Coal for Heat and Hot Water

This Smithsonian piece on coal brought back memories. The theme is the process and the difficulties in getting American households to switch from wood to coal, from open burning to enclosed burning.

I grew up in a house with two coal burners--our kitchen stove was a coal burner, though we could burn wood as well.  In fact, in order to get a coal fire started first you burn some wood.  During the colder months we kept the coal fire going all the time, banking the fire during the night, bringing it alive during the day, after removing the previous day's accumulated ashes to the dump near the side door.  Midway during my years we added an electric stove, very handy for cooking, particularly during the hot days of the summer when you really didn't want a fire going.  (Before the electric stove there was a kerosene cook stove.)

The other coal burner was the furnace, providing hot air to heat the house.  The evidence of the past was visible in the shapes of the chimneys in the walls, two of them; one was still used for the cook stove and the "one-a-day" (a woodburner in the basement which heated water, mostly for weekly baths; the other was closed off.  The chimney for the furnace was outside the house.  I've a vague memory of its being built, or perhaps rebuilt with cinder blocks, so possibly it was originally connected to the second chimney.   It too was banked during the night, which was an acquired skill.

The coal was delivered yearly by dump truck, maybe a couple tons of anthracite of different sizes: smaller for the cook stove; larger for the furnace, into separate bins in the basement.

Proud To Be an American

 In response to a tweet by Will Hurd:

I understand and appreciate why 72% of the country thinks we're on the wrong track, but despite this pessimism what is one reason why you are thankful to be an American?

— Will Hurd (@WillHurd) July 4, 2022

Lots of people from all over want to come here, and most find it good enough to stay and live.

— Bill Harshaw (@BillHarshaw) July 4, 2022

Is the popularity of the country sufficient reason to be proud?  YES.  

It's an objective measure of the value of the country. It's one which both conservatives and liberals, the far right and far left ought to be able to embrace. 

Health System--Dentistry

 My wife and I use Kaiser for health care.  It works well, testing, drugs, specialties, all under one roof (at least metaphorically because there's one database and efficient handoff from one provider to the next).

Unfortunately Kaiser doesn't do dentistry, so when significant problems crop up we're thrown into a different world:

• each provider has her own set of questions to obtain personal data and health history, allergies, drugs, etc.
• each provider has a process to move information back and forth, sometimes still including the use of fax!!!! (This is the 21st century, people).
• each  provider has a separate website which may or may not have been updated and which have their own structure and feel.
• referrals from one to another are a bit kludgey.
• transparency is often lacking.

Otherwise the people are nice and capable. Just operating within a poor structure. 

Sweden Lunches at Neighbors

 This thing about a neighbor's child not eating at a nearby home is oldish. I don't remember ever eating at a neighbor's house when I was young, or vice versa.  There weren't many children in my neighborhood in the first place.  In the second, I think the common expectation was that meals were at a set time and you were expected to go home to eat. 

What Did Historians Make of Muskie's (Supposed) Tears?

 Bob Somerby doesn't have a high opinion of the media, or of liberal thinkers, usually.  Sometimes his posts are tedious, but sometimes not.

Because he's close to my age, Harvard-educated, and former Baltimore schoolteacher, I read him.

Today's post discusses the episode of Muskie's tears, back when he was the leading contender for the 1972 Democratic nomination, having done a good job as Humphrey's VP partner in 1968.  Part of the Watergate investigation revealed/highlighted  Nixon's dirty tricks campaign against Muskie.  Woodward and Bernstein discussed it in yesterday's Post as part of their 50th anniversary piece on Watergate.

I remember both the report of Muskie's "tears" when he spoke defending his wife, and the dirty tricks campaign, as well as the Waldman piece in the Post this century which Bob covers. 

I've wondered over the years what today's historians have made of the story. By today's standards Muskie's defense of his wife is goodish, his vulnerability if he actually cried should not have been disqualifying, the question of whether he actually cried and whether the reporters/media types handled it correctly makes it too complicated to cover briefly.  That's assuming they understand the story. But when I'm cynical I'm guessing it's the sort of factoid which isn't closely examined; it just gets added to the text to provide color, etc. 

Is my cynicism correct?

How To Coddle College Freshmen

 Whoever thought of "experience courses"?

Has anyone taught a freshman first year experience course before? Would you be willing to share your syllabi? What sort of things should one expect to teach in that course?

— John R. Legg (@thejohnlegg) May 31, 2022

From the responses I gather it is an orientation to college extending for some time, perhaps the full term?

It's another example of how today's students have it too damn easy.

Damn, wish I'd had such a course 63 years ago 

Blast from the Past

 Time for something completely different, Silky Sullivan. You have to be old, or a horse racing nut (I'm the former) to know the name, but the two racing performances I remember well are Secretariat in the Belmont and Silky Sullivan in his trademark races.

Am I Addicted to Porn, War Porn?

 I'm not addicted to porn, not sexual porn.  I'm trying to avoid being addicted to what I call "war porn", which I consider some of the reporting from war fronts to be.  In some ways it's similar to sportscasters/writers who are "homers". It's seductive to go all in on supporting one party in a conflict, but too often when you look back on them they turn out to be mistakes. 

