Olympic Medal Count

Well so far there has been a lot of hand ringing and wailing about Canada's medal count. all i can say is if you don't like it why don't you devote your life to a sport and win one for us. Seriously, numerous Canadian records have been broken by teams in swimming. People ranked 15th or 16th in the world have made it to the finals and they've all put on a great show. We've had a number of 4th place finishes and overall we're a pretty small country. Also a number of the sports we're really good at like rowing don't finish till next week so I think we can wait just a little longer and besides it's the SUMMER olympics so lets save our complaining for when we fail for the third time to win a gold medal at an olympics that we've hosted.

Good Luck to all the athletes you're all doing a great job.

How to profit from the world rice shortage but look like you're trying to do something good in 5 easy steps

1. Be Wal-Mart
2. Notice a worldwide food shortage
3. Announce that you'll now be limiting consumers to four times the amount of the product that they would ever normally buy
4. Let Panic buying and hoarding set in.
5. Sit back and let the money roll in.
This week in response to a global rice shortage driven by increasing prices, and low production, Wal-mart announced that it would be limiting people to four 10kg bags of rice per visit. Now I don't know what everyone else normally does but I have never in my life thought that I would need 40kg of rice in one shopping trip. Now if Wal-Mart was recording everybodies addresses and limiting people to 1 bag per month that would be some sort of limit. Still I bought 20 kg of rice in January and have yet to make a significant dent in the bag.
Despite the extremely high nature of the limit that they set, it has led commentators to spend hours talking about food rationing and panic buying despite the fact that there is none of this yet. This "limit" will lead to hoarding and panic buying in North America, driving the price up world wide and increasing the shortages in areas of the world that are already suffering. While shortages do exist in the developing world due to trade restrictions and higher prices it's hard to say that the pallets of rice I saw in Costco today really represent a shortage in North America. Though I have to admit stopping and thinking, "should I buy a few bags now just in case".


So Wal-Mart gets 0 Stars out of 5 for making a decision to create a potential for profit out of a crisis. And the Media gets 0 stars out of 5 for trying to raise their ratings by fanning the flames of crisis for their own selfish ends.

For The Long Emergency Somewhere out there an alarm bell is ringing

I've been looking over a book recently called "The Long Emergency" by James Howard Kunstler. The book has variously been called fearmongering and pessimistic and that probably is true. However being pessimistic doesn't mean that you're wrong. Though I guess it's worse if he happened to be not pessimistic enough. "The Long Emergency" details what will happen to the world when we run out of cheap oil, and everyone who can see the gas price can clearly see that his prediction is coming true. The book focuses on what will need to change in the developed world for us to survive the slow fade as we run out of oil and need to adjust our lifestyles to the new economy. But before the long emergency takes hold another emergency will take place. It will happen when the developing world of 2nd and 3rd world countries start to have food shortages as the cost of oil and transporting food rises and as food production land is converted BioFuels. This Emergency is happening now. The price of basic foods is increasing around the world and in some cases the price of staples like rice and wheat has more than doubled. While this will be annoying for people in the west where food takes up about 10% of income, it will be devastating to the developing world where food is around 80% of a families budget. While we in the west can survive a rise from 10% to 20% of our income for food through cutting back on what we eat and choosing to cut out a few extra purchases here and there. In the developing world this is not the case. If food costs you 8000 pesos out of the 10,000 you earn every month you may be able to survive, but if it costs 16,000 pesos out of 10,000 even with cutting back you will not be able to survive. It's hard to know how this emergency will play out, hopefully we'll be lucky and it will be over with quickly but it's hard to believe that at least some more people won't die as a result before we truely see the end of oil.