Category: Analysis

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sketchy details follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or are they?

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

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

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

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

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

Quality-adjusted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By and large, BLS has no such adjustments for:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post #1946: Now the government is coming for my smoke detectors.

 

Or maybe it’s just the smoke detector manufacturers?

At my wife’s request, I’ve gotten around to looking at the smoke detectors in my house.  How many do we have (three), where are they (one on each level), do they work (eh, mostly yes).  It’s something that one does, from time to time, as a responsible adult.

This is when I found out that the modern recommendation, repeated everywhere, is to toss out any smoke detector that’s ten years old or more.  Or maybe seven years old, depending on the source.

Why?  Well, maybe (fill-in-something-plausible-sounding here).  And if that happened, the smoke detector wouldn’t work.

You wouldn’t want to take a risk of that, would you?

Anyway, this was a new one on me.  You’re supposed to toss out all your smoke detectors once a decade, and buy new.

Really?

That’s what they say. Continue reading Post #1946: Now the government is coming for my smoke detectors.

Post #1945: Microplastic, not sure I much care about it.

 

Let me give you the argument, to see if you buy it.  (Read Post #1941 and Post #1942 to see where I’m coming from on this issue.)

1:  We’ve been using plastic, including artificial fibers, in the U.S., for a long time.  2:  Therefore, best guess, whatever microplastic does to humans, it has already done that to us.  Plus, 3: personally, as it turns out, I live in a microplastic-fiber-rich environment.  I think.

Regarding that last point:  The wall-to-wall carpet that came with my house is polyester fiber.  Not only do I walk around on the cut-off ends of pieces of artificial-fiber yarn whenever I change locations within my home, the fiber is polyester, which typically gets fingered as potentially harmful microplastic.

My guess is that this surely (surely!) generates a microplastic-fiber-fragment-rich living environment.  (But to be clear, there’s only a bit of research to support that, as outlined in this reference.)  And there are a lot of people in the same boat.  A lot of folks who spend a lot of hours in places with synthetic-fiber wall-to-wall carpet.

The upshot is that if microplastic from polyester fibers is a major health hazard, even if that only shows up late in life via a cancer effect, you’d think we’d have noticed it by now.  We’ve had a lot of time and variation in chronic exposure to do so.

Restated:   If there were significant human health effects from typical exposures to microplastic, you’d think we’d have noticed by now.

But how, from this viewpoint, can you explain why we are suddenly seeing and hearing so much about microplastic? How do you explain that, if it has, as you say, been there all along?

My guess?  I guess that we’re now seeing it because we’re now looking for it.

One guess for the uptick is a change in or diffusion of microplastic-detection technology.  The best studies seem to use some fairly exotic equipment, something I take to be a microscopic infrared spectrometer.  Maybe those have gotten cheaper, or maybe it’s just the case that more people have access to the required equipment.  Alternatively, other studies appear to use minimal equipment, but may require significant time.  The publishable standard of measurement is so low (particles per liter) that maybe a lab with the right filter paper (and a microscope and some lab assistants) can quantify microplastic-in-blank to a publishable degree.

(I think that this last point, more than anything else, explains the view that microplastic is an inexhaustible source of clickbait, via finding microplastic in any (e.g.) bodily fluid or organ that you care to examine closely enough.)

A second guess for the uptick is that we now bother to look for microplastics, in both the human and natural environments.

One the one hand, maybe we look more often because “microplastic” is clickbait-du-jour.   An internet-fed fad.  A response to economic rewards for attracting eyes to your article.  After all, every N days, somebody finds microplastic in some new (and yuck-inducing) substance and/or bodily fluid and/or internal organ.  And that makes great clickbait.  Particularly for the closet doomscrollers.

On the other hand, microplastic is part of a legitimate concern about plastic in the environment, overall.  I mean, how many times have we heard this story, only to find out it has an unhappy ending:

There's this stuff?  We use a lot of it.  But it doesn't decompose well.  

So, where does it end up?

But in any case, I’m betting that any human health impacts of microplastic are  pretty subtle.  Not that I’ve done any research on that, but just from a feeling that we’ve been living with plastic for so long, I think we’d have seen something by now.

OTOH, I live in a house with polyester wall-to-wall.  So take this FWIW.

 

Post #1943: Microplastic, doing a burn test for carpet fiber

Most internet sources assure me that only four fibers are likely to be found in the pile of modern wall-to-wall carpet. A handful of sources add a fifth (acrylic).  Perusal of current offerings at Home Depot adds a sixth (triexta).

  • Wool
  • Nylon
  • Polyester
  • Polyolefin (including polypropylene and polyethylene)
  • Triexta
  • Acrylic

I think I can plausibly narrow it down to three, in my case, by eliminating these:

Triexta appears to be new enough that it’s not going to be the fiber in my 20-year-old wall-to-wall carpet.

