Surprising Energy Fact--Gas Prices

From the Des Moines Register, in an article discussing the adverse impact of lower natural gas prices on renewable energy:

"Natural gas prices have dipped  from $11.50 per thousand cubic feet in mid-2008 to $2.77 per thousand cubic feet this week on the Chicago Board of Trade."

Lettuce Talk of Locavores

Post has an article on locally-grown lettuce which I find interesting, mostly because it includes some statistics.

The outfit produces 4,000 heads of leaf lettuce a week, every week, apparently immune to weather variations.  There may be additional outputs; it's not particularly clear. 

The lettuce in grown in 2 fancy-smancy greenhouses, very high tech with computers and stuff, which cover 12,000 square feet, which is a tad over .25 acre.  They're planning to add another greenhouse, some 20,000 square feet, which would bring them up to .75 acre.  Although they're greenhouses, consider this quote:

A computer regulates everything: the 43 high-pressure sodium lights and heater that maintain summerlike light and temperature; the shade cloths that come down at night or when it’s too sunny outside; the pH, nutrient balance and flow of the water and the water system; and carbon dioxide emitted into the air to boost growth.

 They have 12 part-time employees (retirees and housewives paid over minimum wage, plus 3 relatives of the owner-manager.

The lettuce with roots still attached sells in a clamshell for $5 a pop!!! (I'd assume they're selling to K street lobbyists, not to poor underpaid Feds.)  Not clear how much the grower gets. 


So, if we assume 5,000 a week for 50 weeks, that is 250,000.  Assume $2 to grower is $500,00; assume $4 and it's a million.  Assume the equivalent of 6 full-time employees paid $30,000 each is $180,000, leaving $320,00 for operating expenses and profit, or more.

If a population of 1 million uses a head per person per week, then it would take 200 such operations to supply, or 50 acres. So rooftop gardens could indeed supply greens for the city, assuming the residents were very well-paid.

A Win for the Foodies: Hostess Bankruptcy

Hostess Brands, of Wonder Bread and Twinkies fame, is re-entering bankruptcy.  That's a victory for the food movement.

131 FSA County Offices OUt?

That's from the Des Moines Register.

[Updated--here's the press release,
FSA has almost exactly half the 259 cuts being announced by Vilsack in his speech to Farm Bureau.  And here's the fact sheeton the details.  I didn't see any reference to any pre-clearance with Congress.  Since the speculation is that Obama is going to run for re-election by bashing a do-nothing Congress, maybe the plan is to put this on the table, and let Republican Congresspeople yell about closures, then attack them for being hypocrites?  Am I cynical today?]

The Case for Two Parties

Though as a Democrat I don't wish success to Republicans, it's true that two parties are better than one.  That's true even in the District of Columbia, as shown in this Post column.  Briefly, a Republican candidate identified a case of fraud committed by his opponent.  Though he didn't win the election, his efforts eventually sent a city councilman to prison for 3 years. As the columnist observes, Democrats in DC often tolerate corruption.  I think that's endemic in situations where the unscrupulous politician can unite a majority against an outside threat:  think of Mayor Curley in Boston in midcentury rallying the Irish against the WASPs or numerous Southern politicians in the last century rallying the whites  against the blacks or Joe McCarthy pitting true Americans against the subversive unAmericans.

Obama Welshes on Promise?

I realize "welshes" might get me in trouble with the politically correct types, but there's a serious question raised here--whether Obama really carried out his promse.

Life Expectancy

I was surprised to learn that Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders have longer life expectancies than the US.

Indian Education

Ajay Shah has a discussion on the quality of Indian education.  Makes an interesting contrast to the usual discussions in the US

Why Economists Are Free Marketers

Reading Daniel Kahneman's new book,Thinking, Fast and Slow, still in the early chapters.  He discusses "priming", the idea that by association of ideas exposure to one thing will increase the relevance of others.  For example, if you're given "W--H" and "S--P" to complete after being exposed to words like "dirt" you'll likely say "wash" "soap", while if you were exposed to "hunger" it would be  "soup".  This is imperceptible to the person, part of what he calls System 1, though well-established by experiments.

This would explain the saying: "to the boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail".  The boy is primed by the hammer to see things as items to be hit. 

It also explains why economists and humanists think so differently: their priming is different.  Economists talk money much of the time; humanists say, with Mr. Dodgson: "The time has come, the Walrus said,To talk of many things:Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax Of cabbages and kings And why the sea is boiling hot And whether pigs have wings."

It's the Simple Things That Count: Like Concrete

  Charles Kenny writes:

Starting in 2000, a program in Mexico's Coahuila state called "Piso Firme" (Firm Floor) offered up to $150 per home in mixed concrete, delivered directly to families who used it to cover their dirt floors. Scholar Paul Gertler evaluated the impact: Kids in houses that moved from all-dirt to all-concrete floors saw parasitic infestation rates drop 78 percent; the number of children who had diarrhea in any given month dropped by half; anemia fell more than four-fifths; and scores on cognitive tests went up by more than a third. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, mothers in newly cemented houses reported less depression and greater life satisfaction.)

 Concrete also works for highways, which improves economies in the third world.