Labels: fun

Recommendation In Brief
Eliminate commodity program payments for all newly purchased land benefiting from a
1031 tax exchange.
Problem
While many farmers are reporting significant economic hardship, land values have
continued to climb. Average farm real estate value increased over 90 percent from $974
per acre in 1998 to $1,900 per acre in 2006. During that same period, the average value of
cropland increased almost 80 percent to an average $2,390 per acre.
High land values continue to be a barrier for new farmers who are seeking to enter
production agriculture. These high land values are also problematic for small and socially
disadvantaged farmers who are seeking to expand their operations.
A reoccurring theme at USDA Farm Bill Forums centered on how individuals near urban
areas sold their land and moved to more remote areas where they outbid local farmers for
farmland, simply to take advantage of the 1031 tax exchange. For example, Troy, a 26-
year-old college graduate in agribusiness from Utah said, “It has always been my dream
to be able to someday own my own farm. Currently, I am unable to do so due to the giant
barrier of entry which is land values….This is mainly due to speculation of real estate and
1031 exchanges.” Ronald from Minnesota caused a round of applause when he stated
“it's the 1031 tax exchange that's killing the young farmer.” And Len from Wisconsin
added, “The 1031 is just driving our land rents and land prices to where the average
producer, even big producers can't compete.”

Labels: farm program, farmland

• I gotta try some Pink Lady apples. If you like Braeburn - which we do - the PL is maybe just a little more tart, but can sweeten with storage. I had never heard about them.
• The sugar beet industry is pretty puzzled about what happens next. Opening the "sugar border" to Mexico will have consequences, but it is really hard to forecast with the turmoil caused by biofuels.
• You can start a conversation with anybody in the Northwest by asking "You guys getting many Californians moving in?" I have not found anybody here who is not seeing incoming residents somewhere close.
• Potato companies were caught uncovered when the rush for acres took over. Some didn't bother to contract, relying on farmers to overproduce as usual. Result: potato prices have nearly doubled for one producer.
• You can't buy land cheap here either.
  

Labels: news

A few players now dominate our world’s turf, forage grass, and legume seed production, with the majority of trade being turf grasses (perennial ryegrass, annual ryegrass, tall fescue turf varieties, Kentucky bluegrass, and the fine leaved fescue’s). With the European Union expanding to 25 nations, lands in the newer community members may switch to grass/legume seed production. Direct subsidies to grass species in the EU have been taken off, but now the market place will play a major role in European growers decisions to grow grass/legumes seeds. This change to “Farm Based” subsidies will no longer be applied directly to a particular crop. Instead, EU growers will be growing the most profitable crop for their situation, be it grains, oilseeds, or grass/legume seed.

The marketplace has also changed. No longer do end-users obtain supply in advance. Buyers have moved to a “hand-to-mouth” approach. Obtaining supply month’s in advance is becoming the exception. This has forced growers to hold onto their production longer, thus becoming the storage component of the marketing wheel. Improvements in transportation have also allowed end users to wait before placing orders. These marketplace changes will force growers into more timely decisions. In the grass/legume seed business, growers must decide quickly when and which crop to grow, which may also mean quicker movement of growers into, and out of, grass seed production. [More]

Labels: globalization, policy

Labels: fun

Labels: blog, computer

1. Is everything now routinely leaked? Drudge posted the SOTU an hour before the President delivered it. The Iraq Study Group Report was old news when it arrived. And one broker friend thinks even crop reports are being leaked. How else to explain a limit-up close the day before the report? Why bother with a ritualistic announcement if the entire staff has been chatting with the press about it for days?
   
2. The early leak responses have been critical in that the report purportedly low-balls the effects, especially sea-level rise.

The early versions of the report predict that by 2100 the sea level will rise anywhere between 5 and 23 inches. That's far lower than the 20 to 55 inches forecast by 2100 in a study published in the peer-review journal Science this month. Other climate experts, including NASA's James Hansen, predict sea level rise that can be measured by feet more than inches.

The report is also expected to include some kind of proviso that says things could be much worse if ice sheets continue to melt.

The prediction being considered this week by the IPCC is "obviously not the full story because ice sheet decay is something we cannot model right now, but we know it's happening," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate panel lead author from Germany who made the larger prediction of up to 55 inches of sea level rise. "A document like that tends to underestimate the risk," he said.

Greenland's massive ice sheet could begin to melt this century and may disappear completely within the next thousand years if global warming continues at its present rate. According to a new climate change study, the melting of Greenland's ice sheet would raise the oceans by seven meters (23 feet), threatening to submerge cities located at sea level, from London to Los Angeles. [More]

Labels: global warming

Nineteen-fifty marks the high point of newspaper penetration in America: 100 percent of American homes took one or more daily papers. Fifty-six years later fewer than half of American homes get one. At the current rate of decline, no homes will get any newspapers in the not-too-distant future. Morning news, once the monopoly province of newspapers (virtually all evening papers, facing competition from network news, folded in the 60s and 70s), is now overwhelmingly the province of the networks, cable, radio, and the Web. Newspaper readers (as well as broadcast-news audiences) are old and growing ever older (on an actuarial table, you can plot the newspaper's last day). There are, effectively, no new newspaper readers. Newspapers have worked best as a direct-marketing medium—introducing seller to buyer—but the Web is better and cheaper. The mainstay of newspaper profits—real-estate, auto, recruitment advertising—accounting for as much as 30 percent of them, is migrating almost entirely online. Shopping itself, that other elemental commerce connection of a newspaper ("The principle of free speech owes at least as much to department stores as to the First Amendment," notes Ken Doctor in passing), is ever more an online activity. While circulation steadily drops, and as online price competition becomes fiercer, newspapers have, nevertheless, continued to charge more for ads—a kind of pyramid scheme, which, sooner rather than later, falls in on itself. [More]

Labels: media

Labels: global warming

As Canberra joined a Canadian challenge to U.S. farm subsidies on corn, Australian Trade Minister Warren Truss said that if the Doha round negotiations could not be revived, then differences would move to international courts in coming months.

"The lawyers will have a field day," Truss told Reuters in an interview before traveling to Davos, Switzerland. "The negotiators will give way to the lawyers, who will take advantage of the expiry of the so-called peace clauses to exploit elements of the U.S. and current European programs in particular." [More]

The booming demand for corn as a fuel source will make it easier for the US to agree to cuts in farm subsidies, making a new global trade agreement possible this year, the US ambassador to the EU said.

"I am very confident that we are going to get a deal,” C. Boyden Gray told reporters in Washington yesterday. "This whole alternative energy revolution is taking hold.” "This will take the whole issue of agriculture off the table as a sticking point” between the US and European Union, Gray said. Gray was in Washington for the summit between US President George W. Bush yesterday and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. Both leaders reaffirmed their support for the negotiations in the World Trade Organization.
The Doha Round talks, named for the city in Qatar where they began in 2001, broke down last July as the US resisted pledging further cuts in its farm subsidies unless India, the EU and Japan agreed to steep cuts in their agriculture tariffs. Barroso told reporters yesterday that he saw "unequivocal signals, very clear signals from President Bush, that he wants a deal for Doha.” Bush's trade negotiating authority expires at the end of June.
Gray said negotiators will try to make progress early this year, and the administration will ask Congress to extend so-called Trade Promotion Authority through the end of 2007. Negotiators "will be close enough to probably get an extension,” Gray said. Congress, "probably would not extend trade promotion authority” unless the trade talks looked promising, he said. [More]

We've heard predictions before, but as events unfold, policies that were unthinkable with corn at $2 are less repugnant at $4.

Labels: ethanol, farm program, policy, trade

Snow crystals are so perfectly symmetrical! ... Are there not some special forces at work that ensure this perfection?
People are sometimes convinced that the simple explanation of snowflake symmetry cannot be correct, because snow crystals are so perfect in form. These folks argue that the simple explanation would likely yield less ideal shapes, less perfect six-fold symmetry. Therefore they suspect something else is happening -- perhaps some acoustical or quantum mechanical oscillations are enforcing symmetrical growth, for example.

The flaw in this reasoning is the statement that snow crystals are all extremely symmetrical. You can disprove this for yourself if you simply go outside and take a close look at some falling snow. You will soon realize that the beautifully symmetrical specimens are hard to find! The rather unattractive irregular crystals are by far the most common variety (see the Guide to Snowflakes under the heading of Irregular Crystals for some pictures). Even on the best of days, I search for hours to find just a few beautifully symmetrical specimens. I typically glance over thousands of crystals on my collection board before selecting one to photograph -- so already each photograph shows the best crystal out of thousands. And the pictures you see in the Galleries are some of the best among over 6000 pictures I've taken.

Alas, the vast, vast majority of snow crystals are not even close to perfectly symmetrical. The simple mechanism does indeed produce lots of imperfect symmetry, as you would expect. Snowflake photographers always select their most symmetrical crystals to display ... we have to, because no one ever seems to be interested in looking at the irregular ones!

Labels: fun

Labels: Internet

• 25 x 25 [0r 625, for short] - This effort shoot for 25% of all energy needs to be sourced from renewable energy by 2025.

25x'25 Vision: By 2025, America's farms, forests and ranches will provide 25 percent of the total energy consumed in the United States, while continuing to produce safe, abundant, and affordable food, feed and fiber.

• 15 x 15 x 15 [3375] - This goal is to produce 15B bu. of corn turning it into 15B gal. of ethanol by 2015.

• 20 x 10 [200] - This idea is to reduce US gasoline consumption by 20% in 10 years.

Bush's proposal wouldn't be fully effective until 2017. In the meantime, motorists will have driven up gasoline consumption by about 15 percent, according to government and industry projections. While critics want more rapid conservation, plan proponents say that a 20 percent reduction by 2017 still would be significant.

• 3 x 5 - A national commitment to get 3 times more 5 year-olds on cell phones.
  
• 2 x 4 - A patriotic drive to add $2T more in national debt in 4 years. [Amazingly, this would call for much less spending!]
  
