This explains a lot of interviews...

While we are all nattering on about ethanol, the powers that be and wanna be are gathering at Davos, Switzerland to ponder deep ponderings and communicate (?):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't like to excerpt so completely but this was a short post on a wonderful blog, Davos Diary in the NYT

This is more than a casual get-together in a lumpy country. Deals are made and ideas are considered. The World Economic Forum, by virtue of its elitist image (deserved or not) attracts some very bright minds and features debate that should but does not occur in government circles.

Fifty things you may not have known about credit cards...

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

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

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

More
One of my own: If your card is stolen and used, don't panic. I've been through it twice and it worked out fine each time. Be patient while they get your account straightened up. Keep an up-to-date list of automatic charges (satellite company, cell phone, etc.) that go to each card to make this process easier.

[via Metafilter]

Full speed ahead...

President Bush seemingly set in stone America's commitment to immense amounts of ethanol and hence immense amounts of corn. This is good news for farmers, but really good news for ethanol investors.

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

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

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

If we in agriculture think this whopping injection of income will not attract competitors and predators we are fooling ourselves. In fact, there may be efforts to capture the income stream at the farm level. In other words, massive (on our scale, not theirs) investments in farms may be one obvious way to see a return on money. And farm suppliers are cashing in as well.

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

I have opined before that while investing in ethanol may still be a reasonable venture, land could be the next rush. Owners can capture significant profits with custom farming leasing or getting into the business themselves. Besides it is not rocket finance to see what doubling gross profits (and that is what it looks like to my computer) could mean to asset values.

The interesting thing will be to track trends like farm size, farmer numbers, off-farm income, young farmer cohort numbers, etc. to see if higher prices are indeed the answers to these "problems".

My bet is these trends will accelerate, not decline with increased revenue. And the ERS will give us the answers just a few years after the fact.

It's not just for popcorn...

For all of you guys out there who think "cooking" means nuking something in a microwave oven, a heads-up. Your oven can also make kitchen sponges more sanitary.

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

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

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

BIG, BIG Update: Make sure the sponge is wet!!

But wait - there's even more important news about this miracle appliance.

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

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

This example of meaningful science in action, not to mention culinary entertainment, is probably best done when your wife is gone.

Then use a sterile sponge to clean up!

Gee - who's not running for President?...

The latest on possible candidates :

Despite the growing buzz about their candidacy, some, such as CNN political analyst Bill Schneider, say the family's lack of political experience is a setback. Phil, 49, is a pediatrician; Janice, 47, a homemaker, graduated from the University of Connecticut with a history degree; and Wesley, 19, and Phil Jr., 17, have been widely criticized for their youth. Likewise, the family has yet to form an exploratory committee, and, almost all observers agree that, with a combined annual income of less than $70,000, they are already at a serious fund-raising disadvantage. They were also roundly chided by the media after a major misstep in which John Jr. referred to the historic Shaker Village in Canterbury as "sucky." [More]

How sad is it when cnn.com has to label humor columns? Or has politics become indistinguishable from satire?

Sound family science net...

Sophisticated research and polling methods have identified words and phrases that can do more than convey a thought.

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

This power in words is an important weapon in the media war waged by mainstream ag. Consider the words "sound science". To begin with unsound science is not science at all. I have already ranted about this type of code-word communication, but the technique continues to create misinformation throughout modern media.

But even more weasel-wordy are labels like "family" and "community".

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

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

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

Hence the current clamor for a "safety net". It sounds so much better than guaranteed profits. From an engineer's point of view, however, there is little to differentiate between a safety net and a hammock. Besides, couldn't we weave our own nets, like other Americans have to?

Another word-bomb is "actuarially sound" insurance programs. For cryin' out loud. Without $4B in subsidies an actuarially sound crop insurance program would demonstrate vigorously where we should not be planting stuff.

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

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

As long as we talk in unspeak, we will never truly communicate, and the real world will simply pass us by while we recite the same thoughts to each other. We can do better, and the first step is to call a spade a bowl.

You put that submarine down right now, mister!...

My jaw dropped at this picture of the world's largest floating crane.


