I Built the Barely Adequate*...

Somehow I suspect many of these fixes came from Canada - the home of Red Green.

*As opposed to Farm Journal's "I Built the Best"

[via presurfer]

Animal agriculture all comes down...

To the essential fact of humans controlling the lives (and deaths) of animals.  There are important degrees of severity involved, but to expect to find a clever solution to the fundamental outcome of our predator/prey relationship is hardly rational.

But with Iberico production, even this trade-off is not as clear as it might seem. Iberico pigs actually spend the first nine months of their lives in confinement. Granted, it's not factory-farm confinement—they've got some room to move and all-natural feed to eat, nor are they docked or clipped. But the promoted benefits of free-range are absent—no sun, no freshly fallen acorns, no wallowing in big mud pits. While indoors, they're castrated, spayed, kept to a feeding schedule, administered antibiotics when sick, directed to eat and sleep in carefully chosen locations, and, just before the barn doors open to the freedom of la dehesa, mutilated with a nose ring.

As responsible consumers, it's easy to decide to avoid factory-farmed pork. The hard part is what to make of the most acceptable alternative. Does free-range farming justify the mutilation that's often required to keep pigs outdoors? As an ethical matter, the question is open to endless debate. What the conscientious meat eater can take away from it is not so much a concrete answer as a more nuanced way to think about our food choices. In this age of deeply convincing attacks on factory farms, consumers must be careful not to immediately assume that every alternative to factory farming is as "all natural" or humane as its advocates will inevitably declare. The alternatives might require still more alternatives. [More]

Engineers are the poster-children for this problem, but as long as we consider moral end ethical teaching to be a egghead sideline of university educations, we will continue to be troubled by our choices and our society more than perhaps is necessary.

It just wouldn't be the Fourth...

Without the Stars and Stripes Forever by Sousa



I still stand by Vladimir Horowitz, however. (From a 1945 concert, I think)



Since you can't see him actually perform, watch this effort to match. (Arkady Volodos)




And finally, back by popular demand:

Happy Independence Day!!

Another reason not to brag...

About your FICO score.

Yet others have found that there are significant limits to the rationality of personal lending, which is encumbered by many all-too-human prejudices and idiosyncrasies. For example, my colleague Enrichetta Ravina has documented that there is a massive beauty premium—i.e., cheap loans for pretty women—enjoyed by Prosper borrowers, despite the fact that better-looking people are in fact more likely to default on their loans. Economists Devin Pope and Justin Sydnor find that racial discrimination also taints the online loan market—black borrowers are much less likely to obtain funding and more likely to pay higher interest rates relative to otherwise-similar whites looking for financing. [More] [My emphasis]

It makes me wonder how I get any credit at all.


[via curious capitalist]

Waxman, Markey and me...

Those of you who have been reading Incoming (formerly known as John's World) for some time have been participants in my efforts to grasp the truth of the global warming debate and what our response could be.  For those who tuned in late, here are links to previous posts which illustrate the journey I have been on. (Here, here, and here)  [Note: these are collections of various posts sorted by labels like "climate", etc.  Some overlap will occur]

But the time for theorizing is over.  We are faced (or our Congresshumans are) with actually doing something. What is the right decision?

First of all, we may never know.  The time scale involved for this problem exceeds our lifetimes, and almost certainly, our attention span. I think this handicap more than any other induces paralysis by most of my fellow professionals.  In events where neither our education or experience will avail, our first instinct is to resort to skepticism.  We in agriculture have for the most part adopted a methodology of requiring guarantees and insurance for any decision. Oddly, as I have often noted, both the public and government have been happy to oblige.

But global warming requires us to commit to changes and investments that won't payoff in double digits next quarter. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite: we are being asked to sacrifice, on a very significant scale, for the benefit of generations far in the future.

This is definitely not the pattern of our moral decisions.  In fact, all our lives most have carefully avoided looking at the legacy we will leave behind. On the whole, we have not sacrificed financially.  By eliminating the draft, we have avoided the very real possibility of sacrificing to defend our nation, unless we choose the risk personally.  Meanwhile reams have been written about our inability to let go of the dream to "have it all".

Much of the opposition to climate legislation, I think, centers on the idea of sacrifice.  Crimony, we're still trying to grasp the concept of savings - which is sacrificing consumption now for benefits later.

Lost in this self-concern is the very real possibility of ownership of the problem. GHG emissions are something we excel at and our lifestyles exult in it. Perhaps the perspective we need is not so much a noble sacrifice as finally paying for the damage we caused.

Secondly, although we throw around scientific conclusions and especially the results of computer models, few of us really grasp what these assertions mean outside the laboratory. Such common tools as mean versus median and even ℃ versus ℉ trip us up when constructing a solid logical case for our position.  The result has been rampant cherry-picking of data, and context-free statements.  In short, the science of climate change has to viewed through pretty murky waters.

