Weird Sentence of the Day--Obamacare

From Wonkblog on Obamacare:

""The fact that they have about 2 million enrolled is not that far off from 3.3 million."

Sorry--in my math 2 million is a tad over 60 percent of 3.3, which in my dictionary is "pretty far off" from 3.3.

(I think I know what he was trying to say, but he didn't say it.

A Myth of Vietnam

The process of creating history about events in which I've been a (small) part is somewhat disorienting and rather disturbing.  It makes you wonder about the accuracy of history generally.

For example, Vietnam.

In season 3, episode 7 of Mad Men, which is set in 1963 Don Draper picks up a hitchhiking couple who are trying to evade the draft for fear the man will be sent to Vietnam.  Baloney.   We didn't have many troops in Vietnam then.   As advisors, very few draftees would have been included.  Through 1964 only 1 percent of the troops who were killed were draftees.  There were 200 deaths in 1955-63, and another 216 in 1964.

The first draft cards were burned in the summer of 1964, and Joan Baez leading an anti-war demonstration of 600 people in San Francisco is the earliest noted in Wikipedia.

While Vietnam attracted a lot of press attention in the early 60's, I don't remember it as having much impact on the general public.  Apparently Gallup didn't start polling until August 65, when 61 percent of the public said Vietnam troops wasn't a mistake.

Now comes the Coen Brothers with a new film: Inside Llewin Davies, in which they create a funny song: Please Mr. Kennedy from the kernel of a real song, which supposedly in 1961 asked JFK not to draft the singer and send him to Vietnam.   Hitflix has a piece on it, including links to relevant songs.  The 1962 song does not refer at all to Vietnam; it's just a potential draftee asking not to be drafted because Peggy Sue loves him, he hopes. 

Because the 60's ended with Vietnam being a seemingly all-absorbing topic, people today are assuming it was a big deal all the way through the decade.  It wasn't.

I write the above as someone who had a student deferment while in college, but who was drafted in 1965 and did some time in Vietnam (REMF).

"Mr. Custer" was a 1960 Larry Verne ditty written by Al DeLory about a soldier's plea to General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn not to send him off into battle. It was parodied one year later by Jim Nesbitt with "Please Mr. Kennedy," about blue collar America reaching out to the President for a helping hand. Then there was Mickey Woods' 1962 Motown track, also called "Please Mr. Kennedy" about a Vietnam draftee pleading with the President not to ship him away until his girlfriend marries him (because he's convinced she'll run off with another man while he's away).
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/how-please-mr-kennedy-was-born-and-why-its-not-eligible-for-oscar-consideration#eOsbjo8XKUFF0cZp.99

"Mr. Custer" was a 1960 Larry Verne ditty written by Al DeLory about a soldier's plea to General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn not to send him off into battle. It was parodied one year later by Jim Nesbitt with "Please Mr. Kennedy," about blue collar America reaching out to the President for a helping hand. Then there was Mickey Woods' 1962 Motown track, also called "Please Mr. Kennedy" about a Vietnam draftee pleading with the President not to ship him away until his girlfriend marries him (because he's convinced she'll run off with another man while he's away).
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/how-please-mr-kennedy-was-born-and-why-its-not-eligible-for-oscar-consideration#eOsbjo8XKUFF0cZp.99

"Mr. Custer" was a 1960 Larry Verne ditty written by Al DeLory about a soldier's plea to General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn not to send him off into battle. It was parodied one year later by Jim Nesbitt with "Please Mr. Kennedy," about blue collar America reaching out to the President for a helping hand. Then there was Mickey Woods' 1962 Motown track, also called "Please Mr. Kennedy" about a Vietnam draftee pleading with the President not to ship him away until his girlfriend marries him (because he's convinced she'll run off with another man while he's away).
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/how-please-mr-kennedy-was-born-and-why-its-not-eligible-for-oscar-consideration#eOsbjo8XKUFF0cZp.99

"Mr. Custer" was a 1960 Larry Verne ditty written by Al DeLory about a soldier's plea to General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn not to send him off into battle. It was parodied one year later by Jim Nesbitt with "Please Mr. Kennedy," about blue collar America reaching out to the President for a helping hand. Then there was Mickey Woods' 1962 Motown track, also called "Please Mr. Kennedy" about a Vietnam draftee pleading with the President not to ship him away until his girlfriend marries him (because he's convinced she'll run off with another man while he's away).
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/how-please-mr-kennedy-was-born-and-why-its-not-eligible-for-oscar-consideration#eOsbjo8XKUFF0cZp.99

GMO Q and A

I'm usually, not always but usually, opposing the crunchies and the food movement.  But this assessment of GMO varieties strikes me as solid.  And his recommendation for labeling GMO's, which I disagree with, may in fact end up as the only practical way to go.  After all, if everything we eat in the US is labeled "GMO", then nothing is.

