One of the key theoretical elements of our current economic system is that the idea of “supply and demand” is exquisitely sensitive to the comparative values of goods and services – it is considered to be “the” correct way to find a fair value. However, it also seems to have some inherent problems that result in clearly incorrect valuations unless appropriate controls are put into place on the process. Last week’s energy crisis in Texas dramatically pointed out one of these problems. There were multiple instances of people getting power bills that were on the order of a hundred times “normal.” One example that was shown on the news was a man whose usual power bill is $200 a month getting a bill for $17,000. Apparently the reason for this is that since all of the power, and most of the natural gas supply, had been put out of commission by the cold weather – there was almost no supply. However, the demand remained unchanged. That means that the ratio of costs automatically tipped, resulting in these outlandish overvaluation of the power that was delivered, creating the startling bills.

There were many things wrong with what happened. One was that the customer have no way of knowing the actual cost of fuel at the time that they are using it. They signed up to a contract that said the amount that they pay is based upon the instantaneous price point of energy – under the assumption that paying a fixed price would require the power companies to add a “cushion” resulting in higher prices. The problem with this is while it might result in lower instantaneous prices, it can also work the other way and result in higher (shockingly higher) prices. The idea of only paying the “real” price makes sense if you know the real price, and you have the ability to adjust your demand when necessary. However, in situations such as what happened in Texas none of that applied. They didn’t know the price they were paying, and they needed to keep power on for heat, lights and cooking. They didn’t find out about the change in price until after they had used the product and incurred the cost. This is clearly not in alignment with any of the economic theories that posit a balancing of costs because knowledge and negotiations between the buyer and seller.

This all happened largely because Texas considers itself “free and independent”, without regulations as much as possible. Because of this they disconnected themselves from other national grids, removed or didn’t implement regulations concerning the maintenance and design of grid components, and allowed the price of energy to fluctuate without bounds. Therefore, when the terrible weather (which happens every few years), they hadn’t weatherized their energy system, couldn’t get emergency power from out of the state, and prices skyrocketed. It was all very predictable (and had been predicted), but nothing was done about those predictions.

I think this presents us with a very interesting, and sad, example of why an appropriate level of regulations are necessary. In order for a large, interconnected, highly unstable economy (such as exists in the USA) to function properly and equitably regulations are absolutely necessary. The discussion shouldn’t be polarized like it is these days with the too sides going into the far extremes. The discussion should be on figuring out what needs to be regulated and what doesn’t, and how to achieve an optimal level of regulation to provide necessary protections and at the same time not stifle creativity. We need regulations and standards, but we also need to be sensitive to only regulate what needs to be regulated. Clearly, when profits are involved we cannot depend upon companies regulating themselves – that has been shown far too often to be a seemingly impossible expectation.

As an aside, the idea of not interconnecting the State’s power grid with the other major power grids in nearby states reminds me of the bad old days when each region’s railroads used a different gauge (distance between tracks). That was all well and good, but sure made it difficult to share resources or do business across state lines. Apparently there were more than 20 different gauges in use at the same time. That became a real problem during the Civil war because everything had to be unloaded and reloaded (by hand) at each transition. However, it might have some utility in preventing an enemy neighbor from just rolling on it. Of course that is easily fixed. Australia still has this problem of multiple gauges in the same country. Some places have a third rail to accommodate two different gauges on one track, I have been told that there are devices that change the spacing of train wheels (although I never saw them in action), and otherwise there is a lot of unloading and loading to transfer shipments. I am sort of surprised that Texas didn’t go all out and institute a difference frequency and/or voltage standard for their State.

Yesterday was the beginning of “spring cleaning” in my shop. My approach to working in my shop leaves much to be desired from many points of view. One of my really “bad” habits is that I tend to not put things away as I work on projects. Things just get left out on the surfaces for easy access, but after awhile they pile up to the point where I no longer can find them when needed. When that happens it is once again time to put things back where they “live.” Of course that means that the old adage of “a place for everything and everything in its place” becomes important – but unfortunately it is not the situation in my shop. There are places for many things, but there is always a great deal of “overflow” having no home. This stuff just keeps floating around on the surface – always in the way and looking messy.

