Tuesday, March 05, 2024

In poll, voters blame Biden for pandemic

In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, voters say across the board that they prefer Donald Trump's policies to Joe Biden's.

One likely voter, Henry Perez, 50, who lives in California’s Central Valley, put it this way: "Just go to the pump and go to the store — that will tell you everything you need to know about how Biden’s policies have hurt me."

Everything you need to know.

Mr. Perez is complaining about high prices resulting from inflation, which was a worldwide consequence of supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic. He's complaining about high energy costs, which are a consequence of pandemic disruptions, oil producers deliberately restraining production increases to maximize profits, and the upheaval in energy markets caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (I know persons who blame Biden for Russia's invasion, too.)

For many voters, everything you need to know is that prices are higher after the pandemic—a pandemic that began a full year before Biden took office—than before it. That's despite the fact that under Biden, inflation has been lower in the U.S. than many advanced countries, and the U.S. economy has led the world, through and out of the once-in-a-century pandemic. (Both Europe and China have been in economic doldrums.)

It's despite the fact that wage growth in the U.S. has actually outpaced inflation, meaning workers are better off on net.

It's despite the fact that Trump lost 9.1 million jobs in his final 12 months in office, and lost 2.7 million over four years, whereas Biden created 7.1 million jobs in his first 12 months, and almost 15 million jobs in his first three years. That latter accomplishment is unprecedented in U.S. history, and Biden still has another 12 months to increase it further before his first (and only?) term ends.

Of course, Mr. Perez could not tell you anything factual about Biden's "policies," or Trump's. That's the problem with everything you need to know reasoning. It isn't reasoning and it isn't everything you need to know.

Some voters won't vote for Biden because he hasn't delivered on promised student loan debt relief. That's despite the fact that Biden issued an order that would have provided relief to 43 million borrowers, but the Supreme Court invalidated it. All three justices appointed by Trump voted to smack down the Biden move. Elections really do have consequences. (Biden, doing what he can by executive action, has responded with more targeted student loan debt forgiveness, taking multiple smaller bites at the problem.) But what many everything you need to know voters care about is that Biden didn't give them what he promised, so they're mad at him.

Welcome to democracy which, as Winston Churchill put it, "is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried."

Democracy gave us the first Trump presidency. Back then, one acquaintance told me he'd vote for Trump because Trump would run the country "like a business." That's despite the fact that countries aren't businesses, and shouldn't be "run" like them. And for whatever it may have been worth, Trump's own actual business record at the time of the election included four bankruptcies. Now it's been recently adjudicated in court that Trump's business model employs financial fraud, to the tune of $355 million in the single case just concluded, plus $95 million in interest. Trump is on the hook for $450 million.

Although we might wish for better informed voters, we won't be getting them. In some ways it's amazing the thing holds together at all. Maybe this time it won't.

By the way, this post's title is sarcasm. But you knew that.

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.


Tuesday, January 09, 2024

Somebody's gotta say it. Why not me?

I'm not an expert on constitutional law, but I'm occasionally good at basic reasoning. Something that seems noteworthy, but not mentioned in any analysis I've heard, jumped out at me while reading Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the one that specifies that an insurrectionist can't hold office in the U.S. Here's the relevant paragraph:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Discussions of this much-debated section include the question of who must make the finding of insurrection and disqualification. Some observers insist the determination must be made by Congress.

But a simple reading of the text suggests that's not what Section 3 intends, or at least anticipates. The final sentence of the paragraph quoted above is: "But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability."

That is, Congress has the power by super-majority vote to waive a finding of disqualification. It would be odd for Section 3 to specify the mechanism by which Congress could waive its own finding of disqualification.

Thus Section 3 seems to anticipate some other entity than Congress making the determination. Who would that be? It seems the only possibilities are the various states, through their own individual procedures, laws, and courts, or the federal judiciary.

By that reasoning the federal judiciary—ultimately the Supreme Court—is the only entity that could impose a uniform finding of disqualification across all the states. Some observers believe such uniformity is crucial.

I mention this because no analysis I've heard argues against the finding being made by Congress, which would be another way to achieve national uniformity. And as I said, some observers insist that it must be Congress that makes the determination. But it seems to me that the text of Section 3 strongly implies that Congress would not have that role.

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments regarding Donald Trump's disqualification by the state of Colorado. The Court could punt this question in multiple ways, and probably will. It seems unlikely that it would simply uphold the Colorado finding.

Is there a chance it would it go further? Would it say Colorado's finding of Trump engaging in insurrection is correct, and that Trump is therefore ineligible to hold office? That Trump can't be on the ballot in any state?

Probably not this court, even if that would be the most logical result. But stay tuned. This will surely get interesting.

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Saturday, October 28, 2023

Mike Johnson: "I don't think..."

The new Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, said this at a town hall in 2017: "The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver."

Johnson doesn't think burning fossil fuels (for which driving SUVs is his dismissive proxy) is the "primary driver" of present-day climate change. I would suggest that he doesn't think at all.

Which sums up the problem in a nutshell. Does he have an opinion? Yes. Does he think? No.

There are several important "drivers" of "natural" climactic variation (to which Johnson offers a handwave) over geologic time. One is periodic changes to the axis-tilt of the earth, plus changes in the shape of its orbit. These give us ice ages, when prevailing geological processes permit. The science of ice age formation is very well understood.

Another long term driver of "natural" climactic variation is the interplay between geological processes that emit carbon into the atmosphere, and those that remove it, typically playing out over millions of years. I wrote about this recently.

Whatever climate process we consider, carbon dioxide is always in the thick of it, either as a primary driver of change, or as (in the case of ice ages) part of a feedback mechanism. Carbon dioxide is itself the earth's most important greenhouse gas, and is the fundamental determinant of the planet's temperature. Earth would be far colder without an atmosphere containing CO2.

The correspondence between changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration and changes in the temperature of the earth is well understood. The mechanism of that relationship is rather elementary physics, involving how greenhouse gas concentrations make the atmosphere more or less opaque to outgoing infrared radiation. I touched on that here.

The actual atmospheric CO2 concentration has been precisely measured since 1957. The upward march of CO2 concentration over that period is shown graphically by the Keeling Curve. The sawtooth shape of the curve even demonstrates atmospheric CO2 fluctuations between northern hemisphere summers and winters. (The northern hemisphere has far greater land area than the southern hemisphere; CO2 is absorbed by plants during its growing season, which biannually modulates global CO2 concentrations.)

We know that the atmospheric CO2 concentration was around 280 parts per million (ppm) at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The measured concentration in 1957 was 315 ppm. The measured CO2 concentration today is 416 ppm, an increase of almost 50 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: a breathtaking increase in so short a time. We know that increase is due to the burning of fossil fuels, as a consequence of industrialization. Because fossil fuels are a global commodity, we can calculate how much CO2 we emit by burning them, and we can confirm how that correlates with the atmospheric concentrations we measure. We also know there are no natural sources of CO2 emissions happening that could explain the rapid increase now occurring. And we know that the rate of increase right now is far more rapid—stupendously more rapid—than any that has occurred under natural conditions in the geologic past.

Everything I've said here is well understood. Much of it is rather elementary at, say, the level of a first-year physics undergrad. And while we might not expect everybody to have mastered all these details, we can expect everybody—especially policy makers and legislators (and you!)—to at least grasp that scientists understand the science, and in broad strokes that understanding is not controversial among those with the relevant subject matter expertise. In fact, there's enormous scientific consensus that anthropogenic (human caused) climate change is real.

We could also add that over the past several decades the science has been highly predictive of conditions as they have unfolded—so much so that the likes of Mike Johnson, the new speaker, acknowledge that the climate really is changing. It's just that he doesn't think it's for the reason scientists say.

Which is tantamount to him saying I don't think at all. By what authority does he form his beliefs on a question that is fundamentally scientific?

If Johnson is going to offer a contrary opinion, oughtn't he be obliged to at least say why he thinks the climate is changing? Don't hold your breath. All he offers is a handwave, one you can expect to hear a lot more of as the changes now manifesting, this year rather dramatically, become increasingly undeniable. As we saw above, Johnson's handwave is this: Presently-observed climate change is "caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history." None of which Mike Johnson understands. Nor will he make any effort to understand.

It's important to realize that waving at natural variation itself explains nothing. You still need to elucidate the physical mechanisms underlying natural variation, and contrast those mechanisms with what's happening now.

Science does understand those natural variations, some of which I've mentioned here, and explained in the links above. Science very much understands how atmospheric CO2 concentrations are involved in Johnson's "natural cycles." And it understands how the very rapid increase in CO2 concentrations occurring right now are a result, pure and simple, of human emissions. Science explains the why and the how. And thus it understands that humans are rapidly warming the planet. This time there's nothing "natural" about it.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Thursday, October 05, 2023

WaPo likewise botches Social Security and debt

The first obligation of every thinking person is to discern what's real. The first obligation of the news media is to inform its readers, listeners, and viewers about what's real. (Which, by the way, is why one ought never append the word "News" to the word "Fox.")

