Dunno what bags you're getting, but I see two kinds:
Walmart's -- these go to hell in a matter of weeks in sunlight or a few months in a damp environment. Pull up a buried one and all you get is shreds.
50 pound feed bags -- these are thick heavy woven plastic, double-coated. Initially they're waterproof and really tough. About a year after being emptied they start getting friable and shortly afterward kinda turn to powder. Sun accelerates the process but any exposure to an oxidizer (eg. damp soil) does it. I was annoyed because I use about 350 bags a year, and I'd envisioned repurposing 'em as tarps.:(
Not to mention the old marketing trick (I recall a study of same being a/. article a few years ago) of raising the price the week before, then lowering it to slightly *above* what it was originally, so they can advertise this great bargain for Black Friday... knowing that a lot of people only see the "price reduced" part, and have no idea what it was before.
Not only that, but tech stuff commonly has a price drop in January...
Yeah, but Norway probably produces more meat products than vegetable products, just the reality of the climate and terrain. Given that, which one has to be shipped further?
Which is a side effect of being legally beholden to stockholders first and foremost, rather than first to customers and second to the health of the company. IMO stockholders should come in after these, but as it stands they're treated as lienholders, who have first dibs on profits, and by damn there better be profits, even if customers are screaming or leaving, and the company is being killed by pursuit of profit next quarter at the expense of survival next year.
I dunno... my Lutheran Brotherhood mutual fund grows at about double the rate of ordinary stocks, and has never given me a loss since I got it in 1980. I'd call that about as proven as it gets.
But -- my feeling is that despite the usefulness of the investment capital, the stock market is overall a bad influence on business behavior, and... here's how I put it a while back: ==== Stock market: glorified loansharking. You lend companies money in return for what you hope will be a usorious interest rate.
And that 'interest rate' is actually set by what other investors think of the stock.
Consider it an experiment in mob psychology, with your money riding on the outcome. =====
Because of escalating mandated business expenses, I've predicted that we're already on our way to employees becoming independent contractors even at the retail level, therefore responsible for all their own taxes and benefits. (Might teach 'em how much of their wage actually goes to that rather than into their wallets.)
And does this 'social mobility' take into consideration the relative starting points? Cuz in the U.S., what we call poverty is better than the average lifestyle over most of the globe. Naturally it's not as far up from that to the middle class, as it is for someone born into a slum in Bangladesh.
So you make it a percentage of growth over a minimum of NN years, maybe an increasing percentage over time. Of course that isn't entirely wonderful either, in that it would encourage growth at the expense of stability, a problem we already have with being beholden to stockholders as the #1 priority. So... say the CEO pay is delayed for an equal number of years after they leave the company, so stability is necessary if you expect to get paid.
Just throwing out wildassed notions; feel free to throw them back.
And who do you think holds the shares in those investment funds? It's ordinary people, who prefer to let a proven investment fund do the legwork (and it usually pays better than buying stocks on your own).
Basically, the way to prop up the buggywhip industry is to force everyone to buy buggywhips -- either directly (which makes it clear where the burden is) or indirectly (via taxes and subsidies). Either way, people who no longer need buggywhips lose.
"What if I was a billionaire and started buying up all of the farms, then I refused to let people buy food from me?"
There's no point in growing food if you're not going to sell it (growing stuff costs money; farm overhead is actually quite high). So let's say you buy all these farms and let them go dormant. Then you'd have all your capital tied up in nonproductive land, which means you'd lose money (the same invested productively would be making money; this is just an expense -- taxes and upkeep, ya know). How does this make any economic sense, especially if the motivation is greed??
I suggest that if such a cap/ratio is implemented, it be first applied to union bosses... say, no more than double the lowest union rate. Then lets see how well they like it.;)
[I agree with your post, you pretty much covered it all.]
"Google is evil -- they're sending vans in your neighborhood, taking pictures of your houses, collecting your wifi network names, OTA traffic, embedding realtime tracking into your phones, and the list goes on."
Makes me wonder why the NSA bothers -- all they really need is a contract with Google!
The only time I take *preventive* antibiotics is before I go to the dentist, because a good deal of what a dentist does, poking around in your gums and such, is by its nature infective. I started this preventive measure after developing bad jaw infections twice after routine work... haven't had the problem since.
The other advance use I can see is if you don't have access to clean water, and an available preventive is better than probable dysentery.
Conversely, I've become so negatively sensitized to this sort of marketing that the moment I see "could" or "may" in conjunction with some dire threat, I'm instantly suspicious that I'm being sold a load of high-odds baloney.
And the reason it works isn't because of natural antibiotics; it works for the same reason any concentrated sugar syrup would work: it disrupts the wee beasties' osmotic balance, basically sucks all the water out of the bacteria, which kills them. Brine would work too but wouldn't exactly be comfortable in a wound.
Chicken started being a routine bacterial hazard when processing shifted to automation. Have you ever seen automated chicken processing? The freshly-cleaned carcass is washed in the same water the guts just fell into, so is contaminated by default. Hand-cut chicken carcasses don't have this problem.
I would hazard that you could culture bacteria from roughly that proportion of minor wounds, so technically, yes, they are 'infected'. Which does not assess whether the body's own defenses are adequately handling the infection (which in most cases, they are).
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno what bags you're getting, but I see two kinds:
Walmart's -- these go to hell in a matter of weeks in sunlight or a few months in a damp environment. Pull up a buried one and all you get is shreds.
