Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

East Asian people may have genetic defenses against Covid-19

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It’s somewhat taboo to suggest that ethnic groups might be genetically superior or inferior to others, but when it comes to susceptibility or resistance to specific diseases, we should be willing to acknowledge this possibility. Most countries in Asia seemed to manage the Covid emergency much better than most western countries. I thought from the beginning that much better health and quarantine systems at airports must be a big factor. Somewhat privacy-invasive contact tracing measures and a willingness to restrict movement seem to be other significant differences between west and east, and you can see these even in Australia and New Zealand which are still largely ethnically European (although I say lots of Asian faces on trips on Sydney). But even given that, it always seemed like there might be some genetic or lifestyle factors to explain the order-of-magnitude differences.

Studies have shown that more people in Asia have a defense enzyme called APOBEC3A that attacks RNA viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, when compared to people in Europe and Africa…

Some people may wonder if the self-extinction of the delta variant in Japan was caused by something special in the genetic make-up of Japanese people, but Inoue disagrees.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “People in East Asia, such as Koreans, are ethnically the same as Japanese. But I don’t know why this observation was made in Japan.”

Japan Times

The “self-extinction”, by the way, is the idea that once isolated from external influxes and exposed to a largely resistant population, the virus may have acquired mutations that have doomed it.

I understand why it is politically and culturally hard to do contact tracing and quarantine in the U.S., and nearly impossible to physically restrict movement. I still don’t understand why we can’t implement effective screening and quarantine procedures at our international airports when we have had a year and a half of emergency conditions now to get that done.

the littoral combat ship

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We’ve heard a lot about the F-35 aircraft being a boondoggle. Apparently, the U.S. Navy has a boondoggle of its own called the littoral combat ship.

It has been plagued by problems since its conception in 2001. Uncharitably dubbed the “little crappy ship” by its detractors, the program has faced cost overruns, delays, mechanical failures, and questions over the platforms’ survivability in high-intensity combat. Each of the 23 commissioned littoral combat ships cost around $500 million to build, with astronomical operating costs adding to the program’s hefty price tag. 

War on the Rocks

Knowing nothing about naval or littoral combat, building a bunch of small ships like this does seem like a better idea than a few multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers and battleships which can be taken out by missiles and mines. A half a billion dollars for one “crappy little ship” seems a bit steep though.

the anti-vax movement…of 1796

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This is a great article from Open Culture – even if I hadn’t read it (I did), the pictures alone made me laugh out loud. However, beyond the laughs, the interesting and educational part was the description of how each and every new vaccine that comes out causes some fear and resistance, and this has been going on since vaccines were invented. Smallpox was a horrible disease, and the first vaccine was derived from a related virus that afflicts cows. People at the time were concerned that the vaccine would make them grow horns and start mooing. The early vaccine technology was in fact riskier than what we have now, although much less risky than the diseases they were vaccinating against, which is the whole point. The only silver lining is that once a vaccine has been out for a few decades to a couple centuries at most, we all seem to just accept it as the new normal and move on to complaining about the next one that comes out. Almost everyone screaming about the (incredibly effective, low-risk in absolute terms, and absolutely negligible risk relative to the disease it is preventing) Covid-19 vaccine is going to have been inoculated for polio, measles, tetanus, and many other diseases as a child. We don’t appreciate the suffering these vaccines have prevented (at least in developed countries) because we have not suffered ourselves or lost people we care about to these diseases in living memory.

those wild, wacky Covid-19 data points

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I have noticed for awhile that the CDC’s Covid-19 data doesn’t agree with other sources, which don’t agree with each other. Looking at my home city (and County) of Philadelphia, the CDC’s numbers have been consistently higher for many months. This matters because government agencies, employers (including mine), and individuals are basing decisions on these numbers, often the CDC numbers.

Let’s look at today’s numbers for Philadelphia. I’ll look just at “confirmed cases” because that seems to be the most readily available and frequently updated by all sources, although really I think we should be focused more on deaths at this point, because deaths (although morbid) gives you some information on cases and vaccination/immunity combined. In other words, if cases are high but deaths are low, you would have an annoyance but not a major problem. Nonetheless, let’s look at those cases for Philadelphia today! I’m writing this on Sunday, November 21, 2021. I’m using the links from my coronavirus tracker post.

