Those Stuck-in-the-Past Old Fogeys

Like me, many elderly don't like change.  But it varies, and we can surprise you if it's to our benefit:

"Elderly participants were most excited about the idea of autonomous vehicles, but only 36 percent of young adults were comfortable with the idea of riding in one. "

From the Rural Blog, discussing research into attitudes to self-driving cars.

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?

For the Good Old Days of DVD Extras

The NYTimes had a piece on the fading away of extra features which used to be included on DVDs. My wife and I are long-term subscribers to Netflix, back in the days before streaming, and we (or I at least) enjoyed most of the features, particularly the director commentaries. The best movies seemed usually to have been models of teamwork: a lot of talented people working together for a common goal.  No doubt that was an exaggeration, or more kindly a rosy colored look back.

The commentaries varied widely: some directors would narrate the action on the scene--very boring.  Others would use the action as the launching point for little stories, discussions of technique, particularly the more cinematic types.  Some would make a point of praising the work of both the actors on screen and the members of the crew behind the scenes. Some series, like Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, would have multiple features and often two or more commentaries per episode.

I'll miss the extras.

Tabarrok's Great Post re: Facebook

Alex Tabarrok is the less prominent blogger at Marginal Revolution, but I think his post yesterday is great. 

He makes the point that much of the data Facebook stores is created by Facebook, or more accurately in my mind by the combination of our activities which are enabled by and only possible through Facebook.  As he says, speaking of a cousin in Dubai who he's never called or written a letter in over 20 years: "The relationship with my cousin, therefore, isn’t simply mine, it’s a joint creation of myself, my cousin and Facebook."

I tweeted about the post yesterday, not something I do everyday.  I got a response from one person, and we've gone back and forth a bit.  Let me summarize my position:

Like Tabarrok, I've a current relationship with a cousin which has been made possible through the Internet, email in the first instance, then shifting to AIM and finally to Facebook Messenger: a sequence of communication tools of better and better capability and more ease of use.  I understand that the data stored in the cloud has changed with each tool: now Facebook keeps the full text of our messages.  But the capability of the tool is an essential part of the relationship.  Given our personalities and ages we didn't and couldn't establish it based on snail mail. 


I (and my cousin) are interested in genealogy; she's writing a book (at 87) covering events in 19th century Ireland partly involving two collateral ancestors. For us, all bits of data are precious if they concern the lives of our ancestors, or the lives my cousin investigates.  Of course the data is almost all on paper with just a little bit on film.  What does the future hold for genealogists; how will they handle all the data which is now being stored and which presumably will be available?

Better Than We Used To Be

Kottke has a post with an aerial photograph of Edinburgh in 1920.  We don't know the time of year or day; we don't know whether the conditions were normal or abnormal.  But what it suggests to me is a memory, a memory of the great London smog of  1952 (most recently dramatized in BBC's The Crown and of reading about the PA smog of 1948.

Using coal to heat houses, as we did our house when I was growing up, produced smoke which killed, most dramatically in the right (wrong) geographic and climactic conditions.  That problem has been solved, at least for home heating.
 

Incredulity and Impeachment

I remember Watergate.  In 1972 the conventional wisdom about impeachment was perhaps captured in JFK's Profiles in Courage--the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was wrong, very wrong, and the country was only saved by a Kansas senator's courage (IIRC--not bothering to look it up).  The country had skated up to the edge then but had wisely drawn back.  Impeachment was a constitutional dead letter, almost on a par with stationing soldiers in homes (Third Amendment), possibly used in the odd case of a judge, but not for presidents.

As Watergate unraveled, impeachment started to become possible.  Then in the summer of 1974 suddenly things clicked into  place and the avalanche started.

Will history repeat itself? 

I don't think so--Republican support of Trump seems too solid, but as Watergate shows surprises can happen.

