Interesting stuff

  1. WTF? This op/ed calls out Marc Andreessen’s “tech-optimism manifesto” as deluded and unbalanced (my summary), and it is — most obviously by failing to understand non-market goods (the commons). What a mess.
  2. Read how “private equity” (financial engineers) drained money out of hospitals (like a vampire squid) and destroyed their function. Related: PE is privatizing so many firms that the public (and politicians) cannot understand what firms (or markets) are doing — exacerbating the knowledge problem.
  3. Listen to this insightful discussion of “generations” (as a concept) and the real impact of boomers.
  4. Read: Water bodies are getting saltier as the salt we mine washes into those bodies. The #1 source in the US? Road salt.
  5. Finally: Realtors found liable for $1.8 billion in damages in conspiracy to keep commissions high.
  6. Read: Kids did better in school when mobile phones were banned.
  7. Listen: How to overcome our natural tendency to overconsume (food, stuff, attention, etc.)
  8. This won’t go well: China’s male leaders say that Chinese women need to stay at home, “to rear the young and care for the old… [to contribute to] China’s modernization.”
  9. Read: Remember carpal-tunnel syndrome? Seems it had a lot more to do with workers’ rights and white-collar angst than some sudden human frailty.
  10. Freak out: Dihydrogen Monoxide is dangerous!

H/T to DS

Review: The Shepherd’s Life

I wanted to read this 2015 book because it touched on two areas of interest: manual labor (check this review or this one) and sustainable agriculture (read this, this or this).

In the book, James Rebanks’s vignettes and observations are collected into the seasons, from summer to fall and winter and back to spring. These seasons matter because Rebanks herds sheep in England’s Lake District.

The book is delightful for its insights into traditions, community and the ever-present and ever-varied (with seasonal variation) tasks facing farmers and herders.

But the book is far more limited for its insights into sustainability or current practices for rearing the animals that give us meat and fibers. Since Rebanks is talking about his own farm and close-knit community, which represents neither intensive, on-farm practices nor extensive, scale-of-farming realities, his perspectives should not be generalized to livestock management by other herders in the area, let alone elsewhere in the UK or world.

With respect to the intensive margin, there are many farms or livestock operations run on slimmer margins, with less respect for future sustainability over current profits, and on larger scales that disconnect man from animal, farm from community.

With respect to the extensive margin, humans are using too much land for producing meat, milk and fibers. Put differently, it doesn’t matter how much you love your sheep if there are too many sheep. (The same can be said for parents’ love for too many children.) We’re just so far over carrying capacity that Nature cannot sustain all humans and the consumption that they see as normal, prudent or justified.

For more on those themes, read my post on biblical notions delusions regarding sustainable land management, read this recent article on England’s unsustainable park management (or this one), or listen to this podcast on land use (it’s flawed for offering an Overton window that is far too narrow — focussing on the sustainable, small-scale end of farming rather than the large-scale norm).

But, putting those qualms aside (most of them far beyond the control of Rebanks and his neighors), this is a very fine book for its insights into a hands-on life that is not easy and not (often) profitable but rewarding. FIVE STARS.


Here are all my reviews.

