Higher Education Costs

Check Wikipedia for minimum wages in various countries. Note specifically developed vs. undeveloped countries. German is interesting in that there is no minimum wage except there are many exceptions based upon collective bargaining. It infers you are unemployed from a particular job. This is also true in Austria.

This site  has interesting charts on education spending by some countries but I’m not sure what it means aside that we spend a lot but don’t get the best results. There are a lot of blogsites that deal with this issue. Here is another interesting site that talks about what college education costs for students around the world.

Further checking shows that Australia is the first country to make higher education free at the point of entry but it is not a free ride. You have to repay based on a percentage of future income. It has worked well and they have no student loan defaults. In this country Oregon has a program similar to Australia except the repayments only last a certain period of time. For a fuller description check this site.

Cat Play Unit

Now admittedly the cat play unit (CPU) that I have almost finished constructing is not as impressed as the RHU in the previous article, but I’m pleased with it.

Yesterday I spend several hours, longer than it would take to erect a RHU, to create the CPU. It was hard work that required 12 hours of sleep afterwards.

So far I believe it has received the coveted CAA (Cat Approval Award) by Lamont, Patchtricia and Pawline. As witnessed by the following pictures:

The unit has 4 levels including the bottom level. Soon the leg portions will be wrapped with good old hemp rope for additional scratching areas along with the cloth covered levels. There is ample catnip for each level. Note the hanging tennis ball for cat bopping in picture one.. I plan to include other such exercise equipment, such as a punching bag on the top level for additional cat amusement. (The weight bench or hand weights are not the cats.)

I think I need therapy; or maybe this is it.

Refugee Housing Unit (RHU): Truly a better mousetrap.

Every now and then someone comes up with a remarkable idea. The Ikea Foundation in Sweden, a philanthropic furniture branch in connection with the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees has come up with such an idea.

What they have created is truly amazing. When natural disasters take place there is always the problem of housing displaced people. Often they have to live in tents, on average up to 12 years often in very harsh environments. It is estimated that 3.5 million or 10% of refuges continue to live in these tents.

Ikea has developed what they call a flat-pack shelter the RHU that comes in boxes, which can be set up without any tools in about 4 hours. It is comprised of plastic panels that clip on to a metal wire and pipe frame and is 17.5 square meters. Bigger, more private that even has a solar panel to generate electricity and light. In the future they want to improve them to do water harvesting and purification along with lockable doors and windows, but now it makes it too expensive. These unite cost about $500 the improved model would double that.

About 50 prototypes are being used in Iraq, Lebanon and Ethiopia.

You would think the media would be all over this and they would be being promoted like mad. Talk about a company that follows the golden rule, these folks are saints. 

Ethanol Ethics

To folk with an eye to the future alternate energy sources are an obvious way to go. Wind energy, voltaic/Galvanic cells, solar power, geo-thermal, hydroelectricity, tidal power, wave power, radiant energy, and biomass, head the list of these. It is where we are should be investing and developing for long-term sources of energy of the future.

 It is amazing how these concepts are not talked about and even denigrated today. Negativity towards these sources or just ignoring them come from those entrenched in the fossil fuel world. Listening to the ads of BP and the like you’d think they were the economic power saviors of the country. Natural gas is pure, but it will in turn run out. Fracking to develop such sources is fraught with dangers we are not allowed to assess such as the mystery chemicals used in these systems. It is like Wal-Mart advertising its great value to the American dream while it fails to provide living wages to the majority of its employees who need government subsidies to survive; or Heinz when it advertises it “thick” qualities, which seems to just newspeak for hard to get out of the glass bottle.

There is Nuclear power but we have not been able to come with any plausible way to deal with the contaminants it leaves behind.

And then there is ethanol, a renewable resource that farmers love. And now proposals are being made to raise the amount of ethanol to be allowed in gasoline to make it more useable. The farmers love it as it has driven the market up for corn, its primary source up with resulting higher prices. Forty per cent of today’s corn crop goes to the production of ethanol. That’s right 40%.

But there are residual problems with ethanol as well; or those few sentences of change as Boehner says about the current farm bill. Here are some of the problems. E15 (a 15% mix of ethanol to gasoline) we know causes excessive wear on motors and thus more repairs. However, a 51 cent-per-gallon tax credit goes to companies that do this blend; ethanol costs about to a 70 cents per gallon more than gasoline.

Next is the environmental impact of growing extra corn, which requires lots of fertilizer and pesticides – pollutants. Ethanol advocates say it will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but there is no data to support that.

Then there is the obvious result of 40% of corn being used to create a bad fuel, which drives up the price of food.

On our current track ethanol production is ramping up to 13 billions of gallons this year to 36 billion gallons by 2022. I don’t really buy this one as it would take the nations entire corn supply to accomplish it.

But however, you cut it, ethanol seems an incredibly bad sources of alternative energy no matter the short-term benefits to farmers.