  • CDC: 111.55 / 100,000 population / 7 days (data from November 13-19)
  • Pennsylvania state health department: 86.4 / 100,000 population / 7 days (data from November 12-18)
  • Covid Act Now: 116.2 / 100,000 population / 7 days (data from November 20 which they describe as a 7 day average provided by the New York Times)

There are a number of things that could explain differences in the numbers. First, the time periods the data represent varying slightly by source. Second, whether the data represent the date the test was done, the test was reported, or the estimated date of infection. Generally I think what is reported is the date the test was done. This is hard data of a sort, but it introduces a time lag as numerous and scattered labs report their data. The data you are looking at might not yet represent all the data available on a given day, and it might be corrected retroactively, meaning if you check what today’s number was a week from now, you might see a different number from today. Finally, when reporting data for a location like a county, it may be important whether they are reporting all tests done in that county or matching tests to the home addresses (or employer addresses?) of the individuals tested. Philadelphia, for example, has a huge health care industry with a lot of commuters not just from surrounding counties in Pennsylvania but parts of New Jersey and Delaware. (States were never the right entities to track this pandemic, it should obviously be done by entities covering metro areas.)

If all the sources were using similar data but using slightly different time periods or calculation methods, I would expect some differences but I would expect the differences to be random. The state health department numbers are consistently lower, however. I am hoping that might be because they are doing a better job of matching tests to home addresses.

James Galbraith on inflation

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Here is what James Galbraith (an economist at the University of Texas, whose name is always given with the middle initial of K, but I find that a bit pompous) says is causing inflation:

  • high oil prices (“oil” being shorthand for gasoline, fuel oil, and natural gas) driven by pandemic recovery and cut-backs in shale oil/gas production. A short-term solution is to sell from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to stabilize prices. He says shale production will pick up driven by market forces now that prices are high.
  • commodity speculation. Solution is regulation.
  • military spending. This is a good point – he says we are spending $700 billion per year on “weapons and defense”, and I suspect this number would be over a trillion per year if you consider all defense, intelligence, security and nuclear weapons spending as a whole, which is scatter across the government beyond the Department of Defense. Something that irritates me – why do we talk about the infrastructure investment and social spending bills Congress is considering as totals over a decade or more, which leads to a sticker shock effect, but defense spending on an annual basis, if we talk about it all? I AM GOING TO SPEND OVER ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS ON MY HOUSE OVER THE NEXT DECADE!!! But my monthly payment is something I can (just barely, not particularly comfortably) afford on my income, and that is how I think and plan my life and family finances. Democrats seem to think the big numbers have a kind of positive shock value showing that they are doing big, bold things. But Republicans just incoherently scream SPENDING!!! and INFLATION!!! and that communication strategy seems to be winning. (My 30-year fixed rate monthly mortgage payment is going to seem less spectacular, by the way, in a world where a bag of groceries costs $100 or more, which seems to be where we are headed. My wife and I are relying on a lot of prepared food and takeout these days, because I am working full time to maintain our private health insurance and other benefits, and we are raising small children in the richest country in the world without a childcare program. Also, our dishwasher is broken and due to the supposed labor shortage, the repair has been postponed several times even though the part is available. We are grateful that we are healthy and well-nourished and have a roof over our heads and realize many people are in much worse situations…)
  • supply chain bottlenecks, including clogged ports. These will work themselves out, although it seems to be a painfully slow process.

