Solar Just Makes Sense

In the last year I've started to get more interested in power banks and solar energy, both to reduce my usage since starting work-from-home in March, and to have energy ready to charge my phone and stuff in case I lose power here at home. This interest got more acute in the last couple of weeks, when Texas's power grid failed spectacularly.

I already had a collection of power banks acquired from conferences in my old job, and two of those were at least nominally solar-powered. I then decided to buy another one at Christmas, from a name-brand power bank manufacturer, but while it has a lot of capacity it turns out to be pretty bad as a solar charger (it's from Anker, incidentally, but I intend this to discourage you from getting the solar versions of these power banks, rather than that brand).

So instead I went on Wirecutter and found a rundown of portable solar panels, and bought one to see how it worked. I got the X-Dragon, their second choice, because the Big Blue was more expensive than what Wirecutter had (prices change).

Since then, I've set up the panel in my office window every morning, and connected up or two devices. Usually I'm filling up one of the power banks (primarily that solar Anker), and sometimes I'm charging the iPhone or AirPods or something. But usually it's the power banks, since filling those up lets me charge other devices when the sun isn't out.

I'd thought I might have trouble keeping all of the power banks charged, but between charging my iPad and iPhone every day, I'm actually running a surplus of power for those (which means I can connect a USB-connected desk fan my sweetie gave me last year). Unfortunately I can't connect the solar panel to my laptop, or to anything that connects to it, so any reductions in energy I'm using are relatively small, though consistent.

But this leaves me with the sense that we need to build out much more solar capacity, at least in parts of the world where sunshine is easy to count on. With technology like Tesla Power Walls, we'd be able to store up a lot of capacity for when the sun isn't shining, and by pairing with other renewables, like wind (properly winterized, of course), hydroelectric and geothermal, we should be able to generate enough electricity in any sort of weather.

The other thing that occurs to me is that everyone having their own home electrical battery - let's say supplied by their building or homeowners' association or even their city - would completely change the nature of electrical utilities, if not do away with them.

You can argue that the function of a PG&E or a Con Edison is to maintain the physical infrastructure of the power network, including the cables and wires that bring the centrally generated power to each home. But if each house has their own decentralized way of generating that power - most likely to be solar or geothermal, since wind and hydro are harder to generate at that scale - what is the utility company's function?

Because solar is unreliable, and geothermal is expensive and not available everywhere, the utility probably needs to continue to act as a central storehouse of energy. Though again, if the individual home's storage is designed well enough (and with enough capacity), the central power grid becomes redundant, doesn't it?

This is all spitballing, because I'm not an electrical engineer or an architect of power grids. But the question becomes relevant - if a common carrier service like electricity generation actually should be run by a private corporation with a profit motive that doesn't necessarily align with the needs of its customers.

That's not to say that profit is by its definition wrong - but the quarterly driven thinking of basically all companies nowadays means that an energy provider's focus is on increasing its profit at the end of the quarter, rather than on providing the best amount of energy to its customers.

As I said, all spitballing. But again, my experience with solar in the last week or so is showing me that we're missing a huge opportunity to generate clean and reliable energy, for free, from a completely renewable resource. It's great that I can charge my iPhone, iPad, iPod and AirPods (and as I discovered today, my Apple TV remote) completely from solar energy collected on my Anker power bank. But those are a drop in the bucket compared to my TV, personal laptop, work laptop (and monitor), lights and appliances.

It'd be good to figure out this question sooner rather than later.

Coronavirus: Failures of Leadership and of Vision

As we trudge on toward a year since my company sent us to work from home and the Bay Area and State of California closed down, I find myself thinking about Australia.

One of my sisters happens to live there now, a decision that seemed a little unwise at this time last year when large parts of that continent were on fire. But since the pandemic, it's seemed a little wiser - she's still working from home but the shops and restaurants are open, she can see her friends, and life looks to have gone back to something approaching normal.

More gallingly, a google search for "Covid Australia" brings up a little graph that indicates two points. One is that the deadliest day for Australia during the pandemic was 4 September, when 59 people died of the disease - more people died yesterday of the coronavirus in the US than in Australia since the pandemic began. The more damning statistic is that Australia appears not to have had a Covid-19 death since 28 October.

