The Amish housemaid lived in one small room inside the lemon cookie jar
Of our mother’s mother’s pantry at the lake in Canada.
Her linens were chenille and bumpy, worn. Her only jewels were bobby pins.
After supper, after covering the crust of the rhubarb pie with a tea towel,
She retired early to her room. She took off her cotton cap.
She undid the hooks and eyes of her stiff black apron-dress,
Stood reading the chapter from the longsome blue-bound book.
Just as the light on the lake was dimming, at the end of days,
She snuffed out her one late wicker-shaded lamp, and lit (with a curiously
Long-reaching safety match) the waxing crescent-moon above the provinces.
She folded her floury hands beneath her head
And went to her knees by the doll-sized bed.
A Palestinian protester throws stone at Israeli soldiers during the protest in Ramallah, West Bank to mark the 96th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration on November 1, 2013. The 1917 declaration was a formal statement of policy by the British government regarding the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. By Issam Rimawi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images. Ugh.
Richard Vedder warns that American universities are on a “tax-exempt debt binge” that will only end in disaster. “A decade ago, no one seriously predicted cities would go bankrupt, forcing municipal bondholders to absorb large losses,” he writes. “In a few years, we will probably be hearing similar stories about some universities”:
Schools are exuberantly borrowing, in some cases issuing 100-year (century) bonds. Some bond offerings are justified, even wise, as schools are taking advantage of low interest rates to reduce future debt-service obligations. But a lot of this activity is financing construction of high-end student housing, faddish “centers” and stadiums. … Ohio State University borrowed $500 million for 100 years, mostly to build new dormitories. Will the buildings last as long as the debt used to pay for them? Not likely. The University of California issued $860 million in century bonds last year and, as an encore, an additional $2.39 billion in conventional debt recently. (If that sounds like a huge amount, consider that Harvard University, which has about 22,000 students compared with the UC system’s more than 225,000, is more than $6 billion in debt – about $300,000 for every student.) These debt-financed building sprees are increasingly troublesome at a time of unsustainably rising college costs.
Update from a reader:
I got super excited when I saw that post. Then I realized it was just about universities that couldn’t pay their bills. Yawn. Update me when I can attend Marianas Trench Tech.
Josh Jones takes note of William S. Burrough’s frequent and compelling collaborations with rock musicians in the 1990s, from Tom Waits to Kurt Cobain. He captions the above video:
In a mash-up that brings together a band closer to Burroughs’ prime, hear the beat writer’s rhythmic deadpan of Jim Morrison’s “Is Everybody In?,” backed by the surviving Doors. Despite the original players, it’s still a very ‘90s production (though released in 2000). From a Doors tribute album called Stoned Immaculate, the song sits, somewhat uncomfortably, next to covers and interpretations by Stone Temple Pilots, The Cult, Creed, Smash Mouth, Days of the New, and Train, and a bit cozier next to stalwarts like John Lee Hooker, Exene Cervenka, and Bo Diddley. Burroughs’ is the stand-out track among many that also feature the Doors as a backing band, although in an acid-jazz production–with samples of soul music and Morrison himself–that may sound a bit dated. But Burroughs is as dry as ever, underlining the sheer creepiness of Morrison’s poetry in a tribute that also highlights the debt Morrison owed him.
He also released his own album in 1990, Dead City Radio, available to listen to here. Previous Dish on Burroughs here and here.
Roberto A. Ferdman passes along Morgan Stanley research claiming that we are in the middle of a global wine shortage. Felix Salmon spots numerous errors with it:
The Morgan Stanley report paints a picture of a long-term secular downward trend in area under vine, which is running straight into a long-term secular upward trend in global demand for wine. But reality is more complicated than that: thanks to a combination of technology and global warming, an acre of vines can reliably produce more wine, and better wine, than it ever did in the 1970s. And of course if demand for wine really does start consistently exceeding supply, then there’s no reason why area under vine can’t stop going down and start going up.
