Today in 2013, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that put an end to something called the National Raisin Reserve.
Yes, the US used to have a massive stockpile of raisins.
But unlike other federal stockpiles, this one wasn’t in case of a national emergency that might leave Americans desperately low on trail mix.
This was a program to help farmers during the Great Depression.
Essentially, if farmers supplied more raisins than the market demanded, prices would fall, and that might put some farmers out of business.
So the government set up a system to limit the supply of raisins and other commodities.
A committee of growers would decide each year that a certain percentage of each raisin crop would be send to warehouses for a national raisin reserve.
Those raisins could be used for charity, or exports, or animal feed, or pretty much anything except domestic sales.
And for decades, that’s how the American raisin market worked, until farmer Marvin Horne pushed back.
In 2003, he refused to send any of his crop to the raisin reserve; after all, he said these are my raisins, and the government can’t have them just because it wants them.
The government fined Horne hundreds of thousands of dollars; he got pushback from other growers, who thought the reserve system helped everyone in the raisin business.
But he stood firm, and the case ended up in court; in 2013, the US Supreme Court ruled that raisins were not public goods.
They were private property, and if the government wants private property it has to pay for it, not at a discount and not without any payment at all.
Though by that point there hadn’t been any raisins set aside for reserve for a couple years; the surpluses were increasingly going toward grape juice and wine.
So in practice, if not in case law, the raisin issue had… dried out.
This is one of the most practical AI concepts we’ve come across lately.
Memoria is a device for people with Alzheimer’s disease: it prompts patients with information they might be trying to remember at that moment, from displaying a name of a loved one to showing photos of family and friends.
Plus it would have options for remote caregivers to check in with someone who might need it.
One grower’s grapes of wrath (Washington Post via Archive.org)
memoria home medical device and necklace help people with alzheimer’s remember (designboom)
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Photo by Mariam via Flickr/Creative Commons