The news media, even at its best, has egregiously failed Americans regarding Social Security. When it comes to that most essential of programs, most of us literally don't know what's real. (Eighteen years ago an acquaintance of mine, who thinks he's very wise, proclaimed that Social Security is broke, period. It wasn't then, and it isn't now.) Even our best news sources advance a narrative of never-explained assertions that everybody just knows (where just knowing is different from actually knowing), always skipping over crucial detail in a seeming desire to simplify the situation for a populace that can never understand it. Or maybe, as I sometimes think, the reporters themselves don't understand it either. Not that it's all that difficult.

Maybe it's just that the media wants to shoehorn Social Security into some other narrative currently commanding the public's attention, even if it doesn't really fit, and in any case stripped of necessary nuance. I complained about how NPR got it wrong during the debt ceiling debate earlier in the summer. More recently the Washington Post did it too, in a piece on the government shutdown crisis. The Post claimed that "the uncomfortable fiscal reality is that most of what is driving federal borrowing to record levels isn’t even up for discussion this week."

"The government’s biggest annual expense," said the Post, "and the main drivers of U.S. debt, are the retirement programs Medicare and Social Security."

The Post got it half right: the part about the "biggest annual expense." But half right isn't nearly good enough. I will have nothing to say here about Medicare, but it is entirely false that Social Security is a "main driver" of the debt. Social Security hasn't driven the debt at all.

Equating expense with debt is unforgivably misleading. As I wrote recently, Social Security has never added a penny to the national debt. Whether or not it ever does depends on choices we must make about its continuing finances. Those choices can't be properly considered if we don't even know what's real. In promoting an enduring mythology about Social Security and debt, the mainstream media has preempted that crucial discussion. And it has empowered political actors—some of whom are nefarious, and some of whom, who like most Americans, including reporters, are merely ignorant—who would like to severely curtail all our major social programs. Social Security is too important to be treated so mindlessly.

You can certainly imagine the roots of the false narrative. When the Treasury Department lists the top ten U.S. budgetary spending categories, Social Security tops the list. It accounts for a whopping 23 percent of all government spending. (Medicare is fourth, at 13 percent.) Although it's never explicitly laid out in the media's breezy assertions, the idea seems to be this: Social Security accounts for a huge amount of federal spending, and total federal spending is in substantial budgetary deficit, so, ergo, Social Security is a large driver of the debt.

But it just ain't so. Always omitted is the crucial point that Social Security has its own dedicated funding stream: the payroll tax. Also omitted is that the government long ago took explicit and enormously consequential steps to ensure the long term solvency of Social Security, by increasing the payroll tax to levels that were higher than was needed to cover benefit payments at the time. The intention was to grow a large Trust Fund that would contain assets sufficient to supplement the payroll tax when baby boomers eventually retired in large numbers, decades later. And it worked. It's working right now.

This was a shining example of deliberate, intelligent, foresightful government action that's hard to fathom in our present time of extreme dysfunction.

Thus, as a consequence of decisions made in the 1980s to anticipate and prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers, Social Security has actually run a very long term fiscal surplus, which accumulated year after year and decade after decade in the Trust Fund. Almost $3 trillion exists in the Trust Fund today, duly reported in the country's official accounts, as an undeniable testimony to that fiscal surplus. Driver of the debt? Don't be ridiculous.

It is true that over many years Social Security's surplus has had the effect of masking deficits in other parts of the budget. Maybe that helped create some confusion in the mainstream media and elsewhere, because there's a sense in which Social Security's finances were always lumped together, conceptually if not legally, with other government spending. Maybe the media knows full well what's going on, but doesn't want to take the trouble to explain it. Could it just be a matter of inconvenience, or even sloth?

But the citizenry needs to know: Even today, payroll tax receipts plus Trust Fund withdrawals are used to pay Social Security benefits without any borrowing whatsoever. I repeat emphatically: Social Security has never added a penny to the debt.

Social Security does indeed face future fiscal challenges that ought to be discussed and dealt with now, while we have time and space to work out a longer term strategy. One approach to ensuring Social Security is adequately funded into the future would be to increase the payroll tax, and also to increase the amount of income that's subject to it. The other approach, usually advanced from the right, would be to reduce Social Security benefits paid to retirees, but that approach is not at all inevitable, which is why we need to have the debate. We can choose to pay for what we value, and Americans generally value Social Security enormously. America's youth perhaps value it less, not least because they've been told over and over that the program will go bust before they themselves reach retirement. In that sense the myth of insolvency is insidious and noxious.

None of this can be intelligently debated if most of us, including our politicians, don't even understand how the program is financed, and what options are available to us. The media has done us all a great disservice in that regard, by framing the program as a debt problem when it isn't.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Thursday, September 28, 2023

How Verizon treats its customers, and why you should care

Recently I was going through the usual routine of monthly bill paying, at the usual time. Luddite that I am, I still pay a lot of my bills by writing checks and sending them through the mail. (Luddite, yes, but a Luddite who wrote an enterprise web server, and lots of other advanced software, for the university where I once worked. I'm not a complete technophobe.)

My bills all arrive through the mail, too. But this time the Verizon bill was uncharacteristically late. Wanting to wrap up the process, I decided to write a check and send it without a payment stub, in my own envelope. I already knew the amount of the bill.

But where to send it? I consulted my old, saved Verizon invoices, but they had no address to which to remit a payment. I went to Verizon's web site. Same thing: There was no payment address to be found. Verizon wasn't being very helpful.

I did some sort of Google search, the details of which I've forgotten. I found a web page where someone answered my question posed by somebody else: Where to send a payment? A Verizon address in Texas was given. I now know, but didn't at the time, that my payments go to New Jersey.

I wrote out the check, put my account number on it, and mailed it to the Texas address, more than a week before the bill's due date. I figured that if the address wasn't correct, some helpful Verizon employee in Texas would send it on to the proper destination. If it wasn't a legitimate Verizon address (turns out, it was), the post office would return the improperly addressed envelope to me. And worst case, if the check didn't make it to the right place, the current bill's amount would be included on next month's bill and I'd pay it all then.

So, no big deal. Just trying to pay my bill.

It didn't surprise me, although it seemed a tad aggressive, when, sometime later, my wife told me she'd received a communication from Verizon on her phone saying the bill was past due, and demanding payment. I have a phone too, but—you might find this amazing—I don't much use it. I never give out the number to acquaintances, because it isn't a reliable way to contact me. I carry the phone in case of emergencies, since I work by myself in a remote area and might need to call for help. But I don't participate in the whole texting ecosystem. Any messages that might have come to my phone wouldn't have been noticed. You can, however, reliably leave a message on my home answering machine.

Some days later my wife reported another threatening message from Verizon. This was still well before I'd even received the next bill. Finally that bill arrived, and it included the current charges plus the previous month's charges. I wrote a check for the full amount and mailed it immediately.

That very evening my wife came home from work and said she had some bad news: Verizon had disconnected her phone. Whenever she tried to use it, she was redirected to an automated system that demanded a credit card number to make an immediate payment. Same thing on my phone. By that point I'd mailed Verizon two checks, both well before the due dates.

I was furious. What kind of company behaves this way? I needed to talk to somebody to get it all straightened out. Ha! Just try. Seriously, just try. Verizon has become one of those companies that really really doesn't want you to be able to talk to a human being.

Trying to contact Verizon's "customer service" (I use the term very sarcastically) via the two cell phones was a non-starter. I just got funneled into the automated system that demanded a credit card number and would not do anything else.

I checked an old Verizon invoice and saw there was an 800 number under the heading "Questions about your bill?" Oh, I had questions, all right. I called the 800 number. Another automated system. You have to key in the phone number associated with the bill in question. When I did so, I got funneled back into the automated system demanding a credit card number, and nothing else.

I went round and round in a loop, with no apparent way to break out. If you've ever been stuck in an automated menu system, you might have learned that one way to signal your strong desire to speak to a live person is to press "0" in response to all the prompts. Some companies actually have the decency to allow you to break out of the system in which you're trapped, and connect you to an account representative.

Verizon kept demanding a credit card number, and I kept pressing "0". It ignored me, at first, but finally relented. I'm not sure if it demanded enough 0s on my part in order to be sure I wasn't going to capitulate, or whether it simply bailed out of the loop we were in because it kept failing to get what it wanted. The Verizon system did seem to acknowledge my desire to speak to a person when it warned that there would be a $10 "agent fee" if I proceeded. Can you imagine? A fee for a Verizon customer to talk to a Verizon representative.

So I finally got through to a live person, but by this time I was boiling mad, shaking in fury, with the ten dollar fee being the final straw. I recounted everything that had happened, but my anger was spilling out uncontrollably. The person on the other end reflected some of it back at me, apparently indignant that I was saying so many nasty things about my experience with her company. At some point she apparently concluded, for whatever reason, that she wasn't the correct person to help me, and connected me to somebody else. Maybe she didn't have the authority to do anything useful, so she kicked it up to a higher level. Or maybe she just didn't like my attitude.

I told my whole story yet again. This was all Verizon's fault from the beginning, I said. Your bill was late, I said, which was what got this whole mess started in the first place. I've been trying all along to pay my bill, I said. And what kind of company would treat a customer who's been reliably paying his bills for decades in such a heavy-handed way, without even allowing a second billing cycle, that would normally get it all straightened out, to complete? And that $10 "agent fee" is bullshit, I said. So was the $7 late fee I'd been charged on the latest bill. She agreed to remove both fees.

