1. $38B
2. $69B
3. $147B
4. $23B

1. $1.4T
2. $8.7T
3. $232B
4. $678B

Labels: economics

Labels: fun

Labels: farm bill, politics

Labels: culture, fun, home

Labels: fun

The World Trade Organization largely ruled against the United States in an interim decision that it has failed to scrap a series of what the trade body says is illegal subsidies paid out to American cotton growers, U.S. and Brazilian trade officials said Friday.

The interim ruling was handed out confidentially to the parties late Friday. A final verdict, expected in September, could open the door for billions of dollars worth of Brazilian trade sanctions against the United States.

WTO panels rarely change their findings between preliminary and final rulings, and the apparent result is a major victory for Brazil's cotton industry and West African countries that have claimed to have been harmed by the American payments. [More]

Labels: farm bill, trade

Labels: food, fun

Labels: fun, health

Labels: culture, food

Rereading the book 10 years later has been gratifying and humbling. A number of its ideas are, I think, more relevant than ever, while other passages come off as exaggerated or shortsighted. The premise still holds, and thankfully no longer requires much convincing: In our work, home, and social lives, we are saturated with data and stimulus. While our grandparents were limited by access to information and speed of communication, we are restricted largely by our ability to wade through it all. As with calories, we must work constantly to whittle down, prioritize, and pick out the choice nutritional bits. If we don't monitor our information diets carefully, our cerebral lives quickly become bloated. Attention gets diverted (sometimes dangerously so); conversations and trains-of-thought interrupted; skepticism short-circuited; stillness and silence all but eliminated. Probably the greatest overall threat is that so many potentially meaningful experiences can easily be supplanted by merely thrilling experiences. [More]

Labels: culture, technology

The problems with the Republican brand among young people run deeper than Bush.
Young people are often cynical about politics, but believe in government. By a 68 – 28 percent
margin, voters would rather have a bigger government providing more services over a smaller
government providing fewer services. Even Republican young people prefer a larger, more
generous government (57 – 40 percent for bigger government with more services).
Young people adopt views diametrically opposed from the Republican Party on issues
as diverse as the war, global warming, gay marriage and, to some extent, illegal immigration as well. In fact, there is not a single issue in this survey where younger voters line up with the
Republican Party. [More]

Labels: culture, politics

In 2000, pork butchers Smithfield Foods Inc. and Premium Standard Farms Inc. agreed to pay $17.3 million for research on new ways to handle the waste. Last year, researchers at North Carolina State University offered five alternatives that did reduce ammonia and pathogen emissions but were up to five times more expensive than a lagoon system.

The new legislation creates a cost-sharing program for farms that agree to convert to the new technologies. For the next five years, the state will cover 90 percent of the cost, or up to $500,000 for each applicant. The state share drops to 80 percent in 2012 and to 75 percent in 2017.

The hope is that the cost will drop as the systems are improved and demand for them grows.

Justice said she has fielded numerous calls already from farmers interested in the program and companies that believe they can develop still more systems that will meet the new standards.

"The market is wide open," she said. "(Farmers) are ready to go." [More]

Labels: environment, pork, production

More rain and snow is falling in Canada, Britain and northern Europe, two-thirds of which is attributable to human activities. Britain is suffering one of its wettest summers ever, with severe flooding in England. More rain is also falling in areas immediately south of the equator including Brazil, southern Africa, Indonesia and Australia. Nearly all of this is caused by mankind. But countries immediately north of the equator, in Africa, India and parts of China, are getting less water. [More]

While sidewalks crackle in the summer heat, NASA scientists are keeping a close eye on the sun. It is almost spotless, a sign that the Sun may have reached solar minimum. Scientists are now watching for the first spot of the new solar cycle to appear. The 11 year long solar cycle is marked by two extremes, solar minimum and solar maximum. Solar minimum is the period of least solar activity in the solar cycle of the sun. During this time sunspot and solar flare activity diminishes, and often does not occur for days at a time. [More]

Though hurricane season begins on June 1, the stormiest months tend to be August and September, when conditions in the Atlantic basin are most ripe for a hurricane to develop. During these months, ocean temperatures are warmer and there is typically less wind in the upper atmosphere to shear the tops off of developing storms.

