Number Five. Gear Control dot com. Chicken tax makes trucks expensive.
This goes back to 1964 and the export of inexpensive chickens from the U.S. to Europe. It’s important to know your chicken history because those who are ignorant of the chickens are destined to be one. Or something that somebody said that was like that.
In the 1960s, the European Common Market realized their chicken farmers on the continent would not be able to compete with American chicken parts, so they raised tariffs on lots of products being imported from the U.S.
As we all know, tariffs are really simple to understand.
I’ll explain it to you: Tariffs are government things that make some things expensive for some people and other things cheap for some other people.
Most people tend to buy things that are cheap, so if you make something really expensive nobody will buy it, and so you shouldn’t have made it in the first place.
And there are other explanations that are a lot more confusing… so let’s just move on.
Anyway, when Europe made their tariffs, it made chickens expensive, which made people in the U.S. mad, because then no Frenchman would buy a Tennessee chicken.
So President Johnson, the U.S. president, made a tariff of his own to make French brandy and German pickup trucks really expensive for Americans to buy.
Which made the Frogs and the Krauts mad — er, Frenchmen and Germans — and probably also the Americans who wanted to buy the German pickup trucks, but who cares what they want, because someone who buys a pickup probably won’t vote Democrat anyway.
And then the Europeans eventually quit putting the tariff on American chickens — and by the way, does anybody in this story care about the chickens? I mean, they are being traded back and forth like cafeteria food, which they are anyway, but really! — but the Europeans never quit putting the tariff on pickup trucks.
That makes German trucks really expensive and so they are not made. When was the last time you saw a German truck outside of a World War 2 movie?
And that’s why American pickup trucks are so darned expensive today. Because of the Tennessee chickens the Frenchmen won’t buy.
And that’s the lesson from history. I hope you got all that.
You might want to read the original article if you want to understand it better.
Number Four. Thrifty Guardian dot com. California court unlocks gun data for research.
There has been lots of interest in knowing who in California has bought a gun, because researchers at big universities have studied this for a long time and have concluded that when somebody gets shot, they get shot by someone who has a gun.
This means if you know who has a gun, you will know who is going to shoot someone. Because the only people who shoot people with guns are people who HAVE guns.
It takes advanced degrees to understand these sorts of nuances of human gun-shooting behavior, which is why the researchers need more information.
And now they can have it.
Because after 7 years, 3 judges from the 4th District said that Assembly Bill 173 allows data from 4 million gun owners to be used to learn why federal spending fell by 96%, while gun publications fell by 64% over the same 20 years, which it took them 30 years to research.
So the numbers all point to the fact that only people with guns shoot people with those guns, and so that’s why we need their home addresses. And now we have them.
It’s a great day for California numbers. We all should feel safer and maybe move to California.
Number Three. The Verge. The LK-99 superconductor went viral, or maybe not. And Phys dot org. LK-99 myth is shattered.
This one is a little more complicated than the last one but I can make it just as easy to understand. It takes two articles to put this one in context.
A researcher in South Korea with a name I cannot pronounce discovered a rock in his lab that is a superconductor, meaning that if you plug an electrical wire into the rock it will… it will get electrified really fast, and also electrify everything it touches really fast. Which sounds dangerous to me, so it’s a good thing it’s in South Korea, because that’s a long ways from here.
And the rock acts like this at room temperature, whereas every other rock that acts this way — there are others like this? — has to be really cold, like colder than the popsicle in your freezer, like freeze-your-tongue-to-the-light-pole cold. And so they named the rock that does this at room temperature the LK-99 rock, for reasons which should be obvious. To somebody.
The South Korean guy is really excited about this because now he can go on Letterman and maybe buy a Chrysler.
But then another guy, in China, with another name I cannot pronounce said, No so fast, Kimosabe (or whatever China guys call Korean guys) it just isn’t true, because, and here I am quoting from the Phys dot org article:
…The researchers observed that the LK-99 … contained a certain amount of Cu2S impurity, which undergoes a structural phase transition from a hexagonal structure at high temperature to a monoclinic structure at low temperature around 400 K. They found that the resistivity of Cu2S decreased by three to four orders of magnitude around 385 K…
So there you have it.
