The gap between philosophy and practice...

In a post that has stunned the blogsphere, one of the strongest and most articulate voices of libertarianism, Reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch makes the case why he prefers the shockingly socialistic health care in France for himself.

[Note: I really can't excerpt the whole thing, but please click the link to read the post - it's all good and no context is lost]

For a dozen years now I’ve led a dual life, spending more than 90 percent of my time and money in the U.S. while receiving 90 percent of my health care in my wife’s native France. On a personal level the comparison is no contest: I’ll take the French experience any day. ObamaCare opponents often warn that a new system will lead to long waiting times, mountains of paperwork, and less choice among doctors. Yet on all three of those counts the French system is significantly better, not worse, than what the U.S. has now. 
...

What’s more, none of these anecdotes scratches the surface of France’s chief advantage, and the main reason socialized medicine remains a perennial temptation in this country: In France, you are covered, period. It doesn’t depend on your job, it doesn’t depend on a health maintenance organization, and it doesn’t depend on whether you filled out the paperwork right. Those who (like me) oppose ObamaCare, need to understand (also like me, unfortunately) what it’s like to be serially rejected by insurance companies even though you’re perfectly healthy. It’s an enraging, anxiety-inducing, indelible experience, one that both softens the intellectual ground for increased government intervention and produces active resentment toward anyone who argues that the U.S. has “the best health care in the world.” [More]

Even when I disagree with Matt, I have admired both his integrity and clear reasoning. This piece could not have been easy to write, and roughly matches my thinking that our system works OK if you are "in the circle".

Once you fall out of our system, you are screwed.  Now guess which population is increasing.

We can do better, and I don't care what ideological label is attached to it, nor which example we choose to learn from: Canada, UK, France, Germany, Singapore, Holland - whatever.

We're fooling ourselves when we say we have the best system right now.

Where wealth comes from...

I read Steve Cornett's blog religiously.  But then, I'm a Methodist.  He may think he's fooled everyone with his folksy delivery and ham-fisted humor, but I can spot a true intellectual a mile off.  His latest seems like a slab of red meat (heh) for the beef sector but you can tell most commenters didn't pay attention to the last few lines.

Our protein marketing problem is similar to another economic problem I have been droning on about: maldistribution of income.  When the people who really want and need meat can't afford it, we're stuck with trying to argue with vegans to expand our market.

There is a questionable future for that business plan.

"Comfort food is trendy for students because familiar favorites can alleviate stress linked to studying and being away from home," said Tom Post, Sodexo president of campus services. "The biggest change we're seeing is that students are expanding the category of feel-good foods to include comfort world cuisine, such as a Mexican stew or a Vietnamese noodle soup and they are more open to vegetarian dishes with a flair." [More]

Trying to poke more meat down American throats will require overcoming economic, fashion, and medical resistance, as too many of us cholesterol-laden veterans can testify after our annual checkup.

Steve nails this precisely.

This is not going to go away, folks. These new evangelicals are going to keep hammering on these themes in the developed countries.  The beef industry’s future in these countries—with stagnant income growth, nearly stable populations and affluence-guilt—is limited. The future must be in building and serving the broader, worldwide market. 

Vegan Katie isn’t where it’s at. Statistically, she will probably backslide some day, but she will never be a true meat eater. For that matter, neither will her children.

The future is in China and Indonesia and all the places crawling out of poverty doing the jobs Americans used to do. That market is increasing in affluence, but still protein-deficient. And huge. [More]

Meanwhile his fans seem to fixate on his taking on the lefty antiprotein faction.

But I digress, as usual.

It was one comment in particular to Steve's post that arrested my attention.

I'm an Ag consultant, travel all over North America doing seminars--have met in person many of the people you speak of in generalities. These wonderful, but misquided folks have never been in poverty, missed a meal or been denied food..they think it is a right. They are so surprised to find out that food actually comes from the largest industry in the world...agriculture...and they are astonished to find that wealth only comes from Agriculture, Forestry and Mining...the three industries these folks want to see destroyed. What a paradox..the three industries we should be taking the most care are the three most hated and maligned by today's spoiled citizenry. [My emphasis]

I don't mean to pick on this person - his words have been echoed in other comments I see from farmers.  This is an old idea given second life: wealth must be tangible.

The reason it tripped my trigger is I have just finished listening to Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money".  (Another "boomerang" gift from my son who knows he'll get to listen to it as soon as I'm done.  Oh, well - it's the thought...)

It is also one of the the emotive factor behind the rush to gold.  Well, along with the huckstering of the Konspiracy King, Glen Beck.

For farmers, the axiom of wealth being something you can hold is a powerful aphrodisiac.  After all, we take a small amount of seed and produce a thousand fold.  It is visible, it is obvious and it is immensely self-aggrandizing:  I AM THE PHIPPS, CREATOR OF WEALTH.  The rest of you are pathetic parasites.

The only problem is the same one that Ferguson describes with mercantilism.  No economy can grow to its potential if it is limited to a physical basis for wealth. 

The Austrian lawyer and scholar Philipp Wilhelm von Hornick, in his Austria Over All, If She Only Will of 1684, detailed a nine-point program of what he deemed effective national economy, which sums up the tenets of mercantilism comprehensively:^[5]

• That every inch of a country's soil be utilized for agriculture, mining or manufacturing.
  
  
• That all raw materials found in a country be used in domestic manufacture, since finished goods have a higher value than raw materials.
  
  
• That a large, working population be encouraged.
  
  
• That all export of gold and silver be prohibited and all domestic money be kept in circulation.
  
  
• That all imports of foreign goods be discouraged as much as possible.
  
  
• That where certain imports are indispensable they be obtained at first hand, in exchange for other domestic goods instead of gold and silver.
  
  
• That as much as possible, imports be confined to raw materials that can be finished [in the home country].
  
  
• That opportunities be constantly sought for selling a country's surplus manufactures to foreigners, so far as necessary, for gold and silver.
  
  
• That no importation be allowed if such goods are sufficiently and suitably supplied at home. [More]
  
  

The idea of tangible-only forms of wealth seem reasonable until you need a tumor removed or crop insurance. Suddenly the value of knowledge or a legal contract is apparent. In difficult times, the urge to go back to basics is understandable, but we needn't move back to the wheel to regain our footing, surely.

