March 11th Links

• He found that his symptoms did not recur as long as he consumed no more than 1 L of Earl Grey daily. When last seen in November, 2001, neurological examination, nerve conduction studies, and electromyography were normal. He was still drinking 2 L of plain black tea daily (his entire fluid intake), and had no complaints. [Lancet]
• DIRECTOR: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut! (Then in a very male form of Japanese, like a father speaking to a wayward child) Don't try to fool me. Don't pretend you don't understand. Do you even understand what we are trying to do? Suntory is very exclusive. The sound of the words is important. It's an expensive drink. This is No. 1. Now do it again, and you have to feel that this is exclusive. O.K.? This is not an everyday whiskey you know. [link]
• Boswell is the only tomato company in the USA that maintains complete control of the tomatoes from the seed to the field and through the processing factory to the customers' doors. This is made possible by the fact that Boswell is closer to the field than any other tomato processor. They are committed to having "a foot in the field every day" — all of Boswell's tomatoes can be traced back to the 5-foot section of the field they came from. [BWEL]
• Everyone seems to be Instagramming the katsu sandos and caneles at Konbi, a tiny Japanese sandwich shop in Los Angeles. But have you seen the croissant? Ever since Konbi opened last fall, I have double-tapped and saved almost every photo of the shatteringly-flaky, so-damn-chocolatey confection. I just had to know how they got it that way. Here chefs Akira Akuto and Nick Montgomery break down the pastry I can't stop thinking about. [Bon Appetit]
• For the first time since forecasters began recording data — at least 132 years — the mercury did not reach 70 degrees in downtown Los Angeles for the entire month of February. [LA Times]
• There's now a standard grab bag of minimally invasive techniques for making a lackluster neighborhood more appealing. Paint, street furniture, wayfinding signage, potted plants, and branding along with new programming help to define and activate designated areas. In this case the overly wide streets were narrowed, a public pedestrian plaza was cultivated, and a canopy of overhead plastic streamers created an iconic crown. These measures are sometimes dismissed as hipster stunts, but the cosmetic treatments are a reflection of a larger underlying dynamic. [Granola Shotgun]
• Second, contrary to the claims of modern monetary theorists, it is not true that governments can simply create new money to pay all liabilities coming due and avoid default. As the experience of any number of emerging markets demonstrates, past a certain point, this approach leads to hyperinflation. Indeed, in emerging markets that have practiced modern monetary theory, situations could arise where people could buy two drinks at bars at once to avoid the hourly price increases. As with any tax, there is a limit to the amount of revenue that can be raised via such an inflation tax. If this limit is exceeded, hyperinflation will result. Third, modern monetary theorists typically reason in terms of a closed economy. But a policy of relying on central bank finance of government deficits, as suggested by modern monetary theorists, would likely result in a collapsing exchange rate. This would in turn lead to increased inflation, increased long-term interest rates (because of inflation), risk premiums, capital fleeing the country, and lower real wages as the exchange rate collapsed and the price of imports soared. Again, this is not just theory. Numerous emerging markets have found, contrary to modern monetary theory, that they could not print money to cover even their domestic currency liabilities. [WaPo]
• We are now judging one another's fundamental decency based on whether we eat at Chipotle or Chick-fil-A. This may seem silly—harmless, even. But it is uncomfortably reminiscent of stories from conflict zones abroad. In Northern Ireland, for example, an outsider visiting during the Troubles had no way to tell unionists and nationalists apart. They were pretty much all white Christians, after all. But the locals themselves routinely guessed one another's identity based on their names, the spacing of their eyes, their sports jerseys, the color of their hair, their neighborhood, or even how much jewelry they wore­. This process came to be known as "telling." If a reliable cue didn't exist, people would make one up. It was a way to move about in the world in a time of profound tribalism, during which 3,600 people were killed. [The Atlantic]
• Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. [link]
• what we see as a bloody mess that needs charity is natural to most Somalis. Not all—the Somalis actually used to have a rep as the best office workers in the Horn, believe it or not, under the colonial regimes. They're not stupid people. But they are nomads at heart, and nomads don't really have the idea of a central government protecting everybody. They want to protect themselves. Somalis actually live the way these survivalist wackos up in the Idaho panhandle think they live: all on their own, protecting their families. The way the Idaho nuts do it is all wrong, which any Somali or Bedu could tell them: you don't hole up in a log cabin with a bunch of motion sensors and polish your gun collection all day like a sitting duck. You move, you and your goats. You keep moving, keep watch, and don't trust anybody outside the clan. If you're really going to do it you can't do that single-family stuff. Too easy to besiege and wipe out. You need a clan. So the Somalis are organized in clans for mutual defense, hitting each other and running. Used to do it on livestock, then they met their dream car, the Toyota pickup, and never looked back. [War Nerd]
• On Friday alone, five men of Somali descent were shot in separate attacks, one fatally. Police and community members pinned the blame for the bloodshed on an ongoing feud between Cedar-Riverside neighborhood gangs like 1627 and Madhiban With Attitude (MWA) and their rivals, the Somali Outlaws, whose territory includes the area around Karmel Mall. Friday's shootings were a repeat of a familiar pattern: a shooting on one gang's turf is usually followed hours, if not minutes later by an "eye-for-an-eye" response so as not to appear weak, community members say. Two shootings last month are also blamed on the conflict. [Star Tribune]
• Americans have been falling in unrequited love with these glib visiting Brits since frontier days. Every time a 19th-c. British author overspent on child prostitutes or laudanum, he or she embarked on an American lecture tour to repair the family finances, following Dickens' path from one muddy American boomtown to the next. At every stop the author would let the yokels adore him for a few minutes, then retire to make careful notes on the locals' ignorance, foul table manners and general stupidity for the scathing book to be published once safe in London. And the Yanks fell for it every time. After wining and dining their distinguished visitor, the social elite of Podunk would order copies of the noble visitor's account, hoping to see their names in print-only to be stunned at the lecturer's sketch of Podunk as a stinking backwater, and brief description of its leading lights as an "execrable mob of beasts." [War Nerd]
• High-speed rail is presented as some kind of new technology race that America is in danger of losing if it doesn't start building right away. In fact, American railroads began experimenting with high-speed trains back in the 1930s. Japan's bullet trains date to 1964, 55 years ago. By that time, we had already surpassed them with jet airliners. Today, air travel is far less expensive than train travel, with airfares averaging under 14 cents a passenger mile, barely more than a third of Amtrak fares even though Amtrak receives much bigger subsidies, per passenger mile, than the airlines. Racing to build a faster train would be like subsidizing the manufacture of new IBM Selectric typewriters because China developed a faster electric typewriter – no matter how fast, typewriters have been rendered obsolete by word processors. [Cato]