Barbershop/Beauty Shop Networks

 In a market economy the vendors sell something and the buyers decide to buy based on price. If it's not a commodity then quality and features come into play, but the market is supposed to be impersonal.

Got my hair cut today and got musing about networks. My experience with barbershops and my wife's experience with her hairdressers (actually just cuts) says there's a lot of networking going on.  I'd say half the patrons of my shop ask for a specific barber. (It's not a big sample; the shop is old-fashioned male-oriented and I go when there's least likely to be other patrons.) And my wife does the same thing.

You can understand why--a haircut is very personal so someone who cares will choose their barber on particular features. I guess that the market works well enough because buyers have different preferences, and there's enough of us who don't care to keep the market fairly liquid. 

The Future of Fake Food

 I follow some dairy-oriented blogs and twitter accounts, many of which are concerned about the rise of fake milk--plant-based milks.  There's also concern about plant-based meat.

The increasing popularity of these "fake foods" (I'm using the term somewhat tongue in cheek) seems result from several things:

• newness, perhaps faddishness.
• health concerns. It's not clear any of the fake foods are better for you than their "real" competition, but they might be.
• environment.  Animal agriculture, whether dairy or beef, takes a hit from concerns about methane production, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
• animal rights/welfare. You have to kill beef cattle and the male calves of dairy cattle, and we don't like that thought.
• pollution.  CAFOs impact the air and water.

The saving grace for real foods is cost--centuries of development ensure that real foods are cheaper calorie for calorie, nutrient for nutrient, in today's markets.

I remember my mother kneading in the coloring package which came with the block of margarine (butter was scarce in WWII), very upset that she had to serve fake food to us when our cows were producing good milk. The last I checked margarine was cheaper than real butter, although the two products seem to be co-existing.  

I see a similar outcome for today's fake foods: innovation will continue until they're able reasonably to compete with their real counterparts on price and taste, just as margarine does with butter.  Whether real foods become just a high-end niche product for gourmets I'm less sure about. 

[Update--part of this is relevant.]

Agriculture Development Lessons from Outside US

I think the following analysis applies equally to current problems in developing nations and to the history of agriculture in the US,  particularly when you consider the South from 1865 to 1985 or so:

In our evaluations, we often see different results across different segments of farmers—even when assistance is pretty uniform. Farmers with relatively high incomes tend to leverage their access to financing and irrigation to take full advantage of training, often making dramatic gains in production and sales in just one season. In contrast, subsistence farmers and women have more difficulty improving their situations through training, given the multitude of constraints that they face. As a result, we have found income gains concentrated among the top quartile of farmers, with more than half of farmers no better off than when the program began. These findings highlight a natural tension in the sector between helping the poorest of the poor reach food security, on one hand, and helping more established producers formalize their operations, on the other.

When Humans Are Elephants

 The NYTimes Magaine has a short piece on the herd of elephants in China who've gone walkabout. Apparently they just took off in search of better, perhaps because of disturbances in their environment and have now traveled 300 miles. The article suggests the excursion is a model of how nature adapts to change.

To me it suggests what humans have done over the millennia--how we have traveled from Africa across the world reaching every continent and significant island by 1300 CE (except Antarctica.)

I've read one book (Wrangham?) suggesting that periodic shifts in Africa from moist to dry had the effect of pumping humans out of Africa.  So we are elephants too.

Norton's 1774: the Long Year of Revolution

 Mary Beth Norton published this book in 2020,  Reading it in the light of the 1619 Project and our current partisanship makes it particularly interesting.  

Tidbits:

She defines a "long 1774", essentially starting with the Boston Tea Party (December 1773) and ending with Concord and Lexington in April 1775.

Different communities reacted differently to the importation of tea by the East India Company--the Tea Party was the most extreme among the ports (NYC, Philadelphia, Charleston) in that property was destroyed.+

Gadsden writes from SC that the colony is weakened by its high proportion of enslaved blacks--makes them indecisive in responding to the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Port Act (the first UK response to the party).

The activist faction used tactics to manipulate the results.

