Advance Patchwork
Would parliamentary procedures allow the Senate “patch” legislation to be passed on a provisional basis? (ie., it only affects legislation that hasn’t been passed in the house yet, and would therefore be moot if the House doesn’t pass it).
In other words, maybe one way to let cooler heads prevail, and placate House liberals, is for the Senate to quickly put together and pass (via reconciliation) a “patch” bill in advance of a House vote. That way, there’s no “Lucy removing the football” fears on the part of House Democrats.
Weather and turnout
I think everybody seems to agree turnout is a critical factor tomorrow. I’ve heard one or two comments to the effect that the sloppy weather predicted for Tuesday across most of the state favors Brown, by holding down turnout.
But I think bad weather clearly favors Coakley, myself. As a Massachusetts resident following this race very closely, my sense is there’s a huge spike in interest and enthusiasm from a lot of independent (we call them “unenrolled” here in Massachusetts) voters. I could be wrong, but the bulks of these voters strike me as being usually not particularly involved in politics. Brown needs a healthy turnout from these people to counter what I expect to be a larger than expected turnout of committed (and scared!) Democrats and liberal independents. I can imagine many a low information Brown supporter getting up tomorrow with the intention of hitting the polls on the way to work, and then realizing the roads are pretty crappy and thinking “Hmmm, maybe I should go to work first and vote on the way home.” Not all of them will make it — especially if they’re overconfident in the porn star’s chances. City lefties like me can walk to the polls even in a blizzard.
Martha could still pull this thing out. The wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of the right wing would be enough to stave off my seasonal depression for the remainder of the winter.
Should Dems ditch ObamaCare?
I’ve been hearing lots of speculation and commentary that the healthcare bill is primarily what is to blame for tomorrow’s shocking GOP victory, and that Democrats would be well-advised to dump the legislative effort and focus on other things.
Needless to say I don’t agree.
If voters are really that pissed off about ObamaCare, aren’t they simply going to vote for the real McCoy, a Republican, no matter what? Why even consider voting for a member of the party that came pretty damned close to shoving Socialist medicine down our throats when we can have real, manly, rugged individualist proponents of freedom like Scott Brown?
Seems to me savvy Democratic law-makers will quite rightly recognize that some of the angst on display in Massachusetts flows from the perception that the Democrats are ineffective. What we see on display is a preview of what it will be like for Democrats to go before the national electorate without a substantive accomplishment under their belts, exactly like in 1994. Passing a bill will remedy this.
It’s also clear to me that the perception of what ObamaCare is now, before it is enacted, is likely to be significantly more negative than the perceptions of what the legislation actually is, once it’s passed, and people are protected by guaranteed issue and community rating, and death panels mysteriously fail to materialize. As a number of pundits have noted, there is very little support in Massachusetts for getting rid of that state’s existing universal health care bill. Turns out voters like health care security once they possess it.
Some largely overoptimistic thoughts on tomorrow’s election
There are Republicans, Democrats, and independents (unenrolled) here in Massachusetts. The first of these will have a huge turnout, but they’re only 13% of all registered voters. I’m guessing registered Republicans might cast something like 22% of the votes tomorrow. Democrats account for something like 35% of the electorate. They won’t turn out in the same percentage as the GOP, but they should nonetheless turn out in higher percentages than independents; I don’t think it’s out of the question about 45%-48% of the votes cast tomorrow could be by registered Democrats. If Coakley does slightly better than expected among Democrats (most polls I’ve seen suggest Brown will pick up at least 25% of the Democratic vote) — perhaps holding onto a full 80% of this cohort — and Democrats get to the polls in greater numbers than independents — it could get interesting.*
*I’m thinking one possible scenario that would be less than the worst case would be a very narrow win for Brown. If he beats her with, say, 50.9% of the vote, a somewhat more leisurely certification process will look a lot more justified than if Brown wins pretty convincingly and Coakley calls to concede at 9pm. And that just might buy enough time to produce and score a melded bill and get the cloture vote out of the way. I half wonder if Brown himself — despite vows to the contrary — might not actually welcome the chance to avoid being blamed for killing the healthcare bill. If he’s smart, he’ll have already begun to think about 2012.
Anyway, this is all probably wishful thinking because, though my head tells me by rights it should be a close contest and Martha’s still got a shot, my heart (and my eyes — you simply don’t see any Coakley signage even here in Boston) tells me Martha’s numbers are collapsing and Brown could thump to a huge — approaching or surpassing 60% of the vote — victory.
