Presidential Pie

A numbered pi plate helps you slice this pie for maximum effect.

Approximately four years ago, then candidate Obama challenged a crowd to produce a sweet potato pie that is better than his mother-in-law's. There were no takers. This is not a sincere attempt to win, although it does represent all of the lessons learned in five years of weekly pie making. Indeed, your pie maker doubts that his President is impolitic enough to choose any stranger's pie over his mother in law's, especially since she lives in the White House. No one would hold fair contest in those conditions unless they were epically bad at relationships, and would have trouble securing his party's nomination, much less the Presidency.

The story of this effort begins with pie crust dough that had been left in the refrigerator for about a week. This has little impact of flavor, but does tend to activate more of the gluten in the flour, so you have to be careful not to handle it too much lest it become tougher than an aluminum pie plate. Turns out the crust will shrink quite a bit, although this is not a problem if you make an upstanding ridge. It's a serious problem if you try to make a checkerboard crust for a Hoosier Sugar Cream Pie. The net result is that 1/3 of the filling from Ken's Sugar Cream Pie had to be left in the pot.

From that mistake, the Presidential Pie was born:

While the crust is shrinking pre-baking, place a pan with

3 sweet potatoes, peeled and diced

to soak in the extra heat. Once they are tender, about 2 crusts worth of pre-baking, pull them out and scoop 2 cups into a food processor and reduce the oven temperature to 350F. Add

2 eggs

3/4 cup whole milk

2/3 cup light brown sugar

3/4 t ground ginger

3/4 t ground nutmet

4 freshly ground cloves.

Adjust spice amounts depending on their age; these amounts are too much for newly purchased spices.

Process the mix until there are only split-pea sized pieces of sweet potato. Around the outer edge of the partially pre-baked crust, place

8 dried apricots

and in the middle, arrange a circle of

8 preserved figs

Pour the mix into a partially pre-baked crust (with an upstanding ridge!) and bake until the center only jiggles a little bit, roughly 45 min. Once the pie is out of the oven and cool enough to touch, scoop about

1/2 whole milk yogurt

into the leftover Sugar Cream Pie filling over low/medium heat, stirring continuously until it has a yogurt-like texture. Pour and spoon this over the mostly-cooled pie and then let sit over night.

PMCIN Pie

Grain Production: You don't need to irradiate homemade pies.

Fruit Production: Access to transport means access to good food.

Animal Husbandry: Sometimes, a subsidy is well hidden, like in the clean up costs of nitrogen pollution.

Housing: A weak government and iffy property rights leads to epic poverty. And, as the Top Gear guys love to remind us, there's isn't a good mobile solution.

Health: The NRDC takes on "Human Security" from a health perspective.

Transportation: NATO's got a webpage on piracy that should help remind us how important Navies are to our way of life.

Energy: The cheap oil is mostly gone, will there be enough of an economy to left to pay for the transition to other sources?

Security: It's prime time for the Navy, maybe not for scientists, but maybe there is hope for us yet.

Epiphany Pie

Last week, the Fuzzy Wups B^n staff celebrated the Solemnity of the Epiphany, sometimes called Three Kings' Day. We celebrated with friends, and, of course, made a pie.

As is becoming the P&P standard, symbolism to celebrate the priest, prophet and king was baked in. The crust used flour and wine vinegar. While your pie maker is interested in entomophagy, locus are hard to come by this time of year, and so had to make do with a honey sweetened cottage cheese pie from Simply in Season (an excellent book for everyone interested in a sustainable kitchen). Not shown in the picture, there was a rough attempt at the Natal Star using a broiled crust with the background darkened with homemade mulberry syrup, itself good enough to be served to royalty.

First PCMIN Pie of 2012

Grain Production: Even in the US, food is getting expensive.

Fruit Production: The vision of the urban farm is getting closer.

Animal Husbandry: Local meats need mobile processing, apparently.

Housing: Who's got a claim?

Health: How to game a study, lawsuits pending.

Transportation: Driving isn't as cool as it used to be, and private infrastructure funding is no balm in India

Energy: Optimism is bad. Waste disposal is often the most hazardous part of production, but helping clean up is a great job creator

Security: Australia is recruiting to build up their navy as the USN and RN downsize. Meanwhile, Mexico's recent history shows us that it's possible to set up multiple warring governments with the profits of the drug trade alone, as long as you don't mind pretty bad services.

