Why Working for FSA Is Worse These Days

 Sec. Vilsack testifying, link was posted to the Facebook FSA group. At the start he observes that it's no longer true that the county executive director of the FSA office is among the best paid in the county and that serving the public by working for the government has lost some cachet.

Iraq in Retrospective

 This is a comment I posted on Kevin Drum's post looking back at Iraq, which you should read:

"Wish I was blogging then so I'd have a good record of what I was thinking. As best I can remember I was dubious of Afghanistan, given the Soviets failure there, our failure in Vietnam, etc. But it went surprisingly well, and the aftermath seemed to be working well with Karzai getting support.

So with Iraq I was torn. The Post had a reporter who was filing good stories challenging the official line. I still had some skepticism about war. But on the other hand Bush did have Blair on board, and Blair seemed capable and had worked well with Clinton. So I think my attitude when the bombs began to fall was to the effect: I don't think I'd do this if I had the power, but I don't so I hope you're right and can do as well in Iraq as you seem to have done in Afghanistan.?

Why Grist Mills?

  Roots of Progress is an interesting effort I follow.  This particular post  roused my usual contrarian reaction, but also triggered a question, specifically this:

" you should take into account that some types of labor were automated very early on, via wind and water mills"

My question is why?  And who?

ChatGpt says, when asked how different civilizations ground their grain:

Ancient Egyptians: The ancient Egyptians used a hand-powered quern to grind their grains. The quern consisted of two flat stones, one placed on top of the other. The top stone was rotated back and forth to grind the grain into flour.

Ancient Greeks and Romans: The ancient Greeks and Romans used a rotary mill to grind their grains. The mill consisted of a circular stone wheel with a handle on one side. The grain was poured into a hole in the center of the wheel and was ground between the wheel and a stationary stone.

Native Americans: Native Americans used a mortar and pestle to grind their grains. The mortar was a bowl-shaped stone, and the pestle was a long, cylindrical stone used to crush the grain.

Chinese: The Chinese used a stone mill to grind their grains. The mill consisted of two horizontal stones with a vertical stone in the center. The grain was poured into a hole in the center stone and was ground between the stones.

Mesoamericans: The Mesoamericans used a metate to grind their grains. The metate was a flat stone slab, and the grain was ground using a handheld grinding stone called a mano.

Overall, each civilization developed methods that were suited to their particular needs and resources.

Based on skimpy research by google, it seems there's a transition from rubbing two stones together, to a rotary grinder hand powered and then to the water/wind driven grist mills. 

Did women initiate these inventions?

Me and Chocolate Milk

 This piece about the controversy over including chocolate milk in the school lunch program reminded me of something.

Growing up, dad would bring up some milk from the morning milking which went into the refrigerator.  As it was raw milk, the cream rose to the top.  Mom would skim the cream off for use in tea, coffee, cereal.  We'd drink the milk remaining, the skim milk. So I was accustomed to the taste and texture of skim milk.

When dad drove the truck to Greene, our market town for feed from the Grange-League-Federation (co-op) store and bigger grocery stores than our local one, we'd often go in the morning and get lunch at a diner.  My order was always the same, tuna fish sandwich and chocolate milk.  I disliked the taste and texture of the homogenized milk, so chocolate milk was the only thing I'd drive.

The Decline of Flexibility

 Paul Krugman has a piece on the declining flexibility, looking at the supply of artillery shells for Ukraine and shipping containers during the pandemic. Economic theory says that capital should move quickly to solve shortages,  but Krugman says it's not happening now.

I don't think he says explicitly but I think part of the problem is the increasing complexity of manufactured products. The modern PC is much more complicated than the hand crank adding machine I used in an early job.  A modern artillery shell is much more complicated than the comparable shell in the Civil War or even WWII. 

The more complex the product, the more steps in the manufacturing process, the more suppliers in the network, the more opportunity for Moore's law to work. 

Depositors Are Not Stockholders

 I think it's true in 2008 many stockholders were wiped out.  I know we owned GM stock and lost it. The same thing applied to some of the financial institutions--like Lehman.  I think some banks did not go bankrupt; they were for pennies on the dollar by another bank. That means where an investor might have had Bank X stock worth $50 in 2007, when it was bought out the investor may have gotten $2.

How Life Improves

 Kottke has this video showing a 2009 car colliding with a 1959 car.  

Chatgpt claims: According to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the United States has decreased from 5.39 in 1960 to 1.11 in 2019.

