Single varities, crop failure and famine

 

Thomas Malthus’ famous essay on population was published at a time when an energized scientific world was diligently looking for the underlying principles that govern the world.  He was writing a hundred years after Sir Issac Newton had shocked the world and reshaped the way the universe was viewed – both literaly and figurately.  For the next two centuries after Newton scientists were bent on discovering simple principles that would explain the world and lead to wealth, fame and knighthood for the discoverer.  There were also nation-sponsored contests to solve major problems – one contest promised rich rewards for the person who could solve the problem of starvation.  Malthus of course said famine was the logical outcome of the natural growth of population that no increase in food production could offset, but other thought every problem could be solved through science, logic and human control.

In 1771 (28 years before Malthus published his essay), Antoine-Augsutin Parmentier won the contest by finding a food “capable of reducing the calamities of famine.”  His solution?  The potato; the same food source the 70 years later caused the famous Irish potato famine.  But the famine wasn’t the potato’s fault; it was the farmers’ fault.  Imported from South America, the potato spread slowly around Europe, but where it did take hold it often became the staple – in eastern and northern Europe and in Ireland.  But the very nature of importing single varieties leads to extreme vulnerability.  The potato the Irish ate was susceptible to a blight that over the course of several years spread until it destroyed virtually the entire potato crop two years in a row – resulting in a famine.  That had never, and could never, happen its native South America because there are many varities, most of which are unaffected by that blight.

And that is the lesson – variety allows some species to survive while others fall prey to disease, predators or weather changes.   The Las Vegas Sun today published the results of survey by Brookings Institution and London School of Economics.  The report says that Las Vegas is the poster child community built on one industry, one source of food.  According to the Sun story: Before the recession, in measurements analyzing 1993 through 2007, Las Vegas ranked No. 14 in the world among 150 metropolitan areas studied by the Brookings Institution and London School of Economics.  Las Vegas fell to 128th in the rankings during the recession in 2008 and 2009, and since the recovery has begun, its ranking has fallen to 146th. That’s better than only Dublin, Ireland (150); Dubai (149); Barcelona, Spain (148); and Thessaloniki, Greece (147).

When it was expanding, Las Vegas lead the world in expansion, 200 people a said were moving to town, unemployment was the lowest in the nation, real estate prices were going up by 25-30 percent each quarter, investment and construction on the Strip reshaped the way people all over the world thought about casinos, gambling and certainly Las Vegas itself.  Las Vegas has Malthus would have predicted grew at geometric rates.  But like the Irish population in the 19th century, Vegas expanded too far, too fast and then the crop failed with the attendant famine.  Las Vegas will recover in time, just as Ireland recovered from that famine, today’s crisis is of another type, but this should be a wake-up call to Nevada and indeed to any place so heavily dependent on single sources of revenue.  There was more than one cause for the Irish famine and more than one cause to the present economy conditions in Las Vegas – but the vulnerability resulting from one source of substance is a major factor and one that should drive the thinking of all public officials.  Or as the old saying goes: “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.”  Sometimes the oldest lesson have to be relearned over and over again.

 

Butt my head and I bite your nose (or ear)

AP File Photo.

Evander Holyfield’s headbutt of Mike Tyson earned him a retaliatory ear munch.

Sports offers us many entertaining moments, depending on which sport you favor, this might be one of the best times of the year to be a fan.  College football is heading into its final stage, the National Football league, too, is reaching a critical point in its seasons, professional and college basketball are just getting started, the cross country season is over, except for a couple of national high school competition; national championship games and the Superbowl are just around the corner.   True fans get more and more excited as the tension builds, but no as much as they once did.  Television and the Internet have made individual games and competitions so common we often treat them like a reality series, a television commercial or any other regular event – they hold our interests for a moment, generate a little excitement and then we move on to the next one, the one after that and so through season after season and sport after sport.

Long ago, before television each contest that a person was able to see (or hear on the radio) was a momentous event;  some remained fixed in our collective cultural mind for generations.  The names of the stars: Shoeless Joe Jackson, Jesse Owens Red Grange and Babe Ruth still resonance in our collective psyche.   Boxing has provided more than its share of such events and heroes – although today boxing has joined all other sports in sporting soup – it was once very important not just as a sport, but it was a cultural expression.   Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Rocky Marconi and Mohammad Alli became larger than life national heroes. Boxing has few stars of the public stature these days, in part because of the one fight in June 1997; in that fight Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield did much more than demonstrate the manly art of fisticuffs – they butted and bit.  If that was an expression of our culture we were embarrassed.

