Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2016: Two Black Women Stole the Election, the re-run

 

If this is already obvious to you, just skip it.  The gist is that the current Springfield, OH kerfuffle is kind of a re-run.

Do you recall the thumb-drive-vote-fraud-two-Black-women thing?  Republicans alleged vote fraud, based on a clip of routine surveillance video in some polling place.  They were completely wrong, but The Right ruined the lives of the poll workers in that video.

And now, instead of death threats for two Black women, it’s a barrage of bomb threats (and who knows what else) for Springfield, Ohio.

But if you trace the arc of the story, these stories really run parallel, and they spring from the same root.

And that root is Republicans’ willingness to promote stories based on their “stickiness”, truth optional.  I argued this point two posts back.

What I’m saying is, the Republicans constructed or merely “amplified” these false stories because they were “sticky”. They were memorable for their target audience.  And not for any higher purpose, unless you consider lying to make a fictional point an adequate substitute for actual government policy.

Take the first one.  I mean, that just ticks all the boxes, doesn’t it?  Name your phobia.  Fear of a) computers, b) black people, and c) women.  In addition to “vote fraud”.

For the Republican base, that’s a triple-sticky story, and way too good to pass up.  I think it literally made no difference whatsoever to the Republican party whether or not that story was true.

Promulgating that particular lie ruined the lives of the poll workers involved.  Who, I am guessing, where chosen solely because they were Black women, and they made some movement over the course of the day that could plausibly be (mis)-interpreted as something nefarious passing from one to the other.

So, school’s closed in Springfield, OH due to bomb threats?  Not intrinsically different from death threats against those two poll workers.  Just not as well-targeted.

Haitians eating pets.  Again, they just could not pass that up. As discussed earlier, that’s at least a double-sticky.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice?  I guess that’s the viewpoint.  And when they’ve run that dog until it won’t run any more, I’m sure there’ll be something to take its place.

I prefer a more reality-centered discussion, if possible.

OTOH, the explicit defense, by the Republican Presidential candidate himself, is that he heard it on TV.  He most emphatically heard somebody on TV talking about Haitians eating cats and dogs.

In effect, he said he just retweeting.  So it’s OK, then, right?  Whatever it is, somebody else said it first.

Truth optional?  I think that overstates it.  It gets every bit as much consideration as the inevitable fallout.  Which is to say, none.

People re-tweet things because they like them.  And for a lot of people, I’d say truth is optional there, too.  So maybe Trump is the way the world works now.

 

 

 

 

Post #2014: Stocking up on dog meat.

 

People routinely (and perhaps purposefully) misunderstand statistics on immigration.  In this post, I gather more years of data for the interesting top line of this table, from my just-prior post:

Source:  Department of Homeland Security.

Note that there was no increase in the estimated number of illegal aliens living in the U.S. during this period.

Immigration Rule #6

There is no annual count of the illegal immigrants who successfully crossed the border.  That, for the simple reason that they didn’t get caught.  I went over that in these posts:

Post #1927: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands?

Post #1928: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands, part II

Almost every number you hear quoted as “illegals entering this country” is the count of illegal immigrants who got caught.  Which is kind of a “duh” statement, because, as above, if you didn’t catch them, you can’t directly count them.  Technically, yeah, they are “individuals who crossed into the U.S. illegally.”  Stepping onto U.S. soil is what made it lawful for DHS to arrest them.  But they aren’t illegal immigrants who now live here.  The majority were caught within a few miles of the border and then deported.

Anyway, if you hear “two million” or so, that’s the folks who got caught in any recent year.

Best guess, as summarized in the prior posts on this topic cited above, your odds of making it across the border are maybe 30% to 50%, depending on who’s doing the estimating, and from what data source.  That implies somewhere between one and two million per year successfully illegally crossed the U.S. southern border during that latest surge in attempted illegal immigration.

By contrast, if you hear “ten million”, that’s an estimate of the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. at any given time.

And if you can do simple math, and note that the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. doesn’t change much from year-to-year, you quickly realize that there must be a pretty large flow of illegal alien residents who leave the U.S. each year.  Which is really the only point of this post.

Surprise:  There is no strong trend in illegal U.S. residents, through 2022.*

Source:  2015-2018 report, Department of Homeland Security.

* Edit the next day:  There’s now an extended discussion on methodology below.  Original post follows. 

Turns out, based on the best available information, there is no upward trend in illegal U.S. residents.  The slight downward trend evident at the end of the graph above continued right on through 2022.  (As you can see from the very first table posted here.)

If you prefer a simplified graph:

Source:  2022 report, Department of Homeland Security.

Not to restate the obvious, but that’s a couple of decades, over which the estimated number of resident illegal aliens has been fairly stable, at around 10 million.

As I noted in the just-prior post, this count of illegal residents is an indirect estimate.  So there is some reason to question the validity.

That said, the method is consistent, because there are no huge jumps from one Census to the next.  And if you bother to read the report, you can see that these figures jibe with just about every other credible estimate.

It’s reasonable to ask whether this apparent stability is just an artifact of methodology.  I’m guessing not, even though this is remains rooted in the decennial Census.  Note that the numbers remained reasonably stable through three different Census counts. and that, for the most recent counts, DHS uses the annual American Community Survey (also done by Census).  If there had been a big uptick in self-reported foreign-born individuals in 2021, that should have shown up in the 2021 American Community Survey data that form the basis for the last data point shown.

If you read the methodology section of the DHS report in full, there appears to be essentially only one estimate that disagrees with the DHS estimate, and that’s based on some questionable and untestable assumptions.

Pew Research Center (Pew, July 2024) estimates that the number ticked up by 0.5M in 2022.  Their methodology is similar to the one used by DHS.  So, plausibly, the next DHS estimate will also show that uptick.  Looks like the official number from DHS will not be updated until Spring of 2025.

Assuming DHS has that all correct, the bottom line is that this is the only credible estimate that exists, for the number of illegal immigrants currently residing in the U.S.  The nuance you get from Pew is that this latest wave of attempted illegal immigration has, in fact, modestly increased the number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. 

