How did that get past Jeff Bezos?

Jeff Bezos’ pet newspaper actually posted something that would give the owner the heebie-jeebies — it reported that the economy is doing relatively well, that unemployment is below 4%, and the labor market is surging. Which even a billionaire would consider great, except that it reveals one of the mechanisms that is fueling the improvement.

Last year the public sector, which includes education, caught up with its pre-pandemic employment levels, after struggling for years with an understaffing crisis. More robust pay and benefits packages have made those jobs more attractive to workers.

Lindsey Rogers, 27, and her husband, Jared, public school teachers in Baker City, Ore., saw their household income double at the start of this school year, rising by around $48,000, because of mandated salary increases in their new union contract. Their school district in rural Eastern Oregon in previous years struggled to fill open positions, but started this school year without a single vacancy because teacher pay jumped significantly, said Erin Lair, superintendent of the Baker School District.

For the Rogers family, the pay increase means they can afford the $750-a-month child-care costs for their new baby.

“We sat down at a union meeting on Zoom, and they pulled up our new pay scale and it was life-changing,” Rogers said. “I was in shock. We were both in tears. We were going to be able to provide a great life for our kid. We were actually going to be paid like professionals.”

Shocking, I know. You mean people do want to work, they’d just like to get paid what they deserve? Revolutionary, if true.

You know, higher ed is also in the public sector, and I wonder when we’ll catch up. We’re understaffed and get occasional tiny pay raises that don’t keep up with inflation — I look forward to the day we get paid like professionals. That day will probably come the day after I retire, if at all.

We aren’t unionized, by the way.

Under the thumb of the supermarket

I think there has been some cutthroat competition in the grocery business in my small town. When we first moved here, there were two grocery stores: the big supermarket, Willie’s, and a smaller store called Coborn’s. Coborn’s abruptly closed up, to everyone’s surprise — the story was that they were denied a liquor license to allow them to sell beer, and then they packed up and moved out. This town is dominated in some ways by the apostolic church, and they’re pretty strict on the blue law enforcement.

Then a few years ago, a new grocery store, Meadowland, opened up just a few blocks from Willie’s. It’s not a high-end place, it’s got a cheaper esthetic, has a substantial stock, but it’s all a hodge-podge of brands. You’d think it would fold up in the face of competition from the established store, but it’s hanging in there. It’s run by…the apostolic church, so it’s got that advantage.

There’s stuff going on behind the scenes, on the town council, in private meetings, and I know nothing about it. What I do know is that grocery prices have been steadily climbing, and there’s nothing I can do about it, because we’re a small town and competition isn’t much of an option. Buy from the supermarket which basically has a stranglehold on the county, or buy from the fundamentalist church-run business that would probably be even worse if they got a monopoly? What a choice.

Mike the Mad Biologist highlights a brief comment in the Washington Post:

But there is no immediate fix for policymakers. Grocery prices remain elevated due to a mixture of labor shortages tied to the pandemic, ongoing supply chain disruptions, droughts, avian flu and other factors far beyond the administration’s control. Robust consumer demand has also fueled a shift to more expensive groceries, and consolidation in the industry gives large chains the ability to keep prices high, economic policy experts say.

Yes, that’s our situation. We do not live in a food desert, other than the artificially constructed one. We are surrounded by farms — unfortunately, most of them are growing corn for feedstocks and alcohol — but we could do better. In the summer, we subscribed to a local farm service, and every week we got a big box of fresh produce. It was a bit overwhelming, since we’d get this diverse collection of unfamiliar vegetables and had to struggle to figure out what to do with it all, but there’s clearly a better alternative to all the pre-packaged overpriced stuff with get from the overly-familiar store.

I do wonder what Willie’s would do if local farms became a more popular source for groceries. We’d probably also be healthier.

Do you want to be the demon with the pitchfork, or the guys being pitchforked?

Another social media app has opened up — you can now freely join BlueSky without waiting for an invitation. It was founded by the guy who initially created Twitter, which ought to give us all pause, but they promise to give us customizable control over the algorithm. We’ll see. I’m on most of these new social media apps, so I have opinions…amorphous, poorly formed opinions, because I’ve been distracted by too many apps.

So far, I like Mastodon best. It’s a bit of a tangled mess with the swarms of servers out there, but once you get settled in, it’s nice, especially since you don’t feel like you’re enabling some hidden corporate beast somewhere. I get reasonable engagement, the interface works, there’s a substantial volume of traffic since I’m promiscuous about who I’ll follow.

BlueSky is nice and slick and feels most like the old Twitter. Membership has been throttled for a year, and now that it has opened up, it may turn into the worst of old Twitter as the Nazis rush in. One nice feature is that early adopters included lots of scientists, who have built a lot of beachheads to science content.

You might already be on Threads if you have an Instagram account — they seem to be fusing into an unholy amalgam of text and photos. It is a stepchild of the wicked Zuck, so that’s a strike against it, but on the plus side, I am seeing more writing here — people telling stories over multiple posts, and actually taking care to build a narrative. It’s growing on me for that reason.

Of course, Twitter still exists, but I will look down on you if you continue to use it. Leave now. There are good alternatives available. We’re looking at a ‘Fall of the House of Musk’ scenario over there, and soon enough it’s going to be nothing but a crevasse populated with gibbering lost souls. (Well, it’s always been something like that, but you know what I mean, it’ll get worse.)

