The Joys of Old Age: Earwigging

One of the joys of old age is finding pleasure in small moments.  One of the pleasures of recovering from a cold is being able to enjoy a book without guilt.  I enjoy Mr. Grisham, and got a kick out of a legal reference in his latest, Sycamore Row, which is a return to Jake, the attorney played  by Mr. McConaughey, many years ago, back before he won the Oscar.   What was the reference?  Earwigging the chancellor is a violation of legal ethics.

Mississippi has courts of chancery, over which a chancellor presides, to try issues of estates, divorce, etc.  Earwigging means talking to the chancellor outside of court to influence his or her actions.  It's unique to MS.  Only after I enjoyed a long hearty laugh at the phrase did I research and find that I should have previously seen it mentioned last fall on Volokh.com, where it came up in reference to the trial of Richard Scruggs, the MS lawyer who sued over tobacco and later pled guilty of corrupting a judge.

Flash: " the reality is pigs are not particularly nice people. "

Turns out they're pushy.

Small Truckers, Small Dairy Farmers

A good piece here on the plight of the small trucker--the owner/operator. It reminds me of Northview Dairy, the owners of which just sold off their cows. 

I suppose conservative economists would point to "creative destruction", the process by which the free market makes everything better and better for everyone, over the long run.  As an ambivalent liberal, I resist that.  Economic change has real costs and hurts real people. When I ask myself would the world be a better place if we froze  things as they were in 1950, or 1900, or 1491, I have to answer "no",  but as the great Heinlein wrote: there's no such thing as a free lunch.

The White House Garden: The Truth Revealed

My title is false advertising.  I've not posted about the White House garden recently, though it had its spring planting a couple weeks ago or more.

Government Executive runs a piece from the daughter of the farmer who supplied the dirt and the initial plan for the garden.  It's nice, not sensationalistic as my title would suggest.  What does come through for me, as I may have commented on in past posts, is the tension between the public play-acting and the real reality (as opposed to the unreal reality, not to be confused with the fake reality).   As an Obama supporter I take the First Lady at her word--when she started the garden she probably did have the idea that the girls would participate and it would be a real garden.  Because we, the great unwashed American public, demand perfection of our temporary royalty, that was never possible.  In the real world we sow our seeds too thickly and don't get the crop we should.  In the world of the White House, the gardeners can't admit to such failings, must always be on display, meaning the plants must always live in Lake Woebegone. 

I'm Curious--Post Pigford

Some factoids and a question:

•  Secretary Vilsack made a commitment to changing the culture of USDA's county level agencies. 
• The Pigford II payments have been issued.
• There have been changes in the farm loan legislation/programs, earmarking some dollars for socially-disadvantaged, etc. etc.
• ERS has recently reported growth in the number of farms operated by various categories--minorities and women, etc. 

I wonder if there's a data collection and analysis effort which compares FSA/RD/NRCS efforts in the last couple years, with the new culture and the new programs, with the efforts 20 years ago?  How much has changed, and why?

Robot Day: Cows and Grapes

The NY Times has an article on milking robots. 
I'd read about robotic milkers before, perhaps even posted on them, but this is the first report describing units with no human intervention, meaning the cows can determine when they want to be milked!  So the march of technology has the effect of increasing the "agency" of cows, making for more contented cows, I suppose.  (Was it Elsie, the Carnation cow, which keyed their ad campaigns in the 1950's?   NO, my memory is faulty--Elsie was the Borden's cow.  And, coincidentally, one of the dairymen in the article is named Borden, a seventh-generation farmer.)  Will the crunchy food movement celebrate this advance in animal liberation? 

Seriously, this and similar advances elsewhere in farming pose the problem for the farmer: give up, get out, grow up.  You need a bigger operation to make the best use of machines (although apparently California operations are too big) or cope with new regulations, etc.   The other problem is the infrastructure.  If you're depending on a machine to milk your cows, you can't afford power outages (hand-milking even 12 cows when the power goes off is not fun).  And you can't afford malfunctions--I assume the vendors have some support system to provide loaner units with a very short response time, like 1-3 hours.

Elsewhere, Technology Review has a post on agricultural drones. I wonder when FSA will start using them?

ACA and FSA

From the NASCOE President's message: "

"Here we are in 2014 and we still don’t have a good online tool for producers to communicate and file applications on the simplest of programs (okay there are no simple programs)."

Now I don't know how complex the ACA health insurance program is, as compared to the FSA programs.  Obviously there were problems with the software last October, and I gather it's still incomplete as far as payments goes.  But HHS only had a few years to get the software done and tested, while FSA has had over 20 years since the idea was floated.  I'm really p****d at the botched rollout of healthcare.gov; it's almost enough to make me regret my political allegiance.  But I guess if I'm going to be fair, I should admit that compared to USDA/FSA HHS looks pretty good.  (That's probably the first and last compliment HHS will ever receive on their IT implementation.)

It's easy to argue I'm comparing apples and oranges, because I think administering the insurance program will be handled by the insurance company, not by the healthcare.gov website. And the philosophical question is simple: do you want to maximize efficiency or employment in rural areas.  If the former, then go the way some of the loan programs did--centralize administration in St. Louis.  If the latter, become friends with the senators and representative and fight to keep all offices open. 

I suspect we'll continue to muddle our way down the road, closing some offices, doing some modernization, trying to reach both goals: efficiency and rural life.

The Price of Eggs (Volatility, Integration, and Tuition)

Yglesias at Vox posts on the recent price of eggs.

What's interesting is the volatility; over the course of a year (2008) it looks as if the price increased about a dollar, or maybe by 80 percent.  Now I can remember the price of eggs bouncing around in my youth.  IIRC they maybe went from 30 cents to 70 cents and back down (and up and down and up and down).  This was at the end of the era of small flocks, right as the industry started to be vertically integrated, with companies contracting with farmers.  I had always thought the purpose was to gain market power, by reducing the egg suppliers to a handful of companies they could collaborate to adjust supply and thereby keep prices relatively steady.  Now the graph only covers the last 10 years and shows a steady rise in prices but not much volatility except for the one year, so I'm not sure whether my understanding of the economics is wrong, or whether 2008 was an outlier. 

A side note: if the change in the price of eggs from 1954 to 2014 had tracked the price of tuition and fees at the college I attended, the price would be close to $100 now.

"Responsible drinkers don't build breweries. "

That's my sentence of the day, from an interview at Vox with someone who studied legalization of pot.

We humans always overdo on something, or rather there's always some humans who will overdo on any good thing.

Taxpayer Receipt

At the Whitehouse website you can put in the income tax and FICA taxes you pay and see where the money went.  I tried to embed it here, but the code didn't work for me.  I wrote the White House--will be interested to see what the result, if any, is. 

Anyhow, it's a useful idea--people when polled have little idea of how much money goes for each function in government.