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The Glorious Return of the Twinkie
iggymanz writes "The geek food staple the Twinkie is coming back. The sturdy main component of the foundation to the geek four food groups of sugar, fat, caffeine and bacon — with rumored shelf life on the order of the time span to cool a white dwarf to room temperature — the Twinkie, along with Ding-Dongs, Ho-Ho's and Cupcakes, will be returning 15 July 2013 to the shelves under new management of Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropoulous & Co which paid over 400 mega dollars (U.S.) for the brands."
Are they like regular dollars with superpowers?
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
with rumored shelf life on the order of the time span to cool a white dwarf to room temperature
From the AP:
During bankruptcy proceedings, Hostess had said that its overall sales had been declining, although the company didn't give a breakout on the performance of individual brands. But Seban is confident Twinkies will have staying power beyond its re-launch.
As for the literal shelf-life, Seban is quick to refute the snack cake's fabled indestructibility.
"Forty-five days - that's it," he said. "They don't last forever."
So you score with your left hand or the right hand?
The geek food staple the Twinkie is coming back.
Ok, show of hands. Who among you has actually consumed a twinkie after grade school? Last one I had was during the Reagan administration. Obviously they sell but I cannot recall the last time I saw anyone actually eat one. It's like the National Enquirer of foods. They apparently sell lots but you never actually see anyone buying them.
I don't really know any geeks who eat twinkies either. Is this a thing in some part of the country? I know some geeks who are overly fond of sugary treats (I'm one) but twinkies never seem to be in the shopping cart.
Mayor Bloomberg, is that you?
Ever since hearing that after a nuclear war the only two things left are cockroach and twinkies, I've been keeping 2 twinkies in my basement since the 80's. And they're still 100% good. So I guess it's pretty much true.
The USA public may have been sad at the thought of a Twinkies shortage, but the Secret Shadow Government engineered this re-booting of production for one reason. They know we need massive stores of Twinkies to sustain our brave zombie-killers in the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse.
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PBR is overpriced?!?!
It is one of the cheaper beers around. To me, it tastes just about the same as Budwiser or the like. I'm not often in mood for the chug'em ice cold US lagers like these, but they do have their place (on extremely hot days here in NOLA), and I'd just as soon grab a PBR as a Bud or Bud Light, especially since the price is much lower.
When not sweating my ass off, and wanting to enjoy a beer for taste and more..I got for the better stuff, but PBR as far as that style of beer goes, is good as any of the rest and you often find it rock bottom prices.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
PBR costs money correct?
That makes it over priced, they would have to pay me to drink it.
If you want bottled water, just drink that. If you must pickup a sixer of megabrewery product for a hot day you could get some blue moon.
They don't write "news for nerds" anymore under the logo for a reason.
No there aren't. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've been keeping 2 twinkies in my basement since the 80's. And they're still 100% good.
Unless you actually eat them how would you know?
PBR is 153 calories, for about fifty cents a can. 300 calories to the dollar is not bad at all.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
It's like an Americanised eclair. Pastry on the outside, cream on the inside. I don't think they usually put chocolate on the top either. Damn now I have a mad craving for eclairs.
On that note the geek culture of eating shit needs to stop, I mean this stuff combined with a sedentary lifestyle is basically slow or not so slow suicide. Eat small amounts of healthy food, cut back on the coffee and cut out the booze, get regular exercise. Being fat isn't fun or smart and sugar rushes wreck anyone's concentration. Diabetes, no thanks. I'm not a fitness freak but come on, take a half hour at the start of the day to prepare some sushi or maybe a ham and sundried tomato bagel with a touch of cheese for a treat, delicious and filling. Have a cup of green tea.
Could you not just write "Bazinga! 42! All Your Base!! xD!" instead?
If anything, the Twinkie is the food staple to those who are too nostalgic or stupid to know to buy ANYTHING ELSE.
The sturdy main component of the foundation to the geek four food groups of sugar, fat, caffeine and bacon
Ugh. I feel ashamed this is in the summary.
