THE CASE FOR PATIENCE.

Insta Pundit picked up a story of battery scientists who were looking for a way to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries.

Today’s lithium-ion batteries typically rely on graphite anodes to offer a long lifespan. Rechargeable battery performance declines and eventually falls off a cliff (becomes unusable) due to those anodes repeatedly expanding and contracting as lithium ions migrate during the cycle of charging and discharge. Lithium compounds build up on the electrodes during this process then break off during the expansion and contraction. This exposes the surface of the electrode and over time decomposes it to the point of failure.

A better alternative to using graphite for the anodes would be aluminum, but aluminum expands and contracts too much during each cycle. If scientists could stop that happening, we’d have much better performing batteries.

Sometimes, it pays to leave your project on the workbench for a while.

Dr Wang Changan of Tsinghua University and Dr Li Ju of MIT have been working together to stop the oxide coating that forms on the surface of aluminum nanoparticles when it is exposed to air. Their idea was to soak the nanoparticles in a sulfuric acid and titanium oxysuplphate mix, which would dissolve the aluminum oxide and replace it with titanium oxide.

Not the kind of thing you'd want to leave unattended.

Achieving the new outer coating required a set time of soaking. The accident occurred when Wang and Li forgot to remove one batch of the nanoparticles from the soaking process. That batch ended up soaking for several hours longer than intended with the result being the sulfuric acid and titanium oxysulfate mix leaked into the 50nm nanoparticles and dissolved some of the aluminum inside. What this left was a nanoparticle with a 4nm outer shell of titanium hydroxide and an inner 30nm “yolk” of aluminum.

Rather than discarding this forgotten batch, they decided to test it by building batteries using these particles. It turns out they have potentially solved the problem of using aluminum for the anodes in the battery. The extra long soak meant the anodes did not expand and contract, in fact they created a battery that over 500 charge/discharge cycles retained up to four-times the capacity of the equivalent graphite anode batteries. These batteries last considerably longer in terms of usable lifespan and, according to MIT, can hold up to three-times the energy.

And aging these aluminum eggs scales up.

IT TOOK YEARS

TO PERFECT

FOR YOU

A RECHARGEABLE CELL

THAT'S DURABLE TOO

And ripping off a Burma-Shave jingle is fitting.  The Verse by the Side of the Road relates that the research team at the Burma-Vita Company struggled to bring a dependable brushless shaving cream to market, with a number of failed product launches, and over three hundred formulas that didn't work out.  Fortunately, they kept good notes, as there was a jar of formula One Forty-Three that had languished on a shelf for a couple of months, and in its aged form gave a good shave.

RAMSEY-SUBOPTIMAL?

Is nobody teaching the inverse-elasticity rule any more?  Earlier this year, I noted a U.S. News article detailing the difficulties of sin taxes.  Stated simply.

Perhaps the demand for pop is relatively inelastic, and the tax pays for the additional health programs the city expects to provide for the widebodies.  Perhaps that's a private-public bundle.  But if the tax induces all sorts of substitutions, there are neither revenues for the health programs, nor the widebodies making use of the health programs.

Here's a Daily Caller report, still slow on the uptake.

Berkeley’s pioneering soda tax is failing to hit consumers as much as public health advocates had hoped, with stores only passing on 22 percent of the tax to customers.

Berkeley, Calif. was the first city in the nation to vote for a soda tax, with supporters arguing the higher price would cut consumption of sugary drinks and help tackle obesity. The law took effect in March and forced distributors to pay a 1 cent tax per ounce of soda. However, Berkeley’s store owners have refused to play ball and have only passed on a fraction of the price increase to consumers.

There's more work, coming out of Cornell University's College of Human Ecology, which suggests economists who understand tax incidence will never lack for work.

“In light of the predictions of the proponents of the tax, as well as in light of the previous research, we expected to see the tax fully passed through to consumers,” said [John] Cawley, professor of policy analysis and management and of economics in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology. “In contrast, we find that less than half, and in some cases, only a quarter of it is. This is important because the point of the tax was to make sugar-sweetened beverages more expensive so consumers would buy, and drink, less of them.”

Oy. Please copy the following into your notebook.

Raising significant tax revenue suggests a relatively inelastic demand. Ramsey-optimality means raising that revenue with the least excess burden (deadweight loss, for the traditionalist.)

It gets better.

So-called “sin taxes” are designed to improve public health by discouraging people from purchasing unhealthy products. Smoking rates, for instance, have plummeted in the United States in recent decades partly due to federal, state and local taxes that have driven up cigarette costs. Berkeley officials hoped that the soda tax would raise prices and lead residents to avoid energy-dense sugar-sweetened beverages, considered a culprit for high rates of obesity and chronic disease.

But if consumption rates fall, prices will rise by less than the full amount of the tax. This isn't the Maximum Principle, people.  And, if I don't have enough to be aggravated about, there's this.

“There is an economic rationale for taxes when consumption of the good imposes negative externalities, and obesity costs taxpayers billions each year in medical care costs in the U.S.,” Cawley said. “A sugar-sweetened beverage tax is a very narrow approach to internalizing the external costs of obesity, because there are many other food and drink items that are also energy dense and lack nutritional value. But to the extent such a tax helps internalize the external costs, there is an economic rationale for it.”

Strictly speaking, it's bundle pricing, not externality. The stuff that makes you fat is stuff that lands you in hospital, and metering the use of the stuff that makes you fat might be more efficient than allocating general revenues to the hospitals and clinics.

IT REGISTERS. THIS IS WHAT INSURRECTION LOOKS LIKE.

Apparently some fraternity members at Virginia's Old Dominion University, a powerhouse sailing college, decided to hang three over-the-top banners from their house.  It baited university president John Broderick into the usual sputtering dudgeon.

I am outraged about the offensive message directed toward women that was visible for a time on 43rd Street. Our students, campus community and alumni have been offended.

While we constantly educate students, faculty and staff about sexual assault and sexual harassment, this incident confirms our collective efforts are still failing to register with some.

On one level, we can respond to this as just another atrocity by the Thought Police, which appears to be how Robby Soave takes it at Reason.

Some frat brothers are eager to have sex with girls—is this surprising? Have universities become so squeamish that students confessing their desire for sex are guilty of some kind of crime? The banners are suggestive and classless, but they’re not obscene.

