The Danger of Metrics

Wired:

After disruption, though, there comes at least some version of stage three: over­shoot. The most common problem is that all these new systems—metrics, algo­rithms, automated decisionmaking processes—result in humans gaming the system in rational but often unpredictable ways. Sociologist Donald T. Campbell noted this dynamic back in the ’70s, when he articulated what’s come to be known as Campbell’s law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,” he wrote, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
On a managerial level, once the quants come into an industry and disrupt it, they often don’t know when to stop. They tend not to have decades of institutional knowledge about the field in which they have found themselves. And once they’re empowered, quants tend to create systems that favor something pretty close to cheating. As soon as managers pick a numerical metric as a way to measure whether they’re achieving their desired outcome, everybody starts maximizing that metric rather than doing the rest of their job—just as Campbell’s law predicts.

Amen.

Keep an Eye on the Bull at All Times

I broke that cardinal rule today, and I've got a beat up body to show for it.  This bull has seemed much more temperamental than the last one, but I didn't thin k of that when I climbed over a six-foot wooden gate to bust a non-working tank heater out of the ice in the water trough.  After pounding the ice a few times with a wood post, I was trying to pry the heater up when the bull hit me in the crotch with his head.  He knocked me off balance and pinned me against the gate. Each time he pulled back to hit me again, I scrambled to get better footing.  It was a little worrisome waiting while he pinned me until another instant of freedom before he struck again.  Finally, I was able to scramble up the gate and get to safety.  I've got to keep him a few more months to get my cows bred back, but he's worn out his welcome at the farm.

Bye, Bye Incandescent Bulbs

Hello, energy savings:

The whining about government thugs limiting light bulb choices has mainly disappeared to the libertarian loon fringe, where I found my classmate from high school and Galtian Hero/Postal Worker (I know, wtf?) moaning about not being able to waste massive amounts of heat while lighting his home (and getting to burn his fingers if he grabs the wrong bulb to change after turning off the light).  He also made a comment about not having a Hazmat suit to clean up if the bulb breaks.  I tried to point out the benefits of moving from 130 year-old technology and offered that he still had the option of lighting dollar bills on fire instead of burning them secondhand through outdated illumination methods, but he was still kind of bummed out.  It would seem to me that a political ideology based on "rational" decision-making might lean toward electrical efficiency, but apparently, I would be wrong.  Oh well.

Prairie Suffers as Land Comes Out of CRP

(chart should read million)

Weekend Edition Sunday:

"Goodness, there's thousands of species that live in grasslands, including several hundred species of higher plants," says , an ecologist at South Dakota State University in Brookings, S.D. Plus, permanent grass cover keeps soil from washing away.
"With those deeps roots that grasses have, and thick thatch, the water has a hard time getting a hold of the soil," says Johnson.
So more land in CRP means cleaner streams, less fertilizer runoff and more carbon stored in the soil.
Back when Reynolds was showing me those duck eggs, there were 34 million acres enrolled in the CRP — an area roughly the size of the state of New York.
In recent years, though, the conservation reserve has shrunk by more than 25 percent, including those 1.6 million acres that farmers took out of the program this past year.
It's partly because Congress has cut funding for the program. But there's a more important reason: high grain prices.
Farmers have been making a lot of money recently growing corn, soybeans, and wheat. They're bidding up prices for land, and landowners are cashing in.
In southwestern Iowa, near the town of , the owners of about 60 acres decided to take it out of the CRP. They rented it instead to farmer Mark Peterson. "They felt that it would make more income for them, renting it out, than it would being in the CRP," says Peterson.
Peterson recognizes that "it is fragile ground," so he says he'll be extra careful with that land, which is on a hillside. Some parts are quite steep, and the soil could easily wash away.
He grew soybeans on it this year, but he tried to disturb the soil as little as possible. And he'll plant cover crops in the off season to anchor the soil.
Ecologist Johnson, at South Dakota State University, says the shrinking Conservation Reserve is just one part of a larger trend: Farmers are ripping up other grasslands, too, including native prairie that never was plowed.
"I've seen things that I never thought I'd see here in South Dakota," he says. "With these land prices going up, there actually are people out there with Bobcats and front end loaders, pulling out the rocks in hundreds of acres of land that's been in pasture all these years."

