Specialty Crops and Technology

A good piece on produce which avoids the usual crunchy critique that produce and specialty crops are so expensive because they haven't  been subsidized by the government.

The idea that junk food is cheaper than produce because of farm subsidies is so often repeated by food movement leaders like Michael Pollan that almost everyone assumes that it’s true. But the reality is more nuanced.
Subsidies on their own don’t explain why processed foods are cheaper than produce, calorie for calorie. Fruits and vegetables, first and foremost, are highly perishable, which makes everything about growing, harvesting, storing and shipping them infinitely more complicated and expensive. Many of these crops also take a ton of labor to maintain and harvest. Economists who’ve crunched the numbers have found that removing agricultural subsidies would have little effect on consumers’ food prices, in part because the cost of commodities like corn and soybeans represent just a tiny share of the cost of the food sold in the grocery store.

Mainly the piece is about the technology which is impacting the harvesting and marketing of these crops, kicking off with the recent advent of packaged spinach.

The Delay on Perdue

A piece on AGweb notes the delay in getting Sonny Perdue's nomination to the Senate, but doesn't explain why he hasn't gotten his act together.

[Update:  Here's another piece which suggests either it's Perdue's fault or the Office of Government Ethics is snowed under in clearing the paperwork.]

Today's Great Sentence

" if there's anything we native-born Americans excel at, it's crime."

Kevin Drum in a long discussion on the statistics of immigrant crime rates.

Contra Free Market From Israel?

Conservatives tend to be more supportive of Israel these days.  The nation has long since put the kibbutz behind them and is now a booming economy, with particular expertise in IT, high tech and military equipment.  The World Bank has a piece on how that's happened, including this:

Hasson highlighted the key role played by public-private partnerships over the last 40 years. Those partnerships have resulted in the establishment of an innovation infrastructure — including educational and technical institutions, incubators and business accelerators —anchored within a dynamic national innovation ecosystem built around shared social goals.

Specifically, to reduce the risk for investors, the government has focused on funding technologies at various stages of innovation — from emerging entrepreneurs and start-ups to medium and large companies. Strengthened by that approach, the Israeli ecosystem is maturing: according to Hasson, mergers and acquisitions have increased and exit profits have almost tripled over the last three years, with more and more new projects being started by returning entrepreneurs.

What Scares You?

For Dan Drezner:

What scares me the most about the Trump administration isn’t what the federal government will do to me. What scares me is my own ability to look away if the federal government does things to more marginalized segments of the population.

CrowdSourcing the Self-Driving Car

NYTimes had an article on the problems of creating the very detailed map needed by self-driving cars, which led to descriptions of the use of crowdsourcing to solve the problem.  

The idea is simple: have the equipment in each self-driving car update the imagery in the database that guides all self-driving cars.  To me it's a similar idea to my bottom-up car, or trainable car: the data from traversing a route at time A is available to be used to help traverse the same route at time B.

Stockman and Mulvaney

This Politico piece on Republican libertarians such as Amash and Mulvaney brought back memories of another bright young congressman who knew all the numbers in the federal budget and took a job as OMB director: David Stockman, the inventor of the "magic asterisk".   One can only wonder whether he too will write a memoir entitled "The Triumph of Politics, Why the Trump Revolution Failed".

Amazingly his wikipedia article doesn't mention the asterisk.

A New Farm Bill on the Horizon

Chris Clayton has a report on Rep. Conaway, chair of House Ag, and his outlook for a new farm bill.

My initial reaction is it's likely that Trump's budget outline will call for deep cuts in farm programs.  If not, people who want to defend other existing programs against Trump's cuts will start asking: "what about agriculture"?

But then I remember the Reagan administration. That's many years ago and my memory has faded.  IIRC the White House didn't really like farm programs and cut back where and when they could.  But their supporters, particularly conservative House Democrats whom they needed because the Republicans were still in a minority in the House, were able to make deals and fight drastic rollbacks. And the farm situation was rapidly going downhill, as farmers had overextended themselves during the boom years of the 70's and were now facing bankruptcy.  That led to one of the worst years ASCS ever had--1983 and the Payment-in-Kind Program: a jury-rigged program to use CCC-inventories to finance the biggest land diversion program we'd had, perhaps in our history.

And of course there's the freeze on federal employment, something Reagan also had.

A Successful Four Years? Our President Learns?

Here's how Trump has a successful four years:

• give cabinet members leeway to do their own thing
• dominate the news media using his time-tested schtick
• make proposals which sound good but which may not come to fruition
• have a handful of real accomplishments

So lots of sound and fury which appeals to the Republican base while the executive branch handles the daily stuff, mixed with some real accomplishments to appeal to those outside the base.  This is somewhat like the Reagan formula.  He was never very involved in detailed policy or administration, and was more flexible than expected.

Newt Gingrich said something in the paper in morning about Trump being a good learner.  Others, including Gail Collins in the Times today, say he's very curious in small meetings and asks a lot of questions.  So here's a hypothesis:  Trump gets good reviews from acting Presidential Tuesday night.  That represents the "swamp" (aka the established political order) rewarding him for conforming to its norms.  If Trump truly does learn, which is to be proven, and he truly does crave praise, which seems well proven, then he will gradually alter his behavior so he's more like a conventional president.  So what we're seeing now is a process where the establishment is punishing and rewarding Trump for his behavior.


I think the hypothesis is reasonable.  However how likely to change is a 70-year old man?  Not very, I'd say.  On the other hand, he doesn't have a long history as a political actor, so maybe more likely than Nixon, who tried to change every few years.  There's also incentives to stay the course, maintaining faith with his supporters, and close associates. 

Conceivably if the hypothesis works, and Trump is lucky with the economy and foreign policy he'll have a successful presidency. 

Anti-Missile Defenses and Modern Ag Technology

We liberals had a long and eventually unsuccessful fight against various anti-ballistic missile systems. Back in the 60's it was the Nike-Zeus system which eventually got cancelled.  Then it was Reagan's Star Wars and finally it's the system now in place.   Part of the argument was that the technology couldn't work, wouldn't work, or at least could be overwhelmed by counter-measures.

These days we seem comfortable with the idea it works, perhaps because our faith in technology is greater these days?  That faith is boosted by reports such as this, which describes the test of a system of cameras and laser beams for zapping insects, specifically psyllids which attack citrus. Somehow that seems more impressive to me than attacking ballistic missiles, which as the name states have a path determined by gravity (though modern ICBM's launch maneuverable warheads so are no longer solely ballistic.)