THE SUBURBAN LINE ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE. Portland's Tri-Met operates several light rail lines, a commuter train, and something it calls a streetcar. There is an extensive free-ride zone downtown, and the system sells a day pass for $4.75. The car lines follow routes that aren't immediately obvious to me. I attempted to work in some of the system subject to the constraints of a 10:30 Talgo departure from Vancouver and a 6:15 return. (I subsequently learned that one of the rapid transit lines is almost within walking distance of the Red Lion, if one is up for a walk across a Columbia River bridge.) The lines cross downtown, where the cars operate on one-way streets.


The system is slowly being expanded. On my return from Vic's Hobby Shop to the station, I followed a new track along Grand Avenue back to Holladay Street, in order to board a car in the free area. The new track crosses a buried old track at Halsey Street. Perhaps additional track will be unearthed?


Most of my riding went north or east of downtown. There was a bit of a holdup at first, as all service was suspended owing to catenary troubles along Holladay.


I hope that pruning hook has a fiberglass or wood handle.

I was looking for a classic suburban downtown and an opportunity to get some local food. (That's doable in Sharon Hill or Media, Pennsylvania, or Shaker Heights, Ohio.) It's different in Greater Portland. The Gresham line terminates at a large parking lot. The line to Clackamas Town Center terminates near a parking deck and a sizable shopping mall. (Come to think of it, a Pittsburgh line terminates near South Hills Mall.) Noodles provided the exotic meal. Pretty tasty and reasonably priced.


There's a contest to write transit-promoting haiku.


The light rail service is distinct from the streetcar. Streetcar stops are less elaborate. Here, the streetcar line passes through the center of Portland State University. It's more accessible than, say, the Chicago Transit Authority at Illinois-Chicago.


The streetcars are low-floor Skodas, successors to Boston's two rooms and a bath cars.


I had some time to explore both Vancouver and Portland away from the trains and the car lines. Here's a statue of Captain Vancouver, cartographer.

The Esther Short Park in central Vancouver has this simulated rapids for kids to play in. Some of the Portland parks also had watery play areas, a welcome change from decorative fountains and ponds where wading is discouraged or forbidden (are you listening, Chicago?)


Portland has bubblers. I'm surprised that somebody hasn't raised a fuss about water splashing off people's dirty faces and back onto the bubbler head.


Portland's Union Station is well cared-for, it will feature in a subsequent installment.

Yes, there is blue-state smug, if you know where to look. Esther Short Park hosted a Recycled Art show, where this 1974 electric car was on display.


Ferroequinologists will remember that The Milwaukee Road turned its electrification off in 1974.

And Portland sees fit, for some reason, to brag on its public toilets.


Whatever. The Red Lion on the Columbia is a good place to rest, and a Joe's Crab Shack and a Mexican themed tavern are also riverside, an easy walk from the hotel. More on the Talgo trains in the next installment.

(to be continued)

WORKING TO CROSS PURPOSES. On one hand, there are some in higher education who fret about supposed sex imbalances in higher education enrollments. I've been following this story for some time. Four years ago, I noted this.

Anybody remember something called "internalization?" It was wrong, we were instructed, to engage in stereotyping of people in order to prevent those characterizations from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies? And to point out shortcomings consistent with stereotypes was to engage in blaming the victim?

Apparently those rules don't apply to contemporary boys, who can be dosed with Ritalin on the slightest provocation, or regarded presumptively to be louts or rapists. (I exaggerate, but I have encountered enough of such thinking to be more than a bit displeased when it arises.)

My focus has been on the stability, or not, of the Surf City equilibrium. A Minding the Campus essay by Charlotte Allen gives reason to return to the internalization argument. It's going to be hard to entice men to register in order to provide the women with a social life when the men become presumptive villains in the classroom.

There are many possible reasons why men would rather not sign up for education courses. For black and other minority men there are probably too many better-paying career opportunities elsewhere. It's natural that if you belong to the first generation in your family to graduate from high school and enter college in the first place, you probably want to enter a profession that will enable you to pay off your student loans relatively quickly.

Furthermore, many ed schools seem to have an Anybody But White Males policy in place when it comes to awarding the scholarships, fellowships, and grants that ease the financial burden on education concentrators. Take Stanford's School of Education. The American Association of University Women awards grants ranging from $18,000 to students enrolled in master's programs in education at Stanford to $20,000 to students enrolled in doctoral programs. Only women are eligible for these generous stipends. Other Stanford fellowships earmark minorities, but only certain favored minorities: "African American, Alaskan Native, American Indian, Hispanic, Asian American, Pacific Islander," according to the terms of one fellowship. It's ironic that men constitute a distinct minority in education programs but never qualify for "minority' financial aid.

The most troubling reason for young men's lack of interest in learning how to be K-12 teachers, however, may lie in the content of many ed-school's curricula, often: loaded with political correctness, lame psychobabble and useless Marxist and feminist theory, all at the expense of subject-matter content and practical instruction on teaching difficult concepts or maintaining order in a classroom. General bias against men, especially white men, seems to be the rule. When the NEA released its 2008 survey detailing the paucity of men in K-12 classrooms, several commenters on psychologist Helen Smith's "Dr. Helen" blog expressed disillusion and bitterness with an ed-school pedagogy that made them feel unwelcome.

Ms Allen buried the lede.

Ed schools need to think hard about their female-favoring curricula and financial-aid policies that are turning off male students in droves.

Her argument might generalize to the rest of higher education.

CHICAGO'S CLOACA.

The city calls it the Sanitary and Ship Canal. That's a misnomer.

Chicago has a rare distinction among major American cities: It does not employ a disinfection stage at its three main sewage treatment plants.

The result is a river and canal system running so thick with fecal coliform that signs along the banks warn that the contents below are not suitable for "any human body contact."

Notwithstanding the bacteria, the canal is also an expressway for invasive species in both directions.

The canal had indeed been a forceful solution to the city's 19th century sewage problem. But by the beginning of the 21st century, the true costs of destroying a continental divide - which some conservationists refer to as Chicago's "original sin" - were finally coming into focus as water, waste and noxious species mixed in a manner nature never intended.

Pipe-clogging invasive mussels from the Caspian Sea region - which have shredded the Great Lakes' food web and cost billions of dollars to industries and municipalities - rode Chicago's canal waters out of Lake Michigan and into the rest of America. They were followed by round gobies, a prolific predator of native fish species' eggs. Today a fish-killing, ebola-like virus is threatening to spill inland from southern Lake Michigan, an invasion that could have dire consequences for fish farmers in the South.

Those fish farmers brought in the Asian carp as a way of boosting productivity. I'm told it's tasty for a bottom-feeder, and there's a lot of export potential. The drainage canals are pretty, but not exactly recreational waters.

