I'm not talking about email spammers, rather the sites with bot-written text on every subject imaginable, set up solely to attract hits from Google. Hosting bills for that sort of thing are substantial and recurring, and at that level are usually charged by traffic volume (a few cents per GB adds up when you're sucking up millions of hits) yet they still manage to make money...
Nope -- unhappy animals are stressed; stressed animals lose weight. Margins are too thin everywhere to put up with that. And it's not cheaper to run a big modern facility (they cost millions to build and have tech to maintain, vs thousands for old-fashioned wire and dirt and only fence to maintain), but it is more cost-effective in the long run because of those slim margins. But the real reason those corp farms exist is because farmers can't make a living as small individual operations anymore; they've not enough economy of scale, and where urban development is encroaching, are being further driven out of business by ag land being taxed at residential values -- those taxes alone exceed the ag production value of the land.
Another factor is things like the fact that there's no longer a processing plant, nor any small shippers, in reach of any cattle ranch in Montana or Wyoming, and the big shippers won't deal with small numbers like individual farms produce. So to stay in business, a farm has to join (functionally, be bought by) a corp outfit that can do the aggregating. But who still runs the farm? Very often the guy who had to sell it. Experience is hard to buy in the ag field, because the profession has shrunk to less than 2% of the population.
BTW there's no such thing as a "factory farm"; the term is a perjorative created by the ARs to give the public the impression that anything larger than one cow and two chickens is abusive and evil, or that if you raise your pigs in indoor facilities (as is now the rule because pigs have such narrow climate requirements to thrive, and secondarily because they completely destroy pasture) you must be stamping them out from molds.
True as far as it goes, However, this is more like that nannie you hired to care for your kids actually works for a private child-welfare outfit, and in their quest to demonstrate that all parents are neglectful, the nannie molests your child, then submits the molestation video to the court as evidence that you took such poor care of your children that you hired a child molestor as a nannie.
I think you've missed the point of the proposed law, which was to prevent harm caused by *people who take agriculture jobs only to gain access to the animals for videotaping*. In other words, to protect businesses from a specific type of fraudulent behaviour, which is probably a better route (punish those found guilty of such fraud) than business being forced to institute invasive background checks on every prospective employee (which is not exactly a good thing for personal privacy, is an onerous burden on the business, and creates an atmosphere of assumed guilt til proven otherwise).
IMO its mistake was in not extending the law to ALL businesses. It's one thing to discover something ill is going on at your place of work, and report it. It's quite another to take a job with the sole intent of finding wrongdoing, which may not exist (and if not, the activists will MAKE it exist).
And if you were confronted with a film that showed your employees *apparently* caught in the act, what would you think? if you don't know a 3rd party instigated it, naturally you'd assume yep, our guys are guilty, better fix that.
The owners, corp or individual, would still come unglued. Stressed animal is money out of the owner's pocket. And it's money wasted, since the hog still ate just as much (or more, if stressed). Why would a corporation be less adverse to wasting money than an individual owner?? Corps have more bean-counters watching every cent.
Not being a lawyer, I haven't kept good track of where I got all my info, but I'm sure you can find just as much of it as I did. I used to think a lot of these allegations were true myself. Now, having seen how much of it is bogus, I'm no longer naive enough to take evidence from activists at face value.
Some producers have been putting in security cameras, now that the price has come down to rational for an ag budget -- tho more because it makes sense to be able to monitor animals without needing so many boots on the ground. But do you really think businesses should be forced into extra security just to prevent thuggery? Or that someone bent on proving what they wanted to prove wouldn't be smart enough to disable the system first?
There are always going to be a few idiots. Sure, they should be caught and fired, and possibly prosecuted. And you can't always know someone's an idiot til they act like an idiot.
But this type of thing is being held up to the public eye as "the way it's done on a daily basis by the entire animal ag industry" when it most certainly is NOT the norm. The owner of a hog farm would come unglued if he saw workers doing any such thing, because stressed animals lose weight, and their market value is by the pound.
