ID Cards for Government

Government Executive reports on the latest progress report on giving government employees and contractors fancy ID cards. If I understand, we went backwards from last year. And we're still falling short of Bush's objective. [smile]

Like to point out this line: "Agencies had blamed technical challenges to issuing the cards. For example, agencies had to develop solutions for integrating the IDs with support systems that maintain the data and provide an interface with enrollment and issuance functions."

In other words, your card is only as good as the underlying personnel system. If you don't have a good personnel system, it can't support a good ID card system. That's a small detail that program managers, like Bush (or, to be fair, like Gore before him) don't understand.

Disputing with the Dean of Duke

I've commented and re-commented on a post at Grist by Prof. Bill Chameides, the dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. He's relying on Prof. Pollan for a description of the history of the farm programs in the 1970's.

I like my ending, which was to the effect the academics make the mistake that farm programs achieve the purposes for which they are intended.

Validity of Elections

Yes, elections are valid only if the votes are counted correctly. There's lots of concern over the touch screen machines and whether voters can verify the way they voted. See this post over at Project on Government Oversight.

But I'm a bit bemused--I voted for years using the old mechanical lever machines and wasn't able to verify my vote once. For all I know, it was all fake machinery and the real results were arrived at by the election workers. For some reason, the clanking of machinery seems more convincing and more reliable than the transfer of elections. I wonder why?

Secretaries Day

Here's a Slate article from the past on the day.

Run on Rice, the Gas Lines of the 70's

We now have panic, panic, I say, in the stores as people grab up rice and other staples because of fears of scarcity. See this LA Times story (also mentioned in Post and NYTimes today)--Costco and Sam's Club are putting limits on the amounts that can be bought. (Apparently restaurants go there for supplies.)

It reminds me of the gas lines in the 70's--no one wanted to run the risk of running out, so we all filled our tanks up whenever they hit the half-full mark, creating long gas lines. The available inventory moved from station tanks to car tanks, just as rice is moving from warehouses to pantries.

It's an interesting exercise--the economists would say that Costco should just double its price on rice again in order to ration supplies. But the reality is that food is an essential, particularly rice for a Chinese restaurant, so raising prices only slowly decreases demand; it's one of the reasons agriculture goes through booms and busts.

Still No Farm Bill

Apparently there's some movement but slow. A thought: this is one of the unforeseen consequences of delinking farm program payments from production--while farmers would like to know what the program is going to be before they do spring planting, it's not nearly as urgent as in the days when payments were more directly tied to production. (It's also true, with today's prices, the programs are less relevant.)

Poultry in France Is Regulated

I may have mentioned we had hens when I was growing up. I hated the brutes--their nips when you tried to take their eggs could hurt. That's probably why I've not written about poultry on this blog. But this bit in the Beauregard blog caught my eye (he's a Brit living in France teaching English) (he didn't bake something for his daughter to take to the convent for her pre-communion day of mediation):

Now, I have already written at length on the French and their skills as homebakers. This country might be the global gastronomic powerhouse, but French mums just can’t bake. Your bog standard cake stall at an British garden fete, beats the French effort hands down. This is also the country of strict hygiene controls. At a French school fete, you are allowed to bring along a cake bought in a supermarket, but woebetide you if you take along a home made effort, even if it is out of a packet. It’s all to do with the eggs. Powdered egg only. Anything made with real eggs is banned from the spheres of the school cake stall. This also explains why it is so difficult to get a plate of egg and chips in France. In all food outlets, only powdered egg is allowed. Which is why you can’t get an Egg MacMuffin in France.

I assume they've had problems with salmonella?

Farmers Got a Raise

According to this Illinois study:

Farm wages, formally known as return to operator labor and management, averaged $171,507. Find yours by taking your net farm income, then subtracting a fair return to your equity in machinery and land. The statewide average was nearly $100,000 higher than 2006 and about $88,000 above the five year average. The labor and management return statistic has fluctuated as low as $38,707 in 2005, up to the $171,507 of 2007.

I'm not clear on what they consider a "fair return". When I took the ag course in high school some 50 odd years ago, the instructor used 6 percent. Mom always said farmers were foolish--they could sell out and invest their money and live nicely. (Figure 1,000 acres at $4K per, and 6 percent = $240,000 return on investment.) It's one of the things that makes talking about farming tricky. And what would you pay the manager of $4 million in capital. Mutual funds charge something around 1 percent, so that would leave $70,000 for labor. Now I have to admit, crop farmers don't work hard, like dairy/poultry farmers (my parents) did, at least not year round. If they work 50 days worth of 16 hour days in the spring, and another 50 days in the fall (which is an overestimate, I think, but it gives a nice easy figure to multiply by--that's 1600 hours. Add another 200 days of 4 hour days (and 4 hours in the coffee shop), that's 800 hours. So the hourly rate isn't bad, isn't great but it's comparable to teachers.

You Can Fool Some of the (City) People...

A spike in readership led me to the Ethicurean site. Meanwhile Tom Philpott rails about the possibility high food prices will lead the EU to accept genetically modified crops:

Thus, the allegedly free market -- shamelessly rigged by U.S. and European biofuel mandates, which are jacking up the price of corn and soy -- overwhelms consumer desire.

But looking at some stories on the Ethicurean site, it's apparent the free market also helps the cause of organic farming and local food. For example, the farmer whom Michael Pollan devoted a chapter to in Omnivore's Dilemma is charging $1k (that's $1,000) for a personal tour of his farm. (There are cheaper alternatives.) That's easy for someone like me, who is somewhat skeptical, to mock, but city folks have the annoying habit of visiting just at milking time and having no appreciation for the rhythms of a farm, so I can't poke too much fun at it. Besides, as in the case of the "Carbon Farmers of America", if rural rubes can convince city folk to subsidize what they'd do anyway, it barely begins to counterbalance the con games originated in the city.

Secretary Gates and Bureaucracy

From his speech at Maxwell-Gunther AFB:

This new set of realities and requirements have meant a wrenching set of changes for our military establishment that until recently was almost completely oriented toward winning the big battles and the big wars. Based on my experience at CIA, at Texas A&M and now the Department of Defense, it is clear to me that the culture of any large organization takes a long time to change, and the really tough part is preserving those elements of the culture that strengthen the institution and motivate the people in it, while shedding those elements of the culture that are barriers to progress and achieving the mission.

All of the services must examine their cultures critically if we are to have the capabilities relevant and necessary to overcome the most likely threats America will face in the years to come.

For example, the Army that went over the berm about five years ago was, in its basic organization and assumptions, essentially a smaller version of the Fulda Gap force that expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait a decade prior. As I've told Army gatherings, the lessons learned and capabilities built from Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns need to be institutionalized into the service's core doctrine, funding priorities and personnel policies. And that is taking place, although we must always guard against falling into past historical patterns where, if bureaucratic nature takes its course, these kinds of irregular capabilities tend to slide to the margins. ...

[After discussing counter-insurgency and unmanned aerial vehicles...]But in my view, we can do and we should do more to meet the needs of men and women fighting in the current conflicts while their outcome may still be in doubt. My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield. I've been wrestling for months to get more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets into the theater. Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it's been like pulling teeth.

In a way it's ironic that Gates is carrying this message. He won a certain amount of infamy among the left during the late 80's when he was at the CIA for being very skeptical of the reality of the changes in the USSR.

But the bit about UAV's reminds me of an article in Washington Monthly--if I remember correctly it pointed out that Israel had done well with them, some individuals in the US were interested and developing versions, but the armed forces were resisting. Perhaps it even took a Congressional earmark to push their development.