Program Cuts for USDA

The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has a post describing the cuts to be made in the discretionary and mandatory programs of USDA.  The media seems to have focused on the appropriations cuts, but as the post notes there are also proposals to require the Agriculture Committee to cut programs under its jurisdiction.

Revised Republican Cuts of USDA

It looks as if the Republicans, in their effort to cut $100 billion, have added to the previously announced cuts of FSA and NRCS other items, and deepened their cuts of WIC.  (Figures are in millions, with the first one the cut from FY2010 as enacted, the second one from FY2011 as Obama requested.) (Here's my previous post.)

Departmental Administration and Offices (137.7) (105.9)
Inspector General (8.7) (4.5)
Research Education and Extension
Agricultural Research Service (185.1) (84.3)
National Institute for Food & Agriculture (217.1) (150.7)
Other Research (13.2) (20.8)
Marketing and Regulatory Programs
Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service (75.0) (32.3)
Agricultural Marketing Service (9.4) (11.8)
Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (1.6) (3.9)
Food Safety and Inspection Service (88.4) (52.7)
Farm Assistance Programs
Farm Services Agency (190.4) (205.3)
Risk Management Agency (3.1) (5.9)
Natural Resources Conservation Service (172.5) (46.2)
Rural Development
Rural Housing Service Loans & Grants (208.8) (35.1)
Rural Business Loans & Grants (33.2) (51.4)
Rural Utilities Loans & Grants (204.5) (6.3)
Rural Development Administrative Expenses (35.8) (40.4)
Domestic Food Programs
Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants &
Children (WIC) (747.2) (1008.2)
Commodity Assistance Programs (26.0) (7.6)
Other Nutrition Programs & Administration (9.0) (32.3)
Foreign Agriculture Service
Food for Peace (PL 480) (687.0) (544.0)
McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition
Grants (109.5) (20.0)
Foreign Agriculture Service (14.9) (83.4)
Food and Drug Administration (241.0) (220.2)

Budget Cuts Help IT?

This Federal Computer Weekly  piece argues that Republican budget cuts will, in the long run, help IT, because the only way to accomplish program goals will be by using technology. I'd beg to differ. If budget cutting were logical, we'd see more money added to IRS to do a better job of collecting taxes. We'd see upfront investments in IT.  We'd see reorganizations.  My experience is budgeting isn't logical, so we'll see the IRS hacked, we'll see IT money cut back to mere maintenance, and we'll see organizations fiercely defending their turf against the world.

The Bad Teacher and the Bad Boss

Some blogging on teacher evaluations. A quote from one:

The only observation I'll make is that I suspect many reformers see teacher evaluations as a second-best approach. In an ideal, less litigious world, managers would be empowered to make hiring and firing decisions based on a number of factors, e.g., does this teacher play well with others, does he have the "soft skills" he needs to do his job well, does he use a variety of strategies to keep easy-to-teach students in his class while fobbing off harder-to-teach students on others, etc., that are hard to quantify.

 I think the comment shows the blind assumptions common to us bureaucrat types.  Specifically, the assumption is that you have the ideal principal doing the evaluations. Stating the assumption does, I think, show its falsity.  We all know no one is perfect, so we're going to have imperfect principals evaluating imperfect teachers.  That reality is one strong reason to have teachers' unions, or unions of public service employees.

Yes, we could all imagine scenarios in which the principal does her evaluation using sound information on many factors.  The reality is different, particularly because evaluation is something few people enjoy doing, or receiving, so it's likely to be done poorly. 

The Use of New Technology

I wonder how well and fast some innovations penetrate society.  For example, I guess you can assume everyone who uses a PC these days knows how to use a mouse. Remembering Windows 2.0, that was not something you could assume. (The first PC's FSA provided had Windows 2.0 on them.)  So maybe it took 10 years or so for us to convert to a Windows WYSIWYG environment?  But how about sneakier stuff, the bells and whistles software types add on.  Does anyone use everything in Word?  How about Google Maps?

The reason I ask is I just realized this week that the Street View in Google Maps could be used to see where in Ireland my great grandfather lived before he emigrated to the US in the 1820s. Apparently Google hasn't done Germany yet.

Crop Insurance and the LA Times

Via Farm Policy, the LA Times had a long article on crop insurance, using the hook of fraud in the program to include some more serious discussion.

