Steve Hely's Blog, page 18

Tribute to railroads

In his annual letter Warren Buffett waxes about Burlington Northern and Santa Fe:

Rail is essential to America’s economic future. It is clearly the most efficient way – measured by cost, fuel usage and carbon intensity – of moving heavy materials to distant destinations. Trucking wins for short hauls, but many goods that Americans need must travel to customers many hundreds or even several thousands of miles away. The country can’t run without rail, and the industry’s capital needs will always be huge. Indeed, compared to most American businesses, railroads eat capital.BNSF is the largest of six major rail systems that blanket North America. Our railroad carries its 23,759 miles of main track, 99 tunnels, 13,495 bridges, 7,521 locomotives and assorted other fixed assets at $70 billion on its balance sheet. But my guess is that it would cost at least$500 billion to replicate those assets and decades to complete the job.

…

North America’s rail system moves huge quantities of coal, grain, autos, imported and exported goods, etc. one-way for long distances and those trips often create a revenue problem for back-hauls. Weather conditions are extreme and frequently hamper or even stymie the utilization of track, bridges and equipment. Flooding can be a nightmare. None of this is a surprise. While I sit in an always-comfortable office, railroading is an outdoor activity with many employees working under trying and sometimes dangerous conditions.An evolving problem is that a growing percentage of Americans are not looking for the difficult, and often lonely, employment conditions inherent in some rail operations. Engineers must deal with the fact that among an American population of 335 million, some forlorn or mentally-disturbed Americans are going to elect suicide by lying in front of a 100-car, extraordinarily heavy train that can’t be stopped in less than a mile or more. Would you like to be the helpless engineer? This trauma happens about once a day in North America; it is far more common in Europe and will always be with us.

Wage negotiations in the rail industry can end up in the hands of the President andCongress. Additionally, American railroads arer equired to carry many dangerous products everyday that the industry would much rather avoid. The words “common carrier” define railroad responsibilities.

…

I believe that our vast service territory is second to none and that therefore our margin comparisons can and should improve.I am particularly proud of both BNSF’s contribution to the country and the people who work in sub-zero outdoor jobs in North Dakota and Montana winters to keep America’s commercial arteries open. Railroads don’t get much attention when they are working but, were they unavailable, the void would be noticed immediately throughout America. A century from now, BNSF will continue to be a major asset of the country and ofBerkshire. You can count on that.

love it. The boy from Omaha now owns the railroad.

Did Paul Harvey ever do a tribute to the railroad man the way he did to a farmer? (was Paul Harvey a poet?) (did Dodge’s God Made A Farmer ad work?)

The railroad man gets a tough rap in song and tale.

Are Shocking Blue the best band ever from Den Haag?

Wendy’s

reading the Wendy’s Q4 earnings call transcript as a way to enter kenshō and approach sartori.

Bundles served in death as in life

Went looking into the idea that even after death Inka nobles clung to power:

People in Andean societies viewed themselves as belonging to family lineages. (Europeans did, too, but lineages were more important in the Andes; the pop-cultural comparison might be The Lord of the Rings, in which characters introduce themselves as “X, son of Y” or “A, of B’s line.”) Royal lineages, called panaqa, were special. Each new emperor was born in one panaqa but created a new one when he took the fringe. To the new panaqa belonged the Inka and his wives and children, along with his retainers and advisers. When the Inka died his panaqa mummified his body. Because the Inka was believed to be an immortal deity, his mummy was treated, logically enough, as if it were still living. Soon after arriving in Qosqo, Pizarro’s companion Miguel de Estete saw a parade of defunct emperors. They were brought out on litters, “seated on their thrones and surrounded by pages and women with flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them with as much respect as if they had been alive.” Because the royal mummies were not considered dead, their successors obviously could not inherit their wealth. Each Inka’s panaqa retained all of his possessions forever, including his palaces, residences, and shrines; all of his remaining clothes, eating utensils, fingernail parings, and hair clippings; and the tribute from the land he had conquered. In consequence, as Pedro Pizarro realized, “the greater part of the people, treasure, expenses, and vices [in Tawantinsuyu] were under the control of the dead.” The mummies spoke through female mediums who represented the panaqa’s surviving courtiers or their descendants. With almost a dozen immortal emperors jostling for position, high-level Inka society was characterized by ramose political intrigue of a scale that would have delighted the Medici. Emblematically, Wayna Qhapaq could not construct his own villa on Awkaypata—his undead ancestors had used up all the available space. Inka society had a serious mummy problem. After smallpox wiped out much of the political elite, each panaqa tried to move into the vacuum, stoking the passions of the civil war. Different mummies at different times backed different claimants to the Inka throne. After Atawallpa’s victory, his panaqa took the mummy of Thupa Inka from its palace and burned it outside Qosqo—burned it alive, so to speak. And later Atawallpa instructed his men to seize the gold for his ransom as much as possible from the possessions of another enemy panaqa, that of Pachacuti’s mummy.

so says Charles Mann in 1491, required reading. He cites as his sources:

Screenshot

so that’s a weekend sorted.

