Author: Captain Obvious

Did you know that in 1890, some 90% of U.S. bread was made in homes and just 10% in small urban bakeries? The bread slicer had just been invented and taken the nation by storm, and human achievements since then have been compared to it by saying: “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

A lot has changed since then.  Bakery behemoths today that make up the $14 billion bread industry operate at a pace and scale that would have been inconceivable a century ago.  They use large, high-speed factories capable of churning out at least 150 loaves or 800 hamburger or hot-dog buns a minute. Ingredients like flour and oil are piped from silos into giant jacuzzi-sized mixers, where thousands of pounds of dough can be mixed before being divided, shaped, and ferried along snaking conveyor belts into ovens, cooling towers and bagging machines.

But this rough and high-speed journey tears apart a dough’s protein matrix, the weblike structure that traps air bubbles and enables dough to rise. When you let dough collapse as bread pans bounce on their race toward ovens, or sit idle for long periods, the result is a dense, flat loaf.  To prevent this, many industrial bread makers add emulsifiers, dough conditioners and other ingredients that help dough withstand the modern manufacturing process. But now all these enhancers are coming under scrutiny for health reasons.

Once you dig into any of these challenges you find we are all faced with tradeoffs.  Yes, we can “clean up” some formulations and sometimes even improve the product.  But often, something else gets sacrificed.  For bread, the most common side effect is reduced shelf life.

Many of you have probably experienced this when you bought that “designer artisanal loaf” only to find three days later you had a science experiment growing on it.  How often have you noticed the tastes of some of your snack foods have changed and when you compare the labels you see ingredients that used to make it taste great are gone.

Perhaps you remember my conversation with a Pepperidge Farm plant manager where they made those wonderful Goldfish crackers and I found they had changed the frying oil from one that tended to make us fat to one that was a carcinogen.

How do we define “best” today?  How do we know something is better than something else?  Shouldn’t we be teaching children to consider life’s choices this way?

Plastic bags for groceries might seem wasteful compared to carrying those sacks you now see, but in fact it takes a lot more energy to make that cloth sack even if you threw that plastic bag away when you got your groceries home.  We reuse those plastic sacks a lot.

What is the best thing anymore?  Perhaps we really don’t even know and should admit that.

Do you remember when fake fur was popular because Americans were repulsed by the disclosure of how minks and other furry animals were being exploited? Marketers came up with a better sounding name: faux fur. The marketing cleverness here was they disguised the idea of fake which normally implies wrong.

When the process of mining diamonds was exposed, we also saw a rapid response when the diamond industry tried to manage the human exploitation … by guaranteeing their diamonds could be traced to responsible miners. The assumption was that the diamond industry could trace individual stones, which they can’t.

It is fascinating to see how quickly artificial diamonds are catching on for the same reasons. Here is an answer to my question whether people are buying fakes because they want to avoid exploitation:

“Yes, synthetic diamonds, also known as lab-grown diamonds, are popular because they are marketed as an ethical alternative to blood diamonds. Lab-grown diamonds are produced in controlled environments, avoiding unethical practices that may be associated with mined diamonds. Mined diamonds may come from areas affected by war crimes, human trafficking, or genocide. Lab-grown diamonds are also sold straight to the consumer or jeweler, without middlemen, which also helps ensure the diamonds are conflict-free.”

So, we seem poised to substitute fakes for what we were once told were precious attributs. Remember the tag line: diamonds are forever? Plus, we were also told that they were precious because they were so expensive to mine and flawless natural ones were truly rare. Perfection was graded. Now we are making perfect fake diamonds but positioning them as superior because we can know for sure no human exploitation was involved.

The diamond industry is built on a fabrication of implications. We bought them when we got married, and the size of the stone became a proxy for how well off the groom was … or in cruel shaming situations, how much the groom loved the bride. I still remember a commercial for diamonds suggesting that I should spend at least as much as I did for my stereo. Funny looking back on it now. A cubic zirconium looks every bit as good.

