The MIT Yale study examined a hypothetical attack where 1,000 people are infected in a city of 10 million. The CDC proposed "ring" approach results in 367,000 cases, 110,000 deaths, and a year to end the disease. The massive immediate post detection vaccination approach had 1,830 cases, 560 deaths, and lasts 110 days. A preemptive vaccination of 40% of the public dropped that even further.
So why did the CDC propose the ring strategy? It appears that they are using the old disease spread models that are based on 18th century Europe and 20th century Africa and India. These were all agrarian societies with very little travel outside your village, and where the travel was on foot, ox cart, or horse. In that kind of society it is fairly easy to establish a complete and successful ring. The CDC model did not include the spread effects of modern society with its subways, airports, stadiums, etc.
Amtrak Fairness
From time to time people compare government subsidies, etc. when discussing Amtrak. So here are some proposals for modest changes to eliminate some of the current bias against railroads.
- The Federal highways should pay property taxes. The railroads pay
about $600 per mile of track in property taxes. One factor
contributing to the longer time it takes trains to travel (freight
or passenger) from New York City to Chicago is the $3,000+ per mile
property taxes in New York state. New York state just began the
changes to bring their taxes in line with the rest of the country.
The proposed fix is fairly simple. The gasoline tax should be increased to pay $600 per lane-mile for Federal highways. This should go to the local communities as property tax, just like the railroad taxes. The net effect would be a modest 5 cent/gallon increase. It would not change the world, but it would place rail and highway on a more equal ground for both freight and passengers. - The railroads pay for their own police. They use the public courts, but not the public police. So, the airlines should pay for their own security and the highways should cover their part of the policing costs. The security estimates for air travel are already public. They are estimated at $10-15 per flight per passenger. The highway costs are similarly modest. Another 5 cents of gasoline tax should cover it.
- The railroads should not be paying 4 cents/gallon tax for deficit reduction. (Or perhaps the airlines and the highways should be paying 4 cents/gallon tax for deficit reduction.) This difference should be eliminated. I favor eliminating the railroad tax.
- The cost of bridges and crossings should be shared. This change is in fact happening. Twenty years ago the railroads paid for these costs. Now they are sometimes shared. This needs to be extended to cover all the bridge and crossing costs.
Then there are some PR related changes that are needed. These do not directly affect the economics, although they are worth some serious thought regarding long term implications.
- First, the Amtrak budget also includes the costs for all railroad retirees. This is a constant source of confusion and lies. The Amtrak proponents always eliminate these costs, while the Amtrak opponents always include these costs. They distort the whole budgeting process because retiree benefits are really quite unrelated to Amtrak operations. These benefits belong over with Social Security. In fact the railroad retirement act is the equivalent of social security for railroad workers.
- Second, figure out how to deal with depreciation properly. The highway and airports do not report depreciation. The railroads, airlines, and truckers do report depreciation. This is a big item. Over 400 million of the losses reported by Amtrak for this year are depreciation on the track and equipment. From an accounting perspective this is appropriate. But when comparing items shouldn't the depreciation costs of highways and airports be considered? I have no simple answer for this.
The first big shared cost improvement recently opened in Los Angeles. They built a new set of rail lines from the port area up to the main railroad yards. These are in a deep trench part of the way, and they are now fully separated from highway traffic by a combination of bridges and overpasses. The LA highway traffic benefits by eliminating over a hundred railroad crossings with all their attendent traffic jams and hazards. It also eliminates a lot of truck traffic. Before the new lines opened, it was faster to load containers onto trucks and drive through LA than using trains. The LA railroads benefit by eliminating the rail delays, speed limits, and hazards from those crossings.
The next big proposed project is the mid-Atlantic corridor, from Virginia up to New Jersey. In this area both the railroads and highways are nearing capacity. The proposal is for changes to enhance the freight lines, remove freight traffic from the passenger rail lines, and fix numerous bridges. There are some crossing eliminations and some highway adjustments but these are more minor.
Unlike the LA project, this one is over a hundred related small projects. They are designed to eliminate choke points and barriers. For example, the addition of some bypass tracks around freight yards can improve both the yard and the mainline traffic. There are bridge rebuilds that both replace old failing bridges and raise them so that double stack freight cars can travel through to the New Jersey yards instead of stopping in Virginia. There are revisions to the highway traffic patterns around freight yards to eliminate traffic jams.
