Category: Analysis

Anything that I have tested empirically, or explain with detailed calculations, or just generally bother to get all the facts straight.

Post #2036: Replacing my heat pumps III: The tax angles.

 

Winter approaches. 

But no pressure, as I slowly work through the tax angles on this HVAC equipment replacement decision.  And bring somebody in for another quote for new equipment. And maybe, eventually, get everything working again.

If nothing else, this whole episode shows me that it’s good to have multiple heating systems in your home.

Even with one heat pump dead, we have some heat.

And that is way better than no heat. Continue reading Post #2036: Replacing my heat pumps III: The tax angles.

Post #2033: A rare double-attaboy today.

 

I wrote the following two comments (to other comments) on Jennifer Rubin’s opinion piece in today’s Washington Post.

In a first, two people thanked me for my comments.

Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket today.

So here’s something that’s topical, and near-zero marginal effort.  And so far, hasn’t managed to tick anybody off too much.

On the urban/rural Democrat/Republican divide.

Just think of the entire Republican platform as promising to return to the past. They want to pretend to live in a world where: Global warming doesn’t exist. American manufacturing dominates the (Post WWII) world. Women know their place. Non-whites, non-English-speakers are a small and quaint fraction of the population. Coal is king.

I’m sure you can fill in others.

And this jibes well with the core audience, which is rural America. Just look at the red-state blue-state map. Even within blue states, the rural areas are red.

And, at a guess, that’s because rural America has been going backwards, economically, for about the last half-century. In large part from the gutting of light industry in the U.S.

I don’t think anything could have stopped that. But if I were in their shoes, I think I’d listen to anybody who promised to turn back time. No matter how illogical and frankly racist that promise was.

So Trump exploits that. Remember how he was (e.g.) going to bring back American Coal, when talking to West Virginia miners? Even though every trend said that was nonsense.

Well, truth or fiction just doesn’t much matter if you’re poor, getting poorer, and see no way for your children to make a living where they grew up.

Not making excuses for it. I have yet to see any positive policy proposals from the Republican side for doing anything about … well, anything. Just trying to grasp the mindset.

In response to somebody who pointed to the massive increase in asylum-seekers allowed into the country …

Then, if America is still governed by the rule of law, change the law. But what we’ve seen this past year is that, at Trump’s order, the Republican party would have nothing to do with revising immigration law. Because this is too juicy an issue for Trump to use in his campaigning.

In 2022, about a quarter-million people requested asylum, of which Cuba was the most common country of origin. So, roughly speaking, with a population of about 330M, roughly 1 person in 1000 in the U.S. was a new 2022 asylum-seeker. That’s a lot, by historical standards, but hardly a crisis.

That ramped up so much in 2023 that Biden temporarily shut down asylum at the southern border, by executive action, this year. He can’t do that permanently. Not unless he’s a dictator.

But that, along with cooperation from Mexico, greatly reduced the number of people trying to immigrate at the southern border.

And what was the centerpiece of the immigration bill that Trump shot down? It was to expand the immigration courts, and so clear the asylum case backlog and get almost all of those people out of the country, as actual grants of asylum in any given year number in the low tens of thousands.

Instead of just exploiting the issue, it would be a breath of fresh air if Republicans would, like, you know, try to govern. Which starts with addressing a legal issue, by changing the law.

Post 2032: Replacing my heat pumps, part II: How efficient are my ground-source and mini-split heat pump options?

 

The key question for this post is about as simple as it gets: If I have two choices for heat pumps, which one will use less electricity?

In my case, one option is the replacement ground-source heat pump that has been recommended, at a base installed price of about $25K per heat pump.  The other option is to replace my dead ground-source heat pump with a modern air-source mini-split heat pump, at somewhere around half that cost (call it 60% after adjusting for likely difference in equipment life, in my particular case).

This is a stupidly hard question to answer well.  As I explain at length below.

But, after doing all the homework that I care to do, for my house and my climate (with mild winters and an efficient gas-fired secondary heating system), the answer is that either style of heat pump (air-source or ground-source) will use roughly the same amount of electricity.  Or near as I can tell, based on published data.

