THE CRAFT OF COLD SPRING SHOPS.

Highlights from a recent visit to Illinois Railway Museum.

Two Milwaukee Electric composite interurban cars, rebuilt at Cold Spring Shops from deck-roofed cars that looked like big streetcars into cars that looked more like mid-1920s interurbans, remain in preservation.  (There is at least one more car body, being used as a vacation house in Grand Bend, Ontario, but it's in rough shape.)

Coach 1129 (the 1111 designation is a museum member's idea of a sight gag) looks good externally, here under roof but poking into the sunlight, the way they used to do at the Public Service Building.

Parlor Car Menominee 1135, which for years was with 1129, has been moved elsewhere on the museum grounds (to get some stabilization work done?)

The Electroliner rebuilding project continues, here work motor D-13 couples to a tavern-lounge section to move it to Cold Spring Shops for work.

Exaggerating, only slightly.  The work motor often occupies the same storage track as the 'Liner, and 'Liner cars are being moved, one by one, to the electric car shop.

IN PLACE OF HERO PROJECTS, INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS.

Reason's Steven Greenhut, in common with most of Reason's transportation writers, is no fan of high speed trains, especially California's project, which, like the old Chicago - New York Electric Air Line, is starting out with some expensive construction between Nowhere and Vacant Fields.

Chicago-New York Electric Air Line

Image from New York and Chicago history page.

At the conclusion of his article, however, is a sensible suggestion. "If state officials weren't spending so much money on these wasteful rail-related transit projects, they'd have extra money to fix roads, bridges and freeways—and to provide realistic transit projects rather than overbuilt boondoggles designed with a future fantasy train in mind."

Yes, additional frequencies on the existing regional routes (Amtrak and the city-specific commuter services), making better connections between the Los Angeles and San Diego regional trains, and filling in some of the gaps in the rail network (connect Bakersfield to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo) are likely to be more productive at less cost than a San Francisco to Los Angeles Neubaustrecke that, like its German and Japanese counterparts, will have to be tunnelled through difficult terrain.

The roads?  Perhaps it's in the public interest to let some of them crumble.

SKIRMISHES IN THE COLD CIVIL WAR.

It's heating up.  Anarchists and Patriot Bikers slug it out in Berkeley.  A Middlebury faculty member goes to hospital because students object to her interviewing Charles Murray.  Now a Montana Congressional candidate may have boosted his turnout by roughing up a Guardian reporter.

It’s one thing for idiot college kids to be violent. But a middle-aged Congressional candidate?

It is disgusting to me that some conservatives are defending this thuggery, saying that the reporter had it coming.

Yes, conserving bourgeois norms ought to be the prime directive for people calling themselves conservatives.  And yet this Kulturkampf may not be resolved short of normals marching into the common room at Yale or the producers' desks at NBC and dictating the terms of surrender.

REFEREEING IS A CRAPSHOOT.

Retraction Watch notes that Cogent Social Sciences have withdrawn a paper submitted as a way of exposing the rot in gender studies. Publisher blames bad choice of reviewer for publication of hoax paper on penis as “social construct.” The retraction doesn't restore much confidence in the enterprise.

The article was received by a Senior Editor and sent out for peer review as is standard. Two reviewers agreed to review the paper and it was accepted with no changes by one reviewer, and with minor amends by the other. On investigation, although the two reviewers had relevant research interests, their expertise did not fully align with this subject matter and we do not believe that they were the right choice to review this paper.

And yet the editor relied on the algorithm that picked the reviewers, or something, rather than doing a proper vetting. One reason I let my academic electronic mail go away was to shut down the spammy referee requests from the new journals I never heard of. (If an editor really wants my advice on a paper dealing with, for instance, heavy industry, and he's resourceful enough to find me, perhaps I'll have a look.)

And retractions of papers submitted to expose weaknesses in peer review are not as rare as you might think, dear reader.

MISCHARACTERIZING CROWN POINT.

I confess to enjoying NBC's Chicago series of assorted public servants dealing with a community that sometimes go bad, whilst somehow managing to hop into bed with colleagues, or break off the affair, and their on the job performance doesn't suffer, and Human Resources don't get involved.  (Yes, anything can happen in a cartoon.)

Sometimes, though, the inattention to detail, which includes the dispatcher rolling trucks to a corner nothing like the real corner, or the mispronunciations of streets and place names, is jarring.  (Yes, even if NBC can arrange cameo appearances of the Stanley Cup or starters for the Cubs.)

But when the producers attempted to characterize Crown Point, Indiana, as a sundown town the mayor found that a gaffe too far.

Chicago police are investigating the murder of a black male in Chicago who was burned to death by someone who accused him of being a pedophile.

The victim had recently been released from jail for statutory rape. Police find out the victim and his girlfriend he was accused of committing the crime against, who is white, lived in Crown Point.

When they visit the aunt of the victim she tells police her nephew was in jail not because his girlfriend was underage, but because she was white.

"And that don't fly in Crown Point, Indiana," she said.

In a later scene two female Chicago police detectives visit a sheriff's department in Crown Point and talk to the arresting officer, who comes off as a sexist buffoon.

They also spoke with some persons of interest in a seedy bar near a railroad junction, more opportunities to show off bad-ass women.

But the railroad junction looked like one in Griffith.  Crown Point used to be on the Chicago - Indianapolis - Columbus - Pittsburgh Panhandle Line of The Pennsylvania Railroad, but that's long gone.

The old courthouse in Crown Point has been repurposed as a series of shops offering artisanal stuff.

There's also a John Dillinger museum on the ground floor, as it was from the Crown Point lockup that Public Enemy N^o. 1's confederates busted him out, leading the G-Men on a merry chase that included shootouts in Wisconsin and at a Chicago theater, where the chase ended.

Perhaps that history motivated the script writers to set the investigation in Crown Point.  The mayor and the local convention and visitors' bureau would like NBC to apologize.

INVESTING INTO TWO BUBBLES?

Recently retired Nevada and previously Wisconsin and Northern Illinois basketball coach Jane Albright wants to help set up a new academic program.

Albright, who coached Wichita State between Wisconsin and Nevada, said Nevada is now her home. She plans to become a professor at Nevada, with the help of former NIU and Nevada athletic director Cary Groth.

“I am going into educational leadership,” Albright said. “We’re going to try to start a sports management degree here. Cary Groth is leading that.”

There's excess capacity in higher education these days, and putting money into sports doesn't look like a wise investment, whether it's professional teams holding up communities for new arenas, or higher education continually restructuring the conference.

On the other hand, between scholarship athletes on prominent teams behaving badly, and difficult people serving as coaches, they'll not lack for case studies.

RIDING JOHN BEGGS'S HORSESHOE CURVE.

I wish I could have claimed to have invented the bike trail on abandoned interurban railroad grades, but they simply offered relatively level places to ride long distances, and until the cuts were filled in, sometimes featured opportunities to duck under busy streets.

