More on Obama's Energy Speech

I am referring to Mr. Obama's speech recently given at Georgetown University where he promised to "protect America's Energy Security."

Rarely, in my short 29 years on the mortal coil have I heard such delightfully grotesque pandering. Mr. Obama essentially promised a future for every energy-related special interest group, while using the snowclone of decreasing foreign oil imports. And by snowclone I mean "I'll cause more X, and ensure American prosperity by eliminating Y." Other examples are "I'll add more education funding, and ensure American prosperity by eliminating wasteful spending" and "I'll get more police officers protecting our neighborhoods, and ensure American prosperity by decreasing crime" and "I'll strengthen the military, and ensure American prosperity by prosecuting illegal wars without Congressional approval." Well that last one might not fit the mold...

In any case, based on his speech, he promised a healthy future for biofuel, solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas and domestic oil. He suggested hybrid cars and electric cars and fuel cell cars all have a future. Raising emission standards ensures car company lobbyists are happy because it suggests vehicle turnover will remain high...probably bolstered by rebates.

What people need to start realizing is when a President suggests a "diverse energy portfolio" he is campaigning. When he suggests "real solutions" he is probably not within 24 months of reelection.


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Quote for the Day - Revisionist History Edition

"What has been truly thrilling about the Arab Spring - as with the Green Revolution in Iran - was the irrelevance of America and the West." - Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan is clearly forgetting the hundreds of times since as far back as 1953 that America has aided tyrants in Arab countries (usually under the auspices of their internally run anti-terrorism programs). America and the West are not irrelevant in the Arab Spring...we have been a roadblock to it.


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List of Bad Ideas, Day 2,158

Today's bad ideas all come from one source.
Bad Idea Number 4,361: Attempting to curb foreign oil dependence via increased domestic supply. It is widely known that America's oil potential is largely tapped. Remaining oil reserves require more expensive drilling techniques still in development. Increasing domestic production mean either higher oil prices or deep-water Gulf drilling.

Bad Idea Number 4,362: Attempting to decrease foreign oil dependence by pushing large vehicles into using natural gas. Where do you propose we get this natural gas? 97% of all natural gas reserves are in "not the United States," or more specifically, "Russia, Iran, and Qatar." Not to mention the environmental effects of natural gas processing.

Bad Idea Number 4,363: Attempting to curb foreign oil dependence by increasing output of biofuel. The follies of corn-based ethanol are well-understood. Large groups of farmers, hopping on the subsidized price hike of corn actually decreased wheat and soy output in America, which caused a chain reaction of price hikes for food crops. Many farmers could not afford to feed their livestock corn-based feeds. I have suggested, on this blog, that switchgrass (cellulosic base) could be a feasible, environmentally friendly ethanol source without largely affecting food prices...
Meanwhile, 2/3 of US biodiesel plants sit unused...


Bad Idea Number 4,364: Making fun of the phrase "drill baby drill" and then urging increased domestic oil production in the same speech.


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Infinite Free Energy Reported...But Not Found

The level of misinformation in this article is atrocious - both intentional and unintentional. Let's get started.

Alan Boyle, long-time editor at MSNBC, writes:

Someday, your pulse could provide all the power you'll need for your iPod.

If we base our calculations on the power consumption of an iPod Touch being 180 milliwatts (a number I remember reading somewhere but can't find now), then what Alan and others are clearly missing is that the human heart must output an additional 180 milliwatts worth of generating power - and thats assuming 100% conversion efficiency of the nanogenerator device you've hard-mounted to your arteries. Chances are the capture efficiency would be more like 65%, and then including downstream losses while converting that power into a 3 VDC supply, you end up with about 55% efficiency (which is reasonable to assume). That means your heart needs to pump an additional 330 milliwatts of power in order to power your iPod. Based on the fact that the nanogenerator is working from conversion of mechanical energy, and the general rule for food to mechanical energy conversion is "about 20%", we need to essentially multiply that power output by 5 to get input watts. So now we're at 1.65 Watts, and to run it for 24 hours you need about 40 watt hours - which is somewhere around 35 calories.

Alan then describes the device:

Their latest prototype chips are about a quarter the size of a postage stamp, but when you stack five of the chips on top of each other like a sandwich, you can produce 1 microampere of current at 3 volts.

One microamp at 3 volts is 3 microwatts. So to produce the 1.65 watts above calculated to power your iPod, you'd need 550,000 of the devices. If each one has a footprint of "a quarter the size of a postage stamp" which is about a quarter of an inch. So you'd need a device 954 square feet in size to power your iPod.  The average human skin is 21 square feet. So you'd need to cover your body with 45 solid layers of this stuff to power just your iPod. Hmm...


Alan really loses himself in the electronics here and blows it:

That's enough power [from a single piezo unit] to light up an LED bulb or a liquid crystal display on a calculator or computer.

Three volts certainly is a normal operating voltage for many LCD displays and LED bulbs. But there smallest LED bulb you can buy on digikey still pulls 500 microamps. LCD displays use much, much more than that. Voltage really doesn't matter. I have made this really handy chart to explain what I mean. Call this Waller's Law of Micropower Generation:

I know its hard to read, but click to zoom. The point is that voltage is almost totally irrelevant when designing a scaled micro-power supply because you can always put the nodes in series to increase voltage. What IS important is your per-unit current production, and in this case, 1 microamp is really not usable at all.

Boyle (and apparently Zhong Lin Wang from Georgia Tech) are missing is the age old "Conservation of Matter and Energy" which states that matter and energy cannot be created. Devices that draw power from the human body require the human body produce extra energy to make up the difference. In this case, Wang suggests the pumping power of the heart be used. That's fine, but why are we assuming the heart has extra power? In a refined organism like a human, the heart pumps with exactly the right amount of force to move all the blood that need be moved, and not a single muscle fiber extra fires. Why would the human body produce extra heat (that's where the other 80% of the burned calories goes) if it didn't need to?  So Wang suggests the heart's pumping could provide the input force to a piezoelectric that would power an insulin pump.
Great. Let's put even more load on a diabetic's heart.

Then we get a clear test of XKCD's Law of Research Translation:

Wang estimates that the first nanogenerators will make their appearance on the market in the next three to five years, most likely as power sources for environmental sensors or infrastructure monitoring devices.

Which XKCD translates to "I've solved the interesting research problems. The rest is just business, which is easy, right?"