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: Hurricane Oris went from category 1 to 5 in less than 24 hours. Such “explosive” storms will wreck our civilization.
  2. Listen to this (slightly over-enthusiastic but hopeful) report on how the Dutch (better) deal with dementia.
  3. Listen to this interesting dive (part one and part two) into Jordan Peterson’s background, his many inconsistencies, and his hold on the young male mind.
  4. Read how you should get an e-bike before you get an e-car, not just to save money (and the planet), but to be happier.
  5. Think: “In a healthy society, everybody is recognized to some degree. But in an unhealthy society, like the America of today, recognition is doled out to the few—the rich, the good-looking, the athletic, the successful.”
  6. Breathe… by avoiding sociopaths like these: The traits to look for are self-importance, a sense of entitlement, vanity, a victim mentality, a tendency to bend the truth or even openly lie, manipulativeness, grandiosity, a lack of remorse, and an absence of empathy.
  7. Read this excellent analysis of how the US needs more than small scale (a NIMBY favorite) to transition away from fossil fuels.
  8. Read: Governments promises that voters can eat their cake (cheap goods and services) and have it (lower taxes) are really promises for shortages.
  9. Read: America’s disaster infrastructure (think FEMA) is too underfunded and understaffed to help people. Just another of the 1000-cuts that will kill us.
  10. Read: I try to avoid the mess of Israeli-Palestinian politics, but this article (“The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False”) does a good job explaining why the “radical left” supports terror over rule of law. For example: This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts. (I’m also reading Ghosts of Empire (2011), which explains how the Soviets connected imperialism to democracies: Iraqis, unequivocally decrying the connection between Israel and ‘the imperialist’ West, spoke of the ‘magnanimous political support extended by the Soviet Union to the Arab countries during the imperialist-Zionist aggression last June’. Sayid Adib al-Jadr, the chairman of the INOC Board of Administration.

Some old, insightful articles on boats

The Atlantic has been publishing since 1857. As a subscriber, I can access their archive, which is full of interesting tidbits. To focus my “plunge into the past,” I queried articles that mentioned sailing or sail boats, and found some really interesting stuff. The links on years go to PDFs.

1860: Boats turn from sidewheels to screw propellers, amid much skepticism.

1875: Mark Twain’s recollections on his time as a steamboat pilot (the basis for his 1883 book, Life on the  Mississippi) in parts: one, two, three, four, five, six and seven. One good excerpt:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

1895: Much more historical fact on the week of battles between the English and “Spanish Armada” that took place before storms sank so many Spanish ships (=saved by the Atlantic) in 1588.

1897: The US Constitution is now America’s longest serving (active duty) ship, but it was already a legend in 1897. Read how it got its reputation.

1899: Why America needs a bigger merchant marine. Contrast the promises in this pre-Jones Act (1920) perspective to the actual harm resulting from Jones.

1904: The story of a skipper who set sailing records with a clipper ship and then was killed in the Civil War.

1909: Another call to rebuild the US merchant marine (see 1899 above), with some useful and useless “logic.”

1910: How railroads replaced canals for inland shipping, everywhere.

1922: Ferries in the SF Bay Area — before the bridges.

1950: A poseur yachtsman is forced to actually buy a yacht 🙂

1965: Two boating guys go crazy when they form a “Yacht Club.”

2011: Plastiki: Sailing Across the Ocean on a Ship Made of Plastic Bottles

2020: Four Dutch teens on a “study aboard” cruise in the Caribbean are forced to sail home across the Atlantic. It went well.

2015: The Dutch try to help New Orleans reconnect with its delta geography,  which was altered in many detrimental ways since Twain’s 1875 reflections.

Interesting stuff

  1. Listen: “What’s up with Jordan Peterson?
  2. Read: “Black prosperity has provoked white resentment that can make life exhausting for people of color—and it has led to the undoing of policies that have nurtured Black advancement.
  3. Read: The global backlash against climate policies has begun… because people don’t want to pay more for sustainability.
  4. Read: Poor Asian countries are getting poor before they are getting rich.
  5. Read: Insurers are fleeing high risk areas in the US. Will homeowners get the message? (Interesting twist: They will insure oil and gas facilities at risk… because they are allowed to charge for the risk.)
  6. Read: Gas has been piped to British homes for 50 years. Switching it off will be a headache
  7. Read: The Restaurant Revolution Has Begun — by raising prices to profitable levels.
  8. Listen: Multi-level marketing, Goop’s “jade vagina egg,” and other fraudulent health ponzi schemes.
  9. Read: Don’t believe your lying eyes: Companies are giving people easy access to AI-driven photoshop.
  10. Read: Spanish villages are running out of water as farmers continue to overconsume what’s left.

