Demagoguery Opportunity

FCW has a piece on moves on Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.  I would not be surprised to see politicians demagogue this as ceding US authority to those untrustworthy people outside our borders.

The Difference a Quarter Century Makes

I remember a group of us (middle managers from SCS, ASCS, and maybe other agencies) having an after-dinner conversation in roughly 1995.  I expressed some desire for better feedback on directives (I think), and Paul A. said it could be done with the Internet/World Wide Web (I'm not real sure of the dates or the innovation at issue but this is what makes most sense in retrospect.  I had some familiarity with the Internet, having been a Compuserve subscriber for several years and had heard about the web.

Anyhow, today I find these stats at the World Bank:

"Today, 95% of the global population have access to a digital signal, but 5% do not; 73% have mobile phones, but 27% do not; slightly less than half of all people (46%) have internet, but the majority do not; and only 19% of the world’s population has broadband. There also are persistent digital divides across gender, geography, age, and income dimensions within each country."

The Internet Is Not Always Perfect

Back in the day, one of the most valuable items to come into one's in-basket was an updated telephone directory.  That's particularly true after a change of administration--it'd usually take 4 months or so for the reorganization to get done, people get assigned to new positions, and the data put into the directory.  But once you had it in hand, you could spend a little time leafing through, seeing who had been assigned to a turkey farm and who had risen in the world.  (That's especially true for someone like me, who tried to keep away from gossip, mostly because I wasn't any good at it.  Those who participated in the grapevine would already know that so and so had taken his secretary with him to his new position, that the idiot son of a Congressman had landed in an assistant position, etc. etc.

More seriously, though is there anything more serious than climbing the greasy pole, from the telephone directory you could get a feel for the organization.

I launch into this subject to mourn the absence of any organizational directory for USDA or FSA.  (USDA says they have one, but it's been unavailable for years.)  You can search for individuals quite nicely, but you can't find positions.   For example, who is the Executive Assistant to the Administrator, or has that position changed over the years?  From a historical viewpoint, having similar charts of the organization from  1950, 1975, 2000, and 2014 would be instructive.  I remember seeing the USDA level directory from the 1950's, about two pages of big shot jobs.  These days it's probably 20 pages, if only we had one.   Of course, only retired geezers have the time to worry about past history.  :-)

Kevin Williamson Is Wrong: Foreseeing the Future

I'm nitpicking here. He writes at the National Review:

"No one in 1985 knew, or really could have known, what computers would be like ten years down the road, or twenty."

(It's in the context of mocking a NYTimes columnist in 1985 who wrote that laptops were a bad idea, and moving from that  to the idea we can't foresee the future so the market beats government.)

Now I remember old laptops. We had a Zenith laptop at work which we took to a training session.  Actually, it wasn't a computer to put on your lap--it was a portable computer, a luggable.   I also remember something else, something called an electronic calculator.  When I worked at my summer job in the summer of 1959 and later, I used an old handcrank manual adding machine. By the end of the 60's electronic calculators had arrived on the scene, and by the end of the 70's we had programmable calculators.  Innovators in county ASCS offices had started to buy the calculators and program them to compute program payments and loan amounts.  I remember a GAO report urging the agency to establish centralized control over them.

Anyway, no more memories.  My point is that by 1985 we had seen the effects of Moore's law; the capabilities of calculators had exploded and their prices had imploded.  We also had seen the progression from mainframes to minis to micro/PCs.  So anyone with any sense of the history of the past 20 years would have known that computers were going to get smaller and more capable.

And someone, like Al Gore, was on the verge of inventing the Internet, or at least see that an obscure military/academic tool needed to be opened to the public.

The Rule-Making Process

The FCC just changed its rules on regulating the Internet--they're going to treat it as a public utility.  A post at Vox takes them to task for being slow and untransparent in their rule-making process.  While the process for regulatory commissions like the FCC is a bit different than for agencies like FSA, I have to agree that everyone could gain by revising their process to take account of the Internet.  It's a forlorn hope, however--things don't change fast, particularly when you've got lawyers involved.

How Fast Things Change

From a Vox post on Rep. Scalise:

Let's be as generous as we can to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Let's say he spoke to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization but had no idea it was a white supremacy group backed by David Duke. Let's say the name didn't raise any red flags for Scalise, or if it did, he didn't follow up on them. Let's take him at his word that, in 2002, he didn't know there was such a thing as Google (or any of its competitors), and neither he nor his staff even cursorily vetted the groups he accepted speaking invitations from. [emphasis added]

Looking at the history of Google, I suspect very few people were automatically checking Google in 2002. Amazing how fast things change, and how quickly we assume the past and the present are similar.

The Enrichment of Rural Life

Was looking at a recent post on Life on a Colorado Farm, the one where she asks for help in identifying a bird at her feeder, then viewed the comments.  The LCF writer lives on a butte in Colorado, so she sees a lot of weather, and nice views.  In this she's a lot like my mother, who lived near the top of a hill in upstate New York, and enjoyed the views looking west over the hills. 

