I will admit that I don't have a direct source handy (and it is not something printed on the nutritional facts page) but celery juice is incredibly high in nitrates. I have some experience making sausages and cured meats and have come across many things saying that these sorts of alternative curing methods result in as much or more nitrates as using instacure #1 (aka pink salt, a salt blend with 6% sodium nitrate). If they didn't, the cure would not be effective and the meat unsafe to eat.
The peppermint has a slight vomit odor when used to wash clothes (although it dissipates fast...but really smells like someone threw up on your clothes). So if you are on the fence on a scent, I would choose any of the others. Really does last forever...people mix their own hand soap (for those foaming dispensers) and use something like 1-tbsp of Dr Bronners and then fill with water.
That's fair. As I said, I do shop there because I can find higher quality and greater selection of some things. Cured products aside, the butcher is expensive but good (and open when the store is open...I swear the other grocery store's butcher leaves at 6:00 so you are stuck with prepackaged cuts). A little too many bad farmed fish, but the fishmonger is always knowledgeable and you can get more than the basics.
The sugary breakfast cereal selection sucks...but that is understandable.
Unfortunately, often I substitute it in my brain for being "the good grocery store", when really it is the "grocery store with a mission". Back where my parents live, there is actually a "good" grocery store and a more mass-appeal store. The good store's goal seems to be to provide the best--good produce, good meat, good breakfast cereal--they don't try to subscribe to some hippy creed, they just try to find the best tasting version of a product. If that product uses nitrates or high fructose corn syrup (coke vs 365 cola), so be it. Luckily there is a chain of "good" stores opening up around me...none are close enough that I would do my regular shopping there, but I am hopeful that their future expansion plans are in my direction (or that my next apartment will be in their neighborhood).
Its the point of the summary but, unfortunately, not the point of the article.
The article went for the low-hanging fruit of homeopathy and separate organic/non-organic bread slicers. If the article wanted to get at the real ignorance problem at whole foods, they should have looked at the bacon. Or looked at the policies regarding what types of "fair trade" coffee they will sell. I bet there is all sorts of weird shit growing in the cheese aisle, but that's OK because cheese bacteria is not currently a "bad scary item" (it is gluten's turn right now).
For the record--the Dr. Bronner's people write some crazy shit on their soap bottles...but they make a damn good product.
The crazy ramblings are part of the charm (especially the lemon and vaseline birth control method). I think they just keep it on the bottles in memory of the company's founder.
If you don't want the crazy, you can buy bars of Kirk's castille soap at whole foods as well, although I don't think they have a concentrated liquid like Dr. Bronner's. Dr Bronner's is a great travel soap--you can do laundry with it, wash your body or hair (if you are not picky about how it rinses out), and even brush your teeth (if you are brave). I spent a month in Europe with just a little bottle of that super-concentrated stuff...and the big bottle I filled it with is still going strong.
While I mostly agree with you...I rarely see anybody buying stuff from the aisle of homeopathic shit at my whole foods. I think that most of well-off, expensively educated, customers know quite well that that stuff is BS. They probably also don't care that the bread slicer is used on both organic and non-organic bread.
That stuff must be insanely high margin though. What's the profit on homeopathic cure-all (cure-nothing) water? You probably don't have to sell much of it to make it worth the shelf-space (and it is all non-perishable unlike most of their goods).
I always assumed that the aisle of pseudoscience homeopathy crap was just there because it was super high profit margin and likely to be purchased by the customers who will go out of their way to seek out organic products.
Personally, I shop at whole foods because it is on the way home and it has significantly better selection and quality of produce than the Jewel (which is slightly more out of the way).
I really hoped this article (when I read it a week ago, thanks slashdot) would have been about some of the questionable restrictions they place on their food. They have decided that nitrates/nitrites are "evil" and must be avoided...as such they won't sell anything that uses sodium nitrate (instacure #1) as an ingredient. Of course, without nitrates, you won't have bacon or a whole host of other cured meat products (such as many hams/salamis/etc). How does Whole Foods get around this? They figure out how to make bacon using celery juice so that they can say "No Added Nitrates" despite the fact that bacon made this way can actually have higher nitrate concentrations than bacon made with curing salt (and can taste a little funny since who wants bacon made with celery?).