We went through how I'd already mailed the latest payment, way before the due date, that included both months' charges. She agreed to defer any further action for a couple of weeks in order to allow that latest payment to arrive and be processed. We went through a rigamarole that was more tedious than it ought to have been to get the two phones turned back on and operating.

So things seemed to have gotten turned around and were heading back in the right direction. I was calming back down. Then along comes the most recent Verizon bill, and it was $40 more than normal. Why? Two $20 "reconnect" fees to get the two phones reactivated. They will stab and screw you every step of the way. This is Verizon being its true self.

I obviously needed to talk to a customer service rep to get this latest insult fixed. But as I said, allowing you to talk to an actual person is no longer part of Verizon's customer service model. Back to the 800 number. Back to fighting with the automated voice response system, looping repeatedly through the prompts, continually pressing "0" and having the bot on the remote end feigning confusion. You should try it sometime. Somehow the obvious resolution to confusion on Verizon's end—letting a person with a thinking brain intervene—is always the last resort, allowed grudgingly if at all.

But I was—thank the heavens!—eventually connected to a nice lady who was interested in assisting me, and who had the knowledge and ability to do so. It took an hour or more of work, but we plowed through all the mess, with some difficulty, and her making lots of annotations into the system on her end. She removed the two reconnect fees. Then we proceeded to the thorny problem of what happened to that original check that I'd sent to Texas. By then I knew it had actually cleared the bank 11 days after I sent it, and long before my phones were disconnected. According to my bank statement, it was cashed by an entity called "Verizon Financial Payments." But the payment was never credited to my account. As I write this, we still don't know where the money went. The nice lady initiated a process on her end to conduct a trace. I hope I'll eventually get my money back.

My point in describing this sorry affair is not to just add my story to the multitudes of others about the frustrations of consumers dealing with the bureaucratic incompetence of large corporations. The maltreatment of customers demonstrated here isn't just incompetence; it's willful brutish malice. It's a deliberate choice. My point is to ask you to consider whether Verizon is the kind of company with which you want to have a relationship.

Mistakes, like late bills, and even late payments, happen. But Verizon's response every step of the way was heavy-handed and even downright ruthless, apparently because it thinks the power dynamics at play allow it to behave that way. Do you really want to patronize a company that would treat you the way Verizon treated me? That would turn off your phones at the drop of a hat, without reasonable due process, and without providing a reasonable channel for redress?

The Verizon rep who I initially spoke to, who passed me off to the second rep who eventually got my phones reconnected, said with some irritation at me that "we don't disconnect peoples' phones." By "we" she meant that she, and other human beings like her, don't turn off phones. Of course she doesn't! It's all automated, done by mindless machines running software that mindlessly implements the company's policies. The system worked flawlessly, exactly as it was designed, according to rules programmed into the system. The difficulty of customers speaking to a human being is also a deliberate choice made by Verizon, because serving your customers personally is a pain, a cost to be avoided, and so very passé.

Thus has Verizon organized its business in this very manner, to wear down customers rather than serve them. If all goes well, you may never notice. But heaven help you if there's any difficulty.

In recent years, a lot of large companies have found it is possible and indeed profitable to not interact personally with their customers. They have calculated that they can get away with simply not providing a level of service that was once taken for granted. Given the power dynamics involved, customers are mostly helpless anyway. What are they going to do? Many, not willing to be beaten down in a grueling drawn out fight, would simply have provided a credit card number in the first instance, and then paid the $40 in reconnect fees, plus the late fee. Verizon could not care less about the ill will this would engender, as long as the customer remains locked in his relationship with the company.

Here's what customers can do. They can switch. It's a pain, but it's the correct response. They can seek another provider that doesn't treat its customers so despicably. That's what I'm going to do. And persons who have suffered this despicable treatment can publicize as broadly as possible what they've experienced. A company's good reputation used to be an intangible asset—what accountants call "goodwill" that can actually be assigned a monetary value on balance sheets. We need for a company's bad reputation to be a liability. It's clear that only customers, or the lack of them, can ensure that companies behave decently. If we don't demand it, we'll not get it.

Update Oct 4, 2023: In a story yesterday on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, NPR described a couple's struggles with a large, powerful phone company. The couple "decided they didn't need their landline anymore, and they ended the service. But the phone company continued to bill them and bill them, and it ended up affecting Philip Glover's credit." After Mr. Glover contacted the CFPB, he got a letter from the phone company saying the improper charges "would be removed from my credit report and that I wouldn't be hearing from them again on that matter." That company was Verizon.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.


Tuesday, September 05, 2023

Is an electric vehicle right for you?

I was delighted to purchase my 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV in early March. It wasn't easy. The market was still uncomfortably tight, and available vehicles were hard to find. The few dealers that had a vehicle on their lots often demanded substantial premiums over MSRP, typically in the $3K to $5K range. That was unacceptable to me. I ultimately put down a deposit, sight unseen, on a car whose color wouldn't have been my first choice, with a dealer five hours distant, on a vehicle that was still in transit from the factory. I'd been looking for a while and had almost given up, and then I got lucky.

Hopefully the market is somewhat better now, but I haven't checked. Chevrolet says it plans to build 70,000 Bolts this year, a lot more than last. But it also said this will be the Bolt's final year, despite its undeniable success, because Chevrolet is reworking its entire EV fleet, which will be built on its next generation Ultium "platform."

[Update: A general strike by workers against the "big three" auto makers is ominously looming. I've not investigated how it could affect Bolt production, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be good, and that could constrain availability.]

Buying an EV was overwhelmingly right for me. But is it right for you? I'd say that, at a minimum, you need to answer the following three questions all in the affirmative:

1. Do you own your home, or can you otherwise charge your car where you live?

2. Is your daily commute (or daily driving miles) comfortably within the vehicle's stated range?

3. Do you have another, gasoline powered, vehicle that you can take on longer trips?

Although this will change over time, charging infrastructure is still spotty, and anyway, charging takes time. You'll definitely be happier if you can charge at home, and it will almost certainly be the cheapest way to charge as well. In fact, charging an EV at home can save you a lot of money compared to fueling a conventional gasoline powered car, and it's a lot more convenient too. I plug in every evening when I get home. It takes about 10 seconds. I don't miss going to the gas station.

Regarding the second question, my Bolt's rated range is 249 miles, but what you actually get can be higher or lower depending on various conditions. You definitely don't want to cut it too close. For this car, I'd want my daily driving miles to be less than 200.

My own situation is practically perfect. I have a daily round-trip commute of 100 miles, which is large enough that I save lots of money thanks to the car's impressive fuel efficiency, but which the car can easily accommodate.

As for the third question, you really don't want to take your EV on a trip. I don't want to, anyway. Fortunately, I already own a Prius, which can take me as far as I want to go.

The problems with using an EV to travel are that, as I said, charging infrastructure can be spotty, and sometimes, according to reports, unreliable. That will continually improve over coming years. If you're traveling, you absolutely need to have a charging station available at the right place, when you need it. And you want it to be both operable and available. It's not available if someone else is using it.

As I said, charging takes time. I can add 500 miles of range to my Prius in 5 minutes at the gas station. But it takes 30 minutes at a DC fast charger—the fastest charging option—to add 90 miles of range to the Bolt. And if you can't find a DC fast charger, charging could take you a couple of hours, or more. If I had a trip of, say, 300 miles, and if I knew for sure I could access a DC fast charger at the 200-mile point, then I might do it. But my basic assumption is that my car isn't for travel.

But maybe owning a separate commuter car makes sense for you, like it does for me. Or an around-town car. A lot of two-car families could find such an arrangement beneficial and satisfying.

Charging at home is pretty simple. My Bolt came with a charger, plus Chevrolet will pay all or most of the cost of having an electrician install a suitable circuit and outlet to plug it into. Availability of space in your house's electrical panel for the required circuit might be an issue, so beware of that.

There are two "levels" of at-home charging for electric vehicles: Level 1 and Level 2. Level 1 is very slow, and Level 2 is a good bit faster. Neither is nearly as fast as the fast DC charging you can sometimes, but not nearly always, find at commercial charging stations.

The Bolt's charger can do both Level 1 and Level 2, and you can switch between levels whenever you want, assuming you have the appropriate kind of electrical outlets to plug into, which I'll explain. The charging level is automatically determined by the kind of outlet you plug into, and you switch levels by just changing the short cord that plugs into the charger unit on one end and into the electrical outlet on the other. All that cord change does is ensure you have a plug that fits into the kind of outlet you're using, and the kind of outlet determines the charge level. It's easy.

Note that cord switching isn't something you'll likely be much doing in any case. Normally your charger will remain plugged in to a particular outlet where you'll do all or most of your charging, and that outlet will determine what level you charge at.

The charger itself is a small portable device that plugs into an electrical outlet via a short cord on one end and, with a long charge cord, your car on the other. The charger comes with short cords for doing either Level 1 or Level 2 charging, and, as I said, switching them is simple. The long charge cord that plugs into your car always remains attached to the charger. You'll generally keep your charger at home, plugged into its dedicated outlet. Commercial charging stations provide everything you need to charge, so you don't need to carry any equipment with you to use them.