Third, the confrontation between climate science and economics has been a huge battle, with economists struggling to interpret physical science and express it in terms of wealth and risks.  There is growing pushback against the yardsticks preferred by economists.

There will be no snow left on Kilimanjaro within a few years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is zero. There will be no year-round snow left in the Himalayas in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is tiny. There will be no Everglades in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is marginal. There will be no Venice in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is tiny. There will be no New Orleans in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is extremely small.
There are two issues here. First, GDP measures income, not wealth. If your house burns down, it will most likely not change your income. Does that mean you should spend nothing to protect your house from burning down? Second, GDP only measures things that can be measured in money. But the worth of many precious things cannot be measured in money: Yellowstone National Park, the independence of one’s country from foreign rule, the existence of elephants and polar bears, clean air, the ruins of the city of Ur, the fact that humans have traveled to the moon, etc. [More]

In addition, the computer models in both arenas are imperfect, but perhaps more so in the realm of economics.  The best economic arguments against W-M may be the work of Jim Manzi.  But even so, they are not without troubling problems.

On the one hand, you have the actual science of climate change.  And although climate models are enormously complex and subject to considerable uncertainty, they're fundamentally based on physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics.  We know how much CO₂ we're pumping into the atmosphere and we can project with pretty good confidence how much that's going to increase over the next century if we do nothing to stop it.  We know how the greenhouse effect works, we have pretty good historical records of how CO₂ concentration correlates with global temperatures, and we have a pretty good sense of the feedback loops involved in things like melting icecaps and saturation of the ocean sinks.  Basically, our level of uncertainty is within tolerable bounds here.  And what we know is that if we do nothing, global temps are absolutely certain to rise 2°C over the next century, fairly likely to rise by 4-5°C, and at least somewhat likely to rise by 6-7°C.  The lower number would be bad but, just possibly, manageable.  You could at least make an arguable case, as Manzi does, that the cost of preventing an additional 2°C is higher than it's worth.  The two bigger numbers, however, would be catastrophic.  Unfortunately, the science increasingly suggests that these higher numbers are considerably more likely than we thought even a few years ago, and any serious cost-benefit analysis needs to address that.  Using only the lower number avoids tackling the real problem we're up against.
So that's the climate analysis in a nutshell.  On the opposite hand you have the economic analysis.  And that's simply hopeless.  An economic analysis that goes even ten or twenty years into the future is as much guesswork as anything else.  One that goes a hundred years into the future is just voodoo.  It looks like economics, but you might as well be throwing darts.  Compounded over a century, even minuscule changes in assumptions and operating parameters produce enormous changes in your conclusions, and the result is that you end up deep in the weeds arguing over tiny differences in those assumptions instead of simply admitting that they're flatly impossible to forecast.  That's good for slowing down the debate, but not much else. [More] 

I lean toward favoring this conclusion, as the ability to predict long-range economic activity has been remarkably imprecise in the last say, 18 months. Further, economists are rightfully reluctant to taint their analyses with imprecise, albeit shrewd political projections.

Sure, it’s just like the Iraq War. Decades of science using data freely available to all and leading to a series of rigorous, skeptical, peer-reviewed analyses suggesting that action should be taken culminating in a legislative process that has spanned several years is exactly like the rushed, abbreviated, stove-piped false intelligence fueled push to attack Iraq. Manzi is a smart guy, but this is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen him write. Moreover, he’s simply wrong. Decadal defense spending, for instance, is something like $4 trillion. I’d guess that perhaps half of that is pure waste or unnecessary spending. And we’ve been spending like this for decades.
And I’ll reiterate again that a) the costs of the legislation are likely overstated, b) Manzi is assuming that there will be no ancillary benefits to the legislation, and c) Manzi is assuming that after this legislation is passed there is no change in global warming policy in America thereafter, ever, for the next century. I don’t have a problem with people using Manzi’s analysis as a datapoint to consider in determining how they feel about Waxman-Markey, but you’d have to check your common sense at the door to buy his interpretation of it. You’d have to assume that the uncertain costs of an unprecedented climatic shift are likely to be no big deal and well within our ability to handle, while the rather mundane use of government policy to trim a bit off of consumption in an effort to prevent us from killing hundreds of millions of people is bound to be totally debilitating. [More]

Many economists would be more favorably inclined to W-M if the very changes ag was able to insert were not there. The effort could be much better for government finances had writers of the bill stayed with the idea of making carbon reduction a real dollars-and-cents issue immediately.  This means selling permits and granting few exceptions and offsets.

