Instantly Filling Holes, Building Up Solids Using Superglue with Toilet Paper or Baking Soda

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

Speaking of microeconomics…I just learned of a hack that can save some money at home or in a business. It started with an email from an esteemed friend who leads an interesting life as a welder/rigger/artist. He helped build some of the giant sets at the Burning Man festival which, well, burned. His inquiry, with some personal references edited out, went like this:

…At burning man i once watched a man save the day by patching a hole in the plastic gas tank of a golf cart with super glue, toilet paper and vinegar… Suddenly we had a functioning golf cart. Although I’ve never gotten to use this I remember this trick dearly.

Just today [my brother] was telling me about … breaking his glasses. …he had already fixed his glasses. How? He said “I’m pretty good at super glue and baking soda.”  …  He said the baking soda acts as an accelerant and gets very hard when you add super glue to it.


Being a chemical engineer by background, and always curious about household chemistries, this got me poking about the internet. Here is what I found.

The main ingredient in most repair superglues is ethyl 2-cyanoacrylate, along with some polymethacrylate gel and a little sulfonic acid, which acts as a stabilizer. When the superglue comes in contact with moisture, that triggers the polymerization reaction, so the glue solidifies and bonds to surfaces. It works best as a very thin layer squeezed between two closely fitting surfaces. Thicker droplets of superglue may be very slow to harden or not harden at all, towards the middle.


Thus, superglue is notoriously bad for filling in gaps or spaces or holes. For gap filling, you would normally turn to epoxy glue (for strength) or silicone (for flexibility). These glues have their own advantages and disadvantages. I don’t think that either silicone or common epoxy would stand up well to gasoline.

My internet research found that porous paper, like toilet paper, tissue paper, or paper towel, can catalyze the hardening of superglue. You can stuff a hole with a wad of toilet paper, or make a shape out of paper towel, and saturate it with superglue, and it will instantly harden. For the nerds among us, I will note that paper is mainly cellulose, which is a polymer of sugar (glucose), which has water type -OH groups sticking out all over, which harbor a surface layer of adsorbed water.  This YouTube video by Mr Made  has excellent examples of using porous paper for super glue to instantly fill in a hole or build up a solid shape.

It is critical to use freshly opened superglue, and use a thin runny liquid formulation which will quickly saturate the paper, not a thick gel type superglue.

It turns out that baking powder can be used instead of porous paper with superglue to fill in holes or cracks or make solid shapes. You can sprinkle in a thin layer of baking soda, then saturate that with the glue, then add another layer of baking powder and glue, etc. This YouTube video , by The Maker,  nicely demonstrates this technique.

So there you have it, hack away with your superglue.

Don’t Try This At Home:


The main loose end from my researches involves the role of vinegar in that fix of the golf cart fuel tank at Burming Man. Vinegar is usually mentioned as a solvent for superglue, and chemically vinegar is an acid whereas baking soda is a base, so vinegar seems like the opposite of an accelerant for the polymerization. I can only speculate that for making a very thick wad of paper plus superglue to fix the fuel tank, the vinegar may have been used deliberately to slow down the glue hardening a bit. But that is just a guess. I think the cyanoacrylate superglue would have a reasonable chance to withstand gasoline, but I sure would be nervous about relying on such a patch for a fuel tank. It would not take much of a gasoline leak to make Burning Man all that more memorable. Don’t try THIS at home.

Civil War as radical literalism

mdmakowsky7 Comments

I saw A24’s newest and most expensive film to date, Civil War. <<Spoilers incoming>>

A brief summary: the audience is dropped into the middle of a new US civil war as being documented by a group of journalists, our viewpoint centered around a veteran war photographer played by Kirsten Dunst and her (nearly) uninterrupted, first-ballot hall of fame 108 minute RBF. (Seriously, her face is perfection in this movie, I’ve never appreciated her more, absolutely no notes.) A traveling party is formed, a road trip through a war taken on, each stop bringing the gang into contact with increasingly grim and grotesteque humanity.

