Skull + Bone

Super Bowl Sunday Links

Here are some stories for you to check out in between commercials:

Jump on the Bandwagon of a Winning Super Bowl Team? Not These Cleveland Browns Fans - New York Times

The search for Jackie Wallace - NOLA

From Minneapolis to Inglewood, the shifting politics of NFL stadium design - LA Times

Why NFL Ratings Are Plummeting: A Two-Part Theory - The Atlantic

New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX - Wall Street Journal

Inside Oil Giant Shell's Race to Remake Itself For a Low-Price World - Fortune

What It’s Like Inside the Trump Administration’s Regulatory Rollback at the EPA - ProPublica

This country has a lot of rules, but they're all there for a reason — right? - Marketplace

A Kingdom from Dust - California Sunday Magazine.  This is a must-read on an agribusiness empire.

Turning Soybeans Into Diesel Fuel Is Costing Us Billions - The Salt

Farms with Biggest Financial Risk Get Least Government Support - Daily Yonder

Wheat 101: A Guide to Wheat - Big Sky FarmHer

via - BigSky FarmHer

Chart of the Day-Rural Suicide Edition

Washington Monthly:

Included are suicide and undetermined deaths suspected of being suicides. Teenage rate is deaths under age 20 divided by population age 15-19; adult rate is for age 20+.

Emerging analyses show rapidly rising suicide, firearms, and addiction-related “deaths of despair” afflict whites the most in rural and suburban areas where white populations are most concentrated. There are many more suicides among the seven million white rural 35-64 year-old men than among all 40 million American teenagers of all races and both sexes everywhere. Rural areas also tend to have higher rates of gun ownership and firearms mortality (correlated with men’s suicide) and lack the level of mental health services that have evolved in cities.

 There has been a spate of articles pointing out that farmers have a suicide rate about twice as high as the rate amongst veterans.  The scary part of that news is that we are just coming off of a generational price boom that I probably won't see a return to for the rest of my (assumed actuarial) lifetime.  Those of us in agriculture are facing much darker days going forward, at least in a financial sense.  Meanwhile, rural areas continue their steady decline.  Considering these factors, I fear the trend in suicide deaths will continue to worsen.  I don't anticipate that either the public or private sector will work to change any of these trends.  What I can say is that faithful readers of this blog do not have to worry about me, I'll be with you until the bitter end.  I enjoy hating life way too much to ever consider cutting it short.  Plus, there is this to consider:

Breathe

Breathe // An 8K storm time-lapse film from Mike Olbinski on Vimeo.

Chart of the Day: Sources of Wealth

If you want a good illustration of why business tax cuts overwhelmingly favor the extremely wealthy, this chart from Visual Capitalist does the job:

Inside a Pencil Factory

This NYT feature is pretty cool.

Photo by Christopher Payne.

Chart of the Day: Employment by Industry

For the 1st time in US history, the lines crossed in 2017.#Healthcare became our largest source of jobs, exceeding retail.
Data from @BLS_gov pic.twitter.com/bWtp8VtNm6

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) January 7, 2018

A lot of interesting stuff in that chart. Click on this one for a bigger version: 

Bomb Cyclone Demonstrates Boston's Climate Vulnerability

Boston Globe:

It’s time to start talking about ways to protect entire neighborhoods from rising seas, Abbott said. Actually, she said, Thursday’s storm showed it’s well past time.
“We keep talking like this is something that’s coming in 30 years,” she said. “The reality is it has been coming for a while now.”
And experts expect it will become more common, with sea levels in the region projected to rise between 3 and 7 feet by the end of the century. A city report in 2015 found that rising sea levels could make major flooding three times more frequent by 2030 and 10 times more common by 2050.
Both Walsh and Jack Clarke, director of public policy at Mass Audubon, said Thursday’s storm is a wake-up call.
“The reality of climate change makes storms like this the new normal,” Clarke said.
Indeed it was so intense that flooding exceeded what scientists typically call a 100-year storm, meaning one like it only comes once a century.
Climate change, though, is fast upending those calculations.
“This flood level will occur a lot more frequently in the future,” said Paul Kirshen, a professor in the School for the Environment at the University of Massachusetts Boston who studies coastal flooding and sea rise. “It’s possible that at the end of this century we could be seeing these kinds of tides with every tide.”

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen somebody comment that 100-year floods are occurring much more frequently, and that they will have to be recalculated, I wouldn't have to go to work tomorrow.  As it is, it is very obvious that climate change deniers are endangering everyone when they prevent planning for future flooding and other storm damage.

Fighting California's Wildfires

Chart of the Day - Largest Employer Edition

Visual Capitalist, via Ritholtz:

Anything that links Ohio to nearly the entire South is troubling for me.  In the state's defense, our state university system would most likely be a larger combined employer than Walmart but for the system's setup as a number of individual universities, but that is almost certainly the same case in the other states as well (such as Texas or Florida).