I've admired the self-sufficiency off-the-grid kind of folks for years. Always thought the idea of living among likeminded folks into bartering/trading with their skills was cool. I'm to the point where I'm striving on a personal level not to spend much on anything other than true necessities, staying away even from thrift stores or garage sales, checking out freebies and giveaways instead. Even dragged out my sewing machine. Found a delightful website, threadbangers; wow, these teens are so resourceful and creative. I have 3 closetsful of nice things, would probably never have to buy another outfit. I find myself these days with the mindset to seriously look at all I own and figure other uses if possible. And there are so many well done how-to videos out on the net now.
I am George from Washington. I came to know about Predictify by reading the foru. It is very interesting to know about the future and get paid for it. I have few doubts, please share with me your comments.
-------------------------------------------------------------
George Bush
Hey guys came across this get paid to site a couple weeks ago and thought id try them out.
Didn't do much with them to test. I got a check yesterday from them for $38 bucks.
I will be using them more now that I have gotten paid.
1. Over-inflating tires. This does reduce the energy necessary to making the car go, but not because less of the tire is touching the ground. You want the tire to have good contact with the ground and lots of friction because only through friction with the ground can the car push on the road to speed the car up. Imagine if the car were on frictionless ice, you'd never get it moving.
Over-inflating the tires helps because it makes the tire stiffer. It is the flexing and changing of the shape of the tires as it turns that eats up energy from the moving car. You can understand what is happening by thinking about a rolling bowling ball and balloon filled with sand. The bowling ball barely changes shape as it moves while a balloon filled with sand has lots of internal parts that are changing shape. So, the bowling ball will roll for a longer time starting from the same speed as a balloon filled with sand.
2. The situation with slowing down is more complicated than presented. It takes energy to get a car moving. To some degree, it doesn't matter how fast you get up to speed, it's the top speed that matters most. However, your car is more efficient in higher gears and you cannot get into a higher gear if you are accelerating hard. Thus, it is to your advantage to accelerate slowly.
Slowing down doesn't really cost you fuel directly. Unless you are driving a hybrid, your brakes just throw away your energy of motion. So, slowing down unnecessarily costs you since you will need to speed up again.
The final complicating factor is wind resistance. The internal friction of your car is pretty small. If there were now wind resistance, you could get close to just turning your engine off and gliding once you reached cruising speed. However, wind resistance means that the engine has to expend energy even at speed. Worse, the wind resistance increases with the square of your speed, meaning that going twice as fast costs you four times the energy which has to come from the gas. At 50 mi/hr, you have just about half the total wind resistance of 70 mi/hr. This is a huge savings. So, in general, the more time you can spend at lower speeds, the more energy you will save.
Thus, it is not to your advantage to rush between lights since that top speed will cost you all over the place and will barely get you there faster.
3. Going into neutral is generally not that helpful. Most hills (well at least in the Bay Area) will get you going really fast -- faster than you'd want to go. To that extent, it is usually good to let the engine help you brake.
Great idea Jason - and one most everyone should try to implement to see how it can work for them! (Gotta remember to give it a whirl next grocery trip)
We plan on becoming mostly self sufficient within 10 years or so...I will still continue to write and do internet stuff, but hopefully won't need to do it to just to survive the day to day, but rather to learn more, travel, do things we want to to - not just pay a mortgage and credit card debt. A combination of a paid-for solar/wind/water catchment house along with the ability to grow crops will enable us to at least start living that dream!
@Pudentilla I wouldn't go as far to say that it has worked well and efficiently for over 70 years. It has subsisted over 70 years and as I pointed out in my article the earlier recipients got an awesome deal. However, it really doesn't give very good returns on the money current young workers are putting in. So yes, maybe the hostility is generational, but I think it is understandable given the situation.
Michelle has pretty much covered what I'd have said. Specializing in whatever pays best is going to give you a much higher standard of living. It is, though, a standard of living that's brittle--you're vulnerable to general economic downturns, to the failure of your current employer, or even to a simple personality conflict with a single boss.
The boost in standard of living that comes from specialization and trade is so huge, most people will make that choice anyway. (Choosing self-sufficiency is truly a quixotic alternative.) Having said that, a bit of strategic partial self-sufficiency can make your situation less prone to catastrophic failure, and that can make your household a lot more secure.
