My apologies for being absent for so long. I’ve been busy. I have been planning an article on nanodiamonds too, which is coming along more slowly than I’d like. Where I am going with this essay is the profound effect economies of scale have on mankind. Let’s call economies of scale, “Scale,” for short. Whatever you call it, “scale” has erased most the of the differences between the sexes, destroyed the family economy and left the entire human race threatened by a solar flare. But mostly I’m writing about chickens. You can skip the conclusion if you like, it’s depressing.
I ate Costco’s Seasoned Rotisserie Chicken when I was in Hawaii last month. That should not be surprising. Costco sold over 106 million rotisserie chickens in 2021. Obviously, lots of people eat Costco rotisserie chicken. Everything costs more in Hawaii, but not a Costco chicken, they’re still $4.99, even in Hawaii.
Because I live forty-five miles from Fremont, Nebraska. I know Costco opened a huge chicken processing plant there in 2019. Costco’s related business entity is called Lincoln Poultry. We see poultry trucks now all the time, before, there were none. For one hundred miles around, farmers contract with Lincoln Poultry to raise chickens. The average pay for Lincoln Poultry employees is over $87,000 a year, plus benefits. Maybe they are not good jobs, but they pay well. Pretty good for cuttin’ bao at a pack. The median pay for teachers in Nebraska is less than $60,000 a year, plus benefits. Average annual pay for all combined school employees in Nebraska is around $33,000. Even with great benefits, say what? Lincoln Poultry employees have no union, of course. If they did, maybe they could make as much as the school district employees.
My interest? Chicken? I can take it or leave it. Not my favorite, I don’t order it. Chickens roost wherever they want and foul the ground (or equipment) beneath them. My children have been variously scarred by poultry processing. I will never forget the little trembling voice of one of my sons when he saw me chop off the head of a chicken and watched the bird’s mindless death dance. “Oh Dad, that was so cool, do another one.” Or another son’s tears when I gave away a chicken he had cleaned for our family to one of the Mexicans. Or the terror in one boy’s eyes when he was comin’ ‘round the corner of the barn screaming with Rocket the Rooster in hot pursuit. Then there was the time, one cold winter day, when we couldn’t find our youngest for over an hour, until his older brother remembered he’d locked him in the chicken coop. Poor boy was praying he wouldn’t perish with the poultry. We live on a farm, we should keep poultry, but we don’t, not any longer. I’ll not get distracted here with goose and duck tales.
Costco aside, Hawaii has a chicken problem. The headlines say, “Out of Control Feral Chickens” Out on the islands, the 50th State, it’s the current local joke that Hawaii’s State Bird is the chicken. It’s not, it’s the Nene, sometimes called the Hawaiian Goose. I’ve never seen a Nene, but I’ve seen plenty of chickens, sort of everywhere, anywhere. They don’t cost money either. Not even $4.99. No license is required. Free bird. I think the feral chicken population in Hawaii is safe for the time being, virtually no one harvests feral chickens in Hawaii. That’s why it’s a growing problem.
Speaking of Hawaii and chickens, just by the luck of it, I know one of VIPs of Hawaiian chicken farming. I interviewed Emily Taaroa for this article. She used to work in land management for WH Shipman. In the past, Emily would give me the key for Viance’s wood preservative test site and I would give it back to her. Now Emily is all about raising chickens. She and her husband, Yoric, with their ohana (family) own and operate Punachicks Farm, Pasture-raised Chickens. Their farm is on Hilo side of the Big Island. They process around twenty-thousand chickens a year. Hawaii has special regulatory exemptions that allows Punachicks Farm to slaughter their neighbor’s chickens too. Costco is on the Kona side, but so are most of Punachick’s customers. Most of their sales are to the high-end hotels in Kona. Unfortunately, many ordinary Hawaiians don’t think they can afford Punachick’s Pasture-raised Chickens. Anyway, 20,000 chickens are a lot. But it’s .02% of the 106,000,000 million Costco rotisserie chicken. Americans eat lots of chicken. We eat eight billion birds a year. Sixty-eight pounds apiece, for every man, woman and child in the country. Only 1.35% of the total is Costco Seasoned Rotisserie Chicken.
As I stated in the introduction, my interest is in economies of scale. When we lived on the Marshall Islands, we never saw any birds, except when we were on small, uninhabited islands. People ate the birds. The birds didn’t live long if they decided to hang out with the Marshallese. The Marshallese all kept chickens too. They weren’t pets. One can see how Hawaii’s out-of-control feral chicken problem would immediately disappear if all those feral chickens were on the inhabited islands of the Marshalls. Only one thing; all the Marshallese are moving to the United States of America to ‘cut bao.’ The Marshallese word for chicken is ‘bao.’ They didn’t think it up themselves. “Bao” is the transliteration of the English word “Fowl.” Anywhere they process chickens in the US, you can find Marshallese inside cutting. Lincoln Poultry didn’t have to hire too many Marshallese. When you pay $90,000 a year, you don’t have many job openings.
There are a couple more things about Hawaii and chickens that are needed to flesh out the story before the conclusion. Huli huli and Hakaka Moa. Hakaka Moa is Hawaiian for cock fighting. Cock fighting on Hawa’ii is essentially decriminalized. The laws against it are not really enforced and they are only misdemeanors. “It’s a culture thing, you wouldn’t understand.” The Hawaiian voters understand - and you can’t get Hawaiian legislators to get serious about restricting it. It would not be popular to ban cock-fighting. I was under the impression it was legal in Hawaii. I have seen cockfighters on inter-island flights, emblazoned cockfighter team tee-shirts and all, going to cockfights on other islands. I asked Chat-GPT, “what do you call a man who fights chickens?” She replied, “Cockfighter. It is important to remember cockfighting is illegal in all fifty states, including Hawaii.” She brought up Hawaii, I didn’t say anything - unless she is always listening, always watching me. But she doesn’t even know what “boxing chickens” means, so she still has a lot to learn, at least about, “boxin’ chk’ns.”
