White House Gardening: Clean Sweeps

Here's a link to the White House garden--apparently it's to be harvested this Friday. And it sounds as if they'll be planting corn, squash and beans (the "three sisters" approach of native Amdericans). It seems the White House is sacrificing a bit of good gardening for their PR.  I say "seems" because I'm reading between the lines. My version of "good gardening" would involve planting as you harvest.  But the PR aspects of the garden means you need to have an "event" to attract the media and justify a video, which seems to lead them to harvest as much as they can at one time and replanting all at once. Presumably the kitchen is serving enough people each week they can use a big harvest, which isn't something the ordinary household could do.

In our own garden, we had one broccoli plant bolt early before we caught it. The rest of the broccoli and the cabbages won't be harvested at the   We've got the tomatoes stuck amongst the lettuce and peas (lots of both).  

The World of Universal Feedback

I was struck by this Nate Silver piece ranking all the major league baseball parks.  It's just part of the new world where we can get feedback on everything, and ranking on everything.  How long will it take for people to start acting on the information?

Some economist, maybe Hayek, observed the market is very good at gathering information, that prices convey reasonably precisely all sorts of information and there's no substitute for it.  That should mean the prices for tickets for the Washington Nationals games should be low, reflecting not only the less than stellar success of the team but also the deficiencies of the ballpark (which may overlap). I doubt the prices do reflect that information.  But the team owners can react to the ratings and improve the ballpark which presumably is much easier to do than improving the team.

More on Supply Side Solutions for Medicare III

Foreign Policy, via Charles Kenny, has a piece on outsourcing medical care to Thailand (lousy pun in Kenny's link)

Suzy Khimm, guest blogging for Ezra Klein, discusses primary care doctors and a NYTimes oped  suggesting making med school education for primary care doctors free.

John Holbo Reverses Things

Via the Corner, a spot of TV talking head with Eric Cantor.

“Everything is on the table,” he said. “As Republicans, we’re not going to go for tax increases. I think the administration gets that. But we’ve also put everything on the table as far as cuts.”

Imagine what the response would be if this were flipped around. Imagine a Democrat emitting the following, as a bold deficit reduction plan: “Everything is on the table … we’re not going to go for spending cuts. I think the Republicans get that. But we’ve also put everything on the table as far as tax hikes.” No one would say such a Bizarro Norquist thing, of course, because no one on the Democratic side is as bizarre as Norquist. But if someone did, it would be perfectly obvious the person saying this thing wasn’t concerned with deficit reduction. The idea that someone unwilling to contemplate spending cuts – anywhere – was a deficit hawk would not pass the laugh test. As Cantor’s statement does not.

Harshaw Observes Memorial Day

As recorded in this.  (The town was named after a Union veteran who became a politician after the war, holding an office in the Wisconsin state government and running afoul of Robert LaFollette.  No known relation to me.)

Personally, I'd like to express Memorial Day wishes to those who were left behind, the mothers and wives who cooked farewell dinners especially.

Palin and Rolling Thunder

As far as I'm concerned, they deserve each other.  As I've said in the past, Rolling Thunder's claims for participation are incredible.  They've gotten a pass over the years because who could challenge veterans with a good cause?  (Although in my mind, the cause of MIA's in Vietnam was always on a par with the birthers and the truthers,) Both deal more with emotion than with truth. Both claim to be patriotic, but I try to be leary of windbags.

Acreage Crop Reporting Streamlining Initiative--InfoAg

First heard of this in the USDA response to E.O. 13563.  It's to be discussed at the infoag.org meeting in July, by Michael Scuse. As a matter of fact,he's the opening speaker.  This is on the website:

The Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services (FFAS) mission area is considering a review of process improvements that could be achieved through the consolidation of information required to participate in farm programs administered by the Farm Service Agency and the Federal Crop Insurance Program administered by the Risk Management Agency. FFAS is interested in hearing from the public on how best to simplify and standardize, to the extent practical, acreage reporting processes, program dates, and data definitions across the various USDA programs and agencies. FFAS also welcomes comments on how best to develop procedures, processes, and standards that will allow producers to use information from their farm-management and precision-ag systems for reporting production, planted and harvested acreage, and other key information needed to participate in USDA programs. These process changes may allow for program data that is common across agencies to be collected once and utilized or redistributed to agency programs in which the producer chooses to participate. It also may provide a single Web site for producers to report commodity information if they so choose, or access their previously reported information.

 I suggest Googling the title. (It looks to me as if MIDAS has been at least impacted, if not overtaken, by other initiatives, those coming from higher levels.  That's an occupational hazard of bureaucratic initiatives.

NASCOE Lobbying Generates Comments

From USDA's summary of steps taken to improve regulations, this summary of comments received (over 2,000)

The vast majority of comments referenced USDA’s potential review of process improvements that could be achieved through the consolidation of information required to participate in farm programs administered by the Farm Service Agency and the Federal Crop Insurance Program, identified as the Acreage-Crop Reporting Streamlining Initiative (ACRSI). Many of these comments responded to suggestions from various commenters that the Farm Service Agency (FSA) take over delivery of the Federal crop insurance program or other administrative functions of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and the Risk Management Agency (RMA). ACRSI is an initiative aimed at reducing the reporting burden on USDA customers. By consolidating acreage reporting dates, linking crop codes, and sharing producer information across agencies producers will be able to provide acreage data at their first point of contact with USDA whether that be with FSA, NRCS, or their private sector crop insurance agent. Each individual agency will still be required to collect information from producers that is specific to their program(s); however, common information will only need to be collected once. This initiative will minimize the paperwork burden on producers and minimize the number of trips they need to make to a USDA office.

Voter ID Again

I blogged earlier on a possible Voter ID compromise, providing a one-time grace period and issuing ID's at the polling place. Here's a post on the problems with voter ID.  I'm not convinced by the arguments and still think my compromise works. 

When the US Defaulted--Bureaucrats Screwed Up

In a little-known episode, the US has actually defaulted on some Treasury Bills in 1979 due apparently to a perfect storm of events, including maneuvering over the debt ceiling plus bureaucratic problems.  Quoting from Donald Marron's quote of the original article: "on an unanticipated failure of word processing equipment used to prepare check schedules."

That phrase shows how far we've come in 32 years.  I'm curious what sort of word processing equipment they were using at that time--it seems a little late to be using IBM MT/ST's but if they were merging a file of payees with the check boilerplate they would have served.  If they were using more modern equipment, the data storage might have been a problem.  Our Lexitrons used cassettes for storage, the read/write heads would get out of alignment so a cassette recorded on one machine might not work in another.  Interesting also the operation wasn't computerized--after all punch card accounting machines were the way IBM got into computers back in the 1930's.  Maybe they tried to modernize and had some problems. 

Anyhow, bottom line is the US defaulted and a study seems to show it was expensive; the Treasury had to pay higher interest rates for a good period of time.