Associating the banners with sexual assault, as Broderick did in his statement, is a considerable exaggeration. Sigma Nu members certainly didn’t threaten anyone with sexual assault; putting up some mildly suggestive signs does not constitute an act of violence. The banners don’t even clear the sexual harassment bar. They aren’t severe, pervasive, objectively offensive, or directed at anyone in particular.

Or perhaps it's an opportunity, as Insta Pundit suggests, either to make a federal case out of it, or to heighten the contradictions.

My advice to these fraternity guys: (1) Immediately complain to the Department of Education and the Department of Justice that you’re being targeted because of your race and sex, and denied your First Amendment rights. No, nothing will come of this, but that’s not the point. The process is the punishment. (2) Sue on the same grounds. (3) The real killer: Go to the Virginia Legislature and tell them they should cut Old Dominion’s budget. Come prepared with figures on the number of administrators on campus now, versus 10 and 20 years ago. File freedom of information requests and get the travel expense figures for the folks in the administration. Look over them for suspicious and large expenditures. (You’ll find them!) Make a big stink about those.

Administrative bloat leads to large numbers of “student life” educrats without enough to do, so they’ve created a quasi-police-state to fill the time. State legislators are looking for things to cut anyway, and higher ed doesn’t have the clout it used to have. This will hurt them more than anything else you can do.

That second paragraph reinforces the idea that higher education has broken the social contract with the states that fund it, or perhaps aligned itself too closely with a failing political ideology, both of which have merit.

Or perhaps, as Adam Steinbaugh of Popehat suggests, in reacting, the university overdoes it.

Moreover, at the end of the day, requiring the removal of offensive banners won't change the underlying behavior.  It just makes it less likely that people will know who these guys are.

Rather, if Old Dominion is to regulate isolated incidents of speech, it would be better to force these guys to leave the banners up, so everyone recognizes these idiots for who they are. Remove all doubt.

Perhaps, although the simpler explanation might be that the only way for frat boys to subvert the dominant paradigm is to deliberately do something that's seriously over the top.  (That's two plot events in Animal House.)

Once upon a time, that was just a brand of motor oil.  The sign is so over-the-top in-your-face these days that even a weblogger with Unionist sympathies might find a place for one in the garage.  Perhaps that's what Sigma Nu had to do, come up with the most aggressive way of saying no to the prevailing ethos.  Dr. Helen seems to be capturing that spirit.

If women and white knight university presidents are too fragile for this type of prank, they should have their own free standing universities (asylums) where they can live in a bubble filled with other people just like them filled with unicorns and butterflies. These people are idiots and the frat guys are freedom fighters. Fight the good fight and stand up for free speech, even if it is offensive.

Might be even simpler than that: the Perpetually Aggrieved are so easily goaded that baiting them into such overreaction is sport.  It's not, Mr Broderick, that your indoctrination failed to register.  It's that your indoctrination is so over-the-top silly that the only sane response is over-the-top mockery.

OUR CLUELESS RULING CLASS.

Christopher Chantrill lays down the smack.

We conservatives have known it forever, but now ordinary Americans are coming to realize it. Our modern ruling class sucks.

Our ruling class worries endlessly about far-right extremism and nationalism but is too vapid and pompous to realize that ordinary people don't go for extremism and nationalism unless the ruling class has messed up -- like after World War I with the Great Depression and right now with a fragile economy and unassimilated immigrants flooding many western cities.

Some specifics.

Our clueless ruling class spends thirty years forcing banks to flood the country with “affordable housing” mortgages, and then blames the bankers when the bubble bursts.

Our clueless ruling class spends half a century flooding the west with immigrants and playing identity politics with them. Then it is shocked, shocked when the voters start flocking to candidates that promise to put a stop to it.

And he's less than impressed with Jeff Greenfield's chin-pulling.

Yet now, all of a sudden, veteran Jeff Greenfield is called out to worry about the Obama policy legacy? Now, despite all assurances, voters all across the west are rebelling against the failed establishment political parties?

Now, all of a sudden, our ruling class sits uneasily on its administrative throne?

Yes, but social engineering looks so easy on a chalkboard.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE STREETCARS GONE?

Apparently the Roger Rabbit legend, otherwise known as the National City Lines canard, lives on.  Well, give Vox credit for Joseph Stromberg, discrediting it.  If it reads a lot like "The Economics of the Pernambuco Tramway," it should.

Because of these factors, some streetcar companies began going into bankruptcy as early as the 1920s, when they were still their cities' dominant mode of transportation. Huge costs and the falling value of fares forced them to cut back on service, steadily pushing people to the convenient, increasingly affordable automobile.

As they fought to stay alive during the Great Depression, many companies invested in buses, which were cheaper and more flexible. Initially they operated mainly as feeder systems to bring commuters to the end of lines, but as time went on, they began to replace some lines entirely.

That wasn't enough to save most of these companies, especially as city, state, and federal governments pumped more and more money into roads.

Easier to demonize the traction magnates and subject them to regulation. But perhaps the development of personal transit will undo any transportation company.  Note that the jitney operators who sold seats in their automobiles had to be regulated as taxi companies, and with smart 'phones, jitney operators don't have to cruise the streetcar routes to find riders.

To the usual list of reasons, add government complicity in creating the suburbs, and a related Vox essay suggests that transit systems are part of the Welfare State, not necessarily for all citizens in the same way schools or libraries might be.

AVOID THE STRAIN, TAKE THE TRAIN.

The second coming of the Cleveland Browns had a preseason game in Rochester, which, in the airline network, is a "You can't get there from here" destination.  Management thus chartered an Amtrak train.

“To me, it’s the best way to go,” coach Mike Pettine said. “It’s an airplane minus being way above the ground and having people search your bags.”

A bus trip to Rochester would have taken five hours. Pettine said he thought the team charter plane might have had a hard time landing in Rochester, so rather than fly to Buffalo and then board a bus, the Browns went with the train.

Props to Amtrak for locating sufficient coaching stock to protect a passenger extra.

Brian Hartline Instagram photo retrieved from Destination: Freedom.

#ThisIsAFirst for the current iteration of the Browns, wouldn't the original team have had several opportunities to go by rail?

SUMMER'S END.

Rain overnight, and the morning's blue norther hints at what is to come as sunsets creep earlier.

At the Illinois Railway Museum, the second weekend of Day Out With Thomas wraps up.

