Could Coronavirus Save the Economy?

First a disclaimer: This article is going to discuss the potential repercussions of a nationwide outbreak of COVID-19 in what may sound like a positive light.  This in no way means that I think such an outbreak would be good.  Given the estimated fatality rates, a nationwide outbreak would likely result in 2.3 million to 10 millions deaths, which would be tragic and horrific regardless of any positive effects it might have.  Even if such an event might have the potential for significant positive effects, the emotional value of the lives lost would far outweigh any positive effects it might cause.


COVID-19 has a death rate somewhere between 0.7% and 3%.  It has not spread enough outside China to get a solid count, but in China, the death rate is between 3% and 4% in a few places and 0.7% everywhere else.  Making a good estimate of the death rate would require knowing much finer details about these regions than we do, though certain organizations are estimating around 3% despite this lack of critical details.

COVID-19 affects adults far more dramatically than children.  Around 0.8% of deaths are in the 0-4 year old age range.  Only 0.6% are in the 5-18 year old age range.  Thus, minors in general are far less likely to die from the virus than adults.  The highest fatality rate is in the 65+ year old age range, with 72% of deaths falling within that age range.

Together these facts mean that a nationwide COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. could cause as many as (given a 3% fatality rate) 79,200 deaths in the 0-4 age range, 59,400 deaths in the 5-18 age range, 2,633,400 deaths in the 19-64 age range, and 7,128,000 deaths in the 65+ age range.

China, Japan, and the U.S. are approaching economic decline or even disaster due to low birth rates.  This causes several problems, but one of the largest problems is that these countries have aging populations, where a much larger portion of the population is older people than younger people.  As this larger population of older people approaches retirement and various age related diseases, they are going to be contributing less to the economy, but they are going to need more care from it.  This means they will be contributing less labor while needing more, in a population where there are far more people needing labor than there are people capable of providing it.

COVID-19 promises some potential for improving the situation, however only at a horrific cost.  A nationwide COVID-19 outbreak in any of these countries will reduce the older, retiring population far more dramatically than the younger population (to be clear, it will do this by killing them, probably slowly and painfully).

In short, COVID-19 could save the economies of China, Japan, the U.S., and many other countries with low birth rates and aging populations.  Again though, this would come at a horrific cost.

Diversity of Government

I am not sure if I have written on this topic before, but if not, I have been negligent, as this is critical to democracy.  I was reminded to write about this by this article about vaccine refugees.  I have written about vaccination before, so I am not going to go into much depth on the subject here.  That article merely provides a good example of why diversity of government is so important.


To summarize the article, a handful of states have made it illegal for public schools to accept unvaccinated children without a medical exemption.  Many states still allow personal and/or religious exemptions, allowing parents to choose not to vaccinate for any reason, without excluding their children from public school.  A handful of parents in states that only honor medical exemptions have chosen to move to states with a higher degree of "medical freedom".  Alternatives are homeschooling or paying for a private school that does not require vaccinations.  In the context of this post, my personal position on all of this is irrelevant, so I am not going to share it here.  (Again, I have written about vaccination in the past.  If you want my opinion, it is available in other articles I have written.)


One of the biggest problems with democracy is that it can force up to 49.9% of the people to live under laws they do not agree with.  By default, democracy is the best form of government for ensuring that the largest number of people are content with the laws they live under, but democracy can only guarantee satisfaction with the law for half a person more than 50% of the population (for an odd numbered population; one person more for an even numbered population).  That means under a democratic government, almost half of the population can be living under laws they find unacceptable.  It gets worse though.  When you have hundreds or thousands of laws, it is trivial to get to a point where the majority of the population is opposed to almost half of the laws.  Consider, with two laws, 51% might approve of each, but the 49% that disapproves of one might all approve of the other.  That gives only a 2% overlap of people who approve of both, with 98% dissatisfied.  And that overlap can theoretically get as low as a single person, depending on the overarching form of government.  (In a democratic republic or a democratic constitutional monarchy, one person is less likely to make a difference than in a purer form of democracy, but that does not make the situation better.)  When you have three laws, you can end up in a position where 51% approves of each law, but 49% disapproves of two laws and the other 51% disapprove of one law.  That averages out to each individual disapproving of 1.49 laws, or 100% of the population disapproving of 49.7% of laws on average.  It is easy to end up in a situation where the majority is not opposed to any individual law, but the majority of individuals are opposed to almost half of the laws and are generally dissatisfied with the whole situation.  This can make a democratic nation an undesirable place to live for the vast majority of the population.  And that's in a pure democracy, where voters are not aggregated under elected representatives where 51% of the popular vote has the same value as 100% of the popular vote (which is the basis of gerrymandering to minimize the voting power of a particular group).  In representative systems like republics and constitutional monarchies, it is possible for laws to get passed that less than 50% of the people find acceptable (even when representatives do their jobs right).

When people complain about laws too much, the knee jerk reaction tends be words along the lines of, "You can always move somewhere else."  This is viewed as petty and rude, but not only is it often correct, it can sometimes be the most ethically responsible solution.  This is where diversity of government comes in.  While moving somewhere else is sometimes the right solution, it isn't always, nor is it always a solution at all.  Perhaps a family would like to live in a city where liquor laws are fairly strict, because they have a family history of alcoholism and would like to limit their children's exposure to alcohol.  Maybe another person teaches electric guitar as a side gig and wants to live in a city without noise ordinances that would prevent evening appointments.  What if national law governs liquor and forbids local regulation of liquor?  That family now has no city in the country that will be safe for their children.  What if there is a national noise ordinance that applies to all residences within some proximity of other residences?  Now the guitar teacher cannot teach guitar in addition to working a day job.  What if there are 100,000 people living in the country who want a city with stricter liquor laws than national law provides?  Sorry, they are out of luck.  They cannot even found their own city, where they can live under the laws they want.  What if there are 100,000 people who, for various reasons, want to live somewhere without noise ordinances?  Again, that is not an option.  These are not the only examples.  What about gambling?  How about recreational drug use?  Perhaps more controversial things, like abortion.  Maybe how much taxation goes into public education, or maybe even whether or not public education is mandatory in the first place.  Of course, mandatory vaccination is certainly near the top of the list.  And this is not just a problem with national laws.  What if a group of activists convinced every city government in the country that unregulated access to alcohol is a fundamental right, or maybe they convince every city government that unwanted noise infringes on their rights, and now there is not a single city anywhere that can accommodate these people.  Sorry, out of luck, because there is not somewhere else you can move to anymore.

This does not happen a lot in the U.S., because we have fairly high diversity of government.  This diversity is created by sharing of sovereignty between Federal and state governments.  The Constitution limits the powers of the Federal government to things that affect the nation as a whole and to regulation of interaction between states.  And while the Federal government has far overstepped these bounds, we still have a system where diversity of government is fairly high.  If you do not like the laws in your state, odds are good there is another state that would be more acceptable to you.  If you prescribe to the progressive theory that all children should be forced to attend public school, for the social benefit of other children, there are states where homeschooling and most private schooling is illegal.  If you want to homeschool, there are states that protect the right to homeschool.  As the article mentioned above demonstrates, if you want to live somewhere you know all of the kids in school will be vaccinated, there are states where you can get that, and if you do not want to be forced to vaccinate your kids as a condition of attending public school, there are states that give you that option.  The advantage of diversity in government is that like minded people can congregate under laws that are acceptable to them.  It is not perfect, and there will probably never be a place where even one person finds 100% of the laws acceptable, but a fair amount of diversity in government can at least provide the option for the vast majority of people to live under a set of laws where the majority of those laws are acceptable to them.

