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FORD: C**ksuckers. Fuckin' Chief Blair and them all. Cha, man. They chase me around for five months, man. Bumbaclot man. I said, me and him, ya raasclat bumbaclot.In this opening diatribe against Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, Mr. Ford uses no less than three expressions common to Jamaica, but virtually unknown among Canadian-born English speakers. The first, "cha," is a disdainful expletive, the Caribbean equivalent of "bah!"
Monsanto spent close to $1 billion to buy the Climate Corporation, a data analytics firm. Last year the chemical and seed company also bought Precision Planting, another high-tech firm, and also launched a venture capital arm geared to fund tech start-ups.Here's the key shift that is behind that move:
Many farmers have been collecting digitized yield data on their operations since the 1990s, when high-tech farm tools first emerged. But that information would sit on a tractor or monitor until the farmer manually transferred it to his computer, or handed a USB stick to an agronomist to analyze. Now, however, smart devices can wirelessly transfer data straight to a corporation's servers, sometimes without a farmer's knowledge.Data that in isolation is of limited use suddenly becomes highly valuable when aggregated. Here, for example, are some of the ways that companies like Monsanto might use their new stores of knowledge:
details on the economic worth of a farm operation could empower Monsanto or DuPont to calculate the exact value the farm derives from its products. Monsanto already varies its prices by region, so that Illinois farmers with a bumper crop might be charged more for seeds than Texas farmers facing a drought. Bigger heaps of data would enable these companies to price discriminate more finely, not just among different geographic regions but between neighbors.
Comment: And the Pakistan's Taliban are...!
CIA Agent Caught Red-Handed Aiding Pakistani Terrorism?
ISI and CIA Relations US, Pakistan near open war, Chinese ultimatum warns Washington against attack Washington's Terrorists: US 'diplomats' arrested for transporting weapons in Pakistan