The complete project is estimated to cost $6 billion and to be spread over 20 years. It is being proposed as three phases with projects chosen so that each phase yields real benefits. Fixing one bridge changes very little, but fixing all the bridges and tunnels needed to use a new route yields traffic improvements. The costs are somewhat front loaded, with about $2 billion in the first 5 years, $2 billion in the next five, and $2 billion in the final ten.
This one will be another long hard push, just like the LA project. It took years for that project to get approved because it seems almost illegal for highway and railroad activity to be coordinated. It is certainly against all the traditions. But the LA benefits are already clear in the traffic patterns. So the potential for traffic improvements by restructuring freight patterns on the Northest corrider may be realized.
As with LA, the proposal here is to use a combination of railroad (Norfolk Southern, CSX, and Amtrak) and highway funding to cover these costs.
The Nevada malpractice crisis continues to evolve. I wonder whether anyone has some detailed numbers to examine component costs and causes. There are multiple kinds of unreasonable costs:
- Excessive awards for legitimate injuries. For example, there was the ludicrous award of tens of millions of dollars to car buyers of used cars with repaired accident damage that had been fraudulently sold as new cars. There are clearly damages due, but the award of multiple millions is absurd. The damage done is in the tens of thousands. This happens in part because the jury wanted to punish the people responsible for the fraud. A more proper punishment (that did not happen) is a jail term for salesmen and their management.
- Undeserved awards for real injuries. The example here is the idiot who was seriously injured when attempting to hold a lawn mower in his hands and use it as a hedge trimmer. This included using some tape to disable the safety shutoff. At some point juries need to be instructed that stupidity is its own reward.
- The cost of defending against ambiguous claims. There will always be ambiguous claims, and there will always be the legal costs of defending against them. Europe uses the "loser pays" principle. The US has not accepted this because it does have the affect of making justice much less available to the poor. The cost of loser pays is sufficiently high that no lawyer will accept a contingency for a claim with even the slightest ambiguity.
- The cost of defending against silly claims. There are actual sanctions available for filing silly claims, but these are rarely imposed. The law suit has to be beyond totally absurd in most cases. For example, in one case a person was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer when he changed doctors. They sued the old doctors who had not noticed the cancer. They also sued the new doctor even though he had detected and diagnosed the cancer on the very first visit by this new patient.
It seems to be very hard to establish sanctions. Perhaps a filing bond is needed. Require the lawyer to put up a $20,000 bond. If they go to trial and lose, then they lose the bond. If they settle, the negotiations determine whether they lose the bond. If they win, they get the bond back.
This does nothing about absurd awards, but I wonder how much of the real cost is the concerns about lawyers' fees.
XMHTL Compliant
After one concern about readability, I've started testing this page for real portability. This earns me the right to include that cute little logo on the side. I was a little surprised by all the problems that the W3C tester found. Lots of the standard blog templates contain violations. Most browsers don't care, but someday some might. (I also ensure that this page is readable by handicap assistance software by verifying that it is Lynx readable. Tables and formatting get lost, but on the whole it is readable.)
More Tropical Weather
We now have tropical storm Arthur. Not a classic hurricane, but looks pretty good. First of the season.
The dust plume from Mauritania and Western Sahara is more obvious in this picture. The lighting isn't quite right to pick up the dust itself, but the cloud pattern is now clear. My guess is that in a day or two the dust will reach the mid-Atlantic and be lit so that the Western Atl satellite gets a good picture.
Maybe the first Atlantic tropical storm of the year too. The disorganized area that's drifted from the Gulf over Florida and off the Carolinas now is looking organized. Nice circulation building up. Will it go tropical storm, or will it interact with that cold front and go extra-tropical? The clouds are looking tropical.
The Atlantic tropics are starting to become active. The dust plumes and smoke plumes have been visible for a while. There was a really nice large classic dust plume last month that could be seen blowing across Mauritania, over Western Sahara, and out into the Atlantic. The air mass change was clearly visible with the absence of clouds in the dust plume and the obvious wind swirls streaking the dust. There is another one at the moment, although nowhere near as clear, and a smoke plume out of Quebec.