The problem with this system is that people tend to get stubbornly attached to their current location.  When that happens, and they don't like the laws they are living under, instead of finding a place to go that has more suitable laws, they tend to try to oppress those around them, believing that their ideal laws somehow trump the will of the majority.  Sometimes they even convince themselves that everyone everywhere should be forced to live according to their personal beliefs and opinions.  And this tends to lead to political polarization, as people with minority opinions talk louder to try to fool lawmakers into believing they have a majority and the majority, being convinced they are a minority, start doing the same thing.  And it gets even worse when people start projecting their own opinions on other people they share features with.  For example, twice as many women (50%) believe abortions should only be legal under special circumstances (woman's life in danger, rape, incest) than believe they should be entirely legal (24%) or entirely illegal (24%), and yet many feminists are convinced that the broad legalization of abortion is a good thing for the majority of women.  A full 74% of women disagree agree with that.  Not only is this projection completely wrong, democracy is not even about what is good for people.  It is about what people want, because no individual or small group has any right to decide what is best for everyone else.  (Ironically, fewer men (18%) believe abortion should be entirely illegal than women.)  Allowing governments to be diverse, by only attempting to change laws at the lowest level, is a critical factor in maintaining government diversity.  You might want to live under a particular set of laws, but that does not mean others do, even if they are the same gender, race, sexual orientation, or whatever as you are.  To maintain democratic rule in a way that is acceptable to everyone, each person must respect the desires of others, even of they do not seem to make sense.  This means respectfully staying out of local politics that do not affect your region.  Roe v. Wade is toxic to democracy, because it undermines the democratic power of men and women across our entire nation.  Because of that legislation by judicial fiat, the democratic right to live under the laws a group a people collectively prefer has been substantially reduced.  74% of women in America have lost the right to have any say on abortion law, because of Roe v. Wade.  Roe v. Wade significantly reduced diversity of government in one sphere, and that has caused a lot of people harm.

Diversity of government requires two things.  The first is respect for the opinions and desires of others, even when you do not agree with them.  The second is a willingness to live where the laws are acceptable to you, if you have the reasonable ability to live there.  Attempting to go "over the heads" of local government to force a political position undermines diversity of government, and that undermines democracy.  And attempting to force local government to agree with your view, where you could move somewhere else, with more like minded people, also undermines democracy and diversity.  This is especially true when you are attempting to get a local government to conform to what everyone else is doing, because it can cause a particular type of diversity to go extinct, eliminating the choice of anyone else to live under the laws they want.

Another good example of this is the city I live in, which actually has fairly strict liquor laws.  A student at the local university once wrote a persuasive essay on why the city should change its liquor laws to fall in line with cities across the U.S..  The problem with this position is that this student could live in any of those other cities, but people who live in this city do not have anywhere else to go to live under strict liquor laws, because there are extremely few cities in the U.S. with strict liquor laws.  Convincing this city to change its laws would reduce diversity in government, and in fact, reviewing this student's paper is where I first realized the importance of diversity of government.  I prefer living in a city with strict liquor laws, but I am not campaigning to convince other cities to adopt the same laws, and I am not trying to convince the Federal government to override them in favor of my position.  I respect the right of the people living in those cities to choose the laws they are going to live under.  I disagree with California's law eliminating all but medical exemptions for vaccines, but again, I respect the right of the people of California to live under that law, if they so choose.  I am not going to try to force my political position on you any more than I would try to force my religion on you, but I expect and deserve the same respect.

It is not showing me your respect, when you try to force laws on my region against the will of the people that live there.  If you want to show me respect, and if you want what is best for me, let me deal with it.  Let me vote for the laws I want in my region, instead of trying to force on me the laws you think I want or that would be best for me, by appealing to a higher government.  And this applies to everyone.  If you want to show respect for women, instead of trying to make abortion 100% legal and easily accessible in the U.S. mind your own business, and let the people of each state make their own choice about this.  If some of them do not like it, they can move to where the majority agrees with tham, and if some of the women there do not agree with the laws there, let them move where more people agree with them.  That is what respect is about.  It is not about imposing your position and your beliefs on everyone else or projecting your desires on everyone else.  For our country to get along well, and for democracy to even work at this scale, diversity of government is critical, and attempting to undermine it will only serve to increase toxic political polarization and partisanship.

Slavery Smells?

I am conservative, but I actually like Bernie Sanders.  I am no "Bernie Bro".  I certainly do not support all of Sanders' platform.  I think he has his head in the right place though, which is more than I can say for other Democratic Presidents.  But then, Sanders is not really a Democrat, is he?  Actually, no, he is not.  Sanders is more of a conservative socialist.  Conservative?  Really?  Yep, conservative.  Sanders' platform is actually not even close to liberal.  Medicare for All is certainly more conservative than a public option, which has little real world precedent or testing and would cause far more major change (the hallmark of liberalism) than Medicare for All.  His Federal job guarantee thing is actually more reactionary than even conservative, drawing from ideas that have arisen in different ways, multiple times throughout both American and world history.  Also, the Federal job guarantee is founded very firmly in the conservative/reactionary "work to live" culture, that preaches that people who are not doing productive work do not deserve to live (which I have written about before).

There is more to it than that though.  The Federal job guarantee idea stinks of slavery.  One of the most common justifications of slavery in the early U.S. was the assertion that slaves were people who were too dumb to get by on their own, so society had a responsibility to provide them with productive jobs that could satisfy their needs.  Many ancient civilizations mobilized the poor for building infrastructure, often against their will but also often voluntarily, using their poverty to coerce them into doing very grueling and sometimes deadly work that never carried any promise for advancement.  In the U.S., when we hear the word "slavery" we tend to imagine people legally owned by other people and forced into manual labor by their masters, but this "chattel" slavery is actually not as historically common as other types of slavery.  The most common types of slavery are more similar to feudalism, where the "serfs" are technically under an inherited contract to work the land and provide a portion of the harvest to the landowner.  In some regions and time periods, serfs could even terminate the contract at will, making them free to leave.  Few, if any, ever did though, because they could not afford to.  The land always belonged to the governing lord or to the national government.  A serf could not cancel a contract and continue to work the land for his or her own personal benefit.  A serf that bailed out would never find a lord willing to agree to a work contract again.  Serfs were not trained in commerce or productive crafts.  The experience of a lifetime of farm work was only valuable for farm work, and as mentioned before, no lord would take a serf that had canceled a contract.  Serfs were de facto slaves.  No, they were not owned.  They were either permanently contracted to their plot of land, or they were free but permanently attached to the land by their own poverty.

The most common type of slave, historically, was agricultural slave, but most ancient nations employed some form of slavery in nearly all infrastructure work.  Infrastructure work was typically to grueling and dangerous for free people who were not in poverty to be willing to do.  So, governments would instead either buy slaves or advertise infrastructure work to the destitute, who had no other choice but to take any work offered, because they would starve otherwise.  Taskmasters often felt justified in abusing even voluntary infrastructure workers, because they were poor, and the poor have always been viewed as justified targets of mistreatment.  Even in the modern U.S., the poor are common targets of law enforcement and legislative abuse.  The Federal job guarantee, which is supposed to provide the poor with infrastructure jobs, just reeks of the sort of slavery that has been used throughout history to build up the infrastructure of the vast majority of historical nations.

It is actually unsurprising that the Democratic Party would be the biggest proponent of such a program.  It was, after all, the political party created expressly for the purpose of defending slavery.  It may have changed a lot over the last 192 years, but clearly the underlying ideology that some people are too dumb to take care of themselves without heavy intervention is still there, and it seems to be leading toward a type of slavery that is fairly new in the U.S. but that has been the most common type of slavery historically.

