The Collateral Source Rule

One of the more subtle but key underpinnings of the tort law system for compensating people for accidents is the collateral source rule. 

While it is somewhat more involved, the basic idea is that when your own insurance covers you for an injury, for example, for medical bills, or to replace your damaged car or house, or paying you disability payments when you lose income for a period of time, that you can sue for the full amount of the harm without deducting insurance covered losses.

Closely related are the doctrines that say that medical providers have a lien against what you recover in a lawsuit to recover damages that they paid for, and the right of an insurer to bring a lawsuit, called a subrogation claim, against someone whose tortious actions gave rise to the insurance claim to get back what it paid to the insured for that loss, if the insured doesn't sue.

As a practical matter, subrogation claims are uncommon and the lawyers who usually defend insureds who are sued hate bringing them, because the dollar amounts are often modest and they are loss motivated to bring them (and have less of the relevant information in many cases) than an insured who actually suffered the loss.

In substance, a very large share of personal injury and property damage tort cases are cases where the defense lawyers and defense judgment are paid for by one insurance company, and where the medical expenses and property damage claims were mostly paid by another another insurance company or credit extending medical provider with a lien on what was paid for those damages, and where a large share of the non-economic damages awarded go towards paying a contingent fee of the Plaintiff's attorney.

The system provides rough justice, but the benefits of this convoluted system that arises from the collateral source rule, over the system that would evolve without it, are dubious. 

A variety of reforms have been proposed and tried to rework this arrangement, but they're beyond the scope of this post.

Opera And Ballet

Opera and ballet are skeletal stories, told live in extremely intense ways, with maximum pomp and circumstance.

Madam Butterfly, for example, a gilded age classic written by Puccini that debuted in 1904, has only about 11,000 words (with considerable repetition), less than a novella, although more than a typical short story, which is fitting as it can't quite decide if it is a two act opera or a three act opera.

Pop songs are typically two to four minutes and have 300 to 700 words (often with considerable repetition), but are often recorded and are often presented with less pomp. Even a whole album of pop songs, to the extent that people make them anymore, typically has fewer words than a typical short story.

The intense focus these culture genres place on an elemental basic idea or story is part of what makes these works primal and emotionally powerful.

In contrast, a typical single volume novel has 70,000 to 100,000 words, often is made up of several volumes, and tells a much more fleshed out story with multiple intertwined parallel plot lines. It too is powerful storytelling, but in a more cerebral way.

Planetary Defense Is Worth It

I will always be a strong supporter of a strong planetary defense against comets and asteroids. These "Black Swan" events are rare, but the consequences of even one of them striking Earth and doing great damage would be immense.

If they are headed towards Earth's surface and too large for our atmosphere to provide an adequate defense against, they are always the "bad guy."

There are estimated to be about 45 undiscovered mass extinction class near Earth asteroids, about about 13,750 undiscovered "city killer" sized near Earth asteroids (that would destroy everything in a whole metro area of a major city, if it hit one, killing millions of people), and about 214,000 Hiroshima blast sized near Earth asteroids out there. These asteroids could strike us with short notice. The asteroids wouldn't create the radiation blast and contamination of a nuclear bomb (or highly toxic chemical weapon), but would have comparable kinetic impact to a nuclear bomb.

We need both better asteroid detection technologies (which NASA's new NEO Surveyor mission which is scheduled to launch in Septemer of 2027, twenty-one years after it was proposed, will profoundly improve) and better asteroid interception technologies that can respond to incoming asteroids and comets on short notice (i.e. many hours to several days), which is not currently in place, although rudimentary and ad hoc ICBM responses could be devised that could mitigate the harm if done right (but could make things worse if it diverts a large fragment or cluster of fragments from an uninhabited area towards a city).

Image via Wikipedia.

The NEO Surveyor mission is projected to:

• Find 2⁄3 of Asteroids Larger than 140 Meters in Diameter
• Assess the Overall Threat Posed by Potential Earth Impactors
• Assess the Impact Threat Posed by Comets
• Determine Orbits and Physical Characteristics of Specific Discovered Objects

140 meters in diameter is a commonly used threshold for a "city killer" asteroid and would have an explosive energy twenty-times that of the Hiroshima A-bomb, and more in line with a never used H-bombs in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenal. 

If two-thirds of the 140 meter or larger near Earth asteroids were found, that would be about 5,000 of the estimated 13,750 undiscovered asteroids of that size in the first five years of the mission which is planned to run for twelve years.

It will also probably find at least a significant number of undiscovered global distinction sized asteroids of the estimated 45 that remain undiscovered, and a significant percentage of the estimated 214,000 undiscovered Hiroshima bomb impact class asteroids (of which only an estimated 7% of which are now discovered), although probably far less than two-thirds of them.

NEO Surveyor will also refine our estimates of how many large asteroids remain undiscovered despite this mission, and of the risk that these undiscovered asteroids could strike inhabited places on Earth. With more accurate estimates of known asteroid trajectories, more known asteroids which come close to Earth but are not on track to impact it could be ruled out as threats allowing surveillance of potential threats to be narrowed to those objects that really are something to worry about.

We are sufficiently technologically advanced at this point to build adequate planetary defenses, but organizing the planet to fund and deploy them is another matter. The NEO Surveyor mission cost $500 million to $600 million, which is less than a single major U.S. warship or Air Force long range bomber, or several start of the art U.S. Air Force fighter jets. Military missile defense technologies (like the "Golden Dome" plan for the U.S.) can be adapted for planetary defense purposes, to some extent, but aren't optimized for this task.

The good news is that the many millions or more smaller asteroids and space junk objects mostly burn up in the atmosphere before hitting Earth with enough damage to be much more dangerous than a random and rare lightning strike. So, we harm from not tracking or intercepting them is modest.

Also, a huge share of the Earth's surface is made up of oceans, large lakes, uninhabited ice scapes, thinly inhabited mountains and deserts, and thinly inhabited rural areas or wilderness. A "city killer" or smaller asteroid has a quite localized danger zone and isn't radioactive or toxic for the most part. 

So, while it might kill or injure a small number of people in the immediate vicinity of the impact, and might trigger a significant tsunami or landslide (urban areas are disproportionately coastal), about 71% of Earth's surface is water, about 28% of Earth's surface is nearly uninhabited or rural, and only about 1% of Earth's surface is urban. So, most "city killer" or smaller extraterrestrial impacts would lead to fairly modest casualties. But the risk of mass casualties from an extraterrestrial impact is much greater now than it was for most of human history, because the world's population has grown so much and is concentrated in cities.

This analysis assumes that all locations on Earth are equally at risk, which isn't strictly speaking true, but is a close enough approximation of the reality to be a useful starting point.

While there have been only a handful of attested really big extraterrestrial impacts in human history, and only a few more than we have clear evidence of in the last 300,000 years or so when the human species came into being, there have probably been hundreds, if not several thousand that went unnoticed because they landed in uninhabited areas, or left no survivors in thinly populated areas and didn't leave any traces clear enough to attested to their impacts geologically before their impacts were eroded away.

More than half of the “city killer” asteroids that might threaten Earth remain undiscovered. With an infrared eye, NASA’s NEO Surveyor aims to find them.

