Charging Along

I went to a small Electric Vehicle show that a couple of friends were attending, just to hang out with them. While most of the cars were modern, purpose-built EVs, Teslas and the like, there were also a few that had been converted from internal combustion.

EVs are interesting, but conversations with the owners revealed that the United States is going to be a while in fully adopting them, and not simply because of the oil industry. The United States is a big place, and cities of note can be pretty spread out. None of the vehicles on display today could get one from Seattle to Portland, or Seattle to Spokane, without stopping to recharge. My car can easily do Seattle to Portland without stopping. I've never tried to make the round trip without filling up, but I suspect that in the absence of any traffic snarls, I could make it... or the one-way try to Spokane. But even if I needed to stop, it only adds several minutes to the overall drive time.

Since EVs are unlikely to ever match the range and ease of refueling of gasoline vehicles, they'll likely need a boost from other modes of transportation, such as trains, to really meet their potential. Which means that the EV world will likely look very different from the current one. I'm curious to see how it shapes up. 

Leftovers

A pair of relics from my youth; a package of Empire pencils and a yellow plastic pencil box, also produced by Empire. Both made in the United States.

These days, few pencils are made in the United States and I'd be surprised to find that many pencil boxes are made domestically. Which, to be sure, strikes me as odd. According to the Wikipedia article for Musgrave Pencil Company (which, incidentally, helped Empire set up ship in Shelbyville, Tennessee after the company relocated from New York), most pencils made in the United States are made from American wood that is shipped to China, cut into slats, and then shipped back for final assembly into pencils. Am I the only person who finds it strange that it's apparently less expensive to ship wood across the largest body of water on Earth twice than it is to simply cut it on this side of the Pacific?

I understand that labor costs are much lower in China, but how much direct human labor actually goes into making pencils? Somehow, I'm suspicious of the idea that pencils are hand-cut and painted. And the pencil boxes are also simply rectangular plastic boxes. While I get that it takes a certain level of skill to run modern fabrication machines, again, I wouldn't have guessed that it takes enough direct labor for the lower cost of workers in China to drive the business overseas. But then, I'm not in the manufacturing business.

Still, I understand why people were so receptive to Donald Trump's message that China was cheating at international trade, with the help of unpatriotic businesses. To the layperson, the idea that the American labor isn't productive enough to offset the expense of transoceanic shipping likely seems off. So the idea that the government of China was engaging in subsidies isn't that much of a stretch. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find that it was true.

But by this point, I think that a lot of it is simply atrophy. Businesses have closed up shop, or sent jobs overseas, and the expertise and equipment to produce these things has simply become scarce. The expense involved in restarting industries that had been allowed to wind down simply doesn't seem worth it. The recent global supply chain shocks might change that line of thinking, but recent history argues strongly against that.

It's easy to become caught up in nostalgia for the age when American manufacturing dominated inexpensive products like pencils and pencil boxes. More difficult is understanding the economics that allowed for that time, and the changes to those economics that resulted in it ending. Political sloganeering and appeals to nationalism are simpler. Which is too bad. Understanding the economics of a resilient economy would be a good idea.

Push and Pull

I picked up a new mirrorless camera recently, and took it with me to the waterfront one day before work. I don't have a long telephoto lens for it yet (and wouldn't normally carry one of those around with me anyway), so I've been learning to live without the tight framing that I'm accustomed to. Yes, I know that I could simply crop the photo down, but I think there's something to be said for letting things seem small because they're far away.

In any event, these are two grain carriers. The one in the foreground (such as it is) is being maneuvered into position to dock at the terminal by the tugboats. The one in the background (with the blue hull) had just left said terminal, and was starting to head up Puget Sound. Given that it's name was written in Chinese on the rear of the hull, I'm presuming that it's headed off to Asia.

It's interesting to watch the ships come in riding high in the water, their red belts clearly visible, only to leave a few days later with a good 20 or so feet of their hulls now below the waterline. For all the fact that I've lived in the Seattle area for more than two decades, I'm just now really understanding that Seattle is a working port. I suppose that it's just never really been a part of town I spent much time in until now.
 

Talking Points Illustrated

What makes political cartooning interesting, in my opinion, is the distilling down of an engaging observation or worldview into a visual. A picture being worth a thousand well-spoken words, as it were. That, unfortunately, seems to be becoming something of a rare bird.

The following takes on Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, with the intention of taking the company private, are little more than partisan talking points rendered as illustrations. Neither Gary Varvel nor David Horsey offer anything in the way of insight or nuance; Mr. Musk will either "own the libs," or allow Twitter to descend into a cesspool of hate speech and harassment. 

But the two cartoons do raise an interesting question: Who is interested in these takes, but can't be bothered to either read or listen to someone making the points directly? Between partisan voices in formal media outlets and the world of podcasting and blogs, people are falling over themselves to tell their respective echo chambers the news.

I suppose that maybe a pithy picture is easier to share on Facebook or (perhaps ironically) Twitter. It's visual media as a means of virtue signalling; people sharing cartoons with friends, family and/or coworkers who are already intimately familiar with the sentiments being expressed simply as a means of reminding those acquaintances of where they stand on the topic. I suppose that it's not that much different than what I do here. I like to think that I'm offering some form of useful commentary, but perhaps I'm simply reminding everyone who stops by that I'm a curmudgeon who thinks people should do something more useful with their time.

Because, of course, there is a market for this sort of thing. While I doubt that anyone's striking it rich on this sort of thing, it likely drives enough clicks to generate steady paychecks. And, to be sure, the above are not Messrs. Varvel and Horsey's best work. They're capable of much better material. Sometimes, offering up a bit of partisan filler is a good way to meet a deadline. (And no criticism of that from this quarter. I've posted more than my share of filler material in the name of keeping to the arbitrary cadence I decided on back in February of 2007.)

And a lot of political commentary, verbal, print or visual, is about trafficking in grievances. It's a popular form of entertainment. Like most of the rest of the news these days.

You Gonna Eat That?

Hopefully, opening the photograph at full size will make some of the bit players easier to see.

Normally, I shrink pictures down prior to posting them, just so they don't require as much storage space or bandwidth. But in this case, I made an exception. A little above and to the right of the Bald Eagle in the picture is one of the local troublemakers, a Stellar's Jay. A jay that is clearly plotting some mischief. I suspect that it wanted a bite of whatever it was that the eagle had taken up into the tree to eat. Nearly hidden in the foliage to the right of the Jay is one of the several crows that were also likely looking to score some calories that someone else had done the work for. But none of them, in the end, had the nerve to take on the eagle, which was able to eat in peace, presuming that birds are self-conscious when being closely watched.

Unfortunately, even with a good-quality compact camera, nature photography is difficult. The small sensor and narrow aperture at the end of the zoom range mean that even in broad daylight, the camera isn't really capable of getting the level of light it needs for a sharp, crisp picture. And with cellular photography having gutted the compact camera market, better offerings are unlikely to come along. Still, as the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you, so one makes do as one must.