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Our two-year-old was happily snacking on a cheese stick in the minivan and Domestic Senior Management said “Whoever invented cheese sticks was a genius.” Google and Atlantic magazine to the rescue with “The Secret Life of String Cheese” (2014):

For these early pizza joints, [in the 1950s] Baker Cheese would make six-pound loaves or 20-pound blocks of cheese that restaurants would then cut and slice for their pizzas. But then Baker Cheese started getting requests for consumers who were addicted to the hot white melted mass of cheese on their pizzas. They wanted smaller units that they could eat as a snack.

“My grandfather was an innovator by nature,” Brian said. “He wanted to see if he could seek to do something with the product and packaging for these one-pound packages of mozzarella. Mozzarella was already shredded and cubed, but we didn’t want to compete and invest in that market.”

So Frank started experimenting in the factory with these one pound packages. Normally, mozzarella is molded into a shape from a continuous flow of cheese that is then shaped into a block or square. Frank wondered what would happen if he took this continuous flow of mozzarella and simply chopped them into strips?

“He would cut off strips and hand stretch them and roll them up and cut them into ropes, into little three, four, five inch pieces,” Brian said. “He’d soak them in the salt brine—this highly concentrated salt water—and he realized by doing it this way, cheese would have ‘stringing’ characteristics.”

That was in 1976. But it wasn’t until the a few years later, when string cheese had become cylindrified from its original twisted rope state and retail opportunities abounded, that string cheese catapulted from a local oddity to a national craze that caught on with the younger set. A key part of that was packaging, Brian said. Rather than stuffing 15-16 sticks into a one pound bag, they started making the individually wrapped mozzarella tubes we know today.

“With the one pound bags, parents would get [the entire bag] but have to throw them out because it would start to spoil,” Brian told me. “But we invested in vacuum packing to extend shelf life. Pretty quickly, kids thought it was cool and the adults liked it, too.”

A success for both Internet and traditional media!

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We saw the remake of Jumanji last night and enjoyed it . With the Rock, Jack Black (with a female gender ID, but not for car insurance purposes), and Kevin Hart as leads, what’s not to like?

There is a UH-1 Huey for the heroes and an in-flight repair is required to the flight controls up at the lower swash plate (a “mesh plate” in the movie for some reason).

Accuracy: The three tubes connecting the cyclic and the collective to the swash plate are not actually independent functions. In other words, if one becomes disconnected it will not result in a loss of, say, collective control while cyclic control is maintained.

Readers: Who has seen the original? How does it compare to this one?

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Expert readers: What’s the best screen recording software for Windows? I want to make some YouTube voice-over lectures for folks who can’t make it physically to http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/ground-school/ (or who have to miss a section). Almost everything is in PowerPoint, but I don’t think I can use PowerPoint “narration” because some content is hyperlinked out to a Web browser or YouTube. So I think I need something that just records what is on my screen. I have a 4K desktop and a near-4K laptop so maybe output in 4k is ideal?

I don’t need anything fancy. Just turn on and record whatever is on the screen plus whatever comes in from a USB microphone. Maybe trim the front and back (but I have Adobe Premiere also).

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In most states car insurance companies are free to discriminate on the basis of age and gender (dmv.org). If “Starting from the time they begin driving, women generally pay less than men do for car insurance,” and gender ID is not necessarily a function of biology, wouldn’t it make sense to check the “female” box and obtain lower rates?

Why, in a transgender age, is anyone checking the “please charge me more due to an arbitrary and temporary distinction” box?

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I have forgotten the state capitals, but one intact memory of elementary school in Bethesda, Maryland is lining up to get shots (vaccines?) from some sort of “gun”. These were administered roughly every 15 seconds either by the school nurse or a county health worker. It went so fast that I wonder if we were all effectively sharing one needle (HIV and hepatitis were not concerns for schoolchildren circa 1970).

The other day I was waiting for a friend at CVS so decided to use the time to get my “free” (i.e., included in my $10,000/year Obamacare policy) flu shot. Ten minutes later my friend showed up. It took roughly another ten minutes before the shot was “ready.” It turned out that three health care professionals had to process various forms on a computer screen, get a one-page questionnaire from me, and finally deliver the shot with a simple needle (less than one minute). A licensed pharmacist was required as part of the paperwork pipeline.

Here’s what I got in hardcopy:

1. Two-page document regarding the vaccine (Flucelvax Quad). It says “This is an OFF-WHITE SYRINGE.”
2. CVS Health Notice of Privacy Practices, a two-page document in 6 pt type. It is a paper copy that, among other things, says “You have the right to obtain a paper copy of our current Notice at any time.” It also says what will happen if I am or become “an inmate of a correctional institution.”
3. A five-page “Vaccine Information Statement” that discusses the side effects (overlaps to some extent with Document #1)
4. A Vaccine Consent and Administration Record
5. A three-foot-long receipt for $0.00 (coupons following)
6. A $5 off any $25 purchase special coupon specific to having gotten a “free” flu shot (i.e., for giving CVS the opportunity to bill the health insurer)

Is there now this much paperwork and process attached to what was, in my youth, a 15-second paperwork-free experience?

