Don’t Fear the Truth

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Basically, stories about rice being rationed at Cosco are a joke, after you read that people in Haiti are eating MUD PIES. This is not a joke, they use a type of clay, add fat to it, and then eat it.

Here is where I get mad.

The US Defense budget is about $500 Billion a year. 2008 is estimated at over $600 Billion. These numbers are just planned budgets, not actual spending. We spend more than this.

The second highest defense budge in the world is China, at about $60 billion per year. Meanwhile “The United Nations estimates that the cost to end world hunger completely, along with diseases related to hunger and poverty, is about $195 billion a year.”

$195 billion a year would end world hunger completely?

So the US could cut its military spending by enough to wipe out world hunger, and still spend 6-7 times more than the number two military country in the world.

Actually, I am not a fan of just sending countries aid. Welfare only keeps people poor, and I don’t think the citizens of these countries just want hand outs - they want the tools and education to make it on their own. Contrary to popular belief not everyone in Africa welcomes the food we send them. To quote the article:

We can continue the endless cycle of need and dependency, or you can create jobs, develop indigenous capacity, and build a sustainable future.

Aid not only crowds out local entrepreneurship, it makes governments lazy and deprives countries of the incentive to build effective institutions. Public revenue derived from taxes makes governments directly responsible to their citizens. Free money builds white elephants and bloated bureaucracies, it being far easier to create new government jobs than implement policies to fight unemployment, especially when someone else is footing the bill.

Some Africans have even asked that the UN stop sending food to Africa.

Lets recap:

• Sending free food to poor nations only encourages corruption and laziness, and ensures the cycle of poverty and hunger continue.
• The US and other industrialized nations continue to send food to poor nations. These nations are still hungry though, people are still dying every day.
• The US alone could cut its military budget by 33% - think about this, just a 33% decrease - apply that money to distributing free food to poor nations, and end world hunger. Yet they do not, they send some food and aid, but continue to spend three times the money on its military than it would take to end world hunger. The US would still, after this decrease, be spending 6-7 times what China, the number two militarized nation in the world, spends on its military.
• “The World Bank wants developing countries to introduce market reforms, including the abolition of protective tariffs, a move that often causes massive damage to local agriculture.”

It would appear then, that if people in power really believed that free food would solve world hunger, that the US on its own could do so pretty easily. Yet we do not.

If the people in power know that sending $195 billion in free food per year would not really fix the problem, why do we continue to send smaller amounts of free food?

A case could be made that the industrialized world does not want too many of the poor countries to industrialize. Especially Africa. As noted above, the World Bank pushes reforms that cause huge problems for poor nations. This article in the NYTimes even shows how Malawi, a country in Africa started feeding its own people and even selling surplus food to other countries - they ignored the advice given to them by the World Bank, and US Economics ‘experts’. This article really proves that the US is purposely trying keep these nations poor, and starving. How? It states:

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers.

The US is planning on spending $288 billion on farm subsidies - yet we tell African nations not to subsidize their own farming. Malawi decides to go on its own and subsidize farming… and now they have so much food, they are exporting it.

Possibly this is not all planned. I would like to think so, actually. But the evidence is pretty strong. Sending free food is not helping, rich nations are counseling poor nations to use economic policies that they themselves do not use. The US could easily wipe out hunger if it truly felt that sending free food would help these countries.

In a time when oil is getting harder to find, maybe people in power understand that natural resources are limited, and the more countries become industrialized, the more we will have to share with the rest of the world. The US could not sustain its lifestyle if we did not import natural resources, and by keeping poor nations from industrializing, we can buy their natural resources and even claim that it helps their country - which it would, if many of the nations in Africa were not controlled by dictators, and overrun with corruption… which is coincidentally, promoted by the policy of sending them free food…

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Earlier this week, after reading the article stating Canada was going to stop the import of these bottles, I started looking online for glass versions of the bottles we have, called Dr Browns Bottles. These are unique bottles, and reduce baby gas immensely. I found out that you could now get glass versions of Dr Brown’s bottles, so I started checking online stores. Amazon had one seller - sold out. eBay had no one selling any of these bottles.

I spent an hour and a half looking at probably fifty online stores - none of them had these bottles. They were all sold out. It appeared that Dr Brown just released these bottles about a month ago, and with this article hitting yahoo.com, people had bought out every store on the net. Amazing.

I kept checking, started looking for other bottles that might be similar to ours. No local stores even carried glass bottles at all. Very frustrating. If you have kids, trying feeding them with a bottle and wondering if your baby is drinking something harmful to them.

