Separated at birth

Jeffrey Gundlach

Le Chiffre

Nerd amusement

Emacs M-X calendar g m l shows today's date in the Mayan long count.

 

Via Kieran Healy.

GMO Labeling

The election's over, so this is temporarily a non-issue. But it's sure to keep coming back. I've been thinking about it a bit, partly because people who I respect came down on the other side of the issue.

I voted "no" on prop 37 in California. Mainly that's because I think it was motivated by scare-mongering by a small cohort who got funding from the "natural food" industry, which saw it as a way to increase market share. I think the science is pretty clear - that GMO foods are not different from non-GMO foods in ways that are even remotely likely to affect nutrition or health. The variation in products of conventional breeding is far larger, less controlled, and, unlike GMOs, not subject to any regulatory approval process. Mark Bittman, who advocated for prop 37 in several columns, agreed on the science in his last one.

But the science is neither here nor there. Some people have what Marion Nestle refers to as values-based reasons for not wanting to consume GMOs - a variety of concerns related to corporate control of the food supply and how GMOs affect the agricultural economy. Bittman falls into that camp, as does Michael Pollan. Whether they're right or wrong is not the point. Arguments about values are generally thought impolite and anyway are usually fruitless.

I have no issue with this values-based desire to know which products contain GMOs. I might even agree with some of the values. But here's the thing: there are lots of other values-based consumption decisions that people make, and there are very few where the government steps in with a labeling mandate. The only one I can think of is country of origin on clothing, and that almost surely started with demands from the US garment industry. So it's really a result of special favors for industry, not a groundswell of values-based consumer demand.

Where there is a lot of demand for values-based labels, what usually happens is that private certification processes spring up. A few obvious examples are kosher products, organic foods and vegan processed foods. Also "Made in America" on manufactured items, thought I doubt there's any actual certification organization. And, by the way, there's already a private certification organization for GMO-free food. So my question to the pro-labeling camp is, why isn't this adequate? Private certification and labeling allows you to get your values-based outcome while leaving me free to ignore the issue and, more importantly, not pay higher costs coming from your values, which I might not share. Imposing your values (such as  your religious beliefs) on others, particularly if they are costly, is usually not considered fair.

Judging from comments on some blogs, some pro-mandatory-labeling folks just don't want to pay that cost - or rather, they want the cost to be spread over all consumers, not just them. Well, that doesn't seem like a very good argument. Most of the "no" campaign's ads prominently mentioned the additional cost, and it's a safe bet that that was focus-group tested. If the pro-labeling camp is going to get some version of what they want, I think they're going to have to confront squarely the fact that for most people, "your values don't justify imposing a cost on me".

Gerrymandering

The national vote for Democratic congressmen was 51%, vs. 49% for the GOP, essentially matching the Obama-Romney outcome. But the new Congress has only one or two fewer GOP seats than the last one, and they still have a substantial majority. That's the result of the clever redistricting done by GOP-controlled legislatures in 2000 and 2010. (And some off-cycle shenanigans in Texas, if I remember right.)

This figure shows just how well that worked. The blue and red bars are histograms of the district level votes, blue for Dem & red for GOP, natch, showing the fraction of districts with given vote margin, grouped by 5% bins. The GOP peaks at center right are in the 55-60% and 60-65% ranges, where they crafted districts of safe but not concentrated seats. The buckets at 65% and higher are all strongly blue dominated - those are the districts set up to hold the resulting "excess" of Dem. voters.

There's only one way to fix this (short of armed insurrection). Get Democratic control of more state legislatures (difficult because of the gerrymandering) and governorships (less difficult because those are statewide offices). Then turn the tables.

More BART Art

More great posters by Owen Smith - from the MacArthur and Berkeley stations.

 

Sam is off to college

After just shy of 18 years here, Sam has left the house. Catherine took him off to Pittsburgh today to move in at CMU. Orientation starts Monday and classes a week after that. Bye, Sam.

Backcountry travels

This summer's family trip was to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. (The latter are awfully craggy for something that reminded a lonely french trapper of breasts... Even considering how long he'd probably been out there on his own.) We spent two days driving around Yellowstone seeing the various weird thermal features and the canyon, then four days on horseback along the Snake River, and finally two days in Jackson and the Tetons. 