I certainly hope I’m wrong.
Are we weather wimps?
A couple of weeks ago — about the time we got our first big snow storm — The Globe ran a story asking if the people of Greater Boston had become weather wimps given to over-the-top reactions and whining whenever we get a bit of tough weather:
We’re supposed to be known for our hardiness, for the way we embrace the elements with stoicism and even a touch of pride.
So what happened?
This season’s first snow – big, fluffy flakes totaling 10 inches or less – paralyzed an entire region. Workers fled their offices early, clogging highways and side streets. Drivers fishtailed trying to get to supermarkets, only to find parking lots jammed with customers buying last-minute items like bread and batteries. Yet the rush for supplies proved unnecessary. Much of the snow melted yesterday, a sunny, 40-degree day, exactly as the weather reporters said it would.
Nathaniel Philbrick, author of “Mayflower” and “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex,” said he sees signs that New Englanders’ storied moxie is on the wane.
In fact, he used the word crybabies to describe peoples’ reaction to Thursday’s storm, one that set no records, came as no surprise, and delivered the kind of snow, dry and light, that is a DPW commissioner’s dream.
“The fact is, once you get used to these modern conveniences and luxuries, even the mildest inconveniences become an epic tale of deprivation,” Philbrick said. “Perhaps our threshold will be so diminished [that] our version of the Essex disaster and the Mayflower will be the drive home from the mall in 2 inches of snow.”
To be sure, parents needed to get children from the many schools that were dismissed early. The snow, at its peak, was falling at an uncharacteristically rapid clip. City, state, and private industry offices were closing in virtual unison.
Still, Philbrick echoed the thoughts of many residents yesterday who were befuddled by the way the city reacted to the storm – more like, perhaps, the way Washington or Memphis shuts down over an inch of snow.
“People who live here should know how to handle this by now,” said Yvonne Thompson, a 49-year-old construction worker and lifelong Boston resident who pointed out that meteorologists had been predicting the storm for days.
Quite so, Yvonne. And I have to agree, we have in fact become weather wimps. There are lots of reasons for this, but I suspect much of it is transportation: Many people have to drive longer distances on average, and fly more often for their jobs — than was the case thirty or forty years ago. Also, it seems to me many young kids participate in FAR more activities and clubs that require parental chauffeuring than once was the case. Also, the internet makes it easier for employers to “pull the trigger” on sending people home, so that’s one cause as well — there’s more pressure on employers to be “reasonable” and let people work from home.
Over the years we’ve simply became a much more mobile society that is more dependent on smooth-functioning transportation systems than ever before. It’s interesting to note, however, that when we do occasionally get a very snowy winter when blizzards roll in week after week through December, January and February, it seems like the metro Boston area deals with the weather much more efficiently and nonchalantly (and people are much more relaxed) toward the end of the season than is the case at the beginning. People simply get used to dealing with winter weather after many weeks of it. So I expect climate change also has at least something to do with the phenomenon: folks ’round these parts simply don’t have to deal with as many snow events and harsh weather conditions as they used to, so they forget how to deal with it. Also, greater population density means more traffic congestion, which in turn leads to bad driving manners, which makes people shittier drivers, and this makes driving in wintery conditions worse still.
Ahhh, the pleasures of winter in urban New England.
Apocalypto
Mel Gibson has perhaps rightly acquired a reputation as something of a crazy person, but if he’s a bit mad, it’s perhaps justifiable to call him a mad “genius.” For the fact is, Apocalypto is an astonishing film. No time for a particulary long review at the moment, but I will say that if, like me, one of the best parts of watching movies is that you get to be transported to another world, you’ll simply love this film. Gibson has meticulously recreated an exotic, now-lost to history otherworld: that of the early 15th century Mayan civilization. And he’s done so with an incredible degree of verisimilitude. The film is utterly harrowing to watch at times, and yet I found I couldn’t move my eyes from the screen. The last half hour or so of Apocalypto is a tad more predicable and formulaic than the first hundred or so minutes (it almost reminds one of something out of the Rambo series), but the overall effort from Mr. Gibson is so well done, so riveting, so suspensful, and so, well, elegant, you’ll barely notice this shortcoming.
Apocalypto is not for the faint-of-heart, nor is it suitable for children (due to scenes of extreme — albeit non-gratuitous — violence). All in all, a very entertaining work. Very dark at times, but not wholly bleak in its vision. It even manages to impart a relevant message — an apocalypic warning, if you will — to our modern age.