This morning I went online to check again - and found some! Sellers on eBay had them! Hey wait a minute… what the hell is up with these prices?

eBay sellers, and one person on Amazon, are price gouging these bottles. Not just a little either. These bottles sell for $12.99 for a set of two. We use about 10 bottles total, including what we send to our daycare. So I expected to pay about $60 plus shipping for 10 bottles.

Here is the list of eBay sellers that have these bottles.

Six bottles = $109. Four bottles = $59. Two bottles = $34!

I am so, so tired of capitalism. Anything for a buck. Now, if someone gouges a Playstation when they are new, and someone wants to pay $1000 for one, fine. In my opinion, this is different. People are scared, and worried that their *babies* are in danger and these freaks decide not to just make a few dollars on the short supply… they triple the price? A few dollars more I could see, but this is no different, in my opinion, than the company that charged $8 for bottled water at the second Woodstock concert. Disgusting.

We got lucky. The Babies-R-Us store an HOUR away had 11 packages, so we now have the glass bottles. I had thought I would buy the remaining bottles and put them on eBay for the price I paid, just to piss off those scum bags making money off of fear, but then realized I was just taking bottles away from someone locally that might need them.

Is this the end of the world? No. But can we have a little humanity please? Nothing is more precious than a baby. At the right, take a look at my 9 month old daughter. Yes, there is nothing any better about my daughter than anyone else’s daughter, but sometimes I think people need to relate to things visually. There are a lot of people out there just like me, who have bundles of joy just like this little rascal here. We deserve to be safe, and that safety comes before profit. I don’t give a shit if your portfolio drops a little because some plastics company’s stock lost value now that they can’t produce cancer causing plastic. We all deserve to be safe, from the newborn baby up to the retired great-grandmother. Is it too much to ask that safety comes before profit?

And the question of the day is: do you think the corporations knew about dangers of BPA when they started using it? Because in case you didn’t know, the chemical companies do not have to prove something is safe to be put on the market - someone else has to prove that they cause problems in humans. Since you can’t test on humans, that is pretty hard to do until the chemical has been around for quite a few years, and you can start to look for trends, etc. Is it coincidental that after 30 years of use, there is growing evidence that Aspartame is dangerous… and lookie here, Splenda is on the market, ready to take over.

This is not the way it should be. Fuck profit, fuck corporatism, and fuck anyone involved in this shit. We can’t even make cigarettes illegal though when we know that they cause cancer, what are our chances of changing how chemicals are allowed into the market so that we can know our kids are safe with the stuff they come into contact every day?

About Zero. The European Union, Canada, and California are all making these chemicals illegal because they will put a ban on something without conclusive evidence. Is it not better to remove something that seems questionable, until it can be proven safe, than it is to say “well until you can prove that it causes cancer in humans, we will continue to make money.”

I’m moving to Canada. Screw this shit.

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Carbon trading futures are a complicated and technical instrument

Isn’t there a lot of talk about how part of the US Economic problem is being caused by banks doing things that are so complicated, many bankers don’t even fully understand it? Complexity on its own does not prove there is anything corrupt about a process - but I think it means people should take a good hard look at it. Complexity can hide problems, corruption, cheating. Why does carbon trading have to be complicated?

This entire post is Just My Opinion. Take it as it is. I don’t have ten links to give evidence that Carbon Trading is a bad thing, or that it is being abused. My gut instinct is that something is wrong. Rich people are going to make more money trading the right to pollute, and if I am not mistaken, the richer the company, the more it can pollute. Does this mean that a fledgling electric company in some third world country will now also be saddled with carbon credits?

Definitely warrants investigation. Anyone have any opinions on this?

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One of them is that Oil is in decline. “Peak Oil” it is called. The amount of oil we can pull from the ground is declining. Natural gas is also getting scarce. Did you know pesticides come from oil, and fertilizer comes from natural gas? The US is having a natural gas shortage, although luckily, the world is not. Should we start importing fertilizer with our already lopsided trade deficit?

The point is, resources are infinite. As we have increased how efficiently we can produce food, the population of the world has gone up. More people equals more usage to finite resources. Think of the difference between using oil to power our cars, and ethanol. Oil is pumped from the ground at little cost, refined, and shipped to gas stations. The alternative, it seems, is to plant crops, use fertilizer made from natural gas, use pesticides made from oil to keep our production efficiency high, and then transport the crops to ethanol plants to make gas.

