Unintended 5

When bureaucrats and politicians consider what policy option will best serve the people, they must ask this question: "What will happen if we choose this policy?"

Disease experts were consulted when the coronavirus became an epidemic. They said, "Shut down everything." Were child and family experts asked what would happen if everything was locked down? Were business and economics experts asked the question? Were environmentalists asked? Or was the decision knee-jerk, with too many unintended consequences?

In March of 2020 the government of Kenya restricted travel as a pandemic measure. Tourism was wiped out (9% of their economy) and lots of jobs were lost. Poor and hungry locals are killing giraffes to survive. 

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About a hundred million people around the world were pushed back into extreme poverty by measures taken to deal with the pandemic. That's real human suffering.  And even the environment will suffer. People must survive before they can work on preserving their natural environment. 

Studies will be done to analyze whether massive lockdowns were the best strategy to preserve life and mitigate suffering. Maybe some things (like schools) should have been left open. Hopefully something has been learned for the next time.

Unintended 4

Lockdowns of businesses, churches, schools started over a year ago and have been in reversal for  only a couple of months. Many children have been living without their friends and teachers, more alone with their computer screens than is good for them. The global rise in childhood mental health issues is another unintended consequence of radical lockdowns.

A pediatric hospital in Paris reports a doubling of kids needing care after suicide attempts since last September. Other alarming behavior includes running into traffic, covering themselves with disinfectant gel, scrubbing their hands raw, obsessing about infection, slowly starving, panic attacks. 

Pablo was weakened by months of barely eating and drinking when his parents rushed him to that Paris hospital - another "child coming apart amid the tumult of the coronavirus crisis." A year is a very, very long time for young children. They may not have the context or optimism to expect a happy ending any time soon.

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An ER doctor in northern England said, "This is an international epidemic and we are not recognizing it." Pablo's father sums it up this way, "It is a real nightmare to have a child who is destroying himself."

from AP News

Dislike ideas . .

There will always be people who see things differently from how I see things, who disagree with me. But I don't have to dislike them personally. Even if I don't like their idea, I might find something else about them to like.

Mac Hammond says, "Dislike ideas, not people."

Unintended 3b

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

The bottleneck is creating delays for customers waiting to get their purchase. To ease customer disappointment, exercise equipment company Peloton plans to spend $100 million just on transportation including air shipments in the first half of this year. Expenses like these may raise retail prices. Small retailers can't afford air shipments.

Average size of these container ships is also growing bigger, so they carry more containers. The ship below is the largest on the seas, a quarter-mile long and capable of carrying up to 21,000 containers each of which is about 20' by 8' by 8.5' in size. Each of those boxes in the photo is about the size of a twenty-foot room.

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Picture a ship like this in a storm at sea.

Unintended 3a

Business slowed during the pandemic lockdowns; retail shops often closed; people stayed home and they stopped buying things. Wait . . no, they didn't exactly stop buying everything. Overall they spent less, yes, but not nothing.

Exercise equipment for home use actually saw more sales. No surprise there, since most people had much more home time for one reason or another. Sales of electronics also rose, plus equipment of all kinds for home offices. 

A lot of that merchandise is brought into the U.S. by container ship. So there's another unintended, unforeseen consequence of the lockdown:  big logjam. Thirty container ships per day have sat at anchor waiting to be unloaded just off Los Angeles, while the normal number is zero or one (says the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Port, in video below).

Seaboard imports started surging in the U.S. last summer as retailers tried to re-stock depleted inventories. Last fall there were 57 more cargo ships than normal. Ships backed up, too, because many workers in the transport system (trains, trucks, terminals, etc.) were sick or at home due to contact tracing.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Lunar lander 2

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

If the time line works out as planned, SpaceX's spacecraft Starship will put two astronauts on the moon by 2024. That's 52 years after the last time we put people on the moon. 

NASA's Artemis mission to the moon will begin paving the way to permanent habitations and an orbiting space station. The moon will be our best bet for launching missions to Mars. Elon Musk wants to build a thousand Starships to transport people and cargo for the purpose of  establishing a colony there. Both Starship and its Super Heavy rocket will be fully reusable.