That’s not due to the underlying physics of the situation.  If it were only about the physics, ground-source would win hands-down.  Instead, that appears mainly due to faster technological improvement in air-source units over the past decade or so, compared to ground-source units.  This seems to have fully offset the “natural” advantage of ground-source.  In effect, my real-world choice is between air-source using the current generation of technology, and ground source using older technology.  (The model of ground-source heat pump I have been offered was first introduced in 2016.)  Or, at least, using a less-efficient design for the heat pump itself, disregarding which heat sink (air, ground) is used.  That’s what makes it a tie ballgame, as of now.

This leads me to conclude that replacing one of my dead heat pumps with (e.g.) a name-brand air-source mini-split system:

  • Is substantially cheaper, even accounting for likely shorter equipment life.
  • Incurs no significant loss of efficiency compared to my ground-source option.
  • As a bonus, bypasses my house’s barely-functional 1959-era ductwork.

Ground source systems still have some clear advantages.  All the equipment is indoors, and so likely lasts longer.  They work well even extremes of cold or hot weather.

But the fact is, there just ain’t that many of them, particularly in a relatively mild climate like Virginia.  Of the roughly 4 million annual residential heat pump installations per year (in 2022), maybe 50,000 (call it 2.5%) were ground-source units.  That has big implications for how rapidly the units reflect improved technology, and how much choice you have for who installs and services your unit.

Unless some unforeseen problem arises, I will replace one three-ton dead ground-source heat pump with a pair of 1.5-ton mini-split air-source heat pumps.

And I will not feel the least bit guilty about doing so.

I was going to give full and excruciating details but the overall accuracy of the conclusion does not warrant that.  Below, I sketch out enough to summarize how I arrived at the numbers above.

SEER, EER, HSPF, COP, and all that jazz.

The efficiency of a heat pump varies, based on the how big a temperature difference it is trying to pump against, and how close you are to the maximum capacity of the system.  The bigger the temperature difference, and the closer to maxed out, the less efficiently the heat pump runs.

This means that, despite what you read from many internet sources, you cannot simply convert one heat-pump efficiency measure to another with a simple conversion-of-units number.  Yes, you must do that first, because some of these measures mix BTU/Hs and watts, and others don’t.  But in addition, you also have to make some sort of adjustment for how stringent the test is.

It’s very much like EPA mileage.  The MPG the EPA gets depends on how the car is driven.  Typically, EPA city mileage is much worse than EPA highway mileage.  If you compare the city MPG of one car to the highway MPG of another, you’re making a mistake.  So it is, in spades, with SEER, EER, COP, and HSPF.

Now we get to the hard part:  Things are hazy.

If you Google SEER, say, you’ll see the same zero-details definition everywhere:  It’s the ratio of the cooling power produced (in BTU/H), to the electrical power supplied (in watts).  But as to, how, exactly, that’s measured, it’s hard to find any information at all.  E.g., is the energy used to run the water pumps included, what indoor and outdoor temperatures were used for the test, how were ducts, water pumps, etc. factored in, and so on.

  • The details of the tests are proprietary and reside behind an expensive paywall.
  • For the same measure, ground-source and air-source heat pumps use different methods.
  • Certain aspects of overall energy use — duct system back pressure, water pump electricity use, and resistance electrical heating for backup heat — are either ill-specified, or not stated as to impact.

Among the things that I’ve seen hints for, but no definitive answer, is how these tests treat the waste heat of the electric motors themselves.  I saw at least one credible-looking website showing that ground-source heat pumps add the value of this waste heat to their heating output, as if that heat would make it into your ductwork.  But air source heat pumps do not.  That’s consistent with where the compressor is located (inside for one, outside for the other).  But it boils down to an assumption that the waste heat of the compressor motor somehow warms the air in your ductwork, which clearly isn’t the case for the units in my basement now.  I have yet to find a clear answer on that, and it matters materially to the comparison.

So you need to take the table above with a grain of salt.  My interpretation is that if there is a difference in efficiency across the three units I looked at, it’s small.

