Ingenuity on the Phishing Front

Just got this email.  You have to applaud the ingenuity of the phishers.

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Bureaucracy at Jutland

Brad DeLong blogs often about the day-to-day events of various wars.  Recently he's been posting on the battle of Jutland, the biggest naval battle of WWI and the subject of controversy ever since.

On the British side part of the issue has been the relationship between Admiral Jellicoe, the overall commander of the British forces, and Admiral Beatty, the commander of the most important subordinate force. The first was cautious, the second not.  The first was older, the second a young whipper-snapper.  Beatty had the battle cruisers, fast and hard-hitting, but vulnerable, ultimately their trade-offs between striking power and armor were judged to be bad choices

The Brits had superior numbers, the Germans had better ships.  The Brits had controlled the seas for centuries, the Germans were the upstarts. The battle itself was inconclusive--the Brits suffered more losses, but maintained control of the seas.  Both sides arguably had chances to do better, possibly even to win a decisive victory. Between the personalities, the So there's a lot of room for historians to come up with different narratives

Excerpts from tooday's post, which in turn is excerpts from a book:

"As discussed in Chapter 4, Evan-Thomas had not been favoured with a copy of BCFOs [Beatty's orders]. Had he been, he would have found informative Beatty’s ‘Instructions for Concentrating Battle Cruisers when Spread, and Forming Order of Battle’, for while these injunctions were framed with individual battlecruisers, rather than a squadron of battleships, in mind, the impression they impart of the thrust of BCF lore is unmistakable:

A sudden alteration of course by the ship sighting the enemy is seen by those on either side of her far more rapidly than any signal could be sent, and, being an almost certain indication of an enemy having been sighted it should be acted upon immediately. All ships that may be required to support must proceed to do so until they know definitely that they will not be required. The immediate sequel to concentrating is forming Order of Battle and engaging the enemy. In future this will be done so far as possible without signal, and each Captain is to use his discretion in handling his ship as he considers that the Admiral would wish.... Each detached ship should, at her discretion, close and engage the enemy without waiting for further orders.... Ships must never suppose that the absence of a signal implies that any given action is not sanctioned by the Flagship; on the contrary it usually denotes that the Admiral relies on each ship to take whatever action may be necessary without waiting to be told.... The sole object of these instructions is to enable ships to understand beforehand the principles of rapid co-operation, so that the enemy may be brought to action at the earliest possible moment without any ship needing or wishing to wait for detailed orders from the Admiral.

To point out again that Evan-Thomas’s ignorance of BCFOs was not mainly his fault is to emphasize again the divergence between the tactical regimes of the Battle Fleet and the BCF, and more specifically, between the habits of thought expected of their respective junior flag-officers. But if one ferrets around in the ‘70 closely printed pages’ of GFBOs, one finds, amongst the ‘mass of detail which should have been common knowledge’, ‘initiative’ injunctions which, while designed to preserve the unity of a deployed battle-line, are at least partly transferable in sense to Barham’s dilemma at 2.32...."

 My point is simply that you find bureaucracy everywhere, and knowledge of and compliance with instructions is important.

Convenience, Waste, and Nutrition

Cornell gets credit/blame for initiating the rise of sliced apples, which has increased sales of apples, in this study.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.  In our local Safeway, the amount of cooler space devoted to packaged salad green mixes has exploded, as has the number which my wife has bought in the last year.  And what I thought was a temporary display of guacamole and other dips keyed to the Super Bowl stationed just inside the doors has mutated into a permanent display of packages of things like fresh pineapple chunks, etc.

In some ways the trend is good.  I assume there's less waste of food; even ugly apples can yield good slices. I don't see people being as picky over the box of salad greens as they are over a head of lettuce. And possibly the location of waste in the food chain shifts, more at the processing plant, less at the store.  It's convenient--the labor of cutting up a pineapple or making guacamole is centralized and more efficient than the ordinary househusband doing it.  It saves shopping time--by standardizing (the academic "in" term is "commoditizing" the shopper needs only to grab a box.

In other ways the trend is bad.It increases the amount of packaging material which needs to be disposed of.  It encourages consumption, leading to obesity.  Tradeoffs everywhere.

I'm With Trump, for One Time Only

What could possibly put me in the same camp as Donald Trump?

His position on Rolling Thunder--it's not all it's cracked up to be. 

