Save the Planet, Eat Your Dog 942
R3d M3rcury writes "New Zealand's Dominion Post reports on a new book just released, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living. In this book, they compare the environmental footprint of our housepets to other things that we own. Like that German Shepherd? It consumes more resources than two Toyota SUVs. Cats are a little less than a Volkswagen Golf. Two hamsters are about the same as a plasma TV. Their suggestions? Chickens, rabbits, and pigs. But only if you eat them."
Good grief.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think when your ultimate goal is to slaughter and consume .. an animal stops being a "pet". And would sure make an interesting dinner, as your daughter chokes down Fluffy, her pet rabbit.
I mean.. it's an interesting report.. but I don't think anything realistic has been proposed here. They may as well have proposed we treat our cars as pets..
Why even bother looking at this stuff.. there's all kinds of other areas that could realistically be addressed. For example phone books! The amount of resources spent printing and distributing something that 70% of the time probably ends up in a land fill untouched is astounding. I saw some documentary where they were taking core samples at junk yards.. there were literally layers of phone books.. they used it to date the segments..
Another suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
My suggestion is they can fuck off. I care more about my dogs (and cats, cockatiel, and tank of fish) than I do the rest of humanity.
And no, this isn't sarcasm.
Re:Except that (Score:5, Interesting)
Normally, I don't respond to people who have to hide behind being anonymous, but in this case I'll make an exception.
Actually, my tiel is fully flighted (no clipped feathers) and has the run of half the house or more. And while I'm sure you're going to give me some half-assed uninformed PETA sponsored song and dance about how they live better in the wild, I'll merely point out that cockatiels well cared for in captivity live *FAR* longer than they do in the wild.
Re:OMG (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. I'll kill and eat anyone who wants to eat my dog then.
That should strike enough fear into would be dog eaters to leave my dog alone. (sarcasm)
Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Grass-fed beef and organic chicken still have bits that aren't worth using for human consumption. What do you think happens to that.
The grains would be grown and left to rot regardless; farming is ridiculously subsidized.
Re:Good grief.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good grief.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it seems dodgy. Cost can be used as a first-order estimate of environmental impact. A $50 fuel bill has a the same order-of-magnitude environmental impact to a $50 food bill.
And don't forget capital and disposal costs. Dogs are pretty cheap to build (since they are self-replicating), and easy to dispose. SUVs are a bit more expensive.
I think it's safe to say that an SUV costs more to run than a dog. It also costs a lot more to purchase. Ergo, the SUV has a higher footprint.
Didn't the Mongols do this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone else heard of this? Quick googling proves inconclusive.
Re:interesting responses (Score:4, Interesting)
By the way, one of the reasons the black plague spread so quickly in the middle ages was that people blamed cats and dogs and started culling them. Guess what was keeping the rat population at bay? I'd say that alone is good enough reason to keep our pets around. If you want to lower your carbon footprint, stop eating all that unsustainable fast food.
Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind (Score:3, Interesting)
Choosing to be the lone martyr is as effective as being the lone yeast cell in the bottle of sugary water that doesn't reproduce. Individually deciding not to have kids won't work. Population control needs enforcement from government. No way I'm taking one for the team while the free riding asshole over the road has 17 kids because his god wills it, or if the government of the day decides to import someone new (through laws or lax border security) for every child I decide not to have.
Re:OMG (Score:3, Interesting)
During a recession, what I am suggesting is exactly what occurs. The problem more than anything, is that our government believes that industry has a right to exist at any cost. If consumers as they are so lovingly called reduce their spending habits, the idiots in D.C. call it a "crisis" that supposedly needs more government spending to fix.
Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind (Score:4, Interesting)
The myth that it is the population which is causing all the problems is an old one.
The problem is not the population - but the fact that people are very wasteful.
Example: Do you really need a couple of TVs in your house? Three cars? One way to reduce pollution is for us curtail our purchases - we must purchase less of EVERYTHING. Also, we should try and repair broken things before we head out to buy a replacement.
Also, You are right in that this CFL madness going on is a scam. The bulbs are far more expensive and also much more difficult to recycle because of the mercury content.
Also, what about the latest craze for hybrids and electrics? All electrics and any sort of high-end energy efficient solar panel requires rare earth minerals and these are very, very expensive in terms of energy to mine. But yet, we consider these as good ways of saving energy. The better way to reduce automobile emissions would have been to allow individuals to purchase far more efficient engine replacements for their cars or reconditioning the existing engines and cars without requiring them to completely junk the car to purchase a new one.
