The Decline of Garbage, and the Post

The Washington Post has an article on the decline of garbage (the Post itself is in decline--it announces it's doing away with its separate business section) because people are cutting back in the recession. A sidebar, not online, says the U.S. had 250 million tons of garbage, 12 percent of which was food, or 30 million tons. That means about 100 pounds per person per year. Sounds high, although I suspect it includes stuff like my grapefruit rinds, apple cores, and coffee grounds. But it's also my share of the fruits and vegetables which get rejected at the grocery.

Apparently most of the drop is in packaging, which is the single most common category of garbage--we're buying less so tossing less styrofoam and cardboard.

NRCS Is Right Behind (Stimulus)

NRCS has a signup for floodplain easements, using stimulus funds.

Intriguing Title

Implementation of a Dose Standard After 10,000 Years

And the Winner: Kansas State FSA Office (Stimulus)

It's the first FSA office to claim it has disbursed stimulus funds (for farm operating loans), at least whose claim has reached the media. See this link

Our British Cousins Have Their Own Problems of Identity

This is a post from Musings of a Stonehead, a "crofter" in Scotland dealing with his problems with credit rating agencies. I found it fascinating. Reading between the lines, in the UK the social security number (or its British equivalent, if any) is not used to coordinate financial data between the different credit raters (apparently the UK has the same ones we do). That puts the burden on matching names and addresses. As in the U.S., rural addresses are likely more free form than urban ones, which is the problem the Stonehead ran into. It's not clear whether the UK has the equivalent of 911 addresses. (For city readers, most, perhaps all, rural counties in the US have now assigned numeric street addresses to their rural residences so that responders to911 emergency calls can be given a specific destination.)

Keeping Congress Honest

Congress people like to pontificate about the faults of the executive branch, but there's often some hypocrisy involved. That makes a provision of the stimulus bill noteworthy--see this OMBWatch post for details. As the writer says:

The LOC [Library of Congress] database, THOMAS, provides a lot of good information and gives access to full text bills and Congressional Research Summaries. However, it is outdated and lacks a decent user interface and persistent URL’s. Browsing and searching are difficult…don’t even think about asking for an RSS feed. GovTrack.us, OpenCongress.org, and MAPLight.org provide similar Congressional information but with a far more usable format. The downside to them is that they are forced to rely on THOMAS as their source of information. That is, until now.

Wealth, Not Scarcity, Was the Cause of High Food Prices

We got through a scare about food scarcity last year--prices soared. Some foodies thought it was a sign of impending disaster, as the industrialized agriculture system was starting to totter. Now things have changed and people have looked at data.

From Farm Policy:

“‘The report indicated world demand is going to be anemic this year,’ leading to more supplies than analysts expected, said Don Roose, president of U.S. Commodities Inc. in West Des Moines, Iowa. ‘It’s a very fragile world economy.’”

"In part, the Farm Foundation report stated that, “In 2008, Farm Foundation commissioned three Purdue University economists to write the report, What’s Driving Food Prices? Released in July 2008, the report had two purposes: to review recent studies on the world food crisis, and to identify the primary drivers of food prices. The economists, Phil Abbott, Chris Hurt and Wally Tyner, identified three major drivers of food prices: world agricultural commodity consumption growth exceeding production growth, leading to very low commodity inventories; the low value of the U.S. dollar; and the new linkage of energy and agricultural markets. Each was a primary contributor to tightening world grain and oilseeds stocks."

What it says to me is that last year the world (outside our borders) was wealthy, had money to spend, and spent it on food, driving up prices. That's what "consumption growth" means to me. The "low value of the U.S. dollar" simply says the world got richer vis a vis us.

This year the world is poorer and we are richer (those of us who are employed or living off Uncle via a pension).

A Sardonic Smile for Grants.gov

Turns out the Bush Administration didn't give grants.gov enough horsepower to handle all of the Obama Administration's activity. See this NextGov article and here.

I guess the smile's actually on me--I've harbored a sneaky suspicion that many government websites, such as grants.gov, are overhyped and under-used. So the good news would be if Obama can crash a whole string of sites.

Newspapers, the End of

John Kelly has a cute piece in the Post painting the scene as the last newspaper and the last newsroom closes.

Stimulus Watch

An article in the NYTimes on the Interior IG who's moved over to oversee the stimulus mentioned this site as better than recovery.gov. I can see why. The voting pattern seems to favor big projects over small, but that's to be expected. When I checked, just before posting, the Laurel, MS doorbells were the top item. (After reconsideration,I removed "(the $155 doorbell)" from the title of this post--it's perhaps unfair. Let's see what the bid is.)