Recession and Inflation by president

This data is from St Louis Federal Reserve's "FRED" data.  Numbers are computed annually. 

Nixon1  1 recession 5.8%  peak inflation, 4.7% average, inherited 4.3%

Nixon2 1 recession, 11.1% peak inflation, 8.6% average, inherited 3.3%

Ford    0 recessions, 7.6% peak inflation 7.4% average, inherited 5.7%

Carter    1 recession, 13.5% peak inflation, 9.7% average, inherited 5.7%

Reagan11 recession  10.3% peak inflation, 5.7% average, inherited 13.5 

Reagan2 0 recessions 4.1% peak inflation, 3.3% average inherited 3.5%

Bush    1 recession, 5.4% peak inflation, 4.4% average, inherited 4.0

Clinton1    0 recessions, 2.9% peak inflation, 2.8% average, inherited 3.0%

Clinton2 0 recessions, 3.4% peak inflation, 2.4% average, inherited 2.9%

Bush1    1 recession, 3.4% peak inflation, 2.4% average, inherited 3.8%

Bush2    1 recession, 3.8% peak inflation, 3.3% average, inherited 2.6%

Obama1    0 recessions, 3.1% peak inflation, 1.4% average, inherited 3.8%

Obama2    0 recessions, 1.6% inflation, 1.1% average, inherited 2%

Trump1    1 recession, 2.4% peak inflation, 1.9% average, inherited 1.2%

Biden    0 recessions, 8% peak inflation, 4.9% average, inherited 4.6%

The Nixon, Carter, Reagan inflation was all very directly related to the OPEC crisis:
In October 1973, several Arab countries did a surprise attack on Israel, which, unlike the '67 attack, took a few months for Israel to push back.  Nixon threw his support wholeheartedly behind Israel, and the Arab countries formed an organization they called "the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries" and sharply reduced supplies to the US and other countries that had supported Israel.  OPEC continued to blockade oil until well into the 1980s, with the result of 3 recessions and a decade of high inflation.   All US presidents carefully kowtowed to OPEC since then.

 

 

Serenity Lies to Us.

My favorite TV show is 2002's martyred Firefly.  It was presented out-of-order, in the Friday Night Death Slot, by a network that clearly didn't understand what it had, but did let the show's writers and producers do a competent job.  Nearly all of the actors have gone on to have long and successful careers.  It was killed just as it was beginning to develop a following in spite of the horrible support the network had given, and that following quickly grew--sufficiently that the showrunners were given a chance to make a feature film 3 years later.   My thesis is that feature film, as likeable as it is, does not make sense in the context of the rest of the show.

 Almost everything in here is a spoiler.  If you haven't watched the show or the movie, and I urge that you do, don't read this essay until you have.

 There are a number of big screwups--killing off two of the main characters being the least of it.  Another is that the writers seemed to feel that a lot of the movie's viewers would not have seen the TV show.   That resulted in a lot of valuable movie time being spent in exposition.  But the most important is that the central plot element--the origin story of the Reavers and River Tam's connection to it, makes no sense.   As two separate stories, it makes perfect sense, but tying them together as they tried to was simply a mistake.

 I regard the entire movie as Retcon: Retroactive Continuity, meaning, in this case, significantly rewriting the story so that two unrelated back stories share a single plotline.  This was a mistake. 

The alliance, and most likely their corporate benefactors, especially the Blue Sun Corporation, have done and will continue to do a lot of shady things, and they have a staff of secret agents to defend them.   Some version of this is likely true of most powerful governments in our world too, and lots of good stories can be written about them.  They need talented operatives to do this work, and the unnamed "operative" is one of them.  I am virtually certain that River was being recruited and trained to be one too.  I'm pretty sure that Reverend Book was also an operative during the war, although perhaps not as high-level as the Chiwetel or River characters are.

 Similarly, I am comfortable with the story that the Alliance accidentally created the Reavers.    It makes sense, especially since we're aware that they've been learning how to fiddle with people's attitudes and self control with chemistry.  I find it profoundly unlikely that River had anything to do with this, or that The Operative did either.  It does make sense that those who are guilty of creating the Reavers would like to cover up their involvement, and might even use an operative or two to interfere with word getting out.   But I am profoundly skeptical that they would have gone so far as to bury a secret codeword into a trainee operative.

Why do they want River so much?  This secret is sold to us as the central premise of the movie.  They don't want the secret leaking.  Why would they give the secret to a not-yet-fully-trained operative?   I can't think of a single reason, and I can think of lots not to.  If you need for her to know for some reason, there's no reason not to wait until she's been sufficiently brainwashed to be as loyal as the Chiwetel character.   It's mission-specific info.  When the Chiwetel character learns the truth and realizes that he's been brainwashed, he flips.  "No longer their man" as he puts it.   

The answer is that they accidentally put a senior member of the Alliance in a room with River, and she apparently read his mind and found out about Miranda.

That said, central to the show is the message that the Alliance is incompetent.  They are massive, powerful, and most of all boring, and over and over they prove that one part of the administrative state has no idea what other parts are doing.   The operative has figured this out.  But he is

It is tragic that the show was cancelled when it was.  A decade later, the internet was advanced enough that rebooting a show like this would have been easy.  I put forth the example of "The Expanse", which was cancelled by SciFi, but brought back to life a few years later because Jeff Bezos personally liked it.  The actors were mostly all still available and pretty much looked as they had earlier.  Similarly, Serenity was released only 4 years after the show was cancelled.  They had to build a new set, and improved CG and budget made a real difference--and Summer and Jewell were both under 25.  But ten years after the movie, one of the actors had died, and the two that were purportedly teen-agers could no longer pull that off.    The story would have to explain the passage of so much time.

 Animation makes it much more possible to play these games.  Voices change almost as much as physical appearance, but AI voices are getting so good I think this could be faked now.   I hope the new show can pull it off.  I say: put it into the timeline between the show and the movie.  I think there are as many as three plausible years in there. 

Ranking Episodes of Firefly

 My favorite TV show is 2002's martyred "Firefly".  They did 14 episodes, one of them a double-length Pilot, and a feature movie.  The movie was good, albeit disappointing.

 If you haven't watched the show, do it.  Watch the episodes in order, most importantly the Pilot first.  Fox aired them out of order, and that was one of the things that damaged the show's popularity.  There are several spoilers in here.

 

Best Episode: Out of Gas.  This episode was full of flashbacks, many of which explained who members of the crew are and how they came to be part of Serenity's crew.  It's only best by a tiny bit.   The one real error is that Wash set up a call back button, but Mal never uses it.  The plot would make more sense if he had pressed it, and only a few lines would have to change.

Pilot: The initial, double-length episode is only in second place by a nose: it's also one of the best.   It's actual name is the same as the ship: Serentity.  It has several scenes from the battle that gave the ship its name.  We meet everybody, including several of the baddies.  Reverend Book, now aware that he's on a pirate ship rather than the Tramp Steamer that he thought he was boarding, expresses misgivings, which are completely gone by the next episode.

Ariel: Inara needs to go to a central planet for her annual medical certification, and Doctor Tam comes up with a job for the crew to do at that site.   We learn a lot about Jayne, a really lot about River and "The hands of blue".

Objects in Space: a Bounty Hunter attempts to capture River, but River turns the tables on him.  The bounty hunter was a terrific character, and River and Simon are at their best.  River goes from being a character that made the rest of the crew nervous, to being a full fledged part of the crew, that everybody loves--almost as much as they all love Kaylee.

 

The Train Job.   The "second pilot".  It was written quickly, over a weekend, and the network foolishly ran it instead of the real pilot.  It's a pretty good episode, but it fails to do a lot of the exposition that the pilot did so brilliant.  It has a bunch of very likable scenes, such as when the goon is pushed into the running engine and when the captain realizes that he's doing his theft right under the noses of a whole troop of Alliance soldiers.

Safe.   The doctor and River are kidnapped by hill people, who need a doctor.  I really like the world building that this episode does.   It almost ranks with the best episodes.

 Shindig.  while trying to make a deal for some goods to transport, Captain Reynolds gets crosswise with a local oligarch and is forced to fight him.  There's a lot to like about this episode, but it's in the bottom half only because there are others that are significantly better.

