SLAMBOARD

People often make the assertion that government and big business are in bed together. I was thinking about that expression and thinking about environmental issues this morning. It dawned on me that everyone on the planet is also in a proverbial bed with the politicians and the multinational corporations.

When I was a young child, I slept at night in a king-sized bed with my older brother and my younger brother. It was inevitable that my younger brother would pee the bed, at least occasionally. My big brother defensively pushed his two younger brothers over to an area that was less than half the bed. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Please note: The sites that I have linked to in this post have not been thoroughly examined and may not be objectively critical or entirely accurate.

Facebook seems to have joined the list of social websites that I join and then eventually abandon. I am sure that a large portion of the people who joined are very enthusiastic and check in multiple times daily. I go for weeks without thinking about it.

The simple explanation would be ‘Martin is an introvert.’

I don’t think it is that simple. I am generally an active member of one forum or another and I have been for a few years. I saw one board through from start to finish and mourned its passing. I think I just do not value social activity for its own sake. Maybe I am selfish.

Just so people don’t think I am bashing Facebook, I think MySpace is boring too.

The first thing I want to get out of the way is a quick comment about the term Tipping Point. My source for the news about Amazon selling MP3s without any digital rights management software attached used the phrase Tipping Point, but apologized for its overuse. I think the use of the term Tipping Point has reached a Tipping Point.

I was just contemplating making my first ever portable MP3 player purchase and this news sounds really encouraging. We can expect lower prices for legally purchased songs as a price war ensues.

I have only ever purchased music online once or twice from small record companies. I mostly get free stuff from small record companies or simply listen to music on YouTube. If buying popular new releases becomes very inexpensive, the demand might increase to a surprising degree. The hard part will be changing the habits of people who are happily stealing music.

You may not know that many companies that are household names make use of prison labor in the United States. The cliche is prisoners making license plates for the state, or doing road work.

Corporations are pretty quiet about the contracts they have with UNICOR and other companies that operate prisons. There is just no way to put a pretty face on the practice. There is a chance that when you call customer service the person answering the phone will be a convict. My source indicated that there were prison call centers in almost every state in America.

The biggest critics of these programs are, not surprisingly, the competition. Defenders say that the prisons are competing with outsourcing not domestic call centers.

My biggest concern is that a people who profit from the prison system are not going to be motivated to curb the growth of the prison population through positive social change. One sad aspect of this is that prisoners who are indirectly working for big corporations have no hope of getting the same kind of work for that employer on the outside. That is just wrong.

I learned two things about the relationship between exercise and body fat. The first thing I learned is that the report that medical scientists write for each other are way too complicated to for me to fully grasp much less paraphrase in a blog post.

Luckily I was able to learn something worthwhile from a press release crafted by the same scientists.

Studies are showing that when people eat a high fat meal and then exercise, fats get oxidized and broken down into healthier molecules. This happens in the skeletal muscle tissue. The press release is actually pretty good reading.

There are probably thousands of examples that I could use for the point that I am going to try to make in this post. For no particular reason, I have decided to use Cat Food as the example. The demand for cat food existed for thousands of years before an industry came into existence to meet that demand with cheaply produced conveniently packaged and well marketed products.

Wait a second, what did people do to feed their cats before there was a pet food industry?

I think the answer is that they did basically the same thing that the industry does, except without the marketing and the packaging. Pet food is formulated to be nutritious, but at the lowest possible cost. Byproducts of the industries that feed humans are often used and also as as much cheap grain based filler as cats will tolerate. I grew up on a farm that often had a double digit cat population. We went through quite a bit of commercial cat food but we also fed the cats much of the oil and grease related to cooking for people. We would simply add some water to a greasy pan that had been used to cook some meat or fish, bring the mixture to a low boil and add oatmeal and/or cornmeal.

The scandalous adulteration of wheat gluten with melamine that occurred in China is not all that surprising to me. I took a course in applied animal nutrition in college and I remember the complicated calculations used to get a food that met the maintenance and growth requirements for an animal at the lowest cost. This melamine has NO NUTRITIONAL VALUE, but the nitrogen content in the chemical can make it appear that the wheat gluten has a higher protein content. This alteration makes the wheat gluten more valuable on the market.

What happened with China was bound to happen because the Western World was exporting the pressure to minimize costs, but has no way of exporting regulation and oversight. Adulteration like this was widespread in North America before federal regulations and federal resources were directed at the situation.

I’m a bit off track with this post. The main point that I wanted to make is that consumers can have a small pet food industry in their own home so they don’t have to put their trust in the multinational industry that created the Chinese pet food scandal. I was inspired to write this post after seeing a page of recipes for cat meals.

The broader point is that just about every ‘industry’ can potentially be abandoned wholesale by consumers if the situation warrants it.

NASA reportedly will send pressurized rovers and habatation modules with astronauts for the agency’s next moon visit.

This is a very interesting news story, but for this post, I am going to focus on the spelling mistake.

Habitation is not a word that many of us use everyday. There are by some estimates, as many as 75,000 words in a college graduate’s vocabulary. I think anyone who makes their living using the written word should use spell check as a matter of course. I use a spell check program that highlights misspelled words as I type. One drawback to this is that when I am rushed I sometimes make bizarre errors in grammar and sentence structure or type the wrong word entirely. I will sometimes publish a post with these mistakes and notice them a day later when I have time to admire my writing prowess. If I had felt it was necessary to review my spelling before posting, I would catch these other mistakes.

In the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” General Motors was the villain.

General Motors was also making its case against emission reductions in Vermont recently. They lost.

Now executives at GM are talking big about their electric car. The Volt is set to go on sale for about $30,000 as early as 2010. It is a hybrid, but it can travel 40 miles on electricity alone.

There is a small company that will have hybrid and all electric cars hitting the market next year. The company is called Aptera Motors Inc. and their car should cost less than $30,000.

Source for this post: LA Times

If you have a small business and you have decided that it is about time that you got yourself a logo, you are faced with a lot of choices. There are design firms that charge a lot of money and they take the thing almost completely out of your hands. There is also the option of doing it all by yourself.

I think using LogoYes.com and their patent- pending DIY logo process is a great in between option. They can take a custom company logo that you have designed and create a full branding package around it.

LogoYes.com has a demo, and a free trial that lets you go play with their creative software. They also have a basic package for only $99.

I am impressed by the design tool. It is a very intuitive process and I think the vast number of options increases the likelihood of your logo being reasonably unique in your marketplace.

First off, a WARNING. There has been a recall of a huge number of Simplicity Inc. cribs that were sold between 1998 and 2007 for $100-$300.

I think everyone’s first question now when anyone hears about a consumer product that can potentially kill your baby is “Is it made in China?’

Yes, it is. But in this case and in many others recent cases, the problem lay in the design rather than the manufacture. Apologists for the Chinese manufacturing industry are hoping to partially quell the extreme reactions that are resulting from the unfortunate series of events, involving the discovery of hazardous substances in Chinese made pet foods and later children’s toys.

I am sensitized to the potential hazards of unsafe products. I bought a computer recently and the speakers that were included are very cheaply built. The computer is not for entertainment, so I didn’t have a problem with the poor sound quality. I did start to worry when I placed my hand on the right speaker and it felt hot. I’m not that worried. I try to make a point of disconnecting electronics that have transformers whenever I am not using them anyway.

I can’t discount the point that is being made that multinational companies do handle much of the design of shoddy products from outside of China. I do imagine a relay race to the bottom as communication about design, manufacture and price go back and forth.