pageld

As a 1st world farm kid who regularly still 'helps' during fall and spring, this is what I have experienced. My parents don't run a ton of acres, but they definitely make a living off of it.

Fossil Fuels/Brittleness It 'used' to be everyone at least rotated crops every year (corn, soy, wheat, corn) to put nitrogen back in the soil in a more natural process. Now, the rotations are more like corn, corn, corn, soy, corn. Since the soybeans aren't there to put nitrogen back in the soil, farmers use literal tons of oil produced nitrogen. When gas prices are high, my dad's not complaining about the 300 gallons of diesel a day per tractor he's using. He's talking about the increase in nitrogen prices. The price increases have made it so that farmers used to be able to break even at about 2.50 a bushel for corn. Now its something like 4.50. That's a huge jump when you're now getting 200+ bushels per acre and in the 1990's 170 bushels was a great year.

Diversity A few years ago (can't quite remember) there was a huge scare of European corn borer destroying all of one type of corn. It was the crop equivalent of the bird flu scare. It turned out to not happen, but the possibility is still there. Now that we're less diverse one 'superbug' or bad weather year could take out everything.

There isn't anything related to farming on there. Seems odd, especially when they're just talking about revenue and with how much money is in that sector right now.

At 6.60 / bushel corn @ 200 bushels per acre, it "only" takes 760 acres of corn to break the $1M revenue barrier. 760 acres isn't necessarily a lot and can be definitely run by one person, especially with some contractor help.

It probably has something to do with what's classified as a Non-Employer, but it just seems like it should be there.

I used it and it was amazing. My utility replaced it with something called SmartHub, which is almost as good. You just can't embed it anywhere. I always like using the iGoogle thing with my power widget on there. Could always tell when I didn't shut down the computer.

Ford Sync and OnStar somehow already do this. I'm just guessing, but it probably just makes a phone call like "Air bags deployed at xxx lat yyy long location. This has been an automated call."

I know it goes against most people, but I bought a dog from a breeder. Basically just to see its parents and how it acted around its litter.

My wife and I adopted a Lab two years earlier from a humane society. When she went through puberty, she started acting "off". As in she'd be playing, stop, have no depth in her eyes, and bite you if you got near her. 40 seconds later she was fine and she didn't even know what happened. She even bit the last trainer when she had one of her "seizures." The rest of the time she did every trick and voice command perfectly. After we that, we decided we had to put her down. We spent probably $2000 on training in the year-ish we had her not including the hours calling universities and whatnot for advice.

After many hours of researching, we found out her dad "might have been" a German Shepherd used in dog fighting that had other issues. That dog was shot like a coyote because it kept on tormenting cattle. Would have been nice to know that ahead of time.

We didn't want to go through that again. So we paid the $800, drove 6 hours, saw our new dog get corrected by its father, and be genuinely rambunctious. Now when we go on vacation people argue for the rights to take care of him instead of saying no way.

It's amazing what knowing the family history can do to your stress levels.

Like anything, it's just a title. However, how I view it is as someone that is responsible for a "product." A product can be a module, function or full fledged widget, but the product manager is responsible for the item itself. They don't necessarily worry about sales and exactly 'how' things get done. But they have a responsibility for it so they better have an idea of what's going on.

I consider myself a PM and this is what I do:

Srum Lead

Sprint Planning / Release Management

"Tier 3" Support

Documentation Editor

Question Answerer Guy (Why does this piece of software do this and why is this link not blue?)

I'm also the liaison between management and the engineering staff.

There is some more official type stuff on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_manager

Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer. But a lot of people didn't end up liking what he did. Some still say that he ruined the country. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what he should have/have not done, but I know a lot of people that despise the man.

After stating that, I still would like to see more engineering types in leadership positions because engineers are more data driven. However, most engineers are too busy building things to run for office.