Therefore, the best policy option would be to use the revenues from cap and trade or from a carbon tax to decrease the marginal tax rates of other distortionary taxes, such as the payroll tax and individual and corporate income taxes (or to reduce the deficit, which would encourage capital accumulation and help prevent future marginal rate increases). Using the revenue in that fashion would alleviate much of the economic inefficiency that would otherwise arise from cap-and-trade or a carbon tax.
The allocation of emissions permits and decisions on how to spend the revenue raised from permit auctions are sure to be legislative arguments that will not be easily resolved. However, one thing is for certain: Just as implementing a carbon tax and then giving away all of the profits from the tax to rich shareholders would be a policy that no one would support, "free permit allocation" under a cap-and-trade system should be quickly dismissed as a bizarre policy option. Don't give away the cap-and-trade permits! [More]

A body of critics also hold out for a silver bullet from technology. We've had these things appear in history of course, but two factors suggest this time it will be different.  First, we already know some things we could do to cool the Earth for instance.  The bullets would appear to be more arsenic than silver.

Technology that could redden the skies and chill the planet is available right now. Within a few years we could cool the Earth to temperatures not regularly seen since James Watt’s steam engine belched its first smoky plume in the late 18th century. And we could do it cheaply: $100 billion could reverse anthropogenic climate change entirely, and some experts suspect that a hundredth of that sum could suffice. To stop global warming the old-fashioned way, by cutting carbon emissions, would cost on the order of $1 trillion yearly. If this idea sounds unlikely, consider that President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, said in April that he thought the administration would consider it, “if we get desperate enough.” And if it sounds dystopian or futuristic, consider that Blade Runner was set in 2019, not long after Obama would complete a second term.
...
Dyson’s early geo-engineering vision addressed a central, and still daunting, problem: neither sulfur-aerosol injection nor an armada of cloud whiteners nor an array of space-shades would do much to reduce carbon-dioxide levels. As long as carbon emissions remain constant, the atmosphere will fill with more and more greenhouse gases. Blocking the sun does nothing to stop the buildup. It is not even like fighting obesity with liposuction: it’s like fighting obesity with a corset, and a diet of lard and doughnuts. Should the corset ever come off, the flab would burst out as if the corset had never been there at all. For this reason, nearly every climate scientist who spoke with me unhesitatingly advocated cutting carbon emissions over geo-engineering. [More ideas worth considering]

The second fault with hoping for a technological solution to AGW is it will likely not happen without climate legislation.  The penalties of carbon emission are what gives economic value to be pursued by entrepreneurs and inventors.

Finally, it is impossible to overestimate the degree of political leveraging underway with W-M.  On the face of it, why would any politician support a measure clearly flawed with enormous costs in the face of a highly skeptical public? I would suggest one reason is our history is laden with many such efforts that have become major contributors to our well-being as a nation.  Imperfect can work.

Conservatives are continuing to pull the Republican party towards self-immolation today, vowing to defeat the eight House GOPers who backed last week's climate change bill unless they change their votes.
Targeting those eight with the success of the climate bill is a silly and futile task, as the Huffington Post reports, given that Democratic leaders were prepared to twist more arms if fewer GOP votes materialized.
But while we note that most of the GOP climate backers had ties to the environmental community that explain their votes, it's worth pointing out what else all eight have in common: a local investment in transit. [More]

Nonetheless, a strategy of appealing to fears and poorly understood science is not without political risk itself.

But conservatives seem strangely intent on ignoring the power of markets to encourage such innovation. Right now, the emission of carbon is essentially cost-free. Putting a price on carbon would make the development of cleaner energy technologies more profitable. New technologies could be employed, not only by America, but also by China, India and the rest of the developing, polluting world. And it is an added (but not minor) benefit that American resources would no longer be transferred to Saudi princes, Russian autocrats and Venezuelan dictators.
It is perfectly legitimate to argue that the House cap-and-trade system is flawed beyond redemption -- so complex and confusing that it only benefits regulators and the lobbyists who outwit them -- and that Congress should start over with a carbon tax.
It is also legitimate to contend that, while the cap-and-trade system is flawed, it is better than inaction and necessary to spur innovation. And for eight House Republicans who took this stand at great political risk, it is not only legitimate -- it is admirable. [More]

One way to enhance the odds of passage is to load the bill with freebies for everyone.  Ag made sure we got ours, for instance.  In the end, making the leap toward sacrifice was too much for our organizational leadership despite those successes.  In my thinking, Big Ag has not improved its position by choosing this rather dithering and spineless tactic.

What I am surprised about is the agriculture industry’s indignation and opposition to the legislation. Years ago, Kansas State University carbon expert Chuck Rice told me the handwriting was on the wall for some sort of cap on carbon emissions. “It’s critical that agriculture be involved in the discussion so that farmers can participate in a carbon market,” he said.

Well, this bill actually allows farmers the ability to fully participate in a carbon offset program – in other words, to get paid for farm activities that help reduce GHG emissions.

For those of us following climate legislation, this is a real boon for agriculture. Farmers might actually have a seat at the carbon offset table!

Better yet for agriculture, this legislation moves the oversight of carbon-reduction efforts by farmers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Department of Agriculture. Can you imagine the EPA regulating how you practice your no-till to keep carbon in the soil, or how you manage manure to reduce methane gases released into the atmosphere? The regulations would not likely be based in the reality of production agriculture.

