Monday, October 2, 2023

Every day the New York Times' editors check out the latest from NYT Pitchbot and say "hold my beer."

 There is possibly no writer who is more representative of the NYT than Frank Bruni, and I don't mean that in a good way. There are others who are better known and more strongly associated with the paper, but they bring something of themselves to the job. Even the execrable Dowd at least has a distinct voice. Bruni doesn't, which makes him especially useful when you want to get a read on what the people above him are thinking.

Trump has a mammoth lead over all of them, and there’s no sign that it’s shrinking. He’s skating to the party’s presidential nomination. Along the way, he’s doing quadruple axels of madness, triple toe loops of provocation. He’s fantasizing about executing a respected general, and he’s fetishizing firearms, his words coming close to incitements of violence. He’s not sorry for the Jan. 6 riots. To my ears, he’d like more of where that came from.

...

And perhaps the only shot that any of those seven candidates have to stop him and prevent the irreversible damage he’d do to the United States with four more years is to call a tyrant a tyrant, a liar a liar, an arsonist an arsonist. None of them did.

They’re too frightened of his and his followers’ wrath. So forgive me if I chortled every time they talked about leadership, which they talked about often on Wednesday night. They’re not leaders. They’re opportunists who are letting an opportunity slip away from them.

I don't want to spend too much time on the tactical wisdom of attacking the most popular Republican leader since Reagan (at least within the party). Barring some disruption that completely resets the table (like a health crisis or someone fleeing the country to avoid imprisonment), Trump will be the GOP nominee and even if there is a massive disruption, telling the majority they've been supporting a tyrant is probably not the best way to weather it.

But while Bruni's argument flies in the face of evidence and common sense, it aligns perfectly with the narrative the paper has pushing more and more desperately for well over a year now, the latest iteration of one the paper (and much of the rest of the press) has been telling itself for at least a quarter century now about how both parties are basically the same and it's just a few unrepresentative extremists in both parties who cause all the trouble.

The two-part fantasy of the moment is that Trump is an anomaly and that all that is needed is the right candidate with the right approach and the former president won't make it past the primaries. It has been an increasingly difficult delusion delusion to maintain, and the press's efforts to keep it alive are sound like a Pitchbot thread, particularly the evergreen "Experts/researchers/polls say [obvious conclusion], but we talked to [tiny unrepresentative sample] who aren't so sure."

Recent and humiliating case in point.

If opinion polls are to be believed, Donald Trump has the 2024 Republican presidential nomination in the bag. But in a recent Times Opinion focus group with 13 Republican voters who are looking at candidates other than Mr. Trump, the idea that the race was all but over sounded off base, either because they don’t know any other Republicans who want Mr. Trump back in office or because he seems beatable for the nomination.

The press and particularly the NYT has been playing variations on "if the polls are to be believed" for over eight years now, briefly acknowledging Trump's numbers then trying to wave them away with wishful analytics. The hard inescapable death and taxes truth is that Trump's standing at this point is something unprecedented in recent memory (including 2016).

 

Barring extraordinary events, if Trump is capable of running (and remains in the country), he will be the GOP nominee. Any other outcome is so unlikely that to treat it as possible is irresponsible.

The NYT (I'm going to skip the clumsy phrasing "The press and particularly..." and just cut to the chase from here on) appear to have abandoned their quixotic efforts to argue that Trump's polls were worse worse than they looked, and have doubled down on on op-eds and not just focus groups but "where the hell did you get these people?" focus groups. Parties and publications have a long history of stuffing these groups with unrepresentative samples, but I've never seen the thumb applied to the scale with quite this much force.

Beyond the absurdity of not knowing any other Republicans line (shades of the Pauline Kael Nixon quote without the self-aware preface), every response is at odds with what what we know about GOP primary voters. Despite vaccines being Trump's greatest area of vulnerability on the right, there's not an anti-vaxxer in the bunch. No conspiracy theorists either. Almost no mention of abortion and none of it heated. "Few of these voters cared about immigration or wokeism." The only mention of Ukraine was a positive nod to the hawkish Nikki Haley. The only comment about Russia outside of the one involving Haley was one praising... wait for it... Joe Biden.