"Patriotic terrorism" was a thing in 1774. The "woke" were sometimes successful in silencing their opponents, those who disagreed with nonimportation and possibly nonexportation agreements to protest the "Coercive Acts" punishing Massachusetts for the destruction of tea in the Boston Tea Party.

Much of the dynamic seems to be a recognition that all the colonies needed to act together, hence the first Continental Congress and the "Continental Association"

There was a ratchet effect, each big event pushed the sides further apart. In America the progression cemented unity among the colonies and a sense of being a separate country.  Americans might have accepted a revised status similar to that achieved by Canada and Australia in the next century but neither side was able to offer concessions which could have initiated such negotiations.

Within America there was a splitting, as some came to recognize themselves as "Loyalists" and others as committed to the "Patriot" cause, even at the risk of civil war. As the book progressed the reactions of the players seemed similar to those we have seen recently.  As the Patriots coalesced they tend to unite around stronger positions much as the way progressive Democrats have emerged and coalesced since the days of euphoria over Obama's election.

If the Bill of Rights had been in effect in 1774 the Patriots would have violated many of its provisions. Assessing them it seems they followed the rule: look at what we say, disregard what we did.

The British government was receiving reports from the Netherlands and elsewhere of Americans buying arms and gunpowder to smuggle into America.  They took steps to intercept such shipments and pressured the Dutch government to block such sales.  Norton describes these reports but doesn't offer any description of the background--were these individual entrepreneurs acting out of fear of war, much as today people go to the gun store when alarmed, or hope of profit, or were some acting as agents for people in the legislative bodies attempting to speak for the colonies (some improvised conventions, some the colonial assemblies)? Likely there's little documentation to provide such background. 

Although Amazon reviews have criticized the writing as dull, I liked it--it's well done scholarship. 

Representative Capacity and Data Sharing

 I saw this notice today. I was struck by this paragraph:

In late 2020 and early 2021, shared services were developed to make RepCap data available for use by Farmers.gov and other FSA systems through a Representative Authority for Producers (RAP) service. This means the RepCap data (which is loaded and stored in Business Partner) is now being shared with external FSA systems and in the future will be shared with other agencies. Therefore, it is critical that County Offices ensure that data is still valid and correctly loaded.

I don't remember seeing references to sharing data with farmers.gov or other agencies before.  I'm sure it's failing memory, but data sharing hasn't been very common.  

Rocky Road for Debt Relief for Disadvantaged Farmers

 Another judge, this time in Florida, has issued an injunction against FSA's implementing the debt relief program.  

I wonder if FSA employees are relieved that implementation is delayed, just from the point that their workload will be lighter in the fall and winter than now, and that DC will have more time to prepare regulations, instructions and training packages.

Pot Wins

I can still remember Mr. Youngstrom, a high school teacher (maybe science, I forget), vehemently pleading with a class of 9th graders never to use marijuana.  He didn't call it a gateway drug, that's a newish term I think, but that's what he meant.  That would have been 66 years ago.

Now Vox proclaims the victory of pot.  There's no federal legalization, but the trend is clear. 

I Differ With ACLU

 The ACLU celebrates its victory in the Supreme Court over the high school student using the f-word about school and its organizations outside of school hours by selling t-shirts with the f-word.

I use the word myself.  I have supported the ACLU since Skokie and still do. I support the SCOTUS decision.  But I have to disagree with the ACLU--IMO there's a difference between what's permissible and what's desirable.  It's permissible to use the f-word in most settings; it's not desirable to promote its use in most settings.  As with the n-word, I exclude discussion of it when it's necessary or desirable to quote it.

Memory Creep--

Mr. Bell at his 1776 blog coins a phrase: memory creep.  It's a history version of the communication problems in the "telephone game". As he does sometimes, he traces a great story, often recounted by a descendant, back to its original source, finding there's either no solid source or just a tidbit which over time through repeated telling has evolved into a much better story.

I think we see the same phenomenon in current discourse, political partisans on both sides repeat stories, exaggerating and simplifying, until the end result is simple, provoking, and wrong.