Electricity

Two contrasting articles today:

In the Washington Post:

"...today the state uses less energy per capita than any other state in the country, defying the international image of American energy gluttony. Since 1974, California has held its per capita energy consumption essentially constant, while energy use per person for the United States overall has jumped 50 percent.California has managed that feat through a mixture of mandates, regulations and high prices. The state has been able to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, keep utility companies happy and maintain economic growth."

In the NYTimes:

"...residents in this part of Illinois are seeing some of the biggest rate spikes in the country — in some cases, increases of 100 percent to 200 percent.

The higher rates are touching off a fresh round of national debate over unleashing competitive forces on traditionally regulated electricity markets. Opening up the markets was supposed to lead to savings for consumers. But that did not turn out as regulators predicted. The anticipated competition among energy suppliers never fully emerged as natural gas prices more than doubled in the last decade."

I'm not sure what to make of all this. My February bill was the highest it's been (because of cold) and I don't feature doubling it (according to the articles, VA has a rate half of California's). On the other hand, that much of an increase would lead me to more conservation, which would be good for everyone.

x

NOT ALL CAPS

From a Weather Service alert:

"URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ALBANY NY
434 AM EST FRI FEB 16 2007
NYZ038-161600-
/O.CON.KALY.LE.W.0008.000000T0000Z-070216T2300Z/
/O.CON.KALY.WC.Y.0006.000000T0000Z-070216T1600Z/
SOUTHERN HERKIMER-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...ILION...HERKIMER...LITTLE FALLS...
MOHAWK...FRANKFORT...DOLGEVILLE
434 AM EST FRI FEB 16 2007
...LAKE EFFECT SNOW WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM EST THIS
AFTERNOON...
...WIND CHILL ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 11 AM EST THIS
MORNING...
A LAKE EFFECT SNOW WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM TODAY
AND A WIND CHILL ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 11 AM THIS
MORNING FOR SOUTHERN HERKIMER COUNTY. "

Please, bureaucrats at the Weather Service, stop using all caps for emphasis, just because that's the only thing you had back in the days of Teletypes. These days you can emphasize in many ways, whether by color, type characteristics, images, or whatever.

Brooks Jinxes Clinton

David Brooks just endorsed Hillary Clinton for President, thereby jinxing her. His column is based on analysis of her speeches in the Senate on the authorization for the Iraq war. He finds her navigating the hazards, being true to Bill's record, including bypassing the UN upon occasion, supporting a President, but being opposed to the war.

"When you look back at Clinton’s thinking, you don’t see a classic war supporter. You see a person who was trying to seek balance between opposing arguments. You also see a person who deferred to the office of the presidency. You see a person who, as president, would be fox to Bush’s hedgehog: who would see problems in their complexities rather than in their essentials; who would elevate procedural concerns over philosophical ones; who would postpone decision points for as long as possible; and who would make distinctions few heed.

Today, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party believes that the world, and Hillary Clinton in particular, owes it an apology. If she apologizes, she’ll forfeit her integrity. She will be apologizing for being herself."

Her mistake was in believing that GW was someone worthy of support.

Ralph Olson, R.I.P.

Ralph Olson died in January. Who was Ralph? Originally from Vermont, worked for Social Security at one time, which he talked about more than he did about his WWII military service. He had been a typist in the SSA pool, using manual typewriters. He was expected to be fast and accurate. When I knew him it was a fellow editor in ASCS, in 1968 to 1972, when he retired.

In those far gone days, directives were typed, then reproduced by offset lithography--meaning that the printers took a picture of the master that was used to print. So the typed page didn't need to be perfect, because imperfections and corrections could be hidden through the picture-taking process. So when editors asked for changes, the typists would use white-out correction fluid, or correction tape, or, for really big changes, cut and paste blocks of text to compose one page. But sometimes they would have to retype the whole thing. Some handbooks would show their age, when the original page had been typed in 1960 on one typewriter with one typeface, with successive changes and amendments made over the intervening years with newer and different typefaces, with some typists more or less skilled in matching spacing and getting the alignment right.

In those patriarchal days, the typists were almost all women, the writers almost all men. So editors would ask writers for changes, writers would pass the work on to the typists. Some typists would push back, pointing out that the requested change was pointless, just a matter of format or of following some arcane and stupid rule. If they persuaded the writer, the writer would come back to argue with the editor. The whole process turned into continuous negotiations, almost worthy of the 6-power talks with North Korea.

