Cargill used to be a customer of mine. At the time, they were the largest privately-owned company in the world. They also had the second largest private rail transport fleet.

Anyhow, Cargill's original business was buying grain from grain elevators and selling it on the exchanges. When you buy grain on an exchange (and probably other comodities, I don't know), you buy an amount of the commodity at a particular *time*, and at a particular *place*. Cargill built the largest grain transport system in the world. Because of this, they could actually "take delivery" of the grain they bought, because they had the ability to send a "unit train" to go pick up the order. Well, you can see where this leads: commodity arbitrage. They know transport costs to the 4th or 5th decimal place, they own the infrastructure, and they can thus buy on one exchange, say Kansas City April, and sell it across the country at another price. That's the limit of my understanding of this incredibly complex system and business envonronment. Except for one other thing:

All of this requires communication. They actually have the ability to divert rail freight already enroute to take advantage of changing market conditions. They built a communication system that was a sort of private email system that linked the entire US. This was decades before ubiquitous email, and they shouldered the cost of the infrastructure.

It was very, very expensive to send these messages and not much bandwidth was available, so a language evolved of excessive shortening of words. "Thought" is "thot", etc., but to a truly absurd degree. Its a hodge-podge language of phonetic spelling, abbreviation, etc.

Its now considered kind of a badge to send emails in this cryptic jargon, because it supposedly indicates you were there in the way-back-when days of the company. Its so prestegious that relatively new employees actually pick it up as an affectation. When you see an email from one of the real codgers, it's almost unreadable.

Jim