Why Crop Insurance Is Good

Speed.  The farmer gets a check in 1 or 2 weeks.  That's the story this farmer is pushing. (I owe someone a hat tip, but lost it.) It's an op-ed by a corn/soybean farmer.  Since I usually diss crop insurance here, it's time to acknowledge a different view.  (I guess the writer knows the insurance is subsidized but he likes the fact he pays for (a part of) it.

On Silos and Data Models

FSA issued a notice BU-729.  It seems to me, though I may be wrong, it's just another example of data silos, and a reason why, in 1990's terms, FSA should have developed an integrated data model.  Essentially the question is the relationship of geographic areas (counties) with administrative jurisdictions (county committees and local administrative areas) and county offices (of various types, shared management, etc.).  To administer county elections you need part of that relationship, to administer funds you need an overlapping part, to administer real and personal property inventories you need a third picture, to coordinate with NRCS and RD offices and jurisdictions you need others.  Unfortunately in my days at FSA each of those was administered by a separate office (or no office at all) and there was no overall coordination.  Apparently from BU-729 there still is no coordination.  My technocratic (Kevin Drum has a meditation on technocracy) heart is sore.

Project Management Software on the Cloud?

All I know I learned at Info Share.  That sometimes seems to be the case.  This announcement stuns me.  Back in 1992 there was PC-based project management software used by the bureaucrats of Info Share.  We're saying 19 years later there's still a niche for such software based in the cloud?  Seems as if we could have made more progress than that. 

Whoops, A Pollan Reversal?

Prof. Pollan has been quiet in recent months, really since he gave advice to Obama back after the election, so I've not mentioned him.  But via Grist, here's a post on his position on high fructose corn syrup--it's more the quantity than the contets of HFCS.

Steve Jobs and Medicine

The blogger at Respectful Insolence specializes in taking down the "woo" merchants, by which he means anyone who pushes "alternative" or "holistic" medicine. I like his posts, though they usually run longer than I've the patience for and require more medical knowledge than I can muster.  But today's post is on Steve Jobs and his pancreatic cancer and he surprises by concluding Jobs' life couldn't have been saved, probably, even if he had strictly followed all the prescriptions of conventional medicine.

A Shortage of License, Where Are Sodom and Gomorrah?

Marginal Revolution links to a nice piece on meritocracy, as in the decline of.   It's good, though a bit light on solutions to our problem of declining mobility. 


I may have done this before (the problems of a blogger with a faulty memory) but it's possible we have a shortage of vice in the country.  After all, if we want people to rise in socio-economic class from one generation to the next, and I do, we equally want people to fall in class.  I can't get into the Four Hundred unless one of the existing elite disgraces himself.  With that perspective, one of our problems may be there's not enough vice, not enough ways in which the idle rich can go to hell, or the dogs, not enough ways to dissipate wealth. 

It certainly seems as if society is getting more conservative in some ways: less crime, less divorce, less flaunting of wealth. 

So my sermon for today is addressed to the 1 percent: go forth and sin some more.

The Case of the Missing Drill Sergeant

I've the feeling articles on why Americans can't be found to do [hard manual labor, whether harvesting crops in Alabama or wherever] are perennials.  But I noted Italians can't be found to do the hard labor of making cheese, according to this Marginal Revolution post.  So why?

It's not genetic: we know Italians did hard manual labor when they were immigrating to this country in the 1890's. We know WASPs did hard work back in the 1630's and 40's and we know our ancestors did hard work at other times.  So why can't Alabama farmers find Americans to pick tomatoes instead of relying on immigrants?

I offer the solution; it's called the "missing drill sergeant". In my experience there were two things, and two things only, which could make me do hard physical labor: one was growing up with it; the other was a drill sergeant.

By growing up with it, I mean this: by growing to be a man on a dairy farm I incorporated ideas of what was hard and what had to be done, what would make me respected among my peers when I hired out.  I also literally incorporated the muscles I needed to do hard work and the calluses I needed to avoid the pain.

The other way I learned to do nasty things was through my Army drill sergeants.  I was constrained by the situation and forced to do things I'd rather not.

I'd say the same applies to our workforce: we don't have slavedrivers and drill sergeants in the modern economy.  Those Americans who grew up to do the work have, if possible, made their escape, just as I escaped from the dairy farm.  So we rely on people from elsewhere, whose frame of reference from growing up in a less developed country makes picking tomatoes or working on Italian dairy farms seem at least tolerable, considering the financial rewards.

[Updated with a couple links.]

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.]