milking the consumer

1 Competition is supposed to drive down prices, unless, of course, firms are competing against each other as to who can screw the consumer the hardest through collusion! Hooray for free markets!

2 BBC's anatomy of what appears to be a disasterously American idiocy.

3 Who says that Americans are largely desensitized to violence? Certainly not the VT victims!

4 Save the environment, eat a kangaroo!

Why do people complain that solutions to being environmentally responsible are costly and all that jazz when they come up with even more convoluted, potentially disastrous solutions? Bacteria in livestock? Yeah, like that's a system we can fully control. Not, you know, the highly mechanized, extremely precise industrial and transportation machinery that is responsible for nearly half of the remaining GHG emissions globally. Also, the solution should not necessarily be just make the livestock flatulate less, but to grow them in an environment that's more conducive to health - also known as eliminating industrialized, "factory" farms. That would help a lot, not that anyone appears to be proposing such a solution with any real vigor.

5 This could've been a straight Onion article, lol. Had they published it in 2006, many people would've laughed at its blatant absurdity.

6 110% dude, WTF? Not a single person needed to use the lavatory OR thought to clean said lavatory in FOUR DAYS? Yeah, mark that on my list as the 1001^th place I need to see before I croak.

7 I'm surprised he didn't just say "E.T. phone home" and cackle at his wit.

Walking home from bowling I had a thought: the current Industrial Revolution (e.g., 'modern' society post 1700-ish) is experiencing a condensed form of resource abuse in the same style as agriculture did. The Middle East used to be quite habitable, and there is evidence to suggest intensive farming by humans is a large part of the reason it's so arid today (not universally). Until people thought of things like crop rotation or terraced farming, we were on a path to self-destruction (albeit over a much longer time horizon and with a lot lower public knowledge of the consequences). Industry finds itself in the same predicament today, whether it cares to admit it or not.

My hope/dream is that we can one day find new ways to fully make use of the land, in the same way modern farmers have been able to (and like native Americans used to in their hunting). If we could live in a "carbon neutral" society, whereby we exhausted only those emissions absorbed by plants through photosynthesis, or didn't emit anything beyond negligible emissions at all, that would truly be a great achievement for civilization.