Home » Open thread 10/4/22

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Open thread 10/4/22 — 33 Comments

  1. The WSJ is on a roll today. In the previous post, commenter Jefferson’s Revenge recommended Walter Russell Mead’s editorial on Russia/Ukraine – I agree. Gerald Baker’s editorial is also great as is Bill McGurn’s. And the lead editorials are fantastic as well! Good day to pick up a copy if you’re not an on-line subscriber.

  2. you have declared regime change, you tried to destroy the Russian economy, there is no off ramp,

    increasingly we may have no off ramp with a regime that wages wars on preachers, that locks up cancer stricken grandmas, healers like dr simone gold,

  3. This recent mini financial crisis in the UK is continuing to percolate. I haven’t found any great links, so this is mostly TV financial news.

    Liz Truss has reversed her proposed tax cut. Some think she is lacking in spine, others say she never would have gotten the cut through parliament. Some Tories were rumbling about her ouster. The big pushback from Friday (I think) was the BoE doing a complete reversal on gov. bond selling/buying ending up with the latter. News today suggests that the IMF actually contacted the PM and told her not to do the tax cut.

    Purportedly, the BoE bond buying may have helped avert one or more bankruptcies. Credit Suisse has been engaged with investors and clients trying to reassure them that they will still exist next year.

    Larry Summers, of all people, has been sounding a quite alarm about all this. He said that these things usually don’t lead to a major crisis, but sometimes it does. Some people have likened this mini panic to the BNP Paribas crisis of 2007 that led to the Bear Stearns liquidation and later the Lehman melt down of 2008.

    This part is just my amateur speculation: People have discussed for years the notion that when developed economies spend many years in an ultra-low interest rate environment, with high debt loads, it may become impossible to return to historically normal rates. This mini crisis could be a reflection of that.

  4. This strong two day rally in stocks is almost certainly caused by the expectation or hope that interest rates will not go as high as was feared. Perhaps investors think that the US Fed is absorbing some of this bond market turmoil and will take it to heart.

  5. Tax cuts would be the less stupid thing possibles thats why its not done better debauching the currency

    What is the point of being a tory anymore

  6. “It’s me… the tomato from upstairs.”
    – Marilyn Monroe, ‘The Seven Year Itch’ –

  7. My fall tomatoes are growing, but not sure if they will bare fruit before the cold weather or not. Hard to say when the first real cold weather comes. If it is just one or two nights of lite frost, I can cover them up. And we seem to have had a second batch of grasshoppers hatch around September this year. The old grasshoppers really went after my spring tomato plants in the summer.

  8. Unlike general chemistry, entry level “ Organic Chemistry” is mostly rote memorization . Lots of flash cards needed to study and pass that class.

  9. Students of that NYU prof say “We are very concerned about our scores, and find that they are not an accurate reflection of the time and effort put into this class”

    I don’t think I have to point out to this crowd the problem with that complaint.

  10. Teaching the Gen Physics course for the bio, chem, and worse premeds was an exercise in masochism. We made sure no one ever taught the course two times in a row. Walking in the first day of class, the faculty were greeted by sullen faces and crossed arms. They didn’t want to be there, and were convinced the faculty were there to ruin their plans for med school. No matter how much effort a faculty person put into teaching that course, including extended office hours and help sessions, it was never enough.

    The phrase, “But I studied hours for that exam! How could I possibly get a C (or even a D or F)?!” was used so often it was a cliche. I heard from my colleagues in the chem department, take our experience and multiply by 5 regarding the orgo course.

  11. I think our garden is responsible for at least half of the 180 million ton worldwide tomato production. We slightly underestimated the production of our garden in our new West Virginia home and have been trying everything we can think of to use our tomatoes. We’ve dehydrated tomatoes, canned tomatoes, made tomato sauce and given as many away as our neighbors will take, but alas many tomatoes will end up rotting on the vine.

    We had a similar but less drastic problem with cucumbers earlier in the year. It is amazing the amount of food a relatively small garden can produce.

  12. In East Texas I have occasionally seen the wild “ Night shade” plant which has a small green fruit similar to a tomatillo in appearance. The plant even has some similarities to an edible tomato plant. According to my late father, who was a farmers’s market tomato grower, these wild “ night shade” plants are poisonous.

  13. Gregory,
    Enjoy it while you can. If this is the first year that tomatoes have been grown on that property in a while, you likely had a “ free” year from pest such as shield bugs. Each year you grow, the pest population is likely to increase without your interference .

