Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
What's the matter with Wyoming (and Iowa)?
The other day Robert Reich, whose writing I have a love/hate relationship with, wrote this article:
What’s the matter with Iowa?
I'll admit that I was prepared to dismiss it when I started reading it, but I can't. It's a well reasoned article.
I don't think it sums up everything that's "wrong" with Iowa, but it gets some things right. This could just as easily be said, about Wyoming, however:
I saw it happen. When I was helping Fritz Mondale in 1984, I noticed Iowa beginning to shift from family farms to corporate agriculture, and from industrialized manufacturing to knowledge-intensive jobs.
The challenge was to create a new economy for Iowa and for much of the Midwest.
I didn’t have any good ideas for creating that new economy, though — and neither did Mondale, who won Iowa’s Democratic caucuses that year but lost the general election to Ronald Reagan in Iowa and every other state, except his own Minnesota.
Yet not until George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 did a Republican presidential candidate win Iowa again.
When Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa in the early 2000s and flirting with the idea of a presidential run, he told me he worried that Iowa’s high school valedictorians used to want to attend the University of Iowa or Iowa State, but now wanted the Ivy League or Stanford or NYU. Even Iowa’s own college graduates were leaving for Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York.
Vilsack wanted to know how to keep Iowa’s talent in Iowa — a variant of the question I couldn’t answer for Mondale. By this time I had a few ideas — setting up high-tech hubs around major universities, blanketing parts of the state with free wi-fi, having community colleges supply the talent local industries needed — but they all cost money that Iowa didn’t have.
As The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman noted recently, Iowa continues to lose more than 34 percent of its college graduates each year. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more college grads than it produces.
This talent migration has hastened America’s split into two cultures, not just in Iowa and the Midwest but across the nation.
But not entirely.
The thing people like Reich don't get is that much of the country doesn't want to become an upper middle class urban cesspool. Places that people like Reich worship are largely abhorrent in living terms. There's a reason that people look to rural areas and an idealized past.
But people also lash themselves to a dead economy as if it'll come back, even if it means losing track of reality at some point, or even if it means becoming something they claim to detest, welfare recipients. This has happened all over the US.
Something needs to be done to revitalize the main street economy, and people like Reich don't have the answers because at the end of the day, all American economists see things the same way. Everything is corporate, the only question is how much, if any, restraint you put on corporations.
Distributism would cure a lot of this.
If we had a more Distributist economy, we'd have a more local one. For rural areas, that'd mean much more local processing of locally produced goods. There's no reason for the concentration of the meat packing industry, for example. Beef could be packed locally. At one time, my family did just that. And that's only one example.
If the economy was reoriented in that fashion, local industry would expand a great deal. The thing is, of course, not all of those jobs would be the glass and steel mind-numbing cubicle jobs that all economists love.
But here's the other thing. As long as the economy is oriented the way it is, rural states are going to be colonies of urban areas, just as much as, let's say, French Indochina was a colony of France, or Kenya a colony of the United Kingdom. Exploitative, in another word. It's not intentionally so, it is an economic reality.
The problem there is that in those sorts of economies everything is produced for export alone, and everything is precarious. That gets back to my Distributist argument above.
But it also gets to a certain cultural thing in which those deeply aligned with the economy, which includes most people, can't see anything thing else. As long as the economy keeps working, that's okay. But when changes come, that can be a disaster.
Wyoming's very first economy was the fur trade, if we discount the native economy (which is a real economy, and accordingly should not be discounted). Contrary to the popular belief, the fur trade was not displaced, it just was never really very large, and therefore it diminished in importance when other things came in.
The other things were 1) agriculture, which came first, followed by the 2) extractive industries. Both are still with us. Agriculture has suffered to a degree as the naturally distributist industries that support it have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate economics and consolidation. The state, for its part, did nothing to arrest that trend and simply let it happen. In part, that's because the state has always deeply worshiped the thought that the extractive industries will make us all rich and nothing is to be interfered with, including losing local production of the raw resources that are first produced here. I.e., we don't refine the oil as much as we used to, we don't pack the meat, we don't process the wool. . . .
And the extractive industries certainly have made a lot of people and entire communities rich, there's no question of it.