The leafy North Shore channel is a training ground for college crew teams, as well as high school rowers, many of whom see the dirty water as the best route to a varsity letter, and perhaps college scholarship.

Space for all rowers is tight on busy training days, and on weekends they have to dodge droves of kayakers and canoeists.

All of them float past the warning signs lining the banks that caution against any body contact at all.

Only a fool - or an unsupervised child trying to beat the heat on a hot summer day - would purposely take a dip in the North Shore Channel, but that doesn't mean people aren't getting wet.

New Trier Township High School assistant crew coach Hope Poor says her kids are schooled to wash well after practice, scrub popped blisters and keep their heads above water on the rare occasion someone takes an accidental plunge.

They serve, however, as freight transportation corridors, and closing the canal without provision for transportation will be costly. Chicago does not think of Lake Michigan as both water source and water sink, and that would change.

The postcards of a shiny city perched on the shore of a deep blue lake belie an unfortunate reality for the Chicago area. Pockets of it could be headed for a water shortage in the coming decades if the region doesn't stop flushing billions of gallons of water away a day.

Chicago is unlike every other Great Lakes city in that it doesn't pull its water from the lake, use it and send it back as part of a sustainable water management system that allows people to live and industries to thrive without diminishing the lakes.

In this sense, Chicago really isn't a Great Lakes city at all; it is just another American metropolis that has a limited freshwater supply heading into a century where many believe water will supplant oil as a primary economic driver.

The 1900 river reversal means virtually every drop Chicagoans take from the lake - whether it's to wash cars, brush teeth, fight fires or make ice - is a drop sucked away from the lakes and sent to the Gulf of Mexico.

That's why the U.S. Supreme Court decades ago slapped a 2.1 billion gallon-per-day cap on Illinois diversions from Lake Michigan.

It is an immense amount of water - about 20 times what Milwaukee takes from the lake per day - but it might not be enough.

Chicago's western suburbs, like Milwaukee's, are dependent on an ever-shrinking groundwater supply, and it's probably just a matter of time until they'll push to poke their straws into Lake Michigan for a share of that 2.1 billion gallons.

Compounding the problem, the amount of water available right now isn't even close to 2.1 billion gallons because every drop of rain that falls in the south-flowing Chicago River watershed is a drop that counts against its court-allowed allocation.

Kenosha County, where the Root River, which drains into Lake Michigan, and the Des Plaines River, which drains into the Illinois River (on the opposite side of the sub-continental divide), could be Conflict Zero in a future civil war. The canal system, however, provides relief capacity for railroads and highways that are congested with little relief in sight.

Freight train tonnage is expected to grow 70% by 2030, according to a report LaBelle's group put together called The Metropolitan Freight Plan.

The roads are similarly choked, and getting worse faster than most people may realize. In 1982, the average Chicago driver spent about 16 hours a year in traffic jams. By 2002, that number had grown to 56 hours, and it has been projected to reach 80 hours - the equivalent of a typical person's two-week annual vacation - within the next 25 years.

Truck traffic is driving much of the problem.

In the next 25 years, according to the report, the number of trucks on Chicago-area roads is going to grow by a staggering 80% and will account for more than half of the extra vehicles on Chicago-area roadways.

Yet at the same time, some people are beginning to eye the massive canal system as an underutilized asset.

"Fifty percent of commercial goods nationally go through this region, $570 billion is on trucks, and $380 billion is on rail, and they're subject to all kinds of constraints," says Henry Henderson of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The Great Lakes and Chicago's inland waterway transportation systems are really not part of that, and they need to be integrated into it."

To meet that challenge while separating the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River calls for some thought.

The Alliance for the Great Lakes report offers a glimpse of how it might be accomplished.

It suggests that the most logical place to explore restoring the destroyed divide would be on the Chicago River, about three miles west of Navy Pier.

One dam-like structure here and you would effectively solve the problem for Navy Pier and Wilmette, where a second canal flows in from Lake Michigan and eventually merges with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

That would mean the water currently treated at the North Side treatment plant would flow back into Lake Michigan instead of down to the Mississippi, requiring sewage treatment upgrades.

A structure at this location about 3 miles west of the lake would still allow thousands of Chicago tour boats and private vessels to sail along much of the downtown river and into Lake Michigan - a huge advantage over putting a barrier at the lakeshore near Navy Pier.

A second barrier could be installed on the Calumet River near the Lake Michigan shore, south of downtown, the report suggests. This would prohibit the free flow of barges into the lake, but it has an advantage in that much of the sewage and storm water discharges from that area would still flow away from Lake Michigan.

There are two smaller access points to Lake Michigan on the Grand Calumet River and Little Calumet River that would need to be plugged with some type of physical barrier, perhaps a berm. Neither have heavy commercial navigation.

As for the areas where barges would be blocked, [Illinois Senator Dick] Durbin and others expect the new Army Corps study to explore options to transfer that cargo overland, or perhaps transport entire barges overland.

I saw pictures once of a barge elevator in the Netherlands or north Germany that did this, and the Allegheny Portage Railroad did so on a somewhat larger scale.

WHAT THE MANAGEMENT MEASURES, IT GETS MORE OF. Emory's Mark Bauerlein remembers what College Used To Be Like.

There was certainly a fair number of loud [parties] every Friday and Saturday throughout De Neve Drive and along Fraternity Row, plus a few mid-week open doors with beer flowing inside. But something else, too. About half the guys I met spent three or four hours a night in University Research Library (URL---we called it "Urinal"). They rose around 8 or 9am, grabbed a quick breakfast in the dorm cafeteria, speeded down the hill to classes before and after lunch (it was the quarter system, with classes meeting four hours a week), then spent the late afternoon shooting hoops or throwing a football, then dinner at 6, then a trip to the library by 7. If you arrived after 8, you couldn't find a seat. Each night, sitting in a carrel, I heard the tardy ones sidle by searching for spots and wandering floor to floor.

The other half of the guys I met had other plans. They weren't much interested in college, or they dealt drugs, or they played sports all day, or they were just plain screw-ups. The diligent ones recognized them as such, and even though we enjoyed them there was no cachet of "cool" given to them. (Freshman and sophomore year I drifted perilously toward the latter group now and then.) Those who studied hard didn't consider themselves superior, nor did they fit the nerd mold. They played high school football and drank Henry Weinhard. But they studied hard without groaning or crowing, taking their 20 or so hours a week as customary.

Professor Bauerlein has established his curmudgeon credibility previously, and it's time for an E-T-T-S moment.