[I posted a shorter version of the above on Facebook and it generated the predictable encomiums about the wisdom of Obamacare requiring insurance companies to pay for flu shots:

I think the insurance companies cover shots as a preventative measure, hoping we won’t incur more healthcare expenses related to the flu we’d contract if we didn’t take the shot.

It should be free and universal. That will save the most money, and the evidence for that is stone-cold solid.

In other words, the central planners working for the government are smarter than the actuaries who work at insurers, which didn’t previously pay for flu shots. I decided to poke at this assumption a bit with “If it made actuarial sense to do this, why wouldn’t the UK bureaucrats be smart enough to figure it out? They don’t offer free flu shots to everyone. (source) Are the U.S. central planners smarter than the UK ones who’ve been doing it for decades?” That proved to be an impossible conundrum!]

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My Facebook friends have their panties in a twist because President Trump purportedly referred to some countries where people want to emigrate to the U.S. as “shitholes.” (e.g., see “Trump Alarms Lawmakers With Disparaging Words for Haiti and Africa” from the nytimes) The only righteous attitude toward these countries is that they are wonderful places full of culture, orderly Swiss-style cities and villages, and economic opportunity. It is just that the people who live there would rather be in Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, or Buffalo.

Their horror reminded me of the experience of a CBS News crew in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. A former instructor at our flight school was flying a Pilatus PC-12 for a rich guy and the owner said “go down to Haiti and fly supplies around.” He was indifferent to whether the plane was flying out of Teterboro or Port-au-Prince so he packed his bag, stopped for fuel in Fort Pierce, Florida, and kept going to Hispaniola. After a week or so, Dan Rather hopped on the plane so as to be on the ground when the food and water were delivered to grateful quake victims. The crew decided to gather some B-roll from the pilot, assuming that he was there in Haiti because of his profound commitment to humanitarianism. Here’s how the conversation went…

• CBS: What do you think the effect of your work here will be?
• Pilot: Well, Haiti was a shithole before this earthquake and I’m sure that it will be a shithole after all of these relief workers have packed up and gone home.

Somehow I don’t think that this heartwarming footage was ever aired…

[Separately, when are the folks who criticize Trump for saying that Norway is nicer than Haiti going to spend their vacation time and money in Haiti? Or, better yet, become rich by setting up a vacation resort in Haiti?]

Related:

• 2010 Haiti cholera outbreak (caused by the do-gooders), which killed nearly 10,000 people

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I’ve quickly read Fire and Fury, the book that at least the media is talking about.

The author is clairvoyant in that he can see inside the heads of other people. He writes with 100 percent confidence that Donald Trump wanted to lose the 2016 election and was upset that he won. The author, an American man, is able to get inside the head of a Slovenian woman:

He admired her looks—often, awkwardly for her, in the presence of others. She was, he told people proudly and without irony, a “trophy wife.” And while he may not have quite shared his life with her, he gladly shared the spoils of it. “A happy wife is a happy life,” he said, echoing a popular rich-man truism.

How does he know what was awkward for Melania if he is not clairvoyant? Separately, a Google search for “happy wife happy life” reveals no association with income level.

Trump is accused of a lot of bad behavior, but nearly always without any source cited. This information also comes from clairvoyance?

The author doesn’t seem to have done a lot of research. He writes that “no president before Trump and few politicians ever have come out of the real estate business”. Yet George Washington made his money in real estate (see previous blog post and history.org (“Most of this wealth can be traced to Washington’s success as a land speculator, an enterprise that grew out of his early career as land surveyor.”)).

The author expresses confidence that “Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election” because unnamed “friends” of Trump supposedly believed this.

One source of a lot of stuff in the book is Steve Bannon, but there don’t seem to be any quotes, e.g., “Bannon described Trump as a simple machine. The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny.” What did Bannon actually say?

The author seldom explains where he was and how he got access to the few actual quotes. For example:

“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.

Was the author sitting with Donald Trump on a speaker phone? Sitting with Rupert Murdoch?

Since there isn’t enough substantive material to fill up a book-length manuscript, the author resorts to quoting hearsay:

“Mr. Trump said he’s never once listened to a whole Obama speech,” said one of the young people authoritatively.
“They’re so boring,” said another.

What have we learned from this? Trump actually said that he never listened to a full Barack Obama speech? The unnamed young staffer quoted thought that Trump might have said it? What?

