They pump toxic chemicals into the water. Despite how deep they drill, what they pump in percolates up to the water supply. And you want more evidence? You'll never be satisfied, Denier.
Fact is, by doing what the gas companies doing they are STEALING natural gas from under other people's land and polluting other people's water. They have no right to that.
They've gotten a free ride for too long. They need to be stopped and they need to pay for the damages they have already done despite being given immunity by corrupt government officials.
As to the question of known reserves, because we don't have drilling here yet is all the more reason to ban it before it becomes a problem, they pollute our water and they steal our resources. They could find gas reserves in the future. Easier to close the gate before the horses escape.
"Cue the lawyers."
Aye, and they'll waste a lot of money on lawyers as Vermont ties them up in the courts they own. Even if they were to win in Federal court then Vermont would make their lives miserable. Entergy found that out. They "won" and then appealed their own "win" when they found out it Fskd them further. On top of that Vermont added a new $12 million dollar tax on their heads and increased other costs for them. There is more than one way to skin a Big Corp.
Actually, we pronounce it "No Frickin Frackin" here in Vermont.
Apple needs to support old OS, software, programs and thus user data. Shame on them for abandoning Rosetta and Classic. At the very least if they won't support them then they should turn them over to the public domain with complete documentation so other people can support them, non-profit OR for-profit.
3. Ideas are freely available on Kickstarter. They do make that point. If you can't stand your ideas being known don't Kickstart them.
We are building a nano-scale on-farm USDA meat processing facility for our farm. We're using Kickstarter to fund it in part (see http://smf.me/ for details - tomorrows the last day May 15th). I'm open sourcing it. Go see my blog and see the floor plan, read about all the neat things we've developed to make it more energy efficient, smaller, lower cost and useful. If you want to do the same thing then more power to you. Share ideas.
Cool. Hope you too succeed. We are close to finishing the butcher shop portion of our nano-scale on-farm USDA meat processing plant. This summer we should start cutting meat on-farm.
Energy use is one of the biggest expenses in a processing facility. I've designed and implemented a lot of details to cut our energy consumption, use the cold of winter (even with global warming it's cold here most of the year), etc. It is not just good environmental sense (I'm a dedicated environmentalist) but it is also good business sense. Energy costs money.
It is the subsidizing of energy to artificially keep the prices down that is part of the problem we see. If the prices of gasoline and other forms of energy rose to their natural levels then people would take conservation far more seriously.
There is a lot of scientific research that shows other periods when the rate of change was greater. What people don't like is that there is change. They tend to get alarmed at change. This is natural. It's built into their brains on an instinctual level.
The fact still remains that warmer periods had more life and more diverse life. Warming will open up more of the planet to life.
I'm not a global warming denialist. I want global warming.
What I am is anti-pollution. Unfortunately too many people are distracted by climate change and global warming instead of focusing on the real problems like pollution and war.
These are livestock guardian and herding dogs. They do past, future, location names, object names, actions, picking individual animals out of a herd to bring to me, multiple instructions. This is basic wolf pack hunting behavior. And yes, they can say how they feel. Remus, one of them, came to me yesterday and showed me his paw and said he had hurt it. Upon examining it I found that he had stepped on something and cut the pad of one toe. He hurt and wanted attention to the problem. They also have feelings of happiness, jealousy, anger, sadness, grief and they will talk about them. The question is, will people listen.
To protect the data back it up incrementally regularly and then mirror occasionally: 1) to a USB or other removable memory you store elsewhere on your body. Actually, use two, or more, memory chips and rotate between them. Even by day of the week, etc. 2) to a web server somewhere every night. 3) to another web server somewhere else regularly.
Encrypt everything
When you shutdown/close go the machine should go into lock mode.
Use trace software to track hardware in case of theft.
Get a dog. A big dog. A big, mean looking dog that smiles a lot but doesn't wag its tail or accept treats from strangers.
