vboring

guns kill people

2011-02-11T14:24:00.001-08:00

Another one for the duh files.

I live in NRA country now and the lunch conversation turned to gun rights. Somebody suggested that guns don't kill people and claimed that murder rates are similar around the world. The data suggest the opposite.

Murder Rates:
US: 5 per 100,000 people
Australia: 1.2, but this number excludes attempted murders
UK: 1.28, but this number excludes attempted murders
New Zealand’s number includes attempted murders, so should be more comparable to US. It is 1.3
Canada: 1.81, includes attempted murders
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Total crime rates:
US: 80 per 1,000 population
Australia: not listed
UK: 85.5
NZ: 105.9
Canada: 75
From: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_percap-crime-total-crimes-per-capita

Guns per 100 residents:
US: 88.8
Australia: 15
UK: not listed
NZ: 22.6
Canada: 30.8
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_ownership

The US has a lower crime rate but higher murder rate compared to similar countries. Criminals and crime everywhere, but crime rates aren’t correlated with murder rates. Guns make it easier to kill people. We have more guns, so we kill more people.

If you list these countries according to gun ownership rate, the list is in the exact same order as if you list them according to their murder rate. And the proportional rates are also similar. The US has 2.88 as many guns per capita and 2.76 times as many murders per capita compared to Canada. Given very similar cultures, economics, languages, etc, the data suggests that if you double the number of guns in a country, you also double the number of murders. In English speaking countries, roughly one gun in 18,000 will be used to kill someone each year, independent of which country that gun is located in.

Keeping everything else constant, you'll eliminate one murder per year for each 18,000 guns that you randomly remove from a population. It stands to reason that if you selectively remove guns from a population (i.e. from people with criminal histories or from poor or young or people with less education), you should be able to get better results from your efforts. But that is a different discussion.

The ludicrously obvious point is: guns kill people. If you have murderous intent but only a knife at hand, you will probably hurt someone but you are far less likely to kill them.

Smart grid is not low hanging fruit.

2010-08-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

$100 Million to install 24,000 smart meters: http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_15847180

That is just over $4000 per electricity meter to enable communication.

For comparison, a 1000 sq ft of R60 attic insulation costs about $1500 before subsidies.

Replacing every light in your house with CFLs costs about (25 lights x $5) $125. Or prettier LEDs for $1250.

Adding a timer to your water heater so it only heats the water during the hours when you might use it is another $25.

The difference being that all of the things on this list save energy by wasting less energy, while the smartest grid in the world can only tell you how you are wasting energy.

On the other hand, the project will likely result in everyone else’s energy prices going up and raising energy prices does encourage conservation.

maintenance and smart grid

2010-08-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

I read this and was blinded by rage:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/08/09/smart.grid/index.html?hpt=C1

Apparently, the smart grid would have prevented the 2003 blackout that took out the Northeast and caused $6B in damage.

I don’t know how the magic of smart grid would have prevented the utility from slashing its tree trimming budget to boost profits or how it would have prevented the SCADA system from failing to communicate that the lines were overheating or how it would have convinced the operators to listen to the operators from the neighboring utilities or how it would have created an effective regional decision-making structure to force utilities to shed load to prevent the problem from spreading, but somehow, magically, it would have. Maybe by letting the utility know that 20,000 toasters were being used in Tulsa, smart grid would have saved the day.

Outages doubled because of one reason: lack of maintenance. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell an expensive and largely useless smart grid.

Seriously, this is a simple problem that has been badly mishandled. And the fundamental cause is weird financial arrangements. Utilities use loans to build their system. The interest rate they pay on these loans is based on their credit rating. Their credit rating is based largely on how much they owe on outstanding loans as a fraction of what their system is worth. The value of their system is based on money spent to upgrade the system. Additionally, for profit utilities have the rate they are allowed to charge their customers based on the value of their system, so money put into the system means more profits.

So, if they get loans and use the money to improve their system it improves their credit rating, making it cheaper to get loans, which makes delivering power less expensive and/or more profitable.

Money spent on maintenance isn’t treated the same way. It is a current expense – money down the drain.

From an MBA CEO perspective, this is the entire story. Money spent on system improvements makes profits while money spent on maintenance is just gone. Only an idiot would throw money away on maintenance. So nobody does. Instead, you run equipment until it fails, then replace it using a capital improvement budget. And when you can convince your regulators to let you do it, you throw more layers of expensive useless crap like the smart grid on top of your teetering system because it is another way to make more profits. Even if it doesn’t serve any useful purpose, the utility still gets to charge their customers for installing it and extract a profit.

The solution is to let utilities treat maintenance costs the same way capital improvements costs are treated and to increase the cost of blackouts through a fine of some variety. Maybe something like a free week of service for every hour of an outage not caused by unusual weather would do the trick.

thesis idea: geographic diversity of renewable energy

2010-02-28T17:07:00.000-08:00

One of the common claims about renewable energy is that geographic diversity is the saving grace. The wind will always be blowing and the sun shining somewhere. And this is true - to a point.

Earlier this winter, the UK had an uncommonly strong snow storm that was accompanied by several days of cold with little wind. Their nationwide wind energy output went to virtually zero. I don't know of any statistics about their solar power, but it seems reasonable to assume that a few inches of snow would pretty effectively reduce solar energy output to near zero as well. Meanwhile, the cold weather lead to peak load conditions. If the UK relied on wind or solar power to meet any portion of the nationwide peak load, they would have had to take extraordinary measures (like brownouts or rolling blackouts) to keep the lights on. And do this at a time when doing so would cause the greatest harm to the population.

So, geographic diversity of renewable energy production has to be greater than can be found in the UK if we are going to make the power system rely on it. Barring the invention of very large scale energy storage, no amount of wind and solar energy (or smart grid or conservation) will ever be sufficient to meet basic power system reliability criteria in the UK. They will always have to have a non-intermittent power system in place that can serve 100% of the peak load independent of the weather.

The thesis paper's goal would be to determine roughly how much geographic diversity is necessary and possibly to use this as a way to question the wisdom of renewable energy development zones (like the wind energy development zones in West Texas).

It is a very important question for the future of wind and solar power. If the UK wanted to meet the goal of reducing their CO2 emissions by 80% by way of building wind and solar energy, a significant fraction of the 20% of emissions left would have to be consumed by the back-up power system that needs to be kept in place and running on standby ready for severe weather events that only happen once every 50 years.

The solution, of course, is to use excess energy production to fix CO2 into methane (or some other easily stored fuel) and to use it in natural gas peaking plants, but that is the subject for an entirely different type of thesis paper.

sociology of climate science

2010-02-13T08:25:00.000-08:00

A quick thought experiment: If climate scientists were infinitely intelligent, would their results be any more useful for policy?

My claim is "no."

And the reason is because of a selection bias for people who enter the field and sociological influences.

If scientists where infinity intelligent, they’d still be herd animals like the rest of us. If the herd is going in one direction, only a small portion of the population will choose to go the other way. This theoretical herd of infinitely intelligent scientists will apply their intelligence to mock them.

To my mind, the best scientists are borderline autistic (a la big bang’s Sheldon). These people can abandon their own ideas with no thought to social consequences.

And herein lies the problem with the "save the world" sciences (social work, environmental science, climate science, etc). They inadvertently select for people who want to save the world: people who are both highly socially aware and who have chosen their field because they see it as a way to bring positive change.

Being socially aware is a hindrance in science because it makes it harder to bear the scorn of the herd when you disagree with them.

Choosing a science as one's path in life based on the hope to be able to help humanity is a hindrance because it means that if it turns out that there actually isn't anything wrong (that there is no danger to save humanity from) is a form of failure to achieve one's hopes. Additionally, it'd likely mean the eventual loss of one's funding, since climate science without anthropogenic global warming is pretty boring.

So, no I don't think greater intelligence or capability would be remotely useful, but a little bit of impartiality would go a long ways.

Anthropogenic Climate Change Proof map

2009-12-22T15:28:00.000-08:00

I'd like to see a logic map for the need to address anthropogenic climate change.

It'd show the complete logical and scientific analysis from how we know atmospheric CO2 reflects heat to how confident we can be that a given international policy will be effective at preventing changes in our habitat.

I understand that a lot thorough science has taken place approaching each step in the proof from several directions. I think a graphical representation would be the best way to communicate how thorough and robust this process has been and whether there really are any data or analysis choke points (any single crux of the issue that could be false).

Climate Scientology

2009-11-23T08:16:00.000-08:00

I haven’t posted for a long time because I’ve had nothing interesting to say.

But a comment about the hacked climate emails from last week seems to be in order, since I have yet to see traditional media coverage that seems to give a damn about the actual implications of the communications.

The people involved said a lot of dickish things – that is irrelevant and uninteresting. And also seems to be the only thing anyone is talking about.

The only thing that matters is that they confirmed that they were intentionally withholding critical climate data from people who disagree with them – for years. And that they were so dedicated to not sharing their data that they actually said that they would prefer to destroy the data than let people who disagree with them see it. (You can read some of the emails here: http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/11/hacked-hadley-cru-foi2009-files.html#more )

Take a moment to think about that.

And another.

If you are not disgusted, enraged, and outraged, there is something wrong with you.

There is never an excuse for scientists to hide data on any matter that impacts humanity and is being used to guide international public policy– ever. Never. Not one. Ever. None.

The whole point of science is to disagree and try to prove each other wrong while constantly moving closer to the most correct interpretation of the data. That is the scientific method. If scientists only talked to people that agreed with them, we never would have made it out of the dark ages.

If you don’t share your data, it can only be because you think your theory is too weak to withstand criticism, because you have no understanding of what it means to be a scientist, or because you have embraced your theory religiously and cannot accept criticism of it because it could slow the spread of your cause. I think the last is the most likely.

I take both science and the environment very seriously. I think human induced climate change is a plausible theory. Unfortunately, the key historical temperature study that has been used to demonstrate that current times are a-historically warm – is the same study that is based on data that hasn’t been shared.

The crux of the climate change argument has never been verified because of the religious anti-scientific actions of a small group of people (I can’t bring myself to call them scientists) that control the critical infrastructure of climate science. These people are Climate Scientologists and they deserve to be ostracized by the community of real scientists. Real Climate Scientists need to lead the charge against them if they want their field to have any credibility.

To any trolls: please disagree with me in a coherent manner. I would love to be wrong about all of this. It has been a traumatic revelation for me. I’ll just delete any of the incoherent name-calling that pops up when you question Climate Scientology.

Dubai, Dubai, Dubai

2009-08-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

What were they thinking? I really have no idea. I posted a few times about how Dubai was by all appearances, a parade of crazy.

I guess they thought they would follow the example of Las Vegas, building a city in the middle of a wasteland. But it was on the coast, so it had hints of Miami to it as well.

The only problem of course being that Las Vegas and Miami are cities that serve a purpose, that have a source of income. Whereas Dubai was just a way for too rich oil oligarchies to dispose of wealth.

They led the way up with a list of the most preposterous ideas (indoor skiing in the 120 degree desert, underwater hotel rooms, man made islands in custom shapes, world's largest F1 theme park, the world's 55* tallest buildings, why not?).

And now they lead the way down with the world's largest number of ultra-luxury cars abandoned at the airport by debtors hoping to keep their heads and with the world's most rapidly declining real estate values. Their prices have fallen almost as much this year as the worste bubble markets have fallen since their peak. In 7 months they accomplished the same kind of damage that took Las Vegas almost three years to achieve.

Astonishing. Simply astonishing.

Not that it is happening, but that it took so long.

When a city is built primarily from money made by building and selling real estate in that city, how does one determine the underlying value of properties in that city? It is kind of like Detroit, but instead of not designing and building cars any more, they're not designing and building buildings any more. Will the world's 55* tallest buildings stand empty and worthless?

* I made this number up. Nobody knows exactly how many of the world's tallest buildings are in Dubai, because they use the Shariah Law system of measurement based on the distance a donkey can walk in an hour and donkeys can't walk up vertical surfaces. Also, many of these tallest buildings in Dubai are unfinished, so it is questionable as to whether they count as buildings or just as structures.

hydrogen powerplant?

2009-07-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm tempted to start a "why, oh why" file just for this thing.

The details are sparse, but the general idea is that it takes electricity, uses it to produce hydrogen and oxygen from water via electrolysis, then burns the hydrogen to create electricity.

This is a notoriously wrong idea.

Electrolysis is notoriously inefficient, hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store, burning hydrogen is notoriously a waste of an expensive commodity.

I would be very surprised if they have a round trip efficiency of greater that 15%.

The good news is that they claim all of the funding is private, so at least their money isn't coming from taxes.

My favorite quote from the article:

"We're the first company that had the foresight to jump on creating a combinatory system and putting the pieces together to make it viable for the public and for electrical generation"

I'm not sure if "foresight" is quite the word I would have chosen. The "excess of money and dearth of sense" is closer.

wasted waste heat

2009-07-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

Nearly every device that uses energy produces waste heat. In your house, most of this waste heat gets just ends up heating your rooms.

