Those of you who’ve followed this blog for a while know I’m fascinated with the stock and commodities markets and how they work, and especially with how irrational they can be. I’m fascinated with how investors often throw rationality out the window and invest in companies that are less than viable in the long term. Their investments are based more on hype and hope than on any kind of rational decision based on actual data.
I ran into an article about Beyond Meat(TM) that illustrates just how ridiculous things can get. You can click the link up there to go read it yourself, but I’ll summarize it here.
When BM launched its IPO it was worth about $25 a share. Before the current stock market plunge hit, it was trading for $230 a share. That means the company is now worth more than Wendy’s, Jack ‘n the Box, Red Robin and Shack Shack combined, about $13 billion.
So, how is a company that had total sales of only around $65 million, has never made a profit, and is losing over $6 million a quarter, worth $13 billion? The answer to that question is, of course, it isn’t. Not even close. “Investing in Beyond Meat may be a worse idea than opening a video store in the age of Netflix.” is what a columnist at the Washington Times said when talking about the company.
And to make things worse, BM and its competitors are going after what is almost certainly going to be a relatively tiny niche market to begin with, fake meat, and pushing their products based on information that is, at best, misleading. While claiming it’s “healthier” than meat, what is actually in most of those products is some of the most unnatural and highly processed garbage ingredients you can imagine. As the Washington Times’ Richard Berman said, the company “relies on consumers not knowing what’s in their products”. At a time when there is increasing evidence that the highly processed foods we’re shoveling into our mouths are harming our health, BM and the other fake meat manufacturers are pushing this stuff?
Of course this isn’t the first time people have gone a bit silly over companies. Not even close. It’s been going on forever. Look at Uber. Not only has Uber never made an actual profit, it loses, on average, billions of dollars a year. The latest data I heard was that Uber lost more than $5 billion just in the first quarter of 2019. The only reason it still exists at all is because people who should really know better keep sticking money into it in the hopes that they’ll get something, anything, out of it. You’d think that after the company had lost, oh, ten or fifteen billion people would realize there is something seriously wrong with their whole business model and get the hell out. But no, they keep pumping more and more money into it.
Unfortunately the rabbits ate them overnight. Sigh…
Spring has finally come to Wisconsin and I can tell that easily when I get out around people. Everyone seems in a better mood these days as the temperatures start to warm up and we see some sun again.
It was a long, hard winter by almost anyone’s standards. While it wasn’t extraordinarily cold, we did get near record amounts of snow around here, and it seemed like winter was never going to end. And when it did end, the flooding started. Wisconsin was one of the states that got hit with early spring flooding from a combination of rain and snow melt.
Our yard is an absolute mess now that the snow is gone. Branches and twigs from the trees are everywhere. Dead grass and leaves cover everything. But the weather has still been too cold to really do much out there except some cleanup work.
There are some signs of life out there, though, like the flowers above and our Chives.
The chives are tucked away in a corner of the house where they’re protected and some winters they don’t even freeze back. They’re the first green things that pop up every spring and I suppose they’re really the first harvest of the year from the gardens here. But a few chives go a long way around here so once we have our fill of them early in the season they more or less go wild.
Of course it wouldn’t be spring in Wisconsin if the weather didn’t remind us that it can still pull some nasty tricks on us. We woke up the other day to find the ground covered with snow. We got about an inch or two. fortunately it didn’t stick around long and melted pretty quickly.
We’d hoped to get out and get some work done today (Friday) but it looks like that’s not going to happen. We’re getting light rain that’s going to shut down the chance of getting much done outside today. And the weekend is packed. The bi-annual quilt show in Manitowoc is this weekend and we always try to make that if we can. I’m not a quilter but the quilts that are on display at the event aren’t just quilts to throw on a bed, they’re works of art. I’m always amazed at the skill and talent of the people who make them. Hopefully I’ll have some photos next week.
The there’s the house next door…
This is what we saw when we looked out the window the other evening. Not exactly something you want to see, the local fire department with all their trucks and equipment setting up next door.
