The Paperless Office

I remember when IRMD (IT types) was promising the System/36 would mean the paperless office. That didn't work out. But we may be working towards the newspaperless society, given the shutdown of this paper company's last newsprint machine.

Google Reader Is Doomed, and So Am I

One of the problems of growing old is maintenance.  Just getting going in the morning takes a while.  Have to do my 15 minutes of back exercises each day just to keep from having a sore back on a regular basis.  (It works--one visit to the doctor has averted lots of pain, but doing the routine is a pain...)  "Maintenance" also includes the obsolescence of one's knowledge. 

Back in the day when we first got our telephone it was a party line, and you had a crank to turn to ring the bell.  One long ring got you the operator, and a combination of longs and shorts was the code for each of the four or five other households on the line.  Now I was never physically coordinated, so when I first had occasion to use the phone my ringing was atrocious. I'd stutter on the long ring, making it sound like two shorts, etc. so you'd have to apologize to the person who answered because it was the wrong number. 

Anyhow, after time and practice, I finally got good with the phone.  Then of course we got it replaced with the old dial handset, which required a new set of skills...etc. etc.

What triggered this nostalgia? Almost anything these days gets me going but the announcement that Google was killing its Google software this summer is the trigger.  I've used it for years to follow a bunch of blogs and some other websites.  And now I'm faced with finding a new RSS reader, and learning it.  That's maintenance, and that's a problem.

"Appoint Someone With Authority..."

One of the old standbys of government bureaucracy is this: you elevate the issue/area which is important (to you) by asking that the big boss assign it to someone who reports to her.   Or, if you're Congress or the President, you direct that the issue/area be given a lofty title and moved up the bureaucratic ladder.

Does this work?  I'm cynical.  I think the result is mostly pro forma, just resulting in multiplying the number of titles and the amount of bureaucracy. In real life any manager has only a certain number of hours in her day and she's going to spend her energies on the important issues and talk with the people in charge of those important issues.  Usually that means that things like administration, finance, technology, open government, HR, don't get much attention, at least until they make a noise in the Washington Post, on Fox, or on Twitter.


(The title is taken from something I saw on line--perhaps dealing with declassification or FOIA, but it applies to many areas.)

The Decline of WASP Culture

The American Spectator gloats a bit over the decline of mainline Protestantism, as represented by the National Council of Churches and the Rockefellers.

Customer Satisfaction

Recently got my car serviced at the dealers (which doesn't happen often because I don't drive much).  There were a couple followup customer satisfaction surveys, and the counter guy (not the right designation but the guy who wrote up my paperwork) said his pay depended on my satisfaction.

I mention this because I've never run into this followup with any government office, whether FSA, DMV, SSA, IRS, or whoever.  I don't know why.

Actually I do: government agencies figure their customer has to come to them and government appropriators see no need to provide money to measure customer satisfaction.

Though I dinged Al Gore for his Reinventing Government initiative, I think I remember that he tried to emphasize customer satisfaction. At least back when management was looking at county service agencies there was a survey Len C. ran.  I'm a bit skeptical of both the one-time survey and the followup one like the car dealer did.  I doubt the data is really accurate because I tend to be over generous, but I do think trends, particularly in the followup ones, would be informative. 

The Pioneers Get Arrows in the Back

I suppose that title is not politically correct, but it is a metaphor for a corollary of Harshaw's rule ("you never do things right the first time").  The latest example I've run across: Reston 50 years ago installed air conditioning using Lake Anne water. (Back then Reston was the epitome of what today we'd call crunchy trendiness.)  While cutting edge then, it's had problems in the last couple decades.

Maybe the better metaphor is, if you're a pioneer of what is supposed to be a better trail, you may end up eating things you don't want to, like the Donner party.

Crop Insurance and Politics

Chris Clayton reports on bills introduced in Congress to cut crop insurance.  It attracts an unusual number of comments, partly because the thread degenerates a bit (though farmers are still more polite than politicians.)

Program Time and Real Time

This excerpt from notice PL-251  spurs my memory:

In the past, changes made to data related to “actively engaged in farming”, cash rent tenant, member information, etc., simply overrode the previous information recorded. But since the determinations related to the information collected on CCC-902 are continuous, the concept of the Business File application is that the determinations are effective for a specific period of time until the plan is revised and new determinations are made by COC. At any point, users should be able to view the producer’s farm operating plans to get an historical view of the changes made to the operation.

