Republican deathmatch

I prefer to pick on the Democrat candidates: Bernie is just hilarious. Hillary, on the other hand, is possibly the most unlikeable, baggage-laden candidate ever. Sooo easy to take substantive pot shots at these folks.

On the Republican side are some of the best candidates in decades, and one clown. Carson is a great man, but having a hard time convincing people that he can be president, and that's a shame. Rubio has been anointed by the Republican establishment as "their guy" after Jeb crashed and burned, so I'm not all that enamored of him. Being that I'm a naturalized Texan, I find Cruz the most compelling of the group. I like the fact he's got enemies in all the right places. He's principled, very bright, and sticks to his guns (in multiple senses), all of which I like.

Then there's the gold-plated dumpster fire, Trump. He has both the most loyal core, apparently, at about 30%, but also the strongest unfavorables, as in 60% of Republicans are in the "never Trump" category.

So the Republican side has some good candidates plus one raging dumpster fire. Unfortunately, all the decent candidates are splitting the level-headed vote, and if some of those candidates don't stand down, NOW, the clown will be the nominee.

And for those who believe they like Trump: He is not the person he seems.

The Donald is a deal maker, co-author of The Art of the Deal. He is now in "deal maker" mode, trying to seal the deal with Republican voters. He will do and say whatever is necessary to make the deal work. What we're seeing now is the most Republican, most conservative, most Christian-ish that The Donald will ever be. Because once the deal is done, he no longer needs the conservatives, the Christians, the 2nd Amendment folks, etc., that he's now sucking up to. The "make America great" and "send all the illegals home" rhetoric is just what he thinks it takes to make the deal. Historically, Trump seems to be a mildly-right-of-center Democrat, willing to donate to anyone who can give him an edge.

As president, Bernie would be a sincere disaster. Hillary would be a Clinton. 'Nuff said. And Trump would be out to continue to promote Trump, which would also be a disaster.

Ah, but Cruz would be a dangerous disaster as well, right? Yes! But my kind of a disaster! As Robert Reich points out in the best unintentional campaign ad for Cruz EVAH!

Wonderful endorsement, Mr. Reich.

The End of Civilization, or the Earth, or Whatever

Paul Erhlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968. I read it then as an impressionable kid. It was totally wrong then and moreso now. He predicted mass starvation by the 1970s. The world's population was 3.5 billion in 1968. The world's population is now about 7.4 billion, and the fraction of undernourished people has dropped by half, from 33% to 16%, since 1968. For the math-challenged, that works out to about the same number of malnourished people then as now, but the total population of the planet has doubled. You should be impressed. I am.

From Wikipedia's article on the book:

Famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage.[19] The Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, has argued that nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines.[20]

In other words, if you want to complete the war on starvation you need African governments to get out of the way of democracy and freedoms. It wouldn't hurt if we had more of that here, too.

But what started this massive increase in the ability to feed people? Agri-tech. Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, plant improvement programs which allowed people to more easily feed themselves with disease resistant, higher yielding plants.

Ehrlich has left the land of Soylent Green and is writing eco-catastrophe books, which I'm sure are every bit as accurate as The Population Bomb.

A very similar story can be told about "peak oil" and dire predictions of millions freezing in the dark, versus our current situation with inexpensive oil and natural gas, with huge and increasing proven reserves. Petroleum engineering produced effective hydraulic fracturing technology seemingly at the best chosen of times. Why?

When someone believes money can be made by producing something more efficiently, more abundantly, more inexpensively, they start looking for solutions. Some start looking because of altruism, and good on them. But altruism won't put together the millions of dollars of investments needed to find huge amounts of new oil, or provide massive amounts of fertilizer and machinery needed to produce good and inexpensive food.

What about... scarce metals? scarce rare earth elements? scarce water? I'm worried more about scarce brains, but I can guarantee there are people now thinking about how to make a buck supplying more or better replacements of every scarce item you and I can think of. For instance, scarce water becomes a non-issue if someone develops a sufficiently low-cost and efficient desalination method. (The solution may be close.) Good grief: the planet is covered in water!

Which brings me back to the humanitarian, Bono: "Capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid." Not just poverty, brother, but thirst, and hunger...

As we wander into the political chaos season, please keep in mind the elements that foster abundance for the world: freedom, democracy, capitalism.

The sad tale of Death Wish Coffee: a review

Death Wish Coffee is a thing now. A science fiction author whose books I've read has declared herself addicted. Apparently the company won 30 seconds of advertising time during the Super Bowl (which I didn't watch). It's got my curiosity up.

What is Death Wish Coffee, you ask?  It's marketed as "world's strongest coffee" and supposedly contains twice the caffeine of "normal" coffee, while never being bitter and having wonderful tones of chocolate and cherry. According to Caffeine Informer (and other places), Death Wish gets its caffeine content by using mostly robusta beans, which have not quite twice the caffeine of arabica beans. Death Wish also recommends using more than the normal amount of ground coffee per cup.