Every one of the focus group members was a NYT editor's fantasy figure of a typical Republican voter. Remember that scene in Being John Malkovich where everyone looked like Malkovich's? It was like that only with David Brooks' face.


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Friday, September 29, 2023

Deferred Thursday Tweets -- as always, Dems in disarray

All you need to know about the GOP primary in just twenty seconds. You don't need to see any other clips or read any analyses. Just watch this.
  






Growing up in rural Arkansas, I remember my heart going out to those the subsistence truffle farmers.


Another good ad, and one that makes a point we've been hammering.





On Trump, Drudge > NYT







SROs would seem to be the simplest conversions and it would answer a burning need for low income housing, but I never hear those proposed.

 

A note to those who get all worked up about polls more that a year before the election:


And a reminder that, as good as he is with polling data, Nate Silver's track record as a political analyst is decidedly mixed.

(There is an extremely overrated politician from California, but his name isn't Harris.)


Today, Florida...


Tomorrow, the world.

Naomi Klein and Matt ("not Gatez") Gertz need to form a support group.



Untroubled by any hobgoblins of consistency.


Getting serious for a moment, this is an important issue.




The funniest part is that rather than ignore this, Fields waded into the replies under the impression that the details would help.


Big week for Elon.



From Forbes:
Potentially, it could cut carbon emissions by about 50% over a lifetime of use, assuming a buyer replaces a similarly sized gasoline truck, said Nick Molden, CEO and founder of Emissions Analytics, an independent automotive research firm based in the U.K. But if an owner uses it less frequently than the gasoline truck, “that would undermine the climate benefit because the manufacturing emissions to make a Cybertruck would be amortized over too few miles,” he said.
In other words, you could get a much safer appropriate-for-your-needs hybrid with the same carbon footprint, you'd save a ton of money, and you wouldn't look like a complete dick driving around town.




As we were saying twelve years ago.

Tech notes


Before they "fixed" it, the math reasoning section of the SATs relied heavily on rewriting problems with new notation so that students who hadn't had much math wouldn't be at a disadvantage. Similar principles should apply to tests for LLMs.


And misc.


You never know where you'll fidn a history nerd.



Not actually a mole, but I still love this clip.


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Ten years ago at the blog -- the beginning of our "rich people can't shop" mega-thread part 2

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Getting a handle on the paradox of hunger in a country of abundant cheap food

Andrew Gelman has a good SNAP discussion going over at his blog. He also raises an interesting point about the implied statistical content of the previous posts on the subject. The following is a quick attempt (almost entirely dictated into my smartphone while walking to the bank) to make a few preliminary stabs at framing the problem:

We start with household diets. These are collections of individual diets. In some cases we can get economies of scale by combining these while in other cases it makes more sense for them to differ at certain points (for example, if one member is gluten intolerant or is on a low sodium diet). Just to standardize our terms, let's say that each days diet consist of four meals breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack. We measure the quality of each of these meals based on three metrics: nutrition, appeal, and how filling it is. Note, these metrics are not weighted symmetrically – a low score in any one of these areas is more bad than a high score is good. Therefore the first objective is to keep any of these metrics from falling below a satisfactory level. After that is achieved the secondary goal is to maximize these three.

Each meal consists of one or more dishes. Each dish consist of one or more ingredients. Everything interacts. One dish may go badly with another. A light dinner might be more acceptable after a heavy lunch.

These ingredients have to be purchased and prepared under various constraints. These include but are not limited to money, time and access.

The ingredients are bought at various stores. Each store is associated with certain time and transportation costs. For each ingredient, there are a wide range of factors that need to be considered before deciding a purchase. These include the quality of the dishes that can be prepared from these ingredients, the cost of the ingredients, how perishable these ingredients are, how easily they can be stored, and their versatility. To further complicate matters, these factors are sometimes dependent on what other ingredients are available, where they are being purchased and the quantities being bought. For example:

The quality, based on the previous listed metrics, of a dry breakfast cereal is dependent on the presence of milk;

The cost of a given item may be cheaper at one store but only if bought in large quantities;

If the constraint of only being able to shop at one store is added, shoppers may be forced to pay a premium price for being able to get all of the items needed for a given dish (99 cent store shoppers run into this problem frequently).

