Love Those Free Marketers

The incentives certainly work to inspire idiocy:

Jim Massery, the government sales manager for Pittsfield, Mass.-based Lenco, dismissed critics who wonder why a town with almost no crime would need a $300,000 armored truck. "I don't think there's any place in the country where you can say, 'That isn't a likely terrorist target,'" Massery said. "How would you know? We don' t know what the terrorists are thinking. No one predicted that terrorists would take over airplanes on Sept. 11. If a group of terrorists decide to shoot up a shopping mall in a town like Keene, wouldn't you rather be prepared?" From Ta-Nehisi Coates

 “‘However, with the enormous amount of risk farmers are about to undertake by planting a new soybean crop, now is exactly the wrong time to reduce support for the federal crop insurance program,  The American Soybean Association from Farm Policy

Based on the logic of these hucksters, we need a $300,000  armored truck in every town the size of Keene, N (23,000 +) H, or larger, or about 1300 places. And because soybean farmers plant a crop every year, and risk their investment in seed and fertilizer, we can never reduce crop insurance.

Women and Haying

I stumbled across a site, Hay in Art, which I recommend to all feminists who grew up on dairy farms.  I was searching for images of haying for another blog, and found this site which apparently has collected all the paintings showing haying. You'd be surprised how many there are (6700+).  A subset of the collection is women doing haying. The site owner, Alan Ritch, finds a pattern: women raked and men used forks.  And apparently it was common to ted the hay (i.e., turn the cut hay over so it would dry faster). Where I grew up in Broome County, NY that wasn't normal: the hay wasn't dense enough and the conditions moist enough to require it. 

The sheer number of pictures of women in the fields provides a different picture of what life was like in previous centuries.

My sister, who likes to brag about driving the team pulling the hay wagon and hay loader when she was maybe 13 or so, will be disappointed--I didn't see any such images in the database. 

I strongly recommend the site: it doesn't seem to have been updated recently, but it has all sorts of special essays, as Ritch calls them.  Unfortunately, the images are limited in size, and the type's a bit small for old eyes, but it's still fascinating.

Confusion: Minority Farmers and USDA

I'm confused by what's happening.

We have notice AO-1534  establishing a Minority farmer register using form AD-2035
We have notice CM-695, implementing departmental regulations using form AD-2106.

Reading between the lines, although quickly so I'm possibly missing something, the register is intended to collect data from and through  "outreach organizations", the data stays on paper, and goes to the Department.  The AD-2106 is just passed out to program applicants, presumably SCIMS is updated.  A question: can SCIMS reflect whether the race, ethnicity, sex category is based on customer input or is the old eyeball test?

Seems to me it would have been much better to have issued one notice covering the subject.

Looking at the USDA strategic plan it appears USDA believes its current data on customers is good enough for analysis (despite GAO's problems with it).

My own feelings on the subject I stated in these comments on the Federal Register notice the Department put out.

Surprising Factoid: Christmas Carol Didn't Sell

The Economist has a graph showing sales of Dickens books in his lifetime. Christmas Carol is third from the bottom.

Hattip: Marginal Revolution

How Can You Fight Miss America? NASCOE Loses

Technically she's an ex-Miss America, but I don't see NASCOE as being able to counter her.  See this Des Moines Register piece.

The Death of Newsprint: Waiting for Car Service

I take my car to the dealer for service, and always wait for it.  Over the years the waiting room has changed, gotten fancier and fancier.  The last cycle boasts fancy leather chairs with arms for your computer; the previous cycle had just four  seats against the wall for PC users.  Of course, I'm not sure the chairs work so well for people using smartphones and iPads, but that's another story.

Anyhow, back in the day half the people waiting would be reading the newspaper, the other half zoned out watching CNN on the TV.  Today there was one person reading the paper, me, and the rest were on their laptops or phones.  The TV was going, but no one was watching.

The other change in 30 years has been from a mostly white clientele, through a mixed white and Latino clientele, to a Heinz 57 varieties from every continent.

Surprising Sentence

" Government employment is declining nationally by the sharpest annual rate since the 1940s."

That's from this Atlantic post on government employment--the discussion is of government at all levels.  It doesn't allow for contractors (I think I saw something that more American contractors died in Afghanistan last year than military troops.)

It was surprising to see Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Caroline, three states with Republican governors which vote red consistently, among the 10 states with the most government employees.

Government Service from IRS

Recently I had occasion to deal with the IRS (I made a stupid mistake on my 2009 schedule D).  All in all I was pleased with my interactions: one in-person call to the local office, two phone calls.  In all three cases I had to wait, but that's expectable because Congress doesn't fund tax collection as it should.  In all three cases the IRS people were pleasant and competent and the IT systems they had available to them worked well. And, most importantly of course, I finished the series of interactions without owing more taxes.

So, a hat tip to the IRS.

One thing of interest I did note, given the concerns over PPI (Social security number, etc.)  When I went to the office, instead of asking for my SSN I was asked to enter it on a separate keypad--apparently such entry hides the SSN from the employee while authorizing access to one's tax files.  It's an interesting approach.

Bureaucrats = Condoms?

Or isn't that what John Holbo meant in this:

(The principle that layers of bureaucracy are semi-prophylactic against moral pollution is subject to doubt. But we seem to have no other principle, so this will have to do in the case of prophylactics.)…

From a post on the requirement contraception be included in health insurance policies.

Crop Insurance Versus NASCOE

Via Farm Policy, the crop insurance industry counters NASCOE arguments:

Those who call for greater Farm Service Agency involvement in claims adjustment as a way of saving Federal jobs in the countryside do not have the interests of farmers at heart. The “modern” crop insurance program started out in the 1980s with a dual system of delivery in which farmers were given the choice of buying policies sold by private agents who contracted with the government and had the government service claims, or they could buy policies from private companies who would both sell policies and service claims. Because the private sector outperformed the government, especially in terms of quality of
farmer services, timeliness and accuracy of claims processing and cost (1989 Arthur Andersen study reported government cost was more than twice that of the private sector), all program delivery was assigned to the private sector by the end of the 1980s.

I wonder about the context of the 1989 study.  That would FCIC representing government delivery and probably a mostly manual process.  I doubt the Reagan administration would have supported a fair test.  Myself, I don't believe FSA could sell insurance effectively; they just don't have the incentives to do so, but servicing the policies ought to be within their capability.

The AACI statement goes on to bemoan the fact that crop insurance isn't available everywhere, which makes me laugh since FSA's involvement with CAT was ended because it was available everywhere.