This is sort of a caffeine-driven programmer's challenge, and I work among caffeine-driven programmers. So a couple of guys at my office decided to split a pound of Death Wish (~$20) to taste for themselves. Then one of them passed on enough beans for me to make a pot.

So, some information about coffee, from a serious coffee geek:

I roast my own coffee at home. A home-roaster. I really like good coffee and I really dislike bad coffee. (I find Starbucks offensive on many levels.) I like my coffee to be roasted so as to bring out the best aspects of the beans. My favorites are probably Guatemalan beans from Antigua or Huehuetenango, roasted just to second crack, which often brings out cocoa flavors.

There are two commercial coffee genera, robusta and arabica. (Strictly speaking, robusta isn't a genus, but it's often used as such.) The best coffees are arabica. Robusta is used as a filler in some blends when they want to cost-reduce for mass markets. It should be used very carefully because it TASTES BAD. One coffee site refers to the taste as "burnt tires." Robusta, carefully roasted and judiciously blended, probably makes mass-market coffee only a little more awful than it would be otherwise. All "specialty coffee," which is what I drink, is arabica. If you care about coffee, you try to get good arabica beans.

The place I buy my green beans from sells arabica specialty coffees, but they also may sell robusta, irregularly. Sometimes these beans are for blending; sometimes they're for test-roasting and then tossing in the waste bin.

There are espresso blends that heavily use robusta and roast really dark. If you don't want to taste the bean, you roast very dark. (Starbucks apparently makes heavy use of this.) Dark roasting increases bitterness and cooks out the volatiles that might remind you that the bean came from a plant.

So, my colleague at work passed on a few spare ounces of Death Wish beans. The beans were obviously quite dark with the oil on the surface. The fragrance coming from the beans was unpleasant. Possibly the oils had turned. I made a pot. I drank half a cup, trying to keep an open mind. It was bad, but not screamingly bad. Sort of a more acidic Starbucks. Tones of charcoal, and a faint hint of toasted rubber. Sorry, but I didn't really like it.

Curiosity satisfied. Another triumph of marketing over reality. Don't bother.

__________________
See also: How to brew great coffee

Strange days

Yes, I've got the old Doors Strange Days song playing in the back of my head.

The two presumptive candidates for president are now an old unrepentant socialist, and a billionaire whose claims to fame include being on reality TV, a series of news-making bankruptcies, and a series of trade-in wives.

The runner-up (at the moment) for the Democrat nomination is a former Secretary of State and Senator who doesn't seem to be able to name her accomplishments, possibly because they all seem to have seriously negative connotations. Hillary-care. Benghazi. "Smart diplomacy." Security leaks. If this woman weren't so well connected...

One Twitter pundit characterized the primaries as 'pending indictment' (Clinton) vs 'Venezuela' (Sanders) on the Democrat side, and 'gold plated dumpster fire' (Trump) vs 'most punchable face' (Cruz) on the Republican side. It would be funnier if it weren't so close to true.

One amusement is seeing the Democrat candidates trying to out-Leftist each other, then reading the estimates of how many trillions their give-aways will cost. The Republicans are mostly trying to out-conservative each other, which isn't nearly as amusing.

Strange days, indeed.

Why I'm a "climate change" skeptic

I've been keeping up with science, generally, since I was a kid. I'm an engineer because physics, mathematics and the application of these to making things in the real world is fascinating and fun. (For me, anyway.)

My job involves writing a program used by other engineers to simulate the operation of integrated circuits. The program sets up and solves large systems of differential-algebraic equations. The equations come from the topology of the network of connections and from modeling the physics of the devices involved (transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc). If we get the physics or mathematics wrong, the chips in your washing machine, car, camera, cell phone, or Internet router won't work, or die young. Ultimately, the program must match reality or what we do is worse than useless.

With the above as a preamble, it appears to me that the "climate change" crowd is off in the ozone.

• They're still arguing about the data. The surface temperature data appear suspect (especially after being "adjusted"). Data from satellites are more reliable (more accurate; avoids "heat island" distortions and arbitrary data adjustments) but doesn't show a warming trend. In fact, researchers have looked at satellite data and noted no global warming for between 16 and 26 years. Using different datasets over a somewhat longer periods there is a slight (under 0.2C/decade) warming trend, but that trend stopped for at least 16 years while CO2 emissions continued apace.

  

  Remote Sensing Systems troposphere temperature data, Oct 1996 to Sept 2014 

• Questionable methodology: The University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, among others, made the news with "adjustments" to data, lousy statistical techniques, and concomitant conclusions. It looks like lying with data.
• The models don't match reality. The models used in various IPCC reports just don't fit reality. If your program's results have no predictive ability, you don't understand the physics. Which introduces the next point...