But never mind all that: the Morgan Stanley report has numbers and charts, and journalists are very bad at being skeptical when faced with such things. Even Finz’s Chronicle article, which sensibly poured cold water on the report, ends with a “Wine by the numbers” box which simply reproduces all of Morgan Stanley’s flawed figures. And besides, the debunkings are never going to go viral in the way that the original “wine shortage!” articles did.
Update from a reader:
“then there’s no reason why area under vine can’t stop going down and start going up.” Yep, the Spaniards brought wine grapes to California hundreds of years before what seems like half the state was growing grapes. And apples. My cousins live in western Sonoma county, have since the ’70s. It used to be covered in apple orchards. It’s now covered in grape vines. Making small batches, 50 dollar a bottle wine. Which probably makes them more money than sending apples to the apple processing plant in Sebastopol.
Ohio used to be famous for its Champagne. Then Prohibition came along and they stopped making Champagne. The big apple orchard just west of here has begun experimenting with making apple wine, as opposed to hard cider, and even has varietals. Apple wine goes much better with turkey than a Chardonnay. But then I’m of the opinion that Chardonnay doesn’t go with much of anything, Just like I’m of the opinion that most of the time the inky red stuff in a 5 liter bottle is better with whatever going on the table compared to 50 dollar bottles of stuff that’s been thought about too much from where the apple orchard used to be on the drive to my cousin’s house. One of them proudly poured a small glass of the supposedly really good stuff for us. We were polite and said it was interesting and couldn’t think of what it would pair with … because it would pair with refinishing your floors in a spilled wine stain color. I’m didn’t ask how they got that particular balance of turpentine, rusty nails and a undertone of kerosene. The flavor of oak sawdust muted it all. I’m sure the vintner thought it was great. It was overwrought.
Most people most of the time swill stuff from boxes. There’s always going to be enough grapes around to make stuff to fill those boxes. Even if they have to chop down the apple orchards and grow grapes instead. Or stop growing corn and soybeans and grow grapes instead. There’s decent stuff coming from the Finger Lakes, from land that would be good for apples but not for corn or soybeans. It’s too steep… there might be some shortages of some things in the short term but it’s not going to be a long term problem. Unless we are stupid enough to let the world population grow and grow and grow. Then we have other more pressing problems than if there’s a shortage of Pinot Noir.
Humans will eventually reach the limits of their waste-generating capacity, according to three World Bank researchers. But you won’t be around to celebrate:
By 2000, the 2.9 billion people living in cities (49 percent of the world’s population) were creating more than 3 million tonnes of solid waste per day. By 2025 it will be twice that – enough to fill a line of rubbish trucks 5,000 kilometers long every day. … Although OECD countries will peak by 2050 and Asia-Pacific countries by 2075, waste will continue to rise in the fast-growing cities of sub-Saharan Africa. The urbanization trajectory of Africa will be the main determinant of the date and intensity of global peak waste. Using ‘business-as-usual’ projections, we predict that, by 2100, solid-waste generation rates will exceed 11 million tonnes per day – more than three times today’s rate.
[T]here are cultural and policy dimensions to waste production. The average person in Japan, for example, creates about one-third less trash than an American, even though the two countries have similar levels of GDP per person.
This is partly because of higher-density living arrangements and higher prices for imported goods, but also because of norms surrounding consumption. In many Japanese municipalities, trash must be disposed in clear bags (to publicly show who isn’t bothering to recycle) and recyclables are routinely sorted into dozens of categories, policies driven by the limited amount of space for landfills in the small country.
Creating policies that give incentive to people to produce less waste elsewhere, therefore, could be a way of tackling the problem. But, because our garbage is just the end result of a host of industrial activities, some reduction measures will be less important than others. Designing recyclable packaging would be a much less useful solution, for instance, than designing products that don’t need to be replaced as often. Even better, as [researcher Daniel] Hoornweg and his coauthors argue in the article, would be accelerating ongoing increases in education and economic development in the developing world, especially Africa, which would cause urban population growth – and also the amount of trash produced per capita – to level off sooner.