That's why a remark at this story in the Boston Globe on college homework is so annoying. The Globe highlights research appearing on the average number of hours per week that college students log doing homework. The latest study puts the figure at 14 hours per week on average. That figure tallies with similar surveys such as National Survey of Student Engagement and a large University of California study from two years ago. "In survey after survey since 2000, college and high school students are alarmingly candid that they are simply not studying very much at all," the story notes.

According to the recent study (by Philip Babcock, an economist at UCSB, and Mindy Marks, an economist at UC-Riverside), in 1961, students averaged 24.4 hours per week, and by 1981 it had already fallen to 16.8 hours.

And yet, "Some question whether college students ever could have studied 24 hours a week ---roughly three and a half hours a night." That's the annoying remark. It isn't given any attribution in the Globe story, and one wonders who the "some" are. In any case, though, the notion that 24 hours a week of study time is unimaginable . . . well, what to say? It amounts to 3.5 hours per night. C'mon, that's not all that much. If you got to URL at 7, you read and wrote till 8:45, then took a half hour break before going back to the library for another hour and three-quarters. Not a big deal. That left an hour for a couple of beers at home. On Saturdays you could get your hours in right after lunch and leave the night open.

I worked part-time all through college and by my third year joined the 20-hours-of-homework group (I took five years and some summer school to graduate). I got bored, tired, distracted, and jumpy in my library station, but never thought, "This is just too much homework---it's not realistic."

(I got to the library quickly enough after work to snag one of the carrels with a phonograph. Sign out a symphony, pull out the notebook, get it done.)

It does not follow, however, that student slacking is the sole, or even the primary reason, for reduced study time.

If the people who think the 24-hour estimate is a fantasy are professors, that might explain the opinion. When it comes to the reasons for declining hours, Babcock and Marks have one unpleasant surmise: "What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors' unwillingness to challenge them." Professors have downgraded their authority, dropping the "dynamic where a professor sets standards and students try to meet them." Instead, Babock and Marks believe, we have a situation in which "both sides hope to do as little as possible."

This gets us to a rational explanation. The more homework students do, the more material professors have to grade. Or, the more they assign, the more they have to penalize students who don't complete it. High workloads also lower student evaluation scores, especially when one professor requires it and colleagues in the department don't join in.

But the evaluation form and the customer-service mentality are neither necessary nor sufficient.

What's the incentive for a professor to demand an hour of work per night for his or her course alone? Students don't like it and they complain. They send emails asking for adjustments, and when they don't follow the complaints spread. The chair of the department doesn't want to deal with complaints and neither does the dean. Parents shelling out bundles for tuition don't want their children to come home with "C" grades.

On the other hand, a reputation for being demanding sends some of the slackers elsewhere. There are, however, other incentives at work.

Most of all, professors at institutions with high research and/or service demands can only regard rigorous teaching as a danger. They fill out annual reports each year, but neither amount of homework time nor weekly office hours nor out-of-class student engagement meetings are recorded there. They don't increase their salary and they don't get promoted and they don't garner professional prestige by forcing students to bring rough drafts to the office for review/discussion.

The only thing that pushes back against these incentives is professional virtue. Teachers do it because it's the right thing to do. But the rest of the system conspires against virtue, and its near-complete defeat is nicely illustrated by the "nobody did 24 hours of homework" comment. Instead of being a standard professors should sustain, 20+ workloads now appear to many an unreal, and perhaps unjust or sadistic, expectation. Let it go, let it go . . .

On one hand, it is possible to quantify and reward teaching effort. There's such a thing as a writing intensive course in our evaluation system. On the other hand, the big points go to the articles in major journals and the grants. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as major journals and grants boost academic reputation, and the excess demand is not for remedial college. But when headquarters pretends to pay us (nearly twenty years of no real pay increases) while rescinding searches, downsizing departments, and proliferating committees and task forces, does it come as any surprise that Atlas might shrug?

MAKING THE BEST OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES. When I returned home, there was a message from Amtrak time-stamped noon on Friday, June 25, advising me that some of my trip to Portland would be by alternate transportation. As far as I know, there is nobody on Amtrak's payroll with the title of seer, anticipating diesel troubles and signal failures in Wisconsin. I learned from other conversations on the train that the previous day's Builder was going to turn at Whitefish with a rockslide in the way, or would have been turned at Whitefish with bus service in substitution had the rockslide not been cleared. The message was probably anticipating another day of bus substitution around the rockslide. Just as well I had left before the message came in: a long bus ride on mountain roads in the middle of the night isn't exactly vacation travel. In any event, Sunday, June 27 begins in Sandpoint, Idaho, with a 5:20 departure. I can now claim to have seen some of Idaho by day, although I have yet to step off a train or otherwise set foot in that state. On the approach to Spokane, the conductor alerts all passengers destined to Portland or changing trains at Portland to prepare to detrain for substitute transportation, a bus. I make some inquiries and discover that passengers ending their journey in Portland or detraining in Vancouver, Wash., may stay on the train. The announcement primarily affects a large party on a Glacier Park package tour that will be continuing their journey on the Coast Starlight to California. These passengers will be bussed to Klamath Falls, Oregon, to intercept the Starlight there. The Starlight is due Klamath Falls around 10 pm. The Builder arrives Spokane 6:29:10. Some passengers are going to have to entertain themselves in Klamath Falls for a few hours. Some passengers on the Super Dome excursion recommended I try a Red Lion hotel near the Portland convention center. It's sold out, but one on the Columbia River in Vancouver has an attractive rate. It's real close to the Vancouver station, and I ask to detrain there rather than in Portland. No problem, the faster they unload the train at Portland, the better the chances of turning it to head east that afternoon.



Spokane has a new station with an island platform. The traditional station became a visitor center for a world's fair (does anybody do world's fairs any more?) Burlington ran a few freight trains in both directions while the Builder was serviced and divided.

There was time to wander along the platform and check out this classic bakery.


The diesels are serviced off the platform, and I did not see the power that relayed Seven to Seattle. Seven got away at 7:14, and 84-21 tied on to 34027-33049-31027-32048 for Portland. Under way 7:34 according to the conductor's radio, 7:32:47 on my watch. Lounge attendant makes an announcement about the air conditioning in his car. The automatic cycling isn't working, so he's controlling it manually, meaning the car will sometimes be very chilly. He also announces that cinnamon rolls and bottled water will be put aboard for all coach passengers at Pasco.

Eastern Washington looks almost as arid as the Gobi Desert, although the surroundings are not as hardscrabble.

The ruins of Milwaukee's overpass at Lind witness our passage. This overpass is in the gap between the electric operations west from Othello, Washington and east from Avery, Idaho.


Milwaukee bought six trainsets for the Olympian Hiawatha precisely to have sufficient time to turn a train at each end of the line. That expenditure was probably not the one that broke the railroad.