Some seasons have seen unusually late starts. The 1992 season, for example, didn’t start up until August. And boy did it start with a bang: Hurricane Andrew decimated South Florida. [More]

Labels: marketing, weather

The rest is hysteria. In time, this would mean Jeeves and Wooster, with twitchy Laurie as the twit and Fry as the heroic valet, but the purest expression of Fry-&-Laurieness is now available for your ravenous consumption in the form of A Bit of Fry & Laurie—The Complete Collection ... Every Bit!, which gathers every superlatively clever, terrifically asinine, and absolutely inexplicable moment from the four seasons of their BBC sketch show. Its 13 hours are a monument to the comedians' moment of love at first sight—of discovering someone else who took silliness very seriously. Just look at the facial hair they glued on to inhabit their hundreds of clowns over the years. [More]

Labels: fun, TV

Labels: fun

But a gathering body of evidence suggests that local food can sometimes consume more energy -- and produce more greenhouse gases -- than food imported from great distances. Moving food by train or ship is quite efficient, pound for pound, and transportation can often be a relatively small part of the total energy "footprint" of food compared with growing, packaging, or, for that matter, cooking it. A head of lettuce grown in Vermont may have less of an energy impact than one shipped up from Chile. But grow that Vermont lettuce late in the season in a heated greenhouse and its energy impact leapfrogs the imported option. So while local food may have its benefits, helping with climate change is not always one of them. [More]

Labels: environment, food

Labels: fun

A proposal from Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett would help pay for $4 billion in nutrition and food stamps by taxing U.S. plants of companies owned by firms located overseas. Republicans charge the increase would endanger tax treaties and raise the cost of doing business in the United States. [More]

The conservative Club for Growth interest group is planning to include the vote on the Fairness in Farm and Food Policy amendment in the group's 2007 congressional score card. The Club for Growth calls the bill supported by House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "disastrous." The club will distribute the score card to other members of Congress and the public. [More]

Labels: farm bill, politics

Labels: culture, family

Nowhere in their Internet biographies do Vorreyer or Thoma say they are farmers. But they both have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal farm subsidies, money that isn't supposed to go to anyone who isn't farming.

Since 2000, taxpayers have given Vorreyer more than $1.4 million in subsidies, according to federal databases. Thoma has collected more than $655,000 since 2000.

The law says subsidies aren't supposed to go to anyone who isn't "actively engaged" in farming, and that means more than buying fertilizer and hiring folks to do the work.

Taxpayer money has flowed to Thoma and Vorreyer largely through corporations called MV Inc., which has Vorreyer as its sole shareholder, and A&M Inc., which is owned equally by the sisters, federal records show. The sisters also collected nearly $600,000 between 2000 and 2005 via J.C. Dowson Inc., a corporation they own with their brother, John.

• Farmers have to work harder than other people and have no control over their economic circumstances.

• Farm subsidies make food cheap. (AKA - "without us you'd starve")

• Oh yeah, well you can go #$%&*##$

Labels: farm program, policy

"The emissions that come from these worms can actually be 290 times more potent than carbon dioxide and 20 times more potent than methane. In all environmental systems you get good points and bad points."

This is because worms used in composting emit nitrous oxide - a greenhouse gas 296 times more powerful, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide.

Labels: environment, science

The Raven

There once was a girl named Lenore
And a bird and a bust and a door
And a guy with depression
And a whole lot of questions
And the bird always says "Nevermore."
[More]

Labels: fun

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1. How much total money did the FSA hand out during this period? If we do a rough estimate of $20B per year, then the dead guys got about 0.7%. In other words, 99.3% of these funds were NOT dispersed to dead people.
   
2. How does the above compare to other welfare programs of government (SS, Homeland Security, etc.)?
3. How much are we willing to spend in staff, auditors, investigators, etc. to recover that $1.1B?
4. Have you ever tried to close an estate in 2 years? I have and it's like trying to kill a zombie.

Labels: farm bill

In the hubbub surrounding the markup, few noticed some important news: The U.S. business community came out for reduced agricultural subsidies.

In a letter to House and Senate leaders, it called on Congress to “enact long-needed reforms” in farm policy that will “create a dynamic opportunity for U.S. trade negotiators to increase the pressure on our trading partners to offer substantial new market access opportunities that would benefit American farmers, manufacturers and services providers.”

It was signed by several of the biggest guns in corporate America, including the Business Roundtable (representing Fortune 500 giants), U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Retail Federation, National Association of Manufacturers and Information Technology Industry Council. [More]

In 2005, a Kellogg Foundation-sponsored poll conducted in Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota found clear preferences for a strict $250,000 cap on farm program payments, which is the proposed cap in the Dorgan-Grassley bill reintroduced two weeks ago. All three states are considered farm states, and both farmers and non-farmers were surveyed. You can find the poll here. A quote from the poll summary:

[By] more than a two-to-one margin (67 percent to 31 percent) voters in these states support limiting direct payments to single farms to no more than $250,000. Interestingly, support is higher among farm income households and Republicans than among voters as a whole.