Continuing the theme of the author’s ability to see inside others’ heads… “Jared Kushner at thirty-six prided himself on his ability to get along with older men. … Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. … Trump found the White House, an old building with only sporadic upkeep and piecemeal renovations—as well as a famous roach and rodent problem—to be vexing and even a little scary. … [after nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court] Trump would shortly not remember when he had ever wanted anyone but Gorsuch.”

How does this guy know what another person does and does not remember?

The author goes back in time to judge Fred Trump:

Jews and Israel were a curious Trump subtext. Trump’s brutish father was an often vocal anti-Semite. In the split in New York real estate between the Jews and non-Jews, the Trumps were clearly on the lesser side. The Jews were white shoe, and Donald Trump, even more than his father, was perceived as a vulgarian

If Fred Trump was a brute, why didn’t his wife sue him under New York family law and live comfortably and brute-free on at least half of the assets Fred Trump had accumulated? In the age of on-demand unilateral and profitable divorce, why would a rational woman remain married to a “brute” from 1936 until the brute’s death in 1999? The author and the publisher (Macmillan) don’t seem able to check facts with Wikipedia, which describes a white-shoe firm as one that excludes Jews.

Donald Trump is a bad husband:

An absentee father for his first four children, Trump was even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania. … He was a notorious womanizer, and during the campaign became possibly the world’s most famous masher. While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an older man’s cheating personally.

Notorious among whom? Which friends? If Donald Trump is so bad, why doesn’t Melania go down to the New York divorce courthouse and cash in? The author says that she doesn’t enjoy the publicity and attention of being First Lady. So if Donald Trump is a bad husband and being First Lady has no value, why wouldn’t an intelligent person such as Melania avail herself of our country’s no-fault divorce laws and become rich and “independent” (cashing checks every month from Donald would be the source of the “independence,” of course!)? These apparent logical contradictions are never addressed.

The author also doesn’t explain how a multi-billionaire who is purportedly a “notorious womanizer” has kept everything so quiet. Trump has been worth an average of roughly $3 billion for the past 10 years. If he is able to spend 4 percent of his wealth annually, that’s $120 million per year or $328,767 per day. Are there women who could be persuaded to have sex in exchange for something that $328,767 would buy? If not in New York then somewhere reachable by personal Boeing 757? Before the Hollywood Cleansing made the news, we had data such as “20 women slept with me to get promotion” (The Sun) from a supermarket assistant manager. That’s in one supermarket and he was only the assistant manager. The Trump Organization is listed by Wikipedia as having 22,450 employees, roughly half of whom are presumably women, and Trump was the top manager and final decision-maker. If Trump’s priority were womanizing, as the author suggests, why have we not heard about a sex-for-promotion situation (e.g., from a disgruntled employee who was passed over) within the Trump Organization? A billionaire “notorious womanizer” in the cameraphone era has left no evidence of his fun times? Why wasn’t compromising content being generated on a daily basis for the past 16 years since the Sanyo SCP-5300 was introduced?

There is virtually nothing in the book about the substantive work of the President. If you want to know why the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare was unsuccessful while the corporate tax rate cut did go through, this book won’t be helpful.

Bottom line: The book is spectacularly dull unless perhaps you know these Washington insiders personally and want to know what has been anonymously said about some of them. My opinion of Macmillan was diminished by the readily apparent sloppiness of the work.

Related:

• “Trump Named The World’s No. 1 Oppressor Of Press Freedom” (HuffPost) — if true, American consumers would have been well served by the suppression of this book!

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“I was forced to raise my kids in Texas for 14 years” (NY Post) is an interesting piece regarding how it feels to come out of a garden-variety U.S. family court lawsuit.

The husband and wife both want to get rid of each other, but are trying to be strategic about it (and certainly neither of them seems to care about the kids!). The wife is unwise enough to agree to move to Texas where divorce is not a terrifying prospect for the loser parent. Child support is capped and, by statute, the loser parent can take care of the kids up to 43 percent time, including a 30-day summer vacation. Alimony is capped and generally disfavored. The husband figures this out and sues her in Texas before they end up in some jurisdiction that is less favorable to the “breadwinner parent”.

The mom/author becomes the winner parent, but experiences the win as a loss because the husband won’t agree to let her move with her winnings (the kids) to New York or Boston (the author doesn’t mention it, but if she had moved and the husband ever moved out of Texas, she might have been able to collect 5-10X as much in child support cash; see “Relocation and Venue Litigation”).

The author forgives herself for her role in breaking up the kids’ home:

I was afraid to tell my daughters about the divorce, and I delayed the conversation. Finally, one day when they were playing catch, I told them that sometimes parents live in two different houses and that is what we would be doing and everything else would be the same. They said OK and asked if they could go back to playing catch. I realized at that moment that if I could, in fact, keep everything else the same, or close to it, their lives would be as good as any other kid’s.

