Tyrone Power was something of a Brad Pitt/George Clooney heartthrob in 1947, famous for swashbuckling roles and manly action movies. The former Marine pilot was a serious actor however, and wanted to stretch himself to play more complex figures. He convinced his studio bosses to buy William Lindsay Gresham’s recently-released novel Nightmare Alley and make a movie of it, casting himself in the lead. The movie was a flop then but has cemented itself as a noir classic today.

Gresham, it seems, was a dark soul. Fighting in Spain for the doomed Republican cause against Franco’s Fascists, he heard stories of carnival life from a fellow traveler. Gresham was particularly enthralled (and horrified) by the geek, a peculiar attraction in these roadshows, a man so desperate he made his livelihood in a cage biting off the heads of chickens and snakes. I should note that Billboard continued to place ads by carnivals looking for geeks up until the 1960s.

In the story an ambitious, intelligent, but aimless young man, Stanton Carlisle, takes a job in a carnival. Like Gresham he’s shocked by the depravity of the geek and vows to never let himself get so low. In fact he climbs the ranks of the carny hierarchy to the mind-reading act, ultimately stealing the secrets from an older performer and then killing him to cover up his theft. Carlisle leaves the two-bit tent parade with one of the young women in the show and they make it on the vaudeville circuit and settle in New York City. But life as a “mentalist” is still too low-brow for Stanton and he decides to go for the big time and he enters the “spook racket.” Spiritualism was popular stuff then—séances, communicating with the dead, that sort of thing. Stanton attempts his biggest con, fleecing a rich industrialist with a shady past with an elaborate con involving a long-dead girlfriend. In the end his young partner can’t follow through on the deception and the whole scheme falls apart. Stanton had hooked up with a crooked psychologist, Dr. Lillith Ritter, who was a silent partner in the grift. She winds up double-crossing him so even the payoff goes sour.

Carlisle goes on the lam and, in the end, finds that his only choice is to become, you guessed it, the carnival geek. It’s a dark tale, to be sure. Gresham’s nightmare alley is life itself. It’s a recurring motif in the novel, a vision of the walls closing in and a desperate run to a daylight escape that Stan never reaches. Gresham himself was an alcoholic and his life was a series of tragedies despite the success of his book. He wrote extensively on carnivals, con men, hucksters, fake spiritualists and the like and his work today is considered authoritative. He committed suicide in 1962 at the age of 53.

The movie had to be tamed a bit, this was Hollywood after all, but much of the book’s bleakness remains. Power is superb and he’s backed by noir stalwart Coleen Gray as Molly, his luckless assistant, and Helen Walker does a terrifying femme fatale as the coolly detached Dr. Ritter. The producers even built a full working carnival and hired some genuine acts to give the film authenticity. The novel is far more depraved and cynical and revels in the underground argot of that subculture but it is thoroughly gripping. It’s structured using a tarot deck (all the chapters are the cards of the major arcana) and the symbolism is woven throughout. In the movie former vaudevillian Joan Blondell gets the role of Mademoiselle Zeena, the fortune-teller who first takes Stan under her wing. Unlike her protégé she takes the readings of the cards seriously and they foreshadow his fall.

There’s a remake of Nightmare Alley out there. Director Guillermo del Toro’s big budget feature was released in December. I’ll get a look at it soon I hope and report back. I’m intrigued, for sure.

The carnival circuit may be a thing of the past but we certainly are not without its barkers and come-ons and phony acts. The working carny saw the world filled with rubes and suckers. Anyone not in on the “gaff” was fair game for a shakedown. That was small-time stuff, though. We live in the big-time world of grift, from Donald Trump to Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg to Dr. Oz, and those guys mean business. They work on a global scale, not just on small-town hicks. Whether it’s crypto-currency or multi-level marketing we live in a new golden age for the con man.

Keep your wallet in your pocket. And watch the movie (or read the book) if you need reminding!

Hawai’i is 2400 miles from California and 3800 miles from Japan. It is literally in the middle of nowhere. It is one the most remote places on earth, yet it is inhabited by 1.5 million people.

How do people live in such a place, let alone have a modern civilization?

Simple: jet fuel. Hawai’i consumes a lot of jet fuel. Sixty percent of all the petroleum products consumed in the Aloha State are jet fuels. There’s obviously a big military presence in Hawai’i and one expects they are big consumers of both aviation and marine fuels.

But one has to get to Hawai’i first, and that means jet travel. Going by boat means at least five or six days. That’s too slow for modern folks.

Jet fuel is mostly kerosene-based. Kerosene is sometimes called paraffin or lamp oil. Kerosene is distilled from crude oil between 150 and 275 degrees Celsius. It’s about 80% as dense as water. Most of the hydrocarbons in kerosene contain between nine and twenty carbon atoms per molecule.

