Barbershop/Beauty Shop Networks

 In a market economy the vendors sell something and the buyers decide to buy based on price. If it's not a commodity then quality and features come into play, but the market is supposed to be impersonal.

Got my hair cut today and got musing about networks. My experience with barbershops and my wife's experience with her hairdressers (actually just cuts) says there's a lot of networking going on.  I'd say half the patrons of my shop ask for a specific barber. (It's not a big sample; the shop is old-fashioned male-oriented and I go when there's least likely to be other patrons.) And my wife does the same thing.

You can understand why--a haircut is very personal so someone who cares will choose their barber on particular features. I guess that the market works well enough because buyers have different preferences, and there's enough of us who don't care to keep the market fairly liquid. 

The Future of Fake Food

 I follow some dairy-oriented blogs and twitter accounts, many of which are concerned about the rise of fake milk--plant-based milks.  There's also concern about plant-based meat.

The increasing popularity of these "fake foods" (I'm using the term somewhat tongue in cheek) seems result from several things:

• newness, perhaps faddishness.
• health concerns. It's not clear any of the fake foods are better for you than their "real" competition, but they might be.
• environment.  Animal agriculture, whether dairy or beef, takes a hit from concerns about methane production, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
• animal rights/welfare. You have to kill beef cattle and the male calves of dairy cattle, and we don't like that thought.
• pollution.  CAFOs impact the air and water.

The saving grace for real foods is cost--centuries of development ensure that real foods are cheaper calorie for calorie, nutrient for nutrient, in today's markets.

I remember my mother kneading in the coloring package which came with the block of margarine (butter was scarce in WWII), very upset that she had to serve fake food to us when our cows were producing good milk. The last I checked margarine was cheaper than real butter, although the two products seem to be co-existing.  

I see a similar outcome for today's fake foods: innovation will continue until they're able reasonably to compete with their real counterparts on price and taste, just as margarine does with butter.  Whether real foods become just a high-end niche product for gourmets I'm less sure about. 

[Update--part of this is relevant.]

Agriculture Development Lessons from Outside US

I think the following analysis applies equally to current problems in developing nations and to the history of agriculture in the US,  particularly when you consider the South from 1865 to 1985 or so:

In our evaluations, we often see different results across different segments of farmers—even when assistance is pretty uniform. Farmers with relatively high incomes tend to leverage their access to financing and irrigation to take full advantage of training, often making dramatic gains in production and sales in just one season. In contrast, subsistence farmers and women have more difficulty improving their situations through training, given the multitude of constraints that they face. As a result, we have found income gains concentrated among the top quartile of farmers, with more than half of farmers no better off than when the program began. These findings highlight a natural tension in the sector between helping the poorest of the poor reach food security, on one hand, and helping more established producers formalize their operations, on the other.

When Humans Are Elephants

 The NYTimes Magaine has a short piece on the herd of elephants in China who've gone walkabout. Apparently they just took off in search of better, perhaps because of disturbances in their environment and have now traveled 300 miles. The article suggests the excursion is a model of how nature adapts to change.

To me it suggests what humans have done over the millennia--how we have traveled from Africa across the world reaching every continent and significant island by 1300 CE (except Antarctica.)

I've read one book (Wrangham?) suggesting that periodic shifts in Africa from moist to dry had the effect of pumping humans out of Africa.  So we are elephants too.

Norton's 1774: the Long Year of Revolution

 Mary Beth Norton published this book in 2020,  Reading it in the light of the 1619 Project and our current partisanship makes it particularly interesting.  

Tidbits:

She defines a "long 1774", essentially starting with the Boston Tea Party (December 1773) and ending with Concord and Lexington in April 1775.

Different communities reacted differently to the importation of tea by the East India Company--the Tea Party was the most extreme among the ports (NYC, Philadelphia, Charleston) in that property was destroyed.+

Gadsden writes from SC that the colony is weakened by its high proportion of enslaved blacks--makes them indecisive in responding to the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Port Act (the first UK response to the party).

The activist faction used tactics to manipulate the results.

"Patriotic terrorism" was a thing in 1774. The "woke" were sometimes successful in silencing their opponents, those who disagreed with nonimportation and possibly nonexportation agreements to protest the "Coercive Acts" punishing Massachusetts for the destruction of tea in the Boston Tea Party.

