It is not about what we do in the EU and/or what happens in USA.
That is the typical short sighted view of politicians who decided on
the subsidy.
What matters is that the 'biofuel' of course does get imported from
South America and Africa and that it causes in THOSE countries a huge
inflation of food.
Some 3d world country managers are begging to adress this issue: "My
nations people die,
as your bio fuel raises our food prices, the poor are so poor here,
they use that stuff as food
and cannot afford it now".
USA nor Europe can *never* produce that stuff as cheap as 3d world
countries can.
Agriculture in USA and Europe only exists because of protectionism
(without me taking a viewpoint
on protectionistic measures).
For biofuels there is always manners to import all those different
types of food, creating at its
LOCAL market a huge food shortage and inflation of food prices for
the poor, a lot of whom die
as a result.
Not a single EU rule will be able to avoid that it gets imported and
later on somehow subsidy on
bio-fuel causes it to get burned for energy, whereas it is of course
a pathetic expensive form of
energy. There is always a manner to get the stuff into the country.
For example you want to produce
product X of it. By accident after import production line of X gets
left with 95% waste product,
which then you burn for bio-fuel.
So food of the poor ends up as biofuel, good for only a very tiny %
of all energy produced and "by accident"
always a smaller % than the % of energy that gets heavily subsidized
for being bio-fuel!
Yet if you deduce macro-economically, it is LOGICAL that the stuff
that gets used to produce the cheapest
food for the poor, also has a price low enough to get cheaply
imported from those 3d world countries to
our nation, to get burned as bio-fuel.
The poorest of the poorest can afford that stuff only because it is
the cheapest thing on planet earth,
and we are taking it away from them just for some stupid subsidized
bio-energy!
Vincent
On Jun 25, 2008, at 4:50 PM, Geoff Galitz wrote:
I've never really bought the argument that biofuels are causing a food
shortage considering that there is still so much unused farmland in
the US
and farming practices here in the EU. I must admit this out of my
field so
I have no real evidence to support my suspicion, but there have been a
trickle of articles from publications like Der Spiegel and the NY
Times
which indicate there is some suspicion these shortages have just as
much to
do with commodity speculation and manipulation.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/12/business/speculate.php
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,559550,00.html (in
English)
Geoff Galitz
Blankenheim NRW, Deutschland
http://www.galitz.org
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:beowulf-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Vincent Diepeveen
Sent: Mittwoch, 25. Juni 2008 16:07
To: Jon Aquilina
Cc: Beowulf Mailing List; Mark Hahn
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Re: "hobbyists"
Even worse,
Why is there subsidy on bio fuels that get produced out of food eaten
by poor people?
This causes as we speak people dying as they can no longer for a cent
or so buy food made out
of it; the prices have doubled if not more for such types of cheap
food because of subsidy in the
1st world countries for this.
I assume EU will take measures to turn back those subsidies on bio
fuels
that get produced out of food that feeds billions, who now hardly can
afford to buy food anymore as
it gets burned for energy in first world countries, whereas
commercially spoken it cannot get burned,
it is just because of subsidy it can exist.
Even better i would be in favour of a ban on bio fuels that are
outright food products in 3d world countries.
When i just walked previous week into a shop and my sister was
interested in a new washing machine,
i pointed her to the fact that the thing she was interested in, was
eating 3.8 kW, versus the 100 euro more expensive
thing next to it was eating 1.14 kW. It is something that only very
few will notice.
It is easy to cheaply produce equipment that eats more power than
equipment of competitors, that is the fundamental problem.
Vincent - speaking for himself
On Jun 25, 2008, at 8:43 AM, Jon Aquilina wrote:
how much does a sugar glass window cost now that sugar and other
things are being used for bio fuels?
On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 12:20 AM, Mark Hahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
More specifically for HPC, linux seems designed for the desktop, and
for small memory machines.
the only justice I can see in that is that there hasn't been all
that much effort to get bigpages widely/easily used. in
particular, I don't
see that scheduler or general memory-management issues in linux are
particularly biased for desktop or against HPC.
That's funny, because I've heard people get scared that it was the
complete
opposite. That Linux was driven by Big Iron, and that no one cared
about
the "little desktop guy" (Con Kolivas is an interesting history
example).
Con didn't play the game right - you have to have the right
combination of social engineering (especially timing and proactive
response) and good tech
kungfoo. kernel people are biased towards a certain aesthetic that
doesn't
punish big-picture redesigns from scratch, but _does_ punish
solutions in search of a problem.
so the question is, if you had a magic wand, what would you change
in the kernel (or perhaps libc or other support libs, etc)? most
of the things I can think of are not clear-cut. I'd like to be
able to give better info from perf counters to our users (but I
don't think Linux is really in the way). I suspect we lose some
performance due to jitter
injected by the OS (and/or our own monitoring) and would like to
improve,
but again, it's hard to blame Linux. I'd love to have better
options for cluster-aware filesystems. kernel-assisted network
shared memory?
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Jonathan Aquilina
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