Don't give your trash collector your High Tech Trash

 
E-waste.  High Tech Trash.  Did you know in Japan almost all of it is recycled.  In the US almost all of it goes to the land fill.  Why are we throwing away the richest ore stream in the world?

10 to 20 ounces of gold per ton is in this stuff.  No gold mine in the world has ore that rich.  It also has large amounts of silver, hugh amounts of copper, some aluminum, platinum and trace amounts of rare exotics.  It also contains hugh amounts of lead, mercury, fire retardants and dozens of highly poison and crippling chemicals.

Where is it? Computers, cell phones, microwaves, copiers, fax machines, DVD players, TV's, music players of every sort large and tiny, coffee makers, alarm radios, hair dryer, pocket calculators, game player, GPS, digital camera, batteries, ect.  We each have 20 to 70 of these things and throw one out every few weeks.

There are a number of firms in the US processing this, but it's a drop in the bucket, Europe is processing far more, and safely.  Asia is the destination for much of this, but rather than in grinders and furnaces it's done with kids burning and cooking down components, killing them. Well that's an issue, but for us the issue is to handle it safely in our community.  On a recent trip to Arkansas I passed a house surrounded by junk cars, not unusual there, but I noticed a half dozen TV's and old computers laying in the weeds, not good, nor is sending it to landfills.

The materials in these devices cannot be gotten out by you or me, taking them apart is even dangerous, break a circuit board and you get showered by microscopic doses of mercury, lead and fire retardant chemicals and heavy metals.  You have got to turn them over to a recycler.  A few appliance stores will take them back, a few manufactures will pay shipping, but for the most part you need to keep your eyes peeled for a community recycle day, or like I have near my home a recycle center, though they only take computers cell phones copiers and fax machines and batteries, at least it's a start.  I stop over there 2 or 3 times a year with my contribution.

Recycling of is a hugh net savings to the world when dealing with dangerous metals and chemicals, material used to produce a "chip" amounts to 630 times the mass of the final product.  As a teenager a friend of mine had a TV in the pasture, we set it on a brush pile, lit it on fire and threw bricks at it till the hot thing broke.  What a disaster, though we didn't know, those old TV's had several pounds of lead dust in them, and mercury vapor.  Breaking it in a roaring fire updraft surely was a disaster we made unaware of.  By the way, mercury floats for 1 year, no part of the world is without mercury pollution, it's found in polar bears.

Wheat harvest 3 weeks early = 3 weeks longer summer

In less than a month thousands of square miles of the central plains states, TX north to ND, go throughthis progression starting in the south and moving north.

1) Tall green (grass) wheat shading the earth and giving off water vapor helping to cool the atmosphere.

2) Wheat matures, plant dies and grain berries dry, the earth is still shaded from sun light by the standing wheat.

3) Harvesters cut the plant save the berries leaving short stubble and straw, with almost all shade removed the soil and air temperatures in the field rise.

    4) To speed the composting of the straw and prevent weeds, plowing and disking of the fields soon follows, leaving soil fully exposed to the sun, temps increase further.

This is the farming method for wheat in the central plains states.  So far as I know there is no fault in this process, it's what my family has participated in for a century, I explain it only to inform you of something few people are aware of.  When hundreds upon hundreds of square miles of farm land goes from respiration of cooling water vapor to bare earth the temperature of the region begins to rise.  It is a seasonal solar produced rise for sure as days grow longer accelerated by our farming of wheat on a massive scale.  But as barefoot kids and dogs know well the sunny day rule, walking in grass and walking on blacktop are not the same.

But, 2012 could be a scorcher, my theory, we had a warm winter, record spring highs, high soil temps, we are on pace to harvest wheat 3 weeks earlier than ever before.  Kansas will be cutting wheat in mid May.  As the pictures show examples of the 8 million acres will soon be without shade in Kansas alone.  The temperature feed back loop will have a 3 week jump start to a long hot summer in the plains states.

When I was a kid we cut wheat at the very end of June, now it's 45 days earlier, and the summers are hotter.
Temperature variations: grass over blacktop or white roof over black roof, in the range of 40°f.

wheat, corn, taxes

If you look at my blog very often, you know I have a small grain farm, which no one lives on, it's all farmed.  From the air the area is a little like this, but with not so many green (irrigation) circles, in our area not nearly so many sections are irrigated.  In my area all the well permits are used, with rare exceptions, no more can be added to preserve water for the future.  Each of those circles are a quarter mile across.  A section (a one mile square) is 640 acres, a quarter section is what I have, 160 acres.  The irrigation wheel can wet almost 130 acres, the corners, 7 to 10 acres I guess, are dry.  We rotate, but most years the corners are wheat, under the irrigation wheel it can be anything fit for this climate.  The last 4 years we did corn, soybean, corn, soybean and last weekend we planted corn again.  Further back we did other crops.  The well pumps 705 gallon a minute, and we have a permit for 1.3 acre feet per year, or equal to about 15" of rain over the 160 acre.  Thats a lot since it is watered only when needed, if we get a rain, or weather is mild, we don't sprinkle.
Now I have written about this before, about how there is damn near nothing to do to be a grain farmer in America.  Each time someone gets riled up and writes me a nasty gram, claiming I don't know shit about it, its hard work.  Well again, I will explain how much work it is today with mechanized farming practices and a whole industry developed to do bits and pieces of it for you.  So, not necessarily in order here it is:  call the co-op and have them send out the giant spider truck and dump chemicals on the earth, do that 2 or 3 times each year.....hire a custom planter that will pick up the seed, plant it in a few hours at prices you cannot compete with by owning your own drill, tractor, and trucks.......drive by and turn on the sprinkler, or do it from the computer.......hire a custom cutter to cut the grain and haul it........get your old tractor out of storage and spend a day turning the ground........check the grain price on the computer......put in a sell order.......cash check.  Do you feel sorry for me yet?  It wasn't like this until a few years ago when all these services popped up and tractors and combines got to costing more than a house.  If I had a lot more land, it might, just might, be cheaper to own my own equipment like my father and father-in-law did years ago, but now, around here, we are becoming arm chair farmers.
This is just if you are farming grain on flat land.  Cattle, pigs, fruit, that would be more work.

