Social mobility has declined in America, but there are huge variations. Social mobility is the worst in rural areas, especially in the Southeast and on Native American reservations. People born poor in those areas tend to stay poor. Mobility is much better in urban, northern, and coastal areas.
That probably explains the differences in our experiences of what poor people are like.
It's funny, but except for the military service I have a similar background having grown up in a poor urban neighborhood in the Northeast, and most people I know from the old neighborhood are doing pretty well. But that was also a different era with a lot more upward mobility.
I think there's probably an awful lot of people for whom the $120 is extremely expensive, but they take it anyway because they think it's worth it in the long run. Maybe they even use that in place of proper medication/medical care.
That's because the proper medication/medical care is a lot more expensive than $120. Any port in a storm, as they say.
Now I grew up in a low-income neighborhood, and despite the stories you may hear, typical poor people don't spend a lot of their money on this kind of BS. But there are a lot of poor people, which means there's a lot of atypical poor people out there. The lower quintile of US households by income make less than 22,800/year; the Federal poverty level for a household of 4 is 24,600. There's about 47.5 million people living below the poverty line, and if you include people who are skating just above that conservatively I'd say that there are at least 75 million Americans for whom $120 is a lot of money. When you're dealing with populations that big, you absolutely have to go by statistics rather than anecdotes. You can find examples in a group that size to support any hypothesis you care to make about people.
In general, luxury bullshit is marketed to rich people. People don't market expensive French wines to people in the kind of zip codes, they market malt liquor, the main virtue of which is that it's a cheap way to get hammered.
The trick with tyranny, as with so many other things, is to get someone else to do most of the work of maintaining it. The Chinese regime has got this down to a science.
For example if there were a clear and hard limit as to how far you can go with free speech, people would be going right up to that limit and they'd constantly be struggling with people who wander over the line. So in China they keep the exact line vague so most normal people avoid going anywhere near where the line might be drawn.
This particular story shows how distraction is a powerful tool of tyranny. The more people are focused on viral nonsense the less they're focused on things that might challenge the regime.
disproves the belief that being rich means you must be smart.
In fact, to all appearances the US has developed the kind of feckless hereditary aristocracy that P.G. Wodehouse used to satirize in his novels -- only American women are every bit the equal of men when it comes to inanity.
Right. I've felt if the program actually was designed to meet its ostensible goals, it'd be a good thing. In fact, the program is designed to depress tech wages and transfer technological expertise overseas.
A program which was focused in bringing in talent would focus on top talent rather than people with commodity skills, and it would give them an almost automatic path to permanent residency. That would actually increase wages for domestic engineers. A top engineer creates jobs for his colleagues.
That might have worked when people were using old-school construction techniques. but shortchanging modern customers on dimension is a bad idea. If you sell someone a 2x10 they will expect it to fit perfectly into a metal hanger or corner tie designed for a 1 1/2 x 9 1/4 finished joist. When they drill a hole in a stud for pipes or conduit, there's a good chance they'll reinforce the stud with a stud shoe which they'll expect to fit like a glove.
People will notice if you mill their lumber 1/16" too small..
The 1927 standard dimensions have been reduced twice, once in 1956 and once in 1961. The standard sizes for dimensional lumber have not changed in 56 years.
Yes, the standards changes made lumber more profitable, but they also made lumber more affordable. Even today I'd reckon about 10% of 2x4 studs are sufficiently twisted or bent that I'd reject them at the lumber yard, but statistically everyone pays for that 2x4 nobody wants to buy. Milling the board more aggressively means a lower reject rate.
Because back in the 1910s it was still common practice to buy and use rough lumber. If a 2x4 were reasonably straight you wouldn't bother milling it down to size, you'd just cut it to length. But if you were to look at the subfloor (that was before plywood) you'd find that the width and thickness of the boards is about a half inch less than nominal.
There isn't strictly speaking any reason you have to used finished lumber for everything, but because of economies of scale there is no longer any economic advantage to using rough lumber. The carpenter who built your garage probably picked over the 2x4s at the lumber yard. Milling all the boards down from their nominal dimensions makes that job easier, and reduces the reject rate so everyone wins.
