Sambal

I can’t really say that I don’t care about the Terri Schiavo thing, but I don’t have a clear opinion either.

That aside, I was not at all pleased with Bill Hobbs’ suggestion:

And I would like to see Congress pass and the President sign a second law - call it the Terri Schiavo Living Will Act of 2005 - that would require all Americans age 18 and up have a signed, notarized, legal living will, and update it every five years. The law also would require courts, doctors and families to follow the directives of a patient’s living will without deviation.

Might as well call it the Terri Schiavo Estate Attorney’s Full Employment Act of 2005. Why would this be needed? Most people die without the need for a living will — why should the government force everyone to get a living will? Just to prevent another national media circus? Furthermore, which section of the Constitution or federal law empowers Congress to require every adult to prepare a living will?

I would suggest instead a change to federal law such that in the absence of aliving will, the guardian for an incapacitated person would be allowed to file a civil petition for euthanasia, and a jury verdict be necessary to approve it.

This would address my main concern, which is that I want the power to end a patient’s life to rest not with the spouse/family, not with the state, and very certainly not with the doctor or insurer. Ideally, of course, the decision should rest with the patient through the patient’s living will. But in the absence of the patient’s clear wishes, I would like to see the decision to euthanize approved by a body of disinterested jurors. After all, it takes a jury to impose capital punishment; why should it be any easier to end an innocent life?

So, I’m shopping for new batteries, given that I’ll need them pretty soon. Price is relevant to the engineering side too, particularly since battery costs dominate EV running costs. I got very excited when I realized that the small size Kokam lithium polymer cell is just about the right size to fit in my battery case, except that it’s very thin. There’s enough room (I think) to put 8 cells of the 11 A-h size in series (29.6 V nominal) times 3 in parallel, for a total of 33 Ah. That’s about triple the capacity of my lead-acid battery pack, with very good power and less weight than the original. Price is the kicker: ProEV, an SCCA electric race car sponsored by Kokam, gives this formula for price in US dollars: 1.4*(cell capacity in A-h)*3.7V, which works out to about US$1400 for my ebike pack. Ouch! New lead acid batteries will cost about C$80, much much less. But they don’t go as far, or for as many cycles. So how do they all compare, apples to apples?

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Via Instapundit, here’s ThreeBadFingers with a transcript of a talk given by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He comes across (to me!) as straightforward and funny, and he clearly explains his philosophy of Constitutional interpretation. There’s also an undercurrent of begging for help — almost as if he’s saying “Don’t force on me this job of making moral decisions; I didn’t come here to do that. Give me a court full of originalists and we will fairly interpret the text of the Constitution and laws, and take back the moral aspects of lawgiving — put them in the legislature where they belong!”

Here are my favorite quotes:

Though I

What a calm and sensible fellow that Eugene Volokh is. First, he puts forward his belief that criminals who commit particularly heinous crimes should be executed in a particularly heinous fashion; then he responds to his critics with calm and reason; finally he publicly retracts his original position and credits the critics who changed his mind.

I’m perpetually torn on the question of capital punishment. On the one hand, it disturbs me that capital punishment is something the US has in common with states like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. When I was in Lithuania I visited the former KGB headquarters, now turned into a museum/research facility for people who are looking for traces of their missing relatives. At that point I was completely viscerally convinced that capital punishment should be abolished in the US.

But on the other hand, when I look at individual cases where capital punishment has been applied — like McVeigh or Kaczynski or even the Rosenbergs — I have to concede that capital punishment is sometimes appropriate. And if I were on a jury for one of those cases, I would probably decide for capital punishment.

But I still don’t like the idea that there is an employee of the state whose job title includes “executioner.” And I am pleased that Eugene backed away from his initial position in support of adding another title to that — “torturer”. I don’t think it belongs in our society.

This week had last EV1s being crushed, and a fuel cell motorcycle being announced. The turning of a tide?

There were a couple interesting points in the article, eg questions as to whether GM could legally crush a vehicle on which taxpayers have paid an incentive. The idea is the taxpayer is buying something, a public good in avoided emissions which they will receive over the life of the vehicle, so premature scrapping of the vehicle destroys something that the public has already paid for. Seems like a good argument against incentives, better to just tax emissions. There was also more shots fired in the argument over how many customers there were. I have to admit that I believe neither side in the battle. GM’s arguments for scrapping the rest (safety, reliability, liability, availability of spares) would apply just as well to a ‘55 ‘Vette, yet somehow GM never felt the need to collect and crush all of them. And the EV1 is, by all accounts, a quite nice example of a vehicle based on lead-acid technology. Acceleration and handling like a Ferrari, fast enough for the open highway, gas up free for life, decent range (for an EV). There were mistakes, eg the inductive charger paddle, which certainly looks cool, but you can carry a lot more current through a metal-on-metal contact, which is important if you want to gas up quick. The styling is also questionable: if you’re going for sports car performance and parameters (2 seater), you should probably look and be priced like one. The Venturi avoids these problems.

