#how much less support would Ukraine have got under a trump? how much faster would Israel's war have escalated?

[sensiblereblogifposts]

We interrupt our usual broadcast to ask the USAmericans out there, please make plans to go vote for Harris.

What ever you think of Kamala Harris, remember the other guy is basically a fascist.

One of the two will take office after the election - there is no other possibility.

Please do your part in keeping Trump out of power. Go vote for Harris.

[patrick-watson]

The Agriculture Revolution Is Coming

BY PATRICK WATSON

Humans have needs, but we need some things more than others.

Back in the 1940s, American psychologist Abraham Maslow famously classified human needs into a hierarchy, often shown as a pyramid.

At the foundation are our physiological needs: air, water, food, etc. Only when these needs are met can we reach upward to more and more refined stages of material, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment.

You could say, the very existence of civilization depends on the stability of the bottom layer. It’s thus no accident that a huge part of the economy exists to fill these basic needs.

Even smart people can forget this. One person who doesn’t forget—and has used it to accomplish amazing things—is President Donald Trump.

Presidential Endorsement

Last week at the White House, President Trump and his economic advisors met with a group of manufacturing company executives. They discussed how to create jobs and promote exports.

After some opening remarks, the guests introduced themselves to the president. Here’s an excerpt from the official White House transcript.

FRAZIER: Thank you, Mr. President, it’s good to be here. Ken Frazier from Merck & Co., Inc.

FIELDS: Thank you, Mr. President. Mark Fields, CEO of Ford Motor Company.

MORRISON: Thank you, Mr. President. Denise Morrison from Campbell Soup Company.

THE PRESIDENT: Good soup.

MORRISON: Thank you.

I’m not making this up. President Trump’s first thought, on meeting the head of Campbell Soup, was to tell everyone he likes their soup.

Note also, the president did not respond to Merck’s leader with “Good pills,” or to the Ford CEO with “Good cars.” But Campbell got a “Good soup.”

Thinking of Maslow’s hierarchy, this makes perfect sense.

We know food is a basic human need. Soup is basic food. Trump knew this instinctively. He won the White House by convincing those on the bottom levels of Maslow's pyramid that he could raise them up.

Coincidence? I think not.

Consumers Want Better Quality

Americans increasingly want fresh ingredients and fewer preservatives. As the demand for organic grains has skyrocketed, food companies are filling the gap with imports from as far away as Turkey, Ukraine, and India.

The foreign competition has slashed organic-corn prices by 30% and organic-soybean prices by 20%—a fact US farmers are not happy about.

Imported food (or imported anything, really) is not what the Trump administration wants to see. I've written about this shift toward promoting the local economy in Connecting the Dots (subscribe here for free).

Furthermore, suspicions abound that some of the imported grain isn’t really “organic” as the US government defines it.

Yet another problem: American fruit and vegetable farms depend highly on immigrant labor, much of which is now under pressure to leave the country. It’s not clear if there are enough legal US residents (who are willing to do the work) to replace them.

Looks like an economic conundrum.

Consumers want higher-quality food, but we can’t get the components without importing them, which the government wants to discourage. Labor shortages don’t help. How do we square this circle?

Silicon Valley sees an opportunity.

Automated Food Production

Last August, John Mauldin kindly gave me a Thoughts from the Frontline guest appearance (subscribe here for free). I wrote about the way LED lighting could enable large-scale indoor farming.

It appears to be getting closer. From the February 13 edition of the Wall Street Journal:

In a renovated warehouse by San Francisco Bay, plastic towers sprouting heads of lettuce, arugula, and herbs rise 20 feet to the ceiling, illuminated by multicolored LED lights that give the room a futuristic feel.

A group of tech entrepreneurs and investors including billionaires Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt are betting this facility… can redefine how vegetables and fruits are grown for local consumption.

If all goes to plan, the 51,000-square-foot warehouse run by startup Plenty United Inc. will yield as much as 3 million pounds of leafy greens each year. In the coming months, the company plans to begin marketing produce bred for local tables rather than shipping durability.

