Thank you - it does indeed seem not only healthy but reasonably practical, at least if one has access to such sources of food and, indeed, knows how to properly cook it.
It seems reasonable, in fact, to consider that Americans would benefit in many ways from learning to eat as Asians do (ie not much meat, etc). Unfortunately, you're right in what you said earlier in that we don't have these skills, generally speaking.
So, while I agree with you that it seems practical given the skills that your wife has, and the access that you have to be able to buy good food at reasonable prices, I guess then question becomes...can a family who does not have such skills and such access afford to live healthily on less than five dollars a day per person?
I think we can also agree that such skill should be taught, one way or another - perhaps in school though I could perceive some pushback for 'the American way' (or whatever else those who breed and sell beef would come up with to fight such education). Access to healthy food at reasonable prices is, perhaps, more difficult to achieve in some areas but is probably doable across much of the country.
But you share some opinions under your own name. Is your party affiliation more sensitive than your opinions?
What does my party affiliation have to do with the discussion? Nothing I think, but as you are so curious, know that I am a registered independent who dislikes all of the presidential candidates.
Dude, lawyers have taken over our society by creating rules and making sure to enforce them - in most countries they are at the heads of the legislative *and* the executive branches of a government. Basically, the whole government is lawyers.
Since the police and the army are obliged to follow the rules, set by lawyers, as they are obligedto follow their orders, there is really no way for the rest of us to stop them.
And, please, don't start about democracy and elections, as there you are given only the choice between 2 lawyers (or an actor, set forth by the lawyers).
The idea of George Dubbya being a lawyer (ie passing the bar) is kind of funny actually...guess he could be an actor though...
No... let's keep using it, but let's use it in our OWN context, where we MEAN let's kill all the lawyers, because we have OTHER reasons than did Shakespeare's character, because OUR lawyers have basically hamstrung our society, crippled our technology, retarded our advancement, and saddled us with more bad law than good law.
Or perhaps we have crippled our own society by using lawyers the way that we do. Other societies have lawyers that don't have the 'trigger happy' "I'm gonna sue 'em" attitude that rules in the US.
Lawyers don't sue people, people sue people...
Well, okay lawyers sue people too but I think there are usually non-lawyers behind the action in most if not all lawsuits.
So you don't mind if (for example) people know that you think Obama is a socialist, government is too big, and taxes are too high, but the fact that you're a Republican is something you want to keep to yourself?
Thoughts that I want to share I post under my UID. Thoughts that I want to keep private I don't share, or if I want to share an opinion I have but to keep the fact that it's my opinion private, I post as an AC.
Anyone who spent 10 mintues with the iPad, and iPhone would realize they are enormous bandwidth hogs. You don't have to be a telcomm. engineer to see that video chat, and Netflix are killer apps. in terms of backhaul, spectrum and popularity.
They didn't plan properly, didn't spend appropriately and now they are punishing and blaming their users for using these devices exactly as they were designed.
No. They planned and implemented just fine, and are just being ridiculously greedy.
Time for some protection against the carriers - sometimes corporate greed has to be held in check.
I am as disgusted by Obama as much as I was embarrassed and ashamed by Bush. The only reason I am keeping my American citizenship (I no longer live in the US) is so that I can vote for anyone that might possibly be better, though I am starting to have real doubts that it will ever happen.
All this drought, devastation and disaster from just under 1 degree C. Imagine what it will be like at 2 degrees! When you multiply the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of the oceans and air by 1 degree, it's a number that's off the charts. How did people think we could dump that much energy into any system and it would not make a difference?
What's not to understand...when you're talking to people who think the world has only been around for a few thousand years, you can't really expect them to grasp concepts like global warming.
"...the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed last winter, raised the average monthly food stamp benefit per person by about 17 percent, to $133."
Calculate that out, it comes to 4.43 USD per day, per person, for food. Can you live healthily on that? No, I didn't think so.