Image from the linked article in Science magazine.

Russia Has Lost 30% Of Its Black Sea Fleet

Ukraine has done a remarkable job to degrading Russia's Black Sea naval fleet for a country without a navy of its own.

Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was once a dominant regional naval force. But the fleet has been severely weakened, resulting in a shift from an offensive force to a defensive “fleet-in-being.” What’s notable about the fleet’s degradation is that Ukraine didn’t need a traditional navy to inflict it; rather, it used drones, missiles, and targeting to strip the Black Sea Fleet of its ability to operate, offering another example of asymmetric, cheap measures crippling traditional, expensive military platforms.

Russia is believed to have lost 30 percent of its Black Sea Fleet, either to damage or outright destruction. That’s 24–29 vessels lost. Key losses include the flagship vessel, the Moskva cruiser, and multiple landing ships.

The remaining strike force consists of seven offensive warships, including two frigates, three corvettes, and two submarines. So the fleet still exists, but its offensive capabilities have collapsed. . . .

The primary weapon in the fleet’s arsenal is the Kalibr cruise missile. Before the Russo-Ukrainian War, the fleet had the capability to launch large missile salvos. But now the Kalibr can be launched from just five surface ships and two submarines, limiting the fleet’s ability to launch its pre-war missile salvos. . . .

Loss of Bases 

Ukraine has also targeted Russian naval bases. Sevastopol, the primary naval hub, has been repeatedly struck, forcing the fleet to relocate. But the new base, Novorossiysk, has also been under attack.

The result has been that Russia no longer has a secure naval base in the Black Sea, which has obviously degraded its ability to maintain a meaningful presence there. And now, with the fleet concentrated in Novorossiysk, Ukraine has a base under constant drone threat, limiting the fleet’s ability to maneuver.

As a defensive measure, the ships rarely leave port, and the submarines hide near the bases. So the existing fleet is effectively contained—still present but operationally inactive.

Missile Capability Degradation

Maintenance Collapse

The fleet has suffered from a maintenance collapse. The core issue is that there is no dry dock, and the Bosporus Strait has been closed. The result is that no major repairs have been made, and overall readiness has been severely degraded.

Damaged ships have been forced to simply remain damaged, meaning that even ships that survive are slowly losing their effectiveness. . . .

Strategic Implications

The destruction of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet suggests that large ships are now vulnerable to cheap and effective drones that adversaries can deploy in swarms.

Sea control has been redefined; Ukraine does not have a traditional navy, yet it still managed to deny Russia’s ability to use a traditional navy to control the seas.

The global lesson here is that fleets can be neutralized without a fleet-on-fleet battle. The Black Sea may offer a glimpse into the future of naval warfare, where distributed, low-cost systems are effective counters to legacy systems.

From National Security Journal.

Apache AH-64 Gunships On Ships

I've been a longtime advocate of using Apache AH-64 helicopter gunships on naval ships, particularly in roles like piracy suppression on otherwise lightly armed ships, like the Littoral Combat Ships.

Now, the U.S. Navy is now considering the idea.

Posting Patterns At This Blog And Its Sister Blog

Obviously, I'm posting this at this blog than in previous years, averaging about two posts per week, which seems like a reasonable target going forward. This puts this blog on track to have the fewest number of posts since its inception in 2005 (by a wide margin), but still means it is a very active blog compared to many blogs.

Some content that would have appeared on this blog has also been shifted to quick hit posts on Facebook, in lieu of deeper analysis here, because that's quicker and easier. Not infrequently, my Facebook posts get reworked into a quick hits post or a deeper analysis of one of those posts, and conversely, sometimes posts here make their way to Facebook when I think it would be a good fit for that format.

At sister blog Dispatches From Turtle Island, I've managed to keep up the pace of roughly one post every other day that I've maintained since the inception of that blog in 2011, although my posts there have gotten a little thinner and the balance has tipped a little more towards physics from anthropology and prehistory and linguistics type posts that take more effort to write adequately.

I still do continue my practice of about fifteen years of scanning every single preprint at arXiv on astrophysics, general relativity and cosmology, HEP-experiment, HEP-lattice, and HEP-phenomenology (at least 95-98% of the time), of bookmarking the interesting papers, reading the body text of the articles whose abstracts don't tell enough of the story, and of blogging the papers that are truly interesting, as well as scanning my several regular sources for anthropology type articles daily, bookmarking them, and less often actually blogging them (less often than I'd like), and scanning some of my other sources like Science Daily and other science blogs a few times a month. Sometimes I miss a day or two when I'm busy or traveling, but when I do, I go back and add them to my review later (almost all of the time, although I sometimes miss as much as five to ten days a year when I miss too much to easily go back).

This blog has fallen off more than its sister blog, in part, because the means by which I generate ideas for it aren't as systematic.

My stack exchange posting has dropped pretty much to one to three posts a month, mostly at Law.SE but rarely at Politics.SE where I used to be a moderator (a job I've relinquished and don't miss).

I also make an occasional post at the Physics Forums, although that has dropped to maybe 10% of my previous posting rate and often involves cross posts from Dispatches From Turtle Island, or a brief comment to a discussion thread that I started to post at before taking my current job which inhibits my ability to post.

I really mourn the loss of all of the Typepad blog content (even the archival posts!). But, blogger seems to be O.K. for the indefinite future (readers, please give me a heads up if it is preparing to go off line so I can archive my posts, which are also available through Lexis Nexus which syndicates this blog for a trivial royalty of about $25 every 12-24 months), and Substack seems to be quite healthy and is the latest hot blogging platform.

Other 30-90 Year Time Horizon Predictions

In my previous post, Oil and Water, I made some predictions on a 30-90 year time horizon. 

What are some other predictions I'd make in that time frame?

* The U.S. birthrate will fall significantly from current levels, and the U.S. population will decline. Later in that time period, peak global population will be reached as Sub-Saharan Africa reaches is demographic transition, and the global population will start to fall.

* Life expectancies will rise significantly, not only in the less developed world, but in the developed world. Many diseases that are commonplace today with be virtually eliminated or will become much more effectively treatable. These include: M.S., lupus, gum disease, most common STDs, many kinds of cancer, and conditions like Down's Syndrome and cerebral palsy.

* The proportion of people who are non-religious will reach a majority in the U.S. Mainline Protestantism will take the biggest hit. Evangelical Christianity will become much less influential politically and much less conservative as it undergoes generational transitions of leadership. Mormons will experience some of the smaller declines among Christian and Christian adjacent faiths.

* Legacy communications technologies like shortwave radio, a.m. radio, landline phone service, and broadcast television will finally go dark.

* Most global military forces, including the U.S. military, will stop using manned tanks.

* Large surface combatant naval ships will become more scarce globally.

* Everyone's whole genome will routinely be recorded as an infant.

* Existing U.S. race categories will break down and be re-conceptualized as more and more Americans are mixed race.

* There will be at least one major political-economic catastrophe that greatly reduces income inequality.

* Drugs like marijuana and psychedelics which are just being legalized now, will not be re-criminalized.

