Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jun 11, 2024Baked beans made with molasses and salt pork
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1886One of the definitions for a saloon is a place that serves food and drink, but makes most of its money from drink. This certainly was the case in the Old West, where a lot of saloons served a free lunch as long as you bought a drink. Just because it was free, didn’t mean it was low quality food. In fact, many saloons, especially those in larger cities with more competition, served fancier and fancier meals to draw in patrons.
These beans aren’t the French cuisine that some saloons served, but they are delicious. Even without the onions and spices that some recipes used, they’re so flavorful and much better than canned versions.
Baked Pork and Beans
Wash and pick over a large heaping cupful of navy beans and steep them in water over night. Put them on next morning with fresh water to more than cover, and baking soda the size of a bean and let boil about an hour. Then carry them to the sink, pour all into a colander letting the water run away and put back into the saucepan with cold water enough to come up to a level. Boil again and in a few minutes they will be soft. Season with a little salt and tablespoon of molasses. Put them into four pint bowls or tin pans, lay an ounce slice of salt pork on each and bake half an hour.
— Cooking for Profit by Jessup Whitehead, 1886
September 23, 2024
What Food was Served at Wild West Saloons?
August 21, 2024
The Great Enshittification – technological progress is now actually regressing
Ted Gioia provides ten reasons why all our lovely shiny technological improvements have turned into a steady stream of enshittified “updates” that reduce functionality, add unwanted “improvements” and make things significantly less reliable:
By my measure, this reversal started happening around a decade ago. If I had to sum things up in a conceptual chart, it would look like this:
The divergence was easy to ignore at first. We’re so familiar with useful tech that many of us were slow to notice when upgrades turned into downgrades.
But the evidence from the last couple years is impossible to dismiss. And we can’t blame COVID (or other extraneous factors) any longer. Technology is increasingly making matters worse, not better — and at an alarming pace.
[…]
But I have avoided answering, up until now, the biggest question — which is why is this happening?
Or, to be more specific, why is this happening now?
Until recently, most of us welcomed innovation, but something changed. And now a huge number of people are anxious and fearful about the same tech companies they once trusted.
What caused this shift?
That’s a big issue. Unless we understand how things went wrong, we can’t begin to fix them. Otherwise we’re just griping — about bad software or greedy CEOs or whatever.
It’s now time to address the causes, not just complain about symptoms.
Once we do that, we can move to the next steps, namely outlining a regimen for recovery and an eventual cure.
So let me try to lay out my diagnosis as clearly as I can. Below are the ten reasons why tech is now breaking bad.
I apologize in advance for speaking so bluntly. Many will be upset by my frankness. But the circumstances — and the risks involved — demand it.
April 27, 2023
It’s not environmentalism I object to, it’s environmentalists
I thoroughly agree with Tom Knighton here:
I tend to be pretty critical of environmentalism. It’s not that I don’t value things like clean air, clean water, and pristine land free of pollution. I actually do value all of those things. I actually care about the environment.
What I don’t care about, though, are environmentalists.
Much of my issue with them is that they don’t seem to recognize reality or, if they do, they just want everyone to have to pay more and make do with less.
Most evironmentalists I’ve dealt with fail to understand one of the basic tenets of economics: There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Yes, we can make certain changes to how we do things to reduce our impact on the natural environment, but such changes are almost never free and sometimes the potential cost is significantly higher than any rational expectation of benefit from changing. Economics — and life in general — is all about the trade-offs. If you do X, you can’t do Y. If you specialize in this area, you can’t devote effort in that area, and so on. Time and materials limit what can be done and require a sensible way of deciding … and most environmentalists either don’t understand or refuse to accept this.
For example, take the electric cars that are being pushed so hard by environmentalists and their allies in the government. They’re not remotely ready to replace gas- or diesel-powered vehicles by any stretch of the imagination. They lack the range to really compete as things currently stand, and yet, what are we being pushed to buy?
Obviously, little of this is new. I wrote that post nearly two years ago and absolutely nothing has changed for either better or worse. Not on that front.
But there have been some changes, and they really show me why I’m glad I don’t describe myself as an environmentalist.
Actually, I take back a bit of my accusation that environmentalists don’t see the trade-offs: they do see some of them. They see things that you will have to give up to achieve their goals. That’s the kind of trade-off they’re eager to make.
Even if you don’t think climate change is real and manmade — I don’t, for example — I like the idea of clean, cheap sources of energy. Solar and wind aren’t going to produce all the electricity we need, but nuclear can.
Yet why do so many environmentalists focus on wind and solar? It can’t make what we need. It won’t replace coal power plants, especially with regard to reliability. Coal creates power when it’s overcast and when there’s no wind to speak of.
Nuclear can.
Nuclear, in fact, could create power on a fraction of the footprint, minimize pollution due to power creation, and do it safely. For all the fearmongering over nuclear power, there have been only two meltdowns in history — both of which were at facilities with reportedly abysmal safety records and one of which still needed a massive earthquake and tsunami to trigger it.
But wind and solar don’t just create “clean” energy. They also require Americans to make do with less.
That is the heart of the environmental movement. It’s not so much about saving the planet. If it’s not about a cult of personality, as Lights encountered, it’s about making people step backward in their standard of living.
September 30, 2017
Kathleen Wynne’s “War on Economics” is going great!
