Another Voice

When weighing in on wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's evil doings, and the folks who flock to it, these endeavors have made the case that the poor, uneducated, unhealthy, shitkickers are the ones to blame for their predicament. Their fate lies not in the stars or the immigrants (or the Jews, or the Negroes, or the Snowflakes), but in themselves. They continue to elect autocrats, local, state, and federal who treat them like cattle.

How did this happen? Today's NYT has a report from a hillbilly who's been there, and done that.

The truth is, Republican voters who fight against expanding human rights — who love songs like "If the South Woulda Won" and refuse to support Medicaid expansions that would provide health care to thousands in the South — are simply not rednecks, although they might think of themselves that way. Republican supporters bastardize hillbilly history; you can't claim to be from "Hicktown" if you don't fight for the hicks in it.

These are the same people who would still be living as they did in 1865 were it not for the generosity of the American taxpayer and Snowflake 1, FDR. Was FDR specifically motivated to save the South from antebellum poverty by the striking coal miners?

Then, as now, West Virginia was coal country. The coal industry was essentially the state's sole source of work, and massive corporations built homes, general stores, schools, churches and recreational facilities in the remote towns near the mines. For miners, the system resembled something like feudalism. Sanitary and living conditions in the company houses were abysmal, wages were low, and state politicians supported wealthy coal company owners rather than miners. The problems persisted for decades and only began to improve once Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933.

Yes, yes it appears so. Of course. It remains true that Red states are where Blue state tax payments go. One might wonder who in the Red states ends up with the moolah? Ya think may be it's just the rich folks?

And these shitkickers blame Blue state Liberals for their fate! If the South had remained a separate country, the North would have shed a tremendous burden of millions of ingrates. It would be a textbook example of mercantilism: the South makes raw materials and food stuffs, which they trade at poor advantage for finished good from the North. The North 'loses' the War of Northern Aggression, and gains long term (if not permanent) economic supremacy; if Congress has the wisdom to enforce capital flow restrictions.

A very different ending to the story. Not so great for the Black folk of the South, to be sure.

Thought For The Day - 31 January 2021

If there ever were cast iron proof that events drive data, not the other way round: GameStop. I wonder how many quants have committed suicide, metaphorical or real, in the last week?

D.J. You Dirty Guy!

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Back in school, which means any time from high school to undergraduate, I was in some class where the instructor posed the following question: will electric vehicles necessarily lead to lower climate change, although that term wasn't much used in the 60s and 70s. Ooh, ooh, call on me!!! Well I got called on and answered: only if bad gases from power plants are lower than those coming out of tail pipes per net energy used. I got an Atta Boy for that. At the time, I didn't have the answer. Clearly, at point of use, an electric vehicle is cleaner than a gas powered one. But how much pollution results from the production and distribution of those wee little electrons? Not known at the time.

Today brings more reporting that it might be true, but only if power plants aren't mostly coal, and to a lesser extent natural gas, fired (lesser extent since natural gas is less polluting).

Today, electric vehicles in the United States usually produce fewer overall emissions than their gasoline- or diesel-fueled counterparts, even if they're plugged into a grid that relies on power plants burning coal or natural gas, which emit carbon dioxide. That's largely because electric motors are so much more efficient than internal combustion engines.

That's good news, not known way back then.

But the other point, mentioned in the report, is that electric vehicles will only work if there's significant Socialism at work; the same was true with the internal combustion engined vehicle displacing Old Dobbin: all those roads were paid for by the taxpayer. And the report goes into detail.

Some reporting states that there's enough lithium in the earth to support widespread battery powered vehicles. But there's also the question of net-energy expenditure. Just as going from gas powered to battery powered plus electric generation requires knowing where the balance lies, one still cannot defy the laws of thermodynamics, which guarantee that you can't even break even. There's also the net energy expenditure of extracting the lithium and manufacturing the batteries.

Most of the known lithium supply is in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Australia and China. The quality is acceptable and reports reveal that Brazil has lithium mineral reserves that are not only of higher quality but also have lower extraction costs. In 2019, meanwhile, Western Australia has become the number one global producer of lithium, the second largest global producer of rare earths, the third largest global producer of cobalt and the fourth largest global producer of nickel.

So, unlike petro, the USofA plays no part. We'll be importers, whether for raw lithium or products. MAGA!! Keep burning coal!!!

And, of course

Rather than worrying about a lack of lithium, there could be shortages of rare earth materials, should the EV replace the conventional car. One such material is the permanent magnet for the electric motors. Permanent magnets make one of the most energy-efficient motors. China controls about 95 percent of the global market for rare earth metals and expects to use most of these resources for its own production. Export of rare earth materials is tightly controlled.

The limiting factor to reducing climate change through replacing gas transport with battery transport (fuel cell may be better?) is that the additional power generation that such a transition demands can't come from coal fired plants. No, Mother Nature wouldn't approve. That leaves nucular and may be natural gas. Wind, except in parts of Texas and off shore, isn't dependable enough. Pumped water facility using excess off-peak electricity to move water uphill, and thence run it through the turbines during peak is another, incremental, source.