If this is really a life and death situation then also get a gun. While the stupid mugger messes with the dog (only a stupid assailant messes would mess with a big, mean, guardian dog) you shoot the mugger. Some people would suggest a tazer instead but those can kill someone.
Get some sheep, pigs or cattle. This gives the dog something else to do and confuses assailants. Ninja pigs are ideal.
What we really need is printers that can make printers that can make other thing, including more printers. Then we can go exponential and take over the world... hehehe...
It was a very pleasant year. A gentle winter. Years like this come around time to time. So do nasty winters like the three where we had temperatures of under -25ÂF for weeks on end. Then there was the year where it snowed here every month, including June, July and August. Nasty. These things happen. According to recorded history they've been happening for millennia. According to studies of other things these warming and cooling cycles have been happening for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, traditionally, the Earth has been warmer than it is now. In fact, live and diversity flourished during the warming periods. People are upset because things are changing and they don't like change. Life is change. Change is life.
All of this global warming hysteria is distracting people from the real issue: pollution.
Kickstarter isn't about success of the project. It is about funding the project so that it might succeed. Thus there is no bubble to burst on success of project activity.
If you want to have more assurance that the projects you back are going to succeed then make due diligence, just like when financially backing any project. Ask yourself some important questions:
1. Is it a good project / product that has a market?
2. Are the people doing the project experienced in doing this type of project?
3. And most of all, is the project something you want to back? Maybe your back because you want that type of project to succeed. More likely you back because you want the product produced by the project.
If the answers are yes to all three then there is a very good likelihood the project will succeed not just in funding (what Kickstarter is about) but to completion and production of the product (after Kickstarter and what you're really concerned with).
In the real world most businesses do NOT succeed. Those that get to the point of producing a product often don't last very long thereafter. It takes a lot more than just a good idea to last in the market place.
So, what's a good project? Take our project for example:
We are building an on-farm USDA inspected nano-scale slaughterhouse, butcher shop and smokehouse for our pastured pork.
1. There is need, a market for this project: A. The number of meat processing facilities has declined. B. There is a bottleneck in processing, especially in the fall. C. Our farm alone justifies the cost of construction and operation of such a facility because we need reliable, secure, quality processing every week of the year. +This is a project with a guaranteed market since we already pay for hired butchering. Bringing the butchering on-farm means that the 50% of our income that goes to an outside butcher will now stay on-farm. Vertical integration and Just-in-Time Farming.
2. We are experienced and reliable: A. We have nearly a decade of experience raising pastured pigs. B. We have 18 months apprenticing to learn the art of meat cutting. C. We have decades of experience in construction and design. D. We have decades of experience in business, marketing and farming. E. We have a long time established weekly delivery route delivering high quality pork to long time customers year round. F. We have a huge stack of letters of recommendation and testimonials from the above customers you can check out as well as in our Kickstarter Video. +In other words, we're very experienced and reliable.
So this leaves you with question #3: 3. Is our project something you want to back? A. You believe in improving local, small scale agriculture. B. You like our Open Sourcing of our butcher shop, sharing the information so others can build their own in other communities. C. You like pork and bacon!
So, go to our project (http://smf.me) and check out the video, read the description, see all the great rewards. We are already 122% funded. Money we bring in now goes towards the next stage of construction, the on-farm abattoir. And, you can get T-shirts, ivory tusks and best of all, our delicious pastured pork shipped right to your home.
If you don't feel a project meets those three criteria, don't back it. Of course, never back a project for more than you feel comfortable with.
It is not just social networks that are a source of this sort of problem. Apple computer is working hard to kill off old software programs by making them not run under their new operating system. Along with the loss of those old programs is the loss of the old data. In a great many cases there is no new software that handles the old data or does the function. Apple is killing old intellectual property.
Most of this software is used by small businesses who have no leverage with Apple and don't have the funds to write replacement programs. The result is the data is lost.
Additionally, the peak of educational software was during the 1990's and none of that software runs on Apple's new hardware and software. Apple has destroyed immense educational resources in this way.
