SSA, FSA, and Internet Operations

The Post's Federal Page reports a controversy between Social Security Administration and its union, a controversy which may prefigure similar tensions between FSA and its employees.  (SSA is usually considered to have done well in use of the Internet.)

Witold Skwierczynski, president of the National Council of SSA Field Operations Locals, part of the American Federation of Government Employees, sent a letter to the SSA demanding “to bargain over the impact and implementation of the Agency’s decision to shorten the hours field office employees interview the public.”
The letter said that “the Union disagrees with the Agency’s position that most services do not require a field office visit and can be done on the Internet or by the 800 Number.

And Conservatives Wonder Why I Don't Trust the Big Shots

Jack Welch, ex-CEO of GE, and guru of business, has accused the bureaucrats in the Bureau of Labor Statistics of cooking the most recent unemployment rate. 

Prof. Andrew Gelman at the Monkey Cage  reports on an investigation of the integrity of statistics in GE when Mr. Welch was its head.  Seems GE paid a $50 million fine to SEC for accounting fraud.  The graph of earnings under Welch and under his successor is damning in and of itself.

Our Fighters Are Fat

From Tom Ricks  The Best Defense:

At present, 62 percent of active duty military members over the age of 20 have a body mass index that falls into either the overweight or obese category.

 My title is, I hope, unfair.  I'd assume the 62 percent REMF's or FOBBITS, part of the "tail" supporting the fighters, and we have a bigger tail than ever.

And Gov. Romney wants to spend more money on the military? If he wins, I hope a good bit of it is with Weight Watchers.

(Have I ever mentioned that my worst prejudice, the one I have least under control, is probably weightism?)

Romney Ignores Crop Insurance

Here's Gov. Romney position paper on agriculture (reached via Chris Clayton)--I searched for "insurance" and came up empty, searched for "payment" and came up empty. He wants "energy independence", "rational regulation" "new markets" and "reasonable taxation",

In fairness I should note I didn't check Obama's campaign, but by necessity he's been a bit more specific.  And at least Mitt doesn't lump USDA in with Big Bird.

The 8 Inch Floppy

Govloop has this post, with a very young Bill Gates balancing a floppy disk on his finger.  When I first saw it, I thought it was an 8 incher, but it's more likely a 5 1/4 one.  As an 8 incher, it brought back memories of the IBM System/36, the minicomputer which ASCS used to automate its operations. 

(Going even further back, in the early 70's there was a pilot project to put remote terminals in county offices.  The storage at that time was an IBM 7.5 meg disk drive.)

NYTimes

Had an article on school kids and their problems with the new school lunch rules (more fruits and vegetables, fewer calories).  The complaints seem to go in two directions: not enough food (calories), we're still hungry; and too much food we don't like.

This struck me as a bit optimistic:

But the most effective strategy, several food service directors said, may simply be waiting. Research shows that children must be exposed to vegetables 10 to 12 times before they will eat them on their own, said William J. McCarthy, a professor of public health and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Our Forebears Were Restrained in Bed and in Comments?

Boston 1775 now has a series of four posts on "bundling", with this the latest.
He calls it "flaming" and it's about right.

Surprising Unsurprising Fact

Or is it "unsurprising surprising fact"?  Maybe the latter, given the evidence for widening inequality in income/wealth in the nation.  Anyhow, Peter Orszag writes:

In 1990, 20-year-old white women who had at least a college degree were expected to live to age 81, while those with less than a high-school degree were expected to reach 79, a recent study in Health Affairs found. By 2008, however, that two-year gap had widened to more than 10 years. For 20-year-old white men, the difference grew from five years in 1990 to 13 years in 2008.

It's part of a discussion on how the gap affects discussion of entitlement reform:arguing for greater progressivity in any reform of Social Security and Medicare/medicaid reform to offset the gap.  He's not particularly focused on causes, mentioning smoking and the effects of education.

GMO Corn and Unanticipated Consequences

Farming is always complex, and modern technology has its own surprises.

This farmgate post discusses some consequences of the drought: herbicide carryover, because the herbicide is activated by rain/moisture (who knew, not I), and volunteer corn which should be killed before wheat is planted, but it's herbicide resistant (drought meant smaller kernels which went through the combine and back on the ground).

