Post #1954: LA is a great big freeway. Put a hundred down and buy a car …

 

I just got back from a trip to Los Angeles. A business trip of sorts.

All other aspects aside, LA provided a stark reminder of just how long cars last, and how many miles they can travel, in the right climate.

That was just one of several observations suggesting that our current civilization is doomed by climate change.

Move north and build a bunker, like the rich folks are doing.  That, if you plan on being alive 30 years from now.  I’m beginning to think that’s the only sensible response to global warming that remains.

If nothing else, read this to understand why it makes sense that the Federal government seems to be pushing too hard to change the U.S. auto fleet.  They aren’t aiming for conditions today.  They’re aiming for conditions two decades from now, when half of today’s new cars will still be on the road.   If people today weren’t a little put out by it, the Feds wouldn’t be doing their job.


Like a vegan at a barbecue

I wasn’t prepared for the social aspects of being in a crowd in an airport.  I rarely fly, and I’d forgotten what it was like.  In hindsight, putting it together logically:

  1. airports attract people who like to fly, and
  2. it’s noisy, so everybody talks loudly, and
  3. they tend to talk about all the wonderful trips they’ve taken recently, and
  4. the further the trip, the more noteworthy.

So there I sat, a Prius-driving, EV-purchasing eco-nerd, trapped in the middle of a crowd whose principal pastime was, in effect, bragging about how much they added to global warming for their amusement. I.e., who among us had recently taken the most exotic vacation or series of vacations.  And then giving each other oohs and ahhs for feedback.

The prize went to the elderly British couple behind me, who lovingly recited their recent adventures.  They had just flown into LA via Hawaii, after a brief trip to New Zealand.  And were now flying across the U.S., prior to flying across the Atlantic, for a brief stay at home, before their next jolly little jaunt.  Footloose and carefree, they were the most eco-heedless, old people with all the time and money in the world. 

After choking down the FOMO that naturally arises from being forced to listen to that, I did something else I rarely do:  I put on headphones and listened to music full-blast, just to drown out the conversations.

That seemed preferable to losing it in a full Jesus-vs-money-changers-at-the-temple scene.  That would have been completely inappropriate.  After all, what is an airport, if not a temple for those who worship the benefits high consumption of fossil fuels.

If nothing else, hunkering down with headphones, rather than causing a scene, maybe gave me a little more sympathy for those with mild autism.  But maybe it’s just condescending to say so.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m not quite as tightly wrapped as I used to be.


Carbon offsets for air travel?  F*ck it.

In my last post, I figured that this quick trip for two would add about 1.2 tons of C02 to my household carbon footprint this year.

I was prepared for that.  Went into it with my eyes open.  Where I’d guess that the average person in that crowd didn’t give it a passing thought.

The issue isn’t the gas mileage of airplanes versus other modes of transport.   Modern jets get somewhere in the range of 80 to 120 passenger-miles per gallon (per the medium-haul table in this Wikipedia article).

The issue is simply the travel distance.  Any way we’d have chosen to travel, we’d have generated quite a bit of C02.  Two people in a Prius would have generated about a ton.  Two people in a small EV, at the U.S. average generating mix, would have generated about 0.4 tons.

Anyway, my plan was to come home, and see if I could identify some sort of carbon offset that offered true additionality.  That is, that would actually reduce global carbon emissions in proportion to the money I paid for it.

Meanwhile, the airline’s attempts at greenwashing got under my skin.  I don’t know how many time we heard about how careful they would be about recycling the trash generated on board.  All the while, I’m trying to do the arithmetic about a couple of ounces of plastic and paper my wife and I plausibly generated, versus the appreciable fraction of a ton of fuel that we burned, getting from A to B and back again.

I’m clearly not their target audience.  I was hamstrung by my ability (and willingness) to do simple arithmetic.  Whereas they were targeting people with a willing suspension of disbelief.  I just couldn’t get with the message that dealing with our used Kleenexes in an environmentally-sensitive fashion turned this whole excursion into a bit of simple harmless fun.

In any case, after marinating in that milieu for a while, pondering my place in the universe, while frying my eardrums with Jimmy Buffet, I came to the conclusion above.

Better to save my money.  Give it to my kids so they can build a better bunker.


Air travel is just the tip of the iceberg

Source:  U.S. Congressional Budget Office.

That’s probably a bad choice of metaphor, given the topic.  But what I mean to convey is that U.S. air travel accounts for less than 4% of U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions.  It’s 10% of transportation emissions, which in turn are just under 40% of total U.S. emissions.

Instead, what got me into a truly dark mood about the future was a few things that really hit home in my brief visit to LA.

Now, in terms of the physical environment and the people, it couldn’t have been a nicer trip.  Mild temperature, beautiful landscaping, and uniformly friendly people.  That’s mostly what I take back from this trip.

But, to get that:

  1. You fly over hundreds of square miles of tightly-packed single-story bungalows.
  2. Everybody drives everywhere.
  3. Most people drive very nice cars.
  4. Almost all those cars were old-fashioned straight-gas vehicles.
  5. There’s an excellent public transportation system …
  6. … that is used exclusively by tourists and the poor.

In that city alone, millions of people have invested their life savings in property that only functions in that car-centric way.

We visited the Getty Villa, a museum situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast.  As it turned out, the easiest way to get there and back was to take the bus.  (Cell reception is so spotty that it’s all-but-impossible to hail an Uber from that location).  So we did, and we were pleasantly surprised with how nice the buses were, and how nice the bus drivers were, as we asked for directions on what to do next.

And, really, how nice all the drivers were.  Both my wife and I noted that in all the traveling we did in LA, we did not hear a car horn honk, even once.  And that drivers seemed to be quite cautious and courteous around pedestrians.  I can attest that both habits are absent in typical traffic in the DC suburbs.

What really drove it home was driving around with my wife’s cousin.  The idea of driving ten miles to hit up a nice restaurant didn’t phase her a bit.  That’s just business-as-usual there.  She was driving a beautiful nearly-new near-SUV (a “crossover”).  We got to talking, and this thing that appeared to be a nearly-new car had 135K miles on the odometer.  And not a speck of rust or blemish on the car’s finish.  That’s what can happen, in a place that rarely rains.  Cars can last a long time.

But I also noted that the mix of traditional, hybrid, and electric cars on the streets looked absolutely no different from the DC suburbs.  If anything, I noted a lower proportion of hybrids and electrics there than I see around town in Vienna VA.  Which would make sense, if what you’re looking at is generally older, but nice-looking, stock of vehicles.

