To save money, I'd rather cut my son's hair*laughs*...good thing he can't complain (he's 2 yrs old) of the result. The idea of "Group rate" is a nice one!
sometimes the results are not great but often they're pretty cool. i get a LOT of compliments about my girls' hair. i'm actually thinking of letting him try my hair next.
I'm with Anna. What a shame. My wife and I live FRUGALLY. We bought a house as a tax relief and an investment. This investment was made with cautious lending statigies based on fixed interest loans; the same as many of our fellow homeowners. So I'm not real hep on hearing how we screwed up. I can only control my household. I cannot control our corporations or govermental leaders from running our economy into the ditch and forcing good people to take lower paying jobs. I'd really like to reap the benefits of our investment someday as I am sure all of us would. We all better vote!
That's what I save. I never spend a $1 bill...ever. If I want a candy bar or soda, I break a $5 bill. If I go shopping and buy an item for $5.25...I break a $10 or $20. I haven't spent a $1 bill in over 3 years. Now I have almost $5k in $1.00 bills, and it's too much of a pain to exchange them into larger bills, and if I did, I'd just spend the money on something I don't need.
So I keep putting them away. I realize not everyone can do this, but it's my way of saving $$. Dollar bills are easy to spend, but when I gotta pull a $5 or $10 bill out, I stop and think for a sec...do I really need this.
As someone who has had a very limited budget as a result of a child born with heart issues I can, without hesitation, agree that it is expensive to eat healthy. We have to follow a low sodium, low fat type diet for my son. We are still reeling from the bills that were not paid by health insurance. It takes every ounce of creativity to maintain a healthy food household. It does boil down to doing as much 'from scratch" as possible. Both parents work in this house and we have two children, both now school age. When work finishes at 5pm (whether that's politically astute or not) and sports/school activities are at 5.30, that's not a lot of time to cook healthy. Planning, preparation and commitment are key. Thankfully the kids like salads, veggies and dip, fruit (great portable, calorie controlled item - think of an apple) etc. But perishables mean more trips to the store - again time that is in short supply. In addition you can't coupon fruit and veggies. there are wasy but gosh it is not as easy as the prepackaged stuff that would be so handy. (But the sodium! Urgh. The colorings -eek! The fat _yikes!) Someone mentioned juice. We never have juice here because it's so expensive and calorific. I buy the equivalent dollar amount of apples or oranges. We drink town water.
I am a master's educated Mother and I am challenged. I live in a lower middle class suburban area so we have food choices as opposed to bodega shopping. I can patch it together. but I am challenged to do so on a limited budget.
Despite what you said, I was pretty sure that the ads were going to suck. It turns out that all of the ones I've seen so far have been enjoyable. Watching 5 entertaining ads (and getting free entries into a 100k+ drawing) isn't a bad way to spend less than 3 minutes per day. Thanks!!
I'd consider Wisebread readers savvy enough to avoid that though. These ads, almost all of them, are higher-level branding ads. They're not hard sell, they're not even soft sell, they're just reinforcing brand, such as Pepsi vs Coke. If someone goes out and buys 10 cases of Coke after watching a Will Ferrell spot, they need a little more help than Wisebread can offer. And as a professional advertiser, I can tell you now that Superbowl ads are generally there to entertain and reinforce brand presence. Most don't try and push anything on you, so I'd have to disagree slightly with GRS on this one.
If you like the look of a more seared outside (less soggy, darker brown, more carmelized in flavor) go ahead and add a little oil to a frying pan and just brown the outside of the roast for a minute or so before putting it into the pan.
You can get the reddish inside like shown in the picture, but you may not have as tender an outcome. If you want to serve your roast medium rare, you'll probably need to just undercook it in the crockpot (best tested by cutting into it after 6 hours or so) and then put it into the fridge overnight to set. You won't be able to eat it right away, but it will be more tender than if you ate it immediately and you can still have it on the rarer side.
Otherwise, you will need to cook it for 6-12 hours (the longer the more tender) but you won't have a reddish color anymore, and the meat will practically fall apart. (which is how I like it.) Great for shredded dishes or for very sloppy (but yummy) cuts of meat.
Even if you do as I did and save at least 1/3 of your income over the last decade, nothing I could do stopped the government from pursuing policies that cut the value of those saved dollars nearly by HALF over the same period.
Sure, I'm close to hittin the magic $1 million net worth, but what's the point?
I should have bought that McMansion instead and lived it up rather than pile up increasingly devalued dollars.