“This is the best deal that agriculture could have gotten out of the House,” says Laura Sands, a partner at environmental consulting firm The Clark Group and a member of the Ag Carbon Market Working Group. [More]

In the process, the actual legislation has become a predictably bloated package of unrelated topics, making it repugnant for even long-time supporters to embrace.

In fact, the bill also contains regulations on everything from light bulb standards to the specs on hot tubs, and it will reshape America's economy in dozens of ways that many don't realize.
Here is just one: The bill would give the federal government power over local building codes. It requires that by 2012 codes must require that new buildings be 30 percent more efficient than they would have been under current regulations. By 2016, that figure rises to 50 percent, with increases scheduled for years after that. With those targets in mind, the bill expects organizations that develop model codes for states and localities to fill in the details, creating a national code. If they don't, the bill commands the Energy Department to draft a national code itself. [More]

So why have I decided to support this nasty piece of work?  First and foremost, I believe the science behind AGW and carbon emissions. It is low practice to suggest the vast majority of climate scientists are fools and/or conspirators.  If nothing else, our scientific community has propelled us forward at a staggering rate, something that cannot be done based on faked results and anything short of the pursuit of truth.

Any effort to change the habits of energy consumption built over millenia will be awkward and excruciatingly slow, but they must begin with something. At the minimum, W-M is something.  Tom Friedman captures my position pretty well.

Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.

More important, my gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.

Ditto if this bill passes. Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable. That ain’t beanbag. [More]

Moreover, W-M could be the first of many international building blocks, addressing the complaint of non-participation by China and India.

My impression is that Mr Obama is anxious to do something about climate change, yet realises that America can't halt the process of warming by itself; it must have agreement on emission reductions from basically all of the world's large economies. So perhaps the very imperfect Waxman-Markey bill is best seen as a means to push forward a global agreement on emissions. I have previously argued that carbon tariffs would be counterproductive, but it's difficult for those of us without the full complement of diplomatic tools available to the American government to know for sure. My sense is that wise men might have been willing to tolerate a lot of congressional horse-trading and weakening of the bill so long as it seemed likely to facilitate climate negotiations at Copenhagen and beyond. But those wise men may change their position if the included tariff provision undermines its utility as an international bargaining chip.The extent to which the administration pushes Congress to remove this provision—and the language and ultimata it does or does not deploy—may tell us a lot about the good this bill can do in generating real progress on emission reductions. [More]

The trade provisions are bad news, and I hope the Senate can clean the bill up.  But one huge reason I have struggled to affirmative side of W-M is the growing realization it represents the of the next great technology race.  Right now we are not even in the game.

On energy, a disturbing factlet. (And obviously not the only disturbing observation on the energy-and-climate front.) I heard three people separately observe that when it comes to future sources of "clean" energy, there is not a single field in which U.S. companies are the technical or market leaders. One person gave an informal ranking of the leaders this way:
   Solar-powered electricity (ie, photo-voltaic systems): Norway, Japan, China
   Solar-thermal systems (for heating water or buildings) Spain the leader in getting systems deployed
   Wind power: Holland, Denmark, China
   Geothermal power: nobody
   Nuclear power ("clean" in the carbon-footprint sense): France, Japan
   CCS, "Carbon capture and sequestration" (stripping out CO2 and burying it): Norway, Australia, Canada. [More]

This is the reward to leadership - selling the world the next generation of energy technology. This will not occur without a clear signal to investors and researchers we are serious about changing our energy policy.

But here's what I think is the overriding reason to support W-M despite its flaws: even if it's weak, and even if the rest of the world doesn't join in immediately, it starts to align incentives in the United States
in favor of inventing and deploying green technologies.  (Ditto for the ETS cap-and-trade system in Europe.)  And that's critically important: it's in the advanced economies of the world that new green technologies will be invented.  And it's in the advanced economies of the world that existing green technologies will be proven to work on a wide scale.  Once that happens — once the technologies are proven and economies of scale start to bring down their costs — the rest of the world will start to adopt them too.  W-M, in its final form, may not be a strong bill, but by raising the price of carbon even a little bit, it makes the development and deployment of green tech far more likely in the United States, and therefore, far more likely on a global basis too.
And that's critically important.  Conservation and efficiency and cutting back are all necessary parts of addressing climate change, but human nature being what it is, that's never going to be enough.  We're going to have to invent entire new technologies as well.  W-M makes that more likely, and that's why it needs to be passed.  Warts and all. [More]

Finally, but not least important, W-M offers to me an effort to revive the morale of our nation - a tiny step toward setting aside our immediate desires and owning up to externalities we are passing on with almost malicious unconcern. It is an effort to address a problem, not deny it.  It is a chance to sacrifice for the future.

