This is why I eat chicken

Here is why I eat some chicken, no beef, I why I won't be eating shrimp anymore.

This chart is taken from the fantastic report by the UN, "Kick the Habit, a UN Guide to Climate Neutrality.", page 103. You need to combine it with the World Ressource Institute chart, pasted below, on the proportion of the entire problem that is caused by different activities, including agriculture and livestocks (it's 12.3%.)

It's also the reason I drive a 70 mpg motorcycle, and why I lobby for 100% clean electricity for Massachusetts by 2020.

Apple is the new dictator of my industry

I am distressed at the number of the IT professionals who are taking Apple's claims about the goal of the App Store's no-Flash or other such programming languages policy at face values. Apple's objective when refusing Flash has nothing to do with their stated position. Their concerns over quality or stability are not credible, when their action indicate that their goal with disallowing Flash is to reinforce their lock down on the platform. Indeed, Apple has already begun abusing the new-found benevolent dictator position:

• They have censored political speech from being published through the App Store, at the same time as newspaper are transitioning to using the App Store as their publication platform.

• They have blocked the Scratch project from releasing their brilliant programming platform for teenagers on the iPhone, a favorite computer platform of teenagers, destroying MIT's hopes of giving the millennials a Commodore 64-equivalent -- a self-driven path for developing computers wizard skills.

• They blocked Google Voice because it would have reduced AT&T's ability to charge for bandwidth.

Apple's PR department has been spinning their intent since the very moment of the release of the iPhone.

In the late '90s, Microsoft tried to use its monopoly position to crush the possibility that web application could become sufficiently feature-rich to compete with Windows. After years of fighting against that abuse of monopoly power, mainly through the funding of a huge effort to create the Firefox browser, today we enjoy thousands of rich and innovative web applications.

On the back of that success, we geeks are now handing a control of our computing to Apple. If one person buys an Apple products, no harm is done; if we all do, we instantiate an abusive monopoly, one that promises to be even more severely clutched than Microsoft's was.

I humbly suggest you considers boycotting Apple's products, and donating to an organization which fights monopoly abuse, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Free Software Foundation.

Climatologist sues, wants paper to widthdraw its libelous statements

Via Andrew Trumper:

It's probably an unfortunate measure of the quality of modern journalism that few of us would be surprised to hear that an editorial on a politically controversial topic contained significant factual inaccuracies.

But climate change seems to have reached the point where even some apparent facts have become points of contention, and at least some reporters have become comfortable with simply making things up and ascribing their imaginings to credible scientific sources.

Apparently fed up with similar practices in editorials produced by Canada's National Post, a climatologist has now sued the publisher for libel and defamation. But the suit seeks a judgment that's remarkably sweeping: the scientist wants the publisher to hand over the copyright to the editorials so he can attempt to erase them from the Internet.

Link to the Ars Technica article on the matter.

Facebook has gone rogue

You can tell Facebook has gone rogue. After they began leaking information that their user had marked "private," they have now elected to leak this information to any websites you visit.

They require everyone to go through contortions to opt-out, and when you finally reach the button, it is labeled:

Allowing instant personalization will give you a richer experience as you browse the web. If you opt-out, you will have to manually activate these experiences.

You can tell from the turn of sentence that Facebook has been handed over to the marketing department, and that these individuals do not have your best interest at heart. Bastards.

After you uncheck the box, Facebook will reach for an excuse to continue leaking your information, and interpret your friends' non-opting-out as a permission to leak your information on their behalf. Facebook's message continues:

Please keep in mind that if you opt out, your friends may still share public Facebook information about you to personalize their experience on these partner sites unless you block the application.

In order to maintain you sense of inconspicuousness, you have to turn off acquaintance leaking as well.

