At LiveScience Ben Turner reports that the Chinese are preparing to deploy a test molten salt reactor:

The molten-salt nuclear reactor, which runs on liquid thorium rather than uranium, is expected to be safer than traditional reactors because the molten salt cools and solidifies quickly when exposed to the air, insulating the thorium, so that any potential leak would spill much less radiation into the surrounding environment compared with leaks from traditional reactors.

The prototype reactor is expected to be completed next month, with the first tests beginning as early as September. This will pave the way for the building of the first commercial reactor, slated for construction by 2030.

Here’s a good quote:

“Small-scale reactors have significant advantages in terms of efficiency, flexibility and economy,” Yan Rui, a physics professor at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, and colleagues wrote in a paper about the project published July 15 in the journal Nuclear Techniques. “They can play a key role in the future transition to clean energy. It is expected that small-scale reactors will be widely deployed in the next few years.”

The article is a bit misleading, however. Molten salt reactors have been around since the 1960s. They’re not new. One that’s used commercially would be new, however, and there are several U. S. companies just about as far along as the Chinese effort is characterized to be.

The main impediments here are government regulation, litigation, and priorities. We can litigate, regulate, and bicker ourselves to death.

I have a considerable amount for sympathy with the observations Sergio Galeano makes at The Hill:

An increase in skills is not the only thing that workers need. As shifts in labor demand have hurt the most vulnerable workers, there’s been a stronger spotlight on the mentorship, coaching and wraparound support services that are increasingly being recognized as part of a holistic approach to workforce and human capital development.

This support is critical, as women, minorities, less-educated and low income-workers, young people, and immigrants may all need to cope with making more occupational transitions than their peers as the pandemic winds down.

Many employers have responded to this reshuffling of the labor market by offering greater flexibility and nontraditional incentives. Despite this trend, however, benefits may not expand for all, increasing the risk of a second-class workforce.

There’s a role for government in all of these shifts. One way the government can start is greater federal investment in workforce training. Fortunately, there’s a conversation starting in Washington about the federal programs related to workforce development and training.

One of the major changes in the American economy over the last half century or so is that an increasing amount of the expense of training the workforce has been handed off to the workers. Years ago employee training programs and career paths that moved the employee from having, essentially, no experience to being a senior whatever. Those have vanished or, more precisely, they have become a business. Employers hire to suit—everyone from juniors to seniors in practically every field.

I think that Mr. Galeano is overestimating the ability of government to be an effective participant in this process. Government training programs are inevitably retrospective in nature—rather than training people for the jobs of the future or even the present they train them for the jobs of the past or jobs that will never materialize.

I don’t have a completely palatable solution for these problems. My proposal has long been to tighten the job market by limiting the number of workers brought in (legally or illegally) from abroad and restricting the ability of companies to offshore their workforces but otherwise let the market deal with the problem. That, too, has problems.

The quote of the day comes from Rob Smith at RealClearMarkets stated as “Rob’s Rule”:

The more celebrated the expert, the more likely he is to be a self-aggrandizing, bloviating fool.

His target is economics and, while I agree with some of his observations, I disagree with others. I agree with his observation that economics is a behavioral science wholeheartedly. I would add that I believe the move towards econometrics that really began to gain steam about 50 years ago was a misstep. Most of what we know about economics was already known about 200 years ago and for good reason.

Economics is not a predictive science like physics; it’s a descriptive one like anthropology much as economists hate it when I say that. No economist can tell you what the stock price for XXX Corp. will be two weeks from today or what the full range of secondary effects for any given government policy will be. They can be useful in providing the broad contours, though. There’s no real money in broad contours.

I found this piece at U. S. Naval Naval Institute by Captains Scot Miller and Charles Deleot and Manfred Koethe thought-provoking. I think they’re looking at the right problem—bad software:

According to the Consortium for Information and Software Quality (CISQ), in 2020 the United States wasted $2.08 trillion on bad software and its effects—nearly 10 percent of U.S. gross domestic product! The naval services’ estimated budget for fiscal year 2021 is about $207 billion, suggesting the Sea Services may lose $20 billion in 2021 to the effects of bad software. If the Navy was wasting $20 billion per year in fuel, then command dismissals, inspector general investigations, and Congressional inquiries would follow.

