Kevin Drum pushes back on the WSJ claim that household debt is a problem in America, and Kevin brings the receipts:“. . . debt as a percent of disposable income . . . is currently lower than it was at the end of 2019 (9.8% vs. 10%).“. . . household debt as a percent of GDP . . . went up during the pandemic and then back down. It is currently lower than it was at the end of 2019 (76.2% vs. 77.7%).“Total credit card balances today are precisely the same as in the final quarter of 2019.”US families have no serious debt problems
Tags: debt as a % of disposable income is lower, household debt as a % of GDP is lower, total credit card balances are the same as 2019

Testing Oceanic Carbon Capture

I’ve mentioned previously the hypothesis that iron fertilization of the ocean and consequent phytoplankton blooms is one feasible method to achieve global carbon capture. Small-scale experiments have been done already. The results have been mixed insofar as documenting the scale of phytoplankton blooms, but there has been no reported harm.Another strategy relies on chemical sequestration of atmospheric CO2 through alkalinization of surface seawater. The ocean is a well-documented sink for CO2, which freely exchanges at the surface. A consequence of dissolved CO2 is acidification, and the lower the pH, the less CO2 can be dissolved. So the theory is that raising ocean pH on a large scale will sequester more CO2 as

Analogies are risky things, but I think there’s a useful analogy between (1) the belief that global conservation is a sufficient antidote to rising atmospheric CO2 and (2) the belief that herd immunity is a sufficient antidote to pandemics.Herd immunity is the model in which, as a deadly pathogen moves through the population, enough survivors with immunity will remain to attenuate further transmission, protecting uninfected individuals. The track record of herd immunity is well-known. A familiar example is the plague. In the absence of vaccination and antibiotics, a large fraction of the infected population died, while the survivors possessed immunity that protected the remaining people for a generation. The point here is that the price of herd

Yesterday, I posted about geoengineering the oceans as a promising form of carbon capture. But why do we need carbon capture at all? Can’t we just conserve our way out of global warming?No.Here are a couple of reasons why the *only* way to avert climate disaster is to start removing carbon from the atmosphere:1. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is ca. 120 years. What that means is that if all sources of CO2—man-made, forest fires, vulcanism, etc—ceased worldwide starting tomorrow, it would take 120 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop by half. So conservation isn’t enough to reverse the march to climate crisis. Suggesting that carbon capture is just a distraction from having Americans drive less is, to put it gently, hopelessly and tragically

Global heating continues unabated. While decarbonizing our energy sources is certainly important, it is too late to prevent global disaster. Coastal flooding, desertification, wildfires will continue to increase, driving vulnerable populations to migrate and igniting resource wars for fresh water and arable land. It’s already driving migration and violence in the Middle East and Central America.We must find a way to decarbonize the atmosphere on a global scale to prevent an existential threat to humanity. Currently, the most promising path to global carbon capture is geoengineering the worlds oceans. “There will be tradeoffs involved in carrying out any method of carbon removal on a global scale. Ocean alkalinity enhancement would require major new

One motivation to getting my genome sequenced was to see whether I had known risk alleles for dementia (spoiler alert: I don’t). My dad was diagnosed with frontotemporal lobe dementia a few years before he died. His brain biopsy after death returned a diagnosis of Alzheimers. He might have had both.One of the known risk alleles is ApoE4. Homozygosity for ApoE4 is a strong predictor of Alzheimers by the eighth decade. I knew I wasn’t homozygous for ApoE4, because that condition is also associated with hyperlipidemia, and I’ve always had a normal lipid panel. But what would I have done if I had other risk alleles for AD or FTD? It was certainly something I was aware of, just like the risk of discovering that I might have a high risk for colon cancer or

Several years ago, I got my genome sequenced and obtained my variant call files, the tabulation of all differences between my gene sequences and the annotated human genome. Although my primary care physician was aware, I didn’t require his intermediation to obtain or interpret my genomics data. How I might react to adverse information was up to me. I’ve referred to my variant spreadsheet many times since then, whenever I’ve read about a new variant associated with risk of, or protection from, disease.Disintermediated health care information isn’t new or exotic. Anyone can buy and use a digital thermometer, blood pressure cuff, blood sugar monitor, oxygen saturation monitor, pregnancy test kit or COVID test kit without a doctor’s approval.