Actually, he said he was disappointed in the size of the crowd he addressed yesterday; he thought it be more like the March on Washington and blamed the officials for not permitting people to attend.

I've a long history, going back to 2005 (albeit in a draft post I never had the guts to post) of questioning the overblown claims for the event.  It seemed every year that the number of motorcycles coming down Constitution Avenue was higher, but the number was always inconsistent with any reasonable assessment of how many cycles could pass a point over any period. Anyone who doubts my claim will have to do a search on the blog; I never did create a Rolling Thunder tag.

Maybe Trump's disappointment will cause the organizers to quietly fold their tents and fade away, like the old soldiers they are. (This Steve Hendrix piece on the organizers is good, he treats them seriously and sympathetically but to a cynic like me the story explodes the possibility that an event attracting hundreds of thousands could be supported out of a garage.)

The Future of Jobs? From Linen to Games

We've gotten into Game of Thrones, now on season 2.  Last night the commentary mentioned Banbridge.  Banbridge is a town in County Down, Ulster of about 16,000.  It happens to be near where my great grandfather was born, and has been mentioned by my cousin who has made regular trips back to Ulster.  Turns out the town was into linen;  in the words of Wikipedia: "The town owes its success to flax and the linen industry, becoming the principal linen producing district in Ireland by 1772 with a total of 26 bleachgreens along the[River] Bann. By 1820 the town was the centre of the 'Linen Homelands' and its prominence grew when it became a staging post on the mail coach route between Dublin and Belfast."

But linen has fallen on hard times, and there's just one linen mill left operating.  One of the others failed in 2008, and has since been converted to a production studio.It's this studio which hosts a part of Game of Thrones for some seasons.

When you think about movies, they're made all over.  Vancouver and Montreal, Morocco and Eastern Europe, New York, North Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico are just a few of the locations I remember being used for the movies and TV shows I've seen recently, not to mention the old standbys of Britain and Italy.

And the remaining linen mill in Banbridge has long specialized on fine linens and bespoke linens.

So what we have is a shift of jobs from making products to making entertainment.  What's notable is these jobs presumably are safe from automation, which is more than we can say for manufacturing or many service jobs.

No Violence, Please

Having lived through 1968, I'm maybe a bit more sensitive to violent protests at political functions.  I hope the scenes outside Trump's rally as described by Molly Ball here fade away as the summer continues, but I won't bet on it.

[Update: Josh Marshall observes that last night's (6/2/16) violence was well documented; everyone not involved was taking cellphone videos/pics.  Hopefully that enables prosecution and puts a lid on the violent trend.]

Myths Never Die: Millions of Slaves Imported

Since the NYTimes doesn't offer a comment section on this article about what DNA tests of African-Americans show about their migrations, I'm <s>nitpicking</s> criticizing here.

Its first three sentences read:

"The history of African-Americans has been shaped in part by two great journeys.

The first brought millions of Africans to the southern United States as slaves. The second, the Great Migration, began around 1910 and sent six million African-Americans from the South to New York, Chicago and other cities across the country."

 Two serious errors in the second sentence.  First, the colonies and the US did not import "millions" of slaves.  In fact, as Prof. Gates of Harvard writes here, there were less than 400,000 imported.  The vast majority of the close to 13 million slaves went to the Caribbean and South America.

Second, a bit less serious, the South wasn't the only region importing slaves, the Middle Atlantic and New England colonies/states also participated.

Slavery was bad enough, it doesn't need to be clothed in mythical figures.

[I see the Times has issued a correction for the millions figure as of 5/31]

Long Overdue Warning on DNA

There's DNA in your food.  Labels should reflect that.

(Note the label.  Thanks to Somin at Volokh.

Strawberries of the Past

Slate has a piece on strawberries of the past, linking to this USDA resource with pictures of old strawberries. See the previous piece.

Surprise: African Immigrants More Educated than Asian

In an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Journal of Blacks in higher education, African immigrants to the United States were found more likely to be college educated than any other immigrant group. African immigrants to the U.S. are also more highly educated than any other native-born ethnic group including white Americans. Some 48.9 percent of all African immigrants hold a college diploma. This is slightly more than the percentage of Asian immigrants to the U.S., nearly double the rate of native-born white Americans, and nearly four times the rate of native-born African Americans.

From here, via Chris Blattman.