Lewis Strauss, former chair of the AEC, coined the phrase “too cheap to meter” referring to the potential for nuclear power. It was a phrase I grew up hearing in Oak Ridge TN, but it never came to be, there or anywhere else.Now, the Wall Street Journal claims that day has arrived, not because of nuclear, but because of wind and solar:“The changes sweeping Europe’s electricity markets, which were accelerated by the energy crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine, show what could happen in the U.S. in a few years when renewable capacity reaches a similar scale. In 2023, 44% of EU electricity was generated by renewables, compared with 21% in the U.S.“In some U.S. markets—sunny California, the wind-swept Great Plains, and Texas—zero and negative prices are

Big Pharma has become a familiar whipping boy in the debate over healthcare costs. CAR-T therapies to treat certain cancers, for example, can cost between half a million and a million dollars for a single treatment course. What’s the prospect of a cancer cure worth to you?GLP-1 receptor agonists like semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) are transforming the lives of obese patients. For most people, these drugs will have to be taken continuously for the rest of their lives at a cost of ca. $16,000/year. Given the number of obese Americans, this represents a huge burden for insurers, both private and Medicare.But thinking about the benefits simply from the standpoint of obesity treatment elides the economic benefits of

As I posted yesterday, Medicare Advantage, which now covers more than half of the Medicare-eligible population, is a rip-off for taxpayers and for policy holders. Apparently, this is finally sinking in for hospitals and health systems across the country:“In 2023, Becker’s began reporting on hospitals and health systems nationwide that dropped some or all of their Medicare Advantage contracts.“Data on this topic is limited. In January, the Healthcare Financial Management Association released a survey of 135 health system CFOs, which found that 16% of systems are planning to stop accepting one or more MA plans in the next two years. Another 45% said they are considering the same but have not made a final decision. The report also found that 62% of CFOs

It should come as no surprise to regular AB readers that the US for-profit healthcare system is a disaster for everyone except the executives and stock-holders. Here’s yet another confirmation:“A report out Thursday shows that the United States’ for-profit healthcare system still ranks dead last among peer nations on key metrics, including access to care and health outcomes such as life expectancy at birth.

“The new analysis from the Commonwealth Fund is the latest indictment of a corporate-dominated system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured and unable to afford life-saving medications without rationing doses or going into debt.“Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the

Endless online vitriol has been spilt promoting the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was somehow either (a) an engineered pathogen or (b) a virus that escaped from a research facility. While those allegations served the interests of the Trump Administration, the actual, you know, scientific data supporting them was non-existant.Now, years later, the sorts of experiments that could have weighed in support of natural origins of the pandemic, the parsimonious conclusion, have been done:“After an in-depth analysis of the genetic material from hundreds of swabs taken from the walls, floors, machines and drains inside the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China — a site that’s been described as an epicenter of early spread of Covid-19 — scientists

Endless online vitriol has been spilt promoting the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was somehow either (a) an engineered pathogen or (b) a virus that escaped from a research facility. While those allegations served the interests of the Trump Administration, the actual, you know, scientific data supporting them was non-existant.Now, years later, the sorts of experiments that could have weighed in support of natural origins of the pandemic, the parsimonious conclusion, have been done:“After an in-depth analysis of the genetic material from hundreds of swabs taken from the walls, floors, machines and drains inside the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China — a site that’s been described as an epicenter of early spread of Covid-19 — scientists

Kevin Drum has a short piece on the recent surge in auto insurance rates. He doesn’t offer any explanation in his post, but the comment thread has suggestions:• a combination of increase in bad driving and lack of enforcement;• fender benders are much more costly since all the self-driving gear as well as lane alerts, back up and blind spot cameras, etc., are in the bumpers, windshields and side view mirrors;• the increased number of EVs on the road, which some commenters assert are more expensive to repair;• increased damage due to climate change (fires, floods).Commenters note that insurance rates have also surged in Canada and Germany, so it’s apparently not just a US thing.Discuss.Explaining the surge in auto insurance rates

Kevin Drum has a short piece on the recent surge in auto insurance rates. He doesn’t offer any explanation in his post, but the comment thread has suggestions:• a combination of increase in bad driving and lack of enforcement;• fender benders are much more costly since all the self-driving gear as well as lane alerts, back up and blind spot cameras, etc., are in the bumpers, windshields and side view mirrors;• the increased number of EVs on the road, which some commenters assert are more expensive to repair;• increased damage due to climate change (fires, floods).Commenters note that insurance rates have also surged in Canada and Germany, so it’s apparently not just a US thing.Discuss.Explaining the surge in auto insurance rates

