Sambal

Had a meeting last night where the topic of so-called “ethical investing” arose. The idea is, you’re a good person, so you wouldn’t want any of your money going to help support any bad thing. And it’s pretty easy to start listing all the bad things you’d want to avoid, though everyone’s list will be different. Then just avoid those things, right?

This stuff drives me crazy. It’s not just that the list is unstated, or stupid, or ineffective, or invalidly applied in the case at hand. Or that the people are complaining aren’t the ones whose money it is, or that precious time and energy of the organization is being wasted, instead of trying to accomplish the presumably worthy goals of the organization. No, I think it’s the puritanical nature of the entire exercise, this ideal of living in a state of holiness, disconnected and disengaged from the society in which we live. It’s not that ritual purity is new or rare, it’s present in radical religious and political movements since, like, forever. Nor is it that it has no appeal for me. I think I just like to try to be a bit self-aware of when I’m indulging, and spend most of my time in the world.

I shared my experiences with attempting to get to work in an ethical manner. Cars, as we all know, are polluting, require rapidly depleting liquid fossil fuel, whose acquisition kills people in a wide variety of far-off lands and supports terrorist regimes. Buses ditto, except for nastier-smelling pollution, and stealing time which ought to go other places. Bicycles are fun, and steal less time than buses, but probably consume as much fossil fuels as cars. (The very nearly literal sense in which I’m consuming fossil fuels when sitting at the dinner table continues to bother me.) My electric bike runs off of grid power, which hereabouts is mostly coal, still fossil, still depleting (though it’ll last longer than oil), but pretty high impact on pollution and warming. I could campaign for nuclear, but even if I succeeded it’d be ten years before a plant could get built, and enviro-wackos would still complain, though coal likely releases more radioactivity than nuclear. I could buy a PV solar panel, $800 for one which would power the bike, according to the salesman I talked to at Earth Day. Even then, I ought to evaluate the impact of producing that large sheet of high purity silicon. Not to mention figure out what the salesman and panel producer are going to do with the money they earn, who knows, perhaps I wouldn’t approve…

I wasn’t kidding when I said this stuff drives me crazy.

One interesting facet of purity laws is their focus on cleansing. In other words, on restoring purity once the violations occur. It’s as if they universally realize that adherence to such laws is impossible, and instead focus on regaining holiness after inevitable infractions. Perhaps the environmental / social justice movement could do more here. After using a disposable diaper, how to regain purity? If you pair 100 shares of Talisman with 100 shares of Whole Foods Market, are you good? Can you drive an SUV, if you’ve bought a TerraPass bumper sticker for it, and are thus carbon neutral? These questions are difficult, and there are no central authorities to rely on for answers. Radical Islam has this problem, too, with competing mullahs all offering their own edicts.

Actually, ethical investing wasn’t my only contact with ritual purity yesterday. A coworker decided to help out by washing up the coffeepot. By taking it into the lab. And using the cleaning supplies for the laboratory equipment, sponges, etc. Big no no. Cross contamination is a worry in both directions, and unfortunately, the protocols for recovering from the sin aren’t well described in Leviticus.

The last two great auction houses compete for a $20M art sale based on a single round of RPS… great storytelling from the NY Times. The loser would do well to contemplate a serious text and the strategies of advanced computer players before again dismissing it as “a game of chance”.

Interesting tidbit about RPS: by the rules, it cannot be played for fun, there must be something at stake. To satisfy this rule, most serious competitions are “for honor”, although the right to auction $20M in art would also suffice.

First you forget your gloves.
Then the wind picks up.
Then it starts to hail.
Then the battery cuts out.
Then the chain falls off.
And then you arrive.

Still, I rode to work five days last week. And the bike generates interest: to people under the age of six or over the age of 65. Tra la la…

Awhile ago I’d bought a new sprocket to install on my motor, the purpose being to up the gear ratio a bit. EV enthusiasts often rave about the flat torque curve of electric motors, but that’s only true at low and moderate speeds. If you’re supplying the motor with a fixed maximum voltage, there’s a fixed maximum RPM that the motor will go, and the motor will provide zero torque at that RPM. Near that maximum, the available torque declines linearly. If you hook the motor to the wheel with a fixed ratio, as my bike does, you have the least torque available at the highest speeds, which is kindof a bummer since that’s where the greatest drag is. It’s not a problem if you have enough assistance at the speeds where you need it, but I was able to outpedal the motor at top speed, resulting in no assistance. Since the point of the motor was to go faster than I could by myself, this was no good. Thus, the new sprocket, to put the no load RPM above the achieved top speed.

