School choice policies often contribute to racial segregation, underscoring the challenges districts face in promoting equity.
School choice is a central feature in contemporary K-12 educational policy. Some school choice occurs across educational sectors—7% of school-aged youth in the U.S. are enrolled in charter schools, 9% in private schools, and between 3% and 5% are homeschooled. But the most common type of school choice policy operates within or across public school systems. For example, several large urban districts—including New York City, Newark, and New Orleans—allow families to apply to enroll their child(ren) in any, or nearly any, of the district schools.
While the implications of school choice for educational quality and equity are hotly contested, scholars generally agree that in most circumstances choice contributes to racial and socioeconomic school segregation. In most places, charter schools worsen levels of racial school segregation. Furthermore, a large body of research shows that families demonstrate racialized preferences for schools. Most of this scholarship implicitly or explicitly attributes the link between choice and segregation to anti-Black racism, particularly among white and Asian families.
As important as it is to confront individual racism in the school choice process, we believe that it is only one part of the story. School choice policies have many gradations—and how school choice programs are designed play an important, but not well-studied, role in shaping families’ school choices. For example, districts decide how many schools families can choose from, which schools to provide door-to-door transportation for, and where to locate magnet programs. Districts also specify the default school of attendance for families—a decision that significantly influences families’ eventual school choice. Since each of these aspects of school choice policy design influence school segregation, district leaders must keep the goal of educational equity front of mind as they ask crucial policy questions: How much choice, for whom, and how?
In new work, we explore the dual roles of district policy design and families’ school choices—and the implications of this interaction for segregation in elementary schools in North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System (WCPSS). Between 2000 and 2010, Wake County operated an innovative socioeconomic desegregation plan that used school assignments and a targeted or “controlled” choice program to pursue a more socioeconomically and racially integrated school system. Working with the district, we identified the set of schools that the district allowed incoming kindergarteners to select from, the transportation options the district provided to each of these schools, and families’ ultimate choices. We use these data to study how WCPSS shaped the choice sets of incoming kindergarten families and how families’ school choices ultimately served to reproduce a racially segregated school system.
WCPSS designed a “controlled” choice program as one part of its broader socioeconomic desegregation plan
WCPSS’s socioeconomic-based desegregation plan aimed to ensure that low-income students were not concentrated among only a few schools in the county-wide district. The district’s goal was to create a system in which no school had an enrollment of more than 40% economically disadvantaged students or more than 25% of students performing below grade-level on standardized tests. To achieve this goal, the district’s controlled choice program provided each family with a curated set of schooling options. Families’ school choice sets consisted of at least five different schools—including one default school of attendance, or a “base” school. Other options included at least one “calendar option” which allowed families whose base school operated on a traditional nine-month calendar to opt into a school with a year-round calendar, or vice versa. Families were also provided with at least three magnet school options—neighborhood magnets with door-to-door transportation, magnets with a nearby park-and-ride location where children could access bus transportation to the school, and magnets with no transportation provided.
A key piece of this policy involved changing base school designations for a small share of students (5% to 10%) each year with an eye toward maintaining socioeconomic diversity. We do not focus on this aspect of WCPSS’s approach in this study. In prior work, though, we demonstrate that because WCPSS preferred to minimize travel time for families, changes to base school designations drove relatively minor changes in school demographics. Our prior work also shows that most families complied when their base school was changed and that academic outcomes for these reassigned students improved modestly despite concerns about potential harms of moving kids to new schools.
In partnership with the district, we examined how WCPSS designed families’ school choice sets and how families made enrollment decisions in that context. Here’s what we found.
WCPSS is a large, racially and socioeconomically diverse, county-wide school district in North Carolina—a context that made their desegregation work possible (Figure 1). Yet, Wake County, like much of the United States, is also characterized by high levels of residential racial segregation. This meant that the district’s emphasis on providing families with a geographically nearby base school option limited their ability to use base school designations in service of the district’s desegregation goals. In analyzing families’ school choice sets, we found that the racial composition of families’ assigned base school varied systematically by family race/ethnicity. For example, the average Black kindergartner was assigned a base school where 36% of students were Black, whereas Asian and white kindergartners were assigned to schools with Black student populations of 22% and 25%, respectively.
This reality also had implications for what families’ school choice sets looked like—and how different choice sets looked for families from different racial/ethnic backgrounds. On the one hand, WCPSS gave all families a significant degree of “choice”—families across racial/ethnic groups had access to predominantly white as well as predominantly Black schools. And even when we limit our analysis of families’ choice sets to schools with door-to-door transportation, we still found that a wide range of school racial compositions were reflected in families’ schooling options. Yet, because of the tight relationship between families’ race/ethnicity and the racial makeup of their designated base school, what different schooling options represented for different families varies. For example, magnet schools—which enrolled larger shares of Black students in the district—were almost always a more racially diverse option relative to their assigned base school for families in majority white neighborhoods. This was not the case for most families living in majority Black or Latino neighborhoods where the racial composition of magnet schools was not all that different from their base school.
Finding #2: Most families enrolled their kindergartners in their assigned base school
Strong majorities of families attended their designated base school, but we also document variability in base school enrollment rates for families from different racial/ethnic backgrounds. As shown in Figure 2 below, about 70% of white and Asian families enrolled their kindergartner in their base school whereas base school enrollment rates were higher for Black (74%) and Latino families (79%). That such large shares of families attended their default school choice is consistent with empirical evidence from the behavioral sciences showing that individuals disproportionally select default options.
(While it’s true that in most communities, families may believe they are choosing their default school when they decide where to live, this was not the case in Wake County in the 2000s. Most families were aware of WCPSS’s desegregation plan—and the implication that moving into a neighborhood did not guarantee access to the closest nearby school—since some variation of the policy had been in place since the early 1980s.)
The calendar option was the second most popular choice among families in the district, although again we see significant variation by family race/ethnicity. About 16% of white students and 12% of Asian students attended their calendar option compared to only 7% and 6% for Latino and Black students, respectively. Relatively low shares of kindergartners attended any of the magnet options available to them.
Finding #3: If you give families segregating options, they’ll take them
As we noted above, WCPSS’s controlled choice program offered all families school options with a wide range of racial compositions—ranging from predominantly white to predominantly Black. This meant that families had access to either segregating or desegregating school choices. When we analyzed families’ ultimate enrollment decisions, we found that the likelihood of Asian and white families attending their base school declines significantly as the share of Black students in their base school increases (Figure 3). Asian and white families instead enroll their kindergartners in the calendar option—which typically enrolled lower shares of Black students than their base schools—taking the segregating option when presented with an integrating default choice. In comparison, Black and Latino families’ enrollment decisions were unrelated to schools’ racial makeup.
Controlled school choice programs can help and hurt school desegregation efforts
All told, our work highlights both the potential and limitation of controlled choice programs for advancing school diversity goals. Our results make clear that significant majorities of students ultimately attend their designated default school option. And in the WCPSS context, this was notably true even when the district re-assigned a small share of families to new base schools each year as a part of the desegregation plan. These findings underscore that default school assignments are a powerful policy lever available to districts—and one that has profound implications for school diversity and segregation.
On the other hand, our work also underscores the limitations of controlled choice programs. For one, the backdrop of residential segregation and district and family preferences for geographically close default school assignments inherently limits how ambitious policymakers can be in using school choice programs to advance desegregation goals. In WCPSS, for example, residential segregation contributed to notable demographic differences across families’ base school assignments in ways systematically related to their racial/ethnic background.
We also find that racial preferences and anti-Black racism shape how parents navigate choice contexts—a reality that creates acute tensions that districts must navigate in the design of choice systems. From our work and a number of other studies, we know that many Asian and white families avoid schools with large Black student populations when given the opportunity. And yet, it’s hard to imagine a politically viable controlled choice program that constrains families’ choices and actions more than WCPSS did. Some degree of school choice has long been viewed as a necessary component of desegregation efforts given the significant historical evidence that families (and white families, in particular) leave districts taking aggressive desegregation action.
And of course, even WCPSS’s relatively light-touch curation of schooling options for families ultimately proved untenable. In 2009, voters in the county elected school board candidates who promised to end the desegregation initiative and return to neighborhood-based school assignments—a promise the school board followed through on the following year.
What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management? Benefits & Features
The use of emerging technologies in Supply Chain Management is an essential part of a growing organization. By adopting the most advanced technologies, a business can optimize its supply chain operation cost and increase its profitability. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is such a solution provided by Microsoft which ensures smooth functioning of inventory, order fulfillment, and logistics operations. In short, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply chain management is a platform to streamline supply chain operations. At present, Covid has affected the supply chain management’s function but the Dynamics 365 supply chain module is helping to cope up with the new challenges. Let’s discuss more in detail about Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
What is Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (D365 SCM) is a supply chain solution developed to evolve the trade, manufacturing, and supply chain processes. The solution helps you optimize your production, logistics, and distribution processes, making your business resilient to shocks. With exceptional CRM functionalities and customization, Dynamics 365 provides you with colossal control over the sales process, customer satisfaction, and improved productivity.