Look closely at that capture from the Spaulding Tower web camera.  Thomas has a recently redecorated coach on the head pin.  Percy is on another rake of vintage coaches.  At the far end, the power is the Frisco Russian Decapod, 1630.

WE HAVE BEEN SCAMMED, AND WE KNOW IT.

Everything else is commentary, argues Alex Castellanos at CNN.  Sample.

The reality is that Americans have paid both political parties for the utopia of European-lite government. We have the largest government we've ever had, and yet it governs nearly nothing. Not our economy, which is stagnant. Not our place in the world, where we have lost respect. Not our fiscal affairs, where we have been rendered destitute. Not our borders, made of smoke. Not our health care, rendered increasingly unaffordable by a cynically named "Affordable Care Act." The list of big, old, factory-like government's broken promises is unending. Everything Washington's elite said they would deliver, from better race relations and peace in our inner cities, to stability abroad, ends up both a larger challenge and more expensive.

Read and understand.

DON'T MESS WITH THE UNITED STATES.

It transpires that the three young men who took down a train robber, er, jihadi, on the Amsterdam - Paris Thalys had military experience in branches other than the United States Marines.  "Still American badasses" notes Insta Pundit.  In his USA Today column, he extends.  If you see something, do something.

THEY WILL FIND THE TRAINS ARE GUARDED BY UNITED STATES MARINES.

Somebody picks the wrong Thalys train to act out. "Britain's Daily Mail reports that three unarmed U.S. Marines disarmed the man, who was carrying an AK-47 rifle and a knife, when he began to attack passengers on the car." Semper Fi.

SQUALOR IS WHAT DEMOCRATS DO.

Here, courtesy Business Insider, are the most thickly-settled counties, which together hold half the enumerated population.

Business Insider graphic.

Now comes political pundit Jeff Greenfield, who gets a lot more air time as the presidential fields take shape (and when I was a kid, The Making of the President 1960 had the national campaign beginning only after the World Series ended -- these days the World Series can run beyond Election Day, but that's just fine with the commentariat, as the next campaign begins immediately after Election Day) and the legacy talk heats up.  Here's Our President's legacy.  Barack Obama will leave his party in its worst shape since the Great Depression—even if Hillary wins.The Democratic leadership is principally Silent Generation relics and first-wave Baby Boomers. Read the article for the specifics, or consider this map.

Voters appear to be rejecting the Democrats, even (especially?) in the thickly settled states, notably except California, Illinois, and New Jersey.  Here's Mr Greenfield attempting to explain.

You have to go back to the Great Depression and the Watergate years to find so dramatic a reversal of fortunes for a party. And this time, there’s neither a Great Depression nor a criminal conspiracy in the White House to explain what has happened.

Never attribute to malice that which might be more simply explained by incompetence.

CONSTRUCTIVE ECCENTRICITY.

Susan Woodward Remembers Armen Alchian.  There's the Jack Hirshleifer approach to price theory, and the Armen Alchian way.

Hirshleifer approached price theory as geometry. Lay out the axioms, prove the theorems. And never introduce a new idea, especially one like “rent” that collides with standard usage, without a solid foundation. The Alchian approach is more exploratory. “Oh, here’s an idea. Let’s walk around the idea and see what it looks like from all sides. Let’s tip it over and see what’s under it and what kind of noise it makes. Let’s light a fire under it and just see what happens. Drop it ten stories.” The books were complements, not substitutes.

Yes, it's useful to be able to do both. But never lose sight of opportunity cost, specialization, and arbitrage.

FALSE PRODUCTIVITY.

I've been suggesting almost as long as I've been running the Cold Spring Shops that labor supply curves are backward-bending, and that there may be no point in people making a lot of money without any opportunity to have a life.  Let's start in July, 2004.

Presumably the set of social institutions that involved Dad working, Mom minding the kids, and parents staying together for the sake of the children, which takes advantage of the Say Aggregation Principle to ensure that one wage earner could support a family, and which makes unilateral dissolution of marriage less attractive, are not the set of social institutions envisioned in these discussions. There are, however, other institutional changes to consider, including reduced reliance on the treadmill career path, which might in fact be productivity enhancing as people might have less reason to look for ways out of productive but extremely time-consuming jobs. (Regular readers will correctly note that I have played this tune before: perhaps with sufficient notes on the horn the walls will come tumbling down.)

In higher education, the crumbling of the walls might have been midwived by the feminists, but the general principle is still valid.

How then to balance the income effect of greater prosperity, which works in favor of shorter and more flexible working hours independently of any explicit policy, against the competition effect, in which the individuals willing to work harder (the most independent men and women, for the most part?) will get to the prizes first? The French solution of legislating a shorter work week has not been particularly successful.

But we see the same challenges in the private sector.

I wonder, though, whether some of the discouraged workers of the ongoing Great Reset are using the straitened economic circumstances as occasion to say no to the most demanding employers. What's the point of doing the work of four people for twelve hours a day on half your previous salary if "downgrading your expenses" doesn't rule out Internet access or a functioning car or clothing for the kids?

And there are limits to how far a company can apply the tournament model to its staff.  Dean Dad asks the pertinent question.

If the recent New York Times piece about Amazon is at least substantially correct, it sounds like working conditions at Amazon are somewhere between a reality show and Logan’s Run. The Times piece -- which Jeff Bezos denies is accurate -- suggests that Amazon uses its extreme secrecy to enable extreme arbitrariness in how it treats its own people. In the absence of any worker protections at all, hard-charging people are chewed up and spit out quickly. The system will work as long as it’s growing. When it starts contracting, though, the fall will be fast and hard. It’s one thing to put up with cruelty when there’s something in it for you; it’s quite another when the best to be hoped for is to squeeze a little more time out.

Yes, and if you're going to put in the hours of an entrepreneur for a salary, in a country that at least gives lip service to entrepreneurship ...

Here, via USA Today, is an essay by Dustin Moskovitz of Facebook recognizing that the labor-leisure tradeoff is real.

Many people believe that weekends and the 40-hour workweek are some sort of great compromise between capitalism and hedonism, but that’s not historically accurate. They are actually the carefully considered outcome of profit-maximizing research by Henry Ford in the early part of the 20th century. He discovered that you could actually get more output out of people by having them work fewer days and fewer hours. Since then, other researchers have continued to study this phenomenon, including in more modern industries like game development.

