New House Rules for Farm Bill

 Under the new House rules, each bill must have a single subject. I'm wondering how they'll describe the farm bill.

Chevalier--I Remember It Well

 The snowstorm of February 11, 1983, that is.  My fiance and I had a meeting with a priest to arrange for our wedding later in the year.  When we came out of St. Mathews it was impossible for us to get out to Reston, so I got a hotel room.  The next morning we got a cab out to Reston. It had to drop us off about a few hundred yards from the house, so we trudged through the snow, me in my loafers IIRC. 

The Politico story says that the snowstorm shut down DC, enabling Nancy Reagan to set up a family dinner with the Shultzes, over which the relatively new Secretary of State bonded with the president, and which led eventually to Reagan's opening to the Soviets.

That's what happens when the unexpected hits; the people who are confined together form bonds.  Notoriously, Clinton and Monica started their bonding during the government shutdown. 

Loft Living and Office Conversions?

 Some discussion in media about conversions of office towers into residential space. 

Back in the day, 1960s or so, converting warehouse loft space into residences for the arty crowd was a thing.

Before that converting urban houses to commercial uses was a thing.  I remember in Greene NY in the 1940s we patronized 2 groceries, 1 hardware store, and a movie theater all converted from houses.

Covered With Night

 The book, Covered With Night,  is quite good.  The author uses the murder of an Indian by one or two white settlers in colonial Pennsylvania (1720s) as a way to describe and contrast the different societies and views of justice of the parties involved (various tribes, Quakers, British governor, etc.) It won the Pulitizer in 2022, deservedly.

Given the subject and approach, not to mention the prize, you'd expect it to be modern historical writing, and it is, meaning there are no heroes or villains, complexity is embraced, attention paid to women and bit players.

I recommend it. I do think it's a little one-sided, no doub because of the available source material.  The author shows the colonists as sometimes trying and usually failing to understand the ways of the Indians. Fair enough. It wasn't a total failure, but...  She does not try the reverse, to show how the Indians tried and failed to understand the colonists.   As I say, there's likely no source material for that.

Republican Priorities--Ag?

 One priority, according to the new chair of House Ag, is 

"Along with that, he says the committee is learning from the disaster payments that have been made outside of the farm bill baseline to be looking at how to incorporate more of that relief in a way that provides certainty for farmers and ranchers and for the lenders providing them with access to capital."

That's according to an Agmos interview.  That's the way it goes--everything becomes a precedent--in this case the exercises in executive creation of programs by Trump and Biden become rationales for changing, presumably increasing, current programs. 

I'd not that on the one hand Thompson wants greater oversight and audit of the Biden actions, but on the other he's willing to use them to justify program changes before he sees the results.

I think I'm starting the new year in what my wife calls a crotchety mood.

The Joys (sic) of Manual Labor

 Ever since I left the farm, my experience of manual labor has been mostly at my discretion.  That's key.  Even when it isn't, as when we get a big snowstorm and I have to shovel out it's not too bad.  I can tell myself I'm fighting the elements, along with some (not many, the softies) of my neighbors.

Gardening is a hobby with a reward of vegetables, so the work involved is just a prerequisite to a payoff.

There have been times when I really got into using my hands.  The family farm was populated with my father's constructions and improvements: hen houses, brooder houses, range shelters, milk house, cow shed, equipment shed, 3 stall garage, etc. My attempts were more domestic, dining room table and chairs, light box, book shelves, etc.  That was all after I bought my house and before marriage.

This last week or so has brought me back to manual work, not building anything, but repairs around the house. It's been a change from my usual winter routine of reading and TV, but enough to remind me of the satisfaction that can come when you fix something, not as well or nearly as quickly as the expert who does the work for her living, but "good enough fo,r government work", as we used to say.

A Test for "Vertical Farming"

 Starting to see articles on problems that "vertical farming" enterprises are encountering.  Basically it's energy costs, which have gone up recently. Unfortunately energy costs can be quite variable, as anyone who lived through the 1970's can attest. I'd also expect a lot of variation as society digests the conversion to renewable energy sources.

(I was dubious of vertical farming from back when it just was pie in the sky, relying on the sun for energy.  In the very long range, if we get to cheap fusion energy, vertical farming may indeed become economically feasible. But that's a long way away.)

What Robots Learn From Us

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution wrote something, a mere sentence, which impressed me, impressed me so much I misremembered it as "what will robots learn from us?"  (Cowen wrote "A.I.s" but "robots" is the term I like, which I think can include all forms of artificial intelligence.)

It's a good question--mostly robots and other forms of artificial intelligence learn what humans have already learned, at least the humans living in the world of robots, etc.That means, by definition, that they will be biased. 

I wrote "mostly" because for example robots which learn to walk, learn what it means in terms of their motors, gears, and levers--their bodies--not what it means for humans to walk  So robots do experience the world somewhat differently than humans. Possibly robots won't learn some things from us; it's hard to say.

Merry Christmas

 Hope you get more than you deserve, as the theology of this day goes. 

Professor Evaluations

 I follow a fair number of professors on Twitter, mostly historians. I occasionally see tweets complaining about the student evaluations they receive. 

I don't have any sense at all of how student evaluations compare with other evaluation setups, like reviews of products on the Internet, or reviews on Yelp. You'd think it's likely that the evaluations would be somewhat similar--that is, my perception of product and service reviews is that they tend to be more favorable than my intuition is.  Certainly when I evaluate I tend to lend to the positive so I assume that's true of others.

Sometimes the evaluation reported in the tweet is critical, and often the reaction is dismissive.  I suppose that makes sense--if you get some criticism which is useful, it's not going to irritate you enough to tweet about.  But the dismissive bit strikes me as reflecting insecurity and aggravates me enough to blog about evaluations.

Anyhow, I remember an evaluation I got once from my presentation on some program; don't remember which one.  It was mixed, to the effect Bill knows his stuff, but he drones in a monotone. 

😀

It was, and is, true.  It was useful.  IIRC this was near the end of my career in making presentations, and likely accelerated it.  It was much easier to sit in the rear of the meeting room whild one of my employees made her presentation and pat myself on the back for putting her forward.