Dairy Innovation in Brazil

An interesting piece in the World Bank blog:

Within 20 minutes, all 40 cows were milked with new equipment the family acquired two months before with support from the SC Rural Program. Prior to this, they’d had to endure the laborious and time-consuming process of milking the cows by hand. “We decided to adopt this automated system not only to improve productivity and quality of the milk, but because Zenaide and I were having back problems,” said Osni.

I have to say I'm not real comfortable with the writer and the "12-hour internship".  Consider the paragraph above.  Milking cows by hand is time-consuming; even using the milking machines we had on the farm it would take around an hour and a half.  I don't think cows let down their milk much faster these days. 40 cows seems too big an operation for two or three people to manage.  And going from hand milking to an elaborate robotic operation (though the nature of the equipment is never specified) seems a rash decision--too big a capital investment, too big of a leap.

Later in the article there's a reference to technology leading to a tripling of milk production in the state in 10 years. IMO improved breeding and increased numbers would be the biggest contributors to such an increase, with better technology enabling the bigger herds.   But who knows--it's interesting; Brazil may become as a big a competitor of the US in dairy as it is in soybeans.

Administrative Procedure and Bathrooms

Jonathan Adler at Volokh posts on the federal judge's order blocking the administration's guidance to schools on bathrooms, finding that they didn't comply with the Administrative Procedure Act beloved of all bureaucrats.  Adler doesn't note that similar problems arose with the administration's effort to change the rules on undocumented immigrants.  The bottom line is the executive branch didn't go through a rule-making procedure, allowing the public to comment, before issuing the document.  To be cynical, the executive thought if the document wasn't labeled a "regulation", rule-making wasn't required.

So the Obama administration has suffered two defeats this year on issues dear to liberal hearts.  There's some small consolation in this idea: if the Trump administration (:-( should try similar tactics in order to undo or change liberal policies, liberals would have a stronger case to force the Trumpites into the long rule-making process.

Just as a matter of history, I suspect these two episodes are just another step in the long history of changing administrative procedure into formal regulations.  The lawyers have to make work for themselves.

Best Paragraph I Misread Today

From Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain, explaining why a pig was in hospice care:

"Also, pigs are rather mean to each other. They will target and kill the weak amongst them. This is a herd behavior because the weak may attract predators and scavengers. By killing or leaving behind the weak the herd survives. So a pig’s strategy is to beat up the weak individuals. Pigs do not do altruism. Pigs are not kind. Pigs are not loyal. But Hollywood and animal nut groups have made them out to be much like us. They are not. Or rather they are like the worst of us, the Trumps and the Clintons.^†"

I swear when I first read it this morning, I missed the last three word.  I guess it's called Freudian omission.   :-)  (The footnote invites the reader to insert her own preferred politician--I missed that as well.)

Rural Development and LGBT

A post at Lawyers, Guns and Money on the USDA's rural programs, the outreach to the LGBT community, and the concerns of the right wing (Limbaugh).

Erroneous Payments and Wrongful Death

Post reports that SSA has erroneously recorded some people as dead when they aren't.  Seems to be part of a project to improve the accuracy of death records, where SSA continued to show people as living when they were indeed dead. 

(I've blogged on this several times before, but used a number of different labels for the posts.  Search on "erroneous" in the upper left search box to find them.)

Katznelson Is Successful and Wrong (in Part)

Ira Katznelson has succeeded in convincing the conventional wisdom that FDR worked with Southern racists to limit the scope of New Deal legislation so that blacks were not aided.  While that's a smal part of his most recent book, "Fear Itself" , it seems to be the meme which has most resonated with liberals.

Given the scope of the New Deal, you'd have to examine many legislative histories to confirm or dispute the general thesis.  I don't know the truth of others, but I do not believe it is an accurate description of the reasons for circumscribing the coverage of Social Security in the original act.  Katznelson.  I've noted this before in a Post Wonkblog discussion of the book, by point to:

an interesting counterpoint by Larry DeWitt, a public historian with the Social Security Administration. Here's the abstract:

The author concludes that the racial-bias thesis is both conceptually flawed and unsupported by the existing empirical evidence. The exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from the early program was due to considerations of administrative feasibility involving tax-collection procedures. The author finds no evidence of any other policy motive involving racial bias.

I'd add to DeWitt's work by pointing to the expansion of SS coverage to farmers. (See this IRS publication.)  It's personal to me, because I remember my parents becoming eligible in 1950 (from an SSA history):

The amendments of 1950 brought 9 million workers into covered employment (Christgau 1960), including regularly employed farm and domestic workers and, with some exceptions, self-employed persons. These new workers would generally not have much in the way of covered earnings from 1937 to 1950. Except for those just beginning their careers, newly covered workers would thus receive low retirement benefits. A "new start" formula was instituted that allowed the computation of benefits on the basis of average monthly wages after 1950 (if that yielded higher benefits). Similar to the 1939 amendments, this policy reflected a choice by policymakers to award adequate retirement benefits to persons who may have worked (and paid taxes) in covered employment for only a short period of time.

 I'm reminded of this point because among the family papers I just inherited was correspondence concerning the difficulty of establishing my father's birth date (in 1889) to become eligible for SS. The bottom line was that SSA had become a functioning bureaucracy which was capable of handling the extra covered workers, and IRS was capable of writing IRS pub 51.  And the resistance of the farm lobbies, like the American Farm Bureau, had been overcome.  (See this NYTimes article on the differing attitudes of Farm Bureau and National Grange.) This expansion was passed enough though Southern Democrats retained their power in Congress.

While the evidence is clear to me, I'm not holding my breath as I wait for academic historians to recognize this error.

Roger the Dodger as a Republican Indicator

Via Marginal Revolution, Wonkblog has the results of a survey of Republicans and Democrats, which includes their favorite athletes. 

I was struck by the second favorite athlete of male Republicans: Roger Staubach.  I attended most all of the home football games of my university, and my junior year we played Navy at home. (We had delusions of grandeur then, with a quarterback who went on briefly to start for the NY Giants plus the first soccer-style place kicker.)  

Wikipedia says, after a short stint in relief against the Minnesota of Carl Eller:

"A week later, against Cornell, with the offense misfiring, Hall of Fame Coach Wayne Hardin decided to put Staubach into the game to see if he could spark the team's offense. He led Navy to six touchdowns, throwing for 99 yards and two touchdowns while running for 88 yards and another score as Navy won 41–0.^[3]"

 It's an indicator of the age of Republican men that Roger is second most popular.

Trump and Agriculture

Politico has a piece on the A-Team Trump has assembled to advise him on agricultural policy.

I wonder why he has the support of so many agricultural leaders when his economic team and foreign policy team are so weak? 

I suspect a mixture of these things are operating:

• Trump couldn't care less about agriculture, so there's little need for the team and Trump to agree on issues.  Trump can rubber stamp almost anything they come up with. In contrast Trump has positions on foreign affairs and economics which turn off a lot of the "establishment".
• rural areas are strongly pro-Trump, so the ag team represents catering to their interests.  The picture's not so clear when it comes to other areas
• academics are less important to the ag establishment than they are in the other areas.  Like economics, the ag team doesn't seem to have many academics.
• ag leaders on the team are either less interested in free trade and immigration than those not on the team, or they figure they might be stuck with Trump as president and it's worth it to gain positions where they can affect policy (because they know a Trump presidency isn't going to pay much attention to agriculture.
• Something completely different.  :-)

Location, Location, Data Center Location

Reston happens to be very well located for Internet purposes, as shown by this business expansion plan.

It was near enough the Pentagon to be an early presence in the DARPAnet, and things just went on from there. 

Olympic History: Amateurs and Professionals

Back in my youth the Olympics were the realm of amateurs, and a lot of energy was devoted to policing the line between amateurs and professionals. I guess amateurism was the last refuge of the WASP hierarchical society; sports was limited those who had the money and the leisure to train for events and participate in meets.  My impression is the horse events, like dressage and jumping, are the remaining holdouts, but maybe I'm missing the sports without sufficient appeal to pull in a paying audience.

Speaking of audiences, in my youth track and field was the fourth big participation sport, with horse racing and boxing the big audience sports.  (Early TV had the Friday night fights; yes, a professional fight every Friday night, to go along with the bigger events like the Carmen Basilio-Sugar Ray Robinson fights.)  The interest in track and field has dwindled, and the shrinking interest is shown in the meager coverage it gets outside of the Olympics.

Meanwhile the big three of basketball, baseball and football have gained prominence.  One benefit to those sports, as opposed to track and field or boxing or horse racing, is statistics.  Particularly these days you can lose yourself in the statistical analysis of players and games.   Track and field events don't have that complexity; the only thing they have is ever more refined measurement of results.