The exception is that you might need a small adapter to plug a Tesla charging cord into the connector that's currently on the Bolt and on many other non-Tesla EVs. Increasingly, people will want to charge their cars at Tesla charging stations, and anyway the Tesla connector is becoming the new industry standard that all EV manufactures have agreed to adopt. If you do charging on the road, you might want to have the adapter. But if you do all your charging at home, none of this even matters.

To do Level 1 charging, you just plug the charger into a regular household electrical outlet, which operates at 120 volts. Most everything in your house plugs into such outlets: Your toaster, your living room lamps, your hair dryer, etc. You know what I'm talking about. You can even use an already-existing outlet if you have one in a convenient location. You do need to make sure no other appliances are operating on that circuit while you're charging the car, because the car's charger will use most of the circuit's capacity. If you overload the circuit you'll trip the breaker. The normal and best setup is to have a dedicated outlet on a dedicated circuit with its own breaker. With Level 1 charging you only get around 4 miles of range per hour of charge. Not much, but it could work for you if yours is just an around-town car, and you keep it plugged in whenever you're not using it. Do the math.

Level 2 charging at home will give you around 27 miles of range per hour of charge, so a fully discharged battery can be charged in around 9 hours. My car stays plugged in all night, and all my charging is now Level 2, so the car is always ready for me with a full battery next morning. By the way, it isn't necessary to bring the battery all the way up to full charge once you plug the charger in, just as it isn't necessary to completely fill your gas tank. You can plug and unplug whenever you want, adding a little or a lot in a single charging session. All that really matters is that there's sufficient charge in the battery to go the number of miles you'll be driving. The car gives you a continual estimate of how many miles of range is available, bracketed by minimum and maximum estimates.

Level 2 charging uses a 240-volt circuit, and an outlet similar or identical to those that high power appliances such as electric stoves or clothes dryers use. You'll probably need to have that installed and, as I said, be sure there's room in your breaker box for the new circuit. You'll probably need an electrician to verify this and do the work, unless you know your way around electrical wiring. As I said, Chevrolet will generally pay for this, including parts and labor. Chevrolet contracts with installing electricians, so they'll make all the arrangements. Chevrolet won't pay for it if you do the work yourself. Your dealer will provide the details. I don't know about other vehicle manufacturers.

You don't really need to know this unless you're going to do the work yourself, but the Bolt charger needs 8-gauge wire, a 40-amp breaker, and a NEMA 14-50 receptacle. The Bolt's charger draws 32 amps in Level 2 charging. You can buy aftermarket chargers that charge even faster in Level 2 by drawing more amps, but they require larger wire, larger breaker, and so forth. And as always, the Bolt's charger can also do Level 1 from a regular household receptacle, as described above. You can configure the car to draw 8 or 12 amps in Level 1 charging, with 8 amps being the default. Most regular household circuits are protected by 15-amp or 20-amp breakers.

A lot of commercially available charging stations you'll see around town operate at Level 2. These might charge a bit faster than your at-home charger, but they're still a lot slower than the fast DC charging I described above, which some people refer (incorrectly, but that's ok) to as Level 3. Fast DC charging really is in a category of its own, and is a lot less common at the moment. Expect that to change rapidly.

Incidentally, if you can plug into a Level 1 or Level 2 charger where you work or shop, it might make sense to do so. Such arrangements will become increasingly common in our new electrified world. But again, it's probably cheapest to charge at home, except that some businesses or employers might offer free charging, for reasons we won't get into here. If you patronize commercial charging stations, you'll probably want to know what they charge (cost) per kilowatt-hour, and how that compares to what you pay per kilowatt-hour at home. Comparing charging costs across stations will probably become an exercise similar to keeping track of the price of a gallon of gas at different retailers.

Your Bolt's at-home charger is portable, and you can take it with you if you have a place to plug into at your destination. Commercial charging stations have their own charge cords, so you don't need to carry anything with you in your car to use them. The Bolt's at-home charger is a small, brick-sized module with a cord on each end. On one end is a very short cord that plugs into both the charger and into an electrical outlet. As I already described, you change this cord as necessary depending on the kind of electrical outlet you're plugging into, and that selects the charge level, Level 1 or Level 2, automatically. The charger comes with all the necessary cords (and hence plugs) and changing them is easy. On the other end of the charger is the permanently attached charge cord that plugs into your car. It's about 22 feet in length, which is usually plenty long, but you'll need to make sure your electrical outlet is sufficiently close to where you park your car. By the way, it's fine to park and charge your car outside. The charge cord plugs into the charging port on the Bolt's front left fender. Other models could be different and probably are. You can keep your car continually plugged in when it's parked at home.

The instructions warn you to not plug your charger into an extension cord, but that's mainly because the cord might not have wire that's sufficiently large to carry the current drawn by the charger, and most people won't know how to assess that. Best is to plug into a permanent outlet, but if you need to use an extension cord in a pinch, make sure the wire gauge is between 10 and 14. With wire gauge, smaller numbers mean beefier, larger diameter wire, which is better. Further, shorter extension cords are better than longer ones, and a very long cord needs to have larger gauge (smaller number) wire.

I should have said this earlier, but this article isn't intended to be an advertisement for the Chevy Bolt, but rather a discussion about whether an electric vehicle is right for you. Because my experience is with the Bolt, that's what I describe here. But the basic concepts, and economics, are the same regardless of which vehicle you buy. For example, charging levels are standardized across the industry, as are connector jacks (that the charge cord plugs into) on the car, with the caveat that Tesla uses a different connector. The connector standard is currently being changed to adopt Tesla's connector universally, but that isn't something to worry about. Small adapter plugs will be available to switch between different types of connectors.

At the moment the Bolt is the most affordable EV on the market, so it might make the most economic sense. Indeed, the Bolt pretty much owns the low end of the EV market. If all you've ever heard about is high-priced electric vehicles, the Bolt's price might surprise you and renew your interest in EVs. The Nissan Leaf will cost a bit more than the Bolt, and I've heard it's not as good a car. There was a time when I would have bought a Leaf if one had been available. I'm really glad one wasn't.

Most other EV offerings, including Teslas, get pricey quite fast. Many people have surely written off EVs for that reason, although gasoline cars have become pretty darned expensive too, post pandemic, and there aren't many very low cost options remaining. The cheapest Tesla starts at a little over $40K. Most people probably don't realize how affordable, relatively speaking, a Bolt can be. My Bolt EUV's MSRP was a little under $29K. I paid $30K, which was as high as I was willing to go in a market where you really don't have much negotiating leverage. Fortunately, the dealer and I came to see eye-to-eye on this over the course of a 15 minute phone conversation. All this should improve as sanity returns to the car market.

The 2023 Bolt is eligible for a $7,500 income tax credit. That brings my effective purchase price down into the low 20s. But beware: Not all EV models are eligible for the full tax credit. It depends on how much domestic content they contain. The IRS has information on the web that identifies qualifying models. Do your research before you purchase. Your dealer needs to fill out a form at the time of purchase, sending a copy to the IRS and giving a copy to you. You use that when you do your income taxes the following spring to claim your credit. And beware of this, too: The credit you receive can't be more than the amount of tax you owe in the year in which you purchased the car. Basically, that's "total tax," line 24 on Form 1040. So you might not get the full $7,500. Check your most recent tax return for an idea of how much tax you typically owe.

Where EVs really shine is in their fuel efficiency. The Bolt will cost about a third as much for fuel as a reasonably fuel efficient family car. I like to think about my car's fuel efficiency as, conceptually, "miles per gallon," even though there are obviously no "gallons" involved. This is useful for comparing an EV's fuel efficiency with a gasoline car, and can be computed based on the prevailing cost of a gallon of gasoline, the cost you pay per kilowatt-hour (KWh) of electricity, and how many miles your car goes on a utility KWh.

This can be a little tricky, because while the car—the Bolt, anyway—reports miles per KWh, it's using KWh out of the car's battery, not the number of KWh you purchased from your electric utility to put into the battery. Of course, it's the latter that you actually care about, because that's what you're paying for. Because of inefficiencies in the charging process, the number of KWh going out your electrical outlet to the car (and appearing on your electric bill) is more than the number of KWh that end up in the battery to power the vehicle. Because the car is using KWh out of the battery, it's exaggerating miles per KWh from your point of view as a purchaser of electricity.

So, whereas the car might say I'm getting 3.9 miles per KWh (which is what it reported for my first 10,000 miles), the true amount is probably more like 3.4 miles per utility KWh. I estimated this by using a power monitor on my electrical outlet during a couple of thousand miles of Level 1 charging. Level 2 charging is supposedly more energy efficient, and so at Level 2 the gap between what the car reports and what you actually consume could be lower. But I have no way to measure that just now, because my power monitor device only works on a 120-volt outlet. Note that some aftermarket EV chargers report how many KWh they're sending to the car, but the charger that comes with the Bolt doesn't. A charger that tells you how may KWh are sent to the car would allow you to precisely compute the cost of fueling your car, if you cared.