But the handwriting is on the wall. Coal is declining and will continue to do so. And a massive shift in petroleum use is occurring, which Wyoming cannot stop. Petroleum will still be produced far into the future, but its use as a fuel is disappearing. Petrochemicals, on the other hand, are not.
We seemingly like to think we can stop those things from changing in any form. We've tried to through lawsuits and legislation. And yet it turns out that people buying EV's don't listen to our litigation or legislation, any more than they do to Nebraska's Senator Deb Fischer's whining about recharging station funding. Like some who can't face death due to illness, we'll grasp at what we can, rather than adjust.
Part of that is listening to people who tell us what we want to hear. A lot of politicians have tried to gently tell us the truth of what we're facing. Governor Gordon did just recently. When they do that, they're castigated for it.
In 1962's The Days of Wine and Roses the plot follows a man who is a social drinker and introduces alcohol to his girlfriend. They marry, and over time they become heavy drinkers. He finally stops drinking, his wife having left him, and finds her in an apartment, where she is now a hardcore alcoholic. He resumes drinking then and there, in order to be with her.
In the end, however, he reforms and quits. She doesn't. We know how that will end.
That's a lot like Wyomingites in general. We've received the hard knocks and blows. Some of us are going to put the bottle down and face the day, some are not going to under any circumstances.
For some, it's easier to believe that a "dictator for a day" can order the old economy restored and reverse fifty years of demographic change, while reversing supply, demand, and technology to sort of 1970s status. In other words, go ahead and have another drink, it won't hurt you.
But in reality, it might, and probably will.
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Base Ten. 40 is a big round number, I guess.
40
I walked out of the courthouse with a lawyer I know, as that lawyer was in the same law school class as I was. We're not close friends, but his circle of law school friends intersects with mine, mostly due to a common interest in the outdoors. Other than that, I guess because our backgrounds are quite different, we never developed a close friendship. I guess friends of friends are sort of friends, however.
Anyhow, as we were walking out at the same time, having just argued motions against each other, I asked about a partner of his that I had been told was stepping into part-time. He laughed and noted that it was true, but they guy was busier than ever, which I'm sure he is.
At that point, he asked me, "what about you, what are your plans?", meaning not am I about to retire, but as we're law school colleagues, and therefore the same approximate age, do I have retirement on my horizon.
I begged off on the topic. I'm very private by nature and as this recent post indicates, I've had a lot going on recently. In the end, I stated "oh I'll probably die before I retire", which always come across as a joke, and I guess it is, but it's a half-hearted one. Given family history on my father's side, I probably will, and probably well before 65, which basically means, could be any time.
But then actually that's true for a lot of men over 30.
Anyhow, I'm not near retirement. My wife is a decade younger than me, I've had a year of health concerns commencing in October, 2022, and I need the insurance, and I don't want to run out of cash in retirement. And that's not what people really mean when they bring this up. What they mean, is that once you are 60, how far out are you looking?
I dunno. .. .I'll probably die before I retire.
And even if I don't, given my nature, I'll probably keep on keeping on until I'm full retirement age, which according to the IRS is 67 for people born in 1963. Of course, it's important to note that statistically a significant majority of men do not make it to the "full age". Women don't either.
Quite a few lawyers do, however, and beyond that.
Anyhow, he expressed that he intends to work until he's 68. He's presently 61. The reason is that at that point he will have been practicing law "for 40 years".
Shoot, if I make it to 67, that'd be true of me as well.
And I can't imagine a lamer reason to work beyond full retirement age than that. So you'll have been a working member of the bar for 40 years, so what? Is that actually something to be proud of, and if so, why? Or is it an achievement worth aiming for?
And what''s the magic of 40? That its' divisible by ten?
As silly as that question is, I think that is actually it. As we have a Base Ten numerical system, we tend to think of events that way. Military (and much other service) retirements start when a person reaches 20 years of service, which went down at the start of World War Two from 30 years of service. When I was a National Guardsman, the Guard issued Ten, Twenty, and Thirty years of service ribbons.The Wyoming State Bar used to confer honorifics on lawyers who had reached 30, 40 and 50 years of practice, although it doesn't seem to anymore. I can recall being at a County Bar banquet, which we also do not have anymore, when the County Bar acknowledged some lawyers who had just reached 30, 40 and 50 years of service, the first of which I've surpassed but which seemed like a long, long time, at the time.
