Kevin Drum pushes back on the WSJ claim that household debt is a problem in America, and Kevin brings the receipts: “. . . debt as a percent of disposable income . . . is currently lower than it was at the end of 2019 (9.8% vs. 10%). “. . . household debt as a […]
Testing Oceanic Carbon Capture I’ve mentioned previously the hypothesis that iron fertilization of the ocean and consequent phytoplankton blooms is one feasible method to achieve global carbon capture. Small-scale experiments have been done already. The results have been mixed insofar as documenting the scale of phytoplankton blooms, but there has been no reported harm. Another […]
Analogies are risky things, but I think there’s a useful analogy between (1) the belief that global conservation is a sufficient antidote to rising atmospheric CO2 and (2) the belief that herd immunity is a sufficient antidote to pandemics. Herd immunity is the model in which, as a deadly pathogen moves through the population, enough […]
Yesterday, I posted about geoengineering the oceans as a promising form of carbon capture. But why do we need carbon capture at all? Can’t we just conserve our way out of global warming? No. Here are a couple of reasons why the *only* way to avert climate disaster is to start removing carbon from the […]
Global heating continues unabated. While decarbonizing our energy sources is certainly important, it is too late to prevent global disaster. Coastal flooding, desertification, wildfires will continue to increase, driving vulnerable populations to migrate and igniting resource wars for fresh water and arable land. It’s already driving migration and violence in the Middle East and Central […]
One motivation to getting my genome sequenced was to see whether I had known risk alleles for dementia (spoiler alert: I don’t). My dad was diagnosed with frontotemporal lobe dementia a few years before he died. His brain biopsy after death returned a diagnosis of Alzheimers. He might have had both. One of the known […]
Several years ago, I got my genome sequenced and obtained my variant call files, the tabulation of all differences between my gene sequences and the annotated human genome. Although my primary care physician was aware, I didn’t require his intermediation to obtain or interpret my genomics data. How I might react to adverse information was […]
I was born into an America where the eight-hour workday was widely observed. But what was for me just another fact of life was a hard-won right of the labor movement that cost hundreds of lives. “Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age […]
As a subject in the Moderna phase III COVID vaccine trial, I wasn’t told whether I’d get the vaccine or a placebo. Indeed, neither my nurse nor the doctor overseeing the trial knew which subjects got which. It was a double-blind trial. 12 hours after the second jab, I started experiencing a headache, muscle and […]
Kevin Drum has a post up at jabberwocking.com about a claim by the chair of the Alabama GOP that democracies lead to socialism. I can’t think of a single example of a socialist country that evolved from democracy to socialism. Russia became socialist when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky government by violent revolution. Socialism throughout […]