In the U.S., we look to California to take the lead on all things environmental, at least in so far as they pertain to cars.  That’s why CARB — the California Air Resources Board — has such a nation-wide reach.  Any U.S. region that chronically violates EPA air pollution standards can adopt CARB rules as a way of not having to gin up its own plan to try to get air pollution levels below the health-based EPA standards.

Anyway, what really matters for C02 emissions is housing and transport.  LA — and all the cities like it — are locked into a bunch of long-lived investments (the housing stock) that requires massive amounts of vehicle travel, using a fleet of long-lived vehicles.  Basically, using the vehicles that might have made sense two or three decades ago, but are now just a dead weight as we try to preserve the livability of the planet.

Admittedly, with the generally nice weather, the buildings don’t consume anywhere as much energy per square foot as buildings on the East Coast do.

But the cars?  Cars just keep getting more reliable and longer-lived.  I’m guessing that most of the cars I saw on the road this past week will still be drive-able a decade from now.  And that a quarter of them will still be drive-able two decades from now.

And nothing is going to change that.  There’s no to wean that area off fossil fuels.  At least not over any time span I’m capable of imagining.

To be clear, the DC ‘burbs are largely in the same situation.  But the scale of it here isn’t nearly as obvious as it is in the flat, low-rise terrain of L.A.  Plus, here, cars will eventually rust out, buildings rot, and most of the construction is fairly new.  So while the DC ‘burbs feel ephemeral, to my eye, in L.A., it seem like the shabby post-WWII low-rise buildings that fill the blocks now would likely be there forever.  L.A. is a timeless sprawl, whereas DC feels like this is just a passing phase.


Conclusion

Source:  Ultimately, Dante’s Inferno.  The image is off YouTube.

People who don’t want to adapt to the new reality often point to the fact that most of the truly horrific changes from global warming are predicted to be a half-century or more in the future.  Things like the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, or the dust-bowlification of the interior of the North American continent.

But you lose sight of low long it will take us to change.  If every new car sold in LA were magically made into an EV, given how long cars last, you’d still have a big presence of gas-burning vehicles two decades from now.  And the houses?  Nothing is going to change the fact that L.A. consists of low-density housing as far as the eye can see.  Every house with a natural gas furnace is likely to be burning natural gas for heat for the rest of this century.

That’s set in stone.  Or wood and steel and pavement.  Or, ultimately, by zoning and property rights.  And every year where the majority of new cars are old-fashioned gas powered vehicles is another year where that’s set in stone.

Not to mention that, from the standpoint of a human lifetime, your fossil-fuel emissions today are very close to permanent.  About half the C02 you emit today will still be in the atmosphere warming the climate 200 years from now.  Even out to a time horizon of a millennium, something like a third of the C02 you emit today will still be around, warming the climate.  And that assumes that the current natural “sinks” for C02 — like the oceans, which currently absorb C02 — continue to function.  Which they won’t.  At some point, if we get the planet hot enough, Nature as a whole turns from a C02 sink to its own C02 source.

It’s not clear that it’s even worth trying to explain the disinformation that is spread about how long-lived our C02 emissions are.  But let me just tackle one actual fact that gets misstated all the time. 

You’ll read that, on average, every year, Nature absorbs about half of our annual C02 emissions.  That’s both correct and incorrect.  It’s correct in that every year, we emit about 10 gigatons of atmospheric carbon, and on average, every year, nature absorbs about five.  But those figures are completely unrelated to each other. 

On average, per year, Nature absorbs five gigatons a year out of the ~150 gigatons of excess carbon we’ve built up in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.  It’s that excess amount that (e.g.) drives C02 into solution in the ocean. 

And, completely unrelated, we still manage to emit another 10 gigatons of carbon each year. 

Nature would absorb 5 gigatons if we emitted zero.  Nature would absorb 5 if we emitted 100.  (On average, it varies quite a bit across years.)  And, purely by chance, right now, the amount Nature absorbs each year works out mathematically to be half of what we emit each year.  But there’s no cause-and-effect.  That’s just two unrelated numbers. 

The problem with that sound bite (Nature absorbs half) is that it makes it sound like all we have to do is cut back a bit, and Nature will clean up our mess.  Instead, when you do the detailed modeling — how quickly the various natural sinks are filling up, and so on — if we successfully got onto a path of zero C02 emissions by, say, mid-century — at best, it will take literal millennia for atmospheric C02 to return to the pre-industrial level.

There are other commonly-spread canards in this area, but that’s the only one that even knowledgeable people misstate, in a way that minimizes the problem.  From the standpoint of a human lifetime, our C02 emissions are more-or-less permanent.   It’s not that half of what you emitted, last year, got re-absorbed.  It’s that a few percent of the cumulative total excess emissions got re-absorbed by Nature last year.  That long “tail” of the C02 we emit today is just one of the many reasons why most people who have an accurate grasp of the underlying science tend to be more than a bit freaked out about the problem of global warming.

The lyrics that I borrowed for the title of this post are more than a half-century old (reference).  By all appearances, if you live in L.A., you’re going to live that same 1960s L.A. lifestyle now and for the indefinite future.

For however long this relic of the past lasts.

Even with one foot in the grave, I’m not about to start jet-setting.  It’s just not who I am.  But I think I’m done with trying to go the extra mile with reducing my carbon footprint.

So maybe I’ll look around for some carbon offsets that plausibly have true additionality.  But these days, I have to view that as a form of amusement, instead of anything of practical value.  I think most of us are now on the right path, but collectively, it’s going to take us far too long to get there.

Post #1953: Penance for flying?

 

I hate flying.  And yet, my wife and I will soon be taking a flight on a Boeing 737-Max-9, from Virginia to the West Coast and back.

To get in the right mood for the flight, I’m going to calculate just how much this adds to my carbon footprint for the year.   And then start on the path to doing some penance for it.  If that’s even feasible. Continue reading Post #1953: Penance for flying?

Post #1952, addendum 1: How big are Virginia’s batteries going to be?

In the prior post, I finally tracked down and read the Commonwealth of Virginia’s plans for fully de-carbonizing its electrical grid by mid-century. It boils down to replacing the existing natural-gas fired electrical capacity with a combination of wind, solar, and … great big batteries.  You need the batteries because solar and wind are intermittent power sources.

That’s my reading of the law.