So, here we are. Fake diamonds are being preferred by an ever-growing portion of our population. What does that say about our value system? This does seem to align with organic vegetables being preferred by many. And, in a strange way, this aligns with our rejection of green carbon credits that are associated with questionable metrics.

The central idea that seems to be emerging is that we want assurances that our purchases are good for us, our communities, and the world at large. That is a hopeful sign.

But, once again, the climate gestapo steps in because they will criticize lab diamond growers because they use about 3 times the energy compared to real diamonds. But, wait a minute, lab grown diamonds only require 250 – 750 kilowatt hours (kWh) to produce a rough carat. Even at $0.20 per kWh, that is at most $150 per stone. Fortunately, lab diamond companies are answering the call by reducing energy consumption and more renewables to make the growing process more energy appealing.

Are we willing in our society to let people choose by only sending price signals, or do we really need to ban this or that to keep people in line? Seems to me that we are afraid of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith who coined the answer to societal needs as an “invisible hand.” A center finger pointing graphic now seems obvious to me as a visible hand, but that would be politically inappropriate.

Yes, I know you were thinking of the poem by Robert Frost. Sorry to disappoint you, but I am going in another direction, pointing out the road we are on clearly goes nowhere if you are a carbon accounting energy fundamentalist.

This graph clearly shows that the use of fossil fuel in this country is NOT heading down and in fact rising dramatically. How then could we ever believe we will stop adding to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Articles like the one referenced point to the fact that data centers are directly in conflict with environmental goals: https://stateline.org/2024/04/30/states-rethink-data-centers-as-electricity-hogs-strain-the-grid/

It has become increasingly hard to understand how politicians can flipflop so quickly as well: https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2024/04/30/gop-gubernatorial-candidates-promise-coal-boost-utility-regulator-shakeups/

My read on all this is that the seemingly widespread coalition of believers in fossil fuel elimination are rethinking their game books and in the process going to lose their minds.

Also, if you look at the renewables component in the graph above and think about how much energy it took to create those resources, you could easily argue that we would have been better off not making them in the first place. Think about it … producing solar panels and wind turbines requires an enormous amount of energy … which came from fossil fuels in most cases. This is especially true of EVs which have so much embedded carbon that the average driver would never run them long enough to make a positive difference.

Remember, we are buying solar panels and batteries from China, and they are still building coal plants to keep up with their electricity demand. And, just wait till we get to the end of life on all these renewables and must dispose of them because they are not recyclable.

How can the scientific community say they will curb our carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere? The facts are clear as prior blogs indicated that the rate of carbon dioxide release is increasing … e.g., things are getting worse if you believe carbon dioxide is the key measure for planet wellness.

Nobody seems to recognize that demand for goods and services must be curbed, and this means you don’t just let free markets push consumption up in response to the insatiable appetite for profits. You don’t just sit by with ideas like cryptocurrency that gobble energy insatiably in their digital value chain.

I don’t like central planning “socialist” models, but I do believe we must consider their ideas to some extent. The “planetary load” of society has reached a tipping point … we can’t keep going on the current road. We must take a deep breath, pull over, study the maps illustrating our potential paths, and chart a new course.

The road we are on leads nowhere good. We clearly must change course.

… and socializing environmental anxiety in children? Is that the goal of our educational system? Apparently it is in New Jersey. You can’t make things like this up. The title of this blog comes directly from New Jersey’s governor’s goal of indoctrinating high school students. Read it for yourself: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-jerseys-k-12-curriculum-climate-change-indoctrination-tammy-murphy-fb5a8c0e?st=cuwv2hat1mo52u3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Critical thinking is thwarted when you try to answer difficult questions as if you really knew what the right answer is. We have all heard the joke about a lawyer when asked what 1 + 1 equals responds. “What do you want it to be?” I still remember our lead rotor dynamics PhD at MTI when I worked there and his response to the Garrett gas turbine people when they presented the balancing problem with a new design. Knowing the answer was contentious, he wisely asked, “What number you rooking for?” Remember Chinese do not differentiate between R and L sounds in their native Mandarin language.

