Tax Day Thoughts

First, I'm proud to report I sent my taxes off more than 8 hours early.  For me, that's pretty good.  A couple thoughts:

• most people got their Obama tax cut ($250) long ago.  Employees had withholdings adjusted while retirees got it in their social security.  But those of us getting the old Civil Service Retirement annuities didn't get it until we filed our returns.  
• my wife won't agree, but I think we ought to be paying higher taxes. We're thrifty (a synonym of tight or cheap) so we don't live high on the hog and although our income last year took a hit, we still did well.  Of course, Comparing our income and our taxes, and remembering what we've paid in the past, I think the pendulum has swung too far.  (I'm sure Obama's deficit commission will agree with me.)

Cornell Loses to Kentucky Again

This time it's in women's polo. (Hat tip--extension.org). Never quite sure how Cornell ended up with polo--perhaps because we had an ag school when horses provided much of the transport for the country and because we were aspiring to higher status.

Health Care Reform and the Religious

Snopes.com has a piece on the intersection of religion and health care reform, particularly interesting on the Amish.  PPACA ties back to existing IRS regs exempting people from Social Security and Medicare taxes under specific conditions.  Bottom line: we don't yet know which groups may qualify for PPACA exemptions.

USDA People's Gardens

The USDA People's Garden (I'm so old it sounds like a Stalinist project) gets some ink in today's Post. For some reason I feel a bit snarky today.  An excerpt:

As of last week, 255 gardens have been established by Agriculture Department workers worldwide, including an indoor lettuce garden in North Carolina and a vegetable garden on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in South Korea. All of the food grown at these gardens -- 29,656 pounds last year --

If all the gardens were in production last year, which presumably they weren't, they averaged about 120 pounds per garden, which is far behind the 1,000+ pounds claimed by the White House garden.

The garden, now that it's successfully being emulated, is also being bureaucratized, as we see here:

This year, the agency decided it would require volunteers to complete a six-week Master Gardener training program and pass an exam before being allowed to volunteer. Taught by extension-service experts who flew to Washington from throughout the country, the course covered topics including botany and storm-water management. That requirement did not dampen enthusiasm for the program. The class's 80 spaces were filled within 15 minutes of the announcement, and 70 other people were turned away, said Livia Marques, director of the People's Garden Initiative. 

Don't know how many experts they flew in--must say something about the inferiority of the Virgina Tech and UofMaryland extension experts who would be familiar with the local climate that they needed to fly people in.

As a final piece of bureaucratization, FSA has issued instructions on the rules for using time to garden.

I shouldn't mock; it's high time the pasty-faced bureaucrats who toil away at their desks got out into the fresh air and got some tan.(Or maybe Sec. Vilsack should provide protective lotion or he'll face some suits over skin cancer.)  The good air of the Washington summer, the heat and humidity, will all be great for them.

What Happens With Weak Government

From a Wall Street Journal editorial: via News from 1930:

"In 1931, about 34,000 people will be killed and 966,000 injured in car accidents, slightly more than 1930. A large percentage of this heavy toll is preventable; last year, 84% of deaths and 67% of injuries were caused by illegal driving. It's therefore strange that this waste of human life goes on year after year with little public concern. Only 13 of 48 states require driving tests for licenses; traffic law enforcement is lax. "Reckless, careless, or drunken driving is a crime and should be treated as such in the courts.""

There were less than 38,000 people killed  last year, although our population is more than twice that of 1930 and the number of cars and miles driven are much higher.  Why the difference? Governmental regulation, both of drivers and of cars, and the provision of safer highways.  In the stories on Justice Stevens, there's citations of his dissent in a recent case, noting that if his fellow justices had learned to drive on narrow 2-lane roads on which you had to make split-second judgments over whether or not it was safe to pass a slowpoke, they might have been less critical of the driving of the main figure in the case they were deciding. I learned and drove on such highways and I would agree. 

Where Does the "Main Stream" Flow?

Anyone who's read Mark Twain, or just looked at a river, knows it's hard to tell where the "main stream" is flowing. This weekend with all the talk of whether Obama will nominate a main stream candidate I came up with a surefire test to determine where it is (in the eyes of the Republicans): just to the right of whomever is named.

"Done Already?"

The phrase "Done Already" resonates in my life.

A-M is a Vietnamese-American fellow gardener, meaning we both have plots in one of Reston's community gardens. She was in the garden this morning when I arrived, talking with other gardeners. I hadn't seen her before this spring, and my wife had only once, so we guessed she and her husband were visiting his relatives in England.  Only such travels, or caring for relatives as she did last year, would keep her away from her garden.

I believe she's a tad younger than I, but not by much. Her endurance is amazing--typically she's in the garden before I arrive and is still working when I'm pooped and ready to leave.  Sometimes we'll drive past the garden and see her car still parked there.  I'm competitive, so being outworked bothers me. 

Back in my youth I was very competitive.  Whenever my school class had a test, I always wanted to be the first one finished.  I always hated it when the teacher would wait to collect the exams until the end of the period, or the end of the time for testing.  I always loved it when the teacher would accept the exam when done, particularly when she or he would say: "Done already?"

But this morning, it sounded differently--as I was leaving A-M said: "done already?"

Funniest? Paragraph Today

From Der Spiegel, via AWAD's newsletter: "A functioning police force is seen as a prerequisite for a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan. German trainers, however, paint a disastrous picture of the quality of Afghan security forces. Too many police, they say, can't read or write, can't shoot straight or take bribes."

Humane Society and Hens

LA Times has a story on Humane Society videos of "egg-farm" mistreatment of hens.

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?