social commentary – Page 10 – Life in the Cheese Drawer

guest topic

November 13, 2012 kate Comments 6 comments

megan wanted to know what effects having kids has on the environment. i told her that i thought i read somewhere that you could have the worst car ever, fly everywhere, etc. etc., and you still wouldn’t have a worse carbon footprint than having a kid. i don’t know how TRUE that is, so i decided to do some research.
(first, i would like you to know that, unlike some political candidates, i think fixing the environment is a top priority. in fact, it’s MY top priority. like hank green said, what good is universal health care if there’s not an earth to live on? [if i could find the video, i would post it, but i cannot find it.])
ok, so i google “carbon footprint and having children” and HOLY CRAP 1 million results.
wading into the fray, what i find most plausible is a study done by statisticians at oregon state university. from my quick read through of the press release, i gleaned some interesting points:
“…the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environmentally sensitive practices people might employ their entire lives – things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.”
and
“When an individual produces a child – and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future – the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.”
in the US, a child adds about 9,441 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon footprint of a parent, which is 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for an average person (i’m guessing sans child). other countries will have less of an impact since the US is all about consumption – a child born in china will have 1/5th the impact as a child here. (this may change in the future, as china and india are upping their CO2 outputs.)
to top it off, the stats peeps mentioned that this research is relevant to other environmental concerns, such as shortages of potable freshwater consumption.
greeeeeaaaatt.
i don’t know what to tell you parents and parents-to-be. obvs we wouldn’t be here without reproduction, but with 7 billion people on the planet, and populations doing nothing but rising, the probability of the human race dying out is pretty slim.
i go back and forth – on one hand, there are studies like this. environmentally, it would be better to not have kids right now. but then there’s the old “your ancestors were strong enough, smart enough, and attractive enough to get to this point in the universe, and you’re going to choose not to perpetuate your genes?” argument. which makes me feel horrible and like a bad member of humanity.
thoughts?

on SOPA/PIPA

January 12, 2012 kate Comments 0 Comment

Why hello there, Internet. You like this? You like this random spewing of crap from all sides, overloads of pictures and music, youtube, reddit, digg, wikis, lolcats, loldogs, lolbunnies, more cats, movies, cats, constant ADD-causing sensory overload that is the Internet?

So do I.
SOPA/PIPA is not the wonderdrug that legislators and their lobbyists make it out to be. And as someone who has taken two media law/first amendment classes and written a term paper on Napstera (way back in ’01, ya’ll!), I think I can shed a little light on this, not that anyone who’s spent more than two minutes on the Internet in the past three weeks doesn’t know what I’m going to say.
What congress is proposing is a violation of free speech and an impediment to progress. Blocking web sites because they might link to pirated content WITHOUT due process of the law is an egregious affront to our first and foremost basic rights in this country. While you might think that this is good and will prevent people from file-sharing movies and music, what you have to remember is that copyright law protects a lot more than movies and music (the MPAA and RIAA have the most pull as they have the most money, however). It also includes the WRITTEN word (in fact, what I’m typing right now, and why plagiarism is such an offense), PHOTOS, and anything that can be considered original content.
All those lolcats? Someone took the original pictures, and they are technically protected under copyright law. If the government is going to shut down every site that has a lolcat photo on it, the Internet will be a darn lonely place.
If the government is going to arbitrarily block sites that have any copyright infringement content on it, that’s a restraint of the OTHER content on the site – the stuff that’s not under others’ copyright protection that the author wants to be available to the world. And that is where the issue with free speech comes in. To do this without due process of the law? It’s like getting a double-whammy punch of TWO constitutional rights taken away from you.
But the problem here is that media have changed a LOT in the past 15 years. Ultimately, there is a problem with copyright law itself, not something that can be fixed by pushing through a bill that will give god-like power to one government to infringe on the most important thing for which said government is known. For a long time, copyright law covered text, music and movies in traditional media that were relatively innocuous to the copyright holders. With the huge burst of Internet communications/social media and the ability to deliver digital information at record speeds, there needs to be an examination of the medium and how copyright law should be changed to accommodate the medium.
What it comes down to is money. Lobbyists are a powerful thing, and congress likes lobbyists. The lobbyists – MPAA and RIAA (well, RIAA at least for sure) are sure getting a lot of money from the music they’re selling. Artists and performers don’t get much money from CD/legit music downloads sales – record labels get that privilege. So of course they’re going to be annoyed with pirating. Some artists have come out and said that pirating has actually made more people aware of their work, and that that’s a good thing.
And in the words of myself, since that won’t be breaking any copyright laws: “No matter what, people will still share files between themselves, and for every stagnant music label using copyright law as a shield, there is an equally intelligent college student ready to crack a problem that inhibits her ability to swap files.”

