On Tasteless Tomatoes

There is finally a book that explains why our tomatoes are tasteless: Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook, who discussed his book in a very good interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.  It has been my long-running (and not very funny) joke that tasteless tomatoes were a government plot (because of Dept. of Ag funding for transportable varieties), but now I learn that it is actually Florida's fault.  Good news is that more tomatoes are being grown in northern greenhouses, and coming from Mexico, so may be a bit tastier, but consumers need to choose based on taste, which they have not do so far (maybe because there was not much choice!). So, why are Hong Kong tomatoes (and many fruits) tasteless?

Business Anthropology

Another example that some of the best ethnography appears in the business sections of major papers.  This NY Times article by Steven Davidoff contrasts the values and modus operandi of venture capitalists with those of private equity. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, the difference can be important. The VC are Silicon Valley based, and form a community, so share the spoils. The PE are typically NY based and take over companies to restructure them, or make them run better, before they re-sell them. Often they sell them highly leveraged, or the profit comes out of tax breaks and other accounting shenanigans, which is why many are critical of PE. In the case of Silver Lake selling Skype that is discussed in the article, Silver Lake as a PE could not care less whether they are liked or not, so will not spend the $1 million it would take to allow employees who have left Skype to cash in their options.  On a $4 billion deal, they could afford to make this problem go away. But they are PEs, so they don't care; VCs would have, since you never know who you'll have to work with again in Silicon Valley. Great article.

Rugby t-shirts

Someone should collect pictures of humorous rugby t-shirts.  Here is a start.
 

Women's rugby: Aggressive by nature, rugby by choice.

Rugby: If it wasn't a game, the police would be called out to stop it.

 

Fairport Rugby

Fullback

Maul

Pitch

Ruck

Prop

Lock

Flanker

Center

Hooker

Scrumhalf

Winger

Number 8

Flyhalf

Excesses of Capitalism

The idea that corporations are real persons continues to grew. Now a mutual fund that is an empty shell because it is owned by another entity has been declared the only "person" that can be sued (but since it has no money...). See the NY Times' incredulous editorial here.

Money as Gifts

Princeton sociologist Viviana Zeilizer has an interesting Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes in which she argues that "Nostalgic traditionalists and hard-nosed realists" are both wrong when they argue that money is or is not suitable for gifts. "For over a century, Americans have been demonstrating remarkable ingenuity in turning money into meaningful personal gifts." She has interesting examples from the early 20th century issues of The Ladies' Home Journal of ways that people hide money in cards, artwork, or in boxes and small gifts. Very interesting, but she this tension is strictly American, or "Western." Chinese have no problem giving money as gifts. It is the major form of gifts at the Lunar New Year holiday. There is something about money being dirty, be it from religious or feudal traditions, that still requires it to be hidden or laundered in the West, while it can be used "rationally" or "realistically" in China.

Why China is in a bubble

It is not a popular view here (in Hong Kong), but it seems to me that we are in the midst of a bubble. Some simple signs:

• Soaring property prices
• Inflation rising rapidly (just announced at 5.1% for November, up from 4.4% in October and including an 11.7% rate for food), such that it has already caused riots (one in a school in Yunnan, over the rise in lunchbox prices, made the front page of the SCMP)
• Repeated attempts by the government in China, and in Hong Kong, to rein in speculation by raising bank deposit requirements and the property sales tax
• The growing difficulty people are having finding a job, especially the young new graduates (see the NY Times article on this here)
• The smug conceit one often hears that "China is different" (where have we heard that before...)

Hard to figure out how and when this is going to end, however. But it will not be pretty.

Bad gender research

Here are some comments I made to a journalist to critique some recently published social research. Basically, when you ask people yes/no questions, the number may be misleading. Most Hong Kong residents don't think much about homosexuality, and don't care much about it either. So asking them if they are for or against it is not very meaningful. Since the original study made the news, I was happy to comment to show that it was misleading. I'm a bit disappointed that this has ended up in the China Daily, the PRC mouthpiece that no one reads, but anyway...