Since farm income households certainly understand farm programs and their impact, one might assume that their higher support for strict subsidy limits is significant. Not only do voters in these states support strict payment limits, they are willing to take that policy preference into the voting booth:

a majority of voters in each state describe themselves as more likely to support a member who supports limiting direct payments to single farms to no more than $250,000 and at least a third describe themselves as "much more likely" to support such a member. [More]

Labels: farm bill, politics

Labels: farm bill, farm program, politics

Labels: culture, media, TV

Labels: farm bill, politics

A simmering spat over food quality is fast replacing the cheap Chinese yuan as the focus of trade disputes between the U.S. and China. [More]

Politicians on both sides also need to keep their calm. There have been hawkish voices coming out of Washington demanding the US government pursue serious trade sanctions against China after the meat import bans.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in China have accused the Western media of stoking the fears over food safety in China. With next year’s Beijing Olympics fast approaching, there is a danger that China will over-react in cracking down on food safety in a ham-fisted attempt to demonstrate to the world that it treats food safety with paramount importance, punishing undeserving businesses.

Food safety and protecting the health of consumers should be a central concern of all governments. However, politicians should not lose sight of the importance of trade to economic health. Food safety issues must be looked at with a calm head – not with the patriotic zeal currently on display in some quarters of Beijing and Washington. [More]

The games had a profound impact on the city of Atlanta and many in the Atlanta metro area consider the games to be instrumental in transforming Atlanta into the more modern city it has become since. Examples of this are the mid-rise dormitories built for the Olympic village. One of these complexes became the first residential housing for Georgia State University, and has recently been transferred for use by the Georgia Institute of Technology. Other examples include Turner Field, which was a modification of the original Centennial Olympic Stadium, and where the Atlanta Braves baseball team now makes its home. Centennial Olympic Park was also built for the events and is still in use. Atlanta used no public money to finance the games, which cost US$1.8 billion to host. It was the first city in Olympic history to use ticket sales, commercial endorsements, advertising, and private money alone to fund the hosting of the Olympics. The consequence of this, however, was that many felt that the games in Atlanta were over-commercialized and were less exciting than previous games.[2] [More]

Labels: food, international, sports

The data do tell us that economic mobility -- not equality -- is associated with happiness. The GSS asked respondents, "The way things are in America, people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living -- do you agree or disagree?" The two-thirds of the population who agreed were 44% more likely than the others to say they were "very happy," 40% less likely to say that they felt "no good at all" at times, and 20% less likely to say that they felt like failures. In other words, those who don't believe in economic mobility -- for themselves or for others -- are not as happy as those who do.

Perhaps in a world where there is no opportunity for advancement, an important concern is how one's income measures up to others. In the real world where people believe there is opportunity, however, one's own income potential matters a great deal more than what others are earning. Some studies even find that the happiness of workers rises as the incomes of others climb relative to their own, because they see the incomes of others as evidence of what they themselves can achieve. [More]

Labels: culture, economics

Labels: biotech, future, technology

Labels: fun, history

Labels: fun

• the farm is also your home
• Moody Farms is bidding on it
• you farm on 2 (or 3 or 4) sides of the property, making one larger efficient tract
• it represents 18% of your farm income
  
• without it you will have to leave farming
• you have farmed it for 40 years
• your mailbox sits on it
• you compete by blind sealed bid without negotiation
• your operating time frame is generations, not years
• landowners who don't know or care what is "fair"
  

Labels: economics, production

In other words, the Department of Defense is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined—there are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service. [More]

Labels: culture, international, policy

• The limit for DCP's would be umm... raised to $60,000 (What the heck?)
  
• The limit for CCP's would stay at $65,000
• The limit in MLG's would be ...eliminated. (OK - I get the joke)
  

Grassley has been working with Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., on an effort to institute payment limitations in farm commodity programs.
"We believe that if the House would include the Grassley-Dorgan payment limit language in their version of the farm bill, it would save close to $700 million," said Grassley. "With the Senate and House trying to find offsets this year, this seems to be a very good step in the right direction, considering the need to find offsets for spending. Our payment limit legislation would not only help find extra money, but it is real reform in the farm program as well." [More]

Labels: farm bill, farm program, policy, politics

Labels: fun

The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen, both within China and outside, as a major economic disaster, effectively being a "Great Leap Backward" that would affect China in the years to come. As inflated statistics reached planning authorities, orders were given to divert human resources into industry rather than agriculture. The official toll of excess deaths recorded in China for the years of the GLF is 14 million. Western writers using demographic assumptions and other manipulations have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million.^[4] The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years" and the Three Years of Natural Disasters. Many local officials were tried and publicly executed for giving out misinformation^[5]. [More]

Second, the Chinese people, especially the peasant farmers, deserve a huge amount of credit. Here's a couple of paragraphs I wrote recently:

The Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward - agricultural land was less productive in 1978 than it had been in 1949 when the communists took over. In 1978, however, farmers in the village of Xiaogang held a secret meeting. The farmers agreed to divide the communal land and assign it to individuals – each farmer had to produce a quota for the government but anything he or she produced in excess of the quota they would keep. The agreement violated government policy and as a result the farmers also pledged that if any of them were to be jailed the others would raise their children.