The research is clear: beyond ~40–50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative. We have also demonstrated that though you can get more output for a few weeks during “crunch time” you still ultimately pay for it later when people inevitably need to recover. If you try to sustain crunch time for longer than that, you are merely creating the illusion of increased velocity. This is true at multiple levels of abstraction: the hours worked per week, the number of consecutive minutes of focus vs. rest time in a given session, and the amount of vacation days you take in a year.

To which I add, there is nothing magic about 40 hours. The old formula was eight hours for work, eight hours for family, eight hours for sleep.  Yes, there will still be hard-charging people willing to outwork everybody else, never mind the cost.  But part of being able to live better than a cave man is more down time than a cave man enjoyed, and as we are able to live better than a Mad Man, perhaps we ought have more martini time than the Mad Men enjoyed.

Here's Mr Moskovits.

My intellectual conclusion is that these companies are both destroying the personal lives of their employees and getting nothing in return. A candidate recently deciding between Asana and another fast growing company told me that the other team starts their dinners at 830pm to encourage people to stay late (he’s starting here in a few weeks). I also hear young developers frequently brag about “48 hour” coding sprints. This kind of attitude not only hurts young workers who are willing to “step up” to the expectation, but facilitates ageism and sexism by indirectly discriminating against people who cannot maintain that kind of schedule.

The most charitable interpretation of that job description is that people will have accumulated enough of a nest egg to retire by 35 or 40, but there's insufficient evidence of that labor-leisure tradeoff being common.

PROJECTION?

Just after the Republican debate early in August, I raised the possibility that Democrat national committee head Debbie "Blabbermouth" Schultz might have been saying more about her party's field.

This is the same Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz who saw in the relatively few Republican debates a good thing, as it spared likely Republican voters a lot of gaffes. But the also-rans apparently want their shots at the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua.

Give Kirsten (The Silencing) Powers props for getting to the heart of the matter.

Following the first GOP debate, Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz disingenuously quipped to a reporter, "I sort of feel for my counterpart Reince Priebus because it’s pretty clear why they did everything they could to shrink the number of debates and shrink the exposure."

You know who else shrunk the number of debates? Democrats. Wasserman Schultz seems to be telling us why: Hillary Clinton can’t handle the exposure.

Yes, although it's clear somebody has been coaching the Dowager Empress. Every so often she starts out in Full Seventies Strident, then catches herself and dials it back to Slightly Condescending.

Fifteen more months of this?

FINIS TO PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE.

This Toyota commercial is cute.

Years ago, only Volkswagen bragged on the durability of Beetles.  Now kids put money aside for their first car.

NO SECOND TRAIN TO THE CITIES OR BEYOND.

For a while in the early years of Amtrak, passengers in the Chicago and Twin Cities via Milwaukee corridor had the choice of two trains.  The best offerings reprised loosely the Morning and Afternoon Hiawatha schedules, toward the end there was a day trip each way and the overnight North Star for and from Superior.  The service suffered from timekeeping, as the other schedules were the east end of the transcontinental Empire Builder and North Coast Hiawatha service, and one of the ways Amtrak made the trains worth traveling again on no money was to get rid of the spare coaches and power that would have protected the schedule east of the Cities.

I'M NOT IMAGINING THE CONGESTION AND OVERCROWDING.

Apparently, I've always lived in or near thickly settled areas.

Business Insider graphic.

Read into the map whatever you wish about, e.g., the electoral map, or the potential for enhanced Passenger Rail service beyond the Official Region.

BETTER PAY, BETTER WORKING CONDITIONS.

School districts that skimp on those things have trouble hiring or retaining teachers.  Let us be thankful that the Grey Lady catches on.

Across the country, districts are struggling with shortages of teachers, particularly in math, science and special education — a result of the layoffs of the recession years combined with an improving economy in which fewer people are training to be teachers.

At the same time, a growing number of English-language learners are entering public schools, yet it is increasingly difficult to find bilingual teachers. So schools are looking for applicants everywhere they can — whether out of state or out of country — and wooing candidates earlier and quicker.

Dig down, and you discover that the better pay and working conditions -- job ladder tournaments notwithstanding -- are in the private sector, particularly for people with the STEM degrees.

PENNY-WISE, POUND FOOLISH.

I've long been skeptical of fixed-formation tilting trains on a relatively flat railroad such as The Milwaukee Road serving Chicago, Milwaukee, and points beyond.  And the special agreement by which former Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle brought a Talgo assembly plant to Milwaukee only gave his opposition more reason to squelch the deal.  We know since then that current governor Scott Walker ended work on upgrading the Hiawatha service and extending it to Madison, and that he (and his legislature) ended up spending more money for a partial upgrade of the Milwaukee service and cancelling the Talgo contracts.  Two trains for Oregon and Washington were assembled in Milwaukee, as were two more intended for the current Hiawatha service (until somebody figured out -- they could have seen it here first -- that even a longish Talgo doesn't have enough seats to be a Hiawatha, particularly that 5.08 ex-Chicago.)

The breach-of-contract litigation is over, and Wisconsin's Department of Transportation, at great expense, has no further obligation to take or to maintain the two trains.

Wisconsin taxpayers will end up paying $9.7 million more for two state of the art train sets — for a total of roughly $50 million — but leave the trains with their Spanish manufacturer, under the settlement of a nearly 3-year-old lawsuit.

The settlement, which still needs to be approved in court, ends a political saga going back half a decade.

The bizarre and expensive outcome for Wisconsin — paying for a product but not keeping it or ever using it — reflects the depth of the political disagreement in which Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle signed, and then GOP presidential candidate and Gov. Scott Walker nixed, a no-bid contract with Talgo Inc. for trains from Madison to Milwaukee and then on to Chicago

Wisconsin taxpayers are also on the hook for a new basketball arena and an upgrade -- running into many millions of dollars -- to the Zoo interchange, which, when upgraded, will not get basketball fans downtown any faster than they currently get there.  Nor, for that matter, will Chicago - Milwaukee - Madison traffic get through there any more quickly.  The benefit-cost ratio of the rail upgrade might well have been higher.

NO MATTER HOW BAD THINGS ARE IN ILLINOIS, THEY CAN ONLY BE WORSE IN CHIAPAS?

Here's the view of Illinois as a magnet, from the perspective of the American Legislative Exchange Council roundup of rich states, poor states.  From their perspective, it really sucks to be Minnesota, Vermont, or New York.