Family Farm

I like this piece in the Atlantic, written by a person who grew up on the family farm in Alberta, but who is no longer allowed to operate the equipment:

"My dad farms 3,200 acres of his own, and rents another 2,400—all told, a territory seven times the size of Central Park. Last year, he produced 3,900 tonnes (or metric tons) of wheat, 2,500 tonnes of canola, and 1,400 tonnes of barley. (That’s enough to produce 13 million loaves of bread, 1.2 million liters of vegetable oil, and 40,000 barrels of beer.) His revenue last year was more than $2 million, and he admits to having made “a good profit,” but won’t reveal more than that. The farm has just three workers, my dad and his two hired men, who farm with him nine months of the year. For the two or three weeks of seeding and harvest, my dad usually hires a few friends to help out, too.

Harvard Disappoints

Harvard recognizing for 2012  100+ innovations in government.  It's disappointing because probably half of the listings have no url.  Come on, get real.

Technology and Dairy: the Use of Cellphones

Almost forgot to link to this post on the benefits of cellphones for the dairy farmer: when the cows get out and get lost you can coordinate your search and driving efforts using cellphones. :-)

Of course these days the number of dairies putting cows out to pasture is dwindling, but every bit helps.  ("Threecollie", who runs the site, also uses a birder app on her iPHone.)

The Making of a Myth: Apple Maps

Some ideas get transformed into myths, which seems to be happening in the case of Apple Maps.  Consumer Reports did a comparison of the Apple application with Google Maps and GPS and said Apple's version wasn't bad and had some nice features.  But such a lukewarm review can't stand up against the incessantly repeated statement that Apple screwed up.

By contrast, Apple's Siri was hailed on its release as great.  My impression is that continued use of it revealed it wasn't all that good, perhaps much like Maps.

Technology and Dairy Flourish in Small Countries?

The NYTimes has a piece on a technology test in Switzerland: managers of dairy herds can be notified by text if their cows are in heat (based on temperature of vulva and cow activity). (For those benighted souls reading this who never grew up on a dairy farm: you have to inseminate the cow within x hours of when she comes in heat.  If you don't catch her heat, or she fails to become pregnant, you're facing a month of payments for feed that's pure waste, except of course for the cow.) The story says it's harder to tell when a cow is in heat with modern dairy cows. Without challenging that assertion, I'd suggest the high ratio of cows to people in modern dairies also makes it more difficult.

I do wonder if down the line PETA will protest this mistreatment of cows. 

Another development on the technology front is the modification of bovine genetics so their milk is less likely to trigger allergies. Interesting that the development comes from New Zealand.  I wonder about the level of anti-science feeling there.

Competing With Crop Insurance

According to Farm Policy, the crop insurance industry is already bragging on the $2 billion in indemnity payments they have out the door.   It goes on to link to a video NCIS has put out.

This sort of response, and advertising, is a reason why FSA doesn't have a disaster payment program for field crops, as they used to. 

The Culture Which Was Victorian

This post from Treehugger on "tin pack tabernacles" captures a key aspect of Victorian Britain: a combination of  their engineering ingenuity, their religion, and their determination to civilize the world.  Oh, and their penny-pinching. They created a temporary church, made of corrugated iron sheeting, which could be shipped as a package and assembled on the spot.

No Enthusiasm, No Road Signs, in This Election

There was a post on Powerline a while back elevating the comments of people from Virginia.  The basic message was that the enthusiasm for Obama was way down, because they didn't see the number of signs they remembered from 2008. 

That's quite possible, but there's two points: a comparison of the number of signs between Sept 15, 2012 and Nov. 1, 2008 is automatically going to favor 2008, and, at least for Fairfax county, there's been a change in the lwa, as explained in this Reston Patch post.

MIDAS Training/Information

FSA put out a notice on MIDAS training.  I followed the instructions to this on the Foundational Learning System

The narrative for slide 5 (it's important to note slide numbers, otherwise you have to skip forward or back0 said: "in the future, the goal is for 24/7 access by the producer and employee to the data/forms...  (This comes after slide 4 which outlines benefits for producers and field offices in the immediate future.)

I think that vision warrants a lot of discussion.  I see elsewhere that the MIDAS team has presented to (staff on, I assume) the House and Senate Ag and Appropriations Committees. Given Congressional resistance to closing offices, I wonder how the Gordian Knot is going to be cut (online availability = reduced employees?).