Cultural Appropriation

 It's bad if an acting role which is specific to an ethnicity, culture, or gender identity is filled by a straight white person?  But it's good if the musical 1776 or Hamilton is performed by a diverse group of actors?

In the ideal world we shouldn't bar anyone from auditioning for a performance of any role in a standard* play or film.  And we should allow a director to intentionally cast against type if she wants a nonstandard* play or film.

But our world isn't ideal, so how do we deal with that?  We know the available roles aren't representative of the world: too many sexy blondes under 30; too few women over 80, etc. We also know roles vary greatly in the degree to which they're specific to a particularl identity.  So I think the reality is we work towards the ideal, knowing we'll never get there.  You tilt the playing field a bit, or like a guerilla, advance here and withdraw there, testing the limits of what's possible, which means what people will support with money and time.  

* "standard" means a play or film whose casting would be described by a critic without attention to the identity characteristics of the actor.  So a director who wants to try a Shakespearean play with all male actors (as it would have been in his time) is doing a nonstandard version.

Standard Time on the Moon

 The NYTimes has an article on a proposal for establishing a time standard for the moon.  With the number of different nations doing activity there (South Korea?), presumably applying their local time to their work there seems to be a need.

It's further complicated because, as the article notes in passing, clocks run faster on the moon!

I had to ask Chatgpt for an explantion, which is:

"Clocks do not actually run faster on the Moon. However, they do appear to run faster when measured from Earth due to the effects of general relativity. 

According to general relativity, time appears to move slower in the presence of a strong gravitational field. The strength of Earth's gravitational field is greater than that of the Moon's, so time moves more slowly on Earth than on the Moon.

This means that if you were to compare the ticking of two identical clocks, one on Earth and one on the Moon, the clock on the Moon would actually tick slightly slower than the clock on Earth. However, because the Moon is much less massive than Earth, the difference in the strength of the gravitational field between the two is relatively small.

The net effect is that when we measure the ticking of a clock on the Moon from Earth, we observe that it ticks slightly faster than an identical clock on Earth due to the time dilation effects of general relativity. This effect is small, however, and only becomes noticeable with extremely precise measurements."

Myth America III

 Next two chapters in Myth America are on Native Americans, by Ari Kelman, and Emigration, by Erika Lee.

The first seems loosely focused around that idea that Native Americans aren't "vanishing", as Dee Brown and the recently retired ad would say.  The second is mostly about the nativism with which those who lived in the US greeted arriving immigrants, sometimes barring entry to groups or limiting numbers. 

I have a problem with this sentence: "The United States has been a particularly powerful actor shaping the movement of peoples by causing human displacement through war and foreign and economic policies.." The author does not support this assertion; indeed she doesn't discuss it at all that I see.  The problem is it's not true for most of our history, at least as far as war goes.  Immigrants have come from Germany, Italy, Philippines, Korea, Japan, China, and Vietnam--all countries where we've fought wars. But in all the cases the immigration was either the movement of the losers to their supporter (i.e, Vietnamese, Hmong, Chinese) or movement because the war and subsequent occupation troops established pathways for the movement. 

Coincidentally the NYTimes has an article today discussing another immigration myth, that immigrants come and stay.  In fact through much of our history many immigrants have left. That continues today.  The pattern described in the article seems to be: come to US and work for the money; return to the homeland for family and retirement. Prof. Lee does not mention this, though the fact of immigrants leaving undermine the myth that America is so  great no one would leave once here; 

Fading Families

 Don't remember what I've written here about genealogical research.  My sister did a lot during a year when she was no longer teaching school.  That was back in 1978, long before the internet and the extensive digitization of sources.

A digression: genealogical research appeals to the sort of mind who reads detective stories.  Back in the day there was great satisfaction in figuring out connections, assessing what the probabilities were when faced with incomplete evidence, etc. Unless you participated in a group devoted to genealogy, you didn't know whether you were the first to find your great great grandmother, or had some cousins preceded you.  All that is, I think, rapidly vanishing.  With ancestry.com and family search, once a connection is made it's visible to anyone in the world who wants to look. And with digitized sources, rapidly expanding to all the printed matter which still exists, and searching, no longer do you have to hit the libraries and local historical societies as did my sister; just click the mouse and pay the subscription fees.