The change from collective property rights to something closer to private property rights had an immediate effect, investment, work effort and productivity increased. “You can’t be lazy when you work for your family and yourself,” said one of the farmers.

Word of the secret agreement leaked out and local bureaucrats cut off Xiaogang from fertilizer, seeds and pesticides. But amazingly, before Xiaogang could be stopped, farmers in other villages also began to abandon collective property.

Deng and others in the central leadership are to be credited with recognizing a good thing when they saw it but it was the farmers in villages like Xiaogang that began China's second revolution. [More]

Labels: history, international, trade

But is CCD such a tragedy? The honeybee may be the only insect ever extended charismatic megafauna status, but it's already gone from the wild (and it wasn't even native to North America to begin with). Sure, it makes honey, but we already get most of that from overseas. What about the $14.6 billion in "free labor"? It's more expensive than ever: In the last three years, the cost to rent a hive during the California almond bloom has tripled, from $50 to $150.

Good thing the honeybee isn't the only insect that can pollinate our crops. In the last decade, research labs have gotten serious about cultivating other insects for mass pollination. They aren't at the point yet where they can provide all of the country's pollination needs, but they're getting there. This year the California Almond Board two-timed the honeybee with osmia ligneria—the blue-orchard bee: Despite CCD, they had a record harvest. [More]

Labels: policy, production

That's a good point. But where Fine fails is in believing that Murdoch wouldn't buy the Journal just to destroy it. He fails to recognize that rotten old bastard won't be able to keep himself from defiling the paper. It's in his nature to contaminate his own wells. As experienced Journal reporters and editors leave or are driven out, their replacements will owe their allegiance to Murdoch and Murdoch's people. Will they bring to news coverage the impartiality we've come to expect from the Journal? Or will they pull and duck punches on his behalf? Will they skew stories about Viacom and Condé Nast and China to please the well-known views of their master? You betcha. I can't recall any News Corp. employee who got a raise or a promotion after undermining the Murdoch empire's interests with an honest, accurate story. [More]

Labels: media

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The House Agriculture Committee recommendations for Title I commodity subsidies extend the outdated, broken system of the past - moving policy in the wrong direction and making it worse. Congress cannot accurately forecast prices and loan rates for the life of the next farm bill. [More

Agriculture policy -- another manifestation of the welfare state, another contributor to another faction's entitlement mentality -- involves a perennial conundrum of welfare, corporate as well as individual: How do you break an addiction to government without breaking the addicted? If Lugar and like-minded legislators can accomplish their aims, their achievement will be comparable to the welfare reform of 1996 -- the fecund year of the short-lived Freedom to Farm Act. As Lugar again puts his hand to the plow, attempting to plow under a New Deal remnant, wish him well. [More]

The specialty-crops industry accounts for nearly half of all the cash-crop receipts in agriculture. With 119 members of Congress supporting our initiative, we believe that congressional leaders and members of the House Agriculture Committee should roll up their sleeves and enact policy geared toward the 21st century. [More]

A spokesman for Pelosi said the two have spoken about payment limits, which she believes is necessary to reform the farm bill. Peterson met Pelosi on Thursday and was scheduled to meet her again on Friday. [More]

Labels: farm bill, farm program, policy

Labels: politics

The Merc's purchase of the CBOT marks a transition from pit to electronic trading, said Caitlin Zaloom, an assistant professor at New York University and author of ``Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London'' (University of Chicago Press, 238 pages, $29).

Zaloom said moving the Merc's pits to the CBOT building preserves traditional face-to-face trading, which many traders still prefer. Eventually, though, she expects trading floors to become obsolete as electronic trading takes over. [More]

Labels: marketing, technology

The ingredients were the basic four of any word-processing system. First was the computer itself, the Processor Technology SOL-20. Its detailed specifications—its 48K of random access memory, its Intel 8080 microprocessing chip—are now of antiquarian interest, since Processor Technology went out of business several months after I bought my computer.

