Building more housing is vital to improving human well-being, which is ultimately what the grant process is about, or what it’s supposed to be about.

* Is the college essay already dead? Maybe future essays are going to be written on computers without Internet access. Or, colleges could bring back the old school Blue Books!

* “US Cities Are Falling Out of Love With the Parking Lot: California and many local governments are scrapping requirements that once made cars the center of the urban landscape.”

* Bowdlerizing Roald Dahl and the Ethics of Art.

* “How to go car-free — or car-light — in Middle America.”

* “The educational skeptic’s guide.” There’s some quotable material in here for your next Dept. of Education proposal, although you’ll need to be judicious in your choice of quotes—which is almost always true when you’re questioning orthodoxy, however mild the questioning may seem. “Social desirability bias” (SDB) is a real thing, and a lot of educational improvement initiatives are bound up with SDB.

* “The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again,” which is bad for FQHCs and bad for anyone who needs healthcare (which is, over the course of a life, almost everyone).

* “Apartment Rents Fall as Crush of New Supply Hits Market.” Supply and demand matter, and homelessness is first and foremost a housing shortage problem.

* “Smaller, safer, cheaper? Modular nuclear plants could reshape coal country.” This would be a major step in the right direction, especially because coal plants tend to already have transmission lines and interconnect rights.

* “New Thinking on Peer Review at NIH.” Better peer review is welcomed. Like so many forms of institutional infrastructure that really got launched in the postwar period, “peer review” isn’t working well any more.

* Are parts of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department run by gang members? If you don’t want the reporting filter, the original report is here and says things like:

The Department currently contains several active groups that have been, and still are, engaged in harmful, dangerous, and often illegal, behavior. Some of these groups have engaged in acts of violence, threatened acts of violence, placed fellow Deputies at risk of physical harm, engaged in acts celebrating officer involved shootings, and created a climate of physical fear and professional retribution to those who would speak publicly about the misconduct of such groups.

Ever seen the TV show The Shield? I think that was about LAPD, not LA County Sheriff.

* Do nonprofits drive social change? Not according to this analysis, but nonprofits of a certain kind maintain a certain high status among certain persons.

* The efforts of geothermal power startup Fervo. We’ve worked on lots of geothermal energy projects.

* “Global Supply of Cocaine Hits Record Level, U.N. Says: Coca cultivation rose 35% from 2020 to 2021, new report says.” At what point does one decide that prohibition has failed, and it’s time to try a new strategy? Imagine that coffee were under the same sanctions as coca leaves.

* Oregon botches the decriminalization of drugs.

* “Review: The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen.” Another take on the book we previously wrote about, and which is germane to behavioral and mental health. Those of you who work in mental health will likely recognize some of the issues they face (excuse the length of this quote, but you’ll understand why by the end):

“The best minds” of the title refers to Laudor, who’s brilliant by wide affirmation and whose intelligence and intensity are now inextricable from his illness, at least in the popular understanding. But it also refers to the people who created the medical and social context in which the murder occurred – the mental health advocates who fought (and fight) against the effort to hospitalize patients who are psychotic or otherwise dangerous, the anti-psychiatry movement that has demonized treatment of debilitating medical conditions, the media that wanted to see Laudor in nothing but facile storybook terms and so of course could see nothing else, the various authority figures and community members who had enabled Laudor’s uninterrupted descent into madness because they thought it was the right thing to do, and the family members and friends who were unable to see how obviously, cripplingly sick he had become near the end.

Consider also this controversial take:

The biggest problem in American mental healthcare is not people getting stuck in the system but those who need to get in and can’t.

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Links: Homelessness and housing, mental illness treatment, technology grants, and more!

* The NYT notices how poorly L.A.’s Prop HHH went. We talked about some of its problems back in 2017; writing the proposals themselves was good, but, at the same time, it was hard not to recognize the real-world challenges in L.A.’s vetocracy (a portmanteau not original to me, alas). You can’t fix homelessness or housing problems without comprehensive zoning reform, and ideally zoning reform that eliminates the charade of “community input.” Whatever value “community input” may once have had, it’s morphed into a system of “just say no” that exacerbates the housing crisis and lets a small number of unrepresentative persons block almost anything from happening, anywhere.