The subject matter and timing of the film naturally lend themselves to interpretation, subtextual analysis, and Straussian readings. Most films tend to be pretty ham-fisted in their less than subtle themes. With regard to Civil War, there are plenty of thoughts about the underlying meanings and metaphors. Here’s mine: there is no subtext, metaphor, or Straussian messages to be unearthed. The director has pushed this concept and it’s being received as milquetoast marketing. I disagree. There are no secret themes and I think that is the absolutely radical agenda that defines and motivates the artistic endeavor. To portray a war without imbuing it with narrative, only tragic, significance. Hear me out.

There’s a million war movies, most of which have arcs and metaphors strewn throughout. The problem with making a moving about a hypothetical civil war in the modern United States is that the audience will spend so much time looking for the heroes, villains, and associated opportunities to feel morally superior that it seems almost impossible to deliver an effective portrayal of what it might actually feel like to wake up to a US civil war, with a genuinely splintered federalist system of governments and military forces. How do you make a movie that doesn’t celebrate a Civil War as an opportunity for anyone, that doesn’t unintentionally, if inevitably, enoble the prospect of such an outcome? How do you tell a story where nothing good happens because you earnestly believe such a war would be empty and horrible, with nothing advanced or achieved save the destruction of institutions and the killing of millions? Well, it seems that Alex Garland thought the best strategy was to strip a war story down to its barest bones and leave you absolutely zero metaphorical scaffolding to graft your identities or theories on to.

I think it worked. A couple points.

There are no heroes in the film. The four journalists in questions are respectively hollowed out, adrenaline addicted, naive, or looking for one last ride. There is zero allusion to nobility or moral obligation. We never learn the name of a single soldier, whether they are accomplishing a mission, pointlessly dying, or perpetrating atrocities. There’s no arch-antagonist. There are bad people, to be sure, and the third-term President that the film opens with has green lit air strikes on American citizens while filling the airwaves with empty propaganda, but he turns out to be nothing more than a standard-issue cowardly politician wholly incapable of anything save false bravado and begging for his life.

There are no political identities in the film. No left or right wing schism. It might seem that the “Western Forces” alliance of California and Texas is either a transparent political cop-out (putting the largest “red” and “blue” states together) or a subtextual allusion to a schism over immigrants (those states having the largest Latin immigrant populations), but I think there is a far simpler explanation: those are the only two states whose coalition could actually oppose a President trying to usurp the executive branch and fully subvert the constitution. Beyond their populations and economies, the raw number of military bases in the two states (especially air bases), are sufficient that a couple 2 star generals could coalesce a rival military body. There’s also a reference to Florida being an i6 ndependent secessionary state. [EDIT 4/23/24] Guess which states have the most military personnel and air force bases? California (184k+ 8 AFB) and Texas (164k + 9 AFB). Florida has the 5th most active duty personnel, but also has 6 AFB. Everyone else is a either a battle ground or a (literal) flyover state.

The film captures, I think brilliantly, the idle chaos of such a scenario. A world simultaneously shutting down and carrying on with life. Of people mostly trying to survive and wait it out. Mostly. There are some who are not sitting it out, putting themselves in contexts where they can play out their dreams to be heroes or monsters, never accomplishing anything but spreading a little extra death around. I kept thinking about the pandemic on the drive home from the theater. Millions of people died but most of our memories at the peak of the lockdown are of feeling trapped and bored. A civil war in a country this big might not feel all that different for months or even years at a time for most of the population.

The thing about the “banality of evil” is that it’s both extremely real and nearly impossible to portray in a film without comedic deadpan or ghoulish overkill. Civil War portrays a United States ripped apart at it’s constitutional seams by midwit politicians incapable of forward inducting from usurping power and committing atrocities to eventually being executed by a nameless soldier who will report their success to a command chain with no understanding or possibly even interest in putting it all back to together. That’s how the story of the United States as we know it could end. Without heroes or villains, moral or philosophic judgements, without even primary or secondary causes. The thing about a country falling apart, there isn’t always a why, just a when and how.

