Life Lessons from Kevin Drum

Kevin Drum had earlier blogged about the idea his cancer wasn't a particularly educational illness; no big revelations about life had followed from the discovery or treatment .

In this piece he muses about the idea that sharing one's personal experience can help others, even if it is only to say people are not alone. There shouldn't be the expectation that illness is life-changing; sometimes it's just something to work through, or not.

Vote to Preserve the WH Garden?

If you don't like the Democratic ticket you can at least vote to preserve Michelle Obama's White House Garden.  PBS Newshour covers a ceremony this afternoon which tries to preserve it as a permanent feature of the grounds.  Not quite comparable to Jackie's Garden, but something.

I think I've noted earlier my skepticism that the Obama children ever did much in it, despite their mother's naive hopes when it was first announced.  That's just as well, because I suspect Barron Trump won't be living in the White House and the Clinton grandchildren are too young.  So the Park Service will continue to care for it.

Given what happened to Carter's solar roof, I'd expect Trump to do away with all Obama innovations.  Indeed, I wish someone would ask him in the debates whether he plans to redecorate the White House to suit his tastes, maybe a nice gold color with "Trump" in neon above the portico?

The Clintons likely will continue with the garden, but without the fanfare.

Technology as Empowering, Even Dairy Cows

In some ways automated milking systems/robot milkers are the epitome of industrialized agriculture. It's easy to create an over-simplified picture in your mind of what's involved.   I won't venture to compare these systems with our practices with 12 cows in a stanchion system, but much of this extension article surprised me.  Some excerpts:

• "cow’s attendance to the milking station is not only dependent on the PMR and pellets [feed] offered in the RMS [robotic milking system], but also on feeding management, cow comfort, cow health, and social interactions among cows."
• "If forage moisture changes and rations are not adjusted promptly, visits may drop. The drop in visits will result in a decrease in milk production and an increase in the number of fetch cows. The increase in fetch cows may disrupt other cow behaviors, resulting in even bigger decreases in visits and milk production, leading to a downward spiral that creates much frustration for the producer. It is crucial to have consistent feeding in order to maintain high production and minimize the number of fetch cows[i.e. cows someone has to fetch and herd into the RMS]"
• "Cows like consistency. This is even more important in a RMS herd."

The advice in this Progressive Dairy article by a "senior farm management support adviser." advoses letting cows do their thing.  (The "subtext" is the difficulty of changing one's behavior when new technology comes into the job site.)

Those Efficient Private Companies

MGM is building a casino in Prince Georges County, the National Harbor project.  Today's printed Post had an article on the opening plans.  What caught my eye was the subheading--a $500 million cost overrun--the whole project cost $1.4 billion, so that's probably a 33 percent overrun

This will go unnoticed, but similar inefficiency in government tends not to.

Japanese Self-Cleaning Ovens

From Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling we learn that the Japanese have no word for "self-cleaning oven".   That inspired me to search: inquiring minds wanted to know why?  Were all ovens self-cleaning, or what?  This led me to an interesting write-up on Japanese kitchen appliances.

It doesn't directly answer the question, but this is what I read between the lines:

• kitchens are small and appliances are small
• meals are physically small (no Thanksgiving turkey)
• ovens are small (microwaves now)
• ranges are gas (I presume given the size of Japan and population density fuel was never abundant, so no (i.e. "no" = "few') wood/coal stoves for cooking and no transition to electric stoves.

Book Recommendation: Rosa Brooks

The book is "How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon", the author is Rosa Brooks, the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, the leftish foodie and writer.  Interestingly, Brooks is now married to a colonel in the Special Forces, having spent time in the bureaucracies of the State Department (Bill Clinton admin) and Pentagon (Obama admin) as a human rights/law of war lawyer. 

The book is a little diffuse, but it gets blurbs from Gen. McChrystal and Anne-Marie Slaughter, former policy wonk in the State Department.  Brooks acknowledges her experiences have changed and undermined her inherited preconceptions, though you still get the idealism of the former human rights activist. To me, of course, the most interesting bits reflected the bureaucracies of DOD and State, and the tension between them, but Brooks' thesis is that the old paradigms of war and peace no longer work, we need to pay attention to the in-between, particularly as impacted by technology, and fashion new rules of law and social structures to deal with social conflict.   I was struck by her thoughts about the individualization of war--we can track and kill individuals now--what does that do to "war", which used to be anonymous mass versus anonymous mass?

