Category: rant

I've tried my best to steer away from getting into politics on my blog, but I felt I needed to post about this one.

In a recent conversation from his radio show, Rush Limbaugh defended Walmart for "selling crud" to those on food stamps. Rush is not the champion of free market that he would lead you to believe. He'd rather protect corporate interests than the interests of the American tax payer. Rush claims that plenty of stores sell highly processed foods and that it's not the government's place to fix the problem - oh, but it is, Rush!

If the government is spending money to feed people, shouldn't that food be healthy food that won't lead to health complications? ...Health complications which will probably cost tax-payer money too? Regardless of how you feel about the health care debate in the US, the fact is if you need immediate medical assistance, you will receive it - period. Who ends up paying for that is up in the air, but it usually comes from the hospital's bottom line and the government (at one level or another).

Ok, health problems may end up costing us somehow, but we're paying for people's food that live on food stamps, so why not give them good food? I'm not talking about filet mignon, fine wine and imported Kobe beef - I just mean basic staples like bread, produce and meats. Why give a hungry family a tube of mass-produced, ammonia-treated, brine-pumped, pink slime with fillers that passes for ground beef? Why feed a growing child "fruit drink" when we can provide them with real juice, from actual fruit? Why give them a sandwich made of slabs of bleached flower with the majority of the nutrition removed, then added back in at the minimum reportable amount for marketing? The answer lies in cost and how much each food item costs the shopping parent with the food stamps - not necessarily what the healthiest option is.

In an article from the Huffington Post, one MD discusses the hidden cost of "cheap" foods. No shocker, that discount comes at a price. A price paid by, you guessed it, the Federal government. Corn, soy, sugar and several other "big foods" get federal dollars in the form of subsidies to artificially drive down their costs. These lower costs are passed on to food producers for inclusion in their products. Food corporations also get incentives to include these agricultural products in their products. They are included in the form of High Fructose Corn Syrup which is used for sweetener instead of the more easily digested table sugar. Corn is added just about anywhere it can as fillers or oil. Because of the low cost of sugar, it costs less to buy a processed candy bar than it does to buy a single apple. Calorie for calorie, it costs more to fill up on produce than it does to fill up on processed foods. "Processed", by the way, usually means fillers, byproducts and subsidized food.

In Rush's radio show, he says he thinks "there's a nation on earth that has fed itself better than this one". You're right, Rush. Nobody has fed itself better than we used to. We used to not let greedy, multinational corporations produce the overwhelming majority of food consumed in this country, nor did we let those corporations steer public policy on the matter either. By letting the bottom line of those corporations grow fatter than our waist lines, we've become the fattest country in the world, and not because we're eating right. Our quality of food has declined from America's heyday, and that is directly attributed to lobbyists and special interests.

Rush says the lie is that the private sector is failing basic human needs, but the private sector, by in large, is failing basic human needs: they're feeding people garbage and watching their profits soar. There are many small companies with far smaller logistic chains fighting fierce competition to feed people right, but these private labels get swallowed up by Big Food.

Unfortunately, Rush is also wrong when he says the government can't fix the problem. The problem directly lies in subsidies. When we stop artificially lowering the cost of many of the filler foods full of empty calories, the real price of food will show through. The public will see that eating healthy is actually cheaper in reality than the subsidized products Big Food is pushing. If we're going to subsidize, only subsidize the food products that actually reach consumers' mouths directly.

Attention website developers:

Have you spent the last six months living on Twinkies and jet fuel grade coffee to turn out your latest abomination creation? Does it incorporate validated syntax? Does it adhere to all of the W3C standards? Is it fully driven by CSS?

If so, that's great. You've worked hard to achieve what countless Geocities authors could only dream of.

However, this does not give you the right nor the justification to resize my browser without asking first. My personal window settings for my browser are just that: personal. Your content, while possibly revolutionary (but probably wholly unexceptional) is not special, and it does nothing to endear me to whatever your website is trying to tell me.

And woe be unto you if you're trying to sell me something. Not only will I never patronize your site again, I will post rants on websites explaining exactly how you should be publicly flogged for forcing your sizing preferences on the rest of us.

Stop being a butthorn and realize that your, "creatives" aren't anything more than some rendered text and a few pictures.

Kisses,

Mackieman

With all the talk about healthcare and the oh-so-scary "public option", it's hard not to touch on the increasing obesity problem in America. A recent infographic outlines the American obesity problem. (Americans eat the same as the average Chinese citizen, plus 19 slices of bacon!) Is there some sinister plot out to get you? Surely not. It's mostly due to portion control on behalf of the consumer. (Remember how small a "small" used to be?) Also think about how seemingly offensive it is when you order a meal at a restaurant and you finish it all! Heaven forbid you finish your plate and not hurt afterward!) But, for the most part, food is cheap and we love to eat. Salt, fat and sugar: our big three food groups. You'd be hard pressed to name a favorite dish that isn't just mounds of these three. But, again, those 3 are the cheap ones. Most vegetables aren't very cheap compared to a bag of chips. Calorie for calorie, junk food is cheaper. Why? Corn.