Harshaw Rule in Aircraft Carriers

Another demonstration of the validity of the Harshaw Rule (first time fail) is in Robert Farley's piece on the worst aircraft carriers ever built (via Lawyers, Guns and Money).

Berkshire Hathaway and the Pay of Bigshots

From vox, in a piece on "pay ratios" the comparison of the pay of the CEO and the pay of the median employee in the company.  Some ratios are over 1,000.

Not all of the pay ratios released so far are so gaudy. Warren Buffett, the CEO of conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, makes less than twice his company’s typical employee. 

[Updated:  Jeff Bezos earns 59 times the median Amazon employee according to this article.]

Taxes Today

Finished our 2017 taxes today, using TurboTax.  Seems to me they were more complicated than previous years, especially the boilerplate at the end.  Although with Mr. Zuckerberg's testimony still fresh, I still clicked on "agree" without reading and understanding them. I'm sure there's reasons for them, but it doesn't make me happy.

What really makes me unhappy is this sentence: "In Sweden, you can see your tax forms already filled in and approve them on your cellphone." That's from a piece at Monkey Cage on the complexities of our tax system (John Sides interviewing a couple experts).  One point made there--our system would be simpler if we taxed individuals rather than households.   Kevin Drum has in the past pushed the idea of IRS preparing our returns from their available data, with the individual taxpayer responsible for confirming the correctness of the information and adding to it.  It's a great idea, which Intuit will lobby against to their dying breath, so I guess today I contributed to the continuance of our system.

Congress Reluctant on CCC Program

If China puts tariffs on soybeans and other farm commodities, there's been discussion by the Secretary and President of the possibility of providing help to affected farmers, using the authority of the Commodity Credit Corporation.  That's getting some pushback from some in Congress, including Republican bigshots according to this article by Chris Clayton .

Banks With No Cash?

In Sweden, according to Steve Kelman here at FCW: ". In what might sound like a joke if it weren’t true, many banks carry no cash on their premises." Kelman is writing about Sweden and China, which he finds to be ahead of the U.S. in some areas of adopting IT:

"First, other countries’ edge over us is sometimes due to technology developed first outside the U.S., sometimes to quicker user adoption (something that would probably surprise most Americans), and sometimes to a greater ability to make non-tech organizational adjustments, such as eliminating minimum transaction values on credit cars, to get the tech to work better. Second, there are clearly efficiency benefits to the new technologies -- think only of the decline in hold ups in stores and bank robberies thanks to the disappearance of cash. But there are also benefits in terms of the general social climate for innovation."

Jefferson Versus Trump

Andy Seal has a post at USIntellectual History quoting Thomas Jefferson on the importance of public perception in maintaining ethical standards.

Good Things from Trump's Win

Two (sort of) good things from Trump's win:

1. Reading Bill Kristol with a bit more openness to his opinions, since he's a never-Trump.
2. Also George Will, and agreeing with him on civil forfeiture and felon voting.

I think it sort of validates James Madison's insights: multiple interests and viewpoints mean interesting overlaps on the Venn diagrams, resulting in safeguards against demagoguery and extremism.

The Soybean and Grain Embargoes

I remember Jimmy Carter's embargo on grain exports to the Soviet Union.  IIRC farmers didn't like the later, and it played a role in Carter's defeat.  Until I googled, I didn't remember Nixon's embargo on soybeans which was part of his economic maneuvers against inflation, etc.   Earl Butz ate crow over it, according to this piece.

Problem for Trump is that farmers know that patterns of trade can change.  If China puts tariffs on soybeans and switches to other suppliers, even if a trade war is averted, or quickly settled, the effects may be long lasting. 

Four Is the Number

Breaking news:  important--Augusta National now has four female members according to this ThinkProgress post.  That's 100 percent increase over 7 years.  At this rate, adding 2 members every 7 years, it will be about 2095 for half the members to be female.

Good News from Afghanistan

My title is four words, very surprising to find them in the same phrase.  Someone, I think Noah Smith, recently wrote there's an imbalance of news on Twitter; not enough attention is paid to good news.

