Small Space New Wrap Up

Small Launcher Startup Astra Loses One in Test Launch

The last time I mentioned small launcher startup Astra was back in March, when they just missed the DARPA challenge by less than a minute.  Unfortunately, there's not much word on what happened but in a video of the launch you can see the first stage fail after about 30 seconds, and then the vehicle starts tumbling.  It falls back to the ground and explodes on impact.  Astra says the first stage looked good but that's putting a happy face on it.  The mission hoped to make orbit but Astra said the mission's main goal was to test the first stage and since it didn't complete its mission that's got to be a disappointment.  As I expected, both Elon Musk and Rocket Lab's Peter Beck offered encouragement via Twitter almost immediately.

Scott Manley, one of the more popular video channels on space topics, has a video on the subject. 

SpaceX Pressure Test of Starship Prototype SN 7.1 NET Monday.

The original road closure for the pressure test was Friday, but that was cancelled early in the day.  It's not unusual for a scheduled test to slip; the unusual part is they didn't reschedule for the weekend.  SN7.1 has been on the test stand since Wednesday.  After SN6's successful hop test on Thursday the 3rd, SN6 was brought back to the "shipyard" (the area where the vehicles are stacked and built) on Tuesday, 9/8.  SN7.1 was then brought to the a new test stand in the area SN6 hopped from the next day.  At 2013 local here, the system is being worked with a group of guys on and around the test stand.  

The road closure Monday is from 9PM to 6AM Tuesday, so overnight.  I'll look for video Wednesday morning. 

SpaceX Releases an Unusual Video of Last Sunday's SAOCOM-1B launch.

They've released video shot from the cameras on the first stage as it returns to the drone ships before, but the novelty of this video is it's the entire mission from the perspective of the first stage, with sound from microphones attached to the booster.  It's at about 4x normal speed, so it only takes 2:19 of your time. 

NASA's SLS Achieves Important Milestone

I rag on the SLS as much as anyone, so I'm going to tip my hat to them for completing an important milestone test last week.  On September 2nd, they ran a complete burn test of the Solid Rocket Booster that will be used on all versions of the Space Launch System.  See the NASA video here. 

I know at least a few of you are thinking, "wait - those are the Space Shuttle SRBs; why do they need to qualify them?"  The original supplier of the solid fuel for the boosters has gone out of that business or they're not making that mix anymore, so the new supplier needed to be qualified.

There you go - three stories that are each too short to make up a post, but keep up with what's happening.

EDIT 1106 PM EDT 9/12:  Not quite sure how it happened, but as pointed out in the first comment, the video link to the SLS booster test somehow ended up at a video I never watched.  

Was Sturgis Really A Superspreader Event?

Every so often, I start pulling on a thread and find things I think others might find to be interesting.   Often, it’s in reaction to something that makes me say, “that’s funny” or “that can’t be right.”  That was the case this week.  It starts with this cartoon from Steven Breen at Townhall.com who has been in these pages before. 

If that’s not clear to you, the story is that some group did a computer simulation, which they called a study, and concluded that the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, was a Covid-19 superspreader event that led to about 275,000 “cases” of the virus costing the country over $12 billion dollars.  If you look around you’ll find several numbers for their conclusion.

I didn’t cover anything about the Sturgis rally, but my blog brothers in Miami (and elsewhere) at Gun Free Zone did - along with others.  From what I heard, the event was truly “largely peaceful” and while the riders there, given their strong independent streak, didn’t necessarily follow the lockdown mantra, the number of cases was more like 260 than 260,000.  That's a big difference.  So what gives? 

I was able to find a link to the paper so that I could see what they did.  To say it’s unconventional in its approach is a vast understatement.  Given the factor of a thousand, three orders of magnitude difference, between the reported cases by South Dakota Public Health (which counts people in other states) and the paper, it seems that the true number has to be closer to the lower bound.  Even if it’s 2,750 instead of 275,000 it’s a lot of cases but the approach and results are wrong. 

To begin with, the paper was by four economists:  Dhaval Dave, Andrew I. Friedson, Drew McNichols, and Joseph J. Sabia all associated with various universities and published in something called the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, so I’ll call it the IZA paper and pronounce that “eye zah”.  All of these authors are not particularly trained in any aspect of virology, epidemiology or any medical field that I can tell.  Of course, that applies to me, too.  

So where does the data come from?  How do they get this result?  The abstract of the paper summarizes their method as using cell phone data to track all the phones at the rally and then track them to their home counties around the country.  Then they used the number of positive test results in those counties from the CDC and attribute all of those increases everywhere in the country to coming from Sturgis.

First, using anonymized cell phone data from SafeGraph, Inc. we document that (i) smartphone pings from non-residents, and (ii) foot traffic at restaurants and bars, retail establishments, entertainment venues, hotels and campgrounds each rose substantially in the census block groups hosting Sturgis rally events. Stay-at-home behavior among local residents, as measured by median hours spent at home, fell.  Second, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a synthetic control approach, we show that by September 2, a month following the onset of the Rally, COVID-19 cases increased by approximately 6 to 7 cases per 1,000 population in its home county of Meade.

I’m going to concentrate on two words in their description: synthetic control.  When I read that, I have to admit to never seeing that term before, and apparently it was a technique developed in 2010.  A picture is probably a thousand words here, so here’s a plot from the IZA paper. 

The plots show the number of Covid cases per 1,000 residents in Meade County (containing Sturgis), Meade and the counties that border it, and finally all of South Dakota.  The control line is the blue and their data form CDC is the red.  What the “synthetic control” means is they took the growth rate in the number of cases and extrapolated it was just continuing to increase at the same rate.  

How do they know that the positive cases in those counties weren’t going to go up more than the extrapolated increase regardless of whether people attended the rally?  Isn’t it reasonable to ask “what else could have caused this effect?  What else was going on?” 

Extrapolation off the end of hard data is not a control.  A controlled trial is one in which there are two groups as closely matched as possible in every aspect; one group has an experimental treatment given to it and the other does not.  Further, when using animals or especially people, the control and experimental subjects should not know which group they’re in – that’s called a blind study.  In the best medical studies of drugs and other treatments, neither the experimental group nor the experimenter giving the drug should know which group is which.  That’s called a double blind study (some treatments can’t be double-blinded because everyone can see which they're getting).  The reason this is the gold standard way of experimenting is the design totally eliminates any known way for the difference between the two groups to be caused by anything other than the treatment. 