Toying with a sub that way is just so wrong. [more]

[via Neatorama]

It's all about corn...

Our government has apparently decided all farmers should be corn farmers. The State of the Union speech tonight should officially make this One Nation Under Tassels. And when the US is one big cornfield, ag policy will be really easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mandates are easy, and don't show up on government budgets. They are also a side-effect of the strong-executive theory of government. If livestock operators think their study group report will have any more effect than the Iraq Report, they are fooling themselves. In fact, they might be the next big subsidy recipients.

This decision has been made, I think and there is small chance of turning back (we like to stay the course a lot).

Too bad it's another unfortunate choice.

Medical posturing from the ivory towers...

President Bush's purported health insurance SOTU proposal has been leaked and the economist-blogosphere is buzzing with instant analyses. I've read about 10 and not one - that's right, ZERO - seem to address the fundamental underlying problems:

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

One can only assume that most academic economists have pretty darn good coverage through their universities, and have never confronted the issue of being able to pay for insurance but being turned down.

Health insurance is simply a way to hand the bill around. It does nothing to tackle the hard problem of how many liver transplants a person is allowed, or whether to do bypass surgery on a 90-year old or how does a 25 year-old independent trucker with genetic markers for MS get coverage.

Our problem is not just medical insurance. It's paying for all the medical care we now can provide, such as drugs and procedures never imagined 10 years ago. And for how long? The expenditure of increasing portions of our economic output in the final few months of lives is a growing problem that nobody want to tackle, even as it threatens to consume us.

They warned you to plant refuges...

The latest version of the corn borer


Just kidding! This is cecropia caterpillar in a particular stage of shedding (molting?).

Looks to me like it was designed by Lego.

My campaign for an HDTV [Day 1]...

We watch about 10 hours of TV per week - really - I timed it. Thanks to TiVo we watch only stuff we like. But like many of you, I have a perfectly good TV to watch on.

ALL the other guys have BIG TV's however. I am being oppressed. So I have begun an intellectual campaign to convince myself that I need one of those sleek marvels in my living room. It would really help if you guys who have one write in with rapturous comments about how it has changed your life for the better.

Actually, some people are finding despite their skepticism that HDTV adds something.

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

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

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

I checked into that show, and it looks pretty cool. However, some TV producers are worried about that HDTV may actually deliver too-realistic images.

I'm going to investigate what it will take to upgrade my DirecTV subscription to HD. Their goofy website does not make this an easy task.

I'm also thinking that those puppies may go on sale after the Super Bowl.

More later.

Trojan consumers...

There is a trend in public debate to create a "consumer advocacy" group out of thin air. I suppose there is something authentic seeming about "grassroots" opinions. So now, it has become common in public relations for corporate and political campaigns to quietly organize, fund, and even prop up dupes to pose as the "grass". The trendy term for such fronts is "astroturfing"

Some examples:

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

The commercial, in a foreboding tone, suggests that the lights may go out in Illinois if an electricity rate freeze is extended.

"We don't need a California-style energy crisis in Illinois," cautions a voice representing Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity.

It may sound like the campaign of a grass-roots consumer group, but it is not.

Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity gets most of its money from ComEd. CORE, as it is known, is a group of organizations and executives, many with ties to ComEd or the utility industry.

But ComEd's name is nowhere to be seen as the voice-over raises the specter of the disaster to come if the Illinois legislature extends the freeze on electricity rates next week. The commercial has been running on television stations around the state in recent weeks, and full-page ads have been placed in newspapers. [More]

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

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

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

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

While I'm not crying for PETA, the tactic stinks.The happy part is thanks to search engines, anyone can find out who these groups really are. So when I link to a site and wonder where their info comes from and who is punching the buttons, I always start with the "About Us" page. I also like to Google board members and check financial reports.

As for this doubtful source, I get paid by FJ Media to write this drivel and these opinions and words are my very own (not counting the stuff I stole outright or was too lazy to link).

They aren't that easy to think up either.

This can only get worse...

Thanks to a strange set of consequences, "meatlifting" is now the number one "loss prevention" problem for supermarkets.

