Books for the Poor
In more terrific (and hopeful) Latin American coverage from the LAT, Henry Chu tells the story of how an illiterate Brazilian laborer built a 10,000-volume community library in his favela.
Dynamist Blog
A Growth Market
The Mexican avocado industry is booming, thanks to the combination of free trade and rapidly growing U.S. demand. And despite U.S. growers' attempts to block over-the-border competition, that growth doesn't appear to be hurting the domestic industry. (A rising tide and all that.) The LAT's Chris Kraul reports:
Perez's crop is but a trickle in a river of avocados flooding the United States from Mexico, where exports have more than doubled in volume this year over last. The reason? Growers finally have attained unimpeded entree to the U.S. market after eight decades of barriers. Many packing houses are working multiple shifts to feed U.S. avocado demand, which is growing 15% a year.
"It is going to remain this way," Perez said. The opening of the U.S. market "has changed the industry for good."
So sure are Perez and partner Miguel Torres of a continuing bonanza that they hired 20 additional workers this year--a 50% bumping up of the payroll--and invested $4 million in a computerized sorting system to more efficiently box their Senor Avo brand of fruit.
What's driving growth in avocado exports is the elimination of trade barriers and sanitary bans that for most of the last century kept the U.S. market off limits to Mexican fruit. The boost also is thanks to the surprisingly strong growth in U.S. consumption. According to the Irvine-based California Avocado Commission, the state industry's marketing arm, total U.S. avocado sales will reach 440,000 tons this year, an 80% increase from the total consumed in 2000.
"Guacamole's gone mainstream," said John Loughridge, vice president of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Del Monte Fresh Produce Co., the fruit wholesaling giant that buys 90% of Perez's avocados and distributes them across the United States.
"The growth is due to avocados' favorable health aspects, the immigration trend and the popularity of Mexican cuisine," said Loughridge, who added that his company had come "from nowhere" to become the nation's second-largest avocado wholesaler partly because of its strong links to Michoacan producers.
Mexico has grabbed an increasing share of the expanding U.S. market. Benjamin Grayeb Ruiz, a Michoacan grower and current president of that state's growers and packers association, says Mexican exports will reach 100,000 tons this year, up from 42,632 in 2004. That would put Mexico on par with top-ranked Chile, which last year shipped 100,000 tons of avocados into the U.S. market.
Blanketed with avocado orchards, the rolling hills of western Michoacan state are alive with commerce. Uruapan, a city of 250,000, is the nerve center. Equipment firms, truck fleets, sanitary inspectors and orchard workers are all thriving in an industry that will pump about $400 million into the local economy this year, a 50% increase from five years ago. The number of packing plants has grown to 23 from 12 three years ago....
Out-of-work Mexicans are flocking to Michoacan from other states, lured by field wages that have grown 25% to 33% in two years.
"The market has been much better than we thought," Grayeb said. "But we invested a lot of time and money to make it happen."
Next up: Convincing the Chinese to eat avocados. Read the whole article.
"A Lawyer's Lawyer," or Miers-Briggs Constitutionalism
He's Mr. Super-Resume. She's Ms. Bush Crony. But aside from good manners, John Roberts and Harriet Miers actually seem to have a lot in common. Each tends to be described as a "lawyer's lawyer," which means, as far as this non-lawyer can tell, someone who pays excruciating attention to the particulars of a case, without a big picture view of jurisprudence. In other words, not a Law Professor's Lawyer. As this Legal Times profile of Miers put it:
She has also earned a reputation as exacting, detail-oriented, and meticulous -- to a fault, her critics say.
"She can't separate the forest from the trees," says one former White House staffer.
But Miers' supporters say her emphasis on detail and procedure are exactly what the Office of the White House Counsel requires.
"She is very thorough and very hard-working and very conscientious and very careful, which is why she was a good choice for staff secretary and why she's a good choice as counsel," notes Brett Kavanaugh, a former White House associate counsel who replaced Miers as staff secretary in the summer of 2003....
Her critics say the problem goes beyond what Miers does or doesn't know about policy -- and right back to a near-obsession with detail and process.
"There's a stalemate there," says one person familiar with the chief of staff's office. "The process can't move forward because you have to get every conceivable piece of background before you can move onto the next level. People are talking about a focus on process that is so intense it gets in the way of substance."...