Isn't that just a big pile of BS. Even if you do not claim them they still will not receive it because they are "eligible" to be claimed. Basically NO college student under 23 will receive the check. Most of which are the ones who need the money to help keep them out of debt.
I can't believe this article describes Locks of Love as a "great" charity. Among the inaccuracies:
First, Locks of Love only provides wigs for children with "long-term hair loss," usually alopecia areata, NOT KIDS WITH CANCER. This information can be found on their own website, which this article links to.
Second, Locks of Love DOES NOT MAKE WIGS. Also from their website: "Locks of Love is not a manufacturer of any type of hair replacement product or hair care product. As a charity and strictly a charity, we must purchase the custom prostheses we provide for our recipients." They resell the hair you send them, provide a few kids who DON'T have cancer with wigs, and pocket a nice salary. If you're really interested in helping out kids with cancer, sell your hair and donate the proceeds to the MAKE A WISH FOUNDATION, a REPUTABLE charity.
Sorry if I seem rabid about this, but I have knee-length hair, and I'm sooo tired of people telling me I should cut it off and send it to a bunch of scammers.
Interesting method of shopping for groceries. By inflating items +$0.50, You would consistently end up under budget and with more money than you expected to spend.
Rick, I don't think he's arguing that it's bad to earn money, whether by working for wages or by entrepreneurial ventures. Or as Philip puts it, "you don't need to be self-sufficient to be free--it's good enough to be self-reliant, as long as you're careful with debt." You are exactly on the same page as far as that goes.
I think the point about partial self-sufficiency is that learning to do at least some things yourself is a form of diversification (just outside the financial markets). You get to practice a broader range of skills and resources in case cost-benefit ratios change in the future. Some people might even develop expertises that would help them to develop businesses in the future. These are potential benefits in addition to the personal satisfaction doing things yourself can bring.
there's an interesting post at angry bear today analyzing the history of the projections by the Trustees and concluding that a) we're all going to get our dough; and b)we'll all make out better financially over the long term by being skeptical about any "reform" of social security; because in any year where the "payroll gap" is less than 2.23% of 1997 numbers, doing nothing saves you dough in the long run. The great "underfunding" problem is more one of political discourse than one than one you'll see in your check when you retire.
I'm surprised at the degree of hostility to the program expressed here and I wonder how much of it is generational. If your parents had seen quondam bankers selling apples downtown and grannies in breadlines and had prayed their dads would keep the job that was paid in script, because at least you could buy food, and had daily observed the remorseless cruelty that age and poverty contrived for men who earned wages but not enough to create capital, and you had been raised on those stories, you might be more reluctant to dismantle a program that has worked well and efficiently for more than 70 years. Perhaps if your parents were too young or too rich for the horrors of the depression you lack access to the social memory of the social problem that social security solved.
There is a good reason that self-sufficiency is so difficult- it means that you have to give up specialization. Specialization gives gigantic productivity advantages and can allow for economies of scale. If you are a substance farmer does it make any sense to buy a tractor or other expensive improvements?
Personally I do NOT want to go back to the Stone Age... I like knowing that I won't starve if I have bad luck one year. I also like being able to have the wondrous things I would never be able to make on my own.
>The whole structure of the economy is designed for people to >work for wages and then buy what they need
Yes and it is a wonderful system... pick any item from the computer that you are typing at to the clothes you are wearing. Take the cost of the item and divide it by your hourly wage. Now, is there any POSSIBLE way you could have made that item in that much time, even if you had all the raw materials? Could you do it even if you had all of the tools needed to convert the raw items into the finished goods?
>--and that design turns out to favor the wealthy. The poor >and middle-class get a higher standard of living, and the rich >get richer.
Where are the rules that say that the rich are the only ones that can own businesses? I plan to become rich by spending less than I earn and investing the difference so that I'm a partial owner of many businesses. True, rich investors will make more than I do by investing more money, but shouldn't they get more return for their added risk?
"Debt slavery" is the result of bad choices... No system can prevent bad choices without removing individual freedom as well.
The reason there are surplus shipping containers is because the U.S. doesn't export much of anything anymore. These containers are loaded mainly with Chinese goods coming in to the country. We'd ship them back, but sometimes the cost of shipping empty boxes is prohibitive, so they stack 'em up.