Definitions

Each of these measures compares output heating or cooling power, to input electrical power used.

EER (energy efficiency ratio).  Cooling.  Measured at a steady 35C outdoor air temperature, 26C indoor air temperature, and 50% relative humidity (for the outdoor air?).  Heat/cool is measured in BTU/H, electricity is in watts.  I think the test calls for the unit to run full-blast when this is measured.

SEER (seasonal energy efficiency ratio).  Cooling.  Near as I can tell, this is set up to simulate the range of temperatures you would see in a “standard summer”, so to speak.  Heat/cooling power output is measured in BTU/H, electricity input is measured in watts.

COP (coefficient of performance):  Heating:  Generically, COP is simply watts of heat out, divided by watts of electricity used.  Heat pumps have different COP values depending on the temperature tested, and how hard they were running.  But the EPA-reported COP appears to be for one temperature, and I think its with the unit running full blast.  Heat/cooling power is measured in watts, electrical input power is measured in watts.

HSPF (heating seasonal performance factor).  Heating.  Like SEER, this tests the units over a range of temperatures designed to be a sort of “standard winter”.  I believe that, where the unit has a resistance-heating secondary heater, if that clicks on during the testing, the electricity used in secondary heating is counted toward the total.  Heating power is measured in BTU/H, electrical use in watts.

The -2 suffixed versions of these appear to include a more realistic measure of the back-pressure of typical home ducts.  Best I can tell, in the typical situation, you’d expect the (e.g.) SEER2 rating of an appliance to be 5% to 10% lower than the SEER rating.

Accounting for test stringency:  SEER to EER conversion, units-adjusted HSPF to COP conversion.  Here, I found some sketchy internet sources suggesting that where you have SEER and EER for the same unit, SEER is typically 85% of the EER value, due to the more stringent testing cycle.  So I used that to adjust these all to a common EER-style basis.

Conclusion so far

Again, take this table with a grain of salt. There’s a whole lot I don’t know about the details of how each test is applied to each type of machine.  And probably never will know, particularly for the details of testing ground source machines, where tests specifying outdoor air temperature are irrelevant.

That said, if you adjust for the difference in units-of-measurement (BTU/H versus watt), and assume that the tests that use a broad range of conditions (SEER, HSPF) tend to run about 85% of the equivalent tests that use a single set of conditions (EER, and COP as EPA reports it), then you get the comparison above.

Which, honestly, is just about what I came up with, back-of-the-envelope, when I first looked into this some years ago.  The super-high-SEER Japanese-made heat pumps that emerged a decade ago seemed to eclipse (my estimate of) my existing ground-source heat pump’s efficiency.  SEER 25? Maybe I mis-recall.  But I do recall being startled with how high the available SEER ratings got, for air-source units.

Bottom line, efficiency-wise it’s a tossup.  If I weight each units two numbers by local degree-day (3x heating a cooling), I get my estimated all-year efficiency values of 3.6, 3.5, and 4.0 for the three heat pumps examined, respectively.)

If your location experiences lot of time at extremely cold or hot temperatures, ground-source heat pumps still seem to offer some significant efficiency advantages over air-source.  And, for sure, because the equipment is all inside, ground-source is likely to last longer.

But in my case — with a relatively mild climate, efficient (gas-fired) backup heat, and so on — it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Finally, this pretty strongly suggests that the current tax law is out-of-date.  The huge advantage given to ground-source heat pumps might have made sense in 2004.  It appears to make no sense in 2024.

Once upon a time, ground-source heat pumps were king.  But not any more.  And the law has yet to catch up with that.

Post 2031: Both of my heat pumps have died? This should be interesting.

 

 

My house is heated and cooled by two ground-source heat pumps, installed by the previous owner almost exactly 20 years ago.

Well, “was heated and cooled”.  One died last spring.  The other has one foot in the grave, with its most recent repair involving some burned wiring (never a good sign).  Both heat pumps need to be replaced. 

No-brainer, right? Just replace them.