Back tot he title.  One set of clues to ancestry was generational naming patterns. These days the Social Security administration releases statistics on naming patterns, tracing the popularity of names.  (I suspect there's been a recent drop in babies named Karen.) In the old days when family was more important, babies were often named according to a pattern.  For example, my great grandfather named his first son Andrew after his father, and his daughter Sarah after his mother.  In Scots Irish families the next set of children would likely be named after their mother's parents, and so on. The pattern was strong enough  you could use it to deduce genealogy, at least in the 19th century   (By the end of the century it was fading; while my father was named after his mother's father, and my uncle had his paternal grandmother's maiden name for his middle name, my uncle's first name and my aunt's name have no identifiable history in the family

We don't have such large families these days, and the pattern of naming has gone. Does that mean that family feeling is less, or just that a custom has faded away?  

Ask Not

Much discussion on social media about declining mental health, particularly among the young. I'd venture to suggest that the distance our society has traveled is measured by JFK"s words: "Ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for the country"

Two points about the sentence:

1. the emphasis on "doing'
2. seeing the individual as being involved with/part of a greater entity--the country.

I don't have a quote to point to for today's society, but I think:

1. the emphasis has shifted more to "being" (authentic) 
2. the individual is now more separated from larger entities, whether country, occupation, or religion.

I'd guess the evolution is inevitable, caused by changes in the economy, in technology, in beliefs, but it will take society a good while to adjust to the changes.

Was Vertical Farming a Bubble?

 That seems to be the argument of this piece.

While I've been skeptical of it, I think it's premature.  Lots of innovations have had their ups and downs before becoming stabilized.  Humans react with enthusiasm to new ideas and overpromise.  I've seen that in the 1950's with atomic energy, off and on with computers, with the internet, self-driving cars.

I suspect when the technology winnows out the impractical and too costly ideas to arrive at an industry standard it will reduce the capital costs.  Experience will also teach the best locations for vertical farming operations--how cheap the land must be, how close to population centers.  Genetics may tweak the plants for best production under lights.  And the switch away from fossel fuels may reduce energy prices.

All that said, based on an impulse to be fair, I'm still feeling some Schadenfreude.

I Love Armies

 The first two paragraphs of a NYTimes article on getting Leopard tanks for Ukraine:

" Nearly a month after Berlin gave European allies permission to send German-made tanks to Ukraine, the flow of tanks so many leaders vowed would follow seems more like a trickle.

Some nations have discovered that the tanks in their armory don’t actually work or lack spare parts. Political leaders have encountered unanticipated resistance within their own coalitions, and even from their defense ministries. And some armies had to pull trainers out of retirement to teach Ukrainian soldiers how to use old-model tanks."

I particularly laughed at the second sentence: maintenance is always problematic, particularly in armies which haven't fought wars.  

Slippery Slope/Tit for Tat

 One of the arguments of "Hive" is that research shows that in a prisoner's dilemna game which extends over multiple sessions, the best strategy is "tit for tat" but not always.  Straight "tit for tat" can lock the players into a vicious cycle of retaliation, often familiar from Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, etc., while the occasional deviation can transform the game into one of cooperation, which is win-win for both parties.  The book arguments that people with higher IQ's take a longer perspective, so are thus more likely to initiate cooperation, leading to group evolution.

It strikes me that "slippery slope" arguments are related to "tit for tat".  Consider SCOTUS nominations--the Republicans start with Bork, the Democrats with Thomas but either way we've evolved away from the Senate confirmations of the Eisenhower/JFK/LBJ era (though from an old Democrat's viewpoint the real starting point was Gerald Ford's crusade against Abe Fortas.  😉

Myrh America II

 Akhil Reed Amar writes in Myth America about the founding fathers.  He emphasizes Washington's importance to the Constitutional Convention and downplays Madison's contribution, sees little difference between "republican" and "democratic", emphasizes the "union" side of the founding, doesn't accept Charles Beard's interpretation, and accepts the Constitution as helping slavery. 

All in all it seems well-argued.  I was surprised by his singling out Beard; by 1960 he seemed no longer prominent.

Myth America

 Started reading this collection of essays, subtitled: "Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past" David Bell leads off with "exceptionalism".  He mentions the Winthrop sermon, but not the Biblical verse to which he referred. (Mathew 5:14 "You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.") 

I didn't know of the connection to Marxism, though Seymour Martin Lipsetl's use of the concept to explain why the US didn't have socialism was big in the early 60's when I was studying history.