The lesson I took away from Civil War is that a world doesn’t have to end for a reason. It can just end. And when it does, mostly what we’ll do is watch and wait for it to start up again.

Joy on The Inductive Economy podcast

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

I got to be a guest of Vignesh Swaminathan who is based in Mumbai. It’s fun to have a deep conversation with someone on the other side of the world and share it with the whole internet (and the AI’s).

Apple podcast link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dr-joy-buchanan-on-understanding-economics-through/id1719744197?i=1000652541934

Blogpost with links and timestamps: https://www.inductive.in/p/dr-joy-buchanan-on-understanding

The first 10 minutes are about Tyler’s GOAT book. Vignesh asked me to name some influential economists who did not make Tyler’s list.

Around minute 12 we talk about the experimental economics methodology.

The middle (minute 15-42) is a discussion of the pipeline into tech and my Willingness to be Paid paper. He adds his perspective on tech jobs in India.

Around minute 42, Vignesh makes a switch over to the Barbie movie and then Oppenheimer. He observes that Oppenheimer is a “brand.” I speculate on careers in Barbieland. We recorded this before Christmas of ’23, right after everyone had seen these summer movies. Both movies ended up in the 2024 Oscars awards ceremony.

I predicted that people will eventually be able to create a custom movie from a verbal prompt, because of the AI content revolution. Here in Spring of ’24 that has already come true. Sora is shocking everyone and even caused Tyler Perry to halt a physical film studio expansion.

Around minute 55, we pivot to Hayek and competition, which leads to a postmortem on Google Plus (RIP).

1:05-1:16 features intellectual property and my IP experiment with Bart Wilson

Ended with rapid-fire and personal questions.

Skimming back through this conversation has me thinking about tech work. The market for IT workers and programmers has evolved since I first started the project that became “Willingness to be Paid: Who Trains for Tech Jobs?”

I like pointing people all the way back to this report on jobs from 1958. Learn to Code has been good advice for a long time, for the people who can tolerate the work. That does not mean it will be true forever, but I would argue that it is still true today.

Silicon Valley as a career might have peaked around 2021. It’s not going away, but it might not be growing anymore in terms of the number of talented people who can be absorbed there. (Might I suggest Huntsville instead?)

The WSJ recently ran a story “Tech Job Seekers Without AI Skills Face a New Reality: Lower Salaries and Fewer Roles”

The rise of artificial intelligence is affecting job seekers in tech who, accustomed to high paychecks and robust demand for their skills, are facing a new reality: Learn AI and don’t expect the same pay packages you were getting a few years ago.

Jobs in areas like telecommunications, corporate systems management and entry-level IT have declined in recent months, while roles in cybersecurity, AI and data science continue to rise, according to Janco’s data. The average total compensation for IT workers is about $100,000, making the position a target for continued cost-cutting.

One reason tech jobs are less attractive than some other professional paths is that the skillset changes. We mentioned this as a drawback in our policy paper. Computers are constantly changing. Vignesh and I discuss the issue of risk. I suggested that companies could pay less for talent if they were willing to offer packages that carry less risk of getting fired.

Nevertheless, tech still has decent job prospects. An unemployment rate of about 5% is about normal for work, even though tech had seen lower rates at the peak of demand. I do not know what programming as a career will look like in 10 years, but I’d say the same about screenwriting and live sports commentary. The LLMs are coming for everything or nothing or something in between.

I’ve been on tour (regionally) with our ChatGPT paper and getting opportunities to query different audiences about their LLM use. Last week I talked to a young man in our business school who is using ChatGPT to write SQL code at his job. I said in the podcast that I would still advise young people in Alabama to learn to code, even if they are not going to move to Silicon Valley. I think coding is more fun in the LLM-age or at least less miserable.

The Time it Took for Price to Rise

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Last month, Jeremy wrote about how long it takes for prices to double. He identified a few intervals of time that are sensible. But I want to pick up the ball and move it further down the field. Not only can we identify how long it took for prices to double in particular eras, we can also do it for *every month*. Below, is a graph that shows us how many years had passed since prices were half as high (PCE Chained Prices).