I'd compliment the team on the slide show.  The narration seemed not simply to consist of reading the slides, which is good.  In future I hope they get more graphically minded.

As an old directives man, I'd also suggest they need a system for identification of their shows; using names rapidly gets awkward and I'm assuming there will be a process for getting feedback and making changes/corrections  which can gain by such identification.

While the plans for training discussed by the Administrator are good, how will producers learn the system, will they be trained? And shouldn't the software be user-friendly enough not to need training?  Or will the FSA training mostly consist of an interpretation: in MIDAS this is the  equivalent of this process on the current system/System/36?  

Don't Eat Your Spinach?

Myth: spinach is especially rich in iron.  See this post at Wiredscience.

What was the Mark Twain bit about Error being halfway round the world while Truth is still putting its boots on?

The Worm Is Turning, Do Not Call

I'm getting tired of the calls we get.  We have Verizon FIOS which is nice, because I can call up the record of my incoming calls. In theory at least, I can tell Verizon to block calls from people who don't give their numbers, but that seems not to work.

We've been on the FTC's Do Not Call list for 9 years.  Occasionally I threaten the live callers with it, particularly the ones which try to extend the warranty for our car and the one for Discovery magazine, but I've never followed through.

I've never followed through until today, that is. This afternoon I got a robocall pushing vent cleaning.  I hung up, got into Verizon and found the phone number that called, and finally got to the DoNotCall website, where I verified that we were on the list and filed a complaint with them. 

I'm not a big fan of the FTC site.  I got confused and flipped between tabs, which seemed to cause the partial phone number I'd entered to move to the right.  And I'd like for them to save my info to ease entry of future complaints. 

Bottom line: it feels good, even though this is the practical (non)result:

Do not call complaints will be entered into a secure online database available to civil and criminal law enforcement agencies. While the FTC does not resolve individual consumer problems, your complaint will help the agency investigate the company, and could lead to law enforcement action.

Polling Technology

I've gotten tired of the calls I receive.  Several recently have been polls, which is sort of okay.  There are differences in the way polls operate.  Two polls both had the voice giving the choices: if the election were held today, if you would vote for Obama, press "1", if you would vote for Romney, press "2"... But one poll allowed you to press the number at any time, while the other required you to wait until your heard all the options.  Needless to say, I soon hung up on the second poll, while I completed the first one.

I wonder why the run of polls--do they exchange lists of people who are actually willing to answer polls? Probably.  Market research firms run the danger of turning me off--listening to 15 minutes of questions is not fun, particularly when the pollster promised it would just take a "few minutes".  People, my definition of a "few minutes" is 5, plus or minus 1.

Two Word Review of Little America

Mr. Chandrasekaran has written another book, Little America, on the war in Afghanistan, particularly since Obama was elected.  His first, Emerald City, was well-reviewed.

My review is simple: "oh sh*t", repeat at least once for each chapter.

[Updated: For a more considered reaction, see this from Foreign Policy ]

What Really Really Gripes Me: Tax Cheats

From Brad Delong, quoting a Bloomberg piece by Jesse Drucker:

Mitt Romney ‘I Dig It’ Trust Gives Heirs Triple Benefit: In January 1999, a trust set up by Mitt Romney for his children and grandchildren reaped a 1,000 percent return on the sale of shares in Internet advertising firm DoubleClick Inc. If Romney had given the cash directly, he could have owed a gift tax at a rate as high as 55 percent. He avoided gift and estate taxes by using a type of generation-skipping trust known to tax planners by the nickname: “I Dig It.”…

The Obama administration proposed cracking down on the tax benefits in February…. Romney or his trust received shares in DoubleClick eight months before the company went public in 1998. The trust sold them less than a year after the IPO…. Multimillionaires use such trusts to avoid… taxes… [by] assign[ing] a low value to assets they donate to the trust….

 DeLong thinks this amounts to tax fraud, although IRS doesn't prosecute this, presumably because the valuation of the asset when put in the trust is hard to determine.   

Not that I'm calling Mr. Romney a cheat.  It's just taking logic to an extreme.  My alma mater solicits for donations of assets (or did, before the stock market and real estate tanked) as a good tax strategy. 

The Weather Gods Don't Like Obama

Apparently the heat and drought reduced our GDP growth this summer because of reduced agricultural production, just as our warm weather reduced it last winter because of lower usage of energy for heating.   Strange.