Literally, the law calls for the construction of “energy storage” facilities.  While there are ways of storing electrical energy other than batteries, practically speaking, I’m pretty sure that means batteries of some type.

Source:  Wikipedia

For example, Dominion (Virginia’s main electric utility) already owns the largest pumped-storage facility in the world, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station (shown above, per Wikipedia).  That site stores energy by using electricity to pump water uphill from one reservoir to another, and then generates electricity as needed by allowing that water to flow downhill through generating turbines.

Sites suitable for pumped-storage facilities are few and far between.  And other alternatives to batteries tend to be grossly inefficient (e.g., converting electricity to hydrogen, and back again).  So it’s not beyond reason to expect that most of the energy storage that is required to be in the pipeline by 2035 will be battery-based storage of some sort.

The point of this post is to ask whether that seems even remotely feasible and plausible.

And, surprisingly — to me at least — the answer is yes.  Yes, it does seem feasible to produce the required battery-based storage in that timeframe.  Producing and installing (my guess for) the amount of battery capacity required to be in the works by 2035 would be the equivalent of adding grid-connected battery capacity required for manufacturing 400,000 Chevy-Bolt-size electric vehicles.  That much, over the course of more than a decade.  Where Virginia’s current stock of EVs is about 56,000 registered EVs.

Roughly speaking, on a per-year basis, those grid-based batteries will add as much to the demand for batteries as the current manufacture of EVs does.  Given the rapid growth in EVs, and concomitant expansion of world battery manufacturing capacity, filling that amount of demand, in that timeframe, seems completely feasible to me.

That involves some serious guesswork on my part, due to the way the law was written (next section).  But if that’s anywhere in the ballpark, then yeah, then Virginia’s path toward a carbon-free grid isn’t outlandish at all.

Big batteries, and an error in Commonwealth statute?

1. By December 31, 2035, each Phase I Utility shall petition the Commission for necessary approvals to construct or acquire 400 megawatts of energy storage capacity. ... 

2. By December 31, 2035, each Phase II Utility shall petition the Commission for necessary approvals to construct or acquire 2,700 megawatts of energy storage capacity.

Source:  Commonwealth of Virginia statute, emphasis mine.

Virginia law appears to call for our public utilities to build or buy at least 3,100 megawatts of electrical storage capacity as part of this process.

Those of you who are well-versed on the difference between energy and power will have already spotted the problem.  Megawatts is not a measure of electrical storage capacity So the law is written oddly, or possibly incorrectly, no matter how you slice it.

Power is a rate of energy flow per unit of time.  In particular, for electricity, the watt is a unit of power, not an amount of energy.  The electrical unit of energy is the watt-hour.

E.g., the brightness of an old-fashioned incandescent light was determined by its wattage.  But the amount of energy it used was based on its wattage, times the amount of time it was turned on, or total watt-hours used to light it.

When in doubt, just remember that you pay your public utility for the energy you use.  And in Virginia, we pay about 12.5 cents per thousand watt-hours.  (A.k.a. kilowatt-hours.  Or KWH.)

Returning to the Bath County pumped storage facility referenced above, it has a peak power output of 3,000 megawatts, and a total storage of 24,000 megawatt-hours.  Doing the math, if it starts out full, that facility can run at full power for eight hours before all the water has been drained from the upper reservoir.

But if that pumped-storage facility had been built with an upper reservoir ten times that size, or one-tenth that size, it would still produce 3,000 megawatts.  But under those scenarios, the total energy storage could be anything from 1,200 to 120,000 megawatt-hours.

In other word, the section of Virginia statute that specifies the energy storage requirements does not actually specify an amount of energy storage.  It specifies the (instantaneous) amount of power that those facilities must provide (megawatts).

I don’t know whether that’s a mistake, or whether they actually had something in mind.  The nomenclature — megawatts — is what is used to size power plants.  But that makes sense.  Power plants produce electrical power, by transforming something else (coal, gas, sunlight, wind) into electricity.  The assumption with gas and coal-fire plants is that they could produce that power for an indefinitely long period of time.

By contrast, electrical storage facilities don’t produce power, they simply store and release it.  Telling me the amount of (instantanous) power they can release says nothing about how much energy they can store. It says nothing about how long they can keep up that power flow.  Unlike gas and coal-fired power plants, there’s an expectation that they can only keep up that rate of power release for a relatively short period of time.

Beyond this confusion between units of power and units of energy, something about the energy storage part of the statute still does not quite add up.  Per the U.S. Energy Information Agency, Virginia’s grid has a peak summertime output of about 30,000 megawatts (reference).  So the Commonwealth seems to be requiring that new energy storage facilities have to be able to supply about 10% of peak load.  Which, along with the existing Bath pumped-storage facility, would mean that total storage capacity would be able to supply 20% of peak summertime load. But for no more than eight hours (the amount of time that the existing Bath facility can run flat-out at 3000 megawatts.)

By contrast, the fossil-fuel-fired equipment that must be retired by 2045/2050 accounts for about 65% of current generating capacity, as of 2020.  Acknowledging that nighttime demand is below peak daytime time, it still seems like a breezeless summer night would still result in more electricity demand than the Virginia grid could produce.

So they’re cutting it pretty close, that’s all I’m saying.  Sure, we’re on a multi-state grid.  Sure power can flow in from out-of-state.  But if we’re having still and sultry summer nights, it’s a pretty good bet that all our neighboring states are as well.

I guess I should take the 3,100 as a minimum.  Nothing bars out electric utilities from producing more than that.


Enough batteries to power 400,000 Chevy Bolts?

So let me assume a storage capacity, since the law does not actually specify one.  And let me do that by patterning the new facilities on the characteristics of the existing Bath pumped-storage facility.

Let me then assume that the 3,100 megawatts of “storage” means that the new storage facilities have to match the existing Bath facility, and produce at that rate of power for eight hours.  That would require about 25,000 megawatt-hours’ worth of battery capacity.

My Chevy Bolt, by contrast, has about 60 KWH of battery storage.  Doing the arithmetic, and rounding, that’s enough battery capacity to manufacture  400,000  Chevy Bolts.

Virginia already has about 56,000 EVs registered in-state (reference).  So that would be enough battery capacity to produce a seven-fold increase in EVs on the road, in Virginia, in a more-than-decade timespan.

Absent some huge unforseen bottleneck in the current ramp-up in battery production, that seems completely feasible.  Not cheap.  But clearly feasible.


Conclusion:  This is a good start.

It’s fashionable to say that we aren’t doing anything about global warming. 

