Great article on Foodies and the food revolution.
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Why Trees die during a drought
Scientists who study forests say they’ve discovered something disturbing about the way prolonged drought affects trees.
It has to do with the way trees drink. They don’t do it the way we do — they suck water up from the ground all the way to their leaves, through a bundle of channels in a part of the trunk called the xylem. The bundles are like blood vessels.
When drought dries out the soil, a tree has to suck harder. And that can actually be dangerous, because sucking harder increases the risk of drawing air bubbles into the tree’s plumbing.
Plant scientist Brendan Choat explains: “As drought stress increases, you have more and more gas accumulating in the plumbing system, until they can’t get any water up into the leaves. This is really bad news for the plant because this is like having an embolism in a human blood vessel.”
Like a human embolism, the gas bubbles stop the flow of fluid. If that persists, it means thirst, starvation and eventually death.
Choat is from the University of Western Sydney in Australia, a region that has seen years of record-breaking drought. He wondered: How much drought does it take before trees start choking on air bubbles?
He and a team of researchers studied 226 species of trees around the world, including desert trees, rain forest trees and many others. They discovered that for most, it doesn’t take much drought at all.
“So this is the key thing,” Choat says, “that it would only take a small shift in terms of the moisture environment, the temperature … to push these plants across the threshold.”
The threshold between drinking and choking, that is. The reason there’s so little margin of error is that trees have to finely balance eating and drinking. To eat, they open holes in their leaves, called stomata, to absorb carbon dioxide. But the more they do that, the more they lose water by transpiration through the stomata. Lose too much, and they have to start sucking harder — and risk a deadly embolism.
Choat’s research, in the journal Nature, shows that it doesn’t take much drought before trees start to self-destruct.
But what about trees that have evolved to live in really hot, dry places? They’re sippers, not gulpers.
Plant scientists like Bettina Engelbrecht figured they’d have a larger margin of safety before they choke. “Instead,” she says of Choat’s research, “we find, well, it’s all the same — everyone is right at the edge and has a very risky strategy.”
Engelbrecht, at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, studies rain forest trees. “Now, we have to worry about all of them,” she says. “We have to really deal with the problem at the global scale.” That’s because temperatures are rising around the globe. That makes drought more likely and more intense. Big droughts have hit southern Europe, Russia, Australia and the U.S. in recent years.
The first 10 months of 2012 were the warmest ever in the continental U.S. Along with the heat came widespread drought, which still persists in the Southwest.
Nathan McDowell, a plant scientist at the government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, actually puts trees under plastic to see how they deal with less water and more heat. He says trees are adaptable, up to a point.
“Now we’re changing that climate range really fast,” he notes, “faster than any of the living plants here have experienced. So can they change fast enough to adapt to that? You know, the preponderance of evidence right now is saying that [at] lots of locations around the world, they’re not adapting fast enough.”
When they don’t adapt, they stop growing. Beetles and other insects invade. If droughts last long enough, the forests just die, and get replaced with something else.
Be a Farmer
I am taking the time each day to sit and read. I have an Amazon Kindle on my droid. I have searched for Free books on Amazon and downloaded them to my droid. The book that I am currently reading is “The Secrets of Success, a young man’s journey” by H. Bradley Stucki
I had heard the quote reap what you sow, but for some reason the phrase took little bit different meaning, when talking about the farmer that planned out his success by purposely selected to plant the best seeds for the soil and then implements the best plan to sew those seeds and ensure their success.
At the center of all of this is action.
Take action everyday towards your goals!
UnBlock Me
I was playing a little down loadable game on my droid last night called ‘UnBlock Me’. It is a game where you have to move tiles around in order to get 1 specific tile out. Each tile can only slide up & down or back & forth. It is a fairly simple game, but I like it because it challenges your mind to solve a puzzle.
As I was playing this game last night I slowly started to realize that I would start off by looking at the puzzle and find the 1 specific spot that I was going to have problems with, the spot that was keeping me from meeting my goal. Then I would tend to work backwards to figure out how to undo that section & thus, be able to win the game.
This all got me thinking about work/life. Usually we procrastinate and mill around things, yet, if we can push away all the unnecessary things and look to find the actual problem, then we can work to find the actual solution.
‘Out of clutter, Find Simplicity’ ~Albert Einstein
Malicious Compliance
I learned a new term a couple weeks ago and it’s really been sticking with me, however, I have yet been able to use it in a sentence other than to explain it…
Malicious Compliance.
This was how it came on topic.
A painter is contracted to paint a building.
During the painting process there is a change order. The change order leaves out a detail.
The painter does everything by the contract – leaving out common sense – and there is now an error.
The painter has to do more work, thus charging more.
A detail was left out/overlooked, the painter may have noticed. The painter went exactly by the contract & change order.
~Malicious compliance
What you Dread Doing
“That what you Dread doing is usually what you most need to do” ~unknown
The Golden Debate
In the article Rethinking Gold: What if It Isn’t a Commodity After All? Jeff D. Opdyke at jeff.opdyke@wsj.com talks about what if Gold isn’t a commodity.
Wow, he hit the nail on the head with this one! Dollars are a fiat currency. Gold is money.
Ever wonder why fund managers no longer suggest you purchase Gold as a ‘well rounded’ portfolio? I’m guessing that it is because they do not get a commission each year from you holding physical Gold in your hand.
At the very least all investments (maybe including business also) comes in waves – Ups and Downs – the trick is to A) keep you money liquid and moving. B) catch the wave as it is going up, not as it is cresting and about to go down.
This won’t sit well with some people: Gold isn’t a commodity. There. I’ve said it.
But before you fire off an angry response, hear me out. The facts might change your view of gold’s role in a portfolio.
