Kudos and Brickbats FSA County Offices: Strongly Recommended

Mr. Blankenship, a wheat grower from Washington, testified before the Senate Ag committee last week.  Excerpts from his testimony

"In my case, FSA is the easiest local office to deal with. FSA personnel are better trained
than others and more familiar with the actual impacts of changes to program eligibility, payment
limits, etc."

"All in all, the partners in Blankenship Brothers probably make 10 separate visits of several hours to our FSA office per year, minimum, for sign-ups, certification of acreages, CRP status checks, SURE eligibility questions and returning paperwork once proper signatures are collected."

"This GPS-based data management system meshes very well with the GPS-based mapping
recently adopted by my FSA office"  (But otherwise interaction is all paper, with FSA dataloading.)

"The differences between administrative perspectives of offices have caused
some producers to go so far as to buy a small parcel of land in a neighboring county in order to
transfer all of their acres to that county’s FSA office."

I strongly recommend it.  NASCOE will be pleased with it, as he leans towards FSA administering programs.  What he may not fully appreciate are the limitations on making programs operate the same way.

It's good to learn that the effort people like Kevin Wickey (NRCS) and Carol Ernst (FSA) (among many others) put into GIS so many years ago has finally paid off, at least for one operator in one county office.

Inefficient Government: If I Were Dictator

USA.gov has a post on changing your address if you're moving. It's a link to a page with a (short) list of links to sites where you can change your address (USPS, SSA, IRS, VA, USCIS.). 

Now if I were dictator, the government would have one place to change your address.

Global Warming: Northwest Passage for Whales and Plankton

This story from MSNBC suggests that the Northwest Passage is now available not only for cargo ships, but for whales and plankton.

School-End Poems

Dirk Beauregarde has school-end poems, including one familiar to me:


No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks

But I don't know the others.

Liberals Destroy Everything

Not only do liberal historians eat vigorously away at the foundations of our American history (see this link for the most recent attack on one of our Founding Fathers), now a liberal blogger is talking of blowing up the moon!  Is there no end to their destructiveness? Have they no shame?

Peter Falk, Government Efficiency Expert, Dies

After a long and brilliant career, the famed government efficiency expert, Peter Falk, has died at age 83.  For further details, see the obits in the Post and Times.

Unmeasured Improvements in Productivity

Charles Kenny talks about the importance of spreading corrective lenses to the third world.  But how about the improvement in life from lasik eye surgery over corrective lenses?  Does that show up in the CPI?

How about the change from chemical to digital photography?  Or I'm reading "The Emperor of All Maladies, A Biography of Cancer", by Siddharta Mukherjee.  Still early, but it's good and I'd recommend it.  He comments on the the amazing jump in the number of effective medicines between 1940 and 1950.  Where does the reduction of pain and the curing of illnesses get counted in measurements of productivity?

2010 Payments in EWG Database

EWG has updated their database with 2010 payments. As they note, they aren't getting the data they used to, because Congress changed a "shall" to "may" and USDA knows enough to follow the wink.  As I think I've said before [in the comments on the post], the $6.7 million estimate of the cost strikes me as bogus.  The only justification I could think of would be if KCMO has redone the file structures on the mainframes to accommodate the changes in the payment limitation provisions in the 2008 Farm Bill (attributing payments to members).  If the mainframe files changed, that would require changing the programs you run against them. 

To my mind, the EWG database should be a USDA database.

It All Depends on Whose Ox Is Gored

Or James Fallows wrote a famous Washington Monthly article many years ago saying the same thing as reported in this Monkey Cage post by John Sides on scholarly research: if you were subject to the draft and going to Vietnam, there was a (slight) tendency to make you more liberal and more anti-war.

Bureaucracy at CitiBank

This Technology Review post blames bureaucracy at CitiBank for permitting a breach of security which exposed customer data.  It's so simple anyone could do it.