If you and your family haven't been on food stamps then you don't know what you're talking about. You should hope that you never end up living that firsthand because you'd find out real fast that most people on food stamps (like my parents when I was a child) spend it on food and not a single fucking other thing.
Heck yes I can eat healthily on $4.43 a day. I feed my family of 5 a very healthy diet, heavy in expensive fresh fruits and vegetables for $350 a month. Assuming no adjustments for age etc. food stamps would nearly double my food budget. Now, admittedly we regularly eat fairly labor intensive food, dried beans, etc. People who have to work a lot may not have as much time to make things fancy, but man, staple foods are really, really, cheap in the US.
I admit, I have not, so far, had to live on food stamps. I am friends with a similar family who has though, and his wife was amazed at the luxury they could afford on food stamps. "We're eating all kinds of fancy foods we never could have afforded when we were working!"
I suspect the biggest issue with running out of money on food stamps is ignorance on how to cook and how to stretch a dollar. These are both concepts that have been lost in American culture, and they sure aren't being taught in school.
Okay - thanks for this. I'm very interested in the details around this, if you don't mind -
Can I ask where you live? Not specifically, but do you live in a city or in the countryside? In an expensive state or an inexpensive one? Do you buy the fruit and veggies at a local farm or farmer's market or in a supermarket chain? Can you give me some idea of what milk, eggs, specific veggies cost? i.e. a typical shopping trip for you.
How about a this novel idea of "work"? Maybe adults should look for one?:-/
Maybe not everyone can find or keep a job in this economy even if they're trying very hard to. You think that all the people who lost their jobs during the bank induced 'crisis' don't want to be working? Has it occurred to you that when the economy contracts, the number of jobs drops? Has it occurred to you that due to outsourcing of services jobs and shifting of manufacturing out of the country that there are fewer jobs? You think that all the people working part time with no benefits do so because they choose to, or because maybe they can't find a decent full time job?
Are you aware of the concept of the welfare trap, where the single parent or parents of a family get as much or almost as much being on welfare as they would working a job on minimum wage, but that by being on welfare they can take care of their kid(s) and not have to pay for daycare and much more importantly when you have a family, have medical coverage on welfare than they would working for wal-mart or some other shit company that only hires people part time so they don't have to give benefits?
It's all fine and good to say that everyone should just 'work' but the reality is that when you're trying to raise a family by yourself as single parent or when you can't get a good job that pays enough and provides health coverage, that you just cannot because it would actually be worse for your family.
And if you answer that welfare itself is the problem, then I invite you to go to India or some other third world country where there is no welfare, no social benefits...and see the villages of poor living under bridges, the legions (literally) of diseased and disabled (ie missing body parts) wandering the streets begging..and to think about what life in the US would be like if there were no welfare and no social medicine.
A 2007 USDA study found that receiving Food Stamps long term (24 months) was associated with a 50% increased obesity rate among female adults http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/32855/PDF Our poor is OBESE for god's sake.
Also, if a person satisfies criteria for food stamps he/she will also be eligible for other goverment handouts like housing assistance, Medicaid, disability payments etc. For example, a child he/she also will be receiving free lunches at school which will cover 2 out of three daily meals.
Do not make it sound like $133/person is all they are going to get.
How do you get that school lunch covers '2 out of three daily meals' ? Lunch is one meal, not two.
Healthy food costs more than unhealthy food. Poor people buy cheap food for the quantity and cheap food is not healthy food and unhealthy food leads to obesity.
We are talking about food for a day for a person so none of the other 'handouts' apply here. Disability is only for the disabled and we're not talking about the disabled here, but about single mothers, for example, the highest category of families with food insecurity.
So if we look at this for a single mother trying to feed her family, even if you eliminate lunch from the equation (and the nutrition of US school lunches is not very high but whatever, leave it out of the equation) you're still talking about trying to have two meals for 4.43.
Tell me how you can feed a child two healthy meals for $4.43 in a day? Tell me how you can feed an adult three healthy meals for $4.43 in a day?
