It's Scam Season

 Especially for insurance companies that sell Medicare Advantage plans that line their pockets.

 insurance industry whistleblower Wendell Potter warns that it’s because the only “advantage” to these HMO-style networked plans is for the insurers.

Oh, yes. Susie Madrak has more at Crooks and Liars.

Avoiding Financial Crises

 On the recent Nobel Prize award for economics, Paul Krugman has some good thoughts on avoiding financial abysses.

What can be done to mitigate the risk of self-fulfilling panic? As Diamond and Dybvig noted, a government backstop — either deposit insurance, the willingness of the central bank to lend money to troubled banks or both — can short-circuit potential crises. Indeed, the mere knowledge that a backstop exists can often quell a bank run; no money need actually change hands.

But providing such a backstop raises the possibility of abuse; banks may take on undue risks because they know they’ll be bailed out if things go wrong. Case in point: the huge costs to taxpayers of bailing out irresponsible players during the savings and loans crisis in the 1980s. So banks need to be regulated as well as backstopped.

From an economic point of view, banking is any form of financial intermediation that offers people seemingly liquid assets while using their wealth to make illiquid investments.

This insight was dramatically validated in the 2008 financial crisis. Conventional banks were, for the most part, unaffected by the panic; there was no mass exodus from bank deposits. By the eve of the crisis, however, the financial system relied heavily on “shadow banking” — banklike activities that didn’t involve standard bank deposits. For example, many corporations had taken to parking their cash not in deposits but in “repo” — overnight loans using things like mortgage-backed securities as collateral. Such arrangements offered a higher yield than conventional deposits. But they had no safety net, which opened the door to an old-style bank run and financial panic.

a sort of meta point about the Diamond-Dybvig work: Once you’ve understood and acknowledged the possibility of self-fulfilling banking crises, you become aware that similar things can happen elsewhere.

Sure enough, when Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank at the time, finally did provide a backstop in 2012 — he said the magic words “whatever it takes,” implying that the bank would lend money to the troubled governments if necessary — the spreads collapsed and the crisis came to an end

Key Indicators

We measure jobs, wages, and prices. The missing piece in profits.

If we measured corporate profits more often and more reliably, Americans might be getting a story about inflation centered not on workers’ power to get wage gains but on corporations’ power to get price gains. There might be far more discussion about what appear to be record profit margins and their effects on price increases across the land.

So rather than assume the Fed must hike interest rates to cool the economy by weakening workers’ purchasing power — lowering their wages and causing them to lose jobs — we might discuss ways to weaken corporations’ pricing power: such as windfall profits taxes, price controls, and tougher antitrust enforcement.

Never underestimate how certain measurements, issued regularly and reliably, frame the national debate. And always ask why these measures, and not others, are chosen.

Why create vulnerabilities?

The best way to protect from catastrophic storm losses is to not build valuable structures in vulnerable places. Our procedural incentives are sorely misplace.

Local emergency managers know all too well which places in their communities should not be built back after a storm. But they are rebuilt, because the federal government and states provide multiple incentives to rebuild rather than to relocate. The assumption is that taxpayers will always be there to back up private investment after even predictable natural hazards.

Microbes mine depleted oil wells

What to do with a depleted oil well? Turn it into a hydrogen factory.

Texan company Cemvita is promising clean hydrogen at less than US$1/kg, after testing a fascinating new technique in the lab and the field. The idea is to pump specially developed microbes into depleted oil wells, where they'll eat oil and excrete hydrogen.

So, it presumably stops up the top of the well, before pumping a heap of specially bred microbes down into its murky depths in a stream of recycled water. The microbes go to work, feasting, excreting and multiplying, and Cemvita captures the gases as they exit the top of the well, separating them into hydrogen for processing and sale, and carbon dioxide for sequestration. The company is able to send nutrients and inhibitors down into the well to keep things under control and moving in the right direction.

Humans Beat Robots

 The robotic and AI revolution takes a different path than expected. Rather than replacing humans, humans are gaining effectiveness and productivity from robotic and AI functionality.