Wealth, as our GDP figures indicate, is increasingly created by the minds of people, not their hands. Those who think that such wealth is illusory have never watched their farm sell to a lawyer from Tacoma.

Neo-mercantilism is simply the latest effort to make extraction industries or farming the Center of the Universe.  I'm not sure we farmers want to be there, even if we could convince the world we are the only creators of wealth.

Hardly any ...

Verizon

  broadband coverage
       
              in Willmar,  



                                 MN, I just found out...

It will make you go blind...

No, not that. Or soap poisoning.
   
Over-surfing and texting.

The rate of nearsightedness in the U.S. increased 66 percent since the 1970s, according to a study that researchers say suggests parents should limit the hours kids spend texting and Web-surfing.
The prevalence of myopia rose to 41 percent in a survey done from 1999 to 2004 from 25 percent in a study completed from 1971 to 1972, according to research by the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

It costs $3.8 billion a year to treat poor distance vision, a tab that rises by $1 billion for every 12 percent increase in the rate of nearsightedness, the study said. The likely cause is less outdoor time and more activities requiring close-up viewing such as text-messaging, playing hand-held video games and Web surfing, said the study’s lead author, Susan Vitale. [More]

This reminds me of a similar submariner affliction, since living inside a 30' pipe and looking through periscopes didn't offer much chance for long-range focusing. 

Why is it I am having more trouble with presbyopia then? 

Not surfing enough?

Chart of the Day...

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization Food Price Index.

I had never seen this.  The chart is generated from a large basket of ag product prices with currency differences normalized, and published just like any stock price chart.  I should think it would be a good addition to our usual ag charts in our media.

Is it me, or does it look like another 2008 event coming?

[Source]

Falling production in commodities from rice to milk is bad news for just about everyone except investors.
Rice may surge 63 percent to $1,038 a metric ton from $638 on Philippine imports and a shortage in India, a Bloomberg survey of importers, exporters and analysts showed. The U.S. government says nonfat dry milk may jump 39 percent next year, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. forecasts a 25 percent gain for sugar. Global food costs jumped 7 percent in November, the most since February 2008, four months before reaching a record, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Farm prices this year lagged behind copper futures that doubled and oil’s 57 percent increase. A recovery from the worst recession since World War II would spur food demand and boost costs for buyers of commodities including milk processor Dean Foods Co. while increasing the number of hungry people that the UN says now exceeds 1 billion.

“Agricultural commodities will be a great investment in the next three to five years,” said Oliver Kratz, who manages $10 billion as head of Global Thematic Strategy investments at Deutsche Bank AG’s DB Advisors in New York, including $3 billion in agriculture. For those who can’t afford to pay more for food, there’s the “painful” risk of hunger, he said. [More]

It could be this forward-thinking is underlying some of the curious strength in our grain markets.  It certainly seems likely to be a factor in the resurgence in land prices.

Last night in Sioux City I heard SD land prices that beat mine in Central IL: $6000-8000.  Meanwhile an 80 five miles from me that appraised for $5700 just sold for $7200.

These are not isolated examples.

I never did think the "softening" of land prices had much validity, but know my bias is too strong to be objective. Suddenly a piece of ground we just purchased "way over the market" looks a little less foolish.

Department of "Ya Think?"...

I suppose we need an academic paper even now to make the stunningly obvious acceptable data for policy decisions, but this one seems a waste of computer time.

The EPA’s proposal for offsetting the increased release of carbon into the atmosphere is to plant specific kinds of trees on land now used for corn production. Hayes equated the production of trees to a cash rent equivalent by multiplying the average annual sequestration amount in tons by $30. In the Cornbelt, the production of white or red pine trees instead of corn would represent $103 to $133 if the land were converted to forest or $93 to $123 if pasture were converted to forest. He says because of the wide diversity in cash rental rates around the Cornbelt, there would be a large range of desire by land owners to enroll land into the program. Those with poor land would participate and those with higher quality land would not. Hayes used cash rental data at Iowa State and applied it to the Cornbelt. At a rate of $110 per acre he says that suggests 20% of the Cornbelt or 22.5 million acres would be converted to trees, and at a rate of $118 per acre, 25% of the crop land would be converted.
Using the FAPRI computer model to calculate land owner reaction as far in the future as 2023, Hayes says at that time the price of corn will be 28% more than currently, and soybeans will be 20% more. With those commodity prices, 10 million acres of pasture and CRP would be converted to cropland, reducing the amount of land available for the carbon sequestration to 40 million acres.
In addition to creating a computer-based projection, Hayes asked about 250 farmers for their verification of his expectations. He said about half of those were livestock producers and were opposed to the concept because it would result in higher feed costs, and the other half were crop producers, but were also opposed, which surprised Hayes. But their opposition was based on not wanting to setaside part of their operation into another conservation program. Nearly all rented land owned by someone else and did not want to lose the chance to profit from crop production. Hayes says they believed that such a program would raise rental rates and there would be a big difference between an ethanol-based program to increase corn production or a climate change-based program that would provide benefits only to those who own cropland.

Hayes expects that agribusinesses would prefer to see the land remain in crop production because of the opportunity to sell more farm equipment and crop inputs. And he expects those living in rural areas, but not farming, would think in the same vein. But he says to make everyone happy, the climate change program would have to limit conversion of cropland for the carbon offset, and confine it to land that is already pasture, trees, or CRP. That would mean other methods of carbon sequestration would have to be used, such as burying crop residues. [More][My emphasis]

So, to sum up, it would appear that farmers like me don't want to lose rented acres and significant amounts of income to a government land retirement program just like we hate it when somebody else outbids us.

Nope, nope, couldn't see that coming.

Complete with swimming pool...

I had never seen photos of a Russian Typhoon class submarine. 

Typhoon class submarines feature multiple pressure hulls that simplify internal design while making the vessel much wider than a normal submarine. In the main body of the sub, two Delta class pressure hulls lie parallel with a third, smaller pressure hull above them (which protrudes just below the sail), and two other pressure hulls for torpedoes and steering gear. This also greatly increases their survivability - even if one pressure hull is breached, the crew members in the other are safe and there is less potential for flooding.