Hitlerian stimulus
Yglesias takes Tyler Cowen to task for invoking the specre of Hitler and the Nazis to make an argument against Keynesian stimulus:
When a country produces more HDTVs, more people have HDTVs and living standards go up. When a country produces more tanks and military explosives, none of the tanks or military explosives go into private hands (we hope!) so living standards are unchanged. But producing HDTVs doesn’t increase your ability to conquer France, whereas tanks and explosives are useful for conquering France. Hitler’s policy objective was to prepare for conquering France. And his policies worked quite well (though Ernest May reminds us not to neglect the importance of French intelligence failures), they just served Nazi objectives. But I don’t see why Hitler couldn’t have spent the money on something else. If we use fiscal policy to raise measured GDP primarily through building tanks, we’ll have higher GDP and more tanks. But if we use fiscal policy to raise measured GDP primarily through repairing existing roads and building new mass transit and high-speed rail lines, then we’ll have higher GDP, better roads, and more mass transit and HSR systems. It seems to me that living standards would therefore be higher.
Right. I doubt living standards increased for most Americans during the war years, but nonetheless GDP was rapidly expanding. The economic growth was sufficiently robust (explosive, really) to finally jolt the country out of depression. Once the war was over, living standards could resume their ascent, as money for guns was channeled into money for butter.
We don’t have the luxury at the present time to agonize over slumping living standards. The task is to save the economy, and avoid deflation. Once things have returned to normal — a non-deflationary economy characterized by growth — we can hopefully get back to increasing living standards. Personally I expect that, for a while at least, such increases will be modest, given the need to increase savings over the long term, pay back debt (ie higher taxes) and put the economy on a long-term, sustainable path. Still, “modest” need not mean “none.” Ideally, we can increase savings and (modestly) increase consumption over the long term by limiting growth in consumption to a number slightly lower than GDP growth.
Of course, we can (and should!) also try and extract some gains in this regard for the vast majority of the population by tackling the income inequality issue.
Etc.
1) I’m officially resigning from the Caroline Kennedy Defense League until/unless she completes a public speaking course. In her case the apple didn’t just fall far from the tree, the freaking orchard was on a different continent.
2) Byonce’s hit “If I were a Boy” sucks. Her people have badly misused her voice on this one. It sounds like she’s straining. IMO she doesn’t have the booming, bell-like voice of a Whitney Houston, Maria Carey, Leona Lewis or Rihanna. Which is fine. Byonce’s voice is perfectly decent, and even sweet — in a Diana Ross kind of way. She just doesn’t have the cords for the aforementioned song.
A Senator Supports Neo-Hooverism
Kevin Drum (quoting Tim Fernholz) reports that Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell is worried about protecting the taxpayers from the new administration’s plans to right the economy:
A trillion-dollar spending bill would be the largest spending bill in the history of our country at a time when our national debt is already the largest in history,” McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement. “As a result, it will require tough scrutiny and oversight. Taxpayers, already stretched to the limit, deserve nothing less.
It goes without saying that among other deceptions McConnell is well-aware he’s using is misleading language with respect to the country’s debt. Yes, it is true that if you count money owed to future retirees national debt is quite high, but the more relevant public debt figure is about the same percentage of GDP as it was at the beginning of WWII (you know, the same war that, as Krugman puts it, finally provided a stimulus large enough to get the country out of Depression once and for all).
This is not an argument against getting our fiscal house in order to deal with entitlements, by the way — it’s something we need to do (most pressingly, healthcare reform, as Social Security’s problems are easily repairable) after we’ve restored the economy to health. It’s just an argument against letting ideologues like McConnell demagogue the country into a repeat of the 1930s
Ms. Plausibility or, In Which Jasper Officially Becomes a Caroline Kennedy Suckup
Anti-Caroline hysteria sentiment in the ‘sphere seems to be intensifying, and I’ll have none of it, dammit!
