Our Weak Government: David Brooks on

From a long interview with David Brooks by the U of Chicago paper

I think even he [Obama] came to office thinking the presidency had a lot more power than it does. I would say that’s a constant of my journalistic world: every president I’ve covered has learned that the office is in some ways much weaker than they anticipated. In some ways they still think it has some power, but it’s not an awesomely powerful office.

 You'd think some politician would read Neustadt.

Also:

Humor is more or less a young person’s game. You get a little more ponderous and earnest as you get older.

 Gosh, I hope not.  I was prematurely ponderous and earnest as a youth.

Land History and Precision Agriculture

Via Marginal Revolution, here's Blake Hurst in The American (AEI) writing about precision agriculture.  He argues that automated equipment will enable a big jump in the size of farms.  Sounds logical, but...

In FSA I used to be responsible for reconstitutions, the rules on how to make history follow the land as new owners and new operators changed the configuration of farms.  For years I dodged getting into it because it seemed more complex than I wanted to grapple with, but  then I gradually succumbed and found it interesting.

With that background I started to muse about the effect of precision agriculture on changes in farms.  As Hurst describes it, a good part of precision farming is building up a base of detailed data associated with each square meter (or other unit) of land, base extending over several years worth of plantings, fertilizations, and harvestings, data including weather and soil conditions.

So if I farm a section for several years and build up this database, what happens when I die and someone else takes over.  Does the landowner own the data or is it the operator?  (I'm not clear whether the farmer is storing the data in the cloud, or in a device which he owns and controls.) Can there be provisions for transferring the data from one operation to another?

COBOL Lives!

So says the FCW, in this article.

What really surprised me was not the continuing use of COBOL in legacy applications, but the fact that a quarter of colleges still teach COBOL and for some it's still a required subject.  I would have thought that COBOL was so old-fashioned and unappealing that it would have died out in the realms of academia, even though there's still a need for people who know it.

For legacy work, I suspect there's still things where it works pretty well.  Consider the example of payrolls, one of the early applications of computers.  You do payrolls every two weeks, or every month, which means batch processing must work okay.  No need for fancier languages which support objects or whatever is today's hot concept. 

I started programming in COBOL back when I was disillusioned with my bureaucratic career.  Then, after I stayed in the bureaucracy, I got quite good with WordPerfect macros, back before the WYSIWYG days.  Finally I did some Javascript in the mid 90's.  But these days Python seems well beyond me, and not something useful.  It's a shame; there was a rush of satisfaction every time you completed something and ran a test and it worked correctly.  Of course, that rush was usually followed by the frustration of failure when the next test bombed. 

Did anyone notice that Google had a tribute to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, one of the mothers of COBOL?

The Benefits of Decentralized Government

One of my pet ideas is the weakness of the federal government, but it turns out that in at least one respect, we're too centralized.  The Office of Personnel Management makes the snow decisions for the feds in the DC area.  In Canada, there's no central decision making body according to this Gov. Exec. rerun of a Wired report.  Seems to me some decentralization in the US might work better--let the USGS in Reston have a different decider than SSA in MD.

De Minimus Benefits

From Tuesday's Farm Policy:

" Some states, such as New York, will make a $1 Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program  payment to low-income people in order to automatically qualify them for the maximum federal food stamps Standard Utility Allowance for 12 months.
“According to a source tracking the farm bill talks, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that raising the minimum energy subsidy states would be required to make to $20 would be enough to disincentivize states from utilizing the loophole, potentially saving the government $8 billion over 10 years.”

We used to have a "de minimus" provision. I'm ashamed to admit I don't remember in what connection, but the idea basically was that something was too small to worry about.  A similar idea applied to certain small claims, whether it was $10 or $25 I forget.   But why shouldn't the government have a blanket policy: no payments, no claims if the amount is less than $20 or whatever?

Community Gardeners Are No Angels

Grist links to an article on some problems some community gardens face.  Our garden too has locks on the gates and people complain of stolen produce and tools. 

The White House Garden

I've failed to keep up with the White House garden.  Maintenance on it was shut down during the government shutdown in November.  They've had a harvest of fall vegetables, installed some hoop houses, and now are facing ice and snow as the storm moves through.  Don't remember whether they did hoop houses last year.  A few of our fellow gardeners in the community garden are using hoop houses; my wife and I aren't.

The swiss chard won't last through a hard freeze being outside a hoop house; the kale will be fine for spring.  Not sure what she means by the rosemary being gone--that should survive the winter.  Cilantro will be okay in the spring before it bolts.

An Amazing Sentence

From an Ann Althouse post on Andrew Sullivan's defense of Obama:

"Sullivan's analogies and metaphors are a crazy quilt of a mixed bag of bouillabaise."

Base Versus Planted, Continued

From David Rogers at Politico on farm bill negotiations:

In aggregate numbers, the estimated 260 million base acres counted today in farm programs are not so different from the average of real “planted” acres. But within that universe, huge shifts have taken place as corn and soybeans have grown more dominant while rice, cotton and wheat plantings have declined
For example in the South, about 12 percent of the base acres went unplanted in a recent year compared with just 3 percent in the Midwest. Oklahoma and Texas alone accounted for more than 4 million unplanted base acres or 26 percent of the total for the nation that same year.
At the same time in Midwest states, plantings over base totaled almost 9.5 million acres in 2010 — more than double that of the South. And in Kansas and North Dakota, corn plantings have soared as land has been pulled out of the conservation reserve program.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/farm-bill-crop-subsidies-agriculture-congress-corn-soybean-interests-100758.html#ixzz2mioXC5Mu

 

The reallocation/adjustment process he's predicting will keep FSA offices busy for a while.

Yale Foodie Meets "Real Farmers"

The Yale Sustainable Food Project has an organic operation at Yale.  It's been going for several years (I keep following it thinking the student enthusiasm will wane, but it hasn't).

In this post, a Yale foodie meets up with a Farm Bureau summer legislative picnic.  Sounds as if both sides learned a bit.