Some People Never Learn: Erin Is Back

Erin of Raising Country Kids is back, a good photographer (how can you fail with cute kids and a puppy), very good writer, and not having learned how to simplify her life at all.

US as a Christian Nation: an Omission

Much debate over whether the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. (Some of my forebears knew it wasn't a Christian nation because it refused to acknowledge God in the Constitution, and therefore until 1830's refused to perform civic duties which would require oaths.) 

The National Archives has a daily "Today's Document".  Today's  is the "Secrecy Agreement"--after the Continental Congress had declared independence of George III, they started to get scared.  So they all signed an agreement in the fall of 1776 to keep their discussions secret.  Interestingly, although it's a solemn agreement, it doesn't include any swearing.  The fearsome consequence of leaking was to be treated as an enemy to American liberty.

Oops: Typos in Opera

From the Wolf Trap Opera blog:

"Watch out for those typos, some of which are inadvertently helped along by word processing… My recent favorite was Romeo’s aria “Slut, demeure chaste et pure.”  (In case you’re wondering, it’s “Salut, demeure chaste et pure”:

The Christmas Tree "Tax"

Ann Althouse is only one of the people highlighting the new "tax" on Christmas trees. Unfortunately USDA has a tin ear for political impact.  In the old days when the Directives Branch processed a Federal Register document for ASCS there'd sometimes be a press release included in the clearance package, particularly for CCC board decisions. These days they probably should do a blog post in anticipation of an FR document publication; just try to get their side of the story out.

I'm playing catchup today but this sounds like a new research and promotion program, voted on by the Christmas tree growers and with the fees to be used for promotion.  For some background on the research and promotion programs, here's the national ag law center's summary.

Election Report

We voted today.  Elections for the state legislature, Fairfax county board, school board, bond issue, soil and water conservation district. Lots of choices, so being lazy and too cynical for high school idealism basically used the Democrats' sample ballot.

The paper said there was a problem getting volunteers to man the polls, but there was the usual complement at our polling place. 

Because control of the state Senate hangs in the balance (the Reps are favored to take over, ensuring a lot of conservative social legislation will get enacted) we've gotten lots of calls.  Today we had 3 calls to be sure we voted since the Dems have us recorded as "sure" votes they're desperate to be sure we did.

After voting we went off to the theater to see "The Ides of March", which I'd describe as a mashup of Clinton/Edwards/Obama (played by Clooney, who was co-writer and director) as a candidate for the Dem nomination versus Ryan Gosling as an idealist whose illusions are shattered.  Good acting talent, well done, but no chance to feel good about either the country or the Democrats.  (That's unlike Primary Colors, which could break your heart.)

Farm Policy Versus EWG

Keith Good at FarmPolicy critiques the EWG assault on crop insurance in today's post.  In other news the AG committees haven't been able to agree on something to send to the supercommittee (last I saw rice and peanuts might keep direct payments) and Vilsack says USDA might cut 10,000 employees.

"I don't think the banks cared at all about borrowers."

[Grin]  That's from a Calculated Risk post on lawsuits over MERS (the computerized system for recording mortgages].

What the writer is saying is in setting up MERS the banks weren't trying to defraud home buyers, they were trying to save recording fees (i.e., defraud local government you might say) and enable the fancy derivatives and mortgage backed securities which led to the bubble.

Where's the WTO Rules?

There's a blog, CAP Health, which discusses EU agricultural policy.  Based on a cursory review, it doesn't seem as if the EU is going to follow the US in shifting strongly to a crop insurance policy.  Which leads me to the question in the title: one of the advantages of the direct payment program in the Republican's Freedom to Farm legislation in 1996 was its compliance with WTO rules on agricultural subsidies.  These days I've not seen those rules mentioned in any of the discussion of changes to farm legislation. Are they no longer applicable, do we just not care, or does crop insurance fit within them as well as direct payments?

