Sibylla Bostoniensis

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Let us imagine two cousins: Franny and Nancy. They grew up in the same town. They went to the same elementary, junior high, and high schools. They saw a lot of each other growing up. They come from the same hardworking family, which you might call working class, in a community you might call a working-class community.

Nancy became a nurse. Franny took over the family farm.

Nancy made $80,000 last year working for a hospital in the big city.

Franny's farm did about two million dollars in business last year, but revenues aren't profit: when she's done paying for the seed and the fertilizer and the labor and the equipment, she cleared about $80,000.

( Read more... [7,840 words] )

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Delightful serendipity this: going back through my old bookmarks looking for something else entirely, I tripped over this old article from 2017 - which I had totally forgotten about - but which tessellates with today's health headlines.

2017 July 31: inverse.com: "The Mediterranean Diet Only Works for Rich People, Study Says":

If you eat mostly fruits, vegetables, grains, carbs, and non-meat proteins, plus a moderate amount of seafood and dairy products, you're following the so-called "Mediterranean diet" based on the food traditionally eaten by people in the Mediterranean region, and you have a reduced risk of heart disease. But there's a major catch, according to a report on the ongoing "Moli-sani Study" published Monday in the International Journal of Epidemiology: The health benefits were more often experienced by wealthy eaters, because high-quality food in the diet doesn't come cheaply.

A team of Italian researchers from the Mediterranean Neurological Institute (I.R.C.C.S. Neuromed) have been working on the Moli-sani Study since 2005, administering questionnaires and performing health tests on more than 18,000 men and women from southern Italy. In this latest report, they explain how the socioeconomic status of participants has affected results.

Within the bracket of participants who best adhered to the Mediterranean diet – which is "measured by a score comprising fruits and nuts, vegetables, legumes, cereals, fish, fats, meat, dairy products and alcohol intake" – there was still a wide spectrum of results; in other words, participants who ate roughly the same amount of the appropriate foods did not exhibit the same health benefits. Wealthier and better-educated participants experienced a more reduced cardiovascular risk than others.

Researchers speculated that

"Quality of foods may be as important for health as quantity and frequency of intake," explained Licia Iacoviello, head of the Laboratory of Nutritional and Molecular Epidemiology at the institute, in a press release.

And now, today. We may have found the smoking gun:

2023 July 25: Neuroscience News: "AI Unlocks Olive Oil's Potential in Alzheimer's Battle":

[...]

The Mediterranean diet, rich in EVOO, has been associated with a reduced risk of dementia and cognitive decline.

[...]

The findings identified ten EVOO phytochemicals with the highest likelihood of impacting AD protein networks. Compounds like quercetin, genistein, luteolin, and kaempferol exhibited promising effects on [Alzheimer's disease] pathogenesis.

"EVOO" stands for "extra virgin olive oil". Olive oil comes in several grades, of which "extra virgin" is the highest. It comes from the first pressing of the highest quality olives in the best condition, and as such it has the highest concentrations of all of the desirable flavor-imparting chemical compounds.

The next grade down is "virgin olive oil". It's made from less good olives in less good condition, and consequently has additional chemical compounds in it that are not aesthetically pleasing, often a byproduct of the olives losing their freshness.

Further on down the scale is regular olive oil, called in the American market "pure olive oil". It's made by taking virgin olive oil and refining it, to remove the rancid notes - which also removes most of the other notes too; this would leave it pretty much completely characterless as an oil, so a bit of extra virgin olive oil is added back into it so it has at least a little flavor.

In an important sense, extra virgin olive oil is the least pure form of olive oil, having in it more of the essence of the olive - more of the olives' phytochemicals - which gives it its richer flavor, rather than just the bare oil, as the refined variety does.

It is, of course, usually the most expensive grade.

Sometimes it's not. As this article for the food industry explains, in times of poor olive harvests, various economic and logistical forces tend to result in simultaneous lower supply of regular olive oil and higher supply of EVOO, resulting in regular olive oil prices rising and EVOO prices dropping to meet in the middle.

But generally the way to bet, at least historically before the climate went to hell, was that EVOO was notably more expensive than virgin or pure olive oil.

Now the earlier article was about heart disease, and the newer article is about Alzheimer's disease; futhermore, this latter study is in silico, and has not been proved out on human subjects. But in light of this, I would not be surprised to find out that what differentiated the effect of the Mediterranean diet on heart disease between the rich and the poor was entirely due to the phytochemicals beneficial to heart disease being found in EVOO, and not in ordinary olive oil.

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“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

For most of my adult life, I had bought my winter boots by going to Filene's Basement – the original one, in downtown Boston – in August. This pretty reliably turned up something tolerable I could wear for about $20 (in 1990s dollars).

( Then, one year, I failed to acquire boots in August. (Read More) [5,630 Words] )

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[Read in black and white]

One of the characteristics of hipsterism is the "ironic" affectation of styles and tastes of working-class people. This use is called "ironic", but what that means in how the term is widely being employed to describe hipsters is: taking a pose of pretending to like something that it is understood to be unlikable.

( Read more [1,240 Words] )

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Oh, WOW.

When I wrote "[p/a/s, biz/econ, sysdyn, Patreon] Massless Ropes, Frictionless Pulleys", it kept trying to spiral out of control, so I made some ruthless decisions to cut some lines of discussion.

One of them was about misogyny. I couldn't help notice that a huge amount of the job functions, today, that are entirely coordinative communication, are gendered female in our society, today: secretaries, admin assistants, receptionists, telephone operators. And in traditional gender roles in marriages (presumed heterosexual) much coordinative communication with subordinates (children, servants) and outsiders (extended family, neighbors, social contacts) is assigned the woman: managing the social calendar, sending Christmas cards and thank you notes, booking appointments.

And then there's the thing that the treatment of coordinative communication in business has a particularly weird, characteristic status: it's treated simultaneously as incredibly important and vital to the enterprise, but not something that you (can, should or do) pay for. Which it exactly the same weird, characteristic status that women's domestic labor has had for at least 100 years in our culture.

So, of course, I started wondering if there was a connection between the literal economic devaluing of coordinative communication in business and the devaluing of work that is seen as "women's work".

Turns out, somebody else wrote that. On March 24, the same day I posted "Massless Ropes", Longreads posted an excerpt from Nikil Saval's Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, titled ‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker.

It makes the case. Back to the 19th century. Or even earlier, depending on how you look at it.

It does so incidentally. Misogyny is not its primary topic, but it's so core to the issue it comes right through. No, it's about the history of, well, coordinative communications workers and the rise of the concept of the "office".

It is absolutely fabulous, and though long, highly recommended, most especially for those who like secret histories.