I recently had a problem with a dryer that was tumbling and not heating. Being lazy I immediately assumed it was the ignitor. When I went to school they taught me to do all the troubleshooting steps all the time and not make any assumptions. But the real world rewards cheaters nine times out of ten and so mostly I don’t do that. But if you play that game, you have to be willing to pay the price when the 10th times rolls around. In this case, it was not ignitor but I was not too upset about that.
I did a little checking with my meter, found that the thermostat was bad and moved on to order the new parts. The problem is that even though the part is called a thermostat, it is not a thermostat. At least in my education, a thermostat refers to a complete temperature control unit. Historically, this is a switch connected to some kind of temperature control. As the temp rises (or lowers depending on the type) the switch opens and visa versa as it closes. You can have other things that meet the definition of a thermostat but regardless you should not call something a thermostat unless it has all the control elements contained in it.
What the new Whirlpool dryers have is a thermistor. A thermistor is a resistor that changes voltages based on temperature. This voltage is in turn interpreted by a computer that is usually located some distance away although a lot of modern residential HVAC electronic thermostats have everything in one wall mounted package (and hence why they are called thermostats). However, in a dryer, the board that interprets the signal is separate from what they are calling the thermostat and so I don’t think they should be calling it a thermostat. It is a thermistor and should be trouble shot like one.
I am just throwing this out there because I did not recognize this just by looking at the part (in retrospect I should have but I have been running a desk for a long time) and I got confused by what my meter was telling me. It was a lot harder then a lazy person like me wants to work to figure out what was going on. All my normal google and youtube searches kept giving me instructions that took for granted that I had a thermostat even though that is not what I had. In the end, I figured it out it was no big deal. But in the off chance that google will work for somebody, I thought I would throw this post out there to help anyone who might be puzzled by what their meter is showing them when they go to check what they think is a thermostat.
The below video is full of good information if you have time to listen to it (even though it is a video, you will not miss much by just listening). But in my opinion, it fails to address the complexity of this topic in a realistic way even though all the background information is good. The bottom line is that it is easy for any redneck to give the right answer to the above question. It is harder for people regardless of their education to understand and articulate the costs of that answer.
The root of the problem is that US economy is deeply intertwined with the world wide economy. When a ship got stuck in the Suez canal, the resulting supply chain disruptions were felt by factories in small town America. And that was true even though the issue was resolved relatively quickly and it was mostly non-US ships that were impacted. By the same token, it don’t matter who owns the ships or what they have on them, if the Houthi are impacting shipping, the US is going to feel the pain same as everyone else.
Moreover, these things don’t happen in a vacuum. Some people on the left thinks that this is only happening because of the Israeli conflict and if that goes away this will go away. But once you let something like this go unchallenged, why should other people who care about other topics or even just want to make money not try the same thing? If the Houthi get away with doing this with very little costs, it will encourage others with different goals and locations to do the same thing. In the end, failing to stop the Houthi will very quickly (over a period of years to be sure but that is quickly in my book) move us to the law of the jungle ruling the sea and resulting high costs for world trade.
But the problem is, America is the only nation in the West that is has any plausible ability to deal with this threat. Other nations could solve this problem if they made it a national priority and built up their forces over a period of years but right here and right now America is the only one who can plausible shut the Houthis down (that fact that America has failed to do that has more to do with America being unwilling to do things like massive bombing of population centers then any lack of ability).
This is one thing that video below fails to address. It is true as the video says that historically American has only protected American shipping. But what the video fails to address is that historically lots of other nations were more then capable of protecting their own shipping but no longer can. Even as recently as the 1980s, other nations had navies that enabled them to project power effectively (see the UK and Falklands although that was on the very edge of what they could handle). But it is no longer the case anymore and has not been the case for at least 20 years. This means that the safety of the Western World’s economic lifelines is almost entirely in US hands. Other nations can contribute a ship or two, but they can’t sustain the projection of power needed to deal with things like the Houthi on their own. And it does not matter if some abstract notion of fairness says that other nations should protect their shipping. The fact is that they can’t and US will pay the price for their inability along with everyone else.