Back in the 1800s, when you bought a "2x4" from the lumber mill it was green and "rough". That means it had too much moisture content to be used right away, it almost certainly twisted significantly along its length, and was pretty far from rectangular in its cross section. But that cross section was at least two inches by four inches.
So lumber wasn't sold ready to use. What you did was you stacked it in your barn for a few months to dry out, then if you needed an accurate shape you'd run the board through a jointer-planer to produce smooth, precise, parallel surfaces. Both these operations reduce the dimensions of the finished lumber.
By the early 20th century lumber mills started doing all this work for you so you could buy a 2x4 board and use it the same day. Far from cheating the customer as you claim, they're actually adding value by curing it and milling it down to a standard shape. Since 1924 the standard has been that 2 inches rough-hewn is always planed down to 1.5 inches; 4 to 3.5; 8 to 7.25, 10 to 9.25 and 12 to 11.25. But if you went to the lumber mill with a tape measure, you'd see that the 1.5 x 3.5 finished boards indeed start their life as 2 x 4 inch rough boards.
If you think about it, a lumber mill that cheated its customers on dimension would go out of business fast. You'd lay out your project, figure out how many boards you'd need, and not only would you come up short, nothing would fit as expected. The whole point of milling the softwood lumber to a standardized dimension is that you could plan out your material requirements exactly and then buy exactly what you need, when you need it.
Given that the dimensions of finished softwood lumber have been set by national standards for the last 90 years, I'm guessing the lawyer who brought the suit is either an idiot or is looking for a quick nuisance payoff.
Individual businesses may fail, but businesses as a whole will keep trying until someone succeeds at getting their technological hooks into you. It isn't customer demand driving this, nor is it customer benefit (you can't be *that* naive). What's driving this is a fundamental fact of marketing: new customers are expensive to find.
So when you as a customer are seeking a transaction, I as a marketer am seeking to parlay that transaction into a relationship. This is apparent if you look at something like a so-called "dealer warranty" for your new car, which if you read the fine print requires you to get oil changes at that dealer much more frequently than the manufacturer recommends, at a price named by the dealer.
Digital technology transforms the marketplace into something like a dating service where everyone you meet will be a stalker. You buy a tractor from John Deere, Deere tries to create a future revenue stream by forcing you to use an authorized repair center.
Here's a pro tip: look up the result in other sources using google, find a more useful source that tells you things like the name of the journal the research was published in.
In this case it was Nature Climate Change, a relatively new offshoot of the prestigious journal Nature. Nature Climate Change was established in 2011, but by last year ut gad achieved an impact factor of over 19, making it the most cited journal in its field. This doesn't mean it's infallible, but it means it doesn't have to scrape the bottom of the research barrel to fill its pages. This paper may be right or it may be wrong, but it's pretty much guaranteed not to be garbage.
Knowing the journal name makes it trivial to find the original paper, or at least the abstract.
Still it is never possible to know the significance of a paper or a study in the short term. You have to wait until it is cited in a review paper, which will summarize all the supporting and conflicting results that followed any particular piece of research. You should never make a life decision (change what you eat) or policy decision based on any single paper until it has been cited and characterized as sound in a review paper published in a high impact factor journal.
That's part of the attraction. If you've ever seen a cat play with a mouse, it's clear that they're utterly merciless killing machines, and yet they'll let you scratch behind their ears. If they're not hungry themselves, they may even bring you a gruesome present.
You do realize that photos like this prove nothing. You just have to choose your moment when to snap your pic. What you need to do is look at field measurements and sequences of satellite images taken regularly, all year round.
When people did that they came up with this: between 1984 and 2011, persistent snow cover extent on Kilimanjaro went down by 73%, which corresponds to a rise in the snow line of 290m.
Nobody can predict precisely when the first picture of a completely snow-free Kilimanjaro will be taken, but it will be soon. But even after that you'll be able to get pictures of a snow-covered mountain. If you google it you can find pictures of snow in Tampa Florida in 1977. It's not proof that Tampa has glaciers.
Actually, you've got the wrong end of the stick here when you're talking about "extrapolation". If you look at the instrumental record from the 1940s to the mid 70s, the world actually cooled.