No, there wasn’t a fire. It was a training session. All they did was set everything up, get all their gear out, make sure everything worked the way it was supposed to, etc. It was still a bit of a surprise when we looked out the north window and saw that and took us a minute or two to realize what was really going on.
As you can see from the trailer, the big dumpster and debris pile, that place is being worked on at the moment. Someone finally bought the place. When our old neighbors moved out late last summer MrsGF and I seriously considered buying the place if we could get it cheap. The neighbors were just about the nicest neighbors you could possibly ever hope for. An absolutely wonderful young couple with two young kids. But they had more than their share of problems and ended up in bankruptcy and lost the house to the bank. Fortunately it worked out for them in the long run. He has a very good job now and they’re getting back on their feet.
But to get back to that house — MrsGF and I considered buying it if we could get it for the right price. We thought if we could get it for under $50K it would be worth it. But then we found out they were asking $80K for the place and that price was just absolutely ridiculous so we just let it go and talked ourselves out of the idea because, frankly, we couldn’t be bothered. We didn’t want the property badly enough.
It finally sold for $49K. Apparently the mortgage company wanted to get rid of the place fast. Do we regret not getting involved in this? No, not really. Yes, we could have afforded to buy it. We wouldn’t have even had to take out a mortgage. We could have just written a check or used an existing line of credit to buy it. But… Well, what the heck would we do then? Did we really want to get involved in dealing with almost 100 year old buildings, contractors, permits, etc? Well, no, not really. I’m rather relieved that the original sale price was so ridiculously high because otherwise now we’d be stuck with the place.
Turns out the town fire chief bought the place, so at least it went to someone local and someone we know, and not some absentee landlord. He and his son are gutting the place and remodeling it and eventually his son is going to end up buying it from his father.
Let’s see, what else? The move of my electronics gear, radio stuff and computers into the basement is proceeding slowly. I’m still working on cleaning the area up and patching and painting walls down there. I want to get that taken care of first because once I get work benches and equipment in there I’m not going to be able to get at the walls very easily.
I was finally able to get the bicycle out of storage! It’s still been on the cold and wet side to do more than ride around town but it’s still nice to have that out and get even a short ride.
MrsGF and I went to the bi-annual quilt show at the fairgrounds in Manitowoc yesterday and I took lots of pictures. As soon as I have free time I’ll get some of those posted. As usual we saw some absolutely beautiful work by some amazing people.
If you live in Wisconsin you might have noticed something rather curious, the state administration’s campaign ads and the administration itself aren’t talking very much about the most high profile financial fiascoscam deal the state has ever been involved with, the $4 billion plus the state promised to shell out in tax breaks, cash payments and other payouts in order to have FoxConn build it’s factory here. This deal was supposed to bring 13,000 high paying jobs to the state, add still more jobs in various support industries, and help to turn the state into the “Silicon Valley” of the midwest.
And the whole thing has turned into a stinking, reeking mess that smells worse than the local manure lagoon.
Exactly what FC is going to be building on that big hole it’s digging down in southern Wisconsin is anybody’s guess right now, but one thing we can be sure of is that it is definitely not going to be the $10 billion “Generation 10.5” facility the company originally promised. Back in May a news service out of Asia claimed that FC was going to be drastically scaling back the whole plan. FC denied this vehemently. But within about two months it finally admitted that the Gen 10 plant was not going to be built. Instead it was going to be putting in a so-called Generation 6 plant, which was about a quarter of the size of the original facility. But it would be building a Gen-10 plant there sometime in the future. Maybe. It would definitely fulfill its promises about the $10 billion investment and 13,000 jobs. Maybe. It would be done in “phases”, though, not all at once. Maybe.
Well, no.
By the end of summer that story had fallen apart as well. An FC spokesperson told a local paper that it was never going to build a Gen-10 plant here because by the time they had it up and running the market would be glutted with product from other makers. And when you consider the fact that FC apparently never even looked into buying the equipment that would have been necessary to build the Gen-10 plant according to industry analysts, and didn’t make arrangements with Corning to build the required glass manufacturing facility on the site (Corning, BTW, refused to build the facility unless the state coughed up hundreds of millions more in tax breaks and cash), and other things that have come to light since this all started, even someone a lot less cynical than I am would suspect FC never intended to build a Gen-10 plant here in the first place.