Much of the dynamic seems to be a recognition that all the colonies needed to act together, hence the first Continental Congress and the "Continental Association"

There was a ratchet effect, each big event pushed the sides further apart. In America the progression cemented unity among the colonies and a sense of being a separate country.  Americans might have accepted a revised status similar to that achieved by Canada and Australia in the next century but neither side was able to offer concessions which could have initiated such negotiations.

Within America there was a splitting, as some came to recognize themselves as "Loyalists" and others as committed to the "Patriot" cause, even at the risk of civil war. As the book progressed the reactions of the players seemed similar to those we have seen recently.  As the Patriots coalesced they tend to unite around stronger positions much as the way progressive Democrats have emerged and coalesced since the days of euphoria over Obama's election.

If the Bill of Rights had been in effect in 1774 the Patriots would have violated many of its provisions. Assessing them it seems they followed the rule: look at what we say, disregard what we did.

The British government was receiving reports from the Netherlands and elsewhere of Americans buying arms and gunpowder to smuggle into America.  They took steps to intercept such shipments and pressured the Dutch government to block such sales.  Norton describes these reports but doesn't offer any description of the background--were these individual entrepreneurs acting out of fear of war, much as today people go to the gun store when alarmed, or hope of profit, or were some acting as agents for people in the legislative bodies attempting to speak for the colonies (some improvised conventions, some the colonial assemblies)? Likely there's little documentation to provide such background. 

Although Amazon reviews have criticized the writing as dull, I liked it--it's well done scholarship. 

Representative Capacity and Data Sharing

 I saw this notice today. I was struck by this paragraph:

In late 2020 and early 2021, shared services were developed to make RepCap data available for use by Farmers.gov and other FSA systems through a Representative Authority for Producers (RAP) service. This means the RepCap data (which is loaded and stored in Business Partner) is now being shared with external FSA systems and in the future will be shared with other agencies. Therefore, it is critical that County Offices ensure that data is still valid and correctly loaded.

I don't remember seeing references to sharing data with farmers.gov or other agencies before.  I'm sure it's failing memory, but data sharing hasn't been very common.  

Rocky Road for Debt Relief for Disadvantaged Farmers

 Another judge, this time in Florida, has issued an injunction against FSA's implementing the debt relief program.  

I wonder if FSA employees are relieved that implementation is delayed, just from the point that their workload will be lighter in the fall and winter than now, and that DC will have more time to prepare regulations, instructions and training packages.

Pot Wins

I can still remember Mr. Youngstrom, a high school teacher (maybe science, I forget), vehemently pleading with a class of 9th graders never to use marijuana.  He didn't call it a gateway drug, that's a newish term I think, but that's what he meant.  That would have been 66 years ago.

Now Vox proclaims the victory of pot.  There's no federal legalization, but the trend is clear. 

I Differ With ACLU

 The ACLU celebrates its victory in the Supreme Court over the high school student using the f-word about school and its organizations outside of school hours by selling t-shirts with the f-word.

I use the word myself.  I have supported the ACLU since Skokie and still do. I support the SCOTUS decision.  But I have to disagree with the ACLU--IMO there's a difference between what's permissible and what's desirable.  It's permissible to use the f-word in most settings; it's not desirable to promote its use in most settings.  As with the n-word, I exclude discussion of it when it's necessary or desirable to quote it.

Memory Creep--

Mr. Bell at his 1776 blog coins a phrase: memory creep.  It's a history version of the communication problems in the "telephone game". As he does sometimes, he traces a great story, often recounted by a descendant, back to its original source, finding there's either no solid source or just a tidbit which over time through repeated telling has evolved into a much better story.

I think we see the same phenomenon in current discourse, political partisans on both sides repeat stories, exaggerating and simplifying, until the end result is simple, provoking, and wrong.

9/11 20 Years On.

 Just finished "Without Precedent: the Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission" by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton.  Curiosity piqued by comparison with possible 1/6 commission and Ben Rhodes involvement.

It reads well as a straightforward narrative.  Some random thoughts:

• in 2004 we were still very worried about the threat of terrorism. Will historians conclude that we overreacted?  I think so--it was mostly a one-shot lucky blow.
• a couple times they note that in interviewing Afghanis the message was: "don't leave us again". In 2004 Afghanistan was looking okay, but it's rather sickening to read it now, when we're leaving in a hurry. A mistake on Biden's part, I think, though it could follow the course of Iraq--get in, get out, get asked back in.  
• on page 220 they observe that by 9/11 neither the NYC Fire Department nor the Police Department had demonstrated willingness to answer to an Incident Commander who was not a member of their own department.  I want to know if Bloomberg's reorganization of NYC government has fixed that problem.  I suspect not.
• on page 292 they decry the partisan atmosphere of DC then, the worse they'd seen in 30 years.  