In warm climates where air conditioners are common, this is ridiculous. You're paying to pump the heat out of your refrigerator twice. First to pump the heat out of the fridge and into the kitchen, then to pump it out of your house and into the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, you're putting energy into another device to heat cold water.

So, why not combine the two systems? Why not use the waste heat from major household appliances to preheat the cold incoming city water before it gets to your water heater?

Between your refrigerator, air conditioner and clothes dryer there is a fair amount of waste heat just going, well, to waste.

disruptive power tech?

2009-07-17T14:49:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about what it'd take to put me out of a job and am not too worried.

The electric utility industry exists to take advantage of the efficiencies of large scale energy production. Small scale household or neighborhood based production could certainly have a future, but a fairly disruptive technology would have to be invented to make it worthwhile.

No domestic option today is remotely competitive on a cost basis, even with all of the state and federal tax credits. With enough unrealistically optimistic assumptions (like zero maintenance, rapidly escalating utility energy costs, and a 30 year service life), cost inefficient technologies like household solar panels can be sold. But even the vast majority of these systems require being connected to the power system in order to work.

I expect that one day some kind of combined cycle natural gas fuel cell plus solar panel plus batteries system could approach cost parity with the power system, but so what? Most people don't go to the trouble of having that kind of thing installed in order to achieve zero savings.

And I can't think of a system that would require less than two disruptive technologies in order to completely obviate a connection to the power system. The one I think of requires 1) virtually free truly maintenance-free solar panels and 2) ideal energy storage and conversion system(no fumes, no maintenance, no acids, no fire risk, minimal noise, 30 year lifetime, predictable failure).

The other possible source of job loss for me is if some clever exec decides to move my work overseas. The best reason why this is unlikely to happen is that the cost of engineering staff is minuscule compared to the cost of a mistake. I do projects where my time is 5-7% of the project cost. If the project were outsourced, the total project cost might be reduced by 2-3%. But if any mistakes are made and the project construction gets held up by a day or a piece of equipment fails prematurely because it was incorrectly specced or designed, any savings on engineering time would be greatly overcome by construction and maintenance cost overruns.

when bad news is good news (for me)

2009-07-09T07:35:00.000-07:00

I find myself cheering for global financial panic these days because I'm trying to buy a house and because I have acquired some Australian dollar debt.

Every time a bad economic report comes out, people run to the relative security of the USD and US gov't treasuries. This moves exchange rates in my favor. And mortgage rates are strongly correlated with treasury returns.

The only bad news that is bad for me right now is talk of excessive inflation, because inflation expectations also impact mortgage rates. At the moment, there is a lot of talk about USD inflation, but there is also a lot of talk about USD deflation. And that is fine by me. I expect deflation for the next several quarters followed by inflation above 5% for several years, but what do I know.

So, I say bring on the US stock market crash and let the freedom fighters in China prevail. Better yet, let another smallish currency turn into confetti like the Icelandic Kronor did. Imagine what that would do to exchange rates and treasuries.

And it would put an end to all this diversified reserve currency BS that some G8 leaders have been rambling about.

re:one for the duh files

2009-07-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

I was wrong about the recent climate change bill that barely passed through the House.

At the last minute, on the morning of the day the bill was passed, a provision much like what I discussed two posts ago was added.

I still think China's sulfur and arsenic outputs are bigger worries than CO2.

And, so long as we are passing tariffs based on the regulations imposed in other countries, maybe we should have a child labor tariff, a sweat shop tariff, a minimum wage tariff, and so on.

These are all things that impact our humanity at least as much as CO2 impacts our climate.

business idea

2009-07-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

This may be an obvious one, but I think there should be a full line baby stuff rental company.

Baby doesn't use any stuff for more than about a month, so what is the sense in buying it?

Considering how ridiculously expensive some of the gear can be (like the $1200 Gap Stokke Xplory), it'd be a good way for people to exceed their means.

Plus you'd be able to assure people that you'd take the stuff back after the month or so useful life, so they wouldn't have to worry about where they're going to store it until it is old and moldy enough to throw away.

one for the duh files

2009-06-30T11:44:00.001-07:00

The energy bill recently passed in the House puts limits on CO2 emitted in the US with a goal of reducing our CO2 output by 85% by 2050, but makes no effort whatsoever to address the CO2 output (or other pollution) from goods produced outside of the US.

Good thing the US doesn't share an atmosphere with any other countries.

Or a jobs market. (Making energy expensive in the US will push energy-intensive production overseas, taking factory jobs with it.)

How hard would it be to include an imported goods section? Something like:

All imported goods from countries that do not have equivalent CO2 capping programs must pay a CO2 tax equal to what a domestic competitor would pay.

Personally, I care a lot more about the arsenic and sulfur clouds floating over from China, but forcing them to participate in a CO2 program or come up with their own would be a good first step.

why motorcycles basically shouldn't be legal, except for Harleys

2009-06-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

There are two types of riders:

1) Idiots who are willing to accept risk in exchange for performance.

2) People who prefer safety and comfort and are willing to wait their line in traffic.

The first type of people want bikes because they are the fastest machine you can get for the money. These people will love their bikes for all of the several weeks of their remaining lives. There is no way for these people to ever be safe riders, no matter how skilled. As their skill increases, so do the risks they are willing to take.

The second type of people could be good, safe riders, but never will be because they don't see the point in motorcycles. There is an exception within this group, of course: the fashionista Harley riders. They have no interest in performance (if they did, they'd be on a real bike), so they are likely to be perfectly safe. Their enjoyment from the ride has nothing to do with speed or performance, so they can rumble along perfectly contentedly and don't need to take risks or push limits to enjoy themselves.

If anyone cares, I'm the first type. Virtually everyone who has ever bought a bike is. Also just like virtually everyone who has ever bought a bike, I hope to own a ridiculous car someday. Maybe an S2000 or an Elise.

climate change is dead, long live the energy crisis

2009-06-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

I have no specific opinion about human caused climate change.

I think the science is too complicated (and politically charged) to come to any kind of reliable conclusions and I see little point in artbitrarily choosing to believe one way or the other. Think about the number of factors involved between atmospheric composition, solar radiance fluctuation, surface reflectivity, cloud formation catalysts, and so on. It is a difficult question.

The WSJ thinks that we are seeing an international move away from belief that we're responsible.

I just hope gov'ts won't throw baby out with the bathwater. Other types of pollution and environmental degradation are undeniably real: deforestation, fish stock depletion, China's dirty coal addiction (the US and Europe use coal too, but we scrub our smokestacks to take the carcinogens out instead of fogging our cities with it), Europe's diesel particulate issues, soil erosion, worldwide groundwater depletion. These are all obvious and comparatively easily solved problems that have been pushed aside by the carbon debate.

And, of course, there is always the other side of the CO2 problem. The nasty, scary, possibly irresolvable part: that we are depleting the world's cheap energy reserves.

falling prices are annoying

2009-06-24T08:58:00.000-07:00

I'm looking to buy a place in a north Denver suburb.

I don't expect to make money on it, but I don't expect to lose a lot of money on it, either. I figure it'll be a good inflation hedge if things go that way, but mostly it is a lifestyle decision.

The only problem is that prices in the area have been nearly flat for a decade now. This sounds like it would be good news for a buyer, but it isn't. What it means is that there are three types of places on the market: distressed sales of run down houses, grossly overpriced HGTV-inspired amateur flips, and owners with unrealistic price expectations because they need to sell for at least 10% more than they bought for just to break even.

For a buyer, all of these options are bad. It means the only way to buy a place that hasn't been trashed by an angry debtor or abused by the HGTV-addled crowd is to pay significantly above market values. Nowadays, even that is not so simple, since appraisals have become so much more strict.

since when?

2009-06-19T18:55:00.000-07:00

Nobody has been this tired of hearing about economic indicators at their worst since the Great Depression since (you guessed it) the Great Depression.

Why not mix it up a bit? Maybe say things haven't been this bad since before WWII, since Hoover was president, since Hitler graduated High School, since the Empire State building was completed.

Anything.

the way RE pricing should work

2009-06-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of my continuing series on what is wrong with real estate.

Listing prices often have absolutely no relation to reality and make the whole system inefficient. Between short sales listed at ridiculously low prices that the actual property owner will never accept and ludicrously high prices that no new lender will ever give a loan for, badly priced properties just waste everyone's time.

The obvious solution that has probably been suggested a million times before:

A proper appraisal by an actually neutral third party should step #1 in any sale process.

Not a realtor opinion. Not a zillow zestimate. Not a silly homowner guesstimate. An appraisal arranged through a lender. Or, better yet, an incorruptible third party.

You have to get an appraisal to get a loan anyway, few people are willing to buy a place too far above appraisal, and few people are willing to sell a place too far below appraisal.

So, what is the sense in listing a place without getting an appraisal first?

diapers as CO2 sequestration

2009-06-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

They say that disposable diapers can take a century to biodegrade when buried in a typical landfill.

I say maybe that is a good thing.

The process of carbon sequestration is just taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it somewhere else for a long time. So, in the case of diapers, trees took the carbon out of the air, factories turned that tree-captured carbon into a useful product through the addition of a carbon-based sealant (a thin layer of plastic, usually made from oil) and humanity briefly used this product, then put it in the earth.

So, the carbon cycle is atmospheric carbon converted into carbon chains by tree, sealed to prevent carbon returning to atmosphere by factory, stored underground for a long time by an indifferent humanity.

That is the definition of carbon sequestration.

Maybe congress should pass a bill subsidizing paper diapers, carbon taxing rapidly degrading diapers, and banning re-usables and paper recycling in general.

Yes, up to this point, I have been mocking CO2 policy, not really being serious at all.

But, if you really think about it, virtually everything a person owns during their life that isn't metal or water is primarily composed of carbon. Clothes, beds, carpets, computers, houses, food. Basically everything. If all of that carbon came from the atmosphere today and got put into the ground, that'd be a pretty significant carbon sink. Unfortunately, all that plastic still comes from oil.

subsidize taxis

2009-06-11T06:55:00.000-07:00

I pretty much hate mass transit, but understand that there is a place for it.

I mostly don't like waiting for things, or sitting next to strangers, or stopping every 20 seconds.

But I was looking at a chart last night that showed the comparative fuel efficiency of a variety of transport options and it is undeniable that buses are quite efficient when they are full.

They are also the least efficient transport option in existence when they are empty.

My idea: only run buses during times of the day when they are the most efficient option, then subsidize other transport options (like taxis) during the quiet hours. I don't know what the exact rate structure should be, but the city would save a silly amount of money by only running buses 10-14 hours/day instead of 24.

The reduction of diesel particulate emissions would be even greater than the reduction of energy consumption, since most buses are diesel powered.

oh noes!

2009-06-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

Eddie Bauer is going BK.

Where am I going to get my shirts now? They are the only place I've found that sells Large/Tall long sleeve shirts that fit me*. Plus they are wrinkle and stain resistant to boot.

Hopefully they'll have store closing sales and I'll just buy every tall shirt in the city.

They really are just so nice and fit 100% perfect.

*Yes, I have heard of Big&Tall's and yes they are 100% useless unless you are both big and tall (and willing to pay high prices for truly nasty low quality stuff, no offense).

simple tech to reduce RE transaction costs

2009-06-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

I don't really know why real estate agents still exist. I'm using one right now, but only because I have no choice in the matter. Selling agents won't let you see a place unless you have a buying agent. It is 100% ridiculous.

They basically represent a 5-6% transaction tax on top of the other transaction costs.

Many web sites exist to lubricate most of the process. The part that remains is the lock box. Buyers will only give the lock box code to a seller's agent. Not individuals.

The idea to replace the lock box is such:
It is a lock box that communicates via the cell phone network. The buyer contacts the seller to set up a time. The seller enters that time and the buyer's cell number into a permission database. When the buyer goes to the house, they text the lock box. If it is the right time and the right phone number, the lock box unlocks and the buyer can see the place.

If you wanted to get fancy, you could add cameras and such to the lock box to make sure the key gets put back in, etc. But this covers the basics. Or a temporary wireless security camera system to the whole house to make sure it doesn't get trashed while empty.

Other than giving access to places, I don't see that RE agents add any value to the transaction that couldn't be replaced by a good automated system. Certainly not enough to justify a 5-6% tax.

You'd replace the buyers agents first with a fixed cost discount service that is accessible to anyone - agent represented or not. Then buyers agents would slowly disappear.

interesting times

2009-06-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

This is the scariest blog entry I've read in a while.

In essence, the gov't is trying to keep interest rates low to keep the economy from tanking. Low interest rates mean lower operating costs for entities with large debts. Most American entities have large debts, so lower interest rates reduce operating costs, which means it is easier to keep a business or household running.

They recently failed and interest rates jumped 30% in one day.

Simultaneously, the value of the dollar is tanking. Down to its lowest value so far this year.

