The Age today reports that the U.S. has rationed sales of rice. The world price for rice rose about 68% last year.
In February, The Times reported that the world was only 10 weeks away from running out of wheat. The world price for wheat rose about 92% last year.
In January, The Finacial Post reported that U.S. corn exports will seize up in less than three years. The world price of corn rose about 60% last year.
Here's another one from April 24 that talks about the UN having to make "heartbreaking choices" with its emergency aid because it can no longer afford to buy food for starving nations.
So let's talk a little about the real costs and benefits of biofuels, if any can be said to exist. What are biofuels? Biofuels are those fuels like "biodeisel" or ethanol, that are produced mostly from food plants or disguarded by-products of food plants like used vegetable oil. For the most part we use grains like wheat, corn and rice to make ethanol with the very versatile (not to mention gentically modified) canola being used for oil, mostly.
Ethanol is an excellent energy carrier but produces just as much CO2 as regular unleaded fuel. Biodeisel, distilled from old or new vegetable oil doesn't work quite as well, so you'll need a Deisel engine to burn it properly. Even so, you'll still produce just as much CO2 as you would with deisel fuel, so in that regard at least, there's no real advantage to either of them as "environmentally friendly" fuels. They are however, renewable resources.
The European policy on biofuels dictates that there be 2% ethanol by volume in petrol, rising to 5.75% by 2010 in order to create a disired "crude oil saving". America is considering a similar policy, as is Australia and a myriad other countries around the world and the saving in crude oil is the only reason for it.
As we can see from all those articles though, there's already a serious food shortage brought on mostly by our current minimal insistance on biofuels. But as ethanol percentages rise in fuel, so will the demand for those food products. That means food becomes scarce, prices continue to rise, which of course drives yet more inlfation and the UN will have to choose who will die for lack of food.
Is this really the answer that we're looking for?
Thursday, April 24, 2008
BIO - Fuel or Food
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Plonka's Financial Tips
"Well now" says Dikkii, "What have we here?" That's as it should be though because normally, if I had a query concerning the scary world of finance, I'd ask Dikkii. It's a simple fact of life that if you want an informed answer, ask someone that knows a thing or two about the subject.
I call myself "Plonka", not because there was a mathematician of that name - I didn't know that when I chose the name - but because I "plonk" along. I tend to waffle on a great deal about things I know very little about with only the tenuous pretext of scant research, usually at Wiki, to back me and I wait for the blogophere to correct me. It's fun, I make friends and learn as I go.
There are however, some things I know with absolute certainty. One of those things, and herein lies the "tip", is that if a man says to you "I can get you a 70% return on investment", your best course of action is to thank him for his time and politely show him the door, the other side of it for preference. On this point, I'm sure Dikkii will agree with me so I feel confident in sharing this advice.
From The Age:
Mr Hoy's company, Chartwell Enterprises, reportedly promised investors returns of up to 70%. Instead, many were left watching in disbelief yesterday as the locks were changed on its offices in Geelong's Ryrie Street.
"In disbelief"... Surely they can't be serious. Someone even scratched the word "liar" into the door of his Jag. Really? I would never have guessed. He also owns a $900,000 Rolls, a luxury ocean cruiser and a $3million sub-penthouse apartment that isn't built yet. But then if you're a con that's trying to lure people, then the greater your advertised return, the better you have to make it look and this guy did it with style and to great effect.
The basic lesson here is "the greater the return, the greater the risk". I learned that at school in "home economics" (*sigh*...I show my age....) many years ago, and it seems to be one of very few things in the financial world that has remained steadfastly constant throughout that time. I may not know what a "good rate" is at the moment but I do know that 70% is laughable. Sure, some have managed to do exceedingly well at times, but a sustained 70%? Well even the great Mr. Buffett would have trouble with that one I think...
Friday, April 18, 2008
Desktop Religion
The reason I'm writing this post is because Dikkii also mentioned that he'd installed Ubuntu on his old machine. Now being a nerd who's particular penchant is making operating systems work for you, not against you, I thought I'd best give it a go too. After all, I've been known to run with Red Hat, Fedora, Suse or even VMS if you count my Alpha. There's been Commodore 64 emulators, AmigaOS, Amithlon, BE OS, QNX and Knoppix on my machine at various stages, so I suppose it's time to see what the fuss is all about. I have a 750gig hard drive now, so space for weird partitions really isn't an issue.
