Google Employs Bureaucrats

That's the theme of this Times piece. Of course it's true, in any organization you do what you can and you don't do what others are hopefully doing.  It's called "division of labor", as Adam Smith dubbed it. The bigger the organization, the more likely that leads to things falling through the cracks.

What We Used to Look Like

Here's a post by James Fallows with a photo from the 1940's showing what US children used to look like, or at least what we wanted to think they looked like (i.e., WASPs).  We watched Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July" Monday and the parade in Massapequa, NY and the scenes of the high school prom reminded me of this.  (What did I think of the movie: I think it stood up pretty well over the years, though Stone has something about him, maybe a bit of romanticism, with which I'm uncomfortable.)

The U.S. has changed.

Popcorn, Seed Corn, and Fading Memory

Politico today carries a long piece about Senator McCain's opposition to a provision in the farm bill relative to popcorn.  (Haven't checked but it sounds as if it makes popcorn producers eligible for corn crop insurance.) The article treats the provision as an example of an organization getting the legislation written to favor them.

Back in the day, if I remember, which I don't really, seed corn and popcorn were controversial in the context of the target price programs of the early 80's.  Both were produced under contract, which meant the growers didn't really face price risk, which was what the program was supposed to be about.  They also had their own niche market, pretty much independent of the field corn market, so efforts to adjust the production of field corn were irrelevant to popcorn and seed corn.  They did, however, have an argument that the stalks could be used for silage.

Over the years I believe both the seed corn people and the popcorn people got language inserted into the law forcing ASCS/FSA to treat them on the same basis as field corn.  If my memory is right, that means the only thing new is that today the lobbyists are forcing RMA/FCIC to treat them on the same basis.

The logic of the efforts is clear: a group of people who feel relatively strongly about an issue, no organized opposition because groups representing the taxpayers don't understand the issue, no leadership from the Executive because it's such a small issue, a bureaucracy which understands the issue but which works for Congress and is professionally inhibited from voicing opposition, and a legislator who can insert the relevant provision and mouth the words the lobbyist puts in their mouth.

Where's the tea party?

Farm Labor: Half Illegal?

A paragraph from today's Farm Policy:
"And an update yesterday at the Economic Research Service Charts of Note webpage (USDA) stated that, “Over the past 15 years, roughly half of the hired laborers employed in U.S. crop agriculture have lacked the immigration status needed to work legally in the United States. Large shifts in the supply of foreign-born farm labor, such as those that might result from substantial changes to U.S. immigration laws or policies, could have significant effects on production costs in U.S. agriculture. Hired labor (including contract labor) accounted for about 17 percent of the sector’s variable production expenses and even higher proportions in more labor-intensive sectors, such as vegetables (35 percent), nursery products (46 percent), and fruits (48 percent), according to 2006-10 Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) data. This chart is found in The Potential Impact of Changes in Immigration Policy on U.S. Agriculture and the Market for Hired Farm Labor: A Simulation Analysis, ERR-135, May 2012.”

US the Free Trader

Sometimes we think the US uses tariffs on agricultural products unfairly.  Here's a comparison worldwide.

Smith in NYTimes, and the Rest of the Story

Excerpt from Farm Policy:

Dallas Smith, a former USDA deputy under secretary for farm and foreign agricultural services, noted in a letter to the editor in Saturday’s New York Times that, “‘Where the Trough Is Overflowing’ (Deconstruction, editorial page, June 3) does a disservice to both America’s farmers, who feed an increasingly hungry world, and crop insurance, their primary risk management tool.
“There is one reason crop insurance has become the risk management tool of choice for most farmers and political leaders from both sides of the aisle: it works.”

The Times identified Dallas with his old USDA position but surprisingly didn't note his current position.  Here's  Linkedin:

Owner

Dallas R. Smith and Associates, Inc

Currently holds this position

Special Consultant

National Crop Insurance Services

1999 – Present (13 years)

Deputy Under Secretary, Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services

United States Department of Agriculture

Government Agency; 10,001+ employees; Government Administration industry

July 1965 – January 1999 (33 years 7 months)

I was a Senior Executive with USDA from 1985 to 1999. Before that I worked as a County Extension Agent in NC, Cotton Marketing Specialist, Peanut Branch Chief, Deputy Director and Director of a Division within USDA in Washington DC. I also served as a Consultant to the White House on tobacco issues and provide leadership to the Agriculture Committee of the Gore-Mbekia Commission with South Africa. Prior to retirement I received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive.