Now the Waukesha to Oconomowoc section of Milwaukee Electric, which last saw trains in 1941, is the Lake County Trail, and if we get anything resembling late spring or summer riding conditions, it mostly offers those relatively level places.  "The Lake Country Trail follows an old railroad line for most of its route, and because of that is relatively flat, save for a section in the middle where the rolling Kettle Moraine challenged my weak winter legs and lungs."  The rolling Kettle Moraine also challenged the builders of the interurban line.  The Milwaukee Road already occupied the low ground north of Pewaukee Lake and onwards toward Oconomowoc.  Delafield, to the south of the lakes, offered a passenger population without rail service.  Thus the interurban followed the south shore of Pewaukee Lake, providing service to Waukesha Beach, an amusement park, then tackled the moraine on a twisty grade, and returned to lake level between the two Nemahbin Lakes.  "I huffed and puffed my way up a beast of a hill by Naga-Waukee Golf Course and cruised down the other side toward Highway 83, where big-box stores and fast-food places dominated the landscape and broke the back-in-time spell."  That infill development followed Interstate 94, not the interurban.

The article offers recollections of adolescence in the Lake District and suggestions for places to make a journey break to go with the railroad lore.

STILL SEEKING THOSE MISSING MARKETS.

Ronald W. Dworkin, M.D. prays there will be no more shenanigans in crafting a federal health insurance bill.  It's a long article that will reward careful study (and your own introspection.)  The author gets off to a good start.

When it comes to working with one person or a system composed of people, whether it is a small system like the doctor-patient relationship or a large system like health care, a doctor knows that theories must give way to practicalities, an acceptance of imperfections and impurities, and the natural give-and-take between people. Today, serious health care reform demands this sensible outlook as much as the doctor-patient relationship does. It demands skepticism, not ideology.

Perhaps the place to introduce skepticism is with the continued focus on insurance and liability and containing costs.

So much time and energy spent on new theories of health care delivery, so many papers published on the vital role of quality indicators and preventive medicine, so many conferences held on accountable care organizations, the Cleveland Clinic model, health savings accounts, and other delivery methods, and yet the [shares of health care expenditures among payment sources] have barely moved! Both progressive and conservative theories designed to revolutionize health care have proved ineffectual. All that has happened over the past four decades is that [total spending] has steadily grown bigger, in part from population growth, but also from the introduction of more services, drugs, and technologies, and the increase in prices—the same old story.

The most relevant change introduced by the ACA, at least for the average person, lies below the level of ideology: The ACA simply shifted the financial burden of health care from one group of working people to another. People who suffered in the past—for example, those with incomes just above the old Medicaid eligibility level—can now go on Medicaid. Some people working in small businesses are now eligible for government subsidies. Yet other working people have actually been hurt by the ACA. Young low-income families who in the past refused health insurance must now buy it, even though it comes with a $6,000 deductible, making it useless for most such people. But it’s either that or pay a fine.

It's either take out a second mortgage on the house to buy that premium, and still face the deductible, or take the tax penalty, which is smaller.  But nobody wants to face the messy reality that public provision of medical services in the absence of price discovery is going to involve tapping into a lot of tax money.  But the grand fiction goes on and on and on.

Moreover, people with slightly above-average incomes in the individual insurance market must now pay more to subsidize the more favorable position of those just below them. Many working people saw their hours cut, or their labor outsourced to contractors, so that employers would not have to pay for their health care. Some low-income working families became eligible for enormous subsidies on the ACA exchanges while similarly positioned families working in a different environment (for example, in fast food restaurants) were eligible for much smaller subsidies that were manifestly insufficient to cover their insurance costs. So it’s no wonder that people in this category positively hate the ACA.

Curiously (or not), the people who did well under the ACA are the people who always do well. These include the rich, because the rich can take any hit. The one hit the rich took, a new tax on dividends, hardly elicited a yawn from them. People working full-time for large businesses also continue to do well. Their Cadillac plans remain tax-deductible, with the implementation of a tax on part of their premiums continually postponed. In addition, large businesses retain their advantage in pooling risk. And the very poor continue to do well—they have Medicaid. The overall state of affairs today is thus not appreciably different from the 1980s or 1990s.

The overall state of affairs today is experienced rent-seekers continue to extract rents. Doesn't matter whether it's health insurance or weapons that the generals don't want, but defense plant workers and owners do.

EVERYBODY LOSES.

An annoying Guardian reporter barges in on a private conversation between a Montana candidate for elective office and other reporters and the candidate, Republican Greg Gianforte, reacts badly.

Charlie "Never Trump" Sykes uses the opportunity to comment on the coarsening of the culture more generally.

Without prejudging this case, there is no question that Donald Trump is the role-model-in-chief. And clearly you have a lot of people who have been modeling their behavior on Donald Trump who has declared the media to be the enemy of the people. I think this is going to be fascinating to see how this plays out,. Will the conservative media decide that, oh, beating up on a liberal reporter is somehow is not that big a deal? Will it divide along those lines? I can't say what was going on inside this guy's head.

But there's no question about it. You can't not notice the coarsening of the culture and of the political dialogue. I'm in Wisconsin. You know one of our big rising stars is Sheriff David Clarke who has become kind of a superstar in right wing circles for threatening to put people on the ground. He's actually facing lawsuits now for actually threatening to beat up somebody who talked to him on an airplane. And this is kind of this macho, testosterone, fired-up style that has become popular.

There's enough of this no-platforming, or using of muscle, going around in politics that the predictable tu quoque exchanges are burning up the web.  I'll confess that a Guardian reporter complaining, "You body-slammed me and broke my glasses," provokes thoughts about annoying sanctimonious dweebs getting what they deserve, which may or may not help Mr Gianforte as voters go to the polls.

But Mr Gianforte is Right Wisconsin's Winner of the Day for today, and not for body-slamming sanctimonious dweebs.  "Republican Greg Gianforte has to be thankful for early voting."  The Law of Unintended Consequences bites Democrats again. "Democrats are very protective of early voting. We wonder how they feel about early voting today, at least in Montana."  But if Mr Gianforte wins today, we'll see if the House seats him.

Shall we be grateful there haven't been fistfights or canings in the Capitol itself?

THE ONLY RESORT REMAINING IS A TRULY STUPID AND FUTILE GESTURE.

If you're a member of a fraternity, you're likely dealing with the higher education establishment's scorn.  Or perhaps their contempt: you're deplorable, or irredeemable.  Here's Professor Althouse, about to engage the legalities.  "Examples of anti-male talk that the shapers of campus speech should address: 'toxic masculinity,' 'testosterone poisoning,' 'frat boy,' 'bro.'"  If they're going to treat you with contempt, perhaps laughter, as the Fijis at Galesburg's Knox College engage in, is the only possible response.

Several Knox College fraternity brothers have reportedly been punished after they loudly played the song “Proud To Be An American” as student activists marched against sexual assault.

Earlier this month, Knox College’s Students Against a Sexist Society organized a Take Back the Night march, part of a national campaign that raises awareness about rape.

