Immigration and Rationing by Friction

I'm reading "The Strange Death of Europe" by Douglas Murray.  As you can  guess from the title it's anti-immigration but its European focus provides a bit of perspective on the US problem with immigration.

Some bits which have struck me so far:

• he asserts something about people never assimilating, totally ignoring the American (Canadian, Australian, etc. ) experience which shows me that some groups do assimilate.  Not all.
• when people are divided on the policy, as in Europe between human sympathy with boat people fleeing from the "Arabian spring" of 2011 and fear for the impact of the influx on their nation, it makes it impossible for government to do a job.  The result is decision making by friction, by the accumulation of individual choices.
• from a 30,000 foot perspective, as long as there are differences in wealth, opportunity, and particularly stability among nations, there will be migration. 

Vertical Farming of Wheat

This was a tweet which attracted attention.

Vertical farming is my favorite solarpunk invention.

Imagine humanity using less and less of the land, allowing it to revert to nature as we stack our farms to the sky. All powered by solar energy, of course. https://t.co/ZZEIQ0oYFJ

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) August 3, 2020

The link is to a study of really intensive wheat farming under lights.  It got very high productivity.   From the study summary:

Here we show that wheat grown on a single hectare of land in a 10-layer indoor vertical facility could produce from 700 ± 40 t/ha (measured) to a maximum of 1,940 ± 230 t/ha (estimated) of grain annually under optimized temperature, intensive artificial light, high CO2 levels, and a maximum attainable harvest index. Such yields would be 220 to 600 times the current world average annual wheat yield of 3.2 t/ha.

The writers admit it's not economically feasible now or in "near future".  Since they're talking 20+ hours of lighting and boosting CO2 levels and temperature-controlled (i.e., air conditioning) IMHO it's not likely to be feasible until we get electricity from fusion.  I'd assume inventing the equipment to plant and harvest the wheat would be relatively easy, but their 10-layer farm assumes 1 meter separation between layers and super dwarf wheat, so rather cramped quarters.

The study turns out to be a computer modelling exercise, based on extrapolating from one real-life experiment in growing wheat and estimating theoretical maximums. 

 

FSA Sees the Light of Feminism?

Back in the day, when I moved from Directives to the program side, roughly 1978, there were three broad classification groupings: clerical, technical, professional, with the "program specialists" being in the last group.  In the division of maybe 50 people, IIRC we had two women professionals, both of whom worked in the branch which did policy analysis and statistics. The old allotment programs for wheat, feed grains, and cotton had been suspended in recent years, although they were still on the books.  Developing the allotments and quotas had been the original raison d'etre for the branch, meaning they were heavily into statistics and this, if I understood correctly, was the way the women had climbed the ladder to the professional tier.

As the years passed, one woman retired and one died of cancer so it was 1983 or 4 before I remember new  female professionals joining the division. As time passed there was more and more difficulty in recruiting county executive directors to come to DC because of the growing difference in livestyle/cost of living between a rural county and a DC suburb. So recruitment turned to the clerks in county offices, then called "program assistants" and now "program technicians". CED's had been predominantly male, PA's were predominantly  female.  So when FSA was hiring in the mid-80s in connection with installation of IBM System/36's most of the new hires were women.

By the late 80's we had the first woman branch chief: Sandra Nelson Penn, By the time I retired Diane Sharpe was my division director.

Today I see a notice of the current (I don't know if any or all are new) division directors in the Farm Programs area:  DAFP Announces Division Directors and Deputy Directors.  As far as I can tell all four are women.

Congratulations 

Google Translate or Wikipedia and German Junk Mail?

The other day I was researching Gen. Hans Leyers, because my cousin and I were reading the novel "Beneath the Scarlet Sky" in which he is a main character.  There's little in English not related to the novel, so I went to the German version of wikpedia. I used Google Translate to convert the info there to English.  

Suddenly my junk mail folder has a lot of email from German sources--apparently junk emailers have some kind of link to wikipedia.de or Google Translate.

Cultural Differences

A couple differences in culture notice in recent days:

1. Eli Saslow has been doing a series of portraits in the Post of people as they endure the pandemic.  He writes them as a monologue, using short sentences which gives a sense of the tension the person is feeling.  These days I sometimes pass on long pieces in the Post or Times, but Saslow's I read.  Today the subject was an educator--superintendent and principal--in an Arizona district dealing with the governnor's mandate to open school in person by the end of the month.  His wife is a teacher--young kids--and is quoted as saying the kids hug her several times each day. That seems strange to me: I can't remember ever having hugged a teacher, or been hugged, or even seeing a teacher hug a student. I'm not sure whether it's the difference between 1940's and 2020 or between Latinos in Arizona and WASP's in New York.
2. Back when toilet paper was vanishing off the store's shelves Safeway must have made a deal for toilet paper originally made for Latin American countries.  Now it's on sale.  Being cheap, we bought a couple of package.  It's good TP, not premium, but good.  The interesting thing is the perforations are a bit closer together than in US paper. I don't see that's a problem; over time the small difference would make a big difference in the volume used. 

My Election Nightmare

We have record-breaking participation in the 2020 election.  Democrats, being more reluctant to expose themselves to the virus, choose overwhelmingly to use the mail to cast their ballots.  Democrats, being unfamiliar with the process and not particularly good at reading instructions, make errors in completing the ballots.

