Korean Tidbits: the Wall and High Speed Rail

Two bits from the blog on the Winter Olympics:

1  Korea once imitated China in many things, including building a wall (on top of the hill in this photo):

 

2  On high speed rail:

The amazing thing to me coming from California is that they built this 120 km extension and built six new stations in less than 4 years. So far, we have been working for 3+ years on a 191 km section of high speed rail (the first such project in the US) along highway 99 in the Central Valley (as part of an eventual system running from Los Angeles to San Francisco). So far, we have no continuous track or working trains at a projected cost of $10.6 B. To be fair, most of the rise in costs has been a pile of lawsuits by opponents designed to slow down progress and increase costs until they are so high that everyone will give up. Having ridden on these types of train in Italy and Japan, I hope we will persevere. 

The Enemies of the Old

Thin pages of magazines and particularly newspapers which cling together, so you go from page 3 to page 7.

Shoelaces which have to be knotted.

Collar buttons which no longer seem to fit through buttonholes.

Eyeglasses with tiny screws which come out.

Attractive nuisances when driving, distracting one.

The Mines of France

Interesting tweet here on the lasting effects of WWI, particularly the former trench lines and the explosives buried there. A quote: "Today, French government démineurs still recover about 900 tons of ordnance every year, & in Belgium the amount is around 200 tons."

Society Learns

I believe society learns (and forgets). I was struck by the learned reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980's.  Usage of crack declined over time, as young people saw its impact on the older.  Since then, I've seen the learning phenomena in other areas.

One such area is comfort with technology.  Consider the cellphone camera--there's now an assumption that everyone knows how to operate one.  Strangers will ask you to take a picture of them with their cellphone.  How many years did it take for society to learn this operation--10 years maybe?  Society learning means a critical mass of people have all learned the same thing, creating the presumption that everyone knows/believes it.  This can be technique, as with cellphones, or beliefs, as with the idea that crack is bad.

For someone on the fringes of society this can be difficult. I don't use my smartphone as a phone that much, so I'm conscious of having a fragile attachment to society.  On the other hand, I know a lot about American history, and have experienced more of it than most everyone living, so there I feel a strong attachment.

White House Garden Lives!

From a post on plans for the state dinner welcoming French President Macron tomorrow night:

"The first course, using greens from the White House kitchen garden to represent a celebration of spring’s first harvest, will feature a goat cheese gateau, tomato jam, buttermilk biscuit crumbles and young variegated lettuces."

Our lettuce is up, but not yet big enough for salads.  Assuming the White House is a week-10 days ahead of Reston, this looks good.

On (Mis)trusting an Inspector General

Here's the OIG report on Andrew McCabe:

I tried to get a screenshot of it, but failed.  My problem with it is aesthetic--they're using a very black thick sans serif type font. Its only redeeming feature is it's not monospaced.

Irony Alert

Somewhere in my reading today I ran across a brief mention that Gens. Kelly and Mattis found themselves opposing Gen. McMaster on some issues--it seems the split was between those who tried to rein Trump in (Kelly-Mattis) versus McMaster who was more willing to go along.

I can't wait for McMaster's memoir.  If I recall his dissertation, converted into a well-regarded history called Dereliction of Duty, was critical of LBJ's Joint Chiefs for not being straight with him, for going along with his policies rather than resisting the expansion of the war without being open with the public.  So if today's item was correct, it might be that McMaster found it hard to play the role of adviser than he thought it was back in his academic and youthful days.  Wouldn't be the first, nor will it be the last, person to make the discovery.

[Update: it was a New Yorker piece:  "On one side were Mattis, Tillerson, and Kelly, each of whom in varying degrees sought to push back against the President; on the other was McMaster, who made his natural allies furious for what they saw as his habit of trying to accommodate the President’s demands, even if they were far-fetched. “General McMaster was trying to find a way to try to execute, not to tell him no,” the former government official told me."

USDA/FSA Burns "Bridges"

The Obama administration established "Bridges to Opportunity"--see the explanation here and a press release from January 2017 on the expansion. My brief explanation is FSA agreed with nonprofit organizations to refer farmers to them (i.e.  if someone was interested in organic ag, the FSA office could refer the person to organizations promoting organic ag, using a database of those with agreements) using a database.

Now the Trump administration is having the FSA offices to revoke the written agreements with these nonprofits.

The assertion is that the referral service is being incorporated into the "farmers.gov" website.  That seems reasonable, but what's not clear in the notice is why they need to revoke the agreement, if the change is basically incorporating the old "bridges" database into their new consolidated website.

I'd guess there was boilerplate language for the agreements with the nonprofits, but I can't find it anywhere. If I were really curious I'd submit a FOIA request for the language and for data on how many agreements were entered into.  If I were cynical, and I am, I'd suspect the Republican administration views the nonprofits with which agreements were made as likely leaning Democratic, many of them likely serving minorities and women.

Apparently the bulk of the "Bridges" was a replacement for the "Web Receipt for Service" software of several years ago.

Disaster Averted? --EU

I was struck by the chart below  (stolen from a tweet fussing about the fact only the US is predicted to see an increase in government debt over the next years, but what's more interesting to me is the fact that Greece and Italy stand next the top of the list in reducing their ratio.  This is how many years since we were all worrying about the nearly inevitable Greek exit from the EU, the collapse of Spain (also doing ok) and Italy and the resulting disaster for the European Union.  That didn't happen--there's still problems now and in the future for the EU, but on a sunny Friday afternoon it's worth noting the bad news which didn't happen.


From a tweet: 

Why the Change in 1842 to FY?

Here's a piece on a proposal to make the government's fiscal year jibe with the calendar, something which was last true before 1842.  I wonder why Congress made the change back then.  Were they having problems passing appropriations bills timely even then?