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Greed and Growth at War With Each Other, Ctd

I feel I should go on, because one paragraph from the previous entry is almost certainly going to catch me some flak:

The problem, dear readers, isn't the brain vacuum being swept across the carpet by the financial sector. No the problem is the culture of greed in this country where people say to each other "I'd like to make a lot of money in life." When did that become a serious goal? Was it always?

I'm not so naive as to imagine that a world can exist where people actively don't want to be rich. In fact that is not at all what I am suggesting is a solution to corporate and individual greed in this country. Rather, what I am suggesting is the following, and I'll bold and break it so it's easy for you to read:

Making money should not be the primary goal in life, but in America, it is.

The culture of prosperity in itself is no problem. America was built on a foundation that wanted the freedom to prosper. But "prosperity" is changing, as the culture of this country becomes increasingly focused on the tiny few who have exorbitant amounts of wealth (while gaining no happiness) and insistently suggesting that prosperity means being filthy stinking rich, and more importantly: "If you are not filthy stinking rich THEN YOU ARE NOT SUCCESSFUL."

So an avenue for smart kids to be "successful" opens up in the form of developing complex financial products that harvest huge profits from less-intelligent people. Lacking a "higher purpose" than to seek wealth and from it derive happiness, the smart kids are doing the most logical thing, really.

So where's the higher purpose? Where's the need to "do good"? Something is failing America's kids so that they aren't growing up with enough of a sense of altruism, and that something is us. I don't have a fix, unfortunately. I feel the urge to get rich along with everyone else. Maybe we need to teach kids "goal setting" at an earlier age, and actively cultivate altruistic/beneficent goals that will also allow their prosperity, and attempt to weed out "get rich" and the like. I don't know. I just don't know.


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Greed and Growth at War With Each Other

If this is true it is stunning:

The financial sector, which includes lending, stock brokerage, complex securities and insurance, among many other services, derives enormous profits from collateralized debt obligations. These new products require such sophisticated engineering that the industry now focuses its recruiting on new master's- and doctoral-level graduates of science, engineering, math and physics, and pays them starting wages that are five times or more what they would have earned had they remained in their own fields.

"Because these new hires are often the very individuals who otherwise would have comprised the most robust pool of prospective founders of high-growth companies, the financial services industry's steady rise has had a cannibalizing effect on entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy," said Paul Kedrosky, Kauffman Foundation senior fellow and one of the paper's authors. "Excessive financialization exacerbated and distorted the flow of capital in the economy, potentially suppressing entrepreneurship by drawing away entrepreneurial talent."

The knee-jerk reaction is to say "the big bad financial sector is draining America's braintrust." Certainly that is how the Kauffman Foundation makes it seem. But think again. No one is forced to go into finance.

Yglesias adds:

Certainly my observation when I was in college is that almost everyone who had the mentality “I’d like to make a lot of money in life” was planning to instantiate that plan by working in the financial services sector.

That's exactly right. The greedy kids in the engineering (undergraduate) school already had plans to get their law degree or MBA as soon as possible after graduation. They weren't in engineering school to be engineers, really. They had made the shrewd (and often true) assessment that business acumen plus a technical background made them almost universally coveted in non-engineering fields. Engineering, to a certain point, was/is a meal ticket degree, because you could often use it as a leg up into a graduate program. And then you coupled your "technical background" with your graduate degree and sell yourself as a "six figure starting" employee with grandiose claims that engineering, almost magically, prepares you for virtually any and all future jobs.

The problem, dear readers, isn't the brain vacuum being swept across the carpet by the financial sector. No the problem is the culture of greed in this country where people say to each other "I'd like to make a lot of money in life." When did that become a serious goal? Was it always?

It seems to me (and I say this as neither a philosophy student nor a business student) that a business behaves (and is legally recognized) as an entity that is completely self-serving, and in a perfect world (relative to that business) it thrives while all its competitors fail, and fail miserably. The theoretical pinnacle of a business is complete monopoly on its sector of the economy. Multiply this by a million businesses in America and you get our oft-lauded "capitalist economy" which does seem to function pretty well.
However, to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women is not necessarily a strategy conducive to national prosperity. But in America that is basically considered sound corporate strategy. So yes, we have a brain drain in engineering and sciences. And yes, its partially caused by the financial sector having high-paying jobs available.

But its also caused by America being greedy first, and enterprising second.


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The Abstracted Gymnast

She keeps falling, and getting back up, and falling, and getting up again. She stands in line and distractedly watches the other, bigger kids swinging on bars or walking on the beams while she waits her turn to do a somersault down the wedge-mat. When she does it, she clumsily crashes, falling over forwards; "so that's why they call it tumbling" I think to myself with bemusement.

I am sitting in the "observation deck" at McCracken's Gymnastics. Below me rougly 150 girls and boys from ages 3 (like The Abstracted Daughter) all they way up through high school age tumble and spin. The room doesn't need fans to circulate air; the girls on the uneven bars do the job nicely. In my left hand my Kindle rests, forgotten. Post Captain, the second book in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian, is displayed, but I don't notice as the screen saver switches on, showing a portrait of Charlotte Bronte.
Not just my eyes, but rather my whole body has assumed the role of "doting parent" as I sit perched on the edge of the bench seat in the stifling, stuffy, humid air of the observation deck. I crane my neck to watch my little daughter hop wildlyaround in a circle until corralled by her teacher.

Before she went into the gymnasium, we stood outside in line. I asked her "now what's the first rule of gymnastics?" In her chirpy little voice she replied "Don't run."
"No, honey, that's the first rule of the swimming pool. What's the first rule of gymnastics?"
She thought for a second, then: "listen to the teacher."
I nod. "And what's the second rule?"
"Be patient. And the third rule is have fun," she beat me to it. She's never had time for lectures anyway. Moments later, she went in with her seven classmates. I found myself in one of those strange moments you never pictured as a teenager pondering your own future as a parent. Watching my child walk off happily - bravely - with her peers made me fiercely proud and incredibly sad at the same time. There is no fear in my daughter's mind. There is nothing that can hurt her. It makes it easy to get her to go down slides at the playground, to get her to talk to friendly strangers at church, and to be dropped off at preschool with a happy attitude. But fearlessness will grow into empowerment and independence and self-reliance and I know - I dread - that one day she really won't need her dumb old dad very much.