This is one of the worst aspects of the biofuels-driven ag boom economy of the last six years.   Big Picture Agriculture has featured some pictures of some of the worst examples of sensitive land being abused in an effort to cash in on the boom.  Overall, it is tremendously depressing.  As Kay notes in one of the posts, all the additional land contributes to overproduction, which contributes to price deflation, which risks pushing prices below cost of production.  So we are destroying sensitive lands and destroying the ag economy at the same time.  That is not good at all.

The Cincinnati Stadium Screw Job

Another article discussing the crazy public subsidies for professional sports stadiums features Cincinnati:

When voters approved a sales-tax increase to pay $540 million toward stadiums for Cincinnati’s professional baseball and football teams almost two decades ago, city leaders promised lower property levies and a business district along the Ohio River.
The tax relief hasn’t materialized as pledged, said Todd Portune, a commissioner in Cincinnati’s Hamilton County. Instead, the county government is grappling with annual stadium expenses totaling at least $43 million this year, including debt service, county documents show. Residents have seen a public hospital sold, mass-transit investments postponed and little private development near the stadiums that didn’t involve additional public subsidies, Portune said......
In Cincinnati, Bengals owner Mike Brown took control of the team in 1991, after the death of his father, Paul Brown, a Hall of Fame founder and coach of the Cleveland Browns, who in 1967 headed an ownership group that acquired an expansion franchise in the American Football League. The Reds are owned by Robert Castellini, who led a group that bought a team after the 2005 season that was then valued at $270 million. The team is now worth $680 million, according to a data compiled by Bloomberg.
In the 1990s, each team began pushing for public funding to replace Riverfront Stadium, which opened in 1970 and was shared by both organizations. In March 1996, Hamilton County voters approved a half-percentage point increase in their sales-tax rate to fund the football and baseball venues as part of an effort to revive the area along the Ohio River.
Paul Brown Stadium opened for the Bengals in 2000 and Great American Ball Park opened for the Reds in 2003. The stadiums are about a half-mile apart......
Public costs for Cincinnati stadiums now exceed $1 billion in 2010 dollars, according to Long, the Harvard professor, who tabulated expenses for stadiums for a book titled “Public Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities.”
The NFL stadium proved particularly costly, according to Long. Paul Brown Stadium was the second-most expensive public deal of any U.S. stadium, according to her data, with the public paying $706 million, including land, infrastructure, maintenance and tax breaks. It trails only Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium. Taxpayers also spent about $489 million on the Reds’ Great American Ball Park, according to Long’s data.

And not only has Mike Brown screwed Hamilton County taxpayers (and the IRS), he's been a complete asshole while doing it, and the Bengals have failed to win a playoff game since he took over the team.

Farmers Hoarding Corn

WSJ, via Big Picture Agriculture:

Faced with the lowest corn prices in more than three years, many U.S. farmers are stashing away their grain in a bet on a rebound.

The strategy is sending ripples through the corn belt—affecting everyone from grain buyers to storage-bin makers—and tempering the price declines in the $27 billion corn-futures market.
By hoarding freshly harvested supplies, farmers are forcing livestock producers, ethanol companies and food makers to pay a premium over futures in some areas to secure corn, helping to buoy prices during what is expected to be a record U.S. harvest, traders and analysts say. But they warn the move could backfire on farmers in coming months if rival producers—such as growers in South America—generate big crops or demand for corn falls.....

Mary Ann Kwiatkowski, an independent grain trader at the Chicago Board of Trade, says she is "a little less bearish" on corn futures because of the farmers' strategy. Because storing corn leads to higher cash prices, it will cause investors to be less willing to bet on declines in corn futures, she says.

"Farmers have had a lot of years of doing very well," says Craig Turner, a senior broker at Daniels Trading in Chicago, "and they can use the bins as a bank account and only sell when they need to. Having the storage has helped with the price not coming down as much as it would have. It helps stabilize the price."

But analysts say corn growers are taking a big risk, noting that favorable weather so far this season for rival farmers in Brazil and Argentina could lead to large crops in the new year, which could further expand global supplies and exert even more downward pressure on prices.

The corn stockpiles also act as an overhang on the market. Farmers eventually will have to sell their grain, Mr. Turner says, and when they do, the added supplies will weigh on prices.

