Johnny Appleseed

Jonathan Chapman was born in Massachusetts on this date in 1774. Chapman earned his nickname “Johnny Appleseed” because he planted orchards and apple trees across 100,000 square miles of wilderness and prairie in the Midwest. According to the Library of Congress, “Each year he traveled hundreds of miles on foot, wearing clothing made from sacks, and carrying a cooking pot which he is said to have worn like a cap. His travels took him through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana.” Chapman died in 1845.

What about the number of items of “flair”?

From The Atlantic:

Restaurant servers who leave a piece of candy with the check make 18 percent more in tips than servers who don’t. (Leaving two pieces of candy increases a tip even more.) Building on—believe it or not—more than thirty years of research on tip enhancement (which has established that “briefly touching one’s customers, squatting during the initial contact, making additional nontask visits, and displaying a maximal smile when introducing oneself to one’s customers have all been associated with increases in tip amounts”), four sociologists undertook two studies in an effort to determine which of several competing theories most accurately explains why “unexpected food treats” produce larger gratuities. Does the treat increase the “perceived friendliness” of the server? Does it increase the customer’s identification with the server? Or does a “positive affect” produced by the treat make the customer’s assessment of the server rosier? Actually, the authors conclude, writing in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, it’s none of the above; what generates the larger tip is the “norm of reciprocity.” The unexpected treat from the server makes the customer feel obligated to respond with a “friendly gesture” in kind.

Take that you telemarketers

Both the Senate (95-0) and the House of Representatives (412-8) voted Thursday to grant the Federal Trade Commission authority to create a national “do-not-call” list for telemarketers. That means the list should go into effect next Wednesday as had been expected before a court ruled otherwise. Exempt are charities, surveys and politicians.

Best breakfast in Tucson

Remind NewMexiKen please to try the Blue Willow Special the next time I’m in Tucson.

From the Tucson Weekly — “The Blue Willow has it all, and more. Best of all, most of it is available all day long. We’re personally partial to the Blue Willow Special, a fabulous combination of eggs, tortillas, chicken, jalapeños, tomatoes, cheese and sour cream, served alongside potatoes and raisin toast, best enjoyed on the Willow’s extraordinary patio in the cool morning air.”

Best of Tucson

Café Poca Cosa is back as the best Tucson Mexican Restaurant in the 2003 Tucson Weekly Best of Tucson.

Everything about this atmospheric downtown restaurant screams “unique Mexican flavor,” thanks to the supreme talents of its owner and chef, Suzana Dávila. The colorful dining room and impeccable presentation are cause enough for excitement–but wait until you taste the food! Servers, dressed in minimalist attire, bring a chalkboard to your table with the day’s dishes (they change daily) written in Spanish. Choose a single dish, or be adventurous and let Dávila combine three mystery items for you. There are no corners cut with your food, and you can taste it. From the enormous, artistically prepared side salads to the warm corn tortillas that accompany every meal, your taste buds will sing the praises of this stylish eatery.

Where the money goes

Of every dollar the federal government spends ($2.14 trillion in all):

  • 11 cents go to Medicare
  • 22 cents for Social Security
  • 4 cents for other disability and retirement programs

    37 cents for senior and disabled Americans

  • 10 cents for health in all its forms other than Medicare (research, Medicaid)
  • 2½ cents for unemployment compensation
  • 3½ cents for housing and food assistance
  • and another nearly 5 cents for other income security programs

    21 cents, mostly for the unfortunate

  • just more than 17 cents go to national defense
  • and nearly another 3 cents go for veterans benefits

    20 cents for national defense and veterans

  • 1 cent goes for international affairs including foreign aid
  • 1 cent goes to science and space
  • a little less than 1 cent is for farm subsidies (80%) and other agricultural programs (20%)
  • nearly 1½ cents go for parks, dams, forests and other environmental programs including EPA
  • 3 cents are spent on transportation (59% on the ground, the rest for air and water transportation)
  • 1 cent is for community development and disaster relief
  • 2½ cents are for education
  • and another 1½ cents for training programs
  • not quite 2 cents go for justice and law enforcement
  • and 1 more cent for the President, Congress, personnel, printing money, property management, archives, etc.

    less than 15 cents for most federal “government” programs other than defense

  • and lastly 7½ cents for interest on the debt

Where the money comes from

The 2003 federal budget (according to the July White House Mid-Session Review) is estimated to be $1.77 trillion in receipts and $2.21 trillion in outlays (expenditures). That means a deficit of $440 billion. (The actual numbers will be available after the 2003 fiscal year ends this coming Tuesday.)

