The economics of hydropower

by philg

We recently visited the Glen Canyon Dam, which destroyed Glen Canyon and replaced it with a reservoir to hold surplus water in a river that doesn’t have any surpluses (calculations were made in the early 20th century, a period of remarkable wetness when compared to the previous 800 years). From the Carl Hayden Visitor Center:

(Is the visitor center named after a senior engineer who made the dam possible? One or more of the 18 workers who died so that the dam could live? No. It is named for a U.S. Senator who funneled tax dollars into this project.)

The dam powers 400,000 households, which means that the trashing of what would have easily qualified as a National Park does not generate enough power for the houses that are occupied by a single year of immigration into the U.S. What did this cost?

$2.17 billion in pre-Biden (2015) money. The BLS says that this is roughly $2.82 billion in Bidies. If we can arrange for God to give us a new raging river ever 3-6 months suitable for damming, in other words, we can provide clean hydropower to the new American households formed by migrants at a capital cost of $7,000 each.

On the third hand, maybe it would cost us a lot more today to build a monster dam. At the Navajo Bridge, just downstream of the dam, the government notes that modern construction techniques are similar to what we used in 1929, but bureaucracy and regulation are dramatically more challenging:

How much inflation has there been in concrete-rich power-generating facilities? We can look at nuclear plant construction. This 2019 paper says that the cost has gone up about 10X, in constant dollars, compared to the 1970s (takes us twice as long as costs 5X as much per day). If we had help from God (new river ever 6 months), in other words, it would cost $70,000 per new household (see How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?) to provision the power generation infrastructure.

(Comparison: progressive technocrats in California have spent $9.8 billion so far on their high-speed rail dream… without laying even one mile of track (CNBC).)

What would Glen Canyon look like if this massive silt-collecting dam hadn’t been built? Here’s the Horseshoe Bend, just downstream, photographed at 0.5X on the iPhone 14:

What does the dam look like?

A concrete salesman’s dream! Note that last bucket of concrete was poured in September 1963, the same year in which your beloved (I hope) blog host was born. The project was supposed to take 6.5 years, including all of the prep work and the bridge, but was finished after 6 years for substantially less than forecast (by Kiewit, whose Boston Harbor project was rendered lethal by government bureaucrats as described in Book review for Bostonians: Trapped Under the Sea).

Related:

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Avenir: a 4,000-house development in Florida proves that New Urbanism does not maximize profits

by philg

As the U.S. population grows (Pew forecast), let’s consider what kind of residential environment will be enjoyed by the country of 450+ million…

We live in Abacoa, a New Urbanism community developed 25 years ago by the MacArthur Foundation, which didn’t need to make the last nickel off the project. Our development is organized into neighborhoods, each with 130-300 households, a small enough group that people can reasonably get to know each other (see Dunbar’s number). Each neighborhood has its own common facilities, such as a clubhouse/gym, a pool, a playground, and a green field. Neither the neighborhoods nor the development are gated, so everything is integrated and you can walk around without looking at high walls. There is a walkable town center, which is pleasant but denies retailers access to the traffic from a major road. We’re home to a university, a neuroscience lab from Germany, and a biology research lab. For aesthetics, the houses usually have their garages in the back and cars go in and out via alleys. Abacoa has been successful and, we’re told (at least by realtors!), that people pay a premium to live here. Even people who don’t live in this part of town say “I love Abacoa”.

If this style of development makes humans happy and motivates humans to pay a premium, you’d think that it would be commercially successful and copies would be sprouting everywhere. That does not seem to be true, however. Across the main road from Abacoa is a newer community: Alton. Their “town center” is a strip mall on a 50-mph 6-lane road. Their clubhouse/gym/pool is a massive magnificent facility serving the entire development (vastly larger than Dunbar’s number). The houses themselves are crammed together more closely than in Abacoa and often “meet the street” with a garage door.

