Just use your fingernails

It's been a while since we stirred up the subject of automation and the loss of jobs:

The first cargo ship with McLean containers had set off in 1956 from the New Jersey port in Texas. The complete loading of the ship took 8 hours. An extremely short time in comparison with several days needed for the traditional method, and it was reduced shortly afterward by implementing better cranes and parallel unloading and loading of the ships at the same time. But McLean was only interested in one figure: the cost of transporting of one tonne of wares. In 1956, the cost was around $5.83. McLean’s ship Ideal-X managed to do the same for 15.8 cents per tonne.

This way, McLean overcame the first regulatory barrier constraining his containers from controlling the world. By far, this was not the last one. In the introduction, I mention the loaders and unloaders in the docks. These were the workers having one of the most dangerous occupations and generally passed it through generations. In many cities, these workers were having a distinctive social position, and, for example, in New York, not just anyone could reload a truck. This job was exclusive only for the members of a so-called group of “Public Loaders.”

This exclusivity was protected by various trade unions which dictated who could load, for how much, and what could be loaded and unloaded in a port. And this occupation became completely unnecessary with the arrival of containers.

It reminds me of the Milton Friedman story about watching laborers dig holes with shovels. When he asked why they weren't using back-hoes, his hosts explained that back-hoes were expensive but--even worse--they would put workers out of jobs. Friedman answered, "Why not take away their shovels and give them spoons?"

The Feast of the Epiphany

Also known as Three Kings' Day, the feast celebrates the revelation to the Magi that God was before them incarnate. The feast is often taken to be the end of the Christmastide. Some wait to remove decorations, though, until Candlemas.

Here is a famous hymn associated with the feast.



For another, one more time, the Reverend Horton Heat.

Star-splitting

Maggie's Farm puts up good verse:

You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me . . . .

Parris Island and the Bomb Cyclone

Image from an old friend.

UPDATE:

This one is from the Battery in Charleston, South Carolina.

Bedtime

I've read somewhere that a sort of biochemical traffic along the neurons or axons flows backwards during sleep (maybe something like this Scientific American article). This Atlantic article has interesting information about how little we know about what's going on:

If you needed more proof that sleep, with its peculiar many-staged structure and tendency to fill your mind with nonsense, isn’t some passive, energy-saving state, consider that golden hamsters have been observed waking up from bouts of hibernation—in order to nap. Whatever they’re getting from sleep, it’s not available to them while they’re hibernating. Even though they have slowed down nearly every process in their body, sleep pressure still builds up. “What I want to know is, what about this brain activity is so important?” says Kasper Vogt, one of the researchers gathered at the new institute at Tsukuba. He gestures at his screen, showing data on the firing of neurons in sleeping mice. “What is so important that you risk being eaten, not eating yourself, procreation ... you give all that up, for this?”

* * *

Sleep-inducing substances may come from the process of making new connections between neurons. Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin, suggest that since making these connections, or synapses, is what our brains do when we are awake, maybe what they do during sleep is scale back the unimportant ones, removing the memories or images that don’t fit with the others, or don’t need to be used to make sense of the world. “Sleep is a way of getting rid of the memories in a way that is good for the brain,” Tononi speculates. Another group has discovered a protein that enters little-used synapses to cause their destruction, and one of the times it can do this is when adenosine levels are high. Maybe sleep is when this cleanup happens.

What a billionaire is like

Devin Foley ruminates on Trump's spat with Steve Bannon:

I don’t know what it is, but there is something about the guys who are billionaires that is very different from everyone else. To you and me, having $500 million is practically the same as being a billionaire. Even having $50 million or just $5 million is a lot of money to me and far more than anything I have. But here’s the thing, the guy with $500 million is just like the guy with $5 million and just like you and me, he will go to his grave scared that he’ll end up destitute in some filthy poorhouse at the mercy of a nurse-maid who hates life.

But not the billionaires. Yes, they care about their wealth, but they’re after something different at the point they have nine zeroes in the bank account. They’re oddly beyond money.

Of the ones I have met, they have been good men and shockingly frugal. They’re very interested in the interplay between ideas, people, and institutions. They’re looking for trends and rely on their gut instinct quite a bit. They have a small group they trust because they know that the vast majority of people around them, no matter all the nice things said, just want some of their money. They must be detached and insulated from the world, while still able to touch and feel it, they need to have their fingers in things just enough to get a sense of the trends and currents.