Re:Good grief.. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, no it isn't. Price does not necessarily reflect environmental impact at all. One of the reasons coal-power is competitive with nuclear power in the USA is because the coal industry doesn't have to pay for the environmental cost of spewing vast amounts of pollution into the atmosphere. The reason palm oil is cheap is because asian countries are engaged in massive deforestation to supply it. By your reasoning, a higher cost means high environmental damage. But how can that be when you can reduce costs by cutting environmental corners? You make no sense.
Talk of eating your pet makes little environmental sense. Why that instead of, say, not having a second car as many households do? Why that instead of, say, eating 5% less (which many Western households would actually benefit from).
There are many other things to look at first including the elephant in the room - population control. This is just some academic looking for cheap headlines.
Re:Environmentalist nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
A free market requires that everyone's property and individual rights be respected.
A free market has nothing to do with personal rights. Its about having minimal goverment intervention allowing the ecnomony to find the path of least resistance. The most efficent way to produce goods and services.
Its based on the theory that the ecnomony can regulate itself better then the goverment can. Some regulation is needed, but preferably minimial. The more the goverement controls the system, the less of a free market and more of communist system we step towards.
You don't want to take either side to an extreme, as there is a balaning act involved. Too little oversight will result in companys becoming reckless in the serch for profits; too little freedom will smother companies, minimzing the jobs and profits they provide to the region.
Pollution and environmental damage are forms of rights violation
This is the key pivot of your arguement, and i have no idea how you can so cleanly equate pollution to rights violation.
Lets take for example a farming community.
Cows produce greenhouse gases just by their digestive system. Eating, craping, farting, it adds up.
How does me owning 10 cows affect your human/legal rights
How about 100, 1000, 10,000 cows?
Lets take it a step futher.
Lets say their waste goes down stream of some sort that is nice to fish from.
1 cow, not a problem.
10 cows, still isn't a problem.
100 cows, getting an issue.
1000 cows, the river is unhealthy to fish from
Explain at which point your individual rights get violated. (Its not your property so its only your personal rights).
The point of this post is simple.
Free markets will make companies pollute more when they aren't accountable.
You can't make companies accountable just by human rights. If a company damages your properity/rights by a mesuable amount i'm sure you already have legal recourse. For everything else that is unmesurable, you need regulation, to prevent polution from getting out of hand.
I'll also add that too much regulation will result in companys moving to more agreeable countries and taking their jobs with them.(See China and the Kyoto treaty).
Free market leads to a dangerious but profitable market, where as a regulated leads to a less profitable (read: higher poverty) market.
A balancing act is needed. Human rights have little to do with the pros and cons of the free market with regards to polution.
Huge wastage (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the other things I am very disgusted about is "bycatch" in the fishing industries.
In simple terms what happens is a shrimp boat goes out to catch shrimp, and then for every 1 pound of shrimp they catch, they throw away 5-20 pounds of other animals (fish etc)- which do not survive (usually dead by that time).
Then a sardine boat goes out to catch sardines, and if they also catch shrimp or some unwanted fish they throw that away too (even if that species is edible).Then a tuna boat goes out to catch tuna (and throws away other fish). Then a cod boat goes out, etc...
Tons of perfectly edible fish are wasted and killed. Many of the discarded fishes are sold on the market for decent prices, they just happen to be landed by the "wrong boat".
That is a HUGE FUCKING WASTE. This practice should be banned!
If any fisherman can't cut down on bycatch and stay in business, he should be banned from commercial fishing.
Heck at worst force them to turn their "bycatch" to dogfood, if they can't figure out how to turn it to food for humans.
Re:interesting responses (Score:4, Interesting)
hardly evil (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they aren't. A significant percentage are there for drug crimes, prostitution, etc. You can be labelled as a sex offender and go to jail because you peed in an alley. We have moved well beyond the stage where everyone in jail can be considered evil. Are there bad people in jail? Certainly. But being convicted by a jury doesn't mean you really did it, or that it went down the way the prosecutor said. Cops lie, witnesses lie (or misremember), evidence gets planted|lost|tainted|misinterpreted, etc. Many have been released from death row after they were exonerated by DNA evidence. In short, the system is far from infallible, and even when it works flawlessly many who are far from "evil" are caught up in it. Don't fool yourself.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:interesting responses (Score:2, Interesting)
Troublingly, the inability of people to divorce themselves from the "moral good" of owning a pet runs very deep in our culture, and I suspect from conversations I've had with people not raised in a comfortable liberal democracy, owes most of its tenacity to the life experiences of the subject. - If it would never come down to you or the dog, then you never have that thought, and regard pets as sacrosanct.
