Uh, guys...

Lost in the rural umbrage over Chipotle cartoons and "responsible raising" was any consideration that this concept might have endurance. I think the Meat Establishment consistently assumed a little pushback would not just be tremendously satisfying, but snap Joe Public back to his burger-loving senses.

That could still be proven correct, but the chances of a significant change in consumer consumption at the fast food level are growing right now - not diminishing.

The numbers were startling: Shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill shot up 12 percent on Tuesday after the company reported a nearly 26 percent spurt in its quarterly profit. For the fast-food industry, this was fresh evidence that the world of Big Macs and Doritos Locos Tacos has room for a menu with healthier-than-average food and higher-than-average prices.But it came as no surprise to a new generation of smaller fast-food chains that are coming up fast behind Chipotle and its peers, and taking its “food with integrity” mantra even further.A handful of rapidly growing regional chains around the country — including Tender Greens,LYFE Kitchen, SweetGreen and Native Foods — offer enticements like grass-fed beef, organic produce, sustainable seafood and menus that change with the season. Most promise local ingredients; some are exclusively vegetarian or even vegan. A few impose calorie ceilings, and others adopt service touches like busboys and china plates.And despite the higher costs and prices, all are thriving and planning national expansions, some directed by alumni of fine dining or of fast-food giants like McDonald’s.Their success marks a milestone: After decades of public hand-wringing about the empty calories and environmental impact of fast food, the farm-to-table notions that have revolutionized higher-end American restaurants have finally found a lucrative spot in the takeout line. The result already has a nickname: farm to counter.“This is not a passing fad,” said B. Hudson Riehle, the research director for the National Restaurant Association, who added that locally grown food and sustainability were the top two customer priorities reported this year in the group’s annual poll of American chefs. “It’s only going to get stronger.” [More]

The numbers are still absurdly lopsided, but with traditional fast-food (jeez - who'd have thunk that would be a legitimate label?) struggling to generate sales growth, I think there is a real risk that market for proteins - and consequentially, grains - may move slowly overseas. Fast food's future could be dependent on a rising lower class - not a thriving middle class.

It's tough to say how much of Chipotle's strong sales are a result of its campaign, but many analysts give the practices lots of the credit.

McDonald's doesn't expect full-year international comp sales to be too different from its June performance, and July global comps are expected to be negative.That's in spite of the late-April makeover for the iconic Ronald McDonald clown, who traded in his pear-shaped yellow onesie for a hip vest-and-cargo-pant combo. For special occasions, he wears what the firm calls a whimsical red blazer and bow tie. His floppy red shoes remain.Shares of the Oak Brook, Ill.-based company slid 1.4% in the stock market today.By contrast, Chipotle wolfed down profit in spite of higher menu prices, reporting late Monday a 17.3% jump in Q2 same-store sales. Earnings topped views as revenue growth accelerated for a third straight quarter.The company's antibiotic-free proteins and fresh ingredients have made the chain a fan favorite in the fast-casual world.Making over menu items — instead of mascots — may be the ticket to success with consumers. [More]

The numbers are all the more impressive given the healthy (heh) price increases Chipotle announced earlier this year.

Dietarily, I don't really have a stake in this battle. I eat increasingly less beef, but have been doing so for years. But I travel enough to use fast-food for refueling simply because it's, umm...fast. Come to think of it, that may be the large majority of the attraction.

Nonetheless, I think treating this sales trend with the respect the numbers deserve might not serve us better that echo-chamber outrage-fests. 

Out of the closet...

No - not that closet. I have nurtured an abiding fear somebody will find my Kindle and note the astonishing amount of ...um, low quality fiction I read. We're talking space operas, hard-core SF, and even some Tolkein-ish fantasy. We're talking a couple hundred books here. (Some only $1.99 and still overpriced)

It was a relief to find a masterfully written article that helps me justify this juvenile escapism.

Second, some of the most celebrated practitioners of modern fantasy share with their pre-modern predecessors this belief that the fictional apparatus of fantasy is a relatively close approximation to the way things really are for human beings. J. R. R. Tolkien may not have believed in Sauron, but he surely believed that there are in human history people who sell themselves to the Enemy and find themselves as a result of that decision first empowered and then destroyed. And when, at the beginning of Lewis’s Perelandra (1944), the protagonist Ransom’s progress toward a friend’s house is impeded by invisible forces who fill him with fear, Lewis was describing the work of spirits whom he truly believed to exist, though under a slightly different description, just as he probably believed thatsome forms of scientistic rationalism are the product of demonic influence. In short, these writers sought to present their readers with an image of an enchanted world, of selves fully porous to supernatural forces. But because they did so in genres (fantasy, science fiction) known for the imaginative portrayal of the wholly nonexistent, readers confident in their buffered condition can be delighted by those stories without ever for a moment considering the possibility that the forces portrayed therein might correspond to something real. Indeed, the delight of the stories for such readers consists primarily in their perceived unreality. [Much more]

The mental escape routes are handling some heavy traffic these days. Fantasy/SF is a hot genre - and not only with nerds. But some suspect this wave is only a bubble.

Therein lies the rub. There's a reason fantasy wasn't mainstream before. It's a genre that appeals to people who play D&D and get their kicks reading about elves with names like Tanis Half-Elven and Galadriel. Unless publishers can keep finding the next big crossover, fantasy may once again return to its less mainstream, and considerably less profitable, roots. People can only take in so many teenage vampire romances and wizarding schools. It's possible that the next Harry Potter is just around the corner, of course, but it seems like no matter how many "Is Such-and-Such the Next Harry Potter?" articles I read, the books never quite gain enough momentum to go mainstream. Books like Lev Grossman's The Magicians gain wide critical acclaim, but then run into the immovable object that is the hardcore fantasy fan base.As much as I'm enjoying the bubble, I won't care too much if it bursts. Fantasy has simply gotten better over the past decade, and most of the best titles will never be adapted into an HBO series or a movie anyways. The really good stuff these days also tends to be really edgy. R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothingseries is so dark I'm not sure it would make an R-rating if it were translated to the silver screen. Many other contemporary fantasies are similarly adult, with lots of sex and lots of violence. Steven Erikson's Malazan books are also dark, but more problematic from a filmmaking standpoint, as the popular series spans several distinct time periods, countless perspectives, and a sprawling epic storyline. The various storylines are not obviously connected with one another even after several books. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series suffers from the same kind of shortcomings. What works in epic fantasy doesn't necessarily translate onto the big screen.Plus fantasy costs too much money to produce. Dragons, spells, and fantastical worlds are expensive, even in the age of digital animation that has made this all possible. It's one thing to adapt A Game of Thrones, which is as much medieval adventure as it is high fantasy. Martin's work has little overt magic, and few magical creatures. Compare this to the work of Jordan, Erikson, or Bakker and you begin to see how studios such as HBO might be leery of the investment. [More]

It could be the increasing intrusion of technology is affecting our feelings about religion and our dreams alike. The intensifying monotony of our choices for entertainment certainly encourages borrowing someone else's imagination, perhaps. 

