Charles sent me this excellent visual history of the obesity epidemic in the US. Also an animation.
Earlier here.
For food companies, the actual monetary costs of offering larger portions are small, because the cost of the food itself is small relative to labor, packaging, overhead, transportation, marketing, and other costs.
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At movie theaters, upgrading from a small to a medium-sized bag of popcorn without butter costs just 71 more cents. However, it also costs an additional 500 calories (i.e., a 23% increase in price buys 125% more calories). If you shell out another 60 cents, you can get a large, which brings the total to 1,160 calories and almost three days’ worth of saturated fat … At McDonald’s, the difference between a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and a Quarter Pounder w/Cheese medium Extra Value Meal is $1.41, 660 calories, and 4 grams of saturated fat.
Earlier here.
I read a lot about how music companies are attempting to put copy controls (or “DRM”) into music tracks. My friend Barbara was faced with this very issue when she tried to get a track onto her portable mp3 player. The CD she bought was copy protected and could not be easily ripped to mp3, while the track she paid for and downloaded was copy protected and would not load onto her machine. Her liking for this song became transformed into annoyance.
Lately I read that Apple’s DRM for its iTunes Music Store has been broken by DVDJon, the same wunderkid who figured out how to break the CSS copy protection on DVDs. I’ve read lots of screeds from people arguing that since the natural price of a copy of a digital product approaches zero, so to should the market price. Attempts to enforce higher-than-zero prices for copies of digital media somehow fall foul of the mystical constraints of economic rationality theory.
But I suspect the truth is more complex than that. All elegant arguments in favour of economic rationality only work in a society where we are all perfectly rational and prices and availabilty are not generated and constrained by culture and social practice.
It’s obvious that if you look around, you find many examples of artificially high prices for goods or services that are maintained through social contracts. My favourite example is religion.
Now, most religions present the idea of a supreme being, usually some variety of Sky God, to which people can owe allegience in return for unspecified favours and considerations. Most hold that a personal relationship with this Sky God is possible. Yet most religions features a stratified hierarchy, with membership dues and fees tacked on.
In fact, many institutional religions have codified the financial obligations of their believers into law or custom and many people are extremely willing to keep paying money for something that, logically, they could obtain for free.
Throughout history, faced with falling membership and diminishing fees, many established or state religions have been forced to move from comfortable, unspoken legitimacy to bold, in your face regulations and legal manoeuvring to force people to pay their dues, on pain of legal sanction, torture, or death.
Religion is one social practice that is both created and consumed, and whose entry fees are maintained above zero through sanction, custom, and “tradition”. Music is another.
Despite several centuries of especial religious market development, and the development of many hundreds and thousands of individualistic cults and “new age” spiritual movements, most developed nations are still characterized by large populations that willingly pay above-zero fees to organizations in order to reach some accommodation with the Sky God. It’s not inconceivable that the music business will also evolve in this fashion, with large factions breaking off into zero-price consumption cultures, but also large factions remaining engaged in above-zero-price consumption practices, constrained by legal and moral sanction.
It appears that tacked onto the recent $87 billion Iraqi funding installment was a secretive rider allocating some $8m to the Miami police force to “disperse” protestors during an economic summit there. Apparently the police were amazingly well equipped, and itching to try out their new toys. Some of the “nonlethal” munitions they deployed include tear gas, pepper spray, pepper projectiles, rubber bullets, projectile batons, glue bombs and, making their debut on US streets, incapacitating taser projectiles. They also paraded some spanking new police tanks.
Sam Lender, 82, and about 40 other members of Local 1199 - all retired health care workers - were greeted downtown by some 2,500 police officers carrying machine guns and carrying giant plastic shields. “This does not look like the United States of America,” said Lender, who lives in Delray Beach. “It makes me sick.”
Of course, the whole idea of the “Free Trade Area of the Americas” is a Bad Idea for most people because it promises complete freedom for capital with almost no freedom for labour. It also avoids addressing income and regulatory disparities, ensuring that the poorest will stay poor while the richest will see their environmental standards dragged down to the gutter. They could learn a lot from the European Union…
The EU has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to narrow gaps between richer and poorer member countries and regions, the bulk of it since the 1980s. The largest recipients were the so-called “poor four” — Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal. To varying degrees, all have made progress. Since 1982, Ireland has become one of the wealthiest European countries, while Spain and Portugal have increased their gross domestic product per capita levels from 73 to 81 percent and 61 to 72 percent of the EU average, respectively. Greece fell behind in the 1980s, but gained ground over the past decade … Through EU-level regulations, for example, Irish women won a long battle for equal pay legislation and Austrian activists got a parental leave policy. New Eastern European members now must adopt EU environmental, human rights and workplace standards. While the EU is willing to pay for training, infrastructure and other needs to help countries comply, at the end of the day EU regulations are binding.
There is an obvious and growing democratic defecit growing throughout the developed nations, exacerbated by the increasing demands for political and social gains by the nascent middle classes of the developing nations (now emerging from an atypical couple of centuries of economic and climatic turmoil from which the European Powers and the US greatly benefitted). There are obvious parallels with other such transitory periods of progress in history, such as the passing of the ancient regime in pre-Revolutionary France. Then, as now, the State abrogated increasingly draconian powers of policing and crowd control to itself in a reflexive attempt to safeguard “stability” from both its internal and external enemies.
Earlier here.