That was a brilliant question since there were so many assumptions that could influence the outcome of the analysis. You could get any conclusion you wanted to make since the data assumptions were so indeterminant. If you assumed this you got that, but on the other hand if you assumed the opposite (and you rightfully could) you will come to a different answer. He needed to know what answer Garrett engineers were trying to get to. That event stuck with me to this day. Truly brilliant!

Spreading fear and environmental anxiety in our children who already are bombarded with so many messages contrary to their mental health is wrong headed? No wonder suicides are on the rise.

This documentary www.aclimateconversation.com should be in the curriculum. The idea that scientists are being bludgeoned into compliance to produce propaganda should strike fear into everyone. It also triggers fears of historical events that none of us ever want to see repeated. These techniques come straight out of the socialist playbook. Yet, where is the press on all this? Shouldn’t they be reporting it to us?

No … they agree with the agenda and have lost any sense of responsibility and pride in reporting news. They are simply spreading propaganda … no different than Russia or North Korea … except for the fact that the governments there control the press. Ours would appear to be serving the public, but no longer are offering news. They are pushing agendas.

It was a few days ago that Susan and I watched a Netflix documentary on Dan Rather hoping to see excellence in journalism. Nope. It was a celebration of his career of biased reporting … telling the story from his philosophical point of view … not reporting the news.

It frightens me to see how far off the mark our news media has strayed. It should frighten you as well.

Do you know the meaning of this Yiddish word that entered the English language in the 1940s as the Jewish comedians worked the Catskills?  Boy, to many of you that last sentence makes no sense.  The Catskills had fabulous hotels which were called Dude Ranches because they offered all kinds of things like horseback riding but tamed down so “city kids” were able to do them.

I grew up in that world dominated by the simple fact that we New York City dwellers didn’t have air conditioning yet (it wasn’t invented for mere mortals until Carrier did it in the 1950s).  My parents tried to escape the heat (and remember the buildings in New York are densely packed so when they heated up in the sun they reradiated that heat all night) by traveling just a few miles north into the hills of New York just outside of the city, called Catskills.

But I digress … let’s get back to the meaning of schtick.  Comedians and other performers developed characteristics that made them unique.  They were often funny things they did or said repeatedly that became synonymous with them.

“I don’t get no respect” was the phrase used all the time by Jack Roy (born Jacob Cohen) better known by his pseudonym Rodney Dangerfield.  He was known for his self-deprecating one-liner humor.  Today’s clinically and emotionally sterile consumers would point out that this phrase is a double negative meaning that he does indeed get respect.  What endeared him to most listeners is that he sounded like them the way they spoke!

Give me a break.  Can’t you hear him in your mind now that I triggered that with his catch phrase?  Don’t you smile remembering how endearing he was as he confessed all the things that went wrong in his life, and mostly because he bumbled this or that?

George Burns’ (born Nathan Birnbaum) cigar smoking routines we all saw on TV ended with him asking his wife Gracie Allen to “say goodnight, Gracie.” My wife and I were in Las Vegas doing consulting work for Nevada Power and I heard he was performing there and bought tickets so she could see him in person while he was still alive.  She thought the price was way too high, but I reminded her that included a drink.

George performed standup without an intermission for two hours always puffing on that cigar.  It was his part of his schtick. He never cursed or demeaned anyone.  He always made fun of himself in life’s journey.  When he was in his late-90s, I remember watching a TV interview with him.  He was asked if he planned to perform at the MGM Grand on his 100^th birthday.  He said yes, he did.   The interviewer questioned his confidence in that,  to which George replied “Yeah … they may be out of business by then.”

This video summarizing his life’s work played on at the end of the ABC Evening News on his 100^th birthday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=encJXmTe_Bg&t=167s

That my friends is the definition and personification of schtick.  Have we lost our sense of humor?  Are we so concerned about offending someone who might in some way be hypersensitive to any implication they are not perfectly normal?  Is it no longer acceptable to listen to Alice’s Restaurant as a social commentary?

Perhaps President Truman summarized it perfectly in response to General MacArthur’s question to him, “What does the term politically correct mean?”  Truman responded that “political correctness was a doctrine, recently fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and promoted by a sick mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end!”