GAO Disses Direct Payments

GAO issued a report yesterday critical of FSA 's direct payment programs.

They ding them on several grounds, but I'd highlight the last:

Oversight: Oversight of direct payments is weak. With regard to oversight, USDA has not systematically reported on land that may no longer be eligible for direct payments because it has been converted to nonfarm uses, as required for annual reporting to Congress. In addition, GAO identified weaknesses in USDA’s end-of-year compliance review process. For example, USDA conducts relatively few reviews and generally does not complete these reviews within expected time frames.

Their recommendations for USDA/FSA:

• "...develop and implement a systematic process to report on land that may no longer be usable for agriculture, as required for annual reporting to Congress.
• ...ensure the more timely and consistent regular collection and distribution of geospatial imagery needed to corroborate that payments are only made for lands usable for agriculture.
• ...consider options within given budget constraints to improve FSA’s end-of-year reviews by selecting a larger sample of cases to review and ensuring that these reviews are completed in a timely manner.
• ...maintain comprehensive data on misrepresentation and enforcement actions taken nationwide, as needed for management oversight and reporting purposes."

 The main thrust of the report is for Congress to end direct payment programs:

"Direct payments generally do not align with the principles significant to integrity, effectiveness, and efficiency in farm bill programs that GAO identified in an April 2012 report. These payments align with the principle of being “distinctive,” in that they do not overlap or duplicate other farm programs. However, direct payments do not align with five other principles. Specifically, they do not align with the following principles:

• Relevance: When the precursors to direct payments were first authorized in 1996 legislation, they were expected to be transitional, but subsequent legislation passed in 2002 and 2008 has continued these payments as direct payments. However, in April 2012, draft legislation for reauthorizing agricultural programs through 2017 proposed eliminating direct payments.
• Targeting: Direct payments do not appropriately distribute benefits consistent with contemporary assessments of need. For example, they are concentrated among the largest recipients based on farm size and income; in 2011, the top 25 percent of payment recipients received 73 percent of direct payments.
• Affordability: Direct payments may no longer be affordable given the United States’ current deficit and debt levels.
• Effectiveness: Direct payments may have unintended consequences. Direct payments may have less potential than other farm programs to distort prices and production, but economic distortions can result from these payments. For example, GAO identified cases where direct payments support recipients who USDA officials said own farmland that is not economically viable in the absence of these payments.''

Locavores and Vulnerability

I mentioned the storm which hit the Mid-Atlantic states had gone through Reston.  The local Safeway got its power back yesterday, but its stock of perishable food, particularly frozen food, is still being rebuilt.  I think it reflects the extent to which the food chain has adopted the "just-in-time" logic of Japanese car makers from the 1980's, which was a hot meme in the 1990's. 

The discussion in the Post of the impact of the storm included observations from local vendors of high-end meat, including one perhaps apocryphal statement that his butcher had 80 head of cattle which he had to dispose of.  At first it sounded unlikely to me, but thinking about the practicalities makes it more likely.  Consider an operation where a butcher/meat packer buys cattle.  He's set up to move the cattle from the feed lot/ranch to his slaughterhouse where they'll be killed and cut into products he can ship out to his stores.  He knows how much meat his stores can take; he knows how long his refrigerated trucks will take to get the products to the store; he knows how long it will take to slaughter and butcher the animals. 

Simple economics means he should speed the animals through as fast as possible; that's good for the bottomline, reduces the amount of capital needed, and incidentally probably serves the animals well. So what happens when the storm comes through and the stores call up and say, no deliveries until we notify you we've got power back?  He's probably got no storage, no way to hold inventory.  He maybe could load up his trucks and keep their refrigeration units running, but that won't hold much surplus. If he's got 80 head of cattle in the lot, he's not set up to feed and care for the animals, certainly not humanely.

There's a Chaplin or Lucille Ball short where one end of an assembly line stops and the rest keeps going--that's what can happen here.

The point of my reflections is this: though I often question the advocates of the food movement, they've got one thing right:  our modern integrated food production and distribution system is efficient, but it's vulnerable.  Simply because of its integration, a disruption wreaks more damage than with the locavore system. 

Our Christian Nation Founded in Sin?

John Fea reports that one conservative scholar believes it was unChristian to rebel against Britain. 

Lonesome George: RIP

Via NYTimes, the last Galapagos tortoise of his subspecies is dead.

