A Sixth Hack--Mess With GOTV

David Sanger at the Times has a piece on five possible hacks of the election process. All very good, but he misses what seems to me to be the most significant hack: messing with a party's "get out the vote" (GOTV) operation. Unlike most of the election operation, this seems to be centralized, so if there's one central database it's a high-reward target. Screw up the database and the GOTV effort is wasted. Barring that, do a denial of service attack, and you have a similar effect.

Humans Are Strange

"Active and ambitious in a career notorious even among slave owners for its viciousness, Bacon Tait nevertheless married a free woman of color, Courtney Fountain, whose extended family were involved in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad."

From a book review at Dead Confederates, a reminder that history is stranger than fiction.  Book sounds good.

Times and GMO's--II

I blogged previously about the NYTimes article on GMO's,  Tyler Cowen links to another approach--the writer arguing that farmers are making rational decisions on which seeds to buy, which must mean that GMO seeds have advantages over nonGMO.

An Idea for Grain Elevators

This post from Life on a Colorado Farm caught my attention.  They are in the midst of corn harvest:

"One of the things she wanted to do was ‘Go with Grandpa to the Elevator’.  Terry left early…7:30 in the morning…he was 11th in line.  The Elevator opens at 6:00 a.m.  There were trucks there starting at 4:30 a.m.  The days are long during harvest. The wait is longer."

Not clear how long it was before he unloaded but at least 3 hours or more.  So with 11 trucks at 3 hours per that's a good bit of time.

How difficult would it be to do a software program to coordinate scheduling between farmers and grain elevators? It is, after all, just a scheduling problem:  you've got a resource that's time-bound just like a doctor's time, and you've got patients wanting service.   I suppose the reason there is no such program (if that's a true fact, maybe there is one used everywhere but in this Colorado county?) is that it's only a yearly thing, and maybe farmers enjoy the break and the chance to compare notes with the others waiting? 

Dairy: Supply Management Versus Organic

NYTimes has a story on Canadian dairy farmers and their relationship to the EU (remember the Canada/EU treaty which was delayed for a bit by Walloon dairy farmers (i.e., Belgium).  Their concern is that more cheese may be imported from the EU into Canada. Two paragraphs:

The way the country’s “supply management” system works now, Canadian dairy farms are almost guaranteed to prosper. Milk production is controlled by quotas, marketing boards keep prices high and stable, and import duties of up to 300 percent largely shut out competition from abroad.

But after the deal, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, which was signed on Sunday, comes into effect, much more imported cheese will be allowed to enter Canada duty-free from the Continent. And farmers worry that this one dent in their defenses could be the beginning of the end for supply management.

Later the article cites an estimate of over $200 per year in additional costs for dairy products for the average Canadian farmer, or roughly $.50 a day.  Some speculations:

So the Canadian system probably maintains a lot of smaller family dairies, farms which have been lost in the U.S. as dairies got bigger and bigger.  (Maybe I'll get ambitious and research the point--looks like 11,000 farms averaging about 90 cows.  It's hard to get comparable data but a quick skim of this says my generalizations seem valid. This seems to say that there's proportionately more organic dairies/cows in the US..)  The food movement would like that.  But the dairy products in the grocery stores are likely rather generic; with supply management protecting a farmer's place in the economy, there's little incentive to experiment with organic milk, raw milk, or niche cheeses.  The food movement won't like that.

The bottom line, very tentatively, is: families can pay more to preserve family farms or pay more for choice of milk products (i.e., organic).  The downside of supply management is the higher prices apply to all; the upside of the US system is consumers can choose whether to pay the premium prices for organic.

FSA Aerial Photography Using Drones?

FCW has a post on USDA's IT budget requests.  It includes this paragraph:

Then there's the outright fanciful. When the Federal Aviation Administration issued permits allowing commercial drones to be used in agriculture, USDA set plans in motion for its own implementation. To plan for resource allocation and budgeting, the department will need big-data analysis of crop imagery and related data gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles.

So I go to the FSA website and search for "drones", get two supposed hits although I don't see the word within the document, but one of them discusses four-band aerial photography as being available in some states.  

Trump's Taxes

Kevin Drum as usual has a good post on the issue of how Trump handled his tax returns in the 90's, specifically how he avoided declaring forgiveness of debts as income.  I think I'm wrong in my comment on the post--this Trump issue occurred before the Republicans started hammering the IRS (in Congressional hearings during Clinton's second term).  So if the IRS accepted a dubious interpretation of law in the first term, it may reflect something other than badgering from Congress.

Those Damn Boomers

I'm a member of the silent generation (born 1941) so naturally I don't like the boomers. Turns out I'm right, as usual.  Two sentences from a piece on trends in incarceration:

"Multiple factors account for the rising proportion of older Americans in prison. First, ever the trendsetters, baby boomers are somewhat more criminally active in late life than were previous generations."

Alaskan Ag--The Reality of Climate Change

The skeptics of climate change challenge the accuracy of temperature graphs, so I like to find phenomena which can't be challenged, like the Northwest Passage or growing cabbages outdoors in Alaska.

(I remember back in the late 70's there were a few farms with bases or maybe normal crop acreages on record in Alaska. )

Congressional Research Service on Payment Limitation

A new website has lots of Congressional Research Service reports (which are usually not made public, unless the member of Congress who requested the report releases it), including this one on payment limitation issues.