Quotulatiousness

June 17, 2013

Top this – wine corks meet screw-tops

Filed under: Business, Europe, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:14

BBC News looks at the latest attempt to blend the tradition of the wine bottle’s cork closure with the convenience of the twist-off screw top:

Helix wine bottle closure

The unveiling this week of a new style of cork raises the question of why the traditional kind continues to dominate much of the wine world.

The Helix is opened with just a twist of the hand. No corkscrew is necessary as the top of the bottle has a thread inside.

The glass bottle and cork combination for wine is thought to have started in the 17th Century. But newer materials exist today that some argue are better suited for sealing a bottle than cork.

Screw caps and plastic corks have been embraced by producers fed up with wine becoming “corked” — the unpleasant musty taste, likened to wet dog, which is caused by tainted cork.

Influential US wine critic Robert Parker reckons that during the mid 1990s 7-10% of the wine he tasted was corked. In 2004 he predicted that by 2015 screw caps would dominate the wine industry.

The screw cap — generic name “Stelvin” after its biggest brand — advanced spectacularly in “New World” wine nations. By 2011, 90% of New Zealand wine was sealed this way.

But in Europe and the US the cork remains king.

It’s a little puzzling to some. Wine has become democratic and modern. There are prices and drinking styles to suit everyone. So why hasn’t the closure method evolved?

Portugal, where most of the world’s corks are harvested, has fought back against the chemical compound trichloroanisole (TCA), one of the most common causes of tainted corks.

But the screw cap not only avoids the problem of tainted cork, it forms a tighter seal. Most critics say that this guarantees a better flavour for all but the more expensive wines (which may age better with more oxygen).

“We prefer seals that ensure the wine is not going to be faulty,” says Ewan Murray, spokesman for the Wine Society. “Wines that are ready to drink young are always going to be fresher under a screw cap.”

QotD: Demands for less US control over the internet will get much more insistent

Filed under: Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue.

We can’t fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don’t see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.

Bruce Schneier, “Blowback from the NSA Surveillance”, Schneier on Security, 2013-06-17

Collectivism, voluntary and mandatory

Filed under: Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Paul Bonneau makes a case for — gasp — collectivism. Well, certain kinds of collectivism:

This is of course a disease of the political “right”; those on the left generally embrace collectivism so there is nothing hypocritical about their behavior. Sometimes their honesty is refreshing, even when I don’t agree. Anyway it’s easier to make an argument directly against collectivism, than it is to first have to convince the person you are talking to that he is advocating collectivism — and then arguing against it. Thus, collectivist leftists are easier to deal with than are collectivist rightists in denial. This is assuming any argument needs to be made, of course; generally I don’t have any dispute with collectivism per se, but only against the imposition of it on me and mine. If someone wants to live as a cog in a commune, who am I to complain? How is it my business?

To know how not to be a collectivist, for those rightists who are interested in that, we first have to know what collectivism is. Merriam-Webster online says:

    Collectivism

    1: a political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution; also : a system marked by such control

    2: emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity

Already we can see some problems. This is such a broad definition that it includes, for example, members of a church getting together to voluntarily build a church school, at least by the second definition. Few reasonable people of any stripe would have a problem with such actions; indeed, any free/anarchist country would crucially depend on large amounts of voluntary collective action for society to function. What we really mean when we argue against collectivism is the first definition, particularly the political aspect. In that case, people are forced to participate in the schemes of others.

This point raises a question. When leftists say they support collective action, are they thinking of the voluntary sort, against which no reasonable person would argue? Is that the picture they have in their mind as they speak? Perhaps we are wrong to argue against collectivism at all, since we are in fact voluntary collectivists; and what we should be arguing against is coercion. Coercion would be much harder for a leftist to defend — assuming he goes along with it at all (which might or might not be so). Maybe we should remove “collectivism” from the libertarian Lexicon of Bad Things. Maybe we should force leftists to argue for coercion, which is really what we object to, rather than collectivism, which we don’t — that is, to draw him out from behind his usual euphemistic veil. Maybe I should change the title of this article!

Orwell, Huxley, and the world we’re in

Filed under: Books, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

In Salon, Andrew O’Hehir considers the separate strains of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Philip K. Dick that predicted the way we’d be:

In 1946, two years before writing 1984, Orwell wrote an essay about the new form of social organization he saw on the horizon. He predicted it would do away with private property, which didn’t happen – but if we suppose that his idea of private property meant individual autonomy and freedom from debt slavery, this starts to sound more familiar:

    These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

That vision of the future, so much more sober than what we’re used to calling “Orwellian,” sounds eerily like the world we actually live in (with a few doses of Ayn Rand thrown in). So far as we know, our Huxley-Orwell hybrid society emerged organically from the end of the Cold War, rather than resulting from an apocalypse or a grand plan. It’s almost a case of life imitating art, as if Earth’s rulers had selected the most effective elements from various dystopian visions and strategically blended them. But I’m not sure we can blame all this on a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Group, or some Lee Atwater ad campaign. As in The Matrix, we chose the simulacrum of democracy and bumper stickers about “freedom” instead of the real things. We chose to believe that our political leaders stood for something besides rival castes within the ruling elite, chose to believe that a regime of torture and secrecy and endless global warfare was a rational response to the tragedy of 9/11. We still believe those things, but our dystopia is still messy, still incoherent, still incomplete. Which means, in theory, that it can still be undone.

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