A good friend of mine in the law just retired at age 67, sort of. Like a lot of retiring lawyers, indeed all the of the retiring lawyers that I've known recently, he's going to work "part-time". This is super common in law.
I don't get it, and I don't get going for the big round number either.
Law, if you really work it, is all consuming and hard on you. I've never seen one of the lawyers aiming for "part-time" succeed at it yet. Litigation certainly isn't a part-time thing and the schedule is set by the Court, not by individuals, so there's no part-time to it.
Beyond that, however, how can a person become so dull that they hang on for an artificial number?
I know, I know, people will say "I love the law" and that's why they're doing it. Well, bullshit.
Maybe they do love the law, but most lawyers in reality are in it because; 1) they're polymaths (and probably autodidacts) and it was the only thing that suited them, or 2) their undergraduate majors were a bust, and it was the only door open for a career, or 3) they were greedy and thought they could make a lot of money, or 4) they were delusional and mistook a career path that more properly involved a seminary for one that involved law school, or #5) they were the children of professionals that didn't want to become physicians, or #6) they were the children of blue collar workers whose parents held a gigantic outsized admiration for the law as they knew nothing about it.
None of that precludes a love of the law, although #1 suits it the best. #3 and #4 are paths to utter misery.
But that's the point.
Going back to the misty dawn of time when I was a law student, and looking at my collection of friends and associated, they were an interesting group. So were my undergraduate major geology fellows, I'd note. The geology students were all major outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen. Every single one without exception. We didn't sit around and talk about geology, we talked about mountains and fields and wolves and hunting and hiking and fishing.*
Law school was sort of like that, but with a group of people with very divergent interests. There were really dedicated outdoorsmen, but also people who had really pronounced intellectual interests. Law students I was aware of hunted, fished, hiked, climbed mountains in the Himalayas, worked on cars, followed sports, and the like.
I don't recall a single one, not one, who had an interest in the law, actually.
Not one.
And that's how practitioners start out. And to some extent remain. I'm down to a handful of genuine close friends who are lawyers, and then a little broader out than that, friends who are lawyers. Of my close friends, one is an avid outdoors man and gearhead, one is an intellectual and a historian, and one is an autodidactic polymath. Casting the net a little wider, I'd find outdoorsmen again.
Even today, in really thinking about it, I can't think of a single lawyer I know who is just a fanatic about legal topics. We'll discuss them, but its our line of country. I've never once been in a group of lawyers who said, "guess what I saw, a motion for an order to show cause on an injunction that . . . " like I've heard people say, "guess what I saw, otters in the river!".
Which brings me to this.
People acquire their identify from their occupations over time. Or maybe that's just true of some occupations. I have heard people, well, no, men, identified as soldiers, policemen, firemen, and the like long after they retired.
I think that's why somebody is interested in being able to say "I was a lawyer for 40 years". It seems like an accomplishment. . . if there's not much else left to be proud of, or anything else left.
Thing is, nobody really care about that.
It's quite literally, completely pointless.
There's also nothing intrinsically wrong with it, assuming that you didn't make half of that last decade leaning heavily on other lawyers, and that you were capable the entire time, but as an achievement, it isn't one.
Indeed, the much more interesting people are those who can start a conversation with "I was a lawyer for ten years, and then. . . "
At any rate, most people don't start off being some sort of AI image for their profession. We shouldn't see, to end up like that. Surely, a well-rounded person, from a profession of many topics, has other interests.
If they don't, they should.
Footnotes:
*The irony of geology is that so many people who are "granolas" end up being employed by industry. Geology students were the most environmentally minded people I've ever been around, but then they end up working for extractive industries. Among practicing geologist, I rarely meet one you'd call an environmentalist, unless they're employed in the environmental field. As the practicing geologists are drawn from the same pool as the students, it has to be their employment that impacts thier later expressed views.
Sigh . . .
And depicted with a horse too. . .
Kroger retires after 35 years of service
CODY - Worland Wildlife Biologist Bart Kroger retired last month, bringing his 35-year career with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to a close.
“Bart has been referred to as the ‘core of the agency’, meaning through his dedication and continuous hard work, he has significantly and meaningfully impacted wildlife management within his district and throughout the state,” said Corey Class, Cody region wildlife management coordinator. “Throughout his career, he has been a solid, steady and dependable wildlife biologist, providing a foundation for wildlife conservation and management in the Bighorn Basin.”