The most important thing you can be for a billionaire is honest. Flattery and awards work for other men, but the billionaire doesn’t need any of it. The rare gem for him is honesty.

I'm trying to remember if I've ever met a billionaire. Perhaps not. Many extremely wealthy businessmen, but no one truly over the top in wealth in the way Foley is describing, what I think of as "Bill Gates money."  I have at least worked with a number of wealthy guys who valued honesty more than flattery, and therefore were willing to put up with my egregious tactlessness, something I'd have done well to learn to control much earlier in life.  I shudder to think of the number of enemies I made for no good reason and without even being entirely aware of it at the time.

On the other hand, a lot of people probably benefited from my honesty.  I'm interested to see now whether it will play with local voters, who will have to be deeply concerned about opacity in local government in order to find it attractive in a candidate.

Thomases and Henries

Maggie's Farm pointed to a new website, Idlepost, where I found this rumination on Henry II, Thomas à Becket, Henry VIII, and Sir Thomas More:

Let me be plainer. The Covenant is not a collectivist arrangement. It is actually the opposite of a collectivist arrangement, and was so from the beginning. The true Christian teaching stands in anticipation of, and opposition to, the ideals of that “Reformation,” which worked themselves out as a spiritual as well as contractual relation between the People and the State (exalted in “Americanism”). The Covenant is instead with persons, both vertically in their relations with God, and horizontally in their relations with each other: cor ad cor loquitur. To love God and to love thy neighbour: that is the whole teaching. Everything follows from that.

How Does This Happen?

You'd think the scion of a political family of such influence would know better than to produce a headline like this.

Flyover country in Iran

John Ringo's perspective on the Iranian riots.

Full Service

When I was a child, my grandfather ran a service station in rural Tennessee. He'd retired after a long career: welder, working on the atom bombs at Oak Ridge during WWII, then owning a service station for long-haul trucks in the early days of I-75 near Knoxville. He didn't like retirement very much, so after his retirement he bought a smaller service station within walking distance of his house and ran it mostly to keep himself busy. He did light work, oil changes and tire repair, and sold gasoline.

One of the things he offered was "full service," although even in those days it was an option. If you pulled up to the pump closest to the station, you ran over a pressure device that set off a bell inside. He or one of his employees would come out, pump your gas for you -- as much as you wanted, by dollar or by gallon -- and while they pumped it they'd wash your windows, check your tire pressure, clean your headlights, things like that. Though I was a child, he'd often let me do the parts of it that I could do, which I thought was great fun at the time.

Apparently this kind of thing still exists in Oregon. They're very alarmed that it's becoming optional. I hadn't heard of it in years.

The Year of Breaking Things

Often we have spoken about the dangers of ossification to bureaucracy, following Joseph Schumpeter. The usual way this gets solved is through competition, where new and more agile firms break off pieces of the business of giants like IBM. But it turns out there's another way:

The press is doing a good job of telling us what he accomplished in 2017. But they keep leaving out all the stuff he broke that probably needed to be broken. I’ll fix that for you here.

GOP – Trump broke the GOP and reconstructed it along his terms, successfully it seems.

DNC – The DNC has no charismatic leader, no game plan, and little money.

Clinton Dynasty – Done

Bush Dynasty – Done

Mainstream Media – The public learned that news coverage is based on bias as much as fact.

NFL – Ratings down, attendance down.

FBI (leadership) – The FBI as a whole is still highly credible, but the leadership is not.

Pundits – Nearly all the pundits were wrong about Trump’s nomination, election, and successful (by Republican standards) first year.

Government Regulations – For good or bad, we have fewer regulations now.

Hollywood – Big stars are alienating 40% of their potential audience whenever they take time off from groping.

North Korea – They used to have a pathetic but functioning economy. That situation is changing rapidly.

ISIS – Remember ISIS? They used to be a big deal.

TPP – Pulled out

Paris Climate Accord – Pulled out

That's a good point. What else needs to be broken for the good of us all?

Go, Mighty Bulldogs

If you didn't catch the Rose Bowl tonight, you missed perhaps the finest game of football ever played.

