Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

roots = more infiltration

The presence of growing plant roots and organic matter will increase the rate water can move into the soil. We all know this from elementary school, right? Right? Well, some adult professionals are unfamiliar or skeptical. I won’t call out any of my fellow civil engineers by name.

The Effect of Herbaceous and Shrub Combination with Different Root Configurations on Soil Saturated Hydraulic Conductivity

Information on the effects of differences in root and soil properties on Saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) is crucial for estimating rainfall infiltration and evaluating sustainable ecological development. This study selected typical grass shrub composite plots widely distributed in hilly and gully areas of the Loess Plateau: Caragana korshinskii, Caragana korshinskii and Agropyron cristatum (fibrous root), and Caragana korshinskii and Artemisia gmelinii (taproot). Samples were collected at different distances from the base of the shrub (0 cm, 50 cm), with a sampling depth of 0–30 cm. The constant head method is used to measure the Ks. The Ks decreased with increasing soil depth. Due to the influence of shrub growth, there was significant spatial heterogeneity in the distribution of Ks at different positions from the base of the shrub. Compared to the sample location situated 50 cm from the base of the shrub, it was observed that in a single shrub plot, the Ks at the base were higher, while in a grass shrub composite plot, the Ks at the base were lower. Root length density, >0.25 mm aggregates, and organic matter were the main driving factors affecting Ks. The empirical equation established by using principal component analysis to reduce the dimensions of these three factors and calculate the comprehensive score was more accurate than the empirical equation established by previous researchers, who considered only root or soil properties. Root length density and organic matter had significant indirect effects on Ks, reaching 52.87% and 78.19% of the direct effects, respectively. Overall, the composite plot of taproot herbaceous and shrub (Caragana korshinskii and Artemisia gmelinii) had the highest Ks, which was 82.98 cm·d−1. The ability of taproot herbaceous plants to improve Ks was higher than that of fibrous root herbaceous plants. The research results have certain significance in revealing the influence mechanism of the grass shrub composite on Ks.

the “digital nomad visa”

This article in Business Insider lists 29 countries that offer some kind of “digital nomad visa”. Be warned this is kind of a junky site with a lot of ads and links. Basically, you have to show that you have a job paying a certain minimum amount and you are allowed to work remotely, and you get a visa to stay often for up to a year depending on the country. There are clusters of countries in Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Central America making these offers. Other interesting ones include Spain, Portugal, Greece, Iceland, Japan, and UAE (Dubai). The countries have nothing much to lose if you think about it – this is an inflow of money from outside their borders, i.e. essentially an export just like tourism or full-pay international students. If you lose your job, they can kick you out if they want to, or give you a set period of time to find a new one. Singapore is not on this list, but they have a program along these lines as I recall. Not that normal people with normal jobs can afford to live there for any length of time.

Being independently wealthy would be even better of course, but this might be an option for young people, mid-life crisis people without crushing family responsibilities (do these exist?), or not-quite-retired people who still need or want to work.

Are the U.S. Great Lakes cities really our best climate haven candidates?

This article in Planetizen says maybe not. But I think it is all relative, and they may be the best the U.S. has to offer. Cities mentioned in this article are Buffalo, Duluth (MN), Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, Marquette (MI), Minneapolis, and Toledo.

Here are strikes mentioned against the region, with my thoughts in brackets:

  • invasive aquatic species [sad for aquatic ecosystems and sport fishermen, maybe not a big risk to human wellbeing. Great Lakes fish are not a big source of food that I know of, largely due to legacy industrial pollution. In other words we have already poisoned the ecosystem to a degree that we can’t and don’t rely on it as a major food source.]
  • nutrient pollution from farms and sewage [something I have expertise in, and yes it is a big issue. Agriculture is the much bigger issue because it is massive and essentially unregulated. The article focuses on untreated sewage overflow, which everyone can agree are gross, but treated sewage is the bigger player when it comes to nutrient pollution. People are just another big population of animals, and yes we have better wastewater treatment than the cows and pigs but removing nutrients to the degree needed is very expensive and has not been a historical focus. BUT see my comments above regarding sad for the ecosystem and water-based recreation, not an existential threat to humans. Water-based recreation certainly adds economic value, and I am not discounting this, just again saying not an existential threat.]
  • more intense storms [big issue, with daily tragedies unfolding around the country and world. This region is not immune, but certainly not uniquely vulnerable relative to others.]
  • wildly fluctuating lake levels. [This one is interesting, because the levels in the lakes depend on the seasonal balance of runoff and evaporation, which can fluctuate quite a bit. It’s similar to coastal flooding and sea level rise issues, but on a different time scale. To me, seems like a problem if you are very near a waterfront or in a very low lying area. Certainly an issue, but seems less scary/more manageable than a category 5 hurricane hitting your city with the energy of a nuclear weapon, and/or the slow but irreversible rise in sea level.]
  • pressure to divert water across basin boundaries to areas with groundwater depletion, population growth, and pollution issues. [This region has a strong international legal framework for resisting this pressure. Political pressure chips away at it, but the framework exists and the situation is much better than areas in the southeast (Florida-Georgia) and southwest (basically everywhere from greater Phoenix to greater Las Vegas to greater Los Angeles) that are much more water scarce and lack this strong framework. We have a similarly strong framework for the Delaware basin serving greater New York, New Jersey, and greater Philadelphia, and again not perfect but we do much better than areas without such a framework.]
  • Canadian wildfires [yes, big issue. Very bad for the atmosphere and certainly a short-term health hazard for humans while it is ongoing. Things like this are affecting many regions, and I would rather be inconvenienced in Chicago than scared to death in LA I think.]
  • Adaptation, resilience, and infrastructure investment may be lagging behind regions affected by more acute coastal flooding and fire crises. [Maybe, but no evidence for this is provided. Comparing my native Philadelphia to what I saw and heard on a recent visit to Milwaukee, I’m not sure I buy this.]
  • More extreme winter weather [mostly an inconvenience, but sure some people will die especially if power outages happen during extreme cold. Most areas of the country are dealing with extreme, cold, heat, or both. Is the electric grid in the Midwest in worse shape than other regions? Again, I don’t see this as a unique vulnerability.]