  

  John Christy, PhD, University of Alabama, Huntsville 

• The models' physics are suspect: Looking at the above, it does seem plausible that the models are off -- way off. Freeman Dyson, heir to the "smartest man in the room" title in the physics world after the death of Albert Einstein, famously called out climate models as being full of "fudge factors." Phenomenological and empirical models can be useful, but Dyson's mention of fudge factors points out their lack of understanding of the basic mechanisms. The list of poorly understood effects (as regards their contribution to warming) is long, and most of these effects are not included in the models: sunspot cycles, ocean oscillations, ocean currents, Milankovich cycles, even El Nino. One thing that is well understood is carbon dioxide's contribution, but that is under 40% of the model's overall response.
• Proposed solutions ignore the obvious: The "solutions" to global warming all seem to involve the developed world impoverishing itself to reduce carbon emissions. The 80% reduction goal for the USA would have us roll back our carbon emissions to levels not seen since around 1905, which could take trillions of dollars to accomplish. What will this do to global CO2 levels? Essentially nothing. The reality is the United States can't unilaterally make much change in global CO2. China and India are the number 1  and 3 emitters now, and they're just getting started. They have billions of people, many of whom would very much like to just have heat and electricity. The only "solution" that would work to affect global CO2 levels would be a mass extinction of humans. Personally, I object to that as a solution.

Back in 2007, the IPCC Working Group 1 published this gem: “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” As I mentioned earlier, this is quite close to what I do for a living, and is absolutely true. The initial conditions of such a system wildly change the solution. Factor in the possibly major contributions of poorly modeled effects and missing effects, and it's little wonder that there is no predictive ability in the models.

And as a parting shot, from one of my favorite economists, Thomas Sowell:

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

Why, indeed.

A modest environmental proposal

Recently the Obama administration pronounced conjecture as settled science in stating that climate change is causing massive health problems, even though there have been other reports citing studies to the contrary. I'm not buying it. "Climate change" advocates are too shrill, too fact-light and not effective in explaining things like why their models are off, why there's been a much-reported 17+ year pause in warming even though CO2 continues to rise, why the seas have only risen millimeters when they promised that Miami would be swimming before 2000...

Their predictions are consistently wrong. Why should they be trusted? This is just a bunch of government-backed bullies who are willing to twist facts around to get their way, whatever the collateral damage. They'll keep changing the story as pieces of their yarn unravel.

I read a blogger whose mantra about climate change is, paraphrased, "I'll believe it's a crisis when the elites start treating it as a crisis." Normally this is mentioned after Gore or DiCaprio take multiple private jet trips, or the Obamas take two or three government jets, on a boondoggle across the globe. Call it their "carbon bootprint." Obviously the "elites" don't care about their own carbon output.

But these are the people are proposing national climate policy, who supposedly care. They are trying to commit the US to massive efforts and trillions of dollars to combat "climate change." Recent recommendations are to cut US emissions by 80% by 2050, which would roll back our CO2 output to levels not seen since 1905. Even if this were possible, it would impoverish us. The very rich would still be comfortable, but the rest would be freezing in the dark. And that's here in the USA.

Elsewhere on the planet there are billions of people who just want to be warm and have some electricity, running clean water, maybe a nicer place to live, and perhaps eventually a car. China is now the world's largest emitter of CO2, and they've barely started to develop a middle class. India is the third largest emitter, a bit behind China but still progressing toward becoming middle class.

The USA cannot unilaterally reduce the trajectory of atmospheric carbon. We could drop emissions to zero and it would barely change the rate of accumulation of atmospheric CO2. (BTW, I do not think rising CO2 is a disaster. The earth has for most of its history had much higher CO2 than now.)

However, for those who claim to be serious about the "problem," this is the crux: too many humans striving to improve their lives. Even 19th century living conditions for billions of people may produce too much for the anti-carbonistas: China has become the number one CO2 source while much of their population just burns a few lumps of coal for warmth. China will not stop economic progress -- they will do as they have done: make placating noises while developing their economy.

The solution is obvious: a mass extinction event for humans. A few nuclear bombs sent to China and India would probably "save the planet," if anthropogenic global warming is in fact anthropogenic. The USA should be on the hit list as well, since it's still number 2 on the list of CO2 contributors, although I think India will probably pass the USA eventually.

I'm not advocating this. I think the whole "climate change" thing is way overblown and the science is being manipulated. But until the elites propose a solution that would actually "work" rather than a series of half-steps that will beggar the Western world, I cannot believe they are serious.

Why I support the FairTax

I hope you've heard about the FairTax. Here I attempt to explain why I think it's a credibly positive piece of legislation.

I'm sure we can all agree that the US tax code is a disaster. With all the negative publicity the IRS generates for itself, compounded this year by confusion added by the Affordable Care Act (e.g. Obamacare penalties), it's about time to try something totally different. And I mean different in a very good way.

What is the FairTax?

The FairTax is a national sales tax. It's initially proposed to be revenue-neutral at 23%. That's pretty big. It sounds bigger if you note that, to be comparable to quoted income tax rates, 23% is a 'tax included' rate, meaning that if you paid a total of $100 at the register, $23 was tax. Thinking about it like a state sales tax, though, the rate would be 30%: If you buy a $77 item, the tax again is $23 for a total of $100, and 23/77 is 30%. Either way, same large-sounding tax.

The FairTax isn't all that big when you consider what it does: It replaces all federal personal, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment, and corporate taxes. If you have a job, your paycheck increases because none of these federal taxes are taken out.