Well …

The only firm in my area that specializes in ground-source heat pumps quoted me a price of $50,000 to replace my two three-ton (ground-source) heat pumps.  That’s for the basic model.  Bells, whistles, and line sets extra.  I’m guessing the final cost would end up around $60K.

 

At this point, the only thing I know for sure is that no matter what, this home repair is going to be about like buying a new car.  Or two.

Minus the fun.

Follow along for the next several posts, as I get a handle on what to do next.

Am I a heat-pump heretic?

I drive an EV.  Cripes, it’s a made-in-USA Chevy EV, for that matter.

I re-calculate my family’s carbon footprint every couple of years.

And I bought my house specifically because it had efficient ground-source heat pumps.

But the world continues to change.  And I’m not sure I’m going to be replacing those with new ground-source heat pumps.

And the fact that I would consider not doing that makes me something of a heretic.  But I’m still in the process of gathering my facts.

  1. Twenty years ago, ground-source was the undisputed king of heat pumps.
  2. In part, that’s because air source heat pumps of the time weren’t very good.
    1. They worked inefficiently when it was cold out.  To the point of essentially not working.  That caused use of “secondary heating”, meaning, typically expensive and inefficient resistance electric heating.  In winter, your fancy heat pump spent too much time operating as more-or-less a big dumb electric space heater.
    2. And they weren’t any great shakes, efficiency-wise, the rest of the time.
    3. Plus, they just kind of generally sucked.  Comfort-wise.  In the winter, they always seemed to blow air that was, upon careful measurement, slightly warmer than the existing room air.  Or, at least, that’s how I recall my Maryland apartment of the mid-1980s.
    4. Basically, they were air conditioners that, in this climate (Virginia), could also put out some heat, for some of the winter.
  3. My impression is that this changed about ten years ago.  At some point, cutting-edge air source heat pumps appeared to be — by my calculation — at least as efficient as my 2004-vintage ground source heat pumps.
  4. That’s because air-source technology improved rapidly, while the technology of ground-source units … lagged?
    1. Part of the improvement was in finding a way for air source heat pumps to function well even at low outdoor temperatures.
    2. That went hand-in-hand with greater efficiency of operation.  E.g., modern air-source units might now have variable-speed compressors, fans, and so on.
    3. But not much seems to have happened to ground source heat pumps.
    4. The slower rate of improvement in ground source heat pumps is a side-effect of the vastly lower volume of ground-source (about 0.5% of the home market) compared to air-source (the other 99.5%).
  5. As a result, ground-source heat pumps are no longer a slam-dunk winner, compared to traditional air-source heat pumps.

    1. As a matter of basic physics, they should be.
    2. But because they seem to be behind the curve in efficiency improvements, they aren’t.
    3. The upshot is kind of a temporary tie:  The rapid adoption of more efficient technology in the air-source sector has offset (or nearly offset) the inherent physics-based advantages of ground-source heat pumps.  For now.
  6. There is no point number 6.
  7. But the tax laws still grossly favor ground-source heat pumps over air-source.  And the subsidies are large.
    1. For ground source, the Feds pick up 30% of the installed cost, no limits.
    2. For air source, if it meets certain efficiency standards, the Feds pick up a maximum of $2000 (or 30% of the installed cost, whichever is less).
    3. And Virginia offers an incentive system for ground-source that is beyond weird, and must be described in a separate posting.  At first blush it appears ludicrously generous toward ground-source units.
    4. Separately, I’m not sure they were thinking about replacements of worn-out old systems when they wrote the law.  Effectively, what I’m doing is repairing my existing system, by replacing the worn-out heat pumps. But, legally, that’s treated identically to putting in a brand-new ground source heat pump system.
  8. So, something is not right here.
    1. Is the law outdated, and out-of-step with the current state of technology?
    2. Or is the law a closet buy-American plan, as these ground-source units seem to be U.S.-made?
    3. Or am I dead wrong about the near-equivalence of air-source versus ground-source efficiency in the modern world?
    4. Or, some thing even weirder — geothermal versus ground source discussion to be added at some point.
  9. Curveball:  My first floor would be ideal for a couple of “ductless mini-split” systems.  These are little air-source heat pumps, but instead of being designed to hook up to your ductwork, they simply blow air around like a room air conditioner.  You pass the refrigerant pipe and condensate drain through an exterior wall, between the inside air-distribution cabinet, to the outside compressor.
  10. So, why not replace one of the dead ground source heat pumps with two mini-split air source heat pumps, half the size.
    1. Near as I can tell, I’d pay only a modest or no efficiency penalty for doing that.
    2. And it looks like it would be quite a bit less expensive, even accounting for likely shorter equipment life of an air-source system.
    3. Plus, we’d possibly have a warm kitchen for the first time since we moved here, because we could bypass our near-useless 1959 first-floor ductwork.
    4. Plus, it’s lower risk — more like an appliance, and less like a fixture in the house.  If one of those dies, I can just toss it and more-or-less just plug in a new one.  Not quite as convenient as a fridge, but not hugely different.
  11. But … but … but … the very thought of replacing a ground-source heat pump with an air-source heat pump is … heresy.  Particularly given that the actual “ground” portion of the ground-source system — the mile of plastic “slinky” pipe buried in my back yard — still functions perfectly.