DEFUND THE LEFT.

Wesleyan University is notorious as a hot-house for radical chic, but shutting down the remaining fraternities might be inducing alumni to shut their checkbooks. "Our year-over-year giving has fallen to the low 40% to high 30% range…[and] we had approximately 400 [sic] fewer donors than the prior year (9,712 v. 10,209) due primarily to the number of alumni who did not renew their gifts."  Sex-drugs-'n-rock-'n-roll, but only in the commune?

LEX LUTHOR'S LAIR.

Voluntary Xchange alerts readers to the underground complex that accompanies the air rights developments above Grand Central Terminal and the throat trackage.  There's one urban legend that part of Franklin Roosevelt's armored train is still parked under the Waldorf-Astoria.  There's also a backup power supply for the electric trains, that I got into in August 2001 along with an assemblage of O Scalers.

During World War II, this complex was protected by armed soldiers.  There's nothing that secret any more, but I bet mine was one of the last groups to be shown around down there.

THE PILGRIMS, AND THE REGULAR PASSENGERS.

Papa Francesco will be coming to Philadelphia, and the expected throngs will overwhelm the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.  Apparently more faithful are expected in the area than the roads can handle, and the rail and bus operator raffled off about 350 thousand tickets (whether specifically for Papal traffic or for all traffic is not clear from the article) for use at the stations that will remain open on the days of the visit.

A major religious event can strain the infrastructure.  But years ago, The North Shore Line got its Skokie Valley Route open in time to handle the extra traffic for the 1926 Eucharistic Congress closing ceremonies in Mundelein.  The railroad borrowed rapid transit cars from the at-the-time affiliated Chicago Rapid Transit Company, moved a quarter of a million people, many of whom made a mad rush to get home when a summer thunderstorm hit about the same time the closing processional began.  (It's above my pay grade to speculate on Thor flinging his hammer at a gathering of Christians.)  Some passengers rode the electric cars from and to Lake Bluff to connect to the Chicago and North Western, and some rode the electric cars from and to Chicago.  But regular passengers got through, if not on the two steam railroads, on the North Shore Line, which for the day routed its Milwaukee service via the Shore Line.

SOMETHING ELSE ILLINOIS GOT RIGHT?

It's long been possible for careful Illinois collegians to start at a community college and sign up for courses that will transfer -- the term of art is articulation -- to a state university, provided the package of credits is right.  In Wisconsin, there have been teething troubles,  Now comes a further complication.  Some years ago, the state university system set up a number of regional centers that offered the liberal arts courses of freshman and sophomore years, with transfer to the four-year state universities, including Madison and Milwaukee.  These University of Wisconsin centers were distinct from the regional vocational and technical colleges already existing.  Recently, state legislators, looking for new ways to be tight with a buck, have noticed that there are thirteen regional centers and sixteen technical colleges, sometimes in close proximity.  The dual system seems to work well -- has anybody looked at the difficulties someone enrolling in a technical college has switching to the state universities?  And yet, in other states there are institutions that offer the liberal arts courses and the vocational and technical programs -- community colleges.

THE ACCUMULATION OF SMALL ADVANTAGES.

In a Federalist essay, Robert Tracinski is not impressed with the enthusiasm on the right for Donald Trump.

It seems strange that this kind of banana republic cult of personality would find purchase in a republican system (republican with either a small “r” or a big one), but maybe that’s not such an impenetrable paradox. Stable systems of representative government are notoriously slow and resistant to radical change. You can elect a lot of new people to Congress, as insurgents on the right have done in recent years, but the old party leadership stubbornly clings to their positions, and if the last winner of a presidential election is opposed to your agenda, then congressional leaders can’t get much done even if they try. Changing the political system is patient work that takes decades, and most of it is done, not by electing the “right guy” in a single election, but by promoting the right ideas to your fellow citizens and actually convincing people, which is really annoying work.

Well, yes, the Cult of the Presidency is a snare and a delusion, and yet Democrats have been riding it at least since Franklin Roosevelt and Happy Days Are Here Again, and through Camelot to the era of Hope and Change.

Perhaps Trump voters see in a presidential cult the easy way to change things that have not gone well.  Abigail Hall of The Independent Institute argues that it requires something to beat something, even as the New Deal and Great Society and all the rest breaks down.

I’d say that our battleground is one of ideas, not politics. As I’ve written elsewhere, ideas matter. I would also suggest one of the most important things we can do is recognize and point out that it’s government that’s the problem. There are other ways for individuals to coordinate their behavior than relying on an inherently flawed political system. How else do we bring about change? If the rules of the game are the problem, how to do we change the rules? For that, I cannot claim to have an answer (if I did, I’d collect my Nobel prize and retire.)

Via Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem, who suggests there is value both in thinking about the structure, and about persuading voters.

Success in the world of ideas would, unavoidably, produce millions of liberty-supporters who can only defend their views badly. Not everyone persuaded of liberty will refine their beliefs by exploring Rothbard or Friedman (or Bastiat or Spooner or Wilder Lane). Success in the world of ideas will result in voters more likely to support politicians who say libertarian-ish things. Further success will result in voters more discerning in their support for politicians who say libertarian-ish things.

Hall is right to warn that institutions matter, and political institutions by their nature tend to disappoint. Some of the best work in political economy gives us good reason to think so. But part of what success in the world of ideas looks like is an uptake of the ideas among politicians and campaigns and voters. It is not clear that progress requires squelching these political outgrowths.

Should we make it politically profitable for policymakers to do the right thing, or should we make it less profitable for policymakers to do anything?

Push 'em back on both fronts.  That may be how insurgencies develop. (If that sounds like the thesis of Kurt Schlichter's Conservative Insurgency, yes.)  It took the Perpetually Aggrieved years to destroy higher education and it will take years to reclaim it.

After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.
—Jay Parini, The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Roger Kimball manifesto that follows from that summary of the Long March Through the Institutions dates to 2005, and the roll-back of the Perpetually Aggrieved in higher education has a long way to go.  The old "vital progressive center" -- sclerotic or not, orange is the new pantsuit or not, is even more deeply entreched.

Change one mind at a time.

ILLINOIS, THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY?

Perhaps you can say it in Spanish without committing a micro-aggression.