The program ballooned, thanks to insurance industry lobbying and federal rules that make it tough for farmers to go without coverage. Although the amount of acreage covered remained relatively stable, the value of insured crops climbed to $78 billion in 2010 from $36.7 billion in 2001. Premiums, tied to the volatility of the commodity futures market, jumped in price. Agents' commissions, which are tied to crop prices and premiums, have tripled over the last decade.

The trouble, critics say, is that private insurers and their agents reap most of the benefits while the public still picks up the losses.

In 2009, taxpayers shelled out nearly $4 billion to the 16 insurers involved in the program, according to the USDA's Risk Management Agency, which administers the program. Of that, $1.5 billion was paid in commissions to an estimated 15,000 insurance agents. Because there were more gains than losses, the USDA said it retained $1.4 billion, some of which came from farmers' premiums.

 Must be nice to have one's income triple in a decade.  Although it's probably true that many crop farmers have done equally as well in the new century.

A Coming Glut of Almonds and Pistachios

That's my prediction, based on these figures from Chris Clayton:

Speaking of which, all you rolling in the money corn and soybean farmers, figure this math out. Last year, some of these guys in the valley got about 4,000 pounds an acre off their pistachios, and sold them at $2.50 a pound. Production costs for a pistachio crop is about $2,000 an acre. And it's a wonder why private investors are willing to pour money into pistachio or almond orchards that won't make a crop until three to five years.

USDA Farm Cuts

House Appropriations Committee is proposing the following cuts in 2011 FY (the next continuing resolution):

"Food Safety and Inspection Services -$53M
· Farm Service Agency -$201M
· Agriculture Research -$246M
· Natural Resource Conservation Service -$46M
· Rural Development Programs -$237M"

 No detail on what's involved. No cut to SNAP (food stamps) but WIC takes a $738 million hit.  Not sure why it's better to fund the poor instead of women and infants.

NY Dairies Can't Win

Not only have corn prices gone through the roof, but the roof is falling, at least in Saratoga and Washington counties, NY on several farms.

A couple comments, which sound hard-hearted:

• I suspect many of the roofs which succumbed to the snow load were on buildings erected during the last half of the last century.  I doubt either the old-old-fashioned barn on my childhood farm, or the old-fashioned hip-roofed barn which was the standard when I was born would have suffered so.  Their roofs were steeper in pitch than the more modern barns I've seen.
• I'm not sure why FSA should be involved.  Surely the farmers were carrying insurance on buildings and herd.  If they had insurance and the insurance covered barn collapses because of snow, FSA should not be involved.

Sic Transit Gloria: Ken Olsen

Back in the day (whoops, did I use that already) Once the Digital Equipment Corporation was high in the sky.  I remember using the DEC All-in-one system to communicate with Kansas City, writing requirements and discussing schedules.  This was the mid-80's. In DC we had started our word processing with the IBM Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter, changed to the CRT-based Lexitrons, briefly to Wang, and then to the DEC terminals with their email, wordprocessing and rudimentary spreadsheet package.  (The spreadsheet was an attempt to compete with Lotus 123--I remember using it for some computations, maybe on wheat allotment in the runup to the 1986 farm bill.) 

Anyhow, it was on the DEC that I first learned the golden rule of email: black and white type does not convey your meaning, particularly when you're joking, sarcastic or whatever.  (Early days of smileys.)   All this reminiscing is triggered by the death of Ken Olsen, one of the cofounders of DEC.

It's a cautionary tale, matched in later days by the AOL/TimeWarner saga, Alta Vista, and maybe Yahoo, and Ebay.  Who knows the future?

Cotton Price Supports

Back in the day, Oxfam was waging war against US cotton farm programs on behalf of the African cotton growers (in Burkina Faso, etc.). The argument was the program encouraged US farmers to produce at lower prices, making it impossible for African growers to make a profit.  This was when the cotton price was $.55 or so a pound.