Conclusion

That’s as far as I can take it in this first post.  I need to pin down some facts to go any further.

I bought this house in large part because it had an efficient ground-source heat pump.

But the world has changed since I bought it.

The next post takes the two real-world heat pumps — one a ductless mini-split air source heat pump, one the ground-source heat pump for which I have been quoted an installed price — and tries to get an apples-to-apples comparison between them, in terms of efficiency.

That turns out to be stupidly hard to do.

That’ll be the next post:  SEER, SEER2, EER, EER2, COP, HSDF and all the rest of that alphabet soup.  And how on earth they measure that, for ground-source heat pumps.

Post #2027: Toilet paper and self-fulfilling prophecies

 

It says something deeply, deeply weird about the soul of America, that people are panic-buying toilet paper in response to the East and Gulf Coast port strike.

I had a few responses to this, in no particular order.

First, guess I’m glad I haven’t worked my way through my pandemic stockpile yet.

Second, maybe I had better pick up some toilet paper at the store today.  Just in case.

I fully realize that toilet paper doesn’t move through these ports.  Almost all toilet paper used in the U.S. is produced domestically, call it 93% (reference Yahoo).   The rest that is consumed in the U.S. is produced in Canada and Mexico, and isn’t shipped by ocean-going freighter.

And yet, it’s a fallacy to say that toilet paper should be unaffected by the port strike.  If enough people are stupid and irrational about it, and the target of their stupidity is toilet paper, then toilet paper is very much affected by it.

Oddly, if you substitute “Springfield, OH” for “toilet paper” in the last sentence, it still makes perfect sense.

Anyway, the consequence being that if you need to buy TP, you’ll be every bit as much out of luck, even though a shortage is purely a result of irrationality, as if there some actual disruption of the toilet paper supply chain.

Some consumer items will likely go out of stock from this strike.  Bananas being the poster child for that.  But who would have guessed that TP remains the canary-in-the-coal mine for American anxiety.

Source: Clipart-library.com

Post #2026: A quick value calculation, part 2, what’s the automation/job loss issue?

 

Longshoremen serving U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast ports went on strike yesterday.

Here’s something that I find weird about this strike:

  • Foreign labor can’t take these jobs.
  • Only U.S. management can.
  • Impact on consumers is essentially nil, either way.

Interesting, to an economist. That puts a different light on the union’s “no automation” stance.  I think it’s fundamentally different from (say) auto workers.

Let me pin down a few more facts, maybe correct some prior errors.  That’s what this post is about.

What are ILA demands?

 

From CNBC, we get a crisp list of demands, quoting the head of the ILA International Longshoremen’s Assocation:

  • “5 an hour per year increase over six years,
  • all royalties for containers handled,
  • and strict language against automation.”

For this post I’m interested in the last one.

The royalties thing seems to be a modest worker-productivity-related bonus.  Modest seems reasonably, considering that some of the folks at issue are swinging around 40-ton containers of stuff.  Probably inadvisable, possibly infeasible, to provide a strong incentive to hurry.