* Strangely, at least to my eyes, the Department of State (DoS) is offering $250,000 in Building Back Better (BBB) funding to…Canada? This is a real grant opportunity, listed in grants.gov. The grant program purpose is to “promote sustainable and inclusive economic recovery that strengthen the middle class, with a focus on women, people of color and Indigenous peoples, including in the Arctic.” Most DoS RFPs focus on developing countries in Africa, the Middle East, and so on—not Canada, which is not a country that I think of when I think of countries that need U.S. foreign aid. Another RFP is designed for “Advancing Diversity and Inclusion” in Canada, which, relative to many countries, doesn’t strike me as bad at diversity or inclusion. The total grant amounts are low, but my own curiosity factor is high. Does Canada run programs to promote economic recovery in the United States? Does Canada worry about us? Should they?

* Why don’t doctors study the clitoris? From the NYT. I assume nurses and physicians assistants don’t either, which is a peculiar omission for medicine, since medicine is supposed to be the study of the body, and the ability to heal it, too.

* Human challenge trials are a good idea. Much greater freedom in this area is laso a good idea.

* Actual mental illness is not a meme. This is something many of our mental health and substance abuse service clients likely already understand, but there’s a media and social media universe that is pretty removed from the actual treatment provision.

* Chips and China.

* Taiwan prepares to be invaded. Somehow, this does not seem like great news.

* An overview of concrete forming technology. Concrete is in almost all infrastructure and is thus of high importance; most people, myself included, overlook it most of the time.

* “The End of Vaccines at ‘Warp Speed:’ Financial and bureaucratic barriers in the United States mean that the next generation of Covid vaccines may well be designed here, but used elsewhere.” Important news that isn’t getting the attention it should.

* Open-source hospital price transparency.

* New meth treatments are possible. I’m not sure how optimistic I am, given that opioid treatments are useful but hardly a panacea, but something is still better than what we have now, which is “nothing.” Some of our substance-abuse treatment clients have been seeing an uptick in the use of Naltrexone and related medications for alcoholism. We’ve also not exhausted the possible uses of monoclonal antibodies (the proposed meth treatment is a monoclonal antibody), which is also important and notable.

* Illiberal values.

* More on loneliness. Consider weaving ideas about loneliness into your proposals.

* Despite all the blah blah blah you read about “clean” energy, world coal use reached a new high in 2022. Solar, wind, batteries, and all these things are good—we’ve written many proposals to get projects in those fields funded—but the first two are intermittent and the last only stores power. There is currently no good alternative to nuclear power; failure to focus on nuclear means we’e going to burn more coal and emit more methane.

* Why is progress in biology so slow? One of these really important questions, which seldom dominate the news.

* “Income inequality has been falling for a while now.” In this reading of the data, anyway.

* “The Truth about Demographic Decline:” most people want more kids than they feel they can afford to have. This is another instance of exclusionary American housing policy creating scarcity in many domains, including this one.

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Links: Peculiar training and capacity-building programs, the dangers of NEPA, manufacturing jobs strike back, and more!

* There is a real federal program called “eSports and Game Development Skills Training and Capacity Building,” run through the Department of State’s (DoS) U.S. Mission to Saudi Arabia, and the program “requests proposals for projects aimed at increasing the knowledge, skills, abilities, and networks of Saudi youth in game development and STEAM fields.” There is only $45,000 available, however. I also spotted an RFP for “Strengthening Worker Engagement, Empowerment, and Trust in the Dominican Sugar Sector.” Who knew that the Dominican sugar sector is a priority for the DO?

* “The Case for Abolishing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).” Like the “Patriot Act,” which is not patriotic, NEPA actually harms the environment, rather than helping it. Notice: “If you think a two year, million dollar, 1,000+ page environmental report simply to build new bike lanes in an already developed city seems absurd, you’re not alone.” And, also: “America is absolutely drowning in process, forms, and reviews.” We need less participation and more action.

* “Factory Jobs Are Booming Like It’s the 1970s.” Perhaps relatedly: “Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory.”