The oscillations are starting to be visible with their start in Ethiopia and then their steady march westward across Africa and into the Atlantic ITCZ as tropical waves. The stitched satellite imagery currently shows several in Africa and several more waves. A few years ago when it was really active there was more than a month where you could watch a steady stream of these things just marching across.
It has been really nice having the high quality satellite imagery publicly available over the Internet. It makes weather forecasting hobbyists happy.
Also, people being treated are only rarely infectious. The HAARP treatment is not a cure, but it does eliminate almost all of the infectious components.
It becomes apparent that there is good value to be had from active treatment in countries that have reasonable governments. Countries like Brazil and Thailand have demonstrated that the combination of prevention and therapy works and is more cost effective than pure prevention efforts. (See the article for the five key preventative policies needed.)
But in the despotic and chaotic countries, like many in Africa, the primary problem is the government. You have imbecilic governments like South Africa, which tried to outlaw the use of one time drug treatments to avoid mother to child transmission of AIDS during childbirth. You have murderous despots like Zimbabwe where the government is creating a famine to destroy its opponents.
See your history of the early Soviet Union for an example of how this kind of famine works, and of how futile food or other assistance is. The aid is diverted to aid the despotic government. The famine is very effective at killing the government's opponents. Then there is the added bonus that the government can distribute the now empty fertile farms to government supporters. It is all a very nasty evil business. Viruses are not the only parasites that kill millions.
So while money may help in some parts of the world, in others you need a change of government. In still others, such as mainland China, you need a change of government attitude. Until recently they would not admit to having an AIDS problem. Now that they are beginning to admit the existence of the problem, they may begin to slow the spread.
From a different political perspective I suspect that AIDS prevention will be much better supported than other activities like Malaria or dysentery reduction. Malaria and dysentery still kill far more people than is projected for AIDS. But, they are not a contagious threat to the developed countries. Europe and the US are not threatened by these diseases, so they get relatively little attention. A mutated AIDS from Africa would pose another new threat to the entire world. So it will get some money.
At the tail end of the article is a tiny tidbit that could be very interesting. Hepatitis B has an infectious pattern very similar to that of AIDS. It is spread by sex, IV sharing, and blood. Unlike AIDS, there is a vaccine for Hepatitis B. So a very interesting experiment with highly beneficial side effects is the attempt to do widespread vaccinations for Hepatitis B. When you learn what is socially effective as a mechanism for inspiring people to become vaccinated, you know what will be needed for possible AIDS vaccinations. And even if no AIDS vaccine is ever found, you've greatly reduced another nasty disease.
I just replaced a worn out Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) and got to wondering about how widely they are being used and how they are really affecting the energy economy.
It turns out that there is very little readily available free hard data on CFL usage. The available data is some poorly scaled diagrams with hard numbers only for 1999 and 2000. But CFL usage appears to have reached a low stable level, with some recent growth that may indicate a change in the equilibrium. From 1990 to present the CFL bulb sales have been a little bit below 1% of sales. This is bigger than it sounds at first, because CFLs last 10-20 times longer than incandescents. So it corresponds to 10-20% of the "A" sockets having CFLs. This is also mostly a replacement market because that is a long enough period of time that most of these bulbs are replacing previously installed bulbs.
The past two years the US has climbed over the 1% mark. This is probably due to the major push in California to cut energy use. They have had extensive campaigns to convert people to using CFLs by offering the incentive of price discounts and the stick of power blackouts. The CFL news articles indicate a tremendous local impact.
There are also some interesting market evolutions. I had not realized that CFLs are typically purchased at hardware stores and home improvement stores, while incandescents are typically sold at grocery stores and supermarkets. This seems to be closely related to a difference in the purchasers' mind set. The lighting vendors offer both to all stores and the stores basically stock whatever sells. The supposition is that the price difference and lifespan difference cause the buying pattern to be different.
CFLs are evolving to greater convenience in matching incandescents. You can now get candelabra base mini's, and all sorts of funny shapes. They are still adjusting features to figure out what sells best. For instance, what matters more: longer life or more natural light spectrum? It also appears that the volumes are high enough that new semiconductor designs and manufacturing improvements will be driving the costs down slowly.
