Green power: Still what you don’t want to hear

Tyler Cowen reminds us that the most cost-effective low-carbon power source is nuclear.

If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000 to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.

(He’s actually quoting Petr Beckmann at The Economist.)

This is a good time to remind ourselves that the majority of Green Power advocates — or at least the loudest ones — aren’t optimizing for power sources that reduce pollution; they are instead optimizing for power sources that minimize their own fears.  Climate change is scary, so coal and oil are out.  Energy corporations are scary, so natural gas (Fracking!  OMG ONOZ!) and oil (Oilsands!  Pipelines!  Greasy otters!) are out.  Nuclear power is about as scary as it gets, so that’s a non-starter even if it means reverting to all the other scary power sources (see for example what Europe’s doing right now post-Fukushima).

I’m not unsympathetic.  I don’t like scary things, either.  I’d rather avoid choking on smog during my morning commute or turning into a skin crayon as I’m dragged along the highway by a Prius driver dicking around with s/h/its cellphone.  (“Oh sorry, I’ve never seen someone use that crosswalk!”)  But, like GI Joe said back when I was a kid, “Knowing is half the battle!”  And knowing that, say, thorium thermoreactors are about as benign as anything designed to be exothermic is likely to get is rather empowering when it comes to tackling all those other fears.  (I would love to be educated on better alternatives, should any exist, in the comments.)

Car porn, baby!

When was the last time you fapped to a Nordschleife video?

In seven minutes and nine seconds you’ll be able to say “tonight”:

Fullscreen, high quality, you know the drill.

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Here’s a balls-achingly tiny gif of Valtteri Bottas slinging what’s probably the best pass of the season on Esteban Gutierrez at COTA this past weekend.

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And finally, some build threads magic.  We’ll start with a 1986 MkII Supra…

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…and finish with a 1/4-scale fuel-injected V8.

All linky, no thinky 2: The Linkening

So I’m joining the rising tide of anti-intellectualism that’s destroying Classical Liberal Arts Institutions, or whatever, and taking a course on reactive programming on Coursera (one of those MOOCs that’s destroying &c.).  Feels good to stretch my brain again; I’ve wanted an excuse properly to learn Scala for a while, and maybe this time around I’ll actually grok monads.  (If you’re wondering what “reactive programming” is, it’s writing Erlang in languages that aren’t Erlang.  So far as I can tell, at any rate.)

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• Reclaiming fairness as a precept of commerce (EconLog)

Is fairness a process thing or an outcome thing?  I suspect most of us’ll pick one until we come across an instance of the other we don’t like, at which point things go all Black Monolith and we club each other with femurs.

• Do parents seek to maximize the social value of their children? (Marginal Revolution)

Money shot:

As I see it, many upper middle class parents desire their child to be slightly more successful than they are, and in related but not identical fields and ways.

• Why do firms prefer more able workers? (EconLog)

Duh, you say, which tells me you haven’t read it.  “But why wouldn’t you prefer to hire a better worker?”  Why didn’t you buy a Bentley Mulsanne instead of a used Camry?  “So practical!”  Shut up, you’ve made my point.  Why hire a superstar developer for a gajillion dollars when all you need is someone to poke node.js with a stick?  “But assholes drive Bentleys!”  You think Mark Zuckerberg’s an asshole, don’t you?  “Huh?”  Just scroll down already.

• Stayaway from layaway (Marginal Revolution)

The real insight here is into the minds of so-called “consumer advocates”.

• Diffusion of responsibility (Popehat)

Teetering dangerously close to reaggravating my outrage fatigue.

• Dietary fat and heart disease (In The Pipeline)

Oh look, a nice comforting hobby-horse.  Meta-analysis shows that “saturated fat is not the problem”.  No shit, buttercup.  Fat loss is widely correlated with improved cardiovascular health, and a fat loss diet is, de facto, high in saturated fat coming from your own god damn adipocytes.  Here’s the paper’s author giving me an enormous confirmation-bias boner:

Saturated fat has been demonised ever since Ancel Keys’s landmark “seven countries” study in 1970. This concluded that a correlation existed between the incidence of coronary heart disease and total cholesterol concentrations, which then correlated with the proportion of energy provided by saturated fat. But correlation is not causation. Nevertheless, we were advised to cut fat intake to 30% of total energy and saturated fat to 10%.” The aspect of dietary saturated fat that is believed to have the greatest influence on cardiovascular risk is elevated concentrations of low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Yet the reduction in LDL cholesterol from reducing saturated fat intake seems to be specific to large, buoyant (type A) LDL particles, when in fact it is the small, dense (type B) particles (responsive to carbohydrate intake) that are implicated in cardiovascular disease.

