Muffins Overreaction

I wrote earlier that the Obama administration might be overreacting to a report of $16 muffins at a conference. The DOJ IG has now conceded its report was wrong. Of course, the media will not learn any lesson from this and only the best will do a followup story,  The problem is we the public are all ready to believe that bureaucrats are invariably wasteful, so we're easy prey to such stories.

I've a vague memory of a flap over government conferences which resulted in a big clampdown in USDA, requiring the Secretary to approve conference.  If I recall, the problem there was the conference was held at a sexy location (i.e., some resort with a high style reputation), although because it was off-season it was arguably not a waste of money when you looked at transportation costs as well as housing costs.

Trusting Small Business

The RSS feed from Government Executive had two adjoining posts: one was "Fraud continues in small business procurement programs", the second was "House votes to repeal contractor withholding tax requirement. The conjunction is educational.

What we're saying is, while we know small businesses are not angels, being subject to the normal human urge to cheat and lie, the House (and the Senate and the President) are willing to let them cheat on their taxes for a while longer.

Maybe the thing I hate most is tax fraud. I realize the Republicans believe small businesses are the fount of all job creation and the embodiment of all virtues.  But I'm conservative enough, or Calvinistic enough, to believe you don't trust anyone.  As the Founders believed, you have checks and balances.

Cultural Transformation

FSA issued a notice on how to deal with customers, including a long list of do's and don'ts.  When I joined the agency they had a series of training packages for county office employees, including one called "counter skills", since the usual setup for the offices included a counter, like that in banks back then, over which the farmer and employee conducted business.  I've no idea what the package included, whether it was mostly the sort of communication skills included in the current notice or whether it was more content oriented.  I'd guess the later.  The current notice reflects, I think the change in the culture over the past decades.

Unusually for me I'm not quibbling or nitpicking the instructions, they're good, at least for the case where there's an arms-length relationship.  [Second thought: to some extent it's the same sort of thing as the procedure for developing individual development plans or the script for a play.  If the actors put their heart into it, it can be great; if they just read it, it's lousy.]

Building Infrastructure: Cooperatives and the REA

Life on a Colorado Farm has a post on how parts of rural Colorado were electrified.  Clue: it took cooperation, a cooperative, and the government to do it.

Althouse and Jobs

This may be a first, but I recommend the Ann Althouse post on Steve Jobs (the bio) and the comment thread.  Don't think it's quite up to Mr. Coates, but it's good.

Thoughts on Government Regulations

Walt Jeffries has a very interesting post
on the cost of his farm butcher shop, including mention of the government regulations which he faced.  I asked for his view of the regulations, which he provided in the comments, then requesting my response which I've now provided in comments.  We agree on at least one thing:

Scaling things is a general problem that government is not terribly good at. They tend to produce uniforms in one size fits all. Few would argue with that

See his blog.

NASCOE Proposals I

NASCOE has a set of proposals submitted to the Administrator, FSA, and SEcretary Vilsack.  They're interesting, which is why I'll probably post multiple times.  The thing which struck me first was the proposal to combine State offices.

I remember when the Reagan administration tried that.  As a matter of fact, that's how my former boss, Sandy Penn, came to DC.  If I recall Delaware and MD were to be combined, meaning a reduction in state specialists.  I guess Sandy was the low woman on the seniority list, so she transferred to DC. The combination was all set to happen, when it was suddenly cancelled.  The scuttlebutt was that someone in New England, I think a state executive director, was the college roommate of a Congress person with serious clout, maybe membership on the Appropriations Committee? 

Anyhow, forgive my cynicism, but I don't think this is going to happen.  (Coincidentally, DOJ is trying to move some field offices, and getting big flack from the field.)

Those Sex-Linked Differences in Math

When I was young, I was a math wiz.  That was when I was 17.  I rapidly lost my aptitude to the point I almost failed my college calculus course (in my defense the guy had a thick accent and was not an inspired teacher).  But I always accepted the idea that guys were superior in math.  In high school the math teacher, a goateed ex-sailor, graduate of the Merchant Marine academy, set up a class for advanced math (i.e., advanced algrebra, spherical trig, etc.) which was all guys (like 6 of us). 

So when Larry Summers speculated about the possible causes for women to be underrepresented in the sciences, technology and mathematics, and included possible genetic differences at the extremes, I was open to the idea, even though it's not politically correct.  I pride myself on being an open-minded liberal.

But the data seems to be running against that hypothesis, as witness this paragraph in a Washington Post article today:

A recent report from the American Association of University Women notes that, 30 years ago, the ratio of seventh- and eighth-grade boys who scored more than 700 on the SAT math exam, compared with girls, was 13 to 1. Now it’s 3 to 1.

The same article says women are getting more than 50 percent of all doctorates total (a fact I'd seen elsewhere).  But there seem to be two possibilities: between 1950 and now there's been a mutation in female genes which means they no longer "throw like girls" and can handle math, or the culture has changed.

Usefulness of EWG's Database Impaired

A time or two I've noted that using crop insurance instead of direct payments has the effect of hiding the increases in governmental liability (assuming prices and/or yields rise over time) and getting around the payment limitation provisions.  Another side effect is noted in this language in a Grist post:

EWG's Cook is concerned about another potential problem with the proposed new subsidy. With the current set of farm payments, groups can track exactly how much government support individual farmers receive (as EWG does with its Farm Subsidy Database). But with the "shallow loss" plan, says Cook, "the subsidy lobby" is creating a new "income-guarantee entitlement aimed at the biggest commercial operations" that will likely be "totally opaque to the public." Which means no more tracking who gets how much.

I assume there will be no tears shed in the farming community over this.

What Happens When There's No Card Catalog?

One of the ways I try to help people do Google searches is to tell them: type in the window the words you would use in searching the old library card catalog.  But what happens when that advice no longer makes sense?  This was triggered by a post on the NYTimes article describing a private west coast school which banned all technology.  Does searching in Google come naturally, or is it learned? 

I think the later. 

In some ways this is like learning to type--I vaguely remember an article saying that kids were picking up typing by the availability of PC's, etc. with keyboards.  But how many of those kids will be able to do 40 wpm with 1 mistake?

I guess I'm starting this week as a grump.