Watch an animation of what it will look like when Starship is launched to orbit while its booster (Super Heavy) turns around and heads back to earth for a safe landing:

 

Meanwhile, routine business continues. Today at 5:49 a.m. SpaceX launched four astronauts from Kennedy Space Center on a flight to the International Space Station. The pilot, Megan MacArthur, is the wife of Bob Behnke who flew SpaceX's very first crewed mission last year. They will dock with the ISS Saturday morning.

Watch the launch from pre-dawn Florida here.

from Business Insider

Lunar lander 1

Under the previous U.S. president, a goal of 2024 was set to go back to the moon. Last week NASA chose SpaceX to accomplish this goal.

Starship, the same new spacecraft being developed and tested at Boca Chica TX, will be NASA's lunar lander for its Artemis mission.

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SpaceX was chosen over two other competitors (Blue Origin and Dynetics) because in addition to being highly rated in both management and technical categories, SpaceX was also the lowest bidder. 

They bid to do the job for NASA for $2.9 billion, and to assume about the same financial risk for themselves to cover the cost of development and testing because they will also use Starship for their private commercial activities.

from Business Insider

(cont'd tomorrow)

Asylum 3

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

Compassion motivated social reformer Dorothea Dix in the 1800's to campaign for big, safe, therapeutic mental asylums. Compassion motivated mid-1900's reformers to eliminate them. Compassion today urgently calls for a better system than rotating the mentally ill between the streets, jails, and hospital ER's.

Olympia WA mitigation site

Two Olympia police officers on their morning rounds find a shirtless man lying half-way into the street. They politely wake him. He manically throws metal into a cart, screaming about zombies and a mob coming to kill them. It is "Angry Marty," and they will find him again the next morning suffering through another drug-induced terror, and they will have to leave him to fend for himself - until he commits a crime, and then he can go to jail.

"Under the weight of a cultural revolution against the asylums and civil rights lawsuits against involuntary commitment, a prison sentence has become the easiest option. The mentally ill get subsumed into the criminal class."

from City Journal

Asylum 2

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

Victims of mental illness have not ceased to exist, especially with commonly available psychosis-inducing drugs. Instead of big asylum institutions, they cycle through what this author calls the "invisible asylum" of the jail, the street, and the emergency room.

He got a close look at how the city of Olympia, Washington, handles a growing population of the addicted, the mentally ill, and the homeless. They opened a publicly-funded "mitigation site" with 150 tents for shelter and access to services. But it's more of an open-air asylum, with less protection than the old asylums.

A city employee who helps manage the site estimates that almost all of them have both substance-abuse and mental illness to deal with. Police call it the "Thunderdome" because of the raucous nights with shouting, assaults, overdoses.

At Olympia Municipal Jail, officers see the same faces again and again. One of them is Hannah, a meth user and bi-polar, who sometimes lives with her abusive boyfriend at the mitigation site. Her mother once came for her, then left saying that Hannah is her boyfriend's responsibility.

(cont'd tomorrow)

from City Journal

Asylum 1

What to do about persons with mental illness or psychiatric disorder - it's a challenging problem that's probably always existed. 

Back in the 1800's there was a wave of "Institutionalization," the movement to create institutions to bring the mentally ill out of homes and off the streets, in order to protect both patients and the public. The trend was based partially on the belief that they were not hopeless, that some could be treated and helped back to mental health.

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Well-publicized failures of some institutions with inhumane practices led to a wave of "Deinstitutionalization" in the mid-20th century. Community clinics, half-way houses, toughening the standards for admission or readmission, and simply releasing patients were all substituted for institutions. It helped that psychiatric drugs became available. They could limit psychotic episodes and reduce the need to restrain and confine patients.

Today we have a new situation: "Gone are the days of long-term psychiatric hospitalization and housing for the most severely mentally ill. Instead, for better or for worse, patients in need of psychiatric admission are treated for five or seven days and discharged back to the community—sometimes without a place to live.

(cont'd tomorrow)

SN15 next

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

Last week, April 8, the next Starship prototype to be tested rolled out to its launch pad. They skipped SN12-14, so this one's called SN15 and it's the result of those "hundreds of design  improvements" mentioned in yesterday's post. 

New and improved prototypes keep coming out of the factory. By year end there should be an SN20 capable of orbit.

Both the final version of Starship and the first stage it will ride on (Super Heavy) will be fully re-usable for multiple launches, which is the essential key to routine space travel. Otherwise, the costs would be (ahem) astronomical and prohibitive.

