Commercial Intelligence – Page 184 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/04/302011/04/30

Understanding Rising Food Prices

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, 12 Water, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government

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Bottom line: ignorant government policies, and particularly the mandating of corn's use to make ethanol, have driven the price of corn up for real people who want to each corn and products containing corn (which turns out to be just about everything).

It's Getting Harder to Bring Home the Bacon

By MARY KISSEL, April 30, 2011

Wall Street Journal

C. Larry Pope, CEO of the world's largest pork producer, explains why food prices are rising and why they are likely to stay high for a long time.

It's also a business under enormous strain. Some “60 to 70% of the cost of raising a hog is tied up in the grains,” Mr. Pope explains. “The major ingredient is corn, and the secondary ingredient is soybean meal.” Over the last several years, “the cost of corn has gone from a base of $2.40 a bushel to today at $7.40 a bushel, nearly triple what it was just a few years ago.” Which means every product that uses corn has risen, too—including everything from “cereal to soft drinks” and more.

What triggered the upswing? In part: ethanol. President George W. Bush “came forward with—what do you call?—the edict that we were going to mandate 36 billion gallons of alternative fuels” by 2022, of which corn-based ethanol is “a substantial part.” Companies that blend ethanol into fuel get a $5 billion annual tax credit, and there's a tariff to keep foreign producers out of the U.S. market. Now 40% of the corn crop is “directed to ethanol, which equals the amount that's going into livestock food,” Mr. Pope calculates.

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2011/04/292011/04/29

Cyber-Security Politics, Business, Ethics…

02 China, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Computer/online security, Corruption, Cyberscams, malware, spam, Government, InfoOps (IO), Mobile, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Technologies

Is it just me, or does it appear that we're okay with selling our cyber-soul to China (and Russia), as long as we can also blow tens of billions on US firms pretending to do cyber-security?

Report: Despite status as U.S. security threat, China's Huawei partnering with Symantec

East-Asia-Intel.com, April 27, 2011

The Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies, which has been linked to the Chinese military, is working with the U.S. software security giant Symantec, which is engaged in securing hundreds of thousands of U.S. computer systems against outside intrusions, according to a report last week in the Diplomat newsletter.

The report said “China and Russia are leveraging U.S. multinational corporations' economic requirements to accomplish strategic goals that could quite plausibly include covert technology transfer of intellectual property, access to source code for use in malware creation and backdoor access to critical infrastructure.”

Huawei was blocked from buying the U.S. telecom 3Leaf last year by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and also was blocked in 2008 from buying 3Com over security concerns. The U.S. National Security Agency also stepped in to dissuade AT&T from buying Huawei telephone equipment.

Despite those actions, Huawei formed a joint venture with Symantec in 2007 called Huawei Symantec Technologies Co. Ltd. (HS), the report said. Huawei is the majority partner with 51 percent ownership, with the entity being headquartered in Chengdu, China.

The report said a 2008 report identified HS as developing “China's first laboratory of attack and defense for networks and applications.”

The result is that Symantec is assisting China's cyber development of computer warfare capability.

The report was produced by cyber security expert Jeffrey Carr, author of Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld (O'Reilly, 2009).

Phi Beta Iota: The US Government compounds its lack of a strategic analytic model and the requisite integrity to actually pay attention to whatever findings might emerge, with an abysmal inattention to the most basic aspects of counter-intelligence, not just within government, but across the private sector, which does not actually take counter-intelligence seriously either. Creating a Smart and Safe Nation is not difficult–it requires only a uniform commitment to intelligence and integrity across all boundaries.

2011/04/242011/04/24

Call for mandatory sustainable reporting

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Reform, Standards, Strategy, Threats

Call for mandatory sustainable reporting

By Ruth Sullivan

Financial Times, April 24 2011

Sustainability experts have called on global regulators to ask companies to report on their sustainable policy and performance, disclosing results in a similar way to financial reporting.

“A ‘report or explain’ approach could persuade more companies to report rather than explain why they don’t,” said Teresa Fogelberg, deputy chief executive of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

. . . . . .

About 4,000 global companies report their sustainability performance, using reporting guidelines recently updated by the GRI.

These focus on 79 issues including consulting stakeholders on important topics, human rights, the impact on local communities and gender matters.

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2011/04/15

Harvard “Boys” Crash, Burn, No Apology

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Academia, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency

economicprincipals.com

March 27, 2011, David Warsh, Proprietor

A Recent Exercise in Nation-Building by Some Harvard Boys

It was worth a smile at breakfast that morning in February 2006, a scrap of social currency to take out into the world. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management guru, had grown famous offering competitive strategies to firms, regions, whole nations. Earlier he had taken on the problems of inner cities, health care and climate change. Now he was about to tackle perhaps the hardest problem of all (that is, after the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).

He had become adviser to Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.

Phi Beta Iota: Harvard is now the poster child for all that is wrong with education–no intelligence, no ethics, and grotesquely expensive. Yale can now claim the mantle in the East.

Read full original….

Safety copy below the line.

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2011/04/14

Veterans Hosed Upon to Return to USA

03 Economy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

One has to wonder how General Eric Ken Shinseki, USA (Ret) is faring as the 7th Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Out of War, Out of Luck: For Veterans, Skills Learned In Service Don't Translate To Employment

Laura Bassett, 13 April 2010

Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — When Eric Smith, 26, returned home after his second tour in Iraq serving as a Navy medic, he didn't expect to have a difficult time finding work.

While on tour, Smith had worked as a physician's assistant in the intensive care unit (ICU), caring for patients undergoing everything from cancer to recent brain surgery. At times, he served on the front lines treating infections. He never thought the expertise he had developed in the field wouldn’t amount to a job back home — but when he returned he found that he couldn't get a job in medicine without the right certifications.

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Iceland Gets It Right: Say NO to Bank Bail-Outs

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Sense-Making

iceland sanity — Click on Image to Enlarge

Iceland Rejects Deposit Repayments to British, Dutch

By CHARLES FORELLE

Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2011

For the second time, Icelanders voted down a deal to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of euros lost in the island nation's 2008 financial collapse—at once a bold popular rejection of the notion that taxpayers must bear the burden for bankers' woes and a risky outcome that will complicate Iceland's efforts to rejoin global markets.

Web’s Copernican Moment – Hand-Held Rules

Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Mobile

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The Web's Copernican Moment

Dominic Basulto on April 4, 2011, 9:57 PM

bigthink

Whether consciously or not, most of us subscribe to a PC-centric view of the Internet, in which everything revolves around content that is created or accessed via a PC or Mac. However, that is about to change as mobile increasingly becomes the new paradigm for both creating and consuming content. Quite simply, the Web is about to experience a Copernican moment. Before Copernicus, it was widely believed that everything – including the Sun – revolved around the Earth, rather than the Earth revolving around the Sun. In the same way, it might be quaint one day to believe that everything once revolved around the PC rather than the mobile device.

The easiest way to understand this Copernican moment is to understand the extent to which mobile is becoming the new paradigm for the way we use the Internet. In terms of hours of usage, total content consumed and amount of data created, 2010 was the year of the mobile device. Keep in mind that the average teen now sends more than 3000 text messages each month! And that trend is only accelerating in 2011 as social networking rapidly migrates to the mobile device.

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