“Will AI replace radiologists?” is “the wrong question.” Instead, he wrote, “The right answer is: Radiologists who use AI will replace radiologists who don’t.”

Three myths used by the ultra-wealthy

 Robert Reich breaks it down

1. The first is trickle-down economics. 
2. The second myth is the “free market.” 
3. The third myth is that they’re superior human beings 

For over forty years, as wealth at the top has soared, almost nothing has trickled down. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage today is barely higher than it was four decades ago. In reality, the super-wealthy don’t create jobs or raise wages. Jobs are created when average working people earn enough money to buy all the goods and services they produce, forcing companies to hire more people and pay them higher wages.

The market can induce great feats of invention and entrepreneurialism with lures of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars — not billions. And as to the rest of us succumbing to labor-replacing globalization and labor-saving technologies, no other advanced nation has nearly the degree of inequality found in the United States, yet all these nations have been exposed to the same forces of globalization and technological change. 

In reality, the ultra-wealthy have rigged the so-called “free market” in America for their own benefit.

Six of the 10 wealthiest Americans alive today are heirs to fortunes passed on to them by wealthy ancestors.
Others had the advantages that come with wealthy parents. Jeff Bezos’ garage-based start was funded by a quarter-million dollar investment from his parents. Bill Gates’s mother used her business connections to help land a software deal with IBM that made Microsoft.
Elon Musk came from a family that reportedly owned shares of an emerald mine in Southern Africa.

One Solution Could Help

 According to Sam Bowman & John Myers & Ben Southwood fixing the housing problem could fix lots of other things with which people struggle.

“Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment,” they wrote. From Covid to slow economic growth to climate change to falling fertility, they all had one root cause in common: “A shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live.”

 

Their argument was as simple as it was true: So long as housing supply remains constrained in the most economically productive cities in the US, so would the country's potential. Whatever else the US wanted to do — solve climate change, reduce economic inequality, make it easier for people to have as many children as they wanted — fixing the long-running housing problem had to come first. Everything else was just hot air.

Election Deniers in office

 Robert Reich gets to the meat of it.

The commitment to be bound by the results of an election is the most important commitment in a democracy. It is also the most important qualification for public office. It is the equivalent of an oath to uphold the Constitution.

Candidates who refuse to commit to being bound by the results of elections should be presumed disqualified to hold public office.

How to argue

 These are some tips from the debate experts.

First, know when to engage. Arguments, Seo reminds us, are “easy to start and hard to end.” For a dispute to go well, it should be real, important and specific. You need to have a point to make, not just an emotional conflict or complaint to air. If someone has hurt you, figure out why; that becomes a real basis for argument.

Next, pause to consider how important that point is and whether it’s worth arguing over. Finally, stick to the specific dispute at hand so that the argument doesn’t expand or spiral. If the disagreement really is over the dishwasher (and look, there’s often cause), don’t let it become a referendum on your marriage.

know what it is you’re arguing about. To begin, determine the fact, judgment or prescription that you would like someone else to accept. Let’s say it’s “Jen is a team player.” In order to make that claim, add the word “because” and give your reason (“because she involves everyone in the department”). From there, you offer substantiation and evidence to back it up. (“She always goes around the room.” “She checks in with her crew weekly.”) That’s making your case.

Importantly, showing how someone else is wrong isn’t the same thing as being correct yourself. In debate, tearing down the other team doesn’t necessarily prove your team is in the right, nor is it likely to persuade anyone who didn’t agree with you in the first place. “No amount of no is going to get you to yes,” one of Seo’s coaches once told him.

Finally, never let a bully dictate the terms of debate. If faced with a brawler — someone whose aim is, as Seo puts it, “not to persuade but to silence, marginalize and break the will of their opponents” — your only hope is to restore the structure of the debate. In other words, see above.

Questions for election deniers

 From Robert Reich

What are you saying to yourself in private? How are you justifying yourself in your own mind?

