Wait, Russia is still spying on us? And their spies look like THIS???
Where do I sign up to fight in the Cold War?
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Comments
I'm enabling comments on this blog, mostly for Brian, who I don't talk to enough these days (totally my fault, not his).
Don't abuse this, or else I'll take it away - and if that happens expect a post about how we can't have nice things in this house.
Don't abuse this, or else I'll take it away - and if that happens expect a post about how we can't have nice things in this house.
Peanuts on your Chin
I just read an article suggesting that peanuts should be banned on airplanes. I got two paragraphs in and had to close my Web browser. Stuff like this makes me think that I'm the only rational person left in a universe that has totally gone mad.
Look, I was in elementary and high school on the 1980s, not 30 years ago. I don't remember a single person EVER having an allergic reaction to peanuts. We didn't have segregated lunch tables, or peanut free zones, and not ONE kid dropped dead of a seizure because of it.
There was no ADD back then, either. Or ADHD for that matter. Or anything that would require medicating children. When I was a kid, other kids that behaved that way were punished. Because they were acting up. For attention. Even at the ripe old age of youth I knew that these were kids with problems at home, it was poor parenting, not chemical imbalances. Nothing that couldn't be solved with a little firm parenting, some tough love, some consistency in their home lives.
I hear the argument that psychological illnesses were underdiagnosed until recently, but I'm not buying that entirely either. Especially because it doesn't explain how the human race could have suddenly developed a deathly allergy to a food product that has been consumed for hundreds of years without causing any death.
Yes, some psychological ailments (notice I don't call them illnesses) were misdiagnosed until recently - male depression, for example. But kids weren't dropping dead in droves for no apparent reason before, there's no reason to expect why they would now.
Nuts to that.
Look, I was in elementary and high school on the 1980s, not 30 years ago. I don't remember a single person EVER having an allergic reaction to peanuts. We didn't have segregated lunch tables, or peanut free zones, and not ONE kid dropped dead of a seizure because of it.
There was no ADD back then, either. Or ADHD for that matter. Or anything that would require medicating children. When I was a kid, other kids that behaved that way were punished. Because they were acting up. For attention. Even at the ripe old age of youth I knew that these were kids with problems at home, it was poor parenting, not chemical imbalances. Nothing that couldn't be solved with a little firm parenting, some tough love, some consistency in their home lives.
I hear the argument that psychological illnesses were underdiagnosed until recently, but I'm not buying that entirely either. Especially because it doesn't explain how the human race could have suddenly developed a deathly allergy to a food product that has been consumed for hundreds of years without causing any death.
Yes, some psychological ailments (notice I don't call them illnesses) were misdiagnosed until recently - male depression, for example. But kids weren't dropping dead in droves for no apparent reason before, there's no reason to expect why they would now.
Nuts to that.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Knock, knock, Neo
So there's this Mega Store in the DC area called Wegmans, which is like a grocery store, only ridiculously large. It makes Costco look like a gas station convenience store. In fact, it's not unlike the Costco from the movie Idiocracy.
I found myself there the other morning, wandering around amid piles of vegetables, looking for a block of parmesan cheese. I never did find the cheese, for those keeping score, most likely due to the fact that by the time I got to the cheese section (which was more like a giant cheese store), I was suffering from sensory overload, fighting the urge to run screaming from the place and hide under the couch.
The produce section was an epic undertaking of piles and piles of fruits and vegetables the likes of which I had never seen all at once. On display by the front door was a bin holding no less than 500 heads of garlic. Next to that was a table piled high with a vinyard's worth of grapes. Each department was the size of a city block, and as I rounded the corner into prepared foods alley (complete with several full-sized and fully-staffed bakeries and kitchens) I started to feel as though I couldn't possibly be alive and experiencing what I was seeing.
I started thinking about what it would cost to run a place like this. There were no less than 1,000 employees on staff at the time (I counted more than 20 in the bakery alone). Figure each is making about 8$ an hour, that's a staff-only operating cost of $8,000-$10,000 an hour.
An HOUR.
Nevermind the extended run of freezers and coolers, and the amount of electricity it would take to fuel such a thing.
So this thought process led me to wonder how much money they must process through the registers to pay for this. They have to be pulling in $25,000 an hour in revenue just to break even. And that's with over 50% of their capital tied up in perishable goods.
If you're still following me, this is where it starts to get weird.
Looking around at the bakery, the cheese shop, and a diary section quite literally a mile long, I tried to picture where said perishable goods could possible come from. If you figure that the average cow will generate 4-5 gallons of milk at each milking, and can be milked twice a day (these stats are from my dad, a former dairy farmer, so they MUST be right), it takes one cow to make 10 gallons of milk a day.
So to fill a dairy section a mile long, containing several hundred gallons of milk, plus cream cheese, regular cheese, ice cream, sour cream, creamer, and everything else that comes from the udder of a cow, you have to figure that there are several thousand cows working 7 days a week just to supply this ONE store.
I have travelled my fair share of this wonderful land we live in, and I have NEVER seen a single dairy farm that has more than a few hundred cows.
So that means that it would take SEVERAL cow farms at BEST just to supply this ONE store in the metro-DC area - nevermind all of the other grocery and convenience stores in the same region - nevermind all of the other grocery and convenience stores around the country.
Think about the wheat used to make the bread. The sugar cane to make the cake frosting. The coffee beans used to fill the hundreds of bags of ground coffee.
How long, do you suppose, does it take to cultivate a single head of garlic, never mind 500?
The only logical conclusion is that this is all quite impossible. There's not enough farmland left in this world to supply the ridiculously stocked food stores that we all visit on a daily basis. There's no way. Do the math yourself, I'll wait.