This is not a controlled experiment; synthetic control apparently means no control.  They think they monitored people who went to Sturgis.  Let’s say they did, but they have no way of knowing if those people are the people who came down with the disease or the people who spread it.  They associate two variables; (1) cell phones that were in or around Sturgis and then went somewhere else, and (2) an increase in Covid 19 cases in those “somewhere else” places.  If someone who never came in contact with a traveler to Sturgis, or any intermediate contact, came down with the virus their experiment is incapable of knowing that.  It’s an associational study, no better than the junk science I’ve railed about so many times before. 

This is how we get the correlations that say things like eating table salt is correlated with a positive relationship with your Internet Service Provider, or that eating egg rolls is highly correlated with owning a dog (that isn’t in the egg roll).

Steven Green, sometimes known as the Vodka Pundit and who writes for PJ Media, found a couple of remarkable data points.  Where does the figure of almost $12 billion come from?  Their CDC data said these counties had some number of new cases.  Remember, when they say “case”, it means a positive test result and does not mean the person was sick or actually even had the virus, given the reliability of some tests.  They then simply multiply the number of cases times a number they pulled out of, well, their IZA. 

 

(source Tweet)

As of Wednesday, the Public Health Officials have attributed one fatality to spread from Sturgis. 

Note that the study supporting $46k per Covid case is only on the IZA website and has not been replicated.  That’s a big red warning flag.  The warning about the “methodology is suspect at best” is especially applicable to it costing $11k to treat an asymptomatic case.  Need I remind everyone that people with NO symptoms are not sick, don’t think that they’re sick and need NO treatment?  For $11,000 per patient to treat asymptomatic people, I’ll treat as many as you can send. 

My takeaways on the study are that it doesn’t show much of anything.  Their tracking of cellphones using anonymized data is new, but the position resolution isn’t good.  Phones were tracked to “Census Block Groups” which appear to be too big to precisely locate a given bar or restaurant, but could certainly tell if a phone went to Sturgis from Minnesota or North Dakota and back.  CBGs are not uniformly sized.  In the end, we know that phones were in Sturgis, tracked around the event and then to somewhere else.  It’s the linking of the phones to the statistics in the CDC case rates that’s the weak spot.

The weak spot in the technique appears to be the synthetic control group.  They tried to match the population density and “urbanicity” of the control curve to Meade County within some limits (which seem reasonable) and they conclude that Sturgis had an increase in the rate of positive tests, but that’s not controversial.  What’s controversial is the number the state claims vs the number claimed in the IZA paper.  The outrageous claims aren’t in Sturgis and Meade County, the outrageous claims are whatever allows them to say there were 275,000 cases that track back to Sturgis.  I simply don’t see how they can say that.

I’m stuck where I was a couple of paragraphs ago.  Tracking the phone from Sturgis to (pick a place) and then saying there was some number of positive tests in that place doesn’t mean the phone’s owner spread the virus or had anything to do with it.  It simply means the phone was in both places.  I don’t see how causality can be linked like that.  One can say something along the lines of, “do you think it’s a coincidence that all those places had higher numbers of cases after people came back from Sturgis?”  I’d have to say “it could be.”  The issue is that’s what real controlled experiments do for us; they allow us to know for sure, rather than create these elaborate castles in the air.  

Proving a result isn't a coincidence is what statistical testing is all about. 
 

 

Spinning My Wheels in the Shop

I see my last shop date was August 19th and here it is August 40th, so it has been way too long.  

There weren't too many parts to make to complete the intake/exhaust valve stack at that point, just a couple of valve retainers, and a couple of springs.  First, I had to press fit the valve cages into the stack of aluminum slices that make up the intake and exhaust manifold, cut the valves to length and grind them against their valve cages.  

The valve retainers are fiddly little parts; 1/4" diameter shoulder (1/32" tall) and then a 3/16" diameter by 1/16" long nub that sticks into the spring.  When it's assembled the stack-up looks like this (red arrow pointing at the intake valve retainer).

And the two valve retainers fresh off my manual lathe looked like this.  Crappy surface finish!

Pressing the valve cages into the aluminum and cutting the valves off were easy peasy.  

I've been stuck on the springs for at least a couple of weeks.  I've only made a couple of springs before but they didn't have a critical size like this.  I've always followed the step by step instructions on Dean's Photographica and they've worked but what's happening is that I wind the wire tight on to a piece of round bar, and they expand in diameter.  Say it's wound on 3/16 rod; they expand to 1/4" and the retainer falls into the spring (or screws itself down the wire ramp).  I can't seem to get the spring to a usable diameter.  It needs to be 3/16" inside diameter to fit over the valve cage and it can't be so big that the retainer falls into it.  I've tried winding onto a smaller diameter rod, but that one hardly expanded at all.  At this point, I have three that are too big and one that's too small. 

I thought my best chance would be to wind it on a 3/16 drill rod and clamp the wires securely.  To clamp the wires, I'd cross drill the rod and tap it for a couple of #2-56 screws.  Then it's clamp one end of the wire, count out the number of turns, and wrap the far end of the wire around the far screw, before putting it in the oven for heat treatment.  

I should point out that while this is on my Sherline lathe, that's just because the rod is held in the lathe chuck.  This isn't done under power: I turn the chuck by hand to put the wire on.  After the heat treatment, this one opened up to around .220, still just a bit too big.  The valve retainer slipped into the spring.

I haven't tried the exhaust valve spring, but I have some springs I bought back in the GB-22 project days and one looks like it just needs to be cut to length.

Plan B is to remake the valve retainers to be 3/8" OD with a 1/4" nub to fit inside the spring.  I don't think it matters and I've spent too long here.

Meanwhile, I'm making the muffler and searching the drawing to make sure there aren't parts left I haven't made.  I put in a hardware order to be sure I had everything to put it together and ordered an RC airplane carburetor.  I'm getting close to being able to put it fully together, if I can figure out how. 

Early College Covid Indications - Lots of Positive Tests, Nothing Bad

Author Daniel Horowitz, writing for the Blaze, summarizes the news on the COVID-19 front and it all seems like good news.  As of September 4th, over 11,000 college students have tested positive for the virus, although that was using the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test noted for a high false positive rate.  There have been zero hospitalizations and zero fatalities.  Sounds like good news all the way around, as we're in something like Day 200 of the 15 day shutdown to Flatten the curve. 

Remember the goal of flattening the curve? Ensuring that hospitals weren't overrun? Well, what do you call a scenario where thousands of cases result in zero hospitalizations? I'd call it the ultimate flat curve – or downright flat line. Yet rather than recognizing the detection of mild cases among college students as portents of good news, universities continue to sow panic for no good reason.

