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

Michael Pollan Rebuttal: Four Proofs Against Pollan's Corn "Subsidy" Argument

By Brad Wilson at Oct 01, 2010


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Part 1 of the video can be found:  CLICK HERE:  or:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkEhW-tg9Q0&list=PLA1E706EFA90D1767&index=12

Part 2 of the video can be found CLICK HERE:  OR:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feTeT45iWnc&list=PLA1E706EFA90D1767&index=13

(I've recently fixed, updated these links.  B.W. 1/14/13)

I present four proofs in rebuttal of Michael Pollan's farm subsidy argument.  

IN THE VIDEO, PART 1:

1. Economically, low farm prices are caused by a lack of price responsiveness on both supply and demand sides, not by subsidies.

2. Farm prices went down for years, when there were NO subsidies, so there is zero correlation between commodity subsidies and the lowering of farm prices for those years.  Instead we find that price floors were lowered, and prices followed them right down.  Subsidies came after the fact to quiet down (and blame) angry farmers.  The evidence of history supports me, not Pollan.

IN THE VIDEO, PART 2:

3. Econometric studies support me and contradict Pollan.  Five studies cited by Timothy Wise, at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, found very small impacts of subsidy elimination on the prices of these commodities (ie. "program crops"), well under 5% and sometimes below zero.  This contrasts with the much larger percentages of export dumping (below cost, below zero, farm exports), and these percentages do not cover the full range up to a fair trade, living wage price.

4. Real world evidence from subsidy elimination in other countries also supports me, not Pollan.  In three countries discussed by Daryll E. Ray at APAC (University of Tennessee), subsidy elimination did not fix the problem of oversupply, which leads to low prices.


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