Jet fuel is not aviation gasoline (“av gas”). That stuff is used in internal combustion, spark-fired engines. Av gas fuels your buddy’s Cessna and is similar to motor vehicle gas. Jet fuel is more like diesel.

Big jets rely on gas turbine engines. They are called turbofans because they use a big fan or a set of fans to suck air into the combustion chamber and then expel the exhaust to provide thrust.

A passenger jet weighs 400 to 500 tons. A Ford F-150 weighs about two tons, so a jetliner is about the same as 200+ pickups! No wonder they need turbofans.

A jetliner is a mini-civilization. It takes a portion of the populace (and all their needs) to someplace else and promises to bring them home again. Once a jetliner lands on your shores there’s no going back. You are now connected to the rest of the world. And the jetliner leaves people behind who make sure the next jets arrive (and depart) safely. Now your land has been colonized by the jetliner people and life will never be the same.

The jetliner people made Hawai’i into the 50th state. That’s good for me because I’m an American and I can go to Hawai’i without much trouble. That is, if you don’t consider gigantic jets and airports “much trouble.” I’m jetliner-ing to the Big Island tomorrow and I’ll let you know how things are working out there.

The last time I was on an airplane flight was in 2008. That was international—we went to México. In a couple of weeks I’m getting on a plane for a trip to the Big Island—Hawai’i. It’s a domestic flight of course but it doesn’t feel like it. It’s almost 2400 miles from the airport in San Francisco to the one in Kona. That’s about two hundred miles less than the distance from San Francisco to JFK airport in New York City. But the flight to Hawai’i is entirely over the Pacific Ocean!

Jet travel changed the world forever. Cargo ships take five days to cover the SF to Oahu route with extra days needed for the outer islands. Our 737 will make the trip in less than six hours. And a regular middle class guy like me can actually afford the fares!

When you search for fares on Google you get stuff like this:

This is not our flight, just the result of a MFR-KOA (Medford, Oregon to Kona, Hawai’i) entry in the search box. And I clicked on the circle-i “information” icon under the 664 kg CO₂ to get the pop-up.

Average fuel consumption over the entire flight of a 737 (takeoffs and landings take a lot, cruising not so much) is about 2400 kg per hour. For a six-hour flight that’s 14,400 kg or about 18,000 liters (4800 gallons). A 737 can carry over 6000 gallons of fuel and fly over 3000 miles without refueling.

Using the graphic above I’m going to estimate that a six-hour flight makes 600 kg of C0₂. (I’m splitting the difference between 556 and 664.) That’s 100 kg/hour. PER PASSENGER! Here’s a link to how Google comes up with these numbers.

There are about 180 seats on the Boeing 737 we’ll be flying. 600 kg times 180 is 108,000 kg of CO₂! How is that possible? We are only burning 14,400 kg of fuel! But fuel does not burn by itself. It requires oxygen. A modern jet engine consumes over 400 kg of air per second. That’s how it is possible to produce so much exhaust.

Let’s put it all in perspective. Our friends at Our World in Data (a remarkable site) say aviation accounts for about 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions. Here in the States, we account for about 16% of all emissions from domestic flights. (Calculating the contributions of international flights is a little trickier and I’m flying domestic so I’m sticking with these numbers.)

The U.S. retains its familiar role as world leader. We make the most airplane exhaust!

It seems the only way the world will get a handle on global air pollution and the climate impacts of greenhouse gases is by some sort of carbon pricing. Whether it is cap-and-trade, a carbon tax, or some other scheme, we have to start including the externalities that our activities produce. Nothing is for free. If flying makes a goddamn mess, then we have to bear the cost of the cleanup. And we all know the best way to keep things clean is not to make a mess in the first place!

I’ll be polluting my way over to Hawai’i in a couple of weeks, like I mentioned. We will fly to Kona but will stay in Hilo. I’m really excited about being on the windward side of the Big Island where it is rainy and wet. I live in a near-desert so I need a break from sere, arid landscapes. We are going to watch some baseball at the University and then have a week of adventures. I’m going to buy a really nice Aloha shirt and some groovy board shorts. I’ve been given so many recommendations of places to go and things to do that I figure no matter what we actually do it will all be really fun. I’m a pretty relaxed, happy-go-lucky traveler. If I’m in new place I enjoy myself just kicking around and living life. And drinking beer, of course. My first selfie will probably be at the Hilo Brewing Company. I’ll bet that Mauna Kea Pale Ale is mighty tasty!