While I would agree that we aren’t doing enough, and we aren’t doing it fast enough, the planned conversion of the electrical grid to carbon-free electricity (in just under half the U.S. states) is an example of a material change that is in the works.

Source:  National Conference of State Legislatures.

There’s pretty clearly a red-state/blue-state divide in plans for a carbon-free grid.  And it’s possible that the next time Republicans take power in Virginia, or nationally, they’ll put a stop to grid de-carbonization.  In exactly the same way that they killed the Obama Clean Power Plan.  That was a set of EPA rules that would require all states to have some plan in place for reducing the C02 emissions from their electrical grids.  In effect, it was a national plan for decarbonizing the grid, with states given the freedom to implement those reduction targets as they saw fit.  Republicans did their best to block it, and Republicans eventually successfully killed it once Trump took power (reference).

When you look at the details, the statement that we are unwilling to do anything about global warming is not true.  In the U.S., in terms of Federal and state policies that could matter, Republicans are unwilling to do anything about it.

I have to admit, at first blush, Virginia’s plans for decarbonizing its grid seem kind of nuts.  But when I looked in detail, well, it’s not so nutty after all.  In the grand scheme of things, what’s nutty is all the states — in white and brown above — that have absolutely no plans, whatsoever, to address this issue.

Post #1952: Does Vermont really have a carbon-free electrical grid?

 

And if so, can Virginia copy them?

The short answer is, yes and no.

Yes, they seem to have a carbon-free electrical grid. They are the only state in the U.S. to be able to make that claim.

But not, we can’t copy them.  They are the gateway for hydroelectric power generated in Quebec to enter the U.S.  And they have significant hydroelectric power generated within the state.

They’ve done other things as well.  But hydroelectric power is the backbone of Vermont’s carbon-free grid.  And that’s not going to help Virginia meet its 2045 goal of having its own carbon-free electrical grid.

Instead, weirdly enough, near as I can tell, without explicitly saying so, Virginia has made a big bet on batteries as the backbone of our system.  In 2020, our legislature laid out an explicit path for converting our generation to wind and solar.  But unlike hydroelectric, those are intermittent sources — they require something to store the energy.  Rationally, the same legislation requires construction of specific amounts of  “energy storage facilities” to match.

The legislation doesn’t spell it out, but near as I can tell, with current technology, the only thing on the table with the potential to store that much energy is batteries.  Big batteries, for sure.  At least, at the scale and distribution required for an entire state’s electrical grid.

I guess the takeaway is this:  I thought I was taking a big step by buying an EV.  Running my car off batteries seemed like a real leap forward.  But, as it turns out, twenty years from now, Virginia’s entire electrical grid is going to be running off batteries, half the time.

Or, at least, that’s how I read the plan, as laid out in Commonwealth of Virginia statute, Section 56-585.5. Generation of electricity from renewable and zero carbon sources

Continue reading Post #1952: Does Vermont really have a carbon-free electrical grid?

Post G24-006: “My grandmother grew loofahs … once.”

 

The title of this post is my wife’s comment, when I announced last spring  that I was going to plant a few loofah/luffa/loofa gourds at the edge of my garden.

Her grandmother was a master gardener.  I have come to see the wisdom of her decision.

Planting them once produced all I will need for quite some time.  So I don’t see any reason to plant them again this year.


Loofah processing

You can find YouTube videos on this, so there’s little point in rehashing the basics.  You peel them, de-seed them, and (optionally) bleach them.  Or, if not bleach, give them a good soap and water wash.

Lesson 1:  You don’t need many loofah plants.  The yield above was from a couple of loofah plants that I pruned heavily over the course of the summer.  I pinched off flowers and fruit every time I walked past it.  I’m sure I could have had several multiples of this if I’d let the plants procreate at will.

Lesson 2:  De-seeding them completely is a game of diminishing returns.  I let these sit on my back porch over the winter, so all of those are light and dry.  On this rainy March day, the skins mostly came off fairly easily, in one piece, as shown below.  Peeling these took maybe a minute per gourd.

Beating the seeds out of all of them, by contrast, took the better part of half an hour.  I was determined to get as many whole, uncut, seed-free loofahs as I could.  Which meant a lot of beating on gourds that had just a few seeds left in them.  It might have gone faster if I had better technique, but basically I just beat a couple of gourds together until I stopped hearing seeds fall out into the box below.

The result is a small mixed pile of cut and uncut gourds, stuffed into a bucket, ready for bleaching.

 


The half-life of bleach.

The strength of household chlorine bleach falls over time.  Even if stored properly, the longer it is stored, the weaker it gets.  As a result, to know how much bleach to add to anything, you have to factor in how old your bleach is.

Clorox (r) helpfully tells you how to decode their manufacturing date codes, on this web page.  The Clorox bleach above was made on the 140th day of 2020, so it’s just under four years old now.  The no-name bleach in the second bottle likely follows the same Julian-date standard, so it was probably made on the 211th day of 2014.  It’s now close to ten years old.

Then you need a firm estimate of how quickly the bleach degrades.  Here, Clorox is less than helpful, and just says that you need to replace your bleach every year.  Almost as if their main concern were selling bleach, instead of your well-being.

Many seemingly-reputable internet sources quote “20% per year” degradation of the available chlorine in household bleach.  That is a reasonable match for more technical sources, which seem to show something over a two-year half-life for low-concentration sodium hypochlorite stored at room temperature.

That’s surely an approximation, because bleach degrades much faster when warm, among other things.  So “20% per year” embodies some assumption about the storage temperature for the bleach.  But it’s just about all I have to go on.  So that’ll have to do.

Based on that, my bottle of four-year-old Clorox is at roughly (0.8^4 =~) 40% strength, and my 10-year-old bleach should be around (0.8^10 =~) 10% strength.  But to a close approximation, all that means is that, for bleaching these loofahs, I need to use (e.g.) ten times the recommended concentration, if I’m using that ten-year-old bleach.

The most common recommendation that I find is to bleach badly stained loofahs for an hour, using a 1:10 solution of household bleach to water.  Judging from more technical work, that combination, done at room temperature, ought to get even the worst-stained loofahs white without significantly reducing their strength.

The recommended 1:10 bleach/water solution for loofah bleaching is VASTLY stronger than what you would use on laundry.  Household bleach varies modestly in original strength, but the directions suggest at most one cup bleach for a 16-gallon laundry load, or a 1:256 bleach/water solution for laundry.

