A USDA Benefactor of Humanity Dies

Bet you didn't think anyone in USDA ever benefited humanity?  Well, Ruth Benerito was the scientist who's given credit for permanent press.  Link is to her NYTimes obit at age 97.   Wikipedia said she had 55 patents.

I can't resist noting that USDA laboratories are now shutdown, thanks to a certain party.

Healthcare and the Amish

Always fascinated by the Amish, who are exempted from ACA (Obamacare) because they were exempted from Social Security way back in the last century, as this article describes.

The article doesn't mention the Amish occasionally being medical tourists--i.e., traveling to Mexico for some operations, something about which I've read in the last couple years.

Ezra Klein Differs on ACA Software

Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein are notably more damning of the Obama administrations healthcare exchange software than I have been.  This from Klein:

'But the Obama administration did itself -- and the millions of people who wanted to explore signing up -- a terrible disservice by building a Web site that, four days into launch, is still unusable for most Americans. They knew that the only way to quiet the law's critics was to implement it effectively. And building a working e-commerce Web site is not an impossible task, even with the added challenges of getting various government data services to talk to each other. Instead, the Obama administration gave critics arguing that the law isn't ready for primetime more ammunition for their case.

John Boyd Takes a Half Victory Lap

In this Huffington Post piece.

Farmers Didn't Improve Their Fields Until the 20th Century?

One meme of a few in the food movement, Prof. Pollan I'm looking at you, is farmers began industrial agriculture in the 20th century, specifically when nitrates left over from the military started to be used on our fields.  (That's my memory of Omnivore's Dilemma.)

Low-Tech Magazine has a long post on lime kilns  (all that rain in the British Isles tended to acidify the fields, thus creating a demand for lime to counter it).   Wikipedia cites usage of lime for agricultural purposes in the 13th century.  It's easy to underestimate the brains of our ancestors.

I've memories of our whitewashing the stable walls, and using lime on the concrete behind the cows to keep it dry and prevent the cows from slipping.

Obama's Open Government Fail--on Obamacare

I just love to tweak IT types and goo-goo types about openness, and occasionally I like to tweak my liberal friends.  In that spirit, let me quote this from the NYTimes post on activity on the healthcare exchanges:

"It is unclear what the [healthcare] exchanges meant in citing heavy volume; most did not provide numbers, or even return phone calls in the first hours of operation. It is also unclear to what degree problems with the Web sites were due to the kind of technical hurdles that supporters of the program had warned about and that opponents had predicted would demonstrate its unwieldiness."

 Too bad HHS didn't require each exchange website to post their count of unique visitors.

More seriously, I expect the dust to settle and the glitches to get resolved (mostly) in the next few days or weeks, just as Medicare Part D did back in the Bush days.

3 Minutes for Food?

Via Marginal Revolution, a USAtoday story on how the universe is gradually slowing down, in the inevitable triumph of entrophy.

Actually, it seems that fast food outlets are having trouble maintaining their speed of "drive-thru" visits.  I don't patronize such lines, so I was struck by the fact that McDonald's fills orders in about 3 minutes (the current figure is 9 seconds slower than it used to be).

Good Advice from Joel Achenbach

This is directed to all you baby boomer youngsters:

"Those of us staring into the gaping maw of degeneration, senescence and ultimate obliteration are often driven to take on new activities and interests. You could make the case that Walt went overboard.

If you find yourself with an urge to try something new, my advice is to steer clear of anything that might create a problem for which the activation of a remote-controlled machine gun would potentially be the solution.

Pigford II Payments in the Mail

That's according to this Hattiesburg article.

Does USDA Pay Farmers for Not Farming?

The Internet has made me more aware of the persistence of myths and inaccuracies, not to say "lies", in the world of public discourse.

To quote Mark Twain:


One of the persistent memes is the idea FSA (USDA) pays farmers for not farming, for not producing.  That came up in a recent Jonathan Chait piece here, in connection with a discussion that the right supported cutting food stamps but not cutting farm subsidies.   Chait linked to a Megan McArdle defense of the theory, though she would like to cut both food stamps and ag subsidies, based on "reciprocity".  The idea being that food stamps went to the idle poor, who did nothing for them, while subsidies went to farmers who at least were farming.   Chait used a GAO Report of last year 
which I missed, to counter McArdle's argument.

Seems to me there are several aspects to the meme:

• it can refer to the "supply management/production adjustment" programs of past farm bills, in which case it's wrong.  Those programs are dead.
• it can refer to the problem of payments issued to dead farmers.  That can be bad administration by FSA, though the casual discussion of it by people like Chait and EWG doesn't recognize some of the legitimate complexities. 
• it can refer to the problem of direct payments issued based on acreage which is converted to non-farm uses, as cited in the GAO report.  That again is bad administration.
• it can refer to the fact that the direct payment program is "decoupled", to comply with WTO rules--there's no requirement that farmers farm in order to earn the payments.  Again, the GAO report blasted the program for this, but it's what Congress passed.
• it can refer to the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which has multi-year contracts for farmers to devote land, not to production of crops, but to conservation uses.  In my mind, the program's aim is to protect highly erodible land and provide conservation benefits, not to reduce production, but it's true that the program does reduce production.  (It's rather like saying the military draft in the 1960's gave men free health insurance--it did.) It's also true that some of the contracts can cover a whole farm, assuming all of the acreage is highly erodible.

So to me the bottom line is: USDA/FSA has no program which pays farmers for not producing.

[Updated to add the last sentence on the CRP paragraph.]