Author Archives: ape man

China's Electrical Consumption and US Sales Figures

Posted on by
Reply

Marginal Revolution alerts us to the fact that China’s generated 4% less electrical power in October then they did a year before. If this statistic is accurate, China is in a devastating free fall.

One should note that many of the comments on this post are garbage. For example, the idea that this change can be accounted for by the Olympics does not pass the smell test. In the first place, this was a year over year comparison. In other words it was comparing October of this year with October of last year. A lot of people talking about the effects of the Olympics are talking as if it is a drop off from the previous month. Furthermore, the idea that the Olympics can dramatically effect the energy consumption of a billion+ people is absurd. If anything, the Olympics should have cause a rebound in October as many the restrictions put into place for the Olympics were lifted.

The efficiency arguments are also a stretch. If China can grow GDP and shrink electrical usage at the same time it would be one for the history books. I don’t doubt that China is becoming more energy efficient. But historically speaking, efficiency gains only mean that that GDP growth results in a smaller increase in electrical generation. If anyone knows of a case where a developing country cut electrical usage and raised GDP at the same time they should let me know.

The real question centers around reliability of this statistic. All statistics taken by government agencies need to be taken with a grain of salt. And in China that goes double. Plus, I would have liked to know how noisy China’s electrical statistics normally are. Maybe it is common for them to bounce around a lot.

Having said that, there is lots of other anecdotal evidence to the effect that China took it hard in October.

For example, The US Censuses Bureau reports….

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for October, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $363.7 billion, a decrease of 2.8 percent (±0.5%) from the previous month and 4.1 percent (±0.7%) below October 2007. Total sales for the August through October 2008 period were down 1.3 percent (±0.5%) from the same period a year ago. The August to September 2008 percent change was revised from –1.2 percent (±0.5%) to –1.3 percent (±0.3%).

Kind of funny how the US sales drop of 4% from last October matches the drop in China’s electrical consumption huh?

That was fast

Posted on by
Reply

From the Telegraph…

Russia’s parliament announced it would rush through a constitutional amendment that could see Vladimir Putin return to the presidency within weeks.

Amid growing signs of panic in the Kremlin, the State Duma said it would meet on Friday to pass legislation that could allow Mr Putin to return to the Kremlin for 12 years.

Giving short shrift to the supposed inviolability of Russia’s 1993 constitution, all three readings of the bill will be compressed into a single sitting, rather than dragged out over several weeks or months as convention normally dictates.

Putin is a fool. If he was smart, he would let the others take the heat for Russia’s fall from grace and then ride in on his white horse. But by trying to get himself back in the hot seat now, he is going to find out how shallow his popularity really is.

When everyone loves you because you brought prosperity, you have to expect that everyone will hate you when trouble comes.

Tragic Justice

Posted on by
Reply

Remember the McCain–Feingold Act? Read this post from Belmont Club and ponder the strange way that justice works in this world.

Trying to keep money from talking in an election is like trying to ban guns. It only works on honest people. The goal of champaign finance laws should never have been about limiting the amount of money people could give. Instead, it should have been about creating transparency.

Instead of mandating artificial limits, McCain should have tried to fund independent real time audits. We don’t mandate a limit on how much money can be spent training an athlete to be the best. We just require that they pass a drug test.

But that is not what we got. Instead, McCain created a system that limited what honest people could do with their own money and at the same time provided little in the way of real transparency. President Bush signed that legislation into law in spite of professing to believe that parts of the law were unconstitutional.

It is tragic that the person who tried the hardest to play by the rules should suffer the most. But it also seems just that the man who helped create those rules should also suffer from them.

Is this even news?

Posted on by
Reply

From the New York Times…

High school textbooks call it the tongue map — that colorful illustration that neatly divides the human tongue into sections according to taste receptors. There is the tip of the tongue for sweet, the sides for sour and salty, and the back of the tongue for bitter. But recent studies show that while scientists still have much to learn about receptors, the map, at least, is wrong

I had a hard time believing their neat little map in the first place. And I thought it had been disproved some time ago. But the New York Times is making it sound like it is something that they just found out.

On Butchering Chickens

Posted on by
Reply

I just got done killing and butchering a number of Chickens when I checked my RSS feeder and found that that Gene Logsdon had put up a post on how he does it. I found it interesting to compare how he does it to how we do it.

One things for sure, Gene is faster then we are. He says…

My wife and I can kill, scald, and butcher four chickens in half an hour, if we’re in a hurry.

If he is truly counting all the steps it takes to get them in a freezer and his wife really is as fussy as he says she is, he has got us beat on speed. And to make matters worse, we have a machine to help us with the plucking (ours looks like this, but if I had to get one now I would probably get this).