The USDA estimated in November that U.S. corn production will total 13.989 billion bushels this year, easily surpassing 2009's crop, the largest so far. The massive harvest comes just a year after the worst U.S. drought in decades curtailed output and vaulted corn futures to a record-high closing price of $8.3125 a bushel.

I don't see this ending well, and this is one of the biggest reasons I'm pretty bearish about the next couple years' corn crops.  I just don't see anything to drive prices higher for a while.  Also from Big Picture Ag are a couple of farmland price stories.  The fact that a big pension fund is buying a huge parcel of farmland is a contrarian indicator in my opinion.  As for Iowa, I don't know what's going on there:

WTF?  Has anybody out there tried to make those numbers work with corn under $4?

Banking's Big 4

From Businessweek:

Don’t be so sure. Five years after the system was held at gunpoint by a massively interconnected and over-risked Wall Street, the country’s six biggest banks—JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), Wells Fargo (WFC), Goldman Sachs (GS), and Morgan Stanley (MS)—are now 37 percent larger than they were in the depths of the financial crisis. These institutions make more than four out of every 10 loans and tote two-thirds of the banking system’s $14.4 trillion in assets, according to WkndNotes, a private newsletter e-mailed to traders and brokers by investor Eric Peters....JPMorgan Chase is about the size of the entire British economy and holds 12 percent of all cash in the U.S. Unpack its corporate letterhead and you will find old Fortune 500 stalwarts like Washington Mutual, Providian, Chemical Bank, Banc One, Bear Stearns, and Great Western, among many other absorbed institutions. Bank of America, which snapped up Countrywide and Merrill Lynch (and pretty much all Merrill Lynch has snapped up) accounts for about a third of all U.S. business loans, while Wells Fargo (think Wachovia-First Union-CoreStates and the Money Store) makes a quarter of all mortgage loans.

 This is not quite the era of the Trusts, but these four are huge.

Pilot Pork Inspection Program Hits Snags

Bloomberg:

The idea for the program sounded promising: If plants hired their own quality-assurance officers to sort out diseased carcasses and parts before they reached government inspectors, then, proponents theorized, there would be fewer carcasses for the USDA to inspect and reject. This weed-out of diseased animals earlier in the process would reduce the chance of food contamination; it would also allow plants the flexibility to devise their own inspection processes, rather than adhering to rigid cookie-cutter requirements; and, best of all, these efficiencies would streamline production, reducing the cost of pork for consumers.
Almost from the moment the program was fully implemented in 2003, the participating meatpackers saw huge benefits. In 2004, Excel and Hatfield achieved the largest production increases (measured by total number of swine) of any two packers in the U.S. The other three plants accelerated production for Hormel—not just at the official Hormel plant in Fremont, but also at QPP, which bills itself as a “custom packer” for Hormel, and at Farmer John, which Hormel purchased at the end of 2004. Thus, for the last decade, Hormel’s three cut-and-kill operations—the plants that supply all 9.4 million hogs annually for its operation nationwide—have been among these select five plants that have profited from dramatically increased line speeds.
But if packers have been delighted by the increased output, workers’ rights advocates say that runaway production increases have also jeopardized safety...Equally troubling, the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General has raised concerns that faster line speeds could compromise food safety. In May, the OIG released a report finding enforcement of protocols at the five pilot plants was so lax that between 2008 and 2011 three ranked among the top 10 violators of food safety requirements. That’s out of 616 pork-packing plants nationwide. As recently as last year, inspectors at the five test plants found hog carcasses bound for processing with lesions from tuberculosis, septic arthritis (with bloody fluid pouring from joints), and fecal smears. The OIG’s assessment warned that “recurring, severe violations may jeopardize public health.”

Wait, self-regulation might not be working?  Companies get richer, but workers and the public face greater danger?  No, not in an unregulated market.  Seriously, who is surprised by the outcome of this pilot program.  As the article goes on to say.  A similar program is going into effect across the poultry industry, and watchdog groups fear the pork pilot program will be expanded to the entire industry.

Sinking Two Feet?