OK, what does ” …. strict language against automation.” mean?

Taking a step back, the automation technology at issue is clearly explained on gCaptain.  From my layman’s perspective, they have machines now that’ll move/sort cargo containers just like packages.

They’re described as “robots”.  The key thing is that they do this without requiring a crane operator.  The robot operates the crane automatically, including routing of the containers via barcodes.  (I.e., like UPS package sorting).

Let me pause here and say that I immediately thought of Terminator.  I’ll try to suppress that.

Automation means moving tractor-trailer-loads of stuff, in metal shipping containers, off ships, without human intervention.  Near as I can tell.  Crane operators and associated personnel lose their jobs.  Apparently, the West coast branch (of the ILA, I think) agreed to this in the last round of negotiations, and lost (and estimate of?) 700 jobs at one port due to automation of that facility.

So they want the operating company to agree not do to that, in the East and Gulf ports.  They don’t want to lose these jobs.  So they don’t want automated (robot) unloading of containerized freight.

Here’s what makes this kind of interesting.

I may regret saying this, but.

I think to a very large degree, they can’t lose these jobs to foreign competition.  Or, really, to any competition.

And that’s what makes this interesting.

The usual anti-Luddite argument is that automation is inevitable.  If you don’t automate and put those workers out of their jobs/reduce your costs, then your competitor will, and run you out of business.

So in the normal case, sure, Luddite are losers.  Working to prevent a labor-saving (and so presumed cost-saving) change is always a losing proposition.  The  jobs will be competed out of existence, one way or another.  As the business owner, either I cut costs by firing my workers and so the business survives without those jobs, OR I don’t and go out of business, and neither the business nor the jobs survives.

Either way, the Luddites lose their jobs.

Anyway, the kneejerk reaction is “here’s the union, trying to be Luddites, wanting to ban automation … what a losing proposition that is.

But … no.  Not necessarily, in this case. 

First, where else is the freight gonna go?  And these are 100% (I think) union ports.  If the ports remain non-automated, then … they remain non-automated.

It’s not like some U.S. city can grow a brand-new, rail-connected ocean port, with automation but no ILA workers, and undercut the rates at existing U.S. ports.  Can they?   At least not in short order.

And there is no second.  I stand by my opening.  The only entity that can force automation/job loss on these ports is management.  Not foreign competition.

Further, from the import consumer’s perspective, longshoremen’s wages account for a pittance in the overall cost of imports.  (See last post.  That needs some checking into, below, but is probably correct-enough as is.)  Given that, there’s no driving need to kill these jobs with automation.

Heck, pay them double what you’re paying them now AND keep the system as-is (no automation), and best guess, that’ll cost me 25 cents on the $100 in imported-goods’ cost.  Which, by the time they are marked up and sold, I won’t even notice.  If I would have noticed it, at wholesale cost.

Yesterday’s crude calculation, checked, still peanuts.

My claim from yesterday is that the wage bill for longshoremen at U.S. East and Gulf Coast ports is a trivial fraction of the cost of the imports they handle.

My estimate was a quarter-of-a-percent.  In that neighborhood.

No math mistake.  I put what I did yesterday into a spreadsheet, and got the same answer I got yesterday.  FWIW.

Value of exports ignored. The focus of the first articles I read was on imports, and how this might inconvenience consumers, U.S. manufacturers, “the supply chain”.  So I didn’t even think to include value of exports.

I’m guessing value of exports would be about half the value of imports, but I haven’t checked that recently.  (You have to be careful to avoid exports of non-tangible items.   Whatever it is, all it does is make the longshoremen’s wage bill look even smaller, in proportion to value of imports and exports combined.

But see next point.

Bulk commodities should have been excluded from the calculation.  Similarly, military materiel is unaffected.  Or so I read.  And at least one more, common-sense category.

As I understand it, this contract is only for movement of containtainerized freight.  Or nearly.  Stuff in shipping containers.  (Cars, I’m unsure of.)

I read that oil and gas, for example, were unaffected, along with a throwaway line about bulk cargoes in general being unaffected by this particular contract.

