So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 18) What happened to the grown-up snow day
Hello! In follow-up burrow owl news, I need to point you all to @voraciousbrain's tweet of today, which features a slightly more dignified collection of birds.
Also, I only got one "yes" vote for Whitman's Sampler. You people know your chocolate! I myself am angling for a box of these, because who doesn't dream of purple chocolate?
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Adults no longer get snow days. This is the conclusion New York magazine came to, and it's one that the folks at Wharton hail as a boon to productivity. Why? Because people are less likely to want to go out and play in the snow. Quoth the researcher:
“When you are sitting in your office and staring out at an 80-degree day, [you might think,] ‘I’d really like to be out in that,’” said [Bradley] Staats. However, “when it’s dumping rain or [you're] in a blizzard, you might say, ‘What the heck? Why not focus on the work that is here in front of me?’”
So what? Thanks to two factors -- the decline of unions (which had helped push employers to accept that a workweek had limits) and the rise of telecommuting (which has helped to expand the workweek by about 17% for people who do have the option) -- American workers no longer get breaks to deal with real life when things like extreme weather happen.
Who cares? Workers in blizzard-prone areas. It's great for some workplaces that a blizzard won't get in the way of quarterly targets -- especially since weather is so often a factor in business (vol 1, issue 53; vol 1, issue 63).
But all those employees working at home the day after a blizzard? They're trying to work while also trying to handle kids who do have snow days -- and after putting in the usual 9.5 hours, they're going to have to shovel all the snow. It's the worst of all possible worlds.
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Speaking of weather, California's freaky warm, dry spell is going to ruin your diet. Two tasty staples are at risk thanks to our horrific, once-every-few-thousand-years drought.
First up: warm water killed 95% of chinook salmon eggs last summer, a die-off directly linked to lower water levels (and their corresponding temperature rise over the summer). Although California Dept. of Fish and Game workers have released 600,000 Chinook salmon fry, this is really a move designed to save the 2017 salmon season and offset two disastrous, drought-affected years.
Second, it's been quite warm in the central valley this winter, and that's got two potentially disastrous consequences: Crops like cherries and almonds need a protracted winter chill in order to set fruit, and that hasn't happened yet. The other possible disaster in the making: trees begin to set buds and blossoms -- and then there's a late frost that destroys blossom, reducing later fruit yield in the year.
So what? This could be a very bad year for California's agricultural industry. And not only will farmers suffer, consumers will too -- a scarcity in crops leads to higher prices in the market.
Who cares? Environmentalists. People love salmon -- but farming it can have deleterious environmental consequences. As the Monterey Bay Aquarium explains:
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When farmed salmon escape from ocean pens, they threaten wild salmon and other fish by competing with them for food and spawning grounds.
Waste from most salmon farms is released directly into the ocean.
Parasites and diseases from farmed salmon can spread to wild fish swimming near the farms.
Salmon farmers may use pesticides and antibiotics to control outbreaks of disease among the fish. When consumers eat this fish, the residues from the chemicals may affect their health or interfere with medicines they're taking.
It takes over two pounds of wild fish to grow one pound of farmed salmon. As a result, farming salmon actually uses more fish than it produces, which puts more pressure on wild populations.
So if California's salmon industry is pressed, there's an opening for more farm-raised salmon to make it to market. A depressed Californian salmon run is also good news for Alaska's well-run wild salmon industry -- and could cement its place as the leading environmentally-responsible option for people who want sustainable fish.
Other stakeholders in this developing drought-changes-the-diet story: big agriculture (which will face its own decisions about how to meet demand and set prices); locavores who will have to figure out how to square their grocery budget with existing options; the midwest, which may actually have the water to grow many of America's favorite crops. Reports Mother Jones:
According to a 2010 Iowa State University study, just 270,000 acres of land—about what you'd find in a single Iowa county, and a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of acres devoted to corn—could supply everyone in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin with half of their annual tomatoes, strawberries, apples, and onions, and a quarter of their kale, cucumbers, and lettuce.
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Your pop culture note of the day: I am impressed by the incredibly close scrutiny Kelly Conaboy applied to the 50 Shades of Grey press tour, which just sounds awful. I don't think the Zapruder footage was studied with the same attention to detail that Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson's dog-and-pony press shows get from Conaboy, and we are all the better for this misapplication of human endeavor.
Also: When given the assignment/opportunity to write about which regions of the U.S. are leading in ticket pre-sales for Fifty Shades of Grey, The AV Club's @seanoneal rose to the challenge and delivered the news in the prose style of Fifty Shades. The one safe-for-sending excerpt I can share:
Again and again, the Midwest opened up its trembling purse to Grey, coming repeatedly to the Fandango website and purchasing far more than the average in pre-sale tickets. Oh, it bought so much…. Ah jeez.
And so long as we're on the topic of Fifty Shades of Gray -- and really, hasn't this newsletter been building up to this topic? -- I want to also pass along two excellent links that my pals Kim and Dan shared with me: Julieanne Smolinski's hilarious analysis of the prose style for Fifty Shades and Alan Scherstuhl's pithy little broadside pointing out that "mainstream entertainment" includes things women like.
There. You can now plausibly fake your way through any conversation you might have with someone who's really into 50 Shades of Grey.
This is either a Valentine's Day gift to you or the kind of life skill you hope you never have to use.
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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Are there typos? I apologize in advance.
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