Our Weak Federal Government--States Control Fed Employees

In any rationally constructed bureaucracy, the leadership of the organization can control the hiring and firing of the people who do the organization's work.
Right?  Anyone disagree?

So we're all in agreement the Social Security Administration is not a rationally constructed bureaucracy.  As the FederalComputer Week reports:

"Under a joint federal-state funding relationship, SSA pays the full salaries of state employees who do initial processing of disability claims under the federal Disability Determination Services program."

 Because they're state employees, not Feds, some 19 states have furloughed these people, meaning SSA can't timely service these claims.

The Food Movement's Dilemma

 I think it's fair to say the food movement is mostly left, sometimes libertarian, but still mostly left.  As such I'd expect them to be responsive to this post at Understanding Government, noting an article on hunger in America.

But I'd also expect them to appreciate this guy's efforts, serving as a middleman between his neighbors who grow food and make artisanal products and the residents of the DC area:

A longtime foodie and serial entrepreneur, Kostelac is convinced that his old neighbors in yuppie Washington will pay premium prices for produce and meat from the small farmers who are his new neighbors. Now, in this refuge from his failures in the city, he sees opportunity — in the leaves of the grapevine that wraps around his front gate, the morel mushrooms that sprout beneath a shade tree and the wild raspberries that grow faster than ones he planted — that he might have overlooked before.

 So,  the dilemma is: what does the food movement support? Do they want to raise taxes to provide more food stamps to low-income people so they can pay some of the "premium prices" ($3.25 for a bunch of basil, $29.25 a pound for brisket)? Do they want to spend money to subsidize Mr. Kostelac's neighbors so they can reduce their prices?

A cynic, and I'm occasionally one, might say if everyone is eating organic basil in their pesto, what's the point--where does one turn in the effort to prove one's taste is superior?

Members of Congress Receiving Farm Payments

EWG has released their list of current members of Congress who are directly or indirectly receiving farm program payments. The majority own shares in some sort of legal entity(ies); few get payments directly.

Past Sins Recalled

Katrina Vanden Heuvel in the Post on having standards for pundits:

Fox News trumped even that, trotting out retired Marine Col. Oliver North, the former Reagan security staffer who orchestrated the secret war in Nicaragua, to indict President Obama for — you can’t make this stuff up — failing to get a congressional resolution in support of the mission in Libya.

Predicting the Future, Achenbach Is Prescient

See his last paragraph quoted here.

Nitpicky Morning

First Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution writes "cache" when he means "cachet" and then Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy writes "principle limit" when he means "principal".  Standards is gone all to hell.

How Do Economists CAPTCHA This Data?

Guy Gugliotta has an article in the Times on the use of Captchas to interpret scanned text through a special software program.  Apparently when you see 2 words in the Captcha, one is a true word which the software knows, the other is scanned text which the software isn't sure of.  So if you get the true word right, you're a human and the software will consider your answer to the other.  Very interesting. They claim 500,000 hours of brain effort are being spent on replying to Captchas, so their software converts that to useful work.

It raises the question to me: how are economists capturing these gains to utility (or however they'd word it)?  It's unpaid work, but it's very useful, converting the poorly scanned texts of old NY Times and 19th century books into readable, accurate English. Come to that, how do they account for the improved research which historians can now do using Google Books and Google Scholar?

My Loss of Faith in Japan

The Japanese are great engineers, right?  And their society is unified.  And in the face of disaster they cooperate, they don't loot, they work together.

But my faith is severely undermined by this factoid, from a Times piece on the supply of electricity:

In theory, the Tokyo area could import electricity from the south. But a historical rivalry between Tokyo and the city of Osaka led the two areas to develop grids using different frequencies — Osaka’s is 60 cycles and Tokyo’s is 50 cycles — so sharing is inefficient.

 Darn right it would be inefficient.  That's even worse than the division of the US into separate grids, where the Texas grid doesn't really connect with the others so the idea for wind power on the High Plains doesn't work well.  It reminds me of the difference in railroad track gauges which we used to have.  (The Erie Railroad had a wider gauge than others; Southern roads varied.  The idea was to create a monopoly, a niche. It's rather like the difference between Apple and Microsoft: Gates went with open architecture and the advantages of networking; Jobs went with closed architecture and the advantages of specialization.  For years it looked as if Gates had the better argument, but now we're starting to doubt.)

Best Sentence of Mar 29

Comes from Tom Rick's The Best Defense, a pilot explaining the deficiencies of the F-22 for ground support.

"The Raptor also lacks the armor and the price tag required for fecklessly dueling Grunts who own automatic weapons and hate pilots who make more money and look better than they do."

The Farmland Bubble

Yes, 4 percent appreciation a month equates to "bubble".

From Farm Policy:

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Williams and Marcia Zarley Taylor reported on Friday at DTN (link requires subscription) that, “Midwest farmland is appreciating so fast that even professional appraisers are humbled by the pace. A good-quality parcel of farmland sold for $11,500 per acre around Bloomington, Ill., earlier this month. That’s up $3,000 to $3,500 from a year earlier, said Charles Knudson, an appraiser with 1st Farm Credit Services.
“In September, Knudson appraised a central-Illinois property at $8,100 per acre for an interested buyer, but it sold at auction in February for $10,150 per acre. He’s now appraising farmland at 4-percent-per-month gains, a rate that landowners once savored on an annual basis.”

 And see Robert Shiller's discussion at Slate.