Pie-in-the-sky: It starts with wealthy adventurers, then proceeds to iron men in wooden ships. Well, crazy men in leaky ships until we come up with something more poetic.

Bankruptcy in a No Credit Risk world

This is a bit out of date, but with Kodak about to do something very similar, it's topical again.

The AA bankruptcy deal is a great example of "No Credit Risk" in action. Their bondholders will generally have to accept lower rates of return, but given that any leveraged bondholder probably as access to near-zero interest loans, that's not really a big deal. Anyone holding tons of AA stock without a diverse portfolio is pretty dumb, and the recent move by central banks to flood markets with cash have probably offset most investors' equity losses. Customers won't get stranded, or even bothered, by the deal. With the exception of stock options, this won't even touch executive pay.

So, who gets hurt? AA's union workers, retirees and small cities. This is very bad, and makes very clear that managers are welcome to negotiate in bad faith with unions and municipalities because current bankruptcy law protects their personal assets and even their compensation, while their counter-parties have no recourse but to accept further reduced pay and services. The union's primary recourse, striking, is effectively against the law and they cannot go to court to petition for redress because the institution that's harming them is under the judicial branch's protection. In other words, there is no legal redress except to quit, and unless there is a substantial upturn in employment, that option exposes its takers to legal liability for negligence in the care of their families and at a minimum places their own assets at risk to their creditors. Small municipalities often rely on one or two major carriers to provide their business community with access to the outside world, and a major factor in the location of new factories, call centers and offices is airport access. This type of consolidation further reduces the geographic distribution of opportunity to locales near major cities that are more expensive, further decreasing the profitability of labor-intensive manufacturing jobs and requiring that they be done in places with higher cost of living, further increasing workers' reliance on credit cards thus perpetuating the cycle of wealth concentration.

Your pie maker is not opposed to large profits, only to sustained economic profits or those obtained by ignoring their externalities. This is not an obscure question of justice, it is a question of which enforcement mechanism we want to endure under the immutable "Law of Zero Long-term Economic Profits." If there is an industry that is inherently more profitable than any other, a market economy guarantees that people will move into it until it is no longer more profitable than its next-most-profitable competitor unless there are sizable barriers to entry or coercive restrictions that protect the current beneficiaries. In that case, the non-benefiting set must either develop cultural norms that allow them to accept a permanent lower status or pursue efforts to erode the barriers to entry, legal or otherwise. The first is antithetical to idea of an American Dream, and the second explains a lot about the TEA Party and Occupy protests, since the major banks can only hire so many people.

So how do we get from here to what National Academies Sustainability Forum participants refer to as "small 's' sustainability"? The President has offered his Clintonian vision of higher taxes on wealthy households to fund infrastructure spending, and thus increase the velocity of money and explicitly redistribute income. It is generally true that US infrastructure needs help, and that a large number of the unemployed are in the construction trade, so this idea has some merit. However, past experience with substantial increases in government funding [[stimulus]] is that they do not pay for physical infrastructure but instead ship money to preserve existing government contracts with service workers, and so it's hard to call this campaign promise credible. Indeed, attempts at social engineering through the tax code, whether inspired by Robin Hood or Ayn Rand, typically incentivize unexpected behaviors and lead to calls for greater regulatory intervention that creates employment for lawyers and accountants, at least until those markets saturate because there isn't enough economic activity to merit further regulation. The GOP vision of protecting "job creators" from tax liability is laughable on its face, as the main product of their last serious effort to do that is a massive oversupply of unsustainable housing, Depression-level private debt and the highest unemployment rate since WWII.

According to most business owners, customers create jobs. Rich people make the best customers if they feel they can get more out of buying something than they can out of Investing it. Put another way, the best way to create jobs is to convince rich people (i.e. those with disposable income) that the best return on an increasing percentage of their money is to pay someone to do something tangible instead of depositing it with an investment firm. In economics-speak, this means increasing the marginal product of labor relative to capital (in the Basel-III sense, not Adam Smith's). For that, redistribution from wealthy to poor is only marginally effective today as much of the income will simply flow from the industrial executive to the financial investor, often enough the same person, after a finance executive takes a cut. Instead, think of ways to reward people for making and maintaining stuff, for providing services in person that improve quality of life and reduce cost of living.