Either they need to admit that nitrates are OK to eat, or they need to stop selling things that defeat the point of their own restriction.
Well, I suppose it could go either way, but most loud activities don't occur in the bedrooms.
Its going to be the bass filled movie soundtrack or the party guests or the music turned up to hear over the sound of cooking. Obviously its not going to help if your neighbor has a loud TV on the shared wall of their bedroom or has incredibly loud sex, but aligning the quieter areas of the building makes sense (and its not like they build the bedrooms with a window...there is still some sound dampening effort). It also makes it easier for neighbors to be courteous to each other--everyone wants a quiet bedroom so they know to keep the louder activities outside of the bedroom.
They may have been built separately, but those brownstones are pretty much the same as a length of rowhouses/townhomes. The walls sit against each other and there is yard space only out back.
Obviously NYC is too dense to support rowhouses for most of its population...but there are tons of other cities (cities with room for urban detached single-family homes) where they could nicely reduce sprawl. This is already happening--there are tons of failed/undersold McDevelopments out in the exurbs of my city, but the recent construction townhomes all seem to be selling just fine (often in sizes up to 1500sqft). They might not have a 3-car garage, but in the city, a family can get away with one car.
The noise problem seems largely fixable in new construction (at least at a certain level). My friends who bought high rise condos don't hear their neighbors (or at least I have never heard them). That is largely a function of concrete subfloors, better walls, and floorplans that separate noisy areas (so bedrooms aren't placed along the same wall as your neighbor's living room/kitchen).
Of course that's not true about my 100-year old apartment building...and its not true of the recent 3-flat another friend lives in (it is constructed like a single family home since it is so small, so while it is better than my vintage building, you might still get bass rumble from a loud movie).
Obviously I don't know much about the real costs, but I wonder why the gut-rehabs of vintage buildings don't put more effort into soundproofing. Sure there is an extra cost, but I know a lot of people who won't even look at multi-unit buildings that aren't concrete construction--if they marketed the soundproofing, they might open up a larger market. Maybe it was just the real estate boom that meant you didn't need to do it (since there would be mortgage-happy buyers no matter what).
It is heavily used internationally in places where facebook has a small presence.
I think this could be a good thing really (though far too much money) for cross platform messaging. Especially if facebook lends them some help in making a browser based whatsapp service (I hate typing messages on a phone while I am sitting at a computer).
Right now you have all of these systems that don't quite do it (ignoring 3rd party clients for a minute since the average user doesn't use them). iMessage saves you from sending SMS, but only to other apple users (and you can only use it on a computer if you have an apple computer). Hangouts (nee gchat) is great on a computer or android phone, but the iphone client is so bad that a lot of people won't use it, even if they use gchat/hangouts when at the computer. Facebook chat is actually pretty functional from iphone/android/pc, but you've got to use facebook to use it (and facebook friend people). Whatsapp very functional on a phone, but you can't use it on a computer (again, ignoring 3rd party options) and in the US, the only people I know who use it are people with international friends.
If facebook can grow the US userbase (just announcing that they bought it for so much money might get a lot of "curiosity signups"), and lend some development aid (both for PC/browser access and the addition of facetime/hangouts style video chat), there might actually be a pretty good universal chat system. As it stands, there are different groups of people that I can communicate with from my Phone/Tablet/PC--and the same is true for the recipients (e.g. I have to know that I can't gchat them over the weekend but an SMS will still work...)
And if the free software (Whatsapp) isn't deemed secure enough...then they need to look into something like Good where they can still keep the communication walled in but let people use things that aren't outdated blackberries.
When an organization sees people doing things like this, they should recognize that they are not providing the right kind of IT services to their employees.
Yeah, but he wasn't asking for the statuatory damages. He was asking for compensation for the photo plus a job (or at least his name plastered all over their site and being named their official photographer for life). If he is going to sue them for damages, they sure as hell aren't going to name him their official sponsor and plaster their name over their site--they are going to never mention his name, never buy an image from him, and make sure to remove all reference to his photos from their site.