What’s a fair bet? To me, a fair bet is one is which the payoff accounts for the odds of the outcome. Say I’m flipping a coin with you. Each of us puts a dollar on the table. If it comes up heads I get both bucks. If it comes up tails then you get ’em. That’s fair. The outcome—heads or tails—is a fifty-fifty chance. My risk (one dollar) is equal to my reward (one dollar).

Casinos don’t work that way, of course. If they paid “true odds” they’d go out of business. A casino has a lot of overhead so they have to get a cut of all the transactions (the bets) in order to keep the lights on. Take roulette, for example. There are 38 numbers on the table (1-36 plus 0 and 00). If I bet on “red” I’m betting on 18 of those 38 numbers. The odds of getting red are 18/38 or about 47%. That means the house wins 53% of the time.

The house pays 2-to-1 on a red bet. But I have 38/18 chance (53%) of losing that bet! That is, I have about 2.11-to-1 odds against me (38÷18 ≈ 2.11) but I only get 2-to-1 if I win. So the house makes a little bit (0.11) on every bet.

“The house always wins.” This is a truism. All gamblers know this. Yet they continue to gamble. And interestingly, gambling is becoming more and more acceptable as a form of recreation. Once confined to Nevada and New Jersey legal gambling now exists in thirty states due to the emergence of tribal casinos. Not only that, on-line betting has exploded and America’s professional sports organizations have endorsed and embraced fans betting on games. This was unthinkable only a few years ago.

I have to say that this new-found, relaxed attitude about gambling is a bad thing. People are going to be stupid and throw away money that should be used to feed and clothe their children. And the sports industry, already engorged with TV and merchandising money, will only grow fatter and uglier, and the juvenile, anti-social attitudes it celebrates will only become more normalized. That being said, regulating behavior like gambling by making it illegal certainly does not stop people from throwing away their money (and their lives). I can live with gambling being legal. What I don’t like is making gambling seem like harmless fun. It’s not. It’s a gigantic money pit that people throw themselves into and then get chewed up and spit out, much worse for wear than if they hadn’t.

I’m obviously not talking about a Super Bowl pool. Or a handshake bet on a ballgame in a bar. I’m talking about apps on your phone that allow you to monetize every sports opinion your feeble brain can hold. It’s too easy, and there’s too much money involved, and when those two conditions are met bad shit will follow.

The problem with professional gambling houses is that they don’t play fair. I gave you an example of how the house wins on every bet in roulette even if they have to pay out. OK, fine, they have to make a living. As long as the odds and payouts are transparent the gambler can at least see what’s coming. If a gambler gets really lucky and the house starts paying out big money, the pit bosses make every effort to stop the run. They change the dealers, for example, and try to “break the momentum” of the win streak while they ply the players with free drinks delivered by pretty girls, anything to throw them off their game. All of that is perfectly legal. They have betting rules like pot limits, too. In the end, houses can simply close the tables if bettors win too much. A casino can just stop doing business if they see a winning run they don’t like. It’s bad for business and your reputation to do that but going out of business is worse.

Sports betting oddsmakers are really good at what they do. They “pick ’em” with winning regularity. If the big books agree on a result it is almost always a good bet to play the favorite. The average individual bettor really doesn’t have access to better or timelier information and thus cannot come to a consensus about the odds on a game. The pros can do this and so the part-time player, amateur, or wannabe-pro has no chance. They will lose more often than win over the long run if they bet against the odds.

I came across a paper by Lisandro Kaunitz, Shenjun Zhong, and Javier Kreiner titled Beating the bookies with their own numbers—and how the online sports betting market is rigged. (I was directed there by Tyler Cowen’s blog.) These three people figured that most bets were priced correctly. But they also figured that meant some small but significant number of bets were not priced correctly. These bets inadvertently favored the bettor. In order to attract betting on an underdog oddsmakers give enticing payout possibilities. They “sweeten the deal” for the riskier bets. And oddsmakers have to hedge, too. So they have mispriced bets out there to move money around and balance their risks. The writers of the paper figured out how to identify these opportunities. When they tried out their model with hypothetical bets they were successful and made money. They switched to real money and starting winning consistently.

Then the other shoe dropped. The on-line betting places simply starting restricting them from betting. The bookmakers placed limits on the bet amounts and what contests could be bet on, ultimately rendering the strategy impossible to implement. The authors describe it as “discrimination against successful clients.” That’s certainly true. The game is rigged.

The paper concludes:

If we are going to allow and even encourage betting then we should certainly require the industry to “play fair.” The SEC regulates much of the securities market. When I buy a stock or an ETF I have access to all kinds of information about the investments, the costs, and the nature of the risks. This is required by law. Investing is gambling and amateurs get hosed all the time by the big boys but at least there is some oversight by the authorities and some remedies available to the retail customer. Not so with sports betting.