I think they soft-pedal their failure to get Congress to reorganize their committee structure. 

How Is CDC Like USDA/FSA?

 An article in the NY Times mag on CDC, critically assessing it and its role in the overall health care system.  One thing which stood out to me was this:

Around half of the agency’s domestic budget is funneled to the states, but only after passing through a bureaucratic thicket. There are nearly 200 separate line items in the C.D.C.’s budget. Neither the agency’s director nor any state official has the power to consolidate those line items or shift funds among them. “It ends up being extremely fragmented and beholden to different centers and advocacy groups,” says Tom Frieden, who led the C.D.C. during the Obama administration. That lack of flexibility makes it extremely difficult to adapt to the needs of individual states.

It reminds me of USDA/FSA.  Over the years the number of programs and crops covered has grown rapidly, The reason seems similar in both cases: there is a group/organization which feels strongly and has found a representative in Congress to push for coverage.  In the case of a disease/illness, it's patients and their families; in the case of agricultural products it's the growers. In both cases, they're tapping the federal treasury and have no countervailing opponents; it's not like the old days when big business was counterbalanced by big labor.

Are We Segregated?

 Bob Somerby has griped about descriptions of various aspects of our society as "segregated".   He's not as old as I am, but we share a memory of the civil rights movement which fought "segregation".  So how can the movement be considered victorious, and the US still have segregation?

The answer is obvious--the word "segregation" now has multiple meanings.  Back in the day it meant legal segregation, usually the result of statutes or legal contracts, but always enforced by both the police and sheriffs and by informal community pressures.  That segregation was ended by the victories of the civil rights movement.

Today "segregation" means essentially disparate outcomes: residential areas, schools, or institutions which by some measure are predominately one ethnic/racial group or which don't have appropriate representation of other ethnic/racial groups; the group usually being white or black.

By changing means current day liberals are, in my humble opinion, changing the measuring stick, minimizing the gains of the past and accentuating the problems of the present. 

Critical Patriarchal Theory

 Of course, it's "critical race theory" but what if we applied the same sort of thinking to the "patriarchy", defining the term as the belief that men and women are different and must be treated differently in some or all components of society, and that history shows and ratifies such treatment. 

To me it seems that critical patriarchal theory describes reality, at least some of it.

First Amendment Questions

 BBC's Annapour & Co. had an interview with Salman Rushdie, which included some discussion of freedom of speech.  He mentioned the difference between the UK and US, with us being the most protective of speech.  He was asked about hurting people's feelings--he quoted Stephen Fry as responding: "tough".  

I've a somewhat similar reaction, I think, though I'm prone to wavering on hot issues. When the context of speech is a public forum, "tough" is appropriate, because people have the choice of avoiding or participating in a meeting, watching media program, etc. When the context is a classroom where the participant doesn't have a choice, or has less of choice, ideally I'd want to see advance warning. 

Rushdie said there's "no right to not be offended", which I think is correct.  There is a right to not be surprised. 

There's likely some situations which would undermine my position.  How about the advocate who intentionally wants to offend, uses terms or takes positions which be offensive?  Consider somebody who advocates for the expulsion of one group in contested areas: whether it's the Middle East or Northern Ireland?  

In such cases there's the question of the forum: should the person be denied a particular forum? I think they can be, possibly using an economic analysis: what's the cost of allowing participation and what's the possible benefit to the audience? 

I Forgot "Colorism"

 I added "colorism" to my post of two days ago. 

Bottom line is humans are built with emotional responses to the different and strange. We learn to manage/overcome such responses sometimes; in many cases it's individual, in some cases it becomes woven into society and our history.

Our Modern Government at Work

 Just saw this FSA notice.  Its title: Updated Schedule for FAXing CCC-941’s to IRS.

The Farm Service Agency has to check with the IRS to see that program participants have an adjusted gross income (AGI) of less than set amounts.  Because of restrictions on releasing IRS data, FSA has to provide an authorization signed by the participant--the CCC-941 form.   FSA and IRS use fax to transmit and receive the form. 