Through his quiet and thoughtful approach, Bart has gained the respect of both his peers and the public. Bart is best known for his commitment to spending time in the field gaining first-hand knowledge of the wildlife and the habitat that supports them, as well as the people he serves in his district.
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
January 2, the most dreaded work day of the year.
Or so I suppose.
The work tally for the prior year is in, for good or ill. The heavy lifting of the upcoming year, and there will be some, has not yet begun. The last two weeks of any year are, for most occupations, darned near idle, and so whether days are taken off or not, a sort of holiday atmosphere of ease prevails.
Until January 2 comes around and ends it.
Happy New Year.
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
A Prayer to St. Joseph Before Work
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
Mid Week At Work: A Christmas Carol.
Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
A Christmas Carol
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Lex Anteinternet: Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry. A Timely Rerun
Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry
Me, third from right, when I thought I had a career in geology, and probably in coal.
My main employer, right after receiving my bachelor's degree.
- "No household was wired for electricity"
- "Flickering light came from candles and whale oil,"
It really started with navies in some ways, although some might argue that it started with hydroelectric. We'll start with navies.
Navies had been powered by sail up until the mid 19th Century but already by the time of the American Civil War that was changing. The U.S. Navy may have had its grandest ships under sail during that war, but coal fired wheels were being introduced even then. And the scary smoke belching squat "monitors" that signaled the end of the age of sail were coal (and perhaps wood) burning beasts. Slow, hardly seaworthy, but iron clad. It was pretty clear by 1865 that the age of militarized wind was ending.
And indeed the Naval reformation that occurred after the American Civil War is incredibly stunning. Everything about navies soon changed. By the 1890s every major navy in the world was building ships that look odd to our eyes, but which still look familiar . Big guns on big ships powered by coal replaced sailing vessels, and the general purpose yeoman sailor was replaced by the specialist. At about this time, in fact, the U.S. Navy started to switching from a navy drawing its recruits mostly from port towns, and which was in fact an integrated navy, to one which was segregated which drew its recruits from the interior of the country. A wood and sail navy required men who had grown up near, or even on ships, and who knew the ins and outs of sail. That was a multi ethnic, polyglot group of men who in some way resembled the men in every port town around the world more than they did the men in the interior of their own countries. It's no accident that the first Congressional Medal of Honor to go to a foreign born serviceman went to a sailor, in action during the American Civil War fighting a naval battle in. . . . .Japan.
Smoke and spontaneous ignition.
Let's talk about smoke first, the disadvantage that was always there.
This is something that people who are more familiar with ships of the World War Two era don't instantly recall about earlier steel ships, but coal fires smoke and hence coal fired boilers likewise smoke, or rather the coal fires smoke
Coal has a well known propensity to self heat and to make it worse, the better the coal grade the bigger the problem. Exposed to air and moisture coal begins to engage in an exothermic reaction and can relatively easily self heat to the point where it ignites. Moreover, as it self heats and heads towards ignition it drives off highly flammable hydrocarbon gases. Indeed, heating coal intentionally in a controlled environment is a means of producing those gases and has sometimes been thought of as a method of producing them, although its never proven to be an efficient means of doing so.
Coal is so prone to spontaneous combustion that coal self ignition is a natural phenomenon. It simply happens where coal gets exposed to sufficient oxygen and moisture. Anyone who has ever spent any time in an open pit coal mine has seen coal simply burning on its own, as I have.
There are ways to combat this, of course, but the problem is uniquely acute for ships. Ships must store coal in large bunkers and must taken on a lot of coal at certain points. Ships are wet by their very nature. So any coal burning ship has, at some point, a lot of coal with just enough oxygen and moisture to create a problem.
This proved to be a real problem for ships and of course there were extreme catastrophic occurrences, the most famous of which is the explosion of the USS Maine. The Maine is an extreme example of what could occur, but any coal burning ship could experience what the Maine did. Basically, in the case of the USS Maine, the coal self ignited and the coal bunkers had sufficient liberated gas to create a massive explosion. Not quite as dangerous, but still a huge problem, a simple self ignition of the coal without an explosion was a disaster, quite obviously, of the first rate requiring sailors to put the coal fire out under extreme danger.