USDA and Rural Development

 Politico has a piece on USDA's challenges with rural development. Some excerpts:

“We were in the community earlier today of 130 people,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in an interview last month as he toured the Delta region of Mississippi. “The mayor had zero full-time employees. There is no way that community could ever qualify or ever know how to qualify. Those are the communities we need to help.” 

The Agriculture Department oversees the largest set of programs focused on rural communities — roughly 40 — but there are more than 400 programs operating across the federal government

The wide swath of programs and the influx of money from Congress is intensifying long-standing concerns about how well federal money to help rural communities is getting to its intended recipients. In response, the White House has tasked the Agriculture Department with coordinating a pilot program, the Rural Partners Network, to help ensure the funding reaches the poorest and most underserved communities in the country. It is launching in five states and with three Native American tribes this spring to start, with plans to expand to another five, as well as Native Alaskan communities, in August.

 Rural Development staffing, specifically, has decreased by a third over the last decade, while their portfolio of responsibilities has increased by 80 percent, according to Justin Maxson, deputy undersecretary for rural development. In addition, 47 percent of Rural Development staff are eligible to retire.

This is Not Invented Here run rampant. Why do we have so many rural development programs--because everyone, in Congress and think tanks, everyone, thinks they have a better idea than what exists. So instead of modifying and improving an existing program, the incentive is to add a brand spanking new program you can boast to your constituents about, hopefully get reelected. 

Ignore the fact that it will taken the bureaucracy time to get up to speed on the program, even with the dubious assumption that what you've written into law makes some sort of sense.  So over decades of Congress doing their NIH thing,  the poor bureaucrat has to try to understand 40 programs, most of which, like ships, have attracted barnacles of interpretation.  And remember, the more time spent in trying to understand 40 programs means less time getting out and explaining them to the part-time unpaid mayor of a town with no stoplight, and helping her complete the forms and follow the process, much less implement a successful grant in the way Congress envisioned, long ago and far away.

So after years of this, and multiple attempts to reform and restructure the bureaucracy we come up with a new idea.  We need a new bureaucracy--the old one is too old, tired, disillusioned, and waiting to retire.  So instead of fixing those problems we'll create a new structure, where we can start from scratch and do it right.  We'll call it a pilot program--if it works we can expand it. Will we, the sponsors be around years later to assess its results and kill it, fix it, or expand it? 

ROTFLMAO

 

The End of Footbinding in Chinese Culture

 In the past I've commented on Prof. Kwame Appiah's book on Moral Revolutions, which includes a chapter on the end of footbinding in mainland China.  He argued that footbinding was a status symbol (Veblen would agree) which became tarnished as "old-fashioned" and not modern in the early 20th century when modernization was very important in China. So women with bound feet lost their value in marriage, so binding ended quickly-a revolution in morals.

Made sense to me.  Had some resonance because my aunt and uncle worked for the YMCA in China during that time. Among the things they brought back were pairs of sandals/shoes for bound feet.

But I ran across this paper, with this abstract:

We analyze the economic motives for the sudden demise in foot-binding, a self-harming custom widely practiced by Chinese females for centuries. We use newly-discovered Taiwanese data to estimate the extent to which females unbound their feet in response to the rapid growth in sugarcane cultivation in the early 20th century, growth which significantly boosted the demand for female labor. We find that cane cultivation significantly induced unbinding, with the IV estimations utilizing cane railroads – lines built exclusively for cane transportation – support a causal interpretation of the estimated effect. This finding implies that increased female employment opportunities can help eliminate norms that are harmful for females. Further analysis suggests that the need for human capital improvement was more likely to have driven the effects of cane cultivation, rather than the increased intra-household bargaining power for females.

Sounds as if the economists have an entirely different perspective. Since the paper text isn't freely available, I can't evaluate it.  But intuitively it makes sense that upper class/leisure class women would have their feet bound. 

Packing Eggs in Modern Ireland

In the last century we packed eggs by hand. Now it's different. (Also, tractors have power steering.)

 

Check out Noel and Kate operating our newish packing machine. After 16 years of packing by hand we invested in a more efficient way to pack leaving more time to concentrate on bird welfare and farm managementper. ⁦@butlersorganics⁩ #LEAN #farmlife #eggs #organic #shopready pic.twitter.com/m5HN3bprMn

— IrelandsFarmers (@IrelandsFarmers) May 7, 2022

Originalism and Lived Experience

 Just a gripe here. If I understand "originalism" as a way to interpret the Constitution, it says that the Founding Fathers agreed on a document which had one meaning. (No doubt that exaggerates and distorts but it's close enough for my purposes.)

Now I've been in a lot of meetings over the years, some of which involve a group of people coming to an agreement, others involving people trying to understand the meaning of one or more speakers.  I think it's fair to say that in most cases the people who were trying to agree or who were being talked to came away from the event with somewhat different understandings.  In most cases the context was such that the differences made no long-term differences, but the principle is the same.  No group of 39 to 55 people would agree on how to apply the document resulting from their meeting. 

