First Gardening of 2009

Yes, the weather has turned warmish in Reston so I did my first gardening of the year--turning over some soil. I had assumed it might be still frozen, but it wasn't (the shredded leaves from the association probably helped). It's definitely premature--you know all the warnings about the soil being too cold and wet, particularly with our good clay soil, but who listens to written wisdom when the weather is in the 60's?

ASCS as an Incubator of Tolerance?

I've blogged about the Pigford case, in which USDA, the former Farmers Home Administration, and its successor, FSA, get attacked for being racist. That rests on the idea that either the local bureaucrats were racist, and/or the programs they administered were skewed against minorities. Regardless of the truth of the attacks, there is another side--as a federally funded bureaucracy, there were rules and pressures from Washington to override local prejudices. And sometimes those worked, as shown in this story about two men, one black, one white, working summer jobs with ASCS in Texas in 1965.

(A bit of background--ASCS used to hire lots of summer help to measure crop acreages, often one way it recruited its permanent employees. Over the years changes in the programs and the use of certifications and spot checks have lessened the need for measurement, and aerial imagery has enabled in-office measurement, saving taxpayer dollars.)

Where To Cut Back

Extension.org reports on a survey of where people may cut back their spending:

gym memberships
fine dining
magazine and newspaper subscriptions
shopping at high-end department stores for apparel
organic foods
entertainment, such as movie and theater tickets.

Crop Insurance

I feel uncomfortable talking about the crop insurance programs which cover revenue, but this caught my eye:

An attractive feature of CRC insurance this year is that the price used to establish the estimated revenue guarantee for wheat in 2009 is $8.77 per bushel. Wheat futures for spring wheat are currently trading in the $6 to $6.50 per bushel range for September. That means that CRC is providing an opportunity to insure the price, one component of expected revenue, well above what the futures market believes the price will be at harvest time. If you have not purchased a CRC policy already, visit with your local insurance agent before March 15.

Sounds like a no-brainer, but there must be a catch (like maybe the futures markets are wrong, as if that ever happens).

USDA and Race

Mulch posts a link to a Colorlines Magazine article on farm subsidies.

Maybe I'm Wrong, GPO and Google

I've posted, I think, in the past about my impatience with government web sites--I don't see why I can't just Google them. (Yes, I know that you can run Google on some, but I want every document to be as Googlable as any magazine or newspaper article.) But yesterday GPO released its new search site. The discussion in the comments about using meta-data is enough to raise a slight doubt in my mind. I'll have to see how this works out.

Remember Snow Fences?

The Journal-Gazette and Times-Courier have an online site which promoted a conservation meeting, but this piece caught my eye. Yes, it's mostly local news, but I too wonder whatever happened to snow fences? I guess global warming has reduced the amount of snow in the areas I live in to the point where it's not economical to put them up. (They are mentioned in Wikipedia and there seem to be a scattering of articles, mostly in the West, including this one about a Wyoming youngster testing various design.)

Cooking Versus Kids and Jobs

Two factoids I stumbled on this week, but don't have urls for: In the 1960's women spent 2 hours a day (13 a week) cooking. In the 2000's, men and women increased the time spent with their kids.

And today the NYTimes reports that men are losing their jobs in the recession while women aren't (because men and women are concentrated in different fields), meaning it's possible we'll have a higher percentage of women employed than men. (It looks as if the story is based on all jobs, not full-time jobs, but still it's a big change from my childhood, when women mostly didn't work outside the home.)

Green Faddism

The NYTimes has an article today on greens who do without a refrigerator (sometimes by using a freezer, sometimes by going to a dorm size refrigerator). At the end of the article, they quote an estimate of $6 savings per year.

There was also a piece, probably through Treehugger, that quoted a Canadian study that one day of a wood stove released more carbon than a year of driving (or some such comparison).

IMO, these examples show that sometimes greens are no more rational than Wall Street bankers have proven to be.

Pet Peeve: Elite and Pica Type

There may be someone who has noticed I have big problems with those people who still use monospaced elite or pica type these days. This dates back to the 1970's when I was diverted from researching into word-processors (to replace the IBM MT/ST's we were using) by some papers on proportional spacing and type faces. Bottom line: proportional spacing aids readability--monospacing was a limit of the typewriter's mechanism.

So I'm shocked, absolutely shocked, to find the FAA still using it, as in the transcript of the airliner ditching in the Hudson. Come on people, join the 21st century.