The Decisive Benefit Of Weak Psychic Powers

In fiction, often psychic powers are portrayed as extreme, ultra-powerful abilities. But even very modest powers could provide a profound advantage.

Take psychokinesis, the power to physically manipulate things with your mind. Suppose that your psychokinetic power is very weak. You have a range of just ten centimeters. You have a strength and coordination comparable to that of a single hand of first grader.

What can you do with that?

You can open locked doors that don't require a key to unlock from the inside. You can shock someone in your close proximity by socking them in the nose or ears or poking them in their eyes. You can trigger the car alarm on someone else's keys when you are near them, or pick pocket their keys or wallet. You can retrieve jewelry that has fallen into a drain or a sink. You can turn cut the power to a car by pressing a start button or turning a key in the ignition from the passenger's seat. You can zip up or button the back of your dress that you can't reach with your hands. You could pull the trigger on a concealed firearm without moving your hands towards it. You could create a distraction by opening a faucet.

Take telepathy, who can communicate silently with their mind. Suppose that you are a very weak telepath. You have to be touching someone for it to work. You can't communicate outright words or images, only vague urges or strong feelings.

What can you do with that?

You could easily determine if someone is living or brain dead, or if they are human or a robot. You could tell if they were seething with rage inside despite having a calm and civil demeanor. You could manage your relationships better. You could help someone understand you when you can't speak even if you can't be very specific.

Consider pyrokinesis, the power to create or manipulate fire with your mind. You are weak. You have a range of perhaps ten centimeters, and can only make a little spark.

What can you do with that?

Sure, you can light a cigarette or a candle or gas stove, when your matches are wet and you don't have a lighter. But you could also trigger pretty much any fuel tank to explode. You could start a wildfire in the vicinity of flammable materials like dry grass. You could squelch the trigger to a stick of dynamite. You could use it to signal a coded message as you flicked it on and off. You could burn the inside of someone's mouth, or singe or ignite their greasy hair, or create the equivalent of a cigarette burn in some unexpected place to distract them so they'd unhand you.

Consider the ability to see into the future, but very weak. Only within the range of your senses and only for a few seconds in advance.

What can you do with that?

This is essentially the main edge that the Jedi have in Star Wars, allowing them to be just a little bit ahead of people that are fighting them. It could allow you do avoid all manner of accidents. It could prevent you from being betrayed by someone at the last minute, or just prevent you from doing something embarrassing. It might allow you to defuse a bomb by foreseeing what happens if you cut the red wire. It could be very useful on game shows. You could win every time at rock-paper-scissors, or could allow you to know whether to call heads or tails in a coin flip.

You can imagine similar ways that other psychic powers, even if extremely weak, could be game changing. 

Random Thoughts And Predictions

* Fraternity gang rape was a widely acknowledge problem thirty-five years ago when I was in college. Apparently, nothing has changed.

* People in the developed and developing world are having fewer children. The extent to which this is happening and the pace at which this is happening is something that most people, even educated elites, don't fully really comprehend. It isn't necessarily a bad thing. Resources will be spread over fewer people, allowing the people who are around to face less scarcity. But I'm not sure anyone has really carefully thought through how it will change society, even though, in a lot of ways, it is a very predictable thing.

* One counterbalancing factor is that I don't think people really appreciate the extent to which medical advances will transform society either. People will live longer and will be healthier during their lives. Sickness and injury, even old age, are fundamentally solvable problems.

* Much of Africa, and pockets like Afghanistan and Gaza elsewhere, are still basically undeveloped. But those pockets will predictably experience economic development and demographic transitions too, just a bit later than the rest of the world. Indeed, the rate at which they experience economic development, once it really gets going, may actually be faster, because they can learn from the rest of the world's experience.

* Fossil fuels will become irrelevant, or at least much less economically important, with renewables, a mild resurgence of nuclear power, and EVs. This will topple a lot of autocracies. This will allow global warming to level off - still at a much hotter level, but that trend won't continue forever.

* The U.S. may be a generation or two behind Western Europe in secularizing, but its getting there. How will Christianity transform as it becomes a minority religion despite being the plurality religion of theists in the U.S. for the foreseeable future?

* Maybe AI will be a transformative technology, maybe it won't. Ditto for quantum computing. 

* There will be bumps along the way, but we do seem to be on a path towards mass production scale self-driving vehicles that make a large share of all vehicles.

* So far, the path towards urbanization has been steady for two or three centuries. Will remote work change that? I don't think that remote work is going away and I expect it will only become more common.

* Will falling birth rates take the economic pressure off of a switch away from red meat, which takes the most land and water per pound of any kind of food?

* Climate change should eventually push people away from the Southern U.S. and further north, particularly to the water rich Midwest.

* It won't take too many generations for mixed race "mutts" to become the norm and for single race people to become much less common, and this will probably drive changes in the way that we classify race socially. In much the same way that Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Dutch, Russian, Greek, English, and Scottish people all collapsed into a broad "white" category in which lots of white people don't even know which European countries were home to their ancestors, I think that we'll see similar collapsing of categories now thought of as distinct into a general "brown" category that is a bit analogous to mestizos in Mexico, but with significant East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and Polynesian contributions in addition to European and Native America, and with non-negligible African ancestry contributions.

