Some housekeeping: It appears that I'll be in the San Francisco Bay Area the second full week of February, and I'd like to meet up with readers & community members—probably on the evening of the 10th, maybe on the evening of the 11th. If that sounds interesting to you, just make sure you're signed up as a Supporter, Executive, or Member of SOW; I'll announce the time and location soon!
SCOPE CREEP.
- Chick-fil-A's lemon juice factory, which is a little north of LA, uses about 1.6 million pounds of lemons per day. The lemons are washed, and the oils in their peels are extracted to be sold to cosmetics companies. Then the lemons are sized, graded, and sent to one of nine extracting machines that juice and "ream" them. The reamed pulp is mixed back into the juice; the juice is bagged and pasteurized, then boxed and palletized and sent out to Chick-fil-A locations to be blended into lemonade. The factory runs four days a week, and let's assume they shut down for two weeks a year; their total consumption would be around 320 million pounds of lemons per year.
According to the USDA, US lemon production in 2023/24 was 1.02 billion pounds; total lemon availability (domestically produced and imported) hovered around 1.8 billion pounds for the years 2019-2022 (XLS). So, Chick-fil-A's lemon juice factory might consume between one-fifth and one-sixth of the US's entire annual supply of lemons. - It's legal—normal, even—to buy and sell futures contracts on pork bellies, soybeans, and wheat. Go ask the CFTC: Sure, they'll say. Trade all the agricultural commodities you like—just NOT ON ONIONS!!
This surprises you a little, but you don't want to run afoul of the CFTC. Not a problem, you reply. I shall never trade onions futures. Is there anything else I should avoid futures contracts on?
Yes, the CFTC replies. In addition to onions, there is one other thing that you shall under no circumstances trade a futures contract on.
Of course, you reply. What thing is that?
Movie theater box office receipts, the CFTC replies. The one other thing covered under 7 U.S.C. § 13-1, which was passed in 1958 as the Onion Futures Act, is movie theater box office receipts. - New York City has some speed & red light cameras installed, but honestly not that many. To my perpetual frustration it's New York State that controls the number of cameras which may be installed, and even mandates that they be shut off overnight and on weekends (time periods during which over half of fatal auto crashes occur). More or less every week, when I'm out for a run or a bike ride, I see a camera catching someone running a red light. When this happens, the camera triggers a bright strobe light, illuminating the intersection, the car and—importantly—its license plate. Verra Mobility, the contractor that manages the cameras, then contacts the Department of Transportation, who looks up the license plate number and—if they find a match, and if the incident passes "second level reviews"—issues a ticket.
More or less every week I also see cars with license plates that are somehow obscured. Usually this is done with a translucent grey sheet of plastic, installed (illegally) over the license plate and making it more or less unreadable to my eyes. This makes it more or less unreadable to the cameras too, and Verra rejects the image, offering it to DOT to review but otherwise not taking any action. According to this audit, DOT's decision not to review Verra-rejected incidents might have cost the city over a hundred million dollars in 2023, and according to DOT data, there was a dramatic increase in rejected incidents starting in July of 2024. By September, two out of every nine incidents were rejected "because the vehicle had a temporary license plate, a marred and unreadable license plate, or no detected license plate at all." - As of 2014, there were over three million buildings in LA County's Building Outlines dataset. LA County has a population around ten million, meaning that the average building in LA is home to 3.33 people. "The average building in LA" is an idea that doesn't really exist. Nevertheless, more than twelve thousand buildings have burned in LA County over the past week or so—about 0.4% of the total structures in the county—and it's useful, I believe, to multiply it out and see that something like forty thousand people might have lost their homes. This is roughly double the capacity of the Staples Center, and roughly half the population of Somerville, MA.
You can't really compare San Francisco county, circa 1906, to Los Angeles county, circa 2024. LA's land mass is eighty-six times San Francisco's, and LA's population today is roughly twenty-four times what San Francisco's was in 1906. But I was thinking about how a city might handle a sudden, catastrophic loss of housing, and the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire came to mind. The earthquake in that event was massive, maybe 7.9 on the Richter Scale, but it was the fires that really decimated the housing stock. Roughly twenty-five thousand buildings were destroyed, maybe eighty percent of the city, resulting in up to three hundred and ten thousand homeless people in a city that had, just days before, a population of a little over four hundred thousand. Temporary housing was established, of course—but only for twenty thousand people, and only sixteen thousand ever actually moved in.
