Showing posts with label The Pace of Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Pace of Life. Show all posts

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Surprised? No, we knew that all along.

The January issue of the Smithsonian magazine has an article with this headline:

New Research Dispels the Myth That Ancient Cultures Had Universally Short Lifespans

The article starts off with:
After examining the graves of over 300 people buried in Anglo Saxon English cemeteries between 475 and 625 AD, archaeologist Christine Cave of the Australian National University made a discovery that might surprise you. She found that several of the bodies in the burial grounds were over 75 years old when they died.
Yawn.

We knew this all along, and we've said this numerous times before here.

Yup, we have:
The suggestion of the letter writer was that human beings live longer than they used to. This is a common belief, people state that all the time, but it simply isn't true. People live the same number of years that they always have. That number of years varies by population and culture, but it's generally between 60 and 120 years. Extreme old age generally seems to cap out at an absolute maximum of 120 years, a span that's actually mentioned in the Old Testament, interestingly enough. The longest any human in modern times has been recorded to have live is 122 years. There are claimed examples of people living in excess of this number of years, but they lack verification and tend to be subject to serious questioning. This is not to say, of course, that anyone can live to 120 years. Far from it. Only a tiny minority of people shall ever approach that age. But instances of advance years in any one era are quite easy to find. Chief Washakie, for example, lived to be 99 or 100 years of age and was not the only Native American of that to have done so. Adams and Jefferson lived into their 80s. And so on.
And now to that list we can add some disinterred Anglo Saxons.

So the origin of the "myth".  Well, we repeat what we noted before:

Monday, March 28, 2016

Are Robert J. Gordon and George F. Will reading my blog?

Okay, up until this morning I'd never heard of Robert J. Gordon.  I now know that he's a Professor of Social Sciences at Northwestern. He's just released a book entitled The Rise and Fall of American Growth, and no, I haven't read it.

Rather, I read George F. Will's column on it from the Washington Post.  From that, I take it that Gordon has made some of the same economic observations I've made here, that  being that the period from 1870 to 1970 reflected changes so vast and complete that nothing before or after them, including computers can begin to rival them.

I probably wouldn't have set that back to 1870, but the observation is a good one. And I probably wouldn't have extended it out to 1970 either.  Rather, I'd have probably have taken the period of 1900 to 1950, a period that falls within that, but is half as long, and I think that's when most of the change really occurred.  Still, Will's observations are really good ones.  He notes, for example:
Will goes on to state that a conclusion of the book is that the "future is going to disappoint" as things will not continue to improve, in what he terms as a "pessimistic" view, in the same way or pace in the future.  That remains to be seen, of course, and also makes some assumptions about "improvement" that might not really be warranted.  Will expects, or at least writes to expect, maybe, medical improvements but not much else.  But he doesn't really get into what is, and what isn't, really an improvement.

I'd note, as its amusing, that the faith in technology is so high in some quarters that the very first person to comment on the article was appalled by the contents.  That commentor wrote:
Or we'll be old for an increasing share of  our lived days and out of work a lot of them, but who really knows.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Rail Transportation

Very early locomotive, on display on the back of a railroad flat car.

Recently we've been posting a lot about transportation. We've done horses and mule, walking, water transportation and bicycles so far.  Here we're considering trains.

 
Late oil fired steam engine, on display in Douglas Wyoming.

Locomotives, or at least steam engines, are so associated with the second half of the 19th Century that it's a shock to realize that the first steam locomotive was built in 1784 and the first railway model was built in the US in 1794.  Amazingly early.  The first actual working railway was built just a few years later, in 1804, in the United Kingdom.  That early line was an industrial ore hauler, so at least from the US prospective, trains have ended up where they started, hauling things, rather than people, for the most part.  Sort of a case of the past being prologue to the future, really.  The first working railroad in the US came on in 1830, with Baltimore and Ohio.  It was a hopeless crude thing, but it was a start, and from there on trains developed rapidly.

The first locomotives basically looked like a boiler, with gears, on a platform, because that's what they were. They soon began, however, to more closely resemble things we'd recognize as trains.

The first engine and train in America 
Really early train on display on the flatcars of a train in 1900.  Note that the passenger cars on the old train are coaches with wheels altered for rails.

Locomotive engine 
Locomotive, 1850.  In the twenty years between the top photograph and this one, locomotives started to take on a more familiar form, and they'd grown larger.

By 1860, in North America, they'd not only taken on a familiar form, but their rails now stretched throughout the settled East.  In just 20 years the United States and Canada had gone from all roads and water ways to having an interconnected rail transportation system in the East.  Railways had already become an inseparable part of North American life.

The Goliah, at Wadsworth, Big Bend of Truckee River 
Locomotive in California, 1865.

And not only that, but a major undertaking in the United States would, as is well known, link the West and East by rail, in the Transcontinental Railway, where the two sections of the rail would join on May 10, 1869.  Indeed, that accomplishment came in the context of an early example of the government sponsoring a business, something that we rarely think of occurring in the 19th Century, but which the Lincoln Administration, which got it started, recognized as a national need, or at least laudatory goal, that was beyond the means of private enterprise for a wide variety of reasons. The inducement in that 19th Century context involved the Federal government giving to the two building railroads what it had a lot of, land, with the railroad acquiring a swath of sections (square miles) across the path of their lines, which allowed them to have a certain economic payoff in the future, and which also accordingly encouraged the railroads to sponsor development.  The railroads descendants today still retain much of that original grant along what had been the Transcontinental line.

