Smoking and Sex

I owe a hattip to Suzy Khimm at Ezra Klein's blog; here's a post on the economist with maps showing worldwide cigarette consumption, by sex.

About 800m men smoke cigarettes, compared with fewer than 200m women. More than 80% of these male smokers are in low- and middle-income countries. The problem is particularly acute in China, where 50% of men smoke (compared with just 2% of women), consuming one-third of the world's cigarettes in the process.

 I can remember when the local radical (she was a Democrat and she wore slacks) was also a smoker, a scandal for a woman in that small community. She was one of my mother's best friends, and suffered from emphysema in her latter years.

I wonder if the dynamics leading to male smoking in China are the same as in the U.S.

Payment Limitation

One might think that with the likely demise of direct payments, the idea of payment limitations would recede into the background.  But Chris Clayton at DTN  reports Sen. Grassley and others are pushing revisions:

The legislation would have a $250,000 cap for married couples and maintains a hard cap on marketing-loan gains. Under a shallow-loss program, it would set a $100,000 cap for a couple under that program. It would also tighten language defining "actively engaged" to collect payments. Grassley said there are too many people claiming they are actively engaged because they participate in a phone call or two each year about the farm.

Crop insurance would not be covered.

Path Dependency and the Butterfly in Politics

Chaos theory famously says that the flap of a butterfly's wing off Brazil could change the weather in the US.  Path dependency says where you end up depends on where you start, that your choices are constrained by the initial conditions.

Freakonomics reports on a study which says, back when the Tea Parties first demonstrated, if the weather was good in the area the tea party grew larger and more powerful compared to the parties in areas where it rained. 

Can I go from that and say if the night of the Boston Tea Party had seen a blizzard come in, we'd be celebrating our Queen's 60th year of rule?

The Importance of Data Modeling

And thinking outside the box.  The NYTimes has a piece on how American retailers are trying to open up their websites to foreign customers.  Turns out it's not simply a matter of trusting shipments to UPS or FedEx.  For one thing, some foreign countries have postal codes which aren't 5 digits.  Imagine that!

I mock, yet the longer I live the more I see that my own data modeling efforts in the 90's were horribly limited by assumptions and chauvinism.

Rep. Ryan and USDA

From Politico, reporting on the budget offered by the House Republicans:

"And with a new farm bill in the offing, Ryan envisions a major restructuring of food stamps together with cuts in commodity and crop insurance subsidies....

"
For the Agriculture Committee, which hopes to write a new farm bill before September, the expedited budget schedule poses both a severe challenge — and potential opportunity.
The draft numbers demand $8.2 billion over the first year, $19.7 billion over five years, and $33.2 billion over a decade. Indeed, the relatively high first-year number suggests that the budget will assume an early rollback of more generous food stamp benefits first allowed under the 2009 economic stimulus bill.

In terms of core commodity and crop insurance programs, the longer-term savings are considerably more than the draft farm bill negotiated by the House and Senate Agriculture leadership last fall. That measured saved just $23 billion over 10, compared with $33.2 billion.

But if a compromise can be found, the Agriculture Committee could find it in its interest to hitch a ride with the budget package so as to get a farm bill across the House floor with a minimum number of amendments.

Leaving himself a little room to bargain, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) gave a gentle reminder that farm policy is still his domain.
“I would caution people about reading too much into the numbers or policy proposals in either the President’s budget or the Ryan budget,” Lucas said in a statement.”They are only suggestions.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74224_Page3.html#ixzz1pgE2t9Es

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74224_Page2.html#ixzz1pgDimg00

The "E-Plus" World?

At John Fea's blog, meditation on whether we'll have a "print-plus" world or an "e-plus" world?  Will students expect to have all textbooks and assigned reading available in e-books or will the default be to presume as we have in the past, that such material is printed?   You can expand that to apply to government interactions, etc.--we already, I think, assume phone numbers are on websites, not in the whitepages.

US Bureaucrats: Score One for FDA

NYTimes has an interesting article on the problems a Greek entrepreneur had in setting up an olive oil export business.  Even had to provide stool samples.  But, towards the end of the article:

At one point, the company got a huge order from Denmark, he said. But the paperwork for what amounted to a wholesale transaction was so onerous that they decided not to even try to fill the order.

In contrast, he said, getting approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration to export his products to the United States took about 24 hours. “It was all online,” he said. “Nothing could be done online in Greece.”

 Way to go FDA.

(Though on second thought, I hope they're devoting a bit more attention to Chinese exporters.)

When Is a War Not a War

When it is the "events".  A paragraph from Dirk Beauregarde's post on the 50th anniversary of the Algerian War:

We never hear much about the Algerian war in Britan. We never seem to talk much about it in France. Even 50 years on, the war is still very much a taboo subject. Until 1999, the conflict in Algeria wasn’t even called a « war » - politicians would officially refer to the eight years of bloody conflict as « The évents ». It took a parliamentary commission and a new law for the « military opérations in Algeria » (as they were referred to at the time) to be officially qualified as a « War ». The change in terminology was not born from an act of conscience – it was all because there was no money for Algerian war vétérans and war widows – you can’t be a war vétéran or a war widow if the war wasn’t called a war. For years there was a national outcry as widow and vétérans went without pensions or compensation. So i twas on 18th October 1999 in the new Service Pensions Law that the « évents » in Algeria became officially became the « Algerian War ». Wrapping it all up in an obscure pensions act – that illustrâtes the French attitude to the War in Algeria. [Spelling corrected]

"Actively Engaged" in Farming

From EWG's blog:

The highlight of the Senate Agriculture committee’s hearing on farm subsidies and crop insurance was when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked  Michael Scuse, the Acting Undersecretary For Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture whether he considered people who participate in only two farming-related conference calls per year to be actively-engaged farmers. EWG research has uncovered millions of federal agricultural subsidies going to well- off landlords and investors living in every major American city.

 

"Customer-Facing" Jobs

Jargon sometimes catches my fancy.  This one is from an FSA notice on telework.

I assume employees in offices other than county offices show their rears to customers.