I don't know enough to comment further, but I will.  It seems to me if IRS can accept 1040s electronically, they ought to be able to accept 941's electronically. Or it seems as if lawyers/Congress could work out a way to bypass the requirement entirely.  

Debt Relief Stalled

 A federal judge issued a temporary injunction against the debt relief for disadvantaged farmers in the last stimulus act.

Let's Forgive More FSA Loans

 Al Cross at the Rural Blog reports on a bill which would provide forgiveness of up to $250 K of FSA loans to farmers whose AGI is less than $300K.  They'd have to stay in farming for 2 years after receiving the forgiveness.  See here for text.

It, of course, is a response to the problems white farmers have with the forgiveness in the law.

Textiles and Food--a Similar Evolution?

 Virginia Postrel has a new book on the history of textiles. I gave it to my wife but haven't yet read it myself.  Based on online interviews/discussions with her I expect it to be very good.  One theory I've developed from them is there's a general parallel between the evolution of the making and use of textiles and the evolution of the growing and eating of food.  There's a gradual shift from individual hand labor to mass production and marketing of textiles, just as there's a gradual shift from hand labor to mass production and marketing of food.

Me and the ACLU

 I joined the ACLU back in the Skokie days, IIRC. And I'm still pretty much an absolutist on free speech so I'm not enthusiastic about its recent softening of its position.

The Lactose-Intolerant Chinese Don't Have Enough Cows for Their Thirst

 I got to this Reuters article on the growing Chinese market for milk and their lack of enough cows to produce it from the Illinois extension website.  It sparked my curiosity, so I found this BBC article by Googling.  It tries to explain the demand--maybe partially yoghurt, partially other products, partially prestige? 

I'm reminded of a book I've blogged about before, Appiah's, The Honor Code.  In it he discusses the end of footbinding in China.  At roughly the time my aunt and uncle were in China working for the Y Chinese elites were dissing their culture and elevating Western culture as "modern".  Foot binding became regarded as old-fashioned, retrograde thinking.  I wonder if milk is benefiting by a similar logic.

The Lessons of Northern Ireland

 Half my ancestry is from Northern Ireland, my cousin has written on the history of Ulster, and I remember the start of the Troubles there, when the Catholic/Sinn Fein movement seemed in tune with the student movements in France and Germany, not to mention our civil rights movement.

Bottom line--I've tracked developments there with more interest than elsewhere in Europe or the world for that matter.  To me it's an object lesson in human nature, a lesson to put alongside the lesson from Israel/Palestine and the various racial and ethnic conflicts here and abroad.  People are able to discern differences in fine distinctions and often use them as the basis for enmity. Such patterns tend to endure through time, and often lead to vicious cycles of eye for an eye. 

(Watch the TV series Fauda for another example of the same.)

Here's the Times on the current status. It also seems that there's a cycle at work--the young get riled up, get violent, get exhausted, and there's less violence for a while until a new generation comes along. 

Buried in the Charts--Black Men

 The NYTimes had an article on the recent employment report.  Towards the end they had a series of 4 charts comparing the employment levels for men and women for whites, blacks, Asian-Americans, and Latinos.  It was all in support of the article's points about the differential impact of the pandemic. But the charts also had the data for the numbers in the employment market. For three categories there were more men in the force than women, roughly 10-12 percent more when I eyeballed it.  But for blacks there were fewer men than women.  Again roughly speaking, there were about 3 million fewer black men than there should have been if the ratio were similar to those for the other groups.

The Lab Leak Possibility

 For what it's worth, which is nothing, my memory is that early on the theories of the origin of the virus were the wet markets in Wuhan and a weaponized virus from the Wuhan lab, a theory according to something I read this week which was being pushed by Bannon. 

So when I read the Vanity Fair article, this passage strikes me as off:

 But on April 30, 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out an ambiguous statement whose apparent goal was to suppress a growing furor around the lab-leak theory. It said that the intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified” but would continue to assess “whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

Seems to me the ODNI was trying to suppress the Bannon--weaponized theory since they left open the lab-leak possibility.  And part of the push-back by US scientists was denying there was evidence in the virus genome of human manipulation, which would be a smoking gun for the lab leak. 

The other aspect was the determination by Trump and politicos after the virus hit the US to tie it to China--"Wuhan virus" etc. There's past precedent for using a location's name to identify a virus, but not for using it to attack the location.    So there were two triggers for Democrats to push back. The push back was perhaps as lacking in nuance as the Bannon/Trump positions.