Jaynestown.  We learn a little about Jayne and his history.  While he is mostly a crude, money grubbing thug, he does care about things.   We see a lot of the character of various characters.

War Stories.  A great episode in a lot of ways.  Niska, from the earlier Train Job episode, is back and he's angry.  River is starting to recover, presumably with the aid of the treatment the Doctor was able to devise following the episode in Ariel, and we start seeing a little of what the alliance wanted to turn her into. 

Our Mrs Reynolds.  Christina Hendricks plays an interesting character--who seems like an incredibly naive young woman but turns out to be a highly cynical and skilled thief.

Trash.  Christina Hendrick's character is back.   It's a more straightforward episode and it does a little world-building, and it is a great episode overall, but it's definitely in the bottom half.

The Message: Mal and Zoey's army buddy shows up with a secret.    It's got a fulfilling but very sad ending, compounded with the fact that the actors had just been informed that the show had been cancelled

Heart of Gold:  Inara's old friend hires the crew to deal with a thug.   The plot shares a lot with the Clint Eastwood movie "Unforgiven".   It's the archetypical horses and spaceships in the same scene episode, although there are others.  Mal goes full Indiana Jones and chases down a hovercar with a horse.  

Bushwacked.  This is probably the most disappointing episode.   The crew comes upon a colony ship that had been attacked by Reavers, leaving behind a virus that infects the Serenity and the only survivor.  

----

 I rank the movie in the bottom half of this list.  It's a good movie, and it explains some important stuff, but I regard a lot of the plot as inappropriate Retcon.  I'd rank it above "The Message" and below the YoSaffBridge episodes.   I wish they had told more or less the same story with three or four regular episodes, and not tried to do the exposition: most of the audience were already fans, and at least 1/3rd of the movie was wasted on that.  River is now almost a human being, as well as being something considerably more, Simon and Kaylee end up together, and it looks like the Captain and Inara are right on the edge of the same thing.   Wash and the Preacher were killed, only because the authors felt the movie needed the weight of that, not because it added to the story.  Mr Universe is a character that should have either been left out, or had a stronger story arc.  The Operative is a great character and I think his arc was just about right--but should have been spread over three or four episodes.

 

Bison and the Dust Bowl

Did the massacre of the American Bison Cause the dust bowl?   It doesn't appear to be the only cause, but it's clearly a contributing factor.

 The Dust Bowl was an ecological disaster in the early 20th century that devastated American agriculture, and was one of the major causes of the Great Depression.  Millions of new settlers flooded into the Great Plains states after the Civil War, using farming techniques that were appropriate for smaller farms in wetter climates.  Where they had come from, they had not needed to irrigate their fields, and they arrived in the Plains ignorant of the methods.  To some extent, they benefited from a rare wet spell, and to a larger degree, from the immense Aquifer (the Ogallala Aquifer) reaches from South Dakota to Texas.  They drilled thousands of wells into the aquifer and captured much of the few rivers that flowed across it.  They believed a widespread myth that "Rain follows the plow", which was promoted by land speculators and others that profited from their settlement, but did not pay for the consequences of being wrong.   When the wet spell ended in the 1920s, a lot of the land dried up and blew away.  A lot of the landholders had mortgaged their farms, to buy equipment or other advances, which were now in arrears--a million or more "Okies" were forced to give up their farms, which had become the property of the bankers that had lended to them, and which were sold to Agribusinesses for very little.

At the same time, there was an effort to suppress the previous inhabitants of the land, called "Indians" and force them to live on reservations, leaving the best land for the new settlers.  The army killed a lot of indians directly, but probably more indirectly, largely by the mass slaughter of their primary food source, the American Bison.  Around 60 million Bison (sometimes called Buffalo) were killed and by 1889, there were just 541 bison left in the US.  Active conservation has allowed these numbers to rebound to as many as 500,000 today, but the giant herds are gone, and existing agriculture is unlikely to allow them to return.

The Bison, it turns out, do a bunch of unique things that other large Ruminants do not.  They tend to not stay in one place--they eat their favorite grasses down to where they're a little harder to reach, and then move on.  One of the consequences of this is that the seeds from these preferred grasses adhere to the animals fur, and often pass through their guts, but survive and with a nice dollop of fresh fertilizer, are replanted in the new place that the Bison is feeding.  This causes the preferred grasses to spread, and where possible, interbreed with whatever was already there, improving the quality of both.  The great herds would trample the grass...this broke up the ground, and drove the seed below the surface where it was most likely to germinate.  And perhaps most importantly, the Bison like to "Wallow", where they lie on their side and roll around, which digs great pits.   This apparently helps to clean their fur, and helps them scratch itches.  They also like to scratch against trees--they are huge animals and it's amazing to see a tree with the bark missing from one side, up to 9 feet high.

But the wallows have a wonderful secondary effect in the plains.  They catch rainfall.  Left to its own devices, or to regular cattle, any irregularities will tend to get flattened, and rainfall will flow downstream.  Since a lot of this land is clay, it doesn't percolate well, and the water quickly runs off.  But if millions of bison are creating millions of wallow pits every day, a lot of this water catches in the pits, and stays there until it evaporates or percolates in.  That is probably a big part of how the Ogallala got to be there, and we almost completely removed this source in the late 1800s.

 Can the the restoration of the Bison restore the Ogallala?  Since the present population is less than 1% of what it was before the great slaughter, probably not.  But it might go a long way toward helping. 

2026 Electricity Cost, by Source

These are the fully burdened costs of each electricity source, counting capitalization, construction, maintenance, fuel depreciation, etc., as of today

Coal                        .092 to .23 per kWh

Natural Gas            .065 to .10 per kWh

Hydro                     .02 to .06 per kWh

Nuclear                    .037 per kWh

Utility Scale Solar  .03 to .05 per kWh

Residential Solar    .14 to .18 per kWh

Wind                       .024 to .075 per kWh

 

The bottom line: as of today (a couple of years ago, actually), utility scale solar was cheapest and shows signs of continuing to come down.  Hydro is #2, where you can get it, and that price has been stable for some time.  Wind is #3.  Nuclear is potentially competitive, but there are a lot of complicated externalities which make the cost in the table nearly impossible to achieve.  The recent standby, Natural Gas, is now close to the bottom of the heap, and the old standby, Coal, is significantly more expensive.

There are very few externalities from Solar.  The initial cost of the panels, once very large, is approaching trivial and the cost of the land is dominant.  They have very few environmental consequences. (although not zero: the shade changes hunting patterns for predators, for example, and productivity of farmland is somewhat reduced).   The panels last for decades, although recycling them when they eventually do wear out is a small problem.

There are more externalities for wind.  Perhaps the worst is that they interfere with the flight of some birds.   They make a noise which can be annoying if you're close, and some people find them unsightly.  They last 10-20 years, and most of them can be recycled into new windmills when the time comes.

Hydroelectric power has a very high upfront cost, and a theoretical lifetime of about a century, but the production costs are extremely low.  They turn out to have had a much more profound impact than was at first realized, especially on wildlife, such as fisheries.  Fish ladders had seemed to work, but a lot of them were defective and only a tiny fraction of the fish got through, for example.

 Natural Gas, mostly produced in the US as a byproduct of oil drilling, or hydraulic fracturing, has come on line quite strongly in the last couple of decades.  The fuel is comparatively cheap, and produces less CO2 and other pollution per kWh than burning coal or liquid fuel, such as gasoline.  But still quite a lot.  Another useful technology has been Combined Cycle turbines, which pair an internal combustion gas turbine with a steam turbine that exploits the waste heat.  They're able to get 60% or more efficiency, while conventional turbines struggle to get 40%.  But perhaps the biggest advantage is that an individual turbine can be throttled, to match demand, without much efficiency loss.  This makes it incredibly useful as a variable power source that's easily adapted to rapidly changing situations.

Coal is a historic fuel.   Because it was easily available in most of the places to industrialize early (e.g. Scotland, northern Germany, much of the US, China), it was a convenient energy source, and in a very real way, powered the industrial revolution.   It is difficult to throttle power generation to match demand, and all of the ways cost a lot of efficiency.  Moreover, it's dirty, inefficient and has lot of nasty externalities, such as open pit mining and mountaintop removal.  It's been the most expensive of the leading ways to produce energy for about 3 decades and has been rapidly declining in popularity.

