Women in Special Ops

Special Ops is the glamour branch of the services.  Think of the Delta force operatives in Black Hawk Down.  So it's with some surprise I got towards the middle of this post on Tom Ricks blog and found that women are successfully infiltrating even Special Ops. You can't keep a good woman down, I guess.

Schadenfreude on Disaster

I spent long enough in FSA working on disaster programs (not disastrous programs, though opinions may differ, but programs to aid farmers who suffered a disaster) to feel some schadenfreude (wicked enjoyment at the misfortunes of others) at reports such as this.

It's a true fact: any program, public or private, which puts money on the table is subject to scams and fraud.  Different programs have different vulnerabilities.  Whether it was the compensation for 9/11 victims and families, or Katrina, Pigford, or just a simple scheme to fake an accident, burn down one's factory building for the insurance, or claim a whiplash, you always have fraud.

Of course everyone knows we ourselves are innocent, so only a weak-minded blind bureaucrat would treat us as someone to be suspected, someone whose claims must be verified and whose word should not be taken at face value.

Limiting the Use of SSN's

Nextgov had a post a while back reporting the Navy was limiting the use of Social Security numbers. It ends:

The eventual goal is to have a unique Defense Department ID replace Social Security numbers across all the services. Defense expects to begin removing Social Security numbers from bar codes on service member ID cards by 2012.

 There's a gain to using organization-specific (DOD) IDs instead of nation-specific IDs (SSN's), I suppose. My personal prejudice is for using applications which don't require an ID number at all. After all, if you need to distinguish among the multiple Bill Harshaws who live in the world, a combination  of data works.  Just use the Whitepages application and do a search for a last name and a town.  They'll respond with a list of people with the last name and provide the first names, often the ages, and often the other people in the household.  Usually that's good enough for what you want.

Granted there may be some instances in which the organization needs greater certainty.  For example, consider an ID card.  My VA drivers license used to have the SSN on it, but now it's got a customer ID number.  That's what store clerks write down, or they used to, when they ask for ID for a check or a purchase. Such requests are infrequent now; I'm not sure whether it's because businesses have figured the info is not worth the hassle or what.  The better solution would be a picture of me and my card, which they may be getting.

I'd hasten to add that there needs to be an ID card number, which identifies the ID card itself, but which doesn't identify the person. If I lose my license, VDOT needs to reissue one, and know which actual card was lost and which I should have.  That way, if the lost card pops up in someone's possession they can tell the difference. I don't know VDOT's business processes, but it looks as if they do have such a card number on the license.

Finally, if needed, any organization these days should be able to rely on an email address, which is what they do online. Unfortunately not everyone has one, which is a subject for another day.

Are You Allowed To? The Growth of Freedom

That's what I was asked by a person of a certain age (i.e., older than I) recently. I was offering advice on beginning a blog containing posts about a historical personage. The question, as I recall it, was whether you could address the reader directly in such posts. For example, "dear reader, Jane Doe III was the most important person in Anytown during 1840-1860.  You need to understand her life  because it offers an example of how leaders today should act."

My response was, of course: in the blogging world there are no rules. You can do anything and everything.  Given the person to whom I was responding, mentioning the End User Licensing Agreement Google has us agree to seemed superfluous.

This question measures the gap between the world in which I and the person were raised and the world today.  I can't imagine people in their teens and twenties today asking the same question.  Their world is much fuller of opportunities, of possibilities, and much emptier of rules governing personal behavior with others, whether on the Internet or in person.

And You Thought Vegetable Growers Didn't Get Subsidies

Foodies often point to the large subsidies given to field crops and complain that fruit and vegetable growers don't get subsidized.  Whatever the truth of the assertion, I want to point to this new FSA program.  Yes, it's for asparagus, which last I looked was a vegetable.  (I like asparagus, fresh asparagus, locally grown asparagus.) Of course the program is for the 2004 through 2007 crop years.

Frankly, I don't have time left in my life to research this, and the link to the body of the regulations does not work (I've complained to GPO) so I'll just fly off the handle.  This is ridiculous.  No bureaucrat can reasonably administer a program this far removed from the current day. Too much changes.  According to the press release, it sounds as if there were a surge of imports during the period.  Someone got some Congressperson to put this in the farm bill, though it doesn't count as an earmark. 