Arrive Pasco 10:24, take on rolls and water, walk around the platform (another new station), leave 10:34:40.

Beyond Pasco, the railroad uses the Columbia River valley, and the terrain loses its steppe-like qualities. The sleeping car attendant sets up the sandwiches put aboard at Havre. Good sandwiches, and lots of them. Sleeper passengers offered seconds (I passed) and the remaining sandwiches and cinnamon rolls were made available to all takers. It's commendable that emergency provisioning is possible for the trains, although more reliable equipment, whether we're talking about control systems on ten year old diesels or cooling systems on thirty year old lounge cars, would be more commendable.


A barge tow, power lines for the Bonneville Power Authority, all that's missing is Woody Guthrie singing "Roll on Columbia". Wishram 12:30 - 12:35; Bingen - White Salmon wait for freight train, make station stop 1:15:37 - 1:16:22.

The Columbia River gorge works like a wind tunnel. The winds were destructive of Milwaukee Road trains on its crossing, but they make for thrilling wind surfing and dinghy sailing. The latest method of riding the winds is called kite boarding, which involves controlling a small spinnaker with kite strings to propel a surf board.


That's The Dalles, Oregon, on the Union Pacific side of the river, and Mount Hood in the background.


If you're going to be delayed on the Empire Builder, at least be grateful that it's not your usual Pacific Northwest overcast. Passing trees made getting a good picture of Mount Hood challenging, but I was up to it.


There were no ships of plenty locking through at Bonneville as we passed. The conductor made another announcement, advising passengers headed for Washington points on the Talgo train to detrain at Vancouver rather than attempt the connection at Portland. Arrive Vancouver 2:25. The Builder will turn and attempt a 4:50 departure for Chicago. I'm headed to the Red Lion for a long shower and a nap. Passengers headed north will have about an hour layover in Vancouver.

(to be continued)

ANTICIPATING SHERMAN'S MARCH. In the early days of the Southern Rebellion, the senior generals east and west dithered and delayed, while ambitious junior commanders did what they could subject to the objections of their superiors. Grant and Sherman ultimately emerged as the commanders, and the Army of the Tennessee as the instrument of victory. Before them, however, was Ormsby McKnight Mitchel, also an aggressive commander, who secured the improbable cooperation of a smuggler named James Andrews in an attempt to isolate Chattanooga prior to investing it and moving to Atlanta. The project, in military histories as the Andrews Raid, and on film as The Great Locomotive Chase, failed.

The received version of the chase makes for great theater, with trains jumping gaps in rails and boxcars left in position to derail the chasing locomotive or to destroy bridges.

The reality is not as dramatic, although what actually happened is compelling enough, and well-told in Russell S. Bonds's Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor. Mr Bonds has investigated official records, located photographs of most of the protagonists of the chase, reconstructed what happened in those six hours from a stolen train making an unauthorized departure from Big Shanty, Georgia to the same train running out of fuel near Ringgold, Georgia. The raiders might have missed some opportunities to impede their pursuers. The capture, imprisonment, trial, and execution or exchange of the raiders receive the attention they deserve. The Medal of Honor that many of the raiders won has a most humble beginning. An agrarian republic with little use for a martial tradition has to make up the techniques and trappings of industrial war as it goes along, learning lessons that the French and the Prussians ignored to their grief two score and three years later, and also creating a medal that only later became special recognition for extraordinary acts.

I'll leave most of the details out of Book Review N^o. 15, noting that a careful reader will learn much, and that the raiders described their unit's ultimate objectives in terms anticipating Sherman's March. General Mitchel is an intriguing figure. Mr Bonds credits him as prototype for Walt Whitman's Learned Astronomer, and had he lived, the lineup of field commanders in the west might have been imposing indeed. (To this day, Fort McPherson in Atlanta is a subtle reminder to aspiring secesh.)

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

NEVER MIND THE U.S. NEWS RANKINGS. The strength of the football program is what attracts enrollments. Really. (I don't have to make up this stuff.)

Today's students choose colleges based on how good its football team is, its reputation and how far it is from home, [Texas state representative Lois] Kolkhorst [R.-Brenham] said. But after the law goes into effect, detailed course information could also factor into the decision.

The detailed course information includes material that is often publicly available.

State universities will be required to post professors' syllabi, curriculum vitae, published works and salaries. Attendance costs and departmental budget reports also must be posted.

Many professors are already shameless self-promoters. (Stupid Blackboard doesn't recognize guest access right now, although I always allow guest access to my course outlines.) The Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors, much like the main organization, rarely misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

If professors are required to post detailed descriptions of class material online, those opposed to the discussion topics would be able to target specific classes and professors, the association said.

Such a claim does not impress University Diaries.

Professors should be fine with giving attackers better information, shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t that make the attack better informed, and therefore perhaps fairer? Putting this in terms of “our enemies” makes professors sound like Richard Nixon.

Not to mention that full disclosure of courses with a point of view might encourage self-selection by students, or that such information, as interpreted by the likes of Rep. Kolkhorst, might be comic relief.

THE QUEST FOR SPACE. The DeKalb Public Library encounters more space stress than does the Cold Spring Shops library. A new problem confronting librarians recalls troubles early scholars and librarians faced.

Compounding this is the demand by patrons for more computers, an issue libraries didn’t face years ago. Nine computers are available, and four more are being donated.

To make room for the new ones, the reference room must be cleared out.

Because of the limited number of machines, Internet access is limited to one hour per day.At one time, the books were expensive relative to other goods, had to be shared by scholars, and were chained to reading desks. The computers allow access to a lot more information, but they still are expensive relative to other goods, have to be shared by library patrons, and they're chained to reading desks.

The current reference room may have to be cleared, but the reference materials have to go someplace ...

THE QUINTESSENCE OF COSMIC JUSTICE. Chris Hayes, deputising for Rachel Maddow on Nation TV, did a segment on the octopus that has correctly predicted a number of soccer matches, in which he asked viewers to reflect on the oysters that were the octopus's real objective. In the same program, Ms Maddow filed her final report from Afghanistan, where, on a visit to the firing range, she demonstrated that she couldn't carry Sarah Palin's powderhorn.

FAR FROM THE INTERSTATE AND THE AIR HUBS. The first installation of this summer's trip report ended ambiguously, somewhere short of Winona, Minnesota. I subsequently learned that the difficulties continued. A tornado touchdown somewhere near Red Wing dictated a stop for a track inspection. The wine and my general tiredness overrode my usual instinct to awaken when the train is stopped for any length of time. I heard a small voice holler "Daddy" probably at the Twin Cities, well past her bedtime, and a radio report of departure at 4:14. For the most part, it was continued rest. I decided to start June 26 at Morris - Detroit Lakes, 7:55 - 7:57, not much by way of station facilities. A slow roll through Moorhead, Minnesota is followed by a double stop at Fargo, with arrival 8:53 and departure 9:15. The train is approximately six hours late, and headed into the remote territory in which it is the principal mass transportation mode. The schedule of a transcontinental train that handles large parties to Glacier Park ought not be tied so tightly to a daytime regional rail service in a remote part of the country. But a secondary train (Burlington Northern offered such service until Amtrak's inception) is not currently an option.

