Meat and the environment

Seed has a wery interesting article now about meat and its effect on the global development. An interesting point there is that former largely vegeterian societies like China and India can now afford to become meat societies which is causing quite a strain on their grain production. They can't sustain their meat production and therefore have to import food for their livestock. This in conjunction with ethanol production for fuel puts huge strains on grain production over the whole world which is driving prices of food up which is especially bad for Africa (just saw the movie The Constand Gardener and am therefore a bit sad about Africa at the moment).

Another thing that is interesting, producing one kg of beef takes about 20 kg of grain, one kg of poultry takes about 4.5 kg, 1 kg of salmon takes about 1.4 kg of feed (what kind of feed do they need?). Why not buy fish instead of beef next time you go shop? At least eat more chicken then beef. I love beef, I love lasagne, beef with spaghetti and all kinds of beef dishes, but for the sake of our future we really do have to cut down our consumption of it. According to Seed then the average american consumes 100 kg of meat (I guess that is per year), that is 100/365 = 0.274 or 274 g of meat per day which is a good steak (I just ate a 300-400 g steak just two days ago).

Think about it.

A bad aspect of the free market

One of the worst aspects of free markets, like the one in the U.S., Europe and Japan, is that its main propeller is the personal consumption. When the personal consumption goes down then the financial sector is in trouble.

This can happen if the real estate prizes fall and the owners of the estates have mortgages that become less the value of the estates (you have a house that cost you 1 million dollars to buy and you took a mortgage on it to buy it, then the value of the house drops and it is only worth 800.000 dollars) this looks bad in the eyes of the one who gave you the mortgage.

Her is a scenario that could happen:

1. The real estate prizes drop
2. The banks need money to lend to consumers so they can consume as much as they used to before the prizes of their houses went down
3. The banks foreclose on their mortgages and people start loosing their homes

This is bad I think. Of course this is only one scenario, if you have enough money to pay out your mortgage then the bank just takes your money and not your house but most people who took out the mortgages in the beginning do not have that amount of cash lying around so this scenario (which is probably the one that happened now in the U.S.) is worst on the poor, like always when were talking about financial problems, they always hit hardest on the poor.

Zeitgeist

Yesterday I came across a movie that is available online, it is called Zeitgeist and is almost 2 hours long but a really interesting watch.

I especially liked the first part about religion and the third part about economy, though the conspiracy part concerning J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers and all that got a bit on my nerves. The second part about the 9/11 was a bit over the edge for me, there are some factual errors there like that there were 19 people who hijacked the planes but some were under stolen identities which explains why there are some on the old official FBI list of the hijackers who are still alive, I think the FBI have updated the list now. But the part about the buildings and their ability to survive such an impact is interesting, also the part about explosions in the ground floor just before the impact is interesting. The connection made between Hitler and USA is fun also, don't take much notice in it, but it is funny to see :-)

The human rights of property

Was listening to my Sunday show about the future of democracy. There was this man talking about the right to ownership. Now I am an old socialist and have never thought much about the right to ownership, yes, people could own their house and their cars etc etc, but the right to do this was never really high on my agenda. But he was talking about this right and its connection to democracy. He quoted the economist Hernando de Soto who basically is saying that people wont be good participants in a democracy unless they own something. This I think is a pretty interesting point, can you make good decisions about yourself and your society if you don't have anything to loose?

This I relate to a study that was shown in the film The Corporation where they said that a corporation behaved like a psychopath based on the behavioral pattern of many corporations. Now the step from the ownership to corporation is a bit of a step but I think the first incorporates the other so I don't know what to think about this, one the one hand it seems logical what de Soto is saying but on the other hand experience about corporations and when people hide behind the legal document to make their decisions (that is the responsibility of the decision does not lie with the decision makers directly, but goes through the corporation) is a bad one. Is it possible to make a working system out of these two and at the same time ensure the well being of the whole?

Aluminum

Earlier this evening I heard a radio show from back home in Iceland where there was a person who said that it did not pay for the environment for Iceland to produce electricity for aluminum factories because it took so much power to move the bauxite (the ore that aluminum is finally extracted from) to Iceland and then move the final product away from Iceland again.
Now this is something that I can relate to but is it true? Alcoa says it can produce 1 ton of aluminum from 4 tons of bauxite and it takes about 15 kilowatt hours to produce 1 kg of aluminum according to wikipedia. So to produce 1 ton of aluminum with clean energy in Iceland it costs 15 megawatt hours and lets say that if it was produced by unclean energy in the country of the mine then the difference should just be the transport of the bauxite and aluminum. So for this to be economically and environmentally viable then it cant be more expensive to move the ore back and forth from Iceland then 15 megawatt hours per ton. I don't know how much energy it goes into moving 1 ton of stuff by sea or how it scales (that is, how much energy it takes to move 1 ton, and how much energy it takes to move 10 tons). It would be interesting to find out.

Medicine

Every morning I take a Paroxetine medicine that prevents me from getting panic attacks and helps me function in my daily life. Today I had to get a refill on my dose and went to the pharmacy. The main distributor for this medicine is Glaxo Smith Klein and their version is called Seroxat (Paxil in the USA, there are actually different names for different countries, see the above link) and last time I checked it cost around 500 dkr which is pretty much. So I usually get a copy medicine that is a lot cheaper but usually costs around 150 to 200 dkr. But today I was pretty amazed, got a copy medicine from Ratiopharm which I think is stationed in Ulm Germany and it only costed 70 dkr! Now that is just amazing I think. How on earth can someone sell medicine for 500 dkr when a similar product (which perhaps has some other side effects, but how many patients suffer from those?) costs 70 dkr? What is the economics of this? I don't understand this.
I would think that when someone sells a cheaper product then you and can offer all the supply then that seller would force you to sell your product cheaper. But this does not seem to be the case in the pharmaceutical industry.