In short, it is an opportunity to rediscover all those aspects of our nation that many feel slipping away: a can-do mindset and an unabashed desire for ever-nobler goals; an iron commitment to generations unborn; a chance to demonstrate how a fractious and imperfect political system and a diverse culture can do big things. Like always we will recalculate our path as we go, but fixing a goal and direction could add purpose to a culture foundering in self-doubt.

The end of the happy insurance era...

It seems a small matter, especially in an era of frequent price advances, but I think something else is going on in the insurance world.  State Farm has announced an average increase in premiums for homeowners insurance in Illinois of 13%.

State Farm stressed that, despite the coming increase, overall rate levels have declined an average of 4.1 percent over the past five years.

State Farm's recent homeowners rate history is as follows: 2008, an average increase of 2.6 percent; 2007, an average drop of 3 percent; 2006, an average hike of 1.7 percent; 2005, an average decrease of 1.5 percent; and 2004, an average decline of 3.7 percent. [More]

This careful comparison to previous premium decreases is the key to understanding what may be happening. Insurance companies have for the last few years been able to invest our premium dollars for pretty lucrative returns.

No more.

Not only that, but I would guess most of the investment gurus at those companies are scared poopless of encountering more investment disasters like CDS's and such.  So for the time being, I think they are settling for really, really safe places to put money.

That would be a very short list.

The upshot is, premiums will have to reflect more of the true cost of the risk.  Add in the fact that risks of all kinds are increasing.  I have always believed properly priced insurance of any type should constitute a tricky decision for the buyer.  If it's a slam dunk, something is fishy with the arithmetic OR somebody else is picking up the tab.

This is why crop insurance advocates who want "actuarially sound" insurance might want to pause for reflection.  Without the massive subsidies, places that see claims year in and year out would have premiums that would cause nosebleeds.

Here's an especially fast growing leg: Crop insurance. The Ag Department's cost to underwrite it, usually a small slice of crop supports, will top 40% of the $16.8 billion in 2009 payments. Why? Insurance costs rise along with crop prices, boosting the dollars for premiums, indemnities and margins for insurers that sell the insurance (margins are based on the volume of crop insurance). While the program covers no more farms than it did in 2005, its coverage value has doubled to $90 billion. Gains for insurers have nearly doubled as well.

The response in Washington? Big whoopin' deal. Crop subsidy payments will come to 0.001% of next year's budget. You think Obama or congressional bosses will waste political capital on that, or risk angering influential farm and rural lobbies in Washington over such a piffle?

Don't look for any appreciably tighter caps on farm subsidies soon and not more than window dressing on for the profits of crop insurers. They sell the coverage for USDA, which will try to tie insurers' profits to operating costs and not gear their allowances to the volatile annual levels of insurance coverage when they wrap up a new five-year agreement with insurance companies next year.

The recent Senate budget resolution calls for cutting $70 million a year from crop insurance overall costs. That's hardly enough for the insurers to notice. And it surely won't come off benefits to farmers, whose premiums pay less than 50% of their claims. [More]

 Without investment income to offset actually losses, insurance companies have to pay attention to those wild and crazy actuaries who crunch the numbers for them. The numbers don't lie.

At the same time, the insurance industry thinks they have been over-regulated out of their profits.

Several government insurance agencies that have charged low premiums to financial firms are now expected to start raising their rates in an effort to compensate for growing shortfalls caused by the recession, according to The Globe.
Agency officials say the increases in premiums are likely to be passed on to consumers in the form of increased interest rates on loans, lower interest rates on savings accounts and higher bank fees.

The Globe said the reason for the expected premium hikes is years of overly-low rates charged by the agencies during the past 10 years, during which lobbying groups have driven the premium increases down to nothing by appealing to Congress. [More]

So my guess is we should factor in about 10% to the average of our insurance costs.  Excepting health insurance - that one could be much higher.
 

Back to the Bible...

"My sheep hear my voice..."

Apparently so do cattle. 

Building and maintaining fences for cattle is a time-consuming and costly endeavor. That's why a GPS bovine headset may come in handy.

This past year, Dean Anderson and Daniela Rus have designed and tested Ear-a-Round headsets on the USDA's 193,000-acre ranch near Las Cruces, N.M. Each Ear-a-Round is equipped with a GPS receiver, an accelerometer and a magnetometer that respectively track the cow's location, speed and direction.

Before an animal roams beyond its pre-programed virtual boundaries, defined by GPS coordinates, the computer sends an auditory cue intended to keep the cow in its paddock. (Anderson's experiments show his cattle respond to his voice.) [More]

Still, this would change riding fences to debugging transceiver software.

I'll bet the ol' Marlboro Man is rotating in his crypt.

In related news, Scottish sheep are shrinking.  And a dead pig riot in India.

These days it's hard to get too much livestock news.

When we don't have answers...

We shout.

Urban Lehner at DTN, who pens thoughtful posts, took some flack for interviewing Michael Pollan.  He cautiously offers a defense.

