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Horse Shipping Services in California | Rocking Y Ranch
Looking for reliable horse transport services in California? Look no further than Rocking Y Ranch! We offer both local and nationwide horse hauling services, ensuring your equine companion arrives at their destination relaxed and stress-free.
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I hiked Amanda's trail recently and wanted to share the history of the trail. I think it is a good lesson/reminder on why we have reservations for the native peoples in the US and part of the history behind creating the reservations. (Image text below cut)
[Image Text:]
Amanda's Trail of Sorrow
Indians ran away from the Coast Reservation on a regular basis, longing for their home and fleeing starvation and abuse by Indian Agents. The military was called upon to round up these run-away Indians and return them to the reservation. Lieutenant Louis Herzer of Company D, Fourth California Infantry, led a detachment to Coos Bay in the spring of 1864 to retrieve runaways.
Sub-Agent Amos Harvey accompanied the Lieutenant and his men in order to "arrest the Indians" that for a long time had been "infesting the settlement of Coos Bay." Stealth was a required element for successfully catching their "game- squaws, bucks, and half breeds born out of wedlock.'
Corporal Royal Bensell was on that mission. He kept a detailed journal relating the story of Amanda De-Cuys, a blind Coos woman living with a white settler. Excerpts from his journal tell a compelling story.
May 1, 1864
Up Coos River 25 miles to-day after some Indians. Find at the head of tide water a small ranch owned by one De-Cuys. He had a pretty little girl, some 8 years old. We got two Squaws and a Buck. After getting in the boat I was surprised to hear one of the Squaws (old and blind) ask me, "Nika ika nanage nika tenas Julia [Let me see my little Julia]." I complied with this parental demand and was shocked to see this little girl throw her arms about old Amanda De-Cuys neck and cry "clihime Ma Ma [dear mama]." De-Cuys refused to marry Amanda, which would have saved her from internment. He promised Bensell to school Julia.
May 3, 1864
We have taken among the rest several infirm Squaws which the Agent proposes leaving behind to die because he says, "it will cost so far to transportation." Lieutenant Herzer informed the Agent if the Squaws were left he [Herzer] would report him.
[Painting of a Native elder and a younger adult walking with two male soldiers on the coastline towards and soldier on horseback as two other native people, one with a child, lie in the sand.]
May 5, 1864
Lower Umpqua Artist Pam Stoehsler's portrayal of Amanda and other Indians being forcibly marched back to the sub-reservation north of Yachats
[End inserted image]
Break camp and strike directly across the sand hills. One Squaw, (Polly) carries all her "icktus [belongings]" and two children. Harvey furnishes one horse when we need four. This horse packs t[w]o old Squaws. By 4 o'clock the advance reached Winchester Bay and from that time 'till dark they came in by twos & threes, the rear guard bringing in Old Fatty and Amanda.
May 7, 1864
Only made ten miles today. The whole days travel reminded me of a funeral procession, so slow and solemn did we go. First one old "Lama [old woman]" would curl up in the sand, then another, then a general halt, during which the mothers would suckle their children.... Finally out of patience, I would cry "Hyac, clatwa [hurry, go]." It generally took twenty minutes to get started. Some of the Guard, more irritable than me, swore terrifically.
May 10, 1864
This coast along our route today seems volcanic, rough ragged, burnt rock, here and there a light rock which I called pumice-stone. Amanda, who is blind, tore her feet horribly over these ragged rock, leaving blood sufficient to track her by. One of the Boys led her around the dangerous places. I cursed Indian Agents generally, Harvey particularly. By 12 we reached the Agency. The great gate swung open, and I counted the Indians as they filed in, turned them over to the Agent, and, God Knows, we all left relieved.
During the first twelve years of the fifteen years of the Alsea Sub- Agency's existence half of the native population died of starvation, exposure, disease, and abuse. The Alsea Sub- Agency was closed in 1875.
No further information is known about Amanda or if she ever was able to be with her daughter, Julia, again.
[Inserted image of carved Amanda statue, with beads and adornments.]
FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.yachatstrails.org
The first statue at the grotto was washed away in a landslide. The current statue, created at the same time by artist Sy Meadow, was generously donated
[End inserted image]
[End image text]
[Image Text:]
Broken Promises; Forced Internment
The story of Amanda is part of a larger saga of stolen lands, broken promises, inhumane treatment, and forced internment under severe conditions.
In 1855 Central and Southern Oregon Coast tribes signed a treaty ceding their lands in exchange for what they thought would be a peaceful life on a reservation if the treaty was ratified.
In April of 1855, General Joel Palmer, superintendent of Indian affairs for the Oregon Territory, wrote a letter urging the creation of a reservation on the coast of the Oregon Territory to inter Native Americans. In November of 1855 President Franklin Pierce created, by executive order, the Coast Reservation. The new reservation was 1.1 million acres bounded by Siltcoos in the south, Cape Lookout in the north, and the Pacific Ocean to a ridge 20 miles to the east. This rugged land was considered of no value to settlers.
[Inserted image showing Oregon Coast from Lincoln City to Yachats]
Original Coast Reservation
Pacific Ocean
Legend Blue Outliner Original Coast Reservation Red Lines: Highways
[End inserted image]
[Inserted image showing native Alsea people near the water, with canoes, baskets, bags, and carrying items towards canoes]
Alsea Indians on Alsea Bay
[End inserted image]
Three agencies were created to manage the Indians who were held there: the Siletz and Grand Ronde agencies (1856) in the north and the Alsea Sub-Agency (1859) in the south located in present-day Yachats near the Adobe Resort. The reservations prevented the Indians from re-establishing their villages on that land.
Coos and Lower Umpqua Tribes were forcibly marched to the Alsea Sub-agency in 1860, and the Alsea Tribe from the immediate north was forced from their homeland in 1865 when the reservation land was cut in half to allow for non- Indian homesteading.
The treaty was never ratified by Congress, which meant that the lands were never legally ceded, and funds for supplies and resources promised for this displaced population were not appropriated. Genocidal policies* were carried out resulting in the death of many from the imposed harsh treatment and conditions. Since the tribes were denied the weapons needed to hunt, they were forced to survive by farming the wind-swept salty coastal environment. Crops failed, and tribal members starved.
[Inserted images showing a middle aged Coos woman named Lottie Evanoff from the early 20th century and an unknown Umpqua man from possibly the late 19th century:]
Lottie Evanoff (1), Coos, born in 1868; Umpqua man's reservation photo (r)
[End inserted images]
In 1872, tribal members were able to return to their more traditional hunting and gathering practices and successfully farm several miles up the Yachats River. When the U.S.
Government found that the Yachats area was fertile for farming, it violated federal law, forcibly removing tribal members to remaining, agencies. Many Coos and Lower Umpqua travelled south staying with their Siuslaw cousins or back to the Coos Bay area where they found their villages gone and became refugees in their own homeland.
*GENOCIDE: a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups
THANK YOU TO: Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians; Three Rivers Foundation; City of Yachats; View the Future; family and friends of Ben Christensen; Angell Job Corps
[End image text]
The conservation group in charge of the private land around the trail:
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Tuesday, September 5, 2023
For Politicians, Vacations Can Be a Lot of Work (NYT) Labor Day weekend, once the official kickoff of campaign season, now comes almost a year after most candidates have hit the trail and after the first primary debate. The occasion lays out a basic fact of modern presidential campaigns: Politicians need vacations, too. But while taking a break can create an opportunity for campaigns to show that their candidates are just like the rest of us, it also carries potential peril. The “right” vacation can give a candidate time to rest and recharge, to reconnect with family after weeks on the road, and a chance to look presidential while doing it. A tone-deaf vacation—too elite, too disconnected, too much beach bod—is tabloid catnip and can alienate voters. And the wrong vacation can upend a campaign faster than a wave topples a windsurfer. So it’s no surprise that the presidential candidates this year, by and large, are lying low. While most of the 2024 candidates have chosen to emphasize that they are at work rather than at play, vacations were once seen as an opportunity to burnish a politician’s image. Ronald Reagan chopped wood and rode horses at his California ranch. George W. Bush cleared brush in Texas. John F. Kennedy, perhaps the embodiment of the artful presidential vacation, sailed. Stories of vacations restoring the candidate but tanking the campaign are many. When Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for president, went on vacation in late August 1988, he was seen by some as checking out of the race as George H.W. Bush gathered momentum from the Republican convention. Mr. Dukakis was also once pilloried for reading a book called “Swedish Land Use Planning” on the beach.
Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow (Washington Post) In the aftermath of extreme weather events, major insurers are increasingly no longer offering coverage that homeowners in areas vulnerable to those disasters need most. At least five large U.S. property insurers—including Allstate, American Family, Nationwide, Erie Insurance Group and Berkshire Hathaway—have told regulators that extreme weather patterns caused by climate change have led them to stop writing coverages in some regions, exclude protections from various weather events and raise monthly premiums and deductibles. Major insurers say they will cut out damage caused by hurricanes, wind and hail from policies underwriting property along coastlines and in wildfire country, according to a voluntary survey conducted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a group of state officials who regulate rates and policy forms. Insurance providers are also more willing to drop existing policies in some locales as they become more vulnerable to natural disasters.
Faced With Evolving Threats, U.S. Navy Struggles to Change (NYT) A symphony of sorts echoed through the sprawling shipyard on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi — banging, hissing, beeping, horns, bells and whistles—as more than 7,000 workers hustled to fill orders fueled by the largest shipbuilding budget in the Navy’s history. The surge in spending, $32 billion for this year alone, has allowed the Huntington Ingalls shipyard to hire thousands of additional people to assemble guided missile destroyers and amphibious transport ships. But the focus from Washington on producing a stream of new warships is also creating a fleet that some inside the Pentagon think is too wedded to outdated military strategies and that the Navy might not be able to afford to keep running in decades to come. Half a world away, at a U.S. Navy outpost in Bahrain, a much smaller team was testing out a very different approach to the service’s 21st-century warfighting needs. Bobbing in a small bay off the Persian Gulf was a collection of tiny unmanned vessels, prototypes for the kind of cheaper, easier-to-build and more mobile force. Operating on a budget that was less than the cost of fuel for one of the Navy’s big ships, Navy personnel and contractors had pieced together drone boats, unmanned submersible vessels and aerial vehicles capable of monitoring and intercepting threats over hundreds of miles of the Persian Gulf, like Iranian fast boats looking to hijack oil tankers. Now they are pleading for more money to help build on what they have learned. The Navy’s top brass talks frequently about the need to innovate to address the threat presented by China. The Defense Department’s own war games show that the Navy’s big-ship platforms are increasingly vulnerable to attack. But the Navy, analysts and current and former officials say, remains lashed to political and economic forces that have produced jobs-driven procurement policies that yield powerful but cumbersome warships that may not be ideally suited for the mission it is facing.
Security in Ecuador has come undone as drug cartels exploit the banana industry to ship cocaine (AP) Men walk through a lush plantation between Ecuador ‘s balmy Pacific coast and its majestic Andes, lopping hundreds of bunches of green bananas from groaning plants twice their height. Workers haul the bunches to an assembly line, where the bananas are washed, weighed and plastered with stickers for European buyers. Owner Franklin Torres is monitoring all activity on a recent morning to make sure the fruit meets international beauty standards—and ever more important, is packed for shipment free of cocaine. Torres is hypervigilant because Ecuador is increasingly at the confluence of two global trades: bananas and cocaine. The South American country is the world’s largest exporter of bananas, shipping about 6.5 million metric tons (7.2 tons) a year by sea. It is also wedged between the world’s largest cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia, and drug traffickers find containers filled with bananas the perfect vehicle to smuggle their product. Drug traffickers’ infiltration of the industry that is responsible for about 30% of the world’s bananas has contributed to unprecedented violence across this once-peaceful nation.
Subway, train lines, roads closed in Madrid, central Spain after heavy rain (Reuters) A few subway lines in Madrid and high-speed train connections with southern cities were closed on Monday morning and two men were missing after torrential rain hit central Spain. Emergency services were involved in almost 1,200 incidents in the region overnight. Several roads in the Madrid region were closed as half a dozen bridges were torn down by water overflowing the riverbanks. The sudden torrential rain that hit the country transformed streets into rivers in Madrid, Castile, Catalonia and Valencia regions.
Albanian exodus (Les Echos/France) Since the fall of communism in 1991, the small Balkan state has been slowly but inexorably emptying itself, at the pace of incessant waves of emigration. With an aging and declining population and a birth rate in free fall, it is facing all kinds of challenges. One constant, however: every year, some 50,000 people, most of them between 18 and 40 years old, leave in search of a better life. Albania is paying a high price for this exodus, particularly in terms of economic development. “One of my developers left for Facebook in Ireland, another for Worldplay. It took me months to replace them. We’re offering them salaries 10 times higher," says Bora Ferri, who founded a small payment company, Mpay, ten years ago, and is also head of the France-Albania Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Zelensky fires his defence minister (BBC) Even as there are suggestions Ukraine's painstaking counter-offensive might be poised to gather pace, its defence minister has been sacked, with President Volodymyr Zelensky saying it was time for "new approaches" in the ministry. Oleksii Reznikov was credited with convincing Western powers to supply arms but his department was hit by corruption scandals. It's unlikely to lead to a change in battlefield strategy, with generals claiming they have breached Russia's formidable first line of defences in the south. The push has focused on the tiny village of Robotyne, 56km (35 miles) south-east of the city of Zaporizhzhia, where forces are trying to widen the gap so larger units can pass through without coming under fire.