My recommendation for the people I used to follow: jump ship to BlueSky. It’ll be most familiar, and you’ll find ready-made groups with similar interests already building communities. Just be prepared to leap away if it becomes another xitter. You can’t make strong attachments in a time of chaos.

Good morning spider!

Do you have a friendly little feral spider in your house who will sometimes scurry up to you in the morning and wave a leg? You’re missing out if not.

The only bad thing is that they’re too busy living their own lives to stop and pose for a while. I do what I can with an unwieldy macro camera.

All right, your ominous click-bait title worked

I clicked on 4 Black Eggs Have Surfaced From the Dark Heart of the Ocean—With Alien Creatures Inside. How could I not? Fortunately, it was a truthful title. An ROV dived 6200 meters beneath the Pacific Ocean and found strange black eggs attached to a rock, and brought some to the surface (the operators have presumably never seen a horror movie. Don’t harvest the mysterious black eggs ever, and don’t bring them back to the lab.)

“Under a stereomicroscope, I cut one of them, and a milky liquid-like thing leaked from it; after blowing the milky thing with a pipette, I found fragile white bodies in the shell and first realized that it was the cocoon of…”

It was flatworms. Platyhelminths.

Niiiice.

Not at all Lovecraftian or scary, though.

Barbarians! Barbarians everywhere!

Texas is an evil state, with some of its powerful inhabitants relishing the opportunity to slice up immigrants with razor wire. I’m less worried about the immigrants than I am the existence of Texas Republicans.

But maybe I’m being unfair to Texas. After all, South Dakota, the state uncomfortably close to me, has a governor who is entirely sympathetic to the idea of slashing brown people with razor wire and wants to send the state’s national guard and a bunch of money to help out.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Wednesday that her administration is considering boosting its support for Texas’ efforts to deter immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, such as sending razor wire and security personnel.

The second-term Republican governor blasted conditions at the border in a speech to a joint session of the Legislature, a gathering she requested Monday after visiting the border last week. Noem, once seen as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, has made the border situation a focus during her tenure.

South Dakota does not have any border with any other country, unless you count the People’s Republic of Minnesota. Maybe they could worry about Canada, except they do have a buffer state of North Dakota, but Mexico is not of any concern. The only southern immigrants they’ve got are being hired by the farming citizenry who like cheap labor. But this is Kristi Noem’s focus? I kind of suspect the motivation is more racism than defending the border.

Fortunately, the Oglala Sioux Tribe has a solid response to that.

At least one person in South Dakota did not appreciate Noem’s glib demagoguery. That person was Frank Star Comes Out, which is in fact his extremely cool name and not the title of a YA novel about a teenager coming to terms with his sexuality. (We checked.)

Star Comes Out is the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and he was infuriated by the naked xenophobia and obvious cry for Donald Trump’s attention as his search for a vice presidential candidate ramps up. So he penned a letter to Noem informing her that starting immediately, she is persona non grata on his tribe’s land.

Read the letter. It’s a point-by-point response to every claim Noem has made. President Star Comes Out sees right through her: “I don’t see our Indian people and reservations used as a basis to create a bogus border crisis just to help Trump get re-elected as President and Governor Noem his running mate as Vice-President.”

Only barbarians would consider drowning immigrants to be humane…and to be a good strategy for getting votes. Unfortunately, we have lots of barbarians all up and down this country.

An arachnologist fantasizing about summer in February

I have been daydreaming about doing some collecting trips this summer — I have been seduced by the exotic opportunities of tromping around the southern part of Minnesota, place like Pipestone and maybe even making forays into South Dakota and Iowa. Yeah! Get wild with it!

And then, the American Arachnological Society announces the location of their 2024 meeting. It’s going to be in Chetumal, Mexico.

Chetumal is located in the south of the state of Quintana Roo, on the border with Belize. It’s a small town surrounded by mangrove swamps and forest, lagoons such as Bacalar, home to numerous chelicerates in addition to Mayan remains. It faces a gigantic bay that is a reserve for manatees and is located at the gateway to the Caribbean.

“home to numerous chelicerates” isn’t normal advertising copy for a travel destination, but you’ve got to know your audience. Think of the spiders you could find! Suddenly, the south of Minnesota looks tepid and boring.

I have some trepidations. I have zero confidence in airlines anymore, after that catastrophic collapse of my last trip to AAS (the meeting was in upstate NY, couldn’t even get there because airlines kept canceling flights, ended up sitting in the Minneapolis airport for a couple of days). I don’t know if I can scrape any money out of my university travel budget after that expensive debacle.

On the plus side, I do have some Patreon savings I could use — and of course I’d have to fill my Patreon page with travel photos of beautiful Chetumal. You know, the usual touristy things of closeups of spiders in the mangrove swamps. I’ve never been on the glitzy side of scientific conferences, so this might be my last chance. And it’s Mexico! I love Mexico!

So now I begin a period of indecisive agonizing, to go or not to go. I may end up looking at my budget and deciding it’s not possible, but as long as I haven’t done any accounting, I can dream.

Today is a feeding day

Every Tuesday and Friday, I hang out with the spiders and give them flies and mealworms to eat. I am a good and supportive boss. Unfortunately, the one thing I expect of them is that they produce egg sacs for me, and they haven’t been doing their job. I provide humidifiers, I maintain a strict July-like light schedule, I keep them warm, and what do they give me? Nada. Bupkis.

I’m beginning to think I might need to modify the incentives here.

Except…it would be counterproductive to do that to the females, and most of the male are already dead due to natural causes (which, for spiders, includes cannibalism). It’s a little bit frustrating.