Supply chain efficiency has led to wheat stocks going from 3 months or more to no more than several days. Now we read that there is a famine coming...
Wheat futures prices have tripled since 2004, corn prices have
almost tripled since 2005, and soybeans have tripled since 2006.
Meanwhile, crude oil is up merely 60% in the past three years, which
makes it seem very bearable in comparison. U.S. stock prices have
barely eked out a 10% advance since 2005, underscoring the diminishment
of our buying power. A large pepperoni pizza these days costs about as
much as a share of Citigroup (C.N). Citigroup finished Wednesday at $22.15.
This
is no joke, already, in Asia. Rice prices surged to a 20-year high this
week -- more than $18 per hundred pounds -- as countries that have the
most are hoarding it for their own people. Vietnam, India and Egypt
have restricted exports to keep local markets stocked. Thai, Philippine
and Indonesian officials are warning of civil unrest if the flow of
rice does not increase.
Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan in recent
weeks have restricted wheat exports as well, slapping on big tariffs to
make sure shelves are stocked in their homelands amid soaring prices. A
major Russian grains-company chief told Reuters that his country "is in
a condition that has never happened before." Higher prices are not
meeting any resistance from desperate buyers.
Most unusual about
this phenomenon, according to BMO Financial Group strategist Don Coxe,
is that until now, food crises in world history were regional concerns
that arose from crop failures, war or pests. Once global trade of
grains got going in the 19th century in a major way, food shortages in
one country were ameliorated by imports, he said. What's happening now
is a lack of supply everywhere at once.
by
Chris Gilbey
on December 18, 2007 10:35AM (EST)
I can't believe its going to be Christmas in a week.
I thought it might be fun to do a quick reflection on the year and the goings on... just like they do in the mainstream media.
Big impact things of the year in Australia were:
The Chaser's War On Everything APEC stunt. I wonder how much that contributed to the downfall of Howard... if at all? It certainly was hilarious!
The Federal Election itself - after the country being in lock step with the Bush White House for years it is refreshing to think that this country can ever so tentatively take steps that are not directly in line with the US. Wonderful to see Rudd make his declaration of signing Kyoto...
The Web:
Get Up's campaign in Australia to ensure that people are vectored toward simple choices in politics was extremely interesting. Their new campaign to take back the cities is a bit weak in my opinion. We shall see.
I thought that the recent visibility of Ron Paul in the US both in fundraising and in terms of the amount of buzz that is being generated online is extremely interesting. Not sure whether someone who is clearly orthogonal to the mainstream parties could ever pull off being elected, but this may be the time to do it!
Video
Surely this year was the year of the embeddable video. Video is becoming ubiquitous and YouTube is introducing new tools all the time now. Over the next two years I think that video is going to become bigger than Ben Hur. What will be truly interesting will be to see whether the copyright owners are able to put deals in place with the ISP's to stop or monitor P2P file sharing. Of course that is only one part of the problem. Its the whole business of mash ups that will continue to be an issue for them all...
Social Networks
I thought this year really did mark the coming of age of the social network. And yet there are still loads of people that I come across who have no idea about Facebook.... So maybe its still got a year to go before it starts to make real impact.
Security
The issues associated with Social Networks of course bring up the whole matter of security - or the lack thereof. The real issue of course is that in an online world you are operating almost all the time across national borders, which makes it very hard for the cops to chase down the crims. It also makes it very lucrative for the crims that operate online and live in low cost of living parts of the world.
Predictions
This coming year is going to be the big wake up year. People are going to wake up to the fact that we are facing a whole bunch of big big problems. Water is going to be the biggest issue - rising sea waters as a result of the melting of the ice caps; and lack of fresh water in a lot of the biggest cities in the world. Back in the late 90's the CIA put out a report that predicted that the wars of the early part of this century would be fought over water. So far the wars have been about oil it seems. But that will absolutely change.
The financial crisis in the US will get worse regardless of what the Fed does. Why? Because they have reached a point where trust has been broken. Ironically I believe that real estate in Australia and New Zealand will benefit from this. I suspect that well-heeled people in the US who have cash will be trying to get it out of the country and changed into stronger currencies as quickly as possible. I think they will try to find bolt holes in English speaking countries that have strong economic structure. At the moment the UK is looking a bit shaky with the runs on banks they have had there. New Zealand and Australia look pretty good.
That's all for now. Have a great Christmas everyone!
There is a sobering story in the August 14th edition of the Financial Times (excerpt below). It makes for important reading.
The US government is on a "burning platform" of unsustainable
policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare
underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening
a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country's top government
inspector has warned.
David Walker, comptroller general of the
US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country's future in
a report that lays out what he called "chilling long-term simulations".
These
include "dramatic" tax rises, slashed government services and the
large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.
Drawing
parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were
"striking similarities" between America's current situation and the
factors that brought down Rome, including "declining moral values and
political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended
military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central
government".