Catastrophic Rapid Climate Change

According to Krugman's excellent summary of the consensus amongst economists is that avoiding catastrophic rapid climate change would cost 0.03 to 0.09 percent point of growth per year until 2050. In other words, the annual to 2050 would be 2.31 percent, instead of 2.4 percent. That is very small indeed. Put another way, it would cost 775$ per household over 40 years, which is about 20$/year. And at 2.66 persons per household on average, solving the problem cost a whole 7.26$/year. It's about the price of the Starbucks latte you took Jan 17st, plus the price of the one from Aug 23rd.

Let's do a cost/benefit analysis. If we maintain the status-quo, and proceed as usual and burn all the coal available on this planet, the temperature goes up by 11F (see the question-and-answer section at the end of the talk.) New York becomes Mississippi and Mississippi becomes unlivable. If we burn all the coal, we return to the temperature on the planet before the coal was made, 55 millions year ago. It was the time of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a "slow" event, with a gradual warming spread over 20'000 years time, that nevertheless resulted in a mass extinction.

Meanwhile, we human have sufficient coal-fire power plants deployed to get that kind of change done in 100 years. Go us!

So, to complete this cost/benefit analysis, I ask you, how much is your planet worth?

Americans have more investements in each other's health care than Canadians

Little known fact: Health care in America is funded by the government to a greater extends than in Canada. Between Medicaid, Medicare, Military Health Care, and emergency room services for the non-insured or the under-insured, the American government pays US$2,728 per person per year for health care. That's 23% more than the Canadian government expense (US$ 1,893.)

Ref: Wikipedia on the difference between the US and Canadian health care systems.

Why privacy matters

Bad week for privacy rights. The two companies which are running toweringly large repositories of private information, Facebook and Google, both messed up in the same week.

First there is Google. CEO Eric Schmidt, for a man of his stature and competence, as well as the person in control of the database servers that store my email, he came much too close to saying, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide." His version of the unfortunate phrase was

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. (via Boingboing)

And then there is Facebook. With the introduction of their new privacy system, Facebook has published tons of private information about their users. Facebook has revealed the name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the fan pages of everyone, including the information of those who had elected to keep these private.

I will not mince words. If this move, the revealing of information previously entrusted to be private, is not currently illegal under American law, it should be made so.

Snappletronics has a good collection of links discussing the issue, as well as suggestions on where to join protests that are currently being organized against Facebook.

Bruce Schneier has written an excellent piece on why privacy matters. In short, privacy protects us from abuses by those in power.

Privacy is absolutely essential for the members of the opposition party. If the government can spy on them, game over. Your democracy is dead; no challenger will ever win an election again. This is why Nixon had to be impeached. His actions were not as overt as a declaration of dictatorship, but the outcome of his spying activities, if left unchecked, would have been similar.

Privacy for journalists is also non-negotiable. Without journalists to hound the government and expose its troubles, your vote is blind. Your democracy might as well be based on tossing coins rather than votes. The press is, after all, the Fourth Estate. How many anonymous whistleblowers would there be if the journalists' phones were tapped?

Privacy for journalism students is also important. After all, any dirt gathered on them today can be used to intimidate them later in life, when they are threatening those in positions of power. And the same vein, law students must be protected, since they are likely to enter politics sometime during their career.

Similarly, political bloggers and activists will also be the targets of harassment. Their voice can be heard, and if it challenges the government, it may need to be silenced. Indeed, spying for the purpose of censorship might become the norm in the United States. Protesters now find police resistance immediately as they begin to assemble at the location of their rally. The police seem to know where to go. And they know because the phone lines were tapped.

F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show**, New York Times, December 20, 2005

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." A third indicates the bureau's interest in Determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Put yourself in the shoes of a politician. He has a pretty good gig. It pays well, it has great benefits. He enjoys the exhilaration of power and the occasional bribe. The only downside -- it's nerve-racking, really -- every four years he runs the risk of losing his job because someone is smearing his name in public. The best strategy is to start early and gather as much information as possible on the opposition. If no law stops him, he might as well tap the phone lines of would-be-bloggers and anyone likely to become an activist in the future. The information might come handy.

In short, anyone with a bone to grind against the government is in danger. And that's pretty much everyone.