Today, according to this piece by Philip Brasher (hat tip Farm Policy) Oxfam's man in Africa is seeing possibilities for African growers:

Cotton isn't a food crop, but farmers in places such as Mali or Senegal in west Africa could do quite well if cotton prices hold up, Hazard [Oxfam representative] said in a phone interview from Dakar, Senegal. A jump in world cotton prices last year came too late to really benefit farmers as much as it could have, because they have their crop under contract by the time they plant, he said. The world price of cotton shot from 90 cents in August to $1.68 in December, according to the National Cotton Council.
Some west African farmers may switch some of their land from food production to cotton to take advantage of the prices, Hazard said.

 Elsewhere in the piece Hazard notes high food prices may force the poor to cut back on their consumption.

Two observations, after I admit I'm no economist:

• Last I knew the US cotton program wasn't significantly changed.  Matter of fact Brazil won compensation from us via the WTO. So this big turnaround for cotton means there's other forces at work, stronger forces at work, than simply bad, no-good, unwise, even evil US farm programs.
• If the high cotton prices will elicit more cotton production from African growers, so eventually might the high rice, etc. prices elicit more rice production.

Women in Special Ops

Special Ops is the glamour branch of the services.  Think of the Delta force operatives in Black Hawk Down.  So it's with some surprise I got towards the middle of this post on Tom Ricks blog and found that women are successfully infiltrating even Special Ops. You can't keep a good woman down, I guess.

Schadenfreude on Disaster

I spent long enough in FSA working on disaster programs (not disastrous programs, though opinions may differ, but programs to aid farmers who suffered a disaster) to feel some schadenfreude (wicked enjoyment at the misfortunes of others) at reports such as this.

It's a true fact: any program, public or private, which puts money on the table is subject to scams and fraud.  Different programs have different vulnerabilities.  Whether it was the compensation for 9/11 victims and families, or Katrina, Pigford, or just a simple scheme to fake an accident, burn down one's factory building for the insurance, or claim a whiplash, you always have fraud.

Of course everyone knows we ourselves are innocent, so only a weak-minded blind bureaucrat would treat us as someone to be suspected, someone whose claims must be verified and whose word should not be taken at face value.

Limiting the Use of SSN's

Nextgov had a post a while back reporting the Navy was limiting the use of Social Security numbers. It ends:

The eventual goal is to have a unique Defense Department ID replace Social Security numbers across all the services. Defense expects to begin removing Social Security numbers from bar codes on service member ID cards by 2012.

 There's a gain to using organization-specific (DOD) IDs instead of nation-specific IDs (SSN's), I suppose. My personal prejudice is for using applications which don't require an ID number at all. After all, if you need to distinguish among the multiple Bill Harshaws who live in the world, a combination  of data works.  Just use the Whitepages application and do a search for a last name and a town.  They'll respond with a list of people with the last name and provide the first names, often the ages, and often the other people in the household.  Usually that's good enough for what you want.

Granted there may be some instances in which the organization needs greater certainty.  For example, consider an ID card.  My VA drivers license used to have the SSN on it, but now it's got a customer ID number.  That's what store clerks write down, or they used to, when they ask for ID for a check or a purchase. Such requests are infrequent now; I'm not sure whether it's because businesses have figured the info is not worth the hassle or what.  The better solution would be a picture of me and my card, which they may be getting.

I'd hasten to add that there needs to be an ID card number, which identifies the ID card itself, but which doesn't identify the person. If I lose my license, VDOT needs to reissue one, and know which actual card was lost and which I should have.  That way, if the lost card pops up in someone's possession they can tell the difference. I don't know VDOT's business processes, but it looks as if they do have such a card number on the license.

Finally, if needed, any organization these days should be able to rely on an email address, which is what they do online. Unfortunately not everyone has one, which is a subject for another day.

Are You Allowed To? The Growth of Freedom

That's what I was asked by a person of a certain age (i.e., older than I) recently. I was offering advice on beginning a blog containing posts about a historical personage. The question, as I recall it, was whether you could address the reader directly in such posts. For example, "dear reader, Jane Doe III was the most important person in Anytown during 1840-1860.  You need to understand her life  because it offers an example of how leaders today should act."

My response was, of course: in the blogging world there are no rules. You can do anything and everything.  Given the person to whom I was responding, mentioning the End User Licensing Agreement Google has us agree to seemed superfluous.

This question measures the gap between the world in which I and the person were raised and the world today.  I can't imagine people in their teens and twenties today asking the same question.  Their world is much fuller of opportunities, of possibilities, and much emptier of rules governing personal behavior with others, whether on the Internet or in person.