Expectedly, the minimum time to double consumer prices was in the early 80s, taking just under 9 years for price to double. The prior decade included the highest inflation rates in the past 70 years.  Since that time, the number of years needed in order for prices to double steadily rose as the average inflation rate fell. That is, until after the pandemic stimuli which caused the time to plateau. But to be clear, that must mean that prices aren’t doubling any fast that they used to, despite what we’ve heard on the news.

Except… prices are in fact rising faster by 21st century standards. Indeed, measuring the time that it took prices to double covers up a lot of variation. After all, The PCEPI was 15.19 in 1959 and is 122.3 now. That’s only enough difference for three doublings. But as we lower the threshold for price changes, we can see more of the price level patterns. Below-left is the time that was necessary for prices to increase by 50% and below-right is the time that was necessary for prices to rise by 25%.

In these graphs we can see more of the action that happened post-Covid. The time needed for prices to rise by 50% has fallen by about five years since 2020. That’s a 20% shorter time necessary for a 50% increase in prices. The time needed for a 25% increase in prices is even more drastic. As of 2020, people were accustomed to experiencing upwards of 14 years before overall prices rose by 25%. That number fell below 8 years by 2024.

And finally, the most unnerving graph of all is below: the time that was needed for prices to rise by 10%.

Continue reading →

Ten Years Gone: Temple University’s Economics PhD

James Bailey6 Comments

Last weekend brought me back to Temple University, ten years after graduating, for a conference of econ PhD alums. I had so many reactions:

  1. Mixing a research conference with what is effectively a reunion or homecoming is a great idea for a PhD program, and more schools should do it. It brought together alumni from all different years, but it especially felt like a reunion to me since it’s been ten years since I graduated (not that I really know about reunions; I’ve never been to a high school or college one).
  2. Philadelphia in general and Temple University in particular have gotten much nicer (though still gritty). Some of this I expected; the country is getting steadily richer, and it seems like every college is always on a building spree. But as with New Orleans, it is a city still well below its peak population that I first got to know in the aftermath of the great recession. Unemployment in Philly is now well under half what it was the whole time I lived there, and it shows.
  3. Life is short. I was saddened, but not shocked, to hear that one of my professors had died. I was saddened and shocked to hear that one of my fellow students had.
  4. As a kid, whenever I went back to one of my old schools, I usually felt nostalgia mixed with the feeling that everything seemed small. Then I thought this smallness was only about me having grown taller, but now I wonder. At Temple the economics department has changed buildings, but when I went back to the old building everything seemed small, despite me being the same size I was in grad school. But at the time the building loomed so large in my mind; I was so focused on the things that happened there, the classes and tests, the study sessions and writing in the computer lab, what the professors thought, and everything that it all represented. All that apparently made the rooms seem physically larger in a way they now don’t once I have graduated and the professors moved.
  5. Temple PhDs are much more successful than I would have guessed at the time. It was hard for students attending what was then a bottom-ranked program during the Great Recession to be optimistic about our job prospects, especially when we worried we might fail out of the program (a valid concern when, afaik, only 4 of the 11 students in my year finished their PhDs). But things turned out great; just in the past 10 years from a small program there are many people who are tenured or tenure track at decent schools, who have research or important supervisory positions at the Fed, or who are making a name for themselves in the private sector (like Adam Ozimek).
  6. Why have we so exceeded our low expectations? The improving economy helped. Economics PhDs from anywhere turned out to be a valuable degree. Perhaps our training was stronger than we gave it credit for at the time. I see two main tracks for success coming out of a lower-ranked program, where the school’s name alone might not open doors:
    • publish a lot (my strategy), or
    • find some way to get your foot in the door of a major institution like the Fed system or a major bank, then work your way up. The initial way in could be something less competitive, like an internship or a job you don’t necessarily need a PhD for. But once you are in you will be judged mostly on your performance within the institution, not your credentials. In a panel on non-academic jobs, several alums emphasized that conditional on having enough technical skills to get hired, at the margin people/communication skills are much more important to advancement than further technical skills.
  7. Temple’s economics PhD program paused admissions back in 2020, but is aiming to restart with a redesigned program in 2025.