Review: Ask Me Anything

Volume 1 of Reddit’s AMA series came out in 2015. As someone who appeared in it (!), I received a free copy, which I recently got round to reading skimming (reading what I liked, skipping what I didn’t).

There was never a Volume 2 (these critics were right), so looks like this book was a fail. That doesn’t matter to you, dear (blog) readers, since you can just read the interviews — with better layout — on Reddit.

Here are 20 AMAs (out of 60) that I liked:

INSPIRING

INFORMATIVE

PROVOCATIVE

FASCINATING

BEAUTIFUL

HUMOROUS

INGENIOUS

I give this book ONE STAR for wasting a lot of paper on links that people can read online.


Here are all my reviews.

Interesting stuff

  1. Read: Career-Oriented Education vs. the Liberal Arts (also see my review)
  2. Read: The internet is breaking as dominant firms (Google, Amazon) distort access to increase their profits.
  3. Read: Airbnb is losing market share to owners and renters as cities respond to tight supply by restricting Airbnb.
  4. Read: Climate warming means that we’re facing more risk from deadly fungi — among other vectors!
  5. Listen to this entire podcast series (season 1) about multi-level marketing and Ponzi schemes — especially for the loyalty dynamics that I see with MAGA populists, religious cults and est (listen to this one, for example).
  6. Read: Sweater quality is falling b/c manufacturers are adding plastic to “100% wool” sweaters? Oh man.
  7. Read: “The less money your peer group has, the more bling you buy—and vice-versa.
  8. Academics — Read these books! A colleagues recommended the Campus Trilogy, which David Lodge published 1975-1988. The stories are sometimes a bit tense but always insightful/cutting/funny. Each book goes into some  cultural element of campus life (sabbaticals, conferences, tenure) and then explores the games and surprises related to those elements. FIVE STARS 🙂
  9. Read: Fragmentation, trolls and advertising is killing social media. Fine.
  10. Read: California bureaucrats replace academic freedom with “diversity.”
  11. This is not fine:

The easier route to social change

There are many examples of where one group dominates another and limits social change.

Examples: Men dominating women, whites dominating non-whites, citizens dominating migrants, etc.

Some dominants like their power but others in the dominant group may not. Let’s assume that those who are dominated do not like it (sorry masochists!)

While thinking about this combination of power structure and interaction, I came up with the following 2×2 (I love 2x2s!) example for “men’s” and “women’s” bikes:*

This figure shows three things:

  1. Men who ride on cross-bar bikes and women who ride on step-through bikes are “supporting the patriarchy” in a passive or active way. That’s how things do not change.**
  2. Women who ride cross-bar bikes are fighting the patriarchy, which may work but probably will not, since they are the victims of patriarchy.
  3. Men who ride step-thru bikes are ignoring the patriarchy, which weakens it. If enough men stop caring, then the patriarchy (with respect to bikes) will collapse.

These observations are not based on justice as much as real-politiek, in the sense that shifts of power are far easier when they come from above (evolution) than from below (revolution). I do not state this fact as something I agree with; I state it to clarify (a) how people on the two-off diagonals (fight and ignore) are allies in changing the status quo and (b) how much easier it is when defectors from the oppressor class help those in the oppressed class.

Can you make such a 2×2 for your causes? Vegan diets? Gun control? Reading books? Go ahead!

My one-handed conclusion is that bottom-up social change is much harder without some top-down help.

*Here are some critiques of those “differences,” which I agree with. I’m just using the streotype as an example.