Upward of 20,000 Ukrainian amputees face trauma on a scale unseen since WWI (AP) The small band of soldiers gather outside to share cigarettes and war stories, sometimes casually and sometimes with a degree of testiness over recollections made unreliable by their last day fighting, the day the war took away their limbs. Some clearly remember the moment they were hit by anti-tank mines, aerial bombs, a missile, a shell. For others, the gaps in their memories loom large. Ukraine is facing a future with upward of 20,000 amputees, many of them soldiers who are also suffering psychological trauma from their time at the front. Europe has experienced nothing like it since World War I, and the United States not since the Civil War.
The Never-Ending Nightmare of Ukraine’s Dam Disaster (NYT) Sunset along the Kakhovka Reservoir in central Ukraine, especially in summer, used to be gorgeous: kids played in the shallow water near the shore, men fished and young couples walked under the pine trees as the last traces of sunlight reflected off the water. But after the destruction of a major dam just downriver, that shimmering lake, one of Europe’s biggest, simply disappeared. Now all that remains is a 150-mile-long meadow. For 60-plus years, the Bezhan family ran a fishing business on these shores. They bought boats, nets, freezers and enormous rumbling ice-making machines, and generation after generation made a living off the fish. But now there are no fish. Scientific evidence indicates that the dam was blown up from the inside. In one stroke, they unleashed epic floods on Ukraine and an ensuing drought that, taken together, brought a stunning level of destruction to the environment, the economy and the lives of civilians already enduring the hardships of war.
China to Its People: Spies Are Everywhere, Help Us Catch Them (NYT) Beijing sees forces bent on weakening it everywhere: embedded in multinational companies, infiltrating social media, circling naïve students. And it wants its people to see them, too. Chinese universities require faculty to take courses on protecting state secrets, even in departments like veterinary medicine. A kindergarten in the eastern city of Tianjin organized a meeting to teach staffers how to “understand and use” China’s anti-espionage law. China’s Ministry of State Security, a usually covert department that oversees the secret police and intelligence services, has even opened its first social media account, as part of what official news media described as an effort at increasing public engagement. Its first post: a call for a “whole of society mobilization” against espionage. “The participation of the masses,” the post said, should be “normalized.” China’s ruling Communist Party is enlisting ordinary people to guard against perceived threats to the country, in a campaign that blurs the line between vigilance and paranoia. The country’s economy is facing its worst slowdown in years, but China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, appears more fixated on national security and preventing threats to the party’s control.
In China’s shadow, U.S. rushes back to neglected Indian Ocean island (Washington Post) At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force tracking station that monitored Soviet satellites from this island’s soaring tropical forests was a focus of Seychelles life. The American servicemen and technicians living nearby hosted barbecues and bar nights to which all Seychellois were invited, distributed cookies and milk to local children and taught them basketball. Then, the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union collapsed and in 1996 the Americans left, dismantling the tracking station and shutting down their embassy—citing budgetary reasons for abandoning what had seemingly become an irrelevant corner of the world. Today, the compound where Americans and Seychellois partied is home to the Seychelles Tourism Academy, where young islanders training to be tour guides, hoteliers and masseuses take classes, among other subjects, in Chinese—just one small manifestation of a new geopolitical rivalry that has now lured the Americans back. In June, Seychelles became the latest in a string of small nations around the world in which the United States has established, restored or is planning to open an embassy as part of a broad pushback against the influence China has acquired during more than two decades of neglect or disinterest on the part of the United States.
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Why Sacramento? A Guide to Living in the Capitol of California
Sacramento is the capital of California, and it's no secret that the city has a lot to offer. If you're considering moving to the area, here are some things you should know before making your decision:
Climate for Sacramento
If you're looking for a place with a Mediterranean climate—and who isn't?—Sacramento is an ideal choice. During the summer, temperatures are in the mid-80s and it's sunny most of the year. The winter brings cooler weather with average lows in the low 40s, but still plenty of sunshine to enjoy outdoor activities such as golfing, hiking and cycling through our many parks and trails.
The rainy season runs from November to March, though even then it's not uncommon for us to get two weeks of dry weather during this period. Plus, we have more than 200 days of sunshine each year!
Garage Door Service in Sacramento
Garage door service in Sacramento is easy to find. Garage doors are an integral part of any home, and it’s important to know that when you need them fixed or replaced, there are plenty of options at your disposal. Garage Door Service in Sacramento is one such option. We offer everything from garage door repair to replacement services, and we can take care of all your garage door needs with efficiency and professionalism.
If you have a broken garage door or need some other kind of repair work done, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today!
"What is the cost of living in Sacramento?"
Sacramento's cost of living is high, but it’s lower than other major cities. According to the Council for Community and Economic Research, Sacramento’s cost of living index is 121.4—meaning that goods and services are 21% more expensive here than they are on average nationwide. That’s high compared with how much everything costs in most of California (where the average city has an index of just over 100), but when you look at other major metropolitan areas like San Francisco or New York City, our index comes in at some of their lowest points (the San Francisco Bay Area has an index of 162).
Transportation around the city.
The first thing to consider is whether or not you want to live in a place that has public transportation, because that's the only way around Sacramento. Yes, there are cars available for rental and taxi companies, but they're not very reliable if you're used to Uber or Lyft. It's also possible to get around by bicycle, but again this is something people don't usually do unless they have no other choice. Walking works fine if you're only going a few blocks away from your home or office in downtown Sacramento, but it can become uncomfortable when walking long distances on hot summer days (which happen often here). The last option would be horse and carriage—which is popular with tourists visiting the California state capitol building—but this isn't particularly practical for everyday use unless you want everyone else around you thinking about how much more fun their lives are than yours!
The History of Sacramento
Sacramento’s history is a rich one. The city was founded in 1848 as the seat of government for the newly-created state of California and became its capital in 1850. During this time period, Sacramento played host to many important figures in American history: Abraham Lincoln visited during his presidential campaign in 1860; Mark Twain gave a speech at the city’s statehouse later that same year; Buffalo Bill Cody once owned land near where we are now standing, and Teddy Roosevelt came by train from San Francisco on his way to Yosemite National Park (he wanted to see lions).
The city also has an impressive collection of historic buildings, including Old City Hall (1869), which currently houses offices for small businesses and nonprofits; The Crocker Art Museum (1906), which contains over 20,000 works by some of America's most important artists; The State Indian Museum & California State Library (1903), home to artifacts related to Native Americans throughout California's history; The Sutter Clubhouse & Captain Sutter's Fort Restoration Project(1848–1849), where gold was discovered just months before California became a state; And last but certainly not least: Sutter’s Fort itself!
There are many reasons someone would want to live in Sacramento
There are many reasons someone would want to live in Sacramento.
The weather is great, especially compared to other major California cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles.
The food is great. There's a huge variety of restaurants and cuisines, from all over the world! You can find anything you could want here in Sacramento - Thai, Indian, Ethiopian (my personal favorite), Mediterranean...there's even a restaurant that only serves hamburgers if that's what you're looking for!
The culture here is fantastic too - there are so many museums and theaters offering performances every day of the week. If you like dancing or watching plays then this is definitely the place for you!
It's also very affordable compared to other big cities in California - housing prices are much lower than they would be elsewhere because people from other states have moved here because it's cheaper than living where they were before moving out west."
Leader Local Garage Door is the best local garage door company in your area. If you're tired of searching for a company that offers reliable and professional services, Leader Local Garage Door is the best option for you.
Leader Local Garage Door
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When foodies sink their teeth into a slab of cheese from one of the historic dairy farms in Point Reyes, California, their minds probably run to grass-fed cows ranging free on the lush green oceanside hills of Marin County. Over 5,000 dairy cows and beef cattle roam the Point Reyes National Seashore National Park in full view of visiting tourists. Unlike the many dairy and meat companies that slap happy animals on their labels while sourcing their product from hellish factory farms, the dairy and beef farms at Point Reyes represent an agrarian ideal of ecologically and ethically sustainable animal agriculture.
“Pasture-raised” and “extensive” or “regenerative” grazing have been watchwords in the American foodie community since at least the 2000s, when celebrated food writer Michael Pollan presented sustainable, nonindustrial practices as a way out of the ethical morass of the American food system in his award-winning bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Everyone from progressive agrarians to libertarian ranchers to multinational food companies, and even conservation NGOs such as the Audubon Society, has thrown their weight behind the idea of replacing mass-produced meat, from chickens to ungulates, with a holistically raised alternative. While some environmentalists reject beef altogether for its contribution to climate change, pollution, and deforestation, proponents of free-ranging beef have rallied under the motto, “It’s not the cow; it’s the how.” They argue that, done properly, pasture-raised cattle can replace the ecological functions of wild ruminants like elk and bison, produce food on “marginal” land that would otherwise be wasted, and eliminate beef’s carbon hoofprint (since well-grazed land can sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide). This would mean consumers could stick it to Big Ag, fight climate change, and help imperiled animals and ecosystems without actually changing their diets too much; they’d just need to eat a bit less meat and pay a bit more for the grass-fed option.
Whether these promises hold up under scrutiny is a subject of fierce debate. And in recent years, a series of lawsuits have argued the opposite thesis: that even “regenerative” cattle imperil the very ecosystems proponents claim they will “regenerate.”
This past June, the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic, on behalf of the Animal Legal Defense Fund and a number of individual plaintiffs, filed suit against the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service, which manages Point Reyes National Park, alleging that cattle ranching is endangering the iconic tule elk.* It’s not the first such lawsuit that has been filed over the past decade against the NPS to stop alleged environmental damage from Point Reyes cows.
The National Park Service leases parkland to a number of “historic” cattle and dairy farms, which it has done since the park’s creation in 1962. The elk, native to the region but driven to near-extinction by hunting and human activities such as ranching, are protected by a 1976 federal conservation law and were reintroduced to the park in 1978. But to keep the elk from competing with cattle for forage and water, the NPS erected fences that confine the elk to select corners of the park with limited water and forage. This confinement has proved fatal during droughts. Drought in 2013–2014 led to 254 elk deaths. A current drought has already killed over 150 elk, a third of the once 445-strong herd that inhabits Tomales Point, all just a stone’s throw away from thriving commodity cows. Ranchers have even pushed for the right to cull elk outright to keep their populations in check, in part because they have also killed off the natural predators that would do so in a healthy ecosystem. The Harvard suit alleges that “the Tule elk are continuing to die horrific and preventable deaths” in clear violation of federal law.
Prior to the twentieth century, the tule elk were an important part of the Pacific coastal ecosystem and a major component of the diet of the Coast Miwok tribe, the native peoples who lived there. In fact, the NPS concedes that the region’s characteristic hilly grasslands were “the byproduct of burning, weeding, pruning and harvesting for at least two millennia by Coast Miwok and their antecedents.” These grasslands made a juicy target for white settlers arriving in the middle of the nineteenth century. They brought cattle with them, plundered the Coast Miwok lands, hunted large predators and elk to near-extinction, and then grazed their cattle on the hills instead. The intertwined processes of colonial and ecological displacement have continued into the twenty-first century: In 2015, the NPS balked at a proposed “Indigenous Archaeological District” that would have protected Coast Miwok heritage sites from damage from ranching. Even as it did so, it quickly approved a “Historic Dairy Ranching District,” over and against Miwok protests. Today, many Coast Miwok are opposed to the rancher-backed plan to fence and further cull the elk. “The Park Service proposal to shoot indigenous tule elk and promote ranching that harms wildlife, water and habitat is a travesty and contrary to the traditions of our ancestors,” Jason Deschler, dance captain and headman with the Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin, wrote this summer in a statement opposing the cull.
The cows at Point Reyes don’t just compete with the elk. They also defecate about 130 million pounds of nitrogen-rich manure a year, which leaches into the soil and streams and ponds of the area. An NPS-funded study suggested that removal of the cows would benefit numerous native species, including butterflies, seabirds, frogs, and salmon. And yet the same study recommended the expansion of ranching. As a damning investigative report into the issue in the Marin County Pacific Sun suggests, the ranchers and dairy farmers have urged pliant politicians, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, to “pressur[e] the Park Service to prioritize the preservation of private ranching profits over environmental concerns.”
Point Reyes is a microcosm of a much broader anti-wildlife bent in American ranching, regenerative and otherwise. To protect their cows from predators and disease, or simply to ensure that they have access to food and water, ranchers across the country have supported wolf hunts, vulture and wild horse culls, and the deployment of cyanide bombs. It is difficult to count the number of wild animals killed in the service of ranching interests by government bodies like the Agriculture Department’s secretive Wildlife Services, the Bureau of Land Management, and various state-level farm bureaus, but about a million animals per year is the federal government’s own estimate.
Unlike wild animals such as elk, ranched cattle are commodities in a global market. And the goals of commodity production run directly counter to those of a functional ecosystem. In the wild, ungulates like bison or elk range across vast swathes of land, serving all sorts of ecosystem functions just by living: rooting, trampling, defecating, dying and decomposing, serving as food for predators and carrion birds and insects, nourishing other animals and the soil in death as their hooves did in life. Commodity production, be it conventional or regenerative, removes animals like cows from this web of life, using fencing and predator extermination to protect grazers from harm so that they can be profitably sold. In place of that natural web, ranching also requires an economic and material infrastructure to breed, manage, slaughter, process, and transport cattle as they are transformed into beef or milked. Even with the best of ecological intentions, ranchers who want their business to survive must build and maintain that infrastructure according to commercial principles.