His demands were pretty unreasonable (but he's just a college student who probably doesn't realize that).
In store advertisements don't pay like that. It might be a reasonable price for full rights to all photos, but not to license an image for use in an advertisement (which is what you would have to sue them for).
If you are buying openly traded stocks, then for the most part, you aren't putting money into a business.
The money went into the business when the business sold the shares (through an IPO or a later offering). All you are doing is paying the seller for the current value of the share of the company that they own (with hopes that that share will be worth more to you in the future).
If you actually want to put money into a business, you have to be making angel/VC type investments (or at least be buying from a public offering, not from other sellers).
If our currently designed nuclear plants were not designed to throttle...maybe we should add that to the litany of reasons why we should be building new plants that might take into account some of the advances that have been made in the last 40 years.
The only person who can play to tie is the leader going into the final question. Everyone else plays to win. Unless the leader has more than double the points of the 2nd player, he must bet some points or risk losing.
If we assume that everyone will get the question right, the leader must wager enough money to have more than twice as much as the 2nd place player (since you must assume that they wager everything). A common practice is to wager enough to get a dollar more (if you had $80 and they had $50, you would wager 21 and win as long as you get it right or you both get it wrong). What this guy is doing, is only wagering enough to tie if the 2nd person bets everything and wind (so he would only wager $20...he wins if the 2nd player gets it wrong, ties if they both get it right).
This lets you keep a known opponent in the game (and as others have mentioned, they might do the same thing if they are leading you next game).
Nah, the free market has just moved the quantitative talent into the finance sector where they get paid more. Historically, that was not the case...controlling for math skill, there was not this huge premium on going into finance (and where there was a premium, it was often a payment for boredom...valuing insurance was a lot more boring than engineering ).
Now you have algorithmic hedge funds snapping up engineers and science PhDs because they need the quantitative skills (and can easily train them on the finance knowledge) and are willing to pay a multiple over what other industries pay. That's not the boredom premium anymore...that is a lifestyle changing amount of money. This has been going on long enough, that a lot of people are saying "Why bother going the STEM route when I am just going to work in finance? Time for a financial math graduate degree".
If these employers are having such a hard time finding engineers...why not try paying them more? I'm all for making it easier for people to study these topics, but the employers already have a way to provide an incentive: the promise of a high paying (and more fulfilling than finance) job upon graduation.
Hate to self reply, but I sort of forgot where I was going with that original comment.
I meant to add that it sounds like EVE doesn't make it *that* easy to buy your way into the game. In WoW. you can (illicitly) buy items and characters for not a lot of money (lots of max level characters for a couple hundred bucks on the sites I checked just now). EVE may have an allowable way to inject money into the game, but it is not at all like buying a maxed out WoW character and jumping into the server.
Someone on Reddit said that the raw material cost of the big Titan ships goes for something like $3000 if you sell subscriptions at the current rate. Then it takes months to build it (and you probably aren't going to do so well at keeping it unless you have other powerful friends). I could see employed people who want to ease up the grind spending a few bucks to make sure they never have to worry about small expenses, but the instant-gratification real-money guys probably don't want to pay $3000 and wait months.
The explanation I saw made it sound like very little of the "money" lost came from selling subscriptions.
There were big corporations involved in this battle who make significant amounts of in-game money off of their resource monopolies and other money generating activities. The people whose ships were lost didn't buy them using thousands of dollars of USD, they bought them using the resources of their corporation.
Another way to value this (which comes up with numbers similar to the estimates I have seen) is just to take the # of participants * monthly fee * months. So if you had 2200 players, each playing $20 a month (or I guess earning the in-game currency and buying playtime that way...but no matter what, somebody paid for it), you are looking at $44k a month. These big battleships apparently take a very long time to build (and that's only after you have saved up the money), and these big battles sound like they occur maybe a couple times a year at most. So if you say that the losses in this battle were equal to 6 months combined effort from those 2200 players, you get $264k in losses. Those corporations have to rebuild ships valued at approximately the same amount as the battle participants put into the game in 6 months.
