anyone? anyone?

In what’s shaping up to be a timely history lesson, NPR’s Planet Money presents an extensive study of the factors leading to the passage, the immediate consequences and legacy of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 made into a pop-culture reference by the droning line of inquiry of Ben Stein playing a high school economics teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (previously). Economists, who to a man believed the schedule of tariffs to be a disastrous idea, concede that its enactment did not cause the Great Depression as those wheels were already in motion, but agree that it exacerbated an already bad situation and prolonged it, turning a trade war of retaliatory tariffs on imports and exports into an unqualified war.
With the gradual introduction of electricity and the automobile throughout the 1920s, globally but particularly in the United States, farmers suddenly found a significant portion of land freed up that was formerly reserved for growing feed for horses and other beasts of burden, which led to over-production and caused the government to intervene to subsidise prices lest the price of commodities becomes too depressed and there’s less incentive for domestic production. Once the government signalled its willingness to protect a batch of staple goods of strategic importance to the US, things escalated rather quickly with no one wanting to miss out on this opportunity and some twenty thousand goods securing an embargo that held foreign competition at bay. Though international response was immediate, punishing and predictable with countries raising duties on American exports astronomically, not buying US products and turning towards self-sufficiency, the practise carried on for two years until congress reversed the tariffs and conceding that it such an unnecessary economic blunder, they abdicated their role in negotiating trade deals and put that power solely in the prerogative of the executive branch.

neap tide

Though perhaps only a cold comfort and little consolation to imagine how the same cadre that benefit for the present from these regulatory changes are also the ones who are behind the policies that contribute to global warming and sea-level rise and their ocean-front properties will be soon conquered by the waters, the state of Florida has enacted legislation that could potentially severely curtail public access to state-controlled beaches.
A seemingly innocuous change in wording that extends the property-rights boundary out a bit caught only by the fact that the bill contained a rider prohibiting municipalities from passing legislation to countermand state law will give hoteliers and other land owners greater power to control who trods over private holdings to reach what the wealthy cannot yet own outright. Despite the governor’s exuberance and confidence that the landed-gentry won’t abuse this gift and deny people egress, many mayors have protested that such a move will destroy the state’s tourism industry, tossing favour to only a few establishments catering to a particular clientele.

pomp and circumstance

Though the re-discovery of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii buried in the pyroclastic ash of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD is sourced to the excavations by Spanish engineer Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre in the service of the Duke of Parma that began on 6 April 1748, history records at least one previous rediscovery of the long-forgotten settlement. A century and a half earlier, a workman discovered some frescos and inscribed walls whilst digging a ditch and summoned a respected architect from Naples, Domenico Fontana (the same who oversaw the transportation and erection of those Egyptian obelisks in Rome) who assessed the site.
Either out of farsightedness or simple prudishness, Fontana ordered the artefacts reburied and not to be discussed again. Italy during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation perhaps did not have the artistic sensibilities to appreciate what was uncovered. Sort of equivalent to having neglected to delete one’s browsing history (to couch it in modern terms as death came swift and unexpectedly), archaeologists found and continue to find quite a lot of erotic art and imagery and the public was not quite prepared for it. In fact when King Francis of the Two Sicilies visited an exhibition of artefacts collected from Pompeii with the queen and princess, he was so mortified that he decreed that the explicit material be sequestered in a secret Neapolitan museum (Gabinetto Segreto—obviously NSFW) that only admitted mature adults whose morals were above question. One is given to wonder on how many occasions the finds of the past were subject to censorship when it did not fit our collective or personal narrative.  Closed and reopened numerous times over the ensuing centuries according to society’s norms and mores, it was last reopened in 2000 with people under the age of eighteen still not admitted unless accompanied by a guardian.

dynasty

A panel of judges in Seoul upheld the verdict of deposed former president Park Geun-hye, daughter of dictator of South Korea Park Chung-hee who seized power with a military coup in 1963 and suspended state elections until his assassination in 1979, which included wide-ranging charges of corruption, embezzlement, influence peddling and dereliction of duty and sentenced her to twenty-four years in prison.
Fraught with problems from the beginning, Park’s administration started in 2013 and lasted until 2016, propelled to office in part out of nostalgia for the reign of her father—seeing that we’ve become such poor stewards of democracy, we’re letting its institution become such shams and relieve them of their meaning and potency—and also a concerted social media campaign which the national intelligence service admitted to playing a part in. Park’s confidant Choi Soon-sil (who being the daughter of spiritual leader Choi Soon-sil has earned some Rasputin credentials) was also sentenced to twenty years in prison for extortion, abuse of power and unauthorised disclosure of classified materials who exercised great power and influence over Park and the South Korean government despite holding no official government office.

7x7

gloomy sunday: a neural network could teach humans a thing or two about art appreciation and seeing beauty in the mundane

civil engineering: experiment with urban transportation and infrastructure planning, via Kottke

orders of magnitude: the quantity of user data scraped by malicious actors grows

tabletop: British Museum Mesopotamian artefacts curator works out the playbook for an ancient board

methuselah-ness: the defining trait of a tree might be in their immortality (lack of senescence) rather than height or woodiness, via Kottke

legend of the overfiend: a nostalgic screening and a look at the spread of anime and manga

thanatosis: a longer version of mongoose horse-play with explanations of their behaviour