An article by Vaclav Smil at the IEEE Spectrum highlighted for me the contradiction inherent in the pursuit of wind power. Here’s his peroration:

Undoubtedly, a well-sited and well-built wind turbine would generate as much energy as it embodies in less than a year. However, all of it will be in the form of intermittent electricity—while its production, installation, and maintenance remain critically dependent on specific fossil energies. Moreover, for most of these energies—coke for iron-ore smelting, coal and petroleum coke to fuel cement kilns, naphtha and natural gas as feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of plastics and the making of fiberglass, diesel fuel for ships, trucks, and construction machinery, lubricants for gearboxes—we have no nonfossil substitutes that would be readily available on the requisite large commercial scales.

For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.

Not every location is good for using wind to produce electrical power but it takes a lot of fossil fuels to build every windmill made, regardless of whether its eventual placement will be good or not. And then there’s the issue of the backup generation you need when the wind doesn’t blow.

Phoenix, Arizona is a great place for solar energy but lousy for wind energy. A solar installation for the average home in Portland, Oregon might break even over the period of 20 years. Its 200+ overcast days per year makes it a poorer candidate than Phoenix.

There are also places in the U. S. where neither solar nor wind make economic sense. Nuclear or fossil fuels are those places’ best choice.

I found the remarks of the editors of the Wall Street Journal on the relationship between China and North Korea very interesting:

Is China greeting the Trump era by getting tough on North Korea? That may be the impression Beijing has tried to convey by announcing a suspension of coal imports from the nuclear-armed state. But there is less here than meets the eye.

As is often the case regarding Beijing’s ties to Pyongyang, the details of the coal cutoff are murky. In the most generous telling, China has decided to squeeze North Korea’s key source of hard currency to punish it for acting in destabilizing ways—testing missiles, assassinating overseas enemies with VX nerve agent and the like. By this logic, Beijing is signalling a desire to work with the new U.S. Administration on the shared goal of denuclearizing the Kim regime. North Korean state media have pushed this line, slamming China for “dancing to the tune of the U.S.”

Yet Beijing has said that it had to cut off coal imports to comply with United Nations sanctions passed in November. According to the Foreign Ministry, Chinese imports in 2017 have already approached the U.N.’s annual value limit of $400 million. Beijing would hardly deserve applause for buying its full quota and then stopping to meet its legal obligations.

A year ago the Chinese also promised to comply with an earlier round of U.N. sanctions on North Korean mineral exports. But Beijing made sure those sanctions included a loophole exempting transactions for undefined “livelihood purposes.” It then proceeded to rack up record purchases of North Korean coal.

After November’s sanctions moved to nullify the “livelihood” loophole with hard caps, Beijing promised a cutoff—yet still imported more North Korean coal in December than in any previous month of the year. Its total coal imports for 2016, a year in which it twice voted for sanctions on such purchases, rose 14.5% from 2015 and totaled more than $1 billion.

Pyongyang can fund a lot of missile tests with that money. Then there is the unspecified sum China will soon begin paying for 4,000 metric tons of North Korean liquefied petroleum gas, an arrangement quietly announced this month and spotted by Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Beijing sustains Pyongyang in countless other ways, including access to Chinese oil, banks, trading firms, ports and front companies. Contrast this with China’s unofficial economic sanctions on South Korea merely for wishing to defend itself against North Korean nuclear missiles by installing advanced U.S.-made antimissile defenses.

I don’t think that it can be maintained any longer that China’s sole interest in North Korea is in preventing a catastrophic collapse of the regime with an attendant flood of refugees into China. For one thing many of those refugees are probably more likely to flood into South Korea where they might well advance one of China’s foreign policy goals—making a wedge between South Korea and the United States.

I can’t explain why China is supporting North Korea’s nuclear weapons development. They could stop it any time they cared to without causing the collapse of the regime just by preventing the transfer of materials the North needs for its weapons development into the country.

I still believe, however, that the relationship between China and North Korea still requires cost-benefit analysis on the part of the Chinese. In that light our preferred policy should be to make China’s continued support of the Kim regime costlier and more embarrassing. Simple risk mitigation practically requires it.

There’s a good article by academics Jerry Ellig and Rosemary Fike on regulatory reform at RealClearPolicy:

Regulatory rollbacks are all the rage in Washington, from President Trump’s executive orders on regulatory reform to congressional resolutions disapproving major regulations issued by the Obama administration. But whether you think we have too much or too little regulation, reasonable people ought to be able to agree that we should have the right kind.

Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear that we do. One of us (Ellig) authored a study in 2016 revealing that less than half of the major non-budget executive branch regulations proposed between 2008 and 2013 were accompanied by evidence showing that the regulations addressed significant problems. And for about one-third of those regulations, regulators failed to consider the benefits or cost-effectiveness of alternative approaches.

I think that the policy that President Trump has announced, removing two regulations for every one introduced, while probably being well-intentioned is a brute force solution to a genuine problem. I prefer Canada’s rule in the Red Tape Reduction Act that requires that for every new regulation introduced by the Canadian federal government, one of equal burden must be removed from the books. The focus there is right. It’s on the burden imposed by regulation rather than on their number.

Not that number isn’t a problem. The present Code of Federal Regulations weighs in at more than 180,000 pages, seven times as long as it was in 1960.

I believe that the underlying problem is that there are just too many career bureaucrats in Washington who see their job in terms of producing new regulations. That’s completely consistent with Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

In addition regulatory capture practically guarantees that some of level of federal regulation is less directed at providing for the health, safety, or welfare of the American people and much more targeted at helping certain preferred companies or individuals.

Note that I’m not claiming that regulation is unnecessary or that in some cases it doesn’t make us better off. I’m merely pointing out what is obvious to just about anyone who deals much with the federal goverment: a lot of what the federal government requires can’t stand up to a cost-benefit analysis.

In the Denver Post (via RealClearPolitics) Froma Harrop presents a succinct summary of my own views on immigration:

But that doesn’t give Democrats a free pass to fudge on the issue of illegal immigration. They need to say, “We support a generous immigration program, but people without the proper papers cannot come here and take jobs.”

Such a policy would not turn this country into a xenophobic police state. It would make the U.S. more like Canada and Australia, two pleasant democracies that take in large numbers of newcomers but don’t tolerate illegal immigration.

The basic question is what do Democrats believe? I don’t believe the Democratic leadership has any fixed principles other than the urge to power any more than the Republican leadership does. Any statement of principles by them is merely rhetorical.

What do progressives believe? If they believe in an inalienable right to immigrate as many of them seem to, the policy articulated above by Ms. Harrop would not only be intolerable it would be reprehensible, heresy.

Are Democrats merely wed to the status quo with its bizarre and antiquated system of quotas? Diversity quotas, refugee quotas, skilled worker quotas, family reunification quotas, etc.?

The Orwellian language that’s used might be a clue. Under U. S. statute all of those migrants who cross the border from Mexico guided by coyotes are illegal immigrants. They have broken U. S. law. If they have returned to the U. S. illegally after having once been deported, they are committing felonies, serious crimes.

Speaking of confirming something I’ve been saying for some time, this article at Live Science on early human fossils:

These new fossils suggest that far-flung groups of ancient humans were more genetically linked across Eurasia than often previously thought, researchers in the new study said.

“I don’t like to think of these fossils as those of hybrids,” said study co-author Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “Hybridization implies that all of these groups were separate and discrete, only occasionally interacting. What these fossils show is that these groups were basically not separate. The idea that there were separate lineages in different parts of the world is increasingly contradicted by the evidence we are unearthing.”

confirms what I’ve been saying about early hominids. Anatomically modern Humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and who knows how many other early humans aren’t different species; they’re different varieties. The relationships between them are more like the relationship between Golden Retrievers and German Shepherds than are like the relationship between, say, lions and tigers.

The really big question is whether erectus was a different species or not. I know that Leakey thought it was but I’m not so sure and to the best of my knowledge nobody has succeeded in extracting Homo erectus DNA yet.

I do not for one second believe that high U. S. corporate tax rates (and the depreciation schedules) are impeding American businesses’ propensity to invest, as claimed by Alan Daley in his post at RealClearPolicy:

If President Trump and the Congress move forward with tax reform, U.S. businesses stand to gain trillions of discretionary dollars from lower tax burdens, repatriation of their net profits held overseas, and incentives that would permit the expensing of capital investment.

which is sophistry. Increasing the incentives is not identical to effecting. I think the primary effect of those taxes is to impede the companies ability to “repatriate” foreign earnings to distribute them as executive compensation in one form or another.

However, rather than fisking the entire post, I want to draw your attention to these observations:

It must be emphasized that we do not have a headcount shortage of willing workers; we have a skills shortage. Unfortunately, a “can-do” attitude is no substitute for the right skills.

and

Outside of STEM, however, there are tight markets for qualified physical and occupational therapists, nurses, machinists, electricians, and welders. Most of these jobs require that a suitable candidate have at least a post-high school certification and supervised experience or apprenticeship.

which support a point I’ve been making for decades and at The Glittering Eye for more than a decade. If there are no jobs for American junior engineers or apprentice welders or electricians, eventually there will be no senior American engineers or master welders or electricians.