* We've seen the future of war in Ukraine. It is hard to say if it will be stabilizing or destabilizing. What does equilibrium look like in a spy v. spy escalation of drones and AI?

So Many Criminals

We need something like a war crimes tribunal when Trump is gone. 

To try the ICE agents (almost all of them) who broke the law, the military personnel who carried out unlawful orders to commit war crimes, to try everyone who enriched themselves with insider trading and by taking bribes, to punish the crimes committed by corrupt conservative SCOTUS justices in accepting bribes, to punish the Trump 2.0 officials who participated in defying court orders, to punish those who were deliberately indifferent to suffering at immigration detention centers, to punish Elon Musk and everyone else involved in illegal conduct a DOGE, to punish Trump family members who illegally represented the U.S. government (and themselves) in diplomacy without Congressional approval, and on and on and on.

RSS Feeds

The automatic feeds of posts from my blogs seem to have stopped working sometime around September 8, 2026 (about 17 days ago), not just between my two blogs but to other blogs where I am in their blog feed. And, this seems to be happened for other RSS feeds as well, such as Razib Khan's feed.

I know nothing about the causes of this technical problem or whether there are any solutions to it. Comments from people better informed than I am about the situation are welcome.

Librarians

 

What Is The Legal Purpose Of Marriage?

This post was originally an answer at Law Stack Exchange that I wrote. The fact that it is quoted from that source is not indicated for ease of reading:

The case for Western-style marriage as a way to protect woman irrevocably relying on their spouse for economic support when having children

While this isn't a universal justification for marriage, it is an economic reason for marriage that heavily drives the decision to marry in modern times in the developed world in a large share of cases.

This analysis ignores what have historically been uncommon edge cases of couples who by choice or due to infertility don't have children, who are simply swept along following marriage rules that weren't really designed for them, even though they are now far more common, often for reasons that are not primarily economic, or coincidentally benefit from marriage rules not really designed for them.

The explanation of marriage on this economic basis also explains the class divide between marriage utilization in modern societies, with marriage remaining a strong institution for the affluent, while it falls apart from the working class and poor people.

In modern circumstances

Stereotypically, and very frequently in practice, when a man and a woman marry, they have children and the woman ends (temporarily or permanently) or scales back, her participation in the paid workforce. Particularly in the case of woman who have high levels of education or specialized training, doing so dramatically reduces the woman's lifetime earnings. This factor is much less important for woman with little education and/or few specialized skills who pay a much smaller penalty in their lifetime earnings for temporarily leaving the workforce or reducing their earnings while their children are young.

So, for it to make sense for a woman to have her male partner's children with the economic sacrifices associated with that decision, she needs legally enforceable protections for the reliance she places on her male partner to economically support her.

If the relationship falls apart, in the absence of marriage, the only remedy a woman who has sacrificed her lifetime earnings to have children, is child support, which only partially compensates the woman for the cost of raising the child that she had with her co-parent on a part-time basis (as the co-parent usually has some custody rights).

But if she is married and the relationship falls apart, she is entitled not only to child support, but also to a division of marital property and often substantial alimony (a.k.a. maintenance), which reflects her sacrifice of lifetime earnings in her name.

Of course, this remedy only has value (both as a remedy if the marriage ends, and as an incentive for her husband to not divorce her in the first place), if the husband has meaningful assets from which there will be marital property to divide and/or meaningful income from which alimony and child support can be paid.

These considerations help to explain why, in the modern U.S., college educated woman who are married to college educated men or non-college educated men with good economic circumstances, are much more likely to marry before having children (the average is two years after marriage), and are much less likely to divorce, than less educated and/or less economically skilled women.

In contrast, women who have relationships that could produce children with men who are not college educated and have poor economic circumstances tend not to marry before having children (the average is two years before marriage if the couple marries at all), are more likely to divorce if they have gotten married, and are less likely to even acknowledge their co-parent on a birth certificate, because in these circumstances, marriage does not provide meaningful economic protections to the woman having children and when the father is particularly destitute or potentially troublesome, even acknowledging the father's paternity may result in her paying child support to the father and being forced to continue to have him in her life.

In "pre-modern" circumstances

In pre-modern times (i.e. when there were far fewer economic opportunities for single mothers, and contraception outside marriage was unavailable or unreliable, and women tended to have far more children during a lifetime, so really in the 1950s and earlier), failure to have the complete economic support of a husband meant that a woman without a husband and any children she had living with her, were likely to experience extreme economic privation. Very few women had the ability to economically support themselves and their children without a husband in this era (only wealthy women who had significant income generating property could manage this feat).

Also, for most of that era, the state lacked a meaningful capacity to enforce child support, alimony, or shared custody arrangements. So, in that era, a blanket prohibition on divorce absent the most extreme circumstances (and usually even then restricted people who could survive on the property that they owned alone), was the only way to legally protect a woman's reliance on her co-parent to economically support her and their children.

This extreme economic imperative overrode modern era concerns about a relationship falling apart and a couple being forced to live in a "dead" marriage.