Acrylic appears rare enough, in wall-to-wall carpeting, that I can’t actually find any roll-type carpet made with acrylic fiber currently offered for sale.

Polyolefin fibers appear to be used only in the cheapest carpet materials.  At Home Depot, that’s what their self-stick carpet tiles are made of.  That’s not going to be the basis for my well-wearing 20-year-old wall-to-wall.

N.B. 1:  SD means solution dyed, that is, that is, the plastic itself is dyed before the fibers are spun from it.  As opposed to dying the fibers after-the-fact.  This apparently is by far the preferred method for durability in modern carpeting.

N.B. 2:  Olefin (a.k.a. polyolefin) is a polymer (long molecule made from simple building blocks) where the basic building blocks are straight-chain alkanes (carbon and hydrogen and nothing else).  If you make it out of propane feedstock, you get polypropylene.  If you make it out of ethane feedstock, you get polyethylene.  I assume they use polyolefin when they make the fiber out of whatever’s handy, or from a mix of feedstocks.

Burn test

The most commonly-suggested way to tell what a carpet is made of is to burn (a bit of) it.  Condensing the guidance from this site:

Wool barely burns, extinguishes itself, leaves ash, and smells like burning hair.

Nylon burns well, with a smokeless blue flame, leaves a gray/black blob of melted plastic.  And stinks.  (I’ve sealed the ends of enough nylon rope to know that.  It’s your classic burning plastic smell, but does not stink quite so badly as the smell of burning electronics, which is typically the smell of burning PVC (plastic wire insulation).

Polyester burns well, with a smoky orange flame, sputters and drips as it burns, leaves a shiny plastic bead, and smells “sweet” as it burns.  (Really?)

Pretty sure this carpet isn’t wool.  So it boils down to burning a bit of it, and seeing if it stinks.  If so, it’s nylon.  If not, polyester.

What I didn’t realize is that you need a pretty good chunk of fibers to be able to do this test.  First time I tried it, I had a fluffy bit of fibers, and they simply shrank away from the flame.  Second time I got an entire piece of yarn, twisted it tightly, and got it to burn.

Results:  Sputtering flame, no ash, and no stink.  I’m pretty sure my carpet is polyester.  I could refresh my memory with a bit of nylon cord, or burn a bit of known polyester fabric, but I think this all makes sense.  Plus, burning nylon really stinks.  Like “don’t do that inside” stinks.  And while this did not smell “sweet”, this basically didn’t smell like much at all.  Which pretty much rules out nylon.

I may try some different test, if I can find one.

But odds are, given that this is 20-year-old decent-grade grade wall-to-wall carpet, with some worn spots, clearly made of synthetic, and the fiber burns without a stink, this is polyester.

Conclusion

The entire floor of my house is covered with the cut ends of polyester yarn.  And has been for the past 16 years or so.

All this time, not only did this not bother me, heck, it was downright comfy to walk on.

But now that my eyes have been opened, I see this as a comfy source of microplastic polyester fibers.

Should I care about that, or not?  Or do anything differently, now that I know?

Time to let this percolate a bit more.

Post #1942: Microplastic, some more targeted questions.

 

In my last post, I pinned down what I did and didn’t know about microplastic.  And, while I don’t (yet) think this spells the end of civilization, what I learned has given me pause.

With the just-prior post as background, I spend this post homing in on the questions that I should be asking.

They are:

1)  What are my likely sources of greatest exposure?

2)  How does this stuff break down?  What is the half-life of microplastic, particularly fibers, in various environments (including human tissue).

2B)  Are we seeing this topic frequently in the popular press because microplastic has been building up in the environment (that is, it’s now a much greater hazard than in the immediate past), or because we’re looking for it and/or we now have the means to find it?

3)  Are nano-scale (really tiny) fibers a particular concern?

I’m only going to address the first question, in this post.

Understand my background as a health economist.  Surgeons have been implanting chunks of plastic and metal into people for more than 70 years.  (The first pacemaker implant took place in the late 1950s.  Modern metal-and-plastic hip replacements go back somewhat further.)  So the right materials, properly chosen, won’t interact with the body at all.  OTOH, there’s a long list of materials that were tried and rejected, because they were not so inert.

So my prejudice is that incorporating random bits of plastic into your body is probably a bad idea.  The only question is, how bad is it?  And can you avoid it?

Wall-to-wall paranoia

The first question to ask for any environmental health hazard is, 1)  What are my likely sources of greatest exposure?

For airborne fibers, if I walk through it logically, my greatest source of exposure almost certainly has to be the wall-to-wall carpeting in my home.  It’s indoors, it contains a huge amount of fiber, it’s clearly synthetic fiber, and it is constantly being abraded by walking on it.  And it’s “clipped”, that is, every strand of carpet yarn has been sheared off, so that it’s an entire floor surface consisting of the cut ends of synthetic yarn.  In my house, every floor surface save bathroom, kitchen, and foyer is covered in the stuff.