But I'd be more careful how I approached anyone in that context now. A few months back, the family dog (for whom I had no particular affection for, and felt that attitude was shared generally) was put down after developing very serious motor problems. My elderly father, who had a history of mental illness (despite the longest period of functional behavior since the onset of his disorder) spiralled into an acute, almost psychotically rapid mania. The only trigger I could identify was the dog.
I'd long since stopped caring for and identifying with animals, and most people, generally speaking - I fancy myself something of a hardass. But for a lot of people, pets continue to stand in as surrogates for confronting lonliness, fear, love, and death throughout their lives. They would be the first voluntary, elective connection a lot of children make to another being, the first thing they encounter subordinate to themselves, and most obviously the first time they confront mortality, in time-honored sitcom tradition. Most importantly, no pet will ever verbally challenge its master's belief in it, well except maybe a parrot.
My father had lost most of his army buddies, relatives he was close with, et cetera. He handled all of those better than the dog. And it wasn't even his dog. Ultimately, we deal with human beings as adults. With maturity that comes from repeated interaction and our lifetime's trial and error. Pets never ask us to improve on the model we learn, so we deal with them just as we did as children, if not forced to alter our attitudes. All it takes, I think, is one regression back to an old way of fuctioning to undermine us as individuals, as rational creatures. People project their own feelings onto pets in a way they seldom do with other human beings, and that can be a fundamentally dangerous thing to dispute with someone.
Re:Good grief.. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not entirely true. Modern farming methods turn large quantities of natural gas into food via fertilizer.
Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind (Score:2, Interesting)
If you can deal with all your waste and grow all your food in a square 35 feet on a side, I will give you a gold star. Make sure not to walk on your neighbors 35 foot box, he is sick of living in it and a little cranky.
Re:Good grief.. (Score:3, Interesting)
While I am completely against the overfishing we see in the ocean and refuse to touch seafood anymore
FYI you can still eat squid. They're highly populated (one of the few critters, it seems, which enjoys oceanic acidification) and they don't bioconcentrate nasties, plus fishing them doesn't involve big nets that kill indiscriminately.
Re:Good grief.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this might be hard for people in the US to comprehend, but not all farms are rolling Iowa cornfields.
I know this might be hard for the arrogant to comprehend, but not all beef in the US is produced in feedlots. There are many (many!) independent ranchers running cattle through hill country, grazing them on whatever is around. Those with the cojones to compete for the land with mexican weed farming operations can rent BLM land access for grazing, but honestly this is decreasing in popularity; a lot of ranchers are actually being hassled on their own land by this particular phenomenon, at least in California.
Also, all Buffalo is produced in a non-feedlot situation; they won't stand for it. It's also illegal to give them antibiotics (not sure why) so you couldn't put them in that situation anyway. The result is ranging, unadulterated meat. One solution is to get your red meat fix only from free range beef, and buffalo. We the consumer are responsible for this situation, all over the world.
Re:Huge wastage (Score:5, Interesting)
Good grief where to start...
In EU waters (and most western waters) boats are only allowed to take species that they are licensed to take, and of course there are limits on what they can take and once they reach the limit on one type of fish / crustacean they face hefty fines if they *dont* throw them back - dead or alive.
I was watching an interesting doco a while ago where the captain of a prawn trawler was almost in tears as they had had two weeks of terrible prawn hauls so the crew were near mutiny (pay is directly related to how much the boat takes on) but were dragging in tonnes and tonnes of prime fish and under EU law had to throw it all back mostly dead, each time every time as to take it back to port risked him losing his boat.
So laws and regulations written by "well meaning" bureaucrats mandate that in many instance captains MUST take the action that you condemn and ironically you demand more laws and regulations made by the same to make them stop doing what the first set of laws forces them to do in the first place!
Nothings ever so simple as "they should just make a law". In this case they did, because people like you demanded that what they catch and how much they catch be regulated...and huge waste is largely a (now mandated by law) "unintended" consequence like the captains said it would be.
