Great Depression in Ames, Iowa

Published December 27, 2012 | By Iowadawg

There is a lot of history throughout the USA when it comes to the Great Depression. People just forget or try to forget what happened almost 90 years ago. Here we have Ames, Iowa. Read about the corn prices back then!

Although the Great Depression affected most Iowans to some degree, farmers were the first to feel its distressing effects. For them, the Depression began years before the stock market crash of 1929. Early in the 1920s a volatile economy, accompanied by plunging farm prices, signaled an alteration in course, a change from our rural beginnings to the emergence of the United States as the world’s most industrial nation.

When the stock market failed in 1929, what bottom was left in the farm economy simply collapsed. From 1926 to 1930, the cost of putting a crop in — rent, seed, fuel, taxes, labor — averaged about 35 percent more than income. By 1932 that figure had risen to 50 percent. Debts incurred when corn was 80 cents to a dollar a bushel and cattle $10 to $15 per hundredweight were being called in when corn was selling for ten cents per bushel and beef and hogs didn’t bring the cost of shipping. The result was a true agriculture emergency.

In 1932 farm prices fell to all-time lows — corn at eight cents a bushel, pork at three cents a pound, beef at five cents a pound, eggs at ten cents a dozen — with no reduction in the farmers’ tax or debt.

Even the Iowa State Fair felt the effects. Despite sharp cutbacks in expenditures, the Fair recorded its first deficits since 1914. College students found it impossible to pay tuition, even though Iowa State College only charged $75 per quarter, which was reduced to $18 for those maintaining a B average.

A statewide banking crisis left many citizens bankrupt, often overnight, as one bank after another closed its doors. The town of Iowa Falls offers a good example. After the first bank closed in June 1932, the mayor called for a ten-day business holiday on July 4. Upon reopening, banks asked their customers to sign waivers promising not to deplete accounts by more than ten percent per month. Such short-term measures didn’t help long-term survival. On December 21, all three of Iowa Falls’ banks closed. It was five months before a new bank opened in town.

MORE. Go for more pictures and information. Worth your time for sure!

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Make your presents gay! Ah, the old days and how our language took a turn somewhere down the line. Vintage ads.

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Is there an app for that?

There’s now an app where you can report crimes in Marion, Virginia. It’s called iWatchMarion.

Now, don’t go being all silly and downloading it and then reporting a bunch of crazy stuff. First, that’s the wrong thing to do. And, if that’s not a good enough reason, keep in mind that it knows where you are. Yes, it tracks the person that submits the report!

Because iWatch Marion uses global positioning technology, the system intelligently forwards information to the Howard County Police Department based on where the handheld device is physically located at any given moment.

Yeah, this whole “See Something, Say Something” thing kinda bothers me. Oh, sure, I have no problem with neighborhood watch programs. One got Trayvon Martin off the streets, after all. But anything from the Department of Homeland Security — one of the most useless government departments, if not the most useless — can’t be all good. Or any good.

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Gun control supporters count those who have died; Second Amendment supporters count those who will live

Because this is Marin and I am not a hermit, I frequently find myself in conversation with Democrats. It was to be expected, therefore, that conversation over the Christmas holiday would end up revolving around gun control. These conversations were disheartening on all sides. My friends concluded that I support wild-eyed mass murderers, since I believe in the Second Amendment, and I concluded that their devotion to feelings over facts will result in many unnecessary deaths over the years.

As I explain at some length below, the only fact that matters to them is that guns do indeed kill people. Any other data is irrelevant. Indeed, the conversations were practically textbook illustrations of the giant chasm that separates the two world views.

My friends began by attacking the NRA and Wayne LaPierre as evil and fanatic. Only a deranged person could come up with the lunatic idea of placing armed guards in schools. They batted aside the fact that Clinton had proposed and put into place the same plan LaPierre now suggested — armed guards in schools — and that Obama had de-funded that initiative. LaPierre is evil because he wants people to have semi-automatic weapons with unlimited magazines.

Continue reading this HERE.

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Through the Glass Darkly: What U.S. Intelligence Predicts for 2030

Mathew Burrows, counselor to the National Intelligence Council, may have the most fascinating job in Washington. Every four to five years he coordinates the U.S. intelligence community’s crystal-ball gazing exercise, which imagines what the future will bring fifteen to twenty years hence. The sixth and most recent installment, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, offers an eye-opening glimpse into the turbulent world we will inherit as middle classes grow, power shifts to developing countries, demographics change, and humanity confronts daunting ecological constraints.