If not for the steady growth of the Hispanic sector from 2010 to 2014, the population of Illinois would have plummeted by nearly 80,000 people, says a Northern Illinois University researcher who examines U.S. census data.

The rural counties are losing population or adding relatively few people, while Chicago and the collar counties are becoming more congested.

“The face of ethnicity in Illinois is rapidly changing,” NIU researcher Sherrie Taylor says. “As whites and blacks are leaving the state, Hispanics are moving in and being born at a rate that not only replaces, but exceeds, those losses in many counties.”

Numbers in Cook County demonstrate the changes afoot.

From 2013 to 2014, the total population of Cook was essentially unchanged, dropping by a miniscule 179 people. However, if 12,740 Hispanics had not moved into the county, the population would have tumbled by 13,000.

In Chicago’s collar counties, the numbers were smaller, but the scale of the change was much greater. In Lake County and DuPage counties, for every white that left the counties, two Hispanics moved in or were born.  Statewide last year, 89 of 102 counties benefited from Hispanics moving in to replace those who are leaving.

The report relies on Census reports not yet made public, interpreted by sworn Census agents (meaning people with security clearances whose public reports must be checked to protect confidentiality.)  Overall, though, Illinois chased out 10,000 residents on net during 2014.  The Census reports are insufficiently disaggregated to identify immigration, legal or illegal, in the population ticking the Hispanic ethnicity box during enumeration.

YOU CAN'T BUILD ENOUGH CAPACITY TO ALLEVIATE HIGHWAY CONGESTION.

Anthony Downs has written, extensively, about why not, and the people who build the roads may be catching on.  For the visible evidence, check out this post from Travel and Trains.

That's the Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas, where there is no paralleling triple-track Katy Railroad commuter line to take the pressure off the expressway, the way the Wisconsin Division, which modern Chicago riders understand as the Union Pacific Northwest Line, relieves the Kennedy Expressway, and the Racetrack, relieving the Reagan Tollway and Eisenhower Expressway.  (And even with the rail option, the Chicago expressways are often jammed both ways, even before the normal rush hour.)  Although it appears that there is excess capacity in one direction, it's a good bet that all the cars waiting to go away from the camera will be waiting to approach the camera location either later in the day, or the next day.

UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION.

But, suggests Daniel Drezner, there are multiple concepts of failure.

College is just a horrible place to send your children — because you are spending obscene sums of money for a substandard education.

The reasons why it’s a substandard education can get a bit confusing at times, however. Best not to think too much about it.

You still want to think about it? Okay, but I warn you, you’re not going to like my conclusions.

Spoiler alert: too much trendy leftism collides with too much career preparation.  That's the quintessential U.S. News problem (I've been picking up readers recently, that refers to something that concerns the relatively few people who work in or attend or aspire to the fifty or so institutions that claim to be in the top ten in those rankings.  If your environment is the land-grants or the mid-majors or the community colleges, the article might be of academic interest, but not something to pick a fight over in a meeting.)

There's a longer essay by American Enterprise's Andrew P. Kelly, reprinted by Minding the Campus, that might reward careful study.

The wage premium attached to college is down, but the wage premium between earnings of a college graduate and the earnings of a high-school graduate have actually increased over time. The same is true for associate’s degrees.

This sets up what I call the college conundrum: that some education after high school — associate’s degrees, certificates, technical training, some kind of education post-high school — has become more important to economic mobility, but it is also more expensive than ever before, and it is also riskier than before because it is both more expensive, and completion rates have actually declined over time.

This creates what I call the Enterprise Rent-A-Car problem. If you’ve watched college sports on TV, you’ve seen the commercials. Enterprise prides itself on hiring college graduates. And during college games, they profile former athletes who work and run their rental-car counters. So some of us see that, and I myself say, gosh, four years of college to run a rental car counter? College isn’t worth it any more, is it?

But for some parents, particularly in middle-income and working-class families, it is a much more terrifying proposition: my kids can’t even work at Enterprise Rent-A-Car if they don’t go to college.

And so harping on the fact that too many kids are going to college, I think, is tone-deaf. Tone-deaf to the anxieties of the middle class. And this is why it is a defining middle-class issue. People feel trapped. They can’t afford to go to college and they can’t afford not to; the cost of both have increased.

But more third-party payments aren't going to help. If you think higher education is expensive now, wait until it's free.

FAILING THE MARKET TEST.

I've long argued that, in higher education, there is excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention (otherwise known as paying twice for high school.)

Let the record show that new evidence out of Marquette University is not of the kind that would cause me to reconsider my hypothesis.

The College of Professional Studies is one of the great bad ideas the Marquette administration has ever had.

Lured, apparently, by the hope of making a lot of money, Marquette decided to jump into a burgeoning market: Degrees ‘R Us operations catering to “non-traditional” (read, older) students who want a Bachelor’s degree.

For many years at Marquette, departments were under pressure to offer a certain number of evening courses, in order to accommodate such students. We taught our share, and the vast majority of students were always the traditional collage-age [c.q.] undergraduates. But there was an integrity to the process. The non-traditional students paid the same tuition, took equally demanding courses, and met the same requirements as traditional students. When they got a degree, it was a bona fide Marquette degree.

But the sight of institutions offering cut-rate degrees at lower cost with much laxer requirements lured Marquette into trying to compete in a market in which it was not well-prepared to compete, offering an education inferior to its traditional one, doing something sharply removed from its distinctive competence.

We heard accounts, from the few regular Marquette faculty teaching in the College of Professional Studies, of being pressured to reduce course demands far below the level required of traditional Marquette students. Thus the College of Arts and Science refused to accept credits from Professional Studies toward graduation requirements (except in a few rare special cases).

For all the good it did.  Here, in business-speak, is how a provost says "we messed up."

Our extensive analysis of the College of Professional Studies revealed that while we have a high quality product, the college is not financially viable in its current model. We cannot continue to compete without a major influx of resources in a market where competition has increased dramatically in recent years. Our strategic plan, Beyond Boundaries, calls for all of us to ensure our valuable resources are sustainable and to be responsible stewards of these resources. Therefore, we will now work with the University Leadership Council, the University Academic Senate and faculty leaders across campus to review a proposed plan to phase out the college’s operations.

There's no link to the provost's statement. Apparently, despite all Marquette's plans to fire dissident political scientist John McAdams, he's still on the spam administrative information list.

RISING UP ANGRY.

Victor Davis Hanson grapples with the absence (or the reversal?) of racial healing during the era of Hope and Change.  There's a lot to grapple with.  I'll stick with the political economy, in the wake of the non-stimulus economic stimulus that nonetheless placated the right rent seekers.

Overregulating and overtaxing are fine for elites, who have enough money to either pay or find ways to avoid higher taxes. They don’t care much if their power, gas, or health costs go up — at least if they are led to believe that is the proper green atonement to pay for cooling the planet, putting a bait fish back into a delta, or shutting down a coal plant.  Obama in recompense for favoring the aristocratic elite feels that by expanding food stamps, disability insurance, housing, legal, and education subsidies, etc., the lower classes will be satisfied in lieu of a high-paying job on a fracking rig, in construction, or welding on the Keystone pipeline.

Yet in such a fossilized European system, the subsidized lower classes still see little chance of getting all the stuff they see advertised on television and computers, or the opportunities of the middle classes, and don’t wish to accept that their smart phones, Kias and air conditioning make them princes compared to the wealthy of 1970. Throughout history, the absence of parity, not the lack of means, has been the criterion for revolution. I’d go further: the more affluent the consumer underclass becomes due to Chinese-made goods, inexpensive high-tech appurtenances, and federal and state largess, the angrier it become that others have even more. Looters focus on sneakers and electronic goods, not flour and vegetables. Should Obama cut taxes, lift regulations, become pro-energy and pro-growth, and reform entitlements and the tax code to expand the economy at 5-6% growth per annum, would not all sorts of new opportunities open up for African-Americans?

If 1 million illegal aliens a year were not pouring across the border, would not employers vie for labor rather than seek to import it cheaply? Instead, the Democratic Party is mostly about an elite on top that, as penance for its privilege, supports subsidies for the mass below that remains distant and out of sight and mind. By that cheap fillip, I mean the Obama daughters don’t walk into the inner city any more than Chelsea Clinton lives in Jamaica Queens or Barbara Boxer has a granddaughter in the Madera city schools.

History rhymes: the long hot summers that began 50 years ago followed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and the Great Society and Model Cities that came after might have been offered as palliatives, for all the good that did.  Meanwhile The Best and The Brightest gave us Vietnam, and the Selective Service System meant the gentry got student deferments, and lower-middle class men from the inner city and the industrial banlieues got called up.  This time around, it's a volunteer military that has to be more careful with soldiers' lives, and yet the gentry gets a different kind of deferment.

African-American elites envision the urban underclass the same way that some La Raza third-generation Latinos view impoverished illegal immigrants from Oaxaca. Social disparities among the poor become arguments for affirmative-action leverage for elites, as if Barack Obama getting into Harvard Law or Lisa Jackson serving as EPA administrator will lower the crime rate in Baltimore or help change attitudes about illegitimacy in Oakland. Until we confess class is a greater barometer of privilege than race, I see no solution to the escalating tensions. How odd that upscale, one-percent African-Americans at NPR, the New York Times, and MSNBC monotonously blast white privilege, as if their own lives are always far more hurtful than those in Appalachia or rural Oklahoma.

Why is that odd? The upscale Perpetually Aggrieved, of whatever color, would rather have masses of disaffected people to keep disaffected and keep voting Democrat.

Tea Party image.

That's how ward-heeler politicians roll, dear reader.  But I have yet to hear a clear Libertarian or Republican voice suggesting that there is a better way, systematic or institutional or lingering racism or not.  Mr Hanson points out that many underemployed and working-class white folks lead lives not materially much different from those of their counterparts of color.  That's a coalition waiting to coalesce, with the right message.

INTERNAL TOURNAMENT MARKETS.

Robert B. Reich appears to be suggesting that screening for the high rungs of the corporate ladder begins as early as day 1 on the job.

The second thing to know about the new family-friendly work policies is that relatively few talented millennials are taking advantage of them.

They can’t take the time.

One of my former Berkeley students who’s now at a tech firm across the Bay told me he’s working fifteen-hour days.

Another, who’s at a Washington law firm, said she’s on call 24-7. Emails often arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why the emails haven’t been answered.

These young men won’t take paternity leave and these young women won’t even get pregnant – because it looks bad.

Forget work-life balance. It’s work-as-life.

A recent New York Times story about Amazon reports that when young workers hit the wall from the unrelenting pace, they’re told to climb it.

Why do the talented millennials work so hard?

Partly because being promoted – getting more equity, running a division, making partner – promises such vast rewards. Vaster rewards than any generation before them has ever been offered.

Also, you’re either on the fast track or you’re on a dead-end road.

“I've got to show total dedication,” one of my former students explained. “It's all or nothing.”

Which is why millennial men – who research shows have more egalitarian attitudes about family and gender roles than their predecessors – are nonetheless failing to live up to their values once they hit the treadmills.

But Mr Reich's first point is that opting out of the internal tournament means lower pay, less job security, and no shot at the big prizes.

There might be a research project here: why so few entrepreneurs, when the hot companies are expecting their future leaders to show the kind of dedication an entrepreneur, or a strong researcher, or an aspirant to high office or a starting position on a sports team, to call a few other tournaments to mind, demonstrates?

DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE WEEKEND.

Northern Illinois University's administration decided that hiring a chief diversity officer was a better use of payroll than strengthening the faculty.  Purdue University's president, former governor Mitch Daniels, recognized that the provost's job description is meeting with the governing councils of the various areas of the university (the deans of the colleges, Student Affairs, athletics, human resources) and abolished the separate position of diversity officer.

As provost, [Debasish] Dutta is in a better position than [now-redundant chief diversity officer G. Christine]Taylor to engage deans, department heads and faculty, he said. Elevating the position to the level of provost also will help bring attention to diversity across the campus, he added.

"I need more faculty involved in diversity," he said. "That is not only good for faculty but good for the institution as a whole. ... I'm convinced that we will make more progress than what we have made in the first five years."

Two provost fellows or Purdue faculty will help him accomplish these goals and manage another full-time workload.

Let us draw the curtain of charity over that "another full-time workload."

Faculty retirement makes more sense when professors have ways to use time that might otherwise be spent in meetings or filling in the forms that the director of diversity, or the provost, decide are more urgent than keeping current with the research or making the effort to engage the disengaged students who come to Jesus as finals approach.  College Insurrection points to Tax Prof quoting two Northwestern professors who probably aren't suggesting that Wall Street Journal readers invest in model railroad suppliers.