And the stock market is excited about a small bump in a Chinese manufacturing index.

What I think right now:
1) This sentimental stock market rally is running on fumes. I trusted it for 2 days, took my 6% return and ran.
2) If the Fed doesn't get things under control, interest rates are going to continue to rise, which is about the worst possible news for house prices.
3) For the Fed to get interest rates under control, it may need to throw the dollar under the bus, which would obviously lead to 1970s style double digit interest rates and a thoroughly toasted economy.

I expect the gov't to take the proactive approach and accept ridiculous inflation as a pain that voters don't understand well enough to care about. Because of this, buying a house now as a hedge against inflation and as a way to lock in still historically low interest rates is a good decision. Considering that it can still be done with basically zero money down, it is a bet that can't go too badly. Not for me, anyway.

American business talk

2009-05-20T13:06:00.000-07:00

Maybe it is just engineers, but my average work conversation goes as such:

"business, business, business, business. oh yeah, and how're the kids/hobby/weather?"

Like the personal bit is tacked on at the end almost out of guilt.

I don't really mind, since I generally have little interest in the kids/hobby/weather of the person on the other end.

I'm just saying it is weird, is all.

National G Study find Americans are least poor

2009-05-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

Yep, out of all of the nations surveyed, we buy the most new stuff and use the most energy.

Technically, the focus of their study was to determine how "green" various nations are, but instead, they basically just put together an inverse ranking of GDP per capita.

If you're poor, you repair stuff instead of buying new. You only buy what you need. You buy basic items with as little processing as possible. And you don't use very much fossil energy, because fossil energy is expensive. Some goes for clean water.

I just wish we were all poor enough to make this world a better place.

This is my favorite line:

"Consumers in Brazil, Russia and Mexico increased their Greendex score the most, when compared to last year’s results."

Maybe Nat G failed to notice this, but Brazil, Russia, and Mexico are amongst the countries most strongly impacted by the recent economic mess. Remember the riots in Mexico over grain prices last year? Neither does Nat G. They do strongly approve of the decrease in wanton tortilla consumption, though.

A useful study of relative greenness might consider what efforts are made to reduce the impact of consumption. Such as smokestack scrubbing, water management laws, portions of land that are permanently off limits to use. All things that the US has led the way in developing.

Any study that puts China's "foggy" cities and India's exploding population of grinding poverty on the #1 and #2 pedestals as examples to follow is 100% bad for humanity.

The link.

the other kind of fusion

2009-05-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

Who knew there was another kind?

There's natural fusion, which powers the stars.

Plasma-based fusion, which attempts to replicate natural fusion and is the only approach that has had significant funding for decades.

Cold fusion, which had been taboo for so long that only people on the margins of science studied it, except in France and Japan.

And now I'm hearing about laser-based solid fusion, which works as such: ultra dense hydrogen isotopes + lasers = huge amounts of energy + non-radioactive waste (helium, presumably). Worth the read.

loud bathrooms

2009-05-11T07:04:00.000-07:00

I think there should be white noise generators in public bathrooms.

I recently read an article about the new ultra mega jumbo airbus plane and how the flight crews didn't like it because it is quieter than most planes. During long flights the crews take a rest and the white noise from normal planes drowns out passenger noise and provides them privacy enough so that they can sleep.

Privacy in a bathroom is generally a good thing. A cheap way to add privacy to a space is to make it loud. White noise is the least offensive form of loud.

Therefore, adding white noise to public bathrooms is a good idea.

two miracles in one week

2009-04-09T07:16:00.000-07:00

At least three miracles are needed for hydrogen vehicles to become practical and progress has been made on two of them this week.

1) cheap way to produce the hydrogen.

2) practical way to store the hydrogen in a car.

3) cheap fuel cell to use the hydrogen - progress is coming along generally. this is probably the easiest miracle, but it is at the product development stage so companies don't talk about their progress.

We obvious still need to get the energy to produce the hydrogen from somewhere and I think the crazy unschedule-able wind plants will do just fine for that. The hydrogen production facilities will only be profitable with the lowest cost electricity. The electric companies will give them the lowest rates in exchange for the hydrogen companies agreeing to follow the wind plants' output.

Battlestar Gallactica and the smart grid

2009-04-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

There is a compelling story here, but I can't think of a clever way to state it.

Simply put:

There is a consistent (and fairly blind) effort to increase the level of automation in our nation's electrical system at all levels.

This creates an obvious and I think unavoidable way for hackers to play with stuff that might actually hurt people.

Some argue the benefits outweigh the dangers and that robust cybersecurity policies can protect us. I think that is 100% grade A BS. I don't think there is such a thing as a secure network and neither does the CIA. Their sensitive information is kept on computers that aren't connected to any networks. Networked information is basically public information.

As part of my work, I've seen some cybersecurity policies for the energy industry and I'm pretty sure the only reason we haven't seen a major hacker-induced outage is because nobody has really tried to cause one yet. Or maybe because they never learned power flow calculations.

Point being, I think we're better off going the Battlestar Gallactica route - embrace individual computing devices, just never let so many of them talk to each other and make automated decisions that they could endanger the reliability of the power supply.

World Depression II

2009-04-07T14:12:00.000-07:00

Lots of writers are claiming that the current economic issues aren't as bad as the Great Depression.

These comparisons are based on the US experience during the Depression vs the US experience today.

This article claims that if you compare the World then vs World now, every sign indicates that World Depression II is going to make World Depression I look like World War I.

World Depression I was severe, prolonged and unpleasant and all, but since then we've learned far more efficient and effective ways of turning our cash into confetti.

And yet I'm perfectly happy pulling up stakes and moving to a less secure new position. Am I really so confident in the invulnerability of my industry or do I not believe that things are as bad as the analysis indicates?

Mr. Mori and I must share logic diagrams

2009-04-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

Moving to the 'burbs of Denver in a few weeks, I've started to think about what I should get as a second car.

Naturally, I wasted a lot of time browsing ads to see what struck me. This is a useless process for me, because I am a lover of cars generally - and for a wide variety of reasons. My favorite car so far was a 12yr old Geo Storm. I owned it when it was announced the Lotus Elise would finally be coming to the US. I couldn't help but notice how the two were similar in many ways and how the Storm excelled the Elise in some ways (the chassis and the engine were built by the same company; the Geo wasn't held together by glue - well, it hadn't been when it was new, anyway).

Point being, cars are an emotional subject for me so browsing listings leads inevitably to frustration and fail. I'd end up buying something ridiculous like a Eagle Talon TSi (a hot little turbo-ed awd coupe with an engine so explosively unreliable that it has been referred to as a very expensive grenade from which the pin has been pulled).

Acknowledging my inability to make a rational decision, I decided to rely on a logic diagram to guide me.

The design was thus: we already have a reliable, competent, efficient, smallish car (a 2003 Pontiac Vibe). So the additional car should add as much vehicular capability as possible at the least total cost (initial plus operations and maintenance). The capabilities that I value are:

1) AWD or 4x4 for snow-going (AWD is slightly preferred because it is lower cost and probably good enough. I have no desire to drive off-road.)
2) a truck bed for hauling dirty stuff (for when I have a dirty garden)
3) decent acceleration from a turbo (for getting up into the mountains without putting excessive strain on the engine - turbos don't derate at higher elevations the way naturally aspirated engines do)

The required characteristics are:

1) must cost under $12k
2) must have less than 75k miles
3) must carry at least 4 adult passengers

Anyone who spends too much time reading car mags knows where this is going and is probably a little disturbed by it:

The much maligned Subaru Baja Turbo. Unofficially known as "the Subaru Outback that got in a fight with a sawzall - and lost." Depending on the price differential between the turbo version and the base model when it is actually time to buy, there is a decent chance I'll skip the turbo.

If you're still wondering about the title, Mr. Mori is the CEO Fuji Heavy Industries, the parent company of Subaru.

cold fusion stigma melting

2009-03-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

Ever since the episode of extraordinarily bad science (on everyone's part: those who claimed it happened, those who claimed it didn't, the media. bad science all around) in the '80s, it has been difficult for any serious scientists to investigate the phenomena because of the stigma attached to it.

Cold fusion (known as low energy nuclear reactions LENR in boring circles) promises to be everything nuclear fusion power was meant to be. Ubiquitous cheap energy, but without the radioactive waste.

But instead of being continually investigated by the best and brightest, a series of very poorly funded but dedicated folks have kept the dream alive. In basements, garages and France and Japan and one US military lab, mostly.

Up until a few years ago, the DOE even had a blanket ban on funding any cold fusion research.

But, if my interactions with a variety of physicists, engineers, and scientists is anything to go by, there is still a quiet but strong undercurrent of interest in the phenomena.

But today, this article appeared on Science Daily after being published in a proper journal: the American Chemical Society.

Even if the results are quickly proven to be the result of a known phenomena and the authors gently mocked, the fact that that the results were published in a real journal at all is significant. It means more researchers will be able to spend time studying it without throwing their careers out the window.

It is a good day for science.

Three cheers for the editors who allowed the paper in their journal.

haptic-i-tat

2009-03-21T21:38:00.000-07:00

That's my clever name for a multi-mode baby soothing mechanism.

It is a conjunction of haptic and habitat.

It will be the ultimate machine for sleepy baby soothing. It'll produce white noise, vibrate, bounce, and stay warm.

Something tells me someone has already produced this device and I just haven't found it yet. It is probably only sold in Japan.

And it probably has a less creepy name.

wrong economic theory fundamentals

2009-03-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about economics recently. Specifically about how it's foundation is a bit backwards. I don't really have time to write much, but the general idea goes a little something like this:

Classical economics states that the purpose of an economic system is to distribute scarce resources.

This was thought up at a time when resources meant something. When they were a limiting factor. When engineering, marketing, branding, and science barely existed.

I think that today, there virtually are no scarce resources. I'm wrong about this, obviously. Energy is a scarce resource. But, with energy, basically everything else becomes plentiful.

Instead, the vast majority of wealth creation has nothing to do with scarce resources. Wealth is created via added value actions. Specifically, humans modifying or creating things out of basic materials to male them more valuable to other humans.

If the vast majority of value is added by humans, rather than fundamental to the resources themselves, then economics that focus on the resources are missing most of the picture.

An example of why this matters:

From the classical perspective, poor countries are a good thing because they mean that the physical resources of that country can be exploited by he wealthy countries.

From my perspective, poor countries are a lost opportunity because each unemployed person is unable to add value to the system. Each untrained mind and underutilized pair of hands is a lost opportunity for humanity. There is no telling what great works of art or scientific discoveries aren't being made by the billions living hand to mouth right now.

I'm at a Power Systems Conference and Expo right now that brings this point home. I've listened to about 20 technical presentations on details of wind integration, turbine modeling, power system planning, etc and at least 80% of them have been given by PhD's whose parents or grandparents were (or are) probably subsistence farmers.

Naturally, there is also the problem of the selfish materialistic assumptions of modern economics that helped prepare investment bankers to create the mess we're struggling through right now, but I have no time for that right now.

It should be noted that I barely know what I'm talking about when it comes to what is an isn't classical economics, so it may be that there is a branch of it that believes as I do. If anyone can provide a reference, I'd be interested in reading it.

Fast charge battery tech

2009-03-13T11:49:00.000-07:00

One more barrier to electric vehicles fell today. The several hours to recharge a battery pack may soon fall to just a few minutes, if claims from MIT can be trusted.

With this tech, you could keep your car on a constant slow charge at home overnight to take advantage of lower costs, but then also be able take the vehicle for long trips by doing a rapid recharge at a charging station.

Because of the amount of power involved, the rapid recharge will still take several minutes, even if the batteries themselves could recharge in a few seconds. If you have a 60kWhr battery pack (big enough for a subcompact car to have a decent freeway range), recharging in 6 minutes requires a 600kW connection. At 600 volts DC, this requires 1000 amps. Which is just barely feasible with standard equipment.

More likely, you'd have to give it 20 minutes and recharge at about 300 amps.

If you're driving cross country, you should stop and have a decent stretch every few hours anyway, I guess.

nuclear tankers

2009-02-23T10:20:00.000-08:00

The US military uses nuclear power for aircraft carriers and submarines, why shouldn't big commercial ships do the same?

Hyperion power has a small nuke power plant design that they think will prove to be of little interest to terrorists and environmentalists alike.

So, why not put one in a big commercial shipping vessel? It'd be a great way to hedge against fluctuating fuel prices. And they only have to be refueled every couple of decades.

clever and dumb

2009-02-19T09:56:00.000-08:00

Today's clever prize goes to a few members of congress who introduced a bill to tax all stock market transactions at 0.25% to pay for the Wall Street Bailout. It'd kill day traders, greatly reduce volatility, and lead to a more stable system based on soundly reasoned long term buys instead of disruptive momentum speculating.

