Megan McArdle Reveals a Mystery

Ms. McArdle is usually interesting and often sensible, even though she's a bit too libertarian for my tastes.  But today she revealed something--I quote the full post:

"Designer handbag rental.  Terrifyingly, this actually seems rather sensible to me.  I mean, if I didn't buy most of my bags at Target.  In fact, I largely moved out of Manhattan so that I could buy most of my bags at Target.  But if you're going to try to stay at the forefront of fashion, this seems like a cost effective way to do it."

 

I'm sure every male will see the mystery: why does a woman need multiple handbags?

Eating Your Own Dogfood--Kid's Food

A minor theme of the health care debate over the years has been that Congress should not have better health insurance than the rest of the nation, or put another way, that Congress should live by its own standards.  (Come to think of it, that was one part of Gingrich's Contract with America with which I agreed--making a series of laws, like OSHA, apply to Congress.)

In the the IT business it used to be called eating your own dogfood: if you were working on a word processor, you ought to be using it to do your writing.

If I've followed the debate, the Senate health care bill does put the top echelon of the government, including Congress, in the new healthcare exchanges.  And now there's at least a temporary extension to food--Jane Black in the Post reports Congressional staffers are getting fed the same food USDA provides for school lunches. Too bad the law wouldn't allow a continuance--staffers are typically lowly paid and would welcome a low cost lunch every day.  There's no magic to dogfooding, but it gets people outside their usual routine and such change can generate improvements.

What "Open Government" Doesn't Cover--Subordinate Offices

Here, via OMBwatch, is the text of the Obama's administration instructions to agencies on opening government. I like it, but I think there's a major problem: it treats each agency as an entity, not as a set of interrelated offices.  For example, an agency like FSA has over 2,000 county offices, state offices, offices in Kansas City and Salt Lake City.  NRCS and RD have similar structures.

So the issue, which I've hashed with at least one county executive director, is whether you have a centralized unitary open government structure or a more decentralized one. Complying with Orszag's instructions implies a centralized structure, which in a way is contrary to the open government philosophy. I'll be trying to track how NRCS and FSA implement this directive.

Hoop Garden

Obamafoodorama posts on the installation and use of hoops and hoop covers for the White House garden.

"Fabric-covered aluminum hoops have been placed over the crop rows and these capture passive solar energy and boost the interior temperature dramatically, so the garden soil and air is warmed, and crops can flourish--even in winter. Hoop Houses are often tall enough to walk through, but the White House is using mini versions, about two feet tall, which some farmers and gardeners refer to as "low tunnels" or just simply "row covers."....

But no matter: It's warm and cozy inside the covered beds in the 1,100 square foot Kitchen Garden, and the winter crops, which include lettuces, cabbage, winter radishes, onions, broccoli, turnips, and carrots, are easily accessible, because the covering fabric is held down with sandbags, and can easily be flipped back to weed, harvest, or water, if for some odd reason it doesn't rain (but it'd been raining a lot before it started to snow)"

I'm not sure it's going to be warm and cozy, particularly when the winds blow.  And I still think they'd do better with collards and kale than lettuce, but it's their first year.
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Whatever Happened to Clinton's Surgeon General

The one who was unfairly fired  (Jocelyn Elders, maybe?).  She might enjoy this post from Margaret Soltan.  I well remember when masturbation was an unmentionable subject.

Best Sentence Today (Berluscone in a Speedo)

"However, all the attempts I've seen are like Silvio Berlusconi trying to wear a Speedo - no matter how you try to make everything fit, a couple of awkward bits wind up poking out and ruining the picture."  (From the 1930 Blog" musing about an economic theory which would explain current market movements.)

The Problems of Foodies--"Founding Farmers" Restaurant

Jane Black had an article on the problems the hot new "Founding Farmers restaurant" has with its goal of serving local, sustainable, and organic food.  She catches instances where their performance is less than their promises, but I don't take it as a critical, muckraking piece, rather as showing the difficulties of putting a square peg (the sustainable restaurant) into a round hole (the existing food system).  What happens is the buyer for the restaurant assumes a big responsibility which isn't easily performed, the responsibility of searching out the backstory of every food item purchased.  There might, in bigger cities, be a niche for an organic, sustainable broker, someone who takes on that burden and serves as a middleman between food producer and the restaurant.

And Round in Circles We Gaily Go

This post on the USDA blog praises a Forest Service employee who is a finalist in the competition for the best suggestion to save money.  Based on a fast skim (still trying to catch up from my travels) and fading memory, it seems to me ASCS used to use the proposed method.  We even had bank accounts in local banks.  That system is long gone, both the accounts and the methods of processing collections.  So maybe the proposal is in effect a return to the past for a USDA agency.

The Importance of Looks

Robin Givhan is a writer I mostly can ignore but the fashion/culture writer for the Post had a good piece yesterday: the theme being that the Salahi's were able to gate crash because they looked right--a thin blonde on the arm of a man in a tuxedo. Change any of the parameters and the security people would have been much more likely to challenge.  It's a sobering reminder of the importance of the genetic lottery in our culture (probably all cultures).

First We Kill All Middle Managers

No, that wasn't Al Gore's mantra, but he wanted to get rid of them and he thought he did.  Hope he is doing a better job on climate change.  These thoughts evoked by this piece in Government Executive on the use of numerical targets in managing government