This was because of industrial sulfate aerosol emissions, which increases the Earth's albedo. This effect was understood in the 1950s, which was why scientists expected the Earth to continue cooling. Arrhenius's CO2 driven warming theories had been discredited for over half a century because of two mistaken beliefs: (1) that CO2's IR absorption band was the same as water vapor's, so that it coud not materially affect temperature and (2) atmospheric CO2 was in equilibrium with ocean CO2. Both these beliefs were proven false in the late 50s, so from 1967 until 1980 or so the question was whether CO2 driven warming or sulfate driven cooling would predominate.
Until the mid 70s sulfates prevailed, however two additional developments caused a shift in the scientific consensus. First, much more data was collected about the Earth's atmosphere. Second, the availability of computers allowed us to actually calculate the relative effects of CO2 and sulfates, and they predicted an imminent reversal in the temperature trends of the past three decades.
This is as good as scientific confirmation of a theory gets: a counter-intuitive prediction that proves to be true. This is why by the 90s the overwhelming majority of climate scientists had confidence in at least the broad picture the models were predicting.
The culinary principle is sound: thermal mass helps keep the surface temperature high for searing. But you don't need THAT much thermal mass. A heavy, cast iron or carbon steel pan works fine and is a lot faster to preheat. The thing is people who've never seared a steak properly don't know that, so it's an opportunity to sell them a gimmick with allegedly magic properties.
Amazing food isn't the product of exotic equipment. It's the product of basic procedural knowledge applied to simple and versatile kitchen equipment. The same skillet you sear your steak in can produce a caramelized apple tart (Tart Tatin), cornbread, or about a million variations on the omelet. The real secret is most of these things are easy, you just have to know and follow the correct procedure.
Yes, the effect you are talking about is real. But it's not the whole story. I think Whole Foods makes a lot of its money off of what I think of as the "Inverse-Cheese Shop Sketch" method.
Say you're just dashing in for a dozen eggs; you walk past the enormous cheese display and think to yourself, "That's a lot of cheese. I like cheese, but that's not what I'm here for." That's because while choice draws attention, too much choice actually dissuades people from buying. But just as you're thinking "cheese", you almost trip over a floor display of just one kind of cheese, a locally produced raw-milk French-style triple-crème, and instead of having to choose between thirty varieties of cheese you don't know anything about you're faced with a more manageable proposition: do I want to try this one cheese.
When you get to the egg case, you can buy a dozen ordinary eggs at maybe 15% more than the prices at the chain across town; I'm not going to drive across town for thirty or forty cents. But for a dollar more per dozen I can get Omega 3 eggs -- and I am watching my triglycerides. For two dollars more I can get "Organic" eggs. But for three dollars more I can get "free range". And the things is, I really hate animal cruelty; if I believed for a moment that these outfits were more humane, I wouldn't hesitate to pay that much more.
So if you're not careful, you can go in planning to spend $3 on eggs and walk out with eggs that cost you $6, and two ounces of artisanal Brillat-Savarin cheese that set you back $35.
Supermarkets in general try to get you to impulse buy stuff, but Whole Foods tries to get you to impulse buy very expensive stuff. Passing by the meat counter the other day I saw a Himalayan salt grilling block that cost more than the French carbon steel skillet I'd just bought which can do the exact same things the salt block does, and of course a lot more. A Himalayan salt block is the kind of thing that appeals to people who don't really cook that much, but wish that they did.
You make an interesting point, but the fact that security isn't the primary responsibility of the EU doesn't mean the EU can ignore it in setting rules.
The European Convention on Human Rights is part of EU law, so EU explicitly must protect individual rights. But it goes without saying that it also has to take into account the governments' ability to provide security and law enforcement. This is why law requires specially trained experts, who even so still get things wrong a lot of the time.
Effective governance requires a comprehensive view of all the conflicting duties and goals. You can make rules that simply ignore security, but as soon as people feel threatened they'll simply work around the rules. So you can't effectively protect individual rights by pretending that security just isn't a concern.
We did play our part, but so did a lot of others, including the Russians, the Assad Regime, and a multi-year drought which displaced most of Syria's rural population just as global wheat prices spiked.
Our part was next door in Iraq, and intrinsically unstable pseudo-country that was held together by a dictatorial regime we removed.
Maybe you missed the part of the article citing research that showed ANY level of lead was unsafe.
Personally, I find that an epistemologically dubious characterization of the evidence.
A better characterization would be: no safe upper limit on safe exposure can be established at present, other than zero.
