Nestle, the source of at least half the "American" chocolate flavored wax people are refering to here, is a European company.
Sure. They know that they can sell worse chocolate at higher prices to the Americans.
Oddly enough, the Milka brand here in Europe, which is pretty good and fairly inexpensive chocolate, belongs to Kraft Foods, an American company. Personally, I prefer Ritter chocolate, since it's made just a few miles from where I live.
(I'm a little bitter, because I've been struggling through meals made by my German mother-in-law who like all Germans, adds too much sugar to everything in sight.)
Hm, I guess you need to live in the States for a while. Have some Twinkies, donuts, pies (especially those that contain tons of HFCS, like Pecan pie), cake, etc. over there and most "oversugared" German dishes will taste refreshingly bland. During my studies in the States, I actually took to drinking totally unsweetened coffe just to counterbalance the sweetness of the food.
ANY change would be required to be labelled, so no one would pull anything over on you, same as it is today
Question: Do you read the label of each and every bar of chocolate you eat ?
I do so on occasion (mainly to find out how high the cocoa content is, and whether it's milk chocolate oder milk-free chocolate), and I think I'm already part of a tiny minority of chocolate buyers.
Mfr's would be able to choose to do this or not, it would not be a requirement, so it's not that all chocolate would change overnight.
If it makes the chocolate $0.01 cheaper to produce per bar, I would assume that the recipe is changed before the ink on the legal papers had a chance to dry.
The industry wants permission to sell a product for which they know there is a demand.
No, that's not what they are asking for. They could sell their product just fine right now, as long as they don't call it "chocolate". If demand for this crud was really that high, it would sell regardless of what it's called, wouldn't it ?
Also, there are some of the world's best chocolatiers in America, imo, such as:
Great. Though no one who isn't a true conaisseur knows these guys, and the stuff that's sold in large quantities is just awful. In Europe, you can pick the cheap main-stream brands (Milka, Ritter, whatever) and still end up with stuff that's vastly cheaper and vastly better than their American counterpart.
Not to mention that dozens of varieties, if you like your chocolate adulterated with stuff (raisins+rum+hazelnuts, yum) or are looking for unusually high cocoa content.
The diffence is that modern medicine only have a very good understanding of what specific molecule works, how it works and how it is to be used, in what doses, what time of day, how long after symptoms have subsided etc.
None of that is what makes modern medicine "modern". Knowing why it works is just icing on the cake. Knowing that it works is what's important, and it takes serious studies to prove that (double-blind and all that).
Don't want to do a double-blind study ? Then you're selling snake oil.
"Hey, this mold is killing bacteria, and our study has shown that pneumonia patients are three times as likely to survive than with a placebo." - Then you're doing "modern" medicine. Even if you can't exactly explain how those bacteria are killed.
What Americans consider chocolate (Hersheys*cough*) isn't made much worse by this. How much worse can sugar-coated sandpaper get ? And the stuff is way to expensive, too.
Even the crappiest chocolate over here in Europe beats that stuff senseless as far as price and quality goes. Major brand chocolate is still cheaper and in a totally different league as far a quality goes.
I always figured that in Star Trek, the fancy red thing on the front end of the engines (even in the original series) was some kind of.. electromagnetic.. quantum... thing.. of some sort that somehow attracted hydrogen to it.
Acutally, you figured right. The ramscoop of course isn't a physical object 25 miles wide (can you say 'micrometeorite hell'), it uses magnetic fields to capture protons ("hydrogen ions").
You'd have to go a long way to get oil down to 10 bucks a barrel.
If the US stopped buying the stuff today, I could see that happen.
you'd have to convince everybody to ditch their gas powered cars for electric cars.
If you have cheap and unlimited power, you could just synthesize gasoline (as well as pretty much any other petrol product) from CO2 and water. It's perfectly doable, just completely uneconomic right now.
I suspect the world was seduced by the fact that conventional nuclear energy did get up and running fairly quickly - because nobody knew about the dangers at that time,
And because governments were throwing wads of cash at the brightest minds of that time, maybe ?
The taste (or more accurately: smell, since it's your nose that picks it up not the tongue) is subtle, but definitely there. If your poppy seeds were a year old then perhaps the taste was gone, but I can most definitely notice the flavor.
Yep. It's even more pronounced when you have things like poppy seed cake, which is basically mostly poppy seeds and sugar.
Seems hunger can make a person stupid as well as angry.
Yes. It's especially pronounced in diabetics (even marginal ones). It's aggravated if the diabetic in question doesn't know he is diabetic, or doesn't want to know.
Low blood sugar makes people stupid, angry, or both - temporarily. They can turn out to be a completely different person once their blood sugar levels are high enough again.
