I’m starting to see pleas for a reinstatement of requirements to wear facemasks in public places. As I see it the different reactions are:

• This is long overdue. Maybe it should be permanent.
• Hell, no. Masks are useless.
• Whatever

My own view is that masks, whether ordinary surgical-style masks, KN95s, or N95s have a marginal effect in reducing the spread of viruses in general COVID-19 in particular. They aren’t forcefields. If the margin is small enough and wearing masks leads people to doing things they wouldn’t have done without them, mask mandates could be counterproductive.

I wear a mask indoors in almost all public places. That’s my call. I don’t think it will prevent me from contracting COVID-19. I think that its effectiveness is marginal and small. Even if marginal it’s something and don’t imagine that it will do more.

While I found this post by Paul Greenberg at Hakai Magazine about the excavation of a Bronze Age Cretan site interesting, it did bring up a pet peeve of mine. I really wonder if people who recommend the “Mediterranean diet” really know what people who live there eat? They eat an enormous amount of bread. I once saw a photo of a typical Sicilian family’s weekly diet. The table was piled high with bread. Yes, there was other stuff but the main component of the diet was bread. “Staff of live”, indeed. It’s no wonder that the Romans gave land to their soldiers—they needed it to grow wheat.

I think that what most advocates of the “Mediterranean diet” mean is eat more fish and vegetables. That’s all well and good but I suspect it’s a lot less like the real Mediterranean diet than the advocates realize.

At the Washington Post Megan McArdle is elated:

This is a long way from the dream of nuclear power that is safe (no worries about what to do with spent fuel rods!) and so abundant that it will be “too cheap to meter.” Scientists have been chasing this dream since the 1950s, so long that it has become a mordant joke: “Fusion is the energy of the future … and always will be.” For now, that old saw remains true; the reaction would have to generate hundreds or thousands of times more energy than went into it to begin to be an economical source of power. The hurdles to get there are enormous, possibly the most complicated engineering project humanity has ever undertaken.

So it’s probably premature for anyone to dance around the house in their bathrobe, singing “Clean, green energy for everyone!,” but … nope, actually, going to do the happy dance anyway. Scientists have accomplished a net energy gain from a fusion reaction. This is potentially the biggest news of the decade.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are more reserved:

The news Tuesday that U.S. scientists have performed the world’s first controlled nuclear fusion reaction that generates a net energy gain is a refutation of American declinism. But don’t believe the hype that a fossil-fuel free world is near if only the government spends more.

Scientists have spent decades studying how to replicate in labs the nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun and stars. The fission reactions that power today’s nuclear plants involve splitting atoms and result in radioactive waste. Fusion entails combining atoms and theoretically could provide abundant, clean energy with no hazardous waste.

Hydrogen, fusion’s input, is the most abundant element in the universe, and no country dominates its supply, unlike some minerals used in lithium-ion batteries and wind turbines. The reactions also don’t generate CO2. But a stumbling block has long been figuring out how to generate more energy from the fusion reactions than is used to ignite them.

In the experiment that resulted in Tuesday’s breakthrough, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used 192 lasers to heat and compress hydrogen atoms at more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. The reaction released 3.15 megajoules of energy for every 2.05 megajoules of input—with some major caveats.

The lasers are less than 1% efficient and used about 300 megajoules. As Lawrence Livermore director Kim Budil put it: “300 megajoules at the wall [socket], two megajoules at the laser.” Generating electricity from fusion would require such reactions to be performed every second of the day, a vast increase in laser efficiency and reduction in their size.

There’s good reason to be excited about the breakthrough, but the Biden Administration is overselling its immediate impact. “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said.

What the experiment proved is that scientists can recreate the physical reactions in stars. But scaling the technology and making it commercially viable by most scientists’ accounts will likely take another few decades.

while at Big Think Ethan Siegel is even more negative:

For the first time in history, that milestone has now been achieved. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) has reached ignition, a tremendous step towards commercial nuclear fusion. But that doesn’t mean we’ve solved our energy needs; far from it. Here’s the truth of how it’s truly a remarkable achievement, but there’s still a long way to go.

[…]

There are a myriad of takeaway points from this new developments, but here’s what I think everyone should remember about nuclear fusion as we move forward into the future.

• We really have passed the breakeven point: where the energy incident on a target — the key energy that triggers a fusion reaction — is less than the energy we get out of the reaction itself.
• That threshold is just over 2.0 megajoules of incident laser energy, far less than many who asserted 3.5, 4, or even 5 megajoules would be required to achieve the breakeven point.
• A new facility, one with lenses and apparatuses designed to withstand these new energies, must be constructed.
• A prototype energy-generation plant will need to leverage still-developing technologies: safely chargeable capacitor banks, large systems of lenses so that successive fusion-generating shots can be fired with a new set of lenses while the recently used set can be “healed,” the ability to harness and convert the released energy into electrical energy, energy storage systems that can hold and distribute the energy over time, including during the time between successive shots, etc.
• And the dream of a home fusion plant that lives in your backyard will have to be relegated to the far future; residential homes cannot handle megajoules of energy being pulsed through them, and the needed capacitor banks would create a substantial fire/explosion hazard. It won’t be in your backyard or anyone’s backyard; these fusion generating endeavors belong in a dedicated, carefully monitored facility.