The second element in my system was the monitor, a twelve-inch TV screen. Some monitors are like black-and-white TVs; mine—which, oddly enough, was produced by the same company, Ball Corporation, that makes home-canning supplies, displays light-green letters against a background of dark green and is supposed to be easier on the eyes. Third was the external storage device—the equipment that saves the documents you've written when the computer is turned off. The equipment I chose, two small tape recorders, was such a complete disaster that I must discuss it separately later on. Fourth was the printer, a ponderous machine, built like a battleship, which had been an IBM Selectric typewriter before it was converted to accept printing instructions from a computer.

These four machines, and the yards and yards of multi-strand cable that connected them, were the hardware of my system. The software consisted of a program called The Electric Pencil, with a manual explaining the mysteries of "block move," "home cursor," and "global search and replace."

I skip past the day during which I thought the computer didn't work at all (missing fuse) and the week or two it took me to understand all the moves The Electric Pencil could make. From that point on, I knew there was a heaven. [More]

Labels: computer, technology

The National Bureau of Statistics raised its estimate of China's 2006 growth rate from 10.7 percent to 11.1 percent. It nudged up its estimate of total output by 146.4 billion yuan ($18.8 billion) to 21.1 trillion yuan ($2.705 trillion).

The revision brought China closer to Germany, the world's third-largest economy after the United States and Japan. Germany's 2006 output was $3 trillion but its 2.5 percent growth rate was well below China's. [More]

Labels: economy, fun, international

Stream Machine Double-Barrel Water Launcher, $17.95
Also a syringe-style water cannon, this Stream Machine's twin-barrel design (they also come in single-barrel models) doubles the volume of your assault. We drenched our live target and sent him reeling. It still has the problem of using up too much of its 20-ounce ammo supply too quickly, however, so it's good for only five shots per barrel.

As with the Aquablaster, drawing water into the Stream Machine's tubes without spilling is harder than it would seem. And it's common for one barrel to fill with more than the other, so you end up shooting uneven streams. But the two gunlike grips make handling the Stream Machine simple and enable you to put some muscle into the compression, giving it gravity-defying range. We launched a 40-foot stream, farther than with any other model.

Strength: 10
Ease of use: 6
Fun: 4
Total: 20
[More]

Labels: fun

Thanks to well-thought-out Farm Bill support programs, our farmers persevere, and American consumers benefit. In developed nations around the world, most families have not earned enough money to buy food for the year until April or May, but the average American family has done so in just five weeks.

[Translation: Subsidizing corn makes the price lower, and hence food cheaper]

Our nation has chosen a wise strategic and economic course of ethanol and biofuel development. This goal increases corn prices, but it has a negligible effect on the price of food in America. It's worth remembering that the box part of a box of cornflakes costs consumers more than the corn does. [More]

[Translation: The price of corn doesn't affect food prices] [My Comments]

Thus, it is no surprise that the price of corn has doubled in the past year — from $2 to $4 per bushel. We are already seeing upward pressure on food prices as the demand for ethanol boosts the demand for corn: Nationally, food prices were up 3.9 percent in April, compared to the same month a year earlier. Until the recent ethanol boom, more than 60 percent of the annual U.S. corn harvest was fed domestically to cattle, hogs and chickens, or used in food or beverages. Thousands of food items contain corn or corn byproducts. A spokesman for one of California's largest cattle ranches and feedlots noted that since the end of 2005, the company has experienced a 36 percent increase in the cost of feed, "which translates to an additional expense of $101 per head raised." Reflecting these trends, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association has demanded an end both to government subsidies for ethanol and to the import tariff on foreign ethanol.

The poultry industry is also squawking. The National Chicken Council is demanding remedies from senators who represent the big southern poultry states, and the National Turkey Federation estimates that its feed costs have gone up nearly $600 million annually. [More]

Labels: ethanol, livestock

Labels: culture, music

Labels: production

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Respiratory illnesses typically spread via airborne and droplet routes. Airborne transmission involves tiny particles containing pathogens that can remain suspended in the air for prolonged periods of time. Tuberculosis typically spreads by this method. Droplet spread involves larger particles that quickly settle out of the air. Some diseases (SARS and influenza among them) can spread by both routes.

Some pathogens (the influenza virus, for example) can also exist on nonporous surfaces for hours. Theoretically, people don't even need to sit near an infected individual to be exposed. Touching contaminated surfaces such as door handles, window covers, and faucets and then later touching a mucous membrane (eyes, etc.), can lead to inadvertent exposure. This is why quarantine during an influenza pandemic won't work. Quarantine involves separating out healthy people who have been potentially exposed to the illness. For influenza, people can be exposed and not know it. [More hysteria]

People flying with upper respiratory tract infections who cough and sneeze could be offered face masks out of courtesy to fellow passengers. Aircraft could keep a supply of them on board for this purpose. I used to keep a little bottle of 60 percent alcohol-based hand gel in my purse for flights until a crack down on security prohibited carrying bottles of liquids and gels on board. I would squirt a glob into my hand and rub my hands together vigorously after touching bathroom door handles or window shades. Airlines could offer such gels to passengers--especially since not everyone washes their hands regularly.