No-one eats them. Why do you think the company went bankrupt?
They sold 36 million of them in 2011. That's a lot of twinkies if "no-one" is eating them. I just can't figure out who.
Why do you think the company went bankrupt?
They went bankrupt because their (union) labor costs, pension costs and debt load. Incompetent management probably played a role somewhere in there too. They had significant revenue but their costs were out of line with the amount of revenue.
I love it. I'm calling Twinkies "American eclairs" from here out.
I honestly have not noticed that until just right now.
Oh man I need a minute to digest this.
The reason that Hostess went under is that management refused to play nice with their unionized workforce, and they decided that they'd rather have no company than a union shop. Now that the union is busted, they've restarted production with a non-unionized workforce, "generously" allowing those workers to return to their old jobs at about 1/3 what they were paid before.
And if you're wondering which side to blame: Before the strike that ended Hostess, there were a couple rounds of the union taking pay and benefit cuts followed by management giving themselves bonuses for convincing the union to accept the cuts. That's why the union didn't buy the "but if you don't take the cuts, the company will go under" argument.
I am officially gone from
This is another case of corporate S.O.P: declare bankruptcy for one reason; to void any and all obligations to current - and especially - retired employees.
So as you gorge on your new Twinkiees, try to ignore that no doubt they were made by newly or re-hired workers from the now-permanent underclass: longer hours, lower wages, little or no benefits, and laughable health insurance.
Not that much of this will matter to the increasingly Randian crowd on Slashdot.
Calories are not equal to nutrition at all, unless you're on hospice.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Twinkies and other processed foods aren't the problem. One Twinkies a week isn't likely to make a person gain weight, unless they're taking in exactly the number of calories that they're burning.
The problem is that people aren't moving enough and are eating too much. The fact that Twinkies are effectively just a source of calories without any redeeming value doesn't really factor into it.
I remember having a Twinkie once, and it was one of the most disgusting "foods" I've ever eaten. And I've eaten spiders, scorpions and tripe.
It's not really supposed to taste good. It's comfort food. As in it presses specific buttons in the brain to make one feel better in the short term. Sort of similar to why some people have a harder time of managing their sodium intake than others. I have very little compulsion to consume too much salt, but I have to be really careful about my sugar intake because that's a problem for me.
It seems wrong that a brand discontinued by its owner should sell for $400 million.
Perhaps I just don't understand the consumer business.
Maybe that's why I'm a hardware designer...
It's not really the consumer business, it's the corporate chop-shop/knacker business.
"Hostess Brands" has reasonably strong product lines and revenue; but it was having trouble with those pesky 'employees' who wanted 'the wages and benefits specified in their contracts', like some kind of parasitic commies or something. Some of them even had the temerity to suggest that demanding that they take major cuts when the 'Chief restructuring officer' and other higher ups had received 80% raises was a show of rather bad faith.
By chopping up the company for parts, the various brands, which are valuable, can be divorced from any "legacy pension and medical benefit obligations and restrictive work rules"(as the company describes them, in the self-pitying tones of one who has conveniently forgotten agreeing to them...) and turned into sweet, sweet cash, any facilities worth keeping can be sold off, and operations and creditors who actually matter can continue as normal. (Thanks to a little strategic-under-funding of the pension plan, American taxpayers will get to do their part to ensure that real creditors come out unscathed.
The reason they are known to have a long shelf life is because they use banana cream instead of dairy cream, giving them a comparatively longer shelf life.
They have used vanilla cream instead of banana cream since around WWII when there was a banana shortage.
The union took cuts twice, and each time management gave themselves huge bonuses (million +), . SO after that, why would the union cut yet again?
The union played a game of chicken with management and lost. I think it is clear the management was incompetent (and greedy) but apparently so was the union. The company had already been through bankruptcy once before. The union leadership BADLY misread the strength of their position and it cost a lot of people their jobs.
I think the negotiation went something like this.
Mgt: We need wage concessions, etc.
