FSA's Dolcini on IT, Personnel, etc.

Mr. Dolcini has an interview with Agri-Pulse.

Quote:  

He's working on another nationwide rollout for next year: the Acreage Crop Reporting Streamlining Initiative (ACRSI) that's designed to give farmers and ranchers just one stop for reporting acreage numbers for both FSA and the Risk Management Agency (RMA).
The ACRSI project started as a pilot in 30 Iowa and Illinois counties and is opening up slowly to more areas of the country.

I wonder how well the pilot has gone. The tag "ACRSI" shows a gap between 2011, when there was a request for comments in the Federal Register, and 2014, when the farm bill required implementation.  Google shows few hits.  (ACRSI also stands for "Associated Colon and Rectal Surgeons of India".  I hope the pilot testers of the new system didn't feel any need for the tender attentions of that association.) 

Weight of the Past

The NY Times casually mentioned yesterday that while digging for the foundations for a refugee center in Germany they found five unexploded bombs from WWII.

Government as Affirming Congressional Identities

Politico has a nice long piece on the many many programs run by the Education Department.  A few excerpts:

"WHAT MAKES IT so difficult to eliminate ineffective and duplicative programs? Politics, mostly. Creating a program can leave a lasting legacy for a lawmaker, something they won’t give up even in the face of evidence that the program doesn’t work. Often times, Congress can’t defund the program until that lawmaker retires.

 It's bipartisan--Obama has tried to consolidate but:

The Senate’s bill[redoing No Child Left Behind], on the other hand, was a compromise between Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The GOP draft bill consolidated or eliminated 21 different programs. But lawmakers effectively renewed most of them during the amendment process, including Physical Education and Ready-to-Learn Television.
They also brought back the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program—renewed thanks to an amendment offered by Barbara Mikulski. It passed unanimously.

On Overalls, Coveralls, and Jeans

Freakonomics has a piece on why suspenders are better than belts (belts are tourniquets) but belts still rule.

As the son of a farmer who wore overalls all his life, I noted the total absence of overalls in the discussion.  According to wikipedia I should really say "bib overalls" (look at the "talk" page for some of the UK/US distinctions, including coveralls and boiler suits).

Turns out Modern Farmer has a piece with a little history.  It seems that the farmers in the food movement are proud of their bib overalls. I'd had the impression that professional farmers in production agriculture were wearing them less these days, but that's only an impression.  I doubt if there's any statistics on their production over the years.



It's odd--dad would usually change to khaki worksheet and pants when going to town on the weekly trip (for animal feed and people food) and dress in a suit for his school board meetings or meetings of the GLF (the ag co-op).  So to me bib overalls are associated with manual work one has to do.  In contrast I wore jeans (stiff as a board when first bought from Monkey Wards) for work.  I still retain that association and don't wear bib overalls (though my wife wears them for her work in the garden).

Cryonics

Technology Review has a takedown of the recent cryonics story.  An ancient Greek pointed out you never stepped in the same river twice and this is similar.  Living is a flow, not something which can be freeze-framed. Or maybe it's an over-simplified Heisenberg principle--the process must change what it's operating on.

Robert Simon, Reston, VW, and Blacks

When I was in the Army, I was stationed for a while at Ft. Belvoir, which is south of DC. I was there long enough that I used the money I'd saved for graduate school (a long story) to buy a gray market VW bug, a 66 with a 1300 cc engine.  (Mine was white, but this picture is correct.)

On weekends friends and I would drive to tourist sites in the DC area: Gettysburg, Fredricksburg, Antietam, etc.

One such weekend jaunt was to the wilds of Fairfax county where Robert Simon's Reston had just opened.  I think we had trouble locating it, and the spring weather was cool and it had rained, so the sightseeing wasn't the best.  Why were we there?  I had the car, so my friends put up with my choices just to get away from the barracks. And I had read something about the "new town" somewhere, perhaps in the Post article mentioned in the wikipedia entry, and was intrigued.

As a good liberal I had followed the stories in the NYTimes and other media about discrimination in housing, redlining, and blockbusting.  I had also imbibed the popular liberal disdain for the way suburbs were developing, for Levittown, and strip malls.  So the whole idea of a planned "town" where the inhabitants could walk to work, where housing was open to all, where the design included European style urban amenities, was very attractive to me.