There was more rain, and thunderstorms. Grand Forks 10:28 - 10:33 in a downpour; there's a small blockhouse of a station along a curve. Several stops west of Lakota lead to a conductor's announcement of signal troubles, the train apparently complying with stop-and-proceed-at-restricted-speed rules for several blocks. Devil's Lake 12:15:42 - 12:17:07. Here the local train service objective collides with railway realities. Devils Lake, which has no outlet, rises and falls with the rain and snow received or not. Because Canada does not want the brackish water piped into the Red River of the North and into Lake Winnipeg, when the lake rises, the tracks are at risk of being submerged. Burlington has ended freight service between Devils Lake and Churchs Ferry and offered to reroute the Builder on the Fargo to Minot cutoff with a stop at New Rockford, the Builder's old Great Northern routing. The Western Star served the northernmost line at the end, with a connection to a coach-only remnant of the Winnipeg Limited at Grand Forks. Ownership of the line, or a new bridge paid for by Amtrak, are in the hands of Congress. Stop west of Leeds 12:45 to pick up a dogcatch crew, under way 1:07. Rugby, 1:36:32 - 1:38:58. Arrive Minot 2:34:51.


During our Twin Cities stop, the trailing coach was cut off, and the mechanical department solved our diesel problems by turning the motors end-for-end: note that 84 is now leading. The diesels get fuel, the road crews change, some supplies are put aboard the lounge car, and one resourceful family receives delivery of a pizza (there's sufficient cell phone coverage to place an order about a half hour away).

Leave Minot 2:59. The train hosts a wine-and-cheese tasting for first-class passengers. (Oregon and Washington wines, Wisconsin blue, 4 year old cheddar, and Gruyere.) These ladies won a bottle of wine for correctly answering how many "seconds" there are in a year. (Put the calculator away and don't overanalyze.) Bless me, this is pleasant, riding on the rail.


Stanley 3:49 - 3:52, meet stack train in siding, Williston 4:52:48 - 4:59:35, west end of Central Time Zone. This Great Northern Mountain is north of the station, in surroundings befitting its condition.


East of Stanley a substantial stone church and an abandoned town came up on me on the south side of the tracks. This abandoned school, in a still inhabited settlement, is somewhere west of Williston in North Dakota.


Wolf Point 5:38:55 - 5:48:28; Glasgow 6:28:49 - 6:31:54; Malta 7:28:44 - 7:29:15; Havre fuel racks 8:40:15 - 8:50:35; arrive Havre 8:52:04.


There was time to walk the platform and view a Great Northern Northern in somewhat better shape than the steamer at Williston. The diesels are fueled, the coaches watered, and sandwiches are put aboard to provide a lunch for sleeping car passengers on the Portland section. The train is due Portland at 10:10, with ample time to turn the stock for the 4:50 eastbound departure the same day. (What happens when the schedules are seriously disrupted?) Leave Havre 9:06:43, six hours two minutes in the bag, Shelby 10:48:02 - 10:54:10, set watch to Pacific time and turn in.

(to be continued)

THE EFFECT OF RELATIVE PRICES. Behold the Cold Spring Shops library. Now imagine no machine-made paper, no mechanical printing, no computerized proofreading, for that matter, no binding, or no electric lighting.


Thus does Duke's Henry Petroski come up with The Book on the Bookshelf. The primary focus of a civil engineer includes elements in compression and tension, suggesting the shelf, but without items to place on those shelves, the engineering problem is different. Scrolls can be placed in pigeonholes, or, for portability, The Ark of The Covenant. The relatively few hand-lettered books (as binding technologies improved) might be kept under lock and key in a special chest. What happens, though, when the emperor or archbishop dies, and the collection passes to the new emperor, or the new archbishop? And what does the emperor or archbishop do to prevent friends from borrowing books and not returning them? Book Review N^o. 14 will recommend The Book on the Bookshelf for providing readable answers to these questions, and much else. There will be no spoilers, but readers ought contemplate the evolution of the library stack, the imperative that paper be kept far from flame, and the tradeoff inherent in securing relatively expensive books yet making them available to researchers. Casual readers, and the need to organize books, let alone systematically catalogue them, come later. (An appendix offers a taxonomy of organization schemes that is itself instructive.) Note that at the Cold Spring Shops library, respecting one principle implies the violation of several others.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE EVOLUTION OF NORMS. At Econ Log, Arnold Kling poses a fundamental question for libertarian belief systems.

I think that most people resent being told what to do, and yet such people are not libertarians when it comes to other people being told what to do. I have a stronger criterion for natural libertarianism. When you see other people doing something that really offends you, are you willing to see the state allow that behavior to continue? Only if you can answer "yes" are you a natural libertarian. I think that there are very few natural libertarians.

It would take an extremely principled person to see something obnoxious and resist the temptation to say "there oughta be a law." To provoke students I propose equivalences between sodomy laws and smoking bans. Sometimes it's the items mentioned, rather than the principle or lack thereof, that gets into the student grapevine, but teaching has in common with farming a long germination season.

A Lee Harris article in The American extends.

In order to encourage a population rich in internals—i.e., natural libertarians—a society needs cultural traditions that emphasize the value of independence and ethical agency. It must teach the young that they are responsible for their own actions, and to never regard themselves as victims of circumstance. Anthropologists who have studied the huge variety of human cultures have encountered quite primitive societies, such as the Nuer of the Sudan, which raise children to be feisty and independent. They are taught from an early age to resist being bullied by others and to fight back at the first attempt at dominating them. But wherever it may be found, at the heart of the tradition of independence lives a set of imperatives. Be self-reliant. Don’t take other people’s word for something; think for yourself. Never become anyone’s follower. Bow down before no one. Stand up for your rights. Don’t let bullies intimidate you. Don’t permit yourself to become the slave of an addiction and thereby forfeit your all-important self-control. And do whatever you can to make sure that other members of your community uphold and cherish the same tradition of independence.

All of that is hard work, and when your independence comes into conflict with mine, the resolution is not necessarily simple, as the article explains. (That "same tradition" is the seed-bed of all sorts of troubles. You interpret the tradition as a horse-and-buggy, somebody else as a butt-ugly SUV, someone else as an outrageous haircut.)