Alternatives to modern Western-style marriage and the economics driving these alternatives

A modern Western-style marriage isn't the only possible solution to the problem of providing economic security that allows women to feel comfortable making the economic sacrifices involved in having children.

Matrilineal societies with mothers and a male relative heading a household

There are some societies where women have children outside of marriage, sometimes with many men having children who are half-siblings. In those societies, mothers frequently establish households in a non-sexual pairing with a brother or uncle or father. But, most societies historically, and most modern societies, in particular, have not made that choice.

Strong social safety nets that make single motherhood viable

In some countries with strong social safety nets and third-party child care systems, especially in Scandinavia and Western Europe, but also in some countries with Soviet-style communism, single motherhood was much more economically viable and marriage was less common, because yet another solution to the problem of economic support for single mothers was devised.

Polygyny and removing some men and women from parenthood

Historically, in societies where a large share of men lack the economic capacity to support a woman and her children, while a minority of men are affluent, polygyny (sometimes with equal wives, and sometimes with a primary wife and secondary wives or concubines or slaves) solves the economic problem. Other solutions to that situation have been for a certain percentage of women to be celibate in holy orders or as priestesses and to forgo having children. Societies with this economic make up also sometimes have significant portions of men who are eunuchs and/or who become celibate and pursue religious callings.

Polyandry

Historically, in societies where almost all men lack the economic capacity to support a woman and her children alone, polyandry (often with two brothers marrying a single wife) is known and solves the economic problem.

Comment: Do you have any comment on how civil union or domestic partnership arrangements differ from marriage, or are they just marriage by a different name for legal purposes? – Ian Sudbery 

Response: In the U.S., civil unions were invented to be marriage for same sex couples when it was politically unpopular and not constitutionally required to allow same sex marriage. Institutions like PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarité) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_solidarity_pact in France were motivated by the purpose as well, but became popular with unmarried couples who wanted some but fewer legal implications of marriage, often childless cohabiting couples, or couples who didn't want the cultural/religious baggage that the predominant Roman Catholic church there assigns to marriage. – ohwilleke

Waiting For The Next Election

 

From Bernstein's Mass.

Real v. Monetary Inflation

A recent headline noted that the Fed is considering raising interest rates to fight inflation.

Spoiler alert: It won't work.

Usually, inflation is due to the money supply expanding faster than the pool of goods and services out there to spend money on. And when that is the case, raising interest rates can tame inflation.

But while monetary inflation, i.e. inflation driven by growth in the money supply, is the most common cause for inflation, it isn't the only one.

There can also be "real" inflation. Real inflation can happen because the supply of goods and services suddenly gets smaller for some reason. Real inflation can also happen because we have to fork over more goods and services equivalents to get imports we need - usually petroleum products and/or food, but not always.

Real inflation makes us, collectively, poorer. In contrast, monetary inflation doesn't change the aggregate amount of goods and services we consume, although it make redistribute them if wages grow faster or slower than the cost of good and services.

Interest rates don't do anything to address real inflation, because interest rates act on the money supply, and if the money supply isn't the problem, this tool doesn't work. Instead, increasing interest rates to address real inflation produces "stagflation", where increased interest rates slow down economic growth in the real economy, while inflation rises, because inflation isn't being driven by the money supply.

Of course, I'm oversimplifying. But sometimes it is important to focus on the essentials that drive the big outcomes, rather than losing sight of the forest for the trees.

Don't Believe The Hype

 

This narrative is common and it's mostly wrong.

First, it vastly overestimates the electoral strength of progressive Democrats in particular races. Sure, there are places, like CO-1 in Denver, where a progressive can be elected. But a whole lot of Democrats don't come from those jurisdictions.

Second, the main reason that Democrats have failed to elect their agenda is that they haven't controlled the Presidency, the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. Supreme Court at the same time. And, even when they have, by narrow margins, usually, a handful of "moderate" or "conservative" Democrats have thwarted them - usually Democrats elected from jurisdictions very inclined to vote for Republicans.

Democrats have consistently been the party pushing to protect and enhance the social safety net. LBJ's war on poverty brought us programs including Medicaid. Obama brought us the ACA. Democrats have pushed for fair elections. Democrats have pushed to protect civil rights.

Also, not all "corporate Democratic" policies have been bad ones for the working-class and middle class. Free trade and more open immigration rules pushed by "corporate Democrats" have been central to American prosperity. Fiscal responsibility kept deficits smaller and sometimes produced surpluses. Democrats reduced military spending after the Cold War. Most of the corporate bailouts during the financial crisis ended up paying for themselves with interest.

"Corporate democrats" haven't been clamoring for a return of child labor, didn't gut scientific research, didn't gut food safety, worker safety, consumer safety, consumer fraud protections, and public health measures. "Corporate democrats" didn't push to pardon drug kingpins, white collar criminals who committed tens of million dollar to billion dollar fraud, and violent criminals who attacked police and tried to overthrow an election. They resisted Republican efforts to give massive tax cuts to the rich. They tried to support farmers economically, even though farmers didn't vote for them.