By the way, I have reason to believe that an EV's fuel efficiency is significantly better in city driving than at highway speeds, although I've not yet had an opportunity to quantify that systematically. My driving so far has overwhelmingly been on the highway. My driving patterns are dramatically different May through October compared to November through April, so I should have a chance to make comparisons later on.

Here, then, is the "mpg" calculation I use, which, again, is just to conceptualize fuel efficiency similar to how we do with a conventional vehicle. Divide the cost you pay per KWh by the (usually estimated) number of miles per KWh, making a reasonable adjustment from what the car reports. Even better, use the exact number if you can compute it using the car's odometer and a charger that reports total utility KWh. I use 3.4 miles per KWh, as described above, even though my car says I'm getting 3.9 miles per KWh. Since I seem to be paying 12 cents per KWh (see below), I get 0.12 / 3.4 = 0.035. That is, it costs me 3.5 cents per mile for electricity. If I'm feeling really conservative, I estimate that I pay 4 cents per mile. But not today. Now divide the cost per mile into the price of a gallon of gas. If gas is $3.00 per gallon, then: 3.00 / 0.035 = 85. Voilà! I get 85 miles to the gallon! Or so I tell my friends. At these particular price points, the cost I pay to fuel my car is comparable to your gasoline powered vehicle getting 85 miles to the gallon.

Notice that because we're comparing the EV to gasoline powered vehicles, the "mpg" of an EV improves as the price of gasoline increases, and its mpg decreases as the price of electricity increases. The price of electricity is generally much more stable than the price of gas. Right now gas where I live is $3.42 per gallon, which means my "mpg" has gone up to 97! A fuel efficient family car might get 30, so I pay one third as much for fuel. The economics of fueling your EV are likely to be similar, but will depend on which model you purchase and what you pay for electricity.

And of course, none of this can be done until you own the car. So there's that. But my doing the calculations with my Bolt could give you a general sense of EV efficiency. Most people will pay way less to fuel their EV than their gasoline powered vehicle

If you want to do your own calculations, you'll need to know how much you pay for electricity. The slightly naive approach is to just divide the total cost of your monthly electricity bill by the total number of kilowatt-hours on the bill, to get the overall cost per kilowatt-hour. But what you actually want to know is the cost of a marginal kilowatt-hour, which means the cost of the next kilowatt-hour you consume, because that's what you'll be using to charge your car. So the first thing to do is to subtract any fixed costs that appear on your bill, such as the constant $14.50 account fee that appears on mine every month, before dividing by total kilowatt-hours.

That's a good start, and should get you in the ballpark. It's hard to know how to proceed from there. Some utilities might increase the cost per kilowatt-hour for consumption above some specified base amount. Some might impose a demand premium for consumption during peak demand times of the day, or you might voluntarily be on such a plan. That's a reason overnight charging can make economic sense for some people, by charging outside the peak demand window. (You can tell the car to delay charging to a cheaper time of day.) My bill lists a multitude of items, all poorly explained, that make up the total cost, with no defined way to know how they vary month to month and with changing consumption. I ended up comparing my bills from before I purchased my car to those that included a couple of thousand miles per month of car charging, and determined that, as far as I can tell, the cost of a marginal kilowatt-hour for me is 12 cents. That's two cents lower than my working assumption early on, which made me happy.

I completely understand that you might be uninterested in these sorts of calculations. I'm pretty geeky in that regard. You might simply take it on faith that it will cost a good bit less to fuel your EV than your gasoline powered vehicle, and you'd almost certainly be right.

Such energy efficiency might factor into your deciding whether an EV is right for you. If you drive a lot, it could be a really big incentive. If it costs me 3.5 cents per mile to drive my Bolt, and I drive 20,000 miles per year, that's $700 per year for fuel. If the reasonably fuel efficient car I'm replacing costs 11.4 cents per mile for gasoline to operate, that car costs $2,280 per year to operate—a huge difference. I'm saving $1,580 per year. But if you drive a lot less miles, your savings will be less dramatic. For me, the true savings is only $590, because I'm replacing a Prius that gets 53 mpg (verified lifetime average, which is amazing), or which costs 6.5 cents per mile. On the other hand, my wife now drives the highly efficient Prius, whereas she was previously driving a 15 mpg F150. Our EV savings thus cascade through our entire vehicle "fleet."

Regardless of how many or how few miles you drive in a year, the lifetime cost of fueling your EV will sooner or perhaps later save you a lot of money. EVs are generally cheaper to maintain, too, because overall they're much simpler machines than gasoline powered vehicles. There are no oil changes, for example. Because I've always changed my own oil, that's especially nice. The single-speed transmission in an electric vehicle is far simpler than the transmission in a gasoline powered car, and far more efficient. The air conditioner is run by electricity, not by a rotating drive shaft sticking out of an engine and requiring a belt and pulleys. There's no alternator. And so forth.

Before we completely leave the subject of fuel efficiency, I want to warn you about an EPA rating attached to all electric vehicles, which will appear on the sticker of your new car: MPGe, or "miles per gallon gasoline-equivalent." This number is almost useless for most consumers. At best, it can be used to make vehicle-to-vehicle efficiency comparisons, but it doesn't really tell you much else. It doesn't give you an intuitive sense of what it costs to operate your car, the way my faux mpg calculation above does. MPGe isn't based on the price of electricity or gasoline, but rather on the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline, then converted to electrical energy, and finally to how many miles you can go on that amount of energy. It's all pretty abstruse.

My Bolt's MPGe is 119, which might lead one to believe it's like getting 119 mpg in a gasoline powered car. Suffice to say, it isn't, or at least not at current gasoline prices. I'd ignore MPGe completely unless you're comparing different models of cars to get a sense of which one is more fuel efficient. For example, the all-electric F150 Lightning has an MPGe in the mid-70s, from which you could surmise it's only two thirds as fuel efficient as the Bolt. On the other hand, it would be far more fuel efficient than a conventional pickup.

Regardless of how many or how few miles you drive in a year, the lifetime cost of fueling your EV will result in large eventual savings, assuming you keep the car until it's worn out, which is what I do with all my vehicles. To reiterate, EVs are generally cheaper to maintain, because overall they're much simpler machines than gasoline powered vehicles, as described above. Again, there are no oil changes.

But how long will an EV last, exactly? One concern you frequently hear is about battery life. EV batteries are generally warranted for 8 years or 100,000 miles. But then what? It is true that a battery's capacity diminishes as it ages, but modern EV batteries tend to hold up quite well. A large survey of Tesla owners found an average capacity reduction of around ten percent at 150,000 miles. Not bad. That would be like my Bolt's rated range of 249 miles declining to 224 after 150,000 miles. I would be delighted by such a result. The car would still do everything I want it to do. We don't presently know how much it would cost to replace the car's battery pack a decade or more down the line, or even if that's a practical thing to do, but it might not even matter.

Another reason an EV might be right for you is that you have a strong interest in reducing your carbon footprint. A critique you'll sometimes hear from the ideological right is that EVs don't actually reduce carbon emissions, because a lot of our electricity generation still relies on fossil fuels (including, still, a good bit of coal), and because manufacturing car batteries is extremely energy intensive. But studies have shown that EVs nevertheless emit significantly less carbon than gasoline powered vehicles over their entire life cycle (which includes battery manufacturing), and even accounting for the energy mix currently powering the U.S. electrical grid. And crucially, the grid mix is continually getting cleaner, and will for decades to come, as more and more renewable sources come online. An electric vehicle will position you to take advantage of that.

Most sane and sensible people will find driving an electric vehicle to be a pleasant experience. EVs are of course very quiet, and the feel is solid and satisfying. And the acceleration is phenomenal—far better than any V8 gasoline powered vehicle I've ever owned. That's because electric motors have far higher torque than gasoline engines, and respond instantly. If you've never driven one, you'll surely be surprised. Even if you drive sensibly, you'll be glad for that acceleration when you're passing on the highway. (The Bolt is governed to have a top speed of 92 mph, but you get there very rapidly.)

I've not yet used my Bolt over a winter, but you can expect an EV's range to be less when the weather is cold. That's because battery capacity—the total amount of energy the battery can store and deliver—is less in cold conditions. Lithium batteries also have to be sufficiently warm in order to safely (meaning to not damage the battery) and efficiently charge. Thus the battery packs in EVs have built-in heaters, and the car will use some amount of charge current to warm the batteries as necessary. It's generally best to keep your car plugged in all the time when at home, but especially during the winter. Battery warming, plus running the electric cabin heater, could make the car a bit less energy efficient during the cold months. I'll try to quantify that this winter.

I now have over 10,000 miles on my Bolt, and I'm quite pleased. You might find that an EV is right for you, as it absolutely is for me. Being an early adopter could make sense if you can find a car at an attractive price point, and if you can answer "yes" to the three criteria I laid out at the beginning of this article. If it's time to replace or augment an existing vehicle, maybe you should consider an EV. Regardless, electric vehicles will increasingly become the norm over the coming decade. EVs are the future, and there's no getting around that.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

PragerU offers "thought-provoking questions"

The Florida department of education recently approved videos from PragerU to be played in Florida classrooms for student instruction. "PragerU," writes the Guardian, "is not an actual university. It has no accreditation. It is a conservative media company whose goal since its founding in 2009 has been to spread rightwing ideology to adults and children." As NPR reports, "its founder admits indoctrination is its goal," with audio of him saying so.