For every dollar the federal government spends:

  • 36 cents come from individual income taxes
  • 32 cents come from Social Security, Medicare and other retirement taxes
  • 6 cents come from corporate income taxes
  • 3 cents are generated by taxes on alcohol, tobacco, fuel, telephones, air transportation, etc. (excise taxes)
  • 3 cents come from estate taxes, custom duties and government fees (such as $50 for a National Parks Pass)
  • and 20 cents are borrowed from our children and grandchildren
Revised September 26, 2003

Is the time we save costing us too much?

From David Pogue of The New York Times:

You already know that individuals and businesses worldwide are struggling to fix e-mail. The spam, the viruses, the irrelevant forwarding, the insipid joke mailing lists . . . whatever productivity gains e-mail once offered are rapidly being offset by the time we spend weeding through the chaff.

So far, though, nobody has gone as far as suggesting that we’re better off without e-mail entirely. Until now. John Caudwell is the millionaire head of Phones 4U, a chain of high-end cellphone stores in the U.K. Last week, in a move that’s causing shockwaves among, well, just about everybody, he banned all internal e-mail among his 2,500 employees. (They’re still allowed to correspond with customers, suppliers, their repair division and so on.) Mr. Caudwell says he wants his company to conduct their transactions by phone or face to face.

“Management and staff at HQ and in the stores were beginning to show signs of being constrained by e-mail proliferation,” Mr. Caudwell told reporters. “The ban brought an instant, dramatic and positive effect.”

How instant and how dramatic? He says that he’ll save three hours per day per employee, and over $1.6 million per month. That’s a huge productivity boost by any company’s standards.

Still, my first reaction was that Mr. Caudwell is, well, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. E-mail does sap away time, but it also saves massive amounts of time. You can conduct an e-mail transaction in a fraction of the time you’d need for a phone call — meanwhile, you get a permanent record of the exchange, one that you can search, sort and share with people who weren’t present.

But then I began to wonder. Have we reached the tipping point, where the time we save and the time we waste are canceling each other out?

I couldn’t help but fantasize about what I’d do with two free hours a day (that’s about how much time I spend on e-mail, and I’m still thousands of responses behind). I could spend more time with my kids, do a better job of staying fit, get more sleep . . . I could be a better man! I could lead a better, longer life!

But that’s only the beginning. E-mail is a real productivity sapper, sure, but what about the telephone? Talk about time-wasters! It takes you ten times as long to say the same thing, plus you’re spending it with only one person. What an incredible time drain!

Ban phone calls too, I say. Mr. Caudwell would save another three hours a day per employee.

And don’t forget about computers. Good heavens, in the time we spend learning them, debugging them, backing them up, maintaining them, installing new patches and drivers, we’re losing billions of person-hours a year. Get rid of them, too! There’s another three hours a day saved.

And while we’re at it, get rid of the TV’s. Let’s take back the billions and billions of hours we lose to television. And cars — who wouldn’t rather reclaim the time we spend hunting for parking and sitting in traffic?

And fax machines, and PalmPilots, and the Internet!

Just kidding.

Listen, if you really want to save time and productivity, ban meetings. Now you’re onto something.

Homework Deflation

Even more from The Atlantic:

According to a survey of student attitudes by the Higher Education Research Institute, based at the University of California at Los Angeles, only 33 percent of college freshmen—a smaller share than ever before—report having done six or more hours of homework a week during their senior year in high school. And the percentage who said they studied less than one hour a week as seniors has doubled since the question was first asked, in 1987, to 16 percent. Yet the grades they bring to college have improved, evidently as a result of grade inflation. Whereas in 1968 only 17.6 percent of college freshmen reported having earned A averages in high school, today 44.1 percent do. The survey director, Linda Sax, a professor of education at UCLA, says that the decline in study time, at least, may be attributable to the hours students spend using the Internet. Time spent recreationally surfing the Web is clearly displacing time spent studying—but Sax says the Internet may also be helping students to do their homework more efficiently.

Yeah, right.

Not so sweet 16

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport published a report earlier this year on graduation rates for the Sweet 16 NCAA basketball teams. Their chart is here.

The colleges rate from 0% graduating to 86%; the average rate for the 16 for all basketball players is 44%, for African-American players it’s 39%. This is certainly not surprising, and perhaps even higher than expected, but Oklahoma (0/0), Maryland (14/11), Arizona (15/9) and national champion Syracuse (25/0) surely need to re-think their approach. (According to the NCAA the overall graduation rate for incoming freshmen at these schools is Oklahoma 54%, Maryland 69%, Arizona 55% and Syracuse 77%.)

