As IF Times

link Chipotle Warns It Might Stop Serving Guacamole If Climate Change Gets Worse | ThinkProgress.

Of all the spurious reasons to join the march of the Global Warming parade with the deluded idiots, at least this one has the potential for mass outrage.  Whereas for most people, the odd missing penguin, scarce butterfly or dwindling owl population may be somewhat abstract, the thought of missing out on a main food group, Mexican, is unthinkable.

If you removed avocados from the mix in offerings at Mexican restaurants, what would you be left with?  Tomatoes, beans, cheese, beef, chicken and pork.  That may as well be Italian food.  Or if you take out beans and use chopsticks, it’s Chinese food. We can see where this would cause serious social upheaval.  If all of a sudden, the Chipotle restaurant chain loses access to avocados, then they are essentially Olive Garden with corn chips.  Why would anyone go to Chipotle when they can get bottomless bread at Olive Garden?

This isn’t about guacamole, it’s about the very survival of culture.  While it’s one thing to have a melting pot nation, when it comes to food, Americans want a smorgasbord of choices.  Nobody wants McOliveLobsterHut.  Whatever we need to do, however high the tax hikes or however much we have to pay to keep guacamole on the menus, let’s do it. Because it’s not just avocados.  It could be tomatoes that next disappear as a result of  Global Warming.  There goes Pizza Hut; there goes Chef Boyardee and you may as well say goodbye to salsa.

Luckily for Chipotle, the chances of avocados disappearing are as probable as eating a no gas burrito.  Good try though.  What they could do is to put images of missing penguins on their drink cups to raise consciousness of global warming.  Missing penguins cute; avocados, not so much.

link What’s Not Being Said About Bitcoin | TechCrunch.

There are lots of smart people out there who seem to be making money (literally) in the new murky world of Bitcoins.  I’ll confess that I don’t have any good grasp of how this new world digital currency works, but there seems to be some semblance of acceptance by those pioneers at the leading edge of this stuff.  Even retailers and service providers are effecting transactions using bitcoins in parallel with plain old money.

Intuitively, it’s a stretch to think that a currency based on nothing can actually be a medium of payment for goods and services.  In addition, if you can find or ‘mine’ this currency just by fooling around on the internet, it seems just a bit iffy for us hard asset types.  We are reminded of the story of Jack and The Beanstalk.  To summarize the story for those not born in the 1930’s, the mother of Jack was none too pleased when he returned home with a handful of beans as payment for the family cow instead of hard currency.

As it happens, the beans were not ordinary, but of the magical kind and all worked out well for Jack, who was in danger of being sent to an orphanage until that happened.  Eventually, Jack winds up stealing gold coins, eggs and a harp from an unfriendly Ogre and then lives happily ever after with his mom.

We haven’t the slightest idea  if the real life Bitcoin stories will wind up with modern day Jacks being eaten by Ogres or by them scoring great wealth.  It is however noteworthy that Jack’s eventual wealth was acquired by theft and bravery rather than menial work.