Ferris Jabr explores the ethical controversies of reproductive technologies such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which help prevent and treat diseases as well as predetermine the characteristics of children:
In a few cases, people have used PGD to guarantee that a child will have what many others would consider a disability, such as dwarfism or deafness. In the early 2000s, lesbian couple Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough—both deaf from birth—visited one sperm bank after another searching for a donor who was also congenitally deaf. All the banks declined their request or said they did not take sperm from deaf men, but the couple got what they were looking for from a family friend. Their son, Gauvin McCullough, was born in November 2001; he is mostly deaf but has some hearing in one ear. Deafness, the couple argued, is not a medical condition or defect—it is an identity, a culture. Many doctors and ethicists disagreed, berating Duchesneau and McCullough for deliberately depriving a child of one of his primary senses.
Much more commonly, hopeful parents in the past decade have been paying upwards of $18,000 to choose the sex of their child.
Sometimes the purpose of such sex selection is avoiding a disease caused by a mutation on the X chromosome: girls are much less likely to have these illnesses because they have two X chromosomes, so one typical copy of the relevant gene can compensate for its mutated counterpart. Like Marie and Antonio Freeman in Gattaca, however, many couples simply want a boy or a girl. Perhaps they have had three boys in a row and long for a girl. Or maybe their culture values sons far more than daughters.
Although the U.K., Canada and many other countries have prohibited non-medical sex selection through PGD, the practice is legal in the U.S. The official policy of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine is as follows: “Whereas preimplantation sex selection is appropriate to avoid the birth of children with genetic disorders, it is not acceptable when used solely for nonmedical reasons.” Yet in a 2006 survey of 186 U.S. fertility clinics, 58 allowed parents to choose sex as a matter of preference. And that was seven years ago. More recent statistics are scarce, but fertility experts confirm that sex selection is more prevalent now than ever.
In the ’90s, when [biologist Ronald] Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his [sex-selection] process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, Ericsson has said, the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1. Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls. But the picture from the doctor’s office unambiguously does. A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.
Previous Dish on genomic and genetic testing here, here, and here.
In response to the numerous policy cancellation stories, Chait argues that the individuals experiencing rate shock are getting a good deal, in the long-term:
[I]t is true that some people actually are getting decent individual health insurance, and have to pay more under Obamacare. Before, insurers could charge them a rate based on their individual likelihood of needing medical care, and some people are lucky enough to present a very low actuarial health risk. Now those people will have to pay a rate averaging in the cost of others who are less medically fortunate.
Have those healthy 5 percenters who do have decent insurance “lost” under Obamacare? In the very immediate sense, yes. That is what Obamacare advocate Jon Gruber is getting at when he concedes that 3 percent of Americans will be worse off under the new law. They’ll be paying higher rates in 2014 than they would have.
Yet this takes an oddly narrow view of their self-interest. You may pose a low actuarial risk today, but you cannot be certain your luck will continue for the rest of your life (or until you qualify for Medicare). Even people living the healthiest lifestyles suffer illnesses and accidents, or marry people who have a uterus. Those who are paying a higher rate are getting something for their money: a guarantee that some future misfortune won’t lock them out of the market. You might call such a guarantee “insurance.”
[P]oliticians run around talking about how wonderful American health care is. Republicans have a de-facto agenda of opposing any reform to the health insurance system. Democrats are reduced to lying and saying their reform efforts won’t change anything for people who like the coverage they have, because huge numbers of Americans have decided for some insane reason that they like the crazy expensive, often spotty, not-especially-effective coverage they have.
I support Obamacare because I believe it will improve our terrible health care system on the margins. Subsidies will tend to be shifted toward people who need them and away from those who don’t. More people will be covered. Modest cost control improvements will be implemented, such as through a tax on high-cost plans and new payment systems that encourage providers to focus on producing good outcomes rather than providing expensive treatments.
But the real problem with Obamacare is that it does not change the American health care system enough in the direction of other countries’ systems. Republicans are wrong to warn that Obamacare will turn America’s health care system into a European-style one. I wish they were right.
The Dish 