The Importance of Fat

You only know what's important when you begin to lose it.  Fat is important, both for humans and for bureaucracy.

Taking a pro-fat position goes against the grain. I've always been slender, got down to 135 when I got out of the Army, got up to 155 towards the end of my days as a lazy, overpaid govmint bureaucrat.  And while I've overcome some of my prejudices, I have to admit I've some reservations about the obese. It's always seemed more important to me to do something, rather than just sit and jiggle.

I'm getting old. I know because in certain positions my skin is slack over my bones and muscles, my subcutaneous fat is fading away and I can see what I will look like if I make it into my 80's mid 70's.. It's distressing, best handled by denial.

While the headlines continue to be about increasing obesity in the nation, some research suggests being skinny isn't good.  Why? Fat is a reserve of energy, a savings account you can draw upon if and when you get sick. Skinny people don't have the reserve so they don't recover from illness as well; sometimes they don't recover at all.

Politicians love to attack fat, not so much obesity, though Mrs. Obama does a good job, but fat in the form of the "bloated bureaucracy". (The peak use of that phrase seems to be around 1994, the revolution led by Rep. Gringrich.)  Currently Mr. Romney is pledging to cut federal employees while President Obama says he wants a "lean government".

I want to be a bit contrarian, defending the idea of a less than lean government.  A bit of "fat" can improve the way government looks/works.  For example, take the DMV.  Suppose  one DMV employee can handle 20 customers a day, and the DMV office expects to serve 100 customers a day.  So "lean government" means you staff the office with 5 employees, right?  Maybe so, but unless you can ensure that customers arrive at regular intervals throughout the day, you won't provide good and timely service.

A less than lean government can also be important in cases of sudden change.  For example, President Obama decided to permit children of undocumented immigrants to remain in the US for up to 2 years.  That was a change of policy, and the USCIS had a big job quickly to work up the forms, processes, and software to handle the applications.  I don't know what they did, but my guess is they didn't have time to hire employees, so they likely drew upon their "fat", relieving their best employees of routine work and assigning it to less capable employees, the "fat".  They undoubtedly used overtime and contracts as well, but the fat was important.  

The Sweet Sugar of Bureaucracy

Government Executive linked to this video from a Parks and Recreation show.  Maybe I should watch?

Farm Program Support in OECD

Keith Good has a summary of an OECD report comparing levels of farm support among different nations.  Basically because commodity prices have gone up, the level of support (i.e., program payments as percent of total income) has gone down.  As usual the US is below the EU.

Life-Cycle Citizenship

I want to try to push this concept, given the problems in having a reasonable discussion with the current "makers" and "takers" stuff, and based on my consciousness of coming to the close of my lifecycle.

Over the course of a lifetime, people are always dependent at some times and usually are productive at others. So the percentage of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes is higher than 47 percent, because that statement includes both the young and the old.  There's exceptions: people on social security start paying income taxes when their income exceeds $25,000 (a fact I just had to look up), and people on civil service retirement (moi) pay income tax on the portion of their annuity representing the government's contribution.  And, as has been discussed extensively on liberal blogs, employed people pay the payroll tax, drinkers and smokers pay the excise tax, drivers pay the gas tax, etc.

[Updated: Matt Yglesias.]

"School Spirit" and Football

Apparently the boom years of the 1920's also saw a boom in discussions of "school spirit", according to this Google ngram search.. I'm not sure what's going on there.  Maybe it reflects the "high school movement" described in wikipedia:

The high school movement is a term used in educational history literature to describe the era from 1910 to 1940 during which secondary schools sprouted across the United States. During this early part of the 20th century, American youth entered high schools at a rapid rate, mainly due to the building of new schools, and acquired skills "for life" rather than "for college." In 1910 less than 20% of 15- to 18-year-olds were enrolled in a high school; less than 10% of all American 18-year-olds graduated. By 1940, 73% of American youths were enrolled in high school and the median American youth had a high school diploma.^[1] The movement began in New England but quickly spread to the western states. According to Claudia Goldin, the states that led in the U.S. high school movement (e.g. Iowa and Nebraska) had a cohesive, homogeneous population and were more affluent, with a broad middle-class group.^[2][3]

NRCS IT Type

Federal Computer Week Government Executive profiles the whippersnapper who now heads up NRCS IT.

It's fine, but it sounds as if NRCS only got a website when she came aboard, which is wrong.

I've never been very impressed with their website, and it appears it's been revised now, which may be the project which failed twice before.  I do see they have a my.nrcs.usda.gov site.  I'm not clear whether farmers can get services on the website--probably.

I'm not sure what is meant by saying the website is accessible to both external and internal user base. Maybe they're saying the NRCS intranet is accessible through the home page?

Finally in my nitpicking is the claim NRCS is the second biggest USDA agency.  Not sure that's correct, if you add together FSA's federal and county employees, but then NRCS could add in their district employees as well. [Updated to correct error]

The "Makers" and the "Takers": White House Bees

There's no better evidence for the truth of Gov. Romney's position than this report from Obamafoodorama. 

It seems those "takers" in the White House have been exploiting the industrious little "makers" who inhabit the beehives on the grounds, exploiting with this predictable result:

"The beehive this year produced 175 pounds of honey, down from the very large 2011 harvest of 225 pounds. In 2009, the hive produced 143 pounds, and in 2010 it produced 184 pounds."

 In other words, the "makers" have lost their incentives so their production is dwindling away.

"Free the White House Bees"

Sardonic Enjoyment on the Farm Bill

Because my life is not impacted by the progress or nonprogress of the farm bill, I can be amused by the gyrations in the House, as reported by Politico and Farm Policy.  Because I'm a Democrat, my amusement is increased because the Republicans appear to be having a tad more difficulty with its politics.

One thing you can always rely on Congress for, as previously observed by Mark Twain, Mr. Dooley, and Will Rogers: amusement.

Sustainable Ag on Sequestration

I've a lot of respect for the work Sustainable Ag does in tracking Congress and the administration.  Here they discuss the impact of sequestration on farm programs.  The headline is that crop insurance is defined as a prior legal obligation and therefore not subject to sequestration. 

Robot-Ready Cows? Humane Dairying

Having just posted on dairy, I might as well go whole cow.

Here's an interesting piece on the extensive adoption of robots in dairying (I owe a hat tip, but not sure to whom).  Some excerpts:

Many dairy kids [like me] leave the farm because they see their parents slave away in milking parlors twice a day, seven days a week, with never a vacation or even a break for the children's baseball games. With robots, a mechanical arm handles the milking and each cow chooses its own routine, leaving farmers with more time for family and flexibility for other chores.  

Groetsch says the gamble was worth it. The family's small squadron of farm droids, which includes a mechanical cow-back scratcher and an automatic feed pusher, has turned their barn into a 24-hour operation, with less hired help.

The 3,000-pound, red robo-milkers work around the clock, except for twice-daily cleaning sessions. They also eliminate the chore of corralling cows for milking: After being trained to accept the robot, cows get milked whenever they please. The robot measures their production and knows if a cow needs to be milked more or less often

Immigration has a role here; the Dutch are pioneers in dairy technology, Hispanics have more and more come to find their place as hired help on dairy farms.