Bell notes Reagan's use of "shining city on a hill" and Gingrich's pushing of the concept as a political weapon against the left, and Obama's formulation that all nations are exceptional. And he notes Daniel Bell's 1975 essay "End of Exceptionalism".

Personally I'm not ready to concede the term to the right.  America is exceptionally  important; on that all sides can agree. Whether we point to a glorious ascension or a past stained by misdeeds, America can't be ignored. The vehemence of the arguments over our past and future testify to exceptional importance.

Ukraine

 Lots of media coverage of the 1-year anniversary of the Russia invasion into Ukraine.

In general I've been in favor of the Biden policy, supporting Ukraine against Russia but avoiding committing US troops. I still am.  But I remember in the early days after 9/11, I had some doubts,never expressed, about the Bush policy. He seemed to have called it right for some time, but now the conventional wisdom says it was a mistake.

In the case of the Ukraine, we forget Russia invaded in 2014, took Crimea and a good portion of eastern Ukraine. Why the new invasion--was it because EU/NATO/US didn't support Ukraine that much in 2014?

My bottom line--it's complicated and I don't see an easy ending.  Biden's making his calls; they seem reasonable today, they may or may not be the right ones when looking back at it from 20 years on.

A Shepherd Is Angry

 

This ELMs scheme is SO POOR… where are the options for regenerative grazing, for long recovery periods, for trampling carbon, for hyper diverse permanent pasture, for agro-ecological transition, and for actually earning the real cost of public benefits? https://t.co/G0rawZT5xA

— James Rebanks (@herdyshepherd1) January 31, 2023

Good Old Days of Democratic Dominance

 James Fallows had a tribute to Jimmy Carter today, mentioning in passing that the Democratic margin in the House was 150!! I checked, it actually was 149 in 1977 and 122 in 1979.

As Fallows noted, the big fights were intra-party.

Fear the Future--Bot and Sock Puppets

 A comment the other day about communications from fake social media sites--sock puppets.  The writer observed it was sometimes hard to identify messages from bots.

My fear--you ain't seen nothing yet.  Someone is already linking Chatgpt to their fake media sites, so they can push out messages which seem very real with little effort. 

HIve Mind and the Mathew Effect

 Reading Hive Mind by Garret Jones. Finding it good through the first chapters, until he got to the "Ingredients for Good Politics" and the Coase Theorem.  A fast summary: if a state has people focused on the long term, and willing to accept the results of elections, there can be effective bipartisan deals to handle externalities (like pollution) using Coase.  Coase says that if you have good negotiators they can find a win-win solution without the need for regulation. 

Then I started thinking about the Matthew Effect.

An assumption in the discussion is that high IQ people are more future-oriented and more able to do tit for tat bargaining, without holding grudges which lead to mutual destruction. The problem when you apply the idea to politics is that those with the gold/assets are able to hire those with IQ (lobbyists and lawyers) to rig the bargain.

How To Avoid Taxes

 Reading a book by Scott Galloway: Adrift, America in 100 Charts.

He has a chart showing the increase in the amount of corporate earning which are booked in tax havens.  It's gone from 0% in the 1960's to 50% in 2016.  

I wonder what it means.  If we see a figure that corporations pay x% of their income as taxes, is their real tax rate considering total income x/2 %

And the audit rate has declined from the good old days of 1960 of 3 percent to less than .5%.

On Vice and the Prohibition Thereof

 I seldom agree with Prof. Blackman, but I envy him his office setup. (Seven monitors, it's incredible.  I tweeted a snarky comment about the relationship to high tuition rates, but his output is so voluminous that he might be producing seven times that of the average law professor.)

I might agree with his negative assessment of the SCOTUS decision on sports betting.

It seems to me humans are prone to being addicted, sometimes to good things, sometimes bad.  I'm not libertarian enough to say  everyone can choose her own addiction.  I'd rather see the government intervene, possibly with "nudges" rather than flat prohibitions.  Taxing vices like cigarettes and alcohol is good, taxing gambling 

Programming? Chat Bots

 ". It's just programmed to seem human." That's a sentence from Ann Althouse, in a post reacting to the frontpage article in the NYTimes recounting an exchange with Microsoft's trial version of a chat bot. 

