Property Rights In Water Working In Colorado

Colorado Public Radio, today, has an interesting story on the phenomena of "buy and dry" in the state, in which farmers sell their water rights (often for millions of dollars from farms that are marginally productive agriculturally and have no clear successors to farm them) to municipal water systems that need to water to support expanding urban populations.

The practice has virtually ended farming in some rural counties. Initially, there was a concern that simply cutting off water without considering the environmental impact of doing so would lead to swaths of infertile dirts that were a blight on the state and cause rapid economic collapse without warning in rural communities. More recent legislation in Colorado has mandated that the buyers of water rights in buy and dry transactions must establish and fund a thirty year mitigation plan that returns the previously farmed land to a state where it is a sustainable prairie and provides payments in lieu of taxes to the impacted governmental units to reflect the revenue losses that they experience as a result of the lost agricultural economic activity.

On balance, it is an example of property rights, accompanied by reasonable government regulation, protecting the legitimate interests of all involved while putting our arid state's scarce water resources to their highest and best uses.

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Peak Dirt

One of my father's favorite sleeper environmental issues is top soil erosion, a.k.a. "peak dirt." FT Alphaville has a lengthy post discussing the subject in the context of limits on sustainability.

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Did Unions Create The Middle Class?

Many people . . . believe there would be no middle class in America if unions did not organize a third of the workforce after World War II. That post-war era, the sixties, still represents one of the most prosperous eras in the nation's history. But that lesson has been lost on most people who oppose unions.

From here.

Krugman agrees.

I don't oppose unions. But, I am also deeply skeptical of the claim by union supporters, and of liberal economists like Krugman, that they were as important an ingredient in creating the American middle class as claimed.

The Comparative View

Consider, for example, Japan and Western Europe. Both societies are far more economically egalitarian than the United States. They pay their executives less, and have a far more even distribution of wealth. But, they do it in two radically different ways.

Japan's big businesses are formally unionized, but their unions are company sponsored affairs that are actually forbidden by law in the United States on the grounds that they would be too management controlled. Japan also has a fairly small public sector, a very paternalistic government, a fairly weak public sector welfare state, and role for married women that is anything but equal even though unmarried women have substantial economic equality with their married peers.

Western Europe is heavily unionized (compared to the United States) with unions that are much more vigorous in asserting their rights than American unions, and those nations also uniformly have a much more comprehensive public sector social welfare state than either the United States or Japan. Germany gives workers at public corporations seats on the Board of Directors of their companies. France tolerates the kidnapping of executives in the course of union-management negotiations and gives public sector workers a frequently exercised right to strike. Sweden has very high taxes that finance a public sector welfare state that makes marriage an economically unnecessary part of being a parent.

The United States has a union movement that was almost as powerful as that of Europe through the 1960s, but that has declined in the four decades since then. It has a public sector welfare state, but it is anemic. We work more hours per year than workers in any other country in the world, and have the most unequal distribution of wealth in the developed world, together with low taxes by developed world standards overall, as measured by tax revenues collected relative to GDP. We have arguably the weakest private sector union movement in the developed world, but have a large, but timid public sector union movement.

The Weak Chain of Cause and Effect

The weakening of private sector unions has not had some of the results that you would expect. Workplace safety is profoundly improved from the standards that prevailed four decades ago when unions were much stronger. The workers whose wages have stagnated have been in industries where unions were strong, not in industries where unions have never had much of a foothold, although, in those industries, union workers tend to be paid more than non-union workers. Disgruntled workers in an American workplace are more likely to call a trial lawyer than a union organizer. American workers have less job security than their peers in either Japan or Europe, although in Japan this is mostly due to a private sector understanding of fairness, while in Europe it is mandated by law.

Income inequality in the United States has risen more or less steadily since 1947. Changing rates of unionization have done very little to alter the trend line, which has arguably flattened a little for families in the bottom 95% of the income distribution in the last decade. Earned income inequality is risen in Europe as well, but has been mitigated by their tax codes and social welfare state, rather than fundamental differences in the structure of economic relationships between people within businesses.

Public sector workers in the United States got job security and good benefits first, and unionized second, many decades after the prevailing accommodation on the shape of public sector employment terms, conditions and compensation were well established.