The fact is Apple's new hardware is so powerful that it could easily emulate the old hardware and software FASTER than it ran on the old hardware. Yet instead Apple has dropped Classic and Rosetta support.
Try asking the dog. I have a large pack of working livestock dogs on our farm. We use sign language with them. They use some of the signs back to us. There are some limitations, they can't finger spell or do certain moves, but we have have developed a dog-gin mix of sign and vocal language. I also understand some of their own language. All told we have about 300 words that we use back and forth. This is enough language to talk about a lot of things.
Only $80 in fuel? That's very good. Our truck is about that, just a little better but a lot slower. Of course, our truck can carry 10,000 lbs of pigs, live. I probably don't want them running around inside the airplane. And the truck only cost me $6,500.
"The physical universe has a pretty good framerate -- about 8.3*10^16fps, according to Planck -- and it's in 3D too! I've never heard a sober person complain about either of these two things."
Really?!? Seriously? Dang. Why am I getting all this flicker then.
So the difference is insignificant. The 'conventional' farming is destroying the land and wasting fossil fuel. I can raise livestock on pasture far more efficiently than a factory farm. I use virtually zero electricity, propane, gasoline or diesel. I guy no grain. The animals are out on pasture. Conventional hog farmers are losing money many years and in the best years only make about five to ten bucks a pig. I make 25 to 50 times more profit per pig than they do. At the end of the year, conventional farms only exist because they're subsidized by the tax payer. I get no subsidies yet I'm profitable and sustainable.
By the way, check out our on-farm butcher shop project.
Sure, change is a fact of life. But the question is......is climate change bad.
Cooling, which is what we're scheduled for, is very bad as it results in loss of land area and extinctions.
Warming, on the other hand, is very good as it gives us more land area and increases species diversification.
People are just sticks in the mud. They don't like change. They built their cities along the shore lines and feel aggrieved that the waves are rising higher.
Reality check: climate change happens. It has been cycling back and forth for hundreds of millions, even billions of years.
All this discussion of Climate Change and Global Warming misses out on the REAL PROBLEM: pollution. Toxic chemicals, trash, GMOs, that sort of thing. People are using climate change as a diversion from the real issues.
This is interesting because Vermont is trying to apply the sales tax to cloud computing. If code isn't physical property then Vermont my be up stick creek without an addler.
There seems to be a lot of confusion here about what Kickstarter is.
Kickstarter is not about charity.
Kickstart is not about investment.
What Kickstart is about is getting projects off the ground to the point of producing a product that is generally the reward.
Backers make a pledge and in turn return a reward. Generally that reward consists of the product produced by the project. Sometimes the lower tiers of the rewards are simply a Thank You or swag goodies such as a T-shirt. The mid tiers tend to be the actual product and then the higher tiers are sometimes honorary things in addition to the product. So, the backer is spending money to get a product. It's a market place.
But Kickstarter is about a market place for creating the system of making the product. This is different than Amazon or eBay where it is a market place for an already existing product.
I'll give you an example:
Our family raises pastured pigs and sells our all naturally raised pork on our weekly delivery route year round. Right now we have to drive seven hours every week to take our pigs to a distant slaughterhouse and bring back the meat so we can make deliveries to stores, restaurants and individuals.
It would be more humane for the animals, use less fuel, save time, cost us less and give our customers better quality if we could do the meat processing on-farm. What a great idea! So, we're building an on-farm USDA inspected slaughterhouse, butcher shop and smokehouse. The first step is the butcher shop (meat cutting & sausage making).
We're about 90% done with the construction and when the weather warms up enough this spring (we're in the north country and it is still snowing here) we will begin construction again so that we can open our butcher shop this summer.
We've funded our project with our own savings, cash flow from the farm, loans customer & friends, loans from local merchants and CSA Pre-Buys that will be delivered when we start processing on-farm.