In fact there's a great deal of reasearch on how to reduce livestock stress, because margins are too narrow to let any needless stress (ie. weight loss) happen to your stock.
Because it's kinda hard to sue a shady operation that you didn't know was going on until well after it shuts down your business. So now you're broke from defending yourself in court, chances are you were found guilty thanks to their video, your assets are gone, and you're going to sue -- who, exactly? it's months or years later and the activists, who worked anonymously at the time, are scattered to the four winds and their parent outfit says "We didn't do it, we just trained people how to do it."
No, this is more like banning planting evidence that said politicians were committing [insert unpopular/illegal vice here]. The problem hasn't been the reporting, it's been the deliberate manipulation of public opinion using bogus evidence.
Such as the tactic noted in another post:
Or the videos from the pig farms, where the activists wake the pigs up, shine lights around, and distribute food just out of reach (and just out of frame....)
Naturally the animals are alarmed by the unexpected lights and noises in the middle of the night, and make various distressed noises...
In a local case, the company itself thought it was at fault for mistreating cows (so it appeared from the videos), and consequently didn't put up all that much defense in court. Only several months after the company was shut down did it come out that the incident was entirely staged by PETA, who had paid some of the workers to film it after hours. (The workers, being backcountry Mexicans, had no idea that bribes to perform such acts were illegal in the U.S.) But by now it was too late for the truth to matter, the business was gone and the public mind was already made up.
This is far more the rule than the exception. The fact is, if there's a bad situation it will be obvious from the overt condition of the animals, and there's no need to do "undercover" work in the first place.
Another AC complains that we're just deniers if we don't believe the videos. Well, the videos show real abuse, they just didn't show WHO did the abusing (or at whose behest it was done), and that is the problem this proposed law attempted to address: In the AR-activist world, it is perfectly acceptable to covertly abuse animals to demonstrate that animals are abused.
The trouble is that these "animal protection" outfits (themselves large multinational corporations) aren't filming actual incidents, but rather, are *staging* incidents for the purpose of filming them. So yes, the "protectionists" are actually abusing animals to demonstrate abuse.
In one case they got caught, having failed to edit out their own participation from the film presented as "evidence of abuse" in court.
In the infamous "skinning raccoon dogs alive" videos (I believe made by PETA), workers can be heard talking in Chinese -- some bilingual person translated the audible track and turned out they were saying, "Why are we being told to do it this way? this is wrong!"
In fact I've yet to hear of an "undercover video" that is entirely legit; all those I know of have some staged elements, to demonstrate the desired "abuse".
There once was a poor man who lead a donkey every day across the border from one kingdom to another. The border guards suspected that he was smuggling something, so each day as the man passed the border they carefully searched the man and the donkey's saddlebags. But they didn't find anything.
After a while the man starts to wear more expensive clothing and buys a large house. The border guards redouble their efforts to inspect the man and his donkey closely because they now are certain the man is smuggling something. But in their daily searches of the man and the saddlebags they never come up with anything but straw.
After 30 years of this daily routine, one of the border guards retires. One day when the retired border guard is walking across the street, he runs into the man and says "Listen, I am no longer a border guard and I can no longer hurt you. I promise I will never tell anyone, but just for my peace of mind, please tell me what you have been smuggling all those years."
The man replies, "Because I know that you can no longer arrest me, I will tell you. I was smuggling donkeys."
Having grown up in the era when that was so... I totally agree. The fact that the simple and direct response is no longer *allowed* is not only why we have twats like this today -- it's why we also have the threat of overreaching police powers to "protect" us from such twats. If someone had simply and directly knocked a little sense into 'em the first time, there'd be no need for an official correction mechanism (police and courts).
When you're producing, you're also selling, which means you have money to buy and consume with.
When you're only consuming, you lack income and you eventually run out of credit, and then you can't even pay off your debt because you're not producing anything to sell.