For me, it’s a big, fiber-generating surface that I shuffle my feet across, every time I change locations within my house.

Reading up on it, I’m guessing it has maybe 60 ounces of carpet pile per square yard, a.k.a., “face weight” 60 carpeting.  Doing the math, that means my house contains somewhere around 700 pounds of carpet fibers.  In the form of short pieces of yarn, with their cut ends exposed, for me to walk on.  I’m pretty sure that outweighs all other cloth in this household, by a wide margin.  True, on any given day, most of it just sits there.  But so does most of the clothing in my closet.

I can only think of two things arguing against this being my greatest source of airborne synthetic fiber exposure.

The first is that, whatever it’s made of (I have no clue), it’s made to resist abrasion.  It was here when we moved into this house in 2007, and it looks about the same now as it did then.  (To within my ability to tell.  What I mean is, no obvious new wear spots have developed in the past 15 years.)

The second is a potential “inverse-square-law” for inhaled fiber concentrations.  That is, for a given rate of fiber shedding, the closer you are to the source of the airborne fibers, the more of them you may be likely to inhale.  If that’s true, then the fibers shed from stuff that’s right under your nose — shirts, sweaters, scarves, coats — might matter more than the fibers shed at your feet.

And if I put all that together, I come up with the obvious conclusion that crawling around on wall-to-wall carpet may not be smart.  Not that I’m planning to do that any time soon, if I have any say in it.  But the point being that having infants crawl around on your wall-to-wall carpeting might require a rethink.  Putting that differently, if you’re not worried about your kids crawling around on wall-to-wall carpet, I don’t see much point in being worried about this topic at all.  Because, outside of a factory, it’s hard for me to imagine where you could get a higher concentration of inhaled artificial fibers than in crawling across modern wall-to-wall carpeting.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

In my case, I’m going to start by trying to figure out what my carpet is made of.  It was here when we moved in, and I have no clue what the fiber is.  Nylon is a good guess, and everything I read says that nylon, in particular, is a fiber that you’d like to avoid breathing in, owing to what it produces as it slowly breaks down.

And I may be a little more diligent in vacuuming.  Given that the vacuum (in theory) has a HEPA-level filter on it, that (in theory) couldn’t hurt.

Conclusion:  What to do when you’re flying blind

From the prior post, it was absolutely clear that routinely inhaling a lot of nylon fiber is bad for you.  There’s even a name for the resulting condition — flock worker’s lung.

But so what?  Inhaling high levels of almost any fiber or powder is bad for you, be it coal dust, silicon dust, cotton dust, copier toner, wood dust, or what have you.

It’s still an open question as to whether or not there are identifiable health effects from absorption of microplastic at levels commonly found in the environment.

But, from my own perspective, given how picky medical device manufacturers are about the materials they will use for implantable medical devices, it’s a pretty good bet that inhaling and ingesting random plastic bits and fibers is probably not good for you.  How bad, exactly, we can argue about.  But almost surely not a good thing.

My first thought, in a situation like this, is to test for it.  Measure it.  See what my exposure is.

But I don’t think that’s possible, practically speaking.  I already have a “PM 2.5” meter, bought in response to the Canadian forest fires of 2023.  That almost uniformly shows lower airborne particulate levels inside my house than outside.  And that responds to all kinds of particulates, of which the tiny minority is likely to be microplastic fibers.

So this is a case of flying blind.  I can’t tell how much I’m exposed to and I have no clear idea what harm that exposure might do, anyway.

In that case, I can at least try to identify the easily-avoidable sources of microplastic, and so reduce my exposure until better information develops.  I might even go so far as to change what I buy, to avoid funding the production of even more items that shed microplastic.  (E.g., avoid synthetics in my next batch of shirts).  But I’d want to look at the full implications of that first.

So I’m stuck at the “identify my exposures” stage.  My water filter appears to take care of most of the microplastic that might make it into my tap water.  (Though I have no idea what it does with the very smallest particles).  And for airborne fiber, my biggest exposure has to be wall-to-wall carpet.  But this house was built for it, and replacing the existing wall-to-wall with hard-surface flooring would be ludicrously expensive.

Time to step back and let this percolate a bit.

Post #1936: What if this is as good as it gets?

 

Source:  Data are from U.S. DOE, Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-860, Annual Electric Generator Report. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861, Annual Electric Power Industry Report. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-923, Power Plant Operations Report and predecessor forms.

When technology produces big leaps in energy efficiency, it’s pretty easy to make meaningful reductions in your carbon footprint.  Just buy newer stuff.

But as a long-term observer of this issue, it seems to me that technology-driven gains in energy efficiency are hitting their limits.  There are a lot of important areas — cars, fridges, lighting, and even electrical generation itself — where any further reductions in carbon footprint look a lot more difficult.

What I’m trying to say is, looks like technology has already grabbed the low-hanging fruit.