Auld lang syne

I've finished a batch of black-eyed peas and greens for tomorrow, as well as a spinach-orange-olive-pecan salad and a radish-jicama-queso-fresco-pine-nut salad for our neighbor's shindig tonight. There's a roaring fire in the fireplace. We've covered a few plants in preparation for a freeze tonight and tomorrow night--not an extreme freeze like you're getting in the rest of the country, but more of a freeze than we normally get here. We even have a few overnight guests, also unusual for us. I'm looking forward to the party tonight, which includes my annual dose of playing and singing, my heart's delight.

A king without free subjects is nothing worth

At Gutenberg this week, I'm formatting a biography of Alfred the Great by Charles Plummer (1902).  In the war-torn and squalid late 9th century of England, Alfred stood out for the noble and energetic qualities of his mind and character.  After preserving Wessex from the Viking menace, Alfred translated a number of Latin works into the vernacular, including Boethius on the Consolation of Philosophy, though the loose editorial standards of the day leave some doubt how much of his translation is faithful and how much expresses his own fine instincts.  Here are some maxims from one of his translations:

[that] reward should not be looked for in this world, but should be sought from God alone; that a good name is better than any wealth; that true nobility is of the mind, not of the body; that an honest purpose is accepted, even though its accomplishment be frustrated; that a king without free subjects is nothing worth; that no one should be idle, or wish to live a soft life.

Alfred traveled to Rome as a child. As king, he sent emissaries at least to the Holy Land, as perhaps as far as India, no small achievement for his time.

Math = Privilege

Gutierrez says evaluations of math skills can perpetuate discrimination against minorities, especially if they do worse than their white counterparts, Campus Reform reported.

“If one is not viewed as mathematical, there will always be a sense of inferiority that can be summoned” because the average person won't necessarily question the role of mathematics in society, she writes.

According to the website, Gutierrez adds that there are so many people who “have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms… [where people are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly.”

Here's one truth about math skills: if you don't start developing the best ones you can early, many fields of study will be closed to you in college if you follow the traditional path of starting college shortly after High School. These include well-remunerated fields such as engineering, and cutting edge fields like physics.

You could always go do something else for a while, and develop the skills you need during your time away. But if you want the privileges that come from being a successful engineer, say, you're going to have to do the work. Teachers telling you something else to make you feel better about yourself isn't helping you. Since wealth is inheritable, it isn't helping your children either. A teacher who helps you feel good about not overcoming shortcomings in mathematics may be putting generations of your descendants at a disadvantage.

Economists hardest hit

Remember Paul Krugman after Trump's election?

Something similar is shaking out of Brexit, which failed to result in the Brexodus of capital from Great Britain. 

'As we know from Project Fear, the main function of economists is explaining why their last forecast was wrong.'

Dollarization

Is this a peaceful path out of Venezuela's failed experiment?  Or will Maduro start massacres to prevent the humiliation?

Never underestimate the power and value of functioning price signals.  Lies win for a time, but they can't last. As Oskar Matzerath said, "All's lost, but not forever. Poland's not lost forever."

The Feast of St. Thomas of Beckett

He is also known of St. Thomas of Kent, where he died, as memorialized in Ivanhoe.

“By my troth,” said the knight, “thou hast sung well and lustily, and in high praise of thine order. And, talking of the devil, Holy Clerk, are you not afraid that he may pay you a visit during some of your uncanonical pastimes?”

“I uncanonical!” answered the hermit; “I scorn the charge—I scorn it with my heels!—I serve the duty of my chapel duly and truly—Two masses daily, morning and evening, primes, noons, and vespers, ‘aves, credos, paters’—-”

“Excepting moonlight nights, when the venison is in season,” said his guest.

“‘Exceptis excipiendis’” replied the hermit, “as our old abbot taught me to say, when impertinent laymen should ask me if I kept every punctilio of mine order.”

“True, holy father,” said the knight; “but the devil is apt to keep an eye on such exceptions; he goes about, thou knowest, like a roaring lion.”

“Let him roar here if he dares,” said the friar; “a touch of my cord will make him roar as loud as the tongs of St Dunstan himself did. I never feared man, and I as little fear the devil and his imps. Saint Dunstan, Saint Dubric, Saint Winibald, Saint Winifred, Saint Swibert, Saint Willick, not forgetting Saint Thomas a Kent, and my own poor merits to speed, I defy every devil of them, come cut and long tail.—But to let you into a secret, I never speak upon such subjects, my friend, until after morning vespers.”