In the end, gambling is stupid. Leave it to the pros. Have fun at work with lottery pools and NCAA bracket-ology. Slap a twenty on the bar now and then to spice up a TV contest and when you win buy the loser a beer. Like I said, have fun. But stay away from the betting apps. Serious betting isn’t fun—that’s why they call it serious.

And if you think of yourself as a serious bettor, then I suggest you read Kaunitz, Zhong, and Kreiner’s paper. And if you can’t do the relatively straightforward math they discuss then change to another field or go back to school because that’s way better than getting schooled!

Russian oil is in the news. This concerns Americans because, well, take a look:

Here in the States we consume the most oil in the whole wide world. It’s worth noting that America consumes a lot of oil because Americans consume a lot of oil. Note the per capita figures! Only the Canadians and Saudi Arabians can match or beat the Americans.

Germany and Japan are modern countries with high standards of living, representative governments, and the rule of law. Note that per person they consume about half as much oil as we do here at home. Another modern, civilized place is South Korea. They use more energy than Germany and Japan but less than the U.S. (per capita). That’s most likely due to more a more extreme winter climate. Both Japan and Germany modernized sooner than South Korea and thus have more developed and more sophisticated infrastructures. Countries improve their energy efficiency over time. They get better at utilizing their resources. All three nations are dependent on large imports of crude oil and refined products as they have little or no domestic oil industry.

Canada is a very large country and of course it has very cold winters. To maintain their standard of living they have to consume a lot of oil. Canadians, like their southern neighbors, have huge transportation needs. Big countries need big roads and lots of trucks, planes, and ships. All require oil. Saudi Arabia also has an extreme climate, just in the opposite direction, and their energy needs involve not only cooling but the desalination of salt water. The Arabian peninsula is mostly desert. The sheikhs that run that place are also very grandiose fellows and love big, flashy, capital-intensive building projects. Those need a lot of oil. Canada, the U.S., and that Middle Eastern Kingdom are blessed with very large domestic oil reserves. So large in fact that they all export oil.

Russia exports a lot of oil. About 10% of the global supply. In fact, if you have a lot of oil, you export a lot of it. Countries don’t supply their needs exclusively with their own oil. The U.S. and Canada, for example, both import oil despite being major world producers.

Oil is a global commodity. International markets determine the price. Even OPEC can’t set oil benchmarks any more as the worldwide demand is too large and too inter-connected for any one entity to control the outcomes.

We hear a lot about “energy independence.” American politicians and pundits of all political stripes pull out this canard whenever we see spikes in oil prices. We have this notion that we can drill and pump and refine and consume in an entirely domestic market. It’s sort of a quaint, 19th century idea of how capitalism works.

We don’t live in that world. Oil in the U.S. (and other modern democracies) is produced by oil companies, not governments. Oil companies have shareholders and other investors and they are obligated to create returns for those folks. So they sell oil on the international market. Oil companies need a steady supply of crude for their refineries. So they buy oil on the international market in order to manage their inventories. Think of the world as a giant bathtub filled with oil. There are lots of spigots—some dumping oil in, some sucking oil out. The bathtub goes up and down, and the rates of change set the prices.

I can’t imagine any thinking person supporting Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. He’s a crude, stupid bully, and moreover a powerful and dangerous one. Whether the sanctions (including the oil import ban) will have the impact on his regime and his ambitions that the West is seeking I can’t say. I hope so, but I don’t have a crystal ball. And I don’t have a deep enough understanding of economics or international relations.

But I do know that this problem of higher oil prices is as much our making as it is Putin’s. We are gluttonous consumers of the stuff. We can’t get enough of it. Our entire vision of the American Way and the American Dream depends on massive expenditures of energy, and that energy comes mostly from oil.

We have always enjoyed relatively low prices for things like gasoline. Lately gas prices have taken off as well as prices for heating fuels and other important petroleum products. Those price increases hit consumers hard as they ripple through the entire economy. Everything costs more when it costs more to transport stuff. Those low prices are a thing of the past and not just because of Putin and the Ukraine.

Oil is messy stuff. The impacts of oil exploration, production, refining, distribution, and consumption are enormous. We pollute our air, water, and soil with oil and its by-products. The consequences are real. People get sick and die. Locales become uninhabitable. Natural regions and their wildlife are altered and disrupted, even destroyed. These things are called “externalities” by economists. Prices for commodities don’t generally include the costs of these externalities. In other words, when we pollute our world we don’t pay the price at the pump. We pay it later, but it’s dispersed, and we don’t see it.

