Paying Dead People

A very good article in the Post explaining why so many federal agencies have problems paying dead people.  Bottom line: problems in reporting deaths accurately and in sharing data between SSA and other agencies.

A part of FSA's problem is they can't access the full SSA Death file, but have to make do with a subset, apparently because of some restrictions some states put on sharing information.  (Jim Baxa is quoted in the article.)

Yes I Voted

Unenthusiastically, but I did.

Conservation Compliance and Crop Insurance

From today's Farm Policy, discussing farm bill prospects:

"And on conservation compliance, the veteran lawmaker indicated that, “Well, the Senate says they have to have it. They’ve had votes on it where it’s passed by a significant margin. I think, at the end of the day, we’re going to have conservation compliance. But I have been working on this, that if we have to have it—because right now the House is not for this—but if we have to have it, the insurance companies will not be responsible for policing this, so they won’t have to decide whether somebody is in compliance or not.”

I'm not sure the veteran lawmaker (ranking member of House ag) understands conservation compliance, in that I don't know how one would ever require the insurance companies to police it.  Seems to me it would work essentially like the cotton/rice co-ops. 

Broccoli and Industrial Farming

NYTimes Magazine has an article on broccoli,partly discussing efforts to make eating broccoli attractive, partly discussing a farmer in upstate New York:

The farm that he runs with his three brothers and one of their sons is an example of the kind of nonindustrial farm that’s necessary in a revamped vision of American food production and consumption. Last year, Reeves turned out 420,000 pounds of tomatoes, 65,000 pounds of strawberries and 2.4 million ears of sweet corn. And while they have a nice little farm stand just outside the small town of Baldwinsville, with a quaint patch of pick-your-own organic blueberries behind the sales shed, they mostly sell their crops to big grocers, including Tops, Price Chopper, Wegmans and, biggest of all, Walmart.  [emphasis added]

As I wrote in a comment on the article, the food movement tends to label farming operations they don't like as "industrial farming" and "corporate agriculture".  It's not clear to me whether the three brothers are a partnership or corporation but here's the website

MIDAS Updated

The MIDAS page on the FSA website has been updated.http://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/midas?area=home&subject=landing&topic=landing

I'd say it was about time.  Certainly the MIDAS effort has been focused on the FSA bureaucrats, not the public.

ACA IT and Testing

I can't resist the temptation to comment on the healthcare software process.  (BTW, here's a link to their blog.)

They've taken hits for not fully testing, which I can agree with.  On the other hand, remembering the test process we had for System/36 software, I can only imagine the problems they would have had. If my imagination is right, they had these choices for beginning to end testing:

• use live data--i.e., have all the 20-something IT types try to sign up for health insurance for real using their software.  That has some obvious problems, particularly when you have to cover 36 state exchanges. 
• create test data.  The problem here is while you can create applicants, you need to have SS numbers which meet the SSA criteria, and/or you need to create credit histories over at Experian, then you need to tack on test data for those SSN's with IRS, etc. 
• use a subset of live data for test data.  That's what we used to do--get a copy of a counties files in and modify the data to create test conditions. That's very problematic, both from a security standpoint and from a Privacy Act standpoint. And  our FSA system was simple compared to the sort of system ACA requires.

UK Versus US: Enclosed Farmland

An interesting piece in Buzzfeed (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution) on Britain's housing problems. But I want to steal one of its 15 graphics:

Note the "enclosed farmland" category, which basically covers most of England and Ulster, plus bits of lowlands Scotland. 

Trying to find the equivalent for the US.  There's this NASS map, which can get very detailed--I'd never seen it before. 

And there's this map of "prime farmland". 

What's important I think is that farmland in the US is much more splotchy; the UK is much more uniformly developed as either farm or urban.

The Monitor Redux: DDG 1000 Zumwalt

Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money, a piece on the launch of the new destroyer: Zumwalt, with a hull design which reminds me of the Monitor.

Apparently a complex and innovative project which came in okay.  Hope it works out, but so far the DOD looks good.

Via the same source, an article on a new long-range bomber.  Interesting that they're planning an unmanned version of it. 

Funny Sentence About WWII Photo

"Landing, from what I’ve read, was considered one of the more important qualifications for a pilot."

Via Kottke, this sentence is from a piece on the "most honored [US]photograph" of WWII, taken by a "nutty crew".

Anyone who has the slightest interest in military history and/or heroism should read it.

Words To Design By

From a TPM post on Kentucky's ACA IT system:

"From a design standpoint, Kentucky made the conscious choice to stick to the basics, rather than seeking to blow users away with a state-of-the-art consumer interface. A big part of that was knowing their demographics: A simpler site would make it easer to access for people without broadband Internet access, and the content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible.
"We wanted it to have a branded feel, but that was not the most important part," said Gwenda Bond, an exchange spokesperson. "The most important part was that it works. I think a lot of people would say that simplicity is good website design."