45 years ago I purchased a Cuisinart DLC 7 Pro food processor. It was quite a splurge and I’m not sure what the occasion was. Maybe celebrating a promotion or a raise. It sounds like a pittance now but I was earning a pretty good income at the time.

Since then I’ve gone through multiple bowls and multiple blades but the machine itself has continued to run faithfully. Not long ago it began to clank when I turned it on and my wife pronounced it dead.

So, I’ve purchased a replacement, the successor model, at roughly the same price in dollars as the old one which tells you how expensive the old one was. I don’t expect it to last as long but then it doesn’t need to, does it? As me auld mither once said a lifetime guarantee doesn’t need to last as long as it used to.

I think that Rahm Emanuel is one of the most paradoxical characters on the American scene. On the one hand he was the worst Congressman I’ve ever had and an absolutely ghastly mayor for Chicago, only made to look good by the incumbent. On the other he was a pretty effective Chief of Staff and a great leader of the Democratic House re-election campaign. The moral there is ignore what he says about policy but pay close attention to what he says about politics. In his most recent Wall Street Journal op-ed he muses on the present posture of Congressional Republicans:

Nearly 60% of Americans are bothered “a lot” that corporations and rich people don’t pay their fair share, according to a Pew Research survey—and only a third are bothered by the amount they pay themselves. Navigator Research finds 69% support raising taxes on the rich (those making $400,000 or more), on corporations or both to support infrastructure investments—and that includes a majority of Republicans earning less than $50,000 a year. Taken as a whole, 58% of Americans back Mr. Biden’s plan, including 25% of Republicans, according to a Morning Consult poll. This isn’t Ronald Reagan’s coalition anymore—and that works to the Democrats’ advantage.

As public attitudes change, Republicans are in a precarious position—and they know it, as revealed by their rhetoric, or lack thereof. The Trumpist base is hip that they don’t get much directly from the sort of tax cuts that Reagan championed, that George W. Bush signed in 2001 and 2003, and that Mr. Trump touted in 2017. A party hoping to refashion itself as a champion of blue-collar voters and the struggling middle class is quickly realizing that the other elements of its economic agenda don’t resonate either. Republicans can rail against waste, as they’re doing. But complaints about deficits are ridiculous when Messrs. Trump and Bush both sent the federal government deep into the red.

That puts the GOP in uncharted political territory. Richard Nixon understood how fiscal policy overlapped with cultural grievance. His Southern strategy centered largely on the dog whistle that Democrats wanted to tax “you” and give money to “them.” Now Mr. Biden, who has fought against that canard his whole career, has flipped the script: He’s suggesting that he wants to tax a very different “them” and give it to “you.” And that’s working to dissolve the glue that for decades kept Wall Street’s mandarins and middle America’s social conservatives aligned.

It isn’t that Democrats have never been able to win the tax fight. President Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy to close the deficit in the 1990s. President Obama did the same to fund the Affordable Care Act. But raising taxes in both cases proved unpopular, despite being the right thing to do. Mr. Biden doesn’t have to shroud his tax plan in rhetoric about fiscal responsibility. He can lead with it, as he’s doing. That change marks a profound shift of the so-called Overton window—namely, what’s achievable in any given policy fight.

“Minarchism” is the political philosophy that teaches that government should be absolutely minimized. Not just that the “government that governs least governs best” but absolutely limiting the scope of government. When Paul Ryan became House Speaker it was a signal that minarchism had gained a toehold in the Republican Party at the national level. That itself is a paradox when you think about it. Very little of what the federal government does today is actually properly within its scope. The sole roles of a Congress actually committed to minarchism would be to block legislation from going forward and to try roll back existing legislation which pretty well describes Paul Ryan’s House.

Are Republicans actually abandoning that in favor of Trumpist populism? Or were they just pretending to embrace minarchism and have now revealed their true colors? Or are they just facing in whichever direction the political wind is blowing?

Today I put on a tie for the first time in more than a year. It took me a bit to remember how to tie the damned thing.

We attended the baptism of the child of some dear friends of ours.

2035 is a long time away. Who knows what will have happened by then? But bear with me on this. Imagine that California’s executive order banning the sale of new vehicles with internal combustion engines were to become effective immediately and were to withstand the inevitable challenges in the courts. Which of the following would happen and to what degree?

1. Californians would buy a lot more electric vehicles.
2. The price of used cars would rise sharply due to increased consumer demand.
3. The price of used cars would rise sharply due to increased speculation.
4. It might actually become more worthwhile to leave stolen cars intact rather than breaking them up for parts.
5. A lot of car dealers would set up shop in adjoining states just across the California state line.

I think the likelihood from most likely to least likely would be B, C, E, A, D. What do you think?

Speaking of coherence, I urge you to read Tyler Cowen’s brief post at Marginal Revolution on “the inflation trilemma”. It’s terse and I suspect it explains a lot of the economic thinking of the Biden Administration.

Judging by this morning’s “talking heads” programs the biggest news stories of the day have been Liz Cheney’s loss of leadership status in the Republican Party and the missile exchanges between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I haven’t commented on either and I thought I’d explain why. Let’s start with the exchange between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

I don’t think that the IDF should have gone into the Al Aqsa mosque and taken down its PA system, I don’t think the Palestinians should be firing missiles at the Israelis, and I don’t think that the Israelis should be bombing the Palestinians. What I think doesn’t change anything and will convince no one. It astonishes me what claptrap the narrative of the Israelis as western colonizing oppressors is. The grandparents of the majority of present Jewish Israelis were Jews driven from Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and other North African and Middle Eastern countries in the 1940s. Most of their grandparents were not European Jews. Ashkenazic Jews comprise about a third of present Israelis. Said another way today’s israelis are as Middle Eastern as the Palestinians.