I'm not saying Australia is easy to emulate. For one thing, it's an island/continent way out in the Southern Hemisphere, relatively far from anywhere else - because it's the only nation on that continent/island it's easy to limit travel in and out. It's also not the country with the best Covid response, nor even in the top five - the likes of Taiwan and New Zealand and Vietnam have all had fewer than 40 deaths. By the way, for some reason my source doesn't mention Mongolia, which has had a whopping 2 deaths from the coronavirus - wtf?

But Australia, like New Zealand, Taiwan, Iceland, Singapore and Vietnam, has set out explicitly to eliminate the virus from its shores. They haven't eliminated it completely, as yesterday there were 6 new cases reported in Australia, but it's clear that setting an ambitious goal to get to zero has allowed Australia to take steps that let it get the virus under control.

I contrast that with the response here, where from the start the talk has been to "flatten the curve". The implication being that we'll all get the virus anyway, but we should at least make sure that we don't overload our local health services when we do.

Except, news flash: there were parts of the holiday season just gone when certain regions of California had no ICU beds available for severe cases. Own goal.

There might be a lot of immediate reasons for this - it could even be that hospital groups want a certain amount of traffic to come their way, since they get paid per procedure here in the US. But more important is the idea that we've become so unwilling to swing for the fences that we think we can't do any better. And so the message from Washington DC and from Sacramento has focused on slowing the spread, rather than stopping it.

As a country, we seem to have thrown up our hands and given up on all of the problems facing us. We did it in 2012, when Sandy Hook Elementary was shot up; since then the Onion has had to regularly trot out its school shooting headline: "No Way to Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

We did it in 2014 when Michael Brown was shot in the back by a police officer. And we did it in 2009 when the Affordable Care Act added a layer of complexity to our already byzantine healthcare system. We're doing it again in 2020/2021, with the coronavirus and the California wildfires and the complete disintegration of Texas's unregulated power grid following a once-in-a-lifetime winter storm.

That last one, incidentally, is the granddaddy of them all, because we've also thrown up our hands and given up on tackling climate change, which means these once-in-a-lifetime storms are going to become once-a-year storms.

We've given up on tackling income inequality, finding people good jobs after technology has made their existing ones obsolete, securing our government and election infrastructure from foreign and domestic cyberattacks, supporting our allies in Europe and Asia, preserving abortion rights here at home, and on finding ways for convicts and veterans to re-enter society.

A blogger my girlfriend reads notes that countries descend into fascism when elites can't even recognize that problems exist - his point is that with each of these problems we fail to tackle, we inch (or stride, or even leap) closer to the day when a presidential candidate succeeds in subverting the democratic process to take power and eliminate his enemies. And that's the most heartbreaking thing we've given up on: rule of law and protecting democratic norms, following the coup attempt on 6 January at the Capitol.

America likes to say it's number one, but we're not doing anything to maintain that status. And if America ceases to be the guarantor of personal and political freedoms (even when it's denied those freedoms to people in the Global South), there's no telling how long countries with open societies and liberal democracy will be able to hold onto their own freedoms.

Sort it out, America.

Super Bowl LV: What a Difference a Year Makes

I have absolutely no thoughts on the actual Super Bowl that just ended, other than to congratulate Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for their victory, and to offer my condolences to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.

But all I can think of as the curtain falls on this year's event and the NFL season just ended, is where I was when I watched last year's Super Bowl. It was early February, and I was up at Bear Valley for a weekend of skiing with my dad. We watched the first half of the game at the pizza place at the Bear Valley Lodge, then drove down the mountain, in driving snow on a non 4-wheel-drive, to the Round Table Pizza in Arnold for dinner, where we caught the final quarter.

How was I to know then that it would be my last trip outside the Bay Area for a year and counting? Coronavirus was a thing, of course, especially because my girlfriend was traveling for work that weekend and had to take precautions, but we were still more than a month off from when my company had us start working from home, and from when the Bay Area instituted its first stay-at-home order.