If I manage to find another estimated that differs markedly (other than the one addressed in the DHS document), I’ll add that in here.

No surprise:  There is no trend in illegal U.S. residents.

This should really not be a huge surprise, unless you believe in magic.  Because these folks have to make a living somehow.  And the number of jobs available to illegal immigrants is small, and the types of jobs are limited.

Well, there’s no legal way for illegal immigrants to get government aid. I went over that in the posts cited above.  Pick a Federal entitlement program and do the research, and you’ll come to the same conclusion.

(Though, technically, I guess if you show up at a hospital ER and are having a medical emergency, the ER must treat you due to EMTALA.  And I think schools have to accept illegal kids.  But you know what I mean.  There’s no life of taxpayer-funded luxury awaiting illegal immigrants.  Any government resources targeting immigrants are available to legal immigrants only, for all intents and purposes.  Illegal immigrants are, for all intents and purposes, un-people according to the government.)

Ponder that a second, and the stability of that population begins to make sense.  If you are here illegally, the only way you can stay here is to get a job.  (That, or rely on private charity of some form.)

And if there are only so many jobs in the U.S. that can routinely be filled by illegal immigrants … then there’s sort of a natural economic capacity for the U.S. to host an illegal immigrant population.

For example, there are only about 1.3M hired crop workers in the U.S.  Of those, about half are illegal immigrants.  (They are a much smaller share of all farm workers, because the majority of farm workers are self-employed or unpaid family members of farm owners.)

Source:  USDA, farm labor.

Note that the vast majority of illegal residents work in industries other than agriculture.  The table above accounts for well under half-a-million illegal U.S. residents.  Best estimate, there are more than seven million illegal immigrants holding down jobs in the U.S. (Pew Trust, 2020).

Near as I can tell, they do pretty much exactly the kind of jobs you’d think they’d do.  Just think of any job that you wouldn’t want to do.

How can this be?

The one thing I am hazy about is the details on hiring.  How can legitimate, tax-paying businesses hire illegal aliens? I mean, yeah, I checked, and it’s unambiguously illegal:

Source:  U.S. Department of Justice.

This newspaper article provides a matter-of-fact view of it.  It’s a straight-up case of don’t ask, don’t tell.  Amongst the common tricks used for long-term employment of illegal aliens by tax-paying businesses are the following:

  • Declaring workers to be independent contractors instead of employees.
  • Requiring no verification of documents.
  • Contracting out the hiring of labor — so that the folks who nominally “hired” the workers aren’t the ones who pay them.

Conclusion:  Now the Republican rhetoric makes sense.

By far, the most mind-blowing statistic I ran across is that, in aggregate, about five percent of the U.S. workforce consists of illegal aliens. 

And, I’m guessing, unless the size of the work force increases, or the fraction of jobs that are amenable to illegal immigrant labor increases, that’s about where it’s going to stay.

Which, in turn, pretty much determines the long-run size of the U.S. illegal-immigrant population.

And in the end, the stability of that resident illegal alien population makes perfect sense, from the standpoint of the underlying economics.

The upshot is that we have a large resident illegal alien population, of a stable size, due to private enterprise employing them, and a lack of government enforcement of the law.

But if you’re Republican, you can’t say that. 

And, in fairness, the bleeding hearts on the other side of the aisle are unlikely to try to kick those folks out of their jobs, if they even could.   They might even consider that undocumented immigrants fill a necessary and productive role in the U.S. economy, on average.  And that, in some sectors such as agriculture, how can I say this, there would be supply-chain disruptions without them.

To put it as plainly as possible, just about nobody in power (with any sense) wants to fire the seven-to-eight million illegal aliens currently doing our least-desirable jobs.  Certainly not all at once.  Some out of sympathy, but the rest out of pragmatism and profit motive.  And sure-as-shootin’ not when the unemployment rate is in the low single digits.

And, to an economist, I have to say, the current multi-tier system for immigrant (non-citizen?) labor looks almost as if it were designed to extract the most possible “value” (in the economic sense) out of that labor.  You offer some guest-workers a 10-month visa, but you limit the number of those that you offer.  The remainder of your guest worrkers, those not here legally under a visa, are then open for whatever the market will bear, in terms of exploitation.

At any rate, back to Republican policy:  So they offer “sticky” stories.  Haitians eating pets.  Crime waves.  Stealing American jobs.  Just throw that at the wall, and see what sticks with their constituents.

So, unfortunately, it looks like dog meat is on the menu for the foreseeable future.  That, because it is verboten for one political party to discuss the private-enterprise financial engine that supports our resident illegal alien population.

* CAVEAT ON THE METHODOLOGY

If you read one of the tiny-type sections above, you’ll see researchers at the Pew Trust recently updated their estimate of the resident illegal-alien population.  They do more-or-less what DHS does, in terms of methods.  They appear to be seeing an uptick in the resident illegal alien population starting starting around 2020.  (And, if you look closely at the DHS graph, they show the same thing, just skipping one data point.)

Source:  Pew, July 2024

If you look carefully at the end of the DHS estimate above, they too show a similar uptick between 2020 and 2022.  They just didn’t fill in a 2021 number.

To the extent that I understand it, they used the count of all foreign born based on a roughly 1% sample (roughly 3 million) records in the 2022 Census ACS PUMS file.  That’s one of the main drivers of change in that resident-illegal-alien number.  (That, and changes in the separate count of legal citizens who were foreign-born.)

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, except to say that the 2022 numbers are the most recent available.  And they are good numbers, if you believe that recent illegal immigrants will answer the American Community Survey (in proportion to the extent that Census thinks their demographic does), and admit to being foreign-born.  (Or, alternatively, they are good for showing trends, if any presumed proportional undercount remains constant.)

The only thing missing, really, is a “flash estimate” of what the population is likely to be today, after two more years of high rates of attempted illegal immigration.

I don’t think anybody does one, at least not publicly.

