Best Sentence of the Day

"I have always been quite happy with the skin I’m in, though I will now admit that there is more of me in the skin than before."

Beauregarde on growing older.

FSA and Drones

Here's a NYtimes blog post on the proliferation of drones in civilian life.  We already have a college offering a bachelor's degree in them.  One of the uses people imagine for them is agriculture.  And there's this from an article in the print Times on the same subject.

"Mr. Anderson, in contrast, said that later this year, his company would introduce a helicopter for agricultural surveillance that would sell for less than $1,000. “That’s not per hour, that’s for the helicopter,” he said."

 Sounds to me like aerial photography is going to see a paradigm change.

A Good Sentence on Rome

"There were customs duties, credit mechanisms and even the odd 'pop-up' shop for merchandise that had fallen off the back of a chariot…." from Brad DeLong, quoting from a piece describing the variety of markets in ancient Rome.

The Mysteries of France

From Mr. Beauregarde's blog:

" In France we have three choices of fuel at the pump – two star and four star unleaded petrol – which in France is classified by its octane content 95 for 2 star and 98 for 4 star – we also have diesel. A staggering two thirds of French cars run on diesel, and with good reason, a litre of diesel at the pump is on average 20 Euro centimes cheaper than a litre of petrol."

"successive governments ran scrappage schemes to try and get as many petrol cars off the road as possible. Well, petrol (although unleaded) was dangerous. Petrol fumes were far more harmful than diesel fumes, so via a system of generous « cashbacks » motorists were encouraged to trade in their old petrol guzzling cars for « cleaner » diesel cars. At the height of the scrappage schemes, anyone owning a petrol driven car over eight years old, could trade it in for a brand new diesel car and get a 1000 Euro cashback, generally given in the form of a reduction on the new car. Many dealerships often doubled the premium. The results were twofold. Not only did we all buy diesel cars, but also we bought small « economical » cars."

Why is gasoline  so much higher octane than in the States?

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.