Even with this undoubted breakthrough I doubt we’ll see practical fusion in my lifetime. It’s still on the horizon. The horizon is a little closer now but it’s still on the horizon.

I find discussing trade with libertarian free traders frustrating. I believe in free trade. I also believe in the virgin birth. Belief is not enough when you’re talking about the economy. You’ve got to take practical considerations into account as well.

Referring to Don Boudreaux’s piece at AEIR, I wouldn’t accuse him of “naïve globalism”. I would accuse him of not understanding what David Ricardo actually wrote and how what he did write doesn’t apply to our present circumstances.

I have probably understood Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage for longer than Don Boudreaux has been alive. In addition I have actually read what Ricardo wrote and Mr. Boudreaux would be the exceptional commentator if he had. Practically everyone relies on what other say about comparative advantage rather than what Ricardo said.

I think there are several reasons that Ricardo’s theory does not apply to our present circumstances. For one thing “free trade” doesn’t just mean the absence of tariffs. It means the absence of any barriers or restrictions on trade in any form. That includes patents, copyrights, occupational licensing, and any other barrier to trade.

For another I have yet to encounter any manager who engages in the sort of arbitrage that Ricardo imagines. I have met lots who understand absolute advantage. They buy from the lowest cost sources. IMO Ricardo imagined trade that was completely controlled by some authority, e.g. “the Sovereign”, who did engage in the sort of arbitrage described by Ricardo.

A third reason is that unlike in Ricardo’s day the most important factor of production, capital, is highly portable from one country to another. Under such circumstances comparative advantage doesn’t mean much but absolute advantage does.

We are presently in a world in which absolute advantage is king and there are multiple non-tariff barriers that constrain trade.

I look forward to Mr. Boudreaux’s demonstration that even in the presence of those non-tariff barriers and other countries imposed all sorts of barriers on our goods and services the people of the United States would still benefit from that limited sort of free trade. I have never seen such a proof. Maybe it’s possible to construct one but I doubt it.

I think that what would happen is pretty much what is happening. People working the protected sectors, e.g. healthcare, finance, government, would benefit and everyone else would find it much harder to get alone. There would be lots of cheaper goods but the unemployed couldn’t afford them.

What was a rumor yesterday is today’s news. Lawrence Livermore has successfully produced a fusion reaction which actually produces more energy than is used in the reaction, i.e. has “net gain”. That’s a major breakthrough. Here’s a report from KSBW:

WASHINGTON —
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a “major scientific breakthrough” Tuesday in the decades-long quest to harness fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it, something called net energy gain, the Energy Department said.

The achievement will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power, Granholm and other officials said.

“This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery,” Granholm said at a news conference in Washington. The fusion breakthrough “will go down in the history books,” she said.

For my entire adult life practical fusion has been “just around the corner”. Not to diminish the importance of this breakthrough but fusion remains just around the corner. We might have a practical fusion reactor in a year, ten years, or a century.

So, let’s rejoice in this accomplishment while understanding the practical hurdles that remain.

The second Atlantic piece I wanted to comment on is “The Obvious Answer to Homelessness” by Jerusalem Demsas. In the piece the author makes a point which should be obvious but, apparently, is not. The cities and states with the highest numbers and rates of homelessness are not those with the highest rates of poverty, mental illness, or drug addiction but those in which there is just not enough “affordable housing” for the people who are trying to live there. The “obvious answer” to which the author refers is to build more affordable housing.

To the author’s credit attention is drawn to the biggest impediment to building more affordable housing, zoning, and its handmaiden, the full-throated support of progressives for building affordable housing in someone else’s neighborhood.

There’s an old daily strip from the Broom-Hilda comic strip in which Broom-Hilda is walking down the street and passes in front of a booth that Irwin the Troll has set up with the banner, “Questions Answered: 5 cents”. Irwin is, of course, providing the most absurd answers imaginable. Broom-Hilda walks a little farther to find another booth, set up by Gaylord the vulture with the banner, “Questions Answered Correctly: $5″.

Building more affordable housing is, of course, one possible solution to the problem of homelessness but there are others and some of them may be more practical and have fewer run-on effects. Is there any amount of money and construction which will build enough housing in San Francisco’s Mission District?

I would argue enthusiastically against higher federal housing subsidies. For an idea of why read up on the history of Pruitt-Igoe or Cabrini Green. The federal government’s track record in affordable housing is, shall we say, blemished.

