Month: November 2024

Here's a quasi-election related chart to ponder today:

The remarkable thing isn't that fewer and fewer people are checking off the box on tax forms that funds the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. The remarkable thing is that anyone still checks it. But six million of us continue to check the box even though no presidential candidate since 2008 has accepted money from the fund.¹

As a result, there's $400 million idling away in the PECF going unused. You could buy a tenth of a Virginia class sub² for that! Or four F-35 fighter jets!

Or use it for election administration. Or state races. Or just get rid of the whole thing and return the fund to the Treasury (what we sophisticates like to call "a down payment on the national debt.") But surely we ought to do something?

¹This is because you can only receive PECF funds if you agree to a spending limit that's laughable by modern standards.

²That's a tenth of the model that includes an extra four tubes for launching 28 Tomahawk missiles in case the original 12 aren't enough.

Today, for some reason, YouGov retweeted a survey they did a few months ago about the Roman Empire. It turns out that 76% of Americans say they know at least a little about the Roman Empire and 49% have a favorable view of it.

But why? YouGov asked the 76% of Rome-knowers what they admired about it:

Roads, art, buildings, literature, etc. Fine. Military conquests? Sure, I guess. But slaveholding? Only 68% were firmly against it and 5% thought it was great. Where does this stuff come from?

Anyway, you all know where I'm going with this:

This is the rose window at the Votivkirche in Vienna, built by Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian to thank God for saving the life of his brother the emperor after an assassination attempt in 1853. It was completed in 1879.

The top photo was taken inside with the organ pipes partially blocking the view. The bottom picture was taken from the outside at night.

A votive is something offered as thanks for a prayer fulfilled. I think we can all hope for that today.

Yes, I know there's an election today. I'm not deliberately ignoring it, but unless something big happens I just won't have anything to offer until the polls close and results start coming in. Until then, the Prime Directive remains in force: the election might or might not be close, but inherent uncertainties in polling mean the results are wholly unknowable and nobody can make a meaningful prediction.

Except for me. Kamala Harris is going to win the presidency. Democrats will win the House. Republicans will win the Senate. Satisfied?

The new hotness in data centers is to sign deals with nuclear power operators to supply them with reliable 24/7 electricity. There are two ways to do this. First, the data center connects to the power grid normally and just uses a lot of juice. This is called "in front of the meter." Second, a data center can connect directly to the nuclear plant for a specific amount of power. This is called "behind the meter."

Late last week, behind-the-meter hookups took a hit:

Late on Friday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected Talen Energy’s request to increase the amount of power that it could provide directly from its existing Susquehanna nuclear power plant to Amazon’s data center from 300 megawatts to 480 MW. That hamstrings Talen’s ability to step up the amount of power it sells directly to Amazon, whose co-located data center has a potential capacity of up to 960 MW.

Data center owners like behind-the-meter deals because they're quick and provide a reliable amount of power. Nuclear operators like them because they can charge a hefty premium for the power.

The FERC decision isn't final, and it might be revised later after they collect more data about the cost and impact of behind-the-meter deals. For now, though, they say that overall grid reliability for existing businesses and consumers will remain their top priority.

Here's some good economic news I missed a few weeks ago. The yield curve, which is a fairly reliable indicator of recession when it's inverted (i.e. below zero), is now positive:

But now the bad news:

As you can see, the last four recessions started a few months after an inverted yield curve returned to positive territory.¹ We're not out of the woods yet.

¹The yield curve really did invert in 2019, but it was only for one week.

This is apropos of nothing in particular, but with the passage of time it's now pretty easy to figure out how many people died of COVID in the US:

The trendline shows the normal monthly number of deaths excluding seasonal flu. The spikes in 2020 and beyond add up to 1.2 million, all of which are almost certainly due to COVID.

You can look up this number pretty easily, but I thought at least a few people would be interested in seeing it graphically.

NOTE: The total number of deaths is pretty sensitive to precisely where the trendline is drawn, so there's some inherent error in this kind of calculation. At a guess, I'd put it at ±100,000.

Remember the old meme about how the federal government has spent $7.5 billion on EV charging stations but only three had been built? The meme needs to be updated. As of June, 17 stations have been built:

Hmmm. Still not very impressive, is it? But this is like looking at Hoover Dam in 1933 and being indignant that the government has spent a billion dollars¹ and only poured one bucket of concrete:

The EV charging station project was designed from the start to finish in 2030. Here's how it looks if you extrapolate the current growth rate:

We probably won't hit a thousand stations until the end of 2025. That's just the way exponential growth goes. But like Hoover Dam, the EV project is actually ahead of schedule even though there isn't much to see yet.

¹In 2023 dollars.

This is the city of Banning at the tail end of winter, taken from Highway 243 snaking up the San Jacinto mountains. The Eastern Sierras are the snowy peaks in the distance.