 Massive Union Pacific railyard in Laramie Wyoming, a town built on the Union Pacific.

As monumental achievement as that was, it was only the beginning in a seemingly ceaseless and relentless expansion of rail lines that would see rail penetrate nearly every section of the West by the mid 1880s.  What had taken days to achieve before the rail lines came in, accordingly shrunk in time, sometimes to just hours. And rail continued to be put down relentlessly in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century in the U.S.

North of the border, in Canada, the Canadians would have a trans Canadian railway completed by 1885, linking the two coasts of a nation that still had not yet taken its full continental form, and which struggled with a national identity that really started to fully form about that time.  Railways were being built all over Europe at the same time, of course, with national and trans European lines put down everywhere.  The Russians achieved a monumental chore with the completion of the Trans Siberian in 1916, achieving what is arguably the greatest railroad in the world, but doing so only one year before the fall of the government that backed it.  Railroad penetrated into China from Russia, and into Arabia from Turkey.  The British built them in Africa and Australia.  The trans Australia railway was completed in the midst of World War One, being completed in 1917, and bringing yet another example of continental expanses being closed by rail.

Railroads were the long distance land transportation of their era, and they dominated everything about it.  By the 1860s they'd revolutionized the transportation of people and goods.  Americans and Canadians were made into a continental people by the railroads, or at least more completely so, and the Russians could aspire to be the same.  Australia, a nation whose unification was completed by World War One found its coasts united during it.

 
Former Union Pacific Depot in Cheyenne Wyoming, on the line of the original Transcontinental Railroad.

In the U.S, and Canada, an economy that was mostly local prior to 1860s ceased being so by the end of the Civil War, when railroads penetrated into Kansas, and for the first time goods, and perhaps more significantly beef, could be transported across the nation by rail car.  A nation that had been principally a local pork consumer prior to 1865 in short order became a beef consuming nation, particularly as refrigerator rail cars came in about  the same time.  The great cattle drives that followed the Civil War, inspired in part by a huge increase in cattle in Texas during the war, were only made economically possible as the railheads had penetrated as far west as Kansas.

Refrigeration and rail also allowed the nation to have its first really national beverage company, Anhauser Busch, which made use of rail and refrigeration to ship beer all over the United States by the 1870s.  A nation which before had tended to look for everything to be local, now became accustom to every sort of good being shipped across the nation, even something as routine as something to drink.

And rail was glamorous, and would in some ways always remain so. Certain trains, and even railroad men, became famous, and were celebrated in song.  Casey Jones, a real railroad engineer, was for example celebrated in song for his dramatic effort to stop his train to stop his train to avoid a collision, and thereby save lives.  Working on the railroad was celebrated by a song dedicated under that title.

Rail occupied and dominated long distance travel, and even intrastate travel, for decades and decades. Rails continued to expand in the country throughout the first half of the 20th Century and rail transportation was the critical national means of transportation throughout the first half of the 20th Century.  When people traveled any distance at all, they normally traveled by rail.   My father, for example, traveled from Casper Wyoming to Lincoln Nebraska, where he was attending university, by rail, not by car, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  U.S. troops were moved from coast to coat during World War One and World War Two by rail, not by truck as a rule, and not by plane.  Railroad labor troubles during World War One were so disruptive to the war effort that the Federal government took over the rail lines during the war.

And the situation was largely the same in other nations.  In Germany, the military was in control of the rail lines prior to World War One, and German mobilization was based on strict railroad timetables.  The rail lines themselves became lines of combat in World War One, and to a certain extent World War Two, inside of Russia and the Russian civil war saw the odd use of armored trains, which made a reappearance in Soviet use during World War Two.

Rail came to not only serve towns and cities, of course, but to impact their features and even their locations. This is well known in the West, as towns competed to be railheads, which could spell the difference between economic isolation and elimination and prosperity.  Locally, for example, Casper Wyoming beat out Bessemer Wyoming in these regards, meaning that Casper, which was established literally just days prior to the railroad entering Natrona County Wyoming would go on to become one of the largest cities in Wyoming and the county seat, while Bessemer passed away and is now a farm field.

 

This meant that any significant town, and even many insignificant ones, had rail lines and features associated with them, such as depots. But now often missed, and often now neglected, it also mean that a towns hotels, including its best hotels, were typically within walking distance of a railroad depot. The same was true of anything requiring shipping of anything heavy.

 
 Parco Hotel, in Sinclair Wyoming.  Just a block or two from the main line of the Union Pacific Railroad.  This hotel is no longer an operating hotel.
 
 Union Station in Delver Colorado, photo taken from the front of the Oxford Hotel.

 
Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow, Wyoming and Union Pacific station.

Consider then the state of the railroads in relation to nearly every society, just after World War Two.  Troops who had gone to training stations by rail and then to points of embarkation by rail, came home largely by rail.  All materials of any significant nature, except for short hauls as a rule, were moved by rail, with perhaps the only exceptions being intrastate hauling and oil and gas pipelines.  People traveling from one city to another traveled by rail.


World War Two era poster urging people not to travel if it wasn't necessary. This photo shows the inside of a packed train car.

But then, something began to happen to rail, and that something was two things really. The Interstate Highways and Air Travel.