I'm jumping in where I have no knowledge, but that's not the way I understand chat bots like ChatGPT, etc.  Aren't they "learning models"?  To me that means the programmer is responsible for the IQ of the model, of the bot, but not the content of the responses. So it seems that ChatGPT et.al. will be showing us an average person, "average" based on the context the bot is learning from, which seems to be the usual suspects--white, european, educated etc. 

I suppose by controlling the content from which the bot learns the developers can create different personas--say develop a basic personality, then give it a collection of the 500 greatest books in some category with instructions to give the words in them triple the weight. 

Brain Tests

 I've participated in some research on the aging brain, partly because my mother started showing signs of what we assumed was Alzheimers at about my current age, partly out of do-gooder syndrome. 

Two of the projects had me run various computer-based exercises.  The most recent one is being run by a Phd with Georgetown University, possibly with the hospital; I'm not clear.   His exercises spanned a wider variety of challenges than I'd run into before: for example seeing a long sequece pairing seldom seen names (because rare in English or originating in a foreign language) with pictures of the objects  or a sequence of pairs of objects with no obvious connection (i.e., a brick and a coffin). 

Before I got old, I'd almost always do well on tests, tests requiring language knowledge and identifying shapes.  As I've reached my 80's I'm doing less well on the familiar tests, and absolutely lousy on some of the Georgetown tests.  While some of my problems likely are changes in my brain, I think I never would have done well on some of them. 

The ways I and my spouse process ideas and experience are often very different, which was observed years ago when we both took the same tests.  She hasn't taken the Georgetown tests, but I expect she would do much better  than I did on some of the tests.  

In a perfect world, knowing what I do now, I'd wish I had taken these tests back in my teens.  It would have expanded my view of how brains work, and made me better.

Suoer Bowl Ads

Watched the first half of the Super Bowl last night.  Turned it off when Mahomes was injured, knowing the Chiefs were done for.  Besides, I tuned out of all the ads because mostly they included people I didn't recognize.  I realize I'm almost totally disconnected from popular entertainment and celebrity culture. 

Proper Representation II

 When I was young "representation" wasn't an issue. Instead you had "mobility", the idea that immigrants climbed the ladder from poverty to middle class with some striking it rich.  Actually there were different ladders--Jews were noted boxers and basketball players before they became doctors and lawyers. Mobility was often about "firsts". We noted the "firsts"--the first Jewish SCOTUS justice, the first Polish cabinet secretary, even the first black cabinet secretary.

Emphasizing the firsts obscured our view of the many, or perhaps was just a way to avoid looking at the many.   But "firsts" are still important; they show what is possible, what isn't prohibited.  Similarly the extreme cases, like Muggsy Bogues, may be outliers but they too show what's possible.

Somehow this discussion ties into "intersectionality" to me.  But that's for another day.

AFIDA and Congress

 CRS has a paper on the issue of foreign ownership of agricultural land in preparation for the upcoming farm bill.  Two items of note--about half the acreage included in FSA's AFIDA data is forest land (apparently a lot of which is in Maine) and China doesn't show up in the discussion of the owners of the most land.

They mention possible problems in FSA's data, including a request to GAO to look at it.  I am sure there are problems. 

What Is Proper Representation?

The conventional wisdom now seems to be that groups, whether ethnic, racial, gender, ideological, deserve to have representation in every walk of life that matches their presence in society.  

For example, I've noted articles on the dwindling presence of American blacks in major league baseball; the absence of blacks in management positions in the NFL, the lack of conservative professors in higher education, etc

My first reaction is to go slowly--the first consideration is whether there are legal barriers to such representation. Those I presume are almost always wrong. 

A second consideration is that under-representation of one group necessarily means over-representation of other group(s).  For example, the over-representation of Asian students in top educational institutions (i.e., Harvard, Thomas Jefferson High School) is the other side of the under-representation of other minorities. 

A third consideration is the under-representation  of a group in one area means the over-representation in other area(s).  For example, the over-representation of blacks in pro football and basketball seems to be the counterpart to their under-representation in pro baseball.

A fourth consideration is trajectory through history.  For example, blacks seem to have created and still dominate areas of music (about which I know nothing), like hip hop and rap.  Jews seem to be prominent in Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

A final consideration (some would put it first) is whether the differential representation indicates a barrier to advancement of some kind. One rule of advancement is usually--it depends on who you know--meaning the greater the representation the easier it is to advance.

The Hole In FSA Management?

 FSA has something called Box Onespan, which appears to be an on-line signature manager. I'm guessing from messages on the FSA Employee group on Facebook that FSA continues to have a hole in its management. 