Union: We're going on strike
Mgt: We're going to liquidate the company if you do that
Union: You're a bunch of liars and poopyheads
Mgt: We warned you
Mgt takes company into Chapter 7
Union: Oh shit, they weren't kidding.
Mgt: Let's pay our selves some handsome bonuses before this thing completely goes under [/evil cackle]
Welcome back, Type II Diabetes. We have missed you.
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Pointing out how terrible something is for you != banning it.
Ahh yes, because one's lack of self-control is the reason we should implement a law telling a company what size cup they can serve their drinks in.
Should we tell car manufacturers their cars can't go faster than 75 mph too while we're at it?*
Again, we're trying to find a technical solution to a human problem.
* Have to make sure to get in the car analogy
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It's not the union's failt they weren't willing to shoulder the entirety of the cuts while management dicked around.
Actually it is their fault. The union could have conceded more but chose not to. They chose to take the risk of liquidation and they came up snake eyes. They let their ego get in front of their BATNA. Given the financial position of the company management clearly held all the cards in this negotiation. I genuinely feel bad for the union employees since the management seems to have been a bunch of douchebags but they made the choice to risk unemployment over further cuts.
Same great product! Without that heavy union after-taste.
Why 299792458? Why not 299792459? Why not 300000000? Why not 1000000000? And let's not even get into how long a second is.
Backwards compatibility, from when the meter was defined by "the length of this here stick."
Seconds, though? Absolutely. Sorcery that is. I guess there had to be a unit of time to make all of science useful in some way, but seconds are really SI unfriendly since, while you could use units like kiloseconds, you can't really abandon hours/minutes for it.
More Twoson than Cupertino
At least they didn't say 390.625 Mebidollars.
Wasn't the meter originally defined as "1/10000 the distance from the equator to the north pole, as measured along the meridian running through Paris"?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Well... If all you do-gooder types would stop asking to pay for everyone's healthcare, maybe you wouldn't have to complain so much about everyone's lifestyle.
Speaking of having to pay for healthcare being an excuse to control lifestyles... I hear that certain lifestyles run a much higher risk of contracting diseases that are long-term and costly to treat. Maybe we should outlaw such lifestyles on the pretext of not wanting to pay for the downstream healthcare costs. Just saying.
The kilometer was 1/10000 of 90 degrees of latitude. Which of course was for less natural for navigation than the nautical mile, which was 1 minute of latitude. The metric system is just a relic of the days when calculations were done on paper, and needs to be abandoned in favor of the One True System of measure: the Furlong-Firkin-Fortnight system!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I hear that certain lifestyles run a much higher risk of contracting diseases that are long-term and costly to treat. Maybe we should outlaw such lifestyles on the pretext of not wanting to pay for the downstream healthcare costs. Just saying.
Yeah! This. I hear that the hetero style often results in pregnancy (a horrible debilitating disease, if you ask any woman, especially around 9 months in) and huge long-term costs as everyone pays to feed and educate the results. It should be outlawed.
You were paying for everybody's healthcare already in about the most inefficient way possible (ER visits), you're just too dumb to know it.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
I've got MOD points but I can't let this slide. The management was very, very competent. It's just they were after something other than a successful company. To wit: The Pension Fund. The hard part about stealing a pension fund is doing it legally. It requires enormous skill, business and legal knowledge to do it.
What Hostess' management did wasn't just mismanagement, it was a complete lack of management. The bought the company, paid themselves just well enough to stay within the bounds of legality, and then ignored the company entirely. They put no effort into expanding, into controlling and managing the supply chain, or into anything else. Then they sat back, waiting for the company to die and used the pension to pay back the creditors they'd racked up debt with.
The last part that makes it all nice and legal is when a judge ruled that the creditors get paid before employees do. If you paid your own cash money into your pension while working at Hostess you literally got robbed. As an added bonus they killed a major Union without any bad press.
But nobody talks about that. All they talk about is playing an imaginary game of chicken. FYI: You can't win a game that the other side isn't really playing.
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to Unions in South America. Mostly because it wasn't wasn't that long ago...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/