This is a prototype operation, still a long way from being feasible at scale. But if it works, the economic consequences will be staggering.

Right now, our food often travels thousands of miles before it reaches us. Think of all the ship, train, and truck miles it takes to bring fresh produce to every US grocery store and restaurant.

Now imagine if crops could grow in highly automated, energy-efficient local warehouses. We would have better, fresher produce that costs less and is less damaging to the environment.

Meanwhile, other companies are working on lab-grown meats. A cow is essentially a machine that converts corn and water into protein. There might be more efficient ways to do this, or to create substances indistinguishable from actual beef.

This won’t happen tomorrow or next year. But who knows, 10 years from now, indoor farming and meat production could be commonplace.

Food in the Future

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, self-esteem and self-actualization—two things that make us distinctly human and have brought forth art, music, and other forms of culture—can’t exist without the lower levels supporting them.

The ready availability of food is an essential part of allowing us to be fully actualized humans.

Economics is about the ways we manage supply and demand, which means it is really about everything. But it’s first about fulfilling our most basic needs.

The technology-driven switch from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture unfolded over decades. It let people live in cities and enabled the Industrial Revolution, which in time led to all of today’s technology.

The coming change in the way we feed ourselves may be equally significant. It could happen much faster too.

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[thisdaynews]

How National 5G Policy Became Chaotic

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-national-5g-policy-became-chaotic/

How National 5G Policy Became Chaotic

Illustration by Daren Lin

President Donald Trump says he wants America to win the race to the fast new wireless future. He took it seriously enough to sign a presidential memorandum setting a deadline of July 2019 for a new national strategy on allocating the airwaves. That deadline came and went with no strategy in sight.

In September, a Commerce Department undersecretary promised that the strategy was still on the way, telling a gathering of government officials that it would be released in the fall. A Commerce official assured POLITICO that the department did indeed deliver a draft to the White House. As of this writing, no strategy has been released.

In the void, Trump administration officials have been lobbying their own ideas for how America can win the race to build superfast 5G service — seemingly with no coordination at all. Economic adviser Larry Kudlow talked up a new “virtualized” network to counter Chinese hardware dominance. Attorney General William Barr suggested that instead the U.S. should buy a controlling stake in one of Huawei’s European competitors. The idea was unprecedented — and apparently unsupported: A day later, Vice President Mike Pence seemed to walk it back.

Democrats in Congress haven’t missed the chance to pounce on the White House’s disarray on such a fundamental new technology. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the top Democrat on the Commerce Committee’s telecommunications subcommittee, called the White House’s 5G planning “haphazard in the extreme.”

It’s not just the White House, though: If the strategy is ever finalized, Washington is poised for even more confusion, and the reason dates back long before Trump. As China pushes aggressively ahead, with its leading firm, Huawei, a clear national favorite with strong support from the central party, American wireless-communications policy is overseen by an astonishing tangle of agencies—including the Federal Communications Commission, Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. All have overlapping interests and bureaucratic turf to protect. And most notably, the agency most closely charged with overseeing 5G—the National Telecommunications and Information Administration—hasn’t had a leader for months, with no director even nominated.

Washington already has a long to-do list where 5G is concerned. Telecom companies are craving more space on the nation’s airwaves to help build a new and faster network; its promised speeds, up to 100 times faster than what consumers currently get, are possible only with swaths of new bandwidth that government agencies need to free up. They also require FCC and Commerce Department consensus on the standards for how they’re allowed to use 5G airwaves, which has spurred fighting over possible interference with weather forecasting.

Much of that is regulated by the Commerce Department, which has had very high turnover. Nowhere is the problem more acute than the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency created inside the Commerce Department in 1978 to take the lead on allocating wireless airwaves for government use. Along with the Federal Communications Commission, it determines which public and private entities have the right to use which parts of the wireless spectrum.