What hole?  Someone who worries about the day-to-day operation of the county office; someone who is the authority on the common tools used in the office, who worries about training and answering questions.  Instead there's an ad hoc network of county personnel sharing information and tips.

The hole existed, I think, when I worked there and likely still exists. The problem is management in DC is specialized so no one has a unified picture of how things come together in the county office.  

IIRC there were occasional efforts in ASCS/FSA to come up with such a picture: training classes for counter clerks, manuals for district directors, and sometime the area/regional directors in DC would have a take. 

[Updated to eliminate double negative in title]

ChatGPT and Congress

 Yesterday there was a report, which I may be garbling, that Google had given ChatGPT the same test questions they give to engineering job applicants, and the AI qualified as a level 3, apparently an entry level.  The starting salary for level 3 was given as about $180K, more than the starting salary for a new member of Congress, not to mention a member of considerable seniority. 

Not sure what that says about AI, Google, Congress, or the US. 

New EWG Report on Distribution of Farm Payments

 Various newspapers picked up the EWG report.

The lede for one: "The top 10% of recipients of federal farm payments raked in more than 79% of total subsidies over the last 25 years ",  

Here's the EWG report.

Elsewhere they note that the Trump administration changed the reporting of payments--I think FSA must be reporting payments to assignees, so likely using the payee data, not the payable. 

[Update: they note the change in reporting reveals which financial institutions get the most payments: " Surprisingly, the financial institution that received the most farm subsidies was the USDA. The USDA’s Farm Service Agency, or FSA, alone got almost $350 million in farm subsidies between 2019 and 2021, more than any other financial organization." Not a surprise to anyone who understands how the payments word.]]

The Importance of Making/Fixing Things

 A recent hole in the roof meant I had to move away from my keyboard and actually do some work, physical work repairing the damage to drywall.  

Since gardening has been inactive this winter, I've not been doing such work. I found it good to be active, to try to do something, and actually succeed, not perfectly but good enough for government work.  (Note the source says it used to mean quality work. In some ways government specifications still are more particular, and certainly more expensive, than "off the shelf" civilian products. (Note the origin of this expression, not at all related to its current use, meaning standard items, not bespoke.

That's a digression--my point is doing the work was rewarding.

Police Killed in Line of Duty

 Turns out there's a wikipedia page for US police killed in line of duty. Quite a contrast with a page for UK police killed.

For anyone too lazy to click, US killings of police run about 50 or above, the UK runs about 1 a year.

The context is the culture: US view police as maintaining order against crime in the midst of an armed populace, meaning a focus on conflict and violence, while the UK has a different history. In short, there's not an arms race in the UK, there is in US.

Failure To Commit, To Decide

 Ran across this tweet, which sounds interesting. 

Excited to share this new work with @beckyj1 in @ASR_Journal! We examine how local organizations sort people to ration scarce social benefits. We analyze the case of prioritization in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program (1/12)https://t.co/AAlR8Z8AdN

— Simone Zhang (@simonezhang) January 30, 2023

 

Drawing on >1000 local waitlist prioritization policies and interviews with local housing officials, we find many local housing agencies don’t set explicit priorities to determine who accesses a voucher sooner. This is especially true in rural, conservative communities. (4/12)

— Simone Zhang (@simonezhang) January 30, 2023

 My guess is part of this is the costs of deciding priorities.  It requires a conscious decision, which many people find difficult. Being in a rural area raises the odds that the potential decider knows some of the people who will be affected by her decision, and the people affected know who made the decision so there's the risk of emotional confrontations. 

It's also possible that there's no one decider, which raises the possibility of conflict among the deciders.  The outcome can be similar to Congress; which Congress can dodge the decision by kicking the issue to the bureaucracy, local deciders can dodge the decision by leaving it up to first-come, first served. Both tactics give the advantage to those who have the ability and expertise to navigate the bureaucracy.

Me and the Deficit--Raise Taxes!

 NYTimes has an article on how social issues and the deficit play with Republican voters. The point is the Tea Party was very concerned about spending; now voters are less concerned.  (I'd quibble a bit with Cohn's analysis: I think a lot of the Tea Party emotion was over the idea of socialism, specifically pushed by a black president, not so much a concern for fiscal conservatism.)