Not to mention, who are you to force anyone to do anything? They're supposedly free men who own fishing boats and catch fish. If you don't like it don't buy their fish or pay more for pet food so it doesn't *cost them* money to bring in junk fish just so you can feed your dog. Truly I hate to sound like a libertarian but you throwing around like phrases like "force them to turn their "bycatch" to dogfood," makes you look like an mini fascist. Just because they own a boat and supply something that you rely on doesn't suddenly make them your personal slaves. Tell us what industry you're in so we can start discussing "forcing" you to do various things that cost you huge sums of money just to satisfy our own personal attitudes.
Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is not the population - but the fact that people are very wasteful.
The problem isn't the people, it's the people! Want to try again? Here's a free hint: You're trying to argue that human nature doesn't exist. Since it does, the problem is the population, which is made up of the people. You're saying "if people were all good" and I'm saying "have fun in your fantasy land".
All electrics and any sort of high-end energy efficient solar panel requires rare earth minerals and these are very, very expensive in terms of energy to mine. But yet, we consider these as good ways of saving energy.
Wrong. People who buy hybrids don't give one tenth of one fuck about saving energy. They want better mileage for their own selfish reasons, and they want the cachet that comes with a vehicle marketed as being environmentally friendly. If they cared about saving energy they'd have investigated lifetime energy consumption, and they would find out that the makers of hybrid vehicles do everything they can to prevent you from finding out what the energy cost of production is because it is shit. If you buy a TDI Jetta you'll get it at the same price as a Prius, you'll get substantially more vehicle and you'll have a noticeably lower lifetime energy consumption. If you run it on waste vegetable oil (kits have a way of cropping up for even new diesels fairly quickly) then you can bring your energy consumption down still further, something not possible with a gasoline hybrid.
People who buy hybrids are buying smugness, period the end full stop. They do not care about lifetime energy consumption. If they did, they would have bought a TDI (new car option) or just fixed an older, fuel efficient car with relatively low emissions (best option.)
Re:Good grief.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think when your ultimate goal is to slaughter and consume .. an animal stops being a "pet". And would sure make an interesting dinner, as your daughter chokes down Fluffy, her pet rabbit.
That actually happened to my cousins. They raise cattle. It's not their primary source of income so it's not something they do a lot of. They had a cow. Its name was Hamburger. My aunt and uncle would take the kids out there to pet, feed and ride hamburger. He was kind of like a pet to them.
Eventually, the time came to send Hamburger to slaughter. The family kept the good pieces of meat and sold the rest. As they were eating steak one night, my aunt and uncle kept saying, "Hamburger is a lot better that I thought" and "Hamburger sure is tender". The kids would say, "this isn't hamburger, this is steak." Finally, it hit them. They pushed their plates away and went to bed without saying a word.
This actually happens more times that you'd think. Kids take FFA in high school tend to get attached to the livestock they are raising. My little brother for example raised a pig for FFA. After slaughter, he refused to eat any of the ham or bacon that came out of it.
Re:Good grief.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Beef is my favorite food, and I have a large dog. That doesn't change the reality that the environmental impact of my lifestyle and the pet I choose to keep is far higher than a vegetarian with a pet hamster.
Unlike that propaganda piece [i]An Inconvenient Truth[/i], the facts here are pretty clear and difficult to dispute.
Re:Environmentalist nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
A free market requires that everyone's property and individual rights be respected.
A free market has nothing to do with personal rights. Its about having minimal goverment intervention allowing the ecnomony to find the path of least resistance. The most efficent way to produce goods and services.
Its based on the theory that the ecnomony can regulate itself better then the goverment can. Some regulation is needed, but preferably minimial. The more the goverement controls the system, the less of a free market and more of communist system we step towards.
You don't want to take either side to an extreme, as there is a balaning act involved. Too little oversight will result in companys becoming reckless in the serch for profits; too little freedom will smother companies, minimzing the jobs and profits they provide to the region.
This. This is the problem with many people who think they're touting the free market, especially as political policy. (a)A free market != (b)a market - (g)all gov't. regulation . (a)A free market = (b)a market + (c)no externalized costs + (d)an informed consumer - (g)all gov't regulation not required to enforce (b) + (c). Trampling rights and destroying common resources are definitely costs that are currently "external".
With respect to externalized costs a gov't can either regulate the industry through direct legislation, or subsidize businesses that don't externalize costs and rely on consumer ignorance(even if that ignorance is somewhat willful). The push to regulate has met a lot of resistance here which is why you've seen a push in the other direction recently.
Re:More Pollution is Better (Score:3, Interesting)
Upping the atmosphere's CO2 content will just encourage plants and bacteria that thrive on CO2, and the system will pull itself back into line.