And the dumb prize goes to Abu Dhabi for banning employers from firing citizens. Who would ever start a company or hire any employees if they knew that they would be stuck with every employee they hired until the business went bankrupt? 100% dumb. Companies need to shrink sometimes and get rid of unproductive folks. It is part of a healthy process.

will our economic recovery be slowed by our economic recovery?

2009-02-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

One of the big themes for the last several months has been that no matter how bad the news in the US is, the dollar keeps going up in value and investors are still tripping over each other to buy US treasuries.

In fact, the worse the news is, the more interest there is in the USD and treasuries. The USD has gone up by around 30% vs most other currencies in the last several months and the buyers of government issued treasuries are willing to accept essentially zero (and in some cases actually zero) return on their money.

The common explanation is that the USD and treasuries are the world's most secure investments during economic hard times. People are buying them in the hope they'll actually be worth something next year. Nobody wants to get stuck holding the next Icelandic Krona (which recently became nearly worthless as part of this whole crisis).

So what happens when the financial crisis ends and investors start to favor the higher returns of basically any other investment over the USD and treasuries?

Seems to me, it'll lead to a falling USD and demand for higher interest rates on treasuries. Falling USD means rising import prices (most importantly rising fuel costs). Demand for higher interest rates on treasuries will make servicing our national debt more expensive, and increase borrowing costs generally.

None of which is good news for a country trying to recover from a recession.

periodic truck regulations rant

2009-02-15T19:31:00.000-08:00

As far as I can tell, most fuel efficiency/hybrid tech policy is one step shy of being flat out stupid.

Maybe half a step.

Our transport energy use is so high because so many of us drive oversized vehicles from poorly thought out suburbs. We do this as individuals, of course, because it is the smart thing to do. Big trucks are safer, faster, cooler, provide better visibility, and have huge amounts of space to haul stuff all for about the same or a lower price than a similar car. For about $20k-$25k, you can get a decent ford fusion, which meets all of anyone's basic transport needs or you can get a Ford F150 crew cab that is better at everything except parking and fuel efficiency. Sure, the truck uses more fuel, but the incremental cost is insignificant over the first 3 years (which is how long most new car buyers keep their new cars).

So, if I'm avoiding the unavoidable discussion of fuel costs, then what am I going to go on about?

Perverse regulations. The Ford F150 is cheap not because of any especially clever engineering or manufacturing processes, but rather because of crazy crazy federal regulations. In the US, not all cars are created equal. Some cars are passenger cars and follow one set of regulations. Some cars are light duty trucks and follow another set. And some cars are heavy duty trucks and follow yet another set.

The perversity of the regulations is that the worse the fuel efficiency of a class of vehicles is, the less it is regulated. Cars have had fuel efficiency requirements and gas guzzler taxes since the 1970s. Light duty trucks, not so much. Heavy duty trucks (like the Ford Super Duty F-350) - they don't even have to publish fuel economy ratings.

This was somewhat revised recently by the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) law, but only somwhat. You'll still never see a gas guzzler tax on a truck that gets 12 miles per gallon, but you will for any car that gets the same. Instead, each manufacturer was basically told: whatever the fuel efficiency of the mix of vehicles you produce today, improve it by a few percent.

Whereas the oil reserves of the world (and the CO2 concentration in atmosphere) don't care whether this year's ford trucks are more efficient than last year's. They only care about how much fuel is burned. Rather than increasing the efficiency of a truck by 5%, we should be encouraging people to move from less efficient classes of vehicles into more efficient classes. If you move from a 18 mpg truck into a 28 mpg car (2009 F150 and Fusion), that is a 55% improvement.

And the idiotic regulations keep coming. The bill that Obama will sign next week contains tax credits for electric vehicles that vary based on the vehicle weight:

"A credit is also available for each qualified plug-in electric drive motor vehicle placed in service—qualified being a four-wheel, on-road vehicle equipped with a grid-chargeable battery pack of at least 4 kWh capacity.

The base amount of the plug-in electric drive motor vehicle credit is $2,500, plus another $417 for each kWh of battery capacity in excess of four kilowatt-hours. The maximum credit for qualified vehicles weighing 10,000 pounds or less is $7,500.

This maximum amount increases to $10,000 for vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds but not more than 14,000 pounds, to $12,500 for vehicles weighing more than 14,000 pounds but not more than 26,000 pounds, and to $15,000 for vehicle weighing more than 26,000 pounds."

Effectively encouraging the continued use of excessively heavy and oversized vehicles by giving them more tax credits.

How dumb is that?

Similar provisions exist for hybrid SUVs vs hybrid cars.

If the goal is to reduce fuel consumption, the strategy of telling people that they shouldn't change their lifestyle at all is flat out worthless.

Instead, we should have a single uniform set of vehicle regulations. For safety, efficiency, emissions, everything - one set of laws. The preferential treatment that trucks get is flat out wrong-headed.

Level the playing field and see what the market really does prefer.

I think we'd find a lot more Fusions on the road.

For reference, I ocassionally do consider the idea of owning a truck. There are a few nice ones out there that make sense in their own ways. The only remotely affordable and practical Porsche, for example, is a used Cayenne. They sell in the $25-30k range these days.

And I've always had an inexplicable desire for a Ford Explorer Sport Trac with a nearly useless mini-bed in the back.

I really have no idea why I like them. Maybe they are so ugly that they have come around the corner and are cute again.

new cool tech

2009-02-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

solid state refrigeration for the masses.

One of the biggest load growths in the US for the last few decades has been because of people moving to warm areas and getting air conditioning. The sort of device, when it comes to market will probably save a significant amount of energy and provide better performance (solid state means far few moving parts, less noise, less maintenance).

cube finally coming to america. updated

2009-02-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

Check out the gallery. These cars are beautiful.

It takes all of the things that people loved about the original scion xb - all of the things that were left out of the second generation scion xb - and improves them. Plus adds a healthy dose of asymmetry and a CVT. What could be better?

My only hope is that the sticky hair crowd leave this one alone, so that I can continue to want one.

I'll take mine in moss green, thx v much.

update: another gallery

The only thing I don't get is the tiny circle of shag carpet on the dash. Having a whole shag dash would be cool - or at least interesting. One tiny circle in the middle makes no sense. Fortunately, it is optional.

CA budgets and overcrowded prisons

2009-02-10T07:27:00.000-08:00

Three judges in California ruled that the overcrowded prisons are a public hazard and that up to 57k prisoners will be released.

According to an old LA Times article, each prisoner costs the state $31k per year.

So, reduce a public hazard and save $1.8 billion per year.

California's budget deficit for 2008 was $17 billion, so this should account for something close to a 10% reduction of the deficit in 2009.

The only downside: 57k more people looking for jobs. All of them with criminal records, few of them with any significant education or work experience.

Maybe the state could pay them $31k per year to dig ditches, provide them with a secure place to sleep, meals, time to exercise...

the US and Liberia share paid maternity leave policies

2009-02-09T08:05:00.000-08:00

This caught my eye this morning in a Reuters article about what Mrs. Obama plans to do while she is first lady:

"There is no paid maternity leave mandated in the United States, a situation shared by only three other countries: Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and Liberia, according to a 2007 study by Harvard and McGill universities."

Pretty weak.

My company lets me use as many of my paid sick days as I want while baby is under 1, but that is hardly the same thing as maternity or paternity leave.

As it happens, I am lucky enough to have a job that provides an income slightly above the median household income for Seattle, so we don't have troubles covering costs and I have family generous enough to help us adjust to life with an infant, but luck is hardly a solid foundation for maternity leave policy.

torture

2009-02-06T22:12:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of discussion about torturing bad folks recently, and I think most of the discussion demonstrates just how clueless our administration was and how the new one isn't that much better clued in.

Fanatical Muslims participating in a Jihad want to die for their cause. They don't pretend to want to die for it. They actually want to die in the effort to achieve their goals. If they die this way, they believe they go to a special circle of heaven and their life's purpose will be fulfilled and their family will be proud for generations. The American equivalent of the position they think they will obtain is somewhere between Martin Luther King Jr and Jesus.

The people who truly believe this would be very unlikely to be responsive to any kind of torture. Temporary material discomfort is nothing compared to the prize of suffering and dying for their cause.

So, step one in the debate should have been "is it effective." Step two would be "is it justifiable." Instead, everyone has skipped straight to step two, maybe because they can't imagine what it would be like to be motivated by religion in such a fundamental way, so they just assume that nobody could possibly actually feel the way fanatical terrorists do.

Dedicated materialists (like Madoff or any of the jackasses that knowingly created the financial bubble) on the other hand.... torture would be very effective on them. The debate about using torture on them could reasonably get to step two.

Considering the amount and danger of the information these people are still withholding, I think "special investigative powers" of one variety or another could be justifiable.

where is my Shanzai?

2009-02-06T07:26:00.000-08:00

According to the unpronounceable news agency, Chinese folks are embracing everything faux. Actually preferring the off-brand imitation over the original.

My only two questions:

How cool is that?

Where can I get some authentic Mike Aero Jimdan shoes in size 15?

inevitable Dubai fail

2009-02-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

Dubai, the epitome of the ridiculous real estate boom, has entered it's inevitable massive fail mode.

It is going to make the South Florida condo market look like the investment of the century.

To avoid jail time (and severed hands, this is the UAE we're talking about after all, like Saudi a land of oil princes and extremist Islamic governments) foreigners are abandoning their luxury condos, manmade islands, maybachs, and G-classes to flee home.

EV's are still a fail tech

2009-01-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

Tesla announced today that they are massively incompetent at business. It costs them almost $140k to build a vehicle they sell for $92k, netting them a loss of about $50k per vehicle sold.

GM by comparison now seems to be performing very well, since they only lose a few hundred dollars per vehicle sold. It should also be noted that GM probably uses something closer to true accounting rules, whereas the Tesla estimate is almost certainly based on fantasy. They probably take all of their business and engineering costs and spread them over many thousands of vehicles that they'll never actually sell because they're gonna go bankrupt first.

They attempt to put a happy face on things by suggesting that - out of thin air - they can cut their parts costs by about 50% without impacting the quality of the vehicle. Some would wonder why they wouldn't have already done so, if it is such an easy thing to do. Those towards the end of the production waiting list might reconsider whether they really want to pay full price for such a significantly economized vehicle.

Maybe they were too busy "innovating" (read: taping thousands of tiny batteries into giant bundles and breaking transmissions. that really is the extent of their innovation. they bought the motor, controller, charger wholesale from ac propulsion & the running gear from lotus) that they forgot to hire somebody who could take care of the basic stuff that Detroit has been doing for more than a hundred years.

I'd be willing to make an even odds bet that Tesla never finishes their initial production run of 300 roadsters, if anyone is interested. I'd take either side of the bet.

too many action movies

2009-01-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

Maybe I'm the only one, but Obama seems too good to be true.

Unabashedly intelligent, optimistic, aware that other countries exist and their people matter, admits that killing terrorists just encourages them - it is hard to think of anything to object to.

I think he overstated the gravity of our current situation. Then again, maybe he was providing historical context to demonstrate how what we're going through isn't such a great big deal.

Given his popularity and desire to do things the way they ought to be done, he is putting himself out there as enemy #1 for anyone who is happy with the way things are.

Because of this, all through his speech this morning, I kept waiting for something truly awful to happen. Either to him specifically or to the whole city. Action movie kind of bad thing.

I guess the reality is that any horrible thing that anyone may try to do will most likely be done to undermine him and render him powerless, rather than remove him physically.

Nonetheless, I spent most of the speech distracted by thoughts of how a crowd that size could possibly be secure.

Officially official. Officially.

2009-01-15T12:01:00.000-08:00

The state finally updated their records to show that I am, in fact, a fully licensed Professional Engineer. Now I just need to order my official Professional Engineer stamp, and cap and gown.

Well, the stamp, anyway. Most people I know don't use their cap and gown more than once or twice a year, so I may not bother.

Go massive on solar thermal?

2009-01-14T14:15:00.000-08:00

The large-scale solar power option is to convert dilute solar power into concentrated heat energy then convert that into electricity to export to the populated parts of the country.

Some estimate that the US could meet 90% of electricity demand by tapping into the solar energy in the Southwest.

Question #1: what would the regional environmental impact be?

Such a process would take tens to hundreds of gigawatts of heat out of area, potentially altering regional weather patterns.

my guess: irrelevant. each project would be permitted individually. each would only have to prove that their incremental impact would be negligible, which they would be.

Question #2, #3, #4: if Africa weren't such a mess, how much energy could be exported from the Sahara region to Europe (where energy costs are flat out ludicrously high - $.30/kwh is not unusual)? How would that compare to the oil energy exports from the Middle East? Would the income from so much power be enough to give Europe the economic incentive to finally clean up the mess they made in Africa during their empire-building days?

my guesses: more than they could use, 5-10x more, i have no idea

Question #4: (and this is the most appealing one for me) is there an appropriate technology low tech, local material-based way to convert sunlight into electricity for the hot, sunny, and arid regions of the world?