* Putin's regime will collapse, possibly accompanied by a further break up of the components of the Russian state, and will be replaced by a flawed democratic regime or regimes that are still less authoritarian than the current regime.

* China and the countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America will join the ranks of fully developed countries.

* The Palestinian territories of Israel will cease to be. There are multiple, hard to predict scenarios regarding how this comes about. Also, since this is such a hot topic (managing fights over Israeli-Palestinian issues was the worst part of being a moderator at Politics.SE), I want to make clear that this does not reflect a preference about whether this is good or bad, and instead simply represents a prediction about what is likely to happen, particularly in light of recent geopolitical developments in Gaza and the West Bank, and in Southern Lebanon, especially since the events of October 7, 2023, and also in light of trends in Israeli-Palestinian relations during the 21st century (which we are more than a quarter of the way through, yipes!).

* Moderate and modernist tendencies within Islam will eventually start to prevail over extreme Islamist factions in most countries. This will happen earliest in countries where fossil fuel production is the least important part of the economy on a percentage basis.

* Cryptocurrencies will go out of style and will be relegated to a historical curiosity.

* The number of people employed to transport goods will dramatically decrease.

* Drones in all transportation modes, and sessile automated systems will pervasively influence both civilian life and the nature of military conflicts, transforming both profoundly.

* Global manufacturing employment will decrease to due increased automation and Africa will become a manufacturing center due to its cheap labor and permissive regulatory environment, once political stabilization is achieved.

* A much larger share of construction employment will work in factories making large subcomponents of buildings to be transported to the building site for final assembly.

* Economic growth rates will start to stagnate, especially outside Africa.

* People on Earth will launch a space probe to the nearest star, although it probably will not yet have reached its destination and will be in deep space moving very fast towards its destination. In the meantime, it will function as a deep space, space telescope.

* Social norms will increasingly devalue privacy.

* Popular consumer software will become much less buggy, and will eventually get easier to use, after somebody sees the potential for profit in improving on the widely known defects of the current leading software programs in wide consumer or business use.

* The concept of dark matter will be abandoned in favor of some gravitational law based explanation for phenomena attributed to dark matter. This will probably also be the case with dark energy, and the time period half half a century to a century when these theories were the conventional wisdom will be known as the dark ages of astronomy and cosmology.

* While it will never die entirely, I suspect that beyond the Standard Model physics research will lose a lot of luster and support and empirical evidence for it becomes more scarce with an additional generation or three of improved high energy physics experiments that further narrow the gaps where it could play a role, even though physicists will never entirely abandon this pursuit. 

* There are also at least even odds in this time period that theoretical explanations for most of the two dozen experimentally measured physical constants of the Standard Model will be found. Indeed, going towards the next point, this may be a particularly promising place for quantum computing and AI to play a role.

* Quantum computing will be developed, but it will only make much of a difference in specialized applications. Quantum computing seems particularly promising for applications like high energy physics (especially QCD), numerical general relativity capturing non-perturbative effects there, and cryptography.

* I'd be remiss not to mention it, as this time from is critical for AI, but I don't have strong predictions about the impact of AI and machine learning. It seems most useful practically in efficiently analyzing big data sets, for doing something similar to Bayesian statistical analysis to discovery hidden subtle patterns in data,  for digesting research information quickly for people who don't need to understand it in depth, in serving as an efficiency amplifier for computer programmers and other people who write text whose quality isn't important, and for automating customer service, and for automating fairly narrow tasks and jobs even if they require high level "thinking" (as opposed to more general unstructured roles). Visual image interpretation is further down the line but we're getting there. The impact of generative creative fields like art, fiction, and audio-visual presentations is hard to gauge - will it be a curiosity and fad, a tool for serious creators to increase efficiency as in other fields, or will it be transformative in ways unforeseen. And, the non-transparency of AI will continue to be an ongoing issue, although it is hard to know if its current tendency to hallucinate and have no sense of what is true or not is an early beta test version bug or if it is likely to be an ongoing issue. AI alignment as we progress toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) and artificial super-intelligence is also a key issue with some signs already emerging of consciousness and self-preservation tactics by AI models and social cooperation between AI models already starting to emerge. I don't see it as an apocalyptic or existential threat, but there are definitely serious risks involved in the technology, many of which are unknown unknowns.

* The mix of jobs in the job market will change a lot, with many traditional job categories shrinking a great deal and replaced but large numbers of new jobs in sectors that we barely even conceptualize as distinct job roles now. This structural change in the job market will have immense, but hard to predict in detail, political implications.

Oil And Water

Scarcity of oil and rising petroleum prices, and climate change driven drought, are a big deal. But there are fairly clear paths by which our society can adapt to both. Neither would be apocalyptic, even though it would drive significant, visible changes in our day to day material culture.

These matters are particularly worth thinking about on Earth Day, which is today.

Oil

A very large share of all petroleum consumption is for transportation, mostly cars, trucks, construction vehicles, boats, ships, and trains. Advances in battery technology, and EV manufacturing and infrastructure are making electric vehicle alternatives to all of those technologically viable. And, advances in renewable energy and nuclear power can replace almost all of the fossil fuels in the electrical power grid. Coal is well on its way to be phased out in the United States and much of the developed world. Alaska and Hawaii are the only U.S. states where a significant share of electricity is generated from petroleum. Heat pumps are paving the way as an alternative to heating buildings that were historically heated with heating oil in the U.S. (mostly in the Northeast). 

Heat pumps and evaporative coolers (together with better insulation) also dramatically more energy efficient than conventional air conditioning, and renewables like solar and wind combined with modern batteries are particularly well suited to meet the demand for electricity to provide cooling.

Lots of fertilizers that are petroleum based could also become unaffordable, as they have as global petroleum supplies have been interrupted by U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and its counterattacks. But organic farming techniques are now well established enough that these methods pose an obvious alternative path for agriculture is petroleum based fertilizers cease to become economically viable. Dutch models of intensive hydroponic agriculture suggests another off ramp from what is now considered conventional agriculture.

There are some applications where there aren't good alternatives to petroleum, like plastics and jet fuel. But these are such a small share of total petroleum consumption that these uses could be sustained, even if they become more expensive, even if petroleum prices soar and the supplies contract greatly. 

Of course, plastics and petroleum based fabrics like nylon, have only been in wide use for about sixty years. If plastic becomes too expensive, we can revert to using metal, glass, wood, and plant and animal fiber alternatives for applications like kitchen ware and trash bins that aren't uniquely suited to plastic, as traditional alternatives becomes more affordable relative to plastic with rising petroleum prices.

The changes wouldn't be geographically neutral. A collapse in demand for petroleum driving by electric vehicles and organic farming would crush the economies of petrostates in the Middle East, in Brunei, in Nigeria, in Venezuela, and in select states within the United States. West Virginia has already seen its coal based economy collapse, as have many historically coal mining economy based regions in Europe. Wyoming will follow suit. 

On the other hand, rare earth rich areas who supply key components of modern batteries and electronics, may see mineral economy booms.