Six Typhoon class submarines were built, with each carrying 20 R-39 missiles (SS-N-20) with a maximum of 10 MIRV nuclear warheads each. Originally, the submarines were designated by hull numbers only. Names were later assigned to the four vessels retained by the Russian Navy, which were sponsored by either a city or company. The construction order for an additional vessel (hull number TK-210) was canceled and never completed. Only the first of these submarines to be constructed, the Dmitriy Donskoy, is still in active service with the Russian Navy, serving as a test platform for the Bulava (SS-NX-30) missile which is currently under development. The Arkhangelesk (TK-17) and Severstal (TK-20) remain commissioned, though not currently active with the Russian fleet. All the R-39 missiles have been retired. The Typhoons are slated to be replaced by the Borey class starting in 2009. [More]

They came and went after my service (but then so did a LOT of stuff).  These boats were huge!

(Not the best welding I've seen for an outer hull)

[Lots more pics - including the pool/spa]

[via atlasobscura]

It started with a crystal radio kit...

When I was about 8 or 9, I got a crystal radio kit for Christmas and it started me fooling around with electronics.  I get nostalgic when I smell hot solder even now.

But it also stood me in good stead trying to resurrect my ancient Shivvers dryer this fall.

Maybe some young person in your house would enjoy a geeky gift like that.  Here's a suggestion.

I'm thrilled to announce our latest offering from O'Reilly/Make: Books, Make: Electronics, by Charles Platt. This is a book that we've wanted to do for awhile. Many of us at Maker Media have had an interaction that goes something like this: You're at a talk, Maker Faire, or elsewhere, and someone spirits you aside, like they're going to confess to a petty crime or some marital indiscretion. What they want to whisper sheepishly into your ear is that they love MAKE, all of the excitement they see over open source electronics, and the cool kits we sell in the Maker Shed, but they have NO IDEA how electronics work, and the "beginner" books and resources they look at online zoom quickly over their heads and frustrate their efforts to learn. Ultimately, they find themselves too embarrassed to admit their lack of high-tech smarts or to ask questions (which is why they've taken you behind a dumpster to confess their ignorance).
So we decided to make it our mission to create a book that would patiently guide readers into the world of electronics in a way that was fun, clear-spoken, graphical, and experiential. Charles dubbed it "learning by discovery." He has you experimenting with parts right out of the gate, licking batteries (really), breaking and frying stuff, and then you learn what happened and why, the theories behind the parts and processes, and how to do the experiment correctly. For all of those would-be makers and wireheads who've been looking for a book that will finally let them in on all the fun, we made this one for you!

In 340+ pages, Make: Electronics takes you from the most basic aspects of electronic components and theory to essential techniques, such as soldering and using a multimeter, gathering basic tools and setting up a workshop, all the way up to working with integrated circuits, microcontrollers, and building sophisticated devices such as robots. The book is full-color, with hundreds of photos, illustrations, schematics, even fun cartoons. Charles Platt, being the true Renaissance man that he is, did all of this himself. So the book has something of a charming, handmade feel to it. [More]

Of course, if you want to start where I did - back when electrons were square - you can find many kinds of crystal radio kits.

For budding mechanical engineers, how about a model steam engine?

Even in a world of cell phones and video games, DIY toys have appeal to curious minds.  And the feeling of accomplishment when it is working knows no decade.

Will the middle be harder to find?...

As tenor and temperature of various debates escalate, I find myself wondering how much my opinions are affected by my habitual use of Google as my search engine.  In case you hadn't noticed (and few of us did) your results are different from others for the saem search parameters.  Google has quietly personalized your searches.

Here's a good explanation from the nerds themselves. (C,mon, look at 'em!)
 


Opinions in the search engine microcosm are variable.

Imagine you’re in a library — the classic metaphor for a search engine and how it interacts with a searcher, from when WebCrawler’s Brian Pinkerton used to explain how they worked back in the 1990s. Someone walks in and says “travel.” In a library, the librarian would ask more questions, to try and understand what they want. Early search engines didn’t do this. They couldn’t do this!
Over time, search engines tried to do the library-style conversation by offering related searches, as a way to get searchers to refine their queries. Then Google took a huge leap last year by making use of your previous query to refine your results. That makes sense and doesn’t seem to require any particular reason to ask for user opt-in. Again, imagine the librarian. It would be unreasonable to expect them to forget the last thing you said in a conversation you were having, as they tried to help you. Unreasonable and unhelpful.

But would you expect the librarian to help you by remembering everything you’d asked over a half-year period? That might be helpful, sure, but it might also be eerie. But this is what Google is doing now. It remembers everything you’ve searched for over 180 days, and it uses that information to customize your results. To alert you about this huge change, it made a blog post on Friday afternoon. That’s it. [More]

So on any given topic my results will be influenced by whatever I have read and searched before. Does this mean I will see fewer results that show alternate/divergent perspectives?

I'm not sure.  I will likely be pointed to more websites that favor my current position, I think.

But what it does mean is search result rankings are now questionable - a real headache for website managers selling ad space.

So, for those of you who may not have received this message before: search engine ranking is dead. In the very near future, you will no longer be able to reliably check your rankings in the Google search engine.
How to Measure Success
Track your traffic, conversions, and ROI. These are the important metrics for any form of marketing or business. That's the way it should be.
Like it or not, personalization of the Google search results is here. Many are seeing it right now for several search queries.
Google has just been awarded a patent for language personalization of search results. They are (or will be) changing the search results based on the language you use in your search query and based on the language of the Web pages that show up on the search results.
I recently searched for a keyword phrase to do some research on other SEO companies. After performing one search and then entering another search query, Google added a phrase onto the top right of the search results: "Customized based on recent search activity." If you see this phrase on a search results page, then your search results have been personalized just for you.
To get more information about it, click on "More Details." Let's take a look at what Google says:

"Search customization details: search engine marketing company
When possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you're signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history.
The following information was used to improve your search results for search engine marketing company:
Recent Searches
You or someone else recently searched for search engine marketing using this browser."