[Update: see Prof Roberts at Greed, Green, and Grain on the reduction in GDP.]

The End of a Common Culture?

Brad DeLong usually blogs about economics and economic history, bashing Republican economists with verve and vigor.  But he also blogs WWII, one of which triggers this:

Context: 70 years ago today, the Marines on Guadalcanal were engaged with the Japanese forces.  Due to poor communication, a group of Marines gets cut off.  Meanwhile the destroyer Monssen is patrolling offshore.

"It was then that Smoot noticed a lone figure on another hill waving signal flags. His signal read: SEND BOAT ASHORE. The captain was wary of Japanese trickery. The figure was dressed in what he called “army drill,” but from this distance the man could belong to either side. “We didn’t know who it was and I wasn’t going to take any chances.” Smoot asked a signalman if there were a way to verify his identity. The signalman had an idea, and flagged a question to their mysterious correspondent: WHO WON THE WORLD SERIES IN 1941? The answer—YANKEES IN FIVE—decided the issue.
The deck force lowered a whaleboat over the side, and it motored in to the beach. When it returned, it was carrying the commander of the 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines, his aide, and two other marines. Coming aboard, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, age forty-four, saluted Smoot. “I doggone near lost my life getting down to the beach. I’ve got a whole group of my men up there in the hills. I’ve got to get them out of trouble.”

 My title? In 1942 it was safe to assume almost everyone in the US military knew who had won the World Series in the prior year.  The nation shared a common culture, at least in that regard.  My feeling is such an assumption is not safe today, not about the World Series, not about the Super Bowl, not about nothing.

[Updated: Ezra Klein this morning admitted he didn't know who won last year's World Series.]

Graphing Your Wife's Contractions

Matt Stiles at The Daily Viz comes up with visualizations of every sort of data, but this time he outdid himself: graphing minutes between contractions as his wife went into labor.

Congratulations on daughter Eva.

FSA and Twitter Following

FSA is in the list of the 50 most followed Federal agencies. 

But it's included under USDA, which rates 19th out of 50. 

Query: why does USDA have both the @usda and @usdagov tags? And where are the other USDA agencies (Forest Service makes it on its own, no. 47) like NRCS?

The Nissan Leaf and Driving

Technology Review reports on a study of usage of Nissan Leafs.  It seems the drivers are going 16,000 miles a year and encountering greater battery fade than they expected.

I wonder if these owners are driving more because the cost per mile is so low (essentially zero).  The law of unintended consequences?

The Culture That Is Japan

Two bits from the news (NYTimes) today, without links unless I get ambitious:

• Apples poor map software in the iPhone 5 hit Japan hard, but they have their own mapping software because it's so important in cities like Tokyo.  Because the city just grew, it doesn't have a system of street naming and house numbering which permits verbal directions; you basically need a map to find your way.
• Ichiro carries 8 bats in a humidity controlled case because it's very important for the bat to be at the right humidity. Apparently a 31 oz bat can increase in weight by .75 oz due to humidity.  It's also revealing when he was playing in Japan as a young man, he broke his bat in anger, and then wrote an apology to the man who made the bat.

Bad Weekend and Throwing Like Girls

DC area had a bad sports Sunday (Nats, Skins) and a bad zoo Sunday (panda cub).  But James Fallows has had an interesting sequence of posts on the subject of gender differences in how people throw.  A good deal of evidence for culture/training, which makes sense to me.

Rising Costs: Tuition and Weddings

Saw the figure yesterday that the average American wedding costs close to $30,000.  I can't believe it, but then I can't believe tuition costs either.

The Importance of Fat

You only know what's important when you begin to lose it.  Fat is important, both for humans and for bureaucracy.

Taking a pro-fat position goes against the grain. I've always been slender, got down to 135 when I got out of the Army, got up to 155 towards the end of my days as a lazy, overpaid govmint bureaucrat.  And while I've overcome some of my prejudices, I have to admit I've some reservations about the obese. It's always seemed more important to me to do something, rather than just sit and jiggle.

I'm getting old. I know because in certain positions my skin is slack over my bones and muscles, my subcutaneous fat is fading away and I can see what I will look like if I make it into my 80's mid 70's.. It's distressing, best handled by denial.