My wife and I live on a five acre piece of land that could be a “mini-farm”, but is really just a huge back yard. Bigger than we can, or want, to maintain. Our solution to this is to hire part time folks to help out with the “yard” work. This arrangement helps us and gives them a flexible job. However, when it rains we make up jobs that aren’t really necessary so they can work out of the rain – but keep some work going their way. Often this extra work has to do with “cleaning up,” which is where my problem with not have a place for everything comes up.

In an effort to make things look nice and neat, these folks have a tendency to put that loose stuff that is floating around into five gallon buckets – all jumbled indiscriminately together! I end up with buckets of unknown stuff hidden in the corners of the shop. This makes things look nice, but of course it also means that I have no idea where any of it is, leading to great frustration when I need something. As disorganized the situation appeared before, at least I could find things. The approach of filling buckets is just the opposite.

I decided that part of the problem is that don’t have any way to provide enough “homes” for all of the little odds and ends. I have some really nice plastic bins that hang on a wall, but not enough of them. They look like this

These are great, but there are no nearly enough of them. There are more hanger spaces than I have bins, so a partial solution to my problem of not enough “homes” is to purchase more bins. Unfortunately, the local hardware stores don’t stock the same brand of bins. They all stock other brands that make almost identical bins. These other brands make bins that are the same colors, same thickness, apparently the same molds with different brand names. As far as I can tell, these other brands are “knock offs” of the original ones that I purchased decades ago. I took a sample to the hardware store to do side-by-side comparisons and they seemed identical in every way, so I purchased a bunch of them.

I was all set and ready to start “organizing” when I got home, but found that the new bins wouldn’t quite fit the tabs on the wall rack. I could get them on by using two hands and quite a bit of force, but they didn’t just slide right on like the original ones. Upon careful inspection I found that they weren’t “exactly” the same. The original ones have tiny ridges in the tab that hooks onto the rack. Like this:

Those two little “bumps” in the middle keep the opening large, and straight, enough to fit onto the wall unit. That little detail wasn’t included in the “re-engineering” of the knock-offs. This little detail, this little oversight, transformed a cleaver “borrowing” of a design from a quality item to an item that doesn’t work.

I am writing this as an example of the kinds of things that separate quality products from so-so ones. It is the reason that I often pay a little more for something that appears to be “the same.” Tiny differences can change the experience of using the product from being easy and comfortable, to difficult and frustrating. Sometimes the differences are as blatantly obvious as the lack of the tiny tabs, sometimes it is hidden in the properties of the materials – perhaps the difference is just a short cut on the heat treatment of the metal being used. Often the “short cut” doesn’t even change the cost of production, as in the case of the bins where the presence of the tiny bumps would have cost nothing – but the understanding of the features of the higher quality product was not recognized. “Quality” is the sum total of all the “little things.” Mass production aimed at continually achieving ever smaller savings results in the continued spirally down of many products and many production techniques – worldwide. In most cases these cost improvement don’t translate into cheaper products for the consumer, they only translate into higher profits and lower quality products.

Enough of my evangelizing about the apparent slow slide into meritocracy. I just wanted to share what I thought was an interesting case of an “almost” (but not quite) successful clone of a successful product. The outcome was that I returned the bins to the local store and instead purchased them online from Amazon. I try to make as many purchases as possible locally, even when the costs are a bit higher and I have drive 40 miles to get to town (20 miles each way) to get them. But I am finding that harder and harder to do because the selections at the local stores are rapidly shrinking, but also because the quality of merchandise offered is steadily going below my personal cutoff for “acceptable.” I avoid buying inexpensive (meaning low quality) tools and equipment because it is just too expensive due to “not quite” working, with frustrations instead of joy in its use, and the much shorter life before it breaks and has to be replaced.