Food Costs

Charles Blow has an op-ed piece in the Times with a table comparing the Mid-East nations (and the US) on various metrics: age of population, inequality of income, food expenditure, Internet penetration, level of democracy. Overall, there's not much difference between Tunisia, Egypt and the other countries. But on food costs, defined as spending on food consumed at home, as a percentage of household spending, the US is down to 6.8 percent (based on the 2011 Statistical Abstract). Most of the other countries, except Israel and the small oil-rich ones,  run from 20 to 45 percent. 

I suspect this is misleading, however, in that in US the 6.8 percent includes lots of processed food, while in the Mid East the 20+ percent is more raw materials, like flour, beans, rice, olive oil and similar ingredients.  So fluctuations in the price of agricultural commodities hits them much harder than in the US>

On Class, and the Lack Thereof

I recommend Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet, a book of essays written as he became immobilized in body by Lou Gehrig's disease. It's getting 5 stars on Amazon. The writing is graceful.  Judt, now dead, was a Londoner, of Jewish heritage, a historian who taught on both sides of the Atlantic but ended up in New York City.

I want to quote from the essay "Bedder".

"I grew up without servants.  This is hardly surprising: in the first place, we were a small, lower-middle-class family who lived in small, lower-middle-class housing.  Before the war [WWII], such families could typically afford a maid and perhaps a cook as well.  The real middle class, of course, did much better: upstairs and downstairs staff were well within the reach of a professional man and his family." [His parents could afford a day-nanny for him. At Cambridge he had "bedders": women who looked after undergraduate rooms. Oxford has "scouts".]

Judt's class-consciousness is British, as are his gradations.  I think he means his family was middle-class because they weren't "working class/lower class"; they had white-collar jobs, not manual labor.  The "lower" part probably implies no college education, not a professional lawyer, teacher, manager. I think it's generally true a higher proportion of Brits had servants (say from 1850-1950) than Americans. Americans had "help", neighbor girls who might come in after childbirth or during sickness.  But anyone who could afford regular employees probably was considered upper-middle-class. 

Having noted this bit in Judt, I was struck when I saw on a newscast a talking head describing a growing "underclass" resulting from people losing their jobs in the Great Recession and being unable to find new employment. To me "underclass" is a bit pejorative, although perhaps not as much as "lower class" would seem.

Surprising Sentence of the Day: Molotov Cocktail

Who was Molotov? No, that's not the sentence, but I write in stunned amazement that most people today have no memory of him. (Only the precocious baby boomer might remember him.)

The surprising sentence, at Technology Review:

"The amount of energy stored in a given volume of gasoline is 36 times higher than a lithium ion battery, 15 times that of gunpowder and 10 times greater than the energy per unit volume of TNT."

It's from an article explaining why they are the great equalizer.

How Rich Is the Richest Black Person in the World

$10 billion. (He's an Ethiopean.) Hat tip: Chris Blattman

Why Programs Fail

A bit from a new Center for American Progress study on "Design for Success". Part of their answer to the question is:

"proponents [of a program] tend to focus on the politics and perception of a new idea, rather than on less glamorous questions of whether the program is likely to work or whether it is ready to be implemented. They focus on which stakeholder group might back the idea, how it will play with the media and voters, and what effect it could have on future political contests. These considerations naturally lead to compromises, and ideas get amended to increase political support. The changes, however, are rarely about making the idea more effective when implemented, but about luring the support of powerful players.
The problem, then, is that our program-making process focuses primarily on politics, and only secondarily on substantial policy questions. Questions of implementability sometimes seem entirely absent from the process.

(The study in part is inspired by Atul Gawande's "Checklist" book. )

A related quote, on why existing programs continue:

Finally, the political process rewards people who come up with new ideas, not fix old ones. Interest groups court new policies, and reward politicians who champion their ideas. That means Washington decision makers tend to channel their energies into developing new policies rather than fixing existing programs.

 I've skimmed the report which I like. It's more practical than many efforts.  I particularly like the idea in the report that its proposals should be tested on a trial basis, as they recommend for new programs.  However, I'd fault them for being too much a "new idea" (see the paragraph above) and not attending to how existing efforts in OMB and Congress could be modified and improved in light of their recommendations.  It's good my Senator, Mr. Warner, supports the effort, but how much clout is behind it?