While the headlines continue to be about increasing obesity in the nation, some research suggests being skinny isn't good.  Why? Fat is a reserve of energy, a savings account you can draw upon if and when you get sick. Skinny people don't have the reserve so they don't recover from illness as well; sometimes they don't recover at all.

Politicians love to attack fat, not so much obesity, though Mrs. Obama does a good job, but fat in the form of the "bloated bureaucracy". (The peak use of that phrase seems to be around 1994, the revolution led by Rep. Gringrich.)  Currently Mr. Romney is pledging to cut federal employees while President Obama says he wants a "lean government".

I want to be a bit contrarian, defending the idea of a less than lean government.  A bit of "fat" can improve the way government looks/works.  For example, take the DMV.  Suppose  one DMV employee can handle 20 customers a day, and the DMV office expects to serve 100 customers a day.  So "lean government" means you staff the office with 5 employees, right?  Maybe so, but unless you can ensure that customers arrive at regular intervals throughout the day, you won't provide good and timely service.

A less than lean government can also be important in cases of sudden change.  For example, President Obama decided to permit children of undocumented immigrants to remain in the US for up to 2 years.  That was a change of policy, and the USCIS had a big job quickly to work up the forms, processes, and software to handle the applications.  I don't know what they did, but my guess is they didn't have time to hire employees, so they likely drew upon their "fat", relieving their best employees of routine work and assigning it to less capable employees, the "fat".  They undoubtedly used overtime and contracts as well, but the fat was important.  

The Sweet Sugar of Bureaucracy

Government Executive linked to this video from a Parks and Recreation show.  Maybe I should watch?

Farm Program Support in OECD

Keith Good has a summary of an OECD report comparing levels of farm support among different nations.  Basically because commodity prices have gone up, the level of support (i.e., program payments as percent of total income) has gone down.  As usual the US is below the EU.

Life-Cycle Citizenship

I want to try to push this concept, given the problems in having a reasonable discussion with the current "makers" and "takers" stuff, and based on my consciousness of coming to the close of my lifecycle.

Over the course of a lifetime, people are always dependent at some times and usually are productive at others. So the percentage of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes is higher than 47 percent, because that statement includes both the young and the old.  There's exceptions: people on social security start paying income taxes when their income exceeds $25,000 (a fact I just had to look up), and people on civil service retirement (moi) pay income tax on the portion of their annuity representing the government's contribution.  And, as has been discussed extensively on liberal blogs, employed people pay the payroll tax, drinkers and smokers pay the excise tax, drivers pay the gas tax, etc.

[Updated: Matt Yglesias.]

"School Spirit" and Football

Apparently the boom years of the 1920's also saw a boom in discussions of "school spirit", according to this Google ngram search.. I'm not sure what's going on there.  Maybe it reflects the "high school movement" described in wikipedia:

The high school movement is a term used in educational history literature to describe the era from 1910 to 1940 during which secondary schools sprouted across the United States. During this early part of the 20th century, American youth entered high schools at a rapid rate, mainly due to the building of new schools, and acquired skills "for life" rather than "for college." In 1910 less than 20% of 15- to 18-year-olds were enrolled in a high school; less than 10% of all American 18-year-olds graduated. By 1940, 73% of American youths were enrolled in high school and the median American youth had a high school diploma.^[1] The movement began in New England but quickly spread to the western states. According to Claudia Goldin, the states that led in the U.S. high school movement (e.g. Iowa and Nebraska) had a cohesive, homogeneous population and were more affluent, with a broad middle-class group.^[2][3]

NRCS IT Type

Federal Computer Week Government Executive profiles the whippersnapper who now heads up NRCS IT.

It's fine, but it sounds as if NRCS only got a website when she came aboard, which is wrong.

I've never been very impressed with their website, and it appears it's been revised now, which may be the project which failed twice before.  I do see they have a my.nrcs.usda.gov site.  I'm not clear whether farmers can get services on the website--probably.

I'm not sure what is meant by saying the website is accessible to both external and internal user base. Maybe they're saying the NRCS intranet is accessible through the home page?

Finally in my nitpicking is the claim NRCS is the second biggest USDA agency.  Not sure that's correct, if you add together FSA's federal and county employees, but then NRCS could add in their district employees as well. [Updated to correct error]

The "Makers" and the "Takers": White House Bees

There's no better evidence for the truth of Gov. Romney's position than this report from Obamafoodorama. 

