Blog note

I am having endless troubles in trying to migrate to a new laptop. Not sure how this is going to work out or if it will work out. I thought I lost my Disqus account yesterday, but it came back, none of which I understand. If I disappear, I'm not sure how to come back. I may have to remove Disqus from this blog and revert back to the original Blogger comment system. I'm still trying to work through this nightmare.

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Something may be changing with the American worker mindset

The New York Times reports on worker attitudes toward the low paying jobs that dominate some sectors of the economy. Most conservatives blame worker reluctance to take low pay jobs on extended unemployment benefits. However, most economists do not believe that is the main issue for most workers. Instead, workers have reassessed their lives and are tired of being treated rather badly for low pay and long commutes. The NYT writes:

Work-force development officials [in St. Louis, MO] said they had seen virtually no uptick in applicants since the governor’s announcement, which ended a $300 weekly supplement to other benefits. And the online job site Indeed found that in states that have abandoned the federal benefits, clicks on job postings were below the national average.

Of course, it’s early. But conversations with employers who are hunting for workers and people who are hunting for jobs in the St. Louis area revealed stark differences in expectations and assumptions about what a day’s work is worth.

“Clearly part of the problem now,” she said [Katharine G. Abraham, University of Maryland economist, former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics], “is that what employers and what workers think is out of whack.”

[Accordong to employers,] there were good jobs available but not enough good workers to fill them, those who were reliable and were willing to work hard.

That’s not the way Elodie Nohone saw it. “They’re offering $10, $12, $13,” said Ms. Nohone, who already earns $15 an hour as a visiting caregiver and was hoping to find a higher-paying opportunity. “There’s no point in being here [at the job fair in St. Louis].”

The labor market’s deeper problem, said Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell University, is the proliferation of low-paid jobs with few prospects for advancement and too little income to cover essential expenses like housing, food and health care.

The pandemic focused attention on many of these low-wage workers, who showed up to deliver food, clean hospital rooms and operate cash registers. “The pandemic put their lives at risk,” Ms. Blau said, “and we began to wonder if we are adequately remunerating a lot of the core labor we need to function as an economy and society.”

Hundreds of jobs were being offered at the fair. A home health care agency wanted to hire aides for $10.30 an hour, the state’s minimum, to care for disabled children or mentally impaired adults. There were no benefits, and you would need a car to get from job to job. An ice rink, concert and entertainment center was looking for 80 people, paying $10.30 to $11.50 for customer service representatives and $13 for supervisors. But the jobs last just through the busy season, a few months at time, and the schedules, which often begin at 5 a.m., change from week to week.

In St. Louis, a single person needs to earn $14 an hour to cover basic expenses at a minimum standard, according to M.I.T.’s living-wage calculator. Add a child, and the needed wage rises just above $30. Two adults working with two children would each have to earn roughly $21 an hour. [$50,000 a year, or about $25 an hour is roughly the median earnings of wage and salaried employees in the United States]

In recent decades, a declining share of the country’s income and its productivity gains has gone to workers. And for adults without a four-year college degree, the options are especially bleak. From 1974 to 2018, for example, real wages for men with only a high school diploma declined by 7 percent. For those without that diploma, wages fell by 18 percent.

Among job seekers interviewed at job fairs and employment agencies in the St. Louis area the week after the benefit cutoff, higher pay and better conditions were cited as their primary motivations. Of 40 people interviewed, only one — a longtime manager who had recently been laid off — had been receiving unemployment benefits. (The maximum weekly benefit in Missouri is $320.)

Justin Johnson already had a job when he showed up at an Express Employment Professionals office. He was working at a pet feed company, earning $14 an hour to shovel piles of mud or oats. But that week temperatures topped 90 degrees every day and were heading past 100.

“The supervisor pushed people too hard,” Mr. Johnson said. He had to bring his own water, and if it was a slow day, he got sent home early, without pay for the lost hours. He accepted an offer to begin work the next day at a bottle packaging plant, earning $16.50.

Whether workers will be forced into the pre-pandemic situation as time passes is unclear. Interviews with job applicants indicate that wages, hours and commute times matter most to most job seekers. In the St. Louis area, few are willing to work for less than $14 an hour. That is the minimum to cover basic expenses for a single person. Time will tell how this will play out. 

Science: Meanwhile, back on planet Earth -- nanostarships

Scotty beaming photons up, not people

The Breakthrough Starshot project started in 2016 and is bubbling along nicely. Sort of.