It's like the 1970s all over again - little incentive to save in dollar-denominated assets.
I'm shipping my money overseas into more stable currencies in hopes I don't lose any more purchasing power.
I'm not really sure if this is a good advice your giving here. Especially to people who want to save and gain control over their finances.
Advertising is meant to persuade people to spend their hard earned money -- usually on things they don't need -- so I can see why advertisers would pay for people to willingly expose themselves to more ads.
See this blog entry on Get Rich Slowly for a similar view:
The workplace certainly continues to change and there is much economic uncertainty.
Best of success in finding the path right for you. And, if anyone here would like to share their journey with my readers, please contact me at financiallight@gmail.com.
I grew up in a struggling family with 8 kids (one income). What is interesting is the different effects the same upbringing had on us kids.
I am quite frugal, not interested in brands/labels, and very into minimalisation - if its not going to achieve my goals, then it just isnt worth me giving up my hard earned money.
One brother is obsessively frugal (despite 2 incomes no kids) to the point if he spills tomato sauce on a bench, he wipes it into a container to be reused in the cooking.
One sister however is quite the opposite. She constantly seeks out heavily branded (highly visable) clothing, attends the trendy concerts etc, despite not being on a great income. When I gently discussed our spending habits one day, she confided that she never had it as a kid and feels she deserves it, is good enough for it.
I understand the desire to hoard - my parents did it somewhat - it comes from the feeling that if you dont grab something now (for free), you'll need it later when you cant afford to buy it.
Freedom from hoarding comes from security in knowing you can get it later if you actually need it.
You're considering a straight payback instead of net present value.
Discounting back $8000/year over 35 years isn't half of your $280,000 figure.
Remember, the expenses of switching houses come up front:
- a 20% downpayment on the entire value of the house, not just the extra it costs to move to town
- transaction costs approaching 10%
And real returns on residential real estate are about 1% - it's an inflation hedge, not an investment.
Transportation and housing expenses (i.e. maintenance, taxes) are a function of the assets' cash value, but with an order of magnitude difference between the cost of each option.
Again, unless you choose to radically downsize your living space (4 bedroom home in suburbia to a 2 bedroom condo near the city center), you're better off keeping the car to commute downtown.
Recipe sounds just great. I picked up a 2.5# chuck roast today, and I'm going to cook tomorrow. I'll bring it over to our daughter who is just home from the hospital with our latest grandchild (the 8th!).
Never used a crockpot/slowcooker, borrowed hers and I'm [just about] ready to go, except for a couple of questions:
Should I brown the roast on the stovetop before putting it in the pot?
Will a medium-rare to medium with some pink be possible as shown in the picture, or is this gonna be cooked through and through?
And last one: any way to "refine" the cook time for doneness by just sticking a remote probe thermometer into the roast and check?
Great site, really like the stuff here :) Thanks...
Depending on where you are in Florida will definately depend on your install costs. In West Florida the Triple play installation is $49.99 which covers your outside hookup, first video outlet, telephone installation, and internet installation.
Any additional video outlets same trip run 24.95 (pending customwork i.e. wallfish, attic crawl)
I hope this helps.
The version of comtrac we use here doesn't autopopulate any extra rate codes, each CAE has to put those on themselves.
...not everyone has a place for the bin. I live in a mixed commercial/residential area, and we barely have room for the small size trash and recycling bins that we share with our neighbors. There's no way we could fit a yard waste bin in there too. Some friends in another mixed commercial/residential area say they have the same problem.
Fortunately, we have a yard and I compost in a tumbler out there, but our neighbors have no access to the yard, so they're pretty much stuck unless they've got space for a worm bin somewhere and the time to tend it. And while the composting I can do cuts way back on our trash, I can't compost any meat, dairy or oily foods, all of which I'd be able to put in the city bin if we had one. (I've got enough problems keeping the critters away as it is!)
But in general, you're right, a lot of people could compost with far less effort than they realize. Even composting in a tumbler is really not that much work. Put the compostables in the tumbler. Tumble it. Voila. If you're not going for speed, you don't even need to tumble it.
That's hilarious. Oh man. I had to laugh like crazy. I think I will think of that response and laugh again tomorrow. I have to keep reading down the page and see if he responded to that or didn't ever read here again like I'm going to do.