"Everyone already knows what Pollan thinks," I hear someone bellowing. Do they? How many producers and agribusiness people have read "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Pollan's seminal book?

Dan Dooley has, and as he tells it, ag professionals might find the book's thinking more nuanced than they imagine. Dooley is Vice President for Ag and Natural Resources at the University of California and a former owner of Dooley Farms in California's San Joaquin Valley. He says 80 percent of what Pollan writes is "interesting," 10 percent makes him "uncomfortable" and 10 percent is "simply unrealistic."

Dooley also thinks commercial agriculture will continue to lose the national debate over food production if it doesn't do a better job of understanding where its critics are coming from.

"Our attitude in ag is if our opponents understood us, they'd agree with us," Dooley says. "The reality is a lot of these people do understand us and they don't agree with us.

"We have to listen," he goes on. "If we go to the table in the self-righteous position that ag often does, they shut us off. They don't listen to us because we don't listen to them." [More]

His points echo my own, too often belabored here.  I do have two tiny quibbles.

Pollan's seminal work, IMHO, is Botany of Desire.  Every corn farmer should read it.

Second, it says much that while I reviewed the book [Omnivore's Dilemma] over two years ago, even then it had been out for some months.  Could it be that one communications problem ag has is s-p-e-e-d?  (To be fair, Urban does not say he actually read the book.)

I mean, I can understand waiting for paperback, but still.

It also speaks volumes about what the relatively narrow range of viewpoints are deemed acceptable in the ag media. Partly this is due to pressing budget and reader issues.  Unlike this blog, websites and magazines need to make money and making people upset with things they don't want to hear may not seem like the ideal business plan. But mostly I think it is because farmers are not, for the most part, very interested in what other people think.

We're into telling our story - not listening to yours.

That not necessarily a bad thing.  However, it may not be the optimal long-term strategy for producers.

It's the grid, people...

I have long argued that even the feel-good trickle of electricity from wind would be unusable without a better, bigger, and smarter grid.  But building that particular bit of infrastructure rouses strong feelings and lots of work for lawyers.

The news is filled with these conflicts between landowners and those who are building the new transmission lines. Two hundred people in Livermore, California, turned out last month to protest a 600-mile transmission line that would run through the farms and vineyards of Alameda County. Similar protests have cropped up elsewhere in California and in New York.
The oldest story in the country is that rural America pays the largest price for producing the power used in the cities. But the massive investment in transmission lines now underway is immensely complicated. The construction of new lines and the lease payments they bring will benefit some rural residents, while others see it as unmitigated destruction.
Landowner is pitted again landowner, environmentalist against environmentalist and region against region:
• Millions of dollars in wind energy projects are being held up because there isn’t the transmission capacity to move the electricity into the cities. Ledyard King and Larry Bivins report in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader that up to 300,000 megawatts of wind projects are on hold because of insufficient transmission capacity. "It's a huge problem for future development," said Steve Wegman, executive director of the South Dakota Wind Energy Association. "It's like sitting on 1 million bushels of corn and having no way to move it out of there other than a five-gallon bucket." Transmission capacity is the “glass ceiling for renewable energy development right now,” said one wind energy advocate.  
• The argument for spending billions of dollars for new transmission lines comes from environmentalists who want to replace coal-fired power plants with wind power. They describe new electric lines as “green power superhighways.” Other environmentalists say this is a “green oxymoron,” that there is nothing more environmentally destructive than clear-cuts and power lines overlording plains, pastures and wilderness.

• Finally, there is regional disagreement over the need to build new transmission lines. Western states see a clear need for new lines. Eastern states aren’t so sure.  [More]

I think we have lost any sense of even modest sacrifices for a "common good".  In fact, even using that term will likely trigger "socialist-alerts" on search engines.

But the roads and powerlines have to be somewhere. So if you are happy with them messing up your neighbors field, and he's OK with them causing you headaches, I say we have old-fashioned gun fights to settle these things.

Riveting, simply riveting...

Like most of you, I have been glued to my TV - not by coverage of historic federal legislation, or international unrest, or even by that old farmer entertainment favorite, weather - but by wall-to-wall coverage of some guy named Michael Jackson and his recent demise.

Perhaps newscasters are relieved to get back to a topic they are comfortable with.  And maybe most TV audiences are too.

But one happy bit of serendipity was stumbling across this piece of rather important (IMHO) TV news:

The Supreme Court cleared the way for Cablevision Systems Corp., a New York-based cable operator with more than 3 million subscribers, to deploy so-called remote storage DVRs. Unlike current DVRs, which record programs on a device in a customer's home, remote storage DVRs record them in a central location.
As of March, the penetration of DVRs in the United States was 30%, according to Nielsen. Because storing shows on a central server is so inexpensive compared with deploying devices, the ruling clears the way for Cablevision and other distrubutors to offer the service to consumers at very low or no cost.