Dr. Andrew Bostom, a cardiovascular and epidemiology researcher, posted a spreadsheet on twitter of all the positive tests in 17 state university systems as of September 4.  Clearly a small sample of all the colleges in the nation, but the data looks like this:

 Since it's a PCR test, prior experience says the majority of those are false positives.  

Many of them could be false positives, insignificant viral loads, or the dead RNA of a virus that passed weeks ago still being carried around in the student's nasal passages. There is no metric for any of this being monitored in the testing. The irony of the University of Arizona using positive testing of benign cases as the baseline for such draconian measures is that so many of those tests turn out to be false positives. Out of the 13 positive results among members of the university's athletics department last week, 11 of them turned out to be false upon retesting.

That false positive rate (11/13) is  85%, so if we did a worst case analysis and assumed 90% of these college students were really negative, only 10% (1,100) were really positive.   Since it's such a small sample of students and schools, I have hope there really are 11,000 positives out there, although the more people who have had the virus and developed antibodies to it the more likely we achieve "community immunity." 

As always with this situation, the real thing to be afraid of is the State.  

Last Monday, Ohio Health Director Lance D. Himes signed an order requiring even students who test negative to be isolated in a quarantine house on campus. It includes asymptomatic individuals or even those merely "exposed" to a COVID-positive individual. They'd be barred from exiting the quarantine house without written permission from a health official, and individual universities would decide whether parents are even allowed to visit them. This is a mandate for de facto prison – all for an "epidemic" built on false or notional positives with no health risks beyond the ordinary bugs that spread on campuses every year.

By sending your children to Ohio's public colleges, you are essentially sending them off to jail, because it's nearly impossible for them not to be quarantined. Ohio State University is conducting mandatory random testing of 8,000 students each week via their "surveillance testing program." Based on everything we know about false positive or old dead viral RNA, it's a near-certainty that the testing will net dozens of people every week. Now, this order will force numerous friends and dorm-mates to be confined as well.

Because of the amount of latitude variance that the US covers, we bridged two zones in R. Edgar Hope-Simpson's curves of influenza epidemic extent vs. time of year (which has empirically worked for related viruses well - in the sense that it "rhymes," not duplicates). In the first quarter, the worst places to be were high latitude - the sun was low in the sky.  As the sun moved to return to those northern states (April through September), the problem moved south, but the overall numbers of deaths were lower than in the winter; again, similar to Hope-Simpson's work on Influzenza. 

The summer isn't over, so the story hasn't played out, but the following plot shows data as of Sept. 7th. 

(Source: Ivor Cummins in Twitter feed of The Ethical Skeptic.)

This plot is busy, but straightforward.  The top, gray, bar graph is the number of positive tests (they use the word "cases," which I disagree with using since the tests have such high false positives).  Zero is the red line in the middle and reflected below that red line, so that bigger numbers go farther down, is the number of deaths.  They both use date for the horizontal axis.  You can see, for example that in the spring the number of confirmed cases isn't terribly different from the number of deaths.  Because of the CDC screwup on tests, we didn't test people unless we were pretty sure they had the disease. You can see that change completely starting in June when the number of tests tripled while the number of deaths increased but not as much.  Since the peak around the start of August, both positive tests and deaths have been decreasing. 

The obvious good news is that CDC-reported Covid deaths are as low as they were in late March, and headed lower.  Graph at William M. Briggs, "Statistician to the Stars".  Since Gov. Cuomo and other northern governors already killed off the most vulnerable in their states, that high death rate is unlikely to repeat.

Laborious Day 2020

It has been one of those days where I just can't get things done - or done right.  As usual, more details when I'm a bit less pissed off about things.  

In the interim, please accept my most favorite photo of the last few months.  

Excaligator - heh.   

How Can the CDC Impose a Moratorium on Evictions?

The first I heard about this was in a comment last Tuesday night by Divemedic to my post on Property Rights.  A little earlier, he had put up a post on his own blog on the subject.  (You do read him, don't you?)

President Trump's CDC today issued an order that prevents landlords from evicting tenants from residential property, as long as the renter makes less than $99,000 a year. The order states that the tenant is still required to pay rent. Well, if I can't evict them, just how am I going to do that?

The CDC's order went into effect on Wednesday and will remain in effect for the rest of the year.  The subject has naturally triggered a lot of reaction from those of us who want a smaller government and has been written about in a variety of places, such as Reason and the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE.  

Under what power does the CDC; the Centers for Disease Control, have any control over the living arrangements of anyone in the country?  Renters sign a lease with the landlord and agree to pay rent when it's due.  In many cases, like Divemedic's, the landlord is just another small business, not some faceless multinational corporation that can absorb losses for a long time.  The landlord has to pay his expenses on the rental property, typically a mortgage and property taxes.  So the bank is going to demand on time payment from the landlord who is going to either pay out of pocket or lose the property.  The bank likewise has some real expenses due to its written loans, too.  Why is it OK to support the renter but not care if everyone else in the chain loses money?

For legal justification, the Trump administration cites one vague law that says during a pandemic the CDC director “may take such measures to prevent such spread of the diseases as he/she deems reasonably necessary, including inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles believed to be sources of infection.”
...
“All of these measures are localized, and limited to prevent the spread of an infection in a single building or location,” wrote constitutional law professor and Cato Institute scholar Josh Blackman. “None of these examples are even remotely close to a nationwide moratorium on evictions. This action is far beyond the scope of delegated authority.”

I don't see a single word, let alone phrase, in that quote from the law that applies here.  Those renters aren't spreading any disease, and being unable to pay rent because their job ceased to exist doesn't sound anything like, “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles...”

Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican, said, “[this is] transferring control of private property from the lawful owner to the renter, [and] is possibly the most socialist action our government has taken in decades” and “The CDC order is an affront to the rule of law, and an emasculation of every legislator in this country - state and federal.”  Massie is joined by fellow Kentucky Republican, Senator Rand Paul, who added, “CDC does not have the authority to do this.  It's dangerous precedent and bad policy.”

The Fed.gov, with their shutdown orders, have trashed the lives of millions of Americans as they trashed jobs and entire businesses.  I've even heard libertarians say that in a situation like this the Fed.gov is responsible for harming those people and should essentially pay people damages to offset the harm they've done.  The fact they can't arrange the money to pay those damages is a sign of the dysfunctionality of the government.  In March, they came to an agreement bloated with pork and stupid spending, increasing the deficit by $2 trillion; a few weeks ago it looked like a leaner $1 trillion bill was on the horizon, but that fell apart.  They can't reach an agreement because Nancy Antoinette is still speaker and controls the house.  She won't give up the Evil Party's $2 trillion worth of giveaways to leftist causes, which would make it a $3 trillion bill.  Those who think spending $1 trillion is serious money seem to have won the day and blocked those with the Modern Monetary Theory/AOC's “you just pay for it” mindset.