- There is apparently an interest, in certain communities in Japan, of touring manufacturing facilities from the outside, at nighttime, by bus or boat. Called kojo yakei, it is described here as a way to witness "unique, otherworldly beauty":
Most visitors go after dark, as that is when the spectacle is at its best. Huge industrial zones in the towns around Tokyo and throughout Japan are crammed with towering steel castles. Light reflects off gleaming metallic labyrinths, and flames reach skywards like the tendrils of caged demons struggling for freedom. Day and night, gases and liquids pass through a tangle of silver pipework, escaping here and there as clouds of steam that billow skywards. These sleepless furnaces never stop, standing tall like giants as they work their fiery magic to churn out petrol, steel, gas, electricity, and all the exotic substances that lie at the foundation of twenty-first century living.
If you go on a kojo yakei tour, you might expect most of your fellow passengers to be nerdy engineers, but the reality couldn’t be more different. The dominant demographic is often young couples out on dates. They are joined by men and women of all ages, but young urbanites seem to be in the majority. They haven’t come to wonder at the marvellous efficiency of modern industry, or to educate themselves about the their country’s industrial base. Kojo yakei is all about aesthetics – admiring industry for how it looks – as unintended works of public art.
- I'm pretty sure I've shared similar videos here before, but this video of the biggest cork supplier in the world is pretty rad.
- Two textiles that I think about sometimes:
- A tenugui is a traditional Japanese textile—a towel, made from cotton. I own a tenugui, which is decorated with what look like curls of hinoki, to evoke the shavings made by whittling your own chopsticks. Tenugui are about a foot wide and about a meter long. Here's a pretty good video of tenugui being made; the dying process, which begins at 7:17, is particularly interesting.
- A keffiyeh is a traditional Middle Eastern textile—a garment, usually used to cover the head, neck, or shoulders. I also own a keffiyeh, and it is made by Hirwabi, a Palestinian manufacturer a little south of Jerusalem. Here's a good video of the Hirwabi factory; I was having a hard time understanding how my basic black-and-white design was made, and the shot that starts at 1:07 helped clarify things.
- John Donne was born, in London, about a decade after William Shakespeare. He died about fifteen years after Shakespeare did. He was a Catholic at a time when that was illegal; he was also supposedly kind of reckless, spending "much of the money he inherited...on womanising, literature, pastimes and travel." He was not particularly prolific during his lifetime (most of his poems were published posthumously), but one of the things he published shortly after writing it was Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and severall steps in my Sicknes. Donne wrote the book while recovering from "a serious but unknown illness," and structured it in twenty-three parts—one for every one of the days during which he had been sick.
The famous parts happen on the seventeenth day, in the seventeenth meditation. If you happen to be going to a funeral, or if you once knew someone who later died, or if you are simply a mortal person who loves other mortal people, I recommend reading it. Maybe read it twice, actually. Donne's community is the Catholic church, but I give you permission to substitute in whatever community you like: Donne says that your community is universal, and that it belongs to its members. When something happens in your community, it happens to you. It concerns you, and you would be right to pay attention to it. "Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings?" Donne argues that we should pay attention to the big life events that happen to people around us—be a witness to our neighbors' lives, and feel things about them, and allow ourselves to become afflicted by them.
So, having attended a funeral recently, I've been thinking about that. Related, at least to me:- I wrote recently about the time of Shakespeare's life (and therefore Donne's), here.
- (Somewhat) apropos of dealing with death, I picked Of Human Bondage back up last week. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and in the chapter I read last night a character mentions that "Genius in an infinite capacity for taking pains," and that struck me as poignant.
- I've been listening to Kali Malone's All Life Long (Spotify link, Bandcamp link), an album of choral, organ, and brass music.
Thanks as always to Scope of Work’s Members and Supporters for making this newsletter possible. Thanks to Adam for the kojo yakei link, Mike for the Kali Malone record, and a big hat tip to Aaron for helping source the Chick-fil-A links—and running the actual math, too.
Love, Spencer
