[Note: Haven't post any entries for a month, and suddenly I have two. Interesting.]
I am not a smoker, so I was happy with the enforcement of smoking ban in Hong Kong. Nevertheless I was disappointed and suprised by a lot of exemptions in bars. Owing to the opposition the government allowed some bar places to be exempted for a period. I thought it had to be a strong enforcement, but apparently it rules leniently. Like usual, the government makes concession when many business parties does not give any support.
Reading BBC's news I know that North Ireland also put smoke ban in force. Australia had this regulation in force last year. It is a trend that smoke-free legislation will be found in many countries. I know that a lot of them rule it out strictly, so I do not understand why my government always does such silly thing - they execute a new legislation, but always with exemption and concession. The government always claims it takes time to be like this or that, but for something it wants to do it always takes action quickly without mercy. I know the government is hopeless, yet I am still always disappointed. The clubs or bars I often go are all exempted. What's the point of having such legislation? Money speaks everything in this tiny city almost doubtlessly.
I cannot tell how sad the city is without mercy, without memory, without culture but only about business, profit and money. To be concrete, this city has culture, but the culture of profit. We are at the extreme of capitalism and consumerism.
Nevertheless a point I wrote before has to be highlighted once again - we talk about free city and freedom of people. Smoking ban seems to be good for people, yet at the same time it restricts our freedom. I am not a smoker, but a lot of people are. I cannot judge whether the law is really for the sake of our health and non-smokers or it actually exploits our rights to smoke. It is two faces on the same coin. One may say our health is on top of these things, but who knows some people may not even want to be healthy as they choose to smoke - in this way their rights to be unhealthy seems to be exploited, despite the strange logic. Hopefully as a reader you would understand what I am trying to explain here. (Have never had a feedback!)
Monday, April 30, 2007
Cocoa
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11659/1102/
Chocolate's cocoa can be replaced by trans fat and partially hydrogenated oils, particularly when the price of cocoa increases because of the bad harvest in Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two largest producers of cocoa beans in the world.
The suggestion is certainly criticized as trans fat, an unsaturated fat unnecessary for our health, is gradually abandoned by many countries. Yet the cost of adopting the new composition is one third of the original cocoa, despite cocoa is healthier, especially in terms of our cardiovascular system.
The bad harvest was due to a dry weather. I guess global warming is inevitably one of the reasons for the weather. That means it is possible to see the extinction of cocoa because of the continuing bad weather.
I am no longer a big fan of chocolate; still I find it quite unacceptable in my sense that cocoa will disappear from our life one day. We have so much chocolate in our daily life - chocolate bars, chocolate cakes, chocolate ice-cream and so on. Even though someone now says there is a substitution of the same taste, it can never be the same without cocoa. Chocolate, the name itself is already come from cocoa. Can you link chocolate and cocoa together? Probably not; I cannot imagine.
Nevertheless I remember I read one Chinese fiction before about a woman from the future suddenly went back to the past and met a chocolate factory owner. It is an amour but in the story chocolate was extinct in the future world. No one in the future knew the taste. It was one of the most touching stories I have ever read, possibly because I was very young when I read it. Will it become real, let say 50 years later? I feel sad for this.
This morning I read some environmental news provided by the Reuters RSS feed. Everyday there are many pieces of bad news, telling everybody how dangerous the current situation is and how urgent we have to take action for life sustainability. Someday glaciers will be gone, like the news about the melting of glacier in Germany since the beginning of industrialization. Rivers will be dried out or polluted irreversibly, like Yangtze River. Aquatic life is ruined owing to over fishing - can you imagine tuna fish will disappear from our diet completely because of extinction?
The bad news overwhelms the good.
When an increasing number of people gather to fight for our living environment to be livable, wars and human conflicts continuedly devastate our established civilization. It is always easier to destroy than to construct. It takes 30 seconds to knock down a building with a bomb after it took maybe a year to have it built up. People in the war surely understands but they seemingly won't think about it. These people are the most powerful to save the world from deteriorating, yet they apparently choose to create damage rather than aids. It is hardly convincing to be optimistic.
Still, we have to work on it. Otherwise we wouldn't have any single opportunity to survive.
Chocolate's cocoa can be replaced by trans fat and partially hydrogenated oils, particularly when the price of cocoa increases because of the bad harvest in Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two largest producers of cocoa beans in the world.
The suggestion is certainly criticized as trans fat, an unsaturated fat unnecessary for our health, is gradually abandoned by many countries. Yet the cost of adopting the new composition is one third of the original cocoa, despite cocoa is healthier, especially in terms of our cardiovascular system.
The bad harvest was due to a dry weather. I guess global warming is inevitably one of the reasons for the weather. That means it is possible to see the extinction of cocoa because of the continuing bad weather.
I am no longer a big fan of chocolate; still I find it quite unacceptable in my sense that cocoa will disappear from our life one day. We have so much chocolate in our daily life - chocolate bars, chocolate cakes, chocolate ice-cream and so on. Even though someone now says there is a substitution of the same taste, it can never be the same without cocoa. Chocolate, the name itself is already come from cocoa. Can you link chocolate and cocoa together? Probably not; I cannot imagine.
Nevertheless I remember I read one Chinese fiction before about a woman from the future suddenly went back to the past and met a chocolate factory owner. It is an amour but in the story chocolate was extinct in the future world. No one in the future knew the taste. It was one of the most touching stories I have ever read, possibly because I was very young when I read it. Will it become real, let say 50 years later? I feel sad for this.
This morning I read some environmental news provided by the Reuters RSS feed. Everyday there are many pieces of bad news, telling everybody how dangerous the current situation is and how urgent we have to take action for life sustainability. Someday glaciers will be gone, like the news about the melting of glacier in Germany since the beginning of industrialization. Rivers will be dried out or polluted irreversibly, like Yangtze River. Aquatic life is ruined owing to over fishing - can you imagine tuna fish will disappear from our diet completely because of extinction?
The bad news overwhelms the good.
When an increasing number of people gather to fight for our living environment to be livable, wars and human conflicts continuedly devastate our established civilization. It is always easier to destroy than to construct. It takes 30 seconds to knock down a building with a bomb after it took maybe a year to have it built up. People in the war surely understands but they seemingly won't think about it. These people are the most powerful to save the world from deteriorating, yet they apparently choose to create damage rather than aids. It is hardly convincing to be optimistic.
Still, we have to work on it. Otherwise we wouldn't have any single opportunity to survive.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)