Fiji's leadership have already begun their constructive self-criticism.

In a statement released to the Knox Student, the fraternity said that “brothers involved partook in a minor act of ignorance towards marchers walking and yelling directly at our house.”

The statement also mentioned that these members “had been subject to disciplinary action,” the Knox Student said, but it’s unclear what that punishment entailed.

Never mind that hard-three hedgehogs social justice warriors apparently have carte blanche to walk past fraternity houses and yell at the residents therein.  The fraternity members have not been sufficiently indoctrinated.

Knox College’s Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, commonly known as “FIJI,” has been actively involved sexual-assault prevention, the Knox Student noted. Working with the Title IX office and the director of Multicultural Student Advisement, it has held several events about rape, consent, and sexual violence. All members have also completed training about sexual assault.

Perhaps the diversity hustlers are incompetent, and they're rendering ineffective training. Turf them out.

THE POTENTIAL IS STILL ON THE RAILS.

In The American Interest, Christopher Miller has reservations about China's program of public roads, including assistance to the highway departments of neighboring countries.

China itself will discover that lending money to its more poorly governed neighbors is not always a profitable business. And foreign policy analysts who see the Belt and Road as a Chinese-style Marshall Plan will be disappointed as the bubble of sky-high expectations pops. For the United States, there is little to fear in the Belt and Road. Asia may get some useful new roads, but the region will also see the limits of Chinese power projection, even in a sphere such as infrastructure where China has a comparative advantage.

The headline numbers associated with the Belt and Road are impressive, and purposefully so. Asia needs lots of infrastructure and an economic vision. China has an impressive track record building highways and high-speed trains across its own vast territory. With Washington distracted by domestic politics, Beijing rightly sees a chance to set the agenda in Asia. Hence the initiative, which was first launched in 2015, has been repeatedly expanded. Last weekend’s summit in Beijing demonstrated China’s ability to convene heads of state—at least when it is promising them vast sums of money.

The article focusses on the ways in which such assistance, particularly in the form of loans, might go wrong, and the ways in which more consumer buying power in China might foster exports from the neighboring countries to China.

Nowhere, though, does the article mention the Chinese intermodal trains now roving as far as England.  Nothing quite like a productive Neglected Actor.

LIVE LONGER, PAY LESS.

An obscure radio talker called Pat LaMarche thinks that ought to be the tag line for universal Medicare.  Her reasoning:  California's proposed statewide single payer bill costs out as less than her estimate of the current cost to Californians under the muddle that existed long before the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act compounded the muddle.  Perhaps, although perhaps the Californian legislators, with the lessons of Colorado's Amendment 69 in mind, are concealing what the bill is really likely to cost Californians in taxes.  (The estimates of businesses and residents leaving California, or Colorado, don't figure in my story today, as those knock-on effects, while likely to be present, aren't what interest me.)

THE OUTLINES OF THE FOURTH TURNING.

Salena Zito travels to Lake Geneva for a conversation with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Ryan believes the country may be in the middle of a 100-year correction against 20th century progressivism, which could transfer power from a one-size-fits-all federal government back to individual people in states and localities.

"I think it is really important to get local civil society and local communities with the power to innovate problem-solving," he says.

In the late 20th century, says Ryan, the left, the progressive movement, thought big government was beautiful government. "If you could consolidate power in Washington, it is more efficient," he said of left-wing thinking, "If you could send decisions to a centralized authority, we could be more efficient and more effective."

Yet this wound up stunting innovation, he says. "It dumbed-down communities. It treated everybody the same. We went to a low common denominator, and we disrupted the ability for innovation to take place."

So, to him, progressive consolidation of power dismembered civil society, local control and innovation.

"I think what we are seeing is a returning trend to reinvigorating that," he says, calling it a healthy change.

One-size-fits-all might have dumbed everything down, or it might have entangled all the creativity in process-worship and the kind of straining at gnats that anyone who has ever sat through a faculty senate meeting will appreciate.  (The language at the faculty senate tends to use bigger words and smaller gnats than the kind of nit-picking of your Sunday public affairs show, and fewer "at the end of the day" filler, but the end lack of results is the same.)

The full article is worth your attention, considering a number of ways in which Governance by Wise Experts fails to live up to the promises.

RED ON RED FRATRICIDE.

Gender is a social construct, but reconstructive surgery is problematic.  Or something.

[Wisconsin Capitol protestor Thistle] Pettersen is now engaged in a radical leftist civil war. Pettersen is attempting to sue The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice for defamation. A Go Fund Me site started to help Pettersen fund the suit says a February statement from the WNPJ “resulted in hundreds of comments and private messages aimed at harming Pettersen’s reputation and sense of well-being as a community member, as well as denouncing her participation at an environmentalist event that she was a key organizer for.”

What did the snowflake do to provoke a meltdown from the Perpetually Aggrieved?  "She identifies herself as a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) and promotes these views publicly."  That puts her (she doesn't go as xe, xys?) as (gasp!) agreeing with cultural conservatives, if only for reasons that are subtle.

It's not about toying with ideas.  It's about wanting to be able to work the subversives over in Lefortovo.  Losers.

BUILD IT BY INCREMENTS.

Cold Spring Shops friendly connection David Levinson contemplates Australia's envy of the fast trains of Germany or China.

The most recent proposals of CLARA [a private initiative to develop railroads and land] use a form of land value capture to help fund the system, by developing stations along the route, and developing suburbs/towns/cities around those intermediate stations.  I love new planned communities, and this is an exciting idea. I also love value capture. So this is a promising endeavour. But land development on greenfields often takes longer than anticipated, and thus may take a long time to justify the investment, and thus leave investors hanging if projections are not realised, or like so many infrastructure projects before, result in a government bailout. Nevertheless, if the tracks are on the ground, and the first (or second) round of investors are wiped out, the people of Australia will have gotten capital investment in infrastructure at a huge discount, though still be on the hook for operations and maintenance.

That's a throwback to the railway mania, or perhaps to the dot.com mania earlier in the century.  But playing SimTrump doesn't always work out well, on a computer simulation, or for railroad promoters, such as the interurbans of the early twentieth century.

In Australia, though, the venture capital might come from the government.

Peter Thornton has a fact-filled slide deck: Let’s get real about high speed rail in Australia, which comes down against building a full system at first, instead recommends the government, not a private entity, assume the risk and reward and improve shorter distance routes (namely Newcastle to Sydney), and expanding the system over time, rather than conceiving it as one giant project. The government could then sell the operating business and use the revenue to fund the next big thing.

The Australians are already operating a variant of Britain's 125 mph diesel trains. Maybe, as the slideshow illustrates (oh, and check out the antipodean high speed train engaging in street running while you're there) it's not worth spending tens of millions of dollars to shave a few minutes off the running time.

I suppose we could convert the "Free Rein to 110" campaign to "Free Rein to 190" for Australia's metric speed limits.  But getting to 200 or to 240 is feasible with existing diesel trains.

THE IDIOCY OF CULTURAL STUDIES.