• 8 x 10 - A glossy campaign to shrink the Supreme Court by 2010. That swing vote has been such a headache!
  
• 12 x 12 - No, no - that's just gross
• 16 x 9 - A national goal to give 16 million free HDTV's to deserving citizens by 2009.

Labels: ethanol, fun, policy, politics

Labels: fun

A Fortune 50 chief executive — I won’t tell you his name because he didn’t realize I was listening to his conversation — was sitting at a fast-food restaurant with a woman who was coaching him on how to talk to the media. “You’ve got to stay on message,’” she snapped when he would forget his lines. He sheepishly apologized and then managed to mangle his line again.

“Don’t answer the question being asked,” the woman said. “Get to your message,” she said, explaining that he should use “bridge phrases” such as “meanwhile” or “what we know is” to avoid the question being asked and change the context of the answer.

“Like the politicians do,” the chief executive exclaimed.

She also emphasized what she called “flagging,” telling the C.E.O. to insert phrases such as, “the most important thing is…” and “the main idea is…”

“Journalists are looking for complete sentences,” she instructed. “Especially on TV. You want to give them full messages.”

Before they got up, she told the executive, “Tell them what you do.”

He looked at her, slightly befuddled, and replied, “What do we do?”

Labels: economics, globalization

• It is against the merchant agreements of MC, Visa, and AMEX, for a vendor to require you to provide your phone number, home address, or other personal information for credit card transactions. In fact, some states make it illegal for them to require it. (It’s not illegal to ask, but it is if they refuse to process the transaction without that information)

• Credit card numbers conform to the Luhn algorithm, which is just a simple checksum test on the number. What you do is start from the right and double each second digit (1111 becomes 2121), then add them all together, and you should end with a number evenly divisible by ten. If it doesn’t, it’s not a valid credit card number.

• The first digit of the number is the Major Industry Identifier. 1/2 are for airlines, 3 is for travel/entertainment, 4/5 for banking and financial, 6 for merchandizing and financial, 7 for petroleum, 8 for telecommunications. 0 and 9 are for other assignments but you’ll likely never see them. If you look at an American Express card, you’ll see it starts with a 3, a throwback to their travel/entertainment roots.

Labels: fun, money

"All the buzz in Washington surrounding ethanol indicates that it's going to survive," says David Lehman, managing director of the Chicago Board of Trade's commodities group.

Ethanol makers need the help. Corn prices, 75% of the cost of ethanol production, have doubled in the past six months, to more than $4 a bushel. At the same time, the price of ethanol has followed the price of gasoline downward.

Absent a rescue from Capitol Hill, the glut is going to get worse. AgResource's Basse estimates the blending demand for ethanol at 10 billion gallons, 7% of the 150 billion gallons of blended fuel burned each year. Current nationwide ethanol capacity is 5.4 billion gallons. But 6.1 billion gallons' worth of capacity is now under construction, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. That would push supply right past demand and destroy ethanol prices. Unless mandates are tightened. At the moment the motor fuel industry is meeting environmental minimums and exceeding the energy independence ones. [More]

Shares of seed producers like DuPont and Monsanto and fertilizer makers like Potash and Terra Industries are soaring. The gains have further to run, even though the stock prices exceed their five-year averages relative to earnings, said Frank Husic, chief investment officer at Husic Capital Management in San Francisco. [More]

Labels: economics, ethanol, farmland, policy

They then zapped the cleaning equipment in a microwave for varying lengths of time.

After two minutes on full power, 99% of bacteria were inactivated.

And E. coli bacteria were killed after just 30 seconds. [More]

Using only cheap, readily-available equipment, you can create a spectacular lightshow in the comfort of your very own kitchen, providing hours of fun and excitement for your family, friends, and pets!

Ordinary grapes, when properly prepared and microwaved, spark impressively in an extremely entertaining manner. [More]

Labels: food, fun

Labels: fun, politics

Unspeak, writer Steven Poole's term for a phrase or word that contains a whole unspoken political argument, deserves a place in every journalist's daily vocabulary. Such gems of unspeak, such as pro-choice and pro-life, writes Poole in the opening pages in his book Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality, represent an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem. [more]

Poole calls community one of the most perfect political words in English because it

can mean several things at once, or nothing at all. It can conjure things that don't exist, and deny the existence of those that do. It can be used in celebration, or in passive-aggressive attack. Its use in public language is almost always evidence of an Unspeak strategy at work.

The plasticity of community allows it to encompass geography, ethnicity, profession, hobby, or religion, and in the mouths of diplomats and journalists can expand to include everybody, as in the international community, a concept that Justice Antonin Scalia once described—rightly—as "fictional."

Last year, the companies made $927 million in profit, a record. They received an additional $829 million from the government in administrative fees to help run the program. On top of that, taxpayers kicked in $2.3 billion to subsidize premium payments for farmers.

All of that to pay farmers $752 million for losses from bad weather. [More]

Labels: media, policy

Labels: fun

• We can finally start cooperating at the WTO. I mean, with $4 corn who is going to whine about losing LDP's or small direct payments?

