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I have been working on a recipe this past week. It is an American Pale Ale with a spicy jalepeño kick called Fenrir’s Bite (recipe here). Today I put together a 1 gallon batch using the μMLT and the yeast starter I did yesterday. I picked up a coarse nylon bag to fit inside the μMLT with the hopes it would make cleanup easier, but instead it just made things more difficult. I was never able to set a decent grain bed and after doing roughly a gallon of vorlauf, the wort was still not running clear. It also did nothing to make cleanup easier, so I think I am going to scrap the idea of a bag liner for the mash tun.
Goal OG was 1.060 and actual was 1.063 (15.8° Plato on the refractometer). I ended up doing a 70 minute boil to get the volume down to just under 1 gallon so I could fit 400 mL of the starter yeast in the glass jug with the wort. For now it is sitting in the basement. We’ll see if it takes off. Hopefully it will have a nice kick to it.
I ended up dumping the boiled jalepeños into the fermenter. I am not sure if that is going to negatively impact the pH or not. I may take a pH reading tomorrow (since this is an experiment) just to see how much the peppers are adding to the acidity.
Update: The next morning
The airlock is full of krausen. Apparently fermentation took off like a rocket during the night. I also grabbed a pH strip this morning to check if the peppers in the jug were adversely lowering the pH of the wort. One problem though… I am out of wort range pH strips. I have some 2.8-4.4 range strips for checking the viability of my spray bottled StarSan, but that doesn’t really tell me much useful information about the wort. All I can say for sure is that the pH is greater than 4.4.
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It’s a frequent refrain from young condo-dwellers looking to upsize or start a family without fleeing to the suburbs: Why aren’t there more large units downtown?
A recent report by the City Building Institute (CBI) at Ryerson University and a survey by Environics Research both highlighted the need for three-bedroom units in Toronto, arguing that developers and builders are ignoring the demand for larger units by young professionals and baby boomers.
The axioms of urban economics, however, explain why large condominiums are ill-suited for very dense urban cores.
Like other vibrant downtowns in Manhattan and London, Toronto has a tightly clustered financial district that is also home for some young professionals who are mostly unmarried, without children and rent smaller-sized condominiums.
A key to the development puzzle lies in the gap between the stated preferences of these young renter professionals (“Wouldn’t it be nice to start a family downtown?”) with the revealed preferences of young households with children (“The suburbs it is”).
On a per-square-foot basis, a three-bedroom condominium downtown will always be significantly more expensive than a similar-sized townhouse in a suburb. Why? Land prices.
Downtown land is in huge demand because it is scarce, which leads to high prices and high-rise buildings. Condo sizes are smallest in places with the highest land prices. Contrarily, places with less expensive land attract larger units, as per the first axiom of urban economics: Prices adjust to achieve locational equilibrium.
For economic efficiency, scarce and high-priced land must be used for high-density office and residential land uses. Smaller sized units, and not three-bedroom condos, are a more efficient residential use of scarce land that permits more workers to be near their jobs in the financial core.
So, what to do with the unmet demand for large condos?
Well, if there really were an unmet economic demand, builders would have responded to it. Evidence of actual pent-up demand for owner-occupied three-bedroom condos, it turns out, is rather elusive.
Recent Environics surveys found young professionals complained of a lack of three-bedroom condos (a stated preference), but did not necessarily show an interest in owning large condos themselves. In fact, 81 per cent of respondents said that they did not want a condo at all, with most desiring a detached home. Environics found that young professionals were predominantly renters and that 83 per cent did not have children.
Builders respond to revealed preferences and not stated preferences. They are aware of life-cycle triggers, such as the birth of a first child, which increases the demand for space and pushes young families to the suburbs where cheaper land makes owning larger houses possible.
The suburbs, as a result, have become better equipped to cater to families with children: restaurants there always have plenty of high chairs, but try showing up with three children at an upscale downtown restaurant for dinner and watch the staff scramble. The suburbs also have an abundance of soccer fields, playgrounds, parks, hockey arenas, and parking lots for vehicles stuffed with sporting equipment.
When, by contrast, was the last time you saw a parent travelling with hockey bags and children on a subway?