"Sound familiar?" Mr Walker said. "In my view, it's
time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American
Republic is the first to stand the test of time."
Reality starts to set in at some time, doesn't it?
Here are a few ingredients in the collapse:
* Combine lower taxes with the cost of a war, with that cost exacerbated by the fact that most of the forces on the ground are so-called contractors, at a much higher per head cost than the 'official' soldiers.
* The continuing ripples coming from the exposure of Bear Stearns to the subprime mortgage market.
* The gradual impact on the cost of everything from increased oil costs.
* The hollowing out of most western countries' manufacturing through the move to a flat world.
The list goes on...
And while there is a refusal to deal with climate change and the laws of unintended consequences of the war in Iraq - like the rise in terrorism in other countries - it is inevitable that the train wreck is coming.
I was finishing up some work at home tonight and got a skype message from Jan Wyllie, who publishes Trend Monitor.
Jan has done some extremely interesting work analyzing consumer trends over the last ten or more years. He is in the process of writing a new report on the impact of Web 2.0 on business. And I have no doubt that this is going to be a pretty interesting report.
Here is part of his blog that points to where he is going this time round. Should be worth watching.
As Web 2.0 platforms migrate from the open internet enthusiasts
to the worlds of business and government, the issue of information
management will become a company-wide problem, rather than the problem
which information professionals and taxonomists are paid to solve.
Everyone will start tagging and chaos is liable to result.
"Many bands and artists take
advantage of the net by using it to advertise their performances, at
which they sell their CDs. This can be very effective and the major
record companies are becoming less relevant to artists. However,
despite the apparent success of aggregators like iTunes, few
independent artists appear to be profiting from commercial downloads
and a business model based solely on pay-for-downloads is very
difficult to implement successfully."
Lately, similar notions have been been discussed by bloggers, including Chris Anderson of the Long Tail, in his Give away the music and sell the show
post. There is also recognition of the need for sustainable business
models for online music in the blogsphere. Much of this discussion is
focused on economic matters and from the perspective of the music
consumer. This is, of course, legitimate, but implications for musicians
and music producers and aesthetic considerations are rarely discussed.
This is a significant omission. Music is an art form.
The notion that the best way for musicians to use the net is to use
their online presence to promote their performances is at odds with the
general trend towards digitisation and virtualisation. It is also not
good for many musicians and music producers. While some musicians are
great performers and while acknowledging the powerful impact of well
executed theatrical and improvisational performances, it should also be
understood that the excessive dependence on performance and its
analogues represents a failure of the online music market and the
aesthetic impoverishment of music generally.
Let me illustrate this with some personal history. In 1980, when my New Wave band Smig Zee
broke up, I purchased a TASCAM Portastudio, a Korg MS 20 Synthesiser and
embarked on an amateur career as a home recording artist. I was not a
natural performer and was glad to be able to simultaneously produce
music and and pursue a career in the Public Service, as well as an
interest in writing. I haven't performed since 1980 and if I had
continued performing and pursued a professional career in music I would
probably be as deaf as Pete Townsend and would certainly not have
accumulated a nice superannuation fund. I deliberately mention
superannuation to prick the romantic bubble that surrounds the meme of
rock and roll performance and to note that few professional musicians,
even successful ones, are adequately provisioned for old age and
retirement.
Gigging can be very hard on musicians, even those that who are good at
it and enjoy it. To musicians like myself, who are primarily interested
in composition and production, there is nothing more boring and
aesthetically arid that having to play the same songs over and over
again. There are also opportunity costs, time spent performing reduces
time spent composing and producing music.
As a home recording artist I was fortunate enough to participate in the
electronic music boom of the 1990s and had techno music released by
Volition Records and other labels as Alien Headspace and ambient music
released by Silent Recordings as the Trancendental Anarchists. I am
still producing music under these names and also electro-pop, by
FutureRetro and publishing this on the net via Qualia Recordings,
a virtual record company formed with my musical collaborators, Ross
Goddard and Mark Van Veen. To end this excursion into personal history,
I note that this approach is not at all unusual. There are millions of
amateur musicians who are producing music in home recording studios and
releasing it on the net and who do not perform.
Another salient point is that there are genres of music that are
entirely unsuitable for performance. If you've ever seen a techno band
attempt to simulate performance of their programmed productions, you
know what I mean. DJs largely replaced performers of techno and dance
music at dance parties and raves. Ambient music is so internal and
anti-dramatic, that ambient music producers hardly ever attempt to
perform it.
Despite the magnitude and significance of these trends towards the
democratisation and virtualisation of music production, the music
performance meme persists. Perhaps the most absurd recent manifestation
of this is the simulated performance of a number of bands in Second Life.