The bottom line is that if I follow common internet advice and (apparently) approved industrial practice, I should just pour my 10-year-old bleach directly on the loofahs, then make up any difference with the four-year-old bleach diluted approximately 1:2.5.

Let that sit for an hour.  Then drain, rinse, and dry.

Results?  Well, they’re definitely better-looking than they were.  These are tan rather than white, and the remaining seeds show up as black blotches.  Some of the darkest patches didn’t bleach out.  But I’m not going to bother to redo, other than than to dig out the stray seeds.  They are usable as-is, which is all that I require.


Next up

At least I had a practical purpose in mind for the loofahs.

I also planted a couple of birdhouse gourds.  As with the loofahs, after they’d set a few gourds, I started pinching off flowers and fruit whenever I spotted them.  I still ended up with more than I could plausibly use.  These are almost dry now, so doing something with them (or tossing them out) is on my agenda.

Post G24-005: Is it March already?

 

This is one of those old-guy, life-is-like-a-roll-of-toilet-paper posts.  About gardening, yet.

If you actually have things to do, just move along, there’s nothing here for you.

Today’s topics are ginger, spinach, tomatoes, and garlic.

 


1:  Ginger.  If you enjoy watching paint dry …

… you’ll love sprouting ginger.

I decided on a whim to try growing ginger this year.  Apparently, it can be done in Zone 7, you just have to start them in the winter and grow them as housplants until mid-summer.

On the plus side, yes, you can sprout grocery-store ginger root.  There’s mine, above.

On the down side, I planted this particular piece of root just shy of one month ago.

On the other plus side, the internet correctly warned me that this was a slow and piecemeal process.

This is interestingly unlike anything else I’ve ever grown.   Usually, you plant a bunch of fill-in-the-blank, and then, however long it takes them to sprout, you get a bunch of sprouted fill-in-the-blank.   All at the same time.  Not so with ginger.  Each piece of root proceeds according to its own timetable.

On the other down side, this means I have to run an electrical heat mat for months.  I’m only running this at six watts, by using a lamp dimmer in the circuit.  But it runs all the time, so that by the time these are done sprouting (say, three months total?), that’ll be about 13 KWH, or enough electricity to drive may be 65 miles.  That’s rounding error, in the grand scheme of things, I guess.  But I’d rather avoid it if I could.

In hindsight, I ought to have started these around New Year’s Day.  Or not at all.  But now that something has sprouted, I’m going to keep going.


2: Spinach.  What, I’m already late?

Source:  Clipart library.com

Yes, I yam.

My wife is particularly fond of fresh spinach.  But I’ve never had the least luck growing it.

Maybe that’s because I didn’t know what I was doing.  So this year, I actually read the directions.

Turns out, spinach seeds like being in the cold, wet ground.  Far more than I would have guessed.  You should sow spinach seeds four to eight weeks before your expected last frost of the spring.

Or, in my case, the eight week limit was a couple of weeks ago.  So today I planted a few short rows of spinach.  I’m sure this is vastly earlier than I have ever planted spinach in the past.  Maybe I’ll actually get a decent yield this year.


3:  Tomatoes.  No way that it’s time to start tomatoes now.  Is it?

Yep, sure is.  In Zone 7, it’s time to start short-season (a.k.a. cold-tolerant) tomatoes, indoors, if you grow them.  Varieties like 4th of July or Early Girl, and more exotic ones that promise to produce tomatoes in a hurry.

After trying out various approaches to growing tomatoes, I’ve now settled down to growing some short-season (cold-tolerant) ones, and some regular-season ones.  (I’ve given up on heat-tolerant or late-season tomatoes, because all of those that I have grown have tasted just like bland grocery-store tomatoes.)

Cold-tolerant or short-season tomatoes can go out in the garden as soon as all danger of frost is past.  They can tolerate the cool nights that we’re still having in early spring.  By contrast, regular-season tomatoes have to wait another month or so, beyond that, until the nights have warmed up.

Anyway, in my area, we’re now about six weeks before our nominal last frost date of April 22.  So it’s time to get my early-season tomato plants started, indoors.  A week or so to germinate, five weeks or so to grow, then out into the garden they will go.

I was more than happy with the short-season (cold-tolerant) tomatoes I planted the past couple of years, so this is just a re-run.  I just set up six starts each of:

  • Burpee’s 4th of July.
  • Glacier
  • Moskovitch.
  • Quedlinburger Furhe Libe

Transplanted into the garden on or about my last frost date (April 22), I find that the 4th of July is true to its name, and has consistently given me its first tomato on that date, plus or minus a week.  Glacier and Moskovitch come in a few days later.  But for a truly early tomato, Quedlinburger Furhe Libe takes the prize in my garden, consistently beating 4th of July by a week or so.

These all yield decent-tasting golf-ball-sized tomatoes.  They keep on yielding through the summer.  And the deer leave them alone, at least once the plants have a bit of size on them.  What’s not to like?

It’s hard to think about the 4th of July right now, when we’re still having freezing nights.  But there’s a solid and logical chain between starting those seeds today and eating tomatoes out of the garden in early summer.

Sometimes I wish the rest of my life had been that linear.


4:  Garlic:  The hazards of planning for failure.

And then there’s the garlic I planted last fall.

I’ve tried growing garlic in prior years.  I’ve never gotten much yield.  But then again, I never did it right.

Among the things I didn’t know were that you really shouldn’t use grocery-store garlic for planting.  That’s for two reasons.  First, it’s all “soft-neck” garlic, which is both bland and does not grow well in the hot and humid Virginia climate.  (Though it does keep well, which is why you find it in the industrial food chain.)  Instead, I want to grow hard-neck garlic, which I can’t get in the stores here, and has to be bought from a supplier of some sort.  Second, “culinary grade” garlic is the puny stuff.  They reserve the biggest heads, with the biggest cloves, to be “seed grade” garlic.  And it is well-documented that if you plant bigger cloves, you’ll harvest bigger heads of garlic.  Which is precisely why they save the big stuff for use as seed.

The final thing I didn’t know is that garlic may benefit from the addition of a modest amount of sulfur to your soil.  That’s covered in Post G23-067.

Last fall, I decided to do it correctly.  Just for a change.

I bought three varieties of seed-grade hard-neck garlic from Snickers Run Farm, a Northern Virginia garlic farm.  Their product was, by a longshot, the burliest heads of true garlic I’ve ever seen. (N.B, elephant garlic is not actually garlic.)  I added a modest amount of a sulfur-containing fertilizer (Espoma Holly Tone) to the soil, along with compost and mulch.  And I planted in the late fall, when it was already pretty cold, though in hindsight, I probably should have planted later.