"Our Animal Natures"

Very interesting long piece in the NYTimes today with that title.  The co-authors, a cardiologist and a writer, look at the diseases which animals get, which (human) animals get.  (They repeat a joke among vets: "What do you call a physician?  A veterinarian who treats only one species.)

The whole piece is amazing, though obvious, or maybe amazing because obvious, at least once you think about it.  Another reminder of how easy it is for us to fall into tribalism, in this case dividing ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom.

You Can Lead a Child to the Soil, You Can't Make Her Garden

That encapsulates a lesson Mrs. Obama has learned:

Neither Sasha nor Malia appear in photos in the book; they don't like to garden, Mrs. Obama has said during recent interviews.

PicturePHones and Video Teleconferncing

As it happens, I just finished a book on Bell Labs (The Idea Factory) when I saw this IRM notice on FSA video teleconferencing.  (Bell Labs gave us the transistor, fiber optics, communications satellites, cell phones, and information theory, among many other things.)

As almost everything does these days, the conjunction called up memories. Bell Labs came up with the Picturephone in the 60''s, demoed it at the NY World Fair, and released it in a couple of cities.  Though user reaction was favorable at the fair, it fell flat as a consumer product.  The problem was the cost was too high for a communications device where both parties needed the device to communicate.

The book, which I recommend, compared the Picturephone and the cell phone.  The cell phone was also bulky and costly at the beginning, but its big advantage was you could call anyone who had a regular phone or a cell phone with it; it linked you with the existing network and didn't require building a new network.

In the 1980's ASCS tried out a new version of the picturephone (not from AT&T): IRMD got 4-6 devices and I got one to communicate with KCMO.  Again it was a flop--it appealed to the techies but it didn't do much .

A bit later IRMD set up a teleconference center to communicate with KCMO.  We used it for a few teleconferences between programmers and program people, but it required a lot of scheduling and coordination.   We didn't have enough business with KCMO that required the attendance of a lot of people, particularly as we made more use of email. And the value-added of seeing people talk was small.  Our use tailed off to nothing.  I don't know how long IRMD kept it going.

So I've considerable curiosity about the new system in FSA.  The notice indicates it's popular and getting a workout, which is good, but it also sounds complicated which is bad.  It sounds as if it's more capable than something like Skype or similar cheap apps.   On the other hand if I were forced to bet, I'd say FSA probably never did a lot of training on things like Skype.  Am I wrong? It sounds as if it's a dedicated system, separate from the regular communication network, which is a minus.  If people have to share,  they often don't.

I think I commented a while back about the ancillary benefits of conferences/face-to-face meetings (in the context of the uproar over GSA).  The recent bio of Steve Jobs said he was careful to design Apple offices so as to throw people together.  The Bell Labs book says AT&T did the same.  Of course, that's workplace design, not travel conferences, but the principle is the same: people learn from each other and they often learn the most from people they don't work with on a daily basis.

To come back to Claude Shannon and information theory: his measure of "information" says the more redundancy in a message, the less information is conveyed. Most of our daily business is redundant; we do similar things over and over so we don't gain much information and we don't learn.  That's why failure is so good: the first time you try something everything is new, little is redundant, there's lots of learning and lots of information.  That's also why some meetings are good (though not the weekly staff meetings with which I used to bore my employees) provided they introduce new people, new subjects, or new surroundings.

Technology on the Farm

Slate has a discussion of the future of robots on the farm.  The theory is that young farmers come from outside agriculture so don't mind hand work and don't have the money to invest in expensive robots.  On the other hand they're more likely to be techies than the production farmers who are in their 50's, 60's, and 70's, so might be early adopters.    So it's a good, decisive on-the-one-hand, but on-the-other article.

I remember the farmers in Sherman County, KS in 1992 were almost all over 40, which the CED saw as an obstacle to adoption of Infoshare then. That's 20 years ago so a lot of them are now retired, and the number of farmers has probably dropped a good bit.