I’m not going to belabor the societal implications of this.  For me, this means that once I’m driving an EV and living in a house with an efficient heat pump and LED lights, there are no more easy reductions in my household carbon emissions.  Nor are there likely to be, for the foreseeable future.  Lifestyle changes, yes.  Effortless reductions in emissions, no.

Maybe this is as good as it gets.

Continue reading Post #1936: What if this is as good as it gets?

Post #1933: A short, simple explanation of U.S. immigration law

 

/s.  The title is sarcasm.  This post isn’t about explaining U.S. immigration policy.  It’s about giving up trying to understand it, let alone explain it.

U.S. immigration policy is a stew cooked from ancient and modern quotas, agribusiness needs, humanitarian concerns, special exceptions, vestigial ethnic, racial, and religious bias, aftermath-of-war, left-over anti-communism, workforce shortages, national security issues …you name it.

It’s a dish where everybody gets to toss in an ingredient.  Or maybe everybody who can pay to play gets to.  It’s hard to tell.

Policy consists of turning a blind eye to the results, until it’s politically expedient to do otherwise.

 

And by “blind eye”, I don’t mean merely pretending that those folks don’t exist.  Although there’s plenty of that.

It’s knowing they are there, and dismissing it with a shrug.  Ever wonder why they don’t just impose stiff fines on the businesses who hire illegal aliens?  I mean, putting all the right-wing nonsense aside, if nobody would hire you, there wouldn’t be much incentive to immigrate here illegally, would there?

Ponder this:  About 44% of paid U.S. crop workers are illegal aliens.

Who says so, and how do they know?  Who says that so many agribusinesses engage in such a gross violation of Federal law?  The Federal government does.  That’s straight out of the U.S. Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey.  (From their 2019-2020 survey results summary, available as a .pdf at this link.)  And that’s the percent of folks who were willing to be interviewed, and willing to admit that they lacked legal status to work in the U.S.   But that’s after excluding all workers under H-2A temporary agricultural worker visas, from the sampling frame, to begin with.)

So it’s not as if this is some unknown, unquantifiable practice.  It’s an integral part of the U.S. food supply.  It continues because in normal times, nobody is quite crazy enough to try to disrupt that without having something else ready to take its place.

Which, needless to say, we ain’t got.

For the past few decades, the “politically expedient to do otherwise” periods seem to occur just after peaks in immigration.

And since we’re having a peak now, you’d expect another round of doing something about it. Beyond the billion or two we’ve been spending each year,  now, to fix the worst holes in the Mexican border.

And so, I finally arrive at the cause of this particular screed.

By report, a large majority of U.S. Senators are on board with beefing up security at the Mexican border.  Among other things.

But it sure looks like nothing will happen, because the Republican candidate for President sees it as too good a political issue to allow it to be solved on somebody else’s watch (reference).  And as an added bonus, we can make Putin happy by hanging Ukraine out to dry.  As part of our non-action on this issue.  And the Governor of Texas can defy the U.S. Supreme Court, with impunity.  Ah, that’s an overstatement, but it’s close enough.  Narrowlly construed, I think the Court ruling merely means that the Border Patrol can continue to remove the razor wire that gets in the way of them doing their jobs,  even as the Texas National Guard continues to lay more razor wire.  Not because it makes sense, or is effective.  But because that’s unbeatable political theater.

This is U.S. immigration policy?  Yep, it’s what passes for it, in the current situation.

Define U.S. immigration policy?  Apparently, it’s whatever the Republican executives want it to be.  Nothing more and nothing less.

Maybe I see the past through rose-colored glasses.  Maybe it’s because I spent a decade working for a U.S. legislative-branch agency, and ended up with a lot of respect for then- members of Congress.  But I swear that the U.S. Congress didn’t used to be anywhere near this screwed up.

Post #1930: Luminiser lantern, much cheaper to run than a flashlight using disposable batteries.

Above, the Luminiser lantern being powered by a candle (left), and that candle alone, right.

In my just-prior post, I worked out the basic efficiency numbers for the Luminiser candle-powered electric lantern.  It’s vastly more efficient than, say, a mantle-based oil lamp, such as an Aladdin (r) lamp.

I was so struck by how well the thing worked …

Scratch that.  I was so struck that the thing worked, at all, that I neglected to show any numbers on  operating costs.  Let me fix that now.

If you are “on the grid”, nothing is as cheap as plugging an LED lamp into the wall.  No surprise there.  Not by a longshot.

But suppose that, as a moral issue, you would not allow the general use of electricity in your home.  You live in a home that is not merely “off the grid”, but one that is purposefully and thoughtfully un-electrified. For the sake of argument, let’s say you would selectively allow battery-powered devices, when useful and necessary.  A flashlight, for example, might be OK, but a battery-powered television would not.  But you had to use disposable (alkaline) batteries, for such devices, because there’s no place to charge your rechargeable batteries.