But, for now, it looks like only 10-20% of home lighting is high efficiency. That figure is changing slowly.
The commercial users are a very different story. It shows the impact of having accountants and budgets. The transition from the T-12 to T-8 lighting is happening rapidly. The T-8 are the new narrower tubes. T-8 is about 20% less electricity than T-12. Commercial users are replacing T-12 with T-8 whenever they renovate or repair fixtures. A 20% saving on the electricity bill is not worth replacing a good working fixture, but it easily justifies replacing the whole fixture whenever there is a need for repairs. This is a trivial matter of accounting, and commercial customers understand this kind of capital versus operating expenditure tradeoff.
It helps that new T-8 also costs the same as new T-12. The only motivation for new T-12 installations is using up old inventory and the cost of scrapping T-12 manufacturing equipment.
Finally, mercury. One of the current enviro fusses is mercury. There is some reason to be concerned because mercury is a toxic little beast. The fluorescent technology inherently requires some amount of mercury vapor inside the tube. This creates a disposal issue. (You must also balance in that coal also contains mercury. So coal fired power plants are scattering it around to provide the electricity.) The new tubes (CFL, T-8, and T-12) have been optimized down to eliminate about 85% of the mercury. So the problem is much smaller. But some mercury exposure is inevitable.
The energy economics of reusable bottles versus single use bottles is considered by determining what is the distance between bottler and retailer where the petroleum consumed in the extra shipping costs for reusable bottles equals the petroleum consumed in the manufacture of the single use bottle. There are other factors involved in a total system analysis, but the radius where petroleum used in shipping equals petroleum used in the bottles is quite short. This indicates that reusable bottles are not usually justified. The breakeven distance is usually in the range of 50-100 miles. If you include credit for PET re-use and energy recovery, this can drop under 25 miles.
I did the analysis for 1 liter containers. The results are similar for other container sizes. Smaller containers are somewhat less reusable than large containers because there is a higher percentage container weight as the containers get smaller.
First, some raw data and assumptions:| Re-usable 1 liter Glass | 500 g |
| Re-usable 1 liter PET |
300 g |
| Single use 1 liter PET |
28 g |
| Assumed shipping mileage |
around 2 km/kg (typical heavy truck) |
| Assumed truck capacity |
30 Ton load |
The single use PET is one of the new flimsy ultra lightweight bottles. The glass and PET numbers are from European bottles designed to withstand repeated use. The glass bottle typically lasts 40-50 uses before scratches or breakage require its replacement. The lighter PET bottles typically last 10-20 uses before scratches or breakage require their replacement. Their much higher weight is the result of their much greater durability.
The steps involved in using the re-usable bottles are:
- Clean, wash, and fill.
- Ship to customers
- Customer use and return (this is assumed to be cost free because they would normally return for other reasons).
- Ship empties back
The net is 0.56 gm of fuel per bottle per kilometer from the bottler to the retailer.
The steps involved in the single use bottles are:
- Clean, wash, and fill.
- Ship to customers.
- Customer use and return.
- Shred and crush for shipment.
- Ship to recycler.
The net is 0.21 - 0.31 gm/bottle/km
About 30 grams of petroleum goes into one single use bottle, so we can solve for the distance where the extra fuel used in shipping exceeds the petroleum content of the bottle. The single use consumes between 0.2 and 0.3 gms/km less fuel, so the breakpoint is between 100 and 150 km (or 60-90 miles). If the bottling plant is further away than that, the re-usable glass container consumes more fuel for shipping than is used to create the single use bottle.
Other factors that affect this are:
- The use of PET re-usable bottles. These weigh less than glass and last for 10-20 uses before being unacceptably damaged. The overall difference is small. If they last only 10 uses, then they are actually worse, because each use is still an average 30gm of PET consumption. If they last 20 uses, then the distance increases out to about 150 miles before the extra fuel used exceeds that used to create single use bottles.
- PET recovery is good. There are many uses for crushed PET, although it is not generally practical to re-use for food products. It is also a good fuel for final disposal in waste to energy plants. The fuel used shipping around empty bottles is not otherwise productive. So the reuse and final disposal use for PET should be considered. One bottle is the energy equivalent of 100km of bottle shipping. If you derate that to 50% recovery, it gives a breakeven range to 30-45 miles.