The idea was cooked up by a now-dead astrophysicist (Steven Hawking) and a Russian billionaire (Yuri Milner). What go wrong? 

The idea was to build a lightweight spaceship attached to a lightweight light sail. The ship and sail would weigh maybe ~5 grams (~ 0.17637 oz), maybe less. The light sail attached to the tiny ship would be about one square meter in size and weigh almost nothing, being a couple hundred atoms in thickness. One or a flock of these pipsqueak ships would be launched into space by a regular rocket and released once in space. After they are released in space, each pipsqueak would by powered by blasting it with a 100 gigawatt laser light beam from hundreds or thousands of lasers on the ground that can all be precisely aimed at a single point in Earth orbit. The point they will aim at is the little sail. 

100 Gigawatts is enough juice to power about 70,000,000 homes or a pile of small countries. That's a lot of power. 

The force of the laser light hitting the sail would power the light sail on its way to the nearest star Alpha Centauri, about 4.37 light years away from Earth. The ship would be looking for alien civilizations in that neighborhood. The video below shows the array of lasers doing their blasting thing. The idea is to accelerate the tiny sail ship to about 100 million miles/hour. At that speed, it would take only about 20 years to reach Alpha Centauri. 

The little spaceship would carry about 150 mg (0.00529109 oz) of Plutonium or Americium as its electrical power source to run the tiny ship's guidance system, communications gear, cameras, cafeteria and other needed items. OK, no cafeteria. 

There are still a couple of technical hurdles to work through. One is how to hit the sail with 100 gigawatts and not instantly vaporize the ship and its sail. Actually, that's a really big hurdle. 

Another is the light sail material itself. It will be made of an ultra-thin "metamaterial." A metamaterial is stuff, mainly experimental stuff, designed to "pick up" photons from a light source. That picking up thingie acts as a pressure force on the sail, which gently pushes it away from the light source. Stuff sounds a bit vague so some more work on that detail is probably needed. The push on the sail has to be gentle because it will be just a couple of hundred atoms thick. For context, a human hair is about 100,000 atoms thick. The sail will be reeeeeally thin.

Other ongoing projects include design of a coating that will resist space dust particle damage, means to aim the onboard cameras at things of interest at Alpha Centauri and figuring a way to get the contraption to survive the forces on it during launch from Earth into space. Just launching the little bugger from Earth could tear the sail to pieces. Heck, the puff of air from someone just sneezing toward the sail would rip it apart.

For anyone with ideas of how to solve some of the development problems, you can go to this link and pick a problem you want to fix. Once you have figured out how to fix the problem, just let them know and they will be grateful and happy to implement your clever solution. I'm working on the diode laser photon thruster problem right now and am close to a solution.

Other information about this wonderful project can be found here.

DFS getting a tamp down / aka a “bubble popping”

Dark Free Speech has finally gotten Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in actionable trouble.  His law license is being suspended with a better than good chance of being totally revoked in the not-too-distant future.  He will be allowed to have his day in court.

In a ruling released following disciplinary proceedings, the court concluded that "there is uncontroverted evidence" that Giuliani, the former Manhattan US attorney, "communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump's failed effort at reelection in 2020."

Could it be the we are finally seeing some cracks in the DFS dam?  The First Amendment is a slim tightrope to walk, but I think it’s this kind of legal slap-down that can maybe make influential people think twice about spreading lies to the masses and getting away with it, scot-free.  These lies are a huge (if not total) part of all the dysfunction in U.S. politics.  They foment conspiracy theories, insurrections, unwarranted law-making (e.g., voter suppression), and even enable someone, like a Donald J. Trump, to get elected.  Not good, and continues to knock the hell out of e pluribus unum.

So, is this Giuliani thing just a fluke?  Will anything substantial come of it?  Is it just one droplet in the American ocean of DFS justice, and not of any significant importance?

What are your thoughts on the Giuliani smack-down?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

An analysis of American illiberal anti-democratic extremism

The polling site 538 recently posted an in-depth analysis of the rise of polarization and extremism in the US. The analysis points to factors that make the American variant of anti-democratic extremism unique among democracies. 538 writes:

There’s no shortage of plausible explanations for why U.S. politics has become so polarized, but many of these theories describe impossible-to-reverse trends that have played out across developed democracies, like the rise of social media and the increased political salience of globalization, immigration and urban-rural cultural divides. All of these trends are important contributors, for sure. But if they alone are driving illiberalism and hyper-partisanship in the U.S., then the problem should be consistent across all western democracies. But it isn’t.