Now add to that the complexity that comes from the huge number of items that potentially may be included in our analysis and the wide range in personal situations.

Here are some examples of the latter:

An individual with a car in an urban area can probably select from a dozen or more stores and visit 2 to 4 of them in the space of an hour;

Outside of a few areas will served by public transportation, an individual in that same area without a car might only have a choice of three or four stores and might require a full 90 minutes to visit just one;

An ambulatory person in good health might be able to shop a 2 mile radius on foot;

The radius for a senior using a walker might be three blocks;

A working parent might find him or herself so time constrained that any shopping trip that takes more than an hour represents a severe sacrifice.

Finally add to that the need to put every meal on the table every day despite the fact that food consumption can be difficult to predict.

Just to be clear, we are talking about big effects here with substantial policy implications. Inappropriate or overly simplistic analyses can easily lead to disastrously wrong conclusions, but I'm not really the person to say what the appropriate approaches are. Maybe there's an epidemiologist in the audience with a suggestion or two...

 ____________________________________________

 

 For a while, we were posting so much on the economics and marketing of food, I set up a sister blog.

A Statistician Walks into a Grocery Store...

Among other things, we dug up lots of interesting old ads.











 

And finally...

Soya-corn Shreds are people!!








 

 

 

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Thursday, September 28, 2023

The Daily reminds us that the entertainment industry is one of the topics that New York Times never covers well

There are, of course, certain types of stories that the NYT does as well and possibly better than anyone else. Big investigations that require lots of resources and extensive contacts, but then there are areas where the paper has a terrible track record: the entertainment industry (remember, they were among the last ones in the room to realize that initially Netflix didn't actually own any of the shows in the great content library it was supposed to be building); UFOs and the paranormal (perhaps the only time you'll find more fact checking and healthy skepticism in the New York Post -- and, no, I'm not kidding); political analysis (for at least the last ten years); and pretty much any regional story south of Virginia or west of the Mississippi.

This Daily episode on the end of the WGA strike does nothing to break the pattern. It leaves out essential context, misses the subtleties, misrepresents the dynamics, and credulously passes on the studios' self-serving narrative. Here are a few notes.

1

The reporter, John Koblin, focuses exclusively on shows like Bridgerton, but, as we pointed out before, one of the dirty little secrets of the streaming industry is the fact that, despite billions of dollars in marketing PR and credulous news reports to convince you otherwise, mostly people use the services to watch old shows. While there are a handful of originals that score decent numbers, the vast majority of produced-for-the-platform shows do not bring in enough viewers to justify their budgets, even with the most optimistic of assumptions about incremental subscriptions and reducing churn.

Though the streaming services try to be as opaque as possible, these numbers are available, but fortunately for Netflix and company, most journalists would rather parrot the narrative handed them by the platforms and studios rather than actually check things out.


2

It is with licensed shows such as Golden Girls or NCIS where the writers have been the most completely screwed over. When streaming first hit, the studios/producers took advantage of the hype and confusion to get the writers a rate of less than $1 for every million minutes viewed. Keep in mind, this was happening while Netflix was spending money like a drunken sailor, paying the studios as much as $100 million a year to license these same shows, and that these shows were long since in the black so we're talking pure profit. Though were don't have access to all the numbers, it's safe to say that the total spent on the writers of some of these hit shows was less than a basis point (0.01%) of what the studios got for them. (see below.)

Of course, streaming of licensed content is an extreme case (albeit an extreme case that covers the majority of what people actually watch). It was the part of the business where the producers and the studios managed to take everything. Writers do make up a a larger share of the overall budgets, but their share is trivial compared to the hole the studios have dug themselves with mismanagement, the content bubble and general dick measuring. The subscription-based streamers have lost billions and with the exception of the moderately profitable (though debt ridden) Netflix, they continue to. Keep this in mind when you listen to Sabrina Tavernise and Koblin wrap up by talking about how the streamers will have to pass these costs along to the subscribers. If all of the writers had promised to work for free and sweep up the place in their spare time,  the studios would still have to cut production and raise prices.

From Reuters:

 Adjusted losses from the platform widened to $651 million from $467 million a year ago as Comcast continues to invest heavily in content. The company has said that it expects Peacock losses to peak at around $3 billion in 2023, but expects it to steadily improve after that.