On election day, the interim count shows Trump and his fellow Republicans running ahead in most states, including the battleground states.  But most states will take days to process and count the mail ballots. As the count proceeds there is a very high rate of ballot rejections, and Democrats become more and more concerned.  

When the dust settles, Trump is reelected based on accepted ballots.  Post-election analysis shows that 7 million ballots from registered Democratic and independent voters have been rejected.  Trump's margin of victory is -2.8 million votes, better than his 2016 margin, but the improvement is entirely attributable to mistakes in the mail ballot process.

Oh, in my really bad nightmare, in several key states there's a Florida-2000 style recount, reviewing the rejected balllots. 

On Changing the Political Rules

I'm reluctant to see political rules changed.

• when you change them for political advantage, you give your opponents a rationale to do the same.  It's called a "race to the bottom".
• often you can't predict the result.

I gather the Democrats will likely do away with the filibuster in the Senate if they gain a solid majority.  I'm not clear that the conservative Dem senators would go along if the votes of Manchin and Sinema were needed.

They may try to do something with the structure of the judiciary, given the games McConnell et. al. have played over the last 5 years.

I'd rather see the Dems work harder, donate more, and win longer and bigger than take the political risks of changing rules.   

But then, I'm a rather conservative liberal Democrat I suppose. 

A Modest Suggestion--Trump Hotel as Dormitory

Louis Gohmert sleeps in his office, a fact mentioned in an article on his contracting coronavirus.  That's not unusual.  This article estimates up to 100 members of Congress do so.

Over the years there have been many articles bemoaning the decline of civility and bipartisanship in Congress, often attributed to the idea that members commute back to their districts on the weekend and don't develop close personal relationships with members of the other party.

Presumably the members who sleep in their offices are usually the ones who are commuting back home--they don't feel the need to rent quarters in DC when they're only sleeping here 2-3 days a week for 40  weeks.

A third fact: the Trump Hotel in DC  hasn't been doing well with the pandemic.  Once Trump is out of office, it's likely to do much worse than it did in 2017-19.

So my modest suggestion:

Let the US  government buy out Trump's lease on the building and set it up as a dormitory for members of Congress. By housing 250 or so members it should create a better atmosphere in Congress, and it helps get Trump back to NYC the evening of Jan 20.

Diversity Now and Then

I was struck by this tweet the other day:

The suburbs are actually a lot more diverse than NIMBY-in-Chief Trump seems to realize. NIMBYism is still partly about racism, but to an increasing degree it's about classism too.https://t.co/yxOeDJIpW7

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) July 29, 2020

Back in the 1950's and 60's suburbs were often seen as white, because the narrative was evil realtors were using "block-busting" tactics to get whites to sell their city homes for low dollars and flee to the suburbs while they turned around and sold the homes to blacks for high dollars.

With that narrative, anyone moving to the suburbs was "white", regardless of whether they were moving from a formerly Italian, Polish, Jewish, Irish, or whatever neighborhood.  With a different narrative we could have seen the suburbs as diversifying since they were, I believe, the site of mixing of ethnicities into "white Americans". 

But suburbs weren't "integrated", in the terms used then.  A number of prominent blacks have in their history the memory of being the "first" black family on the block. 

These days we say the suburbs aren't "diverse", by which we tend to mean they're segregated by class--typically a subdivision has only a limited range of prices, meaning it is affordable to a group of families limited by their income.  I think in most areas the middle income suburbs are integrated--they've a small number of "minority" families living in them, but not a great diversity.  At least in the DC area, that description might apply to the black-majority neighborhoods in Prince Georges, or the smaller Hispanic, Korean, or other ethnicity areas scattered around the Beltway.

The rule seems to be, if you have the money, groups with the greater feeling of identity (often more recent immigrants) will tend to buy in the same area, while a minority will go elsewhere. If you don't have any feeling of ethnic/racial identity, you buy wherever, usually based on the school system if you have or are going to have children.

Capitalizing "Black" and "White"

The Post announced today it would capitalize "white". This follows on the Times and AP deciding to capitalize "black". 

My gut reaction is opposed to both changes, particularly the "white".  But I'm not sure I've a rational basis for my objection.  Our designations for other racial groupings are capitalized: Asian-Americans, Latino/Hispanic Americans, African Americans; Pacific Islander Americans, Native Americans.  To be consistent in my opposition don't I have to come up with substitutes for those groupings.

I'm not sure, top of my head, of the difference between African-American and black--I know there's a perceived problem in distinguishing between immigrant African-Americans and antebellum African-Americans but does the black/African-American terminology handle that distinction?  (Personally I think the perceived differential might point to an important dimension in American culture, but that's an issue for another post.)

I guess my reaction, as shown in a tweet this morning, is concern over reifying differences.  To me "black versus white" is different than "White versus Black".  A George Floyd demonstration which includes "Blacks" and "Whites" feels different than a "black and white" demonstration (though I suppose a careful writer might say "biracial protesters" or something similar, which leads to the possibly that forcing writers to capitalize "Whites" will drive some to avoid the racial designation entirely.

Another part of my reaction might be discomfort at being forced to consider myself as part of a racial group, rather than assume membership in the majority culture (at least as U.S. is currently constituted).