Getting a D in Health

Greetings, indoor, computer-reader.

The Sunbathing Ape

It's natural for us to feel drawn to amazing photographs of sun-soaked landscapes. We humans evolved as mostly-naked, outdoorsy folks in sunny Africa. Although the cultures (and to some degree the genes) of migrating peoples have done what they can to adapt to more polar environments, if you dig at all deep into our biology you'll see we still aren't fine-tuned to live indoor, boreal lives.

One of the biologically unmet expectations humans in the USA and Canada experience is low sun exposure, leading to Vitamin D deficiency. This article in the Globe and Mail suggests that Canadians typically have about one third of optimal concentrations of vitamin D in their bloodstream.

What's D Good For?

Until recently, it was thought that the major effect of vitamin D deficiency was rickets. Since (last time I checked) rickets wasn't an endemic problem to North Americans, vitamin D was seen as being a non-issue; the mandated additions of D and A to dairy products seemed to be sufficient to keep bone formation normal in children.

However, vitamin D has more functions than merely the regulation of bone density. It's also an important chemical precursor to a lot of important cellular signaling mechanisms: not having sufficient vitamin D is the equivalent of trying to run a government when there's a shortage of notepads to write on.

D and Cancer Rates

One of the worst consequences of screwing up chemical messages is to impede natural anti-cancer cellular mechanisms. Does our D-prived culture result in fact in increased cancer rates? The only way to know for sure is with a double-blind experiment where groups are given vitamin D and placebos at random, and to track prevalence of cancers in the two groups. That's exactly what this study did, and what they found is almost unbelievable. Giving 1.5g supplemental Calcium with 1100 IU per day (about 3 liters of milk worth, but the study used pills) decreased cancer rates by 77% after one year.

Great moons of Neptune! That's a huge decrease! The cautious part of me finds it hard to believe that one factor could be responsible for over half of cancers, and to be fair the study tracked only 1200 women over 4 years, and thus wasn't able to notice enough cases of cancer to have really tight confidence intervals: the range of cancer decreases still consistent with the study is 91%-40% 19 times out of 20. Still, I've started feeding vitamin D to my wife as well as taking it, if not daily, than at least often.

Public Health Consequences

Suppose the study's numbers bear up, and that about half of cancers could be prevented by 1100 IU of vitamin D per day. Would it be a good policy for health insurers (or friendly socialist governments like Canada's) to simply hand out vitamin D supplements? It looks like the cost of vitamin D is pretty much nothing: this bottle of 250 pills (almost a year's supply) with 1000 IU of vitamin D is only $10. On the flipside, the annual cancer rate in the US is 1 in 200. If that could be halved by the D supplement, and if treatment costs on average $40 000, that's an expected savings of $100 per year. Pay one dollar into prevention, get 10 out in unneeded treatment. (Oh, then there's the whole increase in lifespan and quality of life issue too.)

Last Word

I suppose the cautious policy approach would be to conduct a larger study to figure out where within the wide confidence interval the truth lies. However, I'm inclined to start ramping up vitamin D production and consumption programs, maybe even with heavy subsidy by governments, HMOs or otherwise. Let's get a D in health.

Liberty and Bandwidth for All

Greetings, YouTubers*.

In my last post I outlined how our current system of private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) companies is economically wasteful. Although in general the private sector is better than the public sector at providing higher-quality services at a lower cost, with ISPs the product (Internet bandwidth) is a factor of 1000 times cheaper than what ISPs charge. Almost all the ISPs' operational costs come from advertising, distributing and charging for this cheap-as-dirt Internet backbone bandwidth. In other words IPSs are intrinsically so wasteful that publicly-owned networks make sense. This post is going to tackle how I think we should implement municipal data networks.

Letting Demand Drive Expansion

Internet technology changes so fast that it would be unwieldy for a council to try to have a sane policy of technology roll-out which took advantage of the latest and greatest. It would also be hard to periodically gauge the service levels residents truly want. It's much better to make technology policy future-proof, meaning that no new laws or regulations will be required to implement better technology where it's wanted as soon as it's developed.

Here's an example of a future-proof network-building scheme. Have residents pledge (with holds on their credit cards) that they would be willing to pay X dollars for Y service. As soon as a private company notices that enough residents in a neighborhood have pledged enough money to make granting the service worthwhile, they can install whatever hardware they choose which is able to meet or exceed the bandwidth demands Y of all the people who pledged X dollars. The money from the credit card holds would then go into a trust which would pay the hardware companies annuities for as long as the service works (or maybe the trust should be invested with low risk, and 25% of the total equity should be paid to the hardware builder/maintainer each year; since Internet technology becomes obsolescent so much faster than roads it makes sense to make the payment schedule accelerated).

The city would provide all of the (essentially free) backbone bandwidth in exchange for the fact that all Internet services using that bandwidth must be broadcast over authentication-free wireless Internet or users must be able to plug in wired connections for free in publicly-accessible points. (Perhaps encryption could be optional to prevent people from spying, but it shouldn't be mandatory, and passwords must not be secret. With good crypto you can have every user use a different session key, so that even if they know each others' passwords they can't snoop on each other.)

Miscellaneous Points

Here are a few guidelines for details of the policy which might help:

• The quality of service could be specified by three numbers: bandwidth, reliability and latency-to-backbone; that way users can communicate what's most important for them to the free market.
• Perhaps users should pay on a sliding scale, with payments tied to the quality of service received, so that there is always an explicit incentive to provide better Internet service.
• Assuming only 25% of residents who want a given service would pledge for it, maybe the city should match pledges paid out of property tax.
• Since optical fiber is cheap but expensive to lay, it's a common practice to lay cables with many more fibers than will be needed in the near future. These "dark" fibers can later be cheaply lit if needed. Policies should probably specify that some percentage (like 95%) of the fiber laid to make a network must be dark.
• Depending on political will, it might make sense to pay for city-wide phone-level coverage off the bat through taxes, and let people pledge for upgrades as desired.

Conclusions

In the Chicago example of last post we saw that the entire city could have a free data network for a one-time cost of under $15 per person. People are probably willing to pay a lot more for much faster connections; the plan outlined in this post shows a way in which a publicly-owned network can deliver services the public wants as soon as their feasible to deliver without wasting money on advertising and accounting.

This plan isn't anti-business either. The local companies which would spring up to supply the network services asked for by the people would have a leg up spreading to other municipalities where this same incentive policy gets implemented. (I am fairly confident that other municipalities would want to emulate the digital utopias which would come from this type of municipal Internet service.)

With some organization, the people can have cake and eat it too: they can pay a pittance in extra tax in exchange for hassle-free, state-of-the-art Internet connectivity. Everybody wins except old-school ISP shareholders. (Sell!)

*Web 2.0 couch potatoes?

The Answer is Blowin' in the Windy City

Greetings, chatterboxes.

Today I'm going to outline why I think municipal wireless networks are a good idea. We depend more and more on Internet connectivity for our everyday lives; it's no longer the case that bandwidth is a luxury item only a small niche desires. However, the way we typically pay for bandwidth (through private Internet Service Providers, or ISPs) is tremendously inefficient. I'm going to outline an estimate of how inefficient privately-owned ISPs are, then in the next few posts I'll talk about a way in which publicly-owned networks can be financially and technologically sustainable.

Getting Hosed by ISPs

Bandwidth at Internet backbones is ridiculously cheap: about $1 per terabyte (TB) and falling fast. (Based on estimates of web-hosting costs which allow 3 TB of transfer per month for $5 per month - the $1 per TB might not be accurate to within more than an order of magnitude. I don't specifically endorse the web hosting company I linked to - it's just an example of how cheap backbone bandwidth can be.) A heavy home user might transfer about 20 GB of bandwidth per month, costing their ISPs no more than a few pennies per customer per month.

However, the rates which ISPs charge their customers is three orders of magnitude higher: $20 per month is considered a good deal. That's a markup factor of at least 1000.

There are at least three main expenses other than backbone bandwidth which contribute to the costs of running ISPs:

1. The "last mile" connectivity between multiple homes and a backbone connection point
2. Advertising and promotion
   
3. Billing customers

Going Public

If a publicly-operated free (as in beer) municipal Internet network existed, there would be no need for costs # 2 and 3, and I postulate that #1 could take a big hit too by allowing better technology to be used. I think that one of the major reasons private ISPs are scared to deploy city-wide mesh wireless networks is that if users shared their passwords with friends, they could lose customers. Instead they've opted for wired networks (through DSL or cable) which are probably a lot more expensive than wireless mesh networks so they can be sure you don't share your account with friends.

Why do I think mesh networks are cheaper? The City of Chicago plans to roll out a city-wide wireless mesh network for only $18.5 million. A city-wide network would supplant not only ISP communication, but if a few Asterisk servers were part of the setup you could replace aging telephone lines and cellphones with voice over IP (VoIP), obviating the need for phone companies, whose costs are also dominated by the three numbered items above.

Savings

How much do Chicago's 3 million residents currently pay for phone, Internet and cell phones? If we assume one ISP line (at $20/mo.) and one land line (also at $20/mo.) for every 4 residents and one cellphone (at $30/mo.) for every two residents, we'd estimate that Chicago spends $900 million per year on combined data services. Even assuming Chicago's network costs double the estimate with a one-time cost of $40 million, a municipally-funded wireless network is an exceedingly good deal.