We are doing a Kickstarting the Butcher Shop at Sugar Mountain Farm project in order to raise some additional funds. Go see it here as an example of a product based Kickstarter project:
This is not a charity - we are providing product in exchange for backer's dollars.
This is not an investment - we're not selling ownership or stock in our farm.
This is not a loan - there is not interest or payback of the funds.
This is a purchase of product.
In the lowest tiers we say thank you.
In the low tiers you get some cool Goodies which range from T-shirts to other things from our farm.
In the middle tiers it gets into sample packages of meat from our farm ranging from three pounds to 20 lbs shipped to your home.
In the higher tiers there are subscriptions where you can get the meat shipped to you many times a year for up to a decade.
We're offering product in the future, once our facility is up and running with the necessary USDA license so we can ship interstate, in exchange for payment now - the pledge made by backers.
So how do you know we won't just take the money and run as you're worried about with that other project. Well, first I will simply tell you that we are trustworthy and we will do the right thing. Not enough, well, start reading our project, look at the video, see all the work we have already put into this project, see the hundreds of pigs out in the fields, read the testimonials by our existing customers on their letter head and listen to them talk in the video, look at our web site that dates back to 2005, study my web presence. You look at all of that and decide if you feel comfortable. Then you decide what you would like to buy and pledge the amount you are comfortable. It's that simple. The higher a pledge you're going to make the more I would e
Slashdot Mirror
They pump toxic chemicals into the water. Despite how deep they drill, what they pump in percolates up to the water supply. And you want more evidence? You'll never be satisfied, Denier.
Fact is, by doing what the gas companies doing they are STEALING natural gas from under other people's land and polluting other people's water. They have no right to that.
They've gotten a free ride for too long. They need to be stopped and they need to pay for the damages they have already done despite being given immunity by corrupt government officials.
As to the question of known reserves, because we don't have drilling here yet is all the more reason to ban it before it becomes a problem, they pollute our water and they steal our resources. They could find gas reserves in the future. Easier to close the gate before the horses escape.
"Cue the lawyers."
Aye, and they'll waste a lot of money on lawyers as Vermont ties them up in the courts they own. Even if they were to win in Federal court then Vermont would make their lives miserable. Entergy found that out. They "won" and then appealed their own "win" when they found out it Fskd them further. On top of that Vermont added a new $12 million dollar tax on their heads and increased other costs for them. There is more than one way to skin a Big Corp.
Actually, we pronounce it "No Frickin Frackin" here in Vermont.
Apple needs to support old OS, software, programs and thus user data. Shame on them for abandoning Rosetta and Classic. At the very least if they won't support them then they should turn them over to the public domain with complete documentation so other people can support them, non-profit OR for-profit.
1. Kickstarter fixed it. Good for them.
2. Nobody was harmed in the making of this joke.
3. Ideas are freely available on Kickstarter. They do make that point. If you can't stand your ideas being known don't Kickstart them.
We are building a nano-scale on-farm USDA meat processing facility for our farm. We're using Kickstarter to fund it in part (see http://smf.me/ for details - tomorrows the last day May 15th). I'm open sourcing it. Go see my blog and see the floor plan, read about all the neat things we've developed to make it more energy efficient, smaller, lower cost and useful. If you want to do the same thing then more power to you. Share ideas.
-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/
Cool. Hope you too succeed. We are close to finishing the butcher shop portion of our nano-scale on-farm USDA meat processing plant. This summer we should start cutting meat on-farm.
Energy use is one of the biggest expenses in a processing facility. I've designed and implemented a lot of details to cut our energy consumption, use the cold of winter (even with global warming it's cold here most of the year), etc. It is not just good environmental sense (I'm a dedicated environmentalist) but it is also good business sense. Energy costs money.
It is the subsidizing of energy to artificially keep the prices down that is part of the problem we see. If the prices of gasoline and other forms of energy rose to their natural levels then people would take conservation far more seriously.