The push to make every Democrat campaign on a progressive platform is not a winning strategy nationwide. There are races where it can work, and there are races where it won't. You aren't going to elect a progressive Democrat in West Virginia or Kentucky or Nebraska. But politics is a team sport, and without national majorities you can't accomplish anything.

Lying

If you lie once, you have to keep lying to protect that first lie. Eventually, the lies will pile up.

- Please Excuse My Younger Brothers (Ep. 9).

Replacing MAGA

The MAGA Republican Party is horrifically bad. Weimer Republic Nazi party bad. Cambodian Communist party bad. Iranian government of 1979 bad. George Wallace bad. Less sane than the John Birch society. More criminal and less moral than Al Capone. Proven to be absolutely incapable of governing competently.

While the Democratic Party in the United States is a big tent party, MAGA has left a Democratic Party which was already straining to find common ground for its immensely ideologically diverse coalition ripping at the seams, which has produced a lot of unproductive infighting.

This is not good for America. A country with only one viable political party capable of governing is not a healthy democracy.

In the British Commonwealth, there is a concept called a "loyal opposition". A loyal opposite disagrees on lots of important policy issues with the party or coalition that it opposes, but in not an existential threat to the government it is seeking office in, and shares fundamental process and normative values with the party it opposes that are ultimately more important that its policy disagreements with the other party or coalition that it opposes.

Our current election laws, as a practical matter, lock the U.S. into a system with two dominant political parties in any one political jurisdiction at one time. But that doesn't mean that it isn't possible to have a different pair of political parties in one state from another state, and it doesn't mean that it isn't possible for one of those two dominant political parties to be replaced with a different dominant political party.

This has happened several times in U.S. history, most recently when the Republican Party replaced the Whigs, which collapsed around 1860. It has happened in other countries, like Canada, with similar electoral rules, too.

The U.S. is engaged in an experiment along those lines this year in the Nebraska Senate race, in a deep red state that no Democratic Party candidate had any chance of winning, but which is a state that is also not happy with the way MAGA Republicans are running our country. The Democratic Party declined to field a U.S. Senate candidate in that race to clear the way for a center-right independent candidate, Dan Osborn, to run against a GOP nominee who would toe the MAGA line. 

If he is elected in November, he surely won't be a reliable party line vote for the Democratic Party, but he will also be willing to stand up to the insanity of Trump 2.0 when it goes beyond favoring partisan policy preferences to undermining the previously shared foundations of our political system. He won't embrace blatant corruption. He won't support gross incompetence. He won't be a friend of Putin. He won't agree that pedophiles and fraudsters should be protected. He won't try to undermine the rule of law. He won't lie about things that are obvious lies to everyone who hears them. He will understand that there were no air bases in the Revolutionary War. He will understand that the U.S. did not have diplomatic relations with the classical Roman Empire. He will not try to impose tariffs on islands inhabited entirely by penguins. He won't fall asleep in the middle of important meetings. He won't support the violent overthrow of free and fair U.S. election results. He won't completely disregard science. He will provide people with conservative political views who aren't evil or stupid, and don't want the United States to become a failed dictatorship an alternative that they can stomach.

Will he win? 

Who knows? The polls are all over the place in this race (according to the New York Times):

But the vast majority of candidates running for statewide office without being either major party's nominee has no chance of winning at all and would face a complete blow out. But he's been within the statistical margin of error of the Republican or winning in four of the seven general election polls conducted in the race. The only poll conducted since May (about three weeks ago) put him in a tie with the Republican, when the Republican was favored by 16 percentage points in one poll at the end of May. 

Maybe other deep red states can follow suit. Maybe if enough people like him start winning elections, they can band together and form a new political party that is conservative without sharing the worse vices of MAGA Republicans.

Nebraska might be a special case. Its unicameral state legislature is nominally non-partisan, and that might influence the political attitudes that voters have towards independent candidates.

But it is also possible that a lot of red state voters, despite being poisoned by anti-Democratic party rhetoric so deeply that they can't bring themselves to support a Democrat, and holding only moderate views, would support a center-right party not unlike the one that the GOP used to be, over the far-right party that the GOP has become.

Indeed, the mere existence of a credible threat to their re-election from the center instead of the left could be enough to give the GOP in red states like Nebraska to moderate its positions in a way that they didn't need to when it was certain that a Democrat couldn't win in their state, no matter how despicable the candidate running for the GOP.

And, this isn't just about getting the GOP itself to be more moderate (or better yet, replacing the MAGA GOP with a center-right party that is capable of governing sensibly and supports some shared fundamental values that used to be shared across the political spectrum).

It is also about making the Democratic party less of a herd of cats in places where it does have a chance of electing people to public office.

There are lots of pretty conservative people who hold their noses and vote Democratic, and try to influence the Democratic party in their direction, because the MAGA GOP is an existential threat to them personally, or because the MAGA GOP is not a recipe for securing a tolerably functional government.

There are cattle ranchers and food company executives out there who recognize that a healthy food inspection system is good for business, and that high tariffs, sky high diesel and fertilizer prices, and buying tainted meat from Argentina in deals that even the Secretary of Agriculture knows nothing about, are not good for business. So, MAGA may not be right for them. But that doesn't mean that the agree with much of the Democratic Party platform, and trying to make everyone happy just isn't possible.