Did Ethnic Diversity Play A Role?

Some people would argue that American tolerance for inequality has roots in a lack of shared ethnic identity found in both Europe and Japan. I can't rule that out. There is circumstantial evidence that heavy immigration in the late twentieth century has frayed the European consensus on the social safety net and management-labor relations.

Then again, the union movement in the United States has historically been strongest in places where massive immigration has been attracted by job creation, not economically stable places, or places with homogeneous populations. The only place in the agriculture sector that there has ever been any meaningful effort at unionization, for example, has been among immigrant farm laborers. To my knowledge, there are not now, and never have been any unionized plantations. Rural America has produced a great many co-operatives but very few unions.

The deepest economic inequalities in the United States are not in the South where there is the greatest ideological and historical tolerance of inequality in the form of slavery and then, in post-slavery racism, and where opposition to unions has historically been strongest. The plutocrats who have captured such an immense share of the national wealth tend to be based in places like San Francisco and New York City where the financial sectors are strongest, despite the high and progressive taxes that they face there and the strongly liberal local politics. The strongly anti-union Deep South is the home not just of pervasive black rural poverty, but of pervasive white rural poverty.

Southern anti-unionism at the grassroots level may be a product of discontent, in the context of Southern efforts to a great extent successful, to create the "New Rust Belt" in the American South, with existing union efforts to keep new manufacturing investment in the "Old Rust Belt" where their members held jobs in manufacturing companies. From their perspective, Northern manufacturing unions most important position was their opposition to relocating jobs to the South where they lived, rather than any deep felt concern about what it was like to work in a union shop, something few Southerners have experienced.

The current hotbed of union busting sentiment, Midwest states like Wisconsin and Ohio, have historically been relatively homogeneous and inclined to have politics that focused on the collective good. Wisconsin was the epicenter of Garrison Keillor's somewhat idealized middle class heartland where petty village quibbles and small town values prevailed over deep ethnic strife. Where Swedish Lutherans and German Lutherans considered their unions to be mixed marriages. Ohio was one of the first states to proudly embrace a land grant funded system of public education.

Working Class v. Middle Class

Another part of the conundrum of identifying the union movement with the middle class, is that until the relatively recent rise of public sector unionization, unions have been largely the province of the blue collar working class (aka lower middle class). The history of the American union movement is full a smudge faced miners, rank and file factory workers, postal workers trudging through rain, sleet and snow, firemen stinking of smoke, truck drivers and skilled tradesmen.

Today's union movement is more middle class than it used to be because the working class jobs that used to be its core constituency are gone or no longer unionized, while the relatively few middle class unionized jobs have survived and grown relatively more important to the movement as a whole.

The minimum wage and hour laws that unions worked to enact were all but irrelevant to middle class workers who were paid salaries and often exempted from their application. The workplace safety protections and worker's compensation regimes that unions pushed to enact didn't mean much to people who sat behind desks and cash registers all day. The fact that employers started to offer health insurance was as much a product of World War II era wage controls as it was a product of a healthy union movement and benefited non-union workers in factory offices as much as it did union workers on the factory floor.

The entire social class that was at the heart of the union movement has contracted, and the middle class that it now claims used to identify itself with management. Bank tellers have a great deal in common with factory floor workers. They aren't paid much. They are micromanaged. They are rank and file employees of large enterprises that thrive on coordinated mass production. But, factory workers who identified as working class unionized, while bank tellers who identified as middle class, didn't.

A college education and a union card used to be considered contradictions in terms; alternative directions in life. Union leadership is how smart young working class men who couldn't dream of securing a college education or the management jobs that came with it found a way to exercise power in the large institutions where they worked, just as they did as non-commissioned officers did in the military. Yet, a college education is now often considered the defining element of the middle class.

How did access to the college educations that were the thresholds to membership in the middle class open? Mostly through the GI Bill, and after that through the shift of selective institutions of higher education to merit based admissions in the 1960s and the parallel expansion of of state institutions of higher education to accommodate the needs of former soldiers entitled to it as a result of the GI Bill. The political resistance of the civil service that was created to meet this need to being downsized (at a time when higher education employees largely weren't unionized) and student radicalism, rather than labor union efforts, does more to explain why the gates to higher education remained open.