The World Bank has a piece on how Afghanistan's healthcare system has improved over the past 15 years.  (Basically the government contracted with NGO's to handle care for specific regions, which has worked, and importantly Aghan professionals have been replacing the personnel who began with the NGO's.

MLK Remembered

Kevin Drum posts a chart showing Gallup's results for approval of Martin Luther King.  He notes the rising approval over the years from 1966 to the present. 

I was reading newspapers by the time of the Montgomery protests over segregated buses.  As I commented there, it's been interesting to see the evolution of his image. 

• when he was alive, there were a number of major figures who were competing and cooperating in civil rights.  Malcolm X, Stokeley Carmichael, Roger Wilkins, Julian Bond, and many others.  In the beginning he was just one voice among many, gradually emerging as the preeminent voice. His competitors did not always welcome his contributions or support his efforts, and vice versa.  With his death he became the martyred figure we know today whom no one remembers disliking.
• he had more failures (Albany, GA, and Chicago, among others) than we realize today

Vox has a post/interview with Jeanne Theoharis from which I'll quote this:

[Reagan (and America) created a fable of MLK which included these features:]

The first is the focus on courageous individuals, not movements. The second is the idea that King and figures like Rosa Parks shone a light on injustice, and [said injustice] has since been eradicated. The third is the act of putting the movement and the problem of racism in the past. And the fourth is the idea of American exceptionalism — the belief that the civil rights movement demonstrates the power of American democracy.

Humans Can Be Evil

From Techmology Review piece on robotics:

But the trickiest foe these robots face while out in the world could be the most difficult to predict: teenagers. Hitch says teen shoppers have been known to kick the robots in Walmart, or even slam into them with a shopping cart.

Contrarian on the Census

I can't resist being a contrarian on the census.  We liberals dislike the decision to include a question on citizenship in the 2020 census.  The fear is that such a question will increase fear of the government among immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented ("illegal").   That fear seems reasonable. The result would be that immigrants would be undercounted.  Because population counts are the basis for determining electoral districts, immigrants would be underrepresented, and because the counts also are used for distribution of government dollars under some programs, immigrants would suffer.

I've no problem with this logic, so what's my contrarian take?

The Trump administration points out that the American Community Survey (an effort conservatives once tried to scuttle IIRC) has always asked about citizenship. The survey gets very detailed, and its results are used in sociological research and government programs.

My contrarian question is this: if immigrants would be fearful of government questions about citizenship, aren't they already fearful of the ACS?  If so, doesn't that impair the validity of the survey?  And if so, why hasn't the Census Bureau fixed the problem?  And if they have, why wouldn't that work for the 2020 census? 

If the problem can't be fixed, do the users of the ACS know of the distortion?

1968 Remembered

Fifty years ago in January I moved to DC to work at USDA.  In February I was assaulted and robbed. Also in February the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive, hitting a road I had traveled a year before, and changing politics in the US. In March LBJ announced he wasn't running for reelection. In April Martin Luther King was murdered and DC was one of many cities with riots, which I traveled through. In June Robert Kennedy was killed. Meanwhile the US had the continuing demonstrations against the Vietnam War and student protests over race and college governance issues. And the US was in relatively good shape compared to the Prague Spring events in  Czechoslovakia with the Prague Spring, student unrest in France   and other nations. 

It was an interesting time.

Importing Brains, Exporting Ideas

A quote from a Bloomberg piece:

Of the 1 million foreign nationals enrolled at U.S. schools, nearly one-third are from China -- double the number of any other country. Chinese students receive 10 percent of all doctorates awarded in the U.S., most of them in science and engineering. Some 80 percent of Chinese doctoral holders stay in the U.S. and work after they earn their degrees. There are more Chinese engineers working on artificial intelligence at U.S. technology companies than in all of China.
From Bloomberg

IMHO it's better for us to export our intellectual property to China while importing and keeping their best brains.