Income Inequality: Fairfax and Prince William

Propublica has an interactive site which shows, based on Census figures, how equal or unequal the distribution of incomes in your county is.  According to it, about 26 percent of populous counties are more equal than Fairfax,VA.  Meanwhile, Prince William, the next further county out from Fairfax and home of Manassas, VA, more equal than every populous county.  Meanwhile, places like Essex county, MA, Baltimore, MD, and Orleans parish, LA are up there in the 90+ percent.

I'm not clear why the differences, though my guess is: history.  Fairfax has a longer history as a populous county than Prince William, so it had longer to develop pockets of poverty and pockets of wealth (McLean and Great Falls).  The same of course is even more true for the old urban and suburban areas (Fairfax was mostly rural until the 50's.).

Bruce Babcock's Choices: RMA or FSA

From his study for EWG:

"If the decision [by Congress] is that it’s up to the private sector to provide it, the logical course is to reform the current crop insurance program by eliminating the insurance industry’s windfall profi ts as well as insurance-type commodity programs, including ACRE and SURE. If Congress concludes that it would be more efficient to provide a safety net through USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), it should design an easy-to-deliver program in the commodity title that protects farmers against major production risks and frees private insurers from federal oversight. A privatized crop insurance program could then offer policies to farmers who wish to fi ll in any gaps in coverage.

The alternatives are logical, but Congress has rarely been logical.

Phd's Logic Loses Me

Professor Mankiw of Harvard has a post, the logic of which escapes me.  To oversimplify, the question is whether education is the key factor in the rise of the "1 percent".  Professor Krugman argues it isn't, Mankiw in his post argues it is.  But his argument is weird: he says both he and Krugman are in the 1 percent because they both have doctorates (or at least that's how I understand it). If their education had stopped at a high school diploma they wouldn't be in the 1 percent. 

Seems to me the comparison doesn't work.  If education was the or a key factor, one would expect college professors to be in the 1 percent.  They aren't, the examples of Krugman and Mankiw to the contrary.  Depending on the year, the top 1 percent makes between $350000 and $450000, well above the salaries of almost all professors.  (Harvard's average was about half that.)

Planning Ahead and the Auditors

This Federal Computer Week piece describes a conflict between Social Security Administration's management and its OIG: the IG wants SSA to plan its online services more thoroughly, more completely and for a longer period.  SSA is resisting.

I remember back in the day, maybe 1981 or so, either GAO or the USDA IG tore ASCS up over the issue of programmable calculators.  For you whippersnappers,  at one time calculators were the hot electronics item.  This was, I think, back in the day when integrated chips were first being made on a large scale, and companies found they could stick a chip in a case with a numeric keypad and a small display and sell it for big bucks (particularly when you consider inflation, probably several hundred by today's values). 

There were a slew of such manufacturers, some in the US, in Japan.  As Moore's law kicked in, the manufacturers hotly competed by adding features and lowering prices.  But that's a side story. Anyway by the late 70's we had programmable calculators costing in the low hundreds.  And a few ASCS employees, mostly CED's, found they could save a lot of time by buying one and  creating a formula for such things as calculating the deficiency payment, cutting the work down to just keying in the data.  These guys (almost all male I think) used available funds and shared their work.

By the time GAO got involved, ASCS had an investment in programmable calculators of  maybe $3 million (all facts herein based on an aging memory) and one person in DC who tried (rather ineffectually IMHO) to coordinate usage, encouraging sharing of programs, etc.  GAO took a look at the situation and issued a bad report.  They wanted DC to assess which county offices needed the calculators, make one national purchase to save money, and provide standard programs to the counties.

I got involved in drafting the response, which pushed back against the idea.  I'm not sure how well the response would stand up over time--whether we mostly argued for a do nothing approach based on inertia, or whether we were more perceptive..  What we (and GAO) didn't know was that the first CED's were about to buy, or  already had bought, personal computers (maybe an Apple II, maybe a Commodore, maybe a Trash 80) to play with and possibly apply to ASCS business.  My perception is that led to a push from the field which combined with leadership from DC, eventuated in the purchase of the IBM System/36.