But as I continue to note lately, I care less about whether others think my preferences are silly or misguided. At this point, life really is too short. Besides, when I did care I couldn't change their opinions, anyway.

The truly "golden" years...

Jan and I have been unbelievably - and undeservedly - lucky in life. One thing we can take credit for, however, we had our children at a great time in our lives.  As such we enjoyed our "golden" years at a time and in a way many cohorts behind will never know.

The old admonition, "Life begins when the kids leave home and the dog dies" has a bit of truth behind it. Our children were born when I was 26 and 29 respectively.  Which means they left for college when we were in our mid to late forties - no age at all.

Better than that, they never came back, and more importantly achieved financial independence promptly after school. I have written how I was caught unaware by Aaron's return after nearly 15 years away, but that is another story. My point today is how - happy though we are right now - we marvel at the incredible years when we were still young enough to do anything we could afford, we could afford more than we had anticipated, and we were not yet caring for an older generation, or friends coping with health issues.

This life plan doesn't appear to be that common any more.

One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That’s a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support. The common explanation for the shift is that people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s came of age amid several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends. Those who graduated college as the housing market and financial system were imploding faced the highest debt burden of any graduating class in history. Nearly 45 percent of 25-year-olds, for instance, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000. (Kasinecz still has about $60,000 to go.) And more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, meaning they make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree. According to Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at Yale University, the negative impact of graduating into a recession never fully disappears. Even 20 years later, the people who graduated into the recession of the early ’80s were making substantially less money than people lucky enough to have graduated a few years afterward, when the economy was booming.Some may hope that the boomerang generation represents an unfortunate but temporary blip — that the class of 2015 will be able to land great jobs out of college, and that they’ll reach financial independence soon after reaching the drinking age. But the latest recession was only part of the boomerang generation’s problem. In reality, it simply amplified a trend that had been growing stealthily for more than 30 years. Since 1980, the U.S. economy has been destabilized by a series of systemic changes — the growth of foreign trade, rapid advances in technology, changes to the tax code, among others — that have affected all workers but particularly those just embarking on their careers. In 1968, for instance, a vast majority of 20-somethings were living independent lives; more than half were married. But over the past 30 years, the onset of sustainable economic independence has been steadily receding. By 2007, before the recession even began, fewer than one in four young adults were married, and 34 percent relied on their parents for rent. [More]

Look, we loved being parents, but we were stunned by how much fun it was to have grown children. I suppose we missed the crazy times of being 20/30-somethings without spouses or children, but postponing them to 45 ain't the worst outcome in the world either.

Most crucially, we are learning that much of what is glittering beyond 65 is fool's gold. In addition to the scenario laid out above, longer-lived parents often surprise our retirement plans, so that postponed pleasure is being eroded from both sides. 

Again, other than deciding two children were enough (which oddly we often regret) and having them early in our way-too-early marriage (I was 22, fer Pete's sake!), simple good fortune granted us a decade or more of hilarious freedom of action. I know, I know, it could all have been stolen by a health problem or similar life catastrophe, but at least we were in position to take advantage of the absence of calamity.

Our sons will be shifted slightly further down the life-track as they married and propagated at somewhat later ages, but I also know young people who may never see a grandchild, let alone her wedding. The timing just doesn't work.

I wonder if these life examples will move the trend of later marriages and families back to younger ages, or whether it will become astonishing to go on a camping trip with your grandparents when you are 12. 

Re-reading this, it could be interpreted as not merely self-congratulatory, but anti-retirement planning. That certainly wasn't my point. I'm just thinking that birth control has delivered some unexpected cultural results that may take us generations to sort out.

Are farmers committing suicide more often?...

This is exactly the kind of sloppy statistical writing that drives me nuts.  The topic (farmer suicide) looked (and is) serious, but as I read it became apparent the writers weren't interested in framing the numbers in a way that would be helpful to readers.

Since that crisis, the suicide rate for male farmers has remained high: just under two times that of the general population. And this isn't just a problem in the U.S.; it's an international crisis. India has had more than 270,000 farmer suicides since 1995. In France, a farmer dies by suicide every two days. In China, farmers are killing themselves to protest the government's seizing of their land for urbanization. In Ireland, the number of suicides jumped following an unusually wet winter in 2012 that resulted in trouble growing hay for animal feed. In the U.K., the farmer suicide rate went up by 10 times during the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, when the government required farmers to slaughter their animals. And in Australia, the rate is at an all-time high following two years of drought.Robert Fetsch, a retired professor of human development and family studies at Colorado State University, says there are profound social reasons farmers are reluctant to seek help. "Farmers are extremely self-sufficient and independent," he says, "and tend to work around whatever they have, because they are so determined to keep moving."One factor disputed among agricultural and mental health professionals is the connection between pesticides and depression. A group of researchers published studies on the neurological effects of pesticide exposure in 2002 and 2008. Lorrann Stallones, one of those researchers and a psychology professor at Colorado State University, says she and her colleagues found that farmers who had significant contact with pesticides developed physical symptoms like fatigue, numbness, headaches and blurred vision, as well as psychological symptoms like anxiety, irritability, difficulty concentrating and depression. Those maladies are known to be caused by pesticides interfering with an enzyme that breaks down the neurotransmitter that affects mood and stress responses."A lot of farmers are very familiar with the pesticides, so they sort of take it for granted," Stallones says. "It's an invisible kind of thing, so if you can't actually feel it, taste it, touch it, you might not believe it's an issue."Not everyone is sold on the link between pesticides and depression. "I don't think there's firm data on that yet," says Jill Harkavy-Friedman, senior director of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. A greater contributor to suicide in rural areas, she says, is the easy access to guns. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most suicides in America involve firearms, and more than half of all firearm deaths every year involve suicide. Harkavy-Friedman points to a 1998 study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry that showed the most common means of farmer suicide in England and Wales from 1981 to 1988 was guns. Following firearm legislation in 1989 that reduced access to guns, the total number of farmer suicides went down. [More]

I should have seen it coming from the extravagantly photoshopped cover, but it really begs to be given context.  Which is why God gave us Google.