• Why not compulsory college? (EconLog)

We make kids go to school because it’s “good for them”, and everyone agrees that it’s “good for” kids to go to college.  So why not round them up at gunpoint, herd them into cattle cars, and send ’em off to West Bumfuck State?

• Reclaiming fairness: Competition policy (EconLog)

As odd as it may sound, the majority of time and resources of the FTC is not spent on punishing bad business practices as authorized in the FTC Act. The agency overwhelmingly concentrates on enforcing another act also passed in 1914, the Clayton Act, and specifically section 7, which prohibits mergers and acquisitions where the effect “may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.”

• The sad losers of politics (Marginal Revolution)

This is why I don’t blog about politics any more:

Pierce, Rogers and Snyder find that political partisans are more upset about an election loss than a random sample of parents were upset by the Newtown shootings.

• What are humans still good for?  The turning point in freestyle chess may be approaching (Marginal Revolution)

An interesting discussion on how humans can add value to computer programs when those programs are really, really good.  The context there is chess, which is a pretty well-understood game of finite complexity.  I claim that humans have been doing this for decades in software development, whose practical complexity is limited only by what you can convince your publisher is actually possible.  Worried about computers taking over your job?  Computers have taken over mine on the regular over the past two decades, and as a result I keep getting better and more interesting jobs.

• The decline of creative destruction (EconLog)

“Creative destruction” is something that most people who aren’t raging anarchocapitalists like to write off as abstract, idealistic propaganda.  Fortunately, Bryan Caplan is a raging an-cap, and he’s set it all out in time-series graphs so you can actually see it.

• Are students nicer than pornographers and domain traders? (Marginal Revolution)

I have to admit, I threw this in just for the shock value.  But see previous no-think-link about college being good for kids.

• A theory of good intentions (Marginal Revolution)

Why do altruists help people?  Because they want to be seen helping people.  This should surprise precisely no-one.

• “I am a sick motherfucker!” (Deadspin)

Rob Ford lol.

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Tune in next time for part 3, when we’ll discover whether this series is better-on-evens (Star Trek) or better-on-odds (Back to the Future)… or just shit (The Fast and the Furious).

All linky, no thinky

Old News edition.

• Capitalism is awesome (EconLog)

(Take “capitalism” to mean “competition in relatively unfettered markets”.)

• Twitter vs. flying cars (EconLog)

I’m sick of people shitting on Twitter, especially now that it’s established its utility as a low transaction cost (that part’s important, reread it until you understand why) ad-hoc communications medium.  For example, this would have been mired in delusional architecture and Kafkaesque specifications-by-committee if Twitter hadn’t made it possible for Translink’s customer-service folks to simply tell everyone who was interested why the bus is late today.  And if you don’t think web development is all that hard, I invite you to try to buy American health insurance.  Software will fuck you up.

• Ho-hum, move along, nothing to see here (Marginal Revolution)

Turns out the market’s response to the horrible, eschatological, cataclysmic government shutdown was… “Huh, did you say something?  Government what now?  Sorry, I was focusing on things that might affect my bottom line.”  You’d think a Mad Max scenario would qualify, which should make you wonder whether it was likely to happen in the first place.

• What would default look like? (Marginal Revolution)

“Treasury bonds default” has gone from “don’t be absurd” to “well, of course it’s an absurd idea, but…“.  This does not make me any happier.  There’s also this:

Addendum: By the way, we used to read that an attack of the bond market vigilantes would be good for the economy, but it seems this is no longer the case when the vigilantes are led by Republicans.  Hint: an attack of the bond market vigilantes is not good for the economy.

• Getting beneath the veil of effective schools (Marginal Revolution)

Curiously, it turns out that most of the things teachers’ unions champion are of great benefit to teachers but not so much to students.  Don’t read the comments, they’ll give you cancer.

• Dani Rodrik on premature deindustrialization (Marginal Revolution)

An immediate consequence is that developing countries are turning into service economies at substantially lower levels of income.

“Deindustrialization”, if you haven’t bothered to click through, is the act of turning manufacturing jobs that make anti-sweatshop activists righteously indignant into call-centre jobs that make anti-sweatshop activists with bricked iPhones righteously indignant.  Which is progress, I suppose, because if their iPhones are bricked they can’t tweet you handwringing nonsense when you’re busy trying to set your fantasy football lineup.