Janesville and Liberal Government

This book just won a prize for nonfiction writing.  If you don't want to read the whole thing, this New Yorker piece of last year will substitute.

I'm still reading it, but I want to note one failure of government: Obama came, promised help, his man visited, listened, did nothing before leaving for a better paid post.  It's an old lesson of bureaucracy--you need unrelenting pressure from the top to accomplish the difficult.  President Nixon, despite his flaws, knew this and his administration was successful in removing the WWI "tempos"

now the site of "Constitution Gardens". 

Much as I like Obama, and my regard for him as a person is only increased by comparison with his successor, I don't see him as a good manager of the bureaucracy.  (The most glaring failure was, of course, healthcare.gov.)

Liberals believe in the power of government to help, but Janesville is disappointing in that respect.  The conventional wisdom is that job retraining programs are a necessary part of global free trade and/or fighting recessions.  The results from Janesville don't support their efficacy.  The job retraining seems to have worked somewhat like farm programs, easing the transition from a good past to a dimmer future. 

DOD and the Wall?

Today's story is that President Trump wants the military to pay for his wall on the Mexican border.  He's being mocked for it, and deservedly so.  But I believe that a good liberal congressman once upon a time put money in the Pentagon's budget for medical research.

"The Office of Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) is funded through the Department of Defense (DoD), via annual Congressional legislation known as the Defense Appropriations Act. For most programs, the DoD sends a multi-year budget request to Congress in the form of the President's Budget. However, dollars for the CDMRP are not considered part of the DoD's core mission, and are therefore not included in the DoD's requested budget. Rather, the dollars to fund CDMRP are added every year during the budget approval cycle by members of the House or Senate, in response to requests by consumer advocates and disease survivors."

"The CDMRP originated in 1992 via a Congressional appropriation to foster novel approaches to biomedical research in response to the expressed needs of its stakeholders-the American public, the military, and Congress."

CBO has an old post supporting the ending of this practice.

Two Small Livestock Farmers: Different Strategies

I follow a handful of farmers: a couple are gradually withdrawing from farming while two of the younger ones (i.e, maybe 45-50) are involved, but with different strategies:

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm (sadly no longer regularly blogging about his family) specializes in hogs, while Dan Macon at Foothill Agrarian does sheep.

Walt has expanded his operation, using vertical integration, by which I mean he raises hogs and markets the meat, both directly and to stores.  Over the years he's changed from using a commercial butcher to building and running his own butcher shop, just recently receiving his USDA certification so he can sell across state lines instead of just in Vermont.  When you follow him over the years, his determination and drive and the obstacles overcome are amazing, For that reason, I don't recommend his past blog posts for new farmers--they might well be intimidated.

Dan's most recent post, linked to above, explains the logic which leads him not to do marketing, but instead sell his lambs live.  He also notes the economic realities which mean he isn't a full-time farmer.

I recommend both.

[updated to expand on Walt]

USDA a "Lighthouse Agency"

That's from this FCW piece on some GSA IT contract awards:

"The awards support the first phase of work at five IT Modernization Centers of Excellence. Work will begin at the Department of Agriculture, which was selected as the government's "lighthouse" agency.
SIE Consulting Group will be working on cloud adoption, McKinsey & Company is tackling infrastructure optimization, ICF Inc. won two contracts for customer experience and service delivery analytics, while Kaiser Associates was awarded a contact center contract."

Don't know what "lighthouse" means--presumably a new bit of jargon that sounds good but turns out meaningless, like "tiger teams" back in the 90's. 

