Dartmouth head football coach Buddy Teevens was seriously injured when a truck struck his bicycle Thursday night on State Road A1A in Crescent Beach near St. Augustine. The news story in the St. Augustine Record demonstrates something I've been noticing in the media lately -- the bias that bicycles and pedestrians are probably to blame when vehicles hit them:

Teevens, 66, was crossing at 6100 State Road A1A at around 8:40 p.m. when he was hit by a 40-year-old female traveling northbound in a pickup truck, FHP said.

Teevens did not have any illuminated lights on his bicycle and wasn't in a crosswalk or designated crossing area, the report stated. It also noted he wasn't wearing a helmet.

I'm well-familiar with the stretch of road where this collision occurred. It's an undivided 45-mph two-lane road alongside beachfront condos and the occasional business. Citing a Florida Highway Patrol report, the story makes an issue out of Teevens not crossing at a crosswalk -- but it doesn't mention there are no marked crosswalks or intersections with stop lights anywhere around that location.

Another more detailed story from Valley News also mentions him not using a crosswalk, but it's a New Hampshire paper whose reporter wouldn't know the area.

I don't know who caused this accident, but Florida is the most dangerous state in the U.S. for bicyclists. Far too little is done here to make it safe for bicyclists and walkers.

• Vancouver has lost one of its most compelling creators: Darren Barefoot. See his last blog post: They were all splendid
• We in the tech community in Vancouver, Ireland, and beyond were lucky to have intersected with Darren and his life and work.
• I was privileged enough to have hung out with DB (and fabulous partner Julie) at the Northern Voice blogging conference and to be a co-organizer and attend so many NV meetings with him. So many great memories, so many great DB blog posts and words. e.g. May 2, 2016: Why marketers need to become inventors
  • “I like to think my friend Roland invented content strategy in the early 2000’s when he described his Four C’s: create compelling content constantly. Content strategy has, of course, been added to our long list of online marketing activities — media relations, SEO, email marketing, social media and so forth — that everyone does. We have to do these things just to keep up with our competitors. I call these ongoing daily marketing activities “heartbeats,” because they’re constant, reliable and they keep an organization’s outreach alive.”
• Thanks DB. I miss you!

Previously

• February 9, 2023: Inspired by Darren and Derek, I created a real-time daily flickr worldwide barcode website using ruby, a rust static web server and ngrok

Bonus DB links

• DB and J at the Bryght offices, July 25, 2006: https://flic.kr/p/iwUYV
• DB Feb 20, 2009 video: The Internet has changed my life by allowing me to work remotely in Malta

This morning, I learned from Paul Kafasis that major league baseball will be going to a pitch clock, something they tried out in the minor leagues last year. The idea, of course, is to speed up our interminable national pastime.

The story reminded me of a post I wrote about a decade ago in which I plotted the generally upward trend of baseball game durations over about 90 years. I grabbed a new set of data from Retrosheet and made this updated plot:

The last decade has not been kind to fans’ tushies. The black line is the median game length, and the blue zone is the interquartile range, which runs from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile. Games have gotten 10–12 minutes longer in the past 10 years.

Paul quotes a Washington Post article about the how the pitch clock

has reduced the average [minor league] game time from 3 hours 4 minutes in 2021 to 2:36 in 2022

My first thought was How can minor league games possibly last as long as major league games? Isn’t that a violation of the Geneva Convention? But then I remembered that minor league teams put on a lot of non-baseball show between innings. Myron Noodleman (RIP) ate up a lot of time.

I wish baseball luck. A half-hour drop would bring the game back down to the running time it had when I was a fan. I think that’s quite optimistic, but we’ll revisit this graph at the end of the season and see how it went.

[If the formatting of equations looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]

Darren Barefoot died on February 20, 2023 following complications from metastatic cancer. Just weeks before he passed, Darren wrote this reflection on his life. I hope you find pleasure in it. You can read more about Darren’s life in this remembrance.