Conclusion

Does all of this mean that unions can't play an important role in strengthening the American middle class? No. They are eager to step up to the challenge and remake themselves as a movement, and it is a task worth taking on.

But, as a matter of history, it is not at all clear that unions played an important part in creating the middle class, which was instead apparently driven by the widening availability of higher education. Instead, unions actually worked hard to secure justice for the American working class and seemed to be making good headway in doing so until sometime around 1970, when that social class in American life entered a period of seemingly permanent economic stagnation.

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Short Takes

* Spinal fluid biomarkers can distinguish between people suffering from Lyme disease (a tick carried infectious agent), Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (probably a viral condition with a long latency period), and uninfected individuals. This is important first, because Lyme disease and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can present with similar symptoms, and second, because diagnosing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and even finding ways for sufferers to convince people that they have a genuine biologically caused disease rather than simply being lazy, is a major challenge.

* The Kalash people in a remote part of the Hindu Kush Mountain range are one of the most genetically distinct populations in the world. When one has a computer break the world's autosomal genetics into the most distinct possible seven clusters, the clusters that you get are: African, European, South Asian, East Asian, Papuan, indigenous American and Kalash.

Their Y-DNA haplogroups (from a sample of about 43 people) are as follows:
L3a 22.7% (most common in Pakistan)
H1* 20.5% (most common in South Asia)
R1a 18.2% (most common in Eastern Europe and South Asia)
G 18.2% (most common in Southern Europe, Anatolia, Druze, Brahui and Pashtuns)
J2 9.1% (most common in Anatolia and where Indo-Europeans have had an impact)
R* 6.8% (most common in Thailand, Indonesia, the Phillipines and Australian aborigines)
R1* 2.3% (most common in indigenous Americans)
L* 2.3%. (most common in South Asia)

Their mtDNA haplogroups (from a sample of 44 people) are as follows:
pre-HV 22.7% (most common in Socotri, North Africa, Iran and Arabia)
HV* 4.5%
H 4.5% (the modal haplogroup of Europe)
U2e 15.9% (most common in South Asia)
U4 34.1% (most common in Central Asia)
U7 2.3% (most common in South Asia)
J1 2.3%
J2 9.1%
T* 4.5%

They speak a language from the Dardic branch of the Indo-European family (one of the more basal of the Indo-Iranian part of the late language family), and practice a polytheistic religion.

They are between areas that areas typically Central Asian and areas that are typically South Asian in genetic makeup. Their traditions place them as a lost contingent of Alexander the Great's army, but given their uniparental markers, the genetic makeup, their particularly contingent would have had to have picked up members mostly from the area from Anatolia to the Hindu Kush. Their Dardic language is also an anomaly for an isolated community claiming to descend from the Greeks, they lack common distinctively Greek uniparental markers, and their religion is close to Hinduism than it is to Greek pantheistic beliefs. An origin a millennium or two earlier (if not much more ancient) would seem to be a better fit for the facts.

Given their autosomal makeup, any new arrivals in the region from somewhere would have had to either admixed substantially with a relict population that was largely wiped out or overwhelmed genetically elsewhere such as Europe and Central Asia's pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers, or South Asian hunter-gatherer populations disrupted by Munda, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan populations respectively. Alternately, they might have undergone significant selectively driven evolution analogous to that found in Tibetans as a result of living at high altitudes. The case for incorporation of a relict Central Asian hunter-gatherer population is most strongly supported by the modal mtDNA haplogroup U4, which was one of the second most common types found in ancient DNA from Central Asian hunter-gatherers.

* There are a couple of kinds of invasive ants that have an unusual reproductive system. Future queens are clones of the current queen. Future drones (reproducing males) are clones of their fathers. Workers, who do not reproduce, have a mix of the queen and the drone's genes similar to that of ordinary sexually reproducing animals. (I'll try to find a reference later).