And then to make things even more interesting, the spokesperson, said that the Gen-6 plant quite probably wouldn’t be in operation for very long, and all those “good paying” assembly line jobs that they were claiming they were bringing to the state, well, there pretty much weren’t going to be any. Eventually what the facility will really do, they said, was to work on the development of FC’s technologies in displays, cellular and computers. The facility will eventually employ 90% “knowledge workers” and only 10% assembly line work, and most of the assembly line work is going to be done by robots, and, well, that pretty much flushes the hope that the company would employ the lower skilled minority workers from south east Wisconsin right down the drain.
The whole plan has simply evaporated in a puff of smoke. The facility they promised isn’t going to be built. The facility they now claim they will build probably isn’t going to actually operate for very long. The 13,000 jobs has now become maybe 2,000 – 3,000, and 90% of them are going to be “knowledge workers” engaging in research and development. And while R&D is enormously important, well, that’s not the 13,000 allegedly good paying blue collar jobs the company promised in order to sell this boondoggle in the first place.
Now there are a few safeguards in place. FC isn’t going to get $4+ billion out of us. But they are still going to get at least $1 billion from the state out of this deal and the state and local governments are still on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements. While we, the people of the state are going to get, well, we aren’t sure what we’re going to get yet, but it sure as hell isn’t going to be the deal the administration and FC promised when this all started.
The administration should have known better. Seriously, it should have. About 15 minutes worth of research on Google would have told them that if you’re dealing with FC, well, leave your wallet and credit cards at home, count all your fingers when you get your hand back after you shake hands with them, because they’ve done this before. High profile, high dollar projects have been reneged on in India, Vietnam, Pennsylvania, China … And remember that this is the company that had to install nets around the roofs of buildings on its factories in China because it allegedly treated its employees so badly they were committing suicide by jumping off the roofs.
Yes, this is that company.
Now I’m not saying that the politicians down there in Madison deliberately lied to us about this deal. But, well, let’s face it, this current crop of people inhabiting the state capital aren’t really all that bright, now are they? That’s glaringly obvious from the things they’ve said and done over the last eight or ten years. Their primary focus down there isn’t doing good things for the people of the state, it’s getting their asses re-elected so they can hang onto their little bit of power, cling to their fancy offices, go to “fund raising” events where they can guzzle cheap champagne and get their pictures taken with the rich and powerful, and pad their expense accounts. So when FC came along and dangled all those bright, shiny promises, they bit like a starving fish at a worm, and never noticed the hook. They totally ignored all of the warning signs, totally failed to properly research this, totally failed, well, totally failed at just about everything on this deal. And now they’re off soliciting bribes attending fund raising events, and we’re stuck with paying the bills.
The trade war has started in earnest and the effects are filtering down through the economy already. Cash price for soybeans has dropped to about $7.70 or even less, the lowest price in over 10 years. Shiploads of soybeans heading for China have been turned away and have to find other destinations. China has canceled planned purchases of tens of thousands of pounds of US soybeans and is now sourcing beans from Brazil and other countries. It has canceled all of it’s purchases of US sorghum from one story I read. It’s canceling planned purchases of cotton… The list goes on and on. The story in the EU, Canada and Mexico is similar. Tariffs of up to 30% on a huge range of US products.
And there are signs it’s going to get a lot worse. There are noises coming out of DC that the administration is considering slapping tariffs on all products coming from China now. A new list of products that could get hit coming from Canada and Mexico, including automotive products is apparently in the works. That would hit the US auto makers hard because there is no such thing as a “made in the USA” motor vehicle any more. All of them have parts made in Canada, Mexico, China and other countries.
The ag sector is going to get hit first, and get hit the hardest because it is one of the few industries where we have a trade surplus. Huge amounts of agricultural products, both raw and processed, are sold to other countries every year. And we are already seeing ag commodities prices in the US plummeting at a time when commodities prices are already at a point where most farmers are just barely breaking even.