Sustainable Ponzi Schemes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ponzi1920.jpg Charles Ponzi, 1882-1949 was a swindler who made $millions in the 1920s by promising investors huge  returns if they would send him money to invest.  They did, and early investors did get these huge returns: Ponzi was giving early investors money from later investors.   He didn't invent the swindle that today bears his name, but he was an effective publicist who got caught.  Many people have tried it, both before and after.  Such swindles cannot work over the long term, because eventually you will run out of investors, but they certainly can in the short term.

 Many people have pointed out that US Social Security is such a Ponzi scheme.  Well, yes and no.  If the scheme is set up so that it can never run out of investors, it can run indefinitely, and by doing so, it can generate a lot of value for people in the mean time by using the float wisely.  The stock market, and ultimately, the entire economy are also such schemes.   The trick to success is providing enough of a win that most people agree it's a good idea, while not really hurting anybody in the process.  In other words: truly giving value for money to the investors while not screwing anybody.

 Social Security works because as long as new people keep being born, and retirees eventually die, there is an indefinite supply of new investors to keep up with the growing pool of retirees.  The managers need to keep a positive balance, and to date, they always have.   As I write this, they'll be forced to reduce payments after 2034, but by increasing income a small amount, they'll be able to extend this easily.  Historically, they've mostly done this by increasing the cap on payroll deductions.  It's presently $184,500.  20 years ago, it was $94,200.  CPI over that time grew from 201 to 335, so this is faster than baseline inflation (which would have it at $157K), but not much.

The stock market is also such a "swindle".  Stock shares are ultimately worthless, but because investors have a chance to profit, through dividends, in the success of the underlying company, they'll buy in.  So many people have done this that there's a significant market for companies that do not pay dividends, called "growth stocks", which is entirely supported by speculation in the stock shares themselves.   At present time, the value of these shares (called market capitalization) of the world stock markets is about double GDP for the entire world (called Gross World Product or GWP).    Is this sustainable?  Probably not.  Most billionaires (possibly all) and a lot of millionaires are that wealthy solely because they own stock with that much market capitalization, and for a lot of them, their net worth would be highly negative if they were forced to live on the actual profits of the businesses they own.  This is especially true for businesses like "Private Equity" and "Hedge Funds".     E.g.: Tesla/SpaceX owner Elon Musk owns a $trillion in market cap, but these businesses all together brought in around $8B in profit last year.  And these are companies that are actually producing something.  Elon owns less than 15% of Tesla and 42% of SpaceX, so his actual value is well under $1B.  Hedge funds are even worse:  they produce nothing but the financial return.

 With all this market cap, owners are able to borrow against the asset to buy things, so without actually spending the asset, they are able to buy other things, such as yachts, broadcasting networks, sports teams, etc.  Every time they do this, they dilute the real value of both the shares they own and the things they're buying.   Dilution is very bad for the overall economy, because the people who actually do produce things: the workers, have a smaller and smaller share of the total money supply.  Eventually, there will be a comeuppance, and I don't see it being anything other than very ugly.    Millions will probably die, as died in previous "corrections", such as the English and US civil wars, WWI and II, various revolutions, etc.   

 We need to get this thing in balance.  The Wealth Tax, as proposed by Elizabeth Warren, is one way, but it taxes in a way that's uncontrollable, which can cause unintended harm.   I think income taxes should be very much higher on high incomes (presently capital gains are taxed at less than half what earned income is), and there should be a high tax on borrowing against appreciated assets over some high amount.   (presently it's actually a tax exemption). 

North Shore Boatbuilding

In 1963, my parents went to the boat show (I think it was in the Cow Palace in San Francisco), and my dad bought a boat.  It was a kit, made in England, for a 13'3" sailboat called an Enterprise.  A few weeks later, the kit was delivered to the agent for the western US, a guy called Sam Guild, at a place called North Shore Boatbuilding.

Guild rhymes with Mild, it's not pronounced like guild or gild.    He was from Maine and my parents were from Massachusetts--they had surprisingly much in common, in addition to being New Englanders.  I found Sam's obituary: he passed away in 2009 at 80, having moved back to Maine after less than a decade in California. 

 North Shore Boatbuilding was about 2.3 miles north of Marshall, on Tomales Bay.   Marshall is a tiny town, which only has a population of 400 if you count the numerous dwellings along the shore of the bay there.   We went there to pick up the Enterprise kit.   It was just exactly 100 miles by road from our home in Cupertino.

Over the next few months, my dad built it in the garage.  I helped--A lot I thought, but as I was only 8, probably less than I thought at the time.  It was very interesting and I did learn a lot.   The kit had fairly complete instructions but Dad read a lot of books and other things.  After a few months working on it constantly, nights and weekends, it was ready to sail.  We took it to a lake near home and he and a friend went for a sail.  I was taken out for a sail but was not allowed to help.   A few weeks later, he took me out and did allow me to help (trim the jib) and I figured it out quickly.  Barely a year later, I was given the opportunity to sail in a boat by myself (an El Toro) and I was able to do it.  Not long after that, I took formal sailing lessons at one of the local yacht clubs (Sequoia YC in Redwood City), and learned a lot more stuff.

There were about 10 Enterprise class boats in the Bay area by 1965 or so, all built from kits that Sam Guild had imported from England.  Sam had a good facility, not just for building boats but also for sailing them, and several of the boatowners lived up north, making Sams place a central location, so Sam hosted an Enterprise Regatta every month or so for a couple of years.  I was still too little, so mostly my Mom crewed for my Dad, and my sister and I found stuff to do around North Shore Boatbuilding. I tried fishing several times, and never once caught anything.  But I explored a lot.

 The pier is still there.  It's just south of "The Inn on Tomales Bay".  I can't tell if Sam and Ann's house is still there because the trees have grown up (it's been 60 years...).  There were trees near the water back then, but there was a clearing about 300 feet wide between the road and that grove, which is now all covered by mature trees.   The roadbed for the North Pacific Coast narrow gauge railroad was still discernable in the 60s, even though the tracks had been torn out during the Depression, 25 years earlier.

Sam's obituary mentions an 11 foot dinghy that the Guilds carried around on their camper.   I remember that boat well: it was a "Gull" class, which looked a lot like an Enterprise but smaller.  The Guilds carried it on the back of their Volkswagen pickup truck.   They'd brought it down to Redwood City one time on the back of that, and when heading home, had apparently forgotten to tie it down.   We were following, towing the Enterprise on a trailer.  I saw the Gull take off skyward, and it flew moderately well, coming down for a pretty good landing on its hull.  It suffered surprisingly little damage.

 

This is about half the bay area Enterprise fleet in around 1965.  I think the photo was taken by my dad, but I'm not sure where it was taken.  It's not Tomales Bay, Sausalito, or Redwood City, which I'm quite familiar with.  The boat my dad built is 9606.  Disappointingly, I don't have any pictures of Enterprises on Tomales bay or of North Shore Boatbuilding as it was in the 1960s.

 

Ranking the Presidents of my Lifetime

I find it difficult to choose here between my top 3, so in order of their term:

Eisenhower got many things right, a few wrong.  He supported the Warren court.  He supported civil rights and the overturning of Brown vs Board.   He supported the Coup against Mossadegh in Iran, which has led to 73 years (so far) of bad relations with Iran.

Kennedy.  He was successful mainly because he was Martyred and his successor, LBJ, was masterful at exploiting it.  The worst thing he actually did was Bay of Pigs.  The best was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the space program, and advocacy of what would eventually be the Civil Rights Act.

Obama.  The best president that managed to serve full term.   PPACA was his best thing.  He served in the face of the most hostile congress since the civil war.   Hands down the best orator.

Biden was a better president in most respects than Obama, but he had one monumental failure that destroys him: He held on too long and left the field open to Trump.

Carter could have been a great president but for three things:

1: he had the bad luck of running against Reagan, who lied and cheated to make him seem bad

2: He had some foibles on the Iran Hostage crisis.  Mostly not his fault, but he gambled more than he should have

3: His relations with congress were not the best.