“Tolerance” is where you tolerate things that actually bother you. Things that make you go “ick”, or that conflict with strong intuitions on proper behavior. Once upon a time, the idea of gay sex made most folks quite uncomfortable, and yet many of those folks still advocated tolerance for gay sex. Their argument was not that gay sex isn’t icky, but that a broad society should be reluctant to ban apparently victimless activities merely because many find them icky.

Or to find, in the ick, an externality, and let slip the Welfare Economics Paradigm.

CONTEMPLATING SECOND CHANCES. A Joanne Jacobs post, "Leave No Motivated Adult Behind," points to a Community College Spotlight spotlight on a Baltimore Sun editorial by Susan C. Aldridge, president of University of Maryland University College, not to be confused with University of Maryland Baltimore County or Towson State. The president focuses on the difficulties non-traditional students face. (Her opening anecdote identifies one of the problems a military that relies heavily on reserve units faces: a graduating student's son picks up a diploma for dad, called to Iraq.)

But each year, thousands of community college students who want to earn a bachelor's degree — particularly those from modest-income or minority families — cannot continue. America's four-year colleges don't accommodate them.

Perhaps, perhaps not, as her column illustrates.

This is not just a tragedy for them. It is a tragedy for our nation. Researchers estimate that baby boomer retirements will soon leave our workforce 14 million shy of the number of four-year degree recipients we need.

The four year degree is not necessarily a prerequisite for many of those jobs; rather, it has become a precondition to employment thanks to the failure of K-12 to do its job, in part because accommodating recalcitrant learners or incorporating trendy but non-academic topics has crowded out the fundamentals, something the current emphasis on testing addresses, if in a crude way.

What stands in the way? First, cost. Students paying about $2,500 a year for community college tuition cannot always afford the $7,000 average for public universities, much less the $26,000 average for private institutions.

It's in the interest of a public university president to ask the taxpayers to pick up more of the tab, even if it becomes a regressive transfer. (As regular readers know, I benefitted from an economy in which state subsidies were generous and a factory job in the summer and a 20 hour commissary job during the school year met the bills.)

And there are other obstacles. Four-year colleges and universities often reject credits from transfer students. They schedule courses at challenging times for students who work. Sometimes they cannot even provide enough parking spaces for people rushing from work to class.

Transfer credits do pose an obstacle, whether the student is transferring from Montgomery County to Maryland or from Zoo Mass to Harvard. Within a state, articulation agreements among community colleges and state universities make sense. Classes outside of prime time for resident students (before 10 am and after 3 pm) might have low opportunity costs, if one neglects the lives of the faculty. Parking hassles and rushing to class, on the other hand, can reflect the poor life-management skills of students who have become nontraditional because of previous bad decisions, or enabling behavior by their elementary and secondary schools.

How do we change? Once we understand that 65 percent of adults in this country do not have a college degree, it becomes obvious that our traditional public colleges and universities need to adapt. They must work with community colleges to remove obstacles and create pathways for these students to earn degrees that employers value.

This paragraph does not cohere. At one time, K-12 prepared people for adult life: that 65 percent aggregate presumably includes many such people. Some might take an interest in academic subjects later on, not necessarily for workforce development. Workforce preparation, on the other hand, is not necessarily the objective. In many cases, employers spend a lot of money on technical training the universities, and K-12, have failed to do. In other cases, workforce preparation is hard (think rocket science or derivatives trading or civil engineering) and it will take more than a few evening classes or more parking spaces to provide those pathways.

BLESS ME, THIS IS PLEASANT, RIDING ON THE RAIL. I marked off to attend the 2010 O Scale National Convention, which took place in Santa Clara, California, near an Amtrak station and an amusement park. The simple way there is the California Zephyr to Emeryville with a transfer to a Capital Corridor train there. The fun way is by way of Portland.

Portage, Wisconsin, 25 June 2010.

The wine is from dinner, the champagne a gift from Amtrak to the sleeper passengers.

That Friday was the first day of Taste of Chicago, and the White Sox were hosting the Cubs. Passenger loadings on the commuter trains were large, but the trains were running close to time.

Amtrak Empire Builder 27, Chicago to somewhere in Minnesota, 25 June 2010: Amtrak Genesis locomotives 21-84, baggage car 1753 (converted from a passenger car), transition sleeper 39010, sleepers 32073, 32045, diner 38048, coaches 34080 and 31020 completing the Seattle section; coach 34027, Sightseer Lounge 33049, coach 31027, sleeper 32048 completing the Portland section; coach 34041 for the Twin Cities.

Leave Chicago 2:14 (although I matched my watch to a monitor in the Metropolitan Lounge, I'm about a minute slow). Glenview 2:36:00 - 2:38:39, Milwaukee 3:35:36 - 3:54:07. The coach attendant made an announcement that passengers would be getting new friends at Milwaukee. Note the 81 minute running time inclusive of the Glenview stop on 79 mph track. Station work was done well in advance of departure time.

Stop 4:16 west of Barker Road at end of double track to clear an eastbound freight train. Freight by 4:28. After a few minutes the conductor announces a brake problem on the diesel, with a possible 25 minute delay. Short patrol by around 4:50. Moving again at 4:57, brake test 4:59, continuing but at slow speed. Pass Duplainville 5:02, stop 5:07 with a freight train in siding to our north, initially recessed to clear us. Conductor announces we are borrowing a diesel from the freight train. For reasons that will soon be clear, I did not get its number. Diesel has freight gearing, train will continue at 55 mph. Head end power back on 5:39, go 5:45:39. I have a 5:30 dinner reservation. Meet 8 at CP 137 6:30, Amtrak business car with senior management on hind end. Columbus 6:47:55 - 6:55:22, double stop for mechanical department inspection. Portage 7:36:00 - 7:37:24, Wisconsin Dells 7:57:10 - 7:59:23, dusk at Camp Douglas with threatening weather moving in. Tomah 8:50:28 - 8:53:55, stop again 8:54:44, conductor reports a signal failure account thunderstorm, maintainer called. Clear Tomah 9:32:46, maintainer working in relay case under heavy rain. La Crosse 10:22 - 10:25, no smoke stop, rain, buy a glass of wine in the lounge car and turn in prior to Winona.

(to be continued)

THE BOOKWORM CONTINUES REHABILITATION. It's a little easier to type, although I continue to be preoccupied. Here's the second quarter report for 2010. Please follow the link for the date the report was posted to read the diary entry, or book review, at Fifty Book Challenge. I evaluated some books as particularly good (+) or particularly bad (-).