* “Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read,” using phonics and direct instruction. In other words, the simple, decades-old ways work better in this field.

* The Framework modular laptop appears to be good. Modularity should increase longevity and thus reduce waste, although I doubt consumer electronics like laptops account for a high percentage of waste products.

* The NYT finally figures it out: “Why It’s So Hard to Find an Affordable Apartment in New York: There simply aren’t enough places to live, a crisis decades in the making and one that poses a threat to the city’s continuing recovery.” They should’ve learned about supply and demand a few decades ago, but “late” is better than “never.” Oh, and The national housing shortage is likely in the four to twenty million range: which is one reason why we need zoning reform.

* “The U.S. made a breakthrough battery discovery — then gave the technology to China.” Maybe we shouldn’t do that? Seliger + Associates has worked on numerous clean energy projects, and we’d prefer the benefits accrue here.

* “The US basically stopped building large-scale water infrastructure in the 1980s.” That seems bad, and we should start again. “Big” shouldn’t be synonymous with “bad,” even though it has been in the discourse of the last forty years.

* A Canceled Cancellation at the University of Michigan: “The University of Michigan Medical School just took a bold stand for academic freedom.” That’s an improvement over the status quo, but, simultaneously, I wonder how many institutions include “misuse of the bureaucratic apparatus and process” as a punishable offense.

* Colleges engage in extensive price discrimination, though they rarely call what they do “price discrimination.”

* Arguments in favor of intellectual freedom at the University of Austin.

* The paradox of Fermi’s Paradox: maybe we’ve been seeing aliens for a century and yet not admitting that’s what we’ve been seeing.

* “Failing Introductory Economics: A Davidson professor bemoans the state of his classroom.” Note the comments about performance across time. Maybe you’ve also seen that SAT and ACT scores are at their lowest level in 30 years. Complaining about the kids these days is an ancient hobby, but it may be useful to ask the kids these days how they spend their time.

* “Ten years of YIMBYism have accomplished a lot.” Good.

* “The Masks We’ll Wear in the Next Pandemic: N95s are good. Some scientists want to do much better.” Good, too, and there’s no guarantee the next pandemic won’t be far worse than this one.

Manufacturing plants are going up

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Grant writing links: The need to build in America, fixing the grant-funding process in science, sexual activity, and more!

* “Your methods are unorthodox.” We agree.

* “Why America can’t build.” This is consistent with our recent piece on how “‘Homelessness is a Housing Problem’: When cities build more housing, homelessness goes down.” Some problems can’t be solved with money alone: money has to be combined with real-world changes. Increasing the number of dollars chasing a scarce good merely increases the price of that good.

* “Granting funding is broken“—something we all know—and this writer has an extremely impractical, non-scaleable way to fix it. But we encourage experimentation; the challenge is that most grant funding is not meant to be “effective”—it is meant to make the grantor feel good, or to achieve other ends. Understand that, and many other seeming peculiarities of the grant making process fall into place.

* Charitable infrastructure and the financial infrastructure surrounding them. Something very important and yet that few of us consider. We’ve talked before about how grantors that care about efficiency will simplify applications and provide templates; those that don’t—which is pretty much all of them—won’t.

* “How Everyone Got So Lonely: The recent decline in rates of sexual activity has been attributed variously to sexism, neoliberalism, women’s increased economic independence, weight gain, sugar consumption, work rates and hours, and more. How fair are those claims?

* “A 4-Year Degree Isn’t Quite the Job Requirement It Used to Be: New research finds companies are starting to rely less on the college filter in hiring.” Smart. Boosting apprenticeships is a good idea; as I write in that piece, having taught college for many years, the problems in contemporary higher ed are real, and go back to a simple “correlation is not causation” point: college grads earned, and still earn, more than non-college grads. But did “graduating from college” cause higher earnings, or did any number of other factors cause higher earnings?

* Efforts to fund science and influence science funding.

* “Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority head quits over employee-pay conflict.” This does help explain some of the bizarre interactions we’ve had with LAHSA over the decades. Yes, LAHSA has been “solving” homelessness for over 30 years, without much success, but they have built an impressive bureaucracy that employs many people.