Little Free Libraries are oppressive, because rich people are more likely to read, or something.

Little Free Libraries predominantly appear in medium- to high-income neighborhoods in Toronto (an effect that is less pronounced in Calgary, a wealthier city). For both cities, Little Free Libraries are distributed almost exclusively in neighborhoods where 25 percent or more residents have university degrees. In Toronto, Little Free Libraries sprout where public library branches are plentiful and where neighborhoods are white.

That's based on an article in something called the Journal of Radical Librarianship.  "Little Free Libraries®: Interrogating the impact of the branded book exchange."  Again with the "interrogating," as if these people are indulging in fantasies of working enemies of the people over in Lefortovo rather than signalling their prejudices.  "We are not trying to empirically demonstrate that LFL® has caused damage to traditional public libraries, rather we seek to provide an alternative and critical point of view as a departure from the LFL® narrative that has taken hold in the mainstream media."  Whatever.

Translating from the academic-speak:  We don't have any evidence, but we want to demonstrate our Politically Correct bona fides and fatten our tenure dossiers.

SEE YOU DOWN THE ROAD.

The BBC documents the final shows of Ringling Barnum.

LIVING AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS.

Right Wisconsin's George Mitchell isn't into toll roads.

It will be tempting to assume that tolling might “solve” Wisconsin’s transportation finance problem and render unnecessary any need to raise the gas tax. That expectation will need to be tested against the reality of multi-billion freeway reconstruction costs and the price-tag for halting the steady decline in the condition of out-state roads. Once the numbers get crunched there almost certainly will be a shortfall.

The highway commissioners can decide to write off some excess capacity now, or they can confront a more difficult triage later.

The widespread recognition among legislators that new revenue is needed explains the emergence of such ideas. The impetus for such talk is the line in the sand drawn by Governor Scott Walker when it comes to raising the gas tax. It remains to be seen whether the governor can reconcile imposition of tolling with his repeated assurances that current revenue is adequate.

Square "adequate revenue" with "crumbling infrastructure" if you can.

USE YOUR IMAGINATION.

Suppose the North Shore Line decided to have an Electroliner control car serviced at Cold Spring Shops.  The move would look something like this.

Illinois Railway Museum, 20 May 2017.

WE ARE ALL UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED TO OUR GRANDPARENTS.

Yes, you can make a chicken sandwich from scratch.  The money quote.

I never even thought about where these common ingredients come from and how much work goes into it. This really just shows the complexity of our society that just to make a sandwich from scratch there’s an entire army of people specialized in producing each of these ingredients, allowing them to be readily available to us just down the street at the local grocery store, reducing the time from six months to six minutes.

Your sandwich is a privilege. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

REDISCOVERING VALUE CAPTURE.

Here's an old Strong Towns post that has come to Cold Spring Shops' attention.

Today we spend money on infrastructure in the hopes of creating growth. That's backwards. Infrastructure should not be a catalyst for growth but something that emerges in support of productive patterns of development. There has to be a relationship between the infrastructure built and the value created.

Let's examine the way the railroads were constructed. Nobody is arguing that there wasn't government subsidy of the railroads. There was. The land for the tracks and the towns along it were largely given to the railroad companies. Examine that investment, however. Land the government owned was given away. (I realize we can debate whether they owned it -- they didn't -- but that is another conversation.) There was no long term taxpayer commitment. There was no ongoing expense the government incurred.

The railroad then built the tracks. Did they build them and then charge a fee (the equivalent of today's gas tax) to pay for the construction? Absolutely not. That would have been far too speculative. In order to pay for the tracks they did something simple and obvious: they developed the towns along the way. The railroads owned the land, created the railroad stop, subdivided the land around it, sold it to speculators and others looking to develop and then used that money (minus some profit margin, for sure) to build the line. In other words, they used a value capture mechanism to pay for the infrastructure.

The railroads were land developers first, railroad operators second. Once the line was built and the land at the towns sold off, they were free of the need to pay off capital expenses. That meant that the fares that the railroad collected could go directly to covering operations and maintenance (and some profit, for sure). That's a viable model.

It is also a model with direct feedback. What happened when things didn't work out, when a town failed to develop properly or when the development of new towns got out ahead of the demand. If the railroads operated like today's highway departments, if the growth slowed down, we would simply build more railroads and towns. After all, the new infrastructure creates growth, right?

Of course, that is not what happened. Many railroads went out of business, and nearly all lost money, in the Long Depression of 1870, which was at least partially caused by over speculation along the railroad lines. That is what happens in a real market system when there is malinvestment and supply runs too far ahead of demand.

But trade-tested malinvestment cannot go on for as long as government-mandated malinvestment.

The history makes me optimistic about the future of Florida's Brightline train service.

HILLARY CLINTON'S FAT TAILS.

Calm down, I'm not referring to her entourage.

Rather, I'm referring to a post-mortem on the failure of the Smartest Kids in the Room to see the wave election that hit them.

The core of Clinton campaign strategy was their analytics system, developed by dozens of researchers who were led by Clinton’s director of analytics, Elan Kriegel, in close consultation with campaign manager Robby Mook. In the Washington Post, John Wagner wrote, “the algorithm was said to play a role in virtually every strategic decision Clinton aides made, including where and when to deploy the candidate and her battalion of surrogates and where to air television ads—as well as when it was safe to stay dark.” The oracle of the system was “Ada,” a big-data simulator that issued up-to-the-minute probabilities on Clinton’s chances by state and county. Throughout the general election, Ada backed her arguments for a decisive Clinton win in the Electoral College with a ton of stats. But Ada, and all her numbers, turned out to be wrong.

We're not talking about garbage in, garbage out here. Rather, we're talking about a black swan event that ought to have at least been in the analysts' minds.

Ada ran “400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like.” This is a very “big data” sort of claim. 400,000 is rather large—no human could look through the results of that many simulations. Ada’s “intelligence” lay in how she boiled down the results of those 400,000 simulations into a campaign strategy. Each of Ada’s electoral simulations was premised on variations in turnout based around expected margins of error—for example, one simulation might posit that Hispanics would break for Clinton 2 or 3 points higher (or lower) than the data predicted. By sampling a representative subset of all possible variations—the so-called Monte Carlo method of quantitative analysis—Ada would produce a set of outcomes. After such simulations, Ada showed that Michigan and Wisconsin went for Trump only a small percentage of the time, compared to Florida and Pennsylvania, which went for Trump a larger percentage of the time.

Yet what must have seemed like a foolproof, detailed prescription for victory based on data and computation was mostly a confirmation of preexisting biases—particularly the campaign’s faith in the firewall. In another election year, those biases might have turned out to be right, and Ada would have been mistakenly vindicated. Here, though, the oracle was revealed to be little more than a parrot. Once the initial analysis showed that Clinton was favored to win in certain states, Ada helped prevent the campaign from questioning her conclusions.

