Grant More Honorable than Washington?

Saw a piece on the opera/play Appomattox, written by a Brit who was struck by Grant's terms to Lee at Appomattox.  Well he might be.

But our great leaders have not always been so honorable.  Apparently after the victory at Saratoga and the surrender of Burgoyne's army, the terms provided for the repatriation of the troops (not to serve in the war again).  Brad DeLong links to a letter from Washington urging essentially that we violate the terms, arguing that a fast return of the troops would merely free other troops to come from Britain.  (I've a personal interest, my ggggrandfather was a captain who I believe was part of the guards when the captured troops ended up in a camp near York, PA.)

Mobility and the Draft

Here's a piece on the decline of geographic mobility in the US.  The focus is more on short distance moves than long distance moves.  I don't know why the decline and haven't seen a recent discussion.  I do wonder though whether the ending of the draft in the Nixon administration had anything to do with it--the draft was on my mind because I recently argued that a grandparent of several grandsons didn't need to worry about a Republican president getting us into a war and reactivating the draft.

The draft might have affect mobility of young men two ways:

• they got out of their home and into the world, even if they were never stationed overseas. That might have made them more comfortable with traveling and moving.
• they got to know and become friends with men from other parts of the country, perhaps informing them of job and/or educational opportunities outside of their community.

The Dangers of English

I'm stealing two images from an Illinois extension post on big data in agriculture:

U.S. Being Subsidized by Asia

Two posts caught my eye:

• James Fallows at Atlantic on a follow-up post on Chinese education--an excerpt from a reader's comments:

First, the US college system is now deeply dependent on the sky-high tuition that international students pay; here at Purdue, it's often said that the international students are essentially subsidizing the in-state tuition for Indiana students. Many schools are massively dependent on international student dollars, and Chinese student dollars particularly -- which means we're massively exposed to fluctuations in the Chinese economy.

• The NYTimes reports that because of cuts in the National Parks Service budget, they're doing an appeal for contributions to the Korean War Memorial on the Mall, an appeal so far answered only by Korean businesses. 

Folks, this is pitiful.  I blame our politicians and ourselves: we need higher taxes to fund education and parks.

The Stakes of the 2016 Elections

Discussing last night's debate generated these thoughts:

• if a Republican wins the Presidency, the odds are high that Republicans will continue to control the House and Senate.
• since every day the 9 on the Supreme Court get closer to the grave, it's likely there will be some vacancies on the Court during the term, possibly Scalia, Ginsburg, and Breyer, depending on factors. Assume a Republican president, the replacement(s) are likely to be to the right of the 3 (possibly not to the right of Scalia but certainly to the right of Ginsburg and Breyer).  That would move the court rightward and would mean one-party control of all three branches of government.
• we'd see a test of the theory that united government can make big and enduring changes.

• if a Democrat wins the Presidency, the odds are high that Republicans will continue to control the House, maybe the Senate.  
• replacements on the Supreme Court would, I guess, be more moderate than the departed justice. The Senate is likely to be more closely divided than when Kagan and Sotomayor were nominated and possibly more partisan.  So if all 3 of my possibilities leave, the court might move slightly left, with the swing justice becoming one of the newbies. 
• we'd see a test of whether a change of personnel, the President, could change the political climate in Washington.

Either way, the politics of the 2017-21 period will be interesting.

I'm comfortable in predicting that the changes won't turn out to be as drastic or harmful to the country as the partisans would predict.  On the other hand, I'm voting Dem.  :-)

TPP and Agriculture

I suppose if I got into Twitter, I could tweet this link, but I haven't, yet.

Vox has a good piece on the impacts of the TPP (the Pacific trade pact) on segments of agriculture.  Soybean farmers win big, some reductions in trade barriers (Japanese rice, Canadian dairy), etc.