At a national level, nations have an obligation to make sure that their citizens don't spread disease. International travelers should be required to show proof of vaccination against diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, and pertussis, and proof of a negative tuberculosis skin test (or documentation of noninfectiousness in the event of a positive skin test) when applying for passports. People who travel frequently to high-risk areas should be required to document yearly tuberculosis skin tests before flying.

My proposed substitute is the "virtual handshake." I explain that I'm sick, and suggest that we pretend to shake hands from two feet away. Sound good?

It does to other economists, confirming my view that we are models of good sense and common decency. But the rest of the world reacts poorly - so poorly that I've given up offering them my virtual hand in friendship. [More]

Labels: culture, travel

Labels: energy, fun, media

These results clearly suggest that yawning regulates the temperature inside your head, and that perhaps we yawn to cool our brains. What we don't have here is any biochemical cause-and-effect, but this is an incredibly interesting theory all the same.

The findings, if valid, draw a few unexpected conclusions about yawning. First of all, rather than stimulating sleep, a good yawn should fend off falling asleep. And secondly, far from being an indicator of boredom, yawning would appear to be a mechanism for maintaining attention.

So be sure and remember this for your next staff meeting -- it's an excellent excuse, and possibly even a valid one! [More]

Labels: fun, health, science

Photos of China's new second-generation nuclear submarine, believed to be equipped with 12 intercontinental ballistic missile launch tubes, have been published on Google Earth, according to reports. Nuclear weapons analyst Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists discovered the images of China's top secret submarine while searching photos of China's northeastern naval ports. One image clearly depicts China's next-generation Jin-class nuclear powered submarine, according to Kristensen, who has republished the image on his Strategic Security Blog at www.fas.org. The satellite image, believed to have been taken during late 2006 by the commercial Quickbird satellite, shows the submarine alongside a pier at the Xiaopingdao Submarine Base south of the city of Dalian. Kristensen said the images show a vessel about 35 feet (10 meters) longer than the earlier-generation Xia-class nuclear submarine. The U.S. reportedly believes China has been conducting sea tests on the Jin-class submarine since 2004 and then later carried out additional tests on its missile system. The U.S. reportedly believes the submarine and its missile system will be ready for deployment before 2010 [More]

Commercial satellite imagery shows Iran is building a new tunnel complex inside a mountain near a major nuclear site — a possible attempt to protect sensitive uranium enrichment activity from aerial attack, nuclear analysts said Monday.

The pictures taken on June 11 were obtained from DigitalGlobe, a commercial satellite imagery firm, by the Institute for Science and International Security, whose president is David Albright, a physicist and former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. [More]

Still, in the perennial tug of war between security and privacy, security appears to be winning. The next wave in CCTV, experts say, is to marry traditional surveillance with computer software to make cameras better at detecting suspicious behavior that can be the precursor to a crime.

The police are believed to have used a rudimentary form of such technology to make the first arrest in this plot — Mohammed Asha, a Palestinian of Jordanian descent, who was captured on a motorway after his license plate was recognized by roadside cameras. [More]

Labels: technology

For decades, the answer to that question has ranged from a tepid "not really" to a resounding "no." Understandably. In the past, rural interests -- diverse as they are -- have spoken with disjointed, and at times competing, voices. They have also been dominated by agriculture with a capital A -- not the small family farms that most of us care about and yet which receive little help, but the big commodity growers that grab the lion's share of federal farm assistance. [More]

In an effort to cut back, some lawmakers want to reduce or eliminate direct payments, subsidies that are not based on current crop production or prices. The chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, has supported this approach and encouraged spending more money on conservation programs. [More]

Yet a promising drive to shift subsidies away from the largest and more profitable grain and cotton farms to smaller fruit and vegetable outlets, as well as to conservation programs to help farmers keep fertilizer out of the Chesapeake Bay, is faltering badly. [More]

The answer, in a report to be released at noon today, is that farmers in 36 of 55 districts represented by freshmen members would receive a fairer share of federal farm spending if Congress shifted direct payments to share the cost of clean water or wildlife habitat. Farmers in 12 districts would see little or no change. Many of these districts are located in California, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio — large farm states that currently receive little support from USDA. [More]

Labels: farm bill

The rising food costs fueled by ethanol demand are also affecting U.S. consumers. "All things that use corn are going to have higher prices and higher cost, to some extent, that will be passed on to consumers," says Wally Tyner, professor of agriculture economics at Purdue University. The impact of this is being felt first in animal feed, particularly poultry and pork. Poultry feed is about two-thirds corn; as a result, the cost to produce poultry--both meat and eggs--has already risen about 15 percent due to corn prices, says Tyner. Also expect corn syrup--used in soft drinks--to get more expensive, he says. [More]

One speaker in particular championed this concept, suggesting that the opportunities for premiumisation were almost limitless. Now don't get me wrong, I am well aware that the likes of Whole Foods and Tesco and brands like Rachel’s Organic and Green & Black’s have successfully travelled down this road in recent years. But something about his unqualified optimism didn't sit well.

