Dead Customers--Warning to Government List Managers

I stumbled on this while reading an FSA notice:

"The Death Master File Report identifies customers who were updated as deceased in Business Partner during the initial migration. This was a one -time process run from the Death Master File (DMF) from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and approximately 1.7 million customers were updated as deceased. County Offices will not receive work list items for customers on this list as all customers were updated with a date of death and the death was automatically confirmed."

What it says is FSA's master name and address file, probably about 6-8 million names, wasn't being maintained for deaths, so when FSA matched the file against SSA's records, 1.7 records fell out.   I suspect this is a hazard for all lists maintained by big organizations: there's no immediate apparent cost to keeping a record on file and there's an obvious cost removing it.  It takes time to remove a record or flag it as dead, and there's always the chance of error.  So it's easier, cheaper, and safer not to touch the file.

Problem is, leaving the dead on file leads to mistakes, most notoriously payments to dead farmers, and potential security problems.  How many thrillers have you read where someone establishes a fake identity using the name/ID of a dead person?

I believe, back in the old days before System/36, the KCMO mainframe files were routinely matched against SSA death files.  But when we went to the 36, because that process was done once a year or so, it fell through the cracks.  As we used to say in the Army: sorry bout that.

Another Appeal for Typography in the FAA

James Fallows has blogged about the Asiana crash.  This is the last bit from one post:

"* Here is the text of the "NOTAM," or Notice to Airmen, announcing the limited ILS status. The opaqueness of the terminology is unfortunately typical of the Telex-era legacy coding of aviation announcements, but professional pilots would know what it means. In essence it says that at SFO airport the ILS glide path would be OTS WEF -- "out of service with effect from" June 11, 2103:

"SFO 06/005 SFO NAV ILS RWY 28L GP OTS WEF 1306011400-1308222359

CREATED: 01 Jun 2013 13:40:00 

SOURCE: KOAKYFYX"

Now I've great confidence in the ability of professional pilots: I'm sure evolution over the years has created a breed of super beings who don't need any of the aids us ordinary humans need to understand a message.  And this breed inhabits all the corners of the world, and regardless of native language is thoroughly schooled in acronyms. 

But please, give me a break.  We don't use Telex these days.  People under 50 have never even heard of it.  We have lots and lots of bandwidth, so there's no need for concise messages, if conciseness comes at the expense of clarity.   It really is true that upper and lower case are more legible than all upper case, that words are clearer than acronyms, and brevity is not always a virtue.

I'm not up to doing a lot of research, but there's a link there to the FAA website.  I wonder whether pilots could, by clicking a cursor on a map, pull up all the messages pertaining to a specific airport which are still in effect?  Seems like a simple application of technology.

I believe the State Department has finally abandoned all caps; it's time for FAA.

[Note:  this is one of my pet peeves, I don't see my label for it.]

Schadenfreude Towards Locavores

Schadenfreude means enjoying others' misfortune.  I find I enjoy it when people are very self-righteous and self-confident, and then stumble, as in the case of locavores who enthusiastically went into the raising of backyard chickens.

Two articles reporting on people who don't know what to do when hens stop laying eggs.

Post Raisin -- Not the Cereal

The Washington Post has a Style piece on the raisin farmer in California who's violating the terms of the raisin marketing agreement and won an interim victory at the Supreme Court this term.

I don't know enough about this marketing agreement, or the other agreements, to be comfortable in any detailed commentary on the case.

What I do know is this:  agricultural producers in the 1930's had very little power in the market--they had to accept whatever prices the buyers would offer.  The perception then was the imbalance in pricing power between producers and buyers resulted in an unstable market, with wide swings in price as producers over-produced in response to good products, creating surpluses.  Because the demand for food is usually inelastic, it takes a big drop in prices to clear the market of surpluses.  

Hence the cartelization of commodity producers, whether tobacco producers in the 1930s, or oil producers in the 1970's.  In the area of fruit and vegetables the cartels took the form of marketing agreements.  (I'm in danger of confusing marketing agreements with research and promotion agreements, which try to increase demand without controlling supply.  Both types may be initially approved by producer referendums.)

IMHO the question today is whether there are other mechanisms available to producers?  For example, the price of eggs went up and down rapidly in the 1940's and 50's, reflecting the same sort of free market mechanics.  My mother got very disgusted with those farmers who'd expand production when the price was high, knowing the sure result would be low prices a year later.  (She didn't believe in following self-interest; one should look out for the greater good.)