The move is a blow to Hollywood, which had fought the technology all the way to the Supreme Court. Fox, NBC Universal, Paramount, CBS, Disney and other programmers argued that because Cablevision transmits recorded programs to consumers over its cable lines, the remote storage DVRs actually constitute a new on-demand service for which they should pay licensing fees.

Of course, what this is really about is advertising. Television executives are very worried about the ease with which consumers can skip advertisements while watching recorded programs via DVRs. [More]

But if you pause (heh) to think about it, this ruling may have enormous consequences.  Essentially all TV would be on demand if you subscribe to a recording service (i.e. cable or satellite). While not having troublesome hardware in our home sounds great to me (plus and easy way to watch anything on any TV - we I were was too cheap to buy more than one box), ponder what it means in the long run.

At first blush, this seems pretty unobjectionable. Under current U.S. law, it’s legal for a consumer to record television programs for later viewing. This is considered time-shifting, and was first made possible by the VCR. Conventional DVRs are high-tech cousins to VCRs, with a hard drive replacing the videotape. In the U.S., many cable and satellite companies provide boxes that include DVR functionality, generally for an additionally monthly fee.
Cablevision wants to offer DVR as a service instead of a device. Rather than recording 30 Rock on the box attached to your TV, the show will be recorded at Cablevision’s headquarters. Then, when you want to watch it, Cablevision will send the show to your television. If it works right, it should feel just like a normal DVR. Only without the cost of the DVR.
If Cablevision offers this service, I think it will be very successful. Less hardware means less things to break, and the service could presumably send a show to any TV in the house. (Some conventional DVRs can do that, but it’s often a hassle.) Plus, storage scales very well. Cablevision could offer a user much more recording space than a conventional DVR.
In fact, Cablevision could offer unlimited storage. And that’s where it gets dangerous.
Say Mary Jones sets her Cablevision RS-DVR to record 30 Rock. So does Bob Smith. Cablevision only needs to record it once. They can send the bits to Mary or Bob whenever one of them asks for it.
Given that Cablevision has more than four million customers, it’s a fair bet that at least one of their customers would be interested in any given show, so it makes sense for Cablevision to record and catalog every channel it distributes, 24/7/365.
Conventional DVRs only record what you ask them to record, with some modifiers, such as “new episodes of The Simpsons,” or “movies with Steven Seagal.” So for Cablevision’s service to work like a conventional DVR, it should only offer you programs you specifically chose to record. No fair waking up Friday and asking for last night’s The Office.

But wait. Cablevision is already recording every show. Why don’t they just offer a “Record Everything” option? [More]

With lower TV revenues, stuff like "I'm a Celebrity..." could float to the top of TV quality entertainment.

Some sore losers in the competition for advertising revenue see it as a possible playing field leveler.

Perhaps this win for DVR is also a win for print and online advertising revenue. If people can just fast-forward through their TV commercials, it's hard to understand why they would be any more effective than magazine or newspaper ads, in paper or online. That could begin to bridge the gap between what advertisers are willing to pay for TV and print/online advertising. As a result, maybe the DVR will save print journalism. I dare to dream. [More]

This strikes me as a stretch and at the very most, a long time coming as on-demand takes time to penetrate fully. But the point is taken.  If you can't beat 'em, cripple 'em.

Still, I won't miss those fragile recorders (lightning zaps ours routinely).  And maybe I'll only have to learn one final set of remote commands.  After all, rural America is the remote in "remote DVR".

Amaze your friends, confound your enemies: Episode 42...

Yet another Cliff Claven moment.

Why are there 60 minutes in an hour?  24 hours in a day?

Here's a hint:

[Full answer ]

I knew this, of course.


[via 3QD]

Maybe not "enjoy" the ride...

[More]

More reasons to live in Edgar County, IL...

#26:  We actually missed a rain last night.  I am not making this up.

#27:  Safety from submarine attacks

Is it expensive to sink your own sub? Not if you're a drug lord. Each sub costs about $1 million to produce. The crew gets $500,000 or less. A recent 6.4-ton payload of cocaine was worth more than $100 million. As a percentage of the gross, subs are so cheap that they're routinely scuttled anyway.
That's the genius of submersibility. Several months ago, during the Israeli invasion of Gaza, we explored the terrestrial underworld of the Gaza tunnels. The tunnelers were developing a three-dimensional way of thinking about land: While one side built walls and stationed soldiers above ground, the other side went down 60 feet and dug past those barriers.
The nautical underworld is even better. You don't have to dig. You just glide. Even the semisubmersible crafts built by the drug lords are low enough to evade radar. And underwater, you can do something else that can't be done on land: dump your contraband and let gravity take it beyond your enemy's reach. No evidence, no conviction.
To stop this tactic, Congress recently enacted the Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act of 2008, which declares that anyone operating "any submersible vessel or semi-submersible vessel that is without nationality ... with the intent to evade detection, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both."
Maybe that law will deter submarine drug commerce. But what about submarine terrorism? Ultimately, "U.S. officials fear that the rogue vessels could be used by terrorists intent on reaching the United States with deadly cargos," the Post reports. In fact, "Colombian officials say some former military personnel might be helping to design, construct and direct the vessels" used by the drug lords. If so, all that's needed is a financial lure from al-Qaida to build a vessel for a different mission.
It might not be a suicide mission, either. Drug submersible builders are "trying to develop a remote-controlled model," according to officials contacted by the Post. Two men were arrested last year, apparently while peddling this technology. No crew necessary. Just pack the radioactive bomb aboard your craft, slip it underwater, and hit any coastal target.