The capitalist assumptions pervading these enterprises are clearest when regenerative proponents promise to be able to extract food from so-called “marginal” lands. Conventionally defined, “marginal land” is land that has little current agricultural or industrial value, often because of poor soil, water resources, or climate conditions. What ranchers mean is that grazing cattle can extract value, in the form of commoditized beef, from dry, rocky, difficult to access lands. Of course, such lands are only “marginal” from an instrumental, Lockean view that all land must be worked to create value. But from a biodiversity and ecosystem health perspective, so-called marginal lands can be thriving, biodiverse habitats for myriad flora and fauna, which can be disrupted by the introduction of grazers.
Historically, even land that is home to human beings has been deemed “marginal” if its value cannot be commoditized. As historian Joshua Specht shows, ranchers have historically been the spear tip of settler colonialism in the American West. They often used the pretext of “waste” and “emptiness” to violently uproot Indigenous lifeways and ecosystems and replace them with “productive” commercial ranching. The Coast Miwok Tribal Council of Marin linked that history of dispossession to the plan to cull the elk in a letter to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, describing it as “a travesty … that perpetuates a long legacy of harm inflicted on Native People by the National Park Service.”
The idea of converting “marginal” or unused land is basically a promise to produce something from nothing. All too often, that simply means that the costs are hidden. Increasingly, environmental research suggests that while introducing grazers to marginal lands can be economically generative for those who own the grazers, it is degenerative of previously existing ecosystems. A recent meta-analysis in the journal Ecology Letters, for example, found that excluding commercial agricultural grazers increases the abundance of plant and faunal biodiversity in most ecosystems. That’s because most livestock are managed at densities that dramatically exceed those of wild fauna. In fact, the Center for Biological Diversity recently won a lawsuit that will force the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect sensitive ecosystems within New Mexico’s Gila National Forest and Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest from free-ranging cows.
Over the past two decades, proponents of “regenerative” grazing have increasingly justified cattle agriculture by claiming their methods reduce ruminants’ contribution to climate change: Currently, the world’s cows, by belching out methane, contribute about 6 percent percent of all greenhouse gases. (Many note that cows “only” contribute 3 percent of U.S. emissions, but this is only because of America’s massive total emissions.) Regenerative ranching proponents claim, however, that by turning over and fertilizing the soil where they graze, free-ranging ruminants create healthy soil that can act as a carbon sink.
One of the biggest drivers of this claim has been the work of the rancher Allan Savory, made famous through a viral TED talk in 2013. But Savory’s claims have little peer-reviewed support and seem to fail under scrutiny. “The Savory Method Can Not Green Deserts or Reverse Climate Change,” five researchers argued in a lengthy rebuttal published in the journal Rangelands that same year. In 2017, an exhaustive, 127-page study led by scholars at Oxford found that grass-fed livestock “does not offer a significant solution to climate change as only under very specific conditions can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even then small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate.”
Studies suggest that while some forms of well-managed grazing can increase the health and productivity of soil, there is little proof that this has much impact on soil’s ability to capture carbon. To the extent that soil can act as a carbon sink, a widely-cited article in Frontiers in Climate argues that it can do so through practices like cover crop rotation, tillage, and novel soil amendments that don’t use animals at all. But cows or no cows, the idea that soil can act as a meaningful carbon sink at the scale at which global climate change currently operates is itself not entirely convincing. Removing soil from any agricultural use and allowing it to rewild, however, can create meaningful carbon sinks while protecting and restoring biodiversity; wild elk populations might plausibly do more to capture carbon than the most holistically raised cattle.
When it comes to cows, there is actually a sort of perverse climate and ethical math at play. Most of America’s 93 million cattle spend at least some of their life grazing on pasture, although many beef cattle are also fattened for slaughter in feedlots where they are fed soy- and grain-based meals. But since processed meal is easier to digest and beef cattle, on average, spend only a few of their 18-month lives at feedlots, only about 11 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions happen there. The remaining 89 percent happen when they digest rough forage and grasses on pasture. In other words, cows that graze throughout their lives actually potentially emit more than feedlot-finished ones.
Small numbers of grazers may be consistent with healthy ecosystems and have minimal greenhouse gas impact, but only if their populations stay within ecologically defined limits. The situation in Point Reyes, where ranchers have pushed the NPS to be able to use more land for grazing and prevent elk from competing with cows for food and water, illustrates exactly why that’s unlikely.
The problem of scale bedevils regenerative beef from every angle. Holistic grazing cannot hope to compete on price with Big Meat, which operates with high volumes and low margins: A pound of ground beef from a Marin County ranch can run well over $10, compared to $3.99 for mass-produced beef at Kroger. Regenerative ranching proponents often answer that consumers will opt to eat “less but better meat,” but it’s far from clear what’s going to drive that transition at the societal level. (Also worth noting: In the absence of a public agency that could define and regulate ecologically informed grazing practices, “better” meat is a little nebulous. The “regenerative” label has been affixed to so many different techniques that what exactly it means is often hard to pin down.)
As a result, “regenerative” beef currently represents not so much a scalable climate solution as a way for those who can afford to do so to purchase indulgences for their continued meat consumption. The owners of grass-fed beef ventures may market their premium-priced products as a way out of the hellscape of Western capitalistic agriculture. But absent much broader societal changes, regenerative agriculture’s anti-industrial rhetoric is more of a class marker than a call to revolution.
If regenerative agriculture were to challenge the mainstream food system, it would run into some hard physical limits. Converting the beef industry, at current levels of demand, entirely to a grass- and crop-forage feeding system would require increasing the total size of American beef herds by 23 million cows, or 30 percent, according to a recent article in the respected science journal Environmental Research Letters. And that increase, were it even possible, would have monumental consequences for both greenhouse gas outputs and land use. But there simply isn’t enough land in the U.S. for that many grazers. At best, beef production would have to decrease by 39 percent and potentially as much as 73 percent. Framed that way, grass-fed grazing, especially if scaled, doesn’t seem likely to regenerate many ecosystems—indeed, it would likely require deforestation, as is the case in Brazil, where the clear-cutting of the Amazon is driven both by soy plantations for feedlot and factory farm animal feed and by the need for grazing space for grass-fed cattle. And as the Environmental Research Letters article argued, even temporary overgrazing can lead to long-term and perhaps irreversible ecological degradation.
This list of mismatches between theory and empirics prompts an important question: Who does benefit from more demand for holistic-grazed beef? Ranchers and dairy farmers, of course. Regenerative ranching begins with the assumption that cattle must be commercially ranched and then backfills an ecological narrative to sustain that assumption, much as the NPS assumes there must be ranches in Point Reyes and then reshapes the park’s history and landscape to fit that need.
Actually making animal agriculture less ecologically disruptive would mean taking animals’ ecological value as a bedrock principle against and over their value as commodities. That means treating commodity production, not land, as “marginal”: Commodities could be extracted only if doing so didn’t disturb the ecological, social, and cultural value of the landscape. In other words, in most such systems, animals would more than likely play a minor support role for primarily plant agriculture. And that, in turn, would almost certainly mean far fewer grazers entering the commercial food system, and at a much higher price point. Point Reyes, for example, might feature free-ranging elk managed by an Indigenous best practice–driven conservation agency, not dairy cattle grazed by private ranches. This kind of truly eco-friendly meat production would produce even less meat than the current grab bag of practices loosely labeled “regenerative.”
As the elk of Point Reyes might attest, grass-fed beef and dairy are not ecologically benign. Nor are they a solution to climate change. Nor yet, in offering a more expensive alternative to industrial agriculture to those who can afford it, do they offer a clear path for reducing meat consumption society-wide. If anything, regenerative ranching lends itself either to niche locavore indulgence or large-scale corporate greenwashing, but it offers little promise for sustainable food system transformation.
Achieving more sustainable agriculture means we need to produce and eat less meat. To get there, we’ll need individuals to change their habits, but we’ll also need policy aimed specifically at reducing meat consumption through taxation, nudges toward animal-free diets, or, potentially, support for the proliferation of plant- or cell-based meat analogs. Ranchers tend to deny this, not because it is ecologically unfounded but because they are financially invested in ranching rather than regeneration.
*One of the authors of this piece is a fellow at the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Program. He is not and has never been personally involved in the Point Reyes lawsuit.
#regenerative grazing#regenerative farming#animal agriculture#ecology#greenwashing#capitalism#food systems
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4,600 sounds too much for an apartment. How the hell would maddie and tom been able to afford that.
Hello, friend! 🤩🖐
I know that this sounds a bit strange, but that’s about right for a monthly cost in San Francisco. $4,600 USA Dollars per month for a two bedroom apartment, 1.5 bath, and 750-1,000sq foot apartment seems to be the median range for pricing.
Now, apartment/flats are very hard to come by in the San Francisco, California area. San Francisco has very limited space for a family—or a single person—to buy. It’s always very hard to find one, it would be like finding an apartment (or even a row-house or a studio flat) in Manhattan or in London, both places are very limited on living space due to having to fit within a city. In an apartment, you are given the fees for items, such as gas and water, electricity, access to a pool/gym if the complex provides it, the cost for them to take your trash and compose it, repairs, office space if that’s provided as well, location, and other benefits/essentials provided. There’s also a down payment that needs to be paid first, then you get a monthly bill.
We also need to take into consideration of how much each person gets paid per job. Supposedly, there’s an “equal pay” in America, but you and I both know, that’s not true. ((Source)).
As of today, September 2nd, 2020:
A Caucasian woman makes $0.79 to the Caucasian male equivalent of a $1.00
A man of color makes $0.70 to the Caucasian male equivalent of a $1.00
A woman of color makes $0.63 to the Caucasian male equivalent of a $1.00
Unfortunately, not everyone gets the accurate amount of pay. It does not matter the experience, nor years in field, everyone does not get the pay that they deserve. This is not okay. I have no problem talking about American economics and pay here. If you think this is wrong, challenge me. I have no problem providing facts and data to my arguments.
Anyways, we don’t know how long Maddie has been a veterinarian. We just know that Maddie is a well-respected vet in Green Hills. The same logic applies for Tom. The years spent for Tom’s job as a sheriff is undetermined. There isn’t an age, for the two of them to get a rough idea of it. We just know that they’ve had their careers for a while. We can factor out the “starting career salary” for both of them. For the sake of this argument, we will also make the problem solving here generic pay—one where there isn’t that disgusting division in pay.
A vet in Montana makes about $76,000 USA dollars a year with the work that they do. That’s a lot for a small town in the mountains... then again, there are lots of farm animals and horses are always in need of attention. If Maddie were to get a job in San Francisco, she’s make about $10,000 more than that annually. A monthly paycheck would be between $7,000 to $8,000. She could afford the apartment and the luxury’s, as well as other expenses that she would like to have, such as Internet and cellphone services. ((Source)).
A sheriff deputy in Montana makes about $45,000 USA Dollars annually. With the town that The Wachowski’s live in, it might be a tad less. Not a lot, but a small change. If Tom were to get his dream job in San Francisco, he’d take home a $10,000 raise like Maddie did. Figuring in monthly costs for Tom’s job, Tom would be scrapping but. His monthly income would barely be $4,700 USA Dollars. He would just be able to afford rent, no luxuries and no dining out with friends. ((Source)).
With this in mind, the two would have to pay the rent together in San Francisco. They could afford it together with their combined incomes, yes, but Maddie would be the main provider if the two really wanted to stay in that apartment. We don’t even know if they would keep their own vehicles if they moved to San Francisco, they might just want to public transportation instead of worrying about that being added to their monthly bills.
I know that this sounds like scary adult stuff... and lots of math. (Stupid math, I don’t like math). However, the short answer is that they could afford it, but they’d have several changes in their lifestyle, and even more if Sonic went to live with the two in San Francisco.
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Introduction
For more than thirty years developing countries’ economic problems have created major financial crises in the international community. Developing countries have remained so due to their low-income economies. African and Middle East countries live in ethnic diverse communities and are subject to political instability and corruption than Asia and Latin American countries that live in more homogeneous communities. There is more cost involved in a population of workers and who belong to different ethnic groups because of diversity, cultural differences, religion and language. The purpose of this economic development model is to address economic stability, the problems (value inhibitors), solutions (value drivers), the strategies and implementations of the economic enhancement in order to help the developing countries be less dependent on developed countries. So many studies have been conducted on developing countries, but none of the studies have focused on how the developing countries could apply or use the economic models with less participation of the industrialized countries. World Bank and United Nations ought to examine minutely any potential foreign aid application while focusing on this model for developing countries. This model will enhance in devising a strategic means of monitoring the developing countries before distributing fund to those that may not use the model or practice noncompliance. The practical sense of the use of this model is to elevate the developing countries to economic success and stability, and reduce their dependency on developed countries.
Role of leadership
In developing countries, most leaders behave and think differently. Although, these may not be tolerated by developed countries, they are the norm and are based on their ethnicity, beliefs, religion, culture, social classes, and assumption of supremacy. Negotiating and managing conflicts in developing countries is a matter of understanding the genetic makeup of that country. Diversity may create needs but these needs do not have to be neglected in order to create balance among the ethnic or sectarian groups. A Western countries’ style of negotiating and resolving conflicts may not be applicable in the developing countries where religion and ethnicity have continuously impacted the leadership in those countries. Hence, the inefficient and ineffective leadership have led to social development and economic neglect that have caused the worse economy and poverty in those areas. If politics are set aside and economic benefits are put in the forefront by these developed countries, the chances of conflict resolution will be increased.
