(And yes, nearly everyone who posts about that card game is a spammer.)

I think the only thing Coffee and C-Sections have in common is the letter C…Cue Big Bird.

I think the delivery scenario you’re talking must be regional or vary by doctor or something. I think most moms do get to deliver just fine. I think where C sections are getting popular are people who do them electively.

As far as post-birth, I think that must vary by doctor/nurse. I haven’t heard any discouraging words about breastfeeding from any doctors or nurses. They usually seem quite pro with talk of antibodies and what-not. However, my sister got enormous pressure against breastfeeding in the UK. Luckily, she gave them the old Agincourt salute.

As far as artisanal coffee, I’d say it’s like any other artisanal thing. If you want the real deal, you have to find a mom & pop hole in the wall. The corps just can’t do it. They’re too busy cutting this and that to make their stock price look good. So you end up with places like Starbucks for coffee or Panera for bread, where the product is consistant and decent, but nothing to write home about. But that’s all they can really do given their constraints.

I mean, some things just don’t scale up well. If you want real art, go find a starving artist. Otherwise, you go to the mall and get a lithograph of Ansel Adams or Dogs Playing Poker or whatever. The latter must sell to the broadest population it can. They might offer some cool pictures and help elevate people’s awareness, but at the end of the day, they have to make $$$ to raise stock prices. Sell, sell, sell what sells! And in America, that’s consistancy, baby!

Now, as for artisanal coffee being impossible from an industrial sort of place … wouldn’t you think there’d be a chance that they’d do it better than a mom-and-pop place? My suspicion is that it’s less the industrialization than it is some very specific facts about American corporations — namely the legally mandated need for profit maximization — that lead to the low quality. You could industrialize, in the sense of buying all your supplies in enormous quantities and mass-training lots of people according to a rigidly-adhered-to set of standards, and you might actually get a good product at the other end. In other words, why must it be consistently mediocre, rather than consistently good? It seems to me that industrialization is more about the consistency than about the quality, or at least it needn’t be about the quality.

What seems to affect the quality is more the need to maximize profits, which means cutting costs, which means things like buying less-good coffee beans and spending less time training your employees (See “Donalds, Mc.”).

C-sections being elective: read the article.

I quickly read it. Obstetricians like it, I’m sure but also, women are choosing to have it at their own behest well before entering the hospital for labor. But frankly, the woman whose baby was transverse, I don’t blame them for wanting to do a C-section. That’s hard to deal with.

I do agree that C-sections will likely get more common, maybe even the default, but I think there will be a long “conversation” on this over time and I think a lot of women want to give birth vaginally. So I don’t think the techniques to deal with non-C-section births will disappear, even if C-section becomes the safest alternative.

I’ll talk more about coffee later, but I think you’re agreeing with mrz on the point of profit maximization causing problems in the “Why can’t big companies produce artisanal coffee” area.

Thanks for all the great and insightful comments. And sorry for the knock on libertarians. At some point I’ll explain the hives business.

I live in D.C., actually, and Murky is my idol. At which caf