Arid is the tough part. Water is the most common working fluid. Maybe if you did it closed cycle and assumed that dirty water was available and clean water was a desirable output you could come up with something that made a bit of electricity and a bunch of purified water.

Iran and oil prices

2009-01-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

External estimates are that 80% of Iran's tax revenue is from oil sales, implying that creating a budget based on the prices expected this year will mean serious cuts to expenses or extreme violations of OPEC export-limiting agreements. Either that, or Iran had a huge budget surplus last year.

On the other hand, President Ahmadinejad says that Iran's economy is entirely independent from oil prices. So, that is an option, I guess. Considering that there isn't an economy in the world that actually is independent from oil prices, though, I find it hard to believe that a nation that relies on oil to pay for 80% of the government budget could possibly make such a claim with a straight face. In this case, I'll trust the external sources and assume that cheap oil means budget cuts in Iran.

It is an important question because budget cuts mean cuts to government services which means a frustrated population looking for a direction for their anger. In the US, Madoff and a few others will be publicly humiliated and imprisoned for life for their roles in the financial problems. In Iran, the government will continue directing the people's anger at the US and Israel. If things get extreme enough, Iran may be forced to start a shooting conflict to satisfy the bloodlust they incite.

human-caused climate change?

2008-12-30T13:38:00.000-08:00

Putting science into climate science.

I did some interesting reading this weekend. I had been under the assumption that climate scientists were basically competent at their science (I don't know why I keep making this assumption of competence mistake). I had assumed that there was some kind of resounding undeniable proof that we are going through an unprecedented rapid rise in global temperatures. I didn't believe that CO2 is as important a factor as is commonly assumed (I think clouds and forests deserve more credit). But I operated under the assumption that there really was some kind of unique, confirmed global warming.

Now, I'm not so sure.

As it turns out, the most important papers on the subject - the papers that caused the Kyoto protocols to be created, endless hands to be wrung, and millions of poisonous light bulbs to be distributed - the papers upon which all discussion of the matter since has been based - were wildly unscientific in very basic and important ways.

Being a fourth-tier science discipline*, a certain amount of fudgery is normal and expected. But to make giant assumptions with no basis - knowing full well that hundreds of billions of dollars depend on the outcome - should be a capital offense.

The basic, untested assumption: that tree rings are accurate ways to measure historic temperatures. I won't go over the details (see the link above), but the general idea is that all old temperatures were measured using tree ring samples while all new temperatures were measured using thermometers. No tree-ring measurements show frightening rising temperatures, all thermometer measurements do. Nobody took the time to do modern tree ring measurements to confirm that the tree ring temperature measurement system is accurate.

I had a chiropractor who did this kind of thing. Each time I went to them, they measured the condition of my back using a different method, never repeating the same test. It allowed them to show that I was constantly improving under their care without ever exposing them to the possibility of actually figuring out what was going on. It should be obvious to everyone that data collected using different procedures cannot be compared to each other in any meaningful way.

I'm not denying that the climate is changing, nor that humans are responsible, nor that there are many other very real environmental problems caused by humans. I'm denying that anyone has ever done an even marginally reliable study of the matter. I am suggesting that it is a very reasonable thing to be more than a bit annoyed about. So many resourced ineffectually tied up attempting to address a problem that hasn't been properly proven to exist is sickening.

I maintain my skepticism towards the reliance on atmospheric CO2 as the sole explanation for why temperatures are rising. If we cannot reliably prove that temperatures are rising above historic levels, how can anyone imagine that we can accomplish the exponentially more difficult task of explaining why they are rising?

That being said, I still think planting trees is always good idea. They're good carbon sinks, help clouds form, and generally reduce surface temperatures by being more reflective than soil and by functioning as evaporation coolers.

* The tiers of science, according to me: tier 1: Physics. tier 2: Chemistry, tier 3: biology, geology tier 4: climate science, ecology, economics, forestry, most engineering, tier 5: civil engineering, stamp collecting. The basic idea is that as you move down the tiers, you make more assumptions and can make less reliable predictions, because each tier relies on the results of all of the previous tiers. This is not a value judgment, just part of my framework of understanding. I function in tier 4 and wouldn't be happier anywhere else.

public transport performance standards

2008-12-29T20:48:00.000-08:00

We have none and it sucks.

Twice in the past two weeks my bus run was canceled without notification, warning, or apology, despite perfectly normal weather and traffic and there is no way that this can be justified.

While waiting for a bus that never came, I was thinking about how to solve the problem, and the simplicity of the solution made me a bit annoyed. The ridiculously simple solution: real time monitoring.

A gps locater & a communication device for each bus + a bit of software and viola, problem solved.

The device would monitor the location of each bus and report it back on a real-time basis to the existing central dispatch center. The central station monitoring software would normally just collect information. If a bus gets more than, say 7 minutes late it informs the bus dispatcher, who decides how to respond.

The hardware would cost about the same as one day worth of diesel fuel. I can't imagine that the software would be too tough to put together.

For those of us who only ever take the same bus every day(which around here is the majority of riders), it could be set up to automatically inform us when our route is canceled or more than a certain set limit of minutes behind schedule, so we don't waste our time waiting for a bus that will never come. Theoretically, the bus stop itself could display an automatically updated schedule, but that would be asking too much. All I want is basic competence.

As it is, I have no confidence that the system will ever function properly, so I will just make sure that my next job comes with a parking lot.

100% of scientists agree: trees are the answer

2008-12-21T12:36:00.000-08:00

To global energy supply.

Well, 100% of German scientists who wrote this paper.

The plan: reforest the areas of the world that we deforested with rapidly growing species, then convert the biomass into energy.

They conclude that it is practical and possible to obviate fossil fuels this way, possibly at lower cost than not doing so and to be globally carbon neutral.

They didn't include any analysis of the climate impact of planting so many trees, but it seems likely to be significant.

Chu is a smart cookie

2008-12-17T08:22:00.000-08:00

He's the new Energy secretary and he is a smart one.

I recently posted a ppt presentation he gave, that is well worth viewing.

Now, to solidify my good opinion of him, he has endorsed the idea of a petrol tax.

"In a sign of one major internal difference, Mr. Chu has called for gradually ramping up gasoline taxes over 15 years to coax consumers into buying more-efficient cars and living in neighborhoods closer to work.

'Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,' Mr. Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September.

But Mr. Obama has dismissed the idea of boosting the federal gasoline tax, a move energy experts say could be the single most effective step to promote alternative energies and temper demand."

Higher gas taxes would be beneficial on every front - they would reduce our energy consumption and force our domestic auto industry to get in line with international vehicle expectations. Released from the recent idiotic distraction of trucks and SUVs as passenger vehicles, they would be allowed to focus on cars that appeal to all markets.

This administration looks like it is going to make it a lot harder for folks like myself to maintain proper levels of cynicism.

Officially official

2008-12-17T07:55:00.000-08:00

I earned a suffix for my name today.

P.E.

It means that my signed approval can allow a drawing to be used for construction, that my opinion is legally valuable as an expert witness, and that I can do these things virtually anywhere in the world.

And if I lived in Germany, it would mean that polite people would refer to me as "Engineer" the same way that folks 'round here call people "Doctor."

Chu's worst nightmare - ETA Jan 20

2008-12-15T09:32:00.000-08:00

Steven Chu, Obama's energy secretary, has called coal plants his "worst nightmare."

He is the head of the national research lab in Berkley, Ca, and put together a thorough tech-oriented overview of the climate, CO2, and energy problem. He is quite obviously a very intelligent fellow and, based on the style of his powerpoint presentation alone, much more of a thinker than a politician. He is a physicist rather than an engineer, though, so I'm a bit concerned about how capable he is of balancing reality against theory.

As energy secretary, he will preside over a nation that gets roughly half of it's electricity from his worst nightmare. And his favorite new energy supply option? Conservation. In a close second, though, come my favorites of wind/EVs and a new layer of high voltage DC power transmission lines.

wind/EVs - Stanford agrees with me

2008-12-14T18:03:00.000-08:00

A recent study done at Stanford found that the best transport solution is electric vehicles powered by electricity from wind plants.

The worst option, in their estimation, is Bush's favo - cars powered by ethanol produced from cellulosic material. I agree that all things ethanol are 100% idiotic and bass ackwards (why would anyone use a fuel that needs its own brand new distribution system?), but wonder why they think cellulosic ethanol is worse than corn ethanol.

This all presumes that somebody is going to figure out the battery problem, of course. Battery problems, really.

1) there may not be enough lithium in the world to make enough batteries for everyone
2) batteries cost about 10x too much
3) pending confirmation of recent research claims, batteries take up about 10x too much space

Primary point being, wind/EV - it has a bright future once we smooth out a few kinks.

wind/ev power

2008-12-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

From now on, I will no longer refer to wind power without referencing electric vehicles (EVs).

They are entirely co-dependent on each other. Well, wind is entirely dependent on EVs, anyway. And EVs are most beneficial when combined with wind. So, fairly co-dependent.

I've been over this a bit before, but the basic idea is that energy systems with large amounts of wind power are unstable and unreliable - and that is bad for everyone involved. Additionally, they require that old coal plants be kept online and running in their most inefficient range in order to quickly make up the difference when the wind slows. Again, bad for everyone involved.

EVs without wind increase overnight base load - which is great for big coal and nuke plants because they provide the majority of the base load power in the world. This is less good for the self-righteous EV buyers, because it means that they are unintentionally supporting some of their least favorite technologies. No, buying into "green power" options or "carbon offsets" doesn't make a difference. If you use power overnight, no matter where you live or what kind of contract you have, your power mostly comes from coal and nuke plants. These products do subsidize wind power project, but they have no impact whatsoever on where your power comes from or how power in your region is scheduled. Power is scheduled on an hourly least cost basis.

So, the needs of wind and EV buyers are aligned - they complete each other. Wind produces power erratically - and EVs can be set up to charge erratically; or even to give back to the power system when too much of the wind has stopped blowing.

Point being, for large portions of our power to come from wind we need EVs. And for EVs to meet all of the goals of most buyers, we need large amounts of wind power, so talking about one without mentioning the other is shortsighted.

Fortunately, Ford, GM, and Chrysler all have claimed that they'll have an EV on the market within 3 years - and Obama has said he strongly supports wind energy and it is likely to be part of his big infrastructure plans.

domestic automaker protectionism?

2008-12-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

One of the things that helped cause the international trade collapse that turned the 1920's recession into World Depression I was nationalistic protectionism.

Every nation suddenly thought buying goods from somewhere else was a bad thing for the national economy. Global trade collapsed, making things worse for no good reason.

I wonder if we aren't looking at some risk of doing basically the same thing by helping the car and truck folks in Detroit out. We have a big domestic auto manufacturing industry, some in Detroit with old American names, some in the rest of the country with newer (and mostly Japanese) names. So, why should one get free money and not the other?

Say we give the American brands free cash and they use it to make their product more competitive - so much so that Japanese automakers cannot compete (far fetched, I know, considering where things stand today (see Ford Thunderbird, Dodge Caliber, Pontiac Aztek). But lets pretend, for the sake of argument that with sufficient free money the domestics could theoretically beat the imports). Given that no new car buying demand will be created, every sales win by the domestics is a sales loss by the imports.

Effectively, the best possible result of the bailout would be to transfer job losses out of Detroit and into Japan, except that most of the Japanese cars sold in the US are not built in Japan.

Most of the "Japanese import" vehicles sold in the US are built in the Southern US (and Canada). So, the bailout, if successful, will at best have a net impact of moving unavoidable job losses from Detroit to the South.

And that is regional protectionism, which is also known as just plain stupid. I'm not assigning morality or blame to any of this, only pointing out what the net impact would seem to be and that no system-wide benefit can come from it.

New Zealand == Iceland?

2008-12-05T12:36:00.000-08:00

re: major financial crises that undermine their currency.

I sure hope not, but there are certainly some similarities. Iceland had a newly unregulated banking sector that accumulated astounding amounts of nasty low quality foreign debt, which was quite profitable until it wasn't. Now their economy is only slightly better than that of Germany's - in 1925. They still have fish and aluminum exports and loans from the IMF are keeping them somewhat solvent. It is, altogether, an unfortunate situation that could have been easily prevented through the use of basic financial regulation.

NZ is similar in that it has no exports of significance (#1 being dry milk solids) and had a rapidly expanding financial sector. And it is similar in that it's currency is rapidly losing worth (down about 35% since March from .82USD to .56USD) and accelerating. And part of the cause of their currency problems is the same.

Both countries benefited from the carry trade (people borrowed Yen and USD at low real interest rates, then invested it in NZD and Krona for high interest rates + currency appreciation).

I have no idea how big of trend this is or what happens next, but NZ's economy is small enough that something like this could easily get out of control and result in another addition to the IMF's desperate waiting list.

All in all, this whole crazy year has been an excellent argument for why operating in a small national currency is unjustifiably risky. Letting big banks do dumb things on top of that is suicidal.

When things settle down, I hope that more countries see the light and either join the euro or come up with regional alternatives.