Water

In most of the arid west, marginal agricultural activity consumes 80%-90% of all fresh water, while landscaping and golf courses consume about half of the rest of the fresh water. If water becomes scarce, entire regions can eliminate their water hungry landscaping, golf courses can close or become much more expensive or use artificial grass, and marginal agricultural operations can close.

In places like the Arabian Peninsula, Greece, Utah, and California, desalination technology might become more prominent as a water source, at least for high value municipal waters uses like drinking, cooking, and bathing, and gray water systems would use non-potable water (such as salt water from the ocean or salt water lakes) in applications where drinkability wasn't important, like flushing toilets.

Climate change that produces global warming ultimately both gives and takes away arable land. It renders much of the arid West unsuitable for farming and ranching, but makes places that were too cold for farming in the past, more suitable for it. Even when climate change doesn't actually change the total amount of arable land somewhere, it may change the kind of agriculture that is appropriate in that place.

Places that used to support subtropical orange groves may freeze more often and get dryer and become more suitable for cotton and the soft wheat varieties currently grown in places north of Florida in the American South. Crops now grown in the South might start to be grown in the Midwest. The abundant corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains and Midwest might move north to Canada. The Great Plains might transition from grain farming to cattle grazing.

I'm not a climate scientist. I don't have exact models of exactly when and where climate zones that are suitable for particular crops and livestock will relocate. But that's the basic concept.

The ongoing wars across the Sahel of Africa illustrate how ugly the process of having herders ecologically forced into historically horticultural land can be without strong geographically large states to force the transition to be made with money instead of violence can look. But with strong states that remove violence as a viable option, the transition, while still massively disruptive, could be less tragic in places like North America and Western Europe.

Similarly, the skiing industry might relocate from places like Colorado and Vermont to places like the Yukon and Alaska, in North American, and from places like the Alps in Europe to the northern Urals and the Himalayas in Eurasia.

Many Sunbelt communities in places like Arizona and Texas and Florida may see the waves of migration to avoid the cold winters of the north replaced by migration north to avoid the months of hundred degree plus water in the Sunbelt which are already commonplace in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, while the rust belt, with its winters made milder due to global warming and abundant fresh water, may start to look more attractive, and may attract mass return migrations.

One of these days, people in the Sunbelt may return to the traditional solution of having midday siestas, inside cooler, shaded adobe insulated homes, and becoming more active once the sun goes down and the air cools late into the evening.

Coastal communities will have to build dikes or lose land area as sea levels rise, and many will have to remake their architectural landscape in the face of increasingly severe storms, something that will hit the U.S. states of Florida and Louisiana and some islands in Oceania particularly hard.

Species limited to narrow microenvironment ranges will go extinct en masse, as human encroachment upon their habitats, ecological disruption, and human predation have already done to many species already.

How fast will it happen?

We are, in 2026, at about the place on this path that we thought we'd be in the year 2006, back in 1986. Events like the transitions to EVs and heat pumps and renewables and industrial scale organic farming happened, but it took about twice as long as futurists at the time thought that it would.

Climate change, on the other hand, is happening faster than expected by a decade or three. The changes that were initially looking like they would take a century to run their course are now looking like they will occur in half of that time.

Certainly, these transitions are medium to long run trends. They will probably takes decades more to run their course. These transitions probably won't be complete in my lifetime, although they probably will run their course in the lives of my children, or at least, in the lives of my future grandchildren. Less poetically, this time frame is about 30-90 years.

But these trends are both massive and inexorable, like plate tectonics but much, much faster. Fast enough that it will be visible in future tree ring records.

Conclusion

These are huge, traumatic changes that will force mass migrations and fundamental changes in people's day to day culture. But they don't mean the end of modern life as we know it either. And falling birthrates will eventually lead to smaller global and regional populations that put less strain on scarce water and fossil fuel resources.

Quick Health Hits

* Fatty liver disease drugs found.

* A blood test to detect Alzheimer's disease early developed.

* A breakthrough in stopping the Epstein-Barr virus, which is found in 95% of people and causes mono, MS, and lupus.

* Bread, rice, and wheat make you gain more weight with the same amount of calories, by changing your metabolism.

* A new toothpaste would kill gum disease causing bacteria while leaving the rest of the mouth's good microbiome in place.

* A new biochemical cause of aging has been discovered.

* Guinea worm infections have been virtually eliminated. In 1986, there were 3.5 million people infected worldwide, and there is still no cure.

Blame

Part of the reason we use the law to assign blame is to free those to whom blame is not assigned of guilt.

Affordability

What are the easiest policies to make life more affordable?

* Unilaterally end tariffs.

* Legalize car imports from China and reduce trade barriers to importing smaller cars from Europe. This would greatly increase choices and competition for basic cars.

* Support the infrastructure to shift to electric vehicles making us less vulnerable to global petroleum prices and less incentivized to go to war over oil.

* Eliminate fares for high volume transit routes.

* Encourage renewable energy sources like solar and wind which are now cheaper than coal and are not subject to natural gas price fluctuations.

* Remove barriers to building affordable housing, especially zoning that restricts density and rules out multi-family housing, parking mandates, lot size limitations, and aesthetic building code requirements. Encourage high quality manufacturing of homes and large components of homes in lieu of stick building everything on site.

* Encourage the Fed to take a more gradual approach to increasing interest rates when economic conditions call for it to do so, so that housing markets have time to adjust to higher mortgage rates which decrease affordability until housing prices transition to adjust to the ability to pay.

* Tax unoccupied housing more heavily to discourage hoarding of empty housing that reduces housing supply and drives up housing prices.

* Enact policies that financially penalize profitable companies for the burden that they impose on government when a significant share of their workers need welfare to make ends meet, in part, by increasing the minimum wage.

* Shift revenue sources for ECE (early childhood education)-12 education from property taxes to income taxes. This makes the taxes more progressive. It increases funding equity between places with large property tax bases per student (like rich suburbs and resorts) and places with small property tax bases per student (like low income municipalities and rural areas). This also reduces housing costs.

* Make free meals for all part of the standard ECE-12 education package.

* Make access to ECE and kindergarten and afterschool programs universal.

* Encourage international students at colleges and universities who basically subsidize domestic students by paying full tuition.

* Publicly fund higher education, without significant student loans, with all students with a reasonable chance of completing their degrees, while limiting admissions for students who have a high probability of failing. This makes access to higher education possible for working class and middle class kids increasing their future incomes and class mobility while making the economy more productive, and reduces the squeeze on families at the low end of upper middle class who don't easily qualify for need based grant financial aid, but still pay higher shares of their income than others.

* Reinvigorate vocational programs at high schools and community colleges for students for whom a traditional liberal arts college curriculum or four year degree isn't a good fit.

* Establish new medical school and medical professional school capacity to increase the supply of doctors and other medical professionals.

* Welcome foreign medical professionals, thus increasing the supply of medical professionals whose compensation is driven up by a limited supply, especially in rural areas where domestic medical professionals are least likely to prefer.

* Medicare for all or similar universal health care financing, that cuts out health care billing and insurance company administration costs and profits, ends barriers to health care for the self-employed and unemployed and those with jobs providing only second rate health insurance with high deductibles, funds health care in proportion to ability to pay, ends medical debt and bankruptcies, takes pressure off high cost ER care, and improves the bargaining power over drug costs and other provider costs. Health care expenses of employers also reduce wages more or less dollar for dollar.