• You can always depend on the self-interest of strangers: Hotel edition (EconLog)

Quick: Who among you would be so generous as to take in a family of complete strangers with a sick child, give them a room for the night, and serve them breakfast?  Oh, uh, spoiler warning.

• Why not protect workers from customers? (EconLog)

“And then Bryan Caplan stood up and just started Bryan Caplanning at everyone.”

More later.

Rob Ford’s new breakout single…

…DRUN-ken STU-por.

Stay tuned for the return of “All Linky, No Thinky”.  Probably.

Fact: Spiders are adorable

Told you so.  (I’m more of a fan of jumping spiders — they’re like tiny kittens with twice as many legs.)

The orb-weavers are setting up shop on my balcony railing again, murdering gnats and the occasional small housefly with verve and enthusiasm.  If they had ears I’d scrunch ’em like a Border Collie.

Two new lifting ebooks you should read

The first is Matt Perryman’s Squat Every Day.  I titled this post “lifting ebooks”, but SED is of vastly broader interest — it’s a look at the human stress response, acute and chronic, psych- and physiological, through the lens of high volume resistance training (“Bulgarian style”, if you like).  It’s really, really good, and it’s seven bucks.  If you have any interest whatsoever in my training and nutrition posts, you really ought to pick this up.

The second is Jim Wendler’s Beyond 5/3/1.  It’s more or less exactly what it says on the tin — an occasionally-disorganized cornucopia of ideas for taking your training beyond the standard 5/3/1 format.  If you’re not familiar with 5/3/1, get one of his other ebooks first.  At twenty-five bucks, it’s not the no-brainer Squat Every Day is, but it’s stuffed full of good content, worth reading and re-reading like Wendler’s other books.

Gettin’ Shredded: A brief and subjective review of the Ultimate Diet 2.0

A few months ago I did four weeks of Lyle McDonald’s Ultimate Diet 2.0.  In terms of fat lost per unit time, it’s probably the most effective thing I’ve tried, and if my adventures in carb backloading stall out I’ll probably go back to it.

Overview

UD2.0 is a weekly carb-cycling diet.  You spend roughly four days in a severe caloric deficit, flirting with if not actually bathing in ketosis, and burn fat and glycogen like nobody’s business.  After one last workout to fully deplete your glycogen stores and prepare your muscle tissue for an insulin rush, you carb up like a motherfucker over the next 30 hours.  After your carb-up, you lift heavy for a couple of days, then finish up a high-volume glycogen-depleting workout and start again.

The premise, briefly, is that you’ll burn through a pound or more of fat in the four-day deficit, and when you carb up your liver and muscle tissue will be so thirsty for glycogen that you won’t store any carbs as fat.  The carb-up is intended to normalize your metabolism after a few days of frankly ridiculous dieting, and the subsequent lifting ought to rebuild any muscle you lost during that short diet.  If you want more details, go buy Lyle’s ebook, it’s great.  (And also a lot more comprehensive than anything I’m likely to write.)

A week in the life

Sunday is the last day of relatively free eating over the weekend.  You eat low-carb at more or less maintenance calories, and you lift heavy.  For me, this was “pulls” day — snatches, then cleans, then deadlifts.  You’re still carbed up, either from the previous Friday or from whatever you were doing before starting UD2.0, so this is no harder than usual.  Tell any beer left in your fridge that you love it and switch to whiskey and soda, or maybe just soda.

Monday sucks more than Mondays usually do because you’re at 50% maintenance.  Pull out every trick in the book and tell yourself it’s in a good cause.  Hit the gym after work and rep out on big movements — front squats, RDLs, dips, and rows for many sets of ten.  Gaze longingly at the sushi place across the road as you pull out a protein shake and go home to your can of salmon.  Dull the pain with a glass of bourbon IIFYM.

Tuesday and Wednesday are worse than Monday because you don’t even get to lift.  Well, you can lift Tuesday if you want, but you probably can’t lift much.  Listen to Pantera and tell yourself what a hardcore physical culturist you are.  Have an ounce of the hard stuff IIFYM.