7. The Big Short, 28 April 2010. (+)
8. How Obama, Congress, and the Special Interests are Transforming ... A Slump into a Crash, Freedom into Socialism, and a Disaster into a CATASTROPHE ... And How to Fight Back, 29 April 2010. (-)
9. Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula: Cures Many Mathematical Ills, 8 June 2010.
10. Shutter Island, 10 June 2010.
11. Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, 17 June 2010.
12. The Roller Coaster Economy: Financial Crisis, Great Recession, and the Public Option, 19 June 2010.
13. The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, 21 June 2010.

The bookworm has added a few segments. Still no promise of making fifty by year's end.

Oooooooooooooo

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.)

LIFE GOES ON AT THE EAST LAGOON.

Scott Walstrom photograph

The full album is available at Facebook, perhaps by registration only.

HUMAN CAPITAL IS IMPLIED BY BUT NEED NOT IMPLY UNIVERSITY DEGREES.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel draws what might be the wrong inference about Milwaukee's dearth of college graduates.

The smartest cities are getting smarter. Cities like Milwaukee are being left behind.

Better-educated places enjoy higher income, less crime and enhanced levels of civic participation, economic research has found.

And the benefits don't go just to the well-educated. When the percentage of college-educated workers in an area rises, so do the wages of workers generally - even high school dropouts, researchers have found.

At a time when knowledge is the critical force driving economic prosperity, Milwaukee faces an increasing disadvantage. Person for person, the city's pool of college-educated adults ranks among the very lowest of the country's 50 biggest cities, a Journal Sentinel analysis shows. Milwaukee County fares only a little better. Not only that, but cities that had the best-educated populations 20 years ago have increased their stock much more than have less-educated places. The result: a self-reinforcing loop that is widening the gap between the leaders and less-favored cities such as Milwaukee.

The analysis in the article makes use of Marshall's analysis of industrial districts, as well as of agglomeration economies. (Cold Spring Shops readers will get a mini-dissertation. The full dissertation is in the Cold Spring Shops research library.)

Recent economic research has found that the greatest "spillover" benefits of having lots of college-educated workers occur in relatively small, densely populated areas. After a few miles, economic blessings - such as the attraction of new businesses and higher wages for workers across the board - erode significantly, the research concludes.

By and large, that means those benefits are more likely to accrue within cities, said Stuart Rosenthal, an economist at Syracuse University and, with [Toronto's William] Strange, author of key studies on the geographic limits of spillover benefits.

Skilled workers - economists typically use education as an imperfect but measurable substitute for skill - make each other more productive, swapping ideas in an office, on a factory floor or over coffee at Starbucks.

That at least is the theory, and the conclusion of empirical studies by researchers such as Rosenthal and Strange, Edward Glaeser (Harvard), Enrico Moretti (University of California, Berkeley) and Giovanni Peri (University of California, Davis).

Not everyone agrees, but a line of thinking extending at least back to late 19th- and early 20th-century English economist Alfred Marshall argues for the concept.

It seems like common sense. Imagine how much easier it would be to learn bicycle repair working among experienced mechanics in a bike shop compared with working alone in your garage. Or how much harder it is to develop computer skills alone at home compared with spending eight hours every day in an office with colleagues who can field questions about keyboard intricacies and software quirks.

Several economists have investigated the relationship between the prevalence of degrees in the population and regional prosperity, and Richard Florida has written several scholarly books on the subject that are accessible to the inquisitive general reader. The college degree connection is relatively recent. Building additional university capacity in the wrong place is unlikely to spark the kind of development Milwaukee's government (or the government of any Rust Belt city) would like to encourage. There is, however, a pattern in Milwaukee's history that generated an industrial economy subsequent leaders allowed to deteriorate.

A prime example [of agglomeration in action] comes from local historian John Gurda. He tells how in the late 1800s a draftsman named Bruno Nordberg was working in the Walker's Point factory of Milwaukee industrialist Edward P. Allis.

Nordberg had an idea for a steam engine governor. Allis couldn't make the prototype in his factory, but it happened that across the street Henry Harnischfeger had a little machine shop.

Nordberg walked over with his idea and Harnischfeger helped him turn it into steel. The result: the founding of one of Milwaukee's industrial mainstays, the Nordberg Manufacturing Company.

Another regular visitor at Harnischfeger's shop, Gurda writes in "The Making of Milwaukee," was Christopher Levalley, who had an idea for a system of chains to replace leather belts on machinery. From that collaboration grew another major Milwaukee manufacturer, the Chain Belt Co.

Harnischfeger's small machine shop, meanwhile, also grew into an industrial giant. And Allis, founder of Allis-Chalmers Co., outdid them all.

At one time, the four firms combined employed tens of thousands of workers, thanks to the productivity that sprang from their labor and the underlying ideas of entrepreneurs such as Allis, Harnischfeger and Nordberg.

"You have this round of self-generating energy," Gurda said recently in a talk to an economic development group, " . . . and the result was a cross pollination that made the garden bloom."

A garden, as regular readers know, in which the human capital was developed in the high schools and on the shop floor, and in which industrial work was not for everyone.

Face it, you can't send Tennessee's sub-literates to Warren to work in a Chrysler plant any more. It was no accident that they went to Warren and not West Allis to work at Harnischfeger.

Much of that old industrial base is now gone. But city leaders might benefit by understanding that developing strengths is not necessarily the same thing as developing more universities.

One key, said Thomas Hefty, retired CEO of Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Wisconsin, is to play to the area's strengths and nurture existing clusters of knowledge-based industries such as medical devices. Indeed, concentrations of particular types of business tend to beget more of the same, Rosenthal said.

"Companies are heavily attracted to locations in which there is a bunch of employment in their own industry within one mile," he said.

Also critical, said Wisconsin Technology Council president Tom Still, is to strengthen the research capacity at Milwaukee's universities and the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Perhaps so. But everybody else is doing that. On the other hand, I am aware of no city that is developing a new generation of blue-collar aristocrats.

MARKING OFF. Tired. Time away from the weblog. Thanks for looking in. Posting suspended for a while.

NO WINNER IN COLD WAR? So the policy intellectuals tell us.

DeKalb Airport, 6 June 2010.

Those policy intellectuals haven't told me when the Pentagon held a hangar sale to raise rubles.

PULLING THE PIN. Metra conductor Art Anderson reflects on everything he's seen on the railroad.

"It gets in your blood," Anderson said. "You feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. You've taken 3,000 people safely to their destinations."

And sometimes it runs in the family, even when the family runs from the railroad.

Their son Frank "didn't want any part" of railroad work. But a funny thing happened. Frank met and married Janet, a woman from Mexico whose father was a conductor.

The story gets better.

COME OFF IT. Destination: Freedom rides the rails to Glasgow, Montana.