He says raising interest rates alone would not be a good solution to any of these problems. He says it is important for wage increases to go to low-paid workers. That certainly seems fair and just, although I am not sure how that is a solution to the problems above.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution Horizon Scan

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This might be the first best of/forecast article I have come across in 2021, which is a sign of the impending end times (of this calendar year). I can only read the abstract due to The Man’s “Intellectual Property Rights”, but here are a few things mentioned:

  • satellite megaconstellations
  • deep sea mining
  • floating photovoltaics
  • long-distance wireless energy
  • ammonia as a fuel source

Most of these seem fairly self-evident, although I was not immediately sure how you would use ammonia as a fuel source. A quick web search reminds me that it is hydrogen rich, so if you have a chemical or biological process that can separate the nitrogen from the hydrogen without requiring energy input, you can produce hydrogen which you could then burn or use in a fuel cell. Both ammonia and hydrogen are fairly dangerous gases, so you would want to be kind of careful or do this in out of the way industrial areas (typically out of the way of the upper and middle classes, that is…)

really big bombs

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Here are some facts and figures from an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

  • The nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 15 and 20 kilotons.
  • The largest nuclear weapon tested by the United States was Castle Bravo, at 15 MT, in 1954. It was bigger than the scientists calculated it was going to be, and produced more fallout.
  • The largest weapon tested by the Soviet Union was Tsar Bomba at 50 MT in 1961. They actually designed the bomb to be 100 MT and intentionally exploded it only halfway.

You can make bigger nuclear bombs by using smaller ones (relatively speaking) to set them off. There seems to be almost no theoretical limit to how high you could go.

At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.” At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons. Most of Teller’s testimony remains classified to this day, but other scientists at the meeting recorded, after Teller had left, that they were “shocked” by his proposal. “It would contaminate the Earth,” one suggested…

It is hard to convey the damage of a gigaton bomb, because at such yields many traditional scaling laws do not work (the bomb blows a hole in the atmosphere, essentially). However, a study from 1963 suggested that, if detonated 28 miles (45 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth, a 10,000-megaton weapon could set fires over an area 500 miles (800 kilometers) in diameter.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Bombs this big have no strategic or practical use, they tell us. I don’t find this comforting. It just takes one madman to not get that and try something reckless one time, and our civilization is gone.

cars = freedom?

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I don’t know how many regular readers of this blog exist, but if there are some, you know I am not a huge fan of cars. They ruin our urban areas, pollute our air and water, kill and injure us and our children, and make us fat and sick and sociopathic. Beyond that, I knew about traffic stops. The U.S. and U.S. states do not just issue you an ID card at birth. Generally speaking, your driver’s license is your most official government issued ID for most people, and there are enough hurdles to getting one that disadvantaged people (poor, homeless, unemployed, transient, undocumented, disabled, addicted, mentally ill, too old, too young, too busy, the list goes on…) often don’t have them. Those people still use cars to get around in many cases, because that is the only way to get around in many of our communities, and then when they get pulled over in a routine traffic stop they are in trouble. Especially if they already have a warrant or some past legal trouble, which the disadvantaged quite often do.

It’s also always bothered me that you give up your rights against search and seizure the minute you step into a car. Police can stop you and search your car and body on very little pretext in a way they would be unlikely to do if you were on foot (“stop and frisk” aside – another conversation, although it illustrates that police intrusiveness we routinely accept when we are in a motor vehicle can cause an uproar when we are not). Sobriety checkpoints also bother me – don’t get me wrong, drunk driving is very, very bad. But a random sobriety checkpoint subjects you to search and seizure on no pretext whatsoever other than the fact that you chose to get into a car, and if you have some previous legal trouble, or just a paperwork problem, suddenly you are in trouble you had no reason to expect. (The best solution to drunk driving is a walkable community.)

So that’s the disadvantaged portion of the population, who tend to get more disadvantaged over time because the deck is stacked against them. But what about the larger population as a whole? Well, this Freakonomics episode tells the story in a way I hadn’t fully considered:

  • Before cars, ordinary people and police just didn’t interact that much. Generally speaking, a search warrant was required for the police to stop and search someone. There weren’t as many police, they weren’t as heavily armed and they just weren’t that busy.
  • Once cars came on the scene and started killing and injuring people in large numbers, traffic laws were enacted. Police were told to enforce the traffic laws, and courts ruled repeatedly that the imminent danger posed by cars in real time overruled the need to obtain a warrant.
  • Add in guns, or really just the possibility of guns being present in any traffic stop, and you have even more violence on top of the deaths and injuries the cars are already causing – “The traffic stop is the most common encounter between individuals and the police, and it’s also the site of a lot of police violence and police shootings that we see in the news today.“
  • At this point, technology would allow us to handle most traffic violations as an administrative matter, with a picture of the violation and a ticket sent in the mail. The article likens this to tax collection and penalties. The police wouldn’t even be involved in most cases.