There are wealthy doctors out there who are economically conservative and socially moderate rather than liberal, who still have no patience for a MAGA regime that is anti-vax, that votes to shut down rural hospitals, that orders the CDC to fake data on measles deaths, and encourages people to eat beef tallow to be more healthy.

There are cold war veterans out there who don't like having a President who cozies up to Russia and North Korea and China. They aren't impressed with a President who runs such a loose ship that destroyers go a week without power in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, that sailors on aircraft carriers don't have adequate food or working toilets, that commissaries on military bases have spoiled food because their freezers don't work, that military family members and people who risked their lives to be translators for U.S. troops are being deported for no fault of their own to places where they face serious risks of harm, that service members are being ordered to commit war crimes, and that sycophants are promoted while seasoned generals and admirals are purged. Those things don't make you proud of your country.

There are probably plenty of god and country conservatives who are absolute disgusted with the way that Trump has held cage fights on the White House lawn, demolished half the White House, put his scowling image on everything like some third-world dictator, told obvious lies to their face, disrespected veterans, shown not a scintilla of understanding of the Bible, blasphemously portrayed himself as Jesus, mocked disabled people, engaged in rampant infidelity with multiple wives and mistresses, corruptly enriched himself and his family, engaged in insider trading, been convicted of crimes, raped children, paved over the White House rose garden, shown utter ignorance of basic facts in his public speeches, encouraged and promoted immoral aides, and been embarrassed by him falling asleep at important meetings and shitting his pants at public functions, even if they agree with him of many economic and social issues.

There are states like New Mexico which by all race neutral economic and social indicators looks like a red state, where a lot of people are very conservative in their political views, but where they won't support Republicans for office, because MAGA Republicans show open contempt and hate for Hispanics and Native Americans who make up a huge share of the state's voters, President Trump demonizes them, and MAGA thinks that Native Americans and partially Native American mestizos should be deported despite having ancestors who have lived there since long before their land was part of the United States.

There are plenty of Muslim voters who are as socially conservative as the average Evangelical Christian and who are economically moderate at most, who can't in good conscience vote for the GOP because Republicans consider them terrorists and want to actively persecute them, so their stuck in the big tent Democratic Party instead. Many Black Evangelical Christian voters are in a similar boat.

The far right extremism and just plain mendacity and incompetence of MAGA Republicans is probably going to get a lot of Democratic candidates who wouldn't have a chance running against a center-right GOP elected to Congress in two months, in what is likely to be a blue wave election (knock on wood). But a country with only one functional major political party isn't a healthy democracy.

If someone launched a center-right party in the U.S. called, for example, the "Conservative party", it could and should have a good shot at replacing the MAGA Republican party in the U.S. And, that may be the only solution, because the MAGA Republican party may at this point, after more than a decade under Donald Trump's thumb as a cult of personality for him, be beyond saving as an institution.

I'd rather live in a country with two viable reasonably functional political parties than one that's a lost cause and the other that's become a tent where it is very hard for everyone to fit comfortably. But until MAGA is replaced, or the election system is reformed to be a proportional representation system, this is the situation we have to live with and try to make work as best we can.

Fossil Fuels And The Bulk Freight Market (And More)

Executive Summary

Fossil fuels account for 40% of ocean freight, 51% of train freight, and 56% of barge freight. 

New technologies in renewable energy, nuclear energy, electric vehicles, batteries, and heat pumps, could dramatically reduce the importance of fossil fuels in the global economy, eliminating the need for this bulk freight. 

This shift away from fossil fuels would also greatly reduce pollution, slow or stop climate change, improve workplace and transportation safety, strengthen democracy in the world's most authoritarian states and far-right domestic politics, and reduce economic vulnerability and military logistics vulnerability to unrest and military activity in countries that produce oil and gas.

How Are Fossil Fuels Used? What Substitutes Are Available?

The predominant use of coal is to generate electricity and its market share of electricity generation is plummeting, mostly to renewables like solar power and wind power, and to a lesser extent to tidal, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels like corn based ethanol and biodiesel made mostly from restaurant waste fats. Nuclear power provides a significant share of non-fossil fuel electricity and has been pretty stagnant, neither growing nor shrinking in market share much for decades, although new advances are poised to tweak up nuclear power use in some niche applications. A very small share of coal is used for making steel, for purifying water, and in other industrial applications. Coal can also be industrially transformed into a liquid petroleum fuel substitute or a natural gas substitute when oil and gas prices are high enough for this to make economic sense, which is rarely and too briefly to justify building the infrastructure to do it.

The increasing affordability of renewables combined with environmental regulation are making coal obsolete for electrical power generation which is its predominant use.

The predominant use of oil is as a transportation fuel and its market share of vehicle fuel types is also steadily losing ground to electric vehicles (and to a tiny extent, other non-fossil fuel powered transportation modes). 

Oil is used for electricity generation in Alaska, in Hawaii (which has fairly low per capita electricity demand), during disasters and at construction sites, for heating oils (mostly in the Northeast U.S.), for fertilizers, for lubricants, and to make plastics. But all of these non-transportation fuel uses collectively are a much smaller share of oil consumption than as transportation fuels. 