Anyhow, I find myself not in the mainstream of Democrats--I'm much more concerned about deficits and the rising cost of interest on the debt than the average elephant, and much more in favor of raising taxes as a way of handling it than most anyone.  I wholeheartedly support boosting the IRS budget to collect taxes, but I'd also raise taxes on those above $100K. 

Does ChatGpt Mean End of Wikipedia

 Some see ChatGPT as a threat to Google.  Might well be, but won't it be equally a threat to Wikipedia? Humans, being lazy, don't really care about accuracy and objectivity; give them a story whichs seem coherent and it will be good enough.

The Crystal Meth of Purpose

 Elliott Ackerman in his book Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning, uses the phrase:

"the crystal meth of purpose".

The book is a group of essays on his trips to Iraq, Turkey, Syria, getting close to the ongoing fighting among Syrian rebels, ISIS, Kurds, Iraq forces, and remembering his days as a Marine in both Iraq and Afghanistan. 

His point is that combat with your unit provides a purpose which, at least in his experience, is both addictive and not to be found in civilian life.

I never was in combat. Over my life I've known times where I did have a purpose, one which was at least somewhat addictive.  I suspect I'm easily addicted,

The Former Guy Gave to Growers

 Via John Phipps, who retweeted it.  I was trying to find his skeptical piece on vertical farming, but found this worth reading.

My new report for @ewg just released today: Under Trump, Farm Subsidies Soared and the Rich Got Richer https://t.co/oL6xw2OTAS

— Anne Schechinger (@Anne_Weir1) February 24, 2021

Over the years different administrations have stretched the authorities granted under the CCC act and Section 32.   

[Update: One chart from the piece:

What Was I Thinking?

 Damned if I know.  As I age, my short term memory is going. It could be upsetting--you have something in your mind, and a couple seconds later it's gone. So far it's not happened often enough to be really upsetting, so I'm using my time-tested super-power of denial to carry on. 

Self-Driving Cars and Ecology, or "Where's the Running Board?"

 NYTimes had an article on Tesla in its Sunday magazine. Its emphasis was on the problems in the self-driving software.  

Tesla claims that based on accidents per miles their cars are much safer than those driven by people.  That may well be true, but I'd love to see a test where the drivers and conditions are randomly assigned.

I think one problem is the lack of sound data--apparently each company which is trying to implement such software maintains its own data, presumably for competitive reasons. But even if the data were public, there doesn't seem to be a basis for comparison.  The testing being done uses drivers who aren't at all reflective of the overall population and is done on roads and in conditions which aren't representative of normal driving. 

As it stands the testing being done is also unfair to Tesla and the others.  What do I mean?  The current ecology of drivers, roads, and conditions has evolved over a long history. An experienced driver has expectations based on her experience, and operates on their basis. I imagine it could be modeled as a circle in a Venn diagram. Imagine 60 years from now when almost all cars are self-driving.  That ecology will have "drivers" with somewhat different expectations, cars different than todays--notably quicker to to react, and roads which will have been modified for better self-driving. In our Venn diagram, the circle for the current ecology and the circle for the self-driving ecology will not be identical; they'll overlap in some areas.

Today when we judge self-driving software we're judging it by the current ecology, not the ecology of 60 years from now.  It's like cow-catchers on locomotives or running boards on cars--both were things needed by the early rail and automotive systems, but not by the current ones (though it turns out our trucks and SUV's still need them).  It will take time for the ecology to evolve; for drivers to gain experience with the cars, for the cars and software to improve, for the roads to be modified, for the insurance industry to adapt and the laws to change. It will be evolutionary.

The Honor System for Records Management

 A recent newspaper article (Times or Post?) noted that enforcement of the Federal Records Act is entrusted to the honor system. What does that mean?

 When I joined ASCS it had a Records Management Branch in its Administrative Services Division. It had been strengthened as a result of Congressional scrutiny of the Billie Sol Estes scandal.  (The investigators found that ASCS didn't have a good system for filing correspondence and policy papers.) 

The focus of the branch's work was establishing and maintaining a system for filing correspondence, and prescribing a filing system for offices originating policy decisions. Once established the routine was almost self-executing.  New secretaries would be shown what to do: original and carbons, yellow is official record, green is addressee folder, etc.  In my view there wasn't any explanation of the rationale for the way it was designed.

The records management people in the agency were effectively outsiders, people who might show up occasionally, but without any day-to-day contact with the workers   If that was true for fellow employees of ASCS, it was doubly true for the people involved with records management at the departmental level, and quadruply true for the employees of the National Archives and Records Adminstration.