From everything I’ve read, Medicare Advantage is just as scam. By the time my Lovely And Talented Wife® retired and shifted to Medicare two years ago, she took the regular Medicare. This July when I retired, I followed suit. Turns out, a growing number of hospitals and health systems nationwide have dropped some or all of their Medicare Advantage contracts.“Data on this topic is limited. In January, the Healthcare Financial Management Association released a survey of 135 health system CFOs, which found that 16% of systems are planning to stop accepting one or more MA plans in the next two years. Another 45% said they are considering the same but have not made a final decision. The report also found that 62% of CFOs believe collecting from MA is

About 15 years ago, we replaced our electric stove and range, which was breaking, with a gas stove and range. I prefer cooking on gas. In addition to the oven and cooktop, we had a gas furnace, water heater and clothes dryer. To be fair, >80% of the electricity in Missouri at the time was generated with coal.The problem with natural gas is that it is ca. 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and there’s a lot of methane leakage in the lines that transport gas to its consumption points. But that’s not all:“In addition to those leaks, there’s a new worry, too: an increase in methane emissions from certain natural sources, especially tropical wetlands in the Congo, the Amazon, and Southeast Asia, likely the result of warmer, wetter

Farming is a risky business. Always has been. A federal program to keep farmers in business during droughts seems like a good idea to me. Sadly, it’s also a target for fraud:“On a normal day, the promising storms produced snow or rain that would fall onto a system of official weather stations at airstrips or town halls, into heated “tipping buckets.” When the teeter-totter buckets filled with a thimbleful of water, the seesaw tilted, dropping one miniature metal bucket downward to close an electrical circuit. “One “tick” of the bucket, and a signal went out to National Weather Service sensors around the world that the parched High Plains had recorded one hundredth of an inch of welcome water. “What bewildered the trackers is that on many of these

I just finished reading “America for Americans: A history of xenophobia in the United States” by Erika Lee. It is an unsparing analysis of the way xenophobia is woven into the fabric of American law and culture.When you read “America for Americans,” does it conjure an image of native Americans asserting their rights to the lands that were over-run by western Europeans? Of course not. The people who use that expression are overwhelmingly whites of western European descent. The folks who were here before them don’t count. Likewise, the slogan “America for Americans” wasn’t intended to include the involuntary immigrants from Africa, whose residence here antedates the ancestors of many American xenophobes today.

That’s just the beginning.For all the

Trump is promising mass deportations if he’s elected. He claims this will create jobs and economic growth. We’ve been here before.“In the 1930s, state and local governments deported 400,000 to 500,000 people of Mexican descent, promising to create jobs for Americans during the Great Depression. What actually happened? The employment of native-born Americans dropped — and their unemployment went up. American workers ended up with worse jobs and, if anything, their wages were lower. The US workers who were hurt most were the ones whose jobs had to be cut because the businesses they worked for had to downsize because of the loss of their immigrant workforce.“Jump to 1964, when the “Bracero Exclusion” removed almost a half million Mexican farmworkers with

The university where I was on faculty for 37 years has one of ten NIH-funded vaccine testing and evaluation units in the US. I vividly recall attending a presentation by the clinical director of our vaccine center in January of 2020 on the then-new SARS-CoV-2 virus. By the summer, our vaccine center became a clinical trial site for the Moderna mRNA vaccine. I immediately enrolled, even though I knew I had a 50% chance of being in the placebo arm (in the event, I was in the vaccine arm, which was obvious on the second jab).According to Wikipedia, there have been over 7 million Covid-related deaths as of August 2024. To put that in perspective, that’s over a third of the world-wide deaths attributed to World War I (20 million), which by any measure is

A fitting topic for Labor Day, 2024.Over at TPM, they have an extended discussion of the records of the Biden/Harris Administration vs the Trump/Pence administration regarding unions and workplace safety. Click the link to read the whole thing. I’ll keep the quotes here within fair use.“. . . three aspects of the candidates’ records are the most likely to sway union members one way or the other.“Federal workers“Trump signed three executive orders in 2018 that restricted the labor rights of approximately 950,000 federal government employees who belong to unions. In 2020, he signed another measure, known as Schedule F, that The Washington Post described as “designed to gut civil service job protections.”“Biden rescinded those executive orders. He also

