of laser fusion to date: $5 billion, <a href=”https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/science/fusion-project-faces-a-frugal-congress.html?smid=tw-share”>supposedly.</a> (as of 2012).
Construction on the NIF began in 1997 but management problems and technical delays slowed progress into the early 2000s. Progress after 2000 was smoother, but compared to initial estimates, NIF was completed five years behind schedule and was almost four times more expensive than originally budgeted. ,,, (Wikipedia)
Reminds me of cold fusion, which was a real thing except that it was not fusion and it was cold, with the endothermic trigger exceeding the energy capacity of the exothermic output that followed. My guess is that folks with a lot of money invested in oil would support fusion research because they know it poses no threat to their major investments and keeps money out of safe fission reactor development and power grid improvements that would allow distribution of concentrated power generation in geographically advantageous locations by both fission and renewables.
Humanity’s failure to avert the crisis of a warming climate is sometimes framed as a grand technological problem: For centuries, countries relied on fossil fuels to industrialize their economies and generate wealth, and it was only in recent years that alternative ways of powering a society, like solar and wind energy, became viable.
But when it comes to electricity, at least, that story isn’t true. Today, the United States gets 60 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels and just 20 percent from renewables. The final 20 percent comes from nuclear power, a technology that has existed since the 1950s, produces no carbon dioxide and has killed far fewer people than fossil fuels. …
(Op-ed does not mention Fusion Power, which is pretty much always ‘right around the corner.)
(There’s lots of problems with nuclear power. Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, for instance. Disposal of radioactive waste. Relatively short lifetime of reactor facilities. But, at least they do provide electricity.)
My bet is that the problems of fission power are solvable, but the problems of fusion power are not. Also, if one believes that fission reactors are inherently dangerous, then just imagine what could go wrong with large scale fusion reactors.
… Scientists at the California-based National Ignition Facility are exploring a nuclear fusion process that uses lasers to heat a reactor up to 60 million degrees Celsius — four times hotter than the center of the sun. …
Separately, a multinational research group called ITER is working on developing other methods of fusion energy in southern France, with the goal of creating a huge magnetic fusion device by 2025. …
A couple of possibilities there. Notably Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) whose story was told in We Were Soldiers Once… and Young and Billy Westmoreland until his dying day. It was complicated. The domino theory thing was bunk and our involvement went back to 1919 when Wilson failed to tackle colonialism with France and England at Versailles Treaty talks. Young Ho was there on the wait staff, by the way. Wilson got his marching orders for war debt collection from bankers, his friends by way of his infant Federal Reserve, which led to German reparations and a century of Eurasian war along with some sub-Saharan spillover.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
My guess is that a lot more retired generals thought the US withdrawal from Vietnam was a political sellout than were willing to say so publicly after the roasting that Westmoreland got in the press.
Taliban et al irritate us so much on our way out that we feel compelled to come back and brush them aside — really seriously — which the Taliban quickly lose to conventional professional soldiers. Former Afgan soldiers — having be introduced to Zoom world (i.e., what the middle class expects everywhere else) — having been terrified with the experience of actually losing Zoom world forever — take up arms and become a big factor in rolling the Taliban mafia back (Taliban used mafia like intimidation to take over; not real fighting).
We sense an opportunity. We expand our roll up of the terror mafia (how could it happen otherwise) — more and more frustrated Afgans come in for the big win — understanding how much they have to fight for this time. Bingo; in a month the Taliban criminal gang vanishes.
“What you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.”
I have the impression that generous amounts of fusion power would be opposed by a good number of environmentalists today. A future they imagine where people have a lot of energy available to them is to be opposed. That’s really what I pick up from a lot of these guys. They pretty uniformly oppose fission power generation, even though it has a good record and would almost certainly provide decades of power to give time to perfect other energy technologies. For some reason they want to electrify most everything and then count on wind and such, and when that doesn’t work out you can bet they will “sadly” say there is no alternative other than to heavily restrict a lot of activities they do not like much. Bet they lose a lot of influence though if fusion looks viable.
It is a well-known marketing trick to label, relabel, and even mislabel a product again and again to increase sales. We think of the almighty Coke and the multiple iterations that they have had just on their cans. We’ve also seen consumer products like paper towels that have additives that make a mess disappear much faster, diapers that hold, ahem, waste better, and other innovations of consumer products that make our today better than the yesterday.
So how is a product marketed as different, when it could or could not be much different than say, a thousand years ago?
Disposable income in the country has exploded in the past 25 years as evidenced here:
The mean household disposable income is now, depending upon poll and date anywhere from $76,057 per year upwards to $91,000 a year for the standard white family of four. Sadly, we have not seen the same in the minority communities and have to discount disposable income for those groups to 61 cents per every dollar of the above stated ($46,394 if we do the math).
As the suburban disposable incomes have risen, so have also consumer staples, as evidenced by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over that same period:
These two trends of higher disposable income are directly correlated to the increase of CPI over that same period. But what about food prices? Well, here is the same period with data from the BLS:
Now we see a non-conforming set of data in our statistics. I will leave this statistical anomaly up to the finer professionals that write here regularly.
So who are the marketing campaigns for?