- Energy used washing bottles represents over 30% of the energy used in brewing and bottling. There is a significant difference in the washing requirements for returned bottles (usually filthy) versus the washing requirements for virgin PET sleeves. I do not have data to quantify this difference. There are also water pollution issues related to washing of returned bottles. The breakeven distance when this is included will be shorter, and you might never justify reusable bottles in some cases.
The beer and wine situation is one where re-use makes more sense, but the distances are often very large, so improved local recycling uses for the empties may be a better approach. In the case of beer, the aluminum can is usually the lowest resource user because of its excellent recycling characteristics. Aluminum cans are much lighter than re-usable PET, although not as low as single use PET. Shredded and crushed aluminum is easy to ship and usable for a very wide variety of purposes. The aluminum can be sent to the nearest user instead of all the way back to the bottler.
The reports referred to on Volokh Conspiracy have some gaps and mistakes. The ones that I noticed immediately are:
- Systemic change is ignored. A static analysis is a reasonable starting
point because predicting systemic change is very hard. But it is clear
that there have been systemic changes as a result of recycling pressures.
One of these occurred when the construction industry realized that crushed
glass made a superior replacement for sand and gravel. When that happened
the glut of unwanted waste glass vanished and the cost of disposal for
used glass dropped significantly.
Some people don't recognize substitutions like this as re-use or recycling. They only accept uses that they like, not these other uses that also make financial sense. I argue that using crushed glass as a substitute for sand and gravel is just as legitimate as any other form of recycling.
There must be other systemic effects at work because clean recycled paper is worth $100 per ton more than general refuse. (E.g., it costs much less for disposal.) Mixed metals and mixed plastic are also worth $25 to $50 per ton more. I do not know what all their uses are, but people are finding value and adjusting their processes to exploit the value.
- The overall cost of disposal is what really matters to the public. These lower disposal costs mean lower costs for trash services. I know that in my town the town organized yard waste recycling has a mean savings of $15 per household. That justifies the incremental cost of using recyclable leaf bags and taking brush to the town chipping site.
- The capital cost discussion for dual type disposal trucks makes unwarranted assumptions about operating use. Large districts and commercial haulers have sufficient use that they can split their fleet into two kinds of trucks without significantly increasing capital requirements. The total trash volume is the same, so as long as the fleet split roughly matches the recycling mix the capital needed does not change. It is only when the districts are small that it becomes hard to match the truck fleet to the trash mix.
Germany and Japan are the two most aggressive governments subsidizing the use of alternative energy sources. This can be viewed as a strategic military decision. Their extreme dependence on imported power sources was a major factor in World War II strategies. Given their present limitations on military force to protect their imports, it makes sense to reduce this vulnerability. For the cost of a one or two military jets per year they subsidize the extensive use of wind and solar. The result is that at present about 4% of German electrical power is wind generated. Japan has invested less and has a correspondingly smaller effect, but solar panels for heat and electricity are becoming widespread.
When you consider the military ramifications and costs, this is not a bad investment. The other major subsidizers of alternative energy are Spain and Denmark. They too are extremely vulnerable to import cutoffs. They've invested less money, but they are much smaller countries. Denmark has reached 20% non-imported electrical power. This does reduce their military vulnerability. It makes it easier to remain neutral during a conflict, or to take positions that might threaten imports.
(Not what you were expecting was it. The extensive purchases of PV systems by Special Forces, Marines, and others are tactical military uses, not strategic. They just need reliable portable power systems. PV happens to be suitable for that in many climates.)
The some of the markets for PhotoVoltaics have reached maturity. This means that they are fully driven by financial considerations, not government subsidies and regulations. The consumer market is one of these and it has reached the predicable state where you find solar power in use whenever the construction cost for solar is close to that of conventional power.
The solar powered calculator has consumed about 3MWp of solar cells annually for the past decade. At one point it was the dominant user of Japanese solar production. It is now just a small fraction. In all this time it has not been subsidized or required by regulations.
