Month: August 2022

The snowy peak in this photo is Iron Mountain, part of the San Gabriel range. It may not look like much, but here is Wikipedia's description:

While this mountain is far lower in elevation than other Southern California summits, it is the most difficult mountain to climb in the entire region. There are no water sources on the mountain, unless one finds snow. There are no maintained trails, the summit is seldom visited, and the climb is of about 6000 vertical feet (1,800 m), much of it at a 30° to 50° angle on loose soil, decomposed rock, or through brush. Some approaches to the summit require high degrees of rock-climbing skill. One route over the ridgeline from nearby Mount San Antonio (Mount Baldy) is long, difficult, and dangerous. The south mountain slopes in summer are directly exposed to the sun....There are no facilities of any kind on the mountain.

Hold on. In the same sentence Mt. Baldy is "nearby" but the route from Baldy to Iron Mountain is "long." Which is it? And is this really Iron Mountain anyway? I think it is, but perhaps some local hikers can either confirm or correct this.

We now have booster shots aimed at the Omicron strains of COVID-19, and suddenly conservatives are realizing there's a downside to their endless yammering about how the FDA moves too damn slow. Michael Brendan Dougherty fills us in on the FDA's rapid approval of the Omicron boosters:

There’s a catch though: These boosters have been tested only on mice, not on humans.

....There was a libertarian and conservative vision of how the FDA should operate: more liberally, and faster please. They viewed the slow pace of the regulators as an impediment to discovery, innovation, and iteration....But there is another side to the story, which is trust. The faster that medicines are rolled out, and the less oversight they receive, the more room you have to make for public mistrust and doubt.

A very short time ago, it was nearly unthinkable to approve new vaccines without human trials. Now, we live in a world where ongoing booster mandates in some localities would oblige citizens to take a medicine that was never tested on humans or forfeit their access to public accommodations.

First off, Dougherty is wrong: Every year we all get flu vaccines that have never been tested on humans. It is assumed (correctly) that since the basic vaccine is safe, every possible combination of the vaccine against various strains of the flu is also safe. This is the same logic that's driving the fast approval of the Omicron boosters.

More to the point, though, is that everyone who's not an idiot already knew about the tradeoff between speed and safety. Am I being harsh? You damn well bet I am, and it's because the public reaction to the original vaccine approval pissed me off so much. Conservatives (mostly) could hardly shut up about how the FDA was a broken agency and there was no excuse for its sludge-like approval of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. But you have to run trials and analyze the data, and that takes time, we said. Bah, we heard back. A month earlier there was zero chance the vaccine wouldn't be approved. So why not just approve it then?

Does everyone now get it? In the case of the Omicron boosters, we're skipping the human trials and getting the vaccine out fast. Are you happy? Or are the dissenters on the FDA approval panel¹ suddenly going to become conservative heroes, leading to endless yammering about how reckless the FDA is? You can't have it both ways.

¹Yes, there is one.

This is just a "hello, world" post. There's nothing very interesting happening at the moment, and I have to leave soon to submit myself to a truly astonishing array of blood tests.¹ So just to let everyone know that I'm alive, awake, and on the job, here's the cost of natural gas since the war in Ukraine started:

A few years ago it was three bucks. Now it's over $50. In the US it's around $10.

Bottom line: European countries are sacrificing a lot to prosecute the war in Ukraine. In the US it's no big deal. It's good to keep that in mind.

¹Creatinine, white blood count, syphilis, hep A, B, and C, HIV, Epstein-Barr, blood type, glucose level, electrolytes, calcium, bilirubin, phosphorous, magnesium, immunoglobulins, M-protein, uric acid, quantiferon-TB, PTT, etc. etc. Also an EKG and an echocardiogram. And a brain MRI. Next week we do a spinal biopsy, which is really painful. Have you ever had one of those?

UPDATE: 18 vials of blood! Then they chased me down as I was leaving to tell me they'd forgotten one. 19 vials!