As cost of living has increased since the 1980s, so has disposable income, however there is a breakdown as white middle and upper class Americans now command a higher percentage. This allows them to shell out 10% more on average for a Tesla, buy groceries exclusively from Whole Foods, and also pay for labels.
Remember a time of “the Incredible Edible Egg!” or “Pork, the Other White Meat”, or even, “Beef, its what’s for dinner” Those were similar times.
Trade industries for years have thrown money at ad campaigns, and yet recently have stopped. One reason we can explain this is the beef production per year going back to 1910:
We can correlate by this data that beef consumption largely mirrors population growth, as with most things in consumer consumption. We can also have a look at the spikes in certain areas. Let’s start by smoothing it out. Let’s assume consumer consumption since 1985 has not changed, and that the consumption of meat be it beef, poultry, or pork, is somewhat interchangeable. Fungible goods.
In this graph, we have the beef (blue), poultry (orange), and pork (grey).
What we can extrapolate is that the goods are fungible. In the data, there is an increase in poultry in 1995-1996 coupled with a decrease in both pork and beef. So what was going on in marketing in 1995? This year came on the heels of the largest E.coli scare in 1992 where Jack in The Box had contaminated products – beef. That could be one reason for the inversion. Another could be the holdover from the 70-80s anti-fat movements that culminated in a demonization of anything but poultry and turkey, until, in the mid-90s “The Other White Meat” campaign started and pork was lumped into poultry and turkey, although loosely by a New York Times article that was repeated for years until pork loin became interchangeable with poultry and beef in the bin of White Meat. This from 1995-2000 we can see in the trends of the above data. Marketing at its finest, “it’s fatty but still white meat”. We can also see evidence of this around the turn of the century in sports drinks, which to find out, were mostly sugar water with a bit of salt, all made by Pepsi Co, and Coca-Cola, to increase market share with the waning of the sugary soda business. Now that the sugar movement has taken a hit, Pepsi Co. Coca-Cola, and Nestle have double down on water and run campaigns so that the general public doesn’t realize that the municipal supplies their tax dollars pay for are the same taps that fill the plastic bottles they spend over $1 for.
So what can we infer? Marketing matters.
The sugar industry demonized high fat diets as American’s pant size increased year after year. Now that pendulum has swung the other way. But as of the early 2000s a new movement as become common place: organics.
Organics is the process of producing crop and also meat off of minimally treated, somewhat non-invasive methods. We grow produce using responsible methods, and then feed that to the animals and we eat both. The birth of the Organic movement was well on its way in 2005, with a Certification from the USDA program established in 1990, which had arguably lived in obscurity until then.
Fast forward a few years with further demonization of the meat industry due to documentary films such as Food, Inc. and Forks Over Knives! One wants you to buy from a farmer, one wants you to stop buying meat altogether. The birth of Veganism.
So what’s in a label?
Let’s break down public perception into actual quantitative reality:
Level 1 – “All Natural”, “Clean”, “No Hormones or Antibiotics”
Public perception – “They are pumping these plants and animals with all kinds of chemicals”
Reality –The process has not changed in 60 years. Antibiotics are expensive, as are chemicals. Most outfits have to run as lean as possible. This was never an issue.
Level 2 – “Third Party Certified”
Public perception – interchangeable with USDA Certified Organic
Reality – I pay these guys for a label for my packaging. They may or may not certify anything
Level 3 – USDA Certified Organic
Public perception – “superior quality over the terrible agriculture megalords”
Reality – I pay the USDA $10,000 for them to audit my practices and if I do not conform, I can’t use the labeling. Meaning, if I use a product that is ethically, or environmentally better than their guidance I cannot sell as certified organic.
These are the three most commonplace labeling/marketing schema out there right now, but there are two new ones on the horizon about to take the market:
Newspeak 1 – “Certified Regenerative”
Public perception – “They are capturing carbon and regenerating the soils to help with climate change.”
Reality – Pastured meat production has always done this. Most vegetable farms that are multi-generational have been doing this. This is also known as Grandpa’s method and has been around since the European settlers threw dead fish in the ground to plant corn as per instructed by the Iroquois.
Newspeak 2 – “Certified Vegan”
Public perception – “You mean this whole time they have been using animal byproducts to grow our organic vegetables?”
Reality – Yes. We use bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion, manure, and whatever organic materials that we can get our hands on. The majority of the organics we are collecting to compost and fertilize are almost 100% waste products from the fishing, meat processing, and animal raising process. We also get compost from mushroom farms as well, which cannot be reused for mushroom farming. If we were to switch to an engineered lab produced set of fertilizers we would have 3x the costs as well as 3x the waste. Chemical waste, I don’t need to explain, we have billions tied up in superfund sites already and chemical companies trying to sell us all the “next best thing”.
End result – marketing works. With disposable incomes increasing over time and now a 600% jump in people who identify as alternative consumers (vegan, vegetarian) we now have 9.6 million people with an abundance of funds to dramatically sway the agriculture market, for better or worse. We need to be informed as to what these labels mean for the end consumer, as well as the farmer. The middle man will always get his gold.
There is no graph for this: In this graph, we have the beef (blue), poultry (orange), and pork (grey).
I can fix this. I also bought labels for food products (Oscar Meyer, Kraft) and Pharma (Baxter, etc,). I had to abide in both industries with FDA and USDA regulations when having labeling and packaging done. Lunchables, bacon, lunch meat, hot dogs, Synthroid, blood bags, dialysates, etc.