We might consider the matter a different way: it’s not that there isn’t enough housing but that there are too many people. It’s a truism that you get more of what you subsidize. Do we really need more people who can’t afford to live wherever it is they’re trying to live?

If we want state and local governments to build more affordable housing, I would propose a head tax on businesses, i.e. a fixed fee extracted from businesses for each employee. The fee would be used to defray the costs of supporting these workers, i.e. housing, safety, sanitary, education, etc. You might be amazed at how many businesses are dependent on the present subsidies for their very existence and which ones they are.

There are a couple of Atlantic articles I wanted to comment on. The first, “Why the Age of American Progress Ended” by Derek Thompson, illustrates a fundamental misconception. His basic point is that we have overvalued invention at the expense of deployment:

the end of smallpox offers a usefully complete story, in which humanity triumphed unequivocally over a natural adversary. It’s a saga that offers lessons about progress—each of which pertains to America today.

The most fundamental is that implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress—a lesson the U.S. has failed to heed for the past several generations. Edward Jenner’s original vaccine could not have gone far without major assistance from early evangelists, such as Henry Cline; distribution strategies to preserve the vaccine across the Atlantic; and a sustained push from global bureaucracies more than a century after Jenner’s death.

The rest of the piece is mostly a complaint that we’re not living in the world of the Jetsons (“where’s my flying car?”). His solution, apparently, is more public-private partnerships:

The United States once believed in partnerships among the government, private industry, and the people to advance material progress. The Lincoln administration helped build the railroads. The New Deal helped electrify rural America. Dwight Eisenhower signed the Price-Anderson Act, which guaranteed government funds and limited liability for nuclear-energy firms in case of serious accidents, facilitating the construction of nuclear-power plants. John F. Kennedy’s space ambitions made NASA a major consumer of early microchips, which helped reduce their price by a factor of 30 in a matter of years, accelerating the software revolution.

I think the problem is somewhat different than he does and it has two factors. The first is that we’ve already picked the low-hanging fruit from a technological standpoint and the amount of time, effort, and investment required for that next technological breakthrough will be greater than for the previous ones. The pace of technological development is neither linear nor geometric. It’s hyperbolic.

Turning to electronics, the transistor was an enormous breakthrough relative to vacuum tubes. Semiconductors were invented nearly a century and a half ago; transistors 75 years ago. Contrary to popular view there hasn’t been a comparable breakthrough since—what has happened are elaborations on the breakthrough technologies.

The second factor is that in the real world things must make economic sense. We haven’t gone back to the moon, not because we had lost the ability but because it just didn’t make economic sense. With the collapse of the Soviet Union there just wasn’t a pressing geopolitical need and the cost (and danger) of the venture led us to turn to other things. Now our interest has been piqued again because of the activities of the Chinese in space.

This sounds pretty grim. From Gordon Chang at 1945:

Perhaps as many as 90% of China’s 1.41 billion people will come down with COVID-19, said Feng Zijian, former deputy chief of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to Bloomberg News. Feng predicts 60% of the population will be infected in the first wave.

China did not have to wait long. There is now a fast-moving wave ripping through Beijing.

The capital city was not prepared. “We have a child with a high fever but all the pharmacies are out of ibuprofen,” said a Beijing resident surnamed Lin to the Financial Times. “It came too fast, we didn’t have time to prepare.” Shortages are widespread. “Beijing is running out of medical supplies,” the London paper notes.

The situation is so bad, Peking University’s Michael Pettis reports on Twitter, that Beijingers are thinking of deliberately exposing themselves to the disease, so they won’t get it later when the public health care system has completely broken down.

There are also outbreaks across the country, including in Guangzhou, the capital of southern Guangdong province, the country’s factory floor. Some are calling the nationwide situation China’s “nuclear winter.” During the winter, the forecast is one million Covid deaths. Some estimate the toll could reach 2.1 million.

I honestly don’t know how much weight to put on this report. Gordon Chang has been predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese Communist Party or China itself for the last 20 years. A really serious outbreak in China will inevitably cause global problems, both economic and human.

Here’s an interesting little news piece, reported by Economic Times:

The car manufacturer released a statement on Friday that they are taking a difficult decision that will result in layoffs of workers, and it will last for more than half a year. They added that their industry was affected by a lot of factors starting from the surge of the Covid-19 pandemic and the global semiconductor shortage. However, the most challenging aspect was the shift towards the electric vehicle market and the change in manufacturing equipment to facilitate them.

Stellantis said earlier in March that they were going to reduce their workforce at the plant which was responsible for manufacturing the Jeep Cherokee model.

Still, they did not disclose the number of employees they plan to lay off. That was the last of multiple job cut-offs at the facility.

As it turns out, it’s all of them. I wonder whether Gov. Pritzker knew about this when he was running on his sterling record of bringing businesses to Illinois in November?

Will the last one to leave turn the lights out?