Now I'll go back to reading the Vanity Fair article.

Eight Thousand Posts

 I just noticed I've so far published 8001 posts.  Ann Althouse rightfully boasts of her record of daily posting since she began, which was before me. I can't say the same.  I've missed some days, particularly in recent years, and the pace of my blogging has slowed to a post a day.  Some days I'm pretty dry, as today.  It's been drier since Jan. 20. 

I've probably got another 6,000 draft posts.  Sometimes I get an idea for a post, create one with just the title, then go off to do something else.  By the time I get back, I'm wondering what I was going to write, or at least the energy to write on the subject has dwindled away.  Sometimes I write part of one but don't have even the ghost of an ending (endings have always been a problem) so don't publish.  

A few times I've found the subject too controversial; I didn't want to get into it.  That's usually the case with issues of race.  

One of these years I'll go back and skim my past writings, see whether they've stood up.  Not today. Too tired after gardening and errand running. 

Inflation and Women's Lib

 From yesterday's conversation with my cousin--some idle speculation on the interrelated threads of suburbanization, car ownership, feminism, women working and inflation:

• after WWII we had a lot of people moving to the suburbs, the Levittowns, or the Manassas Parks where my in-laws moved to.
• if the household owned one car, then the wife was stuck at home (see yesterday's post on food trucks), or dependent on clubs/associations where one woman could provide transportation.
• there was, I think, more inflation in the economy than we've become used to in the last couple decades.  Inflation around the Korean War, worries about inflation in the 50's and early 60's, actual inflation beginning late 60's.
• inflation made it harder and harder for the one-wage earner family to manage, particularly as the boomer generation was exploding, increasing the pressure for women to go to work.
• the return to work would increase the returns from a second car, which would in turn liberate women a bit more.
• all of which undermined some of the women's associations, like the League of Women Voters and the AAUW. But the experience of the workplace and the paycheck would empower women.

I've not done any research for statistics to back up these threads, but they fit my general impressions.

• 
  

Decline of the Deliveryman

 Made a discovery this morning talking with my cousin, who mentioned the deliverymen/vendors in her neighborhood in Berwyn heights in the 1930.  The family had one car, so when her father was at work her mother was dependent on walking or public transportation.  The area was affluent enough (many UMd college professors and researchers at USDA Beltsville) so that it was worthwhile for trucks to sell meat and cheese, fruits and vegetables, and bakery (3 different trucks--she didn't mention milk which was even available in our more rural area in the 1940's but I assume they had it). I'm visualizing these as mobile farmers markets, though the milkman model would allow for advance orders, so maybe not.

I assume this was an evolution from the older horse-drawn vendors as the suburbs evolved from close in to car-mobile. And I'm guessing that as women went to work and had their own cars, the deliveryman/vendor model was no longer effective or economical.

Makes me muse on today's model--it's probably more efficient energy wise for groceries to deliver than for people to drive to the store.  But people like the  power to inspect and choose.  So will the effect of the pandemic be to somewhat increase the miles driven by grocery/vendor deliveries and decrease the miles driven by consumers to stores?  

[Update: found this link, not very descriptive though.]

[Update: a more informative link about horse-drawn wagons. Note: my cousin remembers the trucks as markets, not as delivery.  Unlike the milkman where you could leave an order in the empty milk bottle.]

What History Should Include

 Bob Somerby comments on a news commentary show where one participant noted he hadn't been taught the Tulsa massacre and just recently learned about the Birmingham church bombing which killed four young black girls in Sunday school. 

I think it seems to Bob (who's maybe 7 years younger than I) and to me that obviously modern kids should be taught both.  

But that's a knee jerk opinion--both Bob and I lived through the reporting of the bombing so it's something of a landmark in the progression of the civil rights movement. We didn't live through Tulsa; not that it matters because the massacre did not, I believe, make any national impression--media is very different now. Given the limited time a teacher has, I'm not sure which events need to be covered--letter from a Birmingham jail, Woolworth counter sit-in, Albany Georgia, Pettus bridge, Shwerner, Chaney, and Goodman?  The laws which were passed, the Rochester riot, the Kerner commission, RFK on MLK's assassination? 

I suppose for most teachers the details have dropped out so their decision making is easier than it would be for me or Bob.