In Defense of Inequality?

On some days I have a populist streak  On some days I have a contrarian streak.

Today I was reading "The Great Escape" by Angus Deaton.  In a chapter on the improvements in life expectancy over the centuries in different countries he observed that inoculation for smallpox used to be very costly: a family like John Adams' would go off for a week or so to be in isolation as they waited for the mild case of smallpox to emerge and run its course until they were no longer infectious.  That required money.  Of course over the years, over the centuries the cost came done, but in this case the richer people were by necessity the early adopters.

Christenson's Innovator's Dilemma argues that innovations develop from a product which may be more expensive and less capable for most purposes, but which better fits the needs of the niche market than the mainstream product.  By capitalizing on the niche, and using the revenue to finance improvements, the innovators can improve and expand, eventually reducing the mainstream product to niche status.

There's another announcement, from Tesla, which builds ridiculously pricey electric cars, but now they're using their battery expertise to expand into power supplies for backup and filling the gaps from solar power.

So, at least today, maybe I'm living in the best of all possible worlds, where the rich finance innovations.  Maybe.

Milloy and Baltimore--Lessons from History

Courtland Milloy in the Post has a column on Baltimore:

"From history, they should have learned important lessons about the self-defeating nature of rioting. Baltimore, like many other urban cities, is still scarred from the burning and looting that occurred in 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. More than a thousand businesses in that city were destroyed, many of them black owned."

It's a point I like, having experienced the 1968 riots in DC.  But I'm trying to think of any history book, or even journalistic book, which got praise as "the" account of a riot in a major city, and I can't remember one.  I'm sure there have been such books, but I don't remember an outstanding one.

Women on Juries

I assumed that when women got the vote, they also got on juries.  Not so.  According to this piece:

" As late as 1943 only twelve states permitted women to serve on juries on the same basis as men."

Apparently the last six words are the key. 

Human Expertise Endangered by Automation: the Sniper

Vox has a sort of video from DOD of a test of a bullet able to change course in mid-flight.  (Don't ask me how they did it.)  The bottom line to me: add "sniper" to the list of jobs endangered by technological obsolescence.  With such a bullet even I could be a sniper.

In basic training you spend a bit of time on the rifle range.  Although I'd shot a 22 rifle to kill skunks and possums on the farm, I was far from being a marksman.  That was very evident in my early sessions on the range. When my company went to the range for qualification tests, I was seriously concerned about flunking, which would have meant having to repeat some weeks of basic.  As it turned out, the test with popup targets (I don't remember that we'd trained on them, definitely not in the way the test went) was such that I passed, almost rating as "expert".  The key was that I didn't have time to get nervous, so I could react to each new target and fire without over-thinking.

USDA and E-Signature

Government Executive "reports" on a "Summit for Digital Government".

The upcoming summit will feature a case study of the USDA’s electronic signature initiative and educational sessions from the most experienced e-signature provider to government. e-SignLive will share best practices gained from more than 500 government customers and some of the longest running, largest paperless initiatives including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, GSA and the US Army.

It's really a promotion for Silanis, a case where the bureaucratic-industrial complex comes together: one or more bureaucracies get the chance to look modern and progressive and the vendor gets the implicit endorsement of a user. In this case the magazine gets free content, since the heading, artfully using grayer type than the black type of the article, reveals:

This content is made possible by our sponsor. The editorial staff of Government Executive was not involved in its preparation.

Maybe in addition to Ike's "military-industrial complex" we should have something like a "contractor-bureaucracy complex?"

"New York is the rat’s ideal habitat"

Growing up in Upstate New York, we knew that instinctively.  New York City was the home of all that was strange, and foreign, and bad, at least on those days when my mother, born in the city, didn't reminisce about going to the American Museum of Natural History during her visits to her grandmother.

The sentence is from a good article in the New York Times Magazines on rats and other aspects of urban ecology.  Did you know that white-footed mice are so "neophobic" (afraid of the new, like me) that the city supports genetically distinct populations?

US Digital Services

The newest thing, a legacy of the rush to fix the Obamacare website, is the US Digital Services.

Digital services' role "will stop when we get you to minimally viable project," Kruger said. The team can help define user needs, build in analytics, wireframe the user experience, deploy and test alpha and beta versions, and generally tune and refine a service to ensure it can serve the intended purpose. "When we're happy with that, we'll hand it back to the business unit, and they'll own it -- to maintain it, to make improvements over time."

"We're not going to be here forever," he said. It is up to the business unit to plan for ongoing maintenance and support, and "from the beginning, we're going to have that conversation."

I think there are some downsides to this idea, or at least there would have been in the old days of COBOL.  One downside was the difficulty of understanding what's going on and making changes to the code.  That was at least one rationale for all the documents produced in the old "waterfall" software development process: users and systems analysts were supposed to produce a lot of documents at different levels of understanding (data, system flow, etc.) which would then enable their successors to understand what was going on.  My own feeling/guess is that what happened when these documents were produced was the people involved learned the process by writing documents, so there was a reasonable base of understanding among enough people to be able to handle people retiring, etc.

Raisins and Vaccines

I've been active in commenting at Volokh Conspiracy on a post concerning the raisin marketing order case which went before the Supreme Court yesterday.

For some reason the issue raises my emotions; partly because I dislike free riders and that's how I view this cases.  It's ironic that the chattering class has been vocal about the measles vaccine, and the problem the anti-vaxers cause while they're united in support of Mr. Horne's free riding on the raisin producers.

Slavery and Mauretania

Kottke.org links to a desire map--Google analyzed the most common query "how much does X cost" by country. 

In four countries of east Africa the most common "X" is "cow".

In Mauretania the most common "X" is "slave", which led me to find this wikipedia entry on slavery in modern?-day Mauretania.

Today's Euphemism: Depopulation

"Handling a depopulation and disinfection on a layer site is more complex than a turkey site..."

from an agriculture.com post on the bird flu problem in Iowa.  (I wonder what position the candidates for President will take on it?)
 
Didn't know birds got flu?  They do, and they're likely the original source of human flu type A, the most common kind.  

Flu is a big problem for poultry producers because there's not much to do except kill the birds, and invent an euphemism for it.