* Reforming the National Science Foundation (NSF) would be a good idea. And yet more on the NIH.

* Tim Bray on riding his ebike. I have an ebike and it’s great.

* “America’s homebuilding trend (that isn’t).” We need to create housing abundance, but we’re not doing so.

* The odds of winning an NSF grant are going up, while applications submitting to the NSF are down by about a fifth. Why? No one seems sure.

* “Rebuilding my conception of the academic life.” From a psychologist who is joining the University of Austin.

* “Nuclear power can help the democratic world achieve energy independence.” Pretty obvious, but here we are.

* “How Much Health Insurers Pay for Almost Everything Is About to Go Public,” in an important win for price transparency and eventually getting healthcare costs under control. One guy “analyzed 1835 hospital price lists so you didn’t have to,” and he finds that, not surprisingly, hospitals hate price transparency.

* “Energy Superabundance: How Cheap, Abundant Energy Will Shape Our Future.” “Will” seems a bit too definitive.

* “The New Founders America Needs: What I told the first students at The University of Austin.” On the commitment to free speech, thought, and inquiry—the sorts of things that universities are, in theory, supposed to facilitate.

* “Build a Charter School, Get Sued by the Teachers Union: Vertex Academies is set to open next month on the old Blessed Sacrament campus in the Bronx. Its founders, Ian Rowe and Joyanet Mangual, are confident they’ll beat back the legal challenge.” This seems undesirable to me; it’s notable how many cities inhabited by persons who nominally care much for disadvantaged young people, nonetheless trap them in poor performing public schools.

* “One Person, One Task: Who’s in Charge of Your Proposal?” We put similar language about this, and the “directly responsible individual” (DRI), in many applications. We’ve toned down some of the language we used to use about universal contributions, and increased the language we’ve been using about effectiveness. You’ve probably noticed that language about “effectiveness” in this post.

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Links: Microgrants programs, dynamism, the CDC during the pandemic, grant performance, and more!

* “So you want to build a microgrants program.” In this, Scott Alexander notes: “(2) Most people are terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE grantwriters.” That’s why we have a business: this stuff is hard. Telling effective stories is hard, especially when having to respond to confusingly worded RFPs. Scott Alexander’s RFPs don’t suffer from that problem, but he still seems to have found terrible grant writers. Many people who are great at doing what they do are simultaneously poor at explaining to others what they do and want to do. We help with that.

* “Building American Dynamism.” One might ask what a typical organization is doing to do that.

* Failures of the CDC as an agency. This is consistent with our interactions with most government agencies; organizations working with most government agencies get things done in spite of those agencies, not because of them. Michael Lewis has a good book, The Fifth Risk, that also discusses these issues.

* “College professors have a right to provoke and upset you. It’s a part of learning. Whether from the right or from the left, calls to silence faculty voices on America’s campuses are inconsistent with the values of a university.” Seems obvious to me, though I quaintly still think it important to encourage students to think, without telling them what to think.

* Emergent Ventures’ life-changing actions. I doubt we’ll ever seen governments fund this way, or most foundations fund this way, but it’s great to see someone doing it. Funders should experiment more and signal to their peers less.

* “A Multigenerational Home in Amsterdam Can Be Reconfigured for Changing Demands.” This is the sort of thing that overly restrictive mandatory single-family zoning in the United States prevents. Much of the U.S. tech and entrepreneurial sectors are creative, fast-paced, and adaptive, while anything related to land use and housing is slow, sclerotic, and ossified. We can and should do better. Still, some large homebuilders like Lennar offer flex-space options to create more or less a small, second unit within the house with a bath, kitchenette, and separate entrance—in jurisdictions that allow this, creating a multigenerational but “single-family” house. The better solution is to legalize missing middle housing everywhere, but, again, sclerosis is the rule.

* “Moth minds: a software grant platform for investing in individuals or others.” We talk a lot about the process of applying for grants, but it’d also be interesting to make the process of giving out grants easier. Re-using infrastructure is good and useful. Existing foundations have whatever infrastructure they’ve cobbled together, and individuals can randomly cut checks, but there’s very little between the two. This is an effort to be between those two structures; it’s somewhat like Fast Grants or Emergent Ventures, it would seem.