If the backbone bandwidth cost were approximately one penny per resident per month it would not be worth the city's while to try to charge people for their individual bandwidth usage, just as we don't try to charge people who use streetlights more for their fair share of electricity costs to the city.

Conclusions

Even if implemented poorly, a publicly-owned data network would give astronomical cost savings over the current arrangement. There are still the potential pitfalls that a publicly-owned network might be terribly cost-inefficient, or that it might not give the quality of service expected by the residents. However, in my next post I will unveil a plan which addresses both of these woes.

Until then!

LeDopore

Taking Ears Off Your Life

Greetings, colonels.

Today's post is going to look at some of the dietary consequences of US corn subsidies. The United States corn industry is politically untouchable since so many processed foods are made from corn derivatives. (If you're interested in more details about factory foods, I thoroughly recommend Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

While many wary eaters know that corn products like corn-fed beef and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) are wrecking dietary havoc among the American people, it's difficult to assault the entrenched food industry without convincing facts about just how much direct damage corn subsidies do to our health. In this post I'm going to show that we can blame pretty much all of our HFCS woes on corn subsidies, and I'm going to show how much damage HFCS really does.

Corn Subsidies

Ever since 1975, the United States has been paying farmers to grow corn in excess of the quantities which the market would naturally bear. Taxpayers make up the difference between the market price and a government-guaranteed price, which is often in the neighborhood of twice the buying price of corn. Americans pay over $5 billion per year (about $17 per capita) to keep farmers producing way more corn than we could ever safely consume.

Consequences of Corn Subsidies

Corn farmers aren't the ones getting rich; the net effect of corn subsidies is to ensure a huge surplus of raw biomass to be used to manufacture higher-value food products. From The Omnivore's Dilemma, I learned that about 60% of the corn grown in the United States goes to animal feed, and much of the remainder goes into producing HFCS. If you drink diet soda or if you steer clear of US-grown meat, your taxes are paying for someone else's unhealthy diet. (Show of hands: would anyone out there resent subsidizing tobacco?)

HFCS Created by Corn Subsidies

If I'm going to accuse subsidies for making us eat unhealthy corn and corn-fed meat, I'd better be sure the subsidies are actually to blame. There are three factors which make methink corn subsidies are the root cause of pretty much all the HFCS consumed by Americans. First, HFCS is cheaper than cane sugar in the US due to subsidy. Second, in Europe, where corn isn't favored like it is in North America, HFCS is almost never used as a processed food sweetener. Third, the timing of the introduction of the corn subsidy coincides with the explosive growth of HFCS consumption in the US, as is evident in this graph (from this USDA site):



Corn subsidies were introduced in 1975, before which it's plain that HFCS was a bit player. Also note that soft drinks began phasing in HFCS as a sweetener, a transformation completed by 1984. (I fancy I can see the kink in the HFCS curve around 1984 - I wonder if that's caused by saturating the soda market.)

Fat Caused by HFCS

If HFCS were like normal unhealthy food, at least a calorie of HFCS consumed would displace a calorie from some other source, meaning that HFCS wouldn't be more responsible for today's obesity epidemic than any other unhealthy food. However, as I mentioned in this post, a recent study showed that HFCS doesn't make you feel full, so consuming HFCS will not make you eat less of other things. (The 95% confidence limit to this study was that 100 HFCS calories may displace 24 other food calories, but the study's best estimate is that people actually eat 17 more calories of other foods for every 100 HFCS calories they consume. Also note that other liquefied sugars may be just as bad as HFCS at displacing other calories.)

Even if you take the most charitable view towards HFCS allowed by the study's margin of error, 76% of the HFCS calories consumed by Americans go to fat. The average annual per capita consumption of HFCS in the United States is 59 pounds. Even assuming half of that gets wasted, that means annually an extra 22 lbs of sugar per American is consumed just because HFCS happens to be today's sweetener of choice. According to this publication (page 13 - also interesting because it claims HFCS might be not worse than other liquid sugars), HFCS is about 4/9 as calorie-dense as fat, so the availability of HFCS means that on average Americans gain an extra 10 lbs per year.

Conclusion

On average, $17 of your taxes every year go to a subsidy which causes people to gain an astonishing 10 lbs per year just through the HFCS mechanism I've outlined. (I expect subsidized animal feed also makes Americans fatter, but the story there is harder to untangle.) Moreover, the over-fertilized Iowa corn monocultures are horrible on the environment, and have killed Mexican farms which can't compete with American corn prices. (Those of you who object to Mexican farm labor should throw your lot in with the anti-subsidy crowd: it's just the subsidies which enable Americans to pay migrant workers $4 an hour while just across the boarder no farmer can afford to hire at $1 an hour. It's not something magic in the soil which makes American farms magically 4 times as efficient at turning labor into food - its the subsidies.)

