Brothers Judd

FITN:

New Hampshire’s Lesson for America (William Ruger & Jason Sorens, December 11, 2023, AIER)

So what has New Hampshire been doing right?

First, the state has gradually and responsibly cut growth-impeding taxes, such as business taxes and the interest and dividends tax, which is being phased out. Since these tax cuts began in 2015, New Hampshire’s economic growth rate has powered ahead of its closely connected neighbor, Massachusetts.

Second, the state has mostly kept school funding local, which tends to make educational decisions more fiscally responsible. Property owners have more direct leverage and choice over their local property taxes than they do state taxes.

Third, the state is trying to solve its housing shortage, which it shares with most other Northeastern states. Local zoning has strangled housing construction, and the state has stepped in with a law requiring towns to allow “accessory dwelling units” (in-law apartments), expedited local permitting, and a housing appeals board to provide quick resolution of zoning disputes.

Fourth, the legislature has expanded personal freedom for its citizens, most notably with Education Freedom Accounts. The state’s per-student adequacy grant to local districts is now available for parents to cover educational expenses outside the public school system.

Finally, the state has been getting rid of cronyist regulations in order to increase competition and opportunities in the marketplace. Some small barriers to starting businesses have been repealed, and the governor signed universal licensing reciprocity this year.

WE’RE #1!:

Why the Worst Weather on Earth Is in New Hampshire (Ross Pomeroy, December 7, 2023, Big Think)

Standing 6,288 feet above sea level, Mount Washington is positively short compared to the rampant “fourteeners” of the West’s Rocky Mountains. It is, however, the tallest mountain for about a thousand miles, looming large over the surrounding terrain. And its horrid weather firmly trounces that of any grander peak.

Kenneth Jones, a longtime board member for the Mount Washington Observatory, which sits atop the mountain, ardently defends the area’s claim to the worst weather on Earth. It combines rain, cold, and wind as no other place does, he says. Sure, there are places like Antarctica’s Vostok Station, which the Russians claim is the “coldest and most inhospitable place in the world,” that are chillier. But Vostok gets almost no precipitation and has winds that blow at a pitiful average of just 11 mph (18 kph). And many other locations are wetter, but they aren’t nearly as cold or windy.

Mount Washington, on the other hand, has it all. The annual average temperature there is 27°F (–2.8°C), with a winter average of 7°F (–13.9°C), and a record low of –47°F (–43.9°C). This frigid air combines with gusty winds to chill visitors’ bones. The average annual wind speed is 35 mph (56 kph), and winds are at or above hurricane force (at least 74 mph, or 119 kph) every other day on average in winter. Then there’s the copious precipitation: about 100 inches (254 cm) of rain and 281 inches (714 cm) of snow each year, with fog cover about 60 percent of the time.

For nearly 62 years, Mount Washington held the record for the fastest measured wind gust over the surface of the Earth: 231 mph (372 kph). It was dethroned in 1996 by winds from Typhoon Ophelia at Barrow Island, Australia, which clocked in at an astounding 253 mph (407 kph). Mount Washington also has the record for the lowest recorded wind chill in the US, –109°F (–78°C), set earlier this year when the ambient temperature was –47°F (–43.9°C) and the winds howled at 122 mph (196 kph). Such conditions would cause exposed skin and the underlying tissues to freeze in a couple of minutes.

IT’S NOT JUST THE STONES…:

New England stone walls lie at the intersection of history, archaeology, ecology and geoscience, and deserve a science of their own (Robert M. Thorson, 12/04/23, The Conversation)

The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere – a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges separating a patchwork of otherwise moist soils.

Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That’s due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels.

Nearly all were built by European settlers and their draft animals, who scuttled glacial stones from agricultural fields and pastures outward to fencelines and boundaries, then tossed or stacked them as lines. Though the oldest walls date to 1607, most were built in the agrarian century between the American Revolution and the cultural shift toward cities and industry after the Civil War.

The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the mind – an estimated 240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) of barricades, most stacked thigh-high and similarly wide. That’s long enough to wrap our planet 10 times at the equator, or to reach the Moon on its closest approach to Earth.

Natural scientists have been working to quantify this phenomenon, which is larger in volume than the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall in Britain and the Egyptian pyramids at Giza combined. This work began in 1870 and generated the U.S. government’s 1872 Census of Fences. Today, scientists are using a technique called LiDAR, or light detection and ranging, to measure and map stone walls across New England.

…but that they also cleared all the trees that surround them.

EFFECTIVELY, OUR MISSION STATEMENT:

Plausibility and Relationships: You Are What Your Friends Believe (Andy Patton, JAN 21, 2022, Still Point)

Peter Berger will be our guide for today’s tour of social plausibility. Berger coined the term “plausibility structure” to refer to the societal contexts of networks of meaning within which these meanings make sense or are made plausible. He is a leading thinker in the field of the “sociology of knowledge,” which, for me, has been a key that unlocks this aspect of the story of modern deconstruction.

Berger lays out his basic perspective in A Rumor Of Angels:

“For better or for worse, [humans] are social beings. Their “sociality” includes what they think, or believe they “know” about the world. Most of what we “know” we have taken on the authority of others, and it is only as others continue to confirm this “knowledge” that it continues to be plausible to us. It is such socially shared, socially taken-for-granted “knowledge” that allows us to move with a measure of confidence through everyday life.”

Berger is saying that our beliefs first come to us through the beliefs of others, and they only remain believable if they continue to be supported and nourished through a believing community that also shares them. In other words, our beliefs become a taken-for-granted part of our paradigm if they are continually confirmed by our social environment. We hold things to be true because people around us also hold them to be true.