Things that make you go "Hmmmm"...

Snipped from the heading of a google search...

Oh, click on the image to get it to a reasonable size.

AMERICA - BEWARE!! THE KIWIS ARE COMING!!

Over the past five years or so that the probligo has been living in the blogiverse he has learned just how fragile - and in so many ways - the average American psyche can be. Just look to the last post for the most recent instance; the inability of an individual to accept that facts can actually oppose standing preconceptions and long held beliefs. But this is not the time nor place for that debate - that is yet to and will come.

About two or three weeks back there was a considerable raruraru in the local (NZ) media about a proposal to move away from traditional pasture farmed dairying toward the techniques used in EUrope and the US with fully enclosed herds on "artificial" feeds. The advantages were many, and much outweighed the perceived costs of open farming.

Personally I hope that they fail. NZ's major advantage in all farming methods is not the "green and clean" message but the fact that our methods are natural; we convert water and sunlight into food.

Now - this last week - there have been reports coming through of Missouri (the US one, so that we are clear) reclaiming some 5% of the total US dairy market (such as this example). Apparently the US dairy state had been losing its markets and consequently suffering reduced production under the pressure of "increasing costs and decreasing returns". That despite what I suspect would be fairly substantial state and federal subsidies.

With milk prices so low and many dairy farmers losing money, the New Zealanders’ low-cost methods, which mostly involve a different way of feeding cows, are luring converts.

“Their impact has been so significant in our state that it’s hard to get your arms around it,” said David Drennan, executive director of the Missouri Dairy Association.

...

As recently as 1975, the state had 20,000 dairy farms and 333,000 dairy cows. Today, there are about 2,000 farms and less than one-third the number of cows.

A decade ago, businesses, farmers, bankers, academics and others gathered around a table in the Greene County Extension Office in Springfield to confront the crisis.

The group realized the business practices of the state’s dairy farms needed to improve.

The turn-round in production has come largely from four farms purchased, "modernised" and managed by Kiwis - the re-introduction of traditional pasture based farms of my countryside.

Kevin van der Poel remembers the skepticism and suspicion when he moved here four years ago from New Zealand with a newfangled approach to raising dairy cattle.

He heard the doubts, peppered with a tall tale or two.

When he started construction on rock walkways for moving cattle between pastures, the rumor spread that he was building housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Some locals thought his cows seemed too thin.

In the radio programme on this topic last week (I still listen to the rural news and other rural based programmes) there was a delightful descrition of a field day held at one of the farms. Questions after the tour ranged from whether cows would get stones stuck in their hooves, to the problem of the cows having to walk too far and getting tired, and the consequent impact on production...

And so we come to -

Tony Finch understands why some people might resent the New Zealanders’ different approach and, ultimately, their success.

“People see that as a threat or a degree of arrogance that we do it right and they do it wrong,” said Finch, general manager of Grasslands Consultants, another New Zealand operation, with 9,000 cows on 10,000 acres around Monett.

“That’s been a struggle — to convince people that what we’re doing is not a threat to what they’re doing, but another way of doing it.”

In many ways, the New Zealanders are returning Missouri dairy farmers to their past.

Traditionally, all Missouri dairies were pasture-based. But, in the 1970s, many began to use confinement operations and increased grain feeding to boost milk production.

In the Ozarks, where most of the dairies are, costs rose as more feed needed to be delivered and more manure needed to be removed. Labor was scarce.
...
The operation, which the van der Poels run out of a nondescript yellow barn set back off a rural highway, pumps about $6 million annually into the local community, he said.

They employ 28 people, about a third of the number required to run a confinement dairy with a similar-size herd.

...thereby returning to my wish for the "enclosed farming" developments in Southland to bite the dust before too many people waste their money on them.

Two (minor) cautionary tales...

First comes this story about Facebook, and the next step in their development of the system -

FACEBOOK is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150 million members by creating one of the world's largest market research databases.

In an attempt to finally cash in on the social networking site, once valued at $US15 billion ($23.6 billion), it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight.

The company, which has struggled to make money from advertising, has been demonstrating the benefits of its new instant polling tool to business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Following from that is the latest Aussie panic about Google -

YOUR local phone exchange is down and your landline and mobile are not working. You need to make an urgent business call but you have no way of communicating with the outside world. What do you do?

A similar scenario hit the internet yesterday when Google, the dominant search engine, suffered a malfunction and marked all websites as dangerous, blocking them from use.

Millions of users were unable to access the sites they were looking for, and instead received the warning: "This site may harm your computer".

While the problem lasted only about 40 minutes, experts estimate millions of dollars were lost from online transactions dependent on the company's search functions. Users reported failures on other Google applications such as Gmail, which has 1.3 million accounts with the Department of Education.

"What happened? Very simply, human error," was Google's response. It said its list of sites containing malware - set up to protect users from potentially harmful sites - was wrongly updated and all sites were automatically blocked.

"Unfortunately, the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs," Google's vice-president of search products, Marissa Mayer, wrote on the company's blog.

But the failure of the search engine giant - believed to capture about 70 per cent of its market - raised questions about how widespread the financial impact would be of a longer or permanent failure of Google's products.

"It's critical infrastructure because people have it so interwoven and so ingrained into their existence that they can't live without it," said tech enthusiast Dave Gray from podcastersemporium.com.

"It scares me to think 'What if something would happen to Google today?'. Businesses would go under, massive amounts of money would be lost, core businesses would fail because they base their business models on using Google services.

"You've only got to look at the biggest-selling phone for the last quarter of last year, which was the iPhone. It's integrated with Google. It's got Gmail built into it, it's got Google Maps built into it, it has YouTube, which Google owns," said Gray.

Google's global range extends beyond internet searches on google.com. When the outage occurred yesterday, users reported failures on other Google applications like Gmail - which is now has 1.3 million email accounts with the NSW Department of Education - and iCalendar, used by businesses to organise and manage events for clients. A longer outage could have impacted the archiving of sites, thus rendering organisations dependent on an online presence for profit or profile virtually invisible to the public.

I remain, yours truly,
probligo the luddite

Who remembers Diebold?

It must be the election season again.

Now from AP -

The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.
...
It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the disputed 2000 presidential recount, Congress provided more than $3 billion to replace punch card and lever-operated machines. State officials across the country said the new systems would eliminate human error and political tampering.

But problems with the machines soon followed: vanishing votes, breakdowns, malfunctions and increasing evidence that the devices were vulnerable to hackers.

Beginning last year, states including California, Ohio and Florida abruptly ordered election officials to mothball their electronic machines. Over the last two years, the percentage of registered voters relying on touch-screen technology dropped from 44 percent to 36 percent.

In November, when the presidential race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain ends, an estimated 57 percent of voters will rely on paper ballots.
...
As of December, 30 states had spent more than $253 million on new voting systems, according to a report by the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that oversees spending of the $3 billion federal allotment.

But the agency does not know how many election districts have since abandoned those newly purchased systems.
...
Leading makers of voting machines have made similar statements [denying malfunction and interference] and blame poorly trained poll workers and human error for most glitches.

What price democracy?

Well perhaps the US could ask India. They poll for their parliament over a period of a week. The paper ballots are hand counted. And while there are the occasional accusations of "missing" votes, it does seem to work reasonably well.

Is it perhaps a reflection of the need for instant gratification?