1. Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac

The Farm Bill, a massive piece of federal legislation making its way through Congress, governs what children are fed in schools and what food assistance programs can distribute to recipients. The bill provides billions of dollars in subsidies, much of which goes to huge agribusinesses producing feed crops, such as corn and soy, which are then fed to animals. By funding these crops, the government supports the production of meat and dairy products—the same products that contribute to our growing rates of obesity and chronic disease. Fruit and vegetable farmers, on the other hand, receive less than 1 percent of government subsidies.

The government also purchases surplus foods like cheese, milk, pork, and beef for distribution to food assistance programs—including school lunches. The government is not required to purchase nutritious foods.

Read the whole article here.

2. Sergey Brin on Google's China Decision

I don't actually think the question of whether this was the Chinese government or not is all that important. I know that seems strange. The Chinese government has tens of millions of people in it, and if you look at the associated army and whatnot it's even larger. It's larger than most countries by far. So even if there were a Chinese government agent behind this, it might represent a fragment of policy, as it were. There are many people there, and they have different views.

If you look at when we entered China with our Chinese operation in 2006, I actually feel like things really improved in the subsequent years. And I know there was a lot of controversy surrounding it, when we had to self-censor a fair amount, but we were actually able to censor less and less, and our local competitors there also censored less and less. We from the outside provided notification when the local laws prevented us from showing information, and the local competitors followed suit in that respect. So I feel like our entry made a big difference. But things started going downhill, especially after the Olympics. And there's been a lot more blocking going on since then. Also our other sites, YouTube and whatnot, have been blocked. And so the situation really took a turn for the worse.

Read Google's original statement on China here, and watch the whole interview here.

There's some repetition in the graphic, but it made me look. I'd like to see a list of what's not censored.

As you no doubt know by now, earlier this month, 25-year old Sun Danyong, an employee of Foxconn -- the company that manufactures the iPhone for Apple -- was apparently driven to commit suicide as he was subjected "unbearable interrogation techniques" by his employer's internal security group. Danyong was under investigation for losing a prototype device of a forthcoming iPhone.

Image via.

As this incident unfolded, we were naturally following it, preparing to write a lengthy post for BlogLESS detailing the dense web of ethically unattractive business practices that combined to manufacture this grossly tragic event.

Given the magnitude of the tragedy, though, pontificating about business ethics, Apple or Foxconn seemed, if not misplaced, then at least unsavory. What luck for us all then, that Fake Steve Jobs delivered one of his best posts ever, finding an appropriate path to the heart of the problem without degenerating too far into the preachiness or grandstanding that a more sober response threatened.

(For those four of you who are currently reading BlogLESS and have never heard of FSJ -- first of all, god bless you. Secondly, you're in for a treat. FSJ runs a Steve Jobs parody blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs -- tagline: "I will restore your sense of childlike wonder. There is nothing you can do to stop me." -- which, under normal auspices, can be very funny.)

Back to the matter at hand, though. I'll now quote the July 21 entry from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs:

Well, this is the world we are living in. These are the people we are dealing with. This is how we have to deal with them. We can't make these products in the United States. Nobody could afford to buy them if we did...

This time it's getting to me. It really is. For a long time I couldn't stop crying. Since then I've just been sitting in my office with the blinds shut. I can't stop thinking about it. It's why I wasn't on the earnings call today. I'm just numb. I'm asking myself, Is this really worth it? Is this what I want to do with my life? Can I live with myself?

1. Design for Disability

Twan Verdonck's toys for the mentally-challenged are now part of MoMA's permanent collection.

On the ethical design front: Brain Pickings has posted a collection of smart designs for the differently-abled. Bravo!

2. Betcha can't stop with just one click

How long will you click on it?

Check out this award-winning Pringles ad. Probably the wittiest banner ad we've ever seen ((maybe the only one)).

3. Chinese Painting Villages

This is surreal.

“Chinese Painting Villages”, such as Dafen or Wushipu in Shenzhen, ...employ about 10,000 artists and produce more than 60% of the world’s oil paintings.

Via.

4. Design History Lesson: Keyboard Layouts

Why are keyboards so poorly designed and yet so difficult to fix?

USAToday writes about the updated Escape and Delete keys on Lenovo laptops. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but there is actually quite a bit of baggage when it comes to keyboard layouts. An interesting lesson on how bad design prevails and why innovation can be so challenging.

I’m very late to the party with this one, but while shopping online recently, I noticed that Wal-Mart has updated its brand. The response so far seems cautious. Folks seem to like the new color scheme, the trendier font, and sentence case hyphen-less wordmark, but there is considerable confusion over the new glyph that replaced the five-pointed star in the logo.

What is that thing? Some people think it’s a sun, or maybe an asterisk. Others are quick to point out its resemblance to a sphincter. Quite a range of interpretation!

It’s an unfortunate bit of abstraction, to be sure, but I think all the consternation about what the logo looks like misses the bigger question of why?

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Taxi Key to the City makes these nice Taxi Cards, cards you give to a taxi driver in a foreign country (here, China) to explain to him or her where you want to go, as almost certainly you don't speak Chinese, and on my experience, Beijing taxi drivers in particular speak just enough English to make it very dangerous to try to communicate.

DLB loves this diagram, from the Beijing Taxi Cards website.

When I was in China, I stayed with a family of American ex-patriots, and they lived in an ex-patriot community. They give out packages of these kind of taxi cards when you move in. The ones they give you are specific to your neighborhood, whereas the ones sold here are more general (they are mainly targeted at tourists for the 2008 Olympics).

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