There are good alternatives to oil to generate electricity in Alaska and Hawaii. Better batteries can limit the need to fossil fuel electricity generation in natural  disasters, in remote locations, and at construction sites. Organic farming and eliminate the need for petroleum based fertilizers (and pesticides). Non-plastic materials can be substituted for plastics in many cases. Heating oils can be replaced by natural gas furnaces or heat pumps (which are powered by electricity).

Natural gas (and other gas state hydrocarbons like propane) is predominantly used for space heating and water heating and as a greener alternative for generating electricity on demand at power plants compared to coal or oil. But very small shares of natural gas use are also used for cooking, ornamental lighting, and as a niche transportation fuel (especially for United Parcel Service trucks, and to a lesser extent, other fleet vehicles). Electrically powered heat pumps, electrically powered evaporative coolers, electric cooking appliances, electric water heaters, and electric vehicles are the main alternatives to direct natural gas use, and renewables (paired with utility scale batteries) and nuclear power are the main alternatives to natural gas for electricity generation.

Fossil Fuels And The Bulk Freight Market

 

The 40% breaks down as roughy 7-8% of total global ocean-going deadweight tonnage and vessel count (there are about 770 active LNG carriers in the world, which are specialized ships necessary to carry liquid natural gas) and about 32%-33% of total global ocean-going deadweight tonnage for coal and oil.[1] Natural gas is primarily transported on intra-continental pipelines, however, with some last mile transportation by truck, rather than by ships, trains or barges.

The numbers are similar for freight transported by freight train (51% of train freight is coal and oil) and over rivers and lakes by barges (56% of barge freight is coal and oil).

As of December 2009: "About 49% of rail freight is coal and another 2% is oil. About 10% consists of grain and grain products. Wood and paper account for 4%. About 10% of loads are non-petroleum chemicals. Stones, gravel, sand, clay and glass account for about 10% Most of the rest (13%) consists of other food products, metals and metal products, motor vehicles, waste and scrap materials."

As of September 2024: "In 2007, coal was the primary commodity moved by barge, accounting for 29% of all tonnages. Petroleum was the second largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 27% of all tonnages. Crude materials, such as forest products, sand, gravel, ores, scrap, and salt, were the third largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 18% of all tonnages. Food and farm products were the fourth largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 12% of all tonnages."

Oil and gas firms accounted for 13.3% of U.S. capital expenditures in 2015, but only about 0.13% of U.S. employment (about 180,000 people); while in the same year the coal industry accounted for 0.16% of U.S. capital expenditures and 0.05% of U.S. employment (about 68,000 people) (and the coal industry has significantly contracted by more than 20% since 2015). By comparison, the retail trade industry accounts for 5.2% of U.S. capital expenditures in 2015 but 11.3% of U.S. employment. Wal-Mart alone employs about six times as many people as the entire oil and gas and coal industries combined. The U.S. oil and gas industry is important to Wall Street, but accounts for less than one in 500 U.S. jobs.

Fossil Fuels and Democracy

The share of an economy that comes from oil, gas, and coal is a good indicator of how authoritarian and far-right wing its politics are likely to be. The absence of production of these fuels in an economy, or reduced reliance of fossil fuel production, favors more democratic and more liberal government.

All of the world's remaining absolute monarchies (as opposed to merely symbolic constitutional monarchies) are in economies dominated by oil and gas revenues. Just one of the 36 countries with oil revenues as more than 2% or more of GDP has a healthy democracy (the outlier is Norway at #28 with 4.8% of its GDP from oil revenues is Norway). Norway's relatively healthy non-fossil fuel economy and democracy is in part due to the fact that it developed its oil and gas resources (mostly in the North Sea) fairly late in the history of these industries.

Among U.S. states ranked by fossil fuel production per capita, the only blue state in the top 8, is New Mexico (where it is 21% of GDP and which at #4 has all sorts of demographic and economic characteristics typical of red states, but votes blue because New Mexico has large Hispanic and Native American populations who are not welcome in the Republican party). Purple Pennsylvania at #9 and Colorado at #10 (each at about 5-6% of per capita GDP) are the only other blue states in the top 18 by fossil fuel production per capita. California at #19 has only $323 per capital of fossil fuel production (about 0.5% of per  capita GDP) and 17 states have no appreciable fossil fuel production per capita.

Environmental and Climate Harm

Coal and oil are probably the biggest drivers of air pollution and global climate change. They are also responsible for the workplace and transportation accidents associated with their extraction, delivery, and use. They are a very significant source of water pollution (including ground water pollution) and a major source of toxic and radioactive waste (coal has somewhat more than trace levels of radioactive elements in it). And, the extraction process destroys otherwise pristine open space and agricultural land, with coal being particularly damaging.

National Military and Economic Security

Reliance on fossil fuels, especially oil in the U.S., and both oil and natural gas in Europe, is also a major national security and economic stability risk, that subjecting economies that consume them to supply interruptions and risks caused by global military unrest associated with the authoritarian regimes that oil production based economies are so prone to be (e.g. unrest in the Middle East, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Russia). 

