Carbon Footprints

Going veggie can slash your carbon footprint: study

Here' s the breakdown.

Meateater = driving 4,758 km

Vegetarian = driving 2,427 km

Vegan = driving 629 km

Organic Vegan = driving 281 km

But they forgot something:

Killing the dirty hippy who wants you to become an Organic Vegan would let you offset your meat eating for 5.78 years.*

*Assume said hippy would live 50 years, producing 281 km worth of driving carbon emissions per year for a total of 14,050 driving mile equivalents, divisible by 4,758 miles/year = 5.78.

Cheat Sheets for Factory Audits

Jury awards Mattel $100 million in Bratz doll maker lawsuit

While trying to learn what the heck a Bratz doll is, I found this interesting tidbit on Wikipedia.

The allegations in the report describe practices found at many Chinese factories producing name-brand products for export. They include required overtime exceeding the legal maximum of 36 hours a month, forcing workers to stay on the job to meet stringent production quotas and the denial of paid sick leave and other benefits.^[11] The report shows copies of what it says are "cheat sheets" distributed to workers before auditors from Wal-Mart or other customers arrive to make sure the factory passes inspections intended to ensure the supplier meets labor standards.

I definitely believe that the factory uses cheat sheets. This is a common practice to get around the social audit requirements. Another ploy is for an factory that can pass audits to outsource its production to other factories who could not. I always wondered if it was worth the effort to game the system by keeping multiple books, creating cheat sheets for workers, etc.

I also think the auditors who make more money when the factory fails (repeat business!) have a little too much incentive to be anal. You can always find a reason to fail any inspection. We had one our factories fail based on not having enough first aid kits available, even though the factory had a full-time nurse on duty. I wonder if a bribe would have resulted in the auditors finding that they were "mistaken" about the violation.

Walmart does have these kinds of problems finding suppliers. They have to be huge and able to ship massive quantities in a two-week shipping window. That is very difficult from a logistical perspective. They have to pass the audit, which means they have the same costs associated with a Western plant. But they have to be dirt cheap, too.

Personally, I am a little tired of all of the hoops everyone has to jump through. Our importer may be doing business with a large chain store soon, so I just got the 50 pages of requirements in PDF form. Yay! Its quite streamlined now, so the China buying offices start dealing direct with the importer's China office (that's us.) All of the tedious work is thrown on our shoulders, while the importer sends a one liner email:

"Hey buddy, I am assuming we are all okay with these requirements, right?"

Yeah, let me review the 7 different test regimes they require and get back to you. Oh, and the buying office is asking me about payment terms...I guess I should feel good that the customer trusts me about this stuff.

CHINA TRIP: September 3-19

Total Days outside Taiwan in 2008: 73

Yahoo News

GOP 'war room' revs up as Romney hits the airwaves

Story not very interesting, don't need to click the link, but I found two gems:

Giuliani, along with another vanquished McCain foe, Mitt Romney, made a flurry of media rounds in the continuing GOP effort to counter the Democratic convention narrative.

Anyone want to bet that this journalist has reads fantasy novels? I mean this in a good way..."defeated opponent" is boring sounding. Vanquished Foe is much better. I imagine McCain the Barbarian defiling the body of Romney before enslaving his wife and children. Though I don't know how a Gelatinous Cube ends up as a Barbarian.

At the same time, three GOP members of Congress — a Cuban-American, a woman and a Jew —

Wait, wait, I think I know this joke. Does an elephant come into the bar next?

were among party people who joined Mitt Romney on the party's shoot-from-the-sidelines attack on Barack Obama on Tuesday.

Oh. Its not a joke. Damn.

Punished for purchases

The allegations, in part, focus on CompuCredit's Aspire Visa, a subprime credit card for risky borrowers. The FTC claims that CompuCredit didn't properly disclose that it monitored spending and cut credit lines if consumers used their cards at certain places. Among them: tire and retreading shops, massage parlors, bars, billiard halls and marriage counseling offices.