And You Thought Vegetable Growers Didn't Get Subsidies

Foodies often point to the large subsidies given to field crops and complain that fruit and vegetable growers don't get subsidized.  Whatever the truth of the assertion, I want to point to this new FSA program.  Yes, it's for asparagus, which last I looked was a vegetable.  (I like asparagus, fresh asparagus, locally grown asparagus.) Of course the program is for the 2004 through 2007 crop years.

Frankly, I don't have time left in my life to research this, and the link to the body of the regulations does not work (I've complained to GPO) so I'll just fly off the handle.  This is ridiculous.  No bureaucrat can reasonably administer a program this far removed from the current day. Too much changes.  According to the press release, it sounds as if there were a surge of imports during the period.  Someone got some Congressperson to put this in the farm bill, though it doesn't count as an earmark. 

Food Costs

Charles Blow has an op-ed piece in the Times with a table comparing the Mid-East nations (and the US) on various metrics: age of population, inequality of income, food expenditure, Internet penetration, level of democracy. Overall, there's not much difference between Tunisia, Egypt and the other countries. But on food costs, defined as spending on food consumed at home, as a percentage of household spending, the US is down to 6.8 percent (based on the 2011 Statistical Abstract). Most of the other countries, except Israel and the small oil-rich ones,  run from 20 to 45 percent. 

I suspect this is misleading, however, in that in US the 6.8 percent includes lots of processed food, while in the Mid East the 20+ percent is more raw materials, like flour, beans, rice, olive oil and similar ingredients.  So fluctuations in the price of agricultural commodities hits them much harder than in the US>

On Class, and the Lack Thereof

I recommend Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet, a book of essays written as he became immobilized in body by Lou Gehrig's disease. It's getting 5 stars on Amazon. The writing is graceful.  Judt, now dead, was a Londoner, of Jewish heritage, a historian who taught on both sides of the Atlantic but ended up in New York City.

I want to quote from the essay "Bedder".

"I grew up without servants.  This is hardly surprising: in the first place, we were a small, lower-middle-class family who lived in small, lower-middle-class housing.  Before the war [WWII], such families could typically afford a maid and perhaps a cook as well.  The real middle class, of course, did much better: upstairs and downstairs staff were well within the reach of a professional man and his family." [His parents could afford a day-nanny for him. At Cambridge he had "bedders": women who looked after undergraduate rooms. Oxford has "scouts".]

Judt's class-consciousness is British, as are his gradations.  I think he means his family was middle-class because they weren't "working class/lower class"; they had white-collar jobs, not manual labor.  The "lower" part probably implies no college education, not a professional lawyer, teacher, manager. I think it's generally true a higher proportion of Brits had servants (say from 1850-1950) than Americans. Americans had "help", neighbor girls who might come in after childbirth or during sickness.  But anyone who could afford regular employees probably was considered upper-middle-class. 

Having noted this bit in Judt, I was struck when I saw on a newscast a talking head describing a growing "underclass" resulting from people losing their jobs in the Great Recession and being unable to find new employment. To me "underclass" is a bit pejorative, although perhaps not as much as "lower class" would seem.

Surprising Sentence of the Day: Molotov Cocktail

Who was Molotov? No, that's not the sentence, but I write in stunned amazement that most people today have no memory of him. (Only the precocious baby boomer might remember him.)

The surprising sentence, at Technology Review:

"The amount of energy stored in a given volume of gasoline is 36 times higher than a lithium ion battery, 15 times that of gunpowder and 10 times greater than the energy per unit volume of TNT."

It's from an article explaining why they are the great equalizer.

How Rich Is the Richest Black Person in the World

$10 billion. (He's an Ethiopean.) Hat tip: Chris Blattman

Why Programs Fail

A bit from a new Center for American Progress study on "Design for Success". Part of their answer to the question is:

"proponents [of a program] tend to focus on the politics and perception of a new idea, rather than on less glamorous questions of whether the program is likely to work or whether it is ready to be implemented. They focus on which stakeholder group might back the idea, how it will play with the media and voters, and what effect it could have on future political contests. These considerations naturally lead to compromises, and ideas get amended to increase political support. The changes, however, are rarely about making the idea more effective when implemented, but about luring the support of powerful players.
The problem, then, is that our program-making process focuses primarily on politics, and only secondarily on substantial policy questions. Questions of implementability sometimes seem entirely absent from the process.