3

 Put bluntly, having weakened the WGA, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) set out to break the union. They proposed reducing the process to piece work, removing staffing rules, and pretty much doing everything they could think of to make sure that writers would have no real power going forward. On top on that they tried bullying and intimidation, leaking statements that the writers would end up losing their homes if they didn't cave, and they tried similar tactics with the actors.

Perhaps 2023 was a bad year for union busting, or maybe they just overplayed their hand. Either way, the AMPTP ended up being the ones to fold, almost certainly ending up with a worse contract than they would have gotten if they had negotiated in good faith from the beginning.

For a much better take on the economics and maneuvering than the Daily, take a look at this interview with Adam (Adam Ruins Everything) Conover. 

 

Also recommended.

Adam Conover Explains the SAG-AFTRA & WGA Strikes, Writing Residuals & Why He's not Scared of AI



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Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Alberta versus the CPP

This is Joseph.

Alberta is a province in Canada. It has about 10% of the population and about 15% of the GDP, driven by rich resources (Oil) and a fairly entrepreneurial culture for Canada. It's a cold prairie province so one might expect Canadians to retire to warmer parts of the country, but the vibrant economy makes it a net importer of young people. They are also gifted with a very right wing premier in power. 

Canada has a pension plan. Nine provinces contribute and the tenth province has their own plan, with an agreement to handle people who contribute to both and harmonized benefits. There are a limited number of reasons one might want to break out of the pack and have their own pension plan. One possibility is that they want to reduce risk by investing in non-Oil assets in case changing energy markets hurts the Alberta economy. But current plans are doing the opposite. 

The real reason is a report that suggests that Alberta could leave with 53% of the assets (on 10% of the population and 15% of the GDP). That is not a typo. The calculation, based on a "one neat trick reading of the legislation" is clearly absurd. A quick calculation showed:
For example, in Tombe’s analysis, a hypothetical situation in which Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta all withdrew from the CPP — three provinces! — would drain the plan of 128 per cent of its assets. And that doesn’t seem to add up.

Since money can't be invented from nowhere and, if the fund is really underfunded like that then all beneficiaries should share the cost of the underfunding , it is unclear what the point is. Is it to make it appear that the federal government is refusing to give Alberta its fair share of assets? All populist rhetoric, in other words. 

Or do they really think other provinces will be okay with raising taxes to replace the huge chunk of assets removed from the plan? The CPP brings in $34 billion per year. The difference between 15% of the CPP ($86 billion) and 53% is $248 billion, which is a large multiple of the income for every year. 

So this is simply absurd. But whether it has a chance of actually gaining a life of its own is another matter in these crazy times. 

P.S. And just in case you thought any of this was serious:

One wonders if perhaps Canada is meant to view this as a bargain, given that the report notes $334 billion is Alberta’s minimum entitlement; it could be $637 billion, eclipsing the entire fund!


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Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Not sure whether to go after Brooks for lying again about food prices or inappropriate agreggation

In case you hadn't heard about this (or had only heard the News Hour version), David Brooks has been catching some flack for this tweet.
Sometimes, Twitter can be a wonderful place to crowdsource a problem. In this case, how do you run up this tab at an airport Applebee's knock-off. It turns out that the food portion of the meal shown in Brooks' tweet cost him quite a bit less...
The restaurant confirmed that 80% of the tab was alcohol, which means that either Brooks has very expensive tastes in liquor (and the Newark Airport 1911 Smoke House Barbeque has a surprising selection of top shelf bourbons)  or he was really relaxed before his flight.


Burger special


The tweet generated so much buzz that Brooks had to address it on News Hour.

The "apology" (I'm sorry but the scare quotes are pretty much unavoidable) is prime Brooks, pretending the uproar was about unhealthy meals and class insensitivity, not about trying to pass off a big bar bill as a food inflation story. 

This is, of course, the same tired shtick that the man has been milking for decades, sweeping generalizations with erudite trappings and always a great show of concern and empathy for the less fortunate, the kind of smug noblesse oblige in sociological drag that places like the New York Times can't get enough of.