Anyhow, our response should have pointed to Moore's law and the rapid transformation of the field and our lack of comprehension of what was happening (always hard for bureaucrats to admit we don't know).  In such a situation, it made sense to stay flexible and relatively decentralized. 

That episode was one of my learning experiences, which sometimes counters my tendency to believe, like IG's do, that good bureaucrats located at the center can establish patterns and systems which work best for the field.  The truth is, it all depends.

Apologies to Commenters

I've screwed up.  There are comments on some of my posts to which I've not responded. I'm sorry and will try to do better.  Responses coming this weekend.

Politico and EWG on Crop Insurance

To balance my recent post on the goodness of crop insurance, let me link to this Politico article on the returns crop insurance offers: when Rain and Hail was bought by the Swiss they promised Wall Street 15 percent return on investment.  The Politico article mentions a new EWG study.

Here's a link to the EWG summary.

Both point out the $8 billion cost of crop insurance, greater than the direct payment and CFC programs currently cost.  But a partisan of FSA can only feel schadenfreude, because EWG would make crop insurance free and open administration of it to competitive bids. 

Florence Nightingale a Mathematician?

Yes, and inventor of a class of graphs.  That's from this interesting site, which says:

Though known as a nurse who changed the standard of health care, she was actually a brilliant mathematician, and the inventor of a class of chart called the polar area diagram.

Those Vassar Girls Are Far-Sighted, and Supremely Confident

" Since Vassar is at present having a conference on the postwar world,"  is a phrase from Eleanor Roosevelts column, as provided by Brad DeLong (who periodically picks up WWII first person stuff under the heading "Liveblogging WWII".  Eleanor was reporting on a group picnic at her house in Hyde Park which included some girls from Vassar, which is just a few miles down the road. More importantly the Canadian PM and FDR were around.

You might suppose the date was sometime in 1944, when I believe the UN was on the drawing board and the Allies were on the European mainland. You'd be wrong.

Nor is it 1943, after the tide had turned in the Pacific and on the Eastern Front and victory in North Africa.

Nor is it 1942, in the darkest days of the Battle of the Atlantic, Japanese advances in the Pacific, and the battle of Stalingrad.

It's Nov. 3, 1941, a month before we officially enter the war.

Why Crop Insurance Is Good

Speed.  The farmer gets a check in 1 or 2 weeks.  That's the story this farmer is pushing. (I owe someone a hat tip, but lost it.) It's an op-ed by a corn/soybean farmer.  Since I usually diss crop insurance here, it's time to acknowledge a different view.  (I guess the writer knows the insurance is subsidized but he likes the fact he pays for (a part of) it.

On Silos and Data Models

FSA issued a notice BU-729.  It seems to me, though I may be wrong, it's just another example of data silos, and a reason why, in 1990's terms, FSA should have developed an integrated data model.  Essentially the question is the relationship of geographic areas (counties) with administrative jurisdictions (county committees and local administrative areas) and county offices (of various types, shared management, etc.).  To administer county elections you need part of that relationship, to administer funds you need an overlapping part, to administer real and personal property inventories you need a third picture, to coordinate with NRCS and RD offices and jurisdictions you need others.  Unfortunately in my days at FSA each of those was administered by a separate office (or no office at all) and there was no overall coordination.  Apparently from BU-729 there still is no coordination.  My technocratic (Kevin Drum has a meditation on technocracy) heart is sore.

Project Management Software on the Cloud?

All I know I learned at Info Share.  That sometimes seems to be the case.  This announcement stuns me.  Back in 1992 there was PC-based project management software used by the bureaucrats of Info Share.  We're saying 19 years later there's still a niche for such software based in the cloud?  Seems as if we could have made more progress than that. 

Whoops, A Pollan Reversal?