What kind of indoctrination? There are, for example, PragerU videos with a cartoon Christopher Columbus (himself a brutal exploiter of indigenous people) and a cartoon Frederick Douglass each downplaying American slavery, which seems to be a thing lately in Florida education. The idea is that slavery in American was nothing special; everyone was doing it around the world.

Here's one that particularly stuck in my craw, because it nicely illustrates the mindless way right wingers "reason" about things they don't understand.

NPR explains how "PragerU Kids has a video questioning the origin of climate change. In this one, a narrator sets up a conversation between a girl and her parents."

Narration from the PragerU video: "But when her anxiety gets high and she tells them that fossil fuels will soon lead to a climate disaster, they challenge her with some thought-provoking questions. They encourage her to consider how the planet has been warming and cooling since prehistoric times, long before carbon emissions were a factor. Can she explain that?"

Can she? She's just a child. A better question is, can they

No, they can't.

The "don't worry, the climate has always been changing" dismissal is pure right-wing lunacy, and not because it hasn't been changing. Of course it has always been changing; learning about how and why the climate has changed helps us understand what's going on now, and what is unique about our present circumstances.

There are a couple of possible insinuations in the PragerU shrug. One is that because the climate has always been changing, humans can't be causing it to change now. That's not just specious; it's stupendously ignorant.

Another is that because the climate has always been changing, change is the normal order of things, so we shouldn't fret about it. Don't worry your pretty head, little girl.

An additional insinuation, if you want one, is that carbon emissions weren't "a factor" in prehistoric warming, so linking humanity's carbon emissions to today's warming is suspect. That, too, is spectacularly ignorant. Carbon emissions have always been a factor, whatever the cause of warming. As any climate scientist will tell you, carbon is fundamental. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (along with less important greenhouse gasses) are what determines the earth's temperature.

One easy lesson from an always (where "always" means over geologic time scales) changing climate is that when the climate moves toward extremes of hot or cold, it's guaranteed to be a pretty awful situation from the standpoint of humanity. You'd very much prefer that it didn't happen. As recently as 20,000 years ago, enormous mile-thick ice sheets covered Canada, and extended down into the U.S. Montreal would have to wait for more congenial times to have a possibility of existing.

There have also been long periods in the earth's geologic past when the planet was unimaginably hot, far hotter than today, with no ice sheets anywhere on Earth, and sea levels hundreds of feet higher than today. What a hellscape that must have been. The girl is right to be concerned.

Although we can glibly acknowledge that the climate has always changed, from the perspective of human civilization, the climate has been remarkably stable. Change might be the normal order of things over eons, but the past 10,000 years, which encompasses the entirety of human civilization, has been a period of moderate and stable temperature and sea level, with very little variation. Some experts argue that civilization was able to take hold and flourish precisely because of temperature and sea level stability. It's a basic fact that human civilization has never experienced any of the extremes of climate variation that the worried girl is being asked to explain. But that is changing. At this very moment we are moving outside the zone of stability that civilization has always enjoyed, with grave implications for humanity.

And we're doing it to ourselves. Very, very rapidly. The rate of change today far exceeds what has occurred naturally in even extreme warming and cooling events. An ice age, for example, takes many thousands of years to develop. That gives all interested parties lots of time to adapt, gradually. Importantly, the biosphere itself has plenty of time, with species and indeed entire biomes migrating to lower latitudes as ice sheets descend from higher ones. Even the rapid warm-up that occurs at the end of an ice age is far slower than the rate of warming we're experiencing today. Whereas the climate warmed by upwards of 9 °F over a period of around 7,000 years coming out of the last ice age, it has warmed by around 2 °F over just the past century. Likewise, sea level rise is accelerating, and the rate could soon exceed that experienced in the big melt coming out of the last ice age. Whatever amount of sea level rise ultimately occurs, it's guaranteed to be disruptive to our coastlines, and the disruption is already underway.

We can, at least, scratch ice ages off our list of climate change concerns. Because the climate "forcings" that instigate ice ages are incredibly weak, there will never be another ice age as long as humanity is around to stop it. You might find that hard to believe, but it is true. The upshot is that humanity does indeed have the ability to alter the climate quite dramatically, and we're doing so right now, rapidly pushing the climate outside the zone of stability that human civilization has enjoyed for its entire existence.

Because the risk is now all on the side of planetary warming, and always will be henceforth, it's instructive to study how the climate has warmed (and then cooled) naturally over periods of tens of millions of years. Such very long term variation occurs because the movement of carbon in and out of solid Earth reservoirs is normally not balanced. Solid Earth reservoirs are massive geologic stores of carbon distinct from more rapidly changing surface reservoirs such as atmosphere, ocean water, forests, and soils. Carbon can move into solid Earth reservoirs (which are thus carbon sinks) faster or slower than carbon is emitted from them (in which case they are carbon sources). Carbon moves in both directions, but at different rates depending on what's happening with the earth's geological activity.

The main mechanism for carbon moving out of the atmosphere and into solid Earth sinks is the weathering of rocks, whereby atmospheric CO2 reacts chemically with rock minerals and is carried away by streams and rivers to be deposited on the ocean floor.

Carbon moves out of solid Earth reservoir sources and into the atmosphere via geologic processes involving plate tectonics and vulcanism. (If you're thus tempted to think that volcanoes are causing present-day warming, please don't.)

The movement in and out of sources and sinks explains why the earth experienced an extraordinary increase in temperature beginning at the start of the Cenozoic era 65 million years ago, followed by a very long term cooling trend over tens of millions of years up to the present. Perhaps we should blame it all on India.

At the beginning of the Cenozoic, the continent of India was situated by itself in the Indian Ocean (they didn't call it that back then) off the coast of Africa. India's continental plate commenced an unusually rapid movement (around 8 inches per year), marching across the Indian Ocean and taking square aim at Asia. Along the way, India's plate rode over the ocean crust and its carbon-rich deposits laid down by the large rivers that had drained southern Asia for eons. The crust and its carbon deposits were subducted beneath the overriding plate under enormous heat and pressure, which caused melting and metamorphism of the ocean crust, and released carbon-bearing gasses that came to the surface via volcanic eruptions and other geologic features.

Thus was carbon rapidly transferred from solid Earth reservoirs into the atmosphere, where it caused the climate to dramatically warm. I say "rapidly," but I use that term relative not to human timescales but to geologic ones. The warm-up that ensued occurred over millions of years, peaking 55 to 50 million years ago in what's called the "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum," or PETM. Warming on the order of  9 to 16 degrees Fahrenheit occurred. Crocodiles and palm trees existed north of the Arctic Circle. It was surely hellish at lower latitudes. The entire planet was ice free; as a consequence, sea levels were hundreds of feet higher than today.

So yes, Virginia, carbon is "a factor."

This explanation is instructive but not complete. Two huge pulses of methane hydrate releases from the upper layers of the sea floor, taking not more than 1,000 years each, amplified the PETM warming. But these methane releases, caused by the melting of normally frozen methane hydrates, were feedbacks operating in the context of an overall warming as a consequence of carbon dioxide imbalance caused by plate subduction over a carbon rich ocean crust. Imagine that: Science really can explain why the climate changes.

It's instructive, too, to note the magnitude of the imbalances that were driving the long term warming. Such source/sink imbalances can change the atmospheric CO2 concentration on the order of one ten-thousandth of a part per million per year, which amounts to 100 ppm over a million years. Contrast that with the present, where atmospheric CO2 is increasing at the rate of 2 ppm per year. Today, CO2 is increasing at a rate that's four orders of magnitude (a factor of 10,000) faster than the source/sink imbalances that drove temperatures stupendously high in the early Cenozic, under "natural" conditions. All today's carbon is being pumped into the atmosphere by humanity's burning of fossil fuels. Human activity has increased atmospheric CO2 by 140 ppm since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Natural factors driving the climate are clearly far weaker than anthropogenic (human caused) ones, and it isn't even close.

Finally, thanks to an overall cooling trend over the past 50 million years, the earth has accumulated far more methane hydrate deposits than existed in the run-up to the PETM. If today's methane hydrates were to be released in a sudden pulse—something that will likely happen if the current warming trend continues—it will be game over for humanity. A pulse of that magnitude would take 100,000 years to unwind.

Back to our story. When India slammed into Asia, things changed rapidly, geologically speaking. India's continental plate rode underneath the Asian one, causing the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and the forming of the Himalayan Mountains. You know, Everest and all that. As India settled into place and the subduction-caused emissions stopped, the brand new mountain range exposed large amounts of fresh rock to the forces of weathering. As we have seen, rock weathering is the primary mechanism by which carbon is moved out of the atmosphere to hard Earth reservoirs. As already noted, a very long term cooling trend occurred, over tens of millions of years, as the weathering continued. A bit over 30 million years ago, glaciers returned to Antarctica, for the first time in tens of millions of years. Cooling continued but at a slower rate. In a cooler climate, the magnitude of temperature fluctuation between ice ages and interglacial periods increased.

