Fumesucker
Fumesucker's JournalWhy is Saudi Arabia buying up African farmland?
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/07/15/why_is_saudi_arabia_buying_up_african_farmlandThe Christian Science Monitor highlights an April report by the International Food Policy Research Institute entitled "'Land Grabbing' by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries." The report details purchases of farmland in developing countries by China, South Korea, India, and a handful of gulf states.
Saudi Arabia recently purchased 500,000 hectares of land in Tanzania and Indian companies have bought land in Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Senegal and Mozambique.
Another analysis of the "land-grabbing" trend relased in June by the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization and two other agricultural research groups examines more closely the potential positives and negatives of the purchases.
Increased investment may bring macro-level benefits (such as GDP growth and improved government revenues), and may create opportunities for economic development and livelihood improvement in rural areas.
But as governments or markets make land available to prospecting investors, large-scale land acquisitions may result in local people losing access to the resources on which they depend for their food security – particularly as some key recipient countries are themselves faced with food security challenges.
Humble Pie + the Blackberries.... Black Coffee
&feature=relatedHang Playing Hedge Monkeys..
Am I unusual, I've never met another atheist?
By which I mean not that I've never actually interacted with another atheist, I'm sure I have but I have never knowingly done so, I've never had someone say "Hey, you're an atheist, so am I" or something like that..
I've lived around this area for a big chunk of my sixtysomething years and have no clue where I might go to deliberately meet another atheist.
Anyone else here never knowingly meet another atheist in the flesh, so to speak?
Free Republic explained at last?
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h3qodE8DPv1Oe-FxDamZaUjmveqg?docId=81a6e4c0da134e52beba3ea7510bf51eWASHINGTON (AP) — Dan the baboon sits in front of a computer screen. The letters BRRU pop up. With a quick and almost dismissive tap, the monkey signals it's not a word. Correct. Next comes, ITCS. Again, not a word. Finally KITE comes up.
He pauses and hits a green oval to show it's a word. In the space of just a few seconds, Dan has demonstrated a mastery of what some experts say is a form of pre-reading and walks away rewarded with a treat of dried wheat.
Dan is part of new research that shows baboons are able to pick up the first step in reading — identifying recurring patterns and determining which four-letter combinations are words and which are just gobbledygook.
The study shows that reading's early steps are far more instinctive than scientists first thought and it also indicates that non-human primates may be smarter than we give them credit for.
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Read the rest of the article at the link..
Using North Dakota as a teaching tool..
I was talking to a friend today and they mentioned how North Dakota is one of the few states that isn't struggling with a deficit in their budget, this person attributed the situation to the fact that North Dakota has its own state bank.
Since were were sitting around the computer I told them to Google "balance of payments by state" and we found that N Dakota ranks fourth of all the states in how much they get back for each dollar they send to the federal government, a net surplus of $2,513 dollars per resident per year in 1997..
http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/545_federal_balance_of_payments_per_capita.html
We then started to look at other states balance of payments, I pointed out that the states that are normally thought of as the most conservative are almost uniformly near the top of the list in collecting money from the federal government, more money than they send in federal taxes.
I left my friend deep in thought, they were truly surprised by this information, I could almost hear the gears turning in their head as they processed the new perspective on disbursement and collection of federal monies..
What made it really effective is that I had my friend do the research themselves, they couldn't say that I was making stuff up.
In my next life I want to be a conservative policy scammer..
Think of how much nicer it would be. Instead of constantly being accused of having evil motives, I’d be presumed to have noble intentions no matter how much the actual content of my policy proposals was at odds with such claims. Instead of being accused of saying bad things I never said, I’d be given credit for supporting good things I’ve never supported. Life would be great!OK, I’m whining. But the continuing defense of Paul Ryan is a remarkable phenomenon. He’s still being treated by many pundits as a man deeply concerned about deficits, when the fact is that his policy proposals are all about redistributing income upward, and make no serious effort to curb debt. He’s even given credit for advocating higher taxes on the rich when he has more or less specifically rejected the things for which he’s given credit.
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Read the rest of the piece at:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/on-ryan-apologists/
New old stock motherboard.. Worth using?
I have an old but still new in the package MSI K8N Neo4/SLI motherboard that I'm considering building into a system, I would have to buy a socket 939 processor, a PCI-E x16 graphics card and some memory for it.. Already have hard drive, case, power supply and so forth..
I only have $10 in the mobo and I'm wondering if it's worth buying the rest of the parts on Ebay, I have about $70 to spend on it and I think I could get into an Athlon 64 x2 processor and a Radeon HD 5450 1GB card and a couple of gigabytes of RAM for close to that..
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