By-the-book, start to finish.

Based on prior experience, I didn’t expect much. I figured half of them would survive. So … rational or not, I planted quite a lot of it.  (Plus, I had to buy quite a bit of seed garlic to justify the shipping cost, which didn’t exactly help temper my decision-making.)

I looked that bed over today, and my only thought was, what on earth was I thinking.  Because, as of today, I have a 32-square-foot bed chock-a-block with garlic plants that seem very happy to be here.

Based on various estimates of typical yield, this should give me somewhere around 8 pounds of garlic, if it all comes to fruition.  That, where the recommended planting is about one pound, per adult, per year.

Luckily, garlic goes great with tomatoes.  And, I suspect, will go with pretty much everything I’m going to cook from June onwards, this year.

Post #1951: Replacing the battery in a cheap cylindrical dashcam.

 

 

This post walks through the process of replacing the “non-replaceable” battery inside a cheap cylindrical dashcam, like the one pictured above.

It’s not hard to do.  I did two identical cameras.  The second one took about 20 minutes.  Both repairs were successful.

You don’t even have to read this post to figure it out.  You can get the gist of the steps by scrolling through the pictures below.

If I learned anything from this, it’s that if I ever buy another dashcam, I’m going to be sure it’s the type that uses a capacitor instead of a battery.

Continue reading Post #1951: Replacing the battery in a cheap cylindrical dashcam.

Post G24-004: Advice on sheltering your bee hotel for the winter.

 

My advice:  Don’t shelter your bee hotel for the winter.  Let it freeze along with everything else.  This post explains why.


Early bee emergence

Last year, for the first time, I hung up a bee hotel.  This is a set of nesting tubes designed to make it easier for solitary/native bees, such as mason bees, to reproduce.  It seemed to be quite successful, per the picture below.  Ultimately I ended up with about 15 nesting tubes filled.

I left that up through the summer and fall, and, per common internet advice, moved it to a sheltered location once winter set in.  In this case, I moved it to the inside of a detached, totally unheated garage.

Moving a bee hotel to a sheltered location, for the winter, is probably not a good idea.  Despite that being widely suggested by seeming experts.  That’s because if your sheltered area is even a little warmer than the outdoors, I think it entices the bees to emerge too early.

That’s what appears to have happened this year.  For my particular Home Depot bee hotel, the nesting tubes that were filled by mason bees last spring …

… are all now empty.

Consistent with that, my wife noticed some bees on her crocuses this morning.  Which was odd enough to stand out.  Because, among other things, not much is blooming right now except crocus and daffodil.  And it’s not all that warm out yet.  The upshot is that it seems a little early to be seeing bees out and about.

I’m betting that those were “my” bees.  And I’m betting that I did them no favors by (inadvertently) waking them up too early, this year.  If I put up a bee hotel again this year, I’m just going to leave it alone.  I’m now of the opinion that  bees ought to overwinter at exactly the temperatures they’ll face out-of-doors.


Like Tinder, but with only 15 people using it.

Experts say that mason bees should emerge when blossoms are open, and daytime temperatures consistently reach 55F (reference).

By those benchmarks — blooms and temperature — my bees are at least three weeks too early. That’s based on these observations.

Blossoms:  Slim pickings.  At present, only the crocuses, daffodils, and maybe a scattered other few species blooming.  There are a few cherry trees here and there, in this area, in blossom.  For reference, the earliest recorded peak bloom date for the national cherry trees is March 15, with April 1 being a typical date (reference March 15 to the National Park Service).  Separately, a harbinger of spring in many areas is forsythia, but our forsythia isn’t even close to blooming yet.

Temperatures:  Still too cold.  We’ve had a couple of days where the high exceeded 55F, but those are still few and far between.  We are not consistently 55F and higher.  But we’re closing in on that.

Source:  Weather underground. 

And based on our historical weather averages, you wouldn’t expect consistent 55F and higher days for another two-three weeks or so.

Source:  Analysis of NOAA weather data for Dulles Airport (Sterling, VA).

All of that, plus my experience last year, tells me that my little batch of bees emerged the better part of a month too early.  Call it three weeks, minimum.

Finally, these bees don’t live very long.  They emerge, eat, mate, and die within a span of a few weeks.  They’re now out of sync with their species in general, and they’re going to be dead before the rest of the local mason bee population emerges.  So, if they all survive, their procreation will be as described in the section title.


Conclusion

I’m not a bee expert, but I’ve spent a lot of time observing the habits of bugs, since I took up gardening during the pandemic.  The one universal rule is that everything in the garden — plants and bugs alike — operates on temperature, and on degree-days.

By keeping this bee hotel in an unheated garage, I kept it warmer than the ambient outdoor temperatures.  I suspect that, one way or the other, this caused my bees to emerge earlier than is optimal, for their species.

If I do this again this year, I’m going to leave the bee hotel outside all winter.  The bee larvae may not much like the cold, but they need to stay in sync with outdoor temperatures, in order to emerge at the right time.

Source;  All the pictures for this post are from Gencraft.com AI, with the prompt of “a bee, wearing a stocking cap and scarf”.

Addendum:  To bee, or not.

Edit:  In the end, I gave it another go, doing it better this time, as explained in Post #G24-008.  This year, my bee hotels are ugly, but properly constructed (closed-ended tubes roughly 6″ long), as shown above.  Well over half the tubes are now filled, as of this writing (4/22/2024).  I’m just going to leave them be until its time to take them down and put them in an emergence box next spring.

Original post follows.

Am I going to put up bee hotel this year?  Not sure, but at this point, I’d say, no not.  Probably not going to put up another bee hotel this year.  For the following reasons.

First, these bees don’t pollinate my garden.  They’re out and about early in the year, and they are gone by the time my garden crops or flowers need pollination.  So when you hear about “attracting bees to your garden to get better yields”, they ain’t talking about mason bees.  The earliest-blossoming food I grow is peas, and my recollection is that mason bees do their thing well before (e.g.) the peas blossom.  Apparently they are good for orchards.  Which would make sense, as fruit trees blossom early.  (And mason bees are orchard bees, or orchard bees are mason bees, or something, I’m not entirely sure.  I don’t have an orchard.)