Leaders who have vision for change may think about what the impact the economic and market development will have in the long-run, and in the locations and in the life of its citizens. The social problems in Malaysia exist because of the ethnic Chinese who are not Muslim in a country where over 90 percent of the population is Muslim.
In developed countries, situations create focus on civilization and leadership, where civilization shapes leaders and leaders shape civilization. Power is treated as a shared resource, but in most developing countries coercion is the system used by leaders. Leaders use physical, economic, and social threats and punishments to induce change in followers for the sake of the leaders. The leaders therefore have become power wielders. These leadership problems have impacted the economic and market structure of the countries. Hence, a new model may mean a step to a new and better way of life for all the developing countries. The Western part of the Asia continent is predominantly Muslims and still have untapped resources that have not been explored because of dictatorship, politics, religion, culture, beliefs, and diversity. Exploring these countries and helping them stabilize will transcend to trading with other developing countries, which will in turn pull them out of poverty, instability, and create peace among the sectarian and ethnic groups.
Asia
Before the coming of the tsunami in December 26 2005, the South Asian countries were poor and developing. Both the South and East Asia have untapped economic sources. These potential raw materials need to be explored in order to help develop the economic and market structure of the region. The tsunami destroyed the infrastructure, economy, and the lives of the people of the South Asian countries. The 6.3 in magnitude earthquake that hit the central java of Indonesia on May 27, 2006 destroyed what was left of the tsunami. These countries will benefit from cash crop, livestock, and poultry production because of their adequate weather and availability of natural water, which will not require a high technology in order to irrigate the farmland. Mechanized farming will need to be introduced and implemented to aid in maximizing production of agricultural products. The Eastern part of South Korea has a comparative advantage over industrial, commercial, and manufacturing production. Producing and trading on building, automobile, motorcycle, and other petty materials in the form of buying and selling will enhance in the development of the market setting and economy. This will help in the stabilization of the East and South Asian countries. A stable economy will help resolve and manage conflict in these countries that have different ethnic groups and history of diversity. The economic and market structure may also aid in the stability of the leadership, political and social system. The environmental problems may need to be addressed in order to guard against pollution or any unhealthy by products or waste materials that may cause harm to people or have short or long term health problems or may be fatal to people. If these countries are stable, they will attract foreign investments rather than needing foreign aid. The military disturbances in East Timor are not helping the economic and the market structure of the young independent country.
The four factors that determine the economic growth are labor, capital, land, and Entrepreneurship. Developing countries have more labor force with lower wages than developed countries and yet their economic growth is still lower than that of the developed countries. Capital is another problem facing developing countries. They need resources such as equipments, machines, factories, and money to work with. Labor without capital is synonymous to guns without bullets. Capital will also represent an investment that will pay off in the future. Most developing countries have untapped resources such as oil, gold, diamond, minerals, forests, and water that represent land which by themselves cannot stimulate economic growth unless they are explored and converted to goods and services. Technology enhances economic growth. A group of agricultural researchers from Texas A&M University and University of California-Davis acquired a four-year grand of $4.4 million from U.S Agency for International Development’s Mission to Afghanistan eGrazing. This discovery will aid the livestock herders to successfully tend to cattle, sheep, horses and goats. If this system had been in place, it may have made an impact during the tsunami in Indonesia. Political and social factors that inhibit Economic Growth are corruption, instability, lack of leadership and administrative skills, population growth, and lack of business enterprises.
Africa
African countries are very poor and in dare need of economic and market structure development. Before these countries go global, they may to have sufficient needs of life by taking comparative advantage of their sources of raw material. Some have cash crops that need to be irrigated, some have livestock and poultry that need to be technologically upgraded, and market structure that needs to be redesigned, developed and implemented. The improvement of the agriculture will help the poor farmers send their children to school, build infrastructure, develop the quality of institutions, and make a smooth run of transportation.
Middle East
Middle East region is a turbulence area because of instability associated with religion, oil, dictatorship, and developed countries’ influence. The Iraq war has devastated the whole region, and couple with the Israel, Palestinian, and Lebanese conflict, which has created further economic drawbacks that amount in billions of dollars. The destruction of the infrastructures, and the lost of lives have sent the economy of Lebanese country decades backwards.
Latin America
Development in Latin Americans countries could stem from agriculture, forestry and fishing, to mining, and manufacturing. These Latinos can help in building their countries rather than trying to immigrate to United States of America. If guided, they will improve their countries’ economy and help in the marketing of agricultural, manufacturing and other natural resources. Immigrants spend much time in the state of California farms, Illinois factories, North Carolina, and areas in the north east of United States of America working mostly in food industries. These efforts can be redirected to Latin America in order to develop the entire area.
Political struggles, lack of administrative skills, and power supremacy have strangled the economic and market structure of most countries in Latin America. For decades the Latinos have traveled north of the border to United States of America in search of better lives. This economic situation has resulted in the deaths and mutilations of people trying to enter United States of America. The smugglers who are known as the “coyotes” have made huge profits for attempting to transport these illegal Latinos across the border. It is very dangerous ventures because of the hot temperature, train transportation, unhygienic felt, bad weather, lack of food, water, and other unknown dangers along the road to the border. Immigrants spend months traveling to the border and most times do not make it to United States because they are caught and send back south of the border. Most gang groups have resorted to kidnapping wealthy Latin Americans living in the United States side of the border for huge ransoms, demand thousands of dollars in exchange to the kidnapped victims and most of the times these victims are killed. Families are separated due to fractured economy when men live their families for years in search of money for food in the north of the border. Income is not redistributed to the population, the rich gets richer while the poor gets poorer. The people of Latin Americas deserve more from their leaders and their natural resources, which has not happened because of corruptions and drug kingpins who have operated by intimidation, coercion, and fear.
The Four “Pies” facing developing countries
Poverty stems from lack of education, opportunities, and low literacy level. These countries do not put too much emphasis in education as they resort to marrying more than one wife and having too many children. Farming and herding have been their main source of food production and livelihood. Ethnicity is attributed to too many tribes, languages, and dialects. It has also contributed to lack of trust amongst different ethnic groups due to lack of understanding each other’s culture and tradition. They have become one country but different people. Instability is created by lack of a stable government by corrupted leaders, who always come to power for the purpose of stealing funds. That ultimately leads to no mandate to build infrastructure, and develop the economy and market for the country. When people’s needs are not met, most of the times in developing countries, rebellion begins when the government neglects a certain group of people. When people are deprived of the necessities of life while the other group has it all because of their ethnicity and religious sect, it creates tensions that lead to a “time-bomb” ready to explode. These most times cause conflicts that are attributed to hatred, sabotage, riots, revolution, and deaths. This is common in the developing countries where corruption and venality have played a role due to self-centeredness on the part of the leaders. Leaders therefore resort to intimidation of their citizens and thereby control these countries by coercion.
17 Strategies for implementing economic and market structure in developing countries
(1)A comprehensive education across the country needs to be instituted. This may be in the local dialect and language in order to make it easy for the citizens of that area. Assessment test of individuals’ talent and abilities need to be explored, recognized and documented to be sure where these individuals’ maximum potentials lie. A program needs to be instituted in order to teach the citizens methods of family planning and birth control. Individuals also need to understand the social and economic benefit of the birth control.
(2)Some individuals may have ability in agricultural work (Crops/livestock/Poultry). Locations with fertile lands need to be located and utilized for crops and livestock, and those areas without fertile land may need to be used based on its comparative advantage, such as poultry, storage of byproducts, and market areas. More here Don Charles Fletcher
(3)Supermarkets are to be constructed in all densely populated locations or urban cities to enable the young men and women find and keep jobs. The stores will consist of three shifts so that students can work and at the same time go to school and do their schoolwork. These markets will be located in the areas where people can afford to shop. A Wal-mart (USA) approach will be most appropriate in these locations. The four utilities of market will have to be considered and instituted as the main reason for the location of the supermarkets.
(4)Consideration of the product that people will want, the price to set for the product, the place that will be appropriate for the supermarkets and their nearness to the people, and how the promotion of the product will be conducted in order to reach the consumers and customers.
(5)The nomadic approach of rearing, transporting, and selling livestock will be changed to using trucks to transport them if it involves long distance in order to avoid spreading of any diseases such as mad cow disease and other diseases that come from livestock feces as they are transported though out the country. Trading locations where buyers and sellers meet, and the days to meet are to be established in both rural and urban areas.
(6)Areas where people still live in poverty, a trade by barter may be established so as to allow the farmers who want to exchange items from their farms to bargain for exchange. This short-run method will continue until the economic development is in place and running.
(7)Foreign investment and property rights need to be considered as part of encouraging investments and savings in order to stimulate the economic growth. This method may help the developing countries to invest less money on capital goods, create more competitive markets, and in turns reduce or eliminate corruption.
(8)Establish local leaders by ethnicity, who will act as representatives or middlemen between the government and their ethnic group. These local leaders may be selected by group they represent and approved by the government to ensure they are working on behalf of the people they represent and not for their own self-interest. In addition, the African experts may be contracted to help establish the boundaries of no corruption.
(9)Individuals have certain religious beliefs and different ways of thinking, and as such need to be segregated according to their sect for the benefit of market structure and economic development. Individuals who understand that certain groups have designated times in which they pray will have no problem doing business with such groups. This may reduce tensions for those who understand the culture of those religious group, and for those, who do not there will be tensions and uneasiness, which is the reason for grouping citizens according to their religious sect.
(10)Government need to institute “watch dog groups” in order to police the programs and to make certain that the programs are in place and running. A 3-year trial needs to be established for any program of economic and market structure that is implemented for these countries. This is enough time to evaluate the program in place in order to ensure its workability. Experts in Africa need to be involved in all phases of implementation in order to combat corruption and promote stability.
(11)Poverty may be reduced if adequate and stable structure for economy and market is established, and the government leaders via the local leaders address all citizen’s problems. The essential necessities – housing, clothing and food - may be the top priorities for these countries in order to reduce the poverty.
(12)Professionals and skilled workers are to be encouraged through issuance of incentives in order to motivate them to stay and reside in these developing countries and help in the development of these countries rather than leaving for developed countries. Mass exodus from these developing countries only harms and delays the development of these countries.
(13)Construction of infrastructure such as roads, buildings, and bridges are important for the economic and market structure of developing countries. Food products and other necessities of life can be transported to their respective destinations as quickly as they are needed when good infrastructure is in place. It may also encourage in foreign investments. Investors will prefer to invest in stable countries to unstable countries.
(14)Construction and installation of adequate running water in developing countries and to all parts of the countries also will help in building stable economic and market structure. It will help in curtailing diseases such as typhoid’s and malaria that usually come from unclean water. It will also help the children to focus in education and literacy programs rather than traveling miles upon miles to fetch water from the streams and wells. Some of these children die in taking these water-fetching adventures.
(15)Installation of electrical system may help in the growth of communities. Businesses cannot operate adequately where electricity is lacking. As such, these countries will require electricity in all areas of the countries as a form of economic development and market structure in order to help businesses function and grow, help in the food storage, and eradicate waste of food products that would otherwise be stored safely in cold rooms and refrigeration.
(16)Social Organizations need to be introduced to help the poor get out of poverty, and give them the opportunity to operate their own small businesses. This type of organizations are set up by the government as not-for-profit organizations, and the purpose is to develop the people’s business skills and issue them interest free start-ups loans to enable them manage their own businesses, which in turn lead them to poverty free. They will guided them to the type of businesses to open, how to open them, where to open them, and why they should open those kinds of businesses.
(17)The potential goals may be achieved by enforcing the use of this model as a condition of receiving funding or foreign aid. As a way to check and ensure that monies do go to what they are intended for, developing countries pledge to use and implement this model. This model will check and police the development of the projects. The intention of this requirement is not to discriminate against developing countries, but to help the citizens of those countries as they have no way of benefiting from these funding and foreign aid that usually end up abused, misdirected, and misused for other personal and private purposes by the leaders due to corruption and venality.
Who Are the Developing Countries
World Bank defined developing countries as those with low-income economies with per capita incomes of $755 or less. World Bank is an International Organization that categorizes such countries as developing countries and also issues loans to them.
Dr. Sidney Okolo is a professor, consultant, strategist, and Africa expert. He is affiliated to several universities and the Managing Director of International Business Associates, a management consulting firm, and also the President of Virtual Classrooms Institute, an online education solution.
#Don Charles Andrew Tyler Grey Fletcher
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Stress-Free Horse Shipping Throughout California | Rocking Y Ranch
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Bill Gates: America’s
The co-founder of Microsoft and his wife debut on the LAND REPORT 100, as America’s largest private farmland owners.