Note that animals don't thrive on CO2, and that fairly small shifts in the percentage of environmental CO2 cause nausea, confusion, and panic. The single largest mechanism for removing CO2 from the atmosphere is NOT respiration, but oceanic gas exchange leading to acidification, in turn moderated by exposed undersea limestone which scrubs the ocean as currents draw water past it. Unfortunately, this mechanism has already been pushed past its limits, so CO2 levels continue to rise. Even more unfortunately, the earth is losing vegetation daily, to human influences. The Amazon, for example, is on the verge of collapse (and may already be past the tipping point. Experts disagree.) So even the mechanism you suggest should compensate is being perverted and prevented by man.
Re:Environmentalism means losing your mind (Score:3, Interesting)
I lived a year in Germany, where no supermarket would give you plastic bags for free. As a result, everyone carried their own sturdier plastic bags, or stored their groceries in their backpacks. Also, their cities are walkable - supermarkets are at walking distance for most people. I have then returned to Brazil where, used to reusable bags, I have purchased a dozen of them (also brought some from Germany). I keep some at work, some in the car, some at home. In these last three years, not a single such bag broke on me. Some of them support weights up to 12 kilograms. Compared to my fellow countrymates, who use and dispose of something around 800 plastic bags a year, I think I'm good.
Re:Good grief.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, MONEY is the only meaningful measure of resource consumption. Even labor requires resources indirectly. Even watching tv consumes resources. Electricity, and the cost of the set, but also, you pay for the salaries of all those involved in producing it and bringing it to you and they consume resources that they would not consume had there been no audience paying. That is why piracy is the most environmentally friendly form of copyrighted material consumption.
In spending money, you take the thing you bought out of circulation. This tends to make more of those things produced. Up to the prevailing price for the item in resources will be used to bring another such item into existence.
Because everything needs some energy to operate ( you can't spend a buck to get a pat on the back and then have the person who patted your back pay you a buck so you can pat their back and so on forever without you both spending money on food ) even things that don't appear to be resource intensive involve engaging some resources. In the back patting scenario, a fraction of a cent's worth of food would have to be purchased for each pat on the back so that less than a dollar would be spent on each back pat until the entire dollar had been spent on food.
Of course food isn't the only consumable resource. There's land ( use of land for a time interval is consumable ), there's metals, there's hydrocarbons, there's energy, water, etc.
BECAUSE money is the only meaningful measure of resource consumption, doing things you wouldn't do for the money is environmentally damaging. For instance recycling is more environmentally damaging than not recycling.
Don't believe me? It's true! Your labor goes into separating your trash into different piles. This has value. Maybe it contributes to increased messiness in your house because you need bins for all the different crap. It takes time out of your day so maybe you don't have time to make supper and go out ( CONSUMING MORE RESOURCES ) maybe you even decide you need a bigger kitchen to house all the bins for paper/plastic/glass/etc. Washing cans and glass jars also increases your water bill.
Some of the crap you recycle such as aluminum cans and metal is worth something, but that would be scavenged and recycled anyway ( for money ). Most of it like much of the paper, and plastic just doesn't pay. Yet it is recycled anyway because you have subsidized it with your labor ( your town dump probably mandated it ), and because of other subsidies. Your town dump probably still pays to get rid of your paper, but because they can recycle it, the dump gets a discount on how much they must pay to get rid of your recyclables. Of course given the many hours the citizens have spent doing this nets the town coffers a tiny fraction of minimum wage for those hours, but who cares right? At least they didn't have to raise taxes to afford a real landfill.
This recycled material is valuable. The cheap availablity of recycled this and that makes resource intensive economic activity that would be uneconomic given high material prices possible further increasing environmental damage. High material prices would have slowed economic activity easing environmental burden, but recycling has lubricated the plundering of the earth with recycled crap.
And in the future when resources are drained, our children's children's children will curse us, not for using up all the resources before they were born, but for using them up so completely even being so cruel as to recycle when it was uneconomic to do so stripping the landfills they now mine for a living of the plastic and metal they survive on. They can't imagine why we would do that unless it was for some sadistic pleasure...
Re:Environmentalist nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
FYI, your "Cow" example is what's known as a "Brightline falacy." What you've said is that since one can't point to the exact moment that one's individual rights were violated that it must mean that said violation never happened. This is incorrect.
Re:Huge wastage (Score:3, Interesting)
Trying to understand your point, here, but all I'm taking away from the rest of your rant is that you hate the gub'mint sticking its big-city nose in your hard-working rural business.
