Salute to Willie Cooper

Willie's been reappointed as state director of the Lousiana FSA office. He's been SED since 1972, showing he's been able to bridge the partisan divide in LA between Dems and Reps. (Mostly SED's get dumped with a new administration.)

The press release announcing it observes he has more than 50 years service in, meaning he's basically donating his time to public service. (He really does have more brains than that might indicate, lots more.)

Times Have Changed

Geezers become tiresome when they keep comparing the past and the present. I know that. But I can't resist. It's as bad when I used to smoke (2 packs+). (Why are we so proud of our vices?)

Anyhow, when I was young, the press would focus on a few metrics: cars, tons of steel, tons of coal, houses. Those were the measures of how well the economy was going and where the US stood compared to the Soviets.

So this figure surprised me:

Currently,85,000 people in the United States are employed by the wind industry; Slightly more than the 81,000 in the United States working as coal miners.

Maybe We Aren't Bigger in the Rear?

The 1930 blog reports this item:

Changes in women's dress styles have enabled Princeton to reduce width of stadium seats from 19 inches to 17.5, allowing 6,000 more seats in stadium.

Found this bit Googling:

The standard airline seat is 17.2" wide, while seat pitch ranges from 28" on some short-haul, down-and-dirty charters, to 33-34" on some planes.

The Technology Learning Curve

From the 1930 blog:

Actuarial Society of America survey reports death rate for passengers travelling on scheduled airlines is 1 in 5,000, or 200 times railroad death rate; safety increases by 63% after pilot has had 400 flight hours.

Obama's Books

Politico has a piece on how Obama's book selections have increased sales. I haven't read the Price or the Friedman (although I follow his NYT columns), have read the Haruf and the McCullough, and maybe the Pelecanos. I like Pelecanos, both because he's from DC and writes about it, and his hitch on The Wire, but I think this is his latest book. I'll get to it.

I like Haruf--one of the few serious fiction writers I've read in the last few years. And McCullough is maybe a little popular (as a failed historian I'm implied by the historians' creed to look down on any popular writer) but the man can tell a story.

So Much for the Sunshine

All good liberals and progressives think sunshine purifies government operations. That's why they push and push for transparent governance.

We fail to remember, that our founding fathers operated in the dark, using an "Agreement of Secrecy" to cloak their treason against the king.

Asymmetric Information on the Croft

Economists talk about "asymmetric information", where the two parties to a transaction have different information. The classic case was selling a used car--where the owner knows how good it is or isn't, but the buyer can't tell.

Musings from a STonehead, the small farmer/pig grower in Scotland, runs into a case of that. He knows his product, but his potential customers often don't know pigs from pokes. As he writes:

The typical customer wants a fantasy, a lifestyle statement, a “product” that says something about them, and they want it now because that’s the fantasy of the moment.

They have an image of themselves as a “modern urban farmer”, as a “saviour of rare breeds”, as someone capturing “the good life”, of being a “modern smallholder”, of joining the ranks of “celebrity pig keepers”, showing their “anti-supermarket” credentials, and so on.

Certainly, we do have people that come to us with a genuine, practical, reality based desire to fatten a couple of pigs but they are in the minority.

But I also know from talking to the wide array of people that come to us, that the real motivation for buying pigs is to “live the dream”, just as it is for buying any other consumer item.

USDA Blog Process Needs Work

Today, I believe, is August 26. Today the USDA blog posted this. Vilsack proclaimed the community garden week August 6.

(I'd suspect this is a symptom of the fact the blog isn't integrated into the USDA institution yet. It takes a while to make such changes.)

Clayton on Musical Chairs: Lincoln as Ag Chair

Chris Clayton argues that Kennedy's death will move Harkin to chair the Health, Education, Labor committee, and Senator Lincoln to chair Agriculture.

Don't know enough to argue, but to observe this is our democracy's version of: "the king is dead, long live the king."

Why NAIS Might Seem Sensible

Today DC and MD students went back to school. Prince George's county has a trial going on--students have cards to be swiped when they board the school bus, which enables the system to track them. The broadcast reports don't say whether they also swipe the cards during the day, but I'd assume they do.

When we track our children and our pets, why not track our food?