We learned in English class, from the textbook, that OPEC is short for "organization of petrol exporting countries". Later, on the same day, our geography teacher told us that OPEC stands for "oil producing and exporting countries". When we asked about the obvious difference between our textbook and his statement, he went on a screaming fit about him being the teacher and always right, and us being the students and always wrong.
Well, the poor guy was having a hard time, having been victim of an, um, large homemade firecracker the previous year. The students responsible for this practical joke had been punished most harshly by being expelled. Of course, if the same happened today, they'd be disappeared for being terrorists. I miss the good old times.
But any attempt to punish state mistakes with huge sums of damages just results in raising the tax burden or less money to spend on essential services. Both of these outcomes punish us all.
And in a democracy, that serves "us all" exactly right for electing morons to govern "us all". "us all" are responsible for the people we put in office.
Yes, but even if CT brain + CT chest only equalled 250 chest X-rays, that's still quite a few X-rays.
It's even less than that. The abdomen and the pelvis are much, much more radiation-sensitive than the chest or the head.
Also, if I remember correctly, they sometimes inject stuff into patients taking CT brain to make those CT scans more sensitive. That would level the difference between CT brain and CT abdomen some, esp. if that injection is itself radioactive.
Um, sorry, but you've go things mixed up there quite a bit.
The contrast agent isn't radioactive (that wouldn't make sense and, in the worst case, would create noise in the the actual measurements). Instead, it is more opaque to x-rays than regular tissue. Depending on the type of the agent, this effect can be used to make blood vessels show up (if the agent stays in the blood), or certain kinds of tumors and lesions, or the intestine (if it is ingested and never enters the bloodstream).
Radioactive agents are used in therapy or for PET and SPECT scans, which are completely different types of imaging technique.
Sorry, I was talking rubbish, it was an MRI scan. Great fun though.
It was more exciting 23 years ago, when being able to have a look at the room-filling computer and the operating panel was reward enough for a loud and boring three-and-a-half hours long procedure.
I asked how much memory the computer had, and the answer was "Many hundreds of megabytes". Needless to say, I was impressed, having known only 8-bit home computers.
"Remember the impact of patient dose.
CT brain + CT chest + CD abdomen + CT pelvis = 1250 chest X-rays"
That's a fairly unfair comparison, since I believe that it factors in the radiation sensitivity of various areas of the body. Head and chest aren't very sensitive, but abdomen (especially the intestine) and pelvis (lots of bone marrow there) are.
Have to admit ignorence and not know the difference
Well, sorry for slinging medical terms around then.
Epidural means "between the skull bone and the top layer of the brain". Draining a hematoma there is comparatively simple - drill a hole through the skull bone and be extremely careful not to go any farther than that. Subdural means "between the outer, protective layer of the brain and the actual brain". Draining anything there means that you have to go through the outer layer of the brain, which is a more delicate operation than just going through the skull bone. The requirements for sterility are also much higher, as you don't want the patient to catch a brain infection in the process.
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The solutions are well known, but they're soooooo inconvenient. The consumer might actually get some exercise trying to stir his peanut butter !
Sadly, though, I have yet to find organic peanut butter here in Europe. The nonorganic stuff is available, but anything else isn't.
The other issue is that "natural" peanut butter tends to separate, and the convenience-oriented consumer doesn't like that.
Sure. They know that they can sell worse chocolate at higher prices to the Americans.
Oddly enough, the Milka brand here in Europe, which is pretty good and fairly inexpensive chocolate, belongs to Kraft Foods, an American company. Personally, I prefer Ritter chocolate, since it's made just a few miles from where I live.
(I'm a little bitter, because I've been struggling through meals made by my German mother-in-law who like all Germans, adds too much sugar to everything in sight.)
Hm, I guess you need to live in the States for a while. Have some Twinkies, donuts, pies (especially those that contain tons of HFCS, like Pecan pie), cake, etc. over there and most "oversugared" German dishes will taste refreshingly bland. During my studies in the States, I actually took to drinking totally unsweetened coffe just to counterbalance the sweetness of the food.
I doubt you can replace kerosene with anything that's that close to water.
Question: Do you read the label of each and every bar of chocolate you eat ?
I do so on occasion (mainly to find out how high the cocoa content is, and whether it's milk chocolate oder milk-free chocolate), and I think I'm already part of a tiny minority of chocolate buyers.
Mfr's would be able to choose to do this or not, it would not be a requirement, so it's not that all chocolate would change overnight.
If it makes the chocolate $0.01 cheaper to produce per bar, I would assume that the recipe is changed before the ink on the legal papers had a chance to dry.
No, that's not what they are asking for. They could sell their product just fine right now, as long as they don't call it "chocolate". If demand for this crud was really that high, it would sell regardless of what it's called, wouldn't it ?
Great. Though no one who isn't a true conaisseur knows these guys, and the stuff that's sold in large quantities is just awful. In Europe, you can pick the cheap main-stream brands (Milka, Ritter, whatever) and still end up with stuff that's vastly cheaper and vastly better than their American counterpart.
