Hydrogen Bombs

There've been two reports recently, touting hydrogen as a clean fuel. And, naturally, burning hydrogen in some types of engine yields only water vapor (well, some bit of NO_x). One is German locomotives, while the other is California setting 2035 as the year for autos being either electric or hydrogen.

It's worth noting that there are two kinds of hydrogen vehicles: those using hydrogen fuel cells (been around for decades) and those using a 'normal' internal combustion engine, just using liquified hydrogen rather than gasoline or diesel. The au courant meme is hydrogen as burned fuel.

So, campers, where's all that hydrogen going to come from? The (nearly, at least until humans run the tap dry) infinite supply of sea water means an infinite supply (ditto) of hydrogen. But guess what? They Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that you'll never harvest as much energy from a process as you inject into it; modulo nucular.

With current tech, electrolysis generally produces hydrogen at about 75 per cent efficiency. So to create a kilo of pure hydrogen fuel, which holds about 39.4kWh of energy, it takes 52.5kWh.

Of course, that's just the pure energy budget, but since the Zeppelins we don't use gaseous hydrogen. We use liquified gas, just like LNG. And it takes a wee bit of more energy budget to make LHG.

To use it as fuel, it needs to be compressed to incredible pressure (generally 5,000 to 10,000 PSI) or kept as a liquid — which means cooling it to less than -253ºC, or just 20 degrees above absolute zero.
...
So, 90 per cent efficient to make, 54 per cent efficient by the time it's in your tank — without even taking into account the energy needed to transport it.
...
So, hydrogen's pretty rubbish as a fuel for our machines.

So, we'll use a stream of wee electrons from coal fired power plants to make the hydrogen? Sounds like a plan.

Also of note; hydrogen powered cars and trucks do not constitute some new tech. Far from it. UPS, among others, adopted (a bit) of LNG powered delivery trucks years ago. And that cute emergency generator in your back yard works on the same principle of gas driven piston internal combustion. Not cutting edge.

Christmas In August

It's worth repeating: the materials listed in The Affidavit are not the haul from the subsequent search. Oh my, no. They are the stuff that Dear Leader Yo! Semite of Thigh Land didn't really want. IOW, just banal shit. He kept the Good Stuff, until the SWAT team showed up. He shoulda known the jig was up, but he is an idiot, after all.

Golf Is Odious

More than a few have taken the LIV golf series, including as one might expect the stragglers left on the PGA tour, as odious. But that's not quite my take. It's yet another example of faux competition, endemic (along with Covid and monkeypox and...) in American (and, may be, all of Western) society. Sure, it's Blood Money as the Fake News tells us many are calling LIV, but the really odious factor is that it takes another game (calling it athletics is a bit much) and turning it into another Professional Wrasttlling. We need this? Do we need yet another faux 'reality program'? Likely not

By The Numbers - part the sixteenth

Google says the original "Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy", but, of course don't tell me what Malware or Virus they let through. All the links were just freely available news content. Most likely one of the Trump cabal demanded it be taken down. Now you know who Google kneels to.

Fly United - part the second

The masters of the universe have been doing it for decades, and have not learned a thing. Or may be they have. May be they have learned that M&A really only exists to make the few sitting on the top of the pinhead rich, while decimating all others. Kind of like a mob or dictatorship. The bankers who finance these boondoggles never seem to catch it in the neck.

So, today we find that HBO Max is the latest victim.

Roughly 70 HBO Max staff members were laid off on Monday, job cuts that are part of a wider reorganization at the cable channel's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery

So, as usual, the 'new' company lays waste to its workers. As if there's enough wasted labor to make up for the debt incurred. Just food for the gods.

Warner Bros. Discovery, which began as HBO's parent company in April when AT&T spun off WarnerMedia and merged it with Discovery Inc., has a crushing debt load of more than $50 billion.
[my emphasis]

Why, oh why, do these masters of the universe always, always pay outlandish, unsupportable, amounts of moolah? The answer is always the same, almost always never admitted: get big enough, and you can control the market and set prices divorced from cost. All teeVee/streaming is heading back to the glorious 50s, with a never ending ship of clones of Ted Mack (look him up). Again, the bankers and those sitting on the pinhead get rich. They get their cuts up-front, leaving the people who do the actual work to get it in the neck. This will not turn out well for those that remain. As any mob, the few sitting on the pinhead will suck out moolah up-front until the enterprise says "hello" chapter 11 or chapter 7. Just as night follows day.

Here's a rose-colored glasses of the first merger

The still-to-be-named company, which will be helmed by current Discovery Inc. CEO David Zaslav, says it wants to further invest in content—about $20 billion worth a year. That could cause the price for whatever streaming service it rolls out to rise—but will it matter if consumers feel like they don't have to pay for several different streaming services, and instead can access a cornucopia of content from just one provider?

Where's the moolah come from? The usual, debt from others

As reported by Deadline, Discovery is currently raising the $30 billion through a sale of debt using what are called senior unsecured notes. These are ways for businesses to raise money for purchases such as this. They are not backed by collateral and, as a result, carry a higher interest rate for the purchaser. They are riskier, but the interest rate helps to make them attractive.

