Balls and Strikes

Andrew Pincus at TPM reports on an exchange with Ms. Kagan on the famous Roberts definition of a judge's role: call balls and strikes.  I'm disappointed she didn't go further with the metaphor.  Anyone who grew up when I did was told the strike zone was between the knees and the armpits, and over the plate.  Anyone who watches baseball on TV today knows that's not the way umpires see it today.  And there's no consistency from umpire to umpire.  The best the pitcher and the batters can hope for is consistency through the day.

Reinventing the Wheel at the Federal Government

Buying in bulk.  That's the new idea, which is really an old idea.  If I remember correctly, Al Gore's Reinventing Government emphasized procurement reform, in part by giving government credit cards out to the field.  The idea was you cut the paperwork, the procurement delays, and you make government smaller and more responsive.  Of course that reform ran into problems, particularly because no one was watching over the use of the credit cards, so they got misused.  Now the Obama administration thinks we can save money by moving more of the procurement action back to GSA.  Perhaps.  And perhaps 15 years from now another administration will try again to decentralize procurement.

Obesity at Lake Woebegon

From Farm Policy, quoting an AP article on the new obesity report:

The article stated that, “The new survey shows that 84 percent of parents believe their children are at a healthy weight, even though nearly a third of children and teens are considered obese or overweight.”

Good for the White House--Composting

Obamafoodorama posts on a video showing the White House compost operation. Although I sometimes mock parts of the food movement, composting is right down my alley.  It fits the Calvinistic/Lutheran piety I was brought up with: waste not, want not.  Inevitably if you're cooking there is some waste, trimmings and inedible parts of plants (although I eat baked potatoes skins and all).  And the larger the operation the more likely you'll have some spoilage.  So I like to see people composting, even though it's difficult to do the way the books say.  You don't always have the right mixture of materials and it can be difficult to keep the moisture and oxygen at the right level.

But all that said, composting is a good thing.

Obesity Is Sam Walton's Fault, Not Farmers

A report cited at Barking Up the Wrong Tree says there's a correlation between Walmart Supercenters and the rate of obesity.  (Of course correlation is not cause and in this instance there's probably a whole set of causal factors affecting obesity and the siting of Walmarts.)

Collision and Comprehensive From Different Insurance Companies?

Would it make sense for me to get my collision insurance from GEICO and my comprehensive liability insurance from Allstate?  (The companies agree it doesn't make sense for me to get my homeowners and auto insurance from different companies; they just disagree on which of them should provide both.)

That's the situation we have with crop insurance and disaster payment programs.  GAO recently released a report pointing out problems because of the different rules, in particular FSA gets reports of disaster damage long after the fact.  So they recommend:

To better ensure that payments under the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments Program compensate farmers who experienced eligible crop losses, we recommend that the Secretary of Agriculture implement procedures so that FSA county officials are notified at the time of crop insurance claims for disaster-related losses so those officials have an opportunity to verify that crop disaster payment applicants experienced losses because of an eligible cause.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't make much sense to me.  Data flowing the other way, from FSA to the insurance companies makes a little sense--you've got one source which theoretically can propagate the data to each company.  But having the data flow from the companies to FSA is problematic.

An addendum: this FSA notice shows the problems involved with having different shares reported to RMA and FSA.

So Much for the Innocence of Nature

Chris Blattman passes on a research report which he labels: "Are Whales Racist"? Once you start distinguishing between "us" and "them", it's a short slippery slope to racism and war.

Weingarten and National IQ's

Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Gene Weingarten uses his weekly humor column to pass on his commencement address to the Bronx High School of Science graduating class.  It's very good--first paragraph:

"I want to begin by apologizing for some of the many, many cruel things I've written over the years about this school. I was basing those comments on my time here, which was 40 years ago, and I can see right now that Bronx Science has improved enormously since then, particularly in the area of diversity. You're no longer all a bunch of Jewish nerds. Now you're all a bunch of Asian nerds"

That quote ties in with an interesting factoid from a research paper I ran across, hat tip Tyler Cowen, I think. The paper was looking at the immigration in light of the average IQ of the countries from which the immigrants came.  (I'd personally take it with a huge amount of salt--I can't comprehend how to obtain such a figure.)  According to the  table they used (in an appendix, but derived from other research), Hong Kong was 108, South Korea 106, and Israel 95.

Popcorn and Production Contracts

Way back when, popcorn growers were about the only farmers with whom ASCS dealt who had production contracts. There was an issue there: our definition of "producer", as in the person who was eligible for farm program payments, always required that the person share in the risk of producing the crop... But some production contracts could lessen the risk, thus raising the question of whether they should still be eligible. 

If I remember correctly, we tried to write the regulations to exclude producers with production contracts, but the popcorn people had the clout to get Congress (or a key Congressman or two) to lean on USDA and get the regulation reversed.  (This sort of thing is what will happen after the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill gets enacted and the regulation writers get down to their work.  That's when it pays to have a Congressperson in your pocket to apply a bit of pressure below the surface, where the media won't notice.)

This meditation is spurred by a farmgate article, showing the rapid increase in production contracts: " contract production has been growing, all the way from 11% of farm production in 1965 to 41% in 2005." 

But the summary is also interesting: "Production contracts are being increasingly used to manage risk, however, when one tries to identify the commonality among farmers who use production contracts, it is difficult, if not impossible, to point to any given demographic, economic, or personality factor. Although the use of crop insurance would seem to have commonality with someone who wants to manage risk, that is not always the case, and many crop insurance users, do not go near production contracts."

Underground Electric Fences?

Via Washington Monthly, Rand Paul is proposing an underground electric fence for the Mexican border.  Now I'm guilty of assuming that I know what "electric fence" means, so I'm laughing at the suggestion.  Back when I was a boy, an electric fence was a single strand of barbed wire, strung on ceramic insulators attached to metal fence posts spaced maybe 10' apart, which served as a temporary fence to keep our cows in the meadows.  Instead of going for multiple cuttings of hay, which on our soil and in our climate wouldn't happen most years, after we hayed the field, and the grass got a little regrowth, we'd turn the cows into the meadows. The "electric" part was that the barbed wire was hooked to a jobbie (I forget the precise terminology) which put an intermittent low voltage electric charge on the wire, giving a sufficient shock to any cow to deter them from pushing the fence over.  A problem with the fence was that it could be grounded, if something (weed, brush) laid against the wire while still connected to the ground.  Thus "underground electric fence" seems to be an oxymoron, but I'm sure Dr. Paul has a reasonable explanation.