Good News: Entrepreneurs and Race

From Fortune:

The number of businesses owned by African American women grew 322% since 1997, making black females the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S.
Overall, the number of women-owned businesses grew by 74% between 1997 and 2015—a rate that’s 1.5 times the national average, according to the recently published “2015 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report” commissioned by American Express Open. Women now own 30% of all businesses in the U.S., accounting for some 9.4 million firms. And African American women control 14% of these companies, or an estimated 1.3 million businesses. That figure is larger than the total number of firms owned by all minority women in 1997, the report found.

It surprises me, because it's easy to slip into the idea that black people seek secure jobs and aren't risk-takers.  It shouldn't surprise me, because I know several of the black women with whom I've worked have had the ability to be entrepreneurs. I don't know whether in retirement they've taken that direction, or maybe their daughters have. 

Why College Costs Are High?

From a Conor Friedersdorf piece on Yale:

These are young people who live in safe, heated buildings with two Steinway grand pianos, an indoor basketball court, a courtyard with hammocks and picnic tables, a computer lab, a dance studio, a gym, a movie theater, a film editing lab, billiard tables, an art gallery, and four music practice rooms.

When I went to college, while freshman dorm was heated and safe, its only frill was a lounge room with a TV.  And we had to walk uphill to reach classes, and uphill to reach the dorm.  

Number of Tractors: 1920 US Versus 2000 Africa

The World Bank has a post on agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa.  Now I'm going by memory, which is that Prof. Pollan in Omnivore's Dilemma wrote that the US had 254 tractors on farms in 1920.  I doubted that, and found the Census report 254,000 tractors (Pollan had missed the unit of measure in the table).  So that figure sticks in my mind, although given my advancing age it should be taken with a grain of salt. 

But that's the context in which I read this:

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the trend has been rather different. In 1961, the number of tractors in use was more than in both Asia and the Near East (at 172 000).  After that the number increased slowly to peak at 275 000 by 1990 before declining to 221 000 by 2000.

 In other words, sub-Africa had fewer tractors in 2000 than the US had in 1920.  Further, the population of Africa was about 600 million, while the population of the US was about 100 million.

National Black Farmers Assocation 25th Conference Agenda

Here's the agenda for the 2-day conference (today and tomorrow) of the NBFA.

When read with a political eye, it's interesting--lots of USDA speakers plus a rep from Clinton's campaign.

Vote on Appropriations or Head for the Hills

Apparently despite their brave talk about returning to "regular order", the thing the House Republicans don't want is to vote on appropriations bills. I'm sure Speaker Ryan is very surprised.

God's Plan for Interest Rates

Mea culpa.  When I skimmed the first mention of this, I thought: there's one of those crazy Republican congressmen again.

Wrong.  It's one of those crazy Democratic congressmen, earnestly telling Janet Yellen that God's plan is for interest rates to rise in the spring.

Erroneous Payments: Two Views

"If I were to tell you that the Social Security disability program was 99.88 percent accurate in issuing benefit amounts to recipients, you might think they were doing an outstanding job. But if I told you the program overpaid by $11 billion – while neglecting to mention how they clawed most of it back – you might dust off your pitchfork and join your local mob’s march to the nearest SSA satellite office."

From the Post 
(The news accounts didn't explain that the overpayments were over a number of years and didn't cite the total payments made.)

Paperwork Reduction Act Takes Deserved Hit

From Github on the revision of OMB Circular A130:

Pretty much everyone who's responsible for designing digital information collections in Government knows the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) is one of the greatest barriers for making government simple, because of the obstacles (real or imaginary) it throws up between government researchers and the public. The idea that any structured information collection from 10 or more people, even if it is voluntary, even if the very purpose of the data collection is to reduce the burden of paperwork on the American public (whether digital or physical) has to go through a laborious, expensive, time-consuming, and rarely useful centralized process doesn't make any sense. The current implementation of the PRA defeats the very purpose of the law, and certainly defeats the objectives of the Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA).

I wish someone like my representatives in Congress would revise the Act.

Bush Replies, Who Was the Ohio Governor?

A blast from the past--there was an Ohio governor long ago who won some fame by his replies to constituent mail, often curt and funny, especially when the incoming letter was irate.  Somewhat like Chris Christie's responses in some of his meetings with constituents.

