A Small Defense of Trump

I pride myself on being able to focus on nuts and bolts of implementation.  With that in mind, I'll offer a small defense of Donald Trump. The story briefly: he holds a fundraiser for vets early in the year, claims to have raised $6 million, of which $1 million came from him.  The media, notably the Post, pressed him on who and when, and yesterday he announced the details.  It turns out he didn't write his check until last week.  The mean-minded, which often includes me, take that as a sign he wouldn't have given without the media attention.

That's surely one story which fits the known facts.  But there's an alternative version of  what might have happened. Trump does the fundraiser without really planning the details of implementation. He does intend to make the donation.  What I haven't seen yet is the details of the handling of the money, whether donors wrote checks to the recipients or whether the money was routed through a checking account.  It's also not clear who determined the recipients--Trump, his aides, or the donors.  Once the media got on his case, Trump's people slapped together what was revealed at the news conference.

Bottomline: While I won't convict Trump of lying about the donations, I will say there's a strong case he and his people were inefficient bureaucrats, proving they fail at implementation.

For the bad case see TPM

Muhammad Ali RIP

Sometime I'll write about my memories of him, but today RIP.

Too Good Not to Steal

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns, & MOney writes"

"You lose a war against the United States, we sell you fighter planes.  You fight a war alongside the United States, we sell you fighter planes.  You beat the United States in a war, we sell you fighter planes:"

 The best bit is the title of the post. 

One Hundred Years of Change

Slate has this post relaying a study on superstitions prevalent in the early 1900's.  While their discussion is interesting,  I'm more struck by the what they show about the changes in society.  The average American these days has no contact with horses, breadshelves, buckskin, babies dying, hoes or rakes. etc.

Ingenuity on the Phishing Front

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

Wells Fargo Online Banking,

Your account was recently accessed from a location we're
not familiar with. Please review the activity details below
and specify if that was you or not:

Location: Germany
Time: Yesterday at 5:52 AM EDT
Location estimated based on IP=87.118.101.175

If anything looks unfamiliar, Wells Fargo will help you secure
your account to prevent people in the future from
accessing your account without permission.
Wells Fargo Online Banking
 

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.]