She's in line now to do some sort of balance beam activity. There's a little boy in her class, he's slightly taller than her. His coordination is incredible. During warm-up he was a machine, and moved fast and skillfully, while my little one struggled to keep up and follow directions. He can't be much older than her. Am I doing something wrong? My daughter is a spit-shine short of genius...why isn't she instantly good at athletics too? The parental fear that "my child is behind" crawls into my brain and I bat it away. I'm doing everything I can, right?

Right?

The little gymnasts (they call them Tumblebugs at McCracken) disappear from sight for a while, doing some activity below me and to the right where the observation deck can't see. I try to relax and concentrate on Post Captain. Aubrey's found out his prizes were contested in court and he faces debtors prison. Maturin is leaving; his torrid love for Diana has him out of his mind. Somehow, I don't find the normally entertaining novel especially interesting, so I just turn it off again and ruminate and watch the gymnasts below.

On the drive over, my little gymnast in the making had told me that she'd prefer Mommy bring her next week. I had tried to socialize with her, to talk about her day, but she'd cut me off in the middle of a sentence, and asked (nicely) if we could listen to music. So assertive for a 3-year-old. We'd quietly sat through Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" (TAD and I happen to love dance/electronic music) and then arrived at gymnastics. Upon sighting the building, she had brightened, and begun asking me for the third time if she would have to wear her jeans over her leotard. We'd walked (I walk - she prances) inside and she'd immediately taken her clothes off so everyone could see her leotard. "Hi," she said to some man twice my size who was waiting with his kids. One of his kids was the aforementioned little boy with mad gymnastics skills. Ava tried to say hi to the little boy too, but he was moving too fast to even notice her.

The little class is weaving its way back across the floor now. The dad of the little boy, I realize, is sitting a little ways down from me here in the observation deck. He's got an iPad, and he's tapping away at some email. He glances up and sees his little blizzard of a boy and puts the iPad down with a grin. I know the feeling. The Abstracted Daughter and her classmates line up in front of a big padded block the size of a refrigerator. I watch as the first kid lays down in front of it and the teacher helps her up into a headstand.
TAD and the little boy are the last two in line. All of a sudden, I kid you not, the little boy leans over and kisses her on the cheek. She doesn't flinch. From this distance, I can't be sure, but I think I see her roll her eyes. Then he leans over and kisses her on the cheek again. She doesn't react at all. Like an ice queen, she ignores him and moves forward in line.

That's my girl.

I knew - I know - that she inherited way too many attractive features from her gorgeous mother to not draw in the boys like iron shavings to a magnet. Some day she'll come home with some pinhead I immediately hate and all a dad can do is hope the boy is a safe driver and has college plans for himself. People think it's pretty damn hilarious when they see my cute little daughter to say "Oh, I bet you are losing sleep already with a cutie like that!" The truth is, at her age the last thing that keeps me up is boys. She doesn't even understand gender yet, really. What keeps me up at night are rapists. Predators. TAD falling down the stairs. Freak car accidents. Losing my job and not being able to feed my family. You know...the fears a father has in the present. I try to let the future, however inevitable, be the future.

But if Ava decides to let that boy-ridden future wait a day longer, I'm not complaining.

After her class is over, she meets me at the door. I help her into her jeans and shoes and coat and we walk to the truck. She tells me a little about what they did. Then she reminds me that she wants mommy to bring her next week. I stifle a sigh and tell her "that's fine with me, but you better ask mommy nicely when you get home." Every sentence is a lesson. Every moment a chance to teach.We get home, and I pass the gymnast off to mommy and head to the grocery store.

As I write this now, I just feel an incredible sadness. Sad that little moments like this slip through my fingers every day. Sad that my little girl is growing up and I can't catch my breath. Sad that I make bold, arrogant statements like "I won't let parenting ruin my life." Sad that my daughter absolutely, and without bias, loves her daddy with everything in her but when she says she prefers mommy to drive her next week I can't help but resent her, and resent her mother too. Sad that minutes each day are wasted in time-out because I have so many rules in my house. Sad that my little big-hearted child gets pushed out of the way in line sometimes. Sad that I told myself I would remember this post, and I've forgotten it. Sad that I made her stay in the house while I went and checked the raspberry bushes the other day. Right now, while she sleeps upstairs, I miss her terribly.

I love my daughter, every inch of her. May she never doubt it.


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An Ingenius, Flawed Plan

Certainly, artificial photosynthesis would be really amazing. But calling this photosynthesis is laughable:

Speaking at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in California, MIT professor Daniel Nocera claims to have created an artificial leaf made from stable and inexpensive materials that mimics nature’s photosynthesis process.
The device is an advanced solar cell, no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water. Then, much like a natural leaf, it uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell to be used when producing electricity.

Actually what happens in a leaf is carbon dioxide is combined (via harnessing photons) into sugar, which is later metabolized to provide the plant energy.

Nevertheless, Mr. (Dr.? Probably Dr.) Daniel Nocera's method is ingenius. Using solar energy to harvest hydrogen and then use a hydrogen-powered fuel cell to produce electricity could solve many world problems, especially in developing nations where utilities are unreliable.

However, so is access to water.

What is unclear is what percentage of the water will be retained after catalysis in the hydrogen cell. Will the device go on forever, taking that same gallon of water and cycling it back and forth from gases to liquid? And how cheap would such a device be? It's a tank of water, this wafer of hydrogen gas production, and a hydrogen fuel cell generator. My guess is the "refrigerator sized generator" that Tata Group has bought the rights to develop will not have a final cost of $5. And so I wonder if Tata Group and Dr. Nocera's device will run into the same brick wall that Segway inventor Dean Kamen hit when he invented his sterling-engine-powered water purification device...the price tag was up, up and away, while the market was poorer than ever. Kamen's device purified a lot of water, and did so pretty quickly. But it cost, by one estimate, $2,800/unit. That's six time the annual income of many of the people that need it.

Someone will probably counter-argue that "the price of these technologies always goes down dramatically once mass production is achieved, and sustaining innovations drive down production costs."

Tell that to Dean Kamen.


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Kindle and the end of the "book era"

Luddites can say what they want about the ebook craze...but since I got my Kindle 3 weeks ago, I've read more fiction than I did in the past 3 years. Now tell me how that's bad for the book business?