"The company touted that cardholders could use their credit cards anywhere," says J. Reilly Dolan, assistant director for financial practices at the FTC. "What they didn't say was that you could be punished for specific kinds of purchases."

That's pretty smart of the card companies. Except I don't get tire and retreading shops as a danger sign for credit risk. Oh and they got the sequence wrong in the story. It should be chronological as follows:

1. Billiard Hall

2. Bar

3. Massage Parlor

wait 12-18 hours and then...

4. Marriage Counseling

Armchair General

Is Georgia is too far away for NATO or the USA to militarily help them?


...and for an even better map that shows the roads and ports, plus Russian bombing attacks, check out the Georgian Ministry of Defence website here...

TURKEY would be the key...with the huge caveat that they may not be interested in helping Georgia. But, assuming they are concerned about keeping a buffer state with Russia and protecting the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, let's look at what they bring to the equation.

Turkey borders Georgia. Turkey is a NATO ally.

Logistically, Turkey has Mediterranean and Black Sea ports. Turkey has a US airbase at Incirlik. Turkey has roads leading to Batumi, a port in Georgia, and from there, road connections to Tbilisi, including one that does not go through Russian occupied Gori. But these roads, including a direct land route from Ardahan, look like they go through serious mountain terrain. Note also the Erzurum is a major air base for the Turkish air force and has runways that are the second longest in Turkey.

In terms of direct military aid, Turkey already has a frigate off the coast of the port of Batumi in Georgia, and as NATO's second largest army, its land forces, could deploy into Western Georgia along the coastal roads, and possibly into Eastern Georgia via Ardahan. The 9th Corps based at Erzurum, with its 9th infantry division in Sarikamis, would be the most likely forces to be used. Note that this information is completely speculative, and according to Wikipedia, many of the Turkish 3rd Army forces in the area, including an entire Corps in Trabazon have been moved after the Cold War ended (to Cyrprus and the Iraq border.) I wonder if any units are moving back?

ARMENIA almost certainly won't help.

As they have a Russian military base on their territory that supposedly was used to send air sorties against Georgia. But they do have a road into Georgia and a rail link from Turkey through their territory to Tbilisi. But they don't have a seaport or any US bases, so they would not be too useful in any event.

AZERBAIJAN is very slightly more likely to help.

They are already involved in NATO Partnership for Peace and have deployed peacekeepers to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Earlier this year, there was an espionage scandal in Azerbaijan involving the Russians. Even so, taking on the Russian bear would be too much.

Then again, they might be worried enough by Georgia's fate to decide to help, logistically at least. The price for serious assistance might be a quid-pro-quo on Nagorno-Karabakh and I am not sure that would be forthcoming. In any case, they have road and rail links to Tbilisi, though their lack of an ocean port along with easy land access again limits to the usefulness of their territory as a logistics base.

CONCLUSION: Turkey will be the main decision maker as to whether Georgia could be defended by the West or not.

If Turkey is willing to help even as merely a logistics base it does not look impossible at all (ignoring the question of if we have enough troops to do so.) In fact, its probably a better supply line than we have in Afghanistan.

If they are interested in keeping their pipeline and buffer state in Georgia intact to the point of offering military assistance, defending Georgia looks extremely viable. If they supplied most of the land forces, NATO could focus on the air and naval forces which are not as committed to the counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I have to wonder if the Georgians shouldn't have been buttering up the Turks more than the Americans. (Maybe they have been?)

NOTE: I am not sure I would advocate defending Georgia, except diplomatically. This is just a thought exercise.

Yahoo News

Scientists prove that Karl is a pussy.

Ghenghis "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry" Khan

Yahoo Headline

College presidents seek to lower drinking age from 21 to 18

Now they want to do that. After ganking me out of free drinks when I was an undergrad.

Some group called the Amethyst Initiative wants to rethink the drinking age. I love the photos they use on their website. They reminded me of all the dinner parties I attended as an 18 year old freshman, where I drank the social glass or two of red wine with my fellow scholars.

I guess the other instances of college drinking like beer bonging in the dorm bathrooms or playing quarters until people threw up have never been documented with photographs so they couldn't use those in their website.