Disinformation Inoculation

Short animations giving viewers a taste of the tactics behind misinformation can help to "inoculate" people against harmful content on social media when deployed in YouTube's advert slot, according to a major online experiment led by the University of Cambridge.

This "pre-bunking" strategy pre-emptively exposes people to tropes at the root of malicious propaganda, so they can better identify online falsehoods regardless of subject matter.

The findings, published in Science Advances, come from seven experiments involving a total of almost 30,000 participants -- including the first "real world field study" of inoculation theory on a social media platform -- and show a single viewing of a film clip increases awareness of misinformation.

The videos introduce concepts from the "misinformation playbook," illustrated with relatable examples from film and TV such as Family Guy or, in the case of false dichotomies, Star Wars ("Only a Sith deals in absolutes").

Lead author Dr Jon Roozenbeek from Cambridge's SDML describes the team's videos as "source agnostic," avoiding biases people have about where information is from, and how it chimes -- or not -- with what they already believe.

"Our interventions make no claims about what is true or a fact, which is often disputed. They are effective for anyone who does not appreciate being manipulated," he said.

"The inoculation effect was consistent across liberals and conservatives. It worked for people with different levels of education, and different personality types. This is the basis of a general inoculation against misinformation."

"We've shown that video ads as a delivery method of prebunking messages can be used to reach millions of people, potentially before harmful narratives take hold," Goldberg said.

"Fact-checkers can only rebut a fraction of the falsehoods circulating online. We need to teach people to recognise the misinformation playbook, so they understand when they are being misled."

Researchers say that such a recognition increase could be game changing if dramatically scaled up across social platforms -- something that would be cheap to do. The average cost for each view of significant length was the tiny sum of US$0.05.

Forever Just Got Shorter

 A team of scientists has found a cheap, effective way to destroy so-called forever chemicals, a group of compounds that pose a global threat to human health.

At the end of a PFAS molecule’s carbon-fluorine chain, it is capped by a cluster of other atoms. Many types of PFAS molecules have heads made of a carbon atom connected to a pair of oxygen atoms, for example.

Dr. Dichtel came across a study in which chemists at the University of Alberta found an easy way to pry carbon-oxygen heads off other chains. He suggested to his graduate student, Brittany Trang, that she give it a try on PFAS molecules.

Dr. Trang was skeptical. She had tried to pry off carbon-oxygen heads from PFAS molecules for months without any luck. According to the Alberta recipe, all she’d need to do was mix PFAS with a common solvent called dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO, and bring it to a boil.

“I didn’t want to try it initially because I thought it was too simple,” Dr. Trang said. “If this happens, people would have known this already.”

An older grad student advised her to give it a shot. To her surprise, the carbon-oxygn head fell off.

It appears that DMSO makes the head fragile by altering the electric field around the PFAS molecule, and without the head, the bonds between the carbon atoms and the fluorine atoms become weak as well. “This oddly simple method worked,” said Dr. Trang, who finished her Ph.D. last month and is now a journalist.

she started testing a number of chemicals until she found one that worked. It was sodium hydroxide, the chemical in lye.

When she heated the mixture to temperatures between about 175 degrees to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the PFAS molecules broke down in a matter of hours. Within days, the remaining fluorine-bearing byproducts broke down into harmless molecules as well.

Dr. Dichtel and his colleagues are now investigating how to scale up their method to handle large amounts of PFAS chemicals. They’re also looking at other types of PFAS molecules with different heads to see if they can pry those off as well.

“It’s a huge challenge, but it’s in our grasp,” he said.

Something New Coming Down the Pike?

 John Stoehr has an interesting analysis.

I have been skeptical of those claiming, after the US Supreme Court struck down Roe, that a backlash is brewing. It’s not that I believe people aren’t mad about losing legal protection of their right to privacy.

It’s that I believe in the wowzer power of the human mind to convince itself that terrible things aren’t so terrible.

I still think I’m right about polling. It can’t accurately capture public opinion in the middle of regime change – as one political order disintegrates and reintegrates to become a new political order.That’s why last night’s referendum in Kansas is so important.

Suddenly, lost faith in democracy feels premature, even silly.

More than two-thirds of voters in Kansas said no to a proposal to change the state constitution in order to let state legislators pass laws severely restricting or even outright banning abortion.

A vote is so much better than a poll. It is concrete. It is indisputable. It is conclusive. It’s an expression of the will of a democratic people. In this case, it was the will of the residents of a conservative state in which Republican voters outnumber Dem voters two to one.

A look in the weeds offers more reason for hope.

First, Kansas referendums don’t usually turn out votes as general elections do. But according to the AP, turnout last night was “within reach” of 50 percent. Fifty-two percent is normal for state generals.

Second, voter registration “surged” after the Supreme Court’s ruling, according to Scott Schwab, the Kansas secretary of state. That surge was, moreover, “heavily Democratic,” according to USA Today. A stunning 70 percent of new voter registration was among women.

Third, these Democratic women powered the no-vote in the state’s suburbs even though these same suburbs went to Donald Trump in 2020.

For those of us worried about the future of democracy, especially the will of a democratic people to take their destinies into their own hands, last night’s results are about as good as any of us can expect.

White women, conservative or liberal, seem to be mad as hell. They’re not going to take it anymore. Plus, they know which party is going to protect them and their rights.

Above all, they know democracy is how to get what they want.

Even though these women are registering as Democrats, and even though they know which party is going to protect them and their rights, last night’s referendum offered a curious, ironic feature.

On the one hand, abortion may be emerging as a true wedge issue that Dems can use to pry GOP voters away from their party just enough to support Dem midterm candidates who will in turn vote to codify Roe into federal statute.

On the other hand, abortion may be emerging as a truly reasonable issue released from the burdens of partisanship – an uncontroversial issue on account of a majority wanting it to be settled – such that it drags the Democratic Party into that sweet, sweet middle of politics.

Abortion could be to our political order what civil rights (Black rights) was to the previous political order – a catalyst for change.

But now that rightwing politics has achieved what it set out to – now that it is advancing toward the criminalization of other individual freedoms that had been settled, like when you can have kids, who you can marry and even which books you can read such moderate voters (ie, white women) seem to be rethinking their commitments.

I hope they continue rethinking.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself. It could be that Kansans voted against this referendum because it was easy to. It wasn’t attached to a candidate, thus freeing voters from having to explain their votes.

But even so, last night was important.

It reminded us to keep the faith – democratic faith.

We the people have the power. We the people have the power, no matter how dark things seem. (The GOP knows this, by the way. That’s why they work so hard to rig the rules of democracy without seeming to have worked so hard to rig the rules of democracy.)

Polling that shows that Americans have lost faith in democracy. And so on.

When we do, we forget why we’re fighting.

We fight not so much to stop the authoritarian collectivism that’s creeping across the republic, though there’s no choice but to fight.

We fight out of love. Democracy is love – if we love, too.

The news from Kansas suggests we are relearning how.

Silver Bullet for Carbon Capture

 A form of melamine could be a cheap and efficient material for carbon capture. So cheap that it might be used in vehicles.

Public Housing Reimagined

 Our poor history with public housing does not have to be repeated. There are several good, new ideas on making public housing work.

But where this model may already most clearly demonstrate the government’s power to increase housing supply is in Montgomery County, Maryland — a suburb just outside Washington, DC. The local public housing authority there is on track to build nearly 9,000 new publicly owned mixed-income apartments over the coming years, by leveraging relatively small amounts of public money to create a revolving fund that can finance short-term construction costs.

“What I like about what we’re doing is all we have effectively done is commandeered the private American real estate model,” said Zachary Marks, the chief real estate officer for Montgomery County’s housing authority. “We’re replacing the investor dudes from Wall Street, the big money from Dallas.”

 the public sector can start with acknowledging they have the tools and resources that make it easier to build even in weak economic periods, plus no voracious investor to satisfy at the end of a project. Governments could even step in now to buy half-finished housing from companies that suddenly find themselves unable to make their financing math work.