4: (totally not his fault) The holdover from Nixon's OPEC policy and the Iran crisis led to high inflation.  His Federal Reserve Chair (Volcker) cured the problem, but too late for it to do Carter any political good

Clinton: a pretty good president, but he did a lot of stupid stuff that left him open to the Gingrich congress.   Lewinsky and Iraq were /totally/ the doings of the Rs. 

LBJ was actually quite a good president, if you get down to it.  Unfortunately, Goldwater's tactic wound up destroying him in the end.   Johnson understood that expanding VietNam was a huge mistake and that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was nothing, but Goldwater managed to inflate it to something that Johnson could not pretend to ignore.  The Great Society, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, etc., were really good things.   He would be at the top of this list without VietNam.

Ford:  After Ike, the least bad GOP president.   He had the luck to serve in Nixon's wake and looked wonderful by comparison.   He did very little, and was convincingly (and rightly) defeated by Carter.

Bush41: Perhaps the most competent R since Nixon, but mostly a promoter of Evil.  His alignment with the Oil industry being his worst problem.  Clinton mopped the floor with him in '92.  GOP'ers will tell you that Clinton only won because Perot stole votes from Clinton, but the numbers tell a quite different story. 

Nixon.  Corrupt but somewhat competent.  Screwed up LBJ's peace settlement with VietNam to undermine him (and his successor Humphrey)  in the '68 election.  Understood environmental issues better than many of his successors.  Watergate.

Bush43: Incompetent and Corrupt. Knew he was out of his depth, so he hired crooked people to do most of his thinking for him.  Reacted exactly wrong when the CIA told him that Bin Laden was determined to attack again.   September 11 was one of his lesser failings.  Invading Afghanistan was a huge mistake.  Invading Iraq before he'd finished with Afghanistan was a disaster.   (The right solution:  Build and fund schools, and promote small business, with not-corrupt banking.  The military should only be there to keep the teachers (and students) safe.)

Reagan. Trump would have been impossible without Reagan's opening us to corruption.  Reagan was incompetent, corrupt, did lots of stupid stuff (e.g.: he sent soldiers to Beirut, despite repeated warnings.  A truck bomb killed hundreds of them.   So one week later, he invaded Grenada.)  Iran Contra.  There are lots and lots of these.  He had enormous personal charisma, which for those of us with functioning BS meters, is a disqualifier.

Trump.  Incompetent, Immensely Corrupt, Stupid, remained in power by threatening people.   Before Trump, it was a contest between Reagan, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Harding who was our very worst president.  Trump takes the prize in a landslide.  He may have destroyed the United States.  It's possible he will destroy life on earth.

Planets, Moons and Satellites

What is the difference between a planet, a moon, a dwarf planet, an asteroid, a comet, etc?   I'm interested here in objective, unambiguous differences.  Arbitrary distinctions such as the actual mass or dimensions of the object are at best a last resort.

 All of these things are satellites, orbiting a star.  A few definitions are easy to pick off:

 A comet is an object with an orbit so eccentric that the heat and solar wind from the star cause large amounts of detritus to be driven into space every time it approaches the star.   Thus it is possible for a comet to change its status over time: once enough stuff has been blown off, it becomes an asteroid.

 An asteroid is an object which is no longer getting stuff blown off by the star (everything starts out that way) but is small enough that gravity does not deform its shape into a spheroid.

A planet is an object which is large enough that its own gravity has turned it into a rough sphere, and is in orbit around the star itself.   A distinction is made between Planets and Dwarf Planets, in that Dwarfs have not cleared their orbit, where full Planets have.  Factors that affect this include size, distance and eccentricity of the orbit, and distance to the star.  A quite large planet on a very long orbit might not have cleared its space, while a small planet on a relatively circular orbit might have.

A moon is a satellite which is orbiting a planet.  It might be asteroid size or dwarf planet size.  There's an interesting theoretical case where a pair of planets is orbiting each other and the star. There are none of these around our star but it's a case which deserves analysis.  My thinking is that if the Center of Gravity of the combined pair is inside one of the objects, then they are planet and moon.  However, if the second object is large enough and the orbit circular enough that the CG is in the space between, they are both planets. co-planets maybe?

 

The way a solar system forms is that it starts with a mass of tiny particles, chaotically distributed.  They might be individual atoms or molecules, in which case we call it a gas cloud, or it might be larger chunks.  There was some initial event that caused all of these particles to be in one place--perhaps a different star blew up, or maybe something else.  But at the start of the analysis, they are near each other (within a few light-hours?) and moving in random directions, and there are enough of them that all of the particles are in orbit around all of the others.

 Now and then, there are collisions.  If the velocities are different enough, and the collisions are inelastic, the particles lose a lot of momentum, and they fall to a lower orbit.   This quickly causes a clumping of these lower velocity particles, which will tend to be in the center.  When the collisions are elastic, the particles bounce off in a new, highly random direction, but when they are inelastic, and the velocities are similar enough, they'll stick together and form larger and larger clumps.  Most of the particles lose enough velocity through this process that they fall into the center, but a few wind up in an orbit around the central mass.  Based on observations, it appears that nearly half the time, the center is actually several objects, which eventually get big enough they form double or triple stars.   Among the inner orbits, anything that's very far from circular quickly collides with something else, and the new mass adds their vectors to make a new orbit.  If the velocities are different enough, they fall into a lower orbit, or the star.  Large planets tend to attract lots of stuff and grow ever larger, and they also cause perturbations in the orbits of smaller objects, leading, eventually, to collisions.

Anything with an orbit that is out of the plane with the others will eventually have one of these velocity-sapping collisions, so eventually all that's left are things that are mostly in the same plane, or a few things that have managed to miss hitting something bigger to survive for a long time.   The direction is determined by the small statistical differences from the initial conditions.

 There inevitably be some clouds that have too little mass to create a star--these turn into brown dwarf stars or sometimes rogue planets.  There are probably a lot of them out there, but since they do not emit light, they have to block or otherwise interact with something for us to detect them.   A lot of it is simply interstellar dust.  It may turn into something if it collides with other objects or dust clouds, but for now, it's just dust. 

Crick, Watson, Franklin and Szillard

James Watson died yesterday.  He was the last of the people responsible for discovering the Double Helix structure.  Watson and Francis Crick won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their discovery, which is one of the most important of all time.

There are two other people who deserve mention.  Most people are aware of the previous work done by Rosalind Franklin, who unfortunately died 1958 but would have certainly deserved a share of the prize. 

The other important contributor was Leo Szilard.  Szilard's most famous achievement was realizing that nuclear decay is caused by a neutron chain reaction, and that by manipulating the density of neutron emitters, you could control the rate of nuclear fission, right up to, and including a runaway explosion, which became known as the Atom Bomb.  Fermi's experiments a few years later led to the first Nuclear Pile in 1938, and in 1945, the first Atom Bomb.  Szilard intentionally kept his idea for the bomb secret because he was terrified of the Nazis getting the A-Bomb first, but he and his friend Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, which motivated the creation of the Manhattan Project.  Szilard and Einstein were specifically kept out of it to try to keep the Nazis from pursuing the idea.  Turned out Hitler regarded this stuff as "Jewish Science" and had effectively blocked progress in his country (Szilard and Einstein, along with Openheimer, Fermi's wife, and many of the others involved were Jewish), but he had no way of knowing that, having fled to England in 1933 and America in 1938.

 Szilard's contribution to the discovery of DNA were severalfold.  He invented the electron microscope in 1928, which made it possible to see some detail in chromosomes for the first time.   And it was he that devised the XRay diffraction technique which Franklin and others would use to work out the physical structure of DNA.

I regard Szilard, who died of a heart attack in 1964 at age 66, as perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century, in a league with only Einstein, Tesla, and Louis Alvarez.  

Geothermal vs Ground Source Heat Pumps

This entry is about an important point of terminology--and a short discussion of each.