"In my view, she's a lawyer's lawyer [who] grasps facts very quickly, in terms of sizing up a situation," says James Francis, who was chairman of Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign and suggested that Miers become campaign counsel.
"She doesn't make careless mistakes and doesn't tolerate careless mistakes in others," adds Francis, who runs his own investment company.
Based on this rather limited sample, I'd say that if you want to be a Bush appointee to the Supreme Court, you've got to be someone other people call "smart," but absolutely, positively not an intellectual--not a systematizer, not a pattern finder, not a theorist, not someone who sees the forest, not, in other words, a person your critics could possibly call an "ideologue." With a nod toward human resources lingo, we can call it the Miers-Briggs Test: Only "S"'s need apply.
Link to National Law Journal via D Magazine's FrontBurner, which is covering the Dallas angle on Miers.
Criminalizing Science
The threat from the left, examined in my new Forbes column.
The DMN's Pro-Pork Flip-Flop
I blogged last week about the Dallas Morning News's remarkable--or, one might say, humiliating--24-hour flip flop on pork for downtown Dallas. First came the high-minded editorial calling for cutting pork, including millions for pretty but unnecessary (and purely local) new bridges over the Trinity River, to fund Katrina rebuilding. Then, a day later, came the reversal. The company's real estate interests obviously trumped its editorialists' principles.
I wasn't the only person to notice. At the Dallas Observer, Jim Schutze ("the Jill Stewart of Dallas") is on the case. Unfortunately, his column's kicker isn't true. I easily found the original editorial on Nexis. He's the better shoe-leather reporter, but I'm good with the electronics.
UPDATE: The Nexis mystery deepens.
Cultural Briefing
Tokyo-based blogger Sean Kinsell eviscerates this WaPost story purporting to find a new girlyness among Japanese men. For a primer on how important local knowledge is to understanding any supposed trend, this post is hard to beat. (Don't get me started on the willful ignorance of suggesting that Vanity Fair readers will understand the contemporary South by reading Christopher Hitchens interviewing communist-turned-agrarian Eugene Genovese. That was a couple of VF issues back: I read it on the newsstand.)
Found Art
For artist Raymon Elozua, odd jobs cleaning out slum-building basements turned into urban archeology--and a collection of artifacts that weren't intended as art but certainly look like it when isolated from their original purpose. To me, these gas stove burners recall the religious totems (at least that's what we think they are) retrieved from ancient sites.
Elozua eventually created an online gallery, with a statement explaining the background (Via Liquid Treat.)
Carnival of Tomorrow
A new edition is up, with items on NASA and space exploration and on Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, among other topics.
Flash Laptop
In response to my wish for an iBook Nano, reader Ivan Kirigin emails:
Just thought I'd comment on the desire for a "flash" laptop. There are some significant technical problems.
Firstly, the processor, screen, and battery taken together comprise the bulk of the weight of a laptop. It is hard to have a fast processor and a good screen and a big enough battery to power them both for a long time, without having a pretty heavy laptop (when compared to the weight of an iPod nano).
Secondly, you probably don't notice for your gadgets, but flash is VERY slow. For the constant reading & writing needed for any good operating system, this is very bad.
There are going to be some major advancements soon which should change this. Firstly flash is becoming faster and larger (the larger is important because computer makers assume people don't want less than 20GB in a computer). More importantly, there is a huge push to get lower-power processors. Also, new OLED displays draw far less power. Both mean that the battery can be smaller. Finally, fuel-cells are going to be more common in 2006 gadgets. The energy density is so much higher, that you can expect both high capacity and lighter weight.
All in all, I would venture to guess that in early 2007, you'll find an ultra-light almost-desktop-replacement laptop. The weight of an large iPod today, the footprint of a small qwerty, and pencil thin.
As for me, I'm about to buy a 9lb Dell, wishing I could afford to drop another grand on a 15lb Alienware beast.
Ivan, who is obviously less sensitive to laptop weight than I am, also sends links to these stories on Samsung's recent advances in flash memory for laptops.
The Manolo Loves the Capitalism
And apparently does quite well by it. He is a "six-figure blogger"--and deservedly so.