Where Are the Immigrants When You Need Them?

Those happy few who watched David Simon's Treme on post-Katrina New Orleans will remember a bit, not quite a subplot, about immigrants coming into New Orleans to participate in the cleanup and rebuilding.  I thought of that when I saw this piece.  

Though it focuses on labor shortages and wage rates, it doesn't mention the incentive for increased immigration.  But the higher the wages in the construction industry, the more benefit to immigrating.

IRS Bureaucrats Did Some Things Right

According to a Politico report the IG, IRS bureaucrats applied heightened scrutiny to some liberal nonprofits on much the same basis as they did to conservative ones: looking at clues from their titles and connections.  The conventional wisdom, as I understand it, is this is wrong, wrong, wrong.  Every nonprofit should get the same amount of scrutiny, and using clues is akin to racial profiling.

This is the issue the Republicans made hay out of in the Obama administration, doing several Congressional investigations,  forcing Lois Lerner to retire, and calling for criminal prosecutions.  I didn't spend much time delving into the details, but I still want now to state two positions:

• if you don't have unlimited resources, it's good bureaucratic strategy to focus your efforts.  That's the theory Obama used in establishing DACA, and it applies for more than just prosecutorial  work. So to me it was perfectly rational for the IRS bureaucrats to devote more attention to groups linked to the Tea Party and to Acorn, than a nonprofit set up to fund local recreational facilities, for example.   I agree it would be bad if the bureaucrats showed a partisan bias, but based on the Politico report it seems they didn't.
• the problem, as it so often is, is Congress in writing a bad law, made worse by bad decisions in the past.  As I understand it, nonprofits can receive tax-exempt donations only if they're not "political ."  What does "political" mean--Congress didn't give a definition and IRS has in the past permitted "some" activity which would seem to a layman to be political, expanding more recently to be less than 50 percent.   That means IRS has to examine the nonprofit in depth, which requires resources, which gets back to the need to focus their attention.

Seems to me it would be better to  worry about interlocking directorates and size of the effort.  Go after the big boys.

Our Morning Hate

Orwell's 1984 featured a Two-Minute Hate, in which the whole society shared a two-minute spasm of hate of their enemy, every day at the same time.   I guiltily thought of that after a few minutes sharing our opinions of our President with a relative, with whom I chat most days.

(This follows an observation yesterday of a headline on the Washington Times website to the effect that the media was biased against Trump: only 11 percent of coverage was positive.  IMHO that means the coverage is fair; he does okay about a tenth of the time, when he's reading from a teleprompter.)

Automated Crop Appraisals?

Crop insurance relies on crop appraisers to sample an acreage of disaster-affected crops and project the reduction in yield which will occur.  It looks as if automated intelligence may be on the way to assist in the job, if not eventually to replace appraisers.  The first crop: cassava.  From Technology Review:

"Some cassava farmers may not be able to tell one plant’s debilitating brown streak from another’s troubling brown leaf spot—but a smartphone-friendly AI can.
Wired reports that researchers have developed a lightweight image-recognition AI that can identify diseases in the cassava plant based on pictures of its leaves. That could be useful, because cassava is one of the most commonly eaten tubers on the planet, but is grown predominantly in developing countries where access to expertise to diagnose unusual crop problems may be limited."

Life Used To Be Better

This can't be dismissed as nostalgia.  Growing up I remember being able to see stars at night, even the Milky Way. Now if you're Kevin Drum you have to travel to Ireland to see it.

Don't know if it's significant but mentions of the Milky Way have declined significantly since the 19th century according to Google Ngrams

Vietnam on TV and in Iraq and Afghanistan

Have now watched most of the Burns/Novick Vietnam series (missing the first one but I'd just completed the Lagevall book) and the last minutes of the longer episodes.  Had my memory refreshed but didn't learn a lot that was new, given that I'd lived through the period, following the media closely, and ended up in Vietnam for a shortened tour (11 months/11 days).  That's my general take, but I did learn more about the divisions in the North's leadership, i.e, the role of Le Duan.

While I found the range of individual stories and responses on the American and South Vietnamese side to be familiar, the stories from the other side were newer, particularly when critical.