Prof. Pollan has been quiet in recent months, really since he gave advice to Obama back after the election, so I've not mentioned him.  But via Grist, here's a post on his position on high fructose corn syrup--it's more the quantity than the contets of HFCS.

Steve Jobs and Medicine

The blogger at Respectful Insolence specializes in taking down the "woo" merchants, by which he means anyone who pushes "alternative" or "holistic" medicine. I like his posts, though they usually run longer than I've the patience for and require more medical knowledge than I can muster.  But today's post is on Steve Jobs and his pancreatic cancer and he surprises by concluding Jobs' life couldn't have been saved, probably, even if he had strictly followed all the prescriptions of conventional medicine.

A Shortage of License, Where Are Sodom and Gomorrah?

Marginal Revolution links to a nice piece on meritocracy, as in the decline of.   It's good, though a bit light on solutions to our problem of declining mobility. 


I may have done this before (the problems of a blogger with a faulty memory) but it's possible we have a shortage of vice in the country.  After all, if we want people to rise in socio-economic class from one generation to the next, and I do, we equally want people to fall in class.  I can't get into the Four Hundred unless one of the existing elite disgraces himself.  With that perspective, one of our problems may be there's not enough vice, not enough ways in which the idle rich can go to hell, or the dogs, not enough ways to dissipate wealth. 

It certainly seems as if society is getting more conservative in some ways: less crime, less divorce, less flaunting of wealth. 

So my sermon for today is addressed to the 1 percent: go forth and sin some more.

The Case of the Missing Drill Sergeant

I've the feeling articles on why Americans can't be found to do [hard manual labor, whether harvesting crops in Alabama or wherever] are perennials.  But I noted Italians can't be found to do the hard labor of making cheese, according to this Marginal Revolution post.  So why?

It's not genetic: we know Italians did hard manual labor when they were immigrating to this country in the 1890's. We know WASPs did hard work back in the 1630's and 40's and we know our ancestors did hard work at other times.  So why can't Alabama farmers find Americans to pick tomatoes instead of relying on immigrants?

I offer the solution; it's called the "missing drill sergeant". In my experience there were two things, and two things only, which could make me do hard physical labor: one was growing up with it; the other was a drill sergeant.

By growing up with it, I mean this: by growing to be a man on a dairy farm I incorporated ideas of what was hard and what had to be done, what would make me respected among my peers when I hired out.  I also literally incorporated the muscles I needed to do hard work and the calluses I needed to avoid the pain.

The other way I learned to do nasty things was through my Army drill sergeants.  I was constrained by the situation and forced to do things I'd rather not.

I'd say the same applies to our workforce: we don't have slavedrivers and drill sergeants in the modern economy.  Those Americans who grew up to do the work have, if possible, made their escape, just as I escaped from the dairy farm.  So we rely on people from elsewhere, whose frame of reference from growing up in a less developed country makes picking tomatoes or working on Italian dairy farms seem at least tolerable, considering the financial rewards.

[Updated with a couple links.]

Muffins Overreaction

I wrote earlier that the Obama administration might be overreacting to a report of $16 muffins at a conference. The DOJ IG has now conceded its report was wrong. Of course, the media will not learn any lesson from this and only the best will do a followup story,  The problem is we the public are all ready to believe that bureaucrats are invariably wasteful, so we're easy prey to such stories.

I've a vague memory of a flap over government conferences which resulted in a big clampdown in USDA, requiring the Secretary to approve conference.  If I recall, the problem there was the conference was held at a sexy location (i.e., some resort with a high style reputation), although because it was off-season it was arguably not a waste of money when you looked at transportation costs as well as housing costs.

Trusting Small Business

The RSS feed from Government Executive had two adjoining posts: one was "Fraud continues in small business procurement programs", the second was "House votes to repeal contractor withholding tax requirement. The conjunction is educational.

What we're saying is, while we know small businesses are not angels, being subject to the normal human urge to cheat and lie, the House (and the Senate and the President) are willing to let them cheat on their taxes for a while longer.