You're also assuming that everyone who has hunger in the US qualifies for food stamps, which is not the case.
I've always wondered why we use cows to generate milk. Given that most of milk is relatively simple (water, sugars, chalk, oil), why can't we have bioreactor into which we put grass-clippings, and get out something roughly similar to milk?
The need for adding protein, and some kinds of vitamins might be moderately tricky, but I should think that this wouldn't matter for many applications. The only thing that would require the full complexity of real milk would be in making (good quality) cheese. This would also appeal to vegans, some vegetarians, and many people with lactose intolerance.
Or...and this isn't so complicated but might just work...we could just get milk from cows?
I have to disagree. The only way to get hungry in US is to blow all your food stamps on liquer and dope. It's actually hard to stay fit with all cheap junk peddled on every corner. If you think a dude on a street with a cardboard sign "Just hungry" is really do not have anything to eath try to give him a sandwich.
In the face of your experience and wisdom, I can only ask if you read the lowly and uneducated, not to mention no doubt poorly researched NY Times article I referenced? No doubt it can't be compared to your omnipotence but still, I'll quote it to you: "...the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed last winter, raised the average monthly food stamp benefit per person by about 17 percent, to $133."
Calculate that out, it comes to 4.43 USD per day, per person, for food. Can you live healthily on that? No, I didn't think so.
If you and your family haven't been on food stamps then you don't know what you're talking about. You should hope that you never end up living that firsthand because you'd find out real fast that most people on food stamps (like my parents when I was a child) spend it on food and not a single fucking other thing.
Is the BBC turning into The Onion? Or is the author just plain daft to start with?
Substituting the words "mini-livestock" in place of "dead insects"? What the fuck are these Brits smoking?
I know crushed-up insects may pass for a semi-decent gourmet meal by British culinary standards, but here in America I'll stick to my 97% lean ground beef and REAL pork chops, thanks.
livestock [lahyv-stok] Show IPA noun ( used with a singular or plural verb ) the horses, cattle, sheep, and other useful animals kept or raised on a farm or ranch. source:http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/livestock
No reason not to use the words mini-livestock when talking about insects bred on an insect farm, for example, that would be sold as food.
By the way, if you're going to be offensive you should at least get your shit straight before vomiting it up on here and embarrassing those of us Americans that don't want to look like complete idiots.
So long as we in the US continue to subsidize corn and raise livestock on it, meat will remain in easy reach of residents of the united states. That's not even considering how an entire huge segment of the population would take the news that they can't do big barbecues anymore. I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm saying this is what I anticipate will happen.
There's already a substantial percentage of people in the US who can't afford to eat. To me anything over zero is substantial given the wealth of the US and here we're talking about 506,000 households or roughly 49 million Americans (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/us/17hunger.html).
Before the idiots on here slam the media, I'll point out that even if you cut this number by a factor of ten you'd still have five million Americans not having enough food. Five million. In the richest country in the world.
I probably don't have to say just how pitiful that is.
The EU has a deliberate policy of remaining self sufficient for food. Euro haters love to rage about the huge grain mountains and heavy farm animal subsidies, but the whole point of them is to make sure the EU will always have enough farming capacity to feed itself should the need arise.
We will never allow ourselves to get to the stage where we don't have enough meat. Yeah, India's population will keep on increasing, but it won't matter much to us. The population of Europe is stabilising and even falling in some places. The third world will carry on starving until they have enough education to limit the number of children they have, but the EU will just keep transferring money from the rich to subsidy for farm animal meat for the rest of us.
America has the same policy but you have to take into consideration that when it becomes more profitable to export food than to sell it domestically the food will be exported. As such, food prices will still increase drastically in the EU and the US even though we can technically feed ourselves.
This won't affect us for meat, most likely...at least not anytime soon, but I could imagine that it might affect us for grains and other non-meat foodstuffs.
As always, it will be the poor of the world who get hit the worst so I'm not too worried for us relatively rich countries (assuming the banks don't destroy our economies completely when they crash again).