The cost tradeoff for calculators is the cost of batteries, housings, clips, doors, etc. vs the PV panel. The PV itself is expensive when compared to plastic parts, but it is thin and easy to automate assembly, so it has lower design and labor costs. PV is also a modest selling point for the "green" customers and for the customers who hate fussing with batteries.
The barrier for PV calculators turns out to be power consumption. There are only a few square cm available on a calculator for the PV panel. In office lighting these cells are limited to about 5 milliwatts of available power. This is enough for a simple calculator but not enough for a fancy calculator. High drain devices like PDAs consume over 100mW and are way beyond these little PV panels. So the market has held steady at 3MWp consumption for some time because that is the size of the calculator market.
The new growth area for the consumer market is the many forms of battery chargers. These used to be mostly toys purchased by "green" customers and a handfull of genuinely remote users. The explosion in use of battery powered devices like cell phones, portable audio, and laptops has changed this. The PV prices have come down a lot and the power requirements for battery operated devices have also dropped. A suitable solar panel costs from one to two times what a second laptop battery costs, depending on how it is used. Using solar can be much more convenient than tracking down a power outlet. So PV battery charging is at the moment a rapidly growing market, driven by features and costs rather than subsidies and regulations.
The next car that I buy will probably have a 42v electrical system (see MIT efforts and SAE summary). The transition from 14v (aka 12v) to 42v systems is starting to go into production. Toyota is selling a luxury car, the Crown Royal, in Japan that uses a hybrid 42/12v electrical system. The 6v to 12v transition took place in the early 50's. The 12v to 42v transition will probably be spread over this decade.
The motivators for this transition are:- Cost: The 42v systems require cables and motors only 1/3 the size. Other equipment like air conditioners are also less expensive in 42v.
- Features: The 12v systems are near their limit for electricity generation. To add more electrically powered devices the capacity provided by 42v systems is needed.
- Efficiency: The 42v electrical devices are in general more efficient, both the generator and the power users. 42v systems also make more dramatic changes in engine technology possible.
- The "instant start" engines. These involve generator, starter, fuel injection, timing, and valve modifications to eliminate the cranking delays starting an engine. This is a desirable feature wanted by customers and a pollution reducing feature. (The techniques work with both 42v and 14v systems, so you will see this on both kinds of cars.)
- Integrated 42v/12v engines with braking power recovery, such as the Voleo and Ricardo effort or the Crown Royal. There will also be more ordinary hybrid 42/12v generators. These generate both voltages so that the initial transition can be done with the big power devices first. The low power devices can transition later. The light bulbs may stay 12v forever, because there are problems designing really rugged bulbs that operate up at 42v. The 42v to 12v conversion may move into the bulb base.
- The electrical air conditioner and then the hybrid heat/electrical air conditioner. Running the A/C using mechanical belts and pumps is inefficient. It lacks controls and features that an electrical system would offer. At 12v an electrical A/C is impractical, but at 42v an electrical A/C will use less fuel and have better features. The hybrid is the next step. A absorptive (e.g., ammonia based) A/C can utilize heat directly, so with some modest electrical demand plus heat from exhaust or a dedicated burner, you get an even more efficient A/C.
- Active transmission, suspension, and similar components. These are electrically powered and dynamically adapt to the road and driving situation.
- The thermionic generator, such as the new semiconductor based designs. Automotive versions exist only as small laboratory prototypes at the moment. They convert heat directly into electricity. They have the potential for 20% efficiency, which is much better than the 10% of today's alternators. If you combine the thermionic generator, car heater, and A/C into a coordinated unit, you do not need to run the engine to generate electricity, heat the car, or run the A/C.
- The stop on idle engine. Once the engine is warm, and with readily available electricity, you can stop the engine when the car is stopped (or even when it would idle). You can restart it immediately whenever it is needed. These are already in use on electrical hybrid automobiles like the Honda Insight.
- The electrical engine, with electrically powered valves, pumps, etc. The engine improvements from individually controlled fuel injection and spark timing are now commonplace. Further improvements can follow from adjusting the valve motions to match the engine needs. For example, you can run only as many cylinders as you need, with the valves on the others open.
- Small, efficient batteries. If electricity is available from a thermionic source you don't need the big battery. You just need a short term storage battery that is charged before starting a cold engine if it has the "instant start" design. This is the end of dead battery problems.