@wildgift No, I'm not saying that millions of people are irresponsible. I also don't like to underestimate people to say that they lack the acumen to plan their own retirements. I just thought your attitude towards retirement seems lazy and irresponsible in that you don't want to deal with it. You can have a portfolio that you don't have to manage that much if you just researched it and set it up to begin with. I think no matter how little money people make they can think about their futures and do some planning on their own. That is all.
Having a single system that's not means-tested helps create a sense of unity and mutuality.
So even though we could do more with less in terms of alleviating poverty, you're saying that it's better to do less with more, because it "helps create a sense of unity and mutuality". Is that it? I'm pretty sure that's what they thought back in Soviet Russia, too.
You've really hit the nail on the head. Social Security isn't about helping the poor. If it were, there would be no talk about "means testing" because it would be OBVIOUS that the wealthy wouldn't receive it. Social Security is about purchasing the senior vote via wealth redistribution. Plain and simple.
The old Gary Cooper movie Meet John Doe touches on some of this. Their term for "wage slave" is "helot".
If you don't want to watch the entire movie (I highly recommend it; they sometimes carry it in the $1 DVD rack at WalMart), then here's a relevant clip.
If expressions like "wage slavery" are meant to carry with them the implication that people are helpless to resist, then I agree that they don't reflect reality.
On the other hand, they certainly reflect the perceptions that a lot of people have--a sense of being trapped in a system that's stacked against them. Because of that, I think they're valuable terms for people (like me) who are trying to show people a way out. It's useful to be dramatic when you're trying to educate people about the trade-offs involved in choosing to live within their means.
They may also be useful for people who are trying to make political changes. For example, the law right now lets a bankruptcy judge wipe away essentially all of a debt-ridden business's debt--money owed to suppliers, employees, a pension fund, etc. A bankruptcy judge can't do the same thing with an individual's debt--an individual with any sort of regular income can't write his debt off without going through a multi-year process of court-supervised debt repayment, a bankruptcy judge can't wipe out mortgage debt, etc. Rhetorical flourishes like "wage slavery" and "debt peonage" may be useful in the political arena for people trying to make the system fairer.
@xin lu, so you're saying that the millions of people who are paid little money, or lack the acumen, experience, or family knowledge to plan their own retirement are "lazy and irresponsible"? Perhaps they are, but, I think they should be cut some slack. Having a $10 an hour (or less) job is bad enough, and if they have kids, they may have to work two jobs and don't have time to deal with a wide range of investment choices.
The CalPERS pension performs well and is steady. It's a good balance to riskier IRAs and 401Ks, does better than other stable investments, and is probably doing better than index funds these days.
I'm lazy about investing and like a set-and-forget style. All this choice we have - it annoys me more than anything. So, yes, I like the government taking care of things for me. I like them to take care of the sewage system, the forests, roads, libraries, indigent people, and numerous other things. I also like them to take care of old folks, and wish they would do more about homelessness.
@bill: As for Warren Buffet getting SS - fine with me. That was the deal offered - everyone pays in, everyone gets something out. Some people get back less than they paid in, others get more. Buffet's just one extremely wealthy guy, but the millions of others receiving SS are not wealthy, and many are low-income. Having a single system that's not means-tested helps create a sense of unity and mutuality.
If you really do want to do more means testing, why don't we introduce toll gates everywhere, libraries for the poor along with pay libraries, and means tested public school too?
You can't make soap without caustic soda. It is part of the soap-making process. However, if made properly, the alkali is completely used by the saponification process. None remains when the process is complete. It is perfectly acceptable to use in organic soap products. Soap cannot be made without a strong alkali.
You really seem to have no idea what you are talking about, so maybe you should just shut the hell up.
I know how to knit, and I could knit a wool sweater but why would I when I can buy one at Salvation Army for $4? The wool yarn alone would cost $30-$50 without the time involvement. The same with quilts. I bought a handmade quilt from a neighbor woman, and it cost $400 (she told me that for as long as it took her to make it, she made pennies per hour). I could have bought one from WalMart for $30. I don't have an answer for it. I do have a garden, though, and do support organic/local farmers when I can.