These Lords had the law and custom of taking that one of their Lords who died and embalming
him, wrapping him up in many fine clothes, and to these Lords they allotted all the service which they had had in life, in order that these bundles [mummies] might be served in death as well as they had been in life. Their service of gold and silver was not touched, nor was anything else which they had, nor were those who served them [removed from] the house without being replaced, and provinces were set aside to give them support. The Lord who entered upon a new reign had to take new servants. His vessels had to be of wood and pottery until there was time to make them of gold and silver, and always those who began to reign carried out all this, and it was for this reason that there was so much treasme in this land, because, as I have said, he who succeeded to the kingdom always hastened to make better vessels and houses [than his predecessors]. And as the greater part of the people, treasure, expenses and vices were under the control of the dead, each dead man had allotted to him an important Indian, and likewise an Indian woman, and whatever these wanted they declared it to be the will of the dead one. Whenever they wished to eat, to drink, they said that the dead ones wished to do that same thing. If they wished to go and divert themselves in the houses of other dead folk, they said the same, for it was customary for the dead to visit one another, and they held great dances and orgies, and sometimes they went to the house of the living, and sometimes the living came to their. At the same time as the dead people, many [living], as well men as women came, saying that they wished to serve, and this was not forbidden them by the living, because all were at liberty to serve these [the dead], each one serving the dead person he desired to serve. These dead folk had great number of the chief people [in their service], as well men as women, because they lived very licentiously, the men having the women as concubines, and drinking and eating very lavishly.

Pedro Pizarro goes on to describe a summit with a mummy:

The Marquis sent me [with orders to] go with Don Martin, the interpreter, to speak to this dead man and ask on his [Pizarro’s] behalf that the Indian woman be given to this captain. Then I, who believed that I was going to speak to some living Indian, was taken to a bundle, [like] those of these dead folk, which was seated in a litter, which held him and on one side was the Indian spokesman who spoke for him, and on the other was the Indian woman, both sitting close to the dead man. Then, when we were arrived before the dead one, the interpreter gave the message, and being thus for a short while in suspense and in silence, the Indian man looked at the Indian woman (as I understand it, to find out her wish). Then, after having been thus as I relate it for some time, both the Indians replied to me that it was the will of the Lord the dead one that she go, and so the captain already mentioned carried off the Indian woman, since the Apoo, for thus they called the Marquis, wished it.

Is it not possible they were playing a prank on Pedro Pizarro here? Five hundred years later who can say. It can be agreed the Inca had weird death stuff going on, but you don’t think they were doing weird death stuff in Extremadura, Spain in 1532? The place is littered with pieces of the true cross and the robe Jesus wore at the Last Supper and black Madonnas and churches called like The Holy Blood. They’d been fighting a religious war, the Reconquista, for 700 years.

The Spanish conquest of “Peru” wasn’t an encounter of a normal culture with a weird culture. It was very weird culture x very weird culture. (Weird here defined as strange, difficult to comprehend to us. Not like we’re normal.)

Every fragment of this encounter shatters off in a million weird directions. The truth can never be known. We can only contemplate the few primary sources that survive with awe and wonder.

Consider for example Guaman Poma, Falcon Puma’s book.

It was discovered in the Royal Danish Library of Copenhagen in 1908. It’s 1,189 pages long and handwritten and illustrated. Richard Pieschman, the scholar who found it, knew it was a big deal but he soon died. It was not available in English until I believe 1980? The 2006 translation selected, translated and annotated by David Frye has a wild introduction. The 2009 University of Texas edition by the late Roland Hamilton is also good, and free to look at here. Frye:

underlinings from the previous owner. Latin American literature began as something strange and stayed that way.

So, you can see how I’ve only gotten as far as John Hemming. That’s a whole other project. Hemming’s bona fides are that he was on the last expedition in which a British person was killed by an uncontacted tribe.

(The Panará) had had no knowledge of clothes and the swish-swish of Mason’s jeans as he walked had unnerved them.

Still true?

What is striking about Los Angeles after a period away from it is how well it works. The famous freeways work, the supermarkets work (a visit to, say, the Pacific Palisades Gelson’s, where the aisles are wide and the shelves full and checkout is fast and free of attitude, elevates grocery shopping to a form of zazen), the beaches work. The 1984 Olympics were not supposed to work, but they did (daily warnings of gridlock and urban misery gave way during the first week to a county-wide block party, with pink and aquamarine flags fluttering over empty streets, and with parking spaces available, for once, even in Westwood)—not only worked but turned a profit, of almost two hundred and twenty-three million dollars, about which there was no scandal.

Saint Joan talking about LA in the August 28, 1988 New Yorker. Will the 2028 Olympics work out the same? I hope so.

Our own observation is Los Angeles works less well in 2024 than it did when we arrived in 2004, but maybe that’s the sweetening filter of nostalgia for youth. There are more people living in tents now than there were then. That seems bad. A dreadful indicator. Does tent-living increase result from prices going insane? Part of it for sure. The economists might tell us that’s connected to increased demand for housing with insufficient supply. The supply (of housing) should go up but that’s hard for various political and bureaucratic reasons.

Too bad, LA used to be a leader in experimental affordable housing projects:

source.

Slow lanes

Ed Catmull, when president of Pixar, the animation studio, built good friction into the process of developing films such as Toy Story. “The goal isn’t efficiency, it is to make something good, or even great,” he explained to Sutton and Rao about the way his team worked through multiple versions of the original idea, improving it as the movie developed. Colette Cloosterman-van Eerd of Jumbo, a Dutch grocery store chain, saw the need to offset the drive for more efficiency with good friction. She instituted “slow lanes” that would allow checkout staff to chat to shoppers, particularly senior citizens who valued social interaction more than speed.

from a piece on Stanford BS professors Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton in Financial Times.

I also loved this idea for a column:

Southern California town origin stories

In 1851 a group of 300 Mormons from southern Utah purchased a 35,509-acre tract in the San Bernardino Valley, laid out a town, planted trees, and built fine homes which they smothered in rose bushes and clinging plants. In a cooperative venture which became the model for all such efforts in the semi-arid Far West, they brought 4000 acres under irrigation. In 1857 a group of German immigrants gathered in San Francisco and incorporated themselves as the Los Angeles Vineyard Society. Purchasing a tract in Southern California which had once been part of the Rancho San Juan Cajon de Santa Ana, the Germans founded the colony of Anaheim, irrigating the soil and planting the vines of California and the Moselle. “We drove through the clean and well-kept avenues or streets, scenting Rhineland on every side,” wrote a visitor in the 1870’s, “and, indeed, this Anaheim itself is nothing but a bit of Germany dropped down on the Pacific Coast.” At Pasadena he might have scented Indiana and high-seriousness of the American Protestant variety. The excessively severe winter of 1873-74 convinced a number of middle class residents of Indianapolis, many of whom suffered from chronic ailments, that they had better emigrate to Southern California as agriculturalists. Incorporating themselves as the San Gabriel Orange Grove Association, they purchased and subdivided part of the Rancho San Pascual at the western head of the San Gabriel Valley: a superb spot, sheltered by the Sierra Madre and Verdugo Mountains, sunny, fertile, and conveniently near Los Angeles. Cottages were built and vines and fruit trees planted. In 1875, when the community acquired a post office, it called itself Pasadena.

Pasadena really does have the vibe/taste of solid Midwesterners from 1875. Who else would have a Rose Parade where they brag about how much tedious work each float takes?

I assumed that Pasadena was from the Spanish but according to About Pasadena on the city’s website:

The word Pasadena literally means “valley” in the Ojibwa (Chippewa) Indian language, but it has been interpreted to mean “Crown of the Valley” and “Key of the Valley,” hence the adoption of both the crown and the key in the official city seal.

More on San Bernardino.

More on Kevin Starr, a hero of mine.

jackasses like Dykstra

the sad demise of Sports Illustrated causes me to reflect on how much I learned from Letters To The Editor in SI magazines I recovered as a boy, picking through the recycled magazine stacks in a converted container at the town dump. The phrase “jackasses like Dykstra” stuck with me so much I think of it almost every time I consider the dress code at a nice restaurant. With ease I was able to recover the original, from February 1994.