If read their analysis correctly, they point the finger at the following culprits:

• Agile development
• Software developers’ guilds

and propose a dedication to Model-Based Systems Engineering as a solution. I think they’re pointing in the wrong direction and, should their proposal be adopted, it will ultimately prove disappointing.

The authors quote one old wisecrack (“garbage in; garbage out”). Let me quote two more:

• A camel is a horse designed by a committee
• An elephant is a mouse built to military specification

“Agile development” can be summarized as the ability to respond to changes in requirements. I have seen good agile developments and bad ones. The difference is generally due to the “product owner”—the individual responsible for determining the scope of the development. Scope creep is impossible when the requirements and specifications of a development are rigidly enforced and that’s true regardless of the development methodology. Scope creep is all too easy when the needs are poorly defined and the product owner has deep pockets. Military projects, whether building a jet fighter or invading Afghanistan, are all too subject to scope creep. If you try to tell me otherwise, I’ll have some of what you’re having.

The authors provide no examples of these “guilds”. There’s a good reason: they don’t exist. There have been attempts at creating such things many times over the last 70 years but they’ve all failed. If they had succeeded there would be no such thing as offshoring software development or staffing companies like Tata.

What do exist are corporations with proprietary products. That has been true since computers were invented and it will inevitably frustrate the authors’ vision. As soon as the MBSE generators they imagine have been developed, those corporations will all change their products to elude them. That, too, is the history of computers.

Software development tools are already evolving to solve the problem the authors identify in a different way. The latest approach is called “low-code/no code”. See also “digital transformation”. While effective those tools are proprietary, too. Their promise is to bring software development closer to the end users and reduce its costs. That has been tried under different guises a dozen different times over the years. The latest strategy will founder for the same reason past approaches have: not everybody wants to be a programmer or has the required mental equipment.

As I read this piece by Theresa Hitchens at Breaking Defense, describing the potential of directed-energy weapons:

Current DE systems under development for countering unmanned aerial systems (c-UAS) have ranges “nearing 1 kilometer,” AFRL’s study explains, as opposed to other types of counter-UAS capabilities — such as net guns and shotguns — which are only effective at “10s of meters ranges.”

and

“By 2060 we can predict that DE systems will become more effective, and this idea of a force field includes methods to destroy other threats too,” he said. “Eventually there may be potential to achieve the penultimate goal of a Nuclear or ballistic missile umbrella. It’s fun to think about what that might be in 2060, but we don’t want to speculate too much.”

I could only think “How much energy would a weapons system capable of defending a military base require?” You can’t do that with solar power. I can only speculate that it would require nuclear fission or fusion or some method of producing power that hasn’t been invented yet.

I have been saying for some time that one of the best things about Illinois is the object lesson it provides for other states. This Wall Street Journal editorial provides another example of that:

Unemployment was lowest in Nebraska (2.5%), Utah (2.7%), South Dakota (2.9%), New Hampshire (2.9%), Idaho (3%), Vermont (3.1%), Alabama (3.3%), Montana (3.7%) and Oklahoma (3.7%). All are governed by Republicans, except Vermont, which has a GOP Governor and Democratic Legislature.

By contrast, the states with the highest unemployment are all run by Democrats: Connecticut (7.9%), New Mexico (7.9%), Nevada (7.8%), California (7.7%), Hawaii (7.7%), New York (7.7%), New Jersey (7.3%) and Illinois (7.2%). Mere coincidence?

Hawaii and Nevada rely on tourism, which will take time to fully bounce back. But what’s Illinois’s excuse? Other Midwest states with a mix of agriculture and manufacturing have unemployment rates near what they were at the end of President Obama’s second term. That includes Wisconsin (3.9%), Indiana (4.1%), Missouri (4.3%) and Kentucky (4.4%).