Farm subsidies: The United States has offered to cut the amounts it is allowed to spend on subsidies to farmers under WTO rules by 60 percent. But the European Union and leading developing countries say that it could still spend over $22 billion a year, more than 2005 spending of some $19.5 billion. It is widely assumed that the United States has at least a further $5 billion of cuts up its sleeve made up of so-called “product-specific de minimis” support, which it rarely uses.

The United States is also under pressure to tighten disciplines in the so-called “blue box”, which is a half-way house between farm aid that is considered trade-distorting and aid that is not, like rural development spending.

The EU, which spends far more, has offered a 70 percent cut in subsidies, but could go to 75 percent if the United States went to 65. [More] [Another view]

• We won't have to worry about cotton farmers or ranchers or livestock producers, but can just throw 'em under the bus as we all produce for wildly expanded mandated markets. Southern producers are not idiots - they are already gaming the shift from cotton to corn. And no doubt scientists will come up with new hybrids or something those guys can grow instead.

The Energy Future Coalition, a Washington-based proponent of alternative fuels, said yesterday that the group expects Bush will call for more than 60 billion gallons a year to be blended with U.S. gasoline by 2030, up from the 7.5 billion by 2012 mandated by current law. [More]

• Agribusinesses will be ecstatic as demand for fertilizer, machinery, seed, etc. will be huge. My guess is we're going to need a bunch of trucks and roads to move all that stuff from where it is to where it is needed as well. If not, Iowa could soon be knee-deep in DDG's.
  

Labels: ethanol, farm bill

1. Providing all the medical care we now have to everybody.
2. Including the growing number of "uninsurables" (thanks to rapidly improving screening such as genetic testing) outside groups or self-employed.

Labels: economics, health, insurance

Labels: fun

But my favorite is a Discovery On Demand channel, which has a series called "Sunrise Earth." Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Put down the bong. But you need no bong to be entranced by the simplicity of the series. It takes the highest quality video cameras around the world and captures 50-minute scenes of the dawn in a variety of spots on this water-planet. There is no narration; no music; just natural sounds. Here's one review:

When seen in vivid, crystal-clear HDTV, the effect is hypnotic. Few viewers will fail to have an impulse to immediately book a flight to join the fun. After watching last night's program on the Cadillac Mountains at the Acadia National Park in Maine, I quickly checked my work schedule for vacation dates. When seen in high-def, the burnt orange skies lingering over the Maine mountains was enough to make me forget, well, nearly everything.

Again, like Kubrick's "Dawn of Man," Sunrise Earth lets the high-def pictures do the talking. There is no narrator getting in the way; only an occasional graphic reveals the location and the time of day. It's a powerful technique. By eliminating the human altogether, Sunrise Earth makes you feel like what you're seeing could be what you would have seen hundreds of years ago. It's nature unplugged.

Labels: TV

• Here in Illinois (Rex Grossman for President!) we about to start paying full price for electricity after a mandated freeze. Politicians are sorting themselves out and a helpful "consumer" group has emerged to inform the public about this proposed rate hike.

• In New York, PETA is being attacked by a similar "consumer group"

There's a very public PR campaign (full page ads in today's New York Times, billboards in Times Square) attacking PETA. Click on their website and hit about us, and you'll find a link. Two more clicks and you find:

The Center for Consumer Freedom is supported by restaurants, food companies and more than 1,000 concerned individuals. From farm to fork, our friends and supporters include businesses, employees and consumers.

The Wikipedia article sheds a bit more light, pointing out that a cigarette company was the initial sponsor of the group and that fast food restaurants are funders as well. Millions of dollars worth of funding from a few giant corporations. [More]

Labels: blog, media

Meatlifting is a grave problem for food retailers: According to the Food Marketing Institute, meat was the most shoplifted item in America's grocery stores in 2005. (It barely edged out analgesics and was a few percentage points ahead of razor blades and baby formula.)

Meat's dubious triumph is due in part to a law enforcement crackdown on methamphetamine use. Meat used to be the shoplifting runner-up to health-and-beauty-care items, a category that includes cough medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in home-cooked meth. In 2003, for example, a quarter of shoplifted products were HBCs, while meat took second place at 16 percent. But states began passing laws that require stores to move medicines containing pseudoephedrine behind secure counters. That was enough to cut the pinching of HBCs, which fell by 11 percent between 2003 and 2005.

Labels: beef, retail

We climb to 2,000 feet and head toward the densest concentration of hogs in the world. The landscape at first is unsuspiciously pastoral -- fields planted in corn or soybeans or cotton, tree lines staking creeks, a few unincorporated villages of prefab houses. But then we arrive at the global locus of hog farming, and the countryside turns into an immense subdivision for pigs. Hog farms that contract with Smithfield differ slightly in dimension but otherwise look identical: parallel rows of six, eight or twelve one-story hog houses, some nearly the size of a football field, containing as many as 10,000 hogs, and backing onto a single large lagoon. From the air I see that the lagoons come in two shades of pink: dark or Pepto Bismol -- vile, freaky colors in the middle of green farmland.