* As a thought experiment, it is interesting to consider would it would look like to have a society where a human or near human species with reproduction system in which only half of women had children, but they had an average of four and a half surviving descendants, assuring the replacement of the species. There are several different permutations of this that would be possible. Half of children could be gay. Half of the children could be infertile (perhaps clones of their same sex parent, or perhaps surgically or chemically neutered). Half of females could be in "harems" like those of alpha dominated gorillas or lions, and only alphas might have the pheromones necessary to trigger reproduction. One imagines that such a society might resemble the Byzantine courts.

Alternately, one could imagine a society where half the women were in a social class that averaged surviving three children, while the other half the women were in a social class that average one surviving child. A study of the vital statistic of a Bronze Age society in Spain based on its burials and the inferred diets of the dead, which showed a minority elite with a high protein diet surviving at much greater rates than a "middle class" (perhaps soldiers) or an even more deprived underclass (perhaps servants or slaves), with this kind of demographics.

* There is a tendency in Anglo-American political economy to imagine a society with strong property rights and weak governments as a "state of nature" against which political action should be measured. But, this sense is to a great extent ahistorical, particularly in farming and more urbanized societies. The oldest Minoan Linear A script is preserves administrative records of ration distribution systems, basically welfare states, that had strong parallels in Sumeria, Egypt, the Hebrew Bible and Rome - i.e. all of the major civilizations of the Mediterranean of the Copper Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, and arguably via feudal societies into to the Middle Ages. There also seems to be evidence that these were command economies in which soldiers played an integral economic part, perhaps along the lines of the large role played by military owned enterprises in the civilian economies of modern Egypt and China. Likewise, fedual societies were basically agrarian economies run on a military footing with involuntary serf labor.

Decentralized market driven economies with contract rights and private property as an important organizing principle doesn't really emerge as the predominant component of the economy until after the Middle Ages end in Europe.

* NPR made some notable observations about the Middle Eastern oil states that are experiencing revolutions at the moment. Generally speaking, these states don't impose significant taxes on non-petroleum activities. Oil money funds government operations including strong military forces and a significant welfare state. This helps explain why the oil rich states of the Middle East have managed to survive while being so undemocratic. Historically, constitutional monarchy and republican government in cases like Rome, England and France have their roots in the need of a monarch to obtain consent of representatives of people who were going to be required to pay taxes to support the state. Taxes are the price of democracy.

* Some of the dates assigned to remains used to argue for an early presence of modern humans in Europe engaged in relatively primative economic industry have been revised upon further examination to more recent dates. Remains previously touted as more than 30,000 years old, which had "long been considered to be the earliest evidence of the remains of modern Homo sapiens anywhere in Europe" in Southern France and Southwest Germany have been re-examined within the last decade and determined to have actually been less than 10,000 years old.

This also influences how one conceptualizes the Chatelperronian lithic industry in Europe, which in turn relates to how smart we think the Neanderthals were. The prior and more primative Mousterian industry is clearly associated with Neanderthals. The industry that follows the Chatelperronian is associated clearly with modern humans. The Chatelperronian has traditionally been associated with Neanderthals as well, but some researchers have argued for it as "an independent development by Neanderthals (d'Errico et al. 1998)" while others "see the Chatelperronian as the result of the acculturation of Neanderthals by modern humans (Mellars 2005)." People care, because if the Chatelperronian was an independent Neanderthal invention, then maybe they were pretty smart and advancing their technology just as the humans did when climate conditions improved. In contrast, the opposite extreme would be to argue that admixture of modern human traits into Neanderthal populations is the only reason that they were able to innovate as much as they did even in the relatively primate Chatelperronian era. Between the two extremes is the possibility that the Neanderthals were capable of mimicing modern human Upper Paleolithic lithic industries, even if they would have been hard put to develop it themselves.

John Hawks, approaching the same underlying question of Neanderthal intelligence from another angle wonders if the ability of people born blind to repurpose their visual centers for language doesn't suggest that language is less hard wired, and hence, less likely to require genetic evolution, than has been often assumed: "Kaschube and colleagues showed that the apparent developmental robusticity of the visual cortex could be maintained by simple rules of self-organization. It doesn't take specialized genetic control to create a visual cortex, it just takes information structured in the right way to flip a few genetic triggers" and the right kind of environmental exposures. As he explains:

The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don't preclude genetics, far from it -- weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.

