Privacy and the Government

I blithely surf the Internet, leaving bits and pieces of my identity here and there. A deputy to the Director of National Intelligence argues that therefore I should be comfortable with a loss of privacy vis a vis the government. I've some sympathy with the argument, but I disagree. Though I personally may be comfortable with trusting the government, most people aren't, so our systems need to recognize that.

I've no problem with the government gathering gobs of data to do their work. But many times the data doesn't have to be tied back to an individual. So the first rule is collect the data but lose the individual. In some cases you need the individual. The second rule should be, when the individual is tied to data, you log accesses and make the log available to the individual. In other words, I should be able to call up, via internet, the job description of any government employee who looks at my tax information, my health data, even my name and address.

Cheap Food and the Difference It Makes

Megan McArdle is visiting Vietnam and blogs.

Cheap food coming from industrialized agriculture has impacts all the way through the society.

Cost of Farmland

To give a sense of the variation across the country, John Phipps recently blogged about the cost of land in Illinois, he paid his sister $4,500 an acre, a neighbor sold for $5,200, and there's a recent rumor of $9K. Compare this LA Times article on Ventura county, CA quotes a figure of $61,000 (orange groves are being replaced by strawberries and other high priced produce).

I remember the Iowa state specialist who back in 1981 was moaning about having bought a "farm too far". I wonder how many land buyers this time around will be caught out. Or have things fundamentally changed?

FSA on Guam

Here's a short piece describing the benefits of FSA's NAP disaster aid program on Guam.

Best Government Blog??

The people at volokh.com are licking their wounds after being beaten out for title of "Best Legal Blog". But their posting intrigued me, so I went to the awards page.

Imagine my surprise to find no category for "Best Government Blog". (One might argue that's an oxymoron, there can't be a "best government" anything. But that's a different subject.)

Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post has something he calls a "googlenope"--i.e., a set of words for which Google can't find a match. Turns out "Best Government Blog" has 3 matches, as of Nov. 10, 2007, before this post is published. But "Great Government Blog" had no matches, until...

This Rule I Like

Blog for Rural America has a tongue in cheek post about "big" farmers versus "small". The senate was debating the issue yesterday (I saw Sen. Chambliss try to engage in a colloquy with Roberts on the subject--big farmers contribute more production to the economy than small.

They propose a rule--no payments to anyone over 5'7". Now that's a rule a bureaucrat likes--clear and precise.

Usability and Gov Gab

To be fair to Gov Gab, which I've questioned before, I found this post to be interesting, particularly the bit on the usability testing Social Security Admin did on the drug benefit. Usability testing was a cutting edge tool in IT in the late 80's but it was difficult to implement. When you're in a time crunch, usability testing is the first thing to go (then training, then instructions, etc. etc.). It takes a lot of discipline to say: do it right the first time and you'll save time (resources) over the long run. It's also true that most times usability testing didn't show a smoking gun, so it's easy to minimize its importance.

Environmentalism versus Locavores

Farmgate has an article on the complications of corn after corn. Someone like Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, or Bill McKibbern would read it and say--you see, industrial agriculture, tweaking the inputs of chemicals, not natural at all. But the article is based on the higher price for corn, which is based on ethanol, which is a result of environmentalism.

Some times you just can't win.

Mr. Pollan Again

Michael Pollan had an op-ed on the farm bill in yesterday's Times. Warning--I'm not a fan of his, to put it mildly. I'm not impressed by the article (surprise!)--he hit the usual points of the "greens". I think he'd do better sticking to his books.

Payment Limitation for Real?

Just for the hell of it, I'd suggest if people really want payment limitation to work, you'd need to give the Justice Department funds for a team of attorneys to prosecute fraud cases. (Now I doubt anyone in Justice has much interest in prosecuting people for violating the U.S.Code in connection with farm payments, even if some conscientious bureaucrat in FSA comes up with some information that warrants referral to Justice. They've got bigger fish to fry.

(This is inspired by a provision in one bill to make farmers ineligible for payments if they're determined to have committed fraud. That's a step, but ask FSA how many farmers fit this description now.)

Absent such provision, payment limitation is like the speed limit.

[note to self--I seem to be in a dour mood today.]