So the best you can say is that, through 2022, there was only a modest uptick in the resident illegal immigrant population of the U.S.

Post G24-025: Squash-off, round 1: Waltham Butternut versus Georgia Candy Roaster.

 

On today’s menu is winter squash soup, made with rich chicken broth.

Crude recipe is given below, for putting this together in well under an hour, using a pressure cooker.

More importantly, this is a taste-test of traditional butternut squash versus newcomer Georgia Candy Roaster squash.  Both of which I grew in my back yard garden this year.

My conclusion is that Georgia Candy Roaster (GCR) is not so much boastful advertising as a statement of limitations.  Boiled — as here, in this soup — it’s pale and flavorless compared to butternut squash.  I’m guessing GCR actually needs to be roasted to bring out any latent sweetness and flavor.

Alternatively, maybe I just got a bad GCR.  If the rest of them look or taste any better, I’ll come back and edit this.

In any case, the picture tells the whole story.  The butternut (left) and GCR (right) have a depth-of-flavor that matches the depth-of-color.

The Waltham butternut is a thin-skinned, thick-necked, sweet-fleshed winter squash, with deep orange flesh.  In this taste test, the boiled butternut tasted much like sweet potato, but perhaps dryer or starchier or more potato-like in texture.

The Georgia Candy Roaster is a thicker skinned, no-solid-neck, starchy-fleshed winter squash, with much lighter-colored flesh.  In this taste test, the boiled Georgia Candy Roaster tasted like potato, that is, starchy, but with no distinct flavor and no detectable sweetness.

Boiled, together, in squash soup, the mix of the two works fine.  But the GCR is little more than a bland vegetable filler in this context.  It’s definitely food, but not much more than that.

Plausibly, GCR squash is a lot better roasted.  Just plausibly, this small-and-tubby GCR was some kind of sport.  The coloring definitely matched the other GCRs.

My other observation is that the GCR has a much thicker skin than the butternut.  I certainly wasted more of it, in the peeling process, trying to pare away any green material.

Neither here nor there.  It’s food.  This year, it out-produced butternut by a fair margin, owing mostly to the large average size of the fruit.

 

Schmaltzitarian squash soup.

This dish is winter squash cooked in full-fat, un-skimmed chicken broth.

The only seasoning is salt.  The flavor comes from the squash and the chicken.  If that’s not good enough for you, perhaps consider cooking something else, before you add flavorings to this recipe.

It’s meatless in the sense that the chicken meat. used to make the broth, is reserved for a separate meal.

Elapsed time is under one hour.

You need

  • a pressure cooker
  • a few (4 to 10, say) bone-in skin-on chicken thighs
  • chopped vegetables enough to fill the pressure cooker 2/3rds full.
    • Winter squash, primarily.
    • With optional soup vegetables such as carrots or celery
  • a teaspoon of salt

Step 1A:  Pressure-cook the chicken thighs:  Elapsed time 30 minutes.

Put a modest number of chicken thighs (4 to 10, say) into a pressure cooker.  Cover (barely) with water.  Heat.  Figure on ten minutes to bring the pot up to pressure.  Cook at high pressure for 20 minutes.

Step 1B:  Cut up the vegetables.

As that’s going on, peel and cut up whatever is going into the pot.  The backbone of the soup is squash, but I added carrots and celery that needed cooking.

You want enough to fill the pressure cooker about two-thirds full.

Step 2:  Remove the chicken and excess chicken stock, if any.

Release the pressure by running the pressure cooker under a faucet.

Use a slotted spoon or similar to remove the chicken from the pot.  Put the chicken aside for a separate meal.

Remove and save any excess stock.

In this soup, you want about one unit of stock for every two units of vegetables.  So you want the pressure cooker to be about one-quarter full of chicken stock, to which you add chopped vegetables up to the two-thirds line on the pot.  Or so.

Salt to taste.  I use a teaspoon of salt for the pot of soup.

This doesn’t need any spices.  With any luck, the chicken fat and salt add just enough savoriness to make a fully-satisfying bowl of soup as-is.

Step 3:  Pressure cook vegetables for five-ish minutes.  Elapsed time around 12 minutes.

Bring the pressure-cooker back up to pressure, and cook for five or so minutes.

Depending on how hungry your are, either release the pressure immediately, or let the pressure cooker cool off for a “natural” release.  The longer it sits under pressure, the softer the vegetables get.

Step 4:  Open and eat.

If the squash is soft but not fully disintegrated, you have chosen wisely.  It is ready to eat.

If the squash has turned too soft, use a stick blender, then pretend that that’s the kind of squash soup you were after in the first place.

Post #2013: Haitians? It’s a twice-sticky story.

 

Sometimes I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to decoding dog whistles.

The latest “sticky” story from our Right is that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats.

This post is me, attempting to decode that last statement.

 

Raining cats and dogs.  I get that.

The latest “sticky” story to become Republican dogma is that a wave of Haitian immigrants is threatening America’s pets.

On the one hand, dog is an excellent source of protein.

Source:  Wikipedia

Seems a bit high in cholesterol, and so it should best be considered more of an occasional treat instead of regular daily fare.

But on the other hand, let it never be said that the U.S. Congress is not capable of addressing major crises facing America.  Prior to this heroic 2018 legislation, below, commercial slaughter of dogs and cats for food was legal in 44 states.  Or so this claims.

Source:  Wikipedia

Didn’t Safeway used to stock that right next to the canned salmon?  I may have confused that with some other disgusting-but-technically-edible thing.  The less said the better, when it comes to canned seafood.

Anyway, those evil (fill-in-the-blank) eat your beloved (dog/cat/baby) is one of the oldest racist memes in the book.  I think earliest recorded “Jews eat babies” smears date back to the early Middle Ages (e.g., Wikipedia), but oddly enough, that was preceded by a “Christians eat babies” thing, in early Rome.  The only modern twist is that dogs and cats are treated as beloved family members now, so the meme has expanded to include common household pets as tasty comestibles.