I suspect that part of the secret to his speed is this…

Theoretically, the water should not be quite boiling—about 180° to 190°F. is just right. But we let the water come to a boil, then let it sit a bit. Our water is usually a bit too hot, and it cooks the skin a wee bit but this is no problem other than the skin might tear in the defeathering process. A bit of torn skin is no catastrophe either, and eventually you will learn to avoid it. I like to start with the water a bit too hot, so that if we are butchering four or more chickens at once, which we usually do, the water will not be too cool by the time we get to the last one. Better too hot than not hot enough.

I find this quick and dirty approach appealing. I am a naturally lazy fellow. But the Troll would kill me if I tried to do my scalding this way. She does not like it when the skin cooks. She says that it affects the taste. Since she can usually tell you all ingredients in a dish just by tasting it I suppose she is probably right. But if you scald the way we do, it takes longer.

We scald the chickens in water that is around 140 degrees. The amount of time we leave the chicken in the water varies with the age of the chicken. But it is generally close to a minute. The skin does not cook and our machine can still pluck the birds clean without breaking the skin. But I think both the scalding and the plucking take longer than if we did it Gene’s way.

Having said that, I suspect that Gene’s real speed advantage lies in the butchering end of things. He saves some internal organs for later eating (which we do not) and he takes the crop out at the front whereas we pull it through. But if anything those differences should make it take longer for Gene to butcher than it does us.

The real trick is the initial cutting to pull the gut sack out. People who don’t have much experience go really slow so as to not cut into the intestine and release all the crap. I imagine Gene can do this part really fast given how many years he has done it.

The Games They Play

Posted on by
Reply

From the New York Times…

The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

This article is getting a lot of press. You should read it if you have not already.

What disgusts me is that it was necessary to kept raids secret from the American public that Al Qaeda clearly knew about.

Put it another way, everyone acknowledges that Al Qaeda wishes to destroy American. Few people deny that Al Qaeda would inflect serious harm on the US if it was left to its own devices. Yet the fact that US was willing to send soldiers to attack Al Qaeda bases where ever they could be found had to be kept secret because of the fuss it would cause.

This kind of hypocritical action plagued the Vietnam war as well. Nixon’s secret B-52 raids were only secret from the American people, not the dudes getting bombed. When you have to hide what is military necessary from your own people you have problems.

An Inside Scoop On The Mercy Ship

Posted on by
Reply

From Ali’s African Adventures….

I’m caring for children who have had brain surgery in the midst of a war-torn country in West Africa. And I taught a seven-year old girl how to paint.

It’s enough.

Have you ever heard of the Mercy Ship? It is a ship that provides medical services to poor countries around the world. Over the years I have heard a lot about this ship and its mission. So I Ali’s African Adventures to be an interesting read. Nothing like getting an inside scoop as to how this ships actually operate.

Good Point

Posted on by
Reply

From Naked Capitalism…

Notice how Keynes expected employment to fall in capital goods industries. We have no version 2.0 for an economy so heavily dependent on financial services. I also wonder, even though the US badly needs infrastructure, if any of these newfangled theories allow for how specialized labor has become. One of the reasons that employment didn’t fall sooner is that even seemingly mundane jobs now require employer specific knowledge (computer systems, internal procedures) that make it more costly to bring a new person on board and deters firing.

Put more simply, how is creating jobs in repairing infrastructure going to help unemployed bank workers? Even if they were willing, many will prove not to be able, and will also be living at a remove from where the jobs would be. In an advanced economy, labor is not terribly fungible.

I have never been a fan of Keynes for reasons that are similar to this. Only my objections have always been based around the fact that real capital is not terribly fungible. I feel that the primary cause of recessions and depression is a misalignment of the capital structure and I don’t think those types of problems can be cured by creating more “demand”.

Yves Smith is simply pointing out the human capital has similar problems. If you train too many people to be lawyers and bankers and not enough to be construction workers, you can’t fix that problem by stimulating the economy.

Talking about Politics

Posted on by
Reply

From Sippican Cottage…

I started out to say that many are talking about the sky falling, but it’s an imaginary sky and so their terror is amusing and stupid to me. Others are warning me that things that have already happened to me are going to happen to me, so look out. Thanks for nothing.

I tried to buy a piece of machinery a little while ago, to expand my business. Your fears of credit drying up are amusing, as all small businessmen’s lines of credit, including mine, freaked out almost a year ago for no good reason, so save me your warnings about it getting bad. I got a notice from the machine tool supplier that the item wasn’t coming and they didn’t know when it would. And their competitors went out of business. And the alternatives still available cost triple and aren’t as good.

For the first time in decades I had the money I needed and the promise of the business I required to support a purchase, and I could not get my hands on the thing I wanted, for no discernible reason. A kind of freakout is required to disrupt this supply chain. I’m not buying Hadron Colliders here; it’s 19th century stuff. And I’m back to 19th century supply chain, apparently.

I get his point. But I am still worried about the sky falling.