Fuel cells, I dunno. That bike isn’t on the market, it’s just a prototype, and it’s certainly not the first prototype fuel cell two-wheeler (Aprilia, Honda, …). Fuel cells would be nice if: you’ve got lots of hydrogen, and found a way to store it, and you somehow got the cost down to less than that of my house. Advocates assure the public that prices will soon drop, and perhaps they will. But to me, a fuel cell looks a lot like a battery, except that it’s made out of platinum, and battery prices certainly don’t drop by 50% every year like silicon chips. Plus they are underpowered (note the 1 kW fuel cell on a 6 kW bike, except that the 6 kW sustained bike can eat twice that for short periods under load), so you need batteries anyway.
If you like the concept, though, they aren’t that hard to build. If you want to build one yourself, start with a battery electric bike. Buy an Etek off of Ebay (~$300), it’s a clone of the Lemco used in the bike in the article. The controller will be maybe $1000. Batteries will depend on your donor bike, your expectations, and your budget. It’ll be < $1000 for lead-acid, up to something like 10x for lithium. Add a fuel cell later to slow charge your batteries. Or add an ICE generator.

In the previous entry,
Sam dares question my assertion of no new oil being laid down, particularly if I’m relying on those flaky geologists. Not that I know enough geology to defend the entire field, but I’m given to understand that
the oil guys really care about where oil comes from, they have
essentially infinite money to work with, and they are more
sophisticated than outsiders like me sometimes appreciate. Eg., the Fast
Fourier Transform was well-known inside before Cooley and Tukey
published it, medical imaging trails seismic by about a decade, the
Top500 supercomputer list of machines, owners, and applications is
usually headed by entries like “unnamed government agency /
classified” and “Giant Oil Co / exploration”. So if it can be known where
oil comes from, they probably know.

My understanding is that a fairly specific set of conditions is
required to make oil. Oil comes only from oceans, other organic carbon
deposits, such as peat bogs, turn into coal. The conditions required
include climatic (hot and wet), so that there’s large biological
productivity. Local geology and hydrology is also important. It has
to be deep, but near land, and in a trapped body of water without deep
circulation, so that bottom conditions are anoxic to prevent
decomposition. Or something like that, and parts of this picture may
be controversial, I don’t know enough to know. Still, think Norwegian
fjords, except with a tropical paradise at the surface, and that’s the
picture I have. This isn’t sufficient to turn into oil, it’s still got
to get buried in the right kind of rock at the right depth for the
right length of time and get trapped under the right kind of cap rock,
but you’ve got to start this way to get a chance, and the picture is
specific enough to exclude anywhere that currently exists. At least, that’s my understanding.

As for citations, the source I can find quotes Klemme and Ulmishek
(AAPG Bulletin 1991) for deposition vs. time, a webified summary of
which is available href="http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/Animator/klemme2.htm">here. This
is mostly gibberish to me, but see Fig. 1. I also ran into this,
written by the (retired) chief geoscientist at ExxonMobil Exploration,
if you want to know
what (at least one dude in) Big Oil thinks about Peak Oil. (Short summary: sure to happen,
could cause geopolitical / environmental / economic / security
disruptions, and go ahead and invest long-term
as if high prices will continue.)

Added: reviewing my original words in the light of above, “no oil whatsoever” is probably overblown, and needs some kind of mealymouth footnote, like “which could turn into an economically viable reserve, or not much anyway”. Indeed, that’s probably all Sam was saying…

It’s working, anyway. I feel impelled to post more because Brer TFox is posting:

and there is in fact no oil whatsoever being deposited right now.

What’s your source on that? Cause if it’s the same people (i.e., mainstream geologists) who claimed that continents don’t move only 45 years ago, I don’t accept that as an authority.

I would accept “the amount of oil currently being deposited is unknown but probably quite small and almost certainly less than the amount of oil being extracted.” But really none?

TFox has a nice post two down about the US current account deficit. I was recently thinking about this in connection with Canada’s removal of the foreign-content cap on RRSP’s.

An RRSP is a flexible, tax-deferred savings/investment account available in Canada. You can put in up to 18% of your income (up to a cap of $15.5k), and that contribution becomes exempt from income tax. The growth in the account is tax-free, but withdrawals are taxed as income.

Until this year, there was a restriction on how RRSP funds could be invested. Up to 30% could be invested in “global” content, while the remaining 70% had to be invested in Canadian content. Typically people would choose GIC’s (a kind of insured certificate of deposit) or bonds, but “Canadian” could include Canadian-managed clone funds which reproduce the behavior of foreign equity funds (plus a fee). But now that’s all changed.

