Along with some social networking widgets and a tag cloud, I added a lifestream page to the blog. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult given WordPress’s rigid code framing. You need these plugins to get it to work: WP-Lifestream, Exec-PHP, Deactivate Visual Editor, Role Manager and a whole lot of fiddling with obscure XHTML and MIME type settings.
Yesterday’s scuba trip went okay. Within a few minutes down me and Lisa saw a moray eel large enough to eat half our torso with one bite. Lots of stinging algae, maybe some sort of tiny jellyfish. Today’s zip lining through the rain forest was fun, but strenuous. Either the heat/humidity or the altitude encouraged me to vent a technocolour yawn when we were done, back at ground level. I vomitted into the same river that was used in Predator, where Arnie covered himself with mud to elude the Predator alien. And so a legend is born…
Me and Lisa are in Puerto Vallarta right now. Getting here was tricky – the rather small US Airways plane flew right into a thunderstorm over its landing strip and tried anyway. The plane was bucking like crazy, surging up and down like a roller coaster. Finally, with only several hundred feet to go, the pilots decided to scrub the attempt and fly east to Guadalajara instead. Pulling up from the landing approach was not fun, and felt a bit like leaving your stomach behind. We landed to refuel, waited a few hours for the storm to lessen, and tried again. It was a nasty landing and the plane came down hard – I was surprised the little tires didn’t burst. Tomorrow we put ourselves at risk again by going scuba diving with manta rays. The hotel where we’re staying has a strict “no children” policy, so it’s mainly gay couples and us. We went for a walk along the bay and it’s an interesting mix of poverty, ostentation, and ex-pats. This is the low season so it’s tropical, rainy, and humid. Apparently most of the gringos come here in December and January.
Guy builds 48 TB media server. Wall power draw only ~475 watts. Impressive. Maybe this is his next machine: 2 TB RAM, 64 CPU cores.
In a nutshell. this long-overdue settlement illustrates the absurdity of imagining that the “free market” can self-police itself. Even though a cheap, efficient additive was confirmed back in 2006 that could reduce the amount of the neurotoxic carcinogen acrylamide in fried potatoes, the large manufacturers not only failed to begin to use this additive in order to reduce deaths and misery caused by the consumption of their products, they actively resisted informing consumers of the known toxic effects of their products (as required by law). Thus, “informed consent” of the consumers was not only frustrated, but actively opposed. Doubtless some hard calculations indicated that money spent legally resisting changing their procedures or informing their consumers could be cost effective versus the known costs of change. The externalities of the health costs incurred by those consumers of the fried potato products who developed cancer and neuropathic disease were moved “off-balance sheet”, and became Somebody Else’s Problem.
Absent ethical self-policing by these fried potato manufacturers, only legal action to enforce compliance with legal regulation has produced any sort of beneficial result. And the scope of this action is constrained: the overwhelming majority of fried potato consumers will spend the rest of their lives ignorant of the fact that these manufacturers conspired to feed them products contaminated with a known poison for several years, and the manufacturers escape with a small fine and continue to pursue business as usual outside the extent of the legal settlement (California). Together, and in the interest of short-term profit maximisation, these manufacturers combined and conspired to flout the law and to fight the State’s legal representatives for years so that they could retain the ability to produce and distribute a toxic product despite the existence of manufacturing processes that could reduce or eliminate the toxin. This is business as usual.
