Main and Lady

Following our visit to AgFirst Farm Credit Bank today, Nancy and I had refreshments at a sidewalk café - Cantina 76 - not far from the State House. We were at the intersection of Main and Lady. You can just barely see the tables on the sidewalk at the bottom of the photo.

Federal Land Bank Building

Nancy and I walked by the old Federal Land Bank building at 1401 Hampton Street in Columbia, South Carolina. The photo above is the cornerstone.

AgFirst Farm Credit Bank is the successor to the Federal Land Bank of Columbia. AgFirst moved to the Bank of America building at 1901 Main Street in 2014. The building on Hampton Street is now apartments - the Land Bank Lofts. Below is the entrance:

The plaque to the left of the door says "Federal Land Bank Building." The plaque on the right says "AgFirst Farm Credit Bank."

The reason for our visit to Columbia was visiting our friends at AgFirst today.

Confederate Womens Memorial

The monument pictured above is on the south side of the South Carolina State House. The inscription reads:

TO THE

SOUTH CAROLINA WOMEN

OF THE CONFEDERACY

1861-65

—

REARED

BY THE MEN OF THEIR STATE

1909-11

Nancy thought it was odd that the men would say that they reared the women. I think "reared" refers to the monument.

The men of South Carolina were very appreciative of the women of their state. Following are the inscriptions on the other three sides of the monument (click on any photo to enlarge it):

SC State House Trivia

We toured the South Carolina State House on Tuesday morning. The photo above is the south side. The statue that looks like it is standing on top of the white pickup truck is of Strom Thurmond.

Inside the Senate chamber in the State House is a portrait of Ann Pamela Cunningham (1816-1875), of Rosemont Plantation, South Carolina:

From the Wikipedia entry for Ann Pamela Cunningham:

[She] is credited with saving George Washington's beloved home Mount Vernon from ruin and neglect. In a letter to Ann Pamela, Cunningham's mother described the crumbling condition of the estate as she saw it in 1853 while on a steamship heading down the Potomac River. Cunningham was in her 30s and, having been crippled in a riding accident as a teenager, decided she would initiate a campaign to save the estate. She raised funds to purchase Mount Vernon by launching an unprecedented appeal for donations through newspaper articles directed toward "the Ladies of the South" and founded The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union, the group that still owns and manages Washington's estate, and served as its first regent. The group purchased Mount Vernon for $200,000. The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association is the oldest private preservation organization in the United States.

On one of the walls inside the State House is a plaque explaining the origin of the poinsettia flower:

Joel Roberts Poinsett (1779-1851) of Charleston, South Carolina, was a diplomat, statesman, architect and naturalist. The language on the plaque that is relevant to the flower:

President John Quincy Adams appointed him first Minister to Mexico, 1825-30. He brought the Christmas flower, named in his honor, Poinsettia from Mexico.

SC State House

SC State House

Photo is the north side of the South Carolina State House in Columbia, SC, taken Monday evening. We toured on Tuesday morning.

PA State House

PA State House

Photo is the Pennsylvania State House in Harrisburg, PA. We did not tour (it was Sunday, after all) but we stopped for lunch at the nearby Bollywood Bar and Grille. Good North Indian cuisine.

New Years Day 2017

Nancy and I both retired at the end of 2016, and we celebrated New Years Day 2017 with brunch at home with family and friends followed by an optional snowshoe hike from the Plot Road to Roundtop Shelter on the Long Trail in Johnson.

The photo above is a little before sunset on the way out. Below are photos of the crew of seven hardy hikers at the shelter.

It was a nice day, temps in the upper 20s (F), windy in places, mostly cloudy. There was about a foot of snow in the woods. If we look happy, it might have been because of the hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps!

Retirement

I have retired after 32 years with Farm Credit including 10 years as President and CEO of Yankee Farm Credit. It was a wonderful adventure! Some of that adventure was captured on the Yankee Farm Credit Blog.

Now a new adventure begins!

People ask me what I'm going to do in retirement. After all, I've been busy with my career in recent years. Busy enough that blogging here has slowed to almost nothing. What am I going to do to keep busy now?

Well, here is George's Strategic Plan for Retirement, if nothing more exciting comes along:

1. Eat, drink, sleep, exercise and be merry!

2. Help Nancy finish hiking the Long Trail.

3. Read books with big ideas. A few to start with:

• The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Joseph Tainter (1988)
• Debt: The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber (2011)
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari (2015)

4. Blog about ideas in said books (and others).

5. Travel with Nancy and blog about it. It's a big, interesting world out there, and we look forward to spending more time exploring it.

6. Spend time in Montpelier learning about how our state government works, especially the Legislature. And blog about it. For some earlier thoughts on government, see my 2013 post on Slow Democracy, Slow Government.

In short, the plan is to spend more time traveling in both the physical world and the world of ideas, looking for adventures to blog about. So stay tuned here!

P.S. Nancy retired at the same time as me. She said she "wanted to be done with me." The photo is from her retirement party. I want to thank the board of directors of Yankee Farm Credit for organizing a classy retirement party for me. Both Nancy and I were better dressed and better behaved on that occasion.

Update 2/08/17: I will continue to blog here about travel adventures in the physical world, but I created a new blog for writing about adventures in the world of ideas. Details in this post: The Switchel Philosopher.

Fewer Rules, More Cooperation

This TED talk by Yves Morieux is excellent:

How too many rules at work keep you from getting things done

His theme is that there are too many rules and not enough cooperation. I like his illustration of effective cooperation, a relay race, even if the French women beat the U.S. women in his example.

Mr. Morieux's earlier TED talk is also good, and provides further discussion of his theme:

As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify

Mr. Morieux is a business consultant, speaking to a business audience about business examples. I certainly support the application of these themes to business. I also think that these themes are even more applicable to how a free people should organize their government. As our world becomes more complex, we have created an ever more complex government. Our government is now far too complex. What we need now is a simpler government with fewer rules (laws and regulations), and more cooperation outside of government.

A word about cooperation: it is by definition voluntary. If you need laws to force "cooperation," then it isn't cooperation. It's authoritarianism. The essence of government is coercion, which is the opposite of cooperation.

Of course, there is a yin-yang tension here. We need some amount of government to prevent anarchy and chaos. But too much government can be as bad as too little government.

There has been recent support for the idea that too much government is a problem from a surprising source: the White House. I say "surprising" because in my part of the business world, agricultural finance, we have seen more new laws and regulations during the Obama administration than during any other time in my career. By far. The Dodd-Frank Act (signed 7/21/10) and the Food Safety Modernization Act (signed 1/04/11), and the endless regulations flowing from these laws, are just two examples.

The most recent assertion out of the White House that too many rules create problems concerns land-use regulation (e.g., zoning):

Why White House Economists Worry About Land-Use Regulations

A pronouncement from last summer was about occupational licensing:

White House Warns States On Job-Licensing Requirements

I applaud this support for less government from the White House! (I wonder if they would go so far as to support Slow Government?)

Yves Morieux does not mention that much of the reason for increasing complexity in business is because it is forced on us by an overzealous government. But he is right that we in business bring much unneeded complexity on ourselves. We need to fight counterproductive complexity on both fronts: what we do to ourselves, and what we allow government to do to us.

China's Citizen Scores

This is scary. From Computerworld:

ACLU: Orwellian Citizen Score, China's credit score system, is a warning for Americans

Mandatory for all Chinese citizens by 2020.

Making It All Up

The cover story in the October 19, 2015 issue of The Weekly Standard is titled "Making It All Up." It is about the state of science in the behavioral sciences. It's not pretty, as you can guess from the title of the article.

The article discusses an August report in the widely-respected journal Science titled "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science" (link). Scientists attempted to reproduce the results of 100 studies published in three psychology journals:

The Reproducibility Project: Psychology was a collaborative, crowdsourced effort of 270 authors and 86 additional volunteers. Across multiple criteria, we successfully reproduced fewer than half of the 100 original findings investigated. (link)

Fewer than half! This is bad science.

Why does this matter? One reason is that bad science contributes to mistaken ideas about the human condition. Another reason is that bad science undermines public support for and trust in science itself.

The problem is not just these 100 relatively current studies. The article explores the weaknesses of several landmark studies in psychology including the famous Stanley Milgram electric shock experiments conducted at Yale in the 1960s.

Another famous psychology study, not mentioned in The Weekly Standard article, was the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo in the 1970s and the subject of a 2015 movie by that name. For a good discussion of the weaknesses of that study see: Why Zimbardo's Prison Experiment Isn't in My Textbook.

Beware the findings of social scientists!

The gold standard of what it means to "know something" in science is still Feynman's 1974 commencement address at Caltech: Cargo Cult Science. I have seen numerous references to this theme lately in widely different fields. Search for "Feynman integrity" on Google to see some examples.

The Coddling of the American Mind

The cover story in the September issue of The Atlantic is titled "The Coddling of the American Mind." The opening sentences:

"Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense."

The article explains microaggressions and trigger warnings – two concepts now common on campus.

Here is another article on this topic from The Atlantic, by a different author:

The Rise of Victimhood Culture

Here are some thoughts on this topic by Megan McArdle, whom I've quoted on this blog before:

How Grown-Ups Deal With 'Microaggressions'

And here is a local Vermont story about trigger warnings on campus:

Public reading of a fictional description of a rape sparks debate over freedom of expression at arts college

Our world is changing. I'm not sure for the better.

UPDATE: Although the Atlantic article does not mention this, the title of the article must be a reference to this 1987 book by Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.