What’s happening in the U.S. is distinct in four respects.

First, the animosity that people feel toward opposing parties relative to their own (what’s known as affective polarization in political science) has grown considerably over the last four decades. According to a June 2020 paper from economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, the increase in affective polarization in the U.S. is the greatest compared to that of eight other OECD countries over the same time period.

Second, the change in how Americans feel about their party and other parties has been driven by a dramatic decrease in positive feelings toward the opposing party. In most (though not all) of the nine democracies, voters have become a little less enthusiastic about their own parties. But only in the U.S. have partisans turned decidedly against the other party. 

Boxell, Gentzkow and Shapiro caution that the cross-country comparisons are not perfect, since they rely on different survey question wordings over time. But they also don’t pull any punches in their findings: “[O]ur central conclusion — that the U.S. stands out for the pace of the long-term increase in affective polarization — is not likely an artifact of data limitations.”

Third, more so than in other countries, Americans report feeling isolated from their own party. When asked to identify both themselves and their favored party on an 11-point scale in a 2012 survey, Americans identified themselves as, on average, 1.3 units away from the party that comes closest to espousing their beliefs, according to an analysis from political scientist Jonathan Rodden. This gap is the highest difference Rodden found among respondents in comparable democracies. This isolation matters, too, because it means that parties can’t count on enthusiasm from their own voters — instead, they must demonize the political opposition in order to mobilize voters.

Fourth, and perhaps most significant, in the U.S., one party has become a major illiberal outlier: The Republican Party. Scholars at the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have been monitoring and evaluating political parties around the world. And one big area of study for them is liberalism and illiberalism, or a party’s commitment (or lack thereof) to democratic norms prior to elections. And as the chart below shows, of conservative, right-leaning parties across the globe, the Republican Party has more in common with the dangerously authoritarian parties in Hungary and Turkey than it does with conservative parties in the U.K. or Germany.

The U.S. is truly exceptional in just how polarized its politics have become, but it’s not alone. People in countries with majoritarian(ish) democracies, or two very dominant parties dominating its politics like in the U.S. — think Canada, Britain, Australia — have displayed more unfavorable feelings toward the political opposition.

In fact, in a new book, “American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective,” another team of scholars, Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, shows that citizens in majoritarian democracies with less proportional representation dislike both their own parties and opposing parties more than citizens in multiparty democracies with more proportional representation.

This pattern may have something to do with the shifting politics of coalition formation in proportional democracies, where few political enemies are ever permanent (e.g., the unlikely new governing coalition in Israel). This also echoes something social psychologists have found in running experiments on group behavior: Breaking people into three groups instead of two leads to less animosity. Something, in other words, appears to be unique about the binary condition, or in this case, the two-party system, that triggers the kind of good-vs-evil, dark-vs-light, us-against-them thinking that is particularly pronounced in the U.S.  

In the U.S., meanwhile, (and to some extent the U.K.), politics have become extremely nationalized. Cities became more socially liberal, multiracial and cosmopolitan, most of the rest of the country held onto more traditional values and stayed predominantly white, and suburbs turned into the political battleground. And as Rodden explains in “Why Cities Lose,” parties with rural strongholds often wind up with disproportionate electoral power, since their opposition tends to over-concentrate its vote in lopsided districts. This rural bias is especially pronounced in the U.S. Senate, for instance.  

While it is both easy and appropriate to criticize Trump and fellow Republicans for their anti-democratic descent in service of the “Big Lie,” it takes more work to appreciate how the structure of the party system itself laid the groundwork for the former president’s politics of loathing and fear. A politics defined by hatred of political opponents is a politics ripe for hateful illiberalism.

The new scholarship on comparative polarization is crucial in understanding this dynamic. In one sense, it offers a very depressing view: Given the current binary structure of American party politics, this conflict is mostly locked in. No level of social media regulation or media literacy or exhortation to civility is going to make much of a difference. But it also offers a kind of master key: If the structure of a party system is as crucial as these studies suggest it is, then the solution is obvious: The U.S. may want to change its voting system to become more proportional.

Questions: Does the quoted material adequately address the reality of what the Republican Party is doing to American democracy, society and politics, e.g., constantly spewing intentionally divisive, mendacious rhetoric and rigging elections in the hope that Democrats cannot win elected office? Should voting in America be made more proportional?