First, we have the good news story. Machine Design magazine reports on a company that has developed a mushroom-based replacement for a lot of packaging foam uses. The company, Ecovative Design, (I assume that's a combination of "ecology" and "innovative") calls their product Ecocradle:
...the material replaces synthetic, petroleum-based foams such as expanded polypropylene (EPP), expanded polyethylene (EPE), and expanded polystyrene (EPS). Containing fungus rather than petroleum, EcoCradle isn’t so much manufactured as it is grown.The article describes how the fungus is grown and processed into the packaging material.
EcoCradle begins as a combination of living fungi and agriculture waste. The fungi — called mycelium, or mushroom roots — is mixed with inedible and unusable agricultural by-products such as seed hulls or seed husks from staples like rice or oats.Sounds like an interesting idea. Around here, I've gotten several things shipped in those water-soluble packing peanuts made from starch. This is a similar idea, but not exactly a competitor to the Ecocradle foam. Here's a test product made from the fungus-based foam:
Now for the other end of the spectrum, the bad news story. It seems in the UK, the "Liverpool Pathway", the name for a system the NHS has been using to kill off old patients, is also being used to kill off the very young - babies. To quote the Mail (UK)
Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’.Is anyone surprised? Just a month ago, we found that the NHS was paying incentives to kill off patients (I hear the Mafia does that, too. Just sayin'...), and there have been many stories of complaints by relatives of how awfully their parents were treated. It's a system that a prominent oncologist called "immoral medicine" and "the most corrupt practice in British Medicine".
Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults.
But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.
Does this remind you of anything? The pattern of killing off - excuse me, providing less extreme measures - for the very young and the elderly? Why, it's the complete lives system (link to pdf) which is embedded into Obamacare! Just look at the graph from the paper on the complete lives system; it clearly shows babies and elderly won't get care. But that's only when resources are limited, which is always. The British NHS took generations to get to where they're actively getting rid of the young and the old; with Obamacare it's designed in from the start.
We need more of the problem solvers and less of the bureaucrats.