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What We Can Do

My first instinct tonight (before those three delighful Bud Lites) was to write about the growing income inequality gap, and point to Megan's article which suggests that a large part of income inequality in the last 20 years is a byproduct of a change in the tax code. You know, and not a byproduct of the rich absorbing all the wealth in this country intentionally and via intense and concerted efforts to lobby government.

No, instead I want to wax optimistic. Tastefully named Alexis Madrigal points to an old journal written by a Russian surgeon, isolated in Antarctica, suffering acute appendicitis. He had no choice but to operate on himself:

I worked without gloves. It was hard to see. The mirror helps, but it also hinders -- after all, it's showing things backwards. I work mainly by touch. The bleeding is quite heavy, but I take my time -- I try to work surely. Opening the peritoneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up. Suddenly it flashed through my mind: there are more injuries here and I didn't notice them ... I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every 4-5 minutes I rest for 20-25 seconds. Finally, here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst and ...
At the worst moment of removing the appendix I flagged: my heart seized up and noticeably slowed; my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it's going to end badly. And all that was left was removing the appendix ... And then I realised that, basically, I was already saved.

Alexis writes: "Two weeks later, he was back on regular duty.  He died at the age of 66 in St. Petersburg in 2000. Just a little reminder that humans can complete some pretty amazing physical feats when their lives hang in the balance."

Earlier this evening I came across, while digging through files on my computer, favorite quotes of Thomas Edison (TAE's personal hero). This one stepped out in front of me:

"If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."

These quotes both reach towards a similar conclusion for me. This human animal is capable of so much good. Once the evolutionary map of our species was sufficiently written, our species rapidly and convincingly dominated the entire planet. In geological time, our species has spread in the blink of an eye. One thousand years is barely enough to move tectonic plates five feet. In that time we went from hunter gatherers to organized civilization. Another five feet of tectonic movement had us building large nation-states and orchestrating trade routes across continents. Another five feet and we were building fleets to cross oceans. Another five feet and our species was on the moon and sending robots to drive around Mars.
Remember, the fact that we've gone from loose bands of people with no written language to space-capable creatures that have beaten hunger in less than 6,000 years is a fair comparison to every other species in Earth's history which so far has been unable to achieve anything comparable over millions of years. The dinosaurs, titans of an earlier Earth, had hundreds of millions of years...literally thousands of times longer than the modern history of our species, and they never once started a campfire. They never once painted a picture on a cave wall.

It is in this spirit that we must realize just how much we are capable of...when we work together. Engineers, working together went from an erratic V-2 missile in 1946 to orbiting human beings via rocket in 1959. Standing together, the people of Egypt toppled their leader. Together, humans have built Wikipedia into the single largest repository of easily accessible information in the history of the known Universe.

But the fundamental premise behind editing a Wikipedia article is that you gain nothing from doing it. You already know the information you are typing. You aren't doing it for you. You are doing it for everyone else. Wikipedia grows because somewhere, down deep inside even the most selfish egghead there is this need to share the contents of the brain with others. People see an error in Wikipedia and think "oh, that's wrong. I could fix that." And with self-satisfaction they do. But they don't get any smarter. They don't gain any personal wealth or accolade. Finding the online identity of a wiki editor is laborious. Finding the real identity behind that avatar is nearly impossible. If you have fixed an entry...you are probably the only person who knows you did it.

The reason I wax so poetically about Wikipedia is specifically because it is a (nearly) universally accessible method by which the human race can mitigate knowledge hoarding by the elite. While I laud the hours of research a physicist may have done to achieve successful storage of hydrogen storage in palladium (I went to grad school, remember), it is no longer necessary to be a physicist to read about it and understand what they did. Wikipedia specifically, and the internet in general, is creating a situation where knowledge inequality is being eliminated.

Of course there is a backlash. People claim that the internet has destroyed their livelihood. This is possible. It is specifically because the rise of society sloughs off certain aged economies that social welfare programs must exist. But that is a topic much more in the realm of a philosophical leftist like Freddie DeBoer.

Instead let us get back on topic: the capabilities of the human species. Last month and before, I have ranted and orated and ranted some more about the complete collapse of the environment, and how I believe the biosphere on this planet has been forced along a path that is unsustainable and that humanity is set up in such a way that we cannot legislate a fix..and human nature does not accept the sacrifices necessary for the fix either.
But it does not have to be so! Even as I type this, I realize my petty words will reach almost no one; my suggested actions will affect even fewer. In my back and forth with Benjamin Dueholm over the essence of monogamy he has made an invaluable point: regardless of whether our ancient, proto-human ancestry was monogamous or polygamous, humans are (perhaps uniquely in the entire animalian history of Earth) capable of choosing to be or not be monogamous as we wish.
This choice...the simple ability to say "yes" or "no" ad infinitum is the most powerful tool Nature (or God or whatever) ever bestowed upon a species.

And so I guess what I want is for people to start choosing to see the good in each other. Can I see the good in Sarah Palin? It wouldn't be easy. Pointing out a good quality in a person you despise is really hard without mentioning the qualities you hate first. Can I see the good in Glenn Beck? Can I see the good in Nancy Pelosi? Can I see good in Steve Jobs?
Before compelling my readership to do anything, I must do it myself. And so I challenge you, readers, to do what I am actively trying (with limited success I must admit) to do: regardless of my feelings towards a person and their opinions I will try to see the good in them.

People are idiots. People are hypocrites. People are greedy and self-serving and stuck in their ways. People are spiteful. People are egomaniacal or narcissistic or both. But if we all start focusing on the good in each other: people can sacrifice, people can work hard, people can respect each other, people can laugh and cry and hug each other...if we start seeing those things, it becomes easier for us to work with them, and they with us. In short, it becomes easier to work together and stop mucking up the future.


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Successful Drones vs. Failed Savants

As I touched on before, Jonah Lehrer has a seemingly contradictory back and forth going with himself, in which he first argues for distracted creativity as a method of success then turns and argues that intense, long-duration focus (grit) is the real key to success. It certainly seems like "long term memory" is not a key to success...har har.

In any case, this apparent contradiction begs the question: is it better to be an underachieving, irritatingly spastic but brilliant artist or a highly-capable, manager-pleasing, right-brained drone who relishes long hours?