Google is personalizing the search results based on your recent search engine queries. They say specifically that based on your location and/or your recent search activity the search results have been altered.
This is happening even if you aren't logged into your Google account. If you are logged into your Google account, you'll likely see even more different search results.
We're going to see more customization and personalization because Google believes this will bring us more relevant, useful search results. As Google moves more toward personalization, it will be even closer to the end of the search engine rankings: no more top rankings or number one ranking for a certain keyword phrase.
What This Means for Company Web Sites
When someone visits a Web site, they will potentially be more "qualified," and the ratio between traffic and conversions might improve. Traffic may go down, but in the long run, the visitors that do visit our sites via a Google search will be more qualified because the search results were personalized to what that they were really looking for.
There are several things that we'll see in the future as a result of Google's personalization of search results:

• Personalized search will change our perception of search engine "rankings."
• Google will focus on a user's intent, showing us search results based on our search history and the query we use. There will be different search results based on whether we're doing research, looking to buy something, or looking for something locally in our area.
• There will be a local impact on the search results. Search results will change depending on the content and keywords on our Web sites and the geolocation of the user. Search results will change based on your IP address.

[More]

One wildcard will be if users opt-out (how-to on the video above) of personalized search and in what numbers. This subtle change in a tool most of us have become used to thinking of as unbiased and stable may be shaping communications more than even Google imagined.

But is it evil?

Dodging a regulatory bullet...

I think this is good news at my level.

The measure requires the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to curb excessive speculation by restricting trading volumes on oil and currency futures. It also requires broker- dealers including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and “major swaps participants” like Fannie Mae to use regulated clearinghouses to process standard derivatives contracts that are normally accepted for clearing and deemed mandatory by regulators.
Some derivatives transactions would also be forced onto so- called swap execution facilities. Hedge funds, airlines and other corporate end-users that don’t pose a risk to the broader financial system won exclusions from the bill’s clearing, trading and collateral requirements.
Delta, Cargill
End users are mainly corporations that rely on derivatives to mange their so-called operational risks, such as protecting against swings in interest rates or fuel prices. Delta Air Lines Inc., agriculture company Cargill Inc. and farm equipment maker Deere & Co. successfully lobbied against some amendments that would have scaled back exclusions.

“Manufacturers of all sizes use customized OTC derivatives to manage the cost of borrowing or other risks operating their businesses,” Dorothy Coleman, vice president of tax and economic policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, said in a statement. “These important risk management tools help keep manufacturers operations going, invest in new technologies, build new plants and retain and expand workforces.” [More]

It's hardly surprising that punitive legislative and regulatory measures are pouring out of Washington after the recent shabby performance of too much of our financial industry.  This measure could have been a lot more burdensome without those exclusions.

And the result would have been obvious in our grain bids and input prices.

This bird better fly...

After literally years of hype, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner may actually leave the ground.

After more than two years of delays, Boeing Co. said Thursday that it plans to fly its new 787 Dreamliner for the first time as early as next Tuesday. The exact timing of the much-anticipated first flight depends on external factors, such as the weather at the airport near Seattle, the company said in a statement.

The Dreamliner's first flight-which has been pushed back multiple times-will be a major milestone for Boeing's marquee commercial airplane program. Boeing plans to fly the plane on a four to five hour test flight departing from Boeing's factory at Paine Field in suburban Everett, Wash., north of Seattle. If all goes according to plan, the Dreamliner will eventually land 30 miles south at Boeing Field in south Seattle, where the 787 test planes will be based.

Boeing executives for the past few months have insisted the Dreamliner will fly by year's end, staking much of their own and the company's credibility on making it happen. For the past few weeks, the industry has been trying to guess the exact date of the first flight. Internally, Boeing had targeted Dec. 22, according to people familiar with the details, but had been hoping to ready the plane for an earlier flight, if for no other reason than to give themselves breathing room to account for weather delays and other potential snags. [More]

How would you like to be a project engineer at Boeing this week?

I have always wondered about the business plan that pre-sells a product so heavily that anything less than spectacular performance is perceived as bad news. It now seems to be the norm, since so much technology has a long development time and the marketing department gets pretty desperate to sell even vaporware.

Our own seed industry is coping with such strategies, and I think 2010 will be sobering reality check for neatly calculated rollout schedules and aggressive marketing campaigns.

Pioneer Hi-Bred said Friday that disappointing yields in field tests will cause it to delay the release of the newest generations of herbicide-resistant corn seed to about 2015.

The Johnston seed company had hoped to introduce the genetically altered Optimum GAT seed lines by next year to challenge the leading seller of corn seed, Monsanto. Shares of Pioneer's parent, DuPont, fell more than 7 percent Friday on the news.

A DuPont investor, Jake Dollarhide of Longbow Investors of Tulsa, Okla., called the news a "huge hit" for Pioneer. [More]

Stuff goes wrong. Customers know this. Over-ventilated technology promises are causing all forecasts to be viewed as fluff.  I think big market advantages will accrue to companies that deliver unheralded innovations that work from Day One.

More proof of evolution...

[More]

Compare and contrast...

And remember.  Some important wealth numbers.

Household wealth in the U.S. increased by $2.67 trillion in the third quarter as stock prices and home values climbed, and revised data showed Americans have a larger hurdle to overcome.

Net worth for households and non-profit groups rose to $53.4 trillion from $50.8 trillion the prior quarter, a second consecutive gain, according to the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds report today in Washington. Revisions put the loss of wealth between the third quarter of 2007 and the first three months of this year at a record $17.5 trillion, compared with a previous estimate of $13 trillion. [More]

 On the other hand, the value of all the farmland in the US is about $2.1T

It makes "overpriced" farm real estate and commodities a little more comprehensible when you realize the rest of the economy just improved enough in the last 3 months to buy us all out.

I'm late for my secret meeting...

I'm willing to be ridiculed for being totally wrong about climate change, but like some others, the charges of a deliberate hoax and conspiracy are growing wearisome. I'm not sure skeptics realize how much it degrades their talking points.

Mostly it does great disservice to some admittedly hyper-focused, but dedicated people of science who, along with their colleagues have lifted all our lives with their relentless pursuit of truth.

Like the oyster guys.

Whatever. Sure. But here's the thing I wonder. How do people who deny climate change reconcile that with guys like this, who are spending entire careers on teasing out really non-dramatic aspects of climate change? This guy is not measuring carbon concentrations in oyster shells for the glory. There are thousands of these people, dorkily and steadily piecing out the causes and predicting effects.