So my verdict is there is no perfect climate haven, but this region still seems like it might be the best the U.S. has to offer. You could point to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine I suppose, but those are not major economic centers unless you count them as part of greater Boston, which is going to face severe coastal issues. In the Midwest you have greater Chicago and greater Toronto, which I see as too big to fail.

https://www.planetizen.com/features/135561-great-lakes-cities-are-touted-climate-refuge-reality-much-more-complex

what’s new in shipbuilding?

We hear that the United States is woefully behind China and other Asian countries, and maybe even Europe, in ship-building. So is it labor cost, labor skill, outdated technology, or some combination that is causing this? Here are a few things being tried at the Philadelphia shipyard, which has recently partnered with a South Korean firm:

The facility builds one and a half ships a year; Hanwha plans to outfit it with “smart yard technology” to speed up manufacturing so it can churn out as many as 10 ships annually and raise sales tenfold, to over $4 billion a year by 2035.

Hanwha’s subsidiary Hanwha Ocean is among the largest shipbuilders in South Korea. Its yard in the country’s southwest produces 40 ships a year…

At the shipyard, Hanwha is bringing in technology from its Korean facilities, including computer-aided design, welding robots and virtual-reality training models. Under a model it calls “cobots,” robots work alongside workers like computer-aided manufacturing and design coordinator Kyle Pernell, with human workers in charge of operating, repairing and programming the robots.

This article is positive, but I remember seeing another article saying that this facility is having trouble finding U.S. workers who are, well, trainable and willing to do this work.

what government policies ACTUALLY increase economic growth?

Wishful thinking and “starve the beast” ideology do not increase the growth rate of a national economy. There are some things that do, according to people who study the evidence (known as economists, although to be fair, some of them are also influenced by ideology if not wishful thinking). According to this Planet Money episode, policies that have been shown by evidence to increase economic growth include:

  • Building housing in cities with numerous and increasing jobs. I always thought of housing as more of a quality of life issue and not something that actually constrains growth, but this makes logical sense. Urban areas (central cities and their suburbs) are where most of the national economy’s growth happens, because they are where most of the workers and innovative ideas are. Available jobs attract people who want jobs, and this can happen faster than the housing market can grow, pushing up prices. At some point, constraints on housing can actually become constraints on growth. People seem to be focusing mostly on the federal government tail trying to wag the municipal government dog in terms of zoning codes, but I have a couple more thoughts to add. First, excellent transportation infrastructure effectively enlarges the housing market that provides access to a given job market. If I could buy a fixer-upper row house in Baltimore and take a bullet train to Manhattan, I would effectively be part of the Manhattan housing market. Our country does not have this (although Baltimore and New York City are connected by some of the best rail our country has to offer, the time and expense of that commute would not be reasonable.) Excellent communication infrastructure also helps, since many professional jobs are now remote or hybrid. Finally, there are technological advances to be made in the construction industry, which has been dead in terms of productivity growth for decades. The big one being talked about is much more factory manufacturing of modular components. Get this figured out, and you can either move some U.S. construction workers to much more productive factory floors, or you can consider allowing immigrant workers in to do these jobs at lower wages, or you can invest in factories in Central and South American economies, thereby relieving some immigration pressure on our borders. Then move it all by electrified freight rail. These are different political choices, but all economic wins. Beyond this technology, I think there are huge gains to be made on construction sites in more efficient risk-based scheduling and logistics, technology-assisted inspections of progress (with drones and cameras), and project controls (AI watching videos of the progress and comparing exactly what is happening on the ground to exactly what was planned, then advising humans on real-time adjustments to the schedule and logistics to manage risk and keep the project on track).
  • Cutting taxes on corporations generally increases growth, because the corporations will invest at least some of the savings in capital goods, work force training, and research and development. But my thought is, why not give them the tax breaks ONLY if they invest the savings in these things, which are also investments in our national economy.
  • Similar to housing, I have always thought of health care as more of a quality of life service and basic human right a benevolent government overseeing a growing economy should be providing to its citizens. But the podcast points out hard evidence that health care investments, particularly for children and low income people, have an economic payoff in terms of reduced health care costs and increased earning (and tax-paying) potential later in life.
  • Allowing in highly skilled immigrants benefits the economy.
  • Investing in the electric grid yields a greater payout in terms of lower energy costs than whatever is invested.
  • Research and development, in things OTHER THAN weapons and war, yields a big return to the economy. Investing in weapons and war crowds out more productive investments the government could be making.
  • The particular webpage covering the podcast doesn’t talk about education, but I know I have seen elsewhere that investments in childcare and education yield big benefits, particularly early childhood education.