Pumped storage hydroelectric projects have been providing energy storage capacity and transmission grid ancillary benefits in the United States and Europe since the 1920s. Today, the 43 pumped-storage projects operating in the United States provide around 23 GW (as of 2017), or nearly 2 percent, of the capacity of the electrical supply system according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Hubris Maximus

Well, the SST is trying to make a comeback, this time as business jet. It's an interesting story, especially the assertion that this aircraft/engine combination won't leave a Concorde type sonic boom in its wake.

Beyond holding only a dozen CxO types, it won't fly as fast as Concorde, 'just' 1,000 miles per hour (mach 1.4) vs. Concorde's 1,354 (mach 2.04). Now, why would Big Business choose to spend a boatload of moolah to spirit fat old white men with face lifts around the world?

The craft has a price tag of $120 million, which the planemaker thinks is a price that people will pay because of the time savings.

Time savings? The CxO class spends its time doing what ex-President AuH₂O 2020 did/does - "He will make many calls and have many meetings." What with global innterTubes, even at Angels 40, any time in the AS2 should be just as productive a place for calls and meetings as a plush corner suite.

According to Gogo, over 2,500 commercial aircraft and 6,600 business aircraft have been equipped with its onboard Wi-Fi services.

All at a cost of ... in the neighborhood of $70/month; that's airline connection, but a business AS2 would pick from this menu, for as little as $39/hour, of flight one may assume. In summary, then, the CxO class can conduct its calls and meetings while at Angels 40, no matter the aircraft. So, why fly at mach 1.4?

Here's the company's answer:

"We analyzed how business owners fly. We looked at a company out of New York that flew business jets around the world, and when we substitute an AS2 for them and rerun those flights for every person who flew on their airplane, AS2 saved them 142 hours a year."

Wow!! Sign me up fur one a dose dem dings. I gather that those 142 hours are total for all those fat old white guys with facelifts; otherwise the company would have stated that as per fat old white man with face lift, of course.

Parallax View - part the forty second

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   920
100 to 999 - 1,682

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,119. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's perpetual lying.

Hot off the presses,

For the B.1.351 variant, vaccination with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine produces neutralizing antibody titers that remain above the neutralizing titers that were shown to protect NHPs against wildtype viral challenge. While the Company expects these levels of neutralizing antibodies to be protective, pseudovirus neutralizing antibody titers were approximately 6-fold lower relative to prior variants. These lower titers may suggest a potential risk of earlier waning of immunity to the new B.1.351 strains/. [my emphasis]

Gentle reader may remember the various times in these endeavors where the durability of coronavirus vaccines was mused about. Guess that was warranted.

You Say M-eye-cro I Say M-aa-cro

While events drive the data, not generally, the other way round, data can show how policy will likely work out. Micro is, again generally, about your general beating your competitions' generals. Macro, again generally, is about policy that affects everybody, more or less, and what policy is most effective for the entire society. Slavery was a policy decision that benefited Southern planters, Northern consumers, but the slave population, not so much.

Years ago Leontief devised the modern input-output macro model of economies. While not so popular now, today's NYT has a report that demonstrates that such a model explicates how both such models and policies go a long way toward understanding how The Real World Works. The key takeaway (the lede in news jargon):

In monopolizing the supply of vaccines against Covid-19, wealthy nations are threatening more than a humanitarian catastrophe: The resulting economic devastation will hit affluent countries nearly as hard as those in the developing world.

American capitalists, meet your comeuppance. All that outsourcing to cheap hands in cheap economies doesn't work well if lots of those hands are sick and dying.

At the center of the story is the reality that most international trade involves not finished wares but parts that are shipped from one country to another to be folded into products. Of the $18 trillion worth of goods that were traded last year, so-called intermediate goods represented $11 trillion, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Tim Cook, he of Apple fame, made his bones as a supply chain wizard, defenestrating American production (and employment) in pursuit of cheap labor in autocratic nations. Oh, hell let 'em die, they're just cheap and expendable; just as American (largely immigrant) meat plant workers. The spirit of democracy.

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the fifth

CNN, and one suspects other Lamestream News, has a recapitulation and foreshadowing of QAnon in the wake of Sleepy Joe's inauguration. This is the key observation

"The most hardcore QAnon followers are in disarray," said Daniel J. Jones, president of Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks extremist groups and misinformation online. "After years of waiting for the 'Great Awakening,' QAnon adherents seemed genuinely shocked to see President Biden successfully inaugurated. A significant percentage online are writing that they are now done with the QAnon, while others are doubling down and promoting new conspiracies."
[my emphasis]

The thing is, this is by no means a New American Thingee. The 19^th century gave us The Second Great Awakening, which was really the first in the time of nationhood.

The better part of 200 years ago, much of the country went through much the same trauma. One of the more wingnut groups, Millerites were led to believe that Jesus would return, on a specific day. Well, I guess he didn't.

October 22, 1844, the day Jesus was expected to return, ended like any other day[31] to the disappointment of the Millerites. Both Millerite leaders and followers were left generally bewildered and disillusioned. Responses varied: some Millerites continued to look daily for Christ's return, others predicted different dates—among them April, July, and October 1845. Some theorized that the world had entered the seventh millennium, the "Great Sabbath", and that, therefore, the saved should not work.

Dejavu all over again. Fun for the feeble minded.