So, I thought I had this figured out.  Racist dog whistle, Republican party.  Nothing new there.  Just the latest twist.

They are, after all, animals.

How you parse “they” tells me something, I think.  If you immediately tsk-tsked about callousness toward dogs and cats, score one point.  If, in addition, you thought I plausibly meant to either “Republicans” or “Haitians” to be animals, you fall into a different class entirely.

No Irish need apply.

But why Haitian immigrants?

For the U.S. as a whole, the capture and deportation of illegal Haitian immigrants is a drop in the bucket.

Source:  The Gummint.  Data taken from:  https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2022  , Immigrations, Enforcement Actions 2022 Data Tables, Table 34d.  (It’s an Excel workbook.)

They’re up a lot, in the past couple of years, owing, I think, to political upheaval there.  (I am somewhat sorry to say I don’t actually know what the trouble is, which makes me a not atypical American.  Looking it up, it’s ah, looks like the total breakdown of the government and civil order, following the assassination of their President, leaving a country split and ruled by gangs.  Plus some natural disaster or disasters.  And to think that the President made a special exception for them, merely on the basis of that. /s)

But that was illegal immigrants caught, or some variation on that.  What about legal immigrants from Haiti, of late?

The real numbers, from the Federal government, on legal immigration, give two different views.  One is lawful permanent residents — the stock of persons who are here legally, but not citizens, in any given year.   Think of them as mostly the stock of persons who are here, on their path to citizenship.  And, naturalizations, the annual flow of persons who became citizens that year.

In no view do Haitians matter much, to the U.S. as a whole, as a source of immigrants, legal or (as above) illegal-and-caught.

Source:  The Gummint, see cite above

A third and final set of official numbers is the U.S. resident foreign-born, that is, the stock of all persons resident in the U.S., in a given year, that were not born here.  This comes from the U.S. Census.

It is often further allocated into legal and illegal, based on something-something-something.

The fraction of those who are here illegally is done kind-of-by-subtraction.  We know the flow of naturalizations by year, and if we add that up over a long enough time period, and factor in human mortality, we end up with an estimate of the stock of foreign born.  The legal foreign born.  You have to add in the legal resident number — a known.  But, if you give it enough years, the sum of cumulative naturalizations, less deaths, plus current stock of legal residents, give your your count of the legal foreign-born.  Which we then compare with Census (the self-reported foreign-born) to arrive at an estimate illegal foreign-born U.S. population, by country, as the residual between those two numbers.  Currently about 10M people.)

The upshot is that the number of individuals who self-report as being foreign-born is … as hard a number as that can be.  No strong reason to lie about it, but no strong reason not to either.  But the split into legal and illegal is … not necessarily wrong, but kinda by subtracting something figures derived from cumulating naturalizations over time, plus (I assume) some adjustment for deaths.

None of that matters, because Haitians manage to keep a low profile for that stat as well.  They don’t show up among the top ten on the list of U.S.-resident illegal aliens by country.

Source:  Department of Homeland Security.

So, if I, against my better judgment, try to figure out what the story is, it’s about Springfield Ohio.  Which apparently does have a concentration of Haitian immigrants.  But lacks any evidence of those people eating pets.

As an odd coda, note that the estimated number of illegal residents has been falling in recent years.  Now be unsurprised that nobody even bothers to mention this.  Because that’s … too normal, or something.

Nobody talks about the outflow of illegal immigrants out of the U.S.  The big annual outflow of illegal immigrants, leaving the U.S., is something I learned in my earlier deep dives on immigration.  Based on the numbers, it’s roughly the same magnitude as the inflow, and always has been.  The southern border is porous — in both directions.

In any case, the net result of focusing on sticky instead of substance is that the Party of Lincoln Trump has managed to divert our attention to dog meat, and so squelch any serious and fact-based discussion on immigration.

My guess is, it’s going to take another Great Depression to put the adults back in charge of our Federal government.  You can only afford to be this frivolous when times are good.

Oh, Haitian.  Maybe it’s a double-sticky.

To understand why Republicans say what they do, sometime you must abandon all rationality, and just enter a world composed almost entirely of Sticky.

Stickiness, attributed to Malcolm Gladwell, describes a story’s ability to stick with you.  To be remembered.

And, in my considered opinion, a desire for stickiness determines much of what Republican politicians say.  And because of that, it really is that divorced from either reality or plausible Federal policy.

Upshot:  I’m guessing Haitian immigrant get the national spotlight because Harris’ father is Jamaican.  Which I’m figuring is close enough?

This is not to imply that dogs and cats are never consumed as meat, not that pets are never stolen and eaten.

But, equally, if your reaction to the original story was “oh, that’s nuts, there’s no outbreak of Hatians eating pets”, then you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the story. 

It’s not about reality.  It’s about sticky.  And about throwing enough stuff at the wall until something sticks.

Give it another week, we’ll forget this Haitian dogs-n-cats story and we’ll be served a steaming portion of whatever sticky story is next.  This is, as far as I can tell, a) effective strategy for the Republican party, and b) pretty much all there is to Republican rhetoric.

There is no logic behind highlighting the pressing national problem of Haitian petophagy.  It serves zero useful purpose, beyond being a propaganda vehicle.

 

Post #2012: Week 2 of my readership drought. Apparently, potty mouth was not the problem.

On the plus side, I’m learning a whole lot more about how the Internets work.

On the downside, perhaps Warren Buffet said it best:

"If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy."

The long and the short of it is that Google (search) hates me, as of about two weeks ago.  Likely, this is due to an update in Google’s search algorithm that occurred mid-August.  And not due to anything I have done (lately) to offend Google.

Long may she rule.

More seriously, I have tried to figure out what changed, and

  1. I still have no clue.
  2. I still  have no firm idea of how to get a clue.
  3. In the meantime, I’ve gotten in bed with the Devil.

Speak of the Devil

Bullets 1) and 2) should be self-explanatory.