Californians know a little about this. We pay more for our gas because it has to meet certain clean-burning standards. And excise taxes are high because 40 million people beat the hell out of the roads and freeways. So some of the externalities are included in the price we pay. These things work, actually. If you remember the air quality in the LA basin in the 1970s, for example, and compare it to today, it’s way, way better now even though there are more people and more cars.

This is only going to continue. Just about every strategy for combating the impacts of climate change involves paying higher prices for energy because we have to include more and more externalities. Prices for energy in developed countries are generally pretty low because modern societies depend on large per capita consumption rates. We can’t have wealth and freedom without abundant, low-cost energy sources.

Ultimately, the transition to lower-impact, less polluting energy sources will require enormous expenditures of both dollars and fossil fuels. Producing a solar panel, for example, needs a hell of a lot of electricity! We are all going to pay for this. In the short term, we’ll see lots of fluctuations. But the long-term trends are pretty clear. Energy prices will go up. Consumer costs will go up. A larger and larger share of our income, over the long haul, will go to cover our energy needs. And to taxes as well as governments will take an increasing role in national energy strategies that will include the associated external costs.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Maybe it will force us to think more like conservationists. Maybe we’ll be encouraged to be less wasteful and to consume resources more thoughtfully. There are happy people in this world who enjoy high standards of living as well as personal liberty and yet don’t waste as much energy as we do here at home. What can we learn from them?

In a confidence game, the grift is usually separated into “short” and “long” cons. In Revolutionary Suicide*, Huey P. Newton talked about how he used to run a short con on merchants. He described (pp. 86-87) how he would distract them when they were making change and thus could walk away with ten bucks after starting with a fiver, or twenty if starting with a ten. It was petty stuff, but it was still a con. It relied on the charisma of the con artist and the trusting nature of the mark.

The long con is best exemplified by Bernie Madoff. He bilked people for nearly twenty years and despite many red flags flew under the enforcement radar due to his many relationships with powerful and influential people. The people he screwed over had been so taken in by his apparent financial brilliance (not to mention his well-polished reputation) that they, even up to the end, refused to believe they’d been ripped off by an amoral creep.

The BBC just broke a story about a long con run by a guy calling himself Ali Ayad. I googled his name and found this:

It helps to be handsome and fashionably dressed. Apparently this asshole created a fake company (a design and advertising agency) in London called Madbird and recruited people from all over the globe to come work for him. He was passionate, eager, articulate and quite convincing. Dozens of well-meaning people took the bait and logged hours of uncompensated work supposedly building a client base. It was all a sham. There was no company. And no money, either. All of these people had been promised salaries and bonuses at a future date. Those never materialized, of course.

The sad part, besides the folks who got hosed, is that there is a real company called Madbird in Olympia, Washington who do actual work and aren’t screwing anyone over. Imagine having to cover your ass because of some prick in another country.

One of the reasons the Ali Ayad bubble burst is that the BBC reporters used a simple internet search on the company’s address. Here’s what they found:

We all know how to use Google’s street view these days. If you do that on the address listed (182 High Street) here is what you see:

Funny how it turns out to be a law office. And so convenient to have a Subway right next door!

How is it possible for someone to bilk and bedevil all these people? For starters, the pandemic has put many into financially precarious positions. Folks are desperately looking for work and eager to seize any opportunity. Con artists understand vulnerability and exploit it. Secondly, it is easy to fake things in the digital age. Apparently much of the Redbird website consisted of stolen images and fictional bios. Finally, any of us are capable of being fooled. Con artists know that even the smartest and most skeptical of people can be victimized if the pitch is sufficiently tailored to them. In fact, intelligent people often fall victim to scams because they are convinced that they cannot be scammed!

I’ve been fascinated by con artists since the 1973 movie The Sting (a classic long con). In that movie, charming small-time rogues (Robert Redford and Paul Newman) manage to rip off a big-shot gangster (Robert Shaw). It’s all very feel-good because Shaw’s character is a baddie, and they have to overcome his naturally suspicious and conniving nature. But most cons target regular people who don’t have those traits. Everyday folks are mostly trusting of others because societies run on trust. Con artists know this and exploit it.

One of the few scholarly treatments of con artists is David W. Maurer’s 1940 book The Big Con: the classic story of the confidence man and the confidence trick. Many of the practitioners of the grift revealed elements of their craft and a truism emerged: “you can’t cheat an honest man.” The con artists relied on the greed of the mark to string him along. An honest man would recognize that the opportunity he was presented with was “too good to be true” and thus could not be taken advantage of.

But that’s not entirely true. Lots of honest, well-intentioned people get conned, mostly because criminals are not only slick but also don’t give a shit about who they hurt. Most ordinary citizens aren’t like that and thus don’t “think like a crook.”