I had completely forgotten the fight until today, I haven’t seen a fight in a very long time, boxing has lost its luster for me.  Today, the New London Day, published an article about a fight in a casino in Connecticut.  Not the usual prize fight the casinos use to promote business and attract customers.  The fighters in this case were not heavy weights fighting for a championship belt and millions of dollars, nor was the fight attended by thousands of people or watched by millions more paying $50 for the privilege.  Instead it took place at one o’clock in the morning between two 50-year old slot machine-playing men. They fought over a $100 slot machine, both claiming the right to play the machine and attempting to deny the same privilege to the other.  As the battle escalated one headbutted the other, only to have his nose bitten in return – but sadly there was no Mills Lane to sort things out or television cameras to broadcast it around the world.  I don’t think I ever wanted to play a slot machine that badly, but it may be good news for the industry if gamblers are willing to fight for the honor of playing the game.

Expanding into every available niche

The 27-storey home is said to have cost 1 billion dollars.

The story of this house and its builder caught my attention today.  It is apropos of absolutely nothing that I normally write about. Except possibly as an illustration of a tendency in all of living creatures is to expand to the absolute limits of the environment to support it and thereby creating a great deal of stress on the environment and the species.

At the end of the 18th century, Thomas Malthus published an essay on population; Malthus theorized that human population would continue to expand until some natural disaster or the lack of adequate food to support it stopped the growth.  The ideas of Malthus were later incorporated into the theories of Charles Darwin and formed the basis of the concept of “survival of the fitness” that was one of the major elements in Darwin’s theory of evolution.  Darwin expanded the concept past human populations to include all living populations – he also added diversity as a principle to Malthus’ ideas.  In diversity a species changes and adapts to all of the possible food and living environments within its range as a way to compensate for the limitations of one particular food source.  That means that one group eats small seeds, others are forced to diversify, one learning to eat very large seeds, another cactus flowers and a third catching fish.  All are adaptations from the original species that ate only small seeds.

Of course, at some point all species run into the population principle – that is they have expanded past the point of the environment to provide adequate food and they have diversified into every available .  Then there is no room for further expansion or diversification and some individuals and species will pay with their lives for that natural urge.

Those concepts can be used further in understanding human behavior.  Certainly, besides population growth to the limits of the available food, humans also diversify, some farm, some manufacturer and some sell McDonald’s hamburgers.  The same is true of our housing,  we cover the landscape with our dwellings and when we run out of horizontal space we build vertically.  But there is another aspect to that basic urge to expand: acquiring.  We will acquire everything that we are able within the limits of our available resources and space, the only limit on our spending is the money we have available .   And that is the story of the house above.  It cost about a billion dollars and is in Mumbai, India.  Formerly called Bombay, Mumbai is a city of 14 million people and famous for its poverty and slums.  The house was built by a Mr. Ambani, said to be the richest man in India.  It towers 27-stories above the sprawling slums of the city, where millions of people barely survive.  But don’t blame him for being insensitive, he is doing exactly what the other 14 million people are doing – expanding to fill every available niche and to limits of the available resources.  Comforting isn’t it? Oh, incidentally, is subsequent editions of his essay, Malthus thought we could use moral restraints to protect us from our nature.  Darwin on the other hand, saw us as animals and therefore could not envision behaving our way out of our nature.

Is the real celebration eating and family or is it shopping?

So, after thinking about what I remember or rather what I did not remember about Thanksgiving as a child, I asked my brother what he remembered as we ate dinner last night.  He also did not have any Thanksgiving memories; except one that surfaced during the conversation and the one I did remember may be the answer to why I don’t remember others.  It was November 1955 and we were moving, again – we moved at least yearly, I went to 13 different schools before graduating from high school – this time we were moving from Reno – actually Sparks – to Roseburg, Oregon.  We stopped at a roadside restaurant, somewhere, neither of us remember where, for dinner.  The restaurant proudly bragged that we could have “all you could eat” on its outside sign. I have always had a very healthy appetite, but at 13 I could eat as much as they could cook – I left that restaurant very disappointed – to me the sign was a challenge, but not to them – it was my first real taste of misleading advertising.  The disappointment is what I remember, not the holiday and it was what my brother remember too.