If it is all a conspiracy and nothing is happening, how do denialists conceive of these guys? Do they think these monotonous nerds who talk in jargon (don't take that the wrong way. I'm sexually attracted to every one of them.) are making it up to promote the conspiracy? Like, they spend the morning thinking up esoteric ways of measuring wave energy by sand lost at different gauges around the state, and the afternoon faking their data so they can please Al Gore? They've done this now for ten years and they plan to make an entire career out of making up the detailed groundwork for fake climate change? All of them? On nothing? Imagine the secret conferences they must hold to synchronize their stories and settle on an allowable variance between the made-up river data, the made-up precipitation data and the made-up ocean data. Besides the groupies, WHAT FOR? [More from another blogger with a similar viewpoint]

I'm fair game, and my assertions open to any criticism, but fer cryin' out loud, casting these guys as world class evil minions is surely absurd.

Do these shoes...

Make my butt look smaller?

While most athletic shoes offer support and cushioning, the new muscle-activating shoes are engineered to create a sense of instability. Design elements like curved soles and Reebok’s “balance pods” are said to force the wearer to engage stabilizing muscles further, resulting in additional toning for calf, hamstring and gluteal muscles.

That sounds great, but do they really work? To support the claims, the shoemakers each offer company-financed exercise studies suggesting that the shoes produce a higher level of muscle engagement, at least in a controlled research setting.

But the studies don’t show whether more engagement leads to meaningful changes in muscle tone or appearance over time. Nor is it clear whether the high level of engagement continues once the walker becomes accustomed to the shoe.

Reebok’s EasyTone has made the biggest splash in the muscle-shoe market, especially with its advertising. In one commercial, the camera drifts away from the woman’s face and zooms in on her backside. Another advertisement claims that the leg and butt-toning effects of EasyTone will “make your boobs jealous.”

The advertisements, aimed at younger women, have appeared in magazines and online, and a big television campaign is under way: 3,000 commercial slots have been scheduled on network and cable in November and December.

But the claim that the shoes offer muscle toning is backed by a single study involving just five people, not published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. In that study, done at the University of Delaware, five women walked on a treadmill for 500 steps wearing either the EasyTone or another Reebok walking shoe, and while barefoot. Using sensors that measure muscle activity, the researchers showed that wearing the EasyTone worked gluteal muscles an average of 28 percent more than regular walking shoes. Hamstring and calf muscles worked 11 percent harder. [More important news for body-conscious farmers]

Answer: Nope.


Nevertheless, do they make a work boot?

Update: Here's the actual commercial.

Department of Zowie!...

Arctic Norwegians were amazed by an atmospheric unprecedented atmospheric display that seems a little UFO-ish for many.

But I think it's legit.

The first reaction of many readers when they see this picture is Photoshop! Surely this must be a fake. But no, many independent observers witnessed and phtotographed the apparition. It is real.
Banbury continues: "It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in color to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end. This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to Earth. According to press reports, this could be seen all over northern Norway and must therefore have been very high up in the atmosphere to be seen hundreds of km apart."

UPDATE (2 a.m. EST, Dec. 10): Circumstantial evidence is mounting that the phenomenon was caused by a malfunctioning suborbital rocket, possibly a Bulava ICBM launched from a Russian submarine in the White Sea. A Navtex no-fly alert was issued for the White Sea on Dec. 9th, and photographers have recorded what appears to be the initial boost phase of a launch beneath the spiral (see inset). A rocket motor spinning out of control could indeed explain the spiral pattern, as shown in this video of a Trident II missile launched from a US submarine in 2007. The Russian rocket hypothesis is plausible, but it has not yet been confirmed. [More]

I immediately tried to picture the reaction on the Ruskie sub.

It's not too often you have failures this photo-spectacular.  I think we should ask them to do one on New Year's eve.

The prototype for health care reform is...

Agriculture?  In a remarkably unique, but perhaps unexpected analogy, Atwul Gawande (of "McCallister medicine" fame) points to agriculture as a model for health cost management.

There are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not. Universal health-care coverage belongs to the first category: you can pick one of several possible solutions, pass a bill, and (allowing for some tinkering around the edges) it will happen. Problems of the second kind, by contrast, are never solved, exactly; they are managed. Reforming the agricultural system so that it serves the country’s needs has been a process, involving millions of farmers pursuing their individual interests. This could not happen by fiat. There was no one-time fix. The same goes for reforming the health-care system so that it serves the country’s needs. No nation has escaped the cost problem: the expenditure curves have outpaced inflation around the world. Nobody has found a master switch that you can flip to make the problem go away. If we want to start solving it, we first need to recognize that there is no technical solution.

Much like farming, medicine involves hundreds of thousands of local entities across the country—hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, home-health agencies, drug and device suppliers. They provide complex services for the thousands of diseases, conditions, and injuries that afflict us. They want to provide good care, but they also measure their success by the amount of revenue they take in, and, as each pursues its individual interests, the net result has been disastrous. Our fee-for-service system, doling out separate payments for everything and everyone involved in a patient’s care, has all the wrong incentives: it rewards doing more over doing right, it increases paperwork and the duplication of efforts, and it discourages clinicians from working together for the best possible results. Knowledge diffuses too slowly. Our information systems are primitive. The malpractice system is wasteful and counterproductive. And the best way to fix all this is—well, plenty of people have plenty of ideas. It’s just that nobody knows for sure.
The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front. Government has a crucial role to play here—not running the system but guiding it, by looking for the best strategies and practices and finding ways to get them adopted, county by county. Transforming health care everywhere starts with transforming it somewhere. [More]

As long-time readers know, I have been less stuck on getting it right than I am concerned about getting reform started. I agree with Gawande one reason to favor this approach is we can't fix the problem, but we can manage it much better than we are now.

We will be constantly tinkering with how we afford and allocate health care, just as we do now. But until we have more mechanisms to to experiment with, our choices will be fewer and worse.

Maybe our history in agriculture is a valid comparison.

I fall for this one...

Every time: going off the grid by using fuel cell technology.