But before I get to Bullet 3), explain this to me.  When I asked Gencraft’s AI for a picture of “get in bed with the Devil”, it had absolutely no problem spitting out male devils.  Such as the guy on the left up there.  But when I said “get in bed with a lady Devil”, or “female Devil”, I had to put the system in Anime mode to be able to squeak that one picture past the censors.  Every other attempt at a lady Devil in bed got me the spilled-ice-cream-cone-of-death black-and-white graphic at the very top of the post, presumably for being risque.

I do not quite know why that is true.  Yet I am amused by it.

This shares ignorance, but not amusement, with my current situation with Google Search.  I do wonder if Google has somehow inserted some AI-rule-making, which would mean that not even Google itself would know why Google Search no longer finds me.  I think “connectionist garbage” is the term for what you get when you try to dissect an AI to learn what it was thinking.

So, getting in bed with Devil.  By bullet 3) above, I mean, with all due respect to that most gracious of near-monopolies, Google Search, that I installed Google SiteKit as a plug-in for this WordPress-based blog.

What I didn’t realize, when I did that, is that Google was going to insert code into my web pages.  Which, admittedly, and in 20-20 hindsight, was stupid on my part.  Nonetheless, when I went to the top of one of my blog pages and asked my browser to “inspect” the underlying code, I felt just a little unclean to find this, sketched below, as part of the web page you are currently reading:

<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) snippet added by Site Kit -->

<!-- Google Analytics snippet added by Site Kit -->

(See below)

<!-- End Google tag (gtag.js) snippet added by Site Kit -->

Below:  I took out the actual code, above, so as not to offend.

The omitted code starts <script> , and ends with </script>, so, you know, all other things equal, even though I don’t read this computer language, kinda think this might be html? Javascript?  Beats me.  Anyway, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that the thing Google Sitekit inserted is a script. 

And it gives a big ol’ shoutout to Google Tag Manager, and passes some sort of fixed ID, which I guess … ID’s me?  For Google’s purposes.  Yeah, it’s a good thing.  So says Google, so it must be so.

But in addition, or possibly because of some implementation of this Tag-Manager thing, I now have access to Google Search Console.  This turns out to be the place where Google tells you everything that’s wrong with your website.  Of which, I seem to have a bounty.

Anyway, Google Search Console is where I am now learning that:

  • Google appears to have found massive problems with my website,
  • But I can’t quite figure out what the hell Google is talking about.

To be clear, I wrote complex computer programs for all of my professional life.  But now, with this stuff?  Here’s my generic algorithm for trying to look into any dimension of this problem.

START

STEP 0:  Come across a term that I don't understand.

STEP 1:  Look up Google's definition of that term.

STEP 2:  Find a term in that definition that I do not understand.

GOTO STEP 1

END

And that infinite do-loop is where it stands, in terms of the technical side of this inquiry.  Presumably, I’ll make some headway, or I won’t.

A deeper philosophical issue

Do do I care about readership or not?

There were a couple of times in the past when this blog actually served some purpose.  During those times, sure, readership was desired.

But those are now ancient history.  These days, I write this mostly for myself.  So, believe it or not, there are benefits to doing this even if I’m the only reader.

Use 1:  Writing enforces rigorous thinking and fact-checking.  For one thing, I find that being forced to write something out does wonders for getting my thinking straight on an issue.  I’m not the first to say that.  I had an economics professor, JRT Hughes, who put it something like:  “Writing is good because it allows us to check the logical consistency of more than just adjacent sentences.”

Use 2:  Diary, particularly garden diary. For another thing, a blog is a good way to mark events.  That’s been particularly useful for the garden.  But the result is that this blog is part diary.  (Which is guess is the original intent of web log, now blog.)

Use 3:  Generating and sharing novel information, analysis, and DIY.  In addition, I use this blog to document any useful thing I’ve made, or insights that I think I’ve made.  That can be as dumb as yep, I really did patch my driveway by hand, here’s how it went. Mostly these are things where either I’m glad somebody offered some hints on the internet, or where I wish somebody had.

Something as prosaic as the price and availability of canning jar lids.  Or something a little more highbrow and sciency-y.  Microplastic.  PFAs.  Documenting the northward creep of the USDA climate zones.  My Teutonic two-tier testing series (e.g., Post #605) gives me a few “Flowers for Algernon” moments when I re-read it now.  The best intellectual exercises that ample free time and intense boredom can generate.

Use 4:   Biting social commentary.  Well, I’m amused by my own, even if nobody else is.

Of those current uses, all my hits were on 3).  Garden hints are popular, DIY stuff is somewhat popular.  My most popular post ever was on making a cheap heated outdoor faucet cover.  And, to be clear, those are often just as much to make note of what I did or found, than to make advice generally available to random Google-Search-driven strangers.

So … nah, not really.  It’s a kick when I get a lot of hits on some technical article.

But I don’t need that to fuel this blog.  Much.

I will continue to investigate my situation vis-a-vis Google Search — may the very electrons of the internet sing her praises — and if there’s something I can easily fix on this website, I will.

Maybe I’ll finally learn how the internet actually works.

Post #2011: Simple, reversible center-draft oil lamp conversion to electricity.

Today I converted a couple of antique center-draft oil lamps, turning them into electric lamps.  The cost was $8 each (plus the cost of a light bulb).  It took maybe two minutes.  No modifications were necessary to the lamp.  And it’s completely reversible, if for some reason I want to burn oil in those lamps again.

If you’re not into oil lamps, you may rightly think “big deal”.  But if you look, you’ll see a lot of electrified oil lamps for sale in antique shops, and these lamps come in two flavors.  The more heinous are the DIY hatchet jobs where somebody literally drills a hole through the oil font, for the electrical cord to pass, thus making sure the oil lamp will never again hold or burn oil.  The less heinous are those where the original oil burner assembly has been removed, and replaced by a modern piece that is wired.  The original oil-burner top is inevitably lost, but those can be restored to burning oil if you can find the right original top for them.  So to get a conversion that a) doesn’t damage the lamp and b) doesn’t lose any original parts — that’s a good thing.