Maybe the thing I hate most is tax fraud. I realize the Republicans believe small businesses are the fount of all job creation and the embodiment of all virtues.  But I'm conservative enough, or Calvinistic enough, to believe you don't trust anyone.  As the Founders believed, you have checks and balances.

Cultural Transformation

FSA issued a notice on how to deal with customers, including a long list of do's and don'ts.  When I joined the agency they had a series of training packages for county office employees, including one called "counter skills", since the usual setup for the offices included a counter, like that in banks back then, over which the farmer and employee conducted business.  I've no idea what the package included, whether it was mostly the sort of communication skills included in the current notice or whether it was more content oriented.  I'd guess the later.  The current notice reflects, I think the change in the culture over the past decades.

Unusually for me I'm not quibbling or nitpicking the instructions, they're good, at least for the case where there's an arms-length relationship.  [Second thought: to some extent it's the same sort of thing as the procedure for developing individual development plans or the script for a play.  If the actors put their heart into it, it can be great; if they just read it, it's lousy.]

Building Infrastructure: Cooperatives and the REA

Life on a Colorado Farm has a post on how parts of rural Colorado were electrified.  Clue: it took cooperation, a cooperative, and the government to do it.

Althouse and Jobs

This may be a first, but I recommend the Ann Althouse post on Steve Jobs (the bio) and the comment thread.  Don't think it's quite up to Mr. Coates, but it's good.

Thoughts on Government Regulations

Walt Jeffries has a very interesting post
on the cost of his farm butcher shop, including mention of the government regulations which he faced.  I asked for his view of the regulations, which he provided in the comments, then requesting my response which I've now provided in comments.  We agree on at least one thing:

Scaling things is a general problem that government is not terribly good at. They tend to produce uniforms in one size fits all. Few would argue with that

See his blog.

NASCOE Proposals I

NASCOE has a set of proposals submitted to the Administrator, FSA, and SEcretary Vilsack.  They're interesting, which is why I'll probably post multiple times.  The thing which struck me first was the proposal to combine State offices.

I remember when the Reagan administration tried that.  As a matter of fact, that's how my former boss, Sandy Penn, came to DC.  If I recall Delaware and MD were to be combined, meaning a reduction in state specialists.  I guess Sandy was the low woman on the seniority list, so she transferred to DC. The combination was all set to happen, when it was suddenly cancelled.  The scuttlebutt was that someone in New England, I think a state executive director, was the college roommate of a Congress person with serious clout, maybe membership on the Appropriations Committee? 

Anyhow, forgive my cynicism, but I don't think this is going to happen.  (Coincidentally, DOJ is trying to move some field offices, and getting big flack from the field.)

Those Sex-Linked Differences in Math

When I was young, I was a math wiz.  That was when I was 17.  I rapidly lost my aptitude to the point I almost failed my college calculus course (in my defense the guy had a thick accent and was not an inspired teacher).  But I always accepted the idea that guys were superior in math.  In high school the math teacher, a goateed ex-sailor, graduate of the Merchant Marine academy, set up a class for advanced math (i.e., advanced algrebra, spherical trig, etc.) which was all guys (like 6 of us). 

So when Larry Summers speculated about the possible causes for women to be underrepresented in the sciences, technology and mathematics, and included possible genetic differences at the extremes, I was open to the idea, even though it's not politically correct.  I pride myself on being an open-minded liberal.

But the data seems to be running against that hypothesis, as witness this paragraph in a Washington Post article today:

A recent report from the American Association of University Women notes that, 30 years ago, the ratio of seventh- and eighth-grade boys who scored more than 700 on the SAT math exam, compared with girls, was 13 to 1. Now it’s 3 to 1.

The same article says women are getting more than 50 percent of all doctorates total (a fact I'd seen elsewhere).  But there seem to be two possibilities: between 1950 and now there's been a mutation in female genes which means they no longer "throw like girls" and can handle math, or the culture has changed.