He changed the conversation; fast and furious grew the mirth of the parties, and many a song was exchanged betwixt them, when their revels were interrupted by a loud knocking at the door of the hermitage.

Did Historical Jesus Really Exist?

On December 18th, the WaPo published an article challenging the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus by Raphael Lataster, a historian who claims Jesus didn't exist. It seems an interesting topic for discussion.

Lataster's main claims about the historical documents are:

The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith. These early sources, compiled decades after the alleged events, all stem from Christian authors eager to promote Christianity – which gives us reason to question them. The authors of the Gospels fail to name themselves, describe their qualifications, or show any criticism with their foundational sources – which they also fail to identify. Filled with mythical and non-historical information, and heavily edited over time, the Gospels certainly should not convince critics to trust even the more mundane claims made therein.

The methods traditionally used to tease out rare nuggets of truth from the Gospels are dubious. The criterion of embarrassment says that if a section would be embarrassing for the author, it is more likely authentic. Unfortunately, given the diverse nature of Christianity and Judaism back then (things have not changed all that much), and the anonymity of the authors, it is impossible to determine what truly would be embarrassing or counter-intuitive, let alone if that might not serve some evangelistic purpose. 

The criterion of Aramaic context is similarly unhelpful. Jesus and his closest followers were surely not the only Aramaic-speakers in first-century Judea. The criterion of multiple independent attestation can also hardly be used properly here, given that the sources clearly are not independent. 

Paul’s Epistles, written earlier than the Gospels, give us no reason to dogmatically declare Jesus must have existed. Avoiding Jesus’ earthly events and teachings, even when the latter could have bolstered his own claims, Paul only describes his “Heavenly Jesus.” Even when discussing what appear to be the resurrection and the last supper, his only stated sources are his direct revelations from the Lord, and his indirect revelations from the Old Testament. In fact, Paul actually rules out human sources (see Galatians 1:11-12). 

Also important are the sources we don’t have. There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses, most of whom are obviously biased. Little can be gleaned from the few non-Biblical and non-Christian sources, with only Roman scholar Josephus and historian Tacitus having any reasonable claim to be writing about Jesus within 100 years of his life. And even those sparse accounts are shrouded in controversy, with disagreements over what parts have obviously been changed by Christian scribes (the manuscripts were preserved by Christians), the fact that both these authors were born after Jesus died (they would thus have probably received this information from Christians), and the oddity that centuries go by before Christian apologists start referencing them.

He has some other things to say, and a number of links within the above text as well to other authors, but that's the gist of it. This is a new argument to me, though I've heard rumblings of it before. I've heard Christian apologists make the opposite claim that, while clearly the miracles and any supernatural parts can be disbelieved, that the case that Jesus was a historical figure is clear for all to see. I actually haven't looked that much into it, though. Any have any good sources on this? Any thoughts about it?

The Penny Post

In 1836, Rowland Hill was tasked by a Member of Parliament to propose a reform of England's cumbersome and expensive postal system.  He examined it systematically and concluded that postal customers were overpaying for useless aspects of the post.  For one thing, most of the resources of the system were eaten up by armies of clerks engaged in a finicky counting of pages; Rowland proposed to substitute a simple weighing of each missive.  Rowland also concluded that the differences in distance of travel were such a trivial part of the cost of each letter that they didn't justify the time spent calculating differential charges.  Finally, he advocated getting the Post Office completely out of the business of collecting a fee for postal services after the fact, by the simple expedient of charging up front.  Up to this time, the cost of postage traditionally had been borne by the recipient, who sometimes would refuse delivery rather than pay.  What's more, over 12% of mail traffic was delivered cost-free to customers with "franking" privileges, particularly members of government.  The result of Hill's improvements, enacted by Parliament over howls of protest, was to permit a wholesale revamping of the Post Office in which a standard letter could be sent anywhere in the country for a penny.

About time we took another fresh look at a creaky old system.  When systems go on long enough without the discipline of competition, they take on barnacles:  good, government jobs that are doing no earthly good for anyone except the clerks receiving the benefits package.