Fossil fuels are like batteries. There is a huge amount of energy stored inside a gallon of oil. There is not that much energy stored in a gallon bucket filled with corn. It takes a lot of energy to get that gallon bucket of corn, but not so much to get a gallon of oil.

Oil is easy, crops, corn, sugar cane, it does not matter - none of them are as easy as oil. This is why oil is used over other sources of energy. It is easy to obtain and use, so it is cheaper. As oil gets more expensive, people think ‘oh yay, now we can use solar and wind energy.’

This will mean that we, as a nation, or world, will become poorer. Think about rising gas prices - it makes everyone a little bit less wealthy than they were 10 years ago when gas was cheap. It used to cost $1.50 to move a 3000 pound vehicle 20 miles. Now it costs $3+. If we use electric cars, and it costs about $3-4 this helps the environment, but we are still less wealthy than we were when oil and gas were cheap. Spread this concept over the entire world, and we all get a little bit poorer.

Is this bad? Not really, but it is something to think about. The world has become ‘wealthier’ because we are more efficient than we were 20, 30, 100 years ago. We can perform the same tasks with less labor and time needed. This wealth was brought about by having cheap, easy energy. Those days are over, and technology can only get us so far. Will we invent a new space age plastic to make cars lighter and increase fuel mileage? Plastic that uses oil, a finite resource? We can’t move back to metals or wood, since the population has increased we have to import wood as it is (if you think the US does not import rain forest wood, you are sadly mistaken), what happens when plastic toys get expensive? Go back to wood? Metal? Scrap aluminum is already high in price, and metals are also a finite resource. Hell there is a shortage of SILICON for christ’s sake. How will we use our computers to design and invent new ways to help us when we are running out of silicon to make computer chips with?

The second elephant is population. Unfortunately, people having more than two kids are dooming my children’s future, your future, and your kid’s future. My children will likely not have the option of having 3 or 4 kids. My wife and I thought about a third child (we have two) but I doubt we will, and I think that if oil shortages start happening, more and more people will start to talk about the fact that our world simply cannot, and will not, sustain all of the people it has on it. Peak Oil, Global Warming, take your pick (I still cling to the theory that Global Warming is a cover for Peak Oil) either way, the days of cheap energy are over. Which is really saying ‘the days of easy wealth are over’. What was life like before fossil fuels? Harsh. The only hope my children have of a good life, I think, are if the world gets educated and realizes that our population needs to decrease, not increase. One child per couple anyone?

An economist would laugh at you for saying this. A decrease in population would be disastrous to our economy. It is like we are on a huge train going 100 mph and accelerating faster every year, and if we even slow down, it will derail. Amazing.

Recycling only delays the inevitable. The only limitless resource is solar, wind, and water energy. We should have been building solar arrays 40 years ago, but the oh so great Capitalist system is unfortunately *reactionary*, and it is its greatest flaw. We are only looking at solar power after oil climbs in price. Only our government could force changes, give incentives, subsidies, etc. to force change early, and unfortunately our oil companies and lobbyists ensured that did not happen. When people cannot drive to work because there is no gas, will we find the CEO of Exxonmobil and drag him into the streets I wonder? Hard to say. People will be pissed though. Think gas shortages are impossible? Read the article, it talks about oil shortages. China is not the only reason oil is climbing in price, it is also that oil is in decline and people in the know realize it, and are driving up the price buying oil futures.

So if the Seattle Times is talking about oil shortages… hmmm… it seems convenient that the most powerful army in the world is situated in the country with the 5th largest oil reserves in the world. How convenient. Look at this list.

Of the top 8 nations, all of them were our ally except three in 2000. Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela. What are the countries most talked about as trouble makers in the media again? What country did we invade?

If the train goes 100 mph slows down, people like Bush, Cheney, Gore, and the Clintons all get poorer. Gotta make sure the trains run on time…

If you start doing some reading about Peak Oil, natural gas shortages, and how much we rely on fossil fuels for much much more than gasoline and electricity, you will never look at pictures like this one the same ever again. Most people see beauty, I now see a whole lotta people needing a shitload of fossil fuels to exist. What will all those people do? What will any of us do?

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What happens is that manufacturers pack their packaging to be safe when shipped on a pallet. Look at the Nintendo Wii picture. Nintendo has styrofoam protecting the unit, but this amount of protection is not adequate for shipping the item through UPS, Fedex or the Post Office. They protect the item from being bumped around, not from being tossed into a UPS truck. In my experience if you do not think that a package could survive being dropped 4 feet onto the ground, you need more packaging before sending it on a UPS truck. I don’t think many people would drop a Wii box from that height - common sense tells you it need more protection.