Huli huli is Hawaiian for turn over and turn over. I learned to make huli huli chicken forty-some years ago in the Marshall Islands. We didn’t have a rotisserie. Huli huli chicken is marinated in soy sauce with chopped onions and garlic. With primitive grills, you turn the chicken over and over, fast. Word gets around the islands fast. At least about how to make huli huli chicken. Iman tata - “it’s the best.”
So? Scale? Well, one of the reasons Maui is burning is because we can’t mobilize firefighters from across the country to concentrate our forces where the fire is, …this time? Wildfires in paradise - it’s never come up before. It’s a, “this time.” Next time will be different, maybe. The Forest Service has over 10,000 trained fire fighters. They are coordinated out of Boise, Idaho by the National Interagency Fire Center, (NIFC). We are prepared to fight wildfires, just not in Hawaii. Not yet. I’m sure Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that.
These firefighter guys (and a few girls) know what they are doing - and when it comes to forest fires, it’s the reason we scale everything big. We concentrate knowledge and capital (manpower and equipment) in fighting fire, and we gain efficiency. Efficiency is what you need to compete. And that is what men and women do, we compete - it’s our competitive natures. Seldom do we get to compete against a foe like fire. It doesn’t look like we are competing at all. It looks like we are cooperating. We are cooperating. So we can win the battle.
That’s why Costco boxes and sells loss-leader rotisserie chicken. They are competing for customers and their money. That’s why the Islanders box roosters. They are competing for Status. Money isn’t status, but status is for sale. You can pursue status by other means. Which brings us to an interesting question, why don’t the roosters form a union and go on strike? What’s in it for them? Chickens may or may not be content, but they can’t imagine not dwelling in Chickendom. Roosters have to fight, it’s in their blood. Although, for my part, I’d rather be a rooster than a hen. If I was a hen, I’d hate the henpeckers and their unrelenting cruelty - God save us from being henpecked. Remember, I have kept chickens. Darwin saw it and decided everything was, ‘survival of the fittest.’ Even the bible leads off early with a competition: Cain and Abel.
Mankind (we) built a city and a tower once. The Almighty came down to have a look. He said to Himself, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” The bible says this is what those men (we) were thinking when they built that tower: “Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
It took a while, but we found the work around. The language of mathematics is universal. When you combine mathematics with the experimental method, well, nothing is restrained from us. Anyone can understand what you’ve discovered. They can repeat your experiment. The scientist doesn’t have to say anything. His data does all the talking. Now we seem to be able to answer any question about matter. Then we put it to use. Pretty soon we are ‘cuttin’ bao’ in one room, three-hundred thousand butchered chickens a day. I was about to say, “we put it to good use.” But I’m not so sure ‘scale’ is such a good idea.
I can imagine the Marshallese were a little happier on their islands in times past than they are now, cuttin’ bao in Arkansas. Sometimes it seems to me their only gain is their unhappiness increases apace with their increased consumption of beer and weed. Now they always have money for drink. Killing and plucking one chicken at a time might not be efficient, but its more normal. It fits in family living seamlessly. Scale is hostile to the hierarchy of sex. Poultry producers tolerate roosters and hens, only because they have to. Scale wants sexless chickens. It wants every chicken to be a fryer and a layer. The industrial revolution is the foundation of feminism. Intellectually, we are living in the tower scale built. Scale wants interchangeable parts. Men and women aren’t interchangeable. Scale wants to erase the differences as much as possible. How can we ever be happy at home, if we can’t differentiate between man and his help-mate?
This is where the solar flare I spoke about in the introduction comes in. Solar flares puke out trillions of tons of charged particles all the time. Some of these flares are beyond superlative. Let’s just say they are big. Sometimes these Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) head straight for planet earth. This is not speculation, this is history. One phenomenon CMEs cause is the Aurora Borealis. Historically we know the Northern Lights sometimes light up the tropics for weeks. The data: corresponding spikes in the radioactive C14 in the dendrochronological (tree rings) record. We know what will happen when ‘the big one’ hits. Earth’s magnetosphere will induce electrical currents corresponding in proportion to the available plasma. Those currents will be induced into everything that will conduct electricity. We have built 2.7 million miles of electrical conductor networks. When the ‘big one’ hits - all the transformers on earth will melt down. Rogue waves of plasma splashing out charged particles. Voltage spikes so high they can’t be recorded. Somebody named “time and chance” will have turned off our new LED lights.
A friend of mine commented recently about my frequent references to time and chance. The bible says, “Time and chance happeneth to all men.” It’s true. It’s also true that we make our own time and chance to some extent. Call Mr. Time and Mrs. Chance, cause and effect. It doesn’t matter to them what you call them. Eerie lights in the night sky were a thing for our ancestors. Such cause and effect is harmless enough without conductor networks being disabled. A CME observed by the fathers? No harm done? I find it very unsettling to imagine how we are going to live without electricity. Can we live without electricity? Those Costco rotisseries won’t huli huli anymore. I said Punachick’s annual twenty-thousand processed chickens were a lot of bao, a lot if you don’t have electricity. We have made a name for ourselves. Nothing is restrained from us. Mathematics and economies of scale have built us quite the tower. Too bad the day’s coming when our toilets won’t flush.
Once I built a tower up to the Sun Brick and rivet and lime Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Very interesting, I enjoyed reading it.