It seems those "takers" in the White House have been exploiting the industrious little "makers" who inhabit the beehives on the grounds, exploiting with this predictable result:

"The beehive this year produced 175 pounds of honey, down from the very large 2011 harvest of 225 pounds. In 2009, the hive produced 143 pounds, and in 2010 it produced 184 pounds."

 In other words, the "makers" have lost their incentives so their production is dwindling away.

"Free the White House Bees"

Sardonic Enjoyment on the Farm Bill

Because my life is not impacted by the progress or nonprogress of the farm bill, I can be amused by the gyrations in the House, as reported by Politico and Farm Policy.  Because I'm a Democrat, my amusement is increased because the Republicans appear to be having a tad more difficulty with its politics.

One thing you can always rely on Congress for, as previously observed by Mark Twain, Mr. Dooley, and Will Rogers: amusement.

Sustainable Ag on Sequestration

I've a lot of respect for the work Sustainable Ag does in tracking Congress and the administration.  Here they discuss the impact of sequestration on farm programs.  The headline is that crop insurance is defined as a prior legal obligation and therefore not subject to sequestration. 

Robot-Ready Cows? Humane Dairying

Having just posted on dairy, I might as well go whole cow.

Here's an interesting piece on the extensive adoption of robots in dairying (I owe a hat tip, but not sure to whom).  Some excerpts:

Many dairy kids [like me] leave the farm because they see their parents slave away in milking parlors twice a day, seven days a week, with never a vacation or even a break for the children's baseball games. With robots, a mechanical arm handles the milking and each cow chooses its own routine, leaving farmers with more time for family and flexibility for other chores.  

Groetsch says the gamble was worth it. The family's small squadron of farm droids, which includes a mechanical cow-back scratcher and an automatic feed pusher, has turned their barn into a 24-hour operation, with less hired help.

The 3,000-pound, red robo-milkers work around the clock, except for twice-daily cleaning sessions. They also eliminate the chore of corralling cows for milking: After being trained to accept the robot, cows get milked whenever they please. The robot measures their production and knows if a cow needs to be milked more or less often

Immigration has a role here; the Dutch are pioneers in dairy technology, Hispanics have more and more come to find their place as hired help on dairy farms.

Feminist Vegans and Dairy

From a letter to the editor of Book World (which I initially couldn't find through navigating the Times website, so retyped, and then found the link by a Google search.

Andrew Delbanco [in a review of The Victims' Revolution] classifies as "cant" the statement that "dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother."  I wonder which of these facts about dairy production he disputes: (1) mammals produce milk only after giving birth (2) female cows produce milk only if they have recently calved (3) people cannot take the milk if the calf drinks it; (4) dairy farmers therefore remove calves from their mothers within days of birth; (5) both mother and child resist and protest this separation; (6) mothers often bellow and moan for days thereafter; (7) mothers sometimes go to extreme lengths to locate and reunite with their calves; (8) dairy farmers utilize restraints to prevent them from doing so.

Dairy is the product of the exploitation for profit of the reproductive capacities of female bodies.  To consider this a feminist issue is a defensible political position.  Cows share with us the basic brain architecture responsible for emotion.  The idea that mother cows do not grieve when their children are removed from them, and are not grieving still as machines suck the milk from their bodies -- that is cant. 

signed: Patrice Jones
Springfield, VT

The writer is a co-founder of VINE, a feminist animal sanctuary that shelters, among others, survivors of the dairy industry.

The context of the quote referred to is: "A couple of years ago, Bawer [the author of The Victims' Revolution] made a trip home to see what’s happened to the academic world he left behind. He attended a few conferences for women’s studies, black studies, queer studies and Chicano studies, where he heard plenty of cant, as when a participant at a “Fat Studies” conference explained her veganism by declaring: “Dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother.”"

Based on my childhood on a small dairy, I would dispute the following:

(2) Cows produce milk for roughly 300 days after calving, not just "recently calved".
(3) Cows produce more milk than any calf could drink. 80 pounds daily in the first month after calving if memory serves, and that figure is probably twice as high now.  We fed our calves about 14 pounds of milk a day, gradually weaning them to hay and grain.  The calf was probably 3 months old, or so. Now if left together, would the calf have continued to suckle? Perhaps, though cows get tired of suckling and are willing and able to use their hooves on their offspring, so I wouldn't expect a prolonged babyhood.
(6) I'd say some cows bellow (never heard a moan) for a couple days, but the majority don't.
(7) We never had any cows go to "extreme lengths" to reunite that I remember.
(8) So we never used any restraints on "grieving cows" which weren't a part of the normal routine--i.e., stanchions to hold them from milking.