From the plane, Smithfield's farms replicate one another as far as I can see in every direction. Visibility is about four miles. I count the lagoons. There are 103. That works out to at least 50,000 hogs per square mile. You could fly for an hour, Dove says, and all you would see is corporate hog operations, with little towns of modular homes and a few family farms pinioned amid them.

Labels: environment, pork

But the most mind-boggling datapoint to me is a 2006 World Bank estimate that opium production in Afghanistan now accounts for at least one-third of the country's GDP.

Hardly a surprise that we've failed to locate bin Laden. Hell, we apparently can't even find almost half a million acres of opium. [More]

“Wait a minute,” Specter interjected. “The Constitution says you can’t take it away except in case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there’s a rebellion or invasion?”

Gonzales continued, “The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion. [More of a very scary interview with your Attorney General and mine]

Labels: drugs, law

Labels: fun

Labels: future, globalization

Labels: fun

Labels: economics, future

Labels: fun

Labels: research

I think of an auctioneer friend of mine, Dean Eastman from northeast Iowa. Dean had a very nice farm auction last Saturday. I dropped him an email wondering how things sold. His response back really caught my attention.

"My phone has rung nonstop for two weeks asking about machinery. They called the morning of the sale, during the sale, and the day after the sale. I'm still getting calls wondering what stuff sold for from people that couldn't make it to the sale. I feel we had a very good sale on Saturday! I do a low-high price estimate on everything when I have a sale with this many dollars. Low being a train wreck bad day, and high being almost a pie in the sky high price. We overshot the high number by 18%." [More]

Labels: economics

Whether it be the practice of an ancient civilization or the subject of examination by a modern day culture, Mummification has always been held in the highest esteem by society. It was common among early cultures, most notably for religious reasons. With the onset of the Dark Ages and the plagues, the art of Mummification began to diminish until finally, this form of care ceased. Looking back in time, it was a practice that extended around the world.

Still, we find ourselves attracted to the role Mummification has played throughout history and the significance it has carried throughout time. It touches something deep within our esoteric being. History shows us what great concern Mummification expressed in the final care of one of nature's most beautiful creations: the human being. [More]

Labels: death, fun

Labels: fun

Labels: religion

But what about $20 per barrel oil by 2011? Oil analyst Peter Beutel of the energy consultancy Cameron Hanover thinks it could happen. Beutel told MSNBC:

"I believe we have that a lot more oil on this planet than people believe. And we are going to find it over the next few years."

Beutel thinks oil prices could fall as low as $20 a barrel in the next 4 to 8 years before beginning to rise again.

And why not? All other things being equal, higher prices encourage more exploration and more technical improvements which leads to more production. If Beutel's right, New York Times reporter John Tierney's $5,000 bet with peak oil alarmist Matthew Simmons is looking pretty good.

In times of great flux, pundits gamble on your memory issues and make all kinds of wild prognostications they can later point back to as prescience.

Then there are the oil analysts. At the beginning of last year most were still expecting the oil price to fall back. It didn’t. By the end of 2006 they had more or less given up and started forecasting long-term oil prices in the region of $70 to $100 a barrel. It should come as no surprise, then, that the oil price spent much of last week in freefall and is now hovering at about $55 — its lowest level since mid-2005. The result? Many analysts have flip-flopped and now predict oil at below $50 by the end of the year. [More]

Meanwhile, I'm retracting my prediction about Rex Grossman...

Labels: future, oil

The logic for Reversal and Restoration is obvious and deep. Intelligent humanity made revolutions in productivity sweep all industries in the 20^th century. We now stamp out cars like tin ducks and microchips too. Unnoticed by many, revolutions in productivity also penetrated forestry and farming. Combined with more efficient production chains and changes in consumer taste, rising yields began to allow us to meet demand for food, fiber, and fuel while using less land: the Great Reversal. The enlarging forests and abandoned farms in the US and in many other nations show it.

Because cities will take a few hundred million hectares more land for the 10 billion people of 2070, we need the Reversal to spread to more nations and for it to extend into a Great Restoration. In the US, foresters may offer 70 million hectares for nature and farmers that much or more. The net effect should be to allow a restoration of nature on land in the US exceeding the size of 100 Yellowstone National Parks or twice the area of Spain. Regional and national case studies could build a global picture. Reflecting the diffusion of productivity through industries around the world, the Great Reversal will surely happen at different times in different places and with different potential. Setting goals, such as a 300 million hectare or 10% expansion of the world's forest area by 2070, may help.

Accomplishing the Great Restoration is the work of the 21st century for foresters, farmers, scientists, engineers, and all the other participants in the wood and food businesses. While avoiding the dangers of intensive cultivation, wise humanity can lift average yields toward the present limits and lift the limits even more. By sparing cropland, we can also spare water and nitrogen.