Original intent is a myth, an "ideal type" as some  used to say, which doesn't exist in real life.

Changing Views of Left and Right--Possible Images

 What sort of image do we have of our society and the left and right?  Often I think it's as if society is there, a platform or a landscape, while left and right act over time, moving one way or another. 

But is that a good image. After all society is people, as are left and right, so society can move as well. 

What's an alternative image: perhaps a crowd, some wearing red, some wearing blue, the majority, the less politically involved, wearing gray.  So you take a snapshot in 1960 of the crowd and you see the reds and blues scattered through the crowd. Take another snapshot today and you see the reds clustered together, the blues clustered-they've both become more cohesive. 

But that image doesn't reflect  a society's movement. Maybe an image is Hawaii, where the continental plate moves over a volcanic hot spot, which creates the various island.  In this image "society" would be all the people, the economy, laws, etc. So society could change because of innovations in technology, in the rest of the world etc.  Meanwhile there would be two "hot spots"; each representing a temperament which seems to be common in people at large: one conservative, one liberal.

That covers the fact there always seems to be a left and a right, a conservative and a liberal faction. And it allows for the fact that conservatives in the 1950's could be strong supporters of segregation, while conservatives today are opposed to racial segregation.

Don't know, maybe I need to think more.

Changing Views of Right and Left--Personal

Twitter activity on how left and right have changed, as here:

The thing about @NateSilver538’s argument here is that a Musk-owned Twitter would subsequently attract conservatives who have leaned way way WAY to the right, thereby refuting Musk’s original inductive generalization. pic.twitter.com/nhuJMnDF41

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) April 28, 2022

I don't know about the national picture.  I do know I've always considered myself on the moderate left and my views have changed sometimes:

• In the 1950's liberals were still supporting public power, the path marked out by the New Deal in the TVA and Bonneville power. That's no longer the case.
• In the 1950's/60's liberals thought that ending legal  segregation and establishing things like civilian review boards would be sufficient.  No longer the case.
• In the 1970s I was called for a month's jury duty in DC.  For one case I was successful in getting off on the basis I couldn't be impartial in a marijuana possession case.  Despite that, I've never been high on legalizing pot, though by now I'm a reluctant supporter.
• Liberals used to have no opinions on legalized gambling; now I guess they support it but it's not a top issue and I still dislike it. 
• Back in the 1950's/60's liberals supported decolonization and were hot for foreign aid. 
• In the 1990's many liberals supported the "Washington consensus" on global free trade.  I still do, but that seems to put me in the minority.

To be continued, maybe.

Commercial Airlines Using Electric Planes in 2026?

 United has contracted for such planes for 2026. At 19 seats they aren't going to be flying between major cities, but rather out to small cities.  I find that I flew in a Beechcraft 1900D which has 19 seats when I flew into Goodland, KS in 1992 or 3.  Goodland has since lost air service. 

Willie and Joe--Showing My Age

I was born before Pearl Harbor.  After the war was over I got a compilation of Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons, depicting GI's in a picture of combat and service life that was more realistic than anything seen before,  A tweet yesterday evoked this memory.

An Ombudsman for EULAs?

 Marginal Revolution has a post which refers to EULA (end user legal jargon). Seems to me we consumers need an ombudsman with authority over all EULA's--someone who will read them on our behalf, because you know the corporate lawyers who draft them aren't concerned with the consumer at all.

Ideally the ombudsman would be able to do a version of the nutrition facts label on food--something which would summarize the critical facts for consumer.

An Archive of Their Own

 As the early adapters among the silent and boomer generations go to the grave what happens to their digital archives?

As a failed historian I lean towards preserving every record, just because scholars have been able to wring meaning from the documentary evidence of the past, even when it's scant.  

As an active user of a Pc for close to 30 years, I know there's an infinitesimal chance that anything in my digital files would be of value to a future historian.  That's true in abstract, even more true given the lack of organization of the files.

A third factor is the ever-declining cost of storage, which leads to the logic of why not preserve it, because we don't know what future historians will be able to do using AI.

I suspect there's a niche for an archive service for personal digital files. That would differ from the services which archive what's on the internet.

Return to the Movies

 After roughly two years my wife and I returned to the movies today--Belfast.

We enjoyed it: some laughs, a moist eye or two, and an education in Van Morrison.

Judging by the audience covid took out a lot more old men than old women.

I can't say whether it deserves "Best Picture", but it deserves the nomination.

Basic Training 20 Years Ago, and 56 Years Ago

 Here's a description of Army basic training as of 1999. 

Some things struck me--the expansion from 8 to 10 weeks first of all.  Sounds as if they've used the extra time for more military stuff-I don't remember a full week of field exercises, nor any exposure to machine guns.

 No mention of policing the area. . Policing the area was basically forming a line and picking up cigarette butts. I wonder if that still happens, given the decline in smoking since 1960's? 

KP--glad to see they still make young troops do it.  By the time I got through basic at Fort Dix and went to Ft. Belvoir they had started contracting it out there.

The pay--$380 a week?  We got $80, IIRC.