Some of the same builders involved in Abacoa have turned their attention to some former swampland that will soon support 4,000 houses: Avenir. It seems safe to assume that the developers want to maximize their profits. What’s profitable? A rejection of much of New Urbanism and what makes Abacoa Great:

  • each neighborhood is gated (many walls!)
  • there is a massive central gym/pool to serve a huge number of households
  • the town center is a strip mall on a busy road
  • driveways and garages are in front of the houses (saves the cost of building alleys)
  • no townhouses and apartments, just single-family homes

I visited on April 7. It’s across the street from and actually farther from “civilization” than the Grassy Waters Preserve:

Here are some houses built by Pulte Homes that meet the street with a driveway/garage:

I will give Pulte Homes credit for a nice outdoor kitchen. I want this one:

While I can see that the massive central gym and pool would appeal to people coming to look at buying a house (only after they move in will they realize that it would have been nicer to have smaller neighborhood-based amenities), I don’t understand why the other things that make New Urbanism communities so pleasant and desirable aren’t profitable. I thought that we had learned our lesson about the dangers of conventional 1970s suburban development leading to loneliness and insanity.

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How innovative is the OceanGate submersible that is in trouble?

by philg

Sad to think about the folks inside the OceanGate Titan right now. Usually the flip side of innovation is danger, as demonstrated by Deepwater Horizon (see Ten years since Deepwater Horizon set a depth record).

How innovative is the Titan? Here are the most critical specs:

Let’s compare to Alvin, built by a cereal company in 1964.

Alvin has the same payload as Titan, but weighs 38,000 lbs (65 percent more) and has dramatically less interior volume. A perhaps more significant difference is that Alvin has small windows. From a 2013 article:

When we set sail later this year, Alvin will have five windows: three up toward the front that are 7 inches across on the inside (17 inches across outside), and two smaller ones off to either side that are 5 inches in diameter on the inside (12 inches across outside). These are considerably larger than the windows we had before.

Titan reportedly has a 21-inch diameter viewport. Let’s hope that wasn’t the failure point. The other big difference is that Titan hull is “Carbon Fiber and Titanium” (above web site) while Alvin’s personnel sphere was entirely titanium (and could detach from the rest of the machine in an emergency, then rocket to the surface).

Here’s hoping that everyone comes out of this alive, though that seems unrealistic.

Related:

  • Remembering William Lewis Herndon, captain of the gold-laden SS Central America (the treasure hunters decided not to attempt sending humans down into 8,000′ of water, but to do it all with remotely operated equipment)
  • “DEEPSEA TITANIUM PRESSURE HULLS” (U-Boat Worx): In our deepest-diving submersibles, we use titanium alloys to achieve optimum size, weight and performance characteristics. Titanium has several distinct advantages – it is stronger than regular steel thereby enabling us to keep the weight of deep-diving models as low as possible. Other advantages include that it requires no maintenance, has an extended lifecycle, and has incomparable anti-corrosive properties.
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Fed blames coronapanic for inflation

by philg

“Fed Chair Sees ‘Long Way to Go’ on Inflation Fight” (NYT):

“Inflation has moderated somewhat since the middle of last year,” Mr. Powell said. “Nonetheless, inflation pressures continue to run high, and the process of getting inflation back down to 2 percent has a long way to go.”

“Inflation has consistently surprised us, and essentially all other forecasters, by being more persistent than expected,” Mr. Powell said. “And I think we’ve come to expect that — expect it to be more persistent.”

He added that there’s a “common factor” that has driven price increases higher. “It’s the pandemic, and it’s everything about the pandemic: The closing of the economy, the reopening of the economy, the fiscal support, the monetary support. All the things that happened went into high inflation.”

