I was struck by this observation by Eric Boehm in a piece at Reason.com complaining about the “Buy American” provisions in the President Biden’s infrastructure bill:

And if you can get a ton of steel made somewhere else for a lower price than the same steel produced here, then you can afford to build more things. Which is, you know, the point of Biden’s infrastructure bill.

Is “to build more things” actually the point of the infrastructure bill? Or do building things, employing Americans, bolstering American industries, and achieving political goals all play roles in it? I suspect that if we hired Chinese crews who used Chinese materials and waived all labor, environmental, and construction laws, we’d actually maximize the amount of stuff built. But that’s not the point.

Now my own personal view is that we don’t really need to build more things. I think we’re actually overbuilt already and that building more roads and bridges actually puts money in the pockets of land developers, contributing to sprawl. Most federal highway dollars by design go to building new roads; maintaining those roads is the responsibility of the states. That’s why when you drive from Illinois to Iowa, Wisconsin, or Indiana you can’t help but be struck by how much better the roads quite suddenly become. That’s because our neighboring states do better jobs of maintaining their roads than we do. What we really need to do is decommission some of the infrastructure that’s already built, identify what’s really useful, and maintain that.

Sadly, I doubt that’s what will happen. What I think will happen is the between three and five years will be spent in the planning and litigation phases of infrastructure before they actually get around to doing anything and when the construction phase actually begins the dollars appropriated won’t go nearly as far as had been expected.

Yesterday we had our goddaughter, her husband, and their 21 month old daughter as guests. My goddaughter is, in the old fashioned phrase, great with child. The baby is due any day now and she’s, well, enormous. It was a pleasant evening. I was the cook, as usual. I have cooked Thanksgiving dinners, as I reminisced yesterday evening, for just about 60 years. That’s a lot of Thanksgiving dinners. We had our usual menu: smoked turkey (I smoke it for about 9 hours), dressing (an adaptation of my wife’s family recipe, mashed potatoes, gravy, braised brussels sprouts and chestnuts, cranberry mold (my wife makes this), my tart and spicy cranberry sauce, and pumpkin chiffon pie (homemade crust), homemade dinner rolls. Just about everything is from scratch. The turkey, dinner rolls, and pie crust turned out the best ever. There’s something to that experience stuff after all.

There’s a quote which is appropriate. I haven’t been able to track down the original source but it goes something like this: “Since the beginning of time old ladies have always claimed that the strawberries were sweeter when they were girls”. There’s actually a kernel of truth in that. Things really aren’t the same as they used to be. Some things are better; some are worse; some are much worse.

You may not be aware of it but the stuff that’s sold as whipping cream in general is not whipping cream. Short version: if it says “Ultra-Pasteurized” on the container, it’s not whipping cream. When I began my Thanksgiving shopping I was shocked to learn that one of the ingredients on which I depended was no longer made. Dean’s Whipping Cream. That was actually whipping cream. If you look at the list of ingredients, there was only one: cream.

But Dean’s went out of business last year, it was acquired by Prairie Farms, and Prairie Farms does not produce real whipping cream. Like most products on the market they produce an ultra-pasteurized product made from cream with a gelling agent added, probably carrageenan (from seaweed). The gelling agent makes it appear to whip but it’s not actually whipping—it’s gelling.

So, if you’ve ever wondered why an old recipe doesn’t come out the way you expect it to, check you ingredients. The producer may have changed them on you. Or the ingredient may not be available at all.

In the case of whipping cream, after checking Jewel, Mariano’s (Kroger), Aldi, and several other grocery chains to no avail I checked Whole Foods and, sure enough, they carry a product, Kalona Super Natural Whipping Cream, that is actually whipping cream. Oddly, Jewel does carry a cream cheese product that is actually cream cheese. Yes, cream cheese ain’t what it used to be, either.

