Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Thoughts on Bill Gates' book  For Bill Gates, the case for net-zero is “rock solid”. The science is settled, and he is convinced that “the only way to avoid disastrous outcomes is to get to zero”. For readers already convinced of the “climate crisis” and the imperative to go to “net zero” by 2050, his book holds no surprises. For those more skeptical of popular discussions of climate change, what is most striking is that Gates – among the world’s most celebrated and successful data scientists — is so curiously unaware or indifferent to data that challenges many of the presumptions contained in his book. Thus, for example, while Gates is aware of the low energy density and intermittency of solar and wind power (when the sun sets and the wind does not blow) and the prohibitive costs of batteries to store electricity at grid-scale, he nonetheless finds it imperative that we have policies “to force an unnaturally speedy transition”. Net-zero “requires the US to build as much wind and s...

A recent study of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic by a member of the Federal Reserve board and economists at the Fed and M.I.T. compared cities that imposed stringent public health measures — including school and church closings, public gathering bans, quarantines and restricted business hours — with cities that opened faster and imposed fewer restrictions. The more stringent cities not only had fewer deaths but experienced “a relative increase in economic activity from 1919 onward.” I understand how this can be counterintuitive to many people, yet the lessons of history are there.

People across the country are now being called racists unless they publicly support the “protests” by Black Lives Matter, an anti-Semitic movement that calls Israel an “apartheid state,” accuses its Jewish citizens of committing “genocide,” and supports the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions movement designed to destroy Israel. Our children are being indoctrinated with lies about what the BLM organization is and what is actually happening on America’s streets – from lies about systemic police racism to the idea that the protestors are peaceful citizens with reasonable demands. Even Nickelodeon and Sesame Street have joined the bandwagon of brainwashing our nation’s kids. "White Silence is White Violence" is the new mantra of the unhinged progressive left - minds that are closed, refuse to look at facts and history, and insist on removing any traces of it by defacing and burning symbols of capitalism and taking down Confederate statues.

Painful memories of ActiveX controls, java applets, Silverlight, Flash and the other attempts at portable code are all being revenged by WebAssembly. I don't care how good someone is at JavaScript. They will make more mistakes (especially subtle, hard-to-find bugs) in JavaScript than they would doing the same task in C#. Every time. Blazor with WebAssembly is mature now to the point of being very useful. The great thing about WebAssembly is that it is a standard, unlike ActiveX or Silverlight.  Here are the steps to create either a Blazor WebAssembly or a Blazor Server app in Visual Studio Code: From a command shell: dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates::3.2.0-preview1.20073.1 1. Install Visual Studio Code, if not already installed. 2. Install the latest C# for Visual Studio Code extension. 3. For a Blazor WebAssembly experience, execute the following command in a command shell: dotnet new blazorwasm -o WebApplication1 You can do the above from a comman...

Pavlov was a scientist who conditioned a dog. Whenever he rang a bell, the dog expected food and its mouth started to water. The smartphone conditions human behavior in almost exactly the same way. Through our smartphones, we humans have become like Pavlov's dog. But it doesn't have to be that way. When we get a text, the sender knows we've received it. We feel some stress about that. We should be asking, "Am I the dog, or am I the master?"  If you no longer trust yourself, who is left to trust? We also get lots of spam calls, usually at just the wrong time. So recently I experimented with some of these phone apps that claim to block spam and unwanted calls. I tried a few and  finally settled on an app called "TrueCaller", but there are a number of other good ones. My criteria were simple: 1. If it's from somebody I have in my Contacts, let it go through, and show me a popup on my home screen that identifies the caller. 2, If it's ...

We identify ourselves as members of all sorts of tribes; our families, political parties, race, gender, social organizations. We even identify tribally just based on where we live (Go Yankees). Tribalism is pervasive, and it controls a lot of our behavior, readily overriding reason. Think of the inhuman things we do in the name of tribal unity. Wars are essentially tribalism. Genocides are tribalism - wipe out the other group to keep our group safe – taken to madness. Another example is the polarized way we argue about so many issues, and the irony that as we make these arguments we claim to be intelligent (smart, therefore right) yet we ignorantly close our minds to views that conflict with ours. Trump supporter? You're a Nazi! Research has found that the more challenged our views are, the more we defend them -- the more dogmatic and closed-minded we become...an intellectual form of "circle-the-wagons, we’re under attack" tribal unity. We are social animals. W...

Since taxes are starting to become newsworthy because of Trump's tax plan, it might be a good time to take a look at some facts. According to the Tax Foundation (non-partisan) in 2016, The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (39.5 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.1 percent). The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 27.1 percent individual income tax rate, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.5  percent). The top 10 percent of income earners paid a whopping 71 percent of all federal income taxes. Think about that the next time you hear the mantra about the rich needing to "pay their fair share".

People create fake news for all kinds of reasons, mostly political. Here's an example: The following "news" article claims that Wikileaks leaked a Podesta email that contains the following: “JB, CF, and JK PACS will be noticeably silent for the rest of the campaign. Each will receive a significant allowance from advertising budget. HRC is in the loop and has talked to all three personally. Eyes only.” I n fact if you search google on the first sentence, about 425 so-called "news sources" have picked this up and run with it. To it's credit, Snopes shows up in the search and they successfully debunk it. But you know what else shows up? A Wikileaks search! That's right, Wikileaks has an excellent search facility. And if you plug that phrase into their search, you will come up with ..... NADA! Wikileaks never published any such email. Apparently somebody in an effort to discredit both the GOP and Wikileaks concocted it out of thin air. You're...

I've got a storied career. I went from being a draft resister hippie type near the end of the Vietnam War to being an expediter at a nuclear power plant construction company near Wall Street, then finally left New York for warmer weather in Florida where I spent a couple of years as a real estate broker and eventually landed at Merrill Lynch as a financial consultant. I stayed at Merrill for about 8 years. It was at Merrill that I first became interested in programming. I had been graphing the technical indicators from Bob Farrell's group in New York with colored pencils and there was an older guy at the Orlando office who had a TRS-80 and printer. So I learned to program the indicator data in BASIC and print out graphs. Before long I had saved up $3500 to buy an Apple IIe and began seriously studying BASIC. Later I enrolled in an external doctoral program to get my PhD in economics, and a good part of my dissertation was spent coding FFT algorithms in Turbo Basic. Later on...