Air travel changed everything about how Americans, and ultimately everyone else in the developed world, thought about traveling long distances. Acclimated to long trips by train as a rule, planes became an option. Expensive at first, as time went on traveling by air became more and more affordable, particularly when the time element was considered.  Even by the early 1950s air travel was displacing train travel. Businessmen started traveling by air.  The military switched from shipping men locally from their duty station to another duty station by train, to air.  Ultimately air became so efficient, that it displaced the train as a fast mail carrier for letters and small packages, with that becoming so efficient that large sections of that business were wholly privatized.

 Western Airlines airliner, Casper Wyoming, early 1950s.  Sailor is boarding aircraft.  This scene says a lot about the change after World War Two, as this airport was built as an Army Air Corps training base during World War Two, with enormous runways.  Post war, it became an international airport, replacing the much smaller local airport that had existed up until that time.

This didn't happen all at once, of course, and in this late era, there were a series of efficient locomotives designed just for fast passenger service. Streamlined steam engines yielded to streamlined diesels, as the internal combustion engine began to take over the rails. But for most of the country, the 1950s and 60s would see the end of passenger train service. The only exceptions were in densely populated sections of the country were commuter rail hung on.

And, also in the 1950s, a new threat to rail arrived in the form of greatly improved highways, particularly the Interstate Highway system.  With Federal funding for highways, under the guise of defense spending for highways designed to speed military mobilization, supposedly, tax funded highways provided a means for trucking companies to compete with privately owned raillines, albeit rail lines that had in some instances been put in with incentives, particularly land incentives, in the 19th Century.  The new Interstates boosted the commercial trucking fleet enormously, and over the road trucks took over quite a bit of commercial hauling.  Without having to pay for their "rails", and able to go anywhere there was pavement, the trucks were liberated from steel rails and could deliver more easily  from port to port.

So, slowly in this same period freighting saw major inroads from trucking, with some sectors of shipping, such as livestock shipping, going over to trucks entirely.  By the 1970s trains were no longer hauling, for the most part, mail, people, and livestock, as well as many other items.  By the late 1990s tracks were being abandoned in some locations, and the old rail lines converted to walkways under "rails to trails" programs.

Pedestrian path in Casper Wyoming, converted from the line of the Great Northwestern Railroad.  Old depot on the right, now an office building.

But rail is persistent, and in spite of the inroads it remains important to us today, even if its faded into a the background to such an extent we can hardly recognize it.  It remains the heavy hauler for the nation, transporting good far more cheaply, and far more environmentally benign, to the extent that anything is, today, carrying more pounds per gallon of feul cheaply than any of its competitors.  And in the expensive fuel world in which we've been recently living (but which seems to be potentially fading back out today), its seen a bit of a revival.  New lines have been put in, in the West, where it remains vital for heavy hauling.  Major coal hauling lines have been built, and even here locally a major petroleum loading hub was just constructed.  In Denver, as in many other cities, a local light rail service for passengers has dramatically expanded, and it will soon run from Union Station to the Denver airport.  Rail hasn't yielded easily, and even in North America, the domain of the automobile, it has kept on.

Monday, November 17, 2014

The law gets larger over time.

Wyoming Statutes, the 1910 and 1920 volumes.  All the state's statutes, in one volume.

The 1945 statutes, five volumes.

Top shelf, the statutes today.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

A legal Gerontocracy?



There's a bill pending in Wyoming's legislature which proposes to remove the mandatory retirement age for the judiciary, which is presently 70 years old.

The cited reason for this bill, which has passed at least one reading in the house, and which I guess will pass, is that the sponsoring legislators were distressed by a relatively recent retirement of a Wyoming Supreme Court justice, whom they regarded as a legal treasure.  Of course, that cited basis is somewhat insulting to the newly appointed justice, but apparently they aren't so worried about that.  They claim, at any rate, that Wyoming's mandatory age 70 retirement means that great legal minds are being deprived from continuing on in the judiciary because of an arbitrary retirement age.  Fans of such legislation also tend to note that people are living, and working, much longer than they used to.

They ought to rethink it.

All of the cited basis for the legislation may well be true.  But equally true are a hosts of physical and social reasons why this is a bad idea.

First of all, I'm not stating that people shouldn't work past age 70 if they want to. That's their own business, if they work in the private sector.  But in the public sector, and particularly in a position of great importance in which the worker was appointed by the Governor, it's another matter entirely.

Most people, even now in our modern age, do not escape the ravages of time. We all hope to, but very few of us really do.  The impacts of age and infirmity impact different occupations differently.  It's rare, for example to find a 40 year old rig hand, they're just too old, just as its rare to find a 40 year old professional football player. The body cannot handle it.  For mental occupations, however, 40 years old might be young.  A 40 year old Governor is extraordinary rare.  Barrack Obama, Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were all regarded as young Presidents, where as they'd otherwise be regarded as middle aged men during those same time periods.  A 40 year old judge is not uncommon, but still fairly rare.  A judge appointed at age 40 will have been practicing law for about 15 years, not a particularly long legal career, and just five years past the point where most practicing lawyers regard a lawyer as proficient.  I've known quite a few lawyers who were still practicing law at age 70, or even 80.  So what's the problem?

