Play the McDonald’s Video Game!
Consumerism, Deforestation, Economics, Global Warming/Climate Change, Health & Disease, Society — by Craig Mackintosh April 23, 2009
Today we look at another environmental feedback loop, and also put you in the driver’s seat of the world’s biggest fast food chain.
Over the last few years, the term ‘feedback loop’ has become common terminology. For the uninitiated, it’s a concise way to describe how the results of an activity cause a change in the activity itself – subsequently amplifying the outcome of the activity, and beginning an increasingly rapid, and potentially runaway, cycle of change.
If this all sounds a bit confusing, here are few of good examples to illustrate:
- Increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are causing permafrost in the arctic tundra to melt – releasing enormous quantities of methane (approximately 20x more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2), thus escalating the pace of warming, thus releasing more methane, and so on….
- Shrinking forests, like the Amazon, reduce the ability of the forest to water itself through evaporation and precipitation – thus resulting in a rapid drying and an escalating reduction in forest cover, causing forests to transform from carbon sinks into carbon sources – amplifying atmospheric warming, escalating forest drying, and so on….
- Increased CO2 levels cause the oceans (the world’s largest carbon sink) to become over saturated with carbonic acid, causing acidification and stratification of seawater until phytoplankton (also an enormous carbon sink – using photosynthesis to take CO2 out of the water) are no longer able to function (and being at the bottom of the food chain, this has direct consequences for all other creatures…).
Today we learn of a feedback loop that is more economic than it is scientific.
With the recession biting hard, and expected to bite much harder, people are penny pinching in any way they can. The result is decreased patronage of more expensive restaurants/cafes, etc. Pricey stores like Starbucks and other eateries are closing up left, right and centre, while cheap and … er… nasty stores like McDonalds are, conversely, seeing increased profits as consumers seek budget options.
Rather than ‘feedback loop’, this would be better described as a ‘feed’ back-loop (okay, that was terrible…). The two obvious feedback loops directly involve environmental destruction and, of course, compromising the health of consumers – each having disturbing economic implications (as they say, you can’t run a business on a dead planet – and you certainly can’t do so from a hospital bed).
But, I must say, despite soaring profits, it’s still not easy to balance the management of such a chain of stores. To get an idea of the challenges these poor guys face, click on the image below to play the McDonald’s Video Game, where you get to manage the four major sectors of this global corporation – agriculture, feedlot, retail and administration. You’ve gotta turn a profit, or else. After playing a while, you may even start to feel sorry for these guys. Or not….
Note: You need a flash enabled browser to play.
Clicked on the image. open a new window but did not initiated program.Cheers. Valerio
Comment by valerio — April 23, 2009 @ 10:18 pm
Hi Valerio – you need a flash enabled browser to play.
Comment by Craig Mackintosh — April 23, 2009 @ 10:40 pm
Feel sorry for these guys?
Profits; the problem is there raking it in, despite spewing out feaces in a bun, and putting a multitude of higher organisms in concentration camps
Comment by Ewan — April 30, 2009 @ 12:37 am
i want to plaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy
Comment by soltis — June 5, 2009 @ 12:13 am
my mother(almost a health food specialist) always told me that they use over 100 diffrenet kinds of cow meat in their burgers
Comment by andrewr — February 3, 2010 @ 1:32 am
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