There are a ton of problems with the Federal job guarantee program.  The first is that it only really helps the poor that need it the least.  A Federal job guarantee would only help able bodied and able minded people who can get regular jobs fairly easily.  It will not help most people with physical or mental disabilities that make it hard to get or keep a regular job.  Much like Obamacare, which attempted to force people to buy health insurance, a Federal job guarantee has a lot of holes people will slip through, and most of those holes are neatly lined up with the holes in the existing system.  It will help some people, but the vast majority will be people who do not actually need the help, and it will not serve most of the people who do need the help.

The second problem with the Federal job guarantee is mistreatment.  Mistreatment of slaves, while not actually as common as people often assume, has always been common, especially of non-chattel slaves in infrastructure work.  (Slave owners typically treated their slaves quite humanely, because they paid significant amounts of money for them, making slaves a valuable investment.  Infrastructure slaves, however, were typically not legally owned and were considered expendable, eliminating most motivation for good treatment.)  Abuse of prisoners in the U.S. is quite common.  There is no reason to believe that overseers for poor people taking advantage of a Federal job guarantee will not also engage in mistreatment.  And no, there will not be enough oversight to prevent it.  Law enforcement abuse of the free poor in the U.S. is rampant, but it rarely gets reported, because poor people cannot afford Federal law suits, and when it does get reported, courts consistently trust police over poor people, often regardless of evidence.  There is no reason to believe abuse of poor infrastructure workers is any more likely to be reported.

The third problem with the Federal job guarantee program is that it does not even solve the problem it is supposedly intended to solve.  The Federal job guarantee program is an alternative to a basic income, which is typically justified on the idea that automation is going to rapidly reduce the availability of jobs in the U.S. (and Sanders has even directly presented the Federal job guarantee as a solution for growing automation).  A Federal job guarantee will only delay that.  The reason we need a lot of infrastructure work in the U.S. is that we have neglected infrastructure for over a generation.  We might have a few decades of infrastructure work to catch up, but once we are caught up, the need for work will drop very dramatically.  In addition, automation is not going to ignore infrastructure.  If we are getting self driving cars in the next decade, you can be sure we are also going to get self driving paving vehicles.  We already have concrete extruding technology that could be adapted to making side walks and constructing bridges with minimal human intervention.  Even things like laying bullet train tracks could be partially automated.  And automation is only going to get cheaper.  Eventually, the Federal job guarantee will be reduced to low value or no value work that would be better to let the private sector handle and that ends up being more wasteful (and thus expensive) than our current disaster of a welfare system.

The fourth problem is that some of the specifics of the infrastructure candidates are talking about are either nonsensical or just straight up harmful.  Sanders likes to talk about "environmentally friendly" infrastructure projects, like wind and solar power arrays, but more and more evidence is showing these technologies to generally be more harmful than clean fossil fuel power generation like natural gas, in no small part because they require more traditional energy production methods to provide reliable power (often dirty coal, to mitigate the high costs of wind and solar power).  Both wind and solar power, at large scale, pose a serious threat to wildlife.  When asked about these issues, politicians blow the harm off as minimal, because our current systems do not do a lot of net harm.  This is because the vast majority of the nation is still running on fossil fuel or nuclear power though.  If we phase these out and replace them with wind and solar, our current wind and solar infrastructure is going to balloon into something enormous, and these trivial amounts of wildlife being harmed will also balloon into something enormous.  We are talking potential extinctions of multiple species of birds and land animals.  Just small scale solar arrays we have already built have significantly impacted at least one endangered species, and proposed solar arrays in other places are causing experts serious concern about potential extinction of endangered species.  And these arrays are in deserts, where there is generally less wildlife to be concerned about in the first place.  In short, candidates advocating for the Federal job guarantee are planning to use it to build infrastructure that will definitely do massive environmental harm and has a high potential for causing extinctions of already endangered species.

The fifth problem with the Federal job guarantee is that it is likely to have a serious negative effect on the economy.  With or without an increase in minimum wage, the Federal job guarantee will likely create more stable jobs than the low end of the private sector.  This might help the workers who take advantage of it, but it will destroy existing lower end businesses, on a massive scale.  If the Federal job guarantee pays a higher wage than the minimum wage, it will not just attract poor people who are having a hard time finding a job.  It will attract millions of people who already have jobs, leaving the businesses they were originally working for without workers.  This will either cause them to go out of business or massively accelerate the automation of lower end jobs.  If the Federal job guarantee only pays minimum wage, regardless of whether the minimum wage is changed as part of the deal, it will still destroy the lower end of the economy.  A Federal job guarantee will provide full time work, at at least minimum wage, guaranteed.  This is way better than a job at say, McDonald's, where you will be lucky to get more than 20 hours a week, and you can be fired at the whim of practically anyone above you.  If a Federal job guarantee bill passes, be prepared for pretty much all fast food, most big box stores (Walmart, Fred Meyers, Ikea, etc...), and most small businesses (currently the largest source of employment in the U.S.) to either go under or automate at least 99% of their processes.  A Federal job guarantee might provide jobs for everyone, but once the dust settles, there might be a lot less available for people to buy with the money they are making, and in the long run, it will guarantee that there will be far fewer private sector jobs available.

The sixth problem with a Federal job guarantee is that it comes with very limited potential for advancement.  Most infrastructure work requires a very small number of experts and a huge amount of grunt labor.  Building roads and assembling power plants provides experience in skills that have little value outside of building roads and assembling power plants, and when the government has a monopoly on infrastructure work, there is not going to be much competitive demand for those skills.  The cost of a Federal job guarantee will be so high, especially in administration, that there will be a very strong incentive to avoid paying anyone much more than minimum wage.  And as the cost of automation drops, there will be an even stronger incentive to keep wages low, because if automation becomes cheaper than wages, the whole system will fall apart.  At that point, if the government does not automate, the private sector will, and then it will be cheaper for local and state governments to employ private companies instead of contributing jobs to the Federal job guarantee, and Congress might even decide to save money by reducing the scope of the Federal job guarantee and paying private companies to do the infrastructure work, leaving a bunch of people with highly trained skills in fields that are nearly 100% automated and no longer need any human labor.  If a Federal job guarantee cannot provide advancement opportunities and eliminates a lot of jobs that do have those opportunities, that is a very distinct backsliding, that will only serve to keep poor people poor, just like our current welfare system.



These are only the top six problems with the Federal job guarantee, and it really bothers me that Sanders and other Democratic candidates cannot see this.  This is an ancient idea that did get stuff done, but it did so at the expense of the poor, not to the benefit of the poor.  Adjusting it by making the wages higher is not going to help, and any Federal job guarantee that ends up giving people a better deal than private businesses can offer is going to do extreme damage to the economy.  The advantage with mistreating the slaves is that anyone who can get a job in the private sector will do it, but while some mistreatment will almost certainly occur, in our current culture it probably will not be enough to prevent a mass exodus from private sector jobs, and when the Federal job guarantee inevitably ends, because the government can no longer afford the administrative costs of paying a large portion of the population to be unproductive, America will find itself in deeper poverty than it has ever been in, in its entire history, because there will not be any jobs for the poor.

There was a time when Sanders at least liked the idea of a basic income.  That is the Sanders I might be willing to vote for, despite being a conservative.  (Of course, basic income is actually a conservative idea at this point.  It has been tested and proven repeatedly, and half a century ago, the right almost passed a basic income bill in the U.S..  Basic income is not a new and risky, liberal idea anymore.  It is a tried and tested idea with a great deal of proven benefits and thus far no significant downsides.)  I am not sure I can vote for a candidate who plans on destroying both the environment and the economy with a Federal job guarantee that amounts to the revival of ancient infrastructure slavery.  When did Sanders bail out on his dedication to the well being of the people, and join the side of the political machine that sees people as nothing more than tools of the government?

