Japan and America

Via Marginal Revolution, a Mental Floss post of 10 tips for Japanese visiting the US.  Provides a glimpse of the cultural differences between the societies.

Organic Does Not Equal Small or American

Modern Farmer has a piece on the costs of converting farmland to organic (it requires a multi-year history of only organic methods being used, which is costly) so Costco is going to finance some vertical integration:

"This first initiative will find Costco partnering with Andrew & Williamson Fresh Produce, based in San Diego, to buy equipment and 1,200 acres of land just south of the border."

As I say in the previous post, the organic premium and demand is there now, but I predict an overbuilding of capacity. 

Organic Does Not Equal Locavore

A Bloomberg piece on the importing of organic grain from Romania and India.  It's certainly not energy-efficient.

This is related to the next post on Costco springing for the costs of converting farmland to organic.  I'd interpret both as saying the price premium for organic is promising enough to warrant these measures.  I'd also guess there will be at some point down the road an overbuilding of organic capacity, because farmers usually overshoot their market corrections.

More Divorce Equals Less Geographic Mobility

Joel Achenbach has a good post tied to his article in the Post on the increase in mortality rates among middle-aged white women.  This from a comment started me thinking:

"(Before you ask why he didn't just move to find a job: he couldn't leave the area because his ex-wife was still alive and he couldn't move the girls more than an hour from their mother, so he was pretty much stuck.) "

To the extent we have increased the number of children living in one-parent households over the years, we may have increased the obstacles to moving for jobs.  Similarly, the number of two-job households would also increase the obstacles.  For example, in the most extreme case a two-professor marriage needs complex negotiations with a new school in order to obtain new jobs for both.

Net result, the decline in mobility noted here.(Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution says it's land use restrictions.)

Which Branch Will Shoot Down Drones?

Politico has a piece on a US Army analysis of Russian military capabilities as demonstrated in Ukraine.  One paragraph:

Karber says the lethality of new Russian munitions has been striking, including the use of scatterable mines, which the U.S. States no longer possesses. And he counts at least 14 different types of drones used in the conflict and reports that one Ukrainian unit he was embedded with witnessed up to eight drone flights in a single day. “How do you attack an adversary’s UAV?” asks Clark. “Can we blind, disrupt or shoot down these systems? The U.S. military hasn’t suffered any significant air attacks since 1943.”

 Knowing the military bureaucracy, it's safe to predict that the Navy, the Marines, the Army, and the Air Force, not to mention the Secret Service and other bureaucracies will all invest in anti-drone research, set up anti-drone units, and lobby Congress to be the lead agency.

Speculation: I'd guess the easiest way to go with drones is to jam their communications, but we'll see.

We Ran a Micro-Dairy

Moliere had a character who was surprised to be told he was speaking prose.  I'm surprised to learn I grew up on a micro-dairy.  That's according to a NYTimes piece today.  No specifics on what constitutes a "micro-dairy"; one instance mentioned has 12 cows so I guess we qualify.

The characteristic which we didn't share with the dairies described is: processing.  These dairies do their own processing and then sell into a niche market.

This is all fine, but I wonder what grass the Wisconsin dairyman finds to feed his cows in the winter? Or did the writer just simplify and omit mention of "hay".  These cows are going to be less productive.  Yes, dairy cattle evolved to eat only grass.  But we've bred them to produce milk longer than needed by their calves and much more volume.  To sustain the production they need grain as well as forage.  

So micro-dairies are fine to provide a niche product marketed to gourmet types, those who have the money to spend on refined tastes, but they won't do anything for the environment.

U.S. Is Not a New Nation

Ron Charles includes this sentence in a review of a novel focused on Thomas Jefferson:

"We’re a young nation, and like any adolescent, nothing rouses us to fits of bitter delight more than detecting hypocrisy in others [i.e., Jefferson]."

I disagree.  You can define "nation" different ways.  One looks at the government and the land included in the nation, another at the "people", an approach which has lost favor.  (Hitler conflated the Reich and the German people.)

Nations like France, Italy, and Germany really were formed in the 19th century, as a government consolidated control over its territory.  "England" and "Britain" form something of an exception--England has been consolidated under the crown since the Norman Conquest, give or take the odd civil war.  Britain still isn't sure whether it includes the Scots or not.

There are nations which have been around in some form or other for centuries: China, Japan, Ethiopia. And if you allow for boundaries to change, Russia, Persia/Iran, Egypt, and others can qualify.  But when you look Latin America, Africa, Australia, and South and Southwest Asia you see the impact of colonialism and nationalism, recent phenomena.

So I repeat: we aren't a young nation, considering the histories of all the nations in the world.  The young nation meme is just a way to claim American exceptionalism.

Courier All Caps Is No No

One of my pet peeves, which I may have mentioned before, is the failure of people to take advantage of the possibilities the computer has given us: specifically the failure to use proportionally spaced type and lower case when communicating.

Back in the early 70's my boss gave me a research project: see if I could find a replacement for our IBM MT/ST typewriters.  As part of the research I read a paper on the benefits of proportional spacing: more legible, easier and faster to read, less misunderstanding.  That's why for hundreds of years printed material was in various proportionally space fonts. 

At that time, typewriters were limited; the usual choices were 10 pt courier and 12 pt. elite, though the IBM Selectric offered more variety, but only the IBM Composer offered proportional spacing for print shop/forms design use.

Meanwhile we still had telegraphs going, which mostly were all cap and monospaced. IIRC even in teletype terminals which used CRT's, that was true. 

Anyhow, places like the State Department and Weather Service which had the telegraph system incorporated into their bones have continued to use monospacing and all caps well into the 21st century.  State may have transitioned off.  And now Brad Plumer at Vox tells us that the Weather Service is going half-way, abandoning the all-caps, but not the Courier font.

IMHO this is a fine case study in bureaucratic inertia.

The Scandal of Trump's Children

Turns out two of Trump's children weren't registered to vote in time for the primary.  What's a scandal to me is that the kids are 33 and 31 years old, meaning they've missed 3 presidential elections and many state and local elections. What sort of citizens don't vote?

Yalie Getting Hands Dirty

It's probably true that fewer (in proportion) youngsters get their hands dirty these days than before.  There's not much real dirt on a cellphone screen. And my impression is part-time jobs during high school aren't very usual any more.  This post on the Yale Sustainable Food Project describes the benefits one Yalie gets from working in the Yale garden.  It's partly the hands-dirty thing and partly having a community.

I can identify with latter.  I worked for 4 years in the cafeteria in one of the women's dorms.  My co-workers gave me a community which, given my shyness, I couldn't have found on my own.  While you can get lost in a big university, there are also niches to find, more than in a smaller place.