Since it's for their own good, time to shove fourteen languages down the their throats in forced mandatory education. Stop concentrating on math and science, start concentrating on languages. Veuillez considérer le bien-être des enfants.
Fourteen no, three yes. I'm American living in France so my son speaks both languages very well. Anticipating the continuing growth of China in the world I've encouraged (read bribed) him to take Mandarin lessons as well.
Shit like this is why you should always travel in heavily-armed groups.
TSA goons may have no qualms about taking out one 'wacko' with a gun, but 20 of them (or, even better, an entire airport full) all traveling together will force them to reconsider their position.
Our forefathers made sure we had a right to keep and carry weapons, to ensure we would always have a means of throwing off the shackles of tyranny - let's not disappoint them.
Won't work unless the entire population rises up at once...which won't happen anytime soon if ever. Anything less than a full revolution would be an armed insurrection and itself classified, no doubt, as terrorism.
In order to get the majority of the population on board, we have to start small; what will at first be considered "isolated incidents" will eventually bloom into full-blown civil disobedience, and they'll have to listen or feel the public's wrath. Oh, and no letting the media and political camps demonize/co-opt the movement for their own purposes - we have to treat them all as the enemy, until they prove themselves friends.
Millions sounds like a lot until you realize that France, with it's population of only 60 million, had 6 million people demonstrating against some employment contract changes the government was going to put into place.
Which sounds reasonable, until you realize that France is, geographically speaking, tiny compared to the U.S.A (~260,000 sq. mi. vs ~3,800,000 sq. mi.). Getting 6 million people to descend on the capital, when it's a few hundred miles from the furthest national border, is a hell of a lot easier logistically than doing so in a nation where the furthest border is several thousand miles away.
OWS was a beginning, but wasn't strong enough to work given how the deck is stacked.
OWS would have been great if 2 things would have happened differently:
1) Instead of allowing themselves to be portrayed by the corporate media as nothing more than a bunch of lazy, narcissistic hippies who had no idea what they were really protesting, but the actual 99.96%, people like you and me (and even a lot of rich fucks who don't realize they're getting screwed over, too), who are the ones getting the shaft here, and
2) Had OWS and the Tea Party come to the realization that their goals were quite similar, and joined forces. The cops would have been far more cautious about their use of excessive force on said lazy hippies, had there been a contingent of well-armed small government advocates to get through first.
In France, the six million people on the streets were on the streets in every major city across the country. A demonstration doesn't have to be centralized for it to be seen when it's a large enough percentage of the population. If you can't get enough people showing what they want, the government will ignore it. There is no reason at all that fifty million Americans can't go out in the streets and demonstrate that they are unhappy with something, other than that they are not unhappy enough to bother doing so.
For the same reason, any small 'uprisings' will be crushed and will be easily made to seem isolated terrorist incidents. You will never gain momentum with this and by doing so you will lose credit with much of the population, those who are not ready to join you in violent uprising.
If OWS had ten percent of the population they would have been portrayed much differently, would they not? Your statement only reinforces what I am saying. If you don't have enough of the population with you, you will be marginalized just as OWS was even though they were completely in the right in what they were doing.
OWS and the tea party have nothing in common other than they are American. OWS wants the 1% taken down a notch and the 99% brought up a notch and the tea party wants republicans back in power which would change nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road
Any cloud services should be geographically redundant such that any disaster anywhere in the country would not affect 'cloud' based services.
Thank you - it does indeed seem not only healthy but reasonably practical, at least if one has access to such sources of food and, indeed, knows how to properly cook it.
It seems reasonable, in fact, to consider that Americans would benefit in many ways from learning to eat as Asians do (ie not much meat, etc). Unfortunately, you're right in what you said earlier in that we don't have these skills, generally speaking.
So, while I agree with you that it seems practical given the skills that your wife has, and the access that you have to be able to buy good food at reasonable prices, I guess then question becomes...can a family who does not have such skills and such access afford to live healthily on less than five dollars a day per person?