As noted (either here or one of the many forums I inhabit) previously: in the good old days there were 3 teeVee networks (and may be, for a time, 1/2 if you count DuMont), which made audience size easily measured and controlled. Before I croak, I'll bet a dime to a donut that streaming, and surely cable/sat, will be down to a few, may be even just 3, providers.

Real Americans

TCM has, for some years now, devoted August to a Star-of-the-day programming. Today is Greta Garbo, and the ones tonight have been from her silent period. One of them is "Love", which is "Anna Karenina". My Russian period was so many decades ago, I couldn't tell you anything about the book or any of the movies made from it. I caught it about half-way through, and she's one good lookin babe.

So, we get to the end of the film, and Vronsky has found Anna's boy (he's been looking for them for three years, of course) at a riding academy who tells him that his mother visits him every day since his father died. At that moment, Anna makes her entrance; Anna and Vronsky hug and kiss and the three leave stage right with "The End".

But that's not the end. We get some text on the screen, which tells us that what we just saw was the "happy" ending demanded by the studio for American distribution, and that we'll now see the alternate (other countries) ending.

The action returns to the point where Anna is leaving St. Petersburg on a train. Instead of getting on the train, she jumps in front of it, a suicide. Hmm.

So, off to the wiki for some explanation. Turns out that the studio hot shots never read the book, so didn't know how it ended, naturally. The alternate ending fits what Tolstoy wrote. And it gets better. Kind of. According to the wiki

(American exhibitors were given the choice of whether or not to use the revised "happy" ending. Theaters on the coasts mostly picked Tolstoy while theaters in Middle America mostly picked the happy ending.)

So, naturally, the bumpkins can't deal with Russian literature. Why am I not surprised?

And, just as naturally, they'll eat a ton of bullshit from a demented would-be czar. Why am I not surprised?

Leontief

Back when I was a young whippersnapper in grad school Leontief was still au courant, and a signifcant factor in macro analysis. Alas in due time, Volker, Laffer, and other knuckleheads turned policy into nothing but worrying about currency.

Inflation drops to zero in July due to falling gas prices.
-- Axios/10 August 2022

Consumer prices were unchanged in July, as plunging prices for gasoline dragged the Consumer Price Index down to zero.

And, the secret sauce? The CPI only figures the direct prices of the commodities. What that means is what Leontief figured out: any advanced economy is a massive input-output engine. Changes in such a wide-ranging sector, energy, finds its way into most other sectors.

As many of us Left Wingnut analysts said as Covid waned (or most folks deluded themselves into believing it has), there would a supply shortage driven period of inflation, until producers were convinced that the new, higher level of demand would sustain. (See: post WWII.) And that's what happened. What the Krugman Klan didn't figure on was the reluctance of producers to resume production. Well, and Putin with a hard on for Ukraine (at least).

If the input-output model is correct, we should see a continuing fall in CPI measured inflation as falling energy prices make their way through the rest of the economy. Stay tuned.

After two straight months of extremely hot inflation readings, this report will be welcome news.

Two months? Now you know how stupid the monetarists are. While Covid-ο came and went in 3 months without any real action being taken, any blip in inflation without even a shred of evidence of fundamental change in the economy is just dumb. But, that's the way of Monetarist Policy.

By The Numbers - part the fifteenth

Not for the first time, I'll bitch about PhRMA telling the world that it costs a Billion Dollars to make a new drug. Well, it turns out that a a report on new drugs actually tells the truth

These days, the average cost, including the many failed trials along the way, is a billion dollars.
[my emphasis]

The report is about curing Type 1 diabetes, and worth your time.

It's the other pandemic, one that killed 6.7 million people last year around the world.
-- Lisa Hepner/one of the film makers covered by the report

It's also a story about a Big Pharma eating a small fish. Happens a lot; and in this case the Big Pharma is scarfing up a competitor. That happens a lot, too.

Drug Culture

There will be, as there has always been, screeching from the PhRMA cabal that giving Medicare negotiation authority will spell the end of new drugs in the USofA!!! And so on. It is still the case that PhRMA, as a whole, spends more on SG&A than R&D (that's Derek Lowe's take, who has been a bench chemist in PhRMA, is generally on the side of PhRMA). There's no shortage of moolah in the drug business. No, there is not. And, just an aside (always mentioned in essays such as this): the USofA and New Zealand are still the only real countries that permit direct-to-consumer adverts for drugs.

So, in keeping with this situation, today a Boston drug developer (Karuna) announced the successful completion of a Phase III trial of a schizophrenia drug. In the PR, the company claims

KarXT is the first potential medicine of its kind with a truly new and unique dual mechanism that does not rely on the dopaminergic or serotonergic pathway to treat symptoms of serious mental illness.

Now, that reads like gibberish to most civilians. The key verbiage is 'new and unique', which the naive` reader is coerced into believing that Karuna has 'discovered' a 'new and unique' compound. Well, not so much.

It turns out that if you wiki the active ingredient(s): xanomeline and trospium, you find that these are ancient, in new drug development terms, compounds.