Think about that the next time you take off your shoes at an airport security gate. If we expect the next 9/11 attack to come from the sky, we may be looking the wrong way. [More]

While my history (I served aboard USS Seahorse SSN-669 back when subs had sails) predisposes me to find this threat credible, it does seem to make sense.  It also points out one more thing that is wrong with our drug policy (it makes drugs so lucrative that any cost is feasible for drug dealers) and also that if terrorists are the "Lex Luthors" Gitmo fans make them out to be, they probably are not planning a duplicate of 9-11.

What institutions will survive?...

If they do what will they look like?

Yesterday driving home from taping USFR I checked the news and markets (and traffic on I65 - particularly gruesome accident there) and of course, there were more than a few announcement that Michael Jackson was still dead.

But leave it up to WBBM in Chicago on the Noon Business Hour (an outstanding collection of business programming) to tell me something about MJ I was mildly interested in.

Being a business show, they spent some time talking about Jackson's finances (not pretty) and then a music business expert slipped in a statement to the effect that unlike the Presley estate, Jackson's body of work probably would not be worth much over the next decades, because recorded music is essentially a Dead Business Model Walking.

This strikes me as perceptive. In fact, I began to wonder what intellectual property would retain much value as the digitization and access to words, songs, etc, becomes freer, faster, and easier.  To date our legal system seems fairly powerless to reverse this trend.

So if we were to start a list of enterprises that likely won't be around in 25 years, say, I think I would put the music industry (as we know it) on the list.  The exception might be live performances, perhaps.

But what else will slip away?

Well, we've talked about various forms of printed information - books, newspapers, magazines.  I would consider them candidates.  Additionally, there are serious questions what TV will be.

But what about universities?

"Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning", he writes. "There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn."

    The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril. [More]

I had not thought about this - college was a long time ago. But I do think the college experience is profoundly different that it was back in the day, both socially and educationally.  The author goes on at length to center in on collaborative learning, and there along with others, I found a common thread running through my list of endangered business species.

I think there are two ideas that pretty much sum up this whole discussion. One is multi-way interaction (as opposed to reliance solely on 1-to-many lecturing). The second, not unrelated, is collaboration among educators and students, and especially among students themselves.

I also think it's pretty clear some ways the modern Internet is able to facilitate the implementation of both these ideas. Namely, things like: video lecture series, social networking tools, constantly improving search tools, online and open-access books, journals, and reference materials, collaboratively made encyclopedias, and on, and on....

Let me conclude by referring to something I wrote about two months ago, that is Clay Shirky's diagnosis of the impending demise of traditional media journalism. (See here.) Near the end was this:

    [T]here is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

    Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time.


In other words: collaboration among consumers of information.

Interesting parallel, wouldn't you say? [More]

For a number of reasons, tools like the Internet and texting are making collaborative effort easier and more productive.

Is agriculture another possible victim/beneficiary of the power of collaborative effort?

As Aaron and I try to build a business organization for his future and my exit (see the next Top Producer Perspective) I am increasingly seeing his working methods and signature skills are reflective of mine, but tending in a collaborative direction.

I have always worked alone, or with Jan - like many old married couples we function essentially as one. I was neither  comfortable with, nor adept at group efforts.  Needless to say this has limited our ability to expand to what technology could do to increase our two-person productivity.  This has not been insignificant either.

Part of the problem for me I believe has been the need to supervise someone else at a distance or give incredibly complicated instructions to cover contingencies. Often this was nearly impossible.

But nearly full-time communication has changed everything for farm operations, I think, and as such allows for larger work groups which can capture even more economies of scale.  In short, collaboration may determine our future as well.

A few years ago I wrote a short story about farming in 2020.  Looking back over it, I envisioned a farm business model similar to law firms, i.e. "Dewey, Gougem and Howe".  I'm not claiming prophetic powers, but that type of multi-principal operation could be the more natural form of work for those who follow the Boomers.

The operational and economic advantages seem considerable at first glance. The analogies to other professions and how they adapted earlier are at least partially valid, I think. And now with the incredible advances in communications, a generation raised in a more connected world seems to be guiding farming away from the "solitary sturdy yeoman" archetype.

The more pertinent question could be "How fast?"