Although Americans consume -way- too much and must bear some responsibility for woes they are experiencing within their own four walls (such as credit card debt), laying the entire blame for the current economic crisis at their feet is like blaming a cancer victim for getting sick. Although cancer victims may contribute to getting sick (too much fatty food, too little exercise, poor genetics, etc.), what this forum is doing is overlooking how much of the disease is being caused by the chemical factory illegally dumping toxins into the drinking water supply while the local water department agent takes bribes to fudge the weekly safety test. The cancer victim pays his taxes and expects the water agent to do his job, but the agent serves another master.
I am a family law attorney (and a tightwad) who spends every day examining and litigating the finances of middle-class couples in financial trouble. Most marriages fail due to financial pressure. A decade ago, it was usually the immature, the selfish, and the foolish who came through my door and I would thwack them over the head and hand them a copy of the "Tightwad Gazette." Today, however, the overwhelming majority of clients are hardworking, fiscally responsible middle class people who can't make ends meet because the deck is stacked against them every step of the way. Most don't have a lot of debt or excessive lifestyles (even by my boil-the-bones/shop at thrift shops standards), they simply don't have enough money left over after paying the hefty mortgage on their modest 3-bedroom ranches, daycare, medical insurance and taxes to buy food or energy. Now, I pulled myself up from poverty by my bootstraps two decades ago through hard work, frugality, and education, so what's changed? Why are so many financially responsible people simply not making it?
Curious, I picked up my husbands MBA books which quote lots of erudite economists and legal precedents in support of free trade/low tax/pro business polices. Now, I'm no economist (though I minored in business as an undergrad, took 4 semesters of accounting, and originally studied to be a corporate lawyer), but I've extensively studied Constutitional law and international business law. I quickly realized 90% of the legal precedent/pro-founding-fathers crap being fed to MBA students is false. Bogus, not true, quoted out of context and often an out-right lie. Curious as to what else is not true I followed quotes given in support of free trade back to the sources (such as incomplete quotes from books used to justify free-trade such as "The World is Flat" which really promotes investment in education, not unfettered outsourcing), back to a secondary source which originates from a pro-business think tank in Chicago in the 1980's. These secondary sources deviate DRASTICALLY from the economic giants whose theories guided the US economy up until the 1980s, such as Adam Smith and Alexandar Hamilton. Don't believe me? Go to the source and read it for yourself...
Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, things changed. Reagan came in, canceled promising alternative energy grants started by Carter (oil companies bought the patents for pennies on the dollar), and used the threat of those technologies to cut an unholy alliance with Saudi Arabia to artificially reduce energy prices (you have to remember that back then, we were the only real consumer of any significance of oil). We won the arms rice against Russia in large part because, deprived of their main source of revenue (natural gas-Gazprom), they had no manufacturing base of their own to support the arms race (sound like the US today?). Over the next 8 years Reagan gutted consumer protection laws fought for by Consumers Union and Public Citizen, practically eliminated meaningful oversight by the EPA, FDA, USDA, etc., reduced IRS auditing of corporations in favor of auditing average middle-class Americans earning less than $30,000 per year, and practically eliminated restrictions on who controlled media outlets and gutted oversight by the FCC. He also loosed control of lobbiest access to Congress. Today, fewer than 8 media conglomerates control 99% of what the average person learns about and who is their biggest advertiser controls what news you learn about. The media, 1st Amendment watchdog of the founding fathers, is owned by corporate America.
Clinton professed to represent the middle, but he worsened the situation by eliminating lending restrictions on banks (source of the current mortgage crisis), instituting so-called "welfare reform" which, though needed, went too far, approved free trade agreements giving multinational corporations unfettered access to our markets, enacted laws which allowed these corporations to shift their earnings overseas to avoid paying taxes, further gutted consumer protection laws, and passed pro-corporate bankruptcy laws. As for Bush, I know you all have his number so I won't mention him, but on September 12th he told Americans they could fight terrorism by going to the mall.
Fed a steady diet of corporate-controlled advertising which manipulates quirks of the human brain (read Jerry Mander's "4 Arguments for the Elimination of Telivision) to increase consumer spending and pro-corporate news, is it any wonder the average American is a mess? Sure, they're stupid for continuing to stare at the boob-tube and not noticing that they get the urge to order out a pizza after the TV ad, but hey, most people just don't have as high IQ's as the average tightwad (read "The Bell Curve"), especially as many of todays consumers are from the post-Reagan/cut-education-to-the-bone generation. It's not that the more aware people aren't writing to their Congressman demanding solutions, the problem is that those Congressmen aren't listening because they're beholden to their corporate sponsors.