Andrew Friedson, a Montgomery County councilmember who has been leading efforts in Maryland to address his region’s housing shortage, told Vox he’s been supporting the public development idea because “there is now much broader recognition and understanding” that governments have to be more aggressive. “The status quo and even marginal improvements are not going to come anywhere close to meeting the need,” he said.

Paul Williams, the founder and director of the Center for Public Enterprise, a recently launched think tank, has been leading efforts to promote the idea of state and local public housing developers.

It’s not an immediate fix — “getting out of this mess will take no less than 20 years,” he wrote in an essay last August on solving the housing crisis — but it’s one of the only viable solutions he sees.

But despite these NIMBY attitudes, some local policymakers are beginning to recognize their own self-interest in stepping up on housing development, capitalizing on tools and public ownership that can create value and be reinvested into the community.

“Both because we don’t have to meet the private sector return requirements, and because it’s much easier to set policy on things that you own, all of that [revenue] just gets poured back into overall housing production and operation,” said Marks, of Montgomery County. “A lot of the time I’m talking to people about the short-term benefits [of our development model], but frankly the biggest benefit is that value that we’re creating very slowly over 20 years, so that the people sitting in my chair in two or three decades will have a ton of resources that can be realizable by them then, to continue the mission.”

Stanley Chang, a state senator in Hawaii who has been leading efforts in his state to promote social housing, says he spent a lot of time visiting places like Vienna and Singapore to understand regions that actually solved their housing shortages. “I’m not arguing we should copy-and-paste but I do think we should learn the lessons from these places,” Chang said.

Kallman, the Rhode Island state senator, says she doesn’t view her proposed public developer bill as a revenue generator for the state, though she acknowledges it could indeed turn out to be one. “For me this is primarily about the state stepping up,” she said. “To solve a housing problem that is affecting huge numbers of people.”

Replacing Coal Plant with Big Thermal Battery

 Holtec floats a plan that replaces a coal-fired boiler with a big thermal battery. One could also drop an SMR into the configuration.

This version of the Green Boiler “is expressly focused to re-purpose the retiring coal-fired plants,” Holtec said. “We believe the market in the U.S. and overseas will be driven by the global imperative to reduce carbon and other pollutants that are making coal-fired plants environmentally untenable,” said Delmar. “Green Boiler in its present form utilizes the surplus power from the grid to build its thermal inventory, which can be tapped to produce electrical power during the period of heightened consumer demand,” he noted. “The current version seeks to use the existing turbogenerator at the fossil plant to produce power. Thus, the energy will be sold to meet peak demand and hence a favorable price. We fully expect the local and federal governments to incentivize this technology with appropriate carbon credit, as some governments already do.”

The economics and flexibility could further benefit from co-locating an SMR-160, Holtec’s 160-MWe small modular reactor (SMR), at a Green Boiler–converted coal plant site, Delmar noted. However, Holtec is also separately developing a greenfield site system that could integrate a Green Boiler with an SMR-160 or a PV solar collector system using a Brayton cycle-based energy generation system.

We need homes for our people

 If we can't build affordable housing, local economies will suffer.

Near the private jets that shuttle billionaires to their opulent Sun Valley getaways, Ana Ramon Bartolome and her family have spent this summer living in the only place available to them: behind a blue tarp in a sweltering two-car garage.

With no refrigerator, the extended family of four adults and two young children keeps produce on plywood shelves. With no sink, they wash dishes and themselves at the nearby park. With no bedrooms, the six of them sleep on three single mattresses on the floor.

Resort towns have long grappled with how to house their workers, but in places like Sun Valley those challenges have become a crisis as the chasm widens between those who have two homes and those who have two jobs. Fueled in part by a pandemic migration that has gobbled up the region’s limited housing supply, rents have soared over the last two years, leaving priced-out workers living in trucks, trailers or tents.

