Monday, September 07, 2009
Sometimes, I Love People
K, so they passed a law to get rid of "happy hour" in pubs in Edinburgh.
They did this by ordering that no drink specials could last for less than 72 hours.
Pubs have responded...by "happy days" drink specials. From the commercials I've heard on BobFM, they'll probably run them Tues-Thurs, and catch the week-day crowd.
I can't remember exactly who it was or how it was phrased, but I seem to remember a GK Chesterton quote involving trying to outlaw drinking, but rather than just saying "no drinking" (which no-one would allow) they tried to ban pub signs, so that no-one would know where pubs where, and he then followed the various creative ways folks got around that.... (if anyone can clarify this, I'd be grateful!)
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8 comments:
Foxfier, completely off-topic.
Can strawberries be harvested mechanically or are they too delicate so that they can only be hand-picked?
Trust me. I'm going somewhere locical with this. Thanks.
I haven't read it, but I think what you're looking for is his novel, "The Flying Inn."
Dean- Technically, yes, but a better answer might be "not very well."
Basically, because strawberries on one plant won't all get ripe at the same time, don't adapt well to being grown in a form that's easy to harvest from. (compared to, say, apple trees-- which can be grown in super-odd shapes)
There are ideas to get around it, but right now it's less expensive to pay folks to harvest than to build machines for it.
ME-
Thanks, I'll have to look around using that.
Foxfier, Thanks. That was precisely the type of info I was looking.
You speak of something that got the wheels turning in my head originally... is the availability of cheap labor perhaps hurting ag-tech innovations?
Glad to be of help!
Kind of hard to say it's *hurting,* just not encouraging -- for example even with apples, there's still demand for human pickers for the higher end stuff and with smaller growers; I've seen orchards where every apple is carefully covered with a little bag, for those fancy gift-box apples.
Most of the mechanical strawberry picking going on right now is used for things like jam.
It's a little like asking if the price of oil hurts the development of alternative fuel supplies-- there'd be more demand for other options if US pickers cost too much to be practical, but the other source might be importing strawberries from Mexico. (Which we already do, come to think of it....)
I'm not sure what other fruits and veggies are mostly picked by hand, although I do know my mom worked on an asparagus farm while she was going to college in the seventies. (Only know that because she quit the day after two guys got in a fight with the asparagus knives, which she describes as being something like a machete razor.)
I'll email my mom and see what she has to say-- she keeps abreast of this stuff pretty dang well.
Oh, unsurprisingly: politics are involved, too.
(Just to confuse you more-- "mechanical apple pickers" are generally basically mobile platforms that make it so the human pickers can just stand there and get a ton of fruit, because THAT is cheaper than making a machine that can sense the fruit, grasp it without bruising and set it in a box.)
Mom's reply:
There are some crops that just don't lend themselves to mechanical harvest for one reason or another. Thin skinned fruit, such as strawberries, fruit that requires a stem be left on such as "the consumer demands" for cherries, fruit that has different levels of ripeness on the same tree or bush. Bruising and skin damage is a major problem with mechanical harvesting. Same with mechanical packing.
"Cheap" labor is a term I don't really like. The thinners, pickers and packers of produce are paid by piece work....paid for what they can pick, not hourly or daily......and they are truly a SKILLED labor but are seldom categorized that way. Most people categorize welders, carpenters etc as Skilled but Ag workers as UN-skilled. A experienced cherry picker can make $200 or $300 a day and that is with a 6 hour picking time and a relatively short period of maybe a month of cherries. Then they move on to thinning or picking another fruit. NOT everyone can pick and make good money. It is a practiced skill developed over time. They are very well paid for the job at the time. The "cheap labor" comes in because you only have to have them employed for a short amount of time instead of yearly or monthly. They could be paid more IF the government didn't require so many foolish rules regarding their employment. As with so many government rules the intent is good but the application of the law is misinterpreted and costly. There was a orchardest that was fined several thousand dollars because his workers had too many cars parked at the cabins. He thought he was doing something good for them by providing them a work crummy on site so they didn't have to drive their own cars to the orchard, but that meant there were two cars parked at one cabin and there is a limit of cars per so many square feet of living space. Same guy was hit with a fine because some of his workers pitched a tent on the lawn instead of sleeping in the hot cabin.....Tents are illegal unless inspected by the State.......How it that for stupid?
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