Back in late 1999, there was worldwide paranoia of an impeding Y2K meltdown on Jan. 1, 2000 because of computer bugs that didn't include four spaces for year, meaning 2000, aka "00", would be interrupted by computer networks worldwide as 1900 and everything would come crashing down. Fortunately, that didn't happen and the impact was relatively minimal. This March 11 there will be computer glitches all over the United States when Daylight Savings Time officially arrives three weeks earlier for the first time. Instead of turning the clocks ahead on April 1, the new law, passed in 2005, makes the change official this Sunday, March 11. Read the rest of the story here.

Whether you agree that human activity on earth is polluting the atmosphere and triggering a warming of the globe, the facts are in - cattle rearing contributes more to global atmospheric, water and land pollution than automobiles.

After first publishing this news last week, thousands of people have read this article on the Internet and dozens have written to me asking that I offer more evidence of the claim.


I appreciate the feedback, and so I have collected some more facts about cattle pollution from a number of sources on the web.

- Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tons in 1999/2001 to 465 million tons in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tons. [source: United Nations report, Dec., 2006]

- When emissions from land use (such as production of feedcrops and grazing land) and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9% of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65% of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure. [United Nations, Dec 2006]

- Animal agriculture produces...37 percent of the methane [in the atmosphere] annually. [NewsTarget]

- Waste from farm animals in the United States alone is 130 times greater compared to humans. Agricultural runoff [containing animal feces and urine] has killed millions of fish, and is the main reason why 60% of America's rivers and streams are 'impaired'. - [source]

Heard enough? I have. I'm just going to eat less meat and make sure it comes from an organic, cattle-friendly farm, which can be found all over Santa Cruz County, California, and increasingly, the nation.


Labels: Animal Farm Pollution, Animal Farming, Animal Pollution, Cattle Emissions, Climate Change, Greenhouse Gases, Greenhouse Warming

I've been running a couple of blogs on Google's Blogger for a while now and I can say without question that their servers are unable to handle the load of requests.

Most of the time when I publish to Blogger, it takes forever, times out or loses my post altogether (which means I do all my writing in Word and then copy and paste).

The program has a lot of great features (but they need many more) but it is unreliable, and that is unacceptable from company that has the resources Google does.

Perhaps they shouldn't have purchased Blogger. Nevertheless, I hope they work on its performance and features and solve them fairly soon or I will be yet another ex-Blogger that Google loses to TypePad, MoreOver, LiveJournal, etc.

Any of those who use Gmail, you must also have experienced difficulties with it, and on a regular basis, like I have.

Therefore, I think I will go the route so many other webmasters have gone - and not happily I must say - and find a reliable service for email and blogging.

Meanwhile, I hope Google is working diligently on it's server issues. They know what they load is, response time, down time, etc. As someone who relies on it presently, I need to be reassured it will get better. I'll even pay a reasonable monthly fee ($4.95, like Typepad charges) if that'll do it.

Apparently it is not a priority at the company because it has been unfixed for at least a year. I know so many people that gave up on Blogger and Gmail and some who even mock it or are bewildered by its success. (Great branding! Remember AOL's first 8 years?)

The folks at Google must know something we don't, otherwise why would they let two of the most popular things people do on the internet - blog and email - suffer from lousey performance and uptime?

Also, it would be nice if they implemented the auto-save feature on Blogger as they do with Gmail.

I can't imagine that being a huge project, but who knows for sure without the real information.

Anyone else have these problems, comments or thoughts?

Phil
indierockcafe.com@gmail.com

http://www.webcontentprofessionals.org/

Web Content Professionals is an organization striving to achieve an interactive central portal for web content professionals and anyone else interested in the web content world with emphasis on web standards, design, content, user experience, search engine optimization.

This includes a lot of people that work "on the web" - most notably copywriters, product managers, content strategists, search engine optimization pros, developers, designers, UI folks, etc. Remember the engineering folks too have great stake in web content optimization on numerous levels.

You may want to check out my other blogs: http://www.indierockcafe.com/ or http://indierockcafe.typepad.com/