Zcom_simple

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

Farm Bill Slides: A Graphic Illustration of Farm Bill History

By Brad Wilson at Feb 23, 2012


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Brad's New "Album"

I've started some new "photo" albums featuring PowerPoint style charts illustrating the history of the farm bill and related topics.  I have created hundreds of these.  So far I've posted a few major ones.  When I have time I will be writing explanations of the data (I've already started). See:

Farm Bill Slides:  http://www.zcommunications.org/albums/list/bradwilson

Farm Bill Slides 2:   http://www.zcommunications.org/albums/list/bradwilson

Some of these, in certain versions, were featured in my videos (parts 1 & 2) "Michael Pollan Rebuttal," which are linked here.  

Unlike effective PowerPoint slides, which are simple and in l arge print, some of these charts include detailed text that explains the data.  Arrows are also used. 

Here are the topics of the first slides (which show up in the reverse order of when they're posted):

1. Corn Farmers Subsidize You.

2. Farmers lost money even while receiving large subsidies.

3. Rice Price Floors were lowered.  Subsidies were later added, but did not make up the difference.

4. Price ceilings for wheat, to protect consumers and corporate buyers, are shown.

5. Shares of the Food Dollar, farmers vs agribusiness input (selling to farmers) and output (buying from farmers) complexes.

Graphic Illustrations of Farm Bill History.

Many of the slides graphically illustrate major parts of US farm bill history, and compare it to the data of farm economics.  For example, several of the first charts show how price floors (policy enacted by Congress and signed into law by the President) were lowered and eliminated, (to secretly subsidize agribusiness with cheap farm commodities,) and how subsidies to farmers were started and increased.  Normally these subsidies are seen as huge windfalls. Here we see that they are part of massive reductions in farm income.
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