Last May, the agency’s chief abruptly resigned after a year and a half on the job, and his acting successor resigned after just a few months. The administration has never announced plans to nominate a permanent leader in the nine months since. With less than a year left before the November presidential election, it’s likely the agency will stay headless indefinitely, subject to leadership from officials on an acting basis. And even then, the latest acting chief left in December.

One rumored source of conflict has long been Earl Comstock, a high-ranking deputy to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross who has tried to assert control over the agency. Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the top Republican on the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, told POLITICO last year he would discourage any candidate from taking the NTIA administrator role due to concerns about department officials intruding on the agency’s turf. “I’d want to know who is really running the show,” said Walden, who formerly employed the last NTIA leader as chief counsel on the panel. “It’s a question of, are you the NTIA? Or is somebody else running the show?”

The instability has spelled trouble for the Commerce Department’s relationship with the FCC, which unlike the NTIA is an independent agency. Although NTIA manages government-held airwaves and the FCC commercial spectrum, the two frequently have to collaborate to help develop U.S. policy on 5G standards.

Despite the turmoil, there have been some baby steps. Commerce Department and FCC officials seemed to settle some differences in August over 5G standards to safeguard weather forecasting ahead of a global telecom conference.

But doubts still run high on Capitol Hill among some Democrats and Republicans over the terms of the deal and whether administration officials are on the same page. In the past year, the FCC alone has gotten into airwave spats with the departments of Education, Energy, Commerce and Transportation, typically over what airwaves the FCC can free up for the commercial wireless titans it regulates. The Commerce Department’s NTIA is supposed to be the agency managing these disputes, but some agencies have bypassed it entirely to take grievances directly to the FCC.

Over the week of Christmas, Trump did make a move to impose some leadership in global 5G policy, assigning 5G coordination duties to Robert Blair, a White House staffer serving as top security adviser to acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. That made waves for other reasons: Blair had recently defied an impeachment subpoena from the House of Representatives to testify about his role in halting military aid to Ukraine.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told POLITICO that despite having heard “favorable comments that [Blair] is a competent guy,” he finds the choice surprising. The stakes are high, and U.S. dominance in 5G is necessary to counter the rising threat of China and its titanic firms such as Huawei. Trump has been lobbying allied countries to spurn using Huawei equipment in their 5G networks.

“Why would you put somebody that’s in the middle of not [just] one controversy into this position?” Warner asked. “If the West can’t offer an alternative, and every month that we don’t have a plan, these are decisions countries are going to make.”

When it comes to 5G, concern over the chaos has become one of the rare points of bipartisan agreement in Congress. In December, Republicans and Democrats on the House Science Committee asked the Government Accountability Office to step in and disentangle the “contradictory statements” from the FCC, NOAA, and NASA on 5G airwave safeguards. The lawmakers wrote about “apparent lack of coordination” among the various agencies on 5G.

Then in January, Walden, the Oregon Republican, joined with House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) to ask the GAO to probe these same issues and others, including agencies sidestepping their traditional deference to Commerce Department processes on wireless spectrum fights.

At a time when the United States is under significant pressure to develop new 5G technology and roll it out on wireless spectrum, Walden and Pallone found “inefficient management and chaotic processes.”

“Last year,” they concluded, “it was clear that the federal spectrum management process broke down.”

Despite these anxieties, the Trump administration has maintained the U.S. is barreling ahead on 5G deployment and has stability, such as the same FCC chair for the duration of Trump’s first term, administration conveners like Larry Kudlow and a Senate-confirmed chief technology officer, who has repeatedly pointed to 5G supremacy as an administration technology goal.

Trump, in his budget proposal for the coming fiscal year released this February, even proposed boosting funding for NTIA by tens of millions of dollars, an increase of roughly 80 percent and largely aimed at 5G. And the president himself is projecting optimism despite the concerns of Democrats, the industry and even his own party.

“Spectrum, we’re opening it up,” Trump said in January at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “We’re in very good shape. I think we’re far advanced, much further than people understand. We got off to a very late start before I got here. But once I got here, we’ve really caught up.”

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