I've admired the self-sufficiency off-the-grid kind of folks for years. Always thought the idea of living among likeminded folks into bartering/trading with their skills was cool. I'm to the point where I'm striving on a personal level not to spend much on anything other than true necessities, staying away even from thrift stores or garage sales, checking out freebies and giveaways instead. Even dragged out my sewing machine. Found a delightful website, threadbangers; wow, these teens are so resourceful and creative. I have 3 closetsful of nice things, would probably never have to buy another outfit. I find myself these days with the mindset to seriously look at all I own and figure other uses if possible. And there are so many well done how-to videos out on the net now.
Hi,
I am George from Washington. I came to know about Predictify by reading the foru. It is very interesting to know about the future and get paid for it. I have few doubts, please share with me your comments.
-------------------------------------------------------------
George Bush
Hey guys came across this get paid to site a couple weeks ago and thought id try them out.
Didn't do much with them to test. I got a check yesterday from them for $38 bucks.
I will be using them more now that I have gotten paid.
check it out yourself
http://www.PaidWebSurfing.com
Two points:
1. Over-inflating tires. This does reduce the energy necessary to making the car go, but not because less of the tire is touching the ground. You want the tire to have good contact with the ground and lots of friction because only through friction with the ground can the car push on the road to speed the car up. Imagine if the car were on frictionless ice, you'd never get it moving.
Over-inflating the tires helps because it makes the tire stiffer. It is the flexing and changing of the shape of the tires as it turns that eats up energy from the moving car. You can understand what is happening by thinking about a rolling bowling ball and balloon filled with sand. The bowling ball barely changes shape as it moves while a balloon filled with sand has lots of internal parts that are changing shape. So, the bowling ball will roll for a longer time starting from the same speed as a balloon filled with sand.
2. The situation with slowing down is more complicated than presented. It takes energy to get a car moving. To some degree, it doesn't matter how fast you get up to speed, it's the top speed that matters most. However, your car is more efficient in higher gears and you cannot get into a higher gear if you are accelerating hard. Thus, it is to your advantage to accelerate slowly.
Slowing down doesn't really cost you fuel directly. Unless you are driving a hybrid, your brakes just throw away your energy of motion. So, slowing down unnecessarily costs you since you will need to speed up again.
The final complicating factor is wind resistance. The internal friction of your car is pretty small. If there were now wind resistance, you could get close to just turning your engine off and gliding once you reached cruising speed. However, wind resistance means that the engine has to expend energy even at speed. Worse, the wind resistance increases with the square of your speed, meaning that going twice as fast costs you four times the energy which has to come from the gas. At 50 mi/hr, you have just about half the total wind resistance of 70 mi/hr. This is a huge savings. So, in general, the more time you can spend at lower speeds, the more energy you will save.
Thus, it is not to your advantage to rush between lights since that top speed will cost you all over the place and will barely get you there faster.
3. Going into neutral is generally not that helpful. Most hills (well at least in the Bay Area) will get you going really fast -- faster than you'd want to go. To that extent, it is usually good to let the engine help you brake.
That is a great idea. :) Adopting the rules of price is right to your grocery budgeting. But, isn't it kinda complicated?
Great idea Jason - and one most everyone should try to implement to see how it can work for them! (Gotta remember to give it a whirl next grocery trip)
We plan on becoming mostly self sufficient within 10 years or so...I will still continue to write and do internet stuff, but hopefully won't need to do it to just to survive the day to day, but rather to learn more, travel, do things we want to to - not just pay a mortgage and credit card debt. A combination of a paid-for solar/wind/water catchment house along with the ability to grow crops will enable us to at least start living that dream!
@Pudentilla I wouldn't go as far to say that it has worked well and efficiently for over 70 years. It has subsisted over 70 years and as I pointed out in my article the earlier recipients got an awesome deal. However, it really doesn't give very good returns on the money current young workers are putting in. So yes, maybe the hostility is generational, but I think it is understandable given the situation.
Michelle has pretty much covered what I'd have said. Specializing in whatever pays best is going to give you a much higher standard of living. It is, though, a standard of living that's brittle--you're vulnerable to general economic downturns, to the failure of your current employer, or even to a simple personality conflict with a single boss.
The boost in standard of living that comes from specialization and trade is so huge, most people will make that choice anyway. (Choosing self-sufficiency is truly a quixotic alternative.) Having said that, a bit of strategic partial self-sufficiency can make your situation less prone to catastrophic failure, and that can make your household a lot more secure.