In conclusion, corn subsidies do enormous harm. While I haven't supported every anti-subsidy argument in this post, I've shown that without corn subsidies you'd have the equivalent weight loss of 10 lbs per year. (I suspect many Americans diet more because of their HFCS-related weight gain - imagine if you got an extra 10 lbs of "free" fat per year! Mmmm... what I'd do!)

It's going to be a tough fight against the food industry, but there are lots of good reasons to abandon our current destructive corn-driven Leviathan. Let's ditch the subsidies and let 'em howl.

Local Produce vs. International Peace

Greetings, Macaroni Munchers.

A lot of my friends are concerned about buying food from too far away, in the interests of both helping out the local economy and of reducing fossil fuel consumption. It's a scary thought about how much our food supply depends on non-renewable resources like transportation fuel, and it's appealing to have the visceral connection to what you eat that you can get only from being able to visit the place where your food grows.

Agriculture and the Developing World

The unfortunate consequence of favoring domestic produce, however, is that you deprive the developing world of the much-needed foreign exchange which comes from agricultural exports. In fact, in non-industrialized areas of the third world, pretty much the only thing they produce that we consume is food.

A typical Nicaraguan farm worker earns about $.25 an hour (a quarter the minimum wage of neighboring Costa Rica). The cost of living there may be quite low, but still I'm disgusted by the fact that they could pick coffee for 8 hours and not earn enough money for a singe espresso shot in an American café.

By insisting on buying domestic food, we're just driving developing-world wages down farther. There are plenty of options for Americans: they don't all need agricultural work to stave off extreme poverty. Giving meaningful work to developing nations promotes the sense of coöperation which leads to good feelings and peace.

Dependence on developing nations for food can also lead to peace-making policy. You're less likely to invade another country if you need the food they produce to survive.

Aside: I'm being overly-dramatic. Americans consume on average 3790 calories per day (although some of that is spoilage), so losing even a third of food imports wouldn't spell widespread famine. At the same time, you're less likely to go to war with an entrenched trading partner; the European Union may have ushered in an age of post-historicism, now that individual countries are so economically entwined that it would be sillier than ever to go to war.

Fuel Costs by Sea and Land

Trade and peace aside, many of my friends want to consume as little fossil fuel as possible in getting their food delivered, so they're careful to buy only from locally-grown produce. However, raw distance-from-home is a poor tracker of fuel consumed, since freight by sea is so much more efficient than by land. Let's figure out just how much more efficient it is to ship a container one mile by sea than by land.

By land, a typical mileage rating for a semi truck carrying a 53-foot trailer is about 6 miles per gallon. Page 5 of this document has all of the relevant information: an ultra-sized container ship traveling at 22.5 knots burns 180 tonnes of fuel per day, and carries 10 000 twenty foot-equivalent units of cargo. After a little math, we find the ship transports the same 53-ft container at 44 miles per gallon.

A ship coming to the United States from Chile burns about the same amount of fuel per container as a semi truck traveling about 700 miles, and if people drive 8 miles to the grocery store to buy 50 lbs of groceries in a car rated at 30 miles per gallon, they burn as much fuel per grocery item as that container ship from Chile.

Conclusions

Before jumping on the "local food" bandwagon, please consider the impact of shunning the developing world. Also, consider biking, busing or walking to the grocery store when possible if you're really interested in reducing fossil fuel consumption.

Bon Appetit!

Financing Hippies

Greetings, venture capitalists.

In my last post, I talked about how it would be a good idea to force all list prices to reflect the expected use cost, so that consumers would be able to more easily compare total costs. In the comments on that post, I also said it would be a good idea to increase energy costs until they hit their "true cost," whatever that might be.

These two suggestions together would be a shock to the economic system, so I'm going to propose a way to finance energy-efficient housing such that the net effect is that nobody gets a stiff bill and energy-efficient technology gets used where appropriate.

Forging a "Standard Deal" with the Banks

Here's the scoop. Everyone want to decrease the taxes they pay towards energy subsidies. Governments are bad at giving environmental incentives proportional to the environmental good done. Banks are greedy. Homeowners don't have piles of cash sitting around, but they're willing to pay huge sums over time in tiny increments.

Here's the plan. Introduce a "standard deal," whereby you can request for a bank to send a housing engineer to your (already-built) home. They will determine which energy-efficient technologies would be most profitable for the house in question. If they decide it to be profitable, the banks could then authorize and pay for energy efficiency updates to be done on the home in question. From that time on, the banks could have a lien on the property for an amount equal to the cost of the thermal upgrading, and for some years' time they would be authorized to take 80% of the difference between the current and pre-improvement utilities bills as estimated by historical usage. The banks would keep the lien on the house until either 10 years have elapsed, or until the amount the bank has drawn has covered the upgrading expense compounded at 15% per year.