My only “cheat” is that I had emptied these lamps months ago, and had let the lamp oil evaporate from the wicks.  So the round wicks in these center-draft lamps were already dry and no longer smelled of lamp oil.

The key part for this oil-to-electricity conversion is a candelabra-base light socket and switch, from Lowes:

Source:  Lowes.com.

Turns out, the plug and switch will fit through the central draft tube of a Rayo oil lamp with room to spare.   Remove the flame spreader, slide that whole assembly, plug-first, down the top of the draft tube.  Let the metal prongs on the light socket lightly grip the inside of the top of the tube.  The bulb sits right where the oil flame used to be.  (Wire the flame spreader to the underside of the lamp so it can’t get lost.)

 

You need to raise up the lamp base about an eighth of an inch, to give clearance for the electrical cord, which simply runs out from under the lamp base.  Currently I’m using folded-up sheets of paper.  I’ll eventually cut a couple of nice-looking thin pieces of wood to do the job.

Choose an LED bulb with a candelabra base and amber glass, put some sort of frosted or opaque chimney or shade on the lamp, flick the switch, and you end up with a nice, clean electrical impersonation of a steadily-burning oil lamp.  Alternatively, with a different bulb, you could have the worlds classiest night-light, as night-light bulbs fit a candelabra socket.

This only works on center-draft oil lamps, not on flat-wick oil lamps.  The presence of that central draft tube is what allows you to make the conversion without butchering the lamp in the process, or having an electrical cord hang down the length of the oil lamp.  The electrical plug, at its widest, is 1 3/64″, as shown.

One final nicety is that any candelabra-based bulb will do.  If the 40-watt-equivalent LED amber-glass bulb I’m using now is too bright, or too dim, there are plenty of options available.  (Or plug a dimmer onto the end of the lamp cord and use a dim-able bulb.)

If nothing else, this highlights what LEDs have done for home lighting.  The socket and wiring are designed to take up to a 60-watt traditional incandescent bulb.  But this 40-watt-light-equivalent LED bulb draws just 4 watts, and produces a similarly reduced amount of waste heat.  The result is that the socket and wiring are vastly over-specified for the amount of heat and electrical current they actually get when used with an LED bulb.

In any case, I rarely have a DIY project go this smoothly.  I was in the process of trying to sell them on Ebay, when my wife asked why I didn’t convert them to electricity.  And that’s when I realized that, unlike flat-wick lamps that are converted to electricity, there was no need to butcher these lamps to make the conversion, as they already have a big hollow tube running right through the center of the lamp.

No muss, no fuss.  No drilling holes in antiques.  It only took one trip to the hardware store, and a couple of minute of time.  And it would take just a minute or two to remove the electrical add-on, and return these to being oil-burning lamps.

Post #2010: PFAs, the revenge of Freon

 

Per- or Poly-fluoro-alkyl substances (PFAs).  They’ve been in the news of late.

This post is a quick refresher on PFAs. For me.  I’m just trying to get my facts straight before seeing if a need to change anything in my life to try to avoid PFAs.

Short answer is no, but more from lack of information than for any positive reason.

Part 1:  An easily-digested chemistry lesson.

Source:  An on-line chemistry course from Western Oregon University.

Alkanes are chemicals consisting of nothing but carbon and hydrogen, where the carbon atoms are “saturated” with hydrogen.  (That is, there are no high-energy “double bonds” or “triple bonds” among the carbon atoms.)  The carbons can be arranged in a straight chain, a branched chain, or some form of circle.  You are already know the names of some common straight-chain alkanes, above.

Aside from the fact that we can burn them as fuel, most common alkanes are unremarkable.  These substances are produced routinely in nature (insert fart joke here) and will break down naturally.  For example, the half-life of methane in the atmosphere is somewhere around 10 years.

But if you can take those run-of-the-mill alkanes, and somehow substitute fluorine atoms for hydrogen atoms … magic happens.

For example, the single most-common plastic in the world — polyethylene — found in milk jugs world-wide, becomes the slickest substances in the world — Teflon.

 

The quick upshot is that whenever you substitute fluorine for hydrogen in these long-chain carbon compounds, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with something that’s pretty cool.  Something that is:

  • completely inert (Halon). or
  • works as a refrigerant (Freon), or
  • produces a nearly-frictionless surface (Teflon), or
  • makes fabric waterproof and oil-proof  (Scotchguard)

The root of all of that is this:

Source:  Chemtalk.

All these magical properties — inert, un-wettable, nearly frictionless — derive from the same source.  Fluorine is the most electro-negative element in the known universe.  That is, among all the elements, fluorine has the strongest attraction to electrons held by other atoms. 

The upshot is that if you can manage to get fluorine to bond with carbon, it stays bound.  It takes a large amount of energy to break that bond, precisely because fluorine wants to hold onto those carbon electrons more than any other element does.  Better yet, that property of being tightly bound spreads to the adjacent carbon atoms, to some degree, so that much of the entire molecule is really strongly stuck together. 

It is no small trick to create fluorocarbons in the first place.  It takes more energy to get a fluorine atom hooked onto a carbon than it takes to get any other suitable element to do that.

This is why there are almost no naturally-occurring fluorocarbons.  I just read that the count stands at 30 such, in all of nature.   And many of the naturally occurring fluorocarbons are produced by a single family of exotic tropical plants.  You are guaranteed scientific publication if you discover a new one.  Correspondingly, nothing in nature has evolved to digest or decompose or otherwise deal with fluoro-carbon compounds, which is why all the plants in that family are incredibly toxic.

Sometime, when you want to feel uncomfortable, read up up what happens if you have any significant contact with hydrofluoric acid.  That intrinsic property of free fluorine is part of the problem.

In short, once you manage to substitute fluorine for hydrogen in a carbon compound, you end up with something that doesn’t want to interact with any other chemicals.  Not water.  Not oil.  Not nothin.  The very properties that make PFAs desirable as industrial chemicals — inert, waterproof, oil-proof, slick — make them virtually indestructible in the natural environment.