First off, the article tells a few stories about tragic suicides.  Fair enough, but those anecdotes prime us for interpreting any numbers as pessimistically as possible. The note the comparisons without any total. 

• "the rate for suicide for male farmers has remained high: just under two times that of the general population"  Let's unpack that.  To begin with, the male rate is always higher than the general population - men kill themselves more often.

[Source]

• So if they were talking about the true general rate, male farmers could be expected to have about twice the rate just because they are male - 20:12

• But if they meant twice the rate for other males, let's see what that looks like. Looking at white males in the US, it turns out the rate for farmers is not so out of line. In fact, it's lower than the rate for physicians, dentists, veterinarians, finance workers, chiropractors, heavy contruction operators, urban planners (?), handmolders (??), real estate sellers, electrical assemblers, lawyers, and lathe operators.
• Look at the above numbers from NIOSH on occupational deaths. They cover a period from 1984 to 1998. For farmers that added up to 94 suicides out of 4984 deaths. That's a little over 6 per year. When the numbers get this small annually even one or two deaths can bump the rate up dramatically.

What are the most recent numbers for farmer suicide?  Amazingly enough, it's hard to find out.  I use "The Straight Dope" as a kind of "Snopes" for these questions. Here's what they found out.

Well, it hasn't been easy to track this one, and I'm not sure I've got a definitive answer. Let's start by noting that suicide statistics are questionable at best. Many suicides are classified as "accident" to spare the family from publicity. So the statistics are only a rough indication.I easily found statistics on the Internet about suicides by age, region, gender, and race, but very little about occupation. Actually, since suicide is the second leading cause of death in the U.S. among those age 15 to 24, probably the answer is "student", but I don' t think that's what you're looking for.I called the library of the Society of Actuaries, thinking they'd know. The librarian said she used to work at a large psychiatric library, and that about 8 years ago, the answer was psychiatrists/psychologists/related. However, she couldnt quote me a source or cite a statistic, except what she says she knew. [More]

In fact, I spent an amazing amount of time trying to nail this statistical jello to the wall. And largely failed.  All the articles I found were slanted to assess blame, attack GMO's or Big Ag or pesticides, raise sympathy for (usually) smaller farmers, or persuade readers to support some cause.

Every now and then you would find a real number (I think) like this:

Still, Colorado state health officials recorded 4,012 suicides in the past five years; 53 were farmers, mostly men, who shot themselves. Bankrupt farmers have sought government help as bankers press for payments, often triggering the suicides. [More]

So that would mean about 10 farmers per year in CO alone. But without historical or comparative numbers it doesn't tell us much. And it sure doesn't jibe with the national numbers from NIOSH above.

I'm not going to waste any more time on this since it looks somewhat futile, despite the tragedy it represents. My conclusions:

1. All suicide stories evoke strong empathy, which primes our interpretation of data.
2. Assume any farmer suicide story to be slanted for persuasive purposes unless proven otherwise.
3. Suicide rates are distorted by low numbers, so disregard any claims of drastic rate changes. 
4. If guns are mentioned, remember while guns are a factor, their biggest influence is effectiveness - suicide attempts by firearm have a much higher success rate than other methods. I don't want to be dragged into an NRA rebuttal rant about guns and suicides, so I'm leaving it at that despite my own aversion.
5. What is happening in other countries, especially India, but also France and China, are largely cultural phenomena, and hard to apply to the US.

So when you read, as I did in Kevin Van Trump's daily newsletter, an account like this, note your reaction and don't leap to conclusions.

West Central Iowa - Two weeks ago my best friend and neighbor committed suicide. The whole community is in shock because this was one of the calmest, nicest guys I knew. He was a good farmer who had cattle and row crops. He worked harder than anybody I know. I talked to him almost every day. This past winter with all the snow and bitter cold for so long while having a lot of cattle, I think it just got to be too much. He knew it was going to be a late spring, had a ton of manure to get hauled because he didn't get much done during the winter, plus all the crops - just took a toll on him. So we all need to learn from this. If you feel stressed out, you either need to get more help or let some livestock or rented land go back. Also we need to watch out for each other. As I look back I could tell he was depressed but not in a million years I thought he would do something like this. There has been many times where I have thought instead of me owning the farm, that the Farm owns ME. Money isn't an issue, just too much work to get done, especially if you farm alone. Farming has changed so much since I started. Seems like the seasons were longer or something. People were more laid back. A lot more rush rush now. Anxiety can sure set in this time of year with looking ahead and so much to do.

Each event is a tragedy of its own, and thankfully, suicide is still rare enough to shock us each time. I don't think the link between suicide and farming is precisely enumerated nor well explained, just frequently spun. 

[A good (albeit troubling) thread on the aftermath of suicide is here.]

Persuasion and other myths...

I have struggled with disappointment for years over my inability to find arguments to persuade farmers and others with logic to share my views on topics from subsidies to inflation to climate change. But new research suggests I was born too late (or early) for this strategy to have much of a chance. In our era, a different belief dynamic is at work.

As I have pointed out before, empirical (observed) evidence - facts, if you will - just don't seem to pack the persuasive power I believe they should.

Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse.Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.Consider how utterly insane that is: being better at math made partisans less likely to solve the problem correctly when solving the problem correctly meant betraying their political instincts. People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right.The skin-rash experiment wasn’t the first time Kahan had shown that partisanship has a way of short-circuiting intelligence. In another study, he tested people’s scientific literacy alongside their ideology and then asked about the risks posed by climate change. If the problem was truly that people needed to know more about science to fully appreciate the dangers of a warming climate, then their concern should’ve risen alongside their knowledge. But here, too, the opposite was true: among people who were already skeptical of climate change, scientific literacy made them more skeptical of climate change.This will make sense to anyone who’s ever read the work of a serious climate change denialist. It’s filled with facts and figures, graphs and charts, studies and citations. Much of the data is wrong or irrelevant. But it feels convincing. It’s a terrific performance of scientific inquiry. And climate-change skeptics who immerse themselves in it end up far more confident that global warming is a hoax than people who haven’t spent much time studying the issue. More information, in this context, doesn’t help skeptics discover the best evidence. Instead, it sends them searching for evidence that seems to prove them right. And in the age of the internet, such evidence is never very far away. [More of a must-read]

My problem is exacerbated by being pretty moderate and therefore wishy-washy on many ideological issues.  I don't have nearly as much problem changing my mind on issues, and since I have been shown to be wrong so many times, it's not new to me. But the larger factor is the blessing of friends who cut me some slack.  Not everybody has that these days.

Imagine what would happen to, say, Sean Hannity if he decided tomorrow that climate change was the central threat facing the planet. Initially, his viewers would think he was joking. But soon, they’d begin calling in furiously. Some would organize boycotts of his program. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of professional climate skeptics would begin angrily refuting Hannity’s new crusade. Many of Hannity’s friends in the conservative media world would back away from him, and some would seek advantage by denouncing him. Some of the politicians he respects would be furious at his betrayal of the cause. He would lose friendships, viewers, and money. He could ultimately lose his job. And along the way he would cause himself immense personal pain as he systematically alienated his closest political and professional allies. The world would have to update its understanding of who Sean Hannity is and what he believes, and so too would Sean Hannity. And changing your identity is a psychologically brutal process.Kahan doesn’t find it strange that we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it. He thinks it’s strange that we would expect rational people to do anything else. "Nothing any ordinary member of the public personally believes about the existence, causes, or likely consequences of global warming will affect the risk that climate changes poses to her, or to anyone or anything she cares about," Kahan writes. "However, if she forms the wrong position on climate change relative to the one that people with whom she has a close affinity — and on whose high regard and support she depends on in myriad ways in her daily life — she could suffer extremely unpleasant consequences, from shunning to the loss of employment."Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.Anyone who has ever found themselves in an angry argument with their political or social circle will know how threatening it feels. For a lot of people, being "right" just isn’t worth picking a bitter fight with the people they care about. That’s particularly true in a place like Washington, where social circles and professional lives are often organized around people’s politics, and the boundaries of what those tribes believe are getting sharper. [Same]

Outside a few close friends, I really don't have much of a tribe. In fact, you guys reading this are a big part of my community. Being a Methodist helps, as that group is certainly less concerned with orthodoxy. Working by myself on a farm is another stroke of luck since I don't have those links to damage.

I'm not blaming the rest of the world - those are just the ground rules now for policy debate, and after reading about it I have realized I've wasted a lot of breath/words. It's a good thing I enjoy the process, because measured by results, I don't have much to show for decades of lobbing my opinions out there.

I read this article right after it was published and frankly it bummed me out for days, but it also seemed to confirm suspicions already lurking in my mind. Tribalism rules.

The obvious follow on question is why is this true now?

Maybe we are all looking for community and a sense of belonging. We already know that is a key factor in happiness, long-lives and satisfaction. And old communities are struggling. The geographical community of proximity, especially in rural areas is depopulated and bifurcating into large farmers and lots of low-income residents. These two groups don't have much in common.

Our civic, fraternal, and recreational organizations are fading as well. Lions and Elks are endangered species. VFW is literally dying off. Masonic lodges are closing. Bowling leagues are lame. And all the time TV and Internet offer a pseudo-community without leaving home or risking the exact social problems Ezra details above. Even work has at best a more fragile sense of inclusion, as layoffs have made everyone anxious, and lifetime employment a joke from the past.

So any real-time, fact-to-face contacts we do have are extremely important. Why not arrange your beliefs to make sure those connections stay in place? After all, what will you replace them with?

The future has hazards ahead for many of us, as well. It appears white Americans get more conservative as we slip toward a minority. So will moderates and liberals bend to go along?

Near the top of the list, they found, was a deep consciousness of being “white in a country with growing minorities.” One participant described his town as such:

Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. Everybody goes to the same pool. Everybody goes—there’s one library, one post office. Very homogenous.

For most of their lives, these people could ignore the country’s demographic change. But the election of President Obama was a clear sign that things were different.The result was fear and anxiety. A fear, for instance, that comprehensive immigration reform would begin a tidal wave of dependency, as Democrats won their votes with the allure of government programs such as Obamacare. “Every minority group wants to say they have the right to something, and they don’t,” said one Tea Party participant. “There’s so much of the electorate in those groups that Democrats are going to take every time because they’ve been on the rolls of the government their entire lives. They don’t know better,” said another. [More]

These issues are magnified to extremes simply due to smaller numbers in our profession and rural life. The fact that farmers overwhelmingly agree on any number of arguably illogical political issues says far less about reasoning power, and far more about fear of loneliness, perhaps.

This too will pass, I think, for the reasons illuminated toward the end of the article. Convictions grounded in ideology eventually fail to cope with reality that doesn't care. I don't know how those moments will unfold - its been 20 years and people are still adamant rampant inflation is a threat. So that would suggest it won't be overnight epiphanies and conversions.

Maybe we will rebuild new communities I can only try to imagine to give us the social assurance to change our minds in the face of evidence. I know one thing for sure: the first step is to give friends slack to consider a new position. Dancing in the end zone after an undeniable election result, for instance, is not just rude, it is an unkindness that destroys connections we need to be happy and pollutes the atmosphere of social discourse.

I still think it all began with Cassius Clay and the death of the Good Winner, but that's a theory for another time.

Children and their toys...

Amazingly poignant.  My favs.

(Also note where they are from.)

The scarce market argument...