I downloaded Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) for i386 and burned me a CD. Then I partitioned off 105gig, just so I'd have some room to breathe, made a 100gig ext3 partition and a 5gig swap partition (I have 4gig of ram and to much is better than not enough). I then bunged in the CD and proceeded to boot from that and install Ubuntu.
And that's where I began to run into trouble. You see, I have an nVidia 8800GTS 512 G92 video card which is very new and very, very fast, and it seems that the drivers for it aren't entirely up to scratch. To cut a very long story short, I made some very silly decisions and now have 4 different versions of Ubuntu to choose from in my CD rack, but nowhere near as much download left as I normally do at this time of the month.
The best one I've found so far is Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) beta AMD64. It installed a treat and automagically updated the restricted drivers for my card.
So I now have a very snazzy Gnome interface (I didn't like KDE4 very much) and as you can tell, everything works a treat everything works a treat. I'm using a thing called "ScribeFire" as my offline blog editor, as you can see in the pic, so we'll see how it goes for a bit. Other than playing X3 or Call Of Duty, I might be using Ubuntu full time...Thursday, April 10, 2008
Sex And The Sacrament
"'It's to dark down here, I can't see what I'm doing', as the bishop said to the actress." or "'It doesn't usually leak this much', as the actress said to the bishop."
Sound's familiar doesn't it? Well it probably should too. "...as the actress said to the bishop" and vice versa have been popular idioms in the English language for a long, long time and have provided us with much humour over the years (Benny Hill immediately springs to mind).
Then there's the one about the young priest who has to fill in for Father Brian one weekend. He has to take a confession from a prostitute, but having never been exposed to such things before is unsure of what atonement to assign for her sins. As he's pondering this he sees the head alter boy and thinks, "He'll know, he's been around a while" so he asks: "John, what does father Brian give for oral sex?" The boy answers: "A can of Coke and a Mars Bar usually, why?"
The old ones are always the best, aren't they? But I can sit here and type crass priest jokes all day. They'd all be old and I wouldn't run out any time soon. We tell jokes like these because they are things that simply shouldn't happen, shouldn't be allowed to happen and yet somehow seem to happen with monotonous regularity, so we laugh at the hypocrisy. It's pure sarcasm at its most sarcastic.
But how did we become so tolerant of and amused by the concept of sex within the pious ranks of the clergy? We all know that priests are not supposed to indulge in this sort of behaviour, yet at the time these jokes became popular, jokes about the priesthood's lasciviousness were all the rage.
Well it probably has a lot to do with Thomas Aquinas. Back in his day, prostitutes were referred to as "actresses" in the polite vernacular and he advocated prostitution, saying things like; "Suppress prostitution and capricious lusts will overthrow society" and "prostitution in the town is like the cesspool in the palace; remove the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place". I can only assume he said such things because the brothels of Southwark, which employed young men as well as young women and "serviced" the clergy free of charge, were owned and controlled by the Bishop of Winchester from as early as the 11th century, a post that Aquinas himself held for a short period. They were also a reasonable source of income too, naturally. Did someone say "MONEY"? Gee, now there's a surprise.
As to the second joke, well it's also a sad fact that sometimes the Bishop's male "employees" were forced to serve as alter boys to atone for their sins before they were sent back to sin again, probably at the behest of a priest. It's been modernised with the advent of "coke and a mars bar" I know, but "ale and a pork bun" used to work just as well back in the day.
As a consequence though, whenever I hear about a clergyman or deeply religious person, whether they be Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Fundamentalist or any of the myriad "denominations" that exist today, being involved in some sort of scandal with an alter boy or prostitute/s, whether they be male or female, it always surprises me that their fellow christians seem to get upset about it. These guys are not doing anything new as far as "church business" is concerned and let's face it, now that they're not the pimps anymore they are at least forced to pay for the services they receive, not like Aquinas and his cronies.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Well FAQ Me.
![xmercy_thumb[3]_thumb[1]](http://lh3.google.com/forskmeister/R_I87yS9bYI/AAAAAAAAAHc/ip1aknql9dA/xmercy_thumb%5B3%5D_thumb%5B1%5D%5B11%5D.jpg)
Mat 19:17-19 - "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. "There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments."
18"Which ones?" the man inquired. Jesus replied, " 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, 19honor your father and mother,' and 'love your neighbour as yourself.'" (My bold)
"Do not give false testimony"... It means "do not tell lies". It's a very simple and straightforward statement, uttered by none other than Jesus himself and written as an instruction from Jesus to those who wish to follow him. "Do not tell lies"... I mention it just so we can all be sure that it is a basic tenet of christianity that really shouldn't be ignored if you purport to be a christian.