Geothermal energy is a way of extracting heat from the earth.  Usually, this is heat from a volcano or geyser or other feature of the earth's surface that brings very hot material close enough to the surface that it's practical to extract energy from it, and either use it directly or turn it to electricity with a steam turbine or other mechanism.  The number of spots where mother nature has been cooperative enough to make this practical are relatively few--consequently, geothermal energy isn't viable in a majority of places.  There is a vast amount of heat down there, far more than we could ever use.  But there have been many attempts to drill down to it, and so far, all have failed.  It's only practical where geology has made an opening for us.

There is a significantly different technology which is often misleadingly called geothermal.  A more accurate name would be a Ground Source Heat Pump.  This technology takes advantage of the fact that large masses of soil, stone or especially water tend collect and store heat, and remain stable year round, at whatever the average temperature is.   This tends to be about 50F or 10C, although many factors affect this.   By passing liquid through it, a heat pump can extract the energy from this and use it to provide heating in the winter and cooling in the summer.   This has enormous efficiency advantages: to cool a space to 70F when it's 90 outside and the ground is 50 takes no energy at all, except for whatever is needed to power the pumps and heat exchanger, while heating above 50 when it's cold outside takes a lot less energy than heating above (say) 10F, a temperature at which heat pumps are very inefficient.   All it takes is some plumbing, buried deep enough and spread out enough to take advantage.

 

 

Al Gore was an early adopter of a Ground Source Heat Pump system in his Tennessee home, and spoke of it often during his presidential campaign, usually calling it Geothermal. 

 

Geothermal energy is one of the very few sources of energy that is not really just a way of extracting solar energy that's been stored up over time.  It's actually heat that's either left over from the formation of earth, compression by gravity, or nuclear reactions (both fission and fusion) occurring deep within the earth's core.  Ground Source, as well as wind, photovoltaic, fossil fuels, etc., are ultimately ways of using the energy from the sun that's stored up by the earth somehow.   e.g.: chlorophyll turns  CO2 from the air into cellulose and other burnable materials, which can be burned to get energy--either by burning it directly, or waiting until heat and pressure from the earth has turned it into fossil fuels over millions of years.  E.g. wind is air movement caused by the differential heating of the surface of the earth by the sun.

Hyperloop Criticism

There are plenty of difficulties with getting a hyperloop or other vactrain system installed, but none of the criticism I'm seeing of the concept is correct.

For example, they give the example of a tank truck that is evacuated and is crushed in a fraction of a second by atmospheric pressure.  This is a shockingly poor example.  These tanks are intended to be filled under positive pressure, and the metal cylinder has thin walls (1/8" or so) which can hold the load because they are loaded in tension, but not in compression.  Any competent engineer would simply make the wall thickness sufficient to sustain this pressure.  This varies with different tube diameters but Musk's original paper did some calculations on this and it's a half inch or more.

This same thing would also make the pipe immune from most forms of attack from terrorists.  It would take a gun caliber 2" or bigger to punch a hole, or a pretty large focused explosion, through a pipe this thick.

Even if the pipe is punctured or develops a leak, all that happens is pressure is lost, and the vehicles within slow down and air friction increases.

Their solution for earthquakes is also simple and effective.  The pipe is attached in a way that allows its support to move on the pipe.  For quakes with movement up to  the compliance of the mechanism, nothing will happen at all and operation can proceed unaffected.  This is well over magnitude 6.  For a bigger quake, there's a chance the travel of the mechanism will be exceeded.  This won't break the pipe but there may be damage.  Vehicles in operation would slow down and might need rescue, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where an earthquake, even of magnitude 9 or more, actually killing hyperloop passengers.

The Winds of Winter

George R R Martin has seemingly paused the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire series after book 5.  The TV show did not pause there, but it went its own way...some of which was entertaining storytelling, but which ended one of the greatest TV shows in history with a disappointing, nonsensical fiasco.

 One of Martin's stylistic modes is that he does a lot of foreshadowing--hints about what is going to happen.  Some of this is intended to make the events make a lot more sense, to deepen our understanding of what is happening.   He has announced that the next book will be called "The Windows of Winter" and that it will probably need to be split into two books.  He insists that he's well along the writing of it but that he's got so many other projects that he's making less progress than the books fans would like.

Jon Snow, Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, had made an alliance with the Wildlings to defend against the Night King and his zombies, but skeptics within the watch murdered him.   His allies, including the Red Witch, have recovered his dead body and have seen the clearly fatal wounds.  

Daenerys has escaped from the attack of the Harpies by riding Drogon for the very first time.  There seems to have been some telepathic communication going on there but it's not clear.  They have flown vaguely south, and have landed on a big hill, but she has no real idea where they are.  Drogon is severely injured and exhausted, and is unable to hunt on his own, and Daenerys is trying to bring him food while he recovers.

Barristan Selmy has survived the Harpy attack, where he was killed in the show.   Along with Jorah and the mercenary, they are planning a rescue of Daenerys, although they don't yet know where to begin.

Mance Rayder, leader of the Wildings/Free Folk, is still alive, the red witch having cast a spell that convinced Stannis to burn one of Mance's more challenging underlings, thinking that it was Rayder himself.  Jon Snow shot an arrow into the victim to spare him the agony of being burned alive. 

Arya is in Braavos, apparently still in training for the Faceless Men.

Sansa and Theon have escaped from Ramsey Bolton and are still in the woods running. 

Meera, Bran and Hodor are cornered by the zombies in what appears to be an alliance with the Children of the Forest.  The old 3 eyed raven is in there with them, trapped in the roots of a weirwood tree.  It doesn't look good.  The incident that tells us how Hodor got his name is very clearly in the near future and will very likely happen just as it did in the show.

Bran has seen that his aunt Lyanna has died in childbirth, and knows that who he'd thought was his half-brother Jon Snow is in fact his cousin, Aegon Targerian, and that Ned Stark went to extraordinary lengths to protect him.  He has a stronger claim to the Iron Throne does Danerys.  Whether Bran knows whether he's legitimate or not is unclear.  The only living person with direct knowledge of this is Howland Reed, Meera's father.

What's about to happen?  I think the TV show got some things right.  The explanation of how Hodor got his name is clearly correct, although it may differ in detail.

I suspect that the show also got the location of Drogon and Danerys right.  How this will play out is unclear but the TV show version is vaguely plausible.  Will there be another demonstration of Daenerys special fire-gift or will her win over the Dothracki come from the dragons and the collaboration of what remains of her loyal Khalate.  Drogon played no apparent role in this in the show, which I find completely implausible.

In the show, the Harpies are innumerable and overwhelming.  This is implausible, although there were certainly be enough of them to force Danerys to flee.  Jorah, Barristan, etc., will plan a rescue.  This too will go more or less as in the show, although I suspect Barristan's presence will change quite a lot.

In the show, Jon Snow seems to have broken his vow to the Night's Watch, which should have severely damaged his credibility.  In fact, because he died and was brought back to life, his vow has been completed, but several times this is explicitly pushed under the rug in the show.  Martin would not have done this.

I think Jon Snow's recovery will happen in a way that is much more public and surprising.  Here's my guess:  Targarian "Dragons" have a special power that gives them some immunity to heat, and also allows them to come back to life in fire, at least if burned before too much decay has set in.   My guess is that the Red Witch will try to revive him, but fail, and then they will burn the corpse as is Night's Watch tradition.  Midway through the cremation, Jon Snow will come out of the fire--hair and clothing burned off as with Daenerys, but his wounds completely healed and apparently fully alive.  The entire night's watch, including those hostile to Jon, the wildlings and Stannis and his army, will see this and recognize that Jon is truly something special.

 Lady Stoneheart (Caitlyn Tully/Stark)  will hear of this and of Jon's true parentage, and realize that her hatred for Jon Snow was entirely misplaced and that Ned was protecting his nephew, not his own bastard, at great sacrifice to himself and her, and that Ned had probably been loyal to her the whole time.  Since Caitlyn is a POV character, we will see her agony of this revelation first hand.  She cannot speak, but will communicate that she now supports Jon/Aegon as not just King in the North, but King of the seven Kingdoms.  her deadly gang of assassins will play an important role in defeating Cersei, and possibly the battle against the night king.