Okay, seriously, I’m not saying Ms. Kennedy is the best candidate for the job, mind you; but she’s obviously a plausible candidate in a narrow universe of plausible candidates. People continue to talk about her like she’s some kind of grossly underqualified airhead — but that’s seems like wild exaggeration colored by Kennedy bashing. She doesn’t have experience running in and winning elections*, but that’s the only thing she lacks from what I can see**. She’s got money, fame, looks, glamor,*** sterling education credentials (Harvard and Columbia Law), she’s a life long New Yorker, she’s prominent in Democratic party circles (vetted Obama’s VP choices and was a co-chair of his campaign, I think), she possesses a strong relationship with the president-elect, she has a pretty impressive rolodex, she’s a respected constitutional scholar, she writes well, and she’s done substantive, meaningful work in policy analysis, non-profit fundraising and governance, arts advocacy, and education. She’s seems to be a very straight arrow (nice family, etc.), and likely has fewer skeletons in her closet than the various elected public officials who would also be plausible candidates for the appointment. And, as Democrats who actually want to win elections (unlike libertarians who understandably would rather see us lose) realize, Caroline Kennedy is almost certainly likely to prove an unsurpassed fundraiser in 2010 — a year when coaxing money from contributors may not be an easy task. Again, she may not be the optimal candidate from the perspective of background and experience (Spitzer’s downfall makes the scene devoid of an obvious concensus choice), but politically — and this is ultimately how such things get decided — she’s very plausible indeed.
*I frankly think this is a weak argument with respect to this particular candidate. I mean, she freaking grew up in the White House, and her uncles were Bobby and Teddy. I have a feeling she knows how the government works, and how legislation gets enacted. Moreover, while personal legislative experience is obviously a plus, Hillary Clinton has shown lack of it isn’t a deal-breaker. And anyway, what’s wrong with having someone with a different perspective sitting in the great deliberative body? Heaven forbid someone other than, you know, a career briber of voters, be sent to Washington to join Schumer.
**Well, she may lack natural political instincts/communication skills based on her upstate tour. It definitely wasn’t an auspicious start. I personally think it’s too early to tell — and I very much doubt Patterson will write her off based on one or two initial missteps (Hillary wasn’t a natural from the getgo either) but Caroline certainly needs to improve in this area.
***I can almost hear the sneering now, but y’all have to take off your good citizens caps and put on your political consultants caps: you can certainly make the case that Kennedy possesses many of the practical attributes — especially in an era when fundraising is likely to get tougher — especially with a mid-term coming up where Democrats are likely to be facing stiff challenges — of someone who can beat King or Rudy (and help other Democrats — most importantly Patterson himself — in the bargain). Cynical or not, that, my dear friends, will surely be of paramount concern in Patterson’s mind.
Finally, one word about the hand-wringing over political dynasties: our constitution got rid of royalty. It doesn’t say people who grew up with backgrounds in politics and affairs of state can’t or shouldn’t be able to run themselves. It seems to me you’ll have to change human nature to insure that. Bottom line is voters have brains, and in a democracy they’re perfectly free to reject princelings, and often do. Neither Romney nor Hillary Clinton is about to enter the White House. George H.W. Bush couldn’t retain it in 1992. The Republic has always known families prominent in public affairs, and always will. John Quincy Adams’s foray into politics didn’t sink us, and neither will Caroline Kennedy’s.
Madoff as outlier
A thought on Madoff: I’ve heard a lot of people make the claim that his malfeasance should have been discovered because of his unrealistic returns. But hasn’t Warren Buffett also enjoyed long strings of years when his portfolio made year after year of double digit returns? I’m aware Berkshire is public, so you just have to look up the components he owns to know it’s all legit, but my guess is Madoff’s fund’s “performance” didn’t look all that implausible, given the multi-year success we occasionally see from Wall Street’s brighter lights (Peter Lynch comes to mind as well). Obviously what the SEC should have done was to require Madoff to show in detail exactly how such returns were earned. Apparently they didn’t.
Thoughts on Caroline
For the most part the controversy surrounding Caroline Kennedy’s intention to pursue a senate seat is entirely understandable; “less is more” are not words one often associates with the democratic process here in the US. I myself — a fan of that mob rule form of government known as the parliamentary system — am disquieted at the prospect of the executive making appointments to the national legislature. So, if you’re opposed to the method whereby vacant offices are sometimes appointed rather than filled by special election, then more power to you — and good luck — you’re free to lobby your fellow citizens to get the law changed. There is something decidedly unfair about being chosen by a governor — rather than directly by the voters — for a seat in the United States Senate
But as long as NY’s constitution requires that a vacancy be filled short-term in this manner, then anybody who is appointed is going to be getting an “unfair” (by this line of reasoning) advantage. Again, I understand the perception of unfairness surrounding the appointment process as such as opposed to holding a special election. But the vitriol from the left focusing specifically on senatorial aspirant Caroline Kennedy qua Caroline Kennedy is a bit much.