Clinton and the Modern Age

Some sentences from Garrett Graff's writeup at Politico after reading the last batch of FBI reports of interviews of the Clinton people:

 "Together, the documents, technically known as Form 302s, depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology, working with a small, harried inner circle of aides inside a bureaucracy where the IT and classification systems haven’t caught up with how business is conducted in the digital age. Reading the FBI’s interviews, Clinton’s team hardly seems organized enough to mount any sort of sinister cover-up. There’s scant oversight of the way Clinton communicated, and little thought given to how her files might be preserved for posterity—MacBook laptops with outdated archives are FedExed across the country, cutting-edge iPads are discarded quickly and BlackBerry devices are rejected for being “too heavy” as staff scrambled to cater to Clinton’s whims."

 Secretary Powell tried to bring State into the modern age:

Powell invested in 44,000 new computers, giving every employee a computer on the desk, and monitored the adoption of the new systems as he traveled by conducting unofficial audits, sitting down at embassies overseas to check his own email and attempting to log into his account. As he told FBI agents, “This action allowed Powell to gauge if the embassy staff was maintaining and using their computers.” He also regularly checked the department’s internal “Country Notes” on the intranet to see if missions overseas were keeping their details up to date.  

 I come away from the long article, thinking more highly of Powell as a bureaucrat--at least he knew from his Army days about the need for solid routines and the likelihood that things will be Fubar.

As for Clinton, since I have a close relation who's never used the IPad Air she received, I shouldn't complain much about her technological incapacity.  I think the facts in the article fully support Comey's decision.  However, I'm bothered by the idea that nobody in Clinton's circle of advisers and support staff, except for the IT guy, seems really to have worried about the nitty-gritty.  It's a prevalent disease of big-shots, IMHO, but I hope as President she finds a Sherman Adams*.

* Ike's chief of staff who made the trains run on time.

Census Bureaucrats and Immigration Laws

I think I stumbled on an interesting bit of bureaucratic history today.  In trying to help a relative decipher a 1910 census listing for a Fanny Cohen in New York City.  The census form is confusing, apparently because it was worked over two or three times.  The initial listing showed her and her parents as being born in Russia, and Yiddish was her first language.

The confusing parts were additional notations, possibly made by the census taker, but more likely done later.  The notes aren't clear.  Our best interpretation at the moment is that they are classifications perhaps required by the Immigration Act of 1924, that is, what was "Russia" in 1910 becomes Poland or Lithuania  after WWI. Because the Act imposed quotas based on the national origins of those already in America, the Census bureau seems to have had to come up with those statistics.

I'm curious whether this is true, and if so how they went about it.  If you have someone going over the 1910 census in 1924, how do they know which part of the Russian Empire, now defunct, Fanny Cohen came from?

Trump's Economist

Prof. Don Boudreaux, of George Mason U. blogs at Cafe Hayek. He seems to be a classical economist, i.e., someone with whom I would agree only once in a blue moon.  Frankly, I don't understand the issue with the Trump economic plan, but I find this pussyfooting around without saying what you really think most distressing: (from an "open letter" to Trump's economist):

"Tipped off by Scott Sumner, I read Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro’s analysis of Trump’s economic plan.  Words fail me.  Nearly everything Navarro writes about trade is not only wrong, but foolish.  A good economist setting out to write a spoof of bad trade analysis could not have done a better job of mimicking complete cluelessness about trade."

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Chinese Exchange Rate

 From Feb 2015 economist:

CHINESE officials tired of defending their exchange-rate policy can at least appreciate the irony in the latest charges levelled against them. For years foreigners [including Donald Trump in the debate on Monday] accused them of keeping the yuan artificially weak to boost exports. Now, domestic critics say, they are doing just the opposite: keeping the currency artificially strong and, in the process, wounding the economy. Some predict China will soon change course and engineer a devaluation. But just as the Chinese authorities did not resort to a big one-off appreciation when the yuan seemed too weak, they are unlikely to embark on a dramatic devaluation now that it is looking strong