The Volt and Farming

The Post runs a Reuters piece on the GM Volt today, in which I think they distorted the picture.  (The gist of the article seems to be here, though it's not quite what appeared in the print edition.) The headline was that GM is losing $50,000 on each Volt they sell. The reality seems to be that GM and farmers share something.

In the article, there's this sentence: "Each Volt then costs around $20,000 to $32,000 to build, including materials, labor and factory operations"  And the Volt is supposed to sell for $39,145.

What that says to me is while GM is taking a loss on each Volt because of the accounting for the development costs and the overhead of the company, they've actually got positive cash flow on each one (assuming they don't discount the price much).  That's like a farmer.  As long as she can sell her crop for more than the out-of-pocket cost of growing and harvesting it, she can keep going, hoping next year the prices will be better and the yield will be higher.  That's rational, at least assuming the farmer is emotionally invested in farming.  So too is it rational for GM to continue to produce and sell Volts, assuming next year the prices will be better, the yield higher, and the company and its customers will be higher on the learning curve.

Farming Apprenticeships

Farmdocdaily has a post discussing the problems of establishing farming apprenticeships.  Sounds a lot more difficult than I would have supposed.  I guess one problem is minimum wage requirements.  Seems as if you could have a contractual relationship farmer A pays B $x an hour for work; apprentice B pays A $x for lessons.  Probably too simple.

Polling

Last night for the second day in a row I took a phone call from a polling service, using an automated system.  They asked roughly similar questions, though last night's was a bit more detailed, particularly on the demographics (i.e., religion). 

If I recall, and my memory is fading, this is the first time I've been polled solely on politics, excluding the calls where the Dems reassure themselves I'm still a rock-bound Democratic voter who will vote/has voted.

FSA and CCC: the Magic Numbers

Are 8.2 and 7.6.

What does that mean? Based on a very fast skim of the OMB report on sequestration, FSA would take an 8.2 percent hit to its administrative funds, and CCC would take a 7.6 percent hit to part of its funds. I don't understand the CCC calculation but the cut amounts to $469 million, with a good portion of the $19,175 billion either exempt or offset.

[Update: Appendix B has a breakdown of sequestrable versus exempt.  Unfortunately I can't copy the text, but something called the "Discrimination Claim Settlement" is sequestrable.  Is that Pigford, or the women and Hispanic?]

In Which I Trash the Sammies

The "Sammies" are awards ( 2012 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals ) to federal employees for service to America.  This year's awardees are described in this Post piece. 

Of course they all appear to be big shots, which sort of makes sense because bureaucratically speaking, the higher you rise in an organization the greater your impact and thus potentially the greater the contribution you can make to the U.S. 

Somehow today this logic falls flat to me.  If I've got a rich uncle who dies and leaves me money, lots of money, I might just set up a series of awards for employees at the lower end of the pay scale, people who went far beyond the bounds of their job description. Seems to me performance by lower-paid employees could be much more extraordinary, all things considered, than the jobs done by GS-14's.   Maybe set the cutoff at GS-7, or at GS-12, but no higher.

Beyond the challenge of identifying a rich uncle, the next step is figuring out an impartial way to make the awards.

Best Sentence Today (Nun)

"What a difference a nun makes."

That's from a Project on Government Oversight post about oversight of nuclear weapon facilities. (The "nun" in question was one of a group of protesters who roamed through a supposedly secure facility, causing a big shot at Energy to change his mind.

Call an Ambulance for the Right Wing

I worry for their hearts when they hear Jane Fonda is playing Nancy Reagan. (I wonder whether Alan Rickman can change his voice enough to be convincing as Ronald--probably he's a great actor.)

MN Famers on Congress " we’re hopeless"

So says Rep. Collin Peterson--his constituents don't expect action from Congress on the farm bill.

From Farm Policy.

[Updated: Politico piece on the current status.]

[Update 2: Politico report on rally for farm bill]