That’s all by way of setting up the comparison.  How would the operating cost of this candle-powered lantern stack up against that of a standard battery-operated lantern or flashlight using cheap, disposable AA alkaline batteries?

Turns out, depending on what you burn in your Luminiser, it’s either vastly cheaper or merely a lot cheaper, than producing the same amount of light with disposable AAs.

I didn’t expect that, and I find it kind of interesting.   Despite the seemingly Rube Goldberg nature of this device — you use the heat of a little oil lamp (“oil candle”) to run a thermo-electric generator, to power some LEDs — the running cost of this is vastly lower than using disposable AAs in a flashlight.

Here are the results of my cost calculation.  Assuming I haven’t slipped a decimal point somewhere, the Luminiser powered with ordinary gas-pump K1 kerosene costs about 3% as much to run as a battery-operated lantern powered with disposable batteries.

Description of the calculation follows.

A few key details

This calculation assumes the following prices, current as of January 2024:

  • 33 cents per AA battery, based on a box of 60 currently at Home Depot.
  • $5/gallon for K1 kerosene (roughly the U.S. national average right now).
  • $15/gallon for Kleen Heet deodorized kerosene (Home Depot price).
  • $30/gallon for paraffin oil (the finest fuel for flat-wick oil lamps), based on the current ACE Hardware price.

For the output of the Luminiser, I’m just accepting the manufacturer’s specs of 200 lumens, for 8 hours, using one 44 milliliter oil candle.

The only hard-to-pin-down unknown is how many lumen-hours you can squeeze out of the typical disposable alkaline AA battery.   This is hard to pin down from manufacturers’ published data for many reasons, not the least of which is that they’ll lie.  But in addition, modern flashlights contain circuits that will turn down the brightness if they are left on.  And, they’ll get dimmer as they run, in any case.  Manufacturers tend to publish data on maximum brightness, and then on run time, where (unstated) the run time is mostly at some much lower brightness.  This means you can’t just multiply published lumen numbers by published run time numbers.  That will typically vastly overstate actual light output.

In my post on candles and lanterns I used an example of a real-life device that produced about 300 lumen-hours per AA battery.  That was a marine distress signal, and likely had been optimized for long battery life.  Similarly, this Nitecore flashlight works out to about 250 lumen-hours per AA battery, on low.

The figure of 300 lumen-hours for a typical AA alkaline battery is consistent with a typical AA alkaline battery capacity of 3 watt-hours of energy, and an overall energy efficiency of LED/driver circuit of 100 lumens per watt.  The AA alkaline capacity figure is pretty much a known, and the lumens-per-watt figure is at the high end of the current crop of off-the-shelf hardware-store lights.  (E.g., 90 lumens per watt for these LED bulbs (Home Depot reference).

Close enough for this kind of calculation.

Addendum:  Re-using/replacing the oil candle.

Edit 1/22/2024:  One day later, and this is obsolete.  See next post for making the permanent refillable replacement for these.

Above:  Original oil candle, 3/16 twist drill, glue syringe, and tiny drill (for air hole).

Below:  Luminiser burning with factory-original candle, and with refilled candle.

The key to operating this cheaply is to use some sort of re-fillable oil lamp to power it.  As shipped, the device comes with a small disposable oil lamp (“oil candle”).  That’s engineered to work correctly with this device, but is an expensive way to produce light.  To run it cheaply, you need to a way to use off-the-shelf kerosene or lamp oil to power this.

I did the obvious thing and demonstrated that I can, in fact, refill the little disposable oil lamp that comes with the light.  At least once.  Drill a hole just big enough for a glue syringe, drill a second smaller hole for to release air, fill the syringe with lamp oil, and inject in into the oil candle.

That works fine.    Light might be a touch dimmer, consistent with using lamp oil (paraffin oil) for the refill, which by reputation will not burn as hot as kerosene.  But if it is dimmer, it’s not dimmer enough to matter.

Lamp oil and kerosene have high flash points, so I’m not terribly worried about the little open holes in the shoulder of the oil candle.  Other than as a spill risk.  Pretty sure the plastic enclosure (and the plastic oil candle itself) would melt before it got hot enough to flash over the raw lamp oil.

But the wick on these disposable “oil candles” does not appear to be adjustable.  Or, at least, not without a lot of effort.  So this looks like it may work once or twice, but not indefinitely.

In the long run, I’m probably going to adapt one of my small (night-light-sized) oil lamps for this purpose.  These lamps are just a few inches tall, and take a round cotton-cord wick instead of a traditional flat oil-lamp wick.  They can produce a flame that’s about the size of the flame produced by this oil candle.  So, by inference, they should be just about exactly hot enough to run this device as the oil candle does.

The Luminiser seems like a robust device, in terms of fuel source.  People have run it successfully using a variety of setups for candles, for example.  Separately, I got it to run by simply sitting it on top of the chimney of one of those miniature oil lamps.  It’s no surprise that refilling the disposable oil candle with lamp oil works well. 