It is not just service workers struggling to hold on. A program director at the Y.M.C.A. is living in a camper on a slice of land in Hailey. A high school principal in Carey was living in a camper but then upgraded to a tiny apartment in an industrial building. A City Council member in Ketchum is bouncing between the homes of friends and family, unable to afford a place of his own. A small-business owner in Sun Valley spends each night driving dirt roads into the wilderness, parking his box truck under the trees and settling down for the night.

The housing shortfall is now threatening to paralyze what had been a thriving economy and cherished sense of community. The hospital, school district and sheriff’s office have each seen prospective employees bail on job offers after realizing the cost of living was untenable. The Fire Department that covers Sun Valley has started a $2.75 million fund-raising campaign to build housing for their firefighters.

Already, restaurants unable to hire enough service workers are closing or shortening hours. And the problems are starting to spread to other businesses, said Michael David, a Ketchum council member who has been working on housing issues for the past two decades.With the onset of the pandemic, the region saw an influx of wealthy buyers looking for a work-from-home destination with plentiful amenities, and the migration sent housing costs soaring even further. In Ketchum, the town next to Sun Valley, officials found that home prices shot up more than 50 percent over the past two years, with the median reaching about $1.2 million. Two-bedroom rentals went from less than $2,000 a month to more than $3,000.

Those jolts came after two decades of minimal residential construction in the city and a dramatic shift in recent years that converted renter-occupied units into those that were either kept largely vacant by their owners or used as short-term rentals.

Similar trends are happening in resort towns across the Rocky Mountain West, including Jackson Hole, Wyo., Aspen, Colo., and Whitefish, Mont. Although some larger employers, including the Sun Valley Company, have developed dorm-style living options for seasonal workers, those have done little to change the housing trajectories for the broader communities.

Case for Economic Integration

 It seems that poverty and reduced opportunity is generally inherited. And it's maintained by the content of social circles which themselves are dependent on who is in your local neighborhood. We need to facilitate more friendships between the rich and poor.

Over the last four decades, the financial circumstances into which children have been born have increasingly determined where they have ended up as adults. But an expansive new study, based on billions of social media connections, has uncovered a powerful exception to that pattern that helps explain why certain places offer a path out of poverty.

For poor children, living in an area where people have more friendships that cut across class lines significantly increases how much they earn in adulthood, the new research found.

Previously, it was clear that some neighborhoods were much better than others at removing barriers to climbing the income ladder, but it wasn’t clear why. The new analysis — the biggest of its kind — found the degree to which the rich and poor were connected explained why a neighborhood’s children did better later in life, more than any other factor.

The effect was profound. The study found that if poor children grew up in neighborhoods where 70 percent of their friends were wealthy — the typical rate of friendship for higher-income children — it would increase their future incomes by 20 percent, on average.

These cross-class friendships — what the researchers called economic connectedness — had a stronger impact than school quality, family structure, job availability or a community’s racial composition. The people you know, the study suggests, open up opportunities, and the growing class divide in the United States closes them off.

Researchers say economic connectedness is a better predictor of a community’s upward mobility than any other characteristic studied yet.

Bringing people together is not enough on its own to increase opportunity, the study suggests. Whether they form relationships matters just as much.

How to live tax-free

 It seems that in New Jersey, all it takes to be free of property, income, and sales tax is to bury somebody on your land.

New Jersey tax code provides a “cemetery” with a “trifecta of tax avoidance,” with breaks for property, income and sales taxes, Brooke Harrington, a Dartmouth sociology professor and self-described tax researcher, wrote on Twitter. The state requires no minimum number of graves to qualify as a cemetery, she added.

The cemetery business idea has been kicking around for a while in the Trump family.

Tax documents from the Trump Family Trust, published by ProPublica, show the trust sought in 2014 to designate a property in Hackettstown, New Jersey, about 20 miles from the Bedminster golf course, as a nonprofit cemetery company.