Daenerys will initially be skeptical of Jon/Aegon's claim, but will eventually accede, including encouraging the dragon and Jon to join.  I suspect the incest in the TV show will not occur, but it might.   I suspect there will be an alliance to fight Cersei and there will ultimately be some cooperative Aunt/Nephew alliance.  Daenerys /is/ the mother of the dragons and will demand a more equal role despite her sex.  Several Targaryan sisters have effectively co-ruled, so this is not without precedent. The fact that the middle dragon is named Rhaegal, after Jon's true father, is some serious forshadowing.

Jamie will join Jon/Aegon/Daenerys after he comes clean about why he tried to kill Bran and how tired he is of his sister's destructive scheme--and buoyed by Tyrion's existing alliance with her.    I suspect the consumation and knighting of Brienne will happen much as it does in the show, but they will marry and live relatively happily ever after.

 I'm not sure who will actually strike the final blow against the night king.  In a way, I hope it's the red witch melesandre, who will kill herself and save the world by doing it.   Arya, with her drop move, is seriously implausible although I admit it was fun to watch.  Theon's dying heroism is very plausible, and he has shown signs of it in rescuing Sansa, but Bran's helpless inactivity is not.   I really like the blue flames coming from Viserion's injured neck, and I do think Viserion getting turned by the night king is a very plausible part of the plot.

 

Colonizing Space

 I'm a fan of shows and movies that depict the colonization of space: Firefly, The Expanse, 2001 a Space Odyssey, etc.     I'm a true believer: Unless we manage to destroy ourselves first, the Human Race will eventually have extensive colonies in space.

 Space colonies are a lot different than colonies in the new world, India, China, Africa, etc 4 centuries ago, or by various cultures around the Mediterranean and other places 2000 years ago.   For starters, there were already people living in most of these places--they had air to breathe, soil to plant crops in, etc.  This is not true in space.  We will either have to bring these things with us or make them there.  Colonization opened people up to new diseases and other problems in the old days; that will also be true of space: Radiation poisoning, lack of gravity, price of air and water, etc.   My dad, who worked for decades designing satellites, is skeptical that we will ever be able to overcome these, but I think we will.  But it will be hard and it will take much longer than people like Elon Musk imagine.

 The first nasty problem is the difficulty in getting people and goods from Earth's surface into space.  This is very hard, but there's nothing completely intractable about it.  Chemical rockets can do it, but at great expense.  SpaceX, to their credit, have moved the needle considerably.  Several science fiction writers have proposed some sort of fusion rocket, which can be profoundly more efficient.  This will require a breakthrough to achieve, although it's superficially plausible.  Several SF stories, Such as The Expanse and Firefly have followed this route.  Breakthroughs, unlike more straightforward engineering, are difficult to predict, but I understand enough of the physics to be pretty confident that the breakthrough will happen, most likely in the next half century or so...I'm guessing it will be some sort of rocket fueled by Nuclear Fusion, but I expect to be surprised...

The next problem is gravity.  It turns out that humans need some gravity to be healthy, although we can tolerate its absence for a little while.  Many SciFi stories imply or require some sort of artificial gravity--Star Trek and Firefly are two notable cases, although little detail is given. Gravity Plating, as suggested by Star Trek, will require a pretty big breakthrough--comparable to the Warp Drive of that same milieu.  It's plausible that they are related--In Einsteinian General Relativity, gravity is an artifact of the warping space by large masses.  There may be other ways to warp space, ways which allow faster than light travel or gravity plating, but these are completely outside our present understanding of physics.  

 The Expanse does away with artificial gravity: they make it the old fashioned way, by accelerating.  In space ships, they are designed so that thrust is aligned with the axis of the ship, and any acceleration or deceleration gives the occupants a pretty realistic impression of gravity.  In the stories, which are mostly about warfare in space, accelerations well over 1 G are commonplace, but I think the vast majority of ships will remain comfortably 1 G or less the vast majority of the time.  The second way, of course, is to spin things--centrifugal space ships.  Several of the space colonies in the stories are asteroids, which have been spun up to create artificial gravity and hollowed out.   A little engineering shows that this is implausible.  A 1 G force on a several mile long cable exceeds the tensile strength of most rocky-based materials, including iron.  Centrifugal colonies will be largely artificial and their diameter will be only a few miles at most.    They may be very long--more like O'neill cylinders and less like those envisioned by von Braun and Chesley Bonnestal.   They might be made from material harvested from asteroids like Ceres, but they will not simply be those asteroids.

Present chemical drives can only produce an acceleration sufficient to get out of the earth's gravity well for a few minutes.  But if there is some sort of fusion drive that can produce a sizable fraction of a G for weeks on end, this will have a profound effect on travel around the solar system.  A ship that can accelerate for many days at one G can go to Mars in a few days.  This would profoundly change economics of a colony.   It could even bring the duration of a trip to another star down to a few decades. 

The third difficult, but not intractable problem, is radiation.  All manned space missions so far have been one of two things:  very short or, beneath the van Allen Radiation belts, which protect us from a lot of radiation.  A colony on the moon, Mars, or in a space station or elsewhere, will need considerable radiation shielding.   The simplest way to do this today is using many feet of shielding.  Heavy metals like Lead are the most effective by thickness, but a much thicker layer of dirt or water is much more effective.  I'm think that most space habitations, including those in centrifugal stations, will be protected by ten meters or more of whatever material is most convenient.  Digging deep underground will be the simplest way to provide this on a planet or moon, but an O'neill cylinder will need to have a thick shell of some sort..

 Water is relatively common in space, but it will be a limited resource for most colonies because it'll need to be mined and transported.  Air is a little more problematic, but not really.   We can breathe any non-poisonous gas mixture that contains enough Oxygen and CO2.  On earth, Nitrogen is most convenient and likely will be in space too, but we're far from limited.  Oxygen can be made from water and other things by Electrolysis and is a byproduct of photosynthesis.

 We will need plants growing in space to feed ourselves.   Simply dedicating surface area to plants is not particularly efficient: The most solar-efficient plants are well under 1%, where present photovoltaics can easily do 15%.  Put photovoltaics on all possible surfaces and grow plants underground under efficient electric lighting.  The photovoltaics are much more tolerant of radiation than plants are and are relatively easy to replace, and to manufacture from materials that we already know are on The Moon and Mars and other objects.

Presuming we don't drive ourselves extinct first (and Elon Musk and Donald Trump are presently the leading individuals working towards making us extinct)  I think we will have permanent colonies in space by 2050 or so, and self-sufficient colonies some time after 2100.  The sorts of populations on Mars and Ceres envisioned in The Expanse are unlikely to occur until there is a major breakthrough, such as the Expanse's Epstein Drive, but I'd think that by 2200 there will be tens of thousands of people living, breeding and dying entirely in space.  Far from the millions portrayed by the Expanse. 

Why Do Liberals Think Trump Supporters are Stupid?

 

The following is by Florida writer Adam-Troy Castro, 2019

'An anguished question from a Trump supporter: "Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?"

The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters - the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don't...

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought "Fine."

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, "Okay."

That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, "No problem."

That when he made up stories about seeing muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, "Not an issue."

That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn't care, you chirped, "He sure knows me."

That when you heard him illustrate his own character by telling that cute story about the elderly guest bleeding on the floor at his country club, the story about how he turned his back and how it was all an imposition on him, you said, "That's cool!"

That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.

That when you heard him brag that he doesn't read books, you said, "Well, who has time?"

That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn't commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, "That makes sense."

That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, "Yes!"

That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man's coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, "What a great guy!"

That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, "Thumbs up!"

That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, "That's the way I want my President to be."

That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they're supposed to be regulating and you have said, "What a genius!"

That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, "That's smart!"

That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was the middle of water and you have said, "That makes sense."

That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, "falling in love" with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, "That's statesmanship!"

That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids. has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas - he explains that they’re just “animals” - and you say, “well, ok then.”

That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.

What you don't get, Trump supporters in 2019, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it's also...hear me...charitable.

Because if you're NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.

How To End US "Decline"

The Orange Terrorist, in his inauguration speech today, said he will end US decline.  Sorry, Dim Don, you, more than anyone else, represent US decline.  Here are some things that will actually reverse the things your voters have been complaining about

Raise the minimum wage.  Lots of evidence (Kruger and Card, etc), proves that at least for moderate changes, raising the minimum wage helps the economy, and there's essentially no evidence that it hurts, even for substantial raises.