What is it about the Internet that seems to produce and/or attract flimflammers? Low barriers to entry? Something else? I have always thought that both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were flimflammers and recent news provides additional support for that view. Tremendously rich and successful flimflammers but flimflammers nonetheless.

It also says something about the global economy that two of the richest people in the world are flimflammers.

I hear that Alexa is losing money. Not surprising—Echo was always a loss leader. You cannot turn money losing lines of business into profitable ones with loss leaders or, at least, it’s darned hard.

There’s at least one thing we can thank Alexa for, the funniest Saturday Night Live sketch in years, “Echo Silver”.

I found Stephen Eide and Carolyn D. Gorman’s report at Manhattan Contrarian simultaneously encouraging and frustrating. Here’s the nub:

The concept of a Continuum of Care system can guide discussions of accountability in mental health policy. In recent years, mental health has been a leading focus of news coverage, with policymakers at all levels of government regularly questioned as to their plans for reform, though the direction of mental health policy reform is often vague, if defined at all.

To function as a tool for accountability, Continuum of Care must be a term of distinction. Not all public mental health programs serve the seriously mentally ill, and not all programs that provide some benefit to the seriously mentally ill should be considered part of the Continuum of Care.

A significant number of major problems facing us could be ameliorated with better mental health care including homelessnesss, crime, mass killings, and drug abuse. I’m afraid it would require more than Continuum of Care but a sea change in how we think about mental health.

We’ve got to remove the stigma and take it more seriously at the same time. Families and those troubled themselves are reluctant to seek care. And the cases in which care is not a choice should be considered more critically than at present.

I think that Joe Chialo has hit upon something at Worldcrunch. France and Germany should stop sending aid to African countries and start investing more capital there. We should be doing the same in Central and South America.

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I know why they and we don’t do that. It’s too risky. The money would just disappear without doing much to boost the economies of those countries. Just as foreign aid does and for the same reasons.

I thought you might find this piece by Casey Crownhart at MIT Technology Review interesting. It has three relevant graphs and the most relevant is the one above.

I have four problems with President Biden’s declaration about the U. S. paying “loss and damage” to poorer countries for its emissions. First, the president doesn’t have the legal authority to make such a commitment. The Constitution is quite clear about that.

Second, the whole concept is implicitly Marxist and wrong, dividing the world into exploiters (the United States and other rich countries) and exploited.

Third, those supporting “loss and damage” imagine a completely one-sided ledger. What they conveniently ignore is the contributions to modern agriculture, medicine, and transportation that the rich countries have made and from which the remainder have benefited. A lot of people in those poor countries owe their lives to the rich countries. Isn’t that worth anything?

Finally, it has the typical problem with foreign aid: poor people in rich countries paying rich people in poor countries. If it does anything respecting carbon emissions it will exacerbate them since the rich guys into whose hands the money flows tend to have higher carbon emissions than anybody else in their home countries.

Also, why start at 1750? Why not start at 10,000BC? Weren’t people emitting carbon then?

The military is falling far behind in its recruitment goals. At Army Times John Ferrari and John Kem propose four prospective strategies for remedying that:

• Put people in Recruiting Command on the promotions track. Right now it’s a dead end.
• Use commercially available sales software to improve recuiting.
• Decentralize procurement as it pertains to recruiting.
• Clearly articulate what it means by quality and why it believes most Americans are not qualified for recruitment into the Armed Forces.

I was surprised that not going to war when we’re not fully committed to winning didn’t make the cut. I would think that an endless meatgrinder from which victory was denied would be demotivating.

I’m seeing quite a few opinion pieces calling for billionaires to be “abolished” (in the NYT and The Nation just to name two). I wonder how they intend to go about it. Back in the 1960s when the highest marginal personal income tax rate was 90%, there were still very rich people (Joe Kennedy’s net worth was about $500,000,000, well over a billion in today’s dollars) so pretty clearly it can’t be taxed away.

I’m completely in favor of ending subsidies to billionaires but it’s hard to drum up any interest in that.