I finally got it on a couple days ago….

(more…)

Peter “Listening to Prozac” Kramer has a new book out, which is excerpted in the NYT Magazine. He talks about depression as disease, pure and simple, perhaps chronic, sometimes fatal, but without spiritual, artistic, or moral overtones. Familiar stuff to anyone who frequents the NYT, they print so much stuff on depression that I’m seriously concerned about the mental health of their editors.

I was recently asked if I was depressed. And it’s true, in the past week or two I have found myself with an unexplained ineffable melancholy, a tristesse, suffusing my thoughts and feelings. It’s moderate, seems most prominent midmorning and midevening, does not interfere with work or home, and wouldn’t seem to require clinical intervention. Ignore it then. Still, it’s odd.

I think I’ve figured it out, though. I’ve been riding my bike to work, ripping along without adequate eye protection. My eyes protect themselves from the wind by watering. So, every day, I arrive at work and return home again having essentially cried lightly for half an hour. And somewhere in the bowels of my brain an ancient circuit tries to account for this purely physical phenomenon by providing a post-hoc emotional explanation, and getting the arrow of causation wrong. Actions define attitudes, as every first year social psych student knows.

So over the weekend my son and I bottled the first batch of wine I’ve made. Well, not the first, technically, if you want to count the balloon wine I tried, based on the bottom recipe at the link. In my case the juice was Safeway generic concentrated grape juice (not even the premium store brand!), and it was not a balloon but a latex glove for an airlock. Hey, it’s what we had around. The glove worked very nicely, too: once fermentation started, it stood up and waved “hi”, then drooped once the action slowed. I stored the result in pop bottles. It was never really drinkable, though a few glasses got consumed, and the rest went down the drain once I realized that it was starting to get worse.

(more…)

What will the impacts of anthopogenic greenhouse gas emissions be? Who will bear them? What are the costs, what are the alternatives, both of avoidance and remediation, and what will those cost? Most importantly, from a policy perspective, how should we think these problems? How can we set up systems which will actually result in some reasonable outcome? I’m glad that nice smart people seem to be working on the problem, so I don’t have to.

Other things I’m not reading that I feel like I ought to:

(more…)

My question is, of course: are these people all going to hell?

During the last US presidential election, I put some skin in the game on one of these online betmatching sites. It was actually very useful, in a psychological sense. Once my money was on the line, unfocused partisan umbrage was immediately replaced by cold calculation of portfolio impact. I managed to neither win nor lose much, however, and the big bet (would some skanky offshore website actually pay off when asked) came through, so I was happy.

I’m still chewing on the transportation efficiency thing. This isn’t necessarily productive, as it’s easy to go crazy trying to figure this stuff out in the abstract. (It’s also easy to get things badly wrong, like an early report that electric cars would emit 60x as much lead per mile as a conventional car burning leaded gasoline. Even were the numbers valid, are all “emissions” equal? Lead particles in the air, ready to rain down into the drinking water, seems different from the occasional fully encapsulated battery ending up in a well-maintained modern landfill.) It’s also unnecessary from a policy perspective. You don’t need to best answer to set policy, just a way to price the positive and negative externalities, so that those costs can get included in the prices paid by consumers. Let the invisble hand work out the optimal compromises.

Still, even if I want to do the calculation, I’m not sure how to do it. There are so many large uncertainties. Does it really make sense to charge the bicyclist for food energy? After all, perhaps they would normally have driven their SUV to the gym to work out for an hour a day had they not been biking, making their personal energy expenditure neutral. Do increases in exercise, at the margin, always lead to increased food consumption? In increased food purchasing? Human physiology is more complicated than mechanical engines, and it’s easy to imagine physiological states where increased exercise leads to decreased consumption. Does increased food purchasing lead to increases in production, or simply less waste as farmers produce all they can in any case? Are we interested in energy costs at the margin, under current conditions, or in some ideal Kantian centrally-planned state where everyone is making the same choice? You’ve got to answer all of these before generating an answer. Still, I bet the Lomborgians would love any calculation (no matter how valid) that showed bicycling to have a bigger environmental footprint than driving an SUV.

ObRide: Through rationing power usage to be kind to the battery, I made it all the way to work yesterday, and home again too. 25.3 final there, 25.5 final back. I felt like I was outpedalling the motor during the hard parts, though, resulting in no assist. Just can’t win.

…liberal bloggers actually do hang out with serial killers.