Today Jeb Bush put out a book of email, one of the early messages quoted in the Politico piece reminded me of that governor, the rest not so much.

Reston From Nothing to Something

This post uses the example of Reston to show how USGeological Survey (home office in Reston) updates its maps, including the process of officially naming geographic features.

Guinness Record Set? Reversals in Congress

I doubt the Guinness people keep track of how quickly politicians reverse course.  If they did they'd have to distinguish between individual politicians, who can reverse on a dime, if a dime lasts 12 hours or one news cycle, and governing bodies, like Congress, who naturally take a big longer.

I suspect Congress just set a new record: on Monday the big budget deal included a cut on crop insurance administrative costs; by the time the deal had passed early this morning (in the Senate), the cut was dead as a doornail.

Shows the clout of the insurance agents, and the usual hypocrisy of those who rail against government subsidies.

Second Hand Clothing

ThinkProgress has a piece on second-hand clothing in Kenya. 

Two points:

• the import of such clothing and the fact it's not taxed undermines the Kenyan clothing/textile industry (that's in the piece)
•  the use and reuse of resources contributes to world efficiency, and thus is environmentally good (I'm assuming the costs of transportation from US to Kenya are more than offset by the reuse) (this is my point)

Given my background, I'm usually impressed by thrift, one of my parents' favorite favorable adjectives.

Humans Are Doomed: Robots Teach Each Other

That's my hysterical take-away from this Technology Review piece on how one robot at Cornell taught a different robot at Brown to do a task it had learned.

I've mentioned a point on self-driving cars before: once you get a car to handle a new situation, it's done, unlike humans who even if they don't forget what they've learned, only imperfectly learned the lessons of their elders. So learning for robots is one baby step, then another baby step whereas learning for humans is one step forward, one step forward, one step backward, and then the grave.

The Siamese Twins

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money has an interesting post on the original Siamese twins, who owned slaves and sired 21 children.

Farmers Take Two Hits

Two hits on farmers in the media:

1. the World Health Organization declares processed red meat to increase the risk of cancer (not IMHO a really serious risk, but the media will play it up).
2. the big budget deal between Boehner, McConnell, and Obama includes a hit on crop insurance companies, requiring renegotiation of the reinsurance agreement between RMA and the crop insurance companies.

Bad Gun Shops

A seemingly simple proposal on which many could agree: clamp down on the 5 percent of gun shops which sell 95 percent of the guns later used in crimes.

But, as one of my mantras says, "it's complicated".  I read another piece on the lawsuit against Badger Guns in Milwaukee (sold a gun to a "straw buyer" who turned it over to someone who shot two cops).  Too lazy to look it up, but probably the Times. I believe Badger Guns is now under new management, though the owner is related to the old one.  That's the loophole, one which FSA experiences with enforcing payment limitation: identity is often fluid, not fixed.  Today's gun dealer is tomorrow's bystander, even though common sense says there's a continuity there.  But the law does not incorporate common sense.  Common sense tells us a lot of bad things and we wish to do no bad.

Addiction Is Bad, But Human

To be human is often to be an addict.

One of my longest addictions is coffee.  I blame my parents; they drank coffee and I wanted to be like them (I know, that's weak).  As the youngest in the household, anything associated with age, with maturity was very attractive. Drinking coffee meant being an adult.

Over time I drank more and more coffee.  By the time I started with USDA I'd hit the office coffee pot every hour or so, just to keep something in my cup.  Over the next 25 years I got stomach problems, so my coffee habit was  balanced by a Maalox habit.  Eventually I started to replace the caffeine with decaf.

These days I'm drinking a bit less, but still on 20 ounces a day of Starbucks leaded, blended with Folger decaf.

Why this post?  I was afraid the doctor was going to tell me to drop the coffee today, but not so.

EU Migration and Global Warming

Over the years there have been a few articles trying to relate climate change and various kinds of political unrest.  You'll have to take that assertion on faith, because I don't have URLs.