Chrysler gives up the ghost

2008-12-05T11:03:00.000-08:00

Well, not yet. But so soon now.

They've hired Bankruptcy lawyers. Considering how badly this will impact the already abysmal resale values of their vehicles (who wants to own a car from a dead automaker? they reek of unfulfilled promises and unsupported spare parts inventories), I doubt that this is an effort to force the gov't's hand into giving them the bailout.

If you're a fan of awful autos, now may be your last chance to buy that Sebring at anything approaching full price.

I called this BK in May, BTW. And I have re-affirmed it about once a month since then.

SRSLY, though, what automaker that produces rubbish like this to compete with accords and camrys ever had a real chance of survival? Their three valuable brands (Jeep, Hemi, & Viper) will probably be bought and find a way to make it through. All the rest of the trash will evaporate, because even pennies on the dollar is too expensive.

the biggest fallacy of efficiency

2008-11-24T09:21:00.000-08:00

Most ways to save electricity at home do not save electricity at home.

Those old incandescent bulbs used their electricity 100% efficiently. They used a small portion of the energy to produce visible light and the vast majority of the energy to produce heat. If you heat your home, some portion of the heat comes from your heaters and some comes from your lights (and your electronics, refrigerator, oven, and so on). If you reduce the heating contribution from the lights (and everything else) by investing in expensive high efficiency devices, your heater will have to work harder to pick up the slack, effectively eliminating any possible gains.

If you live in an area where you use A/C most of the year, though, the opposite is true. Any reduction in energy use in the house will be matched by a similar reduction in cooling load, so efficiency improvements will be matched by more efficiency gains.

NASA discovers glaciers on Mars, crafts plans to melt them

2008-11-21T07:32:00.001-08:00

If we can't have glaciers, why should they?

Seriously, though, this is a pretty big deal.

why you shouldn't buy a prius - or a volt - or a tesla

2008-11-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

Better batteries are coming. Probably sooner than later. They will make today's hybrids look about as cool as Windows 98.

Last week there was a vague announcement in the Korean presses about revolutionary battery technology, that was widely rebroadcast (in the tech gadget community) that I dismissed as unsupported enthusiasm over an unverifiable claim.

Turns out, I was right. Except for the "un" parts.

Their findings have been published in proper scientific journals and referenced somewhat widely.

They know they can build a component that will make batteries much much smaller. The estimate is that the batteries will be 5-10 times smaller.

Roughly speaking, this means replacing a Tesla Roadster's battery pack could give a car that can travel 1500-3000 miles on one charge or the same battery pack could be used to motivate an SUV for 200-400 miles. AKA good enough for 99% of us 99% of the time, AKA the end of petrol.

There are still big challenges to face, but this revelation has the appearance of a major game changer.

the coming plastic scare

2008-11-20T07:28:00.001-08:00

Most everyone has heard of BPA by now, (the commonly used plastic additive that can cause fertility problems) but the rule of plurality* is about to turn popular fear against all things plastic in a big way.

* I just made that name up, but the idea is that things usually come in sets of 0, 1, or many. Basically, you can believe that there are no aliens. If you run into one someday, you may believe there is one species of aliens and leave it at that. If you turn around and run into another species of aliens, you have no choice but to assume that there are many, many species of aliens in existence and we just haven't met them yet. It would be very difficult to argue that there are some very specific conditions that led to precisely two or three alien species evolving and no more. Same goes for dangerous plastic. First there were no dangerous plastics, then there was one, and now there is commonly available evidence that there are many.

Science magazine published an article recently about how commonly used plastic equipment is corrupting lab results because of interaction between the plastics and the organic material being used in the study.

Quoth the study:

"...identified the presence of two families of compounds from the plastic that had contaminated their experiments and produced biological effects: quaternary ammonium biocides-anti-bacterial agents that manufacturers add to plastics-and oleamide, as well as related chemicals compounds used to improve the properties of plastics."

(BTW, switching to glass jars or canned foods is of little use - glass jar lids are usually coated in rubberized plastic, and food cans are as well. Otherwise, the food ends up tasting metallic. There probably are safe plastics, but what institution exists today that could be trusted to tell us which ones they are?)

As an aside, I remember reading an article about almost this exact same study published when I was in high school (around 1997, I think). It involved a plastic softening agent acting as an environmental estrogen and interfering with culture growth, I think. A brief search of the interwebs revealed no obvious references to this, but I'm sure I read it. If true, and if people really do get excited about the dangers of food stored in plastic this time, it'd be an interesting study in the propogation of information. Maybe people weren't ready to be alarmed back then. Now that BPA has paved the way, widespread fear of plastic is impending.

two broken twos

2008-11-18T09:10:00.000-08:00

Funny coincidence: two big deal economic indicators are probably gonna break the 2 barrier this month on their way down:

1) Nation median house price fell from $220k to $200k this year

2) National average gallon of regular gas is at $2.05, down from a peak of $4.10 this summer

more evidence that trees are very significant to global warming

2008-11-18T08:14:00.000-08:00

Water vapor is apparently a greenhouse gas. Clouds reflect sunlight and promote global cooling. Trees emit chemicals that turn water vapor into clouds. Therefore trees have at least a threefold direct impact on global warming:

1) They promote cloud formation, which reduces the amount of loose atmospheric water vapor.
2) They absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.
3) They usually reflect more heat than the ground cover they replace.

The new part of this (for me, anyway) is the second half of number 1. It has been confirmed by atmospheric scientists that water vapor is a significant greenhouse gas:

"Specifically, the team found that if Earth warms 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the associated increase in water vapor will trap an extra 2 Watts of energy per square meter....

'We now think the water vapor feedback is extraordinarily strong, capable of doubling the warming due to carbon dioxide alone.' "

poorly analyzed: the problem of cheap oil

2008-11-17T12:19:00.000-08:00

The WSJ recently published a set of opinions about what can be done about oil prices that are too low. As the national average price of gas is about to dip under $2/gallon, there is a real chance that people will forget that more expensive fuel is a nearly inevitable aspect of our future and that these people will make poor decisions that will endanger our collective national energy security.

Most of the commentators decided to pretend that they were politicians in a debate and completely ignored the question of what to do about excessively low oil prices. Instead, they talked about energy policy generally. As much as I think that all new buildings should be required to conform to high energy efficiency standards, most buildings in the US get their energy from electricity from coal, which has very little to do with oil.

If you're talking about oil consumption in the US, you are talking almost exclusively about transport fuels. And, from what we've seen demonstrated so effectively recently, expensive fuels cause conservation.

Of the commentators, only one touched the magic button for oil consumption:

"Increase federal gasoline taxes. Sadly, the easiest way to hold the gains we have made in reducing oil demand in the U.S. would be to raise federal gasoline taxes as prices fall to lock in a floor price that will continue to stimulate conservation. Some portion of the funds could be set aside for research in alternative energy."

And none mentioned the fact that the EPA fuel efficiency policies push customers into larger, heavier "light trucks" (SUVs) by allowing higher emissions and lower fuel economy without having to pay gas guzzler taxes. This distinction between the classes of cars and trucks is an outdated and perverse one that helped put average americans into insecure energy positions.

So, if the WSJ had asked me what to do to address the dangers of excessively low oil prices, these would be my answers:

1) Phase in a federal gas tax of about $1 adjusted annually for inflation. Use the money to fund personal transportation efficiency research, development, & commercialization. At current prices, this would represent a 50% tax. We'd still have the cheapest gas in the industrialized world, especially when expressed as a fraction of median incomes.

2) Eliminate any regulatory distinction between on-road passenger vehicles types - a car is a truck is an SUV is a motorcycle (obviously, motorcycles would be excused from safety regulations). All of them drive down the freeway with one person inside most of the time, why should their fuel efficiency and emissions be regulated differently?

3) Bring back the the national speed limit. I hate this idea from a personal perspective, but the laws of physics are immutable. Energy spent pushing air out of the way increases with a square of speed, so fuel efficiency rapidly falls. Plus, higher speed limits justify big engines and big engines are less efficient at any speed. I think 55 mph is unjistifiably low, but 65 may be a reasonable national limit.

Paulson: evil or idiotic?

2008-11-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

Speaking with reference to the mess that under-regulated financial engineering and blindingly short-sighted Greenspan Fed policy, Paulson said:

"We have in many ways humiliated ourselves as a nation with some of the problems that have taken place here."

Considering that Paulson was CEO of a company that helped produce the bubble and was part of the administration that helped prevent effective regulation, I'd say that Paulson would be correct if he were speaking in the royal "we" and left the nation out of it.

I am unable to imagine that Paulson could possibly think that the nation as a whole played any part in the mess. Sure, lenders, borrowers, agents, and most everybody else involved acted to maximise their own economic interests and the mess couldn't have been made without them. But, that is the whole point of the regulations that Paulson and party fought against - to prevent parties from acting in a way that endangers the whole economy.

And Paulson knows this. Anyone who has taken macroeconomics 101 knows this. It is an economic assumption: individuals act in their own best interest, even if it may be harmful to themselves and others.

So, to get back to Paulson's statement, I don't think "we have humiliated ourselves" at all, I think our regulations have failed.

Also, to be fair, the "as a nation" part is also bunk. The same stupid things that happened in the US happened in most of the rest of the developed and developing nations. "As a people" would be more accurate.

We, as a people, failed to have effective national regulations because of internation competition to juice earnings through the application of shortsightedness. That's how I see things, anyway.

usage-based car insurance: about freaking time

2008-11-13T12:50:00.000-08:00

Available only in Texas today: car insurance by the mile.

Drive half as much, pay half as much. Unlike some silly, overcomplicated approaches to the problem that use far more technology than necessary, you tell them your current odometer reading and how many miles of insurance you want, then they sell you proof of insurance.

Done.

If you lie about the number of miles or keep driving without buying more miles of insurance, then you are driving uninsured.

My only question:

What's the hold-up for nationwide implementation?

As little as I drive, I spend more on insurance than I do on gas, which is more than a bit ridiculous.

Can some national insurer please buy this company and offer their coverage nationally already?

business idea: ways to use free electricity

2008-11-12T14:15:00.000-08:00

As more and more of our energy comes from unschedulable sources (like wind), utilities will have no choice but to manage consumption on an hour-to-hour basis. This will mean the price of electricity will fluctuate throughout the day, based on the current system conditions. On a windy night, electricity will be nearly free. On a still, cold day, it may cost significantly more than it does today.

And this is a good thing. It'll give us a chance to make the system smarter and more efficient.

So, the business idea is to come up with ways to take advantage of cheap electricity. Once efficient lighting has been adopted, the next biggest residential/commercial energy use is climate control. The idea is simple enough, move heat energy costs away from the peak energy price times by storing heat for later use.

In the case of a home with central heating, this would mean adding an inline heat supply that uses heated oil. When electricity is cheap, the device heats the oil in the storage tank. When electricity is expensive, the device uses the heat stored the oil instead of using expensive electricity.

In areas that are both cold and sunny at the same time, you could add solar thermal heating to the oil tank. With today's technology, this would result in a far more cost efficient and environmentally friendly way to reduce energy consumption than solar photovoltaic panels. PV panels emit all kinds of nasty chemicals in their production that solar thermal panels don't.

France looks to Obama for leadership

2008-11-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

The recent letter from the French president to Obama caught my attention:

"At a time when we must face enormous challenges together, your election raises immense hope in France, Europe and beyond: the hope of an open America, characterized by solidarity and strength, that will once again lead the way, with its partners, through the power of its example and the adherence to its principles.

France and Europe, which have always been bound to the United States through their ties of history, values and friendship, will thus be reenergized to work with America to preserve peace and prosperity in the world. Rest assured that you may count on France and on my personal support."

I agree that the US should lead the way - and that we are uniquely positioned to do so, being the richest, most powerful nation to have ever existed - but part of this belief is a bit of nationalism. I expect that if I were German (or Chinese, Russian, South African, or pretty much anything else), I would think that Germany should be the one leading the way. As president, I expect I would be inviting Obama to join me in my efforts to lead the way, not suggesting that he lead the way and I could possibly be one of his partners in doing so.

I understand that France can't lead the way in nearly everything the way the US does, but the country must have some strong points that it considers world-leading and important, no?

Is there a general sense of helplessness internationally that whatever the US does, that is just the way things are gonna happen? Maybe France will pitch in, maybe not, but who really cares anyway?

Maybe that why there has been so much international celebration about Obama. As a person from an ethnically and culturally diverse background, he is an appropriately international person to lead the culturally and ethnically diverse world.

signs of socialism in "Communist" China

2008-11-07T07:51:00.001-08:00

The high point of this entry is that title. The rest is me talking about things I barely understand.

It is commonly observed that China's free-market-based rapid economic growth is decelerating more quickly than most predicted - and that this could possibly lead to social disruptions.

"Analysts worry that a sharp downturn could undermine the country’s already weakening investment climate and impair some of China’s biggest banks, which have bankrolled much of the boom.