Now, if your point is that Kennedy’s name is a really unfair advantage (ie., she’s some type of royalty) then what you’re really arguing is that someone should be passed over because of something one has no control over. And this is what seems fundamentally unfair to me, because at the end of the day, the woman has no more power over the circumstances of her birth than any other human being. Barring her from office because of her high birth seems fundamentally unfair and illiberal.
One can legitimately make the argument, of course, that Kennedy is unqualified, or that she’s not the best qualified candidate – and again, fair enough. But I haven’t read much in the way of substantive arguments in this regard. I’d like to know why a long career serving the greater good in the arts, say, or in education reform, is automatically an inferior background for the senate than a long career as an electeed public official. It seems to me both backgrounds have their merits, and it is not at all obvious to me which is superior.
The inanity of Amity
Amity Shlaes — writing with a chip on her shoulder apparently acquired because of criticisms made by a certain Nobel-winning economist who knows more about the dismal science than she’ll ever forget — makes a fool of herself with a piece she subtitles “Massive Government Spending is No Solution to Unemployment.”
Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been on the attack lately in regard to the New Deal. His new book “The Return of Depression Economics,” emphasizes the importance of New Deal-style spending. He has said the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn’t spend enough.
He’s also arguing that some writers and economists have been misrepresenting the 1930s to make the effect of FDR’s overall policy look worse than it was. I’m interested in part because Mr. Krugman has mentioned me by name. He recently said that I am the one “whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right.”
Mr. Krugman is a new Nobel Laureate, teaches at Princeton University and writes a column for a nationally prominent newspaper. So what he says is believed to be objective by many people, even when it isn’t. But the larger reason we should care about the 1930s employment record is that the cure Roosevelt offered, the New Deal, is on everyone else’s mind as well. In a recent “60 Minutes” interview, President-elect Barack Obama said, “keep in mind that 1932, 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, inching up to 30%.”
The New Deal is Mr. Obama’s context for the giant infrastructure plan his new team is developing. If he proposes FDR-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn’t. New Deal spending provided jobs but did not get the country back to where it was before.
The very subtitle of Ms. Shlaes’s piece gives away the inanity (or disingenuousness) of her piece, because “massive government spending” is exactly what finally enabled America to return to prosperity after the ravages of the 1930s. In fact, Franklin Roosevelt responded to the critics parroting the conventional wisdom of his day (sound familiar Ms. Shlaes?) by becoming a deficit hawk after his first term. Thus during FDR’s second term the federal deficit declined precipitously via tax hikes and budget curbs — in fiscal 1938 the government was very nearly in (PDF warning) surplus — and lo and behold the economic growth of his first term promptly evaporated and the depression entered a temporary period of intensification. It was not until after Pearl Harbor — when deficit spending by Washington skyrocketed (it reached over 30% of GDP in 1943) that the country finally made a permanent break with depression.
Now, I don’t think Mr. Obama or anybody else is suggesting borrowing on quite so massive a scale. I suspect deficit spending will likely peak somewhere north of 10% of GDP over the next year or two. But if we’re to heed the lessons of FDR’s day our course is clear: a massive stimulus plan along the lines of what Krugman and others are proposing is our best insurance against depression. An absurd emphasis on fiscal rectitude during times like these is surely a recipe for disaster. Fortunately, it appears the new team taking charge in Washington has read its history books.
Bailing out Detroit
I’ve pretty much come around to the idea that doing something with taxpayer money now is better than doing nothing when it comes to the Big Three. Again, if we weren’t coasting along (or headed toward) the bottom of a vicious recession at the present moment, I’d no doubt stick with my free market instincts. But letting them slip into Chapter 7 right now strikes me as very high stakes poker. Yglesias, needless to say, is having none of it:
Part of what makes the auto bailout conversation difficult to have realistically is that this $25 billion number is hanging out there. That’s a lot of money, yes, but it’s actually a relatively small amount of money relative to the scale of the Big Three’s operations. Under the circumstances, a bailout looks a bit like a good deal.
But by the same token, I don’t see any reason to think that $25 billion would actually turn these firms around or even forestall collapse for very long. The car industry in general is in a big slump, and these companies in particular have been on a downward trajectory for a long time.
So what if they money doesn’t stave off collapse “for very long?” If it buys us only ten months it may be worth it. If it ultimately costs $75 billion (probably something under 2% of what Keynesian measures are ultimately going to cost the government over the next few years) but buys us three years, I think it will definitely be worth it. Letting all of the big three go under precipitously at the present time is extremely risky. Sure, maybe the economy would make the adjustments to post-big three life smoothly, but I’d rather not tempt fate. Nobody’s arguing we shouldn’t structure the best deal possible — one that is optimal with respect to the national interest (and that unfortunately means a lot fewer automobile-related rust belt jobs).
