Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

What Watts Cost

Another fun chart from Steve Hayward of Power Line. This one looks at cost per kilowatt hour of electricity. The bars below are color-coded to compare US states (orange) with other countries (blue). 

When the DrsC moved our winter place from CA to NV we cut our energy cost nearly in half, dropping from 29.1 cents to 16.2 cents per kWh. Not to mention we do all heating (except cooking) in NV with natural gas. Our WY summer place is all electric, but the average cost here is only 12.1 cents per kWh.

DEI Harming the Navy

Oops, somebody just said the quiet part out loud. The retired commander of one of our nuclear submarines has written for RealClearDefense that DEI efforts in our Navy have been counterproductive in the extreme. He gives examples.

DEI programs have reduced the sense of camaraderie and cohesion the service needs to protect us. They have wasted time, money, and energies that should have been devoted to war-fighting readiness. They have made worse the very issues they’ve intended to solve. And he implies they have made recruitment more difficult.

It is highly likely he is correct in these assertions. Getting woke in the military doesn’t result in going broke, but it leads to an ineffectiveness our nation can ill-afford.

Good News

You know I believe choice of college major is an important life decision, and it is made quite young. CNBC reports the ten college majors with the best starting salaries, and also reports their mid-career average pay. Two of the 10 start at over $100,000 per year.

I am especially pleased to see the subject I taught - Management - is one of the 10, it comes in #6. CNBC calls it "Applied Economics and Management" which is close enough. For my field they list a starting salary average of $81,200 and a mid-career salary of $169,300.

All of the others are in STEM fields - engineering, computers and math. 

A Suggestion

If you know the parent of a disturbed young person who could become a school shooter, you might want to remind the parent to lock up their weaponry. Parents of kids who become shooters are being arrested and charged with serious felonies. 

For example, Colin Gray, the father of the recent Georgia school shooter Colt Gray, has also been arrested. It is claimed he gave his son the AR-15 style rifle the son used to kill four people and wound several more.

It is bad enough if your messed up kid kills one or more people, you won't live that down. But to go to jail because you weren't a child psychologist par excellence (most of us aren't) who could straighten out your little monster will ruin your life irretrievably. 

A gun safe is cheap insurance, and will protect other valuables too.

Thursday Snark

Image courtesy of Lucianne.com, Sept. 6, 2024.

Weird Gerontological Science

Instapundit links to a research report at UPI.com which finds this amazing relationship.

Seniors with higher levels of mental resilience are 53% less likely to die within the next 10 years than those with the lowest levels, researchers found.

The participants' mental resilience was determined using scales that measured qualities like perseverance, calmness, sense of purpose and self-reliance, researchers said.

Even with chronic health problems or an unhealthy lifestyle, people with high mental resilience remained 46% and 38% less likely to die within 10 years than those with the least fortitude.

"This study is unique in establishing a statistically significant association between psychological resilience and all-cause mortality in the older and retired population, even after accounting for confounding factors," the researchers concluded in a university news release.

Keep your cool and outlive your enemies. As I told a consulting client some decades ago, when asked how I'd respond to a whining employee who self-reported mental problems? My tough love response was: "Cope, dammit, the rest of us have to." 

Wednesday Snark

Image courtesy of Lucianne.com, Sept. 5, 2024.

Anti-Woke Victories ... Maybe

Woke is certainly part of being on the "wrong track." Related to the previous post, I write to remind you that the truism "Go woke, get broke!" continues to notch further victories. New examples have surfaced.

First, Molson Coors has announced they're backing away from DEI efforts, this in the face of a threatened boycott announced by Robby Starbuck. Brown-Forman, Tractor Supply, Ford, and Lowes are others which have acted similarly.

Independently, Sony's vastly expensive first-person shooter game "Concord" has been slathered with DEI symbols and has failed spectacularly. It is the Disney experience revisited.

Sony appears to be folding and walking away from the table. Their new first-person shooter, Concord, has been a bust since its launch on July 23, reaching only 697 peak concurrent players on Steam – an even lower number than that of its beta test, suggesting many gamers didn’t come back for the actual game.

Sony dropped a big bomb when they announced that they will take Concord offline on September 6, which is this Friday, exactly two weeks since its release. Concord will no longer be sold, and anyone who has already bought it will be issued a refund.