Conservatives tend to doubt the immediacy of global warming and to argue that humanity can adapt to changed conditions in the future, just as we have in the past.

On an individual basis, I've great faith in the ability of humans to adapt to the worse conditions. I do think global warming/climate change is real and there's a strong case for trying to cap greenhouse gases.

The turmoil associated with the migration of people from the Middle East and parts of Africa into Europe doesn't make me optimistic about our ability to adapt.  Today the EU is struggling to handle millions (at most) of refugees.  What happens when Bangladesh is struck by a strong cyclone, generating many more refugees than the EU is seeing--do we think that India will be able to handle them?

[Update:  see this Grist piece on the subject of climate refugees.]

The Importance of Knowing What You Don't Know

One of the few lessons I learned at work is the importance of knowing what you don't know.  I remember assuring the state specialist for Arkansas of an answer, which I wasn't really sure of.  Naturally I was wrong, and the answer turned up in an OIG report.

Seems to me the same issue is cropping in with self-driving cars, as witness this Technology Review article on problems with the new Tesla software/hardware.  Apparently Google is trying to handle all situations, but the problem drivers are having with the Tesla is not knowing when the system is approaching the limit of its capability, i.e., not knowing what the Tesla doesn't know or isn't sure of.

It's All Downhill from Here: Pillminders

If I have any young readers, I hope by the time you're old someone will have innovated pillminders away.

Maybe a 3-D printer which can produce any known medicine, with the output passed through a permanently installed port in one's arm, with the timing under control of the embedded personal health minder (the great grandchild of the Apple Watch)?

The older readers will know what inspired this: first you have to take an aspirin a day. Not hard to remember, particularly when one's mind is at 98 percent capacity.  Then the doc adds a prescription pill for circulation problems.  By the time the third pill is added for blood pressure, one's mind is at 90 percent and going more quickly.  So it's time to invest in a pill-minder, perhaps a 7 day jobbie so you only have to fill it once a week.

The next step is a couple more pills, one of which has to be taken twice a day, not once. And now the mind is really losing it.

Maybe what I need is a blogminder--something to remind me what I was writing about when I started the post?

I Hate "Resources"

These days everyone talks "resources", as in we need to devote the resources to fixing the problem, we lack the resources to do this, I (the politician) will devote the resources.. ad infinitum.

What do we mean?

"resources" = men/workers/people + money

I suppose that the term is useful: often if you're adding workers to a project you need the money to pay them and sometimes the decision of whether to add money and contract out the job or add workers and keep it in-house has yet to be made.

But all in all, "resources" is too damn vague: if you mean money you're talking appropriations and taxes; if you mean people, you're talking hiring and training, or moving people from one assignment to another.

Farming Fraud

Via the Rural Blog, an article on a Michigan farmer sentenced to a year and a day for fraud ($500k+).

Drone Registration and Obama's Immigration Actions and Guns

Today's papers (I think, but I'm playing catchup with my reading after a short trip) say that the FAA is planning to implement a registration system for drones by the end of the year.   There's also a piece about the court battle over Obama's immigration actions.  Why do I link the two?

Because I think both cases involve a bureaucrat's favorite piece of legislation--the Administrative Procedure Act.

As I understand it, Obama is being sued by Texas because he didn't follow the public rulemaking provisions of the Act.  Texas argues that the state is harmed by Obama's actions, meaning that he (ICE actually) should have gone through proposed rulemaking, allowing the public to comment on the actions.  There's a prediction the court fight may drag out through the rest of Obama's term in office.  (If they had gone with proposed rulemaking, the administration's lawyers probably figured it would have taken a couple years to complete anyway.)

If the FAA actually gets their registration system, both software and system design and requirements, up and running by Christmas, in time to catch all the drones being given for Christmas, they will have done well.  But why aren't they required to go proposed rulemaking under APA?

My guess is the FAA's argument in fact, if not formally, is that no one will have the balls nor the legal basis for suing over APA procedure.  They might say that the registration system will be so easy and not burdensome that there's no adverse burden to the public.  What I suspect they'll really mean is that the drone industry wants certainty so they can forge ahead, so no company will sue.  The industry will do better by having known standards than a 2-year court fight over process.