At this point, I’m sure I can find a setup that is both convenient and works well.  But I need to work up something a little more permanent, and a little less hazardous, than any of these makeshift solutions.  I should probably also muck about with the electrical side a bit.  For example, see if I could I gin up a USB charger circuit, and splice it into this.  But that’s for another day.

I’m not usually one to fawn over technology.  But I am reminded of Arthur C Clarke’s dictum:  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  I mean, I know how it works — as discussed in the last post, it’s a TEG.  But at a gut level, you feed this gizmo a little tiny candle flame, and it spits out enough light to read by.  Not magic, but it sure looks like it.

Post #1929: The caveman wants his fire, or, better to light one candle.

 

I just bought a candle-powered electric light, on Amazon.  The Luminiser, for $20.

What attracted me to this device, aside from the low price, is that it seems like such an irredeemably stupid concept.  Perfect for the headlights on your horse-drawn EV.  Or perhaps to replace the light bulb inside your ice-powered electric fridge.

It’s almost as if some nerds took steampunk literally, glommed up a bunch of money via Kickstarter, and created this pseudo-retro-techno-thing.  Which is, in fact, how this was developed.

But all that aside, a) it works like a charm, b) the underlying tech is pretty interesting and mostly, c) it’s a vastly more efficient light source than the candle that drives it.  And d), I’ve been wanting to own a device of this type for quite some time.

In fact, in terms of in-the-home, fossil-fuel-fired lighting — oil lamps, candles, Coleman lanterns, Aladdin lamps, gas-mantle lamps, and all of that — this is by far the most efficient one you can buy.

So chalk one up for steampunk, as I sit here typing by the light of that lantern, warmed ever-so-slightly by the candle flame in its heart.

In any case, I’m going to use this new toy as my excuse for running the numbers on the entire range of lighting — from candles to LED lights — that I have in my home.

But I’m leaving the deeper moral question for another day.  Would the Amish accept this?  At root, this two-step light generation process is no different from a mantle-type oil lamp, which is a technology generally acceptable to the Amish.

Continue reading Post #1929: The caveman wants his fire, or, better to light one candle.

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

 

In the prior post I established some basic facts.

1:  We’re still running somewhere around 2M unsuccessful attempts at illegal immigration, per year, at the Mexican border.  This is about a third higher than the previous peaks in FY 1986 (1.6M, Reagan) and FY 2000 (1.6M, Clinton).

Source:  Ultimately, the data are from US DHS, but read the prior post to see what I had to do to generate a consistent timeseries, including COVID-based expulsions,.

2: There are no hard numbers on the count of successful attempts at illegal immigration, per year, at the Mexican border.  That’s the subject of this post.  How do they estimate the number of illegal immigrants successfully crossing the Mexican border?

3:  The Congress has been funding increased personnel, barriers, and tracking technology at this border for decades, and continues to do so today.  That includes 1986 legislation that doubled the size of border patrol staff, and 2006 legislation that authorized 700 miles of walls/fences.  In recent years, the Congress has been funding “border barrier construction” at the rate of about $1.5B/year.  I believe this funding is what Biden administration is using to patch a few of the worst known holes in the Mexican border, in Arizona.

Source:  DHS Border Barrier Funding, Updated January 29, 2020, Congressional Research Service
https://crsreports.congress.gov, R45888   NOTE that there’s a large pot of money not under the control of DHHS that is not accounted for in the recent-year data.  As of this writing, I don’t know what that’s being used for.

I recommend that CRS report, cited just above, because you can see how rational the border control strategy was, at least historically.  To nobody’s surprise, they called in experts from the DoD, and they focused the resources on the easiest/busiest illegal entry routes first (CRS report, op cit, page 2).

That $1.5B a year is in addition to the roughly $6B one-time transfer within the Department of Defense budget, attempted by then-President Trump, to various border security projects.  Of which, only about $2.1B in total is available to be spent, the rest being tied up due to the (ahem) unorthodox way in which the funds were allocated, in part, via a declaration of a National Emergency. (This, as of the 2019 CRS report cited below.)

If you want to know what the DoD has been up to, with the monies re-allocated via declaration of National Emergency, there’s a corresponding CRS report on that, as of 2019, but I couldn’t quite make out what has actually taken place under that funding (reference available on this web page).  Near as I can tell, at the time that report was written, seven sections of border fence/wall were were agreed-upon to be built under DoD funding authority. But it’s clear that funding it this way created a lot of legal and other messes, some of which have resulted in the majority of funds not being spendable for border security.

Efforts by DHS to Estimate Southwest Border Security between Ports of Entry

Rather than re-invent the wheel and do my own research, I’m just going to summarize a 2017 report by the US DHS, with the title shown above (reference).  This is, in effect, a report by the Government, on the performance of the Government, so it’s not clear whether there are any explicit or implicit biases in the analysis.   If nothing else, it’s probably about as good a summary of the technical problem as you are likely to find.