In any case, given their properties, it’s not too surprising that we use a lot of them.  I see a 2021 estimate from the EPA that we produce at least 85,000 tons of PFAs in the U.S. annually (Source:  EPA-821-R-21-004, Page 5-3).  If I did the math right, that’s (85,000 x 2000/330,000,000 =) at least a half-pound per person per year, in the U.S.  And I’m pretty sure that was a partial inventory.

 

2: PFAs: The best of Freon and DDT.

Source:  Socratic.org

“If those chemicals don’t break down under ordinary conditions”, you might reasonably ask, “then where do they end up?”

Seems like modern industrial society has asked that question a number of times now.  And, somehow, the answer is never good.

Start with Freon.  Any flavor of Freon.  If Freon is inert, where does it end up?  The answer for Freon is that it only diffuses into the air, until, some decades after it was released at ground level, it gets broken up by high-energy UV-C radiation in the upper atmosphere.  There, the fragments of that former Freon turn out to be quite good at thinning out the earth’s protective ozone layer.

The twist for PFAs is that they start with the same near-indestructibility of Freon, and tack on the food-chain-accumulation properties of DDT. And in this case, we’re squarely at the top of that food chain.  In addition, PFAs are eliminated from the body quite slowly — I see casual estimates of two to ten years.  Given all that, it’s no surprise to find that 97% of Americans have detectable levels of PFAs in their blood, based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey circa 2007.

Having high levels of this stuff in your blood — say from occupational exposure, or consuming something heavily contaminated — is undoubtedly bad.   I’m not so clear on what the expected health effects would be at typical population exposures.

Part 3:  Action items?

To cut to the chase, no, not really.

You can find advice in this area, but it all appears to be, of necessity, total guesswork.  The fundamental problem is that there is no good assessment of where typical population exposure comes from.  Not that I could find, anyway.  Which means that you have no way to know what’s actually worth avoiding, and what’s somebody’s list of things that might contain PFAs.

For some of these, though, it’s clear that when the Feds started getting them out of consumer products, the average concentration in the blood of Americans began to fall.  Like so, from the CDC, showing U.S. population blood levels of PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonate, top line) after the EPA orchestrated a phase-out of use of that chemical in the US.

Source:  US CDC

On the typical list of things to avoid, you’ll see Teflon frying pans and stain-proof/waterproof fabrics. I’m not sure about the extent to which the PFAs in those types of products actually end up in your blood.

But there’s a surprising amount of common skin-contact and food-contact material that may have more mobile sources of PFAs in it.

Waterproof cosmetics and sunblocks are on everybody’s list.  Although I sure can’t find any that plainly contain -fluro- chemicals listed.  I just checked a couple of bottles here, and many examples on Amazon, and I see nothing that I would recognize as a PFA.  Plausibly, if those contain PFAs, they are inactive ingredients, and so typically aren’t listed?

But also grease-resistant food packaging, including pizza boxes, french-fry bags, hamburger wrappers, paper plates, microwave popcorn bags, and so on.  Basically, a whole lot of stuff associated with take-out food.  All because a lot of grease-proof paper/cardboard coatings contain PFAs. This Consumer Reports article was illuminating, and names names among fast-food restaurants.

Some cooking parchment paper has PFAs to make it extra slick.  Some cleaners and waxes have PFAs.

But aside from “don’t eat fast food”, none of that seems terribly actionable.

For drinking water, of course this stuff is in drinking water.  At least here, where around 10% of what’s flowing past the water intakes here in the Potomac River at Washington, DC came out of some sewage-treatment plant somewhere upstream.

It appears that either activated-charcoal or reverse-osmosis filters will remove PFAs.  (That makes sense, because both of those technologies are good at removing large organic molecules.)  No pitcher-type water filters remove PFAs.  Oddly, I read that distilling water doesn’t remove PFAs either, though I have no idea why not.

4:  Conclusion

My interest on PFAs was piqued by NY Times reporting that sewage sludge used as fertilizer passes PFAs from the sewage stream onto the land, to the plants grown on the land, to (in this case) the cows that eat those plants, and ultimately to people.

This is not news, really.  There have been several EPA actions on PFAs, including cajoling industry into phasing out what appeared to be the worst PFAs. Even a cursory look shows a long history of EPA interest in monitoring these chemicals.

What caught my eye is the case of a farmer whose land was condemned for food production, due to toxic levels of PFAs in the soil, toxic enough to sicken the cattle grazing on that land.  This, where the only plausible source for those PFAs is sewage sludge that has been spread on that soil.  And since PFAs don’t break down, for all intents and purposes, the land is forever condemned for food production.

That’s unusual.  Or, at least, you rarely hear of that out side of EPA Superfund sites.

But in terms of action items, for avoiding eating and drinking PFAs, I’m not seeing a lot of quantitative advice on what to do.

So, in the absence of any better information, I’m just going to put this one on my list of all the things I dislike about the modern world, but that I can’t do anything about.

Post #2009: Punished for potty mouth?

 

This blog lost about 2/3rds of its daily visitors, on or about August 20, 2024.  That, against a months-long backdrop of steady daily page views.

“Tarnation”, I muttered, “what in blue blazes happened?”

Hopping horny-toads, what flea-bitten varmint did this?  I’m-a-gonna blow ’em to smithereenies.

I write this blog mostly to amuse myself and a select few friends and relatives.  But almost all of my page views are from strangers who find my how-to/technical information articles via Google.  For example, my most popular post, by far, shows how to make a cheap heated faucet cover to keep exterior faucets from freezing.

And, upon re-reading the last couple of weeks of posts, I think I’ve found the problem.

I’ve been cussin’ too dang much.  (And/or, Google just upped its standards in that area.)

To put that more technically, many savvy observers believe that curse words negative affect your search-engine optimization (SEO).  In theory, that’s not supposed to be true.  In practice, it appears to be true.  And the only thing that stands out about my most recent posts is frequent (but humor-focused) use of swear words.