I was born into an America where the eight-hour workday was widely observed. But what was for me just another fact of life was a hard-won right of the labor movement that cost hundreds of lives. “Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America” by James R. Green is a history of the fight for the 8-hour work week and the labor movement of late 19th century America. It is also a history of the effects of immigration on work (the borders were much more open then) and the contest for American capitalism at a time when “socialism” and “communism” were not merely the epithets of right-wing bubbleheads but were economic movements espoused by political parties representing tens of thousands

In a previous post, I called attention to the decline in the number of medical students who choose pediatrics as a career. Some of the slack can be taken up by nurses and physician assistants, but access to pediatricians is a growing problem.So, too, is access to pediatric care at hospitals:“Pediatric hospitals have been disappearing all across the country. During the decade before the COVID pandemic, data from the American Hospital Association survey showed an average of 407 pediatric inpatient beds were lost every year — either due to the closing of entire pediatric units or due to the redistribution of resources to more lucrative adult and subspecialty care units.“It wasn’t because there were significantly fewer children to fill these beds; in fact,

If you want to make the big bux as a physician, you need to do procedures (e.g., endoscopies, colonoscopies, surgery). Among the most poorly compensated branches of medicine are pediatrics and geriatrics. And yet:“Pediatricians attend the same medical schools as those who enter other specialties, and education is expensive. Almost half of those who graduated with over $150,000 in debt 20 years ago have still not paid if off completely. In 2020 the average debt of those completing pediatric residencies was $264,000.“General pediatricians also train for the same three years of residency as physicians who treat adults, but they earn much less.”Unsurprisingly, fewer graduates from U.S. medical schools choose pediatrics today than we’ve seen in

When I was in junior high, most girls took home economics and most boys took shop. What I recall hearing about home ec is that it taught some cooking and sewing skills, and how to shop for food. It may have also taught how to balance a checkbook. I ended up learning those things on my own.Kevin Drum has a post over at jabberwocking.com summarizing a recent bill in California requiring a class in financial literacy for all high school students. Read the link to see a summary of the syllabus. Here’s his hot take:“What are they going to do with the smart kids who will understand everything in the first week and then have nothing to do? But after reading this list my concern is more with how average kids are expected to soak this all up. It feels kind of

I came of age scientifically at the beginning of the cloning era. As various genes associated with human genetic disorders—sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s—were cloned, the papers reporting these successes always ended with some statement that now the door was open to therapy. These prophecies proved to be wildly optimistic. Now, with the advent of CRISPR gene editing, it is becoming possible to realize the potential for gene therapies, at least for some diseases. There are dozens of clinical trials underway to pursue such therapies for some of these diseases. However, for rare and orphan diseases, these therapies are often not being pursued.Rare diseases are diseases that affects less than 200,000 Americans.

I got my first COVID shot in August 2020 as part of the Moderna Phase III trial. Since then, I’ve had four additional jabs. Today, I’ll get another booster with the latest Moderna vaccine. I’m looking forward to it. I did contract COVID last November during a trip to Colorado. I tested positive for a few days and had mild symptoms, but completely recovered. The vaccine doesn’t prevent you from getting infected, it keeps you out of the ED and the morgue. Normally, I wouldn’t call attention to anti-vaxxer hoaxes, but together with the mindless attacks on Tony Fauci, there are attacks on the highly effective and safe COVID vaccines. Look, nobody is forced to get the COVID vaccine. Don’t want it? Don’t get it. But don’t lie about it.“The COVID vaccines,

The last decade has seen many initiatives toward clean, green, and low-carbon energy, as well as a global shift toward electric vehicles and automation. Many of these initiatives were enabled rare earth magnets, which is why rare earth magnets are heavily used now and will continue to be used in the future. When my dad retired as a chemical engineer for Martin-Marietta at the age of 62, he started a one-man company based on a patent he was awarded. It was a device that could detect valve function in a closed pipe, and it involved the use of a rare earth permanent magnet. I don’t recall how it worked. I do remember those magnets lying around in the basement, and how powerful they were!The rare earth materials used to create the most powerful magnets and

Pandemics are bad for economies. Vaccinations are an important bulwark against pandemics. But all viruses and all vaccines are not alike.In the case of the annual flu vaccine, annual vaccination against flu variants can be a problem: antibody-producing memory cells crowd out new antibody-producing cells, and people develop relatively few neutralizing antibodies against the strains in the newer vaccine. Does getting updated COVID boosters interfere with vaccine effectiveness?Recent data suggest that regular re-vaccination with updated COVID-19 vaccines against variants could provide protection not only from the SARS-CoV-2 variants represented in the vaccines, but also other SARS-CoV-2 variants and related coronaviruses, possibly including ones that have

