i-eclectica.org

Good news for vegans, bad news for meat-eaters

Via petroleum.berkeley.edu: Tyson Foods Inc., the world’s largest meat processor, warned Monday that rising corn prices could mean U.S. consumers will have to pay more for chicken, beef and pork next year. Bond said the price of corn, which is used to feed chicken and livestock, is going up due to demand from ethanol plants that are springing up to provide alternative fuel sources to oil; meat producers, processors and retailers will have to pass the higher grain price on to consumers because they cannot absorb it in their profit margins. Bond did not provide more details but suggested the higher consumer prices could come when meat demand typically increases during the spring and summer. “Quite frankly the American consumer is making a choice here. This is either corn for feed or corn for fuel, that’s what’s causing this,” Bond said. And the yanks of course would love their cars more than their food; on the other hand, I don’t think there are too many place in the world where people don’t.

Food prices are not only affected directly by the biofuel madness. Farmers certainly in Australia but probably worldwide are also buckling under rising artificial fertiliser costs; they are partially due to closure of production facilities (I wonder why?) and rising demand for alternative fuel. If we would transform ourselves into a smart species right now and put emphasis on organic agriculture and alternative energy technologies, we would go a long way towards decreasing this specific pressure on our wallets and other areas in our human and natural ecological systems, plus we could seriously begin to lay the foundation for a sustainable lifestyle and future …

A useful tweak from Random Good Stuff … it’s been around for a while, but I had forgotten about it; it certainly makes a difference .

And here are some extra tweaks to speed up FireFox:

The video suggests that you set ’network.http.pipelining.maxrequests’ to ’10’. I suggest you set it to ’30’ to get even more speed out of it.

Set ‘network.http.proxy.pipelining’ to ‘true’.

Right-click anywhere in the browser window and select New -> Integer. Name it ‘nglayout.initialpaint.delay’ and set it to ’0’. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.