Isn't that just a big pile of BS. Even if you do not claim them they still will not receive it because they are "eligible" to be claimed. Basically NO college student under 23 will receive the check. Most of which are the ones who need the money to help keep them out of debt.
I can't believe this article describes Locks of Love as a "great" charity. Among the inaccuracies:
First, Locks of Love only provides wigs for children with "long-term hair loss," usually alopecia areata, NOT KIDS WITH CANCER. This information can be found on their own website, which this article links to.
Second, Locks of Love DOES NOT MAKE WIGS. Also from their website: "Locks of Love is not a manufacturer of any type of hair replacement product or hair care product. As a charity and strictly a charity, we must purchase the custom prostheses we provide for our recipients." They resell the hair you send them, provide a few kids who DON'T have cancer with wigs, and pocket a nice salary. If you're really interested in helping out kids with cancer, sell your hair and donate the proceeds to the MAKE A WISH FOUNDATION, a REPUTABLE charity.
Sorry if I seem rabid about this, but I have knee-length hair, and I'm sooo tired of people telling me I should cut it off and send it to a bunch of scammers.
Interesting method of shopping for groceries. By inflating items +$0.50, You would consistently end up under budget and with more money than you expected to spend.
Rick, I don't think he's arguing that it's bad to earn money, whether by working for wages or by entrepreneurial ventures. Or as Philip puts it, "you don't need to be self-sufficient to be free--it's good enough to be self-reliant, as long as you're careful with debt." You are exactly on the same page as far as that goes.
I think the point about partial self-sufficiency is that learning to do at least some things yourself is a form of diversification (just outside the financial markets). You get to practice a broader range of skills and resources in case cost-benefit ratios change in the future. Some people might even develop expertises that would help them to develop businesses in the future. These are potential benefits in addition to the personal satisfaction doing things yourself can bring.
there's an interesting post at angry bear today analyzing the history of the projections by the Trustees and concluding that a) we're all going to get our dough; and b)we'll all make out better financially over the long term by being skeptical about any "reform" of social security; because in any year where the "payroll gap" is less than 2.23% of 1997 numbers, doing nothing saves you dough in the long run. The great "underfunding" problem is more one of political discourse than one than one you'll see in your check when you retire.
I'm surprised at the degree of hostility to the program expressed here and I wonder how much of it is generational. If your parents had seen quondam bankers selling apples downtown and grannies in breadlines and had prayed their dads would keep the job that was paid in script, because at least you could buy food, and had daily observed the remorseless cruelty that age and poverty contrived for men who earned wages but not enough to create capital, and you had been raised on those stories, you might be more reluctant to dismantle a program that has worked well and efficiently for more than 70 years. Perhaps if your parents were too young or too rich for the horrors of the depression you lack access to the social memory of the social problem that social security solved.
There is a good reason that self-sufficiency is so difficult- it means that you have to give up specialization. Specialization gives gigantic productivity advantages and can allow for economies of scale. If you are a substance farmer does it make any sense to buy a tractor or other expensive improvements?
Personally I do NOT want to go back to the Stone Age... I like knowing that I won't starve if I have bad luck one year. I also like being able to have the wondrous things I would never be able to make on my own.
>The whole structure of the economy is designed for people to >work for wages and then buy what they need
Yes and it is a wonderful system... pick any item from the computer that you are typing at to the clothes you are wearing. Take the cost of the item and divide it by your hourly wage. Now, is there any POSSIBLE way you could have made that item in that much time, even if you had all the raw materials? Could you do it even if you had all of the tools needed to convert the raw items into the finished goods?
>--and that design turns out to favor the wealthy. The poor >and middle-class get a higher standard of living, and the rich >get richer.
Where are the rules that say that the rich are the only ones that can own businesses? I plan to become rich by spending less than I earn and investing the difference so that I'm a partial owner of many businesses. True, rich investors will make more than I do by investing more money, but shouldn't they get more return for their added risk?
"Debt slavery" is the result of bad choices... No system can prevent bad choices without removing individual freedom as well.
-Rick Francis
The reason there are surplus shipping containers is because the U.S. doesn't export much of anything anymore. These containers are loaded mainly with Chinese goods coming in to the country. We'd ship them back, but sometimes the cost of shipping empty boxes is prohibitive, so they stack 'em up.
Kind of a sad commentary, don't you think?