STOP telling people they're stupid and it's all their own fault. A) it's only 25%-30% their fault; B) the minute you tell someone it's all their fault they stop listening to you; and C), the orginator of this article is quoting a non-credible source. If you want to change things, take clueless consumers by the hand, gently explain the situation to them and what they can do to fix it in a non-blaming way, then unleash them on Congress to throw the bastards out of office. Educate people that they have been brainwashed and teach them there is another way to live. You can be the smartest, holiest hermit in your cave on the mountaintop, but if you don't come down and mingle with the masses once in a while to set a good example, you're useless. Jesus didn't preach from heaven, he came down to earth and preached to PEOPLE.
There's seems to be a bit of confusion about what I meant in my previous post. When I was speaking of "investing" instead of spending, I wasn't particularly speaking chunking money into the stock market.
I meant that we need to invest in our schools, our communities, in reducing both personal and governmental debt, and especially, as a nation, in finding alternate ways to fuel our country. For the last decade, we've been giving tentative subsidies to alternative energy start up companies, then yanking those at the worst possible moment to instead provide tax breaks and subsidies to the oil companies. This is insane. Why would anyone take the risk, knowing that they are competing with huge, established companies with the added advantage of all the tax breaks and subsidies our current administration can bully Congress into providing?
We need, all of us, to cut debt. We need to quit expecting our schools to raise our children and instead help them teach our children, or we will lose out to China and India in the race to create new technologies. We need to get out of this mistaken, incompetently run war in Iraq that has chewed our armed forces to pieces and put us in hock to the Chinese. We need to grit our teeth, roll up our sleeves, quit complaining and start making the sacrifices needed.
As for the "tax" story submitted by Guest, it's exactly the kind of simplistic silly propaganda that the "haves" always use to squelch the protests of the "have nots." Please, give us actual facts, not "10 guys in a beer hall" anecdotes. Trickle down economics? Think about it; 90% of the citizenry get a trickle, 10% get a lake! Money spent is money spent and will stimulate the economy, whether it's a multi-millionaire buying his third vacation home or a thousand sets of parents buying shoes for their kids. The idea that cutting taxes for the rich is the perfect way to keep our economy strong is insane. I'm with Warren Buffet; it makes no sense at all that his tax rate is less than that of his $60,000 a year secretary.
People like you make me sad. Do you really think abortion is about eliminating something that has a monetary value attached to it? As someone who has known one too many women who have had to abort fetuses conceived through rape, I just can't take the stark black-and-white view that you and your ilk seem to have regarding the actual value of life.
Spend a day volunteering for the Special Olympics. There is a culture of life in this country. You just have to open your eyes.
So much for being able to make a worthy investment to secure your future. First let us hurt the quality of employment so we may try to do what we need with less money than we need; then we shall sign on for "help". This way when the real estate value returns and you decide to reap the rewards of your hard earned efforts you will give the lion's share of it to our federal government! Isn't that grand? The worst part is they are betting on the come and our leadership planned for this.
Sellers believe that they will get substantially higher prices if there is no sniping. The research shows prices go up - by an average of 2.5%. For the vast majority of auctions this means only a few pennies more- Maybe.
Research has also shown that with automatic auction extensions people bid earlier in the auction and there are very few last minute bids. The change in strategy is to get your bid in early. (vs. ebay where people bid late). The net result - prices don't get substantially higher and people alter their bidding behavior to compensate for the change in rules. The outcome changes very little.
ie. people have a maximum price they will pay and are rarely caught up in bidding fever unless it is a rare unusual item. 6 of 1, half a dozen of the other. People must have preferred the ebay format since the vast majority of auction sites that had automatic time extensions are no longer around.
BTW, word on the grapevine is that ebay is moving away from auctions in general and small vendors in particular to large vendors and buy it now. Note how many items Best Buy, Sears etc. sell on ebay these days and how ebay keeps upping requirements and fees for the sellers that are not large corporations. I doubt they would move towards a bidding time extension strategy. There is no evidence to support it and it doesn't fit with their general market direction.
To save money, I'd rather cut my son's hair*laughs*...good thing he can't complain (he's 2 yrs old) of the result. The idea of "Group rate" is a nice one!
Sam
Fix My Personal Finance
http://fixmypersonalfinance.com/
Cutting my kids' hair is one of the only reasons that I want to have children. I cannot wait to have a bunch of little blue-haired, mohawked toddlers.