If that sounds confusing, the Chinese guy’s summary statement should clear it up:
The researchers observed thermal hysteresis behavior in the resistivity and magnetic susceptibility measurements, confirming that it is a first-order transition and cannot be a second-order superconducting transition.
I had long suspected that about the second-order superconducting triangulation thing. Or whatever that was.
Let’s move on.
Number Two. Billboard dot com. Taylor Swift college classes are offered at Harvard.
At last, here’s a story I can finally understand.
Taylor Swift, who sings really well, but could do with a good pair of cargo pants and a belt, and maybe also a long-sleeve shirt, is being studied at Harvard and other universities to understand things like what her songs mean.
Good luck with that.
The Harvard English Department will examine “fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation.”
Wow, that’s a lot of c-words and a-words.
They will also study white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts and… and other text-like things with words that I don’t feel like putting in The Alligator Blog.
Harvard students will learn “how to think about illicit affairs and hoaxes, champagne problems and incomplete closure.”
These are probably good things to study, because I know sometimes there are problems with champagne, like when the cork pops out when you’re not expecting it and it gets all fizzy on the furniture.
And also, incomplete closure is a good thing to study, because we had a sliding door on the barn like that and sometimes a calf would get loose. Which was a problem.
So it’s good to study those things in college.
Number One. Futurism dot com. Sports Illustrated published articles by fake AI writers.
Drew Ortiz is an SI writer of product reviews, who, according to his author description, “has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature.”
Frankly, “the perils of nature” sounds a little goofy, but I’m not one to judge a world-famous sports writer.
"Nowadays,” the magazine says, “there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn't out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents' farm."
It doesn’t say where the farm is, or where he camps or hikes every weekend, but it sounds like a guy who’s really got his outdoor act together.
Drew Ortiz wrote a product review article for SI about volleyball, which is a little off the beaten path for a farmer who hikes and camps, but I suppose everybody’s gotta make a living.
His article describes how volleyball is played, and why it’s so exciting, and why so many people like it the world over, and he also reviews volleyballs.
Things got a little weird when he wrote: “…volleyball can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with."
Shortly after this, Futurism magazine accused Drew Ortiz of not being a person, but being an Artificial Intelligence thing instead.
That might have been overstating the case, since it doesn’t take much in the way of intelligence to know that playing volleyball without a ball is not really a thing.
At any rate, Drew was soon disappeared from Sports Illustrated without explanation. He may have gone back to his parents’ farm, wherever that is. He was replaced by Sora Tanaka, described as “a joyful Asian young-adult female with long brown hair and brown eyes." Which is descriptive, although I don’t think I have ever seen an Asian without brown hair and brown eyes.
Sora, whose last name is exactly the same as a Japanese chainsaw, but maybe that’s just coincidence, is “thrilled to bring her fitness and nutritional expertise to the Product Reviews Team, and promises to bring you nothing but the best of the best.”
It turns out that Drew Ortiz’s photograph and Sora Tanaka’s photograph are both available for sale on archive.today, along with AI-generated photo headshots of other healthy young persons. Drew’s photo can be seen here. Sora’s bio is here.
When asked for comment, Sports Illustrated told Futurism magazine that there was a vendor who was hired to do blah-blah-blah, and did blah-blah-blah instead, and they’ll get to the bottom of the blah-blah-blah thing pretty quick, and then it will be all straightened out, blah-blah-blah.
Meanwhile, don’t worry about it, because we are Sports Illustrated, and if you like the volleyball story without a volleyball you should wait till the swimsuit issue comes out.
And that’s The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, December 8, 2023. Now that you are completely enlightened and informed about Important Things Affecting Your World, have a good weekend.
If you have not shared The Alligator Blog with an unsuspecting friend who has always been nice to you, share this issue. And then see if they’re still speaking to you.
And before I forget it, don’t miss the blog on Monday morning. We will air the first of 3 exclusive Alligator Blog interviews with Santa Clause as he gets ready for his big night in about two weeks. See you then!
Have a good weekend!
Curt
The Alligator News Roundup