Best guess, bulk freight makes up a small percentage of value of imports.  Just scanning the graph below, I’d guess no more than a third.

Source:  Tradingeconomics. com.  Used without permission.  Red annotations are mine.

Wage bill waffling.  Finally, for the pro-forma wage bill, I just plain made up everything except the cited average wage of $35 an hour.  The $35 figure, I read somewhere, and saw it instantly disputed.

In any case, in the pro-forma, I had every union worker under this contract (estimated at 45,000 here, because I read that somewhere) working an 8-hour shift every day of the year (so as to overstate the wage bill, if anything), at an average wage of $35/hour (because, as note above, I read that somewhere).

I have since read that around 75,000 ILA members  may be at these ports,  not all covered by this contract, but all will obey the strike order (none will cross a picket line).  So, even with all the other assumptions of the pro-forma, if you used this figure, you’d up the wage bill by 2/3rds.

Conclusion.   It’s still peanuts.  The wage bill for the workers at question is a small fraction of a percent of the value of the goods they handle.

Post #2025: A quick value calculation

 

Longshoremen serving U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast ports went on strike today.

I have been searching in vain for one simple statistic:

How much do the wages of these longshoremen add to the cost of goods imported into the U.S. through these affected ports?

Near as I can tell, nobody has this pre-calculated.  So I’m going to roll my own.

Before I do, take your best guess.  Is it roughly:

  1. 2.5%
  2. 0.25%
  3. 0.025%

The commonly cited numbers are:

  • $3.5T in imports annually (from this government source).
  • About half of that flows through affected ports.
  • About 45K longshoremen.
  • Average wage of East Coast longshoremen of (say) $35 an hour.

So, assuming that all longshoremen put in one shift per day, 365 days a year, the wage bill for the longshoremen serving these ports is ($35 x 45,000 *8 =~) $12.6 million dollars a day.

By contrast, the typical daily value of goods imported through these ports would be ($3.5T/365/2 =~) $5 billion a day.  This is also a widely-reported figure, typically described as “damage to the U.S. economy).

So the answer is b).  As a fraction of value-of-goods-imported, that’s ($12.6M/$5B =) 0.25%.  Currently, the cost of U.S. longshoremen adds about a quarter of a percent to the cost of good imported through these ports.

And the difference that’s keeping the two sides apart appears to be about $10 in hourly wages.  So the actual money at issue is on order of 0.1% of the cost of imports.

I dunno.  Maybe it’s just me.  But it seems like this would be a relevant number to know, as you form an opinion about this strike.

Given the value of goods at issue, and the relatively small difference between asked and offered wage (I read it as $60 versus $50 an hour, five years from now), and given that West Coast longshoremen already make a wage at about that level, and yet the U.S. economy has not collapsed, I’d like to think that this is going to be a relatively short strike.

Post #2024: Have Republicans finally jumped the shark/turned the corner/gotten fed up?

 

An amazing thing happened over the weekend.  Or, rather, didn’t happen.

Recall the “13,000 illegal immigrant murderers” story that got a flurry of press coverage last Friday.  Including, of course, prominent mention by the Republican candidate for President.

Post #2022: 13,000 murderers … something something something … illegal immigrants? It’s our theme for the coming week.

It now appears that Republicans have stopped citing that number, merely because it’s total bullshit.  This seems like a new development in the campaign, i.e., letting go of something that juicy, just because they had no idea what they were talking about.

Contrast that to the theme from just two weeks back, Haitians Eating Pets.

There, not only did the Republican ticket refuse to quit spreading that lie, they went into a tizzy over being “fact-checked” about it, AND the Republican VP candidate (whatever his name is*) went so far as to admit that even if it isn’t true, they were justified in exploiting the lie for political gain because …  something something something lamestream media fake news … something.

* JD Vance (no periods), James David Vance, James David Hamel, James Donald Bowman.  reference.

Two weeks ago, they wouldn’t back off that lie despite pleas from the Republican Governor of Ohio, and the Republican mayor of the city in question. Heck, even after tacitly admitting that it was not true, they justified continuing to use it.