Google search generates more-or-less all of my referred traffic, so the only plausible explanation for the drop is that something has put me on Google’s bad side.  Upon re-reading my most recent output, the gratuitous curse words stood out as the likely culprit.

An alternative explanation is that Google’s August 2024 update to its search algorithm found something else that it didn’t like about me.  Turns out, quite a few websites saw a big decline in traffic just about the same day mine did.  In theory, if I can cut through the technical barriers, there is a way for me to use the Google Search Console to see if there’s an issue.  But that requires modifying the website and/or the DNS listing, neither of which I particularly want to do.

The lesson is that if our monopoly provider of search services takes a dislike to you, you’re toast.  Whatever Google decides more-or-less determines how the internet runs.

Google giveth, and Google taketh away.

I’ve now gone back and cleaned up the past couple of weeks’ worth of postings.  I’m hoping for the best.

We’ll see if Google can find it in her heart to forgive me.  Whatever it was that I did to offend her.

Post #2008: Pedestrian traffic counts via cheap camera.

 

It took about an hour to construct the vehicle and foot traffic counts you see here.  The hardware was an $18 Kasa camera, plus my laptop to view the resulting footage.

I let the camera film the street in front of my house.  That was not intrinsically different from (e.g.) a Ring doorbell.  (It is legal in Virginia to film anything in the public right-of-way, or anything you can view while in the public right-of-way, other than restricted areas such as military installations, as long as you don’t record conversations that you are not part of.)

I then did the simplest thing possible.  I transferred the SD card from camera to laptop, and watched the video on fast-forward.  It was like the worlds most boring, yet tense, home video.  I stopped the film when something happened, and put down tally marks.

The fastest I could comfortably watch was 16X.  Doing that, recording the events in eight hours of video took about an hour.  (The camera itself is capable of noting the passage of cars, via built-in motion detection, but would not identify passing pedestrians at the distance this was from the street.)

If nothing else, this confirms what my wife and I had both noticed, that this street is used by a lot of dog-walkers.

This is just a proof-of-concept.  Today it’s drizzly, and there’s a school holiday, so this would not be representative of typical Friday morning foot traffic.

The context is the value of sidewalk improvements in the Town of Vienna.  With rare exception, there are no counts of pedestrian traffic in any of the Town’s various studies.  (I did find one, once, but they referred to rush-hour pedestrian street crossing counts along selected corners of Maple Avenue, our main thoroughfare).

The idea being that there’s more value in putting a sidewalk where people will use it, than putting it where they won’t.  Assuming that current foot traffic along a route is a good indicator for eventual foot traffic there, once a sidewalk is built.  (There could be exceptions to that.  But in the main, I think that’s right.)

And that, for planning purposes, you’d like to have some idea of what they’re using a particular route for.

There are currently at least two ways to get pedestrian count data on (e.g.) suburban side-streets that do not have traffic lights.  Other than the old-fashioned approach of having somebody sit by the street and count passers-by.

One is to use cell-phone data, because many cell phones track and report their user’s location on a flow basis, and that information is sold commercially.  Courtesy of the improved accuracy of GPS, data vendors can now tell you (e.g.) how long the average customer walks around a store, based on how long their cell phones linger there.

(I am not sure that this tracking is entirely “voluntary” or not.  That is, did you download an app that, had you bothered to scrutinize the dozens of pages of fine print before clicking “ACCEPT”, would have revealed that you gave that app the right to collection and transmit your location to some central source?  Or, just as plausibly, if you don’t manage to turn off every blessed way that your phone can track you, then somebody’s picking up your location on a flow basis, you just have no clue whom?  For sure, the phone companies themselves always have a crude idea of where your phone is (based on which cell tower your area nearest), and I’m pretty sure they also get your GPS data, nominally so that they may more accurately predict when your signal needs to switch from one cell tower to the next.)

The problem with counts based on cell-phone tracking that it is of an unknown completeness.  Plausibly, some people manage to keep themselves from being continuously tracked.  Or, more likely, any one data vendor only buys that data from a limited number of app providers.   Generally, it’s fine for making relative statements about one area versus another, but needs to be “calibrated” to real-world observations in order to get a rule-of-thumb for inflating the number of tracked phones in an area, to the actual on-the-ground pedestrian count.

Plus, it costs money, and it’s geared toward deep-pocketed commercial users.

Finally, it’s likely that certain classes of pedestrians will be systematically under-represented in cell phone data, most importantly school children, but also possibly joggers.

The other way to do it in the modern world is to use a cheap camera.  Then count by eye.

So, as an alternative, I decided to see how hard it would be to gather that information this way.  Turns out, it’s not hard at all, even with doing the counts manually.  All it takes is a cheap camera, my eyes, and, for eight hours of data, an hour of fast-forwarding.

Not sure where I’m going with this, in the context of writing up the multi-million-dollar make-over of my little street.  I just wanted to prove that it’s not at all hard to get data-based counts of pedestrian traffic on any street.  All you need is a camera, and a place to put it.  And the time to view the results, if you can’t figure out an automated system for that.

My approach may be a bit low-tech for the 21st century in the surveillance state.  But it works.  Fill in the hourly wage of (say) the employee who would have to watch that video, and you come up with a pretty cheap way to provide hard data on need for sidewalks, as evidenced by counts of pedestrian foot traffic.

If you’re going to spend millions of dollars on sidewalks … how could you not do this first, to see that the expenditure is efficient, in the sense of pedestrians served per dollar of expense?

More on this still to come.

Coda

As if to underscore the power of the surveillance state, about six hours after I posted this, I got my first-ever email from Kasa, with an offer for a video doorbell.

That, presumably, because this blog post had the words “Kasa” and “doorbell” in it.

This happens enough that I know the root cause of it.

Sure enough, yesterday I signed into Google, using this browser, to access something via my Google account, and I foolishly forgot to sign out.  Google was therefore somewhat aware of just about everything I did on this browser in the meantime.

Presumably Google ratted me out to Kasa.

Somewhere, the ghost of Orwell is surely laughing.