This is what drives the Biden administration towards conflict with the Houthi. I don’t think they really want a war and if they do want a war the they are sure going about it in a half ass way. But almost any president or possible future president you can think of would do the same thing. They might do it more competently. They might do it with more gusto. Or they might be even more reluctant. But in the end, most of them would come to the same place because they know the voters don’t want another war in the Middle East and they know the voters will blame them for any economic problems resulting from trade disruption. So the incentive from the American voters themselves is to try to find some kind of half measure that squares the circle. It is hard for democracies to produce leaders capable of making effective hard choices because a hard choice is one that voters are not going to like either way.
In the long run, it don’t matter. Based on current trajectories of the US debt, American will soon be forced to stop funding a Navy that can handle such threats. Sooner or later the law of jungle will come to the seas. The demographic forces that are leading to the demise of the modern world will ensure that nobody is able to pick up the mantle when the US is forced to give it up. That is why on a practical level I think the redneck answer is right all along. Shipping disruptions are coming no matter what. The US will not be able to support the burden of keeping the world order from collapsing for very much longer no matter what. So we might as well start the adaption process sooner rather then later. The Houthi might be doing us a favor to help ease us along on the adaption process to what is going to come anyway.
But it bugs me nonetheless to see the issue addressed solely in terms of legalese or fairness with out an honest reflection on the real costs involved. It is a lot easier to blame Biden then it is to contemplate the nature of the systems that produce people like Biden and guide them towards the choices they make. It is a lot easier to say that “we should not be fighting the Houthi” then it is to say, “we should not be fighting the Houthi even if it means 10% inflation and the occasional empty shelves in the stores.” So most people go down the road of imagining that their preferred course of action has no real cost associated with it.
Below are three minor points relating to the war in Ukraine. The first is noting the surprising effectiveness of Ukraine recent drone campaign. The second is discussing the latest Ukrainian political drama. And the last point is observing experience in Ukraine suggests that maybe the US Marine war gamers had good insights into the future of conventional warfare.
“We need the state to come in like a white knight or we may just lose our jobs,” said one fund manager.
It is not so much that the 6% drop last Monday was all that bad in and of itself as it is that people are starting to give up on the market ever recovering. As Reuters reports….
Stock markets in Hong Kong and in mainland China plunged on Monday, extending a long spell of weakness driven by an exit of foreign investors alarmed by China’s wobbly economy and a lack of stimulus measures. Share prices stabilized somewhat on Tuesday after authorities announced plans to support the market, but analysts were hesitant to cheer.
The small-cap CSI1000 index (.CSI1000I), opens new tab has traded below the 5,000 level this week, after a 6% plunge on Monday to its lowest level in nearly four years.
Market participants said the drop triggered “knock-in” levels on “snowball” products, also known as “auto-callables” in some markets, leading to forced selling of stock futures contracts which further pressured the market.
Although a lot of people are pointing at the “snowball” hedges as being a big part of the current meltdown, that is more of a symptom then a cause. The bigger underlying cause is the continued and still unresolved meltdown in the real estate sector. For example, you will read that China’s government is trying to throw roughly $300 billion at the stock market to support share prices. However, the largest failed real estate company (Evergrande) in China has over $300 billion dollars in debt all by itself. And it is very questionable how much of that money investors will ever get back.
One of the reasons I have not been covering this much is because China lies so much and has done so much to undermine what rule of law there was in China that it is hard to tell what is going on. For example, it is not even clear that the bankruptcy proceedings against Evergrande will be honored in mainland China. If they are not honored, then it will be a long time before we can say what the assets that Evergrande still has are worth. A cynic might be inclined to argue that China does not want that discovery to take place for fear of what it would reveal. But failing to follow through with any kind of price discovery means that the holders of the $300 billion dollars of debt that Evergrande owes are getting nothing. To be fair, the investors in Evergrande are likely to get nothing in any case so from China’s perspective there might not seem to be a lot gained by forcing everything to sell off. On the other hand, if they don’t force a sell off and nobody gives Evergrande more money, all the assets are just going to sit around and rot anyway.