Beijing worries that if growth slows to 8 percent or less, not enough jobs will be created in a country that is rapidly urbanizing — and that could lead to social unrest.

To prevent that, the government is preparing a large economic stimulus package, pushing new infrastructure projects, offering aid to exporters and searching for ways to prop up the nation’s severely depressed stock and real estate markets."

For China, which has been communist in name (and frighteningly unpredictable market dictatorship in practice) for decades, this means the billion or so people who have seen precisely zero benefit from the policies so far, who have been politely waiting for their turn to start climbing the economic ladder, may have to adjust their expectations. The kids they sacrificed 60% of their income to send through school so they could get one of the new white collar jobs will have a smaller chance of success.

It is during times of great progress that revolutions happen.

The temporary solution is a bit of socialism - in the form of public works projects much like those that helped bring the US out of the first world depression. This will take cash out of the government coffers. As some have observed, any decline in cash reserves in China is likely to upset US interest rates, since they are the biggest buyer of US treasuries - which help set interest rates. And that would be a bad thing.

today's biggest news story

2008-11-04T09:19:00.000-08:00

nO, nOt that stOry.

Biodiversity again proved that it is of great worth by giving humanity a fungus that can directly convert cellulose into diesel fuel.

Given that US petrol prices are down below $2/gallon in some cities ($1.92 in Kansas City today, that's $.50/liter for the metrically minded), there may not be much near term interest in fungal diesel in the USA today, but it is good news for any countries with both a large cellulose resource and high fuel prices.

New Zealand, with it's large domestic agroforestry industry and petrol at $2NZD/liter ($4.6USD/gal) could be a good place to incubate the technology.

what if CO2 isn't the most important factor

2008-11-03T09:37:00.000-08:00

What if all of our bright climate scientists are stuck in group-think mode and cannot see the possibility that a rise in atmospheric CO2 is correlated with climate change, but not the most important causal factor?

What if the real story is deforestation? What if the complicated climate models underestimated the impact of trees on cloud cover because of cloud-forming factors that they weren't aware of? Scientists recently discovered such a factor.

As a low risk hedge, it would be wise to push for greater global reforestation and afforestation efforts. They will act as carbon sinks, soil stabilizers, sources of revenue, and all sorts of other good things, so little harm can possibly be done by pro-tree policies.

why the rich should pay more

2008-11-03T07:37:00.000-08:00

Taken from a purely Market Capitalist perspective:

Because they have the strongest interest in keeping things the way they are.

Sure, in practice, taxes pay for defense, roads, welfare, police, etc. In principle, what this amounts to is the stability of a system. Without a system, we would quickly devolve into a far less economically efficient situation. Those with little income or assets would have little to lose from this change - and some of them would inevitably come out better. The rich and powerful, though, would almost universally become less rich and less powerful.

This principle even works on a marginal basis. If taxes are too low and social welfare program become ineffective, inequality of income and crime will rise - leading to the kidnapping of rich family members that we see in areas with high income disparity and no social welfare. For most, the cost of increased personal and family security would be greater than the cost of increased taxes.

This is such an obvious fact, that I doubt many wealthy people who have actually taken a moment to consider the implications seriously believe that their tax burden should be low.

petrol prices not crashing for most of the world

2008-11-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

Since June, the average price of pump gas in the US has fallen by about 40% from it's high a bit above $4 to the current national average of $2.42, but many nations haven't been so lucky.

As a result of the rapid and massive swings in the values of currencies, many countries are still looking at pump prices near their June highs. In Australia, for example, the crashing price of a barrel of oil has been nearly matched by the 30% crash in the value of their currency relative to the dollar, the price of pump gas has only fallen about 6% from it's June peak (from $6.0AUD to $5.6AUD/gallon today).

Since every major world currency has followed a similar track for the last few months (except for the Yen, which has risen vs the dollar), nobody has seen fuel price declines anywhere close to what we've seen.

The good news is that consistently high prices for a good long time means more people will be convinced that high prices are permanent, which will lead to higher acceptance of fuel efficiency investments and other energy conservation efforts - which should help keep the price of oil on the decline worldwide, allowing us to ridicule petrol conservation efforts and embrace our giant trucks for a few more years.

why no spiritual descendent of the VW Beetle?

2008-10-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

The great thing about the original beetle - the reason there are still so many around today - was the fact that it was designed to be maintained by the owner.

With every passing generation of cars of every make, user maintenance moves further and further into the realm of myth. Because of this, there is no modern-day spiritual successor to the original beetle.

VW is expected to start selling a small rear-engined economy car called the up! that they consider fits the bill. If modern VWs are anything to go by, it will be anything but. Instead, it will be filled with all sorts of impenetrable electronics, a sealed-until-failure transmission, and engine components that cost hundreds of dollars apeice hidden under ugly plastic cladding that requires specialized tools to remove.

That being said, the up! is a cute one that I would consider purchasing if I didn't live in the land of 5000 lb full size trucks that sell for less than the average import economy car goes for (if you haven't heard, you can now buy a brand new base model Ford F-150 for $13k - about the same as a smart fortwo).

you heard it here first: single global economic system

2008-10-16T08:28:00.000-07:00

Just a few days ago, I mentioned how we have a collection of National banking systems failing to respond effectively to a Global crisis.

I have no doubt that economists have been talking about the reform or replacement of the collection of ineffectual loose agreements we have today for decades - the parallels to the League of Nations are overwhelming. But, today is when I saw the first remotely mainstream discussion of the subject - in the financial media.

I also have no doubt that any of the proposed changes will have any useful impact on the current crisis. This crisis is just getting started still, with house prices across the planet still excessively high and falling - destroying wealth and taking the economy of those invested in housing wealth and its derivatives with it (including the unfortunate Icelanders, who are talking about how they have 3 to 5 weeks of imported food left to eat before they have to figure out a way to convince somebody to accept their currency). It seems to me, the main function of any UN of the Economy should be to have the powers to keep individual nations from getting so wild and crazy in the first place to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

international context

2008-10-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

the house price crash may have started in the US, but declines are now global and nearly universal across markets, according to the IMF.

house prices, it seems, are the opposite of local.

the repricing of risk and associated deleveraging, evaporation of trust and credit, it seems, is a global issue.

too bad we don't have a global institution that can do something about this - like prevent it from happening again.

US doing something right

2008-10-13T07:32:00.000-07:00

With all of the negative talk about politics, corruption, and the unfortunate collection of irrelevant (and often false) personal attacks against any person who catches even a tiny fraction of the world's attention, I was happy to see that the US bureaucracy is actually doing something good:

Free wireless internets for everyone.

"The idea of handing out airwaves potentially worth billions didn't go over very well at the agency. But in May, Mr. Martin proposed auctioning off the airwaves to a company willing to set aside some of its airwaves for free use.

The network would have to reach 50% of the U.S. population in four years and 95% within a decade."

So, you'll get free basic service as a teaser for a subscription-based service. Let's just hope the basic service is good enough to carry a phone conversation so millions of us can get out from under cell phone plans.

single global economic system

2008-10-08T10:34:00.000-07:00

A single global currency is inevitable and the ongoing global financial crisis has precipitated another small step in this direction when all of the major central banks around the world announced a coordinated financial easing policy. Just like it took a world war to create the League of Nations and second world war to create the UN, this financial crisis will help create a financial UN to displace the IMF (which in this analogy is the similarly ineffective and ill-fated League of Nations).

As an aside, I don't think these rate cuts will achieve anything useful re: the current crisis. The fundamental problem is excess debt and the solutions so far have been attempts at making debt easier to acquire. How will encouraging people to take on more debt solve the problem of too much debt?

But that is unimportant. What is important is that it is becoming obvious to everyone that we live in a single tightly interwoven international economy that cannot be controlled by individual national institutions. When this crisis eventually passes, there will be efforts to create something like a UN for the central banking system, though hopefully the design of this institution will take some of the lessons from the successes and failures of both the UN and the European Central Bank.

In the long run, as this institution is seen to be effective, there will be increased pressure to move to a single currency, by adopting the dollar, the euro, or the yuan or creating a new currency.

All of these actions will be supported by the markets because they will reduce risk. Lower risk means greater long term returns on investment.

So, that is the silver lining for the financial crisis, if you were looking for one.

sufficient grain supply? continued

2008-10-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I posted about how some people had convinced themselves that food was becoming permanently too expensive for increasing portions of the population because of Biofuel policies. Specifically, I posted about how silly I thought this idea was.

At the time, wheat futures had doubled in the previous year and looked ready to rocket off to infinity - effectively pricing everyone out of food. Some economists saw this for what it was - a speculative bubble. Some environmentalists saw this for what it wasn't - a sign that poorly design biofuel policies were making poor people starve.

The update is that wheat futures are back down to where they were a year ago - and are rapidly falling. Considering that the biofuels policies haven't changed, but speculative investment strategies have, this seems to indicate that were we looking at a speculative investment bubble.

That being said, I do still agree that the US biofuel mandate should be modified to exclude any fuel made from food sources. Converting corn sugars into Hummer Juice just doesn't make sense from an energy or food perspective.

expensive vacation timing

2008-10-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

first, i went to Australia in April when the USD basically hit its 5-year low vs the AUD at an exchange rate of 1 USD to 1.05 AUD. the same trip today would have cost about a third less, since a Benjamin buys about 140 AUD today.

second, i went on a long road trip over the last few weeks - about 4k miles worth. we paid pretty close to $4 most of the way. today, the national average is $3.45 and falling. given the current plummeting price of crude, i think we'll see gas at the pump break the $3 barrier before New Years. January this year, crude was at the same price as it is today and gas was selling for $2.97.

the overarching theme here being that the world is realizing that while the US economy may not be in the best shape, the rest of the world has their own subprime financial issues that they'll have to freak out about at some point. that, and i have a pretty luxurious job that allows me pretty frequent vacations.

can we please have a balanced playing field?

2008-10-01T10:19:00.000-07:00

Technology-specific subsidies (like the loan guarantees for nuke plants and wind energy tax credits) are extremely effective at preventing innovation and encouraging permanent industrial reliance on government funding.

Subsidies are necessary to bring new tech concepts to commercialization and that is where they should stop. Subsidizing mature commercial products of any variety - coal, nuke, wind, or solar - is socialist and inefficient.

CO2 is a problem, coal plants themselves are neutral. Reducing CO2 production is a good thing, wind farms themselves are neutral. The incentive process should reflect this. Instead, the current incentives encourage coal plants and encourage wind farms more.

If we want to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, all we have to do is remove all subsidies of mature technologies and establish a carbon market that makes CO2 production expensive and CO2 removal from the atmosphere profitable. This must be done in as simple and transparent a way as possible and must be a worldwide effort.

Since a worldwide effort is obviously impossible today, a CO2 tax/subsidy could be established for any product entering or leaving the country. This tax/subsidy would tax any imported product based on the estimated CO2 emissions of production and would refund the CO2 taxes charged against any product exported. This would prevent companies from moving production overseas to avoid CO2 costs.

#1 problem with this idea: it combines the Republican love of markets with the Democratic insistence that CO2 emissions matter.

#2 problem with this idea: all mature industries that are currently subsidized for shortsighted historical reasons would oppose a balanced playing field. Unfortunately, this list includes wind energy, so neither Coal-State Republicans nor Renewable-Mandate Democrats could support it.

a simple explanation of the bill failure

2008-09-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

The first iteration of the $700B bailout bill failed today, with the majority of Republican representatives voting against it.

A quick glance at political maps reveals that virtually none of the red states experienced bubbly house prices (hint: bubbly prices in the past are shown as plummeting prices today), while nearly all of the blue states did (the exceptions appear to be Florida and Nevada, which both had price bubbles and are swing states), since Republicans overwhelmingly represent the rural parts of the country while the house price bubble occurred almost exclusively in Urban areas.

From this perspective, the bailout bill is a mechanism for taking money from those that didn’t participate in the foolishness of the last decade (rural populations which tend to be Republican) and bailing out those that did (urban populations which tend to be Democratic). From this perspective, it is understandable that the Republicans killed the bill.

My story is that rural representatives killed the bill and rural representatives just happen to mostly be Republican. I do not claim that there is anything especially Republican about killing this bailout deal. The modern Republican party can make few claims to the fiscal conservatism they used to represent that would impel them to oppose this sort of bill on political grounds.

For reference, I think the whole US Political system is screwed and I have no intention in taking sides (R vs D) in this post, just making simple observations.

thanks to:

zillow map

cnn map

time to buy furniture

2008-09-29T11:10:00.001-07:00

this is what Russians (who have watched their currency turn into confetti more than once) do when they think things are about to get much much worse.

the big difference between Russians and USAians, though, is that they have a positive savings rate while we have ever-increasing debt at all levels of society. so, they have cash to exchange for furniture, while we have a total debt burden that is many many times larger than our annual income.