Elon Musk put it this way: "It's absolutely profound to have a reusable rocket . . .This is the holy grail."

Only with reusable space vehicles and rockets can the human race even consider colonizing Mars, and that's the goal he's always been going after.

See SN15 transported by "tankzilla" (starting about 8:40), workers attaching lift jig to the nosecone, and an enormous crane placing SN15 on its pad:

SN11 test flight

The most recent test flight of a Starship prototype was launched from SpaceX's Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas, a couple of weeks ago. 

SN11 ("Serial No. 11") performed well on its flight to 6.2 miles altitude, but it couldn't stick the landing. A plumbing problem was determined to have caused it to explode in a huge fireball. Debris was all over the beach.

Test flights, so expensive, reveal vital information to the company. Elon Musk tweeted that they've made "hundreds of design improvements across structures, avionics/software & engine."

SN15 will launch next.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Boca Chica 3

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

SpaceX is willing to throw even more money at Boca Chica. They offered each of the  ~40 residents three times the appraised value for their properties. 

The company plans nothing but growth and construction, and finds it harder to adequately protect the village from possibilities like the explosion of Starship prototypes since all residents live less than 2 miles away. The Federal Aviation Administration required SpaceX to increase its liability insurance from $3 million to $100 million.

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Some sold their homes, took the money and left (as another incentive, Elon Musk said they could return for VIP launch-viewing events).  A few originally stayed, set up webcams and Facebook pages, and waited for better offers.

And some still remain. It's possible that the government could force them out by eminent domain in the interest of the local economy. As of last October, ten residents are still there. Meanwhile, SpaceX reportedly plans to make a resort out of Boca Chica.

from Business Insider

Boca Chica 2

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

From a coastal paradise, Boca Chica has been transformed into a technologically cutting edge rocket launch site of global significance with perpetual lights and noise. Some residents object, but not all of them. A lot of new money has definitely flowed.

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Most people spoke in support of SpaceX at that 2012 public meeting. Hundreds of new jobs would be created in a region that needed them. And there was the thrill that SpaceX always creates for "a new and exciting era in space exploration." 

The company would like to be a good neighbor. Last week Elon Musk announced that $20 million will be donated to county schools and another $10 million donated to nearby Brownsville TX for downtown renovation. The wave of job creation continues as well. In the next couple years they will hire several thousand more people.

But the burly presence of SpaceX is disturbing the community at a new, higher level now.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Boca Chica 1

So remote that fresh water is trucked in, Boca Chica is - or was - a sleepy, unincorporated little community in Texas. Residents like the quiet life there near the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, at Texas' southern tip, with no shops or amenities.

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A new neighbor wanted to move to Boca Chica in 2012, a newcomer so significant that a public meeting was called. SpaceX wanted to build its own launch site there for twelve launches per year of the Falcon 9 -- just a little noise 12x/year.

SpaceX broke ground in 2014 and Boca Chica will never be the same. Residents make a hobby of watching the rocket company and taking pictures. Federal regulations required a level of safety around the site, so checkpoints were set up to stop anyone who wasn't on the list of property owners from getting close. 

As you know, SpaceX is way beyond Falcon 9 now. All testing of their new Starship is done here, the one that is designed to take 100 people at a time to Mars. It's much bigger, there's a lot of construction, and the new neighbor is looking pretty burly.

from The Atlantic

(cont'd tomorrow)

Racism Is, 3

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

Way back on Father's Day of 2008, Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) addressed this issue in a speech at a big Chicago church. He had words for African American dads:

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“Too many fathers are MIA. Too many fathers are AWOL . . .There’s a hole in your heart if you don’t have a male figure in the home that can guide you and lead you and set a good example for you. What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child — any fool can have a child . . .  It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.

“You and I know how true this is in the African-American community . . .We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school . . .And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it."

Some blame the white race for black fatherless homes. Jesse Jackson sharply criticized Obama for, as he called it, "talking down to black fathers."  But Jackson was wrong. Obama was right to call fathers up to a higher level. It's not racist to speak the truth, no matter who doesn't like it.