So: housing and construction productivity; health care; childcare and education; research and development; incentives for corporate R&D, capital investment, and work force development; transportation and telecommunications infrastructure. Raise $1 in taxes, invest it in these areas, get back more than $1, and you could theoretically give the dividend back to the person who gave you the dollar, and everybody wins. Way too rational for our so-called political economy. And this doesn’t include rational risk management, like making sure those urban areas where most of the economic activity and housing are do not get destroyed by floods and fires.

climate change vs. volcanoes

Climate change is scary. Earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis are scary. But these disasters are unrelated, right? Not so fast, says the Guardian. Losing ice in places like Iceland, South America, and Antarctica changes the pressure on underground magma chambers and can trigger eruptions. And apparently there are “at least 100” active volcanoes under Antarctica.

There is no discussion of how all this will affect the secret Nazi and alien bases under Antarctica.

June 2025 in Review

I have a perfect storm of work, school, and family related urgent priorities converging at the moment, so I haven’t been posting as much as usual and might not for a few weeks.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The science on how bad a nuclear winter would actually be gets updated from time to time. It never gets any better!

Most hopeful story: This is the best I can do – Biden wasn’t able to take political credit for his infrastructure and energy transition accomplishments because his accomplishment was getting money appropriated for them, whereas implementation of these will be painfully hard and painfully slow. (Yes, I believe based on evidence and logic that investments in infrastructure and energy production that do not destroy the biosphere are good ideas.) But at least part of this agenda will be implemented over time, and Trump is spending substantial energy of his own only partially rolling back these programs.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: A Minimal Quality of Life index has been developed which is intended to better capture the cost of living real working families and parents are experiencing.

ranked choice voting

Ranked choice voting seems like a good idea, especially for those of us who liked Al Gore, and don’t like the consequences we are living decades later of that election being stolen (yes, I said it out loud). Then again, for those of us who also liked Bill Clinton, there is the question of whether ranked choice voting would have changed the outcome of that one.

Anyway, here is a long, wonky article in the context of New York City politics, saying ranked choice voting does indeed work well most of the time. In a small number of cases it can result in a “Condorcet violation”, where the ultimate winner is not one a majority of voters would have chosen in a head to head matchup.

It still seems to me much better than the system we have, with nearly insurmountable barriers to entry for all but the two large parties, and party insiders and wealthy donors largely determining the two often mediocre choices that are put before the rest of us. The biggest downside I see is that with people so suspicious of even a very simple system of counting votes, a more complicated system will lead to even more mistrust among the public, and even more ability of bad actors to exploit that mistrust. Of course, one alternative would be open, ranked choice primaries followed by an old fashioned, non-instant runoff. But even there, many variations are possible, like having primaries with a large number of candidates whittle the choices to three or four, which are then on the general election ranked choice ballot. Having just two candidates in the general might risk a choice between extremist candidates, where three or four might allow that true compromise candidate to emerge.

undersea energy storage

This idea seems to make a lot of sense. When the wind is blowing, you can use excess energy from an offshore turbine to pump water out of an underwater tank. When the wind dies down, you open a valve and water pressure will push water back into the tank, turning a turbine in the process which can generate electricity. This way, you can generate electricity whether the wind is blowing or not. You have the problem of maintaining equipment in the marine environment and transporting the electricity to shore, but since you have an offshore turbine you have presumably solved those problems. I don’t know that this idea is enough to make offshore wind turbines a great option where they otherwise wouldn’t be.

On land, it seems like you can accomplish something similar with a basic water tower. Use wind or solar energy to pump water up there when you have excess electricity, then drain it down to turn a turbine when the wind is not blowing. If you have a hill, you can put a reservoir up there and run pipes to it rather than building the water tower. Maybe you can use a your water tower or reservoir both for water supply and energy storage, but the turbine itself is going to dissipate some of the energy you need to create water pressure in your pipes, so there are some physics and economics to consider.

https://www.zmescience.com/future/sinking-giant-concrete-orbs-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-could-store-massive-amounts-of-renewable-energy/

the Minimal Quality of Life Index

Something called the Ludwig Institute has put together something called called the Minimal Quality of Life Index, which they say tracks the true cost of living in the U.S. better than other measures. It shows that costs for working parents in particular have just become crushing. And this feels right to this somewhere-above-the-median working parent. If politicians are listening to economists using more traditional measures that do not capture how real voters are experiencing the cost of living, this may explain some of our problems.