Call it a hunch, but the story did not jibe. I scanned the headline for the umpteenth time and then read and reread the pertinent details. Something was missing. Either that or I had a screw loose. According to the Tri-City Herald, a 14,500-acre swath of choice Eastern Washington farmland in the Horse Heaven Hills of Benton County had just traded hands for almost $171 million. That’s a ginormous deal, one that pencils out to almost $12,000 per acre for a whole lot of acres. Pretty pricey dirt, right? That’s exactly what I thought. Especially when it comes to row crops like sweet corn and wheat, which were grown in rotation with potatoes on 100 Circles, which is the name of the property that changed hands. Then again, farmers and investors in the Mid-Columbia River market expect to pay $10,000 to $15,000 for good ground. Anyone who has ever studied the Columbia River Basin knows that the tillable acreage there is coveted ground, a geologic wonder. The soil profile and underlying silty loess are in a league of their own.
I had gained this smidgen of geologic proficiency while researching our 2018 Farmland Deal of the Year, Weidert Farm, in neighboring Walla Walla County. One of the most telling moments in the field that summer came when a soil scientist by the name of Alan Busacca grabbed a shovel and stepped into a 10-foot trench that had been ripped open on the farm by a Caterpillar 336. Dusky layers of silt and sand towered over the 6-foot-tall retired Washington State professor. There wasn’t a rock, let alone a pebble, or even a root to be seen in the soil. Busacca was in his element: It was some of the richest farmland in the Lower 48. And from an agricultural perspective, the region surrounding Walla Walla and the Horse Heaven Hills has evolved into a commercial hub, complete with controlled atmosphere (CA) storage, state-of-the-art transportation infrastructure, and ready access to low-cost hydropower.
These are a few of the reasons why savvy investors have been plowing millions of dollars into farmland on both the Oregon and the Washington sides of the Columbia River Gorge. At current valuations, it’s one of the nation’s best farmland opportunities. In 2018, when 100 Circles sold, it was even better.
More often than not, farmland sales involve hundreds of acres. Thousand-acre transactions — such as the sale of 6,000- acre Weidert Farm to Farmland L.P. two years ago and the 6,175-acre Broetje Orchards acquisition by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan last year — are blue-moon events.
Tens of thousands of acres? Only sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors can stroke a check for tracts in that league, which is exactly what occurred on the sell side of the 100 Circles transaction: The seller was John Hancock Life Insurance, a multibillion-dollar asset manager with key holdings in all the major US markets as well as Canada and Australia.
The story went dark on the buy side, however. The Tri-City Herald reported that the purchaser was a “Louisiana investor,” a limited liability company associated with Angelina Agriculture of Monterey, Louisiana. Sorry, but that didn’t pass the sniff test.
The Land Report tracks numerous Louisiana landowners; Angelina Agriculture is not one of them. Let’s call that strike one. The burgeoning metropolis of Monterey, population 462, rang a bell, but despite my best efforts, I couldn’t connect the dots to anyone whom we had profiled in The Land Report or, for that matter, anyone who was on our watch list. So I took a look at Dun & Bradstreet. At its listed headquarters — 8318 Highway 565 — Angelina Agriculture boasted two employees and reported annual revenues just north of $300,000. Given the size and cost of 100 Circles, both of those figures made no sense at all. Strike two. How about Google Maps? An aerial image of the Highway 565 address revealed a small metal-sided building off by itself in the woods. Strike three, right?
One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies is the 1999 mystery/thriller True Crime. In it, the four-time Academy Award winner plays an over-the-hill journalist who has “a nose” for a story. I am quite confident that Eastwood’s character, Steve Everett, would have picked up the stench from this setup a mile off: a $171 million acquisition by an LLC with two employees in a metal-sided building down a dirt road off the Bayou Teche? I forwarded the lead to our Land Report 100 Research Team. Minutes later, a terse response arrived:
“Ever hear of Bill Gates?”
THE PROMISED LAND | Farmland in Eastern Washington and neighboring Oregon is blessed with abundant moisture, cheap electricity, and unrivaled soils.
THE PAPER TRAIL
Actually, when it comes to the extensive farmland portfolio of Bill and Melinda Gates, the question should be, “Ever hear of Michael Larson?” For the last 25 years, the Claremont McKenna College alum has managed the Gateses’ personal portfolio as well as the considerable holdings of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Although our researchers identified dozens of different entities that own the Gateses’ assets, Larson himself operates primarily through an entity called Cascade Investment LLC.)
In 1994, the Gateses hired the former Putnam Investments bond-fund manager to diversify the couple’s portfolio away from the Microsoft co-founder’s 45 percent stake in the technology giant while maintaining comparable or better returns. According to a 2014 profile of Larson in the Wall Street Journal, these investments include a substantial stake in AutoNation, hospitality interests such as the Charles Hotel in Cambridge and the Four Seasons in San Francisco, and “at least 100,000 acres of farmland in California, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, and other states … .” According to the Land Report 100 Research Team, that figure is currently more than twice that amount, which means Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has an alter ego: Farmer Bill, the guy who owns more farmland than anyone else in America.
The Gateses’ largest single block of dirt was acquired in 2017: a group of farmland assets owned by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Based in Toronto, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board began assembling an agricultural portfolio in 2013, when it acquired AgCoA, aka, Agricultural Company of America. This private US farmland REIT was a joint venture between Duquesne Capital Management and Goldman Sachs that launched in 2007. Over the next five years, AgCoA acquired more than 100,000 acres in nine states. By the time it was sold to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in 2013, AgCoA ranked as one of the leading institutional owners of row crop farmland in the US.
After AgCoA, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board acquired a second tranche of farmland assets when it paid $2.5 billion for a 40 percent stake in Glencore Agricultural Products in 2016. The very next year, however, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board began shedding these very same farmland assets as quickly as it had acquired them. And it did this so quietly one might even say it was done in secret.
There was no public announcement, and no notice in the business press. Instead, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board revealed in the fine print of a quarterly statement that it had sold $520 million in US farmland assets held by Agriculture Company of America. Credit Chris Janiec at Agri Investor for this eagle-eyed investigating. The Americas Editor at Agri Investor, Janiec reported that the assets had been offered as a single block and “that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is thought to be the buyer of CPPIB’s farmland.” Janiec stayed on the story, and the following year, he confirmed the parameters of sale when he reported the addition of 61 properties valued at approximately $500 million to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries’ (NCREIF) US Farmland Index. This half-billion-dollar figure corroborated the AgCoA acquisition, and the paper trail led directly to Cascade Investment LLC.
All told, the 2017 acquisition of AgCoA and the 2018 acquisition of the 100 Circles tract in the Horse Heaven Hills of Eastern Washington total an investment in farmland assets of more than $690 million. Janiec’s sources said some of the AgCoA assets were quickly sold off, but according to the Land Report 100 Research Team, an estimated 242,000 acres of farmland remained.
Yet farmland assets aren’t the sole component of the Gateses’ landholdings. In 2017, Cascade Investment bought a “significant stake” in 24,800 acres of transitional land on the western edge of Phoenix, the most populous city in Arizona and the 10th largest metropolitan area in the country. The acreage sits off Interstate 10, and it is poised to be accessible by Interstate 11, a proposed highway that would traverse 5 miles of the 40-square-mile holding. At buildout, the Belmont development will create a brand-new metropolis, one similar in size to the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, home to Arizona State University and almost 200,000 residents. According to The Arizona Republic, Belmont is projected to include up to 80,000 homes; 3,800 acres of industrial, office, and retail space; 3,400 acres of open space; and 470 acres for public schools.
Cascade Investment doubled down on Phoenix transitional land two years later when it made a second major investment by acquiring more than 2,800 acres known as Spurlock Ranch in Buckeye for $25 million.
SUSTAINABLE INVESTING
A spokesman for Cascade Investment declined to comment on any of the details associated with these transactions or the Gateses’ holdings, other than to say that Cascade is very supportive of sustainable farming.
Much like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation uses science and technology to achieve a number of worthy goals — including transitioning millions of people out of poverty, improving people’s health and well-being, and ensuring that all people have access to opportunities necessary to succeed in school and in life — Cascade’s farmland holdings also aim to further laudable objectives.
In January 2020, The Land Report announced the launch of a sustainability standard that was developed by US farmland owners and operators. Called Leading Harvest, the organization’s goal is to create a sustainability standard thatcan be implemented across the greatest swath of agricultural acreage. Currently, more than 2 million acres in 22 states and an additional 2 million acres in seven countries are represented. Among the participants in the 13-member Sustainable Agriculture Working Group are Ceres Partners, Hancock Natural Resources Group, The Rohaytn Group, and UBS Farmland Investors.
Not surprisingly, one of Leading Harvest’s other inaugural members is a Cascade entity called Cottonwood Ag Management. Committing the resources to launch this all-important standard validates the assertion that Cascade supports sustainable strategies that advance resiliency and efficiency, retain talent, and reduce regulatory burdens.
Although the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has no ties whatsoever to Cascade or its investments, it also has a farmland initiative: Gates Ag One, which has established its headquarters in the Greater St. Louis area. According to the St. Louis Business Journal, Gates Ag One will focus on research that helps “smallholder farmers adapt to climate change and make food production in low- and middle-income countries more productive, resilient, and sustainable.”
A CLOSING NOTE
Remember that metal-sided building down near the Bayou Teche? Turns out that very same property had caught my eye way back when The Land Report was preparing to launch in 2006. Does the name Bernie Ebbers ring a bell? Once upon a time, the business press dubbed the colorful entrepreneur “the telecom cowboy.” That was before the Edmonton native was put on trial for his role in what was, at the time, the largest corporate bankruptcy filing in US history.
In 2005, the former WorldCom CEO was convicted of securities fraud, conspiracy, and filing false reports that were instrumental in WorldCom’s $11 billion dollar accounting fraud. After losing his appeal in 2006, Ebbers spent most of the rest of his life in a federal prison before being granted compassionate release by a federal judge earlier this year. He died on February 2 surrounded by his family.
Ebbers was many things — a dreamer, a liar, a swindler — and he loved land. In 1998 when he was the toast of Wall Street, the telecom cowboy paid British Columbia’s Woodward family the astronomical sum of $73 million for Canada’s largest ranch: 500,000-acre Douglas Lake, a 22,000-head cattle operation. Ebbers subsequently pledged Douglas Lake as collateral for $400 million he ended up borrowing from WorldCom, and in 2003, WorldCom sold Douglas Lake to Kroenke Ranches. The $68.5 million that Kroenke Ranches paid was applied to Ebbers’s IOU. He also owned a 26,236-acre Louisiana farm. It, too, was sold, on September 25, 2006, the day before Ebbers began serving his sentence at the Oakdale Federal Correctional Institution. It was his last deal as a free man.
When Ebbers owned this Louisiana farm, it was known as Angelina Plantation. And its headquarters was in — you guessed it — Monterey, Louisiana. That was the missing piece of the puzzle I had been searching for as I read the Tri-City Herald story. In a former life, Angelina Agriculture, the purchaser that paid $171 million for 100 Circles in 2018, was, in fact, Bernie Ebbers’s Angelina Plantation. The day before he went to prison, Ebbers sold Angelina for $32 million. The farm was subsequently sold to AgCoA, which was acquired by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. In 2017, Angelina Plantation changed hands one more time and became one of the principal farmland assets in the Gateses’ Cascade Investment’s portfolio.
It took a dozen years, but the ownership of that Louisiana farmland went from Bernie Ebbers to Bill Gates with a couple of stops in between. I readily admit forgetting where and when I first caught wind of it, but the moment I read that Tri-City Herald story, I knew the ending definitely needed a rewrite. Steve Everett would be proud.
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A thought experiment on Silicon Valley’s third era
[ read the tweetstorm if you’re in a rush]
June 19th marks the end of American slavery, July 4th American Independence and July 14th the storming of the Bastille. It’s also my 40th birthday, and I’m exploring what we can learn from the past to help navigate today’s struggles for racial justice and economic freedom.
1940-1980: “Atoms” and the military-industrial-labor complex
My dad arrived in the Bay Area in 1970-1971 to get his PhD at Berkeley - just as the area was being rebranded as Silicon Valley.
Free from the stifling hierarchy of the East, the Bay was America’s center for social, technical and institutional change. Black Panthers policed the police in Oakland, shiny BART trains crossed the Bay to SF where the Gay Rights movement was flourishing. My family tree waited a millennia for India to recognize intercaste marriage. My parents would see radical social change in America across every axis in a single generation. Bold leadership in the 60s expanded civil rights and embraced immigration. They (and I) benefited greatly from an economic and social foundation that had been laid over many decades.
Caterpillar Tractor - founded in the Bay Area - embodied the spirit of this era. It went from liberating France in WW2 to building a massive middle class, unionized labor force. Cat later moved its headquarters to Peoria, Illinois - because in this era, cities across the country - not just the coasts - had the ability to compete. Since WW2, America pursued an intentional strategy of geographically broad-based economic development - via highways, airline regulation and distributed national labs.
Caterpillar didn’t just give Peoria a chance, it also gave my dad a chance to put down roots in America by sponsoring his green card. There was no H1B limbo. The nexus of military, industry and labor unions brought immigrants, Women and Blacks into the workforce - with paid apprenticeships (not exorbitant higher education) and technically-focused community colleges paving the way for millions. My mom learned COBOL while her toddlers played in the back of class. Even Hunter’s Point in SF was vibrant during much of this period. (Of course, it was far from a halcyon era - the war machine had massive human cost globally and civil rights were far from evenly enforced in America.)
And while atoms reigned supreme during this era, the military and government patiently invested risk capital in advanced manufacturing, semiconductors and software/networking to prepare America for its future.