Well, one of  the problems is, for a cerebral occupation, some people's minds will begin to go starting in their 50s, but it will not really set in until their 60s.  Quite a few people, so many that's its regarded as a massive public health crisis, begin to suffer from dementia in their 70s or 80s.  Generally, a high percentage of people who suffer from these conditions have a bare inkling when the problems commences, but they have no real idea that they've slipped into it.  It might not be so obvious to others recently.

Indeed, I've experienced that personally.  My mother has fronto temporal dementia.  She cannot live on her own, at age 86, and has not been able to for two years.  But she seemingly remained sharp enough up until about age 80.  Oh, there were signs, but not so much that I was willing to believe them.  Her decline, in the end, came on extremely rapidly and very traumatically.

Surely this is not a problem for an older judge, correct?  After all, it's been pointed out, there's a process to remove a sick or disabled judge.  Well, in order to invoke that process, the judge has to be noticeably sick or disabled, which is not like flipping a switch.

Indeed, I have a couple of lawyer friends, now in their 60s ,who have remarked to me on more than one occasion how their memories were just shot.  One is practicing, the other is not.  The one who is not was frank that he had to quit, as his memory just couldn't match the requirements of the work.  Prior to that he had given up adversarial proceedings, as his memory was no longer suited for it.  That's admirable, but even today I can only barely tell that this is his condition.  I can, but only barely.  I can also, with the lawyer that remains in practice, and has no intention of retiring.

Several years ago I tried a case against a lawyer that very clearly was suffering from some sort of mental decline in his advanced age.  He was in his 70s.  His clients must not have noticed it, and the Court certainly did nothing about it.  His representation of his clients was bizarre to some degree.  And many years ago I had a case against a lawyer who ultimately withdrew from representing his client, who actually was so infirm he fell asleep during a deposition.  In none of these cases did anyone step in to cause the lawyer to step down.  I don't think, by and large, that average people necessarily grasp that a lawyer's skills are declining, and I'm not sure that any of their colleagues are willing or able to do anything about it.

All of that, of course, is from private practice, which people have a right to keep doing. But in a public trust would things be much different?  I doubt it.  And if they were, it'd be at the point where things were so bad that the only thing we'd later remember about that judge is that he had to be removed for mental infirmity. 

And that's just the most obvious case.  Being a judge is actually a fairly grueling line of work, at least for trial judges.  I've tried cases in which the judges became severely ill, but because there was an ongoing trial, they kept on keeping on. They really had no choice.  For older judges, with a greater list of ailments, this would be an increased problem.  Time off the bench means that nobody is there, or in a trial setting, perhaps a court commissioner, a part time judge, is there.  However, Wyoming's voters recently declined to allow a constitutional amendment that would legalize the practice of allowing commissioners to sit on the bench if the judge remains in the county, so that's a limited option.

And, frankly, perhaps its just not in society's interest to have lawyers in their 70s and 80s sitting on the bench, or perhaps particularly on the  Wyoming Supreme Court.  Critics would note that this is already the practice on the Federal bench, but on the trial level, the Federal court's mostly rely on very set law, or on state law.  On the appellate level it can be argued that the examples we have may not really support keeping judges on until, basically, they die.

The law really belongs to the people in the end.  There's a great deal to be said about stability in the law, but sometimes that stability can be a negative stability.  Judges that come on to the court as a species of reformer, either conservative or liberal, end up remaining on the court as a bulwark against change.  At the U.S. Supreme Court level the practice has been to appoint ideological judges who are relatively young, with the idea of cementing the movement o the day in the courts.  It only partially works as the judges end up staying, in some instances, for 30 or 40 years.  That's good, and bad, but do we really want it at the local level?

The Wyoming Supreme Court is not the U.S. Supreme Court, and no great issues of the Federal Constitution will come in front of it.  A lot of important local issues will, however.  If the retirement age is removed, this will mean that the justices, who are often in their 50s, may be on the bench for 30 years.  That's a long time to have a potentially fixed set of ideas in control.

Indeed, on the score, the U.S. Army of World War Two provides an interesting example.  Going into World War Two the Army had a large number of elderly generals.  George Marshall, the senior general of the Army, determined, with the expansion of the Army in 1940, to forcibly retire almost all of them.  It's sometimes erroneously believed that he retired all over 50, he did not, but the impact of his actions had that practical result.  The Army, therefore, went into the war with young generals, some actually only in their 30s.  Why?  Not because the older ones were infirm, it's just that their thinking didn't evolve during an era of mechanized war.  It was fixed in an earlier era.  There's be no reason to expect judges would be any different.

 George S. Patton at age 59. He and MacArthur were unusual for US field commanders in that they were retained even though they were over 50 years of age in 1940.  Patton is believed to have suffered from some temperament problems, however due to head injuries sustained as a younger man, and what his condition would have been like in his 60s and 70s is open to question.

Indeed, keeping the Army example up and going forward, the Army of the 50s, 60s, and 70s reflected the fact that a lot of those World War Two officers did not go when they could have, and should have. The Army changed its retirement policy during the war to allow retirement after 20 years, but many hung on to the required retirement age of 60, and that reflected itself in our strategic thought for a long time.  It will be noted that in at least one war of the 1960s, we did not do so well.

 Major General James Gavin, a legendary airborne general, in his mid 30s.