* Broaden access to long term care, including home health care and assisted living, on a basis similar to universal healthcare, and finance it with estate taxes.

Misconceptions

Conventional wisdom can be misleading.

* Courts are not primarily dispute resolution forums. They are primarily legal right enforcement forums.

* Our system is primarily a rule of law system. We are democratic in the sense that we seek democratic involvement in innovation and change in the system, not that it is democratic in how day to day decisions are made.

* Unemployment is not a shortage of jobs. The absolute stock of jobs is not what matters. Unemployment is a failure of entrepreneurs to devise economically worthwhile things for people to do and to locate people who are available to do it. 

New Health And Climate Research

* They're well along in developing a toothpaste or mouthwash that with treat gum disease by stymying harmful mouth bacteria that cause it, while leaving the good parts of your mouth's microbiome alone. Current mouth washes like Listerine kill everything and the bad bacteria often recover quicker.

* The drought is a problem in surprising ways.

For years, water managers have been puzzled as the Colorado River kept delivering less water than expected—even when snowpack levels looked promising. New research reveals the missing piece: spring rain, or rather, the lack of it. Warmer, drier springs mean plants are soaking up more snowmelt before it can reach rivers, fueled by sunny skies that boost growth and evaporation. In fact, this shift explains nearly 70% of the shortfall, tying the mystery directly to the long-running Millennium drought.

* The same, yet different:

New research reveals that obesity affects men and women in surprisingly different ways. Men are more likely to develop harmful abdominal fat and signs of liver stress, while women show higher inflammation and cholesterol levels. These differences could help explain why health risks vary between sexes. Scientists say this could lead to more tailored treatments for obesity.

* Genes greatly influence your chance of dying from age related health conditions: 

For years, scientists believed our lifespan was mostly shaped by environment and chance, with genetics playing only a minor role. But a new study from the Weizmann Institute flips that idea on its head, revealing that genes may actually account for about half of the differences in how long people live. By analyzing massive twin datasets—including twins raised apart—and using innovative simulations to filter out deaths from accidents and other external causes, researchers uncovered a hidden genetic influence that had been masked for decades.

* A possible alternative to GLP-1 drugs would have less side effects, but some of those side effects like greater executive function and an ability to fight addictions might be good ones:

A newly discovered molecule could reshape the future of weight loss treatments by mimicking the powerful appetite-suppressing effects of drugs like Ozempic — but without many of the unpleasant side effects. Identified using artificial intelligence, this tiny peptide, called BRP, appears to act directly on the brain’s appetite-control center, helping animals eat less and lose fat without nausea or muscle loss.

* Another study suggests that an early dinner and an early breakfast might help you lose weight:

A major study suggests that when you eat could play a key role in staying lean. People who fast longer overnight and start their day with an early breakfast were more likely to have a lower BMI years later. Scientists think this is because eating earlier aligns better with the body’s internal clock. But skipping breakfast as part of intermittent fasting didn’t offer the same advantage—and may even be tied to unhealthy habits.

* Colonoscopies are a big deal and aren't fun. An alternative stool test may be almost as good of a diagnostic test:

A breakthrough in microbiome research could change how colorectal cancer is detected—no colonoscopy required. Scientists used AI to map gut bacteria at an unprecedented level of detail, revealing subtle microbial patterns linked to cancer. By analyzing simple stool samples, their method identified 90% of cases, rivaling one of medicine’s most trusted diagnostic tools.

* Alzheimer's disease attacks your sense of smell early on, which would be very helpful if there were effective treatments for the disease, which there aren't (yet):

Losing your sense of smell might signal Alzheimer’s far earlier than expected. Scientists found that immune cells in the brain actively destroy smell-related nerve fibers after detecting abnormal signals on their surfaces. This damage begins in early stages of the disease, well before cognitive decline. The discovery could help identify at-risk patients sooner and improve treatment timing.

* Also, while I'll find the link again another day, the Epstein-Barr Virus, that caused mono, cold sores, and M.S., also causes lupus. The case for developing an EBV vaccine has just gotten a lot stronger.

Drones v. Missiles

From here.

Cleaner Diesel As An Interim Solution

This is potentially a quick interim fix to diesel pollution that could be quickly adopted at the refining industry level by a handful of major oil companies rather than through vehicle purchases that could take decades to phase in. 

Scientists are exploring a surprisingly simple way to clean up diesel engines: adding tiny droplets of water to the fuel. During combustion, the water rapidly vaporizes, triggering micro-explosions that improve fuel mixing and lower combustion temperatures. 

Studies show this technique can slash nitrogen oxide and soot emissions by more than 60% while sometimes even improving engine efficiency. Because it works in existing engines without redesign, it could provide a quick path to cleaner diesel use.

From Science Daily citing: 

Chukwuemeka Fortunatus Nnadozie, et al. "Advancements in diesel emission reduction strategies: a focus on water-in-diesel emulsion technology" 4(1) Carbon Research (2025) DOI: 10.1007/s44246-025-00210-y

Space Junk Removal

One of the industries of the future will be space junk removal. 

There is already a movie about it (Space Sweepers 2021 S. Korean).

Orbital debris in Earth orbit is not adequately described as a static inventory problem. It is a coupled operations-stability problem governed by shell occupancy, collision kernel, breakup severity, and orbital residence time. The near-term orbital sustainability is controlled by three variables: disposal reliability for newly launched spacecraft, encounter-state uncertainty in the high-risk conjunction tail, and the residual hazard stock of inactive high-mass legacy objects.

Using public ESA, NASA, FCC, NOAA, JAXA, and OECD sources through 2026, we develop a reduced-order control framework for intervention ranking and market formation. Current ESA statistics indicate ~44,870 tracked objects in Earth orbit, more than 15,800 tonnes of orbiting mass, and model-based populations of ~5.4e4 objects larger than 10cm, 1.2e6 in the 1 - 10cm regime, and 1.4e8 in the 0.1 - 1cm regime.

Operationally, the environment is already visible in constellation-scale workload: public reporting by SpaceX indicates that Starlink collision-avoidance maneuvers rose from 6,873 in 12/2021-05/2022 to 144,404 in 12/2024-05/2025. Physically, the present LEO environment shows a separation between the traffic peak near 500-600 km, which drives conjunction workload, and the persistence-driven risk peak near ~850km, where long lifetime/inactive intact mass dominate long-horizon hazard; under current assumptions, 96% of the LEO index is inactive objects.

NASA studies indicate benefit-cost ratios of 20-750 for shortening disposal timelines from 25 to 15 years and greater than 100 for targeted uncertainty reduction in high-risk conjunctions. The analysis implies that orbital-debris services will not emerge as a single homogeneous market, but as a result of linked markets: compliance-led mitigation for new missions, prepared end-of-life servicing and premium SSA overlays, and publicly anchored remediation of the legacy stock.

Slava G. Turyshev, "Orbital Debris in Earth Orbit: Operations, Stability, Control, and Market Formation" arXiv:2603.23552 (March 22, 2026).