After I got out of the Army and got the job with USDA/ASCS I lived downtown for 8 years. But then the idea of investing in a house made sense.  So I ended up looking for houses in Reston, finally buying the townhouse we live in now.

Reston has grown and changed over the years.  According to wikipedia it's now about 70 percent white, with the remainder about evenly split among black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. 

I've always wondered why Reston wasn't more attractive to black Washingtonians,  most of whom when they left the city behind seem to have moved to Prince George's county (now 64 percent black) in Maryland.   One of life's mysteries.  As is whatever happened to my VW, which was stolen from my Reston parking space in 1978.  I hope it's still chugging away somewhere.

The Turing Test and Humans

The Turing  test is the famous  method for determining whether computers can think--can the computer's conversation with a person be so good it can't be distinguished from that of a human?

There was a piece I read today discussing other tests for distinguishing computers and humans.  But I want to discuss going the other way--distinguishing humans.  I'd suggest the only way to distinguish humans from other entities, whether they be computers or chimpanzees, is the genetic one.  By that I mean that a human is born of another human and contains DNA from one or more humans.

When you expand your mental image of "human" from a mature adult to include infants and the mentally and physically challenge I don't think there's a reliable performance test. The reverse Turing test doesn't work--many humans cannot converse, a few have no language at all.  So I think, rather than performance, the only test of humanity is the genetic history.

Fake Meat and GMO's

Nicholas Kristof has a piece in the NYTimes describing the progress being made in developing edible fake meat.  It sounds promising.  I've no problems with the effort.

I do wonder though how the food movement and the environmentalists will react if fake meat becomes a reality.  A fake steak would be good for global warming, given the methane production of cattle.  But it seems to me that fake meat should raise all the concerns which the food movement voices in connection with genetically modified organisms.

What's Wrong with the IG's and GAO?

That's the question I take away from reading Megan McArdle's post on the IG report on the Obamacare website software fiasco.

She says:

You can take this report as a searing indictment of the agency and its contracting personnel. I took something rather different away from reading it:

1. The architects of the law were incredibly naïve.
2. Federal contracting rules are crazy.

I agree with her assessment, but I'd argue that both things reflect the mindset of inspectors general and GAO. They like to see the rules, the paper documents, and to compare what happens to what's on paper.  In many years of looking at GAO reports on USDA/FSA activities I don't remember much direct criticism of political appointees or of Congress. IMHO rhose are more often the source of problems than the career bureaucrats.  (Of course, I'd say that, and of course the auditors aren't going to point the finger at the political types.)

Cage-Free Eggs and the End of the Nest Egg

McDonald's made news by promising to move to cage-free eggs within 10 years.

I did a Google image search and I'm damned if I can see any eggs or nests, just a bunch of happy hens.   But I want to know--where are the eggs?

In my youth we started the chicks in brooder houses, gradually allowing them to free range. When the pullets started laying they'd usually lay in the corners of the brooder houses, but not always.  They seemed to follow the leader--sometimes you'd find a nest along the fence row where some had laid several eggs.

Once we cleared the old hens out, and cleaned the hen house, we'd move the best pullets into the house.  There they had a bank of nests--3 or 4 rows high, with a walkway behind the nest.  The front was hinged, so you could easily access the nest.  The nest itself would have a "nestegg", meant to signal to the hen that this is where to lay the egg.  It usually worked--very occasionally a hen would lay an egg in a corner of the area.

Found this Youtube video, from a manufacturer of colony cages, approved by the EU.

It appears from the last link that the hens lay their eggs on the wire bottom of the cage, periodically a bar riding on top of the wire moves the eggs to a collection conveyor belt at the front of the cage, and the conveyor belt conveys the eggs to the processing area.  Apparently nesteggs aren't essential.

I wonder--the pictures I've seen have been brown eggs. Brown eggs are prettier than white, though the nutrition is about equal. So are the pictures just showing pretty eggs, or have white Leghorn hens, the breed we raised, become unpopular?