When mom married she moved to the valley, which she regretted. Her life on the hill was  back in the early 1900's so there's a great difference in life experiences.  A few of them:

• LCF has a camera with which she takes many great pictures.  Mom had a similar enjoyment of natural phenomena, the clouds, the snow, the seasons, etc. but had no way to record it.
• LCF has the Internet and a blog.  Mom had a lonely life on the hill--they had a watering trough by the gravel road which passed between house and barn and she was eager to visit with the few passersby who would stop to water their horses.  During my childhood she was equally eager to visit with the people who came to buy our cracked eggs.  But I'm sure she would have much enjoyed the companionship available through a blog and blogroll and sharing with people with similar circumstances and backgrounds.

The Rural Blog does a good job at reporting on rural life, which often has greater problems than nonrural life (i.e. drugs, access to healthcare, economy, etc. etc.). One thing we need to remember is the isolation of rural life in the not too-remote past, and the changes made by modern technology.

Does USDA Pay Farmers for Not Farming?

The Internet has made me more aware of the persistence of myths and inaccuracies, not to say "lies", in the world of public discourse.

To quote Mark Twain:


One of the persistent memes is the idea FSA (USDA) pays farmers for not farming, for not producing.  That came up in a recent Jonathan Chait piece here, in connection with a discussion that the right supported cutting food stamps but not cutting farm subsidies.   Chait linked to a Megan McArdle defense of the theory, though she would like to cut both food stamps and ag subsidies, based on "reciprocity".  The idea being that food stamps went to the idle poor, who did nothing for them, while subsidies went to farmers who at least were farming.   Chait used a GAO Report of last year 
which I missed, to counter McArdle's argument.

Seems to me there are several aspects to the meme:

• it can refer to the "supply management/production adjustment" programs of past farm bills, in which case it's wrong.  Those programs are dead.
• it can refer to the problem of payments issued to dead farmers.  That can be bad administration by FSA, though the casual discussion of it by people like Chait and EWG doesn't recognize some of the legitimate complexities. 
• it can refer to the problem of direct payments issued based on acreage which is converted to non-farm uses, as cited in the GAO report.  That again is bad administration.
• it can refer to the fact that the direct payment program is "decoupled", to comply with WTO rules--there's no requirement that farmers farm in order to earn the payments.  Again, the GAO report blasted the program for this, but it's what Congress passed.
• it can refer to the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which has multi-year contracts for farmers to devote land, not to production of crops, but to conservation uses.  In my mind, the program's aim is to protect highly erodible land and provide conservation benefits, not to reduce production, but it's true that the program does reduce production.  (It's rather like saying the military draft in the 1960's gave men free health insurance--it did.) It's also true that some of the contracts can cover a whole farm, assuming all of the acreage is highly erodible.

So to me the bottom line is: USDA/FSA has no program which pays farmers for not producing.

[Updated to add the last sentence on the CRP paragraph.]

30 Gigs of Email?

I can't believe that, but apparently Ezra Klein has almost 30 gigs, because that's all Google would sell him space for.  See this Drum commentary, which quotes Klein.

SSA, FSA, and Internet Operations

The Post's Federal Page reports a controversy between Social Security Administration and its union, a controversy which may prefigure similar tensions between FSA and its employees.  (SSA is usually considered to have done well in use of the Internet.)

Witold Skwierczynski, president of the National Council of SSA Field Operations Locals, part of the American Federation of Government Employees, sent a letter to the SSA demanding “to bargain over the impact and implementation of the Agency’s decision to shorten the hours field office employees interview the public.”
The letter said that “the Union disagrees with the Agency’s position that most services do not require a field office visit and can be done on the Internet or by the 800 Number.

Correcting Errors: Does the Internet Help?

Somewhere on the Net this week there was a discussion of whether the Internet helps or hurts in correcting myths and errors.  It may have been Prof. Bernstein (or maybe someone else) who opined that some errors were checked and caught very quickly, while others persisted on and on and on.

In the latter category is this from Gail Collins in today's Times, in the course of beating up on Congress for not working on the postal system or the farm bill:

The Senate recently voted 64 to 35 to approve a new five-year authorization, which reformed some of the most egregious bad practices, like paying farmers not to grow crops. [emphasis added]

The truth is that we haven't had the authority to pay farmers not to grow crops  for at least 16 years (unless one includes the Conservation Reserve Program, which normally people don't and Ms. Collins is not).   But this error will probably never die, it's like the ejecta from a volcano eruption which has escaped into the atmosphere and persists, dimming the sun of truth.  

No One Ever Washed a Rental Car

That's my best memory of something some economist once said.  Turns out the Zipcar is just another rental, according to this from Treehugger.  The advantage Zipcar presumably has is their continuing relationship with their customers and computers to track when their customers fudge on the agreement.  It's just another way in which modern Americans trade privacy for advantage in the age of the Internet.

Minitel and Compuserve

The Times has a story on the impending demise in France of Minitel. Minitel was once the very popular French version of the Internet, or rather an intranet since it was all proprietary hardware and software.  The French were way ahead of the rest of the world with computerization in the home.  The U.S. had some experiments, which failed, one of which was by Time-Warner, but the French developed such a widespread platform even Norwegian bachelor farmers in Brittainy adopted it, using it to maintain the registrations of their cows, etc. 