I like this scenario because it means we shouldn't be looking for lots of language-specific genetic changes in the last few hundred thousand years. The Neandertal genome suggests that there may not have been any at all.

My second speculation: If the language environment determines the instantiation of language processing, then brains must be substantially different in the way they process language. Children experience different language environments -- not only different languages, but different microenvironments within language communities. Only strong genetic controls could canalize brains despite the differences in their language environments. In brains where language processing emerges readily in the visual cortex, genetic controls cannot possibly synchronize brains in the face of environmental variation.

* A case is being made that the strong genetic discontinuity between South Asia and Southeast Asia, despite the lack of an obviously inpenetrable geographic barrier is attributable to the effects of the Toba volcano erruption, that while not wiping out the modern human population in South Asia, did seriously disrupt and reshape it:

Oppenheimer . . . [suggests] that the prolonged ash cloud could have devastated all or most of India, especially both M and N related populations in the east and south, closest to the volcano. He hypothesizes that this area could then have been repopulated by M dominated groups immigrating from the east, who might then have spread, in a cline, to the rest of the subcontinent, while N-related groups to the west could have repopulated India from that region. This could have left India populated by more recent M and N hapolotypes than those found farther east[.]

He also associates this event with the distribution of tone languages which are found in Africa, "scattered among so many indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, southern China, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Melanesia" and in "northernmost reaches of the Indus valley . . . "would have been a likely spot where a branch of the Out of Africa migrants, who could have broken from the main group to travel north along the banks of the Indus, might have been able to survive the effects of Toba with their African traditions more or less intact. If tone language was part of their HMC inheritance, then that could explain the prevalence of tone language in this area today." Suggested musical linkages that might be legacies of this connection are discussed here.

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The Future Of Farming

American farming has become a high technology modern industry.

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Illegal immigrant population shrinking (updated)

The Great Recession has greatly reduced employment in industries that employ large numbers of undocumented workers (e.g. construction). The result has been a decline in the undocumented population of the United States and in particular Colorado, where the number of undocumented individuals has fallen about 25% (from 240,000 to 180,000) in the three years since 2007.

About 28% of foreign nationals in the United States are undocumented, and about half of undocumented foreign nationals in the United States are Mexican nationals.

Updated February 3, 2011:

In Colorado, the undocumented immigrant population is about 3.6% of the total population.

Nationally, about two-thirds of undocumented immigrants are in the labor force, which would imply about 120,000 people in Colorado. There are 2,665,200 people in Colorado's civilian labor force. So, undocumented immigrants make up about 4.5% of Colorado's labor force.

A crude estimate that assumes that reducing the undocumented immigrant labor force percentage by one percentage point would reduce Colorado's unemployment rate of 8.8% is almost surely wrong, however. In part, this is because undocumented workers generate jobs, both by creating firms and by consuming goods and services and paying taxes that generate jobs, as well as filling jobs. In part, this is because undocumented workers have skill and abilities that aren't present in the general labor force to the same degree, and because employers won't necessarily be able to connect their jobs to unemployed people in Colorado generally. In part, this is because some undocumented workers are themselves unemployed. In part, this is because some jobs done by undocumented immigrants are done at below market rates that are a result of their undocumented status (e.g. getting paid "under the table"), and some of those jobs wouldn't be economically viable at legal labor market rates.

It is quite probable that reducing the undocumented immigrant labor force would reduce unemployment somewhat for other workers in the labor force, but it is hard to estimate what magnitude that effect would have on the unemployment rate.

Probably the best way to estimate that effect would be to do a regression analysis that compared unemployment rates to the percentage of the labor force in each state or region that was comprised of undocumented immigrants. Given the high rate of unemployment across the nation in states with very different rates of undocumented immigrant participation in the labor force, the impact must be fairly modest.

A more sophisticated and more accurate analysis might look instead at undocumented immigrant participatioon in the labor force by both industry and region and do a regression that way (since the mix of industries in a region strongly influences its unemploymenmt rate and the involvement of undocumented immigrants in the labor force varies greatly by industry).

I suspect that this kind of analysis would reveal that undocumented immigration makes a pretty modest contribution to unemployment in the Rust Belt, where manufacturing is dominant, or in the farming states, but makes an appreciable difference in states where the construction industry and hospitality industries are a larger share of the economy, like Nevada.