The Washington Post says that fusion power is finally getting close to reality:

Scientists are mere years from getting more energy out of fusion reactions than the energy required to create them, they said. Venture capitalists are pumping billions into companies, racing to get a fusion power plant up and running by the early 2030s. The Biden administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Department of Energy, is creating tax credits and grant programs to help companies figure out how to deploy this kind of energy.

Yet challenges remain, according to nuclear scientists. The U.S. energy grid would need a significant redesign for fusion power plants to become common. The price of providing fusion power is still too high to be feasible.

The grid may be a problem, but I'm also interested in the idea of standalone fusion plants that are purpose-built for specific projects. Take water, for example. California is running out, but we have the Pacific Ocean right next door and it's brimming with water. The problem is that desalination plants require huge amounts of power to run and have never been worth the cost.

So what are the possibilities of building a fusion plant designed from the start to run a desalination plant and not connect to the grid at all? Water for everyone!

I dunno. Maybe it's still too expensive. But that's just a general problem. Even if the boffins get fusion to work, it still has to be cost effective or else no one is going to use it. And if it does become cost effective, why not use the technology to build some self-contained desalination plants for California?

The Wall Street Journal warns us yet again about the woes of retailers:

From Walmart Inc. to Nordstrom Inc., retailers have a glut of inventory and are discounting items to clear out space for holiday goods. Many have already lowered profit expectations for the year and are working to cut costs as consumers are pulling back spending in categories such as apparel and home goods ahead of the key year-end shopping season.

Maybe so, but before you start feeling too sorry for these guys you should take a look at the big picture:

Retail profits have fallen for a couple of quarters in a row, but they're still well above their trend growth from before the pandemic. Nothing unexpected is happening here.

At least, it's not unexpected for those of us who don't think the pandemic changed the course of human history and forever altered human nature. Which would be me. This is why I figure that returning to trend should be the default expectation for most things.

Diane Ravitch points us to a new study from Paul Peterson and Danish Shakeel that takes a look at student achievement over the past 50 years:

Our data consist of more than 7 million student test scores on 160 intertemporally linked math and reading tests administered to nationally representative samples of U.S. student cohorts born between 1954 and 2007.

....We estimate trends separately by testing program, subject, and grade level and report the median rather than average result to avoid giving undue importance to outliers.

We report changes in student achievement over time in standard deviation units....We interpret a difference of 25 percent of a standard deviation as equivalent to one year of learning.

That's all fine, but the news is not quite as good as their study suggests. As usual I'll focus on reading since that's more representative of general learning:

Here's the key thing to look at: gains in elementary school don't matter unless they're sustained throughout the entire 12 years of primary schooling. In the end, the only thing that matters is how well kids are doing by the time they graduate and enter the workplace.

So take a look at high school. Over the course of 50 years, white kids have improved by 0.6 grade levels. That's barely noticeable.¹

The results for Black kids are more impressive at first glance: they've improved by 2.2 grade levels. However, the bulk of that improvement came in the first two decades of our 50-year period. Peterson and Shakeel don't present their data over time, but of the five tests they use in their analysis only one goes back 50 years: the long-term NAEP. Here's what that test shows:

Black students made big gains in the '80s, but since 1990 the Black-white gap (shown by the green bars) has been nearly flat.²

And in case you're wondering, ending the chart at 2012 is not a typo. For some reason the NAEP folks haven't conducted the long-term test for 17-year-olds since then. I don't know why. However, in 2020 we got results for 13-year-olds and the Black-white gap had widened compared to 2012. There's every reason to think the same thing happened among 17-year-olds.

¹Though it's certainly better than a decline, which is what an awful lot of people believe has happened in primary education ever since the hippies took over.

²Since 1990, the average score for white kids has gone down two points and the average score for Black kids has gone up two points. That's basically nothing.

Here is Joe Biden's approval level compared to the three most recent presidents:¹

Biden looks pretty average for this point in time. Of course, all three of these other presidents got whomped in their first midterm election, so Democrats might not consider this a huge morale booster. On the other hand, Biden's recent triumphs seem to be helping him: he's gone from 38% approval in July to 44% in August. Can he leverage Dark Brandon and semi-fascism into a 50% approval rating in September?