Wages Have Increased Faster Than Prices Since 2019 (Unless You are Rich)

Jeremy Horpedahl4 Comments

While there are many factors to consider, ultimately whether living standards are rising is a race between prices and income. What does that race look like if we start the clock in December 2019, just before the pandemic?

Whether we use median weekly earnings (the purple line) or average hourly earnings for non-management workers (the blue line), they have clearly won the race with two commonly used price indexes (the CPI-U and the PCEPI). That’s good news, and probably not something you hear very often in the discourse about the economy (unless you spend a lot of time reading this blog).

Continue reading →

Rate Cuts Looking Dubious for 2024

Scott Buchanan3 Comments

Fellow blogger James Bailey and I have noted earlier this year that with inflation having  plateaued well above the target 2% level, and with the ongoing strength in the U.S. economy, the three (initially six) rate cuts that pundits predicted for 2024 may not materialize. In fact, we may get no rate cuts at all. This has implications for many things, including housing markets and investing. Also, high interest on the federal debt, layered on top of insane peacetime budget deficits (neither party is willing to tell we the people that we cannot have big spending and low taxes), means the debt will balloon. Sorry about that, grandkids.

Here is a graphic which illustrates the course of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index:

It seems that inflationary expectations are now firmly embedded into wage growth (which is the driver for the increase in Service costs). This mindset way be tough to break. Such is the fruit of the Fed’s head in the sand, inactive approach to raging inflation back in 2021. Instead of nipping it in the bud, they blandly assured us, “It’s just a transitory response to supply shocks”.

One very recent (yesterday) data point is the Census Bureau’s Advance Report on Monthly Sales for Retail & Food Services. This report provides initial data on consumer spending at U.S. retail establishments for March 2024; this is a valuable, timely indicator of current economic activity. According to the Census, Retail Sales expanded by +0.72%, surprising to the upside by +0.32%. This economy just isn’t slowing down.

Slow Landing versus No Landing

The dominant expectation among economists as 2023 drew to a close was that the economy would slow down significantly, gradually enough to justify Fed rate cuts, but it would not crater so fast as to bring on a recession. Now there is more and more talk of a “No Landing” scenario, where GDP keeps chugging along and rates stay high, as the new normal.

Yahoo Finance summarized the recent thinking of Wells Fargo:

The Wells Fargo Investment Institute piled on to that narrative in a note Monday upgrading its outlook for the U.S. economy. While the bank didn’t specifically predict a “no landing” outcome, researchers lifted their gross domestic product growth forecast from just 1.3% for 2024 to 2.5%—the same as last year’s rate of 2.5%.

Wells also said the U.S. unemployment rate will sit at 4.1% instead of 4.7% by the end of 2024. The tradeoff will be slightly higher inflation. The bank now sees U.S. CPI inflation of 3%, instead of its previous 2.8% estimate.

Several factors have been named to account for the unexpected strength of the U.S. economy over the past few years, including record fiscal spending, particularly on infrastructure and semiconductors; the housing market’s resilience to higher rates owing to post–Global Financial Crisis policy changes and supply issues; and even “greedflation.”

But Wells Fargo said the economy has outperformed expectations because financial conditions—a measure of the availability and cost of borrowing, as well as risk and leverage in financial markets—are actually accommodative, despite the Fed’s rate-hiking campaign.

To that point, the Chicago Federal Reserve’s National Financial Conditions Index has been in accommodative territory throughout the Fed’s hiking cycle, and decreased to –0.53 in the week ended April 5—its lowest level since February 2022.

Unless there is a sudden change, it looks unlikely to me that the Fed can cut in May or June or July. If they do not cut by August, the thinking goes, it becomes likely that they will not cut at all this year, because of the optics around the fall election.