I am also wary of the U. S.’s cultivating a cozy relationship with any nationalistic theocracy whether it’s Israel, Saudi Arabia, or, increasingly, India. I just don’t think that’s compatible with American notions of human rights. All of those views taken together are enough to make just about anybody dislike me. Why dwell on it?

Onwards to the Republicans. I live in Chicago in Cook County in the state of Illinois. All of those are run by Democrats. The president of the U. S. is a Democrat and both houses of Congress are presently run, tenuously, by Democrats. What Republicans do or do not do has next to no effect on my daily life but what Democrats do touches my life every single day. I wish the news media were a lot more concerned about honesty, decency, and coherence among Democrats than they seem to be.

And that’s why I haven’t commented on the two biggest news stories of the day.

If you don’t know the names of Bertillon or Lombroso, you will by the time you’ve finished reading this article at the MIT Press Reader by Jessica Helfand about anthropometrics. Here’s a snippet:

The pursuit of human metrics has a rich and fascinating history, dating back to the ancient Greeks, who viewed proportion itself as a physical projection of the harmony of the universe. Idealized proportion was synonymous with beauty, a physical expression of divine benevolence. (“The good, of course, is always beautiful,” wrote Plato, “and the beautiful never lacks proportion.”) From Dürer to da Vinci, the notion that humans might aspire to a pure and balanced ideal would find expression in everything from the writings of Vitruvius to the gardens of Le Nôtre to the evolution of the humanist alphabet. To the degree that proportion itself was deemed closer to the divine when realized as an expression of balance and geometry, proportion had everything to do with mathematics in general (and the golden section in particular) and found its most profound expression in the realization of the human form.

The author glosses over some of the darkest chapters in anthropometry which have largely resulted in the field becoming just shy of taboo. All I can add is a question. How can you really know whether something is real or not unless you measure it? A priori? Article of faith?

I want to commend this article at Wired about an early and widespread misconception about COVID-19 to your attention. Here’s a snippet that contains the meat of the piece:

According to the medical canon, nearly all respiratory infections transmit through coughs or sneezes: Whenever a sick person hacks, bacteria and viruses spray out like bullets from a gun, quickly falling and sticking to any surface within a blast radius of 3 to 6 feet. If these droplets alight on a nose or mouth (or on a hand that then touches the face), they can cause an infection. Only a few diseases were thought to break this droplet rule. Measles and tuberculosis transmit a different way; they’re described as “airborne.” Those pathogens travel inside aerosols, microscopic particles that can stay suspended for hours and travel longer distances. They can spread when contagious people simply breathe.

The distinction between droplet and airborne transmission has enormous consequences. To combat droplets, a leading precaution is to wash hands frequently with soap and water. To fight infectious aerosols, the air itself is the enemy. In hospitals, that means expensive isolation wards and N95 masks for all medical staff.

The books Marr flipped through drew the line between droplets and aerosols at 5 microns. A micron is a unit of measurement equal to one-millionth of a meter. By this definition, any infectious particle smaller than 5 microns in diameter is an aerosol; anything bigger is a droplet. The more she looked, the more she found that number. The WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also listed 5 microns as the fulcrum on which the droplet-aerosol dichotomy toggled.

There was just one literally tiny problem: “The physics of it is all wrong,” Marr says. That much seemed obvious to her from everything she knew about how things move through air. Reality is far messier, with particles much larger than 5 microns staying afloat and behaving like aerosols, depending on heat, humidity, and airspeed. “I’d see the wrong number over and over again, and I just found that disturbing,” she says. The error meant that the medical community had a distorted picture of how people might get sick.

I recommend reading the whole thing. The balance of the article is a detective story. Where did the 5 micron theory originate? It has just about every aspect of a good detective story short of assembling all the suspects in a living room to explain the crime.

It’s also a story about how medical guidance is arrived at. Spoiler: it isn’t necessarily all about the science. And how you go about changing the hive mind of a health care bureaucracy.

This post is for those of you who think that technology always advances. It ain’t necessarily so. I’m in a bit of a quandary. Back in 2014 I purchased an 8.9″ Kindle Fire HDX. I selected it after looking at all of the competitors at the time—it was obviously the best. It has served me well over thousands of miles of travel in a dozen countries.

Recently, it has developed a problem which I have learned is called “ghost touch”. The screen is not responding properly to touch inputs and the device is essentially unusable. I have three alternatives:

• Replace the screen myself.
• Find someone to replace it for me.
• Buy a new device.

The problem I face is that there doesn’t appear to be any tablet on the market today that has as good a resolution as my old Kindle. They all look pixellated (blocky) by comparison. What I have is slow, it doesn’t have a lot of memory, it can’t run present-day Android apps, and it’s not upgradeable but it’s still a better device that the prospective replacements.

This is not the first time that I’ve had the experience of modern technology actually being worse than old technology. The most recent time was 20 years ago. My old home wireless network was actually faster and more reliable than anything on the market even today. And that wasn’t even the first time I had that experience.