Indirect Aggression

Also from The Atlantic:

It’s not just murder and mayhem that are linked to childhood exposure to TV violence. So are gossip, petty theft, and backstabbing—but only among girls. Researchers at the University of Michigan recently examined the relationship between TV-violence viewing among children aged six to ten and their behavior fifteen years later, and the researchers’ findings suggest that childhood exposure to TV violence (along with a tendency to identify with aggressive TV characters and a belief that the violence seen on TV accurately represents real life) better predicts adult aggressiveness than does a child’s initial aggressiveness, intellectual ability, or parents’ educational background. But whereas exposure to violence on TV correlates with adult physical aggression in men and women alike, it correlates more strongly with “indirect aggression” in women. Thus girls exposed to considerable TV violence are more likely not only to grow up to shove, punch, beat, or choke other people but also to try to talk their friends into disliking someone who has angered them.

The Rich Are Different

From The Atlantic:

Why tax the well-off? Because, two recent studies suggest, it’s practically the only way to persuade them to spend money on anyone but themselves. Philanthropy isn’t the answer: a survey from The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that Americans making $70,000 or more dispensed a paltry 3.3 percent of their earnings to charitable causes; in contrast, those making $50,000 to $69,999 gave 5.6 percent, and those making $30,000 to $49,999 gave 8.9 percent. Only at death does the tightfistedness diminish—but even then it’s the threat of the estate tax that awakens the philanthropic spirit. Or at least that’s the conclusion of another new study, which predicts that deathbed donations will drop precipitously if the Bush Administration succeeds rolling back the estate tax. The study finds that the cost of such a repeal, in lost donations and bequests, could be as steep as $10 billion a year—the equivalent of the grants doled out annually by the nation’s 110 largest foundations.

“A miserable failure”

Jack Beatty at Atlantic Unbound on what reelecting Bush would mean for democratic accountability. I found this paragraph particularly compelling:

You can preside over the most catastrophic failure of intelligence and national defense in history. Can fire no one associated with this fatal chain of blunders and bureaucratic buck-passing. Can oppose an inquest into September 11 for more than a year until pressure from the relatives of those killed on that day becomes politically toxic. Can name Henry Kissinger, that mortician of truth, to head the independent commission you finally accede to. You can start an unnecessary war that kills hundreds of Americans and as many as 7,000 Iraqi civilians—adjusted for the difference in population, the equivalent of 80,000 Americans. Can occupy Iraq without a plan to restore traffic lights, much less order. Can make American soldiers targets in a war of attrition conducted by snipers, assassins, and planters of remote-control bombs—and taunt the murderers of our young men to “bring it on.” Can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nation building—and pass the bill to America’s children. (Asked to consider rescinding your tax cut for the top one percent of taxpayers for one year in order to fund the $87 billion you requested from Congress to pay for the occupation of Iraq, your Vice President said no; that would slow growth.) You can lose more jobs than any other President since Hoover. You can cut cops and after-school programs and Pell Grants and housing allowances for the poor to give tax cuts to millionaires. You can wreck the nation’s finances, running up the largest deficit in history. You can permit 17,000 power plants to increase their health-endangering pollution of the air. You can lower the prestige of the United States in every country of the world by your unilateral conduct of foreign policy and puerile “you’re either with us or against us” rhetoric. Above all, you can lie the country into war and your lies can be exposed—and, if a majority prefers ignorance to civic responsibility, you can still be reelected.

Gams to Gladiators

It’s beginning to look like Maureen Dowd has a thing for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger does understand show business though, which includes, of course, modern politics. As Dowd reports: “Asked about the Britney-Madonna kiss, he takes a P.R. view of it, calling Madonna ‘very smart’: ‘When they decide the one shot from the whole show that’s going to be in The L.A. Times or The New York Times, is it going to be you, or is it going to be someone else? I can relate to that.'”

Connect the Dots

Hard-hitting column today from Tom Friedman:

And one thing we know about this Bush war on terrorism: sacrifice is only for Army reservists and full-time soldiers. For the rest of us, it’s guns and butter. When it comes to the police and military sides of the war on terrorism, the Bushies behave like Viking warriors. But when it comes to the political and economic sacrifices and strategies that are also required to fight this war successfully, they are cowardly wimps. That is why our war on terrorism is so one-dimensional and Pentagon-centric. It’s more like a hobby — something we do only until it runs into the Bush re-election agenda.