That was my first commercial Thanksgiving, but not my last, nor yours I suspect.  Those great weekends in Santa Cruz also had a very commercial aspect.  On Friday morning, we all would meet for breakfast, totally taking over the restaurant and then after breakfast in groups of two or three we wander around the shops in Santa Cruz.  It was black Friday, in small letters, and to us it was more social than commercial.  I spent a couple of hours in the used book stores, the others each had their favorite shops, at some point we would meet, drink coffee, eat desert and plan the dinner schedule.  Naively, I thought we had invented that Friday after Thanksgiving tradition – we did not. It seems the term came into use in Philadelphia in the 1960s and spread the rest of country beginning in 1976 – about the same time as those first Santa Cruz Thanksgivings of my memory.

I know this is not the first year that BLACK FRIDAY – rite large – has been a major event, but somehow it had not really hit me just how big an event it has become.  Maybe I was so aware this year because of the paucity of my Thanksgiving memories, and the fact the most of things that I had enjoyed about the holiday are no longer part of my life; or maybe it is because Black Friday is now invading the gaming press, as casino customers desert the casinos to stand in line waiting for retail stores to open.

Whatever the cause, it was cause for me to pause and ponder – will children born now have fond memories of family gatherings at Thanksgiving, or will they remember the early morning lines, the bargains and the frantic start to the obsessive spending that characterizes the next few weeks. Okay, I am just jaded about the commercialization of holidays and still mad at that restaurant that promised me all I could eat, but reneged.  However, it does appear that we are moving toward shopping as our preferred way to celebrate, dancing around cash registers rather than trees, poles or campfires.  A word of caution, don’t be surprised, if like that hungry 13-year old boy, you find that for which you stood in line has been sold – but feel free to buy something else. It is after the engine that drives our economy and the measure of the health of our country.

Wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving, good food and fond memories

 

The Palo Alto, Seacliff State Beach

Happy Thanksgiving!  Thanksgiving is a strange holiday to me, I don’t remember celebrating it until I was an adult.  The first Christmas I can remember I was 4 years old, and I remember the odd birthday, Fourth of July, Valentine’s Day or Easter from my childhood, but no Thanksgivings.  The first one I remember was in Germany and I was 23 or 24 years old, traveling around, my version of the Grand Tour; that year I worked in an American Army restaurant in Munich – it served the traditional holiday fare to American soldiers and their families.  I was allowed to take some leftover to the other Army employees that lived in the same building as I.  Being the only American, I was eager to share our traditions.  The others were generally British or from one of the Common Wealth countries and all of us were single and a long way from our families.  I choose pumpkin and apple pies thinking that I was bringing a great treat.   It was a shock to find no one else liked pumpkin pies – pumpikin appears to be uniquely American.  My next Thanksgiving memory comes from the mid-1970s when my sisters were in high school; my youngest sister brought her boyfriend to our family Thanksgiving dinner – my brother and I took great pleasure in teasing him and throwing food to him and at him.

Thanksgiving didn’t acquire a special identity to me until after I was married and establishing my own family traditions.  My wife’s family lived (and still lives) in Santa Cruz.  Each year we went there for the holiday, usually leaving Reno the day before and coming home Sunday afternoon.  They were a family of 7 children and had lots of friends, children, spouses, and ex-spouses that always came (and still do) for dinner.  They came for dinner and stayed (or at least came back) for dinner, snacks, breakfast the next day, lunch another dinner and usually at least one meal every day until late Sunday evening.  Dozens and dozens of people came and went during the weekend, they ate, played games, walked on the beach, made videos of each other, shopped, talked and just enjoyed the warmth of family.

Those Thanksgivings are still the ideal in my mind, although I have not been to one in 15 years.  Now I go to my youngest sister’s house for dinner, there are usually 15 to 20 of us for dinner; but it ends there, dinner.  It is nice, but I miss the long wandering days in Santa Cruz with the break from a Nevada winter.  My run on Thanksgiving Day was one of the highlights of my running every year.  I am on my way for a run now, it may be 30 degrees outside by the time I start, there is snow and ice everywhere and I will be bundled up like Santa, not stripped down like a runner running on the beaches in Santa Cruz.  That is part of the Thanksgiving tradition, isn’t it, thinking about the people that are gone, the things we used to do together and remembering to be thankful for all of it.

A new reality show: Prisoner for a Day.

 

Today is said to be the busiest travel day of the year; experts are predicting an 11.4 percent increase in travelers and they do not see any major problems with the new procedures. NPR has done a number of programs based around the issue and interviewed a few people declaring they will give up traveling by air before submitting to the new “invasive measures.  The truth, I believe, is somewhat different; in time we will accept the new procedures as the status quo and not give it another serious thought.