1980-2020: “Bits” and global capital, jackrocks and polarization
In 1980, Reagan was elected President - and I was born. This would also be the peak of private sector labor employment in the US and the beginning of global capital (and the multinational companies they backed) as the leading force in forging the social contract.
They promised us that countries with McDonald’s would never go to war with each other. Indeed the Berlin Wall fell, Asian laborers got jobs and Americans could buy cheap stuff at WalMart. Global capital (bits) put atoms inside shipping containers and sent them around the world - abstracting consumers from the manufacturing base.
The writing was on the wall for unions.
As a middle schooler, I saw Cat management and labor (UAW) locked into a multi-year strike over the future. The front line was not in a boardroom or on the picket line. It was neighborhoods, schools and community groups. I remember when a classmate whose dad was in the union talked about how folks in the factory were peeing on effigies of management - including my dad.
Naturally I knew which side I was on. Cat needed wage concessions and freedom to operate to be globally competitive. I’d read Akio Morita, TPS and Lee Iacocca. I worried about Japan Inc. eating our lunch (yes as a 12 year old!) UAW workers and families were much more grounded. They needed a livelihood and wanted certainty for their future.
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War continued to wage into high school. We came home one day to find “jackrocks” outside of our driveway - a tool used in feudal Japan to thwart the advancing armies - horses, chariots - etc. of those in power. In <60 years, Caterpillar had gone from transforming America’s agrarian society to becoming the enemy of American workers. We had the GOP’s Contract with America (stored in my Trapper Keeper) and Clinton signing NAFTA within a couple years. Both parties supported global capital and global capital supported both parties. Maybe jackrocks worked better than voting?
Corporate America soon figured out that if your workers were in China, Mexico or the South, it’s harder for them to stick jack rocks in your driveway. If your kids go to private school or you live in a quasi-private suburb, they’ll be insulated from the wrath of the have-nots in heavily policed, declining urban centers. No peeing on your effigy or having your kid hear about it!
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After college, I became an analyst at Bain & Company. Once an auto parts company hired us to do a “portfolio review”. I meticulously compared the costs of building mirrors in Eastern Michigan or Malaysia - creating a zero defect Excel model. Guess which location won? The auto parts company - like Cat - had the freedom to choose where to put jobs.
But what freedom did the workers have? Marie Antoinette once said “let them eat cake”. The elites of our era now say “let them move”. Social capital is critical for folks navigating change. The educated elite take the portability of social capital (embedded in college degrees and iMessage threads) as a given.
But place and social capital are deeply intertwined especially if you’re poor or a minority. While the deep introspection elites once had during 2016 has now been paved over by new crises, we should never forget that there’s a cost to society of losing its manufacturing base and jobs. How do you model the costs of broken families, drug addiction and a polarized electorate in Excel?
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I grew disillusioned with management by spreadsheet. But I saw a bright spot on the horizon: tech. I remember opening my first iPod, getting 1000 songs in my pocket and believing that America had a shot at leading a new generation of consumer electronics when everyone a decade earlier had written us off in favor of the Japanese. Perhaps tech could bring jobs and prosperity back to the country? I wanted to be part of it.
So I moved to the Valley in 2004 and joined a VC fund. I saw how the VC funding model that Silicon Valley was built on incentivizes high-risk, high-leverage and massive-scale. It encourages companies to cherry-pick top-end talent (immigrants, marquee college grads) to build the differentiated bits. Pick the highest leverage point in the stack, outsource everything else - by building in China and/or pushing the last-mile to an ecosystem that you can control at arms length.
Tech companies could more than pay back the largely fixed costs of software / semiconductor design from the large and homogenous American market. This dynamic attracted massive amounts of private risk capital and enabled aggressive expansion abroad. This model didn’t work for everything (I got burned with cleantech) - but it worked amazingly well for broad swaths of enterprise software, consumer services and marketplaces. I saw how tech could be an incredible lever for wealth creation. But every visit back home to the Rust Belt made me wonder - wealth creation for whom?
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2020+ - A thought experiment on institutional innovation and putting people first
July 14, 2020 - Q2 Earnings - CEO, MEGA TECH CORP - Hi everyone. These aren’t normal times. We’re not going to talk about our 10Q on this call. We’re here to talk about the next 10 years. So if you’re here for DAUs, ARR or CPC, you can drop off now.
We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the race, health and economic crises our country faces. Over the last few weeks, I’ve asked our exec team to leave their homes, their Zoom calls, their DoorDash deliveries - to join protests and explore our community through new eyes.
Race & Place: On Juneteenth, we biked from Sheraton Place to Hunters Point to Tanforan. We saw the real life impact of redlining, mass incarceration of Blacks and the lack of jobs from decades ago - and how our headquarters sustain - rather than disrupt - the region’s policies of de facto segregation. We also remembered how political demagogues once imprisoned our neighbors of Japanese descent. We see today how their rhetoric affects our Black neighbors and colleagues. What might it do tomorrow to folks without legal status in ag/service industries that California depends or the H1Bs we depend on? What does diversity & inclusion mean in this context?
Jobs: The next Friday we biked from SRI to PARC to Sunnyvale and Moffett Field. Our industry once dreamed of a bicycle for the mind and embraced technical education and apprenticeship as a path in the door for Women and Blacks. Meanwhile we’ve pushed vast swaths of work to contractors or platform-mediated transactions - making it harder to use up-skilling as a talent lever like manufacturing employers did in the last era. What’s the impact on income mobility? At what point will 40 million unemployed Americans affect our share prices and the stability of society?
Climate: On Independence Day, we biked on the Bay Trail past landfills, superfund sites and the 101 - alongside poor and minority neighborhoods with terrible health outcomes. We talked about the Bay Area weather forecast for 2060 “fire with a chance of flooding”. We passed abandoned railways and dreams of regional transport - the result of which is folks commuting hours each way from the central valley to work service jobs in our campuses. We wondered about the long run political consequences of isolating our employee base inside the WiFi confines of a private bus network. Where is the voting base to drive institutional change? How many axles or tires will our commuter buses need to keep them safe from jackrocks on the 101?
Health: Last week, we rode from the old Permanente cement quarry to 101 (built by the same cement workers.) We talked about how Kaiser - a private employer of low-skilled workers - internalized their healthcare needs, pursued disruptive innovation and faced fierce clashes with the medical establishment. We thought about how COVID is exposing the brittleness of our employee’s isolation inside a private insurance bubble. No one can be healthy in a pandemic without competent public health infrastructure. Meanwhile, the growing cost of private healthcare makes it harder for tech - let alone the rest of the country - to employ American workers across the wage spectrum - exacerbating job loss and instability.
And as we spoke with others, we saw how the issues that Silicon Valley faces are not unique to one metropolitan area or one industry. It just happens to be the ultimate archetype of Global Capitalism and de facto segregated American metros.
What we now see - more clearly than ever - is that our entire company, our entire industry, our entire Valley - is built on a flawed foundation.
We can no longer just focus on the magical software bits and hope someone else figures out racial equity, employment, climate and health. This is Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions on the ultimate scale. The abstractions are failing - and we’re seeing bugs and unintended consequences all around us. And the more we invest to deal with one-off bugs, the more likely we are to calcify change and imprison ourselves inside a failing stack.
It’s like we decided to build the world’s notification service on Ruby on Rails - or building an iPhone competitor on Windows CE. Fail Whale everywhere. Unfortunately, America’s democratic institutions are in poor condition. They are struggling to deal with inequality let alone looming environmental disaster. A polarized electorate - particularly at the national level - leads to populism and makes it hard for these institutions to execute meaningful, long-term plans.
We talk a lot about speech, misinformation, fairness of targeted ads etc. But it’s becoming clear that UX, linear algebra/training data and monetization in our products is just the tip of the spear to address polarization. We believe polarization is a product of the underlying conditions of civil rights, education, health and climate debt that affect Americans differentially based on race, wealth, neighborhood and region. e.g. If we care about justice, how far does focusing on the fairness of employment ads get us in a world when many people lack the skills and negotiating power to secure a living wage?
So will today’s peaceful protests for racial justice expand into tomorrow’s revolution(s) for economic freedom? If you don’t think things are bad now, think about what happens when the stimulus checks run out. Take a look at the amount of debt in the public sector, use any imagination about COVID, work out what happens to their tax base / pension returns and consider the impact on public services, public servants and their votes. MMT better be a real thing. Maybe we didn’t start these fires, but that refrain won’t save us when the flames come our way.
We’re done debating why we need to act. It’s clear America needs our help. Let’s talk about how we’re going to rise to the occasion. Our mantra will be “internalize, innovate, institutionalize”.
First, we’re going to internalize our problems. I’m here to tell you that issues of racial and economic justice are not just moral issues but they’re financial issues. Racial debt, education debt, health debt, climate debt will hit us harder and harder each year. (By the way, revolution probably won’t be great for your DCF models.) So we’re going to recognize these off-balance sheet liabilities - which amount to a few hundred billion in the US alone over the next 10 years for a company at our scale.
Second, we’re going to innovate against these systemic problems - but our only shot at making progress is if we realign the entire company’s mission to address them. This is not about optics. This is not about philanthropy. This is not another bet. We’re putting all our chips behind one bet - America. It's the country that backed us in the first place, it's where most of our people are and most of our profits. The job for our existing products, platforms and cash flows will be to advance four areas: place / race, skilling / manufacturing, health / food and climate / mobility - starting in America. The board will measure me based on job creation and diversity. It should go without saying that we’re pausing dividends and buybacks for the foreseeable future. Every dollar will serve our mission. Every senior leader will need to sign up for our new mission - and those who choose to stay will receive a new, back-end loaded, 10 year vesting schedule. We want them focused on the long-term health of society - not the whims of Robinhood day traders or strengthening the moats of existing products. We will need to invent entirely new ways to operate and ship products. As Joel Spolsky said, “when you need to hire a programmer to do mostly VB programming, it’s not good enough to hire a VB programmer, because they will get completely stuck in tar every time the VB abstraction leaks”. We need engineers, designers and product managers that will look deep into the stack, confront the racial, job access, health and climate debts that our products, our companies and our communities are built on top of. This is not about CYA process to protect cash cows or throwing things over the fence to policy. We will need to innovate across technical, cultural and organizational lines. This requires deep understanding and curiosity. This will bring more scrutiny to our company - not less. Not everyone’s going to be on board - so for the next 12 months, we’re giving folks a one-time buyout if they want to leave.
Third, we can’t do any of this by ourselves. The problems are too big. Our role will be to provide enlightened risk capital (from our balance sheet or by re-vectoring operating spend) alongside R&D, product, platform leverage to help leaders and innovators pursue solutions in these areas. Of course we will work with our peers and the public sector wherever possible - buying/R&D consortia, public-private partnerships, trusts, etc. But the new era and landscape demands that we explore institutional models beyond global capital/startups, labor unions, NGOs or government. We need models that can more flexibly align people and purpose, that innovate on individualized vs. socialized risk/reward - and that ultimately help build and sustain local, social capital. It’s difficult to say what these will look like - but increasingly figuring this out will be existential for our core business too. Right now, it doesn’t matter if you’re designing the best cameras in Cupertino or the best way to see their snaps in Santa Monica - we’re all just building layers of an attention stack for global capital. Our Beijing competitors have figured this out. ByteDance is already eating our lunch. They’re using the same tech inputs as us - UX, ML and large-scale systems - which are now a commodity - but with vastly lower consequences for the content they show - creating a superior operating / scaling model. They’re not internalizing social or political cost.
What we need in this era is the accumulation stack - where each interaction builds social capital. This is not about global likes. This is about local respect. We’ll create competitive advantage when we build products that reach across race / economic lines to harness America’s amazing melting pot and do so in ways that build livelihoods / property rights for creators and stakeholders.
With this operating model in place, we’re committing to fundamental change in four areas:
Place & Race - We’re done with de facto segregation. Over the next 10 years, 100% of our jobs will be in diverse communities that embrace inclusive schooling, policing, housing and transit policies. (Starting tomorrow, we’re putting red lines on our maps around towns with exclusionary zoning.) This is not about privatizing cities or an HQ2-style play to extract concessions. This is about investing our risk capital and our reputation to innovate alongside government. How do we bring world-class education to neighborhoods with concentrated poverty? What is the future of digital/hybrid charter schooling? Unbundled, community-driven public safety? We’ll embrace “remote-first” as a means to this end. The Bay will become one physical node alongside others (e.g. Atlanta, DC, LA) creating an Interstate Knowledge System that develops diverse talent across the country. We’re going to coordinate our investment with leading peers - since after all, this isn’t about cost savings or cherry-picking. It’s about broadening our country’s economic base.
Skilling & Manufacturing - We will 10x the tech talent pool in 10 years - by inventing new apprenticeship models that bring women, minorities and the poor into the workforce. We’ll start with our existing contractor base, convert them to new employment models with expanded benefits and paths for upward mobility. Next, we will invent new productivity tools for all types of workers - from the front office to mobile work to call center - that brings the power of AI and programming to everyone. These will be deeply tied into new platforms for work designed from the bottom-up to build social and financial capital for individual workers and teams. Last, we’re going to manufacture most of our hardware products - from silicon all the way to systems - entirely in the US within 10 years. This will require massive investment, collaboration and innovation. It may require a revolution in robotics - but we will pursue this in a way that makes the American worker competitive - not a commodity to be automated away. If we’re successful, the dividends of our investment here will have massive spillover benefits to every other sector of manufacturing in the US - autos, etc. - including ones we have yet to dream up.
