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I came in late, but what I heard didn't improve my expectations. His take on Capitalism and Democracy are complete opposites, the only reason they have worked at all here is because there was enough land and resources to exploit and when that ended capitalism started exploiting anything they could get their hands on; largely labor and government. The business of Aristocracy over Democracy with Ukraine being central to his predictions, seems to miss the point Ukraine is not a democracy and were it not a proxy of the west that recieved tons of support from us, the war would have been over. The oligarches from Ukraine took no chances, they jumped on their yachts and left for the west. Those who do the business of terror are often not connected to anything logically predictable. Nothing about the war in Ukraine is even slightly connected to radical groups and terrorists. Steve Hanken

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I will likely follow along, but I'm a deep outsider on such things and frequent thinking from what is considered the far left and very unbusiness like.

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Steve, join the conversation. I think you'll find it interesting.

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Thank you Julie for the invite! Prognosticators and pollsters are great builders of hope that fail miserably on many ocassions, especially in small places where big change is considered about as prodictable as the weather, The results tend to be more trending to what happened to the Edsel, the car that everyone would want that became the "Egg Sucker" most hated. I also recall when Donald Kaul was made to eat crow when they opened up the downtown mall in Iowa City, but now all these years later it appears he was right after all! I will listen with patience, and likely will comment later on what sounds possible! Steve Hanken

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Steve, I heard Houle spreak about 20 years ago. He predicted that any businesses whose model was dependent on being a middle 'man' would be out of business unless the changed what they were doing. He was correct, for the most part, but it was hard to fathom back then.

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After listening to the recent podcast and especially the business of the farm bill etc. I have several comments, 1) Why is it we can spend so much money developing markets for mono crops and factory farming meat production, but nothing for anything else? 2) Why is it conservation plans that are required for some of the farm programs don't include things like cover crops, but always include tiling that make the water problems worse? 3) I heard nothing about dual crops that work as cover crops, things such as winter wheat that can be harvested by simply setting the headers high and simply taking the wheat heads and leaving the rest while the second crop develops 4) if 52 % of the corn crop is used for alcohol production how much fresh water can we afford to waste on creating alcohol while the manure we are creating with factory farms pollutes what water supplies we have assuming you have enough water to water humans and livestock. Let us not forget that water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. Nor should we forget that the amount of manure created by the number of hogs and cattle we have in feed lots and hog factories is equivalent to the entire population of the US in terms of manure and all of it untreated. We already have several diseases in these hog operations that we no longer can control for, 80% of the antibiotics needed to control disease in these operations are lost in manure and near 100 % of the diseases come from the ground. Eventually that will spell disaster for hogs and potentially people.

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Steve, I hope you join the call next week with futurist David Houle!

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