A celiac economist on why ‘gluten free’ isn’t worth the price →

...Here’s the big disconnect that captures the essence of the problem: less than 1 percent of the population has celiac disease, approximately 6 percent are gluten intolerant, and … drum roll please … almost 30 percent of American adults are trying to avoid gluten. One of the main reasons consumers avoid gluten is they feel it’s healthier. It’s generally not.
The blunt reality is that many gluten-free foods are not healthier for the 93 percent of the population that doesn’t have celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. Consider that a Glutino Original New York Style Bagel has 26 percent more calories, 250 percent more fat, 43 percent more sodium, 50 percent less fiber and double the sugar of a Thomas’ Plain Bagel. Further, because many gluten-free products utilize rice flour, they are also at risk of containing higher levels of arsenic than desirable or healthy.
And then there’s the cost. The Glutino bagel I just described costs 74 percent more than the Thomas’ bagel. Nabisco’s Gluten-Free Rice Thins cost 84 percent more per cracker than Nabisco’s Multigrain Wheat Thins. And when it gets to baking products, the costs are even higher. Betty Crocker’s gluten-free brownie mix is more than 3 times the cost per serving of Duncan Hines regular mix.
While economic logic might lead you to conclude that higher prices would lead to lower demand, you’d be wrong. In a classic indicator of bubble dynamics, higher prices have been met with higher demand.

Tyson Foods To Stop Giving Chickens Antibiotics Used By Humans →

This happened very quickly! Good. Note, though, that nothing is being said about continuing to crowd more and more animals together. That's the other dangerous side of modern "farming" practices: if a disease develops a resistance to one of these other antibiotics, it could still destroy our food supply.

Tyson still will use a class of antibiotics called ionophores that are not used to treat humans. If bacteria develop resistance to ionophores, doctors don't care, because they never use ionophores anyway.
Smith pointed out that Tyson is not promising to never ever use a human antibiotic. "What we're saying is, we don't believe that we're going to need to. But we're not going to let chickens suffer," he says.
If the company does resort to using a human antibiotic, though, it will report that use publicly, Smith says.
According to Smith, Tyson already has reduced its use of human-use antibiotics by 80 percent over the past four years. More than 90 percent of its chickens, in fact, now do not receive any human-use antibiotics at any point in their lives.

What explains Burundi’s protests? →

Some of the international community’s worst fears for Burundi begin to come to fruition on April 26 as police clashed with demonstrators protesting President Pierre Nkurunziza’s announcement that he will seek a third term in office.
At least six people were killed in the first two days of ongoing protests. On Monday the government shut down multiple radio stations and arrested a prominent civil society leader, Pierre-Claver Mbonimpa. Worryingly, there have also been reports that the militant youth wing of the ruling party, known as the Imbonerakure, were seen armed with clubs, ready to do battle with the protesters in certain neighborhoods around the city.
Those contesting the government so far have been primarily civil society and opposition political party supporters who see the president’s seeking a third term as an unlawful attempt to hold on to power while violently suppressing any dissenting voices.
These protests were a long time coming...

Are Immigrants a Shot in the Arm for the Local Economy? →

Just one study, but interesting:

Most research on the effects of immigration focuses on the effects of immigrants as adding to the supply of labor. By contrast, this paper studies the effects of immigrants on local labor demand, due to the increase in consumer demand for local services created by immigrants. This effect can attenuate downward pressure from immigrants on non-immigrants' wages, and also benefit non-immigrants by increasing the variety of local services available. For this reason, immigrants can raise native workers' real wages, and each immigrant could create more than one job. Using US Census data from 1980 to 2000, we find considerable evidence for these effects: Each immigrant creates 1.2 local jobs for local workers, most of them going to native workers, and 62% of these jobs are in non-traded services. Immigrants appear to raise local non-tradables sector wages and to attract native-born workers from elsewhere in the country. Overall, it appears that local workers benefit from the arrival of more immigrants.

The Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher →

This seems overly-pessimistic (especially the 5, 10, or 20 year horizon; I don't see nearly enough infrastructure or social organization in place), but most likely contains a kernel of truth. Once upon a time, all clothing was hand-made and custom fit. Custom tailoring became a high-end trade for those who could afford it when mass-produced clothing became "good enough". Perhaps learning will take a similar route...

