USDA Is Tail-End Charlie

"Tail-end charlie" is a term from aerial combat--the last plane in a formation is particularly vulnerable.  In ground combat you don't want to be "point" on a patrol, nor do you want to be at the end of column.

Anyhow, since Trump has now nominated a head of the VA, USDA is officially the tail-end charlie.  Farmers who expected a NYC billionaire to put priority on their concerns were fooling themselves.

I'm Relaxed on Trump Appointees

Jonathan Bernstein captures why I'm relaxed about Trump appointees: the confirmation hearings fulfill other functions than approving/disapproving.   The only thing worrisome is whether all the ethics paperwork will be filed before Senate approval.  The Senate should not approve before seeing all the paperwork.

My attitude is generally: "enough rope", as in give him enough rope to hang himself.    I remember the results of Reagan's appointments: Interior, EPA, and State all self-destructed, and OMB didn't go so well either.

Driverless Car Showdown--Waymo and Mobileye

Mobileye is doing the learning approach, as described here. I've blogged before about the advantages of this approach.  But Alphabet (Google) has spun off its driverless car enterprise into Waymo, which announced this week it would have Chrysler minivans outfitted with its technology on the road by the end of the month.  Waymo isn't building its own cars anymore; instead it's providing a package of sensors, computers, and software to be added onto existing cars.  As well as I can tell Waymo is still taking the top-down approach, presumably taking advantage of Google Map data and expertise.

The competition between the two approaches will be interesting.

Vertical Farming and Misleading Illustrations

The New Yorker has an article on vertical farming, featuring a Cornell professor, Ed Harwood, who is depicted as the prime mover behind aeroponics.  (When you check the wikipedia article he's mentioned in one sentence.)  Anyhow, Harwood's aeroponics uses water sprays of nutrients and a patented fabric together with specialized LED lights.

It all sounds good, but I'm constitutionally unable fully to approve of vertical farming.  The catch in this article is the illustration, which instead of showing stacks of plant trays and LED lights shows a few leafy open-air terraces, with the implication that the light for photosynthesis is furnished by the sun. The illustration fits the original concept of vertical farming, but not that described in the article.

The Virtues of Consistency in Managers

I think I've recounted this before, but I'll do it again.  Early in my managerial career I exploded at an employee, using some curse words.  My boss, actually the deputy director of the division, counseled me in a session I've remembered.  (Of course I had to apologize to the employee.)  Also in the division was another branch chief, Lew, a WWII veteran of D-Day (I think his ship was sunk) who was, to stereotype, a volatile Italian-American, and a male chauvinist. (This was 1975 or so.) One of his section chiefs was a young woman, Linda, who was new to management.  I think the conversation happened some months after a reorganization of the division.

Anyhow, the deputy director noted that while putting Lew as Linda's boss seemed counter-intuitive, he thought it was working.  The key factor was that Lew was consistent, so Linda could learn to adapt to his ways.  By contrast, if your manager was unpredictable, erupting occasionally while usually being emotionally withdraw (i.e, like me), it was hard for employees to adapt, to learn what worked and what didn't.

The lesson rang true to me then, and I've found subsequent experience confirming it.  With this in mind, I fear our President-elect will not be a good manager.  His subordinates will get tired of his changes of directions, and start withholding problems/information which might trigger bad decisions.  And that withholding may lead to bigger problems.

We'll see.

A Good Cornellian

Being lazy, I'm stealing from Vox:

"Charles F. Feeney, who made a fortune from duty-free stores and prudent investments in technology companies, last year successfully completed his goal of giving away $8 billion. Over years of giving, he aggressively avoided the spotlight and asked recipients not to publicize the donations. Feeney has kept about $2 million — with an “m,” not a “b” — to continue his modest retirement. What a nice dude. [The New York Times]

 There's something to be said, however, for not hiding one's light under a bushel--publicizing one's donations helps establish a norm that this is the proper thing to do.

CRISPR: Once Again

Here's a piece on various advances in science the use of CRISPR (editing out genes) will enable in 2017 and future years.

I've been doing regular posts noting the rapid advances in using the method.  My first notice was about 20 months ago, when  I noticed it bypassed the usual objections to genetic modification. Maybe it's time for me to keep quiet, rather than trying to impress with my prescience? 

Farm Structure

ERS did a piece on farm structure recently. Here's its graph:



I've used it to counter the common meme that big corporations dominate agriculture.  It's not true, at least with field crops.  But then I started thinking--it's true enough that corporations are big in fruits and vegetables, but why would that be?

I'm guessing the key is that fruits and vegetables must offer much higher gross income per acre than wheat or corn.  If true, it would follow that those acres are much more valuable and therefore take more capital to acquire, leading naturally to the greater use of corporations to assemble the acreage.

Another factor might be the economic structure: field crops likely require less processing than do vegetables. And fruits and vegetables spoil, they can't be stored, at least not unless they're processed by canning, juicing, drying, or freezing. Those factors make it more likely for vertical integration.    We've had vertical integration with poultry and eggs for 50-60 years.  I suspect the fruits and vegetables sector preceded birds.

Lag Times and Lead Times

People who study human behavior in societies need to worry about lag times and lead times.  That comment results from this piece on  the results of legalizing pot in Washington--most studies show little change in teenage pot use.

I'm not convinced, perhaps because I've a vivid memory of a high school teacher warning against the dangers of marijuana, probably in 1958 or so. But over the last 50 years there have been "epidemics" of use/abuse of various substances, most notably the "crack" epidemic in the 1980's.  That seems to have settled down, perhaps because kids saw the adverse impacts of crack addiction and decided to avoid it.  There have been others--the "date drug" scare, for one. 

Such epidemics are, I think, very much like epidemics of physical disease: the flu, SARS, HIV, Ebola.  The initial cases don't show up in summary statistics; there's a lead time for the disease to spread to the point where it will show up.  The necessity of a lead time means there's a lag time in seeing its effects.

So I'm not convinced by a few years experience in one state.

Happy New Year

Welcoming 2017 with anticipation of many blog-worthy things.