That's the current positions of China and the U.S., in their respective nutshells. (It used to be the U.S. and Europe in those same nutshells.)
And as I've said before, when that debt comes due, my guess is that D.C. will roll over and offer China a state... we're not really using Alaska or Hawaii anyway...
As an example of how out of hand the cops are getting, a couple years ago in Kern County CA, a SWAT unit was sent in to bust someone for having too many dogs. Which is a misdemeanor at worst.
Of course a lot of this comes out of civil asset forfeiture, which is becoming far more of a threat to American citizens than any amount of kiddie porn or terrorists, or any modern level of crime for that matter.
"The bar for trespass is really low in some places. Walking across a parking lot without buying at a store in a strip mall can get someone charged with this in some areas of the US."
Really? Where's that, so I can avoid it?? (And incidentally avoid shopping at those strip malls.)
Tho I can't say I'm terribly surprised. City-owned vacant lots in my town have No Trespassing signs, and by the complete lack of kids playing on 'em and adults shortcutting across 'em, it appears they're enforced.
(Probably a hundred vacant acres right in town. And then they complain that there's nowhere for kids to play and that we need to spend a fortune to "create parks".)
Which is the real reason tinted windows are illegal in some states, tho "safety" is usually cited as the legal reason. Tinted windows make it hard to take photos of your car's interior.
There is a bill before the California state legislature right now that would make it a crime to offer, in a public location, to sell a dog or cat. (No actual animal need be present.) "Hey Joe," you tell your huntin' buddy as you walk from the parking lot into the bar, "my dog had pups. Still want to buy one?" Under this bill, you've just committed a crime. The penalty? Up to $20,000 fine and one year in jail.
Rodney King actually makes a good case against relying on surveillance video:
By dumb luck I saw the UNedited version, which the local L.A. news initially ran without previewing it. King got up and went after those cops FIVE TIMES before they got rough. Those five attempted assaults were all clipped off the tape shown again an hour later, and THAT edition, where he apparently did nothing aggressive, became well-known to the world and was used as evidence in the trial. What became of the original, showing how he tried to attack the cops? I have no idea.
Now, what if the tape shows you apparently robbing someone, when in fact they were robbed by someone else and you ran to help? Excise the escaping robber (or merely fail to catch him on tape) and you're left bending over the body.
Point is, video can be edited or incomplete, what's excised or absent might convict or exonerate, and both can be in error. You have no control over that, but the prosecutors DO. And their job isn't to achieve justice, it's to achieve a conviction.
I don't know about other states or Federal court, but in Montana, if your case is assigned a judge who you feel cannot be impartial re your case, you can file a simple form that throws that judge off your case. You don't need to explain your reasons, either.
I'm reminded of the numerous workarounds used in Soviet Russia, to avoid government scrutiny of everyday lives.
Seems to me a certain amount of privacy, that is, a space which is yours and yours alone, is what defines us as individuals worthy of existing. Want to make your kid feel worthless and like he doesn't matter? snoop in absolutely everything he has or does. Don't let him have *anything* private. Now, think of that on an adult scale. You have NOTHING that is privately yours, therefore you don't matter, is the ultimate message here.
On that note, one of the comments from below TFA says it all:
====== Noprivacyville already exists. It's in countless villages in Africa, the New Guinea highlands, the Amazon. There are no doors, there are no locks. Everyone knows everyone elses business. You can't steal Bob's spear because everyone will be asking "Why do you have Bob's spear?". How much theft do you suppose there is in a village of 50 people? Also nobody gets booked for speeding - there's no cars. ======
I was thinking much the same... "He's reinvented Puritanville."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not talking about email spammers, rather the sites with bot-written text on every subject imaginable, set up solely to attract hits from Google. Hosting bills for that sort of thing are substantial and recurring, and at that level are usually charged by traffic volume (a few cents per GB adds up when you're sucking up millions of hits) yet they still manage to make money...