While researching material for my new “paper” (or perhaps, book) on the global energy situation, I found an interesting relationship that surprises. I started my research by looking into the question of global population growth over the past 200 years. As I expected, when plotted on a graph the curve took the familiar shape of an exponential growth curve – one that is well into the “hockey stick” portion of the curve. Out of curiosity I decided to plot a curve of the global energy use over the same period of time. The results are shown on this graph:

The thing that stood out to me is the rather amazing similarities in the shape of the two curves. As I anticipated, the energy used per capita has been increasing over time as the energy use changed from mostly manual energy (which doesn’t show up on the graph) to more use of external energy sources. I was unable to determine exactly what was considered as “energy use” two hundred years ago, I assume it is referencing sources such as water power, burning of wood and coal, and possibly wind power. I don’t think it included power provided by humans or their domestic animals. In any case, those sources of power would have been minor. The important part of this to me is the observation that even throughout the introduction of the industrial age, there is a strong correlational between the growth rate of the population and that the growth rate of the use of energy – with the use of energy growing substantially faster than the overall population starting at about the time of world war II.

Finding ourselves at this point on the upward turning bend in the growth curve means that things are going to get very much worse very quickly. No matter how you look at it, we are rapidly approaching the point in time when the available resources will be used up, the point where not only can we continue to grow, but the impacts of such growth will become catastrophic in terms of lack of available resources to support the population. Unfortunately, not only will the resources be unable to sustain the vastly increase population, but even after the size of the population collapses we will be in serious trouble because the accessible resources needed to support a much smaller population will have been used up and will no longer be available

This is a similar curve that we were presented with last March with the introduction of covid-19. At that time we were on a curve roughly equivalent to 1850 on the blue curve of the graph. At that time there were a few thousand fatalities from the disease world wide. At that time, it was clear that a major pandemic was underway, even though at the time there were almost no cases in the world outside of China. We followed an exponential growth curve from the initial zero cases to over 400,000 deaths in the USA alone in a year. The curve would have been MUCH steeper had we not instituted heroic efforts to “flatten the curve.” The time line for that has the same general shape as for population and energy use, but over a different duration.

The graph of population versus energy use makes it clear that real problem is with the global rate of population growth. It is driving the use of energy, and driving it is ways that we will be unlikely to be able to maintain by just providing more energy. The only solution is to “flatten the curve” by reducing per capita consumption (or, I suppose, rapidly reduce the population). Given that we would rather avoid a rapid die-out of our population, the only solution is to find ways to get by on the energy from that can be sustained long into the future. I am convinced that this will require finding ways to reduce our use of energy while maintaining an acceptable lifestyle. It seems to me that this points to a need to achieve massive improvements in the efficiency for everything that depends upon energy use. There might still be time to “flatten the curve” of our energy demand if we really take on the problem as an existential one, which happens to be the case. Letting the curve continue steepening has only one possible outcome, which will not be a problem for “the earth” because the earth doesn’t care about anything, but it will be a huge problem for humans.

While listening to a local news report yesterday I heard something that really made me stop and wonder what the world is coming to. The reporter was interviewing a fire chief concerning the level of protection concerning covid-19 required by firemen in his department. The specific question was whether or not they were all getting vaccinated, but the answer turned out to be much broader than that. The answer brought up very concerning implications for the heath and safety of the community. His answer was that not only was the decision to get vaccinated or not a personal choice, but so is the use of other protective measures such as masking/distancing/sanitation. His position is that whether or not first responders want to take precautions against spreading communicable disease is the personal choice of the individual. What immediately sprang to mind upon hearing this was the example of “typhoid Mary.” Mary became famous a little over 100 years ago for being the first known case of an asymptomatic infected person accidentally (and unknowingly) spreading a deadly infectious disease throughout a community. In her case she “only” infected 53 people with a horrible disease, “only” three of whom died. The importance of her lesson was how deadly and dangerous the situation is when there are asymptomatic people with highly contagious deadly diseases in daily contact with those who are at risk. I can’t imagine a situation that is more ripe for this kind of problem than the situation where first responders are asymptotically infected while doing their job.

