Proud To Be "Human Scum"

My cousin identifies as a Republican, though she's recently voted mostly Democratic.  But she appreciates President Trump's calling his Republican critics "human scum". She's planning a t-shirt with that motto to fluaunt that honor to the world.

I don't qualify for it--rather like Americans can't really be knighted by the Queen, I'm left standing by the side, envious.

Updating Voter Lists

This article described the open process being used in Ohio.  They proposed to purge 235,000 inactive voters, but found that 20 percent should not have been purged.

They used an open process-generating a list, then making it public so interested groups could find errors.

Although liberals tend to be suspicious of these exercises, I had enough experience with maintaining name and address lists to be open to it.  These days bytes are cheap, and computers fast, so there's less need to keep the list clean and purged of old data.  But a clean list is still good:

1. although the process of checking voter id against the list may be automated, as it is in Fairfax county, there will be times when a human has to get involved. When that happens the cleaner the better, so there's less likelihood of confusion and mistakes.
2. although fraud--impersonating a voter--is vanishingly rare it can happen, and having dead people on the voter list is one vulnerability.

In my ideal bureaucrat's world, there would be a master register for all residents, so checking could be automated.  But that's never going to happen in the U.S., so this open process seems to me to be the nezt best thing.

It's All in the Spin: We Want Pence

One of the attacks the Republicans are using against the impeachment inquiries in the House is that it's an attempted coup, overthrowing an election.

Sounds good, so we Democrats need a counter:

Bottom line: we aren't trying to oust President Trump.  We have the highest regard for his abilities as an entertainer and businessman and would like to see him devote his great energy and supreme intellect to those pursuits.  It's a win-win, because a President Pence would continue to nominate conservative judges and make a great looking president, while Donald Trump could organize and create an entertainment/news network to take the flag which Fox News is in the process of dropping.

People who forecast the outcomes of elections say the Republicans should be favored to win in 2020 based on peace and prosperity, so there's no downside for Republicans in impeaching the President.

Contract Farming Versus Supply Management

Part of the logic of contract farming, as I understand it, is providing more stability to the industry.

That might be questioned, given a 30 percent drop in egg prices.

Contract farming means the farmer in the hen house doesn't determine how many hens to raise.  She forgoes the possibility of good egg prices and hefty profits for hopefully a more certain profit (assuming disease can be avoided etc.).  The company doing the contracting makes the decision to increase or decrease production. Because the company only has to track what the other companies are doing, a much easier job than reading the minds of thousands of small growers, the company can make better decisions.

What happened to the theory?  Cage-free eggs seems to be the answer.  As producers increase production of cage-free eggs, both because of state regulations and the premium prices for such eggs, they misjudged the effect on demand for eggs from caged hens, and didn't decrease production enough.  The article doesn't say, but I'd guess the contracts the companies had with their growers limited their ability to cut production quickly.  After all the farmers have a capital investment in their hen houses and their cages which they planned to amortize over the lifetime of the buildings and equipment.

I don't know how possible it would be for a cage grower to convert to cage-free operation.  If the change is simply providing more cage space per hen, the conversion might be doable, although the grower would need to add building(s) to maintain the same level of production. Going to entirely cage free would be harder.  And free-range would be even harder.

Canada has a supply management program for poultry and dairy.  I assume that Canadians are as intrested in cage-free egss as Americans, so it will be interesting to see if their plan will work better in handling the changes than our markets do.

On Columbus and Italians

Josh Marshall has thoughts on Columbus/

I'm old enough to remember when WASP's looked dubiously on Catholics (specifically and especially my mother)--they were subject to the rule of the pope, so weren't fully loyal to the US (somewhat as some even today see Jews and Israel), they were relatively recent immigrants and not fully Americanized. 