It’s about as far “off the main line” as you can get. The place was once called “Siding 45” because it was the location of the 45th siding west of Minot, North Dakota on the Great Northern Railway. Today it is known as Glasgow, Montana. Legend has it that somebody, maybe railroad founder James J. Hill (the “Empire Builder” for whom the train is named), touched a globe and his finger pointed to Glasgow, Scotland, and that is how the town got its name.

Glasgow is a community of about 2500 in northeastern Montana. It has as much rail service as cities like Columbia, South Carolina, Omaha, Nebraska and Reno, Nevada; and more than Cincinnati. Every afternoon at 12:26, the “Builder” is scheduled to stop on its way to Seattle and Portland. At 3:47, it is scheduled to stop on its way to Chicago. So a visit to Glasgow can last for approximately 201 minutes, plus any multiple of 24 hours.

There is no scheduled transit in Glasgow, but the “locals” still have some mobility. That is because of Valley County Transit, a provider which has no scheduled service. Instead, the county provides demand-response service in the local area to anyone who needs it. Local service is provided within Valley County, and the fare within Glasgow is $1.50 (75 cents for seniors and persons with disabilities). Out-of-county trips can be arranged, if a van and a driver are available.

The real public transit secret, dear reader, is that the Empire Builder exists in part to provide a day train across the northern counties of North Dakota and Montana, through old railroad towns, many of which tell you stories about Yim's globe, that are as far from the interstate highway system as you can get in the contiguous 48 (a northeatern Montana milepost may show mileage to someplace like Harlowton to the south and Lethbridge to the north) and with the shakeout among air carriers, possibly one puddle-jumper plane a day connecting at Spokane or Billings (Billings?) or Denver to the jet operators. I suspect that residents of the Bay Area or Portland or Chicago or some neighborhoods of Cleveland might find the Destination: Freedom assessment of transit options limited.

The people of Glasgow, Scotland have plenty of intercity trains and local transit. The people of Glasgow, Montana have limited airline service to Billings and Denver; as well as a train to Chicago, or to Portland or Seattle, every day. They also have local transportation whenever they want it. Not many Americans outside of New York City have that level of mobility without an automobile.

East coast readers: the western trains get good reviews. Give one a try. (And bear in mind, in the West "local transportation" might mean Glasgow to Minot or Shelby to Rugby).

West of Chicago, it's a bigger and better Amtrak world. At Union Station, my wife, Laurel (she made the balance of the trip with me), and I walked along an impressive string of tall, gleaming Superliners, searching for our sleeper, No. 731, the New Hampshire. (Naming sleeping cars is a long-standing railroad tradition.)

Just hope that the dining car is adequately stocked and that the toilets work.

THE ROADS PAY THEIR OWN WAY? Wisconsin loggers would like you to think so.

From the North Woods to the croplands and dairy farms of central Wisconsin, transportation is becoming a battleground as cash-starved local governments say they can no longer afford road maintenance costs, and businesses buckling under the weight of recession say they need a dependable transportation system now more than ever.

"I've never, ever seen it to this point where it's one township right after another. All of a sudden now, they just don't have the money to do the road work," said Henry Schienebeck, a third-generation logger and executive director of the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association in Rhinelander. He's operated logging trucks for 26 years.

Lately, Schienebeck has been hopscotching the North Woods to attend town board meetings with loggers who are pleading with local elected leaders to allow them to haul the heavy loads they say they need to turn a profit at a time when that is tougher than it's ever been.

Communities have taken to posting their roads with weight restrictions or requiring loggers to put up insurance bonds that would cover the cost of any road damage that may occur, logging interests and local elected leaders say.

"I'm a fourth-generation logger and I fight this all the time, and it's getting ridiculous," said Max Ericson, who owns a logging and trucking company in Minong and is president of the timber professionals association. "I'm getting sick of it. All I want to be able to do is do my job.

"We don't want to go around tearing up town roads, but we don't want to be out of business either," he said.

On one hand, Wisconsin officials have been diverting money from the various state transportation taxes to other uses. Money is, after all, fungible.

Since 2003, $1.2 billion has been transferred from the transportation fund. The state has borrowed about $800 million to make up for the loss, but the transportation fund faced a net drop of $434 million, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

"We feel like we're paying a lot of money into that transportation fund. We don't think the transportation fund ought to be raided every year," Schienebeck said. "That money needs to go back into the infrastructure."

Raising local property taxes to pay for roads isn't much of an option, [Town of Hull chairman Shane] Graffunder said. Many residents couldn't afford to pay them anyway.

At the margin, higher property taxes will induce out-migration. The very use of property taxes for road maintenance, however, suggests that user fees are not sufficient to provide for the road network.

On the other hand, the loggers and farmers are apparently relying on taxpayers to make private productivity gains from larger trucks possible.

Meanwhile, the equipment keeps get bigger as farmers and loggers try to achieve the economies of scale they need to turn a profit.

Logging trucks used to haul 5 or 6 cords of wood, [Town of] Boulder Junction's [chairman Jeff] Long said. Now, they're hauling 12 or 14.

Investors in railroads, which have been putting money into strengthening tracks to support heavier payloads, have cause to complain about corporate welfare for their competition, if farmers and loggers have been purchasing bigger trucks and expecting the counties to strengthen the roads.

SEND POOR RICHARD TO BUSINESS SCHOOL. Or perhaps it's ancient English idioms, but clearly senior management at BP never learned.

In the design of the well, the company apparently chose a riskier option among two possibilities to provide a barrier to the flow of gas in space surrounding steel tubes in the well, documents and internal e-mails show. The decision saved BP $7 million to $10 million; the original cost estimate for the well was about $96 million.

In an e-mail, BP engineer Brian Morel told a fellow employee that the company is likely to make last-minute changes in the well.

"We could be running it in 2-3 days, so need a relative quick response. Sorry for the late notice, this has been nightmare well which has everyone all over the place," Morel wrote.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish.

Heck, you could put that on a slide.

BP also apparently rejected advice of a subcontractor, Halliburton Inc., in preparing for a cementing job to close up the well. BP rejected Halliburton's recommendation to use 21 "centralizers" to make sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore. Instead, BP used six centralizers.

Let me be provocative. Suppose Dick Cheney were still Vice-President. Might somebody at Halliburton have used a back channel to get a suggestion from Washington that BP or the subcontractor stop work?

In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: "It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this." Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: "Who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine."

Hafte Makes Wafte.

Or, the Poor Richard version:

Neglect mending a small fault, and ’twill soon be a great one.

Put those on the same slide, say, as part of the productivity seminar.

The lawmakers also said BP also decided against a nine- to 12-hour procedure known as a "cement bond log" that would have tested the integrity of the cement. A team from Schlumberger, an oil services firm, was on board the rig, but BP sent the team home on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight the morning of April 20.

Less than 12 hours later, the rig exploded.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.

Indeed.