I lost interest in football after high school. Although college athletes were ostensibly amateurs, the perks they enjoyed, above and beyond full scholarships, made them more like professionals than your average college student. And there were regular recruiting scandals to back up that perception. Now that all that financial compensation is above board, those “student-athletes” are basically professionals. I attended SEC schools for college. Indeed, I competed as a varsity athlete my freshman year. But cross country wasn’t a scholarship sport at Vanderbilt, and Vandy came in last at the conference meet in Tallahassee that year. Our coach was a surgeon who happened to also be a long-distance runner. But other SEC schools like the University of

The big lie about immigration, promoted by the GOP and its right-wing propaganda outlets, is that under Biden the US has had “open borders.” LOL! Nowhere close. And the US hasn’t had open borders at least since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. The law remained in force until the passage of the Magnuson Act in 1943.So is immigration good or bad for America? In his new book, “The truth about immigration: Why successful societies welcome newcomers,” Zeke Hernandez argues that immigrants bring huge investment:“They are either magnets of investment from their home country or because immigrants disproportionately start businesses in the US. J. Daniel Kim, assistant professor of management

Wood is a form of natural carbon sequestration. Yesterday, I posted about how wood is making a comeback as a building material. I’ve since found this article announcing that the world’s largest building built (partly) of wood has been greenlit.“Western Australia is set to become home to the world’s tallest timber building, a “revolutionary” 50-storey hybrid design reaching a height of 191.2 metres.Timber will make up 42% of South Perth’s C6 building, including the tower’s beams, floor panels, studs, joinery and linings.”How green is it?“The building’s developers claim that the 7,400 cubic metres of timber consumed by C6 could be regrown in just 59 minutes from one sustainably farmed forestry region.”To which my brother, a retired mechanical engineer

I attended 7th grade in a building that was built of brick and wood. In 8th grade, I was moved to the new junior high, a formed concrete building in the modern fortress architecture style.Now, it seems, what was old is new again. Wood is making a comeback, with a focus on a green building strategy called “embodied” carbon reduction. The goal is to lower the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the construction processes.“Buildings account for more than one-third of the world’s carbon emissions each year. This year, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center held its first statewide embodied carbon reduction challenge, awarding Payette a grand prize in June for its design of the UMass research building. The competition spotlighted a variety of renovation

Here’s the Penn Wharton Budget Model breakdown for how much each candidate’s economic proposals will affect the national debt:“We estimate that the Trump Campaign tax and spending proposals would increase primary deficits by $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years on a conventional basis and by $4.1 trillion on a dynamic basis that includes economic feedback effects. Households across all income groups benefit on a conventional basis.”“We estimate that the Harris Campaign tax and spending proposals would increase primary deficits by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years on a conventional basis and by $2.0 trillion on a dynamic basis that includes a reduction in economic activity. Lower and middle-income households generally benefit from increased

The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic effect on the US economy that was mitigated by the rapid development and deployment of COVID vaccines. I was a subject in the Moderna Phase III clinical trial of their RNA vaccine, and eventually have had six injections.The well-established benefit of COVID vaccination is that it will keep you out of the ED and the morgue. But what about “long COVID,” the post-acute sequelae of COVID infection that can last for weeks, months or years? Well, my wife (also vaccinated) and I did contract COVID in November 2023, but aside from mild symptoms, we had no long-term consequences. But we’re anecdotes, not data. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine brings the data:“In a decomposition analysis,

If the world is to decarbonize energy without a major economic collapse, nuclear power must be part of the picture. Solar and wind energy generation are growing world-wide, but both will always have to deal with the intermittency problem. Batteries and hydroelectric storage can address some of this, but alternative energy sources must be available for back-up on cloudy days and during still air. The only realistic alternative is nuclear.Despite the storied failures of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, light water reactors have had a remarkable history of safe operation. What about other forms of nuclear power generation?I mentioned molten salt reactors (MSRs) in a previous post. Their virtues include more efficient use of fissile materials,

The false dichotomy of climate change remediationYears ago, I had a Facebook friend from my hometown who was a big enthusiast of molten salt nuclear reactor technology. He wasn’t a scientist or engineer, but his dad had worked on MSRs in the ‘60s, and he fetishized his dad’s memory. As some point, I mentioned that we had installed rooftop solar on our house, and he began attacking me. Rather than see MSRs and solar as two parallel paths towards decarbonization, he was convinced that solar was the enemy of MSR technology–a false dichotomy. Needless to say, his personal attacks ended our friendship.Nowadays, it looks like carbon capture/geoengineering is being vilified as the enemy of conservation/renewable energy on the path to reducing atmospheric