A couple more thoughts – First, there is a link between mounting fines and mass incarceration, so just imposing more fines on disadvantaged people and trying to collect them may not be the perfect answer. Second, this article doesn’t go into it, but there is also a critical role for safer street and intersection design, which can help a lot to reduce the number of violations, deaths, and injuries in the first place. And I already mentioned it, but the larger urban design and land use policy can reduce the need for driving and increase the number of people able to get around under their own power, which is good for the air, water, land, our bodies and our minds!

I still have some hope for computer-driven cars too. The hype has died down, which means the practical application will probably gradually creep up on us when we least expect it. A computer-driven vehicle should be able to come to a complete stop at every stop sign and red light, stay under the speed limit, stay out of the bike lane, and just generally avoid unpredictable behavior. And if it doesn’t, that is a malfunction rather than a crime, which it should be able to self-report to police and insurance companies and get corrected. Some people are still going to get hurt because there is no risk-free transportation system, but it should be far fewer than what we deal with now.

“paying for” infrastructure and social spending

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Overall, I like the way this article in The Week explains how the government spending since the start of the Covid recession, followed by the infrastructure and social spending being proposed now, is likely to be inflationary.

It’s likely, though, that the massive COVID relief bills were the primary culprit. While a supply shock should lead to price spikes, it should also lead to a fall-off in demand as people adjust their overall budgets to higher prices. When people have to spend more on gas and groceries, they should spend less on other goods. That’s not what we’re seeing though: demand remains extremely robust. People are complaining about price increases, but they aren’t cutting back. This is precisely what you would expect if household balance sheets were in generally excellent shape, as in fact they are; if there were lots of pent-up demand due to the pandemic, as in fact there is; and if people were beginning to assume that higher prices were becoming normal — which, if they are, is precisely how you get a self-reinforcing inflationary spiral as opposed to something more “transitory.”

That doesn’t mean those bills were a mistake. The risk really was higher in under-shooting than in over-shooting, and so the government erred on the side of over-shooting and over-shot. It just means that policy going forward has to respond to the new economic situation. Stimulative spending now has a downside of further boosting inflation, and therefore encouraging the Federal Reserve to hike rates faster. Inasmuch as the reconciliation bill’s spending will be stimulative — and its major components like the expanded child tax credit certainly will be — that’s a problem.

The Week

Put another way (not the way this article puts it), the new government spending being proposed is necessary, but right now, with the private economy suddenly heating up, might not be the best time for it. The political system is hopeless about getting the timing right. By the time politicians react to a situation, go through an election cycle, and negotiate a new deal (pun somewhat intended?), conditions have already changed. While I am not an economic historian, this is my limited understanding of how the Kennedy administration managed to ramp up spending in an overheated economy in the 1960s, leading to the inflation crisis of the 1970s.

Monetary policy clearly helps, but “automatic fiscal stabilizers” are another way this problem could be tackled from the government spending end. Congress could pass its “big spending bills”, but tie distribution of the money to economic indicators like the unemployment rate. The Sahm index, which is basically a ratio of the current unemployment rate to its average over the last year. is one metric that has been proposed for this. Using this rule would have turned on the taps in March 2020, then started to throttle back in January 2021 – this sounds about right, given that inflation started to ramp up suddenly in the second quarter of 2021! Congress could take this “set it and forget it” approach, and a future Congress could always undo it if they want, but it might just stabilize our economy and society to the point where it becomes the new normal.

I’ll try not to be cynical. Maybe our politicians are capable of understanding this, communicating it effectively to the public and business community to build support, and doing the right thing.

Okay, I can’t help being cynical – the Democrats will probably push ahead with their enormously beneficial but poorly timed spending bills, the public will benefit enormously from these bills but not give any credit to the Democrats, inflation will continue to ramp up, and the Republicans will fiddle while the economy burns going into the next election cycle.