The internet age has given the con artist a new platform and new tools. It’s bad enough we have to worry about identity theft, we shouldn’t have to deal with jerks like Ali Ayad, too. I suppose the old maxim of caveat emptor (buyer beware) is more important than ever these days. In America’s Wild West it was “keep an eye on your gold and a hand on your gun.” For those of us at home and behind our computers, it’s more like “keep your wallet in your pocket and your finger off the ENTER key!”

Be sure to check out BBC reporter Catrin Nye attempting to confront Ayad about his bullshit. His passive-aggressive and dissimulating responses are the obvious products of a morally corrupt person. His 90,000 Instagram followers ought to take a second look.

*Newton’s book is really quite remarkable and worthy of a read.

Humans have had civilization for a lot longer than they have had electricity. By “civilization” I mean all those organizing structures and practices that keep social groups together. A common language or religion, for example. A transportation network with roads, canals, bridges, and ports. A water supply and a scheme for dealing with waste. A communication network with news, information, and mail. Arable land and agricultural surpluses. Markets. Import and export of commodities. Contracts. The rule of law. Educational institutions. Libraries. Town squares. Musical, artistic, and cultural events. Civilized places have these things. They had these things when oxen pulled plows, not diesel tractors, and when fire lit the night, not electricity.

Today, however, our civilization depends on electricity. Just look at the map. The lit-up regions are where most people live (click on the photo to embiggen).

If you want to destabilize human society just pull the plug. Imagine your life without electricity. Hint: you can’t. Electricity is as essential to you as the air you breathe and the water you drink. Think of electrical energy as the blood that flows through the world we’ve built.

We get electricity by burning coal and other fossil fuels. The heat makes steam, the steam turns turbines. If we are lucky, in some places, we can use falling water to turn those turbines. Or perhaps the wind or tides. We can collect sunlight and dump it to the grid or store it in batteries. With the threat of climate change even much-maligned nuclear fission is looking better and better. Atomic heat is a lot more efficient at making steam than burning hydrocarbons.

The cost of making electricity plummeted in the latter half of the 20th century. It has become so cheap and so abundant that we use it more and more and more. And there are more of us. And we are hotter in the summer than before so we need more electricity to stay cool. Air conditioning demand has been rising steadily for decades—expect that to continue.

Regardless of your political or cultural affiliation in these perverse, anti-social times, we are all better off with civilization and its institutions than without it. Chaos and anarchy make for great sci-fi plots but lousy living.

That means we should all care about our electricity supply. We need a robust and resilient electrical grid with redundancy in case of disasters. This collection of wires and poles and generators and whatnot is as important to our democracy as the founding documents. Thomas Jefferson would probably be aghast at mega-cities and a massive energy infrastructure, but those things are our world, not his. The pieces of the electrical puzzle mean nothing of course without the extraordinary human knowledge base that invented, built, and continues to run the system. Civilizations preserve and transmit important knowledge—that may the single most important thing any civilization can do, to make sure the next generation gets the benefits created by the previous one.

Technology gets so complex and mysterious at a certain point in its evolution that the people who understand it become increasingly like a priestly class. Their knowledge becomes inaccessible to the vast majority of the users of the technology and they become like shamans or sorcerers.

This is a bad thing. You don’t have to know how a polyphase synchronous motor works in order to expect that your electrical grid will deliver the goods. Not everyone is an electrical engineer. But the knowledge that these people have is not sorcery. It is not magic. And the technology has no value by itself but only as part of social structures that serve the needs of people. And we can all work on those.

I need to stay plugged in. You need to stay plugged in. Let’s all stay plugged in.

My favorite website is Astronomy Picture of the Day. APOD to those in the know. APOD goes all the way back to 1995 and there’s a complete archive of all the images. Here’s today’s. You’ve seen it before. It never gets old. We are all just passengers on this third rock from the sun and it’s good to be reminded of that.

But I don’t want to talk about the blue marble. I want to talk about Africa, which is mostly what we see as far as the land area goes. Africa has by some estimates 30% of the world’s mineral resources. That’s reasonable considering its 30 million square kilometers of land, just a few million less than Asia, the largest of the continents. Africa produces over half of the world’s diamonds, about a fourth of the world’s gold, and is rich in cobalt, platinum, manganese, bauxite, uranium, and copper. It’s major producer of phosphate rocks used in fertilizers. It even has lots of fossil fuels!

Why should we care about Africa? Because we use all of those natural resources. If it isn’t farmed, it’s mined. (I should note that Africa has 65% of the world’s arable land.) The Congo (DRC) has most of the world’s cobalt and most of Africa’s copper. Chinese companies not only dominate Congo’s mining industry they built the toll roads to haul the materials from the mines to the export sites. And paid off the president and his family, too. China has the fastest-growing EV market in the world and they want to secure their supplies of critical minerals.