I think we can also agree that such skill should be taught, one way or another - perhaps in school though I could perceive some pushback for 'the American way' (or whatever else those who breed and sell beef would come up with to fight such education). Access to healthy food at reasonable prices is, perhaps, more difficult to achieve in some areas but is probably doable across much of the country.
But you share some opinions under your own name. Is your party affiliation more sensitive than your opinions?
What does my party affiliation have to do with the discussion? Nothing I think, but as you are so curious, know that I am a registered independent who dislikes all of the presidential candidates.
Dude, lawyers have taken over our society by creating rules and making sure to enforce them - in most countries they are at the heads of the legislative *and* the executive branches of a government. Basically, the whole government is lawyers.
Since the police and the army are obliged to follow the rules, set by lawyers, as they are obligedto follow their orders, there is really no way for the rest of us to stop them.
And, please, don't start about democracy and elections, as there you are given only the choice between 2 lawyers (or an actor, set forth by the lawyers).
The idea of George Dubbya being a lawyer (ie passing the bar) is kind of funny actually...guess he could be an actor though...
No... let's keep using it, but let's use it in our OWN context, where we MEAN let's kill all the lawyers, because we have OTHER reasons than did Shakespeare's character, because OUR lawyers have basically hamstrung our society, crippled our technology, retarded our advancement, and saddled us with more bad law than good law.
Or perhaps we have crippled our own society by using lawyers the way that we do. Other societies have lawyers that don't have the 'trigger happy' "I'm gonna sue 'em" attitude that rules in the US.
Lawyers don't sue people, people sue people...
Well, okay lawyers sue people too but I think there are usually non-lawyers behind the action in most if not all lawsuits.
So you don't mind if (for example) people know that you think Obama is a socialist, government is too big, and taxes are too high, but the fact that you're a Republican is something you want to keep to yourself?
Thoughts that I want to share I post under my UID. Thoughts that I want to keep private I don't share, or if I want to share an opinion I have but to keep the fact that it's my opinion private, I post as an AC.
i was at the beach last month and my iphone was SLOW. i look around and every other person has a smart phone.
Hmm... Seems you and the others were using the beach wrong. Not trying to judge, but put down the phone and enjoy the surf, sand and sun.
But then I can't bill my client for the time...
Anyone who spent 10 mintues with the iPad, and iPhone would realize they are enormous bandwidth hogs. You don't have to be a telcomm. engineer to see that video chat, and Netflix are killer apps. in terms of backhaul, spectrum and popularity.
They didn't plan properly, didn't spend appropriately and now they are punishing and blaming their users for using these devices exactly as they were designed.
No. They planned and implemented just fine, and are just being ridiculously greedy.
Time for some protection against the carriers - sometimes corporate greed has to be held in check.
"Of course, ending up with an evolved completely opaque network has advantages once We The People start being forced to line up against the wall."
FTFY
If it were the U.S. I'd be worried they'd come after the stored user data & put people into indefinite detainment (under NDAA 2012).
For the moment, that provision is blocked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012#Indefinite_detention_blocked
I am as disgusted by Obama as much as I was embarrassed and ashamed by Bush. The only reason I am keeping my American citizenship (I no longer live in the US) is so that I can vote for anyone that might possibly be better, though I am starting to have real doubts that it will ever happen.
Don't anthropomorphize nature, she hates it when you do that.
FTFY
All this drought, devastation and disaster from just under 1 degree C. Imagine what it will be like at 2 degrees! When you multiply the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of the oceans and air by 1 degree, it's a number that's off the charts. How did people think we could dump that much energy into any system and it would not make a difference?
What's not to understand...when you're talking to people who think the world has only been around for a few thousand years, you can't really expect them to grasp concepts like global warming.
"...the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed last winter, raised the average monthly food stamp benefit per person by about 17 percent, to $133."
Calculate that out, it comes to 4.43 USD per day, per person, for food. Can you live healthily on that? No, I didn't think so.