* “Alumni Withhold Donations, Demand Colleges Enforce Free Speech.” Something like the University of Austin might be an alternate choice for donations.

* “The global pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness in America.” See also me on Lost Connections, which deals with what the title suggests from a pre-pandemic frame.

* “How to keep your organization out of culture wars.” What’s your focus? You can only have one. Choose it well.

* “The Quiet Scandal of College Teaching.”

* The Arc Institute is “for curiosity-driven biomedical science and technology” and it’s got “open positions for Technology Center group leaders, research scientists, and operational staff” right now. It’s designed to be on people more than particular projects. Like many of the links in this batch, Arc is trying to improve how we fund science and other projects in the United States. It’s hard to look at our pandemic response and think we’re doing things optimally.

* “Alexander Berger On Philanthrophic Opportunities And Normal Awesome Altruism.”

* “Burn the Universities and Salt the Earth.” An overstated rant, but not wholly inaccurate, either.

* “Battery Storage Soars on U.S. Electric Grid: Falling costs and green mandates are boosting demand for batteries capable of storing large amounts of wind and solar power for later use.” All those SBIR/STTR Dept. of Energy proposals we’ve written are bearing fruit. Now we’ll have to see if flow batteries make it: most existing battery installs are li-ion formulations. If your organization is seeking R&D funds for renewable energy and batteries, call us.

* More on ClimeWorks, a firm attempting to scale carbon capture and storage. If you know anyone who says they’re seriously concerned about climate change, ask if they have a ClimeWorks, Project Vesta, or similar subscription (I do). The answers will be revealing.

* “Hospitals Still Not Fully Complying With Federal Price-Disclosure Rules: Some healthcare systems post incomplete pricing data or nothing at all.”

* Against Identity Politics.

* “Democrats’ college degree divide: More educated Democrats are more progressive across the board.” This seems important but also under-emphasized.

* We’ve put up a bunch of landing pages related to grant writing, which will not be of interest to most of you.

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Links: Keys to organizational success, changing the college narrative, a Dept. of Labor (DOL) RFP, and more!

* “Willingness to look stupid,” which is often key to getting things done and learning new things.

* “Is College Worth It? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis.” Depends on the degree, above all else, but at least a third of degrees aren’t worth it in financial terms. If you were told to take out $50,000 of debt for a one-third chance that you’ll never make anything from that debt, would you take the risk? For as long as I’ve been grant writing, “Department of Education Grants Are All About Going to College and Completing A Four-Year Degree.” We’ll know things have really changed when the Dept. of Education changes its perspective and emphasizes skills more than degrees.

* “Plans for Telosa, a $400-billion new city in the American desert, unveiled.” I’d move there: Phoenix, but with better urban design and transit. Sounds great! There is the minor issue that, historically, attempts at building utopian cities in America have all failed badly, no matter the intent. Will this one be different?

* “The housing theory of everything: Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.” Housing shortages are entirely self-imposed, too.

* “On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking.”

* “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’: The number of men enrolled at two- and four-year colleges has fallen behind women by record levels, in a widening education gap across the U.S.” Colleges and universities, or “institutions of higher education” (IHEs—as they’re known in the business), are used to setting up special programs and services targeting women: “Some schools are quietly trying programs to enroll more men, but there is scant campus support for spending resources to boost male attendance and retention.” But note: “Yet skyrocketing education costs have made college more risky today than for past generations, potentially saddling graduates in lower-paying careers—as well as those who drop out—with student loans they can’t repay.” Word about the dangers of college is getting out: going, taking out loans that can’t be discharged through bankruptcy, and not graduating is extremely perilous.

* “The feared eviction ‘tsunami’ has not yet happened. Experts are conflicted on why.” So why have we been denying landlords’ property rights for so long? This also demonstrates that many of self-described “experts” don’t actually know much.

* “So You’re About To Be Cancelled: A group called Counterweight assists people whose bosses and co-workers are forcing them to endorse ‘social-justice’ beliefs.”

* “Increased politicization and homogeneity in NSF grants.” This is, needless to say, bad, for science and our society.