ACA and FSA MIDAS

Being old, I've no need to sign up for Obamacare, so I've no personal experience with the website.  From what I've read, however, apparently the "navigators" who are helping people sign up are using the same software/website as those who are signing up on their own.  If so, that seems wise to me.  It's hard enough to keep one set of software operational and supporting the program.  It would be much harder to keep two sets up-to-date: one set for the public and one set for the government employees.  It would be particularly challenging when you have legislation passed late which requires changes to implement.

I don't know how MIDAS is set up, but I hope they've followed the same approach. 

Is BLS Missing the Food Movement?

Government Executive has a piece on the Bureau of Labor Statistics predictions of job growth by occupation over the next 10 years.  It's interesting, but BLS projects that jobs in agriculture will shrink (-3.4 percent), the only occupation for which that's true.  However, the piece revisits the predictions from 2002.  It turns out they had predicted a 2 percent drop in ag jobs, but the reality was a 7.4 percent increase!

That might tie into the increase the Ag census has seen in the number of farms, which in turn might be driven by the popularity of organic and niche farm products, otherwise known as the food movement.  I can see it growing, particularly as Whole Foods (we own shares) does more linking with local producers and moves into smaller cities, like Boise, Idaho. 

Chicoms Were Also Conspiracy Theorists

Apparently the Chinese thought the Vietnamese willingness to meet for peace talks led to the assassination of MLK:

From a Lawyer, Guns and Money post:

And this leads Communist leaders to say hurtful things to one another. The fascinating moving parts:

1. The apparent belief of Zhou Enlai that the MLK assassination was orchestrated by the U.S. government.
2. The notion that accepting the idea of peace talks gave the U.S. government the leeway it needed to carry out the assassination.
3. The notion that, even if this were true, Le Duan would care enough about MLK one way or the other to change policy.

Our Weak Government: David Brooks on

From a long interview with David Brooks by the U of Chicago paper

I think even he [Obama] came to office thinking the presidency had a lot more power than it does. I would say that’s a constant of my journalistic world: every president I’ve covered has learned that the office is in some ways much weaker than they anticipated. In some ways they still think it has some power, but it’s not an awesomely powerful office.

 You'd think some politician would read Neustadt.

Also:

Humor is more or less a young person’s game. You get a little more ponderous and earnest as you get older.

 Gosh, I hope not.  I was prematurely ponderous and earnest as a youth.

Land History and Precision Agriculture

Via Marginal Revolution, here's Blake Hurst in The American (AEI) writing about precision agriculture.  He argues that automated equipment will enable a big jump in the size of farms.  Sounds logical, but...

In FSA I used to be responsible for reconstitutions, the rules on how to make history follow the land as new owners and new operators changed the configuration of farms.  For years I dodged getting into it because it seemed more complex than I wanted to grapple with, but  then I gradually succumbed and found it interesting.

With that background I started to muse about the effect of precision agriculture on changes in farms.  As Hurst describes it, a good part of precision farming is building up a base of detailed data associated with each square meter (or other unit) of land, base extending over several years worth of plantings, fertilizations, and harvestings, data including weather and soil conditions.

So if I farm a section for several years and build up this database, what happens when I die and someone else takes over.  Does the landowner own the data or is it the operator?  (I'm not clear whether the farmer is storing the data in the cloud, or in a device which he owns and controls.) Can there be provisions for transferring the data from one operation to another?

COBOL Lives!

So says the FCW, in this article.

What really surprised me was not the continuing use of COBOL in legacy applications, but the fact that a quarter of colleges still teach COBOL and for some it's still a required subject.  I would have thought that COBOL was so old-fashioned and unappealing that it would have died out in the realms of academia, even though there's still a need for people who know it.

For legacy work, I suspect there's still things where it works pretty well.  Consider the example of payrolls, one of the early applications of computers.  You do payrolls every two weeks, or every month, which means batch processing must work okay.  No need for fancier languages which support objects or whatever is today's hot concept. 

I started programming in COBOL back when I was disillusioned with my bureaucratic career.  Then, after I stayed in the bureaucracy, I got quite good with WordPerfect macros, back before the WYSIWYG days.  Finally I did some Javascript in the mid 90's.  But these days Python seems well beyond me, and not something useful.  It's a shame; there was a rush of satisfaction every time you completed something and ran a test and it worked correctly.  Of course, that rush was usually followed by the frustration of failure when the next test bombed. 

Did anyone notice that Google had a tribute to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, one of the mothers of COBOL?

The Benefits of Decentralized Government

One of my pet ideas is the weakness of the federal government, but it turns out that in at least one respect, we're too centralized.  The Office of Personnel Management makes the snow decisions for the feds in the DC area.  In Canada, there's no central decision making body according to this Gov. Exec. rerun of a Wired report.  Seems to me some decentralization in the US might work better--let the USGS in Reston have a different decider than SSA in MD.