At the time it was shaping up to be a normal year - I expected I'd do my usual trip to Europe, and hopefully take some other nice trip with my sweetie. Instead the farthest I've been from my house since then has been... San Francisco.

Gosh.

It begs the question of where and how I'll be watching the Super Bowl next year. Vaccines for the coronavirus exist now and they're filtering out into the population, but predictions are sometimes worse than meaningless. It'd be nice to be watching it at Bear Valley again, ideally not when there's a snowstorm and an hour-long drive ahead of me, but even that would be nice, as it'll mean we can leave home safely again.

And maybe I'll take this opportunity to hope for some improvements in America and the world. We're seeing some decent management from the new administration so far, even if the vaccine roll-out isn't going as well as we'd like, owing to the previous administration's incompetence and negligence. But more than good management I'll be hoping for vision - paying attention to the actual problems facing America and the underlying issues that leading to all this polarization and extremism.

It might be nothing more than a pipe dream, but I'm still keeping my fingers crossed.

Internet Self-Improvement: We Already Know the Answers We Seek

I was originally going to title this post "The Pointlessness of the Self-Improvement Internet", but decided that was too harsh, since I still think the idea of self-improvement is worthwhile. But it struck me the other day that a lot of the advice we seek is kind of pointless, because, as my actual title suggests, we already know what we need to do.

Someone on the Tim Ferriss Show - it might have been internet finance guru Ramit Sethi - once said that advice on the internet boils down to three questions:

• How do I get skinny?
• How do I get rich?
• How do I get laid?

To these I'd add a fourth, which is "How do I get published?"

(As a quick aside, it struck me a long time ago that these mapped pretty perfectly onto how I described my own goals)

The problem is that people looking for answers to these questions on the internet are actually looking for a shortcut - in each case, there are long-term and deeply unsexy ways of achieving all of these goals:

• How do I get skinny? Don't eat crap, eat less of it, and move around every day
• How do I get rich? Don't blow your money on stuff you don't want/need, and learn how money works
• How do I get laid? Scrub up, dress nice and cultivate an interesting life (this is relevant if you're looking for a relationship or just a hookup)
• How do I get published? Read a lot, write a lot, send out what you write (and revise intelligently)

In fact, as someone who's read a fair amount of self-improvement, self-help and productivity literature, I can attest that the best books on any of these subjects are clear on how slow and unsexy the best ways of achieving these goals are. There aren't really magic diets that will let you eat pizza every day and magically shred your belly fat, and there aren't scripts that will get you laid every time.

You can even go a step further and point out that almost all questions to advice columns have a simple answer. I read Dan Savage's Savage Love column each week, and whenever he gives the letter-writer the answer to DTMFA, you have to imagine the letter-writer already knows that they should be dumping the person who's caused them to write in. This goes equally well for Miss Manners and other types of advice columns - at some level you know what you should do in a given situation.

Though I'll say that it's not a bad thing that people are asking an impartial and knowledgeable third party to weigh in sometimes - someone's circumstances may have taught them all kinds of inappropriate ways of dealing with diet, relationships or money, so sometimes it is good to get a second opinion.

My objection, by the way, isn't to self-help or advice columns. I just get frustrated (with myself, because I do it all the time) when a situation gets over-complicated and over-thought, even though there's a pretty simple answer that's staring me in the face. To wit, if I want to slim down, I should take care of my body and be careful what I put in it; repeat as necessary for the other categories.

Still, it's also useful to find different approaches to all these questions - with fitness in particular, the things to do can change as you get into shape, so that what worked before just brings you to a plateau. Biggie Smalls put it wisely when he said, "Mo' money, mo' problems."

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's cheat day, so I need to go eat a donut. I'll worry tomorrow about how best to work it off!

Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on FX's The Americans

Just finished the Americans yesterday, after six seasons spread out over more than a year. I'm a little ambivalent, since the finale left a few things open that I'd have liked to see addressed. But even if I can't put it up in my top 5 all time great shows alongside the Wire, the West Wing and Justified (plus the Simpsons and Deep Space Nine), it was a well-done show that certainly belongs with the greats.