There is also the problem that Nintendo (or any manufacturer) prints their boxes for retail sale. If you shipped the Wii box directly through UPS, you would have a bunch of UPS employees handling that box that all know there is a Wii inside. During Christmas season, how many of these would get ‘lost’? Exactly.

The end result of this is that any reseller like an Amazon.com will repack almost anything. Now back to the problem of how carriers charge their customers. As I said, they do not charge a premium until the box gets to a specific size. In the past, carriers would just charge a minimum weight once your package got to a set dimension. So for example, if you had a ten pound box, but your box was too big, they might charge you the thirty pound weight class, so you would pay as if your package weighed 30 pounds. With UPS, there were three tiers, called OS1, OS2, and OS3.

What do resellers do? They buy boxes that are just under that limit, and try to get everything they can into those boxes. When they buy boxes that are over the first ‘tier’, they will buy boxes that are just under the limit of the second tier. Why do this?

The cost of a slightly larger box is negligible compared to trying to stock 1000 different box sizes. Look at the Wii picture again. If whoever shipped that unit had put it in a box that was perfect for it (generally two to three inches larger on each side) it would cost them *exactly* the same to ship it as it cost to ship it in the larger box, except for the extra cost of the box, and the cost of the extra packing.

How would a Amazon.com know to stock boxes exactly that size? What happens when the next order comes down the line, and the item is about the size of the Wii box, but 5 inches longer? Do they stock a box for that item too? The problem here is that a company would have to get a larger warehouse, and stockpile a lot more boxes to get more efficient. No company wants to do this. And they have no incentive to either.

In the last year, UPS and I think Fedex have instituted ‘Dimensional Weights’. Now if your box is of a certain size, you figure out the density of the item using a formula provided by UPS. If the ‘Dimensional Weight’ of a box is sixty-five pounds, but your item weighs thirty, you still pay the sixty-five pound rate. Note though that this only applies to packages over a certain size. No one buying cds or books or cameras or even a laptop will ever have to worry about this. You need to get a box larger than 17″ cube to have Dimensional Weights kick in. This is a pretty sizable box.

What should happen is that all carriers should charge based on density for every package. One more time, look at the Wii picture. Now think of a tractor trailer filled with boxes just like that. Obviously, half of the truck is being used to ship not much more than air, and extra packaging (read: oil based product).

If carriers shipped this way, we could get more on a truck. This is happening already in a way, as UPS has already started charging based on dimensions, but not for all packages. This is a step forward, but not the best solution. UPS instituted this change because the cost of shipping has increased due to oil prices.

Why would we not then just charge this way for every package, and every carrier? How much gasoline could be saved just by UPS and Fedex shipping this way? I would think quite a bit would be saved. Why don’t carriers do this?

It is inconvenient. If you have shipped through the post office, you will see they just weigh a box, price it and ship it. If you bring in a pretty big box, they pull out a tape measure and measure it. If we did this with every package, they would have to measure every package every time.

Are you willing to wait in line more often at the Post Office, to help the environment? Unfortunately we cannot fix our problems by CFL light bulbs, Hybrids and Ethanol. At some point we need to be a little inconvenienced to do something good. This whole article is just one small example of how we could really change things - but those changes won’t be made because they inconvenience people. You might say “well as gas gets more expensive, carriers will make these changes anyway, that is how Capitalism works.”

Well not exactly. What happens is that UPS will incur more costs if gas gets more expensive, and will want to cut costs in *any area* of their business to compensate. If they worry that shipping every item using dimensional weights would irritate customers, they might cut costs by say… reducing the amount they pay on their employee’s medical insurance. Hey wait. Is there a huge problem with companies not wanting to pay for health care in America? Are the costs of doing business going up a lot due to increased energy costs?

Well what do you know. I am not saying that gas prices are making UPS cut health insurance, but eventually, companies will look for any way to cut costs to stay competitive. This is the Huge Flaw In Capitalism, in my opinion. Competition forces companies to be more efficient, but that change to gain efficiency might only be good for the company’s bottom line, and be very bad for society and/or our environment.

As a society, we need to say that we will deal with the inconvenience to help the environment, I think. If all carriers did this, and all manufacturers worked on this issue, it would be a huge cut in oil usage. Global Warming or Peak Oil, take your pick of issues…either way we must get more efficient or suffer the consequences. With things like this, we cannot afford to do nothing and in 10 years say ‘well hindsight is always 20/20 - who knew?’

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