If long-time readers are getting a sense of déjà vu, it may be because we wrote pretty much this same column six years ago. Brooks launched his career by lying about restaurant tabs, so there's a nice sense of symmetry here.


Thursday, July 13, 2017

In his first draft, he took her to Red Lobster for chipped beef

David Brooks has gotten a lot of attention for this passage from a recent column:

I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

Surprisingly few of the commenters, however, have picked up on the overwhelming sense of déjà vu in the anecdote. One of Brooks early successes was an essay analyzing class differences in America based on things like where we ate and shopped. It was a hugely popular and influential piece, slightly marred by the fact that many of the most memorable illustrating examples were not true.

 Sasha Issenberg did the definitive take down.

There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false. According to Amazon.com sales data, one of Goodwin’s strongest markets has been deep-Red McAllen, Texas. That’s probably not, however, QVC country. “I would guess our audience would skew toward Blue areas of the country,” says Doug Rose, the network’s vice president of merchandising and brand development. “Generally our audience is female suburban baby boomers, and our business skews towards affluent areas.” Rose’s standard PowerPoint presentation of the QVC brand includes a map of one zip code — Beverly Hills, 90210 — covered in little red dots that each represent one QVC customer address, to debunk “the myth that they’re all little old ladies in trailer parks eating bonbons all day.”

“Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors,” Brooks wrote. “When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens.” Actually, six of the top 10 states in terms of illegal-alien population are Red.

“We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books,” Brooks asserted. A 2003 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater study of America’s most literate cities doesn’t necessarily agree. Among the study’s criteria was the presence of bookstores and libraries; 20 of the 30 most literate cities were in Red states.

“Very few of us,” Brooks wrote of his fellow Blue Americans, “could name even five NASCAR drivers, although stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country.” He might want to take his name-recognition test to the streets of the 2002 NASCAR Winston Cup Series’s highest-rated television markets — three of the top five were in Blue states. (Philadelphia was fifth nationally.)

…

As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. “On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu — steak au jus, ’slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever — I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most-expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ’seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”

Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”

The easiest way to spend over $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed. After it was published in the Atlantic, the nearby Mercersburg Academy boarding school invited Brooks as part of its speaker series. He spent the night at the inn. “For breakfast I made a goat-cheese-and-sun-dried-tomato tart,” Sandy said. “He said he just wanted scrambled eggs.”

Issenberg's expose got plenty of attention and you might expect Brooks to shy away from dubious anecdotes about the dining habits of “the lower 80 percent.” We might even use this as a jumping off point for a critique of Brooks's character (a man who teaches a course entitled “humility” kind of opens himself up for that sort of thing), but that would be a rather petty exercise of questionable value.

The important question is not "what kind of man is David Brooks?" But "why does someone like David Brooks do so well in 21st-century American journalism?"

David Brooks has a long history of distorting events, omitting pertinent details, making convenient mistakes, and sometimes simply making shit up. The New York Times knew about all this when they hired him, but it didn't particularly bother them because David Brooks was and is the ideal conservative columnist for the paper.

This is because Brooks, better than anyone else, addresses the fundamental paradox of the New York Times political identity, that of a basically liberal paper with a legacy of class bigotry going back at least to the 19th century. Brooks writes thoughtful, literate, often elegant columns that let the readers feel bad, but in a good way, a way that never uncomfortably challenges deeply held beliefs.

There is something almost cute about Brooks' apparent belief that a mishmash of Food Network reruns and lifestyle porn constitute some kind of impenetrable cultural code. It's a bit like listening to second-graders who are convinced they've fooled the grownups when they speak in pig Latin. For the target audience, however, it is a nearly ideal message. It perfectly balances liberal guilt with a sense of class superiority.

To be fair, there are valid points here (as there are with almost all of Brooks' columns) -- Inequality and a lack of mobility are massive problems and the imbalance in education expenditure greatly exacerbates the issues. (I'm a bit more skeptical about the zoning explanation.) – though it's worth noting that the drivers of the great compression (highly progressive taxes, stronger social safety nets, substantial government investment in education, infrastructure and research) don't make much of an appearance.

Brooks is not some soulless hack like Bret Stephens, He is an intelligent, interesting, and in all probability, generally sincere writer. He is also a deeply flawed one, and those flaws and the way his employers react to them, are often highly informative.
