If you want a more bucolic version of the ecological future, consult a paleontologist. The paleontologists look further into the future to a time when the great evolutionary opportunities are not agricultural habitats, but are, instead, vast forests—to a time when the seas are again filled with large species—to a time when new large vertebrates roam new kinds of plains. They look forward in time to a world more interesting to us than our present evolutionary future. The paleontologists can do all this because they begin their discussions of future evolution with the statement, "once humans go extinct." [More]

Labels: environment, future

Labels: culture

About an hour after Taylor reported his “flying saucer” sighting, a barking dog attracted him and “Lucky” Sutton outside. Spotting a creature, they darted into the house for a .22 rifle and shotgun, thus beginning a series of encounters that spanned the next three hours. Sometimes, the men fired at a scary face that appeared at a window; sometimes, they went outside, whereupon, on one occasion, Taylor’s hair was grabbed by a huge, clawlike hand. Once, the pair shot at a little creature that was on the roof and at another “in a nearby tree” that then “floated” to the ground. Either the creatures were impervious to gun blasts or the men’s aim was poor, since no creature was killed.

Labels: fun, travel

Labels: blog

1. The cotton program
2. The NE Dairy Compact
3. The Iowa caucuses
   
4. The Senate debate rules

• The cotton program: Let's see, the WTO has ruled it unsportsmanlike conduct, the cost per farmer has raised all kinds of eyebrows, and cotton farmers are voting with their planters on their predictions for this venerable program. In addition, it doesn't have any conservation or energy glamor. Pillar Strength: 45% .
• The NE Dairy Compact: I have no idea what this was about. All I know is whole bunches of politicians of every political faction from very populous states supported it. It expired in 2001. Pillar Strength: 0%
• The Iowa primary: Iowa residents take very seriously the job of selecting the candidates for president by flocking to caucuses in January. Unfortunately, that is not their unique Constitutional duty. The "momentum" theory of the modern nomination process and examples like the "Dean Scream" exaggerated the importance both of Iowa voters and farm issues. The best explanation of this phenomenon in my opinion was a series of episodes on "West Wing" and dealt with how candidates are forced to take positions they would avoid otherwise to prevent being blown out in the IA voting. This emphasis is being challenged by candidates choosing to skip the caucuses and by other states moving their primaries earlier. Pillar Strength: 40% but dropping fast.
• Senate debate rules: These gentlemanly rules came close to being altered by the Republican majority during heated judicial appointment squabbles. Although they went to the brink, maybe Majority Leader Frist had a prophetic vision about losing the Senate last fall. Pillar Strength: 100%

Labels: policy

The [U.S. asparagus] industry has been decimated by a U.S. drug policy designed to encourage Peruvian coca-leaf growers to switch to asparagus. Passed in 1990 and since renewed, the Andean Trade Preferences and Drugs Eradication Act permits certain products from Peru and Colombia, including asparagus, to be imported to the United States tariff-free....

Meanwhile, the Washington [state] industry is a shadow of its former self. Acreage has been cut by 71 percent to just 9,000 acres. [More]

Jon Gettman, the report's author, is a public policy consultant and leading proponent of the push to drop marijuana from the federal list of hard-core Schedule 1 drugs — which are deemed to have no medicinal value and a high likelihood of abuse — such as heroin and LSD.

He argues that the data support his push to begin treating cannabis like tobacco and alcohol by legalizing and reaping a tax windfall from it, while controlling production and distribution to better restrict use by teenagers.

"Despite years of effort by law enforcement, they're not getting rid of it," Gettman said. "Not only is the problem worse in terms of magnitude of cultivation, but production has spread all around the country. To say the genie is out of the bottle is a profound understatement."

Labels: drugs, trade

Labels: fun, travel

Miliband muses on farm farts ban

While it is unlikely that this will result in a "fart-tax" with civil servants chasing cows round with breathalyzer style methane measurers, Miliband did argue that farmers should act to reduce methane emissions by feeding cattle different food, breeding them to live longer, altering the handling of manure and getting farms to generate "biogas" or "biofertiliser" from animal waste.

Extending the polluter pays principle to farming would likely lead to higher food prices, but Miliband insisted that climate change could provide an opportunity for farmers, as it has done in other sectors. [More]

[My emphasis]

A correct interpretation of the polluter pays principle would detine pollution as any byproduct of a
production or consumption process that harms or otherwise violates the property rights of others. The
polluter would be the person, company, or other organization whose activities are generating that byproduct. And finally, payment should equal the damage and be made to the person or persons being
harmed.
Inanimate objects and the environment do not incur costs, people: do. It is not merely the physical
property that is being damaged, but the interests of the owner. However, most advocates of PPP rarely
talk about harm to people. Instead, they misappropriate the economic theory by redetining the concepts
of cost and damage to apply to things rather than to people. The statement above is typical. Polluters
are said to be those who “damage” or impose “costs” on the environment. [More]

Labels: beef, environment

1. Hugo Chavez, the wildly popular leader of Venezuela, executed an even harder left turn and started nationalizing key sectors of his economy. His example is rippling across South America as a repudiation of capitalists' naive presumption that showing poor people data tables and charts about how they are better off than they would be even with a tiny few becoming obscenely rich. Look, I agree the arithmetic is correct, but the marketing is not working. A vastly scaled down version of this revolt on inequality could be building here.
2. Even weirder, while in Washington DC yesterday I was walking by Union Station about 5:30 PM. when I heard a choir of really good voices singing in a plaza. This choir director could not resist and I stood transfixed for several minutes as a group of about 25 young people made some gorgeous music in open air - always a tough venue. The punch line: They were part of the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement. [I thought that dude was in jail, actually] An earnest young disciple approached me with the inevitable literature, and "engaged me in dialogue" I listened patiently - I had accepted the free concert - and tried to leave by telling him I was simply a choir director who loved good choral music, and I complimented (sincerely) the singers. He began to walk with me explaining how a choir was a good way to show the power of their socialist ideas. I stopped and looked him in the eye and said, "Look - a good socialist choir is a wonderful thing. The real trick is to form good libertarian choir." He turned and left me.