Also, I will invest in hats.
sometimes the results are not great but often they're pretty cool. i get a LOT of compliments about my girls' hair. i'm actually thinking of letting him try my hair next.
I'm with Anna. What a shame. My wife and I live FRUGALLY. We bought a house as a tax relief and an investment. This investment was made with cautious lending statigies based on fixed interest loans; the same as many of our fellow homeowners. So I'm not real hep on hearing how we screwed up. I can only control my household. I cannot control our corporations or govermental leaders from running our economy into the ditch and forcing good people to take lower paying jobs. I'd really like to reap the benefits of our investment someday as I am sure all of us would. We all better vote!
You people need to read the article...there's a link in the article to a website. Search your model number on the website and follow the directions.
That's what I save. I never spend a $1 bill...ever. If I want a candy bar or soda, I break a $5 bill. If I go shopping and buy an item for $5.25...I break a $10 or $20. I haven't spent a $1 bill in over 3 years. Now I have almost $5k in $1.00 bills, and it's too much of a pain to exchange them into larger bills, and if I did, I'd just spend the money on something I don't need.
So I keep putting them away. I realize not everyone can do this, but it's my way of saving $$. Dollar bills are easy to spend, but when I gotta pull a $5 or $10 bill out, I stop and think for a sec...do I really need this.
As someone who has had a very limited budget as a result of a child born with heart issues I can, without hesitation, agree that it is expensive to eat healthy. We have to follow a low sodium, low fat type diet for my son. We are still reeling from the bills that were not paid by health insurance. It takes every ounce of creativity to maintain a healthy food household. It does boil down to doing as much 'from scratch" as possible. Both parents work in this house and we have two children, both now school age. When work finishes at 5pm (whether that's politically astute or not) and sports/school activities are at 5.30, that's not a lot of time to cook healthy. Planning, preparation and commitment are key. Thankfully the kids like salads, veggies and dip, fruit (great portable, calorie controlled item - think of an apple) etc. But perishables mean more trips to the store - again time that is in short supply. In addition you can't coupon fruit and veggies. there are wasy but gosh it is not as easy as the prepackaged stuff that would be so handy. (But the sodium! Urgh. The colorings -eek! The fat _yikes!) Someone mentioned juice. We never have juice here because it's so expensive and calorific. I buy the equivalent dollar amount of apples or oranges. We drink town water.
I am a master's educated Mother and I am challenged. I live in a lower middle class suburban area so we have food choices as opposed to bodega shopping. I can patch it together. but I am challenged to do so on a limited budget.
Despite what you said, I was pretty sure that the ads were going to suck. It turns out that all of the ones I've seen so far have been enjoyable. Watching 5 entertaining ads (and getting free entries into a 100k+ drawing) isn't a bad way to spend less than 3 minutes per day. Thanks!!
I'd consider Wisebread readers savvy enough to avoid that though. These ads, almost all of them, are higher-level branding ads. They're not hard sell, they're not even soft sell, they're just reinforcing brand, such as Pepsi vs Coke. If someone goes out and buys 10 cases of Coke after watching a Will Ferrell spot, they need a little more help than Wisebread can offer. And as a professional advertiser, I can tell you now that Superbowl ads are generally there to entertain and reinforce brand presence. Most don't try and push anything on you, so I'd have to disagree slightly with GRS on this one.
A couple of things:
If you like the look of a more seared outside (less soggy, darker brown, more carmelized in flavor) go ahead and add a little oil to a frying pan and just brown the outside of the roast for a minute or so before putting it into the pan.
You can get the reddish inside like shown in the picture, but you may not have as tender an outcome. If you want to serve your roast medium rare, you'll probably need to just undercook it in the crockpot (best tested by cutting into it after 6 hours or so) and then put it into the fridge overnight to set. You won't be able to eat it right away, but it will be more tender than if you ate it immediately and you can still have it on the rarer side.
Otherwise, you will need to cook it for 6-12 hours (the longer the more tender) but you won't have a reddish color anymore, and the meat will practically fall apart. (which is how I like it.) Great for shredded dishes or for very sloppy (but yummy) cuts of meat.
Good luck, and let us know how it goes!
Government's the problem.
Even if you do as I did and save at least 1/3 of your income over the last decade, nothing I could do stopped the government from pursuing policies that cut the value of those saved dollars nearly by HALF over the same period.
Sure, I'm close to hittin the magic $1 million net worth, but what's the point?
I should have bought that McMansion instead and lived it up rather than pile up increasingly devalued dollars.