If Creativity and Grit are two possible success predictors, I'd like to posit a third option: quality of parenting. Children with good, stable parents are almost invariably successful. Good parents teach their kids to stick with hobbies, to practice conflict resolution with their siblings and peers (and their future spouse), to think creatively both as a member of the family but also in ways to rebel. Good parents send their kids to school, without exception, and teach their children that school is essential to both long-term happiness and success. Good parents praise their child's accomplishments, and positively reinforce good habits like grit and creativity. Good parents also carefully and patiently weed out "bad" traits, like impatience and reactive behavior.

In regards to grit, Lehrer points to spelling bee winners who were able to were "able to deliberately practice" spelling for hours a day through rote memorization. But Lehrer readily admits that grit is a learned trait. So who, pray tell, are gritty kids learning from? Almost certainly from their gritty parents.

Creativity, on the other hand, can be more strongly correlated to our genes. But it can also be quashed in childhood faster than grit can be taught. I've always toed the line between "creative" and "A.D.D." My parents, either through luck or wisdom, taught me to channel my creativity into harmless outlets, like role-playing with my friends, writing, and computers. But other kids weren't so lucky. Their parents, rather than "aiming" their child's creativity like mine did, instead they sought to crush it. And they usually succeeded. I remember vividly a day in junior high when I waxed poetic to a friend (who was widely considered the smartest kid in school) about Dungeons & Dragons and he looked at me like I was insane. Pretending to be a medieval warrior? Ridiculous. The look on his face seemed to imply "no wonder people think you're weird."

He's an accountant now. No offense to accountants. But he could have done anything. His contribution to the world is real, and I honor it. But he missed his potential by a country mile.
Of course, his vocation may be as much a product of his humility as a product of his lack of creativity. If ever there were a failure of my parents, it would be in their attempts to curb my ego. Giving some of my traits a long leash meant other not so savory ones rode along for the ride.

And so maybe there's the point: good parenting is about picking and choosing which traits you want in your future adult and fostering those while weeding out (as best you can) the bad ones. Like I said, there is nothing wrong with my friend who grew to be an accountant. It's not the career I would ever choose...but then again I am bursting with energy and creativity and love "the big picture" and not the details. That's just how my parents raised me.
And so it goes with grit and creativity. Having those traits isn't a silver bullet to success. Having great parents is.


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Military Bashing

Last night while ranting I offended my father, a retired Colonel and Air Force fighter pilot. I was mentioning the $30 million F-15 now laying in a field in Libya. Things got heated, and dad declared "if you bash the military you won't get a lot of sympathy in this house!"

For the record, I have nothing but respect for the United States military. Other than the army of Genghis Khan, I can think of no other fighting force as formidable in human history.

It is how that fighting force is deployed that makes me rant. More than partially, this is because of my father's military service. During my formative years, I watched my father be deployed (as a reservist) to Aviano, Italy, to support Clinton's war in Bosnia. The realization that my father could be shot down in some Eastern Bloc nation not especially interested in his presence was sobering. But even more sobering was the idea that my mother could lose her husband. That feeling has strengthened in me as I have grown up and now have a wife and child of my own. The pain of a spouse losing their loved one is almost incalcuble. And yet here we go, deploying Americans into (well, just "over" at this point) yet another country where we arguably don't belong.

It is against brash deployment of the military, not the military itself that I rant. My dad said once "in a perfect world we don't need the military, but we still have it just in case." I think he's right.


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The Problem With Using "Decile" Divisions

Scott Hodge, both in his Senate testimony and in his followup blog post, argues that America's "top decile" (that is, top 10%) pays an uneven amount of the tax burden compared to the decile income. That is, if you take the share of taxes of the richest decile and divide it by the share of income of the richest decile, you end up with "1.35," which means that decile is paying "more than their fair share."
He then compares our top decile to the top decile in other countries to show how America's rich have a heavy burden compared to other countries.

Several problems:
1. The first is that these data provide a snapshot, not a moving picture. Since 1942 (and especially since 1982), the income share of the top decile has been climbing, and climbing fast. The first page of this pdf illustrates what I mean, and that data only is good through 1998. The last ten years have been even more profitable for the top decile (see chart "Winners Take All").

2. How does comparing the U.S. top decile to the top decile of Luxembourg prove anything? By my quick calculation, 15 of the countries listed in Hodge's chart have a total population that is lower than the population of America's top decile. What can one learn from Luxembourg's economy and tax system, when the top 10% of their population would barely fill the town of Salina, KS? While I do see Mr. Hodge's point; other "freemarket" economies have less tax burden on the top decile...I don't see how you can compare mice to elephants. Further, his chart shows a wide range of ratios, with an average of 1.11. If the chart showed 23 countries with ratios of 0.95-1.05 and the U.S. as a wild outlier at 1.35, I would see his point. But there is that range. And Mr. Hodge makes only a single sentence mention that the "U.S. top decile income share" is the third highest on the chart! Certainly, he can show that we put a tax burden on our rich here in America...but he has also shown that we also reward them handsomely. It becomes a classic chicken vs. egg question here: which came first...America's super-rich or America's tax structure?

3. Not his fault (it isn't in the scope of his article), but Hodge does not expound on the social and economic ramifications of America's tax system as is. Pages 2-4 of the previously mentioned pdf as well as that Mother Jones chart make an important point: "the top decile" doesn't paint the whole picture. Really, it's too broad a stroke to discuss both the income distribution in America as well as her tax structure. Both sources point to the surge in wealth of the top 1% in this country.

4. The data presented by Hodge does not take unemployment rates into consideration, or if it does that adjustment and ramification is hidden and not mentioned. Unemployed don't pay a significant amount of tax. In fact the unemployed (that collect benefits) are really being negatively taxed, since their unemployment income comes from previously collected tax dollars. Unemployment is grossly skewed towards deciles 6-10. And when I say grossly skewed, I mean it. This chart points to the unemployment rates across the ten deciles in America, and please note that the bottom two deciles are above 25% as of this writing, while the top decile is steady at about 1.6%. The disproportion of income tax paid makes more sense, given this context.

I think too many people have this idea that the tax burden put on the wealthy in this country is viewed by the poor as a righteous vindication. I think many in the middle class think high taxes for their (imagined) rich future selves is a punishment imposed by liberals for their having climbed the social ladder. I for one wish we didn't have to pay taxes at all, honestly. I certainly don't like spending 81 million tax dollars in one day on cruise missiles, or burning up 424 million tax dollars in the atmosphere. But the need to maintain, nay, increase the tax rate in this country is a CONSEQUENCE of our actions in the last decade. The current economic climate, like it or not, was almost entirely caused by the actions of the top decile. Letting them shoulder an "unfair portion" of the tax burden as we dig ourselves out of this recession is not a punishment, it is a moral imperative.