It hasn't stopped the content-spam industry, who certainly aren't getting their web hosting for free.
Nope -- unhappy animals are stressed; stressed animals lose weight. Margins are too thin everywhere to put up with that. And it's not cheaper to run a big modern facility (they cost millions to build and have tech to maintain, vs thousands for old-fashioned wire and dirt and only fence to maintain), but it is more cost-effective in the long run because of those slim margins. But the real reason those corp farms exist is because farmers can't make a living as small individual operations anymore; they've not enough economy of scale, and where urban development is encroaching, are being further driven out of business by ag land being taxed at residential values -- those taxes alone exceed the ag production value of the land.
Another factor is things like the fact that there's no longer a processing plant, nor any small shippers, in reach of any cattle ranch in Montana or Wyoming, and the big shippers won't deal with small numbers like individual farms produce. So to stay in business, a farm has to join (functionally, be bought by) a corp outfit that can do the aggregating. But who still runs the farm? Very often the guy who had to sell it. Experience is hard to buy in the ag field, because the profession has shrunk to less than 2% of the population.
BTW there's no such thing as a "factory farm"; the term is a perjorative created by the ARs to give the public the impression that anything larger than one cow and two chickens is abusive and evil, or that if you raise your pigs in indoor facilities (as is now the rule because pigs have such narrow climate requirements to thrive, and secondarily because they completely destroy pasture) you must be stamping them out from molds.
True as far as it goes, However, this is more like that nannie you hired to care for your kids actually works for a private child-welfare outfit, and in their quest to demonstrate that all parents are neglectful, the nannie molests your child, then submits the molestation video to the court as evidence that you took such poor care of your children that you hired a child molestor as a nannie.
I think you've missed the point of the proposed law, which was to prevent harm caused by *people who take agriculture jobs only to gain access to the animals for videotaping*. In other words, to protect businesses from a specific type of fraudulent behaviour, which is probably a better route (punish those found guilty of such fraud) than business being forced to institute invasive background checks on every prospective employee (which is not exactly a good thing for personal privacy, is an onerous burden on the business, and creates an atmosphere of assumed guilt til proven otherwise).
IMO its mistake was in not extending the law to ALL businesses. It's one thing to discover something ill is going on at your place of work, and report it. It's quite another to take a job with the sole intent of finding wrongdoing, which may not exist (and if not, the activists will MAKE it exist).
And if you were confronted with a film that showed your employees *apparently* caught in the act, what would you think? if you don't know a 3rd party instigated it, naturally you'd assume yep, our guys are guilty, better fix that.
The owners, corp or individual, would still come unglued. Stressed animal is money out of the owner's pocket. And it's money wasted, since the hog still ate just as much (or more, if stressed). Why would a corporation be less adverse to wasting money than an individual owner?? Corps have more bean-counters watching every cent.
Not being a lawyer, I haven't kept good track of where I got all my info, but I'm sure you can find just as much of it as I did. I used to think a lot of these allegations were true myself. Now, having seen how much of it is bogus, I'm no longer naive enough to take evidence from activists at face value.
Some producers have been putting in security cameras, now that the price has come down to rational for an ag budget -- tho more because it makes sense to be able to monitor animals without needing so many boots on the ground. But do you really think businesses should be forced into extra security just to prevent thuggery? Or that someone bent on proving what they wanted to prove wouldn't be smart enough to disable the system first?
There are always going to be a few idiots. Sure, they should be caught and fired, and possibly prosecuted. And you can't always know someone's an idiot til they act like an idiot.
But this type of thing is being held up to the public eye as "the way it's done on a daily basis by the entire animal ag industry" when it most certainly is NOT the norm. The owner of a hog farm would come unglued if he saw workers doing any such thing, because stressed animals lose weight, and their market value is by the pound.
In fact there's a great deal of reasearch on how to reduce livestock stress, because margins are too narrow to let any needless stress (ie. weight loss) happen to your stock.
