Miscellany

#Ferguson up close on twitter

11/25/2014

It's easy not to notice things that happen out of site. If you were in Ferguson, Oakland, Seattle or New York City last night you might've had a hard time avoiding the sights and sounds of widespread civil unrest.

But here in rural, densely wooded Northern California -- it would have been easy to miss. Unless you're on Twitter. There's a lot of things that Twitter doesn't do well, but it's an excellent tool for crowd-sourcing first person narratives and multimedia from emerging news events.

mapping the #Ferguson effect on social media

11/25/2014

When news broke about the grand jury declining to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, twitter and other social media networks exploded with tweets, retweets, photos and vines showing what things were like on the ground in #Ferguson, Oakland, Seattle and New York. Since Monday night, protests have spread to other cities as well.

http://srogers.cartodb.com/viz/4a5eb582-23ed-11e4-bd6b-0e230854a1cb/embed_map

Fireweed Farms auction nets $600K for 400 lbs

11/16/2014

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Regional media outlets covering Saturday's legal marijuana auction in Prosser, Wash., have reported that there were 400 pounds available and that the organizers netted roughly $600,000 for an average wholesale selling price of $1,500 per pound.

That compares favorably against wholesale marijuana prices in Northern California, where many pirate and quasi-legal medical growers have long feared that legalization of recreational marijuana will decimate the commodity's value. When Proposition 19 was on the ballot in 2009, which would've legalized recreational use of marijuana in California, growers in Southern Humboldt feared that prices might drop as low as $500 per pound. Despite Prop 19's failure at the ballot box, harvest season prices for NorCal growers have dipped below $1,000 per pound in some cases -- particularly if the crop had problems with mites or mold.

The Fireweed Farm auction was reportedly supervised by officials from the state Liquor Control Board, and only licensed retailers and processors were permitted to bid. This is a much more regulated model of distribution than the one that's emerged in California's medicinal marijuana dispensary network -- where purchasing typically takes place behind closed doors.

The additional regulation, limiting the number of buyers and sellers through a licensing process, may in part be responsible for the $1,500 per pound average Fireweed Farms netted at their auction. It's also possible that the wholesale price of marijuana by the pound will decrease over time as the novelty wears off.

For now, however, there are a probably a lot of black-market growers in Northern California who would love to get the kind of prices that Fireweed Farms did this weekend.

(Source: The Tri-city Herald http://bit.ly/1BET2FW)

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historic marijuana auction in washington state

11/15/2014

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The Smell the Truth blog at SFGate (which is not actually written or edited by the SFGate staff) has been circulating the flyer below. Fireweed Farm could not be reached for comment Saturday afternoon, as calls to the number listed on www.fireweedfarm.com went directly to a recorded messaging saying that "the person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time."

If successful, the Fireweed Farm auction will provide an example of a legal distribution model which is wildly different from the dominant business model that emerged in California's medical marijuana market. California growers looking to do business with the state's network of medical marijuana dispensaries tend to have a lot of competition.

In recent years, particularly after the collapse of the wholesale marijuana market, many medical growers have had difficulty selling their crop to a limited number of legal buyers. For rural growers this process generally involves risky long-distance road trips, delivering samples to the dispensaries.

The auction model, on the other hand, may effectively bring clients directly to the farmer. It may also provide reliable data Washington's wholesale climate, using bidding information to find out what entrepreneurs are willing to pay in the state's emerging marijuana economy.

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"Daily mail or stormfront?" compares news site users to neo-nazis

11/4/2013

Godwin's Law states that any and every dialogue on the internet will eventually make reference to Hitler and\or nazis if permitted to continue on long enough. This 10 question quiz from usvsth3m.com skips a few steps and starts by asking readers to look at out-of-context comments from visitors websites for The Daily Mail (a prominent UK media outlet) and Stormfront.org (an online chat forum for white nationalists).

The comments have clearly been curated on a selective basis -- but the results are still surprising. Although each and every comment is laced with some degree of racial prejudice or xenophobic speech, it's hard to guess which website some of the comments came from.

Daily Mail

Let them get on with their tribal ways. they don't want the modern world and we don't want them. Leave them be.
they should now tip thes [gypsy] camps upside down, i bet there is loads of missing kids there, disgusting people.
How long will it be before the star spangled banner gets replaced by the crescent?

Stormfront

Chavs? Hanging's too good for them. They should be rounded up like cattle, and shot like pigs.
I am not opposed to the office of Monarch. I am opposed to the criminals who occupy the post today.
Remember, King is etymolically related to kin, therfore an ideal king/queen will be concerned with their kin (nation) only.

It may not be fair to draw conclusions here. Selective sampling appears to be a factor. A quick look through comments posted to the Daily Mail's website indicates that explicitly racist or xenophobic statements are uncommon, and they're far less prevalent than than usvsth3m.com's quiz seems to suggest.

Still -- the arguably weak data here raises more questions than it answers.

Fire Fall 2013

5/6/2013

#Ferguson up close on twitter

mapping the #Ferguson effect on social media

Fireweed Farms auction nets $600K for 400 lbs

historic marijuana auction in washington state

"Daily mail or stormfront?" compares news site users to neo-nazis

Fire Fall 2013

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