In a story at Pacific Standard on the ineffectiveness of a Dutch groundwater tax, there was a link to this story:

Federal scientists added another piece of evidence last week in the argument for regulating California's underground water — the San Joaquin Valley's famous sinking landscape is still dropping.
The U.S. Geological Survey study showed a 1,200-square-mile section of the west side in Madera, Fresno and Merced counties has dropped almost 2 feet in just two years.
The land is always subsiding in the Valley, but not this fast. It happened quickly, mostly because of new permanent crops, such as almond orchards, in areas of Madera County that do not have access to river water, say many water experts.
The study has some water community insiders quietly buzzing to me about California passing its first law over groundwater supplies. States such as Colorado have had such regulation for years. There is no such law here.
Even among some farmers, there is talk of the regulation, though nobody has stepped up yet to openly suggest it. This political hot potato will burn most anyone, even in a state as environmentally minded as California.
The USGS study is important. Nearly 2 feet of subsidence in two years over a broad landscape is telling, especially with the clarity of new technology. But a swiftly sinking landscape is hardly new in the Valley.
Between 1926 and 1970, the ground sank nearly 29 feet on the Valley's west side. It slowed after farmers started buying Northern California river water to irrigate.
But farmers have long complained to me that drought and environmental regulation at the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta would force them to use more underground water. It defeats the purpose of the projects to deliver water from the north, they say.

1,200 square miles is nearly 3 counties in this part of the world.  That is crazy.  And 29 feet?  Holy shit.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/11/26/3634251/groundwater-law-coming.html#storylink=cpy

The End of an Error

80 years ago today.  Happy Repeal Day.  Have some liquor and celebrate.

Germany Also Shorts Infrastructure Spending

NYT (h/t nc links):

Germany was once known for its superfast autobahns, efficient industry and ability to rally public resources for big projects, like integration with the former East Germany. But more recently, it has been forced to confront a somewhat uncharacteristic problem: Its infrastructure — roads, bridges, train tracks, waterways and the like — is aging in a way that experts say could undermine its economic growth for years to come.

As it has been preaching austerity to its neighbors, Germany itself has kept a tight rein on spending at home. Now critics abroad, including the European Union and the United States, are pressing it to do more to stimulate its own economy, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s likely partners in a new coalition government, the left-leaning Social Democrats, are seeking more money for a variety of domestic programs.

A good place to start plowing money into, many experts say, is the nation’s physical underpinnings. A government-appointed commission recently concluded that it needed to spend 7.2 billion euros a year, or $9.7 billion, for the next 15 years — roughly 70 percent more than it spends now — just to get existing infrastructure back into shape. Others say that even more is needed for schools, for instance, and for extending fiber optic cables to less populated areas.

$9.7 billion a year?  That sounds like nothing compared to what ASCE thinks the U.S. needs to spend ($3.6 trillion by 2020.  Admittedly, ASCE isn't exactly a neutral observer).  But still, Germany has about 25% of the number of people as the U.S., and spends a tiny fraction of what the U.S. does on defense spending, so $9.7 billion a year is practically nothing.  To put it in perspective, the Brent Spence Bridge replacement, carrying I-75 across the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Northern Kentucky, is expected to cost $2.5 billion by itself.  Anyway, at least we aren't the only extremely short-sighted developed nation.

Petroleum Coke Piles Anger Neighbors

AP:

With the amount of Canadian oil entering the U.S. increasing almost daily, refineries like Marathon in Detroit, BP in Whiting, Ind., and Phillips 66 in Roxana, Ill., have expanded to handle the glut. Even more oil could be on the way if the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is approved, though by then additional domestic pipelines could direct some to refineries in other regions, experts say.
Refineries usually sell the petcoke to other companies, which store it until it can be loaded onto Great Lakes ships for export to places like China. Burning it emits high levels of soot and greenhouse gases, so its use in the U.S. is limited.
In Detroit, petcoke began appearing along the Detroit River in the spring, several months after the Marathon Petroleum Corp. refinery completed a $2.2 billion expansion. But an outcry by residents, who shot video footage of the blowing grit, prompted city officials to order the removal of the piles.
In Chicago, residents became alarmed when the black piles began growing about six months ago, said Tom Shepherd, a member of a neighborhood group. The last straw was when the petcoke went airborne on Aug. 30 and blew into their yards, churches and a Little League field.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has ordered the city Health Department to adopt regulations for petcoke, while aldermen introduced competing ordinances to regulate or ban it outright. The city and Illinois Attorney Gen. Lisa Madigan have filed suit against Beemsterboer over the petcoke on his sites.