That's the same error the people writing credit default swaps made. Then came one day in which a twenty-five-sigma event (under their priors) occurred, followed by another day with another twenty-five-sigma event.  Your Monte Carlo method is only as good as your priors about the variations.  Is your world Gaussian, with two-thirds of the expected events within one standard deviation of the mean?  Or might you be in messy reality, with more than two-thirds of the expected events within one standard deviation, and more than one-twentieth of the expected events beyond two standard deviations?

Dizziness due to success did in the hedgies.  Dizziness due to success did in the hillaries.

AULD LANG SYNE.

The final days of Ringling Barnum's train.

An elephant stretches its trunk through a window to soothe a sick child. A woman gives birth and three months later is back performing on the high wire. A handler of big cats weeps as the beasts lope out of the ring for the last time.

There's a lot more at the article. Read it. Savor it. A sampling:

Ringling is the last circus anywhere to travel by train, and while living on a train can be tough, the accommodations are considered a benefit that other circuses don't offer. Perks include the "Pie Car," the mile-long train's dining operation, as well as a circus nursery and school for the many children whose parents make the circus what it is.

Some observations from the home the performers leave behind, from the unit's last circus baptism, their final times goofing around on "Clown Alley," and other moments the world will never see again.

The baptism? Where else does the priest wear vestments made of repurposed elephant trappings?

Mourn.  Then find yourself an itinerant circus and go to it.

See you down the road.

TROLL LEVEL: ANONYMOUS REFEREE.

Two working academics spike the football over having seriously trolled the gender-studies enterprise.  Skeptic's Michael Shermer describes the trolling as a vital public service.

Every once in awhile it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion, which is why we are proud to publish this expose of a hoaxed article published in a peer-reviewed journal today. Its ramifications are unknown but one hopes it will help rein in extremism in this and related areas.

Yes, it's easy enough to dress up a nonsense argument in pomo-babble and make it sound academic, or something, which is what the authors did.

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

Yes, the gender studies folks might have some tight, er, priors, and yet the paper winds up in a journal, but respectable?  Read on and contemplate Tom Lehrer's "Now there's a charge for what she used to give for free."

We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

Yes, "unwilling to be hen-pecked" might prevent the paper from being published, but even with the careful use of the right buzz-words, the first journal they tried wouldn't have it.

We didn’t originally go looking to hoax Cogent Social Sciences, however. Had we, this story would be only half as interesting and a tenth as apparently damning. Cogent Social Sciences was recommended to us by another journal, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, a Taylor and Francis journal. NORMA rejected “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” but thought it a great fit for the Cogent Series, which operates independently under the Taylor and Francis imprimatur.

It is no accident, dear reader, that Taylor and Francis figure in this story. If there's a Herfindahl index for online citations by Real Peer Review, #tandfonline would probably head the list.  I don't believe in coincidences, though, and perhaps there are working academicians, even in the fever swamps of culture studies, who are as disgusted by the proliferation of online outlets for people more interested in racking up refereed publications for their own sake, rather than, oh, taking on challenging projects and participating in an intelligent conversation.

Suspecting we may be dealing with a predatory pay-to-publish outlet, we were surprised that an otherwise apparently legitimate Taylor and Francis journal directed us to contribute to the Cogent Series. (Authors’ note: we leave it to the reader to decide whether or not NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies constitutes a legitimate journal, but to all appearances it is run by genuine academic experts in the field and is not a predatory money-mill.) The problem, then, may rest not only with pay-to-publish journals, but also with the infrastructure that supports them.

In sum, it’s difficult to place Cogent Social Sciences on a spectrum ranging from a rigorous academic journal in gender studies to predatory pay-to-publish money mill. First, Cogent Social Sciences operates with the legitimizing imprimatur of Taylor and Francis, with which it is clearly closely partnered. Second, it’s held out as a high-quality open-access journal by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which is intended to be a reliable list of such journals.

Thus, the self-confession in Skeptic.

The publish-or-perish academic environment is its own poison that needs a remedy. It gives rise to predatory profit-driven journals with few or no academic standards that take advantage of legitimate scholars pressured into publishing their work at all costs, even if it is marginal or dubious. Many of these scholars are victims both of a system that is forcing them to publish more papers and to publish them more often, to the detriment of research quality, and of the predatory journals that offer to sell them the illusion of academic prestige. Certainly, we have every reason to suspect that a majority of the other academics who have published in Cogent Social Sciences and other journals in the Cogent Series are genuine scholars who have been cheated by what may be a weak peer-review process with a highly polished edifice. Our question about the fundamental integrity of fields like gender studies seems much more pressing nonetheless.

Inside Higher Ed's Scott Jaschik picks up the story.  It is the vanity-press aspect of the hoax that interests me (as, before I quit, my electronic mail occasionally included solicitations for submissions, and in the fine print it looked like I could get stuff approved quickly, but for a small fee.)  Here's Academe's Hank Reichman, with the key point.  "The problem, however, is that the real joke was on the hoaxsters, who either failed to discern or willfully covered up the fact that the journal in question was a vanity publication with little to no credibility in academia. And the alleged “skeptics” failed even to question the legitimacy of the hoaxsters’ sweeping claims."

The discipline that got trolled? One anecdote doth not invalidate the corpus of scholarship. "So, on the basis of publishing a hoax paper in an obscure vanity journal with zero credibility in the field they wished to “expose,” the authors — and those who praise them — somehow jump to the conclusion that the entire discipline of gender studies is corrupt."  To Bleeding Heart Libertarians' James Taylor, it's a cock-up.

The first journal that Bognossian and Lindsay submitted their hoax paper to, and that rejected it, was NORMA: The International Journal for Masculinity Studies. This journal doesn’t even hit the top 115 journals in Gender Studies. So, what happened here was that they submitted a hoax paper to an unranked journal, which summarily rejected it. They then received an auto-generated response directing them to a pay-to-publish vanity journal. They submitted the paper there, and it was published. From this chain of events they conclude that the entire field of Gender Studies is “crippled academically”. This tells us very little about Gender Studies, but an awful lot about the perpetrators of this “hoax”…. and those who tout it as a take down of an entire field.

It might also tell us about the vanity press enterprise, and about the value of citation indices, impact factors, and the rest. (And 115 journals in gender studies, to keep current requires scholars in that field to pick and choose what to read.)  Thus Reason's Robby Soave.  "Hoax social science paper is more an indictment of pay-to-publish journals than anything else."  Precisely.  Orgtheory's E. P. Berman gets the summation.

If your article gets rejected from one of our regular journals, we’ll automatically forward it to one of our crappy interdisciplinary pay-to-play journals, where we’ll gladly take your (or your funder’s or institution’s) money to publish it after a cursory “peer review”. That is a new one to me.

There’s a hoax going on here all right. But I don’t think it’s gender studies that’s being fooled.

Nor, likely, are promotion boards and external reviewers. Part of being asked to serve as an external reviewer, for instance, is having enough visibility in the discipline (which one acquires, dear reader, by writing articles in journals people might skim more carefully) to understand when a portfolio has some stuff of substance in it.