Obianuju Okeocha says, “70% and 69% are very high. Surely this is the root of so many problems. It is not white supremacy to point this out and it is not racist to demand a change within our communities.

from Politico

Racism Is, 2

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

That chart shows the median household income for four races in America. It also shows the percentage of births to unmarried women as opposed to married women in the four races.

A negative correlation exists between the two. The race identified as Asian has the highest income of the four races, and the lowest rate of births to unwed women. The white race has the next highest income, and the second lowest rate of births to unwed women. Hispanics have the next highest income, and the next lowest rate of births to unwed women. Blacks have the lowest income, and the highest rate of births to unwed women.

Single parents across all races have low income levels:

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Organizations exist to change those numbers for African Americans. It should be obvious - from a statistical point of view at the very least - that the lack of a father in a home with children is highly likely to result in very low household income. Do those organizations focus on marriage before kids? 

(cont'd tomorrow)

Racism Is, 1

Misunderstandings are awful. Insult and offense are unnecessary if there was a misunderstanding. Friendship will be destroyed and trust will die if a hurtful motive is assumed. If the bad motivation wasn't really there, it can be tragic. We need more friends and more trust, not less. 

All to say, we must put effort into clear communication. Part of that is simply to know what words mean. Words can be weapons if the meaning is twisted, manipulated. 

Racism is such a word. What do people mean by it?

But first, some data from the U.S. Census Bureau put into chart form:

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(cont'd tomorrow)

Early blossoms

Cherry trees famously bloom in the spring for the Japanese every year. But this year, the beautiful event was early.

A university researcher says that she found documentation of the peak flowering date all the way back to 812 A.D. in the Kyoto area. This year's flowering peak was the earliest ever recorded - March 26.

More than one factor affects the event, but it's thought that higher temperatures are responsible for the trend toward earlier and earlier flowering.

It only lasts a few days and it is celebrated.

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Eucatastrophe

If your only experience with author J. R. R. Tolkien is to watch the movie versions of his masterpiece Lord of the Rings, you may not know that he invented this word: "eucatastrophe."

An Oxford professor and scholar in the mid-20th century, he wrote "high fantasy" fiction that is always counted among the most popular books of the whole century.

He was a genuine Christian living in the skeptical Oxford culture, who influenced the young atheist C. S. Lewis. Tolkien believed that the Christian narrative is true and it gave his work a hopeful, positive nature. Here's what he says about the resurrection of Jesus Christ that we celebrated yesterday on Easter:

"I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy . . it is a sudden glimpse of Truth . . this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. . . The Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible . . Christian joy . . comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love."

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from Tolkien Gateway

Unintended 2

If you're able to do your job from a laptop, you probably didn't lose income during the pandemic lockdowns the way so many others - anybody who had to be there in person - did. You worked through the last year at home. For a lot of you, this looks to become the new normal.

Big cities were hit hard. Without tens of thousands of workers coming into central business districts, small shops that used to serve them won't re-start. Demand for big city real estate declined. The aggregate market value of Manhattan's large real estate management firms dropped by $6.5 billion. Big companies might need maybe half the office space when their employees only come in a couple of times per week.

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Manhattan's economy was sustained by 1.6 million commuters every day. About 90% of its office workers are still working remotely. Because rents and occupancy are down, the city has lost tax revenue (an expected $5 billion deficit next year). But don't worry, we're all going to help them out with taxpayer money. NYC will receive almost $6 billion from the federal stimulus package, plus another $4 billion for their public schools.

from AEI 

from NYT

Unintended 1

We've had a whole year of locked down businesses, events, holidays, jobs, fundraisers, celebrations, graduations, etc. A lockdown of this magnitude was never tried before, so no one knew exactly what would result from such a policy. The results are coming to light.

It seems there was an effect on housing availability. My son, in the market for a new home, ran across a startling article. Within 24 hours of going on the market, the house below generated 133 requests for showings. A total of 32 competing offers were soon received. 

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It sounds insane, as the article subtitle states. The real estate agent says he's never seen anything like this in his 17 years of experience. To secure their purchase, buyers offer cash, make offers well over asking price, forego inspections. I think the word "desperate" was used.

A reason for this craziness? The number of homes on the market in our area is only about half of the number a year ago. With so many working at home, apparently a lot of us are looking for a change - but more are hanging on to what they've got.

It's just one of the unintended consequences of those pandemic strategies. There will be more.

from BringMeTheNews