There is a lot of scientific research that shows other periods when the rate of change was greater. What people don't like is that there is change. They tend to get alarmed at change. This is natural. It's built into their brains on an instinctual level.
The fact still remains that warmer periods had more life and more diverse life. Warming will open up more of the planet to life.
I'm not a global warming denialist. I want global warming.
What I am is anti-pollution. Unfortunately too many people are distracted by climate change and global warming instead of focusing on the real problems like pollution and war.
These are livestock guardian and herding dogs. They do past, future, location names, object names, actions, picking individual animals out of a herd to bring to me, multiple instructions. This is basic wolf pack hunting behavior. And yes, they can say how they feel. Remus, one of them, came to me yesterday and showed me his paw and said he had hurt it. Upon examining it I found that he had stepped on something and cut the pad of one toe. He hurt and wanted attention to the problem. They also have feelings of happiness, jealousy, anger, sadness, grief and they will talk about them. The question is, will people listen.
The hardware is replaceable.
It is the data that is the issue.
To protect the data back it up incrementally regularly and then mirror occasionally:
1) to a USB or other removable memory you store elsewhere on your body. Actually, use two, or more, memory chips and rotate between them. Even by day of the week, etc.
2) to a web server somewhere every night.
3) to another web server somewhere else regularly.
Encrypt everything
When you shutdown/close go the machine should go into lock mode.
Use trace software to track hardware in case of theft.
Get a dog. A big dog. A big, mean looking dog that smiles a lot but doesn't wag its tail or accept treats from strangers.
If this is really a life and death situation then also get a gun. While the stupid mugger messes with the dog (only a stupid assailant messes would mess with a big, mean, guardian dog) you shoot the mugger. Some people would suggest a tazer instead but those can kill someone.
Get some sheep, pigs or cattle. This gives the dog something else to do and confuses assailants. Ninja pigs are ideal.
That's cheap. Where do I send my $1,000? I'm sending extra to make up for those without vision.
Class action lawsuite time.
Adobe has crossed over to the dark side. Now they are officially Evil.
What we really need is printers that can make printers that can make other thing, including more printers. Then we can go exponential and take over the world... hehehe...
It was a very pleasant year. A gentle winter. Years like this come around time to time. So do nasty winters like the three where we had temperatures of under -25ÂF for weeks on end. Then there was the year where it snowed here every month, including June, July and August. Nasty. These things happen. According to recorded history they've been happening for millennia. According to studies of other things these warming and cooling cycles have been happening for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, traditionally, the Earth has been warmer than it is now. In fact, live and diversity flourished during the warming periods. People are upset because things are changing and they don't like change. Life is change. Change is life.
All of this global warming hysteria is distracting people from the real issue: pollution.
Kickstarter isn't about success of the project. It is about funding the project so that it might succeed. Thus there is no bubble to burst on success of project activity.
If you want to have more assurance that the projects you back are going to succeed then make due diligence, just like when financially backing any project. Ask yourself some important questions:
1. Is it a good project / product that has a market?
2. Are the people doing the project experienced in doing this type of project?
3. And most of all, is the project something you want to back? Maybe your back because you want that type of project to succeed. More likely you back because you want the product produced by the project.
If the answers are yes to all three then there is a very good likelihood the project will succeed not just in funding (what Kickstarter is about) but to completion and production of the product (after Kickstarter and what you're really concerned with).
In the real world most businesses do NOT succeed. Those that get to the point of producing a product often don't last very long thereafter. It takes a lot more than just a good idea to last in the market place.
So, what's a good project? Take our project for example:
http://smf.me/
We are building an on-farm USDA inspected nano-scale slaughterhouse, butcher shop and smokehouse for our pastured pork.
1. There is need, a market for this project:
A. The number of meat processing facilities has declined.
B. There is a bottleneck in processing, especially in the fall.
C. Our farm alone justifies the cost of construction and operation of such a facility because we need reliable, secure, quality processing every week of the year.