Usefulness of EWG's Database Impaired

A time or two I've noted that using crop insurance instead of direct payments has the effect of hiding the increases in governmental liability (assuming prices and/or yields rise over time) and getting around the payment limitation provisions.  Another side effect is noted in this language in a Grist post:

EWG's Cook is concerned about another potential problem with the proposed new subsidy. With the current set of farm payments, groups can track exactly how much government support individual farmers receive (as EWG does with its Farm Subsidy Database). But with the "shallow loss" plan, says Cook, "the subsidy lobby" is creating a new "income-guarantee entitlement aimed at the biggest commercial operations" that will likely be "totally opaque to the public." Which means no more tracking who gets how much.

I assume there will be no tears shed in the farming community over this.

What Happens When There's No Card Catalog?

One of the ways I try to help people do Google searches is to tell them: type in the window the words you would use in searching the old library card catalog.  But what happens when that advice no longer makes sense?  This was triggered by a post on the NYTimes article describing a private west coast school which banned all technology.  Does searching in Google come naturally, or is it learned? 

I think the later. 

In some ways this is like learning to type--I vaguely remember an article saying that kids were picking up typing by the availability of PC's, etc. with keyboards.  But how many of those kids will be able to do 40 wpm with 1 mistake?

I guess I'm starting this week as a grump.

I Don't Really Believe This: Tomatoes from Korea

Apparently it's true else why would there be regulations?

These Young Farmers Are Wimps

From the Life of a FArm blog:

The highlight of haying this year was the addition of the New Holland 570 square baler. After putting up 400 square bales we have affectionatley[sic] named them “idiot cubes”.  There is so much work in squares it sure makes you wonder if it’s worth it.

 Of course, that's why farmers have gone to round bales, even though there's a significant loss of hay in the weathering of the outside layer. (I remember the first round bales, back in the early 50's, which were roughly the size of the square bales.  Difficult to handle and because ratio of the surface to the mass was more equal, a lot more loss if you had a rain storm during haying.  You couldn't leave them in the field, so it was a technology which was quickly abandoned, or that at least went back to the labs to be developed later.

Powerline and Climate Change

Back in the spring, the conservative blog Powerline made a big deal of the skepticism of Prof. Richard Muller about climate change. John Hinderaker's last words:

More importantly, Muller is heading up the new Berkeley Earth Temperature Study, which will review and analyze all of the data on this subject starting from scratch. Unlike the Climategate cabal in Britain and in our NASA, the Berkeley group will share its data with all comers. Keep your eye on this; it will take time–years more than months probably–but may prove to be the thread that unravels the main prop of the climate campaign.

Yesterday Kevin Drum observed the results.

Today every liberal is jumping on the bandwagon, gloating in Muller's reversal.  It's really a shame to see liberals stoop so low:  we should be better people than to gloat.

I love it.

How To Do a Demonstration

By chance, NARA had this as document of the day:  

The boomers did do some good demos.

She Won't Be Mother of the Year

Not this year.  She asks these questions:

Why? Why does David have to work so hard to do what comes easily for most? Why does he still sometimes struggle even to call us by name? Why does he sometimes have to make things so difficult?

Why? Why does he take such joy in things that most people don't even notice? Why is he so easy to please? Why is he almost always happy? Why does he work so hard each and every day?

The Advantages of Animals Over Technology

I'm generally favorable to technology, but as my mother used to observe, there were advantages to animals. For example, when field work for the day was over, you could pretty much let the team of horses find their way to the barn.  And, according to her though I never experienced it, if you took a load of potatoes from her folks' farm to the city (Binghamton) to sell, once the load was disposed of the horses would take you home with little or no guidance.