Good President, Bad Person?

The role of personal ethics in politics has never been black and white, but the last few decades have made it even more unclear.  Historically, personal morality was considered an important feature of elected officials, but when it came to voting, the most important factors were consistently fame and platform.  Many historians believe Abraham Lincoln won his Presidency by dressing, acting, and growing facial hair in ways considered highly attractive to women at the time, who then influenced their husbands to vote for him.

Immorality has been common in the White House throughout history.  Much of it is forgotten or ignored by history, but at the time was generally controversial.  Thomas Jefferson had an illicit relationship with one of his slaves while in office *.  Lyndon B. Johnson was more vulgar, more racist, and even more misogynistic than Donald Trump, by a long shot.  Kennedy was on amphetamines and other drugs (see "Dr. Feelgood" for more information) for part of his Presidency (and when White House doctors finally put an end to it, his judgement is said to have improved dramatically).  I think we all know what Bill Clinton did (see Monica Lewinsky if not), and then he lied about it in court, for which there is video evidence.  Nixon actually ended up resigning for activities that probably would have earned him criminal convictions, if his Vice President, Gerald Ford, had not pardoned him as soon as he took office after Nixon's resignation (which many people considered an immoral act by Ford).  And this is not all.  These are just the highlights.

Donald Trump is not clean either.  He has openly and proudly admitted to immoral acts, and he has been accused of (without proof) many more.  Donald Trump is either a pathological liar or spends a lot of time talking about things he never knew much about or has forgotten what he did know.  He's not even close to the most immoral President the U.S. has ever had, but when it comes to morality, he's definitely not a good role model.

On the other hand, Donald Trump has actually done a lot of good things for the U.S., many of which previous Presidents have failed at.  He has done a better job of keeping campaign promises than many Presidents, even when public opinion has shifted to favor those promises less.  He averted potential disaster with North Korea, and he improved our poor relationship with Russia, which was also a cause for concern that previous Presidents failed to alleviate.  While he takes far more credit for the state of our economy than he deserves (just like every other President), he has at least managed to avoid harming it much, which cannot even be said for several other recent Presidents.  His heavy handed approach to trade negotiations seems to have worked out in our favor, on average, even if it was not perfect and could have harmed our relationships with several trade partners.  It has not been perfect.  His strict enforcement of Obama's immigration policy, even when it was seriously harming people, was certainly a mistake, though it did little harm to the U.S..  The attempted investigation against Biden was a pretty poor choice, though again if Sanders keeps his lead in the primaries, none of that will have mattered.  And Trump certainly is not the first President to leverage executive power over foreign policy and aid to give himself an advantage in an election (which is actually common practice, though most Presidents attempt to boost their own reputations this way instead of tear down specific opponents).  Overall, Trump has managed to do a lot of beneficial things previous Presidents either tried to do and failed or just refused to do.

Trump is certainly immoral and even distasteful, but is this a good reason to vote for someone else, if Trump is actually doing a fairly good job as President?  This is a question many Republicans are coming up against this year.  There is no question, Trump is going to get the Republican nomination.  Sanders is currently the front runner for the Democratic nomination, and odds are looking good that he will stay there.  Many Republicans voted for Hillary in 2016, because they either did not think Trump could to the job or because they did not feel right about voting for someone as immoral as Trump.  Trump has proven that he can do the job, but his immorality is still a problem.  Hillary was fairly moderate though, compared to Sanders.  While there are some Republicans who would prefer Sanders outright, most are strongly opposed to Sanders' socialist agenda, even as moderate as it has become in recent years.

Who do you vote for, when faced with an immoral candidate and a candidate who's political platform you very strongly disagree with?  Is it wrong to vote for an immoral candidate who has proven to be a fairly good President?  Is it right to vote to replace a President who has done a fairly good job, merely because you disagree with his morality?  These are the questions many Republicans are finding themselves wondering about this year.  For them, the choice in November is not going to be about which platform they agree with most.  It is going to be about whether platform or morality is more important in a leader.  It is going to be about whether they can tolerate Medicare for All, if it is the only way to get a President with good morals.  It may not come to that.  Historically, every impeachment has flipped Congress, giving the party that did not initiate the impeachment control of Congress, and there is no reason to believe things will be any different this time.  Even if Sanders does get elected, he will almost certainly be up against a Republican controlled House and Senate, but that will not last forever.  Even if he serves only one term, there will be a chance to flip control in 2022.  If we can learn anything with history, odds if this are low, such a short time after the impeachment, but there is still a possibility.  If he serves two terms, then there will be three chances to flip Congress and get Medicare for All through.  Over 8 years, odds of it happening at least once are a lot better.  So again, is it worth the risk to have a morally acceptable President, or is avoiding Medicare for All and potentially other socialist programs worth reelecting an obviously morally corrupt President?

I do not have an answer.  I am generally conservative, but I also support common sense change that has been reasonably tested, and I am willing to support some controversial change, so long as it is treated as an experiment that can be ended if it fails, rather than as a silver bullet that is going to solve everything even though it has never been tested.  (I am a fan of the empirical method, and I believe it should be applied to governance.)  I do not like Donald Trump as a person, but I will not let that taint by view of his performance as President, which has been better than average, as far as U.S. Presidents go.  I am concerned about his morals, but I recognize that a bad President with good morals could be far more harmful to the U.S. than a good President with bad morals.  I am not strongly opposed to Sanders.  He has some good ideas, some of which have been successfully tested either in experiments or in other countries.  I do find some of his platform disturbing and problematic, but I doubt even a Democratic Congress would let the worst stuff get by it.  I am fairly content that Sanders could not do anything seriously harmful, even under a Democratic Congress.  Similarly, I am fairly content that Trump could not do anything seriously harmful under a Republican Congress, though I have less concern here, because he has not yet attempted to get Congress to do anything seriously harmful.  I will not discuss my voting plans here, but I will say that I do not think Trump or Sanders is the devil.  Sanders has become a lot more moderate in his socialist agenda, such that it is far more in line with the will of the people.  Trump has proven that he can do the job, and while he has not done it perfectly, he has done better than many past Presidents.  Trump is not even close to the most immoral President we have ever had.  He is more distasteful than downright bad.  Sanders seems to be generally a good person.  His current agenda is not the most progressive/socialist agenda a President has ever had.  Like Trump's morality, Sanders' political agenda is more distasteful than potentially seriously harmful at this point.  It might be fun to apply hyperbole to Sanders platform, but the reality is, it is not really communist, and most of it is not socialist.  Even Medicare for All is less socialist than our current medical welfare system, because it gives more people a "vote" in the medical economy.  In a sense, Medicare for All is the capitalist approach to medical welfare.

The ultimate question for Republicans this year might just be, who do you vote for, when you have a good President who is a bad person, and the alternative would make, in your opinion, a bad President who is a good person?


* To be fair to Jefferson, his wife died before he was ever elected President, so there is no evidence of adultery.  Further, by all accounts, he was completely faithful to the slave woman, treated her (and his other slaves) as family, and would likely have married her if it was legal and socially and politically acceptable for him to do so.  While his affair is often presented as an example of a President being extremely unfaithful, immoral, and even coercive, the reality is that the relationship was almost equivalent to living with your girlfriend who also happens to be your maid.

Is Modern Physics Failing?