This perspective is not supported by the research psychology literature, but Americans have convinced themselves of it. (some references) The “single parent” believes that she will be a role model for the girls:

In Texas, I raised my children and myself, I like to say. Being stuck first in a bad lonely marriage and then held by law in a bad lonely place turned me to steel. For 14 years, I believed that I could withstand any assault and resist weakness of any kind. I could do anything, say anything, fight for anything. I was independence personified, a show of strength that my daughters could rely upon and emulate.

This is true, statistically and anecdotally. The researchers say that children of single parents are more likely to become single parents. The lawyers say that daughters of moms who collect child support are more likely to become child support plaintiffs.

The kids’ inheritance and college funds are diverted to the lawyers:

Although our divorce was finalized in 2003, for a stretch of years after that, there were additional lawsuits over custody and visitation rights, one after another.

Not having read the Nurture Assumption, she believes that her 14 years of litigation and living where she didn’t want to live have influenced how the kids turned out:

[the now-adult daughters] are remarkable people, something I knew from the start and fought to preserve. I am proud of the fight.

Maybe this article will inspire married folks to talk to a divorce litigator at the proposed destination before they move to a new state?

Related:

• Promise of divorce ruined by children (Australia parental relocation study)

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Before New Yorker discovered a surefire path to profitability in continuously reminding readers how much smarter they are than Republicans, the magazine had space for some interesting articles. Back in 1988, for example, they published a series of long articles by John McPhee titled “The Control of Nature”. Given the latest fires then flooding/mudslides in California, a good place to start is “Los Angeles against the Mountains-I”. Here’s an excerpt explaining how the fire blocks subsequent rain from being absorbed:

In the course of a conflagration, chaparral soil, which is not much for soaking up water in the first place, experiences a chemical change and, a little below its surface, becomes waterproof.

In the slow progression of normal decay, chaparral litter seems to give up to the soil what have been vaguely described as “waxlike complexes of long-chain aliphatic hydrocarbons.” These waxy substances are what make unburned chaparral soil somewhat resistant to water, or “slightly nonwettable,” as Wells and his colleagues are wont to describe it. When the wildfires burn, and temperatures at the surface of the ground are six or seven hundred centigrade degrees, the soil is so effective as an insulator that the temperature one centimetre below the surface may not be hot enough to boil water. The heavy waxlike substances vaporize at the surface and recondense in the cooler temperatures below. Acting like oil, they coat soil particles and establish the hydrophobic layer—one to six centimetres down.

In the first rains after a fire, water quickly saturates the thin permeable layer, and liquefied soil drips downhill like runs of excess paint. These miniature debris flows stripe the mountainsides with miniature streambeds—countless scarlike rills that are soon the predominant characteristic of the burned terrain. As more rain comes, each rill is going to deliver a little more debris to the accumulating load in the canyon below. But, more to the point, each rill—its natural levees framing its impermeable bed—will increase the speed of the surface water. As rain sheds off a mountainside like water off a tin roof, the rill network, as it is called, may actually cube the speed, and therefore the power, of the runoff. The transport capacity of the watershed—how much bulk it can move—may increase a thousandfold. The rill network is prepared to deliver water with enough force and volume to mobilize the deposits lying in the canyons below.

More:

• the complete Control of Nature series
• book version of the same material

[Let’s compare this 1988 piece, just as interesting 30 years later, to what they’ve published lately:

• an article on Oprah Winfrey maybe running for President
• “What the Salvadorans Being Kicked Out by Trump Face Back Home”: “Trump’s revocation of temporary protected status threatens to send two hundred thousand people back to one of the most dangerous countries in the world.” (statistically safer than New Orleans and roughly 2X the murder rate of Washington, D.C. according to citylab.com)
• “Under Trump, a Hard Test for Howard University”: “Trump’s nomination of DeVos, a billionaire businesswoman whom Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, called the “least qualified nominee in a historically unqualified Cabinet,” was seen as another affront.”
• “The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump”: “Chaotic, corrupt, incurious, infantile, grandiose, and obsessed with gaudy real estate, Donald Trump is of a Neronic temperament. … there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land.” (maybe the smarter choice for American voters was Hillary Clinton?)

Who will want to read the above in 2048?]

 

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My California Facebook friends are still lamenting the new tax rates and advocating for California to run a charity-in-lieu-of-state-tax scam (see nytimes).

What is the top rate in California for personal income tax?

• 37 percent federal
• 13.3 percent state

(There is also the 3.8 percent Obamacare tax, but it applies only to capital gains and dividend income, which generally start from a lower base rate.)

The total top tax rate, therefore, is 50.3 percent and it applies only to people with higher-than-median incomes. The folks who say that this is intolerable were previously posting suggestions to return to an Eisenhower-era tax rate of 90+ percent (but people worked around this by paying at the capital gains rate). If they advocated for 90 percent on high incomes, why is 50.3 percent on high incomes intolerable to them?

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