Religion In America

 

Reflections On Six Months As A City Attorney

Six months and a week ago, I started a new job as a senior assistant city attorney at the City ad County of Denver in the civil litigation section. We handle lawsuits brought against the City and County of Denver, and against City employees where the lawsuit arises from the employee's official duties.

The job

Most people who work in my section have backgrounds either in criminal case litigation, or in private sector insurance defense of personal injury cases. I was one of the fairly uncommon applicants who had significant prior experience in civil litigation with government entities. One of my main responsibilities at my first job in Colorado, in Grand Junction, was defending county governments all over Western Colorado from lawsuits, which is more or less exactly what I do now defending the City and County of Denver. In my subsequent private private of law, I had a low volume, but steady trickle of cases where I represented private parties in lawsuits against the government, in addition to having broad civil litigation experience making up about half of my practice in a variety of other areas in both state courts and federal courts. This has allowed me to hit the ground running, compared to many of my peers.

Fortunately, our office operates with a very high level of professionalism, and my co-workers are good to work for.

My current case load (which varies from lawyer to lawyer in my section based upon the lawyer's experience and aptitudes) is about 60% civil rights litigation (mostly, but not entirely, involving actions of the police and jail guards), about 20% plain vanilla personal injury litigation like motor vehicle accidents that is similar to what private insurance defense lawyers do but with a governmental liability twist, and about 20% litigating subpoenas and public record requests where there are disputes that go beyond what can be resolved by records custodians out of court.

Different sections of the City attorney's office handle employee discipline and employment related litigation, enforcement of ordinance violations, child protective proceedings in cases where there are allegations of abuse and neglect, and transactional/corporate counsel type work for matters like negotiating and monitoring compliance with contracts between the City and its vendors, drafting ordinances, lobbying the state and federal governments, and managing conflicts that arise between different city agencies and officials.

There are also some governmental agencies which many people think are part of the City and County of Denver, but which are not: the Denver Public Schools, the Denver District Attorney, Denver Health (the county's public hospital), the Denver Housing Authority, the Regional Transportation District (RTD), the Downtown Development Authority, the Denver District Court, the Denver Probate Court, the Denver Juvenile Court, and probably a few others that I've failed to mention. 

The Denver County Court is a unique hybrid court that combined the roles of the limited jurisdiction state government's county court found in other Colorado counties, and the role of a municipal court for the City and County of Denver where municipal ordinance violations are prosecuted.

The biggest change for me has been transitioning from being self-employed for two decades to being a salaried W-2 employee. 

Mostly, this is for the better and was an important reason to take this job. Instead of having to invoice clients and pester them to pay their bills, or to wait until contingent fee cases are converted into money at the end of a case, money just magically appears in by bank account without me even asking for every two weeks. I get paid vacations and sick days! I get my health insurance through an employer plan, a switch I made shortly before big cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies for self-employed people seeking health insurance took effect. If I continue to work for the City for five years, I get a defined benefit pension. I have a public sector defined contribution plan to which I can contribute about 20% of my income. I can pay for my parking expenses with pre-tax dollars. I don't have to pay anything out of pocket to get IT support. My tax returns will get a lot less complicated starting in 2027 (I had some residual self-employment work and income wrapping up my private practice in early 2026). I don't have to deal with fixing broken copying machines, building maintenance, hiring employees, tax withholding for employees, office security, arranging telephone and internet service, balancing an attorney's trust account, and so on. I don't have to spend large chunks of time marketing and deciding which clients to sign up. My work is mostly (not 100%) confined to 9-5 on business days.

I also get to work in a place with good systems in place, with adequate administrative support, with competent fellow attorneys who can cover for you while you are sick or on vacation, and top quality legal research and office related software packages.

We still have to pay close attention to potential conflicts of interest in new cases (and conflicts of interest that can emerge during cases), so we can send conflicted cases to outside counsel. But, unlike my fairly brief stint in a multi-state law firm with about a thousand lawyers, I don't have to spend half an hour to forty-five minutes every day (like every single other lawyer in that entire law firm) screening new cases brought into the firm for conflicts of interest.

Best of all, except for particular phases of the small share of cases where there is a prospect of receiving an attorneys' fee award, I don't have to track every tenth of an hour of every single working day, since all of the work we do is for the same client and is very unlikely to be the subject of attorneys' fee litigation.

Insights into law and policy and legal practice

Most people, most of the time, are outsiders to government, sometimes spinning conspiratorial narratives about what they think happens behind the scenes in the criminal justice system, and in government more generally. In my subpoena and records request practice, and in civil rights cases, I'm on the opposite side of the fence, with more or less complete access to the full "behind the scenes" story.

I almost always know more about what actually happened, sometimes legally relevant and sometimes not, than the other lawyers in the case and that the judge. It is a rare case where I don't know more or less exactly what happened in all legally relevant ways within a month or two of receiving it, and often within a couple of weeks.

I have nearly full access to all relevant records and a full ability to interview the government employees involved in a context where they are more quickly forthcoming about what I want to know, than in the formal discovery process.

The truth isn't nearly as nefarious as conspiracy theorists and a plurality of civil rights lawyers would have you believe.

This isn't to say that law enforcement officers or jail guards never make mistakes that hurt someone, sometimes in ways that give rise to legal liability, and sometimes in ways that don't.

A significant portion of my job is facilitating the payment of reasonable settlements to people who have been legitimately wronged by the government or government officials. Sometimes a city employee is clearly at fault in a motor vehicle accident. Sometimes a law enforcement officer does cross the line and is in the wrong. The City pays out millions of dollars a year in settlements and judgments as a result.

Most settlement payments err on the side of being generous, in order to avoid the risk that a jury won't correctly evaluate liability and damages in a case and will award an excessive amount. 

A significant minority of jury awards reach the wrong result on liability or damages (sometimes for the government and sometimes against it), often (as post-verdict juror interviews reveal) for reasons that shouldn't be legally relevant or reflect misunderstandings that neither side's lawyers even contemplated were possible. Most of the time, juries reach verdicts that are close to being right, but not all of the time by any means (even when the lawyers and judges are doing their jobs correctly).

My rule of thumb (based upon the available academic literature on the topic, and confirmed by my personal experience) is that in a best case scenario where the lawyers and judges in a case are doing their jobs right and the law dictates a clear answer, is that the likelihood that a jury will reach the wrong conclusion is about 10%. 

The odds that the jury will reach the wrong conclusion rockets up, of course, when one or the other side's lawyers engaged in misconduct, or the judge makes a significant mistake (not always appealable), or there is litigation misconduct by a party in the case such as destroying or fabricating evidence or lying under oath (often not known to the lawyers). The most common problems, however, are lawyer incompetence or a bad ruling from a trial judge or sincere but incorrect witness memories about what happened, and not outright litigation misconduct.

Some kinds of suspicions about what is happening behind the scenes are more often correct than others. For example, I know (from having access to what is in them in cases where I move to quash subpoenas) that the vast majority of internal affairs files sought by defense attorneys in criminal cases that are withheld from them, truly aren't material to the outcome of those cases, even at the margins on credibility issues. The kind of conduct that law enforcement agencies, and governments more generally, care about for purposes of internal employee discipline, are only vaguely similar to the kinds of conduct that give rise to legal liability, or would be relevant in a criminal case in which an officer was involved in some way and is a potential witness.