One Italian-American in my school for a while--don't remember whether Joe was set back or grade or whether  he was a grade ahead.--he didn't graduate with us I know that.  Pretty good athlete and ran with the jocks. Got teased about being a "wop".  At least in memory it was mostly teasing, as we had nicknames for others: "crotch", "piggy", and "spook" were others I remember.  The last one wasn't racial--he was very pale. 

Italian-Americans were climbing the ladder--Senator John Pastore was prominent as the first senator.

In memory at least JFK's election ended most that that prejudice--the Italians were honorary Irish by virtue of being Catholic, so when he won all the recent immigrant groups won.  ("Recent" referring to 30 years before).

Also on immigration--two of the three economics Nobelists announced today are immigrants, which isn't unusual--see this from 2017.

Top 25 Vertical Farms?

Here's a listing of the top 25 vertical farms, although it appears some are equipment providers for aeroponic or hydroponic setups.  There's some mention of LED's, particularly for marijuana. (Indoor farming of marijuana seems to make sense based on what's desirable for the plants, not just because it's easier to hide the plants from law enforcement.)  Mostly these farms are growing greens and herbs.

When I first blogged on vertical farms it was to mock the idea of sun-based vertical farms. That idea seems to have died a natural death; artificial lights are used, changing the economics.  The linked article talks of the possibility of a multi-billion dollar industry by 2022 or so.  Personally I expect there's a fair amount of froth and hype in its current state--at some point the market will sort out which designs and sets of technology can make money in which cities.

Contract Farming for Strawberries?

Contract farming made an early appearance with hens, putting the small farms like my mother's out of business.  It's spread to more and more areas of agriculture, but I wasn't aware that strawberries are now included.   See this Civil Eats story.

Trump's MFP Leads to WTO Violation?

That's the Congressional Research Service's tentative conclusion--US may be billions over its "amber box" limit in 2019.. Its conclusion:

According to the scenarios developed in this analysis, including a projected set of market conditions, the United States may potentially exceed its cumulative amber box spending limit of $19.1 billion in 2019. Excessive amber box payments in 2019 could result from the addition of large MFP payments to the traditional decoupled revenue support programs ARC and PLC.
However, this analysis found that U.S. compliance with WTO amber box spending limits was very sensitive to a change in market conditions and market valuations. Noncompliance hinges on many key market factors that are currently unknown but would have to occur in such a manner as to broadly depress commodity prices through the 2019 marketing year (which extends through August 31, 2020, for corn and soybeans). Another crucial uncertainty is how the U.S.-China trade dispute—with its deleterious effects on U.S. agricultural markets—will evolve.51 Resolution of the U.S.-China trade dispute and an improved demand outlook could lead to higher commodity prices and output values while lowering payments under countercyclical farm programs such as MAL, PLC, and ARC. Such a turn of events could help facilitate U.S. compliance with its WTO spending limits.

Count Me a Pollyanna

I know President Trump has support for his China policy from many Democratic politicians and in academia and the chattering classes.  The conventional wisdom today seems to be we need to be tough on China on intellectual property issues and other non-tariff issues.  That's not an endorsement of Trump's specific decisions on tariffs.

I may be naive, I think in the long run, maybe the long long run, that policy is ill-advised.  That feeling isn't based on much knowledge, but these are pointers:

• Theft of intellectual property might be bad, but it seems also true that it's not always easy to exploit stolen ideas.  Ideas rely on a network, a specific environment for their implementation and and further development.
• "theft" of ideas is applying a concept which applies to personal or real property to intellectual things.  Another way to look at it is that the "theft" means additional minds working on scientific and technical issues, coming up with new property which, if shared with the world, can help all of us.
• In the bad old days of the cold war it was reasonable to worry about theft of weapons designs. These days there's no country with an ideology of world domination.
• We used to dream of the US as a model for the world (see the Gettysburg Address).  We're losing that dream.

Fact--China has 7 times more African students than the US.

Note on Marijuana

Among the things I didn't know about marijuana is that it needs a Mediterranean type of climate--hot and dry and sunny, not the sort of climate we have in the East.  This Post story informed me.