Even John Maynard Keynes said printing money out of thin air was something to be done in bad times and not all the time.  While I'm a "sound money" guy - I strongly believe in a commodity standard, whether gold or silver or some other limited hard asset - I've said many times that I think a fiat dollar like we have could work.  Our leaders and central bankers would have to not play politics with the dollar, not use the printing press to buy votes, not try to change the dollar's value to tweak other countries and they would have to live within a constrained budget.  They should not be allowed to print money to fund foreign wars or the welfare state.  The only difference is that our legislators would have to be grown up, mature leaders.  

In other words, we're screwed.  

 (Tami Chappell/REUTERS/Newscom)

 

 

Weekend Situation Report

It's just over a week since I did my last look at the deteriorating situation in the civil war we're not engaged in.  Certainly nothing has gotten better or offered more optimism.  The violence level nationally has cranked up and not gone down in any way.  Phil at BustedNuckles linked to a scary article at American Partisan about the situation on the ground in Portland.  These are combat veterans with experience from "multiple tours in the late 2000s" and they describe a well-trained unconventional army that ran them off.  It's worth your time to read, but here's the opening paragraph.

“Me and three of my buddies were in Portland this weekend, got attacked by Antifa. There’s a Twitter video with millions of views on it. They ended up on Hannity and Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro etc., of us getting beaten with bats and rocks the size of cantaloupes thrown at us, getting spit on etc. We were all carrying pistols as well. Opportunity, ability and jeopardy, we were in a deadly force situation and we could easily articulate the use of deadly force, but they had pepper sprayed us. They were using industrial strobe lights on us, etc. We couldn’t PID our target and what lied beyond it, They did a great job of taking our situational awareness away, it was fucking incredible.
Bro my perspective on this changed so much.

To me, these are mob tactics that will destroy an under-prepared group going against them.  They've been fighting a guerilla war unopposed for 100 days and are now very confident in their guerilla tactics.  It has always been assumed that the mobs will scatter after the first shots.  If you've taken the common self defense training classes for concealed carrying, I'm sure you've heard this before: if you're surrounded, make the closest one bleed and the rest will probably decide they need to be somewhere else.   

As Michael Bane says in his podcast this week, the Kyle Rittenhouse incident says that's just not true anymore.  Kyle was attacked by three separate guys over a period of time; it wasn't three guys alongside each other that were all in one group; it was spread out in time and space.  The second guy, the guy with the skateboard, knew there was gunfire and he knew Kyle had defended himself.  Kyle is running away and is chased by this guy.  The third guy, the guy with the gun in his right hand until Kyle blew off his biceps, was even farther along in time and he definitely knew that Kyle had already shot the other two guys in self defense.  The fact he was using a rifle didn't slow down any of these guys at all. 

That's just Kenosha.  Last night, BLM and Antifa not only went into Rochester, New York, destroying restaurants and scaring off diners, they went into suburbs and climbed on people's roofs, probably to look for ways into their houses.  They also attacked an apartment building.

Around the same time, the BLM mob was attacking in Denver, again attacking restaurants and the people dining there, as well as cars in traffic.  

Two weeks ago, I was saying to mentally try to have a plan for being out dining and having BLM screaming in your face to raise your hand to show support or having lights shined in your windows in the middle of the night.  That needs to be expanded.  Assuming you don't need to train for actual combat, you need to expand that to include restaurants being set on fire while you're inside, and people climbing around on your roof.  Think about lasers that can blind you shining into your house.  Above all know your neighborhood and the nearest neighborhoods from which people could walk to your house.  Again, there's that axiom that "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy" but it's also undeniable that having a plan and thinking about these things puts you ahead of 90% of the people.

The overall situation continues in its down spiral with the revolutionary forces getting bolder and taking bigger steps.  People talk as if they expect fighting to remain sporadic until the election, and then it starts off no matter who wins.  I could see wider scale fighting as potentially starting any moment. 

A group of BLM rioters on the roof of a Rochester home.  From The Gateway Pundit.

I know we have a cadre of trained operators who could put a world of hurt on the BLM/Antifa organizations, without involving the regular US Army.  I also know that in the last hundred years, regular armies have fared poorly against insurgencies like this; regular armies are built to fight regular armies, not guerilla armies on their home turf.  I would hope that the Fed.gov has infiltrated these groups and is gathering the intelligence needed to take them down.  At least, I hope they have the sense to be doing that. 

Thursday We Had The Other Two Out of Three

On Sunday, I remarked that I got up expecting three milestones from SpaceX including two Falcon 9 launches in one day.  While I'm not sure nobody in history has launched two orbital missions in one day, I'd be surprised if it had happened.  

Thursday morning saw the Falcon 9 Starlink mission that was scrubbed Sunday morning due to weather.  Launch was on time at 8:48 AM and the 60 satellites were delivered to orbit as planned.  Booster B1060 landed on the drone ship OCISLY about 360 miles northeast of the cape 9 minutes later.  No word on the fairings or if there was an attempt to recover them.  Ordinarily, I'd assume there would be, but with the SACOM-1B mission on Sunday, they might have had to choose where to send their only two recovery ships.  

This marks the 11th flight of Version 1 Starlink satellites and 12th overall.  Assuming all 60 satellites on this mission pass their checkout, SpaceX now has around 650 usable satellites up there (ride share missions have left a few satellites out of the 60).  This ignores any satellites that might have failed on orbit and been lost - there have been reports of five being lost.  There are two more Starlink launches set for this month and one in October.  So far.

As usual, there's a full mission video with commentary covering the last minutes of the countdown and lasting until the satellites are deployed.  

After Sunday's scrub of the planned hop of Starship prototype SN6, due to high winds, SpaceX targeted Thursday for the next day they'd try with backup days of Friday and Saturday.  Unlike other hop attempts, the required work went smoothly and the hop went nominally. SN6 lifted off within five hours of the Starlink mission. 

Plans now are for the destructive test of serial number 7.1, already built and waiting to be carried out to the test site.  This will test the most likely flight construction of the Starship, using 304L (low carbon) stainless steel sheet.  This is scheduled for as early as Sunday, with road closures in the area from 8AM to 8PM.  

Behind that is one that's a major step in the prototyping, serial number 8.  

