Sargassum is a disaster for the economy of caribbean countries because many rely on tourism (read white sand beaches), so it may be a good idea to take advantage of it, but how can we be sure that enough sargassum will wash up on the shore for the next 6 months ?
Wether we view sargassum as a disaster or sargassum as a raw material, the problem is that we can't control its flow.
In that case it's probably smart he's doing this as a non-profit rather than a business. A business might go under if the sargassum stops, a non-profit can just wait or just go to other localities where they are getting sargassum and help them build homes there instead.
A non-profit is still...a business...its just a non-profit business. I don't think being non-profit exempts a business from staying alive without funding, wherever that comes from. I'm not saying your last point isn't valid though.
A lot of furnitures for our home.
Like a lot of software engineers, I have a thing for woodworking. I started with a footstool, then I made a simple cabinet, a mirror frame, cabinet with drawers, 3 wardrobes, a kitchen island, another footstool, shelves, a workbench, a desk, and some experimental stuff.
This thing is still operating the ERP of many brick and mortar french businesses. A few software companies have the guys able to maintain it, so they are well off, charging big bucks for every maintenance operation.
As a developer I have been asked a few times to build websites that feed on flat files exported from AS400 (don't bother asking about APIs). It was a pain every single time.
Zend provides PHP that runs on the i, so you should be able to get pretty much any information you want out of and exchange information with SOAP or build an API just like you would on Linux
Ouch, you brought up nightmares about flat files from a previous job. I’m betting it was an AS400 or something similar providing the data I needed to ingest. It was painful.
file drop apis weren't so bad. drop a file in the input directory with a unique name, wait for the response to appear in the output directory. with samba these became easy to work with.
i wrapped a couple of these with soap webservices back in the day and any reliability issues almost always came from the soap server.
ups used to be a gigantic as/400 shop... i wonder if they're still using them...
We waste a third of what we produce. If you take into account what we burn in the process (fertilizer, fuel, water, manpower), you'll realize how bad are our consumption habits.
"In the United States 30 per cent of all food, worth US$48.3 billion (€32.5 billion), is thrown away each year."
"The food currently wasted in Europe could feed 200 million people (FAO, 2013)."
Its not clear if US is any worse of that other countries based on this UN study. The data is very noisy and many developing countries don't have high confidence estimates of waste. Lack of temperature controlled storage and reliable transportation infrastructure can be a big issue in developing countries for example.
There are 330 million people in the US so that means the waste is only worth 130 USD per person. Or to put it another way a years worth of food in the US costs only an average of 260 USD, less than a dollar a day.
That seems unlikely to me. I'm pretty sure that even poor people in the US pay more than a dollar a day for their food. So where does all the money go?
Middlemen. Farmers are paid below market rates, and below cost of production in the US.
Tax breaks and other subsidies let the farmers stay afloat, and organizations such as the Chicago Board of Trade set artificially low wholesale prices.