I just read this article from 2018: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/07/20/this-simple-thought-experiment-shows-why-we-need-quantum-gravity/


That article makes me question the value we are getting out of modern physics.  Now, I don't have a degree in physics.  I have as much formal physics education as is generally required for electrical engineers.  Informally, I have audited or otherwise sat in on a few more advanced physics courses, and I have even done the coursework, as I had time.  I have also spent significant time learning about physics independently, and I have tried to keep up on cutting edge stuff and new discoveries.  I have a decent understanding of most of quantum physics (as much as anyone can understand it, I suppose).  I understand gravity better than a handful of people with Masters and PhDs in physics (some were even professors I had).  I also worked very hard to gain the ability to comprehend four dimensions in a spacial sense, quite successfully (I still struggle with more than that, though mathematically it is quite easy).  I am no expert on physics, but I am very familiar with the big stuff and with a fair amount of the recent stuff.  I know when physicists are sugar coating things or even spreading outright falsehoods though, and that article is full of that.

First, the article actually does a pretty good job of discussing why we need to understand gravity at the quantum scale.  We have no clue how gravity affects interaction at that scale or if it even does.  Gravity is such a weak force at that scale that it is currently impossible to even measure.  That does not mean it has no effect though.  Some of this is pure curiosity, with no practical application, but it is impossible to distinguish.  Much of modern technology is built on scientific discoveries that had no practical application until long after their discoveries.  The majority of modern science has no known practical applications, but just the tiny bits and pieces that have found practical applications have more than made up for all of the work that went into the rest.

The most serious problem with this article is the assertions at the beginning regarding the quality of General Relativity and the Standard Model.  The author asserts,

General Relativity describes gravity perfectly everywhere we've ever looked. From the smallest-scale attractions we've ever measured in a laboratory to the expansion and curvature of space due to Earth, the Sun, black holes, galaxies, or the entire Universe, our observations and measurements have never deviated from what we've observed.

(I am sure the author meant "from what we've predicted" right at the end) and then follows that with,

The Standard Model is equally successful for the other three forces: electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

and concludes with,

Every experiment, measurement, and observation has agreed perfectly with these two theories.

These assertions are incredibly wrong.  General Relativity has consistently failed to predict observations of other galaxies correctly.  Observations of other galaxies consistently find far less mass than General Relativity predicts is necessary for them to avoid breaking apart and flying in all directions.  This is, in fact, why Dark Matter, a theory that is not part of General Relativity or the Standard Model, was invented.  General Relativity is only consistent with observations, because scientists decided that there must be another type of matter we cannot detect to make up the difference between observation and prediction.  By itself, General Relativity fails badly at large scales.  That is not the only failure of General Relativity though.  General Relativity also predicts that all matter in the universe should eventually stop moving away and start coming back together.  In fact, there are two problems here.  One is that the early universe seems to have expanded much faster than General Relativity predicts.  A new particle, the inflaton, has been theorized to explain that (also, unproven properties of the Higgs field have been suggested to explain some of that).  Dark Energy has been theorized to explain current expansion of the universe.  Neither of these are part of General Relativity or the Standard Model, which cannot explain cosmic expansion without them and fail to make accurate predictions without them.

The Standard Model has its own problems.  Contrary to what the author claims, observation has not agreed perfectly with the Standard Model, and in fact, over the last decade, more and more particle physicists have started questioning adherence to and study of the Standard Model, because of how poorly it predicts certain things.  One of the biggest failures of the standard model has been accurately predicting the mass and the magnitude of other properties of new particles.  The Standard Model does not formally predict all properties of new particles, but informal predictions made based on Standard Model have have never proved accurate.  In some cases, predictions based on the Standard Model have been surprisingly inaccurate.  The standard model is actually less of a theory and more of an observation based model mixed with a handful of axiomatic theories, at this point.  The Standard Model constantly needs updates as new particles are discovered and properties of known particles are more precisely measured.  Physicists claim the Standard Model predicts only interactions, not the strength of those interactions, largely because when it does try to make predictions, they are invariably incorrect.  The discrepancies are often quite small, but physics is supposedly a precise, mathematically governed field, making any discrepancy between predictions and observations a serious concern for a theory.  As a model, the Standard Model has certainly been valuable, but as a theory capable of making more than the most basic predictions accurately, it is actually terrible.  The list of outstanding highly incorrect predictions include the atomic radius of muonic hydrogen, which has consistently been measured up to seven standard deviations larger than predicted.  The magnetic dipole moment of muons have also been observed to be significantly different from the Standard Model prediction.  These are only some of the examples that cannot be easily reconciled with adjustments to the Standard Model.  Most deviations are eliminated by changing the Standard Model itself.  A theory that has constantly has to be changed to fit observations is not a consistent theory that accurately predicts things.  It is a terribly inaccurate theory that constantly has to be replaced with slightly different alternative theories to keep up with observations.

The fact is, the author is completely wrong.  Many experiments, measures, and observations have failed to agree with these theories.  General Relativity relies heavily on the invention of new forms of matter and energy to explain away its failures, and the Standard Model relies on modifications to itself to hide its failures.  Constantly adjusting to every failure does not make a theory accurate.  In fact, it suggests that the failure in the theories is so fundamental that the constant adjustments are merely an attempt to mash the theories and observations into agreement with each other, just like Cinderella's sisters cutting off parts of their feet in the attempt to fit the glass slipper.

This is not all though.  General Relativity itself has a serious logical flaw that has been known for a long time.  Modeling gravity as the warping of space-time is a circular theory.  This can be demonstrated easily with the classroom experiment using nylon cloth stretched over a frame.  To demonstrate the warping of space-time, a heavy object is placed on the cloth, making a deep indent.  Other objects can then be placed on the cloth to demonstrate gravitational attraction as well as be given some momentum to demonstrate orbits.  The problem with this is that for the demonstration to work, there must already be gravity, to pull the objects downward, creating the warping in the fabric in the first place, as well as to pull other objects into the simulated gravity well.  And this problem remains even as we add dimensions.  In three dimensions, there still must be gravitational pull perpendicular to our 3D space for this model to work, the same way the experiment requires gravity perpendicular to the 2D cloth surface, which means our space must be embedded in a four dimensional space, where the source of gravity is perpendicular to all three of our dimensions.  But, it does not end there.  The theory is circular.  For this model to remain coherent, the four dimensional space must be embedded in five dimensions, to provide its perpendicular gravitational force,  and so on up to infinite dimensions where no real source of gravity ever exists.  Note that this does not mean that space-time does not warp under gravity (and indeed, it has been fairly well proven that it does); it merely means that such warping is not and cannot be the source of gravitational attraction, as predicted by General Relativity.

When it comes down to it, General Relativity and the Standard Model are clearly deeply flawed, to anyone willing to put aside religious devotion to them.  They are not useless though, nor do they lack ingenuity or elegance.  General Relativity has plenty that is completely correct, and despite its clear failures, it is still one of the most ingenious theories ever constructed.  The Standard Model was designed and followed based on the idea that the most elegant theory is the most likely to be correct, and it has certainly found some of that elegance in reality, but its devotion to elegance has consistently lead to its failures where it has turned out that reality is not as elegant as we have hoped it would be.  The Standard Model, despite its obvious imperfection, has managed to lead to the prediction and discovery of many particles we did not previously know existed, culminating in the discovery of the Higgs boson.  Still, it has failed to consistently make accurate predictions anywhere but in broad details of particle interactions.  Both of these theories have served us well and provided great value, but in the end, it is becoming clear that they are so fundamentally flawed that it is time to to start looking elsewhere.  They have become cars that cost more just in maintenance than it would cost to replace them.  If we continue on, just trying to repair them or invent new stuff to make up the difference, we may end up spending enormous amounts of resources losing sight of reality, ultimately ending up stuck on the side of the road without any other transportation.  It is time to consider that maybe our current understanding of science is starting to hinder scientific and technological progress.  Maybe the reason we have not had any world changing breakthroughs in the century since Einstein and others rocked the world with relativity and quantum physics is that we have allowed science to be dominated by religious devotion to popular theories that discourages any research that might disagree with or disrupt those theories.

