Report says justification for apathy/nihilism rises sharply

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Two-thirds of world's resources 'used up':
The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure.

The study contains what its authors call 'a stark warning' for the entire world. The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself.

- Because of human demand for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel, more land has been claimed for agriculture in the last 60 years than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined.

- An estimated 24% of the Earth's land surface is now cultivated.

- Water withdrawals from lakes and rivers has doubled in the last 40 years. Humans now use between 40% and 50% of all available freshwater running off the land.

- At least a quarter of all fish stocks are overharvested. In some areas, the catch is now less than a hundredth of that before industrial fishing.

- Since 1980, about 35% of mangroves have been lost, 20% of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and another 20% badly degraded.

- Deforestation and other changes could increase the risks of malaria and cholera, and open the way for new and so far unknown disease to emerge.

Financial Times recap:
Salmon farms are far more lethal to wild fish populations than previously thought, according to a study published today, that urges countries to reconsider rules governing fish farming.

After tracking and testing more than 5,000 wild salmon off Canada's Pacific coast, researchers concluded that sea lice from fish farms were to blame for dwindling stocks of wild salmon. Sea lice is harmless in the wild, because only mature salmon are exposed to the parasite.

Battery recharges 80% in one minute

Toshiba preps minute-charge 'miracle' battery | The Register:
Toshiba has developed a Lithium-Ion battery capable of being charged to 80 per cent of its full capacity in under 60 seconds. Filling it up takes just 'a few more minutes', the company boasted today.

Toshiba 'one-minute charge' Li-ion batteryThat's considerably faster than today's Li-ion rechargeables which can take 1-4 hours to reach 80 per cent capacity, and even longer to fill completely.

No surprise. Post-play payment for product placement in songs

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Well placed:
Now McDonald's, which has weathered more attacks on its marketing strategy than most in recent years, appears to be following suit. According to Advertising Age magazine, the fast food chain has offered to pay rappers up to �2.70 ($5) every time a song name-checking the Big Mac is played.

Ready to wake up?

Gear Live | SLEEPTRACKER Watch Review:
The SLEEPTRACKER watch is unique in that while it tells you the time and has a built-in alarm like every other digital watch, this one actually monitors your sleep and wakes you at the moment that your body would best adjust from moving from a sleeping state to being awake.

B.C is boring, overly Christian, conservative, and, did I say, boring.

Satirical comic response to B.C.'s inherent unfunniness as a comic strip. Beautiful!

candy dish
Posted by Hello

Spring roads
Spring is back and the camera feels so good again.
Posted by Hello

Douglas Adams on Astrology

I lean toward this...

Mostly Harmless
- I know that astrology isn't a science, said Gail. Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or what's that strange thing you British play?
- Er, cricket? Self-loathing?
- Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.

Tom Waits' 20 favorite albums of all time

The Observer:
In the first of an occasional series in which the greatest recording artists reveal their favourite records, Tom Waits writes about his 20 most cherished albums of all time. So for the lowdown on Zappa and Bill Hicks, step right up...

A new quote I love

Ever since reading these words a few days ago, they keep circling in my head. I really love them. I think the writer of them seems pretty damn cool also.
"I'd rather be honest, and share everything I could think of, than be secretive & deceptive; better to be hated for what I am than be loved for what I am not"

Feedlot consolidation

Oligopoly Watch:
The latest move in the ever-tighter US meat market is news of a joint venture between cattle stockyard company ContiBeef and pork and beef packer Smithfield Foods. The new, as yet unnamed company, to be owned jointly by Smithfield and ContiBeef's owner ContiGroup, will merge the feedlot operations of the two companies, creating an even more dominant player in the feedlot layer of the beef industry.
...
This is not just an alliance between two big (but not yet dominant) beef feedlot companies. It is also a tie between the top two and dominant competitors in hog farming. As such, it creates a friendly alliance between what the naïve might assume to be bitter rivals.

Cotton-picking Monsanto

Oligopoly Watch:
Monsanto recently announced that it would acquire Emergent Genetics, Inc., a company that develops genetically modified (GM) cotton seed. The $300 million deal will increase the company's GM presence. Monsanto is already the US leader in corn and soybean seeds. It already has a major position in cotton.

Emergent Genetics is the third-largest cotton seed supplier in the US (after Syngenta and Monsanto), with a reported 12% market share. Monsanto clearly sees that it can use its market power and biotechnology capabilities to build that share. Emergent has a major presence in India and some other cotton-growing companies.

This acquisition comes only a few weeks after the announcement of Monsanto's plan to buy Seminis, a leading vegetable and fruit seed company.

Monsanto now leading supplier of produce seeds

Oh, great. This just sucks. Man, how I hate Monsanto. Here comes major GMO produce.

Oligopoly Watch: Monsanto, the world's leading supplier of crop seeds has announced it will acquire privately-held Seminis, the leading supplier of fruit and vegetable seeds in the world. Seminis provides some 3,500 varieties of seeds to farmers and distributors. The deal between the two US-based companies will go for around $1.4 billion.

Pepsico... Tricon... YUM

It's so hard to keep up with the changes. I've been thinking for a long time that Pizza Hut and KFC and Taco Bell were owned by Pepsi. I guess that changed back in 1997. I need a chart; no, I need a really big Venn diagram showing who owns what. I'll go looking.

Oligopoly Watch:
Tricon began life as a spin-off form Pepsico in 1997. The thought was that the returns were lower in the restaurant business that Pepsi had acquired over the previous decades. In 2002, The spin-of has been beneficial for both entities. Tricon changed its name to the comical name Yum! Brands, which was based on its stock exchange symbol (YUM).