One of the challenges with aging is keeping up with, and adapting to, change. Stuff you believed is true at one time can be falsified by additional experiments. That’s how science works, and how science is different from religious dogma. And thanks to the intertubes, checking for updates is fast and easy. I posted here about the lead-crime hypothesis. It concerns the link between leaded gasoline and crime, and enjoys a lot of support from epidemiological data. It turns out to be a better explanation for the rise in crime than permissive liberal culture and decline in crime than broken windows policing and mass incarceration.There are other sources of environmental lead besides leaded gas. Lead paint and lead in the water supply (plumbing) come to

For all the dads and old guys, one of my favorite John Hartford songs:Let him go on mama

Tags: John Hartford, Let him go on mamma

We recently received a letter from the City of East Providence water utilities division asking us to check whether our service line contains lead. Since our house was built in 1935, this was a reasonable possibility. In the event, our line is galvanized iron or steel, not lead. But this ongoing effort to purge lead plumbing reminded me again of the impact of environmental lead on public health, including crime.I’ve been following the gasoline lead-crime story for years, ever since Kevin Drum started writing about it on his blog and then in Mother Jones magazine. The upshot of a lot of research is that gasoline lead may explain as much as 90% of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century, not only in the US but around the world. If

One of the climate change denialist memes is that, since plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen during the day, then increased CO2 will be *good* for trees. Setting aside the facts that increased desertification and increased coastal flooding are decidedly *not* good for trees, a recent study suggests that it more CO2 doesn’t necessarily result in more/faster tree growth:“Why not? Our new research, published today in Nature, shows it comes down to a below-ground battle for phosphorus, a mineral nutrient in soils that is essential for tree growth. The results suggest in some parts of the world, increased CO₂ means tiny bugs in the soil “hold onto” their phosphorus, making less available for trees.”*snip*“Most Australian soils are naturally low

I grew up in Oak Ridge TN, the “atomic city.” It was where the uranium was enriched for the Hiroshima bomb. After the war, uranium enrichment found peaceful application in nuclear power plants. Many of the kids I knew growing up had dads who worked at one of the plants–X-10, Y-12, K-25–that researched and developed uranium enrichment and power plant design.After initial enthusiasm for power that would be “too cheap to meter,” nuclear power plants eventually fell on hard times. The plants were expensive and perceived as terrorist magnets. In the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, they fell out of fashion.With growing concerns about global warming and decarbonization, nuclear power is again finding favor. Bill Gates is crowing about a next-gen

In her book “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman uses the myth of Laocoön as her first example of folly. The Trojans ignored Laocoön’s warning not to admit the Trojan horse. That didn’t end well for the Trojans. Ignoring Laocoön was folly.In his recent substack essay, The Coming Alliance Between Billionaires, Tech Giants, and MAGA-Ideologues, Vindman is a modern Laocoön, warning us of the WhatsApp group “Off Leash.” Created and managed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, Off Leash is ca. 400 individuals in government and tech, who with a wider network of right-wing thinkers and pundits are conspiring against the “Biden Regime,” “globalists,” and liberal democracy as a whole. Vindman paints a frightening picture:“According to [Ken Silverstein, writing

Russ Vought is a Trump loyalist who believes we live in a “post-Constitutional” nation:““We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted:

“Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”‘Post-Constitutional’ sounds suspiciously similar to the post-Tsarist vision of the Bolsheviks in 1917: forget the past, ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears, and let the ends justify the means. That didn’t end well for Russia, and I don’t think we should be turning to Lenin and Stalin for models of political change.WRT immigration and the Constitution,

The Biden Administration executive order setting a numerical threshold to shut down asylum is a performative exercise in futility. It is also cruel.“This “asylum shutdown” will deny, in most cases, the right to seek asylum for migrants apprehended on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico. It goes into effect at 12:01 AM on June 5, and will remain in effect until two weeks after Border Patrol’s weekly average of migrant apprehensions drops below 1,500 per day. That hasn’t happened since July 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic; in fact, 58 percent of all months this century (172 of 296) have seen daily averages above 1,500.“Even then, the “asylum shutdown” would resume should the daily average again exceed 2,500 per day. It is over 3,500