Code of Ethics for Elected Officials

A lot of elected officials, especially at the Federal level, have started using social media, some fairly heavily.  This has been met with mixed feelings.  Some people see this as increased government transparency, while others have seen this as political propaganda.  Either way, participation in social media presents a serious conflict of interest for elected officials.  While it definitely can and probably should be used to increase government transparency, it can also be used to influence people and to spread propaganda, misinformation, and even downright lies, and it has actually been used this way.

As such, we need a code of ethics for elected officials, that includes but is not limited to the use of social media.  I would like to suggest a set of ethical rules for elected officials.

1. Elected officials should always specify whether a social media post, video, recording, or other publication is being produced in an official capacity.  Ideally, elected officials should always use separate accounts for official and personal communications, and the personal accounts should not reference the elected office of the official in any way.
2. Social media content published in an official capacity should stick to facts.  It should not contain propaganda, personal opinions, campaign advertisements, promotion of political or personal agendas, or anything else not directly related to the job the person has been elected to.  Statements of intent to vote on a particular bill in a particular way are appropriate but should avoid any explanation except, "This is what my constituents want".  (And even that explanation might come back to bite you, if it turns out they don't want that.)
3. Official publications that contain information later discovered to be incorrect should be amended whenever possible, noting the error and resolution, and if it is not possible, an official retraction should be published as soon as the mistake is discovered, and reasonable effort shall be made to direct all past, present, and future consumers of the original publication to the retraction.
4. Official publications should generally be reviewed by advisors and/or peers before being published.
5. Official publications should adhere to any standards, regulations, and policies set by the government body the elected official is a member of.
6. Unofficial publications should avoid any and all implication that they might be official in nature or otherwise represent anything other than the personal views of the official, including but not limited to using a separate account for that does not mention the office of the user in the username, profile, or any other publicly accessible information associated with the account.
7. Unofficial publications should avoid accidentally or intentionally using the public profile, fame, wealth, or any other benefit afforded by the public office to endorse or promote any particular political agendas, and indeed, elected officials should generally limit unofficial publications to sharing facts and personal opinion in neutral ways that do not promote or otherwise argue in support of any particular position or platform, even if adherence to this rule feels like it hampers freedom of speech and freedom of expression.
8. Unofficial publications should not be produced or published during time an elected official may reasonably be expected to be working, including any time the body the official is a member of is in session, for bodies that are not active constantly.  For bodies that are constantly active (including the Executive Branch), officials should not produce or publish unofficial publications at any time where doing so would interfere with the work or take time away from the work that would cause even minor negative effects, and ideally any such personal projects should be worked on only during specifically scheduled time off (for example, vacations).
9. Elected officials should surrender access to any and all social media accounts used for official publications upon retirement (whether voluntary or through the loss of an election or expiration of a term limit) from the position.  Ideally, the account should transferred to the ownership of the government body the official was a member of, which will act as caretaker to preserve the account and its contents for consumption by the public.  If the official is later elected to office again, ownership may be returned for the duration of service.
10. Retired elected officials should continue to abide by the terms of this code of ethics with regards to their private social media accounts, with the exception that they may engage more fully in the endorsement of personal political opinions, so long as they continue to avoid using the fame and other benefits associated with having held public office to gain an unfair advantage over other figures who have not had the benefit of holding public office.
11. Retired and current elected officials should never take advantage of the benefits of holding or having held public office for profit or personal benefit of any kind, including the use of official publications for gaining advertisement revenue, the use of official publications in campaign advertisements, the use of official publications for endorsing or advancing personal political agendas (or personal agendas of any kind), the leverage of experience in elected office to claim any manner of authority or special expertise on any matter (including paid speaking engagements), or the engagement in any kind of compensated work for any entity that the official has accepted any form of lobbying from.

Each element of this code of ethics is designed to avoid specific problems that are common today, as outlined below.

1.  Many elected officials, especially those in Congress, are currently using their position to gain fame, for future personal benefit and for the purpose of advancing personal political agendas.  This is not the purpose of elected office, and it is a misuse of taxpayer money that pays the wages of these officials.  Separating official communications from personal communications will help regular citizens separate legitimate concerns related to the job from the personal politics and agendas of the officials.  Public office was never intended to be used as a stage from which to endorse a political platform or other personal agenda.  Public officials are elected to represent the will of the people, not to preach or impose upon the people their own wills.
2. As with 1, the separation of the job from personal opinions is important, and without that separation, elected officials can and do abuse their positions to promote their own platforms, instead of doing their job, which is to represent the will of the people.  The only valid reasoning for voting in a particular way on a bill is that it is what one's constituents want or is otherwise more consistent with the will of those who the official represents than the alternative.
3. Accuracy is critical to transparency.  The people cannot make informed choices when voting, if the information they have is not accurate and up to date.
4. Oversight is wise and necessary in ensuring this code of conduct is adhered to.  It is clear that not all elected officials understand the difference between personal opinion and their job.  Oversight may help them to learn that difference, and if it doesn't, at least it may prevent more egregious violations of this code of conduct.  Oversight will also help to catch factual errors before publication, avoiding the need for excessive retractions.
5. Again, oversight is wise and necessary.  This provides governing bodies with the ability to more narrowly define what is and is not appropriate in an official publication.  This includes censorship of sensitive material that could pose a security threat if published, as well as general rules of civility and propriety in official publications.  Official publications will reflect on the quality of the governing institutions, thus they have a right to regulate the nature of those publications.  (For example, a Representative angrily swearing in a statement about the President reflects very poorly on the House in general, as well as on her constituents and on the U.S. as a nation.)
6. The use of elected office to promote personal political agendas is a serious abuse of power that needs to be stopped.  Again, the purpose of elected office is to represent the will of the people, not to promote one's own political agendas.  Using the benefits of public office to help promote personal agendas is an abuse of power and a theft of taxpayer money.  No elected position should be used to gain an unfair advantage in promotion of personal agendas over those who do not hold any elected position.  To do so is unethical and undemocratic.
7. Merely seeing the title of an elected official in the username or profile text of an account could imply that the publication is official in nature, and it will definitely provide an unfair advantage based on the elected office of the person.  Those seeing an unofficial account for the first time, who do not already know the name of the official, should not be able to tell from the account that the account is owned by an elected official.  It is impossible to enforce complete fairness, as it is unreasonable to require elected officials to use pseudonyms for their personal accounts, but as much as possible, fair practices should be observed, which is why it is suggested that elected officials should generally avoid active promotion of personal agendas on their private accounts, even if doing so seems like it gives up certain rights.  (Note that it is also traditional for the President to release his or her tax records, despite the fact that the privacy of such personal records are generally regarded as protected by the Constitution, so this is not an unprecedented ethical rule.)
8. The time an elected official is being paid to work should never be used for personal activities.  Elected office is a job, and the wages payed to elected officials are payment for labor rendered.  An elected official who is working on personal projects during work time should rightly be fired, just like any other employee who did the same thing would.  It is completely and entirely inappropriate for any elected official to be spending paid work time on personal projects, and accepting full payment for work time partially spent on personal projects is theft against one's employer, in this case the American people.
9. Official publications of elected officials legally belong to the employer of the officials, which is the American people, and thus should be preserved for the use of the people as desired.  In addition, allowing retired officials to retain control of official accounts would allow them to abuse those accounts.  Thus, all official accounts that are not currently in active use should be preserved by the body those accounts are accountable to, both to minimize opportunity for abuse and to ensure the preservation and public availability of the contents of those accounts.  A government cannot remain transparent when ex-officials retain the power to destroy official publications.
10. Retiring does not absolve an official of ethical responsibilities.  Retired officials should not be restricted in public participation in political discourse and promotion of personal agendas, as they are no longer bound to the job of representing the will of the people, but they still should not be allowed to abuse or otherwise leverage their status as retired public officials to gain an unfair advantage over those who have not served in elected office.
11. Abuse of power of this nature is rampant in our government currently, and it interferes seriously with the democratic process.  It is common practice for elected officials to cultivate special relationships with for-profit businesses and other profitable organizations to create future opportunity for themselves once they leave public office.  This results in the drafting and passage of laws and policies designed specifically to benefit special interests, often at significant cost to the general public, purely for the personal benefit of the elected officials.  This is an abominable and wicked practice that undermines democracy, violates the will of the people, and causes significant harm to the people.  This should be regarded as blatant bribery, and all elected officials guilty of this practice should be impeached and thrown out of office, then tried for the high crime of bribery (and/or solicitation of bribery) and sentenced to long prison sentences, without options for house arrest, intermittent imprisonment (like nights or weekends only), or parole.  (And maybe if high profile, wealthy people actually had to pay the same price for their crimes as poor people, our prisons would be less cruel and abusive to prisoners.)  Elected officials should be legally and permanently barred from working for any company or organization they have ever been lobbied by, and they should also be barred from taking any sort of payment or compensation for any work they do that they would not have had without serving in an elected office.  In addition, any official content produced while in office was paid for and thus belongs to the people, making it a violation of copyright law to use it for personal profit or benefit without the express permission of the people.