I realised it was my own shopping habits that were causing my doubts. Increased inflation and rising interest rates here in the UK have without doubt blunted my own personal spending power, causing me to think twice before I drop the premium sausages into the basket, or reach for organic salad, rather than standard products.

The question must be asked then, how does this theory of unlimited premiumisation sit if we enter a sustained period of economic recession? In the UK and US, this question has been largely academic in recent years. [More]

Labels: economy, ethanol, food, organic

Two recent scientific discoveries mark the latest steps toward the ultimate medical-diagnosis technology: the tricorder.

Bones McCoy made Star Trek's portable black box famous by using it to diagnose ailments without ever touching a patient. Now, studies show that the tricorder is closer to becoming reality, because of new medical-imaging technology and a new state of matter. [More]

Labels: fun, science

Labels: culture, fun, music

One of those bridges, the one closest to Passu, was the scene for one of the funniest moments of the entire trip, when a Pakistani man attempted to cross the bridge with his goat. The wooden planks were too far apart for the goat to negotiate the bridge on his own, so the man had to carry it. I thought he would take it in his arms as he would a baby, but that was not the case. Instead, he used ropes to tie the goat’s legs together, much to my bemusement. Eventually he hoisted the goat up and, with Wendy’s help, put it on his back and wore it as a backpack; both of the goat’s front legs were tied to the equivalent back leg, creating two open circles into which he could slot his arms. The man slowly crossed the flimsy bridge in this fashion, and the screams of the tormented goat echoed all over the valley. [More]

Labels: fun, photo

Labels: fun

Dr Burnham's research budget ran to a bunch of $40 games. When there are many rounds in the ultimatum game, players learn to split the money more or less equally. But Dr Burnham was interested in a game of only one round. In this game, which the players knew in advance was final and could thus not affect future outcomes, proposers could choose only between offering the other player $25 (ie, more than half the total) or $5. Responders could accept or reject the offer as usual. Those results recorded, Dr Burnham took saliva samples from all the students and compared the testosterone levels assessed from those samples with decisions made in the one-round game.

As he describes in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the responders who rejected a low final offer had an average testosterone level more than 50% higher than the average of those who accepted. Five of the seven men with the highest testosterone levels in the study rejected a $5 ultimate offer but only one of the 19 others made the same decision.

What Dr Burnham's result supports is a much deeper rejection of the tenets of classical economics than one based on a slight mis-evolution of negotiating skills. It backs the idea that what people really strive for is relative rather than absolute prosperity. They would rather accept less themselves than see a rival get ahead. That is likely to be particularly true in individuals with high testosterone levels, since that hormone is correlated with social dominance in many species.

Economists often refer to this sort of behaviour as irrational. In fact, it is not. It is simply, as it were, differently rational. The things that money can buy are merely means to an end—social status—that brings desirable reproductive opportunities. If another route brings that status more directly, money is irrelevant. [More]

Labels: economics, fun, psychology

An opponent of big livestock farms says a Ball State University study of the hog industry in two Indiana counties offers proof that the sprawling farms bring very little economic impact to surrounding areas.

Bill Weida, an economist for GRACE Family Farm Project, said Ball State's analysis of hog farms in Jay and Randolph counties shows that the pork industry in those counties "is creating so little economic activity that it's almost irrelevant." [More]

Fact: Agriculture is the driving force in most of Indiana’s rural economies. For every $1
of property taxes paid by agricultural land/farms, $0.40 is used in local services
(American Farmland Trust). Also, a survey by the Indiana Soybean Alliance found that
an 8,000 head swine facility generates $17,000 annually in property taxes and will
produce $40,000 in valuable organic crop nutrients. [More]

2006 State Gross Domestic Product (value of all economic activity) $249B
2006 Contribution by Ag (farms, forests, fish, hunting) $ 2B
Source: BEA

[Note: 2005 is the latest data on a county level]
Total local income Jay $525M Randolph $681M
Ag income $15M $11M

