Check out Noel and Kate operating our newish packing machine. After 16 years of packing by hand we invested in a more efficient way to pack leaving more time to concentrate on bird welfare and farm managementper. @butlersorganics #LEAN #farmlife #eggs #organic #shopready pic.twitter.com/m5HN3bprMn
— IrelandsFarmers (@IrelandsFarmers) May 7, 2022
Virginia Postrel has a substack article, touching on changes in cotton production from 1920s (her grandfather was in the trade) to now.
I commented on a couple aspects.
Just a gripe here. If I understand "originalism" as a way to interpret the Constitution, it says that the Founding Fathers agreed on a document which had one meaning. (No doubt that exaggerates and distorts but it's close enough for my purposes.)
Now I've been in a lot of meetings over the years, some of which involve a group of people coming to an agreement, others involving people trying to understand the meaning of one or more speakers. I think it's fair to say that in most cases the people who were trying to agree or who were being talked to came away from the event with somewhat different understandings. In most cases the context was such that the differences made no long-term differences, but the principle is the same. No group of 39 to 55 people would agree on how to apply the document resulting from their meeting.
Original intent is a myth, an "ideal type" as some used to say, which doesn't exist in real life.
Says Justice Alito (who apparently loves Fiddler on the Roof)
I write that after reading this New Yorker interview with Neal Katyal, who describes Alito's draft decision as rooting our rights in tradition.
A separate point--lots of speculation about who leaked the opinion and why. It seems to me everyone is making up a story to fit their preconceptions--like Ginni Thomas being the leaker, because she's the woman we liberals love to hate.
I blogged before about the difficulty of finding a way to a ceasefire in Ukraine. Since then I think I see signs of mission creep.
Ukraine seems to be doing much better in resisting Russia than we anticipated. Ukraine is the underdog being bullied. We're seeing unusual unanimity in Europe about the war. All these factors can feed into a certain euphoria/animal enthusiasm about the war.
But I still don't see an obvious middle ground. Ukraine and its supporters obviously want to repel Russia troops and oust them from their 2022 conquests; ideally they'd like to reverse the Russian gains of 2014. Ukraine also wants compensation for the damage Russia has been inflicting on civilians, housing, infrastructure as well as justice for the war crimes they allege. Finally they want to remove Russia's ability to invade in the future.
IMHO the chance Putin would agree to that agenda is nil. So for Ukraine to achieve its war aims they need a palace revolution in Russia. Unlikely. Think of Germany at the end of WWI and the "stab in the back".
I'm not usually this harsh, but I've never ever been impressed by USA.gov.
As the spokesman in this FCW article says:
""Right now, one of the things that happens is that people go to USA.gov and then we refer people, but it would be ideal, I think … for people to just be able to get stuff done, right there on USA.gov,"What sort of image do we have of our society and the left and right? Often I think it's as if society is there, a platform or a landscape, while left and right act over time, moving one way or another.
But is that a good image. After all society is people, as are left and right, so society can move as well.
What's an alternative image: perhaps a crowd, some wearing red, some wearing blue, the majority, the less politically involved, wearing gray. So you take a snapshot in 1960 of the crowd and you see the reds and blues scattered through the crowd. Take another snapshot today and you see the reds clustered together, the blues clustered-they've both become more cohesive.
But that image doesn't reflect a society's movement. Maybe an image is Hawaii, where the continental plate moves over a volcanic hot spot, which creates the various island. In this image "society" would be all the people, the economy, laws, etc. So society could change because of innovations in technology, in the rest of the world etc. Meanwhile there would be two "hot spots"; each representing a temperament which seems to be common in people at large: one conservative, one liberal.
That covers the fact there always seems to be a left and a right, a conservative and a liberal faction. And it allows for the fact that conservatives in the 1950's could be strong supporters of segregation, while conservatives today are opposed to racial segregation.
Don't know, maybe I need to think more.
Twitter activity on how left and right have changed, as here:
The thing about @NateSilver538’s argument here is that a Musk-owned Twitter would subsequently attract conservatives who have leaned way way WAY to the right, thereby refuting Musk’s original inductive generalization. pic.twitter.com/nhuJMnDF41
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) April 28, 2022
I don't know about the national picture. I do know I've always considered myself on the moderate left and my views have changed sometimes:
An experience with the Massachusetts online application for an ID (just testing) got me to thinking.
Back in the day, that is the early 1990s', we got PC's with Wordperfect 5.0 at work. One of the things I played around with then was using its table tools to create Wordperfect versions of our printed forms. A good part of the motivation was just the challenge in seeing how far I could get and what was involved in getting as close a facsimile as possible. IIRC sometimes I was able to create a version where you could enter data. And I think the ASCS/FSA forms shop followed a similar path for some years, replacing the IBM composers they were using in the 1960s with PCs and Wordperfect.
The next step seems (when I retired I no longer was involved on the creation side) to have been creating online forms with data entry. I don't know the software behind those forms, but over the years I've run into them.
But when you look at that process, it's a survival, like an appendix or wisdom teeth, left over from prior times.
Currently I seem to be encountering the interview process--a series of windows which ask for data piece by piece, with "back" and "continue" options and often with the data entered determined the next sequence of windows to be displayed. That seemed to be the case with the MA application, also with the Kaiser Permanente appointment process I just completed, and in a modified form with TurboTax's process. TurboTax is interesting because the end result of your interview entries is a completed set of tax forms for the user, although it looks as if the data sent to the IRS and VA tax people is stripped down to the data elements.
Perhaps 50 years from now we'll no longer be using forms?
[I belatedly checked and saw I'd already posted on this book, so I'm changing the titles of the two posts so they make a series. ]Part of a planned series on Essence of Decision, a very interesting book using the Cuban missile crisis as the core example of three modes of analysis of how organzations work and act.
I'm struck by how much Kennedy got into the weeds during the crisis. Even so, as Allison/Zelikow describe, there were still disconnects where State, Air Force and Navy were doing their thing unaware of or misunderstanding his orders and desires.
Thinking about that presidency and the one completed on Jan 20, 2021, it's like night and day. Kennedy both by experience in the Navy and by inclination was hands-on; the former guy is hands-on only when it comes to furnishing his buildings or painting his airplane. LBJ, Nixon, and Carter would, I think, have been similarly involved, though with different perspectives, strengths, and weaknesses. Ford I don't know well enough, but I have my doubts. Reagan and GWBush no.
So America was lucky that the former guy never had a real crisis.
Another observation--the Soviet Union's communcation network between Moscow and Dobrynin in DC was marginally better than the 1941 network between Gen. Marshall and the Hawaii command (telegram delivered by Western Union).
And one more--Kennedy didn't have the option of a "surgical strike" on Cuba--dumb bombs on jet planes were too inaccurate.The authors say the decision to go with the blockade was due to that lack. Maybe with today's missiles he would have quickly gone to a strike. Then again, maybe Khrushchev wouldn't have decided to install his weaponry.
