What I Am Reading February 6th

In case you were unconcerned about the rising price of eggs,

“In many ways, the decline of orange juice represents the future of many staple foods. Continuous abundance, a prerequisite for staples, is no longer guaranteed. More and more, the notion of the classic American breakfast—bacon, eggs, toast, milk, coffee, and a glass of orange juice—is beginning to seem like a snapshot of a bygone era. Not only is the supply of orange juice becoming shaky, but so is that of eggs, milk, and coffee.”

Climate change means more than the weather. From The Atlantic, The Last Days of American Orange Juice

Word choice, often the bastion of political correctness, comes from both sides of the aisle.

“The mountain was first dubbed McKinley by a gold prospector named William Dickey in an 1897 article in The New York Sun. Dickey had a good, if selfish, reason. McKinley had just become the Republican nominee for president and supported the gold standard, which would keep the value of gold high—and Dickey’s prospecting lucrative. McKinley himself had never even visited Alaska. The name was made official in 1917. But the mountain already had a name, Denali, which was how the native Athabaskan people had forever referred to it—Denali meaning “the high one.” Alaskans continued to use the old name, and in 1975 the state’s legislature and governor requested a change back to Denali, which the federal government denied. Forty years later, President Barack Obama decided to make Denali the mountain’s official name in recognition of these facts (and as a way of rewarding the Native populations in his political coalition). Now, even as Trump looks to honor one of his favorite presidents by reverting to Mount McKinley, it’s worth noting that the two Republican senators from Alaska are opposed. The office of Dan Sullivan, one of those senators, told a reporter that he “prefers the name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabaskan people gave the mountain thousands of years ago.”

From The Atlantic, There’s a New Language Sheriff in Town

I just finished a book on the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, which is oddly pertinent today for its politics, science, and culture. But I digress. Let’s talk about the underlying science everyone knows: evolution.

“Evolution is elegantly simple, in some ways simpler—or at least, more apparently straightforward—than many other key concepts in science. However, its apparent simplicity continues to attract a disproportionate number of misconceptions, as though to fill in the spaces surrounding what people know … or think they know.

As an evolutionary biologist who has also spent decades as a university professor, I’ve come across plenty of strongly held misunderstandings about evolution and how it works. It’s not necessarily that a little learning is a dangerous thing; rather, a little learning leads to a lot of misconceptions. Here are 10.”

From Nautil.us, 10 Misconceptions About Evolution

Among the finger-pointing in the LA fires is the 100⁺ firetrucks out of service due to budget cuts and restraints. But perhaps some of those budgetary woes were on the supply rather than demand side. 

"A handful of financiers have been allowed to transform a critical, once-vibrant industry into a rent-extracting racket. By consolidating the fire-apparatus industry through serial acquisitions, REV Group and Oshkosh appear to have consolidated the power to raise prices and throttle output of lifesaving equipment with impunity. Using that power, they have imposed years-long delays in delivery on their customers and exorbitant payment terms that will enable them to pass on production costs almost at will — leaving them little incentive to invest in new capacity or greater efficiency to relieve the bottleneck in the fire truck supply chain.”

Why should it take nearly five years to build a firetruck? It takes 2 years to build a tanker ship. From Big, Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the LA Fires?