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Monday, September 25, 2023

Twelve years ago at the blog... pretty much the same conversation we're still having today

Side note. You should google Skaggs.


Friday, September 23, 2011

Joey Skaggs and Rick Perry

I remember an interview with the great prankster Joey Skaggs. Skaggs had a long history of getting major news outlets to report his over-the-top hoaxes as actual news, often scamming the same outlet multiple times. When asked how he managed to avoid running into the same reporters he explained that he would often see people who had covered previous hoaxes but they always had the same reaction: they would pause for a moment trying to place where they had seen him before then would shake it off and go on with the report. I don't have access to the interview, but if memory serves, Skaggs explained that they wanted to believe in the story and that was enough to make them put aside the first-hand experience that told them not to believe it.

I was thinking about Skaggs as I followed the press' eagerness to anoint Perry the GOP candidate for 2012. The press always gets worked up about these late entrants to weak fields. Pundits focus on strengths, downplay weaknesses and fill in the numerous blanks with the most positive possible outcomes. (You can also see this happening with Chris Christie). But I can't think of a case where a Republican entrant has actually jumped into the race (effectively) after the Ames Straw Poll and actually gotten the nomination.

I may be forgetting about an obvious example and even if I'm not it's possible that Perry will get the nomination and even the presidency, but given the recent turn in sentiment both with pundits and at least one (possibly unrepresentative) sample of GOP voters, it's clear that Perry was to a degree a Rorschach candidate.

Why did did so many reporters not anticipate the rough patch that new candidates always face when those initial unknowns are filled in? Why do journalists continue to consistently overrate the chances of entrants who jump in at the last minute? The same reason that the CNN crew didn't recognize Skaggs when he claimed to have written a program that would decide if O.J. Simpson was guilty, because they wanted to believe a good story.

 

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Friday, September 22, 2023

Ten years ago at the blog -- the beginning of our "rich people can't shop" mega-thread part 1

 Friday, September 20, 2013

I know Ron Shaich's heart is in the right place, but...

I'm afraid I'm going to have to take a couple of shots at this:
Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich is spending a week trying to feed himself on $4.50 a day.
Shaich took the challenge to find out what it's like to live on food stamps. He's blogging about the experience on LinkedIn.

The average person on food stamps receives $4.50 per day in assistance, according to The New York Times.
...
When Shaich went shopping with his weekly budget of $31, he was surprised that he couldn't afford coffee, fruit, yogurt, or milk.

Shaich ended up settling on a daily breakfast of cereal without milk, a lunch of lentils and chickpeas, and a pasta dinner. He bought carrots to snack on in between meals. 
Instead of the intended message that being poor is hard, the takeaway is that rich people aren't very good with money. For starters, a competent shopper with a reasonable range of stores should be able to put together the meals and snacks described here for $3.00, maybe $3.50, certainly leaving enough in the budget for some milk for you cereal and a cup of coffee.

Wondering how he got his numbers I ducked into a Ralph's and checked some prices. (For those of you unfamiliar with the chain, Ralph's is the SoCal division of Krogers, not high end but generally more expensive than Wal-Mart which is generally more expensive than Food-4-Less which is generally more expensive that the 99 cents only stores.) The first thing I noticed was that he appears to have bought considerably more than a week's worth of food in some of his categories. When I looked at comparable boxes of cereal and pasta and bags of beans, I saw servings estimates totaling considerably more than seven. For instance, it appears that he bought 13 servings of lentils and 26 servings of chickpeas. Admittedly, suggested serving sizes can be somewhat unrealistic, but still...

More troubling than the shopping, though, is the meal planning. Shaich seems to know nothing about eating on the cheap. Consider the following from his blog:
I had already understood that coffee, pistachios and granola, staples in my normal diet, would easily blow the weekly budget. ... When I could afford something like cereal, it was of the “off-brand” variety, and won’t require a spoon, as I ended up leaving the milk at the register.
The parts about coffee and milk are particularly strange. House brand coffee costs about a nickel a serving and even many of the nicer brands will come in under ten or fifteen cents. For a quarter you can really go to town. The milk I checked was $1.79 for a half gallon. That's less than a quarter a serving (if you buy a gallon, it's less than twenty cents a serving).  Shaich describes doing without these things as a real hardship but doesn't seem to realize that they're in his budget.

