Today there’s a lively exchange going on in the Google Group composed of members of my high school graduating class. About 10% of the class was in the military. One ascended to the rank of colonel in the Air Force. At least one of my high school classmates died in Vietnam.

I don’t have a great deal to say about the holiday. All of those who served during World War I are dead now and soon no one who even remembers the Great War will remain. Circumstances are very different now than they were when Armistice Day became Veteran’s Day. IMO the holiday should be retired.

At the COPS27 meeting, President Biden announced new EPA rules regulating methane emissions. From the Associated Press:

At the climate conference, Biden discussed a new supplemental rule that will crack down on methane emissions, expanding on a similar regulation his administration released last year. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that contributes significantly to global warming.

IMO there’s considerably more bang for the buck in reducing methane and nitrous oxide emissions than from reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If you believe in human-created climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions at all, those should be the focus.

As this EPA page makes clear although methane constitutes about 11% of U. S. greenhouse gas emissions, it’s a much more important contributor to climate change than carbon dioxide.

Most methane emissions are from losses during the production of oil, natural gas (and coal), especially pipeline leaks, and agriculture and that in turn is mostly from “enteric fermentation”, the digestive process of ruminants, particularly cows. There are ways of reducing both of those.

In the case of “enteric fermentation”, methane emissions can be reduced by what you feed cows and how you deal with manure. You don’t need to eliminate the raising of cattle entirely; even fairly minor reductions in methane emissions should be adequate.

I believe that one regular commenter here is something of an expert on this subject and I hope he chimes in.

I’m less enthusiastic about what’s referred to as “loss and damage” (payoffs to poorer countries) for two reasons. First, because it’s a license to steal and second, because it only considers one side of the ledger. I don’t believe that the United States is a net liability to the world. Indeed, quite the opposite but the notion of “loss and damage” payments certainly suggests that’s the case.

At any rate I look forward to the actual policy that emerges from this. I hope there are carrots as well as sticks.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed. Meta. Twitter. Salesforce. Microsoft. Oracle. Lyft. Opendoor. Stripe. All have announced major layoffs. Other major players like Amazon Web Services have announced hiring freezes. The layoffs add up to nearly 100,000. All in all quite a disturbance in the force.

I don’t know if it’s the end of an era but I suspect wages in IT won’t be rising in the near future.

You know what a “collective noun” is? Like a covey of quail, a flock of geese, or a pod of whales? There’s even one for politicians: an equivocation of politicians. If there’s is a collective noun for rationalizations, my researches have not revealed what it is. Whatever it might be, I’m pretty sure we’re going to get it now that the midterm elections are over. As the line from The Big Chill says, rationalization is as great a human need as air, food, or water—-ever tried to go 24 hours without rationalizing?

As of this writing the Red Wave seems to have piddled out. We don’t actually know who will control the House or Senate yet and may not for quite a while. There are some things that we can conjecture on

• Party affiliation does matter
• Gerrymandering works
• Candidate quality does matter
• On net Donald Trump’s endorsement does not help
• The issues (inflation, crime, abortion, etc.) do matter but they’re not dispositive
• Coherence may matter but it’s not essential

Are there any more things we can conclude from the results of the midterms?

Yesterday Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker was elected to a second term. I listened to part of his victory speech.

It is very clear, at least to my ear, that he is running for president. In the unlikely event that President Biden chooses not to run, it looks to me as though every Democratic governor, which includes Newsom, Bennett, and Pritzker, will be seeking the nomination.

Well, I voted this afternoon. Mostly to vote on the referenda but also to vote against Pritzker and several others.

The election judges told me that roughly 2/3s of those registered in the precinct had voted in person. When you add absentee and early voting I’m guessing that the total turnout will be something like 80%. That’s pretty high for a midterm election.

I found this interesting. An archive has been created of the more than 300,000 faces that have appeared in Time magazine from 1923 to 2014. From the analysis:

Our first investigation looked at the relationship between the representation of women in the magazine, and cultural attitudes towards women. Focusing on the period between the 1940s and the 1990s, we found that the percentage of women’s faces found in Time between the 1940s and 1990s correlates with attitudes towards women in both the larger historical context as well as within the textual content of the magazine.

and

An interesting pattern emerges in the smoothed data, notably an increase in the proportion of female faces from the 1920s to 1945, a post-Second World War dip, a rebound beginning in the mid-1960s, followed by a decrease in the 1980’s, and a final rebound beginning in the early-1990s.

We found that this trend was very consistent with the attitudes towards women expressed in the text of the magazine, and also with larger historical trends. Women increased their participation in public life as they entered the workforce during the Second World War, were ushered out of public life during the post-war period until the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. In the 1980s, we saw a backlash against feminism and a return to feminism starting in the early 1990s. These trends in cultural attitudes toward women tend to track well with the extent of their representation in the news magazine.

A lot of the women are smiling since so many of the faces appear in advertisements and advertisements are more likely to depict smiling people, presumably happy with their consumer behavior.

The graph above was sampled from this post at the Center for Immigration Studies by Andrew R. Arthur. I would like to say that it is a balanced description of the problem but, honestly, it isn’t. The Biden Administration inherited a complex problem that was more or less under control and made it worse. The problem is exacerbated by the large number of unaccompanied children crossing the border and by the internationalization of illegal entry into the United States.

The reason it’s a problem is that there is not a growing need for workers who can’t read, write, or speak English and adding to that population pushes the wages down for workers in that cohort already here. The chickens is done come home to roost. We can’t kick the can down the road any longer.

The graph at the top of the page caught my eye. Alarming as it is, it doesn’t tell the whole story. We’re spending three times as much in real terms on K12 education as we did 30 years ago.

Our problem isn’t that we’re not spending enough. We spend more than any other developed country. Our problem is that we aren’t getting enough bang for our buck.

We’re not just in competition with ourselves anymore. We’re in competition with every person with a laptop with an Internet connection anywhere in the world.