But since it was proprietary and not open, it's lost out in the competition with the Internet and PC's, lost out at least in the marketplace if not in the hearts of some of those aforesaid farmers.

Compare France with the U.S.  Compuserve was an early networking outfit, but because we already had PC's penetrating the market it was software only; the hardware was PC's.  Compuserve was eventually ousted and then bought by AOL, which reached for the stars in merging with Time-Warner, only to fail in competition with the open interface of Internet browsers.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

Tradeoffs in India

"Open wifi networks are banned in India, because they make life difficult for policemen. This is a bad tradeoff : we have sacrificed the immense gains from ubiquitous open wifi networks, in return for reducing the work of policemen."

from Ajay Shah's blog.

In Defense of Bricks and Mortar

I've often said giving farmers on-line access to FSA programs/operations is the wave of the future.  But now I need to recognize the other side.  Here's a post at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog on the virtues of opening storefronts to sell Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance. It will possibly take another generation before Americans are equal to the challenge of understanding online applications.  Maybe even longer.  (I'm sure it will come eventually.) Until then, there's a role for hand holding and in-person explanations.

Does Al Gore Have the Last Laugh?

Turns out he's a member of the inaugural class of members of the Internet Hall of Fame.  I expect all Republicans who laughed at him to humbly apologize to the winner of the 2000 election (popular vote division).

Improving FSA Customer Service

One of the issues for any big bureaucracy is how do the bureaucrats at the center/top of the organization monitor the success their operatives have in dealing with their customers/clients.  In the case of FSA there used to be a number of ways the DC people, even those in the ivory tower as Chet Adell used to call the Administration Building, which used to house the Administrator and deputies, kept up with the field:

• first of all there was the feedback up the chain of command, from county through district director, state office and state director to area director
• second there was the feedback through the politicians--the county committee members, state committee members, etc.
• third the correspondence and phone calls directly from the farmers to DC, whether the Administrator, Congresspeople, or President

I think implementing web applications which provides direct service to customers creates a problem--how do you get feedback from the customers?  The established channels don't work (I don't see farmer Jones telling Ms. Smith in the local county office of a problem he had with the FSA website a week ago), and I don't have much faith in the ability of canned surveys to gather useful information. 

Would it work for the county offices to use the same applications as their customers could access online?

NY Times Undermines Security

That's what I took away from their article today on teenagers.  Apparently the true token of love today is information, specifically one's password.  All very touching, but surely the Times should point out the truth: you shouldn't have just one password, but multiple passwords.

[Update: see this Consumer Reports piece after Zappos.]

What Happens When There's No Card Catalog?

One of the ways I try to help people do Google searches is to tell them: type in the window the words you would use in searching the old library card catalog.  But what happens when that advice no longer makes sense?  This was triggered by a post on the NYTimes article describing a private west coast school which banned all technology.  Does searching in Google come naturally, or is it learned? 

I think the later. 

In some ways this is like learning to type--I vaguely remember an article saying that kids were picking up typing by the availability of PC's, etc. with keyboards.  But how many of those kids will be able to do 40 wpm with 1 mistake?

I guess I'm starting this week as a grump.

Building Our Infrastructure: The Unseen Bits

Lots of discussion these days about the need to reinvest in our infrastructure, by which people often mean the transportation industry: roads, rail, airports, FAA control systems. The civil engineers are pushing this, and they are getting traction.  But yesterday as we traveled back to Reston on some interstates (most of which seemed in as good shape as I can remember, though the rest stops had their problems) I was struck by the thought that we're actually improving our infrastructure in unseen ways.

For example, I noticed the emergency call phones along the side of some roads.  And notices for getting emergency information by tuning the radio to a given frequency.  Surely those auxiliary portions of our transportation infrastructure are going to fade away, replaced by smart phone apps.  Rather than the expense of maintaining separate physical systems, our investments in cellular networks and the development of smart phones will provide more information faster at minimal cost. (Just as the PC was able to replace the dedicated word processor and the desk calculator.)

Consider the past: when I was a child each gas company put out a line of road maps, with some competition from Rand McNally and AAA. The maps weren't all that great, but they were all we had. Then the turnpikes came along, followed by the interstates, and the individual states started issuing maps.  Gas company maps went the way of "full service".  With the concentration of traffic on interstates, things like the emergency call phones and the radio information networks were economically feasible.  For trip planning, you could be a member of AAA and get "tripticks" (or something close), assuming you wanted to pay the money and wait for it to be delivered,

Then came the Internet and things like Google maps, which could plan a route in seconds and give alternatives in a way AAA never could.  Since we don't travel much, I was surprised for our recent trip that Google maps now gives updated information on construction and repairs, not to mention weather conditions and traffic flow.  All of this added information is free.

A final thought: having more information available means faster travel and fewer delays which means greater economic productivity.  I'm not sure how the economic statistics are going to capture those effects.