Dynamics 365 SCM is primarily focused on increasing the operational efficiency of the business and, consequently, the quality of the end product. You can have a customer-centric supply chain with end-to-end visibility and reduced asset downtime. The solutions of Dynamics 365 easily connect with your existing system and your business as a whole. From procurement and logistics to delivery and cost management, Dynamics 365 SCM has it all handled.
Benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Implementation of AI to Drive Strategies: Predict demand, optimize cash flow, manage production, and assess the growth of the business with built-in AI functions.
Optimization of Manufacturing Processes: Enhance the flow of manufacturing and finished goods by optimizing warehouse processes, inventory management, and logistics.
Consistent Product Quality: Dynamics 365 SCM enables quick responses to quality issues and adheres to strict product standards at every stage.
Minimized Sales Cycles: Dynamics 365 SCM initiates quick responses and information delivery by the sales team through complete access to customer data.
Automation of Financial Processes: Automate your core business processes with financial processes to improve user productivity and financial performance.
Synchronized and Productive Work Environment: Amplify the output of the workforce, procedures, and tools by improving operational efficiency through IoT, AI, and machine learning.
Warehouse Management: The warehouse management module enables you to manage the processes of manufacturing, distribution, and retail companies, along with transportation, quality control, purchase, sales, and returns.
Logistics: Gain customer satisfaction with efficient distribution and delivery speed. Improve inbound and outbound logistic processes for an enhanced supply chain process.
Why Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management?
Seamless Supply Chains: Right from sourcing and procurement to manufacturing and transportations, Dynamics 365 has it all managed, with its AI functions and automated procedure.
Optimized Order Management: Meet the logistical needs of your multi-national operations with advanced order management solutions of Dynamics 365. Enable mobile supported item tracking for an optimized customer experience.
Upgrade Warehouse Processes: Dynamics 365 SCM boosts the efficiency of warehouse processes like inventory management, warehouse mapping, and warehouse management for error-free completion of orders.
Reduce Customer Returns: Monitor and gain vital insights about the reason for every customer return with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Solution to minimize future returns.
Global Presence: With multi-localization, multi-language, centralized dashboard, and unified interface, overcome the challenges that come along with global presence. Connect all your businesses spread globally.
Simplify Management: Access all the data and daily tasks through a tailor-made application for employee and warehouse roles, to rule out the disadvantage of distance.
Secure And Unified Data: Secure network and firewalls with Azure’s security model. D365 unifies your data by integrating with external data sources like email marketing, account databases, etc.
Features of D365 Supply Chain Management
Dynamics 365 SCM can manage logistics planning, production, procurement, inventory, warehousing, and much more. Below are some of the features of the SCM module of Microsoft Dynamics.
Predictive Insights for Efficient Functioning
Predictive insights through IoT help identify potential machine issues, avoiding downtime and additional maintenance costs, contributing to better product quality and satisfaction of customers.
Swift Vendor Collaboration
The Vendor Collaboration Interface of Dynamics 365 SCM enables vendors to confirm orders and request quotes. They can view and edit basic company information with limited exposure to information about invoices, orders, etc.
Effective Transportation Management
Dynamics 365 SCM helps in managing containers, vehicles, loads, and routes to comply with deadlines and adhere to specific delivery slots.
Accurate Cost Management
Evaluate and account for the costs of raw materials and finished goods, using valuation methods of your choice. Improve product costing by assessing the cost implications of all your products. Handle manufacturing accounting and inventory accounting all under one application.
Asset Management
Asset management through IoT devices and field service data enhances the effectiveness of the equipment and assets tracked by Dynamics 365 SCM. Manage and maximize the life of your assets like machines, vehicles, production equipment, etc.
Final Words on D365 Supply Chain Management
We can clearly say that Dynamics 365 SCM transforms the productivity of your company with actionable insights and unified data. With numerous tools to elevate your financial, commercial, and industrial processes through CRM, Power Automate, and Field Service, D365 is the software you need for your supply chain management. DynaTech is such a Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Partner which has handles plenty of projects in supply chain management and has enormous experience in revolutionizing supply chain operations. Enhance your production execution with Dynamics 365 SCM at DynaTech. Get in touch today! Send us your requirement at [email protected]
The Economist Placing Value on Black Women’s Overlooked Work (NYT, Feb. 5, 2021)
Tracing community activism back a hundred years, Nina Banks says this labor by Black women should be counted as part of the economy. (full text below the cut)
By Eshe Nelson
Every year women do trillions of dollars’ worth of unpaid household work. In the United States alone, that total amounted to roughly $1.2 trillion in 2019, a figure nearly the size of the New York State economy.
In Britain, the statistics agency has a calculator that lets you learn the value of chores like doing laundry, providing child care and taking others where they need to go. Thirty-five hours of child care and five hours of cooking is valued at about 570 pounds ($779) a week.
The fact that the economics establishment counts these chores as work — work still done disproportionately by women — and assigns them value is a win for feminist economists who spent decades arguing that much of women’s contribution to society was economically invisible.
Now Nina Banks, an associate professor of economics at Bucknell University, is taking that idea another step. She argues there is another form of work that has been historically overlooked and uncounted: community activism by Black and other marginalized women.
“Not only are we doing paid work for our communities and unpaid work in our households,” Dr. Banks said. “We are also doing a third layer of community work — we’re exhausted.” Recognizing this collective activism as work reveals the extra burden Black and brown women are under, she said.
In an article published in the December issue of The Review of Black Political Economy, Dr. Banks traces this unpaid community work to the early 20th century and the creation of cooperatives and other associations to provide services governments neglected.
She argues that these activities outside the market economy — with no buying or selling of goods and services, and no paid labor — were incorrectly considered political activity. But the grass-roots organizations behind the community work improved the environment, housing and access to food. Simply put, if someone else had been paid to do it, it would have been counted as work, and a contribution to the economy.
Dr. Banks has spent years trying to right the historical record on behalf of Black women, a mostly lonely endeavor in economics. While she has been scouring archives, much of the rest of the economics profession has followed the trend toward more math- or data-based research in other topics.
Dr. Banks’s interest in revisiting history is less surprising when you consider her most distinctive early memory of economics: When she was an undergraduate at Hood College in Maryland in the 1980s, an adjunct professor explained the gender and racial wage gap with theories about human capital and worker productivity, suggesting that white men are simply more productive.
She was the only Black student in the class, and during a break she went to the basement and cried by the vending machines. “I was so startled and hurt by what he was saying, and I knew it wasn’t true,” Dr. Banks said. “But I didn’t have the tools to be able to confront him.”
Dr. Banks, 57, grew up in Chambersburg in southern Pennsylvania and earned her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, choosing the department specifically for its unorthodox approach.
This week, she took over the presidency of the National Economic Association, which has promoted minority economists in the profession for half a century. Former leaders of the group include Lisa Cook, Darrick Hamilton and Olugbenga Ajilore, whose policy ideas and expertise have been sought in Washington. It is a milestone in a career fraught with hurdles, and in a profession where women and people of color have confronted discrimination and harassment.
Two years ago, Dr. Banks said, she felt like an “island of one” in economics because she didn’t know others pursuing similar research on collective action as unpaid work and her other historical studies. She had struggled to get her research published, finding that the economists tasked with reviewing her work didn’t have the right expertise. It happened again with her recent paper on unpaid work, she said. The Review of Black Political Economy, which is affiliated with the National Economic Association but has all articles peer-reviewed, was the third publication she submitted the paper to.
Publishing academic papers is a notoriously slow and frustrating process. But there is a broader concern that the lack of diversity in economics also means certain ideas don’t get as much attention. (And proportionate representation is still far off; just 4 percent of economics doctorates awarded in 2019 to American citizens and permanent residents went to African-Americans.)
It’s partly why some prominent Black economists study economic history, especially those working toward present-day policy ideas to reduce inequality. They first needed to uncover the evidence of systemic disparities.
Dr. Cook, a professor at Michigan State University, spent 10 years getting her research on innovation theory published. She had found that violence toward African-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to fewer patents filed in the United States, causing a long-term drag on economic growth.
“So much Black economic research,” she said on the NPR podcast “Planet Money,” “is about first proving that Black people are coming from a historic disadvantage.”
Since Dr. Banks’s 1999 dissertation on African-American women migrating to Pittsburgh in the 1920s, her career has been devoted to uncovering the experiences of overlooked Black women. And so she is particularly well known for charting the life of a fellow Pennsylvanian, Sadie T.M. Alexander, who received a doctoral degree in economics in 1921, the first African-American woman to do so.
Dr. Alexander couldn’t find work as an economist and went on to become a lawyer, notching up another first — the first Black woman to be admitted to the Pennsylvania bar. But she still considered herself to be an economist, Dr. Banks said, and delivered speeches on the working conditions of Black men and women, using her research skills to defy the dominant ideology of the time of racial inferiority as a legitimate reason for the denial of civil rights. This summer, Dr. Banks will publish a book on the life and speeches of Dr. Alexander.