Now, as I've said, Ralph prided himself on having been a fast and accurate typist, so he had little time or sympathy for the typists. After all, 250 words on a page, meant a good typist would take 5 minutes to retype the whole thing, clean and pristine. So Ralph would huff and puff at the writer. Sometimes he would almost imply that the writer was at fault for tolerating such a lazy and unskilled typists. But more often he would cave, asking another editor for confirmation that a requested change could be waived.

Ralph leaves no immediate relatives--he had some nephews or nieces if I remember. As the number of veterans of WWII dwindle and fade, so too does the ranks of those who typed in pools.

Compliments to a Republican

From the media:

"Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns wasn’t exactly stepping into the lions’ den, but it was close.

A few hours after he announced USDA was proposing to end farm payments for anyone with an adjusted gross income of more than $200,000 and eliminate the three-entity rule, Johanns traveled to a meeting with farmers in Tunica, Miss.

Tunica County is the home of Dick Flowers, the cotton, rice and soybean farmer who became famous on “60 Minutes” for receiving millions of dollars in government subsidies in the late 1990s."

I don't think it was "late 1990s" because I think I was still at USDA when it aired. Those of us who dealt with payment limitation issues were very aware of it. At least one of us enjoyed watching Mr. Flowers squirm. I give Johanns credit for the trip.

Great Bureaucrats, Robert Moses Revisited

Robert Caro did a great biography of Robert Moses, a man who held a number of public offices in New York City and New York state, and did much building (roads, parks, housing projects) from the New Deal to the 60's. In Caro's book Moses comes across as a very talented bureaucrat, who becomes obsessed with building and building ultimately to the detriment of New York. Jane Jacobs was the critic who articulated the case against him in "The Life and Death of Great American Cities.

This LA Times article discusses a revisionist look at Moses mounted as art exhibitions in NYC. The two people, Moses and Jacobs, are at the ends of a continuum--the difference between the person, the expert, who knows best and the romanticized evolution from the roots, which also glamorizes the past. I tend to lean towards the first and away from the second, but in reality they're two halves of the human personality and both are needed.

They Don't Make Wars Nor Armies as They Used to

Hank Bauer just died. (Obit in NYTimes today) For those of you who weren't born soon enough, Hank was an outfielder for the NY Yankees back when I was a Yankee fan (1948-on), starring in the World Series and then a World Series-winning manager for the Baltimore Orioles. He also was a Marine vet, spending almost 3 years in the Pacific and winning medals.

Yesterday I heard a snippet on C-Span of the Secretary of the Army testifying. He was saying that the policy was one year deployed, two years home station. Then Lehrer News Hour ran the photos of 14 killed in Iraq.

In the old days you often enlisted (or were drafted) for 3 years or the duration. (3 years for the regulars of the Continental line in the Revolution, 3 for some in the Civil War, duration for WWII). And, as Bauer shows, you often fought for the duration. (Audie Murphy, the most decorated WWII soldier fought from North Africa into Germany, Nov. 42 to Jan 45 or so.) Of course, you weren't in the war continuously. In the Pacific, at least in the island-hopping phase, islands were taken fairly rapidly. In the Atlantic, there were invasions and preparing for invasions. For those troops who got stuck slogging up the boot of Italy, they'd be rotated in and out of line, as was also the case in WWI. So for our "combat" troops in Iraq, they're probably seeing more continuous danger over their year tour (for the Army, 7 months for Marines, I think) than Hank Bauer did. If you graphed it, one continuous line for Iraq, one discontinuous up and down line for Bauer.

Another thing I note--there's hardly any privates dying in Iraq. I assume, with a volunteer army, everyone gets promoted at least to sergeant E-5. There may also be the sort of grade inflation in the armed services that the rest of the government experiences--we're all above average.

Bureaucratic Systems and Ptolemaic Systems

Was reading "From the Archives", whose author seems to be a pedant after my own heart, (hat tip to Tyler Cowen) which got me thinking about regulations and then to thinking about scientific theories, particularly Ptolemaic system (i.e. geocentric).