Let's remain vigilant that these announcements are not mere CYA window dressing, while the racist, anti-merit policies continue with new names. 

Right or Wrong Track

Here is Steve Hayward's latest chart for Power Line. If you can't read the fine print, the red line is people who believe the nation is on the wrong track. Blue is those who see it on the correct path. The recent presidential eras are designated across the top.

Our political system is not delivering what people want or expect. If this much discontent doesn't result in regime change in Washington, I will conclude our political system has become unresponsive to public wishes. Merely a shadow play without substance, disconnected from the administrative state which independently operates as it chooses.

About the Houthis

The U.S. has been countering the Houthi rebels in Yemen who've been harassing ships headed to and from the Suez Canal. We've been fighting their cheap drones with our expensive anti-aircraft missiles. 

In each exchange they lose a couple of thousand bucks, we lose a couple of million bucks. This exchange is not sustainable from an economic perspective. And it is stupid, we need to fight their war, not ours.

What I want to know is why we aren't harassing Houthis with our own cheap drones? These can loiter looking for targets which, once found, can be killed by a cheap missile or the drone's suicide dive. 

If we had a couple of these wandering about the sky over every settled area in Yemen it would be harder for them to get set-up to shoot at ships. If a suicide drone loitered till almost out of fuel without finding a target, pick the largest house in the area and crash it. 

If every time a vehicle moved it got dive bombed by a small explosive drone they'd soon stop moving. Infrared should handle night movements. I guess you can move weaponry by camel-back, but not easily.

Postscript

I mentioned the other day about aspen leaves turning a pale yellow. Now the other DrC has seen our first example and posted a photo thereof. I have taken the liberty of reposting it here.

Soon we'll have a whole forest of these beauties surrounding us. With a dark background it looks vivid, against a graying autumn sky they are pale, and of course the tree trunks are white with black accents. Together the ensemble is etherial.

The Black Sheep?

I don't know if these are really Tim's family* and Nebraska isn't MN where Tim now lives but this is truly funny. Instapundit republished it with this wry comment, "He's ruined his last Thanksgiving with woke politics, I guess."

Every family has an outlier, looks like Sinophile Tim is theirs.

*This Daily Mail article says these folk are family, "those posing are related to Walz through his grandfather's brother." That would make them his second cousins.

Bukele Makes a Difference

RealClear World links to an American Conservative article about Nayib Bukele who has employed the “iron fist” in El Salvador and cleaned up its gang-ridden mess. He basically imprisoned everybody who looked like a gang-banger in a huge gulag, and it worked. 

Obviously many have complained about his abuse of “human rights.” He prefers to concentrate on the rights of the law-abiding, and among them he is wildly popular. 

One of the first things he did was kick the NGOs out of the country. I’m beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t add that to the wish list compiled into Project 2025. I begin to conclude NGOs do substantially more harm than good.

What Bukele demonstrated in El Salvador is that you can truly “imprison your way to a safer society,” despite claims by civil libertarians to the contrary.  Comparisons to Mussolini getting the Italian trains to run on time probably aren’t too far-fetched. Except getting criminals out of peoples’ lives is more important than train schedules.

European Stagnation

What their media call “the far right” grows stronger in France and Germany. In both countries the other political parties have vowed not to join coalitions with them. The result is political stagnation, and economic malaise.

Writing for The Telegraph (U.K.), Matthew Lynn views the continent with emphasis on these two large players and reaches a gloomy conclusion.

The blunt truth is this. These are increasingly poor countries determined to get even poorer. There is no one with the ideas, strength or ability to tackle the challenges they face. The far-Right and hard-Right parties – the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France – concentrate only on immigration and, while that is an important issue, they have little to say about liberalising markets, controlling the size of the state, or cutting taxes, even though those are the only policies that are likely to restore growth.

As to how the U.K. should deal with the problems next door, Lynn observes the following.

Post-war Japan didn’t get richer by concentrating on Chairman Mao’s China, even if it was its biggest neighbour. Sony and Toyota were too busy selling into America and Europe. Likewise, American multinationals have never focused on the Mexican market. If your closest major neighbour happens to be a basket case, then you look to the global market instead.

We should be distancing ourselves from the whole mess as far as possible.

His conclusion is that if your neighbor decides to be stupid, there is no requirement for you to join him in his foolishness. It is a truth the U.K.’s new PM Starmer seemingly doesn’t comprehend.  Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link.