Ginsu: Made in the U.S. of A

Another illusion shattered.  I wonder if the implication of the previous sentence is true: do we start life with a defined set of illusions (Santa Claus, tooth fairy, etc.) and gradually they're shattered one by one so that by the end of life we face reality with no illusions?  Or is the truth that we create new illusions as we lose the old ( housing prices can go up continuously,etc.0 so that I'm now seeing the world through a whole new set of illusions?

Anyhow, the NYTimes has an obit of Barry Becher, in which it reveals the shattering truth: the ginsu knife was made in Ohio.  Not only that, "ginsu" has no meaning in Japanese. 

A tangent: this is interesting.  I remember the first things I ever saw which were made in Japan: a couple cheap mock fighter planes with friction motors, which may not be the right word but when you pushed them along a flat surface, they made an engine like noise.  This was probably 1949 or so, the time when "Japanese" meant "cheap" and "junk", at least if it didn't mean something more hateful.  So from that point to 1978 the image and associations with the word changed completely. Still a bit exotic, but completely believable that Japan could export great knives, which could do miracles.

How the World Changes: Stylish Russian Women

The Times had an article today discussing fashionable and rich Russian women.  For some reason I found that amazing; maybe because I remember Nina Khruscheva, Nikita's wife, who for the 1950's and 1960's stood as a model for Soviet women.  Hard to find a picture of her, so I'll steal this from Brown University.

Anyhow "stylish" was never used in connection with Soviet women.  Nor was "fabulous".  As proof, I did Google searches for "stylish Soviet women" and "stylish Russian women".  Six hits for the former, 5600 for the latter.

A Derecho?

While I was sleeping a derecho moved through Reston and on east.  Reports of 450,000 power outages in Dominion's Northern Virginia area, out of roughly 850,000 served.  2 deaths and lots of disruption. One tree went down near the house, but fortunately fell parallel to the townhouses so not much damage. One power outage at Reston parkway and east, but we're west, so we have power and internet, if not phone or TV.

And I slept through it all.
[Updated with link]
[Updated to correct the name to "derecho ]

On Obesity and Exercise, and Children

I'm going to relapse into geezerhood and say the reason Americans are so far is they use strollers for their children.  It's a good way to containerize and control your kids, but it doesn't get them used to exercising.

The other day coming back from the garden I encountered a woman pushing a 2x stroller with a couple kids sprawling across the seats.  Granted, if the three of them were walking, the woman would have had problems; the kids looked as if they'd be two handfuls.

I was reading something somewhere the musings of a person who observed really young children in a foreign society being useful and handling dangerous tools, like a machete at age 3.   Now that's a tad young.  If I remember I was kept out of the barn until I was 5 or so, parents thought it was too dangerous.  But I was anxious to help, to prove I was old enough to do something.  That's not something usually possible for today's suburban kids.

Where I Used to Work: South Building

The photo is from a Government Executive piece on the House ag appropriations bill,  which leads off:

The White House is challenging a move by House Republican appropriators to deny the Agriculture Department any funds in fiscal 2013 for repair and upkeep of its buildings.

The South Building has been undergoing renovation over several years; not sure how far they've gotten.  Some factoids about it:  used to be the largest office building in the US (supposedly the world), see wikipedia; covers two blocks; the legend was the architect had just completed a prison for Michigan or somebody and he used those plans as the basis, may hold about 10,000 of USDA's employees.

It's "South" because the USDA Administration Building (AKA "the ivory tower" of Chet Adell) is on the north side of Independence Avenue.  The picture is taken from the NE corner of the intersection of 12th St NW and Independence, with one of the two exits from the Metro's Smithsonian station in the recess just visible.  Also visible is the disabled entrance required by ADA, as  well as one of DC's food/souvenir trucks.

Minitel and Compuserve

The Times has a story on the impending demise in France of Minitel. Minitel was once the very popular French version of the Internet, or rather an intranet since it was all proprietary hardware and software.  The French were way ahead of the rest of the world with computerization in the home.  The U.S. had some experiments, which failed, one of which was by Time-Warner, but the French developed such a widespread platform even Norwegian bachelor farmers in Brittainy adopted it, using it to maintain the registrations of their cows, etc. 

But since it was proprietary and not open, it's lost out in the competition with the Internet and PC's, lost out at least in the marketplace if not in the hearts of some of those aforesaid farmers.

Compare France with the U.S.  Compuserve was an early networking outfit, but because we already had PC's penetrating the market it was software only; the hardware was PC's.  Compuserve was eventually ousted and then bought by AOL, which reached for the stars in merging with Time-Warner, only to fail in competition with the open interface of Internet browsers.  Sic transit gloria mundi.