READ MORE - Illegal immigrant population shrinking (updated)

House GOP Priorities

They say that budgets are values documents where you disclose your priorities.

The non-partisan Legislative Council, upon whom the Colorado General Assembly has relied for budget estimates for as long as anyone can remember, says that the legislature needs to close a $1.1 billion shortfall to balance the state's roughly $7 billion general fund budget (much of which it is constitutionally required to devote to K-12 education). Republicans, who control the state house, have decided contrary to the economists, that the state will be $195 million worse off than state economists have estimated.

What did House Republicans then do to address this $1.3 billion revenue shortfall?

They voted to give a $3.7 million sales tax break to farmers for goods including bull semen. Agriculture, by the way, is having one of its most profitable years in recent memory, while the rest of the state economy is in the doldrums.

Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler, whose predecessor Bernie Buescher had decided to turn over $3.5 million of excess revenues to the general fund, meanwhile, decided last week that he'll keep the funds for new projects. (Although Gessler has backed down from a controversial plan to moonlight for his old election law firm after receiving advice from Republican Attorney General Suthers on the issue.)

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Twenty Obvious International Trends

Lots of economic, environmental and political predictions are hardly better than horoscopes. Others are reliable enough to be thought of a "fundamentals." I'm more interested in the latter. Here are a few:

1. China's economic growth rate will be greater for medium term time periods (e.g. three years or more) than that of the United States for the foreseeable future, because it is engaged in "catch up growth," while the United States is not.

2. China will experience a notable economic crash in the next decade or so, because it hasn't had one for a long time and periods of even strong sustained growth are almost always interrupted periodically by economic crashes.

3. India's economic growth rate will be greater for medium term time periods than that of the United States for the foreseeable future, because it is engaged in "catch up growth," while the United States is not.

4. India's economic growth rate will exceed that of China sometime in the next ten to fifteen years, because China's per capita GDP is significantly greater than that of India, leaving India with more "catch up growth" potential than China.

5. Oil dependent nations in the Middle East will each experience serious economic contractions not long as oil production in the nation in question starts to fall due to exhaustion of the nation's oil supply. These nations are heavily reliant on oil revenues to sustain their standard of living with imported goods and temporary immigrant workers, both of which will be harder to come by when there are not new oil revenues available.

6. Countries in Africa that experience war and authoritarian governments will experience less economic growth than those with sustained periods of peace and democratic government.

7. In the developing world, it will be a long time before environmental and climate change concerns have enough political clout to cause air pollution to be reduced more rapidly than the increasing scope of economic activity increases air pollution. As a result, emissions will not be reduced rapidly enough to stop continued global warming.

8. Nuclear power will spread to more countries.

9. Oil more be more expensive in real terms in 2020 and more expensive again in real terms in 2030 than it is today. Rising oil prices will make technologies that are powered by energy sources other than oil more attractive. This trend will be a global one, because oil trades in a global marketplace.

10. Oil rich countries that are not close to exhausting their reserves will receive an economic boost from rising oil prices.

11. North Korea's political and economic system will collapse, probably within a couple of decades, if it fails to open itself up to the rest of the world. If it does collapse, it will probably be reabsorbed by South Korea.

12. Public health measures will improve in most of the developing and undeveloped world that are not war torn as patents on new effective drugs expire and make those drugs more affordable.

13. Global fertility rates will fall as more countries become more economically developed.

14. Developing countries will become less religious as they become more economically developed in fairly close synch with falling fertility rates.

15. The need to impose taxes as oil revenues decline will force Middle Eastern monarchs who have not already been deposed in revolutions and democratized of their own free will to make genuine democratic reforms.

16. The proportion of the world population engaged in farming will fall steadily for decades to come.

17. Some small island nations will be swallowed up by the sea and forced to relocate all or most of their populations as sea levels rise with global warming sometime in the next century.

18. A large share of the world's languages, probably half or more, will die in the next few decades.

19. A significant number of plant and animal species will go extinct in the next few decades.

20. The proportion of Africans who are Christians will increase significantly over the next decade.

READ MORE - Twenty Obvious International Trends