Is Google Doomed?
The Economist thinks so. Cover story this week.
ChatBots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) could boot Google off its search perch. Its lead article points out no company is on top forever. Nokia was once king of cellphones; IBM the empress of business computing. Alta Vista was once number one in search, but who can remember its name if The Economist hadn't dredged it up.
I haven’t got my head around AI and Chatbots, yet. But the market was scared this week and shares of Alphabet, Google’s stock market name, took a big hit. I own a chunk of this stock in my retirement account.
Will the sell-off continue? A friend of mine posted: “The best news that happened for Google this week is the new cover of The Economist.”
He means The Economist has a record of being a contrarian indicator.
Wishful Green Thinking
This map of the European Union shows that large swathes of the European Union generate electricity by coal. In particular Germany, with its strong Green Party, has backed itself into a coal corner by insisting on wind and solar. It is the dirtiest kind of coal to boot. Only in Spain, Denmark and Lithuania is wind number one.
Greta Thunberg must be relieved that Sweden has the lowest carbon footprint.
Where Inflation will hit this year
It might not be related, but inflation will be high in Sweden. Inflation in Turkey is predicted to be 40%, adding to the misery following the earthquake.
Zimbabwe inflation is the worst at 204% followed by Venezuela and Argentina. Uruguay next door is just 7.8%.
Uruguay
Uruguay is the second richest country in South America, just after Chile. But the small country, tucked in between Brazil and Aregentia, has the largest middle class per capita in South America. Which keeps things peaceful.
Uruguay is mostly flat, rich, farmland, like the Pampas of Argentina. There is no wasted land, as there is in giant countries like Canada and Australia, where only the the edges are habitable. Beef is the number one export. The population is just 3.48-million. The country is the same size as Bangladesh. Here is Uruguay superimposed on Bangladesh whose population is 166-million.
.And here is Uruguay over the Netherlands, the most densely populated country in Europe and some surrounding bits of neighbours. Population: 50-million
Women on Money
Not many countries have women on their currency. This list notes that some Commonwealth countries have the late Queen on the notes.
The Canadian $10 bill features Viola Desmond, a business woman and black activist from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Apart from the Queen she is only woman to appear on the front of a bill, though women hockey players and soldiers have been on the back.
Essay of the Week
It is almost Maple Syrup season. Here are two stories on the subject, the first one written for this month’s edition of Tempo, a local paper. The second is something I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor 28 years ago.
The Brave New World of Maple Syrup
Maple syrup was flowing long before there were giant maple operations, a maple syrup marketing board and giant surpluses waiting in warehouses to be stolen.
The Abenaki Indians who lived in southern Quebec and northern Vermont, first learned to make a maple syrup-like substance by tapping maple trees in late winter and early spring. For the Abenaki, maple trees produced a natural sweetener long before there was sugar.
Early farmers, well into the 20th century, used the maple syrup season to earn money to buy seeds for the spring planting season. The process started with cleaning up fallen trees in the maple bush and cutting them into usable lengths for the boiler. Long before there were pipelines and fancy reverse osmosis technology, a hole was drilled into the sugar maple tree with a 7/8 inch augur at a slight angle, and a spile was driven in. Depending on its girth, there might be more than one to a tree.
The spile was fashioned so a bucket could hang on it, and there was sometimes a hat for the bucket to keep out debris like bits of bark. The farmer would go around with a horse-drawn sleigh; tractors would get stuck in the snow, emptying the buckets and bringing the sap back to the sugar house. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. The average tree produces just a litre, or around a quarter of a gallon. It was hard work, and the fire had to be constantly tended, the temperature and consistency tested, finishing off the maple syrup at the precise moment.
All the gear, the boiler, the pan and the faucets to draw off the final product was made locally in those days, at small operations in Dunham and Waterloo.
Even as late as thirty years ago, many local farmers produced syrup the old way, tapping several hundred to a few thousand trees. Now there are giant maple forests with tens of thousands of taps, sap collected by pipeline and some water pulled out before boiling by something called reverse osmosis. Don't ask.