The only logical conclusion is that none of this is real. It takes nothing but programming and electicity to create a virtual bag of sugar, a computer-generated head of garlic, a digital pre-wrapped block of parmesan cheese.
Imagine if you will a traveller from the 1920's who wakes up wearing his funny 1920's clothes and fedora hat in the middle of a Wegman's, present day. Imagine his reaction when faced with a pile of 500 heads of garlic. Imagine how surreal this would be to him - they didn't have piles of 500 heads of garlic 80 years ago - they couldn't have.
And there was a lot more land and a lot fewer people around back then.
The only logical conclusion is that nothing is real. You might not even be real. I might not even be real.
And they program the stores to be out of certain things - like blocks of parmesan cheese - to enforce the feeling of reality. To keep us happy. To keep us from pulling the plugs out of the backs of our necks.
Think about that next time you go to Starbucks. Next time you pick up a gallon of milk. Next time you fill your car with gas.
Where are all of the consumer goods coming from? Is there really enough supply to meet the demand of 7 trillion people world wide?
If we all buy or consume a gallon of dairy products every day, that would mean that there would have to be 1 trillion cows in the world. I'll even be conservative, considering that there are little kids in Africa that don't get a glass of milk with breakfast. Or even get breakfast at all. Let's say that every person in the world consumes one gallon of dairy products every other week on average.
That would still require 75 billion cows.
But according to the International Erosion Control Association there are only about 2 billion.
That's not enough cows to supply each person in the world with one gallon of milk each YEAR.
Follow the white rabbit. Knock, knock, Neo...
I found myself there the other morning, wandering around amid piles of vegetables, looking for a block of parmesan cheese. I never did find the cheese, for those keeping score, most likely due to the fact that by the time I got to the cheese section (which was more like a giant cheese store), I was suffering from sensory overload, fighting the urge to run screaming from the place and hide under the couch.
The produce section was an epic undertaking of piles and piles of fruits and vegetables the likes of which I had never seen all at once. On display by the front door was a bin holding no less than 500 heads of garlic. Next to that was a table piled high with a vinyard's worth of grapes. Each department was the size of a city block, and as I rounded the corner into prepared foods alley (complete with several full-sized and fully-staffed bakeries and kitchens) I started to feel as though I couldn't possibly be alive and experiencing what I was seeing.
I started thinking about what it would cost to run a place like this. There were no less than 1,000 employees on staff at the time (I counted more than 20 in the bakery alone). Figure each is making about 8$ an hour, that's a staff-only operating cost of $8,000-$10,000 an hour.
An HOUR.
Nevermind the extended run of freezers and coolers, and the amount of electricity it would take to fuel such a thing.
So this thought process led me to wonder how much money they must process through the registers to pay for this. They have to be pulling in $25,000 an hour in revenue just to break even. And that's with over 50% of their capital tied up in perishable goods.
If you're still following me, this is where it starts to get weird.
Looking around at the bakery, the cheese shop, and a diary section quite literally a mile long, I tried to picture where said perishable goods could possible come from. If you figure that the average cow will generate 4-5 gallons of milk at each milking, and can be milked twice a day (these stats are from my dad, a former dairy farmer, so they MUST be right), it takes one cow to make 10 gallons of milk a day.
So to fill a dairy section a mile long, containing several hundred gallons of milk, plus cream cheese, regular cheese, ice cream, sour cream, creamer, and everything else that comes from the udder of a cow, you have to figure that there are several thousand cows working 7 days a week just to supply this ONE store.
I have travelled my fair share of this wonderful land we live in, and I have NEVER seen a single dairy farm that has more than a few hundred cows.
So that means that it would take SEVERAL cow farms at BEST just to supply this ONE store in the metro-DC area - nevermind all of the other grocery and convenience stores in the same region - nevermind all of the other grocery and convenience stores around the country.
Think about the wheat used to make the bread. The sugar cane to make the cake frosting. The coffee beans used to fill the hundreds of bags of ground coffee.
How long, do you suppose, does it take to cultivate a single head of garlic, never mind 500?
The only logical conclusion is that this is all quite impossible. There's not enough farmland left in this world to supply the ridiculously stocked food stores that we all visit on a daily basis. There's no way. Do the math yourself, I'll wait.
The only logical conclusion is that none of this is real. It takes nothing but programming and electicity to create a virtual bag of sugar, a computer-generated head of garlic, a digital pre-wrapped block of parmesan cheese.
Imagine if you will a traveller from the 1920's who wakes up wearing his funny 1920's clothes and fedora hat in the middle of a Wegman's, present day. Imagine his reaction when faced with a pile of 500 heads of garlic. Imagine how surreal this would be to him - they didn't have piles of 500 heads of garlic 80 years ago - they couldn't have.
And there was a lot more land and a lot fewer people around back then.
The only logical conclusion is that nothing is real. You might not even be real. I might not even be real.
And they program the stores to be out of certain things - like blocks of parmesan cheese - to enforce the feeling of reality. To keep us happy. To keep us from pulling the plugs out of the backs of our necks.
Think about that next time you go to Starbucks. Next time you pick up a gallon of milk. Next time you fill your car with gas.
Where are all of the consumer goods coming from? Is there really enough supply to meet the demand of 7 trillion people world wide?
If we all buy or consume a gallon of dairy products every day, that would mean that there would have to be 1 trillion cows in the world. I'll even be conservative, considering that there are little kids in Africa that don't get a glass of milk with breakfast. Or even get breakfast at all. Let's say that every person in the world consumes one gallon of dairy products every other week on average.
That would still require 75 billion cows.
But according to the International Erosion Control Association there are only about 2 billion.
That's not enough cows to supply each person in the world with one gallon of milk each YEAR.
Follow the white rabbit. Knock, knock, Neo...
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