Today there are more Black economists, but navigating the profession still poses challenges. Over time, support systems have developed, including the National Economic Association and The Review of Black Political Economy, established 50 years ago to be a “hospitable arena” for Black economists to study inequality, Robert Browne, the founding editor, said at the time.
The journal is still where research about race, “especially if you are pushing the envelope,” is published, said Rhonda Sharpe, a co-editor.
The American economics profession has begun to grapple with the diversity problems in its field. In June, when Black Lives Matter protests swept across the United States and then the world, the American Economic Association — the establishment voice for economists — acknowledged “that our professional climate is a hostile one for Black economists.”
More diversity and inclusion initiatives, research avenues and high-profile promotions have sprung up since a 2019 survey by the association found that experiences of sexual harassment and assault were “not rare” for women, and Asian, Black and Latino economists reported “substantially worse experiences” of discrimination than their white colleagues.
Dr. Banks’s career bears these scars, too. Her study of Dr. Alexander is the result of a career knocked off course. She originally planned to become a development economist, a field that studies the growth of low-income economies. But in the 1990s, during an internship at a U.S. government agency focused on development, she was sexually harassed by an economist.
“I decided not to pursue development economics as a result of that experience,” she said. Only a little more than two years ago, emboldened by the #MeToo movement, Dr. Banks complained to that workplace.
“When it came time to write a dissertation, I really wanted to focus on something meaningful to me,” she said. “Something that honored the long history of Black women engaging in work for the African-American community.”
The legacy of this switch is apparent in her latest paper. Her goal is to develop a theory “to elevate the community” as a site of production that deserves as much scrutiny as other work. And to highlight the long-lasting impact of these women.
She goes all the way back to 1908, when the Atlanta Neighborhood Union was founded, led by Black women to survey the needs of their community and provide basic social and health services that the city failed to give. It inspired the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Ala., which worked to increase voter registration and later engaged in political protests, including the Montgomery bus boycott. It resembles some of the work done today by Black women, such as those in Georgia, to register voters in service of improving their communities and reducing inequality, with remarkable consequences.
In 1985, a group of Black women in Los Angeles came together to stop the construction of a toxic waste incinerator in their neighborhood, enlisting professors and health officials to their cause. Two years later, the city dropped its plans. The group, Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, still exists as a nonprofit, developing affordable housing, running youth programs and cleaning streets.
Eshe Nelson is a reporter in London, where she writes about companies, the British economy and finance. @eshelouise
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Finally got around to posting chapter 20 of “Genetic Composite”. Can’t guarantee the quality of this chapter. But I hope it’s at least fun.
...
Hordak gasped when he felt a clawed hand wrap around his ankle and pull him out from under the console he was working on. A halo of wires that he was working on ripped out with him.
Snarling, Hordak sat up to glare at the one who dared bother him.
Catra.
He froze.
“Hey, Hordak.” She said in a taunting tone that somehow made his skin crawl. “You’ve been taking a while, with nothing to show for it.”
Something in the back of his mind set off an alarm. He was in danger here. One misstep could end him. End him before he ever had a chance to see Entrapta again and demand his satisfaction. Never mind getting home and seeing Prime. Catra had the upper hand. Hadn’t had the upper hand since the portal was opened less than a month ago.
“It has not even been one month of this planet’s lunar rotations.” He reminded her. “One cannot expect instantaneous results. Not if you wish a job done properly.”
He said this, remembering full well that he had often demanded instant results from those under him, regardless of the difficulty of the task. Hordak cast his brain around trying to remember if Catra was one such underling he demanded immediate results from and he was alarmed to realize that he could not recall.
Her lips curled into an unforgiving sneer. “I’m giving you until the end of the day.”
“End of the night.” Hordak argued, irrationally negotiating for more time knowing full well that he did not have the upper hand in this situation. “I work best in the dark.”
That unforgiving sneer morphed into a humorless smile. Almost malicious. Like she were laughing at some cruel but secret joke that only she knew. “Until the end of the night.”
She held his eyes for a moment longer. Mismatched yellow and blue, holding bioluminescent red.
Hordak looked away first. Admitting submission.
Catra smirked with a nod. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
She walked away.
Hordak watched her leave, waiting to the count of ten after the bridge door closed behind her to move. He didn’t exactly know what he had to do, but he did know that he couldn’t remain with Catra. He didn’t know the desert like she did, upon arriving in the Crimson Wastes, Hordak quickly learned that all of the reports he’d received on it were inaccurate, if not all out wrong. So, running aimlessly into the dunes was not an escape, it was just a different kind of sentence. What he needed was help.
Loath though he was to admit it.
Needing help meant he was weak.
But, as a treacherous scientist he still had conflicting feelings about once said, ‘Everyone needs a little help sometimes.’
Hordak hadn’t been able to figure out the former She-Ra’s message. It was very apparent to him that he needed the sword for that. However, every ship had a distress signal. That would be simple and straightforward. The kind of thing that even an untrained passenger could activate in a panic-stricken stupor.
The only technology on this miserable planet capable of picking up on a First Once signal was the equipment in his own Sanctum –which may or may not still be functioning- and the Princess Alliance. Hordak already knew that the chances of his own people picking up and following the signal in a meaningful time were slim to none. Not to mention, there was no reason for a Horde soldier to answer a distress signal in the first place. If a being was begging strangers for help, then they were too weak to be worth giving help to.
The Princess Alliance, however… they were soft. Their hearts bleeding for the disadvantaged and the needy. They would answer a distress call. All the more so, since this distress call would be coming from the former She-Ra’s ship. Even if they didn’t necessarily want to help, they would at least want to know what was going on at so important a place.
Once they arrived, obviously, they would never help him.
But former-Force Captain Adora and Catra might distract each other enough that Hordak could commandeer whatever vehicle they came in to simply just drive out of the Crimson Wastes. The two women were rather obsessed with each other, he’d noticed. What better distraction was there for Catra but Adora!
It was the best plan he could come up with on such short notice with such little time.
…
The command room door slid open to reveal that Entrapta had already returned. Dak paused before entering, wondering if they even should, or if they should continue to ‘give Mother some time’, as Micah suggested.
But then Entrapta looked over her shoulder to see who had just come him. “Oh. You’re here.” Her expression was cautiously curious. “Adora say’s you’re also good with tech. Come in and give me a hand with this.”
With nothing else to do, Dak shrugged and did as they were told. Imp resting on their shoulder, their ever-faithful companion.
The command room was much changed from when Dak ran out of it just a few hours before. The consoles and screens that had been inactive and inert before, were now booted up and running, blazing with warm soft light. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the change. The bioluminescent glow of their sclera dimming to not overstimulate the hybrid’s retina.
“Come in, come in.” Moving on her hair, Entrapta crossed the space to the door and wrapped a tentacle of hair around the child, pulling them off their feet and all the way into the control room.
Imp squawked in protest, falling off Dak’s shoulder when she yanked the hybrid off their feet.
Both Dak and Entrapta ignored him.
“This is the most complete First Ones outpost I’ve ever seen!” She continued, not looking at the hybrid as she spoke, but still keeping her hair wrapped around them as she moved. “If I’m gonna study it, I’ll need a lab-“ she cut herself off abruptly, stumbling over whatever word she was about to use. “An intern. I’ll need an intern. Since Adora says you’re good at tech, I was thinking you could be my Lab Intern.”
It was all the hybrid could do to just stare at their mother. Just a few hours ago, she couldn’t even be in the same room as them. Now, here she was, wrapping her hair around them and carrying them around the room as she explained things, speaking a mile a minute, and asking them to work along side her on a shared interest.
“I can take apart and put back together the robots in your Locked Room.” Dak informed her, to give an idea of their level of knowledge and skill. ‘Good with tech’ could mean any number of things and Dak did not want to endanger this tentative connection with their mother just because she and Adora had different ideas of what ‘good with tech’ meant.
Entrapta paused, not quite understanding for a moment. “’Locked Room’? Oh! You must mean my Lab! I keep it locked when I’m not in there. So, you managed to get in huh? Not bad, not bad. All my robots are my own design, but they run off First Ones power crystals, so you’re at least familiar with that much First Ones tech. Good. Good. And I’ve been told that you fixed Imp when he was offline for a bit. Imp is a very sophisticated AI from another dimension.”
Not knowing how to react to all this –for lack of a better term- praise, Dak only flushed, feeling suddenly very self-conscious. “I don’t know what all the things are called, so I can’t explain how I fixed him. I just took a look inside and connected the pieces I thought fit together.” A shrug. “Then Imp woke up and was fine.”
They did not feel the need to share the detail that they were the one who broke Imp and caused the android to go offline in the first place.
“Fascinating.” Entrapta was not looking at them. “You’re a natural prodigy with technology. Hordak, that is, the original Hordak wasn’t as clever as that. He was well educated, obviously, but not intuitive like that. That must be my genetic contribution manifesting. There is a long standing debate over whether intelligence is more strongly determined by environment or genetics. This would make a strong case for genetics.”
Once again, Dak didn’t know what to say in response to that, so they just didn’t say anything. They were just glad Mother wanted them around now.
It seemed no response was necessary because Mother was still talking. Explanations tumbling out of her mouth a mile a minute. She was exhibiting all the energy and passion that came across on her recordings. This was the version of Mother Dak was hoping to meet and they were happy Mother was recovered from her shock of meeting them enough to be this version of herself around them.
“Now that Adora’s got this place up and running, there’s so much data to go through!”
In a bit of a daze, Dak gave the now well-lit and functioning command room a more thorough examination. The consoles mostly all seemed to be on some kind of ‘waiting’ screen, although Dak could not be sure as they couldn’t read the Frist Ones language all the tech was programmed in. The central display screen, however, the one that took up almost the whole front wall, was displaying what might have been a map. It was mostly blank, but it had the latitude and longitude lines of a map. There was a spinning status wheel in the center of the screen as if it were trying to load something, or processing something, or scanning for something. Then every so often the status wheel would be interrupted and a message would flash on the screen, probably informing them of the results of the scan, although Dak couldn’t read it.
“What are we looking for?” They asked. Dak wanted to help Mother and make her like them, but they also needed to know what Mother wanted if they were to try and do it.
“Looking for?” Entrapta was momentarily confused. “We’re not looking for anything in particular. We’re just looking for knowledge! A better understanding of the First Ones and their technology.”
Wriggling in their mother’s hair enough to free one arm, Dak pointed a taloned finger at the main display screen on the front wall. “What’s that doing?”
Entrapta followed their finger with her eyes. “Oh. That. Adora set it to look for Eternia, but Eternia’s not here, so it just keep saying ‘Not Found’ then trying again. It’s in a bit of a loop.” She laughed happily. Technology could be funny.
Dak didn’t know what ‘Eternia’ was or how it might be important to Adora, but if it wasn’t within range of the scanners then it wasn’t relevant at the moment. What was relevant was that Mother wanted to learn more about First Ones tech and she was giving them an opportunity to work with her. Dak did not want to disappoint. They wanted to impress her. They wanted to contribute meaningfully to her research. “What if we set it to scan for other things?”
Turning her attention from the screen, Entrapta blinked at the hybrid, almost as if seeing them for the first time. Then her lips pulled into an excited smile and she clasped her hands together. “Like more First Ones tech! We could map out every single First Ones outpost, settlement, communications array, beacon, and base on the whole planet!”
She let the hybrid down out of her hair and turned to the nearest console, trying to recall her own rudimentary knowledge of the First Ones language. She could read a little. She wasn’t fluent. Certainly nowhere near as fluent as Adora. But she understood enough –she liked to think.
Dak could not reach the First Ones writing. They had been just barely beginning to master the Dryl dialect of Etherian basic when they ran away from home with Bow and Adora. First Ones language was beyond them. But they hoped that the suggestion was enough of a contribution that Mother would start to appreciate them.
Moving on their own hair, Dak came up beside Mother to get a better look at what she was doing. They didn’t recognize any of the characters or symbols on the keys she was typing, but she seemed to and that was the important thing, they supposed.
Imp came back to rest on top of the hybrid’s head to likewise watch Entrapta work, feeling oddly nostalgic. Seeing the hyper and overly excited Princess flit about a lab, with a sparkle in her eye, while a Horde clone looked on in mesmerized confusion. …Imp didn’t realize how much he missed master until this moment. He had been focused on master’s heir this whole time. He never had the chance to pause long enough to wonder what happened to master. Unlike Hode –whom Imp witnessed the fate of- he never saw what happened to master after the Princesses got in. He was in the corridors, covered in foam, locked out of the Sanctum, and master was in the Sanctum with the portal. Imp had no idea what happened to him.
“Look at this!” Entrapta interrupted their thoughts. “There’s a First One’s communications array in the Whispering Woods, in the village of Alwyn! And a First Ones stronghold, also in the Whispering Woods. Lot of First Ones tech in the Whispering Woods. Huh. Must have been a favorite spot of their’s or something.” She tapped her chin with her hair, filing the detail away in her mind for later study. “Ah! Here’s all the First Ones tech that keeps being unearthed in my mines back in Dryl. There’s the outpost in the Northern Reach. And over in the Crimson Wastes there’s-“
She cut herself off suddenly, staring at the signal the display was projecting.
Dak blinked glowing eyes at her. They certainly couldn’t decipher what was being projected on the main monitor. They didn’t understand the significance of the Crimson Wastes’ signal being different from the others.
“That’s not the same signal I picked up from the Fright Zone.” She said, not speaking to Dak in particular, but informing the air around them. “I need to get Adora! She’s better at reading First Ones than I am.”
Entrapta dashed from the room, leaving Dak to wonder what was going on and hope that they were not somehow being an annoyance to Mother.
Without air vents, Entrapta had to run through the halls and corridors like a normal frantic person. She found Adora sitting with Sea Hawk, as the latter was telling King Micah the story of when he first met Glimmer.
“…so then she just looks me dead-ass in the eyes and says ‘set your ship on fire’.” He was saying. “That was the moment I knew I belonged in the Princess Alliance.”
Sea Hawk paused, expecting Micah to laugh at that part. But the old man just looked confused. Like he didn’t quite understand what was supposed to be so funny. Like there was a generational gap that just couldn’t be crossed.
Entrapta interrupted them.
“I need Adora!” She announced, wrapping her hair around the younger woman and pulling her off her seat.
She carried Adora back to the command room, the rest of the group following after them. Equal parts confused and concerned. Scorpia caught up with them along the way and joined the entourage.
Dak had no moved from when their mother left. They didn’t want to risk pressing a wrong button or messing something up.
Entrapta dragged Adora to the center of the room and pointed to the central screen. “What is that?”
It took the other woman a moment or two for her brain to catch up with what Entrapta was asking. Dak realized very early on that while Adora was one kind of smart, that did not actually make her intelligent. On some things, she could be a little slow.
Finally, “That’s a distress call.” She gasped, leaning forward. “And it’s coming from Mara’s ship in the Crimson Wastes!”
“Mara’s ship!” Bow joined the group just a little bit after Scorpia had. “Is someone attacking Mara’s ship!?”
“I donno.” Adora admitted. “But we have to go. Mara was the last She-Ra before me. We can’t let her ship fall into enemy hands!”
“A First Ones’ ship?” Entrapta’s mind at first jumped to a water craft, or perhaps a floating land ship like one of the skiffs the Horde utilized. Those were the only kinds of ‘ships’ on Etheria. But then she remembered when Hordak was telling her of his turbulent origins, he mentioned ‘…with only his broken ship…’ and he was from another dimension where his people possessed technology that allowed them to travel between worlds. First Ones technology was so advanced, they must possess the same ability. The First Ones ship was a ship that had traveled to Etheria from another world –from Eternia! Entrapta had to see it! “Take me with you!”
Bow and Adora exchanged a look.
“I donno…” Adora had her misgivings.
“She might be able to help me fix the parts of Mara’s message that were damaged in the crash.” Bow pointed out.
Adora did want to know Mara’s full message. “Okay, Sea Hawk can get us back to the mainland, I imagine Micah will want to head back to Brightmoon, he can drop Dak off at Dryl on the way. We’ll take Entrapta and make our way to the Crimson Wastes.”
“Not going back to Dryl!” Dak protested this plan. They had only just met their mother, she was only just starting to give them attention. They did not want to be separated from her again. Dak glanced at Entrapta. “I want to see the First Ones ship too.”
“But it’s dangerous!” Scorpia protested. It really felt like she was the only person on the planet concerned for the child’s safety.
“Oh, Dak can take care of themself.” Adora assured her. The hybrid might be young, inexperienced, and naïve. But if they could move through the vents and ducts of the Crypto Castle, climb the outers walls, leap onto flag poles, bash flying deamon androids in the head, and leap-tackle warrior trained Jungle Tribe hunters, then they could handle themselves if things turned south in the Crimson Wastes.
Micah opened his mouth to agree with Scorpia. The Crimson Wastes were no place for a child.
But before he could say anything, the child in question cut him off. “I’m not going back to Dryl.” They repeated. “Not until Mother wants to go back. I’m going to see the First Ones ship with Mother, and you can’t stop me.” A pause. “Imp will help!”
Still perched on the hybrid’s head, the deamon gave a squawk of disagreement. He would not be helping master’s heir get themselves killed. What was it with these Horde clones and self-destructive decision making? First Hode, then Hordak, now Hordak Second of Their Name. It was almost like the drive to satisfy their wants was stronger than their drive to remain alive.
There was a beat.
Then Bow let out a sound half-way between a sigh and groan. “I mean… if they would beak two intruders out of their own dungeon and bludgeon original-Hordak’s flying minion, fly across the Growling Sea, and break into a Horde prison… why would we expect them to go back home where it safe for this?”