* There is a Dept. of Labor RFP from Aug. 10 for “Improving Gender Equity in the Mexican Workplace.” I’m not sure why that activity would be in the DOL’s purview, however worthy said activity might otherwise be. We like to point out silly seeming RFPs when we see them.

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Links: The hospital monopoly problem, the housing construction problem, and more problems (and some good news)!

* “Hospitals Have Started Posting Their Prices Online. Here’s What They Reveal.” That headline isn’t great, and a lot of hospitals aren’t yet posting prices, because they’ve not been forced to. Still, price transparency should aid in lowering healthcare costs. See also “Hospitals and Insurers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why,” which is outrageous, but also fascinating. While most people who haven’t had to deal with a mammoth, unexpected healthcare bill, preliminary data show that “hospitals are charging patients wildly different amounts for the same basic services: procedures as simple as an X-ray or a pregnancy test.”

* “A City’s Only Hospital Cut Services. How Locals Fought Back. Apollo-owned LifePoint is embroiled in a dispute in central Wyoming that now stretches to Washington.” Why are the healthcare prices too damn high? Healthcare is the field with real monopoly problems: at least federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) offer alternatives for primary care.

* “ The Housing Market Is Crazier Than It’s Been Since 2006: Limited inventory, low interest rates and bidding wars are driving prices sky-high. ‘It’s just taken a little bit of the joy out of the process.’” We need to build a lot more housing and liberalize zoning laws, so that we’re not stuck in a negative, single-family-only equilibrium—which is where the vast majority of the country is right now.

* “College Enrollment Slid This Fall, With First-Year Populations Down 16%.” One wonders if this will lead to lower tuition costs, but likely not as colleges seem to ignore supply and demand issues.

* “Large variation in earnings returns among postgraduate degrees, with returns of more than 15% for masters in business and law, but negative returns for many arts and humanities courses.” Getting most kinds of masters degrees is a bad choice.

* “The ‘Target Husk’ in Hollywood Opens at Last, 12 Years After Work Began.” We don’t want to collect too many stories about California’s dysfunctions, but this one is impressive: “While the project was supported by then-Councilman Eric Garcetti and a number of community members who turned out at planning meetings, some residents weren’t impressed with the plans. Just weeks after the council’s approval, two lawsuits were filed. While independent, both complaints made similar accusations: that the city had violated rules in granting Target several variances, that the structure was too tall, and that the proposal failed to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act.” If you are wondering why California can’t build transit and lacks affordable housing, this story is a microcosm for those larger issues. Snake Plisken knew this decades ago in Escape from Los Angeles, one of Isaac’s favorite b-movies.

* Stripe now offers carbon sequestration services. Cool!

* Phoenix, the Capital of Sprawl, Gets a Radically Car-Free Neighborhood. The story concerns Culdesac’s development, which sounds incredibly charming.

* “Is This the End of College as We Know It? For millions of Americans, getting a four-year degree no longer makes sense. Here’s what could replace it.”

* “Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars.” Compatible with my experiences.

* The NSF has an RFP out called “Smart and Connected Communities:” I find the implication that most communities are, by apparent contrast, dumb and disconnected to be notable.

* Why Ne York’s mob mythology endures.

* “Reinventing Racism—A Review.” Something is likely to replace the college system as we know it.

* Jesse Singal’s book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills is coming out soon: you’ll see many social and human service programs implicitly mentioned in it.

* “Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan End Health-Care Venture Haven: Company had targeted innovations in primary care, insurance coverage, prescription drug costs.” In other words, healthcare reform is so hard that even Amazon doesn’t think it can do it.

* “WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using the app.” Time to switch to Signal?

* “The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone:” on efforts to build places that are good for humans to live.

* “I helped build ByteDance’s censorship machine.” ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok.

* “Oregon Is Blazing a Psychedelic Trail: A very promising mental health experiment is taking shape in the West.”

* “Telemedicine Will Be Great After Covid, Too: Pandemic-fueled innovations like remote consultation and licensing reform are good for doctors, patients and public health.” That would be nice.

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Links: COVID’s effects on mental health, job training in construction, and far more!

