Mobile Offices for USDA?

Back in the mid-90's, when the Service Center project was under Greg Carnill, one of the proposals coming from RD was to have mobile offices.  That was seen as a way to reach out to underserved areas (I think especially heavily Latino areas and reservations where language might be a problem). I thought of that when I saw this piece on VA's mobile Vetcenters.

John W. Boyd's Loan Specialist

John Boyd is prominently associated with the Pigford lawsuit.  I just happened to notice there's a vacancy in Mecklenburg county for a supervisory farm loan specialist.  I also found it interesting that the town is Boydton.

Lexis-Nexis Is a Government Innovation

Who would have thought it?  That was my reaction when I read this obit in the Post. Three paragraphs:

Mr. Rubin was a corporate lawyer in New York during the late 1960s when he was asked to give his advice on a new computerized legal research system.

The digital database had begun as a project to catalogue Ohio state laws using Air Force technology [emphasis added] that tracked intelligence reports. Mr. Rubin quickly saw the system’s commercial potential because of its ability to make millions of legal documents easily and quickly available to law firms.

The key was to ensure that the database was simple to use, Mr. Rubin said, because “lawyers can’t type, and only 15 percent can spell.”

 Of course, I enjoyed the last paragraph as well. 

The Era of Good Feelings on the Hill

In a previously unreported interview, there was evidence of an era of good feelings on Capitol Hill, or maybe not.  Maybe it's like the glimpse of that rare woodpecker in the LA/AR swamps, but at least it's something: a Republican legislator was complimentary of a Democrat:

Debbie [Sen. Stabenow] was an absolute pleasure to work with in attempting to put the hurry-up proposal together for the super committee that never came about, but Senator Stabenow, Chairwoman Stabenow was a pleasure to work with and she demonstrated an intense amount ofintensity over on the senate side to try and move things there, so that’s a positive force.

That's from an interview with Rep. Lucas, chair of House Ag.

Obama, Vilsack, and Kahneman

"Loss aversion" is part of  Daniel Kahneman's thought. As he writes in Thinking: Fast and Slow, the theory is that people mostly prefer choices which minimize the risk of loss as opposed to maximizing the chance of gain. And, more interestingly, we prefer a choice which offers the chance of avoiding a loss, even though it's not rational.

On page 305 he ties that into proposed reorganizations, arguing that any reorganization will cause someone to lose something and, given human preferences for loss aversion, they'll fight a lot harder to avoid the loss than people who may stand to gain by the reorganization will fight to implement it.

We can already see this with Obama's proposal on reorganizing commerce; there's lots of resistance to including the office of the US Trade Representative in the overall reorganization.

The same sort of logic applies to the closing of USDA offices; those adversely affected by the loss will fight hard.

But that leads to a mystery: why was Congress able to reorganize USDA in 1994 by combining part of FmHA with ASCS to make FSA?  Maybe part of it was in the splitting of FmHA--those parts which became Rural Development could see themselves as gaining by the reorganization.  The old Rural Electrification Administration had long been a target for reformers, but by merging it into RD the old name and the old reputation was lost, at least among those who had only a superficial acquaintance with USDA and the lobbyists behind it could see a gain.

Meanwhile the farm loan part of FmHA might not have had the greatest reputation in the government: GAO had had the loan programs on its list to give close scrutiny to.  And I remember my boss showing me a letter someone in Congress had sent to the old FmHA, criticizing their failure to implement some legislative provision in comparison with the speed with which ASCS had implemented other provisions.  That was, of course, unfair.  FmHA was bound by different constraints than ASCS, and had a different culture.  But still the contrast might have undermined support on the Hill for maintaining it as a separate agency. 

NY Times Undermines Security

That's what I took away from their article today on teenagers.  Apparently the true token of love today is information, specifically one's password.  All very touching, but surely the Times should point out the truth: you shouldn't have just one password, but multiple passwords.

[Update: see this Consumer Reports piece after Zappos.]

War Horse and Agriculture

Just saw the movie War Horse, a very pretty film.  But Steven Spielberg is no farm boy. The first third of the movie is pre-war, when the thoroughbred Joey, the War Horse to-be, is trained both as a riding horse and a plow horse. In order to pay the rent, the father has promised the landlord to plant a field to turnips. Supposedly the field  is both virgin and stony, impossible to plow. Sure enough, it's on the side of a hill and the ground is strewn with stones (though it's not clear whether they're weathered from the bed rock, which in Devon would be sedimentary, or glacial, rounded by water). 

For dramatic purposes I can understand the decision to plow uphill, it makes the task for Joey more imposing, though it makes no sense from an erosion standpoint. When you see the first furrow plowed, and all subsequent furrows, somehow there's no stones in the soil, just good black soil.

Once the field is plowed, the father, limping from a war wound, starts sowing seed by hand. broadcasting across the furrows (no harrowing recorded). I could almost swear it was oats in the container, but I can't swear to it.  Now, through the miracle of Hollywood, all that broadcast seed turned several weeks later into neat rows! of turnips.  Unfortunately there's a big storm which somehow seems to uproot all the turnips, ruining the crop and creating another crisis for the family to face. I suppose the torrents could have eroded the dirt between the rows, but that didn't seem to be what happened.

I could go on to criticize the placement of the machine guns, but I won't.

It's a must see, if only for Emily Watson, who's always great.

Learning Self-Reliance in Scotland

The Stonehead and wife believe in self-reliance, so their sons learn cooking early.

Agriculture Is Solar-Powered

I have posted on hydroponic lettuce growing.  If you believe the advocates of organic agriculture, commercial agriculture is essentially hydroponic, in that the soil is exhausted so the plants are growing using the nutrients supplied by chemical fertilizers.  That's an exaggeration, but there's a bit of truth in it. That bit of truth means the salient fact about commercial agriculture is: it's solar-powered.

I wonder if anyone has done the calculation of the energy required to grow the crops we raise in the U.S.?  If they have, then you could do a graphic showing the sources of all the energy required to maintain our economy, presumably with solar power being a significant contributor.

Being optimistic about the power of search engines, I tried to answer the question in the previous paragraph, which didn't give an exact answer but did lead to an interesting Harpers article including this:

Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn.

The Done List, Not To-do

I've probably been doing to-do lists for 60 years, off and on.  I get a spasm of will-power, a resolve to do better than I've done in the past, a desire to be better organized: result, a to-do list.  I write this because today's paper included a discussion of a new app for maintaining a to-do list.  I used to be an early adopter, picking up new technology and new software, but no more. No iPhones or iPads for this geezer, no modern apps.

My obsolescence doesn't make a difference; my to-do lists in the past have always petered out very quickly, like water draining into the sand. The number of jobs on the list was always too long, the life of my resolve was too short, and the result was disillusionment.

Two weeks is no basis to judge, but I just may have found an approach which works better for me: the done list.  Unfortunately I can't remember where I saw this suggested, but it's definitely not my idea.  What I've done is forget the list of projects, it's not important, I know well enough the things I'd like to get done. The "done list" is simply a log of days and notifications of what I've done.  My willpower extends (so far) to spending a little time doing something each day.  By recording what I've done I get some reinforcement.  It's the same psychology as the advice manuals on how to write: they say write something each day, every day.