With this in mind, let's take a look at question 6 on the Mercy Ministries program FAQ with my bolds and highlights:
6. How much does the program cost?
Mercy Ministries program is provided at NO COST to the young women.
For young women who are eligible for a Centrelink payment (eg. Youth Allowance, Newstart, Pension) we ask that they contribute their payment to Mercy Ministries for the duration of their time in the program. From this payment the young women receive an allowance for weekly shopping for incidentals.
Upon entry into the program a deposit of $200 is required from all young women (whether eligible for Centrelink payment or not), to cover the cost of any impending medical expenses.
It will then be necessary to replenish the deposit to take it back to a balance of $200 for any further medical treatment that may be required.
For young women who are not eligible for Centrelink support, Mercy Ministries does require them to have a sponsor to support weekly shopping for incidentals and medical expenses.
As Mercy Ministries is not a medical facility we work with the young women alongside medical professionals who support Mercy Ministries to access excellent and affordable medical care.
Any remaining part of this deposit will be refunded to the resident on departure from the program.
So is it "no cost" or a $200 deposit with ongoing costs? One of these things must be a lie, so only one question needs to be asked; In ignoring such a basic tenet of christianity, deliberately and in print and expressly for the purpose of attracting desperate young women, does this organisation still have the right to call itself christian? My personal opinion is no, they don't, but I'm interested to hear what you think.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Mercy Me...
![xmercy_thumb[3]_thumb[1]](http://lh3.google.com/forskmeister/R_BBnSS9bXI/AAAAAAAAAHU/J0OxC7-0Wt0/xmercy_thumb%5B3%5D_thumb%5B1%5D%5B4%5D.jpg)
Sean the blogonaut F.C.D. Does anymore really need to be said? Personally, I don't think so, but for those of you that aren't aware of the fantastic and altogether unselfish and charitable work that Sean has been dedicating his blog to, then I urge you to read on!
I published a very short article a little while ago and the subject matter got Sean's goat and goaded him into action. I have to say, the man is not only a humanist and a gentleman of the highest order, he's also a veritable research machine.
The article concerned those blackguards at Mercy Ministries who insist on treating dangerous and even life threatening medical and psychological conditions using various religious techniques, which of course only ever works for the religiously affected, not the medically affected.
It's quite obvious however, that some of these girls have been suffering serious medical and/or psychological conditions that god either cannot or simply refuses to repair. These girls need proper care, not derision for making "bad choices" or exorcisms to cast out demons, they need love, understanding and care.
Just three simple things. They are not easy things however, nor are they biblical things. In most cases they are not choices, but biological and psychological issues that require professional and/or well trained help and care. Sometimes god's biology just doesn't work the way it should. Why that should be if we were created by a perfect god, not to mention "in his image" is quite beyond me, but apparently he works in mysterious and contentious ways, not to mention being nasty and altogether vindictive, at times.
So I urge each and every one of you that may peruse this article to get over to Sean's right this minute and support him in his effort. I know he'll appreciate it, but the girls will appreciate it too I think, and it's they that really need some support. Mercy Ministries, after only making things worse for them in the first place, only continues to make things worse by refusing to even apologise, let alone heaping more derision on them in the media. It's shameful, hurtful and vindictive behaviour, not to mention completely UNchristian. So while you are at Sean's, please drop the girls a comment and show your support.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Moves are afoot!
Some may be wondering at my quietness. I'll be making the rounds shortly but in the mean time, please accept my apologies. There are however, mitigating circumstances.
Eostre. Yes, we celebrated the autumnal equinox with our usual gusto and flair. That mean lot's of chocolate and a few days of family life, which we enjoyed immensely, thank you.
But every silver lining has its cloud and my cloud is a dark one indeed. Interest rates are not a concern at the moment because a number of us got made redundant. Notice I didn't say "retrenched", that would make sense and would make life a little easier. But I work for EDS which means I now have to endure a 5 week "redeployment plan", which translates in plain English to "the EDS redundancy package avoidance plan". We won't know about any packages for at least 2 weeks.
A package would be nice, but I have a mortgage and a family to feed, so instead of reading blogs for the last week or so, I've been reading job ads. It's making my eyes water, but it's a numbers game in I.T. these days (especially so if you are 43 years old) and to land one, you must apply for many, so that's what I'm doing at the moment.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
The Cost Of Hot Air
You may recall my article "Of Atmosphere and Arguments" and my last paragraph:
I'm all for being cautious and responsible but if the net effect of this argument is simply to make my life more expensive, I shall be extremely annoyed.