The tariffs are being levied on a lot of products that aren’t made in the US at all, or are made in such low quantities that we can’t meet the demand. We have no choice but to buy elsewhere. Some types of steel, aluminum and other metal products, well, we just don’t make the stuff here for a variety of reasons. The paper your newspaper and magazines is made from. Electronics. Clothing…
There are rumors flying around that the Fed is already getting nervous about the prospect of serious inflation as the increased costs filter through the economy.
Apparently China isn’t waiting to implement the tariffs it said it would be imposing, it’s retaliating against the ill advised trade war this administration has implemented by simply refusing to buy US soybeans entirely.
Since about 30% of our soybean crop gets exported to China, if this keeps up for more than a few weeks it could potentially bankrupt a lot of US farmers who are already right on the edge financially because of low commodities prices.
Hopefully no, I’m not going to break it. But I’ve been doing this blog for a long time now and I’m tired of looking at the same style all the time. I haven’t changed the layout or design of this thing since I started it, so it’s high time for a refresh.
I’m not sure if I like this design or not yet. We’ll see. Don’t be surprised if it changes again in the near future. You may see a few posts like this one that essentially have little or no actual useful content (Ha! You could say that about a lot of my articles here, couldn’t you?) so have patience. If there’s something about the new styles you like or don’t like just leave a comment or email to old.grouchyfarmer@gmail.dom.
Okay so I just looked at it and it doesn’t look utterly horrible. Maybe.
I don’t know about you but I get tired of reading stark black text on a bright white background all the time, so that’s the first thing that got changed.
It’s also supposed to be able to do pull quotes. Well, we’ll see about that
This is supposed to be able to do pull quotes too. Well, we’ll see about that. I’ve been promised pull quotes in the past
This format is also supposed to let me put up images at a larger size and higher resolution than the old one did, so we’ll see about that.
Also it’s about 6 in the morning because I can’t sleep and I’m bored so I start fiddling with things.
Now that’s a scary headline, isn’t it? You’ve probably seen similar headlines over the last few days as even some of the major news outlets have been talking about it. What’s especially troubling is that canola oil has been marketed as being a “healthy” oil for many years now, and it is in very wide spread use around the world. So the possibility that it is linked to something as scary as dementia is pretty serious.
What is canola in the first place? Well, in a way “canola” doesn’t really exist. It actually a variety of rapeseed. The term “rape” comes from the Latin word “rapum”, which means turnip. Rapeseed is related to turnip, rutabaga, cabbage and mustard. We’ve been using plants in this family for oil for thousands of years. It seems that rapeseed oil in the first half of the 20th century was used more as a lubricant than as a food product. Production in Canada increased enormously curing WWII.
After the war demand fell drastically and farmers began to look for other uses. Rapeseed oil was brought to the market in the mid 1950s as a food product, but it had some problems. It had a nasty green color and tasted pretty bad. Even worse, it had a high concentration of erucic acid. Animal experiments indicated that consuming large quantities of erucic acid caused heart damage.
In the 1970s Canadian researchers bred a variety of rapeseed that had far fewer objectionable qualities and far less erucic acid. The term “canola” was originally a trademark name for the new variety, made out of “Can” for Canada, and “ola” from other vegetable oils like Mazola.
Modern canola oil is considered, or was considered before this study came along, to actually be fairly healthy. But now…
How concerned should we be about this? This was just one study and more research needs to be done, but it still is something we need to be concerned about. Dementia is very scary and anything that increases the risk of getting it needs to be avoided if at all possible. To be honest, I’m not going to be buying canola oil after this. There are other oils out there with similar smoke points and nutrition profiles that can be used instead.
Those hoping to find out if their Social Security number and other identifying info was stolen, along with a potential 143 million other American’s data won’t find answers from Equifax. In what…
According to TechCrunch the responses being given at the site when you enter your information to see if your data was stolen seem to have no basis in fact. People are reporting that they have entered their data several times and have received different responses, others have entered random numbers and letters and been told they were “impacted”… Right now it looks like you can’t even be sure your data was or was not stolen in this breach if you go to the equifax site to check.