Keep in mind, its a game. You pay for the entertainment value...the reason they have the ships is so that they can one day join a huge battle. The money is not really lost. They got 6 months of enjoyment out of it, and they were going to keep paying for the next 6 months anyways. On an individual level, lots of players (especially the victors) didn't actually lose anything, and I read commentary that suggested the corporations generally cover the entire replacement cost of ships lost in battles like this...so yes, there is less in-game currency in the corporate accounts, but everybody had fun, made the news, and got their money's worth.
IIRC (and I may be wrong), the facebook SMS feature sent the SMS through facebook itself (i.e. using a data connection, not a carrier provided SMS). You could never send and receive your phone's own SMS messages through the facebook app.
Hangouts doesn't send the SMS through data, but rather just becomes your phone's SMS client so that you receive SMS messages in Hangouts as well.
My guess is facebook removed the feature since it was little used and cost money (since they had to operate as an SMS gateway) and having it go away for a while would make it so people weren't confused by the options when they decide to integrate SMS into the app. Not saying they will do this, but it was my first thought when I saw this news yesterday.
Slashdot Mirror
I will admit that I don't have a direct source handy (and it is not something printed on the nutritional facts page) but celery juice is incredibly high in nitrates. I have some experience making sausages and cured meats and have come across many things saying that these sorts of alternative curing methods result in as much or more nitrates as using instacure #1 (aka pink salt, a salt blend with 6% sodium nitrate). If they didn't, the cure would not be effective and the meat unsafe to eat.
The peppermint has a slight vomit odor when used to wash clothes (although it dissipates fast...but really smells like someone threw up on your clothes). So if you are on the fence on a scent, I would choose any of the others. Really does last forever...people mix their own hand soap (for those foaming dispensers) and use something like 1-tbsp of Dr Bronners and then fill with water.
The sugary breakfast cereal selection sucks...but that is understandable.
Unfortunately, often I substitute it in my brain for being "the good grocery store", when really it is the "grocery store with a mission". Back where my parents live, there is actually a "good" grocery store and a more mass-appeal store. The good store's goal seems to be to provide the best--good produce, good meat, good breakfast cereal--they don't try to subscribe to some hippy creed, they just try to find the best tasting version of a product. If that product uses nitrates or high fructose corn syrup (coke vs 365 cola), so be it. Luckily there is a chain of "good" stores opening up around me...none are close enough that I would do my regular shopping there, but I am hopeful that their future expansion plans are in my direction (or that my next apartment will be in their neighborhood).
The article went for the low-hanging fruit of homeopathy and separate organic/non-organic bread slicers. If the article wanted to get at the real ignorance problem at whole foods, they should have looked at the bacon. Or looked at the policies regarding what types of "fair trade" coffee they will sell. I bet there is all sorts of weird shit growing in the cheese aisle, but that's OK because cheese bacteria is not currently a "bad scary item" (it is gluten's turn right now).
The crazy ramblings are part of the charm (especially the lemon and vaseline birth control method). I think they just keep it on the bottles in memory of the company's founder.
If you don't want the crazy, you can buy bars of Kirk's castille soap at whole foods as well, although I don't think they have a concentrated liquid like Dr. Bronner's. Dr Bronner's is a great travel soap--you can do laundry with it, wash your body or hair (if you are not picky about how it rinses out), and even brush your teeth (if you are brave). I spent a month in Europe with just a little bottle of that super-concentrated stuff...and the big bottle I filled it with is still going strong.
That stuff must be insanely high margin though. What's the profit on homeopathic cure-all (cure-nothing) water? You probably don't have to sell much of it to make it worth the shelf-space (and it is all non-perishable unlike most of their goods).
Personally, I shop at whole foods because it is on the way home and it has significantly better selection and quality of produce than the Jewel (which is slightly more out of the way).
