On March 28th we set out on what turned into a six-hour, 239-mile quest for wildflowers south and southeast of Austin, where we hoped to find more than the paltry offerings in town so far this spring. Our first photo stop came in what I take to be Mustang Ridge, where a colony of bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) on an embankment along TX 130 ran parallel to a line of distant clouds.

One place we drove a good distance to check out was the field in Dubina that had looked so good on March 29 last year. No luck: the bluebonnets there had come up again, but much more sparsely. Our last stop before turning west and heading for home came on FM 309 a little south La Grange, where Eve spotted a dense colony of bluebonnets with some bright red phlox mixed in. Because the bluebonnets grew in someone's front yard, and because they looked a lot better than any others we'd seen in the area, I assumed the flowers had been planted. I assumed wrong. The woman who lived there was out on the opposite side of the yard, so Eve went over and struck up a conversation with her. The woman said that the wildflowers come up by themselves in that part of her yard each spring, with some years better than others. This was obviously a good year.

 

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A few weeks ago I quoted from Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein's A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. The passage I cited pointed out the dangers of overprotecting children. Later I came across the City Journal article "Bring Back Risk," by Allison Schrager, that includes this paragraph:

Long before Covid-19, risk-taking was increasingly discouraged. Between 1970 and 2019, the page count of the federal code of regulations on business and industry thickened from 54,000 to more than 185,000. State and local regulations can be even more of an economic burden, especially for small businesses. The number of jobs that required a license, for instance, rose from 5 percent in the 1950s to 22 percent today. Small wonder that the rate of new business creation fell 10 percent between the 1980s and 2018. Other factors influence this decline, including an aging population and changing market structures that reward larger firms, but surveys from the National Federation of Independent Business consistently rank regulatory compliance as a top economic concern. An example of the state and local bureaucratic obstacles that someone launching a small business can face: San Franciscan Jason Yu recently spent over $200,000 seeking permits to open an ice cream shop in 2019, before giving up in frustration.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman