Would you like dung with that? Elephant-style coffee $50 a cup

The Sydney Morning Herald

December 10, 2012

Lindsay Murdoch

A new brand of gourmet coffee comes from coffee beans hand-picked from Thai elephant dung and its price might leave a nasty taste in your mouth.

BANGKOK: Coffee connoisseurs are rushing to pay $50 a cup as the wives of mahouts in northern Thailand eagerly wait to pick through piles of fresh elephant dung.

In a world first, coffee made from pure arabica beans are being slow cooked in the stomachs of a herd of 30 elephants, plucked 30 hours later from their dung, then washed and roasted.

No, the result is not a crap-puccino, promoted as ''good to the last dropping''.

Nice work ... a mahout's wife jokingly holds a basket of beans below an elephant's tail. Photo: AP

Those who have tried Black Ivory Coffee say it tastes of ''milk chocolate, nutty, earthy with hints of spice and red berries''.

Anantara Hotels, Resorts and Spas, a luxury hotel group, is selling the coffee at its hotels in northern Thailand, the Maldives and Abu Dhabi. Business is brisk despite the price tag of $US1100 ($1049) a kilogram.

Correspondents from Bangkok have made the journey to the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos and Burma, meet to witness the jumbo baristas at work and to sip the product.

''When an elephant eats coffee, its stomach acid breaks down the protein found in coffee, which is a key factor in bitterness,'' Blake Dinkin, a Canadian who has spent $US300,000 developing the brand told Associated Press. ''You end up with a cup that's very smooth without the bitterness of regular coffee.''

The coffee beans, hand-picked by villagers on hillsides, stew together with bananas, sugar cane and other ingredients in the elephants' vegetarian diet.

The first batch of 70 kilograms has already sold out and Mr Dinkin hopes to produce six times that amount next year.

Black Ivory is not the first novelty coffee to hit the market in recent years. Coffee passed through civets sells for a similar price. In 2010 the Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, raised eyebrows when he presented then prime minister Kevin Rudd with Kopi Luwak, or civet coffee, during a visit to Australia.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/would-you-like-dung-with-that-elephantstyle-coffee-50-a-cup-20121209-2b3m8.html#ixzz2EhZkxZ3Y

The golden rules for happiness, wealth and stress-free living

Date

The Sydney Morning Herald, November 3, 2012

Marcus Padley

Half the stockmarket game is about making profits, the other half about avoiding losses. Photo: James Davies

HERE are 10 sharemarket lessons you should already know:

■Let's start with an oldie but a goodie. If you find yourself standing up at your dealing desk punching the air in delight, it means ''Sell!''

■And another one. If anyone ever says ''we have entered a new paradigm in equity investment'', sell.

■There is only one thing a falling share price tells you and it's not ''BUY ME''. I do not know what it is about Australian culture, but if something falls in price, everyone wants to buy it. I cannot tell you the number of times my wife has told me ''It's OK, it was 25 per cent off''. She could have saved 100 per cent. A falling share price means ''SELL'' not ''BUY''. It's technical analysis 101.

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■The market falls three times as fast as it rises. An academic study into behavioural finance once concluded that losses have three times the emotional impact of a gain. It explains a lot. Fear is a faster driver than confidence. It takes a lot longer to become confident than fearful.

■Humans are not natural investors. We need mechanisms outside the ramblings of the brain to protect equity investments. Unemotional triggers because our natural triggers of fear and greed are useless.

■No one ever tells you to sell. Step on to a car lot and expect to be sold a car. Appear in the offices of the finance industry and expect to be told to invest. We are there to get you in, not let you out. So when you want to sell, it will have to be your decision. Expect to meet resistance.

■There are no crystal balls. When it comes to tomorrow, financial theory tells you to look at history and project it forward. It's rubbish. Tomorrow is not a reflection of the past but is in fact a blank canvas. Historic returns are not future expectations, they are statistics.