I'm reminded of that when I read a recent post on Ricks' "The Best Defense".  Earlier I'd seen the progress people were making on developing a pack robot, four-footed, self-powered, capable of crossing irregular terrain carrying 1-200 pounds.  It looked impressive. Then there was Sgt. Reckless, a war horse in the Korean War, who carried 5 tons in 51 trips.  I bet she was a lot quieter and a lot cheaper to develop.

The Definition of Wheat

What's fun is to watch a bunch of academics and city folk at Volokh.com try to understand the AAA of 1938 and the Wickard v Filburn case (excess wheat), representing the furthest stretch of Congressional power under the commerce clause of the Constitution.

Either they don't understand the Act, they don't understand farming, they don't understand current farming, or they're just off on tangents.  There's 240+ comments on a post several days old, so I didn't read them all.  Towards the end some of the nonsense gets weeded out.

The Decline of Standards

How do scholars expect to get respect when they don't dress the part:

Beyond the conference, as some commenters note, we almost never teach in suits.  The men in my department tend to wear long-sleeved shirts and ties when they teach, but most of the men professors in other departments wear jeans or khaki pants with a fleecy vest and hiking boots.  (That’s the preferred look around here, anyway, but it’s probably more casual on average than other parts of the country might be.)

In my day the professors wore suits, when they didn't wear corduroy sports coats with the leather elbow patches.  Things have gone to the dogs.

Building Our Infrastructure: The Unseen Bits

Lots of discussion these days about the need to reinvest in our infrastructure, by which people often mean the transportation industry: roads, rail, airports, FAA control systems. The civil engineers are pushing this, and they are getting traction.  But yesterday as we traveled back to Reston on some interstates (most of which seemed in as good shape as I can remember, though the rest stops had their problems) I was struck by the thought that we're actually improving our infrastructure in unseen ways.

For example, I noticed the emergency call phones along the side of some roads.  And notices for getting emergency information by tuning the radio to a given frequency.  Surely those auxiliary portions of our transportation infrastructure are going to fade away, replaced by smart phone apps.  Rather than the expense of maintaining separate physical systems, our investments in cellular networks and the development of smart phones will provide more information faster at minimal cost. (Just as the PC was able to replace the dedicated word processor and the desk calculator.)

Consider the past: when I was a child each gas company put out a line of road maps, with some competition from Rand McNally and AAA. The maps weren't all that great, but they were all we had. Then the turnpikes came along, followed by the interstates, and the individual states started issuing maps.  Gas company maps went the way of "full service".  With the concentration of traffic on interstates, things like the emergency call phones and the radio information networks were economically feasible.  For trip planning, you could be a member of AAA and get "tripticks" (or something close), assuming you wanted to pay the money and wait for it to be delivered,

Then came the Internet and things like Google maps, which could plan a route in seconds and give alternatives in a way AAA never could.  Since we don't travel much, I was surprised for our recent trip that Google maps now gives updated information on construction and repairs, not to mention weather conditions and traffic flow.  All of this added information is free.

A final thought: having more information available means faster travel and fewer delays which means greater economic productivity.  I'm not sure how the economic statistics are going to capture those effects.

Ron Paul and the Farm Programs

Ron Paul released his budget outline, calling for a trillion dollars in cuts.  Looking at the details, Rep. Paul either proposes to continue farm programs unchanged, or considers them so unimportant as to ignore them.  For USDA he eliminates Food for Peace, FAS, WIC,  and research and education, and whacks food stamps. But no mention of FSA/CCC/NRCS.

Front Page of the Times

That's where an article on the proposed replacement of the direct payments program with something like ARRM finds a home. One knows the article won't be favorable to farm programs, even though it begins thus:

It seems a rare act of civic sacrifice: in the name of deficit reduction, lawmakers from both parties are calling for the end of a longstanding agricultural subsidy that puts about $5 billion a year in the pockets of their farmer constituents. Even major farm groups are accepting the move, saying that with farmers poised to reap bumper profits, they must do their part.

The author focuses on the Thune-Brown bill and opposition from EWG. 