This concept is similar to new functionality that is being developed through the MIDAS effort so it is important that State and County Office users understand the concept and how changes made in error affect the historical information available. The reason a “delete” option is not available in the system is because of the need to maintain the historical data.

The problem in the data model always is mapping reality to program requirements.  In the real world, a death, a change of ownership, etc. occurs at any time, which to me argues for specifying the date of such change. But then the question is how the event is applied to program requirements, which is another kettle of fish, and not an easy set of fish to fry.

When we automated operations on the System/36 we seemed to have two options offered by the IT types: continuous files (i.e., name and address, farm file) or year-specific files (acreage reporting, contracts). That meant the clerk/PA had to translate in her head the significance of new/changed data into the meaning for the applicable program and year.  Experience showed those didn't work well enough, so we gradually added time data to some (beginning and end years in the farm producer file) and created year-specific records within others (eligibility file).  That helped, but changing file structure was always a major commitment of programming and testing time, so it was hard to justify with our other priorities.


I wonder: is Ctrl-Z a standard in MIDAS, because while good data should be retained, there's always the need to back out bad data.

Justifying War: Rationale Versus Results

Ta-Nehisi Coates blogged yesterday on the Iraq war, triggered by this James Fallows post, which Kevin Drum also commented on here. Fallows' original point was that we Americans have usually inflated the threat we face, whether in Iraq or elsewhere on the international scene.

The general thrust of the three posts, plus the commentary on the TNC post, is that we've been lied into war (a big oversimplification because the commentary was more thoughtful and various) in the past and wars/military interventions were not worthwhile from America's viewpoint.

I took the contrarian position, as you might expect, and pushed back, citing Kosovo and Korea as examples, which I'm not going to repeat here.  But thinking about Truman and Korea last night I believe there's often a big gap between the rationale for an intervention and what the results actually are, some years down the road. :

1. In the case of our intervention in Iran, overthrowing Mossadegh and reinstating the shah, the rationale was defeating a leftist, pinko leader and supporting someone we could work with. The result we've seen after 60 years is our actions led to a religious dictatorship. 
2. In the case of our intervention in Korea, we thought we were keeping the communists from taking over the whole peninsula.  The result we've seen after 62 years is our actions led to the development of the 15th biggest economy in the world. 
3. In the case of our intervention in Iraq II, the result hasn't matched the rationale.

Maybe the bottom line is that we never really know what we're doing, so we just do our best.

Crop Insurance and Organics

Sustainable AGriculture highlighted RMA's dropping of the 5 percent surcharge for organic insurance, which seems to have been counterbalanced by their acceptance of OIG recommendations on transitional yields and loss adjustment for organic crops.

This OIG report finds that FCIC/RMA has been offering "transitional yields" (the crop yields assigned to a farm for years when there's no actual production history availabe) for organically grown crops which are too high.  For example, if the transitional yield is 125 bushels an acre for organically grown corn, and the true yield is 11...  Congress has pushed the expansion of crop insurance to organic crops, RMA has responded, but had a contractor evaluate the experience. Excerpts:

The contractor recommended that transitional yields be lowered by 35 percent for insurance plans that use APH yields as the basis for the production guarantee in order to better reflect experience data and lower loss ratios. RMA acknowledges that transitional yields for organic crops are generally too high, but has not implemented the recommendation because it considers the production data currently available to be too “thin” to support a methodology for setting separate transitional yields for organic crops.

We found that insured producers for 35 of 48 organic crop policies with losses did not have production histories supporting that they could grow the insured crops to reach the yields used to determine the production guarantee or amount of insurance.16 This occurred because RMA directs AIPs to apply transitional yields and underwriting standards established for crops produced using conventional farming practices to crops produced using organic farming practices. As a result, at least $952,000 of $2.56 million in indemnities that RMA underwrote were excessive. In addition, insured producers with organic crops experienced a programwide loss ratio of 105 percent.17 In contrast, insureds with conventional crops experienced a loss ratio of only 67 percent.

OIG also found the loss adjusters did not follow procedures for adjusting organic crops.·

Twenty-two stated that the AIPs do not require them to obtain and/or review the organic plan and inspection report.
·
Seven said that the loss adjustment requirements for adjusting crops produced using organic farming practices were no different than for crops produced using conventional farming practices.
·
Five stated that the agent and underwriter collected the organic plan and inspection report.
·
Five loss adjusters gave varying reasons for not obtaining and reviewing the organic plans and inspection reports.

 Bottom line: Organic crops can't actually match conventional cropping in yields, at least not on available data.  It will take years to build the data and the loss adjusting experience to do a good job on organics.