+This is a project with a guaranteed market since we already pay for hired butchering. Bringing the butchering on-farm means that the 50% of our income that goes to an outside butcher will now stay on-farm. Vertical integration and Just-in-Time Farming.
2. We are experienced and reliable:
A. We have nearly a decade of experience raising pastured pigs.
B. We have 18 months apprenticing to learn the art of meat cutting.
C. We have decades of experience in construction and design.
D. We have decades of experience in business, marketing and farming.
E. We have a long time established weekly delivery route delivering high quality pork to long time customers year round.
F. We have a huge stack of letters of recommendation and testimonials from the above customers you can check out as well as in our Kickstarter Video.
+In other words, we're very experienced and reliable.
So this leaves you with question #3:
3. Is our project something you want to back?
A. You believe in improving local, small scale agriculture.
B. You like our Open Sourcing of our butcher shop, sharing the information so others can build their own in other communities.
C. You like pork and bacon!
So, go to our project (http://smf.me) and check out the video, read the description, see all the great rewards. We are already 122% funded. Money we bring in now goes towards the next stage of construction, the on-farm abattoir. And, you can get T-shirts, ivory tusks and best of all, our delicious pastured pork shipped right to your home.
If you don't feel a project meets those three criteria, don't back it. Of course, never back a project for more than you feel comfortable with.
Cheers,
-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/
It is not just social networks that are a source of this sort of problem. Apple computer is working hard to kill off old software programs by making them not run under their new operating system. Along with the loss of those old programs is the loss of the old data. In a great many cases there is no new software that handles the old data or does the function. Apple is killing old intellectual property.
Most of this software is used by small businesses who have no leverage with Apple and don't have the funds to write replacement programs. The result is the data is lost.
Additionally, the peak of educational software was during the 1990's and none of that software runs on Apple's new hardware and software. Apple has destroyed immense educational resources in this way.
The fact is Apple's new hardware is so powerful that it could easily emulate the old hardware and software FASTER than it ran on the old hardware. Yet instead Apple has dropped Classic and Rosetta support.
Bad at the core.
Try asking the dog. I have a large pack of working livestock dogs on our farm. We use sign language with them. They use some of the signs back to us. There are some limitations, they can't finger spell or do certain moves, but we have have developed a dog-gin mix of sign and vocal language. I also understand some of their own language. All told we have about 300 words that we use back and forth. This is enough language to talk about a lot of things.
If you want to know what they're thinking, ask.
I already got mine. Check out the pPod:
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/the-apple-ppod/
Great little implant.
One more reason to switch to Mac. Way to go Microsux.
Only $80 in fuel? That's very good. Our truck is about that, just a little better but a lot slower. Of course, our truck can carry 10,000 lbs of pigs, live. I probably don't want them running around inside the airplane. And the truck only cost me $6,500.
See http://smf.me/ for what we put in our truck.
"The physical universe has a pretty good framerate -- about 8.3*10^16fps, according to Planck -- and it's in 3D too! I've never heard a sober person complain about either of these two things."
Really?!? Seriously? Dang. Why am I getting all this flicker then.
So the difference is insignificant. The 'conventional' farming is destroying the land and wasting fossil fuel. I can raise livestock on pasture far more efficiently than a factory farm. I use virtually zero electricity, propane, gasoline or diesel. I guy no grain. The animals are out on pasture. Conventional hog farmers are losing money many years and in the best years only make about five to ten bucks a pig. I make 25 to 50 times more profit per pig than they do. At the end of the year, conventional farms only exist because they're subsidized by the tax payer. I get no subsidies yet I'm profitable and sustainable.
By the way, check out our on-farm butcher shop project.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sugarmtnfarm/building-a-butcher-shop-on-sugarmountainfarm
Cheers,
-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/butchershop
I have prior art that predates the Professor by more than a decade. Case over. The troll needs to go back under his bridge.