The real underlying problem is the unwillingness of American companies to bear the training costs that were once assumed to be a cost of doing business. I believe that lack of willingness derives from their conviction that they can get the people they want by importing them from abroad.

The prevailing view among Silicon Valley’s elite enunciated by Gregory Ferenstein at City Journal:

As far as the future of innovation and its impact on ordinary people, the most common answer I received in Silicon Valley was this: over the (very) long run, an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial “gig work” and government aid. The way the Valley elite see it, everyone can try to be an entrepreneur; some small percentage will achieve wild success and create enough wealth that others can live comfortably. Many tech leaders appear optimistic that this type of economy will provide the vast majority of people with unprecedented prosperity and leisure, though no one quite knows when.

seems to me remarkably naive. I guess I attribute that to how young they are. Even Bill Gates, a relative greybeard among the technological elite, probably has no clear memories of very high marginal personal income tax rates and his dad in all likelihood was not affected by it.

High marginal tax rates don’t prevent people from being rich; they prevent people who aren’t already rich from becoming rich. The rich will do what they always do: avoid, evade, and, when all else fails, flee.

These elites’ preferred outcome works in diametric opposition to their business model, embedding the status quo in amber rather than allowing the highest achievers to rise to the top.

Besides, they’re remarkably innumerate for people in tech. You could tax Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos at 100% and it still wouldn’t realize enough revenue to pay for their vision. For that you need to have high marginal tax rates right down to the top 10% of income earners. Basically, no one in Silicon Valley could afford to live there under those circumstances.

You might want to check out academic Musa al-Gharbi’s post at The Conversation on the recent trends in American politics, particularly the eye-catching graphs about half-way down the page, illustrating Democrats’ loss of vote shares in 18 demographic categories from 2008 to the present. Mr. al-Gharbi explains:

It may be tempting to hold onto the faith in an emerging Democratic majority. Some predict Trump will self-destruct and his followers will be consigned to irrelevance, to the “wrong side of history,” as President Obama often phrased it.

On the one hand, as a social psychologist, I understand this impulse toward comforting thoughts. However, given my background in applied social epistemology, I also know it is imperative for progressives to have a clear-eyed view of the situation at hand.

The Democratic Party is in crisis. Demographics will be unlikely to save them. If anything, the trend seems to be going in the other direction.

and

For instance, there is a common misconception that Trump was ushered into power by old, white, economically disenfranchised men. However, according to the exit polls, Trump actually did worse than Romney among whites and seniors, but outperformed him among blacks, Asians, Hispanics and young people.

While the Democrats lost a lot of support among low-income Americans, I think it would be a mistake to interpret these as Trump’s base. He won a plurality of every income bracket above US$50,000 as well. He also won more non-Christian and nonreligious voters than any Republican since the 2000 election.

Now my explanation for what has happened is somewhat different than Mr. al-Gharbi’s. I think that the Democratic leadership has made some disastrous miscalculations, probably assuming that “wrong side of history” nonsense mentioned above.

Time, particularly political time, is not an arrow. Neither is it a cycle. People respond to events as well as identity.

The American people historically have not been ideological. Pushing the two major political parties towards programmatic parties rather than the “catch-all” parties they’ve always been brings little but misery, clearly illustrated by Gallup’s findings on political identification.

Republicans shouldn’t take any solace in their present ascendancy. The political parties must reform rather than pontificate and the American people respond over time to events.

In reading Daniel Henninger’s most recent column in the Wall Street Journal mostly my eyes just glazed over. I know that he likes Republicans, doesn’t like Democrats, etc.

Except when reading one sentence and this is it:

Which is to say, if the alt-right flirts with white nationalism, the alt-left always conducts politics at the edge of violence, such as the trashing last month of UC Berkeley.

Is that empirically correct? The answer is important.

My impression is that the Tea Party ≠ alt-right and Bernie Bros ≠ alt-left and that the Tea Party movement, at least originally, was a genuine grass-roots movement while there has always been a lot of astroturf in the various left-leaning attempts to replicate the Tea Party’s successes? Is that wrong?

Meanwhile, the other day I was sitting in the waiting area of a tire store and the guy I was sitting next to casually mentioned that his daughter aspired to be a professional demonstrator. I can’t help but feel that’s the political equivalent of the shoeshine boy offering stock tips.