US Digital Services

The newest thing, a legacy of the rush to fix the Obamacare website, is the US Digital Services.

Digital services' role "will stop when we get you to minimally viable project," Kruger said. The team can help define user needs, build in analytics, wireframe the user experience, deploy and test alpha and beta versions, and generally tune and refine a service to ensure it can serve the intended purpose. "When we're happy with that, we'll hand it back to the business unit, and they'll own it -- to maintain it, to make improvements over time."

"We're not going to be here forever," he said. It is up to the business unit to plan for ongoing maintenance and support, and "from the beginning, we're going to have that conversation."

I think there are some downsides to this idea, or at least there would have been in the old days of COBOL.  One downside was the difficulty of understanding what's going on and making changes to the code.  That was at least one rationale for all the documents produced in the old "waterfall" software development process: users and systems analysts were supposed to produce a lot of documents at different levels of understanding (data, system flow, etc.) which would then enable their successors to understand what was going on.  My own feeling/guess is that what happened when these documents were produced was the people involved learned the process by writing documents, so there was a reasonable base of understanding among enough people to be able to handle people retiring, etc.

Raisins and Vaccines

I've been active in commenting at Volokh Conspiracy on a post concerning the raisin marketing order case which went before the Supreme Court yesterday.

For some reason the issue raises my emotions; partly because I dislike free riders and that's how I view this cases.  It's ironic that the chattering class has been vocal about the measles vaccine, and the problem the anti-vaxers cause while they're united in support of Mr. Horne's free riding on the raisin producers.

Slavery and Mauretania

Kottke.org links to a desire map--Google analyzed the most common query "how much does X cost" by country. 

In four countries of east Africa the most common "X" is "cow".

In Mauretania the most common "X" is "slave", which led me to find this wikipedia entry on slavery in modern?-day Mauretania.

Today's Euphemism: Depopulation

"Handling a depopulation and disinfection on a layer site is more complex than a turkey site..."

from an agriculture.com post on the bird flu problem in Iowa.  (I wonder what position the candidates for President will take on it?)
 
Didn't know birds got flu?  They do, and they're likely the original source of human flu type A, the most common kind.  

Flu is a big problem for poultry producers because there's not much to do except kill the birds, and invent an euphemism for it.

Competition in E-Books?

Just found Amazon and Google offering a cheap price on a new book of historical essays (Inequality in Early America).  Don't know why, whether it's a result of competition or not, but I like it.

On a personal note, I got a Kindle for Christmas a couple years ago.  I like it.  I've been able to restrain myself from buying lots of pricey books ($9.99 and up) but not the cheapies--both the free and the 1 and 2 dollar specials from Amazon.  All in all it's increased my book purchases.

CRISPR--Gene Modification

Technology Review has an article on gene editing, which I've posted about earlier.  The idea of removing genetic material from a genome is less frightening than the idea of incorporating genes from one species into the genes of another.

For now, the techniques are being used to modify plants in more modest ways. “The first wave of this technology is just removing a few base pairs,” says Yinong Yang, a professor of plant pathology at Penn State University, referring to the combinations of DNA letters—A, G, C, and T—that make up a genome. By “knocking out” just the right gene, as researchers did with the potato, it’s possible to give a plant a few valuable properties.[The potato modification is intended to increase storage life of russet potatoes.]

The article goes on to mention another permutation--using this new technology to transfer a preferred genetic trait from one variety of a plant to another, the example used is a drought-resistant trait.  Again I don't see such modifications as raising the concerns that GMO opponents usually raise.

How To Improve Government: Twinkies

Via Ann Althouse, a Forbes story on the revival of Twinkies--the company went bankrupt twice, but a turnaround expert has revived the brand. From the article:

Metropoulos’ recipe was threefold. First he spent $110 million modernizing the remaining factories–everything from a utomation (massive, new $20 million Auto Bakers) to improving air flow in the bakeries so they’d be more tolerable for workers in the hot summer months. “You must improve employee conditions, fix the cracks on the floor and those types of things,” says Metropoulos. “It affects the pride, energy and culture of the plant, and that translates into everything.” Next came a $25 million SAP software system to manage inventory and logistics.

 The point is the owners of an enterprise (like the public) have to make their employees feel valued. 

(Even if you disagree with the moral I drew from the story, I recommend the story.)

Organic Farms: Does History Repeat Itself?

One of my problems with the food movement, defined as the people who advocate for organic farming, and/or local farming, and/or  family/small farming, is their ignoring of history.  I once had ambitions to be a historian, and I've kept up an arms-length interest in the subject and profession since my college days, so I tend to be aware of history.

In the past, say up to the 1930's or 1950's, depending on the area and the crop, American farms were essentially organic and the food they produced was often sold locally.  I remember reading a memoir/history from Ontario county, NY (where some of my ancestors had settled and lived for a few generations).  The writer talked about the family farms, about hog slaughtering in the fall, and about the fact that every family had its own recipe for bacon, and knowledgeable folks could identify which farm the bacon had come from.

My point is that time passed, and there were reasons for its passing.  The forces of the market and the way American society has changed were too strong.  However earnestly the food movement tries, unless and until they come to grips with the reasons, its efforts will be eventually futile.

Actively Engaged

The Coalition for Rural America comments on the proposed "actively engaged" rule:

However, the rule also takes two steps backward. The biggest failure of the proposed rule is that it only applies the new “actively engaged in farming” definition to farms structured of non-family members, leaving the loopholes wide open for farms structured solely of family members. We believe the rules should apply across the board regardless if the farm is structured of family members or non-family members.

The first sentence is rhetorical nonsense:  since in their reading the proposal makes no change for family members, it's neither an advance or a retrogression.  However, I hadn't picked up on that point--if I get ambitious I may look at it.

[Updated: yes, existing regs require "significant contribution" (roughly 50 percent and/or 1000 hours of labor) by lineal ancestor or descendant. I know I don't have the ambition to figure out how much tighter the proposed rules are on non-family members than the existing rules are on family members.]

What Ticks Me Off--Taxes

What really gets me is all the politicians, particularly Republicans but Democrats too, who pontificate about the need for a simpler tax system.  When they're given a good idea which would ease the paperwork burden, be optional for the taxpayer, and save money, they allow the lobbying of special interests (i.e., Intuit) to kill the proposal.  See today's NYTimes--Mr. Manjoo picks up an idea Propublica.org has pushed for some time now (having IRS set up taxpayer accounts with the 1099/W2 data preloaded).


And don't get me started on the idea of cutting the appropriations for IRS. Don't go there.