Every time a position like this is opened up for somebody of advanced age, it's closed for somebody of a younger age. If judges are allowed to add another decade or so to their service, ti means that some who would have become judges will not.  It would not be possible for those judges to really make the career adjustment for a variety of reasons later.  Quite a few Wyoming judges in recent years have been in their 40s.  Given another decade of practice would the same individuals still opt for the bench?  A lot of Wyoming judges are appointed in their 50s.  Those individuals will not be opting for the bench in their 60s.

Indeed, while I like all the judges I know in their 60s, the argument can almost be made to adopt the Army's current policy and require the judges to retire in their 60s. Army jurist, like other soldiers, must retire at age 60s, well before Social Security eligibility.  That does insure that all of the up and coming jurists have a place.  I don't know that this same policy would be good for Wyoming, but I can see an argument for 65, or even 63.  Yes, it's young, and perhaps too young. But it also would mean that retiring jurists would make space for lot more younger judges, and there'd be more who were judges over time.  That seems like a good idea to me.

Finally, for those who are able and want to remain working, it allows, or perhaps forces, their talents to be applied elsewhere, which may be to everyone's benefit. Some retired judges have gone on to late interesting and valuable careers.  One became a famous baseball commissioner, for example.  One Wyoming district court judge in recent years went on to be a valuable appointed office under Governor Freudenthal.  There are other roles they can play.

Even with all of that, I suspect that this bill will pass.  People don't like to contemplate the grim realities of later life much, and like to pretend it won't occur.  And people really don't look out much for the younger age groups as a whole, even though people like to claim they do.  My prediction is that this bill will pass, and as a result, the judiciary will be lost to many fine individuals who would have made good judges, and we'll eventually have the embarrassing sceptical of somebody having to be removed for infirmity.

Epilog:

From the June 5, 2013, New York Times.
  ALBANY — At 74, Justice Sidney F. Strauss loves his job and has no desire to stop working. But at the end of 2014, he may be forced into his golden years by a mandatory retirement rule.

“Fifty years ago, when the life expectancy was 61, if you said, ‘You want to work to 76?’ They’d say, ‘You should live so long,’ ” said Justice Strauss, a State Supreme Court judge in Queens. “But as long as I am physically and mentally capable of doing this, I want to keep doing this.”
Each year, judges across New York and the rest of the country grudgingly hang up their robes because of these rules, many of which were inscribed in state constitutions well before the eras of penicillin, cholesterol drugs and hip replacements. More than 30 states and the District of Columbia have an age limit on jurists, according to the National Center for State Courts: 70 is the limit in many states; in Vermont, it is an optimistic 90.
In New York, judges have to retire at either 70 or 76, depending on their courts. But this year, a reprieve seems possible.
The Legislature has been considering a bill that would amend the State Constitution, if approved by voters, to extend the retirement age to 80 for hundreds of judges statewide, including the chief judge of the Court of Appeals, Jonathan Lippman.

Goodness.  Law belongs to the public, and a person loving their job has little to do with that.  Moves such as this effectively mean that people can live in some judicial districts had have the same judge presiding over it their entire lives. That hardly seems fair, or wise.  People may, due to improved healthcare, live to very advanced years, but does that mean that they should get to treat the office of judge as a personal possession for those long lives?

Epilog

Earlier this week I posted an item from the Federal Court list serve on the 70, that's right 70, Federal judges who are still serving on the Federal bench in some capacity who are veterans of World War Two.

I suppose differently, but that of course means that these gentlemen way up there in years.  I mentioned this to a couple of people, and received a couple of different reactions.  Frankly, having had to deal with the problems my mother's dementia creates for her, and therefore by extension us, has caused me to really, really doubt the wisdom of allowing somebody to work in this capacity for so long, and I wasn't the only one.  My mother thinks she's fine, and if she were a Federal judge, she'd probably be refusing to retire.  She certainly is in exceptional health for a person her age, except for mentally.

One reaction was a shocked "why would a person do that" which a teenager expressed to me.  "You could retire and do whatever you wanted."  Frankly, I feel that way too, although at age 51 I'm beginning to see how it becomes the case you can no longer do whatever you'd want. Still, I had that question myself.

A question of that type was one of the things the interviewer asked the various judges. Here's one of the answers?
Q. What makes you continue to serve on the bench?
A. I was appointed for life and I’m going to serve out my term. … it’s a performance of a duty, the same as I was doing when I was in Europe. I’m very big on duty, I was given a duty by President Nixon, and I have done my damnedest to carry it out for the 40 years I’ve been here.
Well, okay, but that perhaps demonstrates why these appointments probably ought to have a cap for retirement on them.  Nixon was a while back there.

Another jurist just enjoyed doing the job:
Q. You’ve kept up an active workload as a judge. For those who don’t have a lifetime appointment, what is that keeps you judging at this time of your life?
A. Well, I respect the court, and I’m interested in what I’m doing, what I have been doing over the years, so I’d like to continue doing as much of that as I’m physically capable of. Well, it’s partly just the satisfaction of doing this kind of work. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have stayed on as long as I did, because I could have retired or gone elsewhere many years ago. This is just what I like to do most.
I like that answer a lot better, quite frankly, although it still bothers me that a person can occupy a limited special occupation for so long.