In terms of the plot, the cat-and-mouse game between Stan Beeman and the Jennings family was probably the best part of the show, better than the one between Hank and Walt in Breaking Bad. But the 80s soundtrack and visuals also drew me in episode after episode - seeing the houses and hotels that the characters inhabited was like delving into some kind of genetic memory for me, since it reminded me so much of the built environments I grew up in.

The other notable thing about the show was its brutality. Early on it struck me how every episode featured at least one fucked-up thing happening, from Philip and Elizabeth helping a South African anti-apartheid activist give a racist countryman a Soweto necktie, to Philip covering up various murders and deaths that happened around him.

Now, I promised spoilers, so spoilers will come after the jump:

In Praise of Sandman Mystery Theatre

I guess it's getting to be a cliche that I write to praise whatever comic I'm reading at the moment, but this post is just that: I restarted my collection of Vertigo's Sandman Mystery Theatre, and I'm glad I did.

I wasn't going to, initially. My Great Big Comics Re-read is in progress, as it has been for almost three years, and oddly enough it felt like I'd just recently read the collected and single issues I have. A few years ago I'd unearthed my old copies, which started about 24 issues in and missed the first issues of several successive storylines, and then at my now-departed local comics shop I found some beautiful collected editions that gathered one year's worth of issues in each volume. I picked up the first two volumes, which got me up to speed on where my single issues had started.

When I first started reading the series in the 90s, it was because of my interest in the wider DC Golden Age, spurred in part because of James Robinson's Starman series (which at one point featured a crossover with SMT and its artist, Guy Davis). It took a while for other Golden Age heroes to appear, but I was intrigued by the re-imaginings of characters like Hourman or the Crimson Avenger. And then I was further drawn in by the dark storylines and the trappings of the period.

It also helped that the series was subtly connected to Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where Wesley Dodds (the main character of SMT) is mystically influenced to start his adventures. This connection takes the form of prophetic dreams that plague Dodds in each story, and relate to the case he's working on. The connection was further exploited in the Sandman Midnight Theatre special, where Dodds encountered Dream during his captivity.

On this reread I'm less interested in the connections to the rest of the DC Universe (or the Vertigo-verse), but find myself more transfixed by the period details. I can't claim to be a great 1930s buff, but some of the other stories I've been enjoying lately, like HBO's Boardwalk Empire, put me in mind of SMT because of when they take place.

Part of the period detail is the look of Wesley Dodds, who's portrayed in most of the storylines less as a Batman-style playboy adventurer, and more as a kind of nerd who fights crime. Instead of being tall, handsome and strong-jawed, he's a bit dumpy and wears glasses.

But this portrayal of the main character brings to mind the other thing I'm enjoying about reading this series again. A key theme is the cruelty and indifference of the period, and it's unflinching in showing the effects on the victims and criminals of all the violence, racism and other horrors on display. Even the cops are casually cruel, as when one hints that he disavowed his sister because she married a black man; even Wesley Dodds wrestles with his own prejudices during a storyline that involves the murder of a string of gay men.

The reason I like this aspect of the series is that, especially in comics, we treat the 1930s as a time of innocence and fun, but it was actually fairly violent. It wasn't a patch on the 20s, when Prohibition turned basically all Americans into criminals, but it cemented the power of the gangsters who made their reputations in the previous decade. And on top of that, the Depression caused a huge dislocation of life and its certainties, which led to violence and fascism basically everywhere.

The Depression and the onset of fascism are hinted at in the book, but it's impossible to discount their influence on the tone of the book, and they make it a powerful response to the more libertarian/objectivist readings of superhero comics (e.g. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).

That said, I don't know if I've ever met anyone else who read Sandman Mystery Theatre when it was running, so I consider it one of the also-rans of Vertigo. This is unfortunate, because I consider it one of the better-written books from the imprint, for the reasons mentioned above. I'm glad that DC published those large collected volumes I found, but the thing I'd really love to see is an HBO adaptation of the book - I think the themes would work quite well on TV now, and they'd be able to make the setting look really good.

And more than anything, it'd be nice to see the book gain some new fans, and potentially lead to more collected editions...