The NIC report identifies four “megatrends”—or drivers—shaping the world of 2030. The first is a dramatic expansion of the global middle class. From antiquity poverty has been humanity’s dominant condition. That is poised to change. Not only will extreme poverty (defined as earning less than $1.25 per day) drop by up to fifty percent, but the proportion of individuals moving into the middle class will explode in the developing world, and particularly in Asia.

Read it all HERE>

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Climate change is big business (for the insurance industry)

Although many industries have fought to prevent action on climate change, there’s at least one major business that’s taking it seriously, according to a recent perspective in Science. Climate change is estimated to cost the world economy $1.2 trillion annually, which is proving to be a stress test for the insurance industry. Lest you think that’s a niche concern, insurance accounts for seven percent of the global economy and is the world’s largest industry.

Increasingly, weather and climate related catastrophes are costing insurers. The number of weather-related loss events in North America has nearly quintupled in the past three decades, according to a recent report from MunichRe. Sandy alone cost New York and New Jersey $80 billion, affecting individuals and business, and impacting health. Claims have more than doubled each decade since the 1980s (adjusted for inflation) and paid claims now average $50 billion a year worldwide.

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Rita Hayworth
New Year’s – 1941

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Both sides of the ideological divide caricature the other, but those on the far left are the most guilty

This new study featured 2,212 visitors to the projectimplicit.org website, a research portal that focuses on “the gap between intentions and actions.” About half identified themselves as liberals, while 500 placed themselves in one of three conservative categories, and 538 defined themselves as moderates.

They were first asked a series of questions to determine their own moral attitudes. For instance, to measure how strongly they believe in loyalty to one’s group, they were asked the extent to which they agreed with such statements as “It is more important to be a team player than to express oneself.”

They then completed similar surveys, offering not their own feelings, but those of a “typical liberal” or “typical conservative.” The researchers compared their assumptions to the answers provided by actual liberals and conservatives, as well as to a different, nationally representative sample of Americans.

“Extreme liberals exaggerated the moral political differences the most, and moderate conservatives did so the least,” Graham and his colleagues report. “Liberals were the least accurate about conservatives and about liberals.”

Liberals tended to stereotype conservatives as uncaring, rather than realize that conservatives’ genuine concerns about harm and fairness are tempered by other moral values that have less value to the left, such as loyalty and respect for authority.

Distorting the picture further, liberals tend to underestimate the degree to which their fellow liberals take those “conservative” values into account when making moral evaluations. Although conservatives did this to some degree, liberals showed a stronger tendency to stereotype their political soul mates, assuming an exaggerated level of ideological purity.

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In Psychiatric Illness, Families Must Be Our First Responders

No mental health system will ever be able to identify serious behavioral problems as early as family.

Time is beginning to soften the shock of the Newtown massacre. As their community returns to the routines and rhythms of everyday life, much debate — some reasoned and some polemical — still rages around gun control.
There is no question that something must be done, but the answer is not to become an armed state. I am a psychiatrist, a physician, and offer my ideas as a mental health professional. I believe there is one immediate action (among others that can be taken) that can reduce the risk of similar searing pain being rained upon families and communities in the future. We must employ an early warning system — one that is already in place. I am referring to the families of people with mental illness.

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Fluctuating environment may have driven human evolution

The landscape early humans were inhabiting transitioned rapidly back and forth between a closed woodland and an open grassland about five to six times during a period of 200,000 years,” said Clayton Magill, graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. “These changes happened very abruptly, with each transition occurring over hundreds to just a few thousand years.”

According to Katherine Freeman, professor of geosciences, Penn State, the current leading hypothesis suggests that evolutionary changes among humans during the period the team investigated were related to a long, steady environmental change or even one big change in climate.

“There is a view this time in Africa was the ‘Great Drying,’ when the environment slowly dried out over 3 million years,” she said. “But our data show that it was not a grand progression towards dry; the environment was highly variable.”

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Here’s How Darpa’s Robot Ship Will Hunt Silent Subs | w video

Submariners like to say there are two kinds of ships: subs and targets. The Pentagon’s futurists want to turn that aphorism on its head, and develop a new kind of surface ship that can turn a sub into a target. Naturally, the sub-hunter won’t have a human on board. Here’s how it’s going to work.

The video above is a new promotional piece of machinima (do people still say that?) released by the defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation, which has a $58 million contract with Darpa to build its unmanned sub-hunter of the future. That maritime robot, called the Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vehicle, or ACTUV, doesn’t exist yet and won’t for years. But here SAIC at least sketches out how the long, thin and “radically different” ACTUV can keep surface ships from becoming targets.

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