(The study in part is inspired by Atul Gawande's "Checklist" book. )

A related quote, on why existing programs continue:

Finally, the political process rewards people who come up with new ideas, not fix old ones. Interest groups court new policies, and reward politicians who champion their ideas. That means Washington decision makers tend to channel their energies into developing new policies rather than fixing existing programs.

 I've skimmed the report which I like. It's more practical than many efforts.  I particularly like the idea in the report that its proposals should be tested on a trial basis, as they recommend for new programs.  However, I'd fault them for being too much a "new idea" (see the paragraph above) and not attending to how existing efforts in OMB and Congress could be modified and improved in light of their recommendations.  It's good my Senator, Mr. Warner, supports the effort, but how much clout is behind it?

Farmers Replaced by a Printer?

That's possible, at least that's how I interpret the implications of a visionary on Freakonomics who wants to eliminate food waste by printing food, yes printing food.

(I think he's full of barnyard extract.)

The Dirty Little Secrets of Life--Milk

There's all sorts of things we live with by ignoring them; just pass by on the other side of the street.  One is milk.

I'm reminded of that by this extension post on milk quality.

Note the emphasis on "clean" in the writeup.  The dirty little secret is that some amount of manure gets in the milk. It's inevitable. It's something we don't like to dwell on, something I didn't dwell on even when I was growing up on a dairy farm drinking raw milk and fully aware of the fact; just something we live with by ignoring.

2012, Egypt, Huntsman, and Elections

I wonder whether there isn't an opening for Jon Huntsman, former Republican governor of Utah and currently ambassador to China, and possibly a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. I think a tacit assumption among the tea leaf readers has been that Iraq and Afghanistan will be quiet enough between now and 2012 that they won't be major issues in the campaign.  So the focus has been on the potential candidates and domestic issues.  But if Egypt means an unsettled period for our foreign relations, it might be a challenge for Republican candidates.  About all most of them could argue is: I've more experience with foreign affairs than Obama did in 2008.  That might or might not be true, but it's not a strong argument.  Mr. Huntsman seems to be one who has a stronger resume on foreign affairs, which might help.

Sidewalks and Paths in Reston II

This is an add-on to my previous post.  Took a walk down Freetown yesterday.  It's an area of single-family homes on both sides of the road, with a sidewalk on one side. Most of the homeowners had cleared their portion of the sidewalk so I only had to walk in the road a couple places.  It gives another perspective on paths and sidewalks. 

Presumably, in the beginning there were cities and country. Cities, and only cities, had sidewalks.  And sidewalks were on the land of, or bordered the land of, owners of private property. So there was a neat division: owners cleared their walks, the city cleared their streets.  Meanwhile in the country the county plowed the roads.

Then we come to the mid-20th century with property developments and planned towns.  And road were separated from the private property owners.  So you begin to have "orphan sidewalks", where the old rule that the property owner was responsible didn't and couldn't work. And thus you have the pattern of Reston, where Reston Association clears its paths, VDOT clears its streets, and the sidewalks (which may be on Reston property or on VDOT right-of-way, I'm not sure but both are possible) go uncleared.

How To Sell to Americans: Bigger Is Better

So says this Extension piece quoting the Chile Blueberry Committee. Given Starbucks has just enlarged its highend product, I suspect they're right.

Grocers More Dissipated Than Hollywood?

So says Temple Grandin, although her basis of comparison is a bit limited.

Grandin attended the recent Golden Globes awards event in Hollywood and found the movie people well-behaved – a sharp contrast from a grocers’ convention she had been to in the 1970s.
"That was a total drunken orgy,” she said.

  Interesting speech noted by extension.

Why We Need Metrics

From a Federal Computer Week piece on blogging:

"Perhaps it's ironic that many substandard federal blogs slog on forever while one of the best [Navy CIO's] was killed. Drapeau said the weak blogs endure because they do not call attention to themselves.
“Who complains about horrible, obscure movies that they haven't seen?” he asked. “And given that the financial cost of having a bad blog is very low, there's little to stop most bad blogs from persisting.”

