Healthy Holiday Hiatus?

Sorry meager audience, but health concerns (and I'll come up with something on healthcare another day) knocked me out of the running for awhile. It turns out that in Arizona there is something called valley fever, which is akin to desert mono- you inhale a fungus, it takes root in your lungs, and the fun starts. It was a struggle to get through the semester but I had a decent finish, and the last of the symptoms are finally fading. When the headaches finish I'll be thrilled.

The semester begins again on the 5th of Jan, and I've got another grad school app as well as the GREs, so the blog may take a backseat to life necessities...but it's not been forgotten. Review of Superfreakonomics forthcoming.

Happy Holidays!

如何生活用经济地可持续发展原则

你好！ok啦。全球人口增长过很快。怎么找够的资源让大家吃也有很高生活水平？我们看一看很一般的生活习惯有助于我们的环境问题和经济问题。

吃肉

对，吃肉真好吃，如国内生产总值越来越高，越来越人想买肉，所以更多公司生产肉，所以肉价格越来越低。但是肉不应该便宜！我们有便宜肉因为公司对牛，羊，鸡，很随便。养动物需要大量的资源，很多土地。每年一头牛使120公斤甲烷，助于全球变暖。用大型工厂农场，又难又昂贵的召回坏肉。怎么办？

吃肉越来越少. 对你的身体，健康有好处！
吃更多养殖的鱼. 吃更多养殖的鱼。鱼，至于技术可以看，不很介意生活在大批坦克，只要水是干净的。 农场提出，意味着我们停止搞乱与周围海洋的生态系统。
吃昆虫. 许多蛋白质！相信我！这只是“恶心”的因素还需要解决。但是昆虫蓬勃发展在狭窄和拥挤的条件下，所以我们可以生产出他们中的很多饲料用更少的空间和资源的人口。我就不知道谁会做饭。

瓶装水

每天带了一个水瓶装不方便。你可能忘记带了，可能忘了满瓶用水, 忘了干净瓶装水. 为什么你买一瓶装水，每次花一美元? 要是每个星期你买一次，每年你花五十二美元，但是在家水便宜。塑料瓶装不可由生物降解的, 塑料瓶装不可由生物降解的处地, 发布不好 化学物. 回收很好，但是可能有几个瓶装丢了，没回收。

喝饮料滤/自来水. 便宜和在你的厨房！ 10美元能买一个过滤器，可以用6个月。在 $1 商店，可以买铝水瓶。一边你节省自己的钱，一边并期待酷。

中央空调

中央空调很方便，但是也很浪费能源和钱。冷却自己的家是昂贵和对环境的不利，如果是运行一整天，坏的化学物质释放到空气中，杀死臭氧层。

用一个电风扇。很手提，很便宜。就你在家的时候开了，然后如果你去别的地方，比如说从客厅到卧室，也能带电风扇。但是最好的好处是每个月你就花3美元！你可以节省很多钱，环境会感谢你。

汽车和交通

汽车生产氧化碳，助于全球变暖。如果你有一辆车，你还需要支付石油和保险业和石油的变化。如果你在事故，后果真的很可怕。和人们通常通勤工作或与在车上只有一个人跑跑腿：如果大家都开着车，我们就都停留在交通！

坐公共交通。 这个方式比开车便宜。使用这个方便的PublicTransportation.org提供看到多少钱，你可以节省燃料计算器。这本轻便的碳排放计算器，可以帮助你看到多少二氧化碳，你会不会在大气中的，如果你坐公共汽车！

How To Live Sustainably & Economically?

Hello! Okay, so: with global population skyrocketing to 7, 8, 9 billion in most projections, how can we find enough resources to feed everybody and have a good quality of life? Let's look at some common habits today that are contributing to a Not Good Life in the long run.

EATING MEAT

Yeah, eating meat is delicious, but as GDP has gone up, more people can afford it and companies produce more and more, lowering the prices at the same time. Meat should not be cheap. It takes a lot of water, grain, and energy to raise cattle. The cattle produce a lot of methane gas and that contributes to global warming. Large factory farms make it hard and expensive to recall bad meat. What are the solutions?

EAT LESS MEAT. It's healthier for you!
EAT MORE FARM-RAISED FISH. Fish, as far as technology can tell, don't quite mind living in tanks in large numbers, as long as the water is clean and they have room to move. Farm-raised means we stop messing around with the ocean's ecosystems.
EAT BUGS. Just as much protein! Seriously! It's just the 'gross' factor that needs to be worked around. But bugs definitely thrive in the cramped and crowded conditions that we subject mammals to, so we can produce a lot more of them to feed the population with less space and resources. I just don't know who will cook.

BOTTLED WATER

It's so inconvenient to carry around a water bottle. You might forget it- you have to fill it, and clean it periodically. Why not just pay $1 to get nice cold water from the machine, and throw it away? Over time though, if you bought it once a week, you'd spend $52 on something you get for almost free at home. Plastic does not biodegrade, so it stays in the ground, releasing bad chemicals over time. Recycling is great but not every single bottle gets recycled.

DRINK FILTERED/TAP WATER. It's cheap and in your house! Buy a filter for $10 and it can last you 6 months.  Aluminum water bottles can be bought at 99cent stores. You will save yourself money and look cool at the same time.