What does all that have to do with today? It demonstrates that the concentration of carbon dioxide drives the climate, which, as I said, is fundamental. And it underscores how seriously concerning is humanity's own carbon emissions, which are occurring at a far faster rate than even natural ones that drove immense climate changes. It also shows that today's climate is warming faster than under natural conditions in the geologic past. Bad as things already are, with all the droughts, flooding, storms, wildfires, and heatwaves, we're still in the early stages of our ill-advised climate experiment. We've not nearly reached PETM-like temperatures, but we absolutely have the ability get there through human action alone.

And isn't that remarkable? The girl is correct to be worried. Thinking about how the climate has always changed is no comfort at all. I said above that any venture outside the climate norms to which civilization is accustomed is likely to be "awful" for humanity. What's amazing is that this time it's all humanity's doing. Don't blame nature for the catastrophe we ourselves are willfully creating right now, and don't use nature to excuse our inaction.

Doesn't that put PragerU's glib dismissal in correct and shameful perspective? In blathering that the climate has always changed, PragerU models reasoning through non sequitur, which does great damage to young minds that ought to be taught facts and consequences appropriate to their grade level, and to think critically. PragerU wants to teach kids to be as mindlessly ignorant and unable to reason as their adults. What a disgraceful perversity masquerading as instruction, all blessed by Florida's department of education. Luckily, Florida's teachers will have something to say about all this, and I'm betting they'll shout hell no to the idea of allowing right wing propaganda into their classrooms.


Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

 

Friday, June 30, 2023

Man, woman, child, stupidity

A Kansas law that imposes broad restrictions on transgender rights goes into effect tomorrow. As NPR's Rose Conlon reports, "the law tethers the legal definition of male, female, man and woman to the sex a person is assigned at birth. It could restrict transgender people's use of a wide range of facilities beyond bathrooms and locker rooms."

State Representative Brenda Landwehr justifies her vote for the law this way: "The idea that my 4-year-old granddaughter would have to go into a bathroom and possibly be exposed to a male, is that right?"

Representative Landwehr apparently forgot to turn on her brain before making that remark.

I know someone whose child was assigned female at birth and is now a transgender man with an impressive growth of facial hair. Testosterone can do that. So now imagine this trans dude with a beard, who looks like and for all relevant purposes is a man, walking into the women's restroom occupied by Representative Landwehr's 4-year-old granddaughter. Because Representative Landwehr says he must. For the sake of the child.

Is there any reason I should not say that Representative Landwehr is stupid?

It works in the other direction, too. A transgender woman looks like and for all relevant purposes is a woman. Neither Representative Landwehr's 4-year-old granddaughter or anybody else would have any idea the trans woman was assigned male at birth. But for Representative Landwehr's meddling, all concerned would be able to attend to their restroom needs without difficulty.

But Representative Landwehr can't resist meddling, and that meddling isn't merely stupid. It's gratuitously cruel, and Representative Landwehr should be ashamed of herself. Such cruelty is a signal characteristic of the right, which can't seem to find within itself to just leave people alone to be themselves. Trans people face all kinds of societal cruelty without the law making their lives even worse. We should all be ashamed.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Thursday, June 01, 2023

NPR is wrong. Social Security has never added a penny to the national debt.

Social Security has never added a penny to the national debt. Never has. That may surprise you, considering all the swirling misinformation, including, alas, from prominent media sources.

But it's true. We don't borrow money to finance Social Security. We pay for it with tax receipts.

The first thing to understand is that Social Security has its own dedicated revenue stream, and always has. It's the payroll tax. That dedicated revenue stream has always been used, both directly and indirectly, to pay Social Security benefits. Directly, in the sense that current revenue is applied to current benefit payments, and indirectly, in the sense that when current revenue is not entirely sufficient, the Social Security Trust Fund—itself funded by the payroll tax—makes up the difference. No regular government spending, deficit or otherwise, is involved.

The Trust Fund itself contains the long term surplus of payroll tax receipts, accumulated over several decades when payroll tax revenue consistently exceeded, by design, Social Security benefit payments. This deliberate accumulation of excess revenue in the Trust Fund was intended to provide a backstop against the retirement of the baby boomers, anticipating far in advance a time when current payroll tax revenue would no longer be sufficient by itself to pay benefits. That the Trust Fund currently holds a positive balance is itself evidence that Social Security has been in long term surplus.

Social Security benefits, then, have always been paid by the payroll tax, and as long as the Trust Fund carries a positive balance, always will be. The government has never borrowed money to pay Social Security benefits. It's now projected that, absent additional measures to fortify it (such as increasing the payroll tax or raising the level of income that it applies to), the Trust Fund will be depleted in about 10 years. That's ten years in the future. Social Security does not now, nor ever has, added to the debt.

I broach this subject now, yet again, in exasperation over a recent NPR story in which reporter Deirdre Walsh said the recent debt ceiling agreement "does not touch the biggest drivers of the debt, Medicare and Social Security." In truth and in fact, Social Security is not one of the "biggest drivers of the debt." Quite emphatically, it is not a driver of the debt at all.

Perhaps Deirdre Walsh, who is a mere "congressional correspondent," and not a financial reporter, doesn't understand this. But she said it on NPR's air. And NPR, which normally has very high standards of correctness, should definitely understand it. Unfortunately, NPR is far from the only major media outlet to botch this basic fact with breezy, ignorant assertions, mindlessly repeated.

Not only has the federal government never borrowed (except as part of a particular debt-neutral rollover maneuver, explained shortly) to pay Social Security benefits, but, remarkably, Social Security itself has loaned a large amount of money to the government, which completely turns the narrative on its head. Far from being a recipient of government deficit spending, Social Security is actually one of the government's major creditors!

You can see this explicitly in the official statement of the national debt, where the Social Security Trust Fund is listed as one of the government's fiscal obligations. (For example, see this. Click on "Published Reports". Search for "Federal Old-Age And Survivors Insurance Trust Fund" in the pdf document. Total value as of April 2023: $2.7 trillion.)

The reason for this situation is easy enough to understand. Over the decades, when the Trust Fund was accumulating its surplus, the Fund needed a way to invest all those excess payroll tax receipts. The solution was to have the Fund purchase special issue government bonds—in effect loaning its money to the government, and creating a situation whereby the government would have to eventually pay the Trust Fund back. This is no different than you or your investment portfolio loaning the government money through your purchase of Treasury bonds, except that unlike your bonds, the special issue bonds held by the Trust Fund aren't traded on the financial markets. They do pay a competitive interest rate, though.

How the Trust Fund redeems those bonds in order to pay benefits is sure to create confusion and suspicion, even though it's easy enough to understand if you turn on your thinking brain. Obviously, special issue government bonds can't be directly used to cut benefit checks; they have to be converted to dollars. The usual way to convert a bond to dollars is to sell it, but as we've seen, the Trust Fund's bonds aren't traded in the financial markets.

So the Trust Fund's bonds are instead sold back to the government, from which they were purchased in the first place. Here's how it works. The Treasury Department issues (sells) new bonds to the financial markets in the amount of the desired Trust Fund withdrawal, which generates the dollars needed to pay the Trust Fund for some of its bonds. This, in effect, retires those bonds: once redeemed they are no longer obligations of the federal government to the Trust Fund, and no longer part of the federal debt. Obligations to the Trust Fund in the official debt are reduced accordingly. The dollars used to buy back the bonds are then used to pay Social Security benefits.

Thus Treasury has "paid off" that part of the national debt represented by the redeemed Trust Fund bonds by creating new debt issued to the financial markets, as regular Treasury bonds, in the same amount. Ignorant critics might cry foul, insisting that the new bonds issued to the markets are evidence that the government has to borrow to fund Social Security, and that the new borrowing is proof that Social Security is increasing the debt. It isn't. The two transactions—the redemption of Trust Fund bonds, and the issuance of new Treasury bonds—cancel exactly, and the national debt remains entirely unchanged. All that's happened here is that Treasury has rolled over some of its obligations—something that happens all the time whenever bonds come due in both public and private finance—and in the process has converted Trust Fund bonds into dollars used to pay benefits. This is precisely how the system was designed to work.

Meanwhile, the Trust Fund loaned its surplus money to the government while it wasn't needed; the government paid interest on the loan; and the government returned the money to the Trust Fund when it was needed to pay benefits.

Notice how this financial maneuver can cause Social Security to become an innocent victim of the debt ceiling crisis. As the debt ceiling is approached, Treasury is prohibited from issuing new bonds, and thus can't complete the maneuver by which Trust Fund bonds are redeemed. That is so even though the maneuver in question does not actually increase the debt.

More directly, even though Social Security has its own dedicated revenue stream, all government payments, including Social Security benefit payments, are funneled through the "general account," which can be viewed as the government's all-purpose check book. Payments of all sorts from the general account tend to get mired in debt ceiling standoffs, whether those payments have anything to with the debt or not. Thus references to Social Security get bandied about during these crises, as if Social Security itself is somehow complicit in what's going on. It isn't.

All this can create the false impression in the public mind that Social Security is part of the government's debt "problem," even though it absolutely is not, and never has been. Media outlets that perpetuate this misconception, and that don't clarify it, are doing the public an immense disservice.