Such technology might sound far-fetched, but the basic patent behind Sridhar’s cells, which he calls “Bloom boxes,” dates to 1899. Fuel cells—which facilitate a chemical reaction between oxygen and hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuel without burning anything—have been used aboard NASA vehicles and Navy submarines for years. The biggest challenge in adapting them for commercial use was making the technology reliable and affordable. That’s where Sridhar’s NASA background gave him a breakthrough advantage.
“To send anything to Mars is so expensive, you have to extract the most use possible out of it. Which means you have to change your underlying assumptions about everything,” he explains. “So with [the Bloom boxes], I did the same thing. I looked at each component and, for example, set a price point that it absolutely had to make.”
Nearly eight years and a reported $250 million in venture-capital investment later, Sridhar has a working product that’s been in field trials for the past two years and is about to go on the global market, at a price he says will be competitive with existing energy options. As for results: in an ongoing trial at the University of Tennessee, a five-kilowatt Bloom box (the size of a large coffee table and capable of powering a 5,000-square-foot house) has proved twice as efficient as a traditional gas-burning system and produced 60 percent fewer emissions.

Since the boxes are “fuel agnostic,” customers can run them on existing propane, natural gas, or ethanol sources. But they’ll also run on plant waste, or almost anything else containing hydrogen and carbon. And the eventual “killer app”? Processing wind- or solar-generated electricity with water to create storable oxygen and hydrogen, then reversing the process to generate electricity at night or in low-wind or cloudy conditions. [More]

The dream of having a big ol' propane tank and being able to generate my own power has been a cherished fantasy of mine since they were first put forward as the answer to spacecraft power.

They make more sense than wind farms or at least complement them, and the idea of distributed power generation strikes me as fundamentally brilliant.  The devil, however, is in the details.  And the politics.


Maybe this time...

Medicare for me?...

One of the ideas being batted around in the attempt to find a compromise health bill is to lower the eligible age for Medicare to 55. This looks at first blush like a brilliant political move becuase even as critics of reform scream about "not socializing medicine", they shout equally loud about keeping hands off Medicare (the most socialist form of health care we have).

Apparently socialized medicine is bad for other people.

There may be a solution coming soon. Medicare may shortly have a buy-in for individuals between 55 and 64 years of age. This could solve a great many problems. The doctors and hospitals would get paid. The insured would be able to continue with their services and with their personal physician in most cases and the Medicare system would have money coming in to offset the expense of treating this group of people.
In addition, statistics show that people age 55 to 65 usually have less medical issues and less medical treatment than most people 65 and older. As a group, they have taken care of themselves better, they are healthier – or at least, the onset of serious health issues that come with age haven’t set in yet – and they tend to see the doctor less, using prevention rather than a cure.

The Medicare Buy-In may take a little time to put into place. Lawmakers are working out the details that would help cover the over 5 million boomers between age 55 and 64 who are uninsured. There would be premiums on a monthly basis to the tune of a few hundred dollars, but the premiums should be less than keeping up with payments for the insurance from the old job and COBRA. [More]

There are intriguing implications for this action. First, would it affect jobs by eliminating one big reason older workers are hanging on?  If so, this might free up some openings for younger workers who are facing a dismal job market.

New data shows that older workers are staying on the job longer causing younger job seekers to be squeezed out of the job market.

A new report by the Pew Research Center's Social and Demographic Trends project revealed that the recession is having a very different impact by age. The downturn is keeping older adults in the workforce longer and younger adults out of the workforce longer.

But according to local employment agencies it is not just the recession causing older workers to stay on longer, they want to keep working and employers want them. [More]

Another consideration is how this might impact rural America, where health providers have long felt improperly compensated.

This is a totally fair complaint. If we’re going to have two different houses of congress, I think it would make sense to elect one of them on some non-geographical basis so as to cut down on the level of parochialism. And if we’re going to have geographically based representation, it ought to be done fairly, not with a system that lets North Dakota have much more representation than Los Angeles County which has 15 times the population. And if we’re going to have an unfair system, it would be nice to at least see some more high-mindedness from the people representing the giant empty square states.
All that said, there’s a real issue here that’s been lurking in the background of a lot of these health reform debates. The system Medicare uses to determine how much money doctors and hospitals get for treating patients contains a heavy geographical component. In other words, the same procedure gets a different level of payment depending on where it happens. Not surprisingly, the political result of this is that everyone is perpetually convinced that their area is underpaid. And in particular, politicians from rural areas believe very strongly that Medicare is underpaying their health care providers.
But is this actually true? I’ve been trying to figure it out for months and . . . it’s hard to say. This post on the Health Beat Blog is an excellent primer on how Medicare payment works. But merely knowing the facts doesn’t really answer the question. That’s because a big part of the issue is a somewhat normative dispute over what we should be trying to accomplish with our policy. In general, the costs of things are lower in rural areas. But when you get into highly specialized medical care, it’s very inefficient to try to provide them in low-density areas. This is why hospitals are generally clustered in central cities. And for people who live in low-density portions of metropolitan areas, the fact that you might need to travel a ways to get specialized medical care isn’t such a big problem—you’re more concerned about getting treated than about the long commute.

But in large swathes of the United States, there’s just no major urban area anywhere even vaguely nearby. Washburn, ND is four hours from Fargo and almost eight hours from Minneapolis. Naturally, people who live in rural areas would like as wide a range of services available to them as possible. So to them an appropriate reimbursement rate is one which is high enough to attract such a level of provider-capacity, and anything that falls short of that constitutes “underpayment.” But from a metropolitan perspective, that’s backwards. It’s just that like how you don’t see art house movie theaters in rural areas, it’s not possible for provision of certain services to be viable in some places without overpaying to specially subsidize them. [More]

Finally, doesn't this seem like a public option by steps?  With even more Americans enjoying the benefits/costs of Medicare, the comparisons will be even more available. I could see gradual rolling downward in the entry age as politics permit.  Especially if the alternative private solutions simply continue their current trajectory of costs and coverage even after their reforms.

Things I haven't posted for a while, Part XXV...

Street art.

[More great stuff]

This will have implications for fashion...

At least for women, I think.

The Spanish government approved Friday a decree that sets limits on the temperature that air conditioners and heaters can be set to in public spaces such as bars, offices and airports in a bid to reduce energy consumption.

Under the new rules temperatures in public spaces should not exceed 21 degrees Celsius (70 Fahrenheit) in winter and should not go below 26 degrees Celsius (79 Fahrenheit) during the summer, the government said in a statement. [More]

I can foresee more sweaters and slacks in winter, a la England. Moreover, you think sundresses are skimpy now...

I wonder how ice cold (summer) movie theaters will cope. And my church could be a violator as well.

