I can't feel my legshttps://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/09/24/walmart-requires-lettuce-spinach-suppliers-to-join-blockchain/ …
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Instead, the hogs belong to a giant corporation, which parcels them out to subcontractors (formerly known as farmers) for fattening. They have to comply with all kinds of cost-saving guidelines, including disposing of hog shit in giant pools of the kind that are spilling over now
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If they don't comply with the mandates, they simply get fewer or no pigs to raise next time around. The financial squeeze is very effective at bringing farmers into line with corporate goals without ever overtly telling them what to do.
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These lagoons of pig shit are now overflowing because of heavy flooding—the kind of extreme weather event we're going to see more of as the climate changes. And they don't exist because North Carolina farmers don't care about the environment; they exist because of Big Ag
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As a tech person, the word 'blockchaing' is triggering, but the real story here is IBM and WalMart moving more surveillance and monitoring further down the food supply chain, to squeeze more out of farmers at the expense of everyone but them
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Note that the pattern—pushing tasks out to contractors who are pitted against each other and find themselves locked in a downward spiral of earnings, in a way that creates terrible externalities for the rest of us—is just as true for Amazon or Uber as it is for hog farming
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IBM is clever enough to wave "blockchain" as a red flag to distract from a project that is about value extraction and the further dismantling of rural America. This is a small illustration of how tech stories are rarely about tech at all, but about the concentration of power

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It's happening in NW Arkansas, NE Oklahoma as well as Tyson and other poultry suppliers start developing GIANT poultry farms disguised as family ops.
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The chicken scratch (waste) is polluting nearby water ways (rivers and lakes, some of which are municipal water supplies). And the current EPA doesn't care
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But what about her emails? What about bengazi?
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