Social Security certainly presents some long term fiscal challenges, as the 10-year window for Trust Fund solvency illustrates. But Social Security has never been funded by deficit spending. It has always paid for benefits from revenue intended specifically for that purpose. So far there's always been enough money to make those payments, and will be for some time into the future.



For completeness, I must explain that there is a nuanced exception to what I have said above—one that in no way contradicts my point. In 2010, the employee-side payroll tax was reduced from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent for 2011 and 2012 in order to stimulate the economy. General revenue—which is to say, deficit spending—was used to replace the revenue loss for the Social Security Trust Fund over those two years.

This was not a move that had anything whatsoever to do with Social Security's finances. It was fiscal stimulus, in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008. The idea was to increase the size of employee paychecks by temporarily reducing the amount of payroll tax withheld, thereby shoring up worker balance sheets, increasing spending by the public, and thus stimulating the economy. It didn't actually have much effect, by the way, because workers mostly saved the extra money rather than spending it into the economy.

Thus Social Security became part of the broader package of stimulus measures the government employed to bolster the economy and hopefully create demand. The government could have used other mechanisms to achieve the same end, such as sending out stimulus checks. The reason this particular approach was taken was that it's a quick and easy change for the government to make, and has immediate effect, compared to other ways of getting stimulus money into the hands of workers. The payroll tax reduction actually replaced the Making Work Pay refundable tax credit, which itself was economic stimulus intended to support workers and the economy in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Thus some amount of government borrowing did make its way into the Trust Fund for reasons that had nothing to do with Social Security specifically, or its finances. The overall thesis I laid out here remains correct: Social Security is a self-funded program and always has been; and it does not increase the debt.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.


Friday, April 14, 2023

Who ya gonna believe: the FDA or hack judges?

The right's enthusiastic answer to the headline's question is: Hack judges!

I've insisted for many years that Republicans can't govern. And they can't. Look at all the roiling dysfunction wherever Republicans have power. That increasingly includes the courts.

The contagion, which has been spreading to the judiciary, commonly presents as an inability to discern what's real. I have long argued that reality discernment is the preeminent problem of our time, because it affects everything.

Thus we have a district court judge from Amarillo siding with plaintiffs in concluding that the FDA is wrong when it says the abortion drug mifepristone is safe. The drug, which has been administered to millions, has been in use in the U.S. for 23 years (even longer in Europe), and has been carefully scrutinized by the FDA all that time. Indeed, "The F.D.A. applies a special regulatory framework to mifepristone, meaning that it has been regulated much more strictly and studied more intensively than most other drugs."

Now comes a three-judge panel from the "conservative" Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that seems at least somewhat agreeable to the Amarillo judge's ruling. In a hasty preliminary ruling, the appeals court harmfully reversed six-years-old FDA rule making, pending a full hearing on the matter.

You might think that even if the appeals court insisted on hearing such a seemingly flawed case, that it would at least give the tentative benefit of the doubt to the FDA and maintain the status quo pending its deliberations. The FDA, after all, has both the relevant experts and the legal mandate to oversee the drug, and has been exercising that expertise and mandate these past couple of decades. Alas, no. The appeals court jumped right in and messed things up.

Not disrupting the status quo pending a full resolution makes obvious good sense, but that's not how conservative courts roll these days. Thus, for example, a seemingly oblivious or uninterested Supreme Court allowed a 2021 Texas abortion law to stand, despite its being patently unconstitutional under half a century of Supreme Court precedent. The justices may have figured they were going to overturn that precedent anyway, or maybe they didn't want to address the noxious novelty (involving, basically, bounty hunters) of the Texas law, so why bother? Such not bothering permitted the Texas law, in all its magnificent illegality, to stand undisturbed by the justices for nearly ten months. So much for the rule of law.

Increasingly we see a right wing judiciary that reeks of ideological and even religious bias, which is why the Fifth Circuit's disruption of the status quo was done so effortlessly. Indeed, the Fifth Circuit adopted some of the Amarillo judge's activist language, which is a stunning breach of judicial propriety—certainly for the district judge, but especially for an appeals court. For example, a court that wanted to convey measured neutrality would not use terms such as "chemical abortion" that are employed exclusively by anti-abortion activists. Thus has the court telegraphed where it wants to go, and the law need not be an insoluble impediment to getting there.

So much is wrong with this case, yet it persists because a right-wing judiciary wants it to persist. The plaintiffs, who argue that mifepristone is unsafe, ought not even have been granted standing to bring the suit. Their flimsy argument for standing is that at some point one of them will inevitably, against his conscience, be called upon to clean up the mess caused by some other provider's prescribing the drug, and by golly, then what? Thus with a straight face do the plaintiffs insist that they themselves are being harmed, and the courts so far have been happy to go along with the charade. A court with some modicum of integrity would throw the plaintiffs out on the sidewalk. (There is relevant Supreme Court precedent regarding standing that we don't have time to get into here. And anyway, as we've seen, Supreme Court precedent ain't what it used to be.)

As an aside, doesn't one sense here at least a whiff of the right's inclination to somehow be personally harmed by—which necessitates control of—what other people do? The right's appetite for social control includes who can marry whom, what children are taught in school, what books are permissible in libraries, what women can do with their bodies, how children with gender dysphoria can be treated, and so on. Never mind that civil libertarians, teachers, librarians, medical providers, and parents are all horrified by such controlling encroachment.

But now I've strayed too far from my basic premise, which is that the right doesn't know what's real. In the case at hand, the core contention brought by the plaintiffs is that the FDA is simply wrong when it says that mifepristone is safe, which compels the question of who you're going to believe: the experts or religion-motivated activists? It's a parable for our time.

What's so mind-blowingly bonkers about all this is that none of it is hypothetical. We have decades of experience with the drug, and millions of doses have been administered. More than half of all abortions in the U.S. are now medication abortions, which overwhelmingly employ a protocol that includes mifepristone. If mifepristone is genuinely unsafe, we'd surely know it.

Thus does basic critical thinking tend toward an easy answer to the "who ya gonna believe?" question, even in persons who don't have time or inclination to master all the relevant details. I would argue that who you believe, in this and similar examples, says something important about how you think, and about how you discern reality. I would also observe that the right's consistent tendency toward conspiracy theorizing (such as by disbelieving the FDA) is in play here. These are broken brains.

One of the reasons the plaintiffs say the FDA is wrong is that the drug causes cramping and bleeding when it, in effect, induces a miscarriage. The plaintiffs view those symptoms as evidence of harm, whereas the FDA understands them to be a consequence of the drug working normally. The FDA insists that serious side effects are rare and, again, there have been millions of cases that presumably back up that claim. There's nothing wrong with curiosity, but any eagerness on your part to just accept the plaintiff's contention at face value is evidence that your mind isn't functioning properly, and that you, too, have motives beyond the discernment of reality.

Extending their bizarre reasoning, the plaintiffs claim that the FDA's approval of the drug was flawed from the outset, all those many years ago. This is an odd argument not just because it is false, but because the initial trials and assessments are performed in order to anticipate what harms might happen if the drug is approved, whereas now we have more than two decades of data about what does happen. Going back to the pre-authorization process and trials to gauge safety doesn't make much sense.

Such disordered thinking is similar to another recent and important public health matter. Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis has bizarrely claimed that Covid vaccines are harmful, and he even convened a "Public Health Integrity Committee" to investigate imagined wrongdoings by drug companies and public health agencies. One of the panel's members, Joseph Fraiman, was the lead author of a paper criticizing initial determinations of mRNA vaccine safety. That paper, which was cited by the governor, is a "reanalysis" of the data from Moderna's and Pfizer's phase III clinical trials involving some tens of thousands of participants that were conducted pursuant to vaccine emergency use authorization. ("Tens of thousands" of trial participants actually isn't a lot for uncovering the rarest of adverse events, but it's the best we can realistically do in such trials.)

The strange thing is that Fraiman's critique of the trials was published long after the vaccines had been in extremely wide use, with literally hundreds of millions of doses having been administered. It was also published long after studies such as this one, in JAMA Network, that came out a year earlier, and involved millions of patients. Despite all that, Fraiman and DeSantis fixate on the Phase III trials rather than the enormous body of subsequent data. Sound familiar?

In other words, Fraiman was complaining that the vaccines might not be safe because those initial trials were flawed (they weren't), even as hundreds of millions of administered doses by the time of his complaint showed they were in fact quite safe. Why didn't he look at that?

I remind you that we are talking here about reality discernment, and I hope you can see why I contend that right wingers have difficulties with it. They seem overwhelmingly compelled to create their own alternative realities on almost every topic. (There can only be one reality, else the word has no meaning. You're not allowed to make your own; you have to discern the one that is.)

Which is all bad enough. But when right wingers don robes they become activist right wing judges and justices, and perverse and destructive outcomes occur. When the judiciary coddles such ludicrous cases, and even intervenes in support of the whacko plaintiffs, it is both an embarrassment and a travesty. We're increasingly moving toward an upended world where reality-challenged judges contravene expert opinion in order to impose their own administrative fiats and thus dictate public health and other kinds of policy.

Soon it will fall upon the Supreme Court to clean this up. The problem, though, is that it, too, is replete with right wingers in robes. Much could go wrong. We will have to wait and see.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.