Seriously, I could see such restrictions sweeping both Europe and the US since city councils and similar government bodies can do so at little cost and appear to be doing good. (And maybe they are)

Why e-readers will take over...

Competition is adding features needed.  Consider this ability on the Nook by B & N:

Another potentially nifty feature is the ability to lend digital books to a friend who’s using a Nook or an iPhone or computer running Barnes & Noble’s e-reader software. If your offer to lend is accepted, the book appears on the borrower’s device for 14 days, while it’s locked on yours for the duration.

The two-week period can’t be extended, nor can the same person borrow the book again. While that lack of flexibility might be a bit of a drag, at least you’re guaranteed to get your book back. Not all publishers will let their books be lent, but Barnes & Noble says more than half of the commercial e-books in its million-title store will be available. The feature hasn’t yet launched; in testing over the weekend, I was able to borrow books, but not lend them. [More]

Think the Kindle won't add that feature soon?  Me neither.  Suddenly, the gripe about sharing books with friends is ended, and hard copies become less important.


Still, I dream of better coverage from Sprint for my Kindle.

Somebody's bullish on corn prices...

Despite dismal fundamentals, obviously input suppliers think there is a future in corn farming.

CF Industries Holdings Inc. increased its offer to acquire rival Terra Industries Inc. to about $4.58 billion as it seeks to increase output of nitrogen fertilizer.
The bid of $36.75 in cash and 0.1034 of a CF share for each share of Terra includes the $7.50 a share dividend Terra declared in September, Deerfield, Illinois-based CF said today in a statement. CF’s previous offer was $32 in cash and 0.1034 of a CF share and also included the dividend.
CF has sought to acquire Terra for more than 10 months while fending off a hostile bid from Agrium Inc. At stake in the three-way battle is whether Agrium or CF will become the world’s second-largest publicly traded maker of nitrogen-based fertilizers after Yara International ASA of Norway. Terra has rejected CF’s previous offers. [More]

I wouldn't count Agrium out just yet, either.

Furthermore, index funds are still buying corn, too.

Christmas music to avoid...

Listen to some samples, if you dare.

Maybe for the office party grab bag?  Take the poll, as well.

Climategate - in case you missed it...

By now, most of us have probably heard about the hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of University of East Anglia, which has been labeled repeatedly as the final nail in the coffin for Anthropogenic Global Warming.

From some pretty overwrought accounts the conspiracy to defraud scientifically by thousands of AGW supporters was driven by politics, desire for fame, or a myriad of other reasons.  If so, this raid of the university's computer was an act of heroic espionage that strikes back at an intelligentsia run amok.

After all, the stakes are enormous: perhaps trillions of dollars and unquestionably every American’s personal liberties. Tomorrow, over 20,000 delegates from 193 nations will gather in Copenhagen to craft an agreement which would not only force American power consumption to levels equal to those of about 1910, but would also have us pay reparations for an imaginary “climate debt” we’ve accumulated by building the world’s greatest economy of all time. That debt is based on the amount of CO2 our financial growth has purportedly pumped into the atmosphere, which, according to the conclusions of the IPCC and based largely upon reports from the CRU, has selfishly imperiled the planet by inducing climate change. [More of a remarkably detailed analysis]

Faced with this apparently incontestable rebuttal and clear evidence of scientists behaving badly, this should be grinding the AGW machine to a halt.  But it's not.

There could be several reasons.

• The "alarmist" camp is too vast and tightly control to be bothered by clear proof of outright fraud and departure from acceptable scientific method.
  
• The public is simply too distracted to understand the nature of the disaster that will be caused by GHG emissions control which is illustrated by this damning evidence.
  
• The AGW camp is unreasoning and won't consider counterarguments.
• The issues released are not sufficient to sway the consensus of climatologists.
• Our news cycle has moved on to other more important developments about Tiger Woods.
  

Having waded through some material from both sides, here are some comments I found useful. First Sharon Begley - one of my favorite science journalists.

Other e-mails reflect the ugly politicization of climate science, which is unending. Climate scientists have been subject to harassment and character assassination (Google "Ben Santer" and "Wall Street Journal" to see what I mean), and just last week, Rep. James Sensenbrenner accused the researchers of "scientific fascism" and, with GOP colleagues, made the stunningly stupid demand that the EPA therefore stop regulating greenhouse emissions. It may be human nature to respond in kind; in one e-mail, a scientist wishes he could beat up a leading denier. But the scientists should be bigger than the know-nothings. Rather than "circl[ing] the wagons," as Curry put it, respond to misinformation with physics, data, and analysis as, for instance, the RealClimate blog does.
Especially since the science—paleoclimate data, heating in the stratosphere relative to the troposphere, and other fingerprints of manmade climate change—is so compelling. Take the two papers by climate skeptics that triggered that "redefine the peer-reviewed literature" e-mail. Both were cited and discussed in the IPCC report—and have now been shown to be riddled with errors. Science worked as it should, good research crowding out bad. [More]

One of the best even-handed analysis came from Popular Mechanics, and it dovetails with my belief that the same scientific discipline needed for the advances in medicine and technology - not to mention agriculture is at work in climatology.

Outspoken critics often portray climate science as a house of cards, built on a shaky edifice of limited data and broad suppositions. However, it's more realistic to think of the science as a deck of cards, spread out, face up. Some data and interpretations of those data are more certain than others, of course. But pulling out one or two interpretations, or the results of a few scientists, does not change the overall picture. Take away two or three cards, and there are still 49 or 50 cards facing you.

The "house of cards" view results partly from the representation of human-induced climate change in opinion polls and in the press, which split the debate into "believers" and "skeptics." This dichotomy is misleading for many reasons, particularly because it implies that those who are concerned about human-induced climate change believe every single claim made by every scientist on this topic, in the way that some fundamentalists claim to believe in the literal truth of every word in a religious text. Similarly, it implies that all skeptics doubt the entire theory.
 
...
 

For these reasons, and based on carbon isotope data, it is all but certain that the present, unprecedented rise in CO₂ is due mainly to human output. But one cannot rule out with complete certainty other factors, for example, global warming itself, that could also be significantly contributing to the atmospheric CO₂ increase.