Now from the private citizen's standpoint, I could argue that my freedom is impaired by any federal regulation of guns drones. I could even argue owning and operating a drone is vital to the citizen's oversight of the federal government and my rights will be violated by this hasty rush to regulation.

I could argue that, but I don't.  I wish the FAA good luck with their software project.

More Action on MIDAS

FSA has new information on MIDAS and new releases of software.  See here.

I'm getting ready for a trip over the weekend so haven't looked at the information.  Possibly the project has its own momentum and logic. 

You Never Do It Right the First Time

There's a corollary to this,  the hiding hand principle.Which says the actual outcome of a project is often very different from the projected outcome.  The original essay by Albert O. Hirschman looks at unexpectedly good results, the more recent study linked to here says they occur only in a minority of cases, mostly it's poorer results.

Nice Paragraph: Fargo II

"Maybe the FX series Fargo is so good because blood looks so beautiful on snow. Red splashes against white, soaking into it, marking something that was once pure with a sudden, swift reminder of violence."

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/13/9512365/fargo-season-2-premiere-recap

How To Change Peoples' Minds: Tax or Nag

Always interested in how people change their minds, if they do.  Two bits of evidence:

1. Taxes work.  From NYTimes, Mexico levied a tax assessed on bottlers of soft drinks. The higher price reduced consumption.
2. Nagging works. NY Times article on  how Californians nag each other about water consumption.

Are Federal Employees Properly Compensated

This piece answers: "no one knows".

I agree. 

CRISPR and the Future of Genetic Modification

CRISPR is enabling a lot of "progress".  A quote from a Technology Review piece, predicting CRISPR-ized seeds being available by the end of the decade:

Gutterson said the objectives of plant labs include engineering resistance to blights or to low rainfall by rapidly introducing beneficial gene variants found in other varieties of the same species. Using conventional breeding to move traits can take many years. “It takes a lot of time and is not as precise as we would like,” says Gutterson. “We could very much short-cut that.”

The key question is the attitude that the public and regulators will take to these plants.

Companies hope gene-edited crops could be largely exempted from regulation. Already, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has told several companies that it will not regulate these plants because they don’t contain genes from other species. However, it’s unclear how the European Union or China will approach plants made with the new methods.

As I've been saying, it's going to be hard to reject such plants.

Making Hay the New Way

My time on the farm spanned the loose hay era and the "square" bale era.

This piece on New Holland Haymakers is interesting, a very new world.  The idea of chopping hay down to 3 inches, both for the cows and to make the bale more dense to save freight costs? And I'm surprised by the relatively low cost.  I wonder if round bale balers are simpler than the old square balers, seems as if they should be.

What Government Does For You

It simplifies your money.  Back in the good old days (i.e. pre-Civil War) you'd need to subscribe to a newspaper just to keep track of what banks are issuing bank notes (paper currency) and what forgeries are circulating.

Population Projections

I've been assuming the world wasn't in too much trouble population-wise, because the birth rate was rapidly lowering almost everywhere.  But that's wrong, I mean the lower birth rate is right, but what I missed was the lower death rate.  This Technology Review graph shows the result.

While the news is depressing for concerns about resources, farming, etc., it is good news for the longevity of children, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Congratulations to Walter Jeffries and Family

They got state approval to operate their butcher shop today, 7 years in the making.

[Update: see the article on the history of their efforts here, informative even for someone who's followed the blog for a number of years.]

When Is a Farm a Farm? II

Illinois extension has a post on the FDA definition of a "farm".

To quote: "The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).... directs the FDA to implement comprehensive, prevention-based controls throughout the food supply chain...."  (Think of mad-cow concerns, as well as listeria and similar food-borne diseases.)