We here in North America need those same things. We want cleaner power sources like solar panels and wind turbines, and we want EVs, and we will likely have to invest in nuclear power again. All of that takes mining. Lots of mining. Mining is messy and the industry has a lousy track record. People and communities are suspicious of mining companies. In too many places in the world the miners have come, gotten rich, devastated the land, and left. The pollution and economic fallout weren’t part of the business plan.

Here at home we aren’t very enthusiastic about new mining projects. We tend to look elsewhere for our supplies. We are willing to trust much of our future to imports from other places. That’s certainly a viable strategy: develop solid trade relationships with stable jurisdictions. But it’s only one piece. A supply chain has to be more robust—if we’ve learned anything in this pandemic we’ve learned that our supply chains are vulnerable.

For starters, there aren’t enough stable jurisdictions in the world. Mining companies would rather work in countries with law and order. Political instability is not good for things like contracts. Secondly, mineral deposits are not scattered equally over the globe. They tend to be clustered in certain places.

So you have to have a domestic mining industry if you have those precious mineral deposits. The United States of America is a good place to mine because mining companies trust the legal system. Their assets will not be seized by outlaws. Their workers will not be attacked by paramilitaries. That’s an issue in some countries.

Wealthy countries have the luxury of exporting their environmental problems. We can let poorer nations assemble our electronics and make our clothes and not worry about the chemicals polluting their air and water. If those industries were here we’d have stricter regulations and things would cost more.

The challenge is to have domestic industries but to do them better. There’s no reason why we can’t pull stuff out of the ground intelligently. There’s no reason we can’t figure in the cost of protecting ourselves from pollution. We can reduce waste. In fact, we can eliminate the whole notion of waste and build a circular economy.

We have to view the minerals in the ground as precious resources to husband and develop for the good of humanity. In a capitalist economy, that’s hard. It’s more about dollars than citizenship. And it takes a lot of dollars to make a mine and keep it going so miners like to get some return on their investment. That makes for a difficult dynamic.

But it’s one we have to solve since, like I said earlier, we are all just passengers on this third rock from the sun.

Do you suffer from FOMO?

If you don’t know the acronym it stands for “fear of missing out.”

Note this is not the same as actually “missing out” on something! This is the FEAR of missing out on something.

It’s a kind of anxiety that seems particularly suited to the modern world. Social media is a great breeding ground for FOMO. Just look at those pictures of your friends snorkeling in the Seychelles!! YOU ARE MISSING OUT! You’re a loser!

Our phones are another source of FOMO. We carry them with us all the time and constantly check for updates because OH MY GOD WE MIGHT MISS SOMETHING IMPORTANT!

TV is great for FOMO. We get bombarded by all the latest and coolest things and it makes you wonder if life has passed you by. All those other folks out there are richer, prettier, healthier, and hipper than you are.

I remember having FOMO when I was an adolescent. In high school the cool kids would be in a group laughing and carrying on and I knew they were having way more fun than I was, both in and out of school. FOMO is fundamental to teen angst.

Then I grew up. I learned that some people were smarter than me. Better looking. Wealthier. More privileged. I also learned that some people worked harder than me. Or were luckier. Or both. In short, I came to understand and accept a lesson that Mom taught me when I was a boy, namely “life’s not fair.”

It’s easy to get cured of FOMO. Just think about all the poor people in the world who don’t have a roof over their heads. Or who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Or who live in some shit-hole like Yemen and have to run from Saudi-led bombing attacks. If you are reading this then you mostly have it made. You are one of the lucky ones.

FOMO is fuel for the financial industry. I’m invested in the stock market. I’ve got some retirement savings that I’d like to (1) grow and (2) keep safe. I do my research and try not to get greedy. I take the long view whenever possible. I try not to let volatility and market fluctuations disrupt my plans.

But it’s hard. There is an endless stream of new investment opportunities. And they all sound so compelling! I don’t want to miss out on a good thing. I don’t want to be that schmuck who failed to put his money into the next big wealth-generating possibility.

Then I remember that I’ve already been that guy! I missed out on Apple stock. Microsoft. Amazon. Google. Man, it would have been cool to be one of the early investors in those outfits. I did buy some gold coins at $300/oz. and sold them later for $1200/oz.! But my portfolio is mostly pretty boring stuff: ETFs, blue-chips, CDs, that sort of thing. Plus I’m a homeowner and like most middle-class homeowners the bulk of my wealth is tied up in my real estate!