* “A Hidden Cost of Covid: Shrinking Mental-Health Services: Mental-health treatment has become harder to find just as the coronavirus pandemic has driven higher demand for such services and hospitals place a high priority on handling the next Covid-19 surge.” This is consistent with what we’ve heard from FQHCs and other mental health provider clients.

* “Prefab was supposed to fix the construction industry’s biggest problems. Why isn’t it everywhere? The Canadian company Bone Structure can produce zero net energy homes months faster than a traditional builder. But its challenges highlight the difficulty of disrupting the entrenched construction industry.” High construction costs have important implications for job-training programs like YouthBuild, several DOL H1-B job training programs, the recent DOL Strengthening Community Colleges Training Grants, and the like: the skills needed in the construction industry are likely to change as modular housing takes off. Notice:

The bigger problem they needed to solve was labor. There have been shortages in labor and skilled tradespeople in the homebuilding industry for years, as workers have fled construction jobs tied to the volatile housing market in the years since the great recession and shifted to higher-paying jobs in other sectors. More than 80% of builders have reported shortages of framing crews and carpenters, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Availability of labor remains builders’ top concern.

If housing developers can’t get skilled persons, they’re going to shift more towards modular.

* “Here’s how DOE’s first crop of risky energy tech has done: Comparing 2009 ARPA-E winners to peers yields a mixed bag.” We’ve written a bunch of ARPA-E, and SBIR/STTR applications, so this one is of particular interest to us. The answer seems to be, “Better than expected” overall. We also seem to have been added to a bunch of SBIR/STTR grant-writer lists, as we’re getting more calls for these projects than we used to. Many startup founders and expert engineers are not writing experts too.

* Rachel Harmon on policing. Much more substantive on this important topic than most of what you’ve read in the media or, worse, on Twitter.

* Don’t believe the China hype. Maybe.

* “Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a climate menace.” All energy sources have serious externalities, and relatively few discussions offer an even and total treatment of them.

* Dropbox is a total mess. This matches our experience: we use Dropbox internally but probably won’t indefinitely, due to the said mess. Peak Dropbox was, for us, about five or six years ago, when it was easy to share files with a link but Dropbox hadn’t started putting a bunch of random stuff where the MacOS Finder should be. The simplicity is declining.

* “People Have Stopped Going to the Doctor. Most Seem Just Fine. Do Americans really need the amount of treatment that our health care system is used to providing?” Although I don’t have an immediate citation to this effect, my impression is that people who don’t actively have anything wrong with them don’t need to see doctors regularly—and that includes the elderly.

* Can philosophy make people generous?

* Why does DARPA work? Much more interesting than the title may suggest, and congruent with the link above regarding ARPA-E winners.

* “Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class.” Overstated, yes, but among the most interesting essays I’ve read in a long time, and I read a lot.

* “Aquatic Invasive Species Prevention Activities in Kansas” is (or was) in Grants.gov, and it’s a favorite recent RFP. I’m reminded of Isaac’s fondness for “giant animal” movies (think Lake Placid, Them!, Godzilla, Attack of the Killer Shrews, etc.), although this project is likely for more terrestrial issues.

* How you attach to people may explain a lot about your inner life.

* Licensed to Pill, on the roll from prescribing and prescriptions in the opioid epidemic.

* Might buildings can 3-d print houses—even the roof. See also the second link in this batch.

* “The Underemployment Crisis: Even before the pandemic, roughly one in ten workers wanted to log more hours.” I don’t see how public policy substantially alters this one.

* Zillow research finds that the strength (or weakness) of housing markets is about the same in urban and suburban areas, despite the many stories and claims about “fleeing the city.” But, “Metro-level discrepancies exist as well, especially in San Francisco and New York, showing that not all urban cores are keeping pace with hot suburban markets.”

* “Silicon Valley and Wall Street Elites Pour Money Into Psychedelic Research: Donors raise $30 million for psychedelic nonprofit to complete clinical trials around drug-assisted psychotherapy for trauma.” Coming to an FQHC near you!

* “The Service Economy Meltdown: As companies reconsider their long-term need to have employees on site, low-wage workers depending on office-based businesses stand to lose the most.”

