Powerline Loses Most of Its Common Sense

You can divide the world into two: people who drive you up the wall and people who don't. The Powerline blog is one of the few right wing blogs I follow, just to see what's going on and try to keep from freezing into intellectual ice.  John (Hinderaker) at Powerline drives me up the wall.  One of these years I'll do a compilation of his comments which seem to me to be unwise.  Paul (Mirengoff)[corrected] doesn't drive me up the wall, though usually I disagree with his comments. Scott (Johnson) also doesn't drive me up the wall.  Today Paul announced he was ceasing blogging.  Too bad.

{Updated: apparently Paul ran into trouble at his law firm over his response to the Giffords events. See TPM. ]

Stealing a Comment on Cats

From Ta-Nahesi Coates blog, his free-for-all comment thread:
by anibundel:

Today in felines:
There are people coming over. The cats don't actually know that. What they know is the following:
The vacuum monster ate the cat hair they so lovingly placed all over the stairs. It was traumatic.
They were given cat nip.
Roomba came out to play, give kitty rides and generally be undaunted by being pounced at.
Their favorite couch blankets all mysteriously disappeared, giving them free reign to shed on the couch proper.
There was bacon for stealing. There were latkes to sniff and generally be confused by before being swatted down from the counters. There were treats.
They then considered the concept of out-of-doors, but after one paw was placed outside by the bravest, and the snow sniffed suspiciously and then horror-of-horrors, gotten on her nose, there was general consensus that this was a Bad Idea, and cat condos were retreated to.

Currently cat toys are being cuddled, and general uproar seems to have died down.

Instead of stealing it I really (cross my heart) would have linked to it, if I could figure out how to in Disqus

Sugar Is Dead

Chris Clayton reports that Sens. Shaheen (D) and Kirk (R) are moving to abolish the sugar program. As they represent the centrists, and Tea Partiers have already said they don't want sugar with their tea, the tide is against sugar in the Senate.  However, look for Sens. Nelson(D) and Rubio (R) to join forces with Sens. Landrieu (D) and Vitter (R) in the fight to sustain the program.

[Updated: not to mention lobbying by American Crystal Sugar, a co-op of  MN sugar growers, which spends as much lobbying Congress as Cargill does. Via FarmPolicy. ]

Negative Things Are True: Payments to the Dead

This Barking Up the Wrong Tree post talks about a study showing humans are more likely to believe the negative to be true.  It comes on the same day as FSA reports that almost all its payments to dead people are valid.

Tea Party Budget Proposals

From Rep. Bachmann:

$20 Billion Replace farm subsidies with farmer savings accounts, eliminating the Foreign Agriculture Service, merging and trimming budget of four agriculture outreach and research agencies, and funding the Food Safety and Inspection Service with user fees.

Note: I don't know how she gets the $20 billion or how much money the farmer savings accounts would get (unless it's just a 401k with no federal matching(.

From Rand Paul:

The following agencies are defunded: ARS, FAS, NRCS (the text says "Resource Conservation Service, so I assume he's trying for NRCS), National Institute of Food and Agriculture. FS is cut by $1.178 billion, the remaining agencies are cut pro rata by $42.542 billion.

Sen. Paul presents the text of a bill (S.162) but it's not in the sort of detail any serious effort would need.  For example, the legislation on farm programs would need to amend existing legislation.  It's perhaps representative of the deep thought which has gone into his proposal that the first page completely defunds the Government Printing Office, this on a bill printed by GPO.  No explanation of how Congress will do its business without GPO.

How To Reorganize

So Obama proposed reorganizing government last night.  But by focusing on duplicated functions he implies the sort of reorganization which takes some silos and puts the silos together under one roof.   For example, taking Rural Housing and putting it under HUD, or Forest Service and combining it with Interior.  That's the sort of reorganization FSA experienced in 1994, when parts of the old Farmers Home Administration were combined with ASCS.  I'm not sure the reorganization has been terribly successful; it wasn't successful quickly. We still have county office employees who are Federal and those who are not.  16 years of effort hasn't changed that.   And I suspect we still have IT employees in St. Louis and IT employees in Kansas City. And the IT applications may not have been as integrated as they might be, as were dreamed of in 1991 under Info Share.

I'd like to suggest a different model for reorganization, particularly for rural areas.  It's a model which will drive some FSA employees, particularly a certain CED, up the wall, but I think it's worth considering and testing.

Some assumptions:

• The number of farms in agricultural areas continues to fall
• The number of people in some rural areas continues to fall
• Technology permits telework to be effective in some cases
• Many people in rural areas are competent with modern technology, but some are not.

The new model office combines a lot of technological bells and whistles, with a set of "generalists", people who know enough about lots of  things to be able to serve as intermediaries with the true experts, either by consulting them remotely by messaging, and videoconferencing, or by putting the customer in touch with the expert. In some respects it operates as a "triage" center.  Its staff is trained enough to be able to refer cases too complex for them to handle, to hand hold for cases that can be handled remotely where the customer needs the assurance and the interpretation, and to take care of routine and simple cases.

The new model  field office works with the new model Federal agency, which tries to serve the public online, but using experts more locally based as intermediaries for those who aren't comfortable with technology.  So the new model Federal agency is doing lots of basic training of the personnel in the

So you set up the new model  field office and test it.  If it works, it's the field service center for all Federal government services and some new ones. (The new ones will aggravate people who might think I'm a socialist.)  So the new office would start by serving as a post office and a passport office (which some post offices do now). It would serve FSA programs, NRCS programs, Rural Development programs.  It would handle Social Security matters.  It would handle IRS matters.  It could serve as an interface for remote medicine.

That's my idea.

Are the Conservatives Right on Healthcare?

One of the major arguments people like Megan McArdle use against the healthcare reform passed last year is that the cost-saving measures included in the plan won't work. People like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias say they will work, they hope.

This Politico article provides ammunition for the conservatives.  Various interest groups and lobbyists are rising up against the Independent Payment Advisory Board.  If one is a cynic, watch for the lobbyists to get legislation weakening it or killing it included in some big package of must-pass legislation.

CDC Does What Every Gov Website Should Do

And that's publish their website metrics.

Of interest, in the list of referring websites, usa.gov ranks just below google.de and google.co.za at no. 38.  That tells me the theory that people will look at usa.gov and then go to other government sites is rather dubious. But that's my preconception. Maybe it's a reflection of poor design between usa.gov and cdc.

Bad Apples

 Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, a study on the effect of "bad apples" on group dynamics, also highlighted on NPR's This American Life.  The  bad applies include the "depressive pessimist", the "jerk" and the "slacker". The lesson from the research appears to be: groups live down to the level of their worst performer.  Except that a very skilled leader can diffuse the effect.

This post, linked to from the above, references McConnell's "Rapid Development", a very good book on the process of software development.  I'd like to think I was good in dealing with bad apples, but I wasn't.  Disliked conflict too much to be consistently good.

The World Ends in Seven Days

At least the world of new Internet addresses, according to this Technology Review post.  We've exhausted the universe of valid unique IP addresses (using IPv4) and we haven't converted to IPv6.  So the doomsday we dodged with Y2K is about to occur.