If things go according to plan, Starship SN8 will be the first ship to fly with a nosecone, flaps, header tanks, and three Raptor engines. The ship will also be the first to attempt a truly bizarre skydiver-style landing, in which SN8 will essentially fall through the atmosphere belly-first before flipping upright at the last second for a soft landing.

To do that maneuver, SN8 will hop much higher than 5 and 6 have; to "tens of thousands" of feet.  Behind SN8, the very fist Super Heavy booster stage is scheduled to start construction soon, once the high bay is completed.  It's currently close, but not fully complete. 

 

 

Who Had Florida Earthquake On Their 2020 Card?

We don't get many earthquakes in Florida, but today brought a quake to the part of the Florida panhandle referred to as L.A. - Lower Alabama.  The L.A. earthquake was originally rated at Magnitude 4.0, but was downgraded to 3.8 on closer examination.   

They also refined the location to just over the Alabama border, but it's essentially on the Alabama/Florida state lines.  The nearest city in Florida is Century, while the nearest city in Alabama is Flomaton.  The same area has had 10 quakes in the last year, all of them weaker than this morning's.

While there was no reported damage or injuries, according to the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, hundreds reported feeling the quake. It occurred more than 6 miles beneath the surface, according to the Geological Survey, and was the first of the year in the state.

Florida is a big state, and can really be thought of as three different states: the very southernmost part from the keys through around Lake Okeechobee, the central part from there up to around where the Suwanee river meets the gulf coast, then the panhandle area that stretches 370 miles east to west.  The western part of the panhandle is on Central time; the dividing line is west of Tallahassee, close to the west side of the Apalachicola Forest.  I've never been near Century or Pensacola, but even from here on the central east coast, that's got to be about a nine hour drive. 

Nobody was hurt and no damage was reported, but it still brought this to mind:

Watermelon Socialists Unveil Themselves

They seem to be a largely UK organization, but I bet most people have heard of the group Extinction Rebellion.  They're probably best known for a comically bad attempt to spray fake blood (beet juice) all over the Treasury building in Westminster.  Because reasons, I suppose.  Another protest was so bad the people they need for allies, everyday working people, took matters into their own hands.  The group was blocking The Tube, the rail system people use to commute to work, and commuters dragged protesters from the roof of an underground train so they could get on with their days.  The stories are some of the commuters beat the crap out of the protesters. Way to get people on your side!

They may think they're dedicated to The Cause but speaking as a Southerner you can understand when I say they're about as sharp as a bowling ball.  Bless their hearts.  

Eric Worrall, writing a Watts Up With That gets right to the heart of the matter with a photo:

Photo credit: Neil Hamilton, UKIP MS England and Wales  

Again, sharp as a bowling ball.  How can anybody espouse socialism as a cure for their imagined environment problem when socialist countries have had the worst records on pollution in the history of the world?  Did they ever hear of something called the Chernobyl nuclear disaster?  Did they ever hear it was largely caused by the Soviet government concealing major reactor design flaws instead of addressing them?  Listen up, Extinction Rebellion.  You know, the Soviet Union's flag featured that hammer and sickle you guys have on your banner.  It shouldn't be that hard to look up.  

Wait, I know the punch line!  They didn't do socialism right!  Right?  No matter how many times you point out to socialists the disastrous, murderous history of socialist regimes, the answer is always that they just didn't do it right.  My answer to that is always to say, "if nobody that has tried it in all of human history has gotten it right, what makes you think you're smarter than everyone before you in all of human history?"

The article on WUWT, by the way, links to a summary of how bad it was in the old Soviet Union written by a guy who actually lived there as a reporter on environmental issues.  I'll borrow one little paragraph out of it:

The Niger delta? The development of the oil industry of Western Siberia was carried out from the 1970s with great haste, using pipes and welding equipment that were often defective. By the 1990s the wells and pipelines were leaking like sieves, a Niger delta every few hundred kilometres. The Bhopal disaster in India? It’s only through enormous good luck that in Dzerzhinsk, the city east of Moscow that remains a key centre of the chemical industry, thousands of residents haven’t been killed by a similar leak of toxic gas. An activist from the place once argued to me that in any case, the levels of dioxins and other lethal chemicals to which the population was exposed ensured a cumulative “Bhopal” every few years. What were the local morbidity rates? Either the information was purposely never collected, or effectively suppressed.

The entire article is a couple of screens long and has example after example.  The punch line to this story is the article describing how bad the environmental care was in the Soviet Union is published on The Socialist Alliance, a pro-socialism Website!  Of course, the root cause of their problems is that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics didn't know how to do socialism right.  

As Ronald Reagan said, “Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it.”

Property Rights Are Human Rights

That old quote by economist Murray Rothbard ran through my head when I heard of the book justifying and praising looting by Marxist writer Vicky Osterweil, "In Defense of Looting."  Peter, Bayou Renaissance Man, wrote about this and more yesterday.  No link for Ms. Osterweil because through the concentrated weirdness of the Internet, I might get her a book sale.  I don't know of a way to loot her book from Amazon.  

To borrow a couple of concepts from Rothbard, 

“The human right of every man to his own life implies the right to find and transform resources: to produce that which sustains and advances life. That product is a man’s property. That is why prop­erty rights are foremost among human rights and why any loss of one endangers the others.

For ex­ample, how can the human right of freedom of the press be pre­served if the government owns all the newsprint and has the power to decide who may use it and how much? The human right of a free press depends on the human right of private property in newsprint and in the other es­sentials for newspaper production. In short, there is no conflict of rights here because property rights are themselves human rights. What is more, human rights are also property rights!”

Author Brad Polumbo, a self-described, “libertarian-conservative journalist" writing at the Foundation for Economic Education,” digs into the controversial NPR interview with Osterweil at the FEE website. Osterweil's interview (and presumably her book) is sloppily-thought out, full of the Marxist, economically illiterate, identity politics-driven drivel we're surrounded by.  She tells the NPR interviewer:

“When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot,” Osterweil says. “That's the thing I'm defending. I'm not defending any situation in which property is stolen by force. It's not a home invasion, either. It's about a certain kind of action that's taken during protests and riots.”

“[Looting is] taking those things that would otherwise be commodified and controlled and sharing them for free,” she continues. “[Looting] demonstrate[s] that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.”

Contempt for looting, meanwhile, is driven by “anti-Blackness and contempt for poor people who want to live a better life,” Osterweil claims.