That's a natural consequence our initial safe dosage estimate previously set being much too high. When you're hunting for the precise dividing line, you start near where you think it is. If you think it's about 10 micrograms/dL is close to right, you look at 8 micrograms or 5 micrograms, no 500 picograms.
The term, of course, means New York City, but graphically making it resemble Chicago would be a smart artistic choice. That way it would look familiar but not instantly recognizable as a particular city.
Show the average American a picture of Marina City and they'll be aware of having seen it before, but they won't necessarily be able to pace it as being in Chicago. New York has been filmed in so much that almost can't turn the corner anywhere in Manhattan without being able to place yourself in New York.
It's the old accounting koan: when a fixed costs variable and variable costs fixed?
When they're unit costs. The way you get prices down is to amortize your fixed costs like store rent over as many shoppers as possible. Even the aisles at MB are noticeably more narrow than typical.
I think there's a bit more to the Whole Foods business model. The high prices keep traffic low.
There's a local chain here called "Market Basket". It's a family run chain that was in the news a few years back when the employees went on strike to defend the ousted CEO. The customer service is excellent, the meat and produce good, and the prices are the lowest of any of the local chains. The problem is that it's always *packed* with shoppers. The aisles are congested, and sometimes I can't even find parking. Every day is Apocalypse preparation day there. At times I've had to wait twenty minutes for deli service, even though they've got five guys behind the counter working like sled dogs.
So if I need one or two things in a hurry I can't at the convenience store, I'll breeze into my local Whole Foods. I'll park withing fifty feet of the front door, walk right up to the meat counter and then right out to checkout, and there's seldom anyone in front of me. An expedition that would take over half an hour at Market Basket is done and dusted in five minutes at Whole Foods, and I pay for the privilege.
By any objective standard, Market Basket is a more sensible place to buy groceries; Consumer Reports ranks it second out of sixty American chains in their most recent evaluation; Whole Foods comes in #27, largely because of their obscene prices. But it's almost like they're in different businesses because they provide different customer experiences.
Slashdot Mirror
Social mobility has declined in America, but there are huge variations. Social mobility is the worst in rural areas, especially in the Southeast and on Native American reservations. People born poor in those areas tend to stay poor. Mobility is much better in urban, northern, and coastal areas.
That probably explains the differences in our experiences of what poor people are like.
It's funny, but except for the military service I have a similar background having grown up in a poor urban neighborhood in the Northeast, and most people I know from the old neighborhood are doing pretty well. But that was also a different era with a lot more upward mobility.
I'm just curious what your personal experience is with poor people.
I think there's probably an awful lot of people for whom the $120 is extremely expensive, but they take it anyway because they think it's worth it in the long run. Maybe they even use that in place of proper medication/medical care.
That's because the proper medication/medical care is a lot more expensive than $120. Any port in a storm, as they say.
Now I grew up in a low-income neighborhood, and despite the stories you may hear, typical poor people don't spend a lot of their money on this kind of BS. But there are a lot of poor people, which means there's a lot of atypical poor people out there. The lower quintile of US households by income make less than 22,800/year; the Federal poverty level for a household of 4 is 24,600. There's about 47.5 million people living below the poverty line, and if you include people who are skating just above that conservatively I'd say that there are at least 75 million Americans for whom $120 is a lot of money. When you're dealing with populations that big, you absolutely have to go by statistics rather than anecdotes. You can find examples in a group that size to support any hypothesis you care to make about people.
In general, luxury bullshit is marketed to rich people. People don't market expensive French wines to people in the kind of zip codes, they market malt liquor, the main virtue of which is that it's a cheap way to get hammered.
That's just intellectual arrogance, the special stupidity of the very smart.
Depends on how you define "downfall".
The trick with tyranny, as with so many other things, is to get someone else to do most of the work of maintaining it. The Chinese regime has got this down to a science.
For example if there were a clear and hard limit as to how far you can go with free speech, people would be going right up to that limit and they'd constantly be struggling with people who wander over the line. So in China they keep the exact line vague so most normal people avoid going anywhere near where the line might be drawn.
This particular story shows how distraction is a powerful tool of tyranny. The more people are focused on viral nonsense the less they're focused on things that might challenge the regime.
disproves the belief that being rich means you must be smart.