A more common manifestation is the simulation of performance in music
videos. This is often extremely ritualised. Singers lip-sync in front
of guitarists playing unplugged instruments, while the drummer hits a
lone snare drum. This represents a singular lack of imagination and a
depressing aesthetic failure. Music videos which attempt to augment the
music with narrative or abstract visuals, do exist, but are vastly
outnumbered by those that pay obeisance to the empty ritual of
simulated performance. A brilliant example of a lateral music video
which abandons the ritual of simulated performance is the Free Hugs video by the Sick Puppies. This was wildly successful and won a YouTube award.
There are also multitudes of bands and musicians who, while composing
and producing their music in studios, feel they have to perform to
promote it and produce income. In many cases, this is essentially the
live simulation of performance, where the musicians attempt to
replicate the studio production and arrangement of their music in a
live performance. They give themselves little or no latitude to depart
from the recorded version in the performance which is consequently
devoid of the immediacy and improvisation which characterises real
performance.
So what is going on here? Is this monumental failure of imagination,
simply a cheap and nasty way of using visual media and live performance
to a advertise digital music or is something more profound involved?
There does appear to be a popular prejudice against programmed and
studio production in favour of live performance. This involves the
notion that anyone can produce music in a studio, but only "real
musicians" can pull off live performance. The illegitimacy of this
prejudice is exposed if one attempts to apply it to cinema, the
canonical virtual art form. I doubt that anyone would seriously suggest
that the best way to promote movies is with theatrical performances.
Nor is the notion, that theatrical actors, directors and producers are
necessarily superior to their cinematic equivalents, seriously
supported. The movie and TV industries eclipsed theatre long ago.
This anomaly has puzzled me for some time. A possible explanation comes
from cognitive anthropologist, Steven Mithen, in his recent book, The Singing Neanderthals.
This excellent text examines the evolutionary origins of music and
posits the theory that one of the major evolutionary functions of music
is the promotion of social cohesion in groups of hominids and humans.
This makes a great deal of sense when one considers the history of
music making. Tribal societies clearly use musical performance, dance
and ritual to cement and enhance social cohesion. More recently, before
the development of recording technologies, the gathering of family and
friends around the piano for singalongs can also be seen as promoting
social cohesion. The emergence of concerts represents a move from group
music making to the group achieving cohesion, through the passive
reception of music performed by professional musicians.
Significantly, the same effect is achieved in raves and dance parties
without the live performance of music. It seems that the most important
factor is that the group is listening to the same music, preferably at the same
time.
If this theory is accepted then the social fragmentation inherent in
the virtualisation of music can explain the atavistic yearning for the
simulation of performance. It may also explain the apparent success of
social networking approaches to online music represented by such sites
as MySpace and LastFM.
As the emergent online music industry churns through business models it
seems that a number of factors are involved in determining what may be
viable and sustainable. I intend to write about other factors such as
the adequate compensation of artists and the pernicious and outmoded
nature of the Star Syndrome in subsequent parts of this series.
Meanwhile I hope I have elevated aesthetic considerations related to
the tension between the virtualisation of music and the traditional
role of performance, in the minds of those interested in development of
a market for audio/visual content of quality. There is the potential
for the transcendent combination of music and visuals, which currently
appears to be limited by an unthinking and aesthetically arid
obeisance to the ritual of performance.
-Before we get into it, allow me to back up just a bit.
First of all, the "Alternative" in the title refers to "alternatives to Google."
That is, one criteria for making it onto the list is to exhibit superiority to Google in one particular feature. For example, TheFind.com is better than Google's Froogle, in my opinion.
And that brings me to my second point: the ultimate criteria for inclusion is not empirical, it is subjective.
The Top 100 for March ended up with some of these "Scattergories":
The move by the world's biggest restaurant chain to feature customers on its packaging is the latest proof of the importance marketers are placing on so-called user-generated content like the homemade videos and blogs that rule the Internet on sites such as social network MySpace and Google Inc.'s video-file sharing site YouTube.
"People are really interested in reality," McDonald's Chief Marketing Officer Mary Dillon said in an interview, pointing to the rise in popularity of reality television shows. "It's about real people connecting with our brand."
"They've really tried to be on the cutting edge of change and the cutting edge is viewed as user-generated content," said Mark DiMassimo, chief executive of New York-based ... more»
“Vuguru will produce and showcase original and third party content in all genres and formats to meet the new demands of the evolving media landscape.”
Vuguru’s first production, Prom Queen, is a scripted, serialized mystery told over 80 episodes – each running 90 seconds long. Set against the final two months of the school year, Prom Queen has a blend of love, gossip, and betrayal – all of the twists and turns of high school leading up to the biggest night of any senior’s life: prom night.
Prom Queen’s short-form episodes are designed to be easily viewed on multiple platforms and are aimed at young, early adopters of new media content and technology. The production offers unique and clear opportunities for advertisers to reach this coveted demo."
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