Effects of the Standard Deal

The net effects of the standard deal are: homeowners get a short-term small reduction in their utilities bill, and after a few years they get a substantial reduction. Banks get a 15% return-on-investment for their cash, at a fairly low risk. Banks have an incentive to hire engineering firms which will install the most energy-efficient technology which will have a payback time of less than about 8 years. Energy usage will go down across the board. Since the energy-efficiency improvements make the house more valuable, the lien plus improvements actually increase the value of the house (unless the banks made a mistake in terms of what kind of improvements to order).

Case Study: Victorian Toronto Mansion

In the case of the Toronto house I mentioned last post in a footnote, over 10 years they were paying more than $100 000 in heating bills. As long as technology exists which is capable of reducing their winter heating bills to less than $1000 per month, that's more than a $50 000 10-year reduction, so if banks could finance a $30 000 or so insulation retrofit for that house, they'd be rolling in dough. The starving students who lived there would see an immediate but small ($200 - $300) reduction in monthly utility costs, and future students living there would do even better.

Standardizing the Deal

I think there should be no new laws made for this program, but that governments should draw up and promote this standard deal into fill-in-the-blanks contracts between homeowners and banks. If banks want to alter the deal, fine; but governments should provide a default agreement which doesn't screw anyone over as a baseline, in part for efficiency's sake and in part because banks have a lot more expertise at getting what they want out of contracts.

Conclusions: Sometimes Everybody Wins

There doesn't always have to be a trade off between the environment and free enterprise. We can't all be top-notch thermal engineers who know what modifications make the most fiscal sense. With this standard deal, everyone can profit, and there will be an increased economy of scale for energy-efficient technologies which make the most sense. It's win-win-win; let's do it.

Upfront Cost Disclosure

Greetings, homeowners.

If you're a regular reader, you'll already know that I have both an environmental and a capitalist streak in me. I don't think these two need be in eternal conflict; in fact today's post is going to outline a way in which we can encourage the adoption of green technologies without messing around with the marketplace.

Good Policy Assumes Laziness

First of all, let me fire a diffuse attack at all of the legislated incentives to get people to adopt new green technology. While legislated incentives can be better than nothing, often the incentives are not proportional to the environmental good done (e.g. giving a fixed tax rebate to cars purchased with better than a certain mileage - there's just a threshold and no proportionality), and almost always these bills can't and shouldn't be passed when the technology has only limited applicability. However, I think that there are potentially many diverse opportunities for incremental improvements that just can't be addressed by legislated incentives. Good policy should automatically reward where it should; good policy is lazy and future-proof.

Virtue should be Its Own Reward

In this post I'm going to outline a way to promote environmental benefits in a natural, non-legislative way. Specifically, we should require that the advertised price of goods reflect the total cost of ownership, and not just the sale price. For example, when buying a house, the only price you would be allowed to advertise should be the sum of the sale price and the forecast cost of 20 years of utilities in the house. This way, houses with the same listed price would be equally affordable, and there would be incentives to build houses that were greener. Let me slow down a bit to unpack all of these comments so that they make a little more sense.

I'm Lazy Too

How many of you have bought a house or rented an apartment without first calculating the expected utility bills? I have never requested past utility statements for any property I've rented, and I certainly haven't done any thorough analysis of properties I'm only marginally interested in. I think I'm pretty typical in my laziness too: while I might try to factor in energy efficiency, I don't have a clear idea as to how much a given setup will affect my bottom line.

Modern economists acknowledge that humans make decision (and big ones too) with imperfect information, which results in less-than-optimal buying decisions. The most common numeric piece of information people take into account when looking to buy a house or rent an apartment is its price; my idea is to fold utility costs into the price from the outset so that people can make a lazy but correct decision as to how much they would like to spend on a heated domicile.

Implementation

If I ruled the world, the list price for all houses would have to be the sale price plus 20 years of expected utilities costs, based on prior use records. (Aside: 20 years is a round figure on the order of the inflation-adjusted doubling time of money at prime rates, so if you were to invest this sum at the time of sale its simple interest could pay utilities from the interest essentially for ever. Perhaps 20 years is a little on the short side.) The sale price would be allowed to be advertised only as a line item in conjunction with the utilities cost and the total list price. Lying would be considered fraud.

Guessing the efficiency of a new building might be difficult, but it should be possible to use statistics to fine any construction company which consistently lowball's the heating estimates of the buildings they make.