Of course, it is the virus that is to blame, not the human response (panic everywhere other than in Sweden) to the virus! But if the wild government spending on coronapanic is now the official cause of inflation, how can the Fed stop inflation? Congress continues to spend wildly with annual budget deficits that were, prior to 2008, seen mostly during wars. From the CBO:

Separately, here’s my latest inflation achievement… paying $30 for Pad Thai (Jackson, Wyoming):

That was one week after getting a haircut in a barber shop… for $55 plus tip (Big Sky, Montana).

Related:

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Update War of the Worlds for coronapanic

by philg

I subjected 7- and 9-year-old boys to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds as an audio book recently. It wasn’t as big a hit as I expected. I enjoyed it, though! I didn’t realize how topical the 1895 book was.

*** spoiler alert ***

I wonder if it is time to update this book for a modern audience. Wells’s prediction of industrial robots needs no tweaking, but he has the Martians being killed by an unknown bacterial enemy. In an updated version, the Martians will reject a bivalent vaccine offered by Pfizer and the director of the CDC. Due to this rejection, which happened because Martians had tuned into Fox News from afar, SARS-CoV-2 kills them all.

The book has a powerful description of humans panicking in the face of a threat and a prescient description of how Californians and New Yorkers might react to Martians wanting to cage and breed them so that they could harvest human blood.

All these—the sort of people that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way—they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them—no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other—Lord! What is he but funk and precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to work—I’ve seen hundreds of ’em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they’d get dismissed if they didn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn’t be in time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world. Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on Sundays—fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits! Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them.

In the updated version, this will be developed further. Wells’s character envisioned a human resistance living on in the sewers. In the update, the resistance will be in Sweden and Florida because Martians can’t tolerate Surströmming and are afraid of alligators. SARS-CoV-2 will take a year to kill the aliens, which will give governors in California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, etc. time to work with federal officials and the Martians to set up the human farms for their respective meek and compliant populations.

Dr. Fauci will leave his portrait-filled study and return to work organizing the development of ventilators powerful enough to treat Martians suffering from COVID-19. The Fauci Protocol will be to put a Martian on vent after 10 “ullas”.

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Science requires that teenagers receive gender-affirming care…

by philg

“First in the nation gender-affirming care ban struck down in Arkansas” (from state-sponsored NPR):

The ruling by U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr. on Tuesday says the state of Arkansas violated several sections of the U.S. Constitution when it banned all gender-affirming treatments for people under 18. The 80-page ruling says depriving trans minors of treatments like hormone therapy would cause them irreparable harm, and that delaying care until adulthood would force teens to go through changes inconsistent with their gender identity.

“Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that, by prohibiting it, the State undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,” the ruling reads. “The testimony of well-credentialed experts, doctors who provide gender-affirming medical care in Arkansas, and families that rely on that care directly refutes any claim by the State that the Act advances an interest in protecting children.”

This is not a political decision. Science requires that teenagers get injected with hormones and have various body parts cut off surgically. It is settled Science that youngsters who receive gender affirming care have improved mental health and well-being.

On the other hand… What did Science tell the folks who run the widely admired technocratically managed universal government-run health care system over in the United Kingdom? “England’s health service won’t give puberty blockers to children at gender clinics” (New York Post, June 11, 2023):

The NHS said the new rules were “an interim policy” that would undergo further review, including the outcome of a research study on the impact puberty-suppressing hormones have on gender dysphoria in children and young people. Findings published last year from a review of children’s gender services led by a pediatrician, Dr. Hilary Cass, said there were “gaps in the evidence base” about the blockers.

The “gaps in the evidence” identified in the U.K. simply do not exist for judges in the U.S.

Separately, what if you’re visiting a teenage recipient of gender-affirming care in a hospital in Arkansas and want to look fashionable? Levi’s has you covered for about $1,000 (photos from yesterday):

Bigger budget? Photos from a Coach store:

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Rainbow-first Retail (examples from Bozeman, Montana)

by philg

I hope that your Pride Month is going well. Let’s talk about the intersection between Pride and commerce….