First responders are highly likely to be exposed to infected persons because that is their job – they respond when people are in distress. Therefore, the opportunity for first responders to become exposed to a disease such as covid is extremely high. In fact it is so high for some other diseases that being vaccinated is a job requirement, not a personal option. The same situation applies to other jobs such as teaching in public schools – vaccinations for certain diseases are mandatory. In addition to a high risk of them to be exposed and infected, there is also an extremely high risk of an asymptomatic responder infecting the “patient” because of the necessary extremely close proximity in many cases involving serious illness or injury (such as when helping at an automobile accident). The nature of the job is to work very hard (lots of heavy breathing, lots of shouting to communicate in the chaos of an event, etc.) in extremely close quarters with serious ill or injured persons whose immunity might be very low because of their condition. It is practically impossible to maintain any “social distancing” or to effectively wear face masks during typical events unless there is a clear and present danger to the fireman, at which point they do have the option to wear highly protective masks with supplied air – but this is seldom done except in situations where there are known respiratory hazards (such as smoke or chemicals). The “mental model” is all about protecting the first responders from the environment or disease from the person being helped, there is little or not consideration about protecting that person from the first responder.

I recently happened to observe a group of first responders in their “time off” mode of interacting with each other and their non-responder friends. They were taking absolutely zero measures to protect each other by wearing masks, distancing, or in any other observable actions. I assume that this is a direct response to the fact that they are regularly forced into the untenable situation of having to perform vital duties that radically violate all proposed safety protocols of masking, distance, avoiding contact, sanitizing after every potential encounter, etc. I can understand a point of view of since it is impossible to avoid the risk when doing the job involving the unknown public, there is little point in taking those precautions when dealing with colleagues and friends in social situations. I get that point of view – they are almost certainly going to be exposed during “work”, so why take so many difficult actions when relaxing during off hours?

This sets up a situation that is exactly why first responders should be mandated to be vaccinated ASAP. They present a grave danger to the public because of the nature of their job if they become carriers (asymptomatic or otherwise) of the virus. The point isn’t whether they are “brave enough” (or proud enough) to be willing to expose themselves and their family to the disease, it is that THEY are the danger to those that they so heroically serve. The risk being decided upon by the fire chief is not about whether the responders will get the disease, it is about whether they will spread it. In my opinion, the “choice” before the individual firemen shouldn’t be whether or not they want to be vaccinated (and do all of the other appropriate precautionary measures, including being tested on a very regular basis), it is whether or not they want to act as firemen for the duration of this pandemic. I agree that there is a personal choice to be made, but it is not whether or not to be vaccinated, it is whether or not you want the job.

By the way, it is my additional opinion that everyone should have a similar choice about complying with the protective measures of social distancing, hand washing, masking, etc. If they don’t want to do that, then they should be willing to stay out of all public places (quarantine themselves from the general public), and be willing to turn down any medical services associated with covid infection. That would make it a truly personal decision about how they want to deal with the risks, but those decisions would not impact the rest of the public that do not wish to be exposed because of someone else’s personal decision. Perhaps the results of being caught violating the rules and regulations with regard to masking and other this is just a citation, a citation that prevents that person from receiving medical attention or other public assistance associated with having the disease – thus freeing up the medical staff and facilities those of us that do not wish to die from the disease. As it is they are insisting upon having their cake and eating it too. They want their “freedom” but then expect the rest of us to pay the price associated with their choice. I think they should pay for their choices by accepting the natural results that come from them. (This is slightly “tongue in cheek” along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s1729 essay the “modest proposal” for solving the devastating food shortage in Ireland – it is likely to be an unpopular solution but it does seem to offer a fair criteria for making the choice of ignoring the public impacts of the current pandemic.)

I suppose we will never know for absolute, positive, no other possibility that there wasn’t election fraud during the last election. There are many things like this, including every theory in science and every “belief” in every religion. That is just the way that the world works – and the nature of “proof.” Theories are presented, investigated, tested and considered from every point of view that we can think of. If we find evidence that the theory is wrong, if we test it and find it doesn’t “pass” the test, then we can definitely “prove” that the theory is false. However, we can never be certain that the next positive test isn’t followed up with a negative one, we can’t “prove” that every avenue has been investigated, that every test has been tested, or that we didn’t miss something important. As some point we finally say that while we can’t be certain that new information won’t turn up we accept the findings as “true” (which is different than proven). We think gravity works and will continue to work, we think aerodynamics will continue to keep airplanes in the sky, all of the things that have come from science and engineering are based upon “unproven” but “true” theories. So while it is not possible to “prove” that there was no significant fraud, enough investigations, observations, considerations and evidence has been found to show that it is “true”. It is true in the same sense that almost every election since the founding of the Country has been shown to be fair and the results have been accepted as being true.