Boorish Behavior
Your jocular tone in SCORECARD about Lenny Dykstra’s oafish antics in a restaurant (Jan. 17) calls for a response. Wearing a hat in any restaurant is a statement of social ignorance or, more likely, appalling ego, and the loud swearing in the establishment in suburban Philadelphia reinforces my impression of this lout. Your flip conclusion, in which his $24.9 million contract is mentioned, was inappropriate. There is still such a thing as class, just as there is a lack of it.
JOHN KELLEY, Winthrop, Mass.

Isn’t SI the publication that ran Karl Malone’s June 14 POINT AFTER saying Charles Barkley should recognize that he is a role model whether he wants to be or not? So why doesn’t this pious injunction apply to Lenny Dykstra, six million bucks a year or not? One reason that people go to nice restaurants is to get away from jackasses like Dykstra.
ROBERT H. PASCHALL, Bishop, Calif.

The importance of bird hunting in American politics

a killdeer

JAB III used to turkey hunt with Lawton Chiles despite being in opposing parties. According to JAB that paid off during the 2000 Florida recount:

BAKER:

Jeb ran against Lawton Chiles in a very divisive and semidirty race. I had become a good friend of Lawton because I was Treasury Secretary and he was Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. We did a lot of work together. He was an adversarial Democrat and I was an adversarial Republican, but we both liked to turkey hunt. He would invite me to Florida to hunt turkeys and I would invite him to Texas to hunt turkeys. I would call the turkeys for him and he would shoot them, and he would call them for me and I would shoot them.

One thing that really paid dividends with respect to the Florida recount—I know I’m jumping ahead of you here—Before I’d gotten over there, but it was reinforced after I’d gotten over there, I remembered the types of people that Lawton had appointed to the Florida Supreme Court. I’d probably met some of them. There was a guy named Dexter Douglass—You may remember who that was.

RILEY

He shows up in your book.

BAKER

In my book, yes. He was an advisor to Lawton. He was the guy who told Lawton whom to put on the Florida Supreme Court. He gave him advice about which lawyers to put on. They were all liberal trial lawyers. So when I got to Florida I was of the view, pretty much right off the bat, that if we weren’t able to get this into federal court we had a really tough row to hoe. As it turned out, that was very true. The Florida Supreme Court pulled us out twice, once in the face of a direct order from the United States Supreme Court to review their opinion—They reversed an earlier opinion. So that relationship I had with Lawton Chiles really paid dividends when it was time to go to do the recount.

There was a significant moment in George W. Bush’s governor campaign in Texas that turned on how he handled accidentally killing a killdeer, the wrong kind of bird, during a publicity event on the first day of bird hunting season. Here’s Karl Rove:

Then also, the famous killdeer incident had a big impact, because it showed—Her attitude toward good old boys was condescending. She felt she needed to placate “Bubba” by every September first going dove hunting in East Texas, outside of Dallas. Of course, she was not a hunter, she could care less, but it was a nice show and she’d get a nice picture for the newspapers. Bush went dove hunting and shot a protected bird, a killdeer, and when he discovered that he had done so, after a sharp-eyed television sports reporter noticed that the white markings on the bird meant that it was a killdeer, Bush’s response was not to deny it, but to dispatch a young aide to the game warden’s office to pay the fine immediately.

Then there was the incident where Cheney shot his buddy in the face by accident. Rove:

Rove

On my lease, and that was my lawyer. I was shocked that fact never came out. If you go back to incorporation papers of Rove and Company in 1981, my lawyer, the secretary/treasurer of my corporation, and my landlord is Harry M. Whittington Jr., and that’s the guy Cheney shot. The press corps never figured it out, but could you imagine the headline in the Washington Post? “Cheney Shoots Rove’s Lawyer in Sign of West Wing Tension.”

Riley

Did you get a funny feeling in your stomach when you got that news?

Rove

We could not get Cheney to make it public, and we needed to. It took until the next morning, before Cheney allowed Katharine Armstrong to feed the news to a reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The White House press corps was furious with us for having hid this fact from the afternoon and to the next morning.

Why did Cheney’s team bungle releasing that news? Dan Bartlett, W. communications director, explains:

The second one is when he shot Harry Whittington and he shut down all internal communication. We couldn’t get hold of him, couldn’t get hold of his staff. Only learned later that there were some back channel communications with Karl, but they decided that no one in the world would understand or have context for him accidentally shooting somebody while hunting except for one reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times who they couldn’t find because she was on a drunk bender for 12 hours. It took that long to find her.