Trader Vic’s Mai Tai

mdmakowskyLeave a comment

The mai tai is a lesson in how a good thing can become a bad thing without the name changing. Followers of politics should take notice. Good rule of thumb: if a mait tai is red it is bad. The simple solution is to always order a Trader Vic’s Mai Tai. If the bartender doesn’t know what that is, just order a Dark and Stormy and live to fight another day.

Trader Vic’s Mai Tai

3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce orange curaçao
1/4 ounce orgeat
1/4 ounce simple syrup
2 ounces aged rum

If you are looking to abstain from alcohol I suspect you could make a phenomenal limeade by mixing in orgeat and some pineapple juice and then garnishing it with dusted red chili or habanero pepper.

Hanging the curtains back up

Joy Buchanan3 Comments

There were not a lot of successful female writers and academics in the 1970’s. Maybe I underestimate how many there were, but obviously they would have been in the minority. I’m reading a chapter on the anthropologist Mary Douglas who somehow combined raising three children with remaining active in academia. I read a few pages while helping at the Cub Scout camping trip.

In one of her books, Douglas added an apology for professional duties eclipsing domestic ones: ‘All our things have fallen into neglect while I have been writing, floors unpolished, curtains falling off hooks. I am grateful to my family for their patience.’

page 130 of The Slain God by Timothy Larsen

It is irksome to hear this woman apologizing for working
what is essentially two jobs and performing so well at each one. (I wouldn’t want
to put anyone off reading Larsen, who admires her very much.)

I had planned to do this a year ago, but then I ended up
writing papers on artificial intelligence and doing a bunch of related speaking
engagements. (I love it – anyone who wants a speaker on ChatGPT should invite
me out.) Anyway, I’m going to try to do the equivalent of fixing the
“curtains falling off hooks.” The curtains really do fall down. You
could have a well-functioning household and drawers full of clothes that fit
your children… and then if someone is not engaged in constant warfare… it
will all fall apart in about 6 months.



The Self-Correcting Property

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Say that the Federal Reserve Prints a boatload of money. We can use the AS-AD model (aggregate supply & aggregate demand) to evaluate the effect on prices and output.

Printing money results in more total spending in the economy. How much of that initial greater total spending is composed of higher prices versus higher output depends on business marginal costs and whether firms know or expected the greater demand to be due to a broad inflationary event (rather than just greater demand for their particular products).

If there is broad inflation, then the price level that is observed in the economy, including inputs, will deviate from what firms expected. Naturally, firms update their expectations. In so doing, they increase the price that they would require in order to produce every quantity of output. The vertically rising SRAS reflects both of these. The rising itself reflects the higher required prices, and the intersection with the LRAS reflects the expected price level. Notice that updating the expectations places upward pressure on prices, resulting in still higher than anticipated prices. This occurs repeatedly and each time that expectations are updated, the difference between the actual and the expected inflation gets smaller. 

This is what macroeconomists call the “self-correcting property’. The economy will adjust to an AD shock ‘automatically’. Of course, automatic isn’t quite the right word. It’s automatic from the perspective of a policy maker. But the self-correction is the result of an economy’s worth of people bidding for scarce goods and changing their price expectations. It’s automatic in the sense that people don’t need to be told to make the effort. The same results won’t occur if buyers and sellers do nothing, which sounds less automatic.

Since the fundamental productivity of the economy hasn’t changed, we eventually return to the original level of output. If monetary policy doesn’t change in the meantime, then prices will simply rise until the long-run price change composes 100% of the change in total spending. Indeed, given the AS-AD model above, half of the price difference between the current price and the long run price is eliminated each period. Similarly, half of the output gap is eliminated each period. This is why monetary and fiscal stimulus that just focuses on total spending only has short-run output and employment effects. The self-correcting property asserts itself and prices rise in the long run.

*In the figures above, I’ve illustrated an initial sharp price change, though sticky prices and very surprising inflationary stimulus can cause a delay in the initial price adjustment.

**Of course, all of this can be expressed in percent change rather than levels.