But the real issue hear is not Evergrande itself, but the property market as a whole. 20% to 30% of China’s GDP is based off of investment in the property sector. If Evergrande is representative of the state of the property market in China as a whole (and all sources seem to agree that it is), that sector of the economy is hosed. Even if it was only Evergrande it would be a big deal. To put the 300 billion that Evergrane owes in context, the entire US budget for the US Navy and Marine Corps in 2023 was 231 billion dollars. So even by US standards, $300 billion is a lot of money and that is only one of the failed real estate companies in China (albeit the largest one as far as we know now).
I don’t have time to parse the wider figures in China to see which are trustworthy and which are not. But just by going by the one figure that I think is accurate, China seems to doing very poorly. So poorly that we might be looking at an economic problems on the scale of the Great Depression.
The one set of figures coming out of China that I trust is the figures for the value of goods that China imports. I think this figure is trustworthy because it can be correlated with figures of what other nations have exported to China (normally I would think that China’s export figures are good for the same reason but this year I think they are off due to goods that got held up in China in 2022 due to zero Covid). And if you look at import values, you will see that China’s imports in dollars terms dropped by 5.5 percent in 2023 compared to 2022.
Now on the surface that might not seem so bad but you need to understand that those are not inflation adjusted figures. So a 5.5 percent drop in 2023 compared to 2022 is probably closer to 10% drop in real terms. Moreover, 2022 was not a great year for China. And if you understand that China imports thing primarily to make things, you have to wonder where the 5% growth that they claim to have in 2023 came from if there imports were down in real terms by almost 10%. You have to go all the way to 2020 to find a year where China’s imports were as low as they were in 2023 in nominal dollar (i.e., not adjusting for inflation). And since inflation in US dollar terms from 2020 to 2023 is 17%, I am not at all sure that in real terms China had lower imports in 2020 then 2023.
That is all the insight I can muster on this topic for now. But if I was betting man, I would bet that China’s economic performance will be a much more prominent news topic in 2024.
On a side note, if you want to understand what a mess Evergrande’s liquidation order is going to create, watch/listen to the below.
It annoys me when people bounce around from thinking Ukraine is losing to thinking that Ukraine is winning based on short term factors. But my last post on the “One New Aspect of Warfare That The War In Ukraine Has Revealed” could have appeared to fall into the same trap of group think and going with the prevailing winds. Currently it is quite fashionable to be pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances due to short term issues and my post on long range fires (a military term I am appropriating and using to cover more systems then the US military typically does) could be seen as contributing to it. So to correct that unbalance let me elaborate on a throwaway line in my last post where I said “The West can easily give the long range tools to Ukraine to cause Russia a lot of pain but then they have to worry about Russia going to nukes.”
In absolute terms, the Russian strategic position is extremely weak. To be sure, if you measure Ukraine alone against Russia, Russia has the advantage. But Ukraine was a basket case before Russia invaded so saying they have the advantage does not mean much. I predicated that Russia would fall apart years back and nothing that has occurred since then has caused me to think that prediction was wrong. It remains one of my biggest fears.
People who are gloomy about the future of the West as I am often seem to fall into the trap of thinking that the West’s enemies are better off. But that just goes to show how much their view of the world is based on mood affiliation and not on facts. Some enemies of the West are worst off then the West is and Russia is certainly in this category. One of my biggest fears in the near term is what the collapse of Russia would mean for me and those I care about. In this fear, the ruling class of the West and I have a lot in common and that is why they don’t really want to see Ukraine win.
