The Northeast Reforests

Northview Dairy is a blog I follow, good photos, nice writing, and once a window into the modern small dairy farm. I say "once" because they sold off the cows in the recent past, except for two.  Today threecollie (the blogger) records a visit to their pasture to check the fences, and scope out the birds, in passing noting the proliferation of maple seedlings starting to grow because the cows no longer keep them down.  She wonders how long before the pasture is forest again.

My answer: not too long. My last visit to the farm where I grew up showed the sidehill pasture was completely grown to trees, trees probably 30 feet high.

Sometimes Life Is Too Complicated

Between dealing with Medicare/OPM/Kaiser on my wife's coverage, my laptop after installing Toshiba software for the wireless modem, and Google maps, which gave me an image which, though correct, didn't match my mental image/memory, today has been a bit overwhelming.

(What does "whelming" mean--turns out it means "overwhelming"--gotta love the English language)

On Mobility--the Differences Within the Fifths

I seem to be in a conservative mood.

Mobility is often measured by dividing the population into fifths by earnings, then determining the number of people moving from one fifth to another.  For example, probably all of the first round picks in the recent NFL draft are  moving into the top fifth of earnings from a lower fifth, perhaps in many cases the lowest fifth.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but when I read about "fifths" I don't think about differences among the people comprising the "fifth", I think about a stereotype: "top fifth" would be a lawyer or financial type; middle fifth would be a white collar worker, bottom fifth would be manual laborer.  That's not quite right, but I hope it conveys my idea: I'm imagining a lot of people with the same characteristics.  In reality, of course, I should be thinking about pro athletes and entertainers and business owners being in the top fifth.

And in the bottom fifth, I should be thinking about the people within the correctional system, the people on SSDI because of physical or mental disability, the illiterate, and so forth.  In other words, when we talk  about the possibility of people moving up from the bottom fifth, there's a good proportion, perhaps 40 percent, for whom a miracle must happen to be able to move up. 

You Can't Will Yourself to Have Willpower

"You can't will yourself to have willpower" is a thought I had, when thinking about poverty, but it also seems to me to apply to dieting.

My idea is that people have willpower in specific areas, and not in others.  For example, I've little problem in exercising willpower in what I eat, but not in whether I can complete a set of tasks. 

Horatio Hornblower Never Thought of This:

I read C.S.Foresters Hornblower series, and reread them, and reread them, and reread them...

The appeal was the Hornblower character, an early nerd who is introduced to us as having navigated by dead reckoning from Britain, around Cape Horn and up to Central America, reaching his precise destination (supporting a rebellion against Spain).  He's a nerd but also an action figure, heroic but inept with women, as witnessed in his marriage.

Anyway, I don't recall that Hornblower ever used the clever stratagem of the young American captain Barney, as depicted in Boston1775's two posts, when he commanded the Hyder Ally, a ship named after the sultan of Mysore.

The setup
The outcome

$14,000 Per Poor Person?

David Brooks says Robert Samuelson reports that the federal government spends $14,000 per poor person in today's column.

I don't believe it.  A top of the head estimate is we have about 45 million poor people (15 percent times 300,000,000 total population).  So Brooks and Samuelson are saying we spend $600 billion on poor people?  No way.

To be continued.

In Defense of Inequality?

On some days I have a populist streak  On some days I have a contrarian streak.

Today I was reading "The Great Escape" by Angus Deaton.  In a chapter on the improvements in life expectancy over the centuries in different countries he observed that inoculation for smallpox used to be very costly: a family like John Adams' would go off for a week or so to be in isolation as they waited for the mild case of smallpox to emerge and run its course until they were no longer infectious.  That required money.  Of course over the years, over the centuries the cost came done, but in this case the richer people were by necessity the early adopters.

Christenson's Innovator's Dilemma argues that innovations develop from a product which may be more expensive and less capable for most purposes, but which better fits the needs of the niche market than the mainstream product.  By capitalizing on the niche, and using the revenue to finance improvements, the innovators can improve and expand, eventually reducing the mainstream product to niche status.

There's another announcement, from Tesla, which builds ridiculously pricey electric cars, but now they're using their battery expertise to expand into power supplies for backup and filling the gaps from solar power.

So, at least today, maybe I'm living in the best of all possible worlds, where the rich finance innovations.  Maybe.

Milloy and Baltimore--Lessons from History

Courtland Milloy in the Post has a column on Baltimore:

"From history, they should have learned important lessons about the self-defeating nature of rioting. Baltimore, like many other urban cities, is still scarred from the burning and looting that occurred in 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. More than a thousand businesses in that city were destroyed, many of them black owned."

It's a point I like, having experienced the 1968 riots in DC.  But I'm trying to think of any history book, or even journalistic book, which got praise as "the" account of a riot in a major city, and I can't remember one.  I'm sure there have been such books, but I don't remember an outstanding one.

Women on Juries

I assumed that when women got the vote, they also got on juries.  Not so.  According to this piece:

" As late as 1943 only twelve states permitted women to serve on juries on the same basis as men."

Apparently the last six words are the key. 

Human Expertise Endangered by Automation: the Sniper

Vox has a sort of video from DOD of a test of a bullet able to change course in mid-flight.  (Don't ask me how they did it.)  The bottom line to me: add "sniper" to the list of jobs endangered by technological obsolescence.  With such a bullet even I could be a sniper.

In basic training you spend a bit of time on the rifle range.  Although I'd shot a 22 rifle to kill skunks and possums on the farm, I was far from being a marksman.  That was very evident in my early sessions on the range. When my company went to the range for qualification tests, I was seriously concerned about flunking, which would have meant having to repeat some weeks of basic.  As it turned out, the test with popup targets (I don't remember that we'd trained on them, definitely not in the way the test went) was such that I passed, almost rating as "expert".  The key was that I didn't have time to get nervous, so I could react to each new target and fire without over-thinking.