Dak smiled. They liked Bow. Bow just got it. Bow was probably Dak’s favorite adult thus far.
Imp chittered something rude under his breath.
As if the matter was settled, Dak grinned. “Are we ready to go?”
…
Hordak wasn’t working on the bridge consoles anymore. He wasn’t even trying to scrub and repair the former-She-Ra’s message.
He was shaping bits of metal and other scrap found around the ship into rangs, wing-shaped blades, pronged on one side, smooth on the other, like the wings on Horde banners, meant to be used as throwing weapons. Hordak was not a master of them. He preferred melee combat weapons like the force-pike or the quarter-staff. But they were his mentor’s favored weapon and Hode was a master of them. So Hordak had tried to become at least proficient with them back when he was still a Force Captain working under the late Lord.
He could not beat Catra in hand-to-hand fisticuffs. She was younger, more agile, and healthy. While he had become old for a clone, was slower than he used to be, and suffered failing health. In a straight up fight, Catra could beat him easily. Hordak needed weapons.
It only he’d had the wisdom –and discipline- to keep in practice with the throwing blades. It had been literal years since the last time he trained with them.
…
“Have you thought of a name yet?”
Zero-Zero-Three did not look away from practicing his katas with his force-pike when Red Hord entered the gymnasium. It was only a fool that allowed themselves to be distracted on the battlefield. There wasn’t a single hitch, or skip, or pause in his motions when he answered the Lord –the other Lord, he was a Lord too now, although it had not been made official yet. It would not become official until Horde Prime announced his elevation and his name.
They were making their way to Capital Core for Prime to make the announcement from Horde World, the center of the Empire. Zero-Zero-Three was a passenger aboard the Leather Vest, Lord Red Hord’s flagship.
“I have been considering several.” Zero-Zero-Three replied diplomatically. “I will never understand how you could have chosen your name so quickly in that moment.”
Red Hord walked the perimeter of the training circle. Watching Zero-Zero-Three’s movements and studying his technique. “Have you never thought of what kind of name you would choose before now?” He asked. “Did you not fantasize about rising to the cabinet from the moment you hatched from the tank?”
“I never thought I’d live long enough.” Admitted Zero-Zero-Three, feeling odd confessing to someone other than Hode. Hode knew about his defects. Hode understood. Red Hord did not know. Red Hord could not understand.
“Is that why you jumped to defend Hode when he didn’t want or need it?” Asked the other clone. “It was stupid, and if Hode had been literally any other Lord, he would have punished you severely. But you didn’t care, because you expected to die anyway.”
In that moment, at Horrin’s trial, Zero-Zero-Three had not even thought about dying. He had just wanted to protect his Lord. An older clone whom was the best superior officer Zero-Zero-Three had ever worked directly under. His own safety –never mind his life- didn’t even enter into his mind.
Completing the final kata in the set, Zero-Zero-Three paused.
He tried not to think about Hode too much. He was still angry at the older clone for demoting him and leaving him behind without explanation. Then the old man just had to go and die, so that not explanation could ever be given. Zero-Zero-Three resented him for that. But, hand in hand with that resentment was a strange and uncomfortable kind of regret. Hode had been the best superior he ever worked under and he died far away. Zero-Zero-Three wasn’t there with him when it happened. Zero-Zero-Three didn’t get to wish him farewell before the older clone went to join the All High Host.
Perhaps he paused too long, because Red Hord walked past the training circle and opened the weapons cabinet on the far wall. “Do you know any other weapons.”
“I am programed the same as all clones.” Zero-Zero-Three sounded almost insulted. “I know all the weapons the Horde uses.”
“But are you good at them?” Red Hord clarified.
Zero-Zero-Three paused to consider. “I’m good at the arm-mounted cannon, and throwing rangs.”
“Well, we won’t be firing arm-mounted cannons inside my ship.” Red Hord announced. “So, throwing rangs it’ll have to be. Let’s have a match.”
He pulled out a case full of twenty four standard issue, polished, and honed rangs.
It was standard contest rules. A few warm up rounds where all they had to do was stand still and throw at the practice targets. After the warmup, Red Hord hit the switch to run the training program. Moving targets now. Alternating gymnasium lights for distraction, panels opening in the walls to place objects in the way, or automated weapons that forced them to dodge or defend while still trying to make their shots. The program rising in difficulty and intensity as time went on.
“You know,” began Red Hord, never taking his eyes off the targets. His hands deftly plucked rang after rang off his belt, and flicked them at the targets with the skill of one who used the weapons often. “It’s not just your own name you’ll have to think of. You’ll also get to name your own capital ship.”
“Oh, that’s easy.” Zero-Zero-Three didn’t have to think about that. He already had something in mind for what he always thought would be a suitably intimidating and strong name for a capital ship. “Monstron, is what I’d name my flagship.”
Red Horde scoffed. Still not taking his attention off the training program they were running. “That does not follow the naming scheme for Imperial command flagships.”
All Imperial command flagships, that is, ships that belonged to the Emperor and his cabinet Lords, all followed the same naming scheme as the Velvet Glove. [Textile], [item]. The Velvet Glove, the Leather Vest, the Vinyl Hood, Lycra Pant, and Linen Cloak. So, Zero-Zero-Three had to come up with a name for his flagship as well as himself.
“Did Hode ever tell you why he named his ship the Vinyl Hood?” Asked Red Hord as he executed an unnecessarily complicated dodge and throw move, and still managed to hit the target.
Zero-Zero-Three did not want to admit that, no, Hode never did tell him why he named his flagship the Vinyl Hood.
“Something that’s hooded is hidden.” Explained Red Hord.
He said it so heavily, as if there was more meaning to the statement than just ‘hoods equal hide’. Zero-Zero-Three didn’t understand the significance and he fumbled a dodge in his confusion. A long pole folding out from the wall and catching him in the stomach. It knocked the wind out of him and he staggered backwards, determined to keep his feet under him. The last thing he wanted to do was collapse in front of one of the cabinet Lords –one of his fellow cabinet Lords, he was one of them now.
Shutting down the training program, Red Hord stared at him, studying. “Hode didn’t tell you anything.”
The words stung. Zero-Zero-Three liked to think he was special to the older clone. At least, Lord Hode seemed to invest unnecessary amounts of time in trying to educate him on culture. Poetry, fiction, sculpture, illustration, and music. But not in how he chose the name for his flagship. Or where he came up with his own name. ‘Hode’ was just ‘Horde’ with the R removed, right? At least, that’s what Zero-Zero-Three always thought. But now that he was learning that he didn’t actually know his Lord as well as he thought he did, Zero-Zero-Three was beginning to question that too.
The other Lord was still giving him a weird look. Zero-Zero-Three almost couldn’t decipher it. “You really don’t know about Hode.”
All this heavily weighted talk about the old clone with veiled significance that he didn’t understand was really starting to irritate Zero-Zero-Three. “Hode was a cabinet Lord, I was merely his Force Captain. He was not required to tell me anything.”
“Of course.” Nodded Red Hord. He was a cabinet Lord too, and was also equally not required to tell his subordinates anything. He circled the perimeter of the room, collecting the throwing rangs from the targets –and the walls just off from the targets, one of them needed to work on their aim. “You know, no one has seen Lord Hode’s deamon since he died. We’re all very interested to know what happened to it.”
Zero-Zero-Three frowned. “When Lord Hode demoted me to Territory Captain and then left me there, he still had his deamon with him.”
“I know.” Red Hord nodded, depositing the rangs back in their case and closing the weapons cabinet. “I wasn’t asking you where it was. Just mentioning that it was interesting that it was missing. Fascinating robots, the deamon-class android. Horde Prime meant them to be sort of administrative assistants for his cabinet. They had the same level of intelligence as a fully formed clone, but with much more memory storage, and the ability to record audio files. It would have made them perfect for relaying messages and communiques between the cabinet without danger of interception by enemy rebels. But all the cabinet used them for was to spy on and undermine each other.”
That must be why none of the other –current- cabinet Lords had deamons of their own. When Zero-Zero-Three was still newly hatched, he remembered another of the cabinet Lords besides Hode having a deamon. But when that Lord died, his deamon was decommissioned along with his flagship and never seen again.
Red Hord moved to exit the gymnasium. “Imagine what kinds of recordings and files Hode stored on his deamon.” He left. “Think of a decent name, and practice more with those rangs. Your aim is terrible.”
…
Everyone piled into the Dragon’s Daughter. Adora, Bow, Entrapta, Scorpia, Swift Wind, Imp, Micah, Dak, and of course, Sea Hawk. It was a little cramped on the deck, but not so much to prevent Sea Hawk from sailing it. There was some awkward squeezing between horse posterior and elongated scorpion tail, and uncomfortable bending and kneeling to tie off the main sail and make sure the boom didn’t swing around the bash anybody in the head.
But after they were out of the harbor and out on the water, things settled down.