Thursday morning you’ll be slavering over the carb-load to come, but before you get there you need to lift.  This workout’s lower-rep than Monday’s, but if you’re anything like me you’ll be disappointed with the weight on the bar.  Deploy your highest-powered pre-workout and your crunchiest, filthiest metal.  Keep at it until you peel yourself off the gym floor and drag your sorry glycogen-depleted carcass over to the tube of Rockets in your gym bag.  It’s time for…

The carb-load.  At this point, if you’ve done your part in the gym and if you avoid excesses of fructose (and its polymers), you almost certainly cannot eat enough carbs over the next day and a half to gain any fat.  Your job, your solemn duty, is to try.  At this point you’re probably wrecking forty bucks worth of sushi and feeling like a kid at Christmas —

Dear Santa, for carb-load I want a pound of Rockets and two cans of Pringles and enough maki to choke a horse and then some burritos and… and…

— and there’s nothing wrong with that, that attitude is what you need to carry you through the carb-load.  Because when you go to sleep on Thursday night, snug in the swole arms of leptin and anabolism, the magnitude of your chosen task begins to dawn and you realize you’ve barely made a dent in the thousand-odd grams of carbs you need to consume if you want to do this right.

Friday starts early.  You get up, you take a shit, and you put water to boil.  One pot is for breakfast, which is two packets of cheap-ass ramen.  The other pot is for white rice.  While the rice cooks you wolf down noodles and MSG and whip up protein to mix with the rice.  You pack that shit in Tupperware and mix protein powder with improbable amounts of creatine and waxy maize and get out the door to work.  Try to shower in there somewhere.

Your co-workers, who by now are probably used to your ketogenic ways, won’t expect to see you in the kitchen microwaving a bowl of rice with bacon, eggs, and a bunch of Sriracha on top, so they’ll make unfunny jokes which you’ll ignore.  Slam that rice and protein, and then mix up a protein shake with so much waxy maize in it that it tastes like drinking a panel of waterlogged chocolate-flavoured drywall.  It’s ten-thirty and your endocrine system’s yelling at you to stop eating, but you can’t.  Lunch is a sushi run.  As soon as you can manage, finish off that rice and protein and the rest of your protein-carb shakes, and work your way grimly through a bag or three of chips from the vending machine.  Insulin might be making you groggy — no coffee!  Coffee is an appetite suppressant, get your caffeine from tablets.  Leave the Coke and its high-fructose corn syrup in the fridge.

Quitting time and you just want to go home and sleep off the massive insulin rush you’ve inflicted upon yourself, but it’s Friday Night, Man, and for a nerd like me that means gaming.  Hit the liquor store on the way home for eight tall cans of Guinness — twelve if you have to share — and a couple enormous bags of chips.  Your friends aren’t ready for this, they’re expecting a veggie tray or a bag of jerky and maybe a bottle of whiskey.  Everything you’ve suffered since Sunday night pays off when you look them deadpan in their wide, startled eyes, gesture to the starchy feast in front of you, and explain “I’m on a diet.”  Mix some creatine into your beer just to ice that particular cake.  Then roll twenties.

Saturday is maybe a better time for everything to pay off.  You’re five to eight pounds heavier than you were on Thursday morning, and more vascular to boot.  Your muscles are loaded with water, glycogen, and pure burning hatred of weakness and inadequacy.  GO SQUAT.  Squats and presses and chins, oh my, all the pure strength work you love for lots of low-rep sets, and you’re stomping around the gym like Duke Nukem when he’s all out of bubblegum.  Give both your psyche and your digestive tract a break and eat at maintenance, with plenty of veggies, steak, and India Pale Ale.

Then do it all over again.

Verdict

UD2.0 is frighteningly efficient at ripping fat off your body.  What’s more, between the carb-load, the weekend lifting, and the fact that you’re constantly changing something related to your eating patterns, it’s also somewhere between fun and engrossing.  If a safe, effective, dreary targeted ketogenic diet bores you to tears… well, UD2.0 won’t bore you to tears.

One downside is that it’s stressful.  Eating low-cal low-carb Monday through most of Thursday sucks.  Glycogen depletion workouts on Mondays and glycogen-depleted workouts on Thursdays suck.  Even carb loads kind of suck once you get halfway through Friday and realize you still have 500g of fucking carbs to eat before roughly midnight.  If the rest of your life isn’t chugging along on a happy stable path, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Another downside is that it requires some fairly specialized workouts.  Applying the “athlete variations” from the back of the book help this out a little, but UD2.0 needs you to do glycogen-depletion work at the beginning of the week, tension work right before the carb-up, and strength work over the weekend.  Don’t like glycogen depletion workouts?  Join the club, we meet Monday nights.  At the gym.

But the good news is that UD2.0 is sufficiently effective that, if you’re reasonably lean to begin with (and if you’re not Lyle suggests you try something that’s less of a pain in the ass until you are), you probably won’t need to run it for more than about a month or two.