Cheers,
-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/butchershop
Check out our Kickstarting the Butcher Shop project at:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sugarmtnfarm/building-a-butcher-shop-on-sugarmountainfarm
Turn.
Off.
Java.
Sure, change is a fact of life. ...is climate change bad.
But the question is...
Cooling, which is what we're scheduled for, is very bad as it results in loss of land area and extinctions.
Warming, on the other hand, is very good as it gives us more land area and increases species diversification.
People are just sticks in the mud. They don't like change. They built their cities along the shore lines and feel aggrieved that the waves are rising higher.
Reality check: climate change happens. It has been cycling back and forth for hundreds of millions, even billions of years.
All this discussion of Climate Change and Global Warming misses out on the REAL PROBLEM: pollution. Toxic chemicals, trash, GMOs, that sort of thing. People are using climate change as a diversion from the real issues.
Sad.
This is interesting because Vermont is trying to apply the sales tax to cloud computing. If code isn't physical property then Vermont my be up stick creek without an addler.
There seems to be a lot of confusion here about what Kickstarter is.
Kickstarter is not about charity.
Kickstart is not about investment.
What Kickstart is about is getting projects off the ground to the point of producing a product that is generally the reward.
Backers make a pledge and in turn return a reward. Generally that reward consists of the product produced by the project. Sometimes the lower tiers of the rewards are simply a Thank You or swag goodies such as a T-shirt. The mid tiers tend to be the actual product and then the higher tiers are sometimes honorary things in addition to the product. So, the backer is spending money to get a product. It's a market place.
But Kickstarter is about a market place for creating the system of making the product. This is different than Amazon or eBay where it is a market place for an already existing product.
I'll give you an example:
Our family raises pastured pigs and sells our all naturally raised pork on our weekly delivery route year round. Right now we have to drive seven hours every week to take our pigs to a distant slaughterhouse and bring back the meat so we can make deliveries to stores, restaurants and individuals.
It would be more humane for the animals, use less fuel, save time, cost us less and give our customers better quality if we could do the meat processing on-farm. What a great idea! So, we're building an on-farm USDA inspected slaughterhouse, butcher shop and smokehouse. The first step is the butcher shop (meat cutting & sausage making).
We're about 90% done with the construction and when the weather warms up enough this spring (we're in the north country and it is still snowing here) we will begin construction again so that we can open our butcher shop this summer.
We've funded our project with our own savings, cash flow from the farm, loans customer & friends, loans from local merchants and CSA Pre-Buys that will be delivered when we start processing on-farm.
We are doing a Kickstarting the Butcher Shop at Sugar Mountain Farm project in order to raise some additional funds. Go see it here as an example of a product based Kickstarter project:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sugarmtnfarm/building-a-butcher-shop-on-sugarmountainfarm
This is not a charity - we are providing product in exchange for backer's dollars.
This is not an investment - we're not selling ownership or stock in our farm.
This is not a loan - there is not interest or payback of the funds.
This is a purchase of product.
In the lowest tiers we say thank you.
In the low tiers you get some cool Goodies which range from T-shirts to other things from our farm.
In the middle tiers it gets into sample packages of meat from our farm ranging from three pounds to 20 lbs shipped to your home.
In the higher tiers there are subscriptions where you can get the meat shipped to you many times a year for up to a decade.
We're offering product in the future, once our facility is up and running with the necessary USDA license so we can ship interstate, in exchange for payment now - the pledge made by backers.
So how do you know we won't just take the money and run as you're worried about with that other project. Well, first I will simply tell you that we are trustworthy and we will do the right thing. Not enough, well, start reading our project, look at the video, see all the work we have already put into this project, see the hundreds of pigs out in the fields, read the testimonials by our existing customers on their letter head and listen to them talk in the video, look at our web site that dates back to 2005, study my web presence. You look at all of that and decide if you feel comfortable. Then you decide what you would like to buy and pledge the amount you are comfortable. It's that simple. The higher a pledge you're going to make the more I would e