Re: Ethanol: Stage 3

[Guest guest]

Not 1, 2 or 3 would work.

Number 1 was being done already and had been for millennia. If you look at the record, you can see how with most grains how the number of kernels per stalk and the size of the those kernels has been increasing over time. This spend up to an extent after Mendleson did his genetic studies several centuries ago. People had been selectively breeding animals directly for ages, but then they more actively applied it to plants, selecting for more favorable traits.

Genetic engineering of today is no different, just that we are doing in one shot what had taken decades or more. Increasing yields from plants makes sense since more food can be produced for less material, energy and land. That's a good thing given how rapidly we are losing farm land.

You have the theory right for communism, but in reality is was never even close, which is why the commoners had a dismal standard of living, and low birth rate, while the Elite Party Members lived like Europeans. The centrally planned economy actually set prices for every item, some 20 million of them. The bureaucracy could not keep up because every time the price of one thing changed, it changed prices on others like a chain of dominoes. More bureaucrats weren't the answer, because that just compounded the problem. As such, there were chronic shortages, people standing in line for days to get one undershirt, maybe. Indeed, internal reports show that it wasn't until the 1950's that agricultural output caught up with what it had been before the Revolution in 1917, in spite of major leaps in farming technology.

You'll never get people to eat less or throw away less food. That's just going to be with us. The only way that that will begin to change is when prices get high enough to force people to make the choice. That will happen to a lesser extent thanks to Ethanol diverting food production to fuel, thus increasing prices of meats and grain products. A greater effect will be if the Middle East brews up and there is a major disruption of world oil supply, naturally as demand in China and India grow greatly, or if a future Democratic Administration passes the "Carbon Tax" that is floating through Congress yet again, which would add trillions of dollars of cost to the economy per year, causing electricity, fuel and transportation costs to shoot up and crippling the economy.

I think the problem in Africa and some other parts of the world stems from misguided compassion. People saw the populations starving during a drought, so they sent food aid. They didn't like seeing people die of disease, so they sent medicine. Combined, the population shot up well beyond what the land could handle. The population of Sudan went from about 6 million in 1900 to a current roughly 40 million today. The land just can't handle them. This is the case in many places in Africa: compassion said help them, but several stages on, there are too many people for the land to handle, the economies have no chance of developing enough jobs to give people work, etc. It would have been better to let nature run its course and try to slowly develop those countries. Again there was failure here as entities like the World Bank just threw money at people with no idea how to use it, causing massive national debts and stage 3 and 4 projects in stage 1 societies, almost all of which failed.

China and India are another matter. Their culture valued large families, especially China because some of the ancient emperors decided that with a large and expanding population, they could have larger armies than their rivals and crush them through sheer mass. The fondness for large families continues even though both nations are very crowded and are running out of arable land and water. As they develop more, those problems will only become more intense.

What is the solution? I think the market and nature will decide that. Food will become more scarce and the people will have to decide do we keep it for ourselves or ship it overseas? Most likely the choice will be to keep it for ourselves. We'll have to see though.

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[Guest guest]

there are two ways to look at this crisis:

1) We should never have messed around with trying to get more stalks

of rice per paddy in the first place and just let people starve to

death as they have for milennia, thereby keeping populations low and

feedable, or

2) Every aspect of life ought to be evaluated much as the communists

have, with every worker being evaluated for a production value and

every human being given a consumption ceiling, and every commodity

that can be naturally grown or raised or mined evaluated for

quantity, availability, and sustainability. In this way every single

birth would have a talley on its head that would be figured in terms

of how much the person can produce versus how much the person can

consume.

This second strategy works well because, given such a low standard

of living, and given the uncertainty one faces as the people in

control change criteria, people would not be so inclined to give

birth because it would imperil their own standard of living.

One would see a steady pulsing of the population. It would fall when

people feel there is only so much food and resources to go around,

but it would rise after the population fell and the amount of

resources to go around increased.

I am not advocating either the first or second option, because there

is a third alternative available to all of us at this exact moment

that hardly anyone uses.

It is called common sense.

If I am not mistaken, Americans are the fattest people in the world

because they eat more calories than they burn off, yet they also

waste more uneaten food than any other country in the world. (And

this above statement excludes people with glandular problems and the

like. I am talking about gluttony, not medical problems.)

Eating modestly, consuming modestly, can conserve food and resources

for everyone and give those that are straving the portions that we

consume over here or throw away unused.

But this third option means a self-imposition of discipline and will-

power, and most Americnans don't have that these days.

Tom

Administrator

Stage 1: Claim a push for energy independence and start a corn based

Ethanol program

Stage 2: Corn prices double from $2 to $4, good for some farmers

Stage 3: Food prices go up, tortilla prices doubling in Mexico and

now the following.

UN warns it cannot afford to feed the world

[Guest guest]

>

perhaps we should give all people recieving aid the ability to

sterilize themselves or put a cap on how many unborn family mambers

qualify. One or 2 child cap in every nation that accepts aid. in the

US as well. welfare cap no additional entitlements. welfare was to

help a family in crisis, not become a lifestyle for generations. A

birth cap would resolve itself by decreasing #'s.