It's like the 1970s all over again - little incentive to save in dollar-denominated assets.
I'm shipping my money overseas into more stable currencies in hopes I don't lose any more purchasing power.
I'm not really sure if this is a good advice your giving here. Especially to people who want to save and gain control over their finances.
Advertising is meant to persuade people to spend their hard earned money -- usually on things they don't need -- so I can see why advertisers would pay for people to willingly expose themselves to more ads.
See this blog entry on Get Rich Slowly for a similar view:
Don’t Watch the Super Bowl Just for the Ads
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/02/02/dont-watch-the-super-bowl-j...
Thanks to all for the interesting comments.
The workplace certainly continues to change and there is much economic uncertainty.
Best of success in finding the path right for you. And, if anyone here would like to share their journey with my readers, please contact me at financiallight@gmail.com.
Mark
http://financiallight.terapad.com/
I grew up in a struggling family with 8 kids (one income). What is interesting is the different effects the same upbringing had on us kids.
I am quite frugal, not interested in brands/labels, and very into minimalisation - if its not going to achieve my goals, then it just isnt worth me giving up my hard earned money.
One brother is obsessively frugal (despite 2 incomes no kids) to the point if he spills tomato sauce on a bench, he wipes it into a container to be reused in the cooking.
One sister however is quite the opposite. She constantly seeks out heavily branded (highly visable) clothing, attends the trendy concerts etc, despite not being on a great income. When I gently discussed our spending habits one day, she confided that she never had it as a kid and feels she deserves it, is good enough for it.
I understand the desire to hoard - my parents did it somewhat - it comes from the feeling that if you dont grab something now (for free), you'll need it later when you cant afford to buy it.
Freedom from hoarding comes from security in knowing you can get it later if you actually need it.
You're considering a straight payback instead of net present value.
Discounting back $8000/year over 35 years isn't half of your $280,000 figure.
Remember, the expenses of switching houses come up front:
- a 20% downpayment on the entire value of the house, not just the extra it costs to move to town
- transaction costs approaching 10%
And real returns on residential real estate are about 1% - it's an inflation hedge, not an investment.
Transportation and housing expenses (i.e. maintenance, taxes) are a function of the assets' cash value, but with an order of magnitude difference between the cost of each option.
Again, unless you choose to radically downsize your living space (4 bedroom home in suburbia to a 2 bedroom condo near the city center), you're better off keeping the car to commute downtown.
Recipe sounds just great. I picked up a 2.5# chuck roast today, and I'm going to cook tomorrow. I'll bring it over to our daughter who is just home from the hospital with our latest grandchild (the 8th!).
Never used a crockpot/slowcooker, borrowed hers and I'm [just about] ready to go, except for a couple of questions:
Should I brown the roast on the stovetop before putting it in the pot?
Will a medium-rare to medium with some pink be possible as shown in the picture, or is this gonna be cooked through and through?
And last one: any way to "refine" the cook time for doneness by just sticking a remote probe thermometer into the roast and check?
Great site, really like the stuff here :) Thanks...
Depending on where you are in Florida will definately depend on your install costs. In West Florida the Triple play installation is $49.99 which covers your outside hookup, first video outlet, telephone installation, and internet installation.
Any additional video outlets same trip run 24.95 (pending customwork i.e. wallfish, attic crawl)
I hope this helps.
The version of comtrac we use here doesn't autopopulate any extra rate codes, each CAE has to put those on themselves.
...not everyone has a place for the bin. I live in a mixed commercial/residential area, and we barely have room for the small size trash and recycling bins that we share with our neighbors. There's no way we could fit a yard waste bin in there too. Some friends in another mixed commercial/residential area say they have the same problem.
Fortunately, we have a yard and I compost in a tumbler out there, but our neighbors have no access to the yard, so they're pretty much stuck unless they've got space for a worm bin somewhere and the time to tend it. And while the composting I can do cuts way back on our trash, I can't compost any meat, dairy or oily foods, all of which I'd be able to put in the city bin if we had one. (I've got enough problems keeping the critters away as it is!)
But in general, you're right, a lot of people could compost with far less effort than they realize. Even composting in a tumbler is really not that much work. Put the compostables in the tumbler. Tumble it. Voila. If you're not going for speed, you don't even need to tumble it.
That's hilarious. Oh man. I had to laugh like crazy. I think I will think of that response and laugh again tomorrow. I have to keep reading down the page and see if he responded to that or didn't ever read here again like I'm going to do.