The anti-Oil Sands crowd and the folks concerned with global warming will combine with neighbors of refineries to really limit these petroleum coke piles, unless the owners find a way to effectively control dust emissions.  As unpopular as petroleum coke is in these crowds, they have to be better neighbors.

Farmers Need To Make Case For Urban Support

A Des Moines Register editorial makes the case that for the Farm Bill to get support, they need to give some things up to get urban support:

That rural-urban coalition fell apart last year when the House removed food stamps from its version of the farm bill. The legislation has also become a battleground for environmental groups that see crop subsidies encouraging reckless and unsustainable management of farmland. Consumer groups increasingly concerned about Americans’ diets and rates of obesity believe Congress should encourage production and consumption of fruits, vegetables and organically grown foods. And, while city folk might be sympathetic to the plight of family farmers, they are less so of corporate-style industrial agriculture. This splintering of views on what had been a fairly noncontroversial piece of legislation has not been lost on lawmakers from rural states, including Iowa’s congressional delegation. Yet it is still not clear that leading farm organizations in this state and in other farm states have gotten the message that they have to make a better case for the federal support they enjoy.
Every other Iowa business would dearly love to have taxpayer-subsidized price supports and insurance that protects against natural and economic losses. Farmers must make a better case for why their industry should get special treatment.
It is not enough just to say that economically stable farming is essential to putting food on the table at reasonable prices. Or that farmers are subject to potentially ruinous risks related to the weather or insects and blight. American farmers must also demonstrate in measurable ways that they are using sustainable farming practices that protect the environment and preserve the land for future farmers.
They must demonstrate that they are willing to accept mandatory conservation rules and participation as a tradeoff for asking American taxpayers to subsidize their business. That has not happened. Instead, powerful farm organizations and state leaders in Iowa send the opposite message that they expect government handouts without any strings being attached.
That attitude will no longer do. Congress is on the precipice of failing, for the third time in the past two years, to pass an extension of the historic farm bill. It is time for rural America to wake up to that possibility.

Farmers are going to find out that the politicians they put into office are so enamored of "trickle-down" economics that they are willing to sacrifice spending which goes to their constituents in order to further cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans.  You get what you vote for.

Our Brains Screw Us Up

Here's a really nice summary of various ways our brains make us irrational.  And this story claims the smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall into these traps:

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.
And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.
What explains this result? One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves.

Good thing I'm pretty dumb.

Purdue's Drum Ain't That Large

A Big Lie Written on a Drum

The Boilermakers exaggerate massively (besides when they claim to be the best engineering school in Indiana):

They parade it proudly through the campus on football Saturdays, roll it out during every halftime performance at Ross-Ade Stadium and thump it throughout each game — the giant percussion instrument that boldly proclaims, right on its face, that it is the "World's Largest Drum."
But is Purdue University's Big Bass Drum truly the biggest?
I scoured the Internet, figuring the drum's dimensions likely were buried on some obscure blog, as most pieces of trivia usually are, only to come up empty. There were lots of estimates for the diameter, but they were decidedly less than precise, ranging from 8 feet to 10 feet.
What I did discover right away was that there's a lot of competition for the title of "World's Largest Drum," which probably explains why Purdue keeps the actual dimensions under its hat, er, shiny steel helmet.
A few drums in Asia and Europe easily tower over the Boilermakers' drum, with the Guinness World Record holder in South Korea measuring in at a diameter of 18 feet 2 inches. Even the naked eye can see Purdue's drum doesn't come close.
What's less clear is whether Purdue's drum beats the competition closer to home.
The University of Texas has Big Bertha, which is 8 feet tall and 44 inches wide, and the University of Missouri boasts Big Mo, which measures in at 9 feet tall and 4 feet, 6 inches wide.....
Inside an aging metal cabinet on the first floor was a square paper boxed labeled "Lafayette Journal & Courier — No. 474." We gently placed the roll of microfilm in a nearby reader.
Smith quickly scrolled through the film, slowing down when he reached the 1921 newspapers — the year the drum was built by Leedy Manufacturing Co. We glanced through Journal & Courier issues from May, June and July before coming to Aug. 6, the day after the Big Bass Drum was unveiled.
And there were the drum's dimensions, right on the front page: "Seven feet three inches in diameter and three feet nine inches wide."