Private Company Screws Up; Government Doesn't

Two articles in the NY Times business section:

• Intel screws up a chip, to cost $1 billion.
• bureaucrat at Treasury Department administers the $29 billion TARP (not the $700 billion TARP), cutting costs through good management.

I like to tweak those who dis the government. Seriously, I think the key thing is change. Mr. Miller at Treasury is new blood, who left Goldman to serve the public, which apparently he has done quite well.  While government bureaucracies can become hide-bound, the periodic shakeups which often arise from elections counter that effect.  Meanwhile, theoretically private enterprise is subject to the discipline of the market. A loss of a billion isn't going to be serious for Intel's managers, although it may be for the person who oversaw the chip development. I doubt that competition is that much of a factor here--Intel seems to have had market dominance for many years. Instead, publicity is going to be the disciplinary factor: Intel couldn't really keep the problem hidden.  And that publicity may redound on the stock price.

Sidewalks and Paths in Reston

In Robert Simons' original vision of Reston, walkers and cars would be separated; cars would have streets and roads, and walkers paths which went through the woods, instead of sidewalks paralleling the roads.  That was the way Reston developed for the first 10-15 years, but then it became apparent that walkers preferred to walk by the side of the road, even when it meant walking on grass or in the mud, rather than following the path.  So gradually Reston has added sidewalks to its paths (Colts Neck Road got a sidewalk south of South Lakes Drive just last summer.)

Why the preference? Often the roads are more direct than the paths.  And the roads feel safer because you're visible to all. And we're all used to walking by the roads.

Our recent snow storm showed one virtue of Simons' vision: snowplows inevitably throw the snow from the street onto the sidewalk, creating an almost impassible barrier to cross, and a forbidding prospect to walk along.  Meanwhile Reston Association is able to send a plow (small Cat, I suspect) down the paths and clear them off quite well, yielding to the weight of snow only when trying to break through the snowplowed-barrier.

I Never Cease to be Amazed

Matt Uebel shares a video from 1994 showing the Today Show rather clueless at the Internet and email. That's just 17 years ago, hardly a generation.   Now, today, it seems a player in world politics, as witness Tunisia and Egypt.

Founding Fathers Had Imperfect Foresight

According to Rep. Duncan Hunter,(in a Grist post) when writing the Constitution the founders envisioned automobiles, but not bicycles.

Pigford II Website

Per an FSA notice, the website for Pigford II claims is blackfarmercase.com. 
It has two bolded statements:

: No payments can be made to any claimants under the Settlement until all claims have been determined. That means that it could be 2-3 years before successful claimants receive any payments.  Please be patient.

Please note: You do not need to pay money to any individual, farm advocacy group, or law firm to participate in the Settlement.  

USDA Moves With the Times

USDA gets props for advertising a website vacancy on Govloop.com. 

Powerline Loses Most of Its Common Sense

You can divide the world into two: people who drive you up the wall and people who don't. The Powerline blog is one of the few right wing blogs I follow, just to see what's going on and try to keep from freezing into intellectual ice.  John (Hinderaker) at Powerline drives me up the wall.  One of these years I'll do a compilation of his comments which seem to me to be unwise.  Paul (Mirengoff)[corrected] doesn't drive me up the wall, though usually I disagree with his comments. Scott (Johnson) also doesn't drive me up the wall.  Today Paul announced he was ceasing blogging.  Too bad.

{Updated: apparently Paul ran into trouble at his law firm over his response to the Giffords events. See TPM. ]

Stealing a Comment on Cats

From Ta-Nahesi Coates blog, his free-for-all comment thread:
by anibundel:

Today in felines:
There are people coming over. The cats don't actually know that. What they know is the following:
The vacuum monster ate the cat hair they so lovingly placed all over the stairs. It was traumatic.
They were given cat nip.
Roomba came out to play, give kitty rides and generally be undaunted by being pounced at.
Their favorite couch blankets all mysteriously disappeared, giving them free reign to shed on the couch proper.
There was bacon for stealing. There were latkes to sniff and generally be confused by before being swatted down from the counters. There were treats.
They then considered the concept of out-of-doors, but after one paw was placed outside by the bravest, and the snow sniffed suspiciously and then horror-of-horrors, gotten on her nose, there was general consensus that this was a Bad Idea, and cat condos were retreated to.

