Most Interesting Sentence of Today

Actually, I'd say this sentence is very surprising.  Nate Silver is launching his new website today and he writes:

"The books in my office — I have about 500 — are arranged by color."

 What?  Is that the way a nerd does things?  

Closing FSA County Offices

Chris Clayton reports NAFEC is lobbying against the planned closures.  He quotes Mike Espy and  Mike Johanns as citing the problems they had in closing offices.  I remember when the Reagan administration tried to reorganize the state offices, combining some in the Northeast.  That was a bloodbath.

The Worth of a Life, the Worth of Closure

Back in the 80's, I think it was, there was a movement to analyze the cost and benefits of government programs, particularly those programs which tried to save lives.  Liberals tended to view the effort as a back-handed way to cut environmental and work safety programs, but I think over time it's been accepted as an exercise which is worthwhile.

For some reason that came to mind when I read the first paragraph of a Propublica post:

The Pentagon spends roughly $100 million a year to identify service members “missing in action” from World War II, Korea and Vietnam – a noble effort to try and bring closure to families and loved ones. But the process has proven incredibly slow and inefficient, ProPublica’s Megan McCloskey reports, with only 60 identifications made in all of 2013.

$100 million divided by 60 works out to a pretty high price tag for providing closure to families, particularly as the people who knew the service members are dying every day.  (The people who didn't know the service members are also dying every day.) 

Attention NASCOE: Congress and Show Me the Money

The Post's Wonkblog has a piece reporting on research on Congress.  Seems that if one approaches a Congressional office with a request for a meeting, when the participants are "constituents", you are much less likely to have the request granted than if the participants are "campaign donors".  This is, of course, a totally surprising result; news which will be buried by the media.

[Update:  A modification--the key point is not that the participants donated to the member of Congress, but that they had donated to some campaign.  So they could be seen as more active and committed participants in the legislative process.  See this interview with the researchers.]

NASCOE has changed its representative on the Hill recently, as they struggle to present their point of view in the budget and legislative battles.  Perhaps it's time for them to set up a PAC to make contributions, as money seems to talk much louder than the soft voice of logic.

Fraud in FSA 578's

I don't recall this before, but maybe that's poor memory, or poor description of what happened:

Getting Food to The People

Whatever happened to the veggie truck and the bakery truck?  An older relative of mine who used to live in the DC suburbs before the war (WWII that is) remembers being able to buy fresh vegetables from a truck and bakery goods from another truck.  I assume such service couldn't withstand the restrictions on driving during WWII and the competition from supermarkets after the war.  But maybe not.  The milkman continued to deliver in my semi-rural area even into the early '50's, and a Good Humor truck has made occasional appearances in  my Reston cul-de-sac within living memory.

I do see the food movement as trying to take us back to the 1920's, the time when farmers grew a variety of crops, there were farmers markets in cities, and nobody was obese (except William Howard Taft, Chief Justice and ex-President).  Or maybe it's a matter of the pendulum swinging: from variety to standardization and uniformity and then back again.  Certainly technology is enabling a lot of new services: car sharing, room sharing, even toilet sharing (see here).  No reason it couldn't be adapted to support delivery routes and other niche marketing devices for farm produce.

FSA's Budget

From the budget document

The 2015 Budget proposes a level of $1.45 billion. As part of the 2015 budget, FSA is developing a “Model Service Center” concept that will result in service centers that are better equipped, better staffed, and will provide improved service to customers. Part of the plan is to close or consolidate 250 offices and restructure the workforce to more effectively leverage its human capital. With reduced redundancies, streamlined business processes, and a reduced national footprint, FSA will be able to deliver programs more efficiently. In addition, FSA proposes additional staffing for farm loans in anticipation of increased loan demand. FSA is continuing to modernize its information technology (IT) systems and move away from unreliable, obsolete systems. Billions of dollars of annual farm program payments, conservation payments, and loans to producers have been dependent upon antiquated IT systems. FSA must continue to upgrade its IT infrastructure in order to provide more efficient and reliable services to producers. 

FSA’s MIDAS program is a critical part of its IT modernization efforts that supports farm program delivery with streamlined business processes and integrated applications that share information and resources efficiently. MIDAS achieved an initial operating capability release in April 2013 that modernized the storage and retrieval structure of current farm records and integrated this information with land use data, land imagery data and producer information. The system will permit FSA employees to access and better validate program eligibility data and financial services data from a single source and improve customer account management.

Rules for Living

1. Don't die
2. Don't grow old
3. Don't grow old and catch a cold.

Words of Wisdom From the Eighteenth Century

Boston 1775 is a good blog on everything around the Revolution.  Today in discussing the Salem gunpowder incident, he offers some words of wisdom:

"You don’t store gunpowder in a blacksmith’s shop."

Pseudo Science and Whole Foods

As a stockholder in Whole Foods (it's done well over the last decade or so) I welcome all positive news for the company.  So I shouldn't promote this article  (Hat tip-kottke.org) which compares the pseudo-science found in the sales pitch for some WF products to creationism and wonders why crunchies get upset about the latter but not the former.

However, I like the article.  It's always good to mock oneself.