I really hoped this article (when I read it a week ago, thanks slashdot) would have been about some of the questionable restrictions they place on their food. They have decided that nitrates/nitrites are "evil" and must be avoided...as such they won't sell anything that uses sodium nitrate (instacure #1) as an ingredient. Of course, without nitrates, you won't have bacon or a whole host of other cured meat products (such as many hams/salamis/etc). How does Whole Foods get around this? They figure out how to make bacon using celery juice so that they can say "No Added Nitrates" despite the fact that bacon made this way can actually have higher nitrate concentrations than bacon made with curing salt (and can taste a little funny since who wants bacon made with celery?).
Either they need to admit that nitrates are OK to eat, or they need to stop selling things that defeat the point of their own restriction.
Its going to be the bass filled movie soundtrack or the party guests or the music turned up to hear over the sound of cooking. Obviously its not going to help if your neighbor has a loud TV on the shared wall of their bedroom or has incredibly loud sex, but aligning the quieter areas of the building makes sense (and its not like they build the bedrooms with a window...there is still some sound dampening effort). It also makes it easier for neighbors to be courteous to each other--everyone wants a quiet bedroom so they know to keep the louder activities outside of the bedroom.
Obviously NYC is too dense to support rowhouses for most of its population...but there are tons of other cities (cities with room for urban detached single-family homes) where they could nicely reduce sprawl. This is already happening--there are tons of failed/undersold McDevelopments out in the exurbs of my city, but the recent construction townhomes all seem to be selling just fine (often in sizes up to 1500sqft). They might not have a 3-car garage, but in the city, a family can get away with one car.
Of course that's not true about my 100-year old apartment building...and its not true of the recent 3-flat another friend lives in (it is constructed like a single family home since it is so small, so while it is better than my vintage building, you might still get bass rumble from a loud movie).
Obviously I don't know much about the real costs, but I wonder why the gut-rehabs of vintage buildings don't put more effort into soundproofing. Sure there is an extra cost, but I know a lot of people who won't even look at multi-unit buildings that aren't concrete construction--if they marketed the soundproofing, they might open up a larger market. Maybe it was just the real estate boom that meant you didn't need to do it (since there would be mortgage-happy buyers no matter what).
I think this could be a good thing really (though far too much money) for cross platform messaging. Especially if facebook lends them some help in making a browser based whatsapp service (I hate typing messages on a phone while I am sitting at a computer).
Right now you have all of these systems that don't quite do it (ignoring 3rd party clients for a minute since the average user doesn't use them). iMessage saves you from sending SMS, but only to other apple users (and you can only use it on a computer if you have an apple computer). Hangouts (nee gchat) is great on a computer or android phone, but the iphone client is so bad that a lot of people won't use it, even if they use gchat/hangouts when at the computer. Facebook chat is actually pretty functional from iphone/android/pc, but you've got to use facebook to use it (and facebook friend people). Whatsapp very functional on a phone, but you can't use it on a computer (again, ignoring 3rd party options) and in the US, the only people I know who use it are people with international friends.
If facebook can grow the US userbase (just announcing that they bought it for so much money might get a lot of "curiosity signups"), and lend some development aid (both for PC/browser access and the addition of facetime/hangouts style video chat), there might actually be a pretty good universal chat system. As it stands, there are different groups of people that I can communicate with from my Phone/Tablet/PC--and the same is true for the recipients (e.g. I have to know that I can't gchat them over the weekend but an SMS will still work...)
And if the free software (Whatsapp) isn't deemed secure enough...then they need to look into something like Good where they can still keep the communication walled in but let people use things that aren't outdated blackberries.
When an organization sees people doing things like this, they should recognize that they are not providing the right kind of IT services to their employees.
His demands were pretty unreasonable (but he's just a college student who probably doesn't realize that).
In store advertisements don't pay like that. It might be a reasonable price for full rights to all photos, but not to license an image for use in an advertisement (which is what you would have to sue them for).
http://www.mediaite.com/online/brilliant-audi-ad-mocking-sochi-olympic-rings-fail-is-probably-fake/
Ah yes, the old "you'll get good exposure" argument for companies not having to pay photographers for their work.
The money went into the business when the business sold the shares (through an IPO or a later offering). All you are doing is paying the seller for the current value of the share of the company that they own (with hopes that that share will be worth more to you in the future).