I am not going to go into detail in this post about all the long time term factors that make me expect the collapse of the Russian state (although I will note that in Russia’s case it is even worse than the lack of babies). Instead, I want to make a simple point about how the logic of my post about the new nature of long term precision fires means that Russia is a hair’s breadth from losing this war overnight. The only thing that is keeping them in the game is the West’s fear of their nuclear weapons. But West’s calculations about what they can get away with are constantly changing. All that has to happen is for their perspective to change slightly and Russia will have face the choice of complete collapse or getting out the big bombs. Continue reading →
As Keynes observed, in the long run, we are all dead. This uniformity in long term results tends to focus our minds on the short term. But that does not change the fact that most of the news stories that we pay attention to will be hardly matter in 10 years. Meanwhile, things that we ignore will have profound impact on the world for a long time to come. What follows is a few things that caught my attention over the last week that did not make the headlines but that I think will matter for a long time to come.
In the short run these things mean nothing. In the long run though, these figures will change the world.
Egypt is continuing its trend of being one of the world’s biggest time bombs. The idea that Latin America will continue to supply an endless supply of young people to America is one of the biggest fears of American nationalist and the biggest comfort for those who see a bright future for American demographically. Yet the data from the sending countries does not support the idea that this tread will last for very much longer. And China is continuing to track the worst case scenarios of its demographic decline. If this continues much longer, the formally pessimistic forecasts of China’s demographic future will turn into an optimistic pipe dream. A fertility rate of 1 becomes devastating very quickly.
An often remarked aspect of the War in Ukraine has been how much the battlefield looks like World War 1. Trenches and mines have been revealed to be very effective just as they have always been. They are effective not because they can’t be beat, but because the cost of beating them is all out of proportion to the cost of making them. It cost next to nothing dig a trench or make a mine, but to defeat a trench or remove a mine is a very expensive deal.
From what I can tell, short range consumer grade drones have only reinforced that logic. I think this is because the attackers have to move away from their electronic warfare assets and towards the enemies electronic warfare assets. Since range impacts how effective electronic warfare is, this means the attacker is moving to a place where his drones are less effective and the enemies drones are more effective. When you add that to the fact that people and equipment on the move are more vulnerable to drone attacks and the defenders advantage is only reinforced.
That is why I don’t think all the talk about short range drones changing warfare is really correct. It has been a truism in military thought that the defenders have the advantage since at least von Clausewitz wrote “On War”. All short range consumer type drones are doing is reinforcing something about war that we all take for granted. The defender has an advantage.
But all the talk about stalemate and how World War 1 has come again has obscured the big change in warfare that has made it so that the attacker has the clear advantage. Continue reading →
This is the second part of a thought process that was started with The 80 Year Crisis Cycle of The United States. While the core argument will stand on its own without any need to reference what came before it, there are things taken for granted in this essay that will seem bizarre if you have not read the previous essay.
It would also be helpful if you have read the following essays but all of them will only serve to provide more depth to the below argument and are not strictly necessary.
An 80 year crisis pattern has been the rule of the United States since it began as a nation. As we start a new year, it has been almost 80 years since the ending of the last crisis that the US faced. If this pattern holds, we should be entering another major crisis any day now. But is there any reason for thinking that American is soon to be faced with another crisis other then superstitious numerology?
If we review the past crisis America has faced, we see that they had demographic and technological antecedents that were observed by contemporaries even prior to the crisis. As a general rule, it was the demographic element that was most evident to those about to go through a major crisis. Long before the American Revolution, it was obvious that American Colonies were growing much faster than the mother country. The rapid growth in slavery and the fact that the population in the North was on track to overwhelm the South was widely known prior to the Civil War. And the rapid urbanization of America prior to Great Depression was known to everyone at the time. In all these cases, the nature of the crisis was a surprise, but the demographic forces leading to them were plain to all.
A common factor in all these crises is that they anticipated a demographic reality whose culmination was long after the time of the crisis. America did not equal the United Kingdoms in terms of population until just before the Civil War even though it was known that this was likely to happen at the time of the American Revolution. The culmination of the demographic submergence of the South into a larger America did not reach its fullest extent until about 80 years after the Civil War. And the widespread destruction of American small family farms did not take place until long after the Great Depression even though it was obvious that America was moving away from small farms long before that. If this pattern holds in the present time, America today should be heading towards another crisis whose demographic culmination we would have reason to believe is still a ways into the future. So does this pattern hold true today?