Now I was told once that the way ancient astronomers developed the geocentric system was, whenever they had an observation that didn't fit the theory, they slapped on another epicycle or other widget to solve the problem. And the theory worked, from Aristotle through Ptolemy right up to Galileo it corresponded with observations as well as any competing system.

Well, that's a metaphor for the way bureaucratic systems develop. Some policy maker lays out a set of bureaucratic rules, or forms, or organizational structures that seems to fit the situation as they understand it. But then the bureaucracy gets hit by members of the public (i.e., their customers, clients, users, or whatever hell buzzword is in favor) with unexpected situations--reality is more complex than the theory. So the policy makers come up with some solution, often a compromise among interests, sometimes half-assed or make-shift, that gets added onto the bureaucratic rules, gets made another form in the set of forms, gets a special office in the bureaucracy (i.e., Doug Feith in DOD). And time passes, more situations come up, more fixes are made. Pretty soon a once effective bureaucratic system gets constipated, because there's too many twists and turns in the pipeline for the s... to flow.

How To Handle Limitations on Farm Payments

The USDA farm bill proposes changes on payment limitations, including making farmers ineligible if their adjusted gross income (AGI) is $200,000 or more (now $2.5 million). My guess, without doing much research, is that this is just another proposal that won't be enacted. That's the history of changes in payment limitation; lots more get proposed than get enacted.

There are at least two aspects of the proposal, aside from the general opposition to payment limitations, that will play into the prospects:

1. The size of the change, from $2.5 mill to $200 K. The bigger the change, the stronger the opposition from groups that are opposed.
2. The all or nothing aspect.

My suggestion, to USDA, to Congress, would be to consider a progressive payment structure. Assume that FSA has the payee's AGI recorded in its payment system. (The bureaucratic problem is getting the data attached to the payee; once you do that, getting the data into the computer system should not be a big deal.) It then would be easy to program the payment calculation to factor payments according to a progressive rule. For example:

AGI Payment

• < $100,000 100 percent of calculated amount
• <$200,000 80 percent of calculated
• <$500,000 50 percent of calculated
• <$1 mill 25 percent
• >$1 mill 0

Vary the amounts and percentages however you want, put in as many levels as you want.

The advantages of the proposal are:

1. Makes the implementation more gradual
2. Counters the widespread criticism that the bigger the farmer the bigger the payment--makes payments "progressive" in some sense
3. Might make payees less likely to try to evade the limitation. (The incentive to evade is variable, like boiling a frog slowly.)

Based on my experience with the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings factoring of payments in 1986, it would be imperative to think through the relationship of factored payment dollars to the payment limitation.

Why Bureaucracies (Plural)?

One reason is good old human nature, as in schadenfreude.
Although I'm almost perfect, I'm not above feeling a bit of satisfaction when I read a GAO Report on the problems NRCS has had implementing payment programs. [Background: The predecessor agencies of NRCS (National Resource Conservation Service) and FSA (Farm Service Agency) fought for many years over which one would handle payments for conservation programs. FSA won for about 30 years, but lost them around the time I was retiring. ]

GAO says:

"Despite legislative and regulatory provisions, it is still possible for producers to receive duplicate payments through CSP and other USDA conservation programs because of similarities in the conservation actions financed through these programs. However, NRCS did not have a comprehensive process to preclude or identify such duplicate payments. In reviewing NRCS's payments data, GAO found a number of examples of duplicate payments.

NRCS state officials agreed that the payments made in these four cases were duplicates. They stated that they were unaware that such duplication was occurring and that they would inform their district offices of it. NRCS headquarters officials stated that the agency lacks a comprehensive process to either preclude duplicate payments or identify them after a contract has been awarded. Instead, these officials said, as a guard against potential duplication, NRCS relies on the institutional knowledge of its field staff and the records they keep."

That's laughable, but what one should expect when a bureaucracy has to do something (i.e., make payments) it hasn't done before. It reinforces the position of NASCOE (the FSA employee lobbying organization) that there should only be one administrative organization for offices serving farmers. That's what I worked on in the early 90's, then lost enthusiasm, partly because the Department didn't understand itself, partly because NRCS had too much lobbying clout to allow it to pass, and finally because the end result was going to be reducing the number of jobs in rural areas. I've still not squared that circle.