Now Can We Take Right Wing Extremism Seriously?

For about four years, I've been one of many talking about the risks associated with the Trump Administration (for the year before that I was foolishly downplaying his chances of getting the nomination, let alone the presidency). Like loads of others, I've drawn comparisons between his regime and that of fascists, Nazis and authoritarians the world over - not just the paranoia of Hitler or the megalomania of Mussolini, but also the deep corruption of Suharto.

A lot of people have responded, to me and others, like we're over-reacting. When I made the comparison to Suharto, four years ago, a friend replied that he'd taken power in quite a bloody coup, whereas Trump had been elected. My response was that the Suharto comparison was his family - I predicted then that his children and wife (wives) would cash in and be at the heart of loads of shady deals. I think it's fair to say that I've been proven correct.

Where I differed from some commentators was in Trump's approach to authoritarianism. I believed (and still believe) that he's not trying to dismantle democratic institutions because he has some agenda - it's just that they stop him doing the things he wants, and so he wants to eliminate them. Others did see a willful destruction of democratic norms, whether because he wants a private army or because he's in the pay of someone like Vladimir Putin.

The attack on the US Capitol building this week sort of proves us both right - he probably knew exactly what he was doing when he whipped those people up and pointed them at the place where the November election was being certified. But it's also still hard to imagine there's some overarching plan to all of his machinations - he failed to get Mike Pence on-side for the coup, for example.

But I think the most important thing that's come out of this week's actions is that we can no longer ignore how right-wing extremism is the biggest problem facing America at the moment. The last few years we've seen people discount the problem, or suggest that we on the left will let Islamist terrorists off but we freak out more about supposed right-wing extremists. But the proof is there on the screen - they exist, they're being directed firehose-like at democratic institutions, and they're racking up a body count.

This isn't to discount Islamist terror, by the way. ISIS is out of the news because of the coronavirus pandemic, but they're still out there, organizing and inspiring attacks in Asia and Europe, including two in France just last year. They're an ever-present threat, but attacks in the US have been fairly rare in the last few years, with 9 taking place since 2012.

Right-wing terror attacks, however, have been quite common in the US in the last decade or so, with 13 occurring since 2012. They're less common worldwide than the Islamist ones, to be fair, but it's clear that in the US you're more likely to be killed by a white supremacist than an Islamist.

The feeling is that the authorities here have handwaved racist and xenophobic terror more than Islamist terror, probably because it's supposedly easier to identify Islamists than KKK members or neo-Nazis. In turn, this has probably left right-wing terrorists more emboldened to carry out their attacks - and that's even without taking Donald Trump's influence into account.

What's ironic is that there's not much dichotomy between Islamist and right-wing terrorists, even if they mutually despise one another - both rely on imperfect understandings of their foundational texts, and target men who generally feel passed over by society, among other similarities. Online content is also instrumental in radicalizing both groups.

While the attack on the US Capitol resulted in far fewer deaths than the 9/11 attacks, we can hope that it causes a similar alignment of policy (although hopefully with far less demonization of "the other" than occurred 20 years ago). 9/11 was a sort of wake-up call to the US that despite its victory in the Cold War there would still be challenges to its hegemony; this will hopefully be a wake-up call that conspiracy theories and economic devastation come with wider costs to American prestige, and America's ability to achieve its goals abroad.

After all, Islamist terrorism would only ever be a sideshow to Great Power politics in which countries like China attempt to challenge the US's superpower status. China and Russia can use the images from Washington this past week to paint liberal democracies as overly chaotic, and build the case for bringing other countries into their own orbits of authoritarianism.

This comment is not intended to demonize either country or its people, by the way - but both China and Russia have heavily nationalistic media apparati that depend on negative integration to tell their populations that they alone are the chosen people (similar to what we do here, of course). Chaos here serves the purpose of those apparati elsewhere in stifling dissent at home and in getting smaller countries to fall into line. Therefore, if we in the US are truly the shining city on a hill that we like to boast about, we need to get back to showing the benefits of an open and free society, to counteract the lures of stable but illiberal governments.