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Live Like Me Syndrome

Listen, y'all. Pert near every city slicker I done come across is tickled to death over this here new book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. While I can't claim to have done read it, I have done read a mighty collection of other people's articles about it. And as it happens to turn out, every dang one of those preachy articles was written by a city slicker.

Meanwhile, y'all, out here in the fields...we don't particularly agree with Mr. Glaeser's thesis. Here in the backwoods, down in the holler, where the girls are corn fed, and the men have red necks...we try not to judge wealth by how "rich" we are. Perhaps, we might earn a pinch more money if we moved to a city. But then we wouldn't own a "yard" or get to "see stars at night" which are two things that out here in the boonies we call an important part of God's bounty.
Certainly, the number of "educated" people might be higher in cities; rural areas particularly seem to be places where "less educated" people can get by. You don't need a fancy "P-H-D" to farm or to work at the Tyson plant. So the argument that cities "are smarter" is sound, but the argument that cities make us smarter is not. Why, just the other day I turned on "Real Housewives of New York City"...boy I tell you those women have to be about the dumbest people on God's Green Earth.

Mr. Glaeser seems to suggest that folks in the city are "greener." I am guessing that poor boy isn't being literal, because nothing is greener than growing corn. Maybe he is talking about that new-fangled concept of "carbon footprints." He might be right, I don't know. I'm not from Hahhhvud like he is. But then again, I've planted a tree or two in my time. But I'm just a poor farm boy from the Breadbasket, what do I know?

But then again, ol' Mr. Glaeser seems to be ignoring some facts. Sure, country bumpkins like me are dumber than edified city folk. But we also ain't nearly as likely to be addicted to painkillers. Out in the country the crime rate is lower. Unemployment is lower. The recession was less painful. Do you hear about the foreclosure rate in the country? I humbly submit, city slickers, that your city is suffering while your kin are moving to North Dakota farm country where the jobs are. If Mr. Glaeser thinks city folk are happier...he better think again.

Look y'all, Mr. Glaeser is as entitled to his opinion as I. But until I hear that he has spent a few quiet evenings sitting on a country farmhouse porch watching the sun set, and heard the cackling howl of coyotes a'runnin' the deer around, he can keep his city-loving where it belongs. Once ol' Glaeser has spent a week workin' the land, sweating in the fields...and then settling down in the evening to a cold one and the paper, I ain't gonna believe a word he says. Seems to me Glaeser thinks he's got all the answers. Maybe he just don't know the right questions.

You just don't get country if you ain't been country.

One more thought: Glaeser calls cities "our greatest invention." Apparently, he's never heard of ants, termites, or bees.

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From the Annals of Hypocrisy

This weekend was pretty hard on Mr. Obama's chances of getting the lucrative TAE Presidential Endorsement in 2012. Mostly this was because of Libya. Here's then-Senator Obama remarking on Presidential power:

"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

And then we have this gem from this weekend:

"I am deeply aware of the risks of any military action, no matter what limits we place on it. I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice and it’s not a choice that I make lightly. But we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy, and his forces step up their assaults on cities like Benghazi and Misurata, where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government."

The level of hypocrisy here is a bit much for me to take in. In the first case, you've got an about face you can believe in. But the second quote causes a cynical laugh and a head shake, because the United States of America in general and Mr. Obama specifically stand by and do nothing while the tyrannical government in Iran crushes (again and again, day after day) dissenters under its heel and murders women and children in the street.

Do we now pick and choose when the President must obey the Constitution? The scary thing is...in my 29 years of life I cannot remember a single instance where a President even pretended like he needed permission to do anything.


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How You Are Helping the Terrorists With Each and Every Breath.

Hot on the heels of the news that U.S. made weapons are being used against protesters in Bahrain comes a report from the Heritage Foundation that each and every American has directly aided terrorists by sharing air with them. From the report:

Each American takes on average 1-2 liters of air per breath, nearly 11,000 liters a day. Combined, more than 300 million Americans are exhaling almost 3 trillion liters of breath every single day - most of which heads east on the wind.Carried across the Atlantic, this exhaled air is breathed in by much of Europe and the Arab world. Due to mixing and turbulence, it is a statistical certainty that many of the molecules of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen breathed out by Americans is breathed in within hours by al-Qaeda operatives in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Therefore, without doing anything but breathe, millions of Americans ensure the survival of terrorists every day.

It is the recommendation of the Heritage Foundation that America adopt a "no exhalation" policy until the full effects of American breathing can be calculated.

Scientists across the nation cried foul, claiming not only that the random mixing of air prevents any possibility of placing blame for terrorists ability to breathe on any one group, but also that a legal requirement to "not exhale" would cause more American deaths than terrorists ever could. However, these claims have been largely dismissed by many in the GOP, suggesting "science" is just a tool of the liberal elite to blind us to the coming Islamic takeover: "When the Muslims take over America...where will we get our air to breathe then?"

Dr. Simon Shapiro, an atmospheric physicist at UC-Berkeley said in a statement "the idea that we should be held culpable for the molecules in our breathe is absurd. Certainly we can choose where we breathe in and exhale. But once that breath has left our bodies, we can not control what becomes of it."

In a related story, the Department of Justice today filed suit against Sol, also known as "the Sun," which the DOJ claims is aiding and abetting terrorists by providing them light to see with. No word yet on whether the Planet Earth will be added to the lawsuit, though government officials have suggested that "no naturally existing phenomena that indirectly makes it possible for terrorists to be alive is beyond our scope at this point."


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Hey Jonah, Why the Apparent Contradiction?

What I don't get is how Jonah Lehrer can write one week about the need to protect the spastic and creative in our society and then the next week positively gush about the need for self-control and the ability to stick to one activity for weeks or even years in order to achieve anything.