Renters, and not investors, generate the demand for shelter space in and around downtowns. Investors respond to the demand by providing one and two-bedroom units to renters. As it is, downtown residential rents barely cover the ownership costs of investors who effectively subsidize the renting young professionals.
If three-bedroom condos in the downtown core made more cents for investors, they might make more sense for builders.
In the end, it is all land economics.
Murtaza Haider is an associate professor at Ryerson University. Stephen Moranis is a real estate industry veteran. They can be reached at [email protected].
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Bernd Lange, the chairman of the European Parliament's important trade committee, has indicated that he now expects the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations will probably fail, following a major leak of confidential documents from the talks.
Greenpeace Netherlands has released half of the entire TTIP draft text as of April 2016, prior to the start of the 13th round of TTIP negotiations between the EU and the US, which reveal US demands in detail for the first time.
Although the EU has improved transparency recently, and routinely publishes its offers for each TTIP chapter, the US has consistently refused to do so. Even MEPs and MPs have faced extreme restrictions on what they are allowed to look at, copy, or even say when it comes to the US position. The new leak by an unknown whistleblower represents a major blow to US attempts to keep its negotiating demands confidential, and provides important information to the both the EU and US public for the first time.
US wants ISDS and regulatory cooperation
The new documents confirm some of the fears expressed by many organisations and commentators regarding two key areas discussed previously here on Ars: the Investment-State Dispute Settlement ( ISDS ) mechanism, and regulatory cooperation
As Ars noted last September, in the face of massive public concerns about ISDS, the European Commission is proposing a modified approach, the Investment Court System (ICS), which it claims addresses the problems of ISDS. However, even though the ICS idea was formally presented to the US last year, one of the TTIP leaks shows that it was not even discussed during the 12th round, something that the European Commission's public report on the negotiations omitted to mention. This confirms earlier indications that the US is not interested in ICS, and will insist on including standard ISDS in TTIP, regardless of EU worries.
A leaked chapter on "Regulatory coherence, transparency and other good regulatory practices" indicates that the US wants all regulations, even those concerning health and safety or environmental issues, to be judged by the yardstick of their effects on trade: "When developing a regulation, a regulatory authority of a Party shall evaluate any information provided in comments by the other Party or a person of the other Party regarding the potential trade effects of the regulation that it receives during the comment period."
In practice, this means that companies will be able to challenge any new EU and US regulations that might have an adverse effect on their profits, as is often the case when new environment regulations are brought in. It is likely to make it much harder to strengthen laws that might disadvantage business but protect public health and safety.
A post on the War on Want site points out that the leaks contain a very clear indication of what the US wants to achieve as a quid pro quo for opening up its markets: "Any export gains for EU car manufacturers will come at a massive cost to European agriculture, with the European Commission sacrificing the small-scale farmers of Europe in order to force open US markets for major European corporations."
The key sentence comes in the particularly sensitive document entitled "Tactical State of Play of the TTIP Negotiations." This is essentially the European Commision's frank evaluation of where things stand in the TTIP talks. Here's what it has to say on the US demand: "progress on motor vehicle-related parts would only be possible if the EU showed progress in the discussion on agricultural tariffs." In other words, if the EU doesn't open up its markets to agricultural products from the US—which means things like beef treated with hormones, and maybe even chlorine chickens—there will be no improved access for EU car manufacturers.
US wants more GMOs in the EU
Perhaps the most problematic demand from the US side is that the Commission should allow foods with GMOs to be approved and sold in the EU more easily. In TTIP documents, GMOs are such a sensitive area that they are called by the euphemism "modern agricultural technology."
At the moment, the approvals process is rather slow in the EU, but the US hopes to change all that, as another leaked chapter makes clear: "Where a Party requires a product of modern agricultural technology to be approved or authorised prior to its importation, use or sale in its territory, the Party shall allow any person to submit an application for approval at any time." Although that sounds harmless enough, it would represent a major change from the present system.
Greenpeace Netherlands naturally singles out some concerns about the environment, and the fact that there is nothing about climate protection in the texts. In its press release it says: "Long standing environmental protection is dropped. The 'General Exceptions' rule, enshrined in the GATT agreement of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), is absent from the text."
Listing image by Greens/EFA
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