This is right up my alley. If you can fill in the gaps, I can post this for you.
Inflation in the United States rose sharply again in July, the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of prices showed, a pandemic-related jump that’s expected to fade but will keep pressure on policymakers until it does.
The Personal Consumption Expenditures index, the measure of price gains that the Fed uses as its official target, rose 4.2 percent last month compared with a year earlier, the Commerce Department said on Friday. The increase was higher than the 4.1 percent jump that economists in a Bloomberg survey had anticipated, and the fastest pace since 1991.
The measure climbed 0.4 percent from June, in line with a 0.4 percent rise projected by economists.
The data, is based on household spending on goods and services, comes as the Fed is considering when and how to begin slowing its large-scale bond purchases, its first step toward a more normal policy setting as the economy heals. Speaking at an annual gathering of economists and central bankers, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, indicated he favors slowing the bond purchases starting this year, while making it clear that the central bank is closely monitoring risks tied to the Delta variant of the coronavirus. …
Personal income increased 1.1 percent in July from June, a figure bolstered by reopening businesses and the Child Tax Credit payments created as part of the American Rescue Plan.
Stocks on Wall Street jumped on Friday, capping a week of gains that lifted major benchmarks back into record territory. The S&P 500 rose 0.9 percent, reaching a new high, and the Nasdaq composite rose 1.2 percent.
For the week, the S&P 500 rose 1.5 percent, rebounding from a loss the week before.
Wall Street started the day slightly higher but the gains picked up after the release of prepared remarks by Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, that signaled the Fed could begin to remove some support for the economy this year but has no plans to raise interest rates soon. Mr. Powell made the comments at an annual gathering of central bankers and economists.
The Fed has been buying $120 billion in government-backed bonds to bolster the economic activity by keeping many kinds of borrowing cheap, and its officials are actively debating when to begin slowing those purchases.
The yield on 10-year Treasury notes fell to 1.30 percent. …
Stocks on Wall Street jumped on Friday, capping a week of gains that lifted major benchmarks back into record territory. The S&P 500 rose 0.9 percent, reaching a new high, and the Nasdaq composite rose 1.2 percent.
For the week, the S&P 500 rose 1.5 percent, rebounding from a loss the week before.
Wall Street started the day slightly higher but the gains picked up after the release of prepared remarks by Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, that signaled the Fed could begin to remove some support for the economy this year but has no plans to raise interest rates soon. Mr. Powell made the comments at an annual gathering of central bankers and economists.
The Fed has been buying $120 billion in government-backed bonds to bolster the economic activity by keeping many kinds of borrowing cheap, and its officials are actively debating when to begin slowing those purchases.
The yield on 10-year Treasury notes fell to 1.30 percent. …
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
“…the Fed could begin to remove some support for the economy this year but has no plans to raise interest rates soon… …The yield on 10-year Treasury notes fell to 1.30 percent. …”
[So, the Fed actually raised interest rates without the Fed actually raising interest rates. What the Fed did was spread the spreads. The inter-bank lending rate which is all that the Fed sets directly remains the same for now and it should be worth noting that the prime rate for short term lending to qualified business clients is indexed off the Fed’s inter-bank lending rate. There are a few other bank rates including even a few credit cards that are in turn indexed off the prime rate, but the bulk of long term lending for big ticket items is driven by bond rates, not the Fed rate or its offspring. Back in 2004, BoA gave me a prime rate HELOC, but in 1Q2009 after the financial crisis was exposed then BoA stopped the draw on it. I had just hit the cap on it and paid it off at prime rate by November 2018, but was never able to borrow more on it. Given the risks of layoffs facing our household and our age, then further borrowing had become a pariah in my eyes.]
well, no one will understand this, but what else is new”
we will risk the illusion of fusion, or the radioactive pollution of fission
before we will pry our cold dead hands off our sacred steering wheel.
we could accomplish the same thing by breeding a few turkeys with an orange feather and poor suvival skills. release it into the wild and do some marketing so that girls swooned for a man with a genuine orange turkey feather.
then we could spend our growing GDP on creating habitat for turkeys.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
BTW, wild turkeys – actual wild turkeys – come to feed in my back yard every morning. There are three adults and at least ten juveniles. If they are still doing this after we take our fall beach vacation, then I may take one for myself. My wife does not eat game birds nor anything but the white breast meat of domestic fowl.
We have flocks of Sand Cranes besides the gangs of turkeys. It is funny to watch the male, tail feathers spread, stand in the road while the flock crosses. Twenty-five years ago, there were Plovers running up the subdivision streets. Gone now. We were nestled between wetlands, fields and woods. Herons, assorted birds and the usual fox, racoons, muskrats, turtles are still plentiful there.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
The sweeping international effort to evacuate thousands of vulnerable Afghans and foreign nationals from Kabul’s airport neared completion on Saturday as the United States continued to withdraw its remaining troops from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after carrying out a retaliatory airstrike in response to a devastating terrorist attack.
Britain planned to end the evacuation of its citizens on Saturday and to begin bringing its remaining troops home, Gen. Nick Carter, the chief of the defense staff, told the BBC’s Radio 4. More American troops have also begun getting on planes and leaving. A military official said on Saturday that there were around 4,000 U.S. troops in Kabul, down from 5,800a few days ago. …
The troop departures signaled a tumultuous end to a 20-year war that has left the country awash in grief and desperation, with many Afghans fearing for their lives under Taliban rule and struggling with cash shortages and rising food prices.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban forces sealed off Kabul’s airport Saturday to most Afghans hoping for evacuation, as the U.S. and its allies were ending a chaotic airlift that will end their troops’ two decades in Afghanistan.
Western leaders acknowledged their withdrawal would mean leaving behind some of their citizens and many locals who helped them over the years, and they vowed to try to continue working with the Taliban to allow local allies to leave after President Joe Biden’s Tuesday’s deadline to withdraw from the country.
Although most of its allies had finished their evacuation flights, the U.S. planned to keep its round-the-clock flights going until the deadline, saying 113,500 people had been evacuated since Aug. 14, the day before the Taliban claimed Kabul. …
Britain ended its evacuation flights Saturday, though Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to “shift heaven and earth” to get more of those at risk from the Taliban to Britain by other means. …
From voting rights to the culture wars, state legislatures controlled by Republicans are playing a role well beyond their own state borders.
With the release of the 2020 census last month, the drawing of legislative districts that could in large part determine control of Congress for the next decade heads to the nation’s state legislatures, the heart of Republican political power.
Increasingly, state legislatures, especially in 30 Republican-controlled states, have seized an outsize role for themselves, pressing conservative agendas on voting, Covid-19 and the culture wars that are amplifying partisan splits and shaping policy well beyond their own borders.
Indeed, for a party out of power in Washington, state legislatures have become enormous sources of leverage and influence. That is especially true for rural conservatives who largely control the legislatures in key states like Wisconsin, Texas and Georgia and could now lock in a strong Republican tilt in Congress and cement their own power for the next decade. The Texas Legislature’s pending approval of new restrictions on voting is but the latest example. …
The next battle, already underway in many states, is over the drawing of congressional and state legislative districts. Republicans control 26 of the legislatures that will draw political maps, compared with 13 for Democrats. (Other states have nonpartisan commissions that draw legislative districts, or have just one seat.)
Democrats have embraced their own causes, passing laws to expand voting rights, raise minimum wages and tighten controls on firearms in the 18 states where they control the legislatures.
But Republican legislatures are pursuing political and ideological agendas that dwarf those of their opponents. This year’s legislative sessions have spawned the largest wave of anti-abortion legislation since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Many Republican legislatures have seized power from Democratic-leaning cities and counties on issues including policing, the coronavirus and tree preservation. …
… On Sunday morning, American University of Afghanistan students and their families boarded buses bound for the airport, on what could prove to be the last day of civilian evacuations.
The American troop departures will mark the tumultuous end to a 20-year war that has left the country awash in grief and desperation, with many Afghans fearing for their lives under Taliban rule and struggling to support their families amid cash shortages and rising food prices. …
Fearing another attack, the Taliban pushed people away from the airport on Sunday, stringing barbed wire across the road to disperse crowds, according to Al Jazeera. …
The attack at the airport on Thursday, which happened as U.S. troops were screening people hoping to enter, once again underscored the human toll of the war — both for Afghans, the overwhelming majority of the victims, and for the American families who lost loved ones sent to fight it.
The 13 American military personnel who were killed came from across the country, from California to Wyoming to Tennessee, and had an average age of just over 22. Eleven were Marines, one was a Navy medic and another was in the Army.
They included Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Mass. Her former junior R.O.T.C. instructor recalled her as an “absolute warrior” in high school, and Marine First Lt. John Coppola said in a statement that she had been “crucial to evacuating thousands of women and children.”
Also killed was Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23, of Sacramento, Calif. In a post on Instagram, in which she is seen holding a child in Kabul, she wrote, “I love my job.”
About 113,500 people, most of them Afghans, have been evacuated since Aug. 14, a Pentagon official said, the day before the Taliban seized Kabul. On Saturday, about 1,400 people were still at the airport, having been screened and booked for flights, Pentagon officials said. …
you are not on my list of “no one.” Neither is Freud. He may have made too much of it, but he discovered things that had not been uncovered before. His trouble is he took his parables too seriously. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but while Freud uncovered Victorian neurosis about sex, and gave us a chance for freedom from neurosis at least, if not opening the way to an unhealthy obsession with it, the neurosis seems to be back, never having really gone away.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
The Victorian Era had a lot of syphilis whereas we have AIDS and, worse yet, child support enforcement. Where lust meets fearfulness then conflicted feelings of denial and guilt will roam free. Such contradictions are the stuff from which all great neuroses are made.
I used to have some acres on which roamed a congregation of wild turkeys. I cam upon them once having a church picnic, the pastor and all the ladies of the choir. Enjoyed watching them.
I think my neighbors have killed all of them by now. Along with all of the elk and the visiting cougar, not to mention the trees that sheltered them during the day.