Currently cat toys are being cuddled, and general uproar seems to have died down.

Instead of stealing it I really (cross my heart) would have linked to it, if I could figure out how to in Disqus

Sugar Is Dead

Chris Clayton reports that Sens. Shaheen (D) and Kirk (R) are moving to abolish the sugar program. As they represent the centrists, and Tea Partiers have already said they don't want sugar with their tea, the tide is against sugar in the Senate.  However, look for Sens. Nelson(D) and Rubio (R) to join forces with Sens. Landrieu (D) and Vitter (R) in the fight to sustain the program.

[Updated: not to mention lobbying by American Crystal Sugar, a co-op of  MN sugar growers, which spends as much lobbying Congress as Cargill does. Via FarmPolicy. ]

Negative Things Are True: Payments to the Dead

This Barking Up the Wrong Tree post talks about a study showing humans are more likely to believe the negative to be true.  It comes on the same day as FSA reports that almost all its payments to dead people are valid.

Tea Party Budget Proposals

From Rep. Bachmann:

$20 Billion Replace farm subsidies with farmer savings accounts, eliminating the Foreign Agriculture Service, merging and trimming budget of four agriculture outreach and research agencies, and funding the Food Safety and Inspection Service with user fees.

Note: I don't know how she gets the $20 billion or how much money the farmer savings accounts would get (unless it's just a 401k with no federal matching(.

From Rand Paul:

The following agencies are defunded: ARS, FAS, NRCS (the text says "Resource Conservation Service, so I assume he's trying for NRCS), National Institute of Food and Agriculture. FS is cut by $1.178 billion, the remaining agencies are cut pro rata by $42.542 billion.

Sen. Paul presents the text of a bill (S.162) but it's not in the sort of detail any serious effort would need.  For example, the legislation on farm programs would need to amend existing legislation.  It's perhaps representative of the deep thought which has gone into his proposal that the first page completely defunds the Government Printing Office, this on a bill printed by GPO.  No explanation of how Congress will do its business without GPO.

How To Reorganize

So Obama proposed reorganizing government last night.  But by focusing on duplicated functions he implies the sort of reorganization which takes some silos and puts the silos together under one roof.   For example, taking Rural Housing and putting it under HUD, or Forest Service and combining it with Interior.  That's the sort of reorganization FSA experienced in 1994, when parts of the old Farmers Home Administration were combined with ASCS.  I'm not sure the reorganization has been terribly successful; it wasn't successful quickly. We still have county office employees who are Federal and those who are not.  16 years of effort hasn't changed that.   And I suspect we still have IT employees in St. Louis and IT employees in Kansas City. And the IT applications may not have been as integrated as they might be, as were dreamed of in 1991 under Info Share.

I'd like to suggest a different model for reorganization, particularly for rural areas.  It's a model which will drive some FSA employees, particularly a certain CED, up the wall, but I think it's worth considering and testing.

Some assumptions:

• The number of farms in agricultural areas continues to fall
• The number of people in some rural areas continues to fall
• Technology permits telework to be effective in some cases
• Many people in rural areas are competent with modern technology, but some are not.

The new model office combines a lot of technological bells and whistles, with a set of "generalists", people who know enough about lots of  things to be able to serve as intermediaries with the true experts, either by consulting them remotely by messaging, and videoconferencing, or by putting the customer in touch with the expert. In some respects it operates as a "triage" center.  Its staff is trained enough to be able to refer cases too complex for them to handle, to hand hold for cases that can be handled remotely where the customer needs the assurance and the interpretation, and to take care of routine and simple cases.

The new model  field office works with the new model Federal agency, which tries to serve the public online, but using experts more locally based as intermediaries for those who aren't comfortable with technology.  So the new model Federal agency is doing lots of basic training of the personnel in the

So you set up the new model  field office and test it.  If it works, it's the field service center for all Federal government services and some new ones. (The new ones will aggravate people who might think I'm a socialist.)  So the new office would start by serving as a post office and a passport office (which some post offices do now). It would serve FSA programs, NRCS programs, Rural Development programs.  It would handle Social Security matters.  It would handle IRS matters.  It could serve as an interface for remote medicine.

That's my idea.