 Judge Leo Glasser provided this reasoning:
Q. Why do you continue to work full-time on the bench?
A. Well, to begin with, I love the law. The United States District Court is without any doubt the greatest court in the world, in the sense that it deals with everything from admiralty to zoning – every conceivable aspect of the law. Also, if senior judges all decided to go fishing, I think the federal judiciary would be in a great deal of difficulty. I don’t remember the percentage of federal cases that senior judges deal with, but it’s substantial. We perform a significant service to the judiciary, and to the country by extension.
 Judge Arthur Spatt's view was similar, implicitly.
Q. Why do you continue to work as a judge?
I carry a full load, absolute full load, same as my regular colleagues. This is the most extraordinary judicial position. …  I have both civil and criminal cases. I have diversity cases, where a citizen of one state is suing a citizen of another state. Every kind of case, whether it is an automobile accident or an action on a promissory note or a contract. I am so fortunate to be able to have this judgeship. … It’s as stimulating  as  the first day I was in it. Every case presents new things, innovative things, interesting things, challenging things.
I can't say that any of this changes my view. Rather, in some ways it reenforces it.   The job doesn't really belong to an individual the way other jobs do, but rather to the country as a whole.  It does charge that person with a duty, but does that duty include occupying it until death?  I don't think so.  Perhaps a larger duty exists to allow it to be occupied by a younger generation at some point. And no matter how much a person might enjoy it, enjoying it wouldn't seem to be a justification for continuing to occupy it.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Old Technology, New Technology, Techies, Open Minded and Luddites

One of the frequently visited topics of this blog is the change in various material items, or the introduction of technology.  Some might suspect that the author might be, therefore, a Luddite, or perhaps a Neo Luddite.  This is not so.

That is, I'm far from the vie that all technology is bad, but at the same time keep the point of view that the measure of a material things worth includes (but only includes) its effectiveness.  Something that works well, works well.  That means, of course, that something old that works well may work better than something new that doesn't work as well.  For example, those who are familiar with ranching can't help but note that the horse has outlasted several of its intended replacements, in some of its traditional roles.  I've seen the dirt bike, the three wheeler and the ATV all come and go as rivals to the horse. They just don't cut it in comparison, so the horse keeps on keeping on.

 http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y3AZokn1pEc/T-xhLWpXV1I/AAAAAAAAEsA/5fthZOT7sLE/s640/t2photo.JPG

And many other examples of this can be found.  Old Coke was better than "new Coke" because it was.  Lots of old tools do the job as well or better than anything that comes after them.  The big old heavy Dodge Power Wagons are still coveted because nothing compares to them in their intended use.  Cast Iron cookery is better than newer items that are designed for the same purpose, not because they are old, but because the are better.  Espousing all those things doesn't make a person a Luddite, just open minded.

All that is fairly obvious.  When the truly open minded sometimes note that a really old technology or method remains applicable in the modern world in an unexpected way, however, it can be a bit of a shock. Retuning to the horse again, for example, its a mind bender to some to realize that there are armies in the world today that retain mounted troops, and that extensive field forces have been deployed of that type as recently as the 1980s, and actually much later.  Both Portugal and Rhodesia, for example, deployed mounted infantry into the 1980s, in combat.  And mounted rural patrols remain perfectly viable in some places, including parts of the U.S. border, today.  That the horse would remain a viable platform should be self evident, but it comes as a shock.  Its competitors, in this context, offer speed and lower training, but they also are inflicted with noise and cost.  It's a cost balancing matter, therefore, and in some instance, the costs favor the horse.  In a related sort of analysis, some work has been done by economist that show on small acreages horse drawn implements are actually more cost effective, if the cost of the human farmer's labor is deducted, than machinery, up until a certain point at which the speed of the machinery tips the balance. Noting that doesn't make a person a Luddite, just a bit eccentric.


What does make a person a bit of a Luddite, however, is refusing to accept that any technology is either an improvement or useful. . . or in sometimes necessary.  I recently ran across an odd example of that.

As folks who stop here know, I'm a lawyer.  Moreover, I'm a lawyer in Wyoming, which means that I travel around quite a bit.  I was also an "early adopter" of the Internet, which was coming into law firms just at the time I entered the law, which is about a quarter century ago now.  Most younger lawyers, I'm sure, can't imagine a day when every firm didn't have the Internet, but I do.  We were just getting dial in when I started up. We still had to go to the county law library to use Westlaw at that time, which I frequently did.  Now, of course, we all have West Law on our PCs, and were connected all the time, literally.  Is that good or bad?  Well, I've debated that, even here on this site, and there are good and bad elements to that.  But anyway you look at it, it is.

Part of that, of course, includes email.  We use email constantly.  And it has very much impacted how we work, I realized today.  And that's where, perhaps, the Luddite aspect of this kicks in.

I won't say that every type of business everywhere must have internet connectivity.  But law firms must.  A firm without the net is not only a rarity, but obsolete.  I've come to assume that most law firms have a webpage dedicated to their firm.   Having one wouldn't be absolutely necessary, but it's darned near necessary.  It's like having a sign out in front of your shop.

Email is necessary.  I don't know how any lawyer can operate without email.  But today I ran across one, to my surprise, that didn't.

In this case the lawyer was across the continent, literally.  I've been having trouble catching him by phone, and he's been having trouble catching me.  That's easy to occur in this situation.  When I first come into the office most mornings, I probably have a series of early morning emails to catch up with. At that same time, this fellow is doing his mid morning work.  By mid morning, when I might have the best chance of calling from my office, he's probably gone for lunch.  When he comes back and returns my call, I may be just getting back or be out doing something.  If I call him after 3:00, he's probably gone, and so on.  