In some sense it isn’t surprising that retailers would have some percentage of their stores devoted to 2SLGBTQQIA+ merchandise because at least some percentage of customers will want items that broadcast their passion for the Rainbow Flag Religion (see “Nothing against LGBTQ people, but they talk about being LGBTQ all the time.”). On the other hand, unless we think that followers of Rainbow Flagism are the majority of customers, it seems odd that 2SLGBTQQIA+ merchandise is right in the front of the store, given greater prominence than everything else that customers might want.

It wasn’t Pride Month last month, but retailers in Bozeman, Montana nonetheless were following a principle that I’m going to call Rainbow-first Retail, in which every customer will be exposed to 2SLGBTQQIA+ merchandise prior to the rest of the shopping experience.

Let’s start at Target. A shopper who comes in to get a toaster, a bottle of aspirin, or a bag of Cheetos must first walk by Pride Island, which is placed just inside the main doors:

Only haters would suggest that Rainbow Flagism is a religion rather than Science, yet Target sells a gingerbread-house-like kit labeled “celebratory offering” (bottom row below; click to enlarge):

You can “Spread the Love” with a spatula by Alice Butts:

I quickly found 2SLGBTQQIA+-themed apparel in sizes down to 3T (for three-year-olds):

What if Mindy the Crippler demands to be included in Pride Month? We can cover her unsightly golden fur with a beautiful rainbow “crop top” in the “pride pet apparel” category:

Is it then fair to say that Target has something for everyone? Perhaps not. An aircraft owner friend likes to say “I’m proud of my race and I’m proud of my sexuality” yet Target does not offer clothing celebrating white heterosexuality.

What if we’re having our 2SLGBTQQIA+ friends over for a party? Target sells 2SLGBTQQIA+ beverages:

The local merchants actually pushed Rainbow Flagism out to the storefront with flags in the windows and stickers on the glass. Customers are required to pay obeisance to the sacred flag before they can walk in and think about transacting business.

Quite a few merchants had the following signs and stickers on their front doors/windows:

Note that Muslims are lumped in with “LGBTQ community members”. We didn’t meet any recent migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Somalia, but I wonder if they feel “welcome here” when they must walk by a giant rainbow flag in order to get food at the downtown market:

“Everyone Welcome” is stenciled on the glass. Would Ron DeSantis be welcome? Wouldn’t that be normalizing hate?

Speaking of Ron DeSantis, notorious for banning books in a state where all 2SLGBTQQIA+ books for kids remain available for free at the public library, the principal bookstore in Bozeman proudly sells for cash those “banned books” that remain available for free at the Florida public libraries.

Maybe “asexual pride” is for married heterosexual guys? (“Only 48% of married women want regular sex after four years”).

If the bookstore window was 100% devoted to 2SLGBTQQIA+, did they have anything inside on a different topic? Pulitzer winner about the greatest American of the 21st century:

Circling back to the “immigrants welcome” theme, locals told us that Bozeman has become completely unaffordable due to skyrocketing rents and house prices. Traffic lights are being added so quickly that we stopped at several that weren’t yet in Google Maps. Apartment buildings are being constructed in what were formerly low-rise neighborhoods. Example:

Here’s data from Zillow:

Unless immigrants are going to be sheltered by say-gooders, won’t population expansion via immigration exacerbate the already-identified “housing for humans crisis”? Here’s a coffee shop that welcomes migrants, but excludes Canine-Americans:

In addition to welcoming “All Countries of Origin” they welcome “All Religions” but have a rainbow sticker on the front door as well:

How can an observant Muslim feel welcome?

Here’s a shop that features, on the outside of the building, a dark-skinned person with a substantial bulge in the panties:

We didn’t see a single person with this skin color during two days in Bozeman.

Circling back to the Rainbow-first Retail theme of this post… why is it profitable? Why does the typical customer want to be reminded to observe Rainbow Flagism when going into a store to buy something that isn’t related to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle?