THE IDEA CATCHES ON.

Trains reports on the combo-car for the 21st century.  Go here for the pictures.

TEN YEARS AGO.

We were running cleanup trains on the model railroad at the old house.

Yes, there's more than a little creative anachronism on display there.  The locomotives and cars have a lot more track to run on these days.

WHERE THE STREETCAR WILL BEND THE CORNER AROUND.

There are tracks going down for the first phase of Milwaukee's new streetcar, which will call at the railway station, the Public Market, and stop not far from the Grohmann Museum.  Good news for me, as a tourist, although I wonder about its utility to locals.  A subsequent extension will get to the lakefront, not far from the German Fest, er, Summerfest grounds.  But alas, no Nineteen Line to Lindwurm Park or the Bavarian Inn.

The construction of the streetcar tracks motivated another television station to air a newly-discovered movie of the final days of Milwaukee's real streetcars.  First, though, they had to find some old technology, the eight millimeter movie projector.

I can't guarantee those video links for long, go check them out now.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

The New York Times stands up for the ancien regime.  Special prosecutors?  Impeachment? Endless scandal-mongering?  The people who voted for Mr Trump may be having none of it.  "Mr. Trump’s fans are not eager to see a return to the establishment-dominated political order he promised to demolish."  The Times, predictably, roll out longtime Trump skeptic Charlie Sykes, to well, if not gaze into the basket of deplorables, at least allude to the misinformed voters, now suffering from cognitive dissonance.

Mr. Trump has created his own political culture, and its devotees are strongly and emotionally committed to it.

“They took a huge risk, and they are deeply invested,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative author who has been critical of Mr. Trump. And the news cycle they inhabit, he added, is only hardening their beliefs.

“These days when people say, ‘Oh, my gosh, this really looks terrible, was I possibly wrong about Trump?’ they quickly go on social media or see the shows and instantaneously find something that reinforces their opinion,” Mr. Sykes added. “And they cling to that.”

It's true that Mr Trump is doing some foolish things, and I'd not object to an intervention where his early-morning use of social media is concerned.  But there was more to his candidacy than Not Hillary. "[Trump supporters] have been struck by the discrepancies between informed opinion, as represented in the pages of the elite newspapers in the country, as well as the scholarly journals of academic societies, and their own perceptions on a wide variety of topics. Such discrepancies are not necessarily signs of unwisdom, of course; they may reflect differences in experiences and world views that lead people to base their opinions on different sets of facts or to interpret the same facts in different ways."  That's from Texas philospher Daniel Bonevac, making the case for his vote for Mr Trump.  There's a lot in the essay, and this passage, in particular, is one that perhaps I can riff on in some future post.

The Democratic Party and its allies in the media and academia have pushed a narrative for decades that portrays free enterprise as cruel, corrupt, and unfair, and government as caring, altruistic, and just. Freedom creates problems; government solves them. Sometimes, that narrative is accurate. Often, however, it is not. The gap between the narrative and reality has been growing as government grows beyond the problems it knows how to solve. And those upholding the narrative seem increasingly incapable of recognizing the divergence. They seem incapable of conceiving of a simple question: Even if there is a better solution than the equilibrium achieved by the free market—by free people freely making their own decisions—why should we have confidence that government can find it? Still less do they seem capable of answering it. I am not saying that thinkers on the left do not propose solutions—of course they do—but that they do not even try to establish the optimality of their preferred policies.

On the other hand, that's standard Failure of Wise Experts stuff. Do your own research.

WIND DOWN THE CARTELS.

Regulation in the public interest inevitably generates rents, that might be dissipated by inefficiently bestowing favors.  It also generates special pleading. The existing service is adequate. If additional service is required, the existing carriers can provide it. The applicant carrier is not competent to provide the service.  In Wisconsin, there will be an extensive review of all state certification of providers.

There is a virtual consensus among economists that state-enforced training requirements for a variety of low to mid-skill jobs, from catering to hair-braiding to interior decorating, have grown excessive, exerting a major drag on economic growth and employment—especially for people who don’t have the time or money to take thousands of hours of costly courses to practice a basic trade that isn’t particularly dangerous and whose skills can easily be judged by consumers.

Licensing requirements for low-skilled work have exploded over the past decades for no other reason than that professional guilds have been able to capture state legislatures and used them to help entrench their market positions. Legislators in other states should follow Wisconsin in scrutinizing existing occupational licensing programs and assessing which ones actually serve the common good and which ones exist to protect narrow and well-connected interests.

I wonder where the egg-graders and butter-graders will wind up.

SO ENGAGE THE REAL CHALLENGES.

I picked up P. M. Bovy's The Perils of "Privilege": Why Injustice Can't Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage with the hope that perhaps a privileged, properly credentialed newly minted academic might be able to engage my assertion that the privilege knapsack really contains the received practices of the insiders, which is to say, the strategies that the insiders used to interact with each other to mutual benefit, and which, at worst, serve as ways to exclude outsiders, and perhaps the constructive thing to do is for the insiders to honor the outsiders for making the effort, and for the outsiders to make the effort to master the strategies.

ECHOES OF THE ICE AGE.

Over the winter, the East Troy Electric Railroad have been resurfacing and raising track that crosses a marsh.

The work underway by Volkmann Railroad Builders of Menomonee Falls, Wis., involves replacing 800 ties and leveling track on a three-quarter-mile section of the 7.2-mile line connecting East Troy and Mukwonago, Wis. The segment has been prone to spring flooding.

"Our board of directors recognized the need to make a commitment to regular improvements to the line to offer a better experience for our riders," East Troy President Ryan Jonas says in a statement. "We have replaced more than 400 ties along the line in each of the past two years, but now we have committed to improving the entire line in a more systematic way."

That marsh dates back to the last glaciation, when the ice melt left kettle lakes amidst the moraines (and all the other glacial formations that Wisconsin kids learn about in earth science classes.) Slowly, the plant matter in the lakes decays, and the lake fills with humus. But you can't build a railroad on humus without a lot of fill, and sometimes you build a pile trestle and fill that in.

The railroad still operates work equipment built in Milwaukee's Cold Spring Shops, where the Milwaukee streetcars received their heavy maintenance.

It's a preservation railroad, these days, and the resumption of summer service prompted Milwaukee's Channel 58 to despatch Michael Schlesinger to report two features, but those video clips have already gone into the memory hole.

BEYOND PROCESS.

It's possible that Our President, in suggesting that the former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation back off on investigating discharged National Security Advisor, has obstructed justice.  Or perhaps he's operating in the spirit of Otter wheedling just one more chance out of Dean Wormer.  (But you'd think that someone in a position of authority would understand that subordinates might interpret wheedling as something more akin to a direct order.)

It's also possible that the ongoing, predictable, political posturing among the usual Washington players isn't going to play so well with citizens, particularly citizens, whether voting or not, who concentrate on making it another day or their kids' sports accomplishments or, well, simply living, for whom the current predictable political posturing is simply the same show that we've been watching since 2005 or 1998 or 1987 or 1973 or 1965 (depending, dear reader, upon when you first became aware of the possibility of scandal, real or imagined, to shuffle the alignments in Washington.)

