The Continuing Death of the Phrase, "Photographic Evidence"

Nice.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/discoweasel/376062313/

Wedding Gifts... from San Francisco!

So I attended a wedding here, and per custom I gave a gift of cash, but in turn received a gift. The major portion of the gift I received was the "Ring Bell Catalog Gift," a system for weddings where the recipient gets a catalog and a postage-reply card. You can pick any gift you'd like from the catalog.

I was browsing through the foods section of the catalog, and the World Food section looks like the Sunday paper in SF! They have a selection of items from Bi-rite on 18th, Scharffen Berger, California Harvest Ranch Market in Pac Heights, and Leonard's 2001 on Polk. Ah, food shopping in San Francisco...

Endorphin High

With Nanke- and Nagasaki-san's wedding last weekend, I didn't get to the gym for a little bit. Man, every time you work out, it makes you feel so much better, you can't believe you ever skipped. Our bodies are hardwired to make us like it and still it's hard to get around to!

Why we make the tools

Pretty awesome.

The_most_epic_GMod_Rube_Goldberg_video_ever

MacBook update

Last week I was sad b/c my Mac kept crashing (kernel panic) and I had to take it into the Apple Store (happily I bought AppleCare for it so I wasn't worried about the charges). After keeping it for 5 days, they couldn't find any problems with it even though they could see the kernel panics in the panic log.

After I got it back, I tested a little more carefully, and I realized there was probably never any problem with the MacBook, but the Time Capsule I bought a few months ago has grown some data problem that crashes the Mac every time I try to access the incremental backup file. The reason I thought it was a computer problem is because the Mac automatically started a new incremental backup every 30 minutes or so, and boom.

So, really, I should take the Mac and the Time Capsule together to the Apple Store, sigh. I might do that eventually but for now I'll have to go without backup (yeep).

Just for the sake of people who might run into this and Google it, the kernel panic message is below the f. Not to be viewed by humans!


--------------------------------------------

Thu May 29 10:13:43 2008
panic(cpu 1 caller 0x0031678A): "btree_swap_node: about to write corrupt node!\n"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.4.31/bsd/hfs/hfs_btreeio.c:197
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
No mapping exists for frame pointer
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0xbffffe68

Butter Shortage and Journalism or lack thereof

The least-expected event of the year in Japan is the butter shortage. For a couple months now, it's been almost impossible to find butter in the stores. Japan is such a consumer culture that I assumed this was just a local phenomenon, but it isn't -- it's nationwide and several months old.

Sadly, almost all of the press reports I've seen, after reporting the basic facts, talk about how this is "one more example of the growing global food shortage." That makes for a good story... but one that doesn't actually jive with the facts. The Japanese English-language press actually has the most insightful reporting that I've found: see the Asahi Shimbun's summary.

Here are the facts that make me doubt this is "one more example of the growing global food shortage":

• Japan's domestic dairy industry is long-established and well-organized.
• The majority of Japan's dairy consumption is domestic -- for milk, approximately 100% (for cheese, it's mostly imported, which leads the overall figure to be 60% domestic).
• For butter, domestic production accounts for 86% of production.
• There is still plenty of cream in Japan. Those of you with the slightest exposure to dairy farms know that butter is made from... cream.
• Japanese retail butter prices are high, about 2x American butter prices. Given that there's no butter shortage in the U.S. (at least not that I've heard about), this makes it seem unlikely that there's a global butter shortage.
• Japanese butter tariffs are also very high in order to support those high domestic prices. According to WTO as referenced at this blog post, butter tariffs are 30% by value plus 1200 yen per kilogram. If you bought butter at U.S. retail prices and imported it to Japan, you would pay twice as much in duty as the butter cost you.
• And here, I think, is the real keystone to the problem: since 2006, domestic butter production has dropped by 11%. This is expected to continue for another couple of years.

Really? What's going on with the last item? Well, two years ago there was a dairy glut in Japan. Farmers couldn't sell excess milk, and as mentioned above there's no infrastructure for a cheese industry, so the milk was being poured out. There was a calf cull (killing off some percentage of the dairy herd) in order to try and rebalance supply and demand coordinated by the government. As explained in this endearing blog post from a Japanese dairy farmer, it takes 2 years for a calf to become a productive milch cow... and coincidentally, it's about two years since the calf cull, so the results of it are hitting right now. By the way, in the long run the idea that Japan perhaps needed to cut back its dairy industry is not unreasonable: the low birthrate here means that the number of children is shrinking, and children are disproportionate consumers of dairy products.

In other words, the story as reported by the mainstream media (that this is merely one more part of the "growing global food shortage" story) makes no sense to me. What is much more clearly supported by the facts is:

• Japan reduced their dairy supply two years ago in a way that took two years to reach the market.
• This relatively small change disproportionately impacted butter rather than milk or cream (perhaps butter is the lowest-value-added choice for what to make from milk? Also, read the endearing blog post for a non-obvious connection between the butter shortage and the powdered skim milk glut)
• Japan is prevented from availing itself of cheap international butter by a ludicrously high tariff, undoubtedly designed to protect those same domestic dairy farmers who had to kill all their calves two years ago.

I hate to sound like an Economist reporter, but the information I can find says that this is a clear result of government intervention in the dairy market. The tariff barriers are the fundamental cause of the shortage (Japan could easily afford to buy butter on the international market otherwise), and within those barriers they slightly underestimated the demand for dairy products.

With apologies to all those who (rightly) worry about a possible global food shortage and would like to use this as supporting evidence, this particular event seems like it needs to be marked up to domestic government actions. I'm disappointed but not surprised that it isn't perceived that way: the press likes tying this into the 'global food shortage' story because that story sells papers, and of course the Japanese bureaucrats would love to place the blame externally rather than admit it's the necessary consequence of the calf cull they organized two years ago.

This misdirection would also suit the Japanese domestic dairy industry because it avoids having anyone suggest the trivial fix: lower the tariff, and suddenly you'll have plenty of butter. The domestic industry doesn't want that in the long term because they're not efficient enough to compete with overseas producers.

Fly Derrie-Air

Hilarious. If only...

http://flyderrie-air.com

Subways that harmonize with towns and are loved by people along the line

You gotta love government works projects' slogans.

New Fukutoshin subway line