50 pound feed bags -- these are thick heavy woven plastic, double-coated. Initially they're waterproof and really tough. About a year after being emptied they start getting friable and shortly afterward kinda turn to powder. Sun accelerates the process but any exposure to an oxidizer (eg. damp soil) does it. I was annoyed because I use about 350 bags a year, and I'd envisioned repurposing 'em as tarps. :(
And maybe envisioning themselves as the collection agency, for a suitable cut of the fines.
Heh heh, a good use for an 'outdated' calendar! :D
Not to mention the old marketing trick (I recall a study of same being a /. article a few years ago) of raising the price the week before, then lowering it to slightly *above* what it was originally, so they can advertise this great bargain for Black Friday... knowing that a lot of people only see the "price reduced" part, and have no idea what it was before.
Not only that, but tech stuff commonly has a price drop in January...
Maybe it says that Amazon's hiring practices tend to select for mentally unstable people. ;)
Not to mention all sorts of local seed producers. There's a big one just up the road from me.
Maybe he also has good genes which trumped the bad genes.
I suspect what happens is that the more empathic are also more likely to burn out. So some are lost, but not all.
Back to the nominal topic -- I've noticed shrinks tend to be nuttier than their patients; a lot seem to go into the field as self-validation.
Yeah, but Norway probably produces more meat products than vegetable products, just the reality of the climate and terrain. Given that, which one has to be shipped further?
Which is a side effect of being legally beholden to stockholders first and foremost, rather than first to customers and second to the health of the company. IMO stockholders should come in after these, but as it stands they're treated as lienholders, who have first dibs on profits, and by damn there better be profits, even if customers are screaming or leaving, and the company is being killed by pursuit of profit next quarter at the expense of survival next year.
I dunno... my Lutheran Brotherhood mutual fund grows at about double the rate of ordinary stocks, and has never given me a loss since I got it in 1980. I'd call that about as proven as it gets.
But -- my feeling is that despite the usefulness of the investment capital, the stock market is overall a bad influence on business behavior, and ... here's how I put it a while back:
====
Stock market: glorified loansharking. You lend companies money in return for what you hope will be a usorious interest rate.
And that 'interest rate' is actually set by what other investors think of the stock.
Consider it an experiment in mob psychology, with your money riding on the outcome.
=====
Because of escalating mandated business expenses, I've predicted that we're already on our way to employees becoming independent contractors even at the retail level, therefore responsible for all their own taxes and benefits. (Might teach 'em how much of their wage actually goes to that rather than into their wallets.)
And does this 'social mobility' take into consideration the relative starting points? Cuz in the U.S., what we call poverty is better than the average lifestyle over most of the globe. Naturally it's not as far up from that to the middle class, as it is for someone born into a slum in Bangladesh.
So you make it a percentage of growth over a minimum of NN years, maybe an increasing percentage over time. Of course that isn't entirely wonderful either, in that it would encourage growth at the expense of stability, a problem we already have with being beholden to stockholders as the #1 priority. So... say the CEO pay is delayed for an equal number of years after they leave the company, so stability is necessary if you expect to get paid.
Just throwing out wildassed notions; feel free to throw them back.
And who do you think holds the shares in those investment funds? It's ordinary people, who prefer to let a proven investment fund do the legwork (and it usually pays better than buying stocks on your own).
Basically, the way to prop up the buggywhip industry is to force everyone to buy buggywhips -- either directly (which makes it clear where the burden is) or indirectly (via taxes and subsidies). Either way, people who no longer need buggywhips lose.
"What if I was a billionaire and started buying up all of the farms, then I refused to let people buy food from me?"
There's no point in growing food if you're not going to sell it (growing stuff costs money; farm overhead is actually quite high). So let's say you buy all these farms and let them go dormant. Then you'd have all your capital tied up in nonproductive land, which means you'd lose money (the same invested productively would be making money; this is just an expense -- taxes and upkeep, ya know). How does this make any economic sense, especially if the motivation is greed??
I suggest that if such a cap/ratio is implemented, it be first applied to union bosses... say, no more than double the lowest union rate. Then lets see how well they like it. ;)
[I agree with your post, you pretty much covered it all.]
"Google is evil -- they're sending vans in your neighborhood, taking pictures of your houses, collecting your wifi network names, OTA traffic, embedding realtime tracking into your phones, and the list goes on."
Makes me wonder why the NSA bothers -- all they really need is a contract with Google!
The only time I take *preventive* antibiotics is before I go to the dentist, because a good deal of what a dentist does, poking around in your gums and such, is by its nature infective. I started this preventive measure after developing bad jaw infections twice after routine work... haven't had the problem since.
The other advance use I can see is if you don't have access to clean water, and an available preventive is better than probable dysentery.
Conversely, I've become so negatively sensitized to this sort of marketing that the moment I see "could" or "may" in conjunction with some dire threat, I'm instantly suspicious that I'm being sold a load of high-odds baloney.
And the reason it works isn't because of natural antibiotics; it works for the same reason any concentrated sugar syrup would work: it disrupts the wee beasties' osmotic balance, basically sucks all the water out of the bacteria, which kills them. Brine would work too but wouldn't exactly be comfortable in a wound.
Chicken started being a routine bacterial hazard when processing shifted to automation. Have you ever seen automated chicken processing? The freshly-cleaned carcass is washed in the same water the guts just fell into, so is contaminated by default. Hand-cut chicken carcasses don't have this problem.
I would hazard that you could culture bacteria from roughly that proportion of minor wounds, so technically, yes, they are 'infected'. Which does not assess whether the body's own defenses are adequately handling the infection (which in most cases, they are).
This scratch could get infected. Terrorists could attack. Probably about the same odds.