Our Great Postal System

Sarah Kliff at Ezra Klein has a post describing the results of a competition among 159 national postal systems.  The issue was which system was best at identifying nonexistent addresses and returning mail to the senders.  USPS came in first, both accuracy and speed.  Given the size differential among the competitors that's an outstanding result.

The Hole in School Gardens/Local Food for School

This is prompted by something I read a few days ago, on the difficulty of caring for school gardens during summer vacations. [Updated: here's the link.]

The food movement, including Mrs. Obama, has pushed for local food in school cafeterias.  It's also pushed for schools to teach their kids gardening.  Both efforts are laudable; both have a hole.

What's the hole?  Schools, most schools anyway, don't operate year round; they close down during the summer.  So to develop local sources of supply you're asking a farmer to ramp up production in the spring and fall, and idle the operation during the summer, or find another market.  It's doable, I suppose, but it adds in another level of complexity for management.

In contrast if school cafeterias rely on national suppliers and don't limit their requests to fresh food, the suppliers can more easily manage things to provide a flow of food during the school year and direct the flow elsewhere (food processors).  Diversification of the market leads to more stability in price and more resilience in response to disruptions and disasters.

Everyone Has His Own Taste

Stanley Fish reports on life in Delaware County, where some 160 years ago my great grandfather was a Presbyterian minister amid a thriving Scots-Irish community with good barns and nice houses:  It's now been invaded by aesthetes from the city, who say: 

It is anybody’s guess as to what will happen if this rumor [of a big development] ever pans out, and the people I talk to regard the prospect with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. Please no Gaps or Banana Republics, Charkut pleads. I really like falling-down barns and falling-down houses, Valk-Kempthorne tells me.

Curiosity: Sometimes You Do It Right the First Time

But not often.  See this Technology Review post.  However, it's nice to hear of people who stayed up late to know the result of the landing.  Reminds me of the days of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo.

White House Garden

Obamafoodorama has a post showing the President in the White House garden.  I don't recognize the vegetables, but they've got good growth.  Don't know if they have sprinkler irrigation or what--the DC area is down about 7 inches from usual rainfall. 

Farmer Software in the Cloud

The Times has a piece by a business professor describing some software applications, a couple of which reside in the cloud: FarmLogs and Farmeron,.

I suppose the next step will be communication between MIDAS and the data in such applications.

Correcting Errors: Does the Internet Help?

Somewhere on the Net this week there was a discussion of whether the Internet helps or hurts in correcting myths and errors.  It may have been Prof. Bernstein (or maybe someone else) who opined that some errors were checked and caught very quickly, while others persisted on and on and on.

In the latter category is this from Gail Collins in today's Times, in the course of beating up on Congress for not working on the postal system or the farm bill:

The Senate recently voted 64 to 35 to approve a new five-year authorization, which reformed some of the most egregious bad practices, like paying farmers not to grow crops. [emphasis added]

The truth is that we haven't had the authority to pay farmers not to grow crops  for at least 16 years (unless one includes the Conservation Reserve Program, which normally people don't and Ms. Collins is not).   But this error will probably never die, it's like the ejecta from a volcano eruption which has escaped into the atmosphere and persists, dimming the sun of truth.  

Marketing Quotas

FSA goes through the motions of determining whether to declare marketing quotas for upland cotton.  It's a nullity, because there's no way to determine the acreage allotments for cotton if quotas were declared.  If quotas are declared, the next step is to provide notices of farm acreage allotments to farmers, who then vote in a referendum whether to agree to the imposition of quotas.  The last referendum on wheat or cotton was back in the mid 1960's, and it was defeated. 

If Congress had any sense they'd kill the 1938 Act, the permanent legislation which comes back into effect whenever there's no farm bill passed before a crop year begins.

The Importance of Drudgery: Maintenance

As it happens, the Post has an article on Afghanistan, describing a post and equipment the Americans handed over to the Afghans which they lack the ability to maintain. And the Times has an article on the problems Assad's military is having maintaining its high-tech equipment, particularly helicopters, during the current hostilities.

The conjunction of the two is an occasion to once again observe the importance of drudgery.  Yes, it's ego-building to do things the first time, to buy fancy weapons, to give high-tech stuff to our allies.  It's good for us, it's good for our arms manufacturers, but it's bad.  Over the years I think I was pretty tolerant of my bosses, but what I couldn't stand was the people who had no regard for nitty-gritty, for the details, for all the steps needed to implement something and then, as I learned by painful experience, the need to spend time and money maintaining what we'd done.  It was all too easy for the big shots, for the guys in the ivory tower of the USDA Administration Building, to talk big.

Though I'm generally an Obama supporter, his administration started off wrong by talking of "shovel-ready" projects, as the President later admitted.  There shouldn't be many such projects in any agency, because you should be working on the stuff for which you have money, and not the stuff for which you may not get money.  And doing the work to take projects off the shelf and into the contracting process isn't likely to create many jobs.

Maintenance on the other hand could create jobs, but its got no sex appeal, no glamor. 

Me and Chipmunks

Via Ann Althouse, here's a piece with which I sympathize.  I have to admit, though, I reverted to my basic conservative side when I had to deal with an infestation of chipmunks in my garden.  Chipmunks are cute, but property is property and my vegetables are my vegetables.  I'm not sure what the food movement, all those urban gardeners, etc., do with the forces of nature against which we must fight.  Maybe you only get lots of pests when you've been gardening for lots of years.