Rising food prices

It seems like yesterday, I was learning all about how there’s food shortages in various parts of the world because local crops were displaced by crops grown for cash that weren’t entirely suitable for the area. Food production was low due to low prices, so there wasn’t enough to go around and the little there was wasn’t too affordable since there was a lack of employment. There was a lack of employment because farmers were struggling. Farmers were struggling because food prices were low. Now I’ve talked myself into a complete circle.
In less global concerns, there was local talk about the death of the family farm. Agriculture had become generally unprofitable. One of the things being blamed were low prices, though we looked at the USA to take the blame for that since their subsidies drive down prices in neighbouring markets.
It feels ironic that we now have people lashing out at bio-fuels and trying to blame them for food shortages because they drive the price of food up. There’s something fishy going on here, but I think I’ll just keep going as I usually do.

Minor Stupidity

Every time I see a “Help support MS” charity, I feel like yelling something like, “Boo, down with MS, and its supporters.” Yeah, I know what they mean and what they’re trying to do. Something about the way they word it makes me chuckle though. There’s an ever so subtle difference between supporting MS and supporting people with MS. For some reason though it just doesn’t turn heads the way having a “support violence” campaign instead of a “support victims of violence” would.
Maybe next time I see one of those guys, I should walk up and casually say, “This is most interesting, I’ve been against multiple sclerosis all my life and have always held the view that we would probably be better off without it. Now people seem to be for multiple sclerosis?” It would definitely be a practice your poker face moment.

Feel good story of the day

A week ago, I found a cell phone on the bus and turned it into the lost and food. Yesterday, same route, same driver, as I got on, she told me that the guy who just got off the bus was the one who owned the phone. A transit employee who was happy to have his phone back. It feels good to have closure on these things.

Things we’re supposed to remember

I’ve been helping my sister with her calculus a bit lately. It has me wondering about something. We live in a society where almost every high school graduate has a solid understanding of algebra and almost every baby boomer who doesn’t work in a math intensive field has trouble with basic algebra. At the same time, we’re expected to remember every single language we were ever taught and when we don’t, it’s apparently a flaw in ourselves for not maintaining that level of understanding. Fact of life, people forget things. Things that seem most likely to be forgotten tend to be infrequently used and taught in a disciplinarian style where the end individual has little interest in the subject.
Thus far, the average person I’ve met isn’t able to calculate how much their pay cheque changes by if they were to work an hour of overtime. For me, that happens to be $15.7, give or take about a quarter. Math and finances are two things that interest me, so I happen to know this stuff. I know little to nothing about things I happen to have little to no interest in, like pop culture or languages that I don’t speak every day.

Mess is over, for another year at least

I work in a factory. It’s a place that’s kind of away from the public eye, so we get a lot of new immigrants and many of them aren’t too confident in their english skills. It’s not too bad since most of the things we tend to say are rather simplistic, though every once in a while I run into a situation that I just don’t know how to approach. We had one person writing “Fed” instead of “Feb” on our document dates. Yes, someone should do something about it, but that’s one that I’m not touching. At the end of the month, I saw a document with numbered dates, so hopefully we won’t run into this again next year. It’s kind of mean that nobody has told him about it yet. Having everyone kind of snicker behind his back is far worse in the long run than someone giving him a gentle nudge and saying that ‘b’s go in the other direction. I don’t really know him that well, but if I had to guess, I’d say this guy has been in the country for over a year already. Well, if I see this happening again next year, I’m going to ask a supervisor to do something. This is just done for now.
Just to clarify, nothing against immigrants here, but I do look down at management for this. I see supervisors run around checking things out all the time and well, if this is the standard they want to set, than I’ll let them be content with what they have.

Dumbest idea of the presidential campaign

I haven’t even read what most of the hopefuls want to do, but this has got to be the stupidest idea of the whole bunch. Otherwise something is seriously wrong.

By legalizing competing currencies, we can end the Federal Reserve’s stranglehold on our money supply and begin to restore value to the dollar.

What does he want to do here? Let the mexicans keep using the peso when they cross over and the canadians use their dollar as well? Have private companies start their own new currencies? I don’t think people will be too accepting of needing to price goods in a dozen different currencies or paying to convert when buying things. Having some border towns using the peso isn’t going to bolster the dollar. Having new private companies run competing currencies isn’t going to help what he considers a problem created by “[the] Federal Reserve, an unelected and unaccountable private organization.” Those too would be unelected, unaccountable and well, private. If anything the USA switching away from the US dollar should cause the currency to plummet dramatically instead of restoring any value.
Somehow, even without looking at any of the other ideas, I think I can safely declare this one the dumbest.

RRSP season

Oh hey, I suppose there’s one more thing to say today. All sorts of advertisements from people looking to get investment dollars. I’ve got a rough idea where I want to put mine. The big thing this year seems to be real-estate investments. I’ll probably be putting some money into real-estate, but I don’t think I’ll put RRSP money into there. I don’t really understand all the tax rules, but as I understand it, you get to depreciate the cost of the building. These things also tend to be mortgaged. Right now, I’m under the impression that roughly four times my original investment should simply be returned to me as depreciation. Maybe I’m abnormal having more more money to invest than my RRSP contribution limit, but there just isn’t enough talk about the tax implications of different investments.

Wow spam

It’s been a long time since I logged in here. I kind of miss writing here. Well, I still remember my password. Not sure what to say about what’s happened lately, so I’m just going to skip that. Gotta work tomorrow, so all I’ll say is it’s amazing the amount of spam a dead blog picks up. Like 3000 posts worth.

Homosexuality is bad…

There was a letter in the paper today that I got a real chuckle out of. It basically went, homosexuality is bad, sex addition does this that and the other things, so avoid homosexuality, stay godly. I looked at that and was like hmm, this is almost like saying, cola is bad, rum contains alcohol, which causes car crashes, so avoid cola. As much as people seem to go for rum and coke, we still aren’t talking about the same thing.
It just seems like arguments against homosexuality start off with one subject, explain why something else is bad or incorrect, then expect the reader to assume that they’re really just the same thing. It’s like there’s a propaganda machine skewing people’s preception of the world. Groups they wish to demonize become known only as most undesireable characteristics of the most extreme members and after being fed lies so many times, they can’t see the real world.
I can say almost the same thing about arguments against evolution. Nobody seems to argue against evolution, they seem to argue against some other theory, which they call evolution but nobody else does.

School shootings from a different perspective

I typically have a somewhat different perspective on things and here’s mine on school shootings. Before I tell you my ideas on reducing school shootings, consider this, how many shooters have we actually arrested and prosecuted? Very few of them. What happens to most of them? Most of them die before they can be arrested. How do they die? A fair number of them simply kill themselves once they’re cornered. Some of these shootings are political and have some sort of motivation behind them. This probably won’t stop. People will continue to get frustrated. Other shootings are a bit of a mystery. It is a violent lashing out at the world though. What happens at the end of a fair number of shootings though is a suicide.
So my idea is this, what if we simply made it more acceptable to simply kill yourself? Maybe if it was more acceptable, people who are suicidally depressed will be content staying suicidally depressed instead of making the leap to homicidally depressed. Let’s leave an alternative for frustrated depressed people. The worst thing we can do is limit options till society in general becomes the subject of one’s frustrations.