But now, is it possible that the Party of Trump has finally hit its limit on folks makin’ shit up, just to get people riled up?

A bifurcated distribution

The polling pretty clearly shows that about half the population is die-hard pro-Trumpers.  No amount of (e.g.) messy divorces, extramarital affairs, sexual assaults, bankruptcies, fraud convictions, felony convictions, a private no-witnesses tête-à-tête with Putin, praise for dictators, praise of pro-Nazi groups, incoherent speeches, flagrant lies, riots at the Capitol aimed at interrupting the peaceful transfer of power, threats to jail political opponents, and just plain ordinary nastiness will make them reconsider their choice.

I sat down just now to figure out how many of the Ten Commandments Trump routinely has broken.  Lie?  Check.  Steal?  Check.  Adultery?  Oh yeah.  Then I realized that if he had adhered to the Fourth Commandment (Sabbath), he wouldn’t have been out on a golf course two Sundays ago, making himself a potential target.  In any case, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he does not routinely appear to break six out of the ten.  I can only assume that above-average performance is why he’s such a favorite among self-described Christian fundamentalists.  That, and his crystal-clear stance on abortion, whatever it is this week.

 

Instead, they just lap that up.  No amount of hate-centered chaos is too much. Near as I can tell, as far as mainstream Republicans are concerned.

For example, most recently, when Trump asserted that Harris was born mentally retarded, Republicans cheered.  (Some?) Apparently, that’s exactly the sort of useful political debate that mainstream Republicans long to hear.  Claim that your political opponent rode the short bus, and you’ll get (some) cheers from a mainstream Republican audience.

This, despite some obvious evidence that if anybody has cognitive problems, it’s — wait, is that a fly in here? — the old fat guy, not his opponent.

So, to current Republicans, this is self-evidently funny:

But this stuff?  Maybe not so much.

 

There seem to be some Republicans who, for whatever reason, react negatively to Trump’s habit of (e.g.) pissing on our war dead, on the Congressional Medal of Honor, and on the democracies that are our long-term allies in maintaining international order.

Or just the general atmosphere of lies, hate, and puerile name-calling that is the core of the Trump campaign.  All of which they were willing to overlook … until some some red line was crossed.

Maybe for some, it was shoving an Arlington National Cemetery employee out of the way so that the Candidate could be filmed, grinning and thumbs-up, standing by the graves of recently deceased U.S. soldiers, to make a campaign ad.

Obviously, that wasn’t objectionable to the core of the Republican party.  But, plausibly, a few were mildly put off by that.

In any case, here’s why I think Republican election strategy has finally changed.

The core of the Republican Party is going to vote for Trump no matter what.  No matter how fundamentally un-American or anti-democracy his behavior is.

But now, as the election nears, every red line he crosses, he manages to alienate just a few more self-described Republicans.  Who then join the long list of prominent Republicans who say they aren’t going to vote for him.

They (Republicans) may have finally reached the point where the over-the-top bullshit is counterproductive.  As fun as it may be, it doesn’t get Trump any additional votes from his base.  Instead, each new outrage now seems to be chipping loose just a few more rock-ribbed Republicans who have (finally) decided that enough is enough.

And so, now that they have maxed out the gains from this strategy of generating outrage at every possible opportunity, and the truth be damned, it’s time to switch to pretending that the Trump candidacy is sane, normal, typical Republican fare.

So that’s what I expect to see, for the last month of the election.  I expect to see a concerted effort to portray the Republican candidate as a sound and serious proponent of democracy and the American Way.  Contrary to all existing evidence to the contrary.

They have to give Republicans who are on the fence some degree of plausible deniability for all the un-American positions and actions their candidate has taken so far.  Plus the tacky grifts.  They need to smother the voices of the many prominent Republicans who have said they aren’t supporting Trump.

So, my prediction is for a return to pseudo-sanity for the Republican presidential campaign.  A push to remake Trump as a Statesman.  Just for the next month.  Just enough to make those on the fence forget the recent past.

I guess we’ll see what happens next.