It’s been a while since I talked about the gardens here, so let’s take a peek at those. It’s been an odd season here with above normal rainfall and rather cool temperatures. It’s been good for some things, bad for others.
We aren’t sure what in the world happened to the dahlias this year. Those are the red flowers behind the cone flowers in the foreground. They just went absolutely crazy. I’ve never seen them get this big before, at least not around here. They’re 4 – 5 feet tall and so thick and lush that it looks like a jungle in there. The cone flowers seem ridiculously happy back there too as you can see. And the sunflowers — oh brother, they’re pushing 7 feet tall.
Handy hint – if you love birds, especially finches, put in some sun flowers. We’ve been putting a few sunflowers in back there for years. It’s right by the window above the kitchen sink and later in the season the finches swarm around that area going after both the cone flower seeds and the sunflowers. They’re great fun to watch, arguing with each other, dangling upside down like little acrobats as they go after the seeds.
The butternut and acorn squash have completely taken over the garden at the back of the garage. We’ve had issues back there because it gets shaded out quite a bit. We’re constantly dragging the vines out of the lawn, out of the raspberries, out of, well, out of everything. They seem to grow a foot or more every day. Absolutely loaded with squash now and still blossoming. We hauled a lot of compost into this bed also last year and it’s paying off now.
One of my issues with modern hybrid flowers is that they’re all show and no scent. I am a very scent oriented person, and it’s always disappointed me that so many flowers that I remember having amazing aromas when I was a child smell pretty much like nothing these days as the plant breeders have selected for ever more showy flowers, and sacrificed the scent, sort of like how they’ve selected vegetables for high yield and tougher fruit to make transport easier, and lost much of the flavor. The alyssum, though, make up for it. Tiny, tiny little flowers that put out an incredible amount of perfume. The scent is almost intoxicating.
Then we have these guys. They sort of look like something from an alien planet or exotic jungle, these beans. The leaves are a foot across, a rich burgundy color when small, then changing to a reddish-green with red veins as they get bigger. They’re about 6 feet tall right now.
The hostas up front have been enjoying themselves too this year. I’ve always loved hostas and we turned this into a hosta garden a few years ago. It had been a mish-mash of odd bushes, grass that never grew properly, some very invasive bushes that someone decided looked pretty. It was a mess. We ripped everything out, tilled up the whole works, put in the cedar fence and started putting hostas in. And we also seem to have pots of plants all up the stairs, along the deck… good grief, where did all those plants come from?
Okay, this isn’t a plant. In the process of building a new gaming computer. My Razor Laptop died on me a couple of months ago and we’re building a new one. We’ve been working under the belief that anything that’s worth doing, is worth doing to excess, so this thing is fairly well loaded up with every goofy thing you can imagine. Interior lighting systems, the CPU cooler has a sort of vortex lighting effect built into it, the fans light up like multi-colored strobes, matching LED light strips inside, even the dopy RAM lights up.
It’s running a liquid cooled Kaby Lake Core i7 processor at 4.2 gigahertz overclocked to 4.7, a Samsung SSD, 8 USB3 ports, Thunderbolt ports, built in WiFi, bluetooth, 6 fans…
Unfortunately the Nvidia video card you see there was was DOA. It worked the first time we turned the computer on. Then we shut it down, did some work on the machine, turned it on, and the card was dead. Sigh… It works on the MBs built in Intel graphics, but that isn’t suitable for any kind of gaming. Grrr… So it’s going to be a while before we get it up and running the way it should be.
Still, dear lord that thing is fast. Eldest son was so impressed he’s thinking of building one for himself.
Stories you might have missed about food, agriculture, and the ever popular ‘stuff’, along with occasionally snarky commentary.
Coffee Linked To Not Dying!
Ooo, coffee — that delightful, delicious beverage that both pleasures the taste buds and enlivens the brain, oh I feel so sorry for those of you who drink tea. (Come on, you tea drinkers know what you’re drinking is lawn sweepings soaked in tepid water, right?)
Anyway, now that I’m done annoying the tea drinkers out there (you know who you are), let’s get on with this.