Anna captured our horseback experience pretty well when she looked at me late on day 2 and, with level gaze, said "Dad, what were you thinking?" That was an especially uncomfortable day, with about 6 hours of riding on already sore butts, and not enough experience yet to know how to more-or-less relax. Also, nothing very scenic.

Day 3 was great - we ended up at a beautiful meadow somewhere a bit north of the river, surrounded by mountains and with a large-ish thermal feature about 3/4 mile from the campsite, which Sam & I hiked to.








There we saw a little geyser, continuously spouting about 3' high, coming out of this green and yellow cone, looking a bit like some sort of giant squash.

We also heard wolves howling in the meadow that night, which was very cool.






The weekend after we got back, Sam & I went off for a 2 night backpacking trip into the Sierra Nevada between Echo Summit (hwy 50) and Caples Lake (hwy 88). We did a loop trail, starting at Hwy 50 just below the Summit, on a little-used, one-time route of the pony express called the Hawley Grade. We really had to hunt to find it, as there was no sign and it began behind the highway guardrail. We never really got far enough from either trailhead to lose the day-hikers, as you can in Desolation. From the Hawley Grade, we continued about 4 miles south, connecting first to the Tahoe Rim Trail, then eventually to the PCT along which we finished the route back to Echo Summit. The second night campsite was a spectacular cliffside spot that Sam found. We just barely snagged it, beating out a couple who'd been stopped by a ranger and forced to wait while he wrote out a fire permit for them. Of course they found out about the site from the same ranger, so we didn't feel too guilty.

Higgs car keys found

CERN announced today that they had found the missing car keys of physicist Peter Higgs stuck to the underside of a superconducting magnet in the main ring. The keys had been lost since 1965, but were predicted to be somewhere in the tunnel.

A week at Van Zandt's

We're at the end of a week at Van Zandt's in Philo. Ahh... west and wewaxation at wast! A westful wetweat indeed. (No wabbit twouble yet.) We're here with five teenagers and no other adults, so the dinner table conversation is not, umm... scintillating. Unlike my BB references...

The river is, however, it's usual serene self, if just a bit colder than usual. But I think that every year. I've kept myself to building just one small dam, in the interests of avoiding more fun with lumbar vertebrae. You can see it off to the left.

Not so much wildlife this year. Just the familiar flock of turkeys, a very screechy green heron that hangs out by the swimming hole and some ducks, which we don't usually see. No sign of the river otter mother and baby from a few years ago, nor the owl family we once had around the field.

We also went down to Mendocino for a day. We got treated rudely at Mendo Burger so we felt like we'd had the authentic experience. Good burgers, though.

A little art on BART

Posters by Owen Smith, whose New Yorker covers I've enjoyed, are now popping up around the BART system. This one adorns the EC Plaza station.

Partial Solar Eclipse

Dappled sunlight through the tree becomes overlapping images of the remaining crescent of the sun.

How do you spell "piss poor"?

Quicken and Bank of America Software User Friendliness

We use BofA for checking, and Quicken to keep track of the account. It's usually pretty convenient - a few key presses to download all recent transactions and balance the account. Quicken keeps track of which transactions it's already seen, and only adds new ones.

For some reason, BofA just decided to change how they identify transactions to Quicken. They've been warning that "there will be changes to your account" for about a month, so we'd have time to prepare, even though there was actually nothing to be done to prepare, so the warnings were kind of pointless. But that does mean that this wasn't an accident and they had lots of time to check that everything would work properly.

Today was D-Day for the conversion. I went to update the account, following the instructions carefully. The account re-connected successfully.... and imported 173 duplicate transactions. No problem, you say: just delete them. Easier said than done! Quicken, in its infinite software-engineering-wisdom, has made it impossible to delete multiple transactions. You have to go through them one by one. Not only that, but you have to use menus and mouse actions. You can't delete downloaded transactions with keystrokes. So I get to spend 30 minutes moving the mouse, pressing buttons, finding the menu target for "Delete" and then confirming.

Nice work, BofA and Quicken! (Thanks to MD for the title of this post.)

Sentence du jour

"France would not be France unless 30 per cent of the electorate appeared to favour a rerun of 1789 at the earliest opportunity."

Well this is pretty funny...

Close call on Angels Landing still haunts California cop