In fact, to all appearances the US has developed the kind of feckless hereditary aristocracy that P.G. Wodehouse used to satirize in his novels -- only American women are every bit the equal of men when it comes to inanity.
Right. I've felt if the program actually was designed to meet its ostensible goals, it'd be a good thing. In fact, the program is designed to depress tech wages and transfer technological expertise overseas.
A program which was focused in bringing in talent would focus on top talent rather than people with commodity skills, and it would give them an almost automatic path to permanent residency. That would actually increase wages for domestic engineers. A top engineer creates jobs for his colleagues.
That might have worked when people were using old-school construction techniques. but shortchanging modern customers on dimension is a bad idea. If you sell someone a 2x10 they will expect it to fit perfectly into a metal hanger or corner tie designed for a 1 1/2 x 9 1/4 finished joist. When they drill a hole in a stud for pipes or conduit, there's a good chance they'll reinforce the stud with a stud shoe which they'll expect to fit like a glove.
People will notice if you mill their lumber 1/16" too small..
The 1927 standard dimensions have been reduced twice, once in 1956 and once in 1961. The standard sizes for dimensional lumber have not changed in 56 years.
Yes, the standards changes made lumber more profitable, but they also made lumber more affordable. Even today I'd reckon about 10% of 2x4 studs are sufficiently twisted or bent that I'd reject them at the lumber yard, but statistically everyone pays for that 2x4 nobody wants to buy. Milling the board more aggressively means a lower reject rate.
Because back in the 1910s it was still common practice to buy and use rough lumber. If a 2x4 were reasonably straight you wouldn't bother milling it down to size, you'd just cut it to length. But if you were to look at the subfloor (that was before plywood) you'd find that the width and thickness of the boards is about a half inch less than nominal.
There isn't strictly speaking any reason you have to used finished lumber for everything, but because of economies of scale there is no longer any economic advantage to using rough lumber. The carpenter who built your garage probably picked over the 2x4s at the lumber yard. Milling all the boards down from their nominal dimensions makes that job easier, and reduces the reject rate so everyone wins.
Back in the 1800s, when you bought a "2x4" from the lumber mill it was green and "rough". That means it had too much moisture content to be used right away, it almost certainly twisted significantly along its length, and was pretty far from rectangular in its cross section. But that cross section was at least two inches by four inches.
So lumber wasn't sold ready to use. What you did was you stacked it in your barn for a few months to dry out, then if you needed an accurate shape you'd run the board through a jointer-planer to produce smooth, precise, parallel surfaces. Both these operations reduce the dimensions of the finished lumber.
By the early 20th century lumber mills started doing all this work for you so you could buy a 2x4 board and use it the same day. Far from cheating the customer as you claim, they're actually adding value by curing it and milling it down to a standard shape. Since 1924 the standard has been that 2 inches rough-hewn is always planed down to 1.5 inches; 4 to 3.5; 8 to 7.25, 10 to 9.25 and 12 to 11.25. But if you went to the lumber mill with a tape measure, you'd see that the 1.5 x 3.5 finished boards indeed start their life as 2 x 4 inch rough boards.
If you think about it, a lumber mill that cheated its customers on dimension would go out of business fast. You'd lay out your project, figure out how many boards you'd need, and not only would you come up short, nothing would fit as expected. The whole point of milling the softwood lumber to a standardized dimension is that you could plan out your material requirements exactly and then buy exactly what you need, when you need it.
Given that the dimensions of finished softwood lumber have been set by national standards for the last 90 years, I'm guessing the lawyer who brought the suit is either an idiot or is looking for a quick nuisance payoff.
Individual businesses may fail, but businesses as a whole will keep trying until someone succeeds at getting their technological hooks into you. It isn't customer demand driving this, nor is it customer benefit (you can't be *that* naive). What's driving this is a fundamental fact of marketing: new customers are expensive to find.
So when you as a customer are seeking a transaction, I as a marketer am seeking to parlay that transaction into a relationship. This is apparent if you look at something like a so-called "dealer warranty" for your new car, which if you read the fine print requires you to get oil changes at that dealer much more frequently than the manufacturer recommends, at a price named by the dealer.