Drivers Monitoring Autonomous Cars

Two points on autonomous cars:

1. China has just authorized Baidu to run their autonomous cars on the highways.  The piece I saw noted that Chinese roads are more crowded and chaotic than in the US, thereby posing a bigger challenge to the software.  I'd add--doesn't that give them an advantage in development--a higher bar to surmount?
2. AEI notes that humans are poor monitors.  We get distracted and complacent and don't jump into action quickly.  I wonder if it would be possible to include a training module in the software--have the software test the driver by requiring intervention in a situation which is actually safe.  If the driver fails to react timely and correctly, do more testing.  If the driver continues to fail, discontinue the self-driving. 

[Added link]

What's 700 Points on the Dow Worth

Not a mention on the front page of either the Post or the Times.  Times have changed.

The Search for Buttermilk and Doom for Cows

My spouse was inspired by the recent St. Patrick's Day to bake Irish Soda Bread, for which she needed buttermilk.

She checked Trader Joe's: out.  I checked Safeway--not available.  Finally found a quart at Giant.

I was amazed, absolutely amazed though, by the pseudo "milk" on sale.  There were a couple upright coolers devoted to the usual 2 percent milk in gallons, plus a variety of milk of kinds and quantities. Next to them were two more coolers devoted mostly to half gallons and quarts of all the various kinds of "milk"--almond, soy, and I don't know what else.  There was another cooler partly devoted to cream products like half and half, whipping cream, etc. and at least another with specialty "milk" type products. 

Even with the authority of wikipedia behind them, dairy farmers are in trouble:

"In food use, the term milk is defined under Codex Alimentarius standards as: "the normal mammary secretion of milking animals obtained from one or more milkings without either addition to it or extraction from it, intended for consumption as liquid milk or for further processing."[22] This definition thereby precludes non-animal products which may resemble milk in color and texture (milk substitutes) such as soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, and coconut milk. The correct name for such products are 'soy beverage', 'rice beverage', etc.
Dairy relates to milk and milk production, e.g. dairy products.

Deep State? Shocking

I believe in the "deep state".

There's a poll out which shows support for a theory of the "deep state" is surprisingly high, surprising to some that is. 

Personally I think it's common sense, though I define "deep state" a little differently.  In my view there are a relatively small number (i.e. less than 1 percent of Americans) who routinely affect the way government operates in ways which aren't visible to Americans on a daily basis.  This would include all the riders and special provisions tucked into laws, particularly appropriations acts and omnibus or "must pass" legislation. It would include all the lobbyists, pollsters, and members of the "chattering class", as William Safire used to call them.  And of course it includes the bureaucrats and lawyers who are concerned with process and procedure, much to the dismay of some politicians.

In most cases the deep state is operating within the overall context set by the limits of public support.  An example on the liberal side--I could argue the "deep state" essentially legalized gay marriage. 

Teleworking and USDA

USDA made the paper this morning for cutting back on the hours employees can telework (here's GovExec's piece).

Teleworking developed after my time at FSA.  Obviously employees like it and environmentalists do as well.  Without any experience of it, I'm left with just opinions with no basis for them. 

But, as a manager, I would have had problems with it, just as I had problems with flextime.  Back when I was a young employee, we worked 8 to 4:30.  That meant first thing in the morning we might gather at the coffee pot to start.  It meant you always knew who was in and who was on leave.  It meant you could  easily schedule meetings (likely we spent more time in unproductive meetings than was good for us--I remember Roy "T"'s acid comments on the division director's staff meetings in the late 70's). 

The work of the unit I managed wasn't easily quantifiable--a manager could give work assignments knowing how much time it should take.

On the other hand, I often had employees in Kansas City working with the IT people on requirements and testing.  I had no problem trusting my employees with working a thousand miles away from the office, so why would I have problems with them working 20-30 miles from the office?  Two considerations:

1. in Kansas City they were working face to face with their counterparts, not alone.  That meant I could get a bit of feedback from my opposite number manager in KC.
2. the bottom line issue is trust  and it's the rare group of 6-10 people where all are equally trustworthy IMHO. So you either bite the bullet and trust all equally, or you recognize differences among the employees, meaning you don't treat them equally.