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Nuclear Fission Fusion

Here's the wikipedia article on fusion reactor safety (notice I said "fusion" not "fission"):

There is no possibility of a catastrophic accident in a fusion reactor resulting in major release of radioactivity to the environment or injury to non-staff, unlike modern fission reactors. The primary reason is that nuclear fusion requires precisely controlled temperature, pressure, and magnetic field parameters to generate net energy. If the reactor were damaged, these parameters would be disrupted and the heat generation in the reactor would rapidly cease. In contrast, the fission products in a fission reactor continue to generate heat through beta-decay for several hours or even days after reactor shut-down, meaning that melting of fuel rods is possible even after the reactor has been stopped due to continued accumulation of heat (Fukushima I incidents demonstrated the problems that can rise in a fission reactor due to beta decay heating even days after SCRAM, an emergency shutdown of the fission reactor).


There is also no risk of a runaway reaction in a fusion reactor, since the plasma is normally burnt at optimal conditions, and any significant change will render it unable to produce excess heat. In fusion reactors the reaction process is so delicate that this level of safety is inherent; no elaborate failsafe mechanism is required. Although the plasma in a fusion power plant will have a volume of 1000 cubic meters or more, the density of the plasma is extremely low, and the total amount of fusion fuel in the vessel is very small, typically a few grams. If the fuel supply is closed, the reaction stops within seconds. In comparison, a fission reactor is typically loaded with enough fuel for one or several years, and no additional fuel is necessary to keep the reaction going.


In the magnetic approach, strong fields are developed in coils that are held in place mechanically by the reactor structure. Failure of this structure could release this tension and allow the magnet to "explode" outward. The severity of this event would be similar to any other industrial accident or an MRI machine quench/explosion, and could be effectively stopped with a containment building similar to those used in existing (fission) nuclear generators. The laser-driven inertial approach is generally lower-stress. Although failure of the reaction chamber is possible, simply stopping fuel delivery would prevent any sort of catastrophic failure.


Most reactor designs rely on the use of liquid lithium as both a coolant and a method for converting stray neutrons from the reaction into tritium, which is fed back into the reactor as fuel. Lithium is highly flammable, and in the case of a fire it is possible that the lithium stored on-site could be burned up and escape. In this case the tritium contents of the lithium would be released into the atmosphere, posing a radiation risk. However, calculations suggest that the total amount of tritium and other radioactive gases in a typical power plant would be so small, about 1 kg, that they would have diluted to legally acceptable limits by the time they blew as far as the plant's perimeter fence.

People often point, especially after reactor incidents like this or after Mr. Obama's SOTU (in which he challenged America to resume nuclear reactor construction) that nuclear reactor development languished after Chernobyl. This is true. What people don't talk about enough is the fact that nuclear fusion reactor research has been underfunded for the last 40 years. Which, honestly, is a travesty, because fusion promises orders of magnitude more energy than a fission reactor while consuming and producing harmless, non-radioactive components.

I am sorry that the nuclear accidents in Japan are happening. My heart goes out to them. People from various groups have raised a myriad of possible ways the accident could have been prevented, or could be prevented from happening again elsewhere. To this I add my two cents: there will only cease to be nuclear reactor accidents once we commercialize and switch to nuclear fusion reactors.


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Battle: Los Angeles is a Battle to believe in

I don't even need to see this movie to write a review of it. Here's what happens: UFOs are increasingly sighted. Suddenly the aliens emerge from where they were hiding amongst us this whole time. We fight a desperate battle and in the end win a bold, explosion-filled defiance of logic.
Even if this doesn't happen...even if the aliens win...movies of alien invasions involving huge epic battles and explosions leave me bored and my eyes hurting from too much rolling.


Imagine we were the aliens. What technologies would we need to reach another planet? Some sort of interstellar drive. Huge amounts of resources. Possible artificial gravity technology.
Let's imagine our telescope technology were to advance far enough that we could "discover" habitable alien worlds. We observe that lights exist on these alien worlds, lights that were emitted from those worlds only a few dozen light years ago. We've developed FTL traveling capabilities because we essentially can harness the energy of a star. We've developed the ability to capture and harness antimatter. We have quantum computing. Our biological bodies have been enhanced both genetically as well as through electronic implants.

So one of our scientists points out that the alien ecosystem might cause us a problem if we visit. So we send a probe first, to capture some of their microbes and learn about their biological makeup. From this, we develop antibodies and/or suits to protect us from their environment. Sorry, War of the Worlds.
Next, a general of our Pan-Global Military Alliance suggests the aliens might be hostile. So we package our own microbes into biological weapons that would simply release seemingly harmless e. coli bacteria on a completely defenseless biosphere. The aliens would have no defense, as our super-advanced orbital bombardment technology could spread the bacteria across their globe in seconds. But just in case they were capable of immune resistance to us...and all the germs we carry with us...we repurpose our Dyson-ring technology as a method to block their own star's light, which would render their planet a lifeless ice ball in weeks.

Look, I could really go on. The point is the technological divide an alien species would have over us would be similar to the one we have over chimpanzees, and therefore these pitched battles involving cool explosions and tragic protagonist deaths only cheapen the genre of science fiction.

Have you noticed that not once in the ST:TOS (Star Trek Kirk Era) and ST:TNG (Star Trek Picard Era) does an advanced civilization invade and conquer a pre-Warp civilization? Or at least it is not a recurring theme, if it does exist in various single serving episodes. The reason for this is that true science fiction writers realize that pitched, lopsided battles between two intelligent species cannot logically happen. One species would be so far advanced of the other that orbital bombardment (either of thermonuclear weapons or bio/chem weapons) would be the cheapest and simplest method to rid a planet of its occupants. Such a thing happens quite frequently in the ST universe, for example in the movie Star Trek: First Contact: the Borg travel back in time to Earth and bombard it from the atmosphere in order to prevent the humans from achieving warp capability.
Furthermore, any alien species sufficiently advanced to reach Earth and wreak havoc would have studied the planet well enough to realize if Earth's biosphere could harm them. Sorry, Signs.

So there are really two scenarios for First Contact with aliens. In the first scenario the aliens bombard us from outer space and wipe out our biosphere. This is because they perceive us as a threat to their current or future status in the galaxy, and destroying our civilization would be low risk/low return in comparison to contact and possible trade and economic ties.
The second scenario is just the opposite. The aliens contact us from outer space and set up a trade partnership with us because they have learned that humans are uniquely good in the known galaxy at being consumers.


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Kindle 3G

I'd like to give a shout out to my wife and parents for going in on one for my birthday this year.

