I was just struck this morning by the absurdity of a jobs shortage. Isn’t that a crazy idea? There’s just not enough to do? Really? Because I don’t feel like there’s too little to do. In point of fact, I feel like there’s way too much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it all.

I suppose that, economically, a jobs shortage is really a demand issue. When there is not enough consumer demand, we see that as a jobs shortage.

When there are too few jobs, the government can spend money to increase consumer demand. When there are too few jobs, the government can spend without competing with the private sector.

When there are lots of jobs, that means that the private sector needs people. Then it has to compete with the government to get those people. That reminds me of the Eisenhower quote:

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.

When human labor is scarce, we must choose how to spend it. Schools or bombers? Ships or hospitals? There are only so many people. There are only so many man-hours for labor. It takes a certain number of man hours to do these things. We allocate those hours using an accounting system called dollars, and the premise is scarcity.

But when excess labor is abundant, we don’t have to give up the bomber to build a school. There are “spare” hours going into TV, Facebook, and World of Warcraft. Lest you think I’m joking, WoW users have logged about 50 billion hours of game time. For comparison, we spent about 4 billion hours on the Apollo project (and that’s a generous estimate).

There are spare hours, why are there not spare dollars?

Automation will exaggerate this situation further. The creation of “stuff” will require fewer man-hours (that sounds good). That leaves more spare man hours without a way to translate them into dollars or economic demand (that sounds bad).

Somehow I got linked to this paper (free on pubmed) on the role of copper in fat metabolism. I thought that the usual Science News Cycle or people who sell copper bracelets would be all over the results. I was pleased to see that most of the relevant news-y results on google were really cautious and not sensationalist. w

The study was an amazing piece of multidisciplinary science. It had:

• Cell biology: inhibitor studies and biochemical pathway deductions
• Biochemistry: analysis of proteins including expressing and analyzing mutant mutants
• Synthetic organic: development of a fluorescent copper sensor molecule
• Analytical chemistry: validation of the copper sensor with ICP-MS
• Bio-analytical chemistry: fluorescence microscopy and image analysis of cells

That’s all in one paper. Seriously cool. And even though it’s all in mice and should be taken with a grain of salt, it is still worth thinking about micronutrients like copper and how to make sure they are in one’s diet.

We don’t buy our hardware, we rent it. All too often, our hardware is controlled by DRM-protected software that can be used to legally extort money from the “owner.”

Example: an inkjet printer can be programmed to turn itself off every 6 months and demand that the printer’s “owner” buy a fresh ink cartridge. The old ink cartridge may be physically viable, but the company wishes to get $50 per 6-month ownership period. Does this sound like a purchase or a rental agreement? It gets worse.

If you “buy” the printer, it may be illegal for you to change its software. Thus, you may own the plastic from which the printer is made but you are only granted a license for the software that is required to actually use it.

You “bought” the printer which was intentionally built broken and it is illegal for you to fix it. It would be more honest to say you signed up for a subscription or rental, but that is not what it said on the box.

Another example: the EFF argued in court that one should have the right to repair a tractor purchased from John Deere. The company argued that the “owner” of that tractor only had “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.” In other words, they owned the metal from which the tractor was made, but not the software required for it to run. Familiar?

These are extractive not productive economic decisions and they should be illegal.

Until they are illegal, I would like to suggest that people invest in backup hardware for critical tasks. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon devices are subject to the whims of their respective corporations. We are encouraged to forget this fact. Everything about these devices is made to encourage us to think of them as ours but the truth is that these companies can brick the devices at any time.

I think it’s a good idea to maintain a Linux box (even if it is a beaglebone or raspberry pi) and local backup hard drive.

With the help of a talented undergraduate, there has been progress on acrylic microfluidics. I checked the depth of the etch as I changed the speed of the cut. The faster I translated the laser spot, the shallower the cut (as expected).

What was very encouraging was the fact that the acrylic sealed at all the depths; none of the chips collapsed and clogged. That means I can probably make channels as shallow as 50 microns and as narrow as 100 microns without much optimization.

I’m still hopeful that I might be able to get down to the 10-20 um range with some optimization, but that might require a new lens to focus the laser more tightly. Thankfully, those cost about $20 shipped directly from China. We’ll see how that goes in 2-3 weeks.

It’s a travel day, so my update schedule is going to be strange.

There’s an interesting article out of U of Texas in Nature Energy this month (see also Eurekalert). It shows how adding energy storage could (counter intuitively) increase dependence on the grid. They model a number of reasons for this.

First, when you add batteries and keep the solar panels constant, you decrease the total energy production due to battery inefficiency (less energy out than you put in).  That has to be made up by the grid. But it gets worse if you keep the cost equal. If you sacrifice buying panels to buy batteries, you increase grid dependence.

So unless you have so much surplus energy you can’t sell it all to the grid, you are almost certainly better off adding more panels rather than batteries. That said, the utility may have excess energy during peak renewable generating hours and it makes sense at that point to buy storage.

Here’s a more verbal demonstration: