Conflicting Mantras

The environmentalists who are worried about climate change trust scientists; the greens who are worried about food tend to denigrate science as in the service of "big ag".   [This random thought in lieu of content; a spring cold doesn't help thought.]

There's Always Those Who Don't Get the Word

Group files a FOIA request for the schema for a database (i.e. a description of what data elements are in which tables of a database).  The charge for it: over $110,000.

A Bill I Can Support

Requiring public information to be online.  See this Next Gov post for details. 

And You Wonder Why Conservatives Oppose

Paul Hinderaker at Powerline quotes a message on the coming problems when health care reform is passed.  The message is based on the flak British PM's get at question time over British health care (shortages here, problems there).  My problem is the confusion of the writer, and of Paul for quoting it: the health care system we'll have after reform is implemented still won't look like the British system. Yes, it will have its problems, but they mostly won't be the sort of problems the UK has.  I say "mostly" because, as  T.R. Reid points out in his book, our current system is really a hodge-podge of different systems:  Medicare/Medicaid is one system; militar and VA are another (much closer to UK than anything else), different systems in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Hawaii. That's not going to change that much under reform; we may have a less diverse system, but we're still going with the hodge-podge.  That's the American way--decentralized, confused, and disorderly.

But as long as opponents don't understand, or willfully misunderstand, what we have and what's proposed, the quality of the public debate suffers.

The Birth of the NRA

No, not the National Rifle Association, but FDR's NRA.http://en.wikipedia.org.   

From the 1930 blog, an editorial from the Wall Street Journal:

Editorial by T. Woodlock: It's clear the doctrine of laissez faire, laissez aller that has guided “classical” economists for a century, is now obsolete; the world economic system is so complex and interdependent that some coordination is needed. However, this doesn't mean that governments should do the planning, as is suggested anew with “each succeeding depression in recent times.” A better alternative would be, despite our antitrust laws and the vestigial attitude behind them, to find a way for industries to achieve better coordination and control, [emphasis added] without surrender of individual initiative.

That's for all those conservatives who blame FDR for cartels--the impetus came from Wall Street.

PS: an added nugget from the same post--I guess we are making progress:

Friday the 13th passed without any untoward occurences, though in Wall Street's tradition of superstition, brokers report hundreds of their customers won't trade that day and some get out of the market the day before.

Idiocy of Rural Life

Does this sound like today's greens: "...[capitalism] has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."

I'm sure you'd stumble over the "idiocy of rural life".  But this is from Mr. Marx, in his "The Communist Manifesto", although he said "The bourgeoisie has...."  It seems "idiocy" is a mistranslation; "isolation" would be better.  See the explanation  here (it's towards the bottom of the page).

Feds Need Their Cookies

Apparently a number of Federal agencies have gotten around the OMB ban on using cookies on their websites. I may be wrong but it seems to me in the early days of browsers (say 1995-2000) there was lots of concern over cookies.  Since then I believe the concern has subsided, which fits my general preconception that new things cause anxiety and the media tends to exaggerate such concerns (at least when they aren't failing to notice the new).  Cookies seem so yesterday, given today's Facebook and similar Web 2.0 stuff.

Rethinking History

When I went to college General Grant was regarded as a good general but a lousy President.  Imagine my shock when I read Sean Wilentz yesterday on why he might be one of our greatest Presidents. Yglesias posts on the article. Wilentz deprecates the corruption charges and focuses on civil rights.

I'm sure George W. Bush took great comfort from the article, as showing the way for his reputation to rebound.

Time to Reengineer Crop Insurance

I'm anxiously waiting for FCIC to adapt the strategy used in Kenya to insure crops--track seed and fertilizer purchases by cellphone to establish eligiblity, determine losses by geographic locale, and deposit indemnity payments to cellphone accounts.  See this post at the World Banks blog.  This would tie in neatly with the cellphone disaster reporting I mentioned in my previous post.

I'm in danger of having my tongue in cheek on these sort of posts, but the reality is that as phone become capable the potential for major changes in business processes grows. The only problem is that humans mostly don't like change.

Suggestion for USDA--Ushahidi Disaster and Crop Reporting

Here is a description of Ushahidi applications (briefly, it's a web process to accumulate and display geographic data provided by cellphone reports--used in reporting disasters in Kenya and Haiti).

For USDA--why not adopt similar applications to assemble crop yield and damage reports, supplementing existing reporting systems?