Without quoting the whole thing, the issues seem to be two-fold: when a "farm" also includes food preparation, and when a "farm" also includes preparing feed for animals.   There's still more regulations to come, particularly on the human food chain.   (As in my previous posts on farm constitution, the purpose of the federal program governs the definition of the farm--there is no platonic ideal of a "farm".)

FDA is setting up training: "The three Alliances—Produce Safety Alliance (PSA), Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance (FSPCA), and Sprout Safety Alliance (SSA) — are developing Train-the-Trainer programs to ensure that lead trainers are familiar with, and prepared to deliver, the curricula and that they understand the requirements of the FSMA rules."  (from the FDA site linked to from the ILext post.)

Al Kamen and the Post

Al Kamen was the Federal Page man for the Washington Post.  He's retiring today, but presumably the page continues.  Before him the Post had a page devoted to the federal government for a number of years, maybe as long as I've been reading it. (There currently is a separate column on federal employee matters.)

Mom's on a Roll

First, earlier this year the government said that eggs were good for you, as my now-departed mother had always said.

Now they're in the process of saying that whole milk is also good for you, that the fat doesn't matter.

So the wisdom of my parents in running a dairy-poultry farm has now been vindicated; their products were and are good for you.

The Importance of Role Models: Carson

" Black medical students are about five times as likely as their non-black classmates to choose neurological surgery as their specialty."

That's from a Post piece on Dr. Ben Carson

Farm Constitution Rears Its Ugly Head

The question of what a "farm" seems simple.  It's actually complex.  From a bureaucratic standpoint it depends on the purpose of the farm program.

Back in the day, Farmers' Home Administration would not talk of a farm, but a farming operation, which as I understand it included all the land, animals and equipment belonging to or operated by the "farmer".  Essentially when FmHA made a loan to a "farmer", they wanted to consider everything which could impact the viability of the loan.  They didn't care about location.

Soil Conservation Service cared only about location.  They worked with the conservation practices on a plot of land, their offices served soil and water conservation districts (usually but not always a county) so what a farmer did in county B was irrelevant to conservation in county A.

ASCS was ambivalent, having to deal with both people and land, both landowners and operators/producers. In the days when disaster programs were uppermost, we wanted to combine land to spread losses and production over the widest area.  In the days when production adjustment was foremost, we wanted to divide land, so the operator had the least ability to designate less-productive land as her set-aside/conservation acreage. When programs shifted (as in the early 80's, our rules were often out-of-date.

Apparently today's programs may have impacted FSA's rules on farm constitution.  DTN has pieces from Marcia Zarley Taylor and Chris Clayton on the issue.  Because some payments under the new farm bill are now determined using county-level data,  whether land located in more than one county is administratively consider to be one farm and located in one county can make a difference.  The articles point out the possibility of losses (farm is located in county B when county A has a higher payment rate).  As usual, they don't point out the possibility of what one might call "windfalls", the farm is located in county A even though much of the land is in the lower rate county B.

The LImits of Progress: Lynching in Brazil

From a Post piece on Brazil:

Every day, according to sociologist José de Souza Martins, at least one person is lynched in Brazil. Since 2011, he’s tallied over 2,500 cases.

Dust in the Hen House

Extension has a post on poultry housing options.  From personal experience I can testify to the dusty conditions in a hen house (what they categorize as a barn).

Air quality is often poorer in alternative housing systems, and this can affect health and hygiene, which is relevant not only for hen welfare but also for food safety.
The large amount of litter and the greater bird movement in alternative systems result in greater concentrations of bacteria and fungi in the air and in greater dust concentrations compared with conventional and furnished cage systems. Greater dust concentrations have been associated with more serious pulmonary lesions, typical of chronic bronchitis, in cage-free birds (Michel and Huonnic, 2003).

As you might expect they've reservations about cage systems.  Whether or not they properly weigh the tradeoffs I won't judge, but there are tradeoffs.

Good for Secret Service

Homeland Security secretary Johnson gave the Secret Service plaudits for getting the pope, the Chinese president, and the heads of state at the UN in and out of the country safely, with no bad press. 

It's nice to see big shots recognizing the work  people do.