Many small producers have left the maple syrup world, though some hardy souls remain. New technology and filling out forms defeated them. Quebec, of course, is still the OPEC of the maple syrup world, producing 72% of total production. It’s a billion-dollar business. The syrup still tastes the same, but the romance has gone out of sitting in the sugar house patiently watching the steam, the sap boiling away and turning into maple syrup.
Syrup Lovers Pay More For Canada's Sweet Sap
Two bitter winters have eaten up producers' surplus and hiked prices
By Fred Langan Special to The Christian Science Monitor
April 5, 1994
KNOWLTON, QUEBEC
THE temperature is 32 degrees F., give or take a degree. When the shadows make it colder in the gray and white maple bush, the sap freezes in mid-run, stuck like a tiny icicle on the spile that milks the tree for its annual liquid harvest, maple syrup.
The sap runs when the nights are below freezing and the days warm. When the sap run is late - it only began at the end of March around here - it usually means a short season and higher prices.
`It's just been too cold this year,'' says Lawrence Rhicard, who has made syrup for more than 40 years on his farm in West Bolton outside this village. ``There's so much snow we can't get to all the trees. We should have 3,500 taps, [but] we've only got 2,000.''
What syrup Mr. Rhicard does produce this short season will fetch a higher price for the first time in many years. Two cold winters have done what a government agency failed to do: get rid of most of the surplus of maple syrup hanging over producers in Canada and the United States.
Last week, when the sap was finally running, the syrup poured from Rhicard's wood-burning boiler in his sugar house.
``Forty gallons of water have to go through this roof to make a gallon of syrup,'' Rhicard says through the steam. He draws off some syrup into a cup.
Light amber in color, it is the best grade from the start of the sap run and much thicker than the sap itself with the sweet, unmistakable taste of maple syrup.
Rhicard, one of Quebec's 11,000 maple syrup producers, will make 350 to 400 gallons this year. It is not his best year, though the quality is top grade.
``Some years you can't make good syrup no matter what you do. If it hadn't been so cold we could have made 600 gallons,'' he says, as he lets half-made liquid drip from a ladle and checks its consistency before straining it through a felt liner into an old milk can.
Rhicard produces about 6 to 7 gallons an hour, stoking his boiler with wood while his sons and grandchildren gather sap from buckets hanging from the spiles or taps on maple trees.
This is the old-fashioned way of making maple syrup - gathering the sap from buckets and using wood for the fire. Some producers are more automated, using oil-fired evaporators and vacuum-powered pipelines to suck the sap from the trees.
These large commercial operators can tap 60,000 trees and produce thousands of gallons of syrup.
`The price of syrup is up 10 to 15 cents a pound this year,'' says Michael Herman, president of Turkey Hill Sugar Bush Ltd., a maple syrup bottler and packager in Quebec's Eastern Townships, a major maple syrup producing area. With about 13 pounds in a gallon, that is a price increase of a dollar or two a gallon for the producer.
``It's been cold and that's slowed down production,'' says Mr. Herman, who sells maple syrup products, from maple jam to pure maple syrup. But for producers and farmers, that is not bad news.
There is no shortage of maple syrup, especially in Quebec, which produces more than 70 percent of the world's supply. Just three years ago, there was a large surplus of maple syrup as a Quebec government agency - patterned on ``marketing boards'' that control agricultural products such as chicken, eggs, and milk - tried to control the market.
It didn't work. The Quebec Federation of Maple Syrup Producers was left with a lake of more than 2 million gallons of maple syrup.
`What's left - about a million gallons - isn't so much a surplus as an emergency supply,'' Herman says. ``It shouldn't affect prices on the market.''
Prices are still low because of the small surplus of syrup in Quebec. Prices would be a lot lower without the cold winters.
``It was a very poor year in 1993, so that used up a lot of the surplus,'' says Archie Jones, a retired professor of forestry at McGill University in Montreal, who is still involved in maple syrup groups. ``The price in Quebec is still about $8 a liter; $15 a liter would be normal.''
That translates into US$23 a gallon in Quebec. In neighboring Ontario - a minor producer by comparison - prices are 50 percent higher, and higher still outside other producing areas such as Vermont.