Eckersley

in 2023 we happened to watch a Dodger Channel / Spectrum Sportsnet LA documentary about the 1988 World Series home run by Kirk Gibson. Probably the most famous moment in post-Brooklyn Dodger history. What impressed though was what Dennis Eckersley had to say. Eckersley threw the pitch Gibson cleared over the right field fence. Here’s what he said about how he handled the postgame interviews:

Scraps of time

Douglas Southall Freeman is out of fashion these days. He was a great perpetuator the Robert E. Lee myth, simply by writing so damn much about him. His biography of Lee takes up four volumes:

and Lee’s Lieutenants (that is to say his generals) get three!:

Then again Lee already had a statue in Richmond, which Freeman saluted every day on the way to work:

Freeman’s work ethic was legendary. Throughout his life, he kept a demanding schedule that allowed him to accomplish a great deal in his two full-time careers, as a journalist and as a historian. When at home, he rose at three every morning and drove to his newspaper office, saluting Robert E. Lee’s monument on Monument Avenue as he passed. Twice daily, he walked to a nearby radio studio, where he gave news broadcasts and discussed the day’s news. After his second broadcast, he would drive home for a short nap and lunch and then worked another five or six hours on his current historical project, with classical music, frequently the work of Joseph Haydn, playing in the background.

from the intro to this book of Freeman’s speeches:

Freeman later remarked that a statement made by [Prof. S. C. Mitchell] during a lecture on Martin Luther meant a great deal to him:

Young gentlemen, the man who wins is the man who hangs on for five minutes longer than the man who quits.

I found some advice that I’m going to make my New Year’s Resolution, boldface mine.

Know your stuff. Now that means a lot in the way of the utilization
of your time. And it means a lot in the way of utilization of a navy
wife or an army wife. You boys think you have a hard life to lead. You
don’t have any tougher life to lead than the life of a navy wife. And
both the navy husband and the navy wife need to learn all they can,
when they can. I’d like to give you a little motto on that question. I
gave it to one of my historical secretaries. She happens to be the one
who came up with me this morning. She said it was the most useful
thing I’d ever told her. It came from Oliver Wendell Holmes, a justice
of the Supreme Court of the United States, who should have been chief
justice. Holmes would get a boy from Harvard Law School every year,
and that boy would have one year as Holmes’ law clerk, a magnificent
training, out of which in their generations have come some of the best
lawyers in public service in America. And one of the favorite things
that he would tell these boys was, “Young man, make the most of the
scraps of time.” Now believe me, if you want to know your swuff and
know it better than the other man, you’ve got to spend more time on
it; and if you are going to spend more time on it, you’ve got to make
the most of the scraps of time. The difference between mediocrity and
distinction in many a professional career is the organization of your
time. Do you organize it; do you make the most of the scraps of time?
Bless my soul, I don’t suppose that the admiral, with his dignity and
justice and regard for all the amenities, says no to you about playing
bridge; but there is many a man who would have three more stripes
on his sleeve if he gave to study the time that he gives to bridge. Don’t
say that you have to have the recreation. You have to have enough
recreation, but diversification of work is the surest recreation of the
mind.

Most of the speeches in this book were given in the late 1930s and early 1940s at The Army War College and the Navy War College. Freeman was conveying lessons learned in the Civil War/War of the Rebellion to the generals and admirals who would end up fighting the Second World War. Freeman’s own father had been in the Army of Northern Virginia.

In the book Freeman tells a bunch of good stories, here’s one about Jubal Early (who Freeman met many times):

Early had about him a carping, singularly bitter manner that alienated nearly every man who was
under him. Lee, if there was a doubt whether a fault was his or a subordinate’s, would always assume it; Early, never. Sometimes his wit was good. You may not be familiar with his great exchange with John
C. Breckinridge. Breckinridge had been, as you remember, a candidate for the presidency in 1860. Before that time he had been a great political leader, standing on the principle of the right of slavery in the territories. He fought with Early through a part of the Valley campaign of 1864. Early never forgot that he was a politician, though Breckinridge was a very good soldier. In a very desperate hour-I think it was at
Winchester-when Rodes had been killed and the situation was very desperate, Breckinridge was in full retreat. Early met him in the road and said, “Well, General Breckinridge, what do you think about slavery
in the territories now?”