Digital technology transforms the marketplace into something like a dating service where everyone you meet will be a stalker. You buy a tractor from John Deere, Deere tries to create a future revenue stream by forcing you to use an authorized repair center.
Here's a pro tip: look up the result in other sources using google, find a more useful source that tells you things like the name of the journal the research was published in.
In this case it was Nature Climate Change, a relatively new offshoot of the prestigious journal Nature. Nature Climate Change was established in 2011, but by last year ut gad achieved an impact factor of over 19, making it the most cited journal in its field. This doesn't mean it's infallible, but it means it doesn't have to scrape the bottom of the research barrel to fill its pages. This paper may be right or it may be wrong, but it's pretty much guaranteed not to be garbage.
Knowing the journal name makes it trivial to find the original paper, or at least the abstract.
Still it is never possible to know the significance of a paper or a study in the short term. You have to wait until it is cited in a review paper, which will summarize all the supporting and conflicting results that followed any particular piece of research. You should never make a life decision (change what you eat) or policy decision based on any single paper until it has been cited and characterized as sound in a review paper published in a high impact factor journal.
That's part of the attraction. If you've ever seen a cat play with a mouse, it's clear that they're utterly merciless killing machines, and yet they'll let you scratch behind their ears. If they're not hungry themselves, they may even bring you a gruesome present.
You do realize that photos like this prove nothing. You just have to choose your moment when to snap your pic. What you need to do is look at field measurements and sequences of satellite images taken regularly, all year round.
When people did that they came up with this: between 1984 and 2011, persistent snow cover extent on Kilimanjaro went down by 73%, which corresponds to a rise in the snow line of 290m.
Nobody can predict precisely when the first picture of a completely snow-free Kilimanjaro will be taken, but it will be soon. But even after that you'll be able to get pictures of a snow-covered mountain. If you google it you can find pictures of snow in Tampa Florida in 1977. It's not proof that Tampa has glaciers.
Actually, you've got the wrong end of the stick here when you're talking about "extrapolation". If you look at the instrumental record from the 1940s to the mid 70s, the world actually cooled.
This was because of industrial sulfate aerosol emissions, which increases the Earth's albedo. This effect was understood in the 1950s, which was why scientists expected the Earth to continue cooling. Arrhenius's CO2 driven warming theories had been discredited for over half a century because of two mistaken beliefs: (1) that CO2's IR absorption band was the same as water vapor's, so that it coud not materially affect temperature and (2) atmospheric CO2 was in equilibrium with ocean CO2. Both these beliefs were proven false in the late 50s, so from 1967 until 1980 or so the question was whether CO2 driven warming or sulfate driven cooling would predominate.
Until the mid 70s sulfates prevailed, however two additional developments caused a shift in the scientific consensus. First, much more data was collected about the Earth's atmosphere. Second, the availability of computers allowed us to actually calculate the relative effects of CO2 and sulfates, and they predicted an imminent reversal in the temperature trends of the past three decades.
This is as good as scientific confirmation of a theory gets: a counter-intuitive prediction that proves to be true. This is why by the 90s the overwhelming majority of climate scientists had confidence in at least the broad picture the models were predicting.
The culinary principle is sound: thermal mass helps keep the surface temperature high for searing. But you don't need THAT much thermal mass. A heavy, cast iron or carbon steel pan works fine and is a lot faster to preheat. The thing is people who've never seared a steak properly don't know that, so it's an opportunity to sell them a gimmick with allegedly magic properties.
Amazing food isn't the product of exotic equipment. It's the product of basic procedural knowledge applied to simple and versatile kitchen equipment. The same skillet you sear your steak in can produce a caramelized apple tart (Tart Tatin), cornbread, or about a million variations on the omelet. The real secret is most of these things are easy, you just have to know and follow the correct procedure.
Yes, the effect you are talking about is real. But it's not the whole story. I think Whole Foods makes a lot of its money off of what I think of as the "Inverse-Cheese Shop Sketch" method.
Say you're just dashing in for a dozen eggs; you walk past the enormous cheese display and think to yourself, "That's a lot of cheese. I like cheese, but that's not what I'm here for." That's because while choice draws attention, too much choice actually dissuades people from buying. But just as you're thinking "cheese", you almost trip over a floor display of just one kind of cheese, a locally produced raw-milk French-style triple-crème, and instead of having to choose between thirty varieties of cheese you don't know anything about you're faced with a more manageable proposition: do I want to try this one cheese.