Or what about California, the nation’s richest state? While California makes up 12% of the U.S. population, it accounted for only about 9% of employment growth last month. Florida and Arizona lifted most of their business restrictions long ago, yet they still added jobs at two to three times the rate of California.

and

California’s labor force has declined 2.8%, or about 540,000 workers, since February 2020. Illinois (2.7%), New Jersey (3.5%) and Connecticut (7.6%) have also lost a significant number of workers. New York’s labor force has fallen by somewhat less (0.9%), though still more than Florida’s (0.7%), Georgia’s (0.7%) and Texas’s (0.8%).

So what’s going on? For one, high-tax Democratic states have continued to lose population to lower-tax states during the pandemic. This likely has contributed to their shrinking workforces and reduced local business demand. The flight of high-earners and office workers has slammed New York City’s restaurant industry.

Let’s look at some various factors:

I picked those states because I think that it’s more useful to compare similar things when trying to identify differences. Why compare Hawaii with North Dakota? There are too many confounding factors. I picked those factors because I thought they might be interesting when comparing and contrasting outcomes.

I’m not as convinced as the editors of the WSJ that it’s the political party that makes the difference or, said another way, I think the causality may run in a different direction than the editors think. The state with the highest unemployment rate is, of course, Illinois which does, indeed, have a Democratic governor. The state with the lowest unemployment rate is Wisconsin which also has a Democratic governor. To my eye it looks as though states with large minority populations tend to elect Democrats and also have high unemployment rates.

I found David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column, ruminating on this moment in American racial relations, aligned very closely with my own views in many ways although I would have phrased it differently:

One question lingers amid all the debates about critical race theory: How racist is this land? Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knows about the oppression of the Native Americans, about slavery and Jim Crow. But does that mean that America is even now a white supremacist nation, that whiteness is a cancer that leads to oppression for other groups? Or is racism mostly a part of America’s past, something we’ve largely overcome?

There are many ways to answer these questions. The most important is by having honest conversations with the people directly affected. But another is by asking: How high are the barriers to opportunity for different groups? Do different groups have a fair shot at the American dream? This approach isn’t perfect, but at least it points us to empirical data rather than just theory and supposition.

I think there’s another question to be considered: what can or cannot be mitigated? I believe that racism presently exists; I also believe that past slavery, prejudice, Jim Crow laws, etc. continue to have effects right down to the present day. What I think is missing from Mr. Brooks’s reckoning is black agency.

I’m glad he mentions a study I’ve mentioned in the past:

Research shows the role racism plays in perpetuating these disparities. When, in 2004, researchers sent equally qualified white and Black applicants to job interviews in New York City, dressed them similarly and gave them similar things to say, Black applicants got half as many callbacks or job offers as whites.

which I interpret as demonstrating that racism is not completely in the past. But he and I are not in complete agreement about this:

When you look at the data about African Americans, the legacies of slavery and segregation and the effects of racism are everywhere. The phrase “systemic racism” aptly fits the reality you see — a set of structures, like redlining, that have a devastating effect on Black wealth and opportunities. Racism is not something we are gently moving past; it’s pervasive. It seems obvious that this reality should be taught in every school.

I agree with the first sentence, disagree with the first clause of the second and have reservations about its second clause. I don’t agree that “systemic racism” fits the reality because I see more than one system involved and they must be disaggregated. And he never defines what he means by “redlining”. IMO redlining is an overused term. When insurance premiums are greater for higher risks than for lower ones, that’s not redlining—it’s insurance. When businesses don’t open in neighborhoods where they cannot be profitable that is not redlining, either. Redlining is when black real estate shoppers are directed to black neighborhoods because they’re black. Consequently, I don’t know whether I agree with the third sentence or not because I don’t know what “this reality” is. I agree that racism exists, is not a thing of the past, and is wrong. I don’t agree that everything that is called “racism” is racism and I don’t agree that children should be taught in schools that the only way to end racism is for the behavior of white people to change because I think the behaviors of both white and black people need to change.

