Persistence of Culture: Navaho Farming

Vox has an interesting post on where "lady farmers" are. (Note: the writer used the much better term "female farmers" when she actually wrote the piece, but I assume I can blame her for the URL.)

There's an interesting geographic pattern.  The counties with the highest percentage of femal operators seem to be either Native American (the Four Corners of the SW = Navaho) or exurban counties, presumably women who find fulfillment in farming, using the earnings from their first career as capital.

Laugh of the Day

An interesting article in the NY Times magazine on Shell Oil's Arctic oil effort and its mishaps (many).   At one point the Coast Guardsmen on a rescue helicopter run into an unpleasant surprise: the smallest of the 18 crew members who must be airlifted to safety weighs 235 pounds.

Victory Lap: Ebola

Buried somewhere in the comments on Ann Althouse's blog is a bet/promise I made.  It was to the effect that if there were more people dying in the US from Ebola than the number of victories the Washington Skins won in the 2014 season, I'd do my shopping on Amazon through Ann's blog.

At that time the numbers stood at: Americans dead of Ebola--zero, others dead of Ebola dying in the US--one, Skins victories--three.  The final score for 2014 was 0, 1, 4.

I have to admit I didn't have the courage of my convictions or I would have offered a straight bet to all comers, but I can at least claim I was right and all the people who panicked were wrong.

Try These Resolutions

I've decided not to do New Years resolutions any more--the usual reason--they don't work.

But for those who do want to make resolutions, consider the resolutions (not New Years) of Rev. Jonathan Edwards.

No End to the HR Courses--Five Generations at Work

FSA just posted a notice on "Diversity and Inclusion Training on Generational Differences for
Supervisors and Managers".

It seems there are five! different generations at work these days, and they work differently, so managers must know how to handle them.

With tongue in cheek, I list the generations:

• old farts (my generation) who hang on and bore everyone with their talk of the good old days
• boomers who bore everyone with their talk of the day they'll retire
• gen X who bore everyone with their self-pity over all the boomers who don't have the sense to retire and make way for new blood
• gen Y (millennials) who are busily searching for a new job away from all the bores.
• post millennials, who are practicing up to be boring bureaucrats as soon as they get out of diapers

Although I mock, it's serious business, even having the imprimatur of a Harvard Business Review article. 

Next subject on the horizon: the different cultures of America, how to deal with the cultural differences between New Jerseyans and Texans, Oregonians and Floridians.  That should be good for a couple days training and a 5-digit fee to the consultant doing the training. 

(I need to create a label for this: should I use "boondoggle" or "human relations".)

High Paid Teachers

In the US our highest paid teachers are college football coaches (a coach is a teacher right).  Jim Harbaugh just signed a contract with a $5 million base salary, with incentives and raises. 

In South Korea, the highest paid teachers are math coaches, also being paid millions of dollars.

Bureaucratic Meetings and Science Fiction

My employees thought I was bad when I held weekly staff meeting, which over time turned very boring.  I would have loved to tell them about the International Space Station meetings, once a day.
And five sets of bosses.  And a a schedule in a spreadsheet.  

I read a good amount of science fiction back in the 1950's and I don't remember any meetings or bureaucratic rules in those novels. 

How Fast Things Change

From a Vox post on Rep. Scalise:

Let's be as generous as we can to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Let's say he spoke to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization but had no idea it was a white supremacy group backed by David Duke. Let's say the name didn't raise any red flags for Scalise, or if it did, he didn't follow up on them. Let's take him at his word that, in 2002, he didn't know there was such a thing as Google (or any of its competitors), and neither he nor his staff even cursorily vetted the groups he accepted speaking invitations from. [emphasis added]

Looking at the history of Google, I suspect very few people were automatically checking Google in 2002. Amazing how fast things change, and how quickly we assume the past and the present are similar.

Best Pun of the Day

In this paragraph from Sugar Mountain Farm, accompanying a picture of a mended boot.

Boots wear out. Sometimes we wear out our souls. Sometimes we get punctures in the sides from projections like sticks or rocks. Even the best boots we’ve found to date wear out. If a boot lasts a year we’re doing well. Wet feet are no fun. Especially in the winter.

F35 and the A10

James Fallows has a long article on the military in the Atlantic.  Part of it is a discussion of the F-35 and A-10.  He doesn't like the F-35 and does like the A-10.  The logic is that the F-35 tries to meet too many goals, do too many functions for all our military air forces, and is essentially political, with subcontractors spread across many congressional districts.  Conversely, the A-10 is single purpose and cheap.

There may be a couple parallels here:

• Robert McNamara's F111 fighter bomber which was initially designed for multiple services.
• Efforts to rationalize bureaucracy by combining organizations, like the USDA Infoshare effort which aborted.

I'm not sure whether it's always the case that working across organizations fails, but it's certainly difficult.  I believe some of the big car companies have tried, sometimes with success, to build different cars using the same chassis/drive train.  So maybe it's a matter of judgment--picking one's shots.