Although Americans consume -way- too much and must bear some responsibility for woes they are experiencing within their own four walls (such as credit card debt), laying the entire blame for the current economic crisis at their feet is like blaming a cancer victim for getting sick. Although cancer victims may contribute to getting sick (too much fatty food, too little exercise, poor genetics, etc.), what this forum is doing is overlooking how much of the disease is being caused by the chemical factory illegally dumping toxins into the drinking water supply while the local water department agent takes bribes to fudge the weekly safety test. The cancer victim pays his taxes and expects the water agent to do his job, but the agent serves another master.
I am a family law attorney (and a tightwad) who spends every day examining and litigating the finances of middle-class couples in financial trouble. Most marriages fail due to financial pressure. A decade ago, it was usually the immature, the selfish, and the foolish who came through my door and I would thwack them over the head and hand them a copy of the "Tightwad Gazette." Today, however, the overwhelming majority of clients are hardworking, fiscally responsible middle class people who can't make ends meet because the deck is stacked against them every step of the way. Most don't have a lot of debt or excessive lifestyles (even by my boil-the-bones/shop at thrift shops standards), they simply don't have enough money left over after paying the hefty mortgage on their modest 3-bedroom ranches, daycare, medical insurance and taxes to buy food or energy. Now, I pulled myself up from poverty by my bootstraps two decades ago through hard work, frugality, and education, so what's changed? Why are so many financially responsible people simply not making it?
Curious, I picked up my husbands MBA books which quote lots of erudite economists and legal precedents in support of free trade/low tax/pro business polices. Now, I'm no economist (though I minored in business as an undergrad, took 4 semesters of accounting, and originally studied to be a corporate lawyer), but I've extensively studied Constutitional law and international business law. I quickly realized 90% of the legal precedent/pro-founding-fathers crap being fed to MBA students is false. Bogus, not true, quoted out of context and often an out-right lie. Curious as to what else is not true I followed quotes given in support of free trade back to the sources (such as incomplete quotes from books used to justify free-trade such as "The World is Flat" which really promotes investment in education, not unfettered outsourcing), back to a secondary source which originates from a pro-business think tank in Chicago in the 1980's. These secondary sources deviate DRASTICALLY from the economic giants whose theories guided the US economy up until the 1980s, such as Adam Smith and Alexandar Hamilton. Don't believe me? Go to the source and read it for yourself...
Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, things changed. Reagan came in, canceled promising alternative energy grants started by Carter (oil companies bought the patents for pennies on the dollar), and used the threat of those technologies to cut an unholy alliance with Saudi Arabia to artificially reduce energy prices (you have to remember that back then, we were the only real consumer of any significance of oil). We won the arms rice against Russia in large part because, deprived of their main source of revenue (natural gas-Gazprom), they had no manufacturing base of their own to support the arms race (sound like the US today?). Over the next 8 years Reagan gutted consumer protection laws fought for by Consumers Union and Public Citizen, practically eliminated meaningful oversight by the EPA, FDA, USDA, etc., reduced IRS auditing of corporations in favor of auditing average middle-class Americans earning less than $30,000 per year, and practically eliminated restrictions on who controlled media outlets and gutted oversight by the FCC. He also loosed control of lobbiest access to Congress. Today, fewer than 8 media conglomerates control 99% of what the average person learns about and who is their biggest advertiser controls what news you learn about. The media, 1st Amendment watchdog of the founding fathers, is owned by corporate America.
Clinton professed to represent the middle, but he worsened the situation by eliminating lending restrictions on banks (source of the current mortgage crisis), instituting so-called "welfare reform" which, though needed, went too far, approved free trade agreements giving multinational corporations unfettered access to our markets, enacted laws which allowed these corporations to shift their earnings overseas to avoid paying taxes, further gutted consumer protection laws, and passed pro-corporate bankruptcy laws. As for Bush, I know you all have his number so I won't mention him, but on September 12th he told Americans they could fight terrorism by going to the mall.
Fed a steady diet of corporate-controlled advertising which manipulates quirks of the human brain (read Jerry Mander's "4 Arguments for the Elimination of Telivision) to increase consumer spending and pro-corporate news, is it any wonder the average American is a mess? Sure, they're stupid for continuing to stare at the boob-tube and not noticing that they get the urge to order out a pizza after the TV ad, but hey, most people just don't have as high IQ's as the average tightwad (read "The Bell Curve"), especially as many of todays consumers are from the post-Reagan/cut-education-to-the-bone generation. It's not that the more aware people aren't writing to their Congressman demanding solutions, the problem is that those Congressmen aren't listening because they're beholden to their corporate sponsors.