Because it's kinda hard to sue a shady operation that you didn't know was going on until well after it shuts down your business. So now you're broke from defending yourself in court, chances are you were found guilty thanks to their video, your assets are gone, and you're going to sue -- who, exactly? it's months or years later and the activists, who worked anonymously at the time, are scattered to the four winds and their parent outfit says "We didn't do it, we just trained people how to do it."
Such as the tactic noted in another post:
Or the videos from the pig farms, where the activists wake the pigs up, shine lights around, and distribute food just out of reach (and just out of frame....)
Naturally the animals are alarmed by the unexpected lights and noises in the middle of the night, and make various distressed noises...
In a local case, the company itself thought it was at fault for mistreating cows (so it appeared from the videos), and consequently didn't put up all that much defense in court. Only several months after the company was shut down did it come out that the incident was entirely staged by PETA, who had paid some of the workers to film it after hours. (The workers, being backcountry Mexicans, had no idea that bribes to perform such acts were illegal in the U.S.) But by now it was too late for the truth to matter, the business was gone and the public mind was already made up.
This is far more the rule than the exception. The fact is, if there's a bad situation it will be obvious from the overt condition of the animals, and there's no need to do "undercover" work in the first place.
Another AC complains that we're just deniers if we don't believe the videos. Well, the videos show real abuse, they just didn't show WHO did the abusing (or at whose behest it was done), and that is the problem this proposed law attempted to address: In the AR-activist world, it is perfectly acceptable to covertly abuse animals to demonstrate that animals are abused.
The trouble is that these "animal protection" outfits (themselves large multinational corporations) aren't filming actual incidents, but rather, are *staging* incidents for the purpose of filming them. So yes, the "protectionists" are actually abusing animals to demonstrate abuse.
In one case they got caught, having failed to edit out their own participation from the film presented as "evidence of abuse" in court.
In the infamous "skinning raccoon dogs alive" videos (I believe made by PETA), workers can be heard talking in Chinese -- some bilingual person translated the audible track and turned out they were saying, "Why are we being told to do it this way? this is wrong!"
In fact I've yet to hear of an "undercover video" that is entirely legit; all those I know of have some staged elements, to demonstrate the desired "abuse".
That's probably already patented...
And this one clearly suffers from prior art:
7. Shaking your mobile device
Ever get pissed off at your phone and shake it up and down until it reboots?
Hmmph. Etch-a-Sketch had that feature decades earlier.
Old news....
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/hierakonpolis/zombies.html
http://www.archaeology.org/online/interviews/zombies/
There once was a poor man who lead a donkey every day across the border from one kingdom to another. The border guards suspected that he was smuggling something, so each day as the man passed the border they carefully searched the man and the donkey's saddlebags. But they didn't find anything.
After a while the man starts to wear more expensive clothing and buys a large house. The border guards redouble their efforts to inspect the man and his donkey closely because they now are certain the man is smuggling something. But in their daily searches of the man and the saddlebags they never come up with anything but straw.
After 30 years of this daily routine, one of the border guards retires. One day when the retired border guard is walking across the street, he runs into the man and says "Listen, I am no longer a border guard and I can no longer hurt you. I promise I will never tell anyone, but just for my peace of mind, please tell me what you have been smuggling all those years."
The man replies, "Because I know that you can no longer arrest me, I will tell you. I was smuggling donkeys."
Having grown up in the era when that was so... I totally agree. The fact that the simple and direct response is no longer *allowed* is not only why we have twats like this today -- it's why we also have the threat of overreaching police powers to "protect" us from such twats. If someone had simply and directly knocked a little sense into 'em the first time, there'd be no need for an official correction mechanism (police and courts).
Me too... but it was the most fun I've had all day!
When you're producing, you're also selling, which means you have money to buy and consume with.
When you're only consuming, you lack income and you eventually run out of credit, and then you can't even pay off your debt because you're not producing anything to sell.