monopoly seed

May 25, 2010 kate Comments 0 Comment

I have one day left of being hfcs-free, and I haven’t decided what to do after it’s done. But, I do have time for one more topic before my month is up. I didn’t get to as much as I would have liked, but I did get the big ones out of the way, which was enough research for me.
But the last topic of the month addresses Monsanto, one of the largest seed companies in the US. I actually didn’t hear about this on “King Corn”; I heard about it on “Food Inc.”. If you are able to see that one, I would recommend that over “King Corn” (although I’d say watch both, but if you’ve only got time for one, see “Food Inc.”). And this lesson is going to be short and sweet because what’s going on is so simple, it doesn’t require much explanation.
In 1996, Monsanto was able to genetically modify seed corn to be “Round-up Ready”, so farmers could buy the seed, plant it, then spray regular round-up, and everything but the planted seed would die. This is SO EASY I can see how if I were a farmer, it would be so incredibly tempting and easy to do.
But here’s the kicker: the gene that makes the seed round-up ready is patented, so farmers can’t save their seed from year to year; they need to buy new seed every year from Monsanto. But the ease of this is so ridiculous, Monsanto has easily gained a huge market share of seed. “Food Inc.” said that Monsanto went from a 2% market share in 1996 to a 90% market share currently. Now, Monsanto is refuting this, as you can read on this page, but I read their “truth”, and it really doesn’t debunk the numbers. I think they’re just trying to sound like they’re not monopolizing the market when in fact they are.
That aside, farmers can buy different seed from different companies, but Monsanto has this nasty habit of going after these farmers to test their seed because of cross-pollination. If you’re the only farmer on the block planting organic seed so you can save your seed, and every other one is using Monsanto seed, chances are that your corn is going to have traces of that patented gene because that’s what corn does.
Then, you get sued by Monsanto for royalties.
Not only that, but the guys who have seed shaking machines are getting sued. Not their seed, not their business – all they do is shake the seed farmers bring them to prepare it for next year’s planting – and they get a big ol’ subpoena from Monsanto. (From Food Inc.)
While enterprising, and easy, and patented, farmers are arguing that the other 50,000 genes in this Round-up Ready seed gives them a right to save seed (which, they have a point).
This issue not only is a monopoly issue, but is rife with problems surrounding genetically modified food (and patenting genes*), which I’m not going to delve into at the moment, but from the hold that Monsanto has on the seed market, you can understand.
So no wonder farmers are buying this seed: easy, but also if you don’t, it carries the risk of being sued by Monsanto for copious sums, and then there’s the end of another small farmer. Nice, Monsanto.
*Seriously: did you know that the gene inside your body that indicates if you have high risk of breast cancer (BRCA gene) is patented?? Of course, by the only company in the US who is able to test to see if you have this high-risk gene. Nice.

a social experiment

April 30, 2010 kate Comments 0 Comment

I watched “King Corn” tonight. In the same vein as “Food Inc.”, I realized that too much of what I eat and drink is just crap. So I’m thinking of doing a social experiment to see if it can be done. Well, I know it CAN be done, but how easily is it done, is the better question, to not consume high fructose corn syrup without going sugar-free (and, in a lesser sense, corn-based food)?
This would also require to me read through the farm bill and bone up on my knowledge in that department. The government subsidizes farms according to how much corn they produce, which in turn produces high amounts of corn on the cheap. Now more than any time in history we have cheap food.
Now, normally I wouldn’t have a problem with cheap food, but since the poverty level is calculated based on the cost of food for a family of four, I see where this has high social impacts. And really? Government subsidies just ruin the idea of a free market.
Not to mention the health impact consuming HFCS has on society. Cheap doesn’t necessarily always mean good. Some guy on “king corn” said the government is producing fast food, not good food.
So, I’m proposing an experiment to see how difficult it is to not consume HFCS while not leading a sugar-free life (this will coincide nicely with my attempt to frequent the farmers’ market more often and my awesome garden I’m growing this summer).
A brief once-over in my pantry and fridge produces ice cream, a 2-liter of Pepsi (*sigh* my weekend indulgence gone unless I find imported Mexican drinkage) and *GASP* bottles of actual corn syrup used for Christmas cookie making.
A little more research is needed, but I think this will result in more homemade (using sugar) goodies instead of store-bought, no sugared pop unless I find a Pepsi throwback (MMMM which I prefer anyway), and making sure to read all the ingredients when I go grocery shopping (ugh). And I’m not going to make Nate do it unless he wants to.
Another large part of the food industry reliant on corn is the beef industry. Grain-fed beef and chicken is the stuff you find in the store because it fattens animals up faster to get to your plate faster. Since I bought my grass-fed quarter cow last year and am hoping to do that again this year, I will mainly focus on chicken.
Watching these documentaries (or hippie-liberal propaganda if that’s what you want to call them) usually just makes me mad. I told Nate tonight that I should just stop watching stuff like this. Unusually insightful, he said: “No. More people need to watch stuff like this. They need to realize how screwed up the government is.”
So, what do you think? What should my goals be? How long should this go on? What do you want to see/read/watch (I am willing to throw stuff on Youtube)?

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