Oh, they are not my neighbors any more. I am just a simple city boy and could not compete with crafty farmer folk.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
When I see the flock feeding out back then I cannot help but think of a honey-orange glaze and stuffing of sweet potatoes, wild rice, raisins, and walnuts. Domestic poultry is most often paired with a dry white wine, but game birds go well with a robust dry red.
but i think it comes ultimately from the fact that the big ape will beat the s…stuffing out of you if he catches you messing with his female (sorry, ladies, but you signed on for the Darwin plan). of course he will beat the stuffing out of her too, because once anger is aroused it needs to spread itself around until the hormones all slosh back into their resting state.
meanwhile the lady in question, unbeknownst to herself, is actually quite interested in the gene pool she is tapping for her unborn child (before there were big apes to impose some regularity on the program, she didn’t really give a f…er, care, who beat up who, as neither the winner nor the loser saw any reason to beat her up), and of course as we evolved and developed “economic growth” supporting the child became the big issue. with enough economic growth the state will take care of child support and men and women will both be free to ignore the problem….as well as their own ultimate happiness.
but yes, all of this led highly evolved humans to feel there was something dangerous, or wrong, or bad, about sex, and at first thought that “god” was watching them and their thoughts, but nowadays don’t give a damn about god, but still feel that there is something bad about what other people do in private, or especially if they do it in the road.
me, i can’t tell if it is or not. certainly there is that child support to think about, even if you are married to the lady, and the big ape if you are not. but i don’t favor government solutions to this problem.
turkey: a silly white bird. which makes me think it funny when etymologists say “honky” is derived from slang for “Hungarian”. It is obviously a reference to another silly white bird who makes a noise said to sound like “honk! honk!”
(yes, i know that “real” turkeys are not white. which proves my point.)
Fusion Power vs Climate Change
Fusion power is a strong alternative energy source
Potential contribution of fusion power generation to low-carbon development
It’s Time for Congress to Support Fusion Energy
Stop Misinformation From Blocking The Rollout Of Fusion Energy
start-up backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos aims to make nearly unlimited clean energy
Scientists race to replicate ‘the power source of stars’ in climate fight
(Because, one of these days, physicists are going to figure out how to get this done.)
ROTFLMAO!
Making a fusion reactor is easy. Containing a fusion reactor is a bit like putting a star in a box.
Congressional (federal) support
of laser fusion to date: $5 billion, <a href=”https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/science/fusion-project-faces-a-frugal-congress.html?smid=tw-share”>supposedly.</a> (as of 2012).
The National Ignition Facility (NIF), is a large laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device, located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. NIF uses lasers to heat and compress a small amount of hydrogen fuel with the goal of inducing nuclear fusion reactions. NIF’s mission is to achieve fusion ignition with high energy gain, and to support nuclear weapon maintenance and design by studying the behavior of matter under the conditions found within nuclear weapons. NIF is the largest and most energetic ICF device built to date, and the largest laser in the world. …
Construction on the NIF began in 1997 but management problems and technical delays slowed progress into the early 2000s. Progress after 2000 was smoother, but compared to initial estimates, NIF was completed five years behind schedule and was almost four times more expensive than originally budgeted. ,,, (Wikipedia)
supposedly
Reminds me of cold fusion, which was a real thing except that it was not fusion and it was cold, with the endothermic trigger exceeding the energy capacity of the exothermic output that followed. My guess is that folks with a lot of money invested in oil would support fusion research because they know it poses no threat to their major investments and keeps money out of safe fission reactor development and power grid improvements that would allow distribution of concentrated power generation in geographically advantageous locations by both fission and renewables.
Is There a Nuclear Option for Stopping Climate Change?
(Op-ed does not mention Fusion Power, which is pretty much always ‘right around the corner.)
(There’s lots of problems with nuclear power. Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, for instance. Disposal of radioactive waste. Relatively short lifetime of reactor facilities. But, at least they do provide electricity.)
Fusion Power vs Climate Change
Fusion power is a strong alternative energy source
Potential contribution of fusion power generation to low-carbon development
It’s Time for Congress to Support Fusion Energy
Stop Misinformation From Blocking The Rollout Of Fusion Energy
start-up backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos aims to make nearly unlimited clean energy
Scientists race to replicate ‘the power source of stars’ in climate fight
(Because, one of these days, physicists are going to figure out how to get this done.)
My bet is that the problems of fission power are solvable, but the problems of fusion power are not. Also, if one believes that fission reactors are inherently dangerous, then just imagine what could go wrong with large scale fusion reactors.
Scientists race to replicate ‘the power source of stars’ in climate fight
… Scientists at the California-based National Ignition Facility are exploring a nuclear fusion process that uses lasers to heat a reactor up to 60 million degrees Celsius — four times hotter than the center of the sun. …
Separately, a multinational research group called ITER is working on developing other methods of fusion energy in southern France, with the goal of creating a huge magnetic fusion device by 2025. …
Forgot where I saw this, but somewhere you can find retired generals that think we should have not left Vietnam.
A couple of possibilities there. Notably Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) whose story was told in We Were Soldiers Once… and Young and Billy Westmoreland until his dying day. It was complicated. The domino theory thing was bunk and our involvement went back to 1919 when Wilson failed to tackle colonialism with France and England at Versailles Treaty talks. Young Ho was there on the wait staff, by the way. Wilson got his marching orders for war debt collection from bankers, his friends by way of his infant Federal Reserve, which led to German reparations and a century of Eurasian war along with some sub-Saharan spillover.
