New and Old #252
The toll of commuting, wine regulation, another branch of Toys 'R' Us, and the difficulty of genuine ecumenism
Four hours a day on the road, We Can Have Nice Things, Stephanie Nakhleh, January 11, 2026
Marshall (we’re using only his first name) is a lifelong northern New Mexican and a longtime LANL employee. What follows is not an argument about preferences or planning theory. It’s an account of what it actually cost one man—and his family—to keep a job in Los Alamos when he could not afford to live here.
Some of what happened:
“The Lab really didn’t care what the weather was doing off the hill,” he says. He and his carpool mates would white-knuckle it through blizzards, calling the hotline over and over.
“Still regular schedule. Still regular schedule.”
Marshall remembers cresting the hill after one of those drives and realizing the roads in Los Alamos were just as bad. And still no weather delay. “You’re like, ‘What the hell? What the hell happened?’”
Maybe even worse were the days when a delay or closure would be called just as they arrived, forcing them to turn around and drive back through the same storm. It was as if it hadn’t occurred to the Lab that not everyone lives 10 minutes from work.
Look, the whole “tough it out, never miss a day of work even when you’re sick in bed, we walked to school shoeless two miles in blizzards and we turned out okay”—no. There’s work ethic, and there’s sadism. I don’t know how else to think about a worldview that glorifies hardship and, worse, thinks that lifting some of that hardship is morally illegitimate.
Whether or not any of that is their intention, that is the world NIMBYs are building. (Or, I suppose, not building.) They are in some measure responsible for the suffering that is downstream of their obstruction.
It’s a funny thing; my mother was saying one of her friends, a schoolteacher, is mystified by how all the young people carry around water bottles. Like, you’re not gonna die if you don’t have water on you every waking moment. Somehow that reminds me of a bit in this piece, where the guy says nobody even thought about the mental and emotional strain of supercommuting.
I think on some level younger people are more attuned to these things; more attuned to their own health and wellbeing. Less cavalier. Maybe, you might say, more conservative than the Boomers. I’m not sure where that point goes, but I think there’s something there.
Senate Bill 983 changes how wineries are classified by creating a tiered system for farm winery licenses. It’s based on the winery’s size and how much fruit must be grown on the property and in Virginia.
It’s designed to protect the integrity of Virginia wine.
“The Virginia ABC was giving licenses to a lot of different people who weren’t totally fulfilling the spirit of the law,” said Bill Hatch with Zephaniah Farm Vineyard.
“It became very simple, I’ll put it that way, to establish a business model where you don’t necessarily have to grow that much,” Hatch said. “You could buy the wine or buy the juice or buy the grapes and not necessarily have to grow them there because growing of the grapes is definitely the hardest part of growing wine.”
Local perspective:
The law is forcing some of the smaller wineries that don’t have the land and have leased property to grow grapes, or that have outsourced them from out of state, to either fulfill the new farm winery regulations or find a different business to run the property.
Funny, we had a pretty poor customer experience at Zephaniah Farm Vineyard, but I guess that has nothing to do with anything. But you can see here how there’s an anti-competitive element to a law like this. I’ve heard of the farm winery licensing system being abused in terms of wineries making/planting the minimum amount (this is a pre-existing regulatory scheme, but I don’t know the details of it before this new bill) and basically functioning as wedding or event halls while getting taxed below the rate for that kind of business.
But a revision to the system that squeezes out wineries—that is, winemaking operations that may not have land and which buy mostly Virginia grapes—at the expensive of vineyards, which grow their own grapes, doesn’t strike me as a good idea. Growing wine grapes is agriculture, and it’s hard, unpredictable work. I don’t see how it benefits the state or the industry overall to make it harder for winemakers to experiment and iterate with the winemaking part of wine, freed of the agricultural/farm work element. (I’m actually not even sure how it benefits vineyards, since they could sell to wineries.)
For a comparison, while farm breweries do exist1, microbreweries almost always consist only of a beermaking facility, with no need to have anything to do with the growing of the barley or hops.
Wine has the whole “terroir”2 thing, which is not necessarily absolutely a real thing, but it’s part of the mystique. But still, while I might regulate the licenses to require a certain amount of all grapes used to be Virginia-grown, I don’t think I’d distinguish between vineyards and wineries per se.
I include this mostly because I didn’t actually know Toys ‘R’ Us still existed in Canada. (Someone mentioned it in a comment on my piece looking for the first American Toys ‘R’ Us store.) And this is not a licensing deal or spinoff. The Canadian Toys ‘R’ Us stores began in the 1980s, as the company moved into Canada, and split off from the main company via an acquisition in 2018, when the original company and the American stores went out of business.
What that means is that every Canadian store is a “real” Toys ‘R’ Us, predating the demise of the company, while the current American Toys ‘R’ Us stores popping up are a relaunch using the old assets.
Here are the Google photos of the store in question; it looks exactly as you would remember it.
The Impetrative Sacrifice of the Mass, The North American Anglican, Sean Luke, March 7, 2025
This is a niche article, but I found it very interesting. It explains, from an Anglican (though I think a more “high church”) point of view what precisely the Anglican issue with the theology of the Catholic Mass/Eucharist was. I can’t say I entirely understand it all, and it’s complicated by the fact that I don’t think all Anglicans/Episcopalians would agree with it, but it does a good job of explaining some of these fine-grained theological disagreements.
The practice of trying to identify the precise area of contention is in general very difficult, I think. There’s a lot of talking past each other, and a lot of mistaking ways of saying things—or stacked assumptions that at some point diverge—for the thing itself. I think of the work I do as somewhat akin to ecumenical dialogue in that respect. Trying to translate ideas between worldviews and identify the core idea at play apart from the ways in which certain people speak or think about it.
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Well, I know of one, anyway: these guys down in central Virginia, who I like a lot. There are some others around, but I’ve not been to them.
Wine snobs should be called “terroirists.”
A short walk between residence and work confers a total range of benefits that are hard to quantify. To the point of the post, it facilitates employees in being more reliable in attendance, even in the face of bad weather and infrastructure failure. Regardless of mode, moving people long distances at speed is very expensive and fragile. The current equilibrium is a failure of business and political policy, and of culture and individual choice. Policy does not facilitate many opportunities for proximate lifestyles, and few people seize the opportunities when they are available.
Regarding the wine making section, it seems to me that most of the dustup is due to taxing classifications. To me, that's a big downside to a lot of our tax system, in that it creates all these weird plateaus and corner cases due to classification. Something that a land value tax is much better at addressing, since it only really cares about land value and nothing else.