Slow Blogging

Wife and I are traveling over a long weekend, so blogger will be slow or nonexistent.

Jobs and Proportional Spacing

In his famous commencement speech Steve Jobs took credit for bringing proportional spacing to the personal computer, claiming that Microsoft wouldn't have had the vision to do so.  It's possible his claim was tongue-in-cheek, but Mr. Manjoo at Slate took it seriously in his appraisal of Jobs. " If he hadn’t brought proportional typefaces to the Mac—if the Mac had never existed—it’s difficult to think of anyone else who would have. Microsoft? Dell? No way."

I beg to differ.  Several lines of development came together on the personal computer.  IBM in 1948 announced the IBM Executive Typewriter, which provided a proportionally spaced font.  To the best of my knowledge, such typewriters were always a class symbol, used for "executives". A second line was preparation of copy for photo-offset printing, with the Varityper and later the IBM Selectric Composer.  A third line started with the mainframe with the creation of typesetting.  These separate lines stemmed from the realization that print is just easier to read and prettier to look at if it's proportionally spaced, which then gets you into the details of font design, serifs versus no serifs, etc. etc. It didn't take Steve Jobs for people to realize this.  He didn't create the demand for it from scratch.

My own exposure to the issue came in the early 70's, when we were using IBM mag tape/selectric typewriters for directives. We were looking for replacement systems, which got me looking far afield at the minicomputers of the day.  The monitors on these were limited:; they could form letters with maybe a 6x9 dot matrix.  And their output was limited to the dot matrix or daisy wheel printer.

Another way to discuss this is to focus on the final product, which is "what you see is what you get"--WYSIWYG, both on the monitor and on the output device.  The Executive typewriter, Varityper, Composer all used hardware to provide the output.  WYSIWYG on the monitor required getting enough pixels on the screen to model different type fonts. WYSIWYG on the output device required a device which could vary the output under software control: inkjet, dot-matrix, or laser printers.  And, of course, you needed a software package between the monitor and output device.

What Apple did do by the mid-80's was package the three elements (monitor, software, laser printer) together in a package which could enable desktop publishing.  Once that was in place the doors opened wide and demand rushed in.

When Women Didn't Do Science and Technology

How short a time that was. A post from the winner of the Google Science Fair--all three winners were female, meeting the President.

A Generalization Too Far

I've taken to following the comments at Ta-Nehesi Coates' blog at the Atlantic.  Today he wrote a true sentence:

The disease of presentism, looking up the past from the strict moral, legal, cultural, political and economic context of our time, is a constant problem.

 There's another disease which I often see, which I can't name, except as in the title of this post.  It's generalizing too much, too far.  For example: the status of women. In today's America they have one status; in the America of 1850 they have another--right?  I'd say wrong. Forgetting about the past, the status of women in the Amish culture, the Hasidic Jewish culture, the Hollywood culture, the Mormon culture, the Salvadoran culture of recent immigrants, etc. etc. is very different. There's some continuities, but we always have these different groups in the bigger society. The best we can do, perhaps, is to recognize we're probably making generalizations about middle and upper middle class mainstream American society.

Tell Me What You Really Think (of 9-9-9)

Via Tyler Cowen, Bruce Bartlett assesses Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan rather soberly.  He concludes:

Even allowing for the poorly thought through promises routinely made on the campaign trail, Mr. Cain’s tax plan stands out as exceptionally ill conceived.

I Remember Hitchhiking

Freakonomics explores a couple reasons for the decline in hitchhiking: fear and the rise of women drivers and an associated rise in car ownership and multi-car families.  I'd add a couple: the rise of limited access highways and the diversion of traffic to them--even if hitchhiking is not explicitly prohibited it's harder to stop and pick up person in the midst of 70 mph traffic; the tipping point phenomena--if it's not often done it feels riskier.

I used to hitchhike on my way home from cross-country practice, though mostly I ended up walking all the way.  Modern kids are spoiled.