These days there is an entirely new class of “investments.” I use quotes because I’m suspicious. I’m talking of course about cryptocurrency. And its underlying technology, the blockchain. And the stuff it has spawned, like DAOs and NFTs. Don’t know what a DAO is? You are missing out. It’s a “decentralized autonomous organization.” And NFTs are “non-fungible tokens.” (I love the word “fungible.”) Are you feeling the FOMO yet?

All the cool kids are into crypto, it seems. And lots of people are jumping into that “investment space” because they have a severe case of FOMO. I suspect a lot of the people dumping their money into this stuff could not give you a simple definition of “blockchain.” And even if they could, they don’t really understand the technology. And it’s not because they are dumb, it’s because it is hard stuff. (Go to this link and read this paper and then tell me if you understand the technology.)

I say this because I’ve spent the last several weeks researching all this. I had an attack of FOMO and needed to know if I should dump some money into crypto, blockchains, DAOs, and NFTs. I sure didn’t want to miss out on this fantastic wealth-making opportunity.

You needn’t worry. I’m over it. I don’t generally suffer from FOMO anyway, so my attack was mild and didn’t last.

Here’s what I learned. Blockchains are an intriguing technology. They are being tried out in lots of places. Right now the only real application is cryptocurrency, but I could see some other interesting uses. Unfortunately the hype about blockchains far exceeds their utility. Right now almost everything blockchain enthusiasts are excited about is being done by the same old boring technologies (like distributed databases) we’ve had for decades. All computer applications suffer from the simple rule of GIGO, or “garbage in, garbage out.” A blockchain filled with accurate and truthful information is useful. A blockchain filled with inaccurate and untruthful information is a waste of storage and computing power. It’s like putting banana peels in a safety deposit box. They’re secure, but they’re still just banana peels.

Cryptocurrency is great for criminals. That’s a fact. Even the most ardent crypto-bro will admit this. These things may, someday, have use as an actual currency for regular people. That is, you could substitute a crypto-coin for actual dollars or pounds or euros. But that’s still undetermined. Raley’s doesn’t take bitcoin. The credit union I make my car payments to doesn’t take bitcoin. Pacific Power doesn’t take bitcoin. The City of Yreka wants my dollars, not bitcoin. They’ll shut off my water if I don’t pay with legal tender.

Right now cryptocurrency is not really currency. It’s a highly speculative investment. A bunch of people have made a hell of a lot of money buying and selling bitcoin. Bully for them, I suppose. I don’t see a real investment here, I just see a giant bubble ready to burst. Right now, if I buy a cryto-asset, I have to hope that someone down the road will give me more money for it than I paid. That sounds like a pyramid scheme to me. Everyone who gets in on the ground floor of the pyramid makes a killing. The rest of the folks, not so much. If I buy stock in Chevron or Lockheed then I own actual shares in the company. They could drop in value of course, but I would still own something. And Chevron and Lockheed will keep making gasoline and airplanes, things that people actually use. That kind of investment works better for me.

I willing to accept that I could be dead wrong. I could be missing out on the next generation of wealth creation. I don’t think so, but I’m not certain, of course. Life is about managing uncertainty, and I can manage this one.

Regardless of your level of risk tolerance, FOMO is bad way to make decisions. Any decisions, not just ones about where to put your hard-earned greenbacks.

I suppose it is appropriate that our big winter storm happens on the first day of winter. In case you missed it today is the Winter Solstice. The sun takes its lowest path through the sky for residents of the northern hemisphere. It is summer south of the equator, and they are experiencing their longest day while we look forward to our longest night.

Because I like to ski I get excited by snowstorm forecasts. But you can have too much snow. If the roads get shut down or power lines get knocked out then there’s not much chance for ski parks to open. I’ve been turned away from a ski area because there was so much snow the employees could not get to work. There weren’t enough people to open the place!

And I like to do other things, too. Like have Christmas dinner with my friends. But Mother Nature might dump too much snow on the highway on Christmas Day and thus keep us from getting together.

Like everything in life, this run of storms is a mixed bag. We certainly need the water and the snowpack. But we certainly don’t need power outages and road closures. It snowed here in town last week, about six inches total, and much of that snow is still lingering. There aren’t many things in the world more wonderful than freshly-fallen snow. But no one likes “old” snow that won’t melt away. It’s just a big, dirty pile of ice that is hazardous to walk on or drive on and you have to scrape it off things, a tedious task at best.

But I loves me some winter. Chapped lips and frozen fingers are a small price to pay.

Northern Californians might be better off staying home during this run of storms. If you have to drive, be careful. (There’s still COVID of course, but no one wants to talk about that anymore.) Make sure you’ve got chains for your vehicle. And it never hurts to have a blanket, foul weather gear, and some emergency food and water in case you get stuck somewhere.

Happy Holidays!