This arm chair farming is one of the multiple reasons for the farmland price bubble.  For the last 2 years the price of farmland goes to new heights every time a piece sells.  The fact that any and all of the jobs in grain farming can be done cheaply by small firms is drawing speculators and corporations into farming in large numbers, they never have to go near the place.  Will the bubble pop?  Maybe, but when?  High grain prices and record high farm profits are drawing non-farmer speculators like moths to a Buick's headlights.  Texas and much of Oklahoma and southwest Kansas have dried up, killed dead by global warming, land to the north and east rocket up in value.  Iowa a few months ago saw a small farm go for 10k an acre, land here is no where near that, but I wish.  T Boone Pickens  has made farming in Texas and Oklahoma panhandle and southwest Kansas harder by buying up water rights, piping that water off to cities for sale, they can't grow much but wheat and grass without water, adding to value of irrigated lands in other areas.  Grain is a world market now like oil.  We read the papers hoping for hail in Brazil, drought in Russia, fires in Texas, wars in middle east, floods in South Africa, the UN to buy grain for Bangladesh, anything to reduce supply and increase demand and hold the prices high if our grain makes it to market.

Now on to taxes in Kansas,  well gop brownback is about settled on what future taxes will be, they wanted to get rid of income tax all together but they are leaning now to get rid of tax on non wages only.  Seems fair to me, fucking middle class and poor don't even have farms and stocks and bonds to make non wage income, it's not fair to be taxed on something the poor don't have.  Yea thats it, we are paying taxes on farm profits, business profits, dividends, cap gains, and they don't, its free ride for them.  Thats the thinking  they use.   .......  I shit you not thats it......  So they haven't got the numbers complete but it looks like the state will fall another couple hundred million shorter if they make this fair thing the law.  Well most the librarians and school nurses are already laid off, lots of music and foreign language teachers to, but I think if we get rid of the few left, cut a few more professors out of the state colleges that could help, we are closing all the courts in the state every few days for a day, we could add more, also the dmv closed for a week, lets do a month, hell they register voters in there, they may close them till Nov. 3rd.   Brownback said if we cut the tax on non wage earnings, it will mean thousands of new jobs.  I don't know how, the couple hundred dollars it could save me will go right into savings for retirement, what am I going to do, buy a new suit, shit, and if you think the grocery store is going to hire another check out guy with their savings your nuts, that money goes out of state to the company that sells self checkout machines.

Chut Wutty shot dead for taking pictures in Cambodia

41 year old Chut Wutty has been hunted by the military and illegal loggers in his Cambodia.  Yesterday Cambodian military police saw him taking pictures of timber felling and killed him on the spot.  A military person also died, but it is not known how, for sure the story will be he attacked, even though he has for years been hunted by lumber companies and the police.

Chut was the founder and director of the Natural Resource Protection Group which has spent years fighting lumber thugs, land grabs, tiger and elephant poachers and exposing the militarys hand in most of these events.  Without military help with shipments few of these products could exit Cambodia.

avalanche free Aspen slides away from Chamber

Yesterday Aspen Colorado voted 11 to 1 to leave the Chamber of Commerce.

Things are hot in Aspen the last few days, slopes are bare, normally they can still ski in Aspen.  Record high temps day after day.  73° Tuesday.   The town is empty, it should be filled with people skiing, getting laid, and lapping up cafe food.

The board had enough of the Chamber's anti-science lobbying and shilling for fossil fuel related corporations.     After pointing to the Chambers denial of human contributions to global warming as being unacceptable, the ghost towns council voted 11-1.  It appears they have a funny idea, they think a business association should act for the general good, I could have saved them last years dues, that's not their purpose.

re: safe meat, "my father-in-law looked at me and said, we can't be part of this"

About 10 years ago we were going to have one of our cattle butchered and the vet said, don't, we recently gave them hormones and meds, you need to sell them he said.  "Hell dad said, we can't be part of this, this is no good".  Over the next 8 months we got out of the cattle business, then sold the pasture land.

Now we have more mad cow found.  I am surprised.  The industry knows it's out there.  Slaughterhouses are limited on how many cattle can be tested, it's law, you can not test more than your limit.  A small processor in Kansas spent 5 years in court trying to get around this law, they had a contract from Japan that would pay high dollar for meat that was 100% tested.  Cattlemen associations and the governement finally drove them out of business to stop the law suit.  The last thing they want is more testing.  The other thing is the animals age, mad cow, if the beast has it, doesn't show up till the animal gets a little older, so the industry is making sure older animals don't get tested so often by a number of methods and economic decisions like making sure cattle meet the stun gun before they get very old.  Take note of what I said, it doesn't show up until the critter is older, young ones can have it but it doesn't test.

Pink slime, why do they mix it, why can't you get a pink slime chili, or burger?  Think.

Slow Jam The News with Barack Obama: Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

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