I got slammed

in A&A on Saturday.

Also by beer. I did a recount and it wasn't really that much beer. But it did its work.

I'd describe myself as sloshy almost ready to chew my cud by the time I left.

Somehow I did not get in trouble with the wife.

Debate Coaches go head to head

NOT SAFE FOR WORK DUE TO LANGUAGE AND HIPPY TAKING DOWN HIS PANTS.



Amazing.

NOT SAFE FOR WORK DUE TO LANGUAGE AND HIPPY TAKING DOWN HIS PANTS.

Yahoo Headline

Huge inflatable art piece escapes museum, wreaks havoc

GENEVA (AFP) - A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday.

The art work, titled "Complex Shit", is the size of a house. The wind carried it 200 metres (yards) from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children's home, said museum director Juri Steiner.

The inflatable turd broke the window at the children's home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Steiner said. The art work has a safety system which normally makes it deflate when there is a storm, but this did not work when it blew away.

Steiner said McCarthy had not yet been contacted and the museum was not sure if the piece would be put back on display.

Looks like there was some warning...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7374546.stm

Fighting the last war...

So, since we seem to have gotten better at fighting insurgencies, built up light infantry units, promoted generals who understand unconventional war, etc., now of course we might have a crisis with the Russians in Georgia. Who have all those tanks and artillery.

Its like the rule of "preparing to to fight the last war" is making sure to assert itself or something.

Libertarian Paternalism

This is supposed to be an up and coming "Third Way" in politics, sort of a cross between the Nanny State that tells you what to do and the Cool Uncle State that lets you do whatever you want to do. The Tories in the UK are enthusiastic about this stuff and this book in particular. (You can listen to a podcast by the author here.)

I posted the example before of some place in SoCal banning fast food restaurants in an attempt to force people to eat better food. That's pretty much the Nanny State.

Now we have the city of LA forcing restaurants to post the calorie counts on their menus. This would be an example of Libertarian Paternalism...you're allowed to make your own choice, but information is provided.

I like this idea much better than the ban. I'm counting calories as it is right now, and that would be a useful bit of information for me to make decisions. I know that in Taiwan McDonalds prints calories on the packaging, but isn't that a bit too late, once you've already bought the item?

(I also like Unit Pricing. Carrefour does a good job with this. Costco not so much. It actually pisses me off when there is no unit pricing in a store.)

Now, the restaurants are apparently opposed to this idea. I am not sure why that should be.

Once you've actually sat down in a restaurant, are you going to leave because the items on the menu are too fattening? Like you don't already know that TGI Fridays has huge portions of fried foods. Will most people who are not on a diet even care?

Or is there some risk that people start to order lighter fare on menus which somehow would translate to less profit?

I'd be interested to know how much of a hit the Hostess people took on sales of Twinkies when it had to first print nutritional information on the packaging.

Or maybe its just a pain in the ass to calculate calorie counts for menus? Using the recipe calculator doesn't seem too hard.

And will there be monitoring and enforcement?

Wal-Mart's China Woes

Ding dong the Witch is dead! Ding Dong the Witch is dead!

Walmart buying offices in China are being closed.

業內人士分析，沃爾瑪全球採購中心在大陸地區兩地裁員，源於其經營不善。據悉，這個採購部門自2002年4月份正式成立以來，經營情況不好，東莞分部成立於當年12月5日，而採購中心成立的目的，是便於公司直接進入業務和工廠的直業採購，從而降低採購成本。

Loose translation is that Wal-Mart's offices that were set up in 2002 to buy direct from factories are not doing very well.

但是，從成立以來，該部門一直競爭不過為沃爾瑪服務的貿易商，採購中心的增加直接採購與降低成本方面，都沒有幫上沃爾瑪的忙，反而增加了成本

In fact, the buying offices could not beat the trading companies, and have not helped Wal-Mart reduced their cost, but in fact have increased them.

UPDATE:

Cool video shows Wal-Mart stores expansion in the USA.