Timelines

Different kinds of cases have different timelines. Records request cases and subpoenas are typically litigated over a period a week to a few months. Ordinary personal injury cases in which a defendant just happens to be a governmental entity, tend to be fairly simple cases that are resolved in a year or two once a case if filed, and are often settled sooner than that. 

Civil rights cases, and personal injury cases which are really civil rights cases in disguise, take one of two typical courses. Many of them are resolved very early on in initial dispositive motion practice and are often dismissed within a few months to a year with complete dismissals on the merits (or for failure to prosecute by a pro se party, i.e. a Plaintiff bringing suit without a lawyer). The civil rights cases that aren't resolved that way can take much longer, in part because they are often prosecuted in federal court which is much slower than state court, in part because interlocutory appeals (i.e. appeals brought prior to a final trial and verdict) are common in civil rights cases, and in part because these cases are sometimes more complex and require lengthy pre-trial discovery and motion practice. I have one case that will probably go to trial soon about eight years after the underlying incident (that involved a handful of people over the course of less than two hours in one place)  took place.

If everyone knew what I know as a governmental defense attorney know within two or three months of a case being filed, these cases could be resolved in six months and would be resolved more accurately than they are in jury trials. But, of course, part of the reason that I can secure this information so quickly is because the people from whom I receive the information know that what they share with me won't be used against them in court. Still, this observation does suggest that there is plenty of room for improvement in the process.

Also, a lot of the delay in civil litigation is a function of simply not having enough judges to keep their case loads small enough to allow them to make prompt rulings, and an overall litigation system that has adapted to that reality.

The quality of plaintiff's litigation

Another thing that my job gives me is a broad overview of the quality of the legal work done by the people who sue the City.

About half the lawsuits brought against the City are brought by pro se parties, or by lawyers whose legal work falls below the standard of care that should be expected from a reasonable competent lawyer. 

Indeed, the best pro se parties (maybe the top 5-10% of them) are doing a better job of litigating their cases than the worst lawyers that we see (although no pro se parties do an excellent job). There are a few lawyers in the Plaintiff's bar who are so incompetent that I am amazed that they passed the bar exam, although even they have basic literacy and some understanding of the process. But there are plenty of pro se parties whose literacy and understanding of the process is below that of an average high school student, who would benefit from representation by even an only marginally competent lawyer.

One of the better arguments for a "civil Gideon" system in which indigent people would routinely be provided access to lawyers by the state, the way that indigent criminal defends are, is that it would make the delays and confusions caused by incompetent pro se litigants largely go away making the whole legal system work much more efficiently.

Cases brought by incompetent litigants overwhelming get dismissed early on, or settled for amounts far less than a competent lawyer could secure.

Incompetent litigants tend to be particularly weak at investigating a case and gathering facts to support it, and in understanding at a more than superficial level the relevant substantive and procedural legal requirements for proving a case of governmental liability. Now and then, they do the right thing despite themselves, however.

Of course, part of the failure rate among these litigants is an inability to accurately judge if they have a legally meritorious case. I have definitely seen cases that were winnable or could have secured a larger settlement, that don't because they are brought by incompetent litigants. But probably 80%-90% of the cases brought by incompetent litigants wouldn't have been brought at all by competent lawyers, who could have identified the weakness in those cases at the outset and not filed suit. 

When I was in private practice, I probably turned away two or three potential clients a week, often potential clients who had heart wrenching stories of misfortune. But those potential clients either didn't have cases for which the legal system had a remedy, or had cases where the likely outcome of  their cases with competent legal representation would provide them with less economic benefit than the cost of competent legal representation, and would have greatly disrupted their personal lives and eaten up huge amounts of their personal time.

And, by the way, incompetence by lawyers isn't restricted to sole practitioners with little experience. I've seen multiple cases of grossly incompetent litigation from medium to large plaintiff's law firms (some of which are household names due to their advertising or due to prominent cases that they have litigated) by lawyers with significant experience.

This isn't to say that all litigants against the City are incompetent. About half of lawsuits against the City are brought by lawyers whose work is at least up to the standard of a reasonable competent lawyer, and a minority but good share of litigants against the city are represented by lawyers whose work represents the best practices in this work, are highly competent, and have screened potential clients in such a manner that they have chosen to represent plaintiffs with meritorious cases.

At least one case that I have handled so far involved a plaintiff who was represented by two successive incompetent lawyers, only to have the case pass to a third, highly competent lawyer that salvaged the case with some smart litigation decisions and was able to secure a settlement much higher than what the previous incompetent lawyers came close to reaching.

Sadly, there is very little that a person thinking about bringing a lawsuit can do to determine if their lawyer is litigating competently or not. That's why we have a bar exam in an attempt to impose at least some minimum standards, but this gatekeeping isn't perfect.

Admission to the bar allows you as a lawyer to handle almost any kind of case (patent law is an exception, and some states set a higher standard to determine if a lawyer is allowed to represent defendants in death penalty cases), subject only to their own self-determination about their competence.

But while being admitted to the bar usually means that a lawyer meets basic standards of literacy and can find their way to the courthouse, with a vague understanding of how the process works, the vast majority of lawyers (I'm an extreme outlier in this regard), have a far more specialized legal practice and predominantly handle a fairly narrow kind of legal work.

Probably a majority of lawyers don't litigate any civil or criminal cases on a regular basis, and instead do transactional work, legal compliance work, or provide counsel to senior corporate officials in their day to day activities.

It is rare for a lawyer to represent both plaintiffs and defendants in personal injury work. It is rare for divorce lawyers or real estate lawyers to handle personal injury or civil rights cases. It is rare for commercial litigators to litigate personal injury cases. It is rare for probate lawyers to do personal injury or civil rights litigation. It happens. I'm an example of that. But it is rare.

Unlike physicians, whose regulators have imposed both a general threshold professional qualification to become an M.D., and an additional professional qualification to practice in a particular medical specialty, the legal profession has almost no secondary level of professional qualification to practice in a particular legal specialty, like personal injury litigation, or civil rights litigation.

Most specialist legal practitioners do develop special expertise in the area where they practice, from working as a junior lawyer in a firm that has that kind of practice, from taking continuing legal education classes in that field, from researching the law and procedure in their own cases, and from the school of hard knocks. But it isn't systemic or uniform among specialist legal practitioners who often have significant gaps in their knowledge of the best practices for handling cases in their specialty.

This can be a particular problem in civil rights litigation where the law is more complicated than in many other areas of law, and where firm sizes tend to be small, so that many practitioners have never worked as junior lawyers under seasoned senior civil rights lawyers to learn the ropes. A fair number of lawyers with this kind of practice went to law school because of, and are driven by, a strong commitment to social justice, but couldn't find an employer in a field relevant to their objectives out of law school. So, they never received the kind of mentorship that they needed to become competent in their field as a result and are prone to making big picture conceptual mistakes and to bad legal judgment that hasn't been honed by more seasoned practitioners.