…which might lead one to believe that how a nation makes peace in the long run is more important than with whom they make war.
My guess is that a lot more retired generals thought the US withdrawal from Vietnam was a political sellout than were willing to say so publicly after the roasting that Westmoreland got in the press.
My Afgan fantasy
Taliban et al irritate us so much on our way out that we feel compelled to come back and brush them aside — really seriously — which the Taliban quickly lose to conventional professional soldiers. Former Afgan soldiers — having be introduced to Zoom world (i.e., what the middle class expects everywhere else) — having been terrified with the experience of actually losing Zoom world forever — take up arms and become a big factor in rolling the Taliban mafia back (Taliban used mafia like intimidation to take over; not real fighting).
We sense an opportunity. We expand our roll up of the terror mafia (how could it happen otherwise) — more and more frustrated Afgans come in for the big win — understanding how much they have to fight for this time. Bingo; in a month the Taliban criminal gang vanishes.
Geez. After 20 years?
“What you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.”
Hey, at least he did not advocate organizing the Taliban into a union in order to bring order to that part of the world.
That’s actually funny. Kudos.
I have the impression that generous amounts of fusion power would be opposed by a good number of environmentalists today. A future they imagine where people have a lot of energy available to them is to be opposed. That’s really what I pick up from a lot of these guys. They pretty uniformly oppose fission power generation, even though it has a good record and would almost certainly provide decades of power to give time to perfect other energy technologies. For some reason they want to electrify most everything and then count on wind and such, and when that doesn’t work out you can bet they will “sadly” say there is no alternative other than to heavily restrict a lot of activities they do not like much. Bet they lose a lot of influence though if fusion looks viable.
Something like this maybe?
Is Electricity Harmful to Your Health?
Some are going to say ‘Of course it is!’
Labeling for Increased Profits
It is a well-known marketing trick to label, relabel, and even mislabel a product again and again to increase sales. We think of the almighty Coke and the multiple iterations that they have had just on their cans. We’ve also seen consumer products like paper towels that have additives that make a mess disappear much faster, diapers that hold, ahem, waste better, and other innovations of consumer products that make our today better than the yesterday.
So how is a product marketed as different, when it could or could not be much different than say, a thousand years ago?
Disposable income in the country has exploded in the past 25 years as evidenced here:
<iframe src=’https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=unitedstadisperinc&v=202108271242V20200908&d1=19960902&h=300&w=600′ height=’300′ width=’600′ frameborder=’0′ scrolling=’no’></iframe><br />source: <a href=’https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/disposable-personal-income’>tradingeconomics.com</a>
The mean household disposable income is now, depending upon poll and date anywhere from $76,057 per year upwards to $91,000 a year for the standard white family of four. Sadly, we have not seen the same in the minority communities and have to discount disposable income for those groups to 61 cents per every dollar of the above stated ($46,394 if we do the math).
As the suburban disposable incomes have risen, so have also consumer staples, as evidenced by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over that same period:
<iframe src=’https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=unitedstacorconpri&v=202108111237V20200908&d1=19960902&h=300&w=600′ height=’300′ width=’600′ frameborder=’0′ scrolling=’no’></iframe><br />source: <a href=’https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/core-consumer-prices’>tradingeconomics.com</a>
These two trends of higher disposable income are directly correlated to the increase of CPI over that same period. But what about food prices? Well, here is the same period with data from the BLS:
<iframe src=’https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=unitedstafooinf&v=202108111242V20200908&d1=19960902&h=300&w=600′ height=’300′ width=’600′ frameborder=’0′ scrolling=’no’></iframe><br />source: <a href=’https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/food-inflation’>tradingeconomics.com</a>
Now we see a non-conforming set of data in our statistics. I will leave this statistical anomaly up to the finer professionals that write here regularly.
So who are the marketing campaigns for?
As cost of living has increased since the 1980s, so has disposable income, however there is a breakdown as white middle and upper class Americans now command a higher percentage. This allows them to shell out 10% more on average for a Tesla, buy groceries exclusively from Whole Foods, and also pay for labels.
Remember a time of “the Incredible Edible Egg!” or “Pork, the Other White Meat”, or even, “Beef, its what’s for dinner” Those were similar times.
Trade industries for years have thrown money at ad campaigns, and yet recently have stopped. One reason we can explain this is the beef production per year going back to 1910:
We can correlate by this data that beef consumption largely mirrors population growth, as with most things in consumer consumption. We can also have a look at the spikes in certain areas. Let’s start by smoothing it out. Let’s assume consumer consumption since 1985 has not changed, and that the consumption of meat be it beef, poultry, or pork, is somewhat interchangeable. Fungible goods.
In this graph, we have the beef (blue), poultry (orange), and pork (grey).