Labels: economics, rural life

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When the economists fed the information into their computer model, there were some signification predictions that resulted:
• World trade in grain would increase from the current 264 mmt up to 561 mmt in 2060, however US export volumes would grow from the current 101 mmt to 122 mmt in 2010 and then decline.
• The shift is for increased corn from Argentina and Eastern Europe, soybeans from Brazil and Argentina, increased wheat from Australia and Canada; and reduced wheat from Argentina and the United States,
• US exports initially increase as a result of increased planted acreage and availability of grain to export, as well as a decline of Chinese exports. The subsequent decline in US exports results from increasing competitiveness from other exporting countries and domestic use of corn for ethanol. Wheat exports drop and soybean exports increase.
The economists studied the impact of what would happen if the lock and dam infrastructure on the Mississippi between Cairo and Davenport and the Illinois River were upgraded by 2020 to handle greater volumes of barge traffic. “The results indicate a change in barge shipments by about +4 mmt by 2020, nearly all of which would be for corn and soybean in equal amounts. Thereafter, the change in barge shipments would be about +1 mmt to +2.5 mmt, with most of it being soybeans.”
They also found that when volumes of grain increase because of reduced delays and costs on the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, total barge shipments decrease on the Ohio River. [More of a great summary from Farmgate]

Delay costs, in aggregate, are comprised of the lower delay costs that would occur at
current capacity, plus the volume effect. The impact of expansions on delay costs are in the area of $61 million, inclusive of both direct effects. Most of this is accrued on Reach 4, followed by Reach 2 and 1. Expansion results in an increase in barge costs due to the increase in volume, a decrease in rail shipping costs, and a slight increase in ocean shipping costs. In total, the impact of expanding locks is a decrease in costs by about $52 million. [More]

Labels: environment, policy

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This military expansion is made possible by startling economic growth. China's GDP now surpasses that of Britain or France. According to Goldman Sachs, China will overtake America around 2027 and become by far the world's biggest economy by 2050 (see chart 3). Even now, it is helping to prop up the weak American dollar by buying large chunks of American debt. China is pushing America aside as the world's biggest exporter, and last year it produced more cars than the United States. Europe, too, poses challenges to America: London is vying to replace New York as the most important financial centre, and the euro has displaced the dollar as the main currency of the international bond market. [More]

Labels: economics, international

Reading Kingsolver, one could also conclude that pesticides were created by giant chemical companies whose sole aim was to cause cancer. But even the American Cancer Society agrees that there is "no evidence that residues of pesticides and herbicides at the low doses found in foods increase the risk of cancer." Studies also show that eliminating pesticides could cut corn yields by 30 percent, rice by 57 percent, soybeans by 37 percent, and wheat by 24 percent. Again, that would mean that a lot more of nature would have to be plowed up to maintain the food supply at current levels.

Family farms are not declining because of some conspiracy by industrial ag giants. Actually, what happened is that farmers became so productive that we needed fewer of them. In 1950, 15 percent of Americans lived on farms. Today only 1 percent of us live on farms. The meantime, the output of staples like wheat and corn nearly tripled, while vegetables nearly quadrupled. And the amount of land devoted to crops fell slightly. This dramatically increased agricultural productivity liberated many like me from farm labor so that we could do other work.

Labels: food, policy

"Bioenergies have become a key factor in the functioning of agriculture markets," Loek Boonekamp, a senior OECD official, told reporters after the release of the study.

"In the medium term we believe that they could lead to prices on international markets rising quite considerably, at higher levels than what we had predicted in former outlooks and above the average of the last 10 years," he added.

Boonekamp said that farm prices, mainly grains, would likely rise by 20 to 50 percent over the next decade. [More happy economic talk]

Labels: ethanol

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Drinking an eight ounce glass of pomegranate juice daily increased by nearly four times the period during which PSA levels in men treated for prostate cancer remained stable, a three-year UCLA study has found. The study involved 50 men who had undergone surgery or radiation but quickly experienced increases in prostate-specific antigen or PSA, a biomarker that indicates the presence of cancer. UCLA researchers measured "doubling time," how long it takes for PSA levels to double, a signal that the cancer is progressing, said Dr. Allan Pantuck, an associate professor of urology, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and lead author of the study. [More]

Labels: health

Within the next decade those older farmers will be looking for someone to take over their operations and selling millions of acres of land.

Much of that land will be merged into bigger farms with fewer people working on them. Rural communities will lose even more young people, and a few will struggle for survival. Some stores that sell tractors and fertilizer will suffer.

"You lose a farmer here or a farmer there, you lose your customer base," said Burtchin, 60, who sits on the board that runs the local grain elevator. [More] [My emphasis]

Labels: culture, economics, media