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.