Jinn of Quality and Risk

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. — Woody Allen ... The first longevity revolution occurred in the early 20th century, as infant mortality declined and infectious diseases were conquered; as a result, more young people now enjoy the opportunity to become old. The next longevity revolution, by contrast, will actually postpone old age. 

Cocoa bean prices have increased steadily over the past two years due to deficits in the supply/demand balance on world markets, but speculative buying has sent them shooting up in recent months. Earlier this week cocoa bean prices on London markets surged to fresh 15-year peaks, up nearly 50 percent since the start of the year. On Thursday afternoon, most active second-month futures were trading at around 1,430 pounds ($2,223) per ton, up from 978 at the start of the year and a low of 547 pounds in December 1999. [Yahoo/Reuters story, with no explanation on the evolution of cocoa supply and demand over the past few years — they don't seem to understand that price is a signal, so they don't focus on the causes of such signal.]

What the story doesn't tell you but should: cocoa production has quadrupled over the past 50 years; prices ranged between $400 and $1000 per metric ton from 1949 to 1972, then between $1200 and $2400 per ton from 1972 to 1997 (omitting a $4000 spike in 1975/76). The December 1999 price was very low compared to the last 30 years, which is a signal to producers/farmers that they should stop investing in cacao fields (due to lower profits); note that the cacao tree yields its first crop at 3-4 years old and reaches maturity at 10, so there is a fairly long time lag in the adjustment of supply to price signals. Finally, the current price is simply in the upper range of the last 30 years. No reason to panic... [data source: Global Cocoa Bean Supply/Demand and Apparent Stock Change, USDA Foreign Agricultural Service]

Hershey's annual report, 1999, Assuring An Adequate Cocoa Supply: The 20th century has witnessed sustained growth in demand for cocoa, growth which has been the result of the world's growing appetite for chocolate. Unfortunately, there have been years when cocoa production did not keep pace with the fairly steady upward trend in demand during this period. Supply shortfalls have resulted in periods of higher cocoa prices which, in turn, stimulated increased plantings, growing production and, once again, falling prices. The impact of these swings in cocoa costs has been significant, both for manufacturers and producers. Producers especially have struggled. High prices in the late 1970s and early 1980s stimulated a significant expansion in plantings in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Yet subsequent price declines limited the ability of these farmers to effectively care for the cocoa trees and still make a living. The result has been the widespread loss of whole cocoa-planting regions to low prices, pests and disease. Today, principally as a result of these price and production cycles, only three countries - Ivory Coast, Ghana and Indonesia - account for the lion's share of world cocoa supplies.

The cacao tree, theobroma cacao: The cacao tree produces flowers and fruit year-round. The cacao tree is small and comes from the forests of Central and South America. It needs a warm and humid climate, regular rainfall as well as a fertile and well-irrigated soil. It grows in the shade, preferably at an altitude of 1,300 to 2,300 feet, in the tropics 20° above and below the equator. The cacao tree yields its first crop at 3-4 years old. It is an adult plant at 10. It produces from 300 to 1,000 pounds of cocoa per acre for about 50 years. 

People are often surprised to see me travel with only one (relatively small) bag, especially during lengthy holidays; on the other hand, I always feel I should have brought even less with me. Now that I've moved five times within London in the past three years, I feel I should own and keep less material property. Each move is an opportunity to travel lighter, and thus feel lighter. He who would travel happily must travel light. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

Our biggest area of learning was bottom-up information architecture. The first edition was grounded in the type of top-down processes that come with building a new site from scratch. In the second edition, we were able to draw upon an understanding of how to redesign sites that already contain huge amounts of content and applications. Our bottom-up approaches begin with lots of user testing and content analysis and lead into the design of metadata schema, controlled vocabularies, thesauri, taxonomies and so forth. This requires close integration of software and information architectures, drawing upon content management systems, metadata repositories, and search engines to provide powerful, flexible searching and browsing solutions. [talk with Peter Morville, via cognitiveArchitects News] 

The profit motive must properly rest on enlightened self-interest, not cynical egoism: The purpose of a company is profit, but profit can be made in various ways. Some methods respect the freedom and well-being of others, while some trample other people's rights and lives. When the executives of a company have no principles or scruples to restrain them, it is only natural that they will try the latter methods. It is natural, but that is not an excuse. To accept selfishness as an all-purpose excuse for mistreating others is to reject the whole idea of right and wrong. [Richard Stallman in The Register, via The Desktop Fishbowl]