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

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

When ethanol demand raises feed prices and the livestock industry cuts back production, meat prices will likely rise. Too many weird store security scenarios spring to mind as shoppers respond with more theft attempts.

So, more innovation is required in the battle against meatlifting. Meat-sniffing dogs pop to mind, though some shoppers might object to having a Doberman nosing around their crotches in search of stolen steaks. But you know what they say about civil liberties in a time of crisis. [more]

I think we can label this "bad press"...

A searing indictment of Smithfield Farms ran in the Rolling Stone magazine. Not pretty.

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

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

The viewpoint is far from even-handed, and the language is masterfully accusatory. However, discounting these fully still yields a pile of bad news and worse projections. Most troubling to me is the concluding paragraph about plans for Eastern Europe.

When Joseph Luter entered Poland, he announced that he planned to turn the country into the "Iowa of Europe." Iowa has always been America's biggest hog producer and remains the nation's chief icon of hog farming. Having subdued Poland, Luter announced this summer that all of Eastern Europe -- "particularly Romania" -- should become the "Iowa of Europe." Seventy-five percent of Romania's hogs currently come from household farms. Over the next five years, Smithfield plans to spend $800 million in Romania to change that.

Even though I consider myself an industrial farmer, I support strong efforts to control environmental externalities caused by CAFO's (or any agricultural activity). We can find other methods of husbandry and we can endure higher meat costs to fund them.

States like North Carolina have the right to manage such economic activity as they choose, but they may be surprised what the increasing population density on the East Coast can do even against powerful business interests.

We're not the only farmers doing well...unfortunately...

Say what you will about the old Taliban, but those guys ran a tight drug ship. Oh sure they oppressed the heck out of women especially, and the population in general, but they really put the clamps on the opium trade.

Our record is somewhat less effective...

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

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

The popularity of harsh authoritarianism in lawless countries is hardly surprising. People who feel threatened sometimes feel the trade off of freedom for safety is worth it. Something similar may be happening under our noses.

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

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

When any American loses a basic right, we all do.

I'll bet I can rig this up in my shower...

Sure - a few T-jet valves, and old Apple computer, some garden hose...

What could go wrong?

[Via BoingBoing]

One more reason to distrust horses...

Never my favorite animal, the horse reveals it hideous nature once again. Watch the chicken. The poor innocent chicken...

[via Neatorama]

Updated 1/20 to add the "missing link" - heh, heh.

A new toy for teaching change in our world...

Check out the latest amazing piece of work from Google.

Follow the path of the Russian Federation, for one. And then watch China and India. You can slow it down and focus on individual countries.

[via HitandRun]

It would make merging on the interstate easier...

The Navy is experimenting with new electromagnetic catapults that can hurl a plane off a carrier. The acceleration is 0 to 150 mph in under a second - which is why I used the verb "hurl".

The limiting factor is going to be the poor dude in the cockpit. Keeping in mind the brain is about the consistency of week-old pudding, 14 G's could be a pretty hard on even the toughest airman.

I'm not worthy...

The Top producer Seminar has turned out to be the best meeting I've been at in year. Part of it is due to the general euphoria from $4 corn, but the large crowd also has a sense of the significance of this moment.

To be sure, there is a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming tome to the conversations, and a determined effort to not get overly worked up, but it is hard to keep from grinning. And I think more than a few of us are trying to figure out what we have done to deserve this economic blessing.

Some of them remember 1973-4 and how that price spike set the expectation level for my generation. I got to the party late in 1975, but my friends were still talking about then. Somehow, I think this good fortune is different.

First, demand for ethanol - and hence - corn is not a whim of the marketplace or foreign buyers - it is mandated by law. While I personally think mandates are bad policy, the fact remains they are in place an controlling corn demand.

Second, while small livestock producers will likely be hit hard by this run-up in feed prices, much of the feed demand is from very large operations who will adapt differently than individual producers - even running losses for significant periods. The events of 1995 showed us how long they will hang tough.

Farmers (and I'm talking grain farmers here) are better positioned and have, it is to be hoped improved management skills at their commands.

I think we can handle prosperity. But can we do it with grace and maturity?