¡Que Mala!

Nick Arama who writes at Red State, is having fun with this treatment of Ms. Harris' given name.

He suggests pronouncing as Spanish, in which case it comes out as ¡Que Mala!  

¡Que Mala! means "How bad!"

Update

I've written that here in the high country, summers are short. Normally autumn begins Labor Day weekend. We drove the Snake River canyon highway to Jackson yesterday and sure enough saw the first few trees that had lost their green. These few had turned an orangey red. 

So far the aspens haven't gone pale yellow, nor the mountain maples a bluish red. That will come in the next couple of weeks. The contrast with the dark green firs is amazing.

It will soon be too cool to eat supper on our screened back porch with the forest view Not yet, but another milestone indicating the time to pack the truck and go approaches.

It's time to start a twice-a-year ritual we call "eating the freezer down." Now that we no longer have an RV transporting frozen food isn't practical. We try to stop buying food and eat what's already on hand. 

We'll be seeing Vs of geese flying south soon. If you're outside when they fly over you know that they 'talk' to each other, they fly along honking.

Like us, they migrate. More than a few geese spend their winter on the golf courses of southern Nevada near our winter place, eating the green grass and driving golfers nuts.

Honoring Labor

The work of this world needs doing, and the lot of those doing it is often the opposite of glamorous. So often we only notice when it doesn't get done, and otherwise take it for granted. 

Today - Labor Day - let's try to appreciate the toil of those that make a good life possible. Most of us are part of a vast web of interdependent activities that constitute life in first world nations. When part of that web breaks down, when someone or some group doesn't do their part, life gets difficult.

I, and probably most of you, like my life as presently constituted. Let's be grateful that this Rube Goldberg thing called "civilization" actually functions most of the time. In its absence life would quickly become as Hobbes described, "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Weird Cardiology Science

Instapundit links to a report of medical research on a behavior that can lead to as much as a 20% decrease in heart disease. The magical behavior: catching up on missed sleep on the weekend. The study was done with UK data as access to massive health data banks is facilitated by their NHS.

With a median follow-up of almost 14 years, participants in the group with the most compensatory sleep (quartile 4) were 19% less likely to develop heart disease than those with the least (quartile 1). In the subgroup of patients with daily sleep deprivation those with the most compensatory sleep had a 20% lower risk of developing heart disease than those with the least. The analysis did not show any differences between men and women.

I find this particularly interesting, as I tend to be a “night owl.” During my professorial years I regularly engaged in late night writing sessions followed by an 8 a.m. class. Those days I got maybe 4.5 hours sleep. 

With a MWF teaching schedule I normally slept in on a Tuesday or more often a Thursday until 11 a.m. It wasn’t on a weekend but it was make-up sleep. The three years I was a bureaucrat my sleep-ins were on weekends. 

My guess is that a mental disposition that “allows” a person to sleep in is related to being less stressed and maybe to lower blood pressure. More type B, less type A (I’m a B-).

Another Auto Technology

We have some new terminology in the so-called "electric motor vehicle" field. So far we've had true EVs that ran on batteries driving electric motors. And we've had hybrid EVs, I happen to own one of these. What is new is EREV technology. Motor Trend explains the difference. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

What's EREV mean? It stands for extended-range electric vehicle, and it's distinct from the plug-in hybrids Hyundai and others more commonly offer. As the name implies, it's an EV, with a decent-sized battery powering electric motors that in turn propel the car down the road. 

The whole range-extender part comes in the form of an internal-combustion engine whose sole purpose is to act as an onboard generator for the electric bits. Simply fill the tank with gas, and you can extend the vehicle's effective range beyond a set radius surrounding an EV charger, with the engine kicking on to generate electricity when the battery's initial charge is depleted.

A plug-in hybrid operates differently, typically with far more limited EV-only range, and the gas engine not only can charge up the battery but also is a primary motivator that can directly power the drive wheels, helping propel the vehicle along.

Present day hybrids provide power to the wheels from both electric motors and their gas engines. The new EREVs will provide all power to wheels from their electric motors, and use their gas engines only to spin the generators making the electricity after their batteries run down.

The EREV advantage will be a larger battery than hybrids have, meaning the owner who has a charging station their garage will do all their around-town driving to work and shopping on battery power. The gas engine will fire up on longer trips and when away from chargers for extended periods.