This is a report done at the behest of the Congress, given the attention that then-President Trump was focusing on the Mexican border.  As described in the Report:

Congress has directed the Department to provide more detailed reporting on southwest border security. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017 directs the Department to publish “metrics developed to measure the effectiveness of security between the ports of entry, including the methodology and data supporting the resulting measures."

To paraphrase, how good a job are you doing now, at preventing illegal immigration across that border, and how do you estimate that?

So this report is exactly what I’m looking for.

Total interdiction rate, including those who turn back after crossing the border:  Implied successful illegal immigration rate of about 30% per attempt.

 

The report spends a of time talking about deterrence.  That is, the people who don’t even try to cross illegally, because we’ve made it tough for them to do so.  Or who turn back, once they see US DHS personnel.  And similar.

For example, US Border Patrol (USBP) personnel count “turn-backs”, that is, estimates of the number of persons who cross the border into the U.S., but turn back and return to Mexico once they spot USBP personnel there.

The USBP also counts “got aways”, that is, individuals observed to have made it past border security.  Essentially, these are reported either by direct observation, or by noticing signs of passage and inferring the number of people involved.

From such counts, plus apprehensions, US DHS calculates a couple of “interdiction rates”, that is, the fraction of all persons attempting to cross, who get successfully turned back.  One of those rates relies solely on data that U.S. DHS personnel observe, and so excludes most of the successful illegal immigrants.  A second estimate of the interdiction rate includes some estimate of illegal immigrants who managed to evade US DHS.

In round numbers, by the end of the period, the US DHS estimate for the success rate at crossing the Mexican border is 30%.  The other 70% either turned back voluntarily when they spotted USBP, or they were caught.

(Note that you CANNOT multiply 30%, times the roughly 2 million illegal immigrants caught at the border each year, to estimate the number of illegal immigrants at about 600K per year.  That’s because the TIR above also includes a count of “turn backs”, who are persons who were NOT apprehended crossing the border.  Based on the above, the estimated number of illegal immigrants has to be higher than that.)

But that depends critically on the very last factor above — the estimated (successful) illegal entries.

How do they estimate that?

Survey data, including only apprehensions (not turn-backs), implied successful crossing rate 50% to 70% per attempt.

There are several long-running surveys of migrants where they ask how often they’ve tried to cross into the U.S., and how frequently they’ve gotten caught.  I cannot even imagine what the potential sampling bias issues are for such surveys.  All I can say is that this DHS report summarizes the results of three long-running academically-sponsored surveys as shown above:  Roughly a 30% to 50% chance of being apprehended on any on attempt at border crossing.

So those who were willing to be surveyed — on either side of the border — report getting caught a lot less frequently than the US DHS “TIR” methodology would suggest.

near-border Repeat offenders, the partial apprehension rate:  Implied successful illegal crossing rate of perhaps 50%.

A final method used by US DHS is to track people who were caught and released into Mexico. Guess how many are likely to try it again.  Then see how many they catch a second time.

Once caught, they record “biometric” information, which I guess is fingerprints, face scans, and similar.  (So that they know if they catch them again.)

They restrict their analysis solely to individuals who live near the border.

Using a survey-based estimate, they take a guess at the fraction of those folks who are likely to try to enter illegally again.

And then they count the number that they catch a second time.

That yields the Partial Apprehension Rate shown above.  Admittedly, these are folks who by definition have had some practice at crossing.  But also, by definition, weren’t particularly good at it.  So, FWIW, they estimate that about half of that population successfully immigrates illegally across the Mexican border, on their second attempt.  And they take that estimate — roughly 50% — as a reasonable guess for the overall rate of successful illegal immigration.

Conclusion

I could go on.  This report presents its own complex estimate of likely count of illegal immigrants, but I honestly didn’t follow the logic or the resulting numbers.

The only real bottom line is that the Mexican border is quite porous, and that successful illegal immigration occurs routinely.  You could quibble over just how large a fraction, but as a good working estimate, you’d be justified in guessing that about half the people who try it succeed.

Moreover, there’s no strong trend there.  The is maybe a little harder to cross now, compared to (say) 20 years ago.  But only a little.

We’re currently targeting a billion or two a year at building and reconstructing walls and fences along the border, adding other security measures, and so on.  I’m hardly an expert, but I’m not seeing anything on the plate right now that hasn’t been there for the past couple of decades.

In any case, given the history of this, I think the notion that we’re somehow going to seal that border air-tight strikes me as somewhat far-fetched. Or expensive beyond our willingness to pay, take your pick.

My prediction is that the current Congress — if it can be prodded into action — will do what prior Congresses have done.  Address the worst known points for illegal entry.  Place a few more patches on the existing system.  And wait for the problem to go away for another decade or so.

