Farmers in China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam — the largest rice-producing countries could experience reduced output due to soaring fertilizer prices.

The International Rice Research Institute warns that harvests could plunge as much as 10% in the next season, equating to about 36 million tons of rice, or enough food to feed a half billion people, according to Bloomberg.

Chemical fertilizers, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, are the most applied nutrients for high-yielding rice cultivation. Farmers have been particularly vulnerable to soaring fertilizer prices as some have reduced the amount of nutrients to save costs. This threatens future harvests as production declines could stoke food inflation for a crop that feeds half of humanity.

Satellite Maps Expose Shanghai’s Supply Chain Standstill
China’s ‘ZeroCOVID’ cautionary measures have had far-reaching impacts on China’s economy, especially on its supply chain and logistics operations.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/satellite-maps-expose-shanghais-supply-chain-standstill

Ships still backed up on the port of Los Angeles but getting better

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2022/04/13/food-prices-eggs-chicken-fruit-soda-cereal/7304935001/?itm_source=AMP&itm_medium=UpNext

Extreme weather is destroying more crops. Taxpayers are footing the bill.

Climate change is straining agricultural insurance systems in the US.

Farmers across the United States are increasingly seeing the impacts of climate change first hand, with a rise in the severity and frequency of extreme weather events. Beyond the loss of food supplies, new data on agricultural insurance payments shows the financial burden of these disasters on taxpayers. 

Over the last 25 years, insurance payments to farmers for crop losses due to drought and flooding have increased threefold, according to a report from the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, an environmental research advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. Taxpayers cover 60 percent of crop insurance premiums through subsidies, and additionally cover damages that exceed premiums. Since 1995, more than $143 billion in federal crop insurance has been paid out to U.S. farmers. Of that, 61 percent, or $87.6 billion, was due to climate change-related impacts. 

“As extreme weather has become more frequent, the climate crisis has already increased insurance payments and premium subsidies,” the report stated. “These costs are expected to go up even more, as climate change causes even more unpredictable weather conditions.” 

https://grist.org/agriculture/extreme-weather-is-destroying-more-crops-taxpayers-are-footing-the-bill/

South Carolina Supreme Court orders 14 church properties be given back to The Episcopal Church
The South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that properties held by 14 churches which left The Episcopal Church over its ordination of gay clergy and acceptance of same-sex unions more than a decade ago shall be returned to the denomination and its affiliated diocese in the state.

Laser game-changers in Middle Eastern warfare – opinion

Now, with production of a new generation anti-missile system based on lasers something entirely different is being introduced into the military balance. The US and Israel worked together on the Nautilus laser in 1996. They tested the system at the White Sands testing range in New Mexico. True, it downed everything that was thrown at it from mortar shells to actual rockets. But it was cumbersome and its technology was not yet ready to make the strategic difference that Israel sought. Nonetheless, the lower cost of laser defense is part of the new advantage that it could provide to Israel if its technology will be judged as being ripe.

• The total amount of the world’s newly generated digital information is expected to have exploded by 60%—to 8 exabytes [in 2005] from 5 exabytes in 2003, according to figures and extrapolations developed by the University of California at Berkeley. That means that [in one year] the world will generate 57,000 times the total of all information in the Library of Congress.
• An exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 1 billion billion. All human spoken words in history are calculated to be 5 exabytes. Information in magnetic media (such as business digital information) account for more than 90% of this staggering total. U.C. Berkeley estimates that global information increases about 30% per year.
• Online information doubles every 6 months
• Corporate information doubles every 18 months
• Scientific information doubles every 5 years
• Biological information doubles every 5 years
• Useful genetic information doubles every 18–24 months
• The sum total of human knowledge doubles every 2–3 years (and is soon expected to double every year)
• Printed knowledge doubles every 8 years
• Technical knowledge doubles every 3 years
• Medical knowledge doubles every 7 years.
• Each year around a million books are printed (that’s titles, not copies), 25,276 newspapers are published (that is separate newspaper titles), 40,000 scholarly journals, 80,000 mass-market periodicals, 40,000 newsletters.
• Estimates based on the Netcraft Web server survey for January 2008 show there are over 155.5 million distinct websites, an increase of over 33 million from six months before.

Generation Z and the Future of Faith in America

March 24, 2022

https://techjury.net/blog/how-much-data-is-created-every-day/#gref

No other generation was able to produce robots that act and look like real humans.