  14. jon baker:

    Interesting. This is the first year that we grew tomatoes on this property. There was a garden there previously that still had asparagus plants but I’m not sure if they grew tomatoes or not. I guess we’ll see what happens next year.

  15. Nightshade grows like hell in northern Illinois. Pretty plant really. I once read you could get accused of being a witch in medieval England if it was growing in your yard. Evidently you could make a tea of it to kill annoying neighbors pets.

  16. How could I possibly get a C (or even a D or F)?!”

    I know exactly how I got a C. The class was slow, so I skipped all the lectures, which, it seems, included some quizzes. Yes, I was headed for an F, but I showed up for the final and got the high score. The professor didn’t quite know how to handle that, so gave me a C. This was a Ivy League college and the students were mostly premed.

  17. }}} Unlike general chemistry, entry level “ Organic Chemistry” is mostly rote memorization . Lots of flash cards needed to study and pass that class.

    As Neo suggested, it, along with Calculus, is one of two classes pre-meddies take that they have limited need for, but which weeds out many of those who might otherwise make it to med school.

    The value of either, in terms of “the resulting doctor” is not unreasonable to question, in itself, and this might have been wiser. Dumbing down anything is just not that bright. If they stopped requiring that, then you would be able to have “before/after” stats that might have been useful 10,15y down the road to determine if there was a valid reason to reinstate. Now, who knows? Different schools will dumb it down to different levels, so there is no vaguely uniform change to consider things against.

  18. }}} I know exactly how I got a C. The class was slow, so I skipped all the lectures, which, it seems, included some quizzes. Yes, I was headed for an F, but I showed up for the final and got the high score. The professor didn’t quite know how to handle that, so gave me a C. This was a Ivy League college and the students were mostly premed.

    LOLZ. I got a “B”.

    There was a class in “Abstract Algebra” (the theory behind Algebras, for which there is more than one, just as there is with “base notations” — base 2, base 10, base 16, etc.)

    The class was one of the earliest I ever had to sign up for, and so was not a great class for my attendance.

    However, it was a GREAT class for me, it’s the only “theory” course which I sucked up like a sponge, AND the book (“Abstract Algebra, by Violet Hachmeister”) was one of the best math textbooks I’ve ever used (out of probably >20 — some courses use the professor’s notes only), all of which were 4000 or above (4 grad level courses).

    So I rarely came to class, and the class had only two tests, a mid-term and a final.

    It was also a very small class, which would have been cancelled for low turnout, but it was required for the math major so they had to offer it occasionally.

    So, I show up for the mid-term, and get the second best grade in the class (the #1 grade went to the school “math wizard”.) The professor seemed rather astonished.

    So, along comes the final. I’d say I did just as well, but the prof nitpicked the eph out of everything I wrote, taking off points here and there for any tiny thing I did not lay out in Long Form… thus reducing the “A” I’d earned to a “B”.

    Not the only time I lost significant points on a test because the professor was a total dick.

    Another time, I got back the final and there were points taken off for fiddly BS, again. I went to the prof, and got him to ack that the points I lost all were over things that he knew (because I DID attend his class, and did interact quite a bit) that I knew from interactions in class. He refused to give me the points, with the explanation that he pretty much did not like me. :-/

    Then there was the small Archery class I got a “B” in, because it was a small class, and there were about 6 students in it, and the teacher did not want to deal with the crap she’d have gotten if she gave everyone an “A”… so I got the “B”, as I was the lowest-ranked “A”. But by the criteria provided at the beginning of the course, I’d earned an “A”.
    :-S

    Needless to say, I doubt if schools have gotten any better at making their grades honestly objective.

  19. }}} The phrase, “But I studied hours for that exam! How could I possibly get a C (or even a D or F)?!”

    “Hmmm. Did you get the test back?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did you go over it to see what you lost points on?”
    “Y-yes.”
    “Did you find any mistakes made by the graders, in that you correctly answered a question that they took points off for?”
    “N-no?”
    (smiling) “Then what, exactly, is the nature of your quandary?”

  20. }}} I think our garden is responsible for at least half of the 180 million ton worldwide tomato production.

