Category: Economic issues

Fiber gets closer

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Generally, if I see heavy equipment anywhere within miles of the abbey, it’s a reason for panic. It means that someone is cutting trees to sell logs, or someone is up to some kind of mischief with a bull dozer. But there is one kind of machinery that is a joy to see nearby. That’s the kind of machinery that buries fiber optic cable.

This equipment was parked during the weekend about two miles from the abbey. It’s not clear whether the route of the new fiber will be on the paved road nearest the abbey. The abbey, by the way, is on an unpaved road half a mile from pavement.

One of these days, though I have no idea when, the abbey will have fast Internet.

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Review: Inequality: What Can Be Done?

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Here are two must-read books for those who care about the human condition in an era in which we are immersed in a dumber-than-rocks political and media culture. I read Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century last year shortly after it came out. That book has received an enormous amount of attention among the intelligentsia and hardly needs a review by me, nor am I qualified to review it. On the other hand, Anthony Atkinson’s book, Inequality: What Can Be Done, ought to be in the hands of everyone who is politically active — or anyone who votes, for that matter.

Piketty’s book is an account of just how appallingly unequal societies have become. Atkinson picks up where Piketty leaves off and explores what might be done about inequality. He develops 15 proposals for reversing increasing inequality. These are not pie-in-the-sky proposals. They are common-sense reversals of the political choices that started around 1980, when an epidemic of voodoo economics and disguised greed (think Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) got loose in our political culture and set us on the course we have been on for the last 35 years.

The common wisdom, as Atkinson points out, is that we can’t afford higher taxes on the rich or strengthening the social safety net, because globalization and technology have made everything different now. But Atkinson shows that to be nothing but voodoo. He devotes a section to the history of globalization and points out that there was a strong wave of globalization in the 19th Century, made possible largely because of technological improvements and economies in manufacturing and shipping. And yet it was during that period of 19th Century globalization that many modern reforms that reduced inequality (until the 1980 reversal) got their start. For example, in 1881 in Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm I proposed old-age insurance. In 1885, Austria adopted compulsory health insurance. In 1902, the first worker’s compensation law was enacted in the United States.

Atkinson points out that econometric models, aided by fast and cheap computing, have become quite good at modeling what-if scenarios of changes in economic policies and taxation. Though the heirs of Reagan and Thatcher continue to believe and to shout about that higher taxes on the rich will stall economies, actual experience over the last 25 years shows no such thing — nor do the econometric models show any such thing. It is no accident that one of the first deeds of the our new Republican Congress was to castrate the Congressional Budget Office, forcing the CBO to go along with right-wing economic voodoo, which got us where we are today.

Inequality: What Can Be Done. Anthony B. Atkinson. Published May 11, 2015, Harvard University Press.

What blowback looks like

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After the little town of Walnut Cove agreed to let the state of North Carolina (at taxpayer expense) drill a geological core sample on town property to test for the presence of frackable gas, what followed was an uprising. These photos are from a press conference called by the state and national NAACP to announce an environmental justice investigation into where these polluting activities tend to be located — near black communities.

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What’s next around here?

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The county convention of the Stokes County Democratic Party, April 21

In July, this blog will be eight years old. Soon I’ll reach the 1,000th post. Any blog that has been around this long is bound to go through changes and fallow periods. But I’m not going away. I’m just trying to get clear on what comes next.

One of the things I’ve had to figure out is just how much involvement I want to have in local politics. I learned during last fall’s political campaign just how exhausting local politics can be, especially when you lose. It took all winter to recover from the burnout. It’s tempting to stay hidden in the woods. I also think that local politics doesn’t make very good blog material, except insofar as the political drama here in Stokes County echoes what’s happening in other places.

I have rolled up my sleeves and decided to stay involved in local politics. Earlier this week, at the county convention of the Stokes County Democratic Party, I was elected county chairman for a two-year term. I also will continue to be involved with No Fracking in Stokes.

Rural counties like this one are in trouble. We are losing population. Our young people leave us because of the lack of jobs and lack of anything to do. Increasingly, jobs don’t pay living wages. Our social services and health departments are overwhelmed. Our schools are begging for help. Even worse here in Stokes County, it is thought that some frackable gas reserves might exist in our river basin, the Dan River basin. Conservatives and progressives have very different views on what needs to be done. Conservatives think that fracking is economic development. As a progressive, I can’t think of a quicker way to ruin and impoverish our county than to let fracking in. Our other assets, such as our state park (the most popular park in the state), our river, and our unspoiled rural beauty, have far greater economic value, economic value that would be ruined by fracking. But conservatives are suspicious of tourism, because it invites people into the county who will never vote Republican.

Conservatives want to fiddle while Rome burns and measure their performance by how low the tax rate is. The burning political issue in this county at the moment (other than a county budget that is not going to balance without a tax increase) is whether emblazoning “In God We Trust” on the side of the county courthouse requires that the county similarly emblazon “In Reason We Trust.” This comes on the heels of a drawn-out and divisive fight in the town of King about flying the Christian flag at a veterans’ memorial. It led to a lawsuit, which conservatives predictably lost. Conservatives somehow convince themselves that symbolic and sentimental issues like these are the things that matter most and around which our futures turn. Meanwhile, Republicans in Raleigh are busy selling off the state to the highest bidder. A test well to look for frackable gas is going to be drilled soon in the little Stokes County town of Walnut Cove. Our own state tax dollars will be paying for the drilling.

Our work is cut out for us.

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An all-Republican board of county commissioners hears about “In Reason We Trust.”

The high existential cost of being rich

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Source: careerassessmentsite.com

Do you know your personality type, as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test? If not, with a little Googling you’ll probably find a way to get a quick and dirty assessment, if not the trademarked test. But the odds are that, if you are reading this blog, then you are not rich, and you are not an ENTJ.

So what’s an ENTJ? Of the 16 personality types described by the Myers-Briggs, ENTJ’s are the type most likely to get rich. Let’s look at the categories.

Extraverted vs. Introverted (E/I)

Intuitive vs. Sensing (N/S)

Thinking vs. Feeling (T/F)

Judging vs. Perceiving (J/P)

There are 16 combinations of these attributes. According to a report by the Career Assessment Site, ENTJ types are most likely to make a lot of money. That is, people who are extraverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging. There also was an article about this at the Motley Fool web site.

If there’s a kind of person that I just can’t stand, it’s ENTJ’s or ESTJ’s. They’re the opposite of people like me (and probably the opposite of people like you, if you are reading this blog). I am an INFP – introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving. Guess which type makes the least money? People like me — INFP’s. I’m pretty sure that’s because INFP’s don’t much care about money beyond what it takes to live reasonably well and to travel a bit.

I want to clear up some common misconceptions, though. Introverts are not shy. In fact, in my experience introverts often have more social skill than extraverts, simply because introverts pay attention, and extraverts never stop running their mouths. There is another misconception that holds that, if feeling is predominant over thinking, then you must not be very smart, and that if you are very smart, then feeling must be subordinate. That is extremely not true. The IQ’s of feeling types follow the same bell curve as all IQ’s. To be able to think sharply does not imply a devaluation of feeling. Feeling, after all, is the key to meaning.

So is money all that matters? Not to an INFP. It is meaning that we seek in life, not wealth and power. If there is anything that strikes existential terror into the heart of an INFP, it’s the thought of the inner poverty that can almost always be perceived in the lives of those who seek wealth and power. I don’t envy them. I feel sorry for them. They seek to fill their emptiness with things, and to compensate for meaninglessness with power.

Now, as for my income, I did OK. To be an INFP is not necessarily to be sentenced to poverty. I never got rich, that’s for sure. But I retired early, and I own my own time and my own thoughts. If an INFP can find the right niche, then creativity, kindness, and insight will be rewarded, even in corporate America.

I wouldn’t trade places with an ENTJ for all the money in the world.

How much coal to power our houses?


Duke Power’s Belews Creek Steam Station, Belews Creek, North Carolina

My post yesterday was about how many kilowatt hours of electricity the abbey uses on a cold winter day. Though I use about half as much energy as the average American, there are no grounds for boasting. When that energy use is translated into pounds of coal, it is substantial.

Here’s how we can do the math. Most of my electricity here probably comes from a coal-fired steam plant, because that’s the nearest generator. That’s Duke Power’s Belews Creek Steam Station. The Wikipedia article on the steam station gives some statistics on the station’s efficiency and tells us how many Btu’s of thermal energy are required at the station to generate a kilowatt hour of electricity. At Belews Creek, which is a pretty efficient steam plant, 9,023 Btu of heat is needed to generate 1 kWh of electricity.

Coal varies in its energy content, but a reasonable average for coal is 20 million Btu of heat per 2,000 pounds of coal. So one pound of coal releases 10,000 Btu of heat when it’s burned. Now we can do the math for roughly how much coal is required to supply the abbey’s electricity.

On the coldest day of January, I used 37 kWh of electricity. Translated to pounds of coal, that means that the abbey required 33 pounds of coal for heat, light, cooking, appliances, etc., on the coldest day of January. On the warmest day of January, it works out to 11 pounds of coal. For the month of December, I used 625 kWh of electricity. That works out to 563 pounds of coal for December. That doesn’t sound so good, does it? But at least my energy consumption is on the low side for an American.