And I believe that’s what Mr. Brooks’s next passage suggests:

Does this mean that America is white supremacist, a shameful nation, that the American dream is just white privilege? Well, let’s take a look at the data for different immigrant groups. When you turn your gaze here, the barriers don’t seem as high. For example, as Bloomberg’s Noah Smith pointed out recently on his Substack page, Hispanic American incomes rose faster in recent years than those of any other major group in America. Forty-five percent of Hispanics who grew up in poverty made it to the middle class or higher, comparable to the mobility rate for whites.

Hispanics have lately made astounding gains in education. In 2000, more than 30 percent of Hispanics dropped out of high school. By 2016, only 10 percent did. In 1999, a third of Hispanics age 18 to 24 were in college; now, nearly half are. Hispanic college enrollment rates surpassed white enrollment rates in 2012.

The Hispanic experience in America is beginning to look similar to the experience of Irish Americans or Italian Americans or other past immigrant groups — a period of struggle followed by integration into the middle class.

If you accept and learn Standard American English; if you work hard in school, you and your children can prosper. If you don’t follow those steps and, indeed, are subjected to social pressure for “acting white”, you won’t.

And this is what I have been saying for decades:

The researchers Richard Alba, Morris Levy and Dowell Myers suggest 52 percent of the people who self-categorize as nonwhite in the Census Bureau’s projections for America’s 2060 racial makeup will also think of themselves as white. Forty percent of those who self-categorized as white will also claim minority racial identity.

In an essay for The Atlantic, they conclude: “Speculating about whether America will have a white majority by the mid-21st century makes little sense, because the social meanings of white and nonwhite are rapidly shifting. The sharp distinction between these categories will apply to many fewer Americans.”

Here’s the one specific policy prescription offered by Mr. Brooks:

Over the last several years Raj Chetty and his team at Opportunity Insights have done much of the most celebrated work on income mobility. They find that, indeed, Black Americans and Native Americans have much lower rates of mobility because of historic discrimination.

But Chetty’s team emphasizes that these gaps are not immutable. If, for example, you use housing vouchers and other grants to help people move to high-opportunity neighborhoods with low poverty rates, low racial bias and more fathers in the neighborhoods, then you can help people of all races lead lives with higher incomes and lower rates of incarceration as adults.

It’s an interesting idea but there is an assumption built into that statement: that the individual will leave the old neighborhood behind. If the sort of “systemic racism” that is being complained about mostly just means that blacks are a minority in the U. S., that is unlikely to change. Neighborhoods have more fathers and lower incarceration rates in them because of behavior not because of something about the zip code.

The most notable quote from this interview with Jeremy Grantham at Reuters is this one:

Bubbles are unbelievably easy to see; it’s knowing when the bust will come that is trickier.

There aren’t any elevator operators these days so that strategy for deciding when to get out is shot. His bottom line is this:

But this bubble is the real thing, and everyone can see it. It’s as obvious as the nose on your face.

If he’s right it may not be a particularly merry Christmas.

Well, I dug around for a recent poll of popular opinion in Belarus and came up with this (PDF). If you don’t feel like reading it, it doesn’t provide a great deal of support for the WaPo’s view.

Among the finds were that

• opinion is sharply divided on Lukashenka
• a lot of Belarusians think he’s a crook
• Russia is pretty popular among Belarusians
• Heck, China is more popular among Belarusians than either the EU or us
• Only a minority of Belarusians support the demonstrations

The conclusion that I would draw is that if the Europeans want to impose sharp sanctions on Belarus, Russia, or both, that’s up to them. Our best posture is dignified silence. As usual I think we should be the well-wisher of the freedom and independence for everyone but the vindicator only of our own.

Maybe you’re skeptical of any poll of Belarusian opinion. I would welcome evidence that contradicts any of the above. Angry protesters don’t necessarily tell you what the majority of Belarusians think.