So I read various reports that part of the Pentagon’s new “strategy” to fight the Iraqi reistance is the wholescale demolition of civilian homes ‘connected’ with alleged resistance figures. This is, of course, in strict violation of the Geneva Conventions against the deliberate destruction of civilian property, except where for those houses which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage. In other words, hitting a structure that is being used directly to attack or supply an attack against your forces is acceptable, but collective punishment against the property of captive civilian populations is not.
As widely predicted early on in the invasion, the Pentagon is simply borrowing from the Israeli IDF’s tactic book when it comes to dealing with Palestinian resistance to their occupation.
I note that after many decades the Israeli tactics seem to have produced very little tangible results except massive property destruction and general bad feeling. Short-term, destroying homes impoverishes people and may force them to fearfully concentrate on mere survival while diminishing their capacity to support resistance fighters in the field, but long-term it is a most efficient method of breeding new waves of resistance fighters.
Perhaps the only more efficient way the Pentagon could encourage more resistance fighters would be to engage in those failure-prone tactics of public mass executions, ethnic cleansing, and property seizure, as popularized by the German Army and SS during their occupation of Western and Eastern Europe. Given that these techniques prompted stronger resistance and rising disaffection throughout most of occupied Europe, all I can think is that in general, that Leaders who command Armies incorrectly assume that the unrestrained application of lethal force can solve all social problems. The current Pentagon planners seem to be making the same mistakes they did during the “strategic hamlet” phase of the Vietnam War. The Iraqi resistance fighters are cleverly drawing them into an escalated application of indiscriminate force against the population - both sides are following the standard script of occupation/resistance, albeit at a faster pace than many historical imperial occupations.
The U.S. military has begun leveling houses and buildings used by suspected Iraqi guerrillas … Pentagon officials rejected any comparison to Israeli military tactics in the West Bank and Gaza, saying U.S. actions are aimed at eliminating military targets — not punishing sympathizers. In September, Israel Defense Forces said the demolition of “houses of terrorists sends a message that anyone who participates in terrorist activity will pay a price for their actions.”
Healing Iraq
Something funny is going on. There hasn’t been any power for 21 hours and water supply is very very weak. I heard something like air strikes last night and choppers where flying very low in our neighbourhood all night. Some people are saying that the whole city is on blackout because the mugahedeen attacked the main power station in Dorah south of Baghdad with mortars and short range missiles. There has been absolutely NO explanation about any of this either on tv or radio. We don’t want to live like sheep anymore
IRAQ THE MODEL
I dont know really know why Saddams regime lasted for over three decades, but I am sure as an Iraqi who survived that period that therere no legal or moral justifications
for it to remain … Through out these decades I lost trust in the world governments and international committees. Terms like (human rights, democracy and liberty..etc.)became hallow and meaningless and those who keep repeating these words are liars..liars..liars. I hated the U.N and the security council and Russia and France and Germany and the arab nations and the islamic conference.
THE MESOPOTAMIAN
I was very pleased to see an arab brother “Firas” joining the discussion. A brother who “understands” better. Iraq is, has been and will always be part of the Arab World. We are ofcourse very angry with terrorists sneaking across the borders to join the Saddamists in their terror campaign. They are misguided and wrong. I have much to say but power is about to shut off so I must say goodbye now.
Iraq at a glance
Today, when I was going to the clinic, Ive seen a guy, he is tall, with a black hair, cute face, but he has sad facial expressions. There was something that has attracted me, It was his ear, his ear was cut from the upper portion. At once I remembered Ali the man who was in our neighborhood, Ali had the same ear cut. Also I remembered a mentally deranged man, he was hiking in Baghdad streets, he had the two ears cut and a burned forehead. There are many others with those defects … If my memory serves me right, that was in 1994, Saddam Hussien had given a command that said (( Any soldier who escapes from the conscription must be caught and his ear must be cut ))!!!
Baghdad Burning
My cousin, his wife and their two daughters were at our house when the commotion began. A few explosions were so loud, the windows began to rattle with each impact and I had flashbacks of March and April. The kids reacted differently- the older one, ran to sit beside her mother, as far away from the living-room window as possible. She once confided to me that the glass terrified her; four of the windows at her grandparents’ home cracked during the ’shock and awe’ phase of the bombing and she still remembers the incident. The younger one was silent and stoic. You can hardly tell she’s scared except that if you sit particularly close, you can hear her grinding her little teeth, which is what she does when she’s frightened.
G. in baghdad
The Americans decided to appoint the first woman judge in Najaf. Halleluiah halleluiah. equal rights, civil society, freedom and democracy. Women of the world be united. No fuckin patriarchal society telling the women to be veiled, to lie down, to get raped any more. A woman judge that would know how deal with women and child cases. Well maybe in another universe: “This is impossible, it is haram. Women are inferior to men, they are emotional, there religion and there mind is not ideal said the women lawyers in the Najaf court house, quoting the prophet (peace be upon his name) - who allegedly has said that 1500 years ago.
Hammorabi
From Al-Jazeera TV today I heard that in Moosal north Iraq where the crash of the USA Helicopters occurred that there are 2 streets named after Al-Fulojah as Fulojah 1 and 2!
Any one can read very clearly the joy in the eyes of the broadcasters in these channels when they present a news a bout the coalition forces or Iraqis killed in a bomb or so. Some time they film these incidents live. How and who told them about it to go to the scene? We know that there should be freedom in the media, but it should not be biased. It is even worse if this bias could lead to blood shed, life losses and destructions.