Here's the latest from Angelo "Ruling Class" Codevilla, with references to civil war and revolution.

America is in the throes of revolution. The 2016 election and its aftermath reflect the distinction, difference, even enmity that has grown exponentially over the past quarter century between America’s ruling class and the rest of the country. During the Civil War, President Lincoln observed that all sides “pray[ed] to the same God.” They revered, though in clashing ways, the same founders and principles. None doubted that those on the other side were responsible human beings. Today, none of that holds. Our ruling class and their clients broadly view Biblical religion as the foundation of all that is wrong with the world. According to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance.”

The government apparatus identifies with the ruling class’s interests, proclivities, and tastes, and almost unanimously with the Democratic Party. As it uses government power to press those interests, proclivities, and tastes upon the ruled, it acts as a partisan state. This party state’s political objective is to delegitimize not so much the politicians who champion the ruled from time to time, but the ruled themselves. Ever since Woodrow Wilson nearly a century and a half ago at Princeton, colleges have taught that ordinary Americans are rightly ruled by experts because they are incapable of governing themselves. Millions of graduates have identified themselves as the personifiers of expertise and believe themselves entitled to rule. Their practical definition of discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, etc., is neither more nor less than anyone’s reluctance to bow to them. It’s personal.

Yes, and Hillary Clinton probably expected the deplorables to cringe and vote for her out of shame, and in that alternative universe of a Hillary Clinton presidency, we'd be well into the fourth month of deplorable-shaming and condescension, and the cheering section of the punditry would likely be writing about how disrespectful any opposition, let alone any mockery of her screechy public speaking style, would be.  Never mind that the lived experience of people who aren't connected to the rent-seeking racket hasn't gotten any better.

The lived experience of people who aren't connected to the rent-seeking racket hasn't improved much in reality as we understand it.  But the Washington process show is simply one more reason for the disaffected voters to raise the middle finger.

To the rootless global elites, though, tradition is subordinated to transgression. What society considers edgy, elites deem worthy of their praise. It isn’t acceptable merely to accept gay life, for example — it must be celebrated. Recalling moving to San Francisco and observing a fully naked man walking down the street, [law professor Joan] Williams recalls feeling proud of herself for being tolerant of such norm-shattering. Among the elites, she says, “It’s a point of pride not to be one of those petty bourgeois who’s shocked by sexual transgression.”

This attitude not only stuns the [inland white working-class] but strikes them as a kind of attack on everything they hold dear. To them, bicoastal urban America is a joke to which they don’t get the punchline. They feel excluded, marginalized, left out. Worse than any of this, they feel condescended to, and it infuriates them, Williams writes.

Hillary Clinton did a marvelous job of confirming their suspicions when she said — in New York City, at an LGBT event — that “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

And now the bicoastal rent-seekers are engaging in what look like the usual process games to perpetuate their hold on power.  Here, suggests Professor Williams, as channeled by National Review's Kyle Smith, is how that is likely to impress the Trump voters on whose behalf this process is supposedly being deployed.

Hillary Clinton reminds them of the prissy know-it-alls who have been bossing them around their whole lives — she’s the lady who tells you there’s no eating in the library, as columnist Jonah Goldberg once put it. They don’t resent Trump, though: They imagine being him and firing her.

And now the prissy know-it-alls seek to win on a technicality where they couldn't win using their vaunted quantitative methods.

[Former president Clinton] famously advised his wife’s campaign to do more to reach out to the [white working class], but in what will surely be recalled as one of the defining moments of hubris on Team Hillary, campaign manager Robby Mook replied, “the data run counter to your anecdotes.”

It’s just too perfect that Clinton lost the election in part because she relied on a gay, 36-year-old Ivy League data nerd rather than a two-time winner of a presidential election to show her the path to the White House. If she wants to learn some anecdotes about how to repel people you’re supposed to be wooing, this book is an excellent place to start.

The anger with the Ruling Class is still there. The bicoastal rent-seekers may yet hamstring President Trump (although he's doing a pretty good job hamstringing himself). But their return to power will not bring in a new era of good feelings, not now.

REPURPOSING THE COMBINATION CAR.

That refers to a passenger-carrying car with a partition setting off a portion of the car for the carriage of checked baggage, express parcels, and dogs.  There's an old-school combination car at the markers end of this model milk train.

The quintessence of a Boston and Maine milk train:  Brookside Creamery, Hood Milk, a BL2, and a surplus combine off the Long Island.

Railway Gazette reports on a British waggon works that proposes to equip coaching stock with sliding seats, so as to convert a full coach into a combination car at off hours, so as to be able to offer Fast Emergency Package Service (oh, wait, that's my South Shore upbringing) on lightly-travelled passenger trains.

According to the developer, 20 rows of seats in a typical coach could be compressed to provide a cargo space equivalent to the capacity of an articulated lorry.

The seats, tables and draught screens within each section of an ‘Adaptable Carriage’ are connected and can be moved along rails fitted to the existing seat rails, with the sliding mechanisms, sensors and locking pins packaged within the void between the rails. The forward-folding seat allows any rubbish left on the seats to be tipped onto the floor for easier cleaning after the seats have been stowed. The reconfiguration process is fully automated and takes less than 3 min.

I suppose that's more practical than running a formation with a combination car and, at peak times, asking passengers to sit in the baggage compartment.

When passenger loads are heavy at the Illinois Railway Museum, these trunks provide overflow seating capacity in North Shore Line combination car 251.

North Shore Line had a similar problem with off-peak cargo loading, so much so that they removed all seats from combination car 255 (long scrapped) in order to handle sea bags for recruits and, on occasion, the instruments of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  I wonder, did that special train use the city tracks to get just across the Milwaukee River from the Pabst Theatre?

MORE POWER TO THE DEFLECTOR SHIELD, MR CHEKHOV.

The British are deploying one.  No, this is not some Nikola Tesla fantasy, being worked on by the boffins of Bletchley Park with the encouragement of Winston Churchill.  It's a way of keeping contraband out of prison yards.

The device creates a 2,000ft (600m) shield around and above a prison that will detect and deflect the remote-controlled devices.

It uses a series of "disruptors", which are sensors to jam the drone's computer, and block its frequency and control protocols. The operator's screen will go black and the drone will be bounced back to where it came from.

The first trial of the deflectors will be on Guernsey, but there is no evidence that it's based on secret German research notes from the Occupation. (The Channel Islands garrisons had a front row seat for OVERLORD but they were incapable of doing much more than radioing reports that it wasn't going so well for their Kameraden.)

Nottingham-based company Drone Defence has worked on the idea in the past year.

Founder and CEO Richard Gill said: "It disrupts the control network between the flyer and the drone. The drone then activates return to home mode and it will then fly back to the position where it had signal with its flyer.