Believe it or not, there are still some folks who think climate change is a hoax. How many are financially invested in that belief, I don’t know. I do know that folks who are currently in the business of making money in the insurance industry *do* believe that climate change is real. They’re no longer willing to insure residential and commercial buildings in risky areas. This threatens to trigger an insurance crisis with major economic consequences in the next 15 years:“In the U.S., the most likely major economic disruption from climate change over the next few years might well be a collapse of the housing market in flood-prone and wildfire-prone states. Billion-dollar weather disasters — which cause about 76% of all weather-related damages — have

The existential crisis of our time is global warming. The planet is already in deep trouble, with polar ice melting, permafrost thawing, sea level rising, increased desertification and more violent storms. The hour is late.“The quest for net zero needs to be fought on many fronts. You have your vanguard offense: simply reducing the carbon footprint of the things we already do. Then there’s the field medics: tactics like planting more trees and restoring peatlands – not to mention just protecting the ones we already have. But what if we could add another line of attack?”Deep Sky, a Canadian atmospheric carbon removal company, is building the world’s first plant to develop and apply commercialized carbon capture. The projected capacity is modest, ca.

Back when we were grad students at UNC-Chapel Hill from 1977-82, my wife and I made several trips to the Outer Banks. One reason was to visit her uncle and his family, who lived in Buxton, just north of Hatteras lighthouse. What struck me then was how many people lived in homes on the coast in spite of the flooding risk. Not only the storm surge from the Atlantic that washed over the barrier islands from the east, but after the storm passed, the water that collected in Pamlico Sound on the west washed back over the islands from the other side. Buxton was in a wide part of the Outer Banks, but if you bought a house on the narrow bits, you were, well, deeply foolish. You didn’t have to be a PhD student to see that.And here we are, 45 years later:“In

Normally, a sentence that begins “Donald Trump says . . . “ is not worth finishing, and that’s how a recent blog post over at jabberwocking.com begins. But finish it I did, and it turns out that DJT says he wants to eliminate all federal income taxes on Social Security. Currently, if SS is your only income, there already are no federal taxes on it. If you make additional income above your SS distributions, you can be taxed at normal federal rates on up to 85% of your SS check, depending on how much additional income. The income taxes on SS go back to the trust fund to extend its life.

So why would Trump support this? Because (a) it’s a tax cut for the wealthy and (b) it depletes the SS and Medicare trust funds sooner, creating problems for

I like Bernie Sanders for many reasons, but this isn’t one of them:“As a result of those challenges, Sanders wants to see more Democrats vocally get behind measures like . . . removing the cap on Social Security taxation so the wealthy pay a full share of their income into the program.”This is a mistake. SS benefits are capped like taxes, so if you lift the cap on taxes and don’t lift the cap on benefits, SS becomes welfare instead of insurance.Look, SS is and has always been retirement insurance, not an investment plan. The wealthy don’t need SS, so it makes sense to cap benefits. Indeed, up to 85% of SS benefits are subject to income tax if you make enough income beyond SS. If you don’t cap taxes, SS ceases to be insurance and becomes welfare paid

Apparently, JD Vance thinks so.*Not to go all anecdotal here, but in 1981, I bought my first car, a brand-new Mazda GLC hatchback, for $5770. In 2024 dollars, that’s $20,000. It had no radio, no air conditioning and no passenger-side sun visor. My most recent car purchase was a 2013 Honda Fit four-door, which I bought for $15,000. It has a radio and CD player, cruise control, air conditioning, front and side-door air bags and both driver- and passenger-side sun visors. So way more car for less money (real dollars). Kevin Drum has a post with actual, you know, data. He plots the average cost of a new car as a percent of average household income and shows that the trendline has been flat for over 30 years.

JD Vance isn’t just weird, he’s unmoored

About ten years ago, we had 22 solar panels installed on the roof of our St. Louis house. Half the cost was paid by Ameren, the electric utility, and we got a 30% tax rebate on the balance. But even with reversible metering, we hadn’t made back our cost when we sold the house two years ago. At that time, ours was among only about a half-dozen homes in our neighborhood with rooftop solar. Here in Rumford RI, there are at least twice as many.California seems like a state ideally situated to exploit rooftop solar, but the Democratic governor of CA is fighting on the side of utilities to curb distributed power generation in the state, which the utilities claim is eating into their profits. Of course, they don’t admit that.“Consider California’s residential