Giving people “free” stuff will always get you support from people who don’t understand TANSTAAFL (including the leader of the opposition), as Chris Selley explains:
Polls suggest Premier Kathleen Wynne’s ongoing war on economists is paying dividends. Fifty-three per cent approve of her Liberal government extending rent control to units built after 1991, according to a Forum Research poll conducted in May; only 25 per cent disapproved. In June, Forum found 53 per cent of Ontarians supported jacking up the minimum wage to $15 from $11.40 by Jan. 1, 2019, versus 38 per cent opposed. The move was hugely popular among Liberal voters (79 per cent) and NDP voters (28 per cent). Wynne’s approval rating is staggering back up toward, um, 20 per cent. But a Campaign Research poll released Sept. 13 had the Tories just five points ahead of the Liberals. That’s pretty great news for this beleaguered tribe.
The boffins still aren’t playing along, though.
Earlier this month, Queen’s Park’s Financial Accountability Office projected the hike would “result in a loss of approximately 50,000 jobs … with job losses concentrated among teens, young adults, and recent immigrants.” And it could be higher, the FAO cautioned, because there’s very little precedent for, and thus little evidence on which to judge, a hike as rapid as the one the Liberals propose — 32 per cent per cent in less than two years.
This week, TD Economics weighed in with a higher number: “a net reduction in jobs of about 80,000 to 90,000 positions by the end of the decade.” And the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis paints the grimmest picture: “We (expect) that the Act will, over two years, put 185,000 jobs at risk” — that’s jobs that already exist or that would otherwise have been created.
It’s easy to see why raising the minimum wage is popular. Governments like it because it doesn’t show up in the budget. We in the media can pretty easily find victims of an $11.40 minimum wage, and reasonably compassionate people quite rightly sympathize. Forty hours a week at $11.40 an hour for 50 weeks a year is $22,800. You can’t live on that.
Of course, these Liberal policies are flying in the face of mainstream economic theory, so you’d expect the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to have lots of arrows in the quiver to fight … oh, wait. Tory leader Patrick “I’m really a Liberal” Brown supports both the rent control and the minimum wage hike, just not quite as much at Wynne does. There’s Canadian “conservatism” in a nutshell for you: we also want to get on the express to Venezuelan economic conditions, just not quite as fast as the government wants. There’s a reason Kathleen Wynne isn’t as worried about getting re-elected as she used to be…
June 1, 2016
The Tradeoff Between Fun and Wages: No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
Published on 7 Apr 2015
If you had to choose, would you rather be a sewer inspector spending your days underground or a lifeguard on the beach? Most would say that being a lifeguard is a more fun job, but a sewer inspector has higher wages to compensate for the less-fun aspects of the job. In this video, we discuss the tradeoff between fun and wages and show how this illustrates that “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!”
October 24, 2012
Persuading Michigan voters to refuse a new free bridge to Canada
The announcement back in June must have appeared too good to be true: a new bridge between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario to be completely funded by Canada. Michigan voters are being urged to refuse the deal:
Canada, understand, has agreed to pay for the bridge in full, including liabilities — and potential cost overruns — under an agreement that was about a decade-in-the-making and officially announced to much fanfare, at least on the Canadian side of the border, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder in Windsor/Detroit in mid-June.
For Michigan, it is a slam-dunk arrangement. As Mr. Norton told one audience: ‘‘If this proves to be a dumb financial decision, it’s on us, not on you.’’
It’s a free bridge, a vital new piece of publicly owned infrastructure — for both countries — and yet one that is in grave danger of being demolished before construction even begins when Michigan voters head to the polls for a ballot initiative attached to the Nov. 6 elections.
[. . .]
Manuel (Matty) Moroun, an 85-year-old self-made billionaire who owns the 83-year-old Ambassador Bridge, is Cynic-in-Chief. The Ambassador is currently the only transport truck-bearing bridge in town. Twenty-five percent of Canadian-American trade, representing about $120-billion, flows across it each year.
It is a perfect monopoly for the Moroun family, a golden goose that just keeps on laying eggs, putting upwards of $80-million a year in tolls, duty free gas and shopping sales in their pockets. Allowing a Canadian-financed competitor into the ring without a fight isn’t an option.
September 4, 2012
TANSTAAFL is not the whole story
At The Freeman, Sandy Ikeda points out that the handy little saying “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” is not enough to explain modern prosperity::
Economics teaches us the importance of TANSTAAFL and capital investment. Again, the trouble is they are not the whole truth.
As I’ve written before, however, there is such a thing as a free lunch, and I don’t want to repeat that argument in its entirety. The basic idea is that what Israel M. Kirzner calls “the driving force of the market” is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship goes beyond working within a budget — it’s the discovery of novel opportunities that increase the wealth and raises the budgets of everyone in society, much as the late Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Madam C.J. Walker (probably the first African-American millionaire) did. Yes, those innovators needed saving and capital investment by someone — most innovators were debtors at first — but note: Those savings could have been and were invested in less productive investments before these guys came along.
As McCloskey, as well as Rosenberg and Birdzell, have argued, it isn’t saving, capital investment per se, and certainly not colonialism, income inequality, capitalist exploitation, or even hard work that is responsible for the tremendous rise in economic development, especially since 1800.
It is innovation.
And, McCloskey adds, it is crucially the ideas and words that we use to think and talk about the people who innovate — the chance takers, the rebels, the individualists, the game changers — and that reflect a respect for and acceptance of the very concept of progress. Innovation blasts the doors off budget constraints and swamps current rates of savings.
[. . .]
Indeed, innovation is perhaps what enables the market economy to stay ahead of, for the time being at least, the interventionist shackles that increasingly hamper it. You want to regulate landline telephones? I’ll invent the mobile phone! You make mail delivery a legal monopoly? I’ll invent email! You want to impose fixed-rail transport on our cities? I’ll invent the driverless car!
McCloskey’s book has shown up a few times on the blog.