Increase taxes on the rich.  From before the great depression until the 1960s, the top marginal tax rate was above 90% and even after Kennedy's cuts, the top rate was over 70%.   This does not seem to have hurt the US economy at all.  Every single case of a tax cut for the rich supposedly improving the economy can be debunked.  For example, Reagan's 1983 cut caused people (mostly businesses) to change the timing of expenses to optimize for the tax change, but after the dust had settled, the economy returned to the mean it had been on before.   It's also important to realize that the extremely high tax rates were only a marginal rate.  For example, in 1955, a married couple earning over $400K owed 91% of their earnings over $400K to the IRS.  A $400K income in 1955 is equivalent to $4.7M today.  But this is only a marginal rate.  The median family income in 1955 was $4400, and the tax on that was $940.  Our $400K earner was actually only paying about a 70% effective rate.

Laffer and others argue that there is a threshold tax rate beyond which, there is no incentive to invest or expand businesses.  Lots of research has been done on this, and there's no evidence at all of such an effect below about 70% effective tax rate.   It's important to realize that when we had these extremely high tax rates, that all of the people who were paying them were getting huge no-bid contracts from the government.  You don't hear much about Howard Hughes and Henry Kaiser trying to lower tax rates.   You hear a lot about them trying to avoid realizing dividends and gains so they wouldn't get taxed, and making big investments and loans so they could call that an expense.

All income should be taxed at the same rate.  Today, long term capital gains and a few other things are taxed at a much lower rate.  I think the right way to do this is to exempt all income below some level, appropriate for where the person lives, and tax all income above that at the same rate.  The marginal tax rate system was an attempt to do that, but I think it's outlived it's usefulness.    I'm ok with long term gains being adjusted by a CPI correction.  40 years ago, this would have been painful to compute, but nobody does their taxes by hand anymore.  The computer can figure it out.

Effectively ban non-productive profiteering.   The value of the economy is the value of all the goods and services in it.   If it is possible to make money without providing a service, this is a drain on the economy. Examples of this include high-velocity trading, private equity, hedge funds, and several others.  Insurance has become largely a scam, especially health insurance.   Some of these things do provide an actual service, but the drag on the economy far outweighs their Return on Investment.   Countries which have nationalized health care pay less than half what the US does.

I'm pretty sure we could devise a scheme which taxes businesses at a rate inversely proportional to the number of employees.    So a private equity or high speed trading firm employs about 20 people and brings in a $billion a year, they should be taxed at 99%.  If a factory employs 10,000 people and brings in that same $billion, they should be taxed at 10 or 20%.   If a small shop employs 20 people and brings in $250K, it should be taxed at $10% or less.

Tax for-profit churches.  If a church engages in politics, proselytizing or any of a host of other for profit operations, they should lose their tax exempt status.  If a church (or any other organization) sponsors a food bank or other actual charity, they should get an exemption for that, but not for funding the preacher's gold mines in Africa.  A significant fraction of the Orange Terrorists support comes from for-profit churches telling their congregants that opposing him is a threat to our freedom.  The truth is pretty close to the opposite.  Simply taxing them will make a lot of them go away.

Support and encourage unions.  The time that America worked best was the 30 years after WWII.  At that time, about 30% of workers were in a trade union.  Trade unions give workers bargaining power which most workers lack.

Build/Rebuild infrastructure.   This employs a lot of people.  The ROI on infrastructure is extremely high.

Adjust the zoning laws to make sure there's profitable low-income housing and healthy food everywhere.  For example, places like South Lake Union here in Seattle used to be a warren of moderate priced apartments.  The rules need to make sure that the moderate income people who work downtown have a place to live.  Tax the bejezus out of luxury condos, etc., and make it cheap to have low-cost restaurants and other shops.

I'm a fan of transit, but we cannot make people use transit by making the alternative miserable.  Some people cannot ride the bus to work--a repairman, a consultant who works a different place every day, etc.

Separate run-of-the-mill banking from Investment Banking.  Until it was overturned in 1996, the Glass Steagal act gave protections to ordinary banks, called "Savings and Loans", including federally insured deposits.  They also did regular inspections of banks and closed them if they violated certain rules.  This meant that for the period that Glass-Steagall was in effect, S&Ls gave a reliable 5% or so interest and nobody lost everything.  Investment banks wanted the government protection, without the limitations, so they convinced congress to overturn this sensible protection.  11 years later, the economy collapsed. Banking and the building industry are very important.  Nobody was making big profits out of S&Ls unless thy were scammers, but it kept a huge part of the economy healthy.

We need to make it as cheap and healthy as possible to be poor.  Whether this is Universal Basic Income, Housing subsidies, or something else, we can't have poor people starving or homeless.

In the same way, we need to make sure that everyone has a safety net.  Rich people claim that only rich people start businesses.  Historically, this is not true.  The people who start businesses are in a situation where they know that failure doesn't make their family destitute.  Whether that's extended family, government programs or something else is beside the point.  At the present time, this does mean that only rich people can start businesses

Are Electric Trucks Practical?

 I just watched a video where the speaker is arguing that the amount of trucking we have in the US will be impossible to achieve if we electrify it all.  This sounded wrong to me, so here are a few numbers.

 There are about 13M trucks over 10,000 lbs in the US, about 3M of them doing long haul.  The vast majority are doing short haul delivery.  Tesla claims it's semi can do 1.7 miles per KWh.  My model S gets about 2.8 miles per KWh and it weighs less than 5000 lbs, so I suspect that 1.7 is optimistic.    Let's guess a full size long haul truck can actually get 1.5 miles per KWh.  Long haul trucks are limited to about 500 miles a day by driver's hours regulations, which works out to about 333 KWh per day.   So to power all 3M of those trucks would take 1 million megawatt hours or 1 terrawatt hour.

That sounds like a big number and it is.  But here's another big number.   In 2022, the US produced about 434 Terrawatt hours of electricity from wind turbines.  That's about 1.2 TWh per day--about 20% more than would be needed to power all those trucks.  Could we add enough additional wind turbines to achieve this?   Yes, definitely.  Present deployment rates have us doubling every 6 or 7 years.

The other 10 million trucks do not consume nearly that much power.  The vast majority of trucks average much less than 100 miles per day, doing deliveries, moving containers around in seaports, moving concrete, moving garbage, etc. The postal service, Amazon and others have been finding that their fleets of electric vehicles are vastly cheaper to operate than fossil fuel counterparts.   I haven't got enough data to make better than a handwave estimate, but it seems unlikely to be more than 1TWh per day.

Bottom line:  While there are definitely some technical issues needing to be solved, none of them are particularly difficult.  The two biggest are adjusting the power grid to make charging available where it is needed, and dealing with the range issues for long haul trucking.   Neither of these requires a breakthrough in order to make near-universal electric trucks practical, just straightforward engineering.

------

 I am of the opinion that most long-haul trucking should be replaced by trains.  Where long haul trucks operate at a fuel efficiency of 10-20 ton/miles per gallon, trains operate at over 400 ton/miles per gallon, have far fewer accidents per ton/mile, and are easily electrified.   Trucks receive huge subsidies as compared to railroads (mainly in the form of taxpayer-provided roads) yet they are about the same cost per ton/mile.  Trains have a few disadvantages relative to trucks.  All are relatively easily fixed:

* Most railroads are full of bottlenecks that cause random time delays.  They used to have fewer--many routes were single-tracked or eliminated when the interstate highways took away a lot of their markets.  Computerized dispatching recovered some of this lost capacity, but not enough to accomodate growing demand.

* A high percentage of industries no longer use railroad sidings, and a lot of them have been torn out.  Thus railroads need to trans-ship a lot of traffic to trucks.  Switching entirely to long-haul trucks eliminated this transfer.  (an entertaining example:  Tesla's Fremont, CA plant is about 30 miles from where I grew up.  It was originally built as factory for GM, and placed along a major rail route.  Supplies are still shipped into the factory by rail, but the cars themselves are never shipped out by train--they are loaded onto trailers and shipped to their destination.  My Tesla Model S was delivered to a service center that is right next to a railroad track and could easily have been shipped by rail, but in fact, it came on a truck.  Because /some/ SCs are not on the rail.

