Clams and Oysters have been canned in America and fished for in the Chesapeake and New England’s Cape Cod bay, and sold in American stores since prior to the 18th century.
They’re not fished out, either. Instead, they’re outsourced. I breezed by the shelf that has all this stuff and did a ‘made in’ check.
The clams products come from Thailand, where as late as the Viet Nam conflict there weren’t canneries to be found there. (more…)
I shouldn’t name it because there’s very nice people now who are out on the street. Alton’s a beautiful town, but as what technically is considered a small American town, it’s not exactly brimming with jobs.
Idealist that I am, a new face in a new town, I opened an account at this underdog thrift, figuring that the giant banks didn’t need my help. Naturally, I got to know a couple of the tellers and once talked over an idea with one of their honchos, (unsuccessfully) suggesting that I could whip them up a more lively web site than the olden-style two dimensional, one-color theme they’d been using. They came back with a ‘no’, but they were down-to-earth ordinary nice folks about the idea. (more…)
You and I can think of a few smarter things to do with $700 Billion than seive it through Washington, where Congress takes what it doesn’t own. I must say, though, that some of the Congressional leaders are asking some pretty taxpayer-oriented questions, like:
‘Why in the hell are we doing this?”, Better, there’s this one:
“Just why in the hell do we only have less than a week in which to decide whether we pull the trigger on this?” More along the lines of hitting it on the head, there’s:
“Heck Joe, if we don’t understand this, how in the hell can the average American fathom it?” (more…)
Bailing anybody out is generally a bad idea. It creates a feeling in the ‘bailed’ that he/she can get away from whatever he/she did wrong to get him in the jam he/she found him/herself in the first place. Unless things have changed since my college days when I learned this, criminal offenders are repeat offenders not just some of the time, but MOST of the time.
But I’m not saying that a newly-bailed-out goliath insurance company has been run and essentially mismanaged by shady characters. Not in this post, anyway. (more…)
That’s a tough question, because the normal reasons don’t apply. Neither do any sort of ‘abnormalities-in-pricing’ factors. Laundry detergents are obnoxiously expensive. Let’s look at what they are made of and how they come to us.
Detergents contain (well, by definition they are) surfactants, or wetting agents, who’s role is to increase the surface area of affected (in this case) fabrics against active cleaning agents in order to remove remove grease or soil. Detergents, both liquid and powder, and are mixed in gigantic batches at room temperature. Thus, there’s no inordinate energy costs loaded in the production of soap, nor has their ever been. The massive yield of packagable product makes the product’s volume less costly to make than the (also mass produced) polyethelyne (higher cost) or boxboard (cheaper cost) empty container. Soap’s not expensive. Families who often went hungry during the Depression at least could always wash their clothes. (more…)
Wow. I can hear it coming. ‘YOU CHAUVANIST!! HOW COULD YOU EVER SAY SUCH THINGS!’
There. It’s out of the way. By reading the above line out loud, I can honestly say I’ve already heard it.
I did quite a bit of work getting this all straight nearly two decades ago when I was fresh out of college. I was male, of course, and I was white. I ambled down to the StL main post office to try to see if I could get on, and to be honest, StL’s job market was ruthlessly hit hard by the still-bleeding aftermath of the Ford-era recession (fueled by economic forces long forgotten).
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