Never trust somebody from Indiana.  One of the things I was going to do if I won the lottery was commission the construction of a bigger drum than the one Purdue has, just to stick it to them.  But since the Universities of Texas and Missouri already have, I won't bother if I hit it big.  Seriously, who lies about the size of their drum?

Big Ag's Losing Fight on Ethanol

Des Moines Register:

With billions of dollars of potential profit on the line, ethanol producers, corn growers and other groups know they have a tough road ahead and a limited window in which to change the thinking of the EPA and White House officials overseeing the mandate, known as the Renewable Fuel Standard. The law requires refiners to buy alternative fuels made from corn, soybeans and other products. The EPA proposal will be open to a 60-day comment period; the agency is expected to finalize the rule in the spring of 2014.
Biofuel producers have wasted little time trying to get their message through to the Obama administration. On Wednesday, just five days after the measure was made public, representatives of Growth Energy, the Renewable Fuels Association, ethanol maker Poet, the National Corn Growers Association and others met with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, White House staff and EPA officials. The industry representatives underscored the damaging impact the proposal would have on the future of biofuels.
Vilsack said administration officials told the biofuels industry they remain committed to the renewable fuels requirement and “understand the importance of it” for offering consumer choice, creating jobs, reducing the country’s dependence on foreign energy and saving motorists money at the pump. The former Iowa governor said more needs to be done to expand consumer access to higher-grade ethanol blends such as E85, which includes 85 percent of the corn-based fuel.
Critics of the EPA proposal contend they must act to prevent a permanent shift in the way blend levels are determined. In the past, the EPA largely followed the annual level requirements put in place by Congress, helping to drive new markets and spur demand for the renewable fuel. The proposed reduction — a move even some in the oil industry have called substantive — would shift the process to one that sets the requirements based on expected market demand.

The ethanol mandate was bad policy growing out of diminishing conventional oil production and high gasoline prices.  The skew it has made in commodity prices fueled a farm land price bubble and has wreaked havoc in livestock production.  With shale oil production spiking, fuel economy improving and miles driven per licensed driver falling, Big Ag has run into a more powerful foe, Big Oil.  If I'm a betting man (and I am), I'd wager on Big Oil.

Another Chicago Privatization Disaster?

This time, it is fare cards for CTA:

But while these privatization debacles have been hard to stomach, Ventra — the new, privatized fare collection system for transit in Chicago — has been nothing short of a complete disaster.
Unlike the old magnetic strip fare card system, Ventra requires riders to purchase a prepaid debit/credit card that doubles as a transit pass. Whereas fare collection has been under public control for the entire lifespan of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), officials recently signed a $454 million deal to turn over fare collection to Cubic Corporation, a multinational firm which, in addition to causing transit fare headaches all over the world, is also a major player in military equipment manufacturing.
Since Ventra went live this fall, nearly every aspect of the new system has been a fiasco. Transit riders are routinely double- and triple-charged for fares, only to find that the process of sorting things out — waiting more than 30 minutes (on average) in the hopes of speaking with an overworked out-of-state employee in a call center — is often worse than throwing in the towel and moving on. A few weeks back, news broke that bus riders were being charged not only for boarding buses, but for exiting them as well.
While some are lucky enough to avoid being overcharged, others can’t get charged even when they want to. In theory, all you need do to board a bus or move through the turnstiles is tap your Ventra card once against a card-reader. But, in practice, it’s never quite clear what’s in store for you—or for all those similarly anxious folks waiting in line ahead of you.
Will it take four or fives taps before have the green light to board? Will it say “processing” indefinitely, as you wait awkwardly at the front of the bus? Will it stubbornly bark “Stop!” when you tap it, even though you just loaded money onto it? Or, miraculously, will you be able to stroll through the turnstiles in seconds and go about your business? With Ventra in place, its a gamble every time Chicagoans try to board a train or bus—a gamble that, as a quick glance at tweets tagged with #VentraVents confirms, much of the city is losing.

