Administrative Procedures and Trump

This ThinkProgress post represents one of the hurdles for the Trump revolution:  simply put, once a regulation is in place, the bureaucracy has to use the Administrative Procedure Act to revise/change/revoke it, including cost/benefit analysis and consideration of public comment.  (There are exceptions to this, of course, and I'm specifying "the bureaucracy" since Congress can change the game, but it's a good general rule.)  In the case of the Clean Water Rule, a judge has found EPA and Corps of Engineers to be rushing too fast (because it's not a simple case, other court cases involved) in their analysis.

How the Brits Do Government IT

The blog.Gov.uk site is the blog for the UK government, as you might guess.  It's interesting to follow the posts, seeing some of the differences and some of the similarities between British IT and US IT.  The British government is a lot more centralized than the US, both at the national level with its civil service setup which uses more cross-department transfers than the US (SES was supposed to incorporate that, but doesn't really), and in the structure of local government--no federalism.

Even though their IT efforts seems to follow the same pattern, with more basic applications being shared across departments, they still have silos.  An excerpt:

"We transitioned 300+ websites onto one platform in 15 months. That meant we didn’t have the time or the opportunity to look properly at how that content fitted together.
And because each organisation’s website moved on to GOV.UK separately, that content came onto the site siloed and has remained siloed. And there are now more than 300,000 individual items on GOV.UK."

Clovis Redux

The appointment of Sam Clovis might be in trouble, as he had an interview in 2014 in which he was critical of crop insurance, which has become the basic safety net program for crop farmers.

Interesting times ahead. (I predict he'll backtrack and the Senate will confirm.)

Opposition to Clovis

From the Yonder, a letter opposing the appointment of Sam Clovis as Undersecretary, USDA, for research.  His background (mainly conservative talk show host) doesn't seem to fit the legal requirement for the position.  The major farm groups say, in effect, to hell with the law, we want someone who has clout with the President.

Actuaries Don't Risk in Marriage

Flowing Data has an interesting post showing divorce rates by occupation.  Lots of data, but a couple highlights:  the military and farmers both have rates below average.  Generally the high paid professions have the lowest rates. The lowest of all: actuaries.

Technology and Dairy

Dairy Carrie reports spending $20,000 on necklaces for their dairy cows.  These are high-tech jobs, which provide indicators when the cow is in heat (high activity) and is sick (not chewing cud). In a dairy above a certain size, and I'm not sure how large this dairy is but not humongous, the dairyman needs help to keep track of these two critical factors.  (Miss a heat, and the cow is going to lose production, effectively 1/12 of annual production.  That's money, that's the difference between profit and loss.)

Regard for the Career Staff I

President Trump has been slow to fill the slots for political appointees in the executive branch, and Dems have been slow to confirm those he's appointed.  That means the various Secretaries have found themselves dealing with career executives a lot, or working without support.  I've wondered what the effect will be.

In the case of HUD apparently the result has been to raise the civil service in Carson's eyes: GovExec reports that Secretary Carson is praising the career employees at HUD.

Chicken Feed (Sack) Dresses

Slate has a post on a 2009 scholarly article about the use of chicken feed sacks to make clothing back in the day, my day as it happens.  (It's even a thing on Etsy.)

I remember our getting feed in 100 pound bags.  Usually the bags were burlap and were returned back to GLF (the co-op we patronized and my dad was a board member of) for re-use.  But in my earliest memories (1945 or so) there are some cloth bags with patterns.  My sister remembered mom sewing her dresses from them.  The article says such clothes were a sign of poverty, and they certainly were to my sister.

But the times were such that people did re-use things.  I remember scavenging old nails from boards and trying to straighten them so they could be used again.  Mom had a rag bag where the unwearable old clothes went, someday to be pulled from the bag and cut into pieces, possibly for use in a rag rug, or in a quilt.  The innards of the quilt would be another example of re-use: milk strainer flannels. Much to my surprise, a similar thing is still available--description says "gauze" where my memory is of flannel squares.  When pouring a pail of milk into the milk can, you used a large metal funnel with a filter square at the bottom, the filter intended to filter out foreign materials (i.e., manure and bedding) which could have gotten into the milk pail.  (It's not only sausage-making that the layperson wants to remain ignorant of. :-)  Mom would wash the filters, which by regulation could only be used once, and use them for various purposes.  Stitched together they'd be a towel for drying dishes; stacked four or five thick, they'd become the basis for a quilt.

While I think I've adapted pretty well to changes in our culture over the last 70 years, except for pop music, the change in attitude towards material things still bothers me.  What I mean is the way people, perhaps mostly kids, will leave pieces of clothing out--presumably they've lost track of their shoe(s), or socks, or shirt and don't care to spend the time to search them out and retrieve them, and their parents are willing to buy new.  It bothers.

The Best British Comedy Ever Made

The best British comedy series ever made is about bureaucrats.

Cotton Wants

Am I getting old and forgetful--I don't remember blogging about this program.  Remember the pressure on Vilsack to do something for cotton, but not this.  Anyway, from DTN:

"The cotton industry and contingent of 135 members of Congress are calling on the Trump administration to continue operating the $300 million Cotton Ginning Cost Share Program created by the Obama administration as a way to help cotton producers."