I Voted Today

My precinct had three sign-in stations where they scan your VA drivers license/ID card and ask you for your name and address.  Then you get your paper ballot, go to the booth and mark it, then scan it at one of two stations.

We waited maybe half a minute for a sign-in station to free up; no waits thereafter.

The precinct seemed busy.  I think usually we get around 700 votes.

Changing Times--Bureaucrats in FSA

I wish USDA had continued to publish an organizational telephone directory.  Back in the day, before computers, we had a printed directory for FSA and a separate one for all USDA DC employees.  I particularly miss the first, which showed employees by their unit.  As far as I know that information is no longer available.  Neither is the old USDA organizational directory which showed all the agencies with their managers down to at least branch level.

All this is triggered by the table in Notice MFP-4 showing the three program specialists to whom questions should be referred--all three are women.  Back in the day, a female program specialist in DC was rare, not unheard of but rare.  With an old-style phone directory I could figure out whether it's now the case that male program specialists are endangered.

Pro-Growth Will Win in 2020?

Michael Tomasky argues that to win in 2020 Dems need to argue for growth against the supply-side theories of the Republicans. 

Democrats, rather than merely appealing to people’s consciences, will be able to respond that government investments and wage increases are growth producers that will spread benefits well beyond the top 5 percent or 10 percent.

 I'm not sure that's right, not entirely.  

Frank Bruni talks to people about how to win in 2020:  A couple Republicans observe:

Be direct, blunt and consistent. “He has the same message today that he did the day he came down the elevator at Trump Tower,” Myers observed. “The message discipline is incredible. He has never wavered. It’s very real and very powerful.”Convey strength. More than ever voters seem to crave that, and many see it in Trump — in the steadiness that Myers mentioned, in the way he confronts cultural headwinds, in his sustained advocacy for Kavanaugh. “The American people like a fighter,” Lewandowski said. “Donald Trump proved that.”"

Trump is "consistent "?  That's not how I see him--he goes back and forth on many issues. But he comes across as "Trump" everyday, every way. 

Promising Book on Rural Consciousness

May post more later, but just got Katherine Cramer's "The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker". 

Looks good--I can definitely understand her description of "rural consciousness."

(As the polling of the current election seems to show a growing rural and remote suburb versus urban and close suburb gap, this may be more relevant than ever, even though written before 2016.)

Perdue Tanks USDA Morale?

From a Govexec piece on agencies with dropping employee satisfaction:

In March, the Agriculture Department announced that it was severely restricting its telework program, reducing the amount of time employees can work remotely from four days a week to one, or two per pay period. The policy change reportedly came after Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue was unable to find an employee in the office on a day that person was telecommuting.

I've some sympathy with Perdue.  He's likely had little to no experience with telecommuting (not that I have any, having retired before it was really approved) and it could have been a shock the first time you try to find someone who's at home, working.

I found this anonymous report from inside USDA  which provides an employee view of the importance of telecommuting, but disappointly has no juicy gossip about the inciting incident.

The real point is something Perdue as a politician should know--it's never easy to take a benefit from a taxpayer or an employee.

Considering the Unthinkable

It's worthwhile to pause my incessant checking of the NYTimes polling site and the fivethirtyeight assessment of probable and possible outcomes and consider the unthinkable:

Maybe, just maybe, the polls are off and Trump's packed rallies represent something more than the enthusiasm of a set of niche voters.  It seems that pollsters and analysts may have reassessed their performance in 2016 and have changed their methods and approach in 2018.  I hope so.  But it's also possible the pull of a conventional wisdom is still working.

We should know  in five days time, although the worse thing I've seen today is the idea it will take weeks to find out who controls the House.  (The reason: a lot of close races and the long time it takes to count mail ballots, particularly in CA.) 

Scott Adams Predicts

Scott Adams, whose cartoon Dilbert I love, has gone on Fox to predict a huge, possibly record-setting turnout for the Republicans in next Tuesday's elections.

'Dilbert' cartoonist predicts huge GOP midterm turnout https://t.co/H1htybgZjj

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) October 30, 2018

Since the Republicans in 2010 got about 44 million votes and in 2014 got over 45 million, I'd say that means a turnout of over 46 million votes. I think elsewhere he's clarified that he's not predicting that the Republicans would still control the House, just the votes would be up.  His rationale is IMHO fuzzy: Republicans love the feeling of the victory of 2016 (Adams was an early and sole predictor of Trump's election), they tend to act more than talk and are bashful in talking to pollsters so the current polls underestimate GOP turnout (it's an echo of an early 21st century meme that voters who opposed  black candidates would not admit that to pollsters).

My record on predictions is bad, so I won't officially predict that Democratic turnout will top the Republicans and top 47 million votes.  We'll see. 

Even Bees Are Losing Their Privacy

Modern Farmer notes that beekeepers are being offered the ability to monitor their bees online, meaning a loss of privacy.  In partial compensation, they can also provide bees with a solar-heated hive, which will harm the varroa mites without harming the bees.  Or, if all else fails, drone bees are on the horizon.  (A possible confusion between drones that are bees and bees that are drones will ensue.)

"Loose" and "Tight" or "Hot" and "Cold"

Finished "Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World".

It's a new book getting some attention.   The author has identified a dichotomy and applied it broadly, perhaps too much so (a familiar pattern: to the girl with a hammer everything appears to be a nail).

Briefly, the idea is that a country like Germany or Denmark has a "tight" culture, one where norms are well established throughout the society.  Whereas a country like the US has a "loose" culture, norms are both less well established and less consistent through the society.  She draws out implications and argues for this distinction explaining other differences in many aspects of society. She does allow for a given society changing from one state to the other.  For example, Singapore became a very "tight" culture in the last 50 years while Saudi Arabia is trying to "loosen" a bit, at least in some areas.

I recommend the book, but it's not why I mention it.

My idea is that societies might also vary between "hot" and "cold"; both hotness and tightness being descriptors which can be applied at the society level to capture qualities we feel intuitively.

I'm triggered of course by the current controversy over whether the president's rhetoric has contributed to recent events.  I think most people would agree that US society today is "hotter" than it has been in the past. There's a lot of fighting going on, whether you see it as Trump draining the swamp and fighting for the forgotten against the MSM and the pointy-headed liberals or as the Resistance waging a battle against hate and ignorance.  That makes today's US "hot".

Global warming suggests that with more energy in the system, it's more likely that storms will be more powerful and more damaging.  Can I stretch the metaphor to argue that the hotter the social climate, the more damage the inevitable storms created by loners and fringe actors are going to cause?

The Future Is Near: The Impact of Autonomous Trucks

This piece at evonomics.com by Andrew Yang is distressing, and convincing. Perhaps the worst part is the impact on small businesses which serve the  trucking industry: the truckstops and motels. Yang doesn't note it, but those enterprises might well be the  lifeline for "flyover America"--the wide open spaces where farming no longer employs the people it used to.