Are the Conservatives Right on Healthcare?

One of the major arguments people like Megan McArdle use against the healthcare reform passed last year is that the cost-saving measures included in the plan won't work. People like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias say they will work, they hope.

This Politico article provides ammunition for the conservatives.  Various interest groups and lobbyists are rising up against the Independent Payment Advisory Board.  If one is a cynic, watch for the lobbyists to get legislation weakening it or killing it included in some big package of must-pass legislation.

CDC Does What Every Gov Website Should Do

And that's publish their website metrics.

Of interest, in the list of referring websites, usa.gov ranks just below google.de and google.co.za at no. 38.  That tells me the theory that people will look at usa.gov and then go to other government sites is rather dubious. But that's my preconception. Maybe it's a reflection of poor design between usa.gov and cdc.

Bad Apples

 Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, a study on the effect of "bad apples" on group dynamics, also highlighted on NPR's This American Life.  The  bad applies include the "depressive pessimist", the "jerk" and the "slacker". The lesson from the research appears to be: groups live down to the level of their worst performer.  Except that a very skilled leader can diffuse the effect.

This post, linked to from the above, references McConnell's "Rapid Development", a very good book on the process of software development.  I'd like to think I was good in dealing with bad apples, but I wasn't.  Disliked conflict too much to be consistently good.

The World Ends in Seven Days

At least the world of new Internet addresses, according to this Technology Review post.  We've exhausted the universe of valid unique IP addresses (using IPv4) and we haven't converted to IPv6.  So the doomsday we dodged with Y2K is about to occur.

A Little Invective Adds Savor to the Day

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has a long excerpt of a review of a book by a sociologist.  The last paragraph she quotes goes:

In a blurb, Michael Burawoy, a previous president of the American Sociological Association and a prominent leftist sociologist, calls the book “encyclopedic” in its breadth and “daunting” in its ambition. He states, “Only a thinker of Wright’s genius could sustain such a badly needed political imagination without losing analytical clarity and precision.” With the correction that Wright is no genius and that the book is suffocatingly narrow in scope, impossibly cramped in imagination, and irreparably muddy in execution, the blurb is accurate.

Faceless Bureaucrat Goes to the Birds, and Global Warming

Reston has a custom of bird counting, and the results are just in.   The birds which are most common here, in mid-January, are birds which don't belong here: specifically Canadian geese and American robins.  They both should be south of here, or at least that's my understanding.

A little Googling reveals I'm mistaken, as is much too often the case.  Robins (the males stick around to fight for territory in the spring, the females being wiser head south).

Samuelson on Sex: Funny

“If Casanova is not the definitive authority on sex, neither is a eunuch.”

From a piece on Paul Samuelson, the late MIT economist.

A Test of Open Government

The following language has been included in most recent USDA appropriations acts.  (Do a search in Thomas.loc.gov.)  It's a gag order imposed by the appropriations sub-committee.  It's also a test of whether the Republicans will adhere to their call for open government. Note the language prohibits telling the President or OMB of information provided to appropriations.

Sec 710 of 2010 Ag Appropriations Act

Sec. 710. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration shall be used to transmit or otherwise make available to any non-Department of Agriculture or non-Department of Health and Human Services employee questions or responses to questions that are a result of information requested for the appropriations hearing process.

AOL and DOD

Matt Yglesias posts on a recent New Yorker article on the  (hoped for) revitalization of AOL, specifically the idea that many people are still paying AOL even though it's not their ISP and it's perfectly possible to use the AOL mail system and the AOL interface without paying. He calls it a "scam".

Why do people do such things? The answer is, of course, there's a tremendous inertia in human affairs.  Many of us don't like change.  Many are lazy.  Many procrastinate. Many value time over money. So the bottom line is we don't do the things we ought to, like changing from AOL, or backing up our hard drives, or changing our passwords every six months, or...

That's true of the government as well.  Just look at the Marines.  They haven't land on a beach since Inchon in 1950, but they were still buying amphibious tanks. 

And it's true of private enterprise as well.  Just look at GM in the 70's, the 80's, the 90's. Then it went bankrupt.

Boeing Can't Do Big Projects Either

The government has problems doing big projects on time and under budget, but so does Boeing.  They just delayed their new plane again: it's now 3 years late. See article.