Health & Food - We’re not going to tolerate a two-class system for healthcare anymore. As we convert our contract workforce to new employment models, we’re going to have to innovate on the fundamental quality/cost paradigm across our benefit stack. This may feel like a step down but it will put us (and the rest of society if we’re successful) on a fundamentally better long-term trajectory. Food is part of Health, and we’re going to innovate there too. Free food for employees is not going to come back post-COVID. Instead, we’ll use our food infrastructure to bootstrap cooperatively-owned cloud kitchens. We’ll provide capital to former contractors - mostly Black and Hispanic - to invest and own these. We’ll build platforms to help them sell food to employees (partly subsidized), participate in new “food for health” programs and eventually disrupt the extractive labor practices we see across food, grocery and delivery.
Climate & Mobility - Lastly, we’ll be imposing a carbon tax on all aspects of our own operations - which we’ll use to “fund” innovation in this space - with a primary focus on job creation. This is an area where we’re going to be looking far beyond our four walls from the beginning. As a first step, we’re teaming up with Elon and Gavin Newsom to buy PG&E out of bankruptcy and restructure it as a 21st century “decentralized” utility. It will accelerate the electrification of mobility - financing networked batteries for buses, cars and bikes along with charging infrastructure - and leading a massive job creation program focused on energy efficiency. Speaking of mobility, private buses aren’t coming back after COVID. Instead, we’re teaming up with all of our peers to create a Bay-wide network of electric buses (with bundled e-bikes) that will service folks of all walks of life - including our own employee base. Oh and one more thing - we’re bringing together the world’s most advanced privacy/identity architecture and computational video/audio to bake public health infrastructure directly into the buses. For COVID and beyond. None of this is a substitute for competent, democratically accountable regional authorities. This is us investing risk capital on behalf of society - with the goal of empowering these authorities. Yes the New York Times will have a field day with this. Maybe in time they’ll leave their bubble, enter the real world, see the sorry state of their institutions - the behavioral health and infrastructure crises on their crumbling streets - and get on board. Until then, our job is to be patient longer than they can be inflammatory.
Open technology for global progress - While we have to prioritize America given the scale of problems, the intent is not to abandon the rest of the world or hold back it’s progress. We feel the opposite - that over the coming decades each country’s technology sectors will thrive. To get there, we will continue to invest patiently - hiring, training, partnering, investing and innovating - but with a clear north star to help each country develop local leaders in new areas. Long-term, we’ll continue to contribute open technology that others can build upon.
America should be the proverbial city on a hill for everyone - not a metaverse for the rich with the poor dying in the streets. We don’t have much time so we’re getting to work now. See you next quarter.
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This call may be imaginary but none of this is sci-fi or requires MMT. What it requires is us to care. To act. Join me on bike rides to explore our past and discuss what tangible actions Silicon Valley’s leading companies can take in the coming quarters and years. Logistics here for rides on June 19, June 26, July 2 and July 10!
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Logging Lessons: steam donkey engines
Welcome to Logging Lessons! Last week, we learned about using horses to transport logs. This week, we’ll learn about one type of mechanical skidder, steam donkey engines!
Mechanical skidders are a type of heavy vehicle used for transporting materials through the process of skidding. In logging, they were used to “drag material from the woods to a landing or roadside.” (https://www.fs.fed.us/forestmanagement/equipment-catalog/skidders.shtml)
In early logging history, skidders were manually pulled by horses, mules, or oxen (as we discussed last week). However, steam-powered mechanical skidders were developed and became increasingly popular for their independence from livestock, particularly in the 1910s-1920s. The most popular in the logging world were steam donkey engines, which was invented in California but played a crucial role in logging in the Pacific Northwest. (https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/donkey_engine/#.XWlG9ShKi70)
Steam donkey engines were used to transport logs from the forest to the railroad tracks (where they would then be loaded onto train cars and transported to the mill to be made into lumber) at the same time that horses were used. They both performed the same function - “skidding” logs across the ground. “Each donkey cost about $7500 and were mostly Willamette Iron & Steel Works models. With the proper tail hold and deflection, logs could be skidded up to one mile. In 1908, an informal company announcement was that all logging would be done with donkeys and horse skidding would be stopped. Horses did prevail and continued their tireless task until replaced by the crawler tractor in the 1930′s. The donkey was able to skid all log diameters and lengths. It was also self-propelled and could traverse and operate on and over most ground conditions.”[1]
Photos courtesy of Potlatch Historical Society
[1] Tom Farbo, White Pine Wobblies and Wannigans: A History of Potlatch Logging Camps, North Central Idaho 1903-1986, 28
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Things to do in Norwalk
Norwalk is a Los Angeles County, California city that has a population of 105,549 since the 2010 demographics as well as is expected to grow to 103,949 by 2019. Norwalk is one of one of the most largely booming cities in California. The city has an abundant background and also has a special, small-town appeal.
Norwalk was initially lived in by the Shoshonean Native American tribe. Its strategic area on the El Camino Real Trail made it an essential stop for transportation. Today, Norwalk is a greatly residential area of warm California. If you're trying to find a relaxing getaway, this sunny city uses a lot of outside chances.
Whether you're looking for a family members pleasant activity or a museum date, the city offers a wide range of options. From exterior tasks to top-rated galleries to bail bonds representative from Angels Bail Bonds Norwalk, the city has everything! Checking out the city and exploring its many attractions is a fantastic way to invest a weekend.
Norwalk Park
Norwalk Park supplies terrific outdoor tasks as well as numerous locations to outing. There is additionally a Cultural Arts Center where site visitors can learn more about the arts at sensible rates. The Center is situated on Clarksdale Avenue and also uses classes for youngsters of any ages. The Mary Paxon Art Gallery also includes neighborhood artists' work.
The city's parks are handled by the Recreation and also Park Services Department. The parks' system consists of 12 various areas with a total amount of 87.3 acres of land. The city is also residence to an increasing regional transport system that offers locals with very easy accessibility to the rest of Los Angeles County. Despite where you live, you're sure to find a park near you to take pleasure in.
Initially, Norwalk was the residence of the Shoshonean Indians, yet was ultimately cleared up as a result of its tactical location on the El Camino Real Trail. It was likewise called "North Walk," which originated from the Shoshonean word for "north walk". Although the city is primarily residential today, it was when a quit on the Anaheim Branch Railroad Line.
Along with the existing park centers, the state is providing $4.5 million to Norwalk to upgrade its parks. The money will certainly aid with park enhancements and also various other park services. The new areas will certainly permit the town to host regional competitions and also will minimize the expense of upkeep. The funds from state bonding will likewise go toward the remodelling and fixing of several various other public parks, including Irving Freese Park as well as Veterans Memorial Park.
Norwalk Nature Center
The Norwalk Nature Center is an excellent place to take your family. It provides a range of classes in nature, domestic animals, and arts as well as crafts. The facility likewise includes an open yard area. The park is cost-free as well as open to the public. Nevertheless, you may need to make reservations to enjoy unique events.
The Norwalk Nature Center offers different tasks several times each month. It has different sort of domestic pets that kids can play with. The premises likewise include romantic gardens, lakes, and also an antique carrusel with repainted horses. The Norwalk Nature Center lies in a location where several family members delight in hanging out outdoors.
Found 17 miles south of Los Angeles, the Norwalk Nature Center is the ideal area to find out about neighborhood as well as local wild animals. Site visitors can take classes in art, gardening, baking, and also live songs. The center also provides a topiary yard, fruit orchard, and also a pond as well as stream. The grounds additionally consist of a variety of animals, consisting of some that reside in the park.
Norwalk's Sproul family is the city's starting family members. They concerned the area from Oregon and also fell in love with the productive land in California. They acquired land in 1869 as well as built a residence in 1870. The Sproul Museum contains a variety of household heirlooms and artifacts. The museum is open to the general public as well as has assisted excursions led by regional volunteers.
A range of exhibits are provided throughout the year, including seasonal exhibits. For the younger group, there are hands-on exhibitions in science, biology, and the environment. Depending upon the period, there is also a dinosaur dig. And, certainly, there are plenty of opportunities to enter a little of workout.
Don Knabe Golf Center & Junior Academy
Located on Shoemaker Avenue in Southern California, the Don Knabe Golf Center & junior academy is just one of one of the most economical fairway in the area. It features a nine-hole par-3 course, double-deck driving range, putting green, practice throwing eco-friendly with bunker, and modern lighting. The program was made by RJM Design Group and caters to a wide variety of ages and also ability levels.
The golf course was previously called Norwalk Golf Course and opened up in 1963. The course includes a par-3 course, double-deck driving array, practice throwing eco-friendly with shelter, putting eco-friendly, as well as clubhouse. It is managed by CourseCo, Inc. and also Rebecca Ramirez works as the General Manager.
The Norwalk Golf Center uses a variety of tasks to maintain the entire family members amused. The training courses are clean, and also the personnel is offered to provide ideas to aid you play your best round. You can additionally play miniature golf, bumper autos, and also go-cart tracks. The facility additionally has a snack bar.
The 9-hole park program supplies an easy-to-play atmosphere for newbies. The eco-friendlies are level and the tee boxes are matted, making it less complicated for novices to practice their brief game. The training course is additionally budget-friendly as well as newly restored. The 9-hole park program additionally includes a driving range and putting environment-friendly for practice.
Mary Paxon Art Gallery
Situated in Norwalk, California, the Mary Paxon Art Gallery showcases the works of regional musicians and also becomes part of the city's Cultural Arts Commission. Its goal is to promote local artists as well as to develop an online forum for neighborhood participants to celebrate the arts. The gallery is open daily and also features the work of a number of regional musicians. Throughout the day, you can enjoy online music, poetry readings, and a month-to-month reception.
If you're interested in art, see the Norwalk Cultural Arts Center for workshops and also special occasions. Situated on Clarksdale Avenue, the Cultural Arts Center has numerous classes for children as well as grownups of every ages. The Mary Paxon Art Gallery features neighborhood musicians' job and hosts a selection of occasions throughout the year. The gallery is located near the attractive Wilderness Park, a preferred hiking area. It likewise provides a range of social activities for elderly people.
This gallery supplies arts and also cultural education and learning at affordable rates. Situated on Clarksdale Avenue, it provides a selection of classes for different ages. The Mary Paxon Art Gallery supplies a range of displays as well as special occasions throughout the year, in addition to a transforming lineup of musicians.
Hargitt House
If you are trying to find a fantastic means to read more regarding background, check out the Hargitt House Museum. It is located at 12426 Mapledale Street as well as is open for scenic tours on the very first and also third Saturdays of the month from 1:00 to 4:00 pm. Admission is free, but contributions are constantly welcome. The tour starts near the Angels Bail Bonds Norwalk office.
This across the country registered historic home was once the house of D.D. Johnston, that organized Norwalk's very first institution district as well as was a noticeable leader of the town. It is now a museum that includes souvenirs and glances into Norwalk's background. You can visit your home as well as take pleasure in the antiques that get on display in the residence.
Your house includes a semi-attached water tower, which has original pipes as well as was added in the 1930s. The residential property additionally includes a privy, fuel pump, hand devices made use of in the yards, as well as a 1928 Ford flatbed vehicle. You can also appreciate the premises of the home, which are likewise open to the public.
Designed in 1891, the Hargitt House is a two-story shiplap farmhouse with gone across gables. The redwood made use of to develop the house was moved from Northern California as well as drifted to Seal Beach, where it was unloaded onto Norwalk Boulevard. The outside is typical Eastlake Victorian, with cross gables and also attractive scrollwork. It was provided on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
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Angels Bail Bonds Norwalk
11819 Firestone Blvd, Norwalk, CA 90650
+15622633431
https://angelsbailbonds.com/norwalk/
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Horse Transportation Service | Horse Shipping : Rocking Y Ranch
When it comes to your horse, trust is paramount. Rocking Y Ranch Horse Transportation understands the deep bond between horse and owner, and we are dedicated to providing a safe, reliable, and stress-free transportation experience for your equine companion. Our experienced professionals are dedicated to handling every detail, whether you're relocating across the country or needing a local vet haul.
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Rocking Y Ranch offers a comprehensive range of horse transportation services to cater to all your equine travel needs: (Horse trailering california)
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Getting Started with Rocking Y Ranch
We take pride in making the horse transportation process as smooth and stress-free as possible for both you and your horse. Here's how to get started:
Contact Us: Call us or fill out our online contact form to discuss your specific needs and obtain a free quote.
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A Common Sense Economic and Market Structure Model for Developing Countries
Introduction
For more than thirty years developing countries' economic problems have created major financial crises in the international community. Developing countries have remained so due to their low-income economies. African and Middle East countries live in ethnic diverse communities and are subject to political instability and corruption than Asia and Latin American countries that live in more homogeneous communities. There is more cost involved in a population of workers and who belong to different ethnic groups because of diversity, cultural differences, religion and language. The purpose of this economic development model is to address economic stability, the problems (value inhibitors), solutions (value drivers), the strategies and implementations of the economic enhancement in order to help the developing countries be less dependent on developed countries. So many studies have been conducted on developing countries, but none of the studies have focused on how the developing countries could apply or use the economic models with less participation of the industrialized countries. World Bank and United Nations ought to examine minutely any potential foreign aid application while focusing on this model for developing countries. This model will enhance in devising a strategic means of monitoring the developing countries before distributing fund to those that may not use the model or practice noncompliance. The practical sense of the use of this model is to elevate the developing countries to economic success and stability, and reduce their dependency on developed countries.