Sloppily-thought out?  Let's start out simply with her definition of looting.  It's self-contradictory.  She says, "I'm not defending any situation in which property is stolen by force" but how is taking something from a store and setting fire to the store not just the use of force but the use of deadly force that would justify a self-defense shooting?  As Polumbo points out:

After all, what happens if people do not allow the mob to take their property?

They end up like David Dorn, a former police officer who was shot and killed by rioters while trying to protect a pawn shop from looting. Or, they end up like one elderly business owner who was caught on camera trying to protect his store and beaten to a pulp by rioters for his troubles.

NY Post Twitter photo

Far from being "free", as Osterweil says, everything stolen imposes costs on other people.  Far from being equitable, the looters dominate the looted either killing mercilessly (like retired officer Dorn) or just beating enough to break bones (like the gentleman shown above).  

If the owners aren't in the store, and don't suffer beatings or worse, they're most likely still financially ruined with their lives and dreams shattered.  Osterweil talks about insurance, the usual nonsense about insurance replacing things, but I'd bet that even if the store owners don't file any claims as a result of the riots, their rates will go up next year because the risks in their neighborhood skyrocketed.  The Watts riots in Los Angeles were studied and said to have reduced the quality of life improvement for the blacks living in that area for at least a decade.  The entire community suffers from looting.

The plain truth is this is the same communist drivel we've heard for as long as we've been aware of the world.  Communists like Osterweil think looting is nonviolent because they don't believe in property rights.  Osterweil wants to eliminate private property with every aspect of life controlled by the omnipresent government.  Her argument that looting is nonviolent stands in contrast to the body count since the rioting started, currently near 20.  Wishing looting to be victimless and innocent doesn't make it so.  The history of communist revolutions is that useful idiots like Ms. Osterweil end up in front of the firing squad fairly quickly.  Communist leaders don't want revolutionaries once they're in charge; they want obedient servants. 

Monday Mirth

It has proven impossible to stay on top of things well enough to have a post to write tonight, so as I try to do, a few things I've found or had emailed to me...

I know the feeling...

Herschel Walker referred to Donald Trump as a long time friend.  This is around when they met, when Herschel went to play for the USFL New Jersey Generals, which Trump owned, in 1984.  

There's a bright side to everything.  Can't make fun of his braces if they can't see them.  Of course, I have some land to sell to anyone who thinks kids will wear masks all day. 

That's all I ever find in my avocados, too! 

One Out of Three Today

That's one out of three of the launches we expected.  Today was supposed to be dual launch of Falcon 9s from the Cape.  A Starlink launch this morning at 10:21 AM and the SAOCOM-1B satellite this evening at 7:18 PM EDT.  Over in Boca Chica, prototype SN6 was supposed to do a 150m hop today.  

When I checked in with SpaceX launches this morning, there was a notice that the weather yesterday interfered with prelaunch operations for the Starlink launch and it has been rescheduled for Tuesday morning, so the morning launch was off.  

As the day went by, I opened a tab on LabPadre where I've watched the majority of tests.  There was a mid-afternoon test where they got close to lighting the engine but aborted.  An apparent recycle that didn't involve sending crews to the pad and then nothing, so the hop was off.  

Luckily, the SAOCOM-1B launch went off without a hitch and it went as we had hoped for.  (That link is to the SpaceX mission video; here's some info on the SAOCOM-1B mission)  The launch trajectory went south, perhaps 10 degrees east of directly overhead, and then the booster returning to the Cape (Landing Zone 1) also went overhead and we were able to see the ~25 second long "entry burn" about a minute before landing.  

Going up on the left and coming down on the right.  Through the tens of Falcon 9 launches we've watched, this is only the second time I've seen this burn, and both the first time I've seen it in the daytime and the first time I've photographed it.  All this from my side yard. 

Due to the flight trajectory we got the launch sounds for a very long time, easily a solid six minutes, ending with the window-shaking sonic boom of the booster on return to the Cape.

We had rainy weather all afternoon but the clouds thinned just enough to catch part of the ascent and the last minute or so of the descent. 

Maybe 20 years ago, I heard a Space Shuttle launch manager say, "you have to get used to disappointment in this business" and that's still the truth.  We started out hoping to see three launches and consider ourselves lucky to have seen one as well as we did.  Next attempt at hopping SN6 will be tomorrow, 8 AM to 8 PM, CDT.  Next attempt at the Starlink launch will be Tuesday morning.  It's not like a long dry spell. 

Let Me Be The First to Call Florida's Covid Outbreak Ending

With the disclaimer that I don't read enough other people to know if I'm the 900th to call it.  Probably not, though.  

I base this on a few numbers from the Florida state Department of Health.  I think the overall argument is easy to see.  Every single stat that I can get from the web site (and I'd like a lot more stats than I can get) is getting better.  This is the overall picture.  

Top left to bottom right: Emergency Department visits with influenza-like illness, then documented new cases.  Bottom left is Emergency Department visits with Covid-like illness and the bottom right is the Percent Positive for Laboratory Testing ("for" is a strange word there to me).  

Everything is getting better.  The ED Visits chart shows current numbers are under a third of what they were in early July.  New Cases are about the 35 or 40% of what they were.  

The time scale is different in the next plots, but the numbers are both moving in the right direction.  The two plots don't show the same sample; deaths seem to be from two weeks to months behind when a new case presents to the system, but the important characteristic is that deaths are declining rapidly.  

My county (Brevard) is in the lowest sixth of rates in the state, with a case rate of 1241 per 100,000, or 1.24%.  We haven't had a day with over 100 new cases since 8/8 and the last week has averaged 42 cases/day.  

The best read on this I've seen lately is one Irish posted several days ago - Lockdown Lunacy 3.0 - it's over on JB Handley's blog, but all the numbers in Florida are all pointed in the right direction.  Handley goes into Edgar Hope-Simpson's important work on influenza and seasonal patterns, which explain why the numbers in the northern tier of states were highest early in the year, and peaked later in the year in the southern tier.  The media made an enormous fuss over this trend, but it's what viruses do.  Irish biochemist Ivor Cummins gives a clear explanation of the seasonality in this short video.  Handley embeds the same video. 

Of course, lots has been learned in the last few months, both in our treatments of the virus and the knowledge of the virus itself.  Among the most interesting to me is the discovery that our T-cell immunity seems to be conveying immunity to this virus in most people.  That implies this coronavirus is genetically similar enough to other coronaviruses (mostly colds) we've been exposed to in our lifetimes.  That drastically drops the number of infections to achieve herd immunity to around the number of cases there have been.  The utter uselessness of the harsh lockdowns is interesting but not "new".  While that linked post is two months old, every study since then has reached the same conclusion.    