Labels: economics, socialism

Labels: insurance

Labels: food, fun

Labels: future, oil

• Bread For the World -
  

Bread for the World hasn't released the kits yet, but the message will be this: America has a moral obligation to change the way it subsidizes farmers and put more money into conservation, nutrition and rural development.

"What we have learned is that the current system does not work for rural America," said the Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World. "Disproportionately, the money in the farm bill is going to a relatively few people, mostly prosperous people." [More]

• Chesapeake Bay Foundation -
  

Maryland farmers are not getting their fair share of the money that the federal government hands out each year in farm production payments. That's a major complaint of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which says that if bay region growers received as much funding as their Corn Belt counterparts, the bay could be a lot cleaner.

An analysis by the environmental group shows that for every dollar's worth of food produced in Maryland, farmers receive 4.8 cents in federal support money. That is well below the national average of 9 cents. Farmers in North Dakota receive an average of 22 cents in federal payments.

The payment figures are based on the foundation's analysis of the U.S. Department of Agriculture farm support payment data for 2000 to 2005. [More]

• Democrats - the party of fiscal discipline (Benefit of the Doubt Rule #6) But seriously,
  

• International Chess Federation
  
• Estonian Parliament
• American Chemical Society

Labels: farm bill, policy, politics

Labels: fun, space

Labels: food

While corn growers have always been aware that South Africa grows corn, and competes in the export market, there is a lot of corn (maize) grown on subsistence farms all across the continent. We also forget how honkin' huge Africa is (this is a Gall-Peters Projection Map which is area accurate, unlike the Mercator projections we are used to, where Greenland/Canada/Alaska are swollen disproportionately):

My guess is that the struggle to develop stable governments in sub-Saharan Africa could yet yield the largest payoff in terms of lifting the poorest of the poor, simply by letting their farmers get on with their work.

Labels: economics, globalization, production

• #2: This year I will be unequivocal in my support of free trade. I am going to stop bashing the Chinese for offering bargains to American consumers. I am going to ask the Bush administration to revoke the textile quotas so Americans will find it easier to clothe their families. I am going to vote to repeal the antidumping laws, which only protect powerful domestic industries from foreign competition. I am going to admit that unilateral disarmament in the trade wars would make the U.S. a richer nation.

• #3: This year I will ask farmers to accept the free market. While I believe the government should provide a safety net for the truly needy, taxpayers shouldn't have to finance handouts to farmers, many of whom are wealthy. Farmers should meet the market test as much as anyone else. I will vote to repeal all federal subsidies to growers of corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans and rice. I will vote to allow unrestricted import of sugar. (See resolution no. 2.) I will tell Americans that eliminating our farm subsidies should not be a "concession" made in trade negotiations but a policy change that we affirmatively embrace.

Labels: economics, politics

In the spring of 1998, Macey notes, a group of six students at Cornell University’s business school decided to do their term project on Enron. “It was for an advanced financial-statement-analysis class taught by a guy at Cornell called Charles Lee, who is pretty famous in financial circles,” one member of the group, Jay Krueger, recalls. In the first part of the semester, Lee had led his students through a series of intensive case studies, teaching them techniques and sophisticated tools to make sense of the vast amounts of information that companies disclose in their annual reports and S.E.C. filings. Then the students picked a company and went off on their own. “One of the second-years had a summer-internship interview with Enron, and he was very interested in the energy sector,” Krueger went on. “So he said, ‘Let’s do them.’ It was about a six-week project, half a semester. Lots of group meetings. It was a ratio analysis, which is pretty standard business-school fare. You know, take fifty different financial ratios, then lay that on top of every piece of information you could find out about the company, the businesses, how their performance compared to other competitors.”

The people in the group reviewed Enron’s accounting practices as best they could. They analyzed each of Enron’s businesses, in succession. They used statistical tools, designed to find telltale patterns in the company’s fi-nancial performance—the Beneish model, the Lev and Thiagarajan indicators, the Edwards-Bell-Ohlsen analysis—and made their way through pages and pages of footnotes. “We really had a lot of questions about what was going on with their business model,” Krueger said. The students’ conclusions were straightforward. Enron was pursuing a far riskier strategy than its competitors. There were clear signs that “Enron may be manipulating its earnings.” The stock was then at forty-eight dollars—at its peak, two years later, it was almost double that—but the students found it over-valued. The report was posted on the Web site of the Cornell University business school, where it has been, ever since, for anyone who cared to read twenty-three pages of analysis. The students’ recommendation was on the first page, in boldfaced type: “Sell.” [More]

Labels: ethanol, oil

As new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of the condition, can be contracted by consuming beef or beef products infected with rogue prions, the work could pave the way for breeding cattle that cannot infect people with prion disease.

