Month: June 2024

Here's a remarkable image:

In 1987 we signed the Montreal Protocol to ban CFCs, which were producing a hole in the ozone layer. In 1992 the ban was extended to HCFCs. Both of these are powerful greenhouse gases that trap sunlight and contribute to global warming. The amount of warming they cause is called "radiative forcing."

It took until 2021, a third of a century later, to start reducing the radiative forcing of HCFCs in the atmosphere. That's a combination of how long it took to actually get rid of HCFCs and how long it took for existing HCFCs to start breaking down.

A third of a century. And carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming, takes much longer to break down than HCFCs. This is why addressing climate change is so urgent. Even if we banned carbon emissions tomorrow, the earth would continue to warm for decades. And we're not anywhere close to banning carbon emissions.

This is Schönbrunn, my favorite European palace thanks to its famous yellow exterior. However, this was not its original color. It went from light orange initially to golden ochre under Maria Theresa and finally to "Schönbrunn Gelb" in the mid-1800s. Our guide claimed that this color was chosen because money was tight at the time and it was the cheapest available. However, I haven't been able to dig up any confirmation of that.

In any case, Schönbrunn is often called a "mini Versailles," which is fair, I suppose. The palace is about half the size of Versailles and the gardens are considerably smaller. For my money, though, the view up to the Gloriette (bottom picture) outclasses anything at Versailles.

NOTE: I oversaturated the palace to bring out the yellow. It's not really that striking in real life. But it's my blog, and if I want to make Schönbrunn prettier than real life then I can.

The Census Bureau released its quarterly figures for industry sales and profits yesterday. For no particular reason, here are the biggest winners and losers since 2000.

Note that specialty retail refers to retail other than food, clothing, and general merchandise. Retail overall is up 74.1% since 2000.

I just got back from my first Lupron injection. As you'll recall, prostate cancer feeds on testosterone, and the Lupron is designed to suppress testosterone and starve the cancer to death. I was curious how long it takes for it to work, so I checked in with Abbvie:

As a former professional marketing executive and a person of the male persuasion, I have some advice: do not call the level deemed a success "castrate level." Among yourselves, sure, do what you have to do. But for the rest of us maybe something like "prostate cancer killing level" would be a better bet.

Possible side effects of Lupron include hot flashes, muscle loss, suicidal tendencies, my boobs swelling, and my balls shrinking. Sounds great!

The FBI released crime figures yesterday for Q1, and as expected, crime was down considerably everywhere:

Overall, violent crime was down 15.2%. Murder was down 26.4%. Overall property crime was down 15.1%.  Crime was down by double digits or more in every single category and in every region of the country.

I don't want to pretend this is all Joe Biden's doing. Nevertheless, the press dedicated a lot of time and space to crime when it went up, and you'd think they could spare a few column inches on their front pages when it's plummeting.

From the Washington Post:

In edited videos, Republican officials and allies of former president Donald Trump repeatedly tried to turn Biden’s Normandy visit into a highlight reel of senior moments and missteps, aimed at showing the president as infirm, addled or out of his depth. Trump, who turns 78 on Friday, has also repeatedly attacked Biden over his age and fitness, and regularly shares videos of the president looking frail.

This is easy to do, usually by using very short clips that seem to show something they don't. It's become a Republican staple in their obsession with portraying Biden as a doddering moron.

Never trust a five-second video clip, no matter which side it comes from. I guarantee you that the full context will always tell you something interesting. Even if it doesn't directly contradict the short clip, there's always something that puts a little different perspective on what happened.

Sure enough, Hunter Biden has been found guilty in the gun case. But I still expect a very mild sentence.

Bill Gates is excited about today's groundbreaking for a Gen IV nuclear reactor¹ in Wyoming:

The plant was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. But my nuclear journey started several years earlier, when I first read a scientific paper for a new type of nuclear power plant.

