Transparent wood and plastic bricks

Lots of secondary coverage, here is the peer-reviewed research:

https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/products/publications/specific_pub.php?posting_id=97297&header_id=p

This is not the transparent wood of days gone by (which I also did not know about), which involved removing lignin. This is a two step bleach (hydrogen peroxide plus sun) and then make the lignin transparent with marine epoxy (so, sounds like it would be waterproof afterwards as well, maybe?). Lighter, less climate impact and better insulation than glass.

Elsewhere, a woman in Kenya is taking non-PET plastic that is not readily recyclable and turning it into bricks:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kenya-environment-recycling/kenyan-recycles-plastic-waste-into-bricks-stronger-than-concrete-idUSKBN2A211N

A couple of good news stories for future building products that will help us transition to a more sustainable, lower-impact future climate.

Monday: assigning chores for voc

So, the day has been ticking along about normal. There is too much snow still on the roads for me to want to go for a walk, so M. came over for a visit and I did the Millenium Falcon Microfighter; it is very cute.

After lunch, T. said he had a voc (vocational) assignment of asking a parent for a chore around the house to do. This is a good voc assignment! Everyone needs to know how to keep a living space neat and clean. I told him to get a clean towel from the drawer, and I talked him through drying dishes and putting them away, while I finished up washing some more and then those were dried and put away. All by itself, a friendly magical moment.

Then! I had him clean the mirror in the bathroom, the sink in the bathroom, vacuum the living room, part of the kitchen and the bathroom. With assistance, he vacuumed the stairs as well. So. Much. Accomplished!

I fully approve of this assignment, and now that I have a more realistic assessment of what he is capable of doing, I’m thinking there will be More of This.

Froth and mania

While some of the GameStop stuff is behind us, apparently, our present and immediate future hold more examples of ... odd. Like, Dogecoin is back? I thought that was a joke, and now, if you use recent trades as an indication, it is worth billions (it is not worth billions; don’t use recent trades as an indication) (none of this is financial or investing or other advice other than Words to Help You Get to Sleep at Night). Elon Musk’s Tesla is buying BitCoin and saying they will accept BitCoin as payment (in the future, maybe? Unclear if they are accepting that now).

The whole thing reminded me of that quote everyone loves so much, but maybe is not actually a Benjamin Graham quote.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/01/09/market/

Graham’s 1934 book has this paragraph in it, according to the article linked above:

“In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities. Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.”

None of that long run / short run nonsense (which may or may not have arrived with Buffett some decades later)! A book published in 1934 was necessarily written before that, which means before the SEC came in and imposed order. If the stock market has ever been a weighing machine, it is in the wake of the SEC’s actions, and before SEC enforcement started to be curtailed under Reagan. The stock market was not very exciting during those decades.

I read an analysis some years ago that the demographic transition is ridiculously great because you get _one_ generation of young adults who can work and who are not burdened (yet) by child / elder care. Once the step down in births has ticked along for a while, the now far fewer offspring will at some point have to take on the elder care responsibilities, and if the society is to continue at all, some amount of reproduction as well. I cannot help but feel like the last few decades on the market were the results of having had heavy handed enforcement, and then easing up. Before the crazy really got going again, there was a halcyon, a Goldilocks period of people still mostly being well-behaved, but unconstrained from taking bold action.

Once it becomes clear that it is a true anarchy, the well-behaved are overwhelmed by the not well-behaved and the options going forward are all unattractive. I’m not sure we are all the way there — I hold out hope that enforcement of existing laws and norms could return us to a better way of doing business — but we are rapidly approaching some kind of point of hard to turn the boat around.