 For land prices. As asset bubbles are being spotted like financial Yeti all around the globe, people are trying to see some sense behind the prices. In this analysis about the boom in classic car prices see if the reasoning resonates with our favorite asset.

From our vantage point — and it certainly is a lay vantage point when it comes to classic cars — there seem to be three core attributes associated with vintage automobiles.The first is uniqueness.Value related to uniqueness is understandable since it relates to how easily an object or item can be sourced, replicated or mass produced. For now, there is little chance that a classic Bentley will be perfectly replicated. Value applied on these grounds seems rational enough.
The second is utility.Though, while this may be a bonus, we’d argue that in classic cars this is not necessarily a core value since most classic cars are notoriously unreliable and hard to maintain.In fact, a lack of utility can even be part of the appeal for classic car enthusiasts, since the joy of ownership is often linked to the challenge of maintaining the cars in working order, or getting them up to scratch.The third attribute, arguably the most important, is historical importance to car enthusiasts and sector specialists. [More]

The third point may be a bigger contributor to land prices than we think: land has continues to stand unchallenged as an historic form of wealth, and because it is intrinsically tied to location it also is a repository of history. To know an ancestor or beloved grandparent walked/bought/farmed an acre is to add the same type of value as knowing your childhood movie idol owned an item. Think of Spock's napkin or Jon Voight's car. Funny doesn't work without a wide acceptance of the underlying truth we feel.

When it come to land next to me, it is truly a scarcity market. And given my conviction that extremely large amounts of liquid assets are looking for a long-term home, farmland could be a semi-scarce asset that can at times possess some attributes of fine art or a Duisenberg. 

This means that using tools that select the best stock for your 401K may not help when making land decisions, especially if you farm. 

FWIW...  

A fascinating (and seemingly endless) stream of "dirty secrets" from  people who work in various industries that they think consumers have no idea about. All this must be taken with a barrel of salt , but a few of my favorites:

I work at a US lobbying firm, and I'm sure no Redditor would be shocked to hear that US legislators are ignorant. You might be surprised just HOW ill-informed a lot of them are, though. Like the Congressman who believed David Cameron was a member of the Socialist party. Or the one that asked me why we called it Russia now, not the USSR. Or the Senator who told me he'd grown up drinking sea water, and it was healthier for you. Or the governor who thought all Jews were killed by Hitler. The list could go on.
 ...
75% of people on twitter are fake. I used to work for a social media company, and spent all day creating and acting like people online to connect people to our clients and make them fans of their music/food/whatever. We also had a "blast" program where we could tweet stuff out from accounts to create trending topics. So most of that stuff is organized.
...
Former paramedic here. I've never once checked, judged, or cared whether you had on clean underwear. Your parents lied.  
...
ex-Panera Bread employee here. EVERYTHING is microwaved, all soups and pastas come in frozen bags, reheated for the customer. pastries and breads come in "half-baked", bakers just slap on some frosting/fruit, and heat it up. it's all fast-food quality food, but with a good reputation. plus it was terrible to work there.  (*see below as well)
...
 Video editor here for reality TV. It's fake for the most part. They usually do multiple takes of the "reality" scenes that are staged beforehand. The most recent egregious use of this is Duck Dynasty. They pass the show off as reality tv and they actually have table readings for that show before shoots. Not saying that reality TV isn't sometimes entertaining. I'm just saying that you shouldn't be fooled into thinking that this is actually reality and the camera just happened to be there when these people were doing what they normally do.

My takeaway is not horror at the idea of such atrocious behavior behind my back. Indeed, it's amazement that the economy and culture that is America can absorb and overcome all these outrages.

*Restaurant food: not what you think. Even in France.

If you’ve ever wondered why French classics such as a “moelleux au chocolat” or a “tarte tatin” tastes suspiciously the same in Paris restaurants, it’s probably because it is. About a third of French restaurants say they use industrial food, and Fasquelle and other officials fear declining standards at the nation’s 150,000 restaurants threaten a tourism industry that represents 7 percent of France’s $2.8 trillion economy.
“The odds are sadly good you’ll be eating a pre-prepared dish or two if you dine out at the low to mid-level of the Paris food chain,” said Alexander Lobrano, author of “Hungry for Paris” and former European Editor of Gourmet. “I fervently hope that a law with real teeth will be passed in France, since it would not only go a long way to preserving the country’s distinguished gastronomic reputation but also reward those chefs who work so hard to prepare ’real’ freshly cooked food from quality ingredients.” [More]

Does it really matter, anyway? If the consumer is unharmed and satisfied, doesn't that imply that our internal standards don't match up with our external pretenses?

Maybe life is more like pro-wresting than we think. At every level, we just decide to believe. More and more, truth has become subjective, and something we manipulate to achieve our desires.

Whatever, it seems to work.

This would explain...  

The heightened sense of entitlement by farmers obvious in the current farm bill debate.



There is no way 'round the realization we commercial grain farmers  are in the economic elite and have been for a few years. I'm sure these attitudes are pervasive in our ranks as we speak.

But my neighbors are worse than I am, of course.

BTW, this attitude drops away as farm programs disappear.

Another arrow problem...  

Just as the R & R uproar in the economics community has reminded us correlation is not cause and sometimes it's really hard to see which way the causal arrow points, another landmark study receives a startling new interpretation.

From the introduction to a refreshingly contrarian article by Stephanie Stern, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law:

In 2007, accompanied by a firestorm of publicity, Robert Putnam announced that residential racial diversity causes declines in social capital. Social capital is a prominent theory, popularized by Putnam, of the aggregate value of citizen participation in associations and organizations, social ties and networks, civic engagement, trust, and norms of reciprocity. In a study of forty-one U.S. communities, Putnam found that people living in racially diverse communities were less likely to work on a community project or volunteer, less likely to expect others to cooperate to solve collective problems, reported lower trust in others, had fewer close friendship ties, expressed less confidence in local government, and registered to vote lessfrequently. Most provocatively, Putnam found a strong “hunker[ing] down” effect, contrary to both the constrict and contact hypotheses of integration, where racial diversity caused residents of diverse communities to withdraw from social and civic life and report lower trust in members of other races and their own race. Unsurprisingly (to all but Robert Putnam it seems), his research provoked a torrent of political commentary and academic response. Conservative commentators argued that the findings called into question the value of racial mixing, headlines trumpeted the conclusion that “greater diversity equals more misery,” and Putnam’s research featured in a recent amicus brief as evidence against the value of affirmative action in college admissions. Sociologists and economists reanalyzed Putnam’s data and conducted their own empirical studies to assess his findings (these studies indicate that the diversity decrement is statistically significant, but small). Legal scholars accepted, albeit unhappily, the conclusion that racial diversity diminishes local social capital.

Curiously, in the handwringing about the harms to social capital and the ensuing debate, no one questioned whether the problem was social capital. From a property scholar’s perspective, one plausible interpretation of the correlation between high social capital and low diversity is that high social capital reduces the costs of excluding minorities (i.e., the non-dominant race in a community) and maintaining racial homogeneity. Holding preferences for racial homogeneity constant and positive, there may be reverse causation: high social capital, in the form of close social networks and strong tastes for organizational participation and voluntary action, may facilitate community organizing to exclude by race or class through both informal and legal mechanisms. The motivation for exclusion may be preferences for homogeneity, increased property values from exclusionary land use policies, or in predominantly minority, lower-income areas, concerns that white gentrification will make housing unaffordable. Conversely, low social capital may make it difficult for residents to organize to exclude and may result in greater racial fractionalization.

More succinctly: social capital facilitates NIMBYism.
The whole point of social capital, after all, is to facilitate collective action. It's usually bandied as a cure for commons-type problems like littered parks or crime-infested streets, but there's no reason to assume a neighborhood will deploy  its social capital only for wise and benevolent ends.  A neighborhood that is adept at organizing litter patrols and crime watches will also likely be adept at organizing opposition to real estate developments that threaten to add economic or racial diversity. If this is the case, then we should expect, rather than be surprised, to see high social capital negatively correlated with diversity. [A little more after my generous excerpt - sorry]

I find this idea plausible at least. Our automatic reaction to ascribe the logical flow of cause and effect makes our initial reactions "sticky", I guess. Being able to devise tests that can detect the chicken from the egg is crucial to preventing the establishment of false world-views and even faultier solutions for problems.

What to do...  

When you don't "get" the Latest Thing. Let's just hypothetically say this references an elderly but still hip blogger/writer and say, Facebook, to pick a subject entirely at random. Even as his less cyber-savvy friends (and even the occasional wife) have gotten on board, he still treats it with disdain.

Well, folks, he's not the only one coping (or not coping) with this dilemma.

The fact of the matter is our professional lives now churn with change. Markets change. Technology changes. Consumers change. Channels change. Competitors change. This is an era of disruption. Not disruption as the occasional event, but disruption as the constant, chronic condition of our professional lives. You would hope that we were getting better at understanding and managing change. And sometimes we are. Too often however, our response is to ignore and forget change, to fake our way through it, to pretend an engagement and a mastery we do not have. And that's bad. That means we are not getting better at change, but steadily worse. We are denying disruption, instead of adapting to it.
We seem to adopt and adapt to something like Twitter by stages, a little like Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief. Except in this case, it's a passage from confusion to congratulation. Self-congratulation.
Stage 1. Confusion. We don't quite get it. We sign up for the new app. We give it a whirl. Not really getting it. By this time, gurus are reassuring us that Twitter is the greatest thing ever. But that doesn't help. We're still not getting it. And so we turn to Stage 2.
Stage 2: Repudiation. It turns out there are lots of people who don't get the new technology and now social life is a little like a competition to show that we're not "falling for it." At this point, there can more social capital in saying that we don't like the tech than that we do.
Stage 2 is marked by snappy one-liners. With the practiced ease of stand-up comedian, we can now be heard saying stuff like, "Twitter. What could I possibly say in 140 characters?" Or, "FourSquare? Why would I want to be mayor of my living room."
Stage 3. Shaming. This is when we are so persuaded that we're right and the new innovation is wrong that we are prepared to make fun of the credulous among us. I was on the receiving end after I gave a presentation on new media to a large advertising firm. When I finished, three planners took turns patting me on the head and telling me, "This Twitter thing. It's just a fad. Give it a couple of months and it will go away." We heard a lot of this sort of thing about Pinterest in the early days. Now it's valued at $2.5 billion.
Stage 4. Acceptance. By this time, the innovation is taking off. The middle adopters are signing on. It's clear now even to us that Twitter is here to stay. Confronted by accomplished, irrefutable fact, we cave in and sign on.
And that brings us to Stage 5.
Stage 5. Forgetting. This is where we destroy the evidence. Now we are inclined to act as if we always understood and approved of a world installed with new innovation. [Please read the rest for suggested therapy]

I'm sure this gentleman has used the described procedure before, but has altered his memory suitably to allow him to maintain his out-sized ego. The author does have some concrete steps that might help if you finish the short article. Maybe the fellow in the example should try them.

Every time...  

We have satellite radio (SirusXM) in both our cars. Of course, you get the free trial subscription and then the rate goes to $15/mo.  Having had this for several years, I know the drill.  You wait for the special offer which is usually half-price for a year. Then, unless you call up and cancel just before it runs out, they automatically charge you full rate for a full year.

Sirius does send a 45-day warning, but of course, you have to remember. When you do call up to cancel, you will be plied with (wait for it) the half-price offer.  I understand all the behavioral economics going on here and do not object, but I asked the guy if there is anyway to save all of us some time without this annual dance.

Nope. So it appears not only is there no free lunch - there is no free half-price lunch either.

[Please feel free to write in with any other tactics you have found productive for XM.]

An honest count...  

I have always been perplexed by our profession's obsession with over-counting our numbers. Take the ubiquitous "2%".  That's 6,200,000 people!

That's also ridiculous.

In 2010, there were 1,202,500 farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers and an estimated 757,900 agricultural workers were employed in the US. Animal breeders accounted for 11,500 of those workers with the rest categorized as miscellaneous agricultural workers. [More]

That's a pretty reliable number, I think. But there are some issues with it as well.

• The farmer number is based on the old USDA "$1000 gross" rule. In fact, 60% of the 1.2M "farmers" are retirement and lifestyle farmers who like the many advantages of Schedule F, I would suggest. So at best - even counting very small farms - the number of what most people would call farmers is around 500,000 AT MOST.
• The balance of the 2% seems to be "others living on farms". The best number I can find is 4.6M which in some Alternate Arithmetic Universe gets rounded up from 1.48% to the Magic 2%.
• Even the above number is questionable because:

In 1993 the Census Bureau stopped counting the number of Americans who live on farms. "Farm residence," it reported, "is no longer a reliable indication of whether or not someone is involved in farming. ... The cost of collecting and publishing statistics on farm residents and farmers in separate reports could no longer be justified." [More]

• So if your wife is a teacher, nurse, plumber, truck driver, or nuclear physicist, we somehow still get to count her among our ranks.
• Your kids count too.

In short, Jack Nicholson was right - we can't handle the truth. And we go to remarkable extremes to distort the data.

One of the most egregious truth-masseurs is Farm Bureau. I remember from my days as a county president (admittedly in the Paleolithic era) the hushed mumbles that accompanied membership numbers. Because FB is a well-funded, expertly-staffed auxiliary unit of an insurance conglomerate (which any Wall Street analyst would conclude from looking at their books), they have concocted unique euphemisms to describe their members as farmer-like entities.

Farm Bureau’s national membership rose to 6,279,813 member families in 2010, marking 50 consecutive years of membership growth. State Farm Bureaus overall reported a total 2,149 more member families this year than in 2009. [More]

Member families? A more accurate label would be "insurance customers who are required to become members of the FB". The fact that TN is the largest membership state should be a clue these numbers say little about actual farmers. Somehow this distinction is skirted when FB testifies before Congress, allowing the organization name to imply a vast base of voluntary dues-paying members.

But aside from the embarrassing lameness of such efforts to inflate our numbers is the question, "Why bother?" Why can't we be OK with an accurate count of our group's ranks?

We're not the only minority struggling with this anxiety.

We’re slowly getting a sense of how many TGBQLX people there are in America. I.e. how many homosexuals, lesbians and transgenders there are in the population. When I was a newbie gay, the mantra was 10 percent. We were “one in ten”. Seriously.
This immediately struck me at the time as a) obviously propaganda and b) ridiculously insecure. There was no way to know for sure, given the ubiquity of the closet back in the 1980s, but ten percent is a hell of a lot of people: 30 million. Why did I keep bumping into faces I recognized wherever I was in the US? If it were really ten percent, where were they all?
And why on earth does it matter if we make up 10 percent or 1 percent? A minority’s civil rights are not dependent on how many of them there are or how large a segment of society they form. Do we say: sorry, guys, you only form 2 percent, you don’t meet the minimal bar for becoming a minority? It’s not like running for the Knesset. It struck me then and now as part of a wearying tendency among some gays to think that every straight dude is just a few beers away from being gay (that’s not how it works); or a desperation to feel somehow more significant because of larger numbers.
Which simply make it all the more of a relief to see that Gallup has finally come up with a believable number of around 3.5 percent. (Check how gay your state is here.) DC is the super-gayest “state” – but that is a little distorted since DC is really the inner city of a larger metropolitan area and the gays tend to congregate there. But there’s also the attraction of politics for gay men. If you’ve ever spent much time among the staffers on the Hill, you’ll know what I mean: the US capitol makes the Vatican look straight. [More]

Sullivan is right: why does it matter? We don't get subsidies because of block voting - we were heavily against Obama and he is our best hope to continue the handouts, especially the ethanol mandate. Clearly government money messes with your mind.

I've always thought minimizing our numbers would have a bigger PR wow-factor. "Only 50,000 farmers produce 87% of the ag products [totally made up example]" seems more impressive to me. If farm payments are slipping away, why not change our thinking to at the very least make sure we actually know how many we are?

Farmer numbers need to come out of the closet.

The curious case of guns and hunters...  

President Obama has been a godsend to the gun industry, with sales booming after each conspiracy myth is rolled out. But at the same time, fewer homes have guns.

 Second, for all the attention given to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows.  Since 1973, the GSS has been asking Americans whether they keep a gun in their home.  In the 1970s, about half of the nation said yes; today only about one-third do.  Driving the decline: a dramatic drop in ownership of pistols and shotguns, the very weapons most likely to be used in violent crimes. [More]

So it would appear we have a smaller number of citizens with a larger number of guns. Not sure what that means.

But at the same time, the popularity of hunting is dropping almost as fast. Take ducks, for example.

The annual duck hunting season in the United States is traditionally big business, but while bird numbers are rising faster than they have for decades, the number of hunters continues to fall. Far from being good news for ducks a new study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin shows how the loss of revenue from ‘duck stamps’ could result in millions of lost dollars for vital conservation work.

“The last 15 years have brought hunting opportunities not seen since the turn of the last century,” said Dr Mark Vrtiska from Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. “The waterfowl population has passed 40 million six times since 1995, something only seen nine times since records began. These should be the glory days for duck hunting.”

However, in stark contrast, the annual sales of the ‘duck stamp’, the Federal licence needed to hunt, are declining. While over 2,100,000 stamps were sold annually in the 1970’s, between 2004 and 2008 this declined to 1,300,000. This fall is continuing with an annual decline of 36% in duck stamp sales. [More]

Or deer.

The fact is, hunter numbers peaked nationwide in the late 1970s and then started sliding. By the 1990s they were plunging across America as the percentage of hunters in the population declined.
Wisconsin dodged that 1990s plummet, insulated by a large rural population that embraces hunting and has easier access to hunting land. From 1991 through 2000, Wisconsin averaged 675,185 gun-deer licenses annually, up 2.6 percent from 658,257 during 1981-1990.
But as more urbanites built homes and planted lawns where cows, steers, deer and farmers once roamed, our hunting population was destined to drop. From 2001 through 2010, annual gun deer licenses averaged 642,466, down 5 percent from the '90s. [More]

The decline of hunting could be a real game changer as fewer of us are familiar with firearms and probably more likely to be averse to ownership as a result. Nor is it a sport you "take up" like golf, I would think. It seems more like something you grow up with, as a rule.

This is one reason I don't waste much time debating gun issues - it's slowly going the right direction without all that vitriol in my life. I'd like to be able to prevent another Newtown, but that looks like tilting a windmill. Pretty pathetic I know, but anything else just seems to add fuel to a dying fire.

The Moon Hoax...  

Only a few problems.

 

Of all the conspiracy theories, this one has always irritated me most. So I'm not impartial here. Good to see some facts thrown at it.

But wait for the finish.

No mood at all...  

I am a gun agnostic. Don't own any. Don't want to. Don't care if you do.

While I would cheer European level gun ownership restrictions, I will not invest any effort to tilt that windmill. It is futile to debate those to whom firearms provide an element in their lives I cannot comprehend. This should be clear to gun control advocates.

But mostly, I think we will outlive this issue as a culture, perhaps in my grand-children's lifetime. 

Consider these trends:

 [Source]

And this one:

 [Source]

 And this one:

 The ownership rate reported is the average estimate taken from "Annexe 4: The largest civilian firearms arsenals for 178 countries. That table gives also the minimum and maximum estimates. Note that for some countries, this margin of error is considerable. E.g. Yemen, ranked near the top with an ownership rate of 54.8, has a low estimate of 28.6 and a high estimate of 81.1. While the United States is ranked for the highest gun ownership rate unambiguously, Yemen based on the margin of error may rank anywhere between 2nd and 18th, Switzerland anywhere between 2nd and 16th. [More]

My conclusion is it will be hard to stuff more guns into the closets of America. The firearms industry will either have to sell innovation (which can only be bad for people) or sell to places where they still don't have "enough" guns. It reminds me distantly of the beef marketing problem.

The US will continue to have a powerful gun lobby and constituency convinced they are protecting some facet of American character that can only be flourish with firearm protection. They will, however, slowly diminish in both number and relevance, it seems.

Like farmers.

No one will take their guns away. Somebody will just sell them after they die. And guns won't make those deaths any less unlikely.

No wonder marketing is harder...  

The other side is using more educated people.

At the very least it seems as if more employers are using bachelor’s degrees as a signal of drive or talent, regardless of of the relevance of the skills actually learned in college.
That is one implication of an analysis from Burning Glass, a company that analyzes job ads from over 20,000 online sources ranging from major job boards to small and midsize employer sites. The company’s chief executive, Matthew Sigelman, says that employers are increasingly requiring college degrees for positions that did not traditionally require higher education.
I asked his company to compile a list of occupations that have shown the most “up-credentialing” in the last five years — that is, occupations whose job ads were significantly more likely to name college diplomas as a prerequisite in 2012 than they were in 2007.
Here is a look at the 10 occupations with the biggest percentage increases in requiring a college degree.

Occupation title	2007-12* Growth in % of Posted Jobs Advertising for a Bachelor’s Degree	2007 % of Ads Requiring Bachelor’s Degree	2012* % of Ads Requiring Bachelor’s Degree
Dental Laboratory Technicians	175%	12%	33%
Chemical Equipment Operators and Tenders	83%	6%	11%
Medical Equipment Preparers	55%	11%	17%
Buyers and Purchasing Agents, Farm Products	43%	54%	77%
Electronics Engineering Technicians	38%	21%	29%
Dental Hygienists	38%	40%	55%
Architectural Drafters	37%	41%	56%
Cargo and Freight Agents	36%	33%	45%
Photographers	36%	25%	34%
Claims Adjusters, Examiners and Investigators	35%	48%	65%

*2012 data is from Nov. 1, 2011, to Oct 31, 2012 

  
(I am assuming that the "Buyers and Purchasing Agents, Farm Products" would be Cargill marketing reps or similar jobs. Maybe Monsanto field reps?)

If you wander through the comments, you'll notice several possible implications from this report. I agree a tough employment market makes "up-credentialing" an easy way to winnow, but also agree that more jobs simply need better education levels than high school seems to be providing. 

With some exceptions, I am not persuaded that college degrees certify the same level of education as they used to. Dumbing down is a crude way of putting it, but it could also be the relative rigor in key academic areas I associate with college degrees from my own era is unnecessary given the compensatory power of computers. Why master any topic when you can google the info you need when you need it?

My Dad used to bemoan the fact I didn't learn the multiplication tables all the way to 25x25 as he did, so I'm guessing my lament is just geezer harrumphing. When skills can become obsolete almost overnight (floor traders), what exactly should colleges teach?

Meanwhile, in our own ranks, the percentage of college graduates seems stagnant.

[Source]

Of course, this is before the Great Return that started in 2008 as farm incomes suddenly made going back home more attractive to graduates. We'll have slightly less dated info from the 2012 Census of Ag in a couple of years when USDA gets around to it with their usual alacrity.

My only thought on Petraeus...  

When did we become the Soviet army?

 And compare to Ike:

Some of 'em aren't even US awards. A good discussion here, here and here.

Just a reminder...  

Recovering from and analyzing the implications of the election have been taxing (heh). Plus I was forced to spend some time in Las Vegas speaking to dairy producers.

But two recent items helped me makes some sense of these events.

First a reminder we are the Purple States of America:

 [click to enlarge] [Source]

I think shifting to this image from the red-blue digital mode is a better model for our brains to use. We have stark divisions enough without introducing an arbitrary and inaccurate choice of two options.

Today I also read something that may help explain why current events are so troublesome for many: the pace of change is really remarkable.

Whether we intended to or not, whether it was sufficient or not, whether we liked it or not, we have been living through a remarkable period of political change in these last few years. We have bored through so many hard boards that we’re no longer surprised when we reach the other side, and we mainly wonder why we haven’t gotten through more of them, or why we didn’t choose different ones. But viewed against most other eras in American life, the pace of policy change in these last few years has been incredibly fast. Historians, looking back from more quiescent periods, will marvel at all that we have lived through. Activists, frustrated at their inability to shake their countrymen out of their tranquility, will wish they’d been born in a moment when things were actually getting done, a moment like this one. [More well worth the time]

We do get tricked into forgetting all the changes we have seen. Perhaps we have become better at adapting. But there is a pace that discomfits us. I think we have met or exceeded that for many, and will continue to face difficult adjustments.