photo credit: greg westfall.

We’ve been eating far fewer portions of meat compared to before, and have been seeing benefit to that, too. I am by no means suggesting that people should go without meat if they enjoy it, but reducing comsumption brings about serious benefits.

Consider how that hamburger is produced:

1. Petroleum-based chemicals are sprayed on farmland in order to yield grain crops
2. The majority of our farmland is used to produce feed for meat animals
3. The average cow is slaughtered at 21 months – that means 21 months of eating grains and corn which may have otherwise fed people; 21 months of producing CO2 and methane greenhouse gas emissions
4. The cow is transported by truck to slaughterhouse
5. The cow is slaughtered and transported by truck to processing
6. Once processed, beef is trucked to grocery stores, restaurants, etc for consumption

Without being scientific about it, every time we bite into that Big Mac, we pollute as much as we would if we were driving an SUV on the highway each day. By some estimates, the meat industry causes more emissions than the entire transportation system.

In our household, meat won’t be eliminated from our diet any time soon. Nor does the environmental aspect of the problem hit close enough to home to cause a cutback. Instead, we’ve embraced the healthy feeling we get from consuming more fruits, nuts and vegetables; it feels more pure, somehow.

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As companies fell one by one, they tried all kinds of bonehead tactics, including suing themselves for damages. The once proud Citigroup self-destructed. Ultimately employees bore the brunt of the economic damage. Greed managed to prevail, of course, as Canada’s capital was held ransom by its transit union in the middle of winter, putting even more of the city’s lowest earners out of work.

Even countries failed. However, it appeared no one told Sweden there was an economic crisis (maybe fueled by the success of the Pirate Party?) while Latvia folded. Eventually the DOW recovered a bit – joy!

Technology may be speeding up our sharing of information, but we still like our embattled old newspapers. Not that it matters, since the only news agency worth following is the BBC, anyway.

Remember Illinois Governer Blagojevich? Let’s not even go there. Blackberry got a presidential endorsement worth over $50 million when President-elect Obama refused to part ways with his cherished device – forcing the CIA to build him a specially-secured unit.

Your privacy remains under siege, but no one seems to worry about the implications of airing their private life on the Internet. The prevailing view is that nothing is your fault anyway – in a particularly gross turn of events, an Ohio teen claimed he shot his parents because they took away his video game.

Facebook is constantly in the news. Your friends are worth less than whopper sandwiches – maybe we would value them more if they weren’t all illiterate.

A bunch of unlikely events happened this year. An African-American man became the 44th President of the United States (and he had his job cut out for him right away), and the Arizona Cardinals made it to the superbowl (although Pittsburgh won it, so all is well in the world). Even the Oscars were weak. While we were otherwise occupied, the monkeys tried to take over.

Not news anymore: The world continues to teeter at the edge of an energy abyss and the powers that be continue to squawk about the merits of the data used to arrive at climate change conclusions when we would be all better off if we started to explore green alternatives. We didn’t even trouble ourselves to write an article about Copenhagen – why bother wasting our breath. Even wind turbines are under seige. California is taking the lead in reducing automobile emissions – time will tell whether they are successful in guiding the rest of the world. I help out by cutting my own firewood from trees that are already dead; I’m a light-weight – real environmentalists use only the finest organic wood(!?). In the end it’s not about technology or one-off changes – creating a sustainable world is going to be hard work – we should start sooner rather than later. Look out for the resource land rush.

At least the spirit of discovery was strong. Using the omniscient Google Earth, scientists were not only able to find the garden of Eden, they were able to find the Lost City of Atlantis! (Although, they lost it again with some haste) Never doubt free information, and never question the wisdom of Wikipedia. Not only is Google leading the way in discovery, they’re leading the way in environmental stewardship by switching their lawn care to goats rather than gas-wasting lawnmowers.