Strong tenure protections impose significant costs on higher education. Although these costs were voluntarily created when universities adopted tenure in the first half of the 20th century, they were markedly increased in 1994 when Congress prohibited mandatory retirement for tenured faculty.

Guaranteed employment for life will not promote good teaching or scholarly productivity when incentive pay is limited, and employment for life can be long. Studies on the abolition of mandatory retirement have found that it dramatically reduced faculty retirement rates. In addition, surveys recently carried out by investment firms suggest that three-quarters of faculty plan to teach far beyond normal retirement age or never retire.

Research productivity declines with age and the lack of retirement crowds out younger and more-productive scholars. Worse still, tenure has evolved in a way that makes it very difficult for universities to dismiss those who engage in serious misconduct or face the loss of mental capacity that would force them out of other jobs. Even if tenure had been sensible when mandatory retirement was permitted, it may now need to be rethought.

I found more rolling stock to add to the railroad. Life is good.

And the first draft of academic research can go public more rapidly (and perhaps exclusively) these days.  Whether "No Irish Need Apply" is common or rare is out of The Oxford Journal of Social History and all over Easily Distracted, where author Timothy Burke invited the middle-school author of the counterexamples to consider Swarthmore after finishing at Sidwell Friends.  (Go ahead, throw the privilege cards all over that one.)  The author of the paper that provoked the follow-on research, retired Illinois-Chicago historian Richard J. Jensen, is participating in the conversation there, where his "the author raises correct but minor points" objection is getting the scorn it deserves.

INSTEAD OF GOING BY SCHUSTERS.

Milwaukee's bus authority might have replaced the artistic weekly passes with card-reader-compatible material, but Rachel Quednau of City Space argues, to use a slogan The Transport Company once put on car-cards, that Transit Riding is a Bargain.

I always purchase a monthly pass. It’s just $62 and I get unlimited rides for 30 days–a steal. While on the bus, I crack open a good book and read for a solid 15 minutes. I love starting my day like this.

I wonder if there's still the custom, as the end of the month approaches, of passengers surreptitiously handing the nearly expiring pass out the window to what looks like a casual passenger.

I wonder if the successors to Schusters, now located at the far reaches of the bus network (and in some cases almost in sight of where the interurbans used to run) offer delivery of those larger items.

As you can see, the bus took me everywhere I needed to go on this day, and 95% of the time, that’s always the case. Only when I need to make the (very occasional) trip to a distant store or to transport a large item do I wish I had a car. As I’ve said before, my boyfriend and I chose our apartment chiefly because of its location, and I shared some ways to make this downtown living possible in this post. From my apartment, I can access at least six bus lines at any given time, by walking anywhere from 1 to 5 blocks, so I use the bus to meet up with friends, grocery shop, go to the library, and more. I also use my feet to run tons of errands, walk to the gym, visit bars and restaurants, and get to church. My location is crucial to my ability to use public transit as much as I do.

Ms Quednau is a resident of Milwaukee's Fashionable East Side, and most of her travels feature the Marquette or Wisconsin-Milwaukee or Third Ward.  Perhaps real estate in the Fashionable East Side is more valuable precisely because of the presence of the buses.  That, however, makes urban gentrification (how else describe the old William K. Walthers storefront on Water Street becoming a fern bar?) more interesting, as busses or trolleys or heavy rail figure in the mix.

WHEN THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN.

A few years ago, we featured the Head Brothers Circus, modelling in miniature the way the itinerant circus of the steam era would roll into town, unload the train, set up, put on two shows, tear down, and roll out of town.

Only Ringling Barnum still tour by train, but they show only in permanent arenas.  There are several truck-transported itinerant circuses roaming the United States and Canada, and Cole Brothers agreed to change their schedule in order to be on the grounds for the Worldwide Circus Summit.

Some things are as they always were, and some things have changed.

Care of the stock takes precedence.  Elephant top is up and secured early.  Two trailers, five pachyderms.  On the railroad shows, you'd find thirteen bulls and a lead horse on an extra-long stock car.

The Big Top, marquee, and midway will occupy this space.  Fortunately for circus enthusiasts, the buildings hosting the Summit activities are on the other side of the back lot.  Perhaps some of the roustabouts could grab some sleep in those trailers before set-up began.  In the era of trains, cast and crew had the opportunity to sleep while in transit.

No more circle of men with sledge hammers driving stakes, and the stake driving machine is now a pile driver head on a Bobcat.  These days, the flags are on the flagpoles, affixed to the top of the tent supports.  Yes, that Erector Set fixture behind is one of six that hold up the tents.  But men still have to shoot the side-wall poles later.  No, I did not see anyone recruiting kids to schlep the side-wall poles in exchange for a free pass, the way it once was.

A larger tractor sets the struts on jacks for subsequent raising.  We will see, no use of elephants or of tractors to get the struts up.

There are a few other Circus Summit attendees on the lot, including a few who know Cole Bros. owner John Pugh.  I overheard Mr Pugh explaining to his friends and acquaintances that the first pair of poles to go up have a pair of motors that walk the rope up the pole.  The spectator sees a number of guys and stays made fast to the stakes, and then the first poles start going up.

The remaining poles walk up the rope.  The rain caps at the top of the poles are in place before they're raised, with bale rings affixed to the bottom of the poles.

I wonder if circus personnel still refer to spectators as "lot lice" or if there's something more colorful and in Spanish these days.  Next, the tent will be unrolled and laced, then the crew will eat breakfast.  I had to get back to my display stand at the Summit.

Come evening, after the Windjammers concert, the crew had to set up the arena.  The big cat acts come either early in the show or immediately after intermission because it's hard to work around an arena.

The circus put on two shows Wednesday and two more shows Thursday and then it was time to move on.

First, remove the side walls and remove everything from inside the tent.  There's a lot of running rigging for the aerial acts to remove, as well as all the sets and ring curbs.

Now strike the tent.  Then there's a lot of heavy lifting involved undoing the laces and rolling the sections for loading.  Fortunately, there's no rain.

The last easily viewable act is the lowering of the struts.  First, the pairs of poles that walked up the rope walk down the rope.  Then the rope walks down the remaining poles, and most of the lights on the site can be turned off.  As I was photographing this, a number of the trucks and travel trailer combinations were on their way to the next lot.