The fact is, a significant amount of the corruption in our government could be quelled, merely by enforcing a code of conduct addressing these elements.  This does not exhaustively cover all possible forms of corruption (for instance, the practice of earmarking funds for states as a tacit bribe for the passage of some unpopular bill), but it covers some of the most destructive and most common types of and motivations for corrupt behavior.  Hopefully by restricting elected office from being an engine for politicians to promote their personal political platforms and build relationships with special interests for future profit, the motivation for corrupt people with ill intent to seek elected office will be significantly reduced, and the tendency toward corruption for those who originally had purer motives will be decreased significantly, giving us a more democratic government that is more concerned with the will of the people than with their own personal profit.

Sustainability

Sustainability is all the rage now days.  We have sustainable farming, sustainable energy, and even sustainable fashion.  Sustainable in this context means that the activity or product does not harm the environment or permanently consume any natural resources.  This might be farming strategies that restore as much nutrition to the soil as they consume, either by limiting the rate of consumption to what the environment can naturally restore through the water cycle and natural decay or by actively replacing those nutrients.  It might be energy production strategies that rely on processes that will continue to produce energy indefinitely.  The benefit of sustainability is that sustainable activities can be continued indefinitely, without ever running out of raw materials or causing so much harm that it is impossible to continue them.

Sustainability is also a myth.  There is no such thing as true sustainability.  All sustainable practices come back to sustainable energy, and energy is not sustainable, as far as modern science has been able to determine.  And let's be clear, thousands if not millions of people have tried to invent truly sustainable energy, and not a single one has been successful.  The First Law of Thermodynamics, which again, has never been broken, states that the amount of energy within a system cannot change, which means energy output of a generator cannot exceed the energy input.  Another way of saying this is that no source of energy can last forever.  Nearly all of our "sustainable" energy comes from the Sun.  The Sun depletes hydrogen gas and other heavier elements to produce energy.  This process cannot be reversed efficiently, and that means solar energy is not sustainable.  Wind energy is also a form of solar energy, as wind is created by atmospheric temperature gradients caused by solar radiation warming the air.  Hydroelectric power is also yet another form of solar energy, provided by the water cycle, which is powered by solar radiation evaporating ocean water.  Not all of our supposedly sustainable energy comes from solar power though.  Geothermal energy does not come from the Sun.  It comes from the compressive forces of about 6 × 10^24 kilograms (6.6 × 10^21 tons) of iron, rock, water, and soil, super heating most of its own volume.  More importantly, all of that thermal energy will eventually bleed out into space, leaving the Earth a cold lump of rock, metal, and ice, without any geothermal energy left for us to harvest.  Just like the Sun, the Earth's reserve of energy will not last forever.  Even geothermal power is not sustainable.  Every other form of energy we can harvest is widely known to be unsustainable.  We have already calculated an approximate date for when petroleum products will run out.  We have sufficient uranium to produce nuclear power for significantly longer than that, but even that is a very limited resource.  The same is true of other potential nuclear fuels.  Even our oceans are not big enough to produce enough fusible hydrogen for a sustainable source of fusion power fuel, though if our technology was sufficiently more efficient, fusion power could be the most sustainable power source, since its fuel is produced by cosmic radiation hitting hydrogen atoms in water.  Eventually though, the entire universe is going to equalize in energy, making it literally impossible to ever harvest energy again.  There is no sustainable power source, because even the longest lasting sources are consuming fuel in a process that is irreversible and will eventually run out.  And every other sustainable practice relies critically on sustainable energy.  Nutrients do not magically appear in the soil.  Bacterial, fungal, and animal actions produce the nutrients, in processes that consume energy ultimately provided by sunlight.  Even sustainable farming and sustainable fashion are not actually sustainable.

If nothing is sustainable, are we just stupid to be pursuing "sustainable" practices, or is it still worth doing?  We are not stupid, but we are misguided.  The concept of sustainability comes from the very wise idea of self sufficiency.  The fundamental idea is that we should protect and conserve our resources, so that we do not have to rely on outside entities beyond our control for our survival.  How many businesses have failed, because an external company supplying some raw material or fundamental ingredient went under?  How many people have ended up unable to sustain their desired lifestyle, because their employer laid them off or went out of business?  Sustainability is about self sufficiency, and self sufficiency is about having access to the resources you need, for as long as you need, without having to depend on something unpredictable for them.

If we acknowledge that the traditional definition of "sustainable" describes a property that is literally impossible, we can adjust that definition a little bit to fit the intent of our meaning and the purpose of sustainability.  This will give us a glimpse into our ideal future and how we might get there.  Let's say sustainability is not fundamentally about whether a process would deplete resources if continued indefinitely, and instead put a practical limit on the time span.  Thus, any process which would take so long to deplete the resources required for it to continue that humanity would no longer exist is a de facto sustainable process.  Similarly, any process which will not deplete its resources before we find another source to replace our current sources is also sustainable.  And of course, any process that causes so little damage that other sources of harm will cause significantly more damage before the given process causes enough damage to be a problem is sustainable.  This means, if we can find a natural resource that can be used to generate sufficient power for our needs, which will not be depleted before either, the Sun expands and destroys all life on Earth, or we find some other source of that resource that will extend our supply sufficiently to continue using it, that form of power generation is sustainable, regardless of whether it would theoretically deplete all of its fuel if allowed to continue indefinitely.  It also means that processes, like farming practices, that damage the soil are still sustainable, so long as that damage will not cause any lasting problems in the time frame from now till our Sun destroys all life on Earth.