Role of leadership
In developing countries, most leaders behave and think differently. Although, these may not be tolerated by developed countries, they are the norm and are based on their ethnicity, beliefs, religion, culture, social classes, and assumption of supremacy. Negotiating and managing conflicts in developing countries is a matter of understanding the genetic makeup of that country. Diversity may create needs but these needs do not have to be neglected in order to create balance among the ethnic or sectarian groups. A Western countries' style of negotiating and resolving conflicts may not be applicable in the developing countries where religion and ethnicity have continuously impacted the leadership in those countries. Hence, the inefficient and ineffective leadership have led to social development and economic neglect that have caused the worse economy and poverty in those areas. If politics are set aside and economic benefits are put in the forefront by these developed countries, the chances of conflict resolution will be increased.
Leaders who have vision for change may think about what the impact the economic and market development will have in the long-run, and in the locations and in the life of its citizens. The social problems in Malaysia exist because of the ethnic Chinese who are not Muslim in a country where over 90 percent of the population is Muslim.
In developed countries, situations create focus on civilization and leadership, where civilization shapes leaders and leaders shape civilization. Power is treated as a shared resource, but in most developing countries coercion is the system used by leaders. Leaders use physical, economic, and social threats and punishments to induce change in followers for the sake of the leaders. The leaders therefore have become power wielders. These leadership problems have impacted the economic and market structure of the countries. Hence, a new model may mean a step to a new and better way of life for all the developing countries. The Western part of the Asia continent is predominantly Muslims and still have untapped resources that have not been explored because of dictatorship, politics, religion, culture, beliefs, and diversity. Exploring these countries and helping them stabilize will transcend to trading with other developing countries, which will in turn pull them out of poverty, instability, and create peace among the sectarian and ethnic groups.
Asia
Before the coming of the tsunami in December 26 2005, the South Asian countries were poor and developing. Both the South and East Asia have untapped economic sources. These potential raw materials need to be explored in order to help develop the economic and market structure of the region. The tsunami destroyed the infrastructure, economy, and the lives of the people of the South Asian countries. The 6.3 in magnitude earthquake that hit the central java of Indonesia on May 27, 2006 destroyed what was left of the tsunami. These countries will benefit from cash crop, livestock, and poultry production because of their adequate weather and availability of natural water, which will not require a high technology in order to irrigate the farmland. Mechanized farming will need to be introduced and implemented to aid in maximizing production of agricultural products. The Eastern part of South Korea has a comparative advantage over industrial, commercial, and manufacturing production. Producing and trading on building, automobile, motorcycle, and other petty materials in the form of buying and selling will enhance in the development of the market setting and economy. This will help in the stabilization of the East and South Asian countries. A stable economy will help resolve and manage conflict in these countries that have different ethnic groups and history of diversity. The economic and market structure may also aid in the stability of the leadership, political and social system. The environmental problems may need to be addressed in order to guard against pollution or any unhealthy by products or waste materials that may cause harm to people or have short or long term health problems or may be fatal to people. If these countries are stable, they will attract foreign investments rather than needing foreign aid. The military disturbances in East Timor are not helping the economic and the market structure of the young independent country.
The four factors that determine the economic growth are labor, capital, land, and Entrepreneurship. Developing countries have more labor force with lower wages than developed countries and yet their economic growth is still lower than that of the developed countries. Capital is another problem facing developing countries. They need resources such as equipments, machines, factories, and money to work with. Labor without capital is synonymous to guns without bullets. Capital will also represent an investment that will pay off in the future. Most developing countries have untapped resources such as oil, gold, diamond, minerals, forests, and water that represent land which by themselves cannot stimulate economic growth unless they are explored and converted to goods and services. Technology enhances economic growth. A group of agricultural researchers from Texas A&M University and University of California-Davis acquired a four-year grand of $4.4 million from U.S Agency for International Development's Mission to Afghanistan eGrazing. This discovery will aid the livestock herders to successfully tend to cattle, sheep, horses and goats. If this system had been in place, it may have made an impact during the tsunami in Indonesia. Political and social factors that inhibit Economic Growth are corruption, instability, lack of leadership and administrative skills, population growth, and lack of business enterprises.
Africa
African countries are very poor and in dare need of economic and market structure development. Before these countries go global, they may to have sufficient needs of life by taking comparative advantage of their sources of raw material. Some have cash crops that need to be irrigated, some have livestock and poultry that need to be technologically upgraded, and market structure that needs to be redesigned, developed and implemented. The improvement of the agriculture will help the poor farmers send their children to school, build infrastructure, develop the quality of institutions, and make a smooth run of transportation.
Middle East
Middle East region is a turbulence area because of instability associated with religion, oil, dictatorship, and developed countries' influence. The Iraq war has devastated the whole region, and couple with the Israel, Palestinian, and Lebanese conflict, which has created further economic drawbacks that amount in billions of dollars. The destruction of the infrastructures, and the lost of lives have sent the economy of Lebanese country decades backwards.
Latin America
Development in Latin Americans countries could stem from agriculture, forestry and fishing, to mining, and manufacturing. These Latinos can help in building their countries rather than trying to immigrate to United States of America. If guided, they will improve their countries' economy and help in the marketing of agricultural, manufacturing and other natural resources. Immigrants spend much time in the state of California farms, Illinois factories, North Carolina, and areas in the north east of United States of America working mostly in food industries. These efforts can be redirected to Latin America in order to develop the entire area.
Political struggles, lack of administrative skills, and power supremacy have strangled the economic and market structure of most countries in Latin America. For decades the Latinos have traveled north of the border to United States of America in search of better lives. This economic situation has resulted in the deaths and mutilations of people trying to enter United States of America. The smugglers who are known as the "coyotes" have made huge profits for attempting to transport these illegal Latinos across the border. It is very dangerous ventures because of the hot temperature, train transportation, unhygienic felt, bad weather, lack of food, water, and other unknown dangers along the road to the border. Immigrants spend months traveling to the border and most times do not make it to United States because they are caught and send back south of the border. Most gang groups have resorted to kidnapping wealthy Latin Americans living in the United States side of the border for huge ransoms, demand thousands of dollars in exchange to the kidnapped victims and most of the times these victims are killed. Families are separated due to fractured economy when men live their families for years in search of money for food in the north of the border. Income is not redistributed to the population, the rich gets richer while the poor gets poorer. The people of Latin Americas deserve more from their leaders and their natural resources, which has not happened because of corruptions and drug kingpins who have operated by intimidation, coercion, and fear.
The Four "Pies" facing developing countries
Poverty stems from lack of education, opportunities, and low literacy level. These countries do not put too much emphasis in education as they resort to marrying more than one wife and having too many children. Farming and herding have been their main source of food production and livelihood. Ethnicity is attributed to too many tribes, languages, and dialects. It has also contributed to lack of trust amongst different ethnic groups due to lack of understanding each other's culture and tradition. They have become one country but different people. Instability is created by lack of a stable government by corrupted leaders, who always come to power for the purpose of stealing funds. That ultimately leads to no mandate to build infrastructure, and develop the economy and market for the country. When people's needs are not met, most of the times in developing countries, rebellion begins when the government neglects a certain group of people. When people are deprived of the necessities of life while the other group has it all because of their ethnicity and religious sect, it creates tensions that lead to a "time-bomb" ready to explode. These most times cause conflicts that are attributed to hatred, sabotage, riots, revolution, and deaths. This is common in the developing countries where corruption and venality have played a role due to self-centeredness on the part of the leaders. Leaders therefore resort to intimidation of their citizens and thereby control these countries by coercion.
17 Strategies for implementing economic and market structure in developing countries
(1)A comprehensive education across the country needs to be instituted. This may be in the local dialect and language in order to make it easy for the citizens of that area. Assessment test of individuals' talent and abilities need to be explored, recognized and documented to be sure where these individuals' maximum potentials lie. A program needs to be instituted in order to teach the citizens methods of family planning and birth control. Individuals also need to understand the social and economic benefit of the birth control.
(2)Some individuals may have ability in agricultural work (Crops/livestock/Poultry). Locations with fertile lands need to be located and utilized for crops and livestock, and those areas without fertile land may need to be used based on its comparative advantage, such as poultry, storage of byproducts, and market areas. More here Don Charles Fletcher
(3)Supermarkets are to be constructed in all densely populated locations or urban cities to enable the young men and women find and keep jobs. The stores will consist of three shifts so that students can work and at the same time go to school and do their schoolwork. These markets will be located in the areas where people can afford to shop. A Wal-mart (USA) approach will be most appropriate in these locations. The four utilities of market will have to be considered and instituted as the main reason for the location of the supermarkets.
(4)Consideration of the product that people will want, the price to set for the product, the place that will be appropriate for the supermarkets and their nearness to the people, and how the promotion of the product will be conducted in order to reach the consumers and customers.
(5)The nomadic approach of rearing, transporting, and selling livestock will be changed to using trucks to transport them if it involves long distance in order to avoid spreading of any diseases such as mad cow disease and other diseases that come from livestock feces as they are transported though out the country. Trading locations where buyers and sellers meet, and the days to meet are to be established in both rural and urban areas.
(6)Areas where people still live in poverty, a trade by barter may be established so as to allow the farmers who want to exchange items from their farms to bargain for exchange. This short-run method will continue until the economic development is in place and running.
(7)Foreign investment and property rights need to be considered as part of encouraging investments and savings in order to stimulate the economic growth. This method may help the developing countries to invest less money on capital goods, create more competitive markets, and in turns reduce or eliminate corruption.
(8)Establish local leaders by ethnicity, who will act as representatives or middlemen between the government and their ethnic group. These local leaders may be selected by group they represent and approved by the government to ensure they are working on behalf of the people they represent and not for their own self-interest. In addition, the African experts may be contracted to help establish the boundaries of no corruption.
(9)Individuals have certain religious beliefs and different ways of thinking, and as such need to be segregated according to their sect for the benefit of market structure and economic development. Individuals who understand that certain groups have designated times in which they pray will have no problem doing business with such groups. This may reduce tensions for those who understand the culture of those religious group, and for those, who do not there will be tensions and uneasiness, which is the reason for grouping citizens according to their religious sect.
(10)Government need to institute "watch dog groups" in order to police the programs and to make certain that the programs are in place and running. A 3-year trial needs to be established for any program of economic and market structure that is implemented for these countries. This is enough time to evaluate the program in place in order to ensure its workability. Experts in Africa need to be involved in all phases of implementation in order to combat corruption and promote stability.
(11)Poverty may be reduced if adequate and stable structure for economy and market is established, and the government leaders via the local leaders address all citizen's problems. The essential necessities -- housing, clothing and food - may be the top priorities for these countries in order to reduce the poverty.
(12)Professionals and skilled workers are to be encouraged through issuance of incentives in order to motivate them to stay and reside in these developing countries and help in the development of these countries rather than leaving for developed countries. Mass exodus from these developing countries only harms and delays the development of these countries.
(13)Construction of infrastructure such as roads, buildings, and bridges are important for the economic and market structure of developing countries. Food products and other necessities of life can be transported to their respective destinations as quickly as they are needed when good infrastructure is in place. It may also encourage in foreign investments. Investors will prefer to invest in stable countries to unstable countries.
(14)Construction and installation of adequate running water in developing countries and to all parts of the countries also will help in building stable economic and market structure. It will help in curtailing diseases such as typhoid's and malaria that usually come from unclean water. It will also help the children to focus in education and literacy programs rather than traveling miles upon miles to fetch water from the streams and wells. Some of these children die in taking these water-fetching adventures.
(15)Installation of electrical system may help in the growth of communities. Businesses cannot operate adequately where electricity is lacking. As such, these countries will require electricity in all areas of the countries as a form of economic development and market structure in order to help businesses function and grow, help in the food storage, and eradicate waste of food products that would otherwise be stored safely in cold rooms and refrigeration.
(16)Social Organizations need to be introduced to help the poor get out of poverty, and give them the opportunity to operate their own small businesses. This type of organizations are set up by the government as not-for-profit organizations, and the purpose is to develop the people's business skills and issue them interest free start-ups loans to enable them manage their own businesses, which in turn lead them to poverty free. They will guided them to the type of businesses to open, how to open them, where to open them, and why they should open those kinds of businesses.
(17)The potential goals may be achieved by enforcing the use of this model as a condition of receiving funding or foreign aid. As a way to check and ensure that monies do go to what they are intended for, developing countries pledge to use and implement this model. This model will check and police the development of the projects. The intention of this requirement is not to discriminate against developing countries, but to help the citizens of those countries as they have no way of benefiting from these funding and foreign aid that usually end up abused, misdirected, and misused for other personal and private purposes by the leaders due to corruption and venality.
Who Are the Developing Countries
World Bank defined developing countries as those with low-income economies with per capita incomes of $755 or less. World Bank is an International Organization that categorizes such countries as developing countries and also issues loans to them.
Dr. Sidney Okolo is a professor, consultant, strategist, and Africa expert. He is affiliated to several universities and the Managing Director of International Business Associates, a management consulting firm, and also the President of Virtual Classrooms Institute, an online education solution.
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