A Man Who Cares: Joe Fore

Joe Fore on Twitter does something I love:  assess typoographical choices of the legal profession.

(Thread) There’s been a lot of #legalwriting typography content lately. After seeing @BobLoeb’s great graphic showing font choices by federal circuit, I wanted to explore each circuit’s formatting choices in more detail, and, hopefully, draw out some broader themes.

— Joe Fore (@Joe_Fore) May 18, 2020

He dings the First Circuit for their use of monospaced type, one of my pet peeves.

Suppose We Didn't Have Work From Home

There have been a lot of comparisons between the current pandemic and those in the past, particularly in terms of case numbers and deaths.

One thing which isn't accounted for in such comparisons is the existence of the Internet and the enabling of work from home. My point is that in 2020 we had the option of closing offices and working from home, of closing schools and going to remote learning, of moving to tele-medicine.

I don't know how much difference it makes; I don't know the extent to which shelter-in-place was implemented in past pandemics.  But I'm sure it makes a significant difference, which social scientists will be trying to figure out over the next years.

Suppose Trump Is Mostly Right?

Let's say the reopening of the US goes okay, some glitches, but on the whole the level of deaths keeps declining down to a low level, so Covid-19 is just the fourth or fifth most common cause of death.

And suppose that's low enough that businesses and schools reopen during the summer without major setbacks.

So now it's October 1 and things have been going pretty well.  And most important they have been going pretty well since May 15.

And the stories in the media are no longer the gloom of uncertainty but the resilience of the country.

And despite the impact on the economy, our "animal spirits" have revived and the majority of the country thinks things are improving, and we're on the right track.

What then will be the outlook for Trump's reelection?

A Note From the Store: Toilet Paper

I was intrigued yesterday by the toilet paper  shelf at Safeway.  Usually they have multi-roll packs of their own toilet paper, plus those of name brands.  There were a few such packs of their own brand yesterday, but the bulk of the shelves were filled with individual rolls of a couple of brands I'd never seen before. They were foreign, I think, but didn't linger to investigate further.

Trump: Keep Your Cotton Pickin' Hands Off My Money

I remember when the Thrift Savings Plan was created as part of a plan to reform the compensation of federal employees, of which I was one. IIRC the administration tried to eliminate the defined benefit retirement plan under civil service.  Switching from defined benefit to defined contribution was all the rage in private enterprise back then.

IIRC correctly there was some opposition particularly on the right based on the idea the investment money would be under the control of political types who would try to use their leverage to further their socialistic goals.

From EBRI's summary:i

KEY FACTORS TO SUCCESS: Despite initial opposition from labor groups and veto threats from the Reagan administration, Congress ultimately enacted a plan that reduced federal spending and eventually won strong support from federal workers, particularly because of the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). Lawmakers deliberately and carefully insulated the TSP from political manipulation and minimized the impact of the federal workers’ investments in the financial markets.

Now the Trump administration is pushing the TSP board not to include Chinese stocks in the I (international) fund.  (Some in Congress are pushing a law forward to effect the same goal.)What it means is a lower return on my money because they view China as an adversary. 

I hope all those conservatives who worried about political considerations impacting TSP investment decisions back in 1986 will now oppose this move.

We Do Better by Our Animals Than Humans?

This is a paragraph from a Washington Post article on an OK veterinary lab which got into Covid-19 testing:

The Oklahoma Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory’s scrappy, collaborative effort to shift gears amid a crisis was aided by basic biological similarities between humans and other species: Animals’ nasal passages are routinely swabbed for viruses, and nucleic acid is extracted from samples and amplified on state-of-the-art machines identical to those used in human testing for the novel coronavirus. But it also highlights the preparedness of many animal health labs, which — unlike public health labs — have been buttressed by federal grants to be bulwarks against outbreaks that could cripple livestock and poultry industries.

That last sentence struck me.

The Impact of Technology on FSA Communications

I posted previously on my discovery of the FDA Facebook group, which is a new means of communication across the organization.  Some further thoughts:

When I joined ASCS my impression was it was hierarchical organization.  Questions would come from the county through the district director to the state office to the area director to the applicable program specialist in the program division.  At least that was the theory. Over time I discovered the role of the county and state committees, which was contested.  In theory they were in charge of applying policy decisions to their counties and states.  (This is what they had been in the 1930's.) In reality it seemed to me that they often lacked the expertise and always lacked the day-to-day operational awareness really to fulfill that role.  As a result over the years their role had diminished, but smart county and state executive directors would manage their relationships with their committees.

The role of the district director was also evolving, as symbolized by the change in terminology from "farmer fieldman" to "district director".  My impression is that these positions were often quite political, with significant turnover when the political party in charge changed.  As a cynic my impression was the quality of the DD's varied, meaning they sometimes were obstacles and were bypassed by the more knowledgeable CED's.

When ASCS started installing System/36's in county offices, it put a lot of strain on the old systems.  First and foremost, nobody involved in the new technology had experience with it, so a simple question that a program assistant might take to a more senior person, or the CED, wouldn't receive an answer. The time required to move a question from county through state to DC (KCMO)and finding someone with an answer and then getting it back down the chain was simply too long.

Time and experience solved some of the problems as we all learned by trial and error. I suspect, but can't prove, that informal communication networks expanded.  People learned who in the state was more capable with the technology. 

Cleaning Up After the Trump Elephant

The old joke about following a circus parade and having to clean up after the elephants...?

After Trump leaves office there will be a lot of cleanup needed:

• reestablishing norms for openness, including releasing tax returns, maintaining public records of who visits the White House,  putting assets into blind trusts, not using official events to push political agendas or to sell stuff, etc.
• redoing the interactions with Congress.
• [updated--prohibiting policy announcements by twitter.]

I don't know how we do this.  The natural tendency of each branch of government is to keep their authority, so it may be harder to undo Trump precedents than we'd like to think.

Bucket-a-Day

I've started reading P.D.James "Time To Be in Earnest"-- a sort of memoir in diary form.  Describing her childhood she mentioned heating the water for the weekly bath.  Don't know why that cause me to think of our "bucket-a-day". Here's an article discussing a modern use.  For us we used it in the summer only.  The rest of the year we had the coal stove going.  In addition to cooking and heating part of the downstairs the stove also heated our water.  Pipes ran through it to capture heat from the fire.  The heated water, being less dense than cold, would rise through a pipe to a tank in the upstairs bathroom.  When you opened the hot water faucets in the kitchen and downstairs half-bath the hot water was drawn from the tank to the faucets. 

FSA Now and Then

I signed up for Facebook years ago, but rather quickly decided I wouldn't make much use of it.

But, the other day I thought to search for FSA and found there's a big and active FSA group there.  I was approved to join, so I'm occasionally starting to review the posts (whatever the Facebook term is for it).

Apparently most (all?) FSA offices are operating behind locked doors, so producer contact is by phone and email.  Looks to be variation in the rules applied and the infrastructure being supplied.  (IMHO that's an old story, inevitable in the US but that's no consolation to those getting the short end of the stick.) 

Reading some of the comments of the toll being experienced by the staff reminded me of the field's experiences with the 1983 PIK program and then the pain of moving to the System/36.  This generation will have their own war stories with which to bore their young successors.