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Where can state government workers relax at Black taxpayers’ expense?

by philg

Today is Juneteenth, when the Black working class can work and pay taxes so that the white laptop class (e.g., federal government workers) can enjoy a day off. But where does the Black working class have the opportunity to pay taxes to fund leisure for white laptop class members who are state government workers? Pew offers a map:

It isn’t surprising that Deplorable Florida fails to give state workers an extra paid holiday (the same article, however, shows that Florida was the very first state (1991) to recognize Juneteenth as “an observance”). Shockingly, however, Juneteenth is merely a “personal holiday” in California that workers can choose to take on June 19 (in which case a worker would lose the opportunity to take a holiday on Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha, for example).

Separately, I hope that your Juneteenth celebration is at least “mostly peaceful” (see “1 dead, at least 22 hurt in a shooting at a Juneteenth celebration in Willowbrook, Illinois, police say” (CNN): “At least 22 people were injured and one person was killed by gunfire overnight in Illinois, in a peaceful Juneteenth celebration… The incident is now one of 310 mass shootings in the US this year…”).

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Inflation for home construction and repair higher than the official number?

by philg

I hope that all white readers who are members of the laptop class and/or government employees are enjoying their paid holiday for Juneteenth. For readers (like me!) who suffer from reduced income as a consequence of reduced working hours, let’s have a look to see whether we can afford to take it easy…

We are informed that inflation is poking along at about 5 percent per year (so you’ll lose half of your wealth over 14 years if you don’t invest carefully). That shouldn’t be enough to derail an insurance company’s profitability, even with regulators limiting price increases to once per year. What are the insurance companies themselves seeing? From the Insurance Information Institute:

“You have to look at year-over-three-years replacement costs, and they’re high,” [Triple-I CEO Sean] Kevelighan said. “Personal homeowners replacement costs are up 55 percent. We’ve got personal auto replacement costs up 45 percent.

The three-year inflation rate, as perceived by insurers paying claims, is around 50 percent. Maybe the problem is behind us thanks to the muscular efforts of Joe Biden to whip inflation? “State Farm Halts Home-Insurance Sales in California” (Wall Street Journal, May 26):

State Farm is stopping the sale of new home-insurance policies in California effective Saturday, because of wildfire risk and rapid inflation in construction costs.

State Farm is the nation’s biggest car and home insurer by premium volume. It said it “made this decision due to historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market.” It posted the statement on its website and referred questions to trade groups.

I think that we can ignore the wildfire risk as the primary business reason here. The wildfires of 2023 aren’t dramatically riskier than the wildfires of 2022. Maybe State Farm is just being greedy so that they can enrich their fatcat shareholders? They’re not truly losing money on new policies, but are trying to pressure California regulators into giving them yet more profits:

State Farm is a mutual company, meaning it is owned by its policyholders, and it has deep pockets. It ended 2022 with net worth of $131.2 billion.

Why does it matter if construction costs are outpacing inflation, as State Farm says? Our grow-the-population-to-450-million-via-immigration plan will result in skyrocketing rents and miserable living conditions for most Americans unless new housing can be built at some price that is affordable to low-skill migrants (who earn below-median wages).

Let’s have a look at a newly built house just north of us in Martin County, Florida, far away from the high prices of Miami and Palm Beach. It’s only about $5,000 per square foot and comes with 2 acres of land:

Related:

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What buildings and parks have been named after George Floyd?

by philg

On this Father’s Day, let’s look at a man who has been highlighted as a great father by the elite…

President Biden says “We will never stop taking action in his honor.” regarding George Floyd:

It has been three years. What, concretely, has been done to honor Mr. Floyd? Minneapolis has George Floyd Square, but has President Biden designated a park or a building in D.C. “in his honor”? If not, why not?

What about a George Floyd Memorial on the Mall? What stops President Biden from delivering on his promise by creating one?

Related:

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