Came close to tears twice, once when an American recounted his first glimpse of women in ao dais

which tracked my reactions when arriving in the early morning at Tan San Nhut airport, once in reaction to the piece on the Vietnam War Memorial. 

I'd say the series missed a couple areas which seem important to me, but which aren't the focus. 

One is the ways in which Vietnamese and American societies started to intermix and separate.  The usual way in which this gets covered is prostitution, with the real blend of the offspring of Americans and Vietnamese.  That got mentioned in the series.  But the blending, the intermixture was more than that.  As soon as Americans arrived, we started hiring help, slowly at first but then more and more.  For example by the time I left in May 67 we had barbers, laundry workers, hootch girls, generator helpers (don't know their exact title, but they helped with the generators), and others which time has erased.  Also mentioned briefly in the series was the black market.  I remember buying my jungle boots (with canvas uppers instead of leather as in the standard issue boots) through the black market--more comfortable than the regular boots but at that time restricted only to combat troops.  In both cases, as in our Afghanistan war, the influx of American money had a great impact on the Vietnamese economy and on the people--some good, some bad.  (Not a new phenomenon--recall the complaints of the Brits in WWII--Yanks were overpaid, over-sexed, and over here.)  

The blending, the intermixture, was accompanied by increasing separation.  When I arrived we were operating generators in compounds in Saigon.  I was then stationed at Long Binh, the main logistical base outside Saigon where we did our best to separate from Vietnamese society--we ended up with aluminum hootches on concrete pads, not the tents we started with.   Think of the "Green Zone"  

in Baghdad.  The logic is understandable: we don't want our soldiers killed so the best way to do that is to isolate them. 

The other point not covered was standard in accounts of the war: the fact that most troops were REMF's, as I was.  Lots to be said about that, but not today. 

Grain Surpluses

Illinois farm Policy News reports that 2017 is going to be another year of more grain produced than consumed, the fourth year in a row.

And when focusing on U.S. farmers, the Reuters article explained that, “Even as farmers reap bountiful harvests, U.S. net farm incomes this year will total $63.4 billion – about half of their earnings in 2013, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast.

20 years ago I predicted grain surpluses once the Russians and Ukrainians got going.  So I was right, right, right!  Just didn't realize they'd be so slow about it.

Hugh Hefner and Ayn Rand

New Yorker piece on Hefner. My first memory of Playboy was my freshman year at college.  My roommate had arrived earlier, and had decorated his bookshelf with a recent centerfold.  As a naive rube from upstate NY it was both shocking and intriguing.  Not enough of either for me to ever subscribe to it, but it continued to be a presence in my mental world.

For some reason now I pair Hefner and Ayn Rand, both libertarians.  I was probably more influenced by Hefner than Rand, since his views seemed more mainline than hers.  I don't know if that's a common linkage; googling doesn't seem to bring up that many hits.  Her general influence seems to have persisted more than his, at least intellectually, though his impact on the culture was greater.

War Gaming Disasters

I'm tempted to say the Trump administration is probably getting some undeserved* flak over their reaction to Hurricane Maria.  What I wonder is the extent to which the bureaucracies war game their responses to disaster.  Does FEMA do a war game, do they war game with state agencies, or is the gaming at the DHS/DOD level?  Or how about at the Presidential level?

We know, I think, that the national security establishment has war gamed North Korea.  Has the national disaster establishment war gamed Hurricane Maria, or other emergencies (like an 8.0 earthquake in California, sun flares that zap transmission lines, etc.?

My guess is they haven't, or the war gaming has at best extended one length beyond the worst disaster that's already happened.  In other words, after Katrina hit NOLA, there likely were simulations and games using a 5.0 hurricane, but I'm guessing the simulations of a Puerto Rico/Virgin Islands wipeout haven't happened.

*though the comparison to the response to the Haitian earthquake leads me to qualify my sympathy.  My point, once again, is the Harshaw rule--we haven't had a major hurricane which squarely hit American territory in the Caribbean for years and so, without a war game, the bureaucracy is doing its thing for the first time.

McArdle on the Trump Tax Plan

Megan McArdle has a good post on the Trump tax plan outline. We would be hit by the loss of state tax deductibility, but that's okay with me, if only they'd reduce the cap on mortgage interest deductions.