STOP telling people they're stupid and it's all their own fault. A) it's only 25%-30% their fault; B) the minute you tell someone it's all their fault they stop listening to you; and C), the orginator of this article is quoting a non-credible source. If you want to change things, take clueless consumers by the hand, gently explain the situation to them and what they can do to fix it in a non-blaming way, then unleash them on Congress to throw the bastards out of office. Educate people that they have been brainwashed and teach them there is another way to live. You can be the smartest, holiest hermit in your cave on the mountaintop, but if you don't come down and mingle with the masses once in a while to set a good example, you're useless. Jesus didn't preach from heaven, he came down to earth and preached to PEOPLE.
Hey, I'm planting peach trees! (How crazy is it to import fruit and vegetables from South America, and buy WATER from Fiji?)
There's seems to be a bit of confusion about what I meant in my previous post. When I was speaking of "investing" instead of spending, I wasn't particularly speaking chunking money into the stock market.
I meant that we need to invest in our schools, our communities, in reducing both personal and governmental debt, and especially, as a nation, in finding alternate ways to fuel our country. For the last decade, we've been giving tentative subsidies to alternative energy start up companies, then yanking those at the worst possible moment to instead provide tax breaks and subsidies to the oil companies. This is insane. Why would anyone take the risk, knowing that they are competing with huge, established companies with the added advantage of all the tax breaks and subsidies our current administration can bully Congress into providing?
We need, all of us, to cut debt. We need to quit expecting our schools to raise our children and instead help them teach our children, or we will lose out to China and India in the race to create new technologies. We need to get out of this mistaken, incompetently run war in Iraq that has chewed our armed forces to pieces and put us in hock to the Chinese. We need to grit our teeth, roll up our sleeves, quit complaining and start making the sacrifices needed.
As for the "tax" story submitted by Guest, it's exactly the kind of simplistic silly propaganda that the "haves" always use to squelch the protests of the "have nots." Please, give us actual facts, not "10 guys in a beer hall" anecdotes. Trickle down economics? Think about it; 90% of the citizenry get a trickle, 10% get a lake! Money spent is money spent and will stimulate the economy, whether it's a multi-millionaire buying his third vacation home or a thousand sets of parents buying shoes for their kids. The idea that cutting taxes for the rich is the perfect way to keep our economy strong is insane. I'm with Warren Buffet; it makes no sense at all that his tax rate is less than that of his $60,000 a year secretary.
And "Guest"....
I sign my name.
Cathyrn Sykes
www.moneytospare.net
People like you make me sad. Do you really think abortion is about eliminating something that has a monetary value attached to it? As someone who has known one too many women who have had to abort fetuses conceived through rape, I just can't take the stark black-and-white view that you and your ilk seem to have regarding the actual value of life.
Spend a day volunteering for the Special Olympics. There is a culture of life in this country. You just have to open your eyes.
So much for being able to make a worthy investment to secure your future. First let us hurt the quality of employment so we may try to do what we need with less money than we need; then we shall sign on for "help". This way when the real estate value returns and you decide to reap the rewards of your hard earned efforts you will give the lion's share of it to our federal government! Isn't that grand? The worst part is they are betting on the come and our leadership planned for this.
Sellers believe that they will get substantially higher prices if there is no sniping. The research shows prices go up - by an average of 2.5%. For the vast majority of auctions this means only a few pennies more- Maybe.
Research has also shown that with automatic auction extensions people bid earlier in the auction and there are very few last minute bids. The change in strategy is to get your bid in early. (vs. ebay where people bid late). The net result - prices don't get substantially higher and people alter their bidding behavior to compensate for the change in rules. The outcome changes very little.
ie. people have a maximum price they will pay and are rarely caught up in bidding fever unless it is a rare unusual item. 6 of 1, half a dozen of the other. People must have preferred the ebay format since the vast majority of auction sites that had automatic time extensions are no longer around.
BTW, word on the grapevine is that ebay is moving away from auctions in general and small vendors in particular to large vendors and buy it now. Note how many items Best Buy, Sears etc. sell on ebay these days and how ebay keeps upping requirements and fees for the sellers that are not large corporations. I doubt they would move towards a bidding time extension strategy. There is no evidence to support it and it doesn't fit with their general market direction.