If we look at the world as whole, the answer to this question is simple. We know the modern world does not have a future. Continue reading →
Normally artists are like anyone else. As they get older their output degrades and their best work is in the past.
But to everything there are exceptions. Leonard Cohen wrote “You Want It Darker” while he was in 80s and dying of cancer (he died 17 days after the album came out). The entire album would have been an achievement for anyone, much less someone in their 80s whose bones are breaking down under cancer. But I think that the title poem (I don’t think calling it a song accurate even though that it what everyone else calls it) is better then anything else the Cohen wrote when he was younger. It is as rich in imagery as his best work when he was younger but it is lot more disciplined and focused then the work he wrote as a younger man. As a result, it hits like a truck without seeming like it is trying to manipulate your emotions.
I think anyone can listen to this without knowing anything and find it very powerful. But if you want to get more out of this you need to remember that this is a very Jewish poem (the background chorus comes from his childhood synagogue). Perhaps the best thing people could do to improve their understanding of it would be to read this on the Jewish prayer Hineni and this on the Mourner’s Kaddish. I also think it is important to remember what lighting the candles on Hanukkah is remembering.
But I suspect (and I could be wrong as it is not as clear as the references above) that the most important reference in understanding this poem is the last part of Isaiah Chapter 50 which reads….
Who among you fears the Lord
and obeys the word of his servant?
Let the one who walks in the dark,
who has no light,
trust in the name of the Lord
and rely on their God.
But now, all you who light fires
and provide yourselves with flaming torches,
go, walk in the light of your fires
and of the torches you have set ablaze.
This is what you shall receive from my hand:
You will lie down in torment.
Regardless of the validity or lack therefore of my own understanding, you should listen to “You want it Darker” if you have not heard it yourself. It is the preeminent modern example of what good spoken poetry sounds like.
Slovakia has a government that no longer supports giving aid to Ukraine. The largest party in the Dutch parliament does not support funding Ukraine. Significant portions of the Republican Party don’t want to give any more money to Ukraine and the support that is slipping away from the Democrats (largely African Americans and Hispanics) is composed of people who have no interest in Ukraine. There is increasing talk about how Ukraine needs to negotiate.
These things are not definitive. This trend towards looking for a way out of the Ukraine conflict was going strong on the part of Western Powers until the Kharkiv counteroffensive and subsequent taking back of Kherson city. These events gave the allies of Ukraine hope that just a little more military aid and Ukraine could win this thing. Perhaps a sudden Ukrainian victory will appear out of nowhere and once more the Western Powers will think that if they give the Ukraine just a little more money, this thing could be all over.
But the history of the West post World War II has been a history of half measures and perpetually frozen conflicts that never end. Korea is still sore spot ever since UN forces accepted a draw with the Chinese. Vietnam is resolved but only because the US decisively lost and Vietnam is too worried by China to hold a grudge. The former Yugoslavia is a powder keg held together by the threat of US air power. Iraq still has US troops in it and they are still conducting strikes in country. Syria has US troops in it who are still doing things that occasionally make for small articles hidden away from the front page. Libya is a frozen mess that nobody wants to put back together nor do they want to the wrong people to put it back together and so it is preserved in perpetual disastrous state.
The point is that only a fool would bet on the West having the staying power to see Ukraine through to the end. Ukraine’s only hope is that Russia is such a mess of demographic disaster and institutional dysfunction that maybe they will fail before the West does. But Ukraine’s own demographic disaster and institutional issues prevent them from having much agency in how this plays out. Their only card was that significant amounts of people were willing to fight for a Ukraine that was not under the thumb of Russia. But those people are a finite resource and there are indications that they are running out.
This realization is starting to creep into some Ukrainian channels. Continue reading →