Subsequently, blog frequency is about to decrease...


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In which I argue by analogy that we MUST raise taxes

Imagine, if you will, that I am 18. I have a really nice car that I partially paid for through a labor-intensive part time job and partially paid for through the beneficence of my parents. The car is very fast and very good looking, possibly the nicest car at my high school.

One day, a good friend of mine who is well known at school for "souping up" cars offers to take it to his house and modify it. He promises, based on his own relevant experience and research he's done on the internet that he can take my car and a small amount of my money for parts and give me at least a 15% boost in performance, without any risk of damaging the car's drive train. I hesitate, because the car is so valuable to me. But the promise of 15% gains in horsepower, torque, and speed with just a tiny monetary input is too good to pass up. I give him the keys.

A couple days goes by and he calls me. The parts were installed, the 15% boost achieved, but something unexpected happened and the engine is totalled. The car is a total loss, he says, unless we replace the engine. Furthermore, when he was testing it out and the engine failed he ran it into a lightpole, causing significant damage to the front bumper.

I report the bumper damage to my insurer, who will pay to replace the damaged parts but it will cost me a $500 deductible plus my premium will go up. These things I can tolerate, as I convinced my girlfriend to loan me the money, temporarily (I spend a significant amount on gas driving her places and I put up with her crap, so she sees the advantages of having my driving available in the future).
However, what to do about that engine? I do not have money to replace it; I will need some sort of loan. So my dad cosigns on a small personal loan and I buy the engine. But the payments are high, as is the interest rate. I quickly realize that my current cash flow is about 60% of what it needs to be to afford to live like I am now but also make payments on that personal loan.

The current government in this country suggests the solution to this fiscal problem would be to eliminate other parts of the car that aren't needed in order to save. So I stop using my seatbelt. I stop using the radio. I stop using the backseat and spare tire. Yet, having stopped using those parts of the car I am no closer to being able to afford payments on the replacement engine. Furthermore now my car is less safe, and less fun. If I get a flat tire down the road, I will be stranded.
Surely, the sensible thing to do is to never let my friend be trusted with my car again. I should learn to live with the power that it has, and be content to live my life without that extra (high risk) 15%. But even this hindsight wisdom puts me no closer to paying for that new engine for my poor car. Plus, how will I cover the increased insurance premium I am now required to pay?

My parents can not afford to make the payments for me. They already have loaned me a lot, or at least spend a lot supporting me and paying for various things I need in my teenage life. So I can't get money from them.  I am 18; the thought occurs to me I could get a credit card to pay off the personal loan, but that just seems insane.Then what should I do? The answer, of course, is to increase my hours at my labor-intensive part time job. This will mean I lose some of my free time. My relationship with my girlfriend might be strained. My grades at school could potentially suffer. I will not have as much time with my friends. I'll have fewer free Saturdays for a while, because I'll be working more to pay for the engine. Certainly, I can stop eating fast food - saving about $25 a week. But that wasteful spending turned saving is a tiny scrap of the total cost of getting that car fixed.
Simply put: I cannot possibly hope to pay for that engine unless I start sacrificing for it.

And yet, raising taxes in this country is an anathema bordering on insanity to our government. In fact the idea of Americans changing their fiscal habits at all is pure communist psychosis. I do not disagree with the individuals who suggest that before we raise taxes we should cut waste. That is a prudent thing to do. I do not disagree with people who suggest that raising taxes might "kill jobs" somehow. Though I do not see it, I cannot prove them wrong. What I can prove is school districts are facing massive deficits nationwide, which without additional funding will certainly - certainly - kill jobs, namely those of teachers. So the question becomes which jobs you want to kill: the small businessperson who owns a barely profitable gift shop in a strip mall, or the teacher who is educating our youth? 95% of small businesses fail no matter how low taxes are. You choose the safer bet there.
I do not disagree with people who suggest that higher taxes might "slow growth" somehow. Copious growth would be really nice, and certainly if this economy came up like a buoy I would laud the high employment that accompanied it. Meanwhile, there is a reason our parents told us to avoid "get rich quick" schemes. Slow growth requires patience and fortitude...this country is fueled by greed and ambition.

I am sorry, fiscal conservatives, because I know some of you out there truly believe that lower taxes means higher economic growth and higher economic growth means salvation. I know some of you believe that somewhere in every local, state, and Federal government book there are pages and pages of waste - and that waste makes up a sizable portion of our budget. I know some of you believe that social welfare programs do nothing but accommodate the lazy. But we tried it your way for the last 10 years and it was a huge freakin' disaster. Now it's time to pay the pied piper.

Unless, of course, you think that "educating children" is a codeword for "wasteful spending."


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NASA evisceration of the day

$424 million? FLUSSSSHHHHHHHH


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Bleeding Heart Libertarians

I think I should start a blog to counter this blog. I will call it "callous populist" and the premise will be:

Having lost all interest in helping my fellow man because of the various social, cultural, and human flaws inherent in current society...I have created a place where we can discuss that life is so hopeless and awful that we might as well surrender our rights to The Man and become drones..."

I think it would be a fun project. Or I could spend that same time trolling the comments of their blog, pointing out that liberaltarianism is a fantasy that requires everyone to be their best, 100% of the time.


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The Oracle of Omaha is a fitting name.

Here's the letter Warren Buffett sent to his shareholders this weekend. I particularly enjoyed this sensibility:

Money will always flow toward opportunity, and there is an abundance of that in America.
Commentators today often talk of “great uncertainty.” But think back, for example, to December 6,
1941, October 18, 1987 and September 10, 2001. No matter how serene today may be, tomorrow is always uncertain.
Don’t let that reality spook you. Throughout my lifetime, politicians and pundits have constantly moaned about terrifying problems facing America. Yet our citizens now live an astonishing six times better than when I was born. The prophets of doom have overlooked the all-important factor that is certain: Human potential is far from exhausted, and the American system for unleashing that potential – a system that has worked wonders for over two centuries despite frequent interruptions for recessions and even a Civil War – remains alive and effective.
We are not natively smarter than we were when our country was founded nor do we work harder. But look around you and see a world beyond the dreams of any colonial citizen. Now, as in 1776, 1861, 1932 and 1941, America’s best days lie ahead.

Sensibility like this is anathema to the financial sector.

The problem with B-H stock is that you can't buy it for 66 bucks a share anymore.


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