The design was far safer than any existing plant, with the temperatures held under control by with the laws of physics instead of human operators who can make mistakes. It would have a shorter construction timeline and be cheaper to operate. And it would be reliable, providing dependable power throughout the day and night. As I looked at the plans for this new reactor, I saw how rethinking nuclear power could overcome the barriers that had hindered it—and revolutionize how we generate power in the U.S. and around the world.

I'm basically in favor of Gen IV nuclear technology. If it can be standardized and mass constructed it really does have all the potential Gates says it does.

But—

You knew something was coming, didn't you? It's this: nuclear enthusiasts tend to sweep the problem of nuclear waste under the rug. I once thought that Gen IV reactors at least improved the waste problem, but I don't think even that much is true. They produce the same amount of long-lasting waste as older plants.

Gates doesn't mention that, and no one else does either. Partly, I suppose, this is because nuclear waste has been relatively harmless over the past 80 years. It gets stored in pools, or vitrified into glass, or buried in canisters, and hasn't resulted in any headline-worthy events yet. So maybe waste isn't really such a big deal?

Maybe, but I can't say this view fills me with cheer. Keeping nuclear waste safe for a few decades isn't that hard, but as they say, past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Waste disposal gets harder as time passes and even "permanent" solutions turn out not to be so permanent after all. If we keep making more and more of this stuff and then storing it all on-site at hundreds of different facilities while we shrug at the waste, someday it's going to backfire. I'm not sure how—groundwater contamination? terrorist attack?—but having a quarter million tons of high-level radioactive waste dotting the world's landscape seem like it's asking for trouble.

So, sure, Gen IV tech is cool and has a lot of promise as a carbon-free electricity source. But there's still all that waste. We can't pretend it away forever.

¹Yes, they number them like Super Bowls. No idea why.

This chart has been making the rounds from immigration hawks:

This seems damning, but I knew there had to be something dodgy about it. I just didn't know what. So I started poking around in the numbers.

The first thing I did was check that the figures in the chart are correct. They are (using the household survey employment levels). And yet, we know the unemployment rate among the native born is better than it was a year ago. How can that be?

The answer turns out to be simple: the native-born adult population has declined over the past year:

Since last summer the adult population of the native born has gone down by nearly a million people. The series is noisy, so the month-to-month figures are going to bob up and down, but generally speaking the past year has been a period when the native-born population has been shrinking and therefore the number of native-born workers has also been shrinking.

This has nothing to do with illegal immigration. It's solely because the native-born population has flattened out:

The growth rate of the native-born adult population slackened in 2021 and then turned actually negative about a year ago.

Why? These are adults over age 16, so the population depends solely on (a) the number of 15-year-olds who turn 16 and (b) the number of people who die. The US death rate has subsided from its COVID peak and is now only a bit higher than it was in 2019, so the overall population decline this year has to be due mostly to a change in the native-born birth rate around 2008. And sure enough, the US birth rate started to plummet right about 2008. What we're experiencing now is an echo of the Great Recession.

But did the Great Recession affect native-born women more than foreign-born women? No. In fact, it hit the foreign born harder. Presumably, the foreign-born population has made up for this via immigration, legal and otherwise.

Illegal immigration might explain a small bit of the continued increase in foreign-born workers, but the decline in native-born workers shown in the top chart is due solely to population decline, not difficulty finding work. The percentage of the native-born population that's working is about the same as it's been for a long time.

Last week I said that I wasn't going to take another crack at photographing Rho Ophiuchi, but on Wednesday I happened to glance at the weather forecast and it said the sky was looking great on Palomar Mountain. So I suddenly decided to go out there and try again.

I don't mean all of Rho Ophiuchi, which I just don't have the equipment for. I mean IC 4603, the "turbulent heart" of Rho Ophiuchi. As you can see, it still didn't turn out very well, even though the sky really was very nice. There are a few reasons for this. First, it's summer, which means the night is only dark for a few hours. Second, Rho Ophiuchi doesn't rise very high above the horizon. Third, it's not a very bright nebula.

However, June is just about the only month that it's even barely high enough to photograph, which is why I decided to try again. If I hadn't, I'd be out of luck for another year.