This opens up a lot of options.  For example, we have discovered uranium on Venus.  Perhaps Venus has sufficient uranium to fuel our power needs till the Sun expands and swallows the Earth.  If this is the case, then if we can figure out how to mine uranium from Venus, before we deplete our own reserves, then uranium fission power is a sustainable source of energy, so long as we can also avoid serious harm.  Modern fission power is much safer than early fission power and all of the associated accidents, and it can be made even safer.  The biggest real concern with uranium fission power at this point is the role it can play in nuclear weapon production.  Nuclear weapons are a very unsustainable use though, because they cause very serious harm.  This is rather a tangent, but it is worth consideration, if we look at it as a side effect of uranium fission power.  For power though, uranium is not the only fission option.  To be clear, the numbers strongly suggest uranium fission power is a sustainable energy source, given our revised, practical definition.  Earth's reserves of reasonably available uranium [1] is roughly estimated to be sufficient to last us around 2.5 million years [2], if we scale the usage of every person in the world and then some (10 billion total) up to energy usage levels of those living in the most developed nations.  Estimates schedule the Sun to destroy the Earth in around 7.6 billion years, so 2.5 million is not inherently sustainable, but if we cannot find a more sustainable source of energy 2.5 million years, maybe we deserve to run out.   This is not the end though.  We are also starting to (finally) pursue thorium fission power generation.  This would approximately double our fuel reserves, giving us a total of 5 million years worth of power.  In addition, Japan is working on extracting uranium from seawater, currently costing $240 per kg.  This is a somewhat renewable process too, because as uranium is extracted, more will dissolve into the sea, essentially giving us access to massive reserves of uranium underwater.  Since 71% of the surface of the Earth is water, if we assume that sea water can dissolve as much uranium as we can extract from land [3], that increases our time before we run out to 17 million years.  And then there is Venus.  Obviously Venus would be a much more expensive source of uranium and thorium, but it does have at least comparable concentrations of uranium and thorium.  Further, current prices for these minerals are around $80 per ton, so odd are really good that we could be mining these minerals from Venus for under $3,000/kg within the next century.  This would far more than double our reserves, because Venus is uninhabited and permanently uninhabitable, meaning that we could mine far more of its surface area.  Without cities, farms, national parks, reserves, stripmining regulations, and just plain land that the owners do not want to sell to mining companies, Venus could be mined for uranium and thorium far more extensively [4].  As a rough estimate though, let's say we get just over double what we can get from Earth, from Venus.  That would give us around 40 million years worth of nuclear fuel.  There may also be uranium and thorium on Mars, and we will probably find significant quantities of these minerals in asteroids.  In short, nuclear power is incredibly sustainable.  The amounts available on Earth and Venus combined still do not even get close to competing with solar energy for how long they will last, but 40 million years gives us way more than enough time to find more sources or to find entirely alternative energy sources.  In that time, we might be able to build something like a Dyson sphere to more efficiently and directly collect solar energy.

What about solar, wind, and hydroelectric power though?  How do those fare against our revised definition of sustainability, and how do they compare with nuclear?  If you are not well educated in these sources of supposedly sustainable energy, the answer will probably surprise you.  They actually do not fare terribly well.  Hydroelectric power has been known to be harmful to the environment since shortly after the first dams were built.  Some of this can be mitigate, for instance, hydroelectric dams can prevent fish populations, notably salmon, from returning to their breeding grounds, after swimming out to the ocean.  Fish ladders were invented to mitigate this problem, but they have been shown to do a poor job of maintaining sustainable populations of fish, and they do not help all species of wildlife that are negatively affected by dams.  Many old hydroelectric dams in the U.S. are actually being decommissioned and torn down, when they become due for major maintenance, in a large part because the ecological harm they cause is not worth the benefit.  Wind generators cause similar problems with bird populations, killing both migratory birds and some larger species.  While reports are sometimes blown out of proportion, protected species, like bald and golden eagles, are at risk of being killed in wind farms built near their natural feeding grounds, like lakes and rivers.  And reports are starting to show that bird safe radar systems that turn off the turbines when birds are flying though have a very poor success rate.  At least half a million birds are killed each year by wind generators.  This may not sound like much, given that Earth is home to hundreds of billions of birds, but as wind farms become more common, those numbers will rise, and experts estimate the world bird population has declined by 1% to 2% over the last 50 years.  With the bird population already in decline, wind farms are poised to make what may currently be a fairly minor problem into a much more serious one.  In addition, wind farms reduce wind speed, and we do not know what other side effects that may have.  Scientists recently discovered that geothermal power can cause earth quakes, because it cools deeper parts of the crust, shrinking the rock and soil and potentially cooling magma that may be lubricating tectonic motion.  The only reason we do not see problems from this is that geothermal power is quite uncommon.  As wind farms become more common though, we will very likely see more dramatic affects from slowing wind speeds.  Solar power is also not blameless.  To start with, it is so inefficient that we need massive solar farms, covering vast areas of land, just to get the same power a coal plant would produce.  In our attempts to be environmentally conscious, we have built many of these in desert areas.  Not only do these areas have very little wildlife, they also tend to get far more sunlight.  Except, it is not true that they have very little wildlife.  Deserts are actually full of wildlife.  Pretty much any place on Earth that is not straight up toxic to cellular biology has some kind of wildlife living there.  This includes deep ocean thermal vents with water temperatures well above boiling.  While warm blooded life cannot survive well in deserts, cold blooded life that has adapted to the high daytime temperatures can and does.  Assuming deserts are barren of life has turned out to be a major mistake, which construction workers have discovered while building these solar farms.  The most obvious desert life that has been harmed by solar farms is turtles that use their shells for shelter during the day.  A great many of these turtles have been relocated as their habitats were destroyed to make way for solar farms.  Most desert life, however, does not live on the surface during the day, and some does not live in the surface at all.  Construction workers, who mostly worked during the day, have not relocated this vast majority of desert life, because they could not see it.  This life is either killed, when concrete foundation is poured over the sand, suffocating anything beneath, or when the shadows of the solar panels prevent the sand beneath from being warmed during the day, causing the burrowed animals to die from the cold of the nighttime desert at night.  In addition, more efficient solar power plant designs are known to sometimes burn birds alive.  Nuclear power, on the other hand, has a very small foot print, limiting its impact on ecosystems.  It does not have spinning blades, nor does it interfere in migration.  It generates far more power, meaning we need far fewer plants.  It is also safer for humans to maintain.  The only by products are heat and nuclear waste.  The nuclear waste is not terribly difficult to contain, especially for thorium plants, and the waste heat would easily be mitigated by the dramatic reduction in CO2 emissions a switch from coal to nuclear power would result in.  In short, by our revised practical definition of sustainability, nuclear is actually significantly more sustainable than solar, wind, or hydroelectric.

It turns out that nuclear power is the most sustainable energy we have the technology for.  Maybe, eventually, we will figure out how to harness solar power that is not pointed at the Earth, so that it does not affect Earth's ecosystems, but the numbers strongly suggest we have at least 17 million years just to figure out how to get nuclear fuel from places other than Earth, and well over 40 million years to find an alternative to nuclear energy.  If humanity manages to survive that long and has not managed to accidentally discover some new source of energy, then perhaps humanity does not deserve to survive.  That is not a problem for us though.  The best thing we can do right now is switch as much as possible to nuclear power, so the next generations will have access to the massive amounts of energy they will need to find the next source of energy.





[1] This includes all uranium that would cost $3,000 per kg (0.04¢ per kWh) or less to extract, not counting uranium contained in sea water.

[2] The uranium in the U.S. alone is sufficient for 50,000 years, and the landmass of the Earth is 51 times that of the U.S..

[3] The $3k per kg value takes into account the fact that we cannot just dig up 100% of the Earth's surface, because people live on some of it, and we want to maintain very large quantities for future development.  As such, sea water probably actually has access to far more available uranium per unit of surface area than land does.  This means this estimate is probably a massive underestimate.

[4] Venus actually has a bit less land surface area than Earth does, but on Earth, we would not be able to mine more than a small percentage of our land area, because any more would disrupt our own ecosystems as well as other ecosystems on Earth.  The damage done by more extensive mining than that would make nuclear power clearly unsustainable, even by our revised definition.


This is the source of the numbers on nuclear fuel cost and availability:

www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-will-our-supplies-of-uranium-and-thorium-last/