That is not to say that there no major problems with our election system. There are. For example, the archaic electoral college system has opened the way to massive and pervasive disenfranchisement of millions of voters, almost all of which traditionally vote Democratic, by Gerrymandering districts in ways that award more electoral college votes than are supported by the population of the States. The Republicans have abused this to the point were it will heavily bias the outcome in favor of Republicans for decades into the future. It has gotten to the point where it is almost impossible to elect Democrats in many districts even when the popular vote would prevail for Democrats.

There are also often reports of highly illegal activities at the level of the precincts. For example, during the election between Gore and Bush, there were many reports of entire mail bags full of ballots from predominantly Democrat precincts being thrown into creeks and rivers, never being reported or counted. Did this actually happen? Probably. It probably happens during all Presidential elections. Is it enough of a problem to swing the outcome? Who knows? We have no evidence one way or the other.

Perhaps the worse problems that we have are associated with various successful efforts by the Republicans to disenfranchise poor voters through various means such voter ID laws, voter registration restrictions, unfair or illegal voter purges, felony disenfranchisement, and voter suppression by making it difficult to vote by the location or numbers of polling places. By far the worst of these types of voter restrictions apply to black and other minority populations, resulting in a massive under representation of votes that are historically cast for Democratic candidates. Some of this falls under the heading of “fraud”, but most is legal, but ethically and morally reprehensible.

We need to find a way to stop the impacts of Gerrymandering, makes sure that all people have ready access to polling places, eliminate the abuses of purges preventing millions of votes from being counted. We also need to find ways to prevent bags of votes being dumped, and we need a way for every citizen to have an easy way to verify that they vote was counted, and counted in accordance with the way that they marked their ballot. We need to find a way to get visibility into the entire voting process so that challenges such as Trump’s unsupported insistence in massive voter fraud is no longer possible. Basically, we need a complete overhaul into the voting system in the United States rather than continuing to rely on the current mix of outdated, archaic, fragile systems. If we don’t do this we will continue to have situations where the Supreme Court appoints the winner of the Presidential election, we will continue to have election after election where the Democrats win the popular vote but lose the election, where millions of eligible voters are prevented from voting, and where fraud remains a viable possibility.

That was an interesting trial of the impeachment of Trump. It seems that it was called in support of providing political cover for those who voted to acquit – at least is what it seemed to me. It all seemed pretty obvious to me, and had seemed that way for months – especially those days after he had used up millions of dollars in taxpayer’s dollars chasing after an obviously failed attempt to find evidence of fraud when none existed. What a farce! I don’t think anyone honestly doubts the House’s contention that Trump was instrumental in setting it up, and then sending the crowd down the street in strict violation of the terms of the permit that had set the location and boundaries based the known threat profile of the event. That one thing should have been more than enough to result in his impeachment, but there was so much more.

The defense centered around a lot of procedural issues because while they knew perfectly well that Trump was responsible for creating the environment, anger, support, direction and lack of timely efforts to stop the riot after it got started they were there to provide cover for the Republicans. That cover consisted of being able to tell their constitutes that the process was flawed, rather than having to tell them that they thought what Trump had done as somehow “appropriate”, “innocent” or “Patriotic.” If they hadn’t been provided with that cover they would have been forced to admit that they voted to acquit because they are also in alignment with Trump’s rhetoric and position that there is a need to “take back America” and “Make America Great Again” – which are both code phrases meaning re-instate the old ways of white supremacy and Christian dominance. But even though they support those values, they needed an alternative story – and the procedural one was fit the bill nicely because they didn’t have to face the actual question of whether or not they think Trump was actually innocent of the changes. They know he was guilty, but they couldn’t afford the political blow-back from their “base” to say so in a public forum. So they hid under the cover of a weak procedural argument. Shame on them!

