Innovation and Bureaucraccy in the USAF

Tom Ricks has an interesting post and comments on the issue of whether remote-controlled drone aircraft need to be piloted by officers, or by enlisted men. As someone who likes innovation, usually, and retains a prejudice against officers from my draftee days, I lean towards answering "Yes".  Some commenters however offer some real-life experiences showing we're still low in the learning curve in dealing with drones.

KKR Is Small Business?

From Political Animal:

Under the Republican definition of "small business," the GOP is fighting to protect companies like Wall Street buyout firm Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts, "which recently reported more than $54 billion in assets managed by 14 offices around the world." PricewaterhouseCoopers, a massive international auditing firm, qualifies for the label, too. So does Tribune Corp., which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun.

Using Technology in Agriculture

I suggested a while back the use of cellphone cameras to document damage to crops because of natural disaster.  Here's an instance where UC-Davis has developed a smartphone app to link the GPS location to the digitized soils map.  I'm not sure how extensively this would be used: soils don't change that often so once you know the soil type present at a location, you don't need it again.  It is an example of some people keeping up with the times.

Professor Henderson's Lament

Bunch of posts relating to Professor Henderson, who discusses his finances and the possible expiration of the Bush tax cut for families with over $250,000 income. DeLong  Marginal Revolution

It's not clear what his income actually is.  Maybe $250,000+, maybe $450,000, maybe something in between.

What is clear is that he makes more any federal government employee with the possible exception of the President.  General Petraeus, for example, has a base salary of around $177,000.

[Updated: Yglesias has a post with more links to the discussion.]

Profits and Sustainability

Chris Clayton sees a gap between the aspirations of the sustainable ag movement and the realities of profit-seeking   From the summary of the NAS report being discussed:

This report recommends reaching this goal through two parallel efforts: an incremental
approach, in which ongoing endeavors to develop sustainable agricultural techniques
are expanded; and a transformative approach, in which multiple research areas are brought
together to design farming systems that balance the competing demands from the outset.

The first approach talks of stuff like "no-till" farming; the second is more utopian. I'm conservative enough to doubt our ability to come up with such a set of farming systems. 

For contrast see this post at Treehugger. There's discussion of a "sustainability index", but the discussions by the operator of a 4,000 acre vegetable farm focus on doing more with less. "More with less" easily translates to more profitability; the sustainability index could be a proxy for "more with less".

Silo Systems: Public Safety Comm Systems

In the past I've griped about the failure to enable public safety agencies to communicate with each other, suggesting there were interim measures which could work.  My gripe was based on limited knowledge; this post  Why Cops Don't Use Cell Phones provides another perspective.

Palin Over Obama Because Obama's Not a Thinker

John at Powerline

Elizabeth Warren's First Job: Find a Bureaucrat

Ron Lieber has a piece in the NYTimes offering Ms. Warren suggestions on what she should be doing. It's a list of policy issues, all very worthy of attention I'm sure.  My advice to her, however, is to get herself a bureaucrat. What would the bureaucrat do:

• determine the administrative relationship between the new agency and the Treasury Department.  Does it have its own budget and administrative personnel, or is it serviced by the Department? Makes a big difference down the road.
• roughly scope the size of the agency.  How many bodies at what grade levels can be/will be hired over the next 12 months?
• work on obtaining office space to accommodate the people. 
• work on setting up telephone system for the people.
• work on the budget/fiscal arrangements so people can be paid and travel can be done.
• work on the IT system for the agency.
• work on the personnel system for the agency--so the people can be hired.

She's Got It

No, it's not Ms. Hepburn but Sen. Lincoln, and it's not achieving the correct pronunciation for the "rain in spain" but getting an ad hoc disaster program out of the administration. 

Different Paths to the Good Society?

Via someone (probably Marginal Revolution or Yglesias, I forget), here's an interesting discussion at the Money Illusion of a metric for measuring a nation.  His discussion puts disparate countries in the top five, but as he says:

You can’t get much more different than Hong Kong and Denmark, at least by the criteria used by most people on the left and right.  But they all do at least one thing extremely well.  They all are exceptionally good at one of the three attributes of a highly successful neoliberal society.  Either they are highly civic-minded (Denmark, Sweden), or highly aware of the sorts of policies that produce economic efficiency (Singapore, Hong Kong) or highly democratic.  Switzerland had more national referenda in the 20th century than the rest of the world combined.  And it also seems that all three have very good governance.

One of the things which gets me about the more chauvinistic patriots in this country is the lack of recognition of different values and different paths.  I don't like Britain's libel laws, but it's a free country.  I don't like the US's gun laws, but it's a good country.  I don't like France's regimentation in certain areas (see Dirk Beauregarde), but it's a free country.  Governmental institutions are important but so is the nature of the society and the course of the nation's history.