In 2012, I used a total of 6,764 kilowatt hours of electricity. That means I’m responsible for burning just over 3 tons of coal in 2012. Now look at our sprawling suburbs, our bright lights, our wasteful buildings, and use your imagination.

If you’d like to do the math to roughly translate your own electrical consumption to an equivalent amount of coal, multiply the number of kilowatt hours on your electric bill by .9023. The .9023 number represents the coal-to-electricity ratio for North Carolina’s Belews Creek plant, but your local numbers probably don’t vary too much, and with a little Googling you may be able to localize your calculations.

Smart meters, and the cost of staying warm


The green bars show my daily electricity usage for January in kilowatt hours. Below: a smart meter.

A year or two ago, my electric company — a regional electric coop named Energy United — installed “smart meters.” The purpose of these meters is to save the power company money, because no one has to be sent around to read them. The meters call home over the electric lines, reporting data back to the power company. Not to mention letting the power company know if your power is out, and automatically tracking widespread outages.

But this calling home doesn’t happen just once a month. It’s a regular thing. This allows the power company to track daily usage of electricity and report it to their customers on their web site.

I’m almost obsessive in collecting data on my electricity usage. I keep records of the abbey’s electrical usage in a spreadsheet, going back to when the lights at the abbey first came on in June 2009. When the weather is exceptionally cold, as it has been at times this month, I like to see how many kilowatt hours it takes to get through a really cold day.

Yesterday, January 25, was such a day. The low was 16F when the day started, and 19F when the day ended. The temperature did not rise above freezing all day, and snow and ice pellets were falling. I used 37 kilowatt hours yesterday. That covered the heat pump’s usage, plus my normal electrical usage. My stove is electric. I baked bread and did a lot of cooking yesterday. I also kept water boiling in a kettle for part of the day to raise the humidity in the house. My electrical cost for the day was $2.82. If I look at kilowatt-hour usage for the lowest-usage day of January (when I used very little heat) and do the arithmetic on the difference, I calculate that my heating cost yesterday was $1.91, while the remaining $0.91 was for other electrical usage.

This blows my mind. Partly it’s that electricity rates are low in North Carolina compared with some other areas, and partly it’s that the abbey is a very efficient building and isn’t too big (1,250 square feet). Plus the heat pump, a Trane unit of the same age as the abbey, is pretty efficient. Heat pumps are by far the most energy-efficient source of heat, though they lose efficiency when the outdoor temperature is low. When the outdoor temperature is, say, 45 degrees, a heat pump is about four times more efficient than when the outdoor temperature is, say, 16 degrees. It is, after all, capturing heat from the outside air and pumping it into the house, so they don’t work as well in cold weather. All heat pumps, as far as I know, having heating coils that kick in if the outdoor compressor can’t produce enough heat. They really are quite amazing machines, and modern heat pumps are much more efficient than the heat pumps of 20 or 30 years ago. Modern heat pumps also use ozone-friendly gases. The old freon systems are getting old and are rapidly being replaced.

These calculations led me to a thought experiment. What if that heat had come from, say, gasoline rather than electricity. If the gasoline had cost $3.69 a gallon, then the $2.82 would have bought me three-quarters of a gallon of gas. The cost of the heating portion of my electricity equals half a gallon of gas. That means that I heated the abbey on the coldest day in January for the amount of energy (calculated according to cost) that it would take to drive an SUV about 8 or 9 miles! How the carbon load compares may tell a different story, but that’s a calculation for another day.

I plan to do a future post on how I’ve used my energy consumption data to roughly calculate my carbon footprint. We all should know what our carbon footprint is.

Note: The abbey has a propane fireplace, and I did use the fireplace some yesterday for the entertainment of myself and the cat. However, the BTU output of the fireplace is much less than the house’s heating system, and the fireplace is never used at night, when the heating system works hardest. Though the fireplace contributed some heat yesterday, the amount of that heat would be minor compared with the heat provided by the electric heat pump system.

So much destruction, so little oil

We’re being bombarded with all kinds of propaganda these days about a so-called renaissance in American oil production, as though they’ve found a way to get around the absolutes of peak oil and keep the stuff flowing for decades more, cheap.

See that little blip on the end of the chart? That’s what we’ve gained from fracking places like North Dakota into mudholes filled with toxic wastes. Can you imagine what we’d have to do to this country to get any meaningful amount of oil from a highly polluting extraction method like fracking?