"Meet John Doe" looks both fascinating and on-topic. I'll watch it soon.
how many oz. per gallon do you set the sprayer to?
@wildgift No, I'm not saying that millions of people are irresponsible. I also don't like to underestimate people to say that they lack the acumen to plan their own retirements. I just thought your attitude towards retirement seems lazy and irresponsible in that you don't want to deal with it. You can have a portfolio that you don't have to manage that much if you just researched it and set it up to begin with. I think no matter how little money people make they can think about their futures and do some planning on their own. That is all.
Having a single system that's not means-tested helps create a sense of unity and mutuality.
So even though we could do more with less in terms of alleviating poverty, you're saying that it's better to do less with more, because it "helps create a sense of unity and mutuality". Is that it? I'm pretty sure that's what they thought back in Soviet Russia, too.
You've really hit the nail on the head. Social Security isn't about helping the poor. If it were, there would be no talk about "means testing" because it would be OBVIOUS that the wealthy wouldn't receive it. Social Security is about purchasing the senior vote via wealth redistribution. Plain and simple.
The old Gary Cooper movie Meet John Doe touches on some of this. Their term for "wage slave" is "helot".
If you don't want to watch the entire movie (I highly recommend it; they sometimes carry it in the $1 DVD rack at WalMart), then here's a relevant clip.
I actually wrote a whole post on The many reasons--besides frugality--to do for yourself.
If expressions like "wage slavery" are meant to carry with them the implication that people are helpless to resist, then I agree that they don't reflect reality.
On the other hand, they certainly reflect the perceptions that a lot of people have--a sense of being trapped in a system that's stacked against them. Because of that, I think they're valuable terms for people (like me) who are trying to show people a way out. It's useful to be dramatic when you're trying to educate people about the trade-offs involved in choosing to live within their means.
They may also be useful for people who are trying to make political changes. For example, the law right now lets a bankruptcy judge wipe away essentially all of a debt-ridden business's debt--money owed to suppliers, employees, a pension fund, etc. A bankruptcy judge can't do the same thing with an individual's debt--an individual with any sort of regular income can't write his debt off without going through a multi-year process of court-supervised debt repayment, a bankruptcy judge can't wipe out mortgage debt, etc. Rhetorical flourishes like "wage slavery" and "debt peonage" may be useful in the political arena for people trying to make the system fairer.
@xin lu, so you're saying that the millions of people who are paid little money, or lack the acumen, experience, or family knowledge to plan their own retirement are "lazy and irresponsible"? Perhaps they are, but, I think they should be cut some slack. Having a $10 an hour (or less) job is bad enough, and if they have kids, they may have to work two jobs and don't have time to deal with a wide range of investment choices.
The CalPERS pension performs well and is steady. It's a good balance to riskier IRAs and 401Ks, does better than other stable investments, and is probably doing better than index funds these days.
I'm lazy about investing and like a set-and-forget style. All this choice we have - it annoys me more than anything. So, yes, I like the government taking care of things for me. I like them to take care of the sewage system, the forests, roads, libraries, indigent people, and numerous other things. I also like them to take care of old folks, and wish they would do more about homelessness.
@bill: As for Warren Buffet getting SS - fine with me. That was the deal offered - everyone pays in, everyone gets something out. Some people get back less than they paid in, others get more. Buffet's just one extremely wealthy guy, but the millions of others receiving SS are not wealthy, and many are low-income. Having a single system that's not means-tested helps create a sense of unity and mutuality.
If you really do want to do more means testing, why don't we introduce toll gates everywhere, libraries for the poor along with pay libraries, and means tested public school too?
You can't make soap without caustic soda. It is part of the soap-making process. However, if made properly, the alkali is completely used by the saponification process. None remains when the process is complete. It is perfectly acceptable to use in organic soap products. Soap cannot be made without a strong alkali.
You really seem to have no idea what you are talking about, so maybe you should just shut the hell up.
Peace
I know how to knit, and I could knit a wool sweater but why would I when I can buy one at Salvation Army for $4? The wool yarn alone would cost $30-$50 without the time involvement. The same with quilts. I bought a handmade quilt from a neighbor woman, and it cost $400 (she told me that for as long as it took her to make it, she made pennies per hour). I could have bought one from WalMart for $30. I don't have an answer for it. I do have a garden, though, and do support organic/local farmers when I can.