If you and your family haven't been on food stamps then you don't know what you're talking about. You should hope that you never end up living that firsthand because you'd find out real fast that most people on food stamps (like my parents when I was a child) spend it on food and not a single fucking other thing.
Heck yes I can eat healthily on $4.43 a day. I feed my family of 5 a very healthy diet, heavy in expensive fresh fruits and vegetables for $350 a month. Assuming no adjustments for age etc. food stamps would nearly double my food budget. Now, admittedly we regularly eat fairly labor intensive food, dried beans, etc. People who have to work a lot may not have as much time to make things fancy, but man, staple foods are really, really, cheap in the US.
I admit, I have not, so far, had to live on food stamps. I am friends with a similar family who has though, and his wife was amazed at the luxury they could afford on food stamps. "We're eating all kinds of fancy foods we never could have afforded when we were working!"
I suspect the biggest issue with running out of money on food stamps is ignorance on how to cook and how to stretch a dollar. These are both concepts that have been lost in American culture, and they sure aren't being taught in school.
Okay - thanks for this. I'm very interested in the details around this, if you don't mind -
Can I ask where you live? Not specifically, but do you live in a city or in the countryside? In an expensive state or an inexpensive one? Do you buy the fruit and veggies at a local farm or farmer's market or in a supermarket chain? Can you give me some idea of what milk, eggs, specific veggies cost? i.e. a typical shopping trip for you.
How about a this novel idea of "work"? Maybe adults should look for one? :-/
Maybe not everyone can find or keep a job in this economy even if they're trying very hard to. You think that all the people who lost their jobs during the bank induced 'crisis' don't want to be working? Has it occurred to you that when the economy contracts, the number of jobs drops? Has it occurred to you that due to outsourcing of services jobs and shifting of manufacturing out of the country that there are fewer jobs? You think that all the people working part time with no benefits do so because they choose to, or because maybe they can't find a decent full time job?
Have a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_9694000/9694094.stm and tell me that the parents of these families wouldn't rather be working.
Are you aware of the concept of the welfare trap, where the single parent or parents of a family get as much or almost as much being on welfare as they would working a job on minimum wage, but that by being on welfare they can take care of their kid(s) and not have to pay for daycare and much more importantly when you have a family, have medical coverage on welfare than they would working for wal-mart or some other shit company that only hires people part time so they don't have to give benefits?
It's all fine and good to say that everyone should just 'work' but the reality is that when you're trying to raise a family by yourself as single parent or when you can't get a good job that pays enough and provides health coverage, that you just cannot because it would actually be worse for your family.
And if you answer that welfare itself is the problem, then I invite you to go to India or some other third world country where there is no welfare, no social benefits...and see the villages of poor living under bridges, the legions (literally) of diseased and disabled (ie missing body parts) wandering the streets begging..and to think about what life in the US would be like if there were no welfare and no social medicine.
If your opinions are that private, WTF are you doing on Slashdot?
One chooses what to share on slashdot.
A 2007 USDA study found that receiving Food Stamps long term (24 months) was associated with a 50% increased obesity rate among female adults
http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/32855/PDF Our poor is OBESE for god's sake.
Also, if a person satisfies criteria for food stamps he/she will also be eligible for other goverment handouts like housing assistance, Medicaid, disability payments etc.
For example, a child he/she also will be receiving free lunches at school which will cover 2 out of three daily meals.
Do not make it sound like $133/person is all they are going to get.
How do you get that school lunch covers '2 out of three daily meals' ? Lunch is one meal, not two.
Healthy food costs more than unhealthy food. Poor people buy cheap food for the quantity and cheap food is not healthy food and unhealthy food leads to obesity.
We are talking about food for a day for a person so none of the other 'handouts' apply here. Disability is only for the disabled and we're not talking about the disabled here, but about single mothers, for example, the highest category of families with food insecurity.
So if we look at this for a single mother trying to feed her family, even if you eliminate lunch from the equation (and the nutrition of US school lunches is not very high but whatever, leave it out of the equation) you're still talking about trying to have two meals for 4.43.