¹I excluded George Bush from this list because his approval rating at this point in his presidency was still artificially sky high thanks to 9/11.

Novak Djokovic is the best male tennis player in the world. He would very likely win the upcoming US Open if he were able to play in it. But he can't. US immigration rules require that foreigners can enter the country only if they've been vaccinated against COVID, and Djokovic has steadfastly refused to do that.

Vinay Prasad says this is ridiculous:

Djokovic is one of the best tennis players of all time. He is currently vying for most majors of any champion (21 to date), competing with Rafael Nadal (22) and Roger Federer (20). But there will forever be an asterisk next to those comparisons because Djokovic is banned from entering the U.S. to compete in this year’s U.S. Open because of a byzantine rule that non-U.S. citizens cannot enter the country without proof of vaccination.

This rule makes no sense from a medical or public health standpoint. Consider the facts. Djokovic is 35 years old, and he is in terrific health. He has had and recovered from Covid-19 twice. This—and the fact that current variants are less lethal than prior strains—means that Djokovic’s odds of doing well were he to get sick with Covid-19 again are remarkably good, and lower than his risk of seasonal influenza.

....Now consider Djokovic’s risk to others. At least 140 million Americans have had and recovered from Covid-19 as of January (this number is higher today), and both vaccinated and unvaccinated can spread the disease. Data shows, when infected, that vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals shed virus at similar rates and for similar durations. Forcing Djokovic to get vaccinated won’t protect others. Sars-cov-2 will circulate in the United States for a thousand years whether we let Djokovic in, or keep him out forever.

Then, there are the absurd contradictions in our current rules. Unvaccinated American citizens can move freely in and out of the country without testing. Unvaccinated people can pack the stadium to watch this year’s U.S. Open, where face masks are optional. There is no vaccine or testing requirement to attend. Worst of all, Novak Djokovic competed in last year’s U.S. Open, where he made the finals before the travel rule barring his entry was in place.

Some of this is a little iffy, but let's go ahead and accept it all as true. It's close enough. In fact, there's an additional consideration that makes Prasad's case even stronger: Djokovic is OK with daily testing, which means that in practice he'd probably be safer than folks who have been vaccinated.

But despite all this, Prasad is still wrong. Whether it makes sense or not, the US has a rule in place. Nor is this rule byzantine in any way. It's simple: if you want to enter the country and you aren't a US citizen, you have to be vaccinated. Everyone is required to follow this rule.

So the real question is whether a celebrity like Djokovic should get a special exemption, and the obvious answer is no. Just because you're famous doesn't mean you get a pass on obeying the law, even if you think the law is stupid.

POSTSCRIPT: And the law is stupid. Most likely we should just suspend it. At the very least we should follow the lead of most other countries and require either vaccination or testing for entry. That would put the whole thing to rest and wouldn't endanger anyone.

I've been occupied with other stuff all day, so I haven't written anything for the blog. There's more to it than that, though: The news continues to be dominated by our village idiot and his chamber of secrets, and I hardly feel like there's much to say about that. At this point, the only thing I'm really curious about is why Trump was so intent on keeping all this top secret stuff in the face of repeated demands to turn it over. But I suspect we'll never find out for sure.

Anyway, a reader asked how COVID-19 was going these days, so here you go. To make up for my laziness today, I have charts for both COVID and monkeypox. You're welcome.

First up is COVID. After the big Omicron surge at the beginning of the year, the COVID death rate plummeted to just under one per million. Since then it's slowly climbed to 1.5 per million:

Our cumulative death rate from COVID is one of the highest in the world, but our current death rate (shown in the chart) is sort of middling. COVID isn't going away, but it isn't getting any better, either.

Monkeypox doesn't kill people, so we have to look at cases instead. Our current case rate is pretty much the highest in the world, but our cumulative case rate is . . . also pretty bad:

Take this chart with a big grain of salt since it depends on how much testing is being done in different countries. We don't know that, which is bad enough, but we do know that the testing rate is fairly low, which is even worse. It's quite possible the United States is considerably better or considerably worse than this chart shows.

This is Hilbert on the second-story balcony looking down upon all that he surveys. And do you know who's king of it?