The same idea could be applied to automobiles: add the cost of driving 50 000 city and 50 000 highway miles before getting the list price. (Aside: this will come out to around $10 000: enough to perhaps convince many people to buy newer, more fuel-efficient cars. Who would want a clunker when the list price is $11 200? We might be able to persuade car manufacturers to lobby for this idea since it would boost new car sales.)

Perhaps major appliances and computers should have a similar addition to advertised price, maybe also including the mean time until failure. At some point gizmos become too small for these advertising restrictions cease to make sense, but I don't know if this transition happens at the "toaster" level or the "microwave" level.

Lazily Greener Incentives

Consider the implications of my idea on builders and house maintainers. If you build a house that's more energy-efficient, its value to the seller will automatically be higher, since it competes with houses of the same list price. The 20-year cost of heating a poorly-insulated house in a cold climate can top $100 000*, so energy-efficient designs and materials could give a significant edge on the open market.

Moreover, if home buyers were to display a fraction of the eco-chic that Prius-cravers show, perhaps small 20-year heating cost stats would carry the same caché as slim cellphones. In any case, energy efficiency could be reducible to a dollar value, which is great for putting things into perspective.

Conclusions

Let me recap a few of the reasons why I think we should add use cost to sale price to determine the list price of automobiles, houses etc.

• It's the duty of the government to protect consumers from false advertising.
  
• Markets are more efficient when more information is used.
  
• It's easier to perform cost analyses once per item sold than once per potential sale.
  
• Green policy should provide continuous incentives to make better products, and these incentives should be proportional to the environmental good done.
  
• Legislated incentives are rigid, slow-to-implement, and fiscally inefficient.
  

In summary, let's get our policy into the adaptive 21st century by making the cost advertised closer to what the consumer is really going to pay.

*Friends of mine in Toronto rented a house with typical winter heating bills of $2000 per month, even though some of them opted to turn the heat down and sleep in arctic sleeping bags. I'm sure that if this heating were advertised in the listed rent they would have rented elsewhere. The 20-year heating cost for this Victorian behemoth would have been over a quarter-million bucks: a significant warning to any prospective home-buyer, and a burning incentive for the current owner to insulate better to protect the house's retail and rental value.

Making Future-Proof Policy

Greetings, fellow nerds.

Today I'm going to address an emerging problem for policy-makers: how to exploit all the latest tech without getting bogged down in implementation details. I'm going to make the case that governments should adopt an adjudicating rather than a micro-managing role in some kinds of service provision.

Today's Tech is a Moving Target

Ours is an age of innovation. The rate of innovation has never been so fast. There's a yawning gap between the cutting edge of (especially) information technology and typical technology usage. As tech speeds up, I see this problem getting worse, not better. Do we want to perpetually wait around for bright ideas to crawl their way through the legislature? Or, do we want an adaptive system where better solutions to public problems can be implemented and rewarded instantaneously? How would such an unregulated system work?

Examples: Road Construction and Power Distribution

I've already given an outline on how we could get the private sector to automatically implement any useful tech in terms of road durability and safety in the form of bonds which annually pay the holder an amount proportional to the good that was done to the community. See my 21st century capitalism post at the bottom for more details.

I'm going to argue that we should trade in our monopsony/monopoly electrical power distribution system for a free market system with fluctuating prices for the same reason. As soon as a new gizmo which does things better gets invented, you should be able to just plug the sucker in and start making cash.

Case in Point: Cold Dutch Ideas

Recently, a Dutch research agency suggested that refrigeration warehouses should turn off their refrigerators during the day (nature article and ZDNet summary) in an idea called "night wind". Excess wind power is generated at night and might get wasted if nobody used it. Since it's OK for some refrigerated goods to vary in temperature a couple of degrees, you would let your warehouse warm up a bit during the day, but get cooled right off at night using green power through a grid that didn't happen to be at peak.

Let's review some of the steps you'd need to go through to put this idea into practice given the current power system.

1. Some researcher thinks it up.
2. Political will is mustered to look into the study.
3. The specifics of which warehouses could use no diurnal refrigeration (possibly season-dependent) are compiled by a central authority.
4. New regulations have to be developed and approved.
   
5. Businesses are notified of discounts (or worse yet - income tax incentives) available for night-only refrigeration.
6. Enforcers patrol the warehouses which signed up to make sure they don't use their refrigerators at night.

Keep It Simple!

I think letting the price of power float is a much better idea, so long as any approved entity can buy or sell energy to the grid. We already have "time of use" power meters which record the time of day each kWh of energy was used. Usually, energy at peak hours costs a high fixed rate while energy at off-peak hours is much less expensive - often less than half as costly.