When I was a turtle-neck wearing theatre student, if you’d asked me what the purpose of life was I would have said to see the great cathedrals of Europe. And, I’ve seen them. From the dusty spires of the Munster in Cologne to the clay coloured minarets of Ta Pinu and Notre Dame before it burned. They were all splendid. 

Art has been everything in my life. I stood alone in a room of Picassos in Dusseldorf. I saw Thoreau’s, The Dream – a glorious hallucination, for Thoreau had never been to the jungle, he’d only seen it in books. I saw Rebecca Horn’s exploded piano in Dublin, hanging over my head like a premonition.

I saw Waiting for Godot performed on the 75th anniversary of its writing. I came to understand how Irish and hilarious it is. I saw Mamie Gummer light up a grimy Manhattan cellar in a one-woman show. I stood in the wooden “O” of Shakespeare’s recreated Globe.

I saw Van Morrison point towards Bantry Bay and then to Derry Quay on stage in Belfast as if he were “bigging up” a couple local pubs. I saw Elvis Costello startle a crowd of maudlen hipsters with a scorching cover of Cowgirl in the Sand while wearing a gold lamé jacket. I was harangued by Gordon Downie to remember that, “life is forgetting.”

I walked and walked and walked. I was a flâneur meandering around cities. I walked across corners of Ireland, England and France. I loved the solace and the freedom from decision making. There’s particular pleasure in finishing a 20-kilometre day at a thousand-year-old inn knowing there’d be just one dinner option on the menu. 

I wrote a book, I wrote a play and at least six thousand blog posts rife with dumb hot takes and cancellable offences. I ran a newspaper, a theatre company and a business. After a mentor invited me to work on the Copenhagen Climate Talks, I realised I could earn a living and still be on the side of the angels. And so, I helped to change laws that protect nature; I compelled people to get vaccinated during a pandemic; and I shook the hands of Prime Ministers in Paris.

I loved a woman for 27 years, but that is private and not for you. 

This has been my life: art, exploring, work and love. I’m proud of it and sad that it’s shortened. I haven’t seen Asia. Will the Canucks win the Stanley Cup in the next thirty years? Will people walk on Mars?

I have a Buddhist friend who legitimately believes that every person is doing their best all of the time. I’ve finally come around to this idea. I’ve lived the best life I could.

What should we make of China’s recent and dramatic policy reversals? Not only did the government summarily abandon its strict Covid policies in December, it has also dropped years of restrictions on the real estate sector. Officials are taking a softer line on internet platform companies, targets of the regulatory crackdown in 2021, and even adopting a marginally less confrontational stance in foreign policy. All of these now-abandoned positions had once been considered key political priorities of top leader Xi Jinping.

So what does it mean that he is doing things so much differently than just a few months ago? Here are four of the leading interpretations that I’ve heard:

Don’t get fooled again. The professional China-watching community is nearly unanimous in its view that all of these policy shifts are merely short-term tactical adjustments to get the economy back on track and restore public and investor confidence after the missteps of 2021-22. According to this view, Xi faces no constraints on his power as he begins a third term heading a government packed with officials he has personally selected for loyalty. Nor is there any evidence that his ambitious long-term goals–of greater global stature and influence for China, a strong national security state, and technological self-sufficiency–have changed.

The recent “pragmatic” focus on economic growth and stabilization is therefore likely to be just a phase. The more political priorities, which were such a feature of Xi’s second term, will return to prominence soon enough. Neil Thomas has a careful example of this analysis over at ChinaFile, and Bill McCahill a more cynical one at the National Bureau of Asian Research.

A more benevolent dictator. These skeptical takes are being advanced mostly to counter the euphoria in financial markets unleashed after China’s abandonment of its Covid controls. A more optimistic school of thought contends that while Xi’s power is indeed untrammeled, his priorities have shifted after three years of economic and market disruption. The policy reversals on multiple fronts are seen as evidence that Xi can course correct, and will continue pursuing a more pragmatic and markets-friendly agenda in the future. For instance, former Morgan Stanley strategist Ruchir Sharma argued in an an FT column that the policy shifts show that Xi is “willing to reform, at least in the depths of a crisis.”