    The house my mother bought when I was 10 had a big Grapefruit tree in the back yard. It was “Duncan” grapefruits. Duncans are a fairly sweet GF, so most would like them… but they are not as popular at the store, because instead of that smooth golden-citrus skin, it tents to have the same skin but with mottled tiny brown (“tan”) spots all over it…. the more brown spots, the sweeter it will be.

    https://www.healthyandnaturalworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/duncan-grapefruit-1.jpg

    Well, on the one hand, if you loved grapefruits, it was a spectacular tree. OTOH, if everyone ate two a day, and you had a Brady Bunch living there, there would only be about 800 fruits left over at the end of the year. 😛

    It was kind of a pain in the ass for me, as, of course, I was responsible for keeping the yard tidy, which meant I had to dispose of all the damned uneaten fruits. And the vast majority were about 50% larger than my adult hand is, and while my hands are not huge, they ain’t small, either.

    I usually tended to just run over them with the mower. :-/

    But yeah, some people don’t realize how much output there can be from a single source, if it’s naturally fecund.

    Kinda Like Benjamin Franklin’s Mom. 😀

  21. Knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

  22. Would you like to peel a tomato?

    –Pookie Adams to her shy boyfriend, “The Sterile Cuckoo” (1969)

    “Cuckoo” was Liza Minelli’s breakout film role, playing a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl. It’s still a charming film situated in early sixties America, when college boys wore ties and button-downs.

    The theme song, “Come Saturday Morning,” was a dellight too.

    –The Sandpipers, “Come Saturday Morning”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nIdGutgymY&t=99s

  23. A doctor friend joked that when she was in med school, occasionally a professor put some calculus on the blackboard and “half the class would faint dead away.”

  24. @ huxley > “Would you like to peel a tomato?”

    I can still see that exact scene as if I was at the movie theater.
    Teen-ager at an impressionable age — what can I say? — and I still love the song as well.

    That’s about all I remember though. No idea now what the plot was (if there was one).

  25. @ miguel — thanks for the link to Kanekoa’s post on the election machines.
    I looked at another of his articles, which was quite interesting. I knew most of the story from other punditry, but found the answer to a question that never seemed to have one before.

    https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/google-rigged-the-2020-election
    (because, of course they did)

    Just past midnight on May 31, 2017, Donald Trump tweeted a six-word phrase that wound up becoming more famous than anyone could have anticipated: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”

    In a leaked document titled ‘covfefe Translate Easter egg,’ Google engineers even went as far as deleting the word, “covfefe” and its meaning “I will stand up” from the Arabic dictionary and replacing it with a shrug emoji in order to further their anti-Trump political agenda.

    A few clicks of the mouse on the part of some Google employees, and voilà: Trump’s viral tweet no longer made any sense.

    The screencaps show the process quite clearly.

    I wish I knew Arabic, because even at the height of the brouhaha, I never saw that meaning suggested by the right wingers, not even in reply to the Washington Post’s “fact check,” but Google appears to think that was a legitimate Arab expression, and what Trump meant (why he used it might require looking into what was going on internationally at the time).

    Anything WaPo presents as “fake news,” I now automatically interpret as factual.

  26. Would you like to peel a tomato?

    AesopFan:

    I was hoping someone would pick up on that line! Minelli was so striking, funny and vulnerable. She got an Academy Award nomination for the role.

    However, unlike most Manic Pixie Dream Girl movies, it ends bittersweet. The boy is not redeemed by her life force and she doesn’t find love and happiness. If one wants a happy ending, one must go back to “Bringing Up Baby” with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.

    You might enjoy this blog post in which a woman recounts seeing “Cuckoo” at a drive-in with her cousin and two young sons:

    _______________________________

    When the second feature came on, however, the boys displayed immediate interest. It was The Sterile Cuckoo, a cute, sweet movie starring Liza Minnelli. We hadn’t planned to stay for it, but every time Mary Veazey said we had to leave, the boys protested. This was a real good movie, Mom, so we stayed.

    We stayed so long that we ran into the scene in the little motel room in which Minneli’s college freshman girl, Pookie Adams, offers Wendell Burton’s sweet, shy freshman boy the opportunity to “Peel the Tomato.”

    And there we were, as they say, ketched.

    The boys in the back seat were leaning head and shoulders into the front. They were very, very quiet. I don’t think they were breathing.

    Their mother and I didn’t breathe either, because if we had, laughter would have bounced off the screen and echoed throughout the lot.

    https://kathywaller1.com/tag/the-stirlee-cuckoo/

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