Second, I’m trying to grow the kinds of plants that (the internet tells me) make good natural nesting sites for these bees.  But that whole enterprise is looking a bit sketchy at the moment.  I’ve started down that path, by not mowing my wildflower beds yet.

You’d think, well, that’s got to be dead easy, just grow some plants and leave them. Just don’t mow.

But its not that simple.

Mason bees need medium-sized hollow stalks to nest in.  (Or equivalent.)  That seems right by my experience so far.  Sturdy annuals will sometimes leave behind big, ugly stems.  Looks about the right size.

But that’s the point where anything ceases to be easy.

In a nutshell, you have to keep them for two years, they’re ugly, they get in the way, and you have to defend them from the deer.  I’m not going to go through the details.  I can boil it down to this.

Do I really want to use my time and attention to try to protect some ugly weed stalks from ravenous end-of-winter marauding deer?  For a couple of years, yet (the literal same batch of stalks, I mean.)  And somehow work around them, while prepping the beds for this year’s flowers.  And in the end, really have no clue whether they are effective or not.

I have a lot of sunk cost in this whole bee-hotel thing, not in the sense of buying the Home Depot wooden bee hotel, but mostly in the time and effort gathering and cutting bamboo, in anticipation of annul replacement of the nesting tubes in that hotel.

In addition, rehabbing that Home Depot hotel for re-use could be a fair bit of work.  I should replace the bamboo nesting tubes each year.  This year — with the off-the-shelf unit — that means breaking the existing glued-in tubes out first.

I think I’ll see how hard the rehab is, first, then decide on next steps after that.

But as of right now, I’m not seeing a huge benefit to anybody or anything in being a mason bee hotel keeper for another year.  I should let them find their equilibrium vis-a-vis the local flora.  Might tweak the flora to try to help them out, if I can figure out how to do it.  But I think I’m going to punt on maintaining a manufactured bee hotel.

Post #1949: The great flat spot in car prices.

 

The biggest eye-opener that I ginned up in the last year was a graph of new and used car prices.  As above.

Functionally, all it told me is that official U.S. price statistics are worthless for tracking trends in how much you have to pay to buy a car.

But, as it turns out, if you look a little deeper, the goofy official U.S. car price data have a lot of company.  That is, many items in the U.S. Consumer Price Index now have “quality” adjustments of the type that generate those odd car price trends.  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) price indices, for such items, net out a BLS estimate of the change in the “quality” of those items over time.  The upshot is that much of the spending in the U.S. Consumer Price Index is now somewhat divorced from the actual prices that you, the consumer, must typically pay.

I am hardly the first one to have noted this.  I think the BLS numbers for home computers, in particular, have drawn a lot of attention.  There, “quality” includes attributes like processor speed, disk size and speed, installed memory, and so on.  As computers have gotten better, but prices have risen in line with overall inflation, the BLS has recorded that as a massive, ongoing decline in the dollar price of home computers.  Per quality-adjusted unit.  And, because computers are part of the CPI, this means a lower overall CPI increase.

My only real point is that the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) is increasingly less relevant as a measure of “the cost of living”.  In any real-world sense.  It doesn’t track what it costs to get by in America.  Not unless you know where I can buy a brand-new 1993 Toyota Corolla, at the 1993 price, instead of what’s currently being offered on new-car lots.

The CPI measures something, and I’m sure that whatever it measures makes good sense to the folks who measure it.  But if you’re merely a typical U.S. consumer, and, say, need to own a car and a phone to get by in life, you can’t take the increase in the CPI as any accurate measure of what is happening to the cost of living.  For you, the typical U.S. consumer.

Sketchy details follow.


Did you know that the price of a typical new car in 2019 was the same as it was in 1993?

Lines:  Price index data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via the Federal Reserve of St. Louis FRED system.  Toyota Corolla lowest MSRP from Cars.com, history of the Toyota Corolla.

That, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official source for U.S. price data, and the keeper of the super-important U.S. Consumer Price Index.

I ginned up the graph above trying to make sense of new and used car prices, Post 1836.

I think we can agree that something happened about half-way up, on the graph above.  Or halfway across, depending on your perspective.  The lines diverge.

What happened, exactly, we might reasonably disagree about.  But the title of the graph gives a broad hint.  Just prior to that, BLS began embedding a quality adjustment in its car price data.

Whatever it was that happened, it’s clear that past that point, what the BLS tracked as the price of a car (orange and gray lines) had almost no relationship to the price of a car, meaning, what you actually have to pay to buy a car (yellow bars).


Did you know that the price of the typical cell phone fell 50% in just the past four years?

Source:  https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SSEE041

From the same folks who produced the car data above.  Again, quality-adjusted data.

Such a bargain now.   Maybe I’ll finally bite the bullet and buy an Apple phone, now that they’re half-price.

Or are they?

Might as well toss this one in, too:  The price for an internet connection is easily 10% less now than it was in 1997.  Again, this is supposed to be an index of the price, in dollars.  I have no clue what the big dip is, mid-graph.  But this is what the BLS says.

Base source:  BLS data query, for finding data series, https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find


Did you know that the dollar price for major kitchen appliances in 2024 is essentially unchanged from where it was in 1998?

Source:  https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find?fq=survey:[cu]&s=popularity:D&q=appliances

You get the drift.  BLS data, quality adjusted Per the BLS, you have to shell out fewer dollars, today, to buy a fridge, than you did 25 years ago.

Quality-adjusted.


Inarticulate conclusion: I am not a Luddite, I think.

I drive an Eee-Vee, for gosh sakes.  I’m not ready to toss my wooden clogs into the industrial machinery of Progress.  Nor am I here to kvetch about the accuracy of BLS’s methods for making these quality adjustments.  (That’s a completely separate issue).

Instead, I want to ask a question.  Can I buy a brand-new 1993 Toyota Corolla?  At the 1993 price?

No?  Then maybe the CPI is no longer a good cost-of-living index.  Or, alternatively, maybe it’s a bit harder for the younger generations to get by than you might think, based solely on the official numbers.

I’m not one to say that the sky is falling because of these quality adjustments embedded in the U.S. CPI.  Practically speaking, I would say that the CPI understates the actual change in “the cost of living”.  Where living is defined as living like the average American.  I.e., has a place to stay, drives a car, uses a cell phone, wears clothes, and so on.

You can see the full list of what’s adjusted in this fashion on the BLS website:   https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/.   Broadly speaking, BLS embeds some sort of quality adjustment into most of the items in these categories:

  • Cars/trucks
  • Clothing
  • Appliances
  • Electronics
  • Information services (internet, phone, cable service).