Think of all of the changes in airline travel we have already endured.  All check-in procedures are longer, more complicated and infringe more on our individual rights and freedoms.  We have to produce identification at least twice before being allowed to board.  We may, at random or by whim of a TSA employee, be frisked, our baggage searched and subject to person questioning.  We are forced to go at least an hour earlier to make allowances for the procedures than we did in the past.  There are no more days of driving up minutes before boarding time, running through the airport (the guy that made it a sporting event is in jail, no running anywhere for him now) leaping over bags and rushing up to an almost closed door of the airplane and then just walking on and taking a seat.

It was possible ten years or so ago, to travel to almost any place in the country, attend a meeting and get back on a plane a go home.  Now those business trips take at least one, if not two, days longer.  We barely get a drink of water during a flight now.  The food, drinks and entertainment that were once standard on all flights over an hour are gone.  We get charged extra for every bag, not just “heavy” ones and we can anticipate future additional charges as the airlines try to compensate for the increases in their costs.  Everything was always more expensive in an airport, but we had a choice, now with the longer waits, tighter controls (you can’t bring your coffee for example through the check points) and lack of food on the flights we are forced to eat one meal, and on a long flight with plane changes, two meals in airports.

All in all, flying today feels more like a visit to a prison reality show – “prisoner for a day” than an exercise of freedom of movement and individual liberty in a democratic country.  But we do not win any prizes or gain any notoriety by participating in this reality show. Happy Thanksgiving!

Racing to dominate or fighting to survive

Science borrows a metaphor from war to describe the process of change and adaptation that is constantly occurring in nature, including between man and disease or pests.   One example would be the adaptation that takes place in a fruit fly to every new chemical spray; the underlying science simply says those that are not killed are stronger, more resistant and raise the race to develop the most superior weapon to a new and more dangerous level.  It is implicit within the metaphor that no one ever wins, it is a process of continual escalation – the nuclear arms could only end with the use of the weapons and the end of the earth or the an agreement by both parties to discontinue the development of weapons.  In nature, that kind of agreement is not possible, so it just continues.  In looking for some background, I want to pursue the subject in more depth later, I found dozens and dozens of other uses of the metaphor; social media sites are in an arms race, computer hackers and computer software engineers are in an arms race, India, Pakistan and Iran are in an arms race, WalMart and Amazon are in an arms race, robotic engineers are in an arms race, even the Transportation Security Administration and the terrorist are in an arms war – we are stuck in the middle of that one – and one last one (although one could come up with thousands of instances of competition that might be termed an arms race) Hollywood and television are in an arms race.  An arms race is a strategic competition between nations, the term implies newer and more powerful weapons developed in response to another country’s latest weapon’ s capability; as a metaphor it applies to competing sides adapting to the others moves and usually involves technological advances.

Warfare can provide other metaphors, like battle, attack or defend.  And there is another level of warfare that is tactical and where those terms are applicable.  Although the tactical level,  too, can be an escalating process and today’s news provided a couple of examples where gaming entities are fighting back against competition, attacking and defending.  A short list would include two lawsuits in Nevada where one entity is trying to prevent another from entering the fray, Station Casinos sued Henderson, Nevada over a license granted to a competitor, Pinnacle gaming sued its former CEO trying to prevent him from opening a competing casino, mayors in Illinois are fighting proposed slot machines in non-casino locations, trying to protect the revenue the cities current get from a casino, in New York the governor is trying to get an Indian casino approved and another tribe is fighting to keep it from happening and the race tracks are adding video table games to compete with the casinos in Pennsylvania, in Delaware one casino is expanding poker to compete with poker rooms in Pennsylvania.  That is the short list from one day only, but even with that many stories, the big news came from New Jersey where the state legislature is on its way to approve a tax break for casinos, new and less restrictive casino regulation, permitting construction of smaller casino, online poker and sports betting. It may not be a war, but there are certainly battles underway.

The underlying battle is for survival.  In the times when there were many fewer casinos, located at significant distances from each other and in a limited number of states, the competition was within each market. It was a competition over market share and profit margins, not survival.  That has changed dramatically.  Gaming has expanded dramatically and now casinos in one state are faced with intense and unequal competition from other states.  That level of external competition also increases the intensity of the internal competition – there are not enough customers for every casino to be profitable and survive.  It is only going to get worse and the gaming industry is going to be transformed by this competition.  At one level, it might be called an arms race, but it isn’t.  It is a fight, a war if you would, for survival.  It is not a race to develop a bigger, newer, stronger more threatening weapon – or casinos.  That metaphor might have been applied to Las Vegas for the last 20 to 30 years, but not today and not to any other casino jurisdiction.