This same lack of knowledge is probably one of the reasons why the menus presented here are so bad -- unappealing, nutritionally uneven, unsatisfying, and completely lacking variety (why eat the same thing every day?). With exception of dried beans and to a degree pasta (prepared foods are always borderline), all of the staples of budget cooking are missing. No potatoes, rice, oatmeal, chicken, eggs or my oft-neglected favorite, popcorn. Alton Brown once pointed out that the use of popcorn as a cold breakfast cereal predates corn flakes. That piece of information alone could have knocked a couple of dollars off of  Shaich's weekly budget.

Shaich's shopping list is filled with questionable to disastrous choices. An example of the latter would be spending more than ten percent of his weekly budget ($3.50) on cheese, a food which, though tasty, is not particularly filling or protein rich. To put this in context, Ralph's was selling name brand chicken for eighty-eight cents a pound and, though I didn't check the price of eggs there, I know that down the street at Trader Joe's a dozen extra large go for a buck eighty (and for two-fifty you can also get a bottle of the surprisingly good wine formerly known as "Two Buck Chuck"). Chicken and eggs are both remarkably versatile and can provide lots of protein for little money. Someone who runs a restaurant chain ought to know this.

I realize I'm being hard on the man but there's a bigger issue at stake. Shaich is the good twin to that jerk on TV insisting there's no hunger in America because you can buy a hamburger for a buck. Their intentions couldn't be more different but still both base their arguments on the same fallacies.

Hunger and food insecurity are not simply the result of a lack of cheap food. For an adult with a car, a decent kitchen, a good refrigerator, lots of time, good organizational skills and no special dietary needs, it is not only possible to eat a filling, nutritional diet on four dollars a day; it can even be fun for a while in much the same way that camping can be fun. (Try Googling "99 cents store gourmet.")

The fun goes away quickly, though, when conditions start deviating from that ideal. As with so many other aspects of poverty, eating on a microbudget is living on a butte -- every misstep can lead to a nasty fall. Shaich does hit on this concern: "When is my next meal? How much food is left in my cabinet? Will it get me through the week? What should I spend my remaining few dollars on? What would I eat if I had no budget at all?" Living on this kind of budget means constantly being one unlucky break away from disaster. A crushed carton of eggs, a gallon of milk gone bad, an unreliable refrigerator, or just a mistake in planning at the wrong time can leave parents going without food so that the kids can eat.

Even if the worst doesn't happen, it's a life of constant stress, the kind of stress we're now learning can have particularly devastating effects on kids and their ability to succeed academically and professionally.

It should be noted that Ron Shaich has done a great deal to address the problem of hunger and food insecurity in this country and he deserves a world of credit, but in this latest effort, he's simply not helping.

 

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Thursday, September 21, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- "Lauren Boebert has perhaps shown a desire to reach across the aisle here."

In case this blog is your only source of news.

Boebert Appeared to Fondle Date’s Penis in Packed Theater as She Put His Hand on Her Breasts





Having a notorious Republican sex offender list recent Republican scandals may not be sending quite the message the GOP is shooting for.




Another Anti-LGBTQ candidate has some things she'd like to get off her chest.


More politics. The Democrats continue to have a nice run with special elections. We shouldn't read too much into that, but it probably does mean more than a poll taken fourteen months before an election.



A little over a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that Dobbs wouldn't have legs as a political issue. This is what you get for listening to David Brooks.






With the caveat that I've had concerns about Rolling Stone's journalism, this is interesting.



As we've said before, the more desperate Trump becomes, the greater more sacrifices he'll demand from the GOP.

 

 Or both. Almost certainly both.


The big guy remains good at Twitter.

 

Do we have to take him?



 Same with my home town in Arkansas. It amazes me how evangelicals have learned to to love Casinos.

The good news is that kids are smarter than most people realize.

Frum nails it.





And back to his old tricks.


Elon keeps busy.




 
Time for tech.


Fallout continues from the Mexican alien corpse hoax.



This does not go at all the way you expect.







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