This has to be posted once every four years. Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Jason Preistley, 1992. No further commentary necessary.
Classic SNL Winter Olympics Cover
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Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com
green ammonia
The idea behind green ammonia is to use renewable energy (solar, wind, etc.) to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be combined with nitrogen gas from the air in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. This is the same as what is done now, except that the most common process is to split the hydrogen off from natural gas, which results in carbon dioxide emissions.
Ammonia is used on a large scale as a fertilizer, so switching to this process would reduce emissions (and wouldn’t make the problem of excess nitrogen reaching our groundwater and surface water any worse, or better). I didn’t realize that ammonia could be burned for fuel. This article explains that even though burning it is less efficient than just burning the hydrogen gas, it is easier to move and store than hydrogen. Burning it does produce nitrogen oxide, which is also a greenhouse gas, but you can use a catalytic convertor to remove that.
It’s not mentioned in this article, but it should also be possible in principle to extract either nitrogen gas or ammonia directly from wastewater and farm waste, which if used as fertilizer would create a closed loop and actually help our ground and surface water at the same time it is helping our atmosphere. This sounds like a win-win-win for me, but it would have a cost, and the cost would have to be paid by the parties producing the pollution now rather than paid by all of us collectively in the future as we are impacted by the pollution, and that is the hard thing to explain and build political support behind.
Zillow’s house flipping debacle
Since I mentioned Zillow’s attempt to use big data to profit on house flipping recently, here is an article on that.
The United States is in the midst of the biggest house price boom ever. The Case-Shiller National Home Price Index was up nearly 20% in the 12 months ended in August, the biggest one-year increase in the history of that index.
Yet one of the biggest real estate brands in the world has seen its stock fall nearly 70% since mid-February. Zillow has gotten hammered after bungling its iBuyer program just three short years after getting into the house-flipping business. The company announced it is shuttering the platform, selling the rest of its housing inventory, and laying off up 25% of its staff.
awealthofcommonsense.com
The housing market has huge inefficiencies, huge transactions costs, and is somewhat corrupt. The algorithms apparently couldn’t account for those factors. The only silver lining is that when you have a big chunk of wealth sunk in the family home, you typically don’t experience huge swings in value on a regular basis.
My Dear Watson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson was, in fact, a medical doctor. IBM’s Watson is not a doctor, but tried to play one in real life, and apparently failed. The idea was to use machine learning to crunch huge amounts of medical records and treatment data, and provide recommendations to real doctors treating real patients. And according to this article in Slate, it just didn’t work and the division is being “sold for parts”. I assume this means part of the IBM company legal entity and/or its “intellectual property” being sold, not the actual computer hardware which must be obsolete by now?
Along with the recent Zillow house flipping failure, this seems like another high profile failure for machine learning/AI-based business plans. It might be that the business plans are ahead of the technology, or the technology is ahead of the data (one gets tired of the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”, but it is a real thing – a lot of what is in my medical records is garbage, anyway), or both.
January 2022 in Review
Most frightening and/or depressing story: A collapse of the Game of Thrones ice wall holding back the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica could raise average sea levels around the world by one foot, or maybe 10 feet “if it draw the surrounding glaciers with it”. The good news is that no army of zombies would pour out.
Most hopeful story: LED lighting has gotten so efficient that it is a tossup on energy efficiency with daylight coming through a window, because no window is perfectly sealed. Windows still certainly have the psychological advantage.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: “Big history” is an Australian program that attempts to unify everything from the Big Bang through our current era of intelligent life.
more numbers on Philadelphia shootings
A report commissioned by the Philadelphia has some facts and figures on shootings, both fatal (the layman might refer to these as “murders”) and non-fatal. Here are just a few that caught my eye:
- For every fatal shooting, 3-4 people are shot non-fatally
- Arguments are cited as the cause of 50% of shootings, while drug-related issues are cited in 18%. (My thinking on this is slowly evolving, because previously I had assumed the drug economy was at the root of much of the violence. I still wonder if the drug economy factors in some way into many of the arguments if you trace them back far enough, and maybe arguments just take on a life of their own at some point.)
- 37% of fatal shootings from 2020 have been cleared as of January 2022, where “cleared” generally means an arrest has been made. I wondered how many cases might still be open from 2020 that might still be cleared, but the report says that when an arrest is going to be made, 75% of the time it will be made within about three months.
- Conviction rates in fatal shooting cases ranged from 96% in 2016 to 80% in 2020.
The book Ghettoside referred to a 40% clearance rate in Los Angeles during the height of the 1990s murder surge there. It is remarkable how similar the 37% number above is. Doing the math, the chances of a murderer being caught and convicted is something like 1 in 3. Again, in a surprising echo of what that book discussed, the recommendations of this report mostly talk about crime prevention and suppression strategies. They specifically talk about dedicating more resources to investigation of non-fatal shootings, but they do not recommend increasing the number of homicide detectives or improving their training.
fairy tales
The Spectator has a review of a new book on the origin of fairy tales. I tended to think “fairies” were Celtic in origin, but this article talks about Middle East, French, and Nordic origins among others. And some were just invented by Hans Christian Andersen, who apparently stayed in Charles Dickens’s house at some point and severely outstayed his welcome.
pictures of plants underground
Wageningen University (Austria?) has an archive of over a thousand drawings of plant species including how their roots are understood to grow underground, provided with scales. They are provided with a Creative Commons license, although the creators request to be informed if they are published elsewhere.
U.S. labor market growth
Axios has a brief piece on the demographics of the labor force in the U.S. A tight labor market is not just a short-term phenomenon during the pandemic recovery.
In the 2010s, the massive millennial generation was entering the workforce, the massive baby bo0m generation was still hard at work, and there was a multi-year hangover from the deep recession caused by the global financial crisis. But now, boomers are retiring, millennials are approaching middle age, and the Gen Z that follows them is comparatively small.
Axios
So combine this trend with anti-immigrant politics, and we may have a problem. It could lead to the double-edged sword of higher wages and inflation, a trend toward toward greater automation and technological innovation, a general drag on economic growth (which could ultimately lead to deflation), left wing politics, right wing politics, business pressure for more globalization/offshoring, or some combination of any of these (other than inflation and deflation, but maybe it is possible to have a sudden reversal between these and hard for policy to react quickly even if we knew what to do). It is hard to know what to do, but rational immigration policies based on skills and education to fill jobs available would be a start.
supply, demand, and prices do not really exist
This statement by James Galbraith makes my head spin a bit.
Just as Einstein had erased Euclid’s axiom of parallels, Keynes’s General Theory had long since obliterated the supply curves for labor and saving, thereby eliminating the supposed markets for labor and capital.
It followed that the prices of production were set by costs (mostly labor costs and interest rates), while quantities were determined by effective demand. Markets were not treated as if they were magical. It was obvious that most resources and components did not move under the influence of an invisible hand. Rather, they moved according to contracts between companies on terms set by negotiation, as had been the case for more than a hundred years. Technology was managed by organizations – mostly by large corporations – in what was sometimes called “the new industrial state.”
Project Syndicate
This is in a review of a book arguing that prices are really important. It’s a bit disturbing to me to think that there might not be a consensus among economists about how the economy actually works. We ordinary people can grasp theories like prices equilibrating supply and demand, and even how interest rates are related to the money supply and inflation, if we try really hard. But we assume the experts understand this stuff on a much deeper level, and that it is fundamentally science. If our understanding of civilization turns out to be based on pseudoscience, we might be in trouble.