That headline up there is not clickbait. It’s true. According to a study published actual real live doctors from an actual research facility and published in an actual science journal (not the Flintstone’s Institute for Advanced Studies of Sciency Stuff and Flat Earth Society where most of the congress apparently gets its science information) you have almost a 20% less chance from dying from just about anything if you drink coffee. Well, probably not getting hit by an asteroid or something like that. They mean heart disease, stroke, cancer, that kind of thing. If you click the link it will take you to an article over on The Guardian and you can get the links to the actual study from there.
containing dicamba after it was learned that more than 200,000 acres of non-GM soybeans were allegedly damaged by the product. The Arkansas ban was approved by the Governor’s office and will go into effect on July 11, and is in effect for 120 days. The Missouri one doesn’t seem to have a specific time limit, but the agency involved in Missouri said it hoped the problems could be resolved and the ban lifted yet this growing season.
Dicamba has always been difficult to work with. It turns to vapor and can drift for extremely long distances. Non-GM soybeans are extremely sensitive to the product, and even a tiny amount can damage the crop, so any kind of drifting is a serious problem. Monsanto has claimed that it’s “VaporGrip” version of the product cured the problems when used properly. But it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
So, you ask, what dos Monsanto say about all of this? Glad you asked.
They’re blaming everyone else, of course. In an interview over at CropLife, a Monsanto spokesperson blamed everyone and everything except, of course, it’s product. Farmers spraying at the wrong time of day, having residue from other products in the sprayer’s tanks, not following proper procedures, using the wrong spray nozzles, spraying in windy conditions. And all, of course, without offering any proof that any of this actually happened.
More Chlorpyrifos Controversy
Five states (and I’ve heard several more are in line to do it too) are suing the EPA over it’s decision to permit the continued use of Chlorpyrifos, a very nasty pesticide that is known to cause serious health problems, especially in children.
I mentioned this before. Last year the EPA determined that chlorpyrifos was dangerous, and public health organizations, doctors and other health care professionals have been pushing for it to be banned for years. The EPA was going to ban the stuff at last.
But then along came Pruitt and he claimed the stuff is just fine and dandy and that they had real actual “meaningful data and meaningful science” to prove it. Associated Press, other media, and health officials have repeatedly requested the EPA provide them with the data, but the EPA has refused to respond to any of the requests.
I don’t like being a cynical old bastard, but I get the feeling the EPA hasn’t provided it yet because they have interns locked in a back room somewhere desperately trying to write something sciency enough to fool the average reader into believing this stuff is “safe”.
Oh, I should point out that DOW, which makes chlorpyrifos, contributed $1 million to Trump to fund his inauguration, its CEO is supposedly good friends with him, and it has spent over $13 million “lobbying” various politicians in the past year.
USDA came out with it’s crop status report, and it’s the worst that they’ve issued since the 2012 drought, with only 65% of the corn crop rated at “good” or better, and only 62% of the soybean crop rated “good” or better.
Now during the drought, corn and soybean prices skyrocketed, with corn pushing the $8/bushel range for a time. So you would naturally think that a report that bad would push the prices up, right?
Well, no. After the report came out, corn prices fell by about 5 cents a bushel, and soybeans dropped more than 12 cents.
Apparently what drove the morning price down was that the report wasn’t as bad as they thought it would be.
Bureaucratic Run Around
More on the dicamba front: BASF, which has partnered with Monsanto to produce the special dicamba blend that was just banned in Arkansas and Missouri after enormous numbers of complaints about crops damaged by the herbicide, is trying to pull a bureaucratic end run around the ban by applying for something known as a “special local need label”. This is a special permitting system that allows the use of a pesticide that normally cannot be used, because no other pesticide would be effective. Basically it was originally intended to help during emergency situations where there was an infestation of some pest that threatened to wipe out a crop, and only a non-registered pesticide would work. If you want, you can read the information about that whole process here.
Considering dicamba has damaged literally hundreds of thousands of acres of crops as it has drifted across the countryside, it seems that problem here is dicamba, not the weeds it’s supposed to control.
What The Hell Is Milk Anyway?