The world continues to resist the magnificent western culture; India made waves once again for its anti-kissing stance… why don’t they want to be hyper-sexualized like us? I wonder if their teenagers spend most of their online time lookup up cosmetic surgery. Maybe they just hate long DVD introductions?

The golden age of Hollywood may be over, but Apple’s is just beginning as video gaming’s Renaissance continues. Sony wasn’t doing so well, and found itself trying to explain why we should care about its PlayStation console. The brave new world has us playing against each other online rather than in the same room.

Back to Obama – the man had some great ideas for improving world security and saving lots of money, and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his idealism. We’re hoping 2010 is the year he finally gains traction. How long will Obama cause jubilation everywhere he travels?

With all the coverage in sports, talk of respect and restructuring of the NHL points system (which must have cost Montreal the cup), no one noticed that Cuba’s government shuffled or that the United Kingdom was thinking about letting Catholics reign as monarchs. Wait a minute stop the presses – Michael Jackson died, nothing else matters!

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Suppose you’ve screwed up, badly. Perhaps the blunder was so grave that someone got hurt, or worse. Do you own up to your actions and take responsibility for the consequences, or do you downplay the significance of what happened or worse, deny it entirely?

If your doctor made a mistake, would you want to know? Recognizing their mistake and its cause would help your doctor avoid allowing a similar incident to repeat, wouldn’t it?

That’s exactly what the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal discovered. As it turns out, the hospital experienced a 50 percent drop in incidents over the three years it has had a full disclosure policy in effect.

Does full disclosure expose doctors and hospitals to increased liability? As it turns out, the majority of health care providers report that patients are less likely to sue if their doctor has apologized and admitted mistakes they have made.

The majority of health care professionals remain reluctant to admit when mistakes are made; however, as other facilities follow the Montreal Hospital’s lead with their own full disclosure programs we will start to see attitudes shift toward openness. By removing the fear of job loss for reporting incidents, hospitals will increase care and better serve their communities and patients.

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photo credit: Krawiec @ USA – NJ

It’s another head shaker straight out of Florida as “Wells Fargo Bank NA” sues “Wells Fargo Bank NA” for outstanding liens against properties involved in foreclosure. In what sounds like the most idiotic chain of events, the bank has hired an attorney to defend itself from, well, itself. The defense even issued an answer to its own complaint: “Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property. All other allegations of the complaint are denied”

What the heck?

Those bonehead 0%-down mortgages are coming back to bite banks now as they are forced to deal with bonehead litigation. According to Florida law, foreclosures are not valid unless the primary lien holder notifies secondary lien holders of the action so they can respond to it. In order to finance mortgages 100%, lenders created two mortgages, one at 80% and the other at 20% to cover the down payment, making themselves the primary as well as the secondary lien holder.

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A lot of interesting things have happened in the past several months as people from all walks of life learn how to stretch their money. A lot of changes have been accelerated by the fuel shocks during the summer of 2008; in a lot of ways we seem to be reverting to the frugal sensibilities of a past generation. More people are choosing to be more picky about when they swipe their credits cards even if that means not buying things until they have money in their bank accounts, the days of the $0-down mortgage seem to be numbered, and there is a lot more acceptance of environmentally-friendly technologies that promise to reduce our overall dependency on foreign oil even if it means taking a hit to the excesses that used to define our quality of living.

An interesting new trend being taken by small businesses is the practice of officering discounted prices to customers willing to pay in cash. This is not the same as paying “under the table” – rather, the store saves its merchant processing fee and passes those savings on to the customer. The idea is a good one in principle – paying in cash forces consumers to take stock of what they are spending as much as it saves stores from transaction fees.

Of course there are drawbacks to the plan. When people pay with cash, they tend to be more conservative with their spending since they tangibly feel their money leave their possession. That will cause stores to lose profits because customers will think twice before buying high-margin “impulse” products at checkout whereas before they might not have thought twice before charging it to their cards. Increased volumes of cash handling opens stores to loss through employee theft from the till, not to mention controls that need to be put into place to count and deposit physical currency.