By the turn of the century naval designers were aware that oil could be used to heat boilers just as coal could, and they began to study it in earnest. Indeed, not only could it be used, but it had numerous advantages.
Unlike coal, petroleum oil for ships fuel did not result in much smoke. It resulted in some, but not anything like that which coal put out. The smoke from a single ship was much less visible and suffice it to say the smoke from a fleet of ships was greatly reduced. Again, there was smoke, but not smoke like that put out by coal fired boilers. Indeed, it was so much reduced that to a large degree detection of ships over the horizon by the naked eye was approaching becoming a think of the past.
And petroleum does not spontaneously self ignite. A big vat of petroleum can sit around forever and never touch itself off. This does not mean, of course, that its free from danger. It isn't. But some of the dangers it poses were already posed by coal, but in lesser degrees. Petroleum burns more freely than coal by quite some measure and once it ignites putting it out is extremely difficult. Sparks, other fires, etc., all pose increased dangers for petroleum over bunkered coal, but they existed to some degree for bunkered coal already.
And petroleum is more efficient and easier to use for ships. Coal was basically stoked by hand, a dirty laborious job. But petroleum wasn't. Petroleum burning boilers were fueled by what amounts to a plumbing system involving a greater level of technical know how but less physical labor. And oil had double the thermal content of coal making it a far more efficient fuel which required less refueling. And on refueling, ships fueled with oil can be refueled at sea. Ships fueled with coal cannot be. Indeed, the maintenance of coaling stations in the remote parts of the globe was a critical factor in naval planning prior to the introduction of oil.
Which isn't to say that there weren't some unique problems associated with petroleum for ship.
For one thing, the fact that it spreads out when leaked and can more easily ignite meant that petroleum added a unique and added horror for a stricken ship. Coal fired ships that were simply damaged and sinking were unlikely to cause a horrific sea top fire. Petroleum ships are very likely to do that. And the risk of a munitions caused explosion is increased with petroleum fueled ships. A torpedo into a coal bunker might blow a coal fired ship to bits with an explosion or might just sink it. With a petroleum fueled ship the risk of an explosion in such a situation is increased as is the risk that oil on the water will catch on fire or otherwise kill survivors.
A huge factor, however, was supply.
By odd coincidence all of the major naval powers, save for Japan, had more than adequate domestic supplies of coal. Some had very good supplies of coal, such as the United States, United Kingdom and Imperial Germany, within their own borders. Japan nearly did in that it obtained it from territories it controlled on the Asian mainland, although that did make its supply more tenuous. At any rate all of the big naval powers of the pre World War One world had coal supplies that htey controlled. That's a big war fighting consideration. Of the naval powers of that era, in contrast, only the United States and Imperial Russia had proven petroleum sources they controlled, and Imperial Russia had proven it self to be a second rate naval power during the Russo Japanese War.
Switching from coal to oil did not occur in the Royal Navy, or any navy, all at once. The decision was made somewhat haltingly and it was an expensive proposition to convert an entire navy to oil. Britain started to convert prior to World War One but it didn't complete the process until after the war. Still, its decision to start constructing capitol ships as oil burners in 1912 was a huge step for a nation that had the world's largest navy but which had no domestic oil production at all. The United States followed suit almost immediately, with its first large ship to be converted to oil, the USS Cheyenne, undergoing that process in 1913.
Diesels in that application show that industrial diesel engines had arrived.
By World War Two every navy in the world was an oil burning, not a coal burning, navy. And it wasn't just navies. Merchant ships had followed in the navies' wakes. They were now oil burning too for the most part. Coal at sea had died.
Still, the trend line had been set.
And it would next show itself with transportation.
At least according to one source written in 1912 coal fueled 9/10s of all locomotive engines at that time. The other 1/10th would have been fired by wood or, yes, oil.
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
The Agrarian's Lament: Blog Mirror: Business As A Calling.
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
The idea of a vocation.
The idea of vocation attaches to work a cluster of other ideas, including devotion, skill, pride, pleasure, the good stewardship of means and materials. Here we have returned to intangibles of economic value. When they are subtracted, what remains is ‘a job,’ always implying that work is something good only to escape.
Wendell Berry.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
At one time grocers were local.
Robert Reich
Why, oh why, must we have this absurd consolidation?