After watching the documentary Food, Inc., I began to realize just how extensive corn has become in all of our foods. Corn subsidies have helped junk food (of which corn is the #1 contributor) become the cheapest source of calories in the American diet. You can buy a ready-made hamburger for less than you can a head of lettuce. You can buy a order of french fries cheaper than you can buy a potato. These artificially low prices are due to corn subsidies.
Subsidies ensure Americans have access to cheap food. The problem has now become that our subsidized food is now too cheap. It's time we come off of our subsidies.

If we look at the infographic above, we learn that Americans consume nearly 4000 calories a day. That's almost 2000 calories more than we should, given our sedentary lifestyles. Essentially we're subsidizing excess calories that never get burned off. Excess food intake does one of two things, it either become fat (giving us the obesity epidemic) or it becomes waste (meaning our tax dollars are paying for crap).

So with the whole healthcare issue at hand and Americans upset about government spending, consider how much of your tax dollars are going toward financing turds.

update: Just in time for the holidays, if you don't believe that overeating causes more moves, consider this: The day after Thanksgiving is the busiest day for plumbers in America, of course Americans also appear to toss out about 40% of our food. So, whatever we're not flushing away, we're just throwing right in the trash.

Former presidential candidate Senator John McCain has issued a press release outlining his new bill to prohibit the FCC from issuing binding rules on how the Internet is operated in the United States.

Now, I am a fan of Net Neutrality from a philosophical standpoint. I firmly believe that Internet backbone carriers as well as end user ISPs should not be allowed to implement network practices that limit users based on the amount they pay for service or how much of a service they use.

But, to me, the issue is much broader than basic FCC regulation over the physical network itself. This is a problem for the FTC in how data networks and Internet access is marketed to a strikingly dumb population, and it is an issue for the Justice department to been involved in when companies consort with one another to stifle competition in broadband markets.

Since the early days of 56k V.90 dialup service, ISPs have shouted from the mountain tops that their service offerings were unlimited. Both myself and several of my friends (Bone_Enterprise can attest) took the ISPs to task on this by remaining connected for weeks at a time. Many times, accounts were disabled and we were informed that we were abusing their network. Despondent, we replied that they advertised the service as unlimited. The response was always, "it is unlimited, but you can't use all you want." The incongruity of it all was something that irked us to no end.

As it turns out, what they were advertising is, "unlimited ability to access," and not, "unlimited usage." I believe this is false advertising in sheep's clothing. Regularly the FDA requires pharmaceutical companies to issue new profanely long commercials clarifying their claims about a particular drug and its side effects. Where is this watchdog mentality about the Internet and the trillions of dollars in GDP that it fosters?

The answer is most assuredly money and power. Companies like the toolboxes over at Comcast (which launched this lovely new feature today) throw tens of thousands of dollars at politicians like Senator McCain and his fellow Congressmen (clogged tubes, anyone?) who are uniquely and egregiously unqualified to be making suppositions about global networks, much less binding law.

Were the understanding of how networks function at an organic level and how an Internet free of corporate bullying drives innovation and economic prosperity truly understood by those with the power, I have a feeling that Net Neutrality would've been a reality some time ago. Of course, the blame is not solely on our elected officials; no, the blame is also shared with our fellow citizens. As a nation, and more specifically as a generation, the vast majority of us have become technology gluttons and demand that everything we interact with be simple, perfect, and require little to no effort from us. I believe this attitude is dangerous and stifles the inner need in each of us to grow and better ourselves through learning.

If we can have such stringent oversight of things like pharmaceuticals and stock market actions, things that require significant time and effort to understand and master, why can we not expect the same from the shepherds of our technology? While I generally advocate less government interaction in our daily lives, I do believe that there are some roles in which government must serve, and this is one of them. When companies get so large and their services so vital, they must be cared for to ensure that they do not take advantage of their customers. It is my hope that, in a limited form, Net Neutrality quickly comes to pass and that companies are forced to fairly market their services to an unsuspecting populace.

But something tells me it may be a ways off.

Facebook has exploded in the last twelve months. Leaving MySpace, Orkut, and the rag tag group of other social networking sites in the dust, it has single handedly surmounted the world of telling everyone everything regardless of whether or not they actually wanted to know. Only Twitter is able to stave off the blitzkrieg of Facebook, and then only because stupid people haven't figured out how awful it is.

I joined Facebook a few months ago at the incessant urging of small people from Scandinavia. Upon further inspection, I acquiesced to the request because Facebook looked like MySpace without the dumb. It was friends connected to other friends and there was some writing of stuff back and forth. It had a pretty clean interface and, minus the AJAX fetish that seems to permeate the site, it works pretty well.

Oh my, how wrong I was.

You see, on Facebook lies the concept of applications. These applications are about as varied as they come, but they all share one defining feature: they are all completely stupid.

Share a round of drinks! Send a hug! Give a smile! Take a quiz! Become a fan of crab people! Most of this crap isn't even possible, much less a passing excuse for social interaction. Never in all my life have I been more thankful for the, "block this application" feature than I am with Facebook.

Sure, Facebook is a lot less intrusive than MySpace, and certainly looks less like a drunk monkey vomited all over my computer screen than MySpace, but it is still sheer crap.

In a clean package.