You can buy and sell futures contracts for almost any agricultural commodity in the United States - corn, wheat, etc…
But not onions
Trading in onion futures was banned by the appropriately named Onion Futures act in the 1950s, after two traders cornered the market.
Maybe they had learned from the Tulip Mania?
In terms of a single species, cows comprise the highest biomass on earth, followed by either humans or Antarctic krill.
I looked it up because it sounded interesting. That act was amended to include a ban on box office receipts futures.
And that’s depressing, in an ethical and ecological way. I would have thought that the krill biomass was orders of magnitude above bovines and humans, but that’s where we are now…
It’s because cows are spherical. Highest volume per surface area means the most mass.
And frictionless!
I’m pretty sure it’s because we raise a lot of cows to feed us on a regular basis.
Ah, got it!
Single species excludes the ants, right? Pity, I like it when ants eat cows.
Probably. Insects are in serious decline worldwide, and, as much as they might bug us, we really do need them around, in abundance.
I remember hearing about that in a Planet Money episode.
Yes, in fact that was the caveat in the article. Ants are of many species.
Krill probably do outmass bovines and humans. But there are lots of different species of krill. To do a species-to-species comparison, you have to pick only one krill species.
I saw that too. I couldn’t find any thing that explained why box iffi e receipts futures trading would be banned. I didn’t look very hard though.
This is more important today than it was years ago, because society has emphasized the idea of “One True Name” or “Real” ID.
When I was a kid, you could just choose the name you used. Because when you got old enough to choose your own clothes, of be confirmed, you could choose your own name. Or for writing, or war, or crime, or rent evasion, or any other reason.
Anyway, I’ve recently been seeing Library / Publisher references where they use Blair explicitly, as if you ought to know that Orwell isn’t his ‘real’ name.
As a kid, I watched The Addams Family. And I assumed that Blossom Rock, the actress who portrayed Grandmama was of Native American heritage (based on her name).
Not so. She got her surname from marriage to her husband, Clarence Rock, and she was the older sister of Jeanette MacDonald, the Iron Butterfly.
Is that why people stopped wearing them on their belts?! (As was the style at the time)
…
For you word nerds, I learned the other day that scale (meaning to climb), scale (meaning a machine to weigh stuff) and scale (meaning the skin of a fish) have different word origins.
Other than spelling and pronunciation, these words have nothing to do with each other.
The real-life kid, Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, on whose story Blatty’s “The Exorcist” was based, became an engineer for NASA.