Our family has saved a fortune by switching to cash. When getting to the bottom of your change jar means no more purchase power until your next pay period, you really start to appreciate the fine art of merchandising and the expertise applied to make you want to buy more and more. Cold hard cash feels more organic, and helps us to appreciate the effort it takes to maintain our lifestyle.

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Rather than have their regular maintenance crew come by and clean up their lawn, Google has decided to employ an army of goats instead. No kidding (a-hem). The goats will eat and then fertilize the grass, and not use an ounce of gasoline to do so.

PETA was reached for comment – in principle they approve of Google’s move, but have concerns about how the goats are treated (protected from the rain, given veterinary care) and humanely transported.

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Suppose you find yourself in this all-too-common situation: multiple credit cards (perhaps maxed) and loans, recently unemployed or perhaps just barely employed. Every last dime you make goes toward paying the minimum balance on your bills and feeding your family – more often than not you run out of money before you run out of month.

When you finally do have a bit of extra cash to pay down, what do you do with it? The most obvious answer is to pay down some of the debt with the highest interest rate. If you pay $100 on a credit card with 25% interest, you save $25 in interest payments over the next year. If you were to put that same $100 on a line of credit with 6% interest, you would save only $6 over the same time. Pretty obvious, right? Not really – you end up saving less than $2 per month.

If you’re in this situation your best way to get out of debt is to make use of what is called the “snowball” method of debt reduction. What this means, is the $100 you have extra goes onto the debt with the lowest balance. Yes, you will pay more in interest over the longer term; however, you will find yourself in a situation where a larger number of small debts are paid off relatively quickly, meaning you have fewer minimum balances to maintain.

Every time a minimum charge drops from your monthly expenditures you will have more money left over to pay for the next lowest debt. The effect: your cash payments snowball into larger and larger sums that make the bigger debts disappear faster. Fewer total debts mean fewer debts to service every month.

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Despite campaigns encouraging people to recycle their used cellular phones, most end up in landfills. In Germany, that amounts to 24 million phones per year – almost 1 for every 3 people. Aside from the obvious environmental harm caused by deteriorating batteries and plastic, the phones represent a significant economical waste – gold.

Hamburg-based company Norddeutsche Affinerie AG has made a business model out of recovering nearly 3.5 tons of gold out of electronic scrap waste, transforming it into gold bars worth over $110 million annually.

Resource-recovery is a growth industry in this poor economic climate; as more consumers get used to recycling their phones and other gadgets, more raw material can be extracted from the waste – reducing landfill clutter and providing resources for new technologies while reducing the need to strip the earth.

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Today’s gaming market is split four ways:

1. PC Gaming – Where pirated copies of games outnumber the legimite. Home of the “hardcore” gamer. Dead simple to create games for, since most programmers begin their careers on this platform.

2. XBox 360 – Where PC Game studios make their money thanks to DirectX. This is the home of the “serious” gamer. Also easy to create games for, since much of the discipline required to develop PC games translates to this platform.

3. Wii – Low-powered games that appeal to the mass-market (the “casual” gamer). Relatively easy for development studios to create games for.

4. Playstation 3 – A good Blu-ray player (at $400? sorry, I’ll pass). Nice looking games but difficult to develop titles for. Sony declares this system the leader, naturally.

According to an article by CNET, Sony makes no apologies for creating a system that essentially hurts the brains of anyone who tries to program software for it. The reason it is so dificult is because it requires programmers to understand parallel programming (we will see a lot more of that as GPU processing hits mainstream).

Sony’s plan is for programmers to become more adept at pushing the limits of its hardware over time (say, over 10 years). It’s an interesting strategy that worked well for the PS2, however in today’s competitive climate I would not (if I were a development studio) want to invest that kind of energy into such a marginal platform knowing I had a much larger potential user base in the XBox and Wii markets.

I suppose the flip side is that any title released to the PS3 potentially has a more captive audience since the market is not as saturated.

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