Dog days in D.C.

As a child I believed that the so-called Dog Days of summer were called that because the intense heat causes dogs to pant more than usual to keep their body temperature down. And while my observation was not entirely misguided, I found out later that the appellation comes from the approximately six-week period when the rising of the sky's brightest star, Sirius—the so-called Dog Star associated with the constellation Canis Major, the "greater dog"—occurs before the Sun, making it visible to observers in the Northern Hemisphere.

The modern starting date is usually said to be July 3, and the ending date is August 11—though most people think of the Dog Days as extending into late August or even early September since they associate this period with exceptionally hot, humid weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

It was in preparation for such days that during my first summer in the District of Columbia, my landlady instructed her handyman to install an air conditioner in the window of the room I rent in a cavernous home in northwest Washington. She insisted that I would never make it through a hot, humid D.C. summer without air conditioning. I told her that I was pretty heatproof and that I would make it just fine. After all, I grew up in Michigan and managed the hot, humid summers there without air conditioning.

Two presidents, dementia and the 25th amendment

A friend of mine, who many years ago used to be a nurse caring for dementia patients, has impressed a very important point on me in recent months: Dementia just keeps getting worse. It never gets better.

It seems the United States has now had two presidents in a row around whom stories of diminished capacity and dementia have proliferated. Recently, a contributor to The Hill wrote about President Donald Trump's confabulation regarding his uncle John Trump, long deceased and formerly a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Now it's important to know the meaning of confabulation to understand this anecdote, so here's the dictionary definition:  "the replacement of a gap in a person's memory by a falsification that they believe to be true." The author of the piece in The Hill believes Trump was simply relating something Trump believed to be true from his direct experience.

Taking a break - no post this week

I am taking a break this week and plan to post again on Sunday, August 17.

Living through the second Gilded Age

While watching the HBO series "The Gilded Age," I was reminded that for most of my adult life I have been living through America's second Gilded Age. The appellation comes from the title of a 1873 novel of the same name by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. As the Encyclopedia Britannica explains:

The title was a provocation: the word gilded describes something covered in a thin layer of gold, shiny on the outside but, perhaps, cheap or rotten underneath. That’s how Twain and Warner saw the United States. Their book—part comedy, part critique, set in Washington, D.C.—mocked a society that looked bright and successful but that, underneath, was corrupt, driven forward by self-serving politicians and grasping businessmen. The title stuck because it captured the contradictions of the era.

This description might seem just as apt for America since the early 1980s as it does for America of the late 19th century. And, while the cast of characters seems similar, the results are very different.  The robber barons of America's first Gilded Age left the country with a sprawling infrastructure of railroads, steel mills, mines, telegraphs and telephones, sturdy physical infrastructure much of which is still in place today.

The robber barons of our current era—the tech overlords who control vast software and information empires—have created ephemeral apps and information products designed to manipulate us and steer us toward a kind of digital indentured servitude, one marked by endless subscription fees and paywalls and constant surveillance of our behavior, both online and off. The tech overlords are in the process of enclosing the digital commons so that everything on it will come at a price, either to our wallets or our privacy.

Transformer bottleneck: Can the U.S. maintain and expand its electric grid?

Electric transformers aren't something most people think about unless one attached to the power lines serving their home or business is damaged resulting in a power outage. Most of the time power is back on quickly indicating that the transformers were not the problem. It takes longer to replace a transformer damaged beyond repair.

And that can be a problem if large numbers of transformers are damaged at once such as occurred in the recent California wildfires. That's because the waiting time for new transformers is now 127 weeks.

In case you don't know, transformers are typically used to bring down voltage. Utilities use high voltages to transfer electricity long distances because it's more efficient. The electricity voltage must then be "stepped down" to the level that most homes and businesses use.

Stocks only go up...until they don't: A history lesson and a forecast

I remember years ago eating lunch with my father and his financial advisor. I stated what I thought was an indisputable fact. I said history suggests that stock markets can not only go down but stay down for many, many years. I cited the 1966 top in U.S. stocks and the secular bear market that ensued and lasted until 1982. He asked me if I was recommending that investors bet against America.

I said I wouldn't put it that way. I explained that the world was moving toward an era of energy scarcity, and that since energy is the key factor in economic activity, this could affect the value of stocks. Even if he disagreed, I said that none of us live as long as the stock market has been around and so it seems worthwhile to know about this history of long-term bear markets that might affect our very finite financial lives. He was unruffled.

