delayed responses to some comments

jan 1, 2007

san, you said some time ago that if we focused on agriculture, the global warming from cows' flatulence would be a great problem. but that's not a good argument: it has nothing to do with agriculture, and everything to do with people's desire for milk, and especially, meat. if you could change behavior so that everybody either became a vegetarian or ate chemically-synthesized meat instead of that which comes from real animals, that is not an issue.

where you and i differ is in a fundamental perception of agriculture as a provider of jobs. i claim that manufacturing has increasingly offered fewer jobs as robots take over many functions. even in manufacturing, many of the jobs are in services such as design, marketing, etc. which can be, and are, outsourced, often overseas.

agricultural jobs can be quite good. the problem goes back to poor infrastructure and poor investment. if there had been enough, we could add so much value in agricultural products that it would be a source of wealth -- examples are seen in boutique farming (eg. vanilla, cocoa), floriculture, etc already.

ghostwriter, sorry to hear your holiday plans did not work out well, and that your trip to hampi got postponed. there is a lot of random illness -- they call it chikunguniya but i think the doctors dont have a clue and this is related to global warming -- going on in india now: fevers and such. i too fell sick in goa, as i mentioned before. maybe next year you can make it to hampi. it's worth it, get a good camera.

i have been happy with my canon a540, but the thing eats AA batteries. i got some rechargeable batteries as well, but i probably need to upgrade them to high-powered rechargeables.

i have been thinking of getting an hp dv9000z laptop, anybody have good or bad experiences with these? it's AMD, but it's a loaded game machine. i am not a gamer, but i like the idea of a 17" screen and a good video card. it will also run vista, although i'll probably run XP for a year or two. for running regular office productivity apps, is the AMD dual-core reasonable compared to an intel dual-core CPU?