CO₂ (and methane) in the atmosphere are nearly transparent to UV and visible radiation, but absorb in the infrared, creating a "greenhouse." If it were not for this, the surface of the Earth would be much colder. This leads to the inference that increasing CO₂ will lead to increasing warmth. Also, high CO₂ concentration in the air leads to ocean acidification, which is probably bad for coral and perhaps also for plankton that make their shells from calcium carbonate (soluble in acid) and form the base of the ocean food chain.

A good-faith effort has been made to determine average global temperature using the instrumental record, with increasing accuracy and precision as the data become more comprehensive. For sure, the average temperature of the atmosphere has been rising for most of the last 50 years. This is consistent with the greenhouse theory, though one cannot rule out with complete certainty that other factors—variation due to sunspot activity, or the last gasp of a long warming trend caused by variation in the Earth's orbit—might also be contributing to temperature change.

The Arctic ice cap is getting smaller, in apparent response to this global temperature increase. Sea level is rising, due to the thermal expansion of the oceans and, increasingly, to melting of the Greenland and/or Antarctic ice caps. It has been shown to most people's satisfaction that the Greenland ice cap is getting smaller.

There may be other factors, not yet accounted for, which could more or less suddenly emerge, and offset some or all of the future CO₂ increase, the warming, the melting and the acidification that are predicted from these simple, well-known observations and the inferences and projections from models based on these observations. That's the nature of science in general. It is really almost impossible to prove beyond all doubt that nothing important is missing from a theory. As a trail sign in Yosemite used to say, "Caution, unknown hazards may exist." In addition, the ecological, economic and social consequences of global warming are also uncertain, adding another layer of unpredictability to this whole scenario.

Most scientists know and acknowledge these uncertainties, and reason as follows. We're in an unprecedented situation, with regard to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the rate at which it is rising. Because this is unprecedented, we are not sure what is going to happen. But global warming is very likely, and reasonably probable outcomes could be fatal. Ignoring it would be like Russian roulette. Want to play? I do not. [More]

So, my view is, like all massive scientific efforts climatology is populated with people who make errors, but also with people who catch them.  Scientific advances cannot be built to last on falsified results, so like other observers, I anticipate furious re-examination of the issues outlined by skeptics, to the good of the effort.

The scientific implications of the Climategate files are probably small, but the political implication is certainly large–because of the politicized nature of climate science confirmed by the files. Verification of the existence of conspiring enforcers of orthodoxy weakens the strongest rhetorical weapon in the alarmist arsenal. The idea that the science behind predictions of potentially catastrophic warming is rock solid and that the putative scientific consensus reflects the rock solidity of the science licenses the inference that there is no scientifically respectable excuse for skepticism of or disagreement with the consensus. That is a big stick to thump people with. But the Climategate files strongly suggest that at least some of the science is not rock solid and that the scientific consensus is at least in part the product of silencing or marginalizing those who might upset it. The files have made “How can we be sure that you did not fudge your data” and “How do we know that dissenting voices have been given a fair hearing?” questions that we now must ask rather than questions skeptics can be effectively shouted down for asking. The files show that suspicion is warranted. That’s a big deal.
It is not surprising to see a “Move along! Nothing to see here!” response from alarmists, but there is certainly something to see. Though I’m sure some ideologues will merely amp up their armtwisting thug tactics to protect the fragile perception of consensus they had achieved (precioussssssss!), I predict that the overall response from the scientific community will be healthy and invigorating. Climate science will become more transparent and more rigorously by-the-book because climate scientists are becoming more fully aware that the impulse to jealously protect a public perception of consensus can undermine itself by producing questionable science and a justifiably skeptical public. [More]

Since I was otherwise occupied when this brouhaha erupted, I have had the luxury of not shooting my mouth off immediately.  And it appears to me the emerging result is a needed shakeup in the rules of procedure for the climatological community, and less than hoped for media and public traction for the skeptic side.  In fact, this whole episode may reshape the way this campaign is carried out.

At any rate, I enjoyed this response, if only for the interesting use of the word "febrile".




Finally, a small, but chilling consideration. Very few comments - both pro and con - were concerned about the fact these e-mails were hacked - i.e. obtained illegally. To me it is one more step in our refusal to rule out any method we think will advance our political agenda.  Bear this in mind as more of your correspondence is done via e-mail.

Just as we eroded habeus corpus in the witch hunt for terrorists, so now do we lightly cast aside another important element of privacy.  And for the most part this is done by people who claim to stand for individual liberty.

Done...

Really.  All done.  Every row. 

Thank you for reading and your patience.  Posting will recommence when this bottle of Moet & Chandon is empty and I have slept without dreaming of unloading trucks and moving augers.

What's the rush?...

We've decided to savor this wonderful harvest and set aside our anxiety about finishing.  With about 130 soggy acres to combine (and dry) we're hoping for some temps in the teens to help out.

(But no snow/sleet/freezing rain)

Posting is hard because of the Cargill schedule and my brain isn't working well, so I'm concentrating on just keeping up with TP and FJ columns, USFR, and speaking - since they generate income.

It's not as bad as the pledge breaks now roiling the PBS schedule, anyway.

Know your local numbers...

Vital information by zip code.  Some from mine:

For counties check here.


[Thanks, James]

The practicalities of protectionism...

It's hard enough to get buy-in for open markets when things are humming along economically.  Remember the drawn-out disappointment as ag stalled the WTO talks.  But expecting any career-minded pol to even consider exposing his dstrict to foreign competition is pretty unrealistic.

I think this illustrates one of the reasons why conventional, market-oriented neoliberal types ought to be more concerned about the labor market situation. If you convince people that it’s not possible for monetary authorities to boost employment, and that it’s unwise to use fiscal policy to boost employment, then it starts to look irresponsible for politicians not to use trade restrictions to protect the jobs of people in their state/district. When an economy is near full employment you can say trade makes the pie bigger and people who lose their jobs will get new jobs. But we’re years away from full employment—which both the Fed and the White House seem to think—then getting laid-off is catastrophic.

The trade restrictions put in place as a response to the Depression exerted a small-but-meaningful drag on growth year after year after year for decades. Going back in that direction would have very deleterious long-run consequences. But it’s going to be extremely difficult to avoid if we can’t produce a healthy labor market. [More]

It could be even if you really study history and think you understand what folks did wrong previously, there are powerful forces pushing you to repeat anyway.