Some Quick, Ill Developed, Political Ideas

In defense of the deep state

The "deep state" is valuable and good, not a conspiratorial anti-democratic force. It is the bureaucratic manifestation of the rule of law.

We say we live in a "democracy" but that's an oversimplification. Obeying the law is not a matter up for popular vote. When we say we are a democracy what we really mean is that changes in the law must be made democratically. Not even the President is allowed to deviate from the law, which the President is sworn to faithfully execute. The President, wearing a different hat, can participate in the legislative process. But the bureaucratic organization that is the state can and normatively should push back against a President who tries to deviate from the way that the law mandates that the organization should behave.

Fiscal federalism

Trump 2.0 has illustrated the perils of relying too heavily on the federal budgetary process to spend funds for public purposes. So have many past government shutdowns.

Of course, dysfunction in the federal budgetary process leaves undisturbed public functions funded and operated at the state and local level with state and local funding. Most law enforcement comes from state and local law enforcement, most court cases (criminal and civil) are handled in the state courts, most K-12 and higher education funding is state and local, most roads and bridges are maintained at the state and local level, state and local law and funding keeps the water running, the sewers flowing, clears away trash from homes and businesses, and regulates the construction industry and real estate development for the most part.

We've seen what happens when this falls apart now. Because Medicaid and VA Health Care are federally funded and don't even had dedicated federal tax funding, they can be undermined quickly when the federal budgetary process goes astray and also equalize services between poor states and rich states. A simple federal tax law change can undermine ACA individual health insurance marketplace subsidies. K-12 education relies heavily on federal funding for special education (i.e. educating the disabled) and for schools in low income areas (which also equalizes situations between poor states and rich states). Higher education relies upon federal funding for grants for low income students, higher educational institutions for military officers and the deaf, student loan financing, and research grants. Disaster relief is heavily federally funded and leaves havoc unchecked when that is suspended. Disease control and weather prediction and monitoring are also heavily federally funded and are screwed up when this changes.

While we couldn't fund the military or the national debt at the state and local level, we could have a system where more health care and education spending is state and local. This would reduce federal influence on how those industries run and remove those industries from the whims of the federal budget process to a great extent, but would also lead to weaker subsidies of poor states and disproportionately worse services in poor states and would subject those services to greater state and local political influence.

After 9-11 we federalized airport security creating the TSA. Today, we see the political price of that as a federal budgetary process fight unrelated to the TSA itself disrupts airport service. Early in Trump 2.0 we saw what happened to FAA air traffic control as a result of exposure to the Trump 2.0 administration and the federal budgetary process.

So far, Social Security is only suffering deficiencies in administrative processing of disability claims for the most part, because it has its own dedicated funding source that insulates it from the federal budgetary process as an entitlement.

But national parks and major transportation ad energy infrastructure programs have seen a twirl.

Could we build a more robust system without facing too many costs?

A Glimmer Of Hope

 The status quo is a one vote Republican majority, but Trump screwed it up for the GOP.

A Song For Our Times (Mad World)

 

Indirect And Non-Obvious Effects Of The Iran War

The U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (the NYT recaps the first week here) will have some indirect and non-obvious impacts, some of which mirror those from the Ukraine War.

* Iran is the sole significant outside military supplier for Russia in the Ukraine War (supplying drones) apart from North Korea which has supplied artillery rounds and some old school military equipment (and even about 10,000 troops) all of which have been subpar in quality and not very useful. The attacks on Iran are likely to divert existing supplies of drones to domestic military use from exports to Russia for use in counterstrikes, and are likely to somewhat degrade Iran's military production capabilities.

* Iran's counterattacks and continued war-like footing have driven up global oil prices dramatically, have had direct supply effects on most of Asia, and have damaged the oil production infrastructure in many Middle Eastern oil producing nations (including Saudi Arabia) which will reduce the capacity of these countries to produce oil in the short to medium term.

* This oil price shock, like many more before it, makes electric vehicles and public transportation more attractive to policy-makers and consumers alike, all over the world, potentially resulting in long-term systemic reduction in demand for oil.

* This mirrors the indirect effect of the Ukraine War in causing Europe to rush to find long term alternatives to oil and natural gas, resulting in wider adoption of EV vehicles, renewable energy sources for their power grids, and energy conservation measures. Again, this results in long-term systemic reductions in demand for oil and natural gas in one of the largest economically developed regions in the world.

* The Ukraine War also strengthened NATO, strengthened European cooperation, and caused re-militarization of European countries, especially those most at risk of attacks from Russia.

* Trump's inexplicable decision to temporarily ease sanctions on Russian oil sales to India, helps Russia in the Ukraine War despite the fact that Russia has used its intelligence resources to help target the U.S. and its allies for Iranian counterstrikes.

* Generally, an international war strengthens the regime attacks vis-a-vis external dissent (something that partially explains Russia's persistence in the Ukraine because the ongoing war there makes Putin more able to crush dissent against him at home). The protests of the Iranian people against its regime may suffer because of this effect. While the U.S. assassinated the Ayatollah, Iran's supreme leader, and many of the likely successors, the successor chosen for this reason is probably more likely to be a hardliner than the person who might have been chosen if the Ayatollah (who was 86 years old and close to 87 when he was killed by a U.S. strike) had died of natural causes as was likely in the near future.

* It seems unlikely that Iran will experience regime change, either in favor of a more democratic regime (Iran's democracy was actually more robust than a lot of regimes in the Middle East), or a monarchist restoration of the Shah. Pre-attack, this had been conceivable because of huge protests against the too conservative Shiite religious regime's social policies, despite the fact that Iran is actually quite religiously and ethnically diverse. Air strikes and missiles are rarely sufficient to secure regime change.

* The war probably delays steps that could be positive for the residents of Gaza.

* The war probably depletes military equipment supplies of Iran, and to a lesser extent, the U.S. and Israel, weakening the affected countries' capacity to fight further wars.

* In much the same way, the Ukraine War has dramatically depleted Russia's military resources (despite half the national budget in Russia being spent on the military and interest on loans to support it).

* The strikes in Iran are very likely to weaken the Republican Party's MAGA coalition, since MAGA campaigned on ending foreign wars of choice and then has repeatedly sought out those wars in Trump's second term, striking Venezuela, embargoing Cuba, striking Iran, and renewing a "drug war" in Mexico, Ecuador, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, which doesn't seem very calculated to actually do anything about drug abuse and drug related crime in the U.S. (as well as threatening Canada and Greenland). This coalition has already been beaten up in special elections and survey results and has a very thin majority (especially in the U.S. House).

* The inflation caused by rising oil prices, weakens support for Trump and the Republicans and strengthens Democrats chances in the 2026 midterm elections, which are just seven months away.

* The Iran War hasn't been particularly effective at diverting attention from the Epstein files which graphically reveal a coalition of child trafficking, corrupt, and Russian influenced officials in senior levels of politics, business, and academia, with Trump at the center of all of it as a highly culpable serial child rapist.

* The Venezuela invasion, by the way, seems inconclusive and certainly doesn't seem to be having much of an oil supply impact.