I figure it like this: the 70% Canadian requirement was intended to pump up investment in Canada and thereby cause Canada’s economy to grow. But since many people were investing their CanCon conservatively, banks were looking for nice safe loans to park that money in. And there’s only so many houses and McDonald’s franchises to finance. Interest rates have been low and are staying low, and I believe this is caused in part by the large pool of RRSP money looking for low-risk borrowers.

The total amount held in RRSP’s in 2003 was $340 billion CAD (source). So with the cap removed, the $240 billion CAD is now free to find a home anywhere in the global capital market. Let’s suppose that all of it goes to the US, into index funds that track the S&P 500.

The investment must be balanced by a current account deficit or else by increased US consumption of Canadian goods and services. And it’s the latter possibility that I think the Government is banking on. Their previous strategy of forcing direct investment in Canada through the RRSP foreign-content cap failed: banks were unwilling to lend the money to economy-growing businesses. The new strategy is to allow Canadians to buy foreign investments (which will incidentally drive the Canadian dollar lower) to make Canadian products more attractive to foreign consumers, so that Canada sees demand-driven growth — this instead of trying to force capital-supply-driven growth.

Good for them. And, incidentally, good for me — now I can put all of my RRSP in Berkshire.

I’m working my way through a long David Foster Wallace article in the
April Atlantic on the life and times of an AM talk radio host. Aside
from the truly wacko typography (parenthetical notes inside footnotes
inside of footnotes, all laid out with Kandy Kolored Acid Koolaid
hyperlinks like a Javascript mouseoverfest gone crazy), it’s fairly
entertaining. Though some of the observations seem
trite (it’s politically conservative! they’re in it for the money! they let the interests of the public trump the
public interest! Omigosh!) there are some interesting points. Eg., one
of the reasons for the particularly crystalline politics of talk radio
hosts is that it’s a job requirement. It’s not just that liberal talk
radio, whatever that might mean, were it ever to exist, would be so
boring that no one would listen. It’s also that a host must keep up a
steady stream of monologue, on any subject of the day, with minimal
preparation, with no pauses, stuttering or normal verbal tics, without
being overly repetitive and maintaining an internal consistency and
narrative flow. It’s very hard, and would be entirely impossible if
factors like research, balance, shaded nuance, or anything other than
instantaneous moral clarity of response was required.

It brings back memories of years ago when I used to listen to Rush
Limbaugh, when he was at the Clinton era peak of his greatness. (Is
he still alive? What would he talk about, now that Republicans control
the House, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court?) I’d
have him on the clock radio alarm in the morning. I’d tried music, but
I’d just sleep through it. I’d tried NPR, or whatever the local
alternative college station was, but that would just put me back to
sleep should I by chance happen to wake up. (Mmm, there may be some
problems, but the world is basically full of nice, thoughtful people,
who are working hard to make it a better place… They don’t need my
help, not today…) Rush, on the other hand, could get me going. Every
morning, he’d be having another coronary over the latest atrocity on
Pennsylvania Avenue, and I’d sit up stock straight, screaming. WHAT!
THAT’S NOT TRUE! YOU LYING SACK OF.. wait, where am I? What time is
it? It’s just Rush, turn him off, time to go. From the station’s point of view,
this is just great. They don’t care why you listen, just that you do.

More stimulating talk radio.

There’s an interesting piece in the NY Times Magazine on the current account deficit, which leads nicely into today’s announcement that the 2004 deficit, $666 billion (smirk), is the largest ever, up 25% over 2003, the previous record holder. Current account deficits are related to trade deficits, the difference in the amount of stuff (cars, oil, everything sold at WalMart) the US buys from the rest of the world (ROW) and the stuff ROW buys from the US. Trade deficits are normally financed by investment flows, eg. the large trade deficit with Japan due to their car makers taking over the US market starting in the 70’s or so was financed by the Japanese buying up things like all the real estate in NYC, and later by building factories in the US (Honda, the largest US motorcycle manufacturer). In the 90’s, it was the US stock market that was the favorite of the world, and the US appetite for foreign goods was nearly matched by foreigners appetite for US dot coms and telecoms. If not matched by investments, then a trade deficit turns into a current account deficit, where goods going into the US are paid for only with US dollars going the other way. Note that the ballooning of the current account deficit occurs right after the market crash. This is all right for awhile, as central banks like US dollars, because they’ve replaced gold as a storehouse of value for central reserves. However, there’s a limit to how much reserve you need, particularly if you start to get nervous about how good a storehouse of value a currency is, given those trade and current account deficits. South Korea sparked a mild panic last month when they announced they were cutting dollar purchases by their central bank. (This is noted by the article too. It states, incorrectly, that the panic stopped when they denied the announcement. In fact, the clarification only stated that they were just slowing new purchases, not selling off their existing reserves. Yet! Still, it stopped the slide in trading.) The biggest and most complex situation, though, is China.

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