Tell me how you can feed a child two healthy meals for $4.43 in a day?
Tell me how you can feed an adult three healthy meals for $4.43 in a day?
You're also assuming that everyone who has hunger in the US qualifies for food stamps, which is not the case.
I've always wondered why we use cows to generate milk. Given that most of milk is relatively simple (water, sugars, chalk, oil), why can't we have bioreactor into which we put grass-clippings, and get out something roughly similar to milk?
The need for adding protein, and some kinds of vitamins might be moderately tricky, but I should think that this wouldn't matter for many applications. The only thing that would require the full complexity of real milk would be in making (good quality) cheese. This would also appeal to vegans, some vegetarians, and many people with lactose intolerance.
Or...and this isn't so complicated but might just work...we could just get milk from cows?
I have to disagree. The only way to get hungry in US is to blow all your food stamps on liquer and dope. It's actually hard to stay fit with all cheap junk peddled on every corner. If you think a dude on a street with a cardboard sign "Just hungry" is really do not have anything to eath try to give him a sandwich.
In the face of your experience and wisdom, I can only ask if you read the lowly and uneducated, not to mention no doubt poorly researched NY Times article I referenced? No doubt it can't be compared to your omnipotence but still, I'll quote it to you:
"...the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed last winter, raised the average monthly food stamp benefit per person by about 17 percent, to $133."
Calculate that out, it comes to 4.43 USD per day, per person, for food. Can you live healthily on that? No, I didn't think so.
If you and your family haven't been on food stamps then you don't know what you're talking about. You should hope that you never end up living that firsthand because you'd find out real fast that most people on food stamps (like my parents when I was a child) spend it on food and not a single fucking other thing.
Is the BBC turning into The Onion? Or is the author just plain daft to start with?
Substituting the words "mini-livestock" in place of "dead insects"? What the fuck are these Brits smoking?
I know crushed-up insects may pass for a semi-decent gourmet meal by British culinary standards, but here in America I'll stick to my 97% lean ground beef and REAL pork chops, thanks.
The other 3% being made up of god knows what of course (in addition to the expected fat):
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=2507910n
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLmJ_-Ygaww
http://www.businessinsider.com/watch-mcdonalds-workers-kick-around-a-dead-rat-like-its-a-soccer-ball-2012-6
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/kfc-says-sorry-for-dead-caterpillar-941451
livestock [lahyv-stok] Show IPA
noun ( used with a singular or plural verb )
the horses, cattle, sheep, and other useful animals kept or raised on a farm or ranch.
source:http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/livestock
No reason not to use the words mini-livestock when talking about insects bred on an insect farm, for example, that would be sold as food.
By the way, if you're going to be offensive you should at least get your shit straight before vomiting it up on here and embarrassing those of us Americans that don't want to look like complete idiots.
So long as we in the US continue to subsidize corn and raise livestock on it, meat will remain in easy reach of residents of the united states. That's not even considering how an entire huge segment of the population would take the news that they can't do big barbecues anymore. I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm saying this is what I anticipate will happen.
There's already a substantial percentage of people in the US who can't afford to eat. To me anything over zero is substantial given the wealth of the US and here we're talking about 506,000 households or roughly 49 million Americans (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/us/17hunger.html).
Before the idiots on here slam the media, I'll point out that even if you cut this number by a factor of ten you'd still have five million Americans not having enough food. Five million. In the richest country in the world.
I probably don't have to say just how pitiful that is.
The EU has a deliberate policy of remaining self sufficient for food. Euro haters love to rage about the huge grain mountains and heavy farm animal subsidies, but the whole point of them is to make sure the EU will always have enough farming capacity to feed itself should the need arise.
We will never allow ourselves to get to the stage where we don't have enough meat. Yeah, India's population will keep on increasing, but it won't matter much to us. The population of Europe is stabilising and even falling in some places. The third world will carry on starving until they have enough education to limit the number of children they have, but the EU will just keep transferring money from the rich to subsidy for farm animal meat for the rest of us.
