Self-management in business

It almost sounds like spontaneous organization with echoes of communal cooperation. Here is a huge business venture where the employees run the show:

Junk Food Jury 2

I hope you have been paying attention to your junk food intake during the holiday season. Why do I care? I don’t really.

But just because I think it is a personal choice and responsibility what you eat, that does not mean everyone else does.

The Ontario Medical Association (OMA), infinitely wise, and powerful, has pronounced on junk food. Apparently, it's the cause of the obesity epidemic sweeping our society and OMA knows how to combat the problem. OMA president Dr. Doug Weir: “We are raising a generation of children that will suffer from devastating and wholly preventable diseases, overwhelm the health system, and die prematurely…. The time for gentle admonitions has come and gone. We need to fight…with…. tax incentives and graphic warnings.”

Privately run and voluntary advocacy groups should be able to push an agenda, but OMA is a special case. They bargain with government when physician’s contracts expire. Effectively they are a union monopoly, with the ear of government. They represent the "political, clinical and economic interests" of the Ontario's medical profession. When they advocate legislation to increase taxes, or restrict marketing, you can be certain such legislation is inevitable. Of course their monopoly plus the government monopoly on healthcare, gives them the credibility to say they can mitigate healthcare costs by behavioural engineering.

OMA uses the unfortunate precedent and apparent success of the anti-tobacco campaign to bolster their case. However, tobacco is not an essential requirement of life, food is. The reasons for the steady decline in Canadian smoking rates over the years may be in part due to government action, but I suspect it has more to do with education and societal pressures. There is little reason to ask someone standing beside you to refrain from drinking cola; smoking is different.

Strangely, there is no real scientific evidence that points to junk food as being the cause of shorter lifespans in people or the primary cause of obesity. Diet is so variable, volume of food may be more important. Should we legislate the size of cutlery? Scientifically, there are too many questions to answer before we impose any judgment on food, even if it were appropriate. Agreement on what is junk food will end up being extremely arbitrary.

Last February three Alberta physicians suggested that junk food be reclassified as "pathogenic," disease-causing, like viruses. I wrote about that story here. Their argument is that junk food contains so many excesses related to various chronic conditions, junk food must be the causative agent. Yet that has never been established because very few people (if any) eat junk food exclusively.

So why is OMA so concerned about your diet that they want to warn you using government legislation? Because we let them, its become fashionable for the political elite to rail against junk food. Lots of stories in the States from the West coast, and the East.

I don't really have a problem with an educational assault on junk food without any government involvement. Good advice on diet is to be expected from physicians, why don't they leave it at that?   

The main argument against the OMA proposal is the libertarian one. Should government use its monopoly on the use of force to control our diets? Certainly not!

A climate science debate? We'll see.....

It's been almost six months since I've mentioned global warming. That recent IPCC conference in Doha was barely worth mentioning, not much of consequence happened. I guess just going to a part of the world that depends on the fossil fuel business, with an anti-fossil fuel message is worth noting. So there, noted.

In case you are wondering, I am not denying global warming (climate change or whatever). I believe the planet has been warming, certainly since the last ice age. It's still warming. Are humans the cause? Maybe to some extent, but not to the extent that we need to take any drastic global action, now or ever.

Over the past 22 years IPCC has put out an "assessment"  of the "climate crisis." The fifth one, AR5, was just prematurely released here. Each report since 1990 made predictions based on the climate models IPCC runs. 

The graphic, which comes from this site, shows predictions from the first assessment (FAR) to the last AR4, including an actual measured record (black arrow), at least according the this website.

Terrence Corcoran in the National Post, says AR5 has a “game-changing admission” about the effect of the Sun's magnetic field on climate. He also points out that a debate has broken out among the priesthood of climate science: "we have a science debate, rather than a dumped consensus. It’s not pretty, but it is an improvement over the secretive science that has dominated the IPCC since its inception."

Its good to see debate, that is the essence of science after all, that's how it corrects itself so the truth does emerge....eventually.

The rest of us can get on and discuss the real manmade problems of sovereign debt and currency. There is your real crisis and looming catastrophe. 

Lots of REASON to be optimistic....

...at the end of 2012.