On Blogging--Personal and Policy

Was reading a fine post by Sharon Astyk here which starts off by commenting on the observable differences in parenting ability she finds among the domestic animals and wildlife on their small farm.  I've seen the same, though I was nowhere near as observant as she is.

She then segues into a discussion of human parenting, of which she's seen much, as she and her husband are parents and foster parents of a large number of children.

When I first started reading her, she was blogging as a peak oil/locavore activist.  She always had an interesting voice, interesting enough to overcome my knee-jerk reaction against the positions she favored and the dire future she forecast.  But time happens to us all, and these days she's less into policy and much less into blogging and much more into managing a large and variable household.  Whether her blogging, as opposed to the subjects she blogs on,  has changed that much, I don't know, but I do find myself liking her writing a lot more.

Residents and Tourists

Living in the DC area I intuitively knew what these anthropologists spent time and money figuring out--the travel patterns of residents and tourists are different. The fact leads to things like tourists seeing sights and visiting vicinities which the resident has never seen.

When I was in the Army stationed at Ft. Belvoir I did a lot of tourist stuff.  Since I've lived here, hardly any, except when escorting visitors.

As far as the "settling in" of new residents, my guess is it's personality-dependent: the amount of exploring before establishing habits/patterns will vary.

Politics in FSA

 From a Government Executive piece on VA problems

“Health care is by definition an enormously specific, patient-oriented, detailed business process,” he said. “The agency itself was designed to be sealed against political influence,” he added, noting its 9,000 to 1 ratio of career to political appointees, compared with a 2,000 to 1 ratio at the Defense Department and a 500 to 1 ratio at most agencies.

In FSA when I was there: 50 SED's, 5 area directors, 4 deputies, associate, and administrator, plus maybe 5 aides--call it 65 total political. That's a 200 to 1 ratio at FSA, meaning it's more politicized than the average agency. 

Our Couch Potato Dogs

Modern Farmer reports on research that says "agility dogs" (i.e. farm dogs) do better on tests than do "companion dogs" (i.e., those dogs who spend their lives on the couch alongside their masters).  Must be why Walt Jeffries boasts of his talking dogs.

Buffett on Government, No It's Private

Brad Delong posts Warren Buffett's lessons learned:

My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in government business of an unseen force that we might call “the institutional imperative.” In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative’s existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the government business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced civil servants managers would automatically make rational government business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.

For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an government agency institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, government corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any government business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of government consultants peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

Ode to Mud, Sweat, and Baths

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm.

" The extra protein allowed for our brains to grow swelling our heads until we thought we were masters of the Universe"

Those Were the Days--Were They?

An old man gets nostalgic reading this Life on a Colorado Farm post about haying, then and now.  But the voice of reality insists:

• I wasn't putting up beautiful alfalfa hay, but less pretty timothy/meadow grass/weeds hay, sometimes having gone through a rain or two which severely diminished its value
• it wasn't early June but likely early July, since we had to wait for the neighbor who did the baling to get his hay done first--a penalty for being a small farmer
• I didn't work on a crew of four, except for a few occasions when I hired out, but usually just with dad, perhaps my sister, and sometimes one neighbor helper
• it wasn't a beautiful blue sky on top of a Colorado mesa but a likely cloudy sky in a New York valley
• and the cut ends of the hay scratched the hell out of my forearms.

Nice how modern machinery enables an older couple (still younger than me) to continue farming but being realistic I suspect there's few to no young neighbor boys around to help--machinery means the population is thinning out in rural areas and getting old.

Would Reagan Have Made the Bergdahl Trade?

I follow the Powerline blog.  Disagree with 90+ percent of what is said, but it offers a view into the right wing.  Currently all the bloggers there are up in arms attacking the Bergdahl deal. 

I see this post reporting on a discussion tomorrow at the Reagan library.  No mention of the subject matter, but I have a suggestion:  Pro or con--would Saint Ronald have made the same decision Obama did?

One of Many Things I Don't Know

I blogged the other day about the VA.  This Kevin Drum post, reporting that the retirement migration of vets skews the supply-demand picture, overcrowding the SW facilities, shows that while my logic was okay my argument falls based on the facts.  Damn stubborn things, facts are.

Get Those Kids Off the Farm

That's the lesson of China in recent years, of the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now of Africa.

Via Chris Blattman, this is the summary of a research paper entitled: "What is driving the 'African Growth Miracle'?

We show that much of Africa’s recent growth and poverty reduction can be traced to a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity manufacturing and services. These declines have been more rapid in countries where the initial share of the labor force engaged in agriculture is the highest and where commodity price increases have been accompanied by improvements in the quality of governance.

In the US the improvements in machinery after the Civil War, added to the rapid immigration from Europe (including two of my grandparents), enabled us to grow.