Handing out a million and a half pink slips in gradual fashion over the next, say, four years (even if this costs the taxpayers a lot of money), is a safer course of action than handing out two million over the next twelve months. It may be a cheaper (for us taxpayers) course of action, too, although our lack of easily observable parallel universes will make it impossible to prove either way.
I think this is basically our choice.
Progressive Hicks in the New England Sticks
Via Yglesias, here’s a cool map demonstrating granular county level voting patterns. Matt writes:
…the Republican parts of the country form a largely contiguous bloc while Obamaland is an incredibly fragment archipelego…it’s an interesting dramatization of the Democrats’ base in cities and inner suburbs. I wonder if anyone’s familiar with any good work on what accounts for the anomalously progressive views of rural New England. What’s the matter with Maine?
I think one way to answer that question is to look into who really is “rural” in New England and who isn’t. Maine certainly seems a pretty rural place when you’re driving through it, but Portland, Augusta, Lewiston, Bangor etc are perhaps more accurately described as urban — even though individually they’re pretty small urban areas. Heck, I suspect something like half of Maine’s population is within plausible commuting distance to greater Boston (not downtown Boston, mind you, but an office park in Andover, MA is a feasible commute for someone living near Kittery or York). This is doubly true for New Hampshire, whose southern portion — where nearly everybody lives — really is a bonafide extension of the Boston suburbs.
My point is, northern New England appears rural, but its genuinely rural parts are home to vanishingly small numbers of voters. The vast majority of voters in the region actually reside in small cities, or liberal college towns, or in the exurban spillover of Boston.
Even highly dense Massachusetts is a good example. The portion of the state west of Worcester makes up something like half the land area, but something like 10-15% of the population. If you remove Pittsfield, Northampton, Springfield and Amherst, you’re down to what, two or three percent of the state’s population? You’ll no doubt find a decent number of Limbaugh fans from amongst this small cohort, but they’re not sufficiently numerous to nudge Western Massachusetts’s political culture rightwards.
I know the image of the reasonable, centrist/liberal, libertarian Yankee living in the wilds of New England is a comforting one to us liberals, but as a life long New Englander, I doubt it’s a very real image.
Mini nukes
I haven’t spent much time in t he nuclear power cheering section of late — mostly because it creates a lot of stuff that might be useful to terrorists — but this sounds undeniably cool:
Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.
The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.
The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. ‘Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,’ said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. ‘They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.’
Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. ‘It’s leapfrog technology,’ he said.
The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. ‘We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.’
I’m officially changing my position on expanding nuclear power from “opposed” to “open-minded.”
On Evolutionary Fitness
Kevin Drum is wondering whether or not avocados are good for you. That got the ineveitable health/diet comment thread going, and one of the commenters opined:
Just eat what tastes good in moderation. Our appetite and taste in food has evolved over centuries to maximize our fitness to survive.
That’s not quite correct. Our appetites and tastes in food have evolved over eons, not centuries, and for nearly all our evolutionary history, food was often difficult to get. Our tastes therefore evolved to insure we would pig-out whenever we encountered foods rich in fats and carbohydrates; it was imperative for our ancestors to build up fat deposits on their bodies so as to increase the probability of surviving the next, inevitable period of scarcity.
For any given individual, a lot has to do with genetics of course, but for many people, the sad truth is that eating what you like best with regularity — even in so-called “moderate” amounts — is not consistent with optimal health*. If you want to maximize your physical well-being, when it comes to eating you most definitely should pay attention to our species’s evolutionary history. And that translates into minimizing the consumption of processed carbohydrates, moderating the consumption of overly fatty meats (leaner protein sources, of course, are highly consistent with several million years of human evolution and should be eaten), and mostly eschewing dairy products. Oh, and eat lots of plants. I’ve never heard a bad thing about avocados.
*For the record, I personally have never been able or willing — at least until very recently — to even approach anything resembling a health-optimizing diet, and I certainly don’t pass judgment on anybody who is similarly inclined. When it comes to utility maximization, who the hell am I to say that being fairly spry at age 92 is worth living a life largely devoid of desserts and pizza? And again, some people have DNA that apparently allows them to live lives of extreme gastronomic excess with few ill effects. Winston Churchill was Prime Minister into his eighties.
Jasper Smith 