There was an awkward moment where everyone was sort of staring at everyone. There really wasn’t much sitting room. Unless they didn’t mind sitting on the taffrail. But that ran the risk of them falling off the boat. Sea Hawk and Adora were the only ones brave enough. Feeling a bit claustrophobic, surrounded by so many people, Entrapta used her hair to lift herself up the mast, finding a more comfortable seat in the crows nest.
“So…” Bow began, trying to diffuse the awkwardness. “Usually, when we sail with Sea Hawk we have songs.”
“I’m not allowed to sing my song anymore.” Announced the sailor.
From out of nowhere, Bow produced his violin. “But we know more than one song, don’t we.”
With musical accompaniment, Scorpia reprised her song ‘Twiddle’.
“Saber had her lovers, they came in at every door,
“You could even say that she was really quite a whore.
“But when she needs some pleasing, she knows just where to go
“I grab my good friend Madam Rouge and we go down below.”
After she finished the final chorus of her song, Micah, wanting to get in on the fun volunteered a song from when he was growing up in Mysticor.
“Sixteen books on magic spells,
“Stacked below the cloak of elves.
“And sixteen books on magic spells,
“So elegantly bound.
“And I know I could not say why,
“On this summer evening.”
When Micah was done, however, the deck lapsed back into an awkward silence. No one really knowing what to say to anyone else. It wasn’t like all of them were friends. Scorpia and Imp were former Horde. Technically, Adora was too, but she was also a Hero of the Rebellion, same as Bow. Micah was an old Rebellion leader, but hadn’t been seen for twenty years. No one on the boat had ever actually met him before coming to Beast Island. No one really knew where Entrapta and Dak stood. Entrapta seemed to hop the lines as if she were playing jump rope, and Dak made it abundantly clear that they stood with their ‘mother’.
“Hey, Entrapta, you know any songs from Dryl?” Scorpia shouted up the mast at the older woman.
Lifting her welding mask, Entrapta looked down at them, almost confused. One would think no one had ever asked her what kinds of songs her country had before. “Well, there was one song my robot-parents used to sing for me…” She confessed. Tapping her chin with her hair, it look her a moment to recall the lyrics. Then she started snapping her fingers, the glove muting the sound slightly.
“Do, do, do, woah… Arrow of entro~opic time.
“Oh, arrow of entropic time.
“If you made a scrambled egg tonight,
“There’d be no return to yoke and white.
“And when it’s fried you, can’t go back to raw food.
“Structure decomposes ‘til it’s gone.
“Hots spots cool and entropy grows on.
“My lab was cleaner, now looks like Mantisours been there.
“Not my fault, blame it on entropic time.”
She petered out as she realized that the others were not enjoying her song quite as much as they did the others. All except Dak. They appeared to be gazing up at her, hanging on every lyric. They, at least, appreciated a bouncy do-op song about science. Entrapta appreciated them just a little bit more.
Imp jumped up on Swift Wind’s back and screeched for everyone to pay attention to him now. He wasn’t just a highly advanced AI and audio file and data storage unit. He had music in him too! Hode made sure to save some song files to him.
“I am not a stage.” Swift Wind informed the flying germline. He might have bucked a bit to get the wined troll of himself. But he couldn’t do so without kicking someone else, they were so cramped on the deck of the ship. So, the horse ruffled his wings and resigned himself to being Imp’s sounding platform.
The deamon opened his mouth and began a recording he never thought he’d ever find a relevant moment to play.
“Are you recording?” Came a voice that sounded remarkably like Hordak’s but… not quite Hordak’s. There was a bit of feedback and a squawk that sounded a bit like Imp’s own voice answering the speaker. “Well, blink or something. I can never tell when you’re recoding. Anyway…”
There was the sound of a few strings being plucked experimentally. Then the plucking melted into an almost haunting melody. Then the voice that sounded like Hordak, but couldn’t possibly be Hordak began to sing.
“If we should lose the fight,
“Light’s Hope burns ever brighter.
“One hundred days and nights,
“Engines, pistons form a choir.
“If blood should stain the skies,
“As waxing stars re-ignite.
“From Despondent dark they rise,
“And strike a chord of steel and light.”
“Nobody wants to hear your crapping Horde songs!” Micah cut him off abruptly. He swatted at the little deamon, whom fell off the horse’s back.
Imp gave an indignant squawk. It wasn’t a Horde song. The Horde had no songs. It was a rebel song. From a rebel world. Taught to Hode by a rebel leader.
Clearing his throat, Sea Hawk drew everyone’s attention to him. “Land’s coming into view. I just wanna confirm, I’m just dropping you guys off close to the Crimson Wastes, and then Micah and I are continuing on the Brightmoon alone.”
Adora and Entrapta nodded.
As She-Ra, Adora could not let ship of the previous She-Ra fall into enemy hands.
While Entrapta was fascinated and excited to study a First One’s craft that could travel between worlds.
Bow, Dak, and Scorpia were tagging along with them for their own personal reasons.
Sea Hawk was going to make sure King Micah finally got home to his daughter.
If you are an up-and-coming business who is trying to get their message out there, then yes!
Let’s begin by discussing what a web presence analysis is.
A web presence analysis is a comprehensive review done on the business’ website, focusing on how the company is performing online. In a web presence analysis, aspects such as content, design, functionality, and visibility are looked at to better understand what the user sees, thinks, and experiences when they express interest in your site. As a business owner, your perception of your website can be totally different from your customers’. While you might view your site as being user friendly and full of important information, the customer might find the excess of information hard to navigate. At the end of the day, the customer matters the most. If they are unhappy, the business will suffer because consumers are the force that drives revenue. This exercise helps you as the business owner to get a better understanding of how customers will view your website. As If offers a new and fresh perspective with the hopes of improving the quality. Below are some of the overall questions that you should be asking yourself when conducting the analysis.....
What keywords to customers have to enter to find my business?
The keyword phrases associated with your website matter tremendously. Researching what keywords perform best ensures that your site is easily accessible. If internet users can’t find your site after one attempt, they will most likely give up and never think about it again. Ubersuggest, Keyword.io, and Google Search Console are all free services that can be a great place to start. While the first two generate longer keywords that users could potentially type into the search engine bar, Google Search Console reports data specifically for your business. It aids you by monitoring customer activities on your site as well as allowing you to access search queries that users type in to find your site. Of course, from using these tools you will gain a better understanding of your search engine visibility. The site Rank Tracker can be used to see how your website’s ranking is among the keywords you listed prior. From here, you can make the required adjustments to better attract customers.
Is the structure of my site pleasing?
Customers make their decision on whether or not a site meets their exceptions based on how user friendly it is. If it is slow and lagging, customers will be impatient. Impatient customers will lead to them leaving your site. If customers know a specific product or service that they are looking for, will they be able to find it by your navigation bar? This is important to ask. The structure should be eye catching. Users should not get lost in paragraphs of information. Neither should they get lost in pages of pictures that provide no text. Balance here is key.
Have I linked my social media sites?
Of course, prior to the analysis it is vital to establish a presence on a variety of social media sites. But, there should be a central location in which all of these are listed. This location should be your website. This will make sure that your social media sites are at their maximum visibility. Ask yourself if you are giving consistent information on all platforms. While there should be slight changes that conform to the demographic, all platforms should be communicating the same big idea.
Do I have competition?
Have you seen other brands like your own on the web? The answer is probably yes. It is important to evaluate your areas of strengths as well as areas of weakness when comparing your site to others like it. If competitors are offering a product at a lower price, then this might make you rethink your listing prices. This is a great opportunity to learn from others that might be performing better than you. Inspiration can also come whenever this step is taken in the analysis process.
What are customers saying about my site?
Reviews of your site, performance, and overall business can be found on social media platforms or your website itself. What do the good reviews love and what do the bad reviews hate? Do I even have any reviews on my website? These are great things to ask yourself. On your site, it might be a good idea to leave a review section that focuses solely on the website, encouraging honest feedback. It is up to you if this review system is shown publicly or for your eyes only. Both have advantages and disadvantages. But the point of this is that customer feedback is a quick and direct way to learn the most about you website’s performance.
These questions will help guide the business owner when conducting an analysis. However, many websites provide services that will do this for you. If you want a professional analysis conducted, check out some of the links below to get started!
Is Indoor Vertical Farming Environmentally Friendly?
There are pressing global issues related to feeding the world, mostly due to factors such as limited arable land, uneven wealth distribution and climate changes. This calls for a change in our approach towards producing food and vertical farming presents a very possible solution.
For those of you who are not familiar, vertical farming is an indoor method for growing plants without soil that utilizes special nutrients delivery systems, highly-controlled environments, sophisticated lighting, resource management and robot automatization (among other things!)
The quickest explanation begins with an example- AeroFarms is one of the most ambitions vertical farming projects with a capacity for producing 1.7 million pounds of greens annually. It is a truly state of the art facility that pushes the boundaries of agriculture. Watch this video to learn more!. Here are some other great vertical farm examples.