The produce world

I've let one of my favorite websites, Oligopoly Watch, sit around gathering cobwebs on my RSS feeder; so, I'm wandering through it today. This article about produce caught my eye.

Bagged salad, for example, is something that did not exist before 1990. That has its own interesting economics. AN article in The Guardian ("Bugs, Sweat and fears", 5/1/2004) traces that category in the UK, but the trends are likely similar in the US or in other industrialized countries. Author Felicity Lawrence's observartions:

* 2/3 of UK households buy bagged salads regularly
* The value of the UK salad vegetable market grew by 90% between 19912 and 2002
* But overall salad volumes had grown only by 18% in that period
* Conclusion: People were paying a lot more for almost the same amount of salad.
* New packaging which seals cut greens in the optimum air mix of oxygen and carbon dioxide gives these salads a much lengthen shelf life (10 days or more). This allows salad vegetables to be sourced anywhere around the world.
* Scientific tests from the Rome Institute of Food and Nutrition have indicated severe loss of vitamins and anti-oxidants from the bagged salad due to preparation techniques. This is also due to the use of chlorine to disinfect the salad and kill any bugs, listeria, and ecoli.
* These salads, more than ever, are prepared in massive, intensive farms using illegal labor.

I found the original Guardian article reproduced here.

AlterNet: The 10 Worst Corporations of 2004

AlterNet: The 10 Worst Corporations of 2004:
The no-repeat rule forbids otherwise-deserving companies – like Bayer, Boeing, Clear Channel and Halliburton – from returning to the 10 Worst list in 2004.

Abbott Laboratories: Drug-Pricing Chutzpah
In December 2003, the company raised the U.S. price of its anti-AIDS drug Norvir (generic name ritanovir) by 400 percent. That is, unless the product is used in conjunction with other Abbott products – in which case the price increase is zero.

American International Group Inc.: Deferred Prosecutions On the Rise
Merrill, AIG and PNC are three of 10 major corporations that have settled serious criminal charges with deferred prosecution, no prosecution or de facto no prosecution agreements over the last two years. Companies are getting off the criminal hook with these agreements, which were originally intended for minor street crimes. Now they are being used in very serious corporate crime cases.

Coca-Cola: KillerCoke.org vs. CokeKills.org
"To date, there have been a total of 179 major human rights violations of Coca-Cola's workers, including nine murders. Family members of union activists have been abducted and tortured. Union members have been fired for attending union meetings. The company has pressured workers to resign their union membership and contractual rights, and fired workers who refused to do so."
"Most troubling to the delegation were the persistent allegations that paramilitary violence against workers was done with the knowledge of and likely under the direction of company managers."

Dow Chemical: Forgive Us Our Trespasses
Today in Bhopal, at least 150,000 people, including children born to parents who survived the disaster, are suffering from exposure-related health effects such as cancer, neurological damage, chaotic menstrual cycles and mental illness. Over 20,000 people are forced to drink water with unsafe levels of mercury, carbon tetrachloride and other persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals.

GlaxoSmithKline: Deadly Depressing
With the antidepressant Paxil (generic name: paroxetine), the story was driven primarily from the United Kingdom, by the BBC program Panorama and a public interest group called Social Audit. They called attention to the severe side effects from the drugs; notably that they are addictive and lead to increased suicidality in youth.

Hardee's: Heart Attack on a Bun
Eating one Thickburger is like eating two Big Macs or five McDonald's hamburgers. Add 600 calories worth of Hardee's fries and you get more than the 2,000 calories that many people should eat in a whole day, according to Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Merck: 55,000 Dead
Testifying before a Senate committee in November, Dr. Graham put the number in United States who had suffered heart attacks or stroke as result of taking the arthritis drug Vioxx in the range of 88,000 to 139,000. As many as 40 percent of these people, or about 35,000-55,000, died as a result, Graham said.

McWane: Death on the Job
Nine McWane employees have lost their lives in workplace accidents since 1995. More than 4,600 injuries were recorded among the company's 5,000 employees.

Riggs Bank: The Pinochet Connection
An explosive report from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, issued in July, revealed that Riggs illegally operated bank accounts for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and routinely ignored evidence of corrupt practices in managing more than 60 accounts for the government of Equatorial Guinea.

Wal-Mart: The Workfare Company
The company takes in more than one in five dollars spent nationally on food sales, and market researcher Retail Forward predicts Wal-Mart will control more than a third of food store industry sales, as well as a quarter of the drug store industry, by 2007. Wal-Mart is the largest jewelry seller in the United States, "despite the fact that the prime target market for jewelry – high-income women from 25 to 54 years – are the least likely of all consumers to shop for jewelry in discount channels," as Unity Marketing notes. Wal-Mart is the largest outlet for sales of CDs, videos and DVDs. And on and on.
For two years running, Fortune has named Wal-Mart the most admired company in America. It is arguably the defining company of the present era.
The company's business model has relied on new innovations in inventory management, focusing on ignored markets (low-income shoppers in rural areas – though this is now changing), and squeezing suppliers to lower their margins. But it has also relied centrally on undercompensating employees and externalizing costs on to society.

Hat tip to Mark for pointing me there.

The use of animals in warfare

Here's an interesting blog entry on the Guerrilla News Network about the use of dolphins, pilot whales, belugas, sea lions, killer whales, horses, and dogs by the U.S. military, with links to their uses in the guerre du jour.

In the Vietnam War, 281 dogs were officially listed as killed in action. Almost all of the remaining thousands were euthanized after they had completed their service. Until Nov. 6, 2000, the United States had no organized policy of finding homes for war dogs at the end of their useful working life

They were classified as equipment. Inanimate objects. And, like the weapons and vehicles, buildings, and other military equipment used in that war, they were destroyed.