By and large, BLS has no such adjustments for:

  • Car/truck repairs, parts, or rentals.
  • Food
  • Energy
  • Health care
  • Misc household stuff

And there’s a separate, seemingly quite different adjustment for rent and the rental equivalent of home ownership.

By inference, then, payments linked to the CPI as a “cost of living adjustment” won’t rise fast enough to keep up with the actual cost of living. To some degree.  This includes most notably Social Security payments, but also most Medicare payments to health-care providers, and in general a whole lot of salary and contractual payment items in the private sector.

In my darker moments, I’m sure this is considered more a feature than a bug, by the Federal government.  At some level, it doesn’t much matter if these quality adjustments are right or wrong on their own merits.  They are saving Uncle Sam some money (via, e.g., reduced Social Security outlays), and they are being tolerated.  In a rational world, legislation that would weaken those adjustments would have to be scored as costing the Federal government money.  Hence, a tough sell, and the net effect is that the legislative branch turns a blind eye to it. 

Meanwhile, getting back to cars. I believe that most of the quality-adjusted items in the CPI have, in fact, gotten a lot better in recent years.  I’ve argued that for cars, specifically, many times, on this blog.  It’s self-evident for phones.  I’m pretty sure my current internet service is a lot faster than it used to be.  And so on.

Back to cars, well, in fact, cars are … more now.  Passenger vehicles are bigger, faster, and get better mileage than they did 25 years ago.

Source:  https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report

But at the same time, if you need a car and a phone to hold a job, you don’t have the option of buying a new 1993 Toyota Corolla (-equivalent), at an appropriate discount to the current model year.  Your option is to buy the better quality modern car (phone, internet, clothing) currently offered for sale.  At the current higher price.

So if your metric is “I gotta have a car”, then the cost of “a car” has indeed risen a lot faster than the BLS says.  Per the original graph, it (yellow bars) seems to have risen right in line with inflation/the overall price level (blue line).

What you can buy now is a better car than you could buy 25 years ago.  Safer.  Better gas mileage.  More bells and whistles.  (E.g., I don’t know the last time I even saw a car that didn’t have power windows and AC, both of which used to be luxury add-ons.)  But it’s still, at root, just a car.

A weird side-effect of this is that, per the BLS, recent generations of Americans are, in essence, victims of forced hyper-consumption.  When I was a youth, I drove cars that were absolute pieces of crap.  But they were cheap.  A kid today has no option but to buy a much better, far more sophisticated vehicle.  And those simply are not going to be as cheap as beater used cars were when I was in their shoes.

You have no choice but to buy a much better fill-in-the-blank than people were buying two decades ago.  And you have more-or-less no choice but to pay accordingly.  The net result of which is that the — income shares — of these items stayed about the same.  A phone was a relatively expensive object four years ago, and it’s just about as expensive now.

But, when it comes to cars, phones, internet service, and so on, as far as the Federal government is concerned, dollar prices have been flat-to-falling for past couple of decades.  And the reason we now pay many more dollars for “a car” is that we have, collectively, decided to buy bigger, better cars.

And while it is true that cars (phones, internet service, …) are better (bigger, more capable, faster, more efficient) than they used to be, you, as the consumer, or Americans, as consumers, don’t really have the option to keep your level of consumption constant.  Every time you replace an item of that sort, you have to replace it with what’s offered in the marketplace.  And if the market offers you ever-more-capable, ever-more-expensive items, well, if you want to replace your old one, that’s what you have to buy.

The bottom line is that if you accept the BLS quality adjustments as fundamentally correct, then you have to believe that we are, in effect, trapped on a treadmill of ever-increasing levels of consumption.  For some items, at least.

And yet, it’s an odd sort of treadmill.  It’s not as if you’re now required to own two phones, if you want to make phone calls.  It’s that you are required to own one, but your only option is to buy one that’s twice the phone it was, four years ago.  At about the same price you’d have paid four years ago.  Which the BLS then handily marks down as a simultaneous doubling of your phone consumption, coupled with a 50 percent cut in the price of a phone.

That’s just bizarrely at odds with perception, I think.  If the price of chicken goes from $2 to $1 a pound, then I correctly perceive that the cost of my chicken dinner has been cut in half.  By contrast, I sure wouldn’t notice much difference in functionality between a four-year-old phone and a brand-new one.  But per the BLS, that price has also been cut in half.  Even though I’m paying more for a new phone today than I would have paid four years ago.

Conclusion.

I guess that’s as far as I can take this train of thought.

If you’re of the opinion that a phone is a phone, then the BLS numbers don’t “fit” your experience.  You’ve seen no huge fall in cell phone prices these past four years.  By contrast, if you are really into phones, then maybe the BLS got everything right and there has been a halving of quality-adjusted phone prices over the last four years.

At root, my issue with these quality-adjusted items is that the declining price per unit is coupled with an offsetting mandatory increase in units consumed.  Per the way the BLS reckons it. With the result being a bunch of price cuts, on paper, that in no way, shape, or form reduce the amount of money I have to shell out, to own a (car, cell phone, and so on).

It’s kind of a good-news, bad-news joke.  The good news is that the price of X has fallen in half, as BLS measures it.  The bad news is that you can’t buy X.  All you can buy now is 2X.  Again, per the BLS method.

Sure, the BLS-measured price of X is way down.  But you can’t pocket that money.  You can’t use it elsewhere.  This makes a BLS-estimated price decline in (say) cell phones fundamentally different from a decline in (say) the price of chicken.  Unlike the chicken, the only way to take advantage of half-price cell phones is to buy twice as much cell phone.

So the joke’s on you.  Your out-of-pocket is the same, but BLS tells you your life has gotten easier.  Because cell phones now cost half what they used to (per quality-adjusted unit).  With the catch being, you now have to buy twice as much cell phone.

The effect of these ongoing quality improvements is that material goods are getting better.  But as the BLS measures it, that makes it appear as if material goods are getting cheaper.

But they aren’t.  Not if the relevant unit is “a working car” or “a functioning cell phone”.  And as a result, changes in the CPI understate the actual change in the cost of maintaining a typical American lifestyle.

My gut reaction is that the BLS numbers help to paint too rosy a picture of what it takes to get by in the modern world, versus the world of a few decades ago.  The march of progress has made these objects and services better.  But it’s almost a matter of opinion as to whether that has made them cheaper.