World Depression I parallels

2008-09-09T10:36:00.000-07:00

If the world runs in cycles and if what we are seeing is the end of an 80 year credit cycle and we are looking at World Depression II, then it is interesting to look at parallels.

Considering that it is election season, presidential comparisons are most entertaining:

Bush compared to Hoover (commonly held at least partially responsible for turning a recession into a depression because of his tax policies)

Obama compared to FDR (responsible for the New Deal, a nationwide infrastructure construction project that helped end World Depression I. Obama's New Deal involves national renewable energy infrastructure.)

I don't agree with either comparison 100%, but they are certainly worth a read.

Greenie Joe?

2008-09-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big fan of the Federal Renewable Energy (RE) Production Credit because it is tax-based and makes it more difficult for public entities to compete in the renewable energy industry, as I wrote about yesterday.

So, what would be better? One quick thought:

Federal Loan Guarantees - they do this for Nuclear Plants and it is quite effective. Just like Nuclear, most RE projects have front-heavy costs and most of them are paid for with long term loans, so they are very sensitive to interest rates. Just like the housing market, affordability is determined more by interest rates than any other factor. Today, the Federal Government borrows money for 30 years at 4.3%, whereas a small business loan today costs 8%. By giving access to cheap funding, the Federal Government could balance the RE playing field for all parties. Small entities would benefit the most because they have to pay the highest interest rates. This would make it easier for towns, co-ops, and small businesses to invest in RE projects. In practice, it would be very similar to what the invention of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did for the housing market during the Great Depression. It greatly reduced the cost of borrowing money without costing the government hardly anything at all.

Just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started with real names that eventually got shortened for the sake of convenience, I'd expect this sort of loan program to do the same. Thus the title for this post.

old hydro vs new wind, public vs private

2008-09-08T07:53:00.000-07:00

Why is it that the nation's rivers (and the power from them) are national resources, but the nation's wind resources are being developed almost exclusively by private entities?

In order to end the Great Depression (funny thing: there was a time when WWI was called the Great War), provide cheap renewable energy, flood control, and irrigation water most of the nation's large dams were built in the 1930s - by entities created and run by the Federal government: the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Bonneville Power Administration, and the Bureau of Reclamation to name a few. These entities have defined regional power systems and have run flawlessly since the 1930s. They are excellent examples of how effective public power can be.

Public Power on a day-to-day basis serves the public. When a decision is being made, these organizations actually ask themselves "is this what is best for our customers?" Private Power ultimately serves shareholders. A complicated set of regulations prevents them from excessively abusing their customers, but at the end of the day they ask themselves: "how will this decision impact our stock value?"

Why is it, then that the Federal Renewable Energy Production Incentive is tax-based? This effectively excludes public entities from the renewable energy game. Public entities don't pay taxes, so giving them tax credits is pretty worthless.

It is a worthwhile time to consider this perverse bias, since the Federal Renewable Energy Incentive is expected to be renewed during this session of Congress.

re: hogwash economics and environmentalism

2008-09-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

last week, i mentioned how the fields of economics and environmentalism ignore each other when making their predictions.

this was specifically in reference to a flat out silly claim that air travel will be prohibitively expensive in the future because of fuel shortages. a bit of news today reinforced my argument:

An algae-to-jet-fuel process from Arizona State U is being moved from research to commercialization.

also, a factoid i ran across in a car mag this morning reinforced the point i made about humanity's willingness to convert coal to liquids when the situation demands it:

Coal-to-Liquids process used to fuel Axis armies during World War II.

i'm not saying these are good or bad technologies. i have no special desire to fly using nazi fuel, or hippy gas. all i'm saying is that some parts of popular environmentalism are almost farcical in how they obstinately ignore economics and technology in order to come up with their dire predictions.

and this makes me a bit mad, because i am an environmentalist. but the practical kind of environmentalist that finds the modern extremist anti-humanity face of environmentalism so ridiculous that i am frequently ashamed to associate myself with any part of the movement.

translation to EE-speak

2008-08-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

Ignore the below. I did a little more searching and found this paper from 2003 talking about the problems related to shedding large loads as a type of spinning reserve. It endorses the idea of load management for reliability improvement, but suggests that managing small loads is preferable.

I still think the idea I wrote about yesterday is a good one. This is pretty rare for me. I usually bore of my ideas within a few hours or look back on them from another perspective and find that they were unoriginal or impractical or poorly thought out. I suspect that most "new" ideas in the world suffer a similar fate.

But I like this one. It is an evolution of an existing process that may be practical and beneficial enough to be worth implementing. My brief search so far hasn't revealed any previous discussion of this exact idea, so there is even a small chance that it may even be somewhat original.

Utilities do something similar already, establishing contracts with certain customers where the customer agrees to be the first load shed to avoid a blackout in exchange for a lower price for electricity. And at least one California Utility recently established a system whereby several back-up generators already installed at customer sites around the city would be turned on to increase production to avoid a blackout.

So, this is essentially the same idea, but instead of responding to near catastrophic events that occur once a year, it would be designed to respond to economic conditions that occur up to several times a day.

The mechanism for implementation within today's energy market would be to sell the flexibility of a load (or collection of loads) on the energy market as spinning reserves. (Spinning reserves are generation facilities that must be run on a standby basis in order for a power system to remain reliable. If the need arises, these plants can quickly increase their power output, so that supply and demand always match. Usually, they are steam-based fossil-fuel-fired plants where the boiler is kept hot enough to allow a fast response to demand.) All power systems need spinning reserves to function properly. The more unpredictable your supply or demand is, the more spinning reserves you need.

Spinning reserves are a largely ignored blemish on the face of wind power, because systems that have more wind power need more spinning reserves to remain reliable and spinning reserves are a source of CO2. Meanwhile, wind energy producers are given CO2 credits based only on how much energy they sell to the system, completely ignoring the increased need for spinning reserves.

So, there you go. If you are looking for a business plan in the utility industry, this one is available. It'd probably work best in California because they have a screwed up, expensive, and deregulated electrical system, year-round irrigation demand, market-based power scheduling, and high concentration of wind energy. Presumably, you could even come up with a way to demonstrate that the process reduced CO2 (by displacing spinning reserves), so you could also realize profits from CO2 credit sales.

market driven irrigation scheduling as form of "pumped storage"

2008-08-28T07:50:00.000-07:00

A small idea for how to reduce the cost of integrating wind through the addition of complexity:

Run irrigation equipment when the wind allows it. Less succinctly: use real-time market-based electricity pricing to influence the short term power consumption of large electric loads to manage the fluctuations of output from large concentrations of must-run power generation (a replacement for running reserves).

I've previously talked about some of the challenges to integrating large amounts of wind energy into a mature power system and mentioned how real time pricing of power for plug in hybrid electric vehicles could be greatly beneficial. I still think it is a good idea, but one with significant barriers to success. One of these barriers being that there are virtually no plug in hybrid electric vehicles. Another being the general principle that the more people are involved in a process the more likely it is to fail. And this process would require that everybody be involved.

So, the same idea applied to a smaller number of larger loads that actually exist today is called for. Simply stated: when there is excess generation in a local portion of the electric system (when the wind is blowing), the price of electricity would be lowered for large customers and they would choose to run their equipment (the irrigation runs). When there is a shortage of generation in a local portion of the electric system (when the wind isn't blowing), the price for large consumers would be raised and they would choose to not run some of their equipment (the irrigation stops running).

This is a good example because the precise timing of irrigation isn't terribly important. Irrigation represents a large fraction of load in rural areas, so if you can influence irrigation scheduling you may be able to make a measurable impact on your ability to cheaply integrate wind power. Most wind power is located in rural areas near the irrigation loads. A potential problem may be that in many places, the highly variable wind inputs may happen at times of the year when there aren't crops to water (winter in the Dakotas, for example, probably isn't a big watering season).

What does this have to do with pumped storage (seen in the title)? The only practical way to store large amounts of energy today is by pumping water up behind a reservoir when you have excess power, then running it through turbines to generate power when you need it. Using irrigation controls as discussed here is basically the same idea, except smarter and more likely to succeed because it doesn't involve building any new infrastructure.

hogwash economics and environmentalisms

2008-08-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

so much surrounding economics and the environment is pure rubbish.

like these drs. of doom claiming that flying will be prohibitively expensive in our lifetimes.

honestly, how do you fool someone into not laughing in your face when you make such claims?

the claim was probably based on the naive assumptions that oil consumption always goes up, that there is not now and there will never be a replacement for oil, and that there is only so much oil in the world.

1) sometimes oil consumption goes down - in the US with gas prices around $4/gallon (prices that most of the rest of the industrialized world has been dealing with for decades), our oil consumption goes down. we drive less when it is expensive to drive. imagine that. economics work.

2) there are at least hundreds of substitutes for oil, possibly thousands. from biomass to coal-to-liquids to solar to nuclear. we don't use any of them in any significant way because oil is helluva cheap. if push comes to shove and people face the possibility of not being able to move around the planet economically or putting some extra carbon in the atmosphere by using jet fuel made via a coal-to-liquids process, the vast majority of people will choose to fly.

3) yes, fine. there is one amount of oil in the planet and it is a finite number. but the number that most environmentalists use for soothsaying isn't that very large finite number. they use the much smaller "economically viable oil deposits" number, which is virtually worthless. as technology progresses, the costs of extracting "uneconomical" oil deposits come down and as prices rise, deposits move from the uneconomical column to the economical one. so, the actual amount of oil that humanity will eventually extract from the earth could be many many times larger than the "total deposits" number that environmentalists use.

economists have ignored environmentalists for decades, bringing us beef production processes that use 15,500 liters per kilo* of beef among other things. maybe environmentalists are just trying to return the favor.

* at this rate of water consumption, agricultural water has been determined by the economic system to be nearly absolutely worthless. even if the entire retail price of beef went only to pay for the water used in the production of the beef (at $20/kilo for a decent cut of beef), you'd only pay $.0013 per liter of water. just over a tenth of a cent. the real price paid is probably closer to 5-10% of that. anyone want to make a guess why we talk about water shortages and what could possibly be done to reduce the risk of having one? giving clean water an economic value greater than 0 would be a good place to start.

what is the opposite of a colony?

2008-08-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

in the day of empires, rich & powerful countries would invade less powerful ones in order to force their population in servitude and slowly strip the country of resources.

so what do you call it when a rich & powerful country invades another country, then pays to upgrade the infrastructure there while the newly established puppet government sits on its assets and watches?

this is apparently the situation in Iraq and it is not a good deal for anyone involved.

the US has big budget deficit, economic, and infrastructure problems that could be improved by big spending big on improvement projects at home (much like the New Deal projects that helped end the great depression).

Iraq has massive unemployment and skilled labor shortage problems that could be improved by the Iraqi government putting its assets to use building their own infrastructure. How will the people of Iraq ever learn to run a modern economy if the US just builds it for them using contract laborers from the US?

add in the fact that employed people are far less likely to become terrorists, and the facts that the Iraqi government needs to get its act together and the US needs to get out of the way becomes a security issue.

change in sentiment re:housing

2008-08-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

houses are beginning to be seen as liabilities, not assets.

they went straight from being the centerpieces of get-rich-quick schemes to being a huge burden to be avoided because they constrain lifestyle choices and reduce mobility.

it is just one article, but it is a sign of the times. and this sign is pointing to the increasing possibility that housing prices will over-correct before returning to their historical (inflation-adjusted) price range.

hydraulic transmission to simplify wind power?

2008-08-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

i'm a bit out of my depth here, but thoroughly interested.

the idea, briefly mentioned here as an aside, is that a new high-efficiency hydraulic pump will allow a simplification of wind turbine design by allowing the big lump of electric generator to be relocated from the nacelle to the ground. this is advantageous because the generator is big and heavy and occasionally requires maintenance. moving a big, heavy thing that requires maintenance from the top of a 250 foot pole to the ground provides obvious advantages. the reason it isn't already a common practice is because the mechanical transmission options available have been too expensive (like a 250ft long crankshaft) or too inefficient (like the commercially available hydraulic pumps).

sounds pretty cool, no? it could reduce wind energy costs by making the turbines less expensive and easier to maintain. the unpopular knowledge is that wind turbine transmissions have long been a weak point.

my extrapolation questions based on a pretty weak hydraulic fluid background:
1) can you take the hydraulic outputs from several wind turbines to power one generator and further reduce costs? a single 100 MW hydraulic-powered generator should demonstrate significant costs savings compared to 100 1 MW generators.
2) can you economically store energy using hydraulic pressure? enough to level the power output from wind sources on a 10 minute scale? 1 hr scale? more? this would increase the value of wind power by decreasing the cost of integrating it into the power system

edit: this paper by Artemis IP in Scotland demonstrating a hydraulic transmission for wind generation suggests that moving the electric generator from the nacelle isn't terribly interesting and implies that only a very small amount of energy storage for sub-second smoothing purposes is worthwhile. the study was done for wind turbines at the 800 kW scale. maybe the results will be different at the 3-5 MW scale.