I also find it interesting that children apparently get the virus but don't spread it (more in Handley's post) and that so-called "super spreader" events have only occurred indoors.  One or two have occurred in events that had an indoor and outdoor component, but none are documented in outdoor events.  

NASA Just Snuck Out a Revised Cost Estimate on SLS

Ars Technica space reporter Eric Berger (and stick to space, would ya, Eric?) reports today that  NASA quietly upped the cost estimates on the Senate Space Launch System. 

"Already within my short time on the job, NASA is checking-off key milestones and marching swiftly toward Artemis I," wrote Kathy Lueders, who moved into the job after leading the Commercial Crew program. "That mission, the first uncrewed flight test of our powerful Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, is just a little more than a year away from launch."

Lueders next discussed preparations for a "Green Run" test of the SLS rocket's core stage this fall, possibly by the end of October. ...

After discussing this and other details, Lueders then rather casually let it slip that, "NASA also aligned the development costs for the SLS and Exploration Ground Systems programs through Artemis I and established new cost commitments." The new development cost for SLS rocket is $9.1 billion, she said, and its budget for the initial ground systems to support the mission is now $2.4 billion.

Back in 2017, the last re-plan said the costs would be $7.17 billion and the first launch would be "December 2019-June 2020."  As of now, the first flight is expected by November of 21.  At the best, that's a 17 month slip from 6/20 to 11/21.  SLS is the gift that just keeps on taking. 

It was only a few weeks ago when we found that each of the four main engines of the SLS would cost $146 Million a piece, or just shy of $600 million for the engines - not counting anything else on the rocket.  These are the same hardware design as the Space Shuttle Main Engines, designed as reusable engines.  At the end of each flight that $600 million will be tossed into the Atlantic.  As I pointed out in that May post, 

SpaceX has set a goal for the next version of the Raptor engine of $250 thousand.  The published thrust in a vacuum of the SSME is 512,000 lbs.  The stated thrust of the Raptor v2 is 250 tons, or 500,000 lbs. 

Not that a Raptor could directly replace an SSME.  It would require redesign of the system. 

What are the chances that the November '21 SLS flight will happen?  It's hard to know.  Certainly the major obstacle to be cleared is the "Green Run" test firing, but there have also been Covid-19 delays.  The Green Run, at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, will be the first test of the entire hardware and "plumbing" system of SLS which will run the system for over eight minutes, the amount of time required for a mission.  

You might say, "What's the big deal?  These are Space Shuttle Main Engines; they're as well known as any engine that has ever flown, if not better.  All that SLS did was design in four instead of three and add some plumbing."  We can be sure both NASA and the contractors have simulated everything that can be simulated.  Unfortunately, that may not be enough.  As Berger points out:

Engineers familiar with testing large, complex systems for the first time say there is a low probability of a perfect test or a major structural failure. However, the highest probability is that NASA and Boeing discover some problems that will at least require several months to address before the core stage is deemed ready for launch.

It's not easy to correlate their simulation vs. reality experiences with the experiences I had in a completely different world.  I suspect the big picture is the same though: by this time, they've ruled out major failures that would blow up the booster on the test stand, but it may still be possible that they need to do design "tweaks" to get the system to work as desired.  If that "highest probability" outcome of having to do some redesign is what happens, the odds of a launch before the end of '21 drop to zero.  

SLS core on the test stand at Stennis Space Center.  NASA photo.

 

Not Widely Reported - More Shots Fired Between Protesters and Property Owners

Hat Tip to the Blaze, I read that a group of BLM activists en route to Washington D.C. got into a disturbance with property owners in Bedford, Pennsylvania.  According to WTAE in Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania State Police released the following statement. 

"The Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) Troop G Bedford station was contacted by a property owner on Monday, August 24 at 11:18 p.m. regarding a group of people in a private business parking lot. Troopers later learned the group was comprised of approximately 30 activists who are traveling on foot and in vehicles from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Washington, D.C. At approximately 11:35 p.m. at the same location and before state police arrival, the property owners confronted the activists. The confrontation escalated, and gunshots were exchanged between the property owners and the activists.

"One of the activists was struck by birdshot from a shotgun. The man was treated and released from the Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center, 1086 Franklin Street Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

"A shotgun, shotgun shells, a semi-automatic pistol and 9mm casings were all recovered at the scene."

Note that was Monday night, so well in advance of the open conflict in Kenosha last night.  

As usual, it's not really known exactly what happened, and this story is particularly hard to figure out.  The WTAE article interviews representatives from the demonstrators, who (of course) act as if they're perfectly innocent choir boys and had nothing to do with causing trouble.

In a video posted early Tuesday morning to Facebook, marcher Tory Lowe said the group had parked to organize before they walked up an incline when a man emerged from a house and started shooting at them with a rifle, firing at least seven shots.

"He was like three feet away from us shooting and I told him there was a minister here," Lowe said in a video posted to Facebook.

Wait... firing seven shots from three feet away and nobody got hit?  That's strange.  Then the article goes on to say

It's important to note that in the video, the sound of a gunshot is heard before a person across the street emerges from their house and confronts the group walking down the road. You then can hear more gunshots, and at some point the people across the street can be heard saying something to the activists. In its first press release, state police said an argument happened and then gunshots were fired.

So the official story doesn't match the station's story and, as always, neither story may match the truth.  

The article at The Blaze goes into some other incidents before and after this incident.  They're a roving band of troublemakers crossing the country, from Milwaukee to DC.

Still, in light of the shooting I would say the evidence is that the "mostly peaceful protests" that have led to widespread property destruction as well as tremendous human suffering have gone to the next stage.  The Rubicon has been crossed and those people who are losing everything have started fighting back.  It's hard to imagine the Antifa/BLM side backing down at this point so I can only see it getting worse for the foreseeable future.

My blog brothers down at Gun Free Zone in Miami have linked to a Michael Bane blog post that seems to be worth reading.  I don't think I can add anything to his list except maybe to emphasize situational awareness, what your city is like, what your neighborhood and the next neighborhood over are like, from state level down to your neighbors.  Think about the things you've seen happening, like being harassed in a restaurant or having lights shined in your windows in the middle of the night, and decide how you're going to handle things.  Having a plan, any plan, puts you better off than the vast majority of the population.

By now, everyone has heard of this CNN story and seen the display.  “Fiery but mostly peaceful” sounds like it could describe a cremation.  A funeral pyre.

What Is That Strange Thing SpaceX is Building at Boca Chica?

That's a question that has come up a lot among the crowds who follow the various channels of updates from SpaceX watchers.  NASASpaceflight.com calls them "Texas Tank Watchers" and sells merchandise with that on it. 