Not to mention that dozens of varieties, if you like your chocolate adulterated with stuff (raisins+rum+hazelnuts, yum) or are looking for unusually high cocoa content.
None of that is what makes modern medicine "modern". Knowing why it works is just icing on the cake. Knowing that it works is what's important, and it takes serious studies to prove that (double-blind and all that).
Don't want to do a double-blind study ? Then you're selling snake oil.
"Hey, this mold is killing bacteria, and our study has shown that pneumonia patients are three times as likely to survive than with a placebo." - Then you're doing "modern" medicine. Even if you can't exactly explain how those bacteria are killed.
Even the crappiest chocolate over here in Europe beats that stuff senseless as far as price and quality goes. Major brand chocolate is still cheaper and in a totally different league as far a quality goes.
Yeah. I think "back then" politicians were much better at picking the right people to throw money at. Today, it's just "my corporate buddies".
Acutally, you figured right. The ramscoop of course isn't a physical object 25 miles wide (can you say 'micrometeorite hell'), it uses magnetic fields to capture protons ("hydrogen ions").
If the US stopped buying the stuff today, I could see that happen.
you'd have to convince everybody to ditch their gas powered cars for electric cars.
If you have cheap and unlimited power, you could just synthesize gasoline (as well as pretty much any other petrol product) from CO2 and water. It's perfectly doable, just completely uneconomic right now.
#1: Yes
#2: No
And because governments were throwing wads of cash at the brightest minds of that time, maybe ?
I can't believe any government that has $200M to spare doesn't immediately throw the money at the guy.
Heck. I can't believe any corporation that has $200M to spare doesn't do it. $200M for what amounts to the license to print money ?
Yep. It's even more pronounced when you have things like poppy seed cake, which is basically mostly poppy seeds and sugar.
The other problem is that, nowadays, you can't intimidate them enough to obey you.
One thing he is definitely not: stupid
Yes. It's especially pronounced in diabetics (even marginal ones). It's aggravated if the diabetic in question doesn't know he is diabetic, or doesn't want to know.
Low blood sugar makes people stupid, angry, or both - temporarily. They can turn out to be a completely different person once their blood sugar levels are high enough again.
Even better is ambiguity of authority:
We learned in English class, from the textbook, that OPEC is short for "organization of petrol exporting countries". Later, on the same day, our geography teacher told us that OPEC stands for "oil producing and exporting countries". When we asked about the obvious difference between our textbook and his statement, he went on a screaming fit about him being the teacher and always right, and us being the students and always wrong.
Well, the poor guy was having a hard time, having been victim of an, um, large homemade firecracker the previous year. The students responsible for this practical joke had been punished most harshly by being expelled. Of course, if the same happened today, they'd be disappeared for being terrorists. I miss the good old times.
And in a democracy, that serves "us all" exactly right for electing morons to govern "us all". "us all" are responsible for the people we put in office.
It's even less than that. The abdomen and the pelvis are much, much more radiation-sensitive than the chest or the head.
Also, if I remember correctly, they sometimes inject stuff into patients taking CT brain to make those CT scans more sensitive. That would level the difference between CT brain and CT abdomen some, esp. if that injection is itself radioactive.
Um, sorry, but you've go things mixed up there quite a bit.
The contrast agent isn't radioactive (that wouldn't make sense and, in the worst case, would create noise in the the actual measurements). Instead, it is more opaque to x-rays than regular tissue. Depending on the type of the agent, this effect can be used to make blood vessels show up (if the agent stays in the blood), or certain kinds of tumors and lesions, or the intestine (if it is ingested and never enters the bloodstream).
Radioactive agents are used in therapy or for PET and SPECT scans, which are completely different types of imaging technique.
It was more exciting 23 years ago, when being able to have a look at the room-filling computer and the operating panel was reward enough for a loud and boring three-and-a-half hours long procedure.
I asked how much memory the computer had, and the answer was "Many hundreds of megabytes". Needless to say, I was impressed, having known only 8-bit home computers.
That's a fairly unfair comparison, since I believe that it factors in the radiation sensitivity of various areas of the body. Head and chest aren't very sensitive, but abdomen (especially the intestine) and pelvis (lots of bone marrow there) are.
Well, sorry for slinging medical terms around then.
Epidural means "between the skull bone and the top layer of the brain". Draining a hematoma there is comparatively simple - drill a hole through the skull bone and be extremely careful not to go any farther than that.
Subdural means "between the outer, protective layer of the brain and the actual brain". Draining anything there means that you have to go through the outer layer of the brain, which is a more delicate operation than just going through the skull bone. The requirements for sterility are also much higher, as you don't want the patient to catch a brain infection in the process.