If you actually want to put money into a business, you have to be making angel/VC type investments (or at least be buying from a public offering, not from other sellers).
If our currently designed nuclear plants were not designed to throttle...maybe we should add that to the litany of reasons why we should be building new plants that might take into account some of the advances that have been made in the last 40 years.
The only person who can play to tie is the leader going into the final question. Everyone else plays to win. Unless the leader has more than double the points of the 2nd player, he must bet some points or risk losing.
If we assume that everyone will get the question right, the leader must wager enough money to have more than twice as much as the 2nd place player (since you must assume that they wager everything). A common practice is to wager enough to get a dollar more (if you had $80 and they had $50, you would wager 21 and win as long as you get it right or you both get it wrong). What this guy is doing, is only wagering enough to tie if the 2nd person bets everything and wind (so he would only wager $20...he wins if the 2nd player gets it wrong, ties if they both get it right).
This lets you keep a known opponent in the game (and as others have mentioned, they might do the same thing if they are leading you next game).
Now you have algorithmic hedge funds snapping up engineers and science PhDs because they need the quantitative skills (and can easily train them on the finance knowledge) and are willing to pay a multiple over what other industries pay. That's not the boredom premium anymore...that is a lifestyle changing amount of money. This has been going on long enough, that a lot of people are saying "Why bother going the STEM route when I am just going to work in finance? Time for a financial math graduate degree".
If these employers are having such a hard time finding engineers...why not try paying them more? I'm all for making it easier for people to study these topics, but the employers already have a way to provide an incentive: the promise of a high paying (and more fulfilling than finance) job upon graduation.
I meant to add that it sounds like EVE doesn't make it *that* easy to buy your way into the game. In WoW. you can (illicitly) buy items and characters for not a lot of money (lots of max level characters for a couple hundred bucks on the sites I checked just now). EVE may have an allowable way to inject money into the game, but it is not at all like buying a maxed out WoW character and jumping into the server.
Someone on Reddit said that the raw material cost of the big Titan ships goes for something like $3000 if you sell subscriptions at the current rate. Then it takes months to build it (and you probably aren't going to do so well at keeping it unless you have other powerful friends). I could see employed people who want to ease up the grind spending a few bucks to make sure they never have to worry about small expenses, but the instant-gratification real-money guys probably don't want to pay $3000 and wait months.
There were big corporations involved in this battle who make significant amounts of in-game money off of their resource monopolies and other money generating activities. The people whose ships were lost didn't buy them using thousands of dollars of USD, they bought them using the resources of their corporation.
Another way to value this (which comes up with numbers similar to the estimates I have seen) is just to take the # of participants * monthly fee * months. So if you had 2200 players, each playing $20 a month (or I guess earning the in-game currency and buying playtime that way...but no matter what, somebody paid for it), you are looking at $44k a month. These big battleships apparently take a very long time to build (and that's only after you have saved up the money), and these big battles sound like they occur maybe a couple times a year at most. So if you say that the losses in this battle were equal to 6 months combined effort from those 2200 players, you get $264k in losses. Those corporations have to rebuild ships valued at approximately the same amount as the battle participants put into the game in 6 months.
Keep in mind, its a game. You pay for the entertainment value...the reason they have the ships is so that they can one day join a huge battle. The money is not really lost. They got 6 months of enjoyment out of it, and they were going to keep paying for the next 6 months anyways. On an individual level, lots of players (especially the victors) didn't actually lose anything, and I read commentary that suggested the corporations generally cover the entire replacement cost of ships lost in battles like this...so yes, there is less in-game currency in the corporate accounts, but everybody had fun, made the news, and got their money's worth.
Hangouts doesn't send the SMS through data, but rather just becomes your phone's SMS client so that you receive SMS messages in Hangouts as well.
My guess is facebook removed the feature since it was little used and cost money (since they had to operate as an SMS gateway) and having it go away for a while would make it so people weren't confused by the options when they decide to integrate SMS into the app. Not saying they will do this, but it was my first thought when I saw this news yesterday.
Put both your SMS and your Instant messaging in the same app (just pushing facebook chat over hangout chat).