Category Archives: living

America’s Raisin Regime: De minimis curat lex # Gosplan’s Sour Grapes in the USA

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Repeat after me: state regulation is always a sane and desirable thing…

WHETHER the obscure statute that governs America’s raisin trade is constitutional, Elena Kagan is not sure. She and her fellow Supreme Court justices are pondering that question at the moment, and will rule shortly. But she sounds reasonably confident that the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 is “the world’s most outdated law”.

Since the 1940s raisin farmers have been obliged to make over a portion of their crop to a government agency called the Raisin Administrative Committee. The committee, run by 47 raisin farmers and packers, along with a sole member of the raisin-eating public, decides each year how many raisins the domestic market can bear, and thus how many it should siphon off to preserve an “orderly” market. It does not pay for the raisins it appropriates, and gives many of them away, while selling others for export. Once it has covered its own costs, it returns whatever profits remain to farmers. In some years there are none. Worse, farmers sometimes forfeit a substantial share of their crop: 47% in 2003 and 30% in 2004, for example.

Participation in this Brezhnevite scheme is mandatory. [...]

Read the rest at America’s raisin regime: De minimis curat lex | The Economist.

Hartley Wintney in Spring

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The Church Oak

The Church Oak

So if you are on the UK Security and Payments scene: Jonathan Care / @ArashiYama is in hospital

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I visited Jon last night and he was very with it, sitting in a chair and messing with his iPad, covered in spots and bruises and with a pair of cannulas (cannulae?) hanging out of him while wired to a drip.

Medically, something has gone wrong with his immune system which is now attacking his own blood platelets; this is a bad thing because without platelets your blood essentially drops out of you. From what I understand the first half of last week was very very bad indeed but as of yesterday he just looked like he’d caught measles whilst battling ninjas using mad judo skillz.

It’s some form of idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura but – geeks be advised – he’s not interested in having diagnosis by google thrown at him when he has a bunch of actual doctors on hand to deal with his specific condition. They are paid more than Wikipedia editors, they can earn their salaries. :-)

If you’d like to visit him (Camberley area) then send a message to his beloved PinkyFluff who will schedule you in – I am certain that Jon would love to see you all at once but Lilly has other ideas about that; also: be advised that she’s been doing a Herculean task of hospital visiting for the past few days and herself deserves props for massive hard work.

Jon’s also available on Twitter; and if you want to help, he needs platelets – stats: should be: 400, was: 1 – so do please go look at http://www.blood.co.uk/

Jon’s likely to be staring at the walls for several days yet.  It’s curious that Steve Lord has equally been through shit of late; and for some reason people think security is a easy profession…