* A high percentage of rail traffic is in what is called a "unit train" where every car is going from and to the same place.  Containers have made it possible to turn mixed trains into unit trains for a big part of their trip--ship from a big terminal on the east coast to a different big terminal on the west coast, and trans-ship or re-classify from there.  Because they can, the railroads have chosen to make the time this takes burdonsome:  typically well over half of the time a shipment takes to arrive is spent waiting in one of these terminals.

Metric vs English System

 I think it's important to understand that the metric system is in some ways superior to the english system of measurement, but in most ways equal.  That the US is stuck on the English system is an accident of history.

During the middle ages and earlier, every region had its own set of measurements, all a little distinct, and in most cases, the units didn't relate well to each other.  France and the rest of Europe pretty much stuck with the old ways--there were at least a dozen distinct units call a foot (pied) in France at the time of the revolution, all a little different from each other and none relating particularly to longer or shorter units.  Britain had this same problem, but in the late 1500s, Parliament decided to rationalize this.  They determined, by statute, that a foot was 12 inches, a yard was 3 feet, a chain was 22 yards, a furlong was 10 chains, a mile was 8 furlongs, an acre was 10 square chains, (or a furlong by a chain), and so forth. This happened to be at the start of the great period of British colonization, and as a consequence, these statute measurements found close to universal acceptance in the largely British American colonies.  They made far greater sense than the mess of the rest of the world.

One of the fads at the time of the revolutions was decimalization.  When Hamilton and others were deciding on a currency for their new country, they embraced the new idea, and went with the decimal dollar.  The english system of money at the time was a mix of sensible and less so:  the pound was 240 pence, split into shillings, but also split into other weird things like a guinea.  240 is divisible by 3, which is not true of decimal systems.

During their revolution, the French decided, finally, to rationalize their system and based it on navigation:  there were exactly 10,000,000 meters between the equator and the north pole on the line that ran through the Louvre, in Paris.  The US president at the time, Jefferson, thought this was a good idea and got the french to send a standard meter and kilogram to Washington.  Unfortunately, the ship was lost at sea and they never got there. Rather than cook up their own, possibly different versions, the Americans stuck with feet, inches and pounds, until another set of standards could be sent from France.  Unfortunately, the French government never got its act together to send another.

At the same time, something really amazing was happening--the industrial revolution.  This started in Britain (Scotland) but soon spread to America.  All of a sudden, standardized parts were all the rage, especially things like Nuts and Bolts, because that made it possible to outsource large parts of your manufacturing process, and suddenly manufacturing was a Big Deal.  The US standard, which has come to be called SAE (society of automotive engineers) measured things in fractional inches and threads per inch, but they did something very special: they established a rating system for the strength of these components.     An American engineer was unlikely to specify a metric (or whitworth) bolt because it was harder to be confident of its strength.

I am an american trained as a scientist--I am perfectly comfortable with either system.  Most of the time it really doesn't matter.  1/4-20 is pretty close to 6mm .8 thread.  as long as I know which I'm using, the difference is unimportant.  There are a few cases where it does matter.  3/4 inches is a standard width for a lot of things, such as the width of electrical and masking tape.  Much of the time it doesn't matter.  But when somebody specifies 20mm, as they often do in Europe. it's a bloody pain to find this in America.  3/4" is 19.1 mm.  Close, but no cigar.   I just needed to get some holddowns for my workbench.  American dogholes are 3/4", european dogholes are 20mm. one will not work in the other.

Bands from Berkeley

I randomly caught a few bars of "Feelin' Blue" from their Willie and the Poor Boys album brought me back...I probably hadn't heard this since I lived in Berkeley in the mid '70s, but it took probably less than a second to recognize it.

Credence Clearwater Revival.  Technically, from El Cerrito, a town just north of Berkeley, but they made most of their records at Fantasy Records, on Parker Street, in Berkeley.  I lived on Parker myself during school year 74-5, although over a mile from the studio.

Country Joe and the Fish.  Joe McDonald's family didn't move to Berkeley until he was an adult, but his mother would be mayor while I lived there and the band would be formed there.   I saw them once, Country Joe without the rest of the band a couple of times.  Of course everybody saw them at Woodstock:  "Give me an F.  Give a U..."

Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen.   Their one big hit, Hot Rod Lincoln, was very out of character for them.   I saw them at Winterland, the Oakland Coleseum, several free shows in various parks.  They always put on a great show.

Joy of Cooking.  A short-lived but terrific band, led by two women.  One of them, Terry Garthwaite, sang in a style strongly resembling Mavis Staples and I was a fan of them before I'd ever heard of the Staples Singers.

Greg Kihn Band.  I first saw Greg Kihn, busking, solo, with his guitar in 1973 on the steps of the Student Union building on the Berkeley campus.  He played there several times, until he came back with a full band.  I wasn't really surprised when he had a hit on MTV in the early 80s.  His band was largely from another Berkeley band, the Earth Quake, which was pretty local.  One of their songs was called AC-DC and it enough resembled a different, later band called AC-DC that at first I thought it was the same band.

The Klezmorim were a Klezmer band that got its start playing in Sproul Plaza, where I saw them several times.  They had some success

Green Day and Counting Crows were both from Berkeley, and didn't get their start until after I'd left.

There are of course a bunch of other bay area bands that frequently played Berkeley.  I saw Jerry Garcia at the Keystone, and the Grateful Dead famously played the Greek Theater on campus several times.  I saw Merle Saunders a couple of times on campus.  Tower of Power didn't come to Berkeley much, but their home base was just south in Oakland.  Santana

Reagan Won in a Landslide?

 No, Reagan didn't win the election of 1980 in a landslide, or even close to it.  But he governed as if he had won the mandate conferred by a landslide.  

There were three main candidates in 1980:

Jimmy Carter, incumbent, got 35.5M votes and 49 electors.

Ronald Reagan got 43.9M votes and 489 electors

John Anderson got 5.7M votes and no electors.

Anderson was a moderate republican, a thing which no longer exists.  In hindsight, it's pretty clear that he ran as a spoiler, stealing votes from Carter.  In addition to the third party candidate, Reagan's team sabotaged the hostage negotiations with Iran, getting them to defer the release of the prisoners until shortly before the inauguration.  Reagan took credit for this, even though it was entirely the work of Carter's team.

Before this sabotage occurred, it looked like Carter had a solid path to re-election, being up by as much as 15 points over Reagan.

Carter won only 6 states: Hawaii, Maryland, Rhode Island, DC, and his home state of Georgia and his running mate's home of Minnesota.    But many of the states that Reagan won were flipped by Anderson's cut:

Reagan won Arkansas bu 5,000 votes.  Anderson got 22000.  6 electors.

Reagan won Connecticut by 135000 votes.  Anderson got 172000.  8 electors.

Reagan won Delaware by 5500 votes, Anderson got 16000.   3 electors.

Reagan won Kentucky by 19000 votes.  Anderson got 31000,  9 electors

Reagan won Maine by 17000 votes.  Anderson got 53000.   2 electors.

Reagan won Massachusetts by 4000 votes.  Anderson got 382,000.   14 electors.   (This is where I was living in 1980)

Reagan won New York by 170,000 votes.  Anderson got 468000.   41 electors

Reagan won North Carolina by 40,000 votes.  Anderson got 53000. 13 electors.

Reagan won Tennesee by 4500 votes.  Anderson got 36,000.  10 electors.

Reagan won Vermont by 12000 votes. Anderson got 32000.   3 electors.

Reagan won Wisconsin by 107000 votes.  Anderson got 160,000.  11 electors.

All together, Anderson took at least 120 electors from Carter.   this was not enough to overturn the election: 369 to 169 electors.  Reagan won.  but where the pundit class tells us it was a landslide, it was actually a fairly near thing.

Reagan proceeded to sabotage the income tax, unions, monopoly regulation, infrastructure construction and much more, and we have still not been able to recover to this day, more than 40 years later.