I turned out to be right about energy costs; the price of oil hit a new record in 2008. But he turned out to be right about the general direction of the U.S. stock market, even if you count the crash of 2008 from which we more than recovered before going on to ever more unsustainable heights. My father was very pleased with the results of this man's advice.

The trouble with copper tariffs

The mainstream news media has already figured out that the Trump administration's proposed tariffs on imported copper of 50 percent would dramatically hike copper prices for American industry and raise the price of products containing copper for consumers, which is just about everything electrical. The reason is simple; The United States is a net importer of 45 percent of its copper needs according the U.S. Geological Survey.

All right, you may say, so there will be some short-term pain until the United States develops enough new copper mining and refining capacity to be self-sufficient. First, it's not easy to build such capacity. New mines can take years to build, assuming you already know where the copper is. As for copper refining, few people want such facilities near them so half the challenge is quelling the opposition to any new refining operations. They also take years to build.

Now nobody is going to spend money building new copper mines and refining facilities unless there is a guarantee that the price of copper will stay sufficiently elevated to justify such investments. Even if the proposed tariffs on imported copper were to go into effect, there can be no guarantee that they would be maintained for the couple of decades that investors need for such long-term investments to pay off.

Denmark takes first step toward owning your own information

Denmark has decided to take the first step toward protecting Danes' personal information by giving them ownership rights to their own image and voice. The Danish culture minister told The Guardian: “In the bill we agree and are sending an unequivocal message that everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice and their own facial features, which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI.” The purpose is to prevent "deep fakes" of an individual and to force such "deep fakes" to be taken down when an individual requests it. Under the law those violating it may have to pay compensation.

I have previously floated the idea of a constitutional amendment that gives all persons ownership of their information. How far that should extend is open to discussion. But it really ought to extend, for example, to the photos many people are taking over this holiday weekend in the United States at family gatherings.

However, the minute those photos are posted, the owner immediately loses control of them, either through the sweeps of artificial intelligence (AI) bots hoovering up everything on the internet or through websites where the photos are posted. These websites may have user agreements that give those websites certain rights to your pictures.

Bismuth: Another critical metal gets squeezed

Unless you are a hobbyist or technician who solders things on a regular basis, your only acquaintance with the metallic element bismuth is probably through Pepto Bismol, the main ingredient of which is bismuth subsalicylate, a pinkish substance sold, not surprisingly, under the name of pink bismuth.

The fact that you can ingest pink bismuth and it will soothe your stomach should tell you something about its toxicity; it's quite low. And, that's why bismuth is  favored over lead for soldering. It is now widely used for soldering of circuit boards and other electronic equipment, lens production for high precision equipment, alloys with low melting points (for example, in automatic sprinklers to activate them when fire breaks out) and, of course, pharmaceuticals.

All of those products are at risk as supplies of bismuth have dwindled. Those of you who read my pieces regularly can almost surely guess who is holding those supplies back. It's China. Bismuth is one of five metals on which China placed strict export limits back in February. Now those restrictions are beginning to bite.

The turbulent globe: Resources and climate change in the background

It should come as no surprise that the two major conflicts raging in the world today involve large energy producers and exporters, namely, Iran and Russia. Energy resources, especially fossil fuels, attract conflicts because they are so unevenly distributed in the world and because despite this, everyone needs those resources. The simple fact is that nothing gets done without energy and fossil fuels are still the dominate fuels in the world.

But it's not just energy, of course, which invites conflict. Water resources are becoming increasingly a focal point of contention. The Pacific Institute, which provides comprehensive data on the world's water resources, also keeps a database of conflict involving water and lists 785 conflicts worldwide since 2020.

While I do not deny that there are other reasons for the conflicts we are seeing—ethnic, religious, geostrategic, domestic politics, even personal—the fight over stuff is always under the surface, especially in a world which is fast depleting its finite stores of nonrenewable energy and minerals. How fast? Two examples will give you a taste.  Through 2021 half of all the oil consumed in the modern oil age since 1859 was consumed from 1998 through that year.  Through 2018 half of all the copper ever mined was mined from the year 2000 through that year. The expectation that we can keep doubling production for many mineral resources from here in ever shorter time frames does not seem credible.