(Source: https://www.dtnpf.com)
Technology is constantly being improved and becoming quite efficient. Because of this, many are considering it to be the future of food production, but there are also opposing opinions concerned with the environmental impact of vertical farming.
Vertical Farming Advantages
Let`s continue with some of the major benefits in order to gain a better overall understanding of the field. This will later enable us to adequately weigh the pros and cons related to the limitations of vertical farming.
Reliability
The dependability of vertical farming is by far one of the best perks of it.. The environment is closed and highly controlled, impervious to weather conditions. This means that the growers can ensure a steady production flow but it also provides predictability. Furthermore, the crops are not seasonal and production can go all year round.
Resource efficiency
Vertical farming uses 80% less fertilizer than traditional farming, but on top of that it also uses a staggering 95% less water thanks to clever circulation and reusability. Operational costs are also reduced with the help of robot automation and there are very few hands-on workers involved.
Lighting
The biggest improvement comes from the lighting vertical farming utilizes. Growing plants indoors requires a lot of light and in order for it to work state-of-the-art equipment is needed. Efficient full spectrum LED grow lights are incredibly energy saving and can provide plants with the precise amounts of light and correct spectrum for each growth stage.
(Source: https://advancedledlights.com/)
Space efficiency
Due to the vertical nature of growing the plants, space efficiency is achieved- just as the name ‘vertical farming’ suggests. A vertical farm uses 88% less air space than a regular farm for the same amount of growing space.
(Source: http://www.businessinsider.com)
Transportation costs
Vertical farming can be implemented almost anywhere, including in the heart of big cities. This means that there isn't any need for lengthy logistics stunts and transportation costs are minimized even more.
Vertical Farming Disadvantages
Now that you're familiar with the concept of vertical farming and what makes it so great, it`s time to take a look at the other perspective. As in many fields, there are plenty of opposing opinions with skepticism involved.
The main concerns critics point out are the large operational costs involved and the carbon footprint on the environment. Despite optimization in all of the growing processes, vertical farms still need to use a lot of lighting as opposed to regular farming which relies on the sun. LED lighting is developing at an incredible pace and becoming ever more efficient, but still only 50% of the used electricity can be converted into light.
Dr. Louis Albright from the Controlled Environment Agriculture Findings department at Cornell University says in a recorded seminar that for each kilo of lettuce produced indoors there are four kilos of carbon dioxide generated. Presumably, this is without the further environmental burden added by devices such as ventilation, climate control and humidifiers. According to an article found on Washington Post producing lettuce indoors can leave a carbon mark of up to 20 times more than producing it outdoors.
(Source: http://www.cnn.com)
In the same seminar mentioned above, Dr. Albright makes a strong case by providing an example of the hypothetical carbon footprint left, if all of New York City`s wheat for a year was grown on a vertical farm. The average New Yorker consumes about 24 kilos of bread annually and it's estimated that in order to grow the necessary amount of wheat it would take 3 vertical farming facilities, each the size of Empire State Building. And while it might seem cool to have such a centralized wheat production point, the costs of running it are quite large. If the facility operates using efficient LED lights, running at $0.10 per kilowatt/hour, the cost would be $11 per loaf of bread- and that’s only to cover the lighting costs! Further production costs are sure to drive the cost of a single loaf significantly up, making it affordable only for the economically stable folks. In the seminar Dr. Albright also makes a similar case using lettuce and tomatoes, and again it turns out to be very pricy.
The Verdict
So there you have it, the two main arguments against vertical farming – cost and carbon footprint. Are they really an issue? Yes, of course. But are these issues resolvable in the foreseeable future? Yes again.
History shows us that technology is always developing, especially when it comes to important matters such as feeding the world. What seems difficult to achieve at the moment might be solved with a simple improvement in a tiny process along the chain. Agricultural equipment manufacturers are putting massive efforts into R&D, especially in the vertical farming field. For example, EdenWorks is an aquaponics vertical farm operation that is researching ways to integrate intricate sensors throughout the facility in order to gather valuable data and then use it for input optimization.
What is essential at this point is for industry leaders to share information and learn from each other, which is understandably difficult in the global competitive market. If the true potential of vertical is unlocked, it would benefit us all.
Author’s Bio: Luis Rivera
Luis has 20+ years of experience in global market expansion, business development, mergers and acquisitions, business re-engineering, finance and investor relations of software companies. He is passionate about technology, spectral science, indoor farming, food production, automation, and more. Since 2015 he is the president of Advanced LED Lights, a leading LED grow lights manufacturer based in Hiwasse, Arkansas. When not at work, Luis enjoys swimming, yoga, as well as growing grapes and flowers in Sonoma, California.
The problem with distributed systems, is that no matter what the question is, the answer is inevitably ‘It Depends’.
When you cut a larger service apart, where you cut depends on latency, resources, and access to state, but it also depends on error handling, availably and recovery processes. It depends, but you probably don’t want to depend on a message broker.
Using a message broker to distribute work is like a cross between a load balancer with a database, with the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither.
Message brokers, or persistent queues accessed by publish-subscribe, are a popular way to pull components apart over a network. They’re popular because they often have a low setup cost, and provide easy service discovery, but they can come at a high operational cost, depending where you put them in your systems.
In practice, a message broker is a service that transforms network errors and machine failures into filled disks. Then you add more disks. The advantage of publish-subscribe is that it isolates components from each other, but the problem is usually gluing them together.
For short-lived tasks, you want a load balancer
For short-lived tasks, publish-subscribe is a convenient way to build a system quickly, but you inevitably end up implementing a new protocol atop. You have publish-subscribe, but you really want request-response. If you want something computed, you’ll probably want to know the result.
Starting with publish-subscribe makes work assignment easy: jobs get added to the queue, workers take turns to remove them. Unfortunately, it makes finding out what happened quite hard, and you’ll need to add another queue to send a result back.
Once you can handle success, it is time to handle the errors. The first step is often adding code to retry the request a few times. After you DDoS your system, you put a call to sleep(). After you slowly DDoS your system, each retry waits twice as long as the previous.
(Aside: Accidental synchronisation is still a problem, as waiting to retry doesn’t prevent a lot of things happening at once.)
As workers fail to keep up, clients give up and retry work, but the earlier request is still waiting to be processed. The solution is to move some of the queue back to clients, asking them to hold onto work until work has been accepted: back-pressure, or acknowledgements.
Although the components interact via publish-subscribe, we’ve created a request-response protocol atop. Now the message broker is really only doing two useful things: service discovery, and load balancing. It is also doing two not-so-useful thing: enqueuing requests, and persisting them.
For short-lived tasks, the persistence is unnecessary: the client sticks around for as long as the work needs to be done, and handles recovery. The queuing isn’t that necessary either.
Queues inevitably run in two states: full, or empty. If your queue is running full, you haven’t pushed enough work to the edges, and if it is running empty, it’s working as a slow load balancer.
A mostly empty queue is still first-come-first-served, serving as point of contention for requests. A broker often does nothing but wait for workers to poll for new messages. If your queue is meant to run empty, why wait to forward on a request.
(Aside: Something like random load balancing will work, but join-idle-queue is well worth your time investigating)
For distributing short-lived tasks, you can use a message broker, but you’ll be building a load balancer, along with an ad-hoc RPC system, with extra latency.
For long-lived tasks, you’ll need a database
A load balancer with service discovery won’t help you with long running tasks, or work that outlives the client, or manage throughput. You’ll want persistence, but not in your message broker. For long-lived tasks, you’ll want a database instead.
Although the persistence and queueing were obstacles for short-lived tasks, the disadvantages are less obvious for long-lived tasks, but similar things can go wrong.
If you care about the result of a task, you’ll want to store that it is needed somewhere other than in the persistent queue. If the task is run but fails midway, something will have to take responsibility for it, and the broker will have forgotten. This is why you want a database.
Duplicates in a queue often cause more headaches, as long-lived tasks have more opportunities to overlap. Although we’re using the broker to distribute work, we’re also using it implicitly as a mutex. To stop work from overlapping, you implement a lock atop. After it breaks a couple of times, you replace it with leases, adding timeouts.
(Note: This is not why you want a database, using transactions for long running tasks is suffering. Long running processes are best modelled as state machines.)
When the database becomes the primary source of truth, you can handle a broker going offline, or a broker losing the contents of a queue, by backfilling from the database. As a result, you don’t need to directly enqueue work with the broker, but mark it as required in the database, and wait for something else to handle it.
Assuming that something else isn’t a human who has been paged.
A message pump can scan the database periodically and send work requests to the broker. Enqueuing work in batches can be an effective way of making an expensive database call survivable. The pump responsible for enqueuing the work can also track if it has completed, and so handle recovery or retries too.
Backlog is still a problem, so you’ll want to use back-pressure to keep the queue fairly empty, and only fill from the database when needed. Although a broker can handle temporary overload, back-pressure should mean it never has to.
At this point the message broker is really providing two things: service discovery, and work assignment, but really you need a scheduler. A scheduler is what scans a database, works out which jobs need to run, and often where to run them too. A scheduler is what takes responsibility for handling errors.