"Someone described it as the final piece in a prison's security puzzle. I think it could have a significant worldwide impact."

Mr Gill said the technology is perfectly safe and does not "hack" or damage the drones. It is relatively cheap to install and, depending on the size of the prison, costs range from £100,000 to £250,000.

The things you learn ... there's a return-home circuit, apparently to prevent the loss of an expensive toy in the event of more mundane signal failures.  I wonder if there's a way to apply this circuitry to digital command control, in order to forestall collisions of model trains.  Think of it as simulating positive train control by setting up bubbles of protection around each train.

WE ARE ALL UNDEREMPLOYED COMPARED TO OUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS.

I keep stressing this point, perhaps letting John Tamny reinforce it will help.

If it were just about maintenance of existing jobs, the U.S. and other countries could mimic the former Soviet Union and abolish technology so that the jobs of tomorrow will be the same as the ones today.  If so, the world, much like the former Soviet Union, would be very poor.  Never forget that before technological advances that saved on labor, the only work available was on the farm.  All toil was focused on feeding oneself.  No sane person would desire a return to what was a very bleak past in which wealth was wholly a function of one’s ability in the fields.

Yes, and in which Our Betters lived in a much higher style than hoi polloi than is the case today.

Werner Schuch, Two Riders of the Thirty Years' War and Farmers, 1881, oil on canvas.

Painting from the collection of the Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Mr Tamny notes that trade (all specialization is for the purpose of importing something, "Working is all about the getting," as he puts it) leaves the Renaissance-era riders as if paupers contrasted with farmers of today.

Life without trade would be defined by unrelenting poverty, and for a high percentage, death by starvation, from a lack of protective clothing, absence of shelter, or all three combined.  The free trade that is essential for an individual on the way to surging productivity and wealth, is by extension essential for country economies.

But what about those disaffected deplorables, consigned to penury and opioids after the mills and assembly lines closed?  Freeze everything as it currently is, notes D. N. McCloskey, and contemplate what you won't get.

Protectionism, for example, recently popular, relies on an error in accounting. Yes, workers making tires in Ohio are made better off by protection. But Americans buying tires are made worse off, regularly by a large multiple of the annual income of the saved job. The erroneous social accounting does not acknowledge the whole country. Trump voters in Iowa, for instance, soon realized that protection is not good for soybean sales.

It's not so good for milk sales in Wisconsin, either.

How, then, lift the living standards of people? "We do not need at the outset a perfect government. Perfect government is unattainable, and anyway unnecessary for a free economy. We do not need more laws, more education, or more guardians. What we need, comprehensively, is liberty."  The details are at the essay.  Read and understand.

DON'T CHANGE A THING.

John Atcheson has a great wallow in a mythical past.

Government – once the champion of the working man, the author of the New Deal, and the architect of the longest sustained and broadly share period of prosperity in US history has become the enemy. Meanwhile, the free market, which exploited workers, defiled the environment, and operated outside of any moral framework, is now believed to be the font of all things good, delivered by pure serendipity. As a result, broad sections of society – including much of the press, the establishment wing the Democratic Party, much of academia and the public policy infrastructure, and of course Republicans -- believe taxes are bad, regulations are bad, small government is good; public programs are bad, and the markets (i.e. the Oligarchy) will automatically provide great things if we just get government out of the way. This is the camouflage under which such nonsense as laissez-faire, trickle-down and supply-side economics keep getting resurrected, no matter how often it fails.

Yes, keep misinterpreting the victory dividend resource curse as evidence, somehow, that the Best and the Brightest once made these things possible, and a cabal of rent-seekers somehow deconstructed the Bright Future made possible through Governance by Wise Experts.  Really.

The reason Republicans win as a minority Party is because Democrats have embraced neoliberalism and rejected true progressivism and the New Deal. As a result, turnouts at election time are typically low, and it’s the Democrats and disaffected Independents who don’t turn out. The difference between the “trickle-down, supply-side” con of the Republican Party and the Democrats’ embrace of the free market, deregulation, lower taxes, markets-know-best agenda that Bill Clinton brought to the Party with the Democratic Leadership Council is simply too small to excite the people.

If Democrats want to win again, they will need to embrace real progressive values, restore a measure of diversity to the press and media by restoring regulations that allowed the FCC to bust monopolies, and invest in the needed infrastructure – foundations, think tanks, academic chairs, etc, to carry a populist message and to reveal the treachery of the Republican’s economic con game.

Oh, please. That infrastructure exists:  Ford, Sloan, MacArthur; Brookings; pick any editor of any highly-regarded academic journal and you're likely to find a prelate of those progressive values.  It's the values that turn voters off, and the absence of trade-tested betterments in parts of the world where markets are treated as criminal per se, that hurt your message.  That's why there was a Democratic Leadership Council in the first place.

YES. NEXT QUESTION?

Is the College Business Model Unraveling?

Marginal institutions are afraid to cut sticker prices, because many parents and students see high tuition as a mark of prestige. So colleges are forced to simply offer an increasing array of credits and scholarships to induce students to enroll, even as they keep jacking up tuition to keep pace with competitors.

Nobody pays list price any more.  Then higher sticker prices render more applicants eligible for government student loans, and that has the same effect on price discovery and trade-tested betterments in higher education it has had in Big Medicine.

Now, if we could get the institutions suffering from Harvard envy to, oh, offer higher education, perhaps good things can happen.

Smaller, less-prestigious institutions could close. Others will be forced to roll back the administrative bloat that has accompanied rising tuitions. Vocational training programs might start to get more enrollees. Cost inflation and debt accumulation could slow down. All of this could be good for a higher education industry that costs too much and delivers too little and that seems to have contented itself with stagnation for quite some time. Expect the academic lobby to start pushing even harder for “free tuition” and other government crutches to postpone the reckoning for as long as possible.

Perhaps, although there is no such thing as free tuition, any more than there was free passage to the Americas, for Britons in the eighteenth century or Slavs in the nineteenth.

The folks running higher education still hope to defer the reckoning, by creating new special committees.  Market tests, as the deanlets and deanlings of Missouri are discovering, have tighter standards.

At the forum, leaders pointed to the enrollment drop partly as fallout from the declining number of high school graduates across the region, as well as ongoing “public perception concerns” since the fall of 2015 when protests that centered on issues of race led to two top leaders’ resigning.

The deficit created by enrollment is coupled with a $14.7 million, or 6.4 percent, cut from the state. It’s a cut that’s not unlike one that many other public four-year universities face after higher education took a hit in the governor’s proposed budget on top of withholdings for the year.

In her presentation Monday, [interim chancellor Garnett] Stokes also highlighted a few longer-term efforts that leaders hope to address, including reviews of the administrative structure, campus facilities, academic programs and research incentives and reviews.

She also called for the establishment of a committee to analyze how Mizzou can work toward an image overhaul to become, among other things, “more forward looking.”

Yes, doubling down on creating an experimental prefigurative community of transformation, which continues to be the fad in higher education, all of its failures notwithstanding, is going to bring in the applications.