The Ukraine War has illustrated how vulnerable Russia has been to attacks on its oil and gas industry, which is not easy to defend, how dependent modern militaries are logistically on oil, and how dependent Europe and other world economies are on Russian oil and gas.

Reduced reliance of ocean shipping of fossil fuels also makes naval warfare and military control of seaways at choke points like the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the Bight of Benin, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca, the Bosporus Strait, the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Baltic Sea much less important and much less tempting for states that want to flex their military power and pirates.

References

[1] According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in an entry about Liquefied natural gas made on June 21, 2024, and a report by Fortune Business Insights, Report ID: FBI103940 updated August 17, 2026 entitled "LNG Bunkering Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By End-User (Tanker Fleet, Bulk and General Cargo, Offshore Support Vessels and Ferries, Other) and regional Forecast, 2026-2034.

The Trump Executive Order Renaming Lake Ontario Is Illegal

Trump has claimed that he can rename Lake Ontario unilaterally with an Executive Order. Google Maps is obeying it. But, of course, like so many of his other Executive Orders, this one is illegal because it contradicts a binding treaty with Canada.

Standing Law Still Broken

The U.S. law of standing basically states that even if the government or a government official is blatantly violating a law that benefits everyone, that unless someone can show how the violation of the law affects them in a way distinct from the way if affects taxpayers or voters or citizens, in general, that no one can enforce the law.

Most mainstream jurists manage to find a way to find standing in cases of clear violations of the law, but the ultraconservatives in the U.S. Supreme Court have used this doctrine to allow Trump to keep building the White House Ballroom in gross violation of the relevant law. The Chief Justice and the three liberal justices voted to prevent him from his clearly illegal actions, but were outvoted 5-4 on a standing argument.

No other sensible system of public law takes this approach. Standing was a rule invented for litigation between private parties that has never worked well in the public law setting.

The Executive-Judiciary Interface In Undermining The Rule Of Law

One of the most distinctive features of Trump 2.0 has been the breakdown of the rule of law. The administration has routinely ignored the law and settled interpretation of existing law in a wide variety of domains.

It has enacted illegal tariffs, it has denied due process to immigrants, it has deported immigrants to countries to which they have no connection, it has illegally impounded Congressionally appropriated funds, it has conducted the Iran war without complying with the war powers act, it has illegally and in violation of international law bombed suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific and killed survivors of its attacks, it has unlawfully meddled in state election processes, it has fired government officials whom Congressionally enacted statutes don't allow it to fire, it has pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, it has corruptly allowed officials to benefit personally in monetary terms from their offices, it has openly admitted to denying FEMA disaster relief based upon how states have voted in recent elections, it has brought sham criminal prosecutions of political opponents, and so on.

Trump 1.0 was odious, incompetent, dishonest, and violated some political norms and legal rules, but shows much less disregard for the rule of law and for well-established political and legal norms.

What changed? How will that affect future administrations?

A lot of the change can be fairly attributed to the courts, especially lower court judges appointed by Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court, which attained a conservative majority and an ultra-conservative plurality under Trump 1.0, consistently letting Trump circumvent rulings against him personally, and against his administration, made by lower courts and non-Trump appointed judges (including many judges appointed by Republican Presidents in prior administrations).

The U.S. Supreme Court's decisions to grant Trump expansively Presidential immunity from criminal liability for his official or arguably official acts (even if they are clearly ultra vires), and to interpret the insurrection clause out of the 14th Amendment, were some of the earliest and most damaging of its steps down this path.

Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't given Trump a complete blank check in Trump 2.0 to be a dictator, largely because the non-ultra conservative justices and the liberal justices on the Court has sometimes formed coalitions to block the ultra-conservative agenda. But this hasn't been consistent enough to discourage mischief in the executive branch.

Of course, the Republican controlled Congress also hasn't pro-actively intervened, but as some justices on the Supreme Court such as Gorsuch are starting to acknowledge, while Congress has significant power to deny funds to the President, Congress has very little capacity to pro-actively contradict or restrain a President inclined to ignore it.

The relative irrelevance of Congress has also been illustrated by Trump 2.0's heavy reliance on executive orders to act, rather than Congressional legislation, despite the fact that Republicans hold majorities in both the House and the Senate, and despite the fact that past precedents have pretty well established that the filibuster in the Senate is a voluntary restraint that the Republican Senate majority has afforded to the minority, and not a legally binding barrier to action, and despite the tight hold that Trump has acquired over the Republican party, effectively turning it into a MAGA party.

So, the existence of a GOP trifecta has, in practice, been less important to the disappearance of the rule of law than judicial and especially U.S. Supreme Court, connivance in facilitating unilateral illegal actions by President Trump (in a highly partisan fashion that it did not afford to President Biden).

Indeed, if anything, the Republican majorities in Congress have been more even handed in protecting the limited rights of the minority Democrats in Congress on a non-partisan basis, than SCOTUS has been in its rulings, many of which simply can't be explained by anything but partisan bias.