What we can extrapolate is that the goods are fungible. In the data, there is an increase in poultry in 1995-1996 coupled with a decrease in both pork and beef. So what was going on in marketing in 1995? This year came on the heels of the largest E.coli scare in 1992 where Jack in The Box had contaminated products – beef. That could be one reason for the inversion. Another could be the holdover from the 70-80s anti-fat movements that culminated in a demonization of anything but poultry and turkey, until, in the mid-90s “The Other White Meat” campaign started and pork was lumped into poultry and turkey, although loosely by a New York Times article that was repeated for years until pork loin became interchangeable with poultry and beef in the bin of White Meat. This from 1995-2000 we can see in the trends of the above data. Marketing at its finest, “it’s fatty but still white meat”. We can also see evidence of this around the turn of the century in sports drinks, which to find out, were mostly sugar water with a bit of salt, all made by Pepsi Co, and Coca-Cola, to increase market share with the waning of the sugary soda business. Now that the sugar movement has taken a hit, Pepsi Co. Coca-Cola, and Nestle have double down on water and run campaigns so that the general public doesn’t realize that the municipal supplies their tax dollars pay for are the same taps that fill the plastic bottles they spend over $1 for.
So what can we infer? Marketing matters.
The sugar industry demonized high fat diets as American’s pant size increased year after year. Now that pendulum has swung the other way. But as of the early 2000s a new movement as become common place: organics.
Organics is the process of producing crop and also meat off of minimally treated, somewhat non-invasive methods. We grow produce using responsible methods, and then feed that to the animals and we eat both. The birth of the Organic movement was well on its way in 2005, with a Certification from the USDA program established in 1990, which had arguably lived in obscurity until then.
Fast forward a few years with further demonization of the meat industry due to documentary films such as Food, Inc. and Forks Over Knives! One wants you to buy from a farmer, one wants you to stop buying meat altogether. The birth of Veganism.
So what’s in a label?
Let’s break down public perception into actual quantitative reality:
Level 1 – “All Natural”, “Clean”, “No Hormones or Antibiotics”
Public perception – “They are pumping these plants and animals with all kinds of chemicals”
Reality –The process has not changed in 60 years. Antibiotics are expensive, as are chemicals. Most outfits have to run as lean as possible. This was never an issue.
Level 2 – “Third Party Certified”
Public perception – interchangeable with USDA Certified Organic
Reality – I pay these guys for a label for my packaging. They may or may not certify anything
Level 3 – USDA Certified Organic
Public perception – “superior quality over the terrible agriculture megalords”
Reality – I pay the USDA $10,000 for them to audit my practices and if I do not conform, I can’t use the labeling. Meaning, if I use a product that is ethically, or environmentally better than their guidance I cannot sell as certified organic.
These are the three most commonplace labeling/marketing schema out there right now, but there are two new ones on the horizon about to take the market:
Newspeak 1 – “Certified Regenerative”
Public perception – “They are capturing carbon and regenerating the soils to help with climate change.”
Reality – Pastured meat production has always done this. Most vegetable farms that are multi-generational have been doing this. This is also known as Grandpa’s method and has been around since the European settlers threw dead fish in the ground to plant corn as per instructed by the Iroquois.
Newspeak 2 – “Certified Vegan”
Public perception – “You mean this whole time they have been using animal byproducts to grow our organic vegetables?”
Reality – Yes. We use bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion, manure, and whatever organic materials that we can get our hands on. The majority of the organics we are collecting to compost and fertilize are almost 100% waste products from the fishing, meat processing, and animal raising process. We also get compost from mushroom farms as well, which cannot be reused for mushroom farming. If we were to switch to an engineered lab produced set of fertilizers we would have 3x the costs as well as 3x the waste. Chemical waste, I don’t need to explain, we have billions tied up in superfund sites already and chemical companies trying to sell us all the “next best thing”.
End result – marketing works. With disposable incomes increasing over time and now a 600% jump in people who identify as alternative consumers (vegan, vegetarian) we now have 9.6 million people with an abundance of funds to dramatically sway the agriculture market, for better or worse. We need to be informed as to what these labels mean for the end consumer, as well as the farmer. The middle man will always get his gold.
Haha, well yall didn’t need to embedded references anyway 🙂
Michael
There is no graph for this: In this graph, we have the beef (blue), poultry (orange), and pork (grey).
I can fix this. I also bought labels for food products (Oscar Meyer, Kraft) and Pharma (Baxter, etc,). I had to abide in both industries with FDA and USDA regulations when having labeling and packaging done. Lunchables, bacon, lunch meat, hot dogs, Synthroid, blood bags, dialysates, etc.
This is right up my alley. If you can fill in the gaps, I can post this for you.
Yes sir. Let me send you my word document.
Try the same for Gmail
Inflation rose again in July, the Fed’s preferred measure of prices shows
Stocks climb to record after Fed chair signals cautious approach to interest rates
Stocks on Wall Street jumped on Friday, capping a week of gains that lifted major benchmarks back into record territory. The S&P 500 rose 0.9 percent, reaching a new high, and the Nasdaq composite rose 1.2 percent.
For the week, the S&P 500 rose 1.5 percent, rebounding from a loss the week before.
Wall Street started the day slightly higher but the gains picked up after the release of prepared remarks by Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, that signaled the Fed could begin to remove some support for the economy this year but has no plans to raise interest rates soon. Mr. Powell made the comments at an annual gathering of central bankers and economists.
The Fed has been buying $120 billion in government-backed bonds to bolster the economic activity by keeping many kinds of borrowing cheap, and its officials are actively debating when to begin slowing those purchases.
