Not Truly a Divided Country

Three of the blogs I've followed for a long time are: Kevin Drum, Life on a Colorado Farm, and Northview Dairy.  

They're in California, Colorado and New York; Kevin's a liberal, the two farm women are more conservative (though they don't mention politics much).   Kevin seems to be urban, the other two rural.  So you assume they don't have much in common?

Wrong.  All three of them like photography and photography of hummingbirds, as you can see by the links above.  Kevin, however, has the advantage of  a new and expensive camera, but all three appreciate the same thing.

The Possible Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles

Via Technology Review here's a good review of these impacts from Ben Evans.

The Wooing of the Powerful: Swamp Creatures Attack

Too lazy for links today but two comments on the wooing of the Trump administration:

• the Pentagon is wooing Jared Kushner by one of the best tricks in the book: take him on a trip to Iraq.  The academics say the way to create friendship is for people to engage together in an effort towards a common objective.  Nothing better than a trip to create togetherness, which is one reason why teleconferencing can never fully replace the real thing.  Remember that Clinton and McCain bonded together when as senators they went on trips and drank vodka together?
• the Chinese are wooing both Kushner and Trump, partly through the vehicle of Henry Kissinger.  A comment in the Post story this morning was to the effect that Chinese knew about dynastic politics, since President Xi is himself the son of a founder. 

No Purity Here

I agree with Jonathan Bernstein's lecture to Democrats on what their priorities should be, notably creating primary challenges to Heitkamp and Manchin as lowest.

I've no problem if my senators Kaine and Warner support Gorsuch--if you can't win a fight, IMHO there's not much point in fighting.

Government Reorg: Nixon and Taft

A nice recap of past efforts to reorganize the goverment here.at the Monkey Cage by Andrew Rudalevige

I've a particular fondness for the Nixon effort, but hadn't known about Taft's effort (William Howard, that is). Why fondness for Nixon, a man good liberals loved to hate?  May have written this before, but my boss at ASCS was able to get the Directives Branch into IBM MT/ST's (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriters) fairly early.  Somehow the people at the White House learned about the capability, and we were drafted into typing and retyping a document for the proposal.  IIRC it was 100-200 pages, describing the reorganization of cabinet offices into four big departments.  Very hush-hush, and something of a let-down when it fizzled.  I wrote "we"--actually at the time we had two male typists, both good, but who soon left, one for the Army, the other for greener pastures.

Anyhow, the lessons of history do not portend great success for Mr. Kushner.

Tiger Teams and SWAT Teams

Jared Kushner is to be head of an Office of American Innovation.

In my RSS feed I've got a bunch of stories which came in the last few days on the general theme of government reorganization, etc.  I keep thinking I'll gather them all into one piece, but no, this is it.

Back in my Infoshare days the rather charismatic leader of the effort liked to talk about "Tiger Teams", and talented technologists, and other buzzwords of the day.  These days "SWAT Teams" are mentioned more often, but the function is the same: pie in the sky promises of a magic bullet (how many more cliches can I stuff into this post?)

My own feeling is people are bound by habits.  Some things can change habits, as WWII changed German and Japanese habits, or Katrina changed the New Orleans school system but mostly people are slow to change and are very inventive finding reasons why a particular change is ill-advised, or just plain wrong.  Now good P.R. can dress up results.  There's a NYTimes piece today which gives Al Gore's Reinventing Government effort some praise.  Me, I don't believe it, not fully  One of his biggies was reducing layers of supervision, which was mostly accomplished in ASCS by paper changes or ignoring the mandates.

So, as to Mr. Kushner, count me skeptical.

The Fun of Polarization

Vox reports on a study of our polarization into blue and red nations, a study which seems to say that social bubbles on the internet aren't the big cause.  Those with lesser access to the internet are more polarized, meaning especially the old geezers among us are especially partisan.

I can sort of understand that; although I don't interact with my high school classmates (I  should but don't) I see what some of them post on Facebook and they're mostly on the right, the far right.

The person who ran the study suspects that polarization is " result of deeper divisions within American society" as the piece summarizes his views.

I wonder though.  Maybe the bottom line on polarization is simple: it's fun.  After all, affiliating with one of the parties provides people with someone to idolize and someone to hate, and an unending flow of stimuli to elicit feelings of hate and love.

Make Love, Not War?

Kottke has a post with this timeline map of the global median age from 1960 to 2060.  It's interesting to see the various countries aging at different rates, until many of the OECD countries are median age of 50+.

But what's also striking is the correlation of young countries with unrest and war.  For example, today the media age of Iraq, Afghanistan and a country in Central America (likely Guatemala) is in the teens.  The other such countries are in central Africa.

So maybe the slogan of the 60's should have read: "make love and war", or "make love amidst war"?

Drum's TrumpamaCare Compromise

I hope my fellow liberals are not so stuck in opposition that they wouldn't be open to a compromise on healthcare similar to that outlined by Kevin Drum.  I fear though that we are, though my fears are somewhat assuaged by the idea that Trump will never go for it. But maybe I underestimate him?

Why Big Farms

This Successful Farming piece on big farms:

A quarter-century ago, small farms generated 46% of U.S. agricultural production. Today, the powerhouse of production is the large family farm with more than $1 million a year in gross cash farm income (GCFI). They represented 2.9% of the U.S. farm total in 2015 but were responsible for 42% of ag output, say USDA economists James MacDonald and Robert Hoppe.

 And the midpoint for cropland has moved from 589 to 1234 in the 30 years from 1982 to 2012.

Why is that?   Illinois extension has interesting graphs, relating the cost of machinery per acre to the size of the farm; in other words the way increasing the land farmed spreads machinery costs over more land.

This has been true since farming began, and more so the more farmers invest in equipment.