FSA and Sharepoint

FSA is using Microsoft's Sharepoint to enable a Web 2.0 style collaboration. This promises to be interesting.  When I joined FSA (then ASCS) it was a hierarchal organization (think military, without the saluting, though that may be unfair--the effect of some Easter wine :-) ).  There was a tradition of pulling in field people for task forces or committees on various things. But otherwise Washington issued directives, state offices could take decisions within prescribed limits, and the county offices were expected to follow.  Committees of elected farmers hired the county executive director.

As technology changed, my impression is that local discretion has been limited. Partly that's a result of civil rights issues and partly a result of other issues.  Whenever something bad happens in the field, whether it's discrimination, inefficiency, ineffectiveness, or just good old stupidity, the reaction of Washington bureaucrats is to respond by limiting discretion and adding on more training, more rules, more audits.  And facsimile and word processing, improved telecommunications have made  it easier to do so.

When the agency automated in the mid 80's with its IBM System/36's and nightly transmissions with Kansas City, it also meant more consistency, more uniformity, particularly as we moved expertise into computer programs.

But technology doesn't necessarily mean centralization and uniformity.  I remember the advent of programmable calculators--some county office directors saw an opportunity in the late 70's to improve their operations, bought the calculators, and created programs useful for their counties. And there was a time when the old bulletin board system offered a chance for local initiative--people could post their spreadsheet programs, etc.  When we moved to the Internet, there was for a time the ability to maintain local pages, but I understand that's been curtailed in recent years. I had dreams once of using Frontpage to do a BBS equivalent, but that never got going.

So, bottom line, what's the outlook for heavy use of Sharepoint?

Back in the Hoover Administration

Let me quote a paragraph from a post on "News from 1930", which is really into 1931 now:

One part of following day by day 1930's news items that I find interesting is seeing that extra dimension about the period that I wasn't aware of. This week's example is the farm situation. The popular image of this is of poverty, drought, and a depression that struck earlier than for the rest of the country - and this is accurate as far as it goes. But what I didn't realize is that this happened in spite of multifarious fairly large farm relief programs and an apparently unstoppable farm lobby. Some news items in this category come up regularly, including the ups and downs of the expensive Farm Board price-support program, and the various drought relief measures that occupied the “just-adjourned” (in 1931) Congress. But, there are also those not-so-little extras that keep popping up - the Federal and joint-stock land banks, organized to provide agricultural credit; the Hoch-Smith resolution, enacted to lower transport rates for farmers (at the expense of the railroads); and, last but not least, the acknowledgement by the Journal's editorial writers that farm interests would probably have the muscle to pass whatever additional relief measures they wanted when the next Congress convened.

Wikipedia doesn't give the history of farm programs its due. The Federal Farm Board was really a test run for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, proving price support alone wasn't workable and establishing the precedent for working with commodity cooperatives.

How To Measure Bureaucratic Output?

Count the words.  That's my initial reaction after doing a little surfing among the various documents on open government, released by the White House, OMB, USDA, and other departments.  I don't know that the flow of words emanating from DC contributes to open government, at least if defined as citizen understanding of government.  But maybe I'm feeling oppressed by the third day of record-setting heat in Reston. We'll see.

Pigford Now

Vilsack has a statement, which says nothing much. The bottom line is, the agreement between the claimants and the government expired on March 31, 2010, but the reality is the claimants really have no choice.  They have to wait and see whether Congress will come up with the additional money. And then whether they can qualify for anything under new rules. Meanwhile, FSA will kick everything to DOJ, according to this notice.

All Okay in School Lunches, Says OK Extension

I don't know the truth, but this is a voice not usually heard:

Deana Hildebrand, Oklahoma State University Cooperative Extension nutrition specialist, said in 2009 the School Nutrition Association (SNA) surveyed more than 1,200 school districts nationwide and found nearly every school district offers students fresh fruits and vegetables, low-fat dairy products, whole grains and salads.

Of course, "offering" is to "eating" as planning is to doing.

Chinese and English Prices

Brad DeLong posts a comparison of the costs in 1700 of various items in Canton China and in London, England.  Milk, lead, mutton, bread, and charcoal were more expensive in China than England, most everything else was cheaper, even much cheaper. Charcoal was 5 times more expensive; tea 25 times less expensive.  It's an interesting comparison.  I'm particularly interested in the charcoal--presumably 2000+ years of civilization meant most trees were gone. And Canton is far enough south that wheat, dairy, and sheep weren't big.  But it's also surprising that China comes out so well in the comparison.  It's a reminder that until relatively recently (1700) that country seemed to provide more people a better life than did the leading Western country.

Chances of Becoming a Farmer Equal to Chances of Making NBA?

That's what John Phipps says, in a post on the advice he gives to young people who are interested in farming (that is, the big ag, industrial, individual owner-style farming).  John compares farming with medicine, quoting a recent NYTimes article on the shift from individual or at least doctor-owned practices, to salaried practitioners.

The Truth About Sen. Coburn

He's got a pretty and talented daughter (an opera singer) and occasionally he commits truth, as in this report. No, I don't know whether Pelosi is a nice person or not, but I'll buy both these statements:

"Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn't mean they're not a good person," he added. He then discussed his own experience of being vilified before asking the crowd not to  "catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody's no good."
"The people in Washington are good," he said. "They just don't know what they don't know."

Bureaucratic Realities: People and Commutes

Walter Pincus has a piece in the Post, passing on an article by an insider on how mundane bureaucratic realities undermined the reorganization of the intelligence community:

Neary [the insider] writes of initial false steps that hurt the organization, using an example that only bureaucrats understand. Under the legislation, the ODNI was not to share location with headquarters of any other community element, an effort to make sure it was not at Langley. So the ODNI went to Bolling Air Force Base, to the new building of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The first DNI, John D. Negroponte, wanted CIA people as staff members. But, writes Neary, since CIA types tended to live near Langley, the ODNI lost at least 10 percent of its staff. They didn't want to make the long commute.
At Bolling, many DIA employees living near the air base took jobs originally meant for those CIA staffers. Then, two years later, the ODNI was permanently located in the Virginia suburbs, beyond Langley, and the DIA workers found that they faced a commute longer than the CIA staffers who didn't want to travel to Bolling. "The merry-go-round ensured the staff never found its feet," Neary said.

In my experience, moves and reorganizations eat up lots of time, simply because they disrupt people's comfort zones. Who sits where (particularly back in the old days before smoking was banned--I spent hours trying to get compatible groupings of smokers and non-smokers. Never had a move more than a few hundred yards, but commuting was and is critical, particularly if not on Metro (subway).

And efforts to create a new organization spanning old agencies are difficult because you need to create the administrative support (space, equipment, funds, HR, accounting, etc.) without having a support organization. I realize that's the sort of thing which occupies the mind of a bureaucrat but is not the slightest interest to anyone else.

Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows

The greens foodies regularly bash the plutocrats of agribusiness who push processed foods down our throats.  But they don't think much of corn-based ethanol, which means they wake up in bed with:

“But when Illinois and Missouri members of Congress opened a new effort recently to extend the tax breaks, a phalanx of opponents quickly mobilized. They include the Grocery Manufacturers of America, the American Meat Institute, the National Council of Chain Restaurants, environmental organizations and pro-taxpayer groups.”

From Farmpolicy on ethanol