Since you're seemingly intelligent enough to work a computer, I'll assume you can figure out how to research something called the tragedy of the commons, if you're not already familiar with the concept.
I'll grant that there are some "hollywood moonbats" who "worship the environment" or something... But in reality what's happening is that government is the only thing that can force people to avoid short-sighted total exploitation of non- or slowly-renewing resources. It doesn't always work out perfectly, but I have greater faith in science-based policy implemented by government organizations than I do in individual wisdom when it comes to shared resources.
You seem extremely hostile to the idea that government might make better long-term choices than individuals. What's your solution to the problems of overfishing, pollution, hill-cutting mining, clear-cut logging, etc? Let the market sort it out somehow? Trust that Jebus will come back soon so our children's children won't have to deal with a polluted world barren of species diversity? What?
Re:Can we finally start denying it again? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you believe in the theory of evolution?
That species evolve due to external influences. Yes.
That men have a common ancestor with monkeys. I haven't a clue.
-I wasn't there
-there currently isn't conclusive evidence to prove a point either way
-and, (most important) it doesn't make a difference until we start giving chimps the right to vote based on this theory.
Do you believe in Big Bang cosmology?
Pfft! Who cares? There are some interesting things going on in the field of quantum physics, but I have zero interest in trying to prove that God doesn't exist so that I can thumb my nose at those "stupid religious fundamentalist." Again, whether the universe went bang, or God said, "Let there be light!" real loud has no effect on my job.
Now, along come climatologists with their data pointing to anthropogenic global warming,
Some climatologists come along with a lot of political baggage, asking to destroy major cultural institutions, with only tenuous indications that the global warming is anthropogenic. Data sets and computer models are destroyed or held in secret. The political entities that want to see major cultural changes grab hold of these climatologist, and conflate global warming with anthropogenic global warming. Strong evidence of the first does not translate to strong evidence of the second.
If Slashdotters haven't drunk your anthropogenic global warming kool-aid, maybe it is because they actually have done some thinking for themselves.
The book is about more (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that anyone will still be reading this discussion. Especially this far down the page...
But I actually looked up the book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Eat-Dog-Sustainable-Living/dp/0500287902/ [amazon.co.uk]
They've chosen an inflammatory title, alright, but it seems the book's about a lot more than pets, and it doesn't look if they really advocate killing the family pooch for a meal.
It looks as if the whole book is about calculating the overall cost of various things in terms of resource usage using a standard unit of hectares/year. Supposedly there are interesting surprises in there. One review mentions that they say that a fully occupied plane is more efficient per passenger mile than cycling (taking into account the food to fuel the rider, and the hot shower to wash of their sweat).
It looks like they've misjudged their publicity drive though. The pet owners are clearly not impressed!
Re:Good grief.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Brought to you by the colour brown. This kind of language doesn't end well [pep-web.org].
In any case, it reminded me of people who say similar things quite earnestly.
I was listening to a interview last night on EconTalk with Dan Pink while I updated my FreeBSD package tree. He was talking about a different mix of skillsets will be required to compete in the workforce of the developed world with so much routine-oriented white collar work heading to India.
He's clearly a smart guy, but he's trying to sell books, so he couches this in left brain/right brain terminology, but we can overlook this. In the spirit of his right brain metaphor he applies some new-age labels to the skillsets most likely to resist deportation to India. More overlooking required. Nevertheless, his points are valid.
One of the skillsets he promotes for the strip-mined jobscape is symphony. This is the ability to see the big picture, how everything fits together, how things are evolving, where it all ends up. Stuff like that.
In my experience the question "what do you think of recycling programs" is a good litmus test for the presence of symphony. If the response is, "well, it's not cost effective, so it's a waste of time" you can only hope the person you're talking to is strong in the other five job retention talents, or they are not long for the job market of the 21st century.
If the answer is "well, it's completely idiotic not to practice closed-cycle resource management, so the sooner we promote this as a cultural value, and learn how to orchestrate this in a cost effective manner, the better off we'll all be" then you're talking to someone with a little more staying power in the sliding jobscape.
And this from a podcast whose host views minimum wage as a form of dire economic distortion, and who often lays on a heaping dose of manlove for first-person price signal narratives.
Returning briefly to the essential but no longer sufficient skills of the past century, such as specialization, insight, and rationality, there's not a lot of upside to conducting this analysis without discussion of the nitrogen cycle, which is used to cost protein, versus the carbon cycle, which is used to price the SUV. One of these problems is not like the other.