** Here, via RB, is the A-Z of the all-inclusive bike seat (see image):

A: A bag covers the patriarchy.
B: And makes the penis shape Be gone.
C: Confirm it is an all-inclusive bag… with all the colors and symbols.
D: I Did sit on it myself, as a representative of the patriarchy.
E: My End discovered it is actually uncomfortable.
F: Figure out that a plastic bag is not a sustainable solution.
G: Got into a mental conflict with myself.
H: Had an existential crisis.
I: I rediscovered me.
J: Just to be obsessed with letters…
K: Picked the letter K to identify as K.
L: Let go of being K because being gay is easier.
M/+M just makes more sense to me anyway.
N: Not to be confused with the fact that anyone can identify with any letter they want though.
O: At least in my Opinion.
P: Potentially resulting in a lot of conflict in a lot of non-Dutch cultures.
Q: Question what does queer actually mean to you?
R: If you can identify yourself as different means you are no longer Racist?
S: Solution to the mental conflict? Aka being queer?
T: Transforming my existential crisis into something that benefits me?
U: Will I do I or Will U do U?
V: Vegan or Vegetarian? That is question….
W: Will the World actually care about my mental conflict?
X: Xsistential crisis.. Sorry too lazy to discuss Xenophobia.
Y: Yeah I know same topic, different nuances.
Z: About Gen Z. Do they have an Attention Addiction because of the AA humor that they will probably misunderstand or are clueless about anyways. That is just my humor that I would like to portray…

Interesting stuff

  1. Amazon’s greedy embrace of third party sellers (often fraudsters) exposes “clients” to shady, unreliable sellers. Back to bricks and mortar?
  2. Thames Water is nearly bankrupt. One reason may be the £7 billion increase in debt and £2.8 billion in paid dividends during the 11 years it was owned by Macquarie. Yes, it seems that Thames invested £1 billion per year during that period, but that spending (a) has not fixed its chronic infrastructure issues and (b) contributed to the financial problems stemming from excess debt and dividends.
  3. Listen: The FTX trial is inspiring journalism/interviews that give interesting insights, i.e., into jury selection and bankruptcy management.
  4. Read: California messes up math education while chasing fantasies of equality.
  5. Read: Heard of all those “blue zones” where people live extra-long? They are probably “blue” because of missing data.
  6. Think: Humans are headed, on current form, to +3.3C by 2100. Use this simulator to see how far (or not) we can go with reductions in emissions/deforestation.
  7. Read: The Economist says “carbon prices are taking over the world.” I find that conclusion far more optimistic than all the games over credits, offsets and adjustments would suggest.
  8. Read: a MacArthur “genius” award for the anthropologist who studied how the poor of Cochabamba help each other with water insecurity.
  9. Read: Nothing Defines America’s Social Divide Like a College Education, for example: H/T to DL

American views on Dutch history

The Atlantic has been publishing since 1857. As a subscriber, I can access their archive, which is full of interesting tidbits. To focus my “plunge into the past,” I queried articles that mentioned Amsterdam and the Netherlands Holland (a far more popular term), and found some really interesting stuff. The links on years go to PDFs.

1876: A Dutch inventor’s pressurized sewerage system (!)

1882: An afternoon in Amsterdam, i.e., rushing to catch the steamship to Zaandam and visiting “the cleanest village in the Netherlands” — later a site of massive chemical pollution.

1918: Dutch Quandries with staying neutral in WWI:

      1. Energy security: It’s hard to stay cold, also insights into the Dutch love for natural gas, post its discovery in the 1960s.
      2. Smuggling banned goods for profit or corruption: Still true with drugs and money laundering.
      3. War. Fight or neutral: Neutrality is hard to maintain, but fighting (WWII) was worse.
      4. Betrayed by USA: Getting pushed around is not new.

1935: A Hans Brinker boyhood (e.g., battling with wooden shoes, falling into canals, etc.

1937: The joy of skating — a tradition that is nearly dead today..

1938: Queen Wilhelmina after 40 years. A fine portrait, with examples like this (on her daughter’s marriage to a German): ‘This is the marriage of my daughter to the man she loves, whom I have found worthy of her love; this is not the marriage of Holland to Germany.’

1948: Holland is back, rebuilding, but they need American help and trade with Germany.

1958: New Europe. A fascinating, extremely well-written account of BENELUX, the steel and coal community, and the EU’s political project.

My one-handed summary: Those who do not know history… are missing a lot of useful wisdom.