Whenever a college student asks me, a veteran high-school English educator, about the prospects of becoming a public-school teacher, I never think it’s enough to say that the role is shifting from "content expert" to "curriculum facilitator." Instead, I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation’s most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. The "virtual class" will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country’s best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide, and a formal assessment that the computer will immediately score and record.
I tell this college student that in each classroom, there will be a local teacher-facilitator (called a "tech") to make sure that the equipment works and the students behave. Since the "tech" won’t require the extensive education and training of today’s teachers, the teacher’s union will fall apart, and that "tech" will earn about $15 an hour to facilitate a class of what could include over 50 students. This new progressive system will be justified and supported by the American public for several reasons: Each lesson will be among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world; millions of dollars will be saved in reduced teacher salaries; the "techs" can specialize in classroom management; performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore "individualized"); and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system.

A View into the Violence in Baltimore

The Baltimore Sun has a timeline of the basic events:

It started Monday morning with word on social media of a “purge” — a reference to a movie in which crime is made legal. It was to begin at 3 p.m. at Mondawmin Mall, then venture down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Inner Harbor.
With tensions in the city running high on the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, police began alerting local businesses and mobilizing officers...

Ultimately, not much happened, at least compared to historic riots, so the story that the "city" rioted, is false, as Jamelle Bouie notes:

On Monday night, there were riots in Baltimore, but it’s hard to say Baltimore was rioting. This wasn’t 1968, when fires touched huge swaths of the city and thousands left their homes. Instead, in a few areas around the Inner Harbor and East and West Baltimore, scattered groups of looters smashed stores, set fires, and confronted police, with residents watching from stoops or out of windows.

As with Ferguson, this is likely violence begetting violence, as a history of police abuse comes to a head at one death. A few months back, the Sun itself covered the history of police brutality in the city:

The city has paid about $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits claiming that police officers brazenly beat up alleged suspects. One hidden cost: The perception that officers are violent can poison the relationship between residents and police.
...
City policies help to shield the scope and impact of beatings from the public, even though Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake acknowledges that police brutality was one of the main issues broached by residents in nine recent forums across Baltimore.

The city’s settlement agreements contain a clause that prohibits injured residents from making any public statement — or talking to the news media — about the incidents. And when settlements are placed on the agenda at public meetings involving the mayor and other top officials, the cases are described using excerpts from police reports, with allegations of brutality routinely omitted. State law also helps to shield the details, by barring city officials from discussing internal disciplinary actions against the officers — even when a court has found them at fault.

Regardless of whether and how this history affected the city on Monday, there is the problem of how the city handled the protests, as Erin Simpson and Andrew Exum debated on Twitter:

For now I'd like to give Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing for the Atlantic, himself a Baltimore native, the last word:

Now, tonight, I turn on the news and I see politicians calling for young people in Baltimore to remain peaceful and "nonviolent." These well-intended pleas strike me as the right answer to the wrong question. To understand the question, it's worth remembering what, specifically, happened to Freddie Gray. An officer made eye contact with Gray. Gray, for unknown reasons, ran. The officer and his colleagues then detained Gray. They found him in possession of a switchblade. They arrested him while he yelled in pain. And then, within an hour, his spine was mostly severed. A week later, he was dead. What specifically was the crime here? What particular threat did Freddie Gray pose? Why is mere eye contact and then running worthy of detention at the hands of the state? Why is Freddie Gray dead?
The people now calling for nonviolence are not prepared to answer these questions. Many of them are charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray's death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray's death and so they appeal for calm. But there was no official appeal for calm when Gray was being arrested. There was no appeal for calm when Jerriel Lyles was assaulted. (“The blow was so heavy. My eyes swelled up. Blood was dripping down my nose and out my eye.”) There was no claim for nonviolence on behalf of Venus Green. (“Bitch, you ain’t no better than any of the other old black bitches I have locked up.”) There was no plea for peace on behalf of Starr Brown. (“They slammed me down on my face,” Brown added, her voice cracking. “The skin was gone on my face.")
When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves.