Bureaucrats Are the Offensive Line of Life

A thought, prompted by the recent introduction into the Football Hall of Fame of Art Monk and Darrell Green. Consider this: there are 5 times as many offensive linemen on the field as quarterbacks, but the Hall of FAme has 33 modern era offensive linement to 23 quarterbacks.

Oh for the Safety of the Chlorophyll Based Economy

I'm searching for a term to contrast with "carbon-based economy". But the title is tongue-in-cheek; witness this sentence quoted in today's NYTimes Book Review: "“In the New York of 1867,” he writes, “horses were killing an average of four pedestrians a week (a bit higher than today’s rate of traffic fatalities).”" (Review of the book called Traffic, which sounds interesting.)

Monsanto and rBGH

Tom Philpott at Gristmill is among those noting with approval that Monsanto is trying to sell off its making of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). It's an interesting issue: on the one hand there's the "yuck" factor, those who believe that interference with nature is wrong and on the other the "green" factor, those who believe efficiency is the way of the future. That is, if the hormone enables the production of more milk from the same inputs, isn't that similar to an Energy-Star appliance?

Obviously I lean more towards the efficiency side. But "lean" is the right word.

Information to Complicate One's Understanding.

Why is Canada slim and the US obese?

Well, a possible reason is difference in the kind of statistics used (see the comments on the post). But it's interesting to consider the broader (ouch!) picture. Seeing a map of Mexico using comparable stats would also be of interest.

Pensions

I'm getting more conservative. Here's a Times article (from 2 days ago) on pension costs in Europe. Due to different attitudes on immigration, their problem is much worse than ours.

"One factor that may offset the issue could be the surprising success some countries have had with the introduction of private pensions.

Sweden created a system in 1999 that siphoned off 2.5 percent of a worker’s gross income and invested it in privately managed stock and bond funds. Employees choose the funds themselves, based on their appetite for risk.

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Managing Globalization: Generational Wars in Europe

Since then, countries including Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and all the Baltic states, as well as Germany, have adopted similar programs. (A proposal by President Bush to do much the same died at the beginning of his second term.)

Germany’s system, using tax incentives to persuade people to save for their own retirement, got off to a slow start in 2001. But now some 11 million Germans have bought into it.

I think the Dems should consider this, even though it's like what Bush and the Reps have suggested in the past. A 1 percent add-on, phased to 2 percent with a corresponding reduction in FICA taxes for the second percentage point, sounds about right to me.

Is Hemingway Back?

Poppa was a big big figure in the arts when I was growing up. People (the artsy types) mocked, but "The Old Man and the Sea" did great (in the 50's). Then, after his suicide and the gradual subsidence of his wives, his children, his reputation, he seemed to be very much a has-been.

But, consider this:

"Bleargh. I did this [i.e., mock a TV show] comfortably from a perch way up on my high horse, where I listened to the Stones and read Hemingway and scowled at girls in obscenely short shorts and bought glasses like Tina Fey's. Competitive dance?"

This is from Caitlin Gibson, a guest blogger for Joel Achenbach, who, by the name alone, must be young, young young. And I swear I've noted a couple other cites of Hemingway recently. He must be on the way back. (Has over 4 million hits on Google--maybe he was never gone, except in my mind?)

The Dutch Are Coming, the Dutch Are Coming [Updated]

It appears that foreign investors have bought up 5+ million acres in the last year. That's what the latest AFIDA report shows. Don't know where they were bought, but if the average is 1K per, that's 5 billion dollars. Could be lots more.

Maine and Hawaii have the highest concentration of foreign ownership, and one Netherlands corporation has over 3 million acres. (Do the Dutch still remember the "purchase" of Manhattan fondly, as an example of the values to be found here? Or maybe they figure global warming is going to doom Holland?)

It's a repeat of the 1970's, when the weak dollar meant lots of foreign investment, and the passage of the AFIDA (reports available here).

[Update: Most holdings are forest land and the changes are in forest land. Canadian paper companies.]

COBOL? A Blast from the Past

The Times has an article on the problems facing the California state government because their IT systems are inflexible:

“In 2003, my office tried to see if we could reconfigure our system to do such a task[i.e. changing wages and terminating employees],” Mr. Chiang told a State Senate committee on Monday. “And after 12 months, we stopped without a feasible solution.”

David J. Farber, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said using Cobol was roughly equivalent to having “a television with vacuum tubes.”

“There are no Cobol programmers around anymore,” Mr. Farber said. “They retired centuries ago.”

Mr. Farber said California was not alone in having out-of-date systems — or handy excuses.

“It’s old technology, and you can’t find a repairman who knows how to fix it,” he said. “It also a neat way of figuring how not to get your salary cut.”

It's true enough--Craigslist doesn't show any COBOL listings in its jobs section. But Microfocus, which used to have a PC COBOL, has this language in a current blurb (from a press release announcing a conference in 2009):

"COBOL, the most pervasive language in global IT infrastructures, will take its place at the forefront of this discussion. COBOL applications will become available as internet-based services, operating in the new cloud-based paradigms in the very near future, bringing major implications for the developer community."

And the more important fact is, regardless of the computer language, IBM 360 Assembler, COBOL or whatever, it's the way the system was designed that's at fault. When it was designed (assuming it was, rather than just growing), no one provided for the flexibility. (Or, maybe not, maybe it's a bluff. Arnold should call it--freeze all pay raises until they figure out how to do pay decreases).

[Updated: Found an interesting discussion at slashdot going over many of these issues. The meat is that what Arnold wants to do is pay only minimum for the period during which he's fighting with the legislature over the budget, calculate and hold the difference in escrow, and once the dust settles disburse the back pay. Also some interesting bits about how CA operates.

This sort of issue is also why the added money for FSA--modernizing software is difficult. Particularly when managers don't know what they're doing.}

More Money for FSA?

According to this report:

President Bush has asked Congress on Friday for $172 million in additional fiscal 2009 Agriculture Department funding to implement the new U.S. farm law and to improve the USDA computer system. The spending would be offset by a $287 million cut in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. Bush proposed the USDA revisions as part of budgetary changes for eight departments and the Environmental Protection Agency, reports Reuters.

And Again, Maybe Our Parents Were Right

My parents (i.e., your great grandparents, probably) thought gambling was the Devil's tool. Not that they put much stock in the devil, but gambling was wrong and foolish (not much difference between the two concepts in their mind, or mine). Catholicism's embrace on bingo was one reason to look dubiously on it. But in the 1960's those attitudes started to seem old fashioned.

But maybe they were right--from a writeup of a scholarly study of lotteries (hat tip, Freakonomics):

In the study, the researchers note that lotteries set off a vicious cycle that not only exploits low-income individuals' desires to escape poverty but also directly prevents them from improving upon their financial situations. They recommend that state lottery administrators explore strategies that balance the economic burdens faced by low-income households with the need to maintain important funding streams for state governments.

Maybe the spread of gambling in the last half of the 20th century has a little something to do with the increase in inequality? Maybe?