However, if a person has email.  None of this matters.  I'd catch him first thing in the morning with an email, or vice versa, and we can exchange them over a day so that, in the course of one day, we'd probably be well on our way to having whatever it was all worked out.  So, I went to find his firm website so I could send him an email.

Low and behold, I couldn't find a website, or even an email address.  His state bar listing didn't even list a fax number.  Finally, I had my secretary call his to ask for a fax number or email address.  They did have a fax number.

Here I'll digress that whenever I call this office, the receptionist is invariably snooty.  That may be, in part, because I have a Rocky Mountain accent (yes, there is such a thing) and I'm dealing with somebody who has a certain distinct regional accent.  She might not be able to understand me, and I can't really understand her all that well.  Or she might just be a bit rude.  I always find that odd in a receptionist.  I'm just trying to call her boss on a work matter, which would seemingly be good for us both.  Treating me like an annoyance would not seem to be warranted.  Oh well.

Anyhow, I resorted to the fax, a technology that seemed pretty amazing when I started 23 years ago but which now seems sort of redundant to email.  Oh well.  But here, I can't grasp how, or even why, somebody in this line of work wouldn't adopt this technology.  Shoot, here we couldn't get by without it now, as everyone else has it, and that's the speed at which we must work.  Indeed, even Iphones are a necessity, as they pick up email.

Monday, February 11, 2013

Pope Benedict XVI Announces his resignation and our earlier thread; Lex Anteinternet: A legal Gerontocracy?

I woke up this morning, like everyone else, to the surprising announcement by Pope Benedict XIV's that he will resign the Papacy on February 28.  As I often will do with important news events, I shared some internet correspondence with my good and sage friend Couvi, who made the comment "It takes a wise and brave man to make that kind of decision."

Truer words were never spoken.

In an important office, it must be hard to resign.  Where a person makes important decisions, that impact people's lives, society and even history, that decision must be an extremely hard tone to make.  And that is why, I suspect, that so few choose to make it.  Pope Benedict, who is a remarkable man by all accounts, occupies a position of supreme importance.  It speaks loudly of his courage and wisdom to be able to step down from it.

The impact of age is something that nobody wish to consider, and which the majority of those in the Western world choose to ignore if they can.  That's a luxury, sort of, of our modern societies.  It wasn't always the case by any means.  It is not true that "humans are living longer" as it is often claimed, as we've commented on before.  The upper limits of people's lives have not changed at all over the centuries. What has changed, however, is that more people make it into advanced old age than before, as fewer people die earlier from accidents and disease.

That's a good thing, and there can be no doubt about that, but what it also means is that more people now experience the impacts of advanced old age than they once did.  That's not necessarily bad, but a person should be realistic.

For many people, perhaps most people, that means that they suffer the aches, pains, and infirmities that advanced old age can bring on. A few amazingly lucky people seem to be spared that, but not most.  But, if a person can be so afflicted, but retain a sharp mind, they are blessed.  Others, of course, are afflicted with the diseases and afflictions of memory and thought, which is a scary thing to watch and endure, and which no doubt is hard for a person to experience.  We here are watching that ourselves, as my mother, a person of high intelligence, has been slowly descending into the fog, while her physical abilities slowly decline, all seemingly without her own knowledge of it.

These are things that seem to take us by surprise, and which most people choose to believe that they will never endure.  But many do.

This brings up the post I made recently entitled:  Lex Anteinternet: A legal Gerontocracy?:  In that entry I noted that Wyoming's legislature, putting a rosy face on aging, is looking at ending the statutory retirement age of 70.  Of interest, Pope Benedict, who is the oldest man to have ever been made Pope was 78 when he assumed the Papacy.  A realist, he determined during his Papacy that members of the College of Cardinals over 70 would no longer be able to vote on the question of who would become Pope, and he commented from time to time that if he was unable to effectively occupy the office, he would resign.  He has now determined to do so.

What the Pope understands, but he Legislature seemingly does not, is that people living on in greater numbers to advanced old age does not mean that everyone will be able to physically do the job, and that there needs to be a formal procedure in regards to that.  Contrary to what so many seem to assume, it has not been the case that the Papacy was occupied "old men."  I don't know the median age upon their deaths (which in the first 500 years of the Papacy was often by execution) but I'd guess it to be in their 40s.  A person may ask what that has to do with the judiciary, but I suspect that the average age of Wyoming judge leaving the bench is younger than a person might presume.  In earlier years, judges tended to leave the bench young enough, in many instances, to resume practice or to go on to other offices or their private businesses, if they owned farms and ranches.

In recent years judges have often been staying until their 70, although there are some admirable contrary examples.  Judge Downes, of the Federal District Court in Wyoming, retired at about age 65, even though he was in a position where he had a lifetime appointment.  Just very recently a 7th Judicial District state judge in his mid 60s announced his retirement.  A very long serving 7th Judicial District Judge, Judge Spangler, retired in what seemed to be his 50s, meaning that he must have gone on the bench very young.  The point here is that all of these men exercised the decision to retire while they were still very much an intellectual force.