I wonder what will now come of this. Does this tell the folks that support the MAGA movement that they were correct, that the “Country” supports them, that they are actually “Patriots” for fighting that way? Does this mean that there will now be an escalation of that sort of activity and boldness? I suspect it does. I also suspect that Mr. Trump will be front and center in that new wave of atrocities. My prediction is that we are now taking a deep dive into domestic terrorism, insurrections, and just plain nasty activity. It appears possible that this will now roll right into an actual fighting revolution, but with no goal except to take as much as possible from as many people as possible. There is no offering of a better union, of anything like democracy, or anything like freedom for anyone except those that have the most weapons and are the most aggressive. It looks to me that a band of criminals has just been handed the keys to the kingdom. It looks exactly like the path that Hitler (and other dictators) took to power, I certainly hope I am mistaken about that, but I see no other obvious next step.

After about three hours, the defense rests its arguments about the impeachment. (I am still looking forward to the Q&A sessions and the closing arguments). It was all pretty amazing. They showed a long montage of video clips showing many of those present in the act of using the word “fight” in their political activities. That is extremely obvious, one video would have made the point. They seemed to be attempting to use this to numb the minds of watchers as if that had anything whatsoever to do with the allegations. Clearly the question was never the simple one of the word “fight” being so incentive as to incite the riot. It is clearly all in context, and their arguments along those lines were childish at best.

And then there was a huge and lengthy discussion about the first amendment. Once again, they presented a specious argument at best. Generally, what they had to say was more or less true, but none of it applied to the case at hand. An interesting point was the political speech has a little “extra” protection, and that is they are not required to tell the truth or to not lie. Obviously Trump has made extensive use of that exception, he has told a record number of lies over the past five years (including the time leading up to the last election) and in no instance was there ever any attempt to punish him or make any contention that he had somehow done anything illegal in doing so. His lies were discussed a lot, and many people on all sides howled and complained about then, but everyone accepted that he was within the letter of the law to do so. That was never a contention, and still isn’t. Once again, the defense spent a lot of time presenting something that is generally agreed to – in the apparently hopes that agreeing with those points somehow had something to do with the trial. They did not, it was just a bit of hot air.

There was also an attempt to make the timeline for inciting the riots narrowly confined to the hour or so that Trump was addressing his crowd. There point was that the charge is only limited to determining if what he said was sufficient to spark the riot – which it clearly would not have been if he hadn’t primed it beforehand. The issues is setting up the situation, bringing in the powerkegs, and then lighting the fuse. It is true that if he hadn’t done what he did to set it up, he could probably have given his speech and nothing much would have happened. But that is not the case. He set it up, he knew what others were doing with regard to bringing the set and setting (and figuratively the barrels of powder), he made sure that all was set and not only did he not try to minimize the possibility of an explosion, but actively and continuously attempted to make sure the energy and anger continued. He picked the timing, the location, the people attending, and he (him personally plus the other speakers) fanned the mood of the crowd. That is all very obvious and true – but the defense lawyers elected to take a few carefully chosen words out of context to “prove” that similar speeches are common and don’t result in the kind of reaction that this one did.

A lot of the defense’s “evidence” that Trump is a long time supporter of what we might like to think of a “truth and justice” is that he uses the term “law and order” as a center piece of his rhetoric. I suppose the defense is hoping that most of the listeners and audience haven’t recognized that this is a highly charged “code word” harking back to racism, white supremacy, the abuses of people like George Wallace, the klu klux klan and other hateful and disturbing parts of America. He uses those terms specifically because they are powerful and important code words to his “base” – there is no doubt that they know exactly what he is talking about – and it doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with “truth and justice”, peace for all, equality, or anything else that his defense team was pretending that it pointed to. It points to hate and intolerance, it does not point to equality, peace, or justice for all.

And finally there was the evidence that Trump did everything he could in the hours during the event to provide support (by way of the national guard or others), attempted to message the group sufficiently to get them to stop. That was a hollow defense. The most that he did was after four hours of rioting was to suggest that they go home, adding that he really thanked them, loved them, and they were true patriots (I am paraphrasing here, he used slightly different terms).