Suppose we took the time-of-day concept one step farther and let electrical power be traded like any other commodity. Then, the steps needed to get warehouses to take advantage of extra power would be:

1. Somebody notices power is more expensive in the day, so she turns off the refrigerators during the day.
2. Profit!!!
   

Once people realize that power's cheaper at night, all sorts of things might get switched over to night-only, such as domestic air conditioning (possibly with a heat reserve), industrial processes, electric car charging, winter heating, etc. I can imagine thermostats which take in two variables: the current temperature and the current cost of electricity, to decide whether to turn on. It would be easy to transmit a few bits of information relaying the current price of electricity along power lines at some frequency other than 60 Hz (probably higher, so the signal would die out over a short range, and so local prices could vary somewhat). Then every appliance from fridge to light bulb could (in principal) decide for itself whether to turn on.

Free Market Benefits

There are six benefits to this system:

1. Consumers would have financial incentives to cut back electricity usage when it's most scarce.
2. The market would be able to decide exactly when price-dependent operation is worthwhile. Personally, I would say "no" to lightbulbs which dim when power is expensive, but "yes" to a fridge which works most when power is cheap, and "definitely" to a plug-in hybrid car which guzzled late-night 2¢-per-kWh hydro power. No extra laws needed!
   
3. Power generation systems would be rewarded for producing electricity when it's most needed (potentially making solar power more financially-feasible in hot and sunny areas - solar needs all the financial help it can get).
4. If somebody developed a large battery for leveling out peak usage, they would be able to make a quick buck right away. No need for proving the thing first: just buy low and sell high. No public investment risk would be involved, and peak prices would go down as peak supply increased, as if by magic.
   
5. The financial incentives for long-distance power cables (such as HVDC) would be immediately apparent, and if they were economical, would be built quickly by profit-seeking companies.
   
6. There would finally be some elasticity in demand for power. Trying to match generation with consumption is one of the biggest causes of damage to power equipment causing blackouts. If systems become over-stressed, prices would go up and everyone who had a smart air conditioner would instantaneously decrease the load on the critically-stressed system.
   

As I see it, the biggest disadvantage of changing to a market-based system is that it would be a change. New hardware would be needed - that's about it.

Conclusions

A market-based power-distribution system has the advantage of instantaneously adding incentives exactly where they would be with an ideal policy system. There would be no lumbering lag between technological innovation and implementation: if it will make money, do it.

Ensuring that financial incentives are aligned with the good of humanity is what 21st century capitalism is all about. Policies where every party has the same goals makes us work together to the benefit of all, harnessing our uniquely human gift of capitalism to do good.

Death match: Big Macs vs. Unprotected Sex

Greetings, fellow nerds.

My Spanish teacher in Costa Rica (Carlos P. - the P. stands for a word which happens to be the foulest word in the Portuguese language, which was entertaining to the Brazilian immigration officials - that's entirely another story though) asked me why Americans are fanatical about staying AIDS-free, but don't give a pair of dingo's kidneys if they die of being too fat. Carlos, the more I think about it, the more it sounds like you're on to something, and I'm going to follow up your comment with a numerical analysis: today we're going to weigh the risk of HIV contracted from having unprotected sex against the increased risk of dying from obesity by eating one Big Mac™.

HIV risk from unprotected sex: what are the numbers?

First off, let's quantify the HIV risk of having sex with an American chosen at random. The CDC estimates the percentage of HIV-positive US residents to be 0.4% (as of 2003). That's already a low number, but to asses the risk of catching HIV from unprotected sex we have to multiply by the transmission rate: that is, given that you have unprotected sex with somebody who's HIV-positive, what are your chances of getting it?

What is this transmission rate? Take a guess. Now decrease it by a factor of 10. If your guess was like mine, you'd still be way above the truth. I don't know if it's general squeamishness or over-zealous sex ed teachers, but the risk of HIV transmission between otherwise-healthy people is between 5 and 50 cases per 10,000 acts, depending on exactly what kind of (more-than-just-oral) unprotected sex you're having (Wikipedia link + original article). That means if you and your (randomly-selected vis. HIV status) American partner are healthy, you have between a 2 in a million and a 20 in a million chance of contracting AIDS from unprotected sex.

Let's put that into perspective. If you live to be 80, you'll have lived 29 200 days. What are the chances (everything else being equal) that today your number's up? That would be 1 / 29200 = 34 in a million, almost twice the HIV risk associated with receptive anal intercourse from a randomly-chosen American male.

My heart goes out to people who have contracted HIV from unprotected sex. I'm sure they have been demonized for being so careless as to indulge in this (so-called) risky behavior. Let's find out just how risky their behavior really was, in terms of Big Mac™ eating.

What's the Lethal Dosage of Big Macs™?