But unlike Canada (I think) the US never had an egg cartel.  And what happened?  Contract growers happened.  Big companies contracted with growers to produce eggs and poultry as innovation paved the way for 100,000 chicken houses.   That process of consolidation meant lots of small poultry producers went out of business, but those who remained faced much less risk because the industry was vertically integrated. 

That's happened in other areas, but mechanisms like futures and forward contracting seem also to have played a part, not to mention crop insurance.  If we were re-creating the raisin industry from scratch, would we have a marketing agreement, or some other mechanism to reduce price risk?

Puffing Agriculture Just a Tad

From the Farm Bureau's New York website:

"Agriculture is New York‘s most important industry. The farm economy generated $4.45 billion in 2008."  It goes on to cite New York's 35,000 farms

From this site

New York's gross state product in 2001 was $826.5 billion, 2nd only to California, to which financial services contributed $282.9 billion; general services, $190.2 billion; trade, $103.5 billion; government, $81.2 billion; manufacturing, $77.7 billion; transportation and public utilities, $59.3 billion, and construction, $17.4 billion. The public sector in 2001 constituted 9.8% of gross state product, tied with New Jersey for the 5th-lowest percent among the states where the average was 12%.

Best Practices, Reinvented

I am reading a biography of Seaman Knapp, sometimes called the father of the extension service.

One of the big problems in agriculture around 1900 was dissemination.  Researchers at the experiment stations and people in the field had identified ways to grow more and better plants and animals, but they couldn't convince farmers to change their habits and adopt new methods.

The description was reminiscent of the "best practices" fad in the 1990's: the idea that business consultants could identify what the best organizations were doing and then inject them into other organizations.

Lots of reasons why the idea doesn't work nearly as well as it ought to.  For one thing, a "best practice" identified by an outsider is likely to oversimplify, to miss some features of the organization's culture which are critical to success.  And importing a "best practice" under the auspices of some high-paid outsider is likely to raise the hackles (does anyone these days know what a "hackle" is) of the people who've been doing the work, in their minds pretty successfully.

[Updated: see this Technology Review post on why Silicon Valley can't be duplicated.]

The Modern Sisyphus or Diogenes

In the Sisyphus myth, the king was fated to roll a stone uphill forever, each only to see it roll back down.  That was my first thought in considering the blog The Daily Howler, written by Bob Somerby.

Mr. Somerby seems always to be disappointed by the truthfulness of media, particularly mainstream media.  The "always" brought Sisyphus to mind, but then I see the king's offense against the gods was to be deceitful and to try to outwit Zeus himself.  So that doesn't work particularly well.

So then I thought of Diogenes, who supposedly wandered the world with lamp in hand, looking for and not finding an honest man.  Maybe that's closer; Mr. Somerby is our modern Diogenes.  Perhaps fitting, since Diogenes was a Cynic.

Or maybe we're fellows under the skin, both nitpickers supreme. 

Anyhow, I recommend occasional dips in the blog, though perhaps Mr. Somerby is wandering the blogosphere with lamp in hand, searching for and not finding the Art of Brevity.

Taxing CRP Payments

The title of this post at Sustainable Ag,  U.S. Tax Court: Federal Self-Employment Tax Applies to Non-Farmer’s CRP Payment,pretty well describes the content.

 It interests me because it involves determining that the owner of land in CRP is not automatically in the business of farming (assuming I understand it correctly).  The theory seems to be that while the owner is being compensated for activities required by the CRP contract, that's not farming but a business.

The EU, Payment Limits, Conservation, and WTO

One of the features of "Freedom to Farm", the 1996 direct payments program, was that it complied with WTO restrictions, meaning basically it didn't affect what crops were grown or not grown.  Regardless of what the farmer did, she was guaranteed the payment as long as she didn't sell the land for a suburban development.   The vision at that time, the height of the Washington consensus,  was that the world was gradually moving away from government subsidies and intervention in agricultural affairs.  Oxfam and other international groups beat the U.S. around the head and shoulders for the distortions introduced by our farm programs, particularly the adverse effects of the cotton program on Third World cotton producers.  But 17 years have passed since that law was enacted and the climate of opinion in the world has changed.  It looks as if we'll replace the direct payments program with crop insurance subsidies without much concern for WTO rules, even though the subsidies obviously affect what's planted.   Has the Great Recession created more tolerance for government intervention, more economic nationalism?

This BBC piece (hat tip John Phipps) shows some of the factors also affecting the EU's redo of their farm policy.

The Importance of What's Underneath

MIT's Technology Review reports on research explaining "fairy circles"., at least those in grassland mostly in South Africa.  It seems it's caused by competition among plant roots.