No matter how you slice it, the influx of a million destitute people a year, in those border states, has to be putting a strain on something.

Despite the rhetoric, some Federal money goes to support whatever-it-is that communities in border states have to spend more money on, in response.  And while illegal (undocumented) immigrants (migrants) are not eligible for (e.g.) Medicaid, the Feds do, in fact, give communities money to deal with the basic humanitarian issues of food and shelter.  (E.g., $290M, per this press release).  Allocated like so, to local charities in those states, showing just the first few listed alphabetically:

But if you read the fine print, none of that applies to successful illegal immigrants, those who got across the border without being apprehended.  Or are not claiming asylum.  And so on.  Those grants to local charities only apply to those who have been “processed” in some form, by immigration authorities.

So at present, there’s a large influx of very poor people, who are almost by definition outside of “the system” and are categorically ineligible for any type of direct Federal assistance.  For example, they can’t get food stamps (reference).  They are, effectively, un-people.

The only major exception is for children.  Even if their parents crossed the border illegally, in theory, the U.S. won’t allow them to starve.  I think.  And schools that take Federal funds have to enroll them.  I think.  Including free and reduced price lunches, if they are not too scared to apply for that.

And so, we have this weird situation in those border states.  Everybody with any sense realizes they’re getting a million or so people a year, currently mostly refugees from bad conditions in South and Central America.  Or just looking for a better life.  Who crossed the border illegally.  And it’s a fantasy to expect that to stop any time soon.  If ever.  But the Feds can’t do anything to ease the resulting strain on state and local governments, because that large population falls entirely outside of the law.

Everybody knows they’re there, somewhere.  Everybody can see that more are coming.  But nobody can help state and local governments deal with the bulk of the problem.  Because that million-a-year influx consists of people who have no legal standing.  And so we carry on, with policy-by-fantasy, or policy-by-turning-a-blind-eye.  Or no policy at all.

Addendum:  Gross versus net, or missing the reverse flow.

Source:  Immigrationpolicy.org

Notice anything odd about the graph above?  If there’s this huge ongoing influx of illegal immigrants … why are all the curves flat?  Why isn’t the estimate of illegal alien U.S. residents rising?

What I’ve looked at so far is the gross inflow of illegal immigrants across the border.   The graph above looks at the net number of illegal aliens living here.  Assuming both estimates are reasonably close to correct, there has to be a pretty big outflow of illegal immigrants, back out of the U.S.

So, as a matter of logic, I’m missing a potentially large flow of people in my overall analysis of illegal immigration.  Some fraction of successful illegal immigrants — those who cross the border illegally, and end up settled somewhere away from the border — eventually cross back.  To get at net illegal immigration, I should, in theory, subtract out that flow.

(And there’s also some fraction of that population lost to illegal immigrants who are granted some form of amnesty, and so convert to legal status.  But there hasn’t been a large-scale amnesty program since Reagan, I think.  Maybe there was one under Clinton?  And then there are attempts to convert the ambiguous legal status of individuals who came here illegally as children but are now grown-up Americans — without legal residency status.)

Historically, there seems to have been a reasonably large reciprocal flow of Mexicans returning to Mexico, from the U.S.  In fact, since 2008, more Mexican nationals have left the U.S. than have entered, by some estimates.  (Or this NY Times article, if you prefer a human interest story to mere statistics.).

To that you’d have to add anybody deported from the interior of the U.S., as only those captured near the border are counted in apprehensions.  (And even there, I’m not sure of the status of long-term illegal residents of communities near the border, who end up being deported as illegal aliens).

By all accounts, if you followed the graph above for another couple of years, there would have likely been an uptick.  But not nearly as much as you might guess, purely from the estimated gross flow of illegal aliens across the border.

Thus, the final lesson for today is that the net growth in the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. is far less than the gross influx of illegal immigrants in any year.

It’s a slight mis-statement to put it this way, but our porous border is porous in both directions.

Addendum 2:  Overstays

Prior to (say) 2017 or so, the single largest source of new illegal U.S. residents every year was individuals who overstayed their visas.  They entered the U.S. legally as tourists, students, or workers, with a visa specifying a defined period of residence, or perhaps legal residence when accomplishing some defined task (e.g., a course of graduate study).  And then the U.S. has no record of their departure, prior to the expiration of that visa.

In the FY 2022 Overstay report, by US DHS, 3.67 percent of persons with such visas overstated their visa, resulting in about 850,000 persons who were, for some period of time, illegal residents of the U.S., because they overstayed their visas.

Aside from that one factoid, I gleaned nothing else useful from that overstay report.  It’s not clear to me how much of that is bookkeeping errors, how much is persons who overstayed by a few days, and so on.  How many eventually left.  And so on.

So it’s hard to make much out of that, except to say that prior to the latest increase in likely illegal immigration at the Mexican border, that was consistently the single largest category of annual “illegal immigration”.  Take that for what it’s worth.