Of course we have no way of knowing what Xi “really” thinks, and whether the current priorities are a tactical feint or a strategic shift. But it’s not out of the question that Xi has in fact just changed his mind. We do know that Xi has in fact changed course on economic policy lots of times, so changing course again is not in itself a shocker. After all, one of the benefits of having absolute power is that you don’t have to worry about consistency.

Furthermore, Xi probably cares more about maintaining his own power and control over elite politics than about the details of various policies. Since his control over the system and key personnel looks secure after the 20th Party Congress, he can be flexible about specific policies. The implication of this view is that Xi is less ideological than sometimes portrayed, and just does what is needed to preserve the power and authority of his government.

The new technocrats. A variant of this interpretation gives credit for the policy pivot more to Xi’s lieutenants. The argument is that while the new leadership team he put in place at the Party Congress was generally portrayed as a bunch of incompetent sycophants in the Western press, in reality they are effective, competent and broadly business-friendly.

Since Xi is confident in their loyalty, he trusts them to do what is necessary, even if that means having to tolerate some embarrassing policy reversals. And because Xi isn’t fighting all the time with Li Keqiang, who kept trying to promote his own agenda, actual policymaking will end up being more sensible. This interpretation suggests that while Xi’s long-term policy priorities of national security and technological self-sufficiency will still be a major focus of government policy, they can be implemented in a less disruptive way than in recent years.

A quiet revolt. There is also a more radical interpretation than any of these: that policies are changing not because Xi’s own priorities have changed, either temporarily or permanently, but because his power has been diminished. The repeated cycles of forced obedience to top-down political campaigns, the enormous costs of the ever-stricter Covid controls, and and ultimately the near-collapse of the economy have, on this view, discredited Xi’s program and cost him authority.

Of course, he remains formally at the apex of the system, but his ability to enforce his views on the country has been diminished, and other people are quietly making more key decisions. The clearest evidence for this view is the way local governments started giving up on the whole system of Covid controls before receiving considered top-down instructions to do so. Anne Stevenson-Yang, always a thoughtful if jaundiced observer, says: “something very important has happened politically to reverse Xi’s power…I think there has been some kind of quiet internal revolt against Xi Jinping’s personal rule.”

I’m not yet a fully paid-up subscriber to any of these schools of thought.

The consensus view, that Xi is executing a short-term tactical correction while keeping his longer-term agenda basically unchanged, certainly has logic and much evidence on its side. But it’s also a product of a type of analysis, based mainly on careful reading of Party documents, that completely failed to anticipate the dramatic shifts in actual policies. That failure argues for giving more consideration to how feedback from economic conditions, public opinion and lower-level enforcement affect high-level policy decisions.

At the moment, I’m leaning toward an interpretation that combines some elements from all of these theories. I do feel that the reversal of Covid policies was a major political event for China. Although the suppression strategy actually worked for a while, by mid-2022, the evolution of new and super-transmissible subvariants made it no longer practical. The central government’s attempt to force local authorities and the populace at large to keep enforcing what had become unenforceable measures discredited both the policies and the decision-making behind them.

Perhaps the man at the top recognized that the center’s ability to enforce compliance with its dictates was at risk, and if the gap between rhetoric and reality became too wide it would expose dangerous weakness. Rather than try to force the bureaucracy to do things people really didn’t want to do, and risk failure, it was better to instead focus on the things that everyone wants and can agree on, like stabilizing the economy.

It’s not a complete course reversal. Some parts of Xi’s recent agenda do have widespread support, like reducing technological reliance on the US. But some other parts, like the common prosperity push, do not. So that’s why we see the most recent rhetoric emphasizing the former and downplaying the latter: it’s an effort to emphasize consensus within the bureaucracy and re-establish compliance. But because norms of authority are unsettled, the longer-term trajectory probably hasn’t yet been locked in. Depending on how the internal political maneuverings evolve from here, maybe this could be a sustained course correction. Or not.