■If half the game is about making profits, then the other half is almost certainly avoiding losses. It's about not stuffing it up. It's almost more important than getting it right. To control losses you need to watch what happens to your investments after you have bought them and act when proved wrong. It is this latter bit that the buy-and-hold philosophy turns a blind eye to and that's why it doesn't work except in hindsight on select examples. Buy and hold was never alive, its weaknesses were just hidden by a bull market.The guy that came up with the line ''if you never sell, you never take a loss'' is an idiot. Sometimes you wonder if long-term diversified investment isn't really just a concept the finance industry came up with as an excuse for not having to pay attention. I'm sure Babcock & Brown, ABC Learning and Pasminco were all long-term investments once.

■Timing the market. If you want to save yourself 10 years of going nowhere, it is clear that occasionally you are going to have to time the market. But let that not dismay you, timing is half the fun. Making a judgment and taking a risk is why we're here and the finance industry would do well to embrace it rather than hide in the cliche that you can't. If the finance industry is going to survive, if we are ever going to differentiate ourselves from the execution-only alternatives, we have to have a stab at it. At telling people ''when'' as well as ''what''.

■Be good to your kids. Those kids you're going to pack off to primary school on Monday are the first generation of investors who will have no experience of the 2008 crash and are therefore the first generation capable of irrational exuberance once again. We will be selling them all our assets at the top one day. So smile and be nice. It's us and them.

Marcus Padley is a stockbroker with Patersons Securities and the author of sharemarket newsletter Marcus Today. For a free trial go to marcustoday.com.au. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Patersons.

No such thing as ownership when it's an e-book

No such thing as ownership when it's an e-book

Date

The Sydney Morning Herald, November 3, 2012

Linda Morris

Features write

BUYERS of e-books may have no more legal rights than ''tenant farmers'', it has emerged, following the case of a Kindle user whose digital library was wiped by Amazon.

The fine print in online agreements inserted at the behest of publishers to protect authors' copyright licenses readers to the digital files but does not grant ''tangible'' ownership, as with any hard copy book.

These conditional e-book licences are policed and can be revoked at the discretion of the e-book retailer as a Norwegian Kindle customer discovered when in October they allegedly violated Amazon's terms and conditions and had their digital library deleted, then reinstated.

No right to read ... Amazon removed George Orwell'sAnimal Farm from their customer's kindles.

Readers are also physically prevented from transferring content to friends and immediate family or between devices by encryption software called Digital Rights Management, devised to protect a creator's copyright from piracy and prevent buyers from on-selling the digital file for profit.

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The case of ''repossession'' has been seized on by the copyright activist and Canadian science writer Cory Doctorow, who sells DMR-free copies of his own books to argue for unshackled ownership of e-books. 

On his blog spot Boing Boing, Doctorow said digital licensing deals circumvented the right for books to be transferred, sold or bequeathed to another person, rendering the reader a mere ''tenant farmer''.

Readers' limited rights are one of the main pitfalls with e-books as sold by some retailers, the president of the Australian Booksellers Association, Jon Page, said.

''This is not the first time Amazon has done something like this. They famously removed George Orwell's 1984 from everybody's Kindles when they discovered they didn't have the rights to sell the e-book. This is very easy for the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google to do because they force their customers to store e-book purchases in their walled garden or cloud through their devices and apps."

Retailers like Kobo and ReadCloud make it easier for customers to download e-book files to their computer so they can keep a copy of the digital file on their own system, Page said. ''But it does highlight the fact that e-books are software and that you are purchasing a licence to read - a licence that can be revoked.''

''The inability to legally on-sell or on-distribute digital products may be something which consumers consider in determining whether to purchase a hard copy or a digital product - this will apply to books, but also to products such as CDs.''

Ultimately the convenience of digital reading outweighed most people's concerns, said Joel Naoum, the publisher of the Australian digital-only imprint Momentum.