Transgenic Foods and Offshore Drilling

I think there's a parallel between offshore drilling and transgenic food crops. Both are things many people,, particularly among the liberals of the world, would rather not do/have. But resistance to both is being undermined, and possibly is crumbling, as the prices of oil and food rise.

Here's a bit in Agweb on the improved outlook for transgenic wheat.

John Phipps on Poland

He traveled to Poland and blogs on what he learned.

Higher Meat Prices in the Future?

That's the message I took away from a John Phipps post, as he quoted from a Purdue professor:

So when does the boom in pork and hog prices come? Based on projections of U.S. slaughter supplies, prices will improve very late this fall and winter and go wildly higher by next spring and summer. When one adds the trade boom, this advances the price escalation. Trade data lags about two months so we are always slow to see those impacts. Trade will likely continue to accelerate and this will encourage even stronger prices than the supply reductions expected for late this year and 2009.

The movement upward has begun for cattle, where prices have been up nearly $10 per hundredweight in the last three weeks. Given the coming declines in pork supply and the more than vigorous export growth, hog prices should not be far behind. If U.S. consumers don’t want to buy up the last of the cheap pork, the world is anxious for the opportunity.

John is skeptical--livestock producers are currently taking it in the neck, apparently.

My Next Door Neighbors

I blogged about the sales history of the townhouse next door a while back in the context of immigrants pushing up the price of housing until the bubble burst, partially inevitably and partially due to Rep. Tancredo. Prices went up and up, then down. According to the Fairfax County real estate site, my neighbor had bought it for $369,000 in 2006, Wells Fargo took it for $265,000 and sold it to a guy in DC for $187,000 two months ago. !!!

The Definition of Poverty

An article in the NY Times on a proposed new definition of "poverty" in NYC:

The nation’s poverty measure was developed in the 1960s and was based on a 1955 study that showed that poor Americans spent roughly a third of their after-tax income on food. Ever since then, the country’s poverty levels have been gauged by tripling the annual cost of groceries.

That model, while updated for inflation, has been criticized for being out of date, inaccurate and not taking into account how expenses like housing vary nationwide. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, families nowadays spend one-eighth of their income on food, with more money going to transportation, child care and housing. Nor does the federal model measure the financial impact of government assistance programs.

I'm not sure whether this implies the cost of food has dropped so much, or that we're spending more on big cars, big houses, and big operations. I'm also cynic enough, and conservative enough, to point out that "poverty" is relative. When LBJ launched the "war on poverty", it was won.

Megan and the Drivers

Megan McArdle has a controversy going over people who ride bicycles in the city and exactly how much they should obey traffic laws. A bit amusing, as I remember the "law and order" folks back 40 years ago and [unfairly] attribute their views to modern-day libertarians and conservatives.

On a more serious note, the problem with speeding in cars and jaywalking as a pedestrian and exploiting the confusion surrounding the definition of a bicyclist is it's the liberal fallacy, or maybe the rationalist fallacy: the person believes their intellect and grasp of the situation is right and infallible, not allowing for Murphy's Law. (Of course I speed and jaywalk, even though I'm a bureaucrat I'm also human. I'm just saying, particularly for an older person, life has many surprises.)

"Estate"

How come "estate" has two meanings, very opposite in meaning? In the U.S. it means a big old place, or a big old pile of money. In Britain it seems to mean a bunch of poor people in one place, what we might call a [low income] housing project.

On Home-Grown Tomatoes, or the Virtues of Middlemen

I mentioned yesterday our first tomatoes have ripened. Yes, they're tasty, much more so than the store's tomatoes. But, some thoughts:

• One of the problems of growing a garden is feast and famine, you have too many or too few. The first few tomatoes of the year are enjoyable, but we always plant more than we really need, so they can become a burden. (The same goes for zucchini, though more so, at least until the squash beetle lays its eggs.) Or, as my gardening neighbor, a lady from Vietnam was complaining, the chipmunks ate all her beets.
• Because we like regular habits, one way to even out the highs and lows is to draw from multiple sources and multiple areas. (Our peas are long gone, while my cousin in MA just started harvesting hers around the Fourth.) But to do so, requires some overhead--negotiations with farmers, etc. And I don't like to negotiate, nor am I good at it. So leave that stuff for the stores, and accept the idea of less tasty tomatoes as a trade-off.
• I read, probably in the Times or Post, someone whose experience with community-supported-agriculture fits the above. She commented on getting a lot of kale, when kale was in season, with the comment phrased to say, I really got more than I really wanted. Then her CSA went out of business, and she was too lazy or too busy to link up with another.
  

Middlemen, like Arthur Miller's salesman, deserve a bit more respect than they get.

Habits Are 45 Percent of Life? Incredible

That's the factoid buried in a NYTimes story on the importance of habits in everyday life, and how big companies manage to instill new habits in the American consumer. The thrust, though, is the importance of developing new habits in developing countries, such as the habit of washing one's hands after using the toilet. (I'm disappointed there was no comparison of the relative difficulties of teaching this habit in Ghana, versus in hospitals to doctors.) The discussion of the manipulation is disturbing, but the need for positive habits is unquestionable, which makes the story very interesting.

I find the factoid incredible, because about 95 percent of my life is habit.

A Good Book

Nicholas Kristof highlights the Greg Mortenson book in today's Times. I should have blogged about it when I read it, if I didn't. Mortenson turned a failure at mountain climbing into a success at building schools in the mountains of Pakistan/Afghanistan. Inspiring and down to earth. The book runs the danger of being saccharine, but it's not.