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Links: The online ad bubble, funny RFPs, college grads and job training, the nature of behavioral health, and more!

* “The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising.” One could alternately ask, “What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?” The answer seems to be, “Not much.” The idea that many companies throw away tens or hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and in some cases more, seems barely believable.

* One of my favorite recent RFPs is for “Strengthening U.S.-Ukraine Business Relations while Addressing Social Issues through ‘Serious Game Jam.'” That’s from the Dept. of State, and it has $100,000 to “introduce U.S. companies to the Ukrainian gaming industry and promote good corporate governance by creating a platform for U.S. developers to collaborate with their Ukrainian counterparts on tackling social issues through ‘serious games.'”

* You may have heard that 41% of college grads are working jobs that don’t require the degree. What should this do to our view on college for everyone, as a panacea to our economic woes? In other education news, “U.S. Higher Education Has a Foreign Money Problem“—but this is mostly the rich, highly marketed schools. Having been a part of higher ed for a long time, I favor a much stronger push towards apprenticeships and vocational education. Lots of people don’t like sitting still and doing abstract symbol manipulation, and we should stop pretending that those personality traits are key to a meaningful life.

* “The evidence for evidence-based therapy is not as clear as we thought.” That shouldn’t, for now, stop you from citing CBT, MET, etc. in your SAMHSA proposals. It still seems, however, that we don’t really know what makes therapy work or how it should work: we’re still leaping in the dark. Colorado, however, looks like it will, in November, decriminalize psychedelics, and a number of research projects are using psychedelics for therapy.

* Owning a car hurts your health. “Beijing has limited the number of new car permits it issues to 240,000 a year… Those permits are issued in a monthly lottery with more than 50 losers for every winner.” Older winners gained more than 20 pounds, compared to the control group of non-winners. Given COVID-19 social distancing and fears, it may be a while until mass transit gains its recent luster.

* Book Review: Just giving. I was surprised by the first quarter of the review and didn’t see the shift coming, although in retrospect I should have.

* Why the US sucks at building public transit. If we could get better at this, we could slash many households’s transit costs and thus free up more money for anything and everything else. Except for endless COVID-19 news, which is scaring most people off of public transit, even though wearing masks on public transit appears to prevent COVID from spreading.

* “Why Japan is obsessed with paper.” I have complained periodically about American publishers not being obsessed with paper at all, and the crappy paper quality used in most books. The New York Review of Books books are among the notable exceptions.

* “In the Future, Everything Will Be Made of Chickpeas.” One hopes. A pressure cooker helps.

* “In Philanthropy, Race Is Still a Factor in Who Gets What, Study Shows.” This is the New York Times, after all.

* For over a decade, the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico has been the epicenter of the American oil boom. Now, it’s the epicenter of its demise. I’ve read versions of this article a couple times already. The Permian Basin could be going back the back economic times that served as the backdrop for the book, movie, and great TV series, Friday Night Lights.

* Can genetic engineering bring back the chestnut tree? If so, that would be great news: chestnuts produce lots of cheap food and good wood. And, then there’s Jurassic Park style dinosaurs. Maybe they’ll love to eat genetically engineered chestnuts.

* The Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup. If not for Chinese censorship, the rest of the world might have been much better prepared.

* The new language of telehealth. Maybe.

* “Exclusive: Tesla’s secret batteries aim to rework the maths for electric cars and the grid.” Maybe. It does seem that nickel and low-cobalt batteries are coming. The second-life systems are also hugely impressive: one rarely appreciated reason to pick electric vehicles is that their batteries can be repurposed for grid storage when the car itself reaches end-of-life. Here is one story on how “Millions of used electric car batteries will help store energy for the grid.”

* Cities are transforming as electric bike sales skyrocket. It is now possible to buy very good electric bikes for $1,500 retail and less-good ones for about $1,000. In this case, COVID-19 terror should help.

* The pandemic is bringing us closer to our robot takeout future?.

* MacOS 10.15: Slow by design. Thankfully I haven’t “upgraded,” although this is not an actual upgrade. We have written periodically about how we use Macs at Seliger + Associates, but we may need to re-think that usage given Apple’s direction.