One of the major considerations for us in where to settle when we moved to New England was being near high end health care. We lived for 40 years in St. Louis, which has multiple tertiary/quaternary care hospitals, including two academic health care centers. On the other hand, I watched as my parents, who lived for 20 years in rural upstate New York dealt with community hospitals, and when my mom was treated for multiple myeloma, she traveled four hours to Dana Farber in Boston.While we are only about an hour from Boston, there are several hospitals here in Rhode Island, with physician groups affiliated with Brown University. But the façade of healthcare security is starting to crumble. Roger Williams and Fatima hospitals have been hemorrhaging money

Another stupid climate change denialist troll trick is to point out that volcanos also emit carbon dioxide and therefore volcanos, not human activity, are the cause of the current climate change crisis. While vulcanism has shaped the climate during earth’s history, it is not a significant contributor today. Human activity-associated CO2 generation dwarfs volcanos. Again, Google is your friend:“Volcanic eruptions are often discussed in the context of climate change because they release CO2 and other gases into our atmosphere. However, the impact of human activities on the carbon cycle far exceeds that of all the world’s volcanoes combined, by more than 100 times.“To put it in perspective, while volcanic eruptions do contribute to an increase in

A favorite canard of climate change denialist trolls is to trivialize the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; how could something that is only 0.04% of the atmosphere drive global warming? Well, Google is your friend:“About 99 percent of the atmosphere is made of oxygen and nitrogen, which cannot absorb the infrared radiation the Earth emits. Of the remaining 1 percent, the main molecules that can absorb infrared radiation are CO2 and water vapor, because their atoms are able to vibrate in just the right way to absorb the energy that the Earth gives off. After these gases absorb the energy, they emit half of it back to Earth and half of it into space, trapping some of the heat within the atmosphere. This trapping of heat is what we call the

In a rebuke to the standard economic model that demand drives supply, housing prices in the US these days continue to rise. How much of this is due to local regulation vs cost of new home construction is above my pay grade. But the claim is that 3D printed homes can mitigate shortages in affordable new home construction:“Dozens of 3D-printed homes have been built across the world – to house a family in the US state of Virginia or members of an impoverished community in rural Mexico. The world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood is currently under construction outside of Austin, Texas.“The technology could be especially handy in a place like the US state of Maine, where approximately 80,000 new homes will be needed by 2030 to address a shortage, according

When I started attending departmental faculty meetings in 1987, there was an emeritus faculty, Harold Katzman, who went to most of the meetings. He rarely said anything, but he did make the effort to show up, perhaps out of personal loyalty. Dr. Katzman was the first graduate student of our department’s founding chair, Dr. Edward Doisy. After he graduated in 1928, Dr. Doisy hired him as a faculty.Shortly before Dr. Katzman died, my then-chairman, Dr. Sly, visited him in the hospital. They got to talking about the early days in the department, and Dr. Katzman recalled a time early in the Great Depression when he was summoned to Dr. Doisy’s office. Doisy told him that there was no money to pay faculty salaries that year.Dr. Sly: “How did you feel about

We’re seriously considering a hybrid for our next car. One species of the hybrid genus is the “plug-in hybrid,” which seemed appealing to me, both from the standpoint of gas economy and to reduce our carbon footprint. Caveat emptor:“In one study from the ICCT published in 2022, researchers examined real-world driving habits of people in plug-in hybrids. While the method used to determine official emissions values estimated that drivers use electricity to power vehicles 70% to 85% of the time, the real-world driving data suggested that vehicle owners actually used electric mode for 45% to 49% of their driving. And if vehicles were company-provided cars, the average was only 11% to 15%.“The difference between reality and estimates can be a problem for

If you or your loved one had successful brain surgery, you can probably thank my colleague, Dr. Richard Bucholz, Professor of Neurosurgery at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. Dr. Bucholz pioneered and invented the image-guided surgery navigational system marketed by Medtronic as the “Stealth Station.” It is standard equipment in nearly every neurosurgical suite in the world.When Dr. Bucholz was first trained in intracranial surgery, the positioning of surgical instruments in the skull was done by approximation, a word that no surgical patient wants to hear. Dr. Bucholz decided it was time to exploit the rapidly advancing laptop computers to design a kind of GPS for real-time intracranial instrument placement. His initial strategy was to