First of all, I don't want to single out Big Macs™, McDonald's™, or even just the fast food industry as unique bringers of ill-health. The Big Mac™ is however a nearly-ubiquitous unit of culinary over-indulgence; let it here symbolize any overly-calorific meal.

There's a good chance that fast food-related factors other than too many calories cause health problems. Films such as "Super Size Me" suggest that high concentrations of fast food can kill - suppose Morgan Spurlock had spent 100 days on the McDonald's™-food-only diet and found that to be lethal. Then we could estimate the risk of eating a Big Mac™ to be 1 in 300 (for 300 meals). That's a risk of more than 3000 per million meals, or between 150 and 1500 times the risk of contracting HIV from unprotected sex. When spread out over many years, the lethality of Big Macs™ can't be that high, so let's get a low-ball estimate of the risk on Big Mac™ poses by its calories alone.

Weight Gain from a Big Mac™ Meal

Surprisingly, if you eat a Big Mac™ and nothing else as a meal, you get about the right number of calories. Assuming that you should be eating 1800 calories a day, the Big Mac™'s 600-calorie payload doesn't sound so bad. It's the side dishes which add the real risk. Full meals at fast food restaurants can have as many as 1825 calories - 1025 too many for an 1800 calorie-a-day diet. For now, let's assume the typical fast food meal has 800 superfluous calories which will be carried around by the diner essentially forever. (I'm not sure if eating too much has a net positive or negative effect on one's metabolism: if you're heavy you might decide to drive instead of walk so much that it counteracts the need to fuel a bigger body.) That 800 extra calories per fast food meal translates to just under a quarter pound of extra body weight; let's see what that does for your health.

Mortality Increase per Big Mac™

I could give you a laundry list of symptoms you could get by being overweight, but instead I'll just boil it down to a number: how much does your mortality rate increase if you have that extra quarter pound on your paunch? According to this JAMA article, in 2000, 111 909 excess deaths were caused by obesity among the 23.3% of Americans who were obese or extremely obese (defined as having a BMI above 30). In 2000 there were 281,421,906 Americans total, which means that 0.17% of obese people died that year from being obese. That's just for the year though - since HIV can let you live for 15 years or more, the risk of dying from obesity in the same span of time you'd expect as from an HIV infection is 2.5%, or 1 in 40.

The last factor to consider is how likely it is for an extra quarter pound to push you into the danger zone. (Aside: in reality, there probably isn't any sharp divide between safe and risky BMIs, but we can still get a feel for the effect size of being obese by this discretization.) From the same study, 33.8% of Americans have a BMI from 25 to 30. Assuming an even distribution of BMIs in the 25-30 range and an average height of 5'10", about 0.8% of people with a BMI between 25 and 30 would be tipped into the BMI > 30 class from that one extra fast food meal. If we assume the risk of already-obese people is at least as great as the risk to overweight people, that means that for 47.1% of the American population, eating one Big Mac™ has a .8% chance of increasing your mortality risk over the next 15 years by 2.5%. Multiplying probabilities, the total risk of that Big Mac™ killing you within 15 years (again, assuming you're a randomly-chosen American) is at least 94 in a million, or between about 5 and 50 times the HIV risk of unprotected sex! That's an average too; if you're overweight, Big Macs™ are at least twice as deadly.

Caveats

There are a few weak points in my argument; let me list them. Here are some factors which may make HIV more dangerous than I let on.

1. People who have more unprotected sex with multiple partners tend to have partners with higher HIV risk too.
2. Other STDs can increase the rate of transmission of HIV by increasing the volume of fluids exchanged.

Additionally, I didn't factor in that being underweight can be risky too; in other words, Big Macs™ could be a benefit to skinny people.

However, my final analysis also didn't take into account the fact that fast food is nutritionally poor, an additional danger I have not accounted for. Moreover, I only counted the obesity risk over 15 years, while the risk in fact continues for as long as you are obese.

Conclusion: Big Macs™ are More Deadly than Unprotected Sex in America.

It would be incorrect to state that every Big Mac™ consumed poses more risk of death than every act of unprotected sex. It also would be wrong to claim that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been totally eclipsed by a wave of obesity; factor #1 under Caveats is too big to ignore in an epidemiological context. However, given my reasonable assumptions, I find that on average Big Macs™ are 5 to 50 times more deadly than unprotected sex with a randomly-chosen American. Carlos P., your intuition was right.

Here's the take-home message:

1. HIV is harder to contract than you might think.
2. Too much food can kill you.
3. We should worry more about our diets, and perhaps less about disease.
4. If you're like me, you probably worry too much about the wrong things.
   

To address #4, I've started a wiki to keep track of the risks around us. Help me complete and update it; then maybe we can keep a sense of perspective when it comes to banal topics like Big Macs™ and ominous-sounding plagues like HIV/AIDS.