(Aside: Writing a scheduler is hard. It is much easier to have 1000 while loops waiting for the right time, than one while loop waiting for which of the 1000 is first. A scheduler can track when it last ran something, but the work can’t rely on that being the last time it ran. Idempotency isn’t just your friend, it is your saviour.)
You can use a message broker for long-lived tasks, but you’ll be building a lock manager, a database, and a scheduler, along with yet another home-brew request-response system.
Publish-Subscribe is about isolating components
The problem with running tasks with publish-subscribe is that you really want request-response. The problem with using queues to assign work is that you don’t want to wait for a worker to ask.
The problem with relying on a persistent queue for recovery, is that recovery must get handled elsewhere, and the problem with brokers is nothing else makes service discovery so trivial.
Message brokers can be misused, but it isn’t to say they have no use. Brokers work well when you need to cross system boundaries.
Although you want to keep queues empty between components, it is convenient to have a buffer at the edges of your system, to hide some failures from external clients. When you handle external faults at the edges, you free the insides from handling them. The inside of your system can focus on handling internal problems, of which there are many.
A broker can be used to buffer work at the edges, but it can also be used as an optimisation, to kick off work a little earlier than planned. A broker can pass on a notification that data has been changed, and the system can fetch data through another API.
(Aside: If you use a broker to speed up a process, the system will grow to rely on it for performance. People use caches to speed up database calls, but there are many systems that simply do not work fast enough until the cache is warmed up, filled with data. Although you are not relying on the message broker for reliability, relying on it for performance is just as treacherous.)
Sometimes you want a load balancer, sometimes you’ll need a database, but sometimes a message broker will be a good fit.
Although persistence can’t handle many errors, it is convenient if you need to restart with new code or settings, without data loss. Sometimes the error handling offered is just right.
Although a persistent queue offers some protection against failure, it can’t take responsibility for when things go wrong halfway through a task. To be able to recover from failure you have to stop hiding it, you must add acknowledgements, back-pressure, error handling, to get back to a working system.
A persistent message queue is not bad in itself, but relying on it for recovery, and by extension, correct behaviour, is fraught with peril.
Systems grow by pushing responsibilities to the edges
Performance isn’t easy either. You don’t want queues, or persistence in the central or underlying layers of your system. You want them at the edges.
It’s slow is the hardest problem to debug, and often the reason is that something is stuck in a queue. For long and short-lived tasks, we used back-pressure to keep the queue empty, to reduce latency.
When you have several queues between you and the worker, it becomes even more important to keep the queue out of the centre of the network. We’ve spent decades on tcp congestion control to avoid it.
If you’re curious, the history of tcp congestion makes for interesting reading. Although the ends of a tcp connection were responsible for failure and retries, the routers were responsible for congestion: drop things when there is too much.
The problem is that it worked until the network was saturated, and similar to backlog in queues, when it broke, errors cascaded. The solution was similar: back-pressure. Similar to sleeping twice as long on errors, tcp sends half as many packets, before gradually increasing the amount as things improve.
Back-pressure is about pushing work to the edges, letting the ends of the conversation find stability, rather than trying to optimise all of the links in-between in isolation. Congestion control is about using back-pressure to keep the queues in-between as empty as possible, to keep latency down, and to increase throughput by avoiding the need to drop packets.
Pushing work to the edges is how your system scales. We have spent a lot of time and a considerable amount of money on IP-Multicast, but nothing has been as effective as BitTorrent. Instead of relying on smart routers to work out how to broadcast, we rely on smart clients to talk to each other.
Pushing recovery to the outer layers is how your system handles failure. In the earlier examples, we needed to get the client, or the scheduler to handle the lifecycle of a task, as it outlived the time on the queue.
Error recovery in the lower layers of a system is an optimisation, and you can’t push work to the centre of a network and scale. This is the end-to-end principle, and it is one of the most important ideas in system design.
The end-to-end principle is why you can restart your home router, when it crashes, without it having to replay all of the websites you wanted to visit before letting you ask for a new page. The browser (and your computer) is responsible for recovery, not the computers in between.
This isn’t a new idea, and Erlang/OTP owes a lot to it. OTP organises a running program into a supervision tree. Each process will often have one process above it, restarting it on failure, and above that, another supervisor to do the same.
(Aside: Pipelines aren’t incompatible with process supervision, one way is for each part to spawn the program that reads its output. A failure down the chain can propagate back up to be handled correctly.)
Although each program will handle some errors, the top levels of the supervision tree handle larger faults with restarts. Similarly, it’s nice if your webpage can recover from a fault, but inevitably someone will have to hit refresh.
The end-to-end principle is realising that no matter how many exceptions you handle deep down inside your program, some will leak out, and something at the outer layer has to take responsibility.
Although sometimes taking responsibility is writing things to an audit log, and message brokers are pretty good at that.
Aside: But what about replicated logs?
“How do I subscribe to the topic on the message broker?”
“It’s not a message broker, it’s a replicated log”
“Ok, How do I subscribe to the replicated log”
From ‘I believe I did, Bob’, jrecursive
Although a replicated log is often confused with a message broker, they aren’t immune from handling failure. Although it’s good the components are isolated from each other, they still have to be integrated into the system at large. Both offer a one way stream for sharing, both offer publish-subscribe like interfaces, but the intent is wildly different.
A replicated log is often about auditing, or recovery: having a central point of truth for decisions. Sometimes a replicated log is about building a pipeline with fan-in (aggregating data), or fan-out (broadcasting data), but always building a system where data flows in one direction.
The easiest way to see the difference between a replicated log and a message broker is to ask an engineer to draw a diagram of how the pieces connect.
If the diagram looks like a one-way system, it’s a replicated log. If almost every component talks to it, it’s a message broker. If you can draw a flow-chart, it’s a replicated log. If you take all the arrows away and you’re left with a venn diagram of ‘things that talk to each other’, it’s a message broker.
Be warned: A distributed system is something you can draw on a whiteboard pretty quickly, but it’ll take hours to explain how all the pieces interact.
You cut a monolith with a protocol
How you cut a monolith is often more about how you are cutting up responsibility within a team, than cutting it into components. It really does depend, and often more on the social aspects than the technical ones, but you are still responsible for the protocol you create.
Distributed systems are messy because of how the pieces interact over time, rather than which pieces are interacting. The complexity of a distributed system does not come from having hundreds of machines, but hundreds of ways for them to interact. A protocol must take into account performance, safety, stability, availability, and most importantly, error handling.
When we talk about distributed systems, we are talking about power structures: how resources are allocated, how work is divided, how control is shared, or how order is kept across systems ostensibly built out of well meaning but faulty components.
A protocol is the rules and expectations of participants in a system, and how they are beholden to each other. A protocol defines who takes responsibility for failure.
The problem with message brokers, and queues, is that no-one does.
Using a message broker is not the end of the world, nor a sign of poor engineering. Using a message broker is a tradeoff. Use them freely knowing they work well on the edges of your system as buffers. Use them wisely knowing that the buck has to stop somewhere else. Use them cheekily to get something working.
I say don’t rely on a message broker, but I can’t point to easy off-the-shelf answers. HTTP and DNS are remarkable protocols, but I still have no good answers for service discovery.
Lots of software regularly gets pushed into service way outside of its designed capabilities, and brokers are no exception. Although the bad habits around brokers and the relative ease of getting a prototype up and running lead to nasty effects at scale, you don’t need to build everything at once.
The complexity of a system lies in its protocol not its topology, and a protocol is what you create when you cut your monolith into pieces. If modularity is about building software, protocol is about how we break it apart.
The main task of the engineering analyst is not merely to obtain “solutions” but is rather to understand the dynamic behaviour of the system in such a way that the secrets of the mechanism are revealed, and that if it is built it will have no surprises left for [them]. Other than exhaustive physical experimentations, this is the only sound basis for engineering design, and disregard of this cardinal principle has not infrequently lead to disaster.
From “Analysis of Nonlinear Control Systems” by Dustan Graham and Duane McRuer, p 436
Protocol is the reason why ‘it depends’, and the reason why you shouldn’t depend on a message broker: You can use a message broker to glue systems together, but never use one to cut systems apart.
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You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“
Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”
Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.
Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance -- although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning -- but failures of will.
The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in fact, remarkable complacency about India's moderate record in removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.
I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India -- whether at the state level or at the center -- can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.
But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation -- that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies -- is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.
Sen says as much:
In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership -- not unrelated to Marxist ideology -- to eradicate hunger and deprivation has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social comparison and contrast.
China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free -- “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” -- allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.
There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel (including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable - 892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790 in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.
You could do the same thing in an open society -- Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much -- but it’s harder.
I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it -- Sri Lanka and Kerala did -- but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.
China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation -- both inadvertently and on purpose.
Look at that malnutrition table again:
Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.
So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China -- or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam -- and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.
Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats -- they weren’t -- but because they weren’t socialists.
Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.