I've been watching this place for days, and don't really have a good feel for the positions of various things, but the construction can be seen on the far left in this view.

RGV Aerial photography, a guy who rents a Cessna 172 and pilot, then hangs out the window to take pictures gives this view from above.  

There's clearly a lot of rebar there, a pretty big hexagonal structure in the middle, and the rebar is forming large tubes inclined toward the center.   

Two sides quickly emerged in the debate: something related to hardware testing or a water tower to supply water for the launch deluge system.  To pick up the story from Teslarati:

As of almost two weeks ago, it was just shy of guaranteed that the concrete foundation SpaceX was working on would be wildly excessive for a water tower, turning it into a question of whether it would be a suborbital or orbital-class test stand for Starship.

Now, Musk has confirmed – somewhat surprisingly – that the foundation will ultimately support an “orbital launch mount” capable of hosting what will eventually be the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.

YouTube channel What About It? offers a rendering of one possible final result.  Looks plausible to me

With a diverter to help protect the reinforced concrete supports, since being hit with millions of pounds of thrust isn't good for concrete.  

A screen capture from RGV Aerial Photography might help you figure out the geometries of the different views. All annotations are mine.   

Back to Teslarati for some numbers

Barring additional changes, Super Heavy will be as tall as the entirety of a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket – first stage, second stage, and payload fairing included. Powered by up to 31 Raptor engines, the Super Heavy booster will produce upwards of 72,000 kN (16,000,000 lbf) of thrust at liftoff – nine times the thrust of Falcon 9, triple the thrust of Falcon Heavy, and double the thrust of Saturn V (the most powerful liquid-fuel rocket ever to reach orbit). Combined with Starship, the full stack will weigh roughly 5000 metric tons (11 million lbs) fully fueled. For the purpose of static fire testing and final vehicle checks after ignition but before liftoff, a Super Heavy-class launch mount will need to withstand more than 7200 tons (~16 million lbf) of force.

Just How Wrong Was The Population Bomb?

Just short of two years ago, I wrote a piece on the 50th anniversary of The Population Bomb.  The 1968 best seller was different from your typical apocalyptic stories; it was supposed to be serious science by an actual scientist Paul Ehrlich.  As I said at the time:

Doomsday prophesy sells, and doomsday from someone with a handful of letters after their name (MS, PhD etc.) sells even better.  The future didn't turn out quite as dismally as Ehrlich suggested; he famously lost a bet where he picked a "basket of commodities" and bet that these five metals would go up in price in 10 years (1980 to 1990) - they declined in price an average of 57.6% while the  population increased.  Nevertheless, he influenced a generation or two of policy makers.

Ehrlich didn't just stop with a prediction that a basket of metals would be more expensive in ten years, he said there would be mass starvation in the 1970s and humanity would die off soon thereafter.  

Ehrlich prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In conclusion, Ehrlich warned that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

It's hard to be much more wrong than Ehrlich.  In contrast, University of Maryland economist Julian Simon published his book The Ultimate Resource in 1981.  He argued that humans were intelligent beings, capable of innovating their way out of shortages by many alternative means.  

I think the history of the intervening years has shown that Simon was closer to right.  Despite the adamant desires of environmental alarmists, there has been no mass extinctions of humans, nor have there been “hamburger wars” for food.  People have innovated our way out of scarcities. 

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.  Together with Brigham Young University economics professor Gale Pooley, the two of them analyzed the two time periods, 1980 and 2017 (hat tip to FEE).  

In “The Simon Abundance Index: A New Way to Measure Availability of Resources,” we look at prices of 50 foundational commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals. Our findings confirm Simon’s thesis. Between 1980 and 2017, the world’s population increased from 4.46 to 7.55 billion or 69 percent. Yet, resources have become substantially more abundant.  

It's almost as if each and every soul born in those 37 years came with some of the resources to support them.   Anybody who has witnessed (or given!) a birth or two can assure you none of the newborns come with supplies for all their needs, so that's not how it happened.  It came about by the diligent efforts of individuals around the globe creating human progress.

Ehrlich and Simon looked at inflation-adjusted prices of commodities. By our count, those fell by 36 percent. Taking that analysis a step further, we have come up with a “time-price” of commodities, which allows us to cost resources in terms of human labor. We find that relative to the average global hourly income, commodity prices fell by 64.7 percent between 1980 and 2017.

Second, the price elasticity of population (PEP) allows us to measure sensitivity of resource availability to population growth. We find that the time-price of commodities declined by 0.934 percent for every 1 percent increase in the world’s population. Put differently, over the last 37 years, every additional human being born on our planet appears to have made resources proportionately more plentiful for the rest of us.

Third, we develop the Simon Abundance Framework, which uses the PEP values to distinguish between different degrees of resource abundance, from decreasing abundance at the one end to super abundance at the other end. Considering that the time-price of commodities decreased at a faster proportional rate than population increased, we find that humanity is experiencing superabundance.

Finally, we create the Simon Abundance Index (SAI), which uses the time-price of commodities and change in global population to estimate overall resource abundance. The SAI represents the ratio of the change in population over the change in the time-price, times 100. It has a base year of 1980 and a base value of 100. Between 1980 and 2017, resource availability increased at a compounded annual growth rate of 4.32 percent. That means that the Earth was 379.6 percent more plentiful in 2017 than it was in 1980.  [Note: all bold added - SiG]

This post struck a chord with me because I've been reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger.  Shellenberger was a celebrated environmentalist until he started saying the conventional green approach was hurting more than it helped.  For example, he started saying we couldn't possibly meet "green energy" needs without nuclear power.  In Apocalypse Never, he argues that the overreaction to climate change is causing damage, and while "climate change" might be a real problem, it's far from our biggest.  I'm only a quarter through the book and already in the first few chapters he's blown away some of the most common stories you hear, from the Amazon burning last year to plastic straws to the threats to gorillas in the Congo.  Time after time he shows how the first world's environmentalists are the problem.  I had intended to provide more detail in "book review" as I've done a few times, but I'll finish the book first. 

The myth of peak oil in one plot.  In 1980 we had only 27 years worth of oil left; 37 year later in 2017 instead of being without oil for a decade, we were down to only 46 years worth of oil left.  Say what?  One guy who has studied the Permian Basin in the Southwest US says it's totally reasonable to consider it a permanent source.  Essentially infinite.  Of course, what happened was that new techniques were developed to get oil out of the ground and that increased the amount that was recoverable.  All because the free market was allowed to function properly.