Harry Potter Kills

According to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, a scientific sampling of people who died in the last year would show that reading Harry Potter novels is strongly correlated with dying young.  If you don't read Harry Potter you're much more likely to live to a ripe old age.  Wish I had known that before I read the series.

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Amazing Sentence of Today: Judges Err

"n ordinary litigation, the judges misunderstand things all the time and reach decisions anyway, and they rarely discover all that they’ve misunderstood.  "

This sentence is from a very good post by Stewart Baker at Volokh Conspiracy discussing the recently declassified FISA court materials.  Don't know whether he's right, but two points he makes:

• the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence which played a disputed role in the failures to prevent 9/11 was unreasonably enforced by Judge Royce Lamberth.
• cultural differences between IT types and legal types may have played a big part in the problems.  (That's an attractive argument to me: I believe in Murphy's Law.)

EWG and Non-Farmers

The EWG has a new report out, entitled "City Slickers Harvest Cash Crop" which Ron Nixon in the NYTimes writes about here, using the hook of the possible extension of farm programs for another year.

EWG has a familiar theme: the inequity of government payments to people who don't get dirt under their nails.  Frankly, I'm surprised the amount here is so low:

 "Residents of America’s 54 largest cities collected more than $24 million in Direct Payment farm subsidies in 2012, according to new research by the Environmental Working Group."

Maybe I've been brainwashed by their previous reports to expect a bigger figure?    I wonder, would this headline sound better to the public: "Heirs of Deceased Farmers Receive Government Dollars"? Of course, we don't know how much is going to heirs, and how much is truly going to Wall Street investors in farmland, but probably the majority of the $24 million.  And it may be that those Wall Streeters who now own farmland have been suckered--if the current high farmland values turns out to be indicators of a bubble, they could be hurt.

EWG has Google maps of the locations of some recipients.  Perhaps significantly, they don't show NYC or Boston.   The distribution of locations in the DC area seems a bit more random than I'd expect; a few markers in the poorer areas, probably showing heirs.

Sailing, Sailing, Through the Arctic

I may have expressed the opinion that the vision of commercial ships sailing around Russia through the Arctic, particularly those sponsored by China, was an indicator of global warming.

Via Tom Ricks at the Best Defense, here's an interesting discussion of the practicality of this.  Bottom line, it's probably not practical for container ships, because they're limited in draft and beam, even though it can be significantly faster.

I recommend a book called The Box, on the development of containers.  This quote from the article is significant:

What is far more important than speed is reliability. Unlike the bulk shipping discussed earlier, schedule integrity is a key service-attribute for containerships. The Arctic will always suffer from periods of poor visibility and the potential for wind-driven ice, both of which can make routes with a comparatively low average transit time have a large variability around that average. More than half of all container cargo is now component-level goods—materials destined for factories for use in production processes operating on a just-in-time-type inventory-management system. That makes consistency, reliability, and schedule integrity of paramount importance. The key goal of container shipping is 99 percent on-time delivery. If this is attainable at all, it will be extraordinarily expensive using Arctic transit routes. Thus the variability in transit time that may be tolerable in bulk shipping is unacceptable for container shipping.

4-H and the Economist

Interesting article praising 4-H in The Economist, implying that it, extension, and land-grant u's account for the differences between US and European agriculture. 

I think not, actually--they contribute but don't "account".

Why Washington Employment in FSA Grows

From a recent GAO report on FSA enforcement of the adjusted gross income limits:

" For example, GAO found errors in 19 of the 22 tax return files it reviewed from FSA offices in two states; one of these errors led to a potentially improper payment of $40,000. FSA headquarters does not monitor state offices' reviews of tax returns to ensure that the offices are applying program guidance consistently and making accurate eligibility determinations, even though federal standards for internal control direct agencies to monitor and assess the quality of performance over time. Also, 2008 Farm Bill provisions requiring a distinction between farm and nonfarm income make it difficult for agency officials to verify if participants' incomes exceed the limits without making errors. Because the statutory limits for farm and nonfarm income differ, to verify such income, FSA officials must comb through sometimes long and complex tax returns to classify and calculate income--a difficult task for those who are not accountants or tax preparers. Recent bills in the House and Senate have proposed using total adjusted gross income instead of farm and nonfarm income, which would reduce the need for FSA to review tax returns."  [emphasis added]

People like to talk about the top-heavy Washington bureaucracy of various agencies, including FSA (yes, I'm looking at you NASCOE).  It's good to mock the proliferation of well-paid bigshots at both departmental and agency levels. But one should also remember that no one outside the agency is ready to trust field (in this case, state office) people to do things 100 percent right and to accept the mistakes if they don't.

I'd praise GAO for recommending simplifying the rules.  I'd also note the indications that some accountants and attorneys actually lie to FSA!  I'm shocked, shocked I say.

Civil Service College

Via Marginal Revolution, here's the "programme" of Singapore's Civil Service College for "Officers" (which I think is their term for front line employees, FSA's equivalent of the county offices.  One item is a 16-hour course in "Responsiveness In Frontline Customer Service: Making Customer Satisfaction A Daily Pleasure".

I've noticed a cultural difference between the other former members of the British Empire and the U.S. in regards to government employees: in the US we call them "bureaucrats" with a pejorative edge; in the other countries, they're "civil servants" or "bureaucrats" used as a neutral term. It may trace to differences in how we established independence (a la David Hackett Fischer's book on the US and New Zealand): we had a revolution against British authority, the face of which was bureaucrat/civil servants.  While Canada, Australia, Singapore, India generally had a more amicable parting of the ways with the "mother country", in which the local people just took over the bureaucracy.

I Think We Look Pretty Good

To this Indian student who writes about his impressions of the U.S.  Hat tip: Marginal Revolution

At least, "pretty good' is my overall impression of his impressions--impressive, isn't it?

My Best Line of the Day

In commenting on a Wonkblog post about whether Americans knew where Damascus and Syria were, I wrote: "Surely the question is not whether Americans know where Damascus is, but whether our targeters know where the Chinese and Russian embassies are."

I thought it was good, but then I realized Ezra Klein is so young he probably was in grade school when we hit the Chinese Embassy during the Kosovo action.   

No one should be that young.

Tip of the Hat

To Diana Nyad.  When I heard two days ago she was trying to swim between  Cuba and the US again, for the umpteenth time, I said she should give up, she's too old.

Turns out she wasn't and I was wrong.