I Infected Your Coffee!

cloiec:

<3

(via cloiemc)

Fucks shall not be given.

This song is a lesson. Not only in good French music, but good punk music as well. Enjoy friends.

Introduction

This is a supply and demand graph. It shows the simple correlation between the demand of the product by the people, the supply, and how much the product should cost at that level of demand. The Y axis represents the cost of the product, the X axis represents the amount of supply of the product, and the negatively moving line is representative of the demand. What this graph shows is thus: Less demand = Less supply needed, and a lower price, because not as many people are purchasing the product.

Here is how the graph works: You find the amount of demand that the public is outputting at the current moment, then draw a straight line that connects the demand line to the price and supply axises (this is the simplest possible form of this graph, obviously). So, logically, the lower the demand, the less supply a company will produce right? Well…

Subsidies

A subsidy is when a government promises its producers of a certain product that they will always pay them the same price for the product, regardless of the market fluctuation. A supply and demand chart with a subsidy as a part of it would look like this:

The subsidy is represented by the green line, and it is showing the price that will always be paid for the said product.

Subsidies are usually reserved for the payment of farmers for their crops, which can be beneficial when the production of crops is small. However subsidies can have their negative effects.

The Downside of Subsidies Using Corn as an Example

Corn. Corn is subsidized in the United States, and this is a fact. In fact, so much corn is produced in the United States that it makes up almost 60% during 2003/04-2007/08  of the world’s corn supply, and it is cheap corn. Now, supplying cheap corn to the world sounds like a great idea, but it has almost no benefits to any country except to America. The downside to the exportation of such cheap corn to other countries is that it is really cheap. So cheap in fact, that it is cheaper for these country’s governments to purchase the corn from the United States rather than from their own farmers, thus causing their farmers to not be able to make money from their corn, thus causing their farms to close and the farmers to go broke.

One country that is a prime example of this happening is Mexico. Mexico had a lot of corn farmers, that was, until Mexico started purchasing corn from the United States for a cheaper price. This caused so many of Mexico’s corn farmers to go out of business that they had to look for a new way to make money, and that easiest way was to go to the United States and get a job. A spiked increase in illegal immigration can be tied to corn subsidies themselves.

Besides not being able to make any money, there is almost no reason for agrarian culture to exist is a country where the food is so cheap to purchase from another. Other than causing farmers to go out of business, it doesn’t allow subsistence farming to exist in countries that need it to exist, because the farmers cannot sell their excess in order to make money to continue their farming, thus limiting the access to food, and leading a starvation. People starve every day in countries all over Africa because of the fact that we subsidize a lot of our produce so heavily.

Summary

Subsidies are one of those economic things that can be both a blessing and a curse, and in the case of the United States and its farmers, it is a blessing to the mega-farms that we currently have in this country, but a curse unto the rest of the world. So much so that, in fact, other countries have asked us to stop subsidizing our corn.

This one chipped piece

Of my bookshelf’s leaf

Is the one I am missing today.

I have one question though:

Does anybody know

If it is also missing me today?

This is the root system on a plant. The roots are designed to absorb nutrients from the soil, as well as water, and to also help keep the plant stable and held in place during stormy situations.

Many are aware of a type of forming/plant growing that is called hydroponics (where are my fellow pot smokers?) Any who, for those who do not know, hydroponics is when a plant’s root system in suspended in nutrient enriched water, and is thus given nutrients through water alone, hence the prefix hydro.

On interesting type of plant growing I have recently learned about is aeroponics. How aeroponics works is that plants are grown on cloth like, or whatever other material you so choose, sheets, and their roots are allowed to dangle in the air. Then, for 5 seconds, every 20 minutes, the root systems are sprayed with nutrient enriched water, and that is how the plant acquires its sustenance. This method of growing allows us to disregard the need for the cleaning of the plants, seeing as how they can be grown in a sterile environment without dirt. This is especially useful for tiny edible plants such as parsley, sprouts, and other such “micro-greens”

E. Joseph Cossman (via ageofreason)

Theorem: Thales describes that “An angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle.”

What is meant by this: If you divide a circle directly in half with a line, you have a semi-circle. If you take the bottom straight-line and mark a dot in the center, and from that dot connect it to any part of the semicircle, then proceed to connect the ends of the straight line to this new point, you will always have a right angle.

Proven: Yes.

It is my personal opinion that we need to examine Ceres as a possible home for extraterrestrial life that could exist in our own solar system. Ceres has been know to have water ice, and it is not to far from us. We do have the Dawn mission which will examine and make observations about Ceres in 2015, and I am extremely excited to witness the results of that mission.

James Madison, former President of the United States (via atheos)

(via friendlyatheist)