This could be exploited by the meat industry, which could raise guaranteed BSE-free beef cattle, though the disease has become a much less significant problem since the practice of feeding cows on meat and bone meal from dead animals was banned. Such beef would also have to overcome public resistance to the idea of eating meat from GM livestock. [More]

Labels: GM, technology

Three days later, Arnold and his partner and investor – an oil and gas attorney from San Antonio named Philip Mani – were attacking the site with a backhoe. After digging down about 5 feet, Arnold scrabbled into the hole with a shovel and started clearing. Finally, the blade clanged against something metallic. The more dirt he moved, the more meteorite he exposed. They lowered the backhoe scoop and strapped the rock to it. Grinding and whining, the machine pulled free the biggest meteorite Arnold had ever seen.

METEORITE HUNTING wouldn't be so lucrative if it weren't for a music executive named Darryl Pitt. He collected meteorites for years, buying them at rock-bottom rates when the only other buyers were scientists. But in 1995, sitting on a collection numbering in the hundreds, he guessed that people would pay big money for space flotsam. "I needed a mechanism to elevate the profile of my extraterrestrial friends," Pitt says. But he knew he wouldn't get any traction unless he could make people see his "friends'" inherent beauty. A former professional photographer, Pitt started shooting pictures of each of his rocks, lighting them as if they were magazine cover subjects and writing rapturous descriptions in the vein of wine connoisseurship. Then he put them on the block at Phillips International Auctioneers and Valuers, alongside dinosaur eggs and a 3,749-carat opal. The plan worked; the first auction netted close to $200,000.

Pitt is still at it. His online catalog describes meteorites as "objets d'art" with sensuous, zoomorphic shapes – an expert sales job. "Sleek tabletop specimen … evocative of the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth," goes one entry. "With a bright platinum patina and compelling from all perspectives."

Only in a culture where some have enormous amounts of money with little or no demands on it can essentially worthless objects, or even subjectively valued things such as art, command significant exchange rates.

And what's with the doctored picture? Meteorites don't glow.

[via Neatorama]

Update: How many meteorites hit the Earth every day? About 20-50.

Keep looking up!

Labels: economics, fun, rural life, wealth

Labels: fun

1. How much horsepower will this baby suck up chopping husks and stalks?
2. How far will a silage wagon get you through the field?
3. Why didn't this guy choose his hybrid for stalk strength (note the reel)?
4. How are you going to store this stuff? And keep it from spontaneously combusting?
   
5. Why not bale it?
6. I suppose we can sell our grain carts, since we'll be stopping every through or round anyway.

Labels: ethanol, farm machinery

It's a challenge to persuade a nation to exchange its current hearing assistive technology (which requires locating, checking out, and wearing conspicuous headsets) for a technology that many more people would actually use. But the results of our west Michigan experiment, and another in 1000 California homes, supports my optimism. Doubling hearing aid functionality will greatly increase hearing aid acceptance and use.

With on-the-horizon technology, we can also foresee music buffs with wireless ear bud loudspeakers. When that day comes, having something in one's ear will become as mundane as glasses for the eyes, and millions of people with hearing loss will be enjoying fuller and more connected lives.

That is the stage we have reached now on earth. The artificial systems we have built still depend on us, and would perish with us if we all died, but they are evolving far faster than we are, and are taking up the planet's resources in the process.

Some people still maintain the fantasy that we humans are in charge and can still control the memes we have let loose. Yet it must be increasingly obvious that we can't; that they are in the driving seat, not us. They are sucking up the planet's resources increasingly fast and, being selfish replicators, they have no foresight and don't care in the least what happens to us or the planet; they can't, they are just replicating information. So we are hovering at this second danger point right now.

Perhaps this critical point has been reached on countless planets and none pulled through—perhaps acquiring new replicators is so dangerous that memes (or their equivalents) always wipe out the original replicator that spawned them, explaining why we have not yet heard from any other intelligent beings out there. Or perhaps it is possible to for an intelligent species to work out what has happened, repair the damage and live in harmony with the creatures it unwittingly gave rise to.

I think it is, and I am optimistic that we will.

Labels: future, predictions

• John's World Nursery - not very funny, but it is in Australia - always good for a funny accent attempt.
• John's World of XV - some of you might not know what XV is: xv is an interactive image manipulation program for the X Window System. That should clear things up. I have no idea what this site is about.
• Sir John's World - art for some.
• 

• John's World of Freethrows - pretty self-explanatory
• 
  
• John's World of Zodiac Art - I think I'm a Feces
• John's World of Camo - Hard to tell what's going on there.
• John's World (NYC edition) - self-absorbed drivel from some guy I don't care about. Not like this blog at all.
• John's World - an early website by a budding Internet geek for whom many of us will soon be working, no doubt
  

Labels: blog, fun