Xanomeline was discovered by Lilly and Novo some 30 years ago. They gave up on it, and it eventually came to Karuna (no, I'd never heard of them either; but they are of Boston, so a bit less likely to be a scam).

In order to reduce the side effect which caused Lilly and Novo to scrap the compound, it was decided to mix in another existing compound which is known to affect said side effect. As I type, it remains a mystery why the bench chemists at Lilly and Novo couldn't figure out this synergy way back in the 90s; the compound that Karuna chose was well known at that time. The compound is trospium (synthesized in 1967).

Trospium chloride is used to treat overactive bladder.

Now, I think that's hilarious!! May be you don't. The point, naturally, is that Karuna (and whoever may have been on the ownership lineage after Lilly and Novo) spent not a penny to 'discover' their compounds. They just looked up Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, took one from column A and one from column B (yes that's Chinese menu meme; the announcement came from Karuna's Chinese 'partner'). As I've written more than once earlier, studies of actually new compounds in recent decades have shown 90%+ based on 'free' research from the Damn Gummint.

PhRMA freeloads off the American taxpayer, full stop.

By The Numbers - part the fourteenth

Since the Religious Right Wingnut Republicans are getting ever more amped up since they got creamed in Kansas, I thought a short reminder of how the Union can be saved is in order. (Aside: the First Civil War started in Kansas from 1854, depending on how you count, just so you know.) It's goes by the name, National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it intends to force a majority winner of the popular vote in the Presidential election. So far as I know, anyway. Imagine: California having more say than Montana!

As of June 2022, it has been adopted by fifteen states and the District of Columbia. These states have 195 electoral votes, which is 36% of the Electoral College and 72% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.

So, twice as many votes as states, by count. The best way to end the drive for Minority Rule, peace Viktor Orban, et al. Not likely to happen before 2024, I suspect. I haven't done the arithmetic, but it's just as likely the Red states could do the same. Here's the list of small, rural states that can tip the College.

Our math went through a few iterations on this but by our final math, in 2012 that could have meant winning the presidency with only around 23 percent of the popular vote.

Note that the list does include a couple Left Wing states that wouldn't (as of today, at least) join:
- Rhode Island
- Connecticut
- DC
- Massachusetts
- and assorted purplish states

So, we can forget signing up Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, DC, Delaware, Vermont, Hawaii, Colorado, Maryland, New Jersey, and New Mexico for the Trump/Orban/Erdogan Dictatorship Sweepstakes since they have already signed the Compact. I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to check which 11 next larger states would have to be recruited. Colorado and New Mexico kind of surprised me. States 12 through 16 signed in 2018 and 2019, so the effort remains alive.

The wiki report concedes that there aren't enough Blue states (as of today, but Kansas' result may alter that) to reach 270, so at least all the Purple and perhaps a Red one or two will be needed.

About The Dog

You've likely heard the old saw about the dog that chased the garbage truck and managed to catch it? What happens next? Well the Radical Religious Right Wingnuts who got Roe v. Wade deep-sixed now know the answer: you get crushed when folks pay attention.

Kansas, not a bleeding heart Left Wing enclave, beat the shit out of them on the question (critical to the gag: put the measure on a primary ballot, which almost always has a low voter turnout - oops not this time Holmes):

The referendum question brought out a surge of new voters, with more than 800,000 people turning out, up on the 470,000 who participated in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, Insider reported.

There are a shit-load of Right Wingnut ever tighter sphinters hoping, against hope, that people will forget all about Roe and The Supremes in November. Good luck. The Inflation 'problem' will likely be resolved, in large part by both the oil industry being hoisted on its obscene profits so far, and the continuing fall in gasoline price.

This ain't a good time to be a Republican Operative.

Fly United

If you're of a certain age, you've seen the poster 'Fly United'. In the bidnezz world, M&A is the fly united meme. And it always starts with rhetoric about synergy and proposed whole being far more valuable than the existing parts. Yada, yada, yada. What really happens, for all these decades of merging, is a massive debt and equally massive cost cutting, aka reduction of product. IOW, the consumers lose. The CxO class gets richly rewarded for their 'hard decisions'. And so on.

So, another example:

The announcement of scrapping plans for the two films comes amid Warner Bros. Discovery trying to cut costs, a whopping $3 billion, in the wake of their merger in April.

American bidnezz is on your side!

I Told You So - 2 August 2022

Well, here's the report:

U.S. manufacturing activity slowed less than expected in July and there were signs that supply constraints are easing, with a measure of prices paid for inputs by factories falling to a two-year low, suggesting inflation has probably peaked.
[my emphasis]

Are You Listening to Me?

Now, how did the Good Guys track down Zawahiri without any boots on the ground? A few Fake News reports have used The Name That Shall Not Be Spoken: the NSA heard every word (text, e-mail, etc. too) in and around Zawahiri for a long, long time.

Now, don't you think they have every word (text, e-mail, etc.) passed from and to the Russians who futzed with our 2016 and 2020 elections? Don't you? The only question is whether they were as deeply co-opted by wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 as the Secret Service.