Well here's the problem:
From The Age 20/02/2008
Commissioned by the Climate Institute, a lobby group, it found Canberra will reap at least $400 million in 2011 and between $7.2 billion and $20.6 billion by 2020 if all businesses that emit greenhouse gases are forced to pay.
Sure, it sounds good, but who's going to foot the bill? Will it be the businesses concerned? Well no. They'll simply pass $400 million in 2011 and between $7.2 billion and $20.6 billion by 2020 on to cash strapped consumers who for the most part, cannot afford it.
But I liked this bit:
The Climate Institute called for the revenue to be spent on helping the poor, who face rising electricity and petrol prices once the new system arrives in 2010.
Are we really as stupid as that? So stupid that we'd invent a methodology then use the money it generates as a subsidy to make the methodology affordable? It really is the most ridiculous idea. There is absolutely no incentive whatsoever for any business to reduce any emissions. They'll simply pay the fees and pass that cost on to Joe Average who will then go to the government, cap in hand, to get his handout so he can afford to pay the increase.
Donna asked if businesses will be forced to upgrade their equipment to "cleaner" technology:
From yet another article at The Age (21/03/2008)
He said the massive Government revenues flowing from carbon permits — tipped to reach $20 billion a year by 2020 — should be spent helping communities such as the brown coal-rich Latrobe Valley, initially by boosting funding for research into storing greenhouse gases underground.
"Boosting funding for research..." So the answer is no. There's no viable alternative and no viable method of emission reduction yet we're perfectly happy to start charging for it. This is where I get seriously upset. We can't stop making CO2 simply because we need the electricity. It's like a tax on breathing.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Mercy?
People often ask me why I have a problem with religion. I guess the main reason is that the overtly religious are perfectly happy to ruin lives in a futile pursuit of god.
From The Age - 17/03/2008...
A SECRETIVE ministry with direct links to Gloria Jean's Coffees and the Hillsong Church has been deceiving troubled young women into signing over months of their lives to a program that offers scant medical or psychiatric care, instead using Bible studies and exorcisms to treat mental illness........
Naomi Johnson, Rhiannon Canham-Wright and Megan Smith (Megan asked to use an assumed name) went into Mercy Ministries independent young women, and came out broken and suicidal, believing, as Mercy staff had told them repeatedly, that they were possessed by demons and that Satan controlled them.
Only careful psychological and psychiatric care over several years brought them back from the edge....
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Dogs and Decisions
The reason for this post is because I've been wanting a new dog or two for a while now and we think we've found "the one", so I'm all exited.
Our old pooch (Harley), was a pure bred Boxer with a serious pedigree who we all loved dearly. She was put down at the ripe old age of 15, due to the fact that she was deaf, blind, riddled with tumours and was no longer enjoying her life. The Melbourne University School Of Veterinary Science is just up the road, so that's where we took her and consequently she, like I hope to be, was lucky enough to be able to donate her body for science.
Anyway, it's taken us a year or two, but we've come to the realisation that we need a new puppy dog. We want two really, another Boxer because they're the best, and a "something else" that no-one's really sure about. It seems to have fallen to me to decide so I've been considering a number of options.
I got to thinking that one pedigreed dog was enough and that the other should really be one from a shelter that needed a chance. So I asked the family what they thought about rescuing a pooch from death row at the Lost Dogs Home instead. This was greeted with exuberance to say the least.
So tonight we went to the web site to see what we have to do to adopt a pooch and we found our pooch. Say hello to Bodie. He's a 2 year old Husky cross, duh, which is unspecified but looks a bit Shepherd to me. He's awful skinny and peeky lookin' and looks like he's done it hard, so our hearts went out to him as soon as we saw him.
When I came and sat down just now there was a note on my desk with his name, animal ID number and Shelter tag no. and the phone number, so I hope the shelter is open tomorrow because it looks like I'm going to get him whether I like it or not...:)
The problem is the disclaimer. The web site makes it clear that someone may have taken him already, or his time may be up at dawn, who knows, but if he is still there I'm going to ask them to hold onto him until I can get there with the kids and ask him if he wants to come home with us. Just look at him, so proud but begging to be loved (not to mention fed), but that's the problem with the lost dog's home, you want to take them all because you know what will happen if no-one wants them...