How might this translate to the Executive Office of the President? On the one hand there must be a greater consciousness of the importance of records, given the constant scrutiny by journalists and investigators and the looming historians.  On the other hand the office has a lot more going on than any agency.  On the third hand, at the end of an administration I imagine it's like when you decide to retire, you zero in on the future and care much less about the wrapping up. Finally, your boss couldn't care less about records. 

[Update: given the discovery of more documents in Biden's places and today's discovery of documents in Pence's place, I think my "third hand" is well supported. I suspect you'd find a few classified documents in possession of a lot of high, and not so high, officials.]

Silos, Innovation, and the Internet

 I remember the burst of enthusiasm surrounding the discovery that the Internet/WWW could be used for business.  Soon it became mandatory for every business to have its own website. Expertise in doing sites was short, so some found a profitable business in creating websites.  I still hear their advertisements from time to time.

Normally I prefer to do business in writing rather than talking, so that meant I was happy with this innovation.  And more and more I found the businesses with whom I wanted to deal had websites.

In the past few years, though, I've tried to deal with businesses who have websites but who don't respond when I send them an email or fill out the contact form on the site.  Sometimes I've reverted to calling them, but usually they lose my business.

What's going on?  I've no proof, not even any data, but my suspicion is it's part of a general parttern:  when an organization has something new to do they:

• may contract it out, or set up a new group to do it.
• they rarely look at how it could impact or improve their existing operations--it's easier to keep doing what is familiar and comfortably within their knowledge and capabilities.
• once the new function (in this case a website) is set up, the initial enthusiasm which evoked the decision, money, and time needed to creat it tends to ebb, especially if the website doesn't show immediate payoffs.
• the end result is the website becomes a dusty relic of some bigshot's pet project  

You perhaps can guess that I think some of this applies to past initiatives by ASCS/FSA/USDA to change the way they operate. 

Indeed, I think it's part of the way our government works.  Part of the life cycle of government initiatives.

[In summary: often the way organizations innovate is by addition, not substitution, which leads to silos.]

Contrarians--Genetic?

 I've long experience with contrarians--my sister was one.  I lean that way myself.

I wonder whether it's genetic or cultural?  Do "tight" societies , presumably ones less welcoming of contrarians, have fewer, or any at all?  I'd assume there might be an evolutionary basis--seems as if the species could benefit by having a few around, just as it presumably benefits by having a few left handers around.  On the other hand, while I'm a confirmed right handers, I was able to train myself to use the mouse left-handed when I was getting carpal tunnel pains.

Inverted Social Norms

Back the day rural areas were viewed positively, with high morality, great character, all the virtues (at least so my mother thought). Meanwhile urban areas were viewed negatively, with dubious morality, poor character, divorce, gambling, drugs,  many dangers. By the 1970's it was clear where the balance of goodness was.

These days it seems that rural areas are the ones with problems, higher death rates, drugs, broken marriages, etc.   Meanwhile the gentrified urban areas and suburbs are seeing a new social conservatism--less sex outside of partnerships or marriage, indeed less divorce, less smoking, etc. 

Bar/CR Codes for Classified Documents?

 I had very limited exposure to the classification system for government documents during my time in ASCS/FSA.  IIRC ASCS did get some classified documents as part of the distribution system for the agricultural attaches stationed in some embassies.  I'm not sure why some, a few I think, were classified; perhaps the attaches had a report on the status of a nation's crops which were obtained by befriending a statistician--I don't know.  Anyhow, a management analyst in Records Management had a clearance and handled them.  I suspect the whole setup was a carryover from New Deal days, before USDA silos were built up, possibly before Foreign Agricultural Service was formed.

Anyhow, I'm not surprised by problems in handling and tracking classified documents.  You might be able to have secure handling if you used a dedicated database with no ability to copy, download, or print.  That way you could track the user ids anytime a document was read.  But, with the possible exception of the most highly classified, that's not practical.  (It does seem that when documents are viewed in a SCIF that while they could be printed, nothing could be taken out of the facility. 

For the more ordinary classified documents, I wonder if they have a system of bar coding or CR coding for them. The problem of course would still be the copying, printing, downloading--how do you assign a unique identifier to the copy, printout, or downloaded document?  If election officials and USPS can assign a unique code to a ballot so it can be tracked, but they don't deal with  duplication.