The yield on 10-year Treasury notes fell to 1.30 percent. …
Fred,
“…the Fed could begin to remove some support for the economy this year but has no plans to raise interest rates soon… …The yield on 10-year Treasury notes fell to 1.30 percent. …”
[So, the Fed actually raised interest rates without the Fed actually raising interest rates. What the Fed did was spread the spreads. The inter-bank lending rate which is all that the Fed sets directly remains the same for now and it should be worth noting that the prime rate for short term lending to qualified business clients is indexed off the Fed’s inter-bank lending rate. There are a few other bank rates including even a few credit cards that are in turn indexed off the prime rate, but the bulk of long term lending for big ticket items is driven by bond rates, not the Fed rate or its offspring. Back in 2004, BoA gave me a prime rate HELOC, but in 1Q2009 after the financial crisis was exposed then BoA stopped the draw on it. I had just hit the cap on it and paid it off at prime rate by November 2018, but was never able to borrow more on it. Given the risks of layoffs facing our household and our age, then further borrowing had become a pariah in my eyes.]
well, no one will understand this, but what else is new”
we will risk the illusion of fusion, or the radioactive pollution of fission
before we will pry our cold dead hands off our sacred steering wheel.
we could accomplish the same thing by breeding a few turkeys with an orange feather and poor suvival skills. release it into the wild and do some marketing so that girls swooned for a man with a genuine orange turkey feather.
then we could spend our growing GDP on creating habitat for turkeys.
Coberly,
No one? I certainly understood it. Freud understood it and wallowed in it a bit too much.
BTW, wild turkeys – actual wild turkeys – come to feed in my back yard every morning. There are three adults and at least ten juveniles. If they are still doing this after we take our fall beach vacation, then I may take one for myself. My wife does not eat game birds nor anything but the white breast meat of domestic fowl.
Actual as opposed to fake turkeys?
We have flocks of Sand Cranes besides the gangs of turkeys. It is funny to watch the male, tail feathers spread, stand in the road while the flock crosses. Twenty-five years ago, there were Plovers running up the subdivision streets. Gone now. We were nestled between wetlands, fields and woods. Herons, assorted birds and the usual fox, racoons, muskrats, turtles are still plentiful there.
Actual is not orange, nor bourbon, nor Trump supporter.
Evacuations From Kabul Wind Down as US Prepares to Pull Last Troops
Taliban guard airport as most NATO troops leave Afghanistan
As Washington Stews, State Legislatures Increasingly Shape American Politics
as evacuations wind down…
Ron
you are not on my list of “no one.” Neither is Freud. He may have made too much of it, but he discovered things that had not been uncovered before. His trouble is he took his parables too seriously. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but while Freud uncovered Victorian neurosis about sex, and gave us a chance for freedom from neurosis at least, if not opening the way to an unhealthy obsession with it, the neurosis seems to be back, never having really gone away.
thx
Coberly,
The Victorian Era had a lot of syphilis whereas we have AIDS and, worse yet, child support enforcement. Where lust meets fearfulness then conflicted feelings of denial and guilt will roam free. Such contradictions are the stuff from which all great neuroses are made.
Ron
I used to have some acres on which roamed a congregation of wild turkeys. I cam upon them once having a church picnic, the pastor and all the ladies of the choir. Enjoyed watching them.
I think my neighbors have killed all of them by now. Along with all of the elk and the visiting cougar, not to mention the trees that sheltered them during the day.
Oh, they are not my neighbors any more. I am just a simple city boy and could not compete with crafty farmer folk.
Coberly,
When I see the flock feeding out back then I cannot help but think of a honey-orange glaze and stuffing of sweet potatoes, wild rice, raisins, and walnuts. Domestic poultry is most often paired with a dry white wine, but game birds go well with a robust dry red.
Ron
child support has always been the main issue.
but i think it comes ultimately from the fact that the big ape will beat the s…stuffing out of you if he catches you messing with his female (sorry, ladies, but you signed on for the Darwin plan). of course he will beat the stuffing out of her too, because once anger is aroused it needs to spread itself around until the hormones all slosh back into their resting state.
meanwhile the lady in question, unbeknownst to herself, is actually quite interested in the gene pool she is tapping for her unborn child (before there were big apes to impose some regularity on the program, she didn’t really give a f…er, care, who beat up who, as neither the winner nor the loser saw any reason to beat her up), and of course as we evolved and developed “economic growth” supporting the child became the big issue. with enough economic growth the state will take care of child support and men and women will both be free to ignore the problem….as well as their own ultimate happiness.
but yes, all of this led highly evolved humans to feel there was something dangerous, or wrong, or bad, about sex, and at first thought that “god” was watching them and their thoughts, but nowadays don’t give a damn about god, but still feel that there is something bad about what other people do in private, or especially if they do it in the road.
me, i can’t tell if it is or not. certainly there is that child support to think about, even if you are married to the lady, and the big ape if you are not. but i don’t favor government solutions to this problem.
Ron
my gramma made very delicious thanksgiving dinner, but as i get older i get squeamish about eating even delicious animals.
I do not allow myself to have opinions about what other people eat…unless it is dogs.
funny thing is I feed my dogs chickens which I do not eat myself.
Ron
turkey: a silly white bird. which makes me think it funny when etymologists say “honky” is derived from slang for “Hungarian”. It is obviously a reference to another silly white bird who makes a noise said to sound like “honk! honk!”
(yes, i know that “real” turkeys are not white. which proves my point.)