Other than further enriching those who don't need it, I've never understood the push for privatization.  It is pretty obvious that ANY cost savings in privatization (which never seem to materialize) are made by cutting pay for workers, who are generally working-class or middle-class, and turned into profits for shareholders and massive pay packages for executives.  I generally don't have much trouble at the BMV, so I'm not sure why private companies assume they can be so inefficient in setting up privatized operations.  It is pretty clear that privatized services almost always end up with fee increases and greater costs to end users, but without benefiting workers who live in the neighborhoods that are served.  Hopefully, such privatization failures like this curb the trend, but that wouldn't benefit our corporate masters.

Cassini or Curiosity?

NASA considers where in its robotic exploration budget to cut:

This year NASA received $16.9 billion, which may sound like a lot but, once adjusted for inflation, is roughly what the agency got back in 1986. Just $1.27 billion of that budget goes into funding all robotic exploration in the solar system. And most space policy experts don’t see that number going up anytime in the near future. In 2014, NASA will put many of its robotic missions through what’s known as a senior review. Administrators will have to decide which of its missions will yield the highest scientific return and may recommend canceling some of them.
And that’s where some sad calculus comes in.
“We have two very expensive flagship missions, Cassini and Curiosity,” said NASA’s planetary science director Jim Green, speaking to one of the agency’s advisory councils on Nov. 5. “So, this particular competition we’ll have to do very carefully.”ou wouldn’t think the Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn since 2004, was in trouble. It has lately been beaming back incredible data about the planet’s rings and moons. A recent image from the mission (above) showing Earth, Venus, and Mars from Saturn was widely shared on the internet and even landed on the front page of the New York Times last week.
But NASA seems to want to focus its dwindling energy on Mars.....Most in the planetary science community would bet that in a head-to-head competition, Cassini loses. That would be a shame. Cassini has already been an incredible mission, and scientists estimate it has at least four more years of life left in it. Cassini’s operating budget is about $60 million per year while Curiosity’s runs to roughly $50 million. That’s about what the Department of Defense has budgeted for 3-D printer research and is less than half of what it’s estimated to spend maintaining its golf courses. The Cassini mission has already cost $3.26 billion to launch and operate.

You know, to come up with that $60 million, maybe we could trim back the dividend tax cut, which costs the government over $20 billion a year.  But hey, who needs science research when super rich folks need lower tax rates on unearned income than what working stiffs pay on earned income.

The Unknown Known

Rumsfeld and Cheney, the Gerald Ford boys, were such a driving force, and so in error.

The Great Whale Slaughter

Pacific Standard:

The work began inauspiciously. In her first season, the Slava caught just 386 whales. But by the fifth—before which the fleet’s crew wrote a letter to Stalin pledging to bring home more than 500 tons of whale oil—the Slava’s annual catch was approaching 2,000. The next year it was 3,000. Then, in 1957, the ship’s crew discovered dense conglomerations of humpback whales to the north, off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. There were so many of them, packed so close together, the Slava’s helicopter pilots joked that they could make an emergency landing on the animals’ backs.
In November 1959, the Slava was joined by a new fleet led by the Sovetskaya Ukraina, the largest whaling factory ship the world had ever seen. By now the harpooners—talented marksmen whose work demanded the dead-eyed calm of a sniper—were killing whales faster than the factory ships could process them. Sometimes the carcasses would drift alongside the ships until the meat spoiled, and the flensers would simply strip them of the blubber—a whaler on another fleet likened the process to peeling a banana—and heave the rest back into the sea.
The Soviet fleets killed almost 13,000 humpback whales in the 1959-60 season and nearly as many the next, when the Slava and Sovetskaya Ukraina were joined by a third factory ship, the Yuriy Dolgorukiy. It was grueling work: One former whaler, writing years later in a Moscow newspaper, claimed that five or six Soviet crewmen died on the Southern Hemisphere expeditions each year, and that a comparable number went mad.

Over the years, it is estimated the Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales, even though the Soviets had no real uses for the whale meat.  So why did they kill them?  To meet numbers:

 The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products. “Whalers knew that no matter what, the plan must be met!” Berzin wrote. The Sovetskaya Rossiya seemed to contain in microcosm everything Berzin believed to be wrong about the Soviet system: its irrationality, its brutality, its inclination toward crime.

That is insane.