The Silent Generation's Luck--I Thought It Was Me

Wonkblog has a post discussing wealth and income over a lifetime, using generational cohorts.  The money quote for me:

 The winners of this historical jackpot appear to be those who were born between 1930 and 1945 and came of age after World War II, who are sometimes called The Silent Generation....

Also

...the Silent Generation appears to get an additional boost because they were born during the Great Depression, a time when people had fewer babies overall. Their lower population meant that they had less competition overall for jobs, housing, investments and other opportunities. Sociologist Elwood Carlson called the generation “the lucky few” because they were smaller than the generation that came before. African-Americans and women born in those years had far more opportunity, and the generation also benefited from the expansion of the American safety net, including Social Security and Medicare, during their lives.

The Silent Generation is me.  Actually, I'm not surprised by this article.  When I joined ASCS in 1968 there were still a handful of employees around from the New Deal days, though most I think had joined the agency after WWII.  We had a week of orientation for new employees. During one session the director of the Personnel Management Division described the number of employees who were near or at retirement age.  What it meant for my own career was I moved up the ladder quickly simply because people were retiring, so I didn't have much competition (except in one instance).  Of course, most days I believe my promotions were a tribute to my hard work and smarts, not the luck of being born at the right time.

Later, say by the late 80's, I was a branch chief and we'd hired a bunch of baby boomers, many former clerks from county office, as part of the effort to support the new IT system. But looking at my office, I knew there was a logjam.   Many, most, of my employees then had the potential to be inmanagement, at least given the prevailing theory that an excellent specialist makes a good manager.  (That theory isn't necessarily true, but it was the assumption in ASCS.) But I expected at least some of them would have to compete against each other if and when I moved out of my job.  With that in mind, I encouraged good employees to move to other units. While some  of my boomers did, in the end two of them did compete for my job.

I wonder how much such hidden factors impact our social issues.  For example, how much is the trend to adjunct professors in college necessitated because we removed mandatory retirement and the boomers are hanging on?

Good Data Modeling Is Important--MP3s

I was usually ambivalent about the IT contractors working for ASCS/FSA. On the one hand I always thought I we could do the job better and faster ourselves, if management would only give us the dollars/people.  On the other hand I have to admit I did learn a lot, even if all the contractors didn't accomplish much (at least in my fallible memory).

One of the things I did learn was data modeling, normalizing data structures and the importance of having it right.  For example, the System/36 just used flat files, with multiple indexes to them.  While the IT people in IRMD and KCMO did a pretty good job in capturing the data needed for some of our activities, one big thing was missed: time, most notably time as reflected in crop/fiscal/program years, and the idea that we could be operating programs for different years at the same time. 

Of course you never get the thing totally right.  For example, our "name" structure assumed the standard WASP structure: first name, middle name, last name, and failed to allow for the naming structures present in other parts of the world or other cultures.

Mistakes in data modeling can have big consequences, as seen in the case of the metadata scheme for MP3 files, as discussed in this piece at The Atlantic.  Classical music is particularly affected.

Global Warming Leads to War: France Versus Switzerland

Conflict over scarce resources often gets violent: think about the Westerns with the cattlemen versus the homesteaders or the sheep ranchers.

And here's proof that global warming will cause conflict on a national scale: the Swiss stole French water in the midst of record setting heat.

Discrimination in Colleges

This Post piece goes into the reality of discrimination on the basis of gender in private colleges.

"Given that girls generally outperform boys in high school—girls earn better grades and account for 70 percent of valedictorians—you’d expect acceptance rates for women to be higher than for men.

Bottom line is admissions are more equal between the sexes than that implies.  Part of the fear is that after a 60-40 ratio, students will avoid the college.  

GMO Soybeans for Everyone

One of the big accusations against industrial agriculture is the fact that patented seeds must be purchased each year from the seed company.  This is a burden on smaller farms with tighter margins.

But patents are not forever.  It turns out some of Monsanto's GMO patents are expiring.  Technology Review has a report on a seed dealer who took advantage of the fact, selling GMO soybeans no longer under patent.  As the article observes, this means the farmer can use some of his harvest to plant next year.

Dairy and Efficiency and Meat

Nathanael Johnson at Grist has a piece on how to make meat greener.   The answer: be efficient--two quotes.

The average dairy cow in California produces 20,000 pounds of milk a year. But the average dairy cow in Mexico produces only 4,000 pounds of milk a year, while in India it’s just 1,000 pounds. 

The carbon footprint of American milk is 63 percent lower than in 1944, researchers have calculated.

Interesting throughout. (Same piece as the previous post on salmon.)

In the 1950's I think we were doing good at about 12,000 pounds, which was well above average for the county.

How To Make Something From Nothing: Feed Salmon

"As long as we are talking about fish farming, we should note that a genetically engineered salmon can produce a pound of fish for every .83 pounds of feed it eats"

From this

Rural Utilities Service Gets Dinged

Politico has a long piece detailing problems with RUS implementation of subsidies for rural broadband.

I'd note the absence of USDA management from the discussion.

A Quote on Todo

From a discussion of historians storage of data on hard drives, etc.:

I once looked at my working directories saved from a previous machine for the first time in five or so years. Among them was an ASCII file called todo.txt. The amount of overlap with the current version was distressing.

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/07/24/postscarcitymentaleconomy/

A lot of the comments described keeping lots of old files and never looking at them.  That's me.

Wasting Food

Grist has the John Oliver video on the subject--as usual quite funny.   There's an interesting bit with a farmer at a farmers market noting that it's difficult to sell the last item in the last hour.  People like to choose, and they look askance at things which people before them have not chosen. Particularly with produce there's got to be some differences among items, so the last one left likely is the least desirable, and who wants to buy the least desirable?