Rant 261 / Gravlax Doesn't Seem Too Hard To Make

It is not the fact that you have the stuff you want that counts, but the fact that you can have it when you want it that is really important. The assurance you get from the knowledge and the sense of security are the most important factors.

That is why there is little reason to actually spend money on non-necessities when you actually have the money to do so. Unless you really want it. Then too bad.






How many more years before inflation and decrease of oil supply cause oil to hit $200 or even $300 a barrel?

When it first hit $100, the world spammed the "PANIC!!" button hard. What would happen when this price doubles or triples?

It is impossible to rule out WW3. The need for energy is great in most nations and it is of utmost importance to, at the very least, maintain their energy supplies for the foreseeable future.

Alternative energy sources aren't very helpful. Renewable energy research aren't exactly going anywhere these days. Water energy used to be the most common source of clean energy until people started to realize how much of the environment is destroyed each time a dam is built. The reservoirs created will permanently flood the land behind the dam, salmons can't swim back to their birthplaces to lay eggs and etc.

Nuclear energy was also pretty cool but disposing the wastes is a dangerous matter and after Chernobyl, no words can make anyone want a nuclear plant remotely near their homes. Plus uranium isn't infinite, just like coal.

Solar energy is too expensive to collect. Solar panels and the other necessary equipments cost so much and allows the users to save too little money compared to the present costs of oil and coal. An average guy using a solar panel at home will save so little that it will take decades for him to recoup the money he spent and finally start to get the "free energy" from the sun. That is, if the equipment never breaks down.

Biofuel comes in many forms. Those derived from food are all nonsense. Food prices around the world are rising already and there is no need to make it worse.

Biofuel from algae looks promising, but that's all there is to it. The amount of improvement it still requires to become commercially viable is still calculated in orders of magnitude.

Energy from our wastes sounds good too, except that it doesn't give nearly enough. In Singapore, our 4 incinerators burn all our trash and produce over 2000 tonnes of ashes to be buried in landfills. Yet all they supply is 2-3% of our electricity. (Of course, it'll be better if we recycle all our trash.)

Therefore, we are very screwed. Let's buy lots of canned food and store them somewhere safe. When the time comes, we can all just hide there and survive on canned food till it blows over.

:P






And what about global warming? Despite all these talk about saving our Earth, no one is mentioning that no matter what we do, Earth will continue to heat up for the years to come. We are not going to stop it. No, what we are doing will not have any visible effect till our grandchildren become adults. Or later.

So food supplies will continue to dwindle as farmers become unable to adapt. Many sensitive crops will become rarer and there will be consequences we cannot imagine. Even now, bees are dying off and no one has any idea why this is happening. " Bah! It's only bees," you say. But bees are the reason we have all sorts of fruits. Bees are necessary to pollinate most flowers in the world's orchards and are considered extremely cheap labour, compared to doing it by humans. Plus they give honey too! If bees go extinct, we are fucked.

By the way, bananas are in trouble too. The most commonly cultivated species of banana, the Cavendish banana, is very vulnerable to the Panama Disease which is quite widespread now. Researchers are still trying to find out which other species they can mix the Cavendish with to give it resistance. As of now, one of its strains has already wiped out all Cavendish in some Southeast Asian countries. The Cavendish, one of the highest yielding species of bananas available, is certain to be non-commercially-viable soon.

Yet more reasons for WW3 to take place within my lifetime.

Albert Einstein once said," I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

I have always thought that it is a wonder of our science that I can eat strawberries in tropical Singapore, so far from the regions it can be cultivated in. The first time I knew strawberries are highly sensitive to temperature was when I played SimFarm. It was one of the most useless crops ever to be grown.

It was so sensitive to everything that by the time I was done with spraying all the pesticide (when insects invade my strawberries), fungicide(whenever fungus is detected) and fertilizer(when the land isn't fertile enough) and it was ready for harvest, there were usually only two possible outcomes:

1) They were of extremely poor quality and could not be sold.
2) My crop became toxic.

I have tried, on several occasions, to store my strawberries that I bought from the supermarket, in my fridge and observed how it changes. It took less than a day in the fridge for some of the fruits to begin to become soft and turn black.

How miraculous our technologies must be that they managed to transport it all the way to the supermarket from the farm!

I know, I know. It was too cold in my fridge. SimFarm taught me that it is very, very sensitive to cold temperatures.

So it means they must have carefully maintained the ideal temperature throughout the journey! I mean, if it takes merely half a day in my fridge for it to become aesthetically-challenged, then it must have been a pretty tough job to bring it here without damaging the fruits at all!

This will be one of the first things to go if the world is in trouble, I believe.






Now I have another reason to buy L4D: some people are posting fake IPs on Garena saying they're hosting games. Makes me waste time connecting to an invalid server.





Wallpaper dump.