When you get to the egg case, you can buy a dozen ordinary eggs at maybe 15% more than the prices at the chain across town; I'm not going to drive across town for thirty or forty cents. But for a dollar more per dozen I can get Omega 3 eggs -- and I am watching my triglycerides. For two dollars more I can get "Organic" eggs. But for three dollars more I can get "free range". And the things is, I really hate animal cruelty; if I believed for a moment that these outfits were more humane, I wouldn't hesitate to pay that much more.
So if you're not careful, you can go in planning to spend $3 on eggs and walk out with eggs that cost you $6, and two ounces of artisanal Brillat-Savarin cheese that set you back $35.
Supermarkets in general try to get you to impulse buy stuff, but Whole Foods tries to get you to impulse buy very expensive stuff. Passing by the meat counter the other day I saw a Himalayan salt grilling block that cost more than the French carbon steel skillet I'd just bought which can do the exact same things the salt block does, and of course a lot more. A Himalayan salt block is the kind of thing that appeals to people who don't really cook that much, but wish that they did.
You make an interesting point, but the fact that security isn't the primary responsibility of the EU doesn't mean the EU can ignore it in setting rules.
The European Convention on Human Rights is part of EU law, so EU explicitly must protect individual rights. But it goes without saying that it also has to take into account the governments' ability to provide security and law enforcement. This is why law requires specially trained experts, who even so still get things wrong a lot of the time.
Effective governance requires a comprehensive view of all the conflicting duties and goals. You can make rules that simply ignore security, but as soon as people feel threatened they'll simply work around the rules. So you can't effectively protect individual rights by pretending that security just isn't a concern.
Not everything is about us.
We did play our part, but so did a lot of others, including the Russians, the Assad Regime, and a multi-year drought which displaced most of Syria's rural population just as global wheat prices spiked.
Our part was next door in Iraq, and intrinsically unstable pseudo-country that was held together by a dictatorial regime we removed.
Maybe you missed the part of the article citing research that showed ANY level of lead was unsafe.
Personally, I find that an epistemologically dubious characterization of the evidence.
A better characterization would be: no safe upper limit on safe exposure can be established at present, other than zero.
That's a natural consequence our initial safe dosage estimate previously set being much too high. When you're hunting for the precise dividing line, you start near where you think it is. If you think it's about 10 micrograms/dL is close to right, you look at 8 micrograms or 5 micrograms, no 500 picograms.
The term, of course, means New York City, but graphically making it resemble Chicago would be a smart artistic choice. That way it would look familiar but not instantly recognizable as a particular city.
Show the average American a picture of Marina City and they'll be aware of having seen it before, but they won't necessarily be able to pace it as being in Chicago. New York has been filmed in so much that almost can't turn the corner anywhere in Manhattan without being able to place yourself in New York.
It's the old accounting koan: when a fixed costs variable and variable costs fixed?
When they're unit costs. The way you get prices down is to amortize your fixed costs like store rent over as many shoppers as possible. Even the aisles at MB are noticeably more narrow than typical.
I think there's a bit more to the Whole Foods business model. The high prices keep traffic low.
There's a local chain here called "Market Basket". It's a family run chain that was in the news a few years back when the employees went on strike to defend the ousted CEO. The customer service is excellent, the meat and produce good, and the prices are the lowest of any of the local chains. The problem is that it's always *packed* with shoppers. The aisles are congested, and sometimes I can't even find parking. Every day is Apocalypse preparation day there. At times I've had to wait twenty minutes for deli service, even though they've got five guys behind the counter working like sled dogs.
So if I need one or two things in a hurry I can't at the convenience store, I'll breeze into my local Whole Foods. I'll park withing fifty feet of the front door, walk right up to the meat counter and then right out to checkout, and there's seldom anyone in front of me. An expedition that would take over half an hour at Market Basket is done and dusted in five minutes at Whole Foods, and I pay for the privilege.
By any objective standard, Market Basket is a more sensible place to buy groceries; Consumer Reports ranks it second out of sixty American chains in their most recent evaluation; Whole Foods comes in #27, largely because of their obscene prices. But it's almost like they're in different businesses because they provide different customer experiences.