That's the current positions of China and the U.S., in their respective nutshells. (It used to be the U.S. and Europe in those same nutshells.)
And as I've said before, when that debt comes due, my guess is that D.C. will roll over and offer China a state... we're not really using Alaska or Hawaii anyway...
As an example of how out of hand the cops are getting, a couple years ago in Kern County CA, a SWAT unit was sent in to bust someone for having too many dogs. Which is a misdemeanor at worst.
More examples in the same arena, long reading but worth it: http://www.americanchronicle.com/authors/view/1941#articles
Of course a lot of this comes out of civil asset forfeiture, which is becoming far more of a threat to American citizens than any amount of kiddie porn or terrorists, or any modern level of crime for that matter.
http://www.fear.org/
"The bar for trespass is really low in some places. Walking across a parking lot without buying at a store in a strip mall can get someone charged with this in some areas of the US."
Really? Where's that, so I can avoid it?? (And incidentally avoid shopping at those strip malls.)
Tho I can't say I'm terribly surprised. City-owned vacant lots in my town have No Trespassing signs, and by the complete lack of kids playing on 'em and adults shortcutting across 'em, it appears they're enforced.
(Probably a hundred vacant acres right in town. And then they complain that there's nowhere for kids to play and that we need to spend a fortune to "create parks".)
Which is the real reason tinted windows are illegal in some states, tho "safety" is usually cited as the legal reason. Tinted windows make it hard to take photos of your car's interior.
http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/
There is a bill before the California state legislature right now that would make it a crime to offer, in a public location, to sell a dog or cat. (No actual animal need be present.) "Hey Joe," you tell your huntin' buddy as you walk from the parking lot into the bar, "my dog had pups. Still want to buy one?" Under this bill, you've just committed a crime. The penalty? Up to $20,000 fine and one year in jail.
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_0901-0950/sb_917_bill_20110218_introduced.html
Where is the outcry over this absurdity?
Rodney King actually makes a good case against relying on surveillance video:
By dumb luck I saw the UNedited version, which the local L.A. news initially ran without previewing it. King got up and went after those cops FIVE TIMES before they got rough. Those five attempted assaults were all clipped off the tape shown again an hour later, and THAT edition, where he apparently did nothing aggressive, became well-known to the world and was used as evidence in the trial. What became of the original, showing how he tried to attack the cops? I have no idea.
Now, what if the tape shows you apparently robbing someone, when in fact they were robbed by someone else and you ran to help? Excise the escaping robber (or merely fail to catch him on tape) and you're left bending over the body.
Point is, video can be edited or incomplete, what's excised or absent might convict or exonerate, and both can be in error. You have no control over that, but the prosecutors DO. And their job isn't to achieve justice, it's to achieve a conviction.
Exactly.
I don't know about other states or Federal court, but in Montana, if your case is assigned a judge who you feel cannot be impartial re your case, you can file a simple form that throws that judge off your case. You don't need to explain your reasons, either.
Also interesting, Sen. Steve Urquhart's blog:
http://www.steveu.com/blog/
I'm reminded of the numerous workarounds used in Soviet Russia, to avoid government scrutiny of everyday lives.
Seems to me a certain amount of privacy, that is, a space which is yours and yours alone, is what defines us as individuals worthy of existing. Want to make your kid feel worthless and like he doesn't matter? snoop in absolutely everything he has or does. Don't let him have *anything* private. Now, think of that on an adult scale. You have NOTHING that is privately yours, therefore you don't matter, is the ultimate message here.
On that note, one of the comments from below TFA says it all:
======
Noprivacyville already exists. It's in countless villages in Africa, the New Guinea highlands, the Amazon. There are no doors, there are no locks. Everyone knows everyone elses business. You can't steal Bob's spear because everyone will be asking "Why do you have Bob's spear?". How much theft do you suppose there is in a village of 50 people? Also nobody gets booked for speeding - there's no cars.
======
I was thinking much the same... "He's reinvented Puritanville."