What the have chosen to do in their retirement and will choose to do is another topic, but I'd also note that one of the longest serving judges at the time he retired, Judge Hartman, went right into critical roles with the state government under Judge Freudenthal. The point being that, here too, Judge Hartman's intellect remained a force, and he wasn't fearful of putting himself into a new role where he'd have to be, essentially, hired.  I suspect, although its' just a guess, that this is what we'll see with Pope Benedict, who remains a very strong intellectual force.  Indeed, the model for this would be Pope Celestine, who came from monastic life but who had a great intellect.  He resigned afters some years hoping to return to the monastery, but he never made, as his successor kept in Rome to consult with.

This all contrasts with the situation in which a person can occupy a position indefinitely simply by occupying it, and that's what removing the age 70 retirement requirement in Wyoming would do.  No doubt proponents of changing the law would note that judges stand for retention, but most people know very little about their local judges and routinely vote to retain them unless there's some criminal case whose outcome they disagree with.  In other words, it would be unlikely that the voters would choose to retire a judge unless things became very bad.  And for those who remain intellectually active, it is not as if there is not other work for them to do.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

The end of Saturday mail delivery

In the category of trends, the U.S. Post Office has announced that it intends to end the Saturday delivery of mail. This move will save the Post Office a great deal of money.  No doubt that's true, and the move can come as no surprise.

Rural mail carrier transferring mail to a second mail carrier, in Kentucky, in the early 1940s.

The surprising thing this go around, as this has been suggested before, is how this is now coming without a whimper or hint of complaint from the general public.  It just is.  This really shows a huge evolution in how we view the mail, as well as a big evolution in how the mail itself is viewed.

When I was a little kid, and at home from school for the summer, I used to really look forward to the mail.  It seems odd to look back at now and realize that.  The mail coming was sort of exciting.  There was "junk mail" then, and bills of course, but I didn't worry about the bills or the junk. The exciting stuff was the other stuff.  Magazines and letters.  My mother in particular wrote a lot of letters and received a lot of letters.  She had family correspondence that went all over. Letters from Canada, Florida, Massachusetts, Mexico and Hawaii were always arriving.  And the magazines were pretty interesting too.  My father, for his office, subscribed to both major news magazines of the period, Time and Newsweek, as well as Life, Look, and later on, People.  National Geographics, and a host of monthly magazines also arrived almost daily it seemed.

Rural mail carrier in Kentucky, 1940s.

Later, when I was in basic training, Mail Call was a huge deal.  Every mail call we hoped for some mail.  Letters were a great distraction from whatever else we were doing at Ft. Sill,and they were eagerly anticipated.

Such was also the case when I was twice at the University of Wyoming.  While in law school I had post office box at the campus post office, and I checked it darned near every week day.  Sometimes I checked it on Saturdays too, particularly if I was going to the early Mass at the Newman Center, which took me right by the post office.  Letters from family and the few magazines I received were always looked forward to.



Now this is much less the case. We still get magazines that we subscribe to by mail, and look forward to them.  Newsweek is gone, of course, now part of the Daily Beast online, as are Look and Life magazines. The National Geographic still comes, and some others. But the letters are mostly gone.  Getting a letter, by mail, is now almost a shock, it's so rare.

Almost all my correspondence is electronic.  All the friends I keep in touch with via correspondence I keep in touch with via email.  I don't even mail Christmas cards anymore, I just do an electronic Christmas letter.  The old vast flood of correspondence the mail used to bring is now all gone, a massive change over former times.  The mail now is made up of magazines, junk mail, and bills.  But even bills are slowly leaving the mail, as more and more people pay for things online.

This blog has, as one of is purposes, exploring the change in things over the past century, and here's a huge one indeed. The mail used to be absolutely central to people's lives.  Now, this is hardly the case.  There are some days we don't even check our mailbox out in front of our house, which is something that never would have been the case earlier.  Down at the office mail is still huge, of course, but even this is beginning to change.  We used to mail pleadings to every court.  Now we electronically file and serve in Federal court, and we also do the same for the Wyoming Supreme Court.  Ironically here, therefore, the Federal government's courts were the first to abandon the United States Post Office, in the legal world.

This trend is set to continue, there's no doubt. The Post Office is only accepting the inevitable, but the interesting thing this go around is that most people don't seem to care.  Shutting down Saturday delivery has been a topic of discussion forever.  Now it will happen, and it seems that most won't notice. 

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

An example of time and distance

These are photographs I recently posted on the Holscher's Hub site. Well, not really recently, but relatively recently.

Just the other day, here, I posted an article about the Revolution In Rural Transportation.  It can be easy to over do a thesis, and hopefully I haven't there, but that topic explored how parts of the Wyoming high country, or even just the back country, was inaccessible for much of the year.  Elsewhere here I've explored just how long it used to take to go from one area to another.

Here's a practical example from this Fall.  These are photos that were taking trailing out of the Big Horns.  Granted, this is pushing cattle.  If a person was just riding, they'd make better time.  Still, it's illustrative as to how distance used to be covered more slowly. And, and perhaps more significantly, it's an example of how distances once seemed so much more vast.  I can, at least in nice weather, easily drive up to this location and back home in much less than a day.  And some of these distances, which take a long time to cover pushing cattle, take under an hour on the road, by truck.

Day one, gathering and start of the trail.






















 The Camp.


 Self portrait, day two.
 Lonely bull.
















The slope, day three.