There is a lot of fighting these days over the definition of the term “milk” when it comes to products being sold to consumers, specifically over the use of the term in describing drinks made with various nuts and beans. I.e. “soy milk” and “almond milk” and that kind of thing. Even USDA isn’t sure, and is using the word “milk” in much of it’s literature when referring to these products.
I can certainly understand why the almond industry wants to use the term. It’s because calling “almond milk” what it really is, isn’t exactly appealing. If they labeled it accurately, they’d have to call it “97% water with a few ground up almonds, emulsifiers, stabilizers, gums, flavoring agents, coloring, added vitamins and minerals and preservatives and you’d get more nutrition from just eating five or six actual almonds than drinking this stuff beverage”.
Why won’t the ISPs connect rural customers? Cost, of course. It would take ages for them to make up the cost of connecting everyone outside of cities and towns. The same thing happened with electricity and telephone back in the day, the providers wouldn’t hook up rural areas until the government pretty much forced them to and paid a lot of the costs associated with it. And in this current political climate, well, a prominent Wisconsin politician (Sensenbrenner) is on record as saying that no one actually needs internet in the first place, thus illustrating that he hasn’t a clue as to what life is like out here in the real world.
The problem with most of these schemes is that they rely on some type of radio communication, either types of cellular networks, microwaves, or some kind of extended wifi system. And the fact of the matter is that we don’t really have the spectrum available to make these schemes work. The radio spectrum is so severely overcrowded now that cellular companies are paying billions of dollars for access to a few frequencies to expand their networks and improve their systems. So exactly where they’re going to squeeze in these new services is problematic.
The other problem is that some of these systems are already being tested or are even already in use in limited areas, and they don’t really work very well and they aren’t really all that fast. We have a kind of microwave system in use around here serving residents that live outside of the wired system, and it has some serious issues. Heavy rain and snow disrupts service, speeds slow to a crawl during ‘prime time’ when many people are trying to use the system, and most of these systems are very expensive, have some very serious data caps, and have lots of other issues associated with them.
Yet another problem is that what the feds are calling “broadband” isn’t really broadband by anyone’s definition. The US has some of the most abysmal internet speeds of any first world country. The ISPs here have been concentrating on throttling back usage, restricting bandwidth, charging utterly ridiculous amounts of money for going over artificially created caps so they can cram ever more paying users into an already overloaded system, and not investing any of that money in improving the infrastructure or in extending their coverage. The result is that US speeds are about half of what they are in the UK, the EU, Japan, Korea, and even the metro areas of China.
The feds definition for “broadband” internet for rural areas is even worse than what it is in urban areas, about 10 meg/second. So you can forget about making that conference call to work if your kid is playing WOW or your dear spouse is down in the basement watching PornHub.
Why is she wearing a mask? If you had to pose in a swimsuit with a bunch of cows, you’d probably wear a mask too.
manure from farming operations. I’ve mentioned before that we have had problems with well contamination from farm runoff, especially in Kewaunee County, were it’s estimated that 30% – 40% of the wells are contaminated. It hasn’t been widely reported, but the problem is so bad that local organizations, schools and others have been giving out drinking water to local families because of the widespread contamination of the wells up there.
The state is going to be issuing new rules that will finally put some restrictions on when, how and where farms can spread manure. Hopefully this will help.
Okay, okay — I know that photo has nothing to do with the story. But if I come across a photo of a person in a swimsuit, wearing a mask, standing with a bunch of cows, I’m going to put it up. I can’t help myself.
Hopefully no, I’m not going to break it. But I’ve been doing this blog for a long time now and I’m tired of looking at the same style all the time. I haven’t changed the layout or design of this thing since I started it, so it’s high time for a refresh.
Ooo, coffee — that delightful, delicious beverage that both pleasures the taste buds and enlivens the brain, oh I feel so sorry for those of you who drink tea. (Come on, you tea drinkers know what you’re drinking is lawn sweepings soaked in tepid water, right?)
There is a lot of fighting these days over the definition of the term “milk” when it comes to products being sold to consumers, specifically over the use of the term in describing drinks made with various nuts and beans. I.e. “soy milk” and “almond milk” and that kind of thing. 
grouchyfarmer 