Popular Things That I Don’t Like

Christmas
Easter
Christianity
Baseball
Dogs
Sitcoms
Peanut butter
Olives
Olive oil
Grass lawns
Whiskey
Gin
Muscle cars
Audience participation
Karaoke
Pro wrestling
Peppermint
Ginger beer
The movie "Remains of the Day"
Live action adaptations of animation
Country western music
Sunrises
Anchovies
Oak barrel aged wine
Adele
Talk radio
Anything midcentury modern
Texas
Multi-factor authentication
MS Word auto-formatting
Suburban street layouts
Suburban zoning
HOAs
Golf
Slot machines
Soft mattresses
Astroturf
Vinyl
Gazpacho
Iced coffee
Wheat germ
Cottage cheese
Time shares
Sequins
Guns

Quote Of The Day

If this kingdom is led by the corrupt, it will be doomed to fall.

- The Frontier Lord Begins With Zero Subjects (2026) (Episode 7).

What Is True And What Is False About Literacy?

Jared Henderson has a thoughtful Substack post about literacy statistics and the "literacy crisis." Many statistics thrown around in the public square about this issue are misleading or ill-sourced. 

Henderson spends a lot of time revisiting his prior commentary on the issue, acknowledging that some of what he said previously was probably wrong or overstated, and sourcing the common misleading statistics. I'll skip that here.

The most essential point is that there are different levels of literacy and commonly cited statistics on point frequently don't disclose what level of literacy they are talking about. They also often cite statistics about literacy in the English language, which is appropriate for many purposes, but neglect to mention that many people in the U.S. who are not literate in English are literate in another language.

"Could not participate" is a mix of non-English language speakers, and people who have physical or cognitive disabilities too serve to interview, two very distinct populations.

Level 1 is minimal basic literacy, and about 8.1% of adults in the U.S. either could not participate in the survey or can't attain this basic level of literacy, although even some people below Level 1 literacy might be able to read a simple story to their children, recite the alphabet, or read a street sign. Many people with Level 1 literacy would struggle to graduate from high school at all.

Level 2 is the literacy level of typical non-college bound high school graduates.

Level 3 is the literacy level of a college bound high school graduate and about 57.5% of Americans have that level of literacy (other sources have put this figure as low as 46%).

Levels 4 and 5 are the literacy levels, roughly speaking, of above average college graduates and people who have graduate degrees.

An OECD report puts the United States in the middle of developed countries for literacy levels:

The United States does have a very high level of disparity between the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile in literacy (and numeracy and problem solving) compared to other developed countries, which is to say crudely that we have very literate smart people and very illiterate dumb people (using the same scale as the mean literacy levels in the chart above).

Prior to COVID, the U.S. was seeing a very gradual trend of improvement in reading and math among school children, but it took a dip (hopefully temporary and due to disrupted educational programs) in the year 2020 from which it had not yet recovered in the most recent available data.

The author describes as a separate matter the decline in the extent to which adults who used demographically used to read books do so now, but attributes this to a disinclination to read rather than a decline in the ability to read long form books. But he makes a point of distinguishing this issue from adult literacy from childhood literacy, each of which are distinct issues with distinct workable responses.

Colorado Ballot Issues In 2026

There will be up to 15 state ballot issues in November in Colorado.

Citizen initiatives that have qualified for the ballot propose changes to state law that include: 

BAD. Increased criminal penalties for the possession or sale of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. 

A LITTLE BAD. Life in prison for the human trafficking of a minor. 

BAD. A ban on transgender youth from playing on sports teams not aligned with their biological sex. 

BAD. A ban on gender-affirming surgery for people younger than 18.

Proposed constitutional changes that have qualified for the ballot include: 

BAD. A requirement that law enforcement notify federal immigration officials when an immigrant without proper legal status is charged with a violent crime. 

BAD. The establishment of a right to use natural gas for cooking and heating. 

BAD. A mandate that all taxes and fees collected for motor vehicles and gas be spent on roads.

Other measures are still awaiting final approval by the secretary of state: 

GOOD. A proposal that would move Colorado to a graduated income tax system in which high earners pay a higher tax rate, marking a big change in tax policy. 

BAD. A cap on the state’s income tax rate. 

BAD. A requirement that sales taxes on sporting goods be earmarked for conservation efforts. 

BAD. A mandate for additional voter verification for mail-in ballots. 

A LITTLE BAD. A ban on congressional redistricting outside the typical once-a-decade census cycle. 

BAD. The creation of a constitutional right to hunt and fish. 

A LITTLE BAD. A requirement that ballot questions be written at an 8th grade reading level.

GOOD. A proposal that would raise the amount of tax money the state can keep under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights — known as raising the TABOR cap — was placed on the ballot by legislators last spring. That extra money, which normally would be returned through refunds or another way, would be mandated to go to education.

World Religions In A Nutshell

About 55% of the people in the world worship the god of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims (a little less than 30% are Christian, a little less than 25% are Muslim, and about 0.2% are Jews). Jews live predominantly in the U.S. and Israel. All of these religions originated in the Middle East. 

A little less than 15% of the people in the world are Hindus. Hindus live predominantly in India.

About 4% of the people in the world are Buddhists. They live predominately in Asia.

Both Hinduism and Buddhist originated in India.

A little more than 1% of the people in the world are adherents of another religion.

About 25% of the people in the world are non-religious.