CENTRAL AIR CONDITIONING

Central air-conditioning is convenient because it cools the home all day, however it is wasteful. Cooling one's home is expensive and bad for the environment if it is run all day, the air conditioner releases bad chemicals into the air while its running, it kills the ozone layer.

USING A FAN. If you have a portable box fan or standing fan, then you can just point it right at you when you're at home. Move it to your room, the kitchen, wherever you are. You'll save a lot of money and the environment will thank you.

CARS AND TRAFFIC

Cars make carbon monoxide,  which adds to global warming. If you have a car, you also need to pay for gas and insurance, tune ups and oil changes. If you get in an accident, the consequences can be really dire. And people usually commute to work or run errands with just one person in the car: if everybody drove a vehicle, we'd all be stuck in traffic!

TAKE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. It's way cheaper than maintaining a vehicle. Use This Handy Fuel Calculator provided by PublicTransportation.org to see how much money you could be saving. And this Handy Carbon Calculator  helps you see how much carbon dioxide you won't put in the atmosphere if you take the bus!

Now, In Two Languages

Today in Chinese class, we began a lesson about economics. I think this is a really useful topic (obviously), so I need to practice my Chinese writing ability, now that I'll have the vocabulary for it. So, and this may be very distracting, but I will be adding some entries in Chinese from time to time. (Don't worry: they will also be simultaneously posted in English).

This week I need to choose which factors I'm going to keep track of for this little exercise. Which ones would have the most impact on quality of life? Are quality of life and standard of living separate things? Income, rent, health insurance, which are the most important, or should I just keep records on everything and find out which mattered most later? (Sounds like this but boy that's work.)

Gotta go meet to prepare for another class presentation...I'll write more after.

现在双语

今天在我的中文课, 我门开始学习经济. 我觉得这个主题最有用，因为我需要练习我的写能力。。。

这个星期，我准备选择什么因素对生活经济有最大的影响，另外我应该注意哪些因素。我能控制什么因素？什么因素有最大的影响？收入，房租，健康保险等等。

需要走，我再写以后！

Utility Check

So although the actual experiment won't "really" start until November, I best get into the habits of detailing funds now: $113 in utilities: electricity, water, and internet. (No TV hookup, no gas because all-electric appliances). This is for September 2011, which still had 110-90 degree weather for most of the month. Now that it's much cooler, we've turned the thermostat higher so hopefully that should lower costs a bit. Goal: under $100 for October's bill. Would a microwave help? (No, says Scientific American. Best cut costs elsewhere.)

Standard of Living Factors?

Okay, so it seems technical setup has gone without a hitch. My plan remains an official "this is the experiment yay!" launch on 11/1/11 (which happens to be my birthday). But in order to really launch, I need clearer parameters on what the hell I am actually trying to measure/accomplish/think about.

What constitutes an "acceptable" standard of living? This will vary widely according to perceived tastes but of course that can be altered (Apple can make you want things you never knew you did, for example; same can be done with insects as protein sources, in theory). So perhaps the best way to go about this is to err on the side of austerity?

So I found this statistic on city-data.com:

Residents with income below the poverty level in 2009: 

Tempe:	19.2%
Whole state:	16.5%

Residents with income below 50% of the poverty level in 2009: 

Tempe:	9.4%
Whole state:	7.6%

Read more: http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Tempe-Arizona.html#ixzz1a7qEnBbW

That means almost 20% of people in Tempe (a city of 161,000: 20% is 32,000 people) are living at-or-below an annual income of $11,500 (for single-person households....it's $22,500 for a family of 4). One in FIVE people are getting by for rent, utilities, food, clothing, education, and healthcare on $46 a day ( or $17,000 a year, an averaging of the single-person income and family-of-four).

$46 a day to spend sounds like a lot, but my rent alone is $456 a month, x12 = $5,472 a year, not even counting utilities. (They come out to about $3.75 a day for me, or would be $1,365 a year). So right there, almost 7k a year gets eaten up in the living expensive of shelter. That's $10,000 left to survive on.

Now personally that would be plenty, if I'm just looking to pay for food and transportation costs, and just for myself (but a single-person household would be $11,500, not $17,000, so I'd be down to $4,500 for yearly food budget already. Okay, that sucks). But most likely that's a figure to be shared by, let's say, a young adult couple with no children.

I think what I want to look at is finding how much money has to be spent in order to have a highly satisfying standard of living, with methods that are easily replicated, along with play-by-play recommendations about how certain factors could be adjusted (lower costs with bulk ordering for larger groups, for example) while still discussing the tradeoffs (bulk ordering from Costco = death to the environment because supply chains are evil, well not really, but I simplify highly). Because don't forget, sustainability + overall wellness is a big part of this too, not just "how cheap can I be?"

So...I guess it means I have to keep thinking.

Getting all the kinks out!

Still waiting for the domain name forwarding to kick in. Surprisingly irritating process, that. It keeps referring it to a page that no longer exists, and with wrong web address masking. Will give it another day before calling GoDaddy to mess with it.

Also still wondering how I shall exactly "set up" this experiment. It's going to require really carefully detailed spending/accounts of where funds go. Doable, but requires me being anal about keeping track!

I hope to also extend this into finding out the minimum threshold for living space, clothing, expenditures on furnishings, entertainment....might have to go to Ikea or people's apartments and do quite a few surveys! This could be kinda fun.

Testing, private launch!

Hello World!

Wow that brings back computer programming memories...