America has the same policy but you have to take into consideration that when it becomes more profitable to export food than to sell it domestically the food will be exported. As such, food prices will still increase drastically in the EU and the US even though we can technically feed ourselves.
This won't affect us for meat, most likely...at least not anytime soon, but I could imagine that it might affect us for grains and other non-meat foodstuffs.
As always, it will be the poor of the world who get hit the worst so I'm not too worried for us relatively rich countries (assuming the banks don't destroy our economies completely when they crash again).
Since it's for their own good, time to shove fourteen languages down the their throats in forced mandatory education. Stop concentrating on math and science, start concentrating on languages. Veuillez considérer le bien-être des enfants.
Fourteen no, three yes. I'm American living in France so my son speaks both languages very well. Anticipating the continuing growth of China in the world I've encouraged (read bribed) him to take Mandarin lessons as well.
...so I'm semi-trilingual...
You speak one and a half languages? :-)
Shit like this is why you should always travel in heavily-armed groups.
TSA goons may have no qualms about taking out one 'wacko' with a gun, but 20 of them (or, even better, an entire airport full) all traveling together will force them to reconsider their position.
Our forefathers made sure we had a right to keep and carry weapons, to ensure we would always have a means of throwing off the shackles of tyranny - let's not disappoint them.
Won't work unless the entire population rises up at once...which won't happen anytime soon if ever. Anything less than a full revolution would be an armed insurrection and itself classified, no doubt, as terrorism.
In order to get the majority of the population on board, we have to start small; what will at first be considered "isolated incidents" will eventually bloom into full-blown civil disobedience, and they'll have to listen or feel the public's wrath. Oh, and no letting the media and political camps demonize/co-opt the movement for their own purposes - we have to treat them all as the enemy, until they prove themselves friends.
Millions sounds like a lot until you realize that France, with it's population of only 60 million, had 6 million people demonstrating against some employment contract changes the government was going to put into place.
Which sounds reasonable, until you realize that France is, geographically speaking, tiny compared to the U.S.A (~260,000 sq. mi. vs ~3,800,000 sq. mi.). Getting 6 million people to descend on the capital, when it's a few hundred miles from the furthest national border, is a hell of a lot easier logistically than doing so in a nation where the furthest border is several thousand miles away.
OWS was a beginning, but wasn't strong enough to work given how the deck is stacked.
OWS would have been great if 2 things would have happened differently:
1) Instead of allowing themselves to be portrayed by the corporate media as nothing more than a bunch of lazy, narcissistic hippies who had no idea what they were really protesting, but the actual 99.96%, people like you and me (and even a lot of rich fucks who don't realize they're getting screwed over, too), who are the ones getting the shaft here, and
2) Had OWS and the Tea Party come to the realization that their goals were quite similar, and joined forces. The cops would have been far more cautious about their use of excessive force on said lazy hippies, had there been a contingent of well-armed small government advocates to get through first.
In France, the six million people on the streets were on the streets in every major city across the country. A demonstration doesn't have to be centralized for it to be seen when it's a large enough percentage of the population. If you can't get enough people showing what they want, the government will ignore it. There is no reason at all that fifty million Americans can't go out in the streets and demonstrate that they are unhappy with something, other than that they are not unhappy enough to bother doing so.
For the same reason, any small 'uprisings' will be crushed and will be easily made to seem isolated terrorist incidents. You will never gain momentum with this and by doing so you will lose credit with much of the population, those who are not ready to join you in violent uprising.
If OWS had ten percent of the population they would have been portrayed much differently, would they not? Your statement only reinforces what I am saying. If you don't have enough of the population with you, you will be marginalized just as OWS was even though they were completely in the right in what they were doing.
OWS and the tea party have nothing in common other than they are American. OWS wants the 1% taken down a notch and the 99% brought up a notch and the tea party wants republicans back in power which would change nothing.