All in all, I'm glad I'm no longer a manager who has to make such decisions. 

J. Edgar's Long Shadow

This is pure speculation, but I believe we can blame J. Edgar Hoover for Mr. McCabe's firing.

Why?

Back in the day, that's the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, and only ending in 1972, Hoover ruled the roost at the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation.  He was a very political leader, using information to protect his position and advance his issues.  He had strict rules for his agents, because he was the one who could bend the rules.

My speculation is that the FBI culture retains that dichotomy: rules on the one hand, leaks to advance the agency or leader on the other.  And that seems to be what happened with McCabe.  He authorized a discussion on background to, he says, correct erroneous information reaching the public.  He claims it was something often done, but it seems to have also been against the rules.  So when OIG people interviewed him, he was caught in the middle, not admitting to something which was okay by FBI norms, but not the rules.

Again, speculation, but to me the culture of an agency lasts, and lasts.

Dairy at a Turning Point?

That's the question in this piece., specifically talking about the Northeast and Pennsylvania.  It gets into the nitty-gritty of milk pricing which I don't understand.

Vertical/Indoor Farms

Here's a Fortune article on an outfit in NJ.

Here's a Technology Review piece on farming in shipping containers.

It's possible that the advent of LED lights makes such farming economically feasible, feasible at least if the produce gets a premium from being "local" and "organic".  USDA has agreed that they may be labeled "organic", though the original organic community does not like the idea at all. 

Call me old, I am, but I don't call these "farms" or "farming".

Humans Are Resilient

I back my assertion with three points:

• my experience as a draftee in the Army
• Chris Blattman in his interview by Tyler Cowen
• Stephen Hawking.

That is all.

Keeping Up With Lawyers and Business: Contract Farming

Modern Farmer reports that SBA's inspector general has determined that poultry farmers operating on a contract with a processor (which 97 percent do) don't qualify as a "small business".

Reminds me of back in the day when ASCS determined that growers of seed corn, which operate under a contract with seed companies, didn't qualify as "producers" because they didn't share in the risk of producing the crop.  That determination was speedily reversed by pressure from Congress (not sure they put it in legislation or appropriations, but reversed it was).

The bottom line is people don't like risk, so for many many years people have been planning and scheming on ways to minimize it.

USDA EEO

Secretary Perdue is proposing to reorganize USDA civil rights offices--he's asking for comments on his proposal.  Strikingly, he's allowing only until March 25 for comments to be received.

I've long since lost my grasp of how USDA is organized so I don't really understand what he's doing.  One change seems to be giving each mission area (I think NRCS, FSA, RMA are now or will a mission area) one civil rights/EEO office.  That would mean taking the Office of Civil Rights out of FSA and putting it at the Under Secretary level.

It seems he's also changing the department level office. Given what happened under Reagan I'd suspect it would have less power, but that's pure speculation.

Traffic Control in Korean Restrooms

Can't resist blogging this from my cousin's Olympic blog:

"That gives us just enough time to hit the restrooms. I don't think I've mentioned them so far, but they are worthy of mention. Korea is one of the most technologically based countries on Earth so I guess that it is no surprise that the toilets have more buttons on them that seem possible. But did you know that they have a sort of air traffic control board in the front of the restroom? A video monitor shows you which stalls are open and whether each stall has a western style toilet or a traditional "squat" toilet. I can't speak for the women, but I notice that the men don't pay any attention to the video board and will often stand waiting at a closed door when the board says that there are clearly open stalls. The other interesting thing is that the women who clean the restrooms don't give you any advanced warning when they go in to clean, they just barge in."

Appalachian Religion

This seems totally wrong, but I swear I got it from a tweet by Lyman Stone, who comes off as pretty knowledgable on both Appalachia and religion. But I can't find the tweet again.

"Statistically, Appalachia is one of the *least* religious places in America. It's as secular as a college campus in California."