For a long time, we’ve all heard that gold is a commodity—no different, really, from silver or wheat or pork bellies. Its price ebbs and flows (supposedly) with inflation, which historically drives commodity prices.
Odd, then, that gold’s elevated price hasn’t fallen in response to tepid U.S. inflation numbers. The Consumer Price Index as of July pegged inflation at just 1.2% for the previous 12 months, not counting seasonal adjustments. Nor has gold reacted to what Mohamed El-Erian, Pimco’s chief executive, recently called “the road to deflation” on which he sees the U.S. traveling.
The conventional wisdom holds that neither of those scenarios—low inflation or deflation—should be good for gold. And yet it refuses to abandon record highs in the $1,200-an-ounce range. Something seems amiss.
I recently asked research firm Ibbotson Associates to run a correlation study to determine how closely inflation and gold-price movements track each other. You would expect gold, as a purported commodity, and inflation to move in tandem.
The data, going back to 1978 and capturing an inflationary spike, shows a correlation of, at most, 0.08.
That is low. Really low. Perfect correlation is 1; at minus-1, two assets move in perfect opposition. Near 0 implies gold and inflation barely acknowledge one another, and moves in unison are largely happenstance.
So if inflation doesn’t push and pull at gold prices, what might it be? If you believe correlation studies, the answer is the U.S. dollar.
Going back to 1973—a period that defines the modern, non-gold-backed dollar—the greenback’s movements closely track gold’s direction. The correlation between month-end gold prices and the Major Currencies Dollar Index, as reported by the Federal Reserve, is minus-0.45.
That clearly is a stronger correlation than you find with inflation. But let’s take this a bit further. Let’s shorten the time frame to the period from gold’s 1980 peak to today.
The result: Over the past 30 years, the correlation between the dollar and gold is minus-0.65—a high negative correlation. It means the dollar and gold are effectively on opposite ends of a seesaw. When the dollar is in favor, gold retreats. When it is under pressure, gold prices swell.
Look at the nearby chart. It is like a photo of a mountain scene reflected in a tranquil lake. The rises and falls and horizontal meanderings of gold are nearly the negative of the dollar’s.
The implication is that gold isn’t a commodity—at least not one that hews to the definition of something that people and industry consume.
Instead, “gold is a currency” whose daily price is a gauge of the market’s concern about the “potential diminishment” of the purchasing power of the dollar and other paper currencies, says Paul Brodsky, a principal at New York’s QB Asset Management.
If he is correct, it is the potential longer-term weakening of the dollar that is the real issue for the gold market, not inflation or deflation.
Some will note rightly that gold’s record spike came amid the last great inflation surge. Those folks might be misreading the tea leaves.
Gold’s four-year rally beginning in summer 1976 happened amid a four-year dollar decline. When the dollar bucked up at the end of 1980, gold prices retreated. Inflation was more of a sideshow than a driving force.
The question, with gold hanging around the $1,200 level, isn’t “Is gold in a bubble?” as so many are asking. It’s “What next for the dollar?”
Since its separation from gold, the dollar has been in a long downtrend, punctuated by periodic strength. The Fed’s Major Currencies Dollar Index is down 27% since 1973, and down 45% since the dollar’s peak in early 1985.
For investors convinced U.S. lawmakers and central bankers will successfully manage the budgetary woes and the massive unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, then gold is overvalued in the long term. Righting America’s national balance sheet would explicitly raise the dollar’s value as investors with money abroad move assets into a more-sound American economy. The selling of euro, yen and pounds would push the dollar higher—and gold lower.
If, however, you worry the U.S. balance sheet is irreparably damaged, then gold currently reflects the likelihood that a weak-dollar trend still has years to run as the U.S. struggles with its financial mess. Investors—and consumers—looking to preserve their purchasing power will gravitate toward gold, since its quantity isn’t easily manipulated.
Invest in gold, then, according your beliefs about the future of the greenback. Just don’t invest based on the idea that gold is a proxy for inflation. You are likely to be played for a fool.
401 K-rash
Some folks are worried that a stock market crash will take place because as baby-boomers start to take out savings from the stock market & retirement accounts. Others that I have talked with have said, not possible, that the amount of dollars that are being put into the market will exceed the amount that baby boomers will be putting in.
However, here is an article that may change both of these hypothesis again, but re-enforces what I was figuring, the stock market will more than likely dip again. But for another reason outside of what I had been thinking – people are tapping their 401K’s as a last resort. So even right now, their accounts are holding, but people (not just retirees) are having to pull money out of their accounts much sooner than they expected.
I like how the article quotes the stock broker saying what a mistake it is to pull your money out of the market – guess who’s money he is most worried about – HIS! By pulling your money out of the market, you are effecting his paycheck – his mind is on his own best interests rather than yours.
People that are pulling money out of their 401K are doing so even though they are facing tough penalties for doing so. I think it is a sad sign of the times.
Those making hardship withdrawals would pay taxes on them at their personal income-tax rate and could face a 10% penalty. Loans carry a set of drawbacks even though participants are repaying themselves instead of a lender. Investors miss out on potential market gains on the amount loaned. In addition, the balance is repaid in after-tax dollars. Those dollars are taxed again when the money eventually is withdrawn during retirement.
senior school speech
High School Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling
American economy
The Financial Sector is dominating the American economy:
“As MIT professor Simon Johnson recounted in the Atlantic, between 1973 and 1985, the financial industry’s share of domestic corporate profits topped out at 16 percent. In the 1990s, it spanned between 21 percent and 30 percent. Just before the financial crisis hit, it stood at 41 percent. The share of our economy devoted to making things of value is shrinking, while the share devoted to valuing made-up things (credit-swap derivatives, anyone?) is expanding. It’s the financialization of our economy.” – Arianna Huffington, Third World America