 We are called to be the caretakers of the planet upon God’s behalf. This does not seem the way to go about it. A more ethical solution to our energy needs it seems to me to take those funds that underwrite and tax advantages given to this industry could be must be used to work on the alternative energies mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Decisions We Make

Ryan Grim writing for Huffington Post posits 6 decisions that could have saved Trayvon Martins life. Here is what he writes:

1. Zimmerman could have decided not to follow Martin. 
For starters, George Zimmerman is not a law enforcement official trained in spotting suspicious or criminal behavior. Zimmerman told a 911 operator that Martin seemed suspicious and appeared to be "on drugs or something. It's raining and he’s just walking around, looking about." It was not 3 a.m. when Zimmerman spotted Martin. Rather, it was early evening, a time when people typically "walk around, looking about." Had Zimmerman simply gone about his business, we never would have heard about either of them.

2. Zimmerman could have listened to the 911 operator and not followed Martin.
Talking to an operator, Zimmerman complained, "These assholes, they always get away." He later narrated, "Shit, he's running.”

"Are you following him?" the operator asked.

Zimmerman confirmed he was. "Ok, we don't need you to do that," the operator told him. If Zimmerman had simply let Martin run away, he'd be alive today. Martin, it later emerged, found Zimmerman as deeply suspicious as Zimmerman found him. Only one of those judgments turned out to be correct.

3. If Zimmerman had not been secretly armed, he probably wouldn't have followed Martin. 
Zimmerman knew that he had an advantage in any possible confrontation with a neighbor: He was concealing a weapon. If a fight started, and Zimmerman began losing, he could pull out the gun and shoot his opponent. The state of Florida allows Zimmerman to patrol his neighborhood armed, which emboldened him.

4. If Zimmerman's weapon had not been hidden, Martin probably would have dealt with him differently.
When a man follows another, tensions rise. One way or another, those tensions led to a physical confrontation. But if Florida law barred concealed carry, Martin would have been able to see that Zimmerman was armed. Zimmerman defenders suspect Martin threw the first punch. But even if that's true, would he have done so if he knew Zimmerman was carrying a loaded weapon?

5. Zimmerman could have been barred from carrying a weapon.
Zimmerman had a long history of violence, including a restraining order for domestic violence, felony charges of resisting arrest, and assaulting an officer (the charge was pled down to a misdemeanor and then closed; Zimmerman's dad was a magistrate at the time). He was bounced from a job as a bouncer for being too aggressive with patrons, the New York Daily News reported. And a family member accused him of a pattern of sexual molestation. He wasn't convicted of any felony charges, which could have barred him from a gun license, but in some societies, people would determine that such a history makes someone less than an ideal candidate for the right to carry around a hidden loaded weapon.

6. Zimmerman could have not shot and killed Martin.
Regardless of who threw the first punch, a series of aggressive decisions by Zimmerman led toward the fight that broke out. Zimmerman therefore bears some responsibility for the altercation. If one starts a fight and loses, the result is generally a bloody nose, a fat lip, a black eye, a concussion or even a broken bone. That's the price one pays for getting into a fight, and it tends to be a deterrent to starting a fight. Zimmerman could have chosen to take his lumps and rethink the decisions he had made that landed him where he was. Instead, he pulled out his gun, squeezed the trigger and killed Trayvon Martin.

Of course, there's a seventh decision that could have been made that night --Trayvon Martin could have chosen to not defend himself.

Whatever the verdict and how we feel about it, these are important questions. They are also questions of faith and how we related to our fellow human beings.

If we expect children to live up to our expectations they often do and if we expect them to live down to our expectations that is likely to happen as well. Zimmerman obviously had definite ideas about his neighbors that contributed to this senseless death.

People of faith also listen to others to help them in their decision-making. In this case again Zimmerman chose not to listen to the wise counsel of others who were more experienced than he in such situations.

Then there is the question of whether one should arm themselves. The standard reason people give is for self-protection. Yet, most of us are ill trained to handle weapons, which in turn can be used against us making ourselves more vulnerable to attack than if we were not armed. Also, you have to be willing to live with the consequences of discharging that weapon and possibly taking another’s life. That is a heavy burden for people of conscience to bear.

Gun packers by the very act of carrying and displaying a weapon project an aggressive persona, making others nervous. Most killings are spur of the moment, occasions of passion when one loses control and if they have a weapon, when their reasoning is impaired they are more likely to use it. Zimmerman’s background certainly shows this type of personality and it is questionable that he should be able to be armed.

I have lived in high-risk environments and we wisely, in my